Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 12:43:09 -0600
From: Thomas Wayne <i_met_this_man@hotmail.com>
Subject: My Sin to Remembrance

My Sin to Remembrance
A twisted short story by Thomas Wayne


	"You don't even remember me, do you?"
	I started. Slopped my McDonald's coffee all over the Daily
Centurion's personal ads column. Busted. In truth I had been staring at the
delicate youth with the severe, even military haircut and maroon CIU
workout jacket. He looked as out of place on campus as I felt during my
afternoon perambulations which more often than not brought me here to idle
behind a copy of the free campus newspaper and observe cafe society.
     I had always hated the rudeness of the question, compounded now by the
impertinence with which it was phrased. I affected an amiable expression
and searched random memory. Had it been last night? No, no gaping hole of a
blackout there to account for it, no missing time. But Wednesday? Ah,
Wednesday. Hours misplaced there, momentarily forgotten but now perhaps not
lost forever. My sudden dread warned me I was about to be reminded of
something. Some humiliation no doubt, some ignominious alcohol-inspired
word or deed of mine remembered by this callow youth now stroking the
day-old peach fuzz of his cheek as he regarded me with unthreatened
amusement.
	"Are you really an 'eschatologist'? That's what you told me. 'As
contradistinguished from a scatologist,' you said. Still don't remember?
You were kinda wasted. As contradistinguished from shitfaced."
	I tried a casual chuckle. "Of course. Hi," I said. "How are you?
Mind was on work, I guess."
	But the kid wasn't giving up that easily.
	"You really don't have a clue who I am, do you? God, I should feel
insulted." But playful, ironic, tweaking me for laughs. "Shall I give you a
hint?"
	I looked around the dining room; we were nearly alone, no mid
afternoon crowd. No one within earshot.
	"I'm sorry," I said, shaking my head in resigned bewilderment, but
not putting the paper aside yet. "Please do. I must be losing it."
	"That's what you said the other night, too. 'I must be losing it,'
you said."
	"That must have been me, then. I've been saying that a lot lately.
You have the advantage of me, sir, I confess."
	My last remark had been intended to disarm him and cut to the
chase. It had no such effect. He had all the glee of a whiz kid showing up
an old dinosaur of a prof standing at the overhead projector before a
packed lecture hall. Too young to be anything but a student. Not one of our
volunteers. Not from the support group. Maybe a campus town bartender. No,
I knew all of those on a first-name basis. Without breaking eye contact or
waiting for an invitation, he slid next to me in the booth.
	"Here's the hint: we were watching your wife on television
together. As a matter of fact, that's the first time you told me you must
be losing it. Starting to come back to you now, isn't it? God, you're as
white as a sheet."
	"The Hoop, right? Wednesday, was it?"
	"Jock bar at midterm break. Twenty TV's, no waiting. You sang to
me."
	"I sang to you?" I stared at him in disbelief, but his steady smirk
drove my eyes back to the personal column. Someone For Everyone.
	The kid opened up, a pretty fair baritone, totally free of
self-consciousness. "'In some secluded rendezvous...'" A woman who appeared
to be well over seventy, wearing a paper hat and a McDonald's uniform,
looked up from the steam table in reverie. A pimply-faced kid dumping the
garbage muttered something that sounded like, "Get a room."
	I flashed on my drunken self crooning the kid over to my table.
Wednesday, definitely.
	He moved closer now. I scooted away a discreet nine or ten inches
before responding: "Keeping busy?
	He lowered his head and regarded me through long lashes, blue eyes
blazing. "You kept us both fairly busy the other night, Steve. You don't
mind me calling you Steve, do you? Professor Toddmann seems so impersonal
somehow, after...well, you know."
	"Who the hell are you, man?"
	"You a bed 'em and forget 'em kind of guy, Steve? Had yourself a
sodomy lobotomy, maybe?" Wagging his head in my face.
	"Look, we both must have had a lot to drink..."
	"You had a lot to drink, Steve. But not too much, if you know what
I mean."
	"Coming in here like this and ambushing me, intruding on my
personal time and personal space--you have a set of balls on you, kid, I'll
say that for you."
	"Who'd know that better than you, Steve? I gotta tell you I'm a
little bit hacked off by your anger, a tad insulted, you wanna know the
truth. Where's all that poet's passion now, all those urgent protestations
of forbidden love? It pricks my self-esteem, no pun intended, not to
mention shatters my romantic confidence to be so soon forgotten, so
cavalierly cast aside on the slush pile of your rejected lovers. I suppose
this means you weren't serious about the job offer, either."
	Like a cop flashing a badge, my beleaguered memory served up a
total recall of our claustrophobic coupling: last stall of the Hoop men's
room just before last call. Me feverishly going for it, kneeling, my head
bobbing as though for apples over the toilet bowl, he posed in a lazy
sprawl spread-eagled across the lowered lid. His fingers had stroked and
played with the hairs on the back of my neck, making no particular haste to
come, heedless of the fire-drill urgency of the moment.
	Playing itself over and over inside my head, mantra-like in rhythm
to my every downstroke, my father's voice uttering his ultimate cussword,
his invoking of the apotheir of degradation, brought up from the base of
his throat like hawking to spit.
	Cocksucker. Accent on the second syllable. O.E. cok: a bantam
rooster; suk: to draw water from a bog. Impolite Sl. (insult) one who
fellates, e.g., another man in a toilet.
	I had bided my time after having risked a sidelong glance and spied
the impressive broad beam heft of the young man's meat while standing to
shoulder to shoulder with him at the tandem urinals in the Hoop men's room,
checking out the Hoop men. His serendipitous schlong had obsessed me from
that moment until it brought me to my knees on the cold tile, making my
obeisance to it, baring the soles of my shoes to mischance.
     It was Bec who had taught me the word schlong. It was her word of
choice for describing the male genitalia, which she did frequently and
unabashedly, liberated as she was. Except that in my particular case, the
word she most often resorted to was schmeckie. A baby penis, a pale pink
grub worm, a child's plaything that glows but does not grow in the dark.
Something to powder and diaper. In a figurative sense she regularly
powdered and diapered me: her income in a field I thought disreputable,
even quasi-criminal, exceeded mine by a decimal place; it was she who'd
made affordable our sumptuous home, the two matching Expeditions in the
driveway, my Rolex watch, even the twelve-hundred-dollar suit I'd soiled at
the knees Wednesday night. It was Bec on local cable access Wednesday night
who brought in the suckers, who paid the money, who paid the bills, who
bought the stuff, who supported the husband who lived in the house that Bec
built.
	Many more drams poured from the reagent bottle of vodka before I
broke free of general conversation and told him what was really on my mind.
That was the moment I most craved these stolen Wednesday nights--the quiver
of fear at having uttered the indecent suggestion, too late to call back
now. Something of the same thrill of fear in being pulled over, the
revolving red Mars lights flashing in the rearview, watching the uniformed
silhouette approach in military stance, then lean in close, his
intimidating sidearm hanging just out of my reach.
	After I'd propositioned him, the kid regarded me as though studying
a dental x-ray, drawing aside the curtain of flesh and surveying all the
rottenness my mouth would offer up. Or was that a fist he was making? Was
he about to knock my eyeteeth down my throat for drill? And would that have
been less of an insult than what ultimately was to follow?
	It turned out he was giving me what anthropologists call the
"copulatory gaze." Two minds with but a single thought, we found ourselves
once more in the men's room that night where I made good on my suggestion.
Payback to my wife for neglecting me, her inane call-in show still running
on cable while I ran him head. He left first; I followed a sixty-nine count
later. I actually sat there watching Rhonda explain the mysteries of
scrying to a rapt Bec and mentally counted up to sixty-nine--a rigid
Wednesday night ritual--before dismounting the bar stool to join him for
our assignation. The counting had been a cautionary thing at first, to
exorcise second thoughts and ask oneself if one were serious, but had
become through habitual overuse a compulsory interlude to allow
anticipation to build.
     "Open your mind," Rhonda counseled Bec and Bonne. "Let the imagery
flow naturally." Bec seemed unusually stiff-necked in front of the camera,
ill at ease as though she knew all about the action going down at the Hoop
that night. Or maybe it was Rhonda's relaxed stage presence contrasting
with her own. Bec had confided in me--for who else has a woman to confide
these things in other than her husband?--that she feared new addition
Rhonda posed an All About Eve kind of threat to her hosting hegemony on Ask
Your Oracles. But there they were, Bec, Rhonda and Bonne--the three
witches. Rhonda with her crystal ball, Bonne of the tarot cards, and Bec.
The lapis lazuli Rhonda Rainier had pinned to her blond coiffure was a
third eye, making her beehive bouffant of high-piled hillbilly hair look
like a turban, especially when she bent to peer into her crystal orb. Bec
was fond of telling me how Rhonda always lost that trailer-park twang the
moment the red eye was lit. Bitchy witches, they had nary a good word for
one another. Rhonda for her part loved to criticize my wife's anatomy,
warning her to keep her "big tits"--four syllables in Rhonda's mouth--from
knocking Rhonda's crystal ball off the table. Indeed, Bec did have big
tits--tits to navigate by. They were what had first attracted me to her in
college. Actually, only I had been in college. Still was, in fact. Bec,
five years farther advanced along life's pathway than me, had been a
graduate school dropout living on her parents' beneficence in a college
town when we first began dating. But that's another story.
	Bonne Terry--first name pronounced bone--held herself above these
petty personality conflicts. A stunning Jamaican woman of impressive mien
and indeterminate age, she read the tarot. Bec worked without any props,
using only her head to get inside yours. Was I following her lead tonight?
     The Hoop was the kind of sports bar where they even had a television
suspended over the sinks in the rest rooms. I had opened the john door and
seen no one at first. Had he run out the back to humiliate me in a coitus
interruptus game of hide-and-seek? Then I heard him clear his throat and
saw from under the last stall his one Reebok-clad foot extended like a
dancer's. Gently I swung the door open to find him playing with it, shaking
it at me, teasing me with its sideshow size, his face high-colored and
ruddy as only an athletic blond's can be. Rhonda's voice squawking on and
on behind me, I threw my silk tie over my shoulder and went to work,
hovering over him, then lighting like a hungry mosquito. His sponginess
became firm, taut urgency in my mouth. But how could he hold out for so
long? Mocking me, making me work for it, challenging me to make him come.
I had drawn the stall door shut behind us-- for propriety's sake, I guess.
It didn't go all the way to the top--almost the lower half of a Dutch
door. Although I couldn't see above his crossed arms, I could sense him
watching my wife's program over my shoulder where the TV monitor peered
like a voyeur. I wanted to make him shoot in my mouth while Bec was
talking, so when I heard her voice replacing Rhonda's. I redoubled my
efforts. Still he maintained.
     Bec's voice filled the room for me; I hadn't heard any footsteps. Then
someone punched the locked stall door so hard that it shook.
     The mean voice of a redneck posing the rhetorical question: "What the
hell's going on in there?"
     Just then my partner chose to ejaculate a copious, albeit ill-timed,
flood of semen. I felt his body stiffen, then relax. He sighed. On the
other side of the door only impatient silence.
     Did he think either of us owed him an answer? Would I have my glass
jaw broken and wired shut, living on pureed foods and milkshakes sucked by
means of a straw threaded through the hole where my eyeteeth once had been?
Blinding TMJ headaches for life? Bleeding insult to the brain, memory loss,
double vision that would render me unemployable, even more in bondage to my
wife than I was now? Deviated septum that would mar me with the smashed
nose and slurred speech of a street bum? The redneck finally relented,
snarled something unintelligible, turned and spat his disgust into the
sink. Banging the door on his way out.
     All my restless Wednesday night forays had been black bag jobs, until
now: never any intruding bystanders factored in to complicate the
equation. The whole point of a secret life is that it remain a secret. I
had a filthy little secret life going on--my Wednesday night avocation. I
had tempted fate for the impure thrill of it; now fate was about to
succumb. I savored the rude pun.
     Bec's Wednesday night cable show--travel time, preparation, studio
airtime, debriefing, cool out time over drinks, social kiss kiss bye bye
time, and return trip home--could be relied upon to consume each Wednesday
from three PM until after midnight, thereby granting me carte blanche to
"explore my limits", as we say in the social psych game. The first and only
limit I had undertaken to explore thus far was one that had always held a
particular fascination for me. Dare I speak its name? Anonymous man-on-man
fellatio. The seat of oratory put to a baser use--exposition, declamation,
persuasion, all reduced to one menial and shameful service--the vicious
adder tongue slithering forth to greet the serpent's head of virility. Hail
fellator well met. Throughout literature and legend I felt the omnipresence
of my obsession. Beginning with the Adam and Eve story I saw a phallic
allegory: the serpent supplanting the woman. Untidy emotional entanglements
I sought to avoid most of all. I had made no more than mental notes of my
furtive explorations and had committed nothing to writing. I deceived
myself that I was embarking upon a new kind of freeform, groundbreaking
participant observation research project, but in the quick of my soul I
knew it to be a lie.
     I had never seen myself as queer. A sly manipulator of men's genitals,
perhaps; a secret service hetero putting one over on my victims. But never
queer. Shame over my inadequate equipment barred me from exposing it to a
stranger's scrutiny. Especially this evening's stranger, whose ample
anatomy and superfluous length would have justified his scorn--another
instance of biological determinism. Or perhaps these Wednesday evenings I
cared more for my cock than for my mouth.
     I stood at the sink, opened the faucet full blast and cupped scalding
water in my hands, rinsing my mouth out. Rinse and repeat, rinse and
repeat, like the directions on a bottle of mouthwash. In the mirror I
caught a glimpse of his expression, bemused by my feverish ablutions, my
pathetic sanitary ritual. He stood, making no effort to zip up, hands on
hips, still semi-erect, aiming a trajectory at about the level of Bec's
face on the television screen.
     "Well, I'm sure we've given each other a lot to think about this
evening," Bec was saying in her velvety TV voice, over the weird atonal
theme music. "New doors are opening up for every one of us. It's up to each
one of us to walk through those doors into a new vision and an enlightened
future. Be sure to join us again next Wednesday beginning at eight PM right
here on Ask Your Oracles."
     The kid nudged the glistening hood of his foreskin into parade rest
with a lazy roll of his thumb. Was it the collected lint from his shorts I
still tasted?

     "So tell me, is your wife psychic enough to pick up on what we did?"
The kid's eyebrows arched like a model's. I took a sip of my coffee before
shaking my head.
     "I figured that it was all fake," he said. "Taking advantage of
innocent, gullible people. How does she live with her conscience?" He fixed
me with a level gaze that unnerved me, and added, "For that matter, how do
you?"
     "What's your point?"
     "Think of all the risk you're exposing her to, what with all the bugs
out there these days. Especially the waters where you're snorkeling,
Steve. Cesspools of incurable disease. You ever hear of a condom? Dental
dam?"
     "Keep your voice down."
     "You telling me to shut up, Steve? Suppose I tell her about the whole
sordid episode?" His broad maleficent grin told me he would do just that if
I didn't stop him. I affected a conciliatory tone. "I'm just telling you
there's a time and place for everything. I'm sorry, what was your name
again?"
     "How soon they forget. It's Randy. Name goes with my disposition, so
you can remember better next time."
     "Who says there's going to be a next time, Randy?" Casual smile while
I said it.
     "You're the one making reference to time and place, Steve. Sounds to
me you're about to ask me for a date. I'll make it easy on you: the
answer's yes. I'll make it even easier. The time could be right now. I'm
footloose and fancy free until my three o'clock poly sci lecture. The place
could be your office at the NDI annex. A fine and private place."
     "'But none, I think, do there embrace.'"
     "'To His Coy Mistress'. I'm impressed."
     "I'm not your coy mistress."
     "But you could be, Steve. You could so easily be. You know, I've given
considerable thought to that job offer you made me. The answer to that one
is yes, too."

It was only after LeGrand died that I began to implode. A perennial college
student, I needed the discipline of a lab partner, assignments and a series
of deadlines to check my tendencies toward indolence. In fact, it was
immediately after LeGrand's funeral that I returned to the office alone at
NDI and logged onto the Internet. That's how I can time it to 2:43 PM on a
Wednesday when, by means of a seemingly random--and definitely
randy--series of hyper links, my sexuality began to change.
     I guess I wanted to dissociate myself from the chrysanthemum stink of
death, to prove to myself that I was still alive. For whatever reason,
looking at women peeing seemed to do it for me at first. Judging from the
superabundant supply of full-color photos online, perhaps about half the
women in this country have at one time or another posed, panties askew,
either squatting or standing facing the camera while they let go their
urine streams. I found I loved the squalid indignity of it. The carefree
expressions in their faces--it would, after all, be necessary to relax in
order for the shot to work--buoyed my spirits. Some had not even cared
enough to disrobe, but instead proudly displayed for the camera how they
had deliberately wet themselves in dark, demeaning stains. How many years
later would the horror of incontinence revisit some of them like a
malevolent Peter Pan? Stop, don't think like that. This is for your
enjoyment, so act like it.
     For several hours I wandered through the online galleries. It had been
necessary to subscribe to some--to "become a member". Oh well, I thought,
"We are all members of one another." Savoring the irony of that one, too.
LeGrand no longer there with whom to share that college professor's
eclectic humor. I used the NDI Master Card number. Eventually I printed
enough "pics", as they were called, to dangerously deplete the color ink
reservoir on our printer. My favorite among them all was a woman of about
thirty in a secluded garden. The sun caught her well-scrubbed face, which
exuded wholesome good health like those young women you see in 1930's films
by Leni Riefenstahl. Blonde, pale and freckled, she wore old-fashioned
round-frame glasses but little or no makeup. A zephyr of a breeze tossed
and played with the white picture hat she wore. In truth, clothed in a
middy blue blouse, from the waist up she looked like a young schoolteacher
picnicking in Nazi Germany. Waist down was the reason for the picture:
wearing only panties, she squatted like a squaw, her long and bony bare
toes splayed in black loam, the dark earth having splattered in flecked
rain patterns as high as her ankles. From where a dainty crooked finger had
deftly swept aside the crotch of white lace panties, a distinctly rude
stream arced forth, curved like a dagger cut from amber, then burst into
droplets before raining down to nitrogenize the soil and further sully
milady's no doubt already compromised virtue.
	She'd really had to go. The thing about hard-core pornography is
that there's no faking it. At least not without world-class special effects
beyond the means of your garden-variety pissoir shutterbug. And by the way,
who had taken the picture? I stared at it, first on the monitor, then the
laser print, as though it held all the enigmatic fascination of the Mona
Lisa. I placed it in my lap drawer, then took it out again. How much had
she been paid? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred? In cash, or was it drugs?
Where does one find such women? Was she a biker's momma, or a young
housewife taking a girlfriend's dare, getting back at her husband for
working late at the office? The insouciance of her go-ahead-and-watch
expression, smiling wide-eyed and casual, straight into the camera, riveted
me. How does one broach to his prospective model the subject of posing for
such a picture? Ply her with liquor or drugs first, then warm her up with a
few innocuous candid shots? Push fluids while engaging in dilatory tactics
in a remote location? A cooler of beer, a camera, and Thou?
	I knew I could store the pics in my desk at work without fear of
discovery. Bec never visited the office, just as I never visited her on the
set of Ask Your Oracles. We respected one another's private lives. And then
I saw it.
	Supported by two brawny California suntanned legs, a
heroically-proportioned cock discharged a king's torrent of urine; a lusty
firehose making a latrine of the gaping mouth of a woman who didn't believe
in dentists. I stared at the electronic pic for many minutes, taking no
more notice of the woman's face than if she had been a stranger on a
passing bus.
	It was the cock that had mesmerized me. Impossibly long and thick,
it seemed to be reinforced with a trio of powerful animatronic rods bundled
just below the smooth velvety surface which glistened as though oiled with
loving and tender care. I found there were chat rooms, and photo exchanges
where one could assume an identity and actually speak in real time with the
owners of such cocks while one admired pics of the subject under
discussion. With breath-catching trepidation and a deep, dirty thrill, I
first entered one such chat room around sunset. I tried adopting the
identity of a thoroughly amoral woman calling herself
"Sue's_gotta_have_it".  There were three others who'd beaten me to the
punch on that one, so I added "69" to the moniker and got a green light. My
password, spelled out in a starline of asterisks like footlights, was
"fell_later." Get it?  Wouldn't you know it, the first place
"Sue's_gotta_have_it" went to chat was the Tool Room. Profligate misuse of
the Internet--possibly the single most revolutionary technological marvel
of the age--permitting men to gratify their egos by displaying their
exposed equipment globally. There were tools galore in the Tool Room.
Homeric tools. Tools for Ripley. The proud possessor of the first I
downloaded claimed to be an Australian fireman named Chet. As chance would
have it, in the time it took Chet to read my salacious fake bio he PM'd me.
     "Hi, Sue. Wanna chat?"
     Now what? Caught staring, I supposed I'd have to play along and chat
for a while with this man, hiding behind my assumed identity. My heart
raced. I clicked the box for my reply and typed: "Hi, Chet. You have a
beautiful penis." Can't go wrong if you open with a compliment, right? I
took a deep breath and clicked "send."
	"Thanx." Then a smiley face. No, three of them in a row. For some
reason I thought of Bec, Rhonda and Bonne.
	I waited. Being new to this, I thought maybe that was all the chat
the situation called for. I clicked to close the PM window and was already
taking the measure of some other man's tool when Chet pursued me there.
	"Hey, where'd ya go?" More smiley faces: six of them this time.
God, these men were aggressive! A furtive thought worried me then: what if
Chet were a computer wizard whose unrequited horniness would turn to a rage
befitting the enormity of his equipment once he discovered the truth of my
betrayal, who could penetrate my false identity, perhaps even find out my
e-mail address here on campus and expose my pretending to be a slattern
admiring his penis! The Daily Centurion could only exalt such a scandal to
front-page status. My colleagues would idle over coffee and read of my
shame. No, I told myself, the game was still afoot and it was up to me to
keep it going.
	"Right here, Chet. Enjoying the view." Could Chet tell I was
looking at another's tool?
	"Thanx again, Sue." Apparently not.
	"That's what I'm here for, your enjoyment."
	So I enjoyed him for nearly an hour with him none the wiser. I
piqued his every fantasy. As a man pretending to be a woman, I had a
tactical advantage over him. For the last few minutes of that hour I
challenged myself to make him masturbate. I think I succeeded. The PM
window was quiet, as though a shade had been pulled down for privacy. At
last he returned.  "I want to leave my wife and marry you!"
	"I'll bet you say that to all the girls" was the best reply I could
come up with to that one.
	"No, I'm serious. Come to Australia. I'll pay the ticket."
	"One way or round trip?" This was getting too extreme for me.
	"Around the world."

					Epilogue
		Unhealthy exercise at the health club

	His penis, sleek and wild as a seal emerging from a dip in the
reflecting pool at the zoo, faced me in the mirror. Its size challenged and
defied me. All rationalization failed: its proportion far exceeded any
justification by his merely greater physical stature. I envied him its
size, wanted to utterly possess it although--because--I knew it was his.
	He toweled off at leisure, in seeming comfort with his nudity in
the steamy closeness of the clubby males-only atmosphere. I broke a taboo:
no more than furtive sidelong glances allowed in this closed society of
men. So many subtle yet inviolable taboos separated the two of us,
invisible as the barriers at the Forest Park zoo. I dared break another: a
subtle widening of the aperture of my eyelids as I continued to stare, not
at the exotic beast itself--a more powerful and robust example than my own,
a Medusa's snake of forbidden lust and casual destruction, turning me to
stone with desire--but triangulating, fascinated by the chance encounter of
its reflection in the mirror. Clean as a whistle, and ready for...what?
	So many near-imperceptible cues betray our cupidity. A too-deep
sigh, a heaving of the chest, a too-feminine attitude given away by
posture, tilt of the head, or carriage of the lips: any one of these,
beyond self-control or self-knowledge brought about by proprioception, can
reveal our inmost desires as blatantly as rouged cheeks and a tiara.
     I knelt and began my obeisance.