c h a p t e r 5

The Electric Adventures of Alvin, Part Two

A Novel of Erotic Satire

Chapter 5

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Okay, no one said it was High Art. No one, that is, except those Ivy League jerkoffs at The New York Times, where the above passage, along with the rest of The Electric Adventures of Alvin, somehow merited an entire cover of the Sunday book review section, under the headline: ``E-Mail From Eros – The Re-Emergence of Erotic Literature in the Age of AIDS.’’ How AIDS came into it, I don’t know. AIDS is never mentioned once in my book, an omission that several reviewers have said was irresponsible of me (Rolling Stone: ``A missed opportunity of infuriating proportions’’). Funny that they should lecture me about responsibility – I’m not the one who picked up this sweaty scrap of pornography and dubbed it ``literature.’’

Of course, my Internet friends, who read the book in emailed installments before it was published, loved it, but at least they loved it for the correct reason, the intended reason, namely that it brought them to orgasm. (Amy69: ``o, alv, it made me cum harder than my jelly dildo!! send more!!!’’) The New York Times cover piece didn’t contain a word about the masturbatory value of Alvin – a missed opportunity of infuriating proportions, if you ask me – but instead called it ``vividly erotic,’’ ``a watershed event in the hidden history of blue fiction,’’ and ``the thinking reader’s pornography.’’ Alvin made The New York Times cum, and now I was screwed. With the Times’ stamp of approval on the thing, along with Vogue and a few other biggies, the copycat reviews rolled in, mostly positive. These staid and respectable reviewers – closet perverts all, if you ask me – fell all over themselves to show how eloquently and fashionably they could support ``the thinking reader’s pornography.’’ In the midst of the hype, the National Organization for Women (of which I am a dues-paying member) put out a statement decrying Alvin for ``making pornography acceptable to the mainstream literati, a disturbing step in the wrong direction,’’ and I anonymously sent them five thousand dollars and a note that said, ``Keep up the fight.’’

But it was too late to derail the porn-train. The Times review, and the rest, is what convinced Beth to get daring and pick up a copy of the book. There is no chance – absolutely none – that she won’t recognize herself (``Brenda’’) and her college roommate Guinevere (``Gem’’) in its pages. She’ll remember the scene described above – remember hanging up the phone in the bedroom and stepping into the living to find me and Guinevere sitting silently, Guinevere in her big Indiana Pacers t-shirt; she’ll remember, certainly, her own comment about the purple vibrator as we left for dinner.

Reading on from there, the roles now clear to her, she will be able to see the rest: My re-connection to Guinevere, years later, through the modem next to the computer on our kitchen table; my introduction of Gwen, through our respective computers, to my old high school pal Mindy (you know her as ``Minnie’’); the connections we three formed with Janey and Mikey and Sindi and all the faceless others. Everything. It will all be out.

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MinniMous: how many times did you and gem do it?

Alvn: once. long ago

MinniMous: is she good?

Alvn: she knows what she’s doing

MinniMous: is she pretty?

Alvn: in a slutty way (Her word). At least back then.

Alvn: Dont know now, been years. Why?

MinniMous: she keeps coming onto me

Alvn: haha – thats gem

MinniMous: you should see this email she sent. describing this vibrator

Alvn: purple?

MinniMous: right – howd you know?

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Of course, the passage from the book isn’t precisely, exactly, how it happened with Guinevere, way back then (before I or most people I knew owned computers). I am a writer of fiction, after all – pornography, true, but still fiction. I have some license.

For example, Guinevere wasn’t actually stark-naked under the long t-shirt; she was wearing candy-red panties. When she exposed her vagina to me and invited me to re-explore it, she did so by pulling aside the left leg-band of the panties. Personally, I found that to be more erotic than complete bottomlessness, but Carol, my agent, wanted it ``hotter,’’ so off came the panties.

Also, Guinevere hadn’t used the word ``snatch’’ to describe her own anatomy; she had said ``cunt,’’ as she frequently did, dropping the word like a little grenade and gleefully watching the explosive effects it had on others. But I hate that word – it’s an ugly gray cinderblock of a word, clearly a male-brained creation – so in my original manuscript, I had her saying ``vagina.’’ Carol, my agent, was appalled. `` `I slid it up my vagina’? Vagina? Are you kidding, Adam? This reads like a damned medical dictionary!’’ Carol said during one of our early phone conversations, in her rapid-fire, cheerfully impatient, agent-like way, as I crouched over the wall-phone in the mail room. ``I’m sorry, Adam, but `vagina’ just isn’t going to work. Snatch, pussy or cunt – those are your choices.’’ So we settled on ``snatch.’’

(Carol had also lobbied to change Gem’s description of herself from ``slut’’ to ``whore’’ – as in, ``God, I’m such a whore’’ – but I dug in over that one, pointing out that the words mean two very different things. Gwen often acknowledged being a ``slut’’ – she reveled in the word, as she reveled in so many forbidden words – but she never, to my knowledge, took money for it.)

The thing is, I never expected Beth to read the book, never expected her to even hear about it. It simply wasn’t (I thought) the kind of book that would ever end up being reviewed or discussed in any forum where she might cross paths with it. It’s full of ``tits,’’ ``clits’’ and ``snatches,’’ for chrissake. How could I have predicted that a magazine like The New Yorker, for example, would, even in its loosest moment, have a single solitary thing to say about Alvin? (``Brazenly masturbatory, but melded with enough societal insight to forgive its perversions.’’) Adult bookstores are filled with things, including written materials, that the mainstream of humanity never, ever sees – believe me, I know this – and I had assumed that that kind of silent irrelevance would be Alvin’s destiny. Which was fine with me. As I said, sales were never the point.

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Alvn: do YOU ever use a vibrator, min?

MinniMous: ooh, personal. answer is no, never tried.

Alvn: you own one?

MinniMous: yes. Darrin got me one a few yrs ago hoping i’d use it.

Alvn: you won’t use it for him?

MinniMous: embarrassed.

Alvn: would you use it for me?

MinniMous: hmmm

Alvn: you could email me description of you using it

MinniMous: detailed description? ``pushing it in now,’’ and all that?

Alvn: yes

MinniMous: and youd stroke?

Alvn: yes. to your old yearbook pic.

MinniMous: o god you still have that yearbook?

Alvn: would you do it?

MinniMous: hmmmm.

MinniMous: okay.

Alvn: wow, i’m really lit.

Gem4U: me too

Alvn: gem??

MinniMous: SNEAKY BITCH!!!

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Once again, I’m getting ahead of myself. You wanted to know how it started, right?

By the final months of my freshman year in college I was a failing English major who had spent too many morning classes asleep in bed recovering from my nightly voyeurism at Benny’s. I wasn’t coming back the following year – I realized that, even before it became official – and this realization triggered some kind of defense mechanism within me that caused me to seek out a spouse.

Part of this urge was a rational one: I was in college, a place thick with young, single, educated women; when else was I going to do it? After I dropped out? After I started working the menial jobs which (I knew, even then) were going to be my fate? If someone were to invent a ``spouse-store,’’ a place where young single men and women could shop for life partners, test-driving different models in conversation and in varied social settings and in bed, before settling on one and signing on the dotted line, that store would look pretty much like a modern college campus. The joke in college was that women were often there majoring in ``Husband Hunting 101,’’ and I knew and accepted that that jaded description now applied very accurately to me as well. I was about to get kicked out of the spouse-store, probably for life, and it made perfect sense that I should make a purchase before that happened.

Part of my spouse-search, though, wasn’t so rational and well thought-out, but was done in the frenzied and unthinking way that a drowning man grabs at anything that might keep him afloat. Benny’s had ruined my education, but it had also educated me, about myself. I now knew that having access to soft breasts and warm vaginas wasn’t, in itself, going to be enough to get me by; I had had plenty of both at Benny’s, and in the end it still left me empty. I needed access to a living, breathing Inner Life, and all that that entails.

And, ironically, I needed normalcy, something that had never previously appealed to me. In examining the memory of the yuppie woman, the non-stripper who stripped, I was bothered, again and again, by the question of why the image was so powerful. Certainly I had seen many women expose much more of themselves than she had, and much more casually – and that, I finally decided, was the point. The look on her face, that nervous-but-intrigued little smile, said it all: She was ``normal,’’ the kind of woman who, normally, didn’t drop her pants for an audience. She had a life outside her vagina, a life that didn’t generally involve showing her vagina in public, so that showing her vagina meant something. And – irony of ironies – there had to be a reluctance to show that vagina, that oh-so-``normal’’ hesitancy that says, ``Well, I don’t normally do this . . . ’’

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I once read part of a thesis in a psychology textbook during my one college year in which a sociologist, a woman (I wasn’t interested in textbook articles written by men), studied the methods and assumptions about human nature that pornographic film-makers use when making their films. Had I finished college and gone into some academic line of work, that woman’s job is the one I would have wanted. I still have a photocopy of her article, tucked in a depressingly small drawer in my dresser where I keep my things from college.

Her theory is this: Part of what makes sexual imagery work is non-sexual imagery. She notes (correctly, I can tell you, from my own extensive research) that most pornographic films aren’t just images of naked, writhing, copulating men and women; they are, instead, images of naked, writhing, copulating men and women interspersed with short, obligatory references to some kind of plot, and some brief, early scenes in which the actors and actresses are clothed. The woman is never just suddenly lying naked and spread-legged over the couch and imploring the man, ``Oh fuck me, fuck me now!’’ She does eventually do that, but first, she shows up at the door, fully clothed, selling Avon or something, haltingly speaking a few poorly written lines.

``If the goal of these films is to bring the (mostly male) audience to sexual climax with the use of sexual imagery,’’ posits the thesis, ``why, then, don’t the makers of these films simply show uninterrupted scenes of the sexual act in progress?’’

The answer, she (and I) concluded, is that these pornographic film-makers, in their meandering, male-brained way, realize that those sexual images will quickly lose their impact if there isn’t some non-sexual imagery against which to contrast it. Seeing a naked breast is good, but it’s better if you have first seen it clothed, and have had a little time to stew, wondering what it looks like under the fabric. Watching the sexual act performed – even performed expertly, by professionals – can quickly denigrate into an irrelevant spectacle of biology, unless that act is performed within the context of some kind of daily-life scenario. The repairman shows up to fix the air-conditioner, for example, just as the woman decides it’s so hot in there that she can’t possibly keep her clothing on for another second (an actual plot that I saw once).

As the thesis puts it: ``The use of initially clothed characters, as well as plot and dialogue – however incompetently conceived and executed – is designed to set a stage of familiarity and normalcy in which the sexual escapades can take place. By showing the viewer a circumstance under which someone like himself might, for example, walk into a store to buy a gallon of milk and end up having a sexual tryst with three buxom sales clerks, the imagery of that sex act becomes that much more relevant to him.’’

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SWORN TESTIMONY

SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,

CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING

SEN. WAITE: Mister Alvin, one of the most distasteful legislative research projects my staff has ever had to undertake was to comb through your book to count up the number of different words you employ to describe – to describe female genitalia.

MR. ALVIN: You actually made your staff do that?

SEN. WAITE: Do you know how many of those words you used?

MR. ALVIN: No. I never had any reason to count them.

SEN. WAITE: Well, let me tell you –

MR. ALVIN: I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t on your staff.

(Laughter in the chamber. Chairman Sen. Reese calls for order.)

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During those final few months of my one year in college, while wife-hunting in earnest, I had five of the eight actual sexual-intercourse partners I’ve had in my life. My first, in high school, was such a short and uncomfortable event that I didn’t seek out the act again for almost two years, even at the height of my voyeurism at Benny’s; Beth and Guinevere were numbers seven and eight, respectively (or vice-versa, depending on how you count it).

All five of the others were packed into three months at the end of my freshman year, after Benny’s had taught me that I needed to find a compatible soul-mate, sexually and otherwise, or I was in for a frustrating life.

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SWORN TESTIMONY

SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,

CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING

SEN. WAITE: The answer, Mister Alvin, is thirty-seven. I’ve got the whole list right here. Thirty-seven different words, to describe – that.

MR. ALVIN: It wasn’t my idea, Senator.

SEN. WAITE: Including one called ``cooch,’’ and one called ``minge,’’ and a few that I just don’t intend to say out loud in this hearing.

MR. ALVIN: Truth is, my publishers made me to add those words in.

SEN. WAITE: . . . ``box,’’ ``poontang,’’ ``stuff’’ . . . ``mary’’?

MR. ALVIN: They thought it would be more appealing to their target audience.

SEN. WAITE: For heaven’s sake, you called it a ``mary’’? Why would you do that?

MR. ALVIN: I would have been perfectly happy with just plain old ``vagina,’’ Senator.

SEN. WAITE: Yes, ``vagina’’ is on here, too.

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As you know if you’ve read Alvin, sexual intercourse isn’t at the top of my list of favorite sexual activities – it is, in fact, somewhere around the middle, above straight masturbation, but well below things like meeting housewives in chat rooms and talking them into taking off their tops and emailing me detailed written descriptions of their naked breasts. The physical act of sexual intercourse simply isn’t as intriguing to me as the world of sexual amenities that has been built around it. There is a difference between an isolated sex act and an Inner Life; it is the difference between one swingset and a whole playground.

Nonetheless, while spouse-hunting during that year in college, I decided, coolly and stoically, that part of the interview process was going to be sexual intercourse. Don’t judge me too harshly on this; I know myself, and it was only fair, to me and my future mate, to take this factor into consideration.

It was astounding to me how easy it was to find applicants. I’m not particularly handsome (other than my nose, which isn’t a bad one) nor charming. Yet one after another, with minimal effort on my part, they fell into bed with me, mostly in my small dorm room on nights when my cannibis-addicted roommate was out. The reasons for this still elude me. Part of it may be that, in the college setting, women are simply more likely to fall into bed, for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which may be that they, too, were taking applications and interviewing prospective life-mates.

But I think – or, perhaps, I like to think – it was because, for all the disaster that Benny’s had brought to my life by that point, it had also brought me a little closer to understanding, and communicating with, the female Inner Life.

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Intercourse

Chapter 7: Occupation/Collaboration

. . . He has to push in past boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy. . . .

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The second woman I had sexual intercourse with (after my less-than-stellar high school debut) was a college sophomore named Mary. She had medium-length reddish hair, almost masculine shoulders, wide hips and thighs very strong legs. The experience was unremarkable except for one moment, near the end, when she wrapped her strong legs around my hips and used them to pull my erection further inside herself. It was one of those moments you find yourself suddenly remembering, years later, for no reason, while washing the dishes.

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. . . She, a human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter. This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. . . . The slit between her legs, so simple, so hidden . . . that slit which means entry into her . . .

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Number three was Sherry: Black-haired, small-breasted, very, very lush between her legs, with a nice smile. She was vaguely ethnic – maybe a fraction Hispanic or something – which mainly made me regretful that I’d never had a full Hispanic, or black or Indian or Asian, or otherwise non-white woman. I still regret that. Before the intercourse-proper, I performed cunnilingus, my first time ever doing that. She tensed and tightened her thighs together at first, hesitating – that wonderful, self-conflicted, oh-so-female hesitation – then abandoned her hesitation, spreading her silky brown legs wide for me and idly stroking the hair on the back of my head while I slowly explored her moist, bushy pubis with my lips and tongue. The moment of her orgasm was as perfect as if I’d scripted it: her hips bucking, thrusting her plush, wet vagina eagerly up at my open mouth, her outspread legs flailing in thin air, her breathing shallow and frantic and, finally, calm. Never had I been so ensconced, so completely immersed, in a woman. After she fell asleep, I quietly manipulated myself to a second orgasm, staring intently at her soft brown left nipple as it peeked innocently out from under the sheet, rising and falling with her rhythmic breathing.

Excuse me. Just for a moment.

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I’m back.

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I wrote a story, shortly before I dropped out of college, in which a man shrinks himself to a height of four inches and explores his wife’s body the way you might explore a forest, finally ending up nestled in her vagina. It was my attempt to capture, via literature, the feeling of immersion in Femaleness that I experienced that night with my face between Sherry’s brownish legs. (The campus literary magazine wouldn’t publish it.)

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Number four was Kari, a short, dark-blonde threater major with very small breasts and hard, tiny nipples, each surrounded by a contrastingly wide areola. She insisted on being on top, clamping and gyrating her small wet vagina all over my penis and dipping her stony little nipples in and out of my mouth. She was, I understand now, an exhibitionist – she kept walking around naked afterward, for hours, past the open window of my dorm room, sitting at the desk like that, talking casually about classes like that, brushing her hair like that – but at the time, I wasn’t experienced enough to fully appreciate that aspect of her. Today, chatting online with exhibitionist women about their exhibitionism is about two spots higher than sexual intercourse on my list of favorite activities.

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. . . The woman having material control of her own sex organs and of each and every act of intercourse would not lead to a reverse dominance, the man subject to the woman, because of the nature of the act and the nature of the sex organs involved in the act. . . . The woman could not forcibly penetrate the man. The woman could not take him over as he took her over and occupy his body physically inside. His dominance over her expressed in the physical reality of intercourse had no real analogue . . . She simply could not do to him what he could do to her. . . .

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Number five was a short and busty freshman, Linda, the only truly big-breasted woman I’ve ever had intercourse with. She was, I’m estimating, a double-D cup, with wide, light nipples, areolas the diameter of baseballs and a thin black strip of pubic hair. She was clumsy in bed, clearly inexperienced, but she had what seemed to be an instinctive understanding of the effects of her breasts on the male psyche. She kept displaying them for me, kneading them, pulling and stretching her nipples in front of my face, encouraging me to play with them, which I did, through a whole happy night of intercourse. (That’s inaccurate: It was a whole night of breast-games, with one brief break for intercourse.)

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. . . Intercourse itself is immune to reform. In it, female is bottom, stigmatized. Intercourse remains a means . . . of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status, impressing it on her, burning it into her by shoving it into her, over and over, pushing and thrusting until she gives up and gives in. . . .

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Number six was Erica: A tall, curly haired, thin-framed, sexually aggressive Young Republican. She kept saying, flatly, ``Fuck me, Adam, oh, god, fuck me, fuck me hard,’’ as if she were acting (badly) in a pornographic movie. I think she faked her orgasm. As if to complete the cliche, she left two rows of painful little fingernail scars on my back.

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. . . Her body – the basis of privacy and freedom in the material world for all human beings – is entered and occupied; the boundaries of her physical body are violated. What is taken from her in that act is not recoverable, and she spends her life . . . pretending that pleasure is in being reduced through intercourse to insignificance. . . .

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My seventh lover (or eighth, depending on how you count it) was Guinevere: art major, Capricorn, ``total fuck-fiend’’ (her words), best friend and roommate of my future spouse. You know her from the book as ``Gem.’’

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Alvin’s post-office box gets more letters asking questions about Gem than about any other character in the book, Alvin included. One husband and wife told me (in a letter that was attached with paperclips to a stack of Polaroid photographs of the wife’s pierced nipples and clitoris) that they had taken to calling the wife ``Gem,’’ and insisting that others do as well, because the utterance of the word turned them both on so much. I’ve noticed lately, in those ads for adult videos that sometimes pop up on the Internet (what, you don’t get those?), a startling number of films with the word ``Gem’’ in the title; it appears that at least three pornographic actresses have appropriated the name or close variations of it. I suppose I could sue, if I had any interest in making more money, but I don’t.

Gem has slipped so completely into the mainstream public consciousness that she seems to register even in the minds of people who don’t browse the hidden world of porn, who perhaps couldn’t even specifically define who she is or why they know anything about her. Yet they do. One night in our living room, while Beth was flipping channels, we caught a few moments of a television sit-com in which a weasely man nervously introduces his stern wife to his sexy new secretary, and when the man says the secretary’s name – ``Gem’’ – the laugh-track erupts, as if no further explanation is needed. Beth, completely unaware of how thoroughly ``Gem’s’’ life intersects her own, laughed lightly at the joke, giving me one of the more surreal moments of my experience.

Thanks to my stupid book, Gem – Guinevere – has become the most famous literary temptress since Lolita, and she’s been just impossible about it. ``alvin, yor the only man in america who isnt trying to fuck me,’’ she gloated during our last Internet conversation, three weeks ago.

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. . . Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said ``yes please, yes hurry, yes more’’ , . .

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Contact: alvinpart2@yahoo.com