Intimates: A Journey Towards Sacred Sexuality
Francis X. Kroncke
Copyright 2015 Francis X. Kroncke
PART 1: COURTING
CHAPTER 1
Do you believe in love at first sight? I know it happens all the time. A tune from his grandparents, sung to him since cradle-rocking days. Mark didn’t care to remember the band, not even hum the tune successfully. It just came. Amidst beer slopping over juggled mugs, in-between smoke barrages: cigarettes in a windowless room—all hopping and shimmying, jolting and swaying to the catchy beat...his heart beating, his mind beaten, this nameless woman who has just sprung into his life, just flipped out from the underside of a cloud: "Smoky Angel!" What else could his romantically polluted mind yield but anticipation of a heavenly delight? So she was—she who was to be ever was.
"Cilla." But he thought she said, "Silly." He was quick with a flirty tone and Come hither! glint in his enchanted eyes ,"Silly girl...do you believe in love at first sight?" But she didn't smile. She hadn’t caught his misnomer; just thought his gesture and tone a bit tipsy rude—Wasn't everyone by now? Then she hears it, Silly at the same moment Mark, sensing his failure, flushes crimson and grins idiotically. Mercifully, she gets it, steps closer to his ear, speaks loudly—"Cilla." Mark sparked back to hot stepping around her....Who could hear—not here on the dance floor! Yelling over the reverberating sound, not just sound, but hot sound—heated by the bodies, thirty or more couples, raising heat to shimmering lust...holding down the quaking lid, harnessing near-boiling-over—'til later! Instinctively, she had let out her name to tame him, to give him something: ancient shadows. She is unsettled by how tethered she feels by his look: green eyes—How many guys have green eyes?—drilling her, grilling her, interrogating every aspect of her being. More, she feels him ripping at her with his probing greens, trying to see through her clothes, see her naked. "Boys are like that!" But his eyes: a nakedness more than just sex—inside, roaming around, peering. ("Is this the end of Courting?") This is what now alarms her. Him, an enticing, entrancing siren—"Mark!" "Rider!" Two shouts. He pitches his voice a screech higher, piercing...he wants her to know his name: "MARK. RIDER."
The band breaks. It was that time. Would she come? Did she really think him silly?
Salvation came, "Cilla!" A female yell. He, still latched onto her face, only hearing, but in hearing, freed by the flash of her eyes in recognition. Again, "Cilla!" Enough quiet and dispersal of couples that she turns to her right and sees Lil waving her over. In a motion, which was too fast for him to be even stunned by, she grabs Mark’s hand and tugs him—to all others a seemingly unwilling catch being dragged: hooked and landed.
"Live long and prosper!" Duet sing-song. In greeting; a glass of molasses dark froth extended.
The two women laugh—a secret amusement of sisterhood: sorority. Mu Mu Chi.
What? on the faces of the males, collegians, not introduced, but sitting down in the booth as sharers of a dream, being there where each simply wanted to be—with a girl.
"Zav." No hand extended; a name and a head-bobbed check-off.
"Mark." Exact in ritual response.
Both wanted to ask, What? Meaning what was his intention? Could they help one another get there? The girls were giggling, not in a ditzy way. "Priscilla" so it dawns on Mark, what her proper name is.
"Do you guys...?" Cilla broke from Lilith. But it was clear that the two hadn’t met before.
Lil had just recently taken up with this guy Zav—an odd-ball in Cilla’s eyes. Lil could have had so many, just anyone she wanted. She had that something all the guys wanted.
Cilla knew she was better looking than Lil. Had fuller breasts. Was a desired model for "Advanced Drawing Studio"—nude enchantress! Yet, Lil had that something even women noticed—something which drew men...Maybe women?... to her. Like warming at a winter’s fireplace—the innocent image which routinely popped into a passer-by's minds—the warmth she exuded.
"Mark." Teasing, tugging: "O, green eyes!" Lil’s snatching voice draws him away, although he wasn’t aware. "What’s your major?"
Anatomy! flew from his silent lips, for he had kidded himself for the last two years that all he wanted to truly, in detail, study was women's bodies. "Accounting," flew from his slightly parted lips.
"Ooo," Lil sarcastically intoned, "no wonder you and Zav haven’t met. He’s a poet, did’ja know it?"
"Bad," Zav groans.
"Bad," Cilla mocks, twisting the word for another meaning; her head tilting as her eyes flare open-wide to express her mocking shock. "You’re Bad, Zav!" Eyes flashing possession of hidden secrets...Zav is annoyed, rankled that she knows.
Bad? Mark glances warily at Zav. What kind of Bad?
After dropping off the girls—His date, my what?— Mark is at that awkward moment when guys who know girls who know each other wonder whether or how or why they should get to know each other.
Zav just glances at Mark: "Night," and turns towards the parking lot.
"Night," Mark returns.
As happens, both end up, a half-hour later, at the same bar, Fear and Trembling—aptly named for its student clientele—although, when once surveyed by Professor Ibar from Soc., few knew its source either in terms of philosophy or inebriated parody.
Not ironically, the guys were at opposite ends of the bar.
They had noticed each other right away.
Each just drank.
Zav, port wine.
Mark, piss beer.
Only when it was shut down, did they accept the moment. Outside, leaning against a the bar's wall in the parking lot, Mark waited because he needed a hurried ride back to campus to beat the night-watchman. If not this Zav, Then I’m screwed!
Instead of chatter, Zav points, directs: "Get in."
He drives the mile over to his off-campus apartment: an upper-classman privilege. Dark and non-descript. A basement: full length of house. Windows with slight moonlight at headband height. Snores. Roommate. Zav hits a faint light exposing the outlines of a couch and chairs and smudges of other entities, but little enters Mark’s mind, he just sits and waits. Zav is, within a drink-dulled moment of awareness, from lamp glow to beacon from fridge to handing him a beer: pale like he likes it...both sit.
"Fuck the drive." Which means, Too tired to drive to campus. Sack out on the couch.
Mark accepts and affirms with a flick of the bottleneck-tapping-forehead gesture outward to his host: drunken code.
Both drink, slow-mo quietly, for several moments.
"Bad?"
A long fuse before—chuckled, "Bad!"
Liquid minutes...they drop their empties and sack out.
Mark wakes to a harshness of sound before the smell of eggs and bacon rouse him.
"Three-fifty. That covers it all, right?"
"All? You’ll never be able to cover it all." Bitter. Nasty.
"Fuck you, Zav." Spitted.
Mark snatches a blur, big and bulky, a blur tall and thick, a guy with a duffel bag slung, snatches it as it is sucked up and out by the open door. Stomps on the up-stairs.
Mark—adjusting trousers, putting on shirt, shaking a leg, yawning—moves the two strides into the kitchen which appears as simply one sector of the huge basement: three interior doors. "There," finger-points Zav, knowing the need for morning watering. The others must be bedrooms. Set out: two plates, even a pitcher of OJ. Mark follows his call to wash up to wake up...reappears, hungry as he is, as the toast pops.
They eat it all—all the eggs: eight, scrambled. All the bacon: a package. All the toast: half a loaf. Swill coffee mugs of OJ. They eat methodically and don’t talk. Zav reads t
he morning paper. Slips sections to Mark...Mark wasn’t a morning paper reader. He just ate, feeling the food enter his belly, felt it as it encountered malingers of intoxication, those renegade molecules of alcohol which hide out waiting for morning—they wait to ambush marauding enemies of passion and delight, these sobering aliens who prophetically arrive at first light to calm the land, to imprison the sleepy libertines of uninhibited indulgence...indigestion! He eats knowing that he will be pained by gas and be seeking to fart his way all morn—Escape!
"Cilla’s quite the looker."
So, it began. Their conversation.
They talked about the girls. Checking each other out by the nuance of question and the betrayal of answer. They liked each other. Not that they were like each other, this they quickly grasped, but that they could each be mostly themselves before the other.
"Howie," pointing towards the door, "that’s why I gave him the boot. Couldn’t keep himself out of my space." Finger-tapping his head. Checks Mark’s response: accept that?. "Plus, he’s flunked out, anyways." Zav curves a lip of mirth. Mark nods his head, minutely swaying an indifferent "Okay."
"Plus," in a third and final comment, rising as he delivers it, "dislocated his shoulder. Lost his mega-ball scholarship."
Driving back to campus. Faithful Mustang. Ancestral steam-shifter. Winter beaten: rust freckled. Passably clean. Mark stashes sobering mental notes. He couldn’t afford a car. Could he hook up with Zav to date Cilla? Answer: "Why don’t you pick up Howie’s fumble? Save me time and money." Meaning, searching for a new roommate.
"How Bad?"
Zav laughs—that gleeful, naughty-teenage laugh which drives a parent nuts.