The Other Woman

I think I’ve mentioned before in these pages that during my college career I managed to have sex with the entire faculty of the French department. Not too impressive a feat, really, since there were only three of them at my little college.

The first of my conquests was the well-hung older professeur who would find me on campus, graciously ask if I cared to take a walk with him, and then escort me either to his office or to the nearest quiet men’s room so that I could go down on his enormous cock. The third of them was a scrawny little bearded queen who picked me up in Williamsburg’s one and only cruisy park, which was more a tablecloth-sized yard of grass that technically was only a park by the fact that it had a bench and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation hadn’t yet paved it over to make way for a Olde Tyme Ice Creame Shoppe.

It’s the second of the three that I’m thinking about today. In one of those strange coincidences, the two of us met in one of the cruisy restrooms at the university where my parents were teachers, a good sixty-five miles away from where he taught and where I went to school. During the spring break of my freshman year I was whoring around in the library on my parents’ campus; the second-floor men’s room was one of several hot spots on campus. I’d already sucked off a couple of guys when the outer door creaked open and someone strode across the room and occupied the stall next to mine. The guy had enormous feet. I wear size eleven, which is already boat-like enough. These had to be at least size sixteens. When the foot closest to mine began tapping, I anxiously dropped my hand and let my fingers dangle invitingly at the bottom of the metal divider.

As I’d hoped, he knelt down and thrust his already-hard cock under the stall. It was long—about eight and a half inches. Skinny—no where near as thick as mine. The knob at the end was a fierce red and was uncut, which in Virginia in the nineteen-eighties was something of a novelty. I knelt down, grabbed his balls in my hands, and gobbled him down.

I didn’t get much time on his cock because someone interrupted us. One of those trolls who wouldn’t go away. Neither one of us wanted to play with this guy lurking just outside the stall doors, so we passed some notes on toilet paper back and forth, negotiating what we should do. For some reason I kept the notes until about a decade ago, when I discovered that they’d more or less disintegrated into the pulp from which they came. I remember his dark and angular handwriting still, though, in which he begged me to go somewhere else with him on campus where he could fuck me.

He didn’t really have to twist my arm. We met in front of the library. He seemed to like the looks of me, though his appearance came as something of a startlement. Beale was a tall and angular man with a head of thick and fiery red hair that he kept in an unfortunate variation of the infamous bowl cut. It looked as if someone had taken a copper kettle and shoved it over the top of his skull. Also noteworthy were the glasses he had to wear for his poor eyesight. Those lenses had to be about an inch thick, and they were stuck in some of the ugliest horn-rimmed frames I’ve ever seen. From about the bridge of his nose to his large feet, Beale was an attractive and well-dressed man. It was just the top six inches it was difficult to look at.

Those weren’t the inches that had caught my interest, though. I decided to overlook Beale’s physical flaws and took him to the basement of a nearby classroom building. There we fucked uninterrupted. It was afterward, when I was pulling up my pants and preparing to make a quick getaway that he told me he was from out of town. He taught at the college down I-64, but he came to Richmond some weekends and maybe next time he did, he could give me a call and we could fuck again? I was charmed (and still horny) enough that I confessed I went to the very same college down the road.

This exchange started my mostly amicable and casual relationship with Beale. Unlike the big-dicked French professor who would only fuck me in his office or in a restroom, and unlike the prissy French professor who fucked me in the park, Beale actually preferred to have me over to his place when we had sex. Usually he’d pick me up on a Saturday morning. I’d stuff my backpack full of my homework and a change of clothes and he’d swing by the dorm. I’d get a little thrill from the risk that maybe someone I knew might see me getting into the car of an older man; he’d get a boy twenty-five years his junior in his front seat and in his bed.

Beale lived in the second-floor flat of an old farmhouse outside of town. For much of our Saturdays we’d sit quietly on his sofa, sometimes back to back, sometimes legs or feet touching. He’d grade his students’ homework. I’d do my reading. In the afternoon we’d retire to his bed and suck and fuck. Then he’d make dinner for me, and we’d watch television and screw some more in the evening, when he’d take me home. Once in a while he’d invite me to stay over. I usually agreed.

I never thought of Beale as my significant other in any sense of the word. He was a little startling enough in appearance—at least from the nose up—that I didn’t particularly want to be seen as his arm candy. With those Coke-bottle glasses off, though, and the straight bangs of his red hair brushed off his face, he wasn’t quite as horrifying. Just kind of cross-eyed. So no, we weren’t lovers, exactly. But I did like his company, and I looked forward to the Saturdays when he’d call and ask if I wanted to spend the weekend with him.

Then it all came crashing down, early in my junior year. I was walking across campus when Beale accosted me out in front of his department’s building, right as I was about to cross the Sunken Garden that’s an architectural feature of the campus. “I have to talk to you,” he said in a hushed voice. “I have crabs.”

Innocent that I was, I thought he meant I have crabs as in I’m going to make some delicious crab cakes fried in butter tonight. Want some? So I just stared at him blankly. “Crabs,” he repeated. “They’re a kind of sexually-transmitted lice. Did you give me crabs? No, of course you didn’t.”

Damn right of course I didn’t. I’d never had lice in my life. Sexually-transmitted lice sounded horrible, like something he’d made up in an attempt to scare me. I continued to stare at him blankly.

“It’s just that my boyfriend came down with crabs and he blamed me, and then I checked myself and I have them all over.” He was still keeping his voice down so that passing students and faculty and tourists wouldn’t hear. “Then he said that maybe that little whore I was cheating around with gave them to me. He meant you.”

Now, maybe over time I’ve boiled down in my memory his speech so that is sounds a lot more unpleasant than it really was. But of three things I was pretty immediately sure. One, he’d just told me I could have some kind of monster pubic lice. Two, he had a BOYFRIEND that I’d never known about. Three, that BOYFRIEND had just called me a whore.

So after I spent a little time processing all this information, I loftily intoned, “Please inform your boyfriend that I did not give you lice,” and stalked off. Then I never saw Beale again. (I saw him around campus. We just didn’t fuck.)

I was still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened to me as I crossed the Sunken Garden. It’s a wide-open space that on that day was just filled with sunshine. So I had good light when I looked down on my arm and saw something very small and insect-like crawling there. I flicked it off, and fled to the nearest men’s room.

When I had my pants down in the stall, I examined my crotch as best I could. To my dismay, I could spy several small blotches among the blond hairs. I had crabs. Not a lot of them—in retrospect I know now that if Beale and his boyfriend had them all over, it was infinitely more likely that he’d given them to me.

And this was in the days before the internet. I had absolutely zero resources to deal with the infestation. I was too mortified to go hunting in the library for information. I couldn’t call my parents and say “Hey do you know any remedies for crab lice? Oh no reason. Just wondering.” I didn’t have friends who’d know. I didn’t have a doctor and didn’t want to go to the campus clinic with anything so embarrassing.

But somehow I managed to figure it out on my own. I scraped off the full-grown lice that had burrowed into my skin. I noticed that there were adhesive little globes on some of my pubic hairs that probably were eggs; those either I detached with my fingernails, or plucked out the pube entirely and disposed of it in the toilet. Three times a day under a strong light I examined my crotch and thighs and scraped and pulled and felt like a dirty, dirty whore. I swore a vow—a sacred vow, witnessed by God himself—that I’d never have sex again. I felt grim and polluted.

My infestation was so light, though, that I’d pretty much rid myself of it completely in about four days. I kept my legs together and my pants up for another week while I nervously watched for more signs of the pesky little critters, paranoid at every itch. By the end of the month, though, I was so horny that I was once again throwing caution to the winds and putting out for anyone who stepped up behind me in the park at night. So much for that sacred vow, right?

My first time being The Other Woman in someone’s sordid affair came complete with my first STD and a sense of shame so complete I wanted to hide my head beneath the blankets for an entire month. Hey thanks, Beale!