Chewing Ass

For Love has pitched his mansion
In the place of excrement.
Yeats

The humiliations of breeding are probably a good thing for a costumed deceiver as gifted as Homo sapiens. How does a male explain to a female that his lust for her rump has nothing whatever to do with her pooper? I'm not sure the male explains it well to himself: some guys do go for the pooper: probably merely by synecdoche. We are not after all nearly so clever as we tell ourselves.

I woke up a moment ago, 1 AM, with an image bubbled up from my memory competing with my bladder and my erection for my attention: Roger, all of us exceedingly drunk and rowdy, waddling on his knees, behind a cute blond and biting her ass as she tried to talk to her boyfriend.

We were sixteen, seventeen years old and ensconced at a table in our favorite tavern, the Park View on Sunrise Highway in Rockville Centre, Long Island. We normally took up three quarters of the bar. I don't remember why we were at a table that Friday night, tossing down pitcher after pitcher of brew. But it was crowded, unusually so. And there were girls there: unusual to find a female under fifty in that dump on any night.

Actually Roger may have been eighteen by that time (he was the only one in our click a year ahead of us in school. Dick too was older, but was never-the-less in the same class with us and his kid brother, Charlie. Brian was the only one younger: a class behind: two and one half exceptions in our group.) Neither was Roger really my friend. I'm increasingly certain that he hated me and I certainly never liked him. But when groups of friends join, wittingly or no forming a click, we accept friends of friends as well as friends. I am sure that every one of us was leaking down his leg at the view of this (and several other) delectable girls with their buttocks practically at our eye level. But it was Roger who actually got off his chair, got down on his knees, knumbled up behind her, stuck his face smack between her buttocks, smack through her skirt, and started chewing on her like one of those trick sets of false teeth. Roger was clowning it because he'd pull his head back so we could all see his jaws extended as much like a shark's as he could manage.

The girl ignored him for long minutes. Then she twitched and smoothed her skirt as though Roger were just a fly, or perhaps a splinter on a post in the stable. The way she brushed her backside, you'd swear she didn't know it was more than a fly. But that was impossible. Roger looked like he was trying to return to the womb through the back door. Finally the girl changed position, angling her butt more toward the bar than toward our table. Roger stumped after her: comically rapid for a man on his knees, like a pecking chicken in an old movie.

It was simply unbelievable to the rest of us howling clowns that the girl didn't turn and look. It was even more unbelievable that the girl's companion never sensed her discomfort. No one looked down. The bar was oblivious. The standing crowd was oblivious.

Roger got rubicund when he drank. But I never saw Roger more red-faced than when his face plunged in and out of that girl's ass as though he would come through his nose. Roger's scars were on spectacular display. When Borny had put the Merc rod through the telephone pole, four out of five got cut to ribbons, but Rog had the record: like forty stitches on his broad forehead alone. Rog had had shotgun. It was Borny's rod but for some reason it was Roger's mother that had the cops deliver the bill for the pole before she even knew why her son hadn't come home yet. The cops could have had it in for him for years.

The girl's wiping at her ass became more frequent, and finally she guided her date deeper into the bar. Another blond ass took her place as rapidly as a seat on the subway gets filled at rush hour. Roger went right back at it.

Within a year our regular dive switched to being the Downstairs, between Sunrise and Merrick, more on Merrick Road than on Sunrise. I think Roger was a prime instigator. He wanted to be among the college crowd. Parkview people were blue collar. The last time I saw Roger was maybe ten years later. He seemed to be half-working there at the Downstairs. He didn't bother to acknowledge that he had seen me. His scars glowed. But I saw no new scars: no signs that any boyfriend had ever taught him manners with a bar stool.

In college myself and back at the Downstairs on a home visit I saw a guy who entered the bar and left with a stunning coed within minutes. I'd never seen him before and hadn't really been paying attention, but I was swiftly informed of what had just been witnessed by anyone with their eyes open. Somebody in my circle knew the guy, knew his modus operandi, and reported it. The guy goes into a bar. He rapidly inventories the females. Selects the cream. Eliminates those conspicuously in a tete-a-tete. Goes straight up to female candidate #1. "Hello. I'm Soandso. There's something I love and I'm very good at what I love. I love to nibble clit, feel the woman respond, give pleasure ... I put ..."

The story went on that the guy would get very detailed as to his technique, but if what I had half-observed was any indication, that stunner had yanked him out the door before he had gotten past "good."

In 1956 I sold significantly more hot-dogs than anyone else by being loud: loud, rhythmic, clever. The following year's champion was quiet, secretive, intimate. So though it wasn't me, I already knew how effective the technique of the Downstairs' cunning linguist could be. The story continued that if he struck out with girl #1, he went straight to girl #2. In the unlikely event that he had exhausted the assembly without a catch, he'd go straight to bar #2.

Roger must have seen the guy, known about him. I wonder if Roger ever learned any indirection.