pretty dumb things

on being fingered with rings

Marriage is a contract that I may never make, and yet I like being fingered by men with wedding rings. It’s not that I can feel the ring. Wedding rings tend toward the slim and the flat. I’ve never had the experienced the interior wriggling of a finger with a ring rococo as Liberace’s , a skull bauble thick as Keith Richard’s, a chunk of metal clunky as Robert Lee Morris’s Superman. The rings that have been inside me have been modest, prudent, utilitarian bands signaling commitment.

There have been three of them in reality and one in my imagination. Of the three real rings, one man was unquestionably cheating and after we fucked, would stomp around the room muttering, “I’m damned. I’m going to hell.” That was not the best part of our sexual congress, and I didn’t keep the affair going very long. (Parenthetically, I might add, shortly after our brief tryst ended, this man fell in love with another woman, and now he, his wife, and this woman live separately in what is by all accounts an amicable polyamory. Bully for him.) One of them lived in a state of prolonged commitment to both his wife and his unabashed affairs with multiple women. He was very open about it all to the women in his life, almost business-like, and yet quite caring to me. He interested me intellectually, but not enough to see him more than twice. The third, and most recent, lives in a happily open relationship with his wife of several years. He has lovers; she has lovers; it all seems quite idyllic.

I feel conflicted about cheating. On the one hand, it’s just not a very nice thing to do to the person to whom you’ve plighted your troth. It isn’t honest, and it smacks of cowardice. A person should strive not to be pusillanimous, a word that feels so much like what it means as to be nearly onomatopoetic. On the other, I tend to be compassionate to people in pain, and often—though not always—people who cheat are people in pain. They’re putting their feelings into actions, not into words, and that, unless it’s interpretive dance, is often a problem. When I consider infidelity, I am caught betwixt me moral core and between my compassion. Mostly, I come down on the side of not cheating, if you’re at all interested.

But this piece of writing is less about the squishy ethical territory of infidelity and more about how I like being fingered by a finger with a wedding ring. Clearly, when the finger is diddling me, I can’t see the ring. I can’t even feel the ring. So the pleasure of the ring comes neither from the visual nor from the sensual. It’s a purely imaginative power. It’s a pleasure that rests in the seat of all pleasure—my pinky-grey and corrugated brain.

It’s difficult for me to put my finger on the exact spot of that imaginary pleasure. I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that part is powered by the shock of the illicit thrill, if indeed the finger belonging to the man fingering me is infidel. Like almost every other human, I do feel pleasure in transgression, and crossing this boundary, like all the strange others that for one reason or another give me the good down-low tingle, nudges whatever purely physical pleasure there is into electrically-charged territory. But the illicitness isn’t it in and of itself.

I know that it’s not because the man, the imagined man, the one without the ring, the one whose ring I imagined and in imagining it found great delight, was Donny, my now-X and then erstwhile fiancé. It was his imagined not-ring that prodded me to gyrate indecorously one sunny August afternoon, his naked fingers twisting and turning inside me. My mind furnished his finger with a ring. It bedighted his third finger on his left hand with a ring, and though neither the ring nor even possibly that exact finger was rubbing the walls of my pussy like a magic lamp, it was real enough to me, and I came from the concept as much as from the reality.

Which all leads me to believe it’s not the cheating that I like. It’s the abstract concept of commitment. It’s the symbolism of the ring, this piece of metal that our culture uses to denote those of us who have made a pact with another human from those of us who haven’t. It doesn’t matter whether the man has committed to me—though clearly my fetishization of the ring in general and my somatic response to Donny’s fictive ring in specific suggests that a commitment to me would be ideal—it’s that this man has committed, for good, bad, or ugly to someone.

I’m sure that my ring thing speaks silent tomes about me. Commitment is something that has eluded me. I, like Mr Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, have reached Q. I cannot, however, reach R, and I should very much like to, even if I suspect that commitment, like the lighthouse, will seem a lot less mystical once I get there, whenever it does, however late in life, in whatever way I’ve been altered by my own world war. I’m sure that my ring thing is fertile ground for solipsism. I think, however, I’ll prefer to hold onto it with my febrile erotic imaginings, flickering, imaginary and powerful.

take me out to the ball game?

There were many things I loved to do with Donny. Sex, obviously—he is the muse for the great wolf’s portion of the naughty-sweaty writing here on my pretty dumb things (a fount of writing that has dried up along with the linn of my sex life, sadly). I loved going to restaurants with him; we always shared everything; it was like eating our intimacy. I loved the date stuff—going to movies, theatre, and like that; I loved the quotidian stuff too—taking our dogs to the dog run, shopping for health and beauty items, you know, the things that couples do when they’re couply. I really miss all of that stuff I used to do with Donny.

Like Yankees games. I really miss going to Yankees games, a loss that has been honed sharp and bright with the start of baseball season and the sudden dash of good weather here in Gotham.

I am a Yankee fan, for good, bad or ugly. Outside of New York, being a Yankee fan is kind of like drinking only Starbucks coffee: you have to justify your love of the evil empire. Sure, it’s evil, but I love it, you feel compelled to say, however ruefully. Inside New York, being a Yankee fan is pretty much a default setting. Sure, there are Mets fans—and they’re so cute with their copycat stadium and traditions—but pretty much everyone who is anyone and lots of people who aren’t are Yankee fans. I am but one of those in the swarming horde.

My relationship with baseball in general and with the Yankees in specific is kind of finicky and romantic. I don’t really understand baseball, or not in the way that grown-ups understand it, anyway. All those numbers and acronyms confuse me, and frankly, I don’t care about statistics. I don’t watch the game for the RBIs or ERs or whatever. I watch it for the poetry. I like the endless diamond that seems to stretch like a kid’s summer vacation into infinity. I like the unabashed green, deep as an emerald and set in place by only a few simple lines of ocherous  dirt. I like the back of Derek Jeter’s neck and the sweep of A-Rod’s thighs. I like the fact that this game takes as long as it needs to; there’s no clock in baseball. I like that. I like a lot of things about baseball and they all tend to the abstract.

Mostly, though, what I love about the Yankees is Jorge Posada. It’s not an erotic love. I don’t want to “do” Georgie, as the recently departed Joe Torre used to call him. I want to put Jorge on my bed and look at him or maybe hug him, like he’s a stuffed animal. I just want to bask in the general glory that is Jorge Posada, because I love him like I love my dog: uncomplicatedly, unreservedly,  and unconditionally. If he had chosen to sign with another organization last February rather than renew his contract with the Yankees, I would have jumped ship with him.

Our love is mutual, even if my number 20 has no idea. Jorge tends to play very, very well when I’m in the stands. Donny once crunched the numbers and discovered that when I’m there, Jorge bats around .700, which is really very good, I’m told. I’m reluctant to suggest a direct cause-and-effect relationship between my presence at Yankee Stadium and Jorge’s output when I am there, but I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. Suffice to say that my very first Yankee game Jorge hit two home runs. I thought that was kind of, you know, normal, but Donny assured me it was not.

I think you can feel the weight of my sadness now that my conduit to the Yankees and proximity to Jorge has dried up. Donny’s and my break-up has done more than merely break my heart; it has deprived me of Yankees tickets. Nay, it has possibly even damaged Jorge Posada’s game. I let his current injured shoulder to speak wordless volumes about my absence from his life.

Sadly, my watching the game on television does nothing either for Jorge or for me. I don’t really “get” televised games. Mostly, they make me want to read a book or masturbate, or both. Plus, when I watch a game, I seem to have no effect on number 20 (my replacement favorite Yankee, number 24, Robinson Cano, appears to have no link to me whatsoever; he does what he does whether I’m there or not; I do, however, like his name and he has a very genuine smile, and yet he’s no Jorge). Plus, there are all those advertisements. I leave a televised game feeling depressed, not rejuvenated. It has none of the sparkle of the live.

So this is where you, my devoted New York readers of my pretty dumb things come in. If any of you—man, woman, both, whatever—happen over the course of this long and liquid summer have tickets and want to give them to me, take me, or sell them to me, please let me know. You can email me here. I especially like going to the game with people who can explain to me what is exactly happening and don’t mind questions that would be more appropriate from a second-grader than from a fully grown woman. And I have to say that those seats that are closer to the field are really much nicer than the ones way up near the sky. I especially like the ones where they have the waiter service and you can sit in your seat and watch the Yankees all practice swinging the bat while you wait for the waiters to bring you things to eat. I like those the best, but really I’ll take whatever I can get.

I rely on the kindness of strangers with Yankees tickets. Think of it this way, don't do it just for me; do it for Jorge. And, really, who can refuse anything to a man with ears like that?

The middle photo and caption comes courtesy of LOLYankees.

the trouble with dreams

The part where I dream of him every night has commenced. Every night, or nearly every night, often enough that it feels like a nightly event, as if my unconscious has a regularly scheduled date for pernoctation, I dream of Donny.

Mostly, in my dreams Donny is moving out, despite the fact that we never lived together. In my dreams, he’s packing boxes, or he’s surrounded by boxes already stacked and packed, and I am struck by both the visual of a nearly vacated room and the feel of a room made new by its echo. In my dreams, I wonder where I’m going to put things, how I’m going to fill the space, now that he has moved out. (Before we broke up, I had all these dreams that I had two apartments, one I lived in and one I didn’t. In my dream, I got eviction notices for both; I felt stress about how I’d pay for both of my homes, especially the empty one.)

I’ve had other dreams where we’re just together, doing stuff; stuff is done by us, and we are there. There’s nothing special about the dream. No penguins or uncanny architecture. No bones or flying or bullets or bodies. No dwarfs or she-males. Just us, talking, doing stuff, and the pervading sense that the end is unquestionably nigh. I’ve had dreams where we fought, and in them we fought with a kind of spitting primal anger we never had in waking life. I’ve had dreams of Donny, lots of them, of late; my mind works overtime to process this loss.

(I also had a dream that in this highly posh, art deco L.A. hotel, Naomi Watts seduced me. She pulled me down onto a velvet divan the color of an arterial spray. She was wearing silk of a color somewhere between ecru and lemon. She kissed me and held my face in her cool, narrow-fingered hands, and the room swirled and morphed and somehow I was in her bed, all crisp, white linen and bolstered headboard swathed in yet more arterial velvet.

She and I were kissing and touching, undressing one another with our hands, and suddenly her husband Liev Schrieber was there also, undressed but for his boxers. I looked at Naomi, who nodded her ascent and then reclined on her side to watch me slide Liev's boxers off over his cock, already swollen and hard as a dehiscent fruit. I got this vivid view of his abdomen carpeted with bristly hairs, my hands shorts sliding his boxers down, the shiny-taut toasty-pink skin of his glans, and his moon-shaped face watching. My mouth nearly watered with the prospect. But then, as dreams do, it got mussed by the appearance of two more people, one a male-male, one a she-male, and in my dream I made my regrets. A threesome with Naomi and Liev was one thing; a five-some was something entirely something bigger than my unconscious mind could wrap itself around. They were very polite, if disappointed.)

This oneiric processing of the emotional break-up is nothing new for me. After I broke up with C, I spent seven long, heart-wrenching years dreaming about him. My C-related dreams were unequivocally painful, involving as they did my dreamed obsession with him: us meeting unbeknownst to his wife and sharing some brief fucking passion in a strange apartment; my breaking into his house and poring through his things, touching his photos like totems; my stumbling across him and his wife in flagrante delicto, and feeling a blaze of delicious horror. These were always painful dreams. I often woke up weeping.

At some point near the end of those seven years, I dreamt of C and I told him how often I dreamed of him and how I would wake up in tears. I knew as I was telling him that the dreams would soon end. They did. I can now see C, and I feel affection for him. I feel gratitude. The ghost of our years together and our love beyond reason colors the room, hovering in the milky distance, but I don’t feel pain. His life is not mine, and I feel thankful for that. In those seven years after we broke up, I never thought I’d get to this point, and yet here I am, able to stand on a peninsula and see C-land, off in the distance, wave a cheerful hello and then walk away with neither insouciance nor sadness.

Someday, I’ll get to that point with Donny, but it’ll be a while. I’m feeling better than I was. I’m now nearly funk-free; I’m able to do the things I need to do without feeling like they’re bigger than I am. I am no longer so distracted that I feel immersed in the Donny-fug, like it’s swirling about me all emo-miasma and clouding my vision. I’m able, from time to time, to see clearly. And then there are my dreams working overtime. (Over time, they will fall away like leaves. Over time, I’ll grow a new pearl where Donny once was.)

I don’t have sex dreams about Donny. But I can still smell his scent, evanescent as water, sweet like beech trees. I can still feel his fingers, and I can still remember the way he kissed. Someday, those details will fall away too. Fall like fluff and stick somewhere, anywhere, but not here in my consciousness.

looking forward to--and askance at--fucking something strange

So time goes tick tick tick, and each splattering spot of time makes me feel just an iota more anxious. Sure, those individual dots of time could all add up to a landscape as serenely sensual as a Serraut. They could also coalesce to form something more grisly, something more akin to an arterial spray than a Sunday in the park. See, the point is that in just a couple of weeks, I’ve an assignation for unabashedly carnal purposes with a man who is a near-stranger and in a city not my own. Frankly, I’ve crossed the emotional river from pure excitation to polka-dotted anxiety.

Plans have been made. The tickets have been bought. Discussions have been had. Scenarios have been imagined. Emails have been exchanged. Body fluids, thus far, have not, but if it all unrolls as it has on the red carpet of my mind, they will be (if in such a way that fluids can be “safer”). It’s not new territory, this planning to make carnal merry with a man I don’t know particularly well but to whose eel I feel an electric attraction, but it feels that way. Exciting and new and frankly just a bit terrifying.

I used to be a bit reckless. I wasn’t reckful. I recked, recked with abandon, recked without a thought to consequence. I recked a lot. I let myself be caught like a maquerau in the seine of willfully blind blundering fucking, and I liked it. I like throwing caution to the wind. I liked the blank bliss of not thinking, that whitewash of consciousness, that feeling that the mental rheostat was being dialed down by this strange flesh, these new fingers, this grunting supplication to sex. I fucked my way into brief quiet oblivions, and even if I recognized that all was not healthy with my world, I did it anyway, because it worked and because I needed the vacation.

Then things changed, as things are wont to do. I gravitated toward Donny as he gravitated toward me, and with the gravitational pull of our relationship, our previously wildly spinning lunar bodies began a stately orbit. We were in sync, and it was good. It seemed it'd last; it didn’t. (Which might be the six-word memoir of my relationship with Donny.) Things fell apart, as things are wont to do; the center could not hold. Now I find myself graver than I had been. Grave enough that I don’t feel the keening need to crash my body against another—any other—in the blind hope that joy will be felt, that escape will be possible, that the strange will be made beautiful and whole.

Now, nearly four years after that point in time I have called SlutFest 2004, that time when I gave myself the big blank check to fuck my way to self-knowledge—an endeavor, I might add, that despite its myriad problems is not without great merit—I’ve changed. I’m no longer so willing to part my thighs for any Dick, Tom or Harry. I am no longer willing to take the risk and walk that erotic high-wire, pole in hand, covered spangly and washed jangly with desire, chin raised with cheeky bravado. I’m not so willing to take that risk that was its own reward. I’m not so willing to fuck a stranger, in short.

And yet, here I am, making this plan, buying these tickets, having discussions, writing these emails, and imagining scenarios. Here I am, dead set on exchanging bodily fluids (albeit with the caveat of “safer”). Here I am, both looking forward and looking askance and feeling the ambivalence of excitation and anxiety. Here I am, closing in on a couple weeks to meeting a strange man in a strange hotel room in a strange city for some strange, blessedly strange, transcendentally strange, blissfully strange, fucking.

(Because, please ye gods, let it be strange, exciting and new.)

The anxiety is there. It swirls around the banal (what if he smells funny?); it eddies around my insecurities (what if he thinks I’m fat?); it circles around the egotistical (what if he bores me?); it bubbles around the big (what if we can’t stand each other?); it churns around the emo (what if it all makes me sad?). The anxiety is there, but so is the constant flame of my knowing that I need this.

It may be painfully cliché. Yet sometimes you just need some sexual healing. Sometimes you just have to get back on the horse. It’s as clear as mud, as fresh as a daisy, as obvious as the nose on my face, as pure as molasses, that I need something hot, hot as hell, and I’m going to take the bull by the horns, and I’m going to fuck the man. In any case, it should be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick; it may even end up being better than sliced bread.

a near doughty paean to mike doughty

It all began with “Screenwriter’s Blues,” off the 1994 disc Ruby Vroom. The plodding synth opening, the chunka-chunka-chunk-chunk bass and drum lines, the antic tikka-tikka-tikka that chimes in anxiously, the weird vertiginous sense of music swirling around you like garbage caught in an updraft, and above it all, the slow unrolling poetry of the words: “Gone savage/ for teenagers with/automatic weapons and/ boundless love./ Gone savage for/ teenagers who are/ aesthetically/ pleasing,/ in other words,/ fly.” The voice, worn as a second-hand suit intones. “Los Angeles beckons/ the teenagers/ to come to her/ on buses;/Los Angeles loves,” it pauses, “love.”

This song got me. It gripped me in its weird jazzy hooks and its self-consciously ironic earnestness, and I felt fine with it. Sure, that disc by Soul Coughing was chock full of chewy musical goodness with “Janine” and “True Dreams of Wichita” and others, but it was this song that got me.

Mostly, it was Mike Doughty, who then called himself “M. Doughty.” It was he—and in particular his voice, frayed at the edges; and his lyrics, so thick and purple with possibility; and his attitude, ironic and woebegone—that I held close to my breast. I held it close and primal as kittens.

There have been a few songs/discs/bands that, like the DJ and the chanteuse of the disco song, have saved my life. There was Elvis Costello and the Attractions Imperial Bedroom, and once for about two months there was The Tom-Tom Club’s “Man With the Four-Way Hips,” and most recently, there has been Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. (There have also been flickers of songs that have risen meaningfully as comets and fallen just as quickly.) Few, if any, have done so with the regularity and consistency of Mike Doughty and his former band, Soul Coughing.

I apologize for my slavish worship at the alter of this artist. Rare, I know, is it that I rave about anything, and rarer is it that I effectively kowtow with such abject supplication, but there you go. This man’s music has that embarrassing effect on me, and as I am still fresh with the glow of seeing him perform last night at the Highline Ballroom here in glamorous Gotham, I can be forgiven, I hope.

Ok, seriously, if there were a Tiger Beat for post-college, self-referential, jazz-inflected alt-rock, eco-friendly, ironic bands, Mike Doughty’s pull-out poster would be on my locker. (It’s a magazine whose 60% post-consumer-fiber pages I have to pause and imagine. It would have articles about Dave Matthews recycling accompanied by pictures of him sorting his High Times and Greenpeace membership renewal requests from his cans of Trader Joe’s garbanzo beans and bottles of micro-brews. The headline would probably read something along the lines of “Hot 2 Recycle 2! Dave Loves 2 Reuse! Recycle! Reduce! (And So Can U!)” And then there would be an accompanying side bar with Ani Di Franco and Aimee Mann in a tank top and floral dress, respectively, carrying their bundled magazines to the curb. There’d be articles on Karen O and her favorite organic cosmetics, on Ben Folds and his turn-ons—Snoop Dogg, girls in glasses, perfectly tuned pianos—and turn-offs—fighting in orchestra halls, censorship and impossibly heavy piano stools, and on Michael Stipe “So He’s Gay! Bald! And 48! He’s Still Hott!”)

Last night’s show was pretty awesome. And while I recoil at having written that last sentence, let me attempt to redeem myself that while Mike Doughty and company—a tall, skinny bass player with random tattoos, a drummer who looked so incandescent with happiness he might at any moment have gone supernova, and a keyboardist who oscillated between ecstasy and brooding—were superswell, the crowd was not, even if they were incredibly decorous. Last night, I found myself part of a company that I hoped would reject me. It was a crowd best defined by their lack of make-up, devotion to the organic cotton ironic t-shirt, history of very expensive education, and undoubted unqualified, unquestioned, and inarticulate devotion to Obama. My friend Betty who went with me said that she was probably the only registered Republican in the room; she was no doubt correct.

But mmm…Mike Doughty. Like him, my default position is that of an apparent  cynic—but within every cynical candy shell beats the warm, gooey heart of a romantic; we are no exception to that truism. Many of Doughty’s songs center on an elusive and elevated woman, a woman who, as he sings of the unnamed woman in the blue dress represents “the perfect hourglass of my loneliness” and whom he just wants to keep dancing. There’s a lot of loneliness in Doughty’s songs. I feel his solitariness it rings the bells, joyful and triumphant, that I hear ring within me. Ring with genre-busting, pleasurably guitar-heavy, complex and ironic, rock aesthetic.

Which is, of course, the mark of any artist: how much you can see yourself in him or her. The artist has this weird catoptric relationship with his or her fan—if  the artist’s work does what it’s supposed to, it does more than just evoke the artist’s own  experience; it reflects that of the fan. I’ve always seen the shadowy shapes of my pain, my joys and my thoughts in Mike Doughty’s music, and for this I am profoundly thankful.

Mike Doughty is a blogger; you can find his blog here. Also, he {hearts} myspace. If you live in Gotham, you might be interested to know that he has another show in Brooklyn on 10 April at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. And finally, here’s a video to “Screenwriter’s Blues,” so you can hear what started me on my journey to Doughty genuflection.

exit wounds

I’m still in the midst of book-proposal writing hell, which is really less hell and more a wan flavor of purgatory, truth be told. I find myself alternately dropped into the cold dreck of self-doubt and  then lifted into the sunny aeries of self-confidence. It’s an unpleasant interior see-saw, and what I want, what I really, really want, is to just finish the fictional document and sign a happy contract. Zig-a-zig hah, indeed.

And yet the telling of other stories won’t wait. They intrude and demand airing, like bed linen left too long. So I must break with the proposing in order to tell you other stuff, for I must tell someone and tell it again, and tell it anew, and each time discovering something fresh.

A week ago I received a letter from Donny. It was a pretty long letter, hand-written, studded with inside jokes like nuts in a pastry. The length of the letter was improportionate to its message. There was, to be precise, no clear rhetorical end. There was nothing about wanting to be with me, or committing to me. There was nothing about what he’s learned in the past couple of months or how he’s come to terms with the way he treated me. Mostly, the letter went something like this: he loves me; he misses me; I’m really so great,  especially my figurative insides.

Which dearth of rhetorical message meant either that a) the letter was all text and no sub or b) it was all sub and not so much text. In reading it a couple of times, both to myself and to one girlfriend, I came to the realization that the letter was more the latter. I don’t doubt that Donny truly loves me, seriously misses me, and unquestionably appreciates my greatness, especially those of my figurative insides. I think all of that is true. However, I also think that he was motivated to write said letter far less because of his love or my insides and far more because of his loss—and his difficulty in dealing with it.

I wasn’t going to respond to the letter. I really wasn’t. I had made up my mind that there was nothing for me to say to it that would help either one of us. There was no conversation to be had, and I resolved not to start one. And then, last Thursday, after the reading at In The Flesh, and after a dinner at a molecular gastronomic restaurant that was accompanied by wine and bourbon, I wove my way back home, and snuggled deep in my soft and yielding bed, I drunk-texted Donny.

What the fuck? I ask succinctly. That’s what I texted him. (It probably surprises none of you that when I text, I do so in fully sentences, complete with punctuation and the best spelling I can muster.) And then with the bed rocking gently, I tried to sleep to mitigated success.

Friday, Good Friday, a day that Donny being Catholic takes off from work, was punctuated by snippets of texts and fragmented conversation. It all culminated in a conversation with Donny late on Friday afternoon, after he’d returned from his “medieval service,” his words, and I from my therapy.

And you know what? It was good to hear his voice. I really missed his voice, his slight Jersey twang and his laugh. I missed his vocal syncopation, the way he pauses before certain words, the way he always calls me by my full hexasyllabic name. I missed the sensory confirmation that Donny lives on in this world, thinks about the things I imagined he was thinking about, laughs at the jokes I thought he’d laugh at, and feels the general emotions I envisioned him feeling. I missed him, and for a brief respite from the pain of our break-up, it was good to just hear him.

But then he brought up the letter, whereupon I had to respond to it and to him. I told him that it was fine to write letters until the cows came home, but it was not ok for him to send them. I told him that in sending this letter, he effectually ripped the scab off the wound that had been healing for the past couple of months. I told him that he had broken my heart, not to put too fine a point on it, and that his decision to write to me was selfish, for I could find no reason for him to write to me beyond his wanting me to help him feel better.

I told him, too, that that was not my job. I told him I was not his friend. I couldn’t be his friend. And while I love him and miss him and wish him the best, I don’t want him. I told him that I realized that I couldn’t change him—that no matter what I did or how much time I gave him, he wasn’t going to joyfully commit to me until he was able to on his own time, and that seemed to be no time soon. I told him to that because I wanted someone who would joyfully commit to me, and he was incapable of it, that the simple math brought me to the painful recognition that I don’t want him.

He was pretty silent throughout, and really, what other response could there be. He knew he’d done wrong in writing me the letter—he apologized for it both in the letter and on the phone—so his silence felt like a tacit acknowledgement of all that I was saying, which all of it I said calmly, precisely and not unkindly. The way I felt was simply that I could not go through what he’d put me through last fall again, that I was angry at him for feeling that I would be there when he reached for me, and that I’d been doing ok with the whole heart-healy thing, until last Friday.

Last Friday, and for the remainder of the weekend, I found myself plunged into an industrial sized vat of what-the-funk, and it did not please me. I lost days at the gym. I got a monster cold. I couldn’t write. I ate a lot. I retreated to the couch and Buffy.

The weird thing is that now, now that the emotional rubble is once more starting to settle, my mind is self-selecting the good bits, the tasty morsels, the parts where we enjoyed one another and held each other and fucked with our foreheads close as greeting Maoris. I have to remind my mind of the pain and the confusion and the unfulfilled promises and how he has so consistently acted so selfishly, like I’m little more than a gem of a hologram with interesting thoughts and a profound penchant for deeply creative sex.

Today, I find myself missing Donny and not liking it at all. I was happier when I felt good with being alone, and not keen as a whetted knife with syrupy, confusing loss.

philosophers: hott or not?

Sure, they had big meaty brains and wrote heavy tomes with intimidating names like Fear and Loathing, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and A Critique of Pure Reason, but were they hott? Were any of them, you know, mattressable? If you met, for example, John Locke or Søren Kierkegaard in a bar  in philosopher’s heaven, which one would you take home at closing time? Challenged to a game of kill, marry or boff, what would you do to Nietzsche, Hume and Hegel? Who would you rather kiss, a young Arthur Schopenhauer or a middle-aged Jean-Paul Sartre?

These are the questions that can keep a girl up at night, or a girl such as myself anyway, a girl with too much time on her hands and a festive case of insomnia. These are the questions that try a woman’s soul. These are the questions that boil down to one dichotomous query: random European philosopher: hott or not?

First up, Scottish philosopher David Hume. He’s rocking the mid-eighteenth peruke/cravat/vest/overcoat combo, so you have to give him some points for sheer sartorial style. Plus, any guy who avers the need for a good game of backgammon over endless philosophical twaddle gets points in my book.

(Click on any image to embiggen it. That's right: your cursor acts like virtual Viagra.)

What do you think? Hume, hott or not?

Next, we have Freidrich Nietzsche. Let us for the sake of argument put aside the whole “God is dead” thing and that unfortunate Nazi co-opting of Nietzsche’s philosophies and the fact that his name is hell to spell. Take a look at those mustaches. Those are some fine, fine whiskers. Even if you don’t go in for the creative facial hair, you have to give it up to a man who shows such commitment to his soup-strainer.

Teutonic, sure, but Nietzsche, hott or not?

G. W. Hegel looks at you like you’ve been a very, very naughty, freches kleines Kind. He looks like he’d like to take down your schmutzige Hosen and smack Ihre zarten Hinterteile, and not because you’d like it. He looks like he might enjoy it, though, even if he’d never admit it to himself but instead would sublimate his pleasure and write a book called Phänomenologie der Arsch.

Yeah, I don't care if it can't really be done.  I’m calling this dyad. Hegel: not hott.

Jean-Paul Sartre is tres, tres French. Just as Nietzsche and Hegel were way German, that’s how French Sartre is. In fact, probably no word summons the je ne sais quoi of Frenchiness like the single word “Sartre.” It’s a name with enough super Gallic power to make a non-smoker hunt for a Galoise and an Atkins fanatic lurch towards the nearest baguette. And yet, looking at the picture, I must ask: is it me? Or is Sartre kind of wall-eyed?

Jean-Paul Sartre: chaudd ou non?

He’s Danish. He’s tortured. He has that wild, sweeping up-do and that crazy “ø” that makes the girls all kinds of høt. He had a broken engagement and wrote emo journal entries. You know that if there had been blogs back in the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard would have had one, like either/or.blogspot.com or sicknessuntodeath.wordpress.org. His MySpace page would have had a picture of the back of his hand and listed his age as 99.

That great Dane Kierkegaard: høtt or nøt?

I know he’s really important and enlightenment and yadda yadda yadda, but would you look at that forehead? Immanuel Kant looks like Max Headroom’s long lost ancestor.

Forgive me, but I Kant go there: not hott.

He said, “the limits of your language are the limits of your world,” but Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein makes me want to go preverbal and call him “Daddy.” He looks like the unlikely lovechild of David Lynch and David Strathairn. Of course, he would talk with an Arnold accent being that he is Austrian.

What’s your position? Yah, yah Wittgenstein iss haht? Or no, he iss naht?

Arthur Schopenhauer. Very influential. But he kind of makes Hegel look like a big, old softie. He makes Hegel look like someone you'd want to be your neighbor. I mean, can you imagine borrowing a cup of anything from this man? Anything other than, I don't know, bile?

But gaze upon a portrait of Schopenhauer as a young dog. Look at those auburn curls, that full mouth, those cheekbones. He was a stone-cold fox. But then look back at him at an old, mutton-chop side-burned dude with the pointy hair and those crazy eyes. He looks like he’s wondering how much good eating there is on your liver.

Now be reasonable, Schopenhauer: hott or not?

And for the first time ever here on my pretty dumb things, I’m giving you, my readers, a chance to use your luscious, edible brains along with your formidable libidos. I’m giving you a poll, so take some time, gaze at the pictures and make your choice. Which philosopher’s stones would you want to watch go jingle, jangle, jingle?

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the dead boyfriend, a reconsideration

Buying a coffee at Starbucks, I noticed this stand of books sitting in a location primed for impulse buy. Like most of the books sold at Starbucks, this book fell neatly into the genre of emo-laden feel-goodery—the kind of book that should be read to a John Williams’s score, the kind of book that will go down like a cliché, the kind of book that will blend like the fruit in a Jamba Juice,  be slurped up just as easy as a  smoothie and be almost as memorable. The kind of book that, by the time you’re finished with it, swirls and morphs into Listening to Tuesdays with the Kite Runner.

The book that caught my eye is called Beautiful Boy, and it is, according to its front jacket, “the story of a father’s journey through his son’s addiction.” The cardboard stand further informed me that “While drug addiction nearly killed his son, but David Sheff refused to give up.” I first pondered the sentence’s grammatical flaw, but then my attention turned to a thought far more grave than the syntax’s coordination issue: my dead ex-boyfriend, Will. Unlike the father and his son, I most definitely gave up on Will when he picked up his addiction to heroin and cocaine like it was luggage he’d left in a bus station locker, that is to say quickly, easily, unthinkingly and wordlessly.

californication dreamin'

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray. And yet in the atomic winter that is my current emotional state, a slim ray of sun has fallen. I find myself immersed in a little Californication dreaming.

It’s been a tough as bricks couple of weeks. Mostly what I want to do is curl up in bed with a pillow over my eyes. I’m suffering through one of those times when every thing feels like a monumental fucking chore. Washing my dishes. Mailing envelopes. Folding sweaters. Don’t even get me started on the state of my floor. It’s just a great, swirly sandy mess, an arid desert, my life is, and right now what I’d like most is to press the snooze bar over and over again until I find I’ve suddenly woken up in a better world.

And yet, there’s this bright spot on the foreseeable horizon, a little glinting glimmer that winks seductively and extends a promise of fragrant flesh, thick lips and a swell cock. What it promises too—and this is the most seductive part of the package, and trust me, the whole package ranks fairly highly on the Casanovameter—is a filthy-naughty mind fully fecund as my own.

What it promises, in short, is a clash of the sexual titans, and though I’m not ready to step into the ring right now, this moment, this minute when my solitary bed beckons like a maternal embrace, I shall be. (A train of thought that leads me inexorably into wondering what my American Gladiator name would be. Termagant, maybe. Or Slush.) What it promises, to be yet more brief, is some effing great fucking.

This is a man I’ve met but whom I’ve never so much as kissed. This is a man of great intelligence and profound perversion (or perhaps profound intelligence and great perversion; it can be so difficult to tell). This is a man whose prurient C.V. would leave most men gasping in jealousy and many women swooning with undiscovered want. This is quite the man, in short. Though to be fair, he is a bit pretentious, if I may be honest, and I think I might.

This is the only man, the only real flesh-and-blood man, to whose imagined image I masturbate with any frequency. He knows this fact, of course, and he feels the commensurate pride intrinsic to it. I have imagined this man doing the voodoo that he does with doo-dads and what-nots to my whoo-hah and I have reciprocated in kind, in my mind, for in real life, we’ve done nothing more than hug and kiss congenially.

But, ah, the delightful electric tension. Livestock has been herded by less current.

And now, plopped square in the midst of this winter of my intense discontent comes the swelling possibility of pressing his flesh. I have imagined it. So has he. It’s grand, really. I play these movies where only I can see them—the great silver-white space of my head—and I see us finally kissing. In an act of passionate cliché, I have ripped his shirt asunder. I have gotten down on my knees, and I have prayed; I have fellated his imagined squat cock with a Mother Superior’s fervor. I have laid belly down and ass up and awaited the squelch of lube and the anxious press of his digits. I have imagined squalling in orgasm and uttering unintelligible gutterspeak.

I have imagined fucking him for days, weeks, years; really, the imagining has happened for years.

Now the possibility to carry the carnal imagining into the realm of flesh sprawls before me, and it does look luscious. It’s not this month, or next, but soon enough to smell it, yet far enough off in the distance that its brightness doesn’t scare me into hiding.

It’s enough to get me out of bed—or back into it.

a jam on jism

Apparently, I’m currently fixated with bukake. It’s a fixation of which I was unaware until I finished up my most recent Penthouse article, the one that you all helped me write. For in the process of explaining ways for the average Penthouse reader to ask his female lover for the low-down dirty-sexy-fun things he wants but doesn’t know how to request, I must have used the example of spooge play at least four times.

In a 2,000-word article, four uses of bukake equals a fixation. Or if not a fixation, at least a profound interest that has moved beyond being merely idle.

here i go again on my own, with fewer cheeseburgers

Forgive me. It looks pretty unlikely that I’m going to have sex any time soon. Unlike the somatic-frenetic summer of 2004, the time when I presented myself with a Publisher’s Clearing House-sized check to indulge the full-spectrum rainbow of my sexual proclivities, I just don’t feel the burning urge to go out and frug with hordes of strange. I also have zero interest in tying on my shoes for the full-length ballet that is dating. I don’t want to tell anyone my life’s story. I don’t want to wait for the phone call. I don’t want to preen and primp in vain hopes. I don’t want to wonder when, or if, he’ll kiss me and when, or if, I’ll like it. The way I feel is that I pretty much can’t be bothered.

Which is all a shorthand way of saying that this break-up has felt very different from every other break-up I’ve ever had. Break-ups are like cheeseburgers: every one may be different, and yet they are all essentially exactly the same. They’re ubiquitous—nearly every restaurant serves a cheeseburger, and nearly every person has suffered a break-up. Some go down easy, and others leave you with a burn in your solar plexus for far too long. Sometimes you look forward to one—you feel an indefinable need for it, cheeseburger or break-up—and once you have it, you feel both guilty and satisfied. But as much as most of my break-ups, and cheeseburgers, seem to have melded and solidified into a single meaty mass, this one stands out.

It has been three weeks since I last spoke to Donny and nearly a month since I’ve seen him. As much as our relationship had endured an epilepsy-inducing on-off-on-off strobe-light freneticism, this off position feels distinctly permanent. I’ve missed Donny. This past week, as I felt buffeted about like a small bird in the maelstrom of emotions surrounding my possible first book, I wished I could call him and share all of it. I’ve certainly missed the sex with him, his pointy pervert’s tongue and his fat-bellied cock. Certain images or smells have projected full-blown and Ilfachrome-bright pictures of his body in my mind. And yet while I miss him, I don’t want him.

I don’t want anyone but my friends, really. Which is what is weird. I’ve had extended periods when I was single; I’m not like some friends of mine who surf the boyfriend wave, bobbing only for a few weeks between men. But every other time that I’ve been single, either I actively pined for a boyfriend or I fucked freely and meaninglessly as a Bonobo. I never felt particularly ok without either the search for meaning in a man or in sex. Now, however, I do.

Sure, I bat about the imaginary man mobile in my mind. I do idle supine in bed or while I’m engaged  in some other task that requires only a model’s portion of my cognition and I entertain romantic fantasies. I do, occasionally, look at a man looking at me, as one is wont to do on a city street, and wonder if I could see myself in and with and perhaps under him. I’m not without desire. I’m just not propelled by it. Desire currently doesn’t fire me, at least not desire for either a mate or a fuck. Strange, that.

Similarly odd, I find myself relatively free of angst about this break-up. I have not gnashed my teeth nor have I rent my clothes. I have not beat my breast and cried Mea Culpa, fists thrust predictably heavenward. I’ve thus far not selected the hair shirt. I have not beat myself up over this break-up and I feel surprisingly little pain. I have felt grief, I have felt sad, but I have not felt like curling up and dying. It’s a peculiar fucking sensation. I’m so accustomed to twisting the knife in my heart that when I’ve put my hand to my breast and found no hilt to grasp, I have laughed.

So here, again, I may go on my own, but the road I go down feels oddly new, however déjà vu familiar. No matter where I go there will be cheeseburgers, but that doesn’t mean I have to eat them.

the man on the subway, a #2 waltz

So I saw this guy today. He looked kind of like Liam Neeson, if Liam Neeson was on the suits end of construction and didn’t really know his way around Manhattan. He had that hair the color of wet sand and a suede jacket just a shade lighter. His face had succumbed to gravity just enough that he had to be around my age. There was a tiny pooch around the mouth, not so much that he looked like Ernest Borgnine, but enough to give his probably long-into-adulthood boyish face a kind of gravitas.

He was pacing the platform at the 96th Street Broadway line. He fidgeted with one of those leather covered folder things so much beloved by men in the construction industry because they think it looks kind of arty and professional, even though any architect worth his weight in blueprints wouldn’t be caught dead carrying one. He kept on walking up to the edge of the platform and peering uptown to see if he saw the lights.

Come closer, dear lights, he was probably thinking, or some less empurpled version of it.

I watched him, kind of shamelessly, really. These days I find myself most often watching men with the kind of dispassionate air of a person appraising celery. No one really goes all gooey, aching to wax rhapsodic, over celery. People do wax over esculent fruits, berries or pomegranates or melons, pellucid grapes and sun-rapt peaches. We can get pretty excited over the smooth and electric skin of eggplant or the taut, bursting flesh of a perfect tomato. But as much as we might need celery, even enjoy it, we humans tend to see it as an appliance of the food world. Men have lately been celery to me.

This guy, though, something about him nudged onto tomato territory. He was markedly taller than I, for one thing, and though he didn’t have the whip-skinny kind of body that most often elicits my down-low, dirty interests, he did. But there was something about him, all nervous in Gotham, his pinky-stripe shirt pleading for approval, his mussed Liam Neeson hair and his hands fiddling with that pleather folder. His hands looked like they’d known a tool or two.

I got this full-body flash of his body pressed against mine, his erection insistent as his geometric belt buckle. I got the imagined taste of his kiss, some strange brew of bad coffee and luncheon meats. I got the feel of his middle-aged flesh under my hands, that slight and not unpleasant thickening just above the hips, his back and arms strong and meaty, his thighs tight as an I-beam. I imagined sidling up to him and giving him my number. I saw him bigger than life in my small apartment, swallowing the space, incongruent as a giant in a lingerie shop. I wondered if he liked the naughty.

I wondered if I could teach him, if he did not. I wondered when he’d last had a woman slip him her number and some fortune cookie of a phrase. Imagine a world with your cock in my ass; your lucky numbers are 69. I imagined small and pointless talk. I imagined hearing his name and not caring. I imagined my body small and malleable in his. I imagined excusing myself to shower. I imagined him saying, "No, please, don’t."

Sitting kitty-corner from him on the 2 train, I watched him when I wasn’t playing Bejeweled, which was often. I saw him look at me. Our eyes met. I imagined his scent, pointy as fir trees and twice as musky. I saw my body under his and imagined his sleek Liam Neeson cock sliding into my defiantly aching pussy like a hot knife into an ice-cream cake. I felt myself melting.

But not quite. Because I’m not in any shape to press flesh with any man, not now, not yet. Not quite. Not by a long shot. Not really. At 34th Street the Liam Neeson man stood up, glanced at me, and flowed with the other liquid bodies off into the afternoon. I sat on the train, Elliot Smith’s Waltz #2 playing in my head. I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m something something something anyhow, and it’s really just fine.

for pity fuck's sake

Sometimes memories choose to rise and twirl like garbage caught in a psychic updraft. There’s no reason why that particular reminiscent plastic bag should get puffed up and filled with wind and sent uncannily upwards become visible, while another similar bag lies overlooked and invisible on the gritty ground, but there it is, bright and improbable, intangible as a toddler’s mobile, and just as mesmerizing.

Of late, two memories have recently blown and shown themselves to me in a fulsome, greasy light. Both of them are marked by pity; they are, in fact, memories of two men I pity sucked and/or fucked.

The pity suck/fuck may be the one sex act that is exactly like bad pizza. I’ve had bad pizza. It tasted wan and squelchy, too salty and overly pointed; it tasted like if you took actual pizza—the pleasant crunch of crust, the slide of melted cheese, the rounded swell of tomato and garlic and oregano—fed it into a computer program and then ate what the computer spit back out. Bad pizza, usually previously frozen, presently nuked and staring bland and white as a lab rat under naked fluorescent bulbs, tastes like computer-generated pizza, a shadow of a copy of a drawing of real pizza, and it tastes pretty much exactly what pity sex feels like.

I have had both bad pizza and pity sex, so I can assert this analogy with certitude.

in which a booty call goes unanswered

Forgive me for my blogging lapse. I didn’t mean to leave my recent righteous pile of vitriol up for so long with so little joyous company in this season of the enforced Happy. (Which is, parenthetically, the thing I hate about the holiday season. I don’t like being told how to feel, nor do I like the pronounced feeling of failure when my joy doesn’t measure up. That’s what I hate. That and the music. And the rampant gluttonous consumerism. I do, however, like the wrapping and giving of well-considered gifts and the food. The music, though, makes me want to staple puppies.)  I’d meant to write and I kept finding myself derailed by other demands. Including a pressing demand made by my boyfriend/ex-fiancé/whatever and his epic cock.

Last Wednesday, I got a booty call from Donny. He had attended his office party, a marthon alcohol-fueled affair that had devolved into a visit to one of the many high-end strip clubs here in Gotham. At around 2:30 a.m. my phone rang, and I answered it. It was Donny calling from the corner below my apartment wanting access. I wasn’t sleeping anyway, wrapped as I was in the gnarly embrace of some hard-core insomnia, so I let him come in.

Donny rarely has an odor, and when he does, it’s an evanescent smell, some waft more hanging reminiscent than an odor in and of itself. Donny usually smells like water, like beech trees, like light. Late last Wednesday—or early Thursday morning, depending on your point of view—he smelled like he’d been imbued with the essence of abattoir-turned-bordello and pickled in gin. He stood weaving gently, a slender reed buffeted by an invisible wind. Drunk, his voice burred and bass, he rambled with a surprising lucidity of thought and clarity of speech. He kept on telling me how loud it was in my room, his voice booming about the silence of my bedroom.

One thing about Donny: he doesn’t suffer from whisky dick. His cock jutted rampart as an I-beam under the civilizing flannel of his charcoal pin-stripe suit pants. He straddled me as I lay supine on the bed, and he whisper-talked in my ear of his watching the strippers and men watching the strippers and his imagining me stripping and men watching me. He gutter-murmured in my ear, his breath hot and rank, telling me how he felt jealous of my past, of all the legions men who had ever seen me strip, and of how all of that history rested forever frustratingly outside of his grasp, and how his jealousy made him supremely hot and ambivalently bothered.

As Donny talked in my ear and ground into my hip, I wrapped my hand around his cock, hard and beseeching in his pants. I appreciated its heft and weight, the feel of it in my hand; I saw myself like King Arthur to Donny’s Excalibur; his cock felt right and thick and appropriately challenging in the curve of my palm. I imagined my unfastening his belt, unclasping hook and eye of his trouser, unzipping them, and drawing out his cock, mighty and glowing as a joyful prospect. I could hear Donny’s moan when my naked fingers reached, touched, and grasped his unflanneled dick.

I could see us fucking in slim seconds, my thighs thrust rudely out of the way like so much thick detritus, or tucked up toward my chest like a diver rolling into artistic freefall; I could feel the stab and thrust of his cock. I could feel the press and the pierce of it. I could see it all play out like a melodrama in all its inebriated messy and predictable glory. I could see my offering my body up to him and his rampant desire, his strange green-glowing lust, fed by his jealousy of all the men who had ever seem me strip in the fecund fields of his mind. I could see it all as I lay there under Donny, his flannel-wrapped dick in my hand, his breath faintly scary and unmistakenly intimate flowing in lurid zephyrs around my ear.

I saw it all, and I said no to the booty call. I denied him, and I sent him home, still mumbling about the strange loudness of my silent room.

Later in the week, we drank red wine and ate pizza with our dogs standing sentry to the crusts. We watched television, and when we were done with the eating and the drinking and the watching and the tossing of scraps to the dogs, we went to bed, and there we fucked in uncomplicated knots, our bodies intertwined and interlocking as our lives are. We fucked in the dark of his bedroom, free of the haunt of his jealousy or the thrum of my anxiety or the noise of the world, or as free as your average flawed humans can be. We fucked and we came and we held each other close and echoed our love from one to another across the small chasm of our bodies.

Joy to the world, indeed.

having gotten the led out

I’ve admitted it before: I am often a highly impressionable person. I am disconcertingly open to idle suggestion. I also fixate rather easily. Like a terrier, I get a hold of an idea and not much can separate me from it. The confluence of these two traits—impressionability and obduracy—explains, kind of, why I recently bought the entire Led Zeppelin catalog.

See, I have this terrible passion for cheesy biographies, generally those of people immersed in, or hanging on the margins of, the music business. I read and loved Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt; that love flowered into this petit obsession. After The Dirt came Pamela Des Barre’s I’m With The Band, Janice Dickinson’s No Lifeguard on Duty, Bebe Buell’s Rebel Heart, and Traci Lords’ Underneath It All. There was also No One Get Out of Here Alive, the Doors story; Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil;  Stanley Booth’s excellent The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones; Dave Navarro’s seriously self-indulgent Don’t Try This at Home; Fargo Rock City, which I love a lot; a couple of books about Kiss; and penultimately, Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed.

And then, naturally, I had to read Hammer of the Gods, the Led Zeppelin story. Let’s face it; my not having read the ür-rock-book about the ür-rock band was a lacuna through which you could drive an Antonov An-225, were you wont to do such a thing. And I have to say, that even lacking the glittery-clever prose of The Dirt’s Neil Strauss or the gritty reality of Legs McNeil, Hammer was a pretty fucking great read. It had the perfectly mixed proportions of a well-created cocktail—just enough dirt, just enough art, just enough pathos, just enough of every important component to make it feel as if you were being given a pretty holistic eye’s view into the life and death of what might be The Greatest Rock Band In The World, or the one that gave us "Stairway to Heaven," anyway.

The thing is this: I was never much of a Led Zeppelin fan.

thoughts on morality, manwhorishness and the confluence thereof

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about manwhores. It started when I began writing my second piece for Penthouse, this guide for men who want to be moral manwhores, and then as I was embroiled in avoiding rewriting the piece and then submerged in reluctantly revising it, the subject sort of slogged to the forefront my frontal lobe, crawling slowly as a nocturnal creature out of its dark recesses and into the light. Now that I’ve just cashed the check for the article, it seems like I can’t not talk about it.

Just to set up a base line understanding, I don’t have any problem with manwhores. In my mind, a man is as free to fornicate freely and wantonly as dolphins in the dating pool that is life. I don’t believe that monogamy is the answer for everyone, nor even for any one person his—or her—whole life. I am not the kind of person who would take the time out of her day to castigate a person for rambunctious sexual activity or exuberant sexual desires. If you’re a man who wants to put notches in your belt until it falls apart and fragments into a thousand leathery strips, rock on with your bad self.

Same thing if you’re a chick, by the way.

(I should also take this moment to say that I’m not the kind of person to chastise those chaste people who choose to remain virgins until marriage or forever. I may not understand it, but I’m not going to say that my way is the only way, and people who do opt against having sex have a right to have their decisions respected, even if I can’t fathom doing it, or not doing it, as it were. While I really, truly don’t understand people who are virgins and don’t masturbate—and I know some—I do respect the decisions of those who remain incomprehensibly abstinent.)

I do, however, have an issue with people who don’t fuck morally. I’ve fucked an awful lot of men. More than your average chick admits to, anyway. Some of those sex acts I’d relive again in a heartbeat; some of them I would gladly have eternally erased from my spotty mind; and most fall into the giant crevasse between sublimity and horror, wherein I feel neither the need to lave myself in their reminiscence nor the desire to scourge myself in their memory. But looking back at those various and sundry sex acts, or as many of them as I can recall,  and arrayed before me they form a prodigious and sweaty lot, I have to say that what separates the fucking wheat from the genital chaff often has less to do with the sex than it has to do with the partner, and how ethical that man (or woman) acted.

I myself have cheated. I have also fucked men who were cheating. I can understand why people cheat. Sometimes people, flawed beings that we are, put our feelings into actions, not words, and sometimes those actions include frottage, fellatio, cunnilingus, coitus, and other Latin terms. I also don’t for a moment suggest that cheating—the act of having sex outside a committed relationship without the express understanding of both committed partners—is moral. (I take a more grey area on the person who is the cheated with—to me, if you’re fucking a person who is cheating, you should know what you’re getting yourself into, but you are not responsible for the actions of the person you’re fucking. I think far too much attention gets thrown at the cheated with, when it’s the cheater who has made the choice. But I do understand these are debatable concepts). There is no way, however justifiable, a cheating person is a moral person because he or she choosing not to honor a commitment.

But, really, cheating is the least of it.

For me, a moral manwhore (or its feminine equivalent) is delineated by how upfront he is in a relationship. A moral manwhore is open about his manwhorish ways, and he lets the woman (or man) in question knowingly decide whether she (or he) wants to have sex with a man who is not interested in commitment. Some of us do, some of us don’t. It should be up to us to decide, openly and honestly, and not colored by the shiny Cubic Zirconia  gilt of false romantic promises, or fake identities, or other pointless and potentially hurtful lies. A moral manwhore, in short, puts the “man” in whore, and he isn’t fearful that he may lose out in lays because he’s honest.

A moral manwhore, too, is one who respects the woman he’s fucking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stood up when I was supposed to hook up. I can certainly understand how real life can intervene in the best laid plans. I can also understand how men sometimes change their minds. I cannot understand, however, how it is that my time becomes less valuable than his, nor can I understand why in this day of nigh-unto-implantable technological devices, it’s so difficult to make a phone call, write an email or send a text to say you can’t make it. A woman who is ready and willing to have sex with a guy is a woman deserving of common politeness.

Ultimately—and this matter is both the most fundamental and the most ephemeral—a moral manwhore knows why he’s a manwhore. The unexamined sex life is not worth living, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s even less worth fucking a person who has not examined his. A moral manwhore isn’t out to hurt women. He isn’t, like the Vampire I had the distinct displeasure to dally with, out to gather hearts, heartlessly. He doesn’t want to feed his ego on the tender flesh of a chick’s sexual permission. He doesn’t want to fool anyone; he just wants to fuck them. And he has looked at why he’s doing what he’s doing and come to peace with it.

Sure, there are other things. Moral manwhores always wear condoms, bring their own, don’t whinge about donning them, and dispose of them after. They don’t pick on, or pick up, women who are clearly damaged or too young and not currently able to make fully informed decisions. They call or email politely to end their dalliances. They don’t expect their fuckbuddies to do favors for them. They put down the toilet seat. They take no for an answer. And so on.

But really, what being a moral manwhore comes down to is just being a real adult. Treating other people as you yourself would want to be treated. Respecting others. Playing nice, Not running with scissors. And knowing not only what you want, but why you want it.

my man in stockings and gloves

My boyfriend, Donny, has long arms and legs. He has the kind of body that looks just a little bit as if he’d been stretched on a rack for a delicately brief period of time. His torso is kind of normal-sized; it isn’t particularly long or short or wide or narrow or anything anywhere. His torso doesn’t have that linguine look that some really tall guys have, nor does it have that block of cheese or lima bean shape that other dudes have. It’s just, sort of, average. His arms and legs, though, like silk scarves in the breeze, they go on forever.

And more germane, they’re carpeted in a wispy-thick silky hair. I could, were I bored stuporous or otherwise inclined, count my boyfriend’s chest hairs. There aren’t that many of them, though what there are have a peculiar length and silkiness. His chest hairs look like they could have come from a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Not, again, that they exist in excess.

The hair on his arms and legs are a different story. They’re silky, but dense as trees in the Black Forest. What’s weirder is how and where they settle. Naked, my boyfriend looks as if he’s wearing opera gloves and thigh-high stockings of hair. He is dressed in body hair like a nineteenth-century whore. All he needs is a big Madame Pompadour bouffant and a corset, and he’d be an Aubrey Beardsley print.

I find looking at Donny’s thighs a wonder. There is the most definite line of hirsute demarcation: on one side there is nothing but smooth marscapone-white skin; on the other a dense thicket of black hair. It’s as if in invisible Berlin wall limns the tops of his legs, just below the scoop of hips and the swell of his ass. I look at his legs, creamy-white obfuscated suddenly by inky black, and I imagine drawing garters down his loins.

This line, of course, gets muddied around Donny’s pubic triangle. It’s as if he’s wearing one of those strange Frederick’s of Hollywood panty-garter-stocking contraptions that want to emulate the naughtiness of garters and stockings, but without all that bother of hardware and actual eroticism. Donny’s pubic hair, and this is probably something he’d deeply prefer my not revealing, and yet I cannot forbear, is very long and very fine. If the hair on his chest belongs to a Cavalier, the hair around his cock is that of a bearded collie. He trims it. He’s very neat.

Aside from the dog-whiffy metaphors and the erotic Victorian similes and the women’s unmentionables analogies, what all of my boyfriend’s body hair makes me want to do most is sling him over my capable lap and spank him like a recalcitrant wench. Which is deeply disconcerting, far more disconcerting that likening my heavy-cocked and pleasingly manly soon-to-be-Betrothed to pampered kept things, like lapdogs and nineteenth-century courtesans.

I don’t have much of a burning desire to give free rein to the Fem-Dom within. I toy with the concept; I bat it about my consciousness like a shuttlecock, but I don’t give it enough serious notice to bring it into any full fruition. When I consider being dominant, I do it in the hypothetical world of erotic fiction—I’ve had this story of a check-out girl who gets fisted by a little person rolling around my imagination for a year or so. Or I’ll bring the concept out and shake it, like laundry being hung on a line, when I’m searching for some image or concept to push me, like a benign crazy person, over the edge to orgasm.

But I don’t spend much time on it. My donning the buck boots of Dominance flickers and falls, uncreated, in the dying of the light. Except where my boyfriend’s lily haunches meet the mossy growth of hair. There it lives, and there it whispers nasty naughty and flinchy things. There it makes my fingers twitch towards a switch, a hard-backed brush, a swishy little spanker. There it asks, however politely, for a wee welt, a tender bruise, a tiny drop of blood.

I have yet to relent, to give action to this hair-whispering voice. I have not, but I feel my fingers itch and dance a minute hairy Victorian minuet at the prospect.

cool tools for men: a brief if hott-making guide

I originally wrote this piece for Sexshop 365, a fabulous online retailer of sex toys in the U.K. (You can read my full list of articles for them here.) I wanted to republish it here to announce my affiliation with Black Label toys of Australia and the United States, a retailer of some seriously fine-ass high-end toys. If you visit Black Label toys, spend $200, and enter the order code "Chelsea Girl" in the promotional/comments box, you'll receive a free Kama Sutra Weekender Kit, pictured to the left. Think of me while you and your lover(s) lick Honeysuckle Dust off one another's naughty bits. And if you use my handy-dandy affiliate button on the lower right hand of this page, I'll get a sweet kickback too. It's win/win/win!

It’s a fact: Men love tools. Though to make the truism truer, it should be amended to note that “tools” need not be made by Stanley or Snap-On (however lovely these brands may be). I use the word “tools” capaciously here, not merely encompassing the noble power screwer or the humble hammer, but also the time-honored dildo, the electric vibrator, the insouciant butt plug. I believe that tools can make the man and so I offer to you this guide those of you who would like to be a little more adventuresome in building your love nest.

cock/rock/castrati

I suspect I’m growing crotchety in my advancing years. I’m all about the crotch, especially when I listen to music. Kids today, I think, what do they know? Who are their idols? What do they listen to when they roll around idly on their beds and listen to music? And what, exactly, took the cock out of rock?

I am not a music critic, though I try it from time to time. I have no credentials beyond an ever-expanding music collection and a willingness to listen to just about everything once (exceptions include polka, reggaeton and that plastic Long Island disco they play on Z100 on Friday nights). I am not particularly well-versed in music history, and I’m certainly not a musician myself, given that I lack the requisite inherent mathiness for musicality. I don’t follow any one band with avidity, and while I like going to shows, I don’t make it a vocation. I’m definitely a musical dabbler, a dilettante at best, a rank amateur in the grand pantheon of people who write and think about music. And yet, I cannot forbear expressing my rock-cock consternation.

As much as my musical tastes glibly wander all over the genre’s map, I am deep-down a rock chick. My musical gut impulse is to consume the raw, the dirty, the gritty, the blues-based and the drug-addled. I may listen to everything from techno to flamenco, but I am most likely to keep my twitchy index finger from pressing the “next” button when my iPod rests on rock. In the kingdom of music, my inner self wears the battered leather pants and t-shirt and slouches in the corner near a puddle of its own sick. It’s just the way I am, for good, bad or chain-smoking.

a first out of mind

Having, as I’ve stated before, a kind of mania for firsts, it can hardly be surprising that I have duly narrated a series of initial events in a sundae bar of flavors—masculine salty goodness, feminine umami tastiness, and other fruity delights. I have recounted my first blow-job, my first anal, my first this, my first that. Rarely have I narrated my last, but my lasts seem to fade into a crimson emo haze like the final shot of Gone With the Wind.

I have a memory for inaugural experiences. I can recall my first day of every school I’ve ever attended (nine, if you care to know). I can recall what I wore on my first date with Donny over three years ago and where we went and what we talked about on the way there. I remember the first time I ever ate Duck à l’Orange and how much I liked it.

One. One. One. I nearly compulsively count my life in a series of firsts, as if I’ll run out of them, and I suppose some day I will.

Which makes it strange that I cannot recall the first time I came with a person. Sure, I came with Armand when he condescendingly applied his hair-dryer-like vibrator to my teenage clit in his tiny apartment, but that hardly counts as actually coming with another human. It was more like I was a bug pinned to Armand’s seedy poly-cotton sheets, and he observed my coming with the detached distance of a scientist. I came less with him than for him. Anyway, in my mind, it doesn’t count. It doesn’t count at all.

I know exactly who it was that made me come more with than for. I can hardly forbear giving his full Semitic name because it is a gloriously descriptive one. His first name is an adjective, his last name a combination of an adjective and a noun. It’s a beautiful name in its lubricious puissant grace—it’s one of those names that you cannot believe parents would actually opt to saddle a child with—and as much as I’d like to offer it to you like an amuse bouche, I must not.

Ok, his name was Randy. That’s as much as I may give you.

Randy was his name. He was a groundskeeper at this awful Newton, Mass condo development where I was spending the summer of my sixteenth year as an au pair to this just awful divorced woman and her rather sweet, if dim, child. Randy was the one bright shiny spot on my otherwise depressing summer horizon. This woman whom I was working for was narcissistic to the nth degree, vain and stupid, always going on about the length of her legs and the depth of her tan. She didn’t work, and yet she needed me, a fulltime nanny. It was fairly deplorable on many levels. Fortunately, I found Randy.

He had a Jew-fro and a Yes t-shirt. I didn’t know what Yes was. It read to me like he was answering my question before I even asked it. He tied his fro into a reluctant submission with a bandana and he sweated glistening rivulets over his tanned skin. His nose was big and he was older than me and I was immediately entranced. I didn’t have to work that hard to seduce him, but seduce him I did.

Almost before I knew it, we were making out in long elliptical sessions on the deep white shag rug of my employer the nights she was out with one of her series of terribly gold-laden boyfriends. Almost before I knew it, I found Randy had stripped me of my terry romper shorts and my rainbow t-shirt, and almost before I knew it, I was succumbing to Randy’s big-haired, big-nosed, receding-chin charms, and almost without remembering it, I know I shuddered my first orgasm under the methodical ministrations of his mouth.

Sitting here and writing this piece, I can nearly summon bits and pieces and details to this first. I can almost create a seamless narrative studded by exactitudes that very nearly convinces me I do remember this first in its entirety. I can see the tiny stalactites of the condo’s blown ceiling; I can visualize the bobbing of Randy’s hair between my adolescent thighs. I can feel the tip of his tongue nudging against the tip of my slit. I can nearly fabricate a whole out of these scraps.

But these bits and pieces and details I summon to mind are untrustworthy. They happened at one time or another, possibly all at once, but I can’t unquestionably ascribe veracity to them—not the stalactites, the bobbing afro, the parted tan teen thighs, or the nose on the slit. I cannot, like Tristram Shandy’s wounded Uncle Toby, put my finger on the map and say, there, there exactly is where it happened.

It happened, though, I know it did, for I fell into a love of sorts with Randy. We “dated” for two years, a word I must put in quotes for to “date” me then was to assume a kind of open relationship (and anyway we lived four hours apart) because I fucked whomever I wanted. I still fell in love with Randy, and I know that he made me come with his mouth, and he did so consistently, and he did so enough that I knew finally that I could come with another person, even if I can’t exactly recall coming with him.

I do remember this: I remember the first time I ever spent a night sleeping with Randy, which was, parenthetically, the first time I ever slept with a man. I was visiting him for the weekend at his college in Amherst, and after a long night of drinking and eating and probably fucking, I wrapped myself around him to sleep.

He promptly pulled himself away. “People don’t really sleep together like that,” he said, “it only happens in the movies.” Somewhat chastened, I retreated to my side of the bed. I stayed there, carefully, sleeping as conservatively as I could, while Randy slumbered on beside me.

Not much time later, I discovered Randy was wrong. (Donny and I sleep wrapped together like a burrito, entangled as wild roses, enmeshed as chain mail.)

I don’t know what happened to Randy—I imagine him with a receding hairline and a small middle-age paunch somewhere with grown kids and a tiny McMansion, but he could be dead or fabulous or something else. I wish him well, wherever he is, even if I can’t exactly recall why.

blue balls and other phantom aches

It’s hard to say whether I never saw him again because I put his name and phone number in my little gold book even before I met him, or if my putting his name and number in my book was merely coincidental to my never seeing him again. I recall with the white cold light of morning that the moment I wrote his name (I’ll call him “John Doe”) and his number (I’ll say it had a 201 area code) in my book, I had a feeling that I oughtn’t. I had a feeling that doing so would be tantamount to a death sentence. I had a feeling, in short, that I was jinxing myself.

I begin this story at what appears to be the end because appearances are often deceiving, or they are at least as often as they are not. So my decision to write John Doe’s name and 201 phone number in my book was both the scratchy-silent death knell to our nascent relationship and it was not, if I may be elusive, and I think I may.

twin peaks, a story with two parts

There was this guy I had a really short relationship with. He, coincidentally or not, had a really short dick. I don’t remember his name, where he came from, what he did for a living, or much of anything about him but for a few random bits. He was uncharacteristically blond. On our first date, he took me to the Central Park Zoo and he held my hand, which I found a bit forward, even if I was fairly sure I’d fuck him fairly soon. He lived in Brooklyn, somewhere. And when we fucked, he taught me a new way to fuck, a posture that in perpetuity I’d call “the short-dick position.”

I met this guy, this blond short-dicked Brooklynite, during the heights of Twin Peaks mania, sometime between April and June 1990. That first season when everyone in Manhattan was turning into the show and you could suddenly get a reservation at Bouley at 8:00 p.m. One other thing I remember about him was this: we definitely watched the series finale in his Brooklyn living room, party-style, with hot cups of joe and slices of cherry pie all around. It was damn fine coffee.

After the party, this nearly-forgotten guy and I crept off downstairs to his basement room and fucked in his patented short-dicked position. I would lay my body somewhat diagonally over his, so that if you hovered like Bob around the ceiling and gazed down upon us, the X of our bodies would mark the spot. Then the dude would introduce his dick into my pussy, and he would use his right index finger to manipulate my clit until I, writhing on his short but effectively located dick, came. That’s pretty much the extant of the memorable bits of the very short relationship with the short-dicked man.

Those bits and this: while at the Twin Peaks party, I met a friend of the forgotten dude. This friend, unlike the Brooklynite, was not blond, nor did he live in Brooklyn, nor did he have a short dick. Nor, for that matter, have I forgotten this guy’s name. His name was, and probably still is, Rex. He lived in Manhattan, in a sprawling loft with a rabbit warren of rooms. He was, and maybe