(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  “She wet her palm with her tongue and reached for my penis.”

  Now consider this alternative:

  “She wet her palm with her tongue and reached for me.”

  Is there any real doubt as to where this particular horndoggle is reaching?

  Step 3

  Resist the temptation to use genital euphemisms, unless you are trying to be funny

  No: Tunnel of Love, Candy Shop, Secret Garden, Pleasure Gate

  Equally No: Flesh Kabob, Manmeat, Tube Steak, Magic Wand

  Especially No: Hairy Taco, Sperm Puppet

  I could go on, but only for my own amusement.

  Step 4

  Then again, sometimes sex is funny

  And if you ever saw a videotape of yourself in action, you’d agree. What an absurd arrangement. Don’t be afraid to portray these comic aspects. If one of your characters, in a dire moment of passion, hits a note that sounds eerily like Céline Dion, duly note this. If another can’t stay hard, allow him to use a ponytail holder for an improvised cock ring. And later on, if his daughter comes home and picks up this ponytail holder from his bedside table and starts absently chewing at the thing, well, so be it.

  Step 5

  Real people do not talk in porn clichés

  They do not say: “Give it to me, big boy.”

  They do not say: “Suck it, baby. That’s right, all the way down.”

  They do not say: “Yes, deeper, harder, deeper! Oh, baby, oh Christ yes!”

  At least, they do not say these things to me.

  Most of the time, real people say all kinds of weird, funny things during sex, such as “I think I’m losing circulation” and “I’ve got a cramp in my foot” and “Oh, sorry!” and “Did you come already? God damn it!”

  Step 6

  Use all the senses

  The cool thing about sex—aside from its being, uh, sex—is that it engages all five senses. So don’t ignore the more subtle cues. Give us the scents and the tastes and the sounds of the act. And stay away from the obvious ones. By which I mean that I’d take a sweet, embarrassed pussyfart over a shuddering moan any day.

  You may quote me.

  Step 7

  Don’t obsess over the rude parts

  Sex is inherently over the top. Just telling the reader that two (or more) people are balling will automatically direct us toward the genitals. It is your job, as an author, to direct us elsewhere, to the more inimitable secrets of the naked body. Give us the reddened stubble in the crease of a debutante’s groin, or the minute trembling of a banker’s underlip.

  Step 8

  Stop actually having sex

  This is very important. Remember that the sexiest thing about sex is really desire, which is just a fancy word for not getting laid.

  Step 9

  It takes a long time to make a woman come

  I speak here from experience. So please don’t try to sell us on the notion that a man can enter a woman, elicit a shuddering moan or two, and bring her off. No sale. In fact, I’d steer clear of announcing orgasms at all. Rarely, in my experience, do men or women announce their orgasms. They simply have them. Their bodies are taken up by sensation and heaved about in various ways. Describe the heaving.

  Step 10

  It is okay to get aroused by your own sex scenes

  In fact, it’s pretty much required. Remember, the intent of any effective scene is to evoke in the reader the feeling state of your characters, including the aroused states. And you’re not likely to accomplish this unless you, yourself, are feeling the same delicious tremors. You should be imagining what you’re writing and—whether with one hand or two—transcribing the details.

  Step 11

  Contrary to popular belief, people think during sex

  The body does its happy labor during sex, but the mind works overtime. And just what do people think about? Laundry. Bioterrorism. Old lovers. Sex isn’t just the physical process. The thoughts that accompany the act are just as significant as the gymnastics (more so, actually).

  Step 12

  If you ain’t prepared to rock, don’t roll

  If you don’t feel comfortable writing about sex, then don’t. By this, I mean writing about sex as it exists in the real world—an ecstatic, terrifying, and, above all, deeply emotional process. Real sex is compelling to read about because the participants are so vulnerable. When the time comes to get naked, we are all terribly excited and frightened and hopeful and doubtful, usually at the same time. You mustn’t abandon your characters in their time of need. You mustn’t make of them naked playthings with rubbery parts. You must love them, wholly and without shame, as they go about their human calling. Because we’ve already got a name for sex without the emotional content: It’s called pornography.

  Bonus Step!

  Step 13

  Read the Song of Songs

  The Song of Songs, for those of you who haven’t read the Bible in a while, is a long erotic poem that somehow got smuggled into the Old Testament. It is the single most instructive document you can read if you want to learn how to write effectively about the nature of physical love.

  RED SOX ANTI-CHRIST

  HOW ONE ASTONISHINGLY BITTER FAN BROKE THE CURSE OF THE BAMBINO

  I spent the last hours of October 27, 2004, burrowed beneath the blankets of my bed, engaged in an activity plainly definable as cowering. It was the fourth and final game of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, and I was living in a dust-caked apartment in Somerville, just a few miles from Fenway Park.

  The Sox were poised to sweep the Cards and thereby end the most ballyhooed dry spell in all of professional sports, dating back to the team’s shipment of Babe Ruth to New York in 1918. I had received multiple invitations to watch this historic contest, and declined all of them. I was a man in possession of an excruciating secret, and I wanted very much to sleep.

  It was dark and stuffy under the blankets. At a certain point, it also got loud. From next door came a noise of jubilation so primal I hesitate to place it in the humanoid category. Then car horns, the fizz-bang of bottle rockets, air horns, small arms fire. The beady red digits of my clock radio read 11:40 P.M.

  Soon the phone would start ringing. My friends, proud citizens of Red Sox Nation, the loudest-suffering fan contingent on earth, would want to share their joy with me. Floodie would confide how he envisioned the final out moments before it was recorded. The Big Ruskie would describe, in slurred and loving detail, the lunar eclipse that painted the moon above Busch Stadium a blushing red. Young Bull would tell me, in that half-ashamed guy manner, that he loved me. If they considered the date at all, it would be to note that the Sox had lost a crushing Game Seven to the Mets on October 27, 1986.

  None of them would grasp the true significance: October 27 happened to be the very day I was born into this world and called to serve as the Red Sox Anti-Christ.

  TO BE A FAN is to live in a condition of willed helplessness. We are (for the most part) men who sit around and watch other men run and leap and sweat and grapple each other. It is a deeply homoerotic pattern of conduct, often interracial in nature, and essentially humiliating. In response, fans have developed what is most accurately diagnosed as a religious psychosis. We honestly believe that our thoughts and actions affect the outcome of games. And that an accumulation of these thoughts and actions, carried out over, say, thirty years, can shape the larger contours of history. So when I tell you that I, Steve Almond, am the primary reason the Sox won the 2004 World Series, I don’t expect you to believe me. I’m just another Jesus freak when it comes to this stuff.

  I can only humbly submit the facts for your consideration…

  ON OCTOBER 22, 1972, the Oakland Athletics played the seventh game of the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. In the sixth inning, Sal Bando hit a long fly to center. Bobby Tolan looked to have the ball in his sights, but his left knee—weakened by the laser malevolence of my glare—buckled under him. The ball fe
ll in for a double, and the A’s went up 3–1.

  The Reds rallied in the eighth, putting two on with no outs. The A’s summoned to the mound one Rollie Fingers. Fingers appeared unfazed by the 56,000 screaming maniacs at Riverfront Stadium. He wore a handlebar mustache, the tips waxed to impeccable upturned points, which, between pitches, he twirled with great élan. This mustache itself seemed to do most of the damage. Fingers induced two strikeouts to stanch the threat, then mowed down three straight in the ninth.

  Five days later I turned six years old. I asked my parents for nothing. There was nothing to ask them for; I had been given the A’s, the Series, a life.

  LIKE MANY FANS, I grew up in a house full of men, the smallest of three brothers born to kind but overextended parents, and residing in a tiny Eichler home at the ass end of an affluent suburb. I attended school in a state of perpetual terror. Bullies could smell the fear on me. They did what bullies must. At home, I waited for my brothers to cast a healing glance upon me, and spent most afternoons alone.

  That I turned to sport for solace should come as no surprise. It was one of the few areas in which I could engage the passion of my father, whose personal archive includes a yellowed box score of the first game he ever attended, a 1951 tilt between the Yankees and the St. Louis Browns.

  Given our location—an hour south of San Francisco—I should have rooted for the Giants. But the Giants were dull. It was the Swinging A’s who kidnapped my heart. They were a dashing bunch, brawny, headstrong, with a tendency to beat one another silly. My favorite book during this era was an illustrated version of the Iliad, and I thought of the A’s lineup as a modern incarnation of the Greeks. They weren’t a team so much as a reluctant coalition of superstars. Bert “Campy” Campaneris,1 Billy North, Joe Rudi, the team’s gallant left fielder—he would smash a grand slam in the first game I ever attended—and, of course, Reggie Jackson, with his tinted shades and biceps of bunched cable.

  The pitchers, equally imposing, bore names only a pro athlete could do justice: Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Blue Moon Odom, not to mention Rollie Fingers. I can still see Odom launching into the divine contortions of his windup, which, at its apex, tipped him over so far the knuckles of his throwing hand brushed the dirt beneath him. And those unis! Kelly green shirts with blingy gold sleeves. It will go without saying that my entire wardrobe was predicated on this unfortunate color scheme.2

  For three autumns, I watched the A’s destroy all comers. In 1973, they handed the Mets a Game Seven thrashing, courtesy of homers by Campy and Reggie. In 1974, they tamed the Dodgers in five.

  None of this struck me as exceptional. It was merely the annual dividend of my devotion. My father and I would seat ourselves in front of the old Zenith in our den and watch destiny unfold, occasionally adjusting the rabbit ear antennae so as to remove excess snow from the unfolding destiny. At a certain point, Fingers would appear and induce a harmless grounder and the A’s would converge on the mound and the two of us would leap up and briefly embrace. I was happy. My father was happy. The world was happy. It might have gone on like this. It should have gone on like this.

  But then fate—or, as I prefer to think of fate, the Lord God of Sport—intervened. The instrument of His cruel intervention? None other than the Boston Red Sox.

  IN THESE EARLY YEARS, I had nothing special against the Sox. My sense of the team was sketchy. They came from a place with snow. They wore old-fashioned uniforms. Their best player, Carl Yastrzemski, had a name I believed to be an exotic lunch meat. My interest was hardly piqued when, in 1975, Boston earned a spot in the AL Championship Series against the A’s. They were just another team my boys would flatten on the way to a fourth title.

  But the Red Sox had a mysterious effect on Oakland, an effect best summarized as making them suck. This was clear from the very first inning of their matchup, during which our sure-handed infield committed three straight errors. Game Two began in more typical fashion: Bando doubled and Jackson sent a bomb over the wall in right. But the Sox struck back for three runs against Vida Blue, then knocked the stuffing out of the unknockable Rollie Fingers, pushing Oakland to the brink of elimination.

  I understood, even as an eight-year-old, that the A’s sometimes lost. What the A’s did not do was lose in the clutch. And thus it was clear to me, as I settled in before Game Three, that the A’s were merely pretending to suck. This pattern of “pretend sucking” continued deep into the game, which I was watching (for reasons that escape me) at my grandparents’ house. From time to time, my grandpa would stick his head in the doorway and offer me a mournful glance. He was a forsaken fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and viewed the garish dominance of the A’s as the inevitable result of my generation’s moral degeneracy.

  In the eighth, down two runs, Oakland finally woke from its slumber, putting men on first and third with Joe Rudi coming to the plate. The Sox went to the pen and extracted their closer, a right-hander with the absurd and villainous name Dick Drago. It was perfectly clear to me what would happen next: Rudi would pull a double down the line. I could see the ball’s sweet humming path through the night, the cloud of chalk kicked up along the left field line; I could hear the crowd’s grateful thunder. And then, quite abruptly, the ball was bounding to the shortstop and the Sox were turning a double play and Rudi was hurling his helmet to the ground and something inside me, some very early notion of faith, shattered.

  AS AN ADULT, I have often found myself in the position of having to explain to women with whom I hope to sleep why I take such a maniacal interest in the Oakland A’s. For years, it was my habit to trot out the story of the A’s golden years, how they seduced me—poor depressed child that I was—with those three sensational campaigns. But the origins of my obsession reside in that first massacre at the hands of the Sox. What characterizes the true fan isn’t the easy pleasure of rooting for a winner, but the struggle imposed by loss.

  There were, of course, plenty of rational reasons the team lost. Catfish Hunter had defected to the Yanks, the A’s bats had gone dead, and so forth. But the true fan is unmoved by rational analysis, and least of all the mercy implied by disappointment. We live in a kingdom of shame and recrimination. Those who defeat us are to be despised. And those who defeat us before defeat seems possible, who pop the cherry of our omnipotence, become sworn enemies for life.

  Was this a healthy psychological posture to assume? I would say no. My father made some effort to explain, in the face of my banshee rage, that flying to Boston and murdering the Red Sox would not actually solve anything. But I had trouble focusing on his lecture, what with my still beating heart torn from my chest.

  The next year, the team shipped Fingers and Rudi to Boston. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn (acting on orders transmitted from my still beating heart) voided the deals. But the damage had been done. The franchise went into a swoon that presaged and outlasted my tortuous passage into adolescence. The A’s were now losers, like me. And the Red Sox were to blame.

  I MUST HAVE SPENT a thousand summer afternoons in my room, listening to Bill King narrate the drubbings subsequently endured by the A’s. My weapon of choice was an ancient silver Panasonic weighing at least twenty pounds, with speakers that popped like fat-back. The A’s fan base amounted to shut-ins, the criminally insane, and me. They drew fewer than thirty-eight hundred per game during the 1979 campaign (54–108), and I myself was perhaps the only person on the planet who tuned in to the broadcast of a July laugher that drew, if memory serves, 937 lost souls to the vast concrete bowl known as the Oakland Alameda Coliseum.

  Against all reason, I found reasons to root. That season it was the rookie center fielder Dwayne Murphy, who set his cap at a rakish angle atop his Afro, from which perch it would inevitably tumble as he dashed toward the gap to flag down one of the many drives surrendered by the team’s pitching staff. Murphy was a lefty, like me, and a specialist at the drag bunt. I nearly wept the first time I saw him perform this elegant bit of legerdemain. He lowered his bat across the plate and d
rew it back just before contact. For a moment, he seemed to have caught the ball on the sweet spot, before gently pushing it between the mound and first base. Murphy himself was halfway down the line before anyone discerned the con. The drag bunt struck me as emblematic of those years: a way of improvising something from nothing, turning a gesture of weakness into strength, of locating redemption in the gaps.3

  The next year, Rickey Henderson joined Murphy in the outfield. The adjective electrifying is shamefully abused in the sporting arena, but it does apply to the young Henderson. He looked like no other ballplayer alive: short and squat and endowed with a massive, rippled complex of muscles best described as the National Republic of Rickey Henderson’s Thighs. I spent hours studying his batting stance, an osteoporotic crouch in which his legs cocked inward at the knee, creating a strike zone the approximate size of a Chiclet. He walked about 75 percent of his at-bats, and once on base he took over a game.

  Henderson’s steals were spectacular for their audacity—everyone knew he was going—and their improbable physics. The mechanics worked like so: About halfway between first and second, Henderson (now moving at the speed of sound) launched himself into a headfirst dive, covering the remaining yardage Superman style, crash-landing on his chest at the same moment his gloved hands hit the edge of the bag, bouncing in such a manner that his body slid across the top of the bag, decelerating by means of the resulting friction, then elegantly hooking the tongues of his cleats along that same front edge to keep from sliding into left field. As a thought experiment, I often speculated how far into left field Henderson would have traveled without this ingenious braking system. My general estimate placed him somewhere around the warning track.

  AND WHAT OF my own derring-do on the diamond? For behind every fan there lives some private history of athletic ignominy. Mine began on the sun-baked ball field of Terman Middle School where, as a shrimpazoid eight-year-old, I showed up with my Reggie Jackson autographed Rawlings for a Saturday afternoon tryout. Along one side of the grass stood the coaches who would draft us, former jocks to a man, with round, scarred knees and beer guts cinched into golf shirts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A: the Little League Meat Market.