Hey, It's Your Gooneral

Spinning Self-Abuse

Gooner, gooneral, fap, no-fap, faptronaut, coomer…

If you want to grab the reader’s attention and show emotion – or disassociation – in a memorable way, consider that self-pleasure can cover a wide spectrum. It’s powerfully engaging. Sad or hilarious, this might be the perfect physical “business” to add to that scene you’re writing that’s become too talky or too thought-heavy.

Note how the Roth sequence runs on and on – and people think edging is a new invention. While the Stephen King sequence is about cars and boys but plays very coy with the actual orgasm – this from the writer who unpacked a whole menstrual period in the girls shower! Also look at the High Language used in the Kennedy Toole sample vs. the innocent language used in the Walker one.

As always, pretentious High Language used to depict a low subject creates humor. Simple language can leave room for wonder and awe.

It’s amazing how much emotion the physical climax can convey.

From The Color Purple by Alice Walker, 1982

Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody. It gits hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But the other parts good too, she say…

…I say. Where’s the button?

Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little.

I look at her and touch it with my finger. A little shiver go through me. Nothing much. But just enough to tell me this is the right button to mash. Maybe.

She say, While you’re looking, look at your titties too. I haul up my dress and look at my titties. Think bout my babies sucking them. Remember the little shiver I felt then too. Sometimes a big shiver. Best part about having the babies was feeding ‘em.

…But when I hear them together all I can do is pull the quilt over my head and finger my little button and titties and cry.

From People Like Us by Dominick Dunne, 1988

Hubie started to drift off to sleep.

When he awoke he looked out the window at the skyline of lower New York, watching a barge go slowly by. On the bed he saw the shopping bag from Wilton House that his mother had left earlier. Unable to sleep again, he took out the magazines and the new book on the Princesses of Monaco, about whom he had no interest. Inside, at the bottom of the bag, he saw a dark brown plastic container. He reached in and took it out. Inside there were fifty Seconal pills.

Hubie reached down and undid the drawstring of his pajamas. For a while his hand rested on his stomach. Then he allowed his fingers to slide down between his legs, resting in his pubic hair. He moved his fingers around, massaging himself lightly. When his penis was semierect, he made a fist around it and pounded himself. For the two minutes and thirty-four seconds that it took to complete the act of masturbation, Hubie Altemus forgot that he was going to die at twenty-seven.

From Carrie by Stephen King, 1974

Billy had not been her first lover, but he was the first she could not dance and dandle at her whim. Before him her boys had been clever marionettes with clear, pimple-free faces and parents with connections and country-club memberships. They drove their own VWs or Javelins or Dodge Chargers. They went to UMass or Boston College. They wore fraternity windbreakers in the fall and muscle-shirts with bright stripes in the summer. They smoked marijuana a great deal and talked about the funny things that happened to them when they were wrecked. They began by treating her with patronizing good fellowship (all high school girls, no matter how good-looking, were Bush League) and always ended up trotting after her with panting, doglike lust. If they trotted long enough and spent enough in the process, she usually let them go to bed with her. Quite often she lay passively beneath them, not helping or hindering, until it was over. Later, she achieved her own solitary climax while viewing the incident as a single closed loop of memory.

From A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, 1980

Bouncing up and down on his side vigorously, Ignatius sensed a belch rising in his throat, but when he expectantly opened his mouth he emitted only a small burp. Still, the bouncing had some physiological effect. Ignatius touched the small erection that was pointing downward into the sheet, held it, and lay still trying to decide what to do. In this position, with the red flannel nightshirt around his chest and his massive stomach sagging into the mattress, he thought somewhat sadly that after eighteen years with his hobby it had become merely a mechanical physical act stripped of the flights of fancy and invention that he had once been able to bring to it. At one time he had almost developed it into an art form, practicing the hobby with the skill and fervor of an artist and philosopher, a scholar and gentleman. There were still hidden in his room several accessories which he had once used, a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, a jar of Noxema. Putting them away again after it was all over had eventually grown too depressing.

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large and devoted collie that had been his pet when he was in high school. “Woof!” Ignatius almost heard Rex say once again. “Woof! Woof! Arf!” Rex looked so lifelike. One ear drooped. He panted…

From Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, 1967

Then came adolescence – half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth – though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil. Through a world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled Kleenex and stained pajamas, I moved my raw and swollen penis, perpetually in dread that my loathsomeness would be discovered by someone stealing upon me just as I was in the frenzy of dropping my load… I once cored an apple, saw to my astonishment (and with the aid of my obsession) what it looked like, and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had. “Oh shove it in me, Big Boy,” cried the cored apple that I banged silly on that picnic…

Clorox??

How would your character describe the act? Even if the scene never goes into your book/story, it’s worth writing. Write a version to express grief, then write a draft to get laughs. Unpack, unpack, unpack.

Next week I’ll revisit the Baby Talk entries and award the final two Jackalope heads. To date the biggest obstacle to winning has been… length. With language this dense, don’t exhaust your reader by taking too long to make your point.

Post new entries or revise your current ones Here. I’ll be in touch with the editor of Smokelong Quarterly to see if they’ll accept a few pieces. Who knows, we might get our own Baby Talk issue. No promises. Just get in your last, best shots this week.