"I'd Love to Fuck Your Brother."
I swear she said that just to fuck with me. It is November, and it is already ass-butt cold outside. The trees are bare, and their branches creak and groan like the groping grasping hands of a blind old beggar lady. We are playing pool in the upstairs room of The Brewery. All I have to do is sink the eight-ball to win. I scratch.
Later, under a million cold hard stars, grasping the steering wheel with gloved hands and wishing that the heater would come on, her words came back to me. I'd heard the same thing, mostly not quite so bluntly from a lot of my girl friends and a few of my guy friends. But The Toad?
Okay, that is a terrible thing to call her, and even thinking it makes me a terrible person. I'd never ever say it aloud, but Jen, who's been my friend since the deep dark pit of despair that was junior high school looks like a toad: short, squat, with oversized lips and slightly bulgy eyes. Her hair is shoulder length, dishwater brown and limp; her bust is enormous and usually contained under something that looks a little like a gunny sack; and she looks out at the world through a pair of half inch thick horn rimmed glasses. Even though we had been friends forever, I had never heard Jen talk about guys or sex or crushes or dating or anything. I had assumed that she just wasn't interested.
"I'd jump Kaleb if I ever had the chance," she had said, finishing her beer. I bent over and pulled the back the cue, trying to concentrate on the shot "I'll bet he's got a pretty big dick."
I blew the shot. It was Jen's game. The bitch. "I've seen it," I said with an evil little smile, draining my own beer. "You're right, it's pretty big."
It takes a couple miles before the heater starts to kick in. I'm just glad the stupid car started in the first place. I've scraped a patch of frost off the inside of the windshield so that I can see to drive. Say what you like about Ohio, the winters are cold. No fooling.
I think about Kaleb, and try to picture him fucking The Toad. It makes me smile because I just can't see it. He is slender and good looking, with olive skin and far away eyes and the build of a long distance runner. He doesn't need this right now anyway; he's got problems of his own. He's moved back in to Mom's house at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, and is in the middle of getting a divorce. He got layed off from his corporate gig in Boston, and has been working swing shifts at a CD factory.
On second thought, maybe a good fuck is exactly what he does need.
The Toad and I are sitting on my old bed in my old bedroom, looking through our old high school yearbook. It has only been three years, but already the people in the pictures look strange, foreign, as if they came from another time, another place; the land of Disco in the realm of the Heartland. We are both amazed; there is no one there that we feel a thread of connection to anymore.
"So have you really?" we have been smoking a little pot, which makes free association seem natural, and everything a little more surreal.
"Really what?"
"You know—seen his dick?"
I have, in point of fact, seen Kaleb's dick twice. Once when I walked into the bathroom when he had just stepped out of the shower; and a second time when I had spied on him while he jerked off to a porno magazine.
"Well, does it make a difference?" Jen asked "If it's a big one or not?"
"Of course it makes a difference." I told her "But it doesn't necessarily make it any better."
I was about ninety percent sure that Jen was a virgin. Me, I had gotten rid of my virginity at the earliest possible opportunity. I had discovered that sex could be in turns awkward, embarrassing, uncomfortable or even painful; and then pleasurable, addictive, explosively orgasmic; and finally: a lot more fun with girls. It wasn't that I was a lesbian exactly; it was more like I was a vegetarian who occasionally indulged in a big juicy cheeseburger. Or something like that.
"So how would he do it to you?" I asked. .
"Oh I don't know..." she said "He'd take me out someplace nice for dinner... it would be romantic but not too fancy, and we'd have great conversation and drink some wine..."
The Toad had obviously thought this through.
"And then what would happen?"
"Oh you know" she blushed "He'd take me home and we'd... do it."
"Details girl! I want details!"
Jen was bright red. She hit me over the head with a pillow.
"Come on girl, spill it! I'd tell you." It was true. When I was first discovering my interest in girls, it was The Toad who got to hear all about my crushes, all my lusts, all in gory detail. I don't know what she'd made of my lesbian fantasies. 'Interesting idea' was all she would ever say.
"Well, the thing is I'm not very experienced." she said "So I don't know how it's really supposed to work. I mean, aside from the obvious."
Jen and I must make an odd pair, I thought. If I'm going to call her The Toad, I should really call myself The Stork. Where Jen was short and stocky, I was tall and gangly. And flat as a rail. With our glasses and our predilection for comfortable oversized sweaters and baggy pants, we must look like refugees from Geek Central. It didn't help that we were both heavily into scifi/fantasy; and computers. In high school, we had both been total outcasts. Fortunately, there is more to life than high school.
"I was thinking" Jen went on "Maybe you could help me practice."
