Message-ID: <6480eli$9802271728@qz.little-neck.ny.us> From: jordan@u36.com Subject: STORY: Autobiographical Essay [MF] Jordan Shelbourne Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-Id: <888583784.AA786437@u36.com> And this is it; this is the last piece I have lurking about that might be considered erotica *and* finished, even if it's not where I want it to be. It may be useful to you to look up a copy of my "Unwrap Party" first; it may not. If I've done everything right, you don't need to. This is in no sense like M1ke Hunt's similarly-titled story. Do feel free to contact me at jordan@u36.com. This story, unlike the others, is *not* available at http://www.u36.com/jordan, though it may someday be. Jordan Today's quotation: "It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful." [Jean Jacques Rousseau] AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Jordan Shelbourne [Tedious legal material: [Copyright by the author, 1998. All rights retained. Please do not archive without permission; for permission, contact me at jordan@u36.com.] I write erotica. I get asked if it's autobiographical. After all, I've had sex, and the sex in my stories is often like the sex I've had. But a story is about a single moment that illuminates the character's life and changes it. Life is not about a single moment. The thing about life is that it goes on, day after day. Here's an old story. You've heard it before: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. It's even true, sort of. There was a woman named Elaine. This was a long time ago, but I haven't forgotten her. We met during an annual show. If the story were autobiography, I might have written it like this: I was adrift that year. I'd graduated but nobody was hiring biologists. Instead, I was a bookstore clerk camping below the poverty line. I had a place to live: I rented a room from Trudy, a former prostitute and a political lesbian. Men (she said) were shit. She was making an exception for me...and for another fellow who was in the throes of a divorce. Every night Trudy groaned; he grunted; and I listened. Eventually I joined a campus theater group full of younger people, because I couldn't listen to that, alone, night after night. Except that that makes you think the story will be about Trudy, and it isn't. It's about Elaine. And me. fiction. In the story, I named her Sarah; I think Elaine would have liked to be a Sarah. Elaine had a scar on her upper lip and the faintest of lisps; her "s" was a bit mushy. She'd been born with a harelip.) I'm often attracted to scarred women -- the scars don't have to be physical. Like, as they say, attracts like. In the story I named myself Ben, the amputated form of Benjamin. Neither Ben nor Sarah has any obvious scars. Such is the power of fiction. Instead I said: The wrap party had been going for hours, and Ben sat apart from it. He had made a vow this year not to get involved with anyone -- not to have a "show romance" -- and he had kept it; this made him feel both proud and obscurely sad. So after the speeches had been made and most of the cast and crew had split up into smaller groups, Ben headed for the spare bedroom in the basement where the coats were stored: Another year done. Before he reached the stairs, someone touched his shoulder; it was Sarah. I don't know why Elaine was attracted to me. Perhaps it was because she thought I was fundamentally a nice guy but that I was *different*. Others have thought that. Perhaps it was because like attracts like. I couldn't say that in the story. Sarah had to have a reason. So I invented a boyfriend who dumped her. In the story, Sarah seduces Ben on the dance floor. I was dancing with Elaine and her roommate, Sue. A slow song came on, and Sue drifted away. Maybe she knew how Elaine felt about me. I remember the feel of Elaine's sweaty body pressed against mine, our arms wrapped around each other, mouth-on-mouth, pelvis-to-pelvis. I remember her small breasts against my chest, the urgency of my erection. Eventually we moved to the bathroom where we almost -- but not quite -- consummated the relationship. When I run into people who were at that party, they still remember the lineup outside the bathroom. So: Sarah and Ben move to the bathroom where they almost -- but not quite -- consumate the relationship. Elaine and I walked through the cold to the apartment she shared. (Sue would not be back from the party for hours.) We ran through the apartment, shedding clothes as we ran, to get to her bedroom. Once there, nearly naked, we lay on the bed kissing, and grinding our hips together through our underwear. I remember adjusting my cock to point up, and how my cockhead poked out of my shorts. I remember her pebbly brown areolas, her nipples (only occasionally hard), and how her small firm breasts nearly disappeared as she lay on her back. I skinned her panties down her legs and kissed my way back up to her damp crotch. She was, I think, the seventh woman I had slept with, and by this time I was getting good at oral sex. She had a long lean body and a tidy round ass; I held the cheeks in my hands as I ate her. It took a long time before she came but eventually she pressed her hands down on my head as she pushed her hips up against my mouth. She made an almost ultrasonic squeak as her body tensed and then she sagged. I did not stop, and she came again soon after, and then one more time. All of this is in the story, but I was free to make up whatever Sarah was thinking. At this point in the story, Ben moves up her body and with her consent they make love. I crawled up Elaine's body and I kissed her. My underpants were gone by then. I pressed my hips against her so that my hard, heavy cock was firm against her mons. I slid my cock along the length of her wet lips, lubricating it, and as I steadied it to enter her, she touched my hand and said, "No." She gasped as she said it and perhaps she was as frustrated as I was, but she said, "No. I don't want any little Elaines running around." I did not have a condom. She was not on the pill. My cock was so hard it *ached*. Perhaps I should not have been able to stop; perhaps most other men would have gone on. But I had faced possible pregnancy twice before and did not want a third. (That would be too wordy to explain in the story.) Instead of having sex, we talked. I don't remember the exact words. Perhaps it went something like this: "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry too," I said. And then I tried to think of a way to ask her if she had come, because I *thought* she'd come but every woman is different. (Two of my lovers had been quiet, and one had screamed obscenities, and one had never come but did not fake it.) I couldn't think of a way that didn't make me sound as insecure as I really felt. "You know I've only slept with one boy?" she asked me. "I couldn't tell," I told her. "When he left me, he said that I was frigid." She sighed. "I was so scared." "Did you come?" I asked her. She nodded, her underlip caught between her teeth. "Then you're not frigid." "I guess not," she said, and we kissed some more. I kissed my way down her sweet sweat-salty body and ate her to another orgasm. And then I lay beside her. "Do you like kinky sex?" she asked me. "I don't know," I said. "Haven't tried much. I guess that means I don't really need it." (If you read my stories, there isn't much kinky sex.) She seemed satisfied with that. "He wanted to tie me up. The boyfriend." "I won't ask to, then," I said. "Okay." She played with my nipples for a while. "Tell me about your family," she asked me. I shrugged. "Not much to tell. My mother died, oh, twelve years ago when I was thirteen. It makes me feel weird to know I've lived almost as long without her as with her. I don't connect with my family, really. My sister keeps doing stuff to pretend we're this Norman Rockwell family. My dad tries but we just don't...connect." "I understand," she said. "I'm from Montreal. Almost from Westmount." I nodded; her family had money. She could see me, but she didn't look at me. She looked at the ceiling, with one hand pillowing her head and the other touching her pubic hair. "My father--" She stopped for a while. This is something pornography never mentions and erotica sometimes does: the time after orgasm can be a naked, vulnerable time. Maybe that's why I usually came alone, back then. "My father," she continued. "He liked to be whipped and humiliated. He hired a woman to--" She was quiet again for a while. "He taped it. The sessions. He left them on the tape player so we could find them. I had some friends over once and one of them pressed Play and we heard it all." There was another long pause. "My parents are divorced," she said softly. "I hate him." I hugged her for a long, long time. Then I told her this true thing: "When my mother was in the hospital, dying, my dad visited every day. I didn't. I didn't want to go to the hospital where I had to be quiet and where it smelled funny. She'd been in the hospital before and she'd always come out. I figured. Or I just didn't care. I don't know any more. When I hate myself I say I didn't care, and when I don't mind myself I say I thought she'd live. And when my dad asked me if I wanted to go I said no." I had to stop because I didn't know if I wanted to tell her why. I squeezed it out anyway. "Probably because I had a TV show I wanted to watch. The next week she was dead." She hugged me that time, and then we kissed some more. She reached down and found my soft cock. She stroked it gently. Despite my shame, it started to harden, to lengthen, to grow. "We could get some condoms tomorrow," she said. "I'd like that," I said. I could have put that in the story. Except that we didn't have sex until two days later and it was good but the mood was somehow different than it had been, even though we held those secret things about each other. No, in the story Sarah and Ben have sex that night. They make love (although Ben worries they might be having sex and calling it love). And when they reveal their love to each other, well, the story is over. Life isn't like that. Elaine and I dated for a while -- I bought her the first long-stem roses she'd ever had, though it cost me half a week's pay -- and when she went to Toronto for her summer job, she even invited me up for a party once. But her friends all had money and came from a different world. I watched her closely while I was there and I could not mistake what she felt: embarrassment. I was an embarrassment to her. I did not have the respect of her friends. I could have put this in the story. I would have had to dramatize this about Ben, that he has this quirky pride even though he often goes for the cheap laugh. I could make up or remember an incident (perhaps about a joke gone wrong) to show the difference between making them laugh and being laughed at. And the aftermath: He kept the stupid smile pasted to his face though he had a sad sick feeling inside himself, a bright and fevered weakness. He wanted in that moment to have his secret back, to hide again the vulnerable parts of himself, but Sarah knew them now and she would always know them, just as he knew hers. He turned to Moira and when she finally deigned to speak with him, he asked, "Do you know Sarah's parents? Her father?" And of course Moira did. Across the room, he saw Sarah's eyes widen, huge and white, and he waited for one word from her, one tiny request -- but she did not say it. She would not beg him in front of her friends. He had the words ready, but saying them would not give him his secret back. It would only expose a new one, that he could be this petty. So instead he said, "Can you tell me about them? She never speaks of them." And he had another sip of the wine that was now flavorless for him. I could have put all of that in the story -- but it's all sloppy loose ends, isn't it? And how do I reassure the reader that Ben got married later, happily, and that Sarah's doing well, too, with somebody else? It makes the whole story seem unimportant, doesn't it? Except it was very important. I was there; I know. Light falling on a field has weight, and so do all the details of our lives. They press us onward and change our direction. I do not know who I would have been without Elaine -- but I could not have written that story. And I could not have written this. -- +--------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `------------+ | story-submit@qz.little-neck.ny.us | story-admin@qz.little-neck.ny.us |