I: In which the author anticipates nookie

On the eve of my first coast-to-coast book tour, my pal — I’ll call him Wilhelm — took me aside for a little literary man-to-man: "The last time I went out on the road it was crazy, dude. Women every night. They just come up to you. They offer themselves."

It is important to note that Wilhelm is a poet. And when a poet tells you he’s getting that much play, well ... you can pretty much draw your own conclusions.

What’s more: I had written a book of short stories — My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002) — with enough erotic content to convey the impression (however mistaken) that I know my way around the female anatomy.

And so, for the first time in many years of traveling, I packed condoms, four varieties, in their bright, hopeful little wrappers, affixed with all those salacious buzzwords — ribbed, lubricated, extra-sensation — which have the effect, even now, back in my lonely writer cage, of giving me semi-wood.

II. In which the author ... not

But, see, that’s just not how the road worked for me. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that I’m kind of goofy-looking. Or that my stories tend to be about sexual disaster. Or perhaps Wilhelm is simply m‡s macho than I.

I sure never experienced the carnival of casual sex he so blithely described. What I found was that women (and men) come to readings seeking an intellectual, creative connection. And while this isn’t always incompatible with sexual adventurism, it tends to diminish the chances for a quickie in the self-help section.

In my case, there was also a logistical issue to consider, one best represented by the following equation: no hotel = no coochie. Yes, to help save money, I stayed with friends. And friends don’t let friends fuck drunk.

Besides which, there’s something indisputably scummy about using your cachet as an artist to hit on a fan. I know it’s a timeworn tradition and all, one of the perks of the biz. But half my stories are about jerks who use sex to primp their frail egos. (This, come to think of it, might also help explain the dearth of fawning bachelorettes.)

III. In which the author addresses the, uh, ejaculation issue

One of the things that became apparent as I read my work aloud is that people tend to get hung up on the sex. As soon as someone starts talking blowjobs, the crowd just freezes. This was especially true when I read the title story, which includes the following passage:

Gradually, her legs sagged to the bed. Her pelvis vaulted into the air. I followed her up, pressed my tongue harder, and suddenly there was a warm liquid coming out of her, a great gout of something sheeting across my cheeks, down my chin, splashing onto the comforter.

The first time I read this scene, the ladies in the front row looked like they’d been bopped in the back of the head with Ron Jeremy’s manmeat.

The first question I got from audiences was, almost invariably: have you ever had sex with a woman who ejaculates? (Or: how much of your work is autobiographical?, which is just a wimpier way of asking: have you ever had sex with a woman who ejaculates?)

My basic response to this question was: yeah, I did. But that’s not really the point. Sex is just the strange chemistry and plumbing of our bodies. I’m far more interested in the emotions that live beneath the thrashing.

Still, the issue wouldn’t die. In Minneapolis, a reviewer named Ann Bauer called my rendering of the female anatomy "woefully inaccurate," setting off a tsunami of protest. One women (God bless her) wrote in to confess that she gushed, was proud to be a gusher, and expressed what I would consider a charitable pity for Bauer.

No less an authority than the New York Times offered the following in-depth analysis of my narrative strategy: "The thing about Almond’s stories is that his characters like to have sex. Really like to have sex."

Yes, Virginia, and often with their clothes off.

IV. In which the author talks cock

For the most part, I think, people who came to hear a story managed to suss out that the sex wasn’t really the point, that my characters have a tendency (like many of us) to throw their bodies before their hearts.

But then every so often, I’d get a question like this: "Why do men always write about their penises?" — a question of such dazzling sophistication that I’d be forced to review my basic understanding of the Western literary canon.

Homer? Dante? Milton? Cock. Cock. Cock. Faulkner? Cock. Forster. Pure cock. Crime and Punishment? Yeah, come to think of it ... cock.

I should note that this question came from a woman, and my guess is that she thought she was being clever, in a kind of snarky feminist way. To me, though, her question was just sort of sad. Not how stupid it was, but the way in which it revealed how embarrassed folks still are about the human body and its desires.

I mean, here we are in a culture that has appropriated sex as its chief marketing tool. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some naked stick figure in lousy mascara. And yet most of us are still freaked when it comes to a serious contemplation of our genitalia. But what the hell else should writers write about? We think about our pussies and cocks all the time. We admire them. We worry about them. We stroke them. We press them against strangers. They take up a hell of a lot of psychic space. (Need this be mentioned: half of the World Wide Web is devoted to the display of genitalia in action.)

And yet somehow, whenever genitals are attached to actual emotions or thoughts, they become dangerous. They threaten to distract us from the product.

This is why Hollywood, as a big for-instance, has such an abnegating relationship with sex. It will show us everything but the jewels, in scenes that are crafted to excise all emotional content from the frottage.