“Guy Stuff,” by Robert Long Foreman, appears in the May/June 2018 issue of KROnline.
It was then that her wet lips met his wet lips and the frenching began.
Here’s a question for our times: How do you write about sex—bad sex, confusing sex, teenage sex—in the age of Trump and Weinstein and Weiner and, well, pretty much every dude everywhere? How do you write about sex if you are a dude, and that pen you’re clutching suddenly looks . . . kind of obvious?
They knew what they were getting into. They were modern teenagers. They’d had access to the internet for years.
One possible answer, as we discover in Robert Long Foreman’s amazing story “Guy Stuff,” is to embrace what is most absurd in our passionate embraces, or rather in our expectations about them. Put two nervous teenagers in a basement rec room, and you get not simply a recipe for disaster, but a scene of innocence. It’s clear they don’t know what they’re getting into, despite all the free internet porn they’ve consumed: behind the brave masks, it’s guess and grab, a shot in the dark, a silent, fumbling WTF!?!
This isn’t right, she thought. Something is wrong. But she knew going into this that Brandon was a fixer-upper.
And that’s just where this story gets started. What do you do when it all goes . . . not wrong, exactly, but . . . sideways? When you feel everything you thought you knew about sex, gender, even basic human anatomy, slip from your grasp? Foreman puts the reader on that couch, feeling around in the dark, thinking, Wait, what? Before you know it, you’re in Rocky Flintstone territory, but the story just keeps on going: off-piste, through the guardrails, straight off the end of that calcific promontory.
She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. Something had definitely happened.
As our fiction editor put it in her reader’s comments, “This story is bonkers.” There are too many spoilers for me to say more. But I can offer you my editor’s guarantee that what transpires in that basement will take you by surprise, shatter your expectations, and have you weeping either with laughter or despair for our species. This story is crazy, but is it any crazier than all the other guy stuff we endure in the name of our culture’s myths of sex and gender?