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Jody Franklin once suffered the embarassment of being heralded a "renaissance man" by a contemporary. This haughty description was intended as an umbrella covering his multidisciplinary forays into writing, film/TV, performance art, music and various other arts and media. While eschewing the term "outsider artist," he nevertheless considers himself an "outsider human being."

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Halfway To a Threeway

Albert Flasher is a buddy of mine, a hard-drinkin' songwriter, a walkin' talkin' Kris Kristofferson song. Years ago, when I first met him, he banged out another three-chord rawker masterpiece called "A Lot of Guys Like To Watch Their Buddies Fuck." The title left a permanent scar on my mind, though the song itself disappeared into that endless fog of long-forgotten memories. But this little story isn't about a lost melody. It's about guys who like to watch their buddies fuck, and the time I found myself halfway to a threeway, another page in my deep and storied history of false starts and unused boners.

I gotta tell you first about Larry. He's one of those guys, maybe the only guy, I've ever known with whom the word "buddy" most accurately described our relationship. Grade Ten we started hanging, and, believe me, it was and even now is something of a new world for me, to hang out with guys and do guy things. Most of my life, I've hung out with chicks and done chick things, as much as I am not restricted by any accident or design of biology. Yeah, for at least a year, one full year, Larry and I were buddies and we did those kinds of things that only male buddies can do with each other. We played bad video games. We wrestled one another (his Hulkster to my Macho Man). We had sleepovers and snuck out late at night to do small-town bored teen juvenile delinquent stuff. You know: vandalism, stealing a chainsaw out of the back of an Econoline van, pissing off the roof of our school, that kind of thing. We even sneaked down to raid Olafsson's strawberry patch one night. The old man sicced his dogs on us, and we escaped under the barbed wire fence and high-tailed it into the woods, laughing. He was one of a kind, and I wonder what animates him now. I haven't seen him in, God only knows, twelve years? Last I heard he'd embarked upon the dusty career of drywalling, and I hope his lungs are still healthy.

Enter the story now Ding Ding the Town Pump. Her real name was Shannon, but Ken and those asshole guys that hung around him called her Ding Ding after a Chevron commercial. It always struck me as cruel but she seemed to like it. Ken nicked her Ding Ding after he supposedly got down her pants, but this was Grade Nine and we were still all about fourteen, and to this day I doubt she was so sexually active back then. Ken was a bullying Alpha who liked to cut other people down to pump himself up, and Susan was no different. A braggart and a liar, Ken probably stayed a virgin long after he first "got with" Shannon.

Every time someone walked by her in the hallway and said "Ding Ding" she laughed and tried to slug them. She liked these kinds of physical acts. I remember she often wore pink harem pants, and every so often when wearing them I would fondle her butt, only to get the laugh and the slug. Seemed it was a game we played, a silly teenage game. I had an on again off again crush on her that lasted a few years, and I always held out the hope that someday we might be together. I asked her to a school dance one time but she turned me down, citing "friendship" as the reason. Anyway, I hung out with her and her crowd quite a bit in junior high, but when we moved to senior high, our group grew apart, and I saw her less frequently.

So it was a treat that one summer day between Grade Eleven and Grade Twelve that Larry picked me up in his Mom's beater of an Oldsmobile and suggested out of the blue we go visit Shannon. I'd never been to her house before, in fact I'd never even known where she lived, but I did get to go to her family's cabin right off the beach on the far side of the lake one memorable night summers before. It seemed an odd but pleasant suggestion that we drop by, as she really had not been a regular part of our lives for a long long time by that point.

She greeted us at the door with a big smile, and a yes yes come in come in! I carry this photo of her in my mind: a shapely brunette with long, curly locks, always wearing loose comfortable clothing; big teeth and slightly crossed yet always-wide eyes. Her charm was mostly in her openness and sense of humor. She was the laugh track to my junior high experience, always there to encourage my class clown antics with a generous and beautiful laugh. When you were around Shannon you just felt good about yourself and your world, because what could be wrong with all this laughter? She invited us in and we went upstairs into her kitchen to get some cookies and pop. Her Mom was in the dining room playing Cribbage with the ladies, and Larry and I respectfully, bashfully said our hellos to the ladies. We took our snacks down into Shannon's room and probably listened to some music. It might've been Guns 'n' Roses, because that was what the kids listened to back then. I stood out in a headbanger town. I was the weird one who mail-ordered vinyl from obscure record labels in the States.

When Shannon and I knew each other best I was still in the most awkward phase of my teenage years. Very impressionable: a blank slate for any to scratch their name upon. And no fashion sense, ever. Three years before I had emulated all the other kids at school, wearing faded denim and a mullet. Now, I was trying to be my own young man, had my bangs hanging down to my mouth like the photo of John Cale taped to my closet door. I always wore a fedora, and had long since given up on denim. Already I was affecting a sensitive artist thang about me, cultivating a unique look I defended against uncaring teachers who tried to force me to remove my hat in their classrooms. A rebel with a cause: my hat stays on my head. Funny enough, long before I bought my own fedora I had borrowed one from Shannon. She didn't wear it often, so she let me have it for the better part of Grade Ten before she reclaimed it, forcing me to pay twenty-five dollars to buy my own. But, yeah, I guess the point is at this time I was pretty cute and attracted a lot of attention from girls, something I never had before. It made my girlfriend jealous as sin, to the point she would go ballistic when she found out I had female lab partners in Biology. I had to constantly reassure her that I had no interest in other girls; mostly, at that time, I guess, to keep our sex alive. I flirted behind her back like a madman because that was all I could get away with.

Larry and I had this other buddy Ted, often the third in our little Grade Ten triumvirate, the best vandal of our crew. He was a womanizer by the age of fourteen, and had more sex and make-outs and touchy-feelies with girls than probably anybody else through our teenage years. He got with a girl long enough to have sex, then moved on to the next one. As a one-girl boy under the influence of political correctness, I thought his behavior sexist, repulsive. He told me, "I'm too young to be with just one girl. I want to have some fun, because this won't last forever. I'll quit doing it when I get married." His attitude was probably the right one. Some of my friends that hooked up when they were fifteen or so are still together fifteen years later, and I wonder how happy they are. I dedicated myself to a chick when I was sixteen. Despite abundant opportunity for other sexual experience, I chained myself to her for four years and missed out on a lot.

Like the night Larry and I visited Shannon.

So, like I said, we're down in her room, and there's a heavy metal cassette tape squeaking as its wheels turn 'round in the ghetto blaster, and we've finished our cookies and pop and we are, all three of us, sitting on Shannon's bed, laughing and giggling about something. Maybe Larry and I were doing as we often did, parroting Monty Python routines, just so we could hear her sweet sweet laughter. Somehow with Shannon things always got physical, as they often did with Larry and I when the laughter was high and we were fooling around. Hormones and high energy. So then we're wrestling on her bed and I'm sure I'm copping feels of her ass just like I used to do back in the old days when we still knew each other well, when her pink harem pants hung off her cheeks, when she wheeled around to catch me with a right hand or to slam the door of her locker hard against me. Sense memory. She encourages us every little step of the way, and I notice I'm hard as Larry has his face pressed right up against hers, and he's half-whispering in her ear and making her body shudder, and she's still laughing and wriggling and squirming around the bed, her body like a serpent in cold water. The top three buttons of her blouse are undone, and I want so badly to see those breasts pop out from behind her black bra. I'm on the backside of her as she's on her side, and Larry's covering the front, and I have this feeling that he may be hard, too, and I wonder if she's all wet and squishy down there. I bite at her neck to feel her shudder, and we've forgotten about all the ladies upstairs. They're way into their game as we are into ours.

My body is inflamed and I want with every cell to be engaged with my two laughing friends right there, but flashing across my mind is my girlfriend and her arms folded, that hurt look on her face as if I'm dissecting a frog with Karen in Biology. What of Larry, I wonder, and I get confused. I'm not even conscious of how or why or where this could go, we're teenagers without a clue, and we should do all that feels natural for us that sunny summer evening, but there is a hidden taboo that stomps me down like a jackboot. And it is more powerful than my hard-on or the wonderful girl whose ass my hard-on is brushing against, it is more powerful than all the swirling sex energy, the hormones and lust, the raw feelings that run through the three of us as we wrap ourselves together atop her bed and rub and touch and grab and poke and stroke. It is powerful enough to invade this private little bedroom and stop us before we go too far. What are they feeling? Do they feel the same as me, do we want the same thing and why am I why why why am I pulling back? This mysterious force reaches deep inside and demands I betray myself. I must break from our little shell, disengage in the service of stoicism. A silent voice screams out we can't do this.

We killed it. We killed it together on cues so subtle, so quick that I never figured out the exact trigger for such a rapid disengagement, a flash of a moment that struck us all like lightning bolts. We parted but stayed close on the bed and took a breather, and laid there in silence for an eternity as the heat subsided. Shannon probably buttoned up her blouse; I don't quite remember even though I think it's one of those things I should. Maybe she stopped because she was afraid she'd have to revisit the merciless harassment of other kids calling her Ding Ding. Or perhaps she was mindful of the ladies upstairs. Perhaps Larry pulled back because he wanted to fuck and wanted to see his buddy fuck but he couldn't see his buddy fuck because, well, that would be too gay.

It was Larry who cut through the awkward tension hanging in the air by telling a stupid joke of some sort or other. Giggles popped like bubbles and we were cast into playful reverie. Larry started picking Shannon's clothes up off the floor, clowning as he put various items on his head, doing little imitations: "Look at me, I'm Shannon!" And that's when all the excitement and passion and hormones took a strange, childish turn. Larry took off his shirt and pulled on one of Shannon's, and I can't quite remember how it progressed because it happened so fast, but both of us boys were stripping to our skivvies and putting on Shannon's clothes. I think we even tried to put on bras, but the straps just couldn't reach 'round our masculine backs. I was a skinny lad back then and managed to squeeze myself into her lavender dress, the one I loved so well as I'd seen her wear it time and again over the years. I remember it felt good to be inside this dress, to be wrapped in this, this total Shannonness. It smelled like her, and I imagined what it might be like to be inside her body. She laughed and I had to try hard to conceal another burgeoning boner. The dress was a little too tight and I still felt all funny inside and right then I was closer to her than I'd ever been.

We were always funny, and she always laughed at us, but I think she was laughing now because we finally mirrored the Monty Python we always mimicked. We were feeling sexy and funny at the same time. It's a rare thing, that, because once you're an adult the sex turns all serious, it's all get down to business and there's no room for absurdity. And we must've been an absurd sight.

There came a knock at the bedroom door and Shannon's Mom came into the room to see how we were doing. Were we being noisy, or was she suspicious of two teenage boys being in the room with her teenage daughter? Whatever the case, she walked in on us as we were clowning in our girl clothes in front of Shannon, and, oh! what a sight we were! Her Mom shared her sense of humor and laughed and laughed. She insisted we parade in front of the Cribbage ladies upstairs, and we complied because, I don't know, we were excited and giddy and this was Shannon's Mom who caught us doing naughty things but saw it as merely comical. So we went up into the dining room, and these were older ladies with graying, curly hair and glasses, with coffee cups and cigarettes, and they joined Shannon and her mother in a chorus of laughter. Larry and I laughed, too. For some reason, we were not ashamed or embarrassed, and nobody was ashamed or embarrassed for us. We giggled our way back down the stairs and stripped ourselves of Shannon.

When the door closed behind us that evening, we locked it and walked away forever. My buddy and I never talked about it, Shannon never mentioned it. I never told my girlfriend; it would've been tantamount to treason. It remained a sacred trust, a memory shared yet splintered amongst three. I'm certain I tore a chunk out of my fragile self-esteem that night, pondering what went wrong. I wanted Shannon but I wanted Larry but I wanted to stay faithful to my girlfriend and I didn't know why I couldn't have all of those things and why I had to choose and why making a choice was so damned hard what was wrong with me for failing myself.

I guess I didn't know it then but we had a pretty good little thing going. "Ah, if only I knew then what I know now." Christ, I'm really starting to sound like a thirtysomething geezer now, but it's true, it's so true. The laughter, the playfulness, the innocence, it never really returns. Yeah, inhibition slapped the potential right out of us that night.

I'd trade it all away, all those empty fucks with strangers, all those cold robot fucks before a relationship's demise, all those pillow discussions playing Freud; I'd trade it all for a return to Susan's bedroom, to our secret and passionate teenage games, to those fiery whips of electricity shooting up my spine, to those erect young cocks and perky little breasts, to the feeling of her lavender dress holding my body in tight embrace; I'd trade all that and more for a return to

One summer evening when I was
halfway to a threeway.