Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Okay, let's have it," they seem to be ordering. "You've been using it your way long enough."

Those assertive bitches. Generally speaking, I prefer to make them do all the doing and giving; that way, I feel I have done something to them: I've gotten away with something. Many of them prefer that too. They blow their young boys. That must seem easier to them. They don't have to undress and show themselves. They don't have to be able to come or pretend to. They don't have to be "good." They don't have to go through motions. (Everybody wants to feel safe, not just me. Older, rancorous, divorced ones, though, do want to get laid, insist on it, demand it. I prefer my women with milder insecurities. I feed on submissive feminine loneliness like a vulpine predator. I'm drawn by the scent. My ravenous snout is insatiably passionate, for an evening or two. Bellicose women whose husbands have been philanderers will hatchet you for it: they are affronted if you do not wish to fuck them.) Then they throw them out.

"What the fuck would I have to talk to him about?" one of them told me about an eighteen-year-old she picked up in a record shop, brought home, and threw out before morning.

No wonder so many of our virile young men have trouble getting it up nowadays. (It serves them right.) I would too. I did. Virginia was certainly safe with me because I couldn't feel at all safe with her. (I certainly couldn't seize control. I had not the confidence or the know-how.) And Virginia, in her turn, could not ever feel safe again with the adjuster who threatened to throw her out of his car (or with Ben Zack either, for that matter, who tried to rape her in his car, despite his crutches, canes, wheelchair, and all) on the deserted street near the cemetery in Queens alongside which they were parked if she didn't put out for him.

"That's just the way he said it too," she complained to me in a tone of petulant protest that was not typical of her. Her poise was shaken each time she spoke of it. "He just took it right out without even asking. I thought he was crazy. I just looked down and it was there. I was sure insulted, I'll tell you. I wonder what Ben Zack told him about me."

I didn't have the confidence and know-how to go too far with her even in my sex reveries without losing heart unexpectedly (and much more). Just like that, my little, rigid, dime-sized prick would dissipate into thinnest air. She scared me (the thought of her all naked scared me. I could never conjure up pictures of her that way). Pretty as she was, she could turn as grisly to me all at once as that separated head of Medusa, that evil, hairy, peristaltic nest of countless crawling adders and vipers arching out to fang me for no good reason.

"Let's do it all the way today," she'd say.

And convert me into lead, wood, or stone every time she appeared to be trying to skate me closer than I wanted to go (into what used to be called sexual intercourse. Today it's called fucking). I'd feel dehumanized and castrated; things would feel gone. There'd be a thumping blow in my chest, and my heart would stop. I would feel ill. With tendons and muscles fluttering weakly, I would long to sneak out of sight for a while, in order to creep back later and begin all over again with her from a distant and more secure footing, inching back cautiously. (I think I enjoyed just flirting with her more than anything else: flirting was an end in itself and still often is. I'm still not always sure I really want to get laid.) I would lose my urge, go numb; I would have a lump in my throat instead of my pants. I lost my cock and balls; they'd go away. They lost their sensitivity. I would have to squeeze or hold or look to be positive those limp and wrinkled sausage casings were still sticking there, still mine. I felt absence; no density or weight. I feel no density or weight there now. What an odd and derogatory thing to have to say about our masculine genitalia.

It is our weakest reed.

I can feel my feet in my shoes when I pause to concentrate on them, and I can feel my thigh bone connected to my ass bone on this wooden chair. I can feel this hand and forearm of mine lying on my brown desk blotter. I can feel my other hand resting overturned on my thigh against the worsted fabric of my trousers and can feel my back turned and angled uncomfortably, the lower part (sacrum) aching steadily but tolerably, but I cannot, for the very life and dignity of me, feel anything inside my undershorts where my exterior sexual organs are supposed to be (and probably are). All I can feel, without touching, is something like sandpaper in one spot where my undershorts are pulled too tight. I try to force a stir and can't. I know I had something there a little while ago. I know they belonged to me. I think I'm entitled to them. I know I will have to open my pants and look if I wish to make certain that what is hanging there is hanging there. I do. It is; they are. What a minor relief. Where else would they go if they went away from me? They feel lost now (I've been robbed!), even as I watch, like sloughed-off skin from a blister or sunburn or the cellophane wrapping from a crumpled, discarded cigarette pack, as though they already have gone away from me to work for somebody better and left only these flaccid parings behind to jeer at me. Until I scratch slowly, rub, tickle, and then — ah! — take a hearty grip. Now I've got him, now I know I've got him back, sturdy, upright, alert, obedient, eager, loyal, ambitious. (I think I'll hire him right now for my department. Such attributes of prickiness are much esteemed in companies and governmental organizations.) That's because its natural state is always so very, very small, negligible, puny, slothful, not just mine, all, unless one's growing somewhere on some kind of human zoological freak, and even then it's large only in comparison with others, unless that human freak is a full-grown horse. There are big heads, bellies, and backsides, I suppose, and God knows there are tremendous, full breasts (although I find I am losing my taste for those and already prefer the smaller, shapelier ones of my wife, Penny, Mary, Betty, and Laura, all of whom wish they had bigger ones), even a brain weighs at least a whole pound or two, I think, but I guess there really is no such thing as a big human dick.

(Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do.)

They are such fractional parts of the total construction they might easily be overlooked if we did not dwell on them. They are arrogant and absurd in their haughty, sniffing, pushy, egotistical pretensions. (We let them get away with an awful lot.) They can't even hold their lordly pose for half a day a week. What a feeble weapon indeed for establishing male supremacy, a flabby, collapsing channel for & universal power drive ejaculated now and then in sporadic spoonfuls. No wonder we have to make fists and raise our voices at the kitchen table.

Mine would pop right up dependably in the days of my youth every time I stopped (or even thought of stopping) to resume joking salaciously with Virginia at her desk beneath the big circular office clock whose slender, pointy minute hand (symbolizing a long, phallic sword or lance for me in those days and a lancet or proctoscope now) sliced ahead with a twitch every sixty seconds. It would project embarrassingly. (I could not even dance with schoolgirl friends in those molten pubic days without launching haplessly into an instantaneous erection that had nothing at all to do with me or with them — I might just as well have shrugged my shoulders and claimed:

"It's not mine. There's nothing I can do about it."

And walked off the dance floor and left it floating there — in midair, disowned — and would have to draw back a bit at the waist in an attempt to conceal it. Now I shove it forward to let them see it's there. That is, I have found, an effective gambit with mature women who have let you know they want it.) I kept myself covered with accident folders I made certain to bring with me whenever I went to Virginia's desk to pretend to search for others as we bantered lewdly.