Charles in Charge.

Having a healthy sexual appetite seems to be the ultimate goal of men these days, judging from all the ludicrous emails I receive daily. These are reminiscent of snake oil days of yore, replete with exotic stories teeming with references to ancient mystics, jungle potions, far eastern secrets, and exotic plants. Certainly I would take any Chinese herbal remedy seriously, I mean, there are over a billion of them, so clearly they are doing something right. However, stay away from Chinese birth control methods, which are obviously less effective.

Let’s be honest however. A good, rambunctious sexual appetite may seem jim-dandy when you don’t have one or can’t seem to keep up with your partner’s acrobatic enthusiasm. But when you are the possessor of a tropical erotic interest and your mate is more of the boreal forest type, problems arise.

And so it was with me. I was a…well, to be blunt, a horn dog. I was forever pawing at my wife, and in a constant state of arousal. I took every opportunity to seduce her, entice her and arouse her. These advances caused her only to become irritated, annoyed and aggravated. I was difficult to have arguments with, as I would rush through the fight in order to get to the make up sex. I was intolerable on long car trips, as I would spend as much time trying to entice her with double entendres as I would on, say, actually not missing our exits. My success rate with both resulted in extremely long journeys, in both the very real and very metaphysical sense. Eventually, it became clear that this marriage was not going to work out. It wasn’t only because of our differing sex drives, but that factor certainly exacerbated the problems.

After the divorce, I spent a bit of time just enjoying being alone. I purchased a nice, small house in the country and found that I rather liked the freedom I had suddenly acquired. I walked around the house in my underwear, I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, watched porno movies with the volume up in the middle of the day, masturbated freely in whatever room I just happened to be in. It was liberating.

But eventually it grew tiresome. I began to long for the touch of another body, and my desires began to insinuate themselves with increasing urgency. There was nothing for it but to begin dating again. I of course had been out of the dating arena for quite some time and was understandably nervous about going back into the breach. I had the well-meaning but misguided help of the married women in my office, who were forever setting me up with single girls they knew.

Suffice it to say that most single girls that I dated were single for quite obvious and oftentimes, startling reasons. Some had personal hygiene issues or nasty habits. Others had all the charm and personality of porcupines.

For instance, Kelly from Human Resources seemed pleasant enough. She was a pretty girl with large doe eyes and a cute turned up nose. However when she laughed she barked like a hound dog and had a habit of cleaning her ears out with whatever utensil was handy, car key, pen cap, shrimp fork…

Alice was another delight. She was an attractive woman, a mere slip of a girl who wore clingy dresses that left just enough up to the imagination to keep the imagination in a perpetual state of distraction. She was, unfortunately, unwittingly bi-polar. Her conversation ranged from the hysterical antics of her cat to the tear-wrenching plight of the Sarajevo refugee camps to the seething rage brought on by her present employer who found her “a tad difficult”. All this before drinks. Later, after dinner when I gently rebuffed an invitation to go up to her apartment and gave no clear indication when or if I would be calling her again, she exploded into a tirade about the sheer stupidity of men who were too blind to see an excellent specimen of femininity standing mere inches from their eyes, apparently waving their arms frantically and expounding the frustrations of particular genders. I physically backed away from her and climbed rapidly into my car, accelerating away with a panicked chirp of my tires.

Darlene was almost the opposite. She was by far the most fetching of all the women I had dated thus far. She had burgundy hair cut in a severe bob, great big green eyes framed by bookish glasses, and she was probably no more than five and a half feet tall, one hundred pounds. She was an elfish thing, an innocent and delicate waif in a world of heavy-handed clumsy giants. The problem was that she simply did not talk. It was not that she wasn’t capable of the task; she was quite adept at ordering the most bird-like portions of food on the menu, a small side salad and a glass of water. I believe her entire bill came to just under two dollars. Her conversations consisted exclusively of one word answers followed by a break of eye-contact. She stared doggedly at her plate as if the nightly news were being broadcast from the china. Dinner was inexorably long and the pauses between conversations reached a point where it began to resemble sort of an auditory black hole, where sounds of other, nearby conversations were sucked up, unable to escape the sheer magnitude of silence between us. I decided that Darlene was clearly not enjoying herself and took her home immediately after dinner, thanking her profusely for a wonderful time. I was home by nine. Surprisingly, the lady at the office who had set us up approached me the following day saying she had received a phone call from Darlene just after I dropped her off. Darlene had apparently had a wonderful time and was quite taken by me and couldn’t wait until we went out again. Those words surpassed the sum total of words she spoke to me the entire evening.

In the weeks and months to follow I dated a bus-line quality cast of characters: a born-again Christian who wanted to tell me her testimony and did so, using breadsticks and the finger bowl to illustrate her baptism; a sales associate who couldn’t go three sentences before being interrupted by her cell phone, pager or PDA; an intense woman from accounting who grasped my hands meaningfully and asked me what a respectable length of time one should date before introducing the topic of marriage. (I indicated that one should wait at least until the salad arrived, which hadn’t); a butch girl from the mailroom who insisted that she was “not just another vagina”. When I attempted to pay for the meal, she began an oration of Biblical proportions damning me and my ‘ilk’ to an eternity of childbirth and subservience. We split the bill.

Of course the more I went out with these strange and quirky women, the more guarded I became. When I took Linda from marketing out for supper, I was so paranoid, waiting for some odd behavioural problem to pop up, a severe facial tic, an aversion to silverware, a tendency to recognize innocent passers by as celebrities and suddenly hound them for autographs, an unnatural desire to crawl beneath the table and curl up into a fetal ball, that I simply could not relax. Linda confided to a friend, who in turn confided to me, that she found me 'weird and unapproachable'. I had become so paranoid of quirky behaviour that it was manifesting itself within me as quirky behaviour.

This forced me to step back from my situation and gain a bit of perspective. I had to ask myself just what was I accomplishing, what was I benefiting from these dates? I still found myself going home alone at night. I still found myself rattling around my empty house, restless and jumpy. And then I realized that I was going to have to be honest with myself. I had to admit to myself that I was dating the wrong kind of women, with the wrong kind of motives. I didn't want what they wanted; I didn't have the same needs that they did. The women I was dating were looking for good, stable men to settle down with. They were looking for rewarding relationships that would eventually evolve into rewarding marriages.

I, on the other hand, was looking for sex. And not just Linda from marketing, fall into bed sex. I wanted really kinky, dirty, it's-a-good-thing-there-are-no-neighbours sex. I wanted the kind of sex you had to prepare for days in advance by upping your carbohydrate intake and marking out the load-bearing walls in your house. I wanted the kind of sex that, if you left the windows open, attracted rutting moose from miles around. I wanted the kind of sex that when you were done, you contemplated submitting the damage to the house as an insurance claim, citing a localized downburst. I wanted the kind of sex that left you so raw that the thought of going to the bathroom made you break out in a cold sweat.

And I just wasn't going to find a willing participant from the parade of women I'd been marching with.

While I was trying to figure all this out, I continued to date. It became more of a hobby at this point and I found it liberating to go into a date with no ulterior motives, no hidden agendas, no preconceived notions and no expectations. This approach made some dates turn out much better than they would have otherwise. And it made some dates devolve into catastrophic scenes of angst and despair.

One woman from the office happened to mention a name to me in passing, Charlene Turner. I knew Charlene. There were two Charlenes that I went to high school with, "Holy Shit Charlene" Kozlov and "The Other" Charlene Turner, whom we called, quite cruelly, Charles. "Holy Shit Charlene" had an amazing body, long lean legs and floating breasts, and she knew how to dress. She was a complete and utter stuck up bitch, but who the hell cared. Charles on the other hand was a round girl in round glasses. I sat next to her in a few classes and found that she was funny and bright, but unfortunately had turned her awkward phase into more of a commitment. She tended to waddle like a land-locked penguin on an uphill trail, and had all the grace of an auto accident.

When the prospect of a blind date with Charles came up, I thought about it for a long time. Certainly I wasn't going to go for any kind of romantic purpose, but then my dates recently had been pretty much bereft of romance anyway. Considering my new state of mind, a date with Charles would probably go just swimmingly. I agreed to be set up and thought, since this was an old high school friend, I would do the whole date up right. I arranged to meet her for dinner at the Palisade, the restaurant in the Radisson Hotel. We would meet in the lobby, just like some old movie. To be honest, and this is quite cruel, I assumed that if she still resembled her high school yearbook picture, she probably didn't get many dates and I wanted this one to be special. How utterly presumptuous and arrogant of me, I know.

I arrived at the lobby just after seven. In fact the massive clock above the fountain had just chimed it's last bell and the echoes were still reverberating in the corridors. The lobby of the Radisson was designed in such a way as to look dazzlingly expensive without actually being so. The water-marble floor simply wasn't. The cut glass obelisk in the fountain was clearly acrylic. The impressive and ominous chandelier that hung from the ceiling was indeed an expense, but it was made up of simple glass rectangles and aircraft cable. However, in this town, you take your glamour where you can get it, squint at it and call it luxury.

As I was standing in the lobby, I noticed a rather rotund woman standing at the grand piano near the restaurant entrance. I assumed it was Charles...Charlene, slapped a warm grin on my face and headed over to her with a jovial bounce in my step. Just as we were about to make eye contact I noticed a set of luggage at her feet and realized that this was not Charlene. In an effort of sheer will and wonderful acting ability, I flicked my grin just up over her shoulder and to the right, nodding congenially to the empty restaurant behind her. She actually turned around to see who it was I was greeting so jovially and I took that instant to turn sharply to my left and disappear behind a convenient fiscus tree.

"That's not me," a voice said behind me. I turned around and looked into the eyes of Charles that I remembered from math class all those years ago. And the eyes were about the only thing I recognized. Charles...Charlene Turner had grown into quite a woman. Now, she was still plump to be sure, but she was a curvy, tight plump and she knew how to wear it well. She was sporting an eye-catching dress with a plunging neckline. It caught the eye all right, it caught it and yanked it down into some serious and dangerously distracting cleavage. It was the kind of cleavage you could fall into, creamy skin delving into mysterious shadow with a sensuous roundness that...I glanced up at her. I had been staring at her chest. Good for me. I was doing well. For an encore, I considered patting her on the fanny and shouting "hoo boy". Somehow, I resisted.

"No," I managed, finally, "that is definitely not you. And you are definitely an absolute...well...I am just so delighted...and very, very happy to see you. I mean, after all these years." Oh, I was a smooth one. All I needed now was to hike my pants up to show a pair of white socks and do a double gainer pratfall into the fountain.

"It is nice to see you too," she replied. "I have to say, I was expecting a skinny, mullet-haired kid with acne. But you've turned out quite handsome."

I don't know if I blushed, it would have been amateurish of me for certain. But I do know that I managed not to return the compliment with some comment such as: "and I thought you'd be fat." Although, I can only imagine the sheer effort required to keep that little gem from slipping out must have been mentally exhausting. Instead I escorted her into the restaurant and to our table.

Suddenly, this little show that I was putting on seemed a bit silly and hollow. Charlene was quite a beautiful woman in her own right and the very idea of me providing a pity date seemed to me quite an embarrassing prospect. In fact, for all I knew, she may have felt that she was lowering her standards for one night to provide me with some social charity I would otherwise never experience.

The waiter came and she ordered a manhattan. How brilliant. My brain suddenly skipped a gear and began that horrible jerking that happens when you realize that the only drink you have ever ordered was beer. The waiter looked at me and I thought what would Hemingway drink? Pernod, probably. Stupid idiot, who drinks Pernod in this century? If my mouth says Pernod, I swear to god I'm going to fill it with my own fist, very very hard. I heard myself order a scotch and soda. I blinked at my resourcefulness. Scotch and soda? My goodness, I wasn't a complete fool after all. Merely an apprentice fool. And so that crisis passed. Another one stumbled in and knocked over something expensive as I perused the menu.

I had no idea what a lot of these items were. Words like "Terrine de Fois de Gras", "Carpaccio de Bouef", "Les Pates Fraiches et Risottos"...I felt suddenly a bit like a drowning man, searching for something to grasp onto. A word jumped out at me...Pasta. Ah, now I could handle pasta. I stared at the word, anchoring my drifting soul upon it. Pasta. Yes, I would have the pasta.

"Appetizers?" asked the waiter. Appetizers? I furiously flipped back a page, reluctantly letting go of the only word on the entire menu I understood. I was about to just close my eyes and point, when Charlene ordered smoothly and confidently. "I think we'd like to try the crab cakes." She looked at me for affirmation. I nodded eagerly, probably too eagerly, in fact I am almost certain that I would look right at home in the rear window of a Buick sedan alongside the other bobble-heads.

Drinks came and I restrained myself from guzzling it down. I grasped the cool glass with both hands and urged it to remain in contact with the table. No good could come from getting sloshed, however therapeutic it may be for my state of mind at that particular moment.

Finally we chatted a bit. She asked me about some old friends and I had the dawning realization that I had not kept up with any of my high school friends, not a single one. I found myself shrugging and giggling at my own ineptitude at carrying on even the most remotely simple conversation with this woman. I had completely lost control of this date and I was suddenly struck with the same feeling the crew of the Titanic must have had, watching utterly helpless as this enormous ship sank beneath the waves. This dinner was going to be a complete and titanic disaster and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

Finally, Charlene heaved a sigh and I assumed that she was about to fold her napkin delicately in her hand, slap it on the table and leave. Instead she turned to me and said the most remarkable thing.

"I don't know about you, but I hate small talk. Deplore it. Now, we could sit here all night and honk away like happy geese, or we could just get a room in this fabulous hotel and do something altogether more interesting."

I was stunned and for a moment, I didn't have the slightest inkling of the remotest idea of a distant and obscure clue of what to say.

And then, it was if the great weights around my psyche were suddenly lifted. My mind stopped gibbering about in a corner somewhere and snapped to attention. My body relaxed immediately and I struck a languid and natural pose. Suddenly I felt that after all these months of thrashing about in the water, trying to swim, I just simply stood up and found myself in a knee-deep pond.

"Charlene, you have just given one of the world's all-time, fantastic and indisputably top-notch suggestions ever to be uttered on this great globe."

"Great." she said, rising. "Leave a nice tip, will you?"

As we were heading out the door, the waiter approached us. "Sir and madam are not staying?"

"Oh, no." said Charlene airily. "We've decided to go have some sex instead." And then she drifted out. I caught the waiter's eye and he smiled broadly.

"Have at it," he said brightly.

The procedure at the desk probably only took a few moments, but it seemed like a maddening eternity to us. We both impatiently tapped our feet and whispered “come on come on come on” under our breaths. But in due time we had our key and were boarding the elevator. A thought struck me as the elevator doors began to close but it evaporated when an elderly couple dashed in with surprising spryness. The ride up was in silence, but a small gasp escaped my lips when I felt Charlene’s hand reach around behind her and cup my crotch. Things were developing down there, for sure and her playful manipulations brought things to their full potential. She murmured appreciatively, leaned her head back and whispered that she was going to have a good time with this. She gave me a playful squeeze.

The elevator reached our floor and we stumbled down the hall, groping each other and giggling like teenagers. She was a full-figured woman, but her body was tight and unyielding, her skin, what I could get my hands on, was smooth and warm. She fumbled with the key card and eventually got the door open. The room had that definitive hotel room smell of generic loneliness, industrial cleaner and cheap soap. We didn’t notice as we were too busy enthusiastically flinging clothing onto every flat surface.

Once she got down to her bra and panties, I could resist her no longer and grabbed her, bringing her body to mine. My hands swept around her and cupped her broad, round ass. I ground my hardness against her and she pressed into me. Our lips met and our tongues danced with a passionate electricity.

Things were going well. I was happy with the evening so far and said so. Charlene tilted her head back and looked at me, a small smile playing on her lips.

“You do date a lot, don’t you?” she asked. I nodded that yes, I did. “And not many turn out this well, I assume.” I shook my head, no not many did. “I can tell. You seem, well, relieved.”