Three One Two: Paint

I've spent time going through my storage cube and seeing how much of my past is hidden away there. In one plastic storage box I did find things Levin left for me long ago. I remember her packing to go off to grad school, remember that she packed up her life in a couple of bags and a few cardboard boxes in the trunk of her car. She gave me a few of her old notebooks--- You're a historian, she said.  This is history. She may have said my history or our history, Too long ago to remember.  But I have been looking through them and thinking about ghosts. 

The notebooks are hardbound Pentalic journals--- both sketchbooks and lined, What's the size? 5 x 8? I haven't seen Pentalic journals in forever, and I have no idea if they're still made. These have hard blue covers; I like the solidity.

Levin had posed naked for sketches and paintings since she was in high school. Self-portraits and for friends and (older?) lovers when she was a high school girl, for the painting professor whose muse she was at university, for lovers male and female. Her sketchbooks have details of nude self-portraits, sketches of collarbones and throat leading down to breasts, sketches of Levin done in a mirror. 

I remember that at one point she and her painting professor had spent time laughing and painting on one another. She'd been thrilled at that. Not just because it felt good or was part of sex, but because her older lover had been able to laugh about it, had been able to give up authority and art-world fame and just play.  So there in the sketchbooks are drawings of herself topless, or just of her breasts and throat, colored in in pencil. 

Levin had large areolae and nipples. I liked that, liked the way it looked when she was in the boy's white singlets that were a uniform look for her, She liked it sometimes, but felt awkward at others. A boy in high school had mocked her for having "pepperoni tits", and she'd been wounded by that. Still, Levin was always bra-less, and I loved the shadow of her areolae and nipples against thin cotton.  I love the drawings, too, and love the colors she used. 

She told me once that one summer she'd worked as a server in a men's club called Rembrandt's. The club wasn't exactly a strip bar. Its gimmick was that the servers and bartendrix girls were topless and painted--- the body paint glowing under the black light that flooded the club. For something like $25 you could paint on one of the girls. Girls had designs and names painted on them.  A patron, she told me, could touch a girl's legs and stomach and back and go around her breasts, but couldn't touch the breasts themselves (something the bouncers enforced). Depending on the tip, the girl would paint her own breasts or slyly trace a glowing streak across the crotch of her bikini. I did laugh when she told me how many men wanted to paint football team names and slogans on a girl. I listened to Levin talk about the club and spent time imagining that there was a secret inner club where girls were totally naked and that girls and their patrons were having black light sex in VIP rooms. I have to grimace about that now. Black light is so very much a period thing, though never one that's been retro-hip. I've run ice cubes around Levin's nipples and dripped candle wax on them and kissed vodka and champagne off them, but we never played with paint. 

One of the notebooks has long passages in Portuguese in it. Levin had done a year abroad in Lisbon, and she was proud of knowing the language. A couple of the passages are marked in red and have my name by them. I've never done Portuguese or Spanish, and I have no idea what the passages are about. She used to whisper to me in Portuguese while we were having sex, and she told me that she was saying the most outrageous Talking Dirty things she knew. I took that as a gift then, and I still take it as a compliment. I wish I could've responded better in German, but in those days my German was far too academic and formal. I should've looked up more bedroom-useful words and phrases. 

I do wish I'd been able to paint her or sketch her...or paint on her. I can talk about a few, a very few, things in art history, but I have no artistic talent of my own. 

Her sketchbooks have a couple of sketches of my face. That's my name and a date on the page, but it's so hard for me to recognize the young man there all in pen-and-ink or colored pencil. Yes, at some point I did have a goatee. Yes, for a while there was a white streak dyed in my hair. Yes, I must've been that thin. I know that I gave her written things--- love letters, the odd bit of poetry (don't ask) ---but I wish I could've given her something visual. I wasn't hopeless at photography in those days, and Levin would've been perfect as a photo model. Portrait photos, nude or not, would've been something to give her.

Levin's painting professor told her once that she needed always to point her toes when she posed naked for him. Nothing, he said, was more alluring than a lovely girl who stretched out her legs and pointed her toes--- especially alluring, he said, if she was in the midst of an orgasm. I have to agree, and I do remember that when her legs were over my shoulders she always stretched and pointed. I'm not sure that means anything now, but I did take it as both very sexy and as a gift.

Two Nine Nine: Tasks

 Tonight is a midsummer night where I feel a sense of foreboding and a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness. There are things in my daily life that are going very badly this summer--- even beyond this endless Red Death season of quarantines and limbo ---and there's also a sense of impending mortality. 

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about preludes, about wondering how affairs and encounters and adventures begin. Those things have always intrigued me--- how and when people make the decision to have sex, or to have a particular kind of sex, or to have sex with a particular person. I've lost any real sense of those things. I've no sense any longer of how these things happen, and it gets harder and harder to imagine being part of those decisions.

I can't recall tonight whether it was Sophocles or Aeschylus who gave thanks to the gods for freeing him from desire--- a cruel taskmaster ---in old age. Sophocles, I think. You're free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it was Sophocles.  I'm not sure tonight what to make of the saying. Desire can be a cruel master, no question about that. And it's ever more cruel as one grows older and watches desire fade.

At some point, desire becomes a mockery. You know that you're no longer thought of as entitled to feel desire, let alone find any satisfaction. At some point, acting on desire, even feeling desire, makes you an object of derision. 

It's easy tonight to think that I've run out of time for desire, run out of time to have desires. 

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do.

I keep thinking that my usual haunts have less and less appeal for me. There seems to be less and less reason to be out. Certainly flirting with lovely girls at small bistros seems to be something I have less and less social standing to do. And I can't really decide whether that's based on fear of being mocked or treated with derision or on fear of being seen to fail at desire. 

I do walk through downtown on summer evening--- properly masked, mind you, here in the time of the Red Death ---and think of myself as a ghost. I will not, now or ever after, look at myself in a mirror or allow myself to be photographed. I certainly won't look any photos of myself.  I walk along not looking into shop windows, not going in to any of the few places open, and knowing that I'm less and less likely to be speaking to anyone again. I've spent my life telling stories, flirting, trying to be an interesting figure there on the edge of things. Those parts of the story seem to have come to an end.

Desire drives, desire obsesses. We know that. But seeing desire fade away is a cruel set of moments.

Two Seven Six: Threads 10

Let's begin tonight with a poem by C.P. Cavafy. The poem has been a favourite of mine for a long time, though in the last few years it's begun to mean more and more to me:

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

I've been writing about stories lovely young companions from my past have told me--- tales of their adventures and encounters, accounts of their experiences and the things they learned. I do note that while these are all girls I've known, the stories are never about me. The stories are never about adventures and encounters I shared with them. If you're thinking that I'll ever write about those moments, those nights, then you're bound to be disappointed.

I won't be writing about any encounters and adventures of my own--- or at least I won't be writing about details. I was brought up to believe that a gentleman, even an aging roué, is bound to certain rules, and discretion is a key rule.  I'll also note that as a straight male of a certain age ("pale, male, and stale") recounting my own adventures seems unpleasantly like bragging. Boasting about one's long-ago conquests--- let alone one's current bedmates ---has something both distasteful and sad about it. Well, I say that as a general proposition, but of course I'm applying that only to males, and to myself first of all. This is the age of the gender wars, after all. Male sexual desire is seen as always having a subtext of creepiness. So don't expect anything like details about my own life and adventures. Being male (and being of a certain age)  means that any recounting of one's own adventures leaves you open to contempt and derision. I'll recount stories lovely girls in my life have told me about themselves; I won't talk about the details of my own encounters.

I wrote back at the end of 2018 about a lovely girl I'll call Liberty. Not her name, of course, but she did remind me a bit of a younger version--- a younger, strawberry-blonde version ---of a British actress/model named Liberty Ross. I wrote about her adventures in a kayak shop--- her first encounter with an older man.  She'd told me the story while she and I kept company that summer and autumn. She was a delight, and her stories were brilliantly exciting. I do remember the first time she told me about the kayak shop adventure--- the two of us out at a rooftop bar, Liberty sitting cross-legged in skinny jeans, telling me about how she first discovered older men and grinning at my obvious fascination. She was a bartendrix girl, and she knew how to tell stories. She had that hippie girl earnestness, too--- her stories were always straightforward and detailed. Once at the bistro where she tended bar she wrote something on a notepad and pushed it across to me. NSNL, it said: No Shame No Limits. She pointed at me with the pen she was using. Remember that, she said. Live it. 

I don't know where she is right now. She always did have a habit of vanishing suddenly. Back to New Mexico? Back to the Pacific Northwest? All I can do is wonder if she'll re-appear here downtown, or if one day I'll get a letter in violet ink, postmarked Santa Fe or Vancouver.  Or Dharamsala, for that matter. She wrote me letters back in the day--- something of which I approved very much indeed. She wrote me about wicked things she'd done and told me to keep the letters safe and think about her years later. Sometimes, too, after she'd fallen asleep here, I'd sit up with my notebooks and try to set down the stories she'd told me. I wanted to keep them in my own archives, wanted to be able to remember her and the things that made her so amazingly alluring.

I'll be re-telling some of her stories here. Suitably redacted, of course. But always honest. Liberty wouldn't have had it any other way. We did share that, the belief that all our lives are made up of stories, that stories matter. So I will be telling stories about her life, about older men in her life and about girls she loved, too. There are stories about threesomes in sleeping bags and in her environmental science labs late at night.  Stories about hotels in Vancouver and art galleries in Taos. I just have to find ways to tell them that would catch her voice.

It does occur to me that I'll be telling stories about Marsha, too. She did spend time in my bed when I was young, telling me about her own adventures. The two stories I've told about her have both been about cars. I just realized that. The Greek charmer in Thessaloniki had a classic MG, and she ended up being groped by a small town cop in a police cruiser. The stories I have in mind are mostly about cars, too. There was someone here who had a sports car, too--- a Triumph, I think. She always loved sports cars. The man here was older, too, maybe twenty-four when she was sixteen or seventeen. I remember that she was impressed by the Triumph and by the fact that he was a diver, an underwater welder on offshore platforms. There are stories  she told that will be spun here as threads.

Her stories--- like Liberty's, like stories from my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand ---are worth recounting and preserving. My own stories, well...not so much. Liberty was in my bed and life for months. Marsha and I were off-and-on bedmates for much of my senior year, and we saw one another sometimes over our respective semester breaks. My stories with them, though...those tales aren't for me to tell. Their stories, though... Their stories are worth presenting.

Two Five Nine: Threads 3

Another loose thread left from stories I've been told over the last few years---

Afterwards, i spent my nights with younger boys, drinking cheap bourbon and listening to loud drum and bass. Younger boys were the cure for the heartbreak caused by the older men in my life. They were wild but easy. We would drive drunk and do burnouts in their crappy cars at Skid Alley, an empty lot in an industrial part of town. We had tactical vomits together in carparks halfway through the night on our way between bars. But we spent most of our time at house parties or at the beach. Bars and clubs didn't give us enough freedom to smoke, for their scuffles, for our endless drinking games. The end goal was always to get as fucked up as possible. The day after our parties we smoked weed and and cuddled under blankets watching 90s kids' films. We would fall into bed together, drunk and high. sometimes we just slept it off, sometimes we would just talk for hours and trade movie quotes back and forth, sometimes we fucked. No matter how we spent the last part of the night, everything would be the same in the morning.

A lovely friend sent me this once upon a time when we were talking about our younger days. Her younger days--- the days she's writing about here ---would've been at the turn of the century, in the very early Noughts. She'd have been sixteen in December of 2001. My own younger days would've been much, much farther into the depths of the Long Ago. Her stories, the stories implicit in the quote, might've been anytime between 2001 and 2005 or 2006. Boys--- "younger boys" ---wouldn't have had cars until 2001 or 2002. She graduated from her posh school in 2003, and the stories might well have gone on through her years at university. I've no idea how easy it was for teens to get into clubs and bars and drink where she lived in those days.

As for my own life, I don't think I went to more than two or three house parties in my high school days, and even at university I never really went out in groups. I wasn't amongst the excluded or ostracized, but I was someone on the edges of groups, someone at a party who was there with a drink in his hand, but not part of conversations. I have never done a "tactical vomit"--- I will note that. Needless to say, I wish I knew more about her stories. I wish she'd given examples of the adventures she had in those days. And I envy her those days with the consuming envy of someone who thinks his own life and past (at least in the days that really count for purposes of stories years later) was never as good as my lovely friend's.

Two Three Six: Interlocutors

I ran across an article the other day lamenting that men, because they have no male friends or social support networks, rely on their wives and girlfriends and partners to keep them emotionally stable, that they burden and wear down their significant others with their psychological needs. A persuasive article, mind you. And it made a real point--- masculinity as defined in contemporary North America leaves no real place for men to develop support networks amongst themselves.

I've said that before at this site. A North American male--- straight, white ones certainly ---past about twenty-four or twenty-five is socially discouraged from maintaining any close male friendships.  Having close male friends past that point leaves one open to accusations of being closeted gay or else a man-child who can't commit to a "real" relationship. You know the term I use: either a Peter Pan or a paederast. And so men throw all their psychological needs onto their girlfriends or partners--- one more weight for the women in their lives to carry.

The article made very good points. There's no denying that. Still, though--- it is disheartening. Dispiriting, anyway.

I sat at my office desk reading the article and felt vaguely guilty. Vaguely empty, too. Truth to tell,  I can't think of any male friends with whom I'd discuss anything personal or emotionally deep. There are a few people with whom I'd trade stories over drinks--- tell tales from books I'd read, bring up odd   bits of information on line, talk about films ---but none with whom I'd discuss anything approaching within cannon-shot of intimate. If I told any stories about myself, they'd be the kind that fall into the category of once-upon-a-time about places gone or adventures in my university days.

So there's that much truth in the article. There's no one I'd invite over for drinks, no one whom I'd call and suggest going anyplace. If I made a list tonight of people I'd count as friends, there's not one who's been to my flat, not one whose home address I know. I have female neighbours who run back and forth between apartments--- cooking, having drinks, sitting outside and talking 'til midnight. That's just not something I can do.

The article also made me vaguely ashamed of ever thinking of long conversations with girls who've been friends-and-lovers. I read the article and found myself deciding not to send emails or make phone calls or send texts. For much of my life friends-and-lovers and I spent long nights on the phone, talking and flirting and having  extended, complicated, random conversations about anything and everything. Looking back, I feel somehow guilty. I feel guilty about being an emotional burden, or about taking up someone's time or emotional energy.

I'd always thought that one of the key reasons for having a girlfriend, a lover, a partner was that you'd have someone to be part of those late-night talks. I'd always thought that being able to have an interlocutor, a confidante, a late-night voice was a key part of a relationship.  Late-night conversations made so many things better, offered a sense of belonging, a sense of comfort and safety and value. Sharing confidences, sharing stories, offering support and belief--- those things were so much of why you wanted a lover, a partner, an affair. I treasured those conversations, and now I feel ashamed of them. Nowadays those long late-night talks sound more and more like an imposition, like a burden and an emotional drain. Asking for time at all sounds like coercion.

So here we are: unwilling now to contact anyone, to call or write or text or do anything that could be construed as asking for anyone's time or energy.  I find that I can't do that, and I can't contact anyone, especially someone who's a friend-and-lover. I won't be a burden, and asking  for time, advice, support, sympathy--- that's no longer acceptable. Unburdening oneself is a burden to others; sharing one's intimacies is an imposition. I can't--- won't ---do that.

Two Two Eight: Kiss

Rainy nights in late winter are a time for watching ghosts in the mirror. On rainy nights here I can look out to the river and feel melancholy wash over me.

I was thinking about kisses today. A kiss is a simple thing, and sharing kisses is how most of us first began to learn to be a lover.  A kiss is a first step in the dance, a first touch of flesh and breath. It's easy to think about kisses tonight, to think about places where I've kissed lovers for the first time. A parked car, the terrace of a bar, the rooftop of a residence hall at university. Walking hand-in-hand through a street of small, hip shops. In the doorway of a Long Island Railroad car.  At an arrivals gate at an aerodrome. Each kiss is a gateway to stories, to pieces of my life, to the faces of lost loves in the mirror.

I remember a girl turning to me in that train car doorway and kissing me hard and saying, I love you...or something.

I remember a rooftop bar on a late-September night, with Talking Heads' "The Lady Don't Mind" playing on the sound system--- looking out at the city lights and then half-turning to kiss the girl who was pressed against me.

I can remember those things tonight. But tonight I am feeling my age, and I'm feeling aware of how time runs out. I'd love to hear that Talking Heads song again. The rains are coming in from the north and west and it does occur to me how long it's been since I kissed anyone. What's going through my mind is that I've forgotten how to kiss.

Once upon  a time, a Young Companion kissed me for a while in a doorway and told me that she'd never been kissed like that, and that she understood why girls liked older men, why girls she knew liked kissing me. That was a long time ago now, and I lived off that one compliment for years and years.

I may just talk about kisses for a bit. There are ways to talk about kisses without feeling ghosts in the air, and I have to find those ways.

Let's just admit that I've always liked kisses hard and deep. I've liked sharing breath and wetness in  a kiss. I've loved the games of passing an ice cube back and forth in a kiss 'til it melts. I've liked sharing a mouthful of champagne in a kiss.

Long, long ago, far back in another century, I first read about sharing wetness in a kiss. I didn't hear the old term "swapping spit" until I went off to university. But I do recall reading about characters in novels sharing saliva in a kiss. I know that a couple of years ago there was a whole thing in porn videos of characters spitting in one another's faces or into each other's open mouths. That's a more deliberate thing, and it traffics in the idea of humiliation more than domination. But what I was thinking of tonight was a particular book, a novelization of an Italo-French erotic film from the early 1970s, something not-quite-hardcore called "Female Animal". I can't recall where I found the novel, though it was almost certainly in some used-paperback store, the kind of place that had its shelves and tables stuffed with yellowing mass-market paperbacks for twenty-five cents each. I don't recall if ever I saw the film version of "Female Animal", though I may have. I remember the "novelization", though. The cover was white--- I remember that ---with the image of a topless girl, her breasts hidden by long, straight hair. She was holding a large cat to herself and trying to look sultry.  The cover was taken from the poster from the film. I have no clue at all who the actress was. I suppose she'd be in her sixties now--- a memento mori thing to realize.

The plot of the film (and its novelization) was simple enough. It was set on the Italian Riviera, and the heroine was a village girl of seventeen or eighteen who was desperate to leave poverty and boredom behind and go off to the bright lights and high life. I suspect that it was called "Female Animal" because there was a fairly brief passage where she's alone in bed and unable to bring herself to orgasm and coaxes her cat into licking her. I have no idea how that was handled in the film.  What I do recall is that the author always describes her sharing saliva when she kisses anyone.

I read that, read about the character's kisses, and resolved to try that with someone very soon. The first girl I did do that with squirmed and made a face when I passed saliva into her mouth, then passed her own back to me very deliberately and intensely. I remember how it felt, and how amazing it was when I was young.

These days, though, I find myself freezing up with worry that I've forgotten how to kiss, that I've lost whatever sense of timing, pressure, rhythm, use of lips and tongue I may ever have known. It's Carnevale season here in my city, and it's a time for masks and kissing strangers on parade-filled streets, and I can't imagine kissing anyone this season. I really do think I'd be afraid to kiss anyone, afraid to try, afraid of not being able to kiss to any effect, afraid of no longer what to do.

I suppose it's the rain that makes me think of these things.

Two One One: High-Functioning

A summer's evening here, warm and hazy. One more archived note, written originally almost sixteen years ago, drunkenly sent to a friend overseas in the austral summer.

The girl who wrote it reminds me that this is

an email from [me at 16], drunk and so stupid...

jim was an older, high-functioning-ish alcoholic that I fell in love with at sixteen...

The email is to a friend of hers, who was in China with her fencing team. So...let's go to a beach house on an austral bay in December of a lost 2002:

heyyy

wat the hell how come u sent Sarah 2 emails and me only one? that's so mean. i'm so drunk already its like 9 o clock here. it's my birthday tomorrow. ive had like 12 gin and tonics. i feel kinda out of it. we were having drinks and i got so upset i started crying. i was real gutted Christmas is so upside down ya know like spending Christmas with people that i never fucken see like my dad and his girlfriend but im not seeing the poeple i really love, its so gay. but jim looked after me and we had mad drunk sex. good to know. haha. Sarah just rang me and shes at a party at Telfords or something and Bradley Jacques is there and last week i went to Woolsworth and bought smokes and condoms off him and he's like real religious and shit and he didn't look to impressed with my fakey but he still sold to me. haha i dont care. so how is the Far East? how is the fencing? ya know its my birthday tomorrow. i'm 17 tomorrow like not a kiddo anymrore. by the way i had such a cool time last night me and jim picked me up and went in his car to Petone Beach and we just sat there for ages just talking and shit it was fucken rad. and i sucked his cock in the front seat ;) then we came back here cos im home alone and shit. Well i was last night and we just hung out, did lines and danced in the kicthen. he is so cool. ur like my best friend ya know and i'm not just saying all this shit cos i'm drunk. you are actually really cool. like not a cardboard cutout like Jingan and Juliana the Asians. You have like a personality. personalities are good. it will be so cool when you get back and we can go the Hummingbird and you can come to the Angus with the boys. oh my god, i keep having weird dreams about Fat Tony like i want him real bad but don't think i really do ya know. i can't believe you have not yet met jim. jim = light of my life, fire of my lions, my sin, my soul. ha ha just kidding that is Lolita. so what the hell loser EMAIL me!! why you email Sarah and not me? that sucks babe ya know. im a bit drunk so sorry if i upset you. you are rad as fuck.  

hVAE A good christmas in case i don't talk from you before then. i'm going to town tomorow for my birthday its tomorrow but jim's not going coming, i'll see him in morning instead. i wish he was coming i wish you were coming too. i know you think i just use jim and he just uses me but maybe it was kinda a little bit of that at the start but now i really quite love him a lot and he's cool as. He even knows about the venting and is a-ok.  i've gotta go now. email me back or i'll be so gutted. tell your sister.

laterhh

Sloppy drunk the night before she turned seventeen. I suppose I wish I'd known her then, just as she was launching out into her Bad Girl years--- her Bad Girl decade, really. I like her sloppy drunk, for whatever that's worth. She's a fun drunk, though prone to tears out of both sadness and happiness. I've no idea what became of Jim, though "high-functioning alcoholic" isn't something anyone sustains for long. How much older was he? Hard to say--- old enough to have a car in a country that tries to keep anyone under eighteen from having a "full" driving license. I also have no idea how long the affair lasted. Long enough for his inevitable collapse into being the non-fun kind of alcoholic?

Still...I've always envied her her past. Posh parents, inevitably divorced,  money and precious little adult supervision in her teens, a life by the beach, a life in posh neighbourhoods where long-legged blonde girls were given a great deal of leeway. She's a successful professional now, with a lovely reno'd house of her own and three rental properties providing her with a private income. A girl who flies to island countries for long weekends and takes her long weekends in elegant little retreat cabins by the shore in hilly wine country. Someone to whom I will always feel de bas en haut, forever and always.

I do envy her all her teen adventures--- envy, not jealousy. That says nothing good about me, but then I'm not likely ever to be described as "high-functioning" in any way whatsoever.

Two Zero Nine: Rain

I'm going to be posting a few stories young ladies of my acquaintance have told me over the years.

I suppose these will be stories that I envy a bit, stories where I wish the male player could've been me. Or they may be stories I envy simply because they're hot and delightful--- stories from a world I wish I could be part of.

They're also here simply because this is an archive of sorts, because I want to be able to have records of these things, to have them saved in a place where I can read them again over the years.

This is a story from August 2012, a story told me a posh blonde girl in a distant city, and it's one of the hottest stories a girl has ever told me:

rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's toy story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shakey. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, then vomited into a pot plant. i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. can i see your tits, he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo, he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. do you want to suck my cock, he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. do you want me to fuck you, he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my muddy skinny jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me. i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

In November 2013, the same girl sent me this intriguing note:

Last night, smashing Jack Daniels, riding a rough bogan boy so damn hard, kissing his neck tattoo & thinking  is this how I live now?

Still have morphine in my pocket, still wearing yesterday's clothes, still thinking about you.

You'll never believe me til you're on your own.

The same girl sent me this a bit later, a lovely expansion of what she'd told me about what happened:

I got dragged to drinks at an apartment in the city by a friend who wanted to score some eccies. I was seriously not in the mood, but I know how it is when you need to score, and figured I'd go along for a little bit. We got buzzed up to the apartment floor, and as soon as I walked in I got a really great vibe. This was a seriously expensive apartment, huge, with a great view over the city and waterfront. There were heaps of people there...this bogan boy from up the line was doing the rounds of the room...I think he had some other stuff besides eccies, I wasn't paying too much attention. My friend paid for her eccies and we left. We'd just gotten into the lift when he came out of the apartment and called out 'Hey darlin', come for a drink with me?' We ended up at an irish pub, doing shots of jager & jack daniels. He took me back to his hotel room, and we did a few lines. I felt really hot, so I just took my top off, kicked off my ballet flats and sat on the floor looking at him, topless, legs wide open. I can still picture the exact look in his eyes as he fell to his knees and grabbed my anlkes, lifting my skirt, then pulling my legs as far apart as they would go.  He went down on me until I came twice, hard. I took his cock out of his jeans and started sucking him there on my knees. He came hard in my mouth, I swallowed most of it but some came spilling out my mouth and running down my chin. I wiped it with my finger then licked it clean. I could tell he loved that. We had a few more JDs, sitting naked facing each other on the floor, until he said if he didn't fuck me soon he was going to explode. I pulled him onto the bed and rode him hard, my cunt almost aching from it. He came deep inside me, his teeth around my nipple. He wanted me to stay the night, said he needed more. I shook my head, pulled my top & skirt back on, kissed him on the lips & cock and went to leave. He told me to wait, and gave me a hundy bag, and $50 for a taxi. He wrote his number on my upper thigh, and told me he'd hook me up anytime he was in Wellington.

I envy her sitting at a desk in her new house in a posh hip suburb of her city, looking at the hard drive where she keeps all her memories, seventeen years worth of them, all the way back to being fourteen. And I'm always both envious and jealous, thinking of all the stories she has there on that drive. I envy her being able to sit in her outdoor living space on the deck behind her house and sip bourbon and feel the wind in from the harbor as she loses herself in memories.

One Nine Six: Metrics

I've tried to write here about sex and romance as slightly distanced, slightly academic issues. No one male these days can write anything about sex that might be taken as "narcissism". But tonight's entry is about me, and about overcoming fears.

A very lovely friend messaged me a few days ago with a very direct request. She wanted to know a particular number in my life. She's Kiwi, and so she's very, very direct. There are only four numbers in my life that I'd worry about. I knew she wouldn't ask about my salary. She wouldn't do that, and I wouldn't have to tell her that she probably makes at least twice what I do (who doesn't?). She knows my age to the day; I've never hidden that from her. She knows the tally of my sexual partners. That only leaves one thing, doesn't it?  Her question was very simple, and not one any girl has ever asked me directly before. It's a question that I've avoided thinking about all my life. I sat on the edge of the bed with my iPad  and watched my hands tremble. At my age, I have very few comforting illusions or  blissful bits of ignorance left; I wasn't sure I needed to lose this one.

But I did remember something. I remembered about loyalty and trust and facing my demons. My lovely Wellington girl had written me not long before to say that if she had to describe me to her friends, she'd say Handsome, smart, passionate, loyal, brave, clever, mine.  And she'd always told me I need my man to be brave. I was brave, once upon a time. And I wasn't going to be the sad figure sitting on his bed and having the shakes. I wouldn't be that figure. That's not the image I want to leave behind. My friend said that she was sure that every boy went searching for the number when he was about fifteen, which isn't true at all. I'd spent my life avoiding the whole topic. I called that dignity or having contempt for silly beliefs, but it was only a lack of courage.

Oh, I did my due diligence. I am a trained historian and researcher. I took my iPad and did some quick and basic research. Yes, there are studies on the issue. However not? I found the numbers based on studies in North America, Western Europe, and Australia-New Zealand.  Now, afterwards,  I can sit here and grin ruefully. I was saying that the "average" result was whatever-whatever, and it struck me that...hmmm--- do I mean average or mode? Or mean?....and that I couldn't for the life of me remember my long-ago statistics classes or what each of those things was or did. (What exactly is "median"?) So I just said "average". Why not? All the average results fell in a reasonably narrow range. I made a note of that. Let's remember--- I have been desperately competitive about test results since I was five years old. I have spent most of my life agonizing over test scores and defining myself by my scores.  So I knew what I was competing against.

The next part of the story is the embarrassing part. You know what it is. There on the bed with a notepad, a red sharpie, and a cheap green plastic grade-school ruler. So I took measurements. Different bases, different positions, different angles.  Made notes. And looked at the numbers.  I typed out a message on my iPad to my friend in Wellington, took a breath, and hit Send.

I spent the day at my desk, disoriented and abstracted. Yes, I imagined a bell curve in my head. And...I knew where I fell on it.  I was comfortably on the right side of the bell curve. Not the right-hand tail, not even close to that. But the place on the bell curve was...acceptable. Acceptable. Not awful. Nothing shameful. I told myself that--- nothing to be ashamed of.  I was nonetheless scared all day. It felt all too like waiting for grades as an undergraduate or sitting outside a parent's room in a hospital and waiting for a verdict.  My hands kept trembling.

About 18h30 that evening I checked my phone for email. She'd answered, and it began, Thank you for being brave. And you're perfect for me.  The answer was everything I'd been too afraid to hope for: love, acceptance, trust, delight. All of that was there. For the record, now: I very nearly cried. That's the really embarrassing part--- not that I looked ridiculous taking the measurements, but that I ever doubted her.

Remember this. I was afraid to know the number at fifteen. I was afraid to know the number at thirty and far beyond. I didn't have to be--- I'd never had to be afraid. I don't know why I'd thought I ever had to be. No lover in all those years had ever laughed or mocked or told me I was lacking. But I spent all those years afraid of my own flesh, and I'd never needed to do that. I had lovers, mind you, but I'd shied away from so many possibilities out of fear. So many times I'd run away from things I could've had if I hadn't been afraid of being mocked.

Remember this, too. That here so late in my life, a very lovely posh blonde girl half my age told me that I was valued and valuable, and that I was brave enough to be her man. If she messaged me tomorrow and told me to get my passport and laptop and a single carry-on and that she'd have a ticket to Wellington waiting for me, I'd throw over my so-called career and be gone--- Poof! Gone like Keyser Soze.

One Six Three: Brown Leaves

There's a blogger at Wordpress who calls himself Romantic Dominant, and who calls his blog A Faded Romantic. I rather enjoy reading him, and I do follow him on social media. He's a fine writer, and I suspect that he and I are much of an age, although I'll add that I'm sure he's been far more successful in life than I've been.  I enjoy reading his thoughts on age and loss and his valedictories to those who've been his friends and mentors down the years. Here on a night in a month of fallen leaves, I will recommend him to you.

November is a birthday month for me. I'm far past the stage in life where I could conceivably look forward to birthdays, mind you. November is a time for reflecting on losses and how faces and names recede into the mists. November is a time for walking down city streets at night and looking at empty shop windows and hoping that you won't see your own reflection, and that ghost girls won't appear in the glass and fade away again.

Novembers so late in one's life make you all-too-aware of loss and decay. A lovely young friend wrote me from somewhere in Great Britain the other night to tell me she'd dreamed of dancing with me on a hotel roof looking down on city lights. She wanted, she said, to wake up in my arms in  beach house somewhere on the coast of Portugal. Lovely thoughts, and I do treasure her. But in November such things make me look in the mirror and realize that I've lost the ability--- or at least the will ---to do those things.

I no longer trust my body. I no longer have faith in it. I no longer think I can be touched, or allow myself to be touched or seen. I've never thought of myself as handsome or physically attractive, but I have thought I could make myself seem at least acceptable. Or that I could employ enough distraction to have my physical self go unnoticed. Tonight, here in what may be a bleak November, I can look in windows as I pass and think that I'll never feel safe again in any situation where flesh and touch are required, or where I have to believe that the fleshly me isn't open to derision.

Kissing ghost girls, or offering caresses: those things I'd do. But I can't allow my flesh to be seen, touched, tasted. I can't allow anyone close to unclothed flesh. I can't allow it; I can't risk it. Flesh, or at least the flesh I'm inside, would be repulsive and unclean.

Here in this November, so close to my birthday, I can't risk being touched or seen.  Standing on city streets, looking into windows, all I can hope is that the ghost girls won't appear, that the creature in the glass will be able to hide away from his own flesh and all things fleshly.

One Four Three: Empty Rooms

I'll pose a simple enough question tonight. If you're reading this, I do hope you'll take the time to respond.

It's been a hope of mine since I started writing here that I'd be able to open up exchanges and conversations, that I'd be able to talk about some of the issues I raise here with others.

Let's try a very basic question tonight.

What if the last person you had in your arms or in your bed was the last person who'd ever be there?

What if you knew to a clear certainty that you'd never be touched again in any romantic or sexual way?

What if you knew to a moral certainty that you'd never have sex with anyone else ever again?

If you knew those things, what would you do?

I've seen columns written by the gender warriors where any sense of dismay or loss about such things is dismissed with contempt. Not having sex ever again, they say, is no loss at all, and to feel fear or dismay or loss is a sign of...what? "Privilege", of course, and misogyny.  To be dismayed over never having sex again is regarded as being complicit in "rape culture".

But amongst those who aren't ranting cultists of the Social Justice Cult---- how would knowing that make you feel?

It'll happen with everyone, sooner or later. Some kiss, some night in bed with a lover, will be a last time for you. Do you see that as too far in the future to make the question worth considering? Have you ever wondered what it would be like on the morning after you realized it was true? What would you see when you look into the mirror after such a realization?

It'll happen with everyone, sooner or later. But tell me--- tell me what it would mean to you to know you'd never be touched again, that you'd never have sex again. What would you do? What would you think about yourself and your future.

Do think about it and get back to me.

Seventy-Eight: Mise-en-scène

A friend in the Midwest asked me to write about sex and the imagination. It's easy enough to begin an essay about that.  It's imagination that brings sex to life, that gives it its energy and power and delights. I can't imagine any physical pleasure that isn't filtered through the imagination or fueled by the imagination. Whatever the body does, or wants to do, it's the imagination that shapes it and gives it meaning.

I've always lived inside my head. I grew up scrolling through scenes in books or films in my head, and whenever I walked down streets--- in the city where I was born, in small lakefront towns in my later teens ---I was always moving through some scene in a film or a book. When I was young I inevitably had a book with me, and I'd read in all sorts of unlikely places and then re-tell the stories in my head. I did the same with films, and once I learned a bit about the grammar and vocabulary of film, I'd walk down tree-lined streets or through a downtown still shaded by wrought-iron balconies and envision how to shoot film scenes there.

I live through books and films; I always have.  On any ordinary day when I'm crossing a street or standing at a window, I'm a character in a story. When I sit at a cafe table and watch people at other tables, I'm telling their stories in my head. I'm creating stories for them, and the more details I can insert, the more depth of context I can create, then the better the stories can be.

There's a new sin (or crime, possibly) that the gender warriors have created--- something called "sexualization". That seems to mean something like imagining what a lovely stranger (or anyone, really) would be like as a sexual partner, or at least imagining them in some sexual way. This is all tied up in issues of "dehumanization" and consent. It's another term that the gender warriors use as a term of abuse that I simply can't understand. I've always made the world around me into a set of stories, and I've certainly told myself stories about sex.

That's not just about looking at lovely university girls whisper past and imagining them naked--- or, better, half-undressed in stylish high-fashion outfits. It's not just about wondering what it would be like to have her legs over my shoulders, or what her sexual tastes and previous adventures might be. It's about long, intricate stories, each one filled with details and backstory. It's about what imagining that any moment, any chance meeting could turn into an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries" or some film shown late night on Cinemax. Not porn, really, since the stories I create in my head are more about settings and styles and poses than about the sex itself.  They're erotica certainly--- tales of sudden, unexpected, risky, breathless, no-names-please encounters. It's just that the look and setting matter more than just the connection of bodies.

I wrote once in a notebook that if something can't be crafted like a story, then it's not worth doing. I suppose I do expect that from romances and encounters: a certain formality, a sense of a clear story arc, the ability to turn the world around me into sets and settings, the ability to be a character in a well-designed tale, the creation of a backstory for myself, my young companion, and the encounter itself.  Sex can be deeply, overwhelmingly passionate, but I always find myself standing just a bit outside the moment, thinking about how what's happening fits into a story arc or into a kind of roman fleuve.

Over the years, I've been lucky enough to find young companions who were girls who lived inside books and films themselves, who understood about films-in-the-head and about the art of narrative. They've had their own roles in the stories they'd tell themselves, their own set of backstories for encounters. We've been able to put our separate visions together, or at least to tell stories that complement rather than compete with one another.

I've long thought that bookish girls make the best lovers because they understand the idea of imagination, of creating worlds and knowing how to furnish them and live inside them. They understand the power of narrative, and the power of realizing that there are (or at least should be) no limits to stories and scenarios. I've been lucky about that, about finding girls who were willing to construct new worlds and imagine new tales. There's always been something thrilling about looking in a young companion's eyes and trying to intuit what stories she wants to tell and how she imagines the look, the style, of what she and I are doing.

Sex is always about imagination for me. It's not an end in itself, but it is the scaffolding, the skeleton, for narratives about worlds and times and characters, about style and sets and settings.  I can't imagine any affair, any encounter, that isn't born out of imagined stories and lived out as a kind of tale. Yes, I do sexualize the girls I see on the street or in cafes or classrooms, though it's much less a matter of the flesh than it is of casting them as characters with particular styles or complex backstories in a long and ongoing narrative.  I can't imagine sex or romance that doesn't exist as part of a story, and I can't imagine not re-visioning the world around me for the stories I tell inside my head. I always whisper to lovers, No limits, and I do mean that. I want them to trust themselves to their own imaginations and just fall forward into new worlds and new adventures, to take up new identities and re-make the ordinary world into something well-crafted and visual and stylish.

Twenty-Four: Spectres

I do remember a young friend in Montreal, walking the streets near McGill late at night, looking at her reflection in storefront glass and asking herself who that girl was, and what story she was from. She'd walk up rue Sherbrooke late, late at night and wonder whatever would become of the girl in the glass.

Not a thought about her future, no. Another kind of thought altogether. She was asking how long reflections last, and whether they live on inside the glass. Every time we look up at the night sky, we're looking back into deep time. That's something that's part of introductory lectures in Astronomy 101 everywhere. There's nothing down here to slow the light, though. Not distance, not resistance inside what was once called the luminiferous aether. Whatever's in the mirror vanished in an instant. Look and walk on, and the world in the mirror evaporates...and the girl in the glass does, too.

There's a last time to be with a lover, a last time to have a lover in one's arms. Figures slip out the door or board the airliner and they're gone. Every affair is ephemeral, every parting is far too likely to be a last one. We know those things. Waiting for a lover at an arrival gate, walking into a room and seeing her--- those are just the pattern for their reverse.

Every kiss can be a last kiss. And every last kiss of an affair can be the last kiss ever. One morning you'll wake up in a lover's arms and, all unknowing, that'll be the last morning of a love affair. One morning you'll wake up in a lover's arms and, all unknowing, that'll be the last time you'll ever be with any lover. One night you'll kiss someone and that'll be the last time you ever kiss anyone.

Sophocles at eighty is supposed to have thanked the gods for releasing him from Lust, the cruelest of masters. I could never do that.

I do watch the reflections as I pass storefronts and watch them distort and disappear. They disappear, and that's a way of counting down to that last kiss, that last lovemaking, counting down to a time when you walk along the streets and pass in utter solitude, with nothing at all in the glass.

Seventeen: Season's Ghosts

The holiday season has begun, and I had a birthday just as Thanksgiving week began. Every birthday brings its own ghosts. I have enough of my own, I know. There are memories of other cities and other times, of lovely young companions from the past. Memory is a dangerous thing, after all. It's too easy to live inside memories, too easy to be trapped by them. Joan Didion has made a career out of pointing out that memory is always a trap, and that only selective amnesia enables one to go on with life.

A friend wrote once of a Christmas Eve where she was aboard a train from Chicago to Syracuse, listening to her iPod and sobbing helplessly in the upper bunk of her sleeping car. She was traveling away from one lost affair to a city where there was still the remembered pain of another. Another friend told me once that she'd spent empty nights wandering through Montreal, looking at her reflection in shop windows and wondering who this ghostgirl was, asking herself what--- in a short story, in a film ---this girl had lost.

Year's-end is a season for ghosts. Kisses on New Year's Eve, hotel suite weekends in a city lit up with Christmas lights, the ritual of parties and gifts... All those things are ways of dealing with ghosts, with the memories accumulated during a year. Year's-end offers a set of rituals for romance, but there's always a hint of desperation. That kiss on Christmas Eve, the stroke-of-midnight kiss as the crowds cheer in Times Square, the coatroom kiss at the party--- they're done to exorcise the bad memories of a given year, to drive away the ghosts of loss and solitude.

There are lovely girls there reflected in shop windows, lovely girls in long coats moving through the winter night, beautiful girls across a table in a restaurant--- and there are kisses implicit in their presence. As there should be, of course. But each one of them is a ghost for another year, just as you'll be a ghost in their memories.  We haunt one another, and we haunt ourselves.

That's one of the things to remember as the year gutters out.