Author: Jimmy "the Perv" Rev History Rev .00 - 12/12/2015 Rev .01 - 03/18/2022
Juicy Fruit
I don’t believe in Destiny, Karma, Fate, or any of that other hippy-dippy non-sense. I don’t believe in Fairies or Unicorns, and never in one thousand years did I believe I would end up a farmer.
***
The Breezy Bean Eco-Farmstead and Permaculture Center, was and might still be located in south-western Iowa, ‘bout 50 miles off the Missouri river and the same out the city of Omaha, Nebraska. The land is flat and beautiful. The dirt is black as potting soil and every bit as soft and giving. It was the kind of place begging for someone to plant roots deep down into, and that’s exactly what the Greenbeans did. Oak and River Greenbean to be precise.
This is a true story, not an allegory.
The Greenbeans were regular people who ended up becoming Greenbeans in the first place as a choice they made for themselves together when they got hitched: “It’s more egalitarian that way,” they said, “rather than favoring one person’s name or the other.” In other words and other times, it would have been appropriate to call the Greenbeens a couple of hippies, but those words and times would fail to capture the changes in counterculture between the late sixties and the early aughts. River and Oak might have been farmsteaders, but they had spent their youth fighting neo-nazis in city streets and moshing the nights away, same as me.
I could call River and Oak Greenbean an attractive couple, but that would be severely understating the level of raw, sexy, hot-Hot-HOT that comes from combining human beings that in love with each other, the world and their own roles in it. Real talk now, as their assistant, I was more than a touch infatuated with the both of them in ways I was not ready to admit or manage. Working on the farm, I was sinking ever deeper into a titillating tension of personal discomfort on account of how comfortable the Greenbeans were with nudity and public acts of titulation.
It would over-complicate this story now to speak of the interworking dynamics of an anti-authoritarian worker’s collective and the complex emotional web of young field hands that come and go over the course of a growing season at Breezy Bean, so instead of going off into the weeds with those details, let’s us pretend, for the sake of simplicity, that I was all alone as an field hand on this farm.
Alone.
Alone with Oak, River, and the two little string beans that River and Oak had thus far brought forth onto this earth: Duck and Goose. Oak, River, Goose and Duck. Each and every one of them was perfect and happy running butt-naked, wild and free around the growing humid heat of a river valley summer. Each and everyone out there at the Breezy Bean but me.
It is shockingly unspectacular to admit that I, Jimmy the Perv, have a predictably droll and boring sense of shame, but there it is! I do. Especially in regards to the human body and my repressed sexualities.
Especially in regards to human bodies and sexy-sexualities in close proximity to my own.
Who wants to hear, much less tell, a tale of body-shaming cowardice in the face of sexual opportunity? Can’t I just bend the truth here–just a touch–for the sake of my own ego? Can’t I paint a picture of bravadocious, polyamorous explorations and liberatory sexual transcendence?
Perhaps.
But if I were to lie to you, here, about something as mundane as my own muddled sexual identity, rooted in disgrace, then how will I ever have the opportunity to discover if there is a deeper truth that exists within myself? No, my indignity cannot be evaded with a lie, not even one of omission. I am that deviant per-vert mortified only by the possibility that I too might be capable of experiencing sexual gratification without causing harm or discomfort to those around me.
In the service of making peace with this reality, I have found it best practice to excuse myself from the distressingly frequent opportunities that I have been presented with to participate in acts of collaborative nudity and sexual revelry. There is no un-awkward to turn down an orgy, but I have learned how to find less-awkward ways of making myself unavailable for the circumstances that lead to them. Unfortunately, even this skill proved difficult to exercise effectively at Breezy Bean Eco-Farmstead and Permaculture Center.
There are just certain hard limits to the potential for modesty on a not-quite-hippy-dippy Eco-farmstead due to the circumstantial necessities of life on a not-quite-hippy-dippy Eco-Farmstead.
Oak and River, like true environmentally-responsible stewards, had decided not to include any unsustainable, bourgeois entrapment like an indoor bathroom into the farmhouse of their dreams—or “The Stalk,” as it was called by the Beans. Instead, they opted to “always piss into the wind,” and built an external self-composting outhouse for bodily functions not related to urination. For the bathing functions typically reserved for the privacy of a bathing room, River and Oak dug out a pond in the middle of their property, to be shared by all Eco-Farmstead and Permaculture Center residents and called this monster of indecency: “The Cleaning Hole.”
No pun intended, but farming is dirty work.
As a farmer, you either bathe daily or else stink in such a fashion as to be capable of smelling yourself over the stank of the cow manure you are shoveling. Oak and River made a habit of taking their daily bath together, at the end of the workday, and suggested that I did the same. Having a particular appreciation for the physical forms of the adult human Greenbeans, I found the idea of joining the two of them in the Cleaning Hole to be more than I was emotionally prepared to handle.
At least it was more than I wanted to handle in the company of others.
Instead of heeding their daily suggestion to “jump in,” I would excuse myself from the moment by slapping my stomach with both hands and insist that it was an ethical imperative to prioritize eating over hyjinx…er, hygiene. River or Oak were either kind of oblivious to my discomfort at the idea of joining them, or obliviously kind enough not to make an issue of it, but in either case, it didn’t prevent them from thoroughly investigating each other’s every last nook and cranny in full view of the only and outdoor kitchen on the farm.
An outdoor kitchen makes a lot more sense in practice than it might in theory to the uninitiated farmhand. You don’t really have to worry that much about cleaning the floors and, in the hot months of summer, a full open breeze is no minor salvation. The full view of fields and the tree line behind them is quite pleasant as well, although, in relative proximity to the Cleaning Hole, it could be, at times, a little too pleasant.
To distract myself, every evening after the work day, I would give my entire attention to the act of peeling spuds, rinsing sprouts, or quartering cucumbers, while Oak and River would give theirs to rubbing themselves and each other up, and down, and all ‘round that Cleaning Hole. They would spare me not one sideways glance to notice the great lengths I went to avoid glancing back. It was like they didn’t even care how carefully I paid them absolutely no attention what-so-ever.
No attention at all.
Not one little peek over to the glistening globules of water drops and all-natural Castile bio-degradable suds dancing pregnantly down backs and fingers and nipples and all the other parts of those closely enamored human bodies I was not paying no mind. No! The entirety of my being remained firmly immersed in the duty of over-cooking and slightly burning every dish that I ever attentively prepared for dinner.
***
It would be fair to say that, by my sixth week on the Bean, a tension had arisen within me that was starting to press hard up against my meager limits of self-control. I was living as a guest in a small farmhouse occupied by a family of four. It was a lifestyle that afforded me few solitary opportunities to allay my straining floodgate. If I was going to keep from embarrassing myself with a set of soggy underpants, I was going to have to get creative and make some serious me time away from peeping ears and eyes.
***
Conceptually, I have never been a fan of bathroom masturbation, not even under the most welcoming of circumstances. However, touching myself downtown in an outhouse was completely out of the question. Equally as disturbing, there was never a moment of the day that little feet and eyes weren’t on the prowl inside or out, so any daytime delight around the Bean was a definitive no-go for me, no matter how normal such a thing probably was there. Night was really just as difficult an option. The Stalk was so fully utilized by its Beans that the probability of someone walking in on me was too great to risk anywhere inside I could think of.
The pressure of the situation continued to build and build until late one night, after a particularly sensuous and vigorous River-and-Oak-bathing session, I resolved to grab hold of my own destiny before it escaped nocturnally on its own. I decided to sneak out and please myself beneath the moon and summer stars like the primitive primate of a human being I had become.
It wasn’t uncommon for folks to get up in the middle of the night and step outside to relieve themselves off the porch, or even make trips down to the composting crapper, so—to not be disturbed—I needed to put some space between the house and myself. A couple hundred yards from The Stalk, across the vegetable beds, there was a copse of oak, walnut and maple trees that seemed like as private a place as I was going to find to do my deed, and so I wandered softly off in that direction with one hand in my pants—“pre-gaming”—and looking forward to getting done with this whole embarrassing situation as quickly as possible.
I was about half way across the farthest field, about 50 feet from the tree line when I heard a combination of a howl and a grunt from ahead that nearly unnerved me enough to give up my errant quest. I am not saying the creature residing inside that bunch of trees was a mama bear or a werewolf, but the idea of invading any unknown creature’s home to profane myself seemed both reckless and terrifying. I knew I wasn’t going to walk any closer to those woods, but it had been so long since I had even touched myself that I could tell I wasn’t far from coming round the home stretch.
The fear of the unknown ahead and the potential for discovery behind only further stimulated my need, and so, right there, in the middle of that field, I decided to chance it and finish what I had started. The garden bed had housed lettuce through the first half of the season, but we had harvested the whole crop a week earlier and had just re-plowed it that morning with the intention of seeding it down with some late season greens for harvest in early fall. The field, still freshly plowed and smelling of renewal, provided me full visibility to the line of ominous trees in front of me—on the chance that untold creature got curious and left its den—but was still hidden enough from human view by the beds of peppers and tomatoes between me and The Stalk. Exhilarated by the possible dangers lurking on either side of me, and working with over a month of intensifying sexual tension, I made short work of the task at hand, my relief exploding into the dark soil beneath me.
I was free!
Free of a weight that had been dragging my entire life down into a perverse cycle of inappropriate daydreams and near misses of awkward moments involving children and half-dreamt self-fulfilling fantasies. I had found a means to escape my torment that would be repeatable if necessary, and I could serve out the rest of the summer sentence on the farm without walking around like a sexually charged firecracker waiting to go off. I apologized in a whisper to whatever mythical creature may have witnessed my rather anticlimactic performance, and made my way over to the Cleaning Hole to tidy myself up a touch before heading back inside to get the best night of sleep I had had at the Breezy Bean.
***
I awoke late the next morning.
Unfailingly, I had been the second person to awaken all summer in The Stalk as a result of sleeping in the community space that all rooms opened onto—but not that next morning. My exertion the night before had so thoroughly liberated me from my torments that I slept straight through the morning rituals of the Greenbeen family, and the sun was already up well into the sky by the time I opened my eyes.
Equally strange, the house—which never failed to be full of life and voices during the day—was completely empty. Pleasantly confused, I picked myself up, put on my work shirt and walked out on the porch to see if they had packed into the Bio-diesel van to make a run in to town or to visit relatives. I looked first to the driveway and saw the old rusty-white cargo van right in its usual resting spot but—turning around and facing the vegetable beds—I saw what had drawn the whole family outside. The farthest field, the one I had soiled the night before, was no longer barren.
Over the course of the hours I had been asleep, a jungle of giant vines—thick as my wrist—had overtaken the entire eighth-acre plot. The giant vine field would have been enough to draw anyone’s attention, but what had drawn all the Beans—Oak, River and both of the Stringbeans—out into jubilant revelry was the massive, fully ripened Moon N’ Stars watermelons growing along those vines—each one swolled up to the size of a beach ball! Upon seeing me up and out of the house, Duck—the littlest of the Beans—ran back to the house to fetch me and drag me by the arm over to the “Miracle!” I was in as much shock as anyone, but whereas they were dancing with joy around the largest, most succulent crop they had ever grown, I was overwhelmed again by a sense of shame and terror.
Not even the night could hide me from the consequence of my discomforting desires.
No one else at Breezy Bean seemed concerned in the slightest about where these monster melons could have come from. However, being relatively certain I held the answer to within my grasp the previous night, I figured it was my responsibility to urge caution as River and Oak were already in the process of trying to separate a particularly plump fruit from its vine.
“Hold on a minute, are y’all sure that we should be harvesting this strange fruit and not calling in some scientists to make sure that it is safe to—”
But my protests were cut short by the hacking swing of a machete severing fruit from vine. Freed from its stalk, the melon dropped on its side and burst open upon contact with the ground. Unable to contain the virulent life inside it any longer, the exploding fruit splattered everyone present in sweet ruby juices and chunks of delectable sweet flesh. The scent was somewhere between honey and sunshine and the flavor of melon soaked into our every pore. For Oak, River and the Stringbeans, this multi-sensory experience produced an immediate fervor for feasting: munching, licking and touching each other in all the possible ways that led to this situation in the first place. I could feel the chemical compulsion of pheromones pulling me towards them, just as strongly as they were feeling compelled towards me, but, aware the origins of this impulse, I maintained just enough of my shame-ridden sense self to run, screaming, from that humiliating field.
I ran and I ran—dripping with juices that could only be described as my own. For miles I ran—terrified to turn back—to face the evidentiary spectacle of my own perversions. I ran and I ran for days. For years. For ever.
Under a sun still baking shame into my skin.