So we did a ritual to cast the demon from him. At the moment we’re seeking a parapsychologist. In the ritual I was bound to the altar as the offering. It wasn’t too bad ’til they drew my blood into a tiny bottle.
Blessed be,
Bobbie
Again, let me say that one’s evaluation of Bobbie’s situation varies with one’s view of occult phenomena. Furthermore, one can decide for oneself whether some of the scenes of torture and subjection which she describes are literally true, utter fantasy, or actual events which have been severely distorted by her own perceptions.
A frustrating correspondence, this. I’m sure a factor in my not having answered the second-last letter was the feeling of utter impotence I’ve experienced throughout our exchange of letters. There’s nothing I can do for her. There’s hardly anything I can do for hardly anybody, but in Bobbie’s case I feel there rather ought to be.
A Letter from Diane
Dear Mr. Wells,
I read your magazine column monthly. My boyfriend and I feel that yours is the best at the newsstand.
Now to my problem. It goes like this: My boyfriend’s name is Fred and we’ve been going steady for the last two years. This might be considered strange because I’m eighteen, but up to only two months ago we have never gotten farther than necking.
Then one night I was babysitting, for our neighbors, and Fred came over. Fred showed me this book he was reading and there were some things in there I never thought possible. While we were necking he told me about some of the things in the book.
Before I knew it we were both sprawled out nude on the living room floor. He fingered me and felt me up. Then he tried to shove his penis into my vagina. Boy was it big. I couldn’t see how it could fit.
He still tried. My vagina wouldn’t expand wide enough for his prick to get in. Then he took his fingers and tried to open me with his hands. It still wouldn’t fit.
Then he tried to shove all kinds of things to open me up. Hot dogs, cucumbers, screwdrivers, and carrots. He then thought I wasn’t excited enough. He started licking my clitoris to arouse me. Nothing worked.
I love Fred very much and I was embarrassed that night. He walked out on me and hasn’t seen me for a week. He called ten days later and said we should try again. I’m afraid to because I don’t know if the same thing will happen. I don’t usually write about personal things but I’m desperate. Please help me.
Diane
P.S. 1. Please answer.
2. Fred told me to tell you to show more cunt in the pictures.
3. I’m sorry for the mistakes but I’m just so nervous about this whole thing.
My reply was returned by the Past Office, marked “No Such Number” and “Addressee Unknown.”
My Life Has Had Its Ups And Downs
I was answering letters when the phone rang. “This is Debbie. I came to New York and I sort of have to see you. I guess I shouldn’t be calling you but I have this problem and I thought maybe I could see you.”
I told her how to find the place, hung up, put a shirt on, moved things around to render the apartment a little less chaotic, and pulled out Debbie’s file. There were four or five letters from her, written over the past two months. She had read one of my books on stewardesses and was thinking of becoming a stew after she graduated from high school, if she decided not to marry the boy she was going steady with. She wanted to know more about becoming a stew, wanted to know something about my writing, wanted to discuss some of the girls I had written about—and generally seemed to want a pen pal. The letters contained precious little information about their author beyond the fact that she had just turned seventeen, would be graduating from high school in June, was going steady with a boy of nineteen named David, and lived in a small town in upstate New York.
The mental pictures I form of correspondents never come terribly close to reality, but Debbie looked so different from my expectations that I was almost shocked. She was very thin, wraithlike, with hollow eyes and a haunted look about her. She wore faded jeans and a denim jacket. Her hair was dark, long, and stringy. She looked impossibly young.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.
I put her in a chair and found a Coke for her. She tried out a few conversational openers and they didn’t get anywhere. Then she said, “I lied to you. I’m only fourteen.”
“Okay.”
“Also I’m pregnant.”
“Does David—”
“I don’t think David knows I exist,” she said. “I lied about that, too. He was this boy that I always liked in school but I don’t think I ever said two words to him. Look, I better go, I didn’t mean to lay this trip on you.”
I sat her down again and we talked. She had been into drugs and sex heavily lately. She had missed two periods and a doctor had confirmed that she was indeed pregnant. She had between two and three hundred dollars—she didn’t say then where she’d obtained it, nor did I ask—and she wanted to get an abortion. She knew they were legal but couldn’t get one where she lived, and didn’t want her parents to know about it.
Did her parents know she was in New York?
“I split from time to time, They don’t pay any attention. It’s just my mother, really. My parents got divorced years ago and my mother’s remarried to Chuck. Just so I don’t bug them, you know, they don’t really care.”
While she took a shower, I bought her some new clothes. Her old ones went into the incinerator, and not a moment too soon. While she got dressed I called a girl I know who is involved with Women’s Lib. One of the Movement’s positive aspects is an abortion referral service. I wasn’t too certain of the morality of arranging an abortion for Debbie myself, but I was perfectly willing for someone else to arrange it for her.
She stayed at my apartment for the better part of a week. She offered to sleep with me but didn’t seem upset when I demurred. The offer stemmed less from any real desire on her part than from a combination of friendship and obligation; we were friends, and I was giving her food and shelter, and the least she could do in return was provide me with sexual gratification.
My friend picked her up, took her to the abortionist, brought her back afterward. Debbie was quite depressed and remote for about a day after the operation, speculating as to whether the fetus was male or female, gradually getting herself used to the fact of what she had just gone through. At this stage she suggested that she might call her mother. I encouraged this, but she changed her mind and did not place the call.
She was tolerable company. She hardly ever left the apartment, but she was perfectly willing to sit on the couch with a book while I put in my hours at the typewriter. She was also good at keeping my coffee cup filled.
We talked quite a bit. Some people can write revealing letters but freeze in conversation, but Debbie was the other way around. Her letters had not really been an exercise in fantasy-tripping, as one might have guessed; the lies she told in them were offhand, and merely a matter of convenience. She had wanted to correspond with me but had been incapable of revealing herself on paper. Face to face, under the stress of the particular circumstances, she was quite open.
The following is a distillation of remarks she made at various times in the course of the week.
• • •
I have always felt out of it. As far back as I can remember. I can’t really remember much about my early childhood.
I’ve had four acid trips. The second trip, I got this rush of childhood memories. Like all the way back to when I was nursing. I got very excited and thought on other trips I could go all the way back and remember being born. But on the two other trips I would have other childhood memories, and I saw they were in conflict, and they also conflicted with what I knew to be the truth, so the conclusion I draw is that they were false memories, fantasies.
I don’t like acid anymore. My fourth trip was a bummer, screaming and freaking and all. Everybody said it was bad acid or something, but I don’t know. I figure your trips come out of yours
elf and it was showing me pieces of me I didn’t want to look at, so I haven’t tripped since that time. It must have been close to a year ago.
I’ve done grass, oh, a lot of times. Mostly because other people were smoking it and here’s this jay passing around so you take a toke. It never did very much for me. I don’t know why.
The past year I’ve been into pills a lot. Uppers and downers. Speed to get up and reds to get down. More downs than anything else. They smooth things out for me. Speed is nice for a rush and the feeling that you can hold it all in the palm of your hand, that your mind is so fast and efficient, but it takes so much out of you. The speed is why I lost so much weight in the past year. You stay up for a few days and don’t think about eating, and then you crash and come out of it all funky and food has no taste.
I’ve been clean for over a week. I figured all I had to do was bring drugs to your place and you would have a shit fit. I mean, I figured you’d be cool, but you wouldn’t need that kind of a hassle.
I’ve always been this lonely kid. My mother never had very much of an interest in me. I don’t know why that is. I think I take after my father and maybe that gives her bad vibes or something.
My father split when I was three. I think I remember him but I really don’t. He’s never been heard from since. We don’t know where he is or even if he’s alive. I have fantasies about him sometimes, which I guess is perfectly normal.
I also have an older brother. He’s much older than I am. I think he’s almost thirty now. He was my mother’s son from a previous marriage, or maybe he was illegitimate. That’s just a guess on my part. I don’t really have any grounds for thinking so but it’s a guess. I haven’t seen him in ages. He lives in California. Once in a while my mother will get a card or a letter from him. He got into trouble when I was a little kid and I think he was in prison for about a year. I think he stole a car or something. He’s not a criminal now, he lives in Los Angeles and sells dental supplies. He’s been married and divorced.
The first sex experience I had was before my mother got married to Chuck. It was with one of her boyfriends. I don’t know if you would really call it a sex experience or not. He was at the house one time when my mother was working. I must have been six or seven at the time. The thing is, he didn’t even touch me or anything. He told me he wanted to show me how men gave babies to women, and he opened his pants and took out his penis and played with himself. He showed me his balls and told me that was where the seeds came from that men planted in women. Then he jerked off and let me watch him ejaculate.
I wasn’t traumatized or anything like that. Actually I thought it was pretty sensational. I remember wishing I had something like that to play with. There was a time when I would check myself every time I went to the bathroom to see if maybe I was growing a cock. I discovered my clitoris and thought maybe it would grow into a penis, but it never did. I would touch it and I must have enjoyed the way it felt but I never thought anything of it and didn’t really know anything about masturbating as something a girl could do.
When I was nine or ten I was very friendly with two boys who lived down the block. They were brothers. One was a year younger than me and the other was two years older than me. We used to play together a lot. They were the only kids I was really friends with at this time.
They used to have peeing contests and would joke about it but wouldn’t let me watch. I kept bugging them to let me watch and finally I talked them into it. I was really excited at the idea of seeing their penises. When it finally happened, I remember being surprised they were so small compared to the penis I had seen before.
I was fascinated with penises. I wanted desperately to touch theirs but was afraid to suggest it. They were all set to have a peeing contest and then the older one turned toward me and suddenly began peeing on me. I ran home screaming and swore I would never have anything to do with them again.
A couple of days later they apologized and said they wanted me to play with them some more. They let me watch them pee and then asked if they could watch me. So I let them, and we did some fooling around. Touching each other. The older one got what I now realize was a hard-on, but he didn’t ejaculate.
I suppose we played that game a half dozen times in all. They moved away, but the game had stopped before they moved. I think we just lost interest in it.
Around this time there was a series of children being molested in the area. Not in our town but in the nearest large city. This man was picking up children—I think it was both boys and girls that he would pick up, but I don’t remember all that clearly—and he was taking them in his car and making them do things. No one was very clear on what he was making them do. No one got killed or anything but we were told in school repeatedly not to have anything to do with strangers.
I had fantasies about this. I would imagine a man offering me a ride after school and taking me into the woods or something and showing me his cock and letting me play with it. I also imagined him playing with me. I knew about intercourse at this stage but somehow never included it in my fantasy. I didn’t know anything about fellatio, although I had heard expressions like “blow job” around the schoolyard without having any idea in the world what it meant. But without knowing about fellatio, I had this desire to do it. In the fantasy, I would play with the man’s cock the way my mother’s boyfriend had played with his, and just as he would be about to shoot I would take the head of his cock in my mouth and suck on it.
The fantasy had a couple of different endings. Either he would tell me he loved me and give me money or a present, or he would take me home with him to be his little girl.
I used to take the long way home from school and walk home very slowly alongside of the curb so that it would be easy for him to talk to me. Of course, nothing ever happened, nothing at all.
I didn’t have any real friends after the two boys moved away. I think most of the kids regarded me as a little bit weird. I was always very quiet. I would be daydreaming in school and sometimes the teacher would call on me and I wouldn’t even have the slightest idea what they had been discussing. A couple of times my mother was called to school for conferences about this. I gather they wanted her to take me to a psychiatrist to find out why I was having trouble relating to school. I remember that term being used. I never did go to a psychiatrist or anything, though.
When I was twelve and a half my aunt died. She was my mother’s sister and they had been fairly close although they lived in different states. We all went there for the funeral and there was this cousin of mine I hadn’t seen in years and didn’t even remember. He was the son of one of my mother’s brothers and was also in that city just for the funeral, as his family lived in Florida. He was seventeen and I developed an enormous crush on him and kept following him around.
I was developed by then and looked probably a little older than my age.
I guess what happened is that I chased him around long enough that he decided he might as well have some fun with me. I don’t know if he had had much experience or not, but at the time I thought of him as the ultimate male. We went into the milking barn one night after dinner. This aunt had lived on a farm. We went into the barn, and he had a pint bottle of wine and gave me a few drinks from it. Then we started making out, kissing and touching. He took my clothes off to the waist and played with my breasts and sucked them. Then he opened his pants and took out his penis, and I immediately began to play with him. I guess I did something right because he said that I gave incredible hand jobs. This was another term I had not been familiar with.
I wanted to take it in my mouth but didn’t know if I should or not. As if he read my mind he asked me to do it, and I didn’t wait for a second invitation. I didn’t really know how to do it. I just sucked the head while pumping up and down on the shaft, but I guess that was enough to please him, because he moaned and groaned and squirmed around and shot in my mouth.
The taste surprised me. I thought it would be sort of creamy and salty in taste, but it was
very strong flavored. I liked it, though. Even more than that, I liked the whole idea of it.
Then he said he would do something for me, and I thought he meant fucking, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do yet for fear of getting pregnant. What he did was finger me, and I had an orgasm from it. I had not yet discovered masturbation, so this was my first orgasm, and it was wonderful. We were there one more day and more or less repeated the process. I sucked him off twice and he fingered me I think three times. He also went down on me, but I guess he had never done it before or something, or else he didn’t like doing it, because all it amounted to was that he kissed me there a couple of times, just ordinary kisses, and then went back to fingering me. It wasn’t really much of a thrill and for a long time after that I thought that being eaten was no big deal for a girl, until over a year later an older man did it who knew what he was doing, and I almost walked up the wall, it was so sensational.
I didn’t see my cousin after that time. He went to his home and I went to mine. A couple of times I was going to write him a letter but I couldn’t think of anything to write, and he never wrote to me. There was never anything like love between us. It was just a matter of having fun together.
But back home after that I was just turned on to sex. I started masturbating and could have an orgasm that way but it didn’t give me any satisfaction. It felt good but only made me more anxious to have sex than before.
I think boys can sense when a girl is ready. Not the boys my age, because they were too young. But older boys who had never paid any attention to me before began to take an interest in me. I was in eighth grade at the time and senior high school boys were starting to pay attention to me. Mostly it was a matter of getting rides home from school and winding up parked somewhere. Of course, it wasn’t long before the word got around that I was a girl who would do things, and then I became very popular.
Love at a Tender Age (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 6
