61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Golden Axe dresses down to its skivvies. Plus: Spore takes on evolution, reaches a stalemate, and takes evolution out for a beer.
As I crouched half-naked in the upstairs staff toilet of a suburban Paris hotel, even the impressively heady mixture of France, kir and daunting expectations of the eighteen other North American teenage girls on my trip could not quite persuade me to lose my virginity to the guy who manned the steam table at the dinner buffet. In retrospect, this was probably an excellent decision. At the time, however, as I rubbed the bulge in his polyester work pants with the heel of my hand, I felt my failure keenly.
"Oui, oui, oui," he murmured, with clear sarcasm. Next time I was in Europe, I vowed to do better.
The next time was several years later. Those years that brought with them the added previous participation in actual sexual intercourse. Past that initial hurdle, I figured sleeping with a non-American would be easy. After all, non-America was crawling with them.
But two days into my second European holiday, an unfortunate bicycle accident in Amsderdam left me with a broken nose, two black eyes, and a missing tooth. Nobody, not even a matter-of-fact Dutchman, was going to fuck me. Even if the bridge of my nose didn't ooze gritty pus every time I nodded my head, my mouth was far too swollen and bloody to offer much pleasure to any but the most dogged of sadists.
promotion
My fantasies of lovers from many lands were quickly shaping up to be just that — fantasies. I began to consign myself to the idea that I would become one of those women, the kind who melt at the barest hint of an accent on a man carrying a purse, who complains bitterly of her lumpen husband's refusal to eat any food ending with a vowel. But after countless couplings with natives of Cincinnati, Nyack, and San Antonio, of Tulsa, Portland, and San Antonio, of Duluth, Pittsburg, and San Antonio, the opportunity for foreign fulfillment knocked once again.
I met him in Vienna, at the opening night party of a show I was touring with. Bound by an immediate physical attraction but hindered by a lack of meaningful common language, we were soon locked into a guileless impasse of grinning and nodding, obscure, befuddled dignitaries eagerly struggling to make a good impression on the powerful.
"You are finding Vienna . . . " he said, trailing off uncertainly. His coaxing eyes were bright and laced on all sides by deep lines. He was at least fifteen years older than me (twenty, I learned later), which, frankly, added to my excitement.
This kind of aggressive tooth-kissing reminds me of the monsters in Alien.
"Oh, yes. I found it just fine. Well, the pilot helped." I joked reflexively.
He stared at me curiously. I downed my glass of wine in one gulp, hoping to asphyxiate myself.
"It's so beautiful here," I added.
"You are from New York City?"
"Well, not originally. I grew up in Omaha. Nebraska."
"Nebraska? What is it?" This is, I am afraid to say, not an unfamiliar question.
"It's a state. Right in the middle of the U.S." I said cheerfully, without a trace of the annoyance I display for the East Coasters who think I am from Oklahoma.
"Nebraska. Yes." He smiled. "Good."
Three bottles of wine later, we were pressed against each other in a cobblestone alley, kissing feverishly. His breath was acrid with cigarettes and liquor, and he forced my jaw open to accept his tongue, which lay heavy and thick in my mouth. Usually, this kind of aggressive tooth-kissing is a deal breaker for me, as it puts in me in mind of the wee fist-like monsters that gnaw their way through John Hurt's stomach in Alien , but I told myself, I'm open to new things. Isn't that what travel is all about?
"Come, please, now to my home," he whispered throatily, kneading my neck hard with his chin.
I declined. I had to get up early. I was jet-lagged. I was too drunk. I would get lost on the way back. All valid, all nonsense.
Visibly disappointed, he silently walked me back to my hotel. I found myself resenting him more and more with each step. What's the hell is his problem? I sulked. It's not like I'm obligated to go home with someone I just met. An American guy would know that. An American guy would just call me later or something. And then, a sobering prospect — Could it be that I'm only comfortable around Americans?
On the steps outside the lobby, he kissed me softly, and left, pressing a small object into my hand. I uncurled my fingers. Nestled in the palm of my hand was a little ball of shiny blue rubber, the kind you can drop out of a window and find, still bouncing, on the sidewalk days later. At four a.m., sleepless with jet lag, and self-loathing, I headed across the street in my pajamas to one of the twenty-four-hour snack kiosks that pepper the streets of Vienna and ordered a kasekreiner, a sausage served in a long bun. Tentatively, I bit down. A stream of runny white cheese spurted out and hit me directly in the face.
This was clearly a sign.
I lay still, chilled Riesling trickling uncomfortably into my bellybutton.
The next afternoon, the dour concierge presented me with a card left in my message box. On one side was a tiny, perfect map of Nebraska, rendered painstakingly by hand. On the other, a phone number.
That night, after a meal of wiener schnitzel (wiener schnitzel!) we sat in front of the large picture window in his airy loft, gazing out at the illuminated city. He touched my face gently and murmured something in German.
"What?" I asked.
"I say, 'You are a beautiful child.'"
In a single phrase, all my personal vanity, father issues and compulsive needs to be coddled and infantilized were addressed and dispatched with the calm efficiency of a Swiss watchmaker. If ten thousand chimpanzees, implanted with the cloned brains of Casanova and Sigmund Freud were gathered in a vast laboratory, chained to typewriters, with the voice of God reading aloud my complete psychiatric records and unflattering testimonials from everyone I've ever dated (documents which, I am sure, share a disheartening similarity), in seventy years or more they could never discover a line that would get my clothes off faster.
He put some Strauss on the stereo and we waltzed naked as he explained the importance of three-quarter time in the Viennese sensibility. I smiled adoringly. He brought out a bottle of sweet white wine, made from tiny grapes found wild in the snowy peaks of the Alps, then poured it over my body and licked it from my breasts. I smiled adoringly. I was being extravagantly seduced by an oh-so-worldly European old enough to be my father; I had quantum-leaped into that Saturday Night Live sketch with Christopher Walken. his accented dialogue expounds on the techniques of erotic massage and the properties of true French Champagne, and for the first time in my life, I had not even the faintest impulse toward sarcasm. He carried me into the bedroom and proceeded to tongue my pubic hair with aplomb. I lay still, chilled Riesling trickling uncomfortably into my bellybutton.
The evening suffered a slight hiccup when I deduced that the rubbery, tire-like band gathered around the base of his penis was not just a physiological quirk but a foreskin. I became so flustered that I was forced to bring the blowjob portion of the evening to an abrupt halt. (My basic sexual training was conducted in the summer camps and conclaves of affluent American Jewry, and little since has challenged its essential thesis). The rest went smoothly, as I'd hoped.
The next morning, I woke up alone. He had left early for work. Dreamily, I was toying with one of the empty condom packets on the nightstand, perched atop The Collected Works of Joseph Beuys, when panic struck. I didn't recognize this brand of condom. Every single fucking word on it was in German, for Christ's sake — a language that had hardly proven trustworthy in the past — and nowhere could I find the comforting word "latex" on the wrapper. Shouldn't the word for "latex" be the same in every language? Could these be, horror of horrors, lambskin condoms? The condoms that, according to my seventh grade Human Growth & Development textbook, were porous enough allow all manner of vermin and infectious agents through? "Oh, God," I said aloud, my heart in my stomach. "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God."
Immediately, I felt ashamed. Why did my scurrilous mind have to ruin what had been a perfectly romantic night, a night full of passion and mystery? Movies are made about such a night, movies where middle-aged women whose husbands have left them for game-show hostesses are egged on by girlfriends with suspiciously lesbian haircuts into redemption through fucking foreign men.
But we were in his country. I was the foreigner.
He called late that afternoon. "I am very touched," he said. "All the girls I have made sex with, you are the only who makes the bed. This is an American thing?"
"No," I said. "It's something I picked up in the Army."
We made plans for a late dinner.
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Rachel Shukert is the author of Have You No Shame? (Random House/Villard). Her work has also been featured in Best Sex Writing 2008, Best American Erotic Poems, and 2033: The Future of Misbehavior. She lives in New York City with her husband and her cat. Her website is rachelshukert.com.
