Bat Girl
by Rod Nibbe
I was in the dark regarding matters of developmental psychology, Freud, pre-Socratic Greece and Oedipus Rex – I was a geophysicist, not a psychologist – but after discovering my condition (my behavioral therapist called it a problem) I learned more than I cared to know. Evidently, as a young boy of fourteen I had exhibited behavior that greatly alarmed my parents. I had insisted on sleeping in my mother’s bed long after the age when that kind of thing is considered cute and endearing. That’s when my mother took action, but I had been possessive of her for years before that. She whisked me off to a clinic crawling with fiendish head doctors. Over the course of five visits a whole gaggle of specialists took my vitals, made me take naps with wires attached to my head, hypnotized me, laid me on a leather couch and bombarded me with questions about my feelings for father, mother, my eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Mosner, pantyhose, the Virgin Mary, gladiator movies, and a litany of other very preposterous interrogations. After a week of exhaustive tests the doctors could uncover nothing definitively wrong with me, but mother insisted they keep looking. More visits with more so-called specialists – nothing. Finally, father persuaded mother that I was moving through a harmless, albeit creepy, phase of adolescence and not to worry. I ended up apologizing to mother and promising never again to ask to sleep with her or ask her out.
Two years later as a high school sophomore, and a virgin, something else came up (but much too fast) on homecoming night in the back of my father’s Plymouth Voyager with Sylvia Spittlemeister, a senior cheerleader. Not two seconds after I unsnapped Sylvia’s lace bra to reveal her pert breasts, a creamy wet mush erupted in my loin. I begged Sylvia to keep quiet about it, but the next week at school cliques of giggling girls stretched chewing gum from their mouths and dangled it limply when I walked by. It left me tainted with a perfervid fear of females for eight years until, as a college graduate student, I ended my self-imposed abstinence and began dating an adjunct professor of Linguistics ten years my senior. Our relationship was steaming along until the night she invited me inside her condominium where things got going. I hadn’t even got to her bra when it happened. She was generously forgiving : “It’s okay … don’t worry. Really, it’s okay.” I was gullible enough to believe her but she never returned my calls.
After that I wore out the battery on my portable phone making calls, following a trail of references which led to Dr. Gretel Wells, a behavioral therapist fresh out of her residency and specializing in male dysfunction. Dysfunction – it sounded almost criminal, and I wasn’t anxious to have a rookie poking around inside my gray matter, but she had credentials and was highly recommended. I spilled my guts about my childhood, but she wanted to know it all, everything about me, right up to the present. I told her I was a graduate student in geophysics at the University of Michigan and planning a trip to the Door County Peninsula.
“We’ll be dragging a four hundred foot cable behind a forty-five foot research ship and dousing the lake with electrical current,” I told her. “I’ll record the impedance and from that we’ll determine where the Silurian aquifer is leaking into the lake.” She seemed fascinated.
"Is the electricity dangerous to the fish?” she asked.
“Shouldn’t be,” I said, “but if we see any bobbing belly up, we’ll knock the amperage down a bit.” Her face squished like she had just tasted something bitter. I carried on telling her I was anxious for a job offer from the Big D Oil Company in Dallas. But if I did get an offer, it would be contingent on a completed thesis and that required Professor Klein’s (my thesis advisor) blessing. Her eyes darted back and forth between me and her notepad, frenetically scribbling notes, trying to keep up as I rambled. Over the next two months I met with her weekly, the focus had returned to my condition – she called it a treatable problem. Occasionally our sessions became contentious.
“It’s a psychological problem, Robert. It can be treated,” she said.
“But that word you use to characterize it – premature. Why premature?” I asked. Her look made me think she thought we were losing ground.
“Are you saying I ejaculate before the correct time, before things have developed fully? Obviously, when I ejaculate, then the time is correct for me, right?” I asked.
“That’s outrageously selfish, Robert. We’re talking about a relationship between two people here. The needs and satisfactions of two people. You are analytical, Robert, but you can’t compute your way out of your problem.”
“Maybe not. But couldn’t premature be understood to be just different? Does it have to connote dysfunction?” I remember the volume of her sigh and the dispirited plop of her pencil on her notepad as she slowly removed her glasses and rested her elbow on the arm of her leather chair.
“It’s psychological, Robert. And it is treatable.”
I dismissed most of her diagnosis as psycho-babble. I bit my tongue suppressing a laugh during her lucid explanation of the Oedipus complex, and how the drama of a two thousand year old Grecian King murdered by his son may explain my fetish for older women. At the end of our sessions she’d assign me homework.
“I want you to indulge your fantasies of older women, Robert. Your suffering from performance anxiety. At home I want you to get comfortable and masturbate, but stop before you feel yourself about to ejaculate. Gradually, you’ll gain confidence and the ability to restrain yourself. In the mean time, consider dating younger women and see if that helps.” I was very busy at the University but I always made time for the homework.
I didn’t elaborate to Dr. Wells everything I knew to be true about Harold Klein, Professor Emeritus, about his indisputable influence over campus recruiters and his capacity for vindictiveness if, as one of his minions, you should cause him embarrassment by botching your thesis defense. In my worst nightmare he sat behind closed doors with the campus recruiters discussing each graduate’s potential. He looked like a statue with his stolid expression and two tufts of hair clinging to his nearly bald head. When the recruiters from Big D Oil inquire about me, Klein simply says, “He’s capable.” Capable – that’s it I think, that’s all he says and the recruiters move to the next name on the list.
I spent weeks fretting over the minutia of data acquisition and pre-troubleshooting everything that could possibly go wrong. On an overcast summer day in May, I rendezvoused with Klein and Riley Henderson, captain of the R V Capricorn, in the cottage community of Egg Harbor on Door County’s Peninsula. The first day on the water was a disaster, thunderclouds drenched us with rain and fierce winds pitched the Capricorn on tops of six-foot waves like a toy boat in a bathtub. We limped back to Egg Harbor with wires dangling, crashed computers, and a galley floor strewn with coffee stains, cigarette butts, charts, books, and captain Riley’s Penthouse magazines.
The next day I unfolded out of Capricorn’s cramped bow berth after a sleepless night; she listed when Captain Riley stepped aboard, his head appeared swollen inside his dirty Captain’s Hat which had a braided gold rope around the brim. His belly sagged over his belt buckle. Klein looked beaten too. He was wearing the same drab blue pants and plaid shirt he had on the previous day. It appeared to me he may have slept in his clothes. There was a pencil wedged between his ear and temple -- a feeble image of erudition disguising a hangover.
Klein brushed past me and mumbled something about “going home if I didn’t get it right today.” There was no pleasing the man. To avoid his recriminations the best you could do was loan him cigarettes endlessly and get drunk with him in the Student Union while feigning interest in his arguments for Communism. If you didn’t do those things your thesis drafts would sit on his desk for months collecting dust like paper weights while job opportunities vanished.
As Captain Riley pulled the Capricorn away from Egg Harbor, Klein slouched against the helm engulfed in an opaque billow of cigarette smoke, pouring back black coffee, and scanning navigational charts. Everything was going smoothly for several hours until the wooden helm cracked with a bang and the ship stopped moving. The auto-pilot had jammed while trying to keep the boat on its programmed course. Captain Riley screamed invectives from the stern where the tow line on Capricorn’s dinghy was wrapped in a knot around the propeller. There was nothing else to do but radio the Coast Guard for rescue. While under tow back to Egg Harbor Captain Riley told me how proud Klein was of his service as an officer in the British Navy.
“He’s pissed. He’d sooner be photographed having sex with a chimpanzee than be seen on a boat under tow by the Coast Guard.” I thanked him for his encouragement. Back in Egg Harbor I considered drowning myself, I discovered that I had miss-calibrated Carpricorn’s navigation recorder. It plotted our course out of the water, down the main street of Egg Harbor, through the State Park on the tip of the peninsula, then back out into Lake Michigan. I never told Klein. We packed everything and left. Klein said I had enough data and he’d had enough headaches.
The next ten weeks I felt like I had a gun to my head, I double and triple checked computations, filled ashtrays with butts, and wastebaskets with rejected revisions. I met with Klein twice over the remainder of the summer, he was still seething from the Coast Guard debacle. I put the first draft in his mailbox the second week of August. Each day of the following week I’d stop by and see it laying there. I stood in a vacant hallway and just stared at it.
I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Wells to work through my stress. She told me it was probably not unrelated to the anxieties surrounding my treatable problem.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“It means it’s all performance related, Robert. Your frustrated trying to live up to other’s expectations, expectations you’ve imposed on yourself.” It wasn’t what I had come to hear.
“Have you dated any younger women since we last met?”
“No, but I’ve been finishing my homework.” Her eyes rolled, and it was then I confessed that I sometimes thought of her when I masturbated. She slumped in her leather chair like melted candle wax. “Oh, Robert.”
The last day of August I walked by Klein’s mailbox and saw it still laying there. Someone had posted an invitation on the bulletin board.
Last summer blowout before Fall Semester!
I’ll buy the beer. You bring the rest.
Saturday 7pm - ? 3545 Downer Ave. Upstairs.
Be There!
It was oppressively humid outside the night of the party. Inside a swell of students and professors were mashed into the kitchen preparing for a morning of aspirin and coffee, a miasma of cigarette smoke choked the room. I saw Klein wedged in a corner with a fresh litter of undergraduates swarming around him as though he were a best selling author. I raised my arms, one hand holding a plastic cup of beer, and slithered through the crowd into another smoke filled room stuffed with a mass of students that looked like caged chickens awaiting slaughter. Seeing Klein, and the thought of living forever with my treatable problem, deflated my party mood, so I left unnoticed, stuffed my hands into my pants pockets, and scuffed along the sidewalk to my Dodge Dart.
I drove from the party to where I lived at the time, the Cave, a basement apartment sunk halfway into the ground; the few windows it had hung at sidewalk level. The Dart’s headlights flashed a girl teetering on the side of the road waving a stiff thumb high in the air. I pulled over, stopped, leaned over the seat and pushed the passenger door open.
“Where you going?” I asked. She asked if I would drive her to a phone and I suggested she use the phone at my place and she said, “Okay.” She fell into the passenger seat and slammed the door. She was blonde, attractive, wearing sandal thongs, a pair of skimpy white shorts, a halter top and a visor. There were fake tattoos on her cheek and ankle, vignettes from the Lakefront summer music festival. I pulled away from the curb and continued driving. She looked at the radio in the dash.
“Can we change the station?”
“It’s a cassette tape,” I said.
“A tape? You put this on tape? Who is it?”
“Graham Parker. It’s Rhythm and Blues,” I said.
“Never heard of ‘em. How old are you?”
“Twenty five.” She appeared unsettled and began frantically rummaging through a canvas bag.
“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.
“Yea, above your head, over the visor.” We didn’t talk for the remainder of the ride.
We arrived at the Cave, I parked the Dart in the street and we got out. We had both been drinking. She tripped on the sidewalk curb, I pulled her to her feet and we stumbled to the entrance of the Cave and I said, “Watch your head,” as we ducked under an overhang and descended the concrete stairwell which led to the front door. I fumbled with my keys as she leaned against the torn screen door holding it open for me. The instant I pushed the door open, something black and fast whooshed through the air inches from my face then disappeared somewhere inside. I jumped backwards into her and we nearly collapsed on the concrete.
“What the fuck was that?” She asked it like I was some kind of weirdo who tricked her into coming so I could tie her up, throw her in a deep well, paint my face with makeup and dance around in a frenzy to loud rock music.
“Hell, I don’t know. Stay here.” I quietly closed the screen door. I stepped into the large entry room strewn with bicycles, rock climbing apparatus, camping gear and stacks of boxes filled with books. A sixty watt bulb filtered through a filthy yellow ceiling fixture. I saw something black tucked above a box in a far corner of the ceiling. I heard her ask, “What the hell is it? Do you see anything?” I tip-toed down the dark hallway, reached into a huge closet and grabbed a long handled broom, gripped it with both hands and stepped stealthily toward the tiny black spot. I must have come back into her field of view because I heard her ask, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Shhh.” I had the broom cocked over my shoulder ready to swing when I kicked an open box of tools. It darted for the light fixture and then I saw that it was a bat and I swung but I missed by a mile, and then – I guess because the damn things are blind – it flew right at me and I swung again and nailed it and it fell into a dust bunny on the floor. It was still moving so I whacked it a few more times. She walked in behind me and asked, “What the hell was it?”
“A bat.”
“How the hell did it get in here?”
“I’m not sure. Probably got inside the walls somehow, then in here through one of the tens of holes in the walls in this dump – I don’t know.”
“Wow, that was very cool.” I smiled at her gallantly, swiped my palms in satisfaction of a job well done (like a professional bat killer would) and said, “Not a problem.”
“God … where are we anyway?” she asked.
“I’m a graduate student at the University. I live here.”
I showed her to the phone, she made a call and slammed the receiver down after two or three rings, “Shit.” We moved to the living area near the kitchen. I sat down.
“Do you live here alone?” she asked.
“No. I have a roommate.”
“Girlfriend roommate?”
“No. I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“No girlfriend? You? Are you sure?” I hesitated and thought of Dr. Wells.
“Yes, I’m sure. Do you want a beer?”
“Sure. Where’s your bathroom?”
I grabbed the last two Millers from the refrigerator, placed the serrated lip of the bottle cap firmly against the damaged counter molding and whacked it. I tuned the stereo to a contemporary rock ‘n roll station and waited for her. The toilet flushed but no girl. I walked down the hallway and saw her in my bedroom sitting in the sag of my single bed, languidly leaning back on the heels of her hands, her long straight blonde hair touching the sheets. Halogen yellow street light filtered through the dirty bedroom window.
“What’s wrong,” I asked. She turned and looked at me.
“You said you didn’t have a girlfriend.” For a moment neither one of us moved. I knew what she had in mind and panicked while thinking of what to do to buy some time before telling her I had to take her home.
“You want your beer? I left them in the kitchen, I’ll go get them.”
“Yeah,” she said.
I walked back to the bedroom from the kitchen fearful that one more woman would know of my treatable problem if I didn’t manufacture an excuse quickly. I handed her a beer and she took a drink, I sat down next to her on the bed. It squeaked. She quickly pulled the bottle from her mouth and tried to suppress a laugh as foam oozed out of the bottle and the corners of her mouth. She set her beer on the floor, grabbed mine and did the same then stood next to the bed, kicked off her sandals, pulled off her halter and wiggled out of the tight shorts. I moved to one side of the bed to make room for her. (I wasn’t trembling; usually I was by that point.) She kneeled on the bed and kissed me. Then she pulled back, her hair fell against my face. I contoured my lips with my tongue to enjoy a second taste of her strawberry lip gloss. She reached down and slid my shorts off. (I hadn’t ejaculated!) The next five minutes seemed like an out of body experience. Her hands slithered over my cock, then she straddled me, moved up and down on me; her whole body swiveled with her hands pressed against my shoulders. I watched her like a voyeur to my own experience. When we finished she collapsed atop me and we kissed. Her tongue darted like a reptile’s inside my mouth. We were both soaking wet.
“Geez it’s hot in here,” she said. We laid on the bed talking.
“No air movement in this cave,” I said. Then I smiled.
“You were spectacular. You don’t know how spectacular,” I said.
“You say it like it’s your first time silly.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. She propped herself up on one elbow and rested her head in the palm of her hand.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. I sat up and leaned against the wall trying to focus on her eyes.
“How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know … why?” I asked.
“Sixteen.” The number hadn’t even registered before she blurted the qualification, “But I’ll be seventeen in two months.” A chasm of silence separated us as I stared at her, my head spinning from too much beer and the recollection of Dr. Wells’ suggestion that I date younger woman.
“Are you mad because I didn’t tell you in the car?” she asked. I stroked imaginary circles around her nipple with my index finger. Her face was tremulous waiting for my answer, she pleaded.
“Come on – say something.”
“No … no, I’m not mad,” I said reassuringly. “I’m actually very satisfied.” She sighed and relaxed against me, I caressed her back, threaded my hands through her hair, luxuriated in the responsiveness of her arms. I had saved her from the savagery of a wild bat, and she had liberated me from the black well of sexual dysfunction. I wanted to keep her there with me, I wanted to possess her, I wanted her to be with me forever.
We dressed and she made another phone call. I heard her argue with someone.
“That was my older sister. Can you drive me to her house? I’m not going home tonight, my parents will be pissed.”
“I want you to stay,” I said.
“Not tonight, I can’t.”
“You never told me your name,” I said.
“Cheryl. Here’s my number where I work,” she said. She scribbled it and handed it to me. “Call me anytime of the morning. Any day but Thursday.”
I scheduled a session with Dr. Wells, Friday, the following week and told her the good news. She was surprised at the effectiveness of her advice that I date younger women.
“Thing is, I didn’t even know she was sixteen until we finished,” I said.
“But sixteen, Robert? That’s not exactly what I had in mind when I made the suggestion.”
“She’ll be seventeen in two months,” I said. “And she’s a very mature sixteen, we’ve gone out two times since … I’m telling you, she’s very mature.” I made an insouciant appeal to her sense of humor. “Look, I’m not just fishing for excuses to not hand in my homework, okay?” She rolled her eyes and shook her head.
The next time I talked with Cheryl, she asked that I pick her up at her parent’s house, she had told them all about me and wanted them to meet me.
“Cheryl, already?” I asked. “What did you tell them?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t tell them about the Cave, just that you’re a fantastic guy with a great sense of humor, your smart … you know, general stuff. It’ll be all right, they’re going to like you, really.”
Cheryl was worth it, I thought. And she was probably right, it was time to let them know who I was and that I was serious, head over heels in love with their daughter. The gravity of the emotion left me momentarily off balance, but it was quickly replaced with a giddiness remembering our amour in the Cave, I drove to her parents’ house brimming with confidence.
As I pulled into their driveway I saw a University parking sticker on a familiar car parked in the driveway. “Where had I seen that car before?” I thought as I walked toward the front door of Cheryl’s house. I hadn’t even got to the front door when my feet stopped moving, I felt my legs turning to salt, my heart palpitated, I felt the deep well of dysfunction reaching back to reclaim me – my eyes were fixed on Professor Klein standing behind the front screen door. Cheryl came bubbling out from behind him.
“Robert! You’re here!” I couldn’t move. Klein stiffened his arm to prevent Cheryl from running out through the screen door to greet me.
“What’s this all about?” he demanded. His face was gnarled with contempt.
Cheryl interjected, “Dad, this is Robert. What are you doing? Let me through the door.” She struggled to get past him but his arm didn’t move.
“I know who he is,” he said, still glaring at me. “You’re the Robert dating my sixteen year old daughter?”
Cheryl looked quizzically at her father, “You know him?” Then she looked through the screen door at me, her face contorted with misunderstanding.
“Robert, what’s going on?” I found the words to say, but I didn’t have the courage to speak them. My mind whipped like a tornado, I felt the pressure of their stares, I saw my future at Big D Oil slipping from my hands and Cheryl waving good bye, I saw Dr. Wells on a broomstick shaking her finger at me, I heard Klein’s sinister laugh echo inside my head. Something made me speak.
“Cheryl, I’ll call you, this isn’t a good time.” I turned and started for the Dart.
“Wait … Robert, don’t leave, wait!”
As I pulled away, I glanced up and saw Klein’s eyes follow me, Cheryl protesting at his side. I sped recklessly down the freeway fusing memories of Cheryl and me in the Cave, the dead bat in the dust bunny, her movement on top of me, her lip gloss, her salty perspiration, the sweetness of her voice on the phone. Cheryl was an angel, she had cured me and I was abandoning her. “To hell with his expectations, to hell with the thesis and Big D Oil,” I thought.
My foot stabbed the accelerator. I veered into the right lane, took the next exit, squealed the Dart’s tires on the freeway overpass, turned and headed down the on-ramp, back to Cheryl’s house.
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© Copyright
2008
RKN. Nonsense, distribute widely and freely!
Last update:
7/23/2008; 8:25:59 PM.
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