That Article In Penthouse

When I turned fourteen my step dad came in one day, stinking of weed and beer, loosened his tie and said “you’re fourteen now, we need to get you some pussy.”

My step dad worked at the time for Burroughs Corporation selling check signers.  Those are machines that sign checks.  Yeah, I know, it sounds like something from Mad Magazine these days, like a cartoon profession or something, but I swear on everything that’s holy it’s what he actually did.  Apparently, and I didn’t know this at the time, if a company has to issue a large number of payroll checks they don’t actually sign them all by hand.  They use a check signer and the machine they use contains something called a signature plate - which is a watermarked metal stamp used to print the signature on each individual actual check.

He also smoked a lot of weed.

According to my mom he has also had a little dick.

If you think that’s too much information then we park our cars in the same garage.

My mother was never exactly a secretive person.

I blame the sixties for all of this actually.

It was really the weed that started the whole thing.

And the sixties gave us weed, so there you have it.

See?  The hippies started it all.

I rest my case.

Because my step dad had this friend named Phillip and he had a wife named Sandy so we always called them Sandy and Phillip, and the thing about this particular couple is they liked to smoke a lot of weed and listen to Eric Clapton, and my step dad wasn’t cool, not Eric Clapton cool anyway, but he kind of wanted to be, cause he had a giant inferiority complex, so he had this thing about running with people who were cooler than him, but he was a business guy and they were always broke, so they were always hitting him up for money.

That’s how he started fronting the larger weed purchases.

Sandy had some pretty big tits.  That’s pretty much all I remember about her.

But Phillip was probably the mellowest dude in the multiverse.  If you look up the words pothead or stoner in the dictionary you’ll find his picture.

I mean this dude was slooooooow.

He worked as a painter, not the artist kind but the kind who does your bathroom, because that’s pretty much the only kind of work you can do when you’re too stoned to string two sentences together.

He once ate a spider accidentally because it got mixed with the pizza dough before we put it in the oven and no one else would go near it after that.

You can’t stand between a pothead and his pizza even if you are a spider.  If you’re a spider in that situation then you should probably bring friends.

Phillip didn’t need friends.  He had weed and Eric Clapton and beige overalls that were splashed with latex paint and that was pretty much all he needed.

Their son Chad was only six years and he was a spoiled fucking brat.  None of the other kids wanted to play with him.

He was the product of their most recent sexual encounter because, to hear my parents tell it, Phillip couldn’t get it up anymore thanks to his constant marijuana usage.

My parents were like most parents, always telling me things I didn’t wanna hear.

But Sandy and Phillip came over all the time, every weekend in fact.

I used to write short stories back then.

They were boring and terrible.

I used to hide upstairs while my parents partied with Sandy and Phillip, hammering away on a manual typewriter.

It took forever.

I used to use the same ribbon over and over.  After a while the letters got kind of hard to read so I had to hit the keys extra hard.

That’s how I learned economy of language.

It’s also how I learned to get high.

Because of Sandy and Phillip and that damn manual typewriter.

I thought getting high would make me a better writer.

I remember being high with Phillip one day two years later and he brought me a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows. He handed it to me saying “don’t mind all that sperm floating on the top” and after that I couldn’t drink it because pot may or may not make you a better writer but it will make you gullible as hell even when you know your chain is being yanked. It lodges things in your head and you can’t jar them loose.

Phillip was slow but he did have his moments.

Let me tell you about the first time I smoked weed.

My step dad owned a silver Chevy Cavalier back then.  It was a pretty cool car for its time, just a perky square of metal with some get up and go.  It was the family car.  We had a station wagon before that.  I think he traded it in.  I still remember, years later, when that Chevy Cavalier finally died.  My step dad’s friend, a good old boy from Sand Mountain, who owed some weird kind of life debt to my step dad, after my step dad saved his life, by calling an ambulance, when the good old boy split his head open swimming at the Blue Hole, was the one who finally pronounced it dead.  I remember standing beside him when he did it, remember looking at the engine, remember seeing the steam coming up from the engine block in great big billowing streams.

“Done warped the head,” he said.

Anyway that was the car I got high in for the first time.

My step dad came home one day and said “let’s go for a ride.”

We used to go on rides a lot back in the day.

Back right before I started growing hair.

You know, down there.

His job involved a lot of what he called “preventive maintenance” calls.  See he worked in both sales and service so he got to do both at the same time, which made a lot of rational sense, and that’s probably why Burroughs Corporation, years later, did away with that position.

Because you know when something makes sense corporations almost never do it.

Don’t get me started on government.

Government is actually worse, if that’s even possible.

I learned a lot about that, years later, working for Wal-Mart, one of the largest corporations in the world.

I think sometimes that my step dad taught me a lot of important things in life without even meaning to.

The most important lessons in life usually happen that way.

Anyway he used to take me on calls.  It was a really cool thing for a kid to do.  We got to go to all the banks in his region.  See banks sign a lot of checks so when you service their check signers you get to be kind of a big deal.

It was a lot of fun walking into a bank as a kid and feeling important.

Because we were important.

Let me tell you something.

Banks make the world go round.

If you aren’t aware of that yet then you need to read Plato’s famous Allegory Of The Cave.  If you’ve read it already then you need to read it again.

Because it was written for people like you.

You know, people out of touch with reality.

People watching shadows on the wall and thinking they’re real.

But I digress.

Anyway you can’t cut a check without signing it.  And you can’t sign a check without a check signer.

It all comes down to signatures and it has since the day this country was founded.

There’s a reason the U.S. Constitution has a bunch of signatures at the bottom.

That’s how it was ratified.

And at the tender age of thirteen I got to walk around ratifying six figure checks.

I had the coolest childhood ever.

Seriously.

Anyway.

So we had this thing where I’d go on calls with him and when all the calls were done we had a ritual.  We always went to Pizza Hut, loaded our pie with all the extras, and then we played Pac-Man.  Back then we had to use quarters to play.

The whole point of this is that going on rides was fun.

It was a fun thing we always did.

So when he said let’s go for a ride I knew exactly what he meant.

He was gonna get me high.

I knew this because I’d been bugging him about it for a minute now.

See I knew he smoked a lot of weed.  Hell I even knew he sold it.

It was kind of hard not to know.

Phillip may have been slow but he was the only person in the multiverse who could roll a perfect joint.

I’m talking machine like precision here.

I knew cause I’d been watching him do it for a while.

He had this wooden box that he did it in.  He’d take five or six great big greasy buds and break them down one at a time with his fingers.  Man, that dude really took his time, kinda like Treebeard, anything that took a long time to do was worth taking a long time doing, or something like that.  Then he’d take the cardboard container from a pack of rolling papers and slowly separate the seeds, holding the lid of the box at an angle just so, so the seeds just rolled right out.  Then he scooped them up.  After that he kept breaking the bud down until he had everything just right.

Then he’d roll a joint using just the meat of his thumbs, rolling that fucker up real slow.

I never could figure out exactly how he did it.

But the joints were always perfect.

They looked like cigarettes.

Like they were machine rolled.

So I knew what weed was.

I knew what they’d been doing.

And I wanted in.

Every time I asked my step dad about it he’d just say “soon.”

So when he said “let’s go for a ride” he winked at me and I knew.

Stephen King says that writing is like telepathy.

And that’s what I’m doing now.  I’m speaking to you telepathically.

Remember that.

I’m going to lead you out of the cave and show you reality.

Just like Plato.

At least that’s what I thought I was doing.

With the weed and all.

I was trying to break on through to the other side.

You know, puncture the veil.

I was searching for a realization.

My step dad kept the joints that Phillip rolled in the front pocket of his button down shirt.

We were driving down Highway 153.

We were heading towards Soddy.

He held the steering wheel with one hand while he lit the joint with the other.  The joint was hanging between his lips.  The acrid smell of urine was still coming from his piss cup.

Oh yeah.  The piss cup.

I never told you about that.

See when you spend a lot of time on the road you’re constantly having to pull over and take a leak.

My step dad didn’t roll that way.

So he kept a cup in the car that he pissed in so he wouldn’t have to pull over.

Then when he came up to a red light he’d open the door on the driver’s side and dump it out on the road.

Saved him a lot of time, I guess.

So yeah when you rode in the front passenger seat you could pretty much always smell it.

Anyway he got the joint going real good and took a drag, just as we were going up over the hill.  We’d be hitting Boy Scout Road real soon now.

I could hear that Chevy engine growl.

I waited my turn.

He handed it to me just as we crested the hill.

“Remember to hold it in,” he said.

I remembered.  Or at least I tried to.

The first time you take a hit off a joint it’s always a bit of a learning process.  It’s just something that everyone goes through.

I pretty much fucked it up the first time.

“You gotta hold it in,” he said.

So I gave it another go.

And this time I hit pay dirt.

It was like a bunch of TNT had gone off in my lungs.

I started coughing like a fiend.

My step dad looked at me, grinning, his eyes a rheumy red over that porn stache of his.

“So, what do you think, kid?” he said.

I told him it was fucking fantastic.

Because it was.

I couldn’t even feel my legs. They felt like hot air balloons.

I think I laughed all the way down Boy Scout Road.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

Smoking weed was fun back then.

I laughed a lot back then.

I don’t smoke weed anymore.

I don’t laugh much either.

When I went back to school on Monday I told all my friends what had happened.  They’d never smoked weed before.

That would change soon.

It wasn’t long before I was famous.

At the end of the next year, my junior year in high school, we had to give an oral presentation in front of our English class for our final grade.

I did a how to speech.

I taught my junior class how to roll a joint.

And I got an A.

Anyway the thing about being fourteen is that I was beating off pretty much all the time.

I still remember the first time I did it.

It kind of happened by accident.

My step dad had given me a stack Hustler magazines.  Hustler was better than Penthouse because in the Hustler shots you got to really see their pussies.  They spread ‘em real wide and everything.  That was kind of a big deal back then.  I really enjoyed those magazines because the pages weren’t sticking together yet.

There was one centerfold in particular I kept coming back to.  She was a brunette with very white skin in a shiny green dress that just kind of fell off her shoulders.  I always had a thing for brunettes even though the first true love of my life turned out to be a blonde.  I guess it was an accidental animal thing.

Sex is nature’s cruelest trick.

Anyway I was just starting to grow hair at that time and every morning I woke up with a hard on.

But I hadn’t learned how to get off yet.

I’d heard about nocturnal ejaculations but I’d never had one (I’ve never had one to this day).

But it still felt good to just touch myself.

So whenever I got a spare minute alone I used to look at the girl in the green dress and touch myself.

Speaking of alone time I didn’t get a lot of that at first.  See we were kind of broke back then.  My step dad made pretty good money, so I was told, but ever since he married my mom he’d been paying off her parent’s mortgage (my grandparents on my mom’s side sucked with money too), not to mention the child support he was paying on the five kids he already had from his previous marriage.

We lived in a two bedroom duplex and when my step dad’s youngest son came to live with us it was me, him and my baby sister all crammed into one bedroom.

So if I wanted to do some touchy feely on my nether regions I couldn’t just drop trou and do it on the fly.  I had to plan ahead.

But I always made time.  Eventually I would make a whole lot more but I’ll get to that part in a minute.

So one Sunday night, through some amazing act of coincidence, I had the house to myself.

See my parents at the time were big bowlers.

Every Sunday night they went bowling.  They were in a league with one of my step dad’s buddies, some rich dude who owned a lot of rental properties in Hixson, Tennessee.

He probably never knew what an asshole my step dad was at the time.

Looking back that’s probably not a fair thing to say.

After all he was paying everybody’s bills so he had to be under a lot of pressure.

I’m sure my mom didn’t help things any.

Because every Sunday night they came home around midnight, screaming and fighting and banging on the formica countertops and waking the whole house up.  It usually went on for about two hours.  They didn’t even take smoke breaks which is saying a lot because they really sucked ‘em down.

That’s probably why my step brother decided to spend the night at his mom’s house.

And my baby sister was at Mamu’s house.  Mamu was our grandma.

So I was fourteen and I had the house to myself and I spent the entire night looking at that beautiful brunette with the white skin and touching myself.

When something magical happened.

I spurted all over her pretty face.

It was my first squirt ever.

And goddamn if it didn’t change my world.

After that I pretty much took over the upstairs bathroom.

The duplex we lived in had one and a half bathrooms.  The half bath was downstairs so the upstairs bathroom had the one and only shower in the house.

So when I planted my flag there it turned out to be kind of a big deal.

My step dad started giving me shit about it.  He’d sit back in his recliner, dipping celery in his Bloody Mary, and guffaw like a deranged fool, his face turning red before he finally descended into one of his world famous (by then) coughing fits (he’d die of COPD years later).

He’d talk about it every time Sandy and Phillip came over.

Sandy just grinned and said I was in heat.

It was pretty fucking embarrassing but I wasn’t about to let that hold me back.

I was on a mission.

Seriously I was beating off like four to seven times a day.

It was like a contest to see how many times I could get off in a single go.

To this day I maintain that that sort of male sexual energy is wasted on the young.

But it was what it was.

Sex is nature’s cruelest trick.

Anyway it all came to a head one day when I forgot to lock the door and my mom walked in on me by accident.

Talk about awkward.  I have no idea to this day how much she actually saw.

But I don’t think I’ve ever pulled my pants up that fast before.

I almost got my cock caught in the zipper.

Anyway my mom told my step dad about it.

And it was right after that that my step dad came home one day and said it was time to get me some pussy.

He said Sandy was going to hook me up.

I didn’t exactly argue with him.

Hell, he’d given me my first joint so why would this be any different?

I spent the next few days practicing and getting ready.

That’s the difference between being fourteen and being fifty-ish.

When you’re fourteen you get ready for your first sexual encounter by beating off more than you already are.

At the age of fifty you just kinda hold back and hope for the best.

So anyway Sandy had a friend who was a nurse and she’d read this article in Penthouse magazine about older women who break in younger men by taking off their pants and fucking them, only they worded it different, they called it “introduction to the sensual arts” or something cause it was an article for women. Go figure.  Anyway Sandy’s nurse friend, Kathy, decided that was something she wanted to do, somebody must’ve dropped my name and after that it was just a matter of getting everything set up.

So when my step dad said he was gonna get me some pussy he wasn’t just whistling Dixie.

He already had a date planned.

I remember getting ready and my mom telling me I needed to take a shower.

She said you had to be clean for this kind of thing.

Like she was reminding me to wear a jacket cause it’s cold outside or something.

I blame the 60’s.

Anyway.

I can’t remember what I wore that day. I know I had blue jeans on cause that’s all I owned.

I probably wore tighty whiteys too. It was all I had.

Looking back I probably should have gone commando but I was still new at this sort of thing.

I brushed my teeth.  I even brushed my hair.  It was kind of long back then.

You know, that 60’s thing.

I was waiting for my step dad to get off work so he could drive me to Kathy’s house.

When he finally got home he drove me to Kathy’s house.

We didn’t talk much on the way.

He just took a joint from his shirt pocket and gave it to me.

“You’re gonna need this,” he said.

Then he dropped me off outside her house. He didn’t even come inside.

I was on my own.

If you’ve ever been to Chattanooga, Tennessee the main thing you’ll remember about it is that we’ve got a lot of hills and there are a lot of little roads that wind their way through them.  Kathy lived in a big giant nest of hills with a lot of windy roads that snaked around.  It took a while to get there.

So there I was standing at the foot of a hill, looking up at her house.

I went to the door and I knocked.

That’s how I met Kathy.

I was there to put my dick inside her vagina but the thing was we’d never even met before.

So she stood there in the doorway.

She was wearing sweatpants.

It turned out she wasn’t wearing any panties underneath them.

That was probably a good idea, wearing something that comes off fast.

She had a T-shirt on too.

And she had long black hair like the girl in the centerfold but her skin looked a little darker.

That was OK.

She was in her twenties, I think.  At the time I didn’t even know what that meant.

She had average sized tits, B cups maybe.

I like B cups. I like A cups too.  I’m also pretty down with the all nipple thing.

I’ve never been a guy who was obsessed with big titties.

I like them all but I prefer the smaller ones.

I like to put them in my mouth and lick the nipples with my tongue.

Nibble on them sometimes.

Anyway.

She asked me to come in.

I came in.

The floor was a hardwood floor.  She wasn’t wearing any shoes.  She was just walking around in her bare feet.  She had pretty little feet with pink toenail polish.

Her soles were a little dirty.

But that was OK.

I wasn’t going to put them in my mouth anyway.

I never had a strong thing for feet to begin with.

I was mainly interested in her pussy.

But I was nervous as hell, just really uncomfortable inside my own skin.

She had the lights turned down low.

She told me sit down on the couch while she put a record on the record player.  She had a lot of records on a bookshelf by the wall.  It was a decent collection.  It was about the size of mine, maybe thirty or forty LPs.

That was a lot of music back then.  They went for ten, fifteen dollars a pop, and they took up a lot of space.

She pulled out a record with a kind of white cover.  There was a cowboy on it.

She started playing “Amy” by Pure Prairie League.

Aaaaammmeeeeee, what you wanna do?

I don’t know what Amy wanted to do but I was pretty sure that Kathy wanted to fuck.

Then she started singing along.

She sang good, in a real sweet singsongy voice.

She was trying to build a mood, having fun.

But I was nervous as hell.

A sign of things to come.

Still she was sweet.

And that was the main thing.

It was a good song.

I really liked it.

It’s not an easy thing to break the ice, even under normal circumstances.

And I’m kind of an icy person under the best of circumstances.

Then she asked me if I wanted a beer.

I said that sounded like a great idea.

She came back with the beers and sat down next to me, real close.

Then we smoked the joint that my step dad had given me.  Looking back I kind of think that scoring weed might have been her real motivation all along.

But who knows?

Anyway we started talking while the weed kicked in.

We talked about my writing.

I tried to explain it to her.

I told her that words were like to magic to me.

I wanted to use words in a way where when you used them they could mean a bunch of different things.

I said I was like an artist who painted pictures with words.

I told her I wanted to write songs one day.

But mostly I just wanted to write poems and stories.

We finished our beers.

Then she leaned in real close and said, “can I ask you a question?”

So I said “sure.”

“John Michael,” she said.  “Do you mind if I kiss you?”

Cause that was my name.  John Michael Grey, and people were always using my first two names together like it was all one thing.

And then she kissed me before I had a chance to answer.

It was my first kiss.

I thought it tasted kind of funny.

I felt her hand moving around on my leg.

Then she put it there.

After that things started happening kind of fast.

To this day I can’t remember how I got my pants off. I can’t remember if she did it or if I did it for her.

The hard on came easily enough though.

Hard ons are fun. They’re even more fun when someone else is looking.

She did some looking.

So did I.

Thing is I was still young enough to be embarrassed by a boner.

I didn’t have as much hair back then though.

She was still wearing all her clothes but I was naked from the waist down.

Then she reached behind my back and took of my shirt.

Then she took my shoes and socks off so I was completely naked.

I had a big boner now.

After that she started sucking my dick for a while.

It felt weird.  I’d never felt anything like that before.

I don’t think she was actually trying to get me off just then.

I guess she was just trying to get me all warmed up.

I couldn’t have got off anyway.  The sensation was all wrong.

When she got done she asked me if I wanted to go to the bedroom.

I said yes and she led me by the hand.

She had a great big bed.  I remember my step dad saying she had a boyfriend, some older guy, but they had what they called an open relationship.

I was thinking he’d probably fucked her on that bed.

Somehow all her clothes came off and she was naked too.

She got on the bed, on her back, and spread her legs.

Her pussy was glorious and it scared the hell out of me.

Then she pulled me to her and helped me put it in.

It was warm.

And wet.

She had a lot of hair going on too.  Hey, it was the 80’s.  That’s how we rolled.

The main thing I remember is that her pussy felt bigger than my dick.

I also remember the way she pressed down on the top of her vagina while I put it in.

But her pussy, it wasn’t like my hand at all. There was just a lot more room down there.

Plus I was just too nervous.

So I started fucking her.

It’s kind of weird how natural it felt.

She was there to teach me but she didn’t really have to teach me that part.

I fucked her for what felt like a long time.

I really gave it the good old college try.

I must have hammered away at that gorgeous scary pussy of hers for at least twenty minutes.

But I couldn’t get off.

I couldn’t cum.

And after a while I just finally gave up.

I rolled over.

Then she rolled over and looked at me.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t cum,” she said.

Yeah well that made two of us.

But what was there to say about it?

We barely knew each other anyway.

If I could do it all over again today I’d blow a fat load between her legs this time.

But that’s just how it goes.

You know, other fish in the sea, all that.

It was probably just as well anyway. 

I would’ve fallen in love with her if I had which was definitely not the point of that particular experiment.

It got really awkward after that and she called my parents.

We made small talk.

But mostly we just fidgeted, waiting.

A little while later my mom came and picked me up.

Yeah, my mom.

She didn’t come in.

She just waited outside in the car.

That was the weirdest car ride of my entire fucking life.

We didn’t really talk at all.

Still, I was glad to get out of that place.

It felt weird.

But cool too, in a way.

After all, technically, I wasn’t a virgin anymore.

Or was I?

It might seem like a split hair but if I didn’t come was it still an according to Hoyle bonafide virginity loss?  Was getting my dick wet good enough?

Those were the kind of questions that only I could ponder.

You know, it takes a philosopher to come up with some dumb shit like that.

I never told my step dad what happened.

I just told him I had a good time.

I didn’t wanna let him down.

Besides, I was still processing it.

I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it myself.

A few years later I got to meet Kathy again.  She came over to visit my step dad.  She was probably there to buy some pills.

It was about as awkward as you’d expect.  I was early twenty-ish and rude.

She sat on the couch watching HBO while I played on our new computer.

We more or less ignored each other.

It was actually the second of our two encounters that really needs a do over.

But life doesn’t work that way, does it?

I really wish it did.

She was an interesting person.

I just didn’t have the maturity at the time.

None of us do, really.

Sex is nature’s cruelest trick.

Harder than death even, and inextricably wound, because, unlike the oblivion of the grave, you still have to live with it.

And there’s no escaping its clutches.

Years later, when I’d read about hot teachers having sex with their younger male students, I could never understand what all the fuss was about.  I mean these guys were acting like they’d been abused or something.

I grew up on Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher.” I don’t know what they grew up on or if they even did.

In my opinion the younger generations have gone completely soft.

Hustler magazine used to rate pornos on a scale of “completely limp” to “fully erect.”

Today’s millennials are completely limp.

It’s just an entire generation of sad, limp little dicks, hanging there forlornly not knowing what to do and not knowing how to do it even if they did.

They think they can stand for something by including everything.

But it doesn’t work that way.

It doesn’t even make rational sense.

Besides they couldn’t bust a real nut if their life depended on it.

No matter how hard they humped.

The generational equivalent of my experience with Kathy.

Just so you know.

My step dad was trying to make a man of me.

And he did.

It just took about thirty more years then we both expected for it to happen.

But the world, in my opinion, could use a little more manliness.

That was the real take home for me, that day.

The hippies may have started it all but when it’s all said and done it will be the real men who have the final say.

Mark my words.

And I mean that in the nicest way possible.

I really, really do.

Because I’m still a hippy at heart in a way.

I’m just not afraid to bust a nut these days.

Ya know what I’m saying?

- for Kathy