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"Have you seen that Presidents of the United States video? The one for Peaches? That's the best video I've ever seen.
Why? Because it's got ninjas in it! Ninjas! They should require every band by law to have at least one video with ninjas in it."
- Via my friend Paris, about 6 years ago.
I went to Bellingham to go see my sweet and loopy ex-roomie, now happily paired with the man of her dreams and going to school to be a Phyto-Remediation expert. I think that's where you learn how to use plants to repair toxicity in the environment.
She's really into not letting things go to waste. She saves everything. ("I let Colin throw away an old pair of shoes today!" she protests, but I lived with her, so really I know better.)
The reason I'm mentioning this is that she recently harvested some 5 5-gallon buckets of apples from neglected apple trees in the greater Bellingham area, and her kitchen is filled with jars of applesauce. I brought over some rum and we made cider and drank rummy cider and they taught me to play cribbage. (One for his nob! And two for his heels!)
She also told me about this poem she wrote. It was so nice, I wanted to post it:
It's okay to play
in the muck
just don't stay
every day
don't get stuck.
Please remember that.
While I was in Rockford, IL we went to a lot of chain restaurants. You know, those upscale chain restaurants with a theme. Like The Thunder Bay Grille, where a waiter offered to take our meal to "the next level".
The waiter had clearly been honing his schtick, but I honestly don't think he was cut out for it. I think his schtick would have been a little bit more appropriate for, like, an extreme sports tour guide or something...I don't know if it was really satisyfying him to serve food.
We all ordered entrees, and all of them came with various soup and salad elements. Also, on the table they had these flat drop buscuits that I think were supposed to resemble hard-tack, but they were so mealy and filled with corn syrup, I don't think that's how people aye them in the wild west, if you know what I mean.
(Note: Are references to the wild west lost on international readers? Andrea? Shauna?)
So we're all sitting there, finishing up our limp salads, when the young waiter, after putting our entrees on a little tray, says, "Are you guys ready to take it to the next level?" meaning, well...dinner. We assured him that we could handle the intensity that was our entree, and he served us.
Now my mom, had ordered her favorite entree there. It's an entree where they have penne noodles, big hunks of salmon, and asparagus, all drenched in this creamy sauce. My mom really likes it, but she doesn't like it so sauce drenched, so she asks for the sauce on the side.
One would assume this to mean that she liked all of the salmon, veggies and pasta on one plate, and the the sauce on the the side. Evidently, however, only about one out of three times she ordered the dish, did she receive it this way.
This time the waited confidently brought her a plate with the asparagus and salmon drenched in sauce, and the noodles on the side. "Here's your side of sauce," he said confidently, "that's how they do it!"
My mom was a little dismayed, but not really entirely surprised. She tried to explain a little, and our server, who clearly wasn't bringing us to the next level, mumbled out some excuses and took off.
He tried again later (to try and recover some semblance of a tip) and sort of tried to re-explain, "You see, the cook didn't want the fish and asparagus to get dry, so he served it like that. I understand that wasn't really what you wanted. If you want it like that next time, maybe you should say you want, 'Everything in one plate, except...'"
"The sauce, on the side?" my mom inturrupted.
"Uhhh...yes."
He had already made a comfortable stake for himself out in front of the thrift store, and it was only noon-thirty. A molded plastic lawn chair, a big pink comforter, and a coffee can containing $4.78 in cash, out on the sidewalk for all to see. He figured that was nearly everything a man could need.
He really turned on the charm for the pretty young art students. "Hey", he mugged, as they passed, "I'm not just makin' this up here. I really am homeless!" He broke into a wide grin when she stopped. Such a pretty little thing, too, with wise eyes. He was glad he got a chance to look at her again as she eyed him dubiously.
"I don't do cash donations. I'm on my way to the store...can I get you something?"
"You know what I would like?" he asked, quite rhetorically. And she, in good spirits, played along, looking expectantly at him to find out.
"Chocolate milk. And a big bag of M&M's."
"What kind of chocolate milk? Whole milk?"
Now he was really hamming it up, "I don't care what kind of milk. Just any kind of chocolate milk you want to get...but peanut M&M's! That would be so nice, it would be like a birthday present. That kind of thing energizes me, you know."
She had long since stopped trying to preach nutrition to men on the street, but he was just making sure, she guessed. She flashed the winning smile of the do-gooder, and turned on her heel humbly to walk to her fancy organic foods store.
She was a vegan lesbian libertarian, and she knew less about milk than she did about politics, so she got the best kind of milk. Organic whole milk with cane juice and real cocoa, in a glass bottle that had a two-dollar deposit. Nowhere in that fancy little store, however, could she find anything as pedestrian as peanut M&M's.
She had come to get some lunch and a cup of coffee, so she got a little lunch and sat down in the sun and ate it with relish. She smiled at everyone who met her eye. When she was done she stood up and walked to the door, thinking that after she gave him the chocolate milk she could go to another grocery store nearby where they were sure to have M&M's.
She could see even from a block away that the chair, the comforter, the coffee can, and the man were gone. When she got to the corner she looked around on the other street, looked everywhere. Motherfucker was gone. She cursed herself a little for eating lunch so slowly, but he had really looked like he was settled, damnit.
She walked home, put away her one grocery in the fridge. Took it out. Shook it. Took a pint mason jar from the cabinet and set it on the counter. Cracked the seal. Poured herself a cold half-glass, still frothy from being shaken.
It poured down her throat in great rich gulps. She regarded the empty glass, sitting on the counter with the last tiny bit sliding off the walls and pooling at the bottom. She poured herself another glass.
I, uh, went back home to Rockford for the holidays. How about that?
I just wanted to put the little header I had at the top of my page in a post for posterity's sake and all, and proclaim the end of sex week. I wish I could say I had grand plans, but not yet...
A WORD OF WARNING: It's all about sex.
Both beautiful and fucked-up, it is the most searched for subject on the internet. In honor of one year of tinyblogging, I am going to spend the next several days exploring it. I will be covering it from a number of angles, including writing about some pretty rough aspects of it in my own life. It's not always going to be pretty, and if you know me in person, you may not want to hear about it. If that's the case, then please go away and come back in a couple of weeks.
Well, I had a few other plans for sex week, but the holidays caught up with me and I think it's time to bring it to a close, kids.
I've written about just about every side of sex except the most important part, the part that makes me realize that I probably won't be celibate forever. The part about love.
Let me tell you a little story. When I was 19 I lived in Illinois, in the town I grew up in. I would sit at either Denny's, or the only cool coffee shop in town, Cafe Esperanto, and there I would write my aching poetry.
There I was, in the cool coffee shop, smoking cigarettes and looking terribly deep, when I looked up and saw her, this bright girl. Her face was so damn pretty and animated, it was like my radar just locked on. I had that moment of fumbling inner desperation when a young man says to himself, "Is there any way to make this happen?"
Sort of. A long shot, really.
The girl who was sitting next to this girl was someone I recognized from my high school. I didn't even remember her name, but I somehow managed to get up the cojones to start with that most tenuous of connections, "Hey, don't you go to my high school?"
Luckily this beautiful girl's friend seemed to have sympathy for my plight. She was warm and friendly, allowing me to sit down and chat them up so fiercely that they had no choice but to invite me to accompany them bowling.
I gave her a hug in the bowling alley parking lot and got her number. It seemed so natural, I called her and asked her if she wanted to go to a movie and of course she did. I have never really 'dated' because it always seemed clear to me when I met someone where there was mutual interest, we just knew right away and we just spent time together. There was no trying to keep our distance or be cool. I just introduced her to my friends and she introduced me to her friends (some of whom it turned out I already knew) and that was that.
She was so intensely witty and bright, with this kind of tactless, incendiary charm. She would tend to elicit strong reactions in people, either they hated her, or they recognized her brilliance and loved her like me. Her family situation was seriously fucked up, and so much of her wit and sauce was to cover up the pain, but I didn't fucking care. I just straight up loved her.
Se was just so goddamn beautiful, with these amazing broad shoulders and just...when she would just be so funny and off the cuff, I couldn't believe she liked a dork like me so much.
A few weeks after meeting her, her parents left town for the weekend (fools!) and she planned a party which would kind of be our first public appearance as a couple. It was a fun party, but I only had my mind on finally getting to lay down in peace with my beautiful new girlfriend, and I could hardly wait until we got everyone out of the house or bedded down for the night. Then, when we climbed nervously into her bed, I thought that I had never looked upon a girl who was so sexy.
I don't remember that first time too well, we were both pretty lit. I do, however remember the many other times that summer we got a chance to do the same thing. In my bed, or many times on a blanket out in a big field near my house we called "the grove".
I remember once there, a little mild lightning storm started and the air was crackling with electricity as we began our lovemaking.
"Remember when I moved in you
and the holy dove was moving too
and every breath we drew was Hallelujah."
- Leonard Cohen
I had no doubt in my mind at that moment that I loved her...that she was my beautiful, warm girlfriend and that everything about being inside her was good. It was then that I first knew that there were no adequate words for love, and that I would only sound foolish if I tried to find some.
That wasn't the only time, either. She was so precious to me, and she was buck wild besides. As soon as we were done she was merely biding her time until we could do it again. She taught me all kinds of freaky things that I was too young to really take advantage of at the time, but secretly I most loved when we would just have straight, delicious, simple vanilla sex. Nothing could have been more exciting or sensual to me than that.
I left her there in Rockford to move to Seattle, and she was married before I really got the chance to tell her how much I loved her.
I have truly loved a couple of women since, but I don't know if I ever gave my heart to someone so openheartedly since. I hope that if I ever do again, it will be with someone so beautiful, so freaky, and that I so admire as that girl.
Perhaps some day I will be ready for that. Perhaps I never will.
This is something I've been relishing the idea of posting for weeks now, waiting for the right moment. Now that I'm back up, please enjoy World Wide Jeb's amazing Sex Week Post.
There are two incidents from my past which immediately spring to mind on the subject of sex. The loss of my virginity at age fifteen to a paedophile who, over the course of one month, methodically raped me with his dirty-old-man companions leaving me with acute paranoia and a devoid sense of trust, along with a mental condition which caused me to regress into panic attacks after I came close to anything resembling an orgasm - or, the drunken antics I got up to with my previous boyfriend, the hypnotherapist; who would hypnotise me into believing he had a impossibly collossal fifteen inch donger and then bonking me silly.
Given that there's not much room for lighthearted anecdote milage with the former, I shall proceed with the latter.
As I'm now in my first fully-blown relationship - two year anniversary in less than a week, thank you very much - I can easily observe in retrospect that any of my previous attempts at coupling up with another fella were completely laughable. I met the hynotherapist whilst living at my parent's house, although he lived in Melbourne - a good hour away.
Fortunately, the hypnotherapist's family owned a beach house in a town just ten minutes drive from where I lived. Every second weekend, he would pick me up in his Porsche (this impressed me no end - a man with money, and at only age 24!) and we'd zoom along the Great Ocean Road to the beach house.
Although every visit we made to the beach house seemed to follow a pre-set script, we still enjoyed ourselves immensely. The hypnotherapist was bi and didn't have much experience with guys - the only ones he had previously involved himself with were one night stands. He couldn't find any guys with anything too much in common with him.
Fortunately, we both had incredibly similar tastes in music - as soon as we arrived, we'd both produce the grab-bag of CD's we'd each selected for the weekend. Everything from Built to Spill to Fear Factory would pound out over the chilly deserted beach whilst we snuggled up inside and talked mostly about music all night.
It wasn't long before I asked him to hypnotise me - I was a little curious, and wasn't completely sure that I believed in the process. After some initial difficulty - it took him seven different hypnotising methods until I started drifting away - we managed to do some basic regression stuff, which was fun. I ensured he tape recorded it so I could listen to it afterwards.
As the alcohol flowed into each Saturday night, I soon asked him if he'd attempted to combine hypnotising someone with sexual activity. His eyes lit up, and he excitedly told me that in all his years of studying hypnotherapy, he'd never considered that.
Wouldn't it screw your mind up? I hesitantly asked. He assured me it wouldn't - as long as you didn't do anything violently disturbing (and that was pretty hard to do anyway, apparently), you'd escape with nothing but some crusty stains on your stomach at best.
With this knowledge in hand, I happily settled back on the bed as he drunkenly muttered his hypnotising mutters. I had no idea what he was about to spring on me, but when I came to he wasn't in the room.
Then he was. Naked. With an enormous, gigantic penis running down his inside thigh.
Blinking in amazement, my mouth made an 'O' shape as I was sure he'd damage at least one of my internal organs with that thing... then I quickly realised what was going on - he'd hypnotised me into thinking he had a fifteen inch knob, and I laughed myself silly. The pee-pee became a regular doodle once again.
The whole incident struck me as quite hilarious, and the hypnotherapist smirked as if he'd known all along it probably wouldn't work. 'If something seems just too impossible, it just won't work,' he taught me. 'Same goes for trying to hypnotise someone into doing something they're really against - it just won't happen.'
'So try something cool that'll work,' I prompted on our next trip to the beach house. 'You choose.'
Off I drifted into nothingworld, and when I came to, who was lying on the bed wearing nothing but a grin but Robb Flynn, singer of Machine Head and my personal sex obsession.
So for one night, I mounted Robb Flynn. I fucked a celebrity, in my own little head. After the hypnotherapist and I broke up (he admitted he was far more interested in some girl he'd met, and our weekends were nothing more than his 'man fix'), it struck me just how unusual the relationship could have been.
A relationship with a steady stream of random, hunky celebrities... well, it's not as bad as it sounds.
Well, in doing sex week for so long now, I've amassed a few things I wanted to talk about that I haven't really got the chance...so I will take this opportunity to do a little name-dropping and talk about what's going on in my little bloggy world.
For one thing, things at the Asshole family are going great guns, what with a foxy new redesign and new home for I, Asshole here at Shauny dot org. That makes a grand total of three of us bitches of Shauna's. Ahhhh, being Shauna's sweeet sweeet bitch is the life.
In other Asshole news, Asshole's little sister has started her own little weblog, Opinion Pie, and I tell you, it's worth reading!
Can I just say that the more time goes by, the more I admire what Dooce does over there in that Doocery.
I also met two more webloggers in real life! First, the Ghetto Fabulous Julie of Accidental, who flashed her Texas charm all over the place in Seattle the other night. It's amazing the kind of online bravado people can generate and then be so shy when you meet them!
Also, Julie managed to lure the elusive Zannah out into the open where I could check out her whole scene. Besides the fact that she's lucky enough to have a boyfriend who can do a flawless Macho Man Randy Savage impression, she just kind of surprised me!
I'll fess, I always thought of her as being something of a crass self-promoter online, simply because she's awfully popular. But in person it is clear that she is self-effacing and accessable and just really fun and child-like. Not at all what I expected!
And last, but not least: Does anyone else find it really spooky that one of the most regular bloggers on the planet, Melissa of Pie in the Sky just dropped off the face of the earth without a word last month? I still go visit her site to scope out her last post, which is starting to seem spookier and spookier to me, since it just gives no indication of what happened to her? Does anyone know? Can we open an X-File?
looks like the tinyblog is back online. thanks for your patience through the technical difficulties and I will now commence to get back to business in what appears to be the longest "week" in recorded history.
What is this, you're saying to yourself, this is supposed to be "sex week", and I haven't seen any just straight up sexy sex action yet! All this weird-ass stories and no sweaty, buck-wild stories of fun, fun, fun. I want my money's worth!
Well, first off, I would like to remind you that the tinyblog comes to you free of any charge (hell, even Kottke couldn't charge for a weblog!) but still, I want you people to feel you have received value, and so I will provide at least one purely salacious story to round out sex week.
I'm going to refer to all the parties by their real first names, mainly because I've posted stories about them with their real names before (hey, internal consistancy is important!), and I know for a fact that they delight in this story. Plus, it's several years ago, and all involved parties are in much different situations now.
Okay enough! I met Cara with her husband outside of a poetry reading in Seattle. They invited me to come over to their house that very night, and Cara started flirting with me right from that moment. Once, after having known them for about a month, I was sitting in the van with her, and she said to me:
"Daniel, *husband* said to me the other day, 'I see how Daniel looks at you.'"
("stammerstammerstammer", I said.)
"Good thing he didn't see how I look back."
("ummmmmm", I said.)
Months went by and I was introduced to not one, not two, but three different lovers of Cara's. It's weird, you can know someone is major trouble, and still respect and love them in 100,000 ways and that's how I felt about Cara. At least one of us had our wits about us usually, though, and so nothing happened between us.
At some point, Cara decided to go to school at the hippie school Evergreen State, and she was then down in Olympia much of the time, living out of her van, and not up in Seattle with her husband much. Consequently, I did not see much of her.
Finally, one day, she called me while I was at work, and said, "Hey, me and my new friend her in Olympia are coming up to Seattle for a school project. We're going to be up there tonight, can we come pick you up from work and commandeer you for the evening?"
Which they did. Cara's friend Jezebel greeted me pretty warmly from the get-go, and we went out to dinner and got a bottle of wine to take to Cara's house. We had a little wine and both Cara and Jezebel clearly had some kind of plan. As the evening was near it's end, Cara turned to me and said, "Hey Daniel, can we come over to your house and have a massage?" (I'm a massage therapist.)
"Yeah," piped up Jezebel, "and sleep over?"
Now I consider myself this pretty liberated guy, who can sleep with a girl and not do anything, and, in fact, I have done it many times, before and since. And I had good reason to behave. Not only was Cara still technically married, but I was attached myself. After Cammy's New Years Eve freak-out (which I have yet to blog about) we were seperated for a month, but under the auspices on continued fidelity. So I was NOT ABOUT to be seduced by two lovely women just because I had two glasses of wine in me, you follow me?
So I let them take me home, and I gave first Jezebel a massage. When I was done, she just got up from the table without putting her clothes on, went to the bathroom, and went and laid down in my bed. Hmm. I got Cara on the table and gave her her massage and then she did basically the same thing.
I looked at them both, laying naked in my bed, looking coyly at me and said, "I'm going to meditate for a minute." (Maybe they would fall asleep by the time I was done.)
I sat down and took a few breaths. Instead of meditating I went over it in my mind. I wasn't going to sleep with these two beautiful girls because I would be betraying not only Cara'a husband, who I considered a friend, but also my own sort-of-ex-lover of several months, who I knew it would totally ruin things with. With a firm resolve, I walked over to the bed.
"You have to lay in the middle," they cooed.
The next six hours were 300 minutes of pure torture as they subtly rubbed up against me and I smelled their hot girl smells and felt their smooth, slender bodies up against me. Cara even mocked me, "It's no use, Jessie, he's too much of a good Buddhist to do anything."
Then, at 4am, she said, "You know, if we would have just done it we'd all be asleep by now!"
I could only admit it was true, and that my rationalizations were quickly eroding. It had been hours and we were all still awake and crackling with sexual energy. I gently stroked them, and when each hand found a tender moist place, I knew I was lost.
"Daniel?" Cara began to query, incredulously.
"Yes," I said, both resigned and quivering with excitement, "I'm going to fuck you both."
In light of all the trouble that it subsequently caused me, I have to say that it was goddamn fun. I would have sex with one of them until my hunger for the other became unbearable, and then I would switch. They sort of half-heartedly fooled around with each other, but it was just for show, and they really did me up right and made me feel like the main event. That combination of guilt and just raw power, and feeling like it was just so many mens' fantasy was so intoxicating, and we did indeed all fall asleep with exhaustion when it was all done.
I don't know if there's an event in my life that I both relish and regret so deeply as that night. Cheers.
Coming soon: Guest Post from World Wide Jeb, and "sex week" poetry!
I now present a reprisal from the archives of The Airman's Mess, something saigonsam thought might be a good addition to "sex week".
This was one of those dreams where you're only a few minutes from waking up, one of those dreams where you can tell that it is a dream, and that's probably why there were real-world elements present. I mean this outrageously hot naked peachskinned dream-blonde was riding me hither and thither but the dream-scenery was my own room, the same room in which I slumbered at that moment, and – you know how difficult it is to speak while inside of a dream; to scream, for example, usually when scared or angry? In this particular blockbuster I was giving voice left and right, all YYYEAHH! OHHOH YYYEAHHH! I mean this was Dream Sex™ in every sense of the word.
–Is this too much information? Go here.
Further, in this hyperrealistic dream with my own room as the setting and all, there came a pounding at the dream-room door and the voice of my dear puritanical mother: "Jack! What's going on in there?!" To which my dream-self, dream-sex-having self dreamily
hollered – with the composite dream-embodiment of every blonde bikini model from all of time riding so blurringly fast and hard above me that she would surely turn to butter in a second, tiger running 'round the tree – I dream-yelled back to dream-Mom, in my dream-voice, I'M HAVING THE BEST SEX OF MY LIFE AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!! And there wasn't anything that could be done, either, because a second later it was ptthhhbt and I woke up.
So there I lay, in my bed, with no eighteen-year-old buxom blonde bikini model anywhere – an 18-year-old girl being, back then, a certifiable Older Woman – and with silence in the room, and me needing to change out my boxers. What did you think? The sensations of a moment ago were dying away like a flywheel running down, but I was giddy and happy and faintly chagrined and faintly guilty-feeling. God, I'm still amazed that my subconscious knew how to make my virginal body feel exactly the way great sex does. Remember Strange Days, that movie with Juliette Lewis and that English Patient guy? That dream of mine would've fetched US$500 per minidisc, minimum.
Predictably, I'd been wearing my last pair of clean drawers when all that happened. So I needed to get downstairs to the laundry room, which, of course, could not be reached without scooting past the kitchen, where I knew my folks would be having coffee and reading the paper. I snuck to the end of the hall and peeked around the corner: there they were. I did a runner and in seconds flat was downstairs with the washer and the dryer; I shucked off my shame, pulled on a new pair from the clothesline, and was in the process of rinsing out the used – decorated with hearts, incidentally, a gift from the girlfriend – when my mom, not of the dream variety this time, walked in behind me. She said something to the effect of, what's up.
I said, "the cut on my back [–I had one] bled into my boxers, so I thought I'd better rinse them off with cold water before it set".
She said okay, then pussyfooted around for a minute talking about this and this and that, and then suddenly looked straight at me and said, "Have you and Carly been having Sexual Intercourse?"
Have you seen Terminator 2? I flew backward against the washing machine in physical recoil and utter shock – just picture Robert Patrick's T-1000 getting blown away with Linda Hamilton's 10-guage shotgun. "AUGH!" I cried, head swimming.
Mom remained perfectly mild. "Well, have you?" she shrugged.
I was choking. "Guh... n!... NO!" I howled.
"Okay then," she said.
I gasped for breath. "Don't ask me that again!"
"I won't," she promised, and walked away.
For a long time, I couldn't understand why she asked me that question that morning. Then, a couple of years ago when I remembered that scene again, it occurred to me to wonder – that dream, so near to wakefulness, with my room as the setting, with me able to speak, with so many similarities to waking reality—
Was it, in fact, all a dream right until I woke up?
Oh, gawd.
Oh gawd.
Well, in a sense, that little game of Haunted House was my first time. But in another sense, the first time I actually did real live coitus with a girl was my first time and it was great. Not just the act, but the whole event.
You see, I was in high school and I wanted to be in a band. Our friends were in a band and we would go to their shows and watch them be so cool. I wanted to be cool too. Unfortunately, I could not sing along to other musicians, and I could not play any instraments. I knew I would find some way for this not to deter me.
At some point, someone played me a copy of Prison, a CD by Stephen Jesse Bernstein, in which SJB reads his brilliant poetry over some electronic music. I could do that! I asked my friend if he would play bass for me, and then I wrote several poems with titles like, "The State of the Onion" (before there was The Onion) and "Bugs Bunny Was a Transvestite".
We had some connections with some of the bands playing the next big high school show, and we managed to get ourselves in for a 15 minute set. We were wandering around the mall blowing off a little steam by engaging in our favorite pastime, when, walking past The Gap, my friend Joe called out, "Sasha!"
I turned my head and there was the most lithe, foxy-fantastic girl I had seen this side of the food court. She was someone Joe knew from his high school (he went to Auburn, and I: Jefferson home of the preppie freaks) and we stopped to say hi and see how she was doing.
Thankfully I didn't have to pull together much smooth, since Joe did all of the talking (and information gathering). Evidently she was the long-time girlfriend of the lead singer of one of the following night's bands, Flannel Camel. He asked her how old Graham was doing, and she mentioned that they had just broken up, actually. Be still my beating heart. She was still going to the show however, and she was heartily encouraged by both of us not to miss out on our debut performance.
Apart, we were Dan and Joe, but together, and with a bass guitar, we were transformed into the dynamic duo of Thoughtless Independence. I was wearing a silk teal shirt with a knit tie, and I swear the only pair of sunglasses that have ever looked good on me. I felt like a superstar, and when I saw Sasha hanging out upstairs, we got into a conversation and just totally spilled our guts to each other. I was riveted by her charm, and listened with incredible attentiveness while she told me how she got raped while on family vacation to that stupid beach boys song "aruba, jamaica, ooooh I wanna take ya" that I now hate even to this day.
I got up there and rocked the mike. It was a magic night. I had prepared little prattle and silly jokes and inflections to the poems only to be done if it seemed to be going well, and I used them all. It all flowed from my mouth and the paper I held in my quivering hands. It was a rush.
The Rockford, IL version of an afterparty was going out for coffee at one of the local 24 hour joints, and it was publicly announced that Perkins family restaurant was the place. Then it was privately disseminated to all the really cool people (and for that one night, I was not a big dork) that we were actually going for cheese fries at Beef-a-Roo. And since Sasha was a band member's recent ex, that's where she was going to be as well.
She gave me her phone number and whispered "call me!" in my ear as she hugged me sweetly and I got into Joe's big damn Impala to go home.
Okay, not being a big dork only lasted a few hours. I think I called her that very night at 3am (just to leave a message and tell her what a good time I had!) but she picked up the phone and we talked until 6am. We went out twice.
Somewhere in all this the conversation went around to sex and I mentioned I had never actually gone there. We talked about it a little bit before she uttered those magic words, "...well, I want to have sex with you."
I realized at that moment that I really had better arrange that as soon as possible, and basically, a time was set.
She was skilled and patient, and we shagged to the delicious strains of Enya's Shepherd Moons, and Edie Brickell's Ghost of a Dog. I think I did a pretty good job! God knows I had done my research. About 20 minutes later, as I lay there next to her with stars in my eyes, I turned around with a dawning realization and said, "Can we do that again?"
Actually, we did it 2 more times, and were about to get started on a third, when my mom came home and we thought the better of it.
That night, I asked my mom if she would drive me to the Denny's so I could go chill and drink coffee with Joe, and tell him I GOT LAID! and my mom asked me, "Did you have sex with that girl?" on the way there.
"Yes." I pridefully admitted, even though I knew that I'd be busted for breaking one of the few house rules (no sex in the house unless you had the means to support a family, read: no one but her). Instead, as she dropped me off, she just said, "Congratulations."
Ok, so it was a rebound thing, and a week later she went back to her longtime boyfriend, but it was special to me! She gave me a mix tape that I still have to this day. I still listen to it sometimes.
Okay, so this deserves a not.so.soft style one-line 'get some comments' question. What music accompanied your first time?
Continuing on the theme of first times, and before I get to my own first time, I present to you the first time of Ariel Meadow, star and writer of electrolicious: the blog formerly known as urban forest.
Then I lost my virginity. It wasn't anything very exciting--it involved Valentines Day, an exboyfriend I'd recently gotten back together with (a cycle he and I were doomed to repeat until 1995), and a red condom that he insisted *I* put on him. (It took me years to figure out that he had a most unfortunate issue with touching himself. Poor guy. I hope he's gotten over it.)
The next day at rehearsal, I realized I was dancing TOTALLY differently. Go pelvis, go! Suddently I wasn't Rum Tum Tugger, I was Rum Tum Tug-Her! Suddenly the spandex and red leather made sense. Suddenly the whole world made sense.
After rehearsal, the director pulled me aside and said, "I see you've really infused the character with a lot more energy--keep it up!"
At the time I chuckled to myself and thought "...If only she knew!" Years later I chuckle at myself and think "...Of COURSE she knew."
To bring us back from the brink of madness, I call on Mena of Dollarshort.org, to bring us this super deluxe guest post:
The First time, Or, Fresh off the Boat
There is a familiar jaw-drop that I'm accustomed to seeing whenever someone learns that Ben and I waited until we were married.
Waited for what? To move in together? To have children?
I'm talking about the big wait.
After the jaw drops, I am then greeted to a half-flinch -- the sort of flinch that says: "I so don't want to hear any Amish/Mormon/Christian propaganda about why I'm evil for having premarital sex, you freak."
Believe me, if I could cite religion as the reason for us being late-90s sexual pariahs, I'd be delighted. Instead, I'm forced to rationalize our decision.
In all honesty, when you begin dating at seventeen and are engaged at nineteen, waiting until you're married isn't that difficult. True, it is an annoyance. And, when you don't have any significant moral cause to base your decision on, you start to wonder why you've actually waited.
But why did we wait?
I really don't know.
What began as pregnancy fears turned into relationship fears -- we had seen too many a relationship sour as soon as sex entered the equation.
But really, I think Ben and I wanted to be different. While we aren't judgmental of others (at least when sex is concerned), waiting gave us the pleasure of knowing that we actually stuck to what we said we were going to do.
Will-power is a mighty thing.
Our willingness to wait even surprised my family. The night before the wedding, my mother, grandmother and I were folding napkins for the reception. When I mentioned for the one thousandth time that Ben and I waited (hoping to make my grandmother proud or something) she said this:
"In my day, the only girls that waited were those fresh off the boat."
That's a pretty way to put it.
And then, there is my eighty-year-old great aunt:
"There's no way in hell they aren't having sex."
Talk about familial support.
So, about the honeymoon -- how was that?
Well, I'll borrow a joke set-up from Seinfeld for this story:
We went to the Sonoma Mission Inn, stayed in a marvelous room, had a delicious Creme Brulee, yada yada yada, we returned back to work a couple days later.
"But, you've left out the best part!"
I mentioned the Creme Brulee.
What can I say? Did you actually have a good first time?
I decided not to post my darkest entry. I guess some things you have to wait to shock your direct loved ones with. In leiu of it, I offer this amazing post. It is written by a writer whom I especially admire, and who I asked to write about sex from a point of view not often explored in weblogs. She asked that I publish it without crediting her, as she doesn't want to be viewed as a total freak who would just go around spouting this stuff. It's her choice. I'm happy to be able to record it here. After this, we'll look at sex from a lighter angle. I promise.
Please heed the disclaimer.
I figured the gun must have been in the car; why else would it feel so cold? I could feel the vapor condensing on its barrel as it rattled against my teeth and bounced off of my tongue. I imagined him getting my call a half-hour ago, and then deciding to go out to his car to get his Glock. It was cold in the house, and even more so since I had just removed all of my clothes.
"Lay down on the bed."
I thought about a lot of things. I wondered where everyone else was. Since he had been discharged from the Seals he had been living with his parents until he could save enough to move out on his own. And there were usually other people around, such as his sisters or his mother.
I wondered if the gun was loaded. I couldn’t think far enough ahead to decide if I wanted to find out. I figured it was; he was just crazy enough to keep a loaded gun around all the time.
I wondered what I’d be doing right now if I hadn’t lied to my mother and told her that he was just a harmless kid of nineteen, instead of a grown man of twenty-five. What if I had gone to class instead? Instead of going to my junior English class I chose to break up with my boyfriend, in the middle of the day, at his house.
"You think you can break up with me and just walk away, huh?"
It was hard to talk around the gun so I chose to keep quiet. With every stroke he took its end jammed into the roof of my mouth. Drops of his sweat fell onto my back and rolled down my sides. It was the most physically painful thing I had experienced up until that time, but I kept quiet and did not cry out.
I thought about how we met; my mother took me out to lunch and he was our waiter. While my mother was in the bathroom he brought me a little cocktail napkin with his phone number on it, and winked at me. My mother commented that he was the best waiter she’d had in a long time. I threw the napkin away.
A month later I went to the movies with one of my friends. He was behind the counter, selling popcorn.
"Why didn’t you call me?"
"I don’t make a habit of calling strange men."
"Aww, c’mon. Call me, I’ll take you out."
We went out to dinner a few times. He picked me up from school and we had sex on my lunch hour, and I would get back before sixth period. He told me that I was beautiful, that I fucked like a porn star, and that when the lights were low I looked just like Julia Roberts. I didn’t find his flattery particularly interesting or believable. Even when I was sixteen I knew when a relationship was just about fucking.
I grew bored with him; my wandering eye lit on someone else. I was tired of his Navy stories and his acid flashback stories, and his spiel about how life would be so much better if he still lived in Scotland. So I decided to break up with him.
My thoughts were broken by his orgasm.
"Get out of here, you bitch."
I stood up and noticed how my legs and arms and everything was trembling. I imagined that even my organs were trembling, jiggling around inside of my body. My mouth, now empty, felt somehow like it was permanently pried open. Blood ran down the backs and insides of my legs and into my socks, which were the only things I was left wearing. I shoved my limbs into my clothes, without putting my bra or underwear back on. I scooped up my shoes and ran outside of the house, stopping only to vomit into the snow-covered bushes next to his parents’ front window.
I got into my car and started it mechanically. I hoped I was okay to drive home. I remember worrying that the blood was going to seep through to the car’s seat. How would I explain that to my parents? I smoked cigarette after cigarette while waiting for stoplights to change- I felt like everything was happening in slow-motion, and that I was moving through a viscous gel.
I took a shower. Was I all right? Was I ruined now? Would people look at me and tell that I’d been raped? I discovered the answer was "no" that night at the dinner table.
"How was your day? Did anything interesting happen?" asked my mom. He was one of the few boyfriends I had in high school that my mom really liked.
"No. Nothing interesting happened."
Why did I say that? Why didn’t I tell her, or anyone for a whole year after it happened? At the time, I was afraid people would look at me differently, as if I had made a mistake. I thought only weak idiots got raped.
Some people have said to me, have you considered therapy? Have you thought about taking a self-defense class? I thought about it, but I look at it as a learning experience. I have become comfortable with my anger and I can reroute it. It fuels me and what I do; if I wasn’t so angry I couldn’t be so single-mindly focused on what I do in life. I know I will never be raped again, because I will eviscerate the person who tries it. I will rip out his neck (let’s face it, most rapists are male) and wear it as an armband. And if I fail at that, and I find myself with my mouth wrapped around a barrel of a gun again, I will find a way to pull the trigger, or throw myself on a knife, or chew at my wrists until they bleed profusely.
What I want to say is, don’t do this to a person.
--- Anonymous
John's high-rise Capitol Hill combo was the masterpiece of a finicky, Catholic, gay investment banker, who clearly had massive amounts of money to burn. It was clean, it was wall to wall quality, it was fastidious. The Catholic iconography was a little wierd, and he seemed to place an almost cosmic signifigance on that fact that his cat liked me. Go figure. It could have been so much worse, eh?
He told me right off the bat that having penetrative sex was off the table so I didn't need to worry. He just suggested we go lay in his bed and watch some gay porn and just kinda go with the flow.
It's so funny to me now, I was like, "Alright, let's get to work." I just turned it on, got him all worked up, jerked him off, gave him a little massage, and walked out the door with a hundred dollar bill. It was lovely. As I left, I thought about taking a cab or taking myself out to dinner, but remembered that $100 wasn't really that much money, and that I had gone into this so I could pay my psycho roommates for utilities and make a clean getaway. So I took a cab.
I think I was expecting Sambo to provide me with a steady flow of clients or something, but I clearly didn't have a very good idea of what I was really going to do. I didn't go to bars or know how to operate in that thing, and I really (thankfully, in retrospect) just didn't know what the hell I was doing.
I tried to be open with my friends about what I was doing, but down to the last one, they all freaked out and thought I was degenerating quickly into a drug-addled AIDS infested streetwalker in a hurry. Some expressed concern, and my roommates, who I was doing this partially to pay back, reacted with some of the most spiteful disgust I have ever experienced.
I saw John 2 more times. One of those times he gave me $500, so in my entire career, I made $700 for 3 hours of work (although arguably my innocence or something) which I think is a pretty good rate.
Finally he went on vacation and in the face of the fact that I had no idea how to find other nice, rich, generous people like him, I ended up finding another place to live, getting a legit job as a home health aide, and finally going to massage school, where I learned the power of touch and why I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever sell sexuality again. It was a healing time.
But wait. I have a couple more stories to tell you about the dark side of sex. In fact, when I look at these, I see that they're really not so dark. In my career I actually netted $660 after expenses. And that's the story I'm going to tell next.
I was telling Paula in chat that this would be the first time my mom had read some of these stories. I'm not going to say exactly how many exclamation points she put on the end of "YOUR MOTHER READS YOUR BLOG" but it was a fair amount.
Anyway, not only does my mom read, but she offers this contribution, to clear up the record about how our conversation went when I was but a young lad of 8:
Daniel was eight, just out of the hospital where he had spent 30 days in traction for a broken femur. He was to spend the next six weeks in a body cast at home. That left him with a great deal of time for reflection. One day he said, "Mom, I've been thinking.", a sure sign of trouble. "I know what everything on my body is for except that sac between my legs. I asked my nurse in the hospital but she told me to ask you." I took a deep breath and began to explain in what I deemed to be eight year old terms, how while women carried half of the baby seed in their tummys and men carried the other half in that sac. I then proceeded to explain how those two halfs were connected. I told him that when a couple was ready to make a baby that the man put his penis in the woman's vagina and his body squirted sperm into the woman and that is how a baby begins life. I was very clinical because I knew that if I made it sound like too much fun Dan would want to try it right away.
Dan looked at me then in the way kids look at parents, trying to picture their Mom and Dad doing this. He gave up that contemplation immediately and got back to his practical considerations. I asked if he had any questions and he said he had a few. His questions were, "How do you know when you are going to squirt so that you get it in the right place in time?" I assured him that he would have ample warning but also cautioned him about being careless in this so that he didn't make a baby before he was ready to be a Dad. Then, contemplating the size of his eight year old equipment, "How many squirts do you get in your life?" "What happens if you use it all up before you make a baby?" I assured him that he would have plenty because the body manufactures all that he would need. He seemed satisfied by this and just said, "OK, thanks Mom." and that was it until he got older and needed the birth control talk and the personal responsibility talk.
So Miss Banana, Sambo and I all started hanging out, and they were sort of determined to give me this hustler education.
Except, I had a whole different vision of the whole thing. I had this idea of sort of being a "love professional". Honest work. A valuable service for money. Integrity. I was actually quite proud of both myself and the whole idea. It seemed like not a bad way to do the whole thing. I would be like this modern sex worker. I could never really do it in the way that Miss Banana and Sambo did, which was to try and get the most for the least. They were sure tricky devils.
They were actually good company when they weren't totally fucking crazy, except for Miss Banana's tendency to treat everyone in her environment like her sub ("Daniel, go to the store and get me some broccoli. Now."), and Sambo's tendency to have diarrhea of the mouth in public. ("That's a forehead? Looks like a FIVEhead!")
Finally though, it was actually arranged for me to meet this one guy John, Sambo's gravy client. Miss B tried to convince me to shave some of my body and I really thought that was a deal breaker, so I didn't. She did however have her way in one way:
I was sitting, quite innocently, in her apartment one day, on this flimsy mushroom stool that was low to the ground. Suddenly, without warning, Miss B abruptly sat on my lap, straddling me. I looked puzzled at her, but realized I was sort of trapped. I couldn't really get her off me without crashing to the ground. She pulled some tweezers from behind her back and I saw what her master plan was. I didn't struggle, and it didn't look too bad, if you like that tweezed pretty boy look. Needless to say, it never became a part of my beauty regimen.
Finally the time had come for me to go up to Capitol Hill to meet this guy for the first time and make some money. $100 for one hour (although Sambo implied that there were often signifigant gifts) and I was advised to leave promptly when the hour was over.
"Are you Daniel?" the voice at the other end of the intercom said. "Come on up."
it will be continued...
So let me tell you a little about Miss Banana before I go on. She was what one might call a hustler. She was a stripper and a smooth talker and a tough bitch all in one. She was the kind of person who could realize that the rent money was due the next day, go to work, and come home with eight hundred dollars. How did she do it? I don't know, but she just had a talent for talking men out of money. Was she a whore? Hell, no. She would never actually put out...she was far too tricky for that. As I understood it she would just ask men for money and they would give it to her.
I remember the day I met her, newly moved into the new loft space in our building. Tim, the pothead, had already smoked a few bowls with her, and brought me over to meet her. She was clearly charmed by me, or intrigued, or...something. She offered me some broccoli right there on the spot and sort of took me under her wing.
I think she always saw me as a sharp kid, someone who knew just enough to get themselves in trouble, and clearly wanted to give me some kind of street education. So, a few days after our conversation, she found me to tell me that she had met someone in a club the night before who might be able to help me.
Sambo was a tall, muscular California goofball. If I would have searched the city for people I thought would make a good romantic match for Miss Banana, I think there's several thousand people I would have picked first, but there was some kind of magic there, and they ended up being together for many years, starting on that night. They had this amazing relationship based on fucking like porn stars, threatening each other's lives, selling speed, and just generally causing trouble. They were perfect for each other.
Sambo was hustler of sorts as well, and lived off the money of men. The way he told it, it was mostly about company, and he never had to do anything sexual for it ("I just tell them I'm not gay," he said.) but I don't know if, years later, I really buy that.
He talked to me a little bit about what he did, and then he graciously offered to hook me up with one of his gravy clients, a man named John. Yes, that was really his name.
you know it's going to be continued...