Three One Six: Austral Summer

 My city is dealing with a sudden winter storm. Roads are closed,  the city is largely shut down, neighborhoods are dealing with loss of power and water. 

Today, though, I found an email from a travel blog that focuses on New Zealand. Today's article was about wine festivals in the North Canterbury hills on the South Island. I did sigh over that. 

Years ago, my lovely posh long-legged blonde friend in Wellington wrote me about her own adventures in the Wairarapa wine country north and east of Wellington one afternoon in the early Austral summer. She'd have been twenty-four or twenty-five when the Adventure happened, and I do wish I could get her thoughts about how she feels these days about the things she did in those days.

I'm assuming that the North Canterbury hills are a different kind of wine country from  the Wairarapa--- pinot noir rather than sauvignon blanc. I do wonder if the sorts of things that happen on wine tours there are as drunkenly wicked as what happened up on the North Island almost a decade ago. My friend described her afternoon like this---

Oh, yes! went to Wairarapa wine country for a festival and had a lot of naughty fun between the vines. 

We met a group of guys early in the day and had a few drinks together, then came across them again at the last vineyard of the day...i sucked two cocks between the vines as the sun was going down...and scored 3 Es!

I asked if this had been two separate encounters, or if the two men had watched each other. Her reply was that

They both watched each other...then one of them licked my cunt...he was incredibly good considering how drunk he was.  i was on the ground, in a black and white striped summer dress, low cut and short, no bra or panties...i actually took a photo on my iphone of him licking my cunt...i have a shot of the top of his head, then another of him looking up & smiling....i love waking up in the morning & seeing photographic evidence of the night's depravity! they were both 50ish...and they both came in my mouth.

I can re-read that now and wish I'd asked more questions once upon a time. She used "we", meaning that she was with one of her girlfriends. What did her girlfriend do? Was she engaged in her own Encounters, or did she just watch? Were phone numbers exchanged with the two fifty-something men?  When she got back to Wellington, who did she tell? She always claimed to have a tight circle of girls she'd known from school and uni, feral posh girls who shared their adventures over drinks. 

No, I never saw the photos. Though I wish I had...and that I could've advised her and/or her girlfriend on how and what kind of photos to take.

Last Sunday was Valentine's Day. Valentine's is a holiday I try to avoid. I'm not likely to have a Young Companion these days, and it's been a while since I had a Valentine's opportunity to share champagne and kisses, or to lick chilled champagne off a lovely girl's erect nipples. I don't miss the sex itself as much as I miss the idea of ritualized romance and the idea that a lovely girl would want to be seen with me in public. I miss the social markers of romance...and the markers of sexual value, 

It's the austral summer in NZ. My posh blonde friend will be haunting the beaches and living in a bikini. Sauvignon blanc time for her, and freckles and a dark tan on those long legs.  

Tonight in the city where I live it'll be just under twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Of course I wish she could be here--- in just a man's faded blue denim shirt...and maybe the merino socks she always wears in cold weather. I'd wish her here to drink pinot noir with me while she curls in my arms and tells me about her stories from austral summers in the first decade of the century. Stories do matter, just as details always matter. 

Winter here still, and I'm unlikely to sleep next to anyone on a winter's night. I have stories tonight, and hot chocolate. But I wish I had my blonde posh Wellington friend.

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 Four: Shadows

 Long, long ago I found a short story with an image that's stayed with me ever since. I can't recall the name or the author. That's long gone. The story was in a paperback anthology of  "modern horror" stories I bought at a used bookshop in Tampa. Ten cents-- I do remember that. I bought a dozen paperbacks there at ten cents each.  Mostly sci-fi, since that's what I was very much into in those years. I was in Florida with my parents, and I needed books for the beach or to read while they drove from St. Augustine down to the tip of Florida on A1A and then back up the Gulf side. 

The stories were all "modern horror", which meant (I suppose) that there were no monsters and no demons, or at least no external ones. No creatures in the swamp and nothing supernatural.  All the monsters were human--- isn't that the definition of "modern"? 

Anyway, the story...  I don't recall the author or the title. That's all long lost. What I do recall is a scene where a character--- a teen girl, maybe the daughter of one of the other characters ---comes into the darkened library of a vast old tumbledown house and spends time going through the shelves and reading by a single small lamp. She does that while naked, though I don't recall if she undresses in the library or walks naked through the dark house. I don't recall what happens, and I don't recall what she was reading. But I do recall being stunned and thrilled by the image--- a beautiful young girl reading naked at midnight in some library with a second level and a balcony and huge bookshelves. Well, I was thirteen or fourteen. Of course I was excited by the image. But of course--- of course ---what meant the most to me was the idea that she'd chosen to be naked with books. I do wish I had a copy of the story. I'd like to know what went on before and after that scene and what the story was actually about. I suppose I never will know, but...that image of a girl naked in a shadowy library has been with me all these years, and it's not something I'll give up.

I liked the idea of her waiting 'til the house was asleep or until everyone (parents? hosts? relatives?) had gone out and then wandering naked through the hallways, feeling deliciously daring. Miss Ginny in Montreal said to me once that she'd done that at the lake house her parents used to rent in the summer, and that once--- on a family trip to the Tennessee mountains ---she'd waited for her parents and siblings to drive into town and then spent a morning wandering the big rented vacation house, peeling off her white bikini and dancing through the rooms and out onto the dock, naked except for headphones, a big glass of white wine in her hand. Beautiful, beautiful image--- Miss Ginny petite and blonde at sixteen or seventeen, whirling and pivoting, listening to British Northern soul, feeling wicked and daring.  What lovely teen girl wouldn't like that feeling? Being naked in the house, she said, was like having her hidden cigarette case or flirting online with older men. Transgression, she said, made her feel alive.

The first time Miss Ginny followed my advice and went to class at McGill in a skirt with no underwear, she called me at eleven in the morning, breathless and exhilarated. She felt, she told me, so alive, so vulnerable and daring. She felt, she told me, like Jane Birkin in 1964. I had to laugh at that, and I had to tell her how perfect that thought was.  

I've always encouraged lovely Young Companions to avoid underwear and to sleep naked. I've always told lovely girls that there's an official dress code if they're involved with me. Miss Ginny of course adopted all my suggestions--- I was the older man who was corrupting her, and she knew exactly how to play her role. 

The girl in the story... I have zero idea how the story developed. I have no idea if anyone was watching her or what happened. But I do recall being there in the car reading and thinking that this image was perfect, that one day I'd ask a lovely girl to be naked in a big, dark house and be in and out of the shadows while we flirted and played.  Levin (of course) slept naked, and I loved seeing her stretched naked on afternoon beds making notes and sketches in her journals or curled up naked in a big chair, reading on an autumn night.

I've kept that image with me for all these years, now--- the girl naked in the library, looking over the rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves,  finding one book after another. So breathtaking to imagine her in a big overstuffed chair, turned to hang her bare legs over the chair arm, naked except for reading glasses, reading something antique and amazing by lamplight.

I'll never know what the story was, or how it developed. But that image will be with me forever.

Three One Three: Boxes

I've been going through boxes and looking for ghosts from my past. I found the journals Levin gave me, and I've spent nights sighing over them. It's odd--- I have so few photos of Levin. I have her pencil and pen-and-ink sketches in the Pentalic journals, and she did lovely self-portraits. What I regret, though, is not taking photos of her. 

That's always been a regret for me. There are really no photos of me, let alone any of me with lovely young companions. I've always avoided being photographed. I can think of only two that I know exist. One is of me at my brother's wedding. The other is me standing outside the house where I'd rented rooms while I finished my doctorate. One of me in a tuxedo, one of me in black blazer and black long-sleeved tee. Two existing photos in all these years. I suspect you can guess the reasons. I'm not fond of my body or my face. And to be photographed next to a lovely young companion would only emphasize how I don't belong there next to her. 

The first time I went to Europe, I flatly refused to bring a camera. A camera, I thought, would mark me as a mere tourist, a rube from the provinces. And so I have no record of my life in Vienna. A year of my life might as well not exist. I feel the same way now about photos of girls I've been with, girls I've loved. I've no clue if any of them contrived to get photos of me, or if they managed to get photos of the two of us together-- though I know that I didn't get any.  Back in the day, I'd have been terrified of being photographed, terrified that any photo of me with a lover would be a kind of mockery of the stories my young companions and I told ourselves about who and what we were. I'd have been terrified that her friends would see photos of me and feel only disdain and contempt. 

Levin and Liberty were able to be muses for older lovers. Miss Ginny in Montreal, too. They were all of them proud of being someone's muse. For Levin that was the painting professor, the man who did that nude portrait of her. For Liberty it would've been the gallery owner in Santa Fe. And for Miss Ginny, it was an aging Russian emigre who played chess with her, taught her to do vodka shots, laughed at her obsession with Swinging London and the early Sixties, and gave her a couple of cartons filled with old issues of Cahiers du Cinema. I'm sure they each had other older lovers for whom they were muses and inspirations, but I keep thinking of that portrait above Levin's bed and about Miss Ginny sitting on the floor of her rooms near McGill, going through articles about half-forgotten French and East European films. Or of Liberty in just a man's shirt, being taught how to paint desert light. 

Liberty told me about her mysterious journal with its "My Older Lovers" chapter, about the entries she'd been making since she was sixteen about the things she'd learned about older men and about how to manage older lovers. I never asked to see it, of course. I certainly never asked her what she said about me--- or if I was in her entries at all. But I do have visions of Liberty sitting cross-legged on a sofa in just a pair of faded, cut-off denim short shorts, brushing that mass of red-gold hair off her face and reading from her notebook on older lovers. I always loved her voice, and I can imagine her doing a kind of podcast, telling her stories out over the aether. Liberty was always very direct and straightforward, always very earnest. It's easy to imagine her reading out her guide to older lovers not as regrets or even as erotica, but just as a clear set of memories--- an operator's manual with clear descriptions of procedure.

Miss Ginny claimed to have something similar, by the way--- written in French, like a good Montreal girl, and bits of her father's Polish ---with lists of books and films older admirers had told her about. Miss Ginny, though, would have focused on the books and films. She wanted, she told me, to sleep with at least one famous academic and one rare book dealer. She wanted the lists, she said, wanted to have a bibliography, an annotated bibliography, to go with her life and experiences. 

There are boxes somewhere in rooms wherever Liberty and Miss Ginny and Levin are tonight. I have to believe that they still have boxes, that they've kept journals and notebooks all these years, that they treasure the stories and the lists they made.  All three girls told me that they set out very deliberately to find adventures and experiences, that they  spent their late teens and early twenties keeping notes and lists, finding raw material for the art and the books they wanted to create.

I miss them. I miss that attitude. I miss the way each of them saw my age as a positive thing, the way each of them set out to design a world for herself, the way each of them kept notebooks and lists. 

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.

Three One One: Receipts

Here in an age of social media, screenshots, and "bringing the receipts", do you think that anyone with a proper sense of self-preservation would ever write a significant other a love letter? The risks seem far too high.

Social media, screenshots, and the ease of forwarding emails and scanned documents would all seem to be things that would kill the love letter.  Yes, of course letters could always be found by those other than an intended recipient. A recipient could share the letters with others. There's a trope from how many stories and novels--- the cache of love letters found hidden many years later, the ribbon-tied letters that solve a mystery or dissolve a marriage. But social media makes "bringing the receipts" so much easier.

And who could risk that? Love letters show you at your most vulnerable. Love letters reveal what you feel, what you need and want in your life. Any love letter that's the least "erotic" or "hot" risks revealing your particular desires, fetishes, obsessions. Worse, possibly, it reveals whether you're capable of writing erotica competently...which isn't a universal skill. Inept erotica leaves you open to derision just as much as being seen to have any non-vanilla desires. 

Derision of course is the real fear here. If a relationship goes bad and you've left "receipts", you are at serious risk. Any professions of passion or love or desire that you've made can be used against you. Any failure to describe anything sexual with perfect literary and political grace can be used as a sign that you're equally incapable of in-real-life performance, And as I noted above, the slightest hint of any non-vanilla desires can be used to show that you're clearly either pathetic or creepy.

I suppose it doesn't even have to be a risk for after a relationship ends. You're always at risk during the relationship itself. Is the recipient sharing your emails and letters with her friends? Are they sitting together and drinking wine and mocking what you've written? Or, here in a pandemic year, are they forwarding emails and screenshots and scans of letters to one another for round-robin dissection and derision? You'll never know, or you'll only know too late. Leaving any trace of yourself for others to dissect is a risky thing, and all the more risky if anything emotional is involved.

Now I do have to ask myself if this particular fear isn't the male equivalent of the fear women have that ex-boyfriends are circulating the nudes that they sent during the relationship. Women don't send me nudes, so the issue isn't something I've had to face in my own life--- I've been trained all my professional life for discretion, and I'm not about to circulate  anyone's deeply personal gifts to me. Still...I do wonder if the two fears aren't equivalent.

I do take it as a given that any revelations to a lover are dangerous, and growing more so. And I take it as a given that no group of women have ever discussed the boyfriend of a group member without subjecting him to contempt and derision. Even if I'm wrong about that, the possibility is always there. And "receipts"--- meaning any letters, any emails, anything that reveals anything about your feelings and hopes ---make you an easy target.

I've always said that love letters were an art that I admired. And, yes, sending deeply passionate love letters is something I wish people still did. I wish that we could still talk about desires and experiments and adventures with lovers and potential lovers. We can't, though. To have desires, to imagine romance and passion--- those things are no longer acceptable. Those things leave you open to mockery as inept, creepy, pathetic, sad. 

There are antique skills that I miss, and I suppose that love letters have joined the list of things I won't be trying again.

  

Three One Zero: Escorts

 I've never used an escort service. Writing that down tonight, I'm not sure how to feel about it. The simplest thing to say is that I could never afford it. I'd be hard-pressed to pay for even a street girl, and using an escort service to find a sex worker would be (and has been) far beyond my means.

I remember a decade ago, when escort blogs and sex bloggers talked about the idea of sex workers who could provide a GFE, a Girlfriend Experience. I saw the film with Sasha Grey and the cable series with Riley Keough. Fell a bit in love with Riley, too, but you'd expect that, wouldn't you? Twitter still has accounts run by women who market the GFE idea--- that they're socially presentable, knowledgeable about wines and food and current events, well-bred, stylishly dressed, and serve as "companions" as much as they provide sex. I would like very much to believe in them, even if only from a distance. 

The GFE idea will always attract me. What I'd be looking for is a companion who'd have the professional skills to shape an experience for me. I like the idea of negotiating with a high-end escort over creating--- if only for a night and a morning ---a world where I'd feel at home, a world that would be like the films I create in my head.

I like the idea of having someone who'd have the skills and intuition to perform with me in films-in-the-head. I like the idea of negotiating or specifying a wardrobe for her (yes, leggy, yes, all worn next to the skin), of providing her with a basic sketch of my interests and likes and dislikes, and then putting myself into her hands for the evening. 

It's catalog shopping, yes--- select a girl from a set of photos and a biography, then brief her on my tastes. And I'd be under no illusions about actual romance or intimacy. But at least I'd feel...safe. I'd know how to be a character in the films-in-my-head. I'd know how to do my own performance. I'd be able to be what I've wanted to be.  At least for a night and a morning.

We've come to this. Hiring a GFE escort and meeting her after a briefing session is the only way I can think of to feel like I could get through an evening of flirtation, an evening that ends in a sexual encounter, without feeling like I was at clear risk of humiliation and disgrace. I have no ability left to believe in my own body or my own ability to hold a conversation, to flirt, to feel like I could be desired. I think that a high-end GFE escort might-- might ---not laugh at me. I have to believe that professionalism would hold her back from that.  That's all I can really hope for.

Needless to say, this is all speculative.  The sort of high-end escort service I'd need is beyond my reach. I've known a few girls in my life who worked as escorts for a while. We were friends, but I never trespassed into thinking they'd take me to bed. I knew their fee schedule, and I knew they were beyond me. Asking for anything--- a reduced rate, let alone a free night ---would've been disrespectful. I wasn't going to do that. 

Well, I will continue to believe that high-end escort services exist. I will continue to believe that such a thing as GFE-skilled lovely escorts exist. Those beliefs are my only way to believe that I could have sex again where I wouldn't be ashamed or afraid.