Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Whore Du Jour
Ok, so today’s WDJ isn’t actually a whore at all, but he is selling sex. Bart is a freelancer who makes the bulk of his living writing erotic fiction, escort ads, and porn site copy like “Are you a horny motherfucker? Do you think you have what it takes to be the porkiest piggy in the pen? When you upload your photo, every hairy bear, kinky twink and cocksucking cumdump will get to vote on whether you're hot or not. Just push out your pecs, fluff up your cock, scrub your hole and show us what you've got!“
The man behind your last orgasm answers a few questions for the woman behind your next below.
1. What do you do for a living?
I'm a freelance writer. A large part of my business is writing porn, mostly gay porn, even though I'm straight. What that most often entails is writing dirty spam type emails, writing the web copy for porn sites, creating the taglines, etc. For the past three months I've been working on a series of Gay Guides to various cities, where I research and find out which bars have the dirtiest back rooms, which parks guys can cruise for anonymous sex, what beaches are nude and gay friendly, what parts of town you are mostly likely to pick up dudes in, what parts of town are unsafe or anti gay and, depending on the city, if the AIDS rates are high.
For example, when I wrote about Rio, I had to put in a section saying “HIV rates are very fucking high here, use condoms for everything.” Strangely, I had to put the same disclaimer in the Dallas guide “because Dallas has one of the highest rates of infection for gay dudes,” much higher than San Francisco or New York. I have done some straight porn and even lesbian porn, but the gay stuff pays much better. I spent about two years writing a series of erotic gay fiction about a dude who comes out of the closet in college and then becomes addicted to unprotected gay sex.
2. How did you get into it?
My first porn job was actually silly. I live in France and when I first moved here I met a British guy in one of the local pubs and we got to talking. It turned out that he was creating some straight phone sex ads. I went to his apartment and he showed me the pictures he had been told to use and asked me if I had any tagline ideas. There was this one picture of a cute topless girl. And I said why not put “Come Here Often?” right over her tits.
The first real paid porn job came about six months later. Freelance work had been really slow and I was behind on my rent and essentially willing to write anything to eat and not get evicted. I put the word out to my former clients and one of them said he knew a guy who was having trouble finding a decent writer for his new gay porn site. It turned out the dude was willing to pay four grand for about 20 pages of web copy which was really good money. The site became somewhat infamous when Rolling Stone Magazine did an article saying that the site was an example of the dangerous fetishes online. What's funny is that the fetish really isn't that bad considering what was out there. It was just guys getting off on the idea of not wearing condoms which is, I think, a pretty universal fantasy about dudes, whether they are gay, straight, or bi.
3. Can you tell us about a few interesting clients?
I've had a lot of interesting clients. My strangest one was a woman who was trying to sell a book about how to be an escort and make a lot of money without actually ever fucking the guys. Her essential advice was to show up with a bodyguard, get the money up front and then when the guy asked for sex say “hey, that's illegal” and then leave in a huff. I can't imagine that that would work that well in the real world.
I've done several guides on “how to meet and treat escorts.” These were essentially for escort services or directories who thought they might be able to drum up more business if guys didn't feel weird or self conscious the first time they thought to go to an escort. So half the guides end up saying in several different ways “dude, lots of guys buy escorts, it doesn't make you a loser.” But then the rest of the guide is always stuff saying “Remember, escorts are human beings. They can say no. You shouldn't beat them up. They are someone's daughter. And you better tip them if they do a good job.” Stretching those two essential messages out to 50 pages can be a bit of a challenge.
I really find the female escorts I've worked for to be really interesting. Most of them are really normal girls when I'm talking to them online and they seem to react really positively to me because I'm not perving on them. It's just a job to me. But it can be disconcerting, however, when I'm talking online or on IM to a really cool laid back girl for a couple hours and then have to sit back and write that she will “suck your cock and make you cum back for more!” Because I've been relating to them as a human being, but now when I write I have to switch gears and objectify them, because that's the job.
I have one gay client who likes to travel around the world to meet guys. I can always tell when he's found a new boyfriend in some exotic locale, because suddenly he wants me to write a bunch of ads for male escorts in that city, because one of the ways he makes money is through male escorts and he seems to have a talent for hooking up with them and setting up deals where he makes money by finding them clients. So, when he suddenly needs a bunch of ads for Brazilian escorts, I know he has a new boyfriend in Rio. A few months later when he suddenly wants Bangcock ads, I know he has a Thai lover.
4. What’s a typical work process for you? What kind of guidelines do you get from clients, etc.?
My main deal is to listen to what they want. Everything is so fetish oriented in the adult industry that it's often very specific. Then I google search for similar sites and see how they are doing it. Then I'll go to asstr.org, which is the biggest written porn warehouse in the world and do a search for that fetish in their stories. Once I read 20 or so stories about that fetish I learn what the slang terms are, and have a fairly good sense of what the guys who are into that fetish are looking for. Then I sit back and try to write out the taglines and jokes first and run them by my girlfriend. If I can get her to laugh, then I know I'm on the right track.
My favorite tag/joke so far was about three years ago when a guy wanted a site for guys who were turned on by the Iraqi prison photos and had a fetish for fucking Iraqi soldiers. I came up with “They Already Hate Bush. Make Them Love Dick.”
.
5. Have you ever been totally embarassed to write something?
There have been jobs I've refused. I won't write necro or K9 stuff. I think the dead should be left alone and I don't think dogs can reasonably give consent. I do get annoyed when clients tell me to write in a “feminine voice” when what they really mean is “Don't use words like cock or fuck.” Real women use dirty words all the time, so I'm not sure why there is this pretense that something is more feminine simply because it uses dumb euphemisms. Writing “His swelling manhood ravaged my body and soul” is pretty embarrassing when what I'd rather write is “His big dick fucked the shit out of me.”
6. How do you psych yourself for writing porn? Do you ever get aroused?
Sometimes I get turned on, but mostly not. In general it's just a job. The times I've gotten turned on have been mostly when I've been writing the erotic fiction. Even though on the page I'm writing about two guys, in the back of my mind I'm thinking of the “bottom” as a woman and imagining fucking her. If the client wants a fantasy scenario that is close to what I like to do in bed it's easier for me to get aroused. When I was writing about the college guy's first sexual experiences with gay sex, I was picturing Parker Posey in my mind and got a few hardons.
7. Are you ever secretly judging or looking down on your clients?
No. Why would I? They are just business people trying to make money online the same way I am. If anything I like my porn clients more than my straight clients. They pay better money and are generally better about paying. I rarely have to hound them to honor my invoices. While a lot of “corporate” clients make you wait two to four weeks to get paid, porn people always seem to pay you in a day or two. Particularly the escorts. They seem to have a firm grasp on the value of money and the importance of getting paid. I suspect that's why I get a lot of referrals and repeat business, because I'm treating people with genuine respect, which I think can be rare in this industry.
8. How’s the money?
For the amount of time I put in it's pretty good. I'm not going to become rich doing this, but I also don't waste time at meetings, worry about kissing ass or any of the stuff people in “normal” jobs have to deal with on a regular basis. I don't usually get up before noon and I'm often done and out having a beer with my friends by 6 or so.
9. What’s the best part about the job?
I get paid for essentially being a 12 year old boy telling dick jokes.
To hire Bart to write your tawdry text, email him at bcalendar@aim.com or contact him through his Elance.com profile.
The man behind your last orgasm answers a few questions for the woman behind your next below.
1. What do you do for a living?
I'm a freelance writer. A large part of my business is writing porn, mostly gay porn, even though I'm straight. What that most often entails is writing dirty spam type emails, writing the web copy for porn sites, creating the taglines, etc. For the past three months I've been working on a series of Gay Guides to various cities, where I research and find out which bars have the dirtiest back rooms, which parks guys can cruise for anonymous sex, what beaches are nude and gay friendly, what parts of town you are mostly likely to pick up dudes in, what parts of town are unsafe or anti gay and, depending on the city, if the AIDS rates are high.
For example, when I wrote about Rio, I had to put in a section saying “HIV rates are very fucking high here, use condoms for everything.” Strangely, I had to put the same disclaimer in the Dallas guide “because Dallas has one of the highest rates of infection for gay dudes,” much higher than San Francisco or New York. I have done some straight porn and even lesbian porn, but the gay stuff pays much better. I spent about two years writing a series of erotic gay fiction about a dude who comes out of the closet in college and then becomes addicted to unprotected gay sex.
2. How did you get into it?
My first porn job was actually silly. I live in France and when I first moved here I met a British guy in one of the local pubs and we got to talking. It turned out that he was creating some straight phone sex ads. I went to his apartment and he showed me the pictures he had been told to use and asked me if I had any tagline ideas. There was this one picture of a cute topless girl. And I said why not put “Come Here Often?” right over her tits.
The first real paid porn job came about six months later. Freelance work had been really slow and I was behind on my rent and essentially willing to write anything to eat and not get evicted. I put the word out to my former clients and one of them said he knew a guy who was having trouble finding a decent writer for his new gay porn site. It turned out the dude was willing to pay four grand for about 20 pages of web copy which was really good money. The site became somewhat infamous when Rolling Stone Magazine did an article saying that the site was an example of the dangerous fetishes online. What's funny is that the fetish really isn't that bad considering what was out there. It was just guys getting off on the idea of not wearing condoms which is, I think, a pretty universal fantasy about dudes, whether they are gay, straight, or bi.
3. Can you tell us about a few interesting clients?
I've had a lot of interesting clients. My strangest one was a woman who was trying to sell a book about how to be an escort and make a lot of money without actually ever fucking the guys. Her essential advice was to show up with a bodyguard, get the money up front and then when the guy asked for sex say “hey, that's illegal” and then leave in a huff. I can't imagine that that would work that well in the real world.
I've done several guides on “how to meet and treat escorts.” These were essentially for escort services or directories who thought they might be able to drum up more business if guys didn't feel weird or self conscious the first time they thought to go to an escort. So half the guides end up saying in several different ways “dude, lots of guys buy escorts, it doesn't make you a loser.” But then the rest of the guide is always stuff saying “Remember, escorts are human beings. They can say no. You shouldn't beat them up. They are someone's daughter. And you better tip them if they do a good job.” Stretching those two essential messages out to 50 pages can be a bit of a challenge.
I really find the female escorts I've worked for to be really interesting. Most of them are really normal girls when I'm talking to them online and they seem to react really positively to me because I'm not perving on them. It's just a job to me. But it can be disconcerting, however, when I'm talking online or on IM to a really cool laid back girl for a couple hours and then have to sit back and write that she will “suck your cock and make you cum back for more!” Because I've been relating to them as a human being, but now when I write I have to switch gears and objectify them, because that's the job.
I have one gay client who likes to travel around the world to meet guys. I can always tell when he's found a new boyfriend in some exotic locale, because suddenly he wants me to write a bunch of ads for male escorts in that city, because one of the ways he makes money is through male escorts and he seems to have a talent for hooking up with them and setting up deals where he makes money by finding them clients. So, when he suddenly needs a bunch of ads for Brazilian escorts, I know he has a new boyfriend in Rio. A few months later when he suddenly wants Bangcock ads, I know he has a Thai lover.
4. What’s a typical work process for you? What kind of guidelines do you get from clients, etc.?
My main deal is to listen to what they want. Everything is so fetish oriented in the adult industry that it's often very specific. Then I google search for similar sites and see how they are doing it. Then I'll go to asstr.org, which is the biggest written porn warehouse in the world and do a search for that fetish in their stories. Once I read 20 or so stories about that fetish I learn what the slang terms are, and have a fairly good sense of what the guys who are into that fetish are looking for. Then I sit back and try to write out the taglines and jokes first and run them by my girlfriend. If I can get her to laugh, then I know I'm on the right track.
My favorite tag/joke so far was about three years ago when a guy wanted a site for guys who were turned on by the Iraqi prison photos and had a fetish for fucking Iraqi soldiers. I came up with “They Already Hate Bush. Make Them Love Dick.”
.
5. Have you ever been totally embarassed to write something?
There have been jobs I've refused. I won't write necro or K9 stuff. I think the dead should be left alone and I don't think dogs can reasonably give consent. I do get annoyed when clients tell me to write in a “feminine voice” when what they really mean is “Don't use words like cock or fuck.” Real women use dirty words all the time, so I'm not sure why there is this pretense that something is more feminine simply because it uses dumb euphemisms. Writing “His swelling manhood ravaged my body and soul” is pretty embarrassing when what I'd rather write is “His big dick fucked the shit out of me.”
6. How do you psych yourself for writing porn? Do you ever get aroused?
Sometimes I get turned on, but mostly not. In general it's just a job. The times I've gotten turned on have been mostly when I've been writing the erotic fiction. Even though on the page I'm writing about two guys, in the back of my mind I'm thinking of the “bottom” as a woman and imagining fucking her. If the client wants a fantasy scenario that is close to what I like to do in bed it's easier for me to get aroused. When I was writing about the college guy's first sexual experiences with gay sex, I was picturing Parker Posey in my mind and got a few hardons.
7. Are you ever secretly judging or looking down on your clients?
No. Why would I? They are just business people trying to make money online the same way I am. If anything I like my porn clients more than my straight clients. They pay better money and are generally better about paying. I rarely have to hound them to honor my invoices. While a lot of “corporate” clients make you wait two to four weeks to get paid, porn people always seem to pay you in a day or two. Particularly the escorts. They seem to have a firm grasp on the value of money and the importance of getting paid. I suspect that's why I get a lot of referrals and repeat business, because I'm treating people with genuine respect, which I think can be rare in this industry.
8. How’s the money?
For the amount of time I put in it's pretty good. I'm not going to become rich doing this, but I also don't waste time at meetings, worry about kissing ass or any of the stuff people in “normal” jobs have to deal with on a regular basis. I don't usually get up before noon and I'm often done and out having a beer with my friends by 6 or so.
9. What’s the best part about the job?
I get paid for essentially being a 12 year old boy telling dick jokes.
To hire Bart to write your tawdry text, email him at bcalendar@aim.com or contact him through his Elance.com profile.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Pink Balls
Sam wanted to play with my tits. The word he specifically used was “worship.” He wanted to worship my tits. He had advertised for a nice, young “non-pro” lady to come over, take her top off and let him worship her breasts, then jerk or suck him off.
A side-note about the meaning of “pro” in the sex industry. You may be thinking to yourself that you become a sex professional when you begin accepting pay for play, and logic would back you up. But the world of escorting is nothing if not nonsensical. “Non-pro” is one of those code words like “donation” or “full service.” It doesn’t actually mean you don’t have sex for money; it means you only have sex for money every once in awhile. If you only worked at McDonalds every once in awhile they’d call you “part-time,” but whatever. From my point of view, even if you’re totally enrolled in night school and only work a shift every couple of weeks, you’re still selling French fries.
But without bringing your tax report to the call, “non-pro” in effect just means “doesn’t look obviously like a street-walking drug-addicted hag.” In my experience, “young and white” generally suffices. And lest you think that I’m pulling on one over on these dudes, when you email a guy as a “non-pro” he immediately asks for your pictures and rates, so it’s a collusion.
Anyway, back to Sam, who wants to worship my tits. I may have previously mentioned that I have very sensitive nipples. I’d rather a guy spend his time up in the Bronx than downtown Manhattan any day. I don’t claim to be able to have an orgasm from breast play, I just really, really like it. So when Sam started emailing me his fantasies of pulling my tits out of my top and squeezing and slapping them, pinching and clamping my nipples, and tying my breasts off with rope, I started to get turned on. The day we arranged to meet, we shot dirty emails back and forth all morning and the simple eloquence of his dirty bon mots (“Come over, I’ll mouth fuck you and blow a load on your face”) got me even more worked up.
By the time I was climbing the stairs to his airy apartment, my panties were already soaked. Sam was quiet in a slightly creepy way. He was young and technically attractive (32, 6 feet tall, dark-haired), but somewhat affectless, like he was zonked out on major mood stabilizers. But despite our total lack of conversational chemistry, something about him drove me completely fucking crazy. I honestly don’t understand it. It must be what it’s like to snort raw pheromones or be under the spell of a love potion.
He told me to sit down in a wooden chair positioned near the window. He literally pulled my tits out of the top of my dress, a move that has always turned me on. For one thing, they look great kind of popped up on a fabric shelf like that, and it’s also just super-dirty. He started to knead and massage my tits, pinching my nipples in between his thumbs and fingers. Occasionally he’d pause and give one of my breasts a little slap, barely grazing the nipple. After a few minutes of this I was out of my head with lust; twitching. I’m sure my panties looked like a water slide. He kept glancing outside from his third-floor window and I got the feeling he was deliberately trying to put on a show for the people on the sidewalk.
He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled his average-sized dick out of his boxers. He stroked it a few times and I reminded him to get a condom. After he slid one on, he held his dick right in front of my lips and in a tone of voice like you’d command an unruly puppy with, firmly said, “Suck.”
I sucked. In my heightened state of hyper-arousal, I nearly sucked the damn thing off. The whole time he kept slapping, squeezing, and pinching my hoisted-up tits, and oh my fucking god, then he started shaking them. Holding onto my nipples he’d give them a firm shake that caused my whole breast to ripple. I have never had this done before or since, but it turned me on to no end. I had found my sex crack.
I lean toward the submissive in my personal sex life: things I love include, having my hair pulled, some name-calling, spankings, being held down, and facials. But despite these proclivities the dorkiness of most Dom/Sub stuff totally ruins it for me. I don’t want to address anyone as master or wear a dog collar, and half the time “Dom” guys just use their status to make you give them head for an hour without having to do anything in return. But I was ready to sign up to be Sam’s slave. Put me on a leash, call me some stupid name, make me catch your cigarette ash in my hands, I was fucking game at this point.
And just as my brain was lighting up like a sexual pinball machine with weird lights and dinging noises and triple point bonuses everywhere, he came. And paid me. And it was time to go.
It's not often that women get blue balls. Usually when I'm hooking up with a guy he's fucking or touching me on his own, and when he isn't I have no qualms about rubbing my clit and telling him to make himself useful. But, of course, I couldn't even do that in this situation. He had gotten what he'd paid for.
My vagina screamed out for attention as I hobbled out the door with wet thighs. I probably would have fucked a guy on the street if one had looked at me the right way. Unfortunately it was sunny and afternoon outside or I probably would have ducked into a bar and made a quick friend. As it was, I just hurried home and came twice with my trusty silver bullet.
I still have no idea why this random schmoe affected me so intensely. I just chalk it up to the mysteries of chemical attraction or math or something else I don’t understand. But I literally masturbated to this guy for weeks until the next time I saw him (which turned out to be the last time). I still haven’t picked up new batteries for my vibe, ya’ll, but after writing this I might even be inspired to do it the old-fashioned way.
A side-note about the meaning of “pro” in the sex industry. You may be thinking to yourself that you become a sex professional when you begin accepting pay for play, and logic would back you up. But the world of escorting is nothing if not nonsensical. “Non-pro” is one of those code words like “donation” or “full service.” It doesn’t actually mean you don’t have sex for money; it means you only have sex for money every once in awhile. If you only worked at McDonalds every once in awhile they’d call you “part-time,” but whatever. From my point of view, even if you’re totally enrolled in night school and only work a shift every couple of weeks, you’re still selling French fries.
But without bringing your tax report to the call, “non-pro” in effect just means “doesn’t look obviously like a street-walking drug-addicted hag.” In my experience, “young and white” generally suffices. And lest you think that I’m pulling on one over on these dudes, when you email a guy as a “non-pro” he immediately asks for your pictures and rates, so it’s a collusion.
Anyway, back to Sam, who wants to worship my tits. I may have previously mentioned that I have very sensitive nipples. I’d rather a guy spend his time up in the Bronx than downtown Manhattan any day. I don’t claim to be able to have an orgasm from breast play, I just really, really like it. So when Sam started emailing me his fantasies of pulling my tits out of my top and squeezing and slapping them, pinching and clamping my nipples, and tying my breasts off with rope, I started to get turned on. The day we arranged to meet, we shot dirty emails back and forth all morning and the simple eloquence of his dirty bon mots (“Come over, I’ll mouth fuck you and blow a load on your face”) got me even more worked up.
By the time I was climbing the stairs to his airy apartment, my panties were already soaked. Sam was quiet in a slightly creepy way. He was young and technically attractive (32, 6 feet tall, dark-haired), but somewhat affectless, like he was zonked out on major mood stabilizers. But despite our total lack of conversational chemistry, something about him drove me completely fucking crazy. I honestly don’t understand it. It must be what it’s like to snort raw pheromones or be under the spell of a love potion.
He told me to sit down in a wooden chair positioned near the window. He literally pulled my tits out of the top of my dress, a move that has always turned me on. For one thing, they look great kind of popped up on a fabric shelf like that, and it’s also just super-dirty. He started to knead and massage my tits, pinching my nipples in between his thumbs and fingers. Occasionally he’d pause and give one of my breasts a little slap, barely grazing the nipple. After a few minutes of this I was out of my head with lust; twitching. I’m sure my panties looked like a water slide. He kept glancing outside from his third-floor window and I got the feeling he was deliberately trying to put on a show for the people on the sidewalk.
He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled his average-sized dick out of his boxers. He stroked it a few times and I reminded him to get a condom. After he slid one on, he held his dick right in front of my lips and in a tone of voice like you’d command an unruly puppy with, firmly said, “Suck.”
I sucked. In my heightened state of hyper-arousal, I nearly sucked the damn thing off. The whole time he kept slapping, squeezing, and pinching my hoisted-up tits, and oh my fucking god, then he started shaking them. Holding onto my nipples he’d give them a firm shake that caused my whole breast to ripple. I have never had this done before or since, but it turned me on to no end. I had found my sex crack.
I lean toward the submissive in my personal sex life: things I love include, having my hair pulled, some name-calling, spankings, being held down, and facials. But despite these proclivities the dorkiness of most Dom/Sub stuff totally ruins it for me. I don’t want to address anyone as master or wear a dog collar, and half the time “Dom” guys just use their status to make you give them head for an hour without having to do anything in return. But I was ready to sign up to be Sam’s slave. Put me on a leash, call me some stupid name, make me catch your cigarette ash in my hands, I was fucking game at this point.
And just as my brain was lighting up like a sexual pinball machine with weird lights and dinging noises and triple point bonuses everywhere, he came. And paid me. And it was time to go.
It's not often that women get blue balls. Usually when I'm hooking up with a guy he's fucking or touching me on his own, and when he isn't I have no qualms about rubbing my clit and telling him to make himself useful. But, of course, I couldn't even do that in this situation. He had gotten what he'd paid for.
My vagina screamed out for attention as I hobbled out the door with wet thighs. I probably would have fucked a guy on the street if one had looked at me the right way. Unfortunately it was sunny and afternoon outside or I probably would have ducked into a bar and made a quick friend. As it was, I just hurried home and came twice with my trusty silver bullet.
I still have no idea why this random schmoe affected me so intensely. I just chalk it up to the mysteries of chemical attraction or math or something else I don’t understand. But I literally masturbated to this guy for weeks until the next time I saw him (which turned out to be the last time). I still haven’t picked up new batteries for my vibe, ya’ll, but after writing this I might even be inspired to do it the old-fashioned way.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Dudes I'd Like to Fuck
So I’ve been watching the first season of HBO’s Flight of the Conchords. I’m so late to the party on this one that there’s no booze left and somebody drew in Sharpie all over a passed-out dude’s face, but I mention it not to say how hilarious the show is (it is) but to tell you how big my lady-boner is for Jemaine Clements, one half of the New Zealish musical duo.
I’m not usually into musicians (I like to be the prettiest one in the relationship), but I am a sucker for funny dudes. He has that Lurch-y kind of hotness that tall indie-rock boys get, and his lips, SWEET MERCIFUL FUCKING LORD, those lips. I would hit it and never, ever quit it.
But even if he wasn’t smoking, I would be forever in love with him just for the way he plays David Bowie when he visits Bret in a dream to help him overcome his body image issues. It makes me laugh so hard I just want to rip my clothes off and sit on his face. Now THAT’S pretty freak-ay.
I’m not usually into musicians (I like to be the prettiest one in the relationship), but I am a sucker for funny dudes. He has that Lurch-y kind of hotness that tall indie-rock boys get, and his lips, SWEET MERCIFUL FUCKING LORD, those lips. I would hit it and never, ever quit it.
But even if he wasn’t smoking, I would be forever in love with him just for the way he plays David Bowie when he visits Bret in a dream to help him overcome his body image issues. It makes me laugh so hard I just want to rip my clothes off and sit on his face. Now THAT’S pretty freak-ay.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Getting Caught
My first real boyfriend pool was a group of underemployed guys in their mid-20s who let me and my slutty friend Jenny watch them play Vampire: the Masquerade between the time junior high adjourned for the day and our parents came home from work. Jenny had seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show, knew all the lyrics of “Punk Rock Girl” by the Dead Milkmen, and smoked pot with her mom, facts which marked her as essentially the most sophisticated person I had ever met.
Having been raised by parents who didn’t even drink, I was so mortifyingly naive about the important facts of life that I could hardly believe it when she chose me to accompany her on these after-school visits. We always dressed up, often in actual slips that we bought at thrift stores and wore as dresses. After slathering ourselves in 99-cent strawberry lipgloss that I bought at Eckerds drug store while Jenny stole the vanilla cigars that were the only smokable product not encased in glass, we would walk over to the modest suburban home that surely belonged to someone’s mother. There I would sit, carefully posturing myself against my natural tall-girl slump, watching as boys who had graduated high-school years ago rolled six-sided dice, tallied magic points, and discussed the merits of various kind of wizardry. It was dizzyling, terrifyingly arousing.
I couldn’t imagine greater sexual heights until the day that Jim showed up. Tall and thin with a scraggly, pube-like goatee and slightly pointed incisors that twisted and turned their way through his mouth like a confused motorist; he even wore a leather jacket. He got my attention immediately and for the first time my interest seemed to be reciprocated – he offered me drags off his Camel Wides and sips from his can of Dr. Thunder.
Although the other guys until that point had been more interested in hanging out with each other quoting esoteric movie lines and cackling at cryptic inside jokes, Jim obviously had a way with women. That is to say, he had had sex with one before. Older than the rest of the already-older-than-me group, it wasn’t outside the realm of imagination to imagine that he may have even fathered a few out-of-wedlock children. He was just that cool.
When he casually slung an arm over my shoulder on a day when I was wearing a particularly fetching piece of reimagined lingerie, I knew he was going to be the first guy to feel my boobs.
The first time we made out he told me although Jenny was the “hot, pretty, girl that anyone would want to sleep with,” he had been really drawn to me because I liked to read books. Even at 14, I was resigned to accepting these types of statements as compliments. I also took it as a compliment when he jammed his hands down my thrift-store Levis and left a ring of yellowing hickeys on my throat in distinctive enough pattern to make my explanation to my mother that I was hit in the neck with a basketball extremely unlikely.
Now that I was grinding Jim’s hand on a regular basis, the hours between school and my mother’s return from work seemed too few. So when Jim told me that his mother was kicking him out for the weekend so she could spend some quality time with her Pall Mall-smoking boyfriend, it seemed serendipitous. This is when I came up with the plan that made it possible for me to live with several boyfriends before moving out of my parent’s house.
Luckily, the kind of guys I dated were always getting evicted or kicked out for leaving their Skoal cups lying around or blowing the rent check at Hot Topic, so it was easy enough to give my too-compassionate parents a sob story about an irrational, borderline-abusive parent and get a free pass to dry hump with much more convenience and immediacy for a few weeks. Despite the fact that at least one of these guys had been driving since the Carter administration and was starting to lose his hair, my parents always believed they were 19. Apparently the casual way Jim strolled to my parent’s minivan, waving to the lovebirds canoodling on the couch with the TV Guide and a fifth of Mad Dog 20/20 also aroused no suspicion.
At the end of the weekend, Jim told me that his mother refused to let him back in the house and whether it was true or he just knew there were more awkward, chafing handjobs where those ones came from, me and my middle-aged boyfriend were now living in supervised sin.
“Remember not to get caught buying beer!” I’d kiss him goodbye like a white-trash, underage Donna Reed as he left for work mowing lawns with my father. On days when there was no landscaping to be done, we’d fool around in the bathroom that locked, with the sound of my little brother hollering and banging on the door as the soundtrack to our foreplay. Once, when my mother came home early, I grabbed a wet n’ wild eye pencil and smeared a rim of black kohl around his eyes as we hastily pulled our clothes on. We then exited together, laughing about how we’d decided to put makeup on him.
But the single greatest triumph for my pubescent libido came when my bedroom door broke. My family was notoriously lax about fixing things; the summer the air conditioner broke was the same one that roaches swarmed our dishwasher, turning it into a repurposed fort won in battle. So when the doorknob leading to my adolescent love-den stopped turning, we just learned to leave my door open a crack, or, if it was shut, to jimmy it open with a butter knife between the door and the frame. This, of course, was a noisy and time-consuming process that quickly alerted occupants of the bedroom to the impending intrusion.
We just “accidentally” shut the door a lot, then quietly had sex until someone was forced to either knock on the door or set off the butter-knife alarm, giving Jim plenty of time to pull out and lounge innocently on the other side of the room like we’d been playing board games all along. If I wore a skirt and we worked around his clothing, we could go from fucking to talking in less than 20 seconds.
Not that my parents weren’t suspicious; as ingenious as I thought my eyeliner explanation had been, sometimes my excuses were weaker. When my father came home to find Jim and I making out on his and my mother’s bed, I told him we were just wrestling. Deadpan, he responded, “Do I need to get my shotgun?”
There just wasn’t really any amount of vigilance that could have kept our hands out of each other’s pants. I was first experiencing a blossoming sexuality, and he was boning a 14-year-old. His penis was a heat-seeking missile and my crotch was on fire. When my parents went to bed on the opposite side of the house we’d retire to our own rooms, wait 20 minutes, then regroup in my pink-walled hormone cabana. Sometimes I’d wake up with Jim’s face in my crotch, unsure of how long I’d been asleep or if my mother had made her first night patrol from her room to the bathroom. Yet our timing in this arena seemed as inexplicably effective as our withdrawal method of birth control. The nights of endless suburban pleasure blended together, dreamlike.
Until one school-night, as I sprawled under Jim’s wiry frame around 2 a.m., there was a knock on the door. For a moment we stared at each other, frozen, his hard-on twitching nervously inside me. I expelled him from my vagina in the same instant he lunged for his boxer shorts. "Just a minute!" I called out, simultaneously shooing him into the closet parallel to the door, his clothes in hand. The closet was, unfortunately, doorless. Jiggling harder than I had been in bed, I set a new record for opening my bedroom door. My mother pressed her way inside despite my attempts to crack the door like I was signing for a UPS package, and immediately asked where Jim was.
"Isn't he in his room?" I asked innocently. From my vantage point I could see both my weary-looking mother in her robe and my naked boyfriend crouching on a crate full of stuffed animals, still sporting a semi like he’d always wanted to sit on a Care Bear’s face.
“No he’s not,” she looked at me penetratingly. One step forward and she’d be able to see the plush-y orgy currently underway underneath the dresses hanging in her 14-year-old daughter’s closet. “Maybe he went out,” I grasped. “The door’s locked from the inside,” she volleyed back. We stood eye to eye in a Mexican standoff. Jim’s eyes grew huge and his member shrunk considerably. I willed her not to come any further into the room.
She craned her neck to look over my head, her eyes sweeping the corners of the room with anger and suspicion. My short sexual life flashed before my eyes, about to be over before I even mastered being on top. She lifted a foot and I wracked my brain for any kind of desparate, last-ditch move to keep her from getting an eyeful of Jim's balls currently dangling just over my seventh-birthday present's plastic nose.
"DOESN'T ANYONE IN THIS FAMILY UNDERSTAND THAT I'M A LESBIAN!" I yelled with all the teenage rage I could muster, startling myself and, to my relief, my mother. Whatever door I had just opened, I had at least halted her forward motion. I watched her expression flicker from shock to confusion to a kind of weary acceptance I was to see on her face many times in the coming years.
"Well, at least you won't get pregnant," she said.
Then, to what will always be my great wonder, she turned around and left the room. The door clicked shut again and Jim was free to get dressed. As my boyfriend exited the closet, I pondered the fact that I had just done the same.
Having been raised by parents who didn’t even drink, I was so mortifyingly naive about the important facts of life that I could hardly believe it when she chose me to accompany her on these after-school visits. We always dressed up, often in actual slips that we bought at thrift stores and wore as dresses. After slathering ourselves in 99-cent strawberry lipgloss that I bought at Eckerds drug store while Jenny stole the vanilla cigars that were the only smokable product not encased in glass, we would walk over to the modest suburban home that surely belonged to someone’s mother. There I would sit, carefully posturing myself against my natural tall-girl slump, watching as boys who had graduated high-school years ago rolled six-sided dice, tallied magic points, and discussed the merits of various kind of wizardry. It was dizzyling, terrifyingly arousing.
I couldn’t imagine greater sexual heights until the day that Jim showed up. Tall and thin with a scraggly, pube-like goatee and slightly pointed incisors that twisted and turned their way through his mouth like a confused motorist; he even wore a leather jacket. He got my attention immediately and for the first time my interest seemed to be reciprocated – he offered me drags off his Camel Wides and sips from his can of Dr. Thunder.
Although the other guys until that point had been more interested in hanging out with each other quoting esoteric movie lines and cackling at cryptic inside jokes, Jim obviously had a way with women. That is to say, he had had sex with one before. Older than the rest of the already-older-than-me group, it wasn’t outside the realm of imagination to imagine that he may have even fathered a few out-of-wedlock children. He was just that cool.
When he casually slung an arm over my shoulder on a day when I was wearing a particularly fetching piece of reimagined lingerie, I knew he was going to be the first guy to feel my boobs.
The first time we made out he told me although Jenny was the “hot, pretty, girl that anyone would want to sleep with,” he had been really drawn to me because I liked to read books. Even at 14, I was resigned to accepting these types of statements as compliments. I also took it as a compliment when he jammed his hands down my thrift-store Levis and left a ring of yellowing hickeys on my throat in distinctive enough pattern to make my explanation to my mother that I was hit in the neck with a basketball extremely unlikely.
Now that I was grinding Jim’s hand on a regular basis, the hours between school and my mother’s return from work seemed too few. So when Jim told me that his mother was kicking him out for the weekend so she could spend some quality time with her Pall Mall-smoking boyfriend, it seemed serendipitous. This is when I came up with the plan that made it possible for me to live with several boyfriends before moving out of my parent’s house.
Luckily, the kind of guys I dated were always getting evicted or kicked out for leaving their Skoal cups lying around or blowing the rent check at Hot Topic, so it was easy enough to give my too-compassionate parents a sob story about an irrational, borderline-abusive parent and get a free pass to dry hump with much more convenience and immediacy for a few weeks. Despite the fact that at least one of these guys had been driving since the Carter administration and was starting to lose his hair, my parents always believed they were 19. Apparently the casual way Jim strolled to my parent’s minivan, waving to the lovebirds canoodling on the couch with the TV Guide and a fifth of Mad Dog 20/20 also aroused no suspicion.
At the end of the weekend, Jim told me that his mother refused to let him back in the house and whether it was true or he just knew there were more awkward, chafing handjobs where those ones came from, me and my middle-aged boyfriend were now living in supervised sin.
“Remember not to get caught buying beer!” I’d kiss him goodbye like a white-trash, underage Donna Reed as he left for work mowing lawns with my father. On days when there was no landscaping to be done, we’d fool around in the bathroom that locked, with the sound of my little brother hollering and banging on the door as the soundtrack to our foreplay. Once, when my mother came home early, I grabbed a wet n’ wild eye pencil and smeared a rim of black kohl around his eyes as we hastily pulled our clothes on. We then exited together, laughing about how we’d decided to put makeup on him.
But the single greatest triumph for my pubescent libido came when my bedroom door broke. My family was notoriously lax about fixing things; the summer the air conditioner broke was the same one that roaches swarmed our dishwasher, turning it into a repurposed fort won in battle. So when the doorknob leading to my adolescent love-den stopped turning, we just learned to leave my door open a crack, or, if it was shut, to jimmy it open with a butter knife between the door and the frame. This, of course, was a noisy and time-consuming process that quickly alerted occupants of the bedroom to the impending intrusion.
We just “accidentally” shut the door a lot, then quietly had sex until someone was forced to either knock on the door or set off the butter-knife alarm, giving Jim plenty of time to pull out and lounge innocently on the other side of the room like we’d been playing board games all along. If I wore a skirt and we worked around his clothing, we could go from fucking to talking in less than 20 seconds.
Not that my parents weren’t suspicious; as ingenious as I thought my eyeliner explanation had been, sometimes my excuses were weaker. When my father came home to find Jim and I making out on his and my mother’s bed, I told him we were just wrestling. Deadpan, he responded, “Do I need to get my shotgun?”
There just wasn’t really any amount of vigilance that could have kept our hands out of each other’s pants. I was first experiencing a blossoming sexuality, and he was boning a 14-year-old. His penis was a heat-seeking missile and my crotch was on fire. When my parents went to bed on the opposite side of the house we’d retire to our own rooms, wait 20 minutes, then regroup in my pink-walled hormone cabana. Sometimes I’d wake up with Jim’s face in my crotch, unsure of how long I’d been asleep or if my mother had made her first night patrol from her room to the bathroom. Yet our timing in this arena seemed as inexplicably effective as our withdrawal method of birth control. The nights of endless suburban pleasure blended together, dreamlike.
Until one school-night, as I sprawled under Jim’s wiry frame around 2 a.m., there was a knock on the door. For a moment we stared at each other, frozen, his hard-on twitching nervously inside me. I expelled him from my vagina in the same instant he lunged for his boxer shorts. "Just a minute!" I called out, simultaneously shooing him into the closet parallel to the door, his clothes in hand. The closet was, unfortunately, doorless. Jiggling harder than I had been in bed, I set a new record for opening my bedroom door. My mother pressed her way inside despite my attempts to crack the door like I was signing for a UPS package, and immediately asked where Jim was.
"Isn't he in his room?" I asked innocently. From my vantage point I could see both my weary-looking mother in her robe and my naked boyfriend crouching on a crate full of stuffed animals, still sporting a semi like he’d always wanted to sit on a Care Bear’s face.
“No he’s not,” she looked at me penetratingly. One step forward and she’d be able to see the plush-y orgy currently underway underneath the dresses hanging in her 14-year-old daughter’s closet. “Maybe he went out,” I grasped. “The door’s locked from the inside,” she volleyed back. We stood eye to eye in a Mexican standoff. Jim’s eyes grew huge and his member shrunk considerably. I willed her not to come any further into the room.
She craned her neck to look over my head, her eyes sweeping the corners of the room with anger and suspicion. My short sexual life flashed before my eyes, about to be over before I even mastered being on top. She lifted a foot and I wracked my brain for any kind of desparate, last-ditch move to keep her from getting an eyeful of Jim's balls currently dangling just over my seventh-birthday present's plastic nose.
"DOESN'T ANYONE IN THIS FAMILY UNDERSTAND THAT I'M A LESBIAN!" I yelled with all the teenage rage I could muster, startling myself and, to my relief, my mother. Whatever door I had just opened, I had at least halted her forward motion. I watched her expression flicker from shock to confusion to a kind of weary acceptance I was to see on her face many times in the coming years.
"Well, at least you won't get pregnant," she said.
Then, to what will always be my great wonder, she turned around and left the room. The door clicked shut again and Jim was free to get dressed. As my boyfriend exited the closet, I pondered the fact that I had just done the same.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Ho-prah's Book Club
Romance sucks. That is, the traditional idea of what romance is sucks. Fuck flowers, the best first-date gift I ever got was a book my date thought I would like. Hearts and flowers and carriage rides, that stuff can’t hold a candle to showing up at the emergency room with a book and a clean pair of underwear. Love is in the details, which is why I fell head over heels for Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape.
I bough the book on a whim (it was 20% off at Barnes and Noble) expecting a light, gimmicky read with lots of music-nerd quibbling. Love is a Mix Tape IS about music, but really it’s about love, the most realistic portrayal of being in love with someone I’ve ever read. I read the whole thing in one night.
Here’s how Sheffield describes the girl of his dreams:
“Renee was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl. Her favorite song was the Rolling Stone’s Let’s Spend the Night Together. Her favorite album was Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. She rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants. She knew which kind of screwdriver was which. She baked pies, but not very often. She could rap Roxanne Shante’s “Go on Girl” all the way through. She called Eudora Welty “Miss Eudora.” She had an MFA in fiction and never got any stories published, but she kept writing them anyway. She bought too many shoes and dyed her hair red. Her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.”
Even more touching than Renee’s cool-girl bravado are her insecurities, and how intimately Sheffield is obviously acquainted with them. The passage I couldn’t get out of my head was the one where Sheffield describes Renee’s reaction to buying a particularly cool pair of shoes in a Boston Fluevog store.
“I told her about the day Renee bought the platform mod creepers and walked down Newbury Street, saying ‘Nobody in Charlottesville has shoes this cool. None of the skinny girls have shoes this cool. That skinny Lori from Georgia doesn’t have shoes this cool.’”
The fact that Renee dies young and unexpectedly makes the story even more affecting. After tearing through this amazing story, Renee was still flouncing through my thoughts and memory, fully fleshed out and moving around. And isn’t that a beautiful reason both for the writing of and the reading of this book? To let the dead get up and dance around.
Buy the Book
I bough the book on a whim (it was 20% off at Barnes and Noble) expecting a light, gimmicky read with lots of music-nerd quibbling. Love is a Mix Tape IS about music, but really it’s about love, the most realistic portrayal of being in love with someone I’ve ever read. I read the whole thing in one night.
Here’s how Sheffield describes the girl of his dreams:
“Renee was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl. Her favorite song was the Rolling Stone’s Let’s Spend the Night Together. Her favorite album was Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. She rooted for the Atlanta Braves and sewed her own silver vinyl pants. She knew which kind of screwdriver was which. She baked pies, but not very often. She could rap Roxanne Shante’s “Go on Girl” all the way through. She called Eudora Welty “Miss Eudora.” She had an MFA in fiction and never got any stories published, but she kept writing them anyway. She bought too many shoes and dyed her hair red. Her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.”
Even more touching than Renee’s cool-girl bravado are her insecurities, and how intimately Sheffield is obviously acquainted with them. The passage I couldn’t get out of my head was the one where Sheffield describes Renee’s reaction to buying a particularly cool pair of shoes in a Boston Fluevog store.
“I told her about the day Renee bought the platform mod creepers and walked down Newbury Street, saying ‘Nobody in Charlottesville has shoes this cool. None of the skinny girls have shoes this cool. That skinny Lori from Georgia doesn’t have shoes this cool.’”
The fact that Renee dies young and unexpectedly makes the story even more affecting. After tearing through this amazing story, Renee was still flouncing through my thoughts and memory, fully fleshed out and moving around. And isn’t that a beautiful reason both for the writing of and the reading of this book? To let the dead get up and dance around.
Buy the Book
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
