43. Youthful folly

You want to know about the first girl? She had Spanish looks, a little Jewish blood and large breasts. She went to an all-girls school and she had fallen deep for the state religion. She converted to lesbianism for a term, as a kind of challenge to the man who would tame her. An appeal: please, I am not the prettiest but, please, you must look at me. What is the worst thing for a girl? To be overlooked. It’s like I don’t even exist. All eyes on us.

Today, twenty years later, she might have converted to a different sect; she might have made the permanent migration and tested her body’s plastic nature with testosterone and the surgeon’s knife. In those days, we were pretty corrupt—even for innocent youths—but our religious frenzy was tamer than today. We waved a rainbow flag and dipped into gay bars and felt daring. We kicked the dead body of Christ and mocked his awkward followers, so keen to offer tea and apologies and sympathy. Well, Christ, your soldiers have become a soft bunch; so terribly, terribly nice—how could we respect them?

I say that we were not so innocent. We, the first with the Internet, the first to explore the full spectrum of hardcore pornography. We had to cultivate patience then, my lad. Those whooping modems delivered a suggestion of pubic hair over five minutes. Could you stand it? I warrant you youngsters would have suffered premature ejaculation…then again, you start so young: a girlfriend relates that a friend’s toddler entered the living room waving his tablet, exploring a threesome at just past three.

Patience. This is what the geneticists call a low time preference society. The reason the West conquered the world: we have individuality and patience and a level of intelligence that is just right. We can also wait for our pornography. Of course, at school, it was a different matter: the donkey fucking a girl was a popular clip, it was impossible to achieve this from home. Years later, working at a German bank, I saw the same thing; not the same girl, or the same donkey, but close enough. Bestiality only works in an institutional setting, school or German bank amounts to the same thing.

They say nobody cares about religion. Nonsense, I say we all far too religious; we are complete fanatics. In those days we were all good little fanatics, this girl a fanatic for LGBT—putting a high price on her great udders. Others, we cared about the environment or climate change or vegetarianism or the war in Iraq. Religious distractions, no? All an old man can say is that the fervour has kicked up a bit. I see the statues come down and the cities burn and the dicks chopped off. I saw it all in genesis twenty years ago, but, in my old age, I have become a disreputable cynic. Yes, I am the man who sits in the corner and chuckles when young people speak and then says: “Oh really, is that so?” And they badger me and say: “What? What? What do you mean?” And I laugh and say: “You’ll see, you’ll see.”

Only the autists survived; everyone else, even the most intelligent, especially the most intelligent, went along with it—and they felt so good, so pure as they slit their own wrists. The autists had some company; the men with thick, broad skulls and a taste for teeth cracked under a boot. You want the esoteric truth? The holy people are the difficult, the disagreeable, and the grumpy: the men in little wooden huts in the forest and the council houses draped in flags that say: E-N-G-E-R-L-U-N-D. Well, not exactly; but you get the point, so easy to mock—the good guys.

What happened to her? I have no idea. She dropped the state religion in the end and, perhaps, she became a Mormon—I just hope the tits didn’t go to waste.