The Importance of Where; A bi-weekly glance at Grayson Russell (#6)
Installment six of Grayson Russell’s work: “Walking Out of My First and Last Orgy, Through Virginity, To a Blow Job where I cut my Hands on the Barnacles of Pier Piling, To losing my Virginity Again, and exiting a Bachelor Party Gang Bang.“
There isn’t much I can say about this piece that the title doesn’t say for itself. Insanity is strewn through this story of an early teenage viewpoint. Go on and read if you are ready to question your own morality.
Here is some of his work if you’ve missed it over the weeks:
The Art of Self Reflection | Installment One
Faulkner’s Room | Installment Two
On Bars, Evictions, and Writing | Installment Three
To Be Chained or Unchained: A Short Chronicle of MDMA | Installment Four
Walking Out of My First and Last Orgy, Through Virginity, To a Blow Job where I cut my Hands on the Barnacles of Pier Piling, To losing my Virginity Again, and exiting a Bachelor Party Gang Bang.
I am not sure why I am being brought back to this memory, but it is the memory of the first and last orgy I walked out on. For some reason I always thought a liter of Jack Daniels could take you wherever you needed to go. And I have had claims of dialogues with the Devil ever since. But a house party gone wrong with Meth and Ecstasy on a rainy Friday night, when you are chasing a girl you know you can never love, and even are aware of the feelings of not wanting to love her, but you romanticize anyway. You drink the whiskey while everyone else laces a joint with Meth and passes it around and then the pills dropped like a lozenge, felt by the tongue at first and swallowed.
I think I was seventeen at the time, and it was Fall and there was slow Autumn rain, and a profusion of bicycles in the garage and we all went for ride. I followed close to a beautiful blonde that I had won over a few weeks before at a redneck campfire because I had caught two green lizards and let them bite my ear lobes and hang there like jewelry. We kissed for over an hour that night.
Fast forward to the rainy night, and the pills and Methamphetamine. I just remember staying to her right a few yards back and calling her name in the wind blown rain. I was so drunk that at some point I crashed into a body of azaleas, and she came and leaned over me, and we kissed again, but the pitch and tone and color of it was so different.
“Let me help you up”, she said.
I don’t know what I said to her, but I felt perfect there in a broken group of azaleas beneath a quiet rain.
I was alone for a long time, laying there, picturing the street lamps, whiskey dreaming.
At some point I gathered myself, the borrowed bike that I miraculously managed not to fuck up, and mounted the wet seat and the slick pedals and followed the way back.
And thank God I was drunk enough when I got back to the party not to know exactly what was happening. From what I can recall, there were cheap-skate Christmas lights circumventing the room, and bodies in positions and places that would only rue a scientist or a doctor. It felt like a Bosch painting or what Lot’s wife was turned to a pillar of salt, because she looked back. That was my one good fortune, because I didn’t look back, but I knew I was too drunk to go anywhere else. The girl I had just kissed was giving head and taking it a few different ways from Sunday.
I walked out in the midst of all that, and raided the fridge for a beer or two, and luckily found a package of imitation crabmeat which put the orgy behind me, far enough so that I woke up passed out on the kitchen table. I had for the first time a pure but cynical sense of being a virgin again.
That was the first and last orgy I walked in and out of, but it wasn’t the last carnival of human sexuality I had a front row seat to. A year or so later I moved for the summer to work on my family’s Tobacco farm. I moved in with my older cousin, and the first night I arrived we went to a strip club. I must have sixteen years old. From the moment of walking in the door I was given 50 dollars in 1 dollar bills and could drink anything I wanted on the house. I ran through the fifty pretty quickly and then was coached on how to tip a stripper. Two lap dances followed with a beautiful blonde that I will never forget.
Then the summer and the work started. I would wake some mornings to find a striper from the bar cooking breakfast for my older cousin. A week later it would be a different girl, and I would play it as it laid, a confused sleepy introduction but nothing more than that. I may have had a cup of coffee with one of the girls at some point, and then I would see them again on weekends but this time not wearing just a button shirt and panties.
I worked so much that I rarely had time off. But one night I cruised to the beach and met a girl along the shore. At that time I don’t think I had been laid since I lost my virginity at fifteen. We hit it off, and waded out in the sea and suddenly I was fast inside her before the waves threw us apart. It felt good holding her, trying to remember her name, trying to get back inside of her after each battery of waves. We soon gave up and waded through the calm, grey inlet waters until we got beneath a bridge. I don’t know why back then I had a fetish for such large breasts, but I buried myself into them there.
She took me into her mouth the distant lights casting our shadows over the rippling water. I leaned back upon one of the pilings to grip something as I came. It’s was the most painful pleasure I have ever felt. For I sliced my hands to shreds on the bridge pilings in the dark, that were covered with barnacles. I think I got blood on her face when I tried to take her hair in my hands. Then suddenly from somewhere her mother was calling her name and she rushed off. My hands burned in the salt water because I had to swim back to the shore where I had left my clothes. I dressed and walked out on the strip at Myrtle Beach, half stranded because my younger cousin and friend had left me with her. I was soaked and had to walk over the same bridge that cruelly wounded me. Then out of nowhere the horn beeps, my name is called. It was almost five in the morning and it was going to be a long day.
I learned a lot that summer about sex and drinking and working like a dog. Not long after I slept with my cousin’s sister’s best friend, whose name curiously enough was Tequila. We fucked on the hard wood splintered floor of an old Tobacco barn, and I wore a black condom which broke. And we drank Colt 45’s and fucked again without the condom.
I learned even more from some of the old guys I worked with. They used to take a watermelon or a cantaloupe and cut a small hole with a clasp knife and sit it under a shade tree for a few hours before they would return and relieve themselves inside of the fruit. As a kid I had heard stories about sheep, chickens and livestock, but not watermelons and cantaloupes. I even heard a story from some of the old guys that a cat nicknamed Gator, who used to drive the tractor in the fields, was drunk and throwing as best he could to girl but couldn’t quite finish. So, his friend threw him off her and finished the job himself.
Then more days of long work, farm labor, and the preacher’s daughter who was just fourteen and lived down the road and all but flatly told me to take her any way that I pleased. Her brother and I were good friends. He worked with me most days. I think we were both addicted to Alice and Chains at the time. He had a sister a year younger, Claire. She was fifteen and I was sixteen and difficult to field her younger sister’s desires, and her brother’s friendship and the moral ambiguity I felt about it all. Looking back, I think I felt a lot for her, but I never made my move. Because I think I felt a part of my life had ended a year and half before on a snowy night in a pine thicket in the front seat of a car at 4 in the morning when being with a woman was more than my conscience could handle at the time.
I don’t really know how to describe it, but I remember showering too many times those first few days and that latent guilt. Who knows if it was moral or ethical pressure, a kind of a religious stumble in the race of becoming a man? What I remember is I felt alive and at the same time vacuous. Empty and bird who had chipped out of his shell, yet a man who returned to the womb.
I never made a play for Claire and I regret it. I never slept with her younger sister and I regret that too. But, to such a minimal degree I feel better for not having done.
I never walked into another orgy and left. In fact I never saw one again, if you define an orgy as somewhere close to half and half the two species of men and women.
I did go to a Bachelor party that went about as far wrong as the human condition will allow. Claire’s brother and I built a stage for the strippers. They were sisters, one having fallen from the tree of ugliness and had some sort of physical contact with every branch on the way down. The other was sharp, built like a yacht as Hemingway would say. By the time I met them they had already fielded and fucked both my uncle and my older cousin. The stage was a small plywood platform about 15 feet long and 3 feet wide, the width of a two by four off the ground. For two sixteen year old boys building a stage for strippers to get naked on was a rush in itself. A preachers son and me, knowing that we were a part something we would never forget.
For the first hour it was pretty calm, we drank and sat around on these melancholy colored couches and watched as one of the sisters danced, and the other disappeared with one of the gentlemen. Most of the guys there were in their forties and weren’t hip to any kind of music so we Dj’d.
The pretty sister, from what I can remember was built like an hour glass, with dark hair and dark eyes, and there was the mystery of coy about her. The other sister was straight forward, more provocative, hungrier. She didn’t have the looks but she had the goods. All of my money I had stashed in a shoe box in my closet because I was saving up for my first car. All I remember is being half fucked up and sticking 20 dollar bills in baseball cap, because I didn’t think to get change before. And I ran out of money when the aesthetically challenged sister stepped off the stage. I stopped in the kitchen for a moment to grab a beer and the preacher’s son and a farm mechanic were rolling a joint and cutting remarks about these poor old bastards taking turns on a good looking girl and then trying to fuck her ugly sister. I stayed long enough for a couple hits and then scrambled back to room to get some more money. I wanted to see her again, the sister with classical curves and dark eyes and red lipstick. When I opened the door to the room, there was a skinny accountant looking guy wearing glasses with his pants at his ankles and the missing sisters legs wrapped around his neck saying shit I am sure he doesn’t ever want to remember. But with him inside of her she watched me, young as I was, go into to my closet to get more cash. And then winked when I shut the door.
After that I think the pretty sister got paid quite a lot for a three way. The woman who had just winked at me came out on stage…and here is where all the lines got crossed and shit got so fucked up, I remember at 16 thinking that if this is a life I want a way out of. The mechanic and the preacher’s son and I stepped outside. The skinny accountant with glasses came stumbling out the door and could barely say two words before he puked.
“Man I just ate the most beautiful pussy from the ugliest woman I have ever seen. I got to get the fuck home. My wife has already called me four times.”
And that was how it was, he peeled out of the slip-shod gravel drive way and I never saw him again. Not long after we left we all walked back inside, and what I saw made the orgy I walked away from seem juvenile. On the stage was a woman, a woman who had just winked at me and been fucked like a rodeo clown by a skinny accountant with glasses. She was laying down on the stage, with two pricks in her hands, slipping the blowjob off left to right. One of the men was going down her while two others held her legs in the air. And then the swapping began. One would enter her swiftly for a few moments and pull out, and I don’t know of any other way to say this, other than he would pull out and slap his penis against her clit. Then the next guy would file in and do the same, all the while she was still giving a blowjob left to right. That’s two, and there were three fighting for her loins. Then she turned on her side and at different intervals there were for different men inside three different orifices of her body.
For a moment I felt like turning around, then turning back and wanting more than anything to be turned into a pillar of salt. I wanted to leave but this is where I lived. I slipped back in my room where the beautiful sister was being taken by two men and grabbed some clothes and the little money I had left and met the preacher’s son and the mechanic outside, both splitting a joint again.
“I can’t take this man. This is fucking madness,” I said. “I can’t sleep in that fucking bed, it’s been fucked on by who knows. And what the fuck is that inside, five to one, it sounds good if you’re talking about sports. I can’t stay here. I just can’t.”
The carnival winded down and I left and took the couch at my friend the mechanic’s house. The preacher’s son stayed and got a blow job on my bed for free from the less-better looking of the sisters. My friend Greg, the mechanic, and I were the only two out of fifteen men that didn’t act like Neanderthals, or pure hormonal animals, or dicks looking for a hole, any hole to fuck.
We got stoned that morning over coffee, and without saying much, I think we both felt a sigh of relief that we were not the lascivious bastards and animals some of the women in our lives had made us out to be.
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