Three Zero One: Kits

 Once upon a time, back in the later Noughts, I went mad one summer. That's easy enough to say now, and it would make a good opening for a story or a Spalding Gray kind of performance monologue. I wish I could be telling a lovely young companion about the story tonight, but this is the best I can do.

I went mad that summer--- a small bit of high drama. And what it was about was simple enough. It started off with travel toothbrushes.  Girls had written me about their Morning-After Kits, about the things they put in their purses before going out on Friday or Saturday nights, about the things they took with them just in case, just in case they ended up sleeping over with a handsome stranger. A travel toothbrush was key to everyone's list. Girls sent lists of items, but not one of them wrote to say that she'd bring a toothbrush or a change of clothes on a date with me just in case. None of them indicated at all that I was worth bringing a toothbrush for--- which may have been the one thing I think I wanted or needed. Make a list of cities--- NYC, Atlanta, SE Texas, Oregon, Baltimore, Montreal, Seattle: no one thought to say that to me. Not any of the girls I have longed for and cared about. Which told me all I needed to know. 

That summer I wrote that:

I will be checking purses in the doorway. If there's no toothbrush, no little vial of deodorant, no change of clothes...she doesn't get in the doorway. I will toss the purse or backpack onto the upper walkway and slam the door in her face. No toothbrush, no Mornings-After Kit, and I don't want her around me.

Be clear--- I don't necessarily expect her to use the toothbrush or the change of clothes. I don't necessarily expect her to stay over. That isn't the point. Not at all. The point is that she'd have the toothbrush with her--- just in case. Whether or not she stayed over, I'd want her to have the kit with her. Just in case. If she didn't toss the toothbrush into her purse, it means that I'm not Valuable enough even for the possibility of a first-date morning-after. It means that she'd already decided that I wasn't fuckable. So I will check for a toothbrush and slam the door in her face if it isn't there. 

It was that kind of summer. And that summer I bought two small travel toothbrushes and kept them on my work desk as magical items. I believed that if just had the two toothbrushes--- the kind that lovely co-eds would keep in a Morning-After kit,  then somehow, magically, girls would want to take Morning-After supplies with them when were with me. 

I still have travel toothbrushes with me-- I think that now I have a total of eleven travel toothbrushes, pristine and unopened. They have multiplied over the years. They're still here as magical items. Each of them is a talisman of some kind, a small futile frozen invocation of hope. Girls still haven't brought Morning-After Kits with them when they've gone out with me. 

Again, it's not the idea of the girl staying over and needing the Kit. It's the idea that she'd bring the Kit just in case,  bring it because I was Valuable enough to be someone she might need it for. The toothbrushes mean a lot--- they're still here as magical items, as ways to pray to be just-in-case Valuable.  I wish now, a dozen or so years later, that I'd never asked anyone about Morning-After Kits and what lovely twenty-something girls brought with them in case they hooked up with someone.

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 Two Eight: Kiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Six Three: Brown Leaves

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ninety-Eight: Finisterre

Memory says that it was sometime in my later twenties when it occurred to me that I would never be married or live with anyone in a romantic relationship. There was no particular trauma involved, no bit of drama. I suppose it was a gradual dawning, much like realising that, say, you've gradually chosen a favourite varietal of wine, and now your wine rack is filled with pinot noir rather than cabernet.  It had to be something like that--- just a quiet acknowledgment that this is the way your life is going to be.

I have in my life asked two girls to marry me. Both accepted, but the project never got much farther than some vague, nebulous idea that marriage might be out there somewhere. No rings exchanged, no plans made or save-the-dates sent. I'm not at all sure I'd have known what to do or how to act, the closer I got to a wedding date.

Those two occasions were later on, and they were nine years apart. Still, I'd never have known at either time in my life what one was supposed to do...or how to cope with what would happen afterwards. I suppose I never thought any girl could ever really want to stay with me, and I was certainly afraid that being married would be a big hit on my standard of living, that being married would make me realise how poor I really was. Marriage requires bringing social standing and stable finances to the table, and it requires some kind of understanding of how to live with another person. I've never had either of those things, and of course it's far too late now.

When I was in my later twenties, I was still in graduate school, working on my seemingly interminable doctorate. I used to blame being unmarried on having poured so much of my life into pursuing a PhD, but in all honesty I can't say that's true. I knew other postgraduate students who married, or who moved in with lovers. I never understood how it happened, though, or how people reached some kind of agreement. I'd had lovers at university,  certainly, but I could never have imagined how one made the jump from planning the next Friday night to planning living together after graduation.  Planning a four-day weekend in Manhattan was something I could do, but I never thought about how one planned a wedding or a life. I never thought about how one asked a girl to move in together. That always seemed like something that would be beyond me, like something that would be futile even to attempt. 

There are endless numbers of articles by authors both male and female that take it as a given--- or which very plainly declare ---that anyone who hasn't been married or lived in a romantic relationship by their early thirties is damaged and unmarriageable. One male author at (I seem to recall) Good Men Project actually did a long post about how only "losers" hadn't been married by their mid-thirties. Anyone who hadn't, the author claimed, was either a failure at his career and  couldn't hold up his economic end of a relationship, or was deeply damaged psychologically ("narcissist", "Peter Pan", "womanizer", "misogynist").  Since I of course have a lifelong history of immediately accepting as true any negative things anyone says about me, such articles leave me  depressed and bitter.

My fear of course is that I slipped into being unmarriageable or unfit for relationships without ever noticing what was happening. But a deeper fear is that I may have had the ability to create and maintain a long-term relationship and just never known it--- or, another way, that I missed the social lessons on what to do if planning a long-term relationship.

Even here in my later years, I tend to see a relationship as being about next Friday night or next Sunday brunch. My Young Companions and I can agree on a restaurant or a kind of wine or on sharing a Sunday NY Times over flat whites at the coffee shop, but I'd have no idea how to discuss anything that others seem to have taken for granted at twenty-four or twenty-five. 

I have no particular wish to be married. I'll say that. I wouldn't know how to live with another person, and I've read enough 19th-c. novels to understand how key money is in any long-term relationship. I can very nearly get by in genteel poverty alone. I have nothing to offer a girl who expects the kind of financial partnership that well-educated North Americans should have in the new century. 

I've certainly fallen in love since my mid-twenties, and I've told girls that I did love them.  Nonetheless, at some point I must've understood that I was now unmarriageable. I'd still to understand how it happened, though, and I'd like to know what I failed to grasp as social lessons at university and after. 

Twenty-Three: Clandestine

Spoke via Skype last night with a lovely friend in New Zealand. We chatted late into the night (or at least late into my night) about books and films. I've known her for something like seven years now, and I very much enjoy our conversations and correspondence.  She's been in a melancholy mood in the late austral summer, and she's been reading poetry and memoirs about lost loves and doomed affairs. I can sympathise with that, and we traded our memories of poetry and books and our own vanished lovers.

She did raise one issue that I think is worth discussing. She's twenty-six now, a Literature graduate who ended up as a financial analyst. She's a beautiful and intelligent girl, and from a moneyed family. She's never had to hide her bisexuality or her party girl weekends. She's always been very open and nonchalant with me about her adventures and preferences. We were talking about her previous weekend---- the Sevens Street Party in Wellington ---and about her dalliances with rugby players (Kenyan, Scottish)  when she stopped and said that it was odd, thinking about it, about what she could tell people and what she couldn't. She looked at me out of the screen and shrugged. She could talk openly about her girlfriends, or about the oral favours she gave handsome rugby players, but there were things she had to hide.

She did have a point. There are still preferences that a girl has to hide to keep her reputation, even in as open a place as Wellington. No one, she says, even her family, ever made her feel bad about being bi. And in her social set, weekends are for partying and one-night stands with handsome or beautiful partners. But she does have to hide some things. She's always had affairs, and often long-term ones, with older men. Handsome boys in their twenties are for party games, men in their forties and fifties are for affairs--- she's felt that way since she was in her days as a bad girl in a school uniform. She had to hide things then, of course--- there would be legal issues (I've no idea what the age of consent rules are in New Zealand). But she had to hide them even when she was an undergraduate and "of age", and she has to hide them now.  People accept her giving oral favours for rugby team shirts as perfectly a part of a Sevens weekend, something girls laugh about amongst themselves over drinks at the Polo Club. But a lover of fifty still draws disapproval and sharp hints that there's something psychologically wrong with her.

I've heard that from girls before about older lovers. Needless to say, as the older male in relationships, I've been regarded as the villain by outsiders. I'm rather used to that. My young companions have had to face derision and, perhaps worse, sham-sympathy from third parties. A friend in Montreal always told me that she felt as if she belonged to  a secret tribe, to a group that had to be as closeted even now as she'd have had to be as a lesbian a generation ago. My Montreal friend told me that talking about the evening she'd had at dinner or out for drinks with an older lover was often out of the question, since so many people at her university treated her as if she needed an intervention and therapy, and some bluntly asked her if she'd been abused as a child.

It's not just age-disparate relationships, of course. My friend in Wellington tells me things that I've heard from other girls over the years here in the States or Canada. Being female and submissive is one of the last closeted things. It's hard for a girl to admit that she's sexually submissive, that she likes playing that role. Lovely friends have called me from university residence halls and from classroom buildings to tell me that they were alternating between tears and cold rage over the things that had been said to them once they'd described themselves as sexual submissives--- not something an educated, mentally stable, intelligent girl is supposed to be these days. One of them told me she'd been described as a "gender traitor" who was complicit in the oppression of women ("rape culture"). My friend in New Zealand tells me her greatest and most tightly-held secret (known only to her ranking girlfriend and the older lovers of her past) is that she likes to be slapped during sex, slapped right at the moment of orgasm. She would never, she says, have let any of the girls at university know that. It wouldn't have been a mere kink, like owning a collection of vibrators or naughty lingerie; it would have drawn instant suggestions that she seek therapy. That particular thing--- being slapped right at the moment of orgasm ---isn't even that rare. At least I've heard a fair number of girls tell me that they liked the idea. I suppose I should be pleased that girls tell me these things, and I am--- I can be both tempter and confidant.

Two things, then, that lovely girls have told me they need to be closeted about, that they need to hide. For all our presumed openness, we still force some people into the closet. We still treat others' perfectly valid choices as markers for social disgrace. If you're reading this, do let me know what you think. What have you had to hide? And are my friends correct about those two things--- older lovers and sexual submission being things that even educated, bright, self-aware girls have to hide these days?