Notes from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 57 Pairs of Things So I wanted two things at once. And those two things were complete opposites.
I hate it when that happens. It was just like this time when I was 15 and I got a chance to be an apprentice at the Provincetown Shakespeare Festival one summer. Cool, right? Only I also met this girl, my first real girlfriend Denise Jemson, who I just started having oral sex with and boy.
Did she know how to suck teenage cock? Remember back in that chapter when I told how Kami gave head like she was born with a dick in her face? It was kind of like that with Denise. She bit pipe eagerly with no discernible reservations.
Like nobody ever told her. Hey Denise, listen, pretend you hate the taste of dick and that you're only putting it in your mouth because they really really want it and you feel sorry for them. So you're going to do them this big favor and now they owe you one. I really liked Denise Jemson.
And for years after we broke up and the only women I met were the ones pretending it was something they hated and that they were doing me a big favor and now I owe them one. I was able to look back on those days with Denise. Knowing. Anyway, I was able to do one of two things that summer.
Be an apprentice to this sort of famous Shakespeare Troop and Rhode Island. Or stay home in Massachusetts and get blow jobs from Denise. And I really wanted to do both. So I sent in my application at the Provincetown Shakespeare Festival and at the same time sort of assumed I'd be rejected.
Because, well, rejection just happens more. I knew that even when I was a teenager, it's life, right? So it was weird. I was gloomy about my inevitable rejection by the Provincetown Company and excited by the thought of a summer of Denise Blow jobs at exactly the same time.
Then when I heard back from the Provincetown Shakespeare Festival that they'd love to have me because they got this really fantastic letter of recommendation from my English teacher and drama coach, Mr. Corcoran, I was really excited and gloomy about missing out on a summer of Denise Blow jobs at exactly the same time. So like I said, I hate it when that happens. It's like you're in a situation where no matter how hard you try, you're destined to miss out on something you really want.
Just because there are pairs of things out there that the universe says you can't have both of it once. It's like philosophy or destiny or science or something. You should read Aristotle or a dumbed down version of Aristotle that won't give your brain a hernia. Parp said years later when I told him my pairs of things in the universe theory.
He was all over that. But when I told Jessica about telling Parp, she said Aristotle was all about black and white. Is that the universe you live in? Black and white?
So I decided I'd be better off not telling people my theories anymore. When I sat down to write the old email to Cammy, I was thinking shit, here we go with the Denise Jensen thing happening again for the jillionth of the time in my life. I wanted to get in shape for a second date and bang Cammy till her ass bruised over and at exactly the same time I was all gloomy about selling my soul to Parp and spending hours at the gym and not getting enough snacks. If I emailed Cammy now and she emailed me back soon, I could end the suspense about what to feel down about it and either avoid the Parp Regimen entirely or start it right away.
Here's the email I ended up sending. Cam alive. I was just thinking about the other night and all I can say is beb, beb, beb, beb, beb, yours, daddy, p.s. Shuck it like it's candy, little William.
No kidding, I proofed that a good five times before hitting send. 30 seconds later, I wanted to blow my brains out. By the way, here's what happened way back in high school with Denise Jensen in case you were wondering. Back when she was blowing me, I also had this best friend named Jerry who lived in this yellow house two streets away from me and whose dad was my mom's insurance agent and me being a teenager and therefore completely stupid, I told him all about Denise and the spun plastic blowjobs.
So about three weeks into my summer at the Provincetown Shakespeare Festival, I heard from my sister Ellen that Denise was blowing the balls off Jerry and really not trying at all to keep it a secret. There was this one famous incident with her and Jerry in a jar of vodka at a party near a granite quarry. To this day, I don't know all the details. Apparently guys were lining up and parents were called.
I try not to think about it. And about a week before I heard about it, we started rehearsing a mid-summer night's dream and I was already depressed. I wanted to play Puck, but I was too tall so they cast me as Demetrius instead. Yeah, I know.
99% of you people reading this have no idea why that Demetrius Puck thing would be depressing, but it was. And it was a lot worse finding out my ex-best friend used insider information to get blowjobs from my now ex-girlfriend. And by the time summer was over, she dumped Jerry and moved down to blowing somebody I barely knew, some fat kid with a wispy teen beard who ran Bible Club at the high school and had this low voice that sounded all compassionate and shit. That was actually a little better because it told me Denise must be crazy.
I mean, she wanted Fatty Bible Fuzzy Boy instead of Lord of All Tale. The bitch was nuts. And the guy who wrote me the glowing reference that got me into the Provincetown Shakespeare Festival, my English teacher and drama coach Mr. Corcoran, he retired a few years later and ended up moving in with the guy who was the artistic director of that very same Provincetown Shakespeare Festival.
I liked Mr. Corcoran and like I said, I'm a liberal, but the thought of two geezers doing each other is… I don't know. It's two geezers doing each other. Am I right?
Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist. Notes from the Upper West Side, copyright 2013 to 2017. By Dan Wrench.