I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can’t get no, I can’t get no
Rolling Stones “Out Of Our Heads” Album, 1965
This could be a porn movie showing in my head. Three teens naked in a bed, a girl and two boys. They are beautiful in form simply because they are young, tender and fresh to living. Actually then, what I’m seeing isn’t porn at all, is it.
My parents’ bedroom. God of piping Mick prances around the bare-assed trio while the record plays. His hoofs pound out the beat. “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Loud to make the devil dance too.
Fall light, the kindest of light, brushstrokes into the bedroom defining their bodies, soft edging around bold shapes, heightening them, squeezing out their substance in a pinch of admiration for their puerile loveliness of which they are so quaintly innocent. This afternoon they have time on their side.
It’s a pellucid afternoon in early October. A perfect afternoon in Wichita.
The afternoon lighting mutes the prairie dog town aspect of the city, its swaths of level dusty housing developments. Wichita is a well paid workers town, unpretentious by nature. Neither pretty nor ugly physically. Modest’s the word.
But the kids are not, most certainly except for Jonathan who thinks he is unique. His companions in nakedness, in the bed, the bed of his parents, are simply naked. It’s Jonathan who feels it heavy, complex, profound, his head making him separate from the rest of mankind.
The three lie squeezed shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, on their buttocks. The girl stares at the ceiling talking to it in an ongoing chatter about this and that most of which is incomprehensible to her listeners.
The boys turn their heads to look at the girl. They are caught in a languid moment of being thunder struck by her, thunder cracks in their glances, lightning blasts the room terrifying and teenage agony is static electric around all three.
The boys admire the girl’s body. What’s not to admire. Sad that these are her best moments alive, the likely pitch of her allure. She holds the boys enthralled by her firm high tits, her dimpled Venus mound, her pert heart shaped face. Her gibberish.
She, young and ripe, plucks at their erections, one in each hand gripping them in place, boys and cocks she holds spellbound. Very old story, yet always a new twist.
Occasionally she pumps them insouciant an idle stroke meant only to to keep them interested. There she’s got them. Literally under her thumb.
This girl in Wichita is 14, quite soon to be 15. The boys are 16. The trio are respectively Terri, short for Teresa, James Paul and Jonathan. Terri is the most promiscuous. She’s well schooled in the matters at hand.
She’s pretty because she’s young but will likely turn coarse, broad face, ears peeking out of her hair. Her body is ready for children, already full figured. Might become a Wichita factory girl at Boeing, Beech, Cessna or Lear. Or Coleman could well be her lot if she turns unlucky and she surely will, putting together lanterns without a union to light a blind world.
She’s a woman while the boys are just boys. Only her mind remains girlish, probably will remain so too. For now she’s pleased, swigging her peppermint schnapps from the bottle, pleasured, pleasuring.
James Paul is also initiated albeit in a roguish jock way. American way of untutored car coupling. Beaming in mirth he’s told Jonathan about when back in Arkansas his football team had taken turns on a pickup bed with the town nympho. After coming the boy ahead of him had said quite seriously “Thank you ma’am.”
James Paul’s got what Jonathan wishes for a body. It’s slim but defined by what is to him that miracle of football workouts, the Greek-marble ‘v’ of muscles pointing down the loin.
In contrast Jonathan, who can’t even toss a football around, in nakedness is very pale, is slack, unformed. No threat, no meanness in him. Weak in wanting to be kind. Hyper sensitive to others especially those pushed outside the herd, like he is himself. And he’s got far away eyes.
When this afternoon began only Jonathan was still a virgin. Something explaining why the three had come to walk about the parsonage naked, lay on his parent’s bed together naked, scampered through the parsonage rooms in reckless nakedness.
Jonathan suspects the other two have lured him here. He barely knows James Paul, only for the month since school started, although already they’re friends, James Paul goading him along, at times dominant. Before this afternoon he’d known nothing of the girl.
This was the nicest parsonage Jonathan had yet lived in. It belonged to Woodland church, an unforgiving middle class, most thoroughly white church in Wichita’s Riverside neighborhood. Riverside, a quarter of rare and sacred waters, the Arkansas and Little Arkansas, making it thick with trees, lots of older houses the same as those clustering in small Kansas towns, a small and whimsical enclave.
The parsonage impressed Jonathan, a trilevel of four bedrooms, three baths, large bright rooms, two fireplaces. The one in the living room in particular opened into the kitchen as well, dual faced, a weird Janus touch that made him proud.
His mother had done her utmost to place their tawdry furniture in it to best effect. Bitter dark chocolate sticks with strange Victorian flourishes, turned in a jeer no matter what she did by the cool modern lines of the rooms.
In this stage set Jonathan had now lost to Terri what in mind he most wanted to lose. That hilarious concept of innocence. But his was a deep rooted virginity more cerebral than physical. He can’t take it off with his socks.
The Stones, he thinks, sum him up. Arrogant, brilliant, bohemian, no satisfaction to be found. He never wears underwear and bets Mick doesn’t either.
For now, however, he’s not thinking much at all, left in a daze, which for him is a very big relief even if fleeting.
The three are in the bed because of James Paul . . . and because of Jonathan’s dick.
James Paul is not handsome but with a rugged look that in high school passes for it. He’s the mischievous one. But charming too, a smiling attentiveness that hooks people and keeps them on his line.
Charm he can turn on and off with a switch. When charm is on and at its strongest he’ll grin in the face of a person, showing his teeth wide and with his tongue slip out his big front tooth, a forgery. That’s peripheral football damage from when he played middle school ball down in Pine Bluff.
First time he’d glimpsed Jonathan naked in gym class he hooted, “Damn but you are one hung preacher’s kid! Never show that to a girl, she won’t let you near!”
When Jonathan blushed, what he hated most, James Paul had laughed with prophetic words, “I’m gonna do something about that.”
For ‘That’ Terri was his trojan horse. A trojan horse with a Trojan.
He told Jonathan, wagging his artificial tooth. “I hear of this girl. She puts out like your mama’s Sunday dinner. We can do her together.”
It got worse. When the three were first naked Jonathan had kept his hands cupped over himself, feeling cold and bereft. “None of that, son, show little Miss Terri. Boy’s got a whopper.”
He’d pulled Jonathan’s hands away, who didn’t have a hard on, as James Paul did. Jonathan wasn’t feeling whopping at all.
Terri had rules. No fingers in her pussy. No tongue there either. No sucking on cocks. Missionary only. Strictly one boy at a time and the other had to leave the room, no voyeurs allowed. This to Jonathan’s relief. He’d been dreading a floor show of what he feared would be his bumbling way.
She’d also made them wear the Trojans she’d brought along in a jeans pocket, rolling one on each before they began. James Paul asked how come she had so many rules, “my daddy told me them.” He asked how she knew how to roll on the rubbers so well and she said without hesitation, “My dad showed me how.”
With her rules Jonathan felt like a cowboy with fences. I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, no no no.
In payment of sorts Terri asked only that they get her a bottle of 90 proof Hiram Walker peppermint schnapps which she drank in full through their afternoon of the faun.
Jonathan bought the schnapps. When he turned 16 he wanted to drink as much as to drive. But Kansas had a strict 21 age rule on booze. Then one time someone whispered to Jonathan that if he wanted a fake ID that could be arranged. He was sent to meet a nervous Wichita State student who acted like a CIA agent.
The student took his new Kansas drivers license and cut out the last number of his birth year with an exacta knife, then typed a different number on a piece of toilet paper, a typewriter prized for the similarity in font to what Topeka used. A bleak font to go with the mural there of John Brown as a psychopath.
This drib of tissue was cut and fixed in place. The revised license was plasticized. It was perfect. It cost Jonathan $30. Almost two weeks salary for him from his 20 hours a week as assistant janitor at Riverside Elementary.
Jonathan used his fake identity through high school and on into college. It gave him a great return, including in a package deal Terri and the peppermint schnapps.
For himself and James Paul he bought a six pack of Grain Belt beer. It sat on the wall to wall carpet beside his parents’ bed condensating throughout the afternoon, afterwards leaving a ghost ring from the cans.
Terri drank in the bed her dark curly head against the backboard, same as on her snatch, a Paleolithic carving of our Magna Mater. She made Jonathan taste the schnapps. He gagged, nothing more foul.
“Nothin’ better than peppermint schnapps,” she critiqued. Her mouth going wide open over schnapps, pronouncing it ‘shh-chnapes.’
In the world of Wichita High School North Terry was trash. It was a school of 2400 students most of whom were middle class. What students were different, like Jonathan, stood out stark sure as did the few black, American Indian, Mexican kids and the poor white.
Jonathan knew nothing about poor whites not even of their existence. When he drove to pick Terri up, James Paul directing him, they arrived in a neighborhood of northwest Wichita hidden away from sight where he’d been genuinely alarmed to find himself in his first trailer court.
James Paul told him, “You can tell they’re trash because they don’t pick up their trash.” Pleased with himself. He has the accent to go with white Pine Bluff that is not as heavy as in nearby Louisiana. Still when he speaks he catches the ear of people in Wichita, where his family had moved in the spring.
Aside from the merits of Jonathan’s penis James Paul admired that he had a car, that he had a fake ID and that he could offer comfortable beds at no charge for frolicking .
James Paul didn’t have a car because his father died wrapping his own around a bridge abutment in Arkansas. His mother refused to let him have the same opportunity.
James Paul wouldn’t talk about his family, not even when his mother and new step father had a baby brother for him. Jonathan didn’t even know the baby’s name. Didn’t know what home life was like for his unusual and intelligent friend.
The Cobbs were not white trash. There was money in the family, maybe from life insurance, or from what else remained obscure. One summer James Paul went to Rome. Then James Paul was given for graduation from North a new ’67 MG convertible.
After that summer the boys lost contact, James Paul going off to a fraternity at KU, Jonathan in his hulking Desoto to SMU. They never wrote, conversed again.
James Paul would come to die four times. Once in Vietnam and then again three times more on a rain slick highway just outside Amarillo.
North put his name with others on a small monument to graduates fallen in Nam. On the class site his name appears with a red rose.
Years later out of wondering Jonathan did research and found that actually there were two James Paul Cobbs in the marine corps at the same time—one from the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, the other from Jonathan’s past.
Jonathan’s James Paul had never been in Vietnam, the other had died there shot down in a copter.
Then a decade on and from a further sense of needing to know, Jonathan searched him again. James Paul had gotten a law degree from the University of Georgia, using it in class action suits, then to Jonathan’s surprise he’d gone to Emory’s Chandler School of Theology for yet another degree.
He’d became an ordained minister in the Christian Church Disciples of Christ and then pastor of First Christian Church Disciples of Christ, Amarillo.
That morning in Amarillo he was taking his motorbike to be repaired, followed by his wife in their car. He was knocked over by a heedless driver, hit and run. In trying to pull the bike off the highway he was hit again.
Then again. Third time, he was killed.
I wonder what happened to his artificial front tooth that he wagged so merrily at the world.
For her part Terri was tragic too. She fell in love with Jonathan.
The three met up a second time for a similar afternoon of what passed for teenage fun, but that time at James Paul’s home. When they fucked the second afternoon through she came to let Jonathan finger her box.
That second time is when it happened. Jonathan felt a sudden surge of pity for Terri, not so different from ejaculation, causing him to kiss her too abundantly, to caress and stroke her like a beloved kitten. He attended to her and that, embellished perhaps by the Schnapps, maybe made him completely clear to her in contrast to other boys, to James Paul for instance who ignored her except to hump hump hump.
Jonathan never lay with her again. Never mind, now she knew who he was, a striking boy that stood out from the others, who girls might scheme for. An older boy tall and with a flop of hair over his forehead, with a car, from a nice house.
North dated from the art nouveau majesty of the 1920s. More like a court house than a school. The halls of North High School were wide.
After the second liaison she’d try to catch him in those lofty halls. Terri had a friend pull his class schedule form the school office so she could ambush him after a class, arms laden with books.
She wanted the usual high school things, to be reassured by more sex, she brushed her tits up tight to him, she yearned for a proper date like to the movies, most of all of course she coveted his class ring.
She began passing love notes to him, scrawls of endless childish blathering that made him dry heave.
He held back strong. Gave nothing. Finally in a panic, after his fellows began taunting him about her, Jonathan decided his only choice was cruelty.
“Stay away from me! Don’t talk to me again! I want nothing to do with you, ever!” This said to her after French class when she’d come up close to him possessively while trying to pass him one of her peppermint sweet love letters. It was the French he cut so often that the teacher forgot about him. The only course he ever flunked. Prescient to his flunking life in France.
Those few words to Terri were probably the most effective he ever uttered. She jolted as if he’d hit her with a fist full-throttle to the mouth. She burst out on the spot in a torrent of tears. She ran off and out of his life, running blindly, head thrust forward like a prow, angled down, hands out in front of her groping, a trailer court girl with a broken heart.
He was to recall those tears for a lifetime, and the words that taught him how effectively words can kill. Sometimes you get what you need.
It was the last he knew of her, except when spotting her in a furtive rush down a crowded hallway desperate to avoid him. Nothing more for her, no tale of achievements or multiple deaths. Nothing of note.
But ah those young girl tears so hot. Hot! No, sizzling.
At 16 I reveled in self pity at how much pain I’d caused another. Mourned for her. For me. Yet mostly I was so delighted, relieved, more thankful than the Woodland congregation when father’s sermon at last came to an Amen. Almost made me a Christian. I knew she was gone for good.
These things all happened in the week following the denouement of the second tryst. After that these doings became of no importance to young me. They faded away in sunlight, not as strong as the sun.
As an old man I’ve no sure memory of her face at all. I only can guess at what might pass for first love in the head of a 14 year old girl from a sleazy trailer court, literally from the wrong side of life, whose father had demonstrated for her on himself how to put on a rubber.
But then, after the three had their first party in the parsonage, Jonathan’s afternoon of the Faun, something horrible haunted Jonathan. It came to Jonathan in a numbing horror.
What happened to his rubber!
He couldn’t recall. He was chronically absent mind, a boy addicted to day dreaming, one lost too often in thought, in distant reveries, mooning over himself, life, a pimple.
He recalled being irritated by the weight of the used rubber dangling on his soft dick. And then?
Oh God, he even prayed one last prayer, what had he done with it. He got down on his knees to peer under and around his parents’ bed. He rummaged through all his possessions, tossed his bedroom, searched the bathrooms. Even looked in books and the kitchen sink.
In his parents’ balding front yard he ran a rake through the crabgrass. Found nothing except a stick of Juicy Fruit pristine in its wrapper, that he chewed.
No rubber. A couple of days and he forgot about it. Consigned it away among the host of mysteries confounding him, finding instead some other obsession to float away upon.
Yet then he was awakened one morning before school by his mother. She banged open the door of his room. When angry, which she was only a few times in her life, her brow mottled with small beads of perspiration. Her moon face drained, became very pale. Her eyes tunneled back.
She looked exactly that way then.
My dumpy dear mother towered in judgment while I cringed down low and small onto the mattress.
“I found this under our bed.” Her tone came from the ice age. Words were enunciated too even and precise like the drum roll at an execution.
“I assume it belongs to you.” Mother flung the used rubber in my face.