Castration Doesn’t Hurt

by Marina J. Neary

Part 2: Sort of Flirting With Catholicism

That night she invited me into her dorm room. You know — to give me a copy of her college journal where her poetry was published?

Mind you, I have not had any real two-person interactive sex in ages, so I couldn’t remember what female anatomy looked like. It was comforting to discover that things haven’t changed much since the 1980s, other than that the bikini line got narrower.

Now, don’t laugh. I’ve had this virtual girlfriend since 1994 when my buddy Matt and I created this nifty program CyBordello. Using the latest animation tools, we modeled a harem of dream girls for ourselves.

Each girl came with her own set of personality quirks, sex tricks and even her own menstrual cycle. See, we didn’t want to make the girls too perfect, because then it would spoil us for life and undermine our chances of having relationships with real women down the road. It was meant to tide us over and give us an excuse to perfect our computer skills.

Matt would pick a different playmate all the time, but I, being pathologically monogamous, stayed true to Emma, a pale brunette with a whip.

I guess Rinnie reminded me of Emma, so that’s why I followed her into her dorm room so eagerly. You never refuse sex from a decent-looking real-life girl, especially if she’s ten years younger. My Mommy, who was neither a hippie nor a prude, raised me just right, with a perfect balance of Catholic guilt and male piggishness. Above all, she raised me a realist. At some point in your life, you simply don’t look the gifted horse in the mouth — except when you’re about to receive a hummer. Obviously, then you have to make sure that your reproductive organ is safe.

And I honestly can’t say I felt a hundred percent safe with Rinnie. She had fangs. We’ve all heard about the horrors of Eastern European orthodontics. This poor girl’s incisors were longer than the rest of her teeth and protruded forward slightly, enough to make me nervous. Intuition warned me that those fangs were not retractable. The girl was a vampire! Not in my kinkiest dreams did I ever get blown by one of the undead.

Still, I didn’t want to look like a coward, not with my belt already unbuckled and my jeans half-way down. So I closed my eyes, threw my head back and started praying as Rinnie lowered herself on her knees, solemnly, deliberately, like some pagan priestess. There was something incredibly creepy in her ballerina gracefulness, which American chicks definitely lack.

She also had the deepest, tightest, smoothest throat I’ve ever had the privilege to explore. After a few back and forth movements, my initial terror started retreating, giving way to bliss. At some point I even opened my eyes and looked down. Rinnie was hard at work, with her lipstick smeared, mascara running and her thyroid shifting up and down. Her frizzy curls diffused in poetic disarray, which prompted me to compose a sonnet in her honor.

I waited for Rinnie to finish her job before reciting the masterpiece to her. She took out a little pocket mirror and started reapplying her lipstick right away, but her nods and hums assured me that she was listening. After I had finished, she puckered and said, “I like you better when you talk HTML code.”

She snapped the mirror shut, popped a mint candy in her mouth and opened the door in front of me, letting me know that I was free to kick myself out of her room. She needed to write an essay for her human sexuality class. Her dog ate the original draft, and she didn’t back it up on her disk, so now she had to reconstruct ten thousand words from memory.

And then she needed to hand-craft a miniature Orthodox Church in Alaskan style out of matches for her great-grandmother’s wedding anniversary. And then she needed to knit a cap for her second nephew, who was born three months premature and was losing way too much heat from his head. And then she needed to paint a poster for this anti-abortion march. And she needed to make five gallons of lobster bisque for a local soup kitchen. All of that had to be done before seven a.m. the next day, and it was already past midnight.

The multitude of Rinnie’s obligations impressed me. How could someone at the age of nineteen juggle so many projects and still find a few minutes for me? That’s what I call multitasking.

“Can we do this again?” I asked, tucking my shirt into my jeans.

“You mean the Guinness festival?”

“No, I mean... what happened after the festival.”

“The Yeats discussion, right?”

“No, after the Yeats discussion.”

Rinnie buried her chipped nails into her frizzy hair and yawned.

“It’s way too late for subtleties, Wally.”

“It’s Bailey,” I corrected her timidly.

“It’s way too late, Bailey. And I have to save hundreds of lives before I collapse. If you want another hummer, just say so. I’ll pencil you in between Josh and Steve on Thursday. You see, I’m trying hard to convince them that they are straight. Ah, it’s a long story. If one of them bails on me I won’t be heartbroken. More time for you.

“I would’ve let you stay tonight, but I need to go for another stupid biopsy in the morning. Get this: they found another lump in my armpit. How annoying is that? But that’s what happens when you grow up in near Chernobyl. You get weird lumps popping out here and there. Then I have that pro-life rally, but it shouldn’t take too long. Keep your fingers crossed that I don’t get trampled by a bunch of feminists.”

“You like children?” I asked her timidly.

“Not particularly. I just hate feminists. Those bra-burning harpies are really getting out of control. I’m telling you, they need an angry male God to smash his fist and put them in their proper places. My Grandma and Mom both have PhDs, and they both out-earned their husbands, and they never bought into that feminist crap. And those American baby-killing dykes with crew cuts blame men for their own failures — how convenient!” She squinted and made that frivolous fluttering movement with her hand. “Besides, I’m kind of flirting with Catholicism. I really dig Gothic architecture and Gregorian chants and stuff.”

And stuff... Wow! I couldn’t wait to introduce her to my buddy Matt. He could easily pattern another CyBordello character based on Rinnie. I also toyed with the idea of introducing her to my folks, because I knew they would be impressed with all her extracurricular activities.

I used to view my Mommy as a wonder-woman. I used to think it took super powers to manage a part-time secretarial job, coordinate baking sales at the church, host monthly book club meetings and not miss a single episode of All My Children. How did Mommy do it? When did she sleep? Now my Mommy with all her achievements paled before Rinnie, who could make enough lobster bisque to feed the entire homeless population of Philadelphia.

Rinnie’s tired growl interrupted my fantasies just as they were about to reach the outer space.

“I believe you were on your way out?”

I left her dorm with a partly undone zipper and mixed emotions. A part of me couldn’t wait for Thursday to come, but a part of me was dreading it. What did I get myself into? What was that gurgling fluttery feeling in my stomach? Was it caused by the proverbial butterflies or just too much Guinness and soda bred? God, I must’ve totally forgotten how to date real women.

When I came home that night I tried logging into CyBordello. Force of habit, I suppose. But for some reason the Emma program wouldn’t launch. I kept getting the same error message. I guess my cyber girlfriend sensed that I had cheated on her and gave me cold shoulder.

Proceed to part 3...