MELINDA'S MAGIC PUSSY

​Justin Panson

It may be helpful to review the dictionary definition of Prurient, one of those vocab words that they make you learn in junior high: Inclined to have or characterized by lascivious or lustful thoughts and desires; arousing or appealing to sexual desire, marked by an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire; bawdy, erotic, lewd, lurid, provocative.


A NIGHT IN THE DIVE BARS
I hadn’t seen Tony in quite a while. After he and his wife got divorced, he moved across town and slipped out of the regular rotation. He’s a dead ringer for the handsome Don Draper of Mad Men fame, with a cool don’t give a damn vibe and savage wit. He and Stanley were close. I met them at the Round-Up, a little downtown dive. Stanley and I go way back, since our wives have been friends since high school. He and I used to have all sorts of camping and canoe misadventures, and a semi-regular Bourbon and Power Tools Night out in the garage when we’d build crude home furnishings, with a seat-of-the-pants circular saw method that would have made real carpenters wince. Somehow, there are no missing digits.

It was just us neighborhood dads catching up, having a few pops, a few laughs, a brief refuge on a Thursday from the hampster wheel of work and school functions. The closeness of the three of us came right back. I was texting another of our buddies, Colonel Jimmy, to come join us. The Colonel hails from Gainesville, Florida and wears his southern pride on his sleeve. He has an outsized, free associative party mode in which he slips into a sort of latter day Foghorn Leghorn persona. He’s one of these rare specimens who can drink and smoke cigarettes all night, and then wake up and run a marathon without much care. No reply from Jimmy.

We were on the back half of the evening, with empty glasses in front of us, and got into the mode of wrapping it up, which was interrupted by the modest suggestion of a nite cap on the way home. The potentially ill-advised “Nite Cap,” when you’re not ready to cash it in yet…but you probably should just go home. “Let’s hit the Flame Club. Yeah, sure, why not.” 

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JESSE’S GIRL
This other little dive joint was right in our hood, a dark long galley bar, home to sportsters on game days and a crowd of gnarly drunks and fools in the late night. We got in there and posted up, checking out the crowd. We spotted Melinda across the way. She was one of the moms from the elementary school where all of our kids went. She was with this big dude and they came over to say hello. She beamed with energy, greeting Stan and me with a hug, and then she turned to Tony and gave him a full blown kiss on the lips…with tongue. I looked at Tony and he sort of raised his eyebrows to say “did that just happen.” She introduced her friend, Jesse, a sort of strong silent type. We were all well tipsy and the vibe was good. The obligatory joke was made that she was “Jesse’s Girl.”

​Did I mention Melinda was a smokin’ hot babe with a brunette bob and a tight little body? She was from Louisiana and had this flirty, charming southern personality. Her recent backstory was notorious in the neighborhood: She had split from her well-heeled husband a year or two before, embarking on a wild period where this tradwife was having fun being bisexual, cavorting with a luscious babe named Trinity, among others. I’m not making this shit up. This was obviously high-quality, scandalous gossip in our little parochial school world.

Just then Colonel Jimmy waltzed in and again Melinda greeted him with a French kiss. Tony and I exchanged another look. She and Jimmy had an ongoing friendly Florida-Louisiana rivalry and they were mixing it up to great effect. We were all feeling loose and speaking quite openly, At one point I asked what sort of trouble they were looking for tonight. In the banter that ensued it came out that she and Jesse were swingers and were trolling for a third, for a little play date. So in the spirit of the moment we began spotting people at the bar for their consideration. Jesse shared that they liked to troll rural watering holes and she, being so hot, would get a lot of rednecks hitting on her and he would end up getting into fights and dodging haymakers. Maybe a combo of sexy thrill seeking and Likes-to-Fight guy?

In a neighborhood full of golf obsessed dad-bros and sculpted self-important yoga moms THIS seemed really interesting…and fun! Here was this empowered woman, beaming a Cheshire Cat smile, on the arm of some well-built thug of a character and she didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought. That was badass. What ensued was a totally honest discussion about sexuality...four guys and a couple, and somehow it all flowed quite naturally. She just came out and said “I don’t care what people think, sometimes I like licking pussy better than sucking dick.” We dudes kind of laughed and said “us too....we understand that."

Maybe to bring Jesse into the conversation she told us Jesse has a big dick and began looking through her phone for a picture. We were like no, no, we don’t want to see Jesse’s junk. We want to see pics of you. She tried to show us and we sort of put our hands in front of our faces in mock horror. He pulled up a few shots of Melinda, close-ups of her in some kind of black strappy bondage outfit. 


I HAVE A MAGIC PUSSY
Then switching back to the female anatomy, she came right out and proclaimed “I have a Magic Pussy.” This was quite funny and intriguing. We asked stupid clarifying questions around such a qualitative claim, and Jesse jumped in and confirmed, having been to that promised land, that Melinda did indeed have a Magic Pussy. It was all pretty damn funny. Here’s this woman in complete command, holding court with five dudes, talking all this junk, the power and command she had based on honesty and good humor! At some point Stanley lapsed into a quiet mode, which he does when he’s drinking. And she turned on him, “You’re judging me!” she accused. He assured her he wasn’t and that he was just buzzed.

Later, as if to break every last neighborhood taboo we were asking which moms from the neighborhood she thought were fuckable. She went through a list and eventually mentioned my wife, Anna, who is this Tina Fey smart-girl beauty, and Melinda said, “I’d fuck her.” Without missing a beat I replied, “I’d watch that.” This got Melinda and Jesse very interested and they were practically pleading with me to ask Anna. I tried to explain to them that my wife is a conventional woman, and that this would likely never happen. Optimists that they were, they maintained that you never know.

Just then Jesse, who was mostly quiet through this whole shit show, spoke up and offered me some advice. He said you can’t ask her all at once, you have to break it up into three smaller pieces to ease her into the idea. “Jesse, my man! I am a communications professional and that is exactly correct—right out of the Communications Textbook, the multi-part reveal when disclosing a tricky piece of information.” I think he even started to script it out for me. This big lug was suddenly much more interesting, with his strategic advice. I again tried to lower expectations, but promised them I would ask my wife. Finally this whole thing wound down and we exited the bar, leaving Melinda and Jesse to their hunting expedition. Were I a writer of fiction I might have crafted a much more spicy end to the evening.
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​SOME KIND OF FEVER DREAM
I woke up the next morning feeling like I had some kind of fever dream, wondering if that all really happened. “Anna, I’ve got a crazy story for you,” I said as we were laying in bed, and I told her the whole thing. When I finished she looked at me with a disapproving eye and said, “So now you want to know if…” “Yes,” I said, “So what do you think, hey, I promised I would ask….” As expected, Anna just shook her head at what an idiot she had married and gave it a definitive “Ahh, NO!” And we sort of laughed it off.

That night remains surreal, to have encountered someone who put their deeper impulses right out there, an honesty and freedom that most people are pretty afraid of. And such an intriguing personality, this fun and proudly southern woman, who happens to also be a good mom—if you can process that much cognitive dissonance.

This is also the tale of a sheltered, vanilla family man who gets a tiny glimpse of the risqué side of life, which kindles the deviant curiosity that lives in every man’s soul. Or maybe I am really just a cheap voyeur, exploiting these lurid details for my writing project. Guilty. It's obvious I am a little too fascinated by this story for my own good.


DISTURBING REVELATIONS
In the aftermath some disturbing details emerged. A couple weeks after our encounter, Melinda posted a close-up of her hand sporting a diamond ring. And then some time later we heard the engagement was off, and that Jesse had been beating her up. Why is that not a total surprise? Then later we learned that Jesse was an ex-con who had been in the clink for God knows what. Poor Melinda, I thought, with affection for her and concern for the nasty, hot mess of a relationship she had gotten herself into.

​In an increasingly sexualized culture this little interlude isn’t all that extreme, really, compared to the openly nasty stuff you see out there. It brings up the idea of how the dreams of everyday people are animated by wild, kinky fantasies, and how most of us are able to keep these dreams compartmentalized. Why don't we act on such powerful temptations? So much of the interesting and spicy parts of life are contained behind the facade of politeness and so-called civility—maybe a necessary suppression. But every so often you hear someone saying the quiet parts out loud. Such was the case on that memorable night.


EPILOGUE
Melinda actually ended up finding the “happily ever after” to her story. She moved on from that wild rebound period and has been in a solid relationship with a good dude for something like five years. Right on!

In the months that followed our encounter, my buddies and I continued to be intrigued and perplexed by such a fantastic prospect as a Magic Pussy. How could we not be? It’s like crack for the sex-addled male mind. Over a few beverages, we had a little followup discussion in which we put the prospect through its theoretical paces. Unfortunately, The Magic Pussy, as a concept, was eventually disproved, under the cold rationality of syllogistic logic. To wit, we determined that definitionally ALL pussies are magic—and therefore Melinda’s pussy, in the particular, could not be magic. Damn you Aristotle!