The Timeless Art of Seduction

Remember George Costanza and the Timeless Art of Seduction? This post is about a different Costanza. Check it out (here).

 

A Stimulating Read

 

Some of you might have noticed the saucy picture added to Chubby Chatterbox’s sidebar announcing a new anthology produced by Publishing Syndicate: On SEX: 69 Hilarious Stories About Everything SEX. Read about it (here).

Peculiar Picture #33

After a long hiatus from painting I’m back at my easel. I was recently cleaning our garage and trying to carve a workspace from the clutter when I stumbled across this acrylic painting. It was intended to be thought provoking, although you need to look closely to understand why. Check out the entire illustration (here). 

 

Sex And The Senile Girl

 

Conversations with my mother can be disturbing (Check out my recent post What Do You Believe In?) but she also makes me laugh. I call every morning to check on her. This morning’s conversation went like this: “Good morning, Mom. What are you doing?”

      

“Same as always. Surviving.”

      

Surviving is her favorite response when asked what she’s doing. “You sound a bit listless. You okay?”

      

“Just tired. Couldn’t sleep last night.”

     

 “Anything bothering you?”

     

 “I’m eighty-seven years old. EVERYTHING bothers me.”

      

“Anything interesting happening at The Lodge?” The Lodge is the name of her retirement facility.

     

 “Yes. We’re getting free HMO for a few days.”

      

“Free HMO?”

     

 “Yes, on the TV.”

      

“Do you mean HBO?”

      

“Stop with the constant corrections. You know what I mean.”

      

“Sorry.”

       

“So last night I watched Libyan porn.”

      

Not something one expects to hear from their mother. “Libyan porn?”

      

“That’s what I said.”

      

Complaining about her retirement home’s TV programming is one of her favorite pastimes. “Mom, I doubt you were getting porn from Libya. I seriously doubt Libya is exporting porn these days. And if they were, your cable provider would probably charge you extra for it.”

      

“Did I say Libyan porn? That isn’t what I meant. I meant Lisbon porn.”

     

 “You’re watching Portuguese people having sex?”

      

I could hear her sigh into the receiver. “Lisping porn! You know—two women.”

      

After letting my mind wrap itself around the notion of lisping porn, I decided to shut her down before this got out of control. “Are you telling me you were watching lesbian porn last night?”

      

“Yes. And they were leaving nothing to the imagination. Hour after hour—they wouldn’t quit.”

      

“So that’s why you’re so tired? You couldn’t sleep because you were up all night watching lesbian porn?”

      

She didn’t answer my question. “You get HMO TV don’t you?”

     

 I nodded at the receiver in my hand and let out a wary, “Yeees.” I had a bad feeling about where this was going.

      

“Do you ever watch porn on TV?”

      

“Absolutely not. Besides, the Internet is packed with porn. I can see anything I want 24/7 on the computer.” Yes, I’m really that stupid.

     

 “Is that what you do all day on that computer? Watch porn? You told me you were writing on the blog thingy of yours.”

      

My mother is an expert at changing the subject, but this time I wasn’t about to let her. “Wait just a minute here. YOU’RE the one watching porn, not me.”

     

 “Well, maybe you and your wife (she seldom calls Mrs. Chatterbox by name) should check out this TV porn. Not the lisping kind; the regular kind. God knows you should exercise more, burn off a few calories.”

      

“Mom?”

     

 “Yes, son?”

      

“Could we please change the subject?”

    

Peeping Toms

 

Writing coaches caution anyone from starting a story with: It was a dark and stormy night, but I’ve always wanted to begin a tale with these words and now you know what I think of writing coaches. Anyway, Mrs. Chatterbox and I had only been married a few years and were living in a duplex in Oxnard, California, so close to the beach that our driveway was covered in sand.

      

One stormy evening, Mrs. Chatterbox phoned to say she was leaving work late and was in no mood to fix dinner. “I’ll pick up something on the way home,” she said.

      

 I  felt guilty that she was the one caught in the storm. “It’s raining pretty hard. Be careful,” I said, just as the electricity went out.

      

As I waited in darkness for her to reach home, I lifted a blind and glanced out our front window to check on the storm. Without street lamps I couldn’t see much, but I could hear the wind howling like a banshee in heat, along with the sound of swirling sand scratching the world raw.

      

A light winked on across the street, the golden glow of an oil lamp. I could clearly see into the bedroom of the young couple who’d recently rented the bungalow across the street. I’d yet to speak with them; for some reason I’d been put off by their attractiveness and athleticism. They stood beside a large bed. He leaned toward her, bent down and kissed her long and hard. She unbuckled his jeans.

      

It felt wrong to be ogling them as they undressed, their perfect bodies reflected in the circular mirror of an old vanity hugging a wall. I considered lowering the blind, but couldn’t. It was like watching a porn movie being filmed before my very eyes. What if

they needed extras?

     

 As the wind whipped sand around the edges of their window, I watched as they pleasured each other. I’d been married a few years to a woman with healthy sexual appetites, and I’d read Everything You Always Wanted To know About Sex*But Were Afraid To Ask, not to mention my familiarity with the Kama Sutra, whose illustrations I’d committed to memory. I wasn’t without a certain expertise in this area and considered myself a competent swordsman, but the Olympian aerobatics and exuberant gymnastics of this energetic couple were far beyond anything I’d imagined, much less attempted. Whereas I’d be huffing and puffing with sweat dripping from me in unsightly fashion, this couple was clearly not out of breath. Instead of sweating like railroad workers shoveling coal into a blazing furnace, their naked bodies glowed like burnished gold in the lamplight.

      

Minutes passed as I lost track of time, the window steaming over from my hard breathing. A noise alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t alone. Mrs. Chatterbox was standing behind me, a boxed pizza in her hands. I could feel my face turn scarlet and I wondered what she was thinking: I’ve married a voyeur, a Peeping Tom!

     

 But her eyes weren’t on me; she was watching the couple across the street, the marathon pair into their second hour of lovemaking. I took the pizza from Mrs. Chatterbox’s hands and walked it over to the kitchen. When I returned she was still standing there, watching as intently as I had been. I tried to remove her coat but she was transfixed by the show and wouldn’t budge.

      

Fine, if she was going to enjoy the performance I saw no reason why I shouldn’t as well. At that moment, we witnessed something taking place in the bedroom across the street that shocked both of us. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; neither could my wife, whose jaw was hanging as low as mine.

      

Mrs. Chatterbox finally tore her eyes from the window. She swung her purse at me, yelling, “You told me that was IMPOSSIBLE!”

      

She stomped off.

      

Back in the bungalow, the dude who’d made me feel like an incompetent kindergartener was no longer naked. He and his lady had donned terry robes, and they were waving at me.

Submitted to Yeah Right.

The Birds And The Bees

Excerpt from my memoir The Kid in the Kaleidoscope:

When I was thirteen my best friend Ricky Delgado asked me, “What do you think of Sally Perkins?”

“Sally Perkins? I dunno. Why do you ask?” Sally lived three houses down. When she was five or six, she pulled her pants down over by the lamp post. I hadn’t thought about her much since then.

“Do you think she’s cute?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t you think she has nice boobs?”

I hadn’t noticed that Sally Perkins had boobs, nice or otherwise. “I guess so.”

“My old man tried to give me ‘the talk’ last night,” Ricky said. “God, was he ever lame.”

“The talk?”

“Yeah, you know—the talk. That shit about the birds and the bees.”

“Oh, that,” I said, trying to sound knowledgeable.

Dad had attempted to give my older brother David the talk a few years earlier and David still laughed about it. My time had yet to come.

“Isn’t it hard to imagine your parents doing it?” Ricky asked.

“It?”

“C’mon. I swear to God, sometimes you’re stupider than Hollowhead.”

That was saying a lot. Andy Hollingsworth, who lived across the street, was the closest thing we had to a village idiot. He couldn’t build a model airplane without gluing his hands together.

“I’m talking about sex!” Ricky said, an edge of exasperation in his voice. “Can you imagine your folks doing the ‘deed?’” He’d recently struck the coup de grace to my childhood by explaining the mechanics of human reproduction to me. I was still in a state of shock.

I had difficulty imagining my stern-faced mother smiling, much less having sex. As for Dad; his ability to vanish when my mother was in one of her foul moods (Dad's Disappearing Act) made it unlikely he could keep anything firm enough for sex. No, I couldn’t imagine my parents doing the “deed,” and I told Ricky so.

We were sitting under the sycamore tree in our front yard. He spat out the blade of grass dangling from the corner of his mouth and asked, “Have you checked the top drawer in their bedroom?”

“Why would I do that?”

Ricky looked around to be sure nobody was watching, then fished something out of his pocket. “I don’t suppose you know what this is?” He didn’t wait for a response. “It’s a condom, for sex, when you don’t want the girl to get preggers.”

“You found that in your parents’ top drawer?”

“Yeah, right near a tube of some cream shit. You can find interesting stuff in your parents’ top drawer,” added Ricky, “you should check it out sometime.”

A few days later, my folks went to check on Grandma who was having trouble managing her diabetes. David was off somewhere campaigning for class president. I had the place to myself.

I entered my parents’ bedroom, and just stood there, giving my courage time to percolate. There was only one dresser in the room—I figured it was my mother’s since it didn’t look like anything Dad would use. I opened the top drawer and prowled around. It was definitely my mother’s dresser; Dad’s things were probably in an Army surplus footlocker in the garage.

At first I was relieved to find nothing interesting. Underwear and nylon stockings but no condoms or tubes of goo. Then something caught my eye—a book.

I can laugh about it now, but back then I shuddered at what I’d found. Far worse than a sex toy or a package of condoms—a library book, one of those titillating bodice-ripper romances. The title was splattered in bright colors across the tattered dust jacket: Slave Queen of Tunisia. A picture showed a sultry vixen clutched tightly in the arms of a muscular sultan, whose bare breasts were nearly as big as hers.

With the book in hand, I dashed back to my room and scoured the pages as quickly as I could. I paused to read sex scenes written with an abundance of poetry, but with enough heat to convince me that Ricky’s description of human reproduction was more or less accurate.

Some of the steamy passages fired up my adolescent furnace, but icy water rained on my parade when I noticed the last date stamped on the check-out card. Ricky had explained how long it took for a woman to “pop a bun out of her oven,” and this unreturned library book had been checked out on the eighth of March in 1952—nine months before I was born.

My hands felt like they were burning as I jammed the seemingly red-hot book back into my mother’s dresser drawer. Now I knew the bitter truth; in spite of my best efforts to think otherwise, my parents had actually done it. Now my mind was polluted with a vision of my conception—Mother lying flat on her back as turbaned Dad worked up a sweat to satisfy her, a distracted look on her face as she absentmindedly leafed through her copy of Slave Queen of Tunisia.

My innocence disappeared like piss in a swimming pool.

How did you learn about the Birds and the Bees?