Three Nine One: Housewives

 I've mentioned erotic art before-- specifically, the graphic novels of Michael Manning, which began to appear in the 1990s. Manning's stories (e.g., Tranceptor, The Spider Garden, Hydrophidian, Cathexis) are...gender-fluid cyberpunk goth erotica. Something like that, in any case. The artwork itself is excellent, and it does remind me a bit of Matt Howarth's sci-fi work. 

Manning's work is hard to get these days. There aren't very many publishers of erotic graphic novels left, and credit card processors are refusing to process payments these days for erotica of any kind. The new century is a place where Gen Z "influencers" look with puritanical disdain on erotica, a place where sex scenes in novels (especially in "romantasy") are (non-ironically) called "smut" and dismissed as politically suspect. 

It's really very hard to find good erotica these days. I've been told that there's at least some new trans and queer erotica being written or drawn, but those are alien genres for me. And even in those genres, visual erotica seems to be suspect-- if only because beauty itself is now suspect, and no one wants to be accused of "fetishizing" bodies or preferences. 

Having said that, I'll note that I found a series of rather good erotic graphic novels from the early Noughts. The series is called "Housewives at Play", and it seems to have appeared from c.2000 through c. 2008. I've found a website (joinforjoy.com) that has several issues posted, and they're worth looking at. As best I can tell, the issues form a more or less ongoing story. The posted issues begin with Nr. 4 in the series, and form a (largely) connected story up through Nr. 18. I haven't been able to find the first three issues, and the story wasn't complete by Nr. 18. The website has most, but not all, of the issues between Nr. 4 and Nr. 18. I can infer how the storyline began, but I have no idea how (or if) it ended. I do wish it was still around.

The artist and creator of "Housewives at Play" is supposed to be "Rebecca". I have zero idea if "Rebecca" was actually female, and I know nothing at all about the person behind the name. The series was published by Eros Comix in Seattle, and I don't know whether the publisher is still in business. If anyone out there over the aether knows anything about the publisher, please do pass it along.

What is there to say about "Housewives at Play"? Well, the art is much better than usual. "Rebecca" did have an eye for lovely women, and her "My Girls" special issue does some excellent pen-and-ink portraits of her main characters. The body types are very much to my taste-- tall, toned, slender, and leggy. The characters don't wax, but they do neatly trim their pubic hair, so we're not stuck with a 1970s Land of Bush O'Plenty look.  The stories began in black and white, but seem to have transitioned to colour at some point. Rebecca's art is at least as good as anything in mainstream comics art.

The stories? Well, semi-comic suburban/pop culture lesbian BDSM is probably the best description. (I couldn't bring myself to use "tongue-in-cheek" here. I just couldn't.) The main character is a bored, 40-year old suburban housewife named Catherine Mitchell. One day, out of nowhere, Catherine is violated by her best friend Patty and turned into a lesbian sex slave for Patty and Patty's newlywed neighbor Beth. Catherine then acquires her teen daughter's best friend Jennifer as her own sex slave, although Jennifer and Catherine's beautiful daughter Melissa (both carefully and repeatedly described as eighteen) are themselves secretly a couple. Hilarity ensues, as does lots of transgressive sex. 

At some point, Catherine, Melissa, and Catherine's incestuous younger sister Lynn are kidnapped by the staff at a local Victoria's (errr..."Veronica's") Secret and sold to teen pop princess Bratty Sneers (Brittany Spears, obviously), teen idol Kandy Korn (Mandy Moore?) and country music idol Fate Will (Faith Hill, I assume). There's also Catherine's ex-lover Stephanie, a Native American stripper/escort who dances under the name Princess Poke-My-Hiney...plus random beautiful guest stars of 18-21 who are all seriously sapphic, blithely promiscuous, and open to trying pretty much anything involving lesbian BDSM. Males rarely appear, although there is a subplot where Fate Will orders a dozen of her ranch hands to impregnate Melissa so that Fate's husband Grim (Tim McGraw) will return from touring and think Fate's given him a child...and Fate won't have to risk her looks and figure with a pregnancy or allow anyone male to have sex with her. 

The stories are hot, yes. They're also fairly funny, and all parties, top and bottom, enjoy the BDSM. Even the subplot where Melissa is being bred by the cowboys is only an excuse for Princess Poke-My-Hiney to rescue her and have hot sex with Melissa ("Gosh, her taste reminds me of Catherine...I wonder where Cathy is these days!"). Everyone loves (extremely) large plastic strap-on dildos, and all actual males are mocked for having tiny penises. All the girls have foot fetishes, too-- which may or not say something about "Rebecca", or at least say something about fashionable fetishes in the Noughts. 

If I have any real criticism it's that the various girls who are topping Catherine or Melissa or Lynn or Jennifer do a lot of sexual humiliation based on slurs ("Get over here, you cunt-loving little lezzie slut pig"). That part seems...unnecessary and mean-spirited. I wanted Melissa and/or Jennifer to tell the older characters that they were all "lezzie sluts" and that there was nothing at all wrong with that...and that they were proud bottoms, but not "pigs". I also had to wince a bit when Fate Will hires Princess Poke-My-Hiney as an escort and makes her talk in 1930s cowboy movie-stereotypical "redskin" dialect. Beyond that, "Housewives at Play" is fun.

Amazon does have some collected editions of "Housewives at Play", but they're asking something like $140 for a collection of issues Nr. 1-4. I like the series, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a paperbound graphic novel that's nearly twenty years old. 

If any of you out there over the aether know anything about the publishing history of "Housewives at Play" or about its author/artist, I hope you'll let me know. I'd like to know if "Rebecca" ever finished the story, and I'd like to see more of her art.

Next time I post here, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into why it's no longer possible to have any sexual preferences and why kink-shaming is now seen as perfectly okay. I want to write about why I can't imagine ever asking a partner to do anything specific or ever telling a partner about any particular interests I might have. I once heard a gay acquaintance described as "so far deep in the closet he can see Narnia", and I want to write about how that phrase can be applied across the gender-orientation spectrum these days...and about how we seem to be losing any sense that sex is worth doing, let alone exploring.

Three Five Nine: Repetition

 There's a question that's been haunting me lately. 

In its simplest form, it's this: how do you acquire fantasies? How do you create new fantasies? How do you re-program your dreams and desires?

There's the old Freudian term repetition compulsion, and it bothers me.  What do you do when you realize that your fantasies never really change, that you play out the same scenes over and over?

There may be some minor changes, some tweaks-- slightly different furniture, slightly different clothes, slightly different time of day. But that's all minor editing, no more than tweaks. I was brought up to be an academic, and I'm used to going back and polishing things I've written. A slight change in adjectives, a slight rearrangement of paragraphs, streamlining a sentence. But that's all minor, all in the service of telling a given story. The underlying story itself never changes.

These days there are a couple of ongoing fantasies that play out in my head. The basic plots are the same-- the couple that should have no chance of meeting or interacting happen to end up encountering one another and talking themselves into bed. Lots of dialogue, of course. Always lots of dialogue. Talking is always a key part of sex for me. And the dialogue is always polished up, always tweaked. 

In the ongoing films-in-my-head there's always a speech delivered by a particular, very tall, fashion model. She's explaining what's about to happen, explaining it to my character. Look, she says, this is a big city. Every night lots of people who are just totally random, who you'd never think could even be in the same places, happen to meet  and end up going home together. It's just odds. Sometimes the odds fall out one way.  I've worked on that speech a long time. Some things matter to me. That explanation for a meeting matters to me.

My mind works like that. I need explanations. I need to know how and why.

I also need to be able to find new fantasies. New things need to happen, characters need to change, characters need to dive into new experiences. I'm given to watching the same films or reading the same books over and over. I'll watch the same film scene over and over just for a particular moment, a particular emotional response. I need to try new things,  even if only inside my head. 

This goes to the issue of how people acquire kinks and fetishes, of how people acquire new desires. Not just new human objects-of-desire, but new stories and new story arcs and plots. 

I like the current films-in-my-head, I like the point of the story, and I like the fantasy girl rather a lot. But I don't want to be stuck forever in a loop. I want there to be new stories.  I want there to be new avenues for adventure, excitement, pleasure.

What I don't how is how to leverage that. I can list things-- activities, places, partners, games --I'm interested in, but those lists don't translate into scripts and scenes in my head. I'm not sure how to look at a description of a kink and then make it something of my own. 

What I need is some incentive to make changes, to try out new adventures.

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)... or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things... but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

I'd love to see Liberty's journal and its "Older Men" chapter. She always saw affairs as learning experiences, and she was very earnest about that. It mattered to her that each lover, male or female, left her with more knowledge about the world. And, yes, I'd love to know what all those things were. I'd love to know what categories she put experiences into. I think I'd especially like to read the very early entries, to read the entries were Liberty was deciding what she wanted to learn and what avenues she wanted to explore.

I wrote this, too--

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

I do wish I knew how each of them defined "experience". The stories Levin and Liberty and my NZ friend Jill told me were often extremely hot, but what I'd like to do is get at the underlying structures, to get at the decisions each of them made to seek out and be open to experiences. Why this particular lover, this particular thing? I'd very much like to know what Liberty's chapter on Older Men says--- what makes someone worth/not worth being a learning experience. I'd like to go through her checklist of things she did to manage Older Lovers, to properly utilize them. 

Backstories matter, just as details matter. The why of something is as important as the thing itself. 

I'd also like to read the letters another friend has been sending out during the season of the Red Death. You know the backstory:

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do. 

I'd love to read those letters, to read what she thanked them for teaching her. One of the letters I know would be to the much older man who told her when she was sixteen that she needed to stop being afraid and actually make the effort to be admitted to Oxford. That affair re-shaped her life, and I'm taking it for granted that she wrote to tell him that. She told me once that what she has now--- a business of her own, a resume that includes political consultancy, a couple of terms as a town councilor ---owes so much to the older lovers who told her that she was capable of doing anything, who took her to bed and talked about the world. I'd very much love to read those letters with her memories. Yes...I wish I was a recipient of one of those letters. I do envy anyone who was worldly and knowledgeable enough to be chosen as one of her mentors. 

Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman... and whatever those things are called in French. I'd like to know how Levin and Liberty and Jill constructed the tales of their lives--- my friends in Montreal and Edinburgh, too. How have they structured what Older Lovers taught them? What things in particular did they want to learn, what things did they learn, what checklists and outlines have they drafted...? 

Experiences have to be crafted into stories, into essays, That's always key for me: taking experience and trying to make it mean something. Liberty's journal, maybe whatever was in Levin's Pentalic sketchbooks and notebooks--- those are all things I'd love to know.

Two Seven Six: Threads 10

Let's begin tonight with a poem by C.P. Cavafy. The poem has been a favourite of mine for a long time, though in the last few years it's begun to mean more and more to me:

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

I've been writing about stories lovely young companions from my past have told me--- tales of their adventures and encounters, accounts of their experiences and the things they learned. I do note that while these are all girls I've known, the stories are never about me. The stories are never about adventures and encounters I shared with them. If you're thinking that I'll ever write about those moments, those nights, then you're bound to be disappointed.

I won't be writing about any encounters and adventures of my own--- or at least I won't be writing about details. I was brought up to believe that a gentleman, even an aging roué, is bound to certain rules, and discretion is a key rule.  I'll also note that as a straight male of a certain age ("pale, male, and stale") recounting my own adventures seems unpleasantly like bragging. Boasting about one's long-ago conquests--- let alone one's current bedmates ---has something both distasteful and sad about it. Well, I say that as a general proposition, but of course I'm applying that only to males, and to myself first of all. This is the age of the gender wars, after all. Male sexual desire is seen as always having a subtext of creepiness. So don't expect anything like details about my own life and adventures. Being male (and being of a certain age)  means that any recounting of one's own adventures leaves you open to contempt and derision. I'll recount stories lovely girls in my life have told me about themselves; I won't talk about the details of my own encounters.

I wrote back at the end of 2018 about a lovely girl I'll call Liberty. Not her name, of course, but she did remind me a bit of a younger version--- a younger, strawberry-blonde version ---of a British actress/model named Liberty Ross. I wrote about her adventures in a kayak shop--- her first encounter with an older man.  She'd told me the story while she and I kept company that summer and autumn. She was a delight, and her stories were brilliantly exciting. I do remember the first time she told me about the kayak shop adventure--- the two of us out at a rooftop bar, Liberty sitting cross-legged in skinny jeans, telling me about how she first discovered older men and grinning at my obvious fascination. She was a bartendrix girl, and she knew how to tell stories. She had that hippie girl earnestness, too--- her stories were always straightforward and detailed. Once at the bistro where she tended bar she wrote something on a notepad and pushed it across to me. NSNL, it said: No Shame No Limits. She pointed at me with the pen she was using. Remember that, she said. Live it. 

I don't know where she is right now. She always did have a habit of vanishing suddenly. Back to New Mexico? Back to the Pacific Northwest? All I can do is wonder if she'll re-appear here downtown, or if one day I'll get a letter in violet ink, postmarked Santa Fe or Vancouver.  Or Dharamsala, for that matter. She wrote me letters back in the day--- something of which I approved very much indeed. She wrote me about wicked things she'd done and told me to keep the letters safe and think about her years later. Sometimes, too, after she'd fallen asleep here, I'd sit up with my notebooks and try to set down the stories she'd told me. I wanted to keep them in my own archives, wanted to be able to remember her and the things that made her so amazingly alluring.

I'll be re-telling some of her stories here. Suitably redacted, of course. But always honest. Liberty wouldn't have had it any other way. We did share that, the belief that all our lives are made up of stories, that stories matter. So I will be telling stories about her life, about older men in her life and about girls she loved, too. There are stories about threesomes in sleeping bags and in her environmental science labs late at night.  Stories about hotels in Vancouver and art galleries in Taos. I just have to find ways to tell them that would catch her voice.

It does occur to me that I'll be telling stories about Marsha, too. She did spend time in my bed when I was young, telling me about her own adventures. The two stories I've told about her have both been about cars. I just realized that. The Greek charmer in Thessaloniki had a classic MG, and she ended up being groped by a small town cop in a police cruiser. The stories I have in mind are mostly about cars, too. There was someone here who had a sports car, too--- a Triumph, I think. She always loved sports cars. The man here was older, too, maybe twenty-four when she was sixteen or seventeen. I remember that she was impressed by the Triumph and by the fact that he was a diver, an underwater welder on offshore platforms. There are stories  she told that will be spun here as threads.

Her stories--- like Liberty's, like stories from my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand ---are worth recounting and preserving. My own stories, well...not so much. Liberty was in my bed and life for months. Marsha and I were off-and-on bedmates for much of my senior year, and we saw one another sometimes over our respective semester breaks. My stories with them, though...those tales aren't for me to tell. Their stories, though... Their stories are worth presenting.

Two Seven Five: Threads 9

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Seven Four: Threads 8

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it) 

She also wrote me to say that

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!

I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things. 

I'd like to know much, more about other stories she's mentioned in passing. One of her close friends was a girl named Sarah who was a competition fencer--- good enough to have competed on a national  level and to have gone abroad to study sabre. Sarah is supposed to have gone to some kind of high-level fencing camp in Shanghai at 16/17 and had a notorious affair with a well-known and much, much older fencing coach. My friend tells me that Sarah is now a physiotherapist in Sydney, but the two girls are still in touch and still remember the volleys of emails they sent one another about their exploits when they were 15-18.  

There was also mention of a girl called Kelly, who my friend looked up to as a role model for wickedness with Maori or Islander boys:

Kelly at 14! She was so advanced for her age...and she loved all the islander boys. She was very hot...tall, blonde, skinny. I think she got pregnant to an islander at 17 or 18 & moved to Australia.

I'd love to know so much more. There are two questions here, of course. 

1. How much of her past is real? Her stories over the last dozen years and more have been deliciously hot and wicked, but how much of any of them can I believe? 

2. What happens if ever she becomes monogamous and domestic-partnered? Will she stop telling stories from her past? Will she reject her Bad Girl days? Will she regret them. And...will she regret telling me stories?

Two Six Nine: Levee

Let's call this a second story about the girl in my last entry, the girl at the Electra Palace in Thessaloniki. I have a few stories acquired from her back long ago, and I do want to archive them here. In the end, we're only the stories we tell. I've believed that for a lifetime.

This story isn't from very long after the summer she had the fling with the Greek boy with the vintage MG. If my memory holds, it happened during spring break the following year, when she was back in the city from Colorado School of Mines. I only heard it later, and I was never quite clear on the details. Marsha was never like the girl from New Zealand whose stories I've recounted here--- she wasn't someone who wrote everything into a journal, someone who thought her life was something to structure into a narrative.  The story itself is a scary one, and very much a #MeToo tale, if not something a bit worse.  I offer that as a warning.

From what I was able to gather, she was back home on spring break. She'd driven out of the city to visit a friend at a college maybe an hour's drive west over the river, and was coming back that evening. She took the older state highway and not the interstate highway. That led over a bridge and through the edge of a small town that had two points of notoriety. There was a restaurant-bar on the highway that had once been the center of a scandal involving illegal gambling, bribery, and half a dozen state legislators. And the town was a major speed trap. You'd come down from a bridge over a small local river and the speed limit suddenly went down to 30 mph. The town made a fortune in traffic fines.

In short, Marsha was stopped and ticketed for speeding coming off the bridge. The local fines were painfully high, and all the more so if you were doing 20 mph or more over the limit. Marsha was terrified of having to tell her parents she'd been ticketed...and at having to ask for a couple of hundred dollars for the enhanced fine. She told no one about the ticket and then drove back over a couple of days later to see if there was anything that could be done to reduce the fine or take driving courses or whatever. That strikes me as painfully naive now, but she was only eighteen, and as a posh girl she might've been sexually experienced since fifteen or sixteen, but nonetheless sheltered from a great many things.

The arc of the story is crushingly obvious. She went to the police station in the small town late one afternoon and talked to one of the deputies about her ticket. He assured her that while the town court was very, very serious about speeders, she had no previous tickets and maybe something could be done. He then invited her for coffee at the little diner down the street so they could talk about what she could tell the court. She got into the police car, and the deputy drove up onto the nearby levee and  tried exactly the obvious thing--- grabbing her, kissing her, and getting a hand up under her shirt. She was braless, as she usually was, and that encouraged him to grope her more. She did tell me that her nipples hurt for the next couple of days, and that he'd left bruises on one breast.

I always obsess about details, but she didn't give me many. I'm still not clear on what she was wearing--- a long-sleeved tee or a polo shirt? Jeans or shorts? I knew her tastes enough to know that she loved polo shirts and had a thing for long-sleeved tees with college logos. When I've played the story in my head, I do imagine her in either a Colorado School of Mines tee or a band tee from whatever she was listening to that spring. Yes, I do understand that worrying about the details of wardrobe isn't a good thing on my part.

In any event, he groped her breasts and tried to kiss her...and tried to go further, to pull open the shorts or jeans she had on and get them down. I'm not sure what happened next. Marsha always said that she'd panicked and begun to cry and hyperventilate and the deputy panicked, drove her back to her car, and more or less shoved her out of the patrol car. She never said anything about what happened with the ticket itself, and for all I know the panicked deputy made it vanish. I certainly don't know what else happened in the patrol car. Did she kiss him? Did he make her give him head? Did any of it go further? Did her jeans or shorts come off? Had she offered him a blowjob to get the ticket fixed? I only had hints from her, and a couple of very brief mentions from the one local friend she told about it all. My own reading of the hints is that something happened, but after all these years, I'll never know what.

Now it probably says a lot about me (and says nothing good) that when I first heard about what happened, what went through my mind was that it was a scary-yet-hot story and that I wanted the story fleshed out. That might be understandable at eighteen, but...now? It is almost a porn video plot, though I'm sure that things like this do happen to young, terrified, vulnerable girls and that it's all a gross abuse of power and, yes, a crime. Nonetheless, even decades later, I do want the details and want to craft it all into a story. Needless to say, while I might've asked her about the details when we were both twenty or so and having a drunken reunion while home from our schools, I'd never be able to ask her now, even if I knew where she was. But the events are still there in my head, and I still see what happened as a film-in-the-head.

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 Five Six: Threads

I need to find more essay topics for this blog.

When I first started writing here, I wanted to devote myself to writing about issues of sex and its social penumbra here in these latter days. I wanted to write essays about what sex, romance, and all the associated rituals were like nowadays. My idea was to write as myself, as a gentleman of a Certain Age looking at the new world. I wanted to do social commentary, or at least record my own thoughts about things. I'd hoped when I began that I might attract comments and responses and find interlocutors with whom I could have long, rambling discussions about the subjects in my posts.

I still hope for that--- for followers and civil yet in-depth discussions. But I need new essay topics. My hope is that lovely readers will offer up suggestions, that they'll suggest things I might write about. Over the last three years we've all moved away from writing about sex and romance and begun writing about the nightmare of American and global politics. I can understand that: we live in a nightmare time. Yet sex and romance do still exist, and they remain as major topics in people's lives. So I hope that my readers out over the aether will leave suggestions. What should I write about? Are there books, articles, films, events that should become the topics of essays here? I am open to suggestions.

There are still stories that I want to use here, to save here, things I want to remember. There are stories that follow a classic narrative arc--- stories whose endings I know, stories I can see as a story. And there are stories whose full arc I'll never know, whose endings remain elusive. Let's look at a couple. The first one is something a friend wrote me four or five years ago.

The guy with the yacht was Jonny. He lived on his boat at the marina. I really liked him, and wanted him to be an 'official boyfriend'. He was smart and funny and cute. He had a science degree, and had worked all over the world as a boat builder. I desperately wanted things to work out between us, and at the time really thought he would make a great partner (maybe this was just compared to the other men in my recent past). But...he did have a few issues -- alcohol abuse, depression. He drove his car into the harbour in a suicide attempt a year or so after we broke up/stopped sleeping together. He was ok, but got sent to the psych ward and charged with dangerous driving. We are still friends and catch up for coffee now and then and I only want the best for him. 

We went on a few sailing trips together - down to the Sounds, each time in the summer. The Cook Strait crossing was a bit rough for me at some parts. But it was beautiful...we saw lots of dolphins, and it was just incredible to be out on the open water. Two of the trips we booked a house to stay at, and one trip we slept on the yacht. He loved going down on me, and was fucking good at it. For years after I wished we had become something more, and I was convinced I could have helped him. But I think sometimes you just have to help yourself and let people go.

She noted that on New Year's Day of 2013 she'd woken up in bed with him on his boat, and that four months later he'd tried to kill himself. I'm trying to decide if the story is a sad one. She ran into him again last year--- discovered he was project managing the renovation of a big house in her new neighbourhood. She said hullo--- they hadn't seen each other around in a while ---and everything was cordial, but she didn't discover whether he was still boatbuilding or still owned/live aboard a boat. I suppose I felt a twinge of jealousy reading about that (did they sleep together again, even if just for old times' sake?), but the other thing I felt was a kind of emptiness. Am I someone a lovely girl would remember years later? Would she say hullo to me? Am I--- have I ever been ---someone's story? I do want to have been important enough to be remembered, but I suspect I haven't been...and won't be. And of course I'll never know the full story of her adventures at the marina or in Marlborough Sounds.

From October 2012---

 It's much less gloomy today.It has really brightened up actually! and i just had a lunch date, which was very fun.i Today I 'm wearing black tailored pants, a blue and white striped shirt, and a black cardigan...very officey. And he is 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 never heard about her lunch date, never heard about the lawyer again.

She wrote me a year later about another lawyer, this one much older:

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

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

Drinking bourbon feels like coming home.

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



She saw him again a bit later:

After our wonderful wicked exchange, I ended up in town until 3am, then ended up at the apartment of the lawyer with the impressive library, got an hour of sleep then washed my face and went to work. Was asked to attend a meeting with the partners...I almost had a fucking breakdown.

I do wonder what became of him. She wrote that he'd made her reach orgasm five times one night and that his library was impressive. I have to know what "impressive" means--- if he really collected books or it that was a euphemism.

And I need to know if Alex the Florist is her usual club nights alias. I need to know how she created Alex the Florist and what personality she constructed for her alter ego.

She told me this fragment back in 2011, a story from when she was 17, back in 2002-2003:

I slept with this guy I met at a club...he was in his early 30s. He gave me E and took me back to his apartment. After we fucked and he fell asleep I stole 2 books and snuck out...


One of the two books was a Steinbeck; she remembered that. "Cannery Row", she thought, though she wasn't sure. Somehow it does matter to know what the other book was.

Stories here with loose ends, with endings that remain unclear.  I hate story arcs that go nowhere. I wish that I could sit with her and pour drinks and ask her about these things. I love her stories, and always have. I just wish I knew more about contexts and settings and the way things played out in the long run.

Two Three Five: Identities

Now's here's a complicated and odd tale I heard today--- a long email from an old friend in a distant city. She has a long-term friend there, someone male, someone of a certain age, someone whom she's known professionally and quasi-romantically for years. Quasi-romantically meaning that she's slept with him a few times over he years. I've never met him, though I've heard her mention his name before.

She'd written me about him back a couple of years ago to say that she was amazed, that her friend had taken her to a very expensive restaurant, ordered the kind of wine I'll never be able to afford, looked at her with grave intensity, and told her that all the time he'd known her, all the way back to high school, he'd had a Secret Life. She was amazed. She prides herself on her gaydar, and while the circles she moves in socially have a substantial number of gay men, she'd never guessed that her friend was among them. Well, he told her about all the byzantine details of his Secret Life: adventures, encounters, older (and moneyed) lovers when he was quite young, haut-gay clubs and parties. She didn't know the name, but I'd have said it was all very like early Andrew Holleran, very "Dancer From The Dance" (the Seventies novel that was tagged as "The Gay Gatsby"). Great stories, apparently. She was entranced by it all, and spent hours on the phone late at night listening to his memories, commiserating with him about older men he'd loved and lost as a boy, sighing over his memories of a time thirty-odd years ago when being gay still had an air of the forbidden.

There was just one small thing, she told me. She'd found out this week that...well...he'd been lying all along, that he'd never had a life amongst the gay demimonde. She wasn't clear that he'd ever been gay or had a gay (or bi) life at all. As best she could tell, it was all a complete imposture.

The question she had was...why? Why had he done it? Was he hoping she'd introduce him to a chic gay world he'd been too afraid to join on his own? Was it some ploy to get her (or other girls) to sleep with him to, well, reclaim him for the Home Team?

My own understanding is that he's gone to ground: blocked her number, vanished from social media, disappeared from the places she thought she might find him. That's almost as strange as the imposture. My friend and I have both known people who pretended to be rich, or Ivy-educated, or British, or artists. We've certainly known gay men who pretended (even now, in the Year Nineteen) to be straight. But this was new.  I'd known girls who pretended to be lesbians to ward off unwelcome male advances, but that's only tactical and temporary, not like creating a whole life, complete with named lovers. And I'd never run across anyone male pretending to be gay when they weren't, even in the here-and-now.

I've always been a fan of literary impostors (Fr. Rolfe, Kurban Said, Sir Edmund Backhouse), but I don't understand quite what his pay-off would've been. Party invitations? He already had those professionally. Entree to chic events? He had those, too. A baroque way to leverage presumed gayness to get girls? That would just be awfully complicated. Some weird fetish about imaginary gay sex? That would be even more complicated, although he did spend lots of time telling her all about the details of encounters and adventures back into his early teens. Maybe it was just boredom and frustration with a  haut-bourgeois life edging its way into his fifties.

Maybe--- maybe ---it was a life he'd longed for, or one that he'd created and come to believe. That happens, I suppose, with lots of complex impostures.  There's a question--- how far did he take the imposture? Did he ever take a male lover? Was there ever someone on his arm--- and if so, did his companion know or suspect what was happening?

My friend told me that she thought I could tell her something, that all those biographies and thriller novels I read about people who've taken up masks and new lives would give me some clue as to why her friend had done this. She's hurt as much as anything else, hurt and puzzled and halfway afraid that her friend is having some sort of dissociative breakdown.

My own questions here are probably self-evident. How did he craft the stories? Where was he getting the names and places? And, too...how did my friend find out? How and when did she see through the imposture? I'd really like to know that. Did he tell her? Did she find out on his own? Did friends of them both reveal something to her? What gave the game away?

I am perplexed  by it all, and saddened for my friend. If you're out there anywhere over the aether, read this and tell me what you think. Why this imposture? What does it mean? What would the backstory be? I'm hoping someone out there has thoughts on this.

Two Two Five: Paper

I've been thinking about love letters.

In the past few years, I've received a handful of emails that were romantic enough, and a few that were deeply passionate or erotic. I can't recall when I last received an actual love letter.

I do want to say that I miss love letters. I miss receiving them, and of course I miss writing them. I miss ink on paper, and I miss opening a letter from a lover. I miss the days when young companions wrote me and used wax seals on the envelopes.

I may still have one or two of the emails lovers have sent me since the early or mid-2000s. Twenty years ago I probably would've printed them off and saved them, but these days there's something suspicious about anyone who'd do that. Most of the email exchanges I've had with lovers are long gone, though. It's far easier to delete emails when an affair ends than it is to throw out (or ritually burn) letters from an ex-lover.  It's painful to go back and read over letters from lost loves, but destroying the letters or deleting the emails leaves a gap in your life and history.

Love letters were a kind of proof, a kind of archivable evidence that I had value to someone. I did archive any that I received, and one of my regrets is that over all these years and so many moves, the boxes with letters from girls who did once desire me have gone missing.

I know that I wrote letters to girls with whom I was involved, and I can still remember some of the more intense or passionate ones. I can remember choosing the right stationery and sitting up late at night with a fountain pen and hand-mixed inks to write a lover. These days, though, I'm not sure I'd do that. I think that these days I'd be hesitant to risk writing a love letter. These days--- in the days of the gender wars ---I'd be afraid that love letters would be used against me.

When I was twenty or thirty I would never have been afraid of that. That I loved someone, that I felt desire for her, that I imagined ways that the two of us could make love--- I'd have owned those things in a heartbeat.  I couldn't have imagined being ashamed of those things. If a lovely girl and I were involved, I'd have been proud of that, proud of being with someone like her. Even if the affair ended, even if it ended badly, I'd have remembered the good parts.

These days, though, love letters--- even those sent to someone with whom you were deeply, mutually involved ---could be spun to seem disturbing. Love letters could so easily be made to seem stalkerish and demanding and "entitled".  Any declarations of passion could be made to seem disturbing and threatening. Any statement of romantic or sexual interests or preferences could be made to seem pathetic or coercive.  Here in these days of the gender wars, love letters can far too easily become evidence against you--- literally so. At the very least, love letters can be used to show how inept and hopeless you are at writing anything romantic or sexual, or that your sexual tastes are stunted, sad, contemptible.

No one uses telephones for long conversations any longer. Phone sex is a dying art. More's the pity about that, since phone sex allows you to construct long, complex fantasies and adapt to a lover's responses. Phone sex is far more intimate than sexting could ever be. And it has this advantage--- unless someone is actually taping you, it's much harder to use against you than a love letter would be.

It's sad enough that I'm thinking about this.  I miss love letters, miss being able to look through my archives years afterward and remember someone I loved, remember that once upon a time someone felt passion and love and desire for me,  remember that once upon a time I was worth the time it took to write me letters. I'd wanted to talk about how much love letters meant to me back in the days of long ago. I'd wanted to talk about how love letters were archived, and how much they meant to me as part of my history.

Right now, though, I can only talk about how much of a risk love letters seem to be, and how I'd be afraid to send anything that might be taken as a love letter (let alone anything about sexual tastes and hopes) to a girl with whom I was having an affair. Right now, no matter how much, how passionately someone and I were in love, I couldn't risk leaving a paper trail. I couldn't risk the ways love letters could be spun to make everything I like, or want, or feel seem contemptible.

Two Two Four: Lasers

The last night of the year, and I'm thinking  of stories  told me by young companions down the years. I do want to remember the girls who told me these things--- lovely voices and presences gone missing over the years. Well, let's put a few more stories into my archives.

The first one is from a girl I knew back in the lost world of the early Nineties. The tale actually came by letter. I still have the actual letter, complete with a Van Nuys postmark. A letter close to thirty years old now. I have no idea what became of the girl who wrote it--- vanished into domesticity somewhere in southern California, I expect. But the story itself is fun and highly visual, something done in blues and greens and black:

Hi! Mmm-- new tales to tell! I actually had sex in a laser beam! It was basically a starfuck. This band (all black) called Voodoo Posse played at After Hours, the dance club at Magic Mountain where I'm working this summer. So I met the drummer after the show, and we ended up at Mystic Lake (in the park still...) where the fireworks/laser show is. We ended up skinny-dipping and swam out to this one platform where a laser (green) shines down on a plume of smoke that rises steadily. Fortunately, a couple of weeks before,  I'd talked to a tech I had sex with a few times about how it all worked. So I ended up fucking the drummer, surrounded by smoke, in the middle of a laser. Have you ever seen a laser mix with smoke up close? It's really intense! This is the second black guy I've had sex with, and he was so much better than the first--- and he was one of the juiciest guys I've ever felt inside me. The oral sex was amazing! He was just crazy with me! Lots of trying new positions in the water!

I remember that her name was Gen--- Genevieve ---and that she was a lovely, brown-haired girl with soft pale eyes.  I have no idea where she is now, and certainly have no idea how she remembers her past and her adventures.

The second is from a posh girl in Colorado from the early Noughts. She'd gone to St.-John's out west, the western branch of the liberal arts college with a curriculum based solely on the Classics. I remember that she graduated, kicked around Europe for a while, was dumped by one lover in some roadside village in Brittany, and mugged in a railway station in Paris. She was last heard of living in Ireland. I'd written asking her about her adventures, and she responded with a few tales, including these---

Q.: Where and how did you first make love outdoors? What was it like? Was there risk involved? How do you feel about being naked outdoors?

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

Q.: Where is the riskiest/most public place you've ever made love? Whose idea was it? What was it like?

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

This one is a bit more harsh, but it's also from Maegan, something from when she was sixteen, back in the first year of the new century. She told me the story maybe nine or ten years ago. I've never had any follow-up on it:

Hmmm, most guys I've met are a bit squeamish about their own taste....they're fine with it all over a girl's body or mouth, but seem to prefer it to stay there.

I was at my first ever rave with some friends, and this older college guy kept hitting on me and dancing with me, but I wasn't interested.  After awhile, I went to use the bathroom, dumb little naive girl that I was.  It was upstairs through a dark hallway, and I had no idea I was being followed, but shortly after I sat down to pee, I heard someone else enter.  I assumed it was another girl, but he kicked open the door, slamming my head against the wall in the process.  I fell back and of course managed to pee all over bare legs. I wasn't wearing underwear, or they'd have been soaked. I was rather dazed and didn't quite understand what was going on, but before I had any idea of who it was, he had grabbed my hair and wrenched my head back (I had two french braid pigtails).  He kept hold of them and used them to yank my head forward as well as control what I did the entire time.  Naturally with him forcing me like that, I kept gagging, but he didn't seem to mind.  He nearly gave me lock jaw, and he shoved his cock as far down my throat as he could; I have no idea who he was. After he left, I was shocked, stunned, and could barely walk. I went downstairs as best I could and stood by someone's car in the parking lot. I gagged for a while and cried. I wouldn't tell anyone else this, but I have masturbated to this story over and over since then. I keep remembering the sound of my own gagging and wondering whatever became of him and how he remembers me now. I can tell you, but no one else. 

Four stories, here on the last night of the year. I miss the voices that attach to the stories. I miss a time when stories about adventures were offered up as gifts and introductions, when stories were exchanged over the aether.

My hope is that in the new year, we'll all feel free enough to have adventures again, and to tell stories about both the past and our plans and hopes and fantasies.

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 Four: Formation

I've very probably written about this before, but since I am posting archived tales, I'll post this again as one of the best memories a lovely girl has ever shared with me. It's certainly a story that leaves me jealous, envious, and depressed. I do wish I could mean this much to the lovely girl in question, and I wish my own life could yield up stories with this much power. This story makes me all-too-aware that there isn't likely to be anything in my own life to ever match her story--- and certainly not in what's left of my future.

My lovely friend sent me these stories--- her darkest secret, she averred ---a few years ago. She told me that she's tried to cut clear of the man in the stories, but somehow she ends up on the phone or on web chat with him far too often. I don't know if she's seen him in the flesh these last three or four years, though it's possible. She calls him B. That could be anything--- Brian, Bob, Bill. The name doesn't matter, of course. It's the power in the obsession and the stories that matters.

Her first discussion of him, in an autumn a few years back---

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,  the next April---

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 annihalates 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 feel deeply jealous, of course.  Always that. I want her drinking Sambuca in my bed; I want her flying to spend weekends in rented beach cottages with me. I want to mean that much to someone, to have that kind of obsessive value to someone.

I will archive stories here, though I suppose that's a painful thing. Still, I was trained to create and maintain archives. There's always the chance that in a few years I'll read these again. I wonder what I might make of them then.  There's always the chance, too, that some unknown reader will find this--- a ghost blog, abandoned on the aether ---and read this and tell herself stories in her head about the tales I'm saving here.

Two One Two: White Lines

More archive materials from the past. I am posting these as messages-in-a-bottle, as memories from other days, from times when I was regarded as a good listener, as an interlocutor for lovely, sometimes self-destructive girls.

These notes are from a girl named Alessandra, someone I knew in another world, someone I knew when the century was still young. Some of the notes are about her friend-and-lover Alys--- yes, Aless and Alys. Red Alys, if I remember, with striking red hair. I have no idea where she is now. I'd heard that she finished university, taught English for a couple of years in Japan, and went on to law school and an MBA. I have a vague sense that she's doing something corporate these days, something in a high glass tower near open water, something that sends her overseas a lot.  I have no idea what she remembers about her past. The last time we spoke, we talked about Heath Ledger's death and a film Ledger had once made about drug life in Australia, a film from an Australian novel called "Candy".

I remember these stories, though, remember them from another, better summer long ago.

Oh, I wasn't happy with where my life was taking me in 2007. I spent half my time dreading going to class when I wanted to change universities anyway, and the other half actually in class and miserable.  I was isolated and doing tremendous amounts of coke alone-- in my private dorm room, in changing rooms at boutiques, in cubicles at the school library. I was in my first serious relationship with  a girl, one who had previously mainly been my best friend, and it was long distance. She (Alys, obviously) had been in a relationship with some Russian pre-med, eight-language-speaking genius, and I broke them up/she left him for me. She had a pretty bad coke problem at the time as well, and I was entirely emotionally dependent on her-- this accounted for MONTHS of being at one another's throats. 

While physically thrilling and fascinating to many, our relationship was beyond emotionally tumultuous, whether it was our age/immaturity, the distance, or the fact that we were two people who were already prone to anxiety who were strung out on coke 24/7, I don't really know. But it was a series of mind games and changes in voice tone resulting in both intentional cruelty and despair on both sides. I remember one night when we were actually together in bed, her becoming cross with me about something and saying that she wished her Russian genius boy would love her again-- I promptly took an x-acto knife and put gashes in my inner thighs. I hadn't been a cutter before, and I haven't been one since, but it was practically an automatic form of release.

My behavior lost that bit of exhilaration at being young and pretty and turned into a very bitter, very deliberate form of destruction that took its toll quickly. One acquaintance commented that when he saw me in Toronto in December '07, I was "electric"-- I hardly weighed anything, but was mercurial and alive, my eyes were huge and always darkly lined, and I was just burning with frustration.  By the end of my freshman year in May '08, all of that had taken a toll. I no longer looked electric as much as I looked completely haggard-- completely drained. 

Also, that particular highly-charged emotional restlessness made me emotionally dependent on others in a way that I generally try very hard to avoid. I'll always be a little reckless, I'll always be a little too daring, but I find joy in the balance of being those things as well as self-contained. I prize my ability to detach and withdraw more than anything.

Alys and I are still very good friends-- best friends, actually. She has a tendency to spoil me wildly, and we only recently (well, I say recently, but within the past, I guess, 6 months) have actually begun sleeping together again. It's easy to fall back with her--- it's easy and it's not fruitless, because I care about her more than anything else, and she's bright and very powerful in her own way. We just work at keeping things separate--- and who knows how well that goes, but so far (recently) we've managed.

Those notes are almost a decade old now. I have no real idea where she is now (Toronto? Vancouver?), and only hints that she's very corporate and flying to take meetings in cities filled with silent glass towers.  I'd love to sit with her over drinks in some neutral city and listen to her tales of her life over the last dozen years.  In the last exchange of notes we had, back years ago, she noted that Alys was returning to Halifax from Bermuda aboard a racing yacht with one of her father's friends, following up on the inappropriate glances she and her father's friend had been exchanging since Red Alys was in high school. I have no idea how that played out or whether there was any truth in it. I'd like to think it was true. Sailboats and posh girls and inappropriate affairs are perfect ingredients for stories.

Two Zero Nine: Rain

I'm going to be posting a few stories young ladies of my acquaintance have told me over the years.

I suppose these will be stories that I envy a bit, stories where I wish the male player could've been me. Or they may be stories I envy simply because they're hot and delightful--- stories from a world I wish I could be part of.

They're also here simply because this is an archive of sorts, because I want to be able to have records of these things, to have them saved in a place where I can read them again over the years.

This is a story from August 2012, a story told me a posh blonde girl in a distant city, and it's one of the hottest stories a girl has ever told me:

rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's toy story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shakey. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, then vomited into a pot plant. i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. can i see your tits, he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo, he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. do you want to suck my cock, he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. do you want me to fuck you, he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my muddy skinny jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me. i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

In November 2013, the same girl sent me this intriguing note:

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

Still have morphine in my pocket, still wearing yesterday's clothes, still thinking about you.

You'll never believe me til you're on your own.

The same girl sent me this a bit later, a lovely expansion of what she'd told me about what happened:

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 I 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.

I envy her sitting at a desk in her new house in a posh hip suburb of her city, looking at the hard drive where she keeps all her memories, seventeen years worth of them, all the way back to being fourteen. And I'm always both envious and jealous, thinking of all the stories she has there on that drive. I envy her being able to sit in her outdoor living space on the deck behind her house and sip bourbon and feel the wind in from the harbor as she loses herself in memories.

Two Zero Four: Weinstein

A story that remains a mystery---

A friend of a friend, someone who teaches Law and History at one of the non-Oxbridge British universities, is as they say "taking advice" in a post-Weinstein matter. He's consulting his solicitors over what amounts to a forced retirement at his job.

He's sixty-ish, I think, so he'd have had another ten years of teaching. Right now he's been suspended and the university administration is orchestrating a forced retirement. He's resisting and is, as best I can tell, planning to sue over the university's failure to follow its own procedures and give him the process written into his contract. My understanding is that it's all based on accusations of "inappropriate conduct", though I have no specifics.

He's at a British university and he's a bachelor, so the first thought his friends here had--- that I had, too ---was that this was about handsome young undergraduate males. That would be the usual British thing, no? But I suppose it could be girls. I know nothing of his preferences or kinks. He's a private enough man, and he did practice law for a while, so he's been trained to discretion. My friends and I agree that it's not particularly relevant what his tastes are, and it doesn't matter to us which team he plays for. We'd probably like to know, though, if only for purposes of gossip.

We have no clue what the specific accusations are. Part of his legal argument is in fact that he's never been given specifics or a chance to refute them.  I can't comment on what he's supposed to have done.  He seems ready for a legal action, for whatever that's worth. All I can do--- all his friends can do ---is watch from the transatlantic sidelines.

I note the story because this is the first brush I've had with the post-Weinstein era.  I was once a mid-semester replacement for a faculty member who'd taken to showing up drunk for his lectures and who'd drunkenly crashed a university vehicle while driving to some official meeting.  But I've never known anyone who was accused of "inappropriate conduct", whatever that might be.

The person in question should be financially okay even if he is forcibly retired. My understanding is that he'll have a pension from his university and that he has a fair amount of land and investments in Pennsylvania (where he's originally from). I'm not so much worried about him as I am intrigued with what the accusations are and what level of process he's entitled to under British law and his own contract.

I've always said that my own love life has been based on conduct as inappropriate as I can manage for these last few decades.  I'm not surprised that in the post-Weinstein world I'll have yet another level of  social disdain attached to me.

One Seven Two: Story Arcs

I've been thinking about stories I'd like to see told.

You know a few of the ideas I've had in my head about erotica. The web and e-publishing have offered up new opportunities for erotica, though I'm not at all sure that the stories out there have touched on tales I'd like to read.

There's the classic s/m tale, of course--- the one where the lovely and innocent young girl discovers the submissive in herself and offers her body up to experience and pleasure through submission and erotic pain. That's "Story of O", of course, and a tale I've loved since my early teens. I've read it in all sorts of permutations, read variations suffused with all the different levels of consent and ecstasy-through-suffering. "Story of O" remains the classic, mind you.  More than half a century on,  nothing else comes close.

Still...whatever became of the reverse tale? Where is the tale--- one no less dreamy and romantic ---about the young man who becomes a dominant? In s/m novels, the male dominant (at least in hetero-erotica) always appears full-fledged, handsome and implacable, cruel and sexually adept. Usually moneyed as well--- after all, dungeons and accoutrements are expensive. But where's the tale of the young man--- intelligent, literate, educated ---who learns to be the one tightening the blindfold and wielding the whip? Where are the long talks he has with the girls who draw him onward? Where are the interior monologues where he tries to reconcile sexual pleasure with fear of being a cliche or a deeper fear of actually becoming abusive? Where are the comic moments of dealing with recalcitrant knots or trying to buy riding whips while the equestrian-shop clerks look on, smirking? Where's the moment when he has to take a deep breath and risk telling the lovely girl across the table on a first date what his tastes are? Where's that scene--- the boy terrified of terrifying the girl, the girl intrigued and amazed and a bit afraid, the two of them trying to use expensive liberal arts educations to talk it all through? (Yes, it does need Whit Stillman's touch and Greta Gerwig's voice)

Alec Waugh--- Evelyn's brother ---did a forgotten tale back in the late 1960s called "A Spy in the Family". It was a very clever little s/m comedy--- thirty-ish wife of a very grey British civil servant discovers herself as a bisexual dominatrix and becomes both domme and a successful agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service. You might find it in a library somewhere, and it is worth tracking down. It's a story I enjoyed, and one I need to read again. It has some of the conversations I'd want to hear--- the what-does-this-all-mean-about-me discussions, though done in a marvelously elliptical British upper-middle way. I do wonder, though, what those same conversations would be like between two reasonably hip people in America now.

There's a tale I do want to try myself, if only as an exercise. There's a website that archives hundreds--- quite possibly a few thousand ---erotica stories submitted across the last twenty years. The stories are organized by genre and topic, which usually means activities and kinds of partners. There's one genre called "celeb-parody" that gets a fair number of stories--- the author's stand-in gets to have sex with the actress/model/singer who obsesses him, or things happen to degrade/punish the female celebrity for not being with the author.  You get the picture. I've only seen one or two where there's been some attention to background, to the central figure herself. I do think there are possibilities here, though. I don't have any taste for revenge tales,  mind you. I can't see writing one of those.

Yet I would like to try a story where a lovely model ends up briefly with someone utterly alien to her world. There's no plausible way to make it anything more than a one-night or one weekend thing, of course. It's even hard to find ways for someone in her job and career niche to have a night away from her entourage and assistants, to find ways to give her a free night. The challenge is to find some plausible way to bring the characters together and watch them talk themselves into a one-night stand. His motivations aren't difficult, though he'd have to be terrified of getting it wrong, of ending up vilified  and mocked on social media or of having her lawyers calling. She couldn't be presented as vapid or slutty or just drunk or on drugs. It couldn't be like that. She'd have to be someone intelligent and self-aware, someone who'd be able to understand why she's doing this--- and make the reader believe it. I'd want to show the two of them talking, to show the two of them deciding that this was worth doing, and that they could live with themselves.

He'd be older, of course. Yes, he'd be me, or a close approximation. Did you ever think it wouldn't be? The next morning, he'd smile ruefully and tell her how Letters to Penthouse it all was (she's in her early twenties--- she probably wouldn't remember Letters to Penthouse) and she'd shrug and tell him it was only weird because of her job, that in any big city  out there there'd been dozens and dozens of random hook-ups between totally incongruous people the night before. Oh, I know who I want the central figure to be (you're free to guess), and a little research at YouTube makes me think she has the intelligence and the voice to be the figure I'd imagine. I may do the story just as an exercise. The erotica itself is likely to be secondary to the two characters talking themselves into bed. I may well have to try this. Let's see if I can still tell stories somewhere outside of my head.

Seventy-Eight: Mise-en-scène

A friend in the Midwest asked me to write about sex and the imagination. It's easy enough to begin an essay about that.  It's imagination that brings sex to life, that gives it its energy and power and delights. I can't imagine any physical pleasure that isn't filtered through the imagination or fueled by the imagination. Whatever the body does, or wants to do, it's the imagination that shapes it and gives it meaning.

I've always lived inside my head. I grew up scrolling through scenes in books or films in my head, and whenever I walked down streets--- in the city where I was born, in small lakefront towns in my later teens ---I was always moving through some scene in a film or a book. When I was young I inevitably had a book with me, and I'd read in all sorts of unlikely places and then re-tell the stories in my head. I did the same with films, and once I learned a bit about the grammar and vocabulary of film, I'd walk down tree-lined streets or through a downtown still shaded by wrought-iron balconies and envision how to shoot film scenes there.

I live through books and films; I always have.  On any ordinary day when I'm crossing a street or standing at a window, I'm a character in a story. When I sit at a cafe table and watch people at other tables, I'm telling their stories in my head. I'm creating stories for them, and the more details I can insert, the more depth of context I can create, then the better the stories can be.

There's a new sin (or crime, possibly) that the gender warriors have created--- something called "sexualization". That seems to mean something like imagining what a lovely stranger (or anyone, really) would be like as a sexual partner, or at least imagining them in some sexual way. This is all tied up in issues of "dehumanization" and consent. It's another term that the gender warriors use as a term of abuse that I simply can't understand. I've always made the world around me into a set of stories, and I've certainly told myself stories about sex.

That's not just about looking at lovely university girls whisper past and imagining them naked--- or, better, half-undressed in stylish high-fashion outfits. It's not just about wondering what it would be like to have her legs over my shoulders, or what her sexual tastes and previous adventures might be. It's about long, intricate stories, each one filled with details and backstory. It's about what imagining that any moment, any chance meeting could turn into an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries" or some film shown late night on Cinemax. Not porn, really, since the stories I create in my head are more about settings and styles and poses than about the sex itself.  They're erotica certainly--- tales of sudden, unexpected, risky, breathless, no-names-please encounters. It's just that the look and setting matter more than just the connection of bodies.

I wrote once in a notebook that if something can't be crafted like a story, then it's not worth doing. I suppose I do expect that from romances and encounters: a certain formality, a sense of a clear story arc, the ability to turn the world around me into sets and settings, the ability to be a character in a well-designed tale, the creation of a backstory for myself, my young companion, and the encounter itself.  Sex can be deeply, overwhelmingly passionate, but I always find myself standing just a bit outside the moment, thinking about how what's happening fits into a story arc or into a kind of roman fleuve.

Over the years, I've been lucky enough to find young companions who were girls who lived inside books and films themselves, who understood about films-in-the-head and about the art of narrative. They've had their own roles in the stories they'd tell themselves, their own set of backstories for encounters. We've been able to put our separate visions together, or at least to tell stories that complement rather than compete with one another.

I've long thought that bookish girls make the best lovers because they understand the idea of imagination, of creating worlds and knowing how to furnish them and live inside them. They understand the power of narrative, and the power of realizing that there are (or at least should be) no limits to stories and scenarios. I've been lucky about that, about finding girls who were willing to construct new worlds and imagine new tales. There's always been something thrilling about looking in a young companion's eyes and trying to intuit what stories she wants to tell and how she imagines the look, the style, of what she and I are doing.

Sex is always about imagination for me. It's not an end in itself, but it is the scaffolding, the skeleton, for narratives about worlds and times and characters, about style and sets and settings.  I can't imagine any affair, any encounter, that isn't born out of imagined stories and lived out as a kind of tale. Yes, I do sexualize the girls I see on the street or in cafes or classrooms, though it's much less a matter of the flesh than it is of casting them as characters with particular styles or complex backstories in a long and ongoing narrative.  I can't imagine sex or romance that doesn't exist as part of a story, and I can't imagine not re-visioning the world around me for the stories I tell inside my head. I always whisper to lovers, No limits, and I do mean that. I want them to trust themselves to their own imaginations and just fall forward into new worlds and new adventures, to take up new identities and re-make the ordinary world into something well-crafted and visual and stylish.