Kicking while Singing

Anney Shenton

It's six weeks since I gave up sex and I'm feeling fine. I have survived another work week without being fired and I'm heading home, smiling with the knowledge there will be no overdue bills in my mailbox, no messages from debt collectors shoved under my door.

It doesn't occur to me to worry about finding a half-naked man sprawled in my doorway. But there he is, lying where the welcome mat would be if I had one. He's in the place I imagine the dog I plan to buy will lie in wait for me each day. Although his face is pressed into the porch, and it is almost dark, I'm fairly certain I don't know him. A back like that, arms like that, I would remember.

'Excuse me,' I say, nudging his ribs with the tip of my shoe, but he doesn't stir. I kneel and put my hand to his back, which rises and falls rhythmically. I'm sure now that he is a stranger. I know I have never touched this back before. My touch-memory is the most reliable thing about me.

His hair is dirty blond and greasy and would be over his collar if he was wearing a shirt, which he is not. I lean in closer and smell sweat but not booze. I touch his back again, prodding, saying, hey, excuse me, but saying it softly, prodding gently, because I'm not sure I want him to wake up right away.

In my head I hear the voice of my therapist. Her name is Cookie and she has changed my life. For the first time in years my rent is not overdue. I have a kitchen full of groceries. I have kept a job for over a month. I am thinking of buying a car.

And now there is a man with nice arms and a lovely back asleep on my porch and I am pretending to wake him whilst actually just enjoying the feel and the look of him and I hear Cookie saying, when you sexually objectify a person you deny their humanity.

I rock back on my heels and think it through. I have been objectifying this person on my porch but that has nothing to do with sex. That's one thing Cookie doesn't understand, actually ? she thinks my promiscuity is the result of seeing other people as sexual objects, when, in fact, the opposite is true. I like to look at and sometimes touch objects, but I only ever want to fuck people. As long as I look at this man as an attractive object my desire is theoretical. But once I start wondering who he is, why he is here, where is his shirt . . . once I start wanting to know the things about him that are not his back and arms and hair and ? yes, I noticed, his denim-clad arse and long, thick thighs, then, then I am in big trouble.

'Hey!' I shake him with both hands. 'Wake up! Hey!' I shake him again, my fingers digging hard into his shoulders. It suddenly seems very important that I get him away from my front door.

He stirs and mumbles into the floor. I stand while he drags himself to a sitting position.

'Hello,' he says, smiling as though I am exactly who he expected to see when he opened his eyes. He is, I guess, in his early forties. His beard is a few days old. 'How you doing?' he says, sleepy voiced and glassy eyed.

'I can't get into my house,' I say and he looks around, his face wrinkling up. It's as though he's only just noticed that he is on a porch with a stranger and not in his own bed with a lover. He looks down at his chest, which, is, yes, as lovely as his back. Lovelier maybe, with its sparse grey-blond hairs and girlish pink nipples. He smiles again as though he too enjoys looking at it.

He stands and I notice his feet are bare. No shirt, no shoes. Underwear? I can't tell. Me, I always wear underwear now. Cookie explained that it was just like when smokers quit they have to throw out their lighters and ashtrays and give up all the things they associate with smoking, like coffee or red wine. We had a whole session where we made a list of all the things I had to get rid of: condoms, lube (purse-size and bedside), vibrators, dildos, handcuffs, butt-plugs. She said I had to get rid of my porn collection and was surprised I didn't have one. I think she thought I was lying because most sex addicts have home emporiums of porn, but not me. I like flesh in the flesh. I never got off on images.

Anyway, when we were finished going through the stuff I had to chuck out we made a list of things I had to buy. Number one was underpants. Years ago I realised I was spending a fortune on undies because I kept leaving them behind at parties or in parks or toilet cubicles. So I stopped replacing the pairs I lost and before long I didn't have any and that had worked out just fine. But six weeks ago I went out and bought a drawer full of sensible cotton knickers. I wear them every day. I even wear them to bed.

I suspect the man on my porch does not wear underwear to bed, if he wears it at all. He is looking directly at me, his hands in his pockets pushing his low-slung jeans lower, revealing a delicate, teasing trail of fine dark hair. Six weeks ago I would have assumed the eye contact and stance meant he wanted to fuck me and I would have acted on that assumption and within two minutes I'd have his jeans off and his (potential) underwear between my teeth.

'I'm going inside now,' I say, putting my key in the door. 'There's a phone booth in the pub across the road.'

'Right, ah, I don't have any money.'

The door is open. I know he is behind me, watching me. I cannot invite him in. He could be dangerous. I know I am.

'I can give you some change for the phone,' I say, but damn it, even as I say it I am walking through the door and he is following and I am in my body in a way I haven't been since the Easter Show.

That was where it happened, where that final straw was laid upon that poor old camel. I had a job selling tickets to Sideshow Alley. I worked in a tiny booth at the top end of the alley and whenever people approached I'd say 'how many' and then whatever number they said I'd tear off that many orange tickets and hand them over and take their money and put it in the little zip bag I wore around my waist.

A couple of days into the job, I was sitting in the break room, which was really just a one-man tent behind one of the bigger display tents halfway along the alley. I'd just eaten an entire bag of fairy floss and was wondering how to get the stickiness off my hands, when the World's Strongest Man came in and sat beside me. When I say beside me I mean beside me, like I was on a milk crate and he picked up another milk crate and put it right up against mine so that the plastic was touching and so was our skin.

You know those summer nights when your inside smells like rum and your outside smells like coconut oil and the heat and booze makes you confused about which is inside and which is out? That's what having the World's Strongest Man pressed against me in that tiny tent felt like.

New people ? strong or not, leopard-skin-loincloth or not ? always create in me a rush of questions. I wanted to know how the milk crate could hold his weight and whether I would be crushed if he lay on top of me and how he felt about having people stare at him all day and whether he might like it if I kissed him and if he knew I wanted badly to know how it would feel to have the World's Strongest Man inside my body.

And it turns out that the milk crate wasn't holding his weight, it was just steadying him while he held his own weight in his glutes. It turns out, also, that he didn't mind being stared at all day but hated it when people talked about him like he wasn't there and, also, he did like it when I kissed him and he was happy I wanted to know what having the World's Strongest Man inside my body felt like. It felt, by the way, the same as having any other man inside me except that the outside of my body was hidden and protected by an enormous tent of muscle and fat. I was not crushed, only cocooned.

But there really wasn't much room in there and he really was very large and so it was perhaps inevitable that the tent of muscle and fat covering me would soon himself be covered by the half-collapsed tent of the Sideshow Alley break room. But even that felt okay, like the world was getting smaller, closing in as we closed in on each other, like the sky was falling in as our bodies collapsed into each other. So even with the canvas slapping against us and even with the sound of people saying, oh my God, they're still going!, even though I could see over his shoulder the shadow people plucking at the collapsed tent, trying to get us out, we kept fucking and when the World's Strongest Man said, I will always remember you, I came hard and kicked the last standing tent pole.

I ended up in hospital, which is where so many of my stories end. Either there or at the police station. This time it was a bit of both, actually, because there was a cop by my bedside taking a statement. The World's Strongest Man had been charged with public indecency and I would be too. I had been charged with this before, locked up overnight even, but this time, the cop told me, I could go away for a while. There are only so many times a person can be warned.

So the cop asked what had happened and I told him. I told him about the smell and the skin and the feeling of being enclosed. I told him how it's hard for me to remember to not do these things because I find people so interesting and I want badly to connect. I tried to explain that I feel life is too short and precious to let people pass through without taking a moment to experience them fully, to feel what they're made of, to know who they are rather than how they appear.

The cop asked if I felt like that with him and I told him, yes, that I'd been wondering the whole time what it must be like to go from tackling bag snatchers to pulling dead teenagers out of car wrecks to watching over thirty-year-old women who forget they're not supposed to fuck in public, and I'd been wondering if he ever went home and took off his uniform and looked in the mirror and realised he wasn't a cop at all but just a kid like the one he'd arrested outside the pub earlier that night.

And although the door was closed, it was a hospital after all, and of course there was no lock, and of course a doctor came in while my cop was mid-thrust and then another cop came and there were whispered meetings in the hallway and eventually the new cop (who stood far away in the open doorway and did not look at me as he spoke) said that I would not be charged this time but that I had better get myself sorted out because next time . . . And he left.

Then the doctor who was observing me for concussion referred me to Cookie, and I told her that the World's Strongest Man/cop incident was the last of a long line of incidents that ended tragicomically. She said I was a classic addict, that I was using sex to disguise other problems in my life and that I had to abstain until those other problems were under control.

I didn't want to go to jail or get another concussion so I took her advice. I went cold turkey and quickly discovered that she was both right and wrong. She was right that I needed to stop so I could regain control of my life, but she was wrong that the sex had been a way of covering up my real problems. As soon as I stopped fucking, life became easy. Sex hadn't been a way of concealing my problems ? it had been the straight-out cause of them.

And so here I am, abstinent, employed, sober, in control. In my hallway is a half-naked man looking at me as though this is the end of a long date during which we both drank too much wine and laughed at things that tomorrow would not seem funny.

'Do you want to use the phone then?' I ask him, pointing toward the kitchen. I am conscious that not long ago I wouldn't have offered this because the phone would have been disconnected.

He nods and moves toward the kitchen. His back fills my view. I crash into it when he stops suddenly. We stand like that: my face against his back, my startled hands on his hips. I stare at the freckles on his shoulderblades. I can smell his hair, which needs to be washed and combed.

'I don't have anyone to call,' he says. My hands landed on his hips by accident, but I am sliding them around to his front on purpose. My face is against his back because he stopped short, but my lips are opening because I want them to.

'I don't have anyone to call, anyplace to go, anything to do,' he says and I can taste the truth of what he says. He is salted by the days of having nowhere to be. I lick the salt and his hips twitch beneath my hands. I know this is trouble, but I have been this man, standing someplace strange, not having anyone to call, anywhere to go. I have been him and I have been kissed and made to feel that standing in a strange place, being strange, was a fine and human thing to do.

I move my hands up over his chest. I pull on his soft girl's nipples until they feel hard like mine. I kiss his back, his neck, his shoulders. Every new place I move my hands or mouth I am afraid he will decide, that's it. I'm scared he will say, stop, he will call me a freak, he will say, what kind of woman are you?, he will run.

'Is this okay?' I ask, kissing up the side of his neck, pressing my breasts into his back.

'Sure,' he says. 'I mean, it's quite surprising.'

I stop everything. My face is hot against the back of his neck. My hands hang limp at my sides. 'I'm sorry.'

'No, it's good. Nothing ever surprises me any more.'

For a second we stand still, both facing the kitchen, not touching. Then he reaches back and takes my hands. He presses them against the front of his jeans. I am as thrilled as I was the very first time I felt a boy's swollen crotch and realised what it meant.

I remember Cookie again. An erection is a reflex, she told me. It's a response to stimuli, not a sign of love, not even a sign of connection. I realise I am doing it again, confusing compulsion with connection, taking a body part personally.

'Obviously,' he says, his cock pulsing through his jeans into my hands, 'I enjoy being surprised.'

I try not to take that personally but my cunt has begun pulsing, sympatico with his cock. I pull away, spin around too fast and hurtle, head swimming, into the living room. I sit on the sofa that I bought with a credit card given to me on the strength of my four weeks continuous employment at the bank. My last sofa was stolen along with all my other furniture and electrical goods. I know who took them: the junkie boyfriend of a moon-faced girl who gave amazing head. While she was going down on me, or maybe afterwards while I was passed out from exhaustion and pleasure, he cleared the place out.

The man is crouched in front of me. He looks like his heart has been broken. 'Do you want me to leave?' he says, but before I can answer he starts unbuttoning my navy polyester bank-clerk blouse.

I kick off my shoes and close my eyes. I think about the time that I lived in a squat and a reporter came to the door and asked to talk to the residents. He had black hair cut like Julius Caesar's and his eyes were watery blue behind thick glasses. We had this chair at the squat, a lovely old brocade thing, and when the reporter sat on it he looked so right, so beautiful, like a boy-king on his throne.

I believe in embracing beauty wherever it appears, I told him and he laughed as though I was mad and so I stripped him and made him believe in the beauty of himself on an old chair in an inner-city squat. Later, after his article was published and we were all evicted, the others said the reporter had used me, but I don't think that's right. I would have answered all his questions whether he'd fucked me or not. It wasn't his fault I couldn't resist unexpected loveliness.

I've been evicted before and since. I never felt like it was such a big deal until Cookie put it all together for me. She pointed out that each of my bouts of homelessness was preceded by inappropriate sex. The reporter; the son of a landlady; the wife of a landlord; the incident with the smashed windows; the thing in the communal swimming pool. And that's not counting the times I've lost my job and therefore my ability to pay rent. That goes something like: boss, boss, co-worker, customer, customer, boss, delivery guy, co-worker, boss's son, delivery guy, World's Strongest Man.

There is a mouth on my left nipple, a hand on my right breast, another hand on my thigh. I open my eyes and notice that I have left the front door open. If anyone strolls past they will see me here on my sofa, ending my abstinence, inviting in chaos.

'The door,' I say, thinking of the neighbours, the police, charges, trouble.

The man looks over his shoulder and begins to move away from me. As he turns I notice the head of his cock poking up above his waistband. I am right behind him as he slams the door. I push him back into the living room and tackle him to the carpet in the process of removing his jeans. They are too large for him and slide off easily.

'No underwear,' I say, wrapping one hand around his cock, using the other to weigh his balls.

'I lost them,' he says, his hands tugging at the waistband of my work skirt. I am still a trainee and this skirt belongs to the company but when the man yanks the zipper so hard that the surrounding fabric is ripped apart I don't care. It's just a job; there are plenty more. There is only this one chance in life to have this man rip my skirt while I knead his silky balls.

'How?' I ask, half-standing, kicking free my ripped skirt.

'Forgot them on someone's floor, I think.' He pulls me down so I am sitting on his crotch. I grind against him while he claws at my regulation beige pantyhose, ripping holes large enough for his hands.

'I thought I was the only one that happened to,' I say, but my words come out like gurgles and I'm not sure he understands. I can feel my wetness seeping through the cotton and nylon as I rub myself against him. I want to be naked but I can't seem to stop moving against him.

He rolls me off him, pushes me onto my back, rips away the remaining shreds of my pantyhose. He bends his head to my crotch. He hovers there a second then plucks up the waistband of my underpants between his teeth. He looks up at me, a mangy dog, proud of its find, reluctant to let it drop.

'Take them off,' I plead, desperate to have his mouth on my cunt. He shakes his head and his beard scratches my swollen clit through the cotton. Then he places his hands on either side of his mouth and begins to drag my pants down. He moves slowly, his chin, beard, mouth and nose, teasing me as he moves down. He leaves the underpants stretched between my knees and leans over me, his hands stroking the insides of my thighs.

'Tell me about this tattoo,' he says, pointing to the word Forever on my right hip.

'Later,' I say, reaching for him with my whole body.

He stays between my thighs and slides a finger into my cunt, then another and another. I force my legs wider, feeling my knickers stretching beyond repair. He smiles at me, that same smile he gave me when he first woke up on my porch, and I am sure I will never regret abandoning abstinence now that I have felt that smile through the hand moving inside me.

Then his hand is out of me and on his cock. His slippery fist works up and down while his other hand presses into my belly, holding me down. I struggle against him and kick my restrained legs. 'Tell me about the tattoo or I'll come,' he says. He's not kidding around: his hand is pumping, his balls are shiny and tight, his breathing fast.

'I used to love a girl whose body was covered in tattoos,' I say, and he slows his pace but keeps his hand moving, nodding for me to go on. 'Most of them were ugly, and some of them were just weird, but I loved her because she believed each one meant something important. She was always starting arguments, then right when things were getting heated she'd rip off her shirt or pull down her jeans. ?It's like this,? she'd say, pointing to a goldfish or lily or some ugly gnome. ?You know?? And I never did, but it didn't matter.

'She was really insecure, always asking me if I loved her, if I wouldn't prefer to be with a man. So I went and got this tattoo so that next time she asked if I loved her I could flash it at her and say, ?It's like this, baby?. I thought it would make her happy.'

He takes his hand off his cock. 'Did it?'

'No.' I lift my hips to meet his hand. He works his fingers in one by one and when I say, come on, please, more, he thrusts his whole hand in and slams his body down on mine.

'What happened with the tattooed girl?' he asks but I don't want to talk about anything sad or anything at all. I lift my head and kiss his lips and to my relief he kisses back.

I scrape my nails down his spine and then grab his beautiful arse, teasing the crack with my fingertips, stroking his arsehole, then pressing it, then slipping the tip of one finger inside. He moans and grinds the head of his cock hard against my clit. My cunt is gripping and squeezing his hand so hard I am worried his bones will be crushed. I tell him I have never wanted to fuck someone so much in my life and he says, I know, and then asks if I have any condoms.

I start to cry, because I am as close to mad with desire as I've ever been and I do not have any goddamn condoms. I keep crying because I remember why I do not, and I am confused that I gave up sex because I was always taking stupid risks, and here I was again about to take a stupid risk because I didn't have a condom because I had sworn off doing this thing that would not be so risky if only I hadn't thrown out all the condoms, and I meant what I said to him ? I really, really have never wanted anything so much as I want to fuck this man right now.

He gets off me, grabs his jeans, runs from the room. I am crying and horrified and agonisingly aroused and before I can untangle my ruined underpants from my ankles and follow him I hear the front door open and slam shut. I stagger naked into the hall and see my handbag on the floor. I don't need to pick it up to know that my wallet is gone.

I stand in the hall, staring at my bag. I can't seem to make myself move. The thing is that although this has proven beyond doubt that I lose all sense when I am aroused, although I am cold and hurting and most likely penniless until next pay day, I am not sorry. I felt real just now, fully alive, and that has not been true for six long weeks. It doesn't matter that it ended badly, only that while it lasted I was connected to another fragment of humanity. For a while I was not so very separate. The door opens. He is there, red-faced, chest hair plastered to his skin with sweat, my wallet in one hand, a vending-machine packet of condoms in the other. I start to cry again and he takes my hand and leads me to the sofa, removes his jeans, lies on top of me and kisses me until we're grinding and grunting again.

And at last his cock is inside me and it is the oddest feeling. It's like I've been running for weeks and now I have stopped. My heart is racing and my hands are clawing at his back and my hips are moving fast, fast, faster, but inside I am utterly peaceful. When I come, I black out for just a second, and when I recover I feel as though I've woken from a very deep sleep.

I open my eyes and am looking right into his. His face seems to break apart and his body stiffens and I am shaking from the inside with the force of his orgasm. He collapses onto me and I lock my legs around his thighs not wanting him to move, not yet.

'What are you doing here?' I ask and he sighs and presses his scratchy face into my neck.

After a minute or so he begins to talk, his words rushing in to my ear as though they've been trapped inside for too long.

'I had a girlfriend once who liked to read to me while I went down on her. I don't remember much of what she read but this one thing has stuck with me, from Bukowski: ?Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.? And that always seemed right to me. I've tried to not do things like this. I've tried to live like a respectable human being, tried to connect with people without sticking my dick in them. I went a couple of years once, never touching another body. And life was easy. I had money in my pocket and food in my belly and a roof over my head. But the whole time I could see Death straight on ahead, just his back, as he sauntered along at a reasonable distance. I'm just following along behind death, I thought. It might take fifty years, but some time I'm going to catch up with him and he'll turn and look at me and I'll be so tired of just walking along looking at his back that I won't fight. I won't kick him in the arse, I'll fall gratefully at his feet.

'So, I started up again. Kicking death in the arse while singing, that's the only thing that makes me want to keep living. I've been told it's an addiction, an unhealthy compulsion, and that's probably true, but so what? So sometimes I end up running naked, pants in hand away from a pissed-off boyfriend I didn't know existed, leaving behind everything I own in the world and collapsing exhausted on a random porch too tired to care whether the owner calls the police on me. And sometimes . . . Sometimes the police do not get called and there is no pissed-off boyfriend and instead of yelling and running and losing everything there is this. And this is good. The only good.'

'Yes,' I say, 'I know exactly what you mean.'

'Yes,' he says, kissing my throat and eyelids and lips. 'Yes.'