Baby Doll excerpt by Mykola Dementiuk

In Baby Doll, Mykola Dementiuk has again brought us an unusual story of a youth growing up in New York City. Skipping school as a daily routine, the main character of Baby Doll finds himself spending time at the East River Park, looking for girls. Instead he finds a pair of pink underwear which take him on an adventure that shapes his future.

Baby Doll gives us a literary look at the complicated psychodynamics of love and sex between a boy and a man in America in the early ‘80s (the beginning era of AIDS, sex-offender witch-hunts, and gay/transvestite visibility). Like a good movie, Baby Doll is definitely worth giving a second (or third) read. Mykola’s mastery at storytelling and excellent writing will keep you engaged the first time through, but subsequent readings will help you understand the complex forces that unfold between the characters. You may question his opinions on femininity and relationships, but you won’t be able to ignore Mykola’s love for words as well as his understanding of a boy’s feelings and behavior.

Sexual counselor Sally Miller (who edited Baby Doll) provides some insight into the story in the afterword.


Baby Doll
Publisher: Synergy Press (2006)
ISBN: 0-9758581-2-2

Excerpt:

At first he couldn’t believe they were an actual pair of panties, but they were the color – pink, what else? – and the size – almost palm size – of a real pair. Except for the soiled hardness at the crotch they were satiny and enticing, but too new-looking to be lying discarded on the grass. Another swatch of nearby pink caught his eye, and he was almost afraid to believe it, like some kind of miracle or gift from the Universe: a bra, a pink bra to match the pink panty!

Where was the girl that went with them? Also lying somewhere about? He looked at the two articles of clothing, his penis stiff, and snatched up the panty. He shuddered at the feel of satin – the first time he had ever touched panty-satin – almost blinded by the sensation spinning up his arm and through his body. Like a thief suppressing his greedy enjoyment and victory for later, he quickly shoved the panty in his pocket. But the bra he lingered over, stealthily walking around it, examining it from each angle, gingerly nudging it with his foot as if scared something might jump at him from under the crushed satiny cups. . . . What? A mouse? A spider? A tit?. . . He snatched up the bra.

He clutched the underclothes in his fists, one in each pocket, pulsing his fingers in and out of the material, and walked quickly to the nearby restroom. It wasn’t so much that the bra and panties reminded him of a woman, a girl, a female, but of things feminine, that is, of stereotypes of the feminine: of softness and gentleness, of lolling about on satin sheets, caressing oneself in powders and creams, in bubble-baths and perfumes, of being taken care of and loved, and all because of one’s natural birthright of having been born female. . . .

Where did these skewed images of the feminine come from? A mother who nightly cleaned Wall Street offices? A drunken father who catered to 3rd Avenue addict/prostitutes, then came home to beat his wife? Teachers and nuns in a grade school who periodically ejected him as unfit for class participation? Too many television shows with beautiful actresses playing roles they could never be in real life?

Or perhaps each of us is born with an innate hatred of the other gender, a hatred that in some, borders on jealousy and regret that one has been cheated in being born different, being born male, or being born female, and striving to correct that ‘error’ of the commonplace with exaggerations of one’s unique difference. Dykes bullying like males, queens softening into females, and each in a ‘new’ gender role as grotesquely facile as the one they’ve rejected. . . .

The boy couldn’t wait to try on his new garments. The restroom was cold, its brown wall and floor tiles doing little to instill a sense of warmth or comfort. The name – comfort station – was a misnomer, as there was no comfort here. It was strictly utilitarian: you entered to pee, to shit, to wash your hands, and you left. Even the toilet stalls were doorless – why have privacy for a natural bodily function everyone had to do? – the toilet bowls open and exposed, and though he had never been interrupted while taking a shit, it was always a hurried roosting lest someone did enter.

Even his chronic masturbations at the upright urinals, sometimes six or seven times a day (not counting his evening ones at home) were also hurried for fear of interruption, but he was always left alone. On rainy days he stayed in the restroom for hours at a time until the boring sameness of the urinals and stall and his own repetitive jerk-off images drove him back out into the desolate park.

There was nothing, or anyone, to be afraid would interrupt him, but public places are just that, public. Just as he had often unobtrusively watched lovers on benches, so he, too, often felt himself being watched and observed, and would turn to catch someone, usually a man, eyeing him from across the baseball fields or on a pathway leading from the river promenade.

Thus it was a nervous and hurried disrobing. He wanted the garments on him since he had first spotted them, disbelieving his good fortune at their unexpected appearance in the dirt. But the enigma of the girl who had worn them intrigued him: did she run off naked in the night, pursued by someone equally naked, like satyrs and nymphs gadding about in forests and woods, free and uncaring of who saw or condemned or even joined in?

Perhaps he should have explored further, perhaps she had discarded a garter belt nearby, or dark nylons, a skirt, a blouse . . . but he shook his head, his breathing deepening, forcing him to slow down, relax, take it easy . . . put them on one at a time . . . the bra first. . . . He held it to his face, the bra surging into his mouth, his nose and eyes into each curved cup, imaging he smelled flesh, stiff nipples,soft tits, hungry lust and passion aching to be touched, clasped, caressed, licked, sucked, fucked. . . .

How did he naturally seem to know the complicated logic of putting on a bra? It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, at least for a girl. . . . He had once seen his mother do it, and wanting to do the same, he tugged a spare bra around his chest. She pulled it away, chiding him that when a boy puts on a girl’s clothes his mother will die. . . . Mother was another elusive word he played with, a word filled with so many meaningful definitions and conjectures, so many threatening ones, so many forgiving ones, so many worthless and meaningless ones too. . . .

He held the panties to his face, his eyes and mouth an expression of fear and lust, his penis more stiff than he had ever been able to rouse himself. With the first touch of the satiny material on his legs the panties seemed to rise up his flesh on their own, shimmering up his thighs and into the crook of his ass. Only his erection proved a hindrance, the panty straining to cover, to clutch, to smother the unfamiliar protrusion. . . . Then he heard the footstep and saw the man. His face went white and his eyes widened in fear. One arm automatically crossed his chest as the other tried to shield his crotch.

With one more step the man was on him, tugging the boy’s cock out of the panty, groping the flat brassiere cups, and the boy’s ejaculation was immediate: sudden, shuddering, devastating. For the first time in his life he had been sexually touched by another. The satisfaction of that touching was unlike anything he had ever experienced in touching himself. Strange hands on his penis and body, especially dressed as he was, and his destiny opened up to immediate fulfillment, his eruption like a last and final release of his solitary boyhood – an oozing, lubricating liquid that spilled not only out of his penis and scrotum but from every pore and sensate fiber of his body and soul. There was no buckling or shooting, only a desperate clutching of the man, holding his shoulders and wrapping his legs around the man’s as he was lifted off the ground and pounded against the bathroom stall wall. There was no penetration, yet the boy felt himself fucked as hard and deep as any girl.


www.mykoladementiuk.com
www.SynergyBookService.com; (Sally@SynergyBookService.com)
Synergy Press
POB 8
Flemington NJ 08822
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