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 Six One: Beliefs 5

A lovely blonde girl down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me about this story a few years ago.  I'll note that there are two competing versions of it. I'm having a difficult time believing in any of her stories now:

amazing weekend! the rugby sevens were in wellignton last weekend and there was a huge street party. i went in with caity and a few other friends...we drank shots all night long. i was wearing a very short black dress, jandals and my anchor necklace. we ducked into an underground bar where a bunch of kenyan players were drinking. they were very hot...we danced with them - caity got fingered on the dance floor.

you get kissing beads at the sevens, so we took theirs and ended up with quite a few more by the end of the night. they should have been re-named sucking cock beads! caity ended up back at a hotel with a kenyan. i went back to a different hotel with a manager of the scotland team. we met in the morning for coffee before heading back to bed together.

The second account is somewhat different. In this version, she and her girlfriend Caity left the club with the Kenyans and went to Oriental Beach---

we met them at a club in town and ended up taking them to oriental bay, a beach very close by. there were three, one was called daniel, not sure about the other two. we were both wearing very short skirts and singlets, no bras, no panties. caity and i were kissing in the cab...and caity was fingering my cunt. one of the kenyans was really into it...the other two were slightly shy initially. 

[When we got to the beach] caity and i started sucking one of their cocks, while the other two watched. we were topless, kneeling on the beach sucking his cock.  the kenyan kept saying 'fuck yeah, suck it bitch'. he was loving it. caity and i were fingering each other while we sucked his cock, then his friends came over and joined in. the kenyan cocks were huge and uncut and delicious. they wanted us to stand, bend over so they could both fuck our asses at the same time. we both screamed, but fucking loved it. the one fucking me was so big and was fucking me so hard i couldn't stand, he had to hold me up.  it felt amazing to just be fucked so hard by random cock. they did call us 'slut' and 'bitch', i don't recall them mentioning 'white', but we both wished they had said 'white slut' and 'white bitch'. 

i haven't told you my favourite part of the night...after caity and i had been fucked in the ass by the two quiet ones we crawled away and held hands and had to shit out all their cum. it felt amazing doing that with caity rubbing my clit. we went back over to them and they gave us one of their beers.

then daniel fucked my ass and quiet kenyan 1 fucked my cunt. i fucking love being DP'd darling. i came so hard.  quiet kenyan 2 fucked caity's cunt and came in her mouth. caity couldn't find her singlet afterwards and had to go home topless. we went home in a taxi from the beach. we were dripping with cum too. the taxi driver almost crashed because he couldn't stop watching us in his backseat. when he got home, we purged together, then drank some vodka, had a bath together then went to bed and licked each other's cunts.

The second version is basic porn, and harder to believe than the first, shorter account. I've no doubt she wrote it to impress me, or at least excite me, but I have to wonder why she chose the particular scenario. I'll also note that Sevens Week did exist in Wellington, so she may have been turning a weekend drinking bout into stories. But why those stories in particular? I'll also note that she didn't always use 'Kenyan'; for the more graphic bits she used a more racialized term. Again, is the word just less taboo in NZ, or was she hoping to excite me with another level of transgression?

I don't believe any of the second version, though I suppose that meeting a Kenyan rugby player named Daniel is at least a possibility.

I've known my blonde friend seemingly forever. I have emails from her dating back to 2006. After all these years, I do wonder if I can believe anything she's told me about anything at all.

Two Six Zero: Threads 4

In February 2011 my lovely, long-legged friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud emailed me to say:

darling,

its a rainy night here, and i'm texting a gorgeous girl who i'm meeting for a drink in an hour or so. i'm hoping to bring her home with me, and pass on some of my wisdom about corona bottles and pool cues. i shall share all details tomorrow!

She emailed me from her iPhone later that night to follow up---

her name is caitlin, she's 22. she's studying english lit & philosophy at uni. she drinks vodka tonics and smokes menthols. she carried 'the sun also rises' in her handbag.  

In May 2011 she wrote this:

caity pissed right in my mouth when i was licking her cunt one time. she told me it was coming, she moaned 'i'm going to piss' and i just opened my mouth, i so wanted to taste her. i swallowed twice! a couple of small-ish mouthfuls.

By June 2011 she was writing to tell me that

Caity has a bright pink strap on, she loves fucking me with it. It's not huge, it's about 6 inches, but it feels amazing in your cunt. I love the look on Caity's face when she has me tied to the bed and just fucks me.

There were men involved, too--- most notably an ex of my friend's, someone with a beach house in a Wellington suburb called Seatoun, someone she described as "cute and stubbly" ---with whom my friend and Caitie had a few threesomes.

It ended badly, though. Caitlin/Caity was much more gay than my friend, whose tastes centered on older men. Caity wanted my friend to commit to the relationship, and while my friend enjoyed the sex and thought Caity was beautiful and bright, she wasn't going to be openly gay and/or monogamous. She'd had flings with girls since she was fifteen or sixteen, and she took having bi affairs as just part of being a posh party girl. But she wasn't ready to be as gay as Caity. Caity was heartbroken and bitter, and blocked my friend's phone number. As far as I know, they haven't seen each other since 2012. A sad ending, I know.

They had something just under a year together. There were stories in there--- the two of them at Wellington Sevens, adventures with Scottish and Kenyan rugby players, a 21-year old boy who claimed to be a virgin,  possibly one of Caity's professors. Those are all stories I want to follow up on, threads I've needed to follow all these years. I'm jealous and envious, of course. Though perhaps more envious of the stories than of the adventures as such.

And I do wonder what other novels Caitlin / Caity kept in her handbag.

Two Five Nine: Threads 3

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

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

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

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

Two 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.

Two Five Seven: Threads 2

There are a few more stories left whose endings and meanings and backstory I'll never know. Details matter, I've always said, and it's the context and the backstory that shapes and gives real value to the stories.

A message to me from March 2007:

I have a lot of stories. But I am 21. Too young for such stories perhaps? Or at least too young for the number that I possess. I spent some time with a very rich, rather lovely man last week. He is 60 years old. He called me a baby. He held my arm and got me a Jack Daniels and shook his head and said, you're just a baby. And I wanted him. 

It would have been so easy to. He owns the hotel and bar that we drink at. I could have held his arm and he could have walked me through the bar, the restaurant, out a side door to the courtyard, past the pool and into his room. But that night, it didn't happen. Which is not to say that it won't sometime soon.

In January of 2008 there was one more mention of that night:

i looked below at what i'd written earlier this year. i wrote about the hotel owner that i wanted to fuck me. i spent my birthday with him a couple of weeks ago. we sat in a dark corner of the bar and talked. the drinks kept coming while we talked about affairs and money and our knees and hands grazed each others. my boyfriend was outside smoking and drinking, and if he hadn't been there i think i would have found it hard to resist going to his room. 

  
However did that play out? Over the years the girl who wrote that message hinted that she did in fact sleep with the older man who'd bought her the drink. He may or may not have owned the hotel where the bar was, and five or six years later the girl may or may not have slept with his grown son, too. And who was the 'boyfriend' she was supposedly with. He appears nowhere else in her emails. Loose ends there, threads and random mentions that go nowhere.

And this one, from February 2007:

i am vaguely drunk. a friend and i have been sitting in my kitchen all night drinking beer, talking about men and writing lists. i feel slighly fuzzy, although not as bad as last night. it's only midnight, an early night for me to be heading to bed. not that i'm entirely sure that's what i'm going to do. i have a feeling i am going to leave the house, without changing my clothes, and see who is at the Angus. i want jim to be there. i've known him since i was 19. he is so familiar yet always exciting. he will probably have gone home by now. he will be too drunk to pick me up so he will walk to meet me. and we'll go back to his place and have a few more drinks and he will fuck me and i never know if it's him i'm thinking of or if it's mike.

So many loose threads there, too. I know what the Angus was--- a hotel bar that was her regular hangout, someplace close to where she was living while at university, someplace maybe halfway between her rented student's house and where she'd grown up. Jim? I have no clue. There was another  Jim in her past, a "high-functioning alcoholic" she knew and had a disastrous affair with when she was 16 or 17. This post-19 Jim is someone new. Mike? Absolutely no clue. And..."not as bad as last night"? My friend was a party girl in her teens and early twenties,  but I've no real idea as to how often she was out drinking while at university, and while I know her tastes--- Maker's, Jack Daniels, tequila shots ---I have no idea how many people she went home with.  Or how her men broke down between the older men she always sighed over and the undergraduate boys she'd meet at parties.

One more passing mention of someone:

did i tell you about the gorgeous maori boy i'm fucking? he's tall, with short dark hair & lovely brown eyes, light brown-gold  skin... he works at the doggy day care place max goes to, so he picks him up & drops him off every day... he was dropping max home one day, and i was sitting in the garden drinking a beer. we started talking, and he showed he how he has taught max to play dead. max was his last drop-off for the day, so i asked him to stay for a drink... and he stayed the night.

That mention was from March 2013.  Max was (and still is) her much-loved golden retriever, and he'd still have been a puppy in those days. The Maori boy was never mentioned again, though her message makes me think he was in her bed more than once.

And then this, from January 2014:

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

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

Again, one single story. Did she ever say that he'd come back into town and given her a couple of more bags of weed or MDMA? I can't recall. No names, no details, and maybe no second act to the play.

Threads that hang loose from stories, pages missing at the end of the book--- stories I'll never get to really know or analyze. And...these days...stories whose believability I'll never be able to really assess.