c h a p t e r 1 1
The Electric Adventures of
A Novel of Erotic Satire
Chapter 11
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Beth and I found our own apartment on campus at the end of that second summer, the first of four apartments we would occupy together over the next few years. She and Gwen hugged in the lobby for a long time as I loaded the last of her stuff into the borrowed pickup truck, Beth crying, Gwen razzing her for crying. I watched them embrace, taking in the image of their chests pressed against each other, storing the image for later, then secured the swaying mound of chairs and boxes one more time under the rope and climbed behind the wheel and waited. Beth was still sniffling when she climbed in next to me.
I was sad for her, but relieved. For the final months that they’d lived together, Gwen had repeatedly offered me an encore of the morning with the green towel, offered it practically every time I stopped by to pick up Beth, as soon as Beth was out of earshot. As you know, I used some of those incidents in the book. From some of the reviews, it was clear that these were among readers’ favorite parts, those few months when Gwen was brazenly offering herself to me, again and again, seemingly at every turn. It’s an odd favorite part for porn readers, given that I declined every time.
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Once, not long before the move, Gwen offered herself to me while Beth was momentarily in the bathroom. I didn’t use the incident in the book, because I thought it would come off as unbelievable, even for Gem.
We’d been drinking in their living room, me trying (as usual) to move Beth and me out of Gwen’s presence, Gwen (as usual) gleefully tormenting me just below the surface of the conversation. She was, as usual, wearing her green sweats. Beth excused herself to use the bathroom, and I’d no sooner heard the lock click before Gwen quickly stood, turned away from where I sat on the couch, bent herself over the nearby armchair so that her sweatpant-clad ass was presented directly before me, and then addressed me over her shoulder: ``We’ve got a minute. You know you want to,’’ she whispered, rocking her hips from side to side.
``Gwen,’’ I whispered back, ``jesus, c’mon, stop it.’’ It was obvious she wasn’t wearing panties; I could clearly see the cleave of her ass through the sweatpants. I was hard almost immediately.
``Seriously,’’ she whispered, urgently. ``I’m wet. You can just pull them down and ram it in, right now, right this second.’’
``Gwen, sit down.’’
``Come on, Adam, just grab my hips and give me a few good thrusts . . . ’’
``Gwen, please.’’
``. . . and just come as quick as you can.’’
``Gwen . . . ’
``Adam . . .’’ she mimicked, getting aggravated and pushing her ass closer to me. ``What, are you gay? I’m offering it! C’mon, fuck me! You know you want it . . .’’
I heard the lock click again. Gwen darted, cat-like, back to her side of the couch and Beth stepped into the room and sat and we resumed talking, the event seemingly forgotten in an instant. It was only later in the conversation, after more alcohol, that Gwen began casually and repeatedly addressing me as ``fag-boy,’’ finally prompting Beth to ask her to stop it.
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SWORN TESTIMONY,
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
SEN. HAMOS: I think part of what disturbs members of this committee, Mister Alvin, is not just your book, per se – I mean, it IS disturbing – but what it says about what’s happening in society today, vis a vis pornography.
MR. ALVIN: I didn’t invent pornography, Senator. I’m not sure why I should have to answer for --
SEN. HAMOS: I know you didn’t `invent’ pornography, sir. But what I’m getting at is, the very nature of pornography has been changing lately, according to the diligent research of this committee. The reach of pornography is expanding, taking on forms that no one would have imagined even a few years ago. And your book appears to promote this disturbing development, and to revel in it.
MR. ALVIN: I’m sorry, I don’t follow.
SEN. HAMOS: Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Pornography, as most of us define it, has ceased to be the isolated, mostly hidden little corner of society that it used to be. And it has ceased to be a one-way, top-down form of commerce, with commercial pornographers selling their – their `product’ to buyers in specialty stores that cater to that sort of thing. Regular people are producing it now, for each other. Not as a business, but for – I guess – for recreation. Sex-chat rooms, sites where people post naked pictures of themselves –
MR. ALVIN: There aren’t any pictures in my book.
SEN. HAMOS: I know that. I’m just talking about, generally, about the fact that normal, regular, everyday Americans are participating, in apparently significant numbers, in what was once a very hidden market, and properly so –
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Beth finished her bachelor’s degree and started on her master’s while I worked a series of jobs – waiter, office clerk, waiter, package deliveryman, waiter. I always came back to being a waiter. It was better money than the other work. My neatness and my organizational skills – what Beth came to call my ``desire for an orderly universe’’ – served me well, tip-wise. And it allowed me endless interaction with women of all shapes and sizes, generally from a vantage point of standing slightly above them, which was ultimately of more value to me than the tips. In the summers in particular, when women were dressing in all manner of t-shirts or light blouses or plunging necklines, I would go to work eagerly, taking in the soft shadows of their cleavage as my appetizers, then savoring the main courses of their voices, that delicious female pitch. Though Beth’s one deep gouge at my pride about the job never fully healed, the truth is, I loved being a waiter. Women eat out in greater numbers than men (that’s a fact) and I was surrounded by them, and it was okay to look at them. Better, I was supposed to look at them, I was being paid to look at them – though there were days I would have served them for free.
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It’s true, what you think: The women ordered salad more than any other thing.
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We married after Beth finished her master’s degree but before she’d started her doctorate. I was still waiting tables. The wedding was a small gathering in her parents’ back yard in Indianapolis, a few dozen of her relatives and her friends from college, and my dad and Uncle Martin, looking uncomfortable and out of place in their rumpled out-of-style suits and mismatched ties, Uncle Martin’s brittle white hair notably uncombed. I spied them later, in a doorway in the house, my dad brusquely combing Uncle Martin’s hair and muttering darkly at him.
The ceremony was a blessedly godless one – a judge married us, to the chagrin of Beth’s mother. ``You know, this atheism stuff of yours was fine when you were goofing around in college, but now you’re starting out your life and you need to get serious!’’ I heard her mother chide her in the kitchen before the ceremony. Beth rolled her eyes and growled something about how ironic it was to refer to ancient superstitions as ``serious.’’ It developed into a fight over the rest of the day, roiling just below the surface during the ceremony and the reception.
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Gwen, who had moved to California by that point and who neither of us had seen in two years, was supposed to come, but she called the morning of the wedding and said something had come up, without saying much more, and wished us luck and that was that. Beth was crestfallen and allowed herself a few minutes of pacing anger over it. I was disappointed; I was relieved.
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why can't I get / just one kiss
why can't I get / just one kiss
there may be some things that I wouldn't miss
but I look at your pants and I need a kiss
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We moved into our latest apartment – our current apartment – two weeks after the wedding. Her dad helped us move in. When he arrived, he carried with him the beige computer on which I’m currently typing. ``Belated wedding gift,’’ he said, though they’d already given us a set of bedclothes and some cash. Turns out he had gotten the lumbering machine from his office, where it was being thrown away to make way for newer models, and he didn’t have any need for it, and thought we could use it.
``Oh, yeah. This will come in handy for my dissertation,’’ said Beth, enthusiastically checking out the keyboard. ``Adam, you can use this to get back into your writing, honey,’’ she added.
I imagined it was little more than a variation on television, for which I’d never had much use. To the extent that a machine could have a gender, this one seemed to me to be inexorably male: a boxy, graceless contraption of plastic and glass and electric cords. ``Yeah,’’ I said, eying it with no real interest. ``That’ll be great.’’
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While we were moving into the apartment, carrying in the few pieces of furniture each of us owned, I accidentally banged a wall in the living room with the big wooden leg of an end-table, breaking an electrical outlet. The brown plastic plate was split from the bottom, the crack running vertically up through one of the holes where the plug is supposed to go in. The vertical line was a little jagged, and it was a little wider at the middle (where the socket hole was) than at the edges, and you could just barely make out a little shine of coppery metal from within, hot and menacing.
It looked for all the world like the delicate lines of a vagina. An electric vagina.
As I marveled at the random art in front of me – Georgia O’Keefe herself couldn’t have rendered so artful a representation – Beth appeared, holding a crate full of books, noticed the broken socket plate, and said, ``Whoa! Don’t touch that. I’ll call the landlady about it.’’ I told her I’d take care of it myself, but I never did. I left it just the way it was. I can look at the cracked socket plate in the living room from where I’m sitting at the kitchen table right now.
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SWORN TESTIMONY,
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
MS. SCHUSTER: I have to ask, Senator, what this line of commentary has to do with my client’s book.
SEN. HAMOS: I’m just saying, this isn’t `Deep Throat’ anymore, this isn’t a few perverts sitting in a dark theater in raincoats watching movies of actors and actresses who are being paid to have sex. This is the real thing, and it‘s everywhere – look at this report – look at this, there are video clips online of married couples having sex – MARRIED COUPLES having sex – and trading their sex videos with other couples, and writing reviews of each other‘s videos –
MR. ALVIN: I’m sorry, what page of the report are you on? And, um, is there a website address included? --
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It was just after moving into our latest apartment that I got the job at the mail room at Lawrence, Hardy & Robinson. I’d been perfectly happy as a waiter, and Beth never openly suggested (except for that one painful jab in college) that I should be anything other than that. But she was a doctoral candidate now, and I was still serving salads to the lunch crowd at Norb’s downtown; the contrast was starting to look bad. I felt unspoken pressure to better myself, or at least to make myself sound better. In the scant social gatherings we attended with Beth’s classmates or other friends, I always dreaded the moment when someone asked what I did, because there was really no way to dress up the word ``waiter.’’ I work with incoming documents at an advertising firm – that sounded better. In reality, it was worse. The mail room was dreary, the work monotonous, the pay no improvement at all. And precious few women crossed my path now, whereas before, I’d been happily surrounded by salad-munching Femaleness.
The only advantage to the new job, besides the fact that it sounded better, was that it opened up my nights – though even that advantage wasn’t immediately clear to me. I’d previously worked almost every night, and now my nights were free, which initially seemed nothing but a burden. Beth was invariably buried in her books at night, and I didn’t have the money nor the friends nor (let’s be honest) the inclination to go out and do something recreational. Television has never held my attention. The kinds of books that interest me are, shall we say, somewhat specialized, and the
It was mostly boredom, then, that initially drove me to start pecking at the beige computer Beth’s dad had given us – the same computer on which I’m typing now.
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SWORN TESTIMONY,
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
SEN. HAMOS: – and `chatting’ about the sex videos with each other, and requesting videos of specific positions from each other. These are regular people doing this, married people with jobs and children, Mister Alvin, everyday people doing this, and your book has become their bible.
MR. ALVIN: Their – their `bible‘?
SEN. HAMOS: That’s how I see it.
MR. ALVIN: The bible of the married couples having sex?
SEN. HAMOS: It’s all there in the report, sir.
MR. ALVIN: And – I’m sorry – how was `Deep Throat’ in a dank theater less disturbing than the married couples having sex?
SEN. HAMOS: Because I didn’t have to look at it every time I opened my mail.
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I’d heard about the Internet, of course – it was still a relatively new thing at this time, and people couldn’t stop talking about it – and I was aware of its growing reputation as a clearinghouse for pornography. But even then, my interest was tepid at best.
Remember that, pre-Internet, the thing we call ``porn’’ consisted mainly of airbrushed magazine photographs or professionally made videos, primarily starring cartoonish models of the Playboy mold. (Ugh! Talk about things that failed to hold my interest.) There were some corners of the industry that were ``harder,’’ but not generally more interesting. Paid models pouting from glossy pages – that’s what people were usually talking about when they talked about porn. I’d assumed this Internet thing was merely a new way of delivering more of the same. I didn’t imagine it would entail a fundamental shift in the very definition of erotica.
I gradually discovered this while I was surfing various photo-posting sites at night, as Beth sat curled on the couch with her stacks of class books. In my nightly boredom, pecking at the keyboard, learning to navigate this intriguing new place, I soon discovered that it was easier than it had ever been in bookstores to find imagery tailored to specialized tastes: ``busty,’’ ``old,’’ ``petite,’’ ``heavy,’’ etc.
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I was encouraged that some of my personal preferences, which had once seemed so rare, were popular enough in this new realm of the Internet to have their own widely understood acronyms and nick-names and detailed specifications. Puffies, for example, were images of women sporting prominent areolea – just one of the many breast-centered categories that included massive, tiny, perky, saggy, and lactating. In this brave new universe, categories like Mature (I was delighted to discover) didn’t refer to the legal requirement of the viewers, but rather the physical reality of the models. BBW meant ``Big Beautiful Women.’’ MILF was a somewhat more colorful acronym to describe women who were older and had had children and who were all the more alluring for it (``Mothers I’d Like to . . . ’’ You know).
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why can't I get / just one fuck
why can't I get / just one fuck
I guess it's got something to do with luck . . .
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It annoyed me that the ``all-natural’’ websites (meaning, women with unshaven vaginas) often were found under the sub-category ``fetishes’’ – as if wanting a woman to actually look like a grownup was akin to wanting a naked midget in a leather mask or something. But generally, I found this vast new universe of online erotica nothing but heartening, in an oddly ethical sense. Especially when I first started browsing the websites labeled ``amateur,’’ and was stunned to discover that they appeared to be just that.
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Of course, some men’s magazines, before the Internet, had made some effort to appeal to this notion of ``amateur’’ porn models – real women, average women, the kind of women that an average man might come across in his everyday life, might even be married to – but I’d always understood that this was fiction masquerading as reality. Even the realest, plainest, most working-mother-of-two-from-Cleveland-looking of them ultimately were, in fact, paid models doing the bidding of their employers. They had to be; it was the structural reality of the publishing business. Porn, even ``amateur’’ porn, cost money to produce. Someone had to take the photos, lay out the pages, buy the paper and the ink, run the presses, drive the trucks that delivered the finished product. It wasn’t like there was some individualized forum that could directly connect subject and viewer, with no involvement from middlemen whose hands were held out awaiting payment. If a woman wanted, with all her glorious womanly being, to unveil herself for an appreciative universe, not for money but for her own Inner Life reasons, just how would she go about it? Unless she happened to own a publishing company, she had no media platform of her own from which to do that.
It wasn’t as if a real woman, a lawyer or a waitress or a mother or a housewife, looking for an Inner Life thrill, could simply strip down in her living room in
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Porn Woes: Amateurs Displace Kings of Porn
by Richard Wagner, Ph.D., ACS, Seattle Sex Examiner
. . . Not only have porn producers discovered, to their great dismay, that smut is no longer recession proof. Now the peons are usurping the industry thrones. Lamentations can be heard echoing throughout Pornville. A ringing of hands has replaced the ubiquitous hand job.
Only a couple of years ago, 80 percent of a porn producer’s income came from DVD sales. Today, it’s down about 30 percent. And some speculate that sales could flat line in only a couple of years. . . . But the bigger problem is American households are using broadband connections to the Internet in ever increasing numbers. 47% at last count and that number will continue to grow exponentially.
. . . And while sales of internet-based adult entertainment grew 14 percent last year, to a whooping $2.8 billion, that figure would be substantially higher if there wasn’t for all the free competition. We can thank the “Tube Sites” for that. The proliferation of free sites allow anyone and everyone to post all the user-generated content he/she wants. And let's face it, there's nothing more compelling than watching the neighbors get it on, right? . . .
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Beth set up her email account soon after we got the computer, and she used it to communicate with her college friends, her professors, her parents. She left it automatically signed in all the times, so that an alert would pop up on in the corner of the screen any time anyone sent her an email. Even before I entered the computer age, my Inner Life had never allowed that kind of openness. Instinctively, I programmed my own email account to shut itself down any time I wasn’t using it. Whenever I was at the computer and one of Beth’s incoming emails beeped innocently at me, I felt a twinge of envy at her lack of secrets – at her normalcy.
She mentioned casually one morning that she and Gwen had reconnected online, and were dropping emails to one another now and then. ``She’s teaching aerobics in
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Sometimes her email would beep while I was using the computer, and a little message would appear in the lower right corner announcing a piece of incoming mail and the screenname of the person it was from. Frequently, of course, it was junk mail, of a sexual nature, presented behind very obviously fake screennames which usually included a woman’s name adorned with addendums like ``69’’ or ``4u’’ or ``3some.”
The first few times that I saw the screenname ``Gem4u’’ beep from the lower right corner while I was on the computer, I’d assumed it was some commercial porn site that had latched onto Beth’s account and was sending her junk. It was on this assumption that I finally did open one of the Gem4u emails when it beeped. I was curious about this persistent porn site that kept inserting itself into Beth’s email. I didn’t consider it snooping, since (I thought) it wasn’t actually email directed at Beth.
When I called it up and saw not lascivious photos, but just typewritten words – a chatty ``heya beth!’’ greeting, something about the weather in
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``SUCH hot guys out here!!’’ Clearly, she hadn’t changed a bit.
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Beth was asleep when I slipped into bed that night, and I took care not to wake her as I lay back and peaked, twice, to the unadorned memory of one of the last times I’d seen Guinevere Romanelli, several years earlier, bent over in front of me, urgently imploring me to yank down her green sweats and take hold of her fleshy hips and drive into her from behind before Beth returned from the bathroom.
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Porn Woes: Amateurs Displace Kings of Porn
by Richard Wagner, Ph.D., ACS, Seattle Sex Examiner
. . . Remember the VHS format? Remember how it revolutionized video entertainment in general, and adult entertainment in particular? Porn moved out of seedy theaters in unsavory neighborhoods and right into our living rooms. Suddenly, pornography had a huge new audience. Millions of new consumers showed up virtually overnight. VHS was king from the mid 1980's till the turn of the century.
But who among us has a VHS player these days? I suppose you see where I’m going with this, right?
When the DVD usurped the VHS tape, DVD sales soared. But the DVD was king for only a few years. Now it’s the web that’s replacing the DVD. For the first time, technology is hurting Big Porn. Everyone thought the internet was going to be a plus for the porn industry. But the opposite happened. And the big boys are scared . . . real scared.
There is now a level playing field on the net. Anyone with a video camera and a exhibitionist streak can compete with the porn moguls . . . and win . . .
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My own email account was filling up mainly with photos of naked amateurs and puffies and BBW’s and MILF’s and naked housewives from
Every night I signed into my mail, it seemed, I was hit with a new tidal wave of naked housewives from
And I wondered about myself, and the potential danger to that yet-unnamed part of me that I would later call my Inner Life. I thought a lot about Benny’s, and how the ease and availability of vaginal secrets there had damaged me, had lifted my fantasizational requirements beyond reason – had created such a tolerance in me, vis a vis precious womanhood, that there almost wasn’t such a thing anymore as ``enough.’’ The smiling imagery of the naked housewives from
So it was that I began drifting away from their digital photographs, and toward their words.
Sometimes the naked housewives wrote greetings to accompany their images. Thoughts. Background about themselves. Fantasies. Sometimes, their words led to chat rooms, big white spaces full of written messages crawling upward on the screen. The price of admission was nothing more than a fictional screenname, created on the spot. This is where, early on, I met Sindi-69 and her doomed ``Post-Mortem Program.’’ It’s also where I first met JaneyX, who I now know is named Jenny, and who is collecting three-thousand dollars a month in blackmail payments from me. They and others started forming my group of friends online, mostly women, mostly, like me, struggling with hungry Inner Lives that weren’t finding the nourishment they needed in the usual places.
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MinniMous: why did u start doing it?
Alvn: `doing”? . . .
MinniMous: um, doing, you know, DOING it. Here.
Alvn: not sure I understand the question?
JaneyX: she means doing US, Alvin
Gem4U: god yer clueless alv
Alvn: why did I start talking here?
MinniMous: talking and the rest
MinniMous: you sound like yor happy at home
Alvn: shes smart & gorgeous and sweet.
Amy69: good in bed?
Alvn: yes
MinniMous: so why did u start?
Alvn: sorry i still dnt understand the question . . .
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More and more, I drifted away from the pictures and toward this odd new world of words, hiding behind my screenname, participating tepidly and passively at first, a few badly typed words now and then, but mostly just watching. It was, again, a computer-age answer to Benny’s: There I was, once again, sitting there at the edge of the stage, watching women of all shapes and sizes expose themselves to me. Watching. Watching.
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Janey (Jenny) initially introduced herself as a buxom black stripper, and later said she actually was a horny blonde college coed, and then took on a couple of other manifestations, before I finally figured out that she was more or less just a regular middle-aged woman, if not an especially honest one.
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The screenname ``Adam’’ was already taken, as was every variation of it that I could think of. Pondering a backup, I remembered the thin-lipped priest at St. Ignoramus, the one who’d always botched my name, and I decided it would be fitting homage to him to use that moniker as I ventured out into a sensual new movement that promised to overrun the repressed old guardians of his faith. But ``
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