Still More Stories About Sex In Which No Actual Sex Takes Place

(To read the first four stories about sex, go here and then here.)

V.

"Hey look," I muttered lazily to the Dame, rolling over in my beach-chair. "That dog's raping a child."

I suppose it doesn't speak very highly of me that I just sat there and didn't immediately jump to the child's defense. I'd never witnessed a canine sex crime before, so I wasn't sure of the decorum. Is it like when a person sneezes and you need to give their immediate family dibs on saying gesundheit? If I was a father and my kid was getting sexually assaulted by a dirty beach dog and some other dude saved him, I would've been really embarrassed. What do you say when a good samaritan makes you look like the worst parent in the universe?

"Wow, thanks for noticing that. I was totally going to do something but, well, I'm just happy he's making friends."

Of course, there were a myriad of other reasons why I didn't leap to the poor boy's rescue. First and foremost, the Dame and I were on vacation. We'd come to the Cayman Islands to relax in style. We were here to drink overpriced rum drinks and swim in the pristine (and overpriced) ocean and smoke Cuban cigars that tasted like burnt butter and get a deep tan that advertised our tropical dormancy and just generally enjoy the vast, sprawling coastline of white sand and whiter people. We did not come here to protect the virginal sphincters of American children from insatiable Caribbean mongrels.

KEEP ON READIN'... THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN!



Again, I must ask, where was his father? The kid was far too young to be taking island vacations by himself. His parents were likely lounging somewhere nearby, asking the cabana boy for another avocado daiquiri, too buzzed to remember that they hadn't bothered with safe sex. And I'm supposed to bail out these deadbeat parents? Listen, I don't change diapers for other people's babies on an airplane, so I sure as hell won't defend their slow-witted progeny from a beach-side sexual plundering. Especially when said sexual plundering may've been deserved.

I don't claim to know much about Grand Cayman, having spent a very short amount of time on the island, but I do know this: Their beaches are populated by an alarming number of stray dogs. They're easy enough to ignore, at least if you're smarter than the morbidly obese tourists who throw cheese fries at them and then act surprised when the dogs shadow them like mobsters trying to collect on a loan. The future rape victim - a pale 8 year-old boy with a mop of red hair and freckles that had dreams of growing up to become inoperable melanoma - was kinda an asshole. He'd been pitching rocks at the beach dogs for most of the afternoon, first in self-defense (to protect his nachos, which he needed only if he was in a hurry for type 2 diabetes) and then just for sport.

I would never normally say this, but when you watch an obnoxious child torment a stray dog with rocks for almost an hour, you have to admit that he is, in every possible sense, asking for it.

The Dame tilted her head, just enough to get a better view of the ocean assault, and sniffed dismissively.

"The dog isn't raping him," she corrected me. "He's just riding him. Like a surfboard."

I studied the pair more closely. The kid was face down in shallow water, the dog perched on top of him, doing things with his hips that I would never describe as "riding a wave".

"I don't think so," I said. "I'm pretty sure surfing doesn't involve quite so much thrusting."

She sat up in her beach-chair - which, in a serious Caribbean vacation, isn't something you do unless your partner is having a stroke or bandits have invaded the beach. "What are you talking about?" She barked. "Why do you have to sexualize everything?"

"This isn't about me," I insisted. "That dog is sexualizing that kid's ass. That's all I'm saying."

"The... dog....," she said slowly, as if I had learning disability. "Is... surfing."



"The... dog...," I repeated. "Is raping... that boy's... poo chute."

Eventually the dog was pulled away, and the kid, looking remarkably unfazed, continued playing in the water. But the Dame and I kept right on arguing, as if a moral high ground was at stake.

"You let one dog get away with rape," I said, "and you're sending a message to the other beach dogs, 'Please commit carnal abuse with our children.' I'm sorry, but I don't want that blood on my hands."

"Do you even know the difference between playing and sexual aggression?" She said. "What were you like at your grade-school playground? Every time somebody got too close on the jungle gym, did you start screaming that they were trying to touch your privates?"

"This is why we're never getting a dog," I said. "Rather than take it for a walk, you'll just let it rape Jodie Foster on a pinball machine."

"I'll teach it to mouth-rape you if it'll make you shut the hell up!"

All in all, it was a great vacation. The Dame and I both got sunburned, I swam in the ocean with my cellphone, we spent a month's rent on frozen rum drinks with miniature umbrellas, and the blurry line between rape and surfing got a little blurrier. Pretty much what I expected.

VI.

Whenever I've gone to a stripclub - and I visited a lot of stripclubs in my 20s - I've always made the wrong decisions. I usually picked the stripper who looked like a sexy librarian, mistakenly believing that black-rimmed nerd glasses is an accurate reflection of a person's personality. But wearing glasses does not make somebody smart, any more than being blonde makes them genetically inclined not to wear panties in public. And yet I can't seem to learn this lesson. Every time I've laid eyes on a stripper who looks like Elvis Costello after getting injected with estrogen, I've allowed myself to get seduced by her flimsy siren song. And then I'm disappointed when she doesn't start yammering about Don DeLillo, specifically his satirical take on novelty intellectualism, as she's grinding her ass into my lap like she's grating cheese.

Even if I didn't naively believe that every stripper is just a few credits shy of an English Lit degree, I'm just not the kind of guy who excels in a stripclub environment. I don't really know what to do with myself when a woman is being overtly sexual with me, particularly when my male friends are sitting around a table and watching me as they sip on watered-down Pepsis.

When a male porcupine is feeling horny, he'll urinate on the nearest attractive female to demonstrate his intentions. But would he pay her twenty dollars so she'll dry-hump him in a dark, smoky club while his buddies watch and wheeze heavily? Not on a dare. Because that's fucking creepy. Stripclubs are a kink that's distinctively human, and the rest of the animal kingdom are a little freaked out by it and would rather we just kept our perverted hobbies to ourselves, thank you very much.

When faced with the awkward sexual tension of a stripper trying to start a campfire on my groin, I tend to become a hack standup comic. "You know what's funny?" I've said to at least one unamused stripper. "There are rhythm-and-blues festivals, and blues festivals, but there aren't any festivals devoted to just rhythm. What's up with that? Why no love for rhythm? That's something I'd like to see, a festival about people keeping a steady beat. Wouldn't you love to go to a concert and there's just a metronome on stage? Or a choir of people snapping? That would be the greatest festival ever."



Many of my guy friends don't care for strippers because they're too acutely aware that it's just a facade. But that's never concerned me. I'm not offended that strippers are pretending to like me. Honestly, I don't see how that's different from any other business transaction. It'd be as absurd as getting insulted when a waitress calls you "sweetie", or a Gap outlet clerk says your ass looks hot in cargo shorts when it obviously doesn't. If you're really paying attention, you'd realize that almost everybody you talk to in a typical day is just pretending to like you.

That's never bothered me. What bothers me is that strippers are like a YMCA pool filled with hepatitis C.

I'll fully admit that I'm not the best judge of such things. I'm obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness. In fact - full disclosure - I've never used the toilet in a public restroom at any point in my adult life. Seriously. Ever. I've used urinals because I can usually do so without touching anything. (Yes, that's right, I just admitted that I don't wash my hands in public restrooms. Don't look at me like that's some kind of crazy confession. It's actually the only rational choice. I know where my penis has been, but I don't know who's been shaving their balls in the sink.) If I'm at an airport and I need to make #2, I will wait until I arrive at my destination - or as I call it, a "safe house" - before placing my butt-cheeks on a toilet. Over the years, I've developed an almost super-human control over my bowel movements. And that is not something anybody should ever brag about in a public forum.

If I won't crap in a toilet that's been patronized by more three people in a 24 hour period, why in the world would I allow my exposed flesh to make contact with a woman whose face has the unhealthy hue of a carrot, and whom I've just seen whirligigging against the greasy lap of my buddy, who I know for a fact has the personal hygiene of an "Our Gang" character. Letting her touch me makes about as much sense as drinking soup off the floor of a New York subway.

Thankfully, stripclubs lost their appeal in my social group as we entered our 30s. My guy friends started settling down and getting married, which meant they only spent their money on strippers when they thought they could get away with it, like bachelor parties. I've gone to a lot of bachelor parties over the last ten years. Too many, really. And I've never protested, because there's something about a bachelor party that seems less obviously sleazy than a stripclub. For one thing, there's a noble reason for the nudity. "Hey, you're getting married! To celebrate your sacred union of love, we all pitched in to pay some stranger to shove her diseased va-jay-jay in your face! Mazel tov!"

A bachelor party is never as fun as you think it's going to be. Because the logic of it is inherently flawed. Never, in the history of humankind, has anyone ever combined two or more clothed males with one or more naked females and it didn't evolve into something incredibly uncomfortable for everybody involved. That's just not a social dynamic that works, regardless of how you crunch the numbers.

There's something about the privacy of a bachelor party that brings out the worst in everybody. Not just the guys, but the women peeling off their clothes. Are you familiar with the "Suck-a-buck"? No? Allow me to paint you a mental picture. A man, possessing the book-smarts of a mongoloid, places a dollar bill over his mouth, and then a woman, who has mysteriously lost her panties and any semblance of self-respect, lowers herself onto his face and, using a combination of suction and kegel exercises, snatches the dollar like a fat child grabbing candy. It's a party game with no winner, unless you live in a country where lip herpes has monetary value. As long as you're down there, why not just dip a chip in her yeast-infested vag? At that point, what do you have to lose?

I've gone to sixteen bachelor parties in the last decade - that's right, six-fucking-teen - and every time I come out looking and acting a little more like Wilford Brimley. I'm always the one saying, "Oh my sweet gentle Jesus, that just ain't right." I'm convinced that strippers are aging me. The only threshold left to cross is for a stripper to hand me a speculum. Please god, let that not be coming next. There is such a thing as seeing too much.

On the topic of "seeing too much," it finally happened. But it didn't involve the genitals I'd imagined.

When my friend Tim Bennett got married, he invited me and the other groomsmen to a bachelor party in Chicago. On a cold winter day, we gathered together in the basement of a North Side bar, like Shriners but without the red fezzes. After drinking enough single malt scotch to suppress our better judgment (or anything passing for dignity), we sat in a semi-circle on fold-out chairs and watched as a pair of strippers did an "erotic" routine in the tired, bored way that indicates professionalism.

I knew something was wrong when they took out the purple dildo. It was... well, huge does not begin to do it justice. It was Bunyanesque. It was like a whale's penis bone. Too big to be intimidating. As a man, you couldn't look at it and feel even a tinge of jealousy. Not just because it wasn't realistic, but because it was irrational. No man is deluded enough to think, "Gosh, I sure do wish my penis was so frighteningly large that every time I made love to my special lady friend, she had vaginal ruptures and internal bleeding."

That's how big it was.

So they were doing their thing, putting the unreasonably mammoth dildo in places that god and nature never intended, and the guys were hooting and hollering, because that's what guys do when women take off their clothes and do ill-advised things with pythonic rubber toys. I'm not sure why strippers aren't alarmed when large groups of men start screaming like a bloodthirsty crowd in a Roman coliseum. I assume it's because they just like to know where we are. Guys are mostly harmless when they're howling and wagging their tongues and high-fiving each other. It's when they get quiet that you have to worry. A silent, horny man is a ticking time bomb.

Hooting like an angry monkey is the "Marco... Polo" of bachelor parties. It just lets the strippers know you're not trying to sneak up on them.

At some point, Tim was dragged onstage, and the strippers writhed and slithered against him, moaning ecstatically as if rubbing themselves against the thigh of a drunken man with a lazy eye was enough to give them screaming orgasms. Of course, what they were doing qualified as actual foreplay about as much as Marcel Marceau was really stuck in an invisible box. It was sexual pantomime.

But then... things got weird.

I'm still not sure how it happened. The strippers, perhaps encouraged by the blizzard of wrinkled dollars showering down on them, got a bit too frisky with Tim. Belts were unlooped, buttons were unfastened, Tim pretended to resist, and somehow his pants ended up around his ankles.

Have you ever seen a movie where somebody says or does something wildly inappropriate and the room goes suddenly silent? The music cuts off abruptly (usually with the sound effect of a needle being ripped from a vinyl record) and you can hear crickets in the background and everybody is staring slack-jawed at the guilty party? That's exactly what it was like. I don't know if crickets were chirping (this was Chicago, after all), but I definitely recall that the music stopped, and that every guy instantly froze in their last position, like they were doing some terrible improv game. Even the strippers looked a little unnerved, and it's really saying something when the person with an elephantine dildo stuck halfway up her hoo-haw isn't the one feeling embarrassed.

Tim's penis was... how can I put this delicately?... a pinkish nub. An overgrown clitoris. It reminded me of a baby's fist giving a thumbs-up. To call it small would be an insult to the word small. A midget is small. A mosquito is small. This was something that, were it a mole, you wouldn't even bother to have your dermatologist take a look at it.



Needless to say, the bachelor party came to a rather unceremonious halt. Tim was married the next day to a woman so shockingly beautiful, our only explanation (whispered amongst the groomsmen) is that she must have the world's smallest vagina. Tim has never denied his lilliputian penis. In fact, he occasionally brags about it. There must be emotional maturity in there somewhere, but I guess I'm just too much of a genitally-insecure broham to see it.

And that, I'm sad to say, was the last time I've ever been in the company of a stripper. I've begged off countless bachelor parties, and avoided meeting my male friends for a drink-and-lapdance at the local nude emporium. It's not that I don't like strippers. Some days I yearn to have jumbo breasts shoved into my face by somebody who wouldn't even smile at me on the bus, or leave a dark stripclub at noon, my eyes squinting at the daylight and my shirt covered in glitter that looks like polychromatic dandruff. But I don't, because somewhere in the back recesses of my brain, I'm terrified that I'm going to learn something I never wanted to know. Not about me, or even female anatomy, but about one of my friends; a friend who, if it wasn't for the bad influence of faux sexual enthusiasm, would have taken his shameful secret to the grave.

Sometimes I think the military had it right after all. Don't ask, don't tell. Believe me, when it happens to you and that painful image burns into your subconscious like a pornographic tattoo, you'll understand.

Read My Lips (or "The Heart is a Lonely Ventriloquist"): Part Two

(To read part one, go here.)

"Oh holy hell," I muttered, my voice trembling with pseudo-panic. "Please tell me you see that too."

"See what?" Carol giggled, inching closer as if we were sharing a conspiratorial secret.

My eyes were wide and bloodshot, like dinner plates decorated with crayons by autistic children. "That little green alien dude with the huge head and the antennas," I said, pointing at nothing. "He's floating right there in front of us!"

Carol looked at the empty air and tried to paint a mental picture. "It sounds the Great Gazoo," she said. "Are you hallucinating the Great Gazoo?"

I was hoping she hadn't seen that particular season of The Flintstones. But this was a woman well-versed in the ways of LSD, so of course she watched a ridiculous amount of cartoons. To be honest, I'd never hallucinated before, so I had no frame of reference. I didn't know what I was supposed to be seeing or feeling, just that something dramatic had to happen soon or Carol would start crying again.

"I don't know what it is, but it's freaking my shit out," I said, burrowing my face into my knees. "He keeps calling me dum-dum."

Carol burst into crunchy laughter. "Oh man, you are tripping balls," she cackled.

KEEP ON READIN'... AND LEARN HOW TO LOVE AGAIN

Sadly, I wasn't tripping, balls or otherwise. My zonked-out brain hadn't conjured a Hanna/Barbera-inspired phantasm. I was just being nice. In fact, I don't think I was even mildly stoned. But when an extremely hot drug dealer sells you a tab of acid that turns out to be an LSD-free scrap of wax paper with a winking, Tolkien-esque wizard drawn on the front, it's best not to make any waves. Especially if you're hoping to sleep with said attractive drug dealer.

It was a major disappointment for me. I'd been looking forward to my first acid experience, and I say that with a modicum of personal shame. The year was 1992, and I was fast approaching the age when trying any drug for the first time betrays a moral weakness. There was no good reason for my abstinence from psychedelics. I had gone to a liberal arts college. I owned several unironic tie-dyed shirts. I didn't play guitar but I still knew all the chord changes to "Mr. Tambourine Man". I had friends who owned Highlander and Evil Dead II on VHS. How could I have made it to 22 without doing LSD?

Not that I was a complete drug novice. I'd smoked enough recreational pot to ensure several public executions in Singapore, but I'd never gotten around to acid. It wasn't for lack of trying. I'd made two prior attempts to take a magic carpet ride, and it always ended in disaster.

ATTEMPT #1: Mid-November, 1987. My college roommate claimed to have a friend who knew a guy who could hook us up with a dude who had access to a blotter of "White Fluff". I had no idea what that was, but it sounded vaguely like something from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I was currently reading with the unblinking devotion I hadn't given to the written word since I was 13 and discovered a dog-eared copy of Penthouse Forum in the woods near my family's house. I wanted to be like Ken Kesey, or at least a version of Ken Kesey who didn't own a van, had never left the Midwest, and whose entire understanding of eastern philosophy came from one-liners in Woody Allen short stories.

I paid for my cut of the acid, which my roommate agreed to buy on our behalf, and then spent the rest of the day worried that the money could be traced back to me. My paranoia only deepened when my roommate failed to show up for our scheduled cerebral meltdown. I waited for hours, carefully plotting my alibi. If worse came to worse, I could file down my fingerprints, dye my hair black, and hitchhike to Canada before the heat caught wind of my trail.

Foolishly, I went looking for him. I wandered the campus, yelling out his name like he was a lost puppy. Just after midnight, I finally returned to our dorm and found him in the lounge, sitting on the couch next to a skinny, pale dude with a frizzy afro and pencil-thin goatee. Their pupils were big as walnuts, so I was reasonably certain they were already well into their acid trip. But that didn't explain why they were both buck-ass naked and eating peanut butter directly from a jar.



"Oh wow, I'm totally sorry, ma'man," my roommate giggled, making no attempt to conceal his flaccid penis. "We got started without you. Help yourself to a few tabs. I left the blotter on my dresser."

I said something noncommittal and slipped away. And then I spent the night on the floor of the student center, re-reading Tom Wolfe's book from cover to cover and looking for any references to unnecessary nudity or peanut butter. Apparently he'd left that part out.

ATTEMPT #2: September-ish, 1990. Now a senior in college, I was determined to let my freak flag fly. I met a girl in my dorm who sold drugs to pay her tuition. I wouldn't have been any less impressed if I'd learned she was smuggling weapons out of Nigeria. I grilled her for details, wanting to hear everything about her dangerous lifestyle. I liked to imagine she was falling in love with me, even though I knew our relationship was doomed from the start. I could see our future so clearly: I'd be sunning myself by the pool in some exotic mansion, waiting anxiously for her call, just as she was being gunned down in Colombia as she boarded a helicopter filled with crates of China White.

"How do you smuggle your drugs onto campus?" I'd ask her. "Wait, don't tell me. You hide them inside a shipment of miniature Virgin Mary statues, right?"

"No," she said, eyeing me suspiciously. "I drive them in the trunk of my Volvo. Are you a fucking narc?"

"Oh, that is sweet," I laughed with girlish delight. "You have the lingo down perfectly. Now, by 'narc' you mean 'undercover narcotics agent'? Can you imagine if I was? That would be so unbelievably cool. Do you think the FDA has a financial aid program for student narcs? I would totally sign up for that. Kidding, kidding, I'm kidding."

I don't know why she tolerated me. I was definitely a nuisance. I just hung around her room and asked nettlesome questions, like "What's that scale for? Is it for gold? Are you like an old-timey prospector?" Maybe she thought I was cute, or maybe I was just the perfect fall-guy if the cops ever kicked down her door. Whatever the case, I finally mustered the courage to make the leap from annoying hanger-on to paying customer. She tried to talk me into doing mescaline, but I didn't want to go on a vision quest and get lectured to by a fox spirit guide in the desert. So I convinced her to sell me some plain old LSD.

When the big day arrived, I went to her room equipped with the acid essentials: a jug of unconcentrated orange juice, a cassette tape of Pink Floyd's Meddle, and directions to the nearest hospital emergency room. But when I showed up, expecting my first LSD experience to be a private affair between me and the woman I desperately wanted to see naked, there was another guy there. He was a greasy man-weasel, dressed like an extra from a renaissance faire. He instinctively knew the perfect thing to say to creep out everyone around him, whether it was quoting Joy Division lyrics or describing how his belt was made from real rattlesnake.

"Oh my little friend, you're in for a treat," he hissed in his Middle Earth wheeze. "I've tried this particular strain of LSD, and believe you me, it's the real deal. It's an intense high, my brutha. Last time I dosed on this shit, one of my balls disappeared for a week."

That wasn't the reassurance I needed. I suddenly remembered all of my mom's frantic drug warnings, like the time she told me about the high school teacher who'd been slipped some acid by one of his students and never... stopped... tripping. I'd laughed off her apocalyptic predictions before, but now I wasn't so sure. Maybe I'd be one of those unfortunate few whose DNA was permanently altered by LSD, and I'd be confined to an asylum bedroom, my arms and legs restrained with leather straps, my brain a rollercoaster of fucked-up imagery, my testicles still MIA.

The panic washed over me, the perfect storm, and I mumbled something about not having exact change and got the hell out of there.



And here I was, just a few years later, sitting in a field with a bunch of strangers at a suburban Chicago blues festival, trying to pop my acid cherry yet again.

Perhaps I'd put too much pressure on myself. I was like a virgin at a whorehouse, determined to feel the same euphoric fireworks that he'd heard so much about. When I swallowed the tab, my endorphins likely cancelled out any hallucinogenic effects. Either that, or Carol had sold me a very overpriced post-it note.

I wanted to believe she hadn't purposively duped me. Her constant apologies did seem sincere. And if nothing else, I liked all the attention. Carol was beautiful. She was pocket-sized, tiny as a dwarf but without the waddling stride, and she had purple dreadlocks. Seriously, purple dreadlocks. It was so exotic and foreign to me, she might as well have had gills. When I met her, I couldn't stop staring at her head. I almost blurted out, "Forget the acid, could I just touch your hair?"

I'd come up to Evanston with a group of guys from Chicago, lured by promises of easy drugs and scantily-clad college girls. Carol, our LSD connection, was a friend of a friend of a friend (aren't they always?). She sold us enough hits for the group, we downed them in the bathroom of a Bennigan's, and then went our separate ways. But for some reason Carol remained by my side. She was either committed to customer satisfaction or she had the same bewildering attraction to me that I had for her.

We ended up wandering away from the festival and sitting on the rocks next to Lake Michigan, waiting for something, anything, that passed for a psychedelic episode. But aside from my (entirely fictional) Great Gazoo sighting, it was a bust. So we just stared out at the water with contemplative expressions, our knees hovering just inches away from each other, narrowly avoiding holding hands every time we shifted positions. I tried to think of something to say that would let her know, funny story, I was actually relieved that her LSD was as potent as a communion wafer. While my friends were probably miffed to be watching a Dr. John performance completely sober, I felt like I had dodged a bullet, and I kinda preferred sitting next to the shoreline with her and doing nothing at all, especially when the alternative involved hanging out with a bunch of monosyllabic hippie wanna-be's, making color-trails with my hands and making asinine observations like "god is dog spelled backwards."

But I wasn't quite so eloquent with her. I spoke in hiccups, saying only what was absolutely necessary. Before long, I was terrified (with good reason) that she was growing bored with my lame attempts at conversation. So I took a leap of faith and shared something I'd never confessed to another human being.

"I used to be a ventriloquist," I said.

I regretted it as soon as the word escaped my mouth. She turned to me and glared, like I'd just told her I was a hermaphrodite.

"I don't mean like a professional ventriloquist," I said, backpedaling. "I just dabbled in it for a few weeks as a kid. It was my brother's idea, really. He forced me to get a ventriloquist dummy."

She didn't say anything. She just stared at me, and it was difficult to tell if I'd repulsed her irrevocably or if her silence was meant as compassion.

"Okay, fine, I caved to peer pressure," I continued. "But it was just a one-time thing, and it's not like I ever took it seriously or asked my parents to send me to magic camp or anything."

She didn't stop me, so I kept talking. I told her about Danny O'Day, my redheaded comedy sidekick with the plaid jacket and bow-tie, who lived with me for almost a month, long after my ventriloquism ambitions had died. I told her how my parents had kidnapped Danny, and it wasn't until years later that I found him in the basement, stored in an old cardboard box with all of the other abandoned toys from my youth.

"What'd you do with him?" She asked.

"Nothing," I laughed. "I just left him there."

"But aren't you worried? What if he comes to life and hunts you down?"

I winked at her, playing along. "I guess I'll just take my chances."

She lunged at me, straddling my chest and holding my wrists firmly against the cold stone. "You have to promise me something," she said, her voice suddenly severe. "Promise me that you'll find Danny, and you'll get rid of him. Can you do that for me? I'm asking you as a friend. Get rid of him."

"I-I don't think..."

"I've seen this happen before," she barked at me. "There's voodoo in those goddamn dolls. You can't begin to understand what I'm talking about. You're just going to have to trust me. They will kill you if you give them the chance."



There were only two plausible explanations. Either Carol's LSD had finally kicked in and she was having some truly bizarre hallucinations about murderous ventriloquist puppets, or she was genuinely crazy. Whatever the reasons, I didn't argue with her. And honestly, I was a little turned on by it. I wanted to believe she was thinking rationally, and there was a part of her that thought my safety was in real jeopardy, that Danny O'Day could actually crawl out of my parents' basement and come after me with a steak knife.

There's something sexy about clinical insanity. Maybe it's the unpredictability. You never know if she's going to take a bite out of your neck or warn you that the ghost of H.P. Lovecraft is living in her crawl space. Whatever happens, it's bound to be entertaining. And worst case scenario, you get a few conjugal visits (prison sex is the hottest sex) before deciding that you need something more stable.

I assured her that Danny would be taken care of. "He's not going to bother either of us ever again," I told her. And then she grabbed the back of my neck and kissed me hard. And let me tell you, there is nothing better than making out with a dreadlocked drug dealer who may or may not be silly high on LSD after you've just promised to protect her from a blood-thirsty ventriloquist dummy.

I felt a little bad about it later. She obviously wasn't firing on all cylinders. I probably shouldn't have mashed with a woman so clearly suffering from paranoid delusions. But in hindsight, it wasn't the make-out session I regret the most. If I could take any of it back, I wouldn't have sent her those pictures of Danny.

True to my word, the very next day I took an Amtrak to my parents' home, found the doll and... well, a promise is a promise. I wrapped Danny's wrists and ankles in duct tape, and tied a handkerchief around his mouth. And then I used a sharpie marker to give him a black eye, so it appeared like I'd roughed him up for good measure. I took a polaroid of the grisly scene, and then wrote on the back: "Don't worry, Carol. You're safe."

I guess it was a little creepy. I couldn't blame Carol for never calling me again, especially if it turned out that she'd been tripping all along and didn't actually believe that ventriloquist dummies were hunting humans for sport. I can only imagine what she thought, opening her mail to find a letter from a guy she barely remembered, who had for some reason taken it upon himself to send her a photo of a bound-and-gagged puppet.

I never saw her or those beautiful purple dreads ever again, but it wasn't a complete waste. I did feel better knowing that Danny was incapacitated. Not that I thought he'd ever come after me but... well, better safe than sorry.

Hmmm. Y'know, now that I think about it, maybe I never needed LSD after all. I did an Abu Ghraib on a puppet while completely sober, so god only knows what I would've done in an altered state. I guess sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

Read My Lips (or "The Heart is a Lonely Ventriloquist")

During the fall of 1978, my brother announced that he was going to become a ventriloquist.

This isn't the sort of news a parent wants to hear from their 8 year-old son. I will never forget the look on my father's face. Our family was gathered around the kitchen table, having a hurried breakfast before fleeing our separate ways, and my dad was trying to read the morning paper in peace. My brother and I sometimes blurted out whatever wild notion happened to pass through our prepubescent heads, just to get a rise out of our parents.

"If Indiana Jones can climb under a moving car," we'd wonder aloud over our Boo-Berry cereal, "I don't see any reason why I can't".

Our dad was smarter than that. He knew we were just trying to get his attention. So he smiled and nodded at our every outrageous suggestion and muttered something noncommittal like, "Whatever you think is best."

But when he heard the word "ventriloquist" trickle out of my brother's mouth, he somehow sensed that this was different. He couldn't have looked more disturbed if my brother had said, "Some of the guys and I have been experimenting with bondage, and I think I'm a sub/bottom. Can I use my allowance to buy one of those leather masks with zippers for eyes?"

There are a lot of very valid reasons not to reproduce, but the one they never tell you is this: You may, at some point during your child's life, need to talk them out of a career in ventriloquism.

KEEP ON READIN'! OR DON'T, NOBODY'S HOLDIN' A GUN TO YOUR HEAD.

My father, wise as he was, couldn't find the right words to explain exactly why this was a bad, bad, bad idea. What could he have said? "Well, son, you know how some of the boys at your school get teased for doing things that the other kids think are uncool? Well, those are the nerds who beat up ventriloquists! Seriously! Do you want to die alone?"



He didn't say that, of course. He just listened to my brother and rubbed his chin and frowned without being too obvious about it. I'd never seen him look so flustered before. The only time he'd been this unsure of himself was when he tried to tell us that Darth Vader was a racist stereotype.

We'd dragged him to see Star Wars for the sixth or seventh time, and on the car ride home, he started ranting about how all the negative propaganda against the so-called "Dark Side" of the Force was just a thinly veiled attack on Harlem and Vernon Jordan. We tried to explain to him that it was dark as in night, not dark as in dark-skinned.

"I wish I could believe that," he said, furiously slapping his hand against the steering wheel. "In that final sword battle with Obi-Kenobbiwon, whatever his name is - who, by the way, has a white beard and an Aryan complexion - I expected that Darth fellow to drop to one knee and start singing Mammy!"

He wasn't going to make the same mistake again. This time, he was determined to think before he spoke. There were a lot of negative things he could say about ventriloquism - I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes - but he wasn't going to do it. He'd learned the hard way that when you're living in the same house with two boys with very long memories, anything you say out loud stays on your permanent record.

"You do what you want," he finally said, returning to his newspaper. "Just don't bring it in the house."

I was stunned. Not by our father's unwillingness to stage an immediate intervention, but that my brother was spending his hard-earned money on a plastic dummy. We'd spent the last few weeks obsessing over the Johnson Smith catalog, our one-stop shopping source for x-ray specs, fake vomit, and ultra-realistic monster masks (with real human hair!). We had a limited income and some difficult decisions to make. Personally, I was still torn between the Build-Your-Own Hovercraft and the Motion Activated Fart Alarm. I relished the opportunity to make my enemies flatulate from a distance (the perfect crime), but how could I resist a product that combined my two favorite pastimes, hovering and transportation? And if I went for the hovercraft, I'd have enough left over to purchase a Life-Size Frankenstein Monster or the World's Smallest Harmonica. Or, if I could scrap together the extra nickels, both. Oh sweet lord, can you imagine? My very own golem with a mouth full of tiny harmonicas, wheezing some Muddy Waters tune? It was like the Johnson Smith Company had recorded my dreams, turned them into reality, and then made them available at prices affordable for a pre-teen budget.



My brother had his reasons for being lured to ventriloquism, they just weren't good reasons. It had something to do with an episode of The Love Boat, which featured an African-American ventriloquist act named Tyler and Lester. It was troubling enough that my brother was taking social cues from The Love Boat, but what really disturbed me was that we were allowed to watch The Love Boat at all. Isn't there a point when parents walk into a room, realize that their children are looking at Gavin MacLeod in short-shorts, and smash the TV screen with the closest blunt object? And then, if you know anything about parenting, you sit down with your child for a heart-to-heart talk about nautical safe sex and male camel toes.

I suppose it was for the best. Better my brother get seduced by a saucy and afro'd dummy prone to calling white people "jive-turkey" and not the other sub-plot in the very same episode, in which a pair of identical twin sisters decided to swap fiances. The Love Boat was many things, but it was not a wellspring of prudent life lessons.

There was no talking my brother out of his choice. He'd even picked out his dummy, carefully selected from a diverse selection of three. It came with a monocle and a top hat, and vaguely resembled Charlie McCarthy, if Charlie McCarthy had made some major career missteps and ended up doing dinner theater in Michigan and developed an addiction to pain pills.

Its most noticeable feature was a smug sneer unlike anything my brother and I ever seen before. It was the kind of arrogant expression that, as time and experience would teach us, usually indicates an utter lack of confidence masked with an obnoxious superiority complex. (And really, what else could you ask from a comedy sidekick?) Every time I looked at it, I thought it was saying, "Hey, good news, I talked some underage girls into coming backstage after the show. I got dibs on the brunette. (Flicks tongue obscenely.)"

Of course, if my brother decided to do something, I had to imitate him. Never mind that I was two years older, and long past the age when an interest in ventriloquism, however casual, could be easily dismissed as "just a stage he's going through." Not wanting to be too obvious in my plagiarism, I picked the next most appealing dummy in the Johnson Smith catalogue: a freckled redhead named Danny O'Day, dressed in a plaid jacket and bow-tie. One look at Danny and you already knew his entire backstory. He was probably the manager of a Cinnabon at his local mall, and he enjoyed playing the French Horn, chaperoning church social hay rides, and crying himself to sleep. He'd kissed a guy once, but it was in college and he'd had too many wine coolers so he didn't think it counted. His favorite karaoke song was "Playground In My Mind", he'd seriously contemplated growing a mustache, and he'd eventually die in his mid-40s after a botched attempt at erotic asphyxiation.

Our friend Mike, who lived down the block, also caught the ventriloquism bug. (Apparently hack vaudeville routines, at least during the late 70s, were as contagious as Chicken Pox.) But by the time he got his hands on the catalog, there was only one dummy not yet claimed by my brother and me: "Drunk Clown". We assumed, rightly or wrongly, that this was just the dummy's stage name, and Johnson Smith wasn't seriously selling children a plastic doll with a history of alcoholism. To his credit, Mike never complained or cried foul. He just smiled and pretended that the only thing he'd ever wanted in the world was a midget best friend covered in clown makeup and stinking of whiskey.

(Footnote: My brother is convinced that ads for the Drunk Clown dummy also described it as a "Child Molester". Neither Mike nor I have any memory of this. My brother is adamant that his recollection is accurate, and will concede only that the pederast subtitle "might have been in parentheses." It is also unconfirmed by Mike, who refused to answer the question, whether he ever engaged in sodomy with his puppet, either as a "catcher" or "receiver.")



When our dummies arrived, we devoted ourselves to learning the craft of ventriloquy. I figured out how to make the doll's mouth move, which really wasn't all that difficult. You just stuck your hand into the gapping wound in its back and pulled the string. As for the whole "lips not moving" part, I was clueless. My brother tried to give me pointers. "Say 'v' instead of 'b' and 't' instead of 'p'," he told me. I just stared back at him like he was speaking Latin. I didn't have the time or patience to learn another language. I just wanted to perform comedy for my peers and win their respect and unconditional love.

I locked myself in my bedroom every night for weeks and rehearsed with my doll, mastering an exciting and innovative new form called Almost Entirely Mute Ventriloquism. Some of my soon-to-be classic routines included "What's the matter, Danny O'Day? Are you choking?!" and "Okay, fine, be like that. I'm not talking to you either until you apologize," and the crowd favorite, "I think Danny's trying to tell us, with a series of winks and nods, that he's being held hostage and there's somebody standing behind the door with a gun."

My brother was the first of our threesome to go public. He performed for a 4th grade talent show, and by his own admission, it did not go well. He didn't get a single laugh, not even a pity laugh. In hindsight, his show business shunning may've had less to do with his ventriloquist skills and more with his comedy material. His entire act consisted of jokes that ended with the same uninspired punchline: "Don't ask me, I'm made out of wood." A careful observer would've noticed that his dummy wasn't wood at all, but rather constructed out of cheap, low-quality plastic that melts at room temperature. But the inconsistencies aren't what killed him. His gags were ultimately too sophisticated for his audience, who had bowl cuts and ate their own boogers and preferred less intellectual and more observational humor; like, for instance, "Hey, did you hear how that kid in Mr. Henderson's class crapped his pants during recess? What's up with that?"

After his shameful debut, my brother threw in the towel in disgrace. His dummy was put into permanent retirement, and because Mike and I considered him our cannery in a coalmine, we abandoned our performance ambitions. Mike seemed especially relieved, as he was having trouble sleeping. As it turns out, sharing a bedroom with a clown with yellow teeth and bloodshot eyes isn't all its cracked up to be.

But while the tide of popular opinion had turned, I opted to hold on to my ligneous companion. I had no interest in ventriloquism anymore, but it was still nice to have the company. I liked coming home from school and finding my red-headed cohort waiting for me. Sometimes, if I thought nobody was listening, I'd sit on my bed and tell him about my day.

I never mentioned Danny to my family. He was a secret, and I didn't expect them to understand. Actually, I didn't understand. I was a little too old to be playing with toys, much less a toy that resembled an adult male with emotional problems. Forget the inanimate object part of it, he just wasn't an appropriate best friend. But he was a good listener. And it was easy to feel superior to him. I may've been an insecure and painfully shy 11 year-old kid, but Danny was a grown adult living in a boy's bedroom with no discernable source of income. Obviously he didn't have a lot going for him.

"So what'd you do with yourself today?" I'd ask Danny every afternoon. "Watched a few Sanford & Son reruns? Made some mac-and-cheese for one? Don't worry, man, things are gonna pick up. Maybe you should update your resume. Okay, okay, don't get defensive. I'm just trying to help."



Have you ever noticed how some pet-owners start to resemble their dogs? The same thing happens when you live with a ventriloquist dummy for too long. I never wore a plaid jacket or bowtie, but as the weeks and months went by, I noticed that we had the same haircut and facial structure. Sometimes I'd glance over at Danny and it felt like I was looking in the mirror, staring at my myself 20 years in the future.

I never had the courage to get rid of Danny. That ugly task was left to my parents. They didn't make a big deal of it, thank god. That would've been unpleasant and awkward for everybody involved. I think my father would've been more comfortable sitting me down and saying, "Okay, son, it's time you learned about masturbation. I'm going to show you the correct way to do it. Drop your drawers and grab that hand lotion." That would've been less mortifying to him than saying, "Listen, uh... wow, there's no easy way to put this... That puppet you're so fond of? Yeah, it's starting to creep everybody out. Maybe you find a friend who's more age-appropriate... or real."

So they did what any loving parent would do; they waited until I went to school and then got rid of the doll. When I came home, it was gone. When I asked them about it, they just shrugged and feigned ignorance. There were no long talks about how "this hurts me more than it hurts you" or "we took it to live on a farm." They just laughed and said, "Oh, that old thing? I didn't even know you still had it. Hey, tell us again about that girl at school you think is cute."

Their poker face was exquisite. It was if Danny never existed at all. The mafia hadn't been this subtle when disposing of Jimmy Hoffa's body. I mourned my plastic sidekick, but I eventually moved on, forgetting that I'd ever had an enfeebled, aphasic pal.

Until ten years later...

(To read part two, go here.)

My Athletic Career (Unabridged)

December 25, 1978: When I was nine years old, my grandfather bought me a catcher's mitt for Christmas. I had absolutely no idea what to do with an oversized leather glove, so my grandfather took me out to the back yard and taught me how to "catch" a baseball. I assumed - incorrectly, it turned out - that this mitt was some sort of self-defense mechanism, designed to protect you from an attacker armed only with a spherical projectile and precise aim.

My grandfather threw the ball at me like he intended to crack a rib. When I caught it, he applauded and said, "Okay, now throw it back."

This seemed to me like madness. I looked down at the ball in my glove, cradled in its leathery web. "Why would I do that?" I asked, honestly perplexed.

KEEP ON READIN'! IT'S NOT LIKE YOU'RE GOING TO THE GYM TODAY OR ANYTHING. C'MON, GET REAL!

"Because we're playing a game," he insisted. "I can't play if you don't throw me the ball."

"But then you'll just throw it back at me," I reminded him.

"Well, yeah," he said. "That's kinda the point."

"But that's silly. I wouldn't wrestle a gun out of your hand and then give it to you so you can try and shoot me again."

My grandfather smiled through clenched teeth. "I'm not trying to hit you with the ball," he said with his last ounce of patience.

"You're damn right you're not," I said, retreating into the house.



October 12, 1981: My younger brother invited me to play soccer with him and some of the other neighborhood kids. These "pick-up games" - am I using the terminology correctly? - were not uncommon on our block. The empty field behind our family's house was perfect for any athletic competition involving a ball and two or more aggressive adolescents pumped full of sugar. I never joined in, usually because I was inside writing stories about drunk gnomes or watching repeats of The Monkees. (In case you were wondering, my favorite Monkee was Micky Dolenz, the fake drummer.) But when my brother sought me out and asked if I'd join them, I was too flattered to say no, even if I knew it was a compliment based solely on math. (Scott, their usual sixth player, was still bedridden after eating a Jawa action figure on a dare.)

I wasn't really what you'd call a full-contact competitor. When somebody had the ball, I pretty much left them alone. Possession, after all, is nine-tenth of the law. If somebody kicked the ball to me, I'd kick it right back. Seemed sensible enough. Whenever I had the ball, angry red-faced boys with flaring nostrils would come charging at me. I didn't need that aggravation. I'd seen a special on 60 Minutes about this very thing. If somebody is mugging you, Mike Wallace told me, and he threatens you with bodily harm, just give him your wallet. Better to lose a few dollars than your life. That sounded like good advice to me, and as the only boy who didn't leave the field limping, I stand by my decision.

For most of the game, I stood in my quadrant, yelling encouragement to my teammates, like, "Yeah, shoot it towards the goal" or "Put the ball in the net of the opposing team!" Helpful tips, I thought. And when that didn't work, I'd share soccer fun facts to anybody within earshot.

"You know," I'd tell them. "In England they call it football."

I was never invited to another pickup game again.



September 2, 1985: When my family moved to the south suburbs of Chicago, I had a unique opportunity to reinvent myself. I didn't have to be the nerd who was lousy at sports, socially awkward, and wrote weird short stories about superheroes getting busted by undercover cops in public restrooms - stories that, much to my bemusement, made my fourth grade teacher cry. I could be... dare I wish for something so wonderful... the jock who was admired by his teachers, aimed for a respectable 2.0 grade point average, and got handjobs under the bleachers from the slutty girl in home-ec.

During my first gym class at the new school, the coach took us outside for a game of softball. Because I looked like somebody who might actually have athletic ability - I've never been what you'd call "scrawny" - I was among the first picked for a team. When I went up to bat, my heart was racing. I was determined to prove myself to my peers, to show that I was worthy of their respect, that I was the kind of guy you could call up and say, "Hey, you want to go down to the park and hit a few?", and I'd know exactly what you were talking about. I was the dude who had a "favorite" team, in a variety of sports genres, and wore jerseys that weren't meant ironically, and who knew exactly how much he could bench press, and who thought the perfect way to spend a Friday night was doing whippets in your friend's dad's basement and then watching skateboarding videos and laughing at their spectacular wipeouts.

The ball seemed to come at me in slow motion. I could practically trace its trajectory. When I thought it was within striking distance, I took my swing. I thrust at it with so much violence that, had I been even close to making contact, I probably would have sent it soaring out of the park. But as it turns out, the ball had barely left the pitcher's hand, and was no less than 40 feet away from me. But my endorphins had kicked in, and I swung at the dead air with so much fierce determination that I lost my grip on the bat.

Eye-witnesses later claimed that it looked like I was throwing a javelin. Everybody on the field dove out of the way, covering their heads like they expected my bat to explode in mid-air and shower them with shrapnel. By the time it landed, just shy of second base, I'd completely given up on my metamorphosis into a late-blooming teenage sports god. My only hope now was to escape with the least possible humiliation.

Because all eyes were on the wood missile, nobody noticed that the ball eventually made it to home plate, where it'd bounced limply off my shins. Sensing an opportunity, I immediately dropped to the ground and cradled my legs, screaming in my best impersonation of agony. A few classmates rushed to my aid, but there's no better way of discouraging nosy do-gooders (who might inadvertently discover my utter lack of injury) than shrieking, "The bone is sticking out! The bone is sticking out!"

I was rushed to the nurse, who was unable to pry my hand away from my supposedly shattered fibula or tibia (I kept changing my mind about what was broken). She sent me home, and I returned the next day with a cane and a limp. Both disappeared within a week, but my first (and last) official "sports injury" conveniently returned whenever gym class required too much physical exertion or could potentially lead to public mortification or unflattering displays of my athletic nonprowess.

March 15, 1998: During a visit to my parents' house, my dad asked if I wanted to "shoot some hoops". I was as surprised to hear those words coming out of his mouth as if he'd said, "You wanna shoot some skeet" or "Who wants to slam shots of Cuervo Gold and then hit on Puerto Rican chicks?" My father, as far as I knew, was not a Brooklyn teenager with a chip on his shoulder.

But I said yes, even though I knew it was absurd, and that claiming we were going to play a sport that even slightly resembled basketball made about as much sense as Michael Jordan saying, "Hey, who's up for some in vivo gene transfer into muscle via electro-sonoporation?" We'd both watched a lot of NBA games - particularly the Chicago Bulls, who my father considered his "home team" even though he lived roughly 250 miles away from Chicago - and we were both slightly fluent in basic basketball terminology, and could say things like "free throw" and "point guard" and "full court press" and actually not be completely unaware of what we were talking about. But that was our entire experience with basketball, which made us roughly as qualified to play the sport as practice criminology or perform a circumcision.

Until today, I'd dribbled a basketball only once in my life, and even that's open to speculation. There are some who would attest that I didn't so much dribble the ball as slap it into submission. As for my dad, I'd seen him try to hold a basketball before. He was not... how can I put this politely?... good. My brother described it as "a retard with an oily baby." I still believe that's the most polite way to put it.

My father and I had played basketball together just once before. When he and my mom first moved to Ann Arbor, their new home had a basketball hoop in the driveway. For a male between the ages of six months and 95, a basketball hoop is like uncut heroin to a junkie. We can't not use it. So he bought a basketball, and when I visited over the summer, we played (or at least attempted to play) a game of HORSE. When this proved too difficult, we shortened it to ASS. When even that required a skill level far exceeding our abilities, we eventually settled on "first one to make a basket without grunting in a way that reminds the other person of a bowel movement wins."

But that was almost two years ago. We were in better physical shape, we told ourselves. This time it wouldn't be so personally embarrassing. We would play a proper game, something with points and scores that don't spell anything insulting. We would jump into the air and wag our tongues and hang from the rafters and do chest high-fives - or at the very least, land a few baskets without once experiencing shortness of breath or dizziness.

I waited on the driveway as my father searched for the basketball in the garage. I stretched my glutes and cracked my knuckles and made obscene "feel the burn" expressions, which I hoped conveyed my competitive ferocity. I was prepared to show Old Man Spitznagel who was taking over as the family's patriarch, if such things were decided solely on three-point field goals. But then he walked out of the garage, holding the basketball like a badly-burned corpse. The lifeless thing in his arms resembled the skin of a baked potato after its insides had been peeled out.

"Wh-what happened?" I asked.

"Not sure," he said, holding out the sad rubber carcass for me to examine. "Must've gotten a leak."

We just stared at it, dumbfounded, like it was a baby we'd found in a dumpster. It didn't seem like there was anything left to do but say a few prayers and dig a shallow grave.

"So what do we do now?" I asked.

He just shrugged. "Don't know," he said. "What do you think?"

I had no idea. There was probably some simple solution to our problem. But that would've involved getting in a car and driving to a place where men in dirty overalls looked at us with derisive expressions. And honestly, we didn't need that kind of sarcasm on a Sunday. So we left the deflated basketball on the driveway and went inside and ate cold waffles and warm beer and watched that Funniest Home Videos show where dumb rednecks get hit in the balls.

Now there's a sport where everybody wins.



November 21, 2007:

Los Angeles, at my brother's home, shortly after an ill-fated attempt to play "catch" with my nephew in the back yard.

ME: Dude! Your kid just nailed me with a baseball!

MY BROTHER: Yeah. So?

ME: He could've broken my kneecaps!

MY BROTHER: You're kidding, right?

ME: He whipped that thing at me!

MY BROTHER: It's a wiffleball.

ME: Well sure, but at that velocity, a wiffleball is like a buckshot. I'm surprised it didn't break the skin. Oh, oh, oh, look! My knee is totally getting red and swollen!

MY BROTHER: Ummmm. You do remember that he's barely two years old, right?

ME: Whatever, man! You know I've never been the same since that compound fracture I got in high school. If anything's broken, you're getting the bill. Take it out of his college fund, I don't care.

MY BROTHER: His forearm is about as big as your thumb.

ME: I demand restitution!