QUOTE OF THE DAY

Seduce my mind and you can have my body,
Find my soul and I'm yours forever.

- Anonymous

THE EYES HAVE IT

Concert at The Echo, bands I don't know. I crawl in solo and early, walking around before the show, making quick eye contact with a brunette in a hippie dress. Green eyes. Young. Half my age (isn’t everyone?). I get a drink at the bar, move around behind her 20 feet or so back. She’s obviously with some tall, galoot in a plaid shirt. He’s yammering at her about his job, what he does. Her eyes dart around the periphery and back to him when she thinks he’s looking at her, feigning interest. He never asks her a question, or even pauses to allow her a random innocuous comment. In fact, he doesn’t seem to really care if she is listening at all, he just presumes so. For the most part he keeps his eyes up in the rafters as he speaks. Glancing at the stage lights, the big, dark speakers hanging precariously in the corners of the room playing some decent, if non-descript CD of post-apocalyptic, West Coast, 80s punk.

She feels my eyes on her. I look up and down her body slowly, memorizing. She’s wearing a loose, hippie-type dress. Summery, muslin perhaps, short above her knees but low-cut with a little cleavage and a necklace I can’t quite see from 10 feet away in the darkened club. She feels my eyes on her, catching me looking her over. When he glances away from her, rambling, she smiles slightly and glances directly in my eyes. I do not avert. This goes on all during the first act, repeating like the incessant bass line. She seems to know the words to all of the songs. I know none of them. She’s obviously a regular and me just a newbie fan who hadn’t even heard of this band until the night before.

During the break I sit on edge of the stage and watch the crowd mill about. Some mating dances, lots of 20-somethings out for a night of rock n roll with packs of friends. She must be on a first date because who would hang with this moron more than once. Almost every time I look at her she is either already looking at me or turns her eyes slightly trying to be nonchalant and not obvious about it. Why her interest in me, I’m unsure. Other than the fact that my fearlessness at making eye contact might be a bit irregular for someone of her beauty and then again, perhaps I'm obviously just forward enough considering her hovering suitor.

During main band’s set, all sexy 70s harmonies and 90s grungy guitars with flashes of Bakersfield honky-tonk twang. She video tapes the whole thing. While the three guitarist front men are much closer to her age, she doesn’t sing along this set but keeps glancing away from her screen and out of the corner of her eye at me. She has positioned herself between the finally quiet boyfriend and the sweat-wet singers and her date is none the wiser. This has got to be a first date or perhaps the closing moments of something gone on too listlessly long.

Before the encore, he runs off with his peanut bladder, and I figure, impulsively, that I only have a minute or two. I take five steps to my left. Eyes locked on hers, her camera is at her side. Everyone else must presume I'm lurching, aching for rock star proximity in the pit when actually I’m scooching to the right over to her side to say, “Your red light is still on.”

“A-----”, she says her name softly, as if a forbidden secret shared.

“Hi. Who’s the guy? What’s is story?”

“He’s boring. He went to get one for the road. You really want HIS story?”

“No, just yours. You, live in town?”

“Yes, Silver Lake. I’m 25. You?”

“That’s two answers. I only asked one…I live in the mountains.”

“Nice…(she waits)”

“54, though I look MUCH younger.”

She giggles. “Older than my dad,” with a big beautiful smile.

Now it’s my turn to say, “Nice.” She laughs out loud.

“Great hiking up there waiting for you, come on up for a visit.” I smile big. She grins big back. I can’t believe how easy it is to just invite this stranger to my moungtain home, miles away. I’m kind of amazed myself. My balls hurt, they are so big. But I figured the dude would be back any minute. “Seen these guys before?” I ask, meaning the band.

“Seen the opener but not the other guys. You?”

“Nope. But they were awesome.” She giggles again. “You like Jeff Beck?...not Beck, Jeff Beck the guitarist?” Now, I’m throwing it out there fast. I am so sick of wasting time especially when I have nothing to lose.

“Sure, he’s got a girl on bass.” I don’t tell her it’s not that band anymore but I’m impressed she knows that.

“I thinking about trying to get tickets to see him in Pomona tomorrow night. Can I call you in the morning?”

She just recites me her number. Hold on…” I scramble for my phone. She repeats it and I get it in without area code, furtively glancing up to see “Mr. First Date” Coming from across the room, walking slowly concentrating to not spill his two full beers.

I start to ask a question, which she anticipates, “323.”

She was about 5’2”, natural, unpretentious looking girl, brunette, curly Joan Osborne type angelic hair. Pale skin. Curvy, dimpled smile. Eyes green like emerald pools. Nice body from what I could see. Not super skinny but not fat either. I liked that she was direct, only shy in the first 30 seconds of me approaching. She looked directly into my eyes when not casually looking around for her dude checking his whereabouts. She seemed very comfortable with my attentions. Quite nonchalant and natural. Wow.

Looking up, I see he’s about 10 feet away, and closing, hands soaked. She has both of their coats in her arms and he tries to hand her a beer and of course, doesn’t reach to help with the coats. Doofus.

Fortuitously, I get a call from my buddy who told me about the show. I turn and look down at my cell before the guy gets that I’m chatting up his girl. Stand there acting busy, texting, “I’m talking to a hottie.” I put my phone to my ear and then glance up at her and she mouths the words, “Call me,” as he leads her to one of the little tables that were emptying out over by the side wall. I head outside, leaning against a car parked curbside, hoping for one last glance. After about ten minutes, they get booted and stroll out into the night. As they pass my post, I look into her eyes and stick my hand against my chest and make it flutter. She smiles and walks by in Moron’s yammering wake.

I can barely sleep all night, anxious to call her. I wait until 11 a.m. the next morning, Sheer will power, I was thinking she was probably up late and didn’t want her to think I was too anxious. She answered on the second ring and said, before I had a chance to speak, “’Bout time you called.”

“How’d you know it was me?” I laughed.

“I recognized the area code. You sure were forward last night,” I hear the teasing under-her-breath smile curving the vorners of her mouth as she speaks.

“I apologize but I just couldn’t risk not seeing that look in your eyes again.”

“…or the chance of seeing me naked.” Boy, this girl was direct, pretty intense for a girl her age. I felt exhilarated but also a bit trepidatious thinking I should probably keep on my toes.

“So are we going to that concert tonight or is this a booty call?”

“Well, do you have a preference?” Two could play this game.

“How about you come over and fuck me and then we decide?” I had no problem agreeing to that but wanted to make her wonder for a moment. “What makes you presume I want to fuck you?” I queried, unconvincingly.

She hung up.

Oh shit. Now, who’s the doofus? But I could practically hear her laugh in the silence of her far-off room. On the tenth ring she picked up, torturing me.

“So that didn’t take long to decide, now did it?” she sounded reserved but playful, but what did I know, I hardly knew her. “Did it?” This time she said it a bit more forcefully.

“I will do whatever you want me to do, young lady.” She had me and I tested the waters to make sure she was ready and willing as she implied.

“In private, you call me Mistress Ann. I presume you know how to pay me proper respect when you address me?”

“Yes, Mistress Ann.”

“Good. Now when I am ready, I will text you my address and I will expect you there within the hour. I want you on your knees at my front door when I answer it. Barefoot. Now, go clean yourself up.”

“Yes, Mistress Ann.”

JNREAJKGALKJRBDV

I am so fucking exhilarated, frustrated, discombobulated I can’t tell you. I feel like I keep walking into walls that bend when my face hits them and I look at the imprint and the face staring back is yours. I want to touch, kiss, caress, spank, whip, suck, eat, bite, watch, smell, wax, hold, lick, fuck, rim, rape, cum on, piss on, tie up, fondle, surprise, kidnap, pinch, worship, spoil…YOU and be touched, kissed, caressed, spanked, whipped, sucked, eaten, bitten, waxed, held, licked, fucked, rimmed, raped, cum’d upon, pissed on, tied up, fondled, surprised, kidnapped, pinched, worshipped, spoiled…BY YOU. I want to sit across from you naked and not say a word until we both jump out of our skin and into a bucket next to the bed where our genetic slipstream coagulates into something not even I could resist on a tortilla.

It is like having the best Halloween outfit EVER and it pours rain, you have a cold, there’s a crime wave in your neighborhood and you aren’t allowed to trick OR treat or even go outside until next year when your outfit probably won’t fit you anymore.

BUT…I’m being calm…I’m accepting…meditating on my current moment…patient…enjoying the view from here…trying ever so hard not to stare at you, drooling like the dawg-boy I am…but when I do, I see me, but with better tits and much less hair…trying so incredibly hard to keep these enamored fantasies at bay, so close I can taste them but as distant as lightning flashing over the desert 30 miles away...trying to figure that it could be worse…I could be 3000 miles away sitting, cock in hand, wondering and dreaming…but perhaps that’s easier…trying to ignore the clock that ticks louder with each passing moment and thinking…'was life always this fucking ridiculous?'

Anyone ever put a piece of chocolate under your nose, touched it to your lips and then popped it into their mouth with a sly snicker…maybe even gave you a little kiss after slowly swirling that melting, heavenly ooze across their tongue and swallowing it down? And though you smell it, taste it, you want more...you wish you could’ve swallowed it whole when you had the chance.

Not envy, or jealousy of that piece of chocolate or that tongue…no, sheer unadulterated desire. And me, I luxuriate in the idea that each moment and conversation and thought of you is part of the process of discovery…your tongue in my ear, trying to break thru and suck on some succulent piece my mind; my fingers inside you, trying to reach up into your heart and feel its pulse racing in time with my own; our skin damp together trying to find out what makes these so like-minded souls, so fucking connected and unreachable at the same time. Just like our own selves are to us, touchable but just out of reach. We, who think we are closer than most in knowing ourselves, knowing who we really are and then, reflected in each other, we see radiant, sometimes enlightening, sometimes jarring bits, shards, and mirrored reflections of ourselves and want to know more.

You once said, “I think with you and I it would always just be about sex.” If that’s true, then I’ve fallen through some other kind of dream where words are colors and sounds taste blue and in that parallel universe all is explainable and all answers are mine to give. Oops. No deal. And at times I think, "Did I come 3000 miles to know less than I did before? To find freedom and temptation and impatience are all just the saw blade carving pieces out of the same jigsaw puzzle of daily existence or did I come out here just to get kinky or are they both slippery funhouse mirror versions of the same thing? Is the tenuous nature of our every waking moment just that simply defined? And perhaps the crapshoot of life is just that--a pre-destined, random slideshow over which there is no control, no rhyme, reason or rational, experiential explanation and an exceedingly incongruous but teasingly seductive soundtrack. “It ain’t why, why, why…it just is” or is it?

I see you on a high dive on the verge of a back flip into a BIG new pool of life and I see that the pool is indeed deep enough, enticing and warm enough and shimmering enough to seduce your desire for the unknown, for the challenge, for the adventure and I just hope you are a strong swimmer for the pool is an impetuous and tempting dream with a strong current. And as you spring up, soar into the air, suspended momentarily in the space between upward motion and downward plunge I want nothing so much as to be that water that envelopes you, that you pierce with your flailing sense of direction, but perhaps I am only destined to be the hot, bronzed lifeguard, package hanging left with one eye on the life preserver and the other on the edge of the pool just beyond which the wavering image of the arrow of your body flashes by…

Goodnight, my sweet muse.

~for Miss Mary, late night letter, written and sent 3:57am. July 11, 2008

MY FIRST TIME

During my first two semesters at college I kept seeing this beautiful young lady on campus; at the service counter in the Spartan bookstore and even at some concerts I went to. I was enthralled. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Her face occupied my dreams and fantasies for days to come. I was instantly hot over her the first time I saw her and I'd linger in that part of the store whenever I saw her there. She had long, full dark brown hair down to the top of her ass.

On June 20, 1976, my buddy and I went to see a concert in L.A. I spotted this beauty there walking down the aisle in front of us.

“Bink, see that girl with the long, brown hair? Do you know her?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s gorgeous. She works in the book store.”

The next day, I started working at the Creation Dock Seafood Exchange restaurant in the touristy part of town. While cleaning up on my first day (I was hired as groundskeeper/janitor/prep cook), this same radiant woman walked by me and said, “Hi.” Needless to say, I was astonished that she worked there, as fate would have it.

I watched her working at the waitress station, from my peephole in the kitchen. I lingered at my tasks a bit until I had a chance to catch her eye again and I took my shot. Getting ballsy with a beautiful woman for the first time in my life. “How’d you like that concert in L.A. last night?”

“How do you know I went?” she asked, blown away that I’d noticed her.

“I never forget a pretty face.” I was shocked as the words flowed gracefully, if horridly clichéd, from my lips. I found out her name was Jill and I helped her bus some tables when she was busy.

While I was on break, eating lunch in the empty bar, she came up and bought me a beer. When I told her how old I was, she was again, surprised. She thought I was her age (I was 19). She was a beautiful, experienced, seductive 23-year-old. Half-Thai, half-Irish, her family from Oregon.

The next day, she asked if I wanted to get a six-pack and hangout after work. Well, yeah but she'd have to buy because I was only 19. We sat in my car at the marina and got to know each other a bit. I was entranced.

We’d visit over lunch for about a week, getting to know each other pretty quickly. Then one day after work, she came over to my apartment and went swimming for a while. She threw her arms around me at one point and I sprouted a tremendous hard-on. She later told me that from that point on she decided to “scheme on” me. If I would’ve been more cognizant of that fact, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. I was really in awe and intimidated by the insanely beautiful girl.

One evening shortly thereafter, I was half-in-the-bag and playing guitar in my bedroom with my roomie and Jill showed up. She said that she had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend, Rex, who she lived with in the next beach town up the coast about three miles. She asked if she could stay with me. Of course, I was thrilled, she didn’t have to ask twice. She tossed a brown paper sack at me that held a fresh pair of panties and a toothbrush. Traveling light. I loved a girl with a plan but I wasn't quite ready for her directness. I was not used to this at all but I would sure try!

This first night she fell asleep (she was buzzed when she got there) and I slept totally naked with a woman for the first time in my life. Let me rephrase that: I spent the night in bed naked with a naked woman for the first time. I did not sleep. I laid wide awake, staring at her beautiful sleeping face, smelling her hair, looking at her miraculous dark brown nipples and marveled at her soft inner thighs wrapped over my legs. I will never forget those racing hours.

After that we started seeing each other after work everyday. It was a beautiful, sunny, blue day there outside my old Pinto where we'd sit outside in the liquor store parking lot watching the sailboats come into the harbor. By the time we had gone back for four more beers--each time the price changing, by the way, even the clerk was distracted by her smile-—she had told me her life story. She was having problems with Rex. She’d lived with him for over a year and they had been fighting for at least ten months. She was having thoughts of moving away from him. She asked if she could sleep with me when she was lonely and upset. Hell, yeah!

We got along grandly for a month or so, sneaking kisses in the bar or the kitchen at work, going farther in the walk-in fridge, almost making love. We'd swim and go to concerts. She finally moved away from Rex, to a place only two blocks away from me. He’d been treating her like shit, hitting her and she had had enough.

She was a tremendously sexual creature. She thrived on sex and all of its eccentricities. She liked to be extremely open in public. In other words, she would tease all day and make out all night. She used to enjoy being the initiator and the aggressor. Both of which, I was in dire need of and very acceptant of this new development in my life.

Jill would come over and jerk me off in the walk in closet while my friends were out in the front room. We’d roll around for hours, sucking face, rubbing all over each other. In our previous nights together, I’d gone down on her a couple of times and she'd always pull me up (I obviously had no idea what I was doing) but instead of telling me what she wanted, she'd pull me up to her mouth and say she wanted to lick her wetness off of my face. Her delicious pussy was the most incredibly gorgeous I have ever seen (and the first I had tasted). Her sparse black hair was as silky as anything I'd ever experienced. I was mesmerized.

She’d also gone down on me a couple of times before (did I mention the walk-in fridge at work?) but I was always SO nervous. So afraid, that I'd not know what to do that I had trouble staying erect when we'd get close to fucking. I thought that there was some secret that I didn’t know and was very afraid to be thought of as inexperienced (although I certainly was).

I was a nervous wreck. A virgin at 19. By this time, we had been around each other for a couple of months, fairly often, a couple of nights a week at least. But she had this louse of boyfriend and there was lots of confusion on both our parts. I just needed the big push to take the step. At times, we'd make the mistake of drinking way too much alcohol. I remember her saying, “Someday, we’re gonna have to not drink so much. Someday we’re gonna have to just fuck.” Gotcha. But, I was scared to death.

Finally, about the time school started back up in the fall, I got fed up with work and quit the restaurant. No more getting drunk with the boss after hours in the bar; no more free meals and no more Jill everyday. My college rock band was just forming and 4-5 nights a week we rehearsed inland about 20 miles away from the beach. With all the running around, we saw each other less and less.

In August, we attended a Crosby, Stills & Nash concert at the Arena. At one point, after she played with my cock, her hand in my pants up in our seats near the roof of the joint, she threw her arms around my neck and she asked me if I loved her. I didn’t know what to say. I'd never been asked this before. Of course, I thought I knew how I felt, but I was scared. She was still, sort of, with somebody else. I was still heartbroken from my first high school sweetheart. I was young and stupid, afraid of committing myself. I hedged a bit, dumb me.

She said, she found herself falling in love with me. I said that I really didn’t know, I was scared of being hurt again.

The music diffused the conversation and on the way home we were joking around and then I said something that set her off. It had started when she asked me what I was looking at as we drove home and a drunk girl with her tits hanging out walked out into the street and I had to slam on my brakes for her to stumble by.

“I had to stop for the road block,” I joked and she said, "So you wish I had bigger tits?" What? She had issues about her breast size and got pissed if I mentioned tits at all. She was picking a fight, I guess. She gave me the silent treatment all the way home.

She'd taken my comment personally and said she'd heard this shit all the time from Rex and that she was tired of feeling bad about herself. I think she was really pissed that I didn't answer her affirmatively earlier about being in love with her. I tried to explain that I wasn’t being malicious or even directing any tit comment at her, to no avail. She ran into my apartment and cranked the stereo up, started dancing and tuned me out for an hour.

A big wall went up and I got tired of trying to talk and being ignored so I got pissed and went into my room and moped. She eventually came in crying saying, “You don’t understand.”

Yes, I do. “No, you don’t.” and that pissed me off more. I went into the living room, running away from my anger. She followed me in, sat beside me. She finally wiped the tears from her eyes, the pain from her heart and she leaned to me and slid her hand over my crotch. Then she took my hand and lightly led me into the bedroom, an innocent, peaceful look on her face. We headed toward the first, and last, consummation of our love.

We had slept together, fooled around often but we had never yet made love. Though it was not due to the fact that we hadn’t had the opportunity or hadn’t tried.

Too many drinks and too many jokes. But that night, though I couldn't say it, we both discovered somehow that we loved one another and in hindsight it scared us both into defensive strategy.

She trying to justify her love for me with her dissolving relationship with this violent Rex guy. Me, trying to figure out if I was really in love since I was still pining for Joni and still blindly hopeful that Joni and I would work out somehow. Strange night…but then it happened.

Sliding down onto the bed, she enveloped me in her soft, warm legs. Undressing herself above me, her eyes never left mine. As she pulled her top up over her head, I saw her amazing child-like body. Her beautiful tiny breasts tipped by dark nipples, lengthening before my eyes as her long, thick dark brown hair brushed over them like clouds hiding a beautiful moon.

She told me to take off my shirt, as I did her eyes followed down my chest and she unbuckled my pants and pulled them down over my feet. She rubbed her dark, warm cunt over my stomach. Her pubic hair as soft, a rabbit pelt of black silk, thinly covering her wet pink sacred place. My belly soaked, rose and fell as she slid down on top of my engorged rod. Rolling together, I pressed my face up through her thick hair, trying to get eye to eye with her dark almondine crescents there in the cave of mane that fell on my shoulders and surrounded my head. Our lips met, her tongue darting into me in time with my cock between her legs. Our bodies melding into one.

She moaned like a wild cat, we rolled together onto the floor and I slipped underneath again for the pleasure of feeling her waist-length hair caress my shoulders and chest again, while she kissed my forehead and ears. The huge pillow on the floor was soft and spongy beneath us and as I rolled again, I felt her legs tighten and clinch behind my back. She was moving furiously, gasping for air and I thought she’d buck me off... On the edge, I moved faster, her fingers clawing at my ass. I collapsed in her arms and we lay satiated. In a little while she got up, stumbled to the bathroom in the hall and puked up the last three shots of cheap tequila and I half-hoped that wouldn’t be the normal reaction every time I made love in the future!

We woke sometime later, dawn was creeping through the plants in the windowsill. A big jet shook the glass pane as the first morning flight slipped out of town over our heads. I kissed her awake and as she moved against me, I slowly sunk my hips into her and we made slow, passionate morning love our lips never parting until we had both shivered the day awake.

I felt like a million pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. She was my 1st real sex. Of course, even before that night I was lost and in love with her but still, held a fading torch for Joni back in my hometown.

After that, I never heard from her again. In a week or two, I heard Rex had convinced her to move back in with him. I couldn't call her house. My ex-boss wouldn't allow me in the restaurant since I'd quit on him. So when the fall semester started up I walked into the book store and asked for her. "She's not working this semester but I just saw her heading down the the beer garden."

I looked around but didn't see her so I sat at a table and began writing in my journal. A few minutes later, I heard her voice nearby.

"Pierce," she was sitting directly across the table from me. Looking radiant but sad. "I'm moving up to San Luis after this semester to live with my grandma for awhile. Rex is nuts and I couldn't stay in town with you. He'd find us and make our lives miserable. I'm so sorry."

I didn't know what to say. My mouth felt glued shut. There was a knot in my chest and I felt sick to my stomach. She stood up and kissed me on the lips, put her hand on my cheek and turned away. "Jill...thank you." She turned, smiling sadly and then I watched her walk away for what seemed like hours.