Life After Sex

Featuring another of the songs I wrote in Malta in January

I’m not sure I got my share, but I’m pretty confident I got all I’m ever going to have gotten.

When I was back in Los Angeles in 2015, I asked the other two males in the band I was in how many gals they’d, uh, enjoyed intimacy with. The guitarist said 150, and the bass guitarist “in the hundreds”.

Me? Maybe 60.

I understand that 60 might sound prodigious to an incel, or to someone who married his childhood sweetheart, and has been faithful, but it’s paltry for a C-list rock star.

I do have my reasons. I got a very late start. I was 19 when First Girlfriend and I first danced the dirty hula. Even in the days when a great many women (almost invariably the wrong ones) seemed to find me irresistible in my early 30s, my lifelong shyness impeded me. And over the course of my life, I’ve been serially monogamous, first for 41 months, and then, with Second Life Partner, five years, six and a half with First Wife, 11 with Fourth Life Partner, and 26 and a half years (and counting) with Mrs. Mendelsohn (who prefers the original, legal spelling). I’ve strayed a few times. By contrast, Mr. None of Mr. In-the-Hundreds’ unions has ever lasted longer than a couple of months.

I turned 78 a few days ago. (I’ll be accepting felicitations and especially gifts until the first of June.) Little Elvis (which I’ve called my equipment since learning that’s what The (White) King of Rock and Roll called his) hasn’t been glimpsed in his former magnificence for months. (I woke up late in 2024 with him in full readiness, saying, “Remember me?”) Maybe every 10 days, when I need to step away from whatever I’m working on for a few minutes, it occurs to me that it might be fun to give him a nice polish, if you see what I mean, as in my days of implacable priapism, but he never seems interested.

I am never aroused by sex scenes in movies or TV, though back in 1976, the opening sequence of the film Lenny, featuring Valerie Perrine as the stripper Lenny Bruce came to love, had the same effect on me (which is to say Little Elvis) as Tina Turner and the Ikettes at a lunchtime performance at my university eight years before.

I have never watched porn. It bores me.

Johnny Rotten is thought, early in the Sex Pistols’ ascendancy, to have characterized as “[sex] is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises”. It seems to me, when I look back, that the best part of sex is the first moment, when the lissome stranger you’ve persuaded to come home with you to see your etchings allows you to put your tongue in her mouth, and then her hand on Little Elvis, or when your gal, (all too) aware of your fetishes, has made herself gorgeous in the way she knows thrills you most steps into view wearing a look that says both “See something you like, big boy?” and “I love you.”

I’ve never fucked (that is, engaged carnally) with another, uh, dude. Once, many decades ago, a key figure in rock and roll history — a prolific discoverer of remarkable talent — came on to me, (very) gently shaming me for my uptight non-pansexuality. Twenty years later, the dear friend who’d invited me to stay with him and his wife after my first marriage disintegrated came on more overtly, but once more I declined. (What if I really liked it?) Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, if for no other reason than it might have been a nice way to express my deep affection for and gratitude to my friend. (Whom I haven’t spoken to in years, and can’t track down because, like the first girlfriend I…recruited after somehow managing to get my shyness to fuck off for a minute, he has the fourth most common surname in America, and a common first name.)

Another of the songs I began writing in Malta in January 2025!

I’d enjoy having sex with you.
Just look down and you’ll see it’s true
I’ve got serious skills and you won’t want for thrills
I’d enjoy having sex with you

Having sex with you would flood my soul with joy
Please allow me to. By the way, my name is Roy

You are hesitant I can see. But I don’t have an STD
I just bathed. I don’t reek. You’ll enjoy my technique
I’d enjoy having sex with you

I’m on fire with passion for you.
I’ve been waiting all song for my cue
I buy condoms in bulk If you spurn me I’ll sulk
I’d enjoy having sex with you

©2025 John Mendelsohn. All rights reserved.