Reflections of a Dirty Old Man, Recently Showered

I keep struggling with this topic, because I keep asking myself – what is a dirty story?

The most influential book on dirty story writing  craft  that I’ve read has been a book by exactly that title “How to Write a Dirty Story” by Suzie bright.  In this book she goes from the point of view, which time has proven to me,  that what makes a dirty story or an erotic story is as personal as our erotic nature itself.

I wrote here in the past the most erotic story I’ve ever read was by a nameless amateur and would only be erotic to me.  It was in a chat room during the earliest days of the internet, when a purportedly young man, say around high school, turned up emotionally shaken because he had just lost his virginity an hour ago.  But how he lost it!

His mother, a single mother, had a best friend he had known and grown up with like a kind of elderly aunt and trusted  old friend.  About one night a week they'd get together to watch TV ever since he was a little kid.  

So,  on this night the TV shows offered are pretty boring, she doesn’t have cable, and sitting side by side on the sofa, himself in a T shirt and jeans, her, in a loose house coat, get on the subject of birth marks.  Like Hooper and shark hunter Quint in “Jaws” showing off their scars, they begin showing each other their birth marks.  The easyones first.  My arm.  Here’s my arm.  I have one on my knee.  I have one over here.  And then the less accessible ones,  in those sweaty places you have to dig down a little to get to.  Soon she is half undressed.  Soon his jeans are pulled down a bit.  Soon she is saying those weak words “I think we need to stop.”  Which a testosterone addled young kid with a visible erection poking over the top of his underwear will say with a lamb like bleat “Why?’ 

It means nothing that she’s old.  It means nothing she’s his mother's friend.  It means nothing they’ve known each other for years.  His jeans are down, her house coat is open to reveal the final birthmark where a young man might hope to find it.  And she says, reluctantly, probably feeling irresistibly, terribly, gloriously dirty “Unless you want to go into the other room.”  The room down the hall.  That room.  He doesn’t know what to say.  She gets up and goes to that room and closes the door.

What happens in the next ten minutes will mark his life.  In his last moments in this world, hopefully many wonderful years from now, if his mind is clear at all, his last affectionate vision before going into that good night will not be of his wife or his kids or of Jesus.  It will be that woman, her clothes heaped hastily on the bedroom floor, the sheet pulled chastely up to her chin, the peaks of erect nipples tenting the thin fabric and those frightened, hungry eyes.  He will stand eternally in the doorway, right up to the instant he decides what he will do with that concealing sheet she is clutching.  And that is the power of woman.

Is that a dirty story?  Or a sweet story?  I don’t think it turns anyone on but me, but it reveals me.  It reveals what I might have wished, what would have turned me on, and how many times I’ve envied that young man, not for what followed next, but for that moment in the doorway when it’s all in front of him and there is a woman in the room waiting for him to choose.  A woman he thought he knew, and realizes now he doesn’t know shit.  His inexperience on these things falls on him with a humiliating thrill just as the rediscovery of her own thrilling vulnerability falls on her.  What will they do?

What is erotic is not the consummation of the act.  It is the offering.  The presence of untested desire, unproven manhood.  The possibility of physical failure or rejection, which would be experienced so differently by the boy and the woman.  The eroticism is what is hidden until it becomes revealed and then becomes sex and maybe sordid and disappointing or gorgeous and transformative.  Someday he’ll be married and it’ll become routine, something he does after brushing his teeth.  It will never be as terrifying and raw and primitive as it is in that first earthquake of his core.   Maybe she will have to show him how to take up the masculine posture between her knees.  Her hand on his back will lower him carefully onto her as though taming a wild animal with gentleness then her other hand will guide the tip of his shivering phallus in like a ship to a dock.  He'll get off a few thrusts before he grunts and shivers, feels something leave him and marvels over the strange hot slickness all around his cock and the sheer weirdness of inhabiting the body of another human being and ask himself is this really what people do.  He'll be too proud and jazzed to ask this woman, who looks like she should be his grandmother, if he did everything right.

 That is the power of woman also.    The eroticism is not the satisfaction of the penis stroking  for the first time.  The eroticism is all that leads to that moment that has pinned him wriggling to the wall like a bug in a glass frame, pinned between her thighs, the mystery of approaching her bed, standing next to her and looking down into her eyes and seeing the offer there, and the realization, which must always be a shock the first time, that a woman has called his bluff.  That she is standing wide open, radically and insanely nude, behind the door which she requires him to open by himself and step through.