Free Rock Bottom by Michael Shilling Page B

… and cream.”
    After a bunch of letters, Darlo wrote her back. Hi, I’m Darlo, uh, I read what you wrote, uh, it was good, I have a pretty good average in school. Uhh.
    They went back and forth for a while. Darlo kept meaning to rip up her letters, but he didn’t.
    When he told his dad about this continued correspondence, David Cox adjusted his jock strap, fingered his graying chest hair, and shrugged. “Good for you,” he said. “Now the son goes looking for the mother. He goes off to the wilderness. The biblical, the biblical. It had to happen. Find out who you are. Hey, can you call the caterer and make sure he doesn’t bring turkey to the shoot? Turkey gives the actors gas. Maybe I ought to have a series about fuckers with a fart fetish! Call it
Blowing Smoke!
”
    Her letters, intense as they were, did not illuminate any corners in his past, did not inform, effect, or mitigate his burgeoning sex addiction. For how could you grow up in a world where bodies had no autonomy, when the images of them contorting, twisting, and malleable were more common to you than a family, at a table, eating a meal, and not just roll right into it?
    Yes. Sex. The problem with sex.
    He lost his virginity at twelve. Her name was Sandy Rose. She was a short, long-lashed, small-bosomed Latina who got paid extra to be his dad’s fluffer. She opened his door one sunny afternoon as light from the swimming pool danced on the windowpane. He was watching
Stripes.
Her bikini was the color of unripe bananas.
    “Your poppy says it’s time,” she said, and mounted him.
    Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade; the years were a blur of afternoon interludes, morning glories, night visions. Comic flesh configurations, maximum sweat, the rippling of muscles, girls on him, in public and private, among crowds and in churches, dare you to do this, bet you won’t do that. Oh, do that again. Do that again. Over here and over there. Over under sideways down. Clench your teeth and arch your back. Hold still. Over and over till his fucking knees buckled.
    Compulsion.
    His friends treated Darlo like the luckiest guy alive. But they didn’t see what had happened on the inside. They didn’t see his brain rewired. They didn’t see how his life resembled that of a lab rat, overloaded with sensation, glutted with pleasure, fattened up with ecstasy until the taste went bland and only one feeling was left.
    His body ached if he went without it for a day. He couldn’t sleep until he had the smell of it on his fingers, the faint taste of it on his tongue, the assurance of it upon waking.
    What people didn’t know was the pain of it. What people didn’t understand was how saying no felt like reversing gravity, how pulling away from pussy was like rending muscle from bone. He could never get in far enough. He could never really touch it.
    Compulsion. Cold sweat.
    In eleventh grade he started playing the drums as a way to calm this ache. He leveraged his horny groove into four-four rhythm. His girlfriend, Jenni Feingold, had encouraged this hobby when she broke up with him.
    “You should see a fucking shrink, too.”
    “Fuck that.”
    He went and bought a kit at Guitar Center. The bottomless aching hole started to fill up. He could bash away and feel less empty. Still, she wouldn’t get back together with him.
    “So you can fuck me and another girl at the same time?” she asked. “So you can pay me to slap her? Darlo, I want a commitment. Not a life in porn.”
    Jenni Feingold. Putting the Fine back in Feingold. The only girl who ever understood him. The one who started off as a drug buddy from the estate next door and ended up trying it all with him. Never a kink for her. Never slumming it. They just wanted the same thing. Until she wanted the weakest thing a person could want. Monogamy.
    He practiced his drums. The more he practiced, the less he wanted to spend all night looking for tail. Even his dad, the Captain of the Mighty Cumshot Exxon, thought