pretty dumb things

fruit cocktease

(We're back with the sex talk, darlings. Oh, yes. Sex.)

When I was stripping, when I was still Candace, a particularly boorish customer said to me, “You know, Candace, you seem like a pretty wild girl.”

Um. Ok, thanks. I guess.

“Do you like scat?” He asked.

Oh. Ella Fitzgerald? Yeah, I said, she’s great.

I knew he wasn’t talking about the improvisational style of jazz singing popularized by this American legend, but I wasn’t going to go there. Few things in the panoramic world of sexual activities make me want to go “Ewww!” like a nine year-old, but anything directly involving poop is one of them.

I bring this man up as evidence to the fact that we can’t always help that which gives uneasy birth to our sexual fantasies. This boor, some other night, not the great scat night, asked me if I’d ever been made love to with a honeydew melon.

I wish, I wish with a white hot extra flamey passion that I had not gotten this delicious idea from this corpulent, piggly stripclub patron. I wish with every crepuscular dendrite in my dusky imaginative cerebrum that I had been gifted with the image of a cool slice of wet green melon parting my labia, lingering over my clit, and pressing my pussy with its resilient weight by a dark, handsome, and preferably Catholic lover.

(All of my important lovers and/or boyfriends were Catholic. I don’t know why. Donny, Ernie, C., Will, Eff, Marta: Catholics all. Even the soul-sucking WMB was raised Catholic. Maybe it’s the lingering whiff of myrrh and guilt.)

Because now I have it, this fruity fantasy. And now I’m stuck with it. And I’m afraid that until such time comes that I have said pussy caressed in said fashion with said fruit, I won’t be able to let go of it.

In fact, this honeydewlicious fantasy of mine has laid the fertile ground for all kinds of other sex acts direct from the produce isle.

I’ve even, once or twice, taken a stab at writing some porn wherein a greengrocer girl seduces a man late night in the supermarket, pulling him into the dark recesses of the mart, somewhere near receiving, where she has him make sweet sweet fruity love to her.

She bends over a box in a short skirt.

He sees she’s wearing little under her white apron.

Her smile beckons.

She pulls him up against her, her back at a wall of boxes.

She presses a box cutter into one hand, a melon into the other.

No, she says, lick me first with this. Their eyes meet. In a flash, he understands.

He cuts a piece of melon, raggedly, hurriedly, inexpertly, And as she stands in front of him, legs spread, panties askew, he teases her sweet wetness with its sweet wetness.

Until the juice runs down his chin.

And all that.

I have, in the last six weeks been figged. I got the idea from this woman. And then I read more about it. And then I got obsessed with the idea until one Sunday I dragged Donny to the upscale mart in his nabe, bought a hand of ginger, forced him to read the figgy pudding directions online, peel the ginger, and stick it in me where the sun has never shone. Ginger is, after all, a root.

It felt amazing. I urge each and every one of you to try it on your onesy. Or, even better, with a ginger-loving loved one.

I have, in the past six months, sucked a lover’s cock with strawberries in my mouth. Not as good as grapes, the strawberries. Grapes, when you have them in your mouth and suck cock, especially when the grapes are green and hard and cold, have a lovely fluidity of movement. They rub and jostle in a sleek way. Strawberries, because of the seeds, do not.

I have, in the past six years, deepthroated a mango. Just because I could.

Today I had a peach, a peach of Valhalla. It was white and delicately scented, and so juicy that it spurted its Valhalla juice out my mouth and down my chin. When I eat peaches like this, I think of them sunwarm and split open and rubbed with abandon against my naked breasts.

Cherries I want stuffed in me like ben-wa balls, rolling against each other, knocking gently against my g-spot.

Persimmons when ripe remind me of licking pussy.

Lychee nuts when peeled look like the imagined testicles of seraphim.

Bananas are too obvious.

We can’t help how we come to want what we want. We can only help how we come.

Eat some fruit. Think of me. And enjoy.

(And thanks to JoeSchmuck for the inspiration for this post and the title. Which I stole.)

fantasies of deliverance

(If you're here for the sex, and I encourage you to be, might I suggest scrolling down and clicking on the link for the Smut category. Either that or enjoying one of these fine blogs. This post is not about sex. Forgive me or spank me, either way.)

A few people have been writing/IMing (that’s right: IM the verb)/calling me about the Chelsea Girl Date-a-Thon 2005.

How is it going? They ask.

You must be inundated with offers, they say.

How do you manage, they query.

You must have taken on a personal assistant, they hypothesize.

Let me give you an update:

• As of now, I have received three rueful offers of wished-for courtship from three separate married men who live in areas of the country and/or globe inaccessible to Gotham but by plane.
• I have received two offers of datage from single men who live if not halfway then one third around the globe.
• I have received one dirty story that included such incendiary points of hotness as having me tied to the legs of a desk with a computer cord, bent uncomfortably and memorializingly over a Xerox machine, and bracing myself against a filing cabinet whilst the writer of the story, who I might add parenthetically is a temp in a law office somewhere in the Northeast, had his ways with various orifices of my body. I think, but I’m not entirely sure the following steno-pool accoutrements were also inserted in the story if not in my orifices: a water cooler, a staple remover, binder clips and a ruler.
• And I have received one email asking if I have naked pictures of myself. (Yes, of course I do. No, you may absolutely not have one.)

In short, my dear friends, not much actual action has been had by me.

And here’s the weird thing: I’m ok with it.

The other day, shortly before my period, a time when traditionally I get weepy at commercials for long distance calling plans and at the sound of children singing, I was thinking about having babies. I don’t have a baby, I’ve never had a baby, and honestly, the baby lust left me about five years ago, a strange and residual hazy rosy-glowed nostalgia taking the place of the baby lust’s dreamy passion. But what I was thinking about was not so much actually having a baby, but the change that being a mother would have on my life.

And I recognized that this fantasy of being a mother—and I realize that my feelings were just that, an utter fantasy, as far removed from the real blood and tears and fingerprint paintings of being a mother as it could be—relieved me of some certain burdens. The idea, for example, of having to finish the tasks at hand to have a profession. The necessity, for example, of having to take meticulous care of my body in order to remain attractive.  The drive, for example, to have to find altruistic work in the world.

Consciously I know that being a mother does none of these things. In fact, motherhood makes it exponentially more difficult to achieve professional accomplishments, physical attractiveness and altruistic deeds; it does not make these drives go away.

And then I started to think about how my fantasy of motherhood was just one fantasy of deliverance in a long, long series of fantasies of deliverance.

The earliest being a man who will make everything bad go away. And this one, given my absent father, and given my being raised in a society that peddles such cruel and disempowering pabulum as Pretty Woman as entertainment, I can hardly be blamed for. As much as I hate it.

Another being my fantasy of money. That somehow, somewhere, in some way I’ll be showered with enough cold, hard American cash that my ceaselessly meager eeking existence will be replaced with one of lavish abundance.

And other, darker deliverance fantasies. When I get depressed, and I do, I have had fantasies of just losing my mind altogether. Just bidding reality a bittersweet good-bye. I know, in reality, the old lady who suntans herself compulsively on the corner of Hudson and W. 12th Street with her shorts tucked into her old lady panties probably isn’t happy, but when I’m mired in the morass of my own bad brain chemistry, her insanity looks like relief. I have gazed at her with envy more than once.

I remember once, too, early on in grad school while I was stripping and tutoring writing and taking three courses, slogging my time on a Stairmaster and imagining how nice it would be to have a full-fledged drug addiction. I have been close enough to those with drug addictions to know it isn’t nice at all, but all I wanted was something to make the pain stop. Thus the fantasy of chemical dependence.

And the ultimate fantasy, death. When I’m really, really down what I want more than anything is to be the one the sniper gets. I yearn for some painless act of random human frailty like the cartoon death of a dropping safe, anvil or piano. With this unexpected act of oblivion, my pain ends and no one has to be angry about it. In my fantasy, it’s win/win.

And finally not so apparently dark, but in reality, it is dark, dark as death, I have the fantasy of love, this love being of course a man, but less a the father figure of  my childhood fantasies, and more the all-empowering, all-embracing, all-consuming, all-needs-meeting romantic fantasy of that single perfect love.

It’s galling to have to admit I have that fantasy. It runs counter to everything I think I think about myself, yet if I dig deep and am honest, I find it lurking there, half hidden under a pile of Valentines Day roses I thought I threw out years ago. It sickens me, but there it is.

So here’s the weird weird thing: today I find I’m oddly zen. I don’t have a man. I don’t really have a job, or at least not a career, not yet. I truly don’t have any money. I don’t even have a couch, now that R2, my long-suffering roommate, took apart the moldering crack couch with a hammer and a Swiss army knife.

And I’m ok. I’m not depressed. And I’m not anxious.

But more to the point of Chelsea Girl Date-a-Thon 2005, I’ve never felt complete without a boyfriend. A boyfriend—or a fuckbuddy, or two or three—has always been like clean underwear to my late Grandmother: something I wouldn’t want to be caught without.

And now without one, I’m finding I’m fine.

Weird.

And those other fantasies, those other dark darlings I have held so close to my childish breast for so long, they’re pretty much gone too. Sure, occasionally there’s a vestige, an apparitional limb that haunts the dark corners of my head. But mostly, gone.

Weird.

Still, though, I might like to be a mom. Maybe.

Or not.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 13, death and birth in the land of subterranean sex

(Welcome to another episode in my stripmemoirs. Pour yourself an adult beverage. Sit in a comfy chair. Relax. Might I suggest rocking some Barry White? The show, once more, is about to begin...)

The time comes in every stripper’s life when, in the course of her normal work day, she wakes, she drinks her coffee, she does her daily doings, she tans, she showers, she applies her prophylactic coat of make-up, she takes a taxi to work.

And she finds her club closed. Dark. Padlocked. With a sheriff’s notice on the door.

Okay, perhaps that time does not come in every stripper’s life, but it did in mine. Sandwiched between the thighs of my thirty-first birthday and Thanksgiving, sometime in November of 1993, Pure Gold finally succumbed to its fiscal death and shut its doors. It took my meager living with it.

Alexis and Melody retained gainful employment. They found themselves folded into the soft, cushy, smoked peach scented bosom of Pure Platinum, but I, though I had been losing weight steadily, was still deemed too hefty to join those who graced Platinum’s ethereal plain.

I was a size 8 and around 135 pounds.

Rejected and dejected, I took my curvy assed body and freaked out head to Scores, which in the fall of 1993 had not yet been endorsed by Howard Stern and was still in the painful transition from sports/titty bar to upscale house of hos. I knew a bunch of the management, and a bunch of the girls, at Scores because after El Morocco had closed its doors earlier that summer they had merely migrated northward a few blocks.

I remember auditioning. I was taken aside by one of the managers and put on a jacked up, postage stamp stage near the bar. I danced on the tiny platform, looking at the busy club with its insects of patrons and butterflies of girls swarming around. I danced my three-song set, peeling my clothes off as I had been trained to do, mesmerized by the shiny shiny hair of the manager below me.

You know those men who have so much product in their hair that each comb strand stays in place, as if the teeth of the comb had just that moment been raked through the hair. You know that hair, those men. They shine in a weird artificial manner.

It is mesmerizing.

He had that hair.

I knew I couldn’t work there.

I got off the platform.

“You’re very pretty,” he said and drew his eyes appraisingly in an up/down/up zag across my body.

Thanks.

“Great tits,” he said.

Uh, thanks.

“Not much cellulite,” he said.

Uh. Thanks?

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Come back after the holidays. We have enough girls right now, but you come back after the first of January, and we’ll hook you up.”

Great. Thanks.

Which meant no job. I had been in strip clubs long enough to know there were never too many girls. There just weren’t always enough of the right girls. I was alright, but I wasn’t all right. Mr. Hair could use me after business slowed down, because then their top earners would skedaddle their aerobicized/coked out/teenaged asses back home or on vacation.

I left, promising that I would return. We both knew I wouldn’t.

Fuck, fuck fuckity fuck fuck. I hadn’t wanted to work at Scores; I didn’t like it. But I needed the job. It was the only high-end club in Manhattan other than Platinum. And I had, like, $300 in my bank account.

So what could I do?

I went slumming.

“FlashDancers isn’t that bad,” Alexis had told me. “You can make a lot of money there.”

Anytime anyone tells you that something isn’t “that bad,” what she means to be saying is that it isn’t that good. It’s like purgatory. Sure, you’re not being buffeted about by the flamey sulfuric siroccos of hell, but you’re not being gently fanned by the sultry zephyrs of heaven either.

“Not bad” is like riding economy. You don’t get the leg room and the warm cookies, but it’s better than stowing away in the plane’s underbelly, succumbing to hypothermia and having your frozen body bisected by the dropping of the landing gear and scattered in pieces over Queens.

I stuffed my surfeit of pride, my sense of entitlement, and my sting of rejection and took a cab to Flash, the official club of David Letterman.

Three words about how I felt about Flash: it scared me.

First, it looked like a strip club. It had neon lights that lit in syncopated trails; its outside walls were laminated in some kind of weird black shiny tile substance that probably was initially made for the interiors of mademen’s men’s rooms, but then was rejected as too gaudy; it had the kiss of death "Live Girls" sign (as opposed to... what?).

It was subterranean. You had to pass a poorly outfitted doorman, cross a pointless and dingy velvet rope, and descend a flight of stairs lit by glitzy lightbulbs, walled in mirrored tiles, and decorated by pictures of nearly naked women trying desperately to look hot while clearly being photographed by an inept man armed with a technical manual and a hard-on.

It smelled. FlashDancers—and oddly all of the clubs in the Flash chain—have a peculiarly eau de Flash smell. It’s a mixture, as far as I can tell, of cigarette smoke, spilled and congealed alcohol, the apparitional waft of a thousand perfumes, and cleaning solvent, Oh, and puke. There is definitely an undernote of human vomit. Probably for earthiness.

The dressingroom wasthissmall. Really. And it was packed. Packed to the bursting tiled walls with women in various states of not quite dress.

Absent was a sense of space. Absent was a sense of decorum. Absent was any pretense that where you were was in a titty bar. Absent was, actually, clothing.

Flash was not nude. It just wasn’t, well, clothed in the strictest sense of the word. Instead of the gowns that I had been wearing for the past six months, the girls wore what could most generously be labeled costumes. Mostly, they were a bikini of some sort and some kind of schmatte around their waists, a scarf or throw covering their asses like a quick-remove tea cozy.

At $10 a dance, Flash was all about speed. Dresses, I would learn, slow you down.

I took one look around, stuffed the pride with a resolve so conscious it was nearly an actual physical move, and dressed in the tartiest gown I had. It was Alexis’s, actually, a chiffon tiger-print slip dress with a deep slit up the side.

I waited to go on stage to audition, the main stage, not one of the three side stages. This, I knew, was a good sign. But then these women were beneath me. This place was beneath me. This all, all of it, beneath me.

The manager Nunzio, who looks like exactly what he is—a kindly Italian grandfather from Brooklyn—asked me what I wanted to be called and where I was from.

CeeCee, I told him. From Chicago.

Over the loudspeakers, over the music, I heard a new DJ call my name called to the stage. I took it.

No, really. I took it. I owned it. That stage was mine. I strutted. I gyrated. I worked my sinuous Sheena-inspired mojo. I ruled as I stripped myself bare.

Three songs later, I walked off that stage with almost a hundred dollars. And a job.

Candace was dead. Long live CeeCee.

I was reborn and FlashDancers was my home.

(If you do go into Flash, located conveniently in Manhattan’s theatre district on Broadway between 52nd and 53rd, and if you do say hi to Nunzio, do give him my regards. Really.)

brown paper packages tied up with string

This is what I like to be tied with.

This is how to cover my eyes.

You can buy it here.

This is how I like to be tied down.

This is what I like to have dripped on me when I'm helpless and at your mercy.

You can get it here and here.

This is how I make you wait for the next installment of my former life as a stripper.

14 things i do instead of write the two articles due by noon tomorrow

1. Read this woman's post on seducing a hot chick in a red leather dress and high heels.
2. Email her to tell her how hot I found it.
3. Consider plucking my eyebrows.
4. Dance to Trick Daddy's "Sugar (Gimme Some)" in my mirror instead.
5. Think about how I should really go to the gym.
6. Reject that idea.
7. Think about the red leather seduction and consider masturbating.
8. Reject idea because it necessitates clean up.
9. Check blog stats. Compulsively.
10. Go on Yahoo! and see if anyone I know is signed on.
11. What the hell. Wash tiny vibe, insert it in panties, read hot blogs, especially this one. Enjoy a sweet sweet orgasm.
12. Write this post.
13. Return to writing articles on why couples should take dance lessons and why Sheryl Crow is still relevant.
14. Sigh.

monogamy: it's not for me

Ahhhhh….monogamy. The promise that keeps us promising.

And the promise that so often fails us. Or at which we fail.

Recently, a bloggy friend wrote me about the issue. He said,

I'm wondering if humans are meant to be monogamous. I know it's been said before, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around "one woman, for the rest of my life."

It's a bit odd, don't ya think?

Re-reading this quote, I find it’s pretty crystal that my friend’s knickers are twisty over the concept of monogamy—in his second sentence, for example, he’s is having a weird out-of-the-body experience. What he means to be saying, I think, is that it’s been said before that perhaps humans aren’t supposed to be monogamous—the clause “I know it’s been said before..” belongs with the previous sentence. Instead, he ends up saying that it’s been said before that he has a hard time with the concept of monogamy, if not the reality.

Which, probably, it has.

Even if only his unconscious admits it.

I wrote my friend back with my ideas on the subject of monogamy; he suggested I post my musings. Here they are, somewhat edited for style, though not for content:

I don't think humans are "meant" to be with one person. We are not geese. I think monogamy, like a political system, like an accessory, like a religion, is a peculiarly human choice, and one, if you make it, you have to make again and again and again, ad infinitum.

Or possibly ad nauseum.

Not to sound too much like the hard-assed grammarian and rhetorician that I have been trained to be, the abundance passive syntax in your short letter—“are meant,” “been said”—raises other questions, questions that actually are central to this monogamy morass. See, the passive syntax removes agency; in the sentences I don’t know who is doing the meaning, nor who is doing the saying. And in point of fact, in reality we as people and readers don’t either.

Who does say humans are or are not meant to be monogamous? Who or what means humans to be monogamous, or not? Figuring out the answers to those questions probably would help those struggling with the larger one-person-only question. Does society say it? Does God mean it? Does nature? Do you buy into those voices as important?

You and your beloved only can figure out what makes sense to you and your beloved. Monogamy is a big rock question. It’s like kids. It’s a dealbreaker. If you look in your heart and can’t compromise on not having a kid when you want one, you probably shouldn’t marry a person adamantly set against parenthood. If you look in your heart and believe that you cannot accept traditional monogamy as a foundation to your relationship, then you probably shouldn’t marry a person who does.

These opposing choices lead to badness. And not the good oh it’s so bad it’s good kind of badness, but real wickedness, real hurt, real pain, real betrayal, and real emotional scars.

Monogamy: it's not for me. Anytime I am hemmed in by some proscription, my desire, eventually, is to act out. Monogamy included. For me, though, it's a bit easier than for you, I suspect. I'm happy to have one man, as long as we can include women in our play, or public play in our play, or play in our play.

I look to Jenna Jameson for inspiration. Sure, I can do porn, but only with my husband. Or with chicks. Really, really hot chicks.

I don’t need to have a lover. In my relationship I don't want to build distance; I want to build intimacy, so my interest lies in finding a man I can explore physical—as well as emotional, intellectual, metaphysical and spiritual—possibilities.

In an ideal world, and this is not yet it, I will find a mate with whom I can explore a wide range of pleasure. I believe in trust, and I believe in a relationship predicated on trust, and I believe in honesty. And, honestly, I can't see that I'll ever make a conscious, willing, and truthful promise to have sex with one human being, and one only, for the rest of my life.

Which is why God created threesomes.

And hot bisexual chicks.

read this now

Take ten minutes of your day and read this now.

interviewliciousnessity

My friend Ms X asked me these five questions. Here are my answers. If you want to be interviewed, go say hi to X on her site. She's all that and an L.A. sunset.

1)What is the one thing you most wanted to do but never did?

Travel. I haven’t been anywhere, except in my head. I need to stop saying I need to go somewhere and just effing make it so.

2) Tell me about the person you have loved most.

I thought about skipping this question because it really warrants its own post. But I’ll answer briefly and save the tortuous tale for some other long-winded day. The person I’ve loved most in my adult life is my ex-boyfriend C. I loved him in ways that I’m only now, nearly ten years after we parted, beginning to comprehend.

I loved him so much he haunted me.

I loved him utterly.

He is now married and living in Jersey, a father to two daughters.

3) What was your favorite song to strip to, and why?

There are two different kinds of stripsongs, in my mind. The first kind are stage songs—the songs to strut my stuff around to on stage, knowing that I’m trying to set up my moneymaking dances—songs that make me feel good about being nearly naked, make me feel powerful and make me feel sexy. They make me get all shakey-shake sassyass with myself. Typcially in clubs, the stage work comes in a three-song set.

My ideal three-song set would be these three:
“Back in Black,” AC/DC: quite possibly the raunchiest rock song. Ever.
“Seven Nation Army,” The White Stripes: very creepy and sexy, and it came out after I quit stripping, so I want to see what it feels like to take off my clothes to it.
“Criminal,” Fiona Apple: I’ve been a bad, bad girl…

The second type are lapdance songs. These songs need a really strong, kind of dramatic, beat. These songs are about seducing one specific person, and they need to make me feel like seducing him (or her) if I myself don't feel attracted to him (or her. Or them, sometimes). My strong preference for lapdances is nasty hip hop. Let’s say you want to drop $100 (before tipping). Here’s what I’d like to dance to:

“Sugar (Gimme Some),” Trick Daddy: it has the Talking Heads hook and oblique references to oral sex; it’s all good.
“Sadiddy,” Brandy: hot back beats, produced within an inch of its life, this song rocks.
“Oops, Oh My,” Tweet: the modern female masturbation anthem, it makes “She-bop” look like a pile of puke. Sorry, I love Cyndi, but it does.
“Slow Motion,” Juvenile: this song was made to grind to. If you want a hot lapdance, get one from a girl during this song.
“No Diggity,” Blackstreet: my favorite lapdance song of all time. I don’t know why; it just is.

4) If you had a superpower, what would it be -- and what would you do with it?

When I was little, I imagined I could press myself through walls. I think that’s just because I wanted to be anywhere but wherever it was I was. (Angelina Jolie said she felt similarly in her childhood, and that was why she got an open window tattooed on her back.) But that’s not what I’d want as an adult.

I considered having the ability to teleport myself, thus limiting the amount of time I had to spend in traffic or in transit. But I have, of late, been realizing that my tendency to bolt is not a strength, and I don’t think I’d like a superpower that enabled that particular defect of my personality.

I think, after careful consideration, I’d want to have the ability to make money troubles go away. I’m not saying I’d want access to unending wealth—that’s just a 007 for badness—but I’d like to be able to make ordinary people’s financial stress end. Not that they’d be living the life of Paris and Paris excess, but that they wouldn’t have to worry about how they were going to pay their credit card bills, send their kids to college and have a nice retirement.  That’s what I’d do. Make people’s student loans, bad financial luck, and poor fiscal moves evaporate like rain in a sunshower.

5) Name five things you'd never want to lose.

My head and my heart.
Everything else I can live without, more or less.

i'm nobody, who are you?

(Yup. More sex talk. Actually, sex talk about sex talk. It's like metafictional chinese box of dirty patter. Enjoy, those of you who are consenting adults, not related to me, and friends who can handle knowing dirty pretty things about me.)

Anonymity. It’s a beautiful thing, this imagined space freed from identity. When anonymous, we are not who we are; we are who we are not.

I spent SlutFest 2004 shrouded in the warm libidinous folds of relative anonymity. Like a giant, virtual masked ball, the world wide web offered me an opportunity to hold a mask to my face and portray myself as someone I wanted to be, however ephemerally.

I had two anonymous affairs last summer, that summer of bored, ceaseless, reckless, and ultimately boring, activity. One was with a married man. Though I met him and fucked him, I never knew his name; I knew him only as “Ken.”

We chatted online and we made a date to meet at the gym. He was to point out the piece of equipment he wanted me to use, I was to use it for exactly thirty minutes. Then we would leave together, all without speaking, and come back here, to my apartment.

Which was, in fact, what we did.

Once here, he positioned me in front of one of my bookshelves. He started pointing out books, asking me what was this one about and what was that.

That one is about a girl who is almost raped, I said.

He punctuated my words with slaps on my ass.

“And that one?” He asked.

That one is about a girl who is raped metaphorically, I said. My words came out in spurts, as I was unable to control my voice as he slapped my ass.

“And that one?” He asked.

That one is about a girl who is abducted, and raped, and goes mad, and dies, I said. I’d never really realized how many books I had were narratives motivated by rape. But then, I am an eighteenth-century scholar.

This “Ken” was my first fuck of SlutFest 2004, and in all honesty, I chickened out. At first. We spent a long time—much longer than Ken wanted—talking on my crackhouse couch. Finally, we began to fool around again; he bent me over, leaning me against a wall, lowered my workout pants and had his very brief way with me.

I saw him this past Sunday on the street near the coffee place where I go to get my triple espresso in the morning.  I was with Becky, walking and talking, and I saw this man who looked vaguely familiar, talking on a cell, wearing a Ramones t-shirt.

Oh, I said to Becky, that’s the married man I fucked last summer.

We had anal, I said to her loudly and clearly.

He didn’t ask, I said.

He looked at us as we passed. We giggled like high school girls. It was way more fun than his fuck.

My other anonymous affair, unlike “Ken,” I never met. He was my anonymous phone sex affair. He would IM me, sometimes just to say hi, but most often to find out if I had time to talk dirty with him on the phone. I never knew his name; I only knew that he was a young lawyer who lived somewhere near Lincoln Center, and that in his fantasies about me he was very dominant.

He would call me and there would be no chit chat.

“You come to my door,” he would say, breathing slightly heavily, his voice raspy like he’d spent his youth downing shots of cheap whiskey. “My door is open, but it’s dark inside the apartment. You enter and you hear a voice telling you to put your hands on the wall. You turn and face the wall. I come up behind you and you can feel my body through your thin summer dress. I tell you to bend over. Do you like that?”

Yes, I would tell him.

“I stand there for a moment so that you can feel the heat of my body, and then I put a blindfold on you. I bend you over more so that I can see your ass and your pussy.” He would stop. “Do you feel exposed?”

Yes, I would tell him.

“Do you like it?”

Yes, I would tell him.

“I pull up your skirt and I see you aren’t wearing any panties. You are a little slut, aren’t you?”

Yes, yes I am.

Yes, yes I was. After a few of these usually mid-afternoon dirty patter sessions with my unknown lawyer, I saw that he had an amazing regularity to his fantasies. Always, always I was bent over, inspected, blindfolded, led to a couch or a bed, forced to sit or kneel, face fucked, turned over, and fucked in the pussy or the ass.

It was like a waltz. It was formulaic, our conversations.

But it was cool. I liked it. While he talked, I would use my fingers to make initially lazy circles over my clit, the laziness turning to urgency and the urgency to orgasm. I would come into the phone in dulcet gasps, more aware than usual of the sound of my orgasm because I could hear it hanging in the air in real time, as well as mediated by the headset of my phone.

One time, he called me. “I just ordered food,” he said.

Okay.

“But I think I have time.”

Okay.

He did the usual, posing me in his hallway, leading me blind to his couch, forcing me to suck his ample cock (hey, it’s my fantasy too), turning me over and having his way with my pussy and my ass.

I came.

He liked me to talk dirty to him while he got himself off. I could hear the urgency in his voice. I could practically hear his hand sliding up and down his shaft.

I started talking dirty to him, telling him what I wanted to do to him, how I would slowly, incrementally slide his cock into my mouth, until it improbably rested against the back of my throat, telling him how on my knees I would gaze up to his eyes, his cock impaling my mouth, telling him how hungry I was for his…

The doorbell rang.

“Oh fuck!” I hear.

Then steps going away from the phone. A broken, strangled-sounding voice, “One minute, please.”

Steps coming back to the phone.

Click.

It was to laugh. Chinese Foodus Interruptus.

At least I got mine.

Whoever it is I was.

(I owe d'jaevle for the inspiration to this post. Read him. He's quite hot.)

iPod therefore iAm

The husband in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist communicates his emotions to his wife by whistling. I understand this. When I am feeling as if I cannot find the words for something I’m feeling, I don’t.

I use someone else’s. And I uses someone else’s tunes, too.

I make a playlist.  I bow down before the makers of iTunes. If erected, the great white obelisk that would be the false idol of the iPod would cause me to genuflect genuinely. I honor the digital Pan, the computerized Apollo, my Bron in a shiny white box.

When I was trying to convince the reluctant Tyler to fall in love with me, I trusted that music was the food of love. I made him this disc I called “Fall Already”:

1. “Free Fallin',” Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
2. “If I Fall You're Going Down With Me,” Dixie Chicks
3. “Help Me,” Joni Mitchell       
4. “Desperado,” Johnny Cash
5. “Why Can't I?”, Liz Phair
6. “I Believe In A Thing Called Love,” The Darkness
7. “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” The Stooges
8. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” Ramones   
9. “Just What I Needed,” The Cars
10. “Express Yourself,” Madonna
11. “I Am Waiting,” The Rolling Stones
12. “Waiting In Vain,” Bob Marley
13. “Do Right Woman - Do Right Man,” Aretha Franklin   
14. “Tell It Like It Is,” Aaron Neville
15. “Not Fade Away,” The Rolling Stones
16. “Baby I Love Your Way (Live),” Peter Frampton
17. “Prototype,” Outkast
18. “Let Love Rule,” Lenny Kravitz
19. “Love and Happiness,” Al Green

He played on.

When I was trying to articulate the pain and confusion I was feeling another relationship’s going south, I made this list:

1. "Why Didn't You Call Me," Macy Gray
2. "Torn And Tattered," Joss Stone
3. "I'm a Mess," Nick Lowe
4. "Everlong (ACOUSTIC )," Foo Fighters
5. "Ghost In You," Robyn Hitchcock   
6. "Kite"    U2
7. "State Of Grace," Patti Scialfa
8. "I Want Someone Badly," Jeff Buckley
9. "Vibrate," Rufus Wainwright
10. "I'm Not in Love," 10cc
11. "I Shall Believe," Sheryl Crow
12. "Only A Woman's Heart," Emmylou Harris
13. "You've Got a Sweet Mouth on You, Baby," Robyn Hitchcock   
14. "All I Want," Joni Mitchell
15. "Cross Bones Style," Cat Power
16. "Downtown Train," Everything But The Girl
17. "Real Love," Mike Doughty
18. "Someone to Watch Over Me," Chet Baker

It failed to have the desired effect.

Sigh.

I have made my friend Becky a list celebrating youth over maturity (“Better than Botox”), comprised a disc for Donny to expose him to new music (“Discovery Channel”), created a two-disc opus for a friend getting over a major heartbreak (“Mend, part 1: Anger” and “Mend, part 2: Fun”).

And now, I have been asked to do this very thing, this thing I love, as part of this other thing I love, this bloggy thing. For, you see,I was tagged. I must play, and now some of you must too. Here's the deal: Jay over at The Zero Boss memed the hell out of me. He memed me good.

He's a little pumpkin memer, and I have been squashed.

So the way it goes is this: I dedicate a song to the ones I love, and then they themselves become virtual d.j.s and do the same.

I'm going to do you one better, though. If any of you want a disc of the playlist with all the songs, email me and I'll send you one.

Because pretty dumb things is all about value added.

Here you go, pretty dumb things, the soundtrack

1. For Aire: “La Tortura,” by Shakira
2. For Argosia: “Garden,” by Pearl Jam
3. Fro Jade: "You Give Love a Bad Name," by Bon Jovi
4. For Zithereen: “Wuthering Heights,” by Kate Bush and “Find My Baby,” by Moby
5. For the Unknown Naughty Girl: “I’m the Kinda,” by Peaches and “Lucky Number Nine,” by The Moldy Peaches
6. For Badlydubbedboy: “Number One Spot,” by Ludacris
7. For the Bastard: “Freaky Girl,” by Shaggy
8. For SJR: “Girls,” by Fabolous
9. And for both together, because a Chelsea Girl has fantasies too: “Closer,” by NIN
10. For appis: “Pablo Picasso,” by The Modern Lovers and by The Burning Sensations
11. For Danielle: “H.W.C.” by Liz Phair and “Closer to Fine,” by The Indigo Girls
12. And for Jay, the Zero Boss: “Thank You (falletin mice elf agin),” by Sly and the Family Stone

Tag, babies, you're its.