Entelechy: A Story About Urban Legends

“I was sunburned… as if a boiled lobster…” I paused to gather my thoughts. I cleared my throat and started again:

“I was perfectly tanned… against Paulo who was also perfectly tanned. We had been hiking in the outskirts of Rio. We had made love underneath a… big fern, a fern so luscious and dripping with moisture from the rains, it was like the dampness of our sweaty skin that dripped with aching desire… a desire so intense that…”

“Why don’t you let me know when you want to be honest,” said my therapist. I looked at the back of my hand that was blazing red from just two days before, and shifted my attention to a small coffee stain on my skirt. I did not want to start over. I was happier with Paulo in Rio. I was more content being perfectly tanned.

“I was sunburned… as if a boiled lobster…” I sighed at the fact, and pushed my hair behind my ear. I continued, and tried not to get lost in a tropical rainforest. “And having wanted too many beers after the sun beat down on my pale skin, I opted for Williamsburg.”

“Williamsburg?” asked my therapist.

“Yes… is that so hard to imagine?” She shrugged. “So…

I walked into the dully lit bar on Broadway, a bar just underneath the J train. I had been there before and did not care for it. It was just a couple blocks away from my friend Lilit’s place, and lacking energy to hold my own in a conversation, she was the perfect choice for a drinking buddy. She tends to talk more than I, and I just wanted to listen that night. I told her about the vibrators I had received from Trojan at work on Friday; she told me about her upcoming trip to Australia. I pushed at the skin on my arm as if to insure that the red was permanent at least for the time being, and she ran her fingers over her porcelain skin and looked at me. I really should have learned about the wonders of SPF by now.

To the left of us sat a gentleman, of sorts, sporting a bandage on his head and a band t-shirt of which I would normally dismiss had it not been a dully lit bar. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him show interest in our conversation – vibrator talk will do that. When he inquired, and I couldn’t hear him, I asked him to join us. Four beers in, I’m a saint.

His bandage? A bicycle accident. His name? Steve Miller. Like the band? Yes. We asked for I.D. He was tall; taller than any fella I had met in awhile – 6’3” to be exact. Something else we learned from his I.D. He was not my type…

“He was not my type,” I said aloud to my therapist.

“In what way?” she asked.

“In the way that he was alive and not my type sort of way… in the way that I did not care for the band on his shirt, or the fact that he told me he loved the Beatles,” I paused to give her space to comment. But she didn’t, so I continued, “And I felt his shorts should have been a different shade of navy, and that he should not have been drinking the beer he was…”

“What beer was he drinking?”

“I don’t know. Whatever kind I wasn’t drinking… and never would.”

“How can you say that, if you don’t even know?” was her question as she squinted at me with a look the reminded me of my mother’s expression of disbelief.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “But it’s the same way I knew that when I took him home, I would not approve of his boxer choice… and I didn’t.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“They were just not anything that I felt was respectable… they were cotton knit, as opposed to that thin cotton, the type of cotton that boxers should be with an elastic top that is covered in ruched fabric that’s only ruched because of the elastic. There was no fabric to be ruched on his boxers’ top… just elastic. It made me think it was something a poor boy would wear. And I was scared to look too close in case I came across a hole to prove my assumption. It was safer to take his boxers off…”

“So you took him home?”

Had I had balls, I would have scratched and shifted them, swept my sweaty brow like John Wayne and pointed out the obvious: I didn’t just take him home, I fucked him.

“Yeah… and it was awful,” I said. Saying the word out loud crippled me. It was just admitting to the fact that I can’t have sex with strangers. It does nothing for me. I’d be more content eating pizza and watching a bad movie in a language I couldn’t understand.

“How was it so awful?” she asked.

“So…

I had heard of jackrabbit sex. The kind of sex where it’s pump, pump, pump, pump, pump at the rapid speed of a jack rabbit on cocaine trying to get to the finish line in some sort astronomical attempt at breaking a Guinness Book of World Record, but I had never experienced it myself. Until that night, I had assumed such behavior was an urban legend, a term that women used at brunch to describe a bad lay. I had not known that it actually existed, that there were real live guys doing such horrible things with their pelvises to women. It was bad enough that I stupidly thought I could take him home without feeling shitty about it the next day, but now I was being humped at a rate that should not be used unless the man in the equation is about to die and the last chance for the survival of the species is for him to blow his load into the woman’s vagina before he drops dead and all hope for mankind is lost. Then, and only then, is jackrabbit sex permitted – for the survival of the species.

I thought about this, of course, as I lay there staring up at the ceiling and focusing on the spots I had missed when I painted my bedroom wall a few years before. I thought about urban legends, too. Not just the one that was being disproved as I lay there, legs spread eagle, writing sci-fi stories in my head, but all the others you hear growing up. Like the driver behind you in his car who chases you down, to tell you that you have an axe murderer in your back seat – you know, because he, the other driver, can see the silhouette of the axe murderer, whereas you, the driver of your own car who is looking forward, can not.

I also thought of the one about how if you ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke at the same time, your head would explode. I was still fearful of that outcome, but had someone offered me the duo at that moment, I would have tried them… or at least suggested Steve Miller ingest some.

In between my walk down urban legend boulevard and my thoughts to write a bestselling novel about men who die after they come, I debated my own fate. Was I going to have to give in and fake it so he would stop? Was that really how things were going to go down?

I had not faked it in quite some time. I had, of course, faked it several times in my life, but it had been awhile. I tried to recall what sort of production it would entail. I weighed the pros and cons of combining screaming and scratching up his back with my nails. Would that stop this madness? From experience, I knew that his drunken state would probably not allow him to climax, or if it did, we’d be looking at too many hours of this thrusting motion that already had me slamming my head against the wall. He either did not notice, or did not care. My head could take it; my vagina and hips were less than thrilled.

I opted for little moans that would escalate into louder moans that would be sprinkled with “oh yes!” I briefly considered saying, “don’t stop,” but since that was the last thing I wanted, I concluded that “oh yes,” would show that I was still alive and hopefully, wouldn’t prolong the fucking assault on my soul…

“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” asked my therapist.

I wasn’t going to answer her with a sentence. I was going to answer her with a question. “Have you ever had jackrabbit sex?”

“Point taken,” she said.

“So…

I’m moaning “oh yes,” and my phone is ringing and I’m trying to see who it see while Steve Miller is calling out “oh baby,” and I’m thinking to myself that this must be punishment for one of the many evil things I’ve done in this calendar year alone. And my head is knocking into the wall, and I’m pretty sure my neighbors can hear this insanity that’s going on. All the while I’m trying to focus on reaching an imaginary climax, but I’m still trying to remember all the urban legend tales from my youth, and I can’t decide where I want to commit my attention: on my fake orgasm, or my fun trip down memory lane.

I imagine that had it been brighter in my room, he would have seen the perplexed look on my face, as I tried to decide between the two possible thought processes. I settled on getting this guy off me as soon as possible, so I took the volume up to a notch that’s just below screaming, and he starts yelling “come with me, baby!” and I’m actually starting to blush and I have a leg cramp. And since my acting skills are the equivalent to his fucking skills, I figure I should just get to the point and I whisper “I’m coming,” in his ear while I roll my eyes and bite my tongue so I don’t yawn.

Finally, after who-fucking-knows how long, he collapsed on me, out of breath, only to tell me he’s too drunk to come. Oh really? If he had addressed this however long ago, he could have been out the door and I could have been eating pizza and painting my fucking nails hot pink or some equally obnoxious color. But no. Instead I’m dripping in his sweat, and his latex-wrapped dick is shriveling back up and out of me; and my phone is still ringing, I still can’t reach it, and he’s too rude to get up.

I finally roll him off of me, throw on the light, sigh loudly, grab my phone and march to the bathroom with the type of purpose you only see in movies about really important people; movies that, because of him and his suckage of life from me, I can’t even recall at the moment. I grab at my crotch to make sure it’s still there and am quite shocked it’s not covered in bruises and blood and looks like the star of some slasher movie. I suddenly feel the urge to apologize to my vagina, but I don’t because that might be too crazy, and I’m really trying to work on not being too crazy after behavior from recent weeks that may have just put me in the sub-category of ‘crazy but not yet too crazy.’

“And the missed calls?” asked my therapist.

“Christoffer, my sister and Bess… I didn’t call anyone back. I was too ashamed. I knew it was going to take at least the next 12 hours to come to grips with the jackrabbit sex, before I could vocalize what had happened,” I explained.

“Where was Steve Miller while you were in the bathroom?”

“In my room, I’m assuming,” I said, “although after several minutes he asked if he could come in… where he peed in front of me before I could get out of the room fast enough… seriously? And I actually asked him that.”

“What did he say?”

“He held his cock in his hand and said, ‘he’s nice looking, right?’”

“He did not,” said my therapist the exact way my friends had the day after the incident.

“He did,” I said.

“And what did you tell him?”

“So…

I stared at the wonky looking thing. It wasn’t wonky because there was anything particularly off about it, but simply because penises are wonky looking by definition. How does one answer that? Was all I could think.

The bathroom light was the only light on in my apartment, and I stood in the darkness of the kitchen staring in shock at the guy before me who had actually asked me a question I had hoped I would never be asked. It was average – everything about it. It wasn’t big or small, or this or that. It was so average and plain that even when I walked away after giving him my answer I had already forgotten what it looked like. I had wished the question had been that easy to forget, too.

“It’s OK for lacking foreskin,” I said, and turned the light out on him and went to bed. He didn’t ask me the meaning, nor did he offer to leave. He came into my bedroom and curled himself up against me. I couldn’t tell if it was out of obligation – as the rumor is that women have to be held after sex – or if he truly wanted to. Not having any major desire to spoon with someone I didn’t know, I told him that it was a complete lie, the whole thing about women needing to be cuddled after sex, and if he felt the need to do such a thing, it would be best if he left, picked up someone else, fucked her and then snuggled up on her. I, however, would need him to roll to the other side of the bed, if he intended to stay. He kissed the back of my neck and rolled away. A part of me died when I realized the lights from my window were illuminating the outline of his boxers on my bedroom floor. I wondered how wrong it would be to hurl them out the window. But I fell asleep before I could act on it.

“You wanna know how I woke up the next morning?” I asked my therapist.

“We may have to save it for your next session,” she suggested, “we’re running low on time.”

“Oh no, I have to share this painful detail… I’ll pay you extra if need be…. So…

I woke up to Steve Miller kissing my hip and telling me he wants to recite me some of his poetry. Why? I don’t know. I’m lying there cringing as he tries to reach around and touch me in some sorry attempt at having sex again, but having used up my only good line, and being just moments away from giving in and apologizing to my vagina, I immediately shut him down. I tell him my friend Lyndsay is on her way over, that there’s a wedding emergency, and he better scram because she’s really conservative and will judge me for being so scandalous. He dresses slowly in front of me, as if trying to tantalize me so I’ll tell him to stay, to take me now, to fuck me like only a true jackrabbit can, but I don’t. I looked out the window instead and wondered how hot it was going to be.

We exchanged numbers just before he left, and I waited a whole five minutes before I deleted his. I went back to my room, stripped my bed of my sheets, ran them to the cleaners and came home to drown my body and apartment in bleach and Pine-Sol. I wondered if there was something stronger than bleach.

“Do you think it would have been a bad idea to have taken a bleach bath?” I asked my therapist.

“Yes,” she said, “but more importantly, why did you feel the need to rid yourself of him so quickly?”

I paused. I knew I could give her a thousand reasons: the Beatles, the wrong navy colored shorts, the fact that he was from the west coast, the way he sounded like my brother-in-law, or how he had a beard, but he wasn’t Zach Galifianakis so I felt betrayed. The list could have been endless had I wanted it to be.

“It’s the tan line,” I said. “The cross between untouched and scathed; the sun’s work, is what it was. It was the insertion of his shoulder blades against the air. I define it as permeating, like a vulgar task that hangs too low, too broken; unresolved in its absolution.”

“What’s that from?” she asked.

“I wrote it a couple weeks ago,” I explained. We both said nothing. I coughed so as to puncture the room with sound. “I guess the point is, I didn’t write that about Steve Miller. I’m never going to write like that about Steve Miller. I can’t justify it or understand it, but I do know this: Steve Miller’s shoulder blades mean nothing to me.”