I watched them party from afar. I was alone. Why?
Because I was the Friday the 13th Part 2 Jason at the Jason party.
It was a friend of a friend's idea. On Friday the 13th, throw a costume party where everyone dresses up like Jason. Now this friend of a friend's apartment had hockey masks galore. For some, the costume was nothing more than the mask. For others, it was much more involved, with moldering jackets and tattered pants and film-ready masks. These were distressed, yellowing goalie masks with triangular markings on the forehead and cheeks, big-buckled, belt-quality leather holding the mask in place. Some of the girls donned grey sweaters and greying wigs to play Jason's mother. Some of the other girls treated this as an 80s party, dressing up as the generic big-haired body-count fodder.
And all the single ladies loved the other Jasons. They clamoured to be crushed in the embrace of the Kane Hodder Jasons from Parts 7 and 8. Their fingers traced the scar tissue of the Jason who went to Hell. They loved to run their hands across the barrel-chest of Jason circa Part 6. They loved Part 4's stealthiness. They loved Part 3's knuckle-dragging traipse. They loved the Jason X Jason, willing to forgive him for the movie. They even loved the trim, strapping Part 5 killer and how he fills out a work suit, and he's not even Jason. These women were suckers for the hockey mask, as it had turned them all into common rink rats.
But I had chosen to be different. I sat there with this burlap sack over my head, watching it all through the singular, ragged eye-hole over my left eye. All the partygoers lacked depth and dimension. I was alone on the couch, twiddling my pick-axe, feeling so small. I wanted to dissolve into the walls and disappear. The partygoers danced and wrestled playfully as “Man Behind the Mask” played yet again. Two girls were grinding Jason X, and I could no longer watch. I slipped away, totally unnoticed, into shadow.
I found what looked, at least to me, like a door to the bathroom. It opened instead onto stairs and the chill of the naked night. I dragged my pick-axe up the stairs and found myself on the roof, looking out onto the city. Light from tiki torches played gently on water from a swimming pool. A single figure cut through the water.
She covered the length of the pool and back and then emerged from the water. Water cascaded down her body, and her hair hung down in a mop. As she took the three steps up the ladder and out of the pool, she whipped back her hair. She wore a hockey mask and, incongruously, a bikini top and bottom to match. She saw me seeing her. She picked up her serrated machete from the poolside tiles and used it to wave me over. I shambled over to her.
“I love your costume,” she said.
“I love yours, too,” I replied. Each of her breast plates was a plastic hockey mask. The same went for her bikini bottoms, a hockey mask hugging her mons.
“Really?” she said. “Personally, I think the hockey mask is a bit overdone. But thank you. Come, sit.”
She guided me to plastic pool chairs and we sat down.
“You know,” she said, “the Friday the 13th films are like sex.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Think about it for a minute. Don't you remember your first one?”
“I do,” I said. “Jason Takes Manhattan.”
Her eyes were a lovely hazel green, and I could see a smile form in them. “The first one,” she said, “is like your first time. You're young. You're a bit afraid. You imagine all kinds of ways it could be. You think of what could be good, bad, horrible. You think of what might make you uncomfortable. You survive it, and it's okay, though it may leave little scars. And even if it's not bad, it still might not be very good.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“Of course you can,” she said. “Your first time was Part 8. But then, with subsequent viewings, as in subsequent sexual encounters, you gain experience. You start to learn about what you like. Each movie is like a new partner, each with its own set of positions. Part 1 is the missionary. Jason X is akin to butt-play, maybe even pegging. After a while, you get to know what you like. You start to realize that it's not such a big deal. It can actually get to be quite enjoyable. With more and more viewings, you start to feel comfortable. Eventually, you'll move on to harder movies—I Spit on Your Grave and A Serbian Film. You have to spice things up now and then, after all. But you have confidence with these partners, since because of the times you had with Friday the 13th. And no matter how much experience you get, you'll always remember your first.”
“I suppose that's true,” I said.
“And eventually,” she continued, “you'll find your way back to Friday the 13th. It's like coming back to an old fling, an old summer love. You know each other, and there are no surprises. You've learned to love their flaws, but you can always see new wrinkles. You come to find a beauty in their shortcomings—a beauty in how they've aged. You feel comfortable with them. You see your old fears and how they've been allayed. You measure yourself by this old lover. You feel young again in their glow.”
“That's beautiful,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “And for me, I always come back to Part 2. That was my first, and still it's my favorite. It gives you Jason before he's too far gone, before he became a commodity. You could still find tenderness and vulnerability in him.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“He's also the sexiest,” she continued. “He's smaller, certainly not the behemoth he'd become. He's also a bit simian. There's something of the primate in him as he moves. He's more lithe and more flexible. He's also the most phallic.”
“How's that?” I asked.
“He's literally a one-eyed monster,” she said, “with that singular eye-hole in this hood. There's a vulnerable beauty there, a nakedness just waiting to be uncovered. That's why I love Part 2 so dearly. I want to just reach out and touch Jason from Part 2 and embrace him. He's still salvageable. But I may be the only one who sees that. So I here I am in these hockey masks.”
“I see it, too,” I said.
I couldn't tell if she heard me. “But still,” she said, “I can only watch the movie so much. I think it could only really spice things up if I could touch him for real.”
Her hand moved over mine.
“You don't mind if I touch you, do you?”
She kneaded my palm for several seconds, and then she touched my face under the hood. I let my pick axe clatter to the floor and touched her mask. Beads of water clung to the plastic, and I let my fingertips absorb them. I drew her mask toward my hood. Our foreheads met, and I rubbed my nose against the plastic nose of her mask. I could feel the little droplets of water sinking through the fabric of my hood. I could feel her breath, too, and soon our mouths aligned underneath our masks, exchanging hot gasps. I could taste honeysuckle on her breath. I caressed her bare shoulder.
She spilled out of the chair and took to her knees. She squared herself in front of my lap, reaching up to grip the straps on my bib overalls. She pulled herself up and sent hot breath down the collar of my plaid shirt. She unbuckled her hockey-mask bikini top and letting it clatter to the ground. Her breasts stood small and pert, the nipples pierced and prominent. She took me by the sleeves and placed my hands on her breasts, letting me palm them and then knead them. My eye locked onto her eyes.
She shimmied free of my grip and sat up into a squat. She unfastened one strap of my overalls, and then the other. She pulled down the bib, and I sat back, baring my boxer shorts. Her hand ventured into my boxers and withdrew my erection. Her hazel-green eyes alighted on the very tip, momentarily strabysmic. I could see her mouth forming a little O under the mouth-holes in her mask.
“Of course,” she said, “you're uncut. You've got every last detail covered.”
She took my member in her hand. Very slowly, she wrapped her fingers around the tip and tugged downward. Gradually, she worked the foreskin back. She gave firm, decisive yanks, and then she sped up abruptly. She paused with her fist clenched around the base, wielding my cock like it was a machete. She leaned in, letting little columns of hot breath down onto my member. My mouth chewed at my hood. She started to jerk me off again. I let out susurrating gasps. I was on the verge of sending come arcing up into the night, and then she stopped.
I was vaguely aware that she was standing up, and I was still getting my sight back when I heard her hockey mask bikini bottoms clatter to the rooftop. She stepped forward and eased her trim midriff and plump mons atop my erection. She hovered there for a while and then eased down, socketing my glans in her lovely vulva. She moved up and down, her torso circling all the while, letting me travel deeper into her wild habitat. I pulled up mounds of flesh from her pert buttocks. With each squeeze, I stirred her around. She churned wildly, pussy squelchy, a saponaceous foam forming on her labia, and soon she liquefied, her juices trickling down. I answered in kind, letting loose a screaming hot torrent straight up into her abdomen. Gouts of come spouted up into her inner recesses. She kneaded her breasts as my seed coursed into her.
Finally, there was no more seed left to give, and still my member spasmed as if it had to give more. I reached for her mask, caressing the fading, flaking markings on her cheeks, fingering the coolness of the bolts and the straps.
“May I see your face?” I asked. “You can see mine.”
“No,” she said. “You are perfectly Part 2 as you are.”
I stammered and I gasped, kneading her shoulder. She stood up, grabbing her bikini bottoms.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to the party,” she said, slipping on the bottoms.
“Can I come with you?”
“You'd better not.”
“What's your name? Your number?”
“No,” she said, leaning into the bra-cups formed by the hockey masks. “There can be no sequel. We're going to leave.”
“We?”
“My boyfriend and I. My boyfriend Jason.”
“Which one is he?” I asked.
“He's Jason X.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
She touched my face again through the hood. Her hand wrapped around the strap of my overalls, the one overtop my heart.
“Never change your costume,” she said. “You are the best one.”
She padded off in her Friday the 13th bikini, disappearing down the stairs. I stared at the pool water for a long time. Then I grabbed my pick-axe and dragged it along the tiles at the edge of the pool, taking the three steps down the ladder, wanting to become one with the water.
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Image Credits: Hypnotica Studios Infinite from Toms River, New Jersey, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons