Getting Off

It Began in innocence and guilt, in wonder and in secret fumblings. We fumbled first with ourselves, taking surreptitious inventory of that fascinating private stock stashed in the slightly damp and sour cellars of our underwear. There was much to explore, more hinted mysteries than seemed containable in such a pink, hairless, unfulfilled nub. One knew, of course, its bathroom duties--but nothing more. Somehow, it gave the impression of not delivering the full promise of its design.

And though it was our own, a part of our equipment the same as our ears or toes or floating rubber Donald Duck, adults--those compulsive policemen of many strange laws--seemed determined that we should not enjoy it. Mothers shouted that we should cease floating or sinking our little dinky-johns (or weenies or nubbins or puddins or dealies) in the bath; when it filled from our bladders or its maiden rubbings and we ran to reveal this new accomplishment in prideful wonder, people shushed or scolded, even if they sometimes hid a bootleg smile. One learned that never was it to be aired in the presence of strangers--particularly little girls--or, even, alluded to in family circles except as it required washing, soothing powders or emptying. Apparently it was a joint of much bad character, a secret to be kept, a worthless appendage making mothers so nervous they gave it disarming nursery-rhyme names. Perhaps its prime value was that little girls couldn't duplicate it. When we gathered in dark corners free of patrolling adults, for our communal comparisons, little girls had no more to offer than big round unbelieving eyes.

As it grew with us, knowing strange stirrings and itches requiring new attentions, so did its reputation for trouble. Its manipulations, carried to the extreme, were said to grow hair in the palms or to foster blindness, pimples and insanity. Almost all small towns provided one decadent human pool-hall example to serve fathers haltingly warning their sons of pud pullings, coupling diseases or poison whiskeys. The more pious soldiers of the pecker patrol assured chronic masturbators of roasting vengeances posthumously awarded in hell. When feverish prayers and fear of hairy palms failed, we found strength in numbers by whacking off down at the old swimming hole, in Billy Clyde's tree house or in Alvin's cellar. Soon we achieved the end result of brief prickly joyous shudders followed by a quick drowsiness, even if--unlike The Big Boys who spit between their teeth, mocked our poor pale crops of pubic fuzz and tantalized us with their endless jokes pairing countless traveling salesmen with endlessly willing farmers' daughters--we could not yet bring forth magic fountains of sticky milky fluids. Our day, pardon the expression, would come.

• • •

And lo! With the green blossomings of the teenage years, new villains walked in the land. Our fevered personal embarrassments were not so much at fault--new lore taught--as those dark caves of hair and heat indigenous to girls; those slippery pits and tender traps in wrappings of cotton or silk. Football coaches in the desert Texas of the Forties warned against the sapping qualities of cigarettes, carbonated drinks and crotches. These would rob a boy of energies vital to the team, to keeping one's head in the game, and would threaten honors to school and town. Our parsons, persistent one-note trumpets of doom, provided the example of Eve's beguiling apple gained through conspiracies with vipers; the loose wives of Potiphar and Lot; temptress Bathsheba and that hussy prophetess of seduction, Jezebel; incest-bent Biblical daughters, mothers, aunts; hot-lipped witches of Sodom; harlots of Gomorrah. Ball crackers, all. Puredee ole cunts! These were advertised as willing agents of disease, defeat, disgrace; as periodic pourers of fouled blood, unclean, inferior products of Adam's rib. Years later, the Army would show us "training films" starring a clean-cut young GI who, beguiled by a Devil's missionary in short skirts, taxed his brief pleasure with a lifelong near-terminal case of root rot.

Our teachers taught us nothing at all, save those scandals and punishments accruing to sophomores discovered in possession of outlaw comic books rudely depicting Maggie doing interesting things to Jiggs, or Dagwood looking on while Mr. Dithers found joy in Blondie's varied hospitalities. When Jane Russell exhibited her twin assets in The Outlaw at a controversial midnight preview reserved for local young hotbloods, our police force patrolled our hot yowlings with their holsters unsnapped. Skittish parents roamed the Yucca Theater's gloom, seeking to rescue their fallen daughters while pretending not to discover their sons. Preachers assumed righteous sputtering poses near the ticket booth, intimidating Vacation Bible School's backsliders. One might have thought Jane had come personally to town, a mattress strapped to her back and indescribably rotten-crotched, offering special schoolboy prices.

Though pussy obviously ranked with hemlock among top poisons, we clung to guilty stubborn compulsions to sample the cup. If more of us smoked or boozed than screwed, well, then, it was only because of uneven opportunities. Reared on tales of bountiful carnal crops harvested by The Big Boys, we privately wondered at sudden famines and fallow fields. Even our contemporaries astonished with their boasts of conquests among bobby-soxers formerly suspected of awarding no more than cold stares or cool smiles. It being axiomatic that Good Girls did not screw (there being no pleasure in animal ruttings for females of high quality or pedigree), a few random-chosen belles starred in our locker-room fantasies. Though usually nominated from a low-rent family, a girl might otherwise qualify for infamy by growing an exceptional bust or appearing unconventional in dress or rouge. Should Bill or Joe or Bob report having made it with Daphne or Mary Lou, then Bruce and Frank and Larry soon would top all prior gamy recitations reserved to the privacy of the football squad. Once chosen, even if owning the toughest hymen in Texas, no girl might decline to serve our slanderous boastings and studied public insults: No matter that we got little more than I suspect of Richard Nixon. Probably our cruel liar's mortar shaped high school dropouts, early suicides and lesbians; on rare occasions, a tormented Daphne or Mary Lou might be driven to the desperation of hostessing a gang bang, as if to fulfill some dark obligatory community prophecy.

In truth (and, unknowingly, following a great American tradition), most of us shed our cherries in the squalid bins and hutches of disinterested whores. We roved in midnight packs among those nooky salespersons populating the peeling old Crawford Hotel--pinching tits, bartering prices, cracking wise, half hoping against being required to perform and half fearful that we might not be--or we made dizzy beery ugly-American assaults on Mexico's cheaper border-city bordellos. And though we locked the frightful knowledge deep within ourselves, I suspect that a high percentage found those initial couplings not nearly so satisfying as dirty stories and underground fuck books had promised.

Probably my own earliest threshings were not atypical. The original working lady was awaited in a scummy motel: We called them tourist courts in that ancient summer that would be F.D.R.'s last. Flashes of that old movie continue to screen themselves on the brain. Enter the 15-year-old boy, hard-peckered and cotton-mouthed, groping overhead for a rough twine string activating a naked yellow light bulb. Flash to the obscenely glinting cover of a mocking worn Gideon Bible on a night table hard by the lumpy, menacing green-brass bed. Cut to close-up of The Kid, involuntarily sucking in breath at heaven's last ostentatious warning while mumbling incoherent prayers of forgiveness to God and Home. Then the clickety-clack of spiked heels punishing a wooden walk, that first false bright smile of commerce, the karate chop to the psyche when one realized that one's partner in paradise was old enough to be...oh, God, yes! Mother! Then a timeless blur: money exchanged; practiced washings of the soon-to-be dipped wick ("Hummmm, honey, that's a big one": kindly moldy lie courtesy of wily management); a daze of inexpert punchings and joustings; breathy exhortations in the ear recommending haste to avoid waste, "Come, kid, come! Git it while it's hot." Panicky thoughts of failure crackled and fried in the brain: the sudden desperate certainty that one would fire a blank. Why, there's nothing much to it. It's awkward. Strained. A gyp! Not at all what--gasp! Ah! Zoom! Surprise!!! Still, it had resembled a wrestling match of pigs in armor more than legend, Hollywood or The Big Boys had hinted, its ecstasy quotient measured near to nil. She gave an abrupt practiced buck and roll: blue ribbon rodeo stock unseating a junior cowboy. Abandoned, unhorsed,The Kid (continued on page 182) Getting Off (continued from page 176) awaited bells and gongs and blinding sunrises lighting the soul. Over the sounds of running water, he heard her mating call: "Better wash your ass and git out a here, kid. I got another trick due in five minutes...."

That sense of being cheated or flimflammed, of screwing's being unfairly advertised, would persist. Victims, we secretly assumed the worst possible contributing inadequacies. We reverted to frustrated hand-reared boys, whacking off until our poor members reddened, grew sore and blistered: remembering Betty Grable's legs, Jane Russell's sinful boobs, any number of undelivered celluloid promises. "Poontang, now, it just ain't as good as it's supposed to be," one football stalwart blurted on a stag beer excursion to the sand hills. We greeted this unwelcome affirmation with sullen mumbles and shufflings: What worth was Eden if even its sweetest forbidden fruits proved tainted or juiceless? The truthful young heretic, beer-eyed and reckless, missed our mood: "I'd ruther jack off. Sure 'nuff, now. Jacking off's just better." We shouted outraged oaths, howled how nooky made our worlds go round, accused our adversary of cowardice, faggotry, small balls. We extracted from his surprised hide the pains and assessments of all those semijoyless squeaky bouncings in the beds of bored mercenaries who had mocked us with their wise old eyes.

For, in fact, we dealt in cash transactions. Some few envied couples, pinned or going steady, regularly made it, sure. Statistical freaks. Forget, however, our schoolboy dreams of flushing coveys of nubile nymphomaniacs whose fathers owned liquor stores. Our high school vamps adhered to the sermons of home and pulpit: kissed with pinched lips, jumped as if they'd seen a snake should naked hand touch naked knee, knew more impenetrable defenses than the old Chicago Bears of Bulldog Turner. Copping a feel of bare tit while parked on some rural lane constituted a hot night, indeed; should one be so fortunate as to engage in a game charmingly designated as stinkfinger, one might dine out on the story for weeks. "Smell my new girlfriend," we'd say, thrusting a finger under a buddy's nose during postworkout showers.

Mexico's whores awarded our first gifts of sexual tenderness, inspiring fleeting thoughts of Devil Woman as other than a cold-fish pro or one of those bobby-soxed iron maidens sponsoring our balcony-seat defeats and rumble-seat losses. Young and sweet-faced, they puzzled and conquered with a shy kindness not native to the American skin trade. In the soft night breezes of border-city Boys' Towns, one could momentarily imagine fuckings near to love. In candlelighted beds, under crucifixes of wood or plaster stoic-suffering pierced Jesuses, we knew our first cool, liquid, soothing marijuana highs and dim, wondrous, dizzy undulations of yielding flesh, and we bent--in salute and gratitude--to our initial, shamed, unmentionable acts of cunnilingus.

Later, spent and shamed and shaken, fearful that others might suspect softenings of our heart or pussy on our breath, we regrouped in designated cantinas to cool ourselves with Carta Blanca beers and thunderous boasts of recent conquering brutalities.

"Find 'em, fuck 'em and forget 'em."

"Damn right. Buncha greasy pepper-bellied Meskin bitches. I bet ain't a man here didn't catch clap."

"Hail far, Joe Bob, I wouldn't a frigged that scabby rag mop of yours with your dick!"

"Bite my ass, Bert. Only thang kept your gal from being judged a sow was her not having enough tits."

Balls affirmed, sir: All present and accounted for....Very well, Sergeant. Tell the troops to stand at ease....

• • •

We grew up; the military, minor colleges or low commerce claimed us. Occasionally reunited, we relived old whorehouse invasions and boasted of new conquests, chuckling over how all the "free" nooky of a larger world drove us toward bankruptcy. Prices of courtship were higher, it seemed, at Texas Tech or Fort Dix or in Dallas. So were hazards: Those who had fatally succumbed to the charms of sophomore coeds, telephone operators or brides with Yankee accents were spoken of with hushed regrets; we figuratively dashed their goblets against the wall. Perhaps our secret parts envied them their conclusions to the chase.

In New York City, it astonishingly developed, young soldiers need not always pay for sex outright. Costs might include drinks at some pickup bar, certainly; even dinner and a hotel room. Still, romantic mystery lurked in never knowing how high the tab might be or what unaccustomed risks or commitments might be required. A girl foolish enough to give it away seemed a potential source of endless profit. Not good enough to marry; no, nothing you'd drag home to Momma. Even so, such partners were less likely to buck one off in midstream or insist that the room be vacated for other appointments. One might even talk to her, almost as candidly as with The Guys, exchanging highly dramatized life stories and impossible dreams. Or be able to follow the plots of movies without fretting over the prospects for later achieving bare tit; maybe, even, imagine in the sheet tangles faint echoes of long-promised bells, gongs, harps.

Most of our consorts were, in fact, semipros who regularly haunted the same poor Manhattan or Queens watering holes. Once Corporal Shenesky had fully explored the possibilities of one or another maiden, only to find her wanting, then likely Sergeant Clark or Private First Class Harper would succeed him. A chart depicting the various linkages might soon take on the appearance of a spider web. To succeed one's comrades in the affections of a well-traveled lady was to become fair game for rough barracks treatment:

"Hey, Garrett, I hear you been eatin' where I won't fuck."

"Piss on your wrist, Carter; I hear you couldn't get it up."

"I could until a certain bitch bit it. Sure hope you been vaccinated."

Fistfights erupted like swirling summer squalls. To our occasional amused horror, some newcomer to our ranks might actually marry one of the more accommodating lovelies. There were methods, few going unused, for instructing such foolish grooms as to exactly what damaged goods they had received. The wonder is that someone wasn't killed.

Homosexuals. Yes, they lived in the flesh as well as in remembered lithpy jokes. Back home, we had labeled certain "sissies" as fags, boys not manly enough for football, ultraSkinnies or Fats who wore eyeglasses and perhaps appeared too regularly on the honor roll. And while we teased them for skin-flute musicians, probably we doubted their participations. In New York, however, we discovered the real Miss McCoys. We preyed shamelessly on their Forties closet needs and guilts. No gay lib movements then provided unity or respectability, no thoughts ran that "queers" or "fairies" might be possessed of civil rights. No, such despised perverts were lower, even, than bitches in heat or common niggers. Our coaches and bosses had called us to account for unmanly executions:

"King, you're blocking like a tired ole fag. I'd sure hate to drop the soap in the shower with you, boy."

"If you boys can't pissant more pipeline than that, maybe you better bring your purses tomorrow."

And back in that foggy old twilight of postpuberty, lashings and stormings were more severe, should one be caught experimenting with cousins of the same sex, than were reserved for our discovered fumbling ignorant misadventures with little girls. If one was required to prove his balls by showing a callous brutality toward women, then a special terror must be extracted from homosexuals.

Headquarters Company preferred Dudley, a 60ish old supernance who wore Pan-Cake make-up and might be found almost any haunted evening seeking young flesh from his Village outpost in (continued on page 228) Getting Off (continued from page 182) Tony Pastor's. Dudley's virtues included generosity with gifts and specializing in servicing wild young herds. A half-dozen rowdies, turned hypermanic by ventures into the forbidden, might accompany Dudley to his apartment, there to drink his booze, steal his trinkets or bully, threaten or slap him around. Poor Dudley: So great was his hot thirst that all save near-certifiable homicidal maniacs would be welcomed back.

To accommodate a Dudley in group safety was one thing; to slip away alone was much the deeper sin. Only if desperately broke, unusually drunk or particularly fired in the loins did one dare. No, any one-on-one relationship conjured up visions too darkly near final perversions. It was, in such cases, ever so much more blessed to receive than to give. One just did not do it; there was a numbing horror even in being suspected of having tooted the skin-flute.

Thus were we tenderly shaped for our connubial beds.

• • •

Those iron maidens who had denied our high school fantasies spent the early Fifties in husband huntings. Increasingly, as they aged on the dark side of 20, they offered samples of themselves. Some lay board stiff and crippled by history; others developed a surprising sweet wantonness. It was like discovering gold: Riddles were solved, beauty glimpsed; much of the bed's taint dropped away. Where once cunnilingus bespoke depravity and dirty wit (one might be accused of "eating at the Y...gobbling a box lunch...munching hair pie...yodeling in the canyon"), we learned the world could become a pretty place down there in the wet warm silken musky.

We took brides. Life temporarily became one long raunchy punching liquid honeymoon. Even if we did not adore our mates excessively--for, in those days, one married simply when the time came--or even if we sensed that the meat might not always remain so sweet, we lost ourselves in free, new, officially licensed carnality. Young women who had kissed with closed lips fell to gaspings and gurglings south of the curly pubic border. Friends were shut out and appointments missed while we gorged.

Then came weepy pregnant wives who wore hair curlers to market, proclaimed bedtime headaches and otherwise imitated their mothers. We knew washdays, bad debts, heartless bosses, crying babies. "The honeymoon's over" took on new profundities. Soon even the fresh miracle of television palled. With little to encourage us at home, our loins stirred anew; the old chase resumed. We began to suspect that it might be endless. Perhaps that long hot race toward infinity, so compulsive and vital even if only momentarily rewarding, was intended as training for purgatory.

More experienced and grown less fearful of celestial bolts, we willingly accommodated divorcees, frustrated husband hunters or ladies not totally satisfied with things at home. Our best teachers often were ten or more years our elders. Made wise and cynical by their own disenchantments, they appeared beautifully casual and practiced beyond belief; one need not bleat that he loved them or fear new wedding dirges. So long as news of our broken fidelity did not limp home to tattle, it seemed, we might enjoy fruitful dalliances plagued only by fleeting visitations of minor guilt.

Ah, too good to last. Our experienced consorts progressively revealed themselves as brittle, bruised, bitter. Rather than blithe spirits, they proved to be women of growing desperations and scar-tissue hearts. Secret drunks and resentful abandoned part-time mothers, they burdened us with their pains and frightened us with bleak visions of tomorrow. We learned what exotic snakes writhed in cold connubial beds: of husbands queer or given to scary fetishes; of premature ejaculations and impotence; of naked bullies and satyrs and mental eunuchs; of middle-aged men who too clearly remembered Momma's admonitions on the care and feeding of their mischievous little dinky-johns. We learned that old heroes of the football field, the business community or--yes!--even the classroom or the pulpit figuratively stood in dark corners, protectively cupping their gonads. Grown weary of such dismal recitals, we contributed one more harsh vigorous grudge fuck and were gone.

We prowled in search of assignations threatening fewer involvements. Alas, the world is not so made. Except for whores, such casual alliances were in short supply. So professional ladies reentered our lives, often after we had drunk ourselves into semistupors in the heating presence of strippers grinding and bumping and flashing their G strings under surrealistic purple lights. Our members made as hard as Chinese arithmetic by such joyless shows, we raged red-eyed and foul-breathed into the night with nameless companions paid to accommodate our loveless desperate thrashings. Later, dully sobered and dreading the early bugles of our jobs, we slipped in quietly against waking our sleeping innocent cursed sexless children.

• • •

In our early 30s--in Ike's last official years of reign or Kennedy's first and final few--we seemed to come, however temporarily, to new and semirestful accommodations with our libidos. Perhaps we were merely frazzled and thrashed out; perhaps natural rhythms dictated that we pause to blow; perhaps, finding ourselves more than formerly in our careers, it became less necessary to seek rewards in couplings. Or, perhaps, our wives suddenly returned from their damp tiring worlds of swollen seedings, morning sicknesses, diaper duties, predawn feedings. Our children, in school, required fewer constant attentions. Their mothers, with fresh opportunities to consult mirrors and their souls, now painted up, patched up and perked up: dieted, exercised, surrendered old hair styles and offered new fashions. Warmer, more comfortable lusts visited and were made welcome. Home fuckings became less frantic or competitive, more leisurely; there was not so much of vengeance in them; they approached good honest fun.

Things were sexually loosening up a bit. Dr. Kinsey had relieved certain hoary nagging fears or guilts by revealing that others knew them, too. If Hollywood remained timid in its products or if Time saw fit to remark on Lloyd Bridges' having said a real live curse word on live television, or if Jack Paar had to briefly abdicate in tears because he'd risked a tame "water-closet" joke--well, at least a certain bold magazine had found fame, fortune and respectability in providing airbrushed views of naked ladies who, apparently, had trouble cultivating their pubic growths; newer editions of Norman Mailer's war novel abandoned the transparent deception of "fugging." If not all young marrieds acted out their fantasies of the suburban wife swappings they now read of, almost everyone remarked it--even if masking their fearful semi-hopes in jests and snickers. Couples gathered over canasta games and wine, fired and freed by verbalizing sex in mixed company, might experiment with occasional bouts of strip poker, safely stopping at those fixed borders defined by sightings of bras, shorts and panties. Group sex--the merry manic orgies of a later day--we could only imagine in the deeper secret cellars of the mind. Those initial self-conscious strip-poker beginnings, however, offered new opportunities outside the home. Once one had seen a visiting wife in the semi altogether, it became somehow easier to steal quick hot kitchen kisses or attempt closet caresses. Often nothing much came of such gropings; occasionally, something did.

Those internal extracurricular affairs were, strangely, loyally monogamous ones. Should Bob begin to tap June's syrups or Jane to surreptitiously entertain Bill, then likely the affairs continued for months or even for years. When the guilty parties were absent from gatherings of other regulars, their presumed secrets might be fully--even clinically or analytically--discussed. Few, perhaps because of their own glass houses, ran to tell tales or make trouble. Indeed, not only were cuckolded husbands or betrayed wives protected from hurtful intelligence but the conspiracy of silence protected June or Bill, should it be discovered that Bob periodically enjoyed his secretary or that Jane found occasional comfort in some third man's theme. To take a lover was almost synonymous with taking a second wife or husband.

Such second wives or husbands originally provided immense satisfactions. One might eat of the fruit without watering the tree. Yet--because no one was eager to wreck a friend's home, or his or her own--one ran small risks outside the norms of accidental discovery. One might know sexual variety, even a special tenderness, without paying in worry of due bills or mortgages; need not view one's partner flopping about in hair curlers or unshaven; might be spared echoes of gas-easing farts or careless splashy pisses from open-door-policy bathrooms. One need listen only to sweet gossip of the unsuspected sexual peccadilloes of old acquaintances or--better yet--to the heated whoopings and sensual cries of a partner who came, best foot forward, determined only to throw a loose-jointed untroubled fuck: dishes, diapers and debts be damned. There were vestiges of romance, too, in the simple fact of illicit rendezvous; one might imagine a dash of Bogart or Flynn in himself: feel leaner, meaner, briefly unconquerable. Perhaps one never is so warm as when wrapped in another man's blanket.

These couplings provided romantic illusions of near perfection, as Hollywood and the marriage manuals had encouraged--and as deposits of baby crap, tangled-haired prebreakfast burpings, mediocre home cooking, lost freedoms and other unwritten guarantees of the marriage contract sadly could not. Opium, of course. Pipe dreams. Bubbles for bursting. A second husband or wife eventually came to act like one: to criticize, nag, require, demand. Dissatisfied with earlier near perfections, one or another partner ultimately and perversely demanded impossible confessions, divorces, new beginnings. Threats followed tears; final cleavings followed in stutter step behind growing thoughts of dangerous explosions threatening public exposure, domestic chaos and career embarrassments. Pangs of new losses soon would be replaced by sighs of relief and resignation. Ah, it hurt good! And after private internal vows never again to become so vulnerable to victimization, the lovers were free to seek fresher, more exciting, more nearly perfect sins.

• • •

Wiser and more mature, we now were situated to assist our children toward botching their own sex lives. If our personal practices were more permissive than those of our parents, we remained almost as traditional (and grew more hypocritical) in our teachings. Mothers who had known the delights and dangers of multiple roots gave harmless pet names to their sons' personal tools while preaching purity to their daughters. Fathers hid their dirty books, prurient thoughts and soiled linen. Maybe we no longer claimed delivery by storks; nonetheless, we offered only vapors in failing to explain exactly how the cute little baby got into Mommy's stomach. If we did not threaten a new generation of masturbators with blindness or worse, we remained conventionally terrified at thoughts of prematurely pregnant daughters or diseased sons. The way Elvis waggled his ass and dry-humped microphone stands or the air disturbed as well as amused us once we saw our children digging and then emulating. At once star-struck fans and repeated victims of lust, we recognized its subconscious beginnings. Unfair that lust should cause us trouble in our descendants, it having so devilishly tormented our own flesh and lives.

Such selfish, protective thoughts surfaced at a time when we foolishly half-presumed ourselves finished with the ancient, instinctive seekings. That time comes, often around 35, when the game suddenly seems not worth the candle. What gain in all those tiresome deceptions, hustles, risks, disappointments? We have sampled strange nectars: However sweet they once may have registered on our tongues, what purpose remains in courting their certain vinegars? Might abstinence make the heart grow fonder? Men in such musings take to smoking pipes; women adopt ceramics. More energies are poured into the making of money and its domestic spendings. Recreation rooms are newly furbished; station wagons replace convertibles with white sidewalls. Dogged attentions are showered on P.T.A. meetings, little-league heroics, small-fry ballet recitals. Television is more watched; books are more read; we are earlier to bed. We gain weight without seeing the ounces until they announce themselves as pounds. Our couplings--at home or away--grow more sporadic, more perfunctory, more dutiful. Rip van Winkle slept here....

Ah, how false the signals of peace!

• • •

I suppose you could call us Old Boys now. We are 45 or past, veterans of many bedroom wars; we have taken our casualties in messy divorces, ditto abortions and double ditto in-house deaths. A high percentage have shed their original wives and, in some cases, lost their replacements to the grave or other attritions. We have reached that stage where, as John Prine sings, "all the news just repeats itself"; we are not easily surprised.

Our children have risen apart from us, becoming semi strangers who visit during summer vacations to puzzle with their deepening voices, rapid growths and clannish generational secrets. We know enough of them and of the world, however, to sense that they no longer sleep in innocent sexless wonder. They are children of their century and their decade, precocious random honest fornicators and straightforward smokers of dope. And though it was inevitable that their world and their times would shape their appetites, we harbor nagging guilts of habits they developed--of scary bloody abortions suffered or young lives forever limited by shotgun weddings--during our absenteeism. Ole Elvis, goddamn, he got 'em ....

Since crossing that invisible dismal border marking our 40th milestones, we have gingerly tiptoed among middle-aging booby traps unexpectedly springing themselves in the psyche. We drink more than formerly, paying more of our flesh in tardy incomplete recoveries. Some mornings we wake feeling, inexplicably, that night-roaming elves and dwarfs have beaten our bones and spirits with small sticks. Mod hair styles often fail to camouflage our upstairs losses; some gallantly fight the battle of the bulge, while others long ago met it waving white flags. In the night, we suspect malfunctioning livers, budding malignant growths, treacherous hearts plotting attack. John Garfield's heart burst while he was humping, you know. We have blinking self-aborting thoughts of those years, approaching at jet speeds, when the mustard becomes too old for cutting. Life's game, at best, has ticked into the early third quarter: We try not to think that we may be two touchdowns behind, facing third and long. Such musings are not improved by grandchildren or by the knowledge that--beginning with that first bleak dawn past our 40th birthdays--we have lived closer to the frosty borders of 60 than to those remembered sunny climes of 20.

Think not, however, that we zipped up or locked away our puds. No, for as in an earlier time, they again became vital to our personal affirmations. Our conduct as we passed 40 gave ex-wives the sour satisfactions of mumbling--with some accuracy--about there being no fools like old fools. Perhaps never before had we run that agonizing old race of the libido with such full-throttle furies, with such crazed and manic abandon. Fair enough, we told ourselves: Even long-distance runners go all out in the home stretch, eh, wot?

The times have been kind to our Old Boy needs and urges. Given the randier inclinations, one may bed down in groups and clusters and bunches, boys and girls--even, once in a while, black and white--mixing together in multiple tanglings. Once the new guilt flushes pass, it beats old-fashioned wife swapping all hollow, save for an occasional hairy butt in your face. Why, hell, you can even advertise in the classifieds for such opportunities! There are magazines devoted wholly to swingers, specifying their place or yours and what French or Greek or leather or pee-peeing specialties they enjoy. Such circuses are not confined to the wicked Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Eastern Seaboard, now. Nosir, out there in small-town Indiana or Nebraska or down yonder in de land ob cotton--in middle America, now!--folks are getting kinkier than a pig's tail in a rainstorm. There are clubs you can belong to, with dances and trophies awarded for trick fucking and best bisexual pyramids and only Satan knows what all. Yes sir, yesterday's old voyeuristic dreams come alive right before your eyes in the nation's inns and not-so private bedrooms. Come on, now: Are such casual group minglings truly pleasing to Old Boys required to suppress all prior teachings before stripping down?

Yes.

And no.

The idea, maybe, is better than the real-life fleshy participation. (Ah, do we revert back to those first guilty inexpert fuzzy boyish couplings when one found great chasms between the advertised dream and the true reality? Have we come at long last, tired old punished flesh, full circle?)

Yes, there can be rising saps, thrills and fevers in plain ole nameless hot carnal thrustings; in climbing multiple mounts without worrying over whose brands they wear or, even, how many yowling spectators may watch one's frenzied buckings and snortings from the stands. When one's head is properly attuned to such sex rodeos, the life of the cowboy is a wonderful one, indeed. On the other hand, the head does not always sing in perfect pitch; no, it can yowl off key. Somebody gets excessively rough, someone else is too fat or has halitosis, a third somebody becomes tardily possessive or a fourth insists on a particular sexual game one prefers not to play. And after the initial fevers dissipate (after he's had a ride or two, so to speak), an Old Boy sitting in a corner with his wine and observing the hot buckings and pitchings of others...well, he sees some pretty silly, pointless and dangerous shit coming down. Maybe it's just that one whose paternal grandfather had his head blown off for being discovered in the wrong bed feels too much old blood in his veins--hears too much danger yelling warnings from his genes--to be comfortable punching other men's wives and girlfriends in front of their very eyes. Maybe, goddamn it, people simply ought to be better than that. Maybe, by God, some things ought to be sacred. Perhaps these are the last days....

Well, invariably, group saps rise again. Still, one never participates without knowing decent postperformance regrets: small ones, often, easily brushed back into the mind and locked in; large ones, sometimes, that spill out and howl, demanding to know of one what he has become; requiring answers he cannot give.

• • •

Difficult to speak for those Old Boys who have retained their original wives, those who have given daily service to the tedious upbringing of children and to carving family turkeys on holidays. As traditional values go, such Dear Old Dads surely deserve higher marks than those of us who have feverishly rambled--whether by plan or by fate or for reasons we cannot name--in search of periodic renewals. Certainly, the stay-at-homes appear more stable; probably they are more content (even if it has meant trimming back sails, stifling urges, ignoring fevers, avoiding adventure), though one wonders how many, if any, are truly happier. Their sex lives, one suspects, are relatively uninspiring: Variety and risks are vital components in the sex game, and these the stay-at-homes have largely forfeited. One imagines for them little more than cataleptic wives; occasional uneasy flings with this or that office cutie; one-night stands while conventioneering in Des Moines. And it has been established that such good family men represent key economic factors in the commercial reckonings of whores. The few loyal family men with whom one has maintained close contact sometimes seem to envy the more foot-loose, though only perhaps when the moon reaches certain ascensions or they've imbibed past their norms. Well, peace to such fine fellows; bluebirds and blue ribbons to them, and unexpected bonuses of beautiful wanton airline hostesses or fiery Playboy Bunnies on their next outings: They deserve prime consolations.

In their private continuations, roving Old Boys conversely tend to seek out younger women--partners little or no older than their daughters--because, you see, they force the better provings. Limber, lithe and loving (not yet spent of emotional coin, relatively unscarred and not yet as bloody as the world shall render them, looser than their mothers in their psyches and habits), they reassure with tales of younger bloods so impatient to achieve their own satisfactions that they ignore the sexual nuances in favor of boom-bam, thank-you-ma'am techniques. Such sweet songs make the Old Boys feel wise and appreciated tutors, afford rare opportunities to pity young men as well as to envy them: no small gifts to Dirty Old Men who need love, too.

Risks may attend these May-December unions. Often people mistake an Old Boy's lover for his daughter or too quickly defer him chairs at parties where all other revelers own flat bellies and seem to recall John F. Kennedy as our first President. Old Boys are likely to hear sarcasm or imagine insults in the polite "sirs" bestowed upon them; unless careful, they may brand themselves walking anachronisms through references to the Depression, 3-D movies or Dagmar, while others are preoccupied with the challenges of sophomore year, discontinuation of the military draft or whatever art it is that Mick Jagger performs. Old Boys able to hear themselves think above the roars of acid-rock bands may be led to solitary musings on the fates of bull elephants. In their cups, they may wonder at their true market value: Goddamn it, am I just another foolish sugar daddy adored only for my money, position, connections? (Pretty irrational: If the sexual revolution and movements "liberating" women have affected the Old Boys, it certainly is to their profit: Not much demanded to marry in these enlightened times, they now offer their young lovers the freedom of fuller risks; they are free to pick and choose and, having chosen, move on.)

Even when things go spanking well among the heats and sheets of May-December couplings (even if one has minimum difficulties making his unspoken weekly quota), one may find himself thinking, as William Faulkner said on completing his final Lovel, "I've been meaning to quit all this." Well, not exactly quit. Slow down, maybe. Pause to reflect upon what all those years of tanglings and mixings have meant; on what has been gained or learned--or lost or forgotten--in life's many beds.

Not that the balls whoop and clatter with any less enthusiasm when celebrating their function; no, it's just that perhaps they aren't as compulsive about calling attention to themselves as formerly. A time comes when the excesses of youth seem not merely wasteful but foolish and somehow vulgar. One is tempted to advise his juniors that Rome wasn't built in a day, that the race--not always to the swift--is too long for sprinting and must be paced. Jaded Old Boy thoughts, of course. The musings of one who, having experienced most of the gimmicks and all the known possibilities, now is free to remember all the faceless parades and mock shows and to wonder at the sum total of his fractional satisfactions.

And just as one becomes convinced he is at long last master of his libido and captain of his soul, that he has fed his crotch hungers to fill and has tight reign on earlier wilder lusts--boom!--the world wafts its incense, provides triggering new aphrodisiacs, shoves him toward the starting line again....

It may happen as he enters some peeling old beer joint, close cousin to those of his youth, where Willie Nelson or Ray Price or Mickey Newbury sweetly wail of unrequited love while tough-faced young barmaids with firm prize asses twitch and switch them enough to make good men quit home. He senses life's tangier juices in such primitive pits; dangers and challenges; violence lurking and heaving under paper-thin skins. (Ah, yes, not to Freud your thumbs to nubs, but: Fucking is stabbing; the joint is a gun; the spontaneous language of carnality often employs the tongues of killers and sadists and footpads; more vengeances may have been gained on mattresses than in all of history's executions.)

Or, another day, he spies the sleek groomed perfect face of a clothes filly striding her colors proudly on the sidewalks of New York, carrying herself as if transporting precious jewels, bearing the simple wonderful gift of herself. Or on some sunny beach, original life forces seeming to creep up once again from the sea as if to settle in the groin's brain to whoop of renewing the species, he sees acres of womanly flesh--jiggling, bouncing, sprawling, strolling, running, slouching--in varied sun belts of tan bespeaking many seasons, and he may ache with the simple selfish impossibility of having it all. Or a lady in residence slips from the shower, at once cool and flushed, full of new mysteries hidden in lovely caves meant for exploring--and, well, over the roar of revitalized blood and the quick clamor of clapping gongs, he decides to postpone retirement at least until tomorrow.

• • •

And what of the used and discarded? Where are those luckless old partners of yesteryear's fun? What are those sad grieving women doing these days?

Making it, probably. Repeating prior cycles in teaching their own unfinished semineophyte lovers new tricks and our old hidden mattress frailties. Having their own spirited semifinal goes with someone else's husband or roving freelance opportunist. Still trying to find which shell hides the pea; still fitting holes to pegs; still wondering--just as we are--at The Big Purpose. Let us hope such mixed blessings for them, anyway. The alternative is a surrender to the hounds and to dowager's humps, a quitting of the spices, preoccupations with lamentations and regrets (pointless wanderings in stark old battlefields where even dead spirits have forgotten who won or lost, or why) and mean-spirited envious gossip more sinful than honest fornications. So sic 'em, gals. Fuck 'em.

It's tougher for women, of course. Really is. The fern libs are on to something. They've caught on about women being stuck with kids they may not have originally wanted but couldn't obtain society's permission to abort or abandon. They've caught on that divorced or widowed women--often unskilled or with their skills atrophied, underpaid, presumed half-dotty or inherently inferior, born less free, considered as brooding stock or live-in maids--know excessive unfair horrors at the divisions of true spoils. All true, more or less. And, additionally, there exists one certain handicapping sexist law unchangeable even by the combined best intentions of Betty Friedan, Jill Johnston and Gloria Steinem: Women simply have less trade-in value the second or third or whatever time around. They are the sex market's used cars. Newer and more streamlined models roll off the lines each year, and how does a 1931 Model A loaded down with children and small dents (even one given careful polishings) compete with a spiffy 1950 Caddy convertible complete with power steering, automatic drive and flying fancy foxtails?

Women of a certain age--The Old Girls: our true contemporaries--were instructed from the grave to build nests and to fill them. That original male chauvinist pig, Santa Claus, brought them dolls and dollhouses; gifted them with Lilliputian stoves, ironing boards, tea sets, portable vacuum cleaners. Life told them: Build nests; play house. The Old Girls now surely recognize such games for their small profits. Even in their knowledge, however, they may have difficulty in shedding Pavlovian instincts outmoded by the times and the new morality. They are more likely to attempt accommodations with discredited myths; to seek, if not find, permanent arrangements. Love. Marriage. Yesterday's promises of wine and roses and vine-thatched cottages.

Pretty good fisherpersons have landed some mighty sorry catches that way, or have failed to attract good honest nibbles--and so became prey for predatory bait thieves. Pray for us all: inexpert anglers casting blindly in dark swift waters; ah, pray for all human salmon struggling upstream to mate.