pretty dumb things

this is how i say trick or treat

This is a picture of me at Flashdancers in 1997. I would be the Jeanie on the right.

Happy Halloween,
Chelsea Girl

my public privates

See, the problem with telling sex stories is this: they often involve at least two people. And this multiplicity can soon inhabit the unstable territory of the deeply problematic, for not all of my stories are my stories to tell.

(Even my stories of masturbation involve someone else, even if that person only exists inside my head: my onanism is a multiplicity of ones.)

I have found it increasingly difficult to tread this territory between public and private—what of my well-trammeled privates I should make public and what should remain between him, or her, or them, and me. Moreover, recently I’ve found that my sex life has been so intimately intertwined with my emotional life that to discuss one would be to willingly jump into a rabbit hole that I’m not sure I have the perspective to see my wendy way out of.

But I’ll try.

I have made Donny angry. I have angered  him for completely understandable reasons, and I do not pretend that his anger has not been righteous. I angered him when I broke up with him here, on my pretty dumb things, before I broke up with him in person. And I angered him by sleeping with someone else while we were broken up (I have given him no details, nor will I give them to you). And I angered him for confessing to him my sleeping with that other.

He’s angry, my Donny. And that means we have been dancing delicately on the edges of our D/s flavored play because he really wants to hurt me, frankly. And I don’t yet trust him not to.

He has not tied me up for months. His ropes rest in neat coils in the bottom of a laundry bin where he keeps his sundry sports equipment: a basketball, a couple of baseballs, a mitt, a football, and several lengths of rope, both hemp and cotton. His gorgeous flogger hangs on a hook in his closet, demurely covered by a very worn blue terry robe. My ball gag sits in my closet on top of my sports bras.

The soy candle is covered in its little tin and the lid has gathered dust.

Neither of us can claim a single finger of ginger in our refrigerators.

We talk about it all, we circle warily the accoutrements and the actions, in bed and outside of it. We talk about why we don’t trust him and why he doesn’t trust himself.(We talk too of how he doesn't trust me. We have not talked about why I don't trust myself, and I'm thinking that we probably need to.) We talk about how I want to be spanked, want to be thrust on my knees, want to be given commands, want to be put in that utopian space of noplace; we talk about how I desperately want that brutal and delicate release.

(When I masturbate I imagine his voice calling me his slut, calling me his whore and commanding me to come. I imagine other voices too, other scenarios, but it has been this one of being dominated that has been dominating my solo sessions.)

The sex we have been having, Donny and I, has been fairly vanilla. It has been often rather more Sara McLaughlin than Trent Reznor. Although, really, it’s kind of more NIN remixed by Alison Breitman. If that isn’t too scary to think about.

Donny and I fuck, and I place his hand on my throat. I encourage him to take control. He presses and I feel my breathing necessarily change and I feel my body begin to release.

And then he stops and he lets go.

He doesn’t trust himself not to hurt me.

I tell him I trust him. I tell him that he can trust me to let him know when it’s too much, when I feel discomfort, rather than the paradoxical comfort I feel from his domination. I tell him I’ll let him know.

And while all of that highly charged sex would seem worthy of my dishing its delectable dirt, I haven’t so much because sometimes it strikes me as not fair to him to tell the details that belong as much to him as to me. I have found myself hedging away from spilling all the seamy seed of our sex because I realize what is potentially at stake.

And that is our relationship. I love him, you see, I love Donny and he loves me.

These pretty dumb things are often Donny’s stories as much as they are mine. He feels ambivalently about my writing. He recognizes that I love to write—no, that I am compelled to write—and he respects my authorship as much as he respects my mind. But at the same time, it sometimes makes him feel violated. Donny has from time to time tried to wrest some kind of control over these pages. When we fuck and it’s particularly power-charged, he has told me to blog about it, or he has asked if I would.

Last night, for example, as he fucked me mercilessly, my body limp under him, my wetness spread like a slick over our thighs, he asked if I was going to write about this. I told him no.

I have, but I haven’t told the whole story.

How much of it is mine to tell? I’m still figuring it out.

Bear with me, please. I just don’t want to ruin one good thing with another.

the very bad date

This is the story of the worst date I ever had.

I’ve had some bad dates. I had coffee with an Internet date who was a loud talker; he yelled the story of being raised by parents in a strange Hindu cult. I have forgotten the details, probably my memory repressed on behalf of the bad date’s.  I had a date with a man who was clearly smitten with me, and though I was lackluster about him, I hadn’t had sex of any sort in a while, and I condescended to let him give me head. He took off his boots and my bedroom filled to its high ceiling with the rank of his foot stank.

I have had dates with guys who asked me out to an expensive restaurant and then asked me to pay half. I had a date with a guy who showed me an album of pictures of his ex-girlfriend. I have had a date that I didn’t know was a date—I thought it was just coffee with a friend—until the guy tried to plant a big kiss on my lips. Which I rejected.

Then he complained to my friend that I was a cock tease.

The point is I know a bad date. I have had bad dates.  This one, though, this one takes the bad date cake.

roundabout my pussy

In a bit more than ten days, I’ll be celebrating my 43rd birthday. At some unknown point in this long winter, I’ll be celebrating the 27th anniversary of losing my virginity. It’s kind of hard to tell which of the two is more pointy in terms of my sexlife.

It’s interesting being in my forties. I have to say that I find myself observing my physical-psychic seismic shifts with an odd detachment. I notice, for example, that I have more cellulite and then I notice I don’t really care. I notice with a flicker of horror that the tender skin on my inner arms is a bit less stretchy and I exhale a momentary sigh and then it’s gone.

My body is falling, slightly. My face is falling, slightly. My pictures are not as pretty as they once were. Yet what would have terrified me—what did terrify me—a few years ago I now accept with the loving objectivity of a Buddhist scientist.

I have sex with the lights on all the time.

I don’t remember the last time I had sex in the dark, unless you count my being blindfolded, and I don’t think you really should.

I find myself in a strange and alien Zenland of relationshipicity. I don’t really recognize this new territory in which I find myself, and I don’t feel all that fussed about it. Donny and I tread in some outer ring of relationship purgatory, and it’s cool. I don’t feel stressed that I am not married, have never been married, may never be married.

I admit I would like to have a more intimate relationship on a more regular basis, but I also recognize that there are advantages to my current state of independent principality. I am Lichtenstein. I may not be huge, but I am my own, and I’m content.

Which is not to say I’m not entirely opposed to being annexed at some point in my life. It is just to say that I’m not counting on it.

And I give all this preamble to talk about my pussy.

Or inexactly my pussy and more exactly my Smartballs. In a recent post, I declared my love for my Smartballs, and I had a bunch of readers write me questions about them, why I like them, whether they should purchase said balls for themselves or their partners.

In short, yes, you should.

And here’s why.

Being fortyish, I’ve noticed, though with less detachment and more excitement, that my sexuality is changing. I have noticed that I have, in recent years, grown bored by consistently vanilla bean sex. I have noticed a passion fruit craving for lavish sensation, for mental fucking as intense as any my pussy can accept, for toys and games and roles, for the indescribable profundity of ass sex. I have noticed, to be exact, a deep and visceral need for extreme sexual variety.

I have noticed that what I like has changed radically. I never would have enjoyed being fucked quickly and hard in my twenties or thirties. In fact, I distinctly remember hating it. I used to term it “rabbit fucking” and dismiss it out of hand.

Now I like it. And while it’s not something that gets me off all the time, it has gotten me off more than once, and I was surprised by that offgetting too.

I used to love getting head. I used to have long, lingering psychedelic orgasms from my lovers licking my pussy, especially in my twenties. I wanted nothing more than to lie back and be drawn gently into the lush and luscious visuals that prolonged pussy lapping provoked.

I saw tapestries. I saw baroque fabrics. I saw densely, intensely colored flowers with individual petals daubed with dew like some kind of realist oil painting. I had long and loving laserlight shows play on the insides of my eyelids as my lovers kissed, sucked, suckled and licked my cunt until I came in some kind of incendiary visual haze.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Indeed, I rarely come from cunnilingus anymore.

I can’t say I don’t miss it, but I can’t say that I do.

In my thirties I found the ability to suspend my pleasure in some kind of slo-mo animation, and my partner C and I would hang there with each other, embracing in this celestial space, until we could hang no longer, and intertwined Aeschylus we would come and crash to the ground.

I haven’t lost that starfuckery, though I haven’t soared in quite the same way again either.

I have noticed in my forties that in addition to new and rabid hungers have come orgasms stronger and more powerful than any I’d experienced before. It’s hard for me to parse whether my middling-agey acceptance of my body and my sexuality and all that jazz and jism is at the volcanic core of this intensity, of if my aging body has given me some gifts to recompense me for my losses.

Ok, less elasticity in my skin, but more orgasms so intense that they make my entire abdomen sore the next day.

(I’ll take the orgasms. You young things, you enjoy your springy skin.)

The thing, then, that I have most realized is that change is inevitable and that my sexuality is no more static than anything else, and thank freaking god for that. For, really, for years I thought that my sexuality was static. I grew up thinking, ok, I’ll learn new stuff, and I’ll enjoy new people, but, yup, basically I can expect this fucking to be that fucking to be that fucking to be this.

Wrong.

Which leads me to my Smartballs.

I had spent some time considering whether I wanted them, visiting them more than once at the Toys in Babeland in SoHo. I liked the idea of having some kind of toy that utilized my pelvic floor, for while I always have diligently done Kegels while riding the train, or masturbating, or standing in line, or during commercial breaks, I like to keep in shape.

I have a tight, tiny twat and I intend to keep it that way, thank you very much.

I looked at traditional Ben-Wa balls, and I looked at Smartballs, and I read a bunch of stuff to figure out what I wanted.

Eventually, I just went out and bought the Smartballs.

I don’t have good luck with this company that makes the Smartballs. The two sextoys I’ve bought that really, really didn’t work for me were made by this company. (I gave them both to my friend Becky Sue. They are silicone. She washed them. She enjoys them. She took me out to dinner to say thanks.) It was with some trepidation that I bought this toy from the same company, but I figured it was worth the gamble.

I inserted them on an afternoon when I knew I’d be having sex later with Donny. And, frankly, they hurt. They gave me cramps. Like tiny susurrations of period cramps, and that’s not so fun.

But the sex I had after, later on that afternoon, was really pretty good. So I gave them another try, inserting them again before seeing Donny, and again removing them before we actually started fucking. When we had sex that night, I found my body very excited from very early on in our sex. When he gave me head, I got very close to coming very quickly, which is very unusual for me (I so rarely come from head anymore. Ch-ch-ch-changes).

Being an astute observer and really rather good at induction, I realized the Smartballs were helping.

The next time, I put them in an hour or so before Donny and I started fooling around, and I kept them in, letting him see the string dangling down between my pussy lips when he undressed me.

Donny, of course, loves sex toys. He loves watching me use them, he loves using them on me, he just loves them. He is, of course, a geek, and he does love gear.

When he gave me head, he noticed that my clit, normally small and elusive as those tiny cat-size Indonesian deer, was fulsome and engorged. My pussy lips too were puffy. And I was wetter than wet and hotter than Georgia asphalt in the summertime.

Looping the string around his finger, Donny took the balls out of me, popped out first one orb and then the other, and expressed shock at how big the balls were. We fucked, finally, and I had one gigantic orgasm under him, my hips reaching toward the ceiling, his body upright on his knees, his cock embedded in my cunt.

Then, fifteen minutes later riding him, I had another orgasm, one so strong and so involuntary I grunted with the strain. I could feel my pussy pulsating outward/inward, like a sea anemone swallowing its prey.

Pretty much those orgasms confirmed my belief about the Smartballs. And since I have been using them consistently—either as part of foreplay or when masturbating—I’ve been having seriously joyfully intense orgasms.

These silicone balls are weighted and strung together, and each ball has some kind of ball bearing floating about inside them. When I have them inside me and I’m just walking around and doing my thang, I can feel them bumping bumping up against my g-spot, and while it won’t make me come, it’s pleasurable.

When I masturbate with them, I sometimes tug on the string with one hand so that the lower ball rubs against my g-spot. The balls have slight indentations scored on their sides, so it’s entirely possible that these grooves give extra friction. I always concentrate on the muscles in my pussy, tightening and releasing them, sucking them in and pooching them out, when I wear the balls. I have found that as I wear them more frequently I have much better control of my muscles, can clench them much harder, and get more excited with my pussy muscle play.

Which is kind of cool, really.

And the point of this very round post, this very elliptical post, this writing that loops in on itself again and again, is this: change means that I never know of what I am capable.

I can do things I never thought I could.

And I know this in part because my pussy has taught me so.

Smartballs, indeed.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 24, answers to smaller questions

In the course of a conversation with a man at a party Saturday night I let it be known that I had stripped for six years. Like many before him, this weird glint in his eye flared and faded, and then he asked, “How was that?”

To which I answered as I have before and no doubt will again, Can I have a smaller question?

It almost always goes that way. I tell someone I stripped. He or she tries fleetingly unsuccessfully to maintain what he or she thinks is a banal expression. He or she fails for a nanosecond. He or she recovers, asking, “How was that?”

May I have a smaller question?

Often, the smaller question is this: “Don’t you hate men?”

Which really isn’t much of a question at all. The question itself expects its own answer and its answer is already de facto a denial.

No, I don’t hate men.

A denial. A defense. And ultimately a support for the asker’s hypothesis that, yes, indeed I do.

I don’t.

I don’t love them either. I feel towards men a lot like I feel towards women, which is to say that there are few I love, fewer I hate, and the vast majority float somewhere, tepid to tropic, in the spectrum between the two extremes.

I’m a lot like most people that way.

The expectation that we strippers hate men usually germinates in one of two places. Either the understanding that we had to have hated men to get into the business of manipulating them in the first place. Or the understanding that having been manipulated by them in the business we have grown to hate them.

Both are extraordinary facile. Neither is true.

Which is not to suggest that my relationship with the general concept of “men” is in any way not effed up. It is. But it remains difficult for me to say whether that effing is mainly due to something that happened before I became a stripper, or mainly due to what happened while I was a stripper, or mainly due to becoming a stripper because of what was effed up before I became one. I write, in part, for me to figure out exactly whence said effing up of my relationship with men occurred.

But I haven’t stopped writing yet, so I haven’t yet figured it out. I will let you know the moment that I do.

But here is a thumbnail sketch of my effed-upness with the general concept of “men”: I don’t trust easily or well or at all; I tend to confuse sex with love and vice versa; I tend to pick/accept/fixate on men who can’t/won’t commit to me; likewise, I have a very difficult time making a commitment to said men; my long-range emotional vision pretty much still precludes the possibility of any man really loving me and committing to me, even though intellectually I know that is my own fear talking.

In short, effed up.

(Notice I don’t count my love of bondage, anal, blindfolds, ball gags, double penetration, hot wax, cold ice, threesomes, D/s, and/or figging as being effed up. These are not problems, in my world; these are pleasures.)

But in the interest of curiosity, and in the interest of my own soul-spelunking, and in the interest of clearing up one common misapprehension about strippers and their thinking about the men for whom they strip, I want to talk about the guys in clubs. The patrons. The men who put the “men” in “Gentlemen’s Club” and the money in my garter.

My customers.

For one thing that hadn’t changed when I returned to Flash were them. Even if the names, the faces, the suits, the credit card numbers had changed, the dudes inhabiting the seats had not.

Bachelor Boys. First, and most benignly, are the guys who come for bachelor’s parties. They are there usually on Saturday nights. You know them from the visible signifiers that they’re already amply loaded on liquid stupidity, and you know them from the kind of herding mentality that surrounds them. They rely on each other for support and approval. In a lot of ways, they are like high school: the guys in a bachelor party are more interested in watching their buddy get a hard on than they are in getting one themselves. They can be loud, rude, drunk, and cheap. They almost always sniff the gown when you drape it around their shoulders. They nearly always feel the need to make the same guttural comments you’ve heard before and will hear again.

They come ripe with the scent of defiant guilty pleasure mixed with a soupcon of obligation.

They are the most transitory of the strip club patrons, by and large, though often one or more of the group may also fit into another classification of strip club patron. They are fast money and are eminently forgettable.

Business Boys. Like the bachelor boys are the business boys. They come like fatted cattle from steakhouses, swollen with food and wine, smoking better cigars than the bachelor boys, but still immersed in the group mentality, the herding instinct, the caveman voyeurship. These two groups view this flavor of sex as being a spectator sport. And both unconsciously recognize power to be part of their sexual equation, but with the business boys, there is a headier jostling for power. One of them has the wallet; he wants something from the others. The others are being wooed, seduced with the largess of the wallet man. They are being shown the good time. Their obligation is to have it, but also to hold their pleasure out like a whore’s orgasm.

They can’t let their pleasure be seen until they are ready or it could devalue their worth.

It can be tricky to approach the business boys. All that testosterone. All that cash floating around their heads like little tweety birds. All those undulations of power. It’s best to wait and to be summoned with the clap of a meaty palm like Wen Zhong calling Xi Shi to the court of Wu. That is to say like a whore being called by a corrupt minister to a royal court.

Or not. You can make money from the business boys, but it requires a tremendous amount of smiling, acting interested, and occasional hand jobs in the Champagne Room.

It was never my bag, baby.

Bosom Buddies. Groups of two or three or maybe four guys who have been friends, they’ve been friends for a while; they’re friends, anyway. And in some kind of laid-back move they come and they sit and they drink and they buy a dance for their friends and they try to make friends with you too.

They want to know your real name.

They want to know what you eat for breakfast. Where you went to college and what you studied when you were there. When they come back in a month or a week or two they remember you, or they remember what you told them, so these are the guys for whom it’s important to keep your fantasies/lies/fantasies straight.

They remember you because they want to be your friend.

But friends don’t pay friends to hang out with them. They forget that, but you don’t.

Tourists. There are the tourists, of course, especially here in New York, the guys who come into the titty bar because it is there and there are tits and they are bored or lonely or horny or all three and a titty bar is a titty bar is a titty bar. It’s a place to go where everyone will know your name as soon as you tell it to them.

I had a Dutch tourist walk up on stage, mesmerized, holding his cash in front of him like an offering to a god.

Which I guess it was.

Apparently, I look Dutch.

Anyway, yeah, tourists. They, like Bachelor Boys, can also blend and mix like a smoothie with those of other groups. They come, they watch, they go, they come.

They often ask if we do escort service. My answer was always no, they didn't make take out containers big enough.

Sometimes they even got the joke.

Lone Wolfs. They come, they hunt, they prey, they hunger. I didn’t deal with them so much because the creep factor was so high. Often these were married men. But always these were desperately hungry men, and if you knew how to play that hunger, if you knew how to feed into it in some kind of incendiary paradox, you could make a lot of money.

A. Lot. Of. Money.

It rarely was my bag, baby. Though once or twice I would get called over. I would get summoned. I would come on crook bent finger, and I made money. The aforementioned lot. But it rarely happened for me.

I surfed, you see. I didn’t like a lot of contact. The lone wolfs are hungry, hungry beasts and what they hunger for most is contact.

Regulars. They would usually cozy up to the bar. They had their spots. Some bought dances. Most bought drinks. You could ask a regular for a dance, but mostly they asked you. Many remembered our birthdays, graduations, holidays and brought us gifts.

What were my best stripping gifts: a collectible video of the Coen brothers’ Fargo complete with a snow-dome of Marge arresting the guy shoving the body into the wood chipper and blood mixed with the snowflakes; eight ounces of Osetra; a DVD player; and an antique metal bank where an elephant throws the quarter through a ring and into the Ringmaster’s hat.

I always had eclectic regulars. 'But you probably knew that.

Misfits. Men who had handicaps or benign kinks. Men who were never going to quite assimilate into mainstream culture for one reason or another. Think R. Crumb here. Think Harvey Pekar. Think the strange guy behind the counter of your local pharmacy. Think tall, superskinny dude with a hearing impediment who wrote me a poem with the following lines:

Oh areoleae, lovely, dark
Are you not a work of art?

He would buy three dances and give me a Lotto ticket every second Saturday of the month. There was another guy who worked at the DMV; he lived with his parents. He came to see the Feature Dancers; he would buy about $500 dances when he came, usually from about four different dancers. We would make sure that no one raked him over too badly; we didn’t want to see him hurt.

There were comic book artists too. Lots of them. Where else do you go to see women who looked like Superheroes?

They would come, sketchbook in hand. I still have a picture of me astride a panther, somewhere, my hair blowing in the wind, my hand holding aloft a spear. It's cliche, but it's pretty accurate.

Except for the panther. And the spear.

Convalescents. And then there were men who used us, the women of Flash, as practice for the real world. They were hurt, these men. Perhaps they had been scarred by a breakup, a divorce, a loss of love so catastrophic that it left them unable to cope with women beyond the fantasy realm. Perhaps they had a childhood so cracked and fractured that they were still inching their ways toward fine. Perhaps they had some combination of both.

These men I felt a kinship to. Them in their pain and their drink. Me in my Lucite shoes and my poverty. I often genuinely liked them. They would frequently pay me to sit and to talk to them for hours, and I could name names here. I could name names you would recognize because they have some fame. But I won’t. I would talk and smile and actually like their company as much as their money.

And over time, I saw their visits diminish. I saw them come with less frequency, less urgency.  Less cash.

And while I missed them and their money, I felt glad that they had used us for good and not evil. I saw them learn, in a way, how to deal with women by dealing with us. It was all on the up and up, really. We knew what the other wanted, even if we didn’t announce it. And so the comfort had to be there. The comfort was there.

They were comforted, eventually, and they left our nest.

And finally, there were the twisted. But I won’t go there yet. I’m not quite ready to lift the hatch of that viper’s nest.

You’ll have to wait until I’m ready to strip that.

It’s not pretty.

Trust me.

For these, these are the ones I come closest to hating. And they deserve it. They really do.

petty sweating/sweaty petting

My roommate is moving out. 

Suffice to say that the surrounding disgruntlement of events precipitating said roommate moving out have kept me from enjoying/pondering/imagining much sex. Suffice to say that events precipitating said roommate moving out have involved both my sweating the petty things and petting the sweaty things. And not in a good way.

This is the sweaty thing in question.

I promise that tomorrow I will do my best to have produced some writing equal in caliber to the standards of wit, insight, eroticism and/or candor that you have come to expect from my pretty dumb things.

it's not just for syphilis anymore

This is my drug of choice.

It is kicking my sinus infection's ass old school.

Now I can just sit back in headache-free splendor, comfortably waiting for my complimentary yeast infection.

Yay.

And in the meantime, can I just say that I am totally loving these? Get some and get a workout from the inside out.

 

night at the circus

This is the year before I moved to Gotham, the year I was living in the condo in Shelburne, Vermont, the summer that the circus came to town.

This is the story of when I did a clown.

Do a clown, do a clown, all the world loves a clown, goes the song. Or something like that anyway. I didn’t know he was a clown when I met him, if that makes those of you who have the profound coulrophobia feel better. When I met him he just looked like your average black-haired, black-eyed studmuffin of indefinable ethnic origin.

When I met him, the first time, he was having lunch. I was serving him. I brought him and his table some kind of pasta, some sort of wine. Jokes were made. Banter was bandied. Extreme flirtage was experienced. The possibility of seduction was created.

I recognized his lunchmates. They were the Ringmaster of the Big Apple Circus, his wife the Horse Mistress, and the man who was the main clown, Grandma. I recognized them from having seen the circus before and having a pretty good eye for celebrity, however minor. And while I would have been extra special charming for them anyway, it was for my then unbeknownst clown that I dialed the charm rheostat up to eleven.

I twinkled. I shimmered. I evanesced.

I was 26. I was a part-time waitress, part-time aerobics instructor. I had ass-length blonde hair and a caramel tan. I was cute as all get out and cocky as hell. I had a boyfriend, Eff, of whom I have written, but he lived here in Gotham and I lived there in Vermont, and while we were planning on living together neither of us had any immediate interest in fidelity (it was, after all, the summer I first realized I was kinky).

We were not strictly faithful, so we played at being French.

And we had affairs.

And one of mine was with the clown.

I don’t remember his name anymore. I have no head for names. I never have. I do remember he was/is Greek, and so I’m going to call him Nick, though that may or may not be accurate. Nick was from New York, I think, and I am certain his father was a man of the Greek Orthodox cloth.

Nick was the only uncircumcised man I’ve ever been with, but as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. The lack of circumcision and the presence of a foreskin were directly related to his Greekness and to his father being a man of said cloth. But I shall do my best not to go leaping, stampeding towards Nick’s penis, though I have had a difficult time not doing that now and here probably because I had a similarly difficult time not doing it then, that waning summer, and there, back home in Vermont.

You know when you meet those people and you get that sudden flash of erotic heat, when you would throw the patio furniture through the glass wall to get to them if you were in a situation that required you to do so? You know when you meet those people and the air is charged with positive pheromone ions? You know when you meet a person and your eyes meet and you know down to the tingling tips of your loins with unshakeable certitude that you are going to fuck?

That was me and the clown. I met him and I knew I would fuck him.

Remember, he was not dressed as a clown. There was nothing clowny about him. No rubber noses, no snapping overwide suspenders, no giant squeaking shoes. Not a rubber haddock in sight. Not even the faintest tinge of greasepaint.

He was, actually, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and he was mighty fine, my Nick the unknown clown. He was, actually, a stunt clown.

He was the clown who held on to the bridle and was dragged along behind the horses. He was the man who leapt from horse to horse, surefooted and faking tottering until his footing slipped and he fell to the ground, dragged around and around from hand, from foot, from mouth behind the horses.

He was a stuntman in a clown suit and he was mighty, mighty fine. Fine, fine ropy hard arms and a fine, fine chocolate bar abdomen. Fine, fine muscular legs and a fine, fine sculpty ass that I would find out was carpeted with fine, fine tiny black hairs.

Typically, typical for me and my skanky destiny at any rate, I had a date with my boyfriend who was visiting to see said circus together. So I went with him, and I watched for my Greek god clown, and I chatted with the Ringmaster and introduced him to Eff. And the next day I kissed Eff good-bye on both cheeks, like a proper French whore, and Eff went home to Gotham, and that night I went again to the circus.

Alone.

I never, ever said I wasn’t a slut.

I never, ever said I played by the rules.

I went to the circus and after it finished, I went and I found my clowny clown clown. And I got a tour of the circus folk. I saw their trailers and their tents. I saw them playing cards and strumming guitars. I smelled the food they cooked for themselves. I saw the honeytrucks for the hoi polloi who did not have their own trailers.  I met the elephants and the horses. I met the camels too, though I am allergic to camels, so I didn’t stay long patting them. I waved at the tigers through their cages.

I toured the backstage of the circus, hand in hand with Nick and then I kissed my clown good-bye.

And I went home and I slept the sleep of the just.

And the next night I went back. After the show was over. I remember what I wore. I remember I wore this little 1950’s off-white eye-lit shirt with a Peter Pan collar that came just below my ribcage and a pair of jeans. I rode my motorcycle to the back entrance of the circus, and I convinced the lax security to let me in.

I parked and I wended my way through the peripatetic caravan of tents and trailers and trucks and vans and animal pens and people smoking in half-spangled outfits to Nick’s trailer.

I knocked on the door, unbidden.

His German Shepherd barked once. My breath caught a bit, for it was not as if I’d asked him if I could come. It was not as if I knew he had not someone else, someone perhaps spangled and leotarded, perhaps hanging batlike from the low ceiling of his trailer.

He opened the door, looked at me, looked at me again, and said, “Nice shirt you’re almost wearing. Come in.”

And we went to bed.

He, my friends, was hot. He was hot as Paris in his Greek altogether. His skin was tawny and almond smooth, except his hands. His hands, from holding on to the rope that pulled him day after day behind the horses, from wrangling elephants and tents, from lassoing and gearing and rigging and pulling day after day night after night was rough as an emery board.

But his hair smelled like man. And his skin was smooth as almonds. His voice was deep and dark, like I like it, burring in my ear, telling me stories of circus life and kidding me about moving to New York.

“Only one in a million makes it in New York,” he said.

I assured him I could meet those odds. (I wish I had now the confidence I had then.)

He laughed at my jokes. He kissed me hard with his generous mouth. He appreciated my aerobicized ass with his ravaged ostler’s hands. He gave me head and I could smell his thick masculine musk even when he was submerged below my waist. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of bathing in the circus.

When it was my turn,  I found his cock was thick and long and covered in a generous hood like a monk’s cowl. I found it interesting, but at 26, I was not the lover I am today. I wonder now what fun I could have with my knowing mouth and muscular pussy with that un-nipped dick. I can only hope my fumbling was appreciated for its fervor.

Under a thin, worn comforter, I fucked him. Outside us were the sounds of late summer in Vermont—cicadas and owls—mixed with the occasional trumpet of an elephant or the lazy growl of a tiger. We fucked to this mixed symphony, and then I slept the night, or most of it anyway, with him under that thin cotton comforter in his trailer. In the small, thin-lighted hours of the morning, I got up and rode my motorcycle the 3/4 of a mile home to my condo.

The next day I rode an hour to some general store to get him Bag Balm for his hands. I once more talked my way past the lax security. I went to his trailer, he wasn’t home, so I patted the German Shepherd on the head and left the balm for him with a short note.

I thanked him, I think, wished him luck, and told him to keep on clowning.

Be a clown, I said. All the world loves a clown.

I did.

(UPDATE: Interesting. I walked past Lincoln Center today and saw the Big Apple Circus big top had been raised. The circus opens tonight and runs until New Year's Day.)

rest less

To tell you the truth there is someone I have been dreaming about.

To tell you the real truth, there are several. They are real someones and they are not.

I have had a dream about a man whom I don't actually know who appeared in my dream, for some reason, at a Sunday dinner in my Grandmother’s old house, right next to the 1970’s brown refrigerator, Brit accent and all.

In addition to placing this unmet man in this uncanny spot of my grandmotherly kitchen, my unconscious also gave him eyeliner. This man and I correspond, sometimes, and he assures me he hasn’t worn eyeliner since an unfortunate turn in a glam rock band many years ago. I told him it was a risk, the eyeliner, but it worked for him in a Bobby Smith kind of Romantics way.

I have had dreams of this barely known man and his witty Brit naughty bits.

I have had dreams too about my imagined Nobodaddy. When I was in bed the other day immersed in my fevered gropings, it was his hand I imagined sliding one, two, three fingers inside me. It was his index finger that stroked my cervix, his forefinger that pressed with precision on my g-spot, his fingers I imagined my pussy stroking in its methodical orgasmic clutch.

I have had dreams about him, the Nobodaddy. The way that my head my body slides and exhales and releases against his gravitas. The way that when entangled in his arms and legs I feel small and somehow young.

I have had dreams of others too, those who remain somehow shadowy purple and indistinct in my mind, men and women both, and sometimes in my polymorphously perverse and fecund imagination they are together.

I have had dreams.

Which is odd, really, because I haven’t really been sleeping much.

Insomnia is the kingdom of the anxious. We who fret toss and turn our sleepfree scepters from hand to hand. We kick at the ermine of our robes and find it twisted like crashed cars between our thighs. We who can’t sleep sometimes type or drink or take a drug or two or test our hands in our nethers to see if with relief we can bring rest.

Which often we can’t.

I have no point today. I am pointless, not pointy. I am round. I am circling like a Spirograph.

It is an autumn of some small discontent.

I can’t seem to write. I can’t seem to think. I can’t seem to sleep. I can’t seem to find a way to make my knees stop aching.

I can’t seem to find a way to mend the gap that mesmerizes me into wakefulness.

I have not dreamed of Donny. He is not beside me as I thrash about in my insomniac's monarchy. He does not visit with me that mesmerizing gap between the life dreamed and the life waking.

fever pitch

I’m sick and fevered.

My libido, however, is fine, fine as a fiddle. Better than fine. Screaming, in fact. My temperature is spiking and I even suffered a migraine today, and yet the clit is yowling for attention.  Yawping like a feral child.

I had to take Imitrex today for my migraine. I also had to touch myself and found myself wet and puffy.

Four fingers were barely enough.

I wish I’d had another hand.

Maybe yours.