Sure, he’d hesitate at first, but that’s why I’d say, come here, Fritos and I’d smile, and I’d adjust my bikini top so it was not sitting where it should and when he took enough steps to reach me, which was only two, I’d run my fingers through his hair and smile when I notice him readying his sword.
A Brief History of Masturbation
Ages 5–6
I discovered that rubbing a soft bristle hairbrush in a quick up and down motion over the top of my underwear, tickled. I did not think of anything, I only felt. My mom caught me doing this in the living room one morning while I was watching
Popeye
. “What in the hell are you doing, little girl!?” I had not broken anything. I was not sneaking a cookie before dinner. I was not hitting my little brother. I didn’t know why she was mad; but then I did and quickly pushed the brush into the crack of the couch cushions and pulled the afghan up to my neck feeling a new kind of bad I’d later recognize as shame. On the black and white box Alice the Goon sang, “I love Popeye, I love Popeye…”
Ages 7–9
My dad gave me an old-fashioned school desk from when he was a little kid. It faced the wall in the corner of my room and I kept books and pens in it. The top of the desk chair was even with my crotch and if I used both hands to hold myself up against it, I could do little push-ups on the chair, creating a heavy friction on my privates. I would think about the pictures from the
Joy of Sex
book my dad kept in the back of his closet. I knew to close the door now, but the desk was old and squeaky so I had to listen for any heavy footsteps coming down the hall. As I got older and bigger, my pumping weight would tip the desk, making it jump off the floor, rattling the books and pens. I’d learn to lean forward on the chair to even out the axis until I was able to finish. I remember my arms were very strong for a grade schooler.
Ages 10–11
One day the desk broke, and when my dad asked how the chair could snap away from the steel base that connected it to the desk part I said I didn’t know and he looked at me suspiciously and I felt my neck and ears start to burn up to my cheeks. That’s when I discovered how to use my hands to do it; wetting my fingertips and rubbing and rubbing. I would think about the naked girls in the
Playboys
my older brother kept under his mattress. My dad took the desk out of my room and put a bookshelf there instead.
12
My parents had a New Year’s Eve party and I woke up to fat “Uncle” Steve with his hands under my sleep shirt. He smelled drunk and he told me shhhhh and kissed me on my mouth, his mustache bristly on my face. While he did everything I felt bad and good at the same time. I cried with no noise while thinking I wish I could scream or that I should scream. When he finished, he just left. I heard him walk down the hall, down the stairs, and I heard him shout, “Frances, get me another fuckin’ beer!” and everyone laughing in response. I didn’t know if he meant my mom or my dad, because my mom’s name was Frances and my dad was named Frank but “Uncle” Steve always jokingly called him Francis. I remember thinking that it really didn’t matter, that nothing really mattered.
13–Current Day
I kept using my fingers. Sure, once in a while I’ll use a vibrator—spice things up. I watch porn and do it sometimes. Okay, a lot. But most of the time I do it before I go to bed, in the dark, alone. I’ll start out thinking of me with a man, or with men; people I know, people I don’t. I never let the men be kind to me and what always gets me off the quickest is if I imagine myself an innocent girl being taken by a fat man with a disgusting mustache. It makes me feel bad and good at the same time.
Fireflies
This one time I was doing karaoke in a dive bar in Ohio. It was just after I learned that fireflies were real, which, when that happens to you, feels like anything magical could really exist. I was drunk, which really goes without saying when you first say that you were doing karaoke. It was a Sublime song and I forget which one it was, but I don’t think that really matters. What matters is that afterwards, this pretty good
–
looking Podunk guy we were hanging out with took me by the hand to the bathroom like we were late for a meeting and he shut and locked the door and started kissing me and he pushed me up against the sink and after about 30 seconds he squatted down and started unbuttoning my jeans. I was like, whoa, nelly! He said, I wanna taste you and the way he was looking up at me… And in my head I was like, you kiss me for 30 seconds and then you go straight to eating my pussy? And then I was like, how the fuck do I get out of this? And then I coaxed him back up to my mouth with something about saving the best for last or something probably lamer or more clever and then I don’t remember but I escaped. My friend who showed me the fireflies drove us home. A deer that ran into the road almost killed us. All the lessons that were learned that night are remembered but not necessarily practiced. What I do remember most though are the fireflies, and how she proved that they were real by squishing one across her palm. It left a fluorescent streak. It made me feel like screaming.
Exactly Raisins
She sprinkles Craisins over the salad authoritatively.
It’s okay, you really only need some sort of dried fruit, really. It doesn’t have to be exactly raisins.
She is a mom and I am not.
Let me see that, and she tips the edge of the glass measuring cup I am holding.
She hums mmm-hmmm while poking her nose. It moves in small figure eights. I try to see her eyes to determine what that might mean, but they aren’t looking at me so I can’t exactly tell.
She releases the rim and I pour the dressing I had just finished whisking on top of the grainy green bubbles of broccoli, the red of the Craisins pokes through the liquid white like they are trying to survive. I feel like saving them. I know they were never meant for this.
She picks up the giant bowl and holds it against her stomach like bag of groceries and tells me to “give her that spoon,” which I do.
She turns away and begins to stir. The back of her is a monolith.
All I can hear are grunts. They are the ugliest sounds I have ever heard.
I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me.
It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out.
By the time I decided to try it my chest had already unclenched, not from crying, but because I removed myself from the interrogation that had brought it on and did tactile things. I washed dishes, opened a Newcastle, put a beach towel down on the patio.
When I took off my clothes and lay down on the terrycloth, I had emotionally estranged myself from whatever it was that had brought about the tangle of emotions that tight-roped somewhere between sex and fear. I just wanted to make myself interact with the outside world, even if it was just fresh air and the sound of birds and lawnmowers.
The sun was hot on my skin but not too hot. Every time I lay out under the sky wearing really only nothing it makes me horny. There’s something about the sun falling on skin that’s normally hidden. Maybe the receptors there are more sensitive to the rays or something. I don’t know. That’s when the challenge to masturbate about my dad came back into my mind and I thought, let’s give science a chance here.
I started as I always do, licking my fingertips and moving them south and then in small up and down motions, circular, up and down, circular, circular, up and down, up and down, I cleared my mind and then thought about my dad.
I tried.
I tried and tried and tried.
And while images of him came and went, my clit wasn’t responding and my brain couldn’t keep an image of my dad long enough from me to even get an image to generate a proper scenario to hold on to.
After a long while the images started to come easier, but they were fleeting. My dad was younger. His skin tight and tan, his hair black. There was a lot more of it. His chest hairs were not gray. He had his clothes off. He was holding his dick. I was a little girl. I was naked. I was tan. My dad’s face. Again and again. He is naked. We are naked in the swimming pool. He is holding me against him. His dick is bobbing up against my bare buttocks. I am still not aroused. My dad lying next to me. We are sideways. We are naked. I am hairless. He is stroking the length of me. My dad’s face. My dad holding his dick. My dad standing in front of me, I am sitting on a toilet, we are naked. He tells me to watch him. My dad lying on his side naked. I am lying on my back naked. He is holding himself. He is looking all over me. He tells me that’s a good girl. He is masturbating. I am getting aroused now. He is masturbating and he is telling me that’s a good girl that’s a good girl that’s a good girl and I am just lying there and then I am back on the toilet again and he is standing in front of me that’s a good girl that’s a good girl and he is jerking off in front of me and I am coming and I came.
I wonder about it all, why the father that came into my head was so young, the places and positions so specific. Then I think about how much I like watching men masturbate. Then I think, no. I think, I am creating drama in order to justify my perversions.
My dad never touched me when I was young.
He never did bad things like this.
These were things in a perverted woman’s imaginative mind.
I love my dad. He loves me. It’s made up. It’s not any kind of fucked up memories dredged up from some forgotten, deeply buried incidents.
I am pretty positive. I mean, there were other things, but never with my dad. I am pretty positive about that.
I think it is weird that I did this but I think maybe part of me “made him” his younger self because if I pictured him how he is now, his old self, gray, skin sagged, hunched, that would just be horrible and gross and even weirder. I think masturbating to his younger self made it almost like it was someone else, someone I knew decades ago, which, is true.
He never touched me. I love my dad.
There was no mother in that house. There were a lot of boys and men and there was me. That is all. That is how it was.
My dad has a tool shed. Its walls are vertical aluminum waves and in the summer, when you are hiding inside of it, the heat stifles. My knees eat the dirt and I hold my breath when I hear them coming. My brothers are running outside. They are looking for me. This is real fear. No joke. No playing around. I smashed the wall of the fort they were making. The wall it took them two days to get higher than their heads. It was made of dumb dried clay-mud bricks they had made with a wooden mold my dad had put together for them in his workshop, which was adjacent to the tool shed I was hiding in. I used a sledgehammer. Not a heavy one. I felt so powerful. I smashed the fuck out of that wall and I was crying while I crushed it. In that moment I wanted to kill them. I hated my brothers. I didn’t care that they would kill me for this. I did not care. In that moment, all I wanted to do was destroy. And I did. Every blow shook my ribcage, rattled my skull. My halter top inched down and down until my baby nipples showed, tiny and pink. Snot fell onto them. Tears fell onto them. My hair stuck to my wet eyes and my snotty nostrils. The air was filled with the dust from the breaking and I choked with it. When everything was smashed I fell to my knees and I remembered this lady from a movie I saw where she found the hands of her murdered children buried in a cornfield. I thought about how crazy that lady looked with all of her out of control snot and tears and screaming. I saw myself outside of myself for a minute and that sort of woke me up and I “snapped out of it” and saw what I had done. Instinct told me I had better get the fuck out of there and I did. I left the sledgehammer. I pulled up my halter top. I hid in the tool shed. Their fury paralyzed me. They were banshees. I felt their tornado of anger whirling around the house while they searched for me. It shook the walls of the shed. I writhed myself small and squeezed as tight as I could into a place under a shelf and between the scalloped wall and a wood cabinet. I will not talk about the cramping, or the thirst, or the blood from sharp edges of BB gun holes in the aluminum or the brutality of the retaliation when they finally found me.
That day taught me there is a safety in all of those things. I am decades older and I look for that safety. I say, “sit on my chest big boy,” and, “deep enough to draw blood, please,” and, “as tight as you want, for as long as you want, double knots.” There are tears and snot and nipples and sticking hair like before. There is a rampage. There is a tornado of anger. I hand them the sledgehammer. I am their fort wall.