Jackie almost broke my dick in a very real and literal sense, is what I’m getting at.

Let’s gloss over some of the contextual details for this story, shall we? I mean, I could really get into it and bloat and recursively/discursively follow my head up my own ass with this story, which is, really, usually what I do, which . . . okay, fine. Let’s abbreviate. Jackie liked to drink, and to fuck, and to listen to The Tragically Hip (a Canadian alt-rock outfit referred to consistently and gratingly as “The Hip,” a fans-only shibboleth used to identify persons as insufficiently tragically whatever and therefore suitable for shunning), and to date old. In that order, as far as I could tell. I ascribe no particular value to any of these traits and present this data to you with anthropological detachment.

Trust me.

For example, I don’t think we ever met in the absence of at least a mild buzz on someone’s part. I also don’t think we met past our first date without sleeping together. As I recall, her preferred positions were cowgirl, which I tend to enjoy for voyeuristic reasons, and what is commonly termed “doggy style,” which arrangement I enjoy but which also can have unforeseen complications. I mean that I couldn’t not see, and therefore not read, the text of her back tattoo, a Hip lyric highlighted with graphics in primary colors. She’d located it maybe six inches north of the traditional location for tramp stamping and therefore centered in my usual visual field. It distracted me profoundly. As an analogy, imagine trying to masturbate with the same song stuck in your head, stuck on the same line, every time, without variation, forever.

My logistical difficulties didn’t seem to practically matter. Jackie came at the slightest touch, often hitting her first climax in very few seconds and regularly reaching numbers in the double digits. By the way, I should mention that this part of the story meets with extreme skepticism. People (lady people, often) insist, when I speak these events aloud to them, that if it isn’t me who is making shit up, then it has to be her. Jackie.

I mean, maybe. It’s possible, but I kind of believed it. Jackie had a larger than average clitoris, and it was sensitive to the point that even the laziest cunnilingus sent her in to paroxysms and vibrators caused her genuine pain. What I’m saying is that, if my reporting these events is boasting, it’s only boasting insofar as someone who witnesses a spectacular, high-speed, multi-car accident boasts. Sure, I was there, and I witnessed it, and it was amazing, but it probably didn’t have all that much to do with me.

For further example (relating back to my earlier list of things Jackie likes) Simon, her recent ex and reason for her being both on OkCupid and in Cincinnati at all, had been old in a relative sense . . . we’ll say mid-forties.

I’m not that old (revising, as aging people do, my subjective marker for the beginning of old to some deliberately hazy point in the next decade). Her father figure (stepdad, I think) had apparently congratulated her on becoming involved with someone roughly her own age after she and I had been seeing each other for a week or two.

She and Simon first met and impressed each other in The Tragically Hip forums (I submit that any internet forum can be hip only to a very discrete, finite maximum), and fandom constituted most of their points of commonality (my possibly flawed inference drawn from admittedly limited and secondhand accounts of their relationship). She moved to Cincinnati to be with him. As the younger, hotter, and more objectively desirable (that is, more obviously conforming to norms fetishizing femininity, youth, beauty, and sexuality) half of the partnership, she could, for a while anyway, indulge herself however she liked.

One of the things she liked to do, and one reason why we were less sexually compatible than we might have seemed at first, is to dress in pornstarishly seductive costumes bought expressly for the purpose and then tease, sometimes for hours. I can cope with teasing for a hard limit of seven minutes, eighteen seconds after which time, if no resolution (coitus, escape, or whatever) is forthcoming, every blood vessel in my head will rupture. .

Simon could neither commit nor, ultimately, put out, and after a consecutive series of relatively sexless months, Jackie jettisoned him into the cold void of middle-aged singledom. Who wouldn’t.

We came home drunk one night, I slightly and she very. I’d taken her to a now-closed bar called Grammer’s in Over the Rhine, a venue distinguished by having the occasional copyright-infringing public movie night and by having a second-floor dance area that, when in use, caused the ceiling over the bar to terrifyingly buckle. We watched a film and talked to some people I knew. She spent the ride home slumped on her back in the passenger seat with her heeled boots up on the dash, kicking and convulsing with laughter, having loud, lascivious, Philadelphian conversation on her cell phone. I rolled down the window. The wind through it became loud. She was one of those persons through whom all information flows unobstructed (if not unaltered). While I was not necessarily shocked to know that my penis and the relative merits thereof were a topic of conversation, actually being party to the exchange as a passive, third-person participant felt new and strange to me.

My mind separated itself from the immediate scenario. I thought about the relative wisdom of having introduced her to friends, for one of whom I harbored, then and now, a mild but enduring crush.

At her apartment and in her bed, I tried to sleep. Or rather, I closed my eyes and waited for nothing to start happening, having undressed and laid my head on the pillow with the introspective melancholy that, for me, is a decay product of lessening drunkenness.

Jackie tugged my boxers down to my knees. I opened my eyes to see her begin to straddle me, supporting herself with one hand on my chest and reaching with her other to guide my autonomically generated erection inside her. I didn’t much feel like having sex and mumbled something to the effect of maybe the morning might be better, I’d sincerely participate in the morning, and maybe we could both go the fuck to sleep right now. She began to rock her hips against me in ascending rhythm, and I thought, well, there are worse things than being in bed with an attractive woman who literally can’t wait to have sex with me. I decided to enjoy myself, making the appropriate gestures and noises and waiting for her to wear herself out.

In her bucking enthusiasm sometime after her fifth or sixth apparent orgasm, she pulled entirely free of me. Before physics or biology could return my erection to a position of safe repose against my lower abdomen, she brought her hips crashing down against my glans with the force of a truly resentful carpenter driving a nail.