FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

The Man Who Could be Hung
By Hayward Hawks Marcus

PAGE TWO:
Now, my parents were both artists, painters of realistic works of human anatomy, and our home library was chock-full of books of nude males and females, but nothing like this. Also, the sex education that I'd received in 1968 at age ten had been sparse; a birds and bees pamphlet that my mother shoved my way before slinking off for a peach daiquiri. It had described sexual intercourse in the most boring, frictionless way possible, apparently to underplay the inherent fun of it all -- When a husband and wife love each other very much and want to have children, they lie very close together. He inserts his erect penis inside her vagina and ejaculates his sperm to fertilize her egg. Nine months later, a baby is born.

I sat in the car and read Nice Girls until the red-hot profanity was burned deep into my gray matter. I closed the book and realized in an epiphanous flash that this cheaply printed text I clutched in my fevered hands had changed me, better than any pituitary gland ever could, for I now saw the full spectrum of my sexual capabilities. This stunning insight was more transformative than the Wizard's bellowing incantation during our Hindu Basket Trick, when he turned me -- twice daily -- from girl into snake.

I placed the book back under the seat. To look for my diary now seemed pointless, since my virginal scribblings were made positively anemic by this latest discovery. Besides, how could I ever begin to chronicle this? And then I noticed it -- a libidinous warmth which germinated from deep within my pelvic region. It crept up my spine like some blob-like monster escaped from a cell, growing in girth and strength, and soon reached my brain and began to eat it, rendering me nearly witless.

I exited the car, the Lust Monster happily gnawing at me while I roamed the Bazaar in a daze. Making my way through the crowd of 1970s faux Victorians, I envisioned every adult I saw engaged in unspeakable acts, doing some very un-Victorian things to one another. And I suddenly understood why parents locked their bedroom doors at night, and it was not -- as I'd previously thought -- to keep the burglars out, but rather to keep the pure minds of their youngsters safe and sane.

I headed for the Wild West Saloon Stage where, at noon and four o'clock, William Wizard brandished swords and guillotines to perform feats of magical mayhem upon my lithe body while I grinned and gestured like a numb idiot. There, next to the stage, I spotted Richard, my would-be paramour, breakfasting on a hay bale beneath an oak tree, looking none the worse for having been hanged three times the previous day. My mind was suddenly filled with fantasies of what might transpire after we kissed by the tinkling creek, and, in this newly revised daydream, I was definitely not a nice girl anymore. Worse yet, this was Sunday.

Richard looked up at me and smiled, and the monster in my brain grew wildly electric. The air turned to some viscous substance, and I froze -- a just-ripened fruit suspended in Jell-O. Breathing was out of the question. Yet everything inside swirled and pulsated in a sexual vortex.

I found myself standing before Richard without ever feeling my feet touch the ground. As he spoke in some unintelligible foreign language, I tried vainly to apprehend the meaning of, "Have a seat." Repeating the phrase -- which I guessed to be either Finnish or Hungarian -- he patted the hay bale while pulling me by the hand toward it. As soon as I sat I was struck by an odor. In junior high school, we would have called it B.O., but, as it exuded from Richard, it could only be dubbed the Essential Perfume of Man. My monster reeled at the scent. Speaking in tongues again, he attempted to hand feed me a bite of his sweet roll. I stared stupidly at him, the morsel hanging from the side of my mouth. He poked it in further, and, as my lips closed around his little fingertip, I knew it was Richard Kelly I wanted to devour, and not some tasteless bit of food.

With a gust of primordial feminine cunning, I looked at him with huge, limpid, Bugs Bunny eyes. "I need to lie down," I muttered, spewing forth a fountain of crumbs over my lap and his. Summoning what little saliva I had, I swallowed the remaining bready sawdust and added, " -- backstage." Richard nodded, understanding that my desire to be horizontal had nothing to do with any sudden illness.

I was totally unprepared for the rapidity with which the experienced male moves when faced with the promise of promiscuity. Whisking me through the wooden door to the empty dressing area just behind the stage, Richard found an unclaimed tie-dyed poncho and spread it over the dirt and sawdust floor. Then he pulled me with him to the ground, and kissed me. Not the soft kiss of my daydreams, this, but a forceful, penetrating, wet kiss. The French kiss of rumor. The kind of a kiss one giggles about while watching late-night uncensored movies at a girlfriend's slumber party. My Lust Monster was now hopping up and down, making gleeful noises like that of a rapidly beating heart. I had never kissed this way before, and began exploring the endless possibilities of kissing as I fell and tumbled, like a triple X rated Alice, down a bottomless rabbit-hole of sex. Hands and fingers began to dance over my flesh. Juices I never knew I had magically appeared. Saliva was no longer a problem.

I had just begun to investigate Richard's body and the carnal possibilities of The End of My Girlish Niceness, when I heard a familiar voice calling from far, far away. The kiss ended. The voice grew loud and harsh, scolding in tones unsuitable for lovemaking. Suddenly Richard was scrambling to his feet, not looking at all like the sophisticated lover he had been just seconds before, and I could see a wizard's goatee wagging furiously in the doorway while words like fourteen and jailbait flew violently about the room. That was the last time I saw Richard, who, I imagine, spent the rest of the Great Byron 1890's Bazaar pursuing less illicit female prey.

William, on the other hand, spent the better part of that Sunday informing any potential lotharios that any solicitations towards me would not be dealt with lightly, thereby killing my prospects for offering up my virginity at the Great Byron 1890's Bazaar. I was understandably peeved, and still sometimes wonder how different my defloration might have been, if, instead of eventually succumbing to a fumbling adolescent with a swarm of pimples and dearth of chest hair, I had actually roped The Man Who Could Be Hung.

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