I dated three girls in high school, I say by way of introduction of my sexual history. I could talk about them all, but I’d rather just skip to the last one. I invested a lot of symbolism in that relationship. I made up creation myths about her. I burned napkins like incense for her. I walked with her out to a church’s front steps, where we would embrace and talk about the pain of living. When we were in the “not going out, but spending a lot of time together” stage, I milked it for as long as possible, so as to build the suspense. At any rate, a large part of my attraction to her was this large sense of the literary I got from her. Probably because she cuts herself. One very memorable day, soon after we had begun kissing, (and thus, going out) we sat together in the little garden area by Student Union and looked down at the ants and flowers, as spring rain gathered in the air above, eventually to soak us. Before that, we embraced and I asked her about the scar on her arm, and she told me it was once a birthmark. It was removed in the fifth grade, but the doctors were wrong; it didn’t go away in a week or two. It never healed. She showed me the marks on her wrists that she made herself, with years of needle pricks and razor blades. She told me that for her, scars don’t heal. And I suppose for me, the attraction was the idea that there we were, two completely fucked up people, who could make each other less miserable, if only for a minute or two. She would ask me if I was happy, but I could never find the words to explain that happiness didn’t enter into. The relationship was so perfect and tragic; it feed my zombies in way that I couldn’t get enough of. It was sexy in the way that Cibo Matto’s song “Artichoke” is. Probably, the plateau of sexual satisfaction comes from just lying together with another person, and that we were able to do in public on the couches. Everything else was only asymptotically better, but I pushed ahead anyway. I enjoyed suckling on her or playing with her breasts or fingering her, mostly because it seemed to make her happy, which I hoped would redeem me. In the end though, we sort of fell out of romance with each other, and she started not being around and then she dropped me. Which, I suppose, I understood. It was just nice to think for whatever little time, I had given her some measure of joy. After high school, I kind of reevaluated all of my memories of her and elevated her to goddess stature, which made sense in the lonely summer way. So, she was the last girl I was with in a sexual way until that terrible Friday.

I think my zombie for girls is really two zombies. One just wants to share a chair and rest its head on a girl’s chest. Just sitting on each other, spooning, that sort of casual but sexual contact. The other zombie wants to push the envelope of sexual experience. This zombie wants to 69 in an airplane bathroom with a stewardess and a librarian. I mostly just listen to the first zombie, but the other zombie is always there too. The first zombie is always sad that I have no one to show the cool posters in my room, or someone to look at all my cool, old books. The other one is always horny. To be honest, I could do without either.

It’s worth pointing out that I am basically just a tangent line to the function of Summerset’s story. I just kind of intersect at a point and then trail off into the distance. I’d rather hear her side of the story, but instead I’m forced to write my story. That’s the trouble with autobiography: it’s a story with just one limited perspective narrator. So here’s my part in it.

To me, Friday night started Thursday night. There was a fire in the elevator of the girls’ dorm, so they came over to our building to pass the time. It was late, “The Daily Show” was repeating itself, and I had a test the next day, but I wanted to see what Summerset and her suitemate Raven McCoy were up at. They invited Marcellus and me to go over to their hall on Friday night for a meal they entitled, “Hump for Your Dinner.” It seems that Raven was scheming to “get some ass.”

Earlier, Summerset was talking with Raven to Marcellus.

Raven, “Guys at this school need to learn about casual dating.”

Summerset, “Casual something… … All I know is something has to give.”

Background information: Raven and Marcellus spent the past two weekends getting drunk together and making out. She even fellated him, though he doesn’t really like her in a romantic way. I think she knows this, but she’s mostly expressing her sexual drive. Like me, Summerset is from York County, and I had run into her before Furman, so naturally, I feared her by default as a potential spy from home. But, as I had come to learn during the weeks leading up to this, that fear was needless. She was just as much of a sinner as me. So, there you go.

Friday afternoon, I paused a game of Earthbound and went with Raven and Marcellus over to her hall. On the walk, I noted sadly how long it had been since I had beheld with my own eyes actual unclothed breasts. Damn foreshadowing. A couple other guys showed up for the meal, but mostly dissipated when the dinner drew to a close. The meal was simple enough, salad, stir-fry chicken, copious amounts of rice. Very decent. To go along with the meal, the girls played a number of songs, including Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently,” with which they sang along. The topic of the meal was predictably, Summerset’s funny past sexual experiences and their current sexual frustration. Frankly, I must say that as a topic of conversation in mixed company, sexual frustration ranks as the proverbial match in a powder room. (Though, I say that not to take the responsibility off the shoulders of the powder room.) I protested that for a girl like Summerset, sexual frustration was largely self-imposed, as any guy would finger her in exchange for a chance to see her delightfully massive boobs. Damn foreshadowing. At the conclusion of the meal, Captain Morgan, the damnable pirate, made an appearance along with his famously spiced rum. After drinking my second double shot of rum, I noted that I was to the threshold of regretful drinking. To drink more than that I knew would bring on naught but misery. I asked the group if I should keep drinking, knowing that I would regret it the following morning. The group response was predictable. Damn foreshadowing.

Now is a good time to introduce another character, let’s call him Butch, who had been recently dumped by Summerset’s roommate, and was wholly nonplused by the situation. And furthermore, he was, like everyone else, including Marcellus, enchanted by Summerset’s good looks. In reference to which, I bring up her “trick.” In the self-deprecating manner that is so common to girls these days, Summerset introduced the question of her bust size being too great. Which it isn’t, at least from an aesthetic point of view, though I’m sure they have many practical problems associated with it. To illustrate the potential for the breasts’ size to be a negative factor in the judgment of her appearance, she proposed showing a trick that had previously been seen by her suitemates, namely holding large objects under her breasts, while standing. Please bear in mind that we were all fucking trashed. The half-empty Captain Morgan bottle was chosen for this demonstration. Marcellus and Butch were eliminated from the opportunity to see this trick on the basis of “the suitemate rule.” Being previously involved with another girl in the suite, they were permanently excluded from sexual dealings with Summerset. I was thrilled at the news, and in my drunken rapture, I feigned collapse before her as she showed me her trick, despite her protest that, “It’s not sexy.” Of course, Marcellus and Butch had to be forcefully ejected from the room prior to this, which involved much kicking and door shoving. I chalked it up as point for York County pride.

After this, a couple things kept sort of rotating around, as things kept spinning out of control like the Gemini VIII. One thing was a proposed game of strip poker. Another thing was Butch’s desire to sleep with Summerset, or at least receive a blowjob. Yet another was Summerset’s commitment to the suitemate rule. The final recurrent factor was Summerset’s unrequited love with a former beau now attending the nearby University of South Carolina.

So, Butch started fondling Summerset’s ass and eventually breasts, and she didn’t protest too much, so I too followed him down the path of fondling, only after grabbing her bottom, I would shake my fist toward heaven and entreat God not to mock me so or asking what the nature of reality was that it should be so cruel by turns, and so forth. I doubt that I would have had the courage (if that’s the word) to fondle Summerset had Butch not initiated it, however, once the process began, it continued down the path of least resistance. Summerset continued to pine away for her boy at USC, whom she guessed was probably with another girl at that moment. Events continued along these lines, as my touching her ass changed into putting my hands between her thighs, or on her breasts, and so forth. While Butch was in the process of disappearing, (I’m not sure where he was for the anti-climax of events) Summerset showed me her storage bin full of writing. Which, of course, I appreciated. Writing is sexy as hell. She explained that she was having difficulty writing about her current situation, and I agreed that writing while in love is difficult. I made one of those post-modern self-references and noted that the events taking place would most likely become a fucked up letter to the moon. I’m becoming less and less of a fan of post-modern self-referentialism. She made another sexually suggestive comment, which prompted me to turn to Marcellus and ask why I ever took that damn invisibility serum, before suckling the exposed area of her bosom. I learned a little more about the application of both tampons and maxi-pads, as the evening progressed. Summerset applied a maxi-pad to the crotch of her tights in anticipation of the game of strip poker, so as to have another piece of clothing to discard. I was confident in my own ability to discard clothing, as I had on a suit coat, a button up shirt, a tie that comes up later, my father’s camouflage pants and my father’s shoes. I’m always disgracing ancestral clothing.

We tried to play cards, and even dealt some cards, as Raven and Marcellus starting going at it on Summerset’s bed, but nothing came of it. The whole time, the question of when we would hump for our supper had remained unresolved. In the time before this, Summerset’s continuing inability to be stimulated to orgasm by a male despite her numerous suitors had become common information. And also, I had begun rubbing her vulva. Please bear in mind that we were all fucking trashed. So, Raven and Marcellus were shooed into Raven’s bedroom, and I continued to attempt to break Summerset’s unlucky streak with men, by use of my fingers and mouth. I had the sense of self-confidence that comes of being way too fucking drunk. We settled down on the bed, and I continued to work, despite her protestations that male stimulation only ever increased her felt need to urinate. Eventually, she seemingly drifted off into an alcoholic slumber, and I ceased my motions. I looked at her and thought about how nice it would be to just sleep there with her, to sleep with someone so beautiful in my arms. She looked like a ballerina in her short black dress. With the underwear slightly askew. But it became apparent that this wouldn’t be the zombie to be fed on that day. I couldn’t rest, and before she drifted off, Summerset had rejected my request to have dry sex with her, on the grounds that it did nothing to help her situation. I agreed, and so, slunk off to the suite bathroom in defeat. Good heavens, I should never be so drunk with someone I know so poorly.

Marcellus and Raven were interrupted in what I later learned was an attempt at coitus aborted in its early stages, (he realized the potentially horrible ramifications of his actions as he rest his penis on her labia) when Summerset burst into their room in tears. I gestured from the bathroom to Marcellus that perhaps we ought to leave by making distressed faces. One can imagine that Summerset was crying about her romantic situation and her erotic difficulties, though I wouldn’t presume to speak for her. Like I said, I really only intersected a larger story, but I’m stuck telling my part of it.

Outside the room, I asked other people in the hall to hit me as hard as I felt I deserved. Guilt and regret had found me quickly. I began pummeling my forehead with my fist, and Butch appeared out of somewhere and stole my tie (which had previously been stuffed into Summerset’s bra-- giving me a greater sense of attachment to it). I chased him through two or three of those really confusing girls’ dorms at high speed before retrieving it and walking back. Actually, I’m surprised that I was able to find my way back.

In the aftermath of the situation, I decided to become better acquainted with Captain Morgan, though I probably shouldn’t have. Walking back with Marcellus, I threw myself into the ground outside of the library in a fit of self-flagellation. My tie and Palm Pilot were thrown loose, and I had to find them in the semi-darkness. Back in my own dorm building, I was so drunk that I managed to go to sleep in the wrong room for a short while, without noticing. When I woke up, I went out in the hall and noticed I wasn’t where I should be. Plus, I was in my boxers. Marcellus’ roommate had my pants and wallet returned to me by the inhabitants of the room later that night, while I was passed out in my own room. Marcellus and I offered up apologies over IM, and I went to bed in my own room, feeling sufficiently disgraced for the evening.

It’s worth saying: I never kissed her on the mouth that I can remember. It seemed to intimate. I pressed my cheek up next to hers and looked at her, but I couldn’t do it. Too personal. Too familiar. The whole slow motion tractor beam thing just wasn’t there. So, there’s one less thing to regret.

Continue.