History of a Couch

Originally published in my story collection College Dive Bar, 1 A.M. (currently out of print).

1985

Purchased from Lazarus Furniture Gallery by Connie Jacobson (frigid, blonde). Three-cushioned, overstuffed, powder-blue upholstery. Assembled in China from cheap materials and even cheaper labor. Connie put it in the parlor, a room where her family was forbidden to sit, and it languished there for the next seven years.

1993

In February, Connie’s eldest daughter Darla got drunk at a high school keg party and stumbled home with Darrin Angelino, her boyfriend of two weeks. They snuck into the house and into the parlor, as it was the room situated furthest from Darla’s sleeping parents upstairs.

Darla got two fingers stuffed up her young snatch for the first time on the blue couch, while Darrin got a hand job, his firm ass clenching and relaxing as Darla worked his thick Italian cock, a real eye-popper of a piece that would prove to be the biggest cock Darla would ever encounter in her life. Watching him come, she felt like she’d successfully operated some obscure piece of machinery.

The couch was imbued for the first time with human secretions—fresh teenage come, vaginal juices, the musk of Darrin’s asshole.

1994

Darla went to college, and Connie coped by purchasing new parlor furniture. The blue couch was moved to the family room where Rusty Jacobson, Connie’s husband, masturbated on it for the next five years on an almost nightly basis.

He had a routine that involved waiting until Connie went to bed, and then going to his special spot in the basement where he kept his porn, panties, and other unmentionables. He’d lay face down on the couch—his favorite position—humping his panty-clad cock against the cushions until he came, his load invariably soaking through the silky fabric and subtly wetting the upholstery.

He always laundered the panties. He never cleaned the couch.

1997-1998

Clifford Jacobson, Connie and Rusty’s only son, got a girlfriend. From November to August, they fucked on the couch whenever they had the opportunity, usually late on weekend nights after Rusty did his business and went to bed.

Sandra, Clifford’s girlfriend, wouldn’t let Cliff fuck her pussy for the first few months of their courtship, so they’d eat each other. Sandra was tolerant of letting Cliff blow his load in her mouth, and sometimes she’d swallow, but Cliff produced voluminous loads, and some come would inevitably leak out and spill on the cushions. Sandra, for her part, was a squirter.

The couch soaked it all up. One morning, Connie found a spot of comingled male and female secretions, which she sniffed at confusedly and, in a subliminal act meant to preserve her delicate sensibilities, quickly blamed on the dog. And no one—father, son, girlfriend—considered the indignity that occurred on the Fourth of July at the Jacobson family reunion, when children and babies crawled on and pawed at the couch’s invisibly, irredeemably filthy surface.

In late July, Cliff, fully sloshed, snuck into the house one night to find dear old Dad on all fours, face buried in the plush arm of the sofa, beefy ass raised high like a horny pussy cat, one hand jacking his cock and the other hidden behind a pair of silky purple panties that barely covered the back of his ass. Cliff didn’t care to dwell on the specifics, but it had been very possible that his father had been playing with his ass back there, working one of his fat fingers into his hole.

Cliff, instantly sobered, retreated from the family room even more quietly than he’d come, back to his bedroom where he laid in bed, covered his head with a pillow, and proceeded the bury the image to the far reaches of his mind. It would more or less stay there for the next twelve years until, in a moment of emotional weakness spurred by the news of his parents’ separation, he’d tell his fiancée.

Rusty, who’d assumed Cliff was spending the night at his buddy’s, remained blissfully oblivious to what his son had witnessed.

The upholstery of the couch cushions were, at this point, visibly weak, though not yet threadbare.

1999-2000

Connie once again indulged in purchasing a new set of parlor furniture with a vague notion that it would fill an enlarging void in her life, left by her children’s departure, and Rusty’s increasing emotional and physical absences.

Rusty and Cliff moved the couch to Cliff’s first off-campus apartment at 426 University Way.

On his way home, Rusty stopped at the highway porn store and bought tokens for the back booths. Porn store culture was something he’d recently discovered. Unlike his wife—to whom he’d admitted his panty fetish in a rash and much-regretted decision in December—the porn store cocksuckers seemed tolerant of—and at times even delighted in—his choice of undergarment.

That night, however, he was alone in his booth, which didn’t particularly disappoint him. He tried straddling the bench and humping the cushion—still his preferred method of getting off—but noticed that it didn’t allow the same sensation as the couch. The pang of couch-related emotions he felt—uncertainty for how Connie’s new couch would feel, loss for the old couch, sadness over how things always had to change—left as quickly as it had arrived.

The four young college men who now shared the couch were friends from their first year of college. The core of this group was Anthony DeAmico and Terrance Cloister. Mr. DeAmico acted as the catalyst for the majority of fluids that would grace the couch in the next year, both vaginal and seminal. (A stud and an exhibitionist, he took a certain delight in fucking in the living room where he could easily be caught.)

Terrance and DeAmico had been engaging in mutual masturbation sessions since they’d become friends in the seventh grade, a practice that continued, particularly in their spring semester of college when their roommates had a joint class every Tuesday and Thursday evening. Inevitably, they’d end up side by side on the couch, shorts and underwear shoved around their ankles, thighs touching, stroking each other’s cocks while they watched straight porn DVDs.

They took secret pride in being able to make each other come at the same time and, since the couch was ratty at this time, gave no thought to wiping their loads on the sides of the couch, these crusty swipes simply joining the menagerie of stains already present.

On the not-altogether-uncommon occasions when Terrance gamely offered his Italian friend a blowjob, most of Terry’s come would shoot on the base of the couch, while DeAmico’s load ended up where you’d expect.

In March, Cliff found a girlfriend who would stick her finger up his ass. They were on the couch the first time she ever did it (his roommates were all out of town), and he came while barely touching himself, a blast that went over his shoulder and onto the back of the couch—a rare and mighty shot, indeed. His proclivity for anal play only increased as he got older, though. Despite what he’d witnessed and suppressed in high school, he never considered the fact that he’d inherited it from his father.

2000-2005

In August, Cliff and his roommates moved out of 426 University Way and left the couch. It stayed in the living room for the next five years, seating several different households of college boys and girls, who, while not sexually chaste, weren’t as libidinous as their forebearers. There was one notable instance when a nerdy grad student, having passed out on the couch after a party, awoke horny and, because everyone else was asleep upstairs, did something he’d been doing since high school: he knelt on the floor and worked his long dick in between the cushions of the couch, humping away until he shot his load into the under-cushion netherworld of crumbs and change and pizza crusts.

2005-Present

Tenants moved into the apartment in August 2005 and moved the couch to the front porch. Though it looked worse than it ever had, its repurposing as a “porch couch” proved to its golden age in so far as its usefulness as an object. It was utilized on early spring mornings, waning summer evenings, and late autumn nights by an ever-rotating cast of residents, friends, neighbors, and strangers drinking, talking, and dreaming while compressing its cushions, springs, and wooden joints.

Being in a public sphere limited the opportunities for the couch’s sexual degradation, though there was one notable incident on an unseasonably warm, late Friday night/early Saturday morning in October 2007. On this night, it seemed like the entire town was getting drunk. One giant party stretched from one corner of the college town to the other, as kids caroused through the streets, happening onto porches and into open doors.

It was this night that a guy named Jenkins—a strapping, obnoxious football player—ended up on the porch of 426 University Way with three girls and two guys with whom he was barely acquainted. All were drunk.

Jenkins declared he’d do anything for twenty dollars.

“I’ll take off all my clothes,” he said and proceeded to do just that, even though nobody offered him any money. He yanked off his shirt and pulled his shorts over his hung and hairy cock to the squeals of the girls and groans of the boys.

“I’ll jerk off right now, shoot on this couch, and lick it off. Twenty bucks,” he said. The girls went, “Eww!”

“That’s fucking sick,” one of the boys said. The other boy restated the terms—for twenty bucks, Jenkins would jack off, come on the couch, and lick it off. If any of the 426 residents had been present on the porch, they probably would have objected, but as it happened, Jenkins simply nodded his alcohol-sodden head in agreement, burped, planted his legs apart, and began to stroke his flaccid cock.

The girls twittered and moved out of the way. The boys looked at each other, put their heads in their hands, and peeked through their fingers as Jenkins stood stock still, looking down as he worked his cock, which, despite the large amount of tequila he’d imbibed earlier, began to lengthen and thicken.

“Holy crap. He’s big,” one girl whispered to the other, who nodded in agreement. A passing gay boy saw a hard and hairy naked guy seemingly jacking off on a porch and stared in amazement for as long as he could without stopping, and when he got to the end of the block, he circled around again, but not in time to see Jenkins come.

The boys and girls fell into a stunned silence as Jenkins crouched low and directed his hard hose at the back of what had once been frigid Connie Jacobson’s blue parlor sofa, softly grunting as come first dribbled and then blasted out of his cock, splashing on the back left cushion. Another shot. The girls: “Oh my god.” The boys: silent, but both processing a context that was kind of, well, gay, and got gayer when Jenkins leaned right down, eyes closed, and dragged his tongue from the base of one stripe of come upwards to the top, gathering the thick juice in his mouth and swallowing.

The girls scurried inside and told everybody how some crazy football player had jacked off on the couch and licked it up, and one of the residents came out enraged, but, seeing how enormous Jenkins was, soon backed down. One of the boys gave Jenkins his twenty dollars, and Jenkins held it over his head triumphantly, but it wasn’t like anybody cheered.

For a week, nobody would sit on the couch where the dude had shot his load, and one of the residents planned to clean it with bleach, but then the local baseball team won the World Series and the town went nuts, all but rioted, and some kids dragged the couch out to the street and set it on fire.

The fire department put it out, but it was just a shell at that point, a frame of black wood and scorched metal springs. The husk was hauled away to a city dump where it currently rots, sometimes host to various organisms who copulate on or around it because that is what living things do.