Two Stories About Sex In Which No Actual Sex Takes Place

I.

At first, I didn't know what I was looking at. It seemed like something was missing. It was just a hairless mound which, based on what little I knew about human anatomy, should have contained a penis. Emily held her dress aloft like it was a boat sail and she was waiting for a gust of wind. She gazed at me expectantly, obviously awaiting some kind of reaction, even though neither of us had a clue just what that reaction should be.

Lacking any other ideas, I stuck out my tongue, wagged it at her and screamed, "Rock and rooooooll!" I had no idea at the time just how dirty that was. I was just following the script.

My uncle had decided it would be funny to dress me up for Halloween like Gene Simmons, the blood-spitting, fire-breathing bass player from KISS. We spent most of the day getting the makeup just right, and creating a costume with bat wings and platform boots. He used a sharpie to add a thick coat of hair to my otherwise depilous 8-year-old chest.

When I joined my friends for trick-or-treating, they were speechless. They watched in slack-jawed wonder as I showed off the stage moves that my uncle had taught me. I could do the guitar-solo-air-kick and the mood-enhancing-crotch-thrust and sing roughly one-third of the songs from the KISS Alive album.

"God of thunnnnnder and rock n' rollllll," I sang in my high-pitched prepubescent squeal. "The spell you're unnnnnnder, is gonna rob you of your virgin soul!"

KEEP ON READIN'... BECAUSE THE FIRST STEP TO RECOVERY IS ACCEPTANCE

If I had any idea whatsoever what I was saying, it would've been ironic. Instead, it was just cute. Well, depending on who you talked to. Some of our neighbors thought it was cute. Others made it abundantly clear that they were not in any way amused by my one-boy performance of "Love Gun" - especially if they were Episcopalian. (Strange, I know. Do all Episcopalians have phallophobia?)

As the evening stretched on, the crowd eventually dwindled down to just me and a girl named Emily, who had never so much as given me a second glance until that night. But now she was standing uncomfortably close and trying to hold my hand. During my performance of "Detroit Rock City," as I flicked my tongue and punched at the air with my codpiece (actually just a plastic ice cream bowl from Dairy Queen), Emily came to the conclusion that I needed to see her vagina. Immediately.

When I told my dad about it later, he just laughed. "I suppose you'll want to buy a guitar now, right?"

"Oh yeah, right," I said, pretending to gag. "Like I want more girls flashing their privates at me. That's just gross."

"Give it a few years," he told me with a wink. "You'll be learning the chords to Led Zeppelin songs just so more girls will lift their dresses for you."

That was the only thing my dad ever told me about sex. Rock musicians get lots of pussy.

II.

I've long been warned that long distance relationships are a terrible idea. But I thought we'd be different. We were two writers. With just a little creativity, I thought, we'd find ways around the lack of physical intimacy. It would be difficult but not insurmountable. Necessity is the mother of invention.

It began with phone sex. At first we were timid, scarcely able to do anything but moan softly. But in a matter of weeks, we became pros at linguistic smut. On some nights our mutual masturbation sessions would drag on for hours, evolving into a foul-mouthed poetry slam. When not muttering filthy suggestions on the phone to her, I devoted entire afternoons to looking up new and more surprising erotic adjectives. Anybody's penis could be throbbing, but when I told her about my "oscillating" cock, I could tell from her quickened breathing that she appreciated the effort.

But I was a hack amateur compared to her. She was in another league. If everything she told me about her vagina was accurate, she either belonged in a side-show carnival or under medical observation. Her brilliance wasn't in the clinical details. She was an artist. She could string together words in ways that sounded like music. Very, very dirty music. And her reservoir of sexual inspiration seemed to be bottomless. She could do twenty minutes alone on the vein that ran down my shaft.

But even the best phone sex can get old if you do it too much. We needed something fresh to keep things interesting. So we added an element of danger. We started calling each other only when we were out in public. It made our discussions hotter, but also considerably riskier. It was one thing if I was sitting in my car in rush hour traffic, where dropping my pants would likely go unnoticed by my fellow commuters. But Whole Foods wasn't the most convenient place to discover that I had a tremendous erection. The other shoppers didn't know that my girlfriend had just described to me, using language that's still banned in much of the South, what she wanted to do to me with her tongue. As far as they could tell, I was just a little too into Cap'n Crunch.

The same logic applies to the public library - specifically, the fiction section, row ln-po. Though you may never see them, rest assured, there are other people nearby, and they'd like to enjoy their literature without overhearing whispered dirty talk, especially if it involves what you intend to bury your face in.

Soon even that got dull. We needed to take it a step further. But what's left after phone sex at grocery stores and government buildings starts to feel tame? When even sending a text message like "wanna guess where my finger is?" while the other person is visiting their grandmother barely registers as a 2.0 on the erotic richter scale?

Well, obviously. We sent each other pictures of our genitals.

When photographing your penis with the intention of giving it to somebody who has seen your penis many times but not as recently as you might like, it's easy to get caught up in a hopeless pursuit of perfection. A wide-shot made my dick seem too small, too much like a boiled shrimp. But a close-up just made it look ferocious, like a character from Destroy All Monsters. I wasn't asking for a lot, just an aesthetic that combined the breath-taking severity of the Washington Monument with the goofy and lovable schlongs of a Manon Cleary painting. Something that an art critic would be able to stare at for hours, never quite able to grasp all of the complexities. Or if nothing else, something that would inspire my girlfriend to say, "What's it gonna take to get that inside me as soon as humanly possible?"


It took several days but I finally settled on 10 photos. They weren't perfect, but they at least demonstrated an artistic perspective, if only as a study in form and color, which made them worthy of a place in the canon of Eric Spitznagel penis self-portraits. A canon which, as of this writing, contains only 10 photos.

I sent her the photos and waited anxiously for a response. My initial fear was, of course, rejection. "Wow, I let him fuck me with that? How did I ever get so desperate?" But then another paranoid thought sent shivers down my spine. I had just given an assortment of genital photos to a woman I'd known for less than three months. For all I knew, there was already a Flickr account with the title "Spitzy's Junk." Sure, you wouldn't necessarily know it was my penis unless you recognized the tiny mole just below my... well, I've already said too much.

I worked myself into such a lather that when she finally called, it took me a moment to realize that she wasn't asking for a ransom. Instead, she told me, without skipping any of the minutiae, exactly what she did to herself while looking at the pictures.

A few days later, she sent me photos of her own naked body. I came so hard, I fell out of my chair and nearly gave myself a concussion.

(To read two more stories about sex in which no actual sex takes place, go here.)