I'll be back next week

It’s that time of year again, when we’re supposed to be indulging ourselves in snowman cookies and eggnog, trimming trees and wrapping gifts, and generally enjoying our time off work. But with a background like mine, no amount of crass commercialism is going to change the fact that Christmas is always going to be less about this dude:



Than this dude:



I grew up a Footloose Baptist, the kind of religious that people in this part of the country have trouble comprehending, the kind not allowed to dance or watch secular cartoons or wear a two-piece bathing suit. The kind of religious you see in documentaries like Hell House, railing against homosexuality and abortion. One of the hard-faced tiny warriors lined up on pews being filled with a boiling rage larger than our own small frames.

I believed wholeheartedly that my lord and savior had died for me to cleanse me of my sins. That the end of the world was coming and that I must spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to save those I cared about from an eternity spent in hell. God could see inside my very mind and heart, I was taught. And he knew when I was tempted by the devil, who would speak to me through secular music, movies, and television. I asked Jesus into my heart at age 4, was baptized in front of the congregation, and swallowed down the bitter intolerance they taught as easily as the grape juice that was supposed to symbolize Christ’s blood.

So deeply did the hellfire and the hate lodge themselves inside me that on a trip back home, just pulling the car up to the red-brick church where I spent my formative years was enough to make my heart flap in my chest like a trapped bird. The conviction that I am a worthless sinner is the very deepest layer of my low self-esteem, and the unrealistically rigid morality I learned imbues the very sexuality that became my livelihood with guilt and fear. The church was not good to me.

But for all the fucked up things about the religion of my childhood, faith itself is a beautiful thing. The people I went to church with weren’t bad people, they just believed in a concept so fervently that it grew bent and warped in the fire of their zeal. In the beginning, God was good. And when I look back at the Christmases of my childhood, I remember the best parts of Christianity. I remember joy to the world. I remember peace and goodwill.

When I lost my virginity to pre-marital rape, I stopped believing in God entirely. I was taught that True Love Waits, but that 19-year-old boy with a boner, well, he didn’t wait. The next time I talked to God it was in a room filled with folding chairs and addicts. When I tried to reach out this loving higher power, all I saw was the stern father of my youth, as oppressive as a suburb. The God I knew damned you to hell; he didn’t pull you out of it.

As many of you have noted, I am not a perfect person. I have made mistakes, over and over again. And sometimes the only way to get back up after you’ve fallen so far is to rely on something bigger than yourself, to pull your head out of your ass and notice that there even IS anything bigger than yourself. And it’s awfully sincere, but when I went looking for God, I found a whole big world out there that saved me from myself. Whether it’s the love of friends and family, the talent that comes and faithfully offers me the right word, the potential for kindness between people, or the ability to tell a story that comforts others. These things can be holy too.

I will never again call myself a Christian; never spend another Christmas with my head bowed in worship, never walk back into the red-brick building where love so often ferments into hate. But this year I approach happiness. And in those creeping moments when I walk down the street and look to the tops of the buildings that skim an endless skyline, when joy unexpectedly fills up my lungs like crisp winter air, until even my blood is sweetly singing. Then I am feeling God.

Merry Christmas.

Vanilla Turns Chocolate

One of the benefits of being a woman is the ability to go out without any money. When I’m broke, I pretty much figure that as long as I can scrounge enough change for the first beer, some guy(s) will keep me in booze for the rest of my night out. I can easily make an evening out of the following paltry handbag contents:







I know, I know, bad feminist, but women still earn 75 cents to the male dollar, so they kind of owe us.

However, my womanly wiles are not infallible. While sometimes the gods of free booze shower down upon me, and I am practically swarmed by cute boys to imbibe with, every once in awhile the beefcake river dries up, the bar is a barren wasteland, and the only alcohol passing my lips is that which I purchase with my own hard-earned cash. It was just one of these lonely nights a few weeks ago when I found myself going home not because I was done drinking, but because I had run out of money.

Luckily, I was sober enough to save enough moolah for a cab, in which I was sitting when I received a call from a tall, handsome, and charismatic man with whom I sometimes share a bed. Since he has been known to shower me with free drinks and dinners, I sensed salvation.

“Where are you?” I answered. He named the bar, I rerouted the cabbie, and within 20 I was back in the sweet spot, perched on a bar stool with a Miller Lite. As I caught up with my companion, I couldn’t help but notice some strange activity in his mouth-al region; he seemed to be licking his teeth with his tongue compulsively.

“You’re on cocaine!” I noted wonderingly.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“I want a bump!” I enthused, rapidly adjusting to this strange turn of events. This particular friend is by no means a fuddy-duddy, but he’s not the type of friend I expect to offer me cocaine (and I do have some). This was a highly unusual turn of events. He explained that he’d gotten bored and all of his friends but the guy with the coke had gone home, so what the hell, right?

I took a key bump in the bathroom, big enough to numb my gums and send that metallic taste dripping down my throat, which oddly enough, are the only parts of doing cocaine I still like. There was a time when things started to get pretty serious between me and cocaine, but since I broke things off a year or two ago, we’ve only had a couple of one-night stands.

Of course, in what seemed like a flash filled with dozens of really intense conversations I would be embarrassed about tomorrow, the bar was closing. We called a car to take us back to his place for what was sure to be some dirty sex. Halfway there, he mused, “Want to go to one of those porn stores?” referring to some shady-looking neon-lighted porno shanties we were passing.



For the second time in the evening I was shocked. Not by the porn, by my date’s out-of-character behavior. I guess that’s cocaine for you, though. Makes you want to filthy, wild sex at the same time it makes your dick go soft.

“Sure, if they’re open,” I answered, which I guess was stupid because when we walked in there were several guys perusing despite the fact that it was about 5 a.m. Drunk and high, it was hard to keep myself from exclaiming, “OH MY GOD, who ARE these guys?” But, seriously, who are those guys in the porno store at 5 a.m.? At least it was a weekend. I’d hate to see the Tuesday night crowd.

We wandered around looking at some glasses fetish videos (his thing) and when I first noticed the video booths in the back, I was pretty sure we were gonna be naked in there eventually. We closed the door, and he inserted some change and flipped through the channels while I sucked his dick. There was a little stool for him to sit on, but a few minutes of crouching with my knees on the metal floor was about all I could handle.

We purchased a facials video from the kindly clerk and walked back outside where it had begun to snow. We stood in contrast to its purity.

“That was hot,” he said.

“Yeah, I was surprised you were into that,” I responded.

“I’m a sex pervert,” he responded.

“No you’re not. I am.”

“I am, too,” he insisted. “I would have opened the door and let people watch.”

I paused. “That would have been really hot.”

We both glanced back toward the door. “Let’s go,” he said.

Giggling, we headed back inside and beelined for the video booths, avoiding eye contact with the clerk. On the way I made a brief, flickering eye contact with an orthodox Jewish guy looking at DVDs. We settled back into the booth and I had commenced sucking him off when we heard the door of the booth next to us open. We exchanged looks, his cock still in my mouth.

I kept going. There was a smallish rectangular opening along the bottom of the metal divider between the two booths. The guy had his head down near the opening, watching us. My gentleman friend seemed to be okay with this turn of events, so I increased the speed of my cocksucking, eliciting moans from both guys. A few minutes later our neighbor’s eyes disappeared from the opening, only to be replaced by his dick shortly afterward. I looked at my partner, a little alarmed.

“Touch it,” he said.

“Are you sure?” I was still unaccustomed to his coked-up alter ego.

“Yeah,” he said, even batting the guy’s dick toward me a little.

I stroked the other guy’s shaft for a minute, wrapping my fingers around him as best I could with the divider between us. He didn’t seem to mind my clumsy grasp, but after a few seconds I turned my attention back to the in-progress blowjob. Yet my newly perverted paramour still wasn’t satisfied.

“Suck his dick,” he urged.

“REALLY!?” I couldn’t believe these words were coming out of his mouth. Many a time I would have done something of the sort without thinking twice about it; as a matter of fact this whole scenario was a particular fantasy of mine. I just couldn’t get over the feeling that this particular guy was making a coke-addled mistake for which he’d look down on me the next day. But he seemed sure.

I took the stranger’s cock into my mouth and gave it three or four long slurps from shaft to head. I pulled back and glanced at my date, and when I turned back around the guy had shot a wad of thick cum on the side and floor of the booth.

“That was quick,” I mouthed. Wiping my hand on his sock, I turned my attention back to the O.G. B.J. My newly spent friend lingered around in the booth for awhile, perhaps waiting for me to finish, but the whole thing had gone on a little too long and I was glad when he left. Another guy stepped in and watched for a little while, but once you’ve sucked one guy off in a peep show booth, you don't really need to do it again.

We gathered up my purse and our newly purchased porno and headed home for the private show.

Girl 27

It was 1937 when Patricia Douglas was brutally raped at an MGM studio party.



She was part of a group of 100 chorus girls for MGM who were called for what they believed was a film shoot, outfitted in skimpy cowgirl outfits, and lined up to await the flood of MGM salesmen on a hospitality weekend for which they had been promised that anything they wanted was available to them, anything at all. Many of the girls were teenagers. Patricia Douglas was 20 years old, a virgin who didn’t drink, but who loved to dance. She wasn’t interested in wild partying, or in the open bar.

And she certainly wasn’t interested in any of the groping, lecherous MGM employees primed to treat the pretty young ladies as party favors. The party was soon out of control; women appealed to waiters and male bathroom attendants to help them fend off unwelcome advances, and David Ross and another man held Patricia Douglas’s nose and poured a glass of scotch and champagne into her mouth. When she ran outside to vomit, David Ross followed.

There he raped her in a parked car, slapping her throughout to keep her from blacking out. A parking attendant finally heard her screams and saw Ross run away, a testimony he made and later rescinded in exchange for a lifetime job at MGM. Douglas was taken away in an ambulance, to be treated by an MGM doctor who gave her a cold-water douche to wash away the evidence. When she made the anachronistically gusty move to press charges, her lawyer failed to show up in court on three separate occasions. Newspapers trashed her as a tramp and a liar, and published her real name, photographs, and address while identifying MGM only as a “local film studio.”





At the grand jury hearing, Patricia Douglas sat in the court room while Ross’s lawyer addressed the jury, saying "Look at her. Who would want her?" MGM even bought off her own mother, acting as court-appointed legal guardian to a minor. Douglas’s rapist went free and the whole story faded into obscurity.

This is the story that documentarian David Stenn unearths through archival footage, documents, and interviews with those involved and their children in his recently-released on DVD documentary Girl 27 (a reference to Douglas’s number on the girls’ call sheet).



I watched it over the weekend, and while Stenn’s approach has rightfully been called a bit self-indulgent (he features himself largely in the film and likes to name-drop Jacqueline Onassis) I found Douglas’s story compelling enough that it didn’t bother me. When Stenn locates her (now an elderly recluse who describes herself as “frigid”), it becomes chillingly clear that even 65 years later, the unpunished assault is still happening to Douglas, and just how much that spring night in 1937 affected the course of her life.

IMDB page for Girl 27
Vanity Fair article