The Reluctant Exhibitionist

by Martin Shepard

  I stiffened now and knew that our meeting would be fulfilled. I was no longer in any hurry. I was no longer concerned about the incompleteness of our experience.

  My chest swelled and burst from the warm ecstatic energy generated by watching and feeling her rubbing. I guided my prick against the soft fleshiness right above her cunt, pressing against her buried clit. And then, with the enjoyment of knowing my house was in order, I slowly and deliberately sank my cock into her.

  And she was truly delicious. Voluptuously yielding. Again and again and again I thrust home. She began to purr, to groan, to growl in a gutteral feline way. Her lips flattened out against her teeth—the only sign she gave of holding back. I sank my tongue beneath them and sucked and pried them loose.

  She pulled and hugged and growled in short choking breaths as I whipped in and out of her with greater and greater frenzy. Pounding her into the worn, pillowy rocks on the shore. And then, in a great animal heaving and huffing and bleating and wailing, we came. And lay still, kissing and caressing. Her hand playing lovingly with my ear. Mine moving mindlessly against her cheek.

  I had finally touched her heart and been touched in return.

  The stillness was interrupted by a power boat racing in toward us. We spun our heads about. Had they seen us here, under the dock? It seemed so, as one of them appeared to be waving. Carol stiffened and started to reach for her clothes.

  “Hey. Don’t do that. If it gave us pleasure to do it, and it gives them pleasure to watch, nobody’s the loser. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  She smiled and let me lay still on her comforting, yielding, loving body. Until it felt right to get up and go home.

  Saturday, August 29

  Going out to dinner with Carol and Jim was the very best thing that Eivor and I could have done. For it afforded us the first pleasant evening we had spent together in the past two weeks.

  Jim is really quite a lovely man. In his late fifties. Jealous. Politically conservative, if not reactionary. Out front with racial stereotypes and prejudices. The antithesis of all that I have believed in. And yet, being in the presence of his personal kindness, sensing his great affection for his wife and children, I came to realize that all of his social and political attitudes were roles, a mask he wore so well and for so long that he himself came to believe it was really his face. But this abstract philosophical crap would never endure the specific realities of his relating to people. Except with those fools who felt compelled to counter his bullshit with some of their own.

  He rather liked Eivor. For all of his imaginary jealousy, he semi-proposed in his hesitant, jocular way that we all get it together sexually. If it hadn’t been for the lateness of the hour and our babysitter’s request that we return home by midnight, we might well have gone back to their house for a foursome.

  I would have liked that. For then there would be one less secret to keep from both Eivor and Jim. And more sharing. And less jealousy. And it seemed only fair to me that he be entitled to enjoy my wife as I had enjoyed his. But most of all, I liked him.

  It is also becoming clearer to me why Eivor has been so bitchy, so down on me, so critical, impatient, curt, and asexual. It is because she is a Romantic. And because she has illusory ideas concerning how a person is supposed to be.

  I think it works like this:

  Eivor finds herself attracted to Phillip. She fucks him. She enjoys him and fucks him again. He becomes the first and only other man she has had a continuing relationship with since we first me. She feels guilty about this. For he is her LOVER. But if he is her LOVE, where am I, her husband? To be a Romantic and love truly does not permit you to love more than one. And so she has to chop me down, criticize me for past and present faults—both real and illusory—so as to justify to herself falling OUT of love with me and INTO love with someone else.

  Like so many people, she must first try to destroy whatever affection she bears one person in order to give herself permission to love a second.

  But I won’t let her do that with me.

  If only she could just fuck him. Without symbolism. Without the conflict. Without the shitting on me that seems to accompany her liaison with Phil.

  And if she doesn’t want to ball me, that’s okay, too. If it has to be. But is it necessary to add so much insult to injury?

  There I go again. Trying to wish away the distressing actuality of it all.

  Better just to attempt to understand it. To accept what is. Without illusions.

  Still, the actuality has shifted, once again, for the better. Being in the presence of our dinner companions forced her/us out of our dead end and into a pleasanter way of relating.

  And back to a respectful, familiar, and detoxified bed.

  XXX

  My final self-interview.

  Q: There are still a lot of holes in your autobiography. And with three chapters left, I hardly see how you can fill them in.

  A: What holes are you referring to?

  Q: Well, you never really talk about your mother and what effect she has had on your life.

  A: But there is nothing in particular I wish to say about her now. She is not, at the moment, an integral part of my life. It is conceivable that after my father dies, she will be.

  Q: That won’t do for an autobiography.

  A: So consider this book something other than an autobiography. Call it “Marty’s Book.”

  Q: But you contracted with your publisher to write an autobiography.

  A: Then call it an autobiography.

  Q: Really. I just don’t understand your attitude. You frustrate. You tease. You never let the reader in to see the real you. You haven’t written about your mother (other than some passing references to her as a stereo-typical Jewish mother), you haven’t explained your own usage of drugs, you’ve said nothing about the beginnings and the development of your relationship with Judy, and you never account for the change in your sexual attitudes from one of total unconventionality to apparent total conventionality. For a person who claims to be an exhibitionist, you are the most reluctant exhibitionist I have ever met.

  And another thing. You’ve yet to pick out a satisfactory title.

  A: How about “The Reluctant Exhibitionist”?

  Q: [Angrily] Stop putting me on.

  A: Call it what you will.

  Q: [Insistently] If you expect to publish this book, you had better start by either answering my questions or telling the reader why you are reluctant to do so.

  A: Okay, okay. I’ll start with my mother.

  My reluctance to write any more about her than I already have comes from a bind that such writing would place me in. You see, I like my mother. And so I don’t want to recount all the grievances I had against her in the course of my growing up. For it would pain her deeply to see that in print. And the fact of the matter is that my grievances were due as much to my own limited perspective as they were to the reality of her being. I was never able, as a child or as an adolescent, to get inside of her feelings, never able to appreciate things from her emotional point of view.

  I was never able to see that her preoccupation with household chores—shopping cleaning, planning, ordering—were attempts to feel significant, attempts to bring order out of chaos, attempts to control the frightening, accidental, awesome experience that life IS. And so I went through my adolescent bitching, moaning, “misunderstood” phase. I was overly sensitive to her unsuccessful attempts to control me (along with other animate and inanimate things in her environment) and under-sensitive to her hurts, loneliness, tearfulness, and despair.

  Actually, in what she set out to do, she succeeded very well. She was an excellent housekeeper and quite thrifty. She may not have provided my father with much intellectual stimulation, but she did free him from joining the many henpecked husbands who have to work harder and harder to keep up with their wives’ demands for clothes, appliances, housekeepers, vacations, cars, and the like.

  She was also always a very attractive wo
man.

  My mother read the first draft of this book and was quite hurt over my earlier mention of her in Chapter 5. She felt my description of her, accurate though it might have been, was quite unflattering, and she asked that I omit her from my book. I tried to make light of her complaint but she became more insistent. For weeks, whenever we spoke, she asked whether she was out yet, and even threatened never to speak to me again if I left her in.

  I know she would not do that, because she does love me. And I don’t want to write any more about her that would cause her more grief. My father’s illness and impending demise is enough of a burden for her to bear.

  This spring she came to visit Judy and me for a weekend. She was in a great dilemma, which I felt for. She wanted to help Judy clean up—as any good guest might—but feared that her attempts at helping would evoke the same “criticism” as she drew last summer. She felt damned if she helped and damned if she didn’t.

  Q: Okay, I can understand that. But is there nothing you can say about her influence upon you? Nothing positive that she gave you?

  A: She gave me my love of the beach and the sea. We share that appreciation.

  And, I suppose that I (as a psychiatrist) and she (as a Jewish mother) both presume to tell others how to live their lives. That really requires a special (although common) arrogance. So that is another way in which we are alike.

  Also, there is the matter of tenacity. My mother will invariably insist/persist in innumerable attempts to gain her way whenever that is humanly possible. I have adopted this attitude myself.

  Q: Anything more?

  A: In a rebellious way, perhaps. I see my sense of detachment arising in reaction to my mother’s emotionality and her overwhelmingness at times.

  Q: You refer frequently to your use of drugs. Yet you never make explicit your use of them.

  A: I suppose that’s because I see drugs as being so much a part of our culture that it had never occurred to me that any explanation was called for.

  If I wrote “I poured myself a drink,” you would never ask me to make explicit my use of alcohol, would you? Nor would you have me explain my use of cigarettes if I wrote, “I had a cigarette.”

  Coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, diet pills, wake-up pills, tranquilizers, sleeping pills—they are all a part of our drug culture. Almost everyone has his favorite drug. I assume that anyone under thirty (and many who are over) who reads this account will have had similar drug experiences to mine and, therefore, would be neither interested in a fuller report nor puzzled by my references.

  Q: Still, you must appreciate the fact that many readers are not familiar with such drug-induced experiences. For all they know, you might be some mainlining heroin addict. Is that the impression you want to give?

  Also, you must consider why you used drugs and what, if anything, you got out of them.

  A: I have never used heroin. It is just about the one popular drug that I have not sampled. I suppose if I could get some laboratory-pure heroin I might try it once—just to gauge its effects—but that is impossible to obtain. The danger of death from shooting adulterated heroin is not worth the risk, as far as my curiosity is concerned.

  I know that addiction (given our archaic drug laws) leads invariably to criminality, to bringing out the worst in a man—although I doubt that I am the heroin-addict type. The other opiates that I’ve tried (morphine, cocaine, opium), have not had any particularly wondrous effects upon me. Perhaps that’s because I feel good most of the time anyway.

  Besides which, I’ve preferred drugs that make you remember, not forget, that increase awareness and not dull it.

  Q: You’re telling us what you don’t do. Please answer the second half of my query.

  A: My motivation for taking drugs, as far as I’m concerned, has simply been curiosity. They are there. People I meet professionally as well as socially have taken them. To share their experiences fully requires that I have a similar one. So I have sampled many drugs once or twice.

  The only drugs that I’ve taken with any regularity have been the psychedelics. And even there I would never have been considered a heavy user. They are not addictive, you know, and do not lead to “more dangerous things,” any more than a fondness for wine with dinner leads one to alcoholism.

  I’ve smoked pot, occasionally, for seven years now. I’ve taken mescaline on perhaps twenty occasions, psilocybin once, and acid twice.

  Q: And what have you gotten out of it?

  A: I would say that my two acid trips (total cost, two dollars) were as meaningful to me as my first psychoanalysis and all of my analytic training. For they made me aware of both the pointlessness of life and the wondrous actuality of it all. I was able to accept my pettiness, my mortality, and my insignificance, and yet not despair. I could see that all my actions, all my statements, were meaningless in any cosmic sense. Yet I appreciated the fact that I would continue to carry on in the exact same way, not really master of my own fate (although pretending to be), but subject of some larger one.

  Q: Big deal. What’s so special about that awareness?

  A: To write about, nothing. To experience it in all of its meaning is something else.

  It has given me a more balanced way of interpreting events. It’s made me calmer. Less concerned with the opinions of the current dogmatists and moralists. Less concerned, even, with my own philosophizing, introspections, and opinions.

  LSD is phenomenally potent. Ten thousand thoughts pour in each second. You lose control of your ego entirely. You can control nothing. The fact that I could survive such an experience without harming myself or others gave me enormous faith in my basic “all-rightness.” I lost whatever fear I might still have possessed about my primordial self.

  I feel that I’ve learned all that I can from LSD. I’m not interested in taking it any longer or taking it just for kicks. I respect both the drug and myself too much to abuse either that way.

  Q: And the other drugs?

  A: Mescaline is a more “female” drug than LSD. Whereas acid gave me harsh reality in each and every form simultaneously, mescaline did wondrous things for my senses. Fucking was an incredible experience on mescaline. Each molecule in my body seemed to have its own individual orgasm. And the quality of awareness was gentler. I entered a blissful religious experience with mescaline as opposed to the apocalyptic one that LSD provided.

  But I hesitate to say what drugs do. I can only say what they’ve done for me. Others, I know, have reacted differently.

  I’ve found that good grass (even more than hashish) can put me back in touch with these same experiences. If you give yourself over to the effects of the psychedelics (instead of planning to use them in any particular way), you find that at times they will evoke paranoia, at times they will act as aphrodisiacs, and at times they will give you sufficient detachment to see situations and people with an insight and clarity that cannot be obtained when you are soberly “closer” to the situation.

  I must add that it has been some time now since I have done anything other than smoke an occasional joint.

  Q: How come?

  A: Mostly because I haven’t felt like it.

  I last took a mescaline tablet this past February … just a few months ago. And that, itself, after a six-month hiatus.

  I had met Judy some two months earlier. Someone had previously given me some mescaline that he insisted I try, but I never seemed to have the time to sample it. I had known Judy in my “right mind” as fully as I felt I possibly could. I wanted to see if my perceptions of her changed under the influence of this drug.

  I dropped the tab and waited. From the reports of friends who had tripped on the same batch, I knew it was quite potent.

  Judy and I were sitting around a fireplace talking. A half hour went by. An hour. An hour and a half. I could tell that the drug was in my system because of its mild physiological effects. But surprise of surprises. There was no alteration in my perceptions. My level of consciousness remained unchanged.

&n
bsp; I appreciated at that moment the value of these drugs. They make you vividly aware of the here and now, the immediate situation. Often, on pot, one has the experience of being caught in the middle of a sentence and yet not being sure of one’s starting point or finishing point. You don’t know how you got there or where you’re going. Yet your listener seems to understand perfectly well what you are saying. You make sense to him.

  That experience is the Gestalt experience of the NOW. Not past or future but the present moment. And if you throw out your plan, the prearranged thing you thought you had to do or say, you are flooded with what it’s like to hear, see, feel, sense, RIGHT NOW. You are “turned on.” Your programmed self is off on a holiday.

  Well, what happened that night with Judy became suddenly clear. I was so tuned in to her/turned on by her—so focused and so concentrated—that I was already high, and thus the drug had no significant effect. After all, mescaline has been described as a consciousness-altering drug. If your head is already into that consciousness, the drug won’t do much for you.

  Q: I’m glad you brought up Judy. Because she is one of the people you must say something more about.

  A: I have something more to say about her in my last chapter.

  Q: I’ve already read your last chapter. A few pages of rather boyish prose about a woman with whom you expect to stay for a lifetime? Really, that won’t do. This is a serious mistreatment of both yourself and her.

  A: Frankly, I’m not sure what more I can add. We met a few weeks after Eivor and I broke up. And I’ve been seeing her ever since.

  Q: She must have made quite an impact on you. Can you describe that occasion?

  A: I’m afraid it will be a let-down. I picked her up at 9:00 P.M. and took her to a tenants’ meeting held to protest our building going cooperative.

  Q: That was the big date?

  A: And to a bar for a few beers afterward.