My friend Aaron just wouldn't give up the music, not even in his forties. He was still playing shows with his troupe of thirty-somethings, their sets a combination of low-fi punk interwoven with mediocre keyboards. I came out to his gigs to show him support, not so much as a fan but more in the way one supports a friend battling alcoholism. I felt mostly uncomfortable at these shows. After you turn thirty, the dream is over, and punk just sounds far too idealistic.
I arrived at the scheduled time of Aaron's set, which in the adult punk rock scene is tantamount to being an hour early. Aaron's band was the middle of three acts, and the opening band was setting up just as I arrived. I ordered a beer and staked a place alone at a table, trying to look like it didn't bother me that I was alone. In truth, it didn't bother me that I was alone, but being alone at a dive bar such as this all by oneself would bother most people, and so onlookers inevitably project onto you the bother that they would have felt in your situation. Thinking about this, I sipped my beer coolly.
The opening band turned out to be unobjectionable, far beyond my expectations based on what I had seen at Aaron's other shows. They were an all-female group, women in their early thirties rocking shag and bob-cut hairstyles. The singer had a good voice but she chewed the mic as she repeated singular phrases, spamming them until they became mantraic. The guitarist, bassist, and drummer were serviceable. The songs were well put-together, and they benefited from their keyboard sections.
The standout in the band was the keyboard player. She had carroty hair, her bangs primly sliced overtop her eyebrows. She wore a green cardigan over her slight frame. She kept her eyes narrowed as she played and closed them for her solos. A half-smirk never left her face, shifting from one side of her mouth to the other. She had her own microphone, but she didn't really sing. Rather, she punctuated the musical interludes with salvos of glottal stops that would have made Buddy Holly pay attention.
Not only were the songs well-composed, but the set-list was arranged into a seamless suite. The songs had crests and troughs along with accelerations and meditations, and the crests were getting progressively grander, building to something. That climactic something was their penultimate song.
That song must've lasted six or seven minutes, but its time signature—its time signatures—obliterated conventional constructs of musical time. The song seemed to last inordinately long, and yet it also ended too quickly. The bass made for a heavy throb, and the drums were assertive. The rhythm section wasn't just keeping time, but was proffering a point and counterpoint to the guitar and the lyrics. The electric guitarist was left to her own devices for not one but two solos, and she came through strongly on both, doing manic fretwork on the first and then striking chords so clangorous on the second that they started to compete with the rhythm section. The lyricist, meanwhile, repeated a phrase that sounded like "Baby, baby, you're a genius, baby."
But if anything was genius, it was the work of the keyboardist. It was her part that formed the main theme of the work, at least to my ear. It started out simplistically enough, with a few notes alternating, the fingerwork well within the wheelhouse of a child experimenting for the first time with black and white keys. But then it spiraled out into a complex array of melodies, the frequency of the notes accelerating and spiralling the whole movement into what sounded like dueling calliopes. It sounded sublime. And then there was the matter of her solo. Her hands traversed the keyboard over and back in fractions of seconds. It seemed as if she was playing every possible note. The sound she attained to was a sort of early-seventies eternalism, Bowie and Bolan and whoever else, along with some Trans-era Neil Young, reaching into that nebulous space where interstellar and mystical mix. As you listen, you imagine you are in blackness flecked with distant stars, and there are all these other planets within reach that you could dance on. With that, she essentially ripped the performance away from the guitar and the lyrics, possessing the keyboard so that it could take full control of the song. The song rocketed off into the stratosphere. I looked to the ceiling, its clots of cobwebs like nebulae. I was out of my seat and dancing among the few WASP-ish strangers shuddering perfunctorily on the dancefloor. The track had taken possession of me, if no one else. I didn't care about what they thought or what I thought, about how right now I might look like someone's dad. I stared up at the moldering ceiling and made bounding circles round and round, my arms at full span and my right foot—my non-pivoting foot—in a folksy hop-step.
I kept dancing, even once the solo ended and the song tapered off to mild applause from the audience. The band got halfway through their outro number before I'd steadied myself, lacquered in sweat. I fixed my eyes on the keyboardist. Still smirky, her eyes still narrowed, she hammered down on a single note over and over again. The set ended with more applause. I stood frozen, watching the band disassemble. I couldn't believe they had to leave. It's like I thought they'd just keep playing and that that would be the rest of my life. The keyboardist would keep playing, I assumed. Then my wits returned, and thoughts began to converge. The penultimate number, I came to comprehend, was one of the finest songs I'd ever heard.
As I stood parsing this out and intellectualizing it in full, the keyboardist carried her keyboard off the stage and walked past me to the back. I barely noticed her. I was distracted in formulating a new imperative: to own that song, to be able to experience it again.
My best bet, I reasoned, was to go into the back where the bands were. I beelined to the back of the bar, prepared to defend my intrusion by saying I knew one of the bands—that I knew Aaron, if I needed a name.
Aaron, as it turned out, was the first person I saw. He was in the back corner with his bandmates, caged in guitars and guitar cases and cymbals. The female foursome was in the front. The keyboardist with the virtuoso fingers was only a few feet away from me, slightly giddy with post-performance excitement and talking with the bassist about something banal.
"Dimitri, buddy!" Aaron shouted. "You made it!"
"Of course," I said.
Aaron had started for the front of the room but I dodged his hug, teetering toward the members of the female foursome.
"Aaron," I said loudly, "you've got to introduce me."
The members of the foursome were glancing over, still dewy and suggestible from their performance.
"You wanna meat Prolapse Scum?" Aaron asked. "Prolapse Scum, this is Dimitrius. Dimitrius, this is Prolapse Scum."
"Hi—"
"Hey—"
"Hi—"
"That was fantastic," I said, interrupting them all at once. "Just fantastic. Your whole set was excellent. But that penultimate track was truly something to experience. You!"
I was pointing at the keyboardist.
"You were ethereal on that track."
She smiled and pulled at her cardigan such that the unbuttoned sides overlapped. "Thanks," she said. "What track do you mean?"
"The second last one. What's the name of that track?"
"I don't know," she said, shrugging, fists gripping either half of her cardigan. "We don't really write them down. At least I don’t."
She glanced at her bandmates, but they had turned back to their other conversations. They had lost interest. They’d been taken by other interruptions as more people filtered into the tiny dressing room.
"It seized me," I said. "I was out of my body for a second. I was out of head, at least. I need to know the name of that song."
"I could look it up," she said. "I saw someone dancing out there. I guess it was you."
"Comin' through," Aaron said, leading his band through. "Showtime, D. See you out there."
The room was so small that the passage of Aaron's band outward was a tide that I couldn't help but get pulled away on. In all the moving bodies in the cramped space, I wound up outside the dressing room and back in the bar.
Aaron's band set up and made a quick transition from their sound test into their set. The two were barely discernible. But tonight, I didn't wallow in the pathos of Aaron's forty-something punk stylings or the pathos of having paid to watch it. Instead, I danced, making me the only person on the floor doing so. In truth, I was still dancing to that nameless song by the female foursome, still spinning to the keyboard solo as if I was the record, as if my centrifugal motion could bring the song back.
I became aware of another dancer, sashaying demurely into the diameter I'd been dancing off. I saw only a blur of olivaceous green. When I slowed to a stop, I saw the keyboardist, looking like she had something to say. She smiled. I smiled too, stretching forward at the neck to hear her over the cacophony. She wet her lips, and then she hollered.
"Justin Bieber's IQ is 80!"
"Excuse me?" I yelled back, assuming I'd misheard.
"'Justin Bieber's IQ is 80.' That's the name of the song.”
"Oh," I said. "Oh wow. Thanks for finding that out. Do you guys have CDs or MP3s? Do you have them for sale?"
"No," she said, and then moved closer, resuming her dance, reasserting the swivel in her torso. She turned her smirk left and right and then center-facing, meeting my eye.
"I'm Natalie, by the way."
We danced to the rest of Aaron's band's set. Aaron's penultimate offering was a cover of Elvis' "Love Me." He typically used it to set up his big finish, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." The keyboardist took my arms and pulled them around her waist, buckling my hands together at the small of her back. Her cardigan could have been velour. She moved closer and I thought she was about to rest her head on my shoulder. Instead, she whispered into my ear.
"If you really want a CD," she said, "I have a whole bunch of copies at my apartment."
Aaron finished with a particularly manic rendering of "Nazi Punks." After the applause had faded, I bid him a quick nod and mouthed some kudos while Natalie said her goodbyes to her bandmates and collected her keyboard. I offered to carry her keyboard, but she said she could handle it. Her place was two blocks away, and we walked down the rain-slicked streets.
"No one compliments our music," Natalie said. "If they do, they give it all to Rachel. She's the singer. Or Bobbie, the guitarist. You find yourself almost not caring, since it's just pleasantries from friends, the stuff they have to say. They pay the fee to see you, but they never buy the albums. We got 200 pressed for the first EP, 40 for each member, and do you know how many are sitting in my apartment? Thirty-nine, or maybe 38. One goes to your mom, of course, who listens to it once and doesn't get it, and one goes to a friend, who doesn't listen to it at all. And they don't pay for it. They'd only pay if you were famous and if they didn't know you and if you were five years younger. So when I hear you say it seized you, I'd say you're either full of shit or too tragically earnest to care how you sound. Either way, it's still better than those limp-dicked generalities you get from friends when it comes to support, feedback, complements, encouragement, or whatever else. I appreciate your eagerness. And I'm eager to get rid of one of these records. This is my place."
We walked through a narrow door and up a narrower flight of stairs, old creaky oak. Natalie had me hold her keyboard case while she fumbled with her keys, and then she body-checked the door open shoulder-first. She turned on the light, tossed the keys, and set down her keyboard case. She pulled off her heeled boots one at a time, and then she pulled off her jeans, one leg at a time.
"Uhhh," I said. "Should I take my shoes off?"
"Take all your clothes off. Start with your shoes. The records are in the bedroom."
The bedroom was lit by a single bedside lamp. Natalie moved me into the warm, yellowish lamp light and unstrapped my belt. My belt and jeans thumped to the floor buckle-first. She unbuttoned her cardigan, pausing at the middle button to shove me off my feet and out of my jeans, to cast me back onto the bedspread. She stayed my gaining erection in her hand and tugged downward, her fist bounding gently off my balls as her other hand continued with the buttons. She wore no bra. The cardigan fell open and her breasts came exposed, incisive nipples ringed with scintillating piercings. She jacked me off with insouciance, her small fist tightly squeezed. She maintained eye contact as her hand did its work, fist clenching and unclenching as she went. Her virtuosic fingers would fan off my shaft and then back on again, thumb staying firmly circled around the base of the glans. My cock reached for her, reached for climax. Natalie let go and then slid off her jeans.
On all fours, she crawled atop me, hair spilling down, heart necklace pendulous, cardigan still over her shoulders. She tucked her hair back behind one ear and then lowered her lovely face toward my cock. She laid her fingers on the shaft and placed kisses on the very tip. She pressed the meatus to her upper lip, letting the tender flesh trace along the divot beneath her nose, letting it press against the cool metal of her lip piercing. She joined her thumbs at the base of my cock, steadying it with both hands. She slipped me into her mouth, holding steady there, letting saliva drain down on my cock. She joined her feet together, bracing herself, and then tilted forward, inhaling my dick. She sucked me like that for several minutes, pausing to collect strings of spittle. She observed these strings webbed between her fingers with great interest. The cardigan slipped down, baring a lovely shoulder, still red from bursting through the door. Upon socketing my shaft in her mouth anew, she drew her balancing hand away from the base of my cock. She slid her fingers between her legs at the far end of the bed, running them along the groove of her pussy. I gripped her breasts in my upturned palms, accepting them like alms, squeezing them so Natalie could balance as she masturbated. She moaned onto my cock, then took her mouth off it.
She scooched forward on her knees, her orange-stripped mons and pink pussy brushing over my cock as she made her way forward. She moved across my chest and pressed her sex up into my face. All at once I was smothered in cunt, cancelling the mood lighting. Rotating her hips, she worked her pubic bone into my jaw while my tongue searched out her clit. She tasted like spiced agave. Her moan held a severe and unwavering D Minor, as if verging on some cynical realization. When I found her clit, her moan spiked to a B. It gave way to a staccato as I rediscovered the spot again and again. She drew up off me with a pop, an instant pocket of humidity between us as her fingers scissored out to split her labia. She rubbed herself, regarded herself. She came with notes dying in her throat, glottal stops that Buddy Holly would have envied.
Natalie fell back onto her hands, let out a whooshing breath, and then crab-walked backward. Pressing her chin to her breastbone, she squared herself atop my erection and then lowered herself down onto it. I pressed at the base of my shaft, steadying my cock so it could slide up into her. With three-quarters swallowed up, she fought a gasp and wet her lips. She circled her hips, gradually admitting more cock, then plunked down, squatting atop my abdomen. I pushed up into her, and, once I was established there, she took over, lowering herself down and then up again. She picked up her down-pressing pace, each downburst occasioning a quavering whelp and a quiver in her limbs. She moved atop me like a windswept stilt house. Soon, she sank into a kneeling position. She spooled her orange locks in her hands as she worked her pelvis. I gripped her breasts, trying to modulate her thrusts, biting my lip to contain my come. I tweaked her areolas, just to distract myself—to distract her. She threaded her arms through mine and pressed down on my chest, bringing my legs up. She thrust into me like a red-blooded male going buck-wild in the missionary position. I tried to roll her over, but she countered me with an embrace, shooting back up. Swinging her leg, she initiated a spin.
Now she fucked with her back to me. I took full enjoyment of her apple-bottom, round little glutes working vigorously to smother my ensnared member. From that tiny ass came massive pistoning power. The length of my dick weathered wave after wave of delectation, a bliss that seemed to gather at the junction of my cock and my balls, promising a massive orgasm—but not too quickly, I hoped. When I could muster an upward thrust, I did, trying to win back some measure of will and control. I had little success. Each sleek buttock would not be held at bay or thrown out of sync, and she continued pounding down with gusto. In the mood-lighting, Natalie glowed with a sheen of hot sweat. She came again, issuing a single, sustained note and sitting up into a squat, making way for a dribble of fluid. She reached back vaguely and, getting purchase on my bicep, pulled me upward. She used the admixture of sweat and secretions around our pressed-together thighs to slide forward onto her stomach.
Natalie arched her back, pressing her hindquarters up high and stretching taut her beautiful buttocks and cunt. I pulled up and steadied myself on my knees, moving forward to guide my cock back inside her. I traced in and out of her slow and breezily, until she reached back and gently slapped me on my arm, like a mare quirting its rider. I darted in and out of her, and she stretched both arms back, fingers sprawled and clawing at her butt cheeks. I brought forward my hips with increasing abandon, lower abdomen colliding with her backside. She let out curt little vocalizations, shrill glottal stops that quickly turned affirmative. I stood up into a squat, gripping her narrow cylinder of waist, fingers splayed down deep into to the cool flesh of her hips, thumbs under her cardigan, sending my manhood delving downward into her fat labia. She arched her back even more pronouncedly, upper and lower-back almost L-shaped. I pounded downward as if hammering a rail spike, and as she screamed and momentarily liquefied with orgasm, she sank down deeper into the bed. As I followed her down, still socketed deep within her, I felt an orgasm stirring in my balls, a veritable crescendo of come waiting to pour forth. But I didn't want our duet to end just yet, and neither did she. My cock was loose into the humid bedroom air. I gripped it tight, determined to stay my seed. Writhing facedown, Natalie was growling that word "more" into her pillow.
I pulled up and steadied myself on my knees atop Natalie’s lovely thighs. Perpendicular to her, I plugged my member back into her sopping pink portico, not before swirling my glans around each labia lip and briefly tracing her perineum. I moved forward into her with full, slow, and hearty thrusts, trying to feel with each ingress every square millimeter of her vagina as I made my way into her and back out. She squeezed her buttocks tight, and my cock disappeared into that lovely crux of the little cruciform drawn by the meeting place of her thighs and the mirrored rounds of her ass. Compact though her cute little butt was, it was also well cushioned, presenting a comely fold pressed up above the thigh. Taking this cushioning as an invitation, I narrowed my angle above her, stretching out my own legs on either side of her, and came down with heavy and unrelenting thrusts, not just of the hips but of my whole body. I clapped down on her, imagining us as two halves of a cymbal. I was pulled back to materiality by the awareness than an unbroken, untamed growl was trailing from my own lips. Natalie hit the high note again, and this time, when she came, it was broken by a scream. I paused, kissing her in profile, brushing back her bangs so I could kiss her forehead, feeling the warmth of her cardigan against my chest. Her screaming died away to glottal stops that did not end until I kissed her mouth.
Natalie turned to face me and we kissed like that for several minutes, pausing our lovemaking to make out. In the midst of our extended kiss, she gripped my cock and twisted it in her fist. This went on for several minutes, and then she slipped me back inside her. I barely noticed—I was so involved in that unbroken kiss. Her lower lip bulged irresistibly. I kissed it, tongued it, clamped it between both my lips diligently, putting absentminded cock-strokes deep into her pussy. Our gazes and our genitals were glued together. She stared up at me so solemnly. My eyes, I assumed, brimmed with awe and amazement, that dumbfounded look one gets when overwhelmed with gratification. Your eyes ask how is it possible that two bodies could create such artistry? I became aware again of my cock in her pussy, the throb of it, the sheer presence of it, the sensation of being soldered flesh-to-flesh in blistering heat. That blissful sensation said that cock and cunt, at least ours, were inextricable. And with a thought like that, who couldn't fuck valiantly? So I went back to my long, determined strokes, set on bringing myself to a finish. My eyes looked into Natalie’s; my cock went deep in her cunt. She murmured about coming—was I going to?—and I murmured back that I would.
"No," she cooed. "Not quite yet."
With that, she craned her lean legs, wrapping them around either side of me and bringing her calves to rest on my shoulders. Her delicate ankles joined at the nape of my neck. She pulled me down close to her so that I necessarily shortened my strokes. That those trim, elegant ankles could bind me to her, making us even more inseparable, left me vertiginous. Buried deep inside her and still burrowing, my cock pumped as if my heart had relocated there. With that ectopic bliss, my heart redoubled its beating in my chest. I'd been pulled in close enough by the embrace of her legs grapevined around my neck that my head hovered over her chest and I heard her heartbeat, like a kick drum. I pressed as far forward as I could and screamed a gale of hot breath into her hair, and I came. I wanted that breath to become hot glue, fusing us together. Natalie gasped from the sheer heat of my seed. Gout after gout of semen poured out into her. It felt as if I'd sprung a leak, broken a watermain of lust, draining and draining until the torrent gave way to beads and then drops. I buried my face in the collar of her cardigan. She threw the garment over me. I pulled her close and waited for the come to seep out of her, washing over my penis and testicles like meltwater.
"I...I..."
I couldn't form words.
"Shh," she said, taking my occiput in her palm, directing my kiss to her forehead.
Finally, the words returned.
"That was incredible," I said. "The way you make love is...is seamless. If there's a sex IQ, yours is like 200."
"What an odd thing to say," Natalie said. "Anyway, I’d better get you that record you wanted."
She slid her nude body out of the sheets and landed in a thumping crouch on the floor. She fished around under the bed and came back with a handful of CD jewel cases. She skimmed one off the top and handed it to me.
"Here you go," she said. "Justin Bieber’s IQ is 80, and the B-side."
"Thanks," I said.
"It’s fifteen dollars."
"For the album or the sex?"
Natalie frowned. “Why would you even make that joke?”
I winced and sank away, rolling off the other side of the bed. "I’ve got some money in my jeans," I said, grabbing my Levis and shaking them down.
"Put them on," Natalie said. "I’ve got an early start tomorrow."
"Oh," I said, putting on the jeans while fishing in the pockets for my wallet. "Because I’d love to stay—"
"No," Natalie said.
Finally, I came up with the cash. "Here you go."
"Thanks for your support," Natalie said. "I suppose you want my number, too."
"Sure?"
"There's always Facebook. Try the Prolapse Scum page if you need me."
But something about her tone said it was best not to try.
"Goodnight," I said, re-buttoning my shirt as I headed for the door.
"Goodnight,' Natalie said, closing the door behind me.
By the time I was halfway home, I knew I probably wasn’t going to find Natalie on Facebook. But I did have her record, and I did have that tune in my head. "Justin Bieber’s IQ is 80" was a masterpiece, and the next time I thought of Natalie, I’d probably have to just play the record. I hummed that sublime keyboard solo the rest of the way home.
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Image Credit: SuicideGirls from Los Angeles, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons