An American Lion

What do I have to lose? I think I can write badly about sex. I know I can write. I know I’m pretty clever. Why not give it a shot?

Some background:

A cringe-inducing passage which compares a sexual encounter to battle with an one-eyed mythological monster was awarded Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize on Monday.

The editors of the Literary Review magazine said best-selling American author Jonathan Littell won the prize for describing a sex act as “a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”

The offending passage compared female genitalia to various Greek fiends, including the mythical monster Gorgon and “a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.”

Here’s what I would submit for the prize, and, remember—this was written by me. Hands off.

Excerpted from The Frisky Mole Boy of Groton:

“The Mother of Someone Else and My Virginity Are Now Gone”

After about eight or nine days of living in the sewer, my head was clear. I didn’t even smell it anymore. I became it. I wore it in my dusty clothes and walked upon it in my church shoes. I had cut the arms off of my suit coat and had abandoned my vest. I wore my white dress shirt with the tails out. The tie was wrapped around my head to cover the bumps from hitting my head on the low-hanging pipes. My pants were a mess, but still loose and comfortable. I kept the driving goggles on my face to protect my eyes from the misty grime. Occasionally, clouds of moisture would roll through the pipes and escape through the manhole covers that I would open with my two by four. This was my way of airing things out. When the smell didn’t bother me anymore, I opened fewer and fewer manholes.

She was about forty-five when I discovered her walking down the alley. She wasn’t slovenly or loose, but that only took a few minutes of looking at me to appear. Ostensibly, she was a respectable woman walking to her car after buying some picture frames from a store. She wore a long tan dress and white shoes. She looked bored in her life, and she looked confused when she saw me sitting in the manhole. I was eating a cheese sandwich that I had figured out how to make myself. Basically, a cheese sandwich is cheese between two pieces of bread.

“Hello there,” she said, half smiling and confused.

“What?” I said, annoyed that she had interrupted me.

“Are you him? The boy they can’t find who’s been living in the ground. In the sewers?”

I shrugged. “I’m here because the severe love of my Father has gotten too difficult for me to manage on a day to day basis. I’m here because this is what I was put here to do. I don’t live in the sewer. I AM the sewer now.”

She didn’t know what to think of that.

I went back to eating my cheese sandwich. She put the picture frames in her car and walked back over to me.

“Sounds exciting. I know something about severe love. My, my husband…” she started to say, crouching down, “I know about that. You know about that. You do, don’t you?” Right away, I could tell she was intrigued by me, but in that weird sexual way I couldn’t quite pick up on at first. You know how a woman looks at you and is wondering what it would be like to take her clothes off in front of you and dance around? You know how she’s sizing you up to see if you actually have twenty dollars? I didn’t know it then, but that’s sort of what she was doing, even though she wasn’t a stripper.

“Father isn’t weird or anything. He’s not sticking his finger up my butt, if that’s what you think. No, he’s just mean and yells a lot. I took some potatoes and now he swears vengeance upon me.”

She nodded, “right. Right. I didn’t mean that. I mean, I know what severe love is.”

I shrugged. It was my ‘whatever, lady,’ shrug.

“Can I join you? I have wading boots in the trunk of my car. I have a rain slicker. And, I have gloves.”

I gave her my cheese sandwich and helped her down the steel rung ladder into the sewer. Of course, looking up her dress was exciting, but realizing that she wanted me to look up her dress, so much so that she pretended to have to climb back out of the sewer and go get her purse so I could see up her dress a second time, well. That was magical.

We walked silently back to the open area where I had established my base camp. She took one look at the mattresses I had stacked up there and the dress came up over her head in a flash.

“Get on top of me,” she said. “Get up there and climb these mountains,” and so I did.

Sex with her was a process of figuring out why I was chasing around a moving mouse. That’s what it felt like to me, her thing. It felt like a white, pink mouse that was trying to escape from an anaconda that was too inexperienced to hunt properly. An anaconda that needed glasses no optometrist was skillful enough to make. This mouse was dampened by her excitement, a bottle with French writing she took out of her purse, and a rolling mist through the sewer. That made it difficult for me on my bare knees to find any kind of traction. Everything about her was freshly scrubbed and smelling of old soap, soap applied without any passion. If she had worn perfume, it was drowned out by the riot of smells that I had learned to ignore. I fumbled, figured out the sticky problems, put right the gravity and the friction, and I learned to chase the brillo pad textures I felt with my thigh like a horseman on the hunt for a fox that had been running around without any common sense.

After I was done with her, she moaned a lot, and asked me to do it all over again. I was tired. I ate another cheese sandwich and fell asleep holding her breasts between my bare feet—why, I don’t know. After we had slept for a while, she woke up and threw me around like a rag doll. She hit me on the head and called me Wilbur. She gave me a pretty good going over, then used a soiled towel to clean herself before she abandoned the sewer and went back to her car, filthy but satisfied. This was the first woman I had ever ravaged in the sewer, and the first woman who had ravaged me in the sewer, but she wouldn’t be the last. This was the woman I credit with taking my virginity. I can’t say for certain. It was all a blur of motion, confusion, and grunting for me, those crazy days of living on the run.

Turns out, I was in school with two of her daughters. They were mortified when I explained to them that I had had my way with their lonely, depraved mother in the sewer when I was living as the Frisky Mole Boy of Groton.