Let's remember Marsha, the girl in the stories I recounted about the Electra Palace hotel in Thessaloniki and the cop on the levee. She was a part of my young life that I do think about a lot these days. I've been told that she's teaching at a tech school--- geology, maybe geochemistry ---these days. I'm told that she's planning a wedding for her daughter. I have to sigh at that. Still, she is in my thoughts--- or at least the stories I know from her past keep coming to mind.
I saw "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" not long ago. I had to note that Marsha reminded me of Margaret Qualley's character--- the hippie girl Pussycat who was one of Charlie Manson's followers. Marsha was never a hippie girl, though she was an outdoors girl. Not quite so tall as Margaret Qualley, and with larger breasts, but the same long, slender legs and a preference for short shorts and sandals. I'll have to think here for a moment. If not quite Margaret Qualley's character, then maybe Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation". In any case, excellent legs and long, dark-brown hair. I've always preferred long legs to large breasts, but she was a 36C, which went with the outdoors girl look.
Back in January I wrote about her adventure in Thessaloniki with the rich Greek boy, the one who drove her up above the city in his vintage MG. Marsha did have a thing for sports cars. She had posters of exotic ones--- Aston-Martins, Bugattis ---on her bedroom walls at home along with posters from ski resorts. I'll suspect that as soon as the Greek boy showed her his MG, he was three-quarters of the way to getting her shorts off...and certainly set to get road head.
Memory says that there was a boy--- older than she was, of course, in his mid-twenties ---with a sports car that she knew here. He had a sports car, naturally. I can't recall what kind, though I think it was a Triumph rather than an MG. My own knowledge of vintage sports cars is minimal at best, and all I can think of would be a Triumph Spitfire or a TR-6. He had one, though, and she was stunned and thrilled to be able to ride in it.
What do I know about the boy? Very little, really. She was fifteen or sixteen when they met; I think he was twenty-four. Her first sports car, and her first older man. His name was Tony--- I do remember that. He was called Tony T, though I have no idea what the the T stood for. Marsha met him through her older sister, who briefly dated him. I think Marsha decided to make her own play for Tony after her sister broke up with him, but the mechanics of it all are a mystery. Marsha's sister Pamela (a film devotee) described Tony once as looking a bit like a younger version of Richard Harris' King Arthur in "Camelot". These days, I have to to rack my memory for what that would've meant. I'll note that I stayed friends with Pamela long after Marsha and I had gone our separate ways. I don't think I ever asked her outright about Tony and Marsha, but she may have told me things over the years. Anyway...what else do I know? Older than Marsha. He rented a small house down by the river. He worked offshore, and then or later he worked as a diver around offshore rigs.
She did tell me that he was her first road head. Not her first oral experience, not by any means, but certainly the first in a moving car. Watching Margaret Qualley blithely ask Brad Pitt if he wanted her to give him head while they drove did make me wonder how her first road head happened. Did she offer him her favors to get a ride in the Triumph? Did Tony tell her that the price of admission for a ride at speed down country roads was a blowjob? I'd like to think that he looked at her over the inevitable aviator Ray-Bans and told her that there was a price for a place in the passenger seat. I'll expect that his smile was insufferable, but just what a tenth-grade girl would've swooned over.
Marsha did spend a lot of time at his house, she told me later. Drinking Heinkens and smoking weed, of course. Cutting school to go do that with a hot older boyfriend was exactly what just what every bougie girl at our school would've thought was a perfect weekday afternoon. They spent a lot of time in bed--- and of course his bed was two mattresses on the floor. Well, at least it wasn't a waterbed. There have to be limits. Always. He liked her FDAU--- face down, ass up ---and he was the first one to introduce her to sodomitical practices. He liked feeling her squirm, and as the older man, he was a bit nervous about getting an underage girl pregnant. Not enough to do anything about contraception, she told me, but certainly enough to get him to do anal sex a fair amount.
Driving with Tony was always about him fingering her down her shorts or under a short skirt. Marsha's usual habit when driving was to kick off her sandals and put her bare feet up on the dash. She'd never heard of a foot fetish at fifteen or sixteen, but she knew that Tony (and a few other older men later) always wanted her barefoot. But having her feet up on the dash made it easier for him to get a hand up her skirt. The Triumph was too small for sex in the car, but Tony knew all the places along the river roads to get out of the car with a picnic blanket.
I used to have visions of Marsha with her shorts off, standing barefoot on the seat of the convertible Triumph, hanging onto the roll bar while she wrapped her legs around Tony. Probably not a viable position, though he could have used it to go down on her. Alas, though, I suspect that vintage Triumphs didn't have roll bars in those days.
Not a lot of drama to the story, mind you. She spent a few months sneaking off from school to Tony's house, and he spent a fair number of afternoons speeding down country roads with her giving him head. In the end, I suppose, they both grew bored. I wonder if she'd had sex in a Triumph and wanted to move up to something else, whatever that may have been in those days (a Porsche?)...or if she had a pregnancy scare...or if she worried about being caught skipping school. I do wonder what would've happened if her parents had caught her with Tony. The drama I think would've been worth seeing.
My lovely long-legged blonde friend in NZ told me that she always took the opportunity to be naked in a fast car with an older lover behind the wheel. My friend in Asheville once pulled off her sundress and drove home naked down back roads one summer night in a battered old pickup truck. I'd like to think Marsha was naked in at least a few sports cars in her teen days. She didn't try being without underwear until later--- something I persuaded her to do ---but I like to think that she'd launched at least a few pairs of bikini panties into the wind and sat with her legs open and sandals off on sunlit drives down the highway.
Monday, March 30, 2020
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Two Seven Eight: Boccaccio
Early spring, and the Red Death is here. The city where I live is in semi-quarantine, with empty streets and social life reduced to nothing. My understanding is that hospitals here in the city are quietly moving towards a crisis.
It's a grim season, and there's no denying that. My lovely blonde friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud has gone missing. New Zealand is under crisis rules, with its borders shut and businesses closed. I've no idea if she's well or if her employers have shut down altogether.
It's an odd thing, the plague in a social media age. I suppose people are still texting, but no one seems to be lamenting that there are no voices out there over the aether. I'm a creature of a dying generation, and telephone voices do matter to me. I suppose that FaceTime and Skype still count as interaction sites, but somehow that's not the same as long talks by phone late at night.
I've seen a few suggestions that here in the time of the Red Death, writing letters is a key skill to revive. I do agree with that, actually. There's something heartening about actual physical letters. There's something about ink and handwriting that makes you feel like you're actually part of a relationship with someone.
COVID-19 has of course destroyed not just the bar and restaurant industry, it's also ruined sex work and most sexual interactions. Sex workers in Europe and North America are trying to move online, to do webcam and cam-girl sex to stay financially afloat. There are no bars or clubs anymore, and fear has emptied out dating apps. In a world of N95 masks and using Clorox wipes on everything anyone touches, sex is fairly out of the question. Even s/m is hard to do if you're Social Distancing--- whipping a lovely young companion at a minimum distance of six feet (two meters?) is a difficult thing.
Now I will assume that the online sale of vibrators and dildos has spiked. The Solitary Vice is the one sexual release left...so long as Amazon Prime continues to deliver. I could note that while Lelo and Hitachi are still bringing pleasure to women, there's no equivalent for men. Or at least no equivalent that anyone male can discuss. Women can tell clever, amusing stories of getting through quarantine and Social Distancing with their vibrators, but no one male can preserve any self-respect if he admits to wanking his way through the plague season. Of course, that's a story for another day.
Tonight I'm thinking about Boccaccio and the Decameron. You know the backstory for that, I'll presume. Somewhere in Italy during the Black Death, a group of wealthy and cultured refugees from the Plague assemble in a country estate and fight off boredom by telling one another stories--- usually scandalous, lascivious, and wickedly clever tales of adultery, seduction, and complicated affairs. I think that there was an updated version in the late 1960s, an Italian film called "Boccaccio '70". But in any case, I am thinking of Boccaccio's characters telling tales of lust and passion while the Plague hovers just offstage. I'm thinking that we need a Decameron 2020. We need to tell one another tales of encounters and adventures, tales of the things we're all prevented from doing by COVID-19 right now.
My thought is that I'll spin out more threads here, that I'll tell stories from the Pasts of lovely friends, and just possibly a few tales from my own past. I hope you'll read this and respond with your own tales. If phone sex is a dying art, and no one actually writes letters any longer, then at least we can tell one another tales here.
I'm expecting that there'll be very little "normal" happening through the rest of the year. The Red Death may not be just outside the window, but it is out there.
So if you are reading this, do write. Do let me know about the stories I'll be posting...and let me know your own stories. This may be all we'll have for a while.
It's a grim season, and there's no denying that. My lovely blonde friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud has gone missing. New Zealand is under crisis rules, with its borders shut and businesses closed. I've no idea if she's well or if her employers have shut down altogether.
It's an odd thing, the plague in a social media age. I suppose people are still texting, but no one seems to be lamenting that there are no voices out there over the aether. I'm a creature of a dying generation, and telephone voices do matter to me. I suppose that FaceTime and Skype still count as interaction sites, but somehow that's not the same as long talks by phone late at night.
I've seen a few suggestions that here in the time of the Red Death, writing letters is a key skill to revive. I do agree with that, actually. There's something heartening about actual physical letters. There's something about ink and handwriting that makes you feel like you're actually part of a relationship with someone.
COVID-19 has of course destroyed not just the bar and restaurant industry, it's also ruined sex work and most sexual interactions. Sex workers in Europe and North America are trying to move online, to do webcam and cam-girl sex to stay financially afloat. There are no bars or clubs anymore, and fear has emptied out dating apps. In a world of N95 masks and using Clorox wipes on everything anyone touches, sex is fairly out of the question. Even s/m is hard to do if you're Social Distancing--- whipping a lovely young companion at a minimum distance of six feet (two meters?) is a difficult thing.
Now I will assume that the online sale of vibrators and dildos has spiked. The Solitary Vice is the one sexual release left...so long as Amazon Prime continues to deliver. I could note that while Lelo and Hitachi are still bringing pleasure to women, there's no equivalent for men. Or at least no equivalent that anyone male can discuss. Women can tell clever, amusing stories of getting through quarantine and Social Distancing with their vibrators, but no one male can preserve any self-respect if he admits to wanking his way through the plague season. Of course, that's a story for another day.
Tonight I'm thinking about Boccaccio and the Decameron. You know the backstory for that, I'll presume. Somewhere in Italy during the Black Death, a group of wealthy and cultured refugees from the Plague assemble in a country estate and fight off boredom by telling one another stories--- usually scandalous, lascivious, and wickedly clever tales of adultery, seduction, and complicated affairs. I think that there was an updated version in the late 1960s, an Italian film called "Boccaccio '70". But in any case, I am thinking of Boccaccio's characters telling tales of lust and passion while the Plague hovers just offstage. I'm thinking that we need a Decameron 2020. We need to tell one another tales of encounters and adventures, tales of the things we're all prevented from doing by COVID-19 right now.
My thought is that I'll spin out more threads here, that I'll tell stories from the Pasts of lovely friends, and just possibly a few tales from my own past. I hope you'll read this and respond with your own tales. If phone sex is a dying art, and no one actually writes letters any longer, then at least we can tell one another tales here.
I'm expecting that there'll be very little "normal" happening through the rest of the year. The Red Death may not be just outside the window, but it is out there.
So if you are reading this, do write. Do let me know about the stories I'll be posting...and let me know your own stories. This may be all we'll have for a while.
Friday, March 6, 2020
Two Seven Seven: Threads 11
A few more stories from my archives, from memories of long ago loves...
The girl in these notes was a co-ed at McGill in those days, a fiercely bright and lovely blonde girl, Polish and French, who styled herself on line after Nabokov's Ginny McCoo. She liked the idea, of being "the alternative nymphet", the alternative story in "Lolita". We both liked that idea, mind you. I wrote her part of a short story once, about Nabokov's Ginny McCoo at nineteen, a co-ed at Barnard at the start of the 1950s, a girl with a cane and the trace of a limp, a girl studying French lit and seeking out her own older lover. Ginny--- my Ginny ---loved that and told me that we must write a novel-length version of it some day.
I don't know where she is these days, my Miss Ginny. When last I heard from her, she was preparing to defend her doctoral thesis--- on the idea of exile in the works of Nabokov and Mavis Gallant ---and thinking of running off to Vancouver or London. I miss her desperately.
I once wrote her to tell her about a girl I saw on a bus here, a girl I sighed over one summertime Saturday morning. Miss Ginny replied to say that
Darling,
I did find the description of the girl on the bus (Deepest South, tanned legs, iPod) incredibly erotic. I think I may have replaced the bus setting with a train. That's very Japanese, isn't it? The other passengers read their papers, airport fiction paperbacks etc while you seduce the Deepest South girl. I have visualized this in my head. It's unbearably erotic. The iPod figures in this as well. Why would a Deepest South girl be so alluring? It's an abstract thing I can't put into words but there is the divide between us...she's miniskirts or shorts and Baby Tees and Mall Shopping and slightly vacant. There's something about the long, slender, darkly tanned legs. Perhaps it's the carefree nature of youth. In the Deepest South, girls still prize tans. Elsewhere, this would be slightly vulgar perhaps. But these girls still cultivate tans with baby oil. I think so, anyways. It's like smoking - there's a carefree decadence about it that only the youthful can enjoy.
That next winter she sent me a wonderful email one morning:
On your recommendation, I went to class panty-free a few days ago. Not denim (too cold in the Ice Block That Is Canuckia) - I wore wool checked (boy's style) trousers... although I must admit I was terribly worried that the zipper might come down when I was least expecting it.
And that, I assure you, was a wonderful thing to find before I went off to my office.
I once wrote her to ask
If you and I were ever out for drinks or at a party, and I tended to address you not just as "darling" (my usual form of address to lovely companions) but as "darling incestuous sibling" in a languid 1920s voice...how would you respond?
Her reply was simple enough:
I think that would be a fun party trick...we would certainly scandalize our fellow party goers. There's a beautiful scene in a film by Bertolucci (Novacento, I think) in which the decadent 20s socialite rides a white horse in a forest named "Cocaine" - gift from her rich and decadent uncle.
Miss Ginny loved the idea of being transformed into a beautiful boy and being swept away by a very wealthy, literate, and wicked older man. She wrote me about that one night--
I've always been boyish, darling...one evening you will have to cut off my long locks and give me an impromptu pixie cut. Turn me into a Beautiful Boy for you. I'll wear a neck tie and a school boy's shorts, if you like.
I've always liked slender, lithe, lovely girls in neckties and Borsalinos and man-tailored jackets. How could I not like playing gender games with Miss Ginny?
She used to sign her letters and emails to me as "Your Incestuous Sibling" or "Your Euro-Film Correspondent". She would lie back in my arms and watch 1960s French and East European films with me. I do hope, very much hope, that she's Dr. Ginny these days, wherever she might be.
The girl in these notes was a co-ed at McGill in those days, a fiercely bright and lovely blonde girl, Polish and French, who styled herself on line after Nabokov's Ginny McCoo. She liked the idea, of being "the alternative nymphet", the alternative story in "Lolita". We both liked that idea, mind you. I wrote her part of a short story once, about Nabokov's Ginny McCoo at nineteen, a co-ed at Barnard at the start of the 1950s, a girl with a cane and the trace of a limp, a girl studying French lit and seeking out her own older lover. Ginny--- my Ginny ---loved that and told me that we must write a novel-length version of it some day.
I don't know where she is these days, my Miss Ginny. When last I heard from her, she was preparing to defend her doctoral thesis--- on the idea of exile in the works of Nabokov and Mavis Gallant ---and thinking of running off to Vancouver or London. I miss her desperately.
I once wrote her to tell her about a girl I saw on a bus here, a girl I sighed over one summertime Saturday morning. Miss Ginny replied to say that
Darling,
I did find the description of the girl on the bus (Deepest South, tanned legs, iPod) incredibly erotic. I think I may have replaced the bus setting with a train. That's very Japanese, isn't it? The other passengers read their papers, airport fiction paperbacks etc while you seduce the Deepest South girl. I have visualized this in my head. It's unbearably erotic. The iPod figures in this as well. Why would a Deepest South girl be so alluring? It's an abstract thing I can't put into words but there is the divide between us...she's miniskirts or shorts and Baby Tees and Mall Shopping and slightly vacant. There's something about the long, slender, darkly tanned legs. Perhaps it's the carefree nature of youth. In the Deepest South, girls still prize tans. Elsewhere, this would be slightly vulgar perhaps. But these girls still cultivate tans with baby oil. I think so, anyways. It's like smoking - there's a carefree decadence about it that only the youthful can enjoy.
That next winter she sent me a wonderful email one morning:
On your recommendation, I went to class panty-free a few days ago. Not denim (too cold in the Ice Block That Is Canuckia) - I wore wool checked (boy's style) trousers... although I must admit I was terribly worried that the zipper might come down when I was least expecting it.
And that, I assure you, was a wonderful thing to find before I went off to my office.
I once wrote her to ask
If you and I were ever out for drinks or at a party, and I tended to address you not just as "darling" (my usual form of address to lovely companions) but as "darling incestuous sibling" in a languid 1920s voice...how would you respond?
Her reply was simple enough:
I think that would be a fun party trick...we would certainly scandalize our fellow party goers. There's a beautiful scene in a film by Bertolucci (Novacento, I think) in which the decadent 20s socialite rides a white horse in a forest named "Cocaine" - gift from her rich and decadent uncle.
Miss Ginny loved the idea of being transformed into a beautiful boy and being swept away by a very wealthy, literate, and wicked older man. She wrote me about that one night--
I've always been boyish, darling...one evening you will have to cut off my long locks and give me an impromptu pixie cut. Turn me into a Beautiful Boy for you. I'll wear a neck tie and a school boy's shorts, if you like.
I've always liked slender, lithe, lovely girls in neckties and Borsalinos and man-tailored jackets. How could I not like playing gender games with Miss Ginny?
She used to sign her letters and emails to me as "Your Incestuous Sibling" or "Your Euro-Film Correspondent". She would lie back in my arms and watch 1960s French and East European films with me. I do hope, very much hope, that she's Dr. Ginny these days, wherever she might be.
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