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Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008
Our inn had a guest book that should have been rated X.
Jan 3, 2001 | I spotted them almost as soon as we walked in. Four small clothbound volumes, stacked on the bedside table. Guest books, I thought. Except they didn't announce themselves as guest books. They had coated paper and velvety exoskeletons, and instead of being centered on the table, they were shoved against the wall, like a pile of old paperbacks you're embarrassed to admit you've read.
But there was no concealing them in the rustic, foursquare, Norwegian-style redwood cabins that make up Deetjen's Big Sur Inn. It's the kind of place that makes a fetish of its openness. Everything subsists in an eternal murmur of water: the river out back, the Pacific coast down the hill. And if you close your eyes and ignore the vaguely human sounds from the adjoining cabin, you can make believe you're the only ones there, the only ones who were ever there.
But it's harder to do so with those guest books staring you in the face. Here suddenly was tangible evidence of past presences, of couples just like Don and me, coming here for similar purposes, to launch or celebrate or save relationships -- the same thing that happens every minute at every resort in every corner of the world. And so when I opened one of those clothbound volumes, I expected nothing more than the usual guest-book banalities, those guarded, impermeable expressions of cheer that I've come to dread: "Had a lovely time ... Couldn't have asked for nicer weather ... Can't wait to come back again!"
But the first line that caught my eye was "My lover's cock is still hard inside me."
And instantly arose the image of a woman (why a woman, necessarily?) straddling a panting male body and, in that first post-coital moment, stretching toward the bedside table, snatching up the clothbound volume, groping for a pen, recording -- on the spot -- an instantaneous stenography of sex.
I began flipping the pages.
"Last night I tied Jenny to the bed ... She was stretched out naked. Fingers and toes touching the corners of the bed ... She was a little nervous but I could tell she was excited. I started very slowly, gently massaging her from the soles of her feet to the tips of her fingers ... Jenny smiled up at me and licked first just the top, then the underside, then sucked the whole length into her mouth ... She sucked and licked me hard, until after a couple of minutes I couldn't hold back anymore. With my hair pushed against her nose, I came in her mouth."
Before long, Don was sitting next to me on the bed, and we were both reading. We read about Sean and Kelly: "Our carnal desires come to the surface, clean and unabated by the trivial business of caring for our home ..."
We read about BR & TN: "We came, and came again ..."
About T. & S.: "We fucked our brains out ..."
About W.: "The bed was soaked, and I came six times ..."
No, these were not the usual guest-book entries. These were graphic obeisances to sex. Sex was the continuous, encompassing force. It was the sickness and the cure, the all-extinguishing act.
"The smell of the fire and fresh sex mixes and fills the room. We lie naked -- spent and silent ..."
Don and I read and read. And after a while all that sex seemed to spill off the pages and into the room, and pretty soon there was no containing it. The cabin could no longer confine it. One couple sprinted down to the beach to make love in a driftwood castle. Another ran into the woods to perform the rare "Mexican cartwheel," leaving in their wake new generations of couples seeking new habitats to achieve the same geographical proximity.
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