The Kid (Part 2): Strange Visitor

[JSample]

The Kid: A Semi-Autobiographical, Somewhat Tongue-in-Cheek Journey of Self-Discovery
(Or, What Happens When I Write a Quicksand Story and Cast Myself as the Hero)

by Jason Sample
August 2017-November 2018

(If you haven't already read Part 1, it's at viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19484#p125564.)

In Part 1 of "The Kid" we met Jason, the protagonist of our story, a married, middle-aged father with a secret fetish for damsels in distress sinking in quicksand. In Part 2 below we meet his antagonist, the personification and embodiment of Jason's secret fetish. For obvious reasons each has always had lot in common with the other... until Jason's fetish fantasy suddenly becomes a reality, forcing him to confront the "monster" in his brain and leading him down a path that will ultimately determine who and what he really is.

That's the "serious" way to look at this story, and it's not an inaccurate description. But considering that the protagonist and antagonist both have a lot in common not only with each other but also with the guy at the keyboard who's telling their story, and considering also that that guy sometimes has a quirky sense of humor, especially when he's essentially writing about himself, the resulting "me, myself, and I" interaction between the three of "us" sometimes produces odd little narrative details and asides that don't always respect the traditional bounds of storytelling. In other words, this is what happens when I write a quicksand story and cast myself as the hero.

Standard disclaimer: As the full title above indicates, this story is "semi-autobiographical"; in the course of it I touch on certain aspects of my own quicksand fetish, both positive and negative, that pertain solely to myself. I do not presume or pretend to speak to or about others' experiences of their quicksand fetishes, nor about quicksand fetishism in general. Your mileage may vary.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The Kid (Part 2): Strange Visitor


Oh, no, Jason closed his eyes and grumbled quietly, not now. He scowled as he turned around to face his unexpected visitor, who had not only sounded familiar but also looked as familiar as he had sounded and, to be honest, wasn’t really as unexpected as the first clause of this sentence had suggested. He stood six feet tall and looked to weigh about a hundred-fifty pounds, kind of gangly, more-or-less clean shaven with dark brown hair parted on the right side of his head, and sporting a pair of geeky-looking, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose to help his nearsighted eyes focus on the world in front of him. He wore a light blue polo shirt with an alligator sewn onto the left side of the chest and a skinny pair of faded Wrangler jeans, topped off (or would that be bottomed-out?) with a pair of size twelve, light blue Converse sneakers. Everything was blue with this guy. He looked just the same as Jason remembered him looking in that goofy photo in his high school yearbook, smiling nerdily and waving awkwardly at the camera. Seeing him now was like looking in a mirror, Jason reflected... a mirror that could look back through time.

“You again,” Jason muttered impatiently at the new arrival. “Look, I really don’t have time—”

“Of course it’s me again, Jay-man!” the interloper interrupted him. “You know me! And I know you better than you want to admit!” He was right about that, Jason admitted to himself more than he wanted to do so; the figure standing before him did indeed know him better than he liked to admit. His visitor was in fact a projection of Jason’s own memories of himself, a reflection of his own psyche, a figment of his own imagination. He was the Kid.

Jason shook his head in a slow burn of annoyance. “Must you come out every single time—?”

“Don’t blame me!” the Kid interjected. “I’m a projection of your own memories of yourself! A reflection of your own psyche! A figment—”

“Of my own imagination; yeah, I know,” Jason replied, rolling his eyes as he completed the Kid’s sentence. “I remember what I wrote a few lines ago.”

“I’m that monster in your brain, Jay-man!” the Kid exclaimed effusively. “That part of yourself that you don’t like, that you pretend doesn’t really exist, the part that wants to possess and control women for your own pleasure! You just project me in this form because it’s easier on your ego! Easier for the readers to visualize, too.”

“Yes,” Jason responded, rolling his eyes and shaking his head again, “I wrote about you in that ‘damsel-in-distress’ topic I posted to the quicksand forum a while back, shortly after I joined.” He crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other as he assessed the implications of his visitor’s presence. “Of course, you do realize that you’re just a clever visual metaphor used to personify the abstract concept of thought,” Jason added, channeling his inner Spongebob.

“And I don’t ‘come out,’ Jay-man!” the Kid insisted, pointing his finger in Jason’s face as he ignored the cultural reference, “You bring me out! Every time you read a quicksand story, or look at a picture, or watch a video, or even just daydream about a pretty damsel in distress sinking to her doom, you bring me out! And don’t get me started on what happens when you write a quicksand story like this one and cast yourself as the hero!” Jason sighed and closed his eyes, lightly facepalming himself as the Kid continued with his tirade.

“But now, Jay-man,” the Kid exulted while gesturing emphatically, “after decades of your dreaming and fantasizing about it, it’s finally happening for real! ‘Help me!’ she cried, ‘I’m in quicksand!’ Of course I’m here! If you wanna blame anyone for what’s happening now, go look in a mirror!”

“Yeah, I’ve already used that simile,” Jason replied wearily. His quicksand fetish was indeed real, as the Kid had insisted and as Jason had spent several paragraphs reflecting during the last leg of his hike up to the parking lot, but his fetish was for the fantasy of the damsel in distress sinking to her doom, not for it to happen to anyone in real life; at least, that’s what he had always told himself. As much as he wished otherwise, he recognized that the Kid was going to be around for at least the next several chapters and probably all the way to the end of this story, especially given its title, and Jason decided to make the best of a bad situation by appealing to whatever sense of human decency that his younger twin might possess. “Look, Kid,” he said, seeking to reason with his unwanted guest, “that girl in the mudflat down near the river really needs our—”

“Helllllp!” the young woman’s terrified voice drifted up the trail again from the mudflat by the river, “I’m in quicksaaaand!”

“‘Helllllp! I’m in quicksaaaand!’” the Kid gleefully mimicked her despairing plea. “Doesn’t the sound of those two syllables strung together into that one beautiful, magical word just get a rise out of you? Something about the ‘k’ and the ‘s’ coming together in the middle to make that sexy ‘x’ sound...”

“I’m more interested in actually helping her,” Jason retorted impatiently as he retrieved a coil of rope from the back of his car and hooked it onto his belt. “If she’s really in quicksand, she could go under and die.”

“But she won’t, ‘cause you’re gonna be her hero, her shining knight, rescuing her from a horrible fate!” the Kid replied mockingly as Jason closed the rear gate of his car before turning toward the direction from which the young woman’s cry had come. “That’s what you’ve always dreamed of, and now it’s really happening!” the Kid went on exuberantly. “And of course she’ll want to reward you… just as you’ve always fantasized since puberty hit when you were twelve years old!” Jason’s younger twin grinned lustfully as he clapped his hands and rubbed them together in salacious anticipation. “Hot sex in the mud with a grateful damsel after you rescue her from quicksand! Hell, yeah!”

Jason grimaced in exasperation at his tormentor’s taunting tone. Of all the times for his quicksand fetish to come out full bore, he thought, this was the worst possible time. He wanted to give the Kid a good comeback, a real crusher, so that he could be rid of him, but as his young doppelganger had said, he knew Jason better than he liked to admit. Jason rummaged around in his imagination, hunting for a means of evicting his uninvited guest from his consciousness so that he could go and actually help the poor girl without needless interruption. Suddenly he had an idea.

“You’re thinking of something, Jay-man!” the Kid exclaimed, pointing in Jason’s direction. “I see that light bulb over your head!”

“How old are you, young man?” Jason abruptly asked his younger twin in an assertive, grown-up, “dad” tone of voice as he reached up to switch off the bulb. Need to save electricity, you know. It’s a “dad” thing.

“Me? How old? I’m, um, I’m sixteen!” the Kid stammered, thrown off by the unexpected question. “Tenth grade! Just got my driver’s license! I drive Mom’s 1972 Plymouth Fury III to school! And I’ve got a hidden folder in my bedroom full of pictures of girls sinking in quicksand that you and I started drawing after late-bloomer you finally discovered masturbation!”

“Sixteen. I thought so,” Jason replied calmly, ignoring the Kid’s derisive dig and shaking his head as he made a point of pointedly pointing his finger back at the high-schooler. “You can’t be here. You have to leave.”

“Huh? Whaddya mean, I have to leave?” the Kid asked, suddenly flustered. “How come?”

“Forum rule number two,” Jason answered, crossing his arms authoritatively over his chest. “No underage characters. Dave’s quite clear about that. ‘Unspecified damages’ and so forth. If you’re only sixteen, you can’t go anywhere near that girl in the quicksand… at least, not while this story is posted on the forum. Now, if I’d simply left it on my own computer for my own enjoyment,” he continued, gesturing apologetically, “it would literally be a different story, but now that it’s on the forum… well… you have to leave.” Jason turned to head back down the path through the woods, intending to leave the far-less-mature version of himself behind in his subconscious as he went to help the young woman by the river.

“But... but...” the Kid shouted after him, emotionally flummoxed at being psychologically outfoxed, mentally out-flexed, and generally out-“exed” by every other verb that also ends in an “x,” regardless of how sexy that letter sounds. Suddenly he had an idea of his own. No light bulb, though. “Wait a minute!” he shouted after Jason. “I’m still just a figment of your imagination! A projection of your own memories of yourself! If I’m only sixteen here, it’s because that’s how old you’re imagining me to be! You’re the one breaking rule number two, not me! Maybe you should leave!”

Jason stopped in his tracks. The Kid really did know him better than he wanted to admit, he thought as he turned around to face his quick-witted opponent, who was now wearing a smug smile on his face. “Of course,” the Kid continued slyly, “if you do leave, you’ll never finish writing this story, and that poor girl down by the river just might sink to her doom, and it’ll all be your fault because you can’t control your memories of yourself!”

“Please! Somebody!” the young woman’s frightened voice cried again in the distance.

Jason sighed, shaking his head in frustration. “Fine,” he replied grudgingly, closing his eyes and flipping forward through the timeline of his memories of himself, searching for a new stopping point. After rejecting several intervening possibilities he finally said, “Okay, Kid, it’s 1982. You’re nineteen now. Just finished your first year of college. Of age, legally adult.” And if there’s one thing this world needs, he added silently as he shook his head again, it’s more dults.

Jason opened his eyes. The Kid looked essentially the same as he had before, except that he now wore a pair of stylish glasses, a college logo tee-shirt had replaced the alligator wear, khakis had taken the place of his jeans, and he stood in a pair of sporty Nikes. His beard was coming in better, too.

The Kid looked down at his new attire. “I’m nineteen now? Cool! I can go to a bar and order a beer!” he enthused, feeling grown up himself.

“Not anymore,” Jason corrected him. “The state legislature raised the drinking age to twenty-one back in the mid-eighties. Sorry.” He turned back down the trail and continued heading toward the river.

“Shoot!” the Kid replied, snapping the fingers of his right hand in disappointment as he followed Jason. “Well, at least I can vote.”

“You can also be drafted, if the government ever reinstates it,” Jason replied, looking at his own right hand and wondering how the Kid had learned to snap his fingers even though Jason had never quite figured out how, “and your beard finally consists of more than just four random hairs growing out of your Adam’s apple.” Jason smiled, knowing that that would get the Kid’s goat. He turned and looked back at his young twin, who was staring at him with a chagrined expression on his face.

“You remember that?” the Kid asked.

“I remember shaving those hairs,” Jason answered, “one at a time.” The Kid was silent for a moment; it had been embarrassing to be the last guy in P.E. class to start shaving.

“Can we go help this girl now?” Jason asked his college-aged self, turning back down the path.

“Sure, uh, yeah,” the Kid replied, trailing along after Jason, momentarily at a loss for words. “Hey, Jay-man,” he said after several seconds of silence between them as they made their way down the path, “you remember all those quicksand drawings we made? And the stories? The ones we hid from Mom and Dad in that folder in the bottom drawer of our desk?”

“Sure do,” Jason replied. “Boobs, butt, and booty, sinking in quicksand; that was all you seemed to know how to draw at first.”

“Hey!” the Kid protested. “Those were my earliest attempts to understand my... um, our quicksand fetish! Besides, my teenaged, adolescent hormones were raging! ‘Puberty love,’ and all!”

“Yeah, you always were on the lookout for the next hot tomato,” Jason responded. “At least you finally figured out how to draw a woman’s face and hands realistically, so she actually looked like a real human being and not just a sex toy,” he added, frowning as the two of them continued down the path leading toward the river. He was growing concerned that he hadn’t heard any more cries from the young woman for the past couple of minutes, and he found himself quickening his pace.

“Did you ever keep them?” the Kid asked, wondering if his fetish-fueled amateur artwork and literary endeavors had stood the test of time.

“Unfortunately, no,” Jason answered wistfully. “I went through a serious religious phase in college and threw them all out decades ago out of a sense of spiritual guilt.” He stopped and turned back toward his younger self. “But you know all about that, Kid; you just finished our first year of college.”

“Ohhh, right!” the Kid responded, an animated look returning to his eyes. “You wanted so much to be the good Christian boy! You thought that maybe religion and Bible-reading and prayer would get rid of me! Well, you were wrong! Ha-ha!” he laughed mockingly again, regaining the sarcastic swagger that he had exhibited earlier toward Jason.

“Yes, I was wrong,” Jason conceded as he turned back down the trail.

“And what was that girl’s name?” the Kid continued, following along after him. “That cute twenty-year-old sophomore, the one you had a crush on? Andrea, or something...?”

“Angela,” Jason said out loud, thinking of her for the first time in a very long time. True to her name, she was indeed an angel, he had thought then and still did in his memory of her, with shoulder-length auburn hair, striking green eyes, a sweet smile, and a well-proportioned, five-foot-five figure that she somehow carried both modestly and proudly at the same time. She would stand up in the religious group meetings at college and give her testimony, he remembered, looking so pure and innocent, untouched by the world. Jason had never paid much attention to what she had actually said; he had instead sat a few rows back, looking longingly at her as she spoke, his heart melting with the puppy-crush that he felt for her. He had so wished that she would notice him, Jason recalled, and maybe like him and want to be his girlfriend, and...

“And yet she didn’t even know you existed,” the Kid completed Jason’s thought for him. “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, Jay-man, maybe better than you do, better than you want to admit!” Jason sighed as he continued walking along, knowing what the Kid would say next. “She already had a boyfriend, the starting quarterback on the varsity football team!” the Kid continued. “She was way out of your league, and there was no way that weak, skinny you could compete with Mister Built-and-Buff! She didn’t notice you, and would never be your girlfriend, so what did you do?” Jason’s younger twin demanded of him.

“I know what I did,” Jason answered, shaking his head.

“You know, but you don’t want to say it, so I will!” the Kid continued triumphantly. “You, the wannabe good little Christian boy, went home after the semester ended and wrote a quicksand story about her! I know, ‘cause I helped you write it!” he crowed, vindication in his voice. “The pure, unspoiled Angela, whom you wanted and lusted for but couldn’t have, the sweet, chaste angel beyond your reach! She didn’t just star in your midnight fantasies, she starred in the very first quicksand story you ever wrote, falling into the mire, struggling in terror to get free, and finally going under forever! You sank her to her doom!”

“Never said I was proud of that,” Jason grumbled as he continued toward the river, the Kid close at his heels.

“You wrote, ‘Angela’s sobs were choked off as she disappeared beneath the surface,’” the Kid quoted from memory, “‘the quicksand forcing its way into her mouth and nose as she tried to take one final, desperate breath, while the muck gradually filled in the depression that her face had left when she went under.’ That’s cold, Jay-man!” the Kid exclaimed, punching Jason in his left shoulder from behind. “What kind of a monster are you?”

Jason stumbled forward under the blow, nearly falling over before regaining his balance and turning to confront his accuser. “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you, Kid?” he said, his voice bristling with impatience.

“You know it, Jay-man!” the Kid gloated back at him. “And I’m going to enjoy it even more when we get down to where that girl is stuck and sinking in the mudflat next to the river! Maybe we’ll even get to watch her go under for real! And now that I’m nineteen, you can’t pull out your ol’ ‘forum rule number two’ to keep me away!”

Jason was reaching the end of his rope with his tormentor, and he didn’t mean the rope hanging off his belt. The Kid had already cost him more time than he cared to admit, but if he were going to have any hope of helping the poor girl trapped in the quicksand before it was too late, he would have to put his adversary at bay once and for all.

“Let me tell you something, Kid,” Jason said emphatically, pointing his finger in his young doppelganger’s face. “Yes, I have a fetish for the damsel in distress sinking to her doom in quicksand, but my fetish is for the fantasy of it, not for it to happen to anyone in real life!”

“Are you sure, Jay-man?” the Kid replied tauntingly. “Remember, I helped you write those stories and make those drawings decades ago, and they always ended with the girl going under! Never once did you rescue her at the last minute, regardless of what you dreamed of in your late-night hero fantasies! I think you want to see this girl go under just as much as I do, but you don’t want to admit it!”

Jason paused momentarily. Despite the last-minute heroics that he would imagine on his part as he lay in his bed years before, his old drawings and stories for which he had expended the time and energy to put them down on paper had always ended with the girl going under, consumed by the quicksand with no hope of rescue in sight. Could the Kid be right about him after all? Could it be that he really wanted to see this girl sink to her doom? Was he really more a monster than a man, and was all his protesting too much about the “fantasy” of his fetish just that? No, Jason argued with himself, he was more than that. Better than that. For the sake of the despairing young woman trapped and sinking in the quicksand down by the river, he had to be.

“Listen, Kid,” Jason said to his young twin, pushing aside his self-doubt as he sought to communicate to his doppelganger the gravity of the moment, “you may know me, and you may know what I’m thinking, but you don’t understand what’s going on. You see what I see, you hear what I hear, but you haven’t learned what I’ve learned. You’re just nineteen, and I honestly don’t know if I can even project you as being much older than that.” Jason shook his head as his memories of himself at that age continued to become clearer. “You’re stunted, Kid, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally,” he continued. “You’ve never even had a real girlfriend yet, and you certainly have no idea what it means to be in an intimate relationship or to make love to a real woman, much less to commit yourself to another human being.” The Kid stared back at him blankly.

Jason clenched his left hand into a fist and glowered as he reflected on the Kid’s immaturity. “Do you really grasp the significance of the fact that I’m fifty-five years old?” Jason fumed at his teenaged foe. “You’re stuck at nineteen! More than a third of a century separates us! That’s more time than has passed since the Challenger disaster!”

“The challenger what?” the Kid replied, scratching his head in incomprehension.

“That’s the whole point, Kid!” Jason growled in anger. “You’re stuck in 1982! You’re completely out of touch with my life, with my world, today! You want to mock my religious beliefs from when I was your age, but you don’t comprehend that people grow and change over time,” he continued. “Do you really appreciate the fact that I’ve been married for more than thirty years? I’m the father of adult children, two of them daughters, and all of them older and more mature than you!”

The Kid’s arrogance, so much on display only moments before, seemed to be disappearing as he shrank back under Jason’s verbal onslaught. “You don’t understand what it means to be trusted by a woman, Kid,” Jason said, his voice softening even as he continued to press his argument. “A woman doesn’t exist for our pleasure, to be used and then discarded once we’ve had our fill of her. She exists in her own right and for her own sake, not as an object to be consumed and then tossed aside. Yes, I wrote that quicksand story about Angela out of lust and unfulfilled desire when I was your age, for that matter, when I was you, but I’ve grown beyond that. You haven’t!”

The Kid’s gaze fell downward, and Jason thought that he saw something in his face that looked almost like contrition. “Look, Kid, I know you’re a part of me,” Jason went on. “You’re a real part of me. I call you that monster in my brain, but you’re really the personification of my sex drive combined with my quicksand fetish. And as much as I don’t like the way you think about women, I know that I need you to be who I really am. That’s why I don’t try to get rid of you anymore like I did back in my religious days in college.”

Jason looked down now as he realized something new about himself. “Maybe that’s why you’re still stuck at nineteen years old,” he said to his counterpart. “I never came to terms with how much a part of myself you really are, or how much a part of you I am. And here’s something else that neither of us may have considered,” Jason added as the Kid looked back up at him. “Not only do I need you, but you need me. Not just because you’re a projection of a part of myself, but because I’m also a real part of you. Each of us is a real part of the other. You may be the raw force behind my sex drive, but I’m the only one who can help you grow beyond mere lust, to help you have a deeper, more nuanced, more self-respecting and other-respecting understanding of your sexuality –– of our sexuality –– regarding women. You need me as much as I need you. Neither one of us can survive or thrive without the other.”

The Kid’s eyes wandered, as if he were deep in thought. Considering that he was a projection of his own psyche, Jason reflected, that made for an interesting paradox: His own thoughts were trying to think for themselves. Jason decided to help the Kid along.

“It’s like that old Star Trek episode, where the transporter splits Captain Kirk into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ manifestations of himself,” Jason suggested helpfully.

“Oh, yeah!” The Kid’s eyes lit up; he had always loved watching Trek reruns after school. “That’s the one where the ‘evil’ Captain Kirk goes after Yeoman Rand and...”

“And treats her as a sexual object for his own pleasure, for his own power and control, not as a worthwhile human being and a capable member of the crew,” Jason finished the Kid’s thought for him. “But it wasn’t until Kirk’s ‘good’ and ‘evil’ sides were brought back together that he could be the captain that both he and those who depended upon him needed for him to be.” Jason wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a flash of understanding in the Kid’s eyes. He also seemed to look a bit older than he had before.

“So...” the Kid said, struggling to wrap his brain around this new way of thinking, which was especially stressful since, as a mental projection, he didn’t actually have a brain to wrap around anything, “you’re saying... that there’s a joy and a pleasure to being with a woman that goes beyond using and possessing her for my own lust and control...?”

“The only reason why you want that control is because you feel like you don’t have any,” Jason replied. “That’s what romantic disappointment and unrequited love do to you. I learned that the hard way when my first wedding engagement fell apart. But I’ve since learned what it means to be in a mutual relationship of love, trust, and respect with a woman, as well as one of sexual desire and fulfillment. You’re still stuck in feelings of social inadequacy and personal rejection, but things won’t always be that way.”

“So...” the Kid responded, “you’re telling me... to be patient?”

“Yes,” Jason answered, “both emotionally and sexually. There can be a real pleasure in delaying your own gratification, and sometimes even in foregoing it, for the sake of another. I know it’s hard to understand, but that’s the difference between mere lust and real love. You haven’t learned that yet, but you will.”

The Kid was quiet for several seconds, lost in thought, and, though Jason couldn’t be sure, his younger self seemed to be maturing ever so slightly before his eyes. Jason finally broke the silence. “So, Kid,” he asked, smiling magnanimously, “whaddya think?”

The Kid lifted his head and looked Jason in the eye. “I think...” he said slowly, “I think… we’d better go check on that girl.”

Shit! Jason cursed himself as his smile evaporated. The girl! He had become so wrapped up in trying to help the Kid come to terms with relational reality that he had momentarily forgotten about her, and now she might well pay for his self-psychoanalysis with her life. Jason quickly turned and began sprinting down the trail, hoping that he wasn’t too late, the Kid racing to keep up with him.



––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

To be continued in Part 3: “Damsel in Distress.”