Several months ago our good friend Bunga Din, one of the best writers on this site, posted "
Regret," a poignant coming-of-age tale describing his breakup with his young sweetheart after she crapped her knickers in his presence. This story deeply resonated with me -- for I, too, suffered the loss of my first true love the night she gave birth to a baby. A brown one. In the bathtub. With me in it.
It has taken many years of therapy for me to be able to talk about it, but this is my story.
It was 1979 -- the fin de siècle era of that long national nightmare which gave us everything from the tragedy of Watergate to the mind-deadening asininity of The Brady Bunch; from the grim specter of nuclear winter to the ineptness of Jimmy Carter. It was not a good time, that darkness just before Reagan spoke and it was Morning in America again. As men in wintry times have ever been wont to do, I warmed the chill of my own existence by wrapping a beaver pelt around it, in this case one belonging to a girl named Tush.
Ah, the beloved Tush! Fair of face, large of rack, firm of ass, open of thighs, empty of head! A banquet of delights for the sex-starved college geek who was the young Dumpster. (Now I'm just a sex-starved middle-aged geek, but that is neither here nor there.) I invaded her the way Hitler invaded France, and she capitulated to me just as willingly. We laid more miles of tube than the Alaska Pipeline; hid more salami than a cheap pizzeria; and had more clambakes than a troop of lesbian girl scouts.
There was just one problem: privacy, or the lack thereof. I didn't meet Tush until I transferred from the University of Georgia -- then, as now, one of the top party schools in the nation, where you can bang the bootie in the middle of Sanford Stadium at halftime and everybody will cheer -- to Stewsburg U, a smaller, church-affiliated school. This meant that, while there was as much copulation per capita as at UGA, you had to be a lot sneakier about it.
We had to contend with everything: inconsiderate roommates, nosy RA's, voyeuristic campus cops. There was just no place to be alone. True, there was the backseat of my car; hell, there was even the flyloft at the Stewsburg Grand Opera House. But we were in love. We wanted romance. (At least Tush did, and I wanted her to stop talking about "getting away together" so she could use her mouth for more constructive purposes.) Indeed, I began to be captivated by her visions of candlelit dinners for two: long, languorous soaks in the tub together, sleeping till noon, naked, spent limbs intertwined after a night of full-throated, orgiastic passion.
(Bookmark that phrase, "long, languorous soaks in the tub together." It is key to this story.)
But where to do it? One night, it came to me: my family's beach house on the Atlantic coast, hundreds of miles from Stewsburg and unoccupied for much of the year. Paradise in view! Trouble was, my Grandmama (remember Dudley Moore's grandmother in the movie Arthur?) was rather strict about who used The House in her absence, and none of my generation had ever been allowed to go unchaperoned.
Ultimately, in exchange for a rather large subvention from my hard-earned student loan money, my younger cousin Danny was persuaded to convince dear Gran I was "doing him a favor" by accompanying him down there for a "club meeting." Danny went off to NYC for a weekend of fun and frolic at my expense, and I set off with Tush for what proved to be, as Scout says in To Kill a Mockingbird, "our longest journey together."
We planned our weekend idyll with all the precision of D-Day. We would fuck on the beaches; we would fuck on the landing grounds; and if we didn't exactly plan to fuck in the streets or the hills, did we ever plan to surrender to our lust! But, in love as in war, the best-laid plans can be undone by the smallest of unforeseen circumstances.
Tush and I arrived at The House late Friday night (we had planned to cut our Monday classes) and, alone at last, we set out to get mellow. This being wintertime, it was cold and dark outside, but that actually aided the ultimate plan of spending the night (indeed, the weekend) in repeated vigorous rounds of Mattress Polo. Those little precooked, smoked weenies had just entered the market, and we consumed a package of them, to repeated innuendos about a rather larger wiener to be devoured later. We also partook of something from the cheese family, but the main focus was to get a buzz on. Innocent of controlled substances, we stuck with Whiskey Sours, Tom Collinses, and such other alcoholic treacle as young people drink before their palates mature. The evening, seemingly, got better and better.
After a bit, however, the tiny part of my higher cortical functions which were still engaged sensed that something was off. Whatever part of whatever animal went into the weenies, combined with the cheese and the Southern Comfort, wasn't making Tush very comfortable. In fact, as I was cutting myself a slice of cheese, I could swear I heard similar activity from Tush's eponymous region. As I scooted over to begin the slow, seductive kissing process -- God, what a man I was in those days! -- I had to fight my way through the aftershocks of a rather aromatic Tush-belch. But we ignored these danger signals in favor of other, more pressing physical needs. Our agenda was a simple one: bath, bed, and beyond.
Remember the vision of "long, languorous soaks in the tub together"? Tush disappeared into the bathroom to carefully set the stage: a dozen or so candles, strategically placed, gave plenty of light to see and be seen. It may sound kinky, but we did it with the lights on whenever we could. Thus no Mr. Bubble, but plenty of lavender-scented bath oil to provide additional (albeit unnecessary) lubrication. I was in charge of music. Recall this was 1979 and another Dudley Moore movie, Ten, had just come out; so naturally I put Ravel's Bolero on the "record player." (Yes, TurdyTreeAnaTurd, one of those!)
Finally, Venus-Tush called to me from her grotto, and I entered and eagerly immersed myself with her in the erotic, amniotic Bath of Bliss. Two people in a bathtub present some interesting logistical problems, especially when it is necessary to position not just four legs, but five (her two and my three). But we were determined to make this work, and, after much amorous foreplay and jockeying for position, the timeless Rules of Engagement for the copulatory act ultimately required her to lean back and spread them wide.
Then it happened, suddenly and without warning. I recall the next few seconds with the kind of anguished, slow-motion clarity reserved for car-wreck victims, or those poor chaps on the Titanic after the cry of, "Iceberg, dead ahead!" Except this wasn't an iceberg. It was hot and steamy, in the worst sort of way.
Just when Priapus penetrated Aphrodite, something large and solid brushed past my own equally-constituted member on a one-way trip topside. I pulled back in time to witness with horror the surfacing of a sea monster. This black-brown Shit Shamu was approximately the same size and shape as my own engorged tool had been mere seconds before, but it instantly claimed pride of place as King of the Seas.
We sat there, motionless, for what seemed an eternity. In the background, Bolero was reaching its climax (which proved to be the only one of the evening), in which the orchestra starts to screech like a train wreck. An apt analogy. Tush and I watched, frozen in horror, as her Mr. Floatie slowly broached-to and sank to the bottom of the tub, trailing behind him a deadly, disgusting brown plume.
The smell was indescribable. Empress Alexandria's Lavender Boudoir mixed with butyric acid. Even the scented candles failed to extinguish the stench, and the bath oil clinging to our skin suddenly seemed to turn to slime. The whole, flamelit scene appeared like something from Dante's Inferno -- The Turd Circle of Hell.
In such tragic situations, however, there are often moments of banality. "Is there," I asked, "any more where that came from?"
"Uh, I don't think so," responded Tush as we both exited the cesspool, grabbing instinctively for towels, fig leaves, anything to clean ourselves and cover our now-embarrassing, Edenic nakedness. "But I need to go to the other bathroom."
"Sure," I said, wiping the goop from my body and wondering if Grandmama had any Pine-Sol in The House. "Take your time."
She did. I heard the toilet flush twice, and then the shower ran until there was no more hot water. Meanwhile I realized I was left to clean up this irrevocably polluted Love Canal! Here was the start of The Dumpster's cast iron stomach, as well as his lifelong fear of too much intimacy.
Although Tush and I did manage to share the bed for the remainder of that ruined weekend, as well as on several subsequent occasions, something got broken that night. We went on home Sunday with the excuse of not missing Monday classes after all, and our relationship, like the stench of her big brown baby, just slowly faded away.
Years later, I inherited The House upon Grandmama's death. but I sold it. Too many painful memories. Nor can I bear to listen to Bolero under any circumstances; and the scent of lavender is a definite anti-aphrodisiac. But unlike Bunga, I have no regrets!