Two Two One: Carousel

This is from an e-mail sent me a couple of years ago from an expat friend who now works in London Town. It does seem that her experience in the world of educated professionals is NOTHING AT ALL like mine. I'm just worried about my runner getting the daily lunch order right. As for my friend---

I've been having a bad summer.

The back story is that several years ago a gay friend of mine introduced me to his then pupilmaster (they are now both barristers at the same Chambers) on his birthday. This married barrister and I fell madly in love at first sight and had a long-term affair, obviously complicated by the whole married-with-children thing. The next year, on the very same date, the same gay friend introduced me to his friend who is a young, badly-behaved, copper-haired heiress. She and I also fell in love pretty much at first sight (my gay barrister friend is at this point getting slightly bemused). I introduced her to the married barrister and they got along fabulously. All was, if not well, broadly functional.

So you'll appreciate the soap operatic shenanigans that followed. A month ago, my lesbian lover ran off with the husband of the pregnant clerk at the Chambers where gay barrister and married barrister are both based. She is now being all housewiffley off in Zone 4, and the Chambers is in a kerfuffle coping with a pregnant, depressed, wronged woman of a clerk. (Gay barrister friend is wondering exactly how he became the one introducing all of the scarlet women into Chambers life.)

Then, married barrister, who had claimed he had basically left his wife and was merely sorting out practical details, tells me he is going on a hiking trip in the alps with his friend. I have no reason to disbelieve him.

While he's away, my landlady/flatmate tells me she wants me to move out ASAP (I only moved in May, at her insistence) so that her anorexic sister can move in so she can keep an eye on her and make sure she's eating. So I am suddenly frantic to find a new place to live. It is difficult to get in touch with married barrister who is without mobile phone access most of the time because he's hiking in the bloody alps...or so he says.

For no particular reason, I have the sudden revelation that he has lied to me and is away with his wife and kids, not hiking with his mate. I am absolutely certain of this (I do get these occasional flashes of intuition). I'm heartbroken and furious,but I decide I have to get conclusive proof that he lied before I do anything. I stalk his friend online to find his work number, ring it up and then hang up when he answers. Confirmed. I email married barrister and tell him I never want to see him again. (Turns out they're in Italy.) At this point he offers to fly back immediately and send emails to his parents/friends/everyone he knows saying that his marriage is over and he wants to be with me, but it is too late.

So things are bad.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a gay friend who is based in Delhi about the whole thing. He told me I should run away to Paris and have a threesome with our friends Albert and Olivier (both quite attractive Frenchman--Olivier I've slept with already). So I am going to Paris on Friday. We shall see.

My friend has a life that sounds exhausting yet definitely worth recording. She will not, she says, be writing her own autobiographical novel because she would like to keep her job and at least a few friends. Nonetheless, I do rather fancy having her in my archives.

Two Two Zero: Forklift

Long ago--- back in the lost springtime of 2007 ---a lovely friend wrote me an email about her rantan week in Wellington, about a week where she'd partied hard and done things she'd never done before. One of her more intriguing notes was that she remembered being with a Maori forklift operator--- her first Maori adventure, and one that gave her a decided taste for Maori one-night stands ---and riding his face while taking long swigs from a bottle of Maker's. I've been asking her for details ever since.

After all these years, she finally wrote me with the details. I'm definitely keeping this for my records. She does tell good tales of her Adventures. And as I've said these last sixteen years, Details Matter:

I met him at a dive bar. I can't remember exactly how old I was, but very early 20s I'd say. Maybe 19? His name was Tane (tar-nay). A friend was working at the bar, and she told me she liked the look of him. I remember her being pissed off at me later when she found out I fucked him. I actually can't even remember her name now. She was Australian. I went to her flat a few times to drink and smoke weed. I remember the night I first met her she was talking to my friend Fergy about how fast she used batteries in her vibrator. I was out that night with Stella and Libby and a group of their friends from the bookshop they all worked at.

Tane had just moved to Wellington from somewhere up north. He was working at a factory, operating a forklift all day. He was cute and very polite. The type of Maori boy from up north that was raised by his grandmother. Early 30s. He was solid and strong looking. He was at the pub alone. I started talking to him. After the pub closed we all went back to my house - the bookshop guys and girls, plus Tane. We had a few more drinks, the others left, he stayed. I was happy drunk, single, and he was hot. We fucked in my bed.

I don't know that I'd ever really tried face-sitting before. I remember being a bit self conscious at first. It's an intimate position, especially with a stranger. But he wanted it and was so into it that I just relaxed into it and enjoyed myself. He was so focused on making me cum. He was a good fuck, and he had a nice cock. But what I remember most was his tongue on my clit and in my cunt. I don't remember if I sucked his cock or not. He stayed the night, and I rode his face in the morning. I remember how much more confidence I had in the morning, from tentatively sitting above his face the night before, to moving and grinding, my hands on the headboard and his hands on my ass.

He texted me the next day, and a few times after that wanting to hang out. We never did. I saw him again about a year later, at the same pub. He gave me a kiss and a flower that I tucked behind my ear.

I do love keeping the stories of her Adventures and Encounters from her posh party girl Past. She's been known to tell me the stories and laugh and say that knowing I was trained as a historian and a lawyer makes it so obvious that I'd be asking for lots of stories, and that she loves being part of the histories I'm keeping.

Two One Nine: Kink

There is such a thing as kink-shaming.

Kink-shaming is not something I know much about, mind you. It's not something I've ever done to any of my young companions, and it's not something I can imagine doing.

The circles I moved in for most of my life took experimentation and certain recherché tastes as a given. Now I'm not naive. There were certainly social rankings and unspoken rules. It couldn't have been easy for many friends to be gay or bi back in the days of my lost youth. There was always that. But I remember being in my twenties and taking it for granted that certain things--- a taste for at least s/m fashion and poses, say ---were perfectly ordinary. I took it for granted that girls with whom I was involved were fine with blindfolds and candle wax and riding whips. I took it for granted that most of the girls I knew at university or in grad school had at least tried three-ways. I certainly took it for granted that part of sex and romance was adventure and experimentation--- risky places, new positions, new roles, new toys, new costumes. I remember that seductions and flirtations were very much about exchanging fantasies and seeing how you'd fit into one another's fantasies. There was a certain thrill in seeing what each of you might think about trying.

That feels gone these days.

In my university days and into my twenties and thirties I had no problem at all telling girls what I liked. I had no problem with that, and certainly no problem listening to a lovely young companion explain about her own tastes and interests.

Not so very long ago, a friend said off-handedly that she couldn't imagine me ever being shy about telling a lover or a potential lover what gave me pleasure. Well, not with her. That much is true. But it's harder and harder for me to admit to any particular tastes or interests.

I'm not sure what I'm afraid of. That I might horrify a young companion with the sheer depravity of it all? Probably not that. A girl with whom I'd discuss those things has already decided to be close to me, and just in being with me at all she's shown herself to be willing to defy most of the usual strictures against depravity.

Maybe I'm afraid that male desire is now regarded as shameful tout court. Maybe I'm afraid that any male sexual interests, even the most vanilla, are regarded as gross and disgusting and threatening. That's always part of it, I suppose.

Maybe it's that I'm afraid that if you say you like a particular kink, that'll define you permanently. I may be afraid that you're not allowed under the current social rules to experiment, to try things and then move on. So much nowadays has to be authentic--- interests and kinks have to speak to some underlying permanent truth or identity. You can't say you really like X on Thursday and then prefer Z on Sunday.

Maybe it's that I'm afraid that there's a social rank-ordering of kinks, that certain kinks are regarded as more pathetic or lower-class or less stylish than others. That might be it--- fear that any kinks or fetishes or preferences won't be good enough, that they'll mark you not so much as depraved but as a loser. That may be  a real fear on my part.

You'll note that I rarely talk here about the details of interests and adventures in my life. That at least in part is based on a fear of having the wrong interests, having ones that don't fit with the life and image I've constructed for myself.

If I had to guess, I'd assign most of my fears to the idea that desire, male desire, is now regarded as dangerous and gross rather than alluring or passionate. It gets harder and harder to imagine telling a young companion what I like or what gives me pleasure. I'm always willing to try whatever pleases my companions. However not? That goes with being the Older Lover, the roué. But I'm now increasingly uncomfortable with talking about my own desires and increasingly unwilling to discuss what gives me pleasure. I'm afraid of being kink-shamed on any number of fronts, and I do find myself becoming increasingly silent and withdrawn around lovers.

Two One Eight: Overtures

When the #MeToo movement broke, there were lots and lots of articles by male writers  demanding to know how they could approach women without being immediately tagged as harassers, predators, or creepy pervs. How, they asked, could they talk to women?

I would've thought that by a certain age, any male would've seen that the obvious answer was...politeness and courtesy. Not so very hard a thing, is it? I understand that the point of these essays was to pretend to naivety, to pretend to a kind of haplessness and terrified cluelessness.

Now I will note that there are changes in the social air. Still...if you're, say, forty-five years old and writing  of those essays, how did you manage to carry on flirtations and seductions for the last thirty years? You made it through the Eighties, the Nineties, and the Noughts. Didn't you adapt to changes over all that time? I have a hard time imagining anyone still sidling up to a lovely girl in a bar and asking what her sign is. Or ordering her a Harvey Wallbanger.

Learning new rituals is always hard. That much is true. But, again--- if you're forty or forty-five now, you've gone through shifts in wardrobe and looks, you've gone through shifts in what counts in assigning social value.  Grunge to metrosexual to lumbersexual and beyond--- you made it through that.  Surely you can do a bit of research in the right magazines and master new habits. It can't be that hard.

My own thought is that where the post-#MeToo essays weren't being deliberately disingenuous,  they did have a small bit of actual unease. My own thought is that the writers were feeling guilt not so much for any actual moments of manipulation or coercion in their pasts, but rather for the fact that what they were trying to do in talking to women was initiate a seduction. They were feeling guilt over male desire.

Many of the responses by female writers were quite clear. Women, they responded, weren't demanding that interactions with men be totally sexless. Women, they wrote, liked sex too. In the right setting and at the right moment, they'd be as interested in initiating a flirtation or seduction as a man. What they wanted, the response essays argued, was honesty and recognition that women were people with rights, value, agency. All of which is very true. And perfectly obvious.

And yet...and yet...as a gentleman of a certain age, I can sympathize with that. Male desire as such is suspect these days, and no matter how polite and courteous an approach is, there's something like guilt. I don't know how to articulate it exactly, but there's a certain amount of guilt attached these days to making an approach at all. Be very clear here--- there's a clear set of social obligations about behavior.  Respect for the person you're approaching--- always and ever that.

I'm not sure at all where the guilt comes from. Is it guilt that I see every social interaction with an attractive woman as having some subtext of at least pro forma flirtation? Is it guilt that I'd be...imposing...sex by someone who looks like me on an attractive woman? Is it that in some way I feel guilty for wanting sex at all? Is it that I've accepted some social idea that all male desire is wrong?

This is all something to consider. I'll continue to believe that basic courtesy and respect are requirements for being out in society at all, let alone for trying to spark a flirtation. But I will have to think about my own feelings of guilt and what prompts them.

Two One Seven: Horror Vacui

Last time I talked about adventures from long ago, about my friend Marta and her adventures on the Alaskan cruise. I do recall sitting in a Montrose bar listening to her recount her summertime tales. I was envious, of course. It was a good story, and I envied her her sense of having Had An Adventure. I envied her determination, too, her willingness at seventeen or eighteen to just do something.

I like having stories like that in my archives. I like being able to imagine invisible bookshelves filled with tales of delights and unexpected thrills and the sense of the new.  I like imagining that the world is made of stories, not atoms.

The stories aren't necessarily mine, and may not even usually be mine. But they are part of the world around me, and discovering the stories means at least as much as having my own. I may be of an age and status where stories of my own where stories will be far and few between, but the world is filled nevertheless with stories, scaffolded with stories of youth and adventure and beauty.

I remember sitting with Marta over drinks and listening to her account of losing her virginity in that cruise ship gymnasium and picturing the things she told me--- the way the Jamaicans' dreads felt swishing across her bare back; the way the gym machine bench felt as she bent over it and hands straightened her body; the sense of being someone newly transformed when she walked barefoot and half-undressed back to her cabin. All those things became part of my memory palace, as did her grin there in the half-dark of the bar as she called up tales from almost a decade before.

My lovely blonde Kiwi friend wrote me once upon a time to say that her grey and rainy day had brightened:

 It has really brightened up actually! and i just had a lunch date, which was very fun.  i'm wearing black tailored pants, a blue and white striped shirt, and a black cardigan...very officey. I'm not wearing anything under either top or bottom, which I know you'll approve of.  My lunch date was s a friend of a friend, up & coming young lawyer. i will probably fuck him, but i do think i like him more as a friend. very funny and cute. I haven't been in any new beds recently, but now that summer is coming on,  I think I'll come out of my reclusiveness.

I loved (and still love) her self-assurance. I never did hear the follow-up to her story, though. Whatever became of the "up and coming young lawyer"? Did she sleep with him? What counts as "young"? And and as important as when and where and how she finally had sex with him is her own set of internal monologues: what were her decision protocols, exactly when and how did she decide to make herself available? I suppose I should follow up on her brief mention from three or four years ago. It matters that I have archives of stories, that I have information and backstories.

I do worry about something, though. I worry that I'll run out of stories, that voices one by one will fall silent out across the aether, that the world I'd like to write about (or experience vicariously) will narrow down to nothing.

I do worry about running out of things to write about. I worry about the world becoming empty. The last two years--- let me stress this ---have been a grim time here at the end of the American republic. It may be getting harder and harder to write about sex and delights and adventures. Everything in daily life seems jagged and depressive and threatening. Is there room right now for memories of lovers and encounters, of moments of excitement and exploration?

There are things that still catch my interest. A lesbian friend--- a very out-and-proud butch lesbian ---is angry at the trans community because, she says, the trans world wants to erase both lesbians as such and the idea of being butch. That's something interesting. That's a potential conflict that I'd like to hear more about. There are endless articles in the post-Weinstein world where women mock men who've written to say that they don't understand the rules of flirtation and seduction in a #MeToo world, and I've like to write about that particular male fear.

The world is made up of stories, not atoms. I don't want the world to empty out. I want there to be stories and histories and memories that I can share in, that I can write about. I do have a horror of being in a world where the memory palace has been emptied out, a world without stories.

Two One Six: Cruise

I've been using this space to archive stories from girls I've known over the years.

The last two years have been a bitter and depressing time, and so few people have had the energy to write about stories and encounters from the past. Nonetheless, even here as the American republic is imploding, there should be time to remember beautiful girls and their encounters.

It's probably too much to expect lovely friends to send me lots of new stories here, but there are still parts of the past worth archiving.

Years and years ago, a girl in Houston told me this story over drinks. Not a story sent me via letter or email, but one I'm trying to remember from a long conversation punctuated with tequila shots.

What I remember is that her name was Marta. She was a friend-of-a-friend, and I can't for the life of me recall how we ended up drinking at a rooftop bar on a spring night. I do recall her story, though.

Marta graduated high school, she told me, as a millennium girl, a graduate of the Class of 2001. Her parents had promised to send her to Europe that summer, but for some set of reasons, they ended up backing out of that--- probably worry that Marta would spend time in London and Paris partying and being debauched by foreign boys. So they took her with them on a cruise up the Alaskan coast. A disappointment to Marta, of course, who had been looking forward to expanding her horizons in Europe.

The trip itself began in Seattle and meandered up to Alaska. I've never been to Seattle or Vancouver, and I suppose I would like to see both cities. Alaskan landscapes might be lovely things, too. But I can understand how Marta was increasingly bored and restless. At some point she began chatting with some of the waiters and stewards. There were almost no people her own age on the cruise, and the waiters were at least sympathetic to her plight.

One night one of the waiters invited her to meet him later in the ship's gym. Marta went. He was Jamaican, in his later twenties, handsome, and had that accent.  The Jamaican part helped,  of course--- one more thing that would defy her parents' beliefs.  So Marta sneaked out to meet the Jamaican boy there amidst the gym equipment. It went pretty much like you'd imagine. They talked, laughed, drank from a bottle he'd brought. Smoked a bit of weed. Which led to making out on the gym floor and to Marta's shirt and shorts coming off and being flung away. Which led to her losing her virginity while on a gym machine bench. She was amazed that she was actually doing this, but even just out of high school she knew that while this wasn't a flat in Paris or London, it was pretty hot. This, Marta told me, was what whiskey and weed were for, for giving her the nerve to just defy her parents and do things none of her friends back in southeast Texas would do.

She did it again with the Jamaican boy the next night. She told me she loved sneaking back to her cabin, shoes in her hand, shorts barely buttoned, her long hair smelling of weed and sex. On the third night, the Jamaican boy brought a friend, another Jamaican. Marta told me that they listened to music on a boombox in the darkened gym, passed spliffs back and forth, and finally did a three-way thing. She wasn't scared, she told me. She'd pretty much guessed that the friend had come along exactly for a chance to join in. Years later, telling me the story, she told me that she'd almost laughed. The friend, she was pretty sure, had provided the first boy with the weed, and he was trading weed for a chance with the white teen girl. They were both handsome, she said, and it was her chance to finally do something in her life.

So there was a three-way. She recalled being bent over one the benches while the two boys took turns, and she remembered being on the floor with the new boy while he explored another entrance. That was Marta's phrase--- went in another door. I had to laugh at that. She said the major thing she remembered was that when she was bent over the bench , the two boys would shake their heads and whip her bare back with their long dreads. Years later, she remembered that as one of the great sensations of her life. She tried all the three-way positions as well as riding each boy and having her legs over their shoulders. She told me that she'd walked naked around the empty gym after sex, doing stretches. Being naked in a gym, being naked out in a risky place, she said, was actually easy. Her first Jamaican kept asking if she wanted her shirt, or at least her underwear, but Marta told them she was fine. She only wished there was a pool she could skinny-dip in.

Sitting there at a rooftop table, she tapped her glass on mine and told me that she hadn't made it to Europe until her last year at university, but that she had come home and told her friends, who were some mixture of appalled, amazed, and envious. She'd gone off to university at Austin in the fall and felt experienced and daring. I ordered more drinks for us and told her that I was very impressed. I did ask her my usual question--- after the three-way, when she walked home, was she wearing underwear? Nope, she said. She'd just left them in the gym. And the boys had had to urge her to put her shirt back on--- she'd wanted to walk topless for at least part of the way back to her cabin.

Am I as much of a wild girl as you hoped? she asked. All I could do was laugh and tell her that I was impressed. Very impressed.

Two One Five: Rantan

The girl who's the heroine in this story sent me this a long time ago. It was one of the earlier emails we exchanged. She'd have been twenty-one at the time, still at university doing a degree in English Lit. We were involved in the rituals of getting to know one another and exchanging our first sets of emails. We'd talked about books and films and visions of escape from where we each lived.  She'd have been in a rented house in those days; I was living in a house that I'd inherited and kept briefly. We'd flirted just a bit, and I was trying to get a feel for who she might be involved with, and what her adventures and past had been like. One April morning I did find this in my in-box:

I have been on the rantan lately. In the space of 8 days I had sex in an alley, I had a threesome in a hotel room, went home with a Maori forklift driver and was generally drunk & debaucherous.

I'm not usually like that. I'm in a very, very close group and it's not usual that I'd stray from it. But something happened a few weeks ago that threw me off. It was a man. But of course. A man who I've never written back about, never really talked about. There's nothing particularly special about him, or about me. Except I think we might be in love. A tragic, doomed kind of love. He told me he loved me. And all I wanted to do was be with him. But I know we can never be together. So I ran. But I'm sick of sad stories.

Tell me about when you were 21...

Years later, we talked about her adventures again. By then I knew what rantan was, and what it meant. Years after that first email arrived, she laughed and remembered this:

I remember that so well! I remember sitting on the Maori forklift driver's face while I took swigs of Jack Daniels from the bottle. I remember breaking into the hotel pool with the two much older men I was with, and swimming naked after they had taken turns fucking me, bent over the hotel bed. And I remember the alley, the grazes on my hands and knees the next morning.

The two older men, yes, I'd like to know more about that. One I think was the (married) owner or manager of the little hotel where the threesome happened.  She did make one further comment on the event:

Wow! Good memories. Yes, I still remember that week! The threesome was actually with the married man I was talking to you about today, and a friend of his. Whenever I saw his friend after that, which was usually every Friday night, he'd give me one of those metal cigarette tins full of weed. I did sleep with him again, but never in a threesome. I think my married man liked the idea of it more than the reality. I remember the Maori forklift driver too...he loved me sitting on his face. The part I can't remember is whatever (really, whoever) inspired this particularly debaucherous week...I shall have to browse my old LJ to try & figure out who exactly had broken my heart.....god, 21.

There are still stories left unexplored there. I wish I knew more. I wish I knew more about her life at twenty or twenty-one. I wish I knew who in fact did break her heart and send her off on her rantan, her "debaucherous week". I want to know about the alley, too. Grazes on hands and knees--- I want to know about alleyway sex positions.