M. J., Part Four

(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part Three.)

 After that trip in the early spring of 1983 which his car broke down outside a historic Virginia plantation, it didn’t take me long to figure out what made M. J. tick. The economics professor I’d been dating for most of one semester and the better part of another really only came to life sexually when I showed him contempt.

Unfortunately, we were at a stage of our relationship when that was all too easy for me to do.
For months we’d had a quiet, respectful, and timid relationship in which he’d given me gifts, taken me out to places where the menus hadn’t seen a refreshing since the nineteen-fifties, and subjected me to silent, boring sex under the covers of his bed with the lights off. When his car had ground to a stop and I’d had to handle matters because he was too preoccupied with fretting and fuming and stomping around his econo-box, I’d snapped at him. I’d stomped off to call a tow truck without consulting him. I’d mocked him in front of the tow truck driver. Probably most damning of all, I’d eaten his share of the sympathy cookies the nice lady with the telephone had given me. Right in front of his face. Without even a pretend offer to share.

The result? When we got back to his apartment, M. J. had practically assaulted me in the hallway, he was so overcome with desire and need. When I was easy and pliant, he’s been reserved and a bit clammy. The minute I showed him exactly how little I thought of him, he couldn’t get enough of me.

The following weekend he showed up with a box from the small department store in Merchant’s Square. He gave it to me with an air of expectation, as we sat in the parking lot of the gymnasium at the back of campus. I opened up the green cardboard lid, pulled back the tissue paper, and found myself staring at about three pounds of some of the ugliest wool ever knitted into a sweater. It was of a hue so grape-purple that if I ever pulled it over my head—and there was no way in hell I ever planned to—I would’ve been greeted with cries of Hey! Kool-Aid!

“What is this?” I asked him, appalled.

“It’s a sweater,” he said. “I thought you’d like it.”

“I’m not wearing this,” I told him. “Sorry.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because it’s hideous.”

He stared at me, then lunged. We ended up having sex in the back seat, right there in the parking lot.

For a couple more weeks we followed a similar pattern. I finally balked at going to the cafeteria for senior citizens on Richmond Road where all the food was boiled to within an inch of its life before being slopped into the steam trays, and we ended up banging like beasts parked behind the dumpster in back. I told him that if I had to listen to him talk about Reaganomics one more time, I’d fucking blow a gasket, and I ended up getting skull-fucked in a restroom along the Colonial Turnpike at eleven at night.

There was just some twisted part of M. J. that flared to life when I was nasty to him. That incident with the tow truck, though, had tipped him far enough out of my favor that really all I could see were his faults—the tasteful yet ridiculous and unwearable presents he gave me, the old lady kisses he gave me under normal circumstances, the clammy-fish touch of his skin against mine, the weird mole on his penis. The more I focused on those faults, the less I wanted to see of him, and the meaner I was.

Eventually I just stopped seeing him altogether.

That was the idea, anyway. He called one Friday night to tell me he’d be picking me up at our usual time, and I told him that I had something else to do. I didn’t feel compelled to make up a bullshit excuse. I didn’t feel I had to soften the blow that way. I just had something else to do, I said, and thanked him and hung up. The weekend after, I did the same thing. He didn’t even call the third week. I felt secure he’d got the message.

My big problem in my youth was an inability to conceive of confrontation. I’d do anything to avoid it. But here’s the thing: if I’d sat M. J. down and told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him any more, there would’ve been an argument and then a couple of days of hurt feelings, but very likely it would’ve been over and I could’ve moved on. My method of breaking-up-by-avoidance dragged out for the rest of the semester, and caused months of pain and annoyance and outright anger.

Because what M. J. started doing was to stalk me around campus. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he’d decided that me ignoring him was my attempt to fan the flames of his desire for me; the more he was denied and rebuffed, the more desperately he had to have me.

So when I would turn around and see him following me across the campus, I would roll my eyes and go back to my walking and pretend he wasn’t there—though it was hard to miss him following behind me like a sad, whipped puppy with a loyalty complex. I hoped he’d just ‘get the message.’ He seemed to interpret my scorn as a promise the most explosive sex of his entire life if he’d persist and stalk me harder.

Which he did, relentlessly. He followed me to classrooms at night where I was studying with friends, who would see his bearded face peeking in the door and announce that some weirdo kept looking in. He would follow me to the library on weekends, and stand in the stacks to stare at me mournfully until one of my study buddies would point him out to me. When I was working at the ice cream store where I earned my income, he’d sit in his car, parked in a space outside the big plate glass windows, staring holes through me while I pretended he wasn’t there.

I passed him off for a while as a friend of my parents—but it became pretty obvious, even to my oblivious companions, that no college kid really talked to his parents’ friend that much. They wanted to know why he was following me so much, all the time, all around the clock. They wondered if he was that way about me, a thought they’d usually accompany with titters and embarrassed glances. It had to end.

Eventually it did, in a hissing match outside the door of a classroom in the business building where I was studying right before final exam time. My friends had noted that ‘that weird guy’ was outside again, which caused me to slam shut my books and stomp outside to have it out with M. J. once and for all.

I didn’t want to see him again, I told him. He had to stop following me. He was embarrassing me. My friends all called him ‘that creepy old guy.’ My supervisor at work was on the verge of calling the cops because she thought he was a flasher. All the frustration of several weeks of stalking came spilling out of my lips.

M. J. looked up at me—he was a short man—and said in a plaintive voice, “But I love you!”

And I just shook my head at him, turned on my heel, and stomped away. That was the end of it, for real this time. I never spoke to him again, never saw him. I don’t know what happened to him, other than that his year-long position ended and he moved on to some other university.

When I look back on my life, there are plenty of incidents of which I’m not proud. That encounter nears the top of the list. Rather than hurt someone just a little, in a straight-forward way, I dragged out the pain and the suffering for weeks, and then topped it off as spectacularly as possible by packing in as much hurtfulness into a couple of minutes as I could muster. I still hear that cry of astonishment—But I love you!—in my nightmares. It haunts me.

M. J. didn’t love me. He might have convinced himself that he did, simply because it justified all the relentless pursuit in which he indulged when I started spurning him. Even when we had been dating and engaging in zestless sex, he’d never mentioned love, or any emotion stronger than a hunger for cafeteria fare or peanut soup. I didn’t love him, either. Toward the end, I didn’t even like him.

He still deserved better, though. If we learn more from the ways we err than the ways we succeed, my time with M. J. was an education. If I could, I’d tell him I was sorry. Sorry for being a know-it-all of eighteen; sorry for being so untaught about the ways people communicated outside of the bedroom. Sorry for being a total dick, certainly.

Neither of us were particularly what the other was looking for. We could have found some common ground, however, if I’d been a little less inept at meeting a challenge head-on. I wish I’d been man enough then to try it.

M. J., Part Three

(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part Two.)

Over the several months I was seeing M. J. , the professor I’d picked up in the campus restrooms during my sophomore year, it wasn’t the presents that kept me going back. Good lord, certainly not. His offerings of clothing were so poorly-chosen that they inadvertently bordered on being calculated insults in a cardboard gift box.

It wasn’t for the sex, either, those grandmotherly fumblings beneath the covers that left me feeling dirtier and a lot less satisfied than when they began. It wasn’t for the company, which mostly was stiff and formal and slightly uncomfortable.

It wasn’t exactly because he was a professor and I was a student and we were each other’s forbidden fruit. I’d slept with a lot of faculty at that point (and would continue to do so all through college and graduate school), so our relationship wasn’t exactly a novelty.

No, mostly I kept going back because I’d never had anyone before who took me on actual dates. The men I saw tended to skip the dinner and the wooing and skip straight to taking me home and fucking the daylights out of me. Though instead of ‘home’ we’d usually use a toilet stall or a dark space behind a park tree.

Although the sex M. J. and I had wasn’t good, or even really competent, I liked being able to think of myself as dating someone. I liked being able to say, without divulging many details, that I was in a relationship. M. J. and I had never professed any affection for each other beyond “I like you in that sweater” (him) or “Thanks for dinner. I’ve never had Beef Wellington before” (me, and I never would again), but technically we were dating. I clung to that for a little while in my youth as a badge of honor.

I also liked the fact that I was whoring around with one of my dad’s old classmates. I had nothing against my dad, but at eighteen I was still adolescent enough that putting out for someone he’d once known—and who didn’t like him for some mysterious reason—tickled my rebellious underbelly a little. It was a private defiance, and not the kind of thing he’d ever find out about. But in a juvenile way, I thought I was Sticking It To the Old Man, and it gave me a little thrill.

By and large, though, M. J. and I stuck for a good three months to a repetitive cycle of Friday night gifts, dinners, and then a night at his apartment. And then one warmer day, he asked if I wanted to go on an outing with him.

It was cold enough that I remember wearing one of his gift sweaters—a white cotton turtleneck with a neck hole so small that pulling it over my face exfoliated more cells than a strong acid peel, and left me red and raw for the rest of the day. But it was also warm enough that the sweater was all I really needed in the weak sunshine of the late winter. I would guess that it was about March. And M. J. suggested we visit a plantation that was only a couple of dozen miles from Williamsburg.

That sounds lovely and romantic!, a good number of you are thinking. I was definitely not. I spent most of my childhood years visiting every damned plantation and Civil War battlefield within a five-state radius of home, and when you consider that I grew up in the former capital of the Confederate States of America, that’s a lot of damned plantations and battlefields. Nor did I trespass on these sacred grounds with an awestruck face and a sense of wonder at the scope of history I was privileged to relive thanks to the preservation efforts of historians like my parents. No, I had stomped around with a constipated look on my face and many long sighs of suffering. So when M. J. suggested we have a jolly afternoon’s outing to a plantation, my reaction was more like, Oh, fuck.

But I knew how to swallow my dislike of American historical sites by then. I told him that sounded dandy, and together we drove off in his car on a sunny Saturday afternoon to our destination.

If you’ve never seen a Virginia plantation, you’ve probably a picture in mind. A bucolic vision of a genteel country mansion with Palladian columns and classical revival proportions, facade whitewashed and gleaming, set back in a verdant paradise of greenery, where in times past gentleman farmers sipped mint juleps with their hoop-skirted wives on the verandah beneath the bougainvillea. Let me disabuse you of the notion. This place was no fucking Tara.

It was a two-room shanty on a rolling bank of weeds and dead waist-high grass, located along a particularly smelly turn of the James River, where raw sewage from the Hopewell wastewater plant seemed to be collecting and stagnating. There was no bougainvillea. There were snarled black cherry trees and wild sumacs, both of which I’d always been taught were weeds. And there was a dispirited woman handing out a slip of paper with the plantation’s history printed on it (free) and selling souvenirs (overpriced) on the front porch.

Touring the place didn’t take that long, but we gave our level best to make it last. With low spirits we peered into the plantation house, which had been furnished with chairs that had weathered for decades in someone’s barn and an old spinning wheel. We looked at the gift shop’s collection of corn husk doll kits and homemade lardy soaps and invisible ink books for kids. And finally we decided to walk by the James, where M. J. managed to get burrs all over his pants legs and cursed and threw a child’s tantrum about it. They were his good pants, he kept saying, though how he could tell the difference between them and any other of the countless pairs of ironed khakis he owned, I had no idea.

Still, for late winter, the weather was nice. I’ve always enjoyed being outdoors. And burrs or no, it was still a welcome change from the usual routine into which we’d fallen.

Then came the fateful trip home.

I knew something was wrong when M. J. started the car and pulled down the dirt country road that led from the plantation back to civilization. His wheels made a terrible grinding noise, somewhere halfway between an amplified root canal drilling and a banshee’s curse. “What is that?” M. J. asked me.

Like I knew? I didn’t drive then. I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-one. My parents were too cheap to let me. (It occurs to me now that M. J. had made some vague noises about teaching me to drive, too—which might have been another reason I kept seeing him until that point. And yes, if you were to call up my father right now and ask him why I wasn’t allowed to drive until I was twenty-one, he will happily admit, “I was too cheap.”) “I think you should stop,” I told him.

He ignored me, and kept driving down the road. Every time he accelerated, the noise would get worse. When he slowed down, its intensity lessened a little, but it still sounded like the kind of thing Ellen Ripley might’ve heard right before the alien queen sawed through the hull of her spaceship. “I think you should stop,” I said.

When M. J. turned onto the two-lane road, the mere act of steering around a corner made the sound triple in intensity. “STOP THE CAR!” I yelled at him, bracing myself against the dashboard as if the whole thing might explode at any second.

We tumbled out of the car when he pulled it over to the side of the road. And there, in the middle of Nowhere, Virginia, we proceeded to have our first fight. “You can’t drive this the way it sounds,” I kept insisting.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said, dubiously. Over ears still ringing by the decibel level of the ‘nothing,’ we argued back and forth for a few more minutes. Finally he said, “What do you want me to do? Call a tow truck? Go to some stranger’s house and call a tow truck? What are they going to say when they see us together?” He was hysterical, almost. It was the most heated I’d ever seen him. He kept pulling at his beard and throwing his hands in the air. “Who am I going to tell them you are?”

He went on and on in this vein for a very long time. I listened to his hysterics in amazement. My mother had a motto that ran a little something like You don’t owe anyone an explanation until you actually owe them an explanation. In other words, some stuff is nobody’s damned business. It’s a stance that’s worked for a lifetime. When he was purple-faced and had worked himself into a tizzy, I turned and stomped off to the closest farm house—a good half-mile away—knocked on the door, and explained that my car had broken down. In return I got the use of their telephone, a good deal of sympathy, and a small bag of sympathy cookies. They’d been baked by Keebler elves, but still.

“Funny, the woman at the house didn’t ask if I was a student fucking my professor,” I announced when I got back to the car much later. “I don’t know how she could’ve missed that.” In a sullen mood, I ate all the cookies and listened to M. J. ’s half-hearted attempts to apologize.

Unsurprisingly, the tow truck driver didn’t grill us on our relationship when he finally arrived, either. He was a hearty, oversized guy who simply tsked at my tale of the strange noise, hooked the car up to his truck, and then agreed to tow us back to Williamsburg. Simple as that. However, I had to do all the talking, down to giving M. J. ’s address. M. J. merely glowered, stood by fretting, and wrung his hands in case I said something accidental like, Did I mention that this elderly homosexual is engaging me for illicit sexual intercourse?

My memory of the driver is of something like Yukon Cornelius. Enormous, red-headed, and bearded. Once the two of us were in his front seat and he was driving us homeward, he kept up a constant stream of chatter. “So you and your dad were out looking at the plantation, huh?” he asked me, fairly quickly on.

I was wedged between Yukon Cornelius and M. J. in the middle of the seat, arms crossed because I was still appalled at M. J. ’s behavior. This question tickled me, though, even though I could hear an appalled sigh from M. J. ’s side of the truck. He could’ve been my dad. They were only a year apart. “We sure were,” I said. “Dad’s not really into old stuff, but I like it.” Well, I thought it was a clever double entendre at the time.

“Well that was real nice of him then,” said the driver. “You know, it’s real nice when a dad and a son do things together. My dad and I weren’t close at all, and time runs out mighty quick. Mighty quick.”
“My dad and I are very, very close,” I said with a straight face.

“That’s real heartwarming,” said the driver. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“We do a lot of fun stuff together,” I remarked, ignoring the fact that M. J. was hyperventilating beside me.

While the driver and I kept up a friendly conversation about nothing in particular, I did something daring. With my left fingers, which was crossed over my chest and tucked beneath my other arm, I tweaked M. J. ’s nipple. He jumped about three feet out of his seat. The driver couldn’t see anything. It was just some devilish stubbornness in me determined to make M. J. as uncomfortable as possible.

It was a long drive. When minutes passed and the driver didn’t ask any awkward questions, or attempt to nail us on the validity of our supposed father/son relationship, or notice me rubbing my hand up and down M. J. ’s ribcage, M. J. finally relaxed. He even crossed his arms and let his fingertips rub and bob against my own.

It was the tenderest moment of our relationship, honestly. Definitely the most spontaneous.

The whole bad afternoon had an unexpected effect on M. J. . Once we were back in his parking lot and Yukon Cornelius was waving out of the window of his truck, M. J. had to turn to me. “Thank you,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You handled all that by yourself and you shouldn’t have had to,” he said.

I shrugged again.

“It wasn’t even your car. Your were right. I over-thought everything.” At least his apology was hitting all the right notes. I had to give him that.

“It’s all right,” I said, unbending a little.

“Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve never wanted to fuck you more than I have right now.”

Now, that part was a little bit of a surprise. “What?” I asked.

“I want to take you inside,” he said, close up, his hand on my wrist, “and I want to fuck you like you’ve never been fucked.”

M. J. had always told me that word was too much of an Anglo-Saxonism, but here he was using it three times in rapid succession. “Well, okay,” I agreed, without having to think about it too much.

We ran into his apartment. He shoved me roughly against the wall. I fell onto his carpeted staircase with one hip. We didn’t retire upstairs to the bedroom and hide under the blankets. We didn’t turn off the lights. He wrestled my pants off me right there in the hallway, pushed me roughly down on the staircase, and fucked my ass so hard that my knees got carpet burn. It wasn’t a long fuck, but it was violent, and animal, and the hottest thing I’d ever done with him. When pulled it out, he allowed me to clean him off for the first time with my mouth.

That would have been hot enough, but then he leaned back against the door and crossed his arms. “Jack yourself off,” he ordered. Then, as he nodded to let me know it was all right, he watched while I spread my legs and whacked away at my dick. I came in my hand—I was afraid what he might do if I dared get it on the carpet, amorous mood or not. Barely had I finished when he grabbed my hand. “Get upstairs,” he said. “Get in bed and take off your clothes.”

I did. He joined me shortly thereafter, and we did it all over again. It might have been the first time I was anxious to have sex with M. J. .

But as time proved, it was also one of the last times.

M.J., Part Two

(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part One.)

The first thing I found out from Professor Washington—M.J.—on our date was that he and my father had known each other during college. My father had been a year ahead of him. The coincidence wasn’t that far a stretch. I was attending my college because it was my dad’s alma mater; he’d really pushed me to attend because of his idyllic memories of the place. M.J.’s entire reason for hooking a visiting professor position at my college had been to assess whether or not he could wrangle his way back into the college as a faculty member. It really is the kind of school that people attempt to linger around,long past their expiration date.

The second thing I found out from M.J. was that he didn’t like my dad. We were sitting in the King’s Arms Tavern, which is what passed for a classy dinner joint in town back then, eating peanut soup, when he let that little tidbit drop. “Why not?” I asked, when he made that announcement.

I was sitting there in my clean but rumpled khakis—the only pair of ‘good pants’ I owned—and that black-and-yellow striped sweater he’d given me and ordered me to wear. My hair was combed neatly, though not on the side, as he’d done in my office. “Because he was a dick,” M.J. said, before taking a bite of his pork chop.

And that was as much as I ever found out about that. I had to wonder if he was remembering my dad correctly. He’s a sweet man. Absent-minded, yes. Paranoid, absolutely. Unable to come within a hundred yards of a computing device without breaking it and then feeling the urge to phone me about it, guaranteed. But he’s not a dick. I’m frequently a dick. He never is. (Later on, when I asked my father in a casual way if he remembered M.J., his puzzled response was, “Who?”)

The topic put a damper on conversation for the rest of the evening. He ate his dinner in silence and I ate mine looking around the room at the tourists and wondering if it was ever going to be over. Then he escorted me to his car, and drove me back to his apartment on the campus’ outskirts. Using the slightest and gentlest of touches on my bee-striped elbow, he steered me through the front door and up to his bedroom, where in silence he undressed me in the same unerotic manner he might’ve undressed a five-year-old nephew for his bath. He laid me in the bed, removed his own clothes, crawled in beside me, and turned out the light.

For a moment, we lay there unmoving between the chilly sheets. I wondered if that was it.

Then he was on me, straddling my chest and shoving his cock into my mouth. M.J. wasn’t gifted down there by any means, and his dick looked even shorter under the best of circumstances because he had pubes that would’ve made Rapunzel stop, pout, and ask his secrets. That shit was long. I remember once noticing that tendrils of it snaked through the fly of his underwear still, after he’d peed at some public toilet earlier in the day and undressed for me later in the day. When he was fully erect, his pubes were still longer than his dick. I’d feel them tickling my face long before I felt the nudge of a cockhead against my lips. It was a bit of a turn-off.

What also turned me off was that M.J. had a mole on his dick. It wasn’t a flat discoloration, or even a beet-colored bump. No, this was a full-blown, juicy, dark red mole that sat like a cooked pea three-quarters of the length down his cock, and every time M.J. straddled my chest and inserted it between my lips, my goal was to do anything to keep that mole out of my mouth.

I’m not really sure why I was so repulsed by it. I had some fear that my teeth would scrape it and I’d find myself spitting it out, maybe, or that I’d accidentally bite it off. Either way, I’d wrap my hand around the base and keep it from crossing my lips.

Or else I’d talk him into fucking me. “Don’t use that word,” M.J. sniffed the first night, when I said it. “It’s Anglo-Saxon.” I wanted to point out, every time, that I was Anglo-Saxon, and that I was pretty sure the name he’d called my dad was an Anglo-Saxonism, but I didn’t see the point of pressing it. If I used words like fuck or shit in front of him, I found out that first night—even if I was beginning him, “Fuck me, fuck my ass,”—he’d stop whatever we were doing to lecture me like a maiden aunt about to wash out my mouth with soap. It was certainly a lecture of a sort I never got from my own dad, the alleged dick. But M.J. liked to fuck, even though he didn’t like to say the word. He would rub my hole with a tiny fingertip of jelly from the ancient jar of Vaseline he kept by the bedside, and then with me face-down and my nose in the pillow, he’d insert himself, raise himself up and down a few times, then gently squirt a load into my hole.

It was about as passionate and erotic as pushups. Then he would roll over and fall asleep. Typically I would spend the night with him. In the mornings, he would either make sure I was back to campus in time for class, or if it was a weekend, he would take me into Merchant’s Square to the men’s department store there and pick out something for my wardrobe. His choices were always conservative, always something I didn’t want, and always something I’d never wear except for him. But he did like it when I wore his clothing on our dates.

That first date was the hard template to all the many dates that followed over the following months. M.J. would track me down somehow—either stumble across me on campus, or call my dorm—tell me when he’d be picking me up, and give me a time to be there. We’d have a silent dinner at a stodgy restaurant with good meat-and-potatoes food. He’d have a glass or two of wine. We’d retire to his place, I’d submit to being undressed, and then I’d struggle to keep his dick out of my mouth and try to maneuver it to my ass. There’d be five minutes of old-lady lovemaking, and then he’d lurch off of me and fall asleep.

Yet for some reason I kept going back to him. For a few months I considered him my boyfriend, even. I think on a lot of levels it was because with M.J. I had a lot of firsts. My first actual dinner date. I’d spent a couple of nights at Earl’s during my teens to work parties, but M.J. was the first guy with whom I actually slept side by side, the way boyfriends do. His gifts weren’t great, or even good, but with M.J., for a while, I felt like I was being courted. He was a gentleman, and I was young and dumb enough to think that maybe a gentleman was really what I needed.

Part of me, too, enjoyed the drama and intrigue of it. I’d always had older fuckbuddies, but now I had an older, even an elderly (at forty-three) gentleman caller! Someone who knew my father, even! The lies I told my roommate on the nights I spent away were at first elaborate tales of deceit and justification, but as time went on, I just left for the night or the weekend and didn’t bother to tell him in advance. I would’ve said that I grew devil-may-care and didn’t give a fuck what he thought I was doing, but I didn’t want to be accused of being Anglo-Saxon.

This is how M.J. and I carried on our relationship, such as it was, for a good four or five months. Until the warm weather of spring came around, that is, and an impromptu excursion out into the countryside changed things.