Three Nine Four: Opus Dei

 I've written about phone sex before, and it's a topic I want to re-visit. 

Phone sex was always something I found to be far better than any sort of sexting or email exchanges. I have no idea if people still sext, by the way. I haven't encountered sexting jokes online in a long time, and it's possible that sexting has fallen out of favor. I'd thought it would've been rejuvenated by the pandemic, but then I thought the pandemic would've revived phone sex, too. It seems that I was wrong on both counts. 

Phone sex is about storytelling in a way that sexting can never be. I'm a storyteller myself, and I agree absolutely with the well-known lines from Joan Didion and Muriel Rukeyser. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and our lives are made of stories rather than atoms. But it seems that we aren't telling stories any longer. Well, nothing that's happened since the end of 2016 has made anyone want to tell stories. I think we're back to the age of windowless monads. We no longer live in an age where sexual adventures are worth pursuing. Survival seems to have replaced pleasure as the key thing in our lives. 

Once upon a time, I did receive phone sex calls from Australia. It would've been in wintertime here, and in the austral summer. Two different girls called from Melbourne to entice me into creating stories for them. I was flattered by that, of course, and there was the thrill of doing something that was not just transgressive but done across multiple time zones, the equator, and a couple of oceans. 

There were other overseas phone sex calls in those days-- the later Noughts. Melbourne, Wellington, London, Edinburgh, Bruges, The Hague...lovely girls made calls to me from all those places. I can't imagine that happening again.

There are stories left over from those days, and I wish the girls were still out there over the aether, or that I at least knew the backstory of the things they told me. I once asked a girl who'd been a co-ed at St. John's College in Annapolis via email where she'd first had sex outdoors. She emailed from London to say that--

Outside Christ Church College at the University of Oxford.  I was on a school trip and certainly was not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals - inside or outside - so there was plenty of risk.  The campus itself was imposing and lent the whole situation a gravity and drama that I have rarely felt since.  I didn't get completely naked, as I was wearing a short white skirt with no underwear, which could easily be thrown up (though it did take some athleticism and flexibility to avoid getting grass stains on that skirt).

That's the sort of story that I liked. So much backstory implicit in what she told me! So many follow-up questions to ask! If nothing else, an account of the positions required would be good.

The same girl answered my question about the riskiest place she'd ever had sex this way--

The European headquarters of Opus Dei.  I've always been privately smug about this one and wish I could tell more people because it delights me in so many ways.  It was in the evening, and we were walking back from a movie.  I had been teasing him throughout the movie and on the trip back, and I guess he just couldn't restrain himself anymore.  We jumped over the fence for what I thought might be a quick blow job, but he threw me on the ground.  It was very passionate and rough, naughty and forbidden.  We were collapsed on the grass when someone caught us and we had to run, me carrying my bra and my jeans half on, cum smeared all over my shirt and jeans.  The man was shouting at us, and he said something about our souls being cursed or perhaps he cursed our souls - something rather violent anyway.

The European headquarters of Opus Dei is the Villa Tevere in Rome. I knew it had to be in Rome, but I had to look up the Villa Tevere. It's a house that was once the home of the Hungarian Legation to the Holy See. I love the story, and all the more so since Opus Dei began appearing in thriler novels as some shadowy conspiratorial group. I still have questions, of course. How naked did she get before she and her male companion had to flee? What had they managed to get accomplished? Carrying her bra? She almost never wore underwear, so why did she have a bra? What imprecations did the person who caught them use? And in what language? (Latin, please let it be Latin)

These are great stories, and I wish she and I had been able to talk more by phone and go through all the details. I still have the emails, and a few postcards she sent from overseas, but I do miss her voice. I have no idea whatsoever about what her life has been like these last fifteen years or so. I did tell her that it would've made a better story if she'd gotten pregnant during the Opus Dei encounter, since aborting a fetus conceived on Opus Dei property would've been a brilliant thing. She laughed across the aether for five minutes straight over that idea.

Still...no phone calls these days. No stories to share, no fantasies to construct together. I hate the silence at night when lovely young companions and I should be telling stories to one another. If you're reading this-- is the aether silent for you as well? Are there stories still being exchanged? Do people still know how to create mutual fantasies? Are we allowed to have fantasies at all these days?

Three Eight Seven: Gifts

 Today is the day after Christmas, and here we are in the last week of the year. The last week of December is always a dead, empty week-- a time for watching the last embers of the year fade to ash. It's a week for pessimism and a sense of loss. There seems to be no way of escaping that.

Christmas gifts are rare at my age, but this year I did receive one gift worth noting. Someone with the best intentions in the world gave me the gift of a spa day. I have a lovely and expensively-produced gift card for a day at a hip local spa.  I was duly appreciative. The gift was unexpected, and it was given in friendship. So please be very aware that I'm not saying anything bad about the person who gave me the gift card. I was thrilled to be remembered at all. But the gift will never be used, and there's no way it can be.

This is the second time in my life I've been given a spa day, a "self-care" day. The first time was years ago-- back in the last age, back in the last millennium. Again, it was intended to be something enjoyable. I didn't use that first gift certificate, either. There was no way I could use it. I did tell the person who gave that first spa day to me that I loved the gift, and I did tell her that I'd used it and had a wonderful time at the spa. There was no way to tell her the truth-- that I'd put the gift envelope in a desk drawer where it would be forgotten forever.

No one like me can ever have a "self-care" day. No one like me can ever use a spa day. There are always social rules-- yes, arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless. I'm a straight, cis, white, middle-class male of a certain age. Spa days aren't for people like me. Any day involving care of the self-- care of the body --isn't for people like me.

I've been in saunas before, and sitting naked in a steam room isn't something I can do. I found myself barely able to breathe in a sauna once, and I knew why. I knew that it was about anxiety rather than any physical issue. I'd seen horror films and thrillers where someone gets trapped in a sauna...so that was certainly on my mind. But most of the anxiety was that I had to be unclothed. The sauna towel around my waist did nothing to make me feel secure. I was aware of my body, and that's never  a good thing. 

I've never seen any reason for the male body to be exposed. I've never seen anything attractive or aesthetically pleasing in the male body. I've certainly never seen anything attractive in my own body...let alone when covered in sweat and gasping for breath. I didn't want to suffocate in the sauna, but what I was most afraid of was being seen by anyone else. I remember being desperately afraid of anyone else using the sauna while I was there. I was terrified of being seen-- terrified of having anyone else see what my body was really like. 

Now, I'm a  trained historian. I know that in Classical Greece, upper-class men exercised naked and took pride in making their bodies fit to be seen. That Greek attitude is utterly alien to me. I can read about Japanese or Korean spas-- elegant, hi-tech, sleek, with robot-serviced cold and hot baths and future-coded steam rooms --or watch videos demonstrating their technical wonders. I can do those things and marvel at the facilities...but there's no way here under God's green sky that I could go to one.  For all that I've obsessed over cyberpunk visions of Japanese style, I couldn't go to a Japanese or Korean spa. Not even the idea of having a Wm. Gibson experience could get me there.

I've spent my life suggesting to young ladies of my acquaintance that all beautiful girls should sleep naked. I'll stand by that position, but I've never been able to sleep naked on my own. It seems wrong for someone like me.  If I can't be naked in my own bedroom, I certainly can't do that at a spa.

The spa day I was gifted included a full-body massage. I almost grimaced at that. I've never actually had  a massage, and there's no way it can happen. There's no scenario for me in which  getting a massage ends well.

If the person doing the massage is female, there's nothing but shame awaiting me. I understand that a trained masseuse sees human bodies as a set of muscles and nerves, that she'll have been trained to be a professional. But I'll still be utterly ashamed to have anyone female (and presumptively attractive) see my flesh. And in a post-#MeToo world, other, horrible things can happen. I'd be on the massage table and there'd be a touch on my back and shoulders and...well...what if my body began to respond? What if I did start to become, you know, aroused?  I could stay face-down to try to hide what was happening and try to get away from any touch. It wouldn't do me any good, though. 

One of two things would happen. The masseuse would be disgusted or enraged. Not all the apologies in the world for the involuntary physical response would be enough. She might recoil in disgust and/or point and laugh with contempt. That would be bad enough. But she'd be even more likely to immediately for the manager...or call for the security guards. I can so easily imagine myself being shoved out of the spa and told never to return-- and I can imagine the police being called. I can always imagine that-- the police coming and me ending up in handcuffs. No matter how professional and clinical the setting was, I couldn't risk having a masseuse touch me-- or even see me.

And having a masseur instead? That can't be allowed to happen. I know how that would play out. I'd be Geo. Costanza from "Seinfeld", fleeing a massage in self-loathing horror because he thought that "it moved!" when a male massage therapist touched him. I know that we're supposed to laugh at Geo. Costanza and his fears, but I nonetheless have the same fears. That knowledge does me no good at all-- if anything, it makes me feel worse. That I could have homophobic fears makes the whole self-loathing thing worse. Being afraid of being touched at all by anyone male is the kind of fear that should leave you angry at yourself. Homophobia and low-key gay panic aren't socially or politically acceptable, and I agree that they shouldn't be acceptable. Discovering my own fears is disturbing and calls up waves of self-loathing. 

But here we are. I can't be anyplace where I'm outside my armour-- i.e., anyplace where I'm a body, where I'm flesh rather than a set of constructed masks and costumes. I certainly can't be touched. I very much like holding hands with a lovely companion, and I love tracing a fingertip over a beautiful girl's thigh or collarbone. But I dislike being touched myself. Being flesh is unsettling and far too risky. Physical pleasure is far, far  too risky these days.

The old year is ending, and I've taken no pleasure in 2024. I don't expect to feel anything pleasurable in 2025. I have a gift card for an expensive spa day that I can never use. The gift card itself I can't even re-gift. I don't want to giver to know that I  couldn't use her gift, or that I gave it to someone else. The card will end up in my desk, buried under old bank statements. 

I appreciate the thought behind the gift, and I very much like the giver. But anything that involves the self as a body-- I can't use that. I can be a lot of things, but I can't be a body. I can never accept pleasure as a gift.    

Three Six Seven: Observers

 It's been a while since I've had stories to tell you here. I want you to know that I apologize for that. Stories mean a lot to me. They always have. 

Stories are histories of lives, of the other lives that I, a flaneur-at-arms, move through. They're the lives that I see but never quite belong to. Over the last few years we've had a world where the pandemic and awful politics have made stories (or at least the kinds of stories that I've recounted here) seem trivial or obsolete. Stories of sex and sexual adventures are out of fashion. More's the pity of course. Sex has lost the tang of adventure and become all about abuses of power. It's not been a good time to be a roue.

This summer has been exhaustingly hot. Here in my own lost city, we've had more than a month of blindingly white sun and no rain, of days like ovens. There's no relief to be found in swimming pools-- every pool's a hot tub this summer --and it's too hot for afternoons in bed with a lovely young companion. There are leggy co-eds on the downtown street in tiny shorts (but not miniskirts-- I wonder why not) but they all look wilted and deeply drained. My own thought is that here under the Heat Dome, we're in the Burmese version of Hell-- a place too hot even if you've been through Rangoon in the summer.

However, I do have one story. A friend and I were talking by telephone the other night, each of us in the air-conditioned dark of our respective cities, and she did tell me a story. We were talking about the idea of consent, about the idea of past experiences that came right up to the line of something awful...but didn't quite cross over into a true-crime tale.

Her story was simple enough. She was still sixteen, not quite seventeen, in the summer between Grade 11 and senior year. She was with her parents at a rented condo on the beach. She was deeply, gnawingly bored. She spent her days getting away from her family, reading, walking along the beachfront, becoming tanned in that Deepest South way, and sneaking drinks. It wasn't hard to get alcohol where she was, and she was usually pleasantly buzzed before noon. I know the place she'd been at, and she would've been one of scores of girls her age doing exactly the same thing. There hadn't been any boys she'd wanted to flirt with, and there hadn't been any summer flings. She was in fact still a bookish virgin. 

She was on a bench by the beachfront one morning very early when she was approached by what she still calls "an older gentleman". She was reading when he came up. She told me that the "older gentleman" (and here "older" seems to have meant something like sixty) was pleasant enough, and sounded shy. He called her "Miss". He was reasonably well-dressed. He told her that it was a delight to see a young lady as pretty as she was so early in the day and asked about the book she was reading. My friend just smiled politely and thanked him for the compliment. They chatted for a moment about the book and then he asked her if she'd be offended at a question. She just shrugged.

He told her, a bit apologetically, that he thought she had very lovely legs and asked if she minded if he looked at them. My friend told me that she thought that was more hilarious than creepy and told him she didn't mind. She thought about asking if he wanted her to strike modeling poses. She didn't, she told me, feel threatened as much as she just felt like she was part of a comedy bit. Why not play along? She was wearing a short sundress and sandals, so she just crossed and uncrossed her legs a few times and stretched her legs out on the bench. She asked how she was doing.

He told her that her legs were amazing, and that he appreciated what she was doing. It had been, he said, a very long time since anyone like her had let him look at her. At that point he shyly (he called her "Miss" again) asked for a favor. He told her how lonely he was, and told her that if she was willing, he'd sit on the next bench over and just...look. He wouldn't touch her, he said, and he wouldn't come any closer than the next bench. All he wanted, he said, was to look and, well, pleasure himself.

My friend said that she was well aware that she was supposed to be angry and/or horrified , and that she was supposed to run away. She didn't feel preyed upon, though. What surprised her was that she didn't feel anything at all, really. She told the man that, okay, sure, that was fine. He'd be on another bench, and she'd be reading. It wasn't, she told me, like she had to really do anything.

So she put her legs up on the beach and just...read. She could tell that he had his hand inside his shorts and that at least for a while, he was exposed. The thing was, she told me, that he wasn't really part of her day. The book meant something to her, but the older gentleman was just a figure on another bench. There was no one else around, which made it all easier. It was only later that she wondered if the man had wanted to be caught or slapped or chased away. Was he, she asked, maybe disappointed at her for not yelling at him and threatening to call the police?

He spoke to her very briefly. He asked her to pose a bit ("would you mind very much...?") and draw one knee up, and to turn a bit to the side. He apologized and asked if she was wearing anything under her sundress. She barely looked over her sunglasses and told him underwear, but no bra. He didn't ask her to open her legs, though she did laugh and tell him that what she was wearing was a cotton thong in pale peach. She could hear him, but said it wasn't moaning or gasping-- just soft sighs. Telling the story to me now, she said that if he'd asked her to pull up her dress a bit, she might have. Maybe. She wondered, too, why he hadn't asked her to kick off her sandals. Her later experiences with older men had taught her that any man over forty either had or was developing a foot fetish. 

She wasn't sure exactly when he finished, but when he did he leaned forward and took a moment to get his wind back. She didn't get to see any evidence of what he'd done. She put down her book and asked him if he was okay. He nodded and stood up and thanked her several times. She crossed her legs to let him have a memory of her legs up to her mid-thighs and told him that she hoped he'd enjoyed himself. He told her he had and this meant a lot. He reached out to shake her hand. That was the only time he touched her. They shook hands and he went off down the beachfront walk. She never saw him again.

She wanted to pull out her phone and tell...someone. But she didn't. There wasn't any way to tell the story that didn't make it seem really true-crime creepy or, worse, funny in a sad way. She felt, she said, sorry for the man. Was he really lonely and just desperate for some kind of sexual interaction or did he just ask a different girl to do this every day? She wanted to believe he was just desperately lonely-- he'd certainly seemed genuine enough in his shyness --and however pervy the whole thing had been, she didn't want to laugh at the man. She ended up not telling anyone until she was at university, and the hardest thing, she said, was making it very clear that she hadn't felt violated and that she hadn't felt angry or contemptuous. 

The whole experience, she said, was maybe ten minutes or so out of her life. She hadn't had to do anything; no one had touched her. It made her feel like she'd become someone who had a story to tell, and that was good. But she wasn't sure how to present the story, or quite what to make of it. Nothing bad, she said. All that had happened was that someone had said he liked her legs and that she'd read a book while on a park bench. A decade later, she said, and she still wasn't sure what the story should mean.

Three Five Five: Interlocutrix

 The phone sex worker I met last month and I have been exchanging emails and texts. I'll note right at the outset that I haven't engaged her professional services, and that I don't intend to raise that subject. 

She is a professional, and apparently a highly regarded one in her field-- the equivalent of an FMTY Girl. It would be disrespectful to ask for freebies. I don't ask friends who are chartered accountants to do my taxes for free, and I don't ask doctor friends to treat me for free. Professionals are paid for their skills, and to ask them for freebies is a sign of disrespect. I know her per hour rate, and she'd certainly be worth it. I know that she treats her regular clients well and does empathize with them, but there's always (as there should be) a certain professional distance with clients. I'd much rather be a friend.

She asked if I have either Zoom or Face Time, so I expect we'll be talking via our laptops. It's easy to sit up late at night and just exchange emails. We've talked about our lives and about films and music and places we've been. It's easy to tell her things, and I have missed the idea of email as a way to actually correspond. I've been saying here that I miss things like letters and long telephone conversations in my life, and talking to her has been a throwback to the days when people did exchange information and stories. That's the part of friendships and relationships I've missed most in the social media world. I'm a long-form sort of person, and I can't tell anyone anything important in 280 characters or whatever the text/Twitter limit is.

I can see why her clients-- mostly older, mostly monied --are willing to pay her rates. She is an excellent interlocutrix. That's her key skill. She can make a client feel safe. She listens, asks questions, is sympathetic. Phone sex, she told me the night we met is another world, and a fantasy world should not only have No Shame, No Limits, it should be...comfortable. 

Being good at phone sex is a rare thing. Being good at ordinary sex-in-the-flesh is probably a rare thing. It takes thought. Passion, yes, but it also takes thought. Anyone good at phone sex has to make his/her partner feel not just desired, but comfortable inside that desire. I've always been someone who talks during sex. I want to exchange information with a partner-- about how each of us is feeling, about what each of us is thinking, about what the physical moment reminds us of. One lovely young co-ed in my past laughed and said that what it all made her think of was a space mission and Mission Control. Yes...we may have done NASA voices the rest of the evening. Voices are lifelines, even during sex (or maybe especially during sex).

Phone sex isn't just two people masturbating while holding their iPhones. It's about world-building, about building worlds the partners feel comfortable inside. It's about creating and sharing fantasies and knowing that you're able to be safe and still explore No Shame, No Limits. My friend has those skills, and she's made a very successful career out of them.

I don't expect I'll ever find out about her skills first-hand, but I love the stories she tells (names and identifying details all omitted, of course) about fantasies she's been part of. And I do very much enjoy being able to talk with her about our lives. Voices matter, details matter, being valuable enough to be someone's interlocutor matters. 

Three One Five: Sleep-Out

 My lovely posh blonde friend in New Zealand, my long-legged Wellington girl, once spent a long night telling me stories from her past. I've written about some of those before, and you can go back a year or so and read over some of her adventures. 

I've always found her stories to be amazingly hot, although I have developed serious doubts about some of her stories--- the ones about foreign travel, or being swept away by millionaires, or about adventures and encounters in risky or exotic places. 

She did write one brief note, though, that I find believable. I asked her about her introduction to anal sex, and she wrote to say it was with a Maori boy she knew, one who was slightly older. I'm not clear whether he went to her posh school or whether she knew him from her feral party girl life. The story she told me was:

I was 15, both of us drunk as fuck, we'd been at a party together, then went back to his house, he lived in a sleep-out at the back of the garden, we'd fucked a few times before this night, but never in the ass....he was big, and he just went for it, tiny bit of spit for lube...i screamed...he almost stopped, and i screamed at him to keep fucking going!...i was crying and screaming and moaning and loving it...he spit in his hand, then rubbed his dick with it... he came in me and i moaned and cried as hard as i could.  Tama-te-rangi, I still remember his full name...he was gorgeous.

A sleep-out in New Zealand is "a single-storey detached building up to 30 square metres", or "typically a building separate from the main house which is used as extra accommodation. It does not contain cooking or kitchen facilities and usually shares facilities with the main dwelling. Its used in association with the main house and isn't a standalone/ self-contained accommodation option." So there's that. 

I do wonder whether they did the Jill's Introduction to Sodomy experience in the garden or in the sleep-out itself. It does matter where exactly it happened. I'd like it to have happened outdoors, or maybe on the porch of the sleep-out. A risky place, anyway. My friend claims that she always enjoyed the idea of risking being discovered having sex, whether by parents (hers or the boy's), friends, or strangers. And she's never been shy of being naked outdoors.

It matters, too, that the boy was Maori. Jill told me once that the posh girls at her school loved the idea of exotic partners, whether Maori or Islander, and that she loved the whole golden-brown skin tone thing. Telling me that story fifteen years after it happened, she was proud that her first anal experience was with someone exotic.

The sleep-out reminds me of the girl in Baltimore having sex in the carriage house in Silver Springs. Which of course makes me think of where that girl is today--- somewhere in South Brooklyn, I believe.

My one shred of doubt here is that Tama-te-rangi is a fairly famous name in Maori culture. It's also it seems a name given to a fair number of Maori boys, so it's possible that it was simply a common Maori name there in Lower Hutt and Wellington. But I'll never quite be sure.

It does leave me saddened that she didn't tell me the extended story, the story of how she met him, of how they started having sex, of what her girlfriends at school thought, of what happened after he finished that night. How long did they keep up a FWB relationship? And how much older was he? All those things matter... 

I'll always remember her for having amazingly hot stories. I only wish I knew more of them.

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 Eight Nine: Disclosures

I was sitting outside with a lovely neighbour here at the lakeside flat the other night, talking and working our way through a bottle of Belvedere vodka with iced tea. How Deepest South is that, do you think? I'll note that we were in separate deck chairs on the upper deck, and that we were properly socially-distanced. This is the time of the Red Death, and I've been socially-distanced and properly masked throughout. My neighbour herself is a lovely girl. She's been here in my apartment complex for almost four years now. She has long, toned legs, a mass of reddish hair, and is something of a party girl, though she's no one's fool. The night itself was good. Cool for the season here, with the scent of earlier rain still in the air.

At some point she confided in me that she was and always had been "a total sexual deviant". I hadn't heard the word "deviant" in twenty years, and I was immediately intrigued.  She reached out one arm and tapped her glass on mine and drunkenly repeated that she was "such a deviant". Of course I asked. How could I not ask? She told me that she'd lost track of how many people she'd had sex with, and asked me if I remembered my own body count number. I do, of course, but that's because I've always written such things down, all the way back into my teens. Everything is written down, everything is annotated. I did become a trained historian, after all. I didn't ask whether she didn't know her own number because it was so large or simply because many of her encounters had been drunken couplings that she barely remembered. Please note that I'm not imposing any moral judgment here, and I never would.  She's lovely and probably thirty or thirty-one. I can make a guess at what the number might be, but the only significance it would have is if she and I laid bets on whose was higher at her current age.

She then told me that she felt like a deviant, too, because she'd had girls in her past. She'd always loved girls, she told me, though she hadn't had the nerve to hook up with more than a few--- which of course is very much like my friend Jill in NZ.  How odd that she finds being at least occasionally bi to be so wicked that she can only admit it after several large vodkas.

She looked at me and shook a finger and told me that she just knew I was someone who tied girls up and whipped them. I had to laugh at that. Good guess, I told her. Very good guess. But of course I do love playing with blindfolds and silk scarves and riding crops and candle wax with lovely young companions. My neighbour told me that I was just so obvious, that that was something all men my age who had "all those bookshelves" liked. I did shrug and tell her that with age you learned to rely to technique and style rather than raw physicality. That was all okay, she said. Older men came up with interesting things to do. And you, she said, I'll bet you're really good at doing scenes and telling stories with girls. That's something I was proud to hear.

This does not--- let me emphasize that ---end with the two of us in bed, or with her on my couch being whipped. It doesn't. It ended with us clinking glasses and just talking until two or three in the morning.  In a non-plague year, it would've ended with a long hug and maybe--- maybe ---a goodnight kiss.  But it wasn't a night that was going to end in bed. It didn't need to, and while I love flirting shamelessly with her, I'm not going to step outside any bounds.

But it did make me think. During the night out on the deck, we talked about our respective experiences and pasts. I've usually been someone to whom strangers in bars or on trains confide their secrets, and my neighbour found me to be a good listener and a safe confidant. I'm glad that she does. Importantly, she hasn't been embarrassed or nervous around me since. That matters, too.

Nonetheless, it is an odd thing. She told me that she hasn't had anyone who'd understand about her secrets in years. I've been feeling the same thing lately. Confidantes are hard to find lately. Certainly harder than when I was, say, twenty-five or thirty. It seems much less safe these days to admit anything to anyone. In the time of the gender wars, admitting anything to anyone seems like putting a weight on their shoulders or, worse, like some kind of demand or threat.

I've always loved the whole experience of drunkenly telling one another secrets, about disclosing one's past and interests and fancies. There's a delight in that, in the sharing. Sharing fancies and obsessions is very often better than sex-in-the-flesh. Mutual surprise, the moment of laughing with someone at shared things, the electricity of being on the borderline between flirtation and seduction--- all those things make disclosures fun.

Yet it feels less safe now. Not just because the other person might be turned off, but that they might be angered. I'm less and less sure these days about such things. It's hard to offer up compliments, of course, although my neighbour is fine with my obviously appreciating her legs. But it is harder to tell the stories girls and I would've talked about twenty years ago, or maybe even ten. The world has changed around me and sometimes I haven't followed along with it.

Two Eight Four: Lithography

I'm thinking tonight of a girl from my past, from far back in the last age. She and I knew knew each other casually when I was at grad school, and there was a brief affair back in my clubland days.

Her name was Levin, and I did like that name. I can't recall how she ended up with the name. I've known posh families who gave daughters first names that were family names--- a girl might end up with her mother's maiden name. That explained the Schuylers and Mackenzies and Hunters that I knew at university. Levin's name may have come from that. But there's also "Anna Karenina", isn't there? Remember that Kitty and Levin were the other couple, the couple of whom Tolstoy approved. I suppose that back in those days I'd have hoped she was named after a character in "Anna Karenina", even if the name came from a male character. I'll note that I've always liked androgynous names on lovely girls. You're free to make of that what you will.

Levin was doing fine arts at the university here--- lithography. She was five-four or five-five, I think. Pixie-cut blonde hair,  very slender, tanned.  I can't recall the colour of her eyes, though I want to say blue or green.  Soft voice, I recall. She'd learned Portuguese at uni and spent a year studying there. She had a signature look, I remember: white singlet, skinny jeans, ankle bracelet, espadrilles. Sometimes cotton drawstring trousers.  She bought the singlets in packs of three, sized for young boys. Always worn next to the skin, of course. I laughed with her about air-conditioning and how she was always the girl with erect nipples.  She had a barbell piercing in her right nipple--- the first girl I'd ever seen with one.

I remember her rooms at university--- sketches and lithographs tacked to the wall, the smell of chemicals from the lithography process. No idea whatever happened to her, though I think she wanted to go out West. I do remember sitting on her sofa and watching her work on her sketch journals (was the brand Pentalic?) and drinking vodka-limes with her. I wish I'd kept some of the sketches she gave me.

Levin always told me that she liked my bookshelves and liked it that I'd listen to her talk about art. She had good tastes in music, I thought. We both liked New Wave and synth-driven dance music, and we spent more than a few nights dancing at the local clubs near the university. I can remember standing behind her on the balcony at a place called Options on spring and summer nights, arms around her, kissing her shoulders, feeling her press back into me, knowing that she was all bare flesh under charcoal linen drawstring trousers.

It was a brief affair, and casual.  There was a time back in the last age when it was still possible to have casual affairs. I'm not sure that people-- at least people under thirty --have affairs any longer. And from what I'm reading in late-Millennial and Gen-Z literature, sex in these later days seems to be more about apologies than passion. Anyway--- Levin and I had a few months together off-and-on and parted friends. We even had goodbye drinks when she went off to do an MFA on the other side of the continent. We spent a last night together in her empty rooms on a tree-lined street, her art supplies all in boxes. I remember that her wardrobe all fitted into a couple of duffel bags. She'd be leaving the next day with her whole life in the backseat of a compact car. I did give her a couple of my  shirts as a goodbye gift, along with a couple of sketch journals (if not Pentalic, what was the brand?). That wasn't a bad way to part. I kept the sketches she'd done for me for rather a while; I think I had a favourite framed.  The sketch was one of a bedroom with light coming in through French windows. The room was one we'd rented one weekend in a city known for wrought iron balconies and genteel decay. I always told her that the city outside those windows could've been Alexandria or Charleston or Lisbon.  There was a hint of someone on the bed, and she told me to imagine it was her, face down over the bed, looking out to the city while I took her from behind. I did like that, liked the idea that she'd turned that hint of shadow on the bed into something I'd remember.

Levin is easy to remember tonight--- kisses on her ankle bracelet, kisses on that nipple piercing (still shocking in those days), Pet Shop Boys playing and her hands always smelling of lithography chemicals. I've reached the time in my life when I spend time remembering girls from the last age, when melancholy becomes the dominant mode in my thoughts. Easy enough to remember Levin's hipbones and ankles and the pale gold fuzz on her upper thighs. Easy enough to remember a time when art and desire and the taste of vodka-lime all went together.

So let's think of that tonight, and a couple of lines from Cavafy:

These things are all so very old---
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

Two Eight Three: Skin

I have been thinking today about going down to the pool. It's a perfect day for it: cool, slightly breezy, sunlit.  Summer is almost here, and we'll have  soul-killing heat and humidity until some time in October. I should be taking advantage of the afternoon. Yet I can't bring myself to do that. In a better world, I could talk with certain girls--- Liberty, say, or my New Zealand friend, or the girl in Asheville ---and explain why body fear has set in. There's no one here to ask for support or advice, alas.

I could begin by noting that after six weeks of lockdown for the Red Death, so many people are worried about I've heard called having acquired a "Coronavirus 15"--- extra pounds put on by inactivity and stress eating. There's very much that.  That does make me a bit shy about going into the pool.

Yet it's not so much that. It's not fear of a few extra pounds. It's fear of being mocked or questioned about the body piercings I have. I can laugh and say that, well, it's not like the current governor of New York isn't supposed to have the same things (and Bella Hadid certainly has them). I was in the pool the last few summers and never felt any body fear or body shame like this.  I can't bring myself to be anywhere where I might be mocked or questioned about my piercings.  And I've lost track (or control of) what messages the piercings might send to any of the bikini girls who do frequent the pool.

My lovely blonde friend down in New Zealand always told me that when she'd borrow her family's beach house for a long weekend (sometimes for a week) she'd pull her BMW into the garage and start undressing as she went into the house. She told me once that her shoes would never make it past the door and wouldn't be needed again until she was on her way back to her own house in Wellington. The beach house had an in-ground pool, and she told me that wearing a swimsuit in her own private pool was simply not something that was ever going to happen. She did the same, she said, whenever she borrowed her (divorced) father's house on the South Island, too. Swim naked, sunbathe naked, read naked on the patio. She used to tell me that in a week at either place, she'd be barefoot the entire time, always sleep naked, and that the only thing she'd be likely to wear would be a faded old denim shirt or a cotton pullover sweater when cooking or in case there was a cool wind in off the Tasman Sea or Marlborough Sounds.

Liberty was the same way. On weekends when she and I would rent an AirBnB house on the coast or on a mountain lake in the Carolinas, she'd wear (if anything) just one of my shirts or one of the lightweight cotton sweaters she habitually pilfered from my closet. Her goal, she told me once, was just to be naked in sunlight--- she always talked about doing that one day on the Gold Coast in Australia or on an island in the Caribbean, just being naked for a whole summer, swimming and snorkeling and turning darker and darker.  She said that by the time she was in her mid-teens, she found herself unable to get to sleep if she was wearing anything. She felt, she said, absolutely secure and powerful and alive when she was naked in sunlight or in the water.

That's an attitude of course that I can admire and be excited by, but it's never something I could adopt or emulate. I can look down to the pool this afternoon--- the pool is empty right now ---and imagine that the water would be perfect. But there's no way at all that I could go down myself right now.

I can't imagine feeling sunlight on skin, and I certainly can't imagine ever having my body seen any longer. I'd absolutely be too ashamed and fearful to have anyone close enough to see my flesh up close, let alone taste or smell or touch it.

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.

Two Seven Five: Threads 9

My friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud has always noted off-handedly that for girls at her posh high school, adventures and encounters with Maori or Islander boys had a certain transgressive value. She's always had a taste for Maori boys and developed crushes on Maori models--- e.g., Grace Hobson, Daniela Hayes, Michaela Steenkamp...or her stories about the dog walker for her Golden Lab or the forklift operator. Golden-dark skin and light eyes leave her wet and breathless.  I asked her about that once:


--Amongst your high school friends, was fucking Maori boys/men thought to be just ordinary sex, or was it forbidden?

Definitely not forbidden, but slightly more than just ordinary sex. You were much more likely to get a knowing smile from HVHS girls than a look of disapproval.

She told me once, too, about an older Maori boy and her first experience with sodomitical practices:

I was 15, both of us drunk as fuck, we'd been at a party together, then went back to his house. he lived in a sleep-out at the back of the garden. we'd fucked a few times before this night, but never in the ass....he was big, and he just went for it, tiny bit of spit for lube...i screamed...he almost stopped, and i screamed at him to keep fucking going!...i was crying and screaming and moaning and loving it...he spit in his hand, then rubbed his dick with it... Tama-te-rangi, I still remember his full name...he was gorgeous!

That's a hot image, and a very powerful one. I like it that fifteen years later, she still remembered his name. I'd like to know the back story here--- how she met him, how old she was when they met, how they first had sex, exactly how old he was (I've always thought he was in his mid-twenties), how often they had sex, how he talked her into her first adventure in sodomy, how long the affair lasted. All the details. And of course I wondered about what her other early experiences with sodomitical practices and anal adventures were like. She was very fond of that particular sort of sex in her mid and late twenties, and I'd love to hear her full memoirs of such things. Details matter. Details always matter.

And what would she say to Tama-te-rangi if she ran into him now? Would the attraction still be there? Would they reminisce? Fall into bed for a No Strings afternoon? Would she care if he was married (she's always had a thing for married men)? I'd like to know all those things in detail.

I do like putting these memories and stories down here. I want them archived, want them to be something I can read later, something made into history as much as just stories. I do worry, though, that one day I'll run out of stories from my New Zealand friend. I have a few still collected from girls here in the States, small bits of ethnography or micro-history that I can preserve.

I suppose I should note that it's difficult for me to tell any stories of my own. There's something socially unacceptable about anyone male recounting his own adventures. It sounds like bragging, or, worse, just sounds creepy and disturbing.  And, alas, I think of my own stories of adventures and encounters and inevitably compare them to the stories girls have told me over the years. I'll never think that any stories I'd have to tell could compare to the stories my NZ friend has to tell. My own stories, I fear, could never excite a girl the way her stories would excite me.

I'll archive as many stories as I can find in my emails, letters, chat logs, notebooks. I want these things kept down the years. I only wish I had more of my own to offer.

Two Seven Two: Threads 7

This passage came to me in April of 2018. My friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud sent it to me with neither backstory nor context. She told me that it was something she'd found on her  XHD where she keeps all the secret memories of her past. There's no date on it,  and no names. I wish she'd told me more, and of course I wish I could see more things that she has hidden away on that XHD:

Back then I wasn't good at asking for what I wanted. I wanted to ask him to make just a little bit of room in his life for me. His wasn't a life you could slide into without thought or care. His kid was very sick. I didn't want much. I wanted us to walk our dogs together and go for drives up the coast. We fucked for a while and he just made me feel so good. I lived alone then, and he would turn up at random times. I would cook us dinner and we would watch TV, my head in his lap.

And now...his boy is all grown up and cancer free. His wife left him. He isn't too subtle about looking at my tits. Maybe he is remembering the nights he came on them and the mornings he squeezed my nipples while he fucked me from behind. He is still loud, and funny, and a bit of a goof brain. He wears glasses now. I never thought we were going to end up together; it was a moment in time. But I remember how good he could make me feel and how hungry I always was for him.

It's a melancholy story, isn't it? A married man (her weakness, back in her early and mid-twenties), the sick child, the knowledge that it was all hopeless from the start.  I do wish I knew more about it all. She says that even post-affair, he's someplace where he can see her. Did they try to rekindle the affair? Did they sleep together again? Whatever was the conclusion to all this? I hate it when there are stories that I see that have no context and no conclusion. That's the quondam academic in me.

In September of 2018 I asked her about the life she imagined for herself. She wrote me this about the daydreams she had for her imagined life:

i work at the local arthouse cinema. it's generally pretty quiet. between selling tickets and making coffee and showing people to their seats, i do crossword puzzles and read. i watch a film everyday. i walk to work. i wear skinny jeans and graphic tees, and a cardigan in the winter. i have an older lover who takes me out for dinner and is fond of me. i live with a grumpy old cat called tom. i never really made friends in the city, and i spend most nights with my books. i am content.

I replied to her that same evening, with my own daydream:

I love this idea. I can imagine being in a small town on the coast near a little liberal arts school. I work at a small bookstore, selling books to students and sitting by the coffee machine and reading. Once in a while I teach a History course at the little uni. On weekends I kayak around little coastal inlets and picnic with you on the beach. We have a garden and a small verandah where we read. Our little beagle Frederick sits with us, happy to be loved. We listen to Cigarettes After Sex. I wear slim jeans and oxford-cloth button-downs and black tees. We cook for each other and sit in the evenings and watch the sky and sea darken. Our lives are quiet and simple.

I miss sharing daydreams with her, and I miss the lives for the two of us that we constructed in our heads. I miss the idea that one could be content.

Two Seven Zero: Threads 5

A few more adventures from my lovely blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud--- tales from her twenties in Wellington...

In March 2011 she wrote me about this. She'd have been twenty-five that spring--- or NZ autumn ---and back at university, getting an accounting degree after her English Lit degree:

i had a delicious older man's cock in my mouth this morning. i love starting the day with a mouthful of cum. i missed my first class, i was having so much fun...

She did tell me more about him. His name, she said, was Shane---


...he's around 45. he's tall and strong. he has short dark hair and a cute, stubbly face. he owns a sand blasting and spray painting business and is a client. i'm not sure if its common practice in the US, but here young lawyers and accountants have to spend quite a bit of time out on secondment, getting to know the way their clients businesses work etc. so, thats how we met a few years ago. we ended up at the same function at the marina a few nights ago and one thing led to another.

 the first time, he bent me over the bonnet of his car and fucked me from behind. it was so hot. he came in my mouth then carried me inside. he lives by the beach. his bedroom had big windows overlooking the sea. he had a beautful cock, big and thick and hard. it felt so good in my mouth and hands. he licked my cunt and i came so hard. he fucked my ass and cunt and told me i was beautiful.

i must have fallen asleep around 3, and had a terrible nightmare, because i woke up screaming and shaking. he pulled me towards him and whispered 'its ok, its ok' over and over in my ear. he ran his finger through my hair and spooned me for the rest of the night.


in the morning he was so gentle and lovely. i sucked his cock and he came in my mouth again. he made us both smoothies then fucked me in the shower and drove me to class. i'm meeting him for a drink after work tonight. he's gorgeous and funny and i want him.  

Was I jealous? Oh, certainly. He had a house on the beach in a hip suburb called Seatoun, and she more-or-less lived there during the affair. A few months only, but ones she still wrote about years later. 

There were always other older men in her life. In November 2013, she wrote to say---

I did think of you on Friday night, drinking Makers that seemed to set my blood on fire. Lying naked in a strange bed, all I could think was this isn't really me. i'm not really here.

I stayed until the morning and walked home in the dawn light.

Drinking bourbon feels like coming home.


He was a lawyer. I was Alex the florist, sexy & uncomplicated.

"Drinking bourbon feels like coming home..."  That's a brilliant line, and one that I'll be passing on to lovely friends. It's one I want my friend Ash in Bo'ness and London Town to use.

A couple of nights later she wrote me to say that---

The lawyer asked me out for dinner Friday night! I am tempted to say yes, as he made me come about 5 times and had a very impressive collection of books.

I wonder if she kept up her identity as Alex the Florist when she was with him---  blonde Alex, simple and easily bedded, with no complications of intellect. That he gave her five orgasms isn't the buried lede here, of course. What matters is that she created Alex the Florist, a blonde girl I was wild to meet. I very much wanted to get to know young Alex, to see how well she brought the character to life. And of course I wanted to sample Alex's oral sex skills in some dark corner of a Wellington bar (the Bangalore Polo Club was her favourite in those days)--- in a dark corner, or in the alleyway behind the bar, where she notoriously would take handsome bouncers on midweek nights...

Two Six Eight: Electra

A memory from long ago, here on a rainy January night.

I was thinking today about Salonika, in northeastern Greece. It's Thessaloniki now, but I still think of it as Salonika, the name it bore in Ottoman times and during the Great War. No particular reason for thinking of it; I may have been idly looking at things from forgotten fronts of the 1914-1918 war. I was trained once upon a time to do History, and I still find odd corners of the world fascinating.

Thessaloniki, though... It's a word and a place that calls up a story from my teens.

In my final year at high school I dated a girl named Marsha. Lovely girl--- long, dark brown hair down past the middle of her back, eyes almost as dark as mine. Five foot six, I recall, with excellent legs. We weren't a serious couple, but we dated throughout the year; I even attended her prom. Her father was an executive with a shipping corporation, and he was always away on trips overseas. I did envy that rather a lot--- a life with travel, a life in aerodromes.

The summer after high school, the summer before I left home to go off to university, her father took his wife and daughter  with him on one of his trips. She wrote me from hotels in London and Rome and Athens.  She even wrote me on TWA and Lufthansa "in flight" stationery--- in those days, airlines still had things like stationery that passengers could use. She brought stationery back for me, too. Hotel stationery is a small fetish of mine. Some of it I kept for years. I loved getting letters from overseas, loved feeling even second-hand cosmopolitan.

Her father had to spend a few days in Thessaloniki. They stayed at a hotel called the Electra Palace. I looked it up on line, and it's still there. It seems to have been reno'd a few times since Marsha and her parents would've stayed there; I've no idea how it looked then. It's rated as a five-star hotel, though the website seems to suggest that its prices are substantially less than a five-star hotel would be in Manhattan or London. She sent me a postcard from Thessaloniki; I don't recall what was on it.

The story I learned later was that she'd been introduced to the son of one of her father's business contacts. He was a perfect cliche for the son of a wealthy Greek businessman of the day. Twenty-five or twenty-six, Mediterranean-handsome, an expensive smile, and a restored classic sports car--- a vintage MG, possibly. Marsha became his project.  He drove her through the city, drove her along the coastal roads, drove her up into the hills above the city. I've always imagined that he drove with his hand on her bare thigh from their first moments in the car. I can even imagine what she might've worn on a summer's day--- she had a khaki miniskirt that she liked a lot, and of course girls from where she  grew up lived in cut-off denim short shorts in summertime.

Hand on her thigh, obviously. And very soon, there was a fair amount of road head. There were parked-car encounters up in the hills overlooking the city. There may have been a shadowy figure sneaking out of her hotel room at the Electra Palace before dawn on a couple of nights. The road head would've been something she loved. She always did. They did go dancing at some expensive discos, too. It's still easy for me to imagine her in her favourite dance-floor look--- white silk blouse unbuttoned almost to the waist and worn next to the skin, black velvet short shorts, dress sandals. Easy, too, to imagine parked car encounters. Pulling up that khaki mini and straddling the Greek boy or stepping out of the parked MG to pull down her cut-off short shorts before climbing back in--- I can imagine either. I'd spent time persuading her to avoid underwear, but she may or may not have been following my suggestions in Greece. An MG cockpit was a tiny thing, and Marsha would've had to work to get herself into a driver's seat with him. She was flexible, though. I do recall that.

I remember that she bought a faded-pastel pink denim jacket in Athens. I do imagine her wearing that just over her shoulders with nothing underneath, smoking a joint with the Greek boy while they leaned on the hood of the parked MG.

The boy was seven or eight years older than she was, but I don't know if she ever thought about the idea of an older lover. She and I never talked about age. She and I were effectively the same age, which no girl in my life has been for years and years. Marsha was actually older than I was by four months--- a major thing in the days when the drinking age was eighteen rather than twenty-one.

I found out the details of what had happened in Thessaloniki later. She and I saw each other a few times when she got back to the States, but we were both planning to go off to university. I was going off to New England and she was bound for the Colorado School of Mines. It was only on Christmas break when we got drunk together and she told me the Thessaloniki story in detail. I couldn't be jealous. She and I had enjoyed being with one another and having our own encounters, but we weren't a serious couple. In any case, I was deeply involved with a girl in Connecticut, a girl who'd be in and out of my life with high drama for the next four or five years. So I couldn't really be jealous. I was envious, though, envious of the vintage MG and of her spending a month in Europe. Envious, too, of expensive hotel sex. She always liked men with sports cars; that was her particular kink. I do wish I knew more stories about that from her younger days.

I didn't keep a diary in those days, or at least not a formal one. I probably wouldn't have made notes about her encounter in Thessaloniki, though these days I would. My memory is still reasonably good, though I do run the risk of all older roues--- losing all the best stories here in the autumn of my years. I only regret that when she drunkenly told me about what she'd done I didn't pull her close across the bed and have her tell me all the details. I'd like to be able to savor her stories here when I can imagine them as happening in a distant world.

Two Six Seven: Numb

I saw ads at social media today about a product called Roman Swipes. I first thought the wipes were male body-cleansing wipes, much like the Every Man Jack "speed shower" cleansing wipes I've become obsessive about storing--- wipes designed to make sure that a potential Young Companion isn't sickened by the taste or scent of male flesh and male...parts.

I'll note that I have a supply of Every Man Jack and Cetaphil wipes on hand just...in case.  You did note that I've become horrified and disgusted by my own flesh, didn't you? You know the drill: shower twice a day under water as hot as I can bear, use a body wash probably originally designed for biohazard labs, and rough washcloths that will abrade away a couple of layers of skin. I'm not taking any chances.

Roman Swipes, though, aren't body cleansers. As best I can tell from the ad copy, they're  wipes saturated with a "4% Benzocaine solution" that's supposed to increase time-to-male-orgasm by 340% over several months.  The idea of course is that the Benzocaine is a numbing agent and that you apply it to...sensitive areas to reduce overstimulation-- i.e., it numbs your penis to prevent what used to be called ejaculatio praecox. It doesn't seem like you can just go into a drugstore or to Amazon and buy a pack. From what I could tell by a quick glance at their website, you sign up for a monthly or quarterly program.  Now I have nothing to say about the product or its efficacy. I was just perplexed by the idea of the product.

Ejaculatio praecox has never been my problem. Quite the contrary. I don't need the product for its intended use. When I first glanced at the advert, I hoped it was for another body cleanser. I'm always in the market for anything that can assuage body fear for a little while.

Reading the ad copy, though, it began to occur to me that I am reaching a place in life where Encounters might require pharmaceutical assistance. That hasn't happened yet, though I know it will...which itself is a fear that keeps me paralyzed and unwilling to try.

I used to tell myself that if it ever came to that, to systems failure, that I wouldn't be too proud to use the Blue Pill. My friend Katie in the Home Counties told me that she'd been with men who were a wide range of ages, and that she had no problem with the Blue Pill. She'd known boys in their twenties who used it "recreationally" and men in their late sixties who did need it to perform.  She told me that the Blue Pill existed to solve a problem, that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, she said, she had a problem with dryness, and she'd just use a bit of "personal lubricant". Same thing, she told me--- there's a problem, and you use a tool to fix it. None of it is a judgment about your value as a person or a lover. 

When she and I talked about that, I completely agreed with her. I told myself that if ever the time came, I'd look for a simple and efficient way to fix the problem. Just a pill, I told myself. And I had confidence in my other skills. I told myself that I wasn't a one-trick pony. I knew other ways to offer pleasure to  a Young Companion, and I knew that if the moment came, I'd get through it.

None of that is likely to be true, of course. Over the last year, I've been edging closer to fear that any systems failure would in fact be a judgment on my value as a person. A year ago, I'd have brushed off any fears.  That's not the case tonight. I'm paralyzed by fear of failure, and in the best tradition of...much of my life...I'm unwilling to risk being seen to fail.  Worse, I'm unwilling to be seen at all. I'm increasingly unwilling to be touched. Tonight, even if the opportunity presented itself, I'd be unwilling to be a body with a Young Companion. I'd take it for granted that my flesh--- look, texture, taste, scent ---would disgust any girl who'd be in my presence,

So...I don't need the Roman Swipes. The Blue Pill would be pointless. I have a store of Every Man Jack wipes and I spend my time standing under scalding water and sanding away at my skin.  If I could remove any trace of texture, scent, and taste, I would.  The next stage is...what? Changing my clothes down to the skin two or three times a day? I don't think the Blue Pill can do anything about my growing inability to venture out into anything social.

Two Six Six: Voix

A new year has begun. No one is quite sure whether we're in the Twenties of the new century yet. There's still that debate over whether we have to wait until 2021 to say that a new set of Roaring Twenties is here. Tonight it seems likely that "Roaring Twenties" may refer less to parties and Bright Young Things and more to a new war in the Near East, but there are still a few optimistic souls who hope that the new decade will be all Gatsby's mansion and debs in Bugattis.

I'm finding that the new year and new decade are likely to be one of silence.  New Years itself was grey and quiet here by the lake. I began 2019 with an evening of cocktails and flirtations with lovely bartender girls. This year as the numbers changed I was at home with a glass of Irish whiskey, sitting alone on the deck, looking out to lights on water. I do suspect that most of the year will be like that.

I've always prided myself on my ability to tell stories, to create a world out of words. I've always said that such luck as I've had with lovely, long-legged Young Companions has been based on words and not flesh. There's a certain kind of literary co-ed I've been able to talk into bed, and I'm all too aware that it has nothing to do with my looks or body. It's always been about the stories I tell. This year, though, this new year--- I suspect I've lost that.

2019 began with lovely girls talking with me all night and finding me to be an experiment worth trying. That seems to have evaporated.  I've lost the ability to talk, to tell stories. There are places where I spent the last half of 2018 dining, sampling wines and cocktails, and flirting with lovely girls. I can't bring myself to do that any more. I can't bring myself to have conversations in public. For reasons I can't quite articulate, I spend less and less time out. I haven't been back to any of my old haunts in six or seven months. All the doorways downtown where I used to go seem alien and depressing. I've managed to talk myself into a state where I feel unwelcome everywhere. Sitting at a barstool that may have been a favourite spot once upon a time now feels empty, uncanny, and out of place.

I no longer know what to say to lovely girls. I no longer have faith in my ability to tell stories, or to do exchanges, or to be part of a conversation. I no longer believe I have anything to say to anyone. I find it harder and harder to believe that anyone would want to be part of a conversation with me.

Part of me wonders if the social rules have changed, and whether I'm simply excluded by the new rules. No one has ever said anything like that to me, but the nagging fear is there nonetheless.

Let's also note that I'm less and less at home in my body. I've become uneasy thinking about my own flesh, and I find myself  uneasy, ashamed, and preemptively embarrassed by the thought of having my body seen or touched. It's harder and harder to imagine undressing for a lovely Young Companion, and the thought that a lover might be disgusted by my flesh haunts me in a way it never did at sixteen or twenty. I find myself scrubbing my skin 'til it's raw and showering twice a day under the hottest water I can stand. I find myself looking for OTC drugs that will shut down bodily functions lest they humiliate me. I find myself unwilling to imagine a lover's touch, or be undressed even when alone.

My suspicions are that I'm approaching some kind of depressive spasm, and that by Lent I'll have talked myself into being housebound and mute.

I do walk past downtown doors and listen to music and voices leaking out and realize that I can't speak there, that I have nothing to say, that I no longer know how to respond to voices. I can't imagine anyone wanting to hear anything I have to say.

Two Six Three: Despair

I've made this blog about being an aging roue. I've never hidden that. Tonight I am feeling my age, and not just my age. I'm feeling a certain kind of emptiness.

Time runs out.  We all know that. And tonight I'm feeling that. I do feel as if a part of my life is closing out. There's a sense of loss here, a sense that there's less and less of a way for my life to involve either physical pleasure or any intimacy with a lover.

I have tried these last few years to avoid making this blog too personal or to use it to lament my own failings. Here in the last days of October, though,  it's hard to avoid a sense of melancholy.

I've always hoped that this blog would generate comments and discussions, that there would be lovely interlocutors with whom I could talk about the ideas behind sex and social lives. There isn't an interlocutor tonight, and I feel that lack very deeply. I've never minded writing into the void. I've spent a great many nights pacing through my rooms talking to imaginary classes and audiences, telling stories and posing hypotheticals. I was an academic for a long time, and I've never lost the style.

The other evening I noted here that I find myself unable to talk to others any longer, that it's become harder and harder to imagine opening myself up to a young companion or a potential lover. Asking about likes and dislikes, about preferences and fantasies, seems increasingly dangerous in the age of the gender wars--- and in an age of social media and public shaming. Any kind of openness about those things, any sharing of your life and what it means seems far too dangerous these days. Conversation, let alone seduction, feels too much like a trap.

Fear of opening up, fear of asking, fear of conversations and seductions. There's that. And there's also a growing fear of and disgust with my own body. I am less and less willing to allow my body to be seen. I have less and less faith in my body. It's served me reasonably well all these years, but I find myself thinking that it's now a failure.

I have purchased several packets of "speed shower" body wipes, and I find myself compulsively swabbing myself down. I would never ask anyone to touch my flesh these days, and I would be far too terrified to ask anyone to taste or accept my flesh as part of lovemaking. I live in fear of having a smell, of having a taste, of having some disgusting texture. Hot showers all through the day, repeated body scrubs, antiseptic wipes. "Speed shower" body wipes whenever I have a few moments. I do live in fear of the moment when I'd see disgust and revulsion in a lovely young companion's eyes. Flesh is a failure. At least my flesh is a failure.

It's going to be that kind of November, and it's going to be that kind of life--- one where any ability to be with a lover, a partner, a young companion has been closed off.

Two Six Two: Silence

I've written about this before, but it's something I keep thinking about. It becomes harder and harder here in the age of the gender wars to tell anyone that you feel physical desire towards them. It becomes harder and harder to express not just underlying desire, but your own preferences.

Despite however many years of popular culture talking about "communication", it seems to be increasingly difficult to tell a potential lover what it is you actually like to do. It seems to be just as difficult to ask someone what she likes.  I know that I feel far more afraid now of being mocked or attacked for my preferences than when I was, say, eighteen. I feel that telling a lovely young companion that I find her desirable or telling her what I like in bed is just a lot riskier than it was when I was an undergraduate.  Desire itself feels somehow suspect.

I'm well aware that it could just be me--- a function of age and despair. Yet my reading of comments at articles and blog posts about sex and relationships makes me think that it's something more general. There's a spirit of disdain and mockery in the culture at the moment that's depressing and disturbing.

A few years ago, I felt that I had a reasonable grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses as a lover. I was clear on what I liked, and clear on what I'd like to learn and experience. My lovely blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me once that she couldn't imagine me ever being too shy or scared to tell a lover what I wanted. She may have been right once upon a time, but that's no longer so. She also told me that one of the things she liked about me was that I was willing to try whatever my partner thought would give her pleasure. She was (and is) right about that. Someone else, a lovely friend in Montreal, told me that one thing she liked about me was that I was willing to discuss the things that gave pleasure, that I wasn't shy about asking whether something pleased my partner. These days, though, I stay mute. I'm not about to ask anyone anything, and I'm certainly not about to make any revelations.

Over the last few months I've been posting stories here, trying to save stories girls have told me, ones that leave me excited and intrigued.  I do wish I had newer stories to post. I sometimes fear that the days when lovely young companions and I could exchange stories and try to arouse one another are gone. Out there on the web, it seems less and less a Done Thing to tell stories.  I miss listening to a lovely friend's tales of adventures. I miss the sense of sharing lives and Pasts.

I miss the days when it seemed easier to tell someone what I enjoyed, what I'd like to try with them.  I miss the days when sex and romance involved constructing adventures and challenges, when lovers could risk being open to one another,  when silence wasn't the default state for being out with someone.

Two Five Eight: Beliefs 4

My lovely long-legged blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me this story over a long period. She'd always hinted at having a dark secret, a shadow from her teens that carried over into her late twenties. This is what she finally told me, back in 2012:

I can't stop fantasising about my uncle (for clarification - he's my mothers cousin, but I shall refer to his as my uncle for convenience). He must be...62ish now. He's tall and tan and solid. He owns a pub in the outback in Australia. I first met him when I was in my mid teens, he taught me how to blow smoke rings, we drank sambuca and we fucked. Now I can't stop thinking about the last time I saw him...it must have been 2008? Or 2009? It was at a family funeral. When I saw him after the funeral I went up to him and hugged him. Brushing my hands around his waist, I felt something like an electric shock. 'Hey there, beautiful' he whispered in my ear, then kissed my cheek. An hour or so later I noticed him watching me, and nodding his head towards the bathroom. I swallowed the rest of my gin & tonic and walked ahead of him. I was wearing black heels and a black skirt. After he shut the door, he ran his fingers up my thigh, lifted my skirt and kissed my bare cunt. 

I need him again.

And again,  another story, some months later, in the spring of 2013---

it has been years. but there will never be anyone else. i met him when i was 17. not so young, i suppose. but give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. cards on the table, right from the beginning. first cousin once removed is the technical term. and thirty-odd years between us. our first night together i was drunk. sambuca flowed through my veins. but it was electric. i knew at the time it was different to anything i'd ever felt before. i didn't know that i'd never feel anything like it since. it was a cheap motel room. we fucked countless times that night, then the next day he flew back to australia. a month later he flew me to his pub in the outback. we had a whole month together. to date, that was the longest time we ever spent together. i started to understand that it was love. we'd pour drinks at his bar all night, then take a bottle upstairs with us. we would drink and talk until dawn. the sex was amazing. he went down on me for hours.  i'd had men before...but not like this. i felt so powerful, so needed, and so loved. 

we've been together all over the place. vancouver, tokyo, auckland, sydney, the outback, fiji, wellington. we steal long weekends. we fly each other wherever, whenever we have the chance. for a long time i wouldn't let him cum in my cunt. my mouth was fine, preferred. i got over that though. its been ten years now. and nobody touches me like he does. nobody looks at me like he does. he is the only man i want, and i can never have him. 

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” 


and i have tried to not let it consume me. i slept with men his age. boys my own age. girls. there is only him. i've had long-term boyfriends, who thought nothing when i flew to fiji for a 'girls weekend' and spent four blissful days with his tongue in my cunt and his arms around my waist. when i flew to vancouver with friends he arranged to be there for a weekend too...i told them i was catching up with my uncle, and had his hand in my cunt in the lift up to his hotel room. another time we were together for four nights in auckland. we stayed at a house in devonport, and it was like this 'what we could have been' experience. we cooked for each other, and read aloud to each other. we played cards, and mixed each other drinks. we walked around naked. we bathed together. we came together all week. it was agony to catch the plane home after that. 

he is my addiction. we're a chemical reaction. 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” 

some nights i stay up late, drinking straight bourbon and smoking. habits i learnt from him, of course. they aren't my only bad habits. on those same nights i might cut and purge. i didn't pick up those habits from him, but i'd say he inspired them. it would kill him to hear me say that. what we have together chokes me. it annihilates me. it is everything, yet it can never be anything. how did it end up like this? i was young and drunk, our first night together should have been just that, a drunken regret. not the start of an affair which would come to both doom and define me. 

and a few weeks ago i got a text. i will see him soon. 

this is my secret. 

I told other, trusted girls about the stories, and they always doubted it. It was too pat, the said, too cliched. That my Wellington friend has always liked older men isn't open to doubt, but her "uncle" ('first cousin once removed') as the key affair in her life? Well...it is a bit too much like a soft-erotica novel, isn't it? And certain things don't quite hold up.

He owns a pub in the Australian outback? Okay, fine. But her stories include tales of him taking her off for weekends--- or weeks ---in Fiji, Noumea, Japan, and every major city and beach resort in Australia (ten days in a rented villa in Noosa Heads, a week in Cairns), as well as a rendezvous in Vancouver and that rented house in Devonport, an Auckland beach suburb. He owns a pub--- a perfectly respectable social status, but how does he afford to fly her everywhere or fly to meet her? Three nights at the Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver? How did he--- and he is supposedly married ---afford that, or explain just suddenly needing to jet off to the States and Canada?

The affair has, according to my friend, lasted since since she was seventeen. That's almost half her life. No one has never discovered the affair. Not his wife, not her family. A month after they first fell into bed, he flew her to Australia for a month. How did she explain that--- at seventeen or eighteen ---to her parents? How did he explain to his wife that a blonde teen distant relative would suddenly be arriving and staying? How did she hide it from all her various boyfriends (and her supposed first husband) for sixteen or seventeen years?

She calls him B., though whether that stands for Bryan, Bob, or Bill I'll never know.  She was claiming as recently as last summer to still be calling him frequently, to still be longing for him and planning or hoping to go with him to Mauritius or the Maldives. Nonetheless, it doesn't hold together. Too many security risks, too much time and money involved. As much as I care about my NZ friend, I can't believe the story. Her "uncle" B. would be almost seventy now. I don't know that he was ever real; I don't know what to think of any of this.