a 4th of July musicale for Big Bertha

[franksolich]

This is dedicated to Big Bertha, the “Bertha Venation” primitive on Skins’s island, with the hope that she enjoys herself while attending that, uh, “music camp” in Connecticut next month.

Bertha Venation (21,323 posts)   Tue May 26, 2015, 09:44 PM

Camping Questions

Hi. I'll be going camping for the first time in August……

After which Big Bertha, and in more than one thread, asks a whole lot of questions.

As a personal favor—after all, franksolich has nothing against Big Bertha, has nothing but the best of sentiments about her—what follows was written as a general guide, in story form, about which Big Bertha may, speculatively, most likely expect to encounter during this first experience of hers, and how she might conduct herself.

As usual, this is a work of fiction, but somewhat based upon some rather unusual real-life experiences had over the years.

- - - - - - - - - -

“I can’t believe this,” I said, exasperated.  “This totally screws up my hopes and plans for the holiday.  I was counting on it being just you and me, in blissful solitude, nobody else around.

“I needed it to be just you and me, alone together.

“What the Hell were you thinking, when you invited all of these people here for the holiday?

“For two months now, since the Big One, I haven’t had a single moment of privacy around here, someone always watching me, lest I drop dead without telling anyone beforehand.

“It’s been irksome, this constant concern and vigilance, inhibiting my life.

“Being a normal red-blooded male, I have the normal need to hop around in the sack with a woman, but there’s been none of that going on here for two whole months, because there’s always people around who might see, and be offended. 

“It’s been a harsh, savage, brutal repression of certain masculine needs and wants.  The pressure’s been intense, and I’ve got to let it out, let it go.

“So I’d been thinking, with you coming, and us being alone, I could let it all hang out, and we could hop around in the sack non-stop for five whole days, until all this sexual pressure inside of me’s spent.

“And the pressure off, all the pent-up carnal needs and wants having been placated, I’d be mellow again.

“But now this, strangers people running around here like it’s Grand Central Terminal, able to see everything that’s going on—dear God, when oh when am I going to get relief?

“I’m a man, for God’s sake, a member of the male race.  I really have a need to poke and pop; now what the Hell am I supposed to do?”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I’m sorry,” she said; “being way over on the other side of the state, I wasn’t aware that you were dealing with a restrained libido, unable to do anything about it because others were with you all the time, giving you no privacy, no personal space.  And knowing you, I have no doubt the pressure’s been intense, unbearable.

“It’s just that middle-aged males who’ve had heart attacks just aren’t that much into intimate relations, even if they still have the ability to get it up—“

“Hold on, hold on, hold on, you forget,” I pointed out, “most middle-aged men suffering heart attacks have a lot of other things wrong with them too, the consequences of leading a too-decadent, too-easy, too-secure, too-unchallenging, of a life.  So it’s not just a heart attack that turns them into eunuchs.

“I give you Marc, the bacchanalian DFW primitive, or the gouty old GoneOffShore primitive, the guy who bought the good-looking wife, or Skippy, or Atman, as examples of what the ‘good life’ does to one’s vitality and sex drive.  These guys probably need something pharmaceutical to get any livelier than a dead fish.

“Those of us who’ve had a rougher go of it, compelling us to lead the strenuous life, keep our virility and vigor years, if not decades, longer.  I had a great-great-grandfather, Peter Leitzner, who had a convulsive, tumultuous life giving him little or no material gain, who sired his last child, by his fourth wife, who was then 41 years old, at the age of 96 years.

“If one doesn’t let oneself go, like the Eveready bunny one can go on and on and on…..”

“But on the other hand,” she resumed, “I’ve never known anything bad enough to deter you from fulfillment of your passions.  When you need it badly enough, you get it, and God help anybody standing in your way.

“The guests are going to be camping down on the river, and the two of us’ll be here; I fail to see how their presence could interfere with your blowing off steam, letting go of all the built-up sexual pressure.”

“We’ll see,” I said.  “Who are they, and how many?”

“There’s supposed to be fourteen, and there’s eleven of them already here, setting things up.  They’re music students, undergraduates and graduates, from a college in Connecticut. 

“They’re rather, uh, experimental and cutting-edge. 

“They wanted to do a ‘camp’ out in nature, but there’s not much nature in Connecticut or anywhere else in New England, everybody’s so crowded.  A friend of mine told them about you, and they contacted me.

“Their main concern is for absolute privacy, because they take what they do very seriously.”

Well, I said, “I’m not happy about it, but they did make a good choice; there probably isn’t much in America that’s more remote, more isolated, than the Sandhills of Nebraska, but yet at the same time all the conveniences of civilization are easily accessible.

“And because I’d already told everybody around here that the holiday was being reserved for just you and me, there won’t be anybody around…..except these long-hairs.”

“They asked if you were an uptight sort of person, if unconventional behavior might discombobulate you.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

Early in the morning, I awoke before she did, and crawling over her to get off the bed—I usually sleep against the wall, which pens me in if there’s more than one person abed (there’s been as many as four, but fortunately no one “plus”-sized)—I went into the kitchen to make coffee.

There was no point in waking her up; she’d spent nearly the entire day before driving from the other side of the Sandhills, the most daunting, the most formidable, the most challenging, natural barrier in the western hemisphere, to get here, and was tired.

While my back was turned watching the coffee trickle down, a woman from the crowd camping on the river walked in the back door.  She probably knocked or something to let me know she was there, but being deaf I didn’t catch it.

She was about thirty years old, tall, brunette, and wearing a two-piece bikini.  Of course she stared, but being used to getting caught unawares like this, I made no move to cover anything, instead offering my hand, “hi, I’m franksolich, I’m pleased to meet you, and no, I’m not embarrassed; it happens.”

For a first-time exposure, she was a trouper, and smiled.  “I thought you could hear me coming, but anyway, two of us came up here from the river, as we wanted to see if anybody here was awake yet.  I’m Sarah.”

I offered her a cup of coffee, and taking one for myself, the two of us walked out to the back porch, to admire the faraway Sandhills beyond the river.

It took me a half a minute or so, because I was looking at something else, to notice the second person.  She was standing in front of the wood-burning grill, for some indecipherable reason poking the ashes with a stick.  She was dark blonde, reasonably tall, svelte, also wearing a two-piece bikini.

“I’m Kate,” she said, offering me her hand in introduction, although it was done so ambiguously I wasn’t sure if I should shake it, or kiss it.  “It’s nice to see you’re not uptight.  We were told you weren’t, but one never knows for sure until meeting in the flesh.”

“But how do you know I’m not uptight?” I asked her; “we just met.”

“Oh, you’re not uptight,” she insisted, “not the way that you came up looking like that.  Your self-confidence is awesome.”

Yeah, I assured her; “I’m not uptight, although many of my friends wish I were a, uh, little less uninhibited.  But hey, we’re out in the middle of nowhere, nobody to see us, so who cares what we’re up to?”

“It’s very hard to find privacy these days—in a place reasonably close to civilization and its amenities,” she said, “and we were thrilled when learning of this place.”

Remembering what my personal guest had said the night before, I offered, “the noise, I suppose, from all your music-playing.  There’s a lot of people who dislike music, no matter what kind it is.  But anyway, it’s okay out here, because there’s nobody to be bothered by it, no matter how much noise one makes.”

“Oh, but it’s not that,” she said; “it’s more so that we like to compose and play in the nude, and it gets irksome having an audience who’s interested in something other than the music, all these weirdos and creeps and others who won’t mind their own business—“

“But why do you compose and play in the nude?” I interrupted; “and yeah, that seems a sure-fire way to attract attention one might not want.”

“There’s a sense of freedom, of exhilaration, being nude and doing music at the same time,” she answered; “it liberates the creativity and imagination.”

Oh, I said.

to be continued

[franksolich]

“So…..what was it like, having a heart attack?” she asked, changing the subject.  She, and the others, had apparently been told “something” had happened before arriving here. 

“I suppose there was the abruptness, the pain, the numbness—“

“There was none of that,” I interrupted, “which is why it greatly startled me when, in the emergency room, the head physician announced to me, ‘you’re having a heart attack, and a pretty big one too.’

“One could’ve knocked me over with a ten-foot primitive; I had no idea.

“I knew something was going on, but the symptoms didn’t seem to match anything I’d ever read about.

“It was about 2:00 a.m. the Saturday morning before Mother’s Day, and I was coming back here from the big city.  I was halfway home when I noticed I was having some, uh, problems.”

The big city’s forty-two miles away, and no towns in between here and there.

“I wasn’t breathing; it seemed as if the lungs had just, out of the blue, shut down.  No matter what I did—whatever one can do while driving—to billow the lungs, they didn’t.

“I was halfway between home and the big city; decision time.  I don't have a cellular telephone."

As she was a stranger to me, I didn't want her to know my particular vulnerability, that I'm deaf, so I quickly glided over that, hoping she wouldn't ask why.

"My first impulse was to proceed on home, and have someone come over.  But for whatever reason, I ignored that impulse, and turned around right in the middle of the highway and headed back towards the big city.

“As you know, while the highway’s a good highway, a great highway, a better and solider and wider and cleaner highway than any of those found in blue states and blue cities, it’s very little traveled, especially at night.

“I drove on and on and on, at the same time desperately trying to get my lungs to do what they’re supposed to do.  Here, I don’t know if it was perception or reality, but I wasn’t taking in any air, although I must’ve been, otherwise I wouldn’t have lived so long.

“It definitely felt as if I were taking in no air.

“Somewhere along the line, in the darkness ahead, I saw automotive headlights coming my way; I blinked my lights indicating distress, and of course this being a red area, the other guy stopped.  I recognized, but didn’t know, him.  He recognized, but didn’t know, me.  Just two faces that had seen each other around.

“’Give me your telephone,’ I immediately said, and although the request was rather, uh, abrupt, something compelled him to offer it to me.  I dialed 911, gave my name and location, and tossed the telephone back at him.

“’It’s 911,’ I said; ‘you talk to them; I can’t hear them.’

“It was a shock to him, but he was a trouper.

“After which I turned to my car and began banging my chest, my ribs, my abdomen, against the vehicle, so as to get the lungs to…..do something.

“God, and the sun and moon and planets and stars aligned up exactly right that night, and the ambulance, as if being borne on wings, was there within minutes; I was about eight miles away from the big city.

“The rescue guys thought for sure I was going to crack my ribs, doing what I was doing, and forcibly shoved me down onto the stretcher, jamming an oxygen mask on my face and feeding me nitroglycerin.

“I was totally conscious through it all; there was never any pain, any numbness.  Maybe there was in fact pain, but I wasn’t feeling it, being much more concerned that I was trying to breath, and not succeeding.  That itself isn’t a pleasant feeling, but I wouldn’t say it’s pain.

“So I was taken to the hospital, where the immediate diagnosis was ‘atrial flutter/atrial fibrillation,’ an abnormally-high heart-beat rate accompanied by a rapidly-evaporating blood pressure; I’m pretty sure given more time, I would’ve soared to 300 heart-beats per minute, and a blood pressure of…..0/0.

“I was in intensive care the next four and a half days, being closely watched, but nothing else happened.  Everything that was done, was exactly the right thing to do, there were no complications, no unexpected surprises—due of course to that I’ve never been afflicted by the ailments of affluence and the too-easy, too-secure, too-comfortable life.

“I was pretty open-and-shut; whenever they did something, they didn’t have to drill through blobs of blubber, or cope with other organic problems; I presented them with simply a heart-attack, nothing more than that.”

“Well, even though I don’t know you yet, I can’t tell you how relieved I am, that you’re okay,” she said.

“Yeah, I was lucky,” I said; “the fruits of having been a compulsive chain-smoker—2-3 packages a day, usually—of cigarettes since mid-1978, when I was a teenager—and this was the worst that happened; a lot of people have done a lot less and suffered more.  For whatever reasons, I’m sure God likes me.”

to be continued