CHAPTER 12
The guys celebrated their Twentieth with a vigorous hand-shake, a mile-wide grin, a thumping brotherly hug, and a staccato chorus of "Zowie!"s. It was as Mark would have designed their companionship, if he could have put it on a spreadsheet—Mark and Zav as offsetting, balancing columns of solid data, making for a profitable bottom-line. But they didn’t talk about it that way. Simply went about, "Twenty! Twenty!"
Being Twenty meant getting unFixed. In itself, a nervous expectation. For it meant more than "Turning the spigot back on!" Quite a bit more...by the time they had passed seventeen, a subtle re-direction in their sexual Play was being fully effected by their counselors. Those adults who "Are always here for you. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Remember that." Adults-as-intruders, so tagged once introduced at the beginning of The Course but eagerly sought as advisers as sessions of "Advanced Courting " unfolded.
At nineteen the counselors became ever more daily present. They were addressed as "Elder So-and-So"...old enough to have an empty nest...all their kids out and about. These Elders would show up at a bar, a party, after a lecture, sometimes even as initiating contact with a quite thinly-veiled excuse for intruding—"a cousin-on-your-Mother’s-Aunt’s-Grandfather’s-side"—weird. Conversations would begin without Mark or Zav even knowing that they were beginning.
The fact that Zav had a counselor led Mark to conclude that he wasn’t "really that Bad." Truth is, that didn’t seem an issue, not for quite sometime. But he did log a memo.
The subtlest but most consistent change was in the new imaginings opened by imagery and language. Of her. Incrementally shifting from the ever eagerly awaited unveiling of new techniques for pleasure...gobbled hastily and put into practice immediately! by those Courting— shifting from the childhood years of narrow-sight of I am me! into broader sight of I am we!...shifting now back to narrow-sight but one which could only come from the broader-sight border, of "One is one!" Meaning, that one was to become this other, this girl—to create an unsettling spiritual egoism which was Two-as-One while enabling each to be solely one—the creative challenge of evoking Presence.
"Tough stuff," all nodded, counselors and students, "Coupling relationships are tough stuff."
"What you did was more for her than you." This in explaining why boys got Fixed.
"Elder Jansen, girls were ours for the taking. Did I miss something?" A riff of hardly suppressed sniggering and bawdy guffaws slaps the room.
"Listen." Stern. Authoritative. "Girls who now become wives. Your wife. They will know only one man—you. They will know only the sexual delights you deliver, you bring as gifts. You are all they need be, must be, now. You sow the seed, they reap the harvest."
The Elder was so serious and so very grave that no one seemed even to be breathing.
A monotone voice, almost ventriloquism—"What have we sown?"
Therein laid the first turning for Zav. Everything which seemed to have been...just wasn’t what it was supposed to be. A girl having five boys or five-hundred. A girl having sex in every conceivable position and contortion. Girls as being the ones whom the boys served" It just wasn’t so!
His mind wanders back to so many of the same situations. "Come here, boy!" Firm, commanding, authoritative... in that special way certain, especially older, girls were. Meaning, she knew that he was ready to do whatever she wanted. But her invitation was all really coquettish, a cooing cover for what she didn’t say but meant, "What’s your pleasure?"...she making him know that he was there because she wanted him, and that, when spent, she could call another...even before he was out of the room...Aaarrrggghhhh! to linger would have been humiliating—for the freedom each boy bestowed was his lack of pride of ownership, that’s what The Course taught.
"What you did was more for her than you." Was the Elder a poet?
"You’re a hoe. Rake the ground. Seed the furrow." Mark understood.
Perplexed—what was the Elder trying to say? "Or saying that I can’t grasp?"
"Girls have the power." Every boy knew it meant to have babies. They were "loaded," meaning with eggs. When Mark thought Zav loaded it was only with "Bad seed," meaning teenager mothers...a great offense, a grievous sin, a social abomination. ("Mom, is that what you were trying to tell me?")
Teenage mothers—none has Zav ever known or known anyone who has known, but he had known that older guys—married and widowed—did come and take a girl...even a Greenie...now and then. It was not from their boasting—not from these men, but a taunt from a girl, but a taunting barb, "You’re still such a weenie Greenie!" It happened to Zav only once. Mark never came close to the subject.
Why was this permitted? Such a question marked Zav a poet.
("Mom, is that what you were trying to tell me?")
"Girl power!" a phrase when tossed about by the boys ...a macho, posturing phrase. Sometimes hards would pop out and be displayed as it was shouted, especially in mega-ball bars.
"Girl power!" when now thrown about by the girls was a flush of breast-swelling, cunny dripping lust...words of fire which made each feel good, feel strong, feel eternally alive...a phrase that stroked the waiting womb....wakened an echo.
Zav was prepared to press his counselor, Elder Samuleson, "If I’m to keep her pregnant—pop one, seed another...I’ve thought about this—What am I to do when she can’t?"
"Ah, inevitably! The Twenties’ Question. Actually, you’re ahead of yourself, here, son. Most don’t start stumbling over this till about twenty-six. Some, never...How shall I phrase this?"
"Clearly, I hope."
He strokes his short goatee, half-smiles, paused for an oracular inflection, "Nothing truly spiritual is clear."
A minute. Not too petulant: "That’s obvious."
The Elder taints Zav’s cleverness with a bitter curl of his upper lip.
"I’d rather wait till your wife carves this answer on your soul." Finality!
Zav’s preening curiosity ("Most fragile self-assuredness!" Ha.) shatters as the door shuts behind the exiting Elder.
"Mark, did you ever think about, about getting one pregnant?"
Both were supposed to be preparing for their graduation. Writing invitations. Sending out some resumes. Thinking about other things. Becoming consumed with the details of entering Coupling— hoping for an interesting work assignment, reviewing paint patches in anticipation of their first home, things like that...but not Zav—"Did you ever think you’d might leak?...Then what?!"
Mark pauses... resigned, "Okay. I’ll indulge you. No."
There was a silence. Itchy. Zav wasn’t as easy to swat as a mosquito.
"Okay. Sure. Who hasn’t?"
Swat!
"But I never talk about it. We—me, Cilla, any girl...never talked about it."
Swat! Swat!
Mark gathered up his stuff: pen, cards, books...all which told Zav that he wasn’t going to sit "through one of these serious talks, again!" Firking poet!
"Come on, guy, don’t you think that’s significant. Now?"
Mark halts. Feels like a defendant in the dock. "Father Almighty! Okay. What good would it have done? Scare the daylights out of her? Nothing you could do, even if you wanted. If, and I say "if" —if she thought you were thinking about it...bang, blam! gate shut—no pussy, tonight!"
"Gotcha, but if you felt it...if you felt it and we were supposed to be pleasured, we were supposed to empty ourselves and explore every aspect of our sexuality...why, why the hell didn’t we?.... Didn’t I?"
("What would I put in Column B?")
Trying to fall asleep, trying to shut-down the out-of-control fluttering Flicker...but he can’t. He sees himself sitting there, on their couch, asking Lil, "Did you?"...and she explodes, not into words, but her whole body, as if the answer was so powerful that it detonates her body, her body becoming one word, one sound, the only answer.
He looks at Cilla, but it is clear that she is deaf and blind.
He tries to remember...is hating himself for having
buried the memories...about more than once, several times, just about to pop the question...it seemed like that, "Pop the Question" being the Playful phrase for asking a girl to become a woman by marrying you—you, then, a real man...not just a boy, even more than a guy...Real man!...when she says, Yes.
Pop the question: "Do you want to get pregnant?" In the question delivering the answer, "Yes, I can!" unFixed and with Balls!
But he didn’t. Why?
("Ain’t I Bad?")
Zav sees himself at so many moments of questions—the "Can I?" questions. Lick you? Bang-bang the back-door? Come in your mouth? Get you to crank me?...it seemed that every act had, at one time, a "Can I?" question around which hung an odor of death—dying if she said No or rolled-away. It took sometime for the boys to catch-on that the girls had been trained to "Do what you must!"
("But for all those years, you didn’t pop the question...not even once?!")
Falling-asleep. Into a dreamscape. Aware. Watching himself as another...a monstrous figure of fearsome height and breadth...snatches away the blanket which covers him and Lil. Snatched, but she stays locked in dead-sleep. It is Zav’s eyes which a dreadful fear rips open, opens-wide, his heart pounding, he hears his heart-pounding in his ears.
Monstrous and fearsome, so he, himself, rises. Stands in front of this alien one as armor is placed upon him, as a sword is received by his hand which rises effortlessly to receive...then it is he beside this one, this one whose presence he now knows as his own presence—they looking down on Lil as she slumbers, as she dreams, as they stand vigilant by her side...guarding, protecting, securing.
("Preparation!")
"Twenty! Twenty!" ...boisterous and booming and bottle-clanking—drunk as skunks, graduated and degreed...Stupid as sloths! brashly proclaimed...ever-ready, now knowing what they meantby "Live Long and Prosper!"