My Mentor

Many young men in the salad days of their minority have enjoyed what is known in tonier circles as a pas de deux or a choreographed dance between two people usually in the configuration of mentor and mentee. At a propitious juncture in this person’s life a helpful witness is introduced either through conscious effort or sheer serendipity who participates as teacher and guide with their charges in the concrete mastering of a trade while hopefully offering insight into the vagaries of life as well.

Carpentry, plumbing and masonry immediately come to mind as dependable entries to commercial life, protégés studying these disciplines under the auspices of able journeymen. For the physically gifted former champions often fill the breach.

I too, had my youthful pas de deux, not with a grizzled union man or former gold medal winner, but in my case as the one and only student of a neo-cougar and proto-milf 15 years to my north who went by the unforgettable name of Skan Kee Ho… a woman of formidable carnal talents who schooled me in the arcane world of lovemaking with the attention to detail of a master criminal.

She was a married woman whose husband traveled a lot, but even when home didn’t have enough arrows in his quiver to quench her insatiable thirst for sex. Ho never thought of it as cheating, but instead viewed it as a duty to impart her knowledge in training competent stickmen, that in her view was in short supply.

            The summer of 1971 was very good to me. Pot was 10 dollars an ounce. Acid was a nickel. Lessons from this vilda chaya, free! My introduction to her came at a critical point in my life as I was hoping to transition from chronic masturbation to the more moderate consideration of losing my virginity.

            Skan Kee Ho…the inscrutable wild beast, an emancipated freedom rider of the senses was a woman of such dedication to the ancient art of man pleasing that to call her what she probably was, was an insult to the very thing that floated her considerable boat…giving pleasure. Ho was a black belt in fellatio and a grandmaster in rimming. Rumor had it that to attain that level a woman had to insert her tongue into a tiny thimble 10,000 times a day, every day for 10 years.

            My tutelage went on for most of the summer. Night after night my Asian succubus took me on a trip to the darkest trenches of desire, put me in a vice grip that were her thighs, hams that rumor had it could crush walnuts. Even at 18 I had a hard time keeping up with her insatiable carnal needs. This woman was a smoldering cauldron of molten estrogen. During our horizontal tête-à-têtes her sanctum sanctorum became so lubricious I had to wear a poncho from the Maid of the Mist lest I risk drowning in her magnificent cascading precipitate.

            I couldn’t decide which I found more erotic, the drill instructor style of her sexual commands or the fact that she could bench press 250 pounds with her tongue.

            The coup de gras of the summer came on August 30^th 1971. We were at her place. Her husband was out of town as usual. Barry White was on the turntable. We split a bottle of cheap wine or “liquid crowbar” as she liked to jokingly call it, not only to smooth away any moral impediments that might be lingering on my part, but to put her in the right frame of mind to give me a send off that could never, ever be duplicated even if I spent the next 50 years as a pool boy at the Kinsey Institute.

            For on this night not only did Skan Kee Ho invent the Rusty Trombone, the Strawberry Shortcake and The Pirate, but beat me out of a c-note as well.