This mind is like a batting cage. Words from across my life, words of mine, words of others, come at me. I deflect them. I try, at least. Names of important lovers seem to come in hardest, fastest. Facial tics of my mother, the way she responded to questions when she had no answer, how I once told her sister that my mother loved me, she just didn’t know how to. I woke up today recalling the time I broke out in hives as a dozen people watched, aghast, one person saying I had transformed into a cactus. Moments later the hives disappeared, and those people stopped staring. I once looked out this window and stood up, spontaneously masturbating to the sight of a woman walking her dog while, for some reason, licking her fingers. I had fornicated with a woman just an hour before, and would fuck her senseless hours later when she got back from work. In between those rounds of sex with this woman I masturbated 6 times. Without ever telling her of such things I carried on like this for months. Only once did she intrude upon my solitude of waste, visibly appearing insecure and angry in the way some women get when they find their man taking care of himself. Only I should be responsible for your sexual arousal seemed to be the sentiment she never found words to articulate. Upon her intrusion into my solitude of waste I pulled my pants back up and tried to assure her that I did not masturbate for being unsatisfied with our sex. That was a lie. I was, in fact, always unsatisfied with our sex, treating is as a physical catharsis for myself while knowing from the looks in her eyes and ancillary expressions of insecurity that she knew our time together was limited and that she felt she would never get fucked like this again. Today I masturbate with freedom and safety, after ending a 4-month dalliance with a woman who asked me to masturbate an inch away from her face. More specifically she wanted me to jizz on her face, which I did several times before concluding it was not something I want to do again. It felt degrading and base, though I have to admit that it was almost the only act left on my bucket list of sex. What a difference there is between jerking off in bed to a video of a facial cumshot compilation and simply putting the phone down after coming onto myself versus shooting a load onto a woman’s face and feeling obligated to take care of her afterward. My sexual desires evaporate the moment the jizz leaves my body, and I have never had any desire to taste, touch, or handle it. With her I did not have to taste it but I felt it appropriate to at least offer to help clear it off her face, hair, and body. As for that bucket list I think only one act remains. I’ll save a description of it if I ever find a likely candidate who wants to be the better half of that act. I might have felt better about coming on this woman’s face if she had even smiled just a little bit, or given some indication that she liked it or that it felt good to her. Like all our sex it felt like work. She came here to do a job, and to have a job done to her. Any time she came over here it was strictly business. Within seconds of me closing the door after her arrival she would take off her shoes, shirt, and pants, get my shorts off of my body and out of the way, then sit me down on the couch and suck my cock for an hour straight, maybe longer, I don’t even know what time is anymore. She may have been a dream woman for many guys but I found it monotonous, and I’ve known other men who’ve been involved with women like this and I think most of them would agree. It’s not too good to be true, it’s too true to be good. We had nothing to talk about, not even the slightest whiff of mental connection, and she seemed to be fine with that. My escape hatch was that she wanted me to do things to her that I simply did not want to do. I will not shit or piss on another human being, and I told her I could not and would not do anal. She seemed to find it strange that any man did not crave or at least get perked up at the opportunity to perform these acts. I may go back to her, or she to me, for occasional dalliances. She has a beautiful face, perfectly imperfect breasts, and all her tastes were usually sweet. Our closure was perfectly amicable, and mutual. She is in my mind because she is the most recent but all the women I’ve known resurface throughout my days, their stray words squawking at random like distraught seagulls on the beach. I didn’t even know you played a musical instrument said the woman for whom I’d played piano a dozen times or more. You’re the most heterosexual man I’ve ever known said the woman who thought all men were gay, and who thus delivered the statement as a compliment, albeit a very gawky compliment that left me asking Wait, is that a good thing? I remember the way one woman’s lips pursed after I said something she thought only I could say. She’d call me “MT” with a drawl and a smile, then kiss me. Emmm Teeeeeee! She was the sweetest one. Still, so many times I am left asking myself what has made me think I need sex, or want it. How am I improved by being with a woman? Am I improved? Were they improved on account of their time with me? I remember the elegiac words one woman used to describe our long-term relationship. She called it “Our life together”. Why can I never let those words exit this batting cage of my mind? Did we have a life together, or just a years-long hookup forcibly appointed with the trappings of a relationship in exchange for the social rewards and congratulatory acceptance among peers and strangers? One word from her threw me back in time across 25 years. She spoke of how so much of our sex took place while we were both intoxicated to a point where we didn’t even remember it the next day. I don’t remember the entire context or substance of this conversation but her argument was that sex was supposed to be “special,” and how could it be special if you don’t even remember it later? I didn’t have it in me to tell her that except for a few memorable incidents I do not remember women I’ve known for the sex we shared, with or without the memory-wiping effects of alcohol. Further to that we had sex fully sober far more often than when drunk. In my uncomfortable defense I used a combination of words that felt like they’d come from someone else’s mouth. Are you saying the sex is no good? “No good” was the pair of words I could not have ever expected, in this or any context, to come from me. It felt like the words of a dumb thug trying to provoke a response out of his accuser. How could the sex be no good if we were doing it 12+ times a week, sometimes 3 or 4 times in a single day? She never said the sex was good, but she didn’t say it was “no good” either. She only said that she wanted “more.” I didn’t have the poise of thought to ask “More than 15 times a week?” But the word that came back to haunt me, and which this already uncomfortable argument even moreso, was “special.” It threw me back to the night I lost my virginity to a woman much older and experienced than I. We were lying on the bed, doing a stationary victory lap after our first full fuck, when I said something to the effect that sex with her was “special.” This woman suddenly changed personality. Her hands shook, hysterical-style, and one of them pressed my chest to keep me lying down as she sat upright, her back stiff but swaying like a bamboo shoot. It all came pouring out. She had been raped, molested, abused, and tormented throughout her youth, into her twenties, by her father and other family members. She had run with gangs and been in jail, forced to suck a whole bunch of cocks before taking them in her ass. To her sex was a bodily function, a human necessity. It was nothing special and she labeled me a naïve child for even bringing that word into the conversation. I tried to comfort and empathize but I was completely out of my league. There seemed no way to comfort, and having minutes earlier lost my virginity to this woman I obviously had no common ground from which to talk about sexual abuse. She warned me to stay away from her. I should have. She never knew I’d been a virgin until that night. I sometimes ask myself it that would have altered her attitude about my naïvete. As would be common with me throughout my relationships I failed to heed obvious warning signs, in this case not just inferred but explicitly stated. Still, in my youthful language of love the vocabulary had no words for danger, and having just been all the way inside of a woman for the first time I guess it would be called a rookie mistake for me to have blurted out that this made her special. She became exhausted with the discussion, threatening to kick me out of her apartment, but settling down and lying in bed with me as she continued to shake, slowly calming down. My mind scrambled, struggled, awkwardly tried to imagine myself capable of making her confessional exhaust to me a building block for our future together, not a sledgehammer to its foundation. Fast forward across the decades where the tables had turned, in a way. A few years after losing my virginity I would be raped by a woman. A few years after that I was forced (so it felt at the time) into having an affair with a married woman. I wanted to keep sex special but after those encounters it felt dangerous, risky, and something for which I needed ample assurances before letting it happen. Once those assurances were secure, though, it was free and easy to get things going. But was it ever “special” again? I think of the woman who would rape me, jumping out of bed, exhilarated, announcing That was the best sex I ever had. Sure, that was a special moment. But it came two days before she raped me. I think the most special moments for me have been making sex videos and watching them with the woman. These were videos that were shredded and completely destroyed after the relationships ended but I found it sweet and even comforting to watch two people, one of them myself, enjoying each other’s bodies. One woman and I played these videos back on the subways and buses, strategically seated so that no one else could see. I think of it now and remember how sweet it felt, watching the woman sitting next to me on the bus as she sucked my cock earlier that morning, looking into the camera and smiling. It was sweet, or rather special, whatever the potential risk of someone else seeing what we were watching, realizing it was us in the video, stealing my phone, then bombarding me with email threats that the video will be posted to the internet unless I pay ransom of a billion bitcoins. Truth is, in that particular situation, neither the woman involved nor I would have had a problem with those videos going public, not at the time, at least. We’d regret it now but we were really into each other for a long time. Another phrase that harpoons me at random came from a woman with whom I had phone sex for over 20 years. We never met, I have no idea what she looks like, but me-oh-my together on the phone we could make that cunt of hers sing. It was a wet, sticky, viscous sound that makes my mouth water now just thinking about it. We lasted 20 years because we had a lot more to talk about than how much I wanted to feel her cunt juices all over my face, or how she promised she could take all of my cock into her mouth, down to and including my balls. No, we spoke of other things. We talked once about being alone. At the time I was single and not happy about it, while she was considering getting married to someone she’d been dating for several months. In fact she made two famous-to-me statements in this conversation. She had been married, twice, and described it by saying “It’s just like being single, except there’s always someone else there.” That sounded to me like something I had never known, but it also sounded like the only kind of arrangement where I could be married to a woman, where I still felt single even though the woman was always there. I am constitutionally incapable of cheating on a woman so for me feeling “single” in a committed relationship does not equate to fucking around, nor does it come anywhere close to that. (By the way, this session at the batting cage reminds me how often I feel like every woman I’ve ever been with is always here, always sitting on the couch or making noise in the kitchen, always present and keeping an eye on me from one attitudinal vantage point or another.) The other memorable phrase this woman used referred to her years of being single and not involved with men at all. Earlier in life she had been promiscuous, but after giving birth to child #6 she decided enough was enough. After her kids had all grown and moved on she spent years by herself. She said “I like my own company,” going on to say that she really did not need a man, but that sometimes it made sense. I felt a bit of self-repudiation in my head after she said all this. It made me realize that I do not like my own company, I do not like being alone, but I do wish I could find something where I could maintain the feeling of still being a single, singular, independent individual without having to feel like my presence is a performance being constantly evaluated and critiqued. Okay, I’m done trying to capture the full clatter of the batting range inside my head. It’s not just women whose words rise up, it’s anything, any chance encounter with a stranger that led to a mutual laugh, any stray obscenity or pearl of wisdom wafting from the conversations of a crowded room, any moment spent concentrating on something that turned out to be a waste of time. It’s all there, unfree of itself.