Hard Evidence- The Collected Bawdy Writings

by Kevin Keck

  Lorraine’s spirited cries for extra dick should have been another red flag waving furiously in my face, and perhaps this accounts a little more for my lack of surprise concerning her revelation about my neighbor, Brian. Her responses were never as enthusiastic when I probed her desires to go down on her hygienist, or watch me as I viciously plunged into another woman’s aching pussy. (And oh, how these things were heavy upon my mind in that interval of weeks leading up to the year’s end! Every fantasy I’d conjured about the transformative alchemy of two women entwined around my body played continually in my imagination-- all those orgasms that seemed so intense when Bridget and I shared them with others via wires and satellites were about to be replaced in memory with the genuine intensity of human static, heat, and breath. I found myself masturbating with increased frequency, to the point where I eventually tore the skin on my insatiable penis-- instead of stopping I simply continued jerking off with Neosporin and hoped for the best.)

  The one question I wanted to ask but avoided in the weeks prior to the party regarded the amending of Lorraine’s engagement ring clause: why had she suddenly dropped this as a requirement for our mutual exploration of group sex? I didn’t touch the issue; I played it as cool as I possibly could, given the fact that fulfillment of a lifelong dream was but a short time away. Also, I was happy to have the ring subject dropped period, regardless of its relation to swinging. In the preceding months, Lorraine had been dropping hints relentlessly that what she wanted more than anything else in this world for Christmas was an engagement ring. A lot of this pressure emanated from her mother, a Charlotte socialite who adhered to the quaint notion that a girl was destined to be an old maid if she wasn't wed by the age of twenty-five. Lorraine was teetering on the brink of spinsterhood, and thus sales flyers for jewelry stores were not carted to the recycle bin with the rest of the papers; if we were watching television and a commercial for a jewelers came on, she'd make a comment along the lines of, "That's a pretty ring-- that's the sort of ring I'd like." Even if she was in another room when the advertisements commenced, she would step into the doorway for the duration just in case a commercial featuring engagement rings came on. Perhaps she thought she was being subtle, but it's difficult to fail to notice that someone only provides commentary when a specific piece of jewelry flashes on the screen; it was a Pavlovian response to be marveled at, which I would have had I not been the target of her programming.

  Besides, even if I had the desire to be married, I certainly didn't have the money; I taught college part-time, and that was enough to eek out an existence for me. I'm a terrible wage earner in the same way I've always been a poor athlete: I don't see why I should work hard to own a home and drive a nice car or the point of winning any sort of game when we're all just going to end up dead anyway. Why bother? Better to spend your time like Thoreau, working as little as possible and doing as much of what you like while you're here. Such an attitude prevents one from accumulating the capital necessary to purchase precious metals, but it does afford the luxury of acquiring a gift card to Target, and as Lorraine was soon to be moving into a new apartment I thought that a gift with the possibility for fulfilling a variety of desires was a splendid idea.

  When New Year’s Eve arrived I spent most of the day restraining myself from masturbating. I was fully healed by then and eager to avoid another friction injury-- no one wants to expose their penis for the first time at a swingers party and have it looking mangled and distressed. But also my aversion to wanking was because when I am anticipating excitement and adventure I become far to eager prior to the event and wear myself out before anything actually happens. This behavior doesn’t confine itself merely to erotic encounters (oh, the number of dates I’ve canceled at the last minute because I’ve spent a whole day jerking off and thus satisfied my hunger single-handedly!), but spills over into a variety of social activities. I am the fellow who arrives at the party already intoxicated, or who gets too high before the concert. In either case, I end up sleeping through the pinnacle of everyone else’s evening, which is yet another reason I prefer to remain in my own domicile: rarely do I miss anything exciting by passing out early there. A cat may knock over a fish bowl and the glass will shatter me back to consciousness, but that’s about it.

  However, I did allow myself to discharge one round in the morning and the afternoon to ensure that I wasn’t overly primed when the stars aligned later in the night. In both instances I was watching gang-bang porn, trying to pick up any last-minute pointers for group etiquette, but the weeks of anticipation made me quick on the draw, and I was unable to glean anything new. It just looked like an animalistic, free-for-all fuck-fest. There seemed to be little actual protocol, but these were professionals I was watching: I viewed the people I would be meeting that night as hobbyists, and just as other amateur groups have unwritten codes for behavior (for instance, you can‘t just go groping female Klingons at the Trekkie conventions-- I learned that the hard way), I was certain there were policies of which I was unaware that would complicate matters for me. But still, no matter my anxiety over the rules of order, nothing could dampen my spirits, for very soon (it was so close I could taste it) I would be having sex with two women (or more!) simultaneously.

  Lorraine and I started out the door around nine that night to walk to the party; winter is often non-existent in North Carolina, and so the evening was only mildly chilly. We ambled casually through the streets of my neighborhood, the houses brightly lit with the trappings of Christmas that would be dismantled by the end of the week. Over the rooftops, through the naked winter branches, the skyline of Charlotte loomed with its imposing phallus, the Bank of America tower. Any other night I’d wish for the warm Spring rains and greening of trees to erase its presence on the horizon, but for once it looked merely like an enormous steel Christmas tree topped with a crown of stars, beaming down the last rays of the year onto the churches and shops and people below.

  As we turned the corner I put my hand on Lorraine’s ass; she was wearing a black cocktail dress that made her look especially fuckable. A voice from a passing car yelled, “Woohoo!” and then that car stopped just ahead of us. I recognized it: it was my brother’s.

  He rolled down the passenger’s side window and said:

  “What up, dude? I thought I‘d missed you.”

  I leaned down and put my head in the car. “We just got started,” I said. “Some friends of Lorraine’s are having a party.”

  “Cool, I was hoping you had something planned.”

  I turned my head to look at Lorraine; she’d lit a cigarette and was giving me the wide-eyed stare of, No, absolutely no way is he coming. I put my head back in the car. “I don’t know, dude. You may not be dressed properly.” My brother was sporting shorts, a tie-dyed t-shirt, sandals and a thick hemp necklace. He was and still is a bearded and hairy fellow.

  “What the fuck, man? It’s tradition that we spend New Year’s together.”

  This was not exactly true. My brother and I had spent the previous New Year’s Eve together, but that was it. It was his habit to declare anything that had occurred once a tradition if he wanted to do it again. This was not some weird revisionist history that he deployed as a way to imbue one with guilt and get his way; he was not as clever as our mother in that regard. He was being sincere, and it was for this reason that I looked back at Lorraine and made an apologetic face while simultaneously fighting the urge to grab my bother’s keys from the ignition and hurl them into the bushes and take off running with Lorraine. But she had heels on, and Brandon was, after all, my younger brother. I opened the car door for her and he drove us the few blocks to Karen and Harry’s.

  In retrospect I could have told him, No. But it’s not quite that simple. Though my brother has a history of intruding at the most inopportune times-- and this was certainly one of them-- I felt honor-bound to take him along even on those occasions when his presence was guaranteed to be a disaster. Though he has since moved to Arizona to be as far from ou
r mother as possible, at this time he was still living (at the age of 24) in the same bedroom he had lived in since he was ten. Sadly, the décor had undergone few changes in those years, though he had scaled back his shrine to Star Wars after I introduced him to smoking pot-- something had to be done, and cannabis was the only remedy I could think of for a fellow who was bordering on a life of celibacy.

  Part of the problem was that my brother was just entering puberty when my mother was undergoing her first in a series of debilitating depressions. I was mostly absent during a lot of this, being older and away at college, but the fallout of her episodes easily reached me-- my father and brother were present for the meltdowns. I’m uncertain as to the particulars concerning those years, but as my father escaped into the church, my brother surfaced from adolescence absent of any discernible ambition in life, withdrawn and something of an emotional literalist: though capable of sarcasm himself, he tended to stay on the surface of meaning where others were concerned. Such traits made him vulnerable to people who took advantage of his good nature (I was shamefully among those cretins from time to time), and thus, as he was my only sibling, I had a conscience which compelled me to guardedly usher him through as many of life’s experiences as possible. It would only strike me after he’d gone to Arizona that I was hovering over him exactly as my mother had done, but in a considerably different manner.

  Because of my brother’s inherent sincerity, he did not pickup on Lorraine’s clear displeasure with his arrival during the brief ride in the car; she masked her mood with a smile and small talk, but it was conversation which meant, Motherfucker, if I had a time machine, I would travel back to the night of your conception and convince your father to wear a condom. I assumed this had a lot to do with the nature of the party, and I was with her in that regard: I had no desire to witness my brother have sex, or have him watch me. Or be in the same room naked with him. Or put my penis where his penis has been. There was a whole range of reasons, but I was only partially right in my speculations as to Lorraine’s irritation. She knew what I did not: one of those unspoken rules I’d wondered about dictated that if there was a guy, he had to bring a girl. Single men were an unwanted nuisance.

  I should have known this-- I try to enforce a very similar rule when hosting large social gatherings myself: for the heterosexual male, there’s no kind of party more terrible than a sausage party. Straight men who are lubing themselves with alcohol become dangerously restless when they do not have women around to impress. In a situation where the men outnumber the women by large numbers, the males turn on one another like hungry jackals, thus ruining the mating chances of the entire herd. I fully understood the need for a delicate balance in the sexual ecosystem. But this was my brother. Surely he would have special privileges, and besides it was New Year’s Eve. Where was the holiday spirit?

  Karen and Harry lived in a modest cottage in the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood, just across the railroad tracks and down past the Penguin restaurant. We appeared to be the early arrivals as the house did not give off the appearance of being in full swing. Harry answered the door, a fellow roughly the same age as me, with dark hair and a chiseled, gymnast look. He was wearing roughly the same clothing as my brother.

  “Lorraine!” he exclaimed as he opened the door. He pulled her into a tight embrace and kissed her full on the lips. I thought this was a bit inappropriate, swinger or not, when he suddenly released Lorraine and swept into a deep bear hug, kissing both of my cheeks and saying, “And you must be Kevin! It’s so good to meet you-- Karen and I have heard so much about you.” When he let me go he was beaming with a warm friendly smile, but there was something too friendly about it that made me uneasy. His smile quickly collapsed into puzzlement when I stepped aside and my brother, who had been loitering in the background on the front porch, moved to make his way in the house.

  “And you are…?” Harry trailed off.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “This is my brother, Brandon.” I offered no further explanation, and Harry stuck his head out the door and glanced both ways.

  “Just the three of you?”

  “Yep,” I said. I looked around for Lorraine; she had disappeared.

  “Ah, okay. Well…” Harry stuck out his hand to my brother. “Nice to have you Brandon. Come in and have a beer.”

  My brother said, “Cool,” but I had distinctly detected in Harry’s tone that it was not cool at all. Not by a long shot.

  Harry and Karen’s home seemed like one catalog photo after another: every item in every room seemed carefully chosen and placed. It did not feel like an actual home, but rather a model of what the home of a 21st century, young, urban, professional couple should look like. When Harry opened the refrigerator, I noticed everything inside of it seemed arranged: things lined up in an unnatural way. The beers were in rows; the cottage cheese, sour cream, and cream cheese were placed in order of descending size. There was a menagerie of anonymous Tupperware containers also separated by size. The condiments in the refrigerator door: sized. There was a time in my life when such tidiness would have made me feel as though I had encountered my soul mates, but there was something fucked up about neat-freak swingers.

  I mentioned to Harry how nice his house was, but he dismissed the comment as though he’d heard it all before, saying only, “Yeah, it’s okay. Karen decorates. You guys want a bong hit?” He opened the freezer and took out three quart size mason jars, then reached into the cupboard and removed an ornate bong standing about 18 inches high. My uneasiness began to subside significantly.

  "So what we got here," Harry said as he opened the jars, "is AK-47, Trinity, and Northern Lights. What you want to start with?"

  Start with? Harry had just announced he had three varieties of high grade weed-- weed that had a name. When marijuana has a name, prepare for the complete annihilation of reason. I consider myself a cultured smoker of pot, but I don't have the connections to rendezvous with the contraband Harry presented as though it were merely a series of frozen dinners. I was worried that I might not even remember the impending orgy.

  Harry packed a sample of each variety for me and my brother, and as we worked our way through each numbing hit I heard the laughter of women emanating from a doorway. Occasionally their tittering was punctuated by a deeper voice, and I said to Harry, "Who else is here?"

  "Greg and Brittany. Lorraine is probably downstairs with them and Karen."

  "Oh, so we're not the first to arrive."

  "Nope, you're last. I guess that makes you it." Harry winked at me and then put the bong to his mouth as he filled it with smoke and inhaled. My brother smiled at me.

  "Last? Isn't anyone else coming?"

  Jerry exhaled as he spoke, making his voice sound strained. "No, it's just the six of us-- well," he titled his head toward my brother as he looked at me, "seven. We like to keep these things, you know, intimate." He winked at me again, then began packing up the bong for another round; my legs and arms tingled. I felt like I needed to speak or I would forget how to talk, so I did my best to make cocktail chatter:

  "So Lorraine tells me that Karen's a hygienist; what do you do?"

  "I work at the bank. B of A."

  "Cool. What do you do there?"

  "I market credit cards and high-interest loans to families and individuals who have a history of managing their debt while accumulating more revolving accounts. It's a lucrative market for banking right now, because so many workers-- particularly low-wage earners-- are conscientious, you know? We market to pride. That's a really fresh market. What do you do?"

  "I teach."

  "Tough market. Teachers are a high credit risk-- tough for them to work more than one job to cover the bills, you know?" He turned to my brother, "You?"

  "I live at home."

  "Loyalty. Good market. Parents are good about picking up the tab. You have a credit card?"

  "I use my dad's." My brother's unflinching honesty about his dependent situation at the age of twenty-four embarrassed me, m
ost likely because it had been only too recently that I was equally dependent on our parents' good graces, and I was much older.

  Harry handed the bong to me as he addressed my brother, "Think about getting your own. If your dad banks with us we can tie your card into his account and you'll never have to worry about the bills with the bank-- you two can work out some arrangement." After passing my brother the bong, Harry said, "Well, let's go downstairs. That's where the real party is." And then as an afterthought to my brother, "Remind me to give you my card before you leave to give to your dad; I'll get you both a better interest rate." My brother nodded with sincerity.

  The downstairs of Karen and Harry's house looked precisely what the basement of a swinger's house should look like: it had a large leather sofa, a recliner, a large screen television, a bar, and a bean bag chair. The lighting was dim and there was a glass top coffee table that operated as a buffet for lines of cocaine.

  Lorraine was downstairs as Harry had suggested; she was sitting next to a brunette who was wearing jeans and a tank-top. Another couple-- a guy who looked similar to Harry (chiseled, athletic) and a thin, doll-like blond-- were standing at the bar. Everyone stopped talking when we got to the bottom of the steps.

  "Well, the gang's all here," said Harry, and walked off to the bar to make a drink. My brother and I stood in the room, everyone staring us. My perception of time was warped, so it seemed like several minutes passed before I raised my hand and said:

  "Hi, I'm Kevin." I jerked my thumb at my brother. "This is my brother." I looked at my brother; he grinned at the room. I added, "Brandon. That's his name."

  The brunette stuck her hand out toward me; I had to take a few steps forward in order to reach it. "Hi Kevin," she said. "I'm Karen." When she smiled it was sheer radiance. It was easy to see why she'd been a model; she exuded a classic beauty, somewhat like Audrey Hepburn. I smiled back, lips tightly sealed, self-conscious about my chipped tooth; it probably looked as though I were attempting to stifle a fart.