Eric and I go way back. Not quite as far back as high school, but nearly. We have been friends for many years. We've lost track of each other a couple of times, then run into each other again and have always been able to pick up where we left off. It wasn't one of those friendships that required constant companionship to keep it alive. In fact it seemed to thrive on distance and separation, probably for good reason!
We are very different personalities, and we certainly have pursued different courses in our lives, so it wasn't a closeness that was held together by Saturday night binges, football games or any of the other things that are supposed to cement male friendships. It was just that when we did get together the distances and the differences seemed to melt away. It was as if we hadn't seen each other since the night before, not the decade before.
We hadn't tried to share our lives and we lived too far from each other to live in each other's pockets. But if one of us needed a dependable partner for any enterprise, we both knew that a phone call was all it would take to bring assistance.
So I called him up.
"Eric?"
"Good God, Lew! Is that you? Where've you been?"
I laughed. "I haven't been anywhere! I never go anywhere."
"Well," he said. "That's not true. Last time we talked you'd just come back from Greece."
"Italy"
"Right. Well I wasn't far off."
He'd always been a bit vague about geography. The trouble was it wasn't just that he was hazy about where places were. He was even worse when it came to following directions, and finding places.
"You remember I once helped you drive your stuff across the country?"
"Sure," he said. "That was quite a trip!"
One of the things I remembered clearly about the journey was that on more than one occasion Eric's willful misreading of the map took us miles out of our way.
"You remember the girl?"
I did indeed. We had had finally found our way back to the highway after being lost half the night, and picked up a hitchhiker on the on-ramp back onto the interstate, just as the sun was coming up.
By the time the sun went down again Eric had fucked her twice, made her give me a blowjob while I drove the truck, and abandoned her at a truck stop.
He may not have been good at directions, but he was unerring when it came to finding pussy, willing or not. He had the single-mindedness of a homing pigeon.
That wasn't the only time I shared a woman with him.
Eric married Marie a couple of years after he left college. She wasn't at all like the women I have come to associate with him; good time girls mostly, some of them very good looking and most of them big women – rubenesque, I suppose would be the polite way to put it. Marie was a thin reed-like woman with a sharp tongue, a graduate student in philosophy with more brains in her pinkie than Eric could muster in his whole body, even if you added the brain in his cock to the rather smaller one in his head.
The three of us were hiking and camping in the Smokies. Late one afternoon I fell while crossing a mountain stream and soaked my clothes and my sleeping bag. That night I shared their sleeping bag with them. I remember Marie's cold skinny backside getting progressively warmer until she shifted to accommodate my growing erection. I fucked her without ceremony while she spooned with her husband, and then we all turned over and he fucked her too while she held on to me. It was never repeated and nobody ever mentioned it. She eventually left him; got fed up with his philandering and the fact that he wasn't terribly satisfying intellectually, I expect. But he was good natured enough and he let her go without demur. Eric subsequently ended up with a succession of women who were his intellectual equals, which isn't saying much.
The thing about Eric is that he is a great man friend; easy going, always ready to help you out of a jam or to get some job done. It's worth a lot to have a friend like that, one who will put himself out for you and help you see something through. He is good company too. Not a great conversationalist, but amiable, and - well, just easy to be with.
The only thing that seems to get him off balance is lust – he gets a bit crazy where women are involved. I suppose he isn't really very different from the rest of us, just a more extreme case. When Eric meets a woman, almost any woman, his judgment goes to pieces. It doesn't matter if she's good looking or bad looking, clever or stupid; just as long as she's his body type, Eric has to have her. She can be nice to him or she can be nasty to him; it doesn't make any difference. If there is the remotest possibility that he can get his prick into her he lavishes her with attention and seduces her the old fashioned way with flowers, and dinners and declarations of love.
Most of the time it works, and mostly it doesn't take very long. He is Prince Charming on steroids; attentive and devoted. Women love him. He once showed me a picture album of women he had dated. It was his catalog of conquests. A third of the women were gorgeous, and the rest ranged from pleasant to unbelievably ugly. But they were all smiling lovingly at him as he took the picture. Most of them were either half naked or completely naked and had that satisfied, sleepy mussed up look that well fucked women seem to acquire.
"Who's that one then?" I asked him, pointing to a picture of a big brunette, lounging naked on a chaise longue, with her hand covering her pussy.
"I don't remember her name. But I had a hell of a job getting rid of her. She wanted to get married."
And that was the problem. They all fell for him, but once he had fucked them vigorously for a few weeks he lost interest. The big problem in Eric's life was getting rid of lovelorn women. He didn't seem capable of just telling them it was over.
He couldn't say, "Hey, honey. That's it! Take your shit and get out. It's all over."
His way of getting rid of them was to behave worse and worse towards them in the hope that they would get the message, and end the relationship themselves. Some of them did, some of them didn't. He tried standing them up for dates, making sure they would see him with other women, taking money out of their purses, insisting on doing things they didn't like, like coming in their mouths or fucking them in the ass. Of course, sometimes these strategies backfired – especially the last one. Most of the time they decided they liked it after all.
But the fact remained that Eric's big problem was not so much finding women to fuck, but getting rid of them afterwards.
"I need you to help me move the boat. I need someone who won't shit their pants if the weather blows up."
The boat had been stored at a boatyard on the other side of Lake Michigan over the winter.
"So, are you going to help me or not," I asked, knowing very well that he wouldn't refuse. But I should have been ready for the next thing he said.
"Sure, of course. But there's this girl I've been going with......"
