e x c e r p t s
The Electric Adventures of
Stand-alone stories excerpted from the novel:
A scientist and his wife embark on the ultimate product-testing assignment.
It is possible to die of pleasure?
The story of a simple man, the beautiful woman he loves, his frightening quasi-supernatural powers of mental suggestion, and his cat.
* * *
Other excerpts (by topic):
The V-word
Media
Politics
Fan mail
The C-word
God
Grooming
Grammar
The B-word(s)
Motherhood
Reviews
Feminism
`Money shots’
The V-word:
I like the proper words for things – vagina, clitoris, vulva, labia, breast, nipple, areola, to name a few of my favorites – but Carol, my agent, 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.
I won’t compromise my principles this time. For the purposes of this manuscript, a vagina is a vagina, and not a ``gidget.’’
Media
How, exactly, do you start an interview with a man whose ``Inner Life’’ centers on imagining women’s vaginas?
That’s not my assessment of the anonymous writer the world knows as
I acquiesced (``I’m brunette,’’ I told him, hesitantly) only because my editor had warned me the conversation might get personal, and I had taken the assignment with that understanding. I’ll admit, I didn’t expect the assignment to include describing my vagina to a strange man over the phone, but I figured if I could handle two years of covering Congress, I could handle ``Alvin.’’
Politics:
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: 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?
Fan mail
It sometimes worries me, in a societal kind of way, that ``
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.
The C-word:
Guinevere hadn’t actually 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.’’
God
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.
. . . 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.’’
Grooming
. . . Look at old copies of men’s magazines from the 1970s and 80s, and the thing that immediately stands out are the thick, lush, dark, warm, unruly, jungle-like bushes of hair between women’s legs. They would just let it grow, even those who routinely showed their vaginas to mass audiences. But vaginal fashions are like clothing fashions: They change, and not always for the better. . . . The professional women who pose in commercial pornography today are practically – or often completely – bald between the legs. I hate this, and I hope you do, too. Pubic hair is part of what makes a woman a woman, as opposed to a girl. What could possibly be sexually interesting about a bald vagina? Why would any woman who is fully (beautifully, lavishly) developed go out of her way to make herself appear less so? Why turn wine into grape juice? In my opinion, men who are sexually aroused by bald vaginas should be viewed as potential child abusers.
My point is, the trend among professional women toward shaving is part of what initially drove me, much later, to seek images of non-professional women on the Internet who, for whatever reason, are less likely to treat their pubic hair like cheap shrubbery. (I’m hoping, by the way, that the recent clothing fashion trend among women toward dressing as if they just stepped out of 1976 will, ultimately, extend to vaginal fashions.)
Grammar
Clarence’s problems with the book, he told me not too long ago, were partly about the Internet-chat passages. ``Intelligent people don’t talk like that, `l.o.l.’ and `o.m.g.’ and all this artless jumble of disassociated letters,’’ he told me, as we were sorting the mail one morning. ``Also, what’s with all the misspellings? Why do people think that just because they’re typing on the Internet, they don’t have to use the Queen’s English anymore? Is this what the `Internet Revolution’ hath wrought? Willful misspellings and incomprehensible acronyms?’’
I don’t argue with him on these points. I’m not inclined to defend the literary value of The Electric Adventures of Alvin the way I imagine other authors defend their work, because, as I’ve told you, the point was never literary, but masturbatory. On that front, I wouldn’t have expected Clarence, as a male and a homosexual, to find anything there that he liked. As you know, the few male characters aren’t what you’d call likeable. Notwithstanding many feminists’ savage (and probably accurate) assessments of my book, I can tell you that it was written entirely with female readers in mind. It’s never surprised me that men in general seem not to get it, and that applies especially, I suppose, to gay men. Clarence occasionally harangues me on this issue (``You couldn’t have just thrown us a bone? So to speak?’’). I’ll tell you what I tell him: The book is what it is.
. . . Mindy’s voice now, as I imagine it (I’ve not heard it since high school) is textured and contoured and a shade deeper than the girlish squeal that used to entertain me. She has (I imagine) that calm and knowing tenor to her voice that mothers tend to acquire after awhile, the result of softness crusted with experience, of having been the supposedly weaker gender, but called upon to carry out the harder lives, the greater demands, the more numerous and disparate roles; of having had men inside them, and babies inside them, their bodies vessels for both pleasure and life, even as they calmly and competently clean up the messes of both the babies and the men.
A mother’s voice is, at its core, a kind of sigh – not a dreamy or sad or frustrated one, but one of calmly sorting out the layers of life. Does anyone really doubt that women’s lives in general – mothers’ lives in particular – have more layers to them than those of men?
The B-word(s):
. . . You’re the only guy I was able to tell that to, adamski. And this is going to sound weird, but you’re the only guy I’ve ever been able to talk to about, well, um, yea, you know – those. (fine, I’ll just write it: boobs! boobs boobs BOOBS!) It must have seemed to you like that’s all I ever talked about! I guess you could probably write a book about them at this point – ``The History of Mindy’s Breasts’’. Sorry. With most guys, I’m trying to change the subject and keep their eyes from looking there, but with you, I just felt comfortable talking about it (them) (haha). I hope you didn’t mind too much, Adam-ski. I’m going to miss having you as my sounding board on that topic (I mean, those topics, ar ar, ok I’ll stop now). . . .
Reviews
Okay, no one said it was High Art. No one, that is, except those Ivy League jerkoffs at The New York Times, where 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.’’
Feminism
The reporters have mostly dissipated lately, but there are still protestors gathered outside the hospital every day, below my window, mostly Christians and feminists from what I can tell, carrying signs that say things like ``Just Say `No’ to Porn,’’ and `Alvin’ with a red line through it, and the occasional Biblical quote. The Christians and the feminists don’t seem to get along with each other very well – I’ve noticed that, at times, they actually appear to be two separate sub-groups, standing a little apart from each other, as if they’re not real comfortable with their little alliance – but they’re certainly united in their hatred of me. Sometimes they get to chanting things like ``
`Money shots’
. . .
``Not really.’’ Was she actually going to do this again?
``When you fuck her, do you ever close your eyes and imagine you’re fucking me?’’
``No.’’
``You could, you know – fuck me, I mean. Any time you want. She wouldn’t have to know.’’
``Gem, stop it, okay?’’
``I thought about you – last night, when I was using with my purple vibrator. Remember my purple vibrator?’’ . . .
* * *
. . . So now I’m ready, and I mean READY. I can’t remember the last time I was that wet, which as you know, alv, is saying something. I led the boys into the bedroom & and I take the box of condoms out of the drawer and tell them ``saddle up,’’ and I peel off the panties while theyre all watching and rolling the condoms out. The point-guard breaks one trying to get it on, so I went over and helped him. meantime the forward, who obviously knows what hes doing, has got the condom on right away and he’s moving to the bed and look at me the whole time, kind of smiling and making eye contact and basically giving me this look like, `I want it NOW’ and that turns me on so much that I step over there and lie back and pull him right down on me.
And just like that Im getting totally fucked by this young stud while these other two boys are watching and stroking and waiting their turn(!!!)
. . . Meantime the point-guard has finally got the condom figured out and he steps over and I take his cock in my hand. And the forward is still fuckking me for all hes worth, and then I totally get off on saying to him, ``okay, sweety, yor friends want a turn now, you can have seconds later.’’ Just saying it made me cum. . . .
* * *
Here’s one of the letters from
. . . Here is the note:
Dear Alvin: My husband took these! Do you like them? We took them after I read your book! You made me cum so many times with that book
* * *
. . . He watched her peel away first her icy demeanor and then her eyeglasses and then her baggy wool sweater and her voluminous corduroys, finally standing before him in all her great fleshy glory. Her fat pendulous breasts hung past the deep crease of her navel; her grapefruit-sized nipples, taut and red, encompassed the whole end of each heavy tit, pointing at her feet. He could see now that her hips were almost as wide across as she was tall. Her trunk-like thighs pressed against each other tightly, the line between them rising to meet the round expanse of her belly, just the smallest hint of lush triangular hair peeking out from the intersection between her legs, mostly hidden by rolling flesh.
``Lie back,’’ she said. He did.
``Close your eyes,’’ she said. He did.
She lowered her great form over him and he felt the various parts of her settling heavily and warmly onto his prone body. He was unsure which parts they were. The soft embrace around his hips, he thought, must be her inner thighs; surely that was her great bosom now encompassing his face and upper chest. He felt soft flesh ensconce his hard cock, but which soft flesh, he couldn’t know. Her belly? Her thigh? Her arm? Or perhaps the nether-regions between her legs? He lay there, under a hot soft avalanche of flesh, feeling her acres of skin engulf him.
His cock now found a deep, warm crevice, its embrace luring him toward orgasm. He didn’t know if this crevice was The Crevice, or some other part of her.
``That’s it, honey,’’ she whispered. ``Let yourself go. Let yourself cum.’’
He came, hard, still wondering exactly where it was he was coming, though it was no longer anything more than a mildly intriguing academic question. The roiling, rolling pleasure that shuddered out from his groin and through the rest of his being now made the question irrelevant. He was coming while ensconced in her big, wide, round, soft, beautiful womanhood, coming atop or against or within some hot velvety cove in her multilayered landscape. Where it was, exactly, no longer mattered. He was strolling a broad hot sunny tropical beach that extended as far as the eye could see; he could lay down his towel and lie back his body and let the sun encompass him at any spot in the sand, any spot at all, and feel as good as it was possible to feel . . . .
. . . Now Gem, spread-legged and smiling on the couch, reached her right hand down to the swollen pink lips of her pussy and whispered: ``I put it right here, Alvin.’’ Without hesitation, she slipped her first two fingers right into her eager hole and pushed them up to the knuckles. He could see the shiny wetness of it from where he sat. She let out a hard breath, staring at him and smiling, and said: ``I slid it up my snatch and I pretended it was you,
Then, whispering urgently, fingers still buried, eyes half-closed: ``You know I’ll be your slut, Alvin – your own personal slut. You know how good it feels, inside me …’’
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``Quite a ride . . . Absolutely brilliant!'' - LL Book Review
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c. 2009 Kevin McDermott
I am seeking a literary agent or publisher
Contact: alvinpart2@yahoo.com
