This blog is Adults Only!
I mean it now.
Today I sent a brand, spanky new and totally revised book proposal off to my major agent. Thus proving once again that I'm capable of yanking myself up by my pretty little bootstraps at least one more time.
Monday, I start the job at the office, which may be a level in hell for me, but at least I'm going to be working for a known and beloved demon.
So there, wicked and conspiring universe. Up your collective butthole.
I never thought I’d agree with anything that Neil Sedaka ever voiced in song, but in this one respect he is correct: breaking up is hard, so hard, to do.
Having made that stony blanket statement, now let me backtrack a bit. Breaking up, if you’ve fallen out of love, is not hard to do. Then, actually, it is remarkably easy. It’s like ripping a Band-Aid off a cut that’s healed and on a patch of skin without hair. Breaking up with someone with whom you’re now longer in love is, and forgive the extreme visceral metaphor here—and I warn you, it bears a kind of X-Games intestinal intensity—is like taking the perfect shit. When you no longer love someone, dumping that person has a kind of gliding excretory grace. It’s nearly pleasurable. And when it’s over, you clean yourself up a bit and all you feel is relief.
Not so when you break up with someone whom you still love. Then it’s kind of more like those medieval torture devices where they dragged your intestines out and wound them like yarn upon a spit. It’s a long, slow death, from what I’ve read, and you’re likely to pass out from the pain. As rococo as this image is, it’s also the most apt metaphor for what I’ve been enduring with Donny, my X, since last September when he messily told me that in fact, no, he wasn’t ready to marry me.
The upshot of all of this red, gooey gore is that I’m out here on the beach and I did not invite Donny. Rather, I invited a few other friends and a couple of them are joining me. We three girls will undoubtedly pillow fight vigorously while wearing pastel panties and twee tank tops, until we melt into a heap of tanned limbs and Sapphic intent. Actually, we won’t. But you’re free to let that sugarplum image dance in your collective heads if it pleases you.
And yet, even here on this little island with its sand and its chirruping birds and its crashing of the surf and its sun beaming in a charming, non-fatal way, I am enveloped in the emotional aspic that is the lingering break up. Donny, apparitional, haunts my thoughts, and as much as I want to exorcise him, I like him lingering, kind of like the rank, pink smell of flowers so past their prime that they approach the loam readiness of mulch.
I probably need a lover. I vacillate. I masturbate. Mostly, I masticate. Though I’m currently on a bender of beach waddling/wogging, an endeavor that seems to put a gentle kibosh on my cookie eating. I try to think of myself as incorporeal, which is difficult at the beach. There’s just so much skin-ness here. I’m brown as the proverbial beetle. My feet are so tan they look transplanted. I recognize that part of the process of this compulsive sun exposure (with sunscreen) and beach exercise has buried within it the attempt to reunite me with my own flesh. The break up took a physical toll, you see, and for many months I wanted to pretend I simply had no body, now that I had nobody.
It’s probably a good sign that I want to turn Donny into a ghost, that I want him to thaw, melt and resolve into a dew, because for many months I desperately wanted to be the ghost. This break up has been so very painful that I’ve had fantasies of simply vanishing. I’ve wanted to walk the streets invisible. I’ve pondered the glorious obscurity of the burka. I’ve wished that I could be as alone as a ghost, a solo shade flitting about the Hades of Manhattan. I’ve wanted, frankly, to cease to exist, but not, you know, in a permanent kind of way.
Last night I had a dream that I had succeeded, nearly. I dreamt that I’d taken some obscene overdose of Technicolor pills and that said dose had deposited me on death’s door. I felt this intense desire to just, finally, let go. But I didn’t. In my dream, I was revived, and then in a shocking turn of events that really happens most often only dreams, I was with Dustin Hoffman. I was interviewing him. He was looking at me peculiarly, and I explained what had happened with me the previous night: pills, color, desire, drifting, snapping back to life. He was solicitous.
And then he asked, “So I don’t suppose you would consider something casual, like a fling?” I considered it. I demurred. We continued talking, and Dustin morphed into a forty-ish Robert Redford. A while later I woke up.
What I make of all of this is that I’m fumbling through this break up. It’s not been easy because I loved Donny; I loved him enough to choose him as my husband. I remain hurt that he didn’t choose me, and I remain doubly hurt that it’s taken ten months for me to begin to realize that he isn’t the man I thought he was, that we are not in love any longer, and that I am ready to move on.
But something in my gut is telling me to accept all of that all of that gristly truth. Incredibly I’m almost listening.
The thing about summer is that with sunset comes a swelling of hushed expectation. This direct correlation between dusk and hope is a peculiarly summery phenomenon; at no other time of year does the setting of the sun create a palpable sense that at any moment, something wonderful might occur.
This feeling was born for me in adolescence. I don’t remember being a kid in summer and at night feeling much more than the physical smoothie of tiredness, happiness and wish that it would be morning. Only the sprouting of strange hairs and even stranger desires made twilight potentially magic. There was, with adolescence, a new and profoundly erotic romance to dusk. It was like I could suddenly feel an entrance to a magical realm where fairies would run amok doing unutterable and mostly unconceivable acts to one another with unabashed joy. Maybe Shakespeare had it right; midsummer makes love-besotted asses of us all.
I’m looking at my life with most likely more than half of it gone. It’s a strange place, this interstitial space between youth and decrepitude. I don’t feel my age; I suppose I don’t look it. In my head, which is where I live most of the time, I oscillate in age. One moment I feel like I did when I was 22, another I’m 13, still another I’ve telescoped to a chronologically appropriate 45. On the inside, I’m like Alice in the drawing room, shooting up and down in interior size, but often without the aid of biscuits or elixirs, though I wouldn’t rule them out.
And yet, however constantly shifting the internal landscape, summertime’s sense of nightfall wonderment lingers. There could be something, it feels, something so astounding I can’t quite make it out sitting there, right there, just beyond, just next to that firefly or that one or the one over there, if only I could be quick enough to grasp it.
There have been a handful of times when the wonderment has been requited. One was at a camp dance with Adam Fell; we met fortuitously and flirted with the white-hot intensity of stars on the verge of supernova. Another singular bunch happened repeatedly with Donny Barber; we would come together under the velvet fall of night, and unspeaking, solder our mouths together; his kisses invariably tasted like tobacco and beer. There was the hot, pulsating night that my seduction of Marta became inevitable. Once, on Summer Solstice, about twenty-five years ago, I met a detestable rich boy who later that night taught me to orgasm during sex; I disliked the boy, but I loved fucking him. Another time, I met a boyfriend at an Oscar Wilde play; dressed in a friend’s white linen suit, my hair plastered to my head, I looked like a boy; we walked home hand-in-hand, and a some guys yelled out anti-gay epithets and we laughed because we could.
More recently, there was the first date with Donny, my X, when we walked the promenade on the Hudson; he told me about the engineering of jet planes, and I watched his pervert’s mouth with avidity. There was another night too, a comedy of errors, early in Donny’s and my dating history, a night of wandering around Riverside park, missing one another by minutes, and a roller skating guy who acted like Hermes and brought a message from me to Donny.
My magic revolves around others; my magic revolves around love. That something glowing and effulgent and corporeal; that something just outside of my fingertips and on those slender occasions when I can touch it, that something so pleasurable it makes me will myself from exploding. All those years later, all this time and all this experience, all those days beginning and ending, all those seasons rolling off one another like words from my tongue, all that everything, and still the crepuscular wonder remains, that hope, that wish, that near dusky touch of something waiting, something astounding.
And then as if to torture me, my unconscious serves up a piping hott sex dream dwelling on Donny’s dexterous fingers. It’s not enough that I spend my waking days repeating an elliptical list of highly rational, extremely persuasive and extraordinarily lucid reasons why I need to move on, post-hastey, but now my unconscious feels the need to prod and poke at the most delicate parts of me as if to remind me as to why I ought not.
It’s less fun, really, and I’m beginning to see the wisdom of the phenomenon of the rebound boy. Regretfully, I also know I’m no longer the kind of woman who can surf the relationship wave, hanging ten and shooting the green hook-up tunnel. I am simply not that flexible. Maybe I need to take up tantric yoga and learn some new relationship asanas. Downward-face double-dating dog, or some such.
Last night’s sex dream, as my sex dreams tend to do, held out the sweet pink promise of orgasm, attenuated it, and then snatched it away. My unconscious is a cruel, perverse mistress, and not in a good way. My sex dreams tend to incorporate people I know, so Donny’s presence, and more to the point the presence of his long and agile fingers, was unsurprising. Nor was the unusual setting—my back up against a wall of unknown origin, my skirts wadded up around my midsection, Donny close as a conspirator, his fingers buried inside me as if he was trying to snitch a lost object from an inconvenient locale. My sex dreams like to present to me a full spectrum of sexual behaviors that in my waking state I’d be hard pressed to find particularly pleasurable. They like to remind me of my conscious limitations.
I can’t help feeling that this dream is part and parcel of my current stage in the Donny-processing process, which is one wedged somewhere between the hard wish and the rocky fear. What precisely those wishes and those fear are, however, remain murky.
Like, for example, when we talk, I become a ventriloquist’s dummy as this horrible voice makes me go all puppet-like as it insists on asking/intimating/insinuating that Donny is dating someone else. I hate this voice, and yet even as I feel its words burble in my mouth, I’m incapable of stopping them. I am momentarily the unwilling acolyte to this horrid Svengali. And after I utter them, these phrases that require Donny’s swift and pointed denial, I feel dissatisfied. Yet I’m not sure what exactly I’m dissatisfied with—Donny’s denial because it wasn’t ardent enough, Donny’s denial because I’d actually like him not to deny, myself for asking in the first place, or something else I’ve not yet ascertained.
I find myself caught between the wish that he’s seeing someone and the fear that he is, or perhaps the wish that he is and the fear that he isn’t, or the wish that he isn’t and the fear that he is, or…bugger it. I can’t help but feel that were Donny to move on, and were I to know it, painful as it was, it would give me the tacit permission to move on my own darn self, and frankly that would be an immense relief. I feel like such a schnook that I can’t extend that permission to myself, but as of yet I can’t.
And here’s the kicker of last night’s erotogenic near-apogee: historically, I have a far harder time moving on from relationships with extra-good sex. Pretty much what keeps me yearning is high-quality fornication. It took me, for example, seven years to fully process my loss of C, the man I loved most and best prior to Donny. I shudder to think how long it will take me to see Donny fully recede in the relationship rearview mirror. On the other hand, lovers less stellar like Eff and Ernie vanished quickly and, like arsenic, left only a bitter trace.
My Xs have a tendency toward coupling unto nesting. All of my serious Xs—C, Eff, Ernie, even the Goat-Gatherer—hooked up like doilies with someone new within weeks/months of our relationship’s demise. C and Ernie were married (to other people, not to one another, though that image amuses) within a year and a half. I suppose this history too is another complicating factor to my wish/fear surrounding Donny. I more than half expect him to take up with someone else, and quickly. And no small part of me just wearily wishes that he would.
See, here’s the internal conundrum waging noisily as roofers inside my head: do I make an imprudent proposal, or do I not? It’s a question one could almost sing to a Clash song, were one to simplify the syntax.
The essentials of the issue are stark. Next week I am at a vacation house rather surprisingly alone. It’s a lovely little house with all the comforts of home and then some—I, for example, have neither cable nor a washing machine. It’s near the beach. It has a deck and a grill and it’s quiet and quaint and there are roses that bloom assertively. I wasn’t expecting to be spending about five days at this here house by myself, and yet here I am, staring a five-day, beachy solitude in the sandy, sunny face. I’ve asked a bunch of my friends to join me, and for a variety of reasons (mothers visiting, trips to Europe, busted exhaust systems in their vintage automobiles) no one can make it. So faced with spending a solid expanse of time on my onesy, I have been mulling over inviting, yeah, Donny.
My X and I remain in chatty contact. We are both of us tiptoeing precariously on that tightrope between parting forevermore and cleaving together. We chat, and the talk, seemingly light and fluffy as meringue, is thickly pregnant with possibility. It’s not just the sexual innuendoes that come and go like so many erotic birds winging about; it’s the subtext of keening loss and wailing need and the slow, inexorable thrum of love. Neither of us seems set on what we want, and it’s horrible and delightful in equal measure.
I’ve been turning over this idea of Donny spending this free-floating beach-bound time with me for weeks. It’s a concept I’ve considered from all its polyhedal angles. I’ve imagined the best and the worst, but mostly I’ve imagined us fucking. I really, really miss fucking my boyfriend, and I’m having a hard time teasing apart the threads of my emotional desire from those of my purely rank red pussy, to steal a line from Joyce and in doing so paraphrase it poorly.
To be fair to the totality of the situation, I’ve also considered inviting a stranger. There must be some man somewhere on this wet blue planet to whom I’d be attracted and who would want to visit me on this slender wisp of sand with the express purpose of unrestrained and possibly prelapsarian fucking. I’ve flipped the concept of some strange over and over like a pancake, so much so in fact that it has grown a bit tough. If it’s this hard for me to get roused over the abstract concept, I probably would have a really hard time with the reality.
And so it goes back to Donny, a known and beloved entity with fully known and beloved body parts. I imagine our playing house as a break from our break up and from our lives, as if this house that is not mine nor not his, this place that squats on this space that is neither land nor ocean, and this time that is not quotidian however much every day elements linger and in lingering grow a halo of specialness. In my mind, Donny’s coming would be utopian—attached to nothing, it would hang in space, unchained to expectation.
But I know the cold steel reality of the situation is that none of that is really possible. It is, after all, an imprudent proposal, an idea made unworkable by its churning emotional wake, and the naked fact that Donny, still unable to commit to me, is not the man I want in my life, much less in my pussy. Or possibly the other way around. To give him unfettered access to both, even for just a few days, is tantamount to giving up, bowing down, turning my belly to him and showing submission—and not in the good way.
So alone I’ll probably go it, those handful of days with sun and sand and grilled flesh and fresh corn. It’s not the worst thing that could happen to a girl, especially one like me who has had the metaphoric rug pulled out from under her optimistic legs as often as I have this past year. Still, it seems a shame to waste these days with no one but myself to play with.
Where I live in Gotham is terribly progressive and verging on horribly hip. I moved into my apartment almost fifteen years ago—making it the place I’ve lived the longest in my life, which is an oblong concept for me to wrap my mind around—and when I moved into this ex-tenement, there were no locks on the front doors. The local drug dealer hid his stash in the lighting fixture outside my door. It was a building, and a neighborhood, populated primarily by gay dudes, Puerto Rican families, and the occasional person like me who was neither gay nor Puerto Rican.
In the past fifteen years, I’ve seen this building in specific and Chelsea in general alter radically. The scary bodega downstairs has been replaced with a Thai restaurant staffed by an endless parade of feminine-looking dudes, one of whom looks like Roy Orbison if Roy Orbison had been an Asian cross-dresser. The Army-Navy store has been replaced with a boutique where one complete outfit would cost more than my rent. The little diner with the sign proclaiming “Chewy, Chewy Oats” has been renovated into a super-high end diner drenched in “fun” and “irony.” My building is largely occupied now by people who can afford to shop and eat at such locales.
Being assertively progressive and verging on horribly hip, and being a neighborhood that is residential, commercial and tourist-happy, my neighborhood is besieged by what I call the “Spangers for Change,” people employed to raise money for the ACLU, the Democratic Party, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the World Wildlife Fund, and so on. These people tend to be college students. They tend to look earnest and freshly scrubbed, as if they’ve been exfoliated of all the cynicism that encrusts normal Gothamites. They nearly vibrate with optimism.
They usually stand in book-ends, each at opposite ends of the block, waiting like goalies to block people like me from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. They sometimes wear the t-shirt of their organization of choice. They invariably bear clipboards. They inevitably assault you with this line: “Hi! Do you have a moment for __________?” The Spangers for Change don’t really want your time. They want your money. They may ask for your time, but it’s a ruse, a sham, an insincere come on.
The Spangers for Change (a name I take from the term for the kids who populate the East Village, sit on street corners, and desultorily cry, “Spare change? Spare change?” in such a way that it sounds like “Spange? Spange?”) first appeared about four years ago. Their presence was, like baseball, barbecues and ice cream sandwiches, a summer thing. At first few in number, they were like exotic birds who migrated to aestivate on my block. Then their numbers grew. Soon I was dodging not just Greenpeace and NARAL, but five or six different—and sometimes competing—organizations. And then they were there not just in the summer, but during every college vacation. It’s Spring Break, I wanted to tell them, why the fuck aren’t you out there doing jello shots, having indiscriminate sex, and flashing your tits like a normal person.
I, not surprisingly, turned surly. Going to my laundromat was like running an obstacle course. No, actually, I shouted, I don’t have a moment for reproductive rights. My frustration and my responses escalated in tandem. Soon, I found myself having long disquisitions with these people. I explained to them in clipped, curt and aggressive sentences that while I used to give money to the Democratic Party/ACLU/World Wildlife Fund, I certainly won’t now because they were RUINING MY LIFE. I made long, impassioned rhetorical arguments to convince these people that what they were doing was counterproductive, intrusive and MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE. And did I mention how they were FUCKING UP MY QUIET TRIP TO THE BANK?
In retrospect, I realize I had edged into the histrionic. But just as one avoids the crazy lady with the bags and the matted hair, these kids started to avoid me, so it worked.
This summer, I have either mellowed or resigned myself to the unavoidable presence of the SfC. I wave at them wearily, like an old elephant too saddened by flies to really care. I haven’t yelled at even one SfC, no matter how chipper they’ve been, nor how resolutely they’ve camped outside my building’s door.
Today, walking to Starbucks, one stopped me. Tall and tousled-haired, he looked like he should be smoking fatties on a beach somewhere. I think he was spanging for the Dems, but I could be wrong. And, damn, he was cute. All kinds of tall, skinny, flat goodness, like a long human length of white boy licorice whip. He stopped me asking if I had a moment for…whomever. I told him, no, thanks. When I returned with my coffee, he stopped me again.
“You’ve come back!” he said and smiled. For a nanosecond, I considered making him a deal: I’ll donate to your cause, I thought, if you fuck me. I briefly imagined turning this SfC into a political whore. If he really believed in the wetlands, I thought, he could put his pecker where his mouth was. I’d write a check his ass could cash.
I had this mental flicker of him in my apartment, the rooms made somehow smaller by his long, linguine presence. I imagined his college boy funk and his ungroomed manbush. I saw his thin thighs wedged between my own more stolid ones. I envisioned the song I could make him sing, my mouth wrapped around his earnest dick.
And then, smiling over my shoulder, I put my key in my door, and left him on the street to accost others more progressive, hipper, and probably less perverse, than me.
I imagine the most Warner Brothers of endings: safes falling, pianos crashing, rickety bridges snapping, large explosions in primary colors. To say that I’m not taking the recent rejection of my book proposal well would be an epic understatement. To be completely honest, I would very much just like right now to cease to exist. I’m having a hard time going from minute to minute and not collapsing in a heap.
Had the Very Large Publishing House actually bought the book that made the two editors perk up like spaniels when I told them about it that afternoon in February, I would be right now in a diametrically opposite position. I’d be so happy that sunshine would be beaming out my ass. I’d be so happy that I’d be floating. I’d be doing little dances of joy punctuated with pinching of my flesh just to make sure that I was awake and not dreaming something too improbably good to be true.
I don’t remember a whole lot of the specifics of that meeting last February. Much of it went by in electric quivers of anxiety, though a few odd details remain: the greige of the mushroom bisque that I spilled on my sweater, the way my hands felt strangely chill, the appraising gaze of the female editor. And I remember this: I remember saying, much to my emo chagrin, that I really, really hoped that this book actually came to fruition, because I wasn’t sure how much more I could take of my hopes being raised all lofty only to be dashed on the jagged rocks of disappointment. Or something along those lines.
I knew then that I couldn’t take another pony in the mist, another time when a person extended to me the possibility of a dream becoming corporeal, only to have that person pull it away, like Lucy and the football, at the last moment. I had just had that happen with Donny and my engagement. I bore the pain of that loss like a burn victim. I didn’t feel my skin had healed enough to have it happen again.
So I worked really diligently and slowly on the proposal. I solicited advice from people in the writing biz. I sent out portions of the proposal to friends, colleagues and strangers, and I sifted what they said with my own thoughts, and I incrementally built a proposal that I felt really good about.
I got an agent. A serious agent with a list of seriously impressive clients. I kept in touch with the editor from the VLPH. I gradually began to believe in the actuality of this dream becoming real. I steadily, and shockingly, began to trust all the people who told me that this book deal was going to happen, that my book was going to sell, that I was going to be paid real money to be a paid, validated, signed, sealed and genuine author. That, like Pinocchio, I was going to fulfill my dream of becoming real. Even more, I'd be able to pay my rent, afford my student loans and get health insurance for the first time in seven years.
The email from my agent informing me that the VLPH had passed on my book came as a complete shock. Even now, nearly 72 hours later, I can barely believe it. I had done the work. I had created a proposal for exactly the book that the editors had enthusiastically said they had desired. I had worked really, really hard on it. I had made informed choices after canvassing many people in the know. Against my own nature, I had come to be invested in my success. And I had been shot down.
Today, I really, truly don’t know what I’m going to do. Everyone has been quite kind, and yet I feel completely alone. I don’t have job. I don’t have much money coming in. I don’t have very much work lined up because I’d trusted in my proposal, in the words of others, and in the beneficence of the universe that this time I’d get what I wanted. I didn’t, and I don’t know if I have it in me to suffer more rejection. I know I don’t have it in my bank account.
As many of you know, I have webstalkers. These two people—and I know who they are—have waged a campaign of hate against me for the past two years. Often, their voices have served as a digital chorus to my own worst, most self-defeating interior monologues. As I’d gotten closer to this book deal, I’d found the collective voice of these people to be increasingly funny. They were grasping at straws. It was clear: I was a good writer; I was having success. Their voices began to take on a darkly ludic quality. I found I could laugh at them.
Now, though, I keep returning to an email they sent me on 25 February. “Please stop postponing the inevitable and kill yourself now,” they wrote. Perhaps, I think, wrapped as I am in my own dejection, I should, but thinking of all of the people that my suicide would bum out, I can't. So I'll just curl up, cry, visualize Acme anvils dropping, and secretly dream of some small, life-saving success.
(Image courtesy of The Acme Catalog, From Warner Brothers, text by Charles Carney, published by Chronicle Books.)
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.
The other night, I had a strange dream. My dreams, as longtime readers of my pretty dumb things, tend to the dancing dwarf, backwards-speaking, red-curtained weirdness of David Lynch, if David Lynch directed pornos. Which, parenthetically, would be fantastic. This one dream, however strange, didn’t neatly fit that paradigm of XXX-rated bizarroworld. For rather than engaging in a bacchanal with a group of masqueraded orgiasts, rather than lap-dancing in a town square for Adrian Grenier, rather than diligently lapping the pussy of an unappreciative girl, I hugged Hilary Clinton.
In my dream, I was in a sterile-looking white room, a committee meeting room, one adorned with the stark albumen light of fluorescent bulbs and decorated with multiple white boards. It reminded me of a larger version of a seminar room in this college where I used to teach. It had all the ambiance and comfort of industrial carpeting and windows that can’t open. The room was fairly humming with intense activity.
It was unclear why exactly I was there; I felt like a tourist in the mad rush of activity. There were many people with very important looking clipboards wandering about; people talked into their Blackberries with a zealot’s purpose. These people were dressed in clothes I’d never, ever wear: business attire, suits with skirts, buttoned blouses, plaid without irony. These were not my people. And yet there I was, spang in the middle of the rush, accompanied by someone, a friend, a tether to my waking life, and a person whose face I can’t exactly call to mind.
In the corner sat Barack Obama, who was fervently opening a pile of packages that seemed to be filled, one and all, with hand-made clothing emblazoned with his image or with words of support. He looked pretty happy as he pulled sweatshirts, t-shirts, and down parkas all sporting “Obama ’08!” messages. He had the aspect of a surprised rock star being showered with the material love of his masses. Oddly, though, he sat in the corner pretty much alone, but for the boxes, bags and growing mound of Obamariffic clothing.
I looked at Obama, said something to my friend, something that like my friend’s face has now faded from memory. I then exclaimed, And that’s why I voted for this woman! and flung my arms around a shocked and slightly stony Hillary Clinton, who happened to be sitting there, right next to me, with an unlikely convenience.
Hillary, not unsurprisingly, doesn’t enjoy being hugged by effusive strangers. I mean, who does, but I received a response from my dream Hilary that seems entirely in keeping with what my waking mind would expect from the corporeal Hilary, were I in a position to effusively throw my arms around her. Which is to say, she blenched and then she reciprocated as well as she could, given her rather icy demeanor and the extreme oddness of the situation. Once I recovered from my brief mania, I explained to Hilary that not only was I a supporter, but so is my mom, who is also a delegate up in Vermont.
And that pretty much ended the dream. In the real world, I did, in fact, vote for Hilary. I voted for her because as a Freshman senator, she pushed through more legislation than any other congressperson. I voted for her because she’s an ardent and unwavering supporter of reproductive rights; without Hilary, Plan B simply wouldn’t be legal. I voted for her because I feel of the Democratic candidates, she has the most experience. I voted for her because, as Tina Fey famously said on Saturday Night Live a couple of months ago, Hilary may be a bitch, but “bitches get stuff done.” Finally, I voted for Hilary because I am a feminist, and I believe in throwing my vote behind my beliefs.
I understand the arguments against voting for Hilary. I do see her record on the war as profoundly problematic, and there are legitimate questions about her financial dealings. Her choices of political advisors have shown some serious lapses in judgment. Nonetheless, when I looked at all of the weight of the evidence both for and against supporting Hilary, I chose to vote for her. I have nothing against Obama; should he become the Democratic presidential candidate, I’ll dutifully vote for him, but I’ll be honest and say that as much as I’d like to share a turkey sandwich with the man, he is not my first choice for president.
Which is all parenthetical to the fact that once I had the dream, I discovered that I wasn’t alone in experiencing a dream wherein political candidates show up uninvited to the caucus of a your unconscious. Apparently, and this may not be news to you, but it was to me, there is a whole big groundswell of people having the political candidate dreams, so much so that Sheila Heti, a Canadian fiction writer, has started a website wherein people can submit their political candidate dreams for analysis.
Not only am I not the only person who is having political candidate dreams, but I’m also not the only person who is excited to find out a) that other people are having them, but that b) we can find out what the dreams mean, for media outlets from The New Yorker to NPR have picked up on Heti’s website, and done so in a rather effusive tone. Everyone wants to know what dreams mean. They’re so mysterious, what with their eldritch details and disquieting aftertaste. That they’re political dreams only makes us thinky types grow more tumescent than usual.
Naturally, I’ve submitted my dream for analysis. Should Heti’s team of crack Jungians choose my oneiric puppy from the litter, I’ll certainly let you know what they come up with. In the meantime, I’m just going to bask in the limited glory that, for once, my conscious and unconscious minds are on a like track because if I could get close enough to Hilary, I would hug her. Even if she didn’t like it.
So essentially how I’m feeling is that in the kingdom of the annoyed, I’m wearing the Royal Crankypants. Everything—everything—is noisome. This feeling isn’t new. It’s been building like a tsunami in the open ocean of my unconscious.
That last sentence, that really irritates me. I’d cross it out and start again, but I’m going to let it sit as a silent, purple testament to exactly how prickly I feel. I’m tetchy, goddammit, tetchy as fuck. The world conspires to make me ill tempered.
I’m annoyed by my skin. It’s itching everywhere, particularly places I can’t reach. Yesterday, I ran into Donny’s cousin at one of the places I freelance. She’s looking to be there full-time. That was deeply irritating. Not to mention awkward. This whole thing about Jezebel being sold to Condé Nast is galling me, first because I thought they’d been sold, and then later because I realized it was an April Fool’s joke. My obtuseness rankles me.
I’m really maddened by the fact that Ernie, my X, has apparently gotten a job at a college here in Gotham. I was really looking forward to his being forced to move to a very different Congressional district. I’m angry at how long it’s taken GQ to send me a check for the freelance work I did—maybe all of my annoyance is really Condé Nast’s fault. Darn that Sy Newhouse, darn him all to heck. Also—my iTunes is really bothering me. 7,000+ songs and all it can play are the ones that suck. How many times do I need to hear “Everybody’s Kung Fu Fighting”? That is not a rhetorical question.
My stupid book proposal is really annoying me. It’s annoying me to infinity; it’s annoying me to the nth degree. Which is pretty much the same thing, and my repetition really irks me. It’s also annoying me that beyond “irritating” and “annoying” there are not that many good words with which to express the feeling of being irritated and/or annoyed. My thesaurus really abrades, affronts, aggravates, angers, bothers, bugs, burns, chafes, confuses, distempers, disturbs, enrages, exasperates, frets, galls, gets, grates, harasses, incenses, inflames, infuriates, irks, maddens, needles, nettles, offends, pains, peeves, pesters, piques, provokes, rankles, rasps, rattles, riles, roils, ruffles, sours, tries, vexes me.
My sleep has been choppy of late. It’s infuriating. My sleep comes late, after much coaxing, many countings of breath, and too well into the inky blackness of night. When I do finally sleep, I toss fitfully. My sheets wad up like swaddling around my thighs. I sleep aware of my sleep, not plunged like a baptized infant in Lethean waters. And can I say, wow, this writing sucks like a pangolin. The sleeplessness and the sucking weary me. So does my pretentiousness. I should just fart in a wineglass, sniff it, and call it a day.
See, my sleep becomes all the more precious when, as I was early this morning, my unconscious gifts me with a sex dream, even one as David-Lynch weird as the one I had last night. (I might add that my cat chose the exact moments of my sex dream to walk over my head, press his wet nose into my eye sockets and purr loudly. I really, really hate my cat.) And it was weird, it was a strange dream, even as dreams go, but in it I got to kiss a woman who looked an awful lot like Madeline Zima. And that, unlike an echidna, does not suck.
In the dream, I was back visiting FlashDancers. They had remodled extensively since my last visit there in 2002, or at least they had in my unconscious. For one thing, it was a lot larger than it used to be. It sprawled all subterranean for blocks, like a parking garage stacked full of ecdysiasts. Plus, they’d installed these weird bidet-toilets that were separated from one another with iridescent blue shower curtains, apropos nothing. Really, the whole dressing room was the height of minimalist chic, as if Jacques Herzog, the architect for Prada, had redesigned it. It was pretty disconcerting, but I was accompanied by my Madeline-Zima look-alike stripper, so all was fine with the world when I had to squat over the weird bidet-toilet and my Frye boots kept skidding out from under me, threatening to deposit me in the toilet drink.
Of all the strippers in all the world, the one who glommed to me in my dream was this Madeline Zima creature. All big eyes and thin shoulders and white skin and black hair. All improbably young. Even in my dream, I was pinching myself that a woman like this would be interested in me for longer than it would take her to apply lip gloss. Yet here she improbably was, talking about hair cuts with a kind of improportionate fervor and dropping lines like “I think everyone needs both a boyfriend and a girlfriend, don’t you?” casually as used matches. I was—and am—inclined to agree.
In my dream, it was just a matter of time before we kissed, and soon—after wending through the new FlashDancer dining room (It looks like a Ponderosa, I said; she laughed), after downing monolithic dark drinks poured by my unconscious bartender with a very heavy hand, after my Madeline-Zima clone had instantaneously and inexplicably changed out of her long-gown stripper garb and into a pair of denim short-shorts and a tank top, and after she pulled me into a dark alcove, we kissed. It was, might I say, not at all annoying. It was, might I say, a really lush and lovely kiss. It was, might I say, too bad it wasn’t real. I'd like to pry her apart and eat her with my fingers.
Dream-drunk, I tried to write my phone number for my freshly bussed Madeline-Zima girl, but I couldn’t. I tried and I tried, but every number came out wrong, wrong as pork soda, wrong as culottes, wrong as creationism. No matter how many times I tried to crib my digits on a card, the numbers were all wrong. Not-Madeline-Zima sat looking expectant and only a little bit exasperated.
Which brings me back to my own irritation. The cat walking on my head and nose-butting my eyelids woke me. I hate my cat. And here I am, typing crappity-crap-crap in crankypants.
I’m going to meditate on pictures of the real Madeline Zima in hopes that they will soothe the snappish beast within. It could happen.
I am kind of the queen of unfortunate sex dreams. Sometimes—albeit rarely—I am gifted with sex dreams I could narrate without a flicker of shame. For example, the one time my unconscious gifted me with a dream wherein I made out with a Cool-Hand-Luke-era Paul Newman on the wide back seat of a Greyhound bus. That’s a dream about which I can feel unabashed joy. Thumbs up to my unconscious for choosing that particular scenario.
Less shame-free, but still well within the narrow perimeters of jubilant sex dream, is the one I had where I was lap-dancing for Adrian Grenier in the Deadwood-era town square. That was a dream weird enough that I have to stop and question it: why a town square? Whither the dust? And why the booty shorts? Adrian Grenier, inherent skankiness, hirsute face and all, him I get. The surroundings, less so. They call the dream into question.
I’ve certainly had multiple sex dreams about people I know, and people I don't, that fail to fall into the overly eldritch territory. I’ve had enough of them that they’ve faded into a greyed memory wash. I’ve had enough dreams about my X I call here C that I could fill multiple scrapbooks in my mind. Though those dreams were sometimes tinged with the musky brown of emo, rarely were they weird. They were just painful, even if they held me hostage and made me come quick and quiet in the slipping fields of the night.
And then there are the just flat-out effing creepy dreams I’ve had in my life. Usually these dreams don’t fall under the category of “Sex Circus of the Stars.” Usually these dreams have people I know, or are related to, or both. These are the ones that make me want to go running to my therapist the Freudian, so she can whip out her Li’l Sigmund Analysis Kit and have a go at them. (And frankly, these dreams make me happy I’m not a Jungian and therefore fucking myself in some strange psychic hall of mirrors; this kind of dream makes me glad I’m under a Freudian’s care and therefore can open the unsavory can of frugging worms to a limitless range of narratives.)
I have, in the past, dreamed of compromising positions not only with relatives, but with bosses, co-workers, and, when I was teaching, former students. (Oddly, I never had a dream about a current student, though it’s possible I’ve just squelched the memory if I had. When I taught, I resolutely saw my students as non-sexual beings, much as when I stripped I envisioned the men I danced for to have nothing more than those sloping, gentle Ken-doll bumps where their genitals should have been. It just made it easier for me.) Each and every time I have woken after one of those strange dreams, I have felt faintly dirty.
My libido is a dangerous muse. I see my libido as a Mata Hari kind of character. Some squat Dutch woman masquerading as an Indonesian princess, working both sides of the war. I can’t trust my libido, for it will fuck me, and such was the case the other morning when I woke from a high-def, surround-sound, smellorama dream about one of my friend’s wives.
My friend is quite the talker. He tells great stories with gusto. He is also much enamored of his wife. When he’s with her, he compliments her to everyone and kisses her hair tenderly. When he’s not, he just talks about her. I know things about her that she might or might not be comfortable with my knowing—I don’t know her very well, so it’s hard for me to judge accurately what her reaction might be. I like her fine. She’s very nice and quite cute and plenty smart.
My unconscious, however, apparently really likes her, for the other night it served her up like a tiny, brown and hairless banquet for me in my dreams. In my dream, she reclined like a pasha on a bed of white pillows as I licked her pink and completely bald pussy. This bareness being a detail my unconscious was able to borrow from my conscious mind because her husband divulged it, and this being one of the things I know about her that may or may not sit right with her. In my dream, her clit was engorged like a strawberry. It was unnaturally plump and round, this being a detail my unconscious pulled out of its fecund dark ass and having no bearing, as far as I know, in reality. In my dream, I had slipped one finger into her pussy, and I was about to slip in another, when I woke up, abruptly.
The same night I dreamt of my friend’s wife, another friend was dreaming of me. I got an email describing to me my smell and taste and my friend’s mourning the morning shower and an inquiry about what I actually smell and taste like. I can only imagine that my own concept of my smell and taste must be akin to when John Malkovich goes through his own portal.
Malkovich? Malkovich? My smell or taste resonates in my senses. MAL-KO-VICH!
I’ve often wondered if when I’ve dreamt of others, they too have dreamt of me. I have wondered if they could tell when they see me, as if the dream has hung around me in some kind of nocturnal neon aura. I’ve wondered if they could see the embarrassment I’ve tried to suppress and if they could discern its source. It’s funny to me that as I slept sexy-dreaming of someone else, another person across the globe was dreaming of me. It’s as if every night as we sleep, these spectral selves take off and flit about, lodging for a time in another brain, leaving the glistening trails of nocturnal erotics, like something Tinkerbell would leave behind, if she were feeling frisky.
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.
Today I’m wondering what my life would be like if I never date or, possibly, mate again. It’s a new and peculiar sensation to consider living my life swimming solo. I’ve always felt as though one of the things I should have on hand, like toilet paper and cereal, is a man. I never once thought about choosing not to have a man. I have understood that there would be necessary periods in my life when I would be manless, but I always considered those periods to be finite, and sooner or later I’d return to my formerly manned position, fully coupled and therefore right.
But now I’m thinking, what if I don’t? What if, rather than consider my default position in the world as coupled, I see my preferred state as single? It has, quite frankly, a lot of advantages.
In the past when I’ve been single, I saw it as a state that required correcting. It might be a compulsory state, one necessitated by a recent break-up and the grieving thereafter, or one made mandatory by the sheer impenetrable business of my life, but it was one that I resented and fretted over. It was a state about which I felt angry and one that made me sad as I bought single cans of soup and rented videos for the weekend. Being single was not a joy; it was a sorrow. I bore it with all the stalwart nature of a toddler separated from that shiny, shiny toy.
Now, though, I’m finding a lot of advantages to my singledom. I am responsible for no one’s emotional state but my own, and I like that. I had to tend the emo garden of my ex-boyfriend/fiancé/whatever with tremendous care. He leaned on me like a tomato on its stake. It was a lot to keep up. I loved Donny very much, and I liked being able to support him, but it did make me feel a bit cowed. I’m enjoying cultivating my own garden, and I say that in the most Panglossian sense.
I like dressing up when I feel like it and not when I don’t. I like feeling free to go out, stay up late, sleep when I wish, wake when I do, and not hearing anyone criticize it. I like spending time with my friends, and I really like spending time by myself. I like having a messy house when I don’t feel like cleaning (which is often) and having a clean house when I do (which is rare, but it happens). I like staying up until 2:00 a.m. writing. I like feeling unentangled. Disencumbered. Free. Alone.
Mostly, I like living my life in the way I like, and not having to suffer the condescension of men who feel like they know better than I, that I can benefit from their superior experience, and who let me know in no uncertain terms what I should do. I don’t miss having to nod politely while wishing silently that they would just shut the motherfuck up. I don’t miss arguing the point either, when I could stand their advice no more and told them to shut the motherfuck up, if usually in more polite language.
I recognize that I have been through a hell of a lot in the last six months. I realize that my heart feels strangely anaesthetized. I realize that loneliness may just not have set in yet. I realize I still mourn my last relationship for all of its faults. I also realize that being single is really kind of cool. And I realize, for the first time in my life, that being alone with myself is a pleasure.
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.
“These things must be handled dee-lih-cat-ly,” says the Wicked Witch when she tries to remove the ruby slippers from Dorothy’s feet.
Many of you have emailed me to ask how the meeting went on Tuesday. A couple of you have left comments wanting the same. And I want to tell you in full, explicit, breathy detail, I really do. I want to give you the blow-by-blow, the color commentary, the dizzying rallies, the confounding falls, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. I want nothing as much as to express to you in glittering detail the landscape of my feelings. I want to recount to you bon mots, spilled soup, and flaky crumbs. I want to tilt your heads back like a flock of baby birds and spill into your gullets the wines I drank.
I can’t.
And this feeling of having a log jam of things I want to write about, want desperately to express on the page, to share and therefore to feel relieved of (as well as perhaps relived of), but for some confluence of reasons being unable to do so, is a feeling with which I’m growing infinitely familiar. There are things I want to give up with the pure, liberating freedom of a maidenhead, and I can’t. It would be imprudent, I find. It would be poor judgment, I realize. It would do more harm than good, I know, and so I don’t.
It’s way, way harder than you might imagine. Things left unsaid seethe and boil and froth and turn rank. I tell my friends, but it’s not the same. I don’t really ever unbosom myself of anything unless I write it. Which may be why I’m a writer, but then again it may just be because I’m a pretentious empurpled twit with more solipsism than sense.
As much as I want to spill the entire pot of cannelloni, I must forbear because one of the two editors I met reads this blog. I cannot, then, write with unbridled freedom. It’s not that I don’t like her—I actually do, especially her shoes, which were these 1940’s style pumps of leopard print—it’s more that until the deal is signed, sealed and delivered, it’s probably best to play these things close to the vest or chest or breast or whatever.
Here’s what I can tell you. They didn’t like the first book I pitched, a book whose title and premise I love, and a book that I had planned out in my head. They both listened patiently; they both tented their fingers; in their foreheads, twin vertical lines signifying concentration appeared; they both asked intelligent questions.
Sitting across from them, I had this feeling that what I was saying was being perceived in the book editor’s version of dogspeak. Instead of hearing, “Blah, blah, blah, bone. Blah, blah, blah, Scruffy. Blah, blah, blah, go out for a walk, blah, blah, Scruffy,” they heard, “Blah, blah, blah, feminism. Blah, blah, blah, strip clubs. Blah, blah, blah, pole-dancing, blah, blah, blah Susan Faludi.” Alas.
So at the end of my relatively articulate speech, they looked at each other and asked, “Who do you see as the audience for this book?” At which point, I knew I’d struck out worse than A-Rod in any post-season game.
So I then turned to book idea #2, which they seemed to love. Their eyes got spaniel bright. If they had tails, they would have wagged. So I’m going to work on a proposal for it. In an idyllic world, I'll finish it in a month.
That would be the highly edited version of the story. I liked the two editors, I love my ebullient friend who made the lunch possible. I’m excited about the book. And that is all I can say on the matter at present, because somewhere along the line, I actually started to grow up and find an eternal editor who doesn’t need to take inopportune cigarette breaks. I kind of miss my old, smoking editor, the one who clearly drank too much Johnny Walker and had the salty mouth of Walter Winchell. I suppose you do too, but then sometimes things really do need to handled delicately as undergarments.
Tomorrow is a very big day. It’s the sort of day that could change lives forever. It’s a defining day in that it could absolutely make or break, and yet the possibility for a less black-and-white result lingers. It could be a stumble along the journey, a clear and definite victory, or the end. We won’t know until it’s over.
Tomorrow, you see, I am meeting with two editors from a publishing house. I big publishing house. An imprint of Random House, to be exact. Tomorrow, in a meeting set up by a friend, over a good Italian lunch and great Italian wine, I am pitching my book to two editors, one the Executive Editor of this particular imprint of Random House, the other the editor he wants me to work with. My friend, who has a memoir on bookshelves next month, has shown his editor my writing; he liked it; and now we have a meeting.
Currently, I am just about vibrating with a burbling mixture of anticipation and nerves. By tomorrow morning, I’ll be able to mix paint with my nervous energy, although it’s been a slow slog to this level of “I’m so excited/I just can’t hide it/I’m about to lose control/ and I yadda yadda yadda.” When the meeting first was set last Friday, I received the news with all the visible emotion of a caryatid.
“What’s the matter? You’re not excited,” my friend said. He sounded bitterly disappointed. I think he expected a whoop or a squeal or at least a w00t.
I am excited, I said evenly. This is me excited.
“You don’t sound excited.” He paused. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve got a book deal.”
Empirically minded as I am, I remain superstitious. Like my Puritan ancestors who didn’t praise the beauty of their children for fear that their praise would doom the excessively beautiful child to an early grave, I fear investing too much in a gorgeous egg unhatched. I don’t want to jinx anything with an emotional reaction, so I stay blank as Hindu cattle in the face of news that would send my emotive friend into exuberant orbit.
I come from a long line of dour and pessimistic people, I said to my friend. Don’t rush things, I told him. He eventually gave up in exasperation and hung up the phone.
He’s gratified to know that today the excitation has set in, and as I prepare for the meeting—tweaking my title, writing outlines, practicing pitching it in the shower—this grand balloon seems to be swelling in my solar plexus. An unstable balloon, a balloon I feel reticent to trust, but a big swelling, cheery red balloon nonetheless.
Tomorrow is a big day. A really big day. It might decide my future, or it might just be a bump along the way. I won’t know until later.
And, oh yeah. I’m also voting. If you live in New York as I do, or if you live in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, or Utah, you should too. It's just a really, really big day all over.
Sadly, the book deal for the book that was to be my first book, although not my book but a book written by me, has gone south. Suffice to say that it was no one’s fault; I wanted more money; they wanted to give me less; we couldn’t agree on numbers; life goes on.
Though I can’t spill the whole pot of bubbling beans, the book in question was a collection of erotica written centered on the employees of a business this particular corporation would like to be known as “an upscale gentleman’s club,” but which I would term simply a strip club or, were I in a sassier frame of mind, a “titty bar.” It was, essentially, a book that splayed its fictionally tanned, toned thighs across the Venn diagram of erotica, journalism and corporate branding. The book’s agent, the corporation in question and I all agreed that I, being both a former “entertainer,” a writer of erotic fiction and an occasional journalist, would be perfect for the project.
As it turned out, the project wasn’t perfect for me, or I should say that the money offered for the project was much less than perfect, and so I chose to walk. I wish the corporation, the agent, and all involved the best.
I’m sad about this loss, but this post is less about the travails of my first Book That Wasn’t and more abut how bone-vibratingly surreal it was for me to go to the club of corporation in question, meet with the club’s P.R. guy and the book’s agent, and talk with the various employees of the establishment/gentleman’s club/strip club. Because what I found when I stepped through those double doors and into the inescapable shuk-shuk-shuk bass-thrumming atmo of every titty bar between Bangor and Beijing, was that you can take the woman out of the strip club, but you can never take the stripper out of the girl.
I’m living the fill-in-the-blank life of the uncertain status quo. Donny and I remain talking, mostly about incidentals like the end of Joe Torre and Donny's unchangingly brutal days at work and how things go with my various writing projects (there is a book project in the works, though it’s not my book; in November, I will actually get to press the LA flesh of the agent who might become the Ari to my Vince; my second Penthouse article comes out in a couple of weeks, and I am busily working on my third; and the legendary Susie Bright has just sent word accepting a story of mine in an upcoming anthology). It pleases him that I’m busy writing. It pleases me too, but for different reasons. It pleases both of us to talk, however much we talk about just an infinitesimal something more than nothing.
We still have not had sex. I still remain plagued by the alien pleasure of sex dreams. My unconscious thrusts me into strange couplings; most lately I dreamt I was making out in long elliptical, taint-teasing loops with this man I’ve met once; my dream closed with us taking an outdoor shower and my inexplicably drying myself with a fur rug and wrapping it, fur side in, around my damp body like a sarong. My body reminds me regularly how violently I want to be fucked violently. But sex—with or without Donny—is just not an option. It’s a weird state, and it’s alienating, this feeling like my libido lurks like a guerrilla in the underbrush, something I can neither attack directly, nor evade entirely.
Mostly, I inhabit much the same feeling I get when I’m traveling. When I’m on the road, or in the air, or on my way to somewhere definite, I get this interstitial sense of nothing. Traveling, I am freed of anxiety or happiness or anger or guilt or anything. It’s like just the act of moving from one space to another frees me from the necessity of experiencing any emotion; I’m no where when I am on the road; in this Utopian space, I’m not limned by my feelings. I feel a lot like that right now. Like I live in the blank spaces in between the individual frames of a movie.
I know, too, that like in traveling this current blank space is finite. Sooner or later, I’ll arrive at a place, and then my feelings will be waiting for me, like a wrapped bar of soap in a hotel bathroom. They will be unavoidable, but as I don’t know now what the end of the journey is, I don’t see a whole lot of point in investing myself in either outcome: Donny choosing to commit or my choosing to leave him. It’s an invisible trek that covers intangible ground that leads to no clear destination. I should be a jangled ball of anxiety, but I’m not.
If Donny decides to commit, then let the party and the work begin. I’ll be cautiously and grandly optimistic. If he decides he can’t, or if I feel I can’t travel this uncertainty any longer and it’s time for me to come to rest, I’ll be sad. I’ll feel grief and disappointment and a whole host of other emo bogeymen. I know that this blank space can’t last forever, nor do I want it to stretch into infinity. The only infinite blankness is death, and I have, like Renton in Trainspotting, for once chosen life.
So I sit here, strangely temoeling nowhere, oddly uncertain and pleasantly void, biding my time with my bags and my blank itinerary, waiting to see where I go and what happens next.
Last night, I orgasmed in my sleep. It was a quick flicker and fall of an orgasm; it rose and fell like a plastic bag caught in an updraft, just this out-of-nowhere ambush of genital thrill that traveled like an electric current, sparking and jolting, and finishing almost before it had begun.
It’s not that strange for me to get the sexy dreams. Like Belinda in Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, I too have had a morning dream that hovered over my head, a dream that even in slumber caused my cheek to glow. I get them most often, not surprisingly, when I haven’t had sex for a while. These dreams are like supplicant gifts my libido presents me when I haven’t been paying it adequate attention; they are meant to spur me delicately into indelicate actions. They are meant, I think, to remind me to fuck myself, or to get fucked, or that fucking, at any rate, should be a priority, regardless of whether it is a solo act, a duet, or more.
Generally, my sexy dreams have a sexy context. My erotic unconscious is far more darkly perverse than its waking sister. In my sleep, I have been plied by toys by a very intent Jenna Jameson; I have found myself at the center of a masked orgy of people whose genders defy any discreet definition; I have sucked and fucked students male and female; while sleeping, I have experienced deeply imaginative and physiologically impossible sex acts and the orgasms produced thereby, and I have been grateful for them. It’s a freebie, this dark nocturnal gifting, and if when I wake, I find an uncomfortable psychic vestige clinging to the walls of my mind like toilet paper on my shoe, it’s a small price to pay for a free orgasm.
Sometimes, albeit rarely, when I nap I wake with this feeling as if I am rising to the surface of a deep, thick lake, and as I do, I get a rush of pleasure burble lazily from my pussy on out through my limbs. It’s not an orgasm, precisely, but it’s not not an orgasm either. It’s this orgasmic twilight released by my rise and rush, and it’s pleasurable despite there being no words for it. Or perhaps because of its elusion of lexicon. It feels good, in short, whatever it is.
I once told Donny about this nap-waking coming/not-coming. His face fell. “Really,” he said, “you come when you wake up from a nap?” He paused. “I have to work so hard to make you come, but all you have to do is wake up.” He looked bitterly disappointed.
What was really weird about my quick-flicker wet dream this morning was that my dream was not in the slightest bit sexy. In my dream, I was in a hotel room, and I had apparently stayed past check-out, and this horde of really awful blonde sorority-type girls were hounding me to leave my room so they could check in. In my dream, I was gathering my things, which seemed to multiply like tribbles as I put them into my bag. The girls walked around me, hurling insults and generally making themselves Jurassic bitches. I stood next to the bed, fishing some previously nonexistent article of clothing out from under something, and suddenly, I felt my body tense and shake.
Oh, no, I thought, and then Oh, yes. This guerilla orgasm twirled and rose up my center like a vaporous viper, twisting evilly and pleasurably. I shook in spasms, helpless. And then it was gone, but my shame at having to pack in front of these French-manicured and flawlessly high-lighted women—a shame multiplied by this sneak-attack orgasm—lingered. And then I woke up.
I wonder how much my unconscious, even as it gifts me with this sexy fragment, seeks to punish me for not being more like these women who harassed me in my dream. These women who clearly had fulltime jobs and memberships to gyms and sparkly credit. I wonder why I feel the need to make myself hurt even as I make myself feel good, even if I don’t know I’m doing it.
I wonder too if I hurt so badly by the recent perfect storm with my boyfriend/fiancé/X that I can’t even imagine coming with another human, that only an orgasm that steals upon me involuntary as a sneeze is available to me. I wonder if my hurt, and it is a prodigious hurt, is making me that alienated from my own sexuality. I suspect it is.
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.
Darling, I said to Donny last Friday over oysters.
“Darling?” he said, mignonette cup poised over a Naked Roy. “This can’t be good.”
Sugar, I said, it’s almost August, and in January I’m moving in, and I won’t do it without an engagement ring. I just want to give you a heads up, I said, because you can’t buy a ring in a weekend.
Donny’s face oscillated quickly between “what the hell” and “she knows me well.” He stopped at an expression uncharacteristically inscrutable. And then he laughed, a short abrupt snort and said, “Ok.”
The time has come, or so I’ve thought, to talk of many things. Not ships, nor shoes, nor sealing wax, though whether pigs have wings seems an apropos topic, for I’ve often felt the chance of my marrying was about as likely as pigs flying. As much as I’ve like the idea of a flying pig—and who doesn’t, really, at least in a cartoon sense, all pink pudgy bellies and white loop-edged wings, their porcine expression equally surprised and sanguine—I’ve known that pig-flying, while a charming concept, is a physical impossibility, and this is very much analogous to how I’ve constructed marrying. (I suppose pigs could have wings and not fly, though that seems less practical as well as less charming.)
In the past year, I’ve been crystal clear with Donny about my desire to marry him. Part of me feels unsure exactly why him and why now, but a great fat lot of me finds that uncertainty a load of hogwash. I want to marry him because I love him, sure, but also because he’s the first man I’ve met with whom I can see spending my life with, with whom I can envision us working together to build a future we’re both pleased with, in whom I am constantly surprised and only comfortingly bored, with whom I can talk about anything and whose kinks mesh with my own like teeth in a zipper.
Donny is, in short, the first man I’ve known whom I trust with my life, my heart, my body, and my brain. I don’t suppose that it’s a coincidence that we came to know one another just as I came to know—and to forgive—myself. But that metaphysical rambling is best left for some other time.
I’ve been operating under the tacit understanding that as I’ve been clear with Donny about what I want that he is on board with it. He has not, as yet, run from the room screaming. But nor has he sat down and proclaimed his intentions to marry me in plain brown-wrapper English. Over the past year, he has confessed that he thinks about our marrying too, he has progressed to discussing where we’ll put various pieces of furniture in his apartment when it becomes our apartment. He has discussed with me, albeit in a kind of fanciful, hypothetical sort of way, where and when we would get married. He has agreed without agreeing.
I have, therefore, been sallying forward, full steam ahead, on the assumption that the future we are planning is one we will be planning together.
I find it a little odd. I would like to know in no uncertain terms that my vision of a Donny husband, and all that is glorious, mundane, and deeply problematic about that vision is one he unquestionably shares. As of now, I don’t, and that blank space is a bit frightening; like a test question I fear I can’t answer, I don’t want to look directly at it, nor can I exactly avert my gaze.
After the oyster/engagement ring discussion of last Friday, I emailed the jewelry designer I have in mind, and then I told Donny that I’d emailed her. I told him too when I received an email back that informed me that our visits to Fire Island will overlap and that we will have a chance to meet her in a little over a week. I told him all this, all of it, with the inward feeling of lip-biting, as if it was all a little too fabulous for me to out-and-out trust, as if I was inwardly cringing in anticipation of his response.
In this new gilt visage of ring designing and buying, Donny has been more or less tractable, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m not entirely at ease with this leading of the horse to the matrimonial fount, and yet I’m aware that my boyfriend often need a definitive push to make changes because he is a person who feels quite comfortable, thank you very much, with stasis. He had to be fired from his last crappy job for him to leave it, and now, almost three years later, he’s making three times as much and has the respect of a giant corporation. I love Donny passionately, but he is not one to run headlong into change.
I am.
I suppose that this dynamic, this complimentary yin/yang of stasis and fluidity, is one of our strengths as a couple, but I still feel weird as I take Donny by the hand and show him his future with me. I feel I have to walk on and trust that he, my carpenter, will continue walking close at hand.
Like many girls, when I was nine I desperately wanted a pony. I wanted a pony so badly I could feel its wet velvet nose, smell its oaty coat, taste its hay-and-horse-poop flavored air. I really, really wanted a pony. I was living in the middle of nowhere, Vermont, and the least that could happen, I felt, was that I could get a pony.
Sure, much of my hot pony lust was motivated by my voracious reading of equine novels like Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague. But just as much emanated with my being alone so much of the time. From about 2:30 in the afternoon when the school bus dropped me off in my small town’s dusty center until about 7:00 when my parents finally returned from their day of work I was alone. These hours splayed before me every day, and they were too painful to look at. These were aching hours, hours I tried to fill with something—anything—to keep my restlessness, my boredom, my loneliness at bay. I read. I watched television. I did my homework. I took long walks out my back door into the hills behind me or out my front door into the fields and streams in front. I was always utterly, unchangingly alone.
I really wanted a pony. A pony, I felt, would give warm body to my aching hours. I would have a companion, a source of entertainment, and a mode of transportation. I would have a conversation piece, something I could use to lure elusive friends to me, and something with which I could use to visit them. I would not be so all alone with a pony, I reasoned. I’d have this lovely, squat, four-footed heavy bundle of life that needed me in equal proportion to how much I needed her—or him—my ideal pony was genderless as a teletubby.
One afternoon after coming home from school, an amazing thing happened. There, wandering around the field in front of my house, a field unbounded by fences and unused except for twice-summerly hayings, was a pony. It was brown with a black mane and tail, and it was beautiful. I could not believe my great good luck. I found a rope and a carrot and I walked out to the pony; I looped the rope around its neck, fed it a carrot and led it, tractable and compliant, to my house across the street.