That theme ballooned into a greater realization, too, that my initial fantasies about the adult world or, more, the adult world of pornography, were incorrect, were shallow and unconvincing, that there was a carefully ordered balance between the everyday public sphere and the furtive world of desire, and that the porn stars and prostitutes were not carrying the banner of perfect bacchanalian body and mind pleasure, but were stand-ins, simulacra, for a shadow projected by our bodies, that since the end result of sexual desire was families and children and stability and rules and education, a precise and orderly protection of children until we can finally buy those magazines and videos and booze, we needed that balance and that hidden world to remain a shadow, a longing, an urge, channeled and kept fast with fear and guilt and an inchoate sense of calamity or we might descend into animalistic chaos, unable to partner with only one girl or boy or man or woman until the children grow, safe and with that perfect loving parental dyad, and so just as I had become discontented after only a few months with my stack of sexual dynamos, I imagined that there might be some virtue in trying to avoid masturbating, resisting and pushing back what had become a ritual driven by whatever stimuli were present on a given day, Farah Fawcett, Colonel Wilma Deering, Rebecca, Gwen, the shorts of the girl riding the bike, the slightest hint of bra straps through the teacher’s white blouse, every cheerleader at my school, individually and in groups, Princess Leia, then working through to orgasm eidetically in the hardest, dirtiest porn I had seen, that if I could control myself I could also control the urge for novelty as well and derive satisfaction from the resistance and overcoming of these tendencies, like being forced to wait, snackless, with the clots of kids before a dinner party and trying not to whine about it, trying to be more like the adults and governed in my wants and my actions, that by so doing I would be becoming those adults and take more pleasure in simpler acts like holding Rebecca’s hand, unsweating, my erections stabilized somehow, and be present at that moment without the sharp sword of desire and sex hanging over me, coarsening me, at every moment.
I wasn’t sure what I needed to do, what the mechanics of stopping entailed, laying in bed at night, not touching myself, trying not to think about sex and women and girls, trying to think about things I had once thought about, before masturbation and porn, about Christmas gifts and war machines, space vehicles and ancient civilizations, maps and sports, and I found that my erection would subside in ten minutes or so with careful concentration, but that I would also fall asleep, and that in the morning, waking, it would be back, densely meaty, requiring another round of mental obscurants to get it soft enough that I could pee, sitting on the toilet, far back on the rim, leaning forward onto my legs to just slip the tip of my penis under the rim and urinate low enough that it didn’t fountain all over the floor, ricochet off the toilet seat, and dribble into my underwear below, and I tried the same process in class, halting side peers at interbutton gaps as the teacher leaned over to talk to students, the woman smiling knowingly as boys darted glances and too quickly looked away or peered over the tops of their textbooks, and I began to have some sense of control, mastery, of my masturbation device, insofar as I didn’t drift off, but now and again I did, late in the afternoon, late in spring, the humid sponge of Virginia spring settling into the hollows and valleys, and I would wake with a start and my pants and underwear straining, and I would glance about, gauging the relative interest in my crotch from those around me, and they never noticed or cared, but I would lean forward, press sideways, hoping that it would snap down against my thigh, and I preferred jeans, my last bell bottoms recently swapped out for 501s, and the new universe of button fly jeans meant a possible new threat of buttons popping loose, but they never did either, and I would start my mental exercises, and I settled on an image of the Jefferson Memorial as my focus at times like this, with the cherry blossoms along the pond, April or March, the Washington Monument reflecting in the distance, and if I had to stand up to change classes, I would press my books down hard to hold everything in place.
And then, after a two weeks, the dreams began, explicitly sexual while being intricate and surreal, and the first was just a pastiche of cut-up female forms straddling me, different heads and arms, breasts and legs, disgorging tiny rings of dripping ivy leaves from their vaginas, some strange cross-over between a chastity device and a birth control insert, and we were hiding under the covers and I was holding the wet ring of leaves when I heard Franklin’s sister, Susan, and she pulled the covers out from over us and I was lying beside Rebecca, and Susan was saying she was going to have to tell my mother, and I pulled the sheet back from her and threw the ring at her, but she ducked, a shocked surprise in her eyes, and she started to storm away, and I was then alone in the bed but with a huge erection, so I wrapped the sheet gently around it and then pulled on one end to gradually unravel it, evoking warm feelings of masturbation briefly, and that was all I remembered, and then another night, days later, I dreamed of a cheerleader from my school and she was standing close to me and asking me why I was bothering her all the time, and her eyes slanted in anger at me, and she got even closer to me, and I could see the freckles on her cheeks, pink, perfect circles, and I found it odd that freckles should be so perfectly circular, like a Raggedy Ann doll, and I tried to kiss her and she didn’t stop me or respond and I kissed, puckering my lips, opening my mouth, and she didn’t respond at all, but just stood very still, unmoving, and her lips were dry and coarse, and I reached up my hand and rubbed it across her chest and she didn’t respond to that, either, and I was so focused on her body, so close, looking down, that I couldn’t even see her face anymore, it had disappeared somewhere above me, above my head, just leaving the sweater and the torso, and I was then running from class to class, uncertain which room I was supposed to be in, and then I was in the principal’s office and there were teachers standing around the edges of the room, and there was a stack of plastic sheet protectors in the center of his desk with a crystal paperweight centered on it to hold it steady, and the paperweight was just like one on my father’s desk, a rondelle of leaded glass, chiseled at the edges, and I could see through the top of plastic sheets but the image inside was like a holographic face of a porn star, eyes lined with soot black, lashes built into dark, piceous fence lines, lips red and orange, glinting, but her face was moving around, blinking, speaking, but no noise was heard, and I looked down and had my erect penis in my hand and was systematically pulling along its length, my fingers in a loop around my glans at the apex, then my hand flattened and I rubbed the tip with my palm as if I was petting an unfamiliar dog for the first time, and I awoke that morning and went to pee and saw a glint of clear fluid at my meatus, and touched it with my fingertip and it was gelatinous, it was semen, just a drop.