Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Not Making It Dear Ann Landers: I'm missing out. The sex revolution is passing me by. No good kidding myself. The proof is there, in color, behind glass, on...
...the pressure on the neck...
...Does Spiro Agnew have redeeming social value...
...So maybe he's a little nicer looking than I am-but what the hell, Ann, I'm no horror show...
...They're being shot out of cannons at one another...
...There's been a pubic hair breakthrough, Ann...
...Between classes...
...And the concentration is murder...
...Speaking of the family, I'm worried about my kids, teenagers...
...The guy relaxes...
...She wasn't unattractive, you understand, a little heavy in the shoulders maybe, but not unattractive...
...The realtor never said anything...
...I go to porno movies in the afternoon...
...Where do I pick up my card to join the national sex party...
...No, I'm looking for spontaneity, for improvisation...
...Milestones and landmarks, that's what I'm after, Ann...
...The bathtub, of course, any closet whatever the size, the washing machine, the electric range...
...Reuben would admire our tries at novel positions...
...It could feed the world...
...I prowl through the house and every place I look I see a pleasure niche...
...Outtasight...
...Zing...
...Maybe after the others leave . . . But no tingling music, no lights turned down...
...A Social Democrat professor performing like that and I'm home reading lousy novels...
...I don't offend...
...Front, back, sideways, standing, crouching, jumping, balancing, juggling, a tremendous amount of thumping, thudding and squishing and slurping...
...You can pinpoint the advances being made each and every month in the field of Sex and Love...
...What a put-down for me, Ann...
...I'm not choosy...
...How does a guy get in on it, Ann...
...I'm moving here, she's moving there...
...Such a crop...
...Not once...
...there are places I haven't been...
...We sit around afterward, making conversation-and I wait for the thing to happen...
...Understand, please, I'm not exclusively a movie freak...
...I sit and study, but Ann, who wants to be an armchair theoretician...
...How would I know if I didn't study the mags that pubic hair is beautiful...
...oh boy, the lower back...
...I know that out there somewhere they are turning the back seats of cars into palaces of sensuality...
...It's true I haven't figured out how to put the ice cube treatment to her...
...I'm definitely better built than Henry Kissinger...
...but she's ready to experiment-up to a point...
...Filmy garments flying all over the place, grapplings with strange flesh in overstuffed cushions, a Bedlam of delights...
...If I told you my daydreams about that range . . . I'm convinced that General Electric and Westinghousc are in the pornography game...
...Come home, Andrew...
...Listen, I'm of an age with Marlon...
...What's the choice...
...that buxom matron upside down from a chandelier...
...Marlon and Me A guy walks into an empty apartment...
...But that much better...
...All we get are yawns and sometimes we're not invited back...
...Stop fucking around out there...
...I'm not getting enough...
...I read the first section of American Mischief, Ann-about this professor who services six hot women of different ethnic makeup and erotic requirements...
...Where you sit at least two or three seats away from the next creep, a row away if possible, and you keep your hands out of your lap...
...Just send somebody...
...I waited for the spark...
...Cramped and thrashing, shoes still on...
...Please don't bring up the business of whether the movies have redeeming social value...
...Many's the marriage manual we've studied together?but the damn things get us out of sync...
...The Impossible Dream To get back to my own hunt for promiscuity...
...Did I hear you suggest a visit to a massage parlor...
...Piece, bread and land...
...Just look at any girly magazine...
...Would she have batted me in the mouth...
...It's done with lights, isn't it...
...Surely not that they should grow up a searcher like me, doomed to middle-aged deprivation...
...do they wait till we go home and then do it with other people...
...I don't want to leave the impression, Ann, that my wife isn't a good sport...
...What kind of a question is that anyhow...
...In fact, she's determined for us to make the national average...
...She showed me the kitchen and the bathroom, which needed a painting, and the bedroom-the bedroom . . . and believe me, Ann, I was ready for anything, waiting for the spark that would fling me and the janitor's wife panting onto one another...
...Tell me the truth, Ann...
...But I have done my share of apartment-hunting, and the only woman under 70 I was ever alone with in an empty apartment was a Hungarian janitor's wife...
...Was it my fault...
...Knees behind elbows...
...Oh, things are certainly happening, Ann...
...From my reading, I know that ice cubes and whipped cream applied ingeniously are terrific stimulants-but the truth is that in our house the whipped cream still goes on chocolate pudding and the ice cubes go into Diet Cola, where they melt without giving anybody much of a charge...
...Granted, we've had different lives, and maybe he's in better shape...
...Never mind printing this in your column...
...Should I have mounted the janitor's wife as she was grunting down by the radiator...
...Do I make myself clear, Ann...
...A couple of times, I think it actually went as programmed, but I was concentrating so hard that I didn't notice when it was over...
...And she says, "You're married, aren't you...
...Heartening...
...I watch and I watch and I see what's being done, by who to whom, and I ask myself, how come those people can carry on like that for an hour and a half while I have trouble stringing things out for 15 minutes...
...Performing acrobatic intimacies...
...A professor...
...I'm unfulfilled, I feel that my citizenship is being questioned, my constitutional rights mocked...
...The proof is there, in color, behind glass, on marquees-the whole world is kinky with sex, and me on the outside...
...I want to pass new boundaries...
...The strain on the thighs...
...Ann, what do you think...
...Ann, I'm still not walking straight from the night we saw Last Tango...
...the twisted joints...
...ankles meeting wrists...
...I've been staring for several years, Ann, and all I get back are dazed and dirty looks...
...Ann, Ann . . . it's not for me...
...I go where the action is...
...Hard-core...
...There's nothing in the cupboard from puffed rice to teabags that doesn't play a part in my 24-hour sexual phantasmagoria...
...that messenger boy, disgusting kid...
...Prepaid sex-is that what the revolution is all about...
...A person has to learn...
...I want to experience experiences...
...My wife and I aren't stay-at-homes...
...I tell the wife I'm working late and go to singles bars...
...in comes this plump girl, French, she doesn't wear pants, and six minutes later they're all over one another...
...I miss my opportunities...
...They are with it, unhung, hanging out, juices flowing like mad . . . My kids...
...The pain indicates to me that I enjoyed it, yet who can tell...
...Or is she still suffering recriminations of her own over not having crushed in her powerful arms that desirable stranger who asked her how big a bribe was required to get on the waiting list...
...To neighbors' houses, mostly, for dinner...
...I'm on the upstroke, she's on the downthrust...
...All right, so my wife may not be Ms...
...I'm trying...
...The lower back...
...For the hostess to give that barely perceptible nod which, if you're attuned, is the invitation to crazy doings...
...I'm 45 years old, Ann, and it never happened to me in my life...
...Everybody, PhDs and illiterates, race no obstacle...
...Deep Throat, still I think Dr...
...Can the services have advanced very much...
...It's true we haven't placed an ad in any of the swingers' mags, but we go out quite a bit...
...I sit down and turn to whoever's next to me and say, "Hi...
...Or can it be that the trouble lies not in my stars but in my suburb...
...Come home, Debby...
...We stay late, Ann...
...People are doing things on trapezes...
...I think filthy thoughts: That 13-year-old in the window seat, spread-eagled on a grassy knoll...
...I'm a book nut too...
...Ann, you want to hear what I do...
...I think hard, I stare hard, I sweat...
...Whatever the reason, I'm definitely on the wrong end of a socio-technological curve...
...She bent over to turn on a radiator and her housedress lifted to expose the back of her knees-she was wearing socks...
...Camera tricks...
...Should fun hurt that much...
...A Social Democrat, if I'm not mistaken...
...pelvis making contact with spine...
...I want to break down barriers...
...I was in the Navy, Ann, and took liberty at several sleazy ports of call...
...What's going on, Ann, is this: Everybody is doing to all parts of everybody else marvelous dirty things...
...Mind you, I don't claim to be any great man of the world...
...I never ride on a subway without looking for that special connection...
...Is it possible that while the residents of Great Neck, Shaker Heights, Beverly Hills and Silver Springs are balling each other from sunrise to sunrise, Greenburgh, New York, where I live, remains fixated in the '50s...
...Tell me, Ann, do those people in the manuals go into training before they're hired, like for the Olympics...
...Acres of the stuff, in full color...
...Sensational vibrations...
...What am I supposed to want for them...
...But if she's making the move, I'm missing it...
Vol. 56 • March 1973 • No. 6
