Do you know what it’s like to have something take over your whole life? To be so obsessed that every waking thought leads only in a single direction? I do. My preoccupation was the usual one for a sixteen year-old male – sex - but I was a particularly suitable case for treatment. What really gripped me was that I seemed to be the last of my entire class to have a proper girlfriend. To hear the others talk, you’d believe they spent every night in some incredible bonk-fest. Not me. I wasn’t getting any – had never got any! It wasn’t for want of trying. I’d come close on a couple of occasions, if you’ll forgive the pun. There was this one girl who was supposed to be really easy, mad for it. Naturally I was the one who bombed out. I got her to the bedroom and then received that “What kind of girl do you think I am?” line just as my hand was disappearing into her knickers. I didn’t answer that one; it must have been totally bloody obvious! Not even a moron in a hurry could have mistaken my intentions. Still, crashed and burned, again!
There I was, sixteen years old and pure as the driven snow. Everyone else had steady girlfriends and seemed to be at it like demented rabbits. Not me. All alone with a dog-eared Penthouse and a box of Kleenex as my only consolation. Something needed to be done! I mean, it wasn’t as if I was that bad looking. Some of my pals were total mobile zit-farms. OK, I’ll confess to the odd infrequent blemish – the kind that usually erupts on a Friday night and you make it worse by messing with it – but other than that I was mostly presentable. I had the regulation number of eyes, ears and teeth. I just didn’t have, couldn’t get, a girl. The problem was the usual prime cause of teen-age angst. The girls I fancied didn’t fancy me, and the ones who did, well, I didn’t want to know. No wonder Auden called it the ‘age of mirrors and muddle.’
It was probably because I was so obviously desperate. I must have been transmitting signals like Sputnik. O... Læs hele novellen
