Jailbait

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I tried not to ask too many questions because they only inspired outrage and scorn. Along the way, he name-dropped writers and editors. Finally, he turned to sex.

I played along, but I was no Lolita. This was a game of egos. If I wanted what Dicks had to give me — the wisdom of his experience as a great writer — I would have to venerate him and lead him on, to flirt.

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Which would be pathetic on your part. Women and their boohoos and neediness. Our first meeting concluded with a writing assignment. I called him a week later. The whole place was dark.

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The kitchen, even on the sunniest day, was a cold chamber of shadows. Dicks and I sat across from each other, a small desk lamp on the kitchen table illuminating the printed pages I brought with me. At each meeting, he made me a martini.

He ate cereal and smoked marijuana. Conversation was mostly one-sided: None of the work I showed him was very good, or very honest.

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But that was beside the point. I just wanted to listen to him talk. If he spent five minutes addressing my writing, I felt my visit was worthwhile. My ambition was not to be successful — to publish books and be renowned, rich and powerful, like Dicks; I wanted, truly, to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence, away from the stupidity I saw in my classmates, teachers and parents, or on television and on the subway. I understood that life would be meaningless unless my art reached toward an understanding of who I was, and what I was doing here.

Part of what made him interesting was that I felt he would dismiss me the moment I bored him.

I kept calling and asking if I could visit. When I turned eighteen, our meetings became more overtly sexual in tone. One day he took me by the hand and led me into his office, unearthed a huge cardboard box, and proceeded to pull out photographs, mostly Polaroids, of young, attractive women.

There were hundreds of them.

Another time, I raised my arms to lift a book off a high shelf and Dicks traced his finger over my exposed stomach. Nobody had touched me there before. I can do more with this one finger than some college kid could do with his entire body.

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The touch lingered long enough for me to be stunned for a minute. I made up an excuse to leave quickly that day.

But I called again before too long. Then there was the kiss at his kitchen table. Sixty-five-year-old lips, cold, slack, weirdly passionless. When he sat back down, he asked if he could take me to bed. He just wanted to pleasure me. We argued about this for hours. Yes, I stayed for hours and argued. They were some of the most rhetorically challenging hours of my life. I was alive and engaged, watchful and cautious with my body language, arrogant and flirtatious in my speech.

The last time I saw Dicks, I brought a new story. Learn More about jailbait. Resources for jailbait Time Traveler!

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