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 I was thirteen, my neighbors paid me twenty bucks to feed their dog and collect the mail while they were away for a week. They gave me a key to their house, and they hadn't been out of the driveway for five minutes before I was in the master bedroom, rummaging through the wife's underwear drawer.
The precise neurological impulse that caused me to do this remains a mystery, although I'm pretty sure it was connected to the fairly recent discovery that I could masturbate happily for hours.
I was constantly on alert for all things sexual, and even though I was young, I understood that for most people, sexuality was something kept hidden in drawers, in the tops of closets, and under the bathroom cabinet.
This was where my parents hid their own variety of Freudian interests, which included a cock ring nestled in a brown bag, along with some clothespins and a feather boa. Before my penis began pressuring me into mildly criminal behavior (North Carolina has a viciously strict series of sex laws, and I am certain they forbid the soiling of undergarments belonging to another man's wife), I spent hours covertly going through my parents' stuff, combing their bedroom for clues to the mystery of mating. Had my mother and father actually been as boring as they appeared, my life might have taken a different route. As it stands, they apparently liked to fuck as much as the next couple, so I unearthed a wealth of porn films, magazines and instructional pamphlets. I never confronted my parents with my findings, but I grew increasingly skeptical about whatever "truths" they had to tell me. They had burned me once with the whole Santa Claus debacle, and I wasn't going to allow myself to be duped like that again. I was convinced that my parents, along with every other adult in my neighborhood, were keeping something from me.
Excavating my neighbors' bedroom only substantiated my hypothesis. The husband had a treasure trove of Playboys — every issue going back ten years. So for the length of their vacation, my sole interest in life was to be in their house, masturbating to whatever beauty that Hugh Hefner had crowned for a month's reign.
However thrilling as the naked pictures were, I kept being lured back to the underwear drawer of the wife, Martha. She was a young mother, in her late twenties, and she had a way of interacting with people that hinted she was a sensual creature. Whenever she touched me, I felt a mixture of discomfort and excitement.
Her drawer was a cornucopia of undergarment fashion, running from standard cotton whites to a pair of crotchless red lace. Not being terribly familiar with women's underwear on a one-to-one basis, the reason for such panties'  existence completely eluded me at the time. My first thought was that this variety of underwear was designed to allow hassle-free urination in real clutch situations. After all, my mother would complain about the length of the women's-restroom line whenever we went someplace public, so I could imagine instances where speed was a valued commodity.
I took off my shorts and stepped into the crotchless red panties, putting them on over my white briefs. Their purpose became immediately self-evident. I looked at myself in the mirror: a thin, thirteen-year-old boy in briefs and red lace crotchless panties. I didn't feel strange seeing myself like that, and that fact — along with the purchase of an Amy Grant album in 1990 — haunts me to this day.
The afternoon before my neighbors returned, I dumped all of Martha's underwear out on the bed and rolled around naked in it, stroking myself. I was careful to put everything back in a way that revealed as little as possible, but nonetheless, that was the only time I was ever asked to house-sit. For years, I thought nothing of it, until I realized that I had been quite liberal with their petroleum jelly and lotion, and that I always cleaned up with their towels, then disposed of them in the laundry hamper without washing them.
For years after my week in the Xanadu of my neighbors' house, I didn't have many opportunities to ravish unattended lingerie. On the few occasions when I did have unrestricted access to various apartments and houses, it was usually for the purposes of pet-sitting, and the delicates in question either belonged to grandmotherly types or women who held no allure for me.
When I was a senior in high school, I broke down and asked my girlfriend for a pair of panties. To my surprise, she readily consented. But when I was alone with my bounty at the end of the night, I found myself totally uninterested in what I had coveted for so long. A week after she gave them to me, I was at her house swimming. When I went inside to use the bathroom, I slipped into her older sister's room, shut the door behind me, found her underwear drawer, kneeled before it and masturbated. (It was fortunate that the drawer's height was simpatico with my peculiar necessity to be on my knees while I flog myself). I came in less than thirty seconds, then realized, after the fact, that I had soiled several of her panties. It would have been too risky to throw them all in the laundry, so I mixed things up in the drawer a bit. That seemed to  make the scene of the crime look more or less normal, but the drawer's contents still smelled like come. I swore that if I didn't get caught, I would never violate a woman's space like that again.
I kept that promise until I was in grad school. My upstairs neighbor, Michele, was the most heavenly of all God's creatures, and although she and I became good friends, that's all it was ever going to be. I knew this because she told me, "Keck, I would never fuck you. I just couldn't take it seriously." I had heard that before, and prior experience had prepared me for spending weekends with the object of my affection while she pined away for one joker or another.
I don't know why I snapped with Michele. I suppose it had to do with her taking a shower while I was sitting in her apartment watching Under Siege 2. On the way to the bathroom, she walked past the living room and told me to make myself comfortable; she was only wearing a towel, and I could seee the double crescent of her ass peeking from under the hem.
After I suspected Michele was in the shower and unlikely to know what I was doing, my first instinct was to fall to my knees and masturbate. There was a bottle of lotion on the coffee table, a roll of paper towels by the television. Every single prop I needed was in place, and for some reason I stopped. I stood up, walked to the bathroom door, listened for her movements. Then I went back down the hallway to Michele bedroom.
My hands were shaking as I opened and closed her drawers, searching for the right one. (Naturally, it was the last one I opened.) The first thing I saw was a pair of undies with a fruit print. I started to grab those but hesitated; clearly they were atypical. The rest of the drawer held standard black lace, cotton whites, some tasteful and understated designer numbers. I was somewhat disappointed, but that didn't change the fact that I had a tremendous, throbbing erection.
Suddenly I couldn't hear the shower running. I grabbed a pair of beige Calvin Kleins and headed back to the TV.  Just as I reached the hallway and was stuffing her panties into my pocket, the bathroom door opened. I stopped in my tracks and turned to the wall, facing a poster that was a 3-D puzzle of an eye.
"What are you doing?"
I didn't answer her right away, trying instead to get my breathing under control. I focused intensely on the eye puzzle.
"I'm trying to solve this puzzle," I said.
"Haven't you already done that?"
I had already solved it, the very first night I had ever been in her apartment. She had caught me red-handed.
"Oh, right," I blurted. "Well, actually, I heard the shower stop, and I was waiting for you to come out, because I need to take a leak."
I pushed past Michele and into her bathroom without waiting for a response.
Once I was in the bathroom, I leaned back against the door and steadied myself. My right hand was still thrust in my pocket, disguising the bulge of wadded-up underwear. They appeared to be some sort of polyester blend — definitely not silk, but still marginally sexy to the touch. Without thinking, I fell to my knees, took out my cock, wrapped the underwear around it, and made perhaps six full strokes before I came all over them.
It wasn't until that particular moment that I fully considered the consequences of my actions: I had transgressed against the cosmos by failing to abstain from defiling other people's underwear. I was going to pay, and I knew that the impending calamity would be brutal in its scope.
I had to try and reverse my actions, make things right with the world. I quickly resolved that I would wash the underwear, and then just as stealthily as I had ganked the Calvins, I would return them to their rightful place. No harm, no foul.
I stuffed the sticky panties in my pocket and left the bathroom. Michele called out from her bedroom:
"Come back here and tell me how this skirt looks."
Because she had been candid about the fact that we would never copulate, Michele somehow thought  that I wouldn't lie to her about how she looked. (Apparently because there was no ultimate payoff for me.)
She was standing in her walk-in closet, looking in the mirror.
"Well?" she said.
I looked her up and down. Then, I noticed them: Lying at her feet was a pair of black underwear that hadn't made it into her clothes hamper. My heart began to palpitate. I had never gotten my hands on panties that were fresh from the field. Since I had made an arrangement with my conscience to right my early wrongs, I decided that another pair wouldn't hurt.
"I don't know. It seems a bit tight. Can you move freely in it?"
"I guess so."
"There's no time for guessing, Michele. There's nothing more silly-looking than a girl who's bound too tightly in her skirt. Walk to the end of the hallway and back to be sure."
My reasoning was absurd, but Michele was just insecure enough to buy it. She left her bedroom, taking longer strides than usual. I pounced on the panties lying in the closet and plunged them into my vacant pocket. When she returned, I was standing casually by the bed, examining a copy of Self magazine.
"You're right," she said. "It is too tight."
When I was finally alone in my own apartment, I closed all the blinds and pressed Michele's worn panties to my face. They smelled musky. I examined them closely: the crotch held the unmistakable residue of dried vaginal secretions.  Oh, it was too much! I was delirious, and for a second time that night I fell to my knees and masturbated. This time, however, I pressed the scented underwear to my face, while my first catch of the evening bore witness to a second coming. When I finished, I pledged to swear off women's underwear. I placed the profaned panties in the bottom drawer of my nightstand and forgot about them for a month.
My apathy in returning Michele's underwear was, more or less, due to my inability to figure out a way to replace them without being caught. I had read enough Agatha Christie in my youth to know that criminals are often apprehended when returning to the scene of the crime. I finally realized what I had to do: wait until she put a load of laundry in the washer (which was in the basement of our building), slip in after she had gone back to her apartment, and put her underwear in the wash. That's precisely what I did. I surmised that Michele would be none the wiser, and all would be right with the universe.
After I made the drop-off, I sat in my apartment, relieved that I had finally rid myself of the horrible albatross of Michele's underwear. I was certain that I had desecrated my last piece of ladies' apparel, and I was grateful to whatever forces of nature allowed me to escape discovery. Then came the knock on my door.
When I opened it, Michele was standing there, and she thrust the evidence of my betrayal in my face. I was mortified.
"The most fucked-up thing just happened!" she said. "I've been missing these panties for weeks. I mean, I've been looking for them everywhere, because they go with two of my favorite bras, and when I took my laundry out, there they were. What the fuck do you make of that?"
I studied her face; she didn't seem accusatory, just genuinely puzzled.
"It must be static cling," I said. "It is winter."
Michele seemed relieved by this, as if she had imagined that some creep was invading her laundry and having his way with her delicates. She started up the stairs toward her apartment, and I pretended not to notice that a thong was about to slip from her laundry basket.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Kevin Keck has worked as a minor league baseball
announcer, pastry chef and forest ranger. In 1997 he
boxed semi-professionally, losing all but one of his
nineteen bouts within two rounds via knockout; the
exception lasted three rounds. His writing appears
frequently on Nerve.com.
click here for more Kevin Keck articles |
©2002 Kevin Keck and Nerve.com
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