The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) Read Online Free PDF Page B

involved with 69.
    It would have been far too horrifying for me to comprehend.
    When Connie told Sarah and me that girls sucked on men’s penises until junk flew out of them, well, jeez! Sarah and I were forced to stab our fingers with a jackknife, press our blood together, and take an oath that “I hereby swear to God I will never put a boy’s dick in my mouth and suck on it until junk flies out, and furthermore, no boy’s face will ever come within two feet of my vagina.”
    This was serious business! Sarah’s sister Connie had gotten married at 14 to a guy who was, like, 20! Apparently that was legal in Kansas. Connie knew all the ropes, all the tricks of the sex trade. She’d done it all! And she spilled it all to me and Sarah. Except for the queer stuff. She had no data about queers, and we didn’t ask because we didn’t know queers existed.
    I had a slight inkling about lesbians, not the sexual part or what they were called, just the love part. My pediatrician had lived with her nurse for 30 years. My mom called them old maids, but I could tell that they were really in love with each other. I just thought “old maids” meant two women who’d lived together for a long time without getting married to men. Then there was one of my cousins, who had bigger biceps than my dad, cropped hair, and who strutted around like a dude. I just thought she was really athletic, which she was. My concept of dykes and old maids was skewed, and it certainly didn’t involve sex.
    But back to Jeffrey. He was about six foot three, I’d say, with black hair and cobalt blue eyes, the lethal combination of features that I can’t resist. He didn’t look at all feminine. In fact he was extremely masculine and charismatic. Ahhh, I would skip classes to watch Jeffrey dance or eat his lunch or just walk across the green-grassed campus. When he would walk past me directly and speak to me, I’d manage to eke out a barely audible “Hi,” and when he said “Hi” back to me what he was really saying was “Hi Kirstie, I’m madly in love with you . . . Let’s glissade our way through life and make stunning black-haired, blue-eyed dancer babies.” At least, that’s what I thought I heard him saying.
    I’d known Jeffrey for eight days when he suddenly disappeared. He was nowhere to be found, and believe me, I looked and looked . . . and looked. No one knew of my torrid affair with Jeffrey, not even Jeffrey. So I had no one to talk to.
    But there were two savvy girls across the hall from me in the dorm, Mary and Linda, who seemed to know everything about everyone. Although they were only 16 themselves, they were light-years ahead of me regarding life and sex and men.
    “Whatever happened to that ballet guy, Jeffrey?” I cautiously asked with calculated casualness. “You mean that black-haired queer?” asked Linda. There’s that word again. What’s with that? Queer to me meant strange, odd, eccentric.
    “Yes, where’d he go?” I asked.
    “He went back to New York, I heard, to be with his lover,” said Mary.
    This was devastating news, although I feigned indifference until I just had to know . . . “Is she a famous ballerina, too?”
    “Hahaha,” they both laughed. “ ‘She’ is a ‘he’ and yes, he’s a dancer, too.”
    What???!!! What?! What??? What . . . what? What! What??!! I took a breather— WHAT???!!! What a lousy way to learn what queers were. What a crummy way to find out the dancing man of my dreams was the lover of another man.
    After I’d gotten over Jeffrey, round about Thursday, I set my eyes on another guy, Ken. He was the total opposite of Jeffrey. He was a musician with lightish brown hair and lightish brown eyes, sort of an average beige-looking kind of straight guy.
    Oh hell, you know what? Ken isn’t even worth the ink and paper. Suffice it to say, he was just your average lower-level heartbreaker with a little dick, probably. I never got around to inspecting it . . . All I really