15 April — Thursday
Checked my Post Office box. Nothing in it, which was to be expected. The ad just came out yesterday, and even if some pervert rushed straight to the mailbox, his reply wouldn’t show up before tomorrow at the very earliest. I didn’t really expect anything today, just went and checked because I had some time to kill on my lunch hour.
On the way home, I bought some cow shit for my plant.
If anyone had told me that the day would come when I would spend fifty cents on cow shit for a plant, I would have told him his head was on backwards. (As it happens, no one ever told me, so the world was spared that exchange of sparkling wit.) But I did. Spend fifty cents, that is, and for my money I got a two-pound bag, yellow with green lettering, of sterile dried cow manure. I suppose it’s very important that it’s sterile. I wouldn’t want my philodendron to have a baby, would I?
I took a teaspoon and mulched my plant with cow shit. It smells sort of nice, actually. I don’t know whether all cow shit has this pleasant open-air smell to it, or whether this only happens if they dry and sterilize it. At any rate, I mulched Mother with about a half-inch of the shit all around the base, and then I watered it so it wouldn’t blow all over my apartment, and now I feel I have done my good deed for the day. Also for the month, as the plant won’t need any more cow shit for at least that long. Judging by the amount I used, and the quantity I still have on hand, I’ll be able to feed my little green darling for the next three years before it’s time to run out and buy more cow flop.
I wish there were something to do with it besides feed philodendrons. Maybe I could mix it with water and drop it out the window on people’s heads.
“Look, Ma. A flying cow just shat on me smack in the middle of Manhattan!”
Somehow I think not.
Last night I watched Bill with a girl.
Got there and he said another girl was coming over. I asked if it was Wanda again.
“Not Wanda. A girl I never met before. She called up in response to the ad. Very nervous sort. Married, and never had an orgasm. Married six years, I think she said. A couple of kids. Bought The Sensuous Woman and tried masturbating but she’s too embarrassed to make it work for her. Husband just throws her an in-and-out three or four times a week. Pops before she can get in the mood. Thinks if someone would cat her for a month or so she might find the path to Paradise. Not that she put it that way, but that’s what it seems to boil down to.”
“You’ll want me to leave, then.”
“Not unless you want to.”
“But—”
“Thought it might be kicks for you to hang around and watch, Jennifer.”
“But she won’t want that, will she?”
“Who’s going to tell her? You squat in the closet, peep through the door. She won’t know you’re around.”
“I thought you never like to lay a bad trip on a girl, all that rap about existing wholly for her pleasure.”
“And so I shall. Her pleasure and yours, love flower. What she doesn’t know won’t cramp her style. She comes, she goes, and you keep quiet in there. Won’t hurt her a bit, will it?”
And so we play it that way. Terribly exciting. And dirty- feeling at the same time, because I am watching someone in secret, watching someone who does not want to be watched, who would not put up with it if she knew. Crouching naked in the closet, easing the door ajar a few inches after she and Bill begin to get acquainted. Dark in the closet, light in the room — no way she can see me, of course, but seems to me she would have to be able to hear my ragged breathing, the pounding of my imperfect heart.
Tall, big-boned girl about thirty. Not fat yet, but she will be if she doesn’t start having orgasms, because it looks as though she’s already beginning to search for them at the bottoms of cookie jars. Large Earth Mother breasts. Dimples in her bottom. Dark curls of twat hair reaching almost to her navel.
(Fantasy: I would like to eat a girl someday sans pubic hair. Either too young to have it — how perverse — or freshly shaved. Shall I perhaps shave my own? I wonder if the absence of hair there would be apt to turn men and/or women on or off? In pornography that I’ve seen they almost always have pubic hair. The men always do — I’m sure I’ve never seen a picture of a man who shaved there. And almost all the women. All the ones in the movies, and most of the ones in still photos I’ve seen. Though I do recall — quite vividly — a close-up of a shaven woman. Wonder whether it appealed to me in and of itself, or because it was so different from the unshaven ones, or on the third hand — look ma, three hands — because one could glimpse details otherwise obscured. But I would surely hate to cut myself shaving. Suppose it’s not that much different from shaving under your arms. Could become routine and automatic, something one does before dates — shave the pits, shave the crotch, put on lipstick and perfume, and off we go to the orgy like a well-brought-up young lady.)
Helen (her name last night) would have worn out a razor blade a day. Really a copious bush. This didn’t seem to turn him off. Nothing about her seemed to turn him off.
Interesting to watch him operate. She had come up specifically to be screwed, or in any case to be eaten, and they had established all this in front, and yet he had to seduce her. Not romantically, but he had to talk her into it. All of these stupid objections she raised. “Oh, I don’t know. Oh, perhaps I’ll hate myself afterwards. It would be terrible to hate myself forever for an act of adultery. Oh, if I could only be sure—”
Took him fifteen minutes, and then he played her gradually, romanced her physically, much kissing and petting and slow undressing, playing that genius tongue over those oversize breasts, getting the old hand between those plump thighs, fingers on safari through the jungle of dark curly shrubbery. Little sounds from her — “Oh. Ooooh. Ah, oh.”
Then abruptly she sat up, weight supported on arms extended behind her, eyes clenched tight.
“I don’t think this is working.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t let go.”
“Just go along with it, Helen. Just be passive, just enjoy. Relax with it. Don’t think about where you’re going. Just think about where you are.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just enjoy how it feels. Doesn’t it feel good?”
“Yes, but—”
“Isn’t it exciting?”
“But I’m not excited.”
“But it feels good.”
“Yes, but—”
“So lie back and enjoy it.”
Odd watching. Quite unlike a movie. Better and worse than a movie. Worse because crouching in a closet is far less comfortable than sitting in a plush seat, even the seat of a shabby Times Square porn house. And because one’s perspective from that closet cannot shift as the camera can, dollying in for close-ups, moving back and around to examine the problem from different points of view. One static shot, distance and camera angle never changing, and not all of the action visible from that fixed angle.
Had my eyes been a camera, the movie they would have recorded would have been a boring one. Vastly inferior to the general run of commercially available filth.
In that sense, worse. In another sense, better. Because these were not actors speaking written lines but people engaged in a real drama, and only one of them even knew I existed as the drama’s audience. And so I was able to get into the skin of Helen as I wouldn’t have been able to do had she been performing an identical role on a movie screen.
The identification was not total. I became Helen to an extent, felt what she felt, struggled as she did to lose self and to be overcome by flesh. But I also remained me, ARjenniferLENE, thrilled equally by my own peeper’s role, the visual input enhanced by a helpful finger on my clitoral nether-finger, trembling on the brink for the longest time but holding off, deliberately holding off, keeping my own culmination back in the hopes of synchronizing it with Helen’s.