I originally wrote this in 1995 as an exercise, just to see if I could write something like this. How well I succeeded is something you'll have to decide for yourself. There are some circles in which this sort of thing is considered a major turn-on, and I was close to those circles for a while...until I slid back into the quarter-gigabyte of corpulence spread across this site and fell asleep again. This may not seem to have any place in this section, but hey...I didn't put this section together to offer my drinking buddies yet another source of jerk-off stimulation.

I've actually been told by a couple of female visitors that it's actually a pretty good story. Maybe it's just my own insecurity about my own masculinity, or maybe this really is just the most scumsuckingly awful emotional pornography. But for whatever reason, I can't read this today - in 2011 - without squirming.

There's something to be said for a good fuck. But eventually that's not enough. There's got to be more. Tonight there is more.

"I want Niagara Falls, Dee."

"God, you had that last week."

No kidding. I'd never seen anything like it. Just on a lark we decided to walk up the hill to the park, a half-mile downhill trek. Strangest sense...when we got there, we just sat on the bench and looked at the clouds. The day hung like heavy smog, the kind of atmosphere that calls up nasty memories of childhood...the intense loneliness of a toddler alone on dog day afternoons. We looked at each other and walked back up the hill.

Breathing heavily by the time we reached the top of the hill, we heard the sounds of domestic aggro from the second floor apartment kitty-corner to mine. Dee slapped me lazily on the small of the back, nudging me in the direction of the park. Down we went. And the rain started to fall...a hard, cleansing rain, the kind that pulls the shit out of the air and leaves the stink of must. We just walked, not saying a word, not looking at each other, drenched and breathing damp, crisp air. Appetizer air. Hors d'oeuvre air. By the time we reached the park a second time the sun was shining; we flopped on the soaking wet grass and lip wrestled, holding each other hard, clenching at the gut so hard, our knees jammed so tightly together that they had large red tattoos when we finally came up for air. It was almost as if we were trying to even up the electricity, bring the rest of our bodies in synch with the mild fatigue in our legs. And it was very uncharacteristic for us. We always seemed to regress into infantility around each other, but this was something quite different...not a drop of tenderness to this.

"That really felt animal," I said, staring straight ahead.

"Yeah," Dee responded. "I liked it."

I could feel myself sag with those words. I couldn't put my finger on why. It was a felt sense of having done something sinful. Not just spiritually wrong, but unnatural. And as much as I realized that most of that feeling was about old bullshit, I also knew that at some level there was some truth to it. I stood up and stretched. I wanted to go home; damn the noisy neighbors. I just wanted to be someplace familiar. I felt awful.

I reached out my hand to pull Dee up...she looked up at me. She wasn't taking it. She knows when I'm down on myself and doesn't take well to it. She got up on her own and we started walking.

We didn't talk about much, not much of anything, my favorite kind of talk. But our smalltalk had never had this quality to it. I felt like I was phased out of my body somehow, a couple of inches back and outside of my own skin, and full of a calm tension. It was almost as if the electricity of our kisses had literally shocked me out of my own body. The pull of the t-shirt on my nipples felt as though the nerves were feeling the pressure on my side instead of in front of me. My legs felt as if they were barely moving for the strides we were taking. From the moment I sat up I had been aware of this tension in the pit of my stomach, like a string unravelling, and a feeling of being somehow harnessed, chained in some way. It was that moment of tension just before falling in love...oh, how too well I knew it...but it had never stayed with me like this before. I always fell over the other side of that tension into hoopiness and hearts and flowers. This time it was hanging around like a stray cat grateful for a free meal.

And I didn't feel like holding Ross like a mother the way I usually did when he got like this. So we walked.

The drunken assholes in the upstairs apartment had settled down by the time we got back. We climbed the stairs instead of taking the elevator, and the second we got in the door I knew that within all of five minutes and we'd be back down that hill again. Ross made a couple of sandwiches and said nothing. I had a pee and lit a cigarette.

When Ross started pacing I knew that was my cue to suggest another walk. Exercise seems to be the only thing that gets him out of this shitty space. The apartment was clean but he was prowling, looking for things to pick up and put away, looking for anything to get out of that feeling. In the space I was in I felt like I could reach right into his soul and touch that feeling, and it was horrible...murky, endless, and no place I wanted to be. No place I'd let a friend stay if I could help it.

"Come on, Ross," I said, "let's grab some ice cream somewhere."

"Sure. Why not?"

I took him by the hand -- it surprised me how firmly I did it -- and literally pulled him out the door.

I hadn't noticed anything but good feelings coming up the hill, and none of the trips we'd made down the hill seemed special, but this trip scared me, trembly-scared, and that nice spacey feeling was gone in about two blocks.

Nothing brings me out of my shit like someone in trouble. And I could tell Dee wasn't doing too well. I couldn't figure for the life of me why she wanted to take another walk, but when she grabs me that forcefully I don't say no, and I'm usually right not to. By the time we'd gone four blocks I could see her knees trembling as her feet hit the pavement, and I couldn't think of what to say. It was like a wall had formed between us that I couldn't get through, and I wished at that moment that I was back at the apartment. Suddenly the sun felt like an indictment. What an odd choice of words. All I could think to ask was

"Are you all right?"

"I think so," she said. We both knew it was bullshit.

"Let's sit on the curb."

I helped her down. I could feel the rough concrete most uncomfortably on my ass, but the feeling was only momentary. The second her butt hit the curb her whole body started to shake. The look in her eyes was one of stark terror. I held her tightly; her body shook so hard under the hot sun that it vibrated my own. Sweat poured off of her and she turned pale.

"I don't know what's happening to me," she mumbled. Her teeth were clenched.

"It's a panic attack. Are you scared?"

"Um." she replied."

"Are you afraid of something happening to you, or just weirded out?"

"I think I'm just weirded out," she replied.

"Good. It's a panic attack. But it's not all in your mind; it's all in your body. It's probably nothing serious...it's like a seizure and usually you feel better afterward. Just hang in and I'll be here."

I just sat there and held her. She was literally pouring out energy of some sort. We were both dry as a bone by the time we got back to the apartment; she was so wet with sweat in five minutes of sitting on the curb that her t-shirt was soaked. I wondered if it might have been the sandwich...I'd seen people get sick with food poisoning in minutes after eating spoiled meat...but the next words out of her mouth assured me that it wasn't the sandwich.

"I'm losing my body, Ross. I'm scared."

It was no comfort at all having him hold me, not like it usually was when I was scared. This felt deeper than anyone could comfort. It was a sense of being utterly, totally lost, of not having any idea what I could do about it, and not knowing if I'd ever come back. I looked down at my arms. The perspiration was so thick it was running off my wrists in a steady drip, but it was as though it wasn't my sweat, wasn't my body.

I needed to know how bad this could get. Maybe I should get to a hospital. I relaxed into the shaking as far as I could, feeling my consciousness slip farther and farther away from my body. It felt as though half the nerves in my wrists were resting on the pavement, the other half scattered in front of me...I couldn't tell where my body was. It was delirium. I relaxed a little more and suddenly felt my soul literally slipping out through my back...and something even scarier. I could sense a hand, a large brown hand, waiting to catch my soul if I let it fall just that much farther, and I knew beyond any doubt that that hand was not going to let me go.

I knew who owned it, too. An image flashed through my head from a night about five years ago, the night I'd been grabbed in the college parking lot by those two men and nearly raped, both of them doing time thank God and thanks to me, and while I had always felt glad to see them put away more for what they'd done for others -- they hadn't hurt me, not really -- suddenly it dawned on me that I had almost been raped!

I felt as if a wave had passed over me. All at once I knew why I'd been scared and sweating. And it was over, and I knew I'd suffered far more from what had happened that night than I had ever wanted to admit, especially to myself.

It's funny how memories work sometimes. The feel of Ross' shirt in the palm of my hand at that moment...I don't ever remember feeling anything softer. And when I'm with him, and he wears that shirt, I can come so close to that same feeling, and not even brand-new fleece feels that soft to me.

In no more than a second I saw her face change and soften, and the shaking stopped, and she just turned and drove her face into my chest and howled like a child in shock. I'd never seen a grown woman cry like that. And here we were, on a suburban streetcorner, at four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, me holding this wet, bawling woman, completely unsure what to do except to rock her like a small child and tell myself that whatever the reason for it, she must have needed this, and I just hoped like hell I wasn't the cause of her pain. I half knew I wasn't, but I wasn't exactly sure.

It felt exactly like those dreams in which you look down at yourself and realize that you're totally naked in the middle of everybody you know.

Tonight there is more.