Great Sex, Great Writing...

...and my First Time.


("Blogger" ate this post with a nice side salad and a slice of pie last night, which felt kinda weird, but hey, what do I want for nothin'...rrrrubber biscuit? So, let's give 'er another go, shall we?)
Ok, honestly, I don’t remember my first time.

I remember the season, sort of, and if I wanted to I could probably bring all kinds of flashy CSI reasoning to bear and to deduce the approximate time and place, but frankly I don’t remember and I don’t really care, because First Times suck.

They’re necessary, but lets not romanticize it – they are, at best, Run Dick Run. See Dick Run.

You don’t know what the fuck you are doing. The person you’re with doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing. You haven’t developed an educated palate yet and have absolutely zero capacity to appreciate the different between, say, stale Ho Ho’s and the almost feloniously perfect alloy of ginger, wasabi, sesame seed and dark chocolate that is a Black Pearl Truffle from Vosges.

You are, in a word, an idiot. Or at least I was...so I don’t remember my first time. I remember my First Good Time.

I was in fourth grade – obviously precocious – and it all went down in the school Library, and loosely involved the following: a sudden thunderstorm, Vincent Price and a beat-up Electro Tone, Deluxe Model 444 suitcase record player.

And oh my yes it was Gooood, and I remember every detail.

I remember the damp smell of the old books in the little back room. I remember the sharp tang of Ohio Bluetip match sulfur and Camel unfiltereds that always swam up from the basement when the janitor was smoking. And I distinctly remember the thrill that we were probably doing something very wrong, and might get caught at any minute.

See there’s something I probably don’t have to explain to anyone here. It’s a dirty little secret that we don’t talk about it public, but we all know its true.

Reading Is Sex.

And yes, of course, sex is sex...and for that alone we should have a parades and a week of national celebration each and every year. But Reading IS sex. Not like sex...it IS sex. Words get inside you. It is penetration, and in the most intimate way. There is an arc to it. And, when you read the really good stuff, it changes the way you breathe. There is plotting and drama (Boy, howdy! :-). There’s rising action, there are climaxes...many of which are, to be kind about it, barely competent.

This is something that non-readers don’t understand at all, except that they know we have this weird fetish, which is why everyone in the Universe gives me books as gifts, and they’re usually not so good. So for them, here’s a little wisdom;

I have enough books. We all have enough books. They deluge us like April rain in Chicago. Like infomercials for God and cash flow schemes and bad punditry on Sunday morning. We have enough -- more than enough -- but we don’t have time to read them all so please, please...just...stop. What you don’t understand about us is that every time we crack the spine of a new novel or anthology, or comic book, we’re starting a new relationship, and that we will almost always slog along through it as best we can because, hey, even bad sex is still sex.

And then we cross the path of a Real Goddamned Book.

A ferocious, new lover that knows us and plays with us far better than we deserve. That takes us in confident hands to places that we never even had the imagination to wish for. We are transported. And we also know at some molecular level that we’re going to tire of her some day. That as perfect as it is, it will fade.

We’re older now, and we know entropy will eventually work its will -- eventually we will move on –- and since we already know this with an evangelical certainty, we are first driven to glut ourselves, to race to the end, to run through every position...and then we go back over that same fleshy ground with a fine, caressing touch.

And once that primal starvation-level hunger is sated, we lean back on our haunches...and that’s when we see that our new goddess is virtually unscathed. She’s panting and slick with a big, lewd smile, and we can’t help but notice that there is still a whole lot more meat on the bone.

“Oh,” we think before madly plunging right back in, “its gonna be like that!”

Which is why I haven’t gotten around to reading the copy of the “The Chamber” or “The Order” or “The Amicus Brief of Death” or whatever the hell the title of the Grisham was you got me for Christmas.
Last year.

And which is why I don’t remember my first time. But my first Good time was in the library, on a rainy day, with an Electro Tone suitcase record player, listening on scratchy vinyl to the slowly rising horror in Vincent Price’s voice as he read “Berenice”. And then in the most calm, refined tone you can image, Basil Rathbone explaining that he had borne “The thousand injuries of Fortunato” as best he could, “but when he ventured insult”, he simply had to waste his sorry ass in “The Cask of Amontillado."

I could feel it, down deep, in a way I wouldn’t be able to articulate until years later, that this was different. This was Important, and suddenly it was screw Dick and screw Jane, and screw the Spot they rode in on.

Because this was my First Good Time.
And this was my introduction to Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.