RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Twelfth Fragment

* This is a fictionalized account of some shit that actually happened. All the names, locations, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. – JG *

So when I begin to look back all kinds of weird wounds open up, bloody little flowers blossoming on the undersides of my arms when I wasn’t looking, scratching an itch that doesn’t exist anymore. It was all so close to the surface, too – it didn’t take long for it to all come back, the Fear and the Excitement and the Sex and the Death, all dropped squarely into my lap. Literally: I got a massive adolescent hard-on ten minutes into my reverie and it pulsed with lust and anxiety in the same teenage mating rhythm I remembered so well. Bizarre to consider now: perhaps all the non-stop thinking about fucking was a hedge against Death, a heaping spoonful of Eros to help the Thanatos go down. Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together – a glib joke, but truer than it sounds.

So now, of course, your adult sex is more loving, more proficient, more satisfying and certainly more leisurely than in high school, but in high school – specifically Kenton North Senior High School – every furtive groping had an observer, every rushed coupling was an exhibition, every Menage was a Menage a Trois with that sick skinny bone-thing skull-grinning in the corner, watching and waiting for the space between breaths to slip in just a little finger of Death.