by Savannah Lee
(08/22/07)

My face was so hot you could fry an egg on it. Despite that, I went ahead with my plan. I marched into Professor Gordon's office, threw my proposal down on his desk, and said "My name is Julia Lowe and I want to suck your cock."

He went Cliffs-of-Dover white and dropped his pen.

Hand trembling, I tapped my proposal. "It's for my senior anthropology project. See? I'm supposed to bring participant-observer skills to bear on an aspect of community life, so...I picked the phenomenon of student-teacher affairs. Now, I don't mean we have to pretend to fall in love or anything," I reassured him. "This is going to be strictly a physical affair, and I'm going to observe the social adjustments we make to accommodate it. I plan to get started right away by crawling under your desk and fellating you."

Professor Gordon, now flushing almost as scarlet as me, picked my proposal up. He verified that this was in fact what it said -- or maybe he was just trying to find something to do with his shock.

"I'm not wearing a bra," I added, to help him get in the mood.

He stammered something with the word 'unethical' in it.

"'Unethical' my white cotton panties! I'm not in any of your classes. I'm not even in your department. I speak absolutely no Russian and have no desire to. You will never be in a position to give me a grade or evaluate me in any way, nor will any of your close colleagues. That's why I picked you."

Actually that wasn't why. The reasons I'd listed were just blind luck. Truthfully, I picked him because he got the highest score on my Professorial Package Rating: a GHI (Gotta Have It) with Oak Leaf Cluster. For the past three weeks I'd conducted an exhaustive survey of professorial crotches, rating them from IBAA (Invalidated By Advancing Age) through EW (eeew!), EH (eh), NB (not bad), DT (definitely tasty), and the aforementioned GHI. Know that, in keeping with the practices of this institution and my own ideals, my survey was entirely equal-opportunity in regards to gender. The only difference was that, with female professors, I added the rating AWSD (Always Wears a Skirt, Dammit).

All right, can I make another confession? Gordon's rating came way before the project. Way before. I'd been wanting this bastard for a year now. And through my anthro seminar, I finally got the nerve to manufacture an excuse.

I'd been watching Gordon for so long. Or more precisely, I'd been watching that heavy, prominent bulge in his pants. We're talking Mission Accomplished prominent, despite lacking the crypto-bondage straps on either side to set it off -- and, thank God, the right-wing delusions. It was almost too good to be true. I wanted him -- but he was so aloof, so intellectual.

Then I'd had to come up with a project on social behavior, so I thought, well, intellect for the intellectual! It was worth my giving it a try. I could sell it as a lark. A joke, almost. If all else failed, I could say it was Anthropology.

The object of my simultaneous academic-erotic designs was now spluttering something about my age.

Well, I was prepared for that. I whipped out, you should pardon the expression, my driver's license; it demonstrated that I was twenty-two years old.

"No, I, I...I didn't mean to question your legality per se," he said. Oh, his confusion was so cute! "I just meant to say that, in relation to myself, you are..."

"Desirable and vital," I told him. "Don't lie." I came around and perched on his desk right near his chair. "How long?" I asked him. "How long since you've felt alive?"

He looked away. "That...that is irrelevant."

"Bullshit. It's everything." I moved in; I found his zipper.

He tried to put me off. "Julia...you don't understand."

Taking a huge risk (this could be assault?), I put my hand in his shorts.

I stopped.

It was cold. Cold and inert, with a strange feel like rubber. It -- it was rubber. It was fake!

I looked up in shock.

He wouldn't meet my eyes.

I stuttered, "P -- professor -- what --" Was he an FTM? Had he been born a bouncing baby girl with a bow in her hair? Were there shell-shocked parents somewhere, wondering where they "went wrong" with their little Georgina?

His voice came out crumbly and gray. "About ten years ago...I had...there was an incident."

I was too stunned to understand. "A what? What do you mean?"

"I mean an incident. You will forgive me if I don't go into details."

Scenes of horror -- an attack by an unleashed dog, by a deranged human -- burst into my brain like the ten o'clock news. "Oh my God," I whispered.

He took my hand and moved it up and to the side; I felt thick scar tissue. "It was a...prolonged event," he said, "and...very serious. My fiancée," he added, "rather disappointed me by not even making a pretense to remain loyal. Recently I've come to feel that she did us both a favor."

I was still flailing around mentally. "You...you mean you lost your..."

"Yes. 'I lost my.' I piss like a girl, though I don't feel like one. You probably think my little totem is pathetic. But it reminds me of...who I think that I still am."

Well. I made the only reply that I could.

I tore his pants the rest of the way open, pulled down those tight briefs (now I understood why they were so), grabbed that thing for all it was worth, driving it halfway up his stomach in the bargain, and shoved it right in my mouth. Balls and all.

And I sucked.

I sucked to slap down my own shock and fear. I sucked to defy what had happened to him. I sucked to give the finger to that fiancée of his, who had not done them both a favor. I sucked for Jesus, because whereas Jesus might not have chosen this exact deed as the means, he in his lovingkindness would have blasted -- and possibly through me was blasting -- mercy upon this man. I sucked for Jesus, then, and logos and cathedral and even old Sister Ancillita.

That's right, I sucked for church. I sucked for consecration. I sucked for ritual. I sucked for holiness. I sucked for profanity. I sucked to ignore how stupid I felt. I sucked for the thing itself!

I was, after all, an anthropologist, a student of artifacts and objects of meaning. Totems. Yes. I sucked for intellect: that dick which was not one. I sucked for Simone de Beauvoir. That not-one which was more dick than dick. I sucked for Robert Desnos. I sucked for my own mouth: inside it, the soft wet rubber was boundaries I didn't know I had, boundaries being shattered.

Amid the shards of them I began to suck because I was wet. Wet for it, God help me, for everything from its foul taste and its strange feel to its fakeness and its tragedy and its pride.

I was hot for Professor Gordon's rubber softie. I engulfed it, I gummed it like real balls, I licked and nipped and tongued it. For real.

"My God," he said in a strange new voice. "My God."

Something stirred against my chest. It was his remnant.

"Holy shit," I said. "What do I do, what do I do?"

"I don't know."

So I started licking across the jagged stumps and twisted scar tissue.

I remembered my first-year anthropology professor (Shepard, straight out of Aging Hippie central casting, and I loved her). I remembered her saying When I was with the Megono, I slept in the longhouse with the other women and the children. We were all on the floor together, and the children would pee in their sleep. I woke up soaked! And that was just how it was. Now here, of course, I would never tolerate that. But over there, the rules were different. It was another country. And she stopped and really looked at us.

You always have to be ready to pack up and go, don't you?

When he came, it was watery and diffuse and from the center of the wreckage. It didn't shoot out, like I was accustomed to, but gushed all over. I watched it spread with amazement and dismay.

"My pants!" he said.

We both started laughing. "Here," I said, and started licking it up. "Ack," I said. I wiped my mouth. "I'm sorry. I've never swallowed."

"Could have fooled me."

I stopped and looked up at him. One of the few times I'd really, truly looked into someone's eyes. They were bright, set in a fragile smile.

From this country there was no way home. No dirt road, no dusty airstrip could take me even halfway there.

"Oh..." I began to say, but, finding nothing where his name should have been, burst into half-tears. After this, how was I going to call him Professor? But I'd never called him anything else. (Never spoken to him before today. Strange to remember that; I'd watched him for so long.)

He made a laugh that sounded embarrassed, though his eyes were still candleflamed. Gently he said "Call me by my name."

"George," I said. "George."

"Julia," he said, and took my hands.

He bent his head and kissed them. Somehow that was the most intimate thing. The feel of his lips on my knuckles and pads.

He was a strong kisser, exact and decisive, dry and warm. I thought, good God, what it must have been when he could lay you down and stick it in. When those driven lip-prints could tell you just what was coming. Was the devil jealous, George?

At last he buried his face in them, my hands, and held them to him. "Julia," he spoke into them. "Julia." No man had ever said my name like that. Like it was a vessel...into which he could put anything.

I knew that what he wanted to put in me right now was meaning. Hadn't I felt the same? There'd been so much I wanted to tell him when I first tried to say his name. I would have had to make up the words, because the words didn't exist, but right then I'd thought I could.

I knew better now. We were going to have to struggle, the two of us. But I think he'd learned a thing or two about that, living like he had. As for me, I'd trained for long journeys and learned stamina of mind by slogging through nights of prose that could only take me further and further away from what its writers tried to convey.

"Julia," he said again, thick-voiced with the fight.

"Shhh," I said, and freed a hand to stroke his hair. "Later. Later. Right now...let me see your eyes again." The only light in the room.

Funny. I didn't even know any longer where the object of meaning was that had started all this.

I don't know how long we stayed like that. But it is, dear Professor Maye, the reason why I haven't returned to class -- any of them -- and have in fact withdrawn from the College. I hope you'll understand. Please accept this, not so much as a paper, I suppose, but as a testament that what anthropology teaches goes beyond the relativism of external experience to the relativism of inner experience as well. What explorers like Maya Deren found in The White Darkness can be found right down the hall; I too was mounted by Erzulie in the end. I have gone inland to find what can no longer be contained in books, and only pretends to be found overseas.

P.S. In case you were wondering, Professor Shepard got an AWSD.

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