Lesbians

A Boy's First Experience With Lesbians
My first experience with Lesbians, I didn't even know they were Lesbians. I was a teenager and they lived next door to us. It was a mother and daughter, the mother in her fifties and the daughter in her early twenties. I was fifteen. God, what an age for a boy; the perfect age. At fifteen my body was perfect, my hair was corn-silken white to the point they called me "Cotton," my face was baby-cute, my eyes were bluer-than-blue, I was always smiling, and I had no fear of attention; in fact, I demanded it. I loved most getting attention from girls; especially those who fit my young appetite: dark hair long or short, glasses a plus, tall or short didn't matter; my most steady demands were for a certain look in her face, a slim-slim waist, breasts worth trying to see, legs worth trying to sneak a peek up them as high as I could get, and extravagant bottoms (that's what my class called a girl's hips, and Jesus X, I can't believe I'm using the word "hips"; how out of the loop is that? I'm probably trying to be politically correct. I'm sorry, ladies, but the word "ass" just fits what y'all have behind you to a "T" with me. Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer saw the license plates that were personally tagged "The Ass Man"? It drove him mad because he considered himself the real Ass Man; he felt no one appreciated a woman's ass like he did. Ended up the owner of the Ass Man license plates was a cosmetic surgeon who specialized in tits and ass and meant it in terms of his profession and not in terms of his likes.)

The young woman in her early twenties who lived with her mother next door to me fit several items on my fifteen-year-old sexual appetite. She had long dark hair, a slim-slim waist, breasts worth trying to take a peek at, and legs I didn't have to wonder about because the first time I saw her was when they were moving in and she was wearing shorts. Holy Fires of Hades, that was enough to set me on the prowl like a good little wolf-boy. OK, the mother didn't move me at all. She looked more like a man than she did a woman. Even her name, Jesse, was mannish to me. She wore pants all the time and wore her hair cropped short, like Gertrude Stein cut her hair during what she called her Caesar look. One shirt she used to wear looked just like the shirt the postman wore and I got to thinking of her as a postman.

At that time, and this is due to the era I'm talking about, I really didn't know what the hell a Lesbian was. I'd heard of Lesbos because I read poetry and my grandmother had a copy of Edith Hamilton's encyclopedic effort at cataloging Greek fables, so I knew about Sappho. But Lesbos was just a Greek island to me and Lesbians were inhabitants of that island. This mother and daughter were ordinary women to me. So Jesse looked like a man; so did my aunt who was a deputy sheriff out in California. In fact, my aunt really did look like a deputy sheriff; this woman really was a woman who just looked like a man; walked like a man, too; she wasn't sexy at all.

One night, with my feelers for sexuality waving around searching whatever sexual things were in the air, I happened to stop at our dining room window, the window that faced the mother and her daughter's house. My feelers were feeling heat. I pulled one of the Venetian blinds up and looked straight across and into the open window of a room in their house. Just as I focused, the light in the room came on and in came the daughter. Holy Yipes, I yelled inside, my heart palpitating like a treat-expecting pooch, my hopes so high I was all penis by then, my penis the commander of my full-throttled ship of state and my brain the sailor...or may I dare make a pun?...my brain was the seaman.

I was on fire like an astronomer is when he's got access to a high-powered telescope and my telescope was fixed on my early-twenties good-lookin' girl neighbor. She was wearing jeans and a silk blouse. Soon, swhoosh, the blouse came off. Ach die leber, Augustin! Jesus, a woman in a bra. That wasn't new to me; I ogled the bra ads in my mother's women's magazines. Then she unzipped her jeans and hop-stepped about getting out of them. A WOMAN IN HER BRA AND PANTIES. (Yes, Otto Preminger was right in that great movie, Anatomy of a Murder--score by Duke Ellington, in case ya didn't know--"panties" was a word that would put a blush on the collected's face in those bland years of blouses buttoned up to the neck and skirts, even the tight ones, flapping down to girls's ankles. Panties were called "unmentionables." Jesus. How stupid Puritanism was.) A woman in her bra and panties was pretty hot for this 15 year old and by then my ding-a-ling was out and being rang (any Chuck Berry fans left alive?)(I AM CERTAINLY ALIVE AND I'M A WORSHIPPER OF CHUCK BERRY, one of the real inventors of American rock and roll, which has to stick to the blues to be true rock and roll. The stupid Liverpool fakirs and the London School of Economics imitators just couldn't get the blues down and that's why their shit and the shit that follows ain't really ROCK and ROLL--but I'll save this rant for a later day!).

Next thing I know, the god-damn mother came in the room. Oh shit, the mother was in her bra and panties, too--big panties, too; grandma panties! God. My ding-a-ling's clapper dropped dead and dull for the moment. I began to feel guilty about what I was doing. I was a Peeping Tom. Shit, I could be arrested and taken over to the county hoosegow (juzgado, which meant a panel of judges in Spanish and that panel of judges meant jail most of the time you went before them). I kept on looking. I was just about to tuck tail and back away when the mother reached over and undid the daughter's bra. Hope reared eternal again. Oh MY GOSH-a-rootie, the daughter's breasts were naked. I was beginning to hyperventilate. I hadn't seen naked breasts since flat-chested Elizabeth Mulkey let me see hers one night when I was French kissing her as I had her pinned to the backseat of my best friend's dad's new Buick Century on a double date to a drive-in movie that past summer. Ka-chong-ga! Now the mother was massaging the daughter's breasts. Jesus, she was really going to town on them; damn, tweaking her pink nipples, the daughter acting as though she was scratching an itch with her hips as she bucked them back and forth against her mother's leg. Then, OH HELL, the mother leaned over and kissed the daughter; hell, full on the lips, HELL, holy Cristo, she was doing to her daughter what I had been doing to Elizabeth Mulkey at the drive in movie last summer.

I needed to get some advice from somebody about what I was watching, but, shit, no I didn't quit looking. Oh, hell, no, not me when I was fifteen and all wrapped up in my penis's finest philosophical feelings.

They moved to the big bed, the mother pushing her daughter back on the bedspread, still kissing away, except, HOLY CRABS, now mom was sliding her hand inside her daughter's sweetly innocent panties; OH MY HOLIEST OF ELECTRIFIED CATS! the mother had pushed the daughter's panties down over her knees and now she was...OH MY SON OF A BITCHIN' GD Mama Mia, she was--shhhhhhh! I'm whispering, she was fingering her daughter's nanner-nanner. I was sweating; and so was the daughter; I could see it glistening on her face. Shit, this was getting the ding-a-ling being rung again--it was ringing like a house was afire! Call out the firedogs. The Hounds From Hell. Save me, I was praying to the God who lived in the attic of our house, save me from this; I'm too young for this. But I kept my focus and I kept my palpitating heart and hand and I kept all bells'a ringin'. My eyes were glued to that slit between those Venetian blinds, straight across at that postman stuffing mail into that mail slit. And then...

And then...I learned what a Lesbian was, though, don't get me wrong, I still didn't know they were Lesbians. When mom replaced her fingers with her face, that's when I experienced my first Lesbianism. OH MY HOLY SANDALS OF THE BUDDHA! Mom looked to me like she was trying to lick her way inside her daughter, through what the Romans called the vestibule of love. The daughter looked like an angel laying their getting "eaten" alive by her mother. I was right in time with them and after it was over and the towels had cleaned up and mom and the daughter had turned off the lights, I lay awake all that night going over and over what I'd seen.

When I rather out-of-breath told my best friend about it a couple'a days later, he looked at me like I was a peabrain. "Jesus, man, they're a couple of Lezzies." "Lezzies?" "Yeah, man, Lez-be-ins, women that F women." "No shit." "Damn, I thought you were hip, man. I gotta give you this Havelock Ellis book I've got. That's where I learned all of this."

Havelock Ellis was a revealing treat when I later read him. But then I could write a couple'a paras about old Havelock Ellis. He introduced one of my female dream women, Hilda Doolittle, to Sigmund Freud. She became she said "Freud's pupil" and Freud called her his "analysand" and she wrote one of her better poems about it, Tribute to Freud, and Hilda was so f-ing sexual she was bi, couldn't resist screwing men, yet, she was only faithful to Annie Winifred Ellerman "Bryher" from 1918 when they met in Paris until H.D. kicked the bucket in 1961 when she was nearing 80.

I find that Lesbians treat me very nicely. They don't seem to be afraid of me, which gets me easily in amongst them. I think it's because I'm not an aggressive male. Also, I show a lot of female traits since I was raised manless by three very witchy women. I had a father, but, hell, he was mostly dead asleep under the evening newspaper when I ever saw him. Two of the sexiest women I know now are a Lesbian couple. In fact, a couple of years ago they married each other holding their own wedding, leading their own ceremony, singing their own wedding songs, and then having a wedding reception that was, Hellfire, the cat's meow. One of them, a truly god-awfully beautiful woman, is the lipstick. The other one, who I fell in love with the minute I met her, acts the mannish role, though to me she is overwhelmingly more sexually attractive than the lipstick.

Gay men. Well now you come to a whole other story. Since I'm a male, shit, I have to admit, I can't make myself get "into" men as sexual objects. I'm in too much competition with hetero men to want to F them with love. Yet, a lot of my favorite authors are Gay, or Homosexualists, as Gore Vidal called himself and his friends: Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Somerset Maugham (what a hell of a writer Maugham was), Allen Ginsberg (I've got to read Howl again; what a poem that son of a bitch is), John Rechy (City of Night, one of the great naturally written books I've ever read), Larry Durrell (whew, what books that Alexandrian Quartet), and probably D.H. Lawrence, though a lot of these guys went both ways. I don't think I could go both ways; I find women my natural objects of love. Men. Huh. I'd rather do a sheep, I think. An older white trash lad who was in my class in high school owned his own sheep ranch--why he was trying to graduate high school I never heard--he chewed tobacco 24/7 and he could drink an R.C. Cola with a plug packed tight in his cheek, swallow the R.C. and then expectorate the tobacky juice. "Sure, I gits 'em mixed up occasionally, but it don't matter; I like the tastes'a both of 'em." And this guy admitted to us younger dudes one day that a female sheep's female organs were very close to a human woman's. Then another kid said he'd seen this guy do one of his sheep one day when they were all getting drunk as Lords out there on the old cracker's homemade wine. "Yup," he drawled, "I do all my female sheep; I'm their big daddy." He let out a chain of chaw-stained laughter spitting out over his chaw-stained brown teeth. "Cain't knock 'em up either. I got one I call Honey she's so lovin'." I recall somewhere in T.E. Shaw's Seven Pillars of Wisdom that the older Arab men he observed had trouble deciding between the sheep and the young boys.

I must admit I once had a deeply involved experience with a Lesbian lady who at the time happened to be my boss. She quit her very high-paying job to move to the country and live with her lover, but the night before she left at a going-away party, we fell in love. We were locked together most of that party, confessing love, kissing, feeling each other, moving against each other, wanting to meld. And then her lover came in, looked for her, found her, and started cursing her with the foulest of gutter-born venacular. This wonderful wide-eyed young lady who looked like a living peach to me, came running to me crying, and falling against me, she asked me to not let her go with her lover, still meanly standing back a ways hurling her hatred at me.

I have tried to imagine what would have happened had I not let her go with her lover that night. That's just what I did. Was I a coward? Was I too sane? Would I have been insane to have taken this sweet young woman away from her lovingly planned Lesbian future? I to this day can't imagine how it would have come out. I guess it would have been like if I had had a chance to make it with Hilda Doolittle back at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century; say I'd have met her the day she met Bryher Ellerman in Paris. I've never imagined what it would have maybe been like. I can be pretty sure it wouldn't have lasted. None of my heterosexual hooking ups lasted. On the other hand, it might have been the love that would have lasted had I carried through with her request. She certainly is still crying against my inner chest and a pang goes through me every time of every day I think of her.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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Did You See: That embarrassing speech the "president" made on teevee last night? How the hell does this fool accrue a 29% approval of his Punch and Judy Show? Except in this Punch and Judy show, Punch uses a real club and belts the hell out of every son of bitch who disagrees with him? Show fear and this Punch loves you; show no fear and he loads you in a small plane and shoots your ass right in the face. Our "president" and his crooked as hell family hates all people, not just blacks. I think most of all, this little louse hates himself the most. You think he's projecting?

Mexicans immigrating to the U.S. (all of that western US used to belong to Mexico) has been going on for over a century. Why all the hullabaloo over it now? Of course, since everything this lamebrain says is a f-ing lie, all the gobblygook and weirdo solutions to this "phony" problem are pipedreams coming out of his Pappy's old unplugging and hemorrhagic ass--biometric identification! What the hell do you do with legitimate Mexican-Americans? Do they have to get a biometric ID, too? Does that mean white folks get away with f-ing murder because they were born with the correct biometric skin? What about the influx of Indian, Bangledeshi, and Pakistani immigrants? What about all the Asians flocking overhere? Do we need to brand them, too? Holy Cripes in Holy Hell, this fool is fiddling without a god-damn fiddle while this country slides further and further down the slopes of glory and right into the boiling shit of Chaos.

Stupid friggin' idiots who make these off-the-wall laws and then break them all right f-ing naked in front of us while they're smoking illegal Cuban cigars, eating meals that would give most of us gout, partying hearty with whores and gay banger-boys--God-damn, I have to go GROWL at the friggin' moon. Jesus, am I insane? or are the rest of you insane? Eugene O'Neill in one of his plays goes to a freakin' insane asylum and stares into the eyes of an insane brother and he says, and I paraphrase, "Shit, you bastard. I see you laughing at me. You know, don't you? I'm the crazy bastard aren't I?" Meaning, once you're in the nuthouse, you can act any damn well you please, including pissing and shitting all over yourself--hell, one of the warders will hose you down and get you clean in no time and then you can just sit frozen like a block of wood for a couple of months--that total peace of mind only the insane know.

aninsanegrowler
for The Daily Growler