c   h   a   p   t   e   r      1

 The Electric Adventures of Alvin, Part Two

A Novel of Erotic Satire

Chapter 1

c:/writingfiles/adam/intro

If you’re reading this, you already know who I am. That is, you know who I’ve said I am. My real name isn’t Alvin, of course, but I don’t consider that to have been a lie. You knew it was a pseudonym, right? I mean, that part was obvious, wasn’t it?

I don’t know anything at all about you (other than the fact that you’ve bought this book, which indicates to me that you really need a hobby), and you already know way more about me than any stranger should. But I’m going to tell you more anyway:

My real name is Adam Schakowski. I am writing to update you, reader, on events that have occurred since the publication of my best-selling novel The Electric Adventures of Alvin, which has ruined my life.

c:/docs/mallbooks/test

Alvin, as you know (if you’ve picked up any newspaper or magazine in the Western hemisphere in the past two years), is a nakedly prurient book about Internet sex. ``Erotic fiction,’’ the book jacket calls it, for the same reason that people who eat snails call them escargot: It sounds better than saying ``snails.’’ Bald-faced pornography is what Alvin actually is, no matter how much my publishers and the critics and The New York Times and all the others try to rearrange it on the plate. A paperback copy is sullying our cramped living room as I type this (my publishers put it in paperback practically before the ink was dry on the first hardcover edition, the greedy perverts). It is stacked among three books that Beth bought yesterday at the mall. At the mall! Where any teenager could pick it up! What are these bookstore chains thinking? Aren’t there any standards anymore?

Alvin is at the bottom of the stack. I’m holding out hope that Beth will get distracted by the other two books and not get around to reading it. I initially gave some thought to hiding it, letting her think she’d misplaced it, but I decided against that, as it might draw attention to it and prompt her to crack it open.

If and when she does start reading, it will be over in a matter of days or maybe hours. Pseudonym or no, she will recognize me there, and herself, and her old friend Guinevere (you know her, from the book, as ``Gem’’). I figure I should be packed and ready to move out by the time she hits chapter four.

c:/misc/scifi/chat

Amy69:           what will she say?

Alvn:               don’t know

MinniMous:    maybe she wont say ANYTHING.

Alvn:               thats sort of what i’m afraid of

Gem4U:           u worry too much, alvin

Gem4U:           u always did

c:/mycomptuer/notes/martiansummer

Beth and I share this computer, an early-model IBM with a flickering screen and a ``J’’-key that sticks. I’ve taken as many precautions as I reasonably can to ensure that she doesn’t come across what you’re reading right now. I break up all my writing and notes into small, separate files, and I mix them up with other files from my research – chats, blogs, emails, newspaper website articles, Wikipedia entries, passages from the Bible – and I scatter them throughout the computer’s hard drive like rice at a wedding. I give them titles designed to minimize the possibility that she will open them. This file, for example, is not (obviously) part of a story about a group of astronauts who land on Mars and discover proof of the non-existence of God, but that’s what I’ve led Beth to believe it is. That is my cover-story for being here at the kitchen table before dawn every morning clattering at the dirty beige keyboard. Beth doesn’t view science fiction as legitimate literature – a narrow but, for the moment, convenient prejudice; it’s unlikely she’ll get curious about my Mars-God project and start opening files. And if she does happen to find one, she will have only a piece of the whole, with no way to determine what file comes before or after. I have a handwritten list of computer file names, a key, showing the order in which they go, so I can string them together at the end. Don’t laugh; I wrote an entire bestselling novel this way – a huge, sprawling, obscene meal of a novel, composed of hundreds of innocent-looking little forkfuls of computer files, and she never even knew it crossed our keyboard. She still doesn’t. Not yet.

The thing is, I’ve misplaced the key. This is unusual for me, as I tend to be very organized (some would say obsessive). I know I put it in the left under-fold of my wallet – it was written on the back of a long grocery receipt, in light pencil, a list of a couple hundred separate computer file names, numbered in order and folded into a tight little square – but I’ll be damned if I can find it there now. It’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’ll put these files together for you as best I can.

c:/beth12

I just moved Beth’s stack of books to look at the cover again. ``Erotic fiction’’ – funny how respectable that makes it sound. Personally, I don’t have any problem calling a snail a snail.

c:/misc/scifi/chat31

Mikey000:       is she dangerous?

Gem4U:           lol. Having trouble imagining that

Gem4U:           unless she’s changed a lot since college

Gem4U:           (and gained a couple 100 pounds)

Amy69:           what about it alvin? Has she changed a lot since college?

MinniMous:    maybe she wont even know.

Mikey000:       yea, how can you be so sure she’ll know?

Alvn:               she’ll know.

Amy69:           so what? With all the money you made from this, who cares?

Gem4U:           true, alvin. maybe you should liten up. what happens happens.

Alvn:               you of all people know its not that simple gem

c:/erotfict/misc12

``Erotic fiction.’’ Right. As the author, I’m here to tell you that Alvin is neither.

c:/textdocs/adm57

Don’t even try to claim you didn’t read it, by the way. Someone has bought 589,776 copies of the wretched thing (as of the close of business last Thursday), and it certainly wasn’t me. I’ve heard numerous people, in my everyday life and in the media, making a point of denying they have ever read The Electric Adventures of Alvin, and it is a mathematical certainty that many of them are lying. This makes sense; it is exactly the kind of book a person would read and then deny having read, especially after the business last year with the Congressional hearings.

My accountant, Morgan – a forty-something black woman with hard eyes, a delicately pointed nose and small, flat breasts with disobedient nipples – assures me that I am wealthy as a result of all these supposedly unread copies of Alvin. Morgan knows I am married and living in a three-hundred-ninety-dollar-a-month apartment and she remains baffled by my insistence that she not contact me at home. ``You should lighten up, Adam. Enjoy it. Have a party,’’ she said the last time we talked in her office, during my thirty-minute lunch break from the mail room at the Indianapolis advertising firm of Lawrence, Hardy & Robinson. She’s also wondering why I keep that job, which pays seventeen-thousand six-hundred dollars annually, roughly the equivalent of a week’s worth of royalties from the book. ``You have enough room to take some chances here,’’ Morgan said last time, her steel nipples charging through one of the thick, canvassy shirts she wears, futile armor against her own bullets. ``You should set up shop, focus on your writing. You should travel. I’m surprised your publisher isn’t putting you on a book tour.’’

In fact, my agent, Carol Crowne, has been trying to talk me into just that for months. She’s getting insistent about it, too, always calling me on the mail-room phone (I’ve resisted all her attempts to get my home number) and telling me how we’re really onto something, how these sales numbers are just the beginning, how we could triple them – ``Triple them, Adam!’’ – if only I would stop resisting their attempts to market the thing. The only interview I’ve allowed was a phone interview with a reporter named Hanna from the fashion magazine Elle, because I liked her British accent, and I wouldn’t give her my real name. Carol says that’s not enough. ``The anonymity bit has been great, it’s created a lot of interest, but I think we’ve hit the plateau. We need to unveil you now, Adam,’’ she told me last week. ``Anonymous authors get attention for awhile, but then it gets annoying. Remember in the ’90s, the way they milked the mystery around Primary Colors, then opened up at just the right moment? That’s how we want to do it. Maybe we can arrange for some newspaper to break the story, and we’ll deny it’s you for awhile, and then we’ll hold a press conference and admit the whole thing. We’ll hit a million copies, easy!’’

Carol can’t fathom why I don’t want to hit a million copies, why I don’t want to promote any more gushing reviews of the book, why I don’t want to see any more debate about it on C-Span. I’ve tried for two years to keep the thing out of Beth’s view, and now that’s she’s gone and bought it, all I can hope for is that she’ll stick it on the bookshelf behind the couch and not get around to reading it, that she’ll just forget about it, but Carol isn’t even remotely with the program on that. I suspect it was Carol who started the industry buzz that Alvin is under consideration for a National Book Award, which, if true, would be nothing short of catastrophic (Beth builds her reading list around that, and the Pulitzer).

I sent a handwritten scrawl of a registered letter last month to all the National Book Award selection committee members that I think may take care of that, but Carol’s still at it. Her latest thing is the Oprah Winfrey show. They’re doing a segment called ``Edgy Literature, or Filthy Porn?’’ and, obviously, they want Alvin – whoever he is – to be there. Carol was almost in tears during our last phone conversation (``No one turns down Oprah! Cormac McCarthy doesn’t even turn down Oprah!’’) and I couldn’t make her understand that appearing on national television runs counter to my central goal of preventing anyone from finding out I wrote this book.

c:/misc/harpers/review143

            (Harper’s, June 12, pg. 26-27)

. . . The book is presented as fiction, and it certainly contains elements which one assumes must be fictional (many of the lavishly described sexual positions undertaken by the ever-elastic Gem, for example, strain physiological credibility). But one cannot read through to the end without having the unsettling and repeated feeling that this is as much autobiography as autoerotica.

This suspicion is further enhanced by the author’s decision to hide himself behind not just a pseudonym, but a rather silly one. ``Alvin’’? Just ``Alvin,’’ no last name, no biographical information, no nothing? Was this meant to be a serious ploy? The name itself is, of course, deliberately un-sexy, as if to get the reader to lower his or her guard. In contrast to the lasciviousness that lurks between the book’s covers, the protagonist’s fraudulent name reminds one of a cheerily innocent 1950s pop-music band, or perhaps of a Saturday-morning cartoon replete with animated rodents talking in high-pitched, rapid-fire cadence . . .

c:/textdocs/adm23

Ever since it was published, I’ve been putting out these fires – the media inquiries, the Congressional hearings, the looming threat of a National Book Award – and I’ve managed to mostly isolate Adam from Alvin. To my knowledge, only a handful of people know that I am him.

There are Minnie and Gem, who you know from the book (their real names are Mindy and Guinevere). My accountant and my agent both know, though my agent has never seen my face. And I had no choice but to tell my lawyer, a pleasantly round woman named Lynda Schuster who I hired from the Yellow Pages after Congress subpoenaed me last year. Lynda’s the one who convinced the Sub-Committee not to expose my identity, and then came up with that creative solution as to how I could still testify. Which I’m sure you remember.

The only others who know (as far as I know) are Clarence, the heavy homosexual who works next to me at Lawrence, Hardy & Robinson, the advertising firm whose mail I sort; and JaneyX.

Of course, I don’t have to tell you who she is.

c:/notes/adam43

For the record, I was not making fun of Congress with that mask, despite what the media kept saying about the hearings. I kept seeing these news stories saying I was ``protesting sexual repression from behind a mask of satire,’’ and – how did the Washington Post put it? – ``unmasking the political hypocrisy of the Congressional Internet debate .’’ Always with the ``mask’’ puns. I think it was Newsweek that labeled me ``The Masked Diva of Digital Sex.’’ I swear, these reporters just can’t get over how clever they are.

c:/mydocs/thoughts/clarence04

Clarence, the homosexual who sorts mail with me, is forty-nine years old, bearded, weighs probably four-hundred pounds, and is the closest thing I’ve had to a friend (outside of cyberspace) in the past three years. He beats me at chess during our lunch breaks. He deduced my true identity without any help, just from reading my book, which was unnerving to me because, until that point, I could still wonder if that was possible.

``You’re him, aren’t you?’’ Clarence asked me breathlessly one morning in the mail room a few months ago, holding up a half-read hardcover edition of The Electric Adventures of Alvin.

``Yeah, right,’’ I said, coughing up a laugh. ``That’s why I’m working here.’’

``You’re him!’’ Clarence insisted, with a maniacal grin. ``I may have to blackmail you!’’

Clarence is the one breach in my anonymity that I never worry about. He hasn’t told a soul, and he wouldn’t, though I have to say I wasn’t thrilled with his review of my work. ``I’m sorry, Adam, there wasn’t beauty there,’’ he told me, after he finished it. ``I think you’re a lonely man.’’

c:/misc/notes/clarence47

Clarence has lived alone for twenty years and hasn’t had a lover, of either gender, in almost as long.

c:/adamnotes/alv-news/star2

Here’s the first newspaper article I ever saw about the book. I pulled it off the Indianapolis Star web site more than a year ago and started a file I called ``alv-news.’’

Surprising Sales For Cyber-Sex Novel

NEW YORK (AP) – A quirky little novel about Internet sex has logged onto this week’s list of national bestsellers.

Sales of the book The Electric Adventures of Alvin have approached the 100,000-sales mark, which is considered unusual opening for the erotica genre. The anonymously written novel details the sexual escapades of an Internet addict and the women who seduce him through his computer.

``These kinds of numbers aren’t usually associated with – well, with these kinds of books,’’ said industry analyst Gerald Ryan. ``It’s hard to explain. You just never know what might suddenly push readers’ buttons.’’

The brisk sales come even as some bookstores decline to carry the book due to protests from religious groups. In addition to its sexual content, the novel takes a critical view of religion. Among the characters is a Catholic priest who collects photographs of mating animals, and a Baptist minister who injures himself while engaging in Internet sex in a chat room called ``Jewish & Looking.’’

``It wasn’t enough for this cowardly writer to produce pornography. He had to produce anti-religious bigotry as well,’’ said the Rev. J. Martin Ackerman, head of People for a Moral America, which plans to launch a national boycott of the book. ``I don’t know what problems `Mr. Anonymous’ has had in his life, but whatever they are, he should ask God for help instead of blaming Him.’’

c:/textdocs/adm9

My pleasantly round lawyer Lynda mentioned to me once that she got a glowing write-up in some major legal journal after the hearings, calling her handling of it ``brilliant’’ and ``groundbreaking.’’ Most of the members of the Sub-Committee clearly didn’t think so. They were pretty mad, and I guess I don’t blame them. I didn’t realize how ridiculous it looked until later, when I saw some of TV and newspaper pictures. Plus, the mask made it hard for me to testify – I had to lift it up a little at the chin to talk into the microphone at the witness table, and it kept dropping back down and obscuring what I was saying.

I felt guilty lying to Beth about why I went to Washington that week (I don’t even have an ``Aunt Mary,’’ let alone a dying one), but what else was I supposed to do? Just come clean? ``It’s like this, sweety: I’ve been subpoenaed to testify before the `Ad-Hoc Senate Sub-Committee on Pornographic Something-or-Other.’ About, y’know, that bestselling stroke-book that I secretly published? The one about all the torrid online affairs I’ve been having these past few years? Including the one with Gwen – yes, mmm-hmm, that Gwen, your old roomy. Anyway, I’ll be back Wednesday.’’

c:/janeynotes/janeyintro

The woman who readers of The Electric Adventures of Alvin know as ``JaneyX’’ is actually named (I’ve recently learned) Jenny Goode. She’s currently blackmailing me. Janey (Jenny) is the one we evicted from our circle, as you’ll recall (chapter seventeen), because we decided she was unstable. This must have seemed a harsh judgment, coming as it did from a group of sexual-compulsive techno-philes who sit around in front of their respective computer screens masturbating over one another’s typed words, but Janey was unstable even by our standards.

I looked up from a batch of envelopes one day five months ago to find this awkwardly tall, thin, small-breasted, yellow-haired woman, about fifty years old, standing in front of me in the mail room, dressed in mismatched, colorful layers and smiling calmly. I thought at first she was one of the downtown homeless who had somehow wandered past security. When I asked if I could help her, she nodded but didn’t say anything. She just kept smiling, expectantly. A moment later, I suddenly knew – I’m still not sure how – and I said: ``Oh, God. Janey?’’

She nodded again and said: ``Actually, it’s Jenny. But you get the idea – Alvin.’’ The idea was that she was there to demand money in exchange for not reporting my secret to the world, and to my wife. As always, though, she hadn’t thought the thing through. At the McDonald’s where we negotiated that day during my half-hour lunch break, she asked for a thousand dollars, apparently unaware that that is about twelve hours’ worth of book royalties for me. When we went to the bank together and I handed her two thousand dollars – explaining that I wanted to care of next week as well so that I could see her as little as possible – she stared blankly, and I realized she hadn’t been thinking in terms of a ``next week.’’ Turns out she’s no better at blackmail than she was at friendship. She was going to just walk away with one thousand dollars and never come back, I guess.

After I explained to her how royalties work, and tried to give her some sense of just how much money I was actually making from my published account of our faceless sexual adventures together, she announced, boldly, that she wanted twenty-five hundred dollars each and every month, for as long as I could afford it. I suggested we make it an even three thousand, in exchange for her promise that I didn’t have to look at her conniving face again. We set up a lock-box for her at the bank where I could leave the money each month, I showed her how to use it, and I said goodbye.

She didn’t want to leave it like that. ``Oh, Alvin, c’mon, let’s at least have dinner tonight and talk, just catch up. I’ll buy,’’ she said, as she tucked the thick stack of bills into her pocketbook. I said: ``It’s `Adam,’ not `Alvin.’ And, no.’’

c:/notes/congressnotes/congress01

SWORN TESTIMONY, SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY, CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: . . . Now, I want to stress that, contrary to some of the hysterical media coverage of these proceedings, we are not out to ban `Grapes of Wrath’ or anything like that. But I fear most Americans don’t yet realize the scope of the problem we face today.

This isn’t just about professional pornographers foisting their perversions on our civil society anymore – that’s something that has been going on, in one form or another, since the first crudely drawn pornographic images appeared on cave walls. But today’s challenge is greater than any we have previously faced. For the first time in the history of pornography, this dark form of commerce isn’t a one-way, top-down market dynamic in which pornographers produce, market and sell their product to passive buyers. With the advent of private websites, `blogs,’ `chat rooms’ and other Internet developments, people who were once mere buyers of pornography are now producing and distributing it. And the form of this new pornography isn’t just photographic, but linguistic. As we sit here today, this new form of pornography is humming through computers all around us, as regular people all over our nation – indeed, all over our world – hand each other dangerous words as surely has they once handed each other dangerous photographs, or dangerous film reels.

I’m holding in my hand the book that might be considered the bible of this dark new realm of `Internet sex.’ I’m sure most of you haven’t read it – I know I haven’t – but I’m just as sure that you’re aware of its content. . . .

c:/docs/taxthought

I’m still paying Janey (Jenny) every month, which is fine. The money is useless to me anyway, because I have no way to explain to Beth where it came from. I can’t go out and buy a house or a car or any of the usual perks of wealth. Not that I’m inclined to do those things – I’ve never been interested in ownership of inanimate objects that are unrelated to my Inner Life – but the point is, what’s the use of being rich if you can’t tell anyone? We can’t even go out for a nice dinner without her agonizing the whole time about the expense, unaware that we could own the restaurant. The money is nothing but a curse, just one more lie to feed. I’m still trying to determine how I will explain to her, in April, why our income tax bill is higher than my entire salary from the mail room.

c:/system /notes/carol/wordsforvagina

I still don’t know how Janey (Jenny) found me. But aside from her and a few other small breaches, my anonymity – my armor – is mostly intact, from my wife, my family, even from the prying eyes of my own agent.

Like so many of the women in my life, I’ve never seen Carol, my agent, not even a picture of her. I picked her out of the yellow pages under ``agents, book’’ the day I finished writing Alvin, because the ad was small and had a low and needy look that seemed to say, ``I’ll take anything I can get.’’ I called the number, and when a female voice answered the phone, and it turned out not to be a secretary (Carol couldn’t afford a secretary at the time, though now she has two), that sealed it. All the other agents I called were male, an ugly and graceless gender that I try to avoid in my daily life as much as possible. As soon as I heard Carol’s voice, I knew I wanted her to read my manuscript, to read about Gem and Minnie and the posting board and the purple vibrator, to open her mouth in astonishment at my lavish descriptions of the velvety breasts and soft inner thighs that Alvin, my protagonist, encounters in The Room. Whether she agreed to publish it was almost irrelevant. The opportunity to put my words, those words, in front of a pair of female eyes – in the guise of a legitimate business proposition – stirred me, and that, as always, was the point. I was, in a literary sense, flashing her. If she reacted in any way even slightly favorable, I figured, it would just open up another avenue of fantasy, but I wasn’t daring to count on that. The fact that she was going to read the words was enough. On the day she called and enthusiastically offered to get it published, I was so overwhelmed by the fantasy opportunities that I called in sick to the mail room and spent the day in bed, alone.

Fantasy was the point, the only point, from the very beginning. I wanted people to read Alvin not because I wanted their money – I’ve never viewed money as goal in itself and have never understood those who do – but because the thought of people (women) reading those words, pondering them, perhaps even employing them as masturbatory material, lit my Inner Life in a way that nothing else did. It didn’t occur to me, nor interest me, that the book might find a widespread, non-masturbating audience, that it might be taken as something other than unabashed whacking material. How could it? It was pornography, plain and simple. I should know, I wrote it.

In fact, I even changed the wording of my original manuscript (at Carol’s insistence) to intentionally make it more pornographic than it originally had been. I like the proper words for things – vagina, clitoris, vulva, labia, breast, nipple, areola, to name a few of my favorites – but Carol said it needed to be ``hotter,’’ so, reluctantly, I dummied it down. ``Vagina,’’ for example, a beautiful and perfectly functional word, become a parade of vulgarities, including ``snatch,’’ ``bush,’’ ``cunt,’’ ``trim,’’ ``beaver,’’ ``mary,’’ ``strange,’’ ``honey pot,’’ ``muff,’’ ``love glove,’’ ``poontang,’’ ``cootch,’’ ``minge,’’ ``gidget,’’ ``vadge, ’’ ``twitch,’’ ``twat,’’ ``box,’’ ``jenny,’’ ``pie,’’ ``bird,’’ ``kitty,’’ and, of course, the ever-popular ``pussy.’’ Carol gushingly approved, but the changes made me wince while reading the final flats that she sent to me.

c:/vaginanotes/vagina24

I won’t compromise my principles this time. For the purposes of this manuscript, a vagina is a vagina, and not a ``gidget.’’

c:/critics07

With language like that, I assumed Alvin would end up, if anywhere, on the shelves of adult bookstores, in the small sections set aside for those rare adult-book-store patrons who prefer words to visual images. That was okay with me. I was aiming squarely for the groin, not the mind. And, of course, the cover art that Carol arranged stuck with that theme. (You remember it: A drawing of a computer screen, displaying an image of a woman’s naked torso, from mid-breast to just above her vagina.) So it surprised me when I received a copy, from Carol, of our first review, and it wasn’t in some under-the-counter men’s magazine I’d never heard of, as I assumed it would be, but in Ms. – a woman’s magazine! This was initially thrilling (Women were reading this! Women! A female reviewer, female editors, female subscribers! Owners of breasts were reading this!), though I assumed the review would be scathing, filled with finger-wagging adjectives like ``perverted’’ and ``pornographic’’ and ``sick.’’

Instead, the reviewer, a woman whose first name was Lynn (Lynn!), called it ``an intriguing new approach to erotic fiction, a must-read for those who like their literature a little dangerous.’’ Carol circled that line in the photocopy she sent me at the mail-room (and she saw to it that it was re-printed on the back cover of the first paperback edition) but I wasn’t sure what to think. ``Literature’’? The opening paragraph of Alvin, as you know, is a detailed description of a woman sitting naked from the waist down, spread-legged, in front of her computer monitor, holding open her vaginal lips with one hand and using the other to rub the computer mouse against her clitoris. How did this get to be ``literature’’?

Still, several women had now read it, and that was enough to send me into fantasizational bliss, until the subsequent reviews began rolling in, and I started to panic. Esquire: ``A refreshing exercise in `out-there’ fiction.’’ Harper’s: ``Edgy and daring.’’ Cosmopolitan: ``Deliciously perverse.’’ And, of course, those smut-peddling perverts at The New York Times: ``Thoughtful and relevant societal commentary, gamely masquerading as erotica.’’ What was it, exactly, that these people had read, I wondered. Carol was ecstatic, but I was distraught, watching my underground creation rise closer and closer to the surface, where it would be aired for all to see, including Beth. Beth doesn’t browse adult book stores, but she certainly does browse Cosmo and The New York Times.

c:/mycomputer/foresterstory

The nicest thing any of the reviewers have said about me, in my opinion, was in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which a reviewer named Susan wrote that, although Alvin was ``unadulterated pornography’’ (true enough), ``its anonymous author clearly possesses a spark that could burn brighter in some other genre – any other genre.’’

That touched me, though I can’t honestly say I think she’s right. I haven’t given myself much reason to believe that I’m capable of writing anything other than unadulterated pornography. I’ve tried. During those brief periods of my youth when my Inner Life wasn’t in control of me, I actually had aspirations of literary greatness – or at least of literary relevance, of writing something other than pornography. I attempted a serious novel once, about the relationship between a married couple during the Depression – Mr. and Mrs. Forrester, I named them, randomly – and about their noble attempts to stay together through hardship. If it sounds vague, I guess it was; the point is, it wasn’t going to be about sex. But thirty pages in, I got bored with it. I started day-dreaming about the characters naked. Pretty soon, every time I tried to write a description of a female character, I found myself describing her in far more detail than your average serious novel would go, and then I would have to take a break. When I started in on one heavily metaphorical scene involving the sale of a loaf of bread, and ended up writing a lavish description of Mrs. Forrester’s moist pink inner labia, I knew it was time to admit I wasn’t going to be the next John Steinbeck.

c:/misc/eaoa/alvinexcerpts/notes/firstsentence

Gem spread her silky brown thighs widely across either arm of the desk chair, and slid her hand between them, taking her hot soft pussy into her own eager palm. Her vadge was a flower, a radiant living cluster of lush darkness outside and moist pink petals inside, and now she gently parted those petals to find the knot of life at the center of her, that beckoning little clit. With her free hand, she guided the computer mouse there, its smooth hard cold plastic a shocking foil to the delicate warmth of her soft wet muff. She let out a small gasp as she felt it against her, pressing her like the button on a keyboard. On her computer screen, Alvin’s words were anxiously lined up to penetrate her . . . 

c:/notes/adam96

Stephen King said once, in answer to critics who asked why he hasn’t written something more respectable than horror: ``Sooner or later my mind always seems to turn back in that direction. God knows why.’’ I guess I could say the same thing about my own writing talents, such as they are: They always turn back in the same direction, a little further south than the direction other writers go. I have accepted, reluctantly, that if I have a future in this business, it is as the pre-eminent recorder of all things carnal – the Steinbeck of stroke-books.

c:/notes/congressnotes/congress24

SWORN TESTIMONY, SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY, CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING

. . . SEN. HARMON: Mister Chairman, I’d like to object once again to this ridiculous spectacle.

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Your objection has been noted, Senator.

SEN. HARMON: That mask is an affront to the seriousness of this hearing and the dignity of this chamber!

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: As you know, Senator, this was the compromise we agreed upon with Mister Alvin’s attorney --

SEN. HARMON:  And that’s what we’re supposed to call him? ``Mister Alvin’’?!

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: This compromise has allowed us the benefit of Mister Alvin’s testimony on this important matter, without the constitutional issues of privacy that would have arisen --

SEN. HARMON: But Mister Chairman! That mask! I mean, just look at him!

MR. ALVIN: (INAUDIBLE) . . . 

c:/notes/normajean

Why Marilyn Monroe, you ask?

There have been lots of pretty elaborate theories about this, and I hope I don’t disappoint you here, but it was mostly the process of elimination. There were dozens of different masks in the Washington, D.C., costume store that my pleasantly round lawyer took me to right before the hearing. Many of the masks were political in nature, and she advised me not to pick any of those. I don’t know much about politics, but I understood her point: Showing up to a congressional hearing wearing a Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan mask probably wouldn’t have gone over well. She even ruled out the Abraham Lincoln one (which I thought was pretty cool because of the hat and beard).

Most of the other masks were scary ones – Freddy Kruger and Frankenstein and that kind of stuff – and my lawyer suggested that, given what some of the more conservative senators on the Sub-Committee already think of me, I probably shouldn’t show up at the hearing dressed as a monster.

c:/mydocs/alvinmailnotes/notes12

It sometimes worries me, in a societal kind of way, that ``Alvin’’ is so famous. What does it say about our culture when a fictional Internet pervert becomes a pop-icon? I have a post office box where his (Alvin’s) mail is sent, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff I get. Many of them write letters recounting their sexual encounters in lavish, if amateurish, detail. (Don’t try to impress a professional pornographer with descriptions of your endowments, folks.) A lot of them send pictures, Polaroids of themselves, naked more often than not. Some of them send Polaroid closeups of just their sexual organs, without bothering to include their faces, which tells me they didn’t read the book very carefully. The male photos I deposit into the first trashcan outside the post office; the female ones I save for later.

I also get an amazing amount of mail from religious zealots, people who alternately tell me that I’m a child of God who will be forgiven, and that I’m going straight to hell and nothing I can do will stop that from happening. Many of them include addresses where I can write to them if I’m serious about saving my soul. I have, so far, resisted the urge to gather up all the naked Polaroids I’ve received and send them to the addresses on the religious zealots’ letters.

c:/notes16

One morning, I heard two women and a graceless male, all in their forties, discussing The Electric Adventures of Alvin in line at bank while I was depositing one of my royalty checks. All three had read it. The women had liked it, something they admitted to the man sheepishly, giggling a little, though both were beyond giggling age. The man hadn’t liked it and said he didn’t even understand it, which figures.

One of the women was a tallish, bony redhead with very angular hips and low, heavy breasts. I fantasized that night that I introduced myself to her as the real Alvin and offered to play out her favorite scenes from the book, one by one, and that she enthusiastically agreed. ``Let’s start with chapter nine,’’ she said, unbuttoning her blouse.

c:/mydocs/alvinmailnotes/notes23

Through the bus window on the way home one day I caught sight of a hand-painted sign in the door of an alternative bookshop that said: ``We Have ALVIN!’’, and the word `Alvin’ was red and had little waves coming off it, as if it was hot, which I thought was a nice touch.

c:/mydocs/notes4

Rush Limbaugh once berated Alvin on the radio that plays in the mail room at work, and I waited to see if my co-workers, especially the women, would get into a discussion about it, but they didn’t.

c:/mydocs/alvinmailnotes/notes98

Another time, a short, round woman stopped me on the sidewalk on my way into work with a petition to ban Alvin from the downtown library. I signed, twice.

c:/notesbioinfo

A lot of the letters I get ask what I look like, where I live, whether I’m married, all those questions that are usually answered on the back of the book jacket, but weren’t on Alvin.

I am thirty-six years old. I am five-foot-ten, one-hundred-seventy pounds. I have straight brown hair of average length, a little thinning on top. I wear brown plastic-rimmed glasses. I have no facial hair. My eyes are dark brown. My nose is very straight – it is the closest thing to handsome on an otherwise average-looking face. My few friends in college joked that I look like a Norman Rockwell image of the boy next door. They called me Richie Cunningham, the boy-next-door character on that old show ``Happy Days.’’ You know that guy on the Mazda commercial, the average-looking guy who is trying to catch up to the beautiful woman on the motorcycle? I look very much like him. Put plastic-rimmed glasses on that guy, and he’s me.

My penis is eight-and-a-half inches long when erect, measured on top, from belly to tip. It is six-and-three-quarters inches in circumference at the base. This sounds like more than it is. Take a measuring tape and loop it at six-and-three-quarters inches, and you’ll see that it’s not as big as it sounds, it’s not like the circumference of a softball or anything. But it is big around. I don’t say that out of arrogance; male sexual organs, including my own, mean nothing to me. I ponder size only as it relates to the reactions women have had to it during my few real-life sexual encounters. Every woman with whom I’ve had sexual intercourse – and we’re not talking an army here – said or otherwise indicated that she liked the thickness of it. Length, on the other hand, seems to be irrelevant to them, which makes a certain amount of sense when you consider the placement of the vaginal components; the important stuff is all near the entrance. My length, in fact, is a bother; I was actually too long to go completely inside two of the women I’ve slept with, which in turn prevented us from getting the full effect of the width at the base. I’d gladly give up a few inches of the length and add them to the girth.

My shaft, when erect, is very straight, not curved or leaning as with some men. Not judging here, just stating facts.

My pubic hair is light brown, lighter then the hair on my head, and long and thin rather than short and thick. My testicles are of average size and shape; I haven’t measured them for circumference, but I can tell you they aren’t noteworthy one way or the other. I am circumsized.

My wife’s old roommate Guinevere (Gem from the book) had my penis to herself one morning, before Beth and I married, and she spent years afterward attempting to have it again. I don’t claim that that has happened frequently in my life; again, I’m just stating facts here.

c:/misc/gemstuff26

Guinevere asked me once, years later, on-line: ``do u ever grab it w/both hands & hold up it up & think, god i’m hung?’’ I don’t.

c:/notes/congressnotes/congress79

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate’s long-awaited hearings investigating the societal impact of Internet pornography began Monday with controversy, as the star witness testified while wearing a Marilyn Monroe mask.

The erotica author known only as ``Alvin’’ wore a plastic Halloween-style mask of the late film icon, held to his head with a rubberband, as part of an agreement between his attorney and key members of the Senate Ad-Hoc Subcommittee on Electronic Pornography.

The author’s anonymously written pornographic novel, The Electric Adventures of Alvin, has sold more than 200,000 copies nationwide, sparking renewed debate in Congress about Internet pornography. The committee had agreed that the author could veil his identity in exchange for his testimony, but several committee members said they were outraged when they arrived at the hearing to discover the mask he chose to wear.

``We made a good-faith agreement with `Mr. Alvin,’ or whatever his name is, to let him keep his anonymity in exchange for his honest help in this important investigation, and he turns around and denigrates these hearings,’’ Sen. Mark Dillard said after the hearing.

Several subcommittee members made a motion Monday to revoke the agreement with the author and require him to remove the mask, but the motion failed.

``I don’t like it, either, but we did agree to allow him to shield his face, and we didn’t put any conditions on that,’’ noted subcommittee chairman Sen. Edwin Reese. ``There’s nothing in our agreement to prevent him from making a statement with whatever mask he chooses, and clearly that’s what he decided to do.’’

``Alvin’’ didn’t explain to the committee why he chose the Marilyn Monroe mask, or what kind of statement it was that he was making. To some, however, the message was clear.

``Marilyn Monroe was the pre-eminent sex-symbol of her time, an unprecedented melding of pop-culture and sensuality,’’ said Jeremy Krause, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is following the hearings. ``Today, the only thing that comes close to that kind of socio-sexual impact is the home computer. Clearly, that’s the message `Alvin’ is trying to convey.’’

c:/misc/descriptive/bth

Beth and I have been married three years, and lived together before that. She has a master’s degree in psychology and is working toward her doctorate, while holding a job as a secretary for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. We met while she was in college and I was getting ready to drop out. She still has one foot in the world of college, a world that has long been closed to me, for reasons I’ll get into later.

She has light blonde hair, straight and extending just past her shoulders, blue almond-shaped eyes and an unusually full bottom lip. She is five-foot-five, with a petite frame, small, firm breasts (A-cup), a flat waist and a surprisingly round rear end for someone so thin. Men stop and turn when she walks past, something she pretends not to notice or enjoy but which (she once admitted to me, reluctantly) she actually does.

When undressed, her dark nipples are her best feature. The skin on her nipples and surrounding areolas is so dark that it’s closer to brown than pink, which makes them easy to see against her pale skin even with the lights out. The areolas are flat, smooth and vertically oval-shaped.

c:/nipplemeasure

The vertical diameter of each of Beth’s areolas is two-and-one-eighth inches, and the horizontal diameter is one-and-three-quarter inch (she allowed me to measure them with a cloth sewing tape measure one drunken night, both of us laughing the whole time). Her nipples are thick but short, and flat on top.

c:/adam10/spacepubes

Beth’s pubic hair hovers between blonde and very light brown. It is straight and soft, as tends to be the case with blondes, but is unusually thick, almost as thick as the pubic hair on your average brunette, thick enough to form a pronounced mound under panties or bathing suits. In college, the first time I slid my fingers under the waistband of her panties and down into the silky warmth of her vagina, her pubic hair was trimmed so short that I could immediately feel skin beneath it. Later, at my pestering, she grew it out, and has kept it that way, though she complains that the hair sometimes binds in the elastic of her underwear.

Beth’s clitoris is small and sometimes difficult to find (especially in all that hair), but becomes hard as a pebble when stimulated.

c:/misc/background/settingdescription

We live on the outskirts of Indianapolis, on the top floor of a three-story brick building near a railroad viaduct and bordered on two sides by vacant lots. Many of the houses around us are empty. There is little traffic here, even on weekdays. There’s a streetlight right in front of our building, and no others in the area, giving our front stoop, at night, the feel of an island of light in a dark ocean. I pick up cans and blowing garbage from the front sidewalk and small front yard just about every morning on my way to the bus stop (we don’t own a car) and there’s always more litter there the next day. I often wonder how it is that litter seems not to blow into nicer neighborhoods.

Our building’s small lobby and stairway, sheathed in a thin, worn brown carpet, is generally clean but has an odor of cat urine that greets you, mewing, at the front door. Beth says it is a faint odor, and she mostly smells it on warm days, but I smell it thickly every day. I try to breathe only through my mouth as I climb the stairs, but it’s a difficult thing for me to do, like walking around with my eyes closed, and invariably some of the smell comes in. I have a hypersensitive sense of smell, a condition which medical science doesn’t yet acknowledge but which plagues me nonetheless: I smell car exhaust long after the car is gone; I smell tiny pockets of old fart or sweat or cigarette smoke in the wind carried from who-knows-where; I smell my own blood, salty and sharp, in the internal veins of my nostrils, a constant and unwelcome companion. And, of course, I smell cat piss. It is worst at the third and eleventh steps.

I complain monthly about the odor to Mrs. James, our landlady, who lives on the ground floor of our building, and she tells me each time she plans to have a service come in and clean the stairway carpet, but she hasn’t yet done that. Mrs. James is about fifty years old, gray-eyed, short, slightly heavy, with curly brown hair, and is the owner of enormous breasts. She wears a small crucifix that she absent-mindedly massages between her thumb and finger when she talks with you. On the day that we knocked on her door to ask about renting the apartment, the contrast between her mountainous breasts and the tiny gold crucifix, perched atop them like a scowling little chaperone, was almost too much for me to bear. What waste. ``You are married, right?’’ she asked, twice, during that first half-hour talk, massaging her crucifix. On the lease application form was the question, ``What church do you attend?’’ Mrs. James, reading over the form after we signed it, paused a moment at the blank space we left there, but said nothing.

c:/mydocs/mrsjames7

``Oh my god, did you see how big she was?’’ Beth whispered to me as we walked away from the building. I pretended I hadn’t noticed.

c:/misc/spaceships

I am estimating that Mrs. James’ breasts are in the triple H- or I-cup range, if such a thing is possible. The brassieres she wears look like nylon armor, their seams and buckles poking rigidly through her blouses. It is hard to estimate her weight, because of the enormity of her breasts, but I can tell you she isn’t heavy enough to make her bosom look even remotely within expected proportions. Though I have never seen her naked, I can tell you, with near-certainty, that the areolas surrounding her nipples possibly surpass the diameter of a softball. In my vast visual experience with the female form, I have learned there is no such thing as a huge-breasted woman with small areolas, except those who have been medically enhanced (it is, in fact, the first and most reliable clue to fraud).

The characteristics of Mrs. James’ nipples themselves are harder to predict; her bras are too rigid to give any clue as to length, shape or thickness. Her pubic hair (I have deduced, from her eyebrows and forearms) is thinly textured, though probably covers a wide region, and is dark brown.

c:/mrsjamesstory

I have a fantasy in which Mrs. James somehow gets locked out of her apartment while wearing nothing but a bathrobe – things like this can happen in fantasies – and she knocks on my door asking for help. She has, happily, left her crucifix at home. The bathrobe is too small, revealing more cleavage than she probably ever reveals in real life.

I have worked this fantasy over many times, trying to reconcile it with Mrs. James’ real-life persona (this is important if a fantasy is to have any texture to it) and I have deduced that only religious torment on her part could conceivably lead to a situation in which she guides the warm pink tips of her giant breasts into my mouth. So religious torment it is: Mrs. James’ husband has been dead four years (in real life); she has a hidden sensuality that prayer and church work has never quite been able to eradicate (in the fantasy); but her religion prevents her from masturbatory relief (in the fantasy – and, most likely, in real life).

Can I help her? She slowly opens her robe, then leans back and closes her eyes as I begin moving both hands around the soft outer edges of her gargantuan orbs. Her nipples, in the fantasy, are soft and fleshy, encircled by a wide, vast, light areola that fades gradually at the edges so there’s no clear line where the pink island of areola ends and the fleshy ocean of breast begins, as is often the case with busty women. I open my mouth wide over the tip of her left breast; the areola is so large that I can’t cover it with my open mouth. I slowly close my mouth, dragging my lips along the pink, dimpled skin, closing in on the soft nipple, and then I pull as much of the nipple and surrounding tissue into my mouth as I can without letting it bump my teeth.

She lets out a small moan, the release of years of religious oppression, as I start massaging both her nipples, alternately, with my tongue. I run my right hand gently down her belly and my fingers slowly plow through her thin, soft pubic hair, parting it like wind parts a field of wheat, as I listen to her breathe. (Yes, yes, I know: How is this, in Mrs. James’ religiously damaged mind, more excusable than masturbation? I’m still working that out.)

c:/wikipedia/publichair/

. . . Pubic hair can vary in color considerably from the hair of the scalp. In most people it is darker, although it can also be lighter. On some individuals, pubic hair is thick and/or coarse; on others it may be sparse and/or fine. Hair texture varies from tightly curled to entirely straight. Pubic hair patterns can also vary by race and ethnicity.

Patterns of pubic hair, known as the escutcheon, vary between the genders. On most women, the pubic patch is triangular and lies over the mons veneris, or mound of Venus. . . .

c:/mydocs/morningshere

The inside of our apartment is clean (I make sure of that, daily) but so small that just about everyone who has ever come in has paused inside the door and taken a moment to get bearings, an ``is-this-all-there-is?’’ look on their faces. The entrance opens directly into the small living room, and from there you can see into the kitchen on one side and the single bedroom and adjoining bathroom on the other. That is, in fact, all there is. When all the doors are open, you can stand with your back to the kitchen sink and look clear though the living room and bedroom and into the bathroom and see the sink there, the entirety of the apartment.

We eat on our couch, because we have converted our kitchen table into a kind of work area, centered around the old computer on which I am typing right now. Lately I’ve been tempted to replace it with something with a faster modem (just try tying your Inner Life to an outdated modem and see how frustrating it is) but I haven’t come up with a way to explain to Beth how we could afford it.

Beth goes to classes Mondays through Wednesdays, riding to campus with Jack, the tall, dark-haired, heavy-eyebrowed study partner she has known a couple years, and who has a car. On Thursdays and Fridays she works. Jack gives her a ride on those days as well, because he goes to campus five days a week and Beth’s office is not far out of the way. It saves us twelve dollars a week in bus fare, which mattered once, though it doesn’t anymore (though Beth doesn’t know that). I’m supposed to be out the door by eight, but I’m often running behind, and it’s not unusual for me to pass Jack on the cat-piss-smelling stairs as I’m leaving for work and he’s arriving to pick up Beth. I’ve spent the past year or so trying to think of some diplomatic way to thank him for the transportation or at least engage him in conversation, since he is a friend of Beth’s. I’ve often felt like we – I and Beth, that is – might be closer if we knew one another’s friends better, and I can’t realistically introduce her to mine. Sometimes we – I and Jack – stop and talk a moment in the stairway about the news or whatever it is he and Beth are working on in their classes. But usually we just nod and I ask him how it is outside, and he tells me.

c:/bibnotes/genesis38

. . . And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass . . . that he spilled it on the ground . . . And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him . . .

c:/docs/notes/chairbackground

The second piece of furniture in our living room, across from the couch, is a dark-wood rocking chair with faded and torn upholstery on the seat and the top half of the back. Beth’s grandmother had had it in her house and gave it to Beth as a birthday present her first year of college. Beth had it appraised once, and was told it was an 1880s chair worth around two-thousand dollars, though she’d never consider selling it. She isn’t normally sentimental about things like chairs, but this one is an exception. It looks as if it was once beautiful, and the wood is still in fine shape, but the faded and lumpy upholstery ruins the effect.

Last month, Beth got a three-hundred-dollar payment for some tutoring she had done, an unusual windfall for us, and she announced, giddy, that the chair was finally going to get a new look. Then she called around and learned that to have it re-upholstered the way she wanted was going to cost at least twice what she had available to spend. She complained bitterly for days – ``It’s just a little bit of cloth! How can it cost so much to attach a little cloth?’’ Watching her steep in disappointment, I took a chance and said: ``You know, I think I can maybe come up with the rest. The electric bill wasn’t too bad this month.’’ She smiled and kissed me and told me how sweet that was, but that I had to be kidding. As far as she knows, we can’t afford an extra three-hundred dollars any more than we could afford three million. So she bought some embroidered cloth and cut and shaped and pinned it over the old upholstery. It looked like what it was – a cheap substitute for the real work – and we couldn’t sit on it because of the pins. She left it like that for a week, glancing over at the chair frequently as we sat on the couch eating in front of the TV, trying to convince herself it didn’t look that bad.

On Monday, I got a royalty check at the mail room from my publisher – just under fifteen-thousand dollars – and I deposited all but thirty dollars into the savings account where I keep it. The thirty dollars was for my bus fare and lunches for the rest of the week. That night I came home to find that Beth had removed the embroidered cloth from the rocker, exposing the worn upholstery once again. She didn’t say anything about it, but she hasn’t spent the three-hundred dollars on anything else, so I suppose she’s planning to save up the rest as she can and have it re-upholstered at some time in the distant future. She is completely unaware that we could own a newly upholstered chair, along with the building in which it sits, in no more time than it would take for me to write a check.

There are many kinds of betrayal. If I had the courage, I would come home with three or four-hundred dollars in hand and some contrived story to explain it – ``I got a bonus at work’’ or ``I won a bet’’ or ``I found it on the bus’’ – and I could probably get away with it. But there’s always the chance she would start asking hard questions. Despite my living a lie, I’m not a good face-to-face liar, and I instinctively avoid situations where I have to be. So the old upholstery remains. A hard bubble of guilt rises in my stomach every time I look at it.

c:/notes/congressnotes/congress/Watson

SWORN TESTIMONY, SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY, CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING

SEN. WATSON: Mister Alvin. I have a computer at home. Like most people in this room, I find that that computer has become an integral part of my life. I read the news on it. I pay my bills on it. I keep up with my schedule on it, I communicate with my friends and colleagues on it. When my grandchildren visit, they play their games on it. That computer, and the millions of computers like it around this great nation, all tied together by this great web of technological innovation called the Internet, has become as much a part of our national way of life as baseball, or fireworks, or, or  . . . or television. It has become part of what defines us. Don’t you agree?

MR. ALVIN: (INAUDIBLE)

SEN. WATSON: And yet this same amazing new tool of ours, that teaches and nurtures our children, also threatens them. It threatens them with words and images that reach from countless hidden rooms of dangerous strangers, into the home and hearth we have protected in this country for more than two-hundred years. It threatens to tear down the carefully constructed boundaries we have built around on the norms of social and sexual behavior throughout this great society. As surely as it touches everything, this brave new world of instant and complete communication, so it threatens everything, when it is twisted from a useful tool into a destructive toy. And I’m here to tell you, Mister Alvin, that in this book of yours, I see a deliberate and gleeful twisting of our Internet culture, into a tawdry, sensualist, and, yes, Godless playground. I see a garden turned into a wasteland, by a generation of short-sighted hedonists rallied around the perverse anti-religion of masturbatory sexual philosophy espoused by your book. Do you understand why this might be of concern to some fair-minded members of this sub-committee?

MR. ALVIN: (INAUDIBLE)

SEN. WATSON: I don’t understand what you’re saying, sir. Mister Chairman, could you direct the witness? --

MR. ALVIN: (INAUDIBLE)

CHRMN SEN. REESE: Mister Alvin, please speak into the microphone.

MR. ALVIN: Is this better?

CHRMN SEN. REESE: Yes, thank you. Let the record reflect that Mister Alvin has lifted the bottom part of his mask so as to position his mouth directly at the microphone. Mister Alvin, you may proceed with your answer.

MR. ALVIN: I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?

c:/textdocs/adm48

I’ve wondered if maybe I could arrange for someone else to send Beth a few hundred dollars to re-upholster the chair, under some guise – ``You’ve won our totally random sweepstakes!’’, something like that. Carol, my agent, certainly owes me the favor, but I’m not sure how I’d go about arranging it without giving her more information about myself than I’m comfortable with.

I’ve made Carol a wealthy woman, but despite that, and despite her frequent demands for face-to-face meetings, we’re still just disembodied voices to one another – hers the kind of low, slightly husky voice that, I’ve learned, is often owned by sexually interesting women. She has this rapid-fire, cheerfully impatient way of talking that strikes me as very agent-like and also very attractive. I have guessed that her breasts are C-cups, though I have no means to confirm this. I suspect, from the voice, that she may be a lesbian, which doesn’t diminish my interest in the least; as with most women, I don’t specifically harbor a goal of having sexual intercourse with her. Mainly, I just want to see her naked. I’ve given serious thought to saying something bold to her – ``Describe yourself to me naked, Carol’’ – during one of our frequent phone conferences, just to see what she’ll say. I’m fairly certain I could get away with it. She already figures I’m warped anyway – what kind of person writes a bestselling novel, then hides from it, refuses to let his agent see his face, refuses to do Oprah? – so probably the worst she would do is laugh it off as exactly the kind of irreverent wackiness you would expect from the author of The Electric Adventures of Alvin. ``He told me to describe myself naked, Oprah! That kooky, warped genius! No wonder he’s been at the top of the bestseller lists for three months!’’

c:/mydoc/BkAwrdLetter/draft

From Alvin

To, selection comittee, National Book Award

Regard:  ``The Electric Adventures of Alvin’’

Gentelmen (and any ladys that might be on the board) :

I understand you are considering bestoeing you’re prestegious award on my novel!

My agent said that I should not contact you like this but I just had to tell you how awesome it is to finely be taken serious by literally types.

Thank you thank you thank you. I wont let you down!

Now, on to the BIG one: the PULITZER!!

- Alvin

(ps – does this mean you guys are going to finely stop dissing Stephen King every year?)

c:/notes/carol20

Having a woman view me the way Carol does – hopelessly, but profitably, warped – could theoretically have its advantages, in terms of her not expecting normal behavior from me.

I have one recurrent fantasy in which I show up at Carol’s office. In the fantasy, she’s brown-haired, brown-eyed, average middle-aged build, slightly hippy and busty, and wears a skirt. (This image is too generic, I know. That’s the big drawback of attempting to fantasize about someone with too little base information on which to build.) I lay it out for her bluntly: ``Carol, I’m a pervert. You don’t become the bestselling pornographic author in America without being a pervert. You are rich because I’m a pervert. I’ll do Oprah for you, and make you even richer, but first you have to do something for me: I want to see you naked. No sex, no touching, nothing like that. I just want you to take off every stitch of your clothing. Socks included. We need to unveil you now, Carol.’’

After a silent, red-faced moment, she strips, laughing with bemusement and shaking her head – ``The things I do for my writers’’ – haltingly removing her blouse, folding it neatly and setting it on her desk, dropping the skirt to the floor, laughing nervously, unhooking her bra with a sheepish ``I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this’’ grin, and then, after shaking her head and laughing one more time, peeling off her pink cotton panties. Her breasts, as I envision them, are fleshy-smooth and slightly sagging, with nipples as dark as Beth’s and as hard as Morgan’s (my accountant), but longer. A mound of thick dark hair nestles between her legs, reaching ambitiously toward her navel.

She spins around once on her bare heels for me, shakes her head and again laughs self-consciously, then stands there smiling, naked as snow, and says in her almost-husky voice: ``You will do Oprah, right?’’

Excuse me a moment.