81 Vaginas, a Pillow Blog

the last post

2005-11-19T19:01:00.000-08:00

will be up soon...

A

2005-11-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

She had the name of a Greek goddess. I suppose her parents gave it to her, but this is LA and people name themselves, too. We met at the Viper Room. I’d gone because it is where River Phoenix overdosed. The California of the modern youth, where stars can be born and die.

We had a moment on the beach, like a moment from a film. It was after dark. Santa Monica, with the waves, it seems safer than it is. She sat on my lap, and her hair fell over my face, and I thought I knew why I’d come to California, to LA, to planet earth. I though I knew everything. Life wasn’t about much more than this, my back in the sand, the tiny waist in my hands, the good smelling hair.

She had a kitten; it was dying. Those straight LA suburb streets, tree lined, and the lamps softly illuminating everything, so that if you ever leave there, if you ever go back to what you’d once called home, the realreal darkness, it scares you. There are the hills, the Hollywood sign, houses called bungalows tucked away, and fruit, lemons, oranges, it really grows by accident on trees in backyards.

We’d been to dinner; you carry a pager around until it goes off and your table is ready; then there was the beach; now her apartment, the kitten, very small, gray, in a box. It was misery embodied. The vet couldn’t tell her what was wrong. There was test after test. Blood drawn directly from its shaved belly. Every couple of hours or so, she had to force turkey paste into its mouth. She’d quit her job to take care of it. A makeup artist. There would be other jobs. There would be other kittens.

This one, it wasn’t supposed to be alive. If it could have thought like that, it wouldn’t have wanted to. Sometimes, at least for awhile, it would mew.
I remember when she called, the same night we met, her voice on the phone. My friend, J, we weren’t roommates yet, had not yet fucked, she was over in that late night, we were making noodles, and A called, and J told me: I like her voice, I like her name.

The night of our dinner, of the beach, A never took the kitten out of the box. I guess she was used to it. I couldn’t get off of my mind. She was in her bra and panties, on the bed, a big kind, high off the ground, all comforter and pillow, her body was beautiful. This is why you come to California, everything is perfect, everything except the kitten.

I’d write about it later, turn it into a story. In the story, the narrator goes with the girl to the vet. Indeed, the next morning, I went with A. I held the kitten. It was dry, despondent, light. I thought it was a shame that she was forcing it alive; all these tortures of blood extraction and feeding; it made her, A, ugly to me, naked in her need. In the story, I hold my thumb over its nose. It claws my hand, but weakly. We’re at a light. I say to her: the kitten has died. She asks me What? I hand her the kitten, and I get out of the car.

She wouldn’t let me finish undressing her. I liked her name too. And her voice. I liked the way she looked in her bra and panties, and how she kneeled over me on the beach. I liked the promise of her body; what I could see of her x beneath the panties; that I had to imagine the rest, and that it would come to me. I would touch it, infiltrate it through her, cement myself to the city and to her.

I liked most of California.

I didn’t kill her kitten. But I remember, in the car, with it in my lap, feeling bound by it to her, or by her to it, feeling because of it, I was in something over my head, this girl who wouldn’t let die what no longer pleasured from living. She was pretty beside me, her name, her voice, but there was her desperation. And I began feeling an urge I’d have often afterwards, almost any time there was any kind of real connection, when you get past the surface, when the woman isn’t a picture, isn’t an idea, isn’t just the tips of her hair or the inside of her x, but a full on woman, and what you face is intimacy, and what you mean to do, it is to flee.

z

2005-11-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

Her theory was that we could go to a mosque and be married; I was leaving that part of the country, Michigan, soon, and after I’d gone, the marriage would be naturally dissolved. Her therapist had told her she needed to have an affair, or so she said. So here she was, working a loophole in her religion, and though I understood her desire to cheat on her husband, a monster as she described him, less so as I begin to intuit, I did not really want to accept why she thought I would.

My wife was in our apartment, several months pregnant, asleep. I’d met z with a friend, M, at a club. M, the tall, not very attractive Australian with lots of money; after my wife and I divorced, he would forsake our friendship to try to seduce her. Of course, she would reject him. That intimacy of friendship one mistakes for a different kind of affection. I’ve never been brave enough to be so blind.

In any case, I meant for him to have z, and I tried to arrange it. This was probably an impulse to have the vicarious experience. This time in my life when I was most settled on being settled. They went out once or twice. She had twins, little boys; her husband, Lebanese, as she was, worked all the time, she said. He hated her. She hated him. She wanted to be out in the world, out of the marriage, but it was complicated.

Sometimes, she would come to our apartment and spend a night or two. There was a mattress I’d put on the living room floor. My wife, the anti-insomniac, asleep by nine, z and I watching television. They were friends, in the way that women sometimes relate like friends without seeming to be really connected.

Will you hold me? she asked.

And afterwards, I told myself and my wife I didn’t know where it would go. I didn’t imagine what could happen. The little kisses on my neck that I could allow to go on for so long because they were so light they felt almost not like kisses at all.

But then it became impossible to pretend I didn’t know.

Come outside, I told her. We stood in the woods, on the path on which I walked our dogs, z and I, and she held me again. She kissed my mouth and told me we had to fuck. I put my hand down the front of her pants, into her panties, I felt the hair, the wet, little else. A thin girl with a neck so tiny it disturbed me to touch, tall and with slightly bulged eyes, fine cheek bones, a pretty mouth.

I drew my hand away. Later, I’d tell myself it went there without conscious effort. That I didn’t know what I was doing. What she was doing.

She knelt on the woodchips and unzipped my pants. It was spring, not overly warm, a mosquito landed on my neck, I could feel it dipping into me, and I wanted not to slap it.

She took out my x, just the tip of it. She looked up at me and she said, This is all we can do for now.

I said nothing and she took me, just a little of me, in her mouth. After a moment, I tried to lift her. I said, You’re degrading yourself, though that is not what I meant.

It was me degrading me.

She didn’t understand my half refusal. Even as I carried her things to her car, loaded her up, told her she must go, she talked about the marriage at the mosque, the way that God would acknowledge us as holy so we could fuck, the way it would fade away and leave us to the rest of our lives.

I told my wife. I confessed it not the way I do here, but like a person who had been overwhelmed, who had gotten in over his head.

z called the next day and my wife told her that she felt betrayed. z said it as my fault, that I’d been looking at her since I met her, that I’d related to her sexually, that even if I hadn’t asked her explicitly, she could see it in my all the time, that throbbing question. My wife hung up.

I wanted to think as my wife did, that z was wrong, that she had projected her desire on to me, but the fact is, I knew then as I know now that I do it, without meaning to, or at least barely meaning to, that many of my interactions with women, are consciously and unconsciously, craftily and instinctually, guided by the desire to seduce.

l

2005-11-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

It may bore you.

She herself may bore you.

She tries not to and this makes it worse. She is too young to know many men who aren’t entranced by the credential of her beauty and the drawing power of her x. Some women almost never outgrow that.

Nude, her breasts are small, her ass slightly slack. You get too old to tell a woman what she wants to hear. This makes her want to hear it more. There are men by the hundreds in any bar, and there is nothing extraordinary about you but your inattention. This is not a tool, but a fact, and your acceptance of it is a meridian. A thing inside of self to fear, like any change.

She comes to your apartment once, twice, three times. She wants to make her father small. She means to take from you what she can mistake for the semblance of his full on acceptance.

This is your green couch and she is small on it, her practiced smiles, the phrases with which she means to shock you, as if you haven’t heard someone so blunt or quick before, but this confidence is a put on, and you’re tired. She needs you to ask her for the gift of her body, but for you it is no gift and so eventually she needs to ask you to ask her, and she goes about all of it like most any girl who has yet to walk through the fires.

But you will not play.

Annoyed, you tell her each time to go. The first time, your hand beneath her bare jeans, on her ass. Lunges, you tell her. Your body won’t keep. It’s not keeping all ready.

What you’re not attracted to in her is not the way her ass feels. Don’t see her wrong. She is that kind of lovely that will begin to creep away at twenty five. But this is her at twenty three.

What the real problem is: you’ve reached the point where you can’t stand a spoiled girl.

And so you see the absolute limit of a bonding. It will begin with a fuck and end with one, little more. There will be the mechanics of it for you, and what will she have then.

But hand on her ass, cold words coming out of your mouth, you know the truth. You know the little lies you tell yourself: that if you stand there with your knife and your bloodlust and she finally throws herself on it, have you done wrong?

Second visit. She works in a Victoria Secret and she asks you to see her panties and bra. She kneels on the bed. How does it look? You can’t see like that any more, the way most men see, not this girl, not at this moment, not most girls. You watch a woman drink a soda and you can imagine the sugar in her blood, in her guts. There are layers even to physical beauty, not to mention the other.

It gets harder for one to be beautiful in front of you.

The attraction is base. That’s not quite the same as saying nothing is there. Her breath is slightly foul, as if from a stomach disorder. The bones of her face are very fine, her cheeks like airbrush inventions. Her waist very narrow; her skin dark and smooth; her eyes prettprety. She takes a good photograph, leaning forward, the first night, her blue shirt, her bared shoulder, eyes down cast, her gentle smirk, but it is all illusion, the picture better than the sum of her, and on the bed in her bra and panties, a pornographer’s dream, and I have the heart of a pornographer, but I do not further undress her. We lie there for a long time in the silence and the dark, my back to her, and she tells me all the secrets she thinks will make me admire her.

You could fuck her then, you almost do, the third night; this time she comes unbidden, and she stumbles through her vision of seduction. You sit above her with your knife, your bloodlust, but beyond the ecstasy of the death itself, you will both be disappointed by what you don’t take here.

Her belly still sunken. Her hips bones still visible. Her x small and slightly open, lines of wet running through the dark cats eye of it; you go in with your fingers, with your tongue. You feel overly somber and you know what this will be like for her, a wound to carry afterwards, a reminder of a man she thought she was taking possession of only to see that she herself had been possessed and left behind.

In the end, you do not fuck. It feels to her like rejection, and she is bitter leaving.

In days, in an email, she’ll tell you that she’s finally agreed to her boyfriend’s proposal, that she’ll marry him. You should wonder as if it is a legitimate question how she’s been broken. You should realize that the apparent virtue of your freezing does not so clearly reflect on your desire to protect any her; in the end you must recognize that it wasn’t for her at all that you weren’t fucking, not really.

In the end, you're always trying to save yourself from something, even the smallest thing...say the ennui of fucking a girl you've already known by type over and over.

M

2005-10-31T14:51:00.000-08:00

While you’re fucking she tells you that at the club she was taking meth and this makes you feel accidentally involved in a date rape.

This is a girl I met through an online personal site, as if that would solve a problem. As if a woman chosen that way would prove to be more suited. As if I'm looking for more suited. As if there is any woman who except for through act of will you'd choose to be alone on an island with the rest of your life.The lies we tell ourselves when we're tired.

M is is the noise you create after a bad breakup when you are afraid to be alone with your brain.

She is part of what you do when you think you mean to really really retire, move into the next phase of life, crash land on that island.

She's your first attempt.

She looked much sexier in her picture than she did in real life but she was plenty sexy, a sort of club girl who worked in a vet clinic by day but put on the makeup mask and the hothot clothing at night, a thin girl with a heartbreak story that didn’t match her sex kitten photos, lips pouted to the camera, tongue out and tip bent up along the side of some female friend’s face.

(That's right, I'm looking for the love of my life, a final final love, and that is the picture on which I stop).

It's the middle of the week. She takes me to a place in which I feel too old, an underground club where the music is hard and the kids are jumping up and down. I feel overly tall, overly worked out, a sort of giant, out of place, this mythological land that makes perfect sense to the people that inhabit it.

This girl, her friends, all of them pretty, what am I doing here? What is she doing with me?There's vodka. The walls are black, the floor strange, like particle board, chewed up in places and spongey. This is a better hell, dark and somewhat dirty, but you might choose to be here, just not for long, not for an eternity.

She's in and out of the booth, dancing, her friends, all this sort of conversation, people talking anyway, and we drink and the floor gets blacker and I was ready from when I walked in to be away.

When she asks me to stay the night, I don't know why. Both of us are looking for something we probably shouldn't believe in. Both of us are probably going about it all wrong. She asks me to her bed maybe because she thinks that is how it starts, if it is to start at all. And when it comes down to it, I suppose she is right.

I've alreayd had my ephinany, though. It's not going to work. Not like this. I think I've learned my lessons well and am ready to settle, like anybody who walks out of a building that has burned. I know the value of what I might have again and so I mean to get it quickly and take care of it well, but I'm with this girl because of her picture, and that's not going to cut it.

My realization some time in the club, or mabye in the car on the way to or from it: I'm not going to find HER, whoever she is, if she even is, this way, or that way.

That fine line. On one side, you're a monk. On the other, you are 81vaginas. It's not that you ever cross it. It's just that it can be crossed.

She is sucking my x and I am pulling down the boxer shorts with the elastic band rolled several times to make them snug, and I am wondering vaguely who they belonged to. She's got little plastic packages full of lubricant she squeezes out into her x, telling me that some medication she is on makes her dry. That and the ceiling fan.

It's late. The next time I see her--I return for a jacket that I'll leave by accdient in the morning--we watch cartoons and she eats Capitan Crunch without milk and I feel like the stranger I am, sitting on her couch, wondering how much time has to pass before I can take my jacket and go this time for good.

Anyway, we fucked. I think there is some affection in it, and certainly some pleasure. There are moment, as with any fuck, when you sense that connection you're after. Her eyes fall into yours. Or she kisses you more delicately. My hand is flat on the front side of her hip, the tips of some fingers on her sunken belly, her life right beneath them, all the working mechanics of a full on human being, complete, if you look up--and I do, I always do--with soul and whatever that entails.

And I know what I'm doing. I know it for real. I'm trying to get the feeling of some girl that is gone off of me. The thought of her out of my mind. The way sometimes we try to clean things not with water, not with purity, but with other kinds of stain. You rub dirt over your bloody hands.

And nothing really gets your mind free. This would take a lobotomy, a pill, a bullet.

I'm looking for the love I never fully had, a cave in which to hibernate, a grave in which to rest, but I stop on the sexiest photo I can find. I fuck her more than anything to take possession of her particular appeal, as if after that it will always belong a little bit to me, the way a woman picks a flower so she can annex its beauty to her own.

She tells me she took meth at the club. I'm fucking her. Her ass is small and round and pale. There is a little operation scar on her belly. She told me about before we met. She's got this story of loss, some boy she couldn't see that she should have kept and now she is digging around in the dark for one like him.

In the morning, at the stop light close to my apartment, dawn really, after the night of fucking, I fall asleep sitting in my car, I don't know for how long. I just wake and the light is green and I wonder where I am, and who.

e

2005-10-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

That kind of Irish that is black haired. The eyes blue and deep set, the skin pale. You look at her the first time and tell yourself stories that all pretty much end the same way: if you touch her, your life will change.

Rainbows move away so that you never can prove they don’t end in pots of gold, but everybody breaks down up close. The question is not how many lovers you’ve had but why you’ve had them. The question is whether or not the serial fucker is less culpable than the man who is reputedly trying to run down an illusion.

And as for you, you’ve only loved women you fucked—before that, you are capable merely of want—and this is enough to make you believe that you don’t really know how you feel about a woman until after the fucking.

And as for e, we’re fucking in a nearly empty apartment, a place into which I’m about to fully move, as if my life in this new place will be better than my life in the place I’m leaving. There are only a few boxes and the carpet is new and we don’t turn on any lights, such is our guilt, or perhaps our sense of the fragility of the long moment. e is on the floor with her knees by her shoulders.

She is her face; it is extraordinary. She’s been staring at me, frank and curious. From the distance of her admiration, she is the one. Picture her smiling at a Bed Breakfast early morning table. Imagine her in the seat beside you as you drive through some night. She’s cultivating the lines on your face, listening to the ways you nightmare, laughing out loud when you do something silly. She’s holding the hand of your son. She will mourn you when you die. She’s been watching me, and I see her, and I know what she means by it, and all of this is possible.

Up close, when you know her, she’s a mess. She drinks too much, has her second DUI, there are problems with her parents, there have been problems with her men, she is headed for some kind of crash, a series of them.

By the time we meet with intention, I look at her and get a general sense of disaster. The idea of a slow path of destruction.

Before the fucking, I cannot know the love that is broader than want, but that a woman and I don’t have that potential for love, of that I can sometimes feel certain, sometimes even before the first kiss. I look at her and see liability.

This habit of seduction that outlasts the potential on which seduction aught be based.

There are checker boards and checkers, and we play. (You tell yourself, if you sit back and let her come at you, you’re not responsible). Later, we stand in a grocery store, a loaf of bread, a jar of almonds, a post drink late night picnic.

She’s very lovely, nude on the floor of the apartment that will be mine but at the time feels like what it is: an empty and strange place that I will have to learn to inhabit. She’s flexible, little, her breasts are quaking mounds, and she never in that near dark seems to close her eyes. She tells you with them the first time she looks at you that she wants to fuck you, or maybe it is a more general want and this is just where it leads, but now, what her stare means, you don’t know with certainty. In retrospect, it is as if she is trying to make you aware that she is fully conscious, that she knows who she is, who you are, what you are doing, that she wants you to see her seeing you.

Her blue eyes no color at all in the shadow, just open and with the white around them, and her mouth, her pretty lips, later she’ll put them around your x, and later yet, she’ll say about it, I never go down on a guy.

(Later: drunk phone calls, night after night, accusations, declarations, promises, pleading).

She’s brought me a framed picture, something she bought in Czechoslovakia. We’ve been fucking, on the floor, and then with her leaning on the bar, her ass overly thin and disappointing, insubstantial, her face forward, eyes maybe open then too, black hair falling across her pale shoulder blades. While she dresses, I hang the picture, close to where we’ve been.

I like her voice. She is smart and sometimes she talks about things and in such a way that makes even my brain go quiet and reallyreally listen. But you get close and you see the cracks, the problems, the liabilities. There is, after it all, a sense of doom to her, an easy prophecy of a sort of chunk by chunk loss of her, from this world into the next, or into a simple darkness, a beauty that will be broken down, that is on that path all ready. What she is really looking for, staring at, who knows? A savior. A witness. A second opinion.

x, J, (T, A )

2005-10-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

The thought process starts almost right now, on this napkin in a bar on this night that is not quite the present.

It goes first to x. Call it a blind date, though that description is not precise. Call her a reporter, though she was not a reporter any longer. She was a good postmodern media mix: Polynesian/Anglo, tall and well breasted, with what we’d call no accent though everybody who doesn’t talk like you has an accent; she called herself a gym rat—there was something unattractive about the phrase—and her sense of humor was sophomoric; her beauty was just a little off so it is fitting to imagine her a broadcasting rather than being broadcast about.

(There was another reporter. This in a foreign country, and there she is well known. Imagine a sharply dressed woman, petite, with perfect hair, a woman who had come to the States, to Atlanta, for her broadcast training; you can see the Mediterranean in her, a pretty but not beautiful woman. Imagine that to walk with her is to have her name shouted out over and over, right past your face, right through you, TM¸ TM! The way people want to be recognized by the recognized. We fucked only briefly and not very deeply, her x so narrow, so shallow, it felt more like a point of victimization than a pleasure, this in the apartment of a a, a friend, if you can call him a friend [we went one Halloween as Caesar and Brutus, me all bloody, and later A would remark of that particular a that the costumes were apropos (a colleague, he’d try to betray me professionally), and I’d tell her not to worry, that that a is one of those men who only wants to be a bully, that however he tried to fuck with me, it was ineffectual; one of those men who resent the power they perceive in other men the way some women resent the beauty they see in their friends, he couldn’t really do me damage—but A was kind to want to notice, this lovely girl with her deep set eyes and that caricature of a stripper’s body, A and I, twelve hours before my flight taking me forever away, we were finally coming clean, and A was pressing and I was pressing, me to her, saying it was meant to be, asking my fingers into her body, though it was daylight and we were outside, Syrian workers leaning into the fence, trying to see what they could, those last desperate hours, there were so many to so goodbye to say that I did not properly say goodbye to much of anyone, and to one I did not say goodbye for real, this haunting girl r who would sometime later follow me to the States and reek all havoc (she would dance under Karma and you know I deserved it) but A, this lovely girl, her tongue (how strange a thing, I’d seen it touching her teeth, seen her mouth, seen her body, for months, thought about it vaguely, and now it was upon me) in my mouth (and how strange it feels to kiss and touch when you reallyreally know that it can go no further, not this day and not tomorrow and, speaking practically, not ever), six months of preamble, of foreplay, you always wonder, or you always should: is this real? Am I here and is it now? this girl in the Mediterranean sun, her flesh damp, her shirt open, and the flight on which you’ll leave now en route to touching down and waiting and we lean against the coarse building wall, there are palm trees and there is the sea and this is a goodbye and if you see it as I do this is like a scene from a love film, though there is no real love, only real longing] and T, that reporter, and me in the apartment of a, a friend that had yet to openly and ineffectively tried to betray me but knew he would, the way all people’s motives and where they’ll lead are known to them if they dig hard enough, A she’s kneeling on the bed, her x too tight, so my x in her mouth, and I think of her moving with me from trendy club to trendy club, where for us there is never an entrance fee, where we never pay for drinks, and I am not her accessory, she really likes me, and in this crowd of youth there is nothing to hide, but in this country of tradition all affairs are dangerous, and my apartment, we cannot go there, so here we are in the bed of a friend, he’ll find the condom wrapper later, and maybe his hate will be born for me then; quite late, I walk her out, past the guard gate to her Range Rover, she is more sure of herself than pretty, she has the ears of half the people, strange power, but I’m with her not because of it but because she is terribly interesting and her breasts stand out sharply from her little body; those nights we walked from club to club, the stain of wine on her breath, and it goes on and on and it goes off.)

And I know who I am. I’ve had the luxury of too many choices; I am a spoiled man. I’m scribbling on a napkin at a bar, making an outline, as if it is more interesting to write about fucking than it is to fuck.

Vodka tonics, and some people say they drink to forget, but sometimes I say I drink to better remember. This bar to I go out of habit; wherever I live, there is such a bar, not far away, familiar, and I feel safe there and most of the time sure. This one is populated primarily by divorcees, or at least women that feel like it, thirty and beyond, for the most part. And here, I stand out. The middle aged men with their bellies pushing against their expensive shirts. Boys show up, but they are too clearly boys in this atmosphere. And I get to straddle the line. I get to appear all grown up but not all grown out; there will be two or three like me in here in a night. And there will be some standout girls. In the club next door, I would fade quickly, though they wouldn’t.

There is nothing here that interests me. Or next door either. Maybe much of anywhere.

I think primarily of the second reporter, that not quite blind date, a place called the Dark Horse, we got very drunk. I was nervous at first, and she never has been.

In the crowd, in that good light, she was aggressive. Kiss me, she said. And I did. There was some game she was playing, trying I think to bowl me over, whatever power that would give me, and I was trying to go almost stride for stride, like a man in the wrong kind of match but trying to fit anyway.

She pushed her hand beneath my beltline. I don’t know what she was trying to prove against me but I am certain this had little if anything to do with attraction. I am not erect or close. All around us are people but I don’t imagine that she’s doing it for there benefit. I don’t imagine she’s doing it for mine.

She tells me to touch her in the same way. I do it, the x completely shaved and only slightly wet, and for whose benefit I touched it I can’t say for certain

There is another girl in the bar, J, my leasing agent, a woman I’d made out with in a different bar a week before, and then, sober, the next day, she’d told me, as I fantasized about how she’d spend her lunch breaks romping with me in my apartment, she told me she was too young for me, which was, of course, another way of saying I was too old for her.

It had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as a woman for whom I was too old. Now it did. Now it does.

Call it a meridian. There is the you that you are before you consider that you’ve actually moved too far away from the next generation to touch it, and there is the you that become when you realize you have. You can trace the lines on my face with the tips of your finger, but I’d never done that before J.

So she’s in the bar, and she’s said hello, and I don’t know what all of this she’s seen. I stand there with my x feeling very limp in small in x’s unfriendly grip and with my hand hanging dead in her pantyless jeans, and I think about J, about her x; I think that I will get close to it, the way I think of it now as well: one untouched x amongst the billions of untouched x’s, some small fraction of the overwhelmingly large group that you will never ever known.

The reporter, x, I walked her to car. We kissed there. In private, she was less aggressive. I knew not to push it. She was going to call me when she got home. She did not. She did not return my call the next day. I let it go. You picture things as butterflies in your hands and you just unfold your fingers.

The first reporter, the people in the streets, she took me from club to club, this little version of fame.

I’m scribbling about them on napkins. There is nothing here that I want, and that is a particularly damning type of frustration, not wanting anything.

My father used to mark the milk carton so I would not drink more than I had been allotted. I remember how it was when I first left the house and had money, and I could walk in the grocery store and buy whatever I wanted. I marvel at it sometimes still, despite all the restrictions I’ve put on myself, not unlike my father’s restrictions, the way it feels to know that anything you want is yours if you choose to take it. I walk the aisles and I could have this or that and all and more and it doesn’t mean as much to me as once it might have.

If I let them put ice in my drinks, I’d crack it with my teeth.

And there is a moment, a blond woman, I’ve seen her before and felt no real attraction, but then she was still and now she is dancing with not grace but abandon, and whatever you call it, she can move in a way not many women can move, and we want many rare things. My glass, it may as well be filled with arsenic and I’d drink it just hard—I’ll never have this woman, and when I do, she will not be enough.

(Most blogs like this end in death of self, depending on what you mean by end, and depending on what you mean by death of self.)

The men, they sit with their sucked in bellies still over their belts, their drinks in arms cocked and forced toward flex, or the skinny boys who look around faux tough, and I stand here, alone as alone as alone as alone. But I know my destiny. I know about the death of us all; I believe in it.

And I know there will be a girl first. In my bed. In my space. In my life for real. All of that again. And I know her name, or so I think. I’m aware of my path, where I’m going, and how I got here, too. I’m standing in bar not really wanting anyone that it seems I might be able to have.

So it seems as if everything is worked out in my mind, but it’s not—I know too that I will have to work hard to not resent the woman who will inevitably grow to represent the conception of death of all other choice, even if it is not choice I think I need.

The peace I can find from walking out of the bar, the peace in fact I feel in so doing, will not always be with me.

And you—youyou—the real you—you’ll be here. You’ll know what it is like, how it feels when you sort of hate who you’ll be more than you sort of hate who you’ve been.

j

2005-10-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

You can hardly count it, but under what criteria does one count? and only the simple writer, and only the simple reader, thinks it is about counting.

This is a Montana blizzard of my youth, which lasted as long I suppose as the youths of most men these days, which lasts perhaps even into the now.

She was quite a bit older than I was, twice as grown up, and where we always found ourselves was hovering in the doorway of her fifth floor apartment in a big brick building near the university. We’d hug and sometimes she’d hold and if you were still enough you could feel her gently kissing your neck but I hardly ever felt still at those times.

I was afraid of her. I suppose that fear was based on some subconscious wisdom, some instinct. I wanted badly to be in her, but at some level I must have also known I’d be in over my head.

This was a beautiful woman, athletic, smart. There was a picture, the only one I had of her, standing on a tennis court. You could see her stomach, the slight ripple of muscle there. It was the only time I tried to show a girl off to my father, putting that picture down in front of him, but his response was non-committal.

And she wasn’t my girl. In fact, she was some other man’s.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t get it, at least not right away. The door was open, but she wasn’t going to stand there with it in her hand forever. By the time I came around, it was too late. I tell that to women now, when they don’t move forward at the right time and then later want whatever kind of bonding might have been available; I say, Our time has passed.

I knew her best through the winter and it wasn’t until spring until I tried to act but by then the moment was gone. There was a night at a house of which she was taking care; we watched a film and she put her legs, bare, in my lap, and I sat very still. It was snowing. I can’t remember the movie. I don’t think we finished. Somehow we ended up dancing, holding each other and moving our feet and whispering as if we weren’t alone though we were. The house belonged to a screenwriter, a man who had just been paid a lot. What I remember of it best is his collection of laser discs, at a time when I’d not known they exist.

We danced in some room I can’t picture. I was telling her about my prom. I don’t know why. I suppose because I didn’t know what to say. There were her lips on my neck again, just a kiss, the way once a straight male friend kissed my neck when he was going to travel to Australia and be gone for a year, leaving me to guard over his girlfriend—which I did, whom I did not touch—the kind of kiss that can be just an expression of some kind of affection.

We went to our separate bedrooms. Mine was upstairs.

Later, in the spring, when we were past hope (there was never real hope for anything real between us; I was simply under-prepared), she said, I kept waiting for you to come down.

And I told her, I kept waiting for you to come up.

I remember that long night. The ceiling, the tightness in my neck, the snow outside the window.

In the beginning, I never really went into her apartment. Those early nights of winter. The steps went down the outside of the building, and I run away from her and down them, my feet loud against the steel, and I’d run off across the field of snow to my own place, trying to understand what was going on, or maybe trying not to. Wanting to be breathless and tired.

Later, she gave me a book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I still have it. In the front cover, she has written: I simply want to give you something I love.

We would lie on her couch and I would read it out loud to her.

She is sick, maybe fevered, and the winter won’t wane, and I still don’t know if she wants this or not, but I move my hand up her bare leg. Maybe my hand moves itself. I keep reading and move my fingers beneath her shorts. A blanket is covering us. We’re still. In an impossibly brief amount of time, I’m touching her x. I’ve felt others, but none like this, perhaps because the others I could conceive of; this one, hers, it is the truly unknown, and yet I am in the process of beginning to know it.

I am not ready.

She moans and her weight relaxes completely into me.

I keep reading, and I move my hand away, back down her leg.

With most things, it is forward or backward. There is rarely such a state between two people as absolute stagnation. My fingers do not go inside. They go back down her leg.

Later, I’d dwell on it. I’d tell my friend, D, that I wish I’d had the courage. That if I’d slept with j, there would at least be something solid to hold onto, a rock in my memory—I’ve always been afraid of what I’ll lose in forgetting—but it has turned out not to be true. I remember her, those January evenings, the falling snow, the way she felt, what little I felt of her, I remember it, enough of it, I do.

X

2005-10-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

We were always trying to get next to an x.

Halloween reminds me of what a child I am, or want to be. I play “The Monster Mash” for my son, and I time trip back into one of those school parties, plastic capes and rubber masks, cotton spiderwebs and cutout skeletons with brads for joints, and candy everywhere. They play the tape of the beating heart, the screaming woman, the hissing cat.

It’s needing more from the world that causes you to grow. Lack of innocence is expansion of want. And one day, you’ll recognize all the black holes into which everything falls.

That’s me, fifteen or sixteen, out in the cold, with a balloon and my memory from grade school of how to make piñatas with glue and newspaper strips. I want to be the Mordred, in his gold, the wicked son of Arthur and his tricky sister, the creepy-cool knight-killer boy from the movie.

I don’t know if it will work and my fingers are going numb, slathering strips of wet newspaper on the balloon. Shaping a mask. Strips ribboned up for curls. Gold spray paint.

The Halloween party is in the city, and what we hope for, the five of us jammed into a car, is that there will be plenty of girls there. What we think we want to do is fuck but none of us could arrange that even if a girl was willing. We’re just driven to get close; we just move recklessly in the direction of any x we can.

And none of us think about why. We’re kids. We think about how. And we don’t even think about that well. We’re bundles of wish, of prayer, of hope. The accident that will get us laid may be coming.

I’ve read Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint but I don’t get any of it. I don’t understand that our desire to try to fuck is something to contemplate.

The girl, she’s dressed like a genie, complete with that flap of fabric that covers her mouth and the tip of her nose. Like that and in the dark and the music, I think she’s pretty. My mask is the opposite of hers: only my mouth is visible. I’ve heard about the Ancient theory that people fall to earth as hermaphrodites and break apart and then go forever seeking out the other half, but it doesn’t cross my mind as I notice that our masks complete each other.

Outside, pressed against her in the light of the street lamp, I see her skin is bad.

And yet there is her midriff, a belly button with a jewel in it. Her genie pants are pink and billowed and gossamer. We kiss and I touch and her skin is slightly wet and she doesn’t taste very good but everything I need or want to need is before me. I could pretend I remember it now, and I could write out that false memory, but it’s lost for me as it most likely has for you: the feeling of the possibility of communing with something that you think will really fulfill you.

If you read this blog, if you’ve lived this life, you probably know there is no such thing. Peace is a different endeavor.

This is the second vagina, and all I expect is to get my fingers in. Anything beyond would overwhelm me.

I slide my hand down and she lets it go.

( I think now of the birth of my son and the death of a love and the few other very deep moments when we realize we are really right up against it, the pure stuff of life, and I’m sure those first few times, those first few touches of that which it was hard to believe we’d ever be allowed to touch, can count amongst them).

The mound, bristly. The skin soft.

My finger inside. And aside from the fact that it is warm, there is no real tactile pleasure in this. This isn’t why we touch vaginas. It’s not even why we fuck them. Our own hands are better from a purely physical standpoint.

It’s that she’ll let you. Her x is something into which many boys want to put their fingers, but on this Halloween, you’ve somehow risen from the pack of them.

(Since then, it’s never enough. You always want more, whatever you get, whatever she gives. She’s nude for you, she’s open for you, she is yours, and then what? But I’m fifteen or sixteen, and I stand there in the cold autumn air with my finger in that warm wet place, and I don’t want anything more.)

Inside again, the dim lights, the loud music, all these costumes. She has on that thing that covers her face. I leave off my mask. My friends, they’re waiting for me, but I feel separated, and I don’t tell them about any of it right away.

L

2005-10-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

I’m thinking of chocolate covered almonds. The chocolate is dark, dairy free. There is a candy shell, yellow or purple or red. As I drive she pops one and then the other into her mouth. I learned from my mother when I was young to fear a woman who eats.

I gave up those candies, all candies, as I’ve given up other things, as, if I lived long enough, I’d give up nearly everything.

And of course, death makes spartans of us all.

But for now, it is the sugar rush of candy. (And for a long time, it’s been meat, dairy).

L is pneumatic and blond. We meet at a bar, twice, in fact. She’s smiling and open eyed and lovely and each of the times I come across her I think about her for a while after she’s gone.

She tells me she has a child but the bartender tells me she has two and over the phone she tells me that truth before I ask her for it. We play pool in the middle of the week, though I am not the sort that plays pool. She is the kind of girl you trust enough right away to do things with that you would not normally do. If she asked me to dance, I might.

The pool hall is nearly empty, but I know the boys there watch her. She’s an open invitation in front of a mostly closed door. You’ll mistake her kindness and her bubbly nature for an easiness that isn’t really there.

She drinks a lot. There’s that and the candy almonds. There are things that people don’t hide up front that wouldn’t bother you later on but are too much too early.

He breasts are round and firm, her ass small and curved, but she will not show her stomach. Maybe something has happened to it in birthing. She wants to be fucked exclusively from behind, with her shirt not off, just down around her waist.

Her oldest is thirteen and she is only 27. She calls him several times in the night to postpone her coming home and finally cancels it all together. We finish and she turns to kiss me and we stop and then a little while later, we start again.

In the morning we wake and she showers and dresses but then we start again. She asks me to come in her mouth and I do. Then I see a drip of it on her blouse, a flower print without shoulders, a deeply cut neck.

She’s got to go home, to her boy, the babysitter, and the younger one, the babysat.

She talks of a gift for seeing into people and into the future and she is so serious and so certain and tells me stories that are so convincing I began to ask her about me, about my future, and she tells me that everything will be ok. I suppose she knows that at this time not everything is.

You can almost take a hold of her. You can almost want to. It is almost always this way with a woman. You reach a point where you might go forward or might go back, where everything is tangible, and the smallest thing can move you in either direction.

I feel guilty in the car as she eats the chocolate covered almonds. She’s going home to her sons and there on her flower print shirt is the darkened fabric where my come dripped. And I have a son. And an ex wife who is his mother.

And it’s not at that moment or this one that I feel L has been misused. It is that in this effort for connection, in this testing of bonds, we all are. Where there is need or want there is danger. We introduce ourselves to disappointment, time and time again. We create illusion and crash ourselves against it.

L understand me. She says, You’ll be all right. Someday, you’ll be ready to really share your space again.

I imagine her waking in the night and me stiff beside her and curled away, and maybe it is true, or maybe she just knew some other way. It is nice to be known and nicer yet to be known and accepted.

I think of L and chocolate covered almonds and the sun on her face and the way she smiled when she got out of her car. It’s a fondness I feel and a fondness I see, and the car door closes and because this is a post, that sounds like an end, and to the fucking, it was, but to the knowing it wasn’t.

E

2005-10-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

I haven’t thought of these slacks for years, but they were the best I ever had. Charcoal gray, Dockers, I think, and a perfect fit. The night I met E, she was wearing red slacks. First, I met her boyfriend, a bartender. I can’t remember what he was wearing. He was doing tricks with match sticks on the bar, one of the best looking men I’ve known. Let me keep my build and brain and give me that face and I’d rule the world. Well, not all of it, but a lot more of it than I do now.

The slacks eventually just wore out. You put them one day and you know, however fond of them you are, this is the last time.

The girl, E, was pretty, with a sort of Icelandic look, but in fact she was Belgium. It would take us several weeks to get to fucking but I knew she was up to it within the first few minutes. I rarely feel a girl is coming on but with her it was clear. R, her good looking boyfriend, would wander away to do his job and she and I would sit there and drink and chat.

Eventually, he’d play American football with me and a team another ex-pat and I had formed. Like most of the young men in this particular country, he’d been spoiled to the point of hubris by parents who had survived war, and though he was handsome and strong and young, he had no realistic idea of the size of the world or his own scope in it.

I liked her accent. Her hair looked brittle and she had a sad mouth and was one of those girls whose waist really sinks in, so even though her hips weren’t large, she was an hourglass, her breasts pert, her belly button sunken.

You want things to be permanent. Sometimes, if I’m buying something that I really like, I have started to mourn its eventual loss even before I’ve gotten it out of the store. Sometimes, for this reason, I buy two. What you have to know, though, is that it’s not just the wearing out that makes our relationships to things ephemeral. It’s that we change. We can remember who we were and how we used to feel about things, but we can’t be that person again.

Perhaps it is that way with people. I think of the very old couples, the twenty five year anniversaries, the thirtieth. Some of those relationships are there after all that time for good reasons. I know that.

There was no sense of potential or desire for permanence with E. (I want to give you the rest of the letters because I really like her name.) We were in a place where about half of us were from out of the country, even those whose blood lines went back to it. Almost everybody was peeling away, and though this was a large city, you felt about those people who seemed to be bound there the sort of sorrow and envy we feel here for our friends that stay in the little towns we leave.

This was only five years ago but I’ve lost much of it, how we worked toward the night of fucking. How we arranged to go drinking alone, the taxi-service to my apartment, the guard gates and across the lot (were we hand in hand?), the elevator ride up. The apartment with its balcony hanging over the Mediterranean.

I’m certain that E and I kissed the first time on the rug on the stone floor. A lot of things start on throw rugs. This one was Egyptian. I can see her on it, simply nude.

The fucking was on the couch. It went on for some time and eventually I pressed my finger her xx and then into it, the way we do further along in a love affair, when our tape worm lusts keep crying out for more and different

I probably knew I was in trouble before then. I probably knew that there was no ending point. That you just go on and on, and when they tell you that it’s the journey not the end, this is what they meant.

Pellynor and his Questing Beast.

I left that country. I remember the last days, the packing, the paperwork. All these affairs to wrap up. The slacks, I knew it was time to leave them. I’d like to think I'd like them now, and they’d fit, but it wouldn’t be the same. The promises we make when we are young are promises the people we become can not always keep.

A

2005-10-05T16:22:00.000-07:00

I’d not choose her on my own. She says she’s never done anything like this before and by her fast chatter we can tell that she is excited in that nervous way. It is also apparent she has taken for granted we will undress with her.

She’s returned from a stint in China and talks about the ying and the yang, only she pronounces them differently than you probably do. Almost everything she says is metaphysical, and if sometimes she didn’t slow down against a question to rethink what she’d said then her conversation would be annoying.

But one gets from her a sense of sincerity and absolute openness that makes a conversation I’d normally not find bearable actually enjoyable. It is as if she is figuring herself out even in the context of the conversation, and a simple remark from either of us can turn her pensive. She’s thinking, having her little eureka moments, and coming at us with them.

After an hour, she declares that she knows this will be good for her, the conversation, meeting K and I this second time, what she imagines we’ll do together.

I’m not sure how I feel about it. And it’s hard to tell with K, who must be a little bored, who is smiling but somewhat stiffly.

We’re sitting in a bar, though not the same bar where we’ve met. This night, we’ve come together not by accident but with purpose. A has something very specific in mind. She tells us she wants to perform oral sex on me while I perform oral sex on K. She smiles and shivers and turns her head when she says this; it is childlike and endearing and though it is quite sexual her manner makes it feel like anything but.

She talks about the phallus. She talks about mine. She talks about size and angle.

I can’t tell what K thinks. We could go on and on like this, not making a decision because nobody wants to say out loud that a decision must be made. It’s like talking about the price when you want to buy something from a friend. There seems no good way to get to the heart of it.

Finally, I just say that K and I should talk for a moment privately.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

A smokes on the balcony and K and I undress, and then start, on the floor in the living room. The entire wall is window and the blinds are half pulled across it; A comes to the glass and watches through it.

At times like these, you try not to be conscious of being watched. You think about your favorite kind of pornography, the amateurs when the couples aren’t professionals trying to put on a show. Still, there is a girl behind the glass, and how can either of us not be mostly aware?

Then she is inside, circling around us, getting on her hands and knees, pressing her face to the floor so she can look from this angle or that angle, pushing my hand aside, moving K’s hair, so frankly curious that I have to stifle a giggle.

As if we’re dealing with a scientist or an alien, intent on the study of the mechanics. She has not event taken her glasses.

Eventually, her hand is on my thigh, then around my x as it goes in and out of K’s x. This is a singular pleasure, one I’ve not experienced before in other threesomes, the grip and then the other grip, K’s wetness working between A’s palm and my x.

A kisses me, finally, on the mouth. There is the taste of her cigarette. I kneel between K’s legs and work on her x with my tongue, and A puts her face right next to mine. Then, as she said she would, she goes down on me, holding my x in her hand and taking the tip of it in and out of her mouth, a strange sort of head that is better witnessed than it is felt, and so K and I watch A and my x for awhile.

She’s not bisexual, she’s told us. But when K takes my x into her mouth, A kneels between her legs and kisses for a very long time. Now I play observer, getting close in that semi-dark so I can watch her tongue dart in and out. She pulls on the back of my head so that I join her and it is hard to tell flesh from flesh down there, what I’m licking, so I close my eyes and open my mouth and for a little while, forget myself completely.

When we touch her, she shies away. She has not undressed. We switch around several times. Always she has her mouth pressed to one of our x’s or the other, and at least once, she kisses K’s x while I fuck it. As for A’s x, I’m curiously un-fascinated with the idea of it.

She is a Russian girl with something of accent, slim and with a broad smile, eyes that go away when she smiles, hair she should take better care of. She’s charming in her way and slightly demanding and the whole thing probably for all of us becomes a bit boring.

Then K’s hand is up A’s shirt. Then the shirt is up and the breasts are out. It’s been a year since she’s has had any kind of sexual contact. She pushes each of our heads to a nipple and she tells us precisely how she wants to be kissed, and when we do, she squirms, the way she did in the bar when we talked about the prospect of the evening, and moans, and it feels as if she could come with this alone, though she does not come.

Eventually, we must stop. But who brings that up?

It is awkward to get into a situation like this, and it is awkward to get out. It’s late, I finally say. Nobody is really sated but nobody will be. K has come a few times, but those are mild orgasms that build one on top of the other to something grand, and it will take full on and focused penetration for that, and the room with three bodies tangling and untangling is too busy for that.

So we go down with her in the elevator, and this is the brightest light in the rawest moment that she’s been exposed to us or us to her, and in truth, I try not to look. I don’t want to know. She’s shy by her car, quick to get in, quick to pull out, fast down the road.

Afterwards, that night and now, I have no sense of ambivalence; it is not a bad memory, and, in fact, has a certain pleasantness to it. It’s just that I’ve never quite understood it. I still don’t know exactly what to make of it. I wonder what she got and what she didn’t and just plain why it was.

X

2005-10-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

I’m 12 or 13 and an older neighbor tells me a friend of hers needs a babysitter for her little boy. The girls are going into the city. They pick me up and the friend is blond and wears a pair of jeans with a zipper that goes from the front of the pants, around the crotch, and up the back. I’ve never seen pants like those, before or since. When the girls pick me up, my father looks at the zipper and looks at me and looks at the zipper again.

In the car, the girl puts on prank glasses that give her huge, false eyes and turns and looks at me and laughs. I try to laugh too. When she takes the glasses off, she’s almost pretty.

Hers is a trailer house and the little boy is three or four. He eats fish sticks and I put him to bed.

Then I am alone in her trailer. I sit on her bed for a little while and then I go around and open her drawers. I look for a long time at her underwear. I think about those jeans, that zipper, and those stupid glasses. I’m trying to figure out if I’m attracted to her and my first guess would be no but I’m alone in her trailer and there is a power in this I’ve never really known and I’m 12 or 13 so eventually I get attracted to just about anything.

To keep the trailer warm at night, she’s told me, she leaves the oven on and the door open.

In the bathroom there is a wicker hamper and I dig through it until I find a pair of underwear. Everything smells slightly stale. The panties are white and there are dark reddish smears in it. These I hold to my nose and the odor is staler yet.

This is not the birth of my ability to feel both repulsed and attracted. It is just the first time I consider it.

I can’t decide if I want the panties because they’ve been up against some girl’s x, or if I don’t want them because they are stained, or if maybe why I want them more is because of the stain. I am in and out of the bathroom a few times before I decide to lock the door and masturbate with the panties close to my face.

Afterwards, I know I don’t want them. I put them back in the hamper. I go out and watch the little television. After ten or fifteen minutes, I’m thinking about the panties again. It doesn’t take long before I’m thinking about the singular pleasure of masturbating to them again. I go and get them and bring them out to the little living space. Just as I’m about to masturbate again, the little boy comes out of his room. He’s gotten cold and he leans over the open over door, warming his hands.

I watch him, his mother’s panties in my hands behind my back, his mother out with her zipper jeans, her zany glasses.

The boy goes back to bed.

I masturbate three or four more times. Between the second and the third, I don’t even bother taking the panties back to the hamper; I know no matter what I’m going to keep them. Eventually, the girls come back. My neighbor drives me home.

I never see the girl in the trailer again. She doesn’t pay me for my babysitting that night or the next day as promised, and my father gets mad. I lie and say that she brought money to school for me. I’m afraid that she knows I’ve got her panties and so I don’t want my father to make a fuss.

I keep them for a long time, years, even. Where they are now, or where she is, or the boy, who would be at this moment about what we’d call grown up, I don’t know.

Xx and Xx

2005-09-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

There were two and this was a bachelor party and I didn’t think these kind of things happened in real life. We were all of us young and there was the excitement of boys going into a world they didn’t know but had heard about, the way it must be for some youths as they head toward war. Sex, like violence, was a broad subject, one we could not understand in complexities.

There was the redhead, taller and older, with a sharp smile, a woman whose persona was strong. There was the petite blond, uncertain and unable to pretend certainty. There were seven or eight of us, with bottles of beers held in our laps.

The dancers, they would take some of us upstairs one by one, and in that room we could kiss them and they would kiss our x’s and the blond would lie down and you could watch and even join when the redhead bent to place her mouth against the x of the blond. There was the price of the overall dance and we’d paid that but each of us that went upstairs went up there with fifty dollars.

Four of us went.

The blond and the redhead put four x’s in their mouths. The blond lie still and the redhead went down on her four times. The saw four boys come into their own hands. Four boys knocked, and four boys left. Then they dressed and went downstairs and out to the car where their driver waited.

The redhead hugged us all goodbye and kissed each of us on the mouth quickly. The little blond wanted to be away and she didn’t embrace but turned her shoulder and averted her face.

Sometimes, she had tried to smile.

I thought: I wish she were my girl. I wish there were a way. I thought that if I could get inside of her for real I would never want to be inside of anybody else. She was small and serious and she felt not exactly fragile, but there was something in her you wanted to protect—and not because you are a hero, but because you believed that if you protected her she would be yours.

They were walking down the little hill, grass a strange green in the street lamp, the redhead turning to wave, her smile sincere, the blond fixated on the car. Of course, the driver—somebody at some point had taken him out a beer—had to be paid out of the money the girls had collected.

The two of them dancing had cost one hundred dollars. This was in the living room with the group of us. Some sat on the couch and one on the recliner and we’d carried chairs from the kitchen for the others. Nobody wanted to be close to anybody else at a time like this, though everybody felt close.

The blond stood back and moved in her own space to music from a boom box. The redhead traveled from boy to boy and we sat there more ashamed to turn away than to watch as she worked against our friends.

You put your hands on her hips. She leans into you. She presses her nipple against your lip and you open your mouth and somebody you’ve known for a decade, since before puberty, leans forward to see if that is reallyreally happening.

One hundred dollars. And four boys went up the steps with fifty dollars each. There is a man in the car that must be paid and two women split what is left.

We sell all kinds of things and I’ve been married to a dancer and I know that for some people it costs more to sell particular things than others. I think about my own career and yours and the idea that in the end there won’t be much left of most of us.

The blond shouldn’t have been doing it. She wore white mesh gloves and a white garter belt. Sometimes at my second ex wife’s club there would be a girl like that, and you always wanted to tell her—now that you understood how some of it works and doesn’t—that she should stop now.

The blond, her x was small and open and it makes me wonder still that if wetness can sometimes be a function of pure mechanics and no psychology. The redhead tried to lead her and tried to make her feel all right but the blond did not want comfort from anybody there.

She was on the bed and her thighs were open and though I was touching her, I never really got to touch her and maybe that is why I felt as she walked down the hill that I’d hardchange my life to bring her into it.

You yearn like that everyday, and you get used to it. The girl who cuts you hair. The woman behind the register at the grocery store. All around you are women you tell yourself could improve your world, not just with their beauty but with whatever it is you think you see beneath it.

Maybe that’s almost always why we touch. You connect to see what will come of that connection, and rainbows, so that you can never prove there isn’t gold at their ends, move away, but some women don’t.

The blond, she didn’t walk quickly, but firmly, in her heels down the hill. I imagine fresh blisters on the flesh there. I try to think of her now, a long time later, me in the same city, sitting within a mile of where all of that happened. I’d like to guess her happily married, and to somebody better than I was or am, and I suppose it is not unlikely. This is what we always want for those about whom we accidentally care.

M and F

2005-09-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

We’d read the other well, each the other's best audience, and sometimes one would mean this figuratively, but here this is literal. As a result of this, and of the pictures (her mouth pouted, her eyes very blue, the pose in which she leans forward with her palms on her thighs, that very wide smile, her ass further divided by the line of the panty) because of the complement of fact that she sent these pictures, and because of whatever she saw in mine, we decide to meet.

This is about a different blog, a blog in which the writer was more public, in which you could see my name and my face. And I hers. And we had this audience, reading us both, watching us to see if two people can be caused to seem to come together.

In fact, we could, though they didn’t cause but only predicted and probably were never really able to fully believe it. She drove the six hours, from her state into mine.

I was very sick, only I didn’t know it.

I knew I was coughing a lot. On that blog I wrote about my day to day life, dating and my profession and whatever it was I thought of love and death and sex and television, the same things everybody else writes about. The same things minus the tv I still write about.

There was a woman, F, who lived in a town where I used to live with a wife. It wasn’t far from where I was living when M came to see me, that town where a woman I’d married and I had lived in a house together like a family. Finally I was going back, driving the ten miles up the freeway into that different and old and somewhat lost world, going up there where I thought I’d never go again, going to see this woman F, though any real potential between was shot. The first night she came late to my house and I’d only kissed her before that, her pretty Latina face, this rare woman older than me, a music industry girl who could drop names but never did; you had to pry them out. F, always smiling, her energy good, a sharply dressed woman, and it was the way she looked at you that turned you on. That night we barely knew each other but she came to my apartment from the bars (I’d stayed in with my cough) and though she didn’t act it at first, she came there with something wrong and she was there to solve it but I wasn’t the solution but she couldn’t realize it and before I did we were fucking and tears were streaming down her face.

I was always afraid to even touch her after that.

But still, she’d gotten a little ways into my head. I’d go up to that town that was sort of painful sometimes to see F and I’d drink with her because it felt good to be around her. It wasn’t that we were creating strong enough memories to blot old ones but the pain of memory I’d create was quickly swirled up and deflated in our meetings and it seemed a smart solution.

It felt sort of good to finger the scar and then slip into a bar and into a vodka. F and I would drink and talk and kiss.

Christmas lights in the naked little square trees. I remember all of this. (There is much about much that I don’t want to forget, the little storehouse of thingsthathavepast. There were the three bars, and I could tell you the smell of each, and, one night, a band, and I could tell you most of the songs, but it was only just this last Christmas season, so I suppose this is no feat, but I mean to do it with everything, so afraid of aging or something more sinister and less defined am I.)

We’d talk, and she was a good talker and a good listener, a smart woman I admired. We would drink and she did that well as well. And we’d kiss, and I always liked the way she kissed. After I'd leave, I'd remember her crying after our first fuck, I'd decide I'd probably not see her again, because I assumed our relationship would always be limited by those tears, though we’d talked and drank over them until they seemed solved.

Better just to move on, I'd think. But then, as soon as I was beside her again: intoxication.

Those nights with the Christmas lights in the little square between the bars, the sky clear and cold, this town where I’d lived with a girl I’d loved and married and not so long ago but in a different life entirely and now it was now and I’d sing that to myself: now now now.

Walking between bars or to one or the other of our vehicles, I’d cough myself to my knees in the cold air.

I was sick, but I didn’t know how sick. I was old, but I didn’t know how old.

And of course, F and I would fade out, as everything is, and maybe even at the proper pace.

Amidst all of this, up comes M, this six hour drive, and we meet in flesh, taking a drink at a bar close to my apartment, and she is quite different from her blog, which is sassy and overtly sexy and hyper and clever—this woman that men want to fuck and women want to be more like—and here, across from me, she is quiet, and she studies me, with her eyes which are not even blue, but green, (but prettier green than that sharp and false blue), she watches me and listens to me talk, and listens to me cough, and finally she wonders out loud if I am attracted to her for real.

Yes. She’s wearing black slacks, a black shirt. Her hair is very blond. You would turn to look at her face. But more than that, you know by her quite she is not all bluster; the sincerity, the depth you read into her writing, it was not that you invented it: it was there to find.

And me, well, I’m better looking when I’m sick. Somehow, I’m more vital. My skin, my eyes, I sort of shine. This is fever, and fever, even in my head, as long as you minus the nausea, fever is my friend. It separates me from the world so that I can’t feel self conscious, and my thoughts, it’s like liquor: they are more lucid. I’m on my third week of coughing and my second day of the third or fourth bout of fever, this one higher than it was the day before, and as we sit and drink and cough and M studies me it, that fever, grows.

Maybe she shouldn’t kiss a man so sick. But she does. And it is her idea, I think—I rarely try to give the idea to a woman, and never with a woman I haven’t know sexually for some time—to take my x in her mouth. This is in the living room, all dark save a candle, all shadow.

This is where the writer materializes. Her black slacks open by a button. Her black shirt off. Those heavy breasts. Like a person I might have dreamed up off of her words, off of her photographs, and me standing there in a sort of stuffy shock, thinking about the way this moment was born from the first time I read her first entry and saw her face beneath a straw cowboy hat.

The way you say: I must have this woman.
And for many of them about whom you say that, the having doesn't materialize.

And we fuck all night, not long bouts—I can’t breathe very well, and often, I get light headed—but we fuck, over and over again, my temperature rising, she can feel it. But we’re into this and nobody is asking if we shouldn’t be. If anything, the fever accentuates the fuck, or vice versa. My lungs are growing bacteria. When finally I find myself with a doctor, she tells me everything I've done wrong. This night or any like it, according to her, one of those things.

Sometimes as we fuck or just before we begin or just after we seem to have finished, I slip into a near dream and the dream becomes half nightmare and this blond woman is like a succubus and I have to fuck her until she wants to go away because if I give in she will inhabit me.

We sleep with my hand burning on her belly. I wake and turn and where am I? I wake and turn and who are you? I wake and turn and without knowing the answer to either of these questions, like a man overly trained, or, as she wrote about it, like a robot, I begin fucking again.

In the morning, she goes, but not unhappily. I’m glad for the cold air beside her car. Happy for my open shirt in the wind. She’s holding my face. Her hands cold, my face hot. We’re wondering if we’ll see each other again, or if all that fucking was to making it not necessitate. She’s driving away, and my hot turns cold, my sweat to shiver, almost in an instant, and I wave and I sit down on the curb and hold my arms over my chest. After a little while, I go in.

Later, I’ll know how sick I am, and how old. But for now I just return to the place where she has been, a woman who for most people is really more figment than reality, this woman who I had fucked and fucked, over and over, but really, she was fucking me, or we were fucking each other, and as sweet as I want to make it, often she was a demon lover seeming to feed off of my fever and thus could easily by read as a product of it rather than an accessory to it, but the proof of it her earrings on my nightstand.

She blogs it.

I don’t, not until now.

M

2005-09-21T06:46:00.000-07:00

Her husband was a cop and that made all of this not smart.

How much easier it is to focus on external danger

There comes a time when what I am drawn to is housewives. It starts early, at maybe 19, 20. Some afternoon in some park when I notice that I am noticing mothers standing in the sun. And I realize that it’s not just that suddenly they seem viable as sexual objects, it is that suddenly I feel viable as a potential sexual partner.

I’m sort of grown up. I have an x. They could, these housewives in their conservative shorts, in their tied-around-the-waste-sweaters, with their sunglasses pushed up into their hair, these women could take me seriously. They could take me seriously as one of those, as a lover.

Seven or eight years later, in the midst of my own marriage, it comes to me harder. This is in a Recreation Center, and I’m lifting weights, and across from me, through big glass walls, are all these not quite middle aged women, doing crunches on exercise balls while music plays.

And I see them going up and down, their imperfect bodies, the little slack on the arm, the little tears starting in the flesh of the face, that extra weight on the thigh, and I wonder what they want with all of this.

They are mothers and wives and as much as children can give a woman—or a man, for that matter—there are just things these women are not getting from their children. Or their husbands. What they are is five or ten years into a marriage and there is something in most of these women that nobody who says “I love you” you to them—or doesn’t say it anymore—gets. These women are going up and down on their exercise balls and what they feel is not necessarily empty. What they feel is something crushed up inside of them, some still but seemingly barely extant part of some person they are or might have been and have not abandoned but have never been allowed to expose.

These women wishing for more perfect witnesses.

And that’s what you want to be.

Look at their lipsticked lips. Their manicured nails. Those old rings. That well done hair. Look at her exercise clothes and her mini-van or SUV and understand that her life is almost good enough but she almost believes in a bridge and you may almost be able to be it.

So as it happens, years after I realize that this particular kind of woman interests me, and some years after I give heavy consideration to that consideration in a Recreation Center, I begin in earnest, and some of the 81 are from this set.

This one, M, her husband is a cop and that makes it a mistake. She is petite, with blond hair and pretty face, a voice I like. Her children get together with my child. I like the word “playdate”.

There is a Christmas party; she comes and she stays longer than anybody. It’s cold out and pretty and I walk her to her SUV and she moves almost as if to hug me and I move almost as if I don’t want to be hugged, a sort of uncertainty, but somehow we both know then a door is open.

Within month, I’m finger fucking in a vehicle outside a bar. Her skin is very soft. She’s open mouthed and leaned back and she’s at a stage where there is no need for any pretense.

I myself am cheating. This is the beginning of the relationship with my second wife, r, and here I am out with a woman who came to our Christmas party, whose husband is a cop.

Two days later, M, she’s reading a book I’ve suggested to her. Her husband, the cop, he comes up to her and he wants to know: What is this?

I suppose there were other clues. The way her hair was in my car. The way I had to confess myself to r. He calls M out on the book and I guess she chooses not to lie because this is what she wants.

I’m her catalyst.

She says that we kissed and held each other; not the whole truth, not so much as to send him over the edge. She’s tired enough of a marriage that it is hard to define as truly bad to risk what she says might be an experience with a glock.

He says he’s going to hurt you, she tells me.

I’ve earned this. For a long time, when a police car pulls up behind me, I’m ready for my beating. But no beating comes. They move toward divorce. I move toward marriage.

It is some time later, she’s moved to a neighboring state, and my own new wife is becoming my exwife, and I recognize that I’ve seen her for the last time. That kind of pain, nobody describes it properly; the only way to know it is to be in it.

It is now that M returns.
She reminds me of Reese Witherspoon. Or Beverly D’Angelo.

We drink vodka and eat candy worms. She gets close to me. I let her get close. We are listening to her music while we sit on the couch. She pushes her shoulder into me. I turn my chin. We kiss. It is not long before we undress.

How little she is with her clothes off. I watch her work against me. I watched parts of me work against her. This is nice, but I’m a bit raw. It feels good, but it kind of hurts.

She’s going to stay the night.

I feel both relieved and frightened. Relieved because I will not have to be alone with myself. Afraid because the presence of another accentuates the absence of the girl who has gone.

The next day, I do what I do. M’s car is gone when I return from my work. I am relieved, and afraid. Afraid to be alone with myself and relieved to not be with a girl who is not the girl who has gone.

M’s car is not in the parking space, but her knee high boots are standing by my door. Her bags are on the floor. And she’s left me a note: she’s gone for groceries. It is pasta. I can’t outwardly resist the idea of her cooking for me and eating with me and staying another night. But inside, I resist. I feel myself shutting down. I feel myself going distant.

I mean that night not to touch her but she does not mean not to be touched. And I am glad when I turn toward her touch. When she pushes through my walls. When she insists on my intimacy. And I am glad when her mouth presses against mine. When I penetrate her.

The next day, she has to return to her new state, her new life. I can hardly look at her. I pick up one of her bags to carry it out. I start to cry. I put on a baseball cap and pull it over my eyes. I can’t quit crying. I can’t talk. I walk with her to her car. I put the bag inside. She stands against me and I hold her and I cry. After I let her go, I run up the stairs, into the apartment I once shared with a girl, and there I fall to the floor, and now I sob, the way I haven’t done for years.

Ashamed, over the phone, I tell M that it was one goodbye too many.

I suppose, in a way, that it is true. I’m crying for almost everybody I touch and will not touch again. Some of the girls who are gone. Who are reallyreally gone. Not just the newest ex wife, but the old one, and every other woman I’ve loved.

A Night in the Life

2005-09-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

I go alone, almost always.

This is not a post about x’s. We’re running out of them. I go alone to the bar and I come home that way too.

I’m not saying that I’m in here to meet a girl, but I will admit that I notice that every girl in here is a deviation of some girl I’ve been with before. This is not an epiphany. I’ve been noticing it for a long time, with every bar, with every collection of women it holds.

My past is littered with ruined relationships and no woman in this bar or any other is superior to a great many of the women from whom I’ve moved on. And yet, if we’re being honest here: did I not sometimes ruin those relationships just so I could be in a bar like this amongst women like these?

This is not an irony. This is a reminder: most moves are lateral and men don’t move on and on and on because in so doing they are finding something better, it’s that the something is NEW that keeps them moving toward it.

Anyway, the bar. A mixed crowd in terms of age, ethnicity. The atmosphere is calmer than that of the dance club next door. The club and the bar, side by side, and people circulate between the two.

I’m beside two blondes. I mean to have vodka tonics and I’m not sure what I mean to have beyond that. It’s just supposed to be the night at the end of the week when you sit in a particular kind of notquiet. Most anything can happen. What does is that the blondes and I strike up a conversation.

The blondes, half drunk, are evaluating nearly everybody in the bar. It is fair to assume that if I’d not been taken into their circle, they’d be talking about me. I am, though, in their confidences, momentarily immune. We buy each other drinks. The shorter one is engaged, her third marriage, and the taller one is married for now. They’re as old as I am, but they don’t seem it. I like the way they’ve aged. The tall one I’ll later see knows how to move, but it’s the shorter one I sort of vibe with. When she goes to the restroom, the tall one, the good dancer, she tells me that her friend is half deaf.

She reads your lips, she tells me. Don’t tell her I told you.

It proves to be an exaggeration. The tall girl has told me that about her shorter friend in the way girls have of cutting the legs out from under other girls; she’s trying to make her friend less attractive.

Her friend is, in fact, attractive, with a face similar to what has proven to be one of my longest enduring female friends, A, a girl I’ve kissed but never touched deeply, a woman working on her third marriage and first child, one of the smartest women I know, and most dangerous in he way she handles men. I’m very fond of her and this fondness translates to the little blond because of the similarity in their faces.

Two women pass. One of them looks at me and I don’t look away. She touches my back and murmurs something and then passes on, a pretty girl with what I at first believe is a Mediterranean look, a well dressed girl with hips and ass too large for my conscious taste, but she’s got the gate and confidence of a stripper, and on some level it’s all very attractive.

Across the bar, there is a man with a pink tie, stiff shirt, a man taking himself seriously, with a very pretty girl, dark hair, dark eyes. He seems young but she seems even younger, and sometimes it looks like she glances over, but I’m not sure. Maybe she thinks the girls are talking about her. In fact, they are. Maybe she thinks I’m looking at her. In fact, I am.

A very drunk girl with a very nice figure in a very nice black dress, a girl whose face is probably not what I’d call pretty even when she is sober, passer, her face twisted up drunk indignation. She is all frown, glare, bluster.

All cleavage and leg.

She passes, and one of the blondes say something and the black dress girl stops and wonders what the blond said and so to get off the hook the blond says: My friend thinks you’re cute.

The black dress girl focuses on me, looking angry. She wants to know if I really said that about her. And I’m a little afraid of her. Somebody has already made her mad tonight. Or maybe she is always mad. Anyway, I say, Yes, I think you’re extraordinarily pretty.

And her face softens. It does not become soft. Just softer. And she comes forward and puts her hands on either side of my face and she kisses my mouth, which I do not open. And then she backs up and then she goes on her way.

The blondes laugh. I drink.

The girls want to go, next door, the club. As we prepare to leave, the man with the pretty girlfriend, the stiff shirted pink tied man, he comes over, sort of aggressively, this man outclassed by his date, this man at who my companions have laughed a little. He says he and his girlfriend play a little game when they go out, just for kicks, they want to know: if I were alone, if she were alone, would I give her my number?

She’s sitting there across the way, smiling but no longer comfortably.

I decide: this couple, they’re too young to be swingers, at least not the kind that would approach a man in a bar.

I decide it is about the way a woman wants to know that she is beautiful. The way a man wants to wield the power of her beauty, especially when he has little beyond it. He heard laughter, he decided to push against it, to make a point.

I say that I would not give her my phone number; I’m honestly not sure why I give this answer except that somehow my pride was involved. His grin fades. The blondes like my answer. As we walk out, I hope the man lies to the girl about what I said.

In the club, I sit and the girls dance in front of me, with each other, with me, one of them good, the other not. It’s sexy enough. A Black man with a Fu-Man-Chu, an older man, he tips his imagined hat at me, as if I’m really in this, as if these are my girls.

But they are not my girls.

He tips his imagined hat and then he asks one to dance and then the other. Neither will.

He tells me that something is wrong here, nobody will dance with him. There’s a transvestite, I almost make a joke, he should dance with her. But I swallow the joke, and fifteen minutes later for real he is dancing with the transvestite, close and hard.

The girls are putting on a show for me, or maybe I’m part of the show, I don’t know.

I’m not sure if there is any legitimate want here. On a surface level, I could want to fuck either of them. It is imaginable that I could even feel intimate with the short blond. In some vague way, they want something off of me. Most certainly, they both want me to want them. And with the shorter one, the little blond, her face is perfect, and maybe she is half deaf, but what does it matter, and she lifts her shirt and her belly is perfect, too, and then for a little while I want her and I want her and I want her.

And seduction is possible. Seduction is always possible. Into every house is an open window.

But I’m almost beyond it. There’s a girl somewhere with whom I’m trying to hammer something out.

So, why the bar at all?

I’m half caught up in this very old habit. Older than I am. The monkey me in the cave, but refined. Fuck her and fuck her and fuck her.

Outside for a breather, I lean against the light pole and call the girl I’m supposed to be hammering something out with. From the first bar come the two girls, the Mediterranean looking one, sure of herself and sexy. She knows me, and I know her. Not really, but well enough, by type and by momentary connection. They stop in front of me and get me off the phone. They are going downtown, some bar I know, and they think I should go.

I say maybe I will. I say, I’ll probably see you there.

The tall girl, I don’t know where she’s from, but her accent is strong, and as she and her friend start walking away, she turns and looks at me hard, and she says something in Spanish, and then she says it again, and again, getting further away from me but staring back and repeating this phrase. And there is a look in her eyes. She’s a girl walking away from a fuck but still talking about it, the way a boy walks away from a fight but keeps talking to the boy he might have fought.

And god help me, for a moment, I still believe. There is a mystery to be solved here; there are pants to take down, an x to explore, and all that flesh and soul around it, and only now, on the morning after, do I stop to think that if I fucked her, it would really be me fucking the accent, the Spanish phrase she kept repeating, whatever it was, I’d be fucking that and the confidence in her stride and the unhidden hunger in her eyes, the complement of their focus on me.

Inside are the blondes. I keep my body and tongue mostly still, the blond girl, the little one, she’s looking at me and waiting. She knows how this works. I know how this works. It’s time for a step. Her hand his on my thigh, close to my knee, very casual. I’m supposed to put my hand on her hip. Maybe touch her face. I’m supposed to do something.

I’m keeping still just because I think I should.

I think I should.

I think I should.

You know what this post is about. You know what this blog is about. It is about longing. The kind that drove the Romans west. And everybody has been going west pretty much every since. That thing over the horizon that we mean to get to, just so we can decide to move on from it.

I come home alone. Not Spanish speaking girl, no blond, no dark haired dark eyed girl whose boyfriend likes to play games.

Home alone, and this is not a victory. There is something here to beat, but it’s not so easy as that. You can’t even see with certainty where the battle lines are and what specifically they are about and if you imagine and end to it, you can’t imagine a life beyond, the restructuring.

The project, whatever it is, it is vast.

K and S

2005-09-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

False starts. Everything is just a bit forced. What is wrong here?

I want to make this entry but I can’t find my way into it. Any entry, but non of them are working.

Like K, the girl whose sister I fucked once, whose sister I suppose I was dating, like the way it was between K and me when we finally got together.

(S, she was easy to get into. I was young and I knew K was in the next room and I knew I’d rather be with K but the fact was that for a brief time S was beside me and now she was beneath me and I hardly understood how to seduce a woman, so making some kind of complicated switch over was pretty much unthinkable. S and me, I don’t think that we really liked each other that much and I wonder if in a way that didn’t make the fucking seem so effortless.

She came onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelvethirteenfourteen times justlikethat.

I know not because I counted but because she told me. And of course, years later, I’d learn to wonder if she came at all. Years later, I’ve never met a woman that multi-orgasmic, and those that have been even a fraction of that took a hell of a lot more work then I was capable of putting in with S that night.

Regardless: there she was screaming and rocking beneath me and I felt I’d been sucked into something bigger than I was and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted mostly for her to shut up and I even said Shhhhh, but if she heard, she did not listen. I figured to ride it out, the way they tell you to do if you’re caught in avalanche. Eventually she stopped.

Then we were done.)

K and I, we’d ride around in my car with the top down; it was summertime and we were full of youth. We never talked about the idea that we were a clear match and S and I were not. Then S and I faded out. K and I stayed friends.

Finally in autumn we gave it its go.

I know her still, the way you know someone you talk on the phone with once a month and see for an evening every other year.

Her marriage went like this: they were happyhappy. Then he got a bit sad. He stopped working. They moved to a bigger city. He developed strange habits, like not leaving the house for days and days and says. He stopped fucking her. She started fucking around, one night stands, dangerous sex. Then there was a legitimate boyfriend, a legitimate affair. Her work required her to travel. The lover, he was wealthy. They’d meet in FL, in LA, Pittsburgh. She and her husband argued; she was unhappy, this wasn’t working, what should they do? Divorce, maybe. She wanted to talk about it. He had an idea: he put the phone on speaker and dialed a number. It was her lover’s voice mail. The husband said, Shall we ask him what to do? There had been a private detective. There were details. There were photos.

He didn’t treat her right, not since the second year of the marriage. Hardly anybody can do that, not over time. When he didn’t fuck her, he told her it was her fault, in that way men have of externalizing what in actually is an internal problem. The way it is easier to blame others than examine ourselves.

So in way, he made this happen to himself. Still, I try to imagine what he felt, knowing what he knew, looking at her over glasses of dinner wine, greeting her when she returned from the office, from her business trips. The pictures he had, the details, the way they must have torn at his guts.

I know that I’m glad I wasn’t that lover.

And K, maybe you can blame her, but I can’t.

I think about that night we tried to fuck, skipping all the preliminaries, not trying first to establishing a romantic relationship. We hatched the plan over a Chinese dinner. Maybe we should fuck. We honestly liked each other, and in a way that can support a relationship. There was an attraction but we’d never indulged it.

The thing was, we’d never even flirted.

So we went about trying to fuck, mercenary style. Since then, we’ve both become adept at it. Not that that is necessarily something toward which you should aspire.

She went home and I went home and then she came over. She had on a red teddy, the kind that snaps between the thighs, and unsnaps there too.

And you keep thinking as you unsnap those buttons: this is going too quickly. We should kiss more first. We should hold hands for awhile.

We felt intimate, but there was no intimacy between us that night. It was like a boxing match with a friend. You step inside the ring and how strange you suddenly feel, how tentative.

I went inside of her x, the look, the feel of which I cannot remember. She wanted to be on top. I slipped out. Half hearted and half masted.

She said, This isn’t right.

Her face is now much as it was then. The good and sharp smile, the pretty dark brown eyes. Her voice on the phone, the way she laughs, it hasn’t changed. I don’t think it has.

We couldn’t really fuck. I put on jeans and went outside and sat on the steps. The air was cool, my torso bare, I folded my arms for warmth. She came out to smoke a cigarette and I looked at her and she looked at me and I know that we both liked how the other looked. I knew that we were like minded and maybe even like spirited.

I knew that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend.

We’d just fucked it up. We just didn’t find our way. It’s just that sometimes everything is there, you just can’t get it down.

l

2005-09-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it’s about this:

Caught in the ennui of dip after dip, like the ennui of days, and you think of days as you dip, the absurdity of one after the other, your shadow on the slick gym wall rising and falling and rising and falling, and it strikes you that you will have had done more dips than you will have lived days.

A muscle looks better in use.

Think of those dancers who aren’t trying to share an experience with a partner but just want somebody to look good with. The way sometimes people become for us pedestals, stages, soap boxes.

Do we look good together?
(Do I look good against you?)

In this room, you need mirrors, the kind you put on the wall and the kind she has in her eyes.

Let’s talk about her, a girl at that time not unlike I am at that time, a girl who wants to know who she is by how she imagines we look when fucking. If she masturbates about it afterward, who do you think she imagines mostly?

She touching your shoulder, murmuring against your arms, and this is why you lift, in this post-warrior culture where that kind of exercise is only useful to an athlete, these kind of arms almost obsolete; you do it not so much because you think she’ll want to fuck you more if you have arms, or abs, or glutes, but because simply you want to admire yourself when you fuck.

It’s a showcase and you are your own best audience, and all is vanity.

This is l, and she’s almost capital, but the problem with her is that beyond that vanity there is nothing. This is the girl you call vapid, though she is smart. The kind of girl who has no cause save breast cancer, and that because she might someday have it.

And the first night she sits on the steps, her shirt still on, her panties off, her tampon in, and I’m kneeling there with my back muscles in the moonlight, licking her upper-x, and what she does is apropos: she strikes a pose, elbows bent, tight arms flexed, head thrown back, her little neck a pulse of muscle and tissue.

The second night we fuck on the couch, old fashioned, me on top, and we pretend we’re looking at each other. In fact, sometimes I am. Sometimes I marvel at her body, this aerobic addict, this woman whose only real virtue is that kind of discipline. The stomach sunken and lined. The ribcage raised and the lungs behind it, they could breathe for almost ever. The mound of one breast. The other breast. Neither dripping off the side. Neither sunken in on itself, old grave like. Just there, standing, above her beating heart. She’ll turn over, a haunch for an ass, those leanly muscled legs, the hamstrings with the cord you can grip.

This is the woman you alone on an island and starving would want to eat.

Or for two or thee nights, not in a row, you want to fuck, this near masturbation, you’re getting off on yourself. You’re in love with her hands on your bi’s, how big they feel in her grip, your fingernails on your chest, isn’t it vast?

Everything she says ruins it a little. Everything you answer ruins it a little. So encourage silence. Fuck like bodies fucking. Pretend it is art, listen for the click of the camera in your mind’s eyes, her skin a better color than your skin, but in this light, it’s all right, everything is, you get to be beautiful.

You’re all line an indent.

There is no danger of love. There is no danger of misunderstanding.

Later, you’ll know better, you’re flaws, and probably somewhere else in the world a real mirror is giving her back hers. You think of Charles Bukowski, there are no beautiful women, no strong men.

L

2005-09-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

There is that first what you thought was love, that high school girl with whom, in that Shakespearean teenager way you have of thinking then, you willed yourself to fall dramatically into something you called love. Who is she now, in that small town, in that dusty part of the world to which you haven’t returned in more than a dozen years?

It is a fact. She is there. In fact, as far as you know, as impossible as it seems, everyone woman you have touched like that lives and breathes and thinks athisveryrightnowmoment, just as as you do. Her life just as real. The story of the world still telling itself to her, only in it, she is the protaganist, and you're a minor character.

She is there, in that same town, married to someone you know. Not that you know him anymore. Not that you know her. Not that they know you.

She is like you, in her early thirties. You are both as close to your future grandkids as you are to the first kiss you shared.

How to talk about that? How to eroticize a girl you knew when she was just a girl, her lips the first you reallyreally sunk into? Large by comparison, but comparison to what other mouth? Just large. And the flavor of her, for there was a flavor, you can remember trying to describe it in something you wrote once for a different audience.

This is a little dance that you do together. She comes close, you come closer, she pulls away. There are the notes and poems you put in her locker. The stationary with the cutout silhouette of a unicorn beside a castle that you buy in the city and use for love letters.

This is high school and as badly as you want to fuck, you are scared to death of it. There are the older guys in the locker room, telling you: It might be big, but if you don’t know how to use it…

And of course, you don’t. You know what will happen. You will crash and burn, flying a plane you never earned and shouldn’t have gotten your hands on. This misplaced equipment that for a time is more a curse than a blessing.

It’s not much of a romance, and it doesn’t even get close to sex. That is her ass in track team shorts but even though you’re holding her hand you know you’ll never touch it. She’s smiling in the sun, and those are her nipples showing through her shirt, but they aren’t reallyreally nipples. If you took her shirt off…

Never mind. You’ll never take her shirt off.

Little towns like that, a few of you move on, most of you stay.

Years later, when you’re off at college and she is not, she calls you.

This is the girl you drove for once, that first summer after graduation, after your little high school romance or whatever it was ended, at a time when she was visiting a sister seven hours away, and she called you late and you drove all night and you arrived at dawn and she realized immediately it was a mistake. It had always been a mistake. This desire to be close but not veryvery close. Fifteen minutes, twenty later, the return drive in burning disappointment. The highway, part of it along a river, the road twisting and turning, your eyes unfocused, bleary. You were home by dusk.

Two years later she finds you. Not that you are hard to find. Not that you are that far from her. The college city not far from the little town. Thirty minutes though it seems often longer.

Then there is a trip to the county to visit her. Then there is her trip to the city to see you. A one dollar double feature at the Roxy, movies already out on video, and it is summer time and she’s wearing pink shorts. And you know you’ll they’ll come off.

You believe in her x and you know you’ll make it real.

Undressing as iconoclasm. Touching as demystifying. Her x, her nipples, all of it real after all.

And yet, somewhere along the way, some of the certainty fails. Even as it is bare before you, it takes on those more elusive, more transcendent qualities. Despite the fact that you’ve been around a few x’s now; despite the fact that you’ve proven yourself; despite the fact that she is buying into this neo-you seduction, you feel an increasing sense of pressure. And fear.

And before it, you are reduced. She grows and you shrink.

You’re twenty but you are still a teenage boy near-begging for what a girl has been taught to keep at arms length from you.

These are your fingers inside the first x you ever really really wanted and got.

But you’re hardly really touching her—you hardly know how—and anyway, this is like the man who keeps running but must fall: any step now, it will end.

And it does, where it always had: with her uncertain. She is bare, pulling the comforter up, and you are collapsing onto the bed. You haven’t fucked. It doesn’t matter. Behind every door there is another door and they further you get, the harder they are to open.

Fucking, like writing, is an act of regression, an act of reduction; in fucking and writing, we first turn things into less than they are, and then, sometimes, we try for the opposite: we try through our fucking and writing to blow things up into grander meanings. The picture is lost but what you mean for it to represent is created.

We lie there nude and not having fucked and I have no idea what she felt. As for me, what I felt was eluded, and an understanding that it will always be that way to a degree, that no matter what you take or meant to, or what you don’t, there will always be something ungotten.

We chase after whatever it is the way children chase after the strings of balloons that have gotten too high, leaping and running and sometimes maybe even gripping, and feeling the tug of it, but it will not come down--and it will not lift you up--it cannot be held, you cannot really know it.

Here is my Year Book, 1989, in good condition, as if not so many years have passed. I look at it, the pictures there, L and me and others, and I know I’m getting old. And it’s funny, and it’s scary, that I can read what she’s written: Picture this: Fall ’88, a guy comes into a girl’s life in. In the beginning, he drops little hints here and there. One day, this guy finally lets go and tells the girl “It’s not secret how I feel for you.” From then on, it an uphill (shall we call it) battle. The girl denys him and pushes him away. He backs off and the girl finds herself missing him. Now talk of stars falling and moons coming down arise. The two are united. The relationship could’ve went on for longer. But…as once said, somethings are better left unsaid. The end. Thank you for sharing all you ever did. You will always be a special person to me. Remember the good times because despite the bad ones there were good. This is the best I can do. I never was any good at signing annuals. Never will be. For some reason I can’t stop writing in this thing. I guess I just to fill up these pages so that what you write and what I write is the only thing on them. So maybe years from now, you’ll dig this out and remember. L.

All memories are exercises in the pain of loss, and yet who are we without them? The way I know myself through this blog. This act of reduction, expansion, reduction, expansion...

H and h

2005-09-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

We would hang out at this bar and play “rock, scissors, paper” and the one who was put out would have to go talk to a stranger of the opposite gender. It’s much easier to take a risk when you have an excuse and so the game is one where you can no more lose on purpose than you can win by anything more than chance.

They had the same name but spelled it differently and were the same age almost to the day but H was tall and blond and blue eyed, while h was petite and dark haired with eyes like rootbeer barrel candies.

h thought she was in love with me and H was one of those rare and intriguing people who didn’t always make what she thought known. The three of us fucked around the first time the night after I met H in a bar and told her that I had a friend who wanted to fuck another woman and wondered if she would.

She kneeled on the carpet in a room in a place where h was house-sitting and worked my x with her hand and mouth, while h kneeled behind her and did what she did. They kissed and went down on each other and I fucked neither. There was a parrot loose in the room, a social bird who ate when its owners ate, and I wondered what he thought of it all, these naked people rising off of each other, sinking down on each other, saying nothing, ever.

I suppose men want to be with two women because the idea of seeing a woman’s face against another woman’s x is fascinating, and most certainly there is sort of aesthetic value to it. Perhaps there is too the idea that the pleasure two women can bring a man is greater than the pleasure one can, but the truth is most men aren’t prepared for even the full on pleasure of which one woman is capable. What it comes down to in the end is that if these experiences are going to mean much to you, is that you have to be doing it to deepen your sense of connection, you want the intimacy to run in yet another direction.

You could never say I was dating either and often in fact I was dating somebody else all together. Sometimes, the three of us fucked, and sometimes H or h and I would get together individually. The last time with h was in a hotel room at a conference we’d attended from different cities and she sucked me until I came in her mouth, a rarity with her or any woman, this tiny girl with her Juliette Binoche face, a girl that had been spoiled so badly she sometimes thought she had nothing even though the world had been made easy for her, and by the time she crawled beneath the blankets of my hotel room bed, Don Quixote playing on the television and me semi-transfixed on it, my resentment for that part of her had set in and there was something cold and even kind of awful in that finish; and the final touch with H, it was the last time I’d see her, we were parked in a car outside an apartment where it was dangerous to be parked, at a time when neither of us should have been doing what we were, her hand moving my x, my fingers in her x, this feeling of unfinished business, a kind of near desperation for on thing more or another, this sense that we’d close the book on it all because eventually that is what you do.

As a threesome went to Vegas together and sometimes we’d meet in one of our offices after hours for what felt especially risky and heightened sex, those nights with the city lights coming in through the windows and the three of us making shadows to collide with other shadows in a place that hours later would be run through with fully dressed people who even if they were able to look into the face of any of the three of us could not have imagined the capacity of that person to act in such a way in a place like that or probably any other—there were all these times, all these trips, but what I remember between us the most was one of the last.

The three of came half drunk one night to the apartment they were then sharing. I fucked one and then the other and whatever girl I fucked worked her mouth against the x of the other and sometimes I’d kiss that girls mouth or just hold her face to my shoulder; and for awhile H and I just fucked, slowly, while h sat on the edge of the bed and watched, and for awhile, I sat back and watched them as they worked on each other, and then H watched h and I fuck, this one hard and quick. Everybody seemed to know his or her place and time and turn so well that everything, every movement, every transition, was seamless.

Then it was the three of together again, limbs so intertwined you never knew what belonged to whom and you didn’t care, this tangle of flesh you’d not want to untie, the mystery you’re only satisfied not solving.

There is this way we want to see two girls and a guy. Either as dubiously unrealistic, some event that if it can be planned and the plan actually enacted will certainly lead to a series of surprise problems, jealousies and uncertainties and just a doubling of the overall mess any two people create together; or the opposite, the idea of three as some kind of pinnacle, that impossible pleasure that if you actually touch will turn your life magic. But what it was, what it became, was neither, just a further baring, a final kind of intimacy.

That night almost everything that can happen did, and I liked them both better than I ever had or would again except in memory, and I’ll not try to figure out exactly why.

This was a big bed and after we had finished, we lie there nude in that cool room and I felt that we were truly and permanently alone, the three of us together on a little boat in the sea, tired and satisfied and affectionate, floating through some night toward it doesn’t matter where, me and h and H on one of those rare occasions when there was no more to do and no more desire to do it, when I was full and certain of my fullness.

When whatever had been had been enough.

In Memorial

2005-09-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

This isn’t about an x, or even a person with one, though to connect him to an x, or a number of them, is possible. With words, most anything is.

Along with a girl who had once been my lover, M watched me and a new lover fuck, only he watched not us in the flesh but the shadows on the wall. Aside from my father, he may be the smartest man I’ve known. Not only was he intelligent, but learned, a man who read everything, from Camus to Chanlder, from Bukowski to Kant, a man who knew how to talk philosophy and how to prowl the streets, a man with the heart of a thief and a poet, and he could have talked about the fucking in terms of Plato’s cave, shadow moving against shadow. This was all in a foreign country and not so long ago and none of us where kids anymore.

His had a kind of genius wisdom that some might call useless because there was no tangible benefit. It never required him to advise, only to understand, which is the thing we want maybe most from any other living thing, perhaps more in the end even than blind love. He saw me trade for x what I’d bought with years, but he never tried to stop me. He knew the truth about me and that particular x and all the x’s of all the girls on this blog because really it is only about them in that it is about me, and what he knew of me he knew from knowing himself, the way if any of us had enough insight, we’d understand the universe.

There were nights you could smell the whiskey through is pores and at bars there was always trouble. Some girl, some boy, some bouncer. He burned everything, or almost everything, his bridges, but this is not to say that he burned the people he held close; the loyalty of the half fiend may be the better kind of loyalty. The thief’s code is at least a code, and in truth the average person has none, or little.

On his birthday, he used heroin. On the other days, he thought about it. Though it might be fairly said that the moment you meet any person, you know he or she is going to die, in fact, you don’t really know it, but with him it was different, you saw his death in his smile and his eyes and from the first time we shook hands I wondered if he’d die in front of me. You would have wondered it too.

Lowry writes that those that are most eloquent in their doom are the hardest to save and M could talk to you about his despair and yours in a way that was nothing short of beautiful. There are some people to whom you can only bear witness and he was one of those.

If you met him, you’d want him to live. But you know what happens to people who are closer to characters than they are to people and they go to Mexico: like Geoffrey Firmin, they are going to finish it. Or let it finish them.

He is barefoot in my apartment in a country farther away than that; hung over and broken footed, his blood on the balcony from a cut he won’t remember having made, another night when he has aggressively twisted the knob on the stopwatch of his life. There is a girl x in my bed and it is morning and he is calm and when she rises, he’ll treat her graciously. She’ll cling to me harder in his presence, so brightly dark his aura, the kind of person you hardly ever meet and hardly know what to do when you meet him. He’s crossed lines you’ll never cross and wouldn’t acknowledge if you didn’t know somebody who lived on their other side.

I told him once that I felt inspired to write his eulogy, and he said that that was good, but that he didn’t want to see it. He said that when the eulogy was of use, it would be none of his business, as if the connection between the dead and this world is really no connection at all.

I didn’t write it then. You don’t want something like that to collect even a day’s worth of dust.

I write it now because it is time.

J

2005-08-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

There was a living room so big and so empty you could play football in it, and sometimes I did. This is LA and this is me and J and J, roommates, and from our windows you could see the Hollywood sign in one direction, palm trees fading out into Beverly Hill, Santa Monica, supposedly the Pacific.

I'm starting to think about thinking, but maybe I'm not starting soon enough, like the man on the Purgatory path to Heaven in Dostevesky; he sits for a thousand years frurstrated at the length of the road before he begins to walk it.

My bed in this apartment is cheap and overly used; there is a tv on a cardboard box with a sheet over it at the foot of the bed. What we are is young and far from home, and in that apartment, high as it is, there is always a breeze.

We rarely meant to fuck but we often did.

This is J, who has never had sex, never had a drink. We wrestle and engage in mock torture, the way children do when they are testing the limits of power and touching the pleasure of cruelty. It dissipates into my fingers on her x, like an accident, then a finger inside, followed eventually by a sort of non-penetrating fuck, and then a penetrating one, with her eyes rolling back and her mouth open and this semi-seizure like state that implies danger and frightens me out.

This or something similiar a few times becomes habit, a once a week or so sort of thing. Other nights, I have dates. Sometimes, I bring J as a buffer, when I'm getting tired of a girl. We do most everything together. Work. Study in the same Master’s program, take the same classes. The grocery store. The gym. We eat on the floor with bowls in our hands. This is the soup she made. This is the bread I bought.

We are not playng house. I don't think we are. Maybe I just don't think.

Each time we fuck it is an accident and will be the last, unless another accident happens. I’m so young, I’m not even trying to understand it. Everything is so fresh, I don’t even know that you ought to try to figure it out.

In this city, at this time, I’m a novelty, the kid from the country, and somehow, that makes me attractive, so I’m fucking a lot. This is where I realize that women like men like to fuck. If I were smart, I’d be overwhelmed. If I were more conscious, I’d be trying to make sense of it all. Me and J and the other J, for that matter, and me and any girl fucking on my bed in front of the television on the card board box with the sheet over it.

To be human, that’s what we do. We try to know what it all means. As if it does.

I see x’s everywhere, in the clouds, in cuts on trees, in the way a napkin falls. For a time, way back then, I believe that the common odor that underlies every x I’ve known is on my skin, as if I am turning into a giant x, like a further perversion of the Gregor Samsa story.

I hold my wrist to J’s nostrils and ask her to smell and she indulges me and says, “Yes, pussy.”

A Black girl, quite thin, from a northern city, and she was going to think she loved me though she was going to claim no so such affection. And I was going to go on blindly, into every cave, past every fossil, with none of Da Vinci's fear, nor his examination, certainly not their fruits.

We’re roommates, we’re friends, sometimes we fuck, and that is all. This is what I tell myself.

She kicks a part a puzzle I’m building. I say, “You’re going to get it now.” She gives me a hard stare. I rise. She runs even though there is nowhere to go and she doesn’t really want to get away. I catch her in the hallway. We roll to the floor. She fights hard, even though in winning she would lose, and there is no winning.

So far, all of this could be legitimate violence.

She’s pinned. Her breasts are as flat as they can get beneath my weight. Her nightshirt is all the way up her thighs. I lick her face. She squirms. I lick it again, her cheeks, her lips.

It goes from there.

She checks on me late. “You’re having a nightmare.” I don’t know. I’m suddenly awake and she is pushing into my bed telling me I’m afraid. I start to believe that I am. She is holding my head, telling me that at this moment I need somebody to do that. She’s telling me things I’m not sure of, but in that late dark you are going to believe whoever it is that speaks. Her hands on my shoulder, kneading them.

It goes from there.

She drops a milk carton full of water off the balcony and it explodes behind me as I leave the building. She throws a vodka oj under my comforter one night when I have two girls over and we invite J and all get drunk together; I’ve made out with each of the girls and when I see the sheets all yellow I think at first one of them has crawled in their and vomited or peed.

She breaks a cd and puts pieces of it in my shoe.

“I wanted you to bleed,” she says.

She knew her mother loved her when her mother chased her out of the house with a loaded handgun.

God’s truth, this behavior is a mystery to me. I’m a kid from the rez, from a mountain state, from small towns and under developed ideas. I’m trying to find my way into the world but if I think about something, it is how to fuck this girl as opposed to what that fucking means.

This is me, bleeding in my shoe, the cut like a mouth that means to tell you to wake up.

With me she learns to drink, to fuck. You could say I am the corrupter but it really isn’t fair. Both of us are going to leave our gardens. All of us, every day, its further into the wilderness. We’re supposed to progress toward from an Eden through an earth almost like hell to a heaven that is like Eden and maybe it is so but what I sense with her then and anybody now and everything really is more know to me as Milton’s Anarch, and there is no real journey.

She says, “I’ll never put a man’s cock in my mouth.”

I see her in the moonlight, on the floor with me, she’s kissing my thighs. I wonder if she will. I know she will. Everybody eventually will. We will do all the things that are done. We will become everything we have time to become. My x is in her mouth. Who knows what hunger keeps it there, what love, what hatred?

Because she said she wouldn’t be she does, I am rapt. Her face in the moonlight. Her mouth that I’ve kissed and will kiss again. Everything is made new.

We live together a year, these two girls and me, but this is about the second J, and we fuck probably fifty times. She becomes the first woman to go lower, to my xx, her head between my thighs, her hand pumping my x furiously.

What does it mean, that that can be done, that it is done, that is done to me, that I enjoy it, that this girl who never even touched an x before does it, that she wakes me in the night and wrestles with me in the day? The milk carton explodes and I dive forward as if from a bomb. The earthquake has come and gone but we all remember.

I believe in true love and marriage and perfect lives. I go through girls, tell myself I’m looking for love, and, in fact, I am looking for something more than flesh, though I think I’ll find it in the flesh, this magic x that once you touch it your hand will stay, your heart will ease. I grew up on sitcoms and love songs. Here I am.

Think.

(All these people falling in the dark stretching out to touch each other as they pass.)

She lying face first on my bed, one arm stretched back, the fingers of that hand in her mouth, I’m backwards and straddling her, masturbating over her ass, coming that way, that notsowhite splatter against her notsodark skin.

(When I think of the word "orgasm" I think of the word "demoralized".)

People write to make meaning, the same reason they pray, the same reason they read, the same reason they try to hear god. And what does it mean, my come on her back, the broken cd in my shoe, any of it, any of this?

These are posts in every one I try to get a hold of something and in each I sort of do and there is more that runs through my fingers than there is that I grip and regardless of what I squeeze up in the ball of my fist and tap into the screen, I know that all these meanings are false.

This is a blog about vaginas, and when I’m being honest, the most that I can say is that it is about the chaos, inside of them and outside of them. And maybe it was then, with this girl or one or another of the others, that I really begin to try to make sense of it all.

What a long road it is that leads us to understand the important and true question is not so much about what it means, but about what it doesn't.

J

2005-08-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

We’d dressed as Adam and Eve, and what do you expect when you go out and come back like that?

Plastic leaves stapled to underwear, all that flesh, from the garden of the party, this girl who drank so much once upon a time she didn’t drink at all, and me, drunk, with our apple, the prop, we were friends, that’s how it started, and you might say good affairs start that way, or you might say the really good ones start with the immediate sparks that want to feel like destiny, but in any case, there she is leading me around by the apple, I’m trying to get my teeth into it, but she pulling it away. The game is tease and all we really are is a show and when finally I bite the apple it’s time for us to go.

Later, we’d be roommates, and we’d fuck once then, too, but this was the building where we met, the party where it started, me stripping Eve, her stripping Adam, in an apartment that would be destroyed by earthquake in a city that is the final proving ground for Western civilization, LA, and to think of her is to think of it, and to think of it is to think of her.

We talk sometimes even now on the phone, the days she lived with me and the other J, who will also be blogged, in the expensive but empty high rise apartment; sometimes we talk about the little building that fell and some even rarer times we talk about how we fell together there, that bed.

Her smoker’s mouth, her body with those long muscles, this Native American girl who was like me far from home, she’s beneath me, she is as nude as Eve and I am as nude as Adam, moving into her and almost out, my thumb the untrimmed hair of her x, and this is fucking or whoknowswhat and there is no god to witness, no devil to tempt; if we feel shame it is for other reasons and if we feel love it is for other reasons, too.

We were basically kids and we never held hands because we weren’t like that though for awhile she thought she wanted to be. There was a dog on a street corner, starved and dying and I sat with him for an hour, getting him to drink water from a bottle, waiting for J to come with food and call the animal control.

We were innocent and we thought of how they’d groom him, all hairless ribs, all dried out nose, make him well, find him a home; they never showed and so finally we took him. He nipped at us but there wasn’t much to it; he sat there in the backseat as we drove; the man came out of the building, pulled the dog from the car, wrapped a leash around its mouth so that it would not be able to bite, and then the dog and the man were gone and we felt we’d done something wrong.

She is a poet and I remember reading the poem she wrote about it and it feeling for the first and only time that I could see my life for real in art, this dusty moment, this prelude to death; it made me cry and still does.

That first night she was mostly still beneath me and I don’t think we went for long. It was indulgent, perhaps we didn’t think enough about what things meant or might seem to or what the consequences might be; perhaps we didn’t know enough about the world to think like that.

It is, in any case, one of those memories that has mostly faded, along with the other time we fucked, as if nothing permanent came of that particular touching, though something as close to permanent as I know came to us just the same, this long term friend.

In the high rise apartment more than a year after the Halloween party, before we all moved away, sometime after the second time we fucked, I went to get her from her room one afternoon and she told me to wait; I could see through the slats in the door as she moved across her floor. She was nude from the waist down and I was watching her without her knowing it. There were her long legs, pretty and light brown, the black patch of hair, the distinct shape of her ass, all of it visible to me as if I’d never seen it, and, indeed, it felt I hadn’t, so I stood there still and quiet and watched her pull on her jeans.

It is as precious to me a moment as any.

D

2005-08-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

The important thing to remember about this one is that it was because of a girl who wasn’t interested. I was in the city of my old habits and I was there because I missed them, as if they were really broken.

So I’d returned for an extended vacation and I left a woman waiting and someday I would marry her, and the important thing to remember about this one is not that it was because of a girl who wasn’t interested, but that it was because of this one I married that girl.

The important thing to remember is that both of those “because”’s are tentative. I might have married who I did and almost when anyway. I might have fucked D anyway.

The girl that wasn’t interested was a friend of a friend in a group of friends and it is easier to describe a girl’s lack of interest than it is to describe a girl’s interest, but all we really want to talk about are the girls who say yes.

The girl that wasn’t interested, a V or a K or an S, something like that, she said, “Oh my God, that’s D…”.

Who was D?

An athlete. An Olympian. She’d won a medal. One of those sports where the woman in question is strong and lithe and flexible, where you watch her do her thing and you want to fuck her, whoever she is, just because she can do it. She’d been on the cover of Newsweek or Time, one of those magazines, but I’d never seen that picture.

She wasn’t really very pretty.

So I went for an autograph of a famous girl I didn’t recognize to impress a girl that wasn’t interested and wouldn’t be.

The bartender called her by her first name and when it was time to go and we lingered the bouncers did, too, gently and firmly, saying her name, D, and that we had to leave. The next day we had lunch and I went with her while she bought a wet suit and then we went to her high rise apartment and begin by making out in the afternoon on the floor while looking at photo albums full of people I did, in fact, recognize.

You come to the city of your old habits and she is precisely who you mean to accomplish.

After her, where else is there to go? At least not if we understand these things to be about something other than connection. And when you go to a city of your so called old habits, it is not connection you seek. If anything, you’re there to escape it.

This one is about how you end up married for the first time.

She wasn’t very pretty, at least not to my taste, but she had this body, and she was known, and that was supposed to make her valuable. There were other reasons for her value, as is there is with anyone but what did I know of them?

Afterwards, almost immediately, I’d find myself leaning over glass counters in jewelry stores trying to buy an engagement ring. Afterwards, I’d return early to the city of my so called new start, and there I’d begin working on my first marriage, my first divorce.

Old habits. New starts.

She kneeled on the bed and looked over her shoulder. There were tears of toilet paper all around her x. This can, it does, happen to anybody. She was a famous girl, her face on the cover of a magazine in an album of memories that I think were fading fast as she tried to live in the life after.

I didn’t find her pretty, but this wasn’t about pretty, and I didn’t find her engaging, but this wasn’t about that kind of engagement. Little pieces of toilet paper, like you wear on your face after a bad shave, her ass raised, her stomach sunk, her shoulder up, her hair on her shoulders, her face turned, her mouth open.

I went in and she sunk forward.

Afterwards, if you asked me then, I would have told you that that was the last time I’d ever fuck like that. Maybe I meant it. Maybe it’s mostly born out.

Maybe and mostly.

She sucked my fingers as we fucked. Her lovers had been bad, in bed and outside of it, a string of them, and we fucked hard, mostly with me behind her, for a long time. Her makeup was coming off but that didn’t bother me. There were tears of toilet paper moistened to her x, but I tried not to care.

It was afterwards, while she dressed, while she reapplied her makeup, while I stood at the window higher up than I’d felt climbing anything else, stairs or trees or mountains, that everything bothered me: that I was in her apartment, that we’d have to ride down together in the elevator, that she’d have to drive me to place I was staying, that this stranger, who some people knew but I did not, this girl that you find pretty in her craft, I’d have to be alone with her more and close, though I did not feel close, though I did not feel like being alone with anybody but myself.

This is the deflation that comes after I’ve come, only this time, I hadn’t come.

The important thing to remember is that it all starts when I mean to impress a girl who could not care less. Or the important thing to remember is it all ends with a marriage to a girl who could hardly care more.

I don’t know. Maybe those are the important things.

X

2005-08-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

This take place in Aspen, with C, a friend from my youth and still a virgin, our 21st summer, seven or eight years after his brother died in a town to which I’ve returned, the place of my childhood, as if I might find something I think I’ve left there, whatever peace, whatever innocence. We drive every weekend the 45 miles into Aspen, a pass up and over the Divide, a dangerous stretch of highway, one of the bloodiest in the country, too many rock falls, too many zigzags, too narrow the road, too excited the travelers.

The girls are three, a tall Black woman you’d think of as a model, all poise and beauty, in a full length coat too hot for the weather, her older Anglo friend, with an odd gap in her front teeth, attractive just the same, at least in the vodka glow, in the bar lights, and short plump woman, the fifth wheel, who approved of none of this.

They all worked at a phone company and had gone on vacation together. Strange friends, it seemed, not that C and at this point weren’t, so many years separating us that we didn’t know each other, the death of his brother, a twin, between the now and when we’d played together as kids, a certain meridian. But here I was back and the town was that small, what else was there to do but for the two of us to try to know each other again?

I started with the gap toothed woman because her friend seemed out of my league. Drunk and young and showing off for C, I slid a cube of ice on the palm of my hand up her nyloned leg, and in this game of chicken, she never said “give”, never did anything but smile so that finally it came to rest against the taut fabric of panty beneath nylon, and she smiled and leaned to me and said that I was bad, the way a girl says it when she means it as a compliment.

By the time we’d climbed the little fence to their hotel swimming pool, I’d somehow traded over. The Black girl and I were in the hottub, overlooking the pool, where C was holding the side and trying to back float while the gap toothed girl sucked his x.

My fingers were inside the Black girl, beneath bikini bottoms, that odd sensation of penetrated flesh under water. She was leaning over the side of the hot tub, watching, her ass slightly raised, letting me do whatever I did. We fucked in that position a time so short that C and the girl below had not finished before we did.

It was all sort of surreal. I was trying to put myself in the moment, to appreciate the spectacle of her ass half out of the water, the muscle of her back, the fall of her damp hair. She wasn’t there, though, not really, and the first time I withdrew, she turned over and folded her legs and that was that. We went and sat quietly in the dark hotel room, not touching while the plump friend snored and C and the gap toothed girl did whatever they did out there in the pool.

It was the only fuck of that summer, a summer of transition.

It was late when we left and the buzz had worn off all of us. If anything, I felt frustrated. I’d not pushed for enough, had taken nothing of value, and C, and the gap toothed girl, they seemed at perfect ease.

On the drive home, he kept telling it to me over and over: Did you see how I fucked that girl? I fucked her so good…

And I was bored and even envious and thinking that I should have stuck with her, that her reaction to my hand beneath the table told me everything I needed to know, and I wanted C to shut up, and finally he did.

In that silence, we crossed the Continetnal Divide and started down the other side of the pass in that late dark, that near dawn.

The road turned sharply, the car did not. We crossed the yellow lines. We shot out onto the pull off where in the day cars would park and overlook the valley below.

There was the gravel and the tires and there was me screaming: Wake up!

And there was the braking and the sliding of the car and when it settled and the dust stopping falling I got out and measured with my eyes three feet between where we’d finally stopped and where we would have begun to die.

He was my childhood friend, along with his brother, who had drowned in the lake over which our town looked, his body never recovered, his house, with the best view of the water, standing like a tombstone. We ran around the forests, playing soldier, playing knight, sticks fashioned into bows and arrows, swords and guns; we’d point to the top of the mountains and talk about the ranch we’d have up there some day, on the great bald dome, three houses and three wives, three friends that would go on and on forever, the way you want to think love lasts.

I’d returned and two of us were sort of grown up, and one of us had never been to prom, never touched an x, never had a good or bad fuck, would never father a child, would never read or write this or anything like it.

I stood there with the headlights shining out into the darkness and the terrible drop off below and my sleepy eyed friend telling me to get in, he’d drive more carefully.

I got in.

The stars were going to disappear.

I said, Tell me again about how you fucked her.

G

2005-08-16T20:49:00.000-07:00

So you find yourself with a pill bottle, eight pills inside. This costs you one hundred dollars outside a nightclub, an impulse buy. You’re with a girl and she says, Yes, let’s get them.

These pills, they’re Viagra, and after you and the girl fuck with one of the pills in your system, you ask the girl, Could you tell?

She’s not sure. She wants to know if you could tell. Well, there is the fact that your erection is back. Again. And again.

And, you think, it felt a bit more swollen, a bit closer to bursting.

The next morning, there is the fact that you wake up especially hard.

So yeah, sort of, you can tell.

And what worries you, why you don’t fuck around with those pills after that: what if you start to need to take them? Like sleeping pills. One night you just realize: the only really good sleeps left in my life are going to come from sleeping pills.

Cut to: a different girl sometime before who wants to prove she cares for you and so gives you a bottle of prescription sleeping pills. There are only a few, a half dozen left, and you’d call it an act of kindness, but you know the girl and thus you know that everything she gives she gives in hopes of a higher return. These pills, they make you overly dizzy so you don’t use them up; rather, you keep them. Think of this as a backup. Or maybe a souvenir.

Both these girls have been blogged.

Cut to: a girl that hasn’t.

Cut to: the pills sitting in their bottles half a year later, sort of forgotten, in a new apartment.

And you sitting on the couch with this new girl. This is a pretty girl, but there are problems. This is an ex-stripper, and that’s not one of the problems. You were married to a stripper once upon a time and though that fairy tale ended darkly, you’ve got nothing against strippers. In fact, she wasn’t even a stripper when you met her.

This new girl, G, she is a girl who drops names. She dated so and so and so and that pro whatever and this producer.

Really, a producer, let’s look him up, what’s he made?
Well, only commercials…

This list of men. It’s not that you don’t believe she knows them; it the word “date” that you question. This is a girl men want to fuck, probably too much for their own good or hers.

And she’s got friends, rich men, she doesn’t fuck them, but they take her places and buy her things. They really care about her. This is what she tells you. She might even believe it.

What she’s doing with you is its own little mystery, because you aren’t buying her anything, and this your second date is a dvd in your apartment, and the only reason you have this date is because the first one ended with a surprisingly swell make out section.

Surprisingly swell.

But now, you feel tired. In life, you might say. Of it, whatever you want to mean by it. And you know like a good prophet there’s nothing here, nothing substantial—barely, to be honest, any attraction.

You’re here, you’ve let her here, out of habit, but here you are.

This is me with a girl in my apartment who doesn’t really belong there. There is a candle burning in my bedroom and a number of condoms in the sock drawer. The girl is on the couch and I’m on the couch and this is a familiar scene. But honestly, really, I’m not in it.
Habit habit habit.

Yeah, go ahead and try to get yourself born again. If you broke every habit you have you wouldn’t even be alive. The entire structure of you life is built around habits, good and bad and natural.

She’s pretty, a girl who would photograph well, and tall, and thin, twenty five and she’s going to lose it. Then what? Gym memberships and plastic surgery and all that. She’ll be ok. She’s got all that coming and she doesn’t mind it. All of this is as natural to her life as getting a driver’s license is to anybody’s.

This pretty girl, and not bad, but personality wise, we’re not meshing. She insults your apartment the moment she steps inside, one of those girls always trying to maintain position by putting things beneath them. Seeing what they can squash so that they can stand a little taller on it. She figures if you’re on edge than you won’t notice that she is.

What this is about is control. She’s trying to be in it. Who isn’t? Poor girl. I don’t blame her.

It’s really rather grim. The movie plays. The couch is large. If you could have guessed you’d have a girl like her some time ago, say when you were seventeen, if you could have imagined it, you would believe that your life was going to be perfect. What else could a scene like this denote?

For one night with one single girl like her, you would have traded ten years of your life. Once upon a time.

But now?

Actually, you probably wouldn’t go through with it. Really.

But the girl, she’s aggressive. The girl, she says, What’s wrong with you? The movie is almost over and you haven’t touched her, though her long legs are pushing her bare feet up against your folded thighs.

She means; Why aren’t you moving on me?

The question to ask yourself about now, it is: Why’s she pushing it? Does she really just want to fuck? Does anybody?

You can’t answer that question. Neither can I. But she’s pushing forward. She is saying, anyway, that she wants to fuck.

So fuck it Habit habit habit.

She says, Let’s go to your bedroom.

What I do, I go to the kitchen and open the cabinet door behind which I keep my medicines, the vitamins and cold remedies and the Viagra and the sleeping pills. I grab a bottle, shake out a pill, trying to move fast, not wanting her to know, sort of shaky with the idea of doing something I shouldn’t times two.

Something solid bothers me, but I’m not sure what. I tell myself, This whole thing is off, that’s all.

I pop the pill, rush the bedroom, she’s quick to undress, that ex stripper body, long and lean and moving by habit in those stripper ways, from stripper vogue to stripper vogue, and after just a little while, my x feels extra hard. I feel especially full. She’s been down on my x for half a minute and I’ve been down on her for probably five, a girl who knows that a man likes it when she makes sounds of pleasure not just while his mouth is against her x, but when his x is in her mouth, too. As if she likes it there. As if as much as anything, for her this is about x.

She says only two men have made her come. This, I know, you know, she knows, it’s a set up. It’s so that when she seems to come it will seem significant. Ask yourself again: Why?

(You could get caught on that question. You and me both. All the time, over and over, every second of every fuck and the moments that precede them: why?)

But hell, it’s out of my hands. I’m all hopped up on my Viagra.

It’s got me going so good I wish I wanted to be doing this.

She goes through a routine that may or may not be coming. It finishes in collapse, like what a dancer does at the end of a song.

Can you come? she asks me.

I’d rather not, I say. This is me just being honest

Ok, she says. This is her, not being honest.

I want her to leave, and I imagine that even she sort of wants to leave, so I tell her that I have trouble sleeping with a near stranger in my bed. This is true. I tell her I have to be up early. This is not true.

Let’s see how it goes, she suggests. Maybe you’ll fall asleep. If not, I’ll go.

I agree. After about ten minutes, she gets up and starts dressing.

I’m going to go, she says.

Ok.

But I stand up to take her out to her car, and before we get anywhere, she kisses me. I’m erect, easily and strongly, and I sink her back to the bed and tug down her slacks and I go down on her for some long time and then we get to fucking again, and I think as I fuck: Damn, she was almost gone.

Something is still wrong. I already know what, have always know what, just not in the conscious part of my mind. It’s like a pebble in your shoe. You’re aware and then not really and then you just sort of resigned.

To get it out, you have to really think about.

I do. It hits me. Mid fuck.

Cut to: sleeping pills.

I took the sleeping pills. Not the Viagra.

And all that voodoo, this idea of the more swollen dick, it’s gone. And the voodoo of the sleeping pill, it hits. I’m worried that like some narcoleptic, I’m going to fall asleep on the girl. Color me instantly tired.

She is so focused on me coming, it’s as if this is all she’s here for, as if if I come while fucking her, she’s accomplished something, and me, I’m just dizzy tired, sickly fatigued, fucking away.

So I fake it.

Now we’re done.

And then, here’s the trick, I’ve got to make her think I can’t sleep. So that she’ll agree to go again. I’ve got to make her think that her presence is keeping me up, and, as she knows, I’ve got to be up early. The melding of the lie and the truth which perfectly captures the essence of the night.

The problem is, I keep dozing off. And then in my half wake, my half sleep, I worry about her being there, in the morning. She really is a stranger, and this really is my room, my bed, and all that really means something to me.

So I fight the pills. The pills are strong. Who, or should I say what, is going to win?

You’re not tired, I tell myself. Maybe you really did take the Viagra, I tell myself.

But the chemistry of it is beyond just what I believe. The sleeping pills are in my blood. The girl is in my bed. The Viagra is in the bottle.

Try to stay awake. Pop open your eyes. The girl, she’s watching you. Look around. You’ll see this room, a relatively new room, like you’ve never seen it before. The corners. The doors of the bathroom, the closet, the nightstand. The blinds and the traffic beyond them. You try to focus on everything, be aware of everything to keep yourself awake, but you go sliding into what you look at, what you think about.

The pills vs your brain.

(To lead a good life, you have to be as conscious as possible.)

Not every bind you find yourself in is your fault. But this one, let’s be honest: this is all about what a fuck up I can be.

J and c and x

2005-08-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

To remember either J or c is to remember a particular era, my pre fucking days, to be certain, but more specifically, I’m talking about autumn and the first real grown up girlfriends of what was supposed to be the beginning of my real grown up life. To think about either is less to think about her than it is to feel myself at eighteen. It is to think about a particular fall, one of thirty three, and though the leaves tumble in the same way every year, the feeling I get when I think of these particular leaves, those particular girls, that particular fall, it is absolutely distinct.

I suppose in fact every day is distinguishable, but from so far forward, it just becomes one lump, the way our lives seem when they are paragraph summarized, the way these girls might seem if one doesn’t take a moment to really recall.

J and I, we’re always on the living room floor of my mother’s house, a few blocks from campus, that university neighborhood, this four-years-until-graduation-and-beyond-life; it’s the middle of the day, almost always; her running pants are half pulled down, this Indian girl with slightly bad skin, the salty flavor of her x when I go below, like a diver without good lungs, submerging and after a few seconds, surfacing; she squirms beneath my touch, a girl not certain if the pleasure of it overrides the guilt or whatever it is that causes us unease in our moments of hunger sating.

The air, it has that quality, you know it, wherever you live, we all do; it cools and it grays and you can smell things which were once green turning back into earth, fall when people start to start fires.

Those are the steps of the mailman, heavy on the porch, and there he is, passing the open blinds, and whether or not he sees us, accidentally displayed like the kids we are trying to find our way into sex, I don’t know, lying there together in that soft autumn light, the sun like an egg yolk, the stripe shadows of the blinds running across us. The mail falls through the slot. J strokes my x for a minute at a time then abandons it, like an item in a store you pick up and think about buying but return to the shelf, over and over again.

J has said to me the first “dirty” thing I remember a woman, at least a woman I knew, that first night walking from the porch of my mother’s home where we had been kissing, down the street lamp sidewalks, across the campus, to her dorm room, a time early between us, before I’d seen her x or could really believe she had one, and she said: “I’m a mess.”

And maybe she thought I wouldn’t understand or maybe she took it for granted that I would but in any case, I did, and the world changed a little. There were girls out there, clean girls with whom you held hands, and they actually acknowledged their x’s.
Girls you sat beside in classrooms and saw at bookstores, they had them, too, x’s, and those x’s could become a mess based on something you did with her: this is the kind of world you wanted to live in but didn’t dare think you did. Look at it open in front of you. This is fall and what you feel like is your going to have all the experiences that grow you up.

And later, the girl from my first college math class, c, with her long relaxed curl that reddish color now back in fashion, a slightly Asiatic face, her penchant for lying, her long legs, and her long ass, like two oval stones rising out of the stream, I transition into her, this way of trading not necessarily up, but away, that men have; we are collectors by nature and what we think about are not the things in our collections but the things outside of them, the ones we don’t have, the explorer not interested in the map he’s drawn but the one he hasn’t.

c comes with me back to my home town to watch the high school play, this is already nostalgia fodder, and everything there is so small and everything feels so strange that it grows unbearable. It is not place to bring a girl. She tells me stories about her father on the long ride home, fascinations, really, her imagination running away with her, and me in the dark silence listening and believing.

Not long after we stand in my mother’s living room and c’s slacks, they’re black, I unbutton them, and she holds them up, one hand clasping fingers on the button side and the button hole side, as I lead her into the bedroom.

I can’t remember anything about her x except the shock of touching it (like that first shock years before with a sweaty girl from the fair whose x I didn’t expect to be wet and so I imagined was bleeding and so I pretended I heard something and ran round the corner of the church where we’d gone to make out and held my fingers up in the streetlight—no blood—and then {what would any of us so young do, this desire to know?} I sniffed).

She’s on the bed, the comforter, my mother’s bed, my mother’s comforter, this long girl, c, with her pants off now, and her panties down, and me, I know that I want to want to fuck her.

But: whereas J and I seemed to be pushing into something together, mutually uncertain and uncomfortable, c feels ages ahead of me, and so what I think when I’m being honest with my thoughts is that I’m not ready for her.

Or it. She looked much less dangerous with her underwear on.

So it’s simple: I am afraid.

Thin and worried about being nude in front of a woman; underexperienced and worried about when I’ll come and how, and if I can really get it in, and how I should compose my face and whether or not I’ll be too loud or too quiet.

It’s almost Thanksgiving and has gotten cold and for a little while I miss J; we were together at a Halloween party, and that wasn’t long ago, but it feels like a simpler time, laughing in our costumes, drinking with our masks pushed up on our heads, this little lesson in how you’ll regret whatever you leave, the places and the people.

c’s waiting, expectant, I imagine, ready to be made love to, fucked, taken to other worlds. Ready to have happen to her all kinds of things I don’t know how to do but want to. The simple wish of my youth, I’d make it on any falling star: I wish I could make a woman come just by looking in her eyes.

I go into the bathroom, come out bare save a towel around my waist—it might as well be a white flag—carrying an unwrapped condom—it might as well be a last place ribbon—and something in all of this pushes c away, or she’d already changed her mind while I was undressing and wrapping myself and then unwrapping the condom.

She laughs, begins to dress. This semi-rejection feels too easy, as if this is exactly the way it should go, and I catch it with near relief.

She drifts. I drift. These two girls, in the fall of the first year of my supposed adult life, these girls who came and went before the first snow, that long ago and faraway.

And the patterns of my fights with women, they were set with these girls, the way I was with them some reduced but recognizable image of the lover I now am, so too was I some reduced but recognizable image of the enemy I can seem to become; the way I bully, the ways in which I’m wrong and right, the pettiness and insecurity that comes out under cover when I argue, you could see it all with either of them, the way you could see, if you looked close enough and at the right times, my absolute amazement with the body of the woman, any woman, when it is revealed, my fascination with her x and the idea that she is actually sharing it with me; you can color me awed from then till now and so it is apparent who I am, good and bad and everything else, from the beginning, when I am green and underbloomed, till whatever this is, this time, the middle I guess.

J and c, not my first real lovers, or even my first x’s, but my first somethings or another; if you define a woman particularly enough, she’s going to be a first something. And it may seem even to me that I miss them both, or at least one or the other, but this isn’t true. I wouldn’t really want to sit over tea with J or sink into a bathtub full of warm water with c; I wouldn’t want to share pictures of our children.

It’s that old me, it’s that old season, the freshman boy in the small city, with his towel and his condoms and his middle of the day explorations of territory both in and out of myself that was absolutely new, that’s what I miss.

L

2005-08-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

In the story your parents tell, there was a statue of bronze in the shape of a nude woman that acted as the base of a lamp at your aunt’s house. In this story, you are two years old and every time you visit that aunt, you stroke the lamp and babble to it. Eventually, for some unrelated reason, the aunt gets rid of the lamp, and in the story your parents tell about you, the next time you visit you go and stand where it had been and you wail.

Freud suggests that we lose some love, often our mother, and that the people we bring close to us after that face our unconscious resentment for not being that lost love, so we begin to torture them as a form of punishment.

I’d like to say that L is that first lost girl, and despite the fact she’s not the first girl I said it to, she is most certainly she’s the first girl I loved. Still, in truth, you could see in how I related to her some strain of torment, the way boys get when girls get close and they don’t know what to do, all the awful things we offer up, hard and cold and demanding, the way at times a man can seem devoid of care.

Say about her that she is a meridian: that on one side of her I am one thing, and on the other, I am something else. It is not so much that she changed me as that I was in a period of change. My knee was healing from the first serious injury of my life. Before that, you don’t think anything bad can happen to your body. After that, you wince when you see people running down stairs.

We’d known each other by hello for a year, and I admired her ass once as I watched her make copies at a university copy machine. Admiration is not the quite word. As with any girl, it was the ass and what was around it that fascinated me. She was something to my eyes extraordinary. She had a boyfriend and after it ended she came one afternoon to my apartment; I was still on crutches and she told me she found this charming.

So there was the initial fuck, and all that fucking, and the living together, and the moving together, so much to write about you feel almost like not writing at all.

Christmas, I’ve moved down the coast for graduate school and now am visiting; already we’re unwinding ourselves from each other, but that’s not what it feels like. A rented cabin in a town held above the sea; we fuck on the other side of the do-not-cross-fence, the edge of the cliff, sea slugs in the long grass and everything gray, but to me it is all beautiful. She’s shivering slightly, her bared ass looks cold, and we begin to fuck. The insight I have then is the most enduring of insights: that all this is temporary, the cold and the heat and the beauty, our touching, our lives, everything will go, and you say to yourself this is not to live but to embrace mortality, fucking like that into the sunset and the girl never looks back, she just jolts forward and sinks toward you and jolts forward again; how quiet all this is; and the further epiphiny comes: it will never get better than this: you are at the top of the mountain and what is there to do now?

You could push forward. This is storybook death and since you’ll die one day anyway, since all of this will, why not? Only who will read the story and how will you know it’s been read and from your grave of water or earth, how will you value it?

It all spins away. A boy doesn’t learn until the third or fourth time that when he takes a woman for granted this is just a part of his nature he must confront, not indulge, that there is nothing wrong with the relationship, that he is destined, though, to try to find something wrong with them all. That he will miss her after all. That he does love and need her despite his fears, or whatever it is that fucks him up about this.

The break up comes long before the last fuck, but the break up is clearly final.

This last fuck in Vegas, memorable, her x over my face, my x in her mouth, this very rare moment when you are touching the beautiful thing and still knowing it as beautiful, when the beauty hasn’t been broken by the fact you’ve been allowed beside it. We’re fucking in the Mirage, or some other hotel like it, a point of meeting just for kicks or the next to last goodbyes, or whatever it is, all her beauty revealed to me, the way beauty usually is in loss, but now somehow revisited, this momentary reprieve, like the walks I take pound dogs for before they put them to sleep, if sleep is what you call death.

She was wearing white suit pants and an open throated blouse and that was a decade ago but picturing her now hurts.

There was the return trip, the Vegas to LA drive in the night, I’d brought her plumbs, her favorite fruit, and I ran them back up to her hotel room; she was not happy to see me five minutes after that heavy post fucking goodbye; and now I was on the road, ok enough, though it seemed I shouldn’t be, four hours with just me, the first time in my life I knew it might be like that in general, the first time I realized sometimes it is just the taste of her x and the feel of her as she comes that you have to go on.

And that if it is not enough, then what?

The most amazing thing about her was that her eyes are almost gold, like a lion’s. The statue, it was bronze. And don’t let Freud or me lie to you, even if by accident; there is no lost love: that vision of the perfect woman is just the desire to have the many vaguely embodied, and that resentment, it is what we feel for the one that has cut us away.

The last I heard from her she said she’d gotten old and fat, but I’d didn’t believe her and I didn’t care.

Everything aside, what I like is that though she is gone there is at my core love for her so that I can believe in the almost eternal nature of what I call real love. It might have faded for her; I’ve never known a woman, no matter how tightly she gripped, who didn’t move fully past me, but she was the first of three I’ve not fully past, and I consider it a blessing.

c and m

2005-08-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

Though on the night I met m we fell to fucking, I considered her and m both as friends. Each has a daughter my son’s age and we went on play dates together, the little girls and my little boy, parks and swimming pools and kid eateries filled up with video games and plastic tunnels.

c, that first night, she wanted to fuck and fuck and so we did, and in the morning, I was ready for her to leave, anxious to go about my day, one I envisioned spending alone, but she wanted to fuck more and the fucking became somewhat chorelike.

Much later, not long ago, in fact, a female friend, one who has been blogged, would see c’s face accidentally captured on a home video of my son and his playmates, and this friend asked me to go back to c, to freeze, those soft eyes, that expression that made you believe she was thinking about something beautiful.

Who is she?
She looks like she belongs in a French film.
Have you fucked her?

The way some women always want to know about other women, what the connection is, how they compare, where she in the world, this vague but not impossible threat.

c was not an actress and though you could see her like that, some French girl playing herself in some sad French film, she was, in fact, a semi-pro kickboxer and her back was so muscular that fucking her from behind bordered homo eroticism.

It was that and other things. The way in the kitchen, she’d reach for my x while I was cooking the kids’ dinner and I’d have to squirm away and tell her over and over again that while my son visited, my sex was off.

What finalized it, or rather what preempted anything serious, it was that when fucking she’d push her palm against my chin with the thumb cupped up to press against one cheek and the fingers against the other, not the way a grandmother tries to force a pout out of a mouth but the way a boy usually does with a girl when they are playing games of domination and submission, pushing upward, like she was trying to force my head, my face, out of existence.

As for m, she was having marital problems, a Pilipino woman older than I, short and pretty in a flat way, she hung around with us, consistently resentful of c, a passive aggressive woman who felt to have been starved of everything, all the nutrients that make us whole, a woman who tried so badly to show you how intelligent she was that you began to realize she really wasn’t very intelligent at all.

She thought her marriage would be ok if she fucked other men for a couple of months and so she moved into a hotel not far from where I lived. There, one evening late, she sat in my lap and said, I've always thought about this, and kissed me. Then she unbuttoned her shirt and sat there bare chested, her tiny breasts poking out at me, her looking down at herself, this emotionally fragile woman as fucked up as any I’ve ever known, and when I see it now what I feel for her is sad, the moment one of complete pathos.

There was no way then to deal with it and so I remained perfectly still, my eyes downcast, saying nothing, almost not breathing, like a man who is dying, who is almost all the way out of this world.

After that she was persistently after me to fuck her.

Her child was a beautiful and almost perfectly silent girl, and I realized that she didn’t speak much because her mother was always talking. The father sounded like a good man and I wanted to help m understand that her marriage was salvageable, that she wouldn’t do better, that for the sake of the child, she should try to work it out. I suppose I could see that she was doomed either way, that kind of restless heart that will pop itself eventually, and I figured it was best for the little one to at least be in her father’s home when all that went down, and so I argued with m the way usually a woman argues with a man that maybe counseling would help, but she would hear none of it.

She was determined to fuck and I was determined we should remain friends only.

m and I, we still fucked but I tried not to very often, and she’d never push overly hard, but she’d never quit pushing, either. She’d been through the fires, done things I haven’t done, been places I’ve not been; the stories she told of what became of her after she divorced her oppressively religious husband: hardcore swinger parties, professional dungeons, double penetrations, the fire she walked through much deeper than the fires I know, and yet she was remarkably unburned, with the face and eyes soft, as if none of it had worn her out on anything

Being with either of them or sometimes both was like feeding tape worms: there was so much need, and you felt in the end they’d eat you and then what was around you and what was around that, like the Pink Panther cartoon where the vacuum cleaner swallows up everything there is until all that is left is outerspace and itself, and then it swallows the moon and stars, and then it swallows itself.

I told m finally we could fuck but only if she understood we’d never speak again, our friendship would be over, and I calculated wrong, because I assumed she valued me beyond the idea of fucking, but she said, Ok.

It happened with c, the three of us at the bars and then we went onto my big bed.

m looked small with us, and perhaps I cold have found this interesting, enticing, but given the overall context, it put my off. There was an oversoftness to her skin I found nearly repulsive, and that together with the fact that she remained completely passive, lying there letting everything happen to her, all added up to making the experience semi-grotesque.

I watched as c kneeled on the bed and licked at m’s x and it was like watching an animal drink at a pool. I couldn’t fuck her or even touch her that way, and I thought with what felt like nostalgia about all the girls’ I’d been with who’d looked alarmingly beautiful with their faces pressed to the face or between the thighs of another woman.

I thought about those times the way in our worst moments we think of childhoods to which we’ll never return, innocence lost, and this night, it was an ugly night.

When c finally stopped licking, I started to fuck her, the beginning of that long labor that we always went through, and so it was almost with relief that I saw that m had risen and begin to dress, her jaw clenched, feeling alone and sorry for herself, just the way I could have told her fucking around with me would have caused her to feel.

As the night began it might have seemed that things were coming together, but of course, this was the moment of impact and everything was going to go apart.

It wasn’t as if any of us in that room that night wasn’t getting what he or she deserved, though it might fairly be say that all of us had once been to taught to expect that from life we might get more of what we thought we needed.

X

2005-08-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

I spend last night in a bar where once I met a girl who told me during our flirty conversation that she believed she tasted good. This was a tall girl in a sleeveless dress and her arms where that pretty color of tan that hasn’t gone too deep and so I licked her, a sort of unreasonable move more likely to annoy than to charm, but I would at least like to imagine since I can’t remember for certain that somehow the context justified the action.

What I liked best was her smile and I liked it most when she flashed it after I licked her arm. We'd gone daring together and the bond was immediate.

We went for a two am breakfast, her and me and my friend and her friend, and afterwards, she took me to her home. Her friend disapproved. Mine did not.

You couldn’t see it in the bar but she was fragile. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend, a pro football player, and she wasn’t ready for much of anything but she wanted to be. By the time we reached her house, neither of us were drunk, and so it wasn’t that, but rather it was that she was telling herself she ought to be pushing forward that caused her to take these steps with me, only they were coming too soon and too quickly.

If I met her now, last night, for example, I would let her go, the way some people do with some animal they come to realize they shouldn’t have hunted.

I was younger then and not as often capable as thinking like that.

The bar has a new name but it is the same bar; last night, I sat in the same place I’d been standing when I met her, this short length of open wood between the place the cocktail servers pick up drinks and the corner on the other side of which is the important long stretch. Everybody drinking, everything dim but the bottles, the night like any bar night, where the girls become so pretty in the liqour and the light.

(And you know you’re in trouble when you are in a bar and you can look at any girl and know what she is like naked, with her imperfections exposed to your post coital eye, her vulnerability fully bloomed, everything revealed, the real contours of her face and body, out of the glow of the bar room attention.

You know you are in trouble when you’re in a bar and there is no one you really want to fuck. You see butts instead of asses. What you feel is alone. And the last thing you can imagine wanting to do is put your tongue some girl’s exposed skin.)

The night I met her, not so many years ago, in this city to which I’ve returned, in this bar to which I’ve returned, to this very spot to which I’ve returned, in this illusion of life as a cycle instead of line that goes zipping off bottle rocket-like and eventually fizzles, that night not so many years but such a long time ago, her smile so pretty, her hair long, the little scar on her arm where they gave her an immunizations as a child, what else was there to do but try to get close?

Later, she wasn’t sure, even though she kept saying she was. She lifted her dress and as I remember it there were no panties to take off or move aside. I kissed her x. After a little while, I went inside of her, neither of us undressed, sprawled on a couch the color of which I want to recall but cannot. We fucked rather slowly and I don’t remember any real pleasure in it. I remember looking at her face and waiting for her to smile and the focus of her eyes just over my shoulder and I remember that after a little while, she seemed to try to come.

We went out to the balcony and smoked a cigarette together. I felt fond of her, the way I would with an old friend. She talked about her ex boyfriend and you could hear how she was trying to make sense of their breakup, the way we look for meaning in this chaos of relationship.

I was leaving the city in a week. The state. The country.

I would be gone.

Now I’m back. If she sat beside me, I’d recognize her in a heartbeat. Once upon a time, in my older life, I used to tell myself that I met a single girl over and over; that we had to reintroduce ourselves, but in essence, there was the soul of one Woman, a line of stones across a river, all the dots you can connect to get from one point to another, but each of them the same, those familiar places we go to rest and from which we can scan out the next leap, and sometimes, when it came to goodbyes, and even hellos, this made things easier.

I know better now, better than believing that, and better, even, than trying to make certain things like goodbyes and hellos easier. I’m sitting in the bar drinking what I always drink. The girls are all around and some of them will let you lick.

(She was standing beside me, smiling, looking over, looking away, looking over again. We began to talk. I asker her what her virtues were and she thought and she smiled and she said, I think I taste good.

And I smiled and bent toward her, and I said, I think I taste well.)

m

2005-08-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

She was soulless and thus one was much more capable of wanting her than loving her and that made her safe to fuck. Of course, who am I to say that anybody hasn’t a soul? Or, for that matter, to imply that anybody has.

I just mean that she would never care for anyone beyond herself and it is almost impossible for me to think I’m in love with a woman like that, as intoxicating as her beauty might be.

And m, to look at her, even in pictures, even in flesh, she was quite beautiful.

In a busy night club where I was ignoring her because she demanded attention she asked me to fasten her necklace and from that little intimacy was born seduction, though to claim its authorship as my own would probably be to mistake what happened.

These are late afternoons in her crazy uncle’s expensive Mediterranean apartment, a place like a museum, the antiques polished, the recluse in a duplicate floorplan upstairs, sometimes his cane moving across the polished stone floor like a bone, my fingers in m’s x, her on all fours, dark hair thrown back on her dark skin and those eyes as light brown as butterscotch candies. She runs it hot/cold and the mystery of her sometimes surrender and sometimes refusal to surrender is still unsolved to me.

By the time it was over I had been carrying a cell phone she’d gotten me, one of those gifts people give to imprison the giftee. It was then a time of long conversation and text messages and me who had been trying to live that Spartan life feeling suddenly weighted and by a girl who save the virtue of her persistence and her beauty was not weighty. Finally one night I knocked the phone from the bed in my sleep and found with relief in the morning it was broken.

She was to a degree a liar and you often felt that she was trying to trick you, not so much because you’d only go the direction she wanted you to if she manipulated you, but because it was habitual.

My heart was hardly with her but sometimes I sat in the living room on that stiff furniture with the wind coming off the sea and lifting the curtains and her accidentally posing across from me and the two of us looking like an artist and a model, that kind of almost perfect couple, two people who demand attention, the way certain pretty girls seem to shout look at my bone structure and certain men that seem to fancy themselves artists seem to shout: read my mind, and everybody demands that everybody else know their hearts.

Hubris, of course, on all counts.

She was dating a man on the television and I passed him once shooting a segment for his show and I called her cell from her other cell and held it up so she could hear him talking and she could know I’d passed him and he was blind to me. I suppose I wanted him to seem a fool even though he represented a level of safety, the way boyfriends and husbands always make a girl feel safer to me, especially up front.

There was meanness between us, I suppose because I resented what she wanted off of me and because she resented what I wanted off her, those cross purposes. Once I told her that her beauty was an accident and that though she was in her moment of perfection she’d never hold it. You could see how it would happen, looking at her thighs as she sat across from you, or her ass as you fucked her from behind, her teeth just after she’d kissed you, you could see the potential for some small change, some series of them, and you’d know how they would ruin her, for she was perfect and real perfection can afford no movement; simply: since there is no such thing as more perfect, one can only move away from it or stand still and nobody stands still.

Often, she was cold, coming on what she thought as subtle in that old cliché way of a woman who wants you to want to marry her, and me coming across honestly in that old cliché of a man who wants to fuck. Towing the line between these cross purposes, and so she’d fall to thinking she wanted to fuck and every now in then, in that fucking, I’d feel in deep and I’d think the way we feel before the orgasm demoralizes us, that this was the stuff of life and since she’d given it to me she had something to do with near immortality, and so for a little while, less than ten minutes of any meeting between us, both m and I seemed to be getting what we wanted.

What I was doing with her beyond that, I couldn’t say, not eve now, except that we want beautiful things.

My father was a big game hunter, a taxidermist, who thought he loved the animals he killed and even that they loved him. Me, I’m a vegan, but I’d imagine you know better than to think that means I’m not some kind of killer who is always looking for ways to spiritualize his kills.

The time I best remember fucking her was a time when I thought we wouldn’t fuck at all. Tired by m’s company, I’d brought A. This was late night after a missed flight and a more than normal sense of restlessness rolling around in me. The girls refused to touch but each in her way worked on me and I was bored with the moment and resentful of them both.

Somehow or another, it happened that A and I began to fuck and m half lay back on the couch. She’d stripped down to her panties and the second or third time I looked up at her, her hand was buried in them. It seemed an unusual thing for a woman, especially this woman, to find inspiration by the sight of fucking, especially this man she wanted to consider hers. Perhaps it was that her outward beauty outshone A’s and so she felt no threat, especially as she couldn’t see how perceived from the inside, which is half of where we look, she compared unfavorably.

In any case, the way she fingered herself, focused as was on my body and A’s, how we looked fucking, made me want her and so I pulled her down onto the carpet. She was very wet, and I curled down against her as we fucked so that my head was beside her head, our ears touching. There was a real sense of connection. The moment had made her raw. It wasn’t long until I was wishing we were alone, feeling for a little while bonded, then the connection went thin, the fucking like a microcosm of our relationship, moving from that honeymoon excitement to boredom, that feeling that you’ve reached your limits. I stuck a finger in her xx almost out of a sense of desperation, the way sometimes when we know we are running out of fuel we drive faster as if somehow that will ensure we make the station.

With this she began to come.

Later, not much later, she’d be angry with me about it all. The broken phone and the fact that she’d fucked me after I’d fucked A, the way I was wandering off from her, but what I’ll remember is a time after that, when I’d just returned from a visit to the States and jetlagged, I bumped into m on the streets. I’d come back with a bad hair cut and was conscious of it sitting in that apartment in which we’d so often fucked or moved toward fucking and then turned away from it.

It felt like nostalgia and the traveling and the haircut so short I felt bald had left me vulnerable and she seemed unattained. She was warming herself up to me as she always had done, sitting across the room, then close, finally touching, and that touching would lead to a deeper touch, always my finger in her x, rarely my x in her mouth, then her sitting up with her legs spread and me kneeling to lick her x and her taking me by the chin or the side of the head to lead my mouth to hers, my x to hers.

This time, it all felt forced. In fact, it felt as it always had, only this time I saw it for what it was before it had advanced much.

In one bedroom there were her clothes spread all over the bed, the way spoiled girls seem to do, and I sat amongst the scattered blouses and skirts and panties thinking of how she might look in them. She had her shirt off to change into another and you could see half her areola soft and evenly colored above the cut of her bra and I wondered after the perfection of her body and face and I had the barely realized epiphany that nobody is really vapid, no matter what she seems, and that might have saved the moment, though it didn’t.

I’d talk to her after that, but we’d never see each other. I’d leave the country, her and other girls, and something has become of her since then, some other man’s lover, or maybe the same man, the one from the television show, or maybe she is a wife and mother, though it was only three years ago and it hard to imagine all that happening in such a short time, though much more has happened to me since.

I think about that winter evening on her bed with her clothing scattered around it. There is always the specter of what might have been, these ghost lives a moment changed by not much would have sent us into for real, the potential for something between us, the way you think of shaping somebody and she is probably thinking of shaping you, and all you really face is collision and disaster, but it was never very close: I never believed in her, not really.

Though there is the way a sunset frustrates you: what is the function of beauty? What can you do with it but try to have it. Look at my father with his rifle pointed in the direction of some wildly lovely creature in the falling snow.

On the bed was a vest of rabbit. I lifted it and felt of its fur and regardless of what she said, I knew as I held it that this is where we reallyreally stopped.

R and a

2005-08-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

The thing to remember about her is that if I sabotaged my second marriage it began in earnest with R on the dog path, an unremarkable girl with blond hair and blue eyes, large breasts and a Boston Terrier. We met by introduction through an elderly man whose dog often played with mine; the meeting was brief and later she’d tell me she thought I was either an asshole or gay because I paid her no real attention.

What you think when you walk away from a blond girl with big breasts and blue eyes, all those b’s, when you’re walking with the dog you share with a woman who waits, what you think on this fall day on the asphalt path in the shade of apartment complex forest is that you’ve traded the one for the many.

Whatever you do, whatever you decide, you will second guess it.

Every choice is right. Every choice is wrong.

If you think you can move in a direction without regret, think again.

The woman who is waiting, she makes you happy enough. Sometimes you say to yourself: what more could I want from a girl? And if the answer isn’t really much, than it must not be more from a particular girl your looking for. Or at least that is the kind of thing I think when I pause at the top of the hill and look back at the blond haired blued eyed girl with her Boston Terrier.

This is about R, five foot five, one hundred and twenty pounds, what else is there to say? We would never fuck and wouldn’t even get together for another six months. We’d see each other on the path and chat briefly and I’d move on.

But when my marriage went bad, whether I sabotaged it or not, whether I really wanted that or not, the relief I tried to sell myself on the mornings after was that now I could began again with earnest seductions—not quick fucks justified by bad fights, but legitimate full on potential laden assignations.

R, in the immediate vicinity, she was the first girl I brought into that once shared home.

We never really dated though I bought her a Valentine’s Day gift; we would meet for drinks and we’d watch dvd’s and she slept half a night in my bed. She let me take down her shorts and she let me put my face between her thighs and she did not sop me when I began to tongue her x, but she would not let me take her shirt off. There was a tattoo on her lower back, her very lower back, the first thing she showed me that first time I meant to seduce her and I took it as the first sign that she meant to be seduced.

Her sister is two years older and looks just the same as R except that at that time she wore her hair short while R wore he hair long; naturally I’d want to fuck her, that sister thing, the way we always want to fuck the sisters and friends of our girls, but no, I never did, not R’s.

In a bar with two friends, the three of us half drunk males trying not to play our alpha male games, we bumped by accident into R and her sister and a friend. She was drunk and more warm than she was when we were alone. The sister asked to see the stomach that R had talked about and so R lifted my shirt and they all evaluated and the friend dragged her finger down the line that divides my hip from my torso. My friends stood by drinking their beers, watching R show off, and since I was being shown off, this was a moment I liked.

As far as I can remember, she, like a, a girl from pretty much the same time period, a girl whose x I only slipped a finger into once, this girl who had the sad face of Charlotte Rampling, those pale blue eyes that always looked pained, the face of a suicide waiting to happen, this girl with her two bottle of wine a night habit and a father who was dying and a vintage Mercedes she was overly attached to, this girl a, always trying to hide her expressions of mourn with wide smiles and easy laughter that only counfounded the sorrow, she, like R, as far as I can remember, never touched my x. And I’ll never be long with a woman who doesn’t at least make it seem as if she can’t help but reach for me there, as if she has or at least wants a special and almost separate relationship with my x, the way I’ll have one with hers.

They were women both of them who let things happen without doing much, hardly any sexual aggression in them, at least not much with which they were comfortable, and though you know a woman can be freed from whatever it is that freezes her, you tell yourself taking part in that kind of escape makes you responsible for the escapee, and R, so underextraordinary, and a, so damaged, I could not see myself as responsible for either.

It just faded out, in both cases, without ever having picked up much steam. R was gone before a but a was gone more sharply, and it was R, really, that day on the path, that helped to start this fresh round, a girl who I’m sure never knew her significance in that way.

I think about how immediately after the hard breakup that preceded these girls, I’d felt pain; for a few weeks, these weeks when I knew R and a few other women, a amongst them, I was telling myself that yes, this is what I traded it for, a blond or a brunette on my couch, the movie only half over, the bottle half gone, the legs half open.

Perhaps everything would have been different if I hadn’t walked my dog that day. She was wearing pink shorts, tight, and a bulky white sweatshirt, this mismatch of confidence and covering; you wanted to know her, what she was hiding, what she wasn’t, the way you want to know many girl.

And the price you paid and what you really got for it, well, those are hard things to determine.

fatigue

2005-08-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

as way of an apology and explanation for a promise borken: a pic.
it is used with permission of the girl.
and i am as tired as i look.
the place all this restlessness gets you.

respite

2005-07-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

moving and won't be on until monday.
consider this a promise borken.
every promise eventually is.
but the promise to have something up by monday evening, that's a new promise.
i'll keep it. you'll see.

S

2005-07-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

A Portuguese woman who worked in finance for the UN. We were foreigners in a Mediterranean country but she wasn’t nearly as foreign as I was.

Our meeting was simple: she walked alone into a pub where I was sitting with friends, looked around, looked at me in particular, begin to walk out, then looked at me again.

She acted surprised when I caught her up on the street and maybe she was surprised; maybe she’d not meant to invite all this. When we fucked, she spoke to me in Portuguese, but this is not what makes it memorable.

A week or two later, she asked me to her hotel and because on each of the nights I’d gone drinking with her and her friends, I’d recieved what seemed mixed signals, I wasn’t sure what she wanted with me there, in the middle of the day, a sudden and under-explained call.

Her face was rather round and she wore her hair in a pageboy cut, a dark eyed girl with a wide smile and large teeth that made it look when she smiled sort of dangerous, like a woman who could devour.

She was in a sundress and the room was very small.

When she sat on the bed and folded her legs, I saw she had on no panties and it wasn’t so much that unexpected flash of pubic flesh and hair that excited me as it was the idea that she had to know I’d seen what was supposed to be secret and yet she was nonplussed by that knowledge.

It was enough to make me feel invited.

I’d never seen so much hair on an x or around it; a dark line grew up from it to her belly button and when I traced it with my eyes, a fear passed over me that it would stop me dead.

In fact, it didn’t. In fact, with this girl I could not stop fucking, though I tried three or maybe four times.

She’d talked in the past about an ex lover, a man from Finland to whom she’d been engaged, I think. We’d meet for drinks and get to kissing but he was always on her mind. That was a love that had gone wrong and now she regretted it, and I remember thinking from the way she talked about him that I hoped some of my ex lovers would talk about me in the same way.

Now we were fucking and what she liked was to kneel on the bed so she could watch in the closet mirror as I fucked her from behind. There a thickness to her flesh, a sort of firmness, as well, so that you understood her nude as a woman of bodily strength you would not recognize in the clothed world.

We’d gone on for awhile and I’d not come but I’d realized it was time to stop though there was no real reason for stopping, so that I felt gradually strange in the small hotel in the broad daylight with this girl from Portugal with that line of hair on her belly, this girl who still was in love with another man and fucking me for who knows what reason.

She put back on her dress and I put back on my pants. Then she stood for some reason above me on the bed and as I embraced her I thought again of her crossing her legs and I saw her x all over again, and I remembered her bare ass and the small of her back and the muscles on the back of her neck that strained as she watched herself and me and the mirror and how they strained more when she would turn to meet my eyes or kiss; and so my hand went up her thigh, hypnotized, maybe, by the remarkable availability of this x, and soon my fingers were inside of her and I was sweeping her down because I had to fuck again, a if to settle it this time once and for all.

The second time and at least one more we got to the point of dressing before falling back to the fucking, like a record that hits a point of skip and leaps back and plays over again and seems ready this time to go to the end but never quite gets over the scratch.

We went on in this cycle for several hours and finally as she lie there this time in her dress I felt that I was coming though it was never my intention with her to come. Though in fact we’d agreed that I would not come.

I closed my eyes and I blackened my mind and I tried to shut down my body as I pulled out.

She asked me if I’d come and I said and believed I’d not, and then I opened my eyes and we looked together at the smallest pearl of a drop on the head of my x, this bubble of potential life that had escaped.

I hadn’t lied, but I felt like a liar.

I didn’t know what to say and so I asked her if this is why she’d invited me. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled, the same way she’d done in the pub when I might not have followed her.

A woman in her clothes who passes by you. You think you want to know them all, all their secrets, to prove to yourself that there really is an x beneath all that cloth, tongue in her mouth, lust in her heart, as if there is something about you that places you amongst the very few deserving people who will know her in these ways.

These clothed girls. These two worlds. In one of them, the women pass dressed and nobody really thinks they fuck anybody. In the other, you see them bare and you know them for their wants.

You think you want to be close to each of them that touches anything in you.

Maybe it’s not just that you imagine this need; maybe you really do have it, and maybe it is legitimate in its way.

Several years later and you ask yourself how you feel about this one, for example. As if it can be some kind of gauge for the others; as if you can know whether you should have or should not have, the many by the one.

Several years later, you blog her, you blog the others, and with most of them by the time you’re done writing, you’re hard against the memory, and you’ll come to the thought of her at least one more time.

That uncrossing of her legs and the exposure of her x in that sundress; that mysterious and alarming line of hair to her belly button; these things you’ll never lose, and the point of having them you don’t know but you’re glad to have them just the same, and that’s all really there is to say about it, or any memory.

Interlude

2005-07-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

What I am talking about is last night, and this is not an x post, she either has been blogged like that already or she will be blogged like that but this I mean in a different way.

She is my apartment and her live in boyfriend is wherever he is.

She’s trying to teach him that she’s leaving and he’s trying to hold on to her and so he tells her that he’ll do anything for her; everything he says boils down to need. He promises to morph, to reinvent, to do anything. He bares himself past the point of his true vulnerability.

His heart, he always says, feels to miss beats and his headaches are getting bad and seriously, seriousfuckingly, he thinks the stress of all of this may be killing him.

These thoughts he punctuates with bouts of pouting and bouts of screaming accusation, but everything ends up in apology and please.

She spends time with me to stay away from him. She tells herself what she wants is me but the truth is what she wants is anybody not him; what she wants is to not be alone in the vacuum of one you want to be away from but are habituated to, the way the prisoner misses his cell.

So we’ve spent the day together and part of the evening and I’m ready for her to go but she has not gone. She sits on the couch and watches while I do my situps.

Her phone rings. I come up, hold, lower, do it again. She answers. I come up, hold, lower, do it again.

We are in the same room but we are far apart; this world of exercise is solitary and I don’t resent her presence in it in this moment but I wouldn’t want to do it again tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I want to do my situps, and maybe everything else, alone.

I know by now I can’t be her full on transition strategy. How I came to this conclusion I’m not sure or at least am too tired to articulate, but though once I could imagine a future with her now I cannot.

I come up, hold, lower, do it again.

Her voice, it’s far away. Her conversation, I don’t mean to hear it. I love the feeling of a situp, that old habit, the way you feel every muscle, one build on top of the other clicking you into place, then the uncoiling, and you are flat and the pain you’ll get to is semi-sweet.

I’ve met the boy, good looking and trying to sell himself as the strong silent type, and I thought about all the secrets I know of him, the way she has made him transparent, that type of pathos.

He sips his drink and eyes me but I can hear him begging her. He smiles smugly when we shake hands goodbye, but I can see the way his face distorts when he wants her to think he is in pain.

Boys always want to hang on. For him, for most of them, for most of us, it’s about possession. By nature we don’t like to give up what we hold, even if we don’t demonstrate a feeling of value for it.

But I’m not willing—I don’t think I’m willing, anyway—to possess this girl. Let’s say I’m ninety percent sure that we are eighty percent of the way through this thing, which is to say there is much more behind than in front, which is to say we’ve entered the last act.

I come up, hold, go down.

I hear her say, Oh my god…what emergency room?

And she clicks the phone dead and she looks at me and she says, J was struck by lightening.

The first thing I wonder is how he arranged it, this act of God we compare things to when we want to suggest how rare they are

I know what he’s doing even as the doctors examine him. He is thinking about the way to play this, how to point out in almost subtle ways that it’s her fault he was where he was and when; how to demonstrate that he is bitter toward her for what she’s recently done but that he still loves her though honestly he should not, how to suggest that he is ready to forgive, if she can demonstrate her allegiance to him, especially in this time of recovery.

In his minds eyes, he practices a wince so that he might demonstrate to her a physical pain he doesn’t really feel but pretends to want to hide.

How to scare her with the specter of his near real death.

And I know what she’ll be doing for some time. She’ll be taking care of him.

She’s gone and really that’s what I wanted of her but now that it seems I’ve lost her I began to reconsider.

I come up, hold, lower.

I think: Struck by lighting.
I think: I can’t compete with that.

J

2005-07-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

Another girl with a boy who couldn’t imagine his girl like this, and it is this failure of his knowledge of her that forces the space from which she begins to look for one like me.

Once, you can imagine it, they fucked as deeply as she and I ever will, and that moment has gone, but he doesn’t know it because boys are always slow to release. Slow to realize. Slow.

And me, I bring her, if you can consider her brought, into a complicatedly crowded situation already.

How I love options but hate making choices.

An East-Asian girl with my her black hair sleek and her lips perfect pouts and a sort of myster to the eyes she occasionally lets you study.

She remained nearly still beneath me in this not slow fucking, and she focused on my shoulder, on my arm, on my belly, on my chest, and her eyes would move very slightly over the area at which she stared, like an artist trying to remember something she’d want to recreate later, or an assassin looking for a point of entry.

Finally her hand would move up and she’d touch to the point of her gaze lightly at first, the way we touch things of which we want to be sure, and then less tentatively, with a grip that meant to thoroughly know what it held, and then her hand would fall away and she would move her eyes to some other part of me and start again.

I realized: she was eroticizing me.

She was turning me into photographs, pornography: this is the man that fucks me and this realization made me want to thank her, the way I felt about r early on when she’d come to watch me play football and sit rapt throughout it and tell me afterwards, it was beautiful, you moved like a lion…opposite of the way I felt about my first wife when she was bored with my little boy games and couldn’t see me for having seen me so much.

We all want to be admired. We all want to be adored. And whatever it is they admire and adore you for the most, you start to hunger for something other. If they seem to love you for your body you beg attention for you mind. If they seem to love your thinking you want them to want you for your dancing.

Eventually she raised her head toward my arm, slowly like one who is hypnotized, like one caught up in the inevitable, and I saw that she meant to kiss a standing vein just below my shoulder, and the way she did it with her perfect lips parting perfectly and then freezing there in a kiss that held like a photo made me want to forsake everything.

Made me want to feel her bite and burst the vein.

Our fist kiss was in the wind of a passing train outside a city bar stuck in the country where because we were some kind of novelty everything for us was free and we sat on a couch in the pulsing music and the pulsing light and she would not look at me for long periods of time and then look at me hard and so finally I had written on her hand: I want you and she’d nodded and ten minutes later written on mine can we go and outside we’d embraced, our first real touch, and if in this blog you want a movie moment, perhaps that is it, J in her pink dress moving into my arms and the train flashing by with all its noise and suction and her hair whipping and her mouth, that perfect mouth, opening.

And now she studies me the way I study women sometimes not for fault or lack of fault, not because I want to find the weak point on which later I might obsess, but because I am astounded by the idea of our contact, of her contact with any person, that something so seemingly magic, unworldly, can be touched by one like me.

And you wonder: does she lift me up or do I pull her down?

As if this is a collision between an angel and man as opposed to a collision between two humans simply. The way we try to spool art into our fuckings. Or the way we simply see it there.

Sometimes, rarely, with a woman you may become sharply aware that she is a full other being, complete as you are, absolutely whole, that she thinks and feels as many thoughts and emotions as you feel, and as deeply, and when this happens, when the weight of not just her body and words but the full of her strikes me, I slip toward her, almost as if a transference of consciousness is taking place, and in it, I lose the world a little.

We fuck and I am her and maybe she’s even me.

She’s had one lover but she’s had him well, or her instincts are pure, because she touches with fingertips and the tip of her nose and even her eyelashes not in the way of most women that is like an experiment in touch quickly performed and then abandoned, but with the patience of one who thinks she is practicing art and has the confidence that even though the flesh of the touched is still, it loves this attention.

She will lie for a long time with her legs apart and her knees raised and her two fingers opening her x because she knows precisely where she should be kissed and she wants you to know it also.

And on this night and others there is never enough, you cannot leave this table full, but you will leave this table. You’ve crashed against the limits of sex, and it should remind you of the Buddhist lesson, to live in the moment, your hovering there like a yo-yo at the end of it string, the place a genius in his fit of epilepsy hovers quivering and momentarily enlightened before coming back to the world, and you tell yourself: be here and now.

And afterwards, you tell yourself: I was there.

The memory you know you are creating when you fuck properly.

If you are addicted to anything, this is it.

k

2005-07-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

Blond and blue eyes and petite and big breasted like a perfect little party girl, only now she’s twenty eight and her marriage has become separation and that separation leans toward divorce and she is looking hard for something to cling to.

In fact, so am I.

This is a period of sickness, pneumonia, and I am thirty something but I know now that some day I will die, and I know that my body will betray me in other ways, so that I will live as my father and other older men I know live, off of prescriptions and doctor visits and with caution.

So sickness keeps me calm and she lies often enough beside me and when I wake I imagine and fear that she has studied me when I slept and who knows what awful thing she’s see then?

It is a game we play; I try not to drift off before she does and sometimes I win, and then I study her and see her with her face slack and her mouth slightly open. There are angles from which she isn’t beautiful to me but she is the kind of girl a man likes to take with him walking on a crowded beach or into a bar where all his friends and maybe even some of his exes hang out.

Though basically, we’re housebound.

Sometimes I walk her out to her car and it is her face and especially her eyes in the sunlight of the winter of my sickness that offers up the greatest illusion of possibility.

As it begins with k, I face a pregnancy scare with a girl already blogged; she calls me on Christmas Eve and tells me the two pink lines are on the stick, do I know what they mean? I’m coughing, convalescing, recently diagnosed and very much alone and very far away. She hasn’t got the box and so I call everybody I can think of, including my mother, and nobody can tell me what two pink lines mean. The next day, Christmas, I drag myself around the city in which sickness has gotten me stuck and try to find an open shop. Finally, a grocery store, and they have the tests, and I read the box, and it is simple: she is pregnant.

A week later, her doctor tells her she’s not. Or maybe she made it all up, there was no stick, no missing box, no doctor. I don’t know and won’t ever.

But in that week, what I think about, it’s k; what I think is that she and I will marry and raise the baby that I’ve made by accident some night two months ago with this other woman.

K and I, we don’t even fuck. Aside from the first night of my return, when she pushes herself on top of me and says, Should we? she is self conscious enough to know she is underprepared for that kind of penetration. And me, I’ve fucked too much in this sickness without knowing it was serious and now I know.

More than anything, I want to rest beside her.

Of course, one thing leads to another. You intertwine your little fingers. Then your legs. She kisses your forehead, you her cheek, she your mouth. These are tongues acting tentative. Like they are saying goodbye more than hello. But that is your hand on her tiny belly, you fingers in her thin hair.

It always ends the same way. I’m on all fours leaning down across her torso and one pair or another of gym pants is always pushed halfway down her legs and her panties have followed them and I’m licking a very small and wet and completely shaven x, slowly, and she has her hands on my shoulders and eventually she is saying, We’d better stop.

A man, or at least this one, never knows how he feels about a woman until after he’s fucked her. The mind clears and the eyes open. I try at this stage to never sleep with a woman with whom I don’t have some sense of serious potential, not that that potential is even close to a guarantee.

And there’s a window, it’s open I don’t know how long, but what you find is that perhaps it is possible to crawl through it to soon, but most certainly it is possible to not crawl through it in time. All this sleeping, all this licking, no fucking, afternoons with dvd’s, light dinners in the evening, always lying there in bed together, touching her x, rubbing her temples, and the window closes. One day you wake up in the late afternoon with the dvd you were watching with her still playing and her blond hair splayed on the pillow and her eyes closed and the lashes clumped with mascara and you look at her hard and you know its over, that you cannot at this point even try to recreate the potential.

The spark of it has burned out for lack of serious blowing.

You tell her to return to her husband and you mean it. You tell her that the hump that comes up in every relationship is the hump people bring with them. They think to solve it by starting over but what they find is that as the relationship with the new person progresses, there again is the hump.

And what you do then is you start over.

So that you will live always on beginnings and never know a decent middle or end.

You tell her: this is no way to go about it.

Solve the problem in this relationship. Someday, anyway, you’ll have to solve it. Your hump. Why not now, with him? And him, the hump he carries, let him work it out now, with you.

I want to get better and so I stay still long after she is gone, days and weeks, even.

Later, she’s calling a lot, and you think sometimes to go back for the fuck, but you know that’s all you’d be going back for, another fuck, as if they can be stacked up together and get you to some high place.

Age, better sense, fatigue, empathy, something like any or all of those things tell you better.

D and r

2005-07-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

Something brings her to the building where I do my work. Something puts her in a room across the hallway from my office.

Call it coincidence.

When I pass the open doorway I give a sweeping glance to the twenty or so people seated inside, and my eyes stop on her:

An interesting face, the blond hair short and pulled back and the blue eyes standing out and the crooked smile that suggests that more often than not, whatever she is thinking she won’t tell you.

The kind of face that stops you at a party. Or in the hallway. Staring in like a incompetent spy, thinking as you know better than to think but sometimes cannot help thinking anyway that if only you could have and know this girl, you’d be satisfied.

Sometimes you know that you will someday funnel through the clouds and step into the blue, just you and a woman, and that there you will create with her a world nobody else will really access. This is what you tell yourself sometimes, anyway, especially when you are tired, or just when you are calm.

Call this a sort of prayer.

I return to my office and I almost lose the thought of her to my work.

Eventually, she comes to stand in the doorway. You might want to call this serendipity.

She says nothing and I wait for her to speak. She looks too together to be the kind of woman that would reply to a gaze by confronting the gazer, or maybe it is that that is precisely what a woman as together as she looks would do.

Then I realize, she doesn’t need to announce herself or her intention: I know who she is already.
I say her name, first and last, the way you say the name of somebody you want to prove you have not forgotten.

I say, What was it, two years ago?

And she says, No, just last year.

Indeed, just last year.

We met a bar. She was with a friend and for much of the night she hid behind a front of bemusement, the way we like to seem as if we are just watching things unfold instead of participating in them, as if this faux witness status will keep us safe.

She would only take my number but I felt sure she’d call. Our conversation was both airy and intelligent, and we'd played well off of each other, the way sometimes strangers can dance together one song and because of accidental shared rhythm seem not strangers when the song is over.

She didn’t call.

Then she was in the grocery store a week later, standing in line with a green basket in her arms, and I was able to walk behind her and look at her the way we look at people we want to appraise when they don’t know we’re appraising them, and the cut of her waist, the round of her ass, the bare of her shoulder, all these things made me wish she’d called.

We can call this coincidence too, this meeting in the supermarket a little over a year ago.

She seemed happy to see me and she laughed openly as we talked and she did not explain her not calling but she simply gave me her number.

Several nights later, we had dinner, drinks. I was at a point of stumbling out of the sleepwalk that follows a bad break up; it was like waking from a fever, that morning of transition between sickness and health, and I was telling myself not just to find lovers, but to find the Woman.

We leaned against the car and for the first time kissed and she moaned softly as if she had a hidden hunger and I realized that for all her fronts there was to her a physical and emotional loneliness and that because she made her choices carefully she had not been touched properly for some long time.

Her apartment was like the kind they use to show prospective renters; nothing was out of place; it was as if nobody real lived there, the furniture, the paintings, that was all. Her room was more personal and there she changed into workout shorts and a t-shirt and how I admired her while she changed, not just the shape of her body, but that there was no show of false modesty: she simply turned her back, took off her blouse, her jeans, her bra, and stood there for a moment bare like that.

We fell to kissing and I re-undressed her and she opened my jeans.

I lay on her bed with my head almost off and she stood with her x over my face so I could kiss it, a pretty x bright pink just inside. She leaned forward and I felt that we were moving toward full surrender. Her hair was on my x, then her face, her mouth; I could hear her kiss but I couldn’t tell her lips from her hair and know exactly how or where she worked against me.

Then she was up again, unsurrendered.

We were moving too fast, even I knew that.

I had recently been talking with another girl, r, and we had a date planned for the next night. We’d meet at her house in the country and everything would move so quickly there, to such a level of intimacy and involvement, that my focus was not just cut in half but taken fully away, so that within twenty four hours, D was blurred for me and our night together was undercut.

When she called to ask to see me again, I simply didn’t call back.

I began drinking vodka tonics on the porch of r's country house and thinking that maybe, if I drank enough of them, I could go on with her forever. A half Cuban girl, like all the women here, a girl from wealth who held herself with poise, this girl, her perfect face, her tape worm heart, the way she'd suck my x until I came and whisper to me afterwards that it was a fun way to show her care, the way we'd fuck and stop fucking and start again, passing nights and sometimes days, the way her physical hunger was so bare, her face in the night coming toward me, her slightly open mouth on my neck, my belly, my x; I remember her shaven x and the first time I touched it and the last and the ass not properly shaped but how when I would fuck her from behind it was the small of the back I loved, her tan skin taut, and what I remember best is holding her face in my hands while she lay on the kitchen floor both of us sloppily and unexpetedly fucked of sudden impulse and me telling her in that fearful afterglow that one day she would see something awful in me, and how after I told her that I made her promise that when she did, she'd look again before going.

We would fall apart: her insecurity, my lack of preparation for a relationship; the way her parents had accidentally taught her to lie first as not just a form of protection, but so that you can get what you really want which most certainly won't be given straight across; the way mine had accidentally taught me to trust the motives of no one because inside the word "love" is the real meaning of "want" and people care for you only so well as they can possess you. So we were open but we were gaurded and she played her games by habit and I called her out on everyone of them I could recognize and some of them that I just imagined even though it wasn't always useful or needed.

Eventually, r and I would see through each other, the way eventually everybody does, and the mysteries would die, and that would be that.

Before all that inevitability though, r and I had fucked for the first time, in the shower, on her bed, in that country home, over and over and over in a twenty four hour period, and in that fucking, I'd lost D all together.

Now she’s in my doorway, her hair cut shorter. Twenty minutes earlier, her face had captivated me and I had wanted her in that stupid way of wanting that causes us to think we’d trade almost anything to really know the girl at who we’re staring.

She asks me what I’ve been up to and I tell her. I ask her the same. We are smiling as if I never didn’t call her back. We are smiling as if I’ve not pressed my mouth against her x and she had not bent her face to mine.

We are smiling as if I hadn’t paused in the hallway to look at her the way you look at a savior.

She bends her wrist to show her ring and says, I got married.

And I smile and ask about the man. And I smile as she tells me she is going to Turkey for a month, to yacht around the Meditation, and she remembers somehow that once upon a time I lived in that part of the world, and I re-like her lips, her teeth, the composure of her face as she talks.

I think of how you cannot keep your hands on a body forever, or even for long, how no matter the depth of the want you’ve fallen into when you come with her, no matter how you think in that glorified moment no more false than any other of our temporary emotions: this is all I want forever and everything is ok…no matter any of this: there will be a release, sometimes sooner than later. Sometimes before you even get to that point.

And the smile on her and the eyes and the body, this full on woman that I knew for a single night just over a year ago, how when she parts I want to follow.

J

2005-07-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve only known one real ladies’ man but it wasn’t as if he thought about it that way. He moved from woman to woman as another means of studying the world; he went from lover to lover because he was restless; mostly, he did these things because he could, and the women let him because he never acted as if he knew of his power. Women loved him in a way that made them want to possess him but also made it so that when they realized they probably wouldn’t be able to possess him, they would give and take what they could just the same.

If you sat drinking wine in his little apartment over the garage in the university town where we lived there would always be some girl in the alley throwing small stones at the little window to ask him to come down or if she could come up.

One of these girls was J, a sort of plain faced girl but with very pretty eyes and a little mole at the corner of her mouth. When I imagine her it is always in a jean skirt though I don’t remember when exactly I saw her wearing it. Her hair was brown and somewhat thin and she always seemed composed, as if in an emergency she would be the one to think it out before reacting.

It was at the time that D was sleeping with her and several other girls that he and I went camping. I was twenty or twenty one and D was five or six years older. I’d noticed as the day progressed that his mood was glum and finally by the fire that night I asked him what was wrong. He looked up and he said, “Dude, I’ve got gray shit coming out of my dick.”

This was Chlamydia and to his credit he intended to call each of the girls from whom it might have come or to whom it might have been given. Against my credit instead, of feeling sympathy for his problem or being moved by the fact he shared it with me, I simply thought: I don’t want to be in the same tent with this person.

I grew up in the AIDS generation but he’d just missed it and so I had a condom in my wallet before I had hair around my x and he’d worn them only when the girl in question insisted.

I’d leave that town after graduation for work on a master’s degree and when I had it, I’d come back, two years later, taking one year off before I sought the final degree in another city. D was gone by then but within the first few weeks of that return I saw J again, working at a restaurant, and we decided to take a drink together. Afterwards, there was a strip club where she seemed hypnotized by the girls that danced and after that we stopped by a video store and rented a porno.

We lie together on the floor without touching for awhile. Before I’d gone away two years earlier, we’d worked together briefly and made out once at a cemetery where we’d gone one night to smoke cigarettes and look at the sky. The first kiss started with what she called a “devil’s hit”, or maybe it was a “double hit”, her drawing on the cigarette then blowing it into my mouth. She wasn’t his girl then, hadn’t been his girl for long, or perhaps it is that she was never his girl, none of them were.

As we watched the film she put her palm flat with the fingers splayed on the front of my jeans, applying pressure to my x. It was all sort of expected and surprising at the same time. We’d engaged in some kind of contract when we went to the strip club, when we rented the video, but neither of us had said anything about sex, and we’d not even kissed.

Soon, I had her pants and shirt off. We stayed on the floor. Her x was of the kind that for me is too internal, a line cut in flesh, not enough around the outside of it, shaved and overly red, and the fucking was unremarkable so that I can’t remember now if we changed positions much or how long it lasted or if there was any coming.

Days later, I woke in the middle of the night hungry. I wrapped myself in a blanket and stopped by the refrigerator where I took a scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy then I ambled on to the bathroom. As I held my x in my fingers and prepared to pee, I saw on the tip of it a brownish clump.

Dude, I’ve got gray shit coming out of my dick.

I cursed him. I cursed her.

I cursed everything, every fuck, the entire loss of my innocence, all of this in a heartbeat, an instance, I mourned who I had once been and what I had become and the price of it apparently leaking out of my x. I longed for a kool-aid and a hot summer day of youth and hot chocolate and sledding and anything at all but girls and strip clubs and pornos and the things they could pump into you.

Then I realized what I was looking at hadn’t leaked out of me. I realized that a bit of potato with gravy had fallen on my x and clung there.

I was relatively young, on my way to a PhD program, no ladies man like D, though often I wanted to be what he was, effortlessly pursued, and tried to learn from him what cannot be learned so fell back to just admiring and sometimes begrudging him his way with women. But it was not my way. And neither did I have his disease, or any.

B

2005-07-09T16:44:00.000-07:00

A high school friend calls me on the 7th of July to tell me about a 4th of July accident that resulted in the death of a kid who was a few years behind us in school. Whenever anybody from that old circle dies, B is the one to tell me. Spreading news like this gives him some kind of grim pleasure, the way I remember it giving his mother.

I come from one of those places where more people die than they do in normal places.

This is a place where suicide rates are high, though homicide is fairly low, where people die early of alcohol and cars and monotony.

This is one of those places most people don’t leave any other way.

I am distant from that place, connected to it only through three or four phone calls a year and occasional bouts of nostalgia.

This is one of the places that if you leave you either fairly soon come back or you become really gone.

My friend wants to know before he tells me the kid is dead if I remember the kid, who, of course, is not a kid anymore, just a person I will always remember that way. When he asks if I remember the kid I know why he is called and whose death he is reporting. I say that yes, I remember that kid, that I used to thump him in the head with my class ring.

Not wanting to spoil his buildup to the announcement, I listen as if I don’t know where this is going.

And I don’t say to my old friend the first thing that crosses my mind: of course I remember that kid: his sister’s x was the second I’d touched and the first for any sustained period of time.

Perhaps he remembers anyway. Maybe it has crossed his mind. We were all in the high school play together, the three of us and others that we were witness to the accident. There was a cast party at my house. My parents had just separated but were pretending it was something else. My mother was a wreck but in many ways she never has been anything but.

B and I went upstairs to my bedroom and I don’t remember how we started kissing or how long we did it. She was a pale girl with long brown hair and the body of the basketball star she was. I don’t remember how my hand got down her pants, but I remember that as I was finger fucking her she repeated several times, “It keeps getting bigger and bigger,” talking about her x, not mine, which she never touched.

There was no real point of reference for me, and I, too, was fascinated by the working of her x, the way it wetted and widened, like a hungry thing that could feed itself if the food came close, like a thing that knew more about itself and the world beyond than B or I did. I might have gone on like that, hypnotized, for some long time.

How or when or why we stopped, I don’t remember.

My mother was angry that I’d disappeared for so long and that when I came downstairs my neck was covered with huge bruises. I’d left her alone with all these people and I’d embarrassed her.

We went on, to another friend’s house, a place where his mother would drink with us and the party was real, and overwhelmed by the experience of just proud of it, I told my friends what had happened, and I repeated what B had repeated, that it kept getting “bigger and bigger.”

She found me sometime later. There weren’t tears in her eyes although in retrospect I think my shame would have been less if she’d cried. She said that someone had just told her that I’d been talking about what we’d done and that that someone “knew everything.” As it is with many things, there was no reasonable explanation, nothing much at all to say.

I know she is married now and I imagine she’s forgotten what happened between us. When I evoke a picture of her in my mind, which I don’t have to do—I have my yearbooks—but which I do anyway, I see her with an earnest and strong and almost absolutely resigned face, like that of a pioneer woman.

I could go on a bit about how I wish I’d not talked to others about what had passed between us, and I could try to go on a bit about what this small event meant in my life, but in the context of hers, and all those that will gather to bury her brother, it has no significance. He is a kid who grew up a little and won’t grow up anymore, and pretty soon, maybe today, she stands at his grave, and I imagine on her that pioneer stoicism, the way a frontier woman looks when she buries a husband, a son, a brother…and this is as far as my imagination takes me.

Somebody I've touched is dead and the closest I can get to mourning is a memory of his sister's x.

There are all kinds of things for which we need to forgive ourselves, and that last is for me is amongst them.

A

2005-07-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

To my taste this is the third least attractive woman I’ve fucked.
(Or why not write "who fucked me?")

In any case, she was a friend and co-worker, and it had not occured to me to think of her in that way.

Then I saw her take a Midol and suddenly she had an x.

The way it went down you might think I was more the seduced than the seducer but in fact from the moment I read the label on the bottle I think I started to work her with something akin to instinct.

I lived with a girl then, L, and she'd be the first girl I loved with a real love, though I didn't love her at that moment. (And who is to say when love begins? On what day do you wake having crossed that line?)

The three of us had gone drinking and A asked me to drive her from our apartment in her car to her apartment because she was too drunk to drive herself.

At her apartment, she leaned toward me and asked me if I were attracted to her. We were sitting for some reason on a rug on the floor drinking rootbeer schnapps.

This was winter and I knew I had a late night walk of a mile home through the cold. And I knew that L wouldn't wait up with worry. That she wasn't like that. That we weren't.

I said that yes, I was attracted to her.

A said, Then why don't you kiss me?

Within five minutes she had in her mouth my x, less than half erect; she was sucking it up in a way that stretched it out and made me look away.

It isn’t that she wasn’t pretty. Some people thought she was. She was an exercise addict; I remember her calves, how tight they looked, and her little stairstepper ass, and how after my knee surgery she slept half a night beside me on the floor--the only place I felt comfortable sleeping--of the of the apartment I had before moving in with L, and how that night A kept her tiny hand on my shoulder and I only realized it when she got up quietly to go.

There was a wild shock of hair around her x, reminiscent of the hair on those troll dolls you could buy when I was a kid.

We fucked in her bed and she was the first girl who rubbed the area between my x and my xx, snaking her hand down in short and sudden bursts that frightened me. She'd talked a lot recently of a serious boyfriend a year gone and I suppose that was something he liked or she thought he did.

We were both of us drunk, she more than I, and though it was obvious to us both what were doing, that this was a quick and drunken fuck to take care of whatever attraction accidently sprung up between people forced into close quarters--the way we always kind of fall for our co-workers, our cell mates, our arranged spouses--she begin to pull me back on the bed as I was dressing to go.

She said, I keep dreaming of waking up next to you. Stay with me.

I remember the cold of the walk home and the warmth of L, drunk too and sound in her sleep.

I had regret but what made me most contemplative was that it was mild.

I'd learned something though I hardly knew what and at that age really wasn't really set up to bear it. I lie there stiff beside L in the dying dark, wondering who I really was and who I'd really be and looking back now, I'm glad for me and for all of us that our sight is semi-limited.

J

2005-07-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

On a beach with my son I realize her x is always with me because he is always with me.

I realize: I can never unknown her, nor do I want to.

How then to write about the x through which your child was delivered?

There was a first fuck, in the Garden of our relationship, before we really knew each other. And all the subsequent fucks like a series of dots you connect to get a sortofpicture of what we were as an us. There was the last fuck, and all the ones before it that were supposed to be the last.

And there is and will always be the possibility of the next fuck.

I’ve been married twice and had many lovers, but I’ve only felt a full sense of intimacy with one woman and the question I ask myself now is: how do you write about her x?

Anal always seems to come after you’ve been fucking the regular way for long enough to get sort of used to it. Your hand is on her ass—maybe she put it there—and then it’s working its way down—and maybe she’s pushing it in that direction.

Sooner or later, you’re going to rest a finger against that hole. Sooner or later, you’re going to let the tip slip in almost as if by accident.

Sooner or later, the idea of that kind of fucking is going to get into your head like obsession.

There’s no open discussion of this and we’re innocent enough to think that it ought to be done in something like ceremony to keep it separated from our regular sex lives. Afterwards, those two types of fucking will meld and what we call regular will continually require redefinition.

(You start with your fingertip barely touching her xx like an accidental hint she takes also as if by accident, and you find you’ve started on a path that leads to many paths, and if you are with this woman long enough you will walk them all, if indeed you mean to keep walking).

She wears a black dress and no panties and is leaning over a couch we wouldn’t want to see in good light. This is in a little room you can rent in an adult book store while the video you handed the counter guy plays on a television in the wall. J is looking over her shoulder at the video and I’m looking at her.

She’s not my wife yet, and though I think I know her well just the same, the expression of fascination on her face is something I’ve never seen on her before. To the way she is standing and looking and even, I imagine, breathing, there is not just an openness, but an unparalleled eagerness.

I lift her dress and lean across her back and she strains her neck to kiss my mouth.

I have a picture of J: she is standing in a pool, and the water halfway up her chest must strike her as cold because she has folded her arms; her hair is wet and there is an expression of faraway focus in her eyes, a sort of beautiful sadness, and if you want to see it, imagine Sophie Loren.

We’re in this porn store booth because we believe to do something so dirty we must be somewhere dirty, because since it seems to us we’re going off some carnal dive into depravity, we aught do it in a way that is depraved.

Of course, I’m only pretending I think it’s depraved.

Porno births, ass fucking, all of this is part of what I consider my secret darkness.

Yet here we are and she kisses hard and grinds her ass against my pants.

(And in retrospect it occurs to me that to corrupt is not to introduce darkness into her—who has that power?—but to introduce somebody to the darkness organic to her).

Here we are in the buzz of a breaking taboo that will when fully broken will become something sort of like addiction. Let us go places we never meant to go but deep down must want to. Or perhaps it is just the going we want. That kind of pushing.

I kneel and kiss her ass and then slide my tongue down the line that grows from the base of her spine until my tongue presses against her xx. She shutters and I sink a finger into her x, which is wetter than I’ve ever known it. She rolls her hips and she never takes her eyes off the television. Occasionally, I turn to it as well, but then her hand is in my hair, pulling my mouth back round.

(And for those glimpses I can see them both, these years later, a sandy haired man and a tight haired woman on the roof of a building in the broad daylight.)

I stand and unbutton my pants and smear the lubricant on my x and then smear it around her xx. The penetration is easier than we expected—and on the next few efforts, we’ll be surprised by the level of pain and difficulty, as if we made it that first time through luck and adrenalin.

We’re fucking. We’ll have to walk out, our clothing straightened, feeling like the man and everybody in the store know precisely what we’ve done, and maybe they do. We’ll have to cross the parking lot exposed not just to the people that frequent and work at porno shops, but the world at large as well, all these regular people who would never dream of ass fucking or watching dirty movies or the things we ourselves haven't dreamnt of yet but will. We’ll have to lean into each other, taking solace in the idea that what we’ve done we’ve done together and if we are judged we are judged as one.

I’m fucking her ass with my hands on her waist, thinking vaguely that this is so much I want more, whatever that might be.

And you don't do this because it feels slightly different on your x; you do this because it feels different in your mind: a deeper kind of surrender. You do this because nobody you know admits they do. I push in most of the way and one of her hand flutters back, wanting to take me by the hip but not quite making it, and her eyes are on the television but they are not focused and I freeze so that I can freeze this moment, so that I can stand still enough to remember it perfectly, the cut of her face in that light, the reverse curve of her back, that suspended hand.

Maybe by then I know that I love her. Maybe she knows she loves me. I don’t suppose I could imagine marriage, insemination, birth, divorce. Perhaps though the powers of transcendence we believe we attain in the purest moments of fucking do take me that far. Maybe I saw all of it, and all of this, and beyond.

We’re fucking in the light of the television and that is her ass, small and with the tan lines visible, her ass, the only ass in the world—for a little while, the only thing in the world—the black dress rolled up on top of it, my x appearing and disappearing into it like a magic trick rewound and replayed and rewound again.

And she comes hard.

And I come.

A decade later, I’ll walk on the beach with my son, and I’ll think about how J is always with me. We talk on the phone and sometimes in person about our lives, who we are seeing, what they seem to mean to us, and I always wonder about the men in her life, if they fuck that way. As for me, I’ve fucked other girls in the ass and yet with J when I think about what I lost she it the only one where it is complete, where it seems to me I lost every bit, which means I had every bit to lose.

I suppose that denotes a deeper love.

M

2005-06-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

She kept those gourmet jellybeans in a glass bowl because she knew I liked them and so I was sort of wrapped in her the way we get when we are very young and our feeling are based more on symbols and gestures and the stuff we hear in love songs than on the deeper understandings that really binds.

I’d never seen her as anything but sweet until just after the first time we fucked and the rubber I’d gotten an hour earlier—on a desperate and unexpected trip to the grocery store during which I wore my boots on the wrong feet because when I put on the first one that way in the dark I was too impatient to take it off and start again—was not on my x when I pulled it out of hers a minute after I came, and, as she told me with a groan, moments before she would have.

Her eyes had what I thought of as a sort of Mongol cut to them and though she was thin her belly was strangely swollen. Both of these things served to fascinate rather than repulse me, the same way her seeming lack of carnal hunger did. Our relationship was slow moving so that though we’d been out a few times and stayed in a few times we’d done little more than kiss.

This night she invited me to stay but said she didn't think we should do anything serious. This was the first time I was close to a woman in a bed without the certainty of fucking between us and that made me want her badly.

We kissed a bit and then stopped and I'd stare at the ceiling and start kissing her again.

I thought I ought not but almost as if I couldn’t help it my hand was up her nightshirt and down her panties and almost as if she couldn’t help it her hand was on top of mine to make sure it moved in just the right way.

This was her x for the first time, and so suddenly and completely it overwhelmed.

So I was off to the store with the toes of my boots pointing the wrong way and an idealized vision of the fucking that would follow, on this night and subsequently.

Then I came a moment too soon and then it turned out the condom wasn’t with me and after five or so minutes of me playing amateur gynecologist, we realized it wasn’t with her either.

Her expression soured at first, and I’d never seen this air about her, but I quickly learned to prefer it to the flatness that followed. In silence, we begin to search the futon and then the floor around it, and then the furniture around the futon.

She moved more and more quickly, with jerky motions, as if she was angry at everything she handled, and I felt a tremendous pressure to find the condom, as if once that mystery was solved a pressure would run out of the room and we’d be ok again.

I suggested to her perhaps it had disintegrated, and believe me when I say that then I was innocent enough, if you’re willing to call it innocence, to actually believe in the possibility of a fucking so extraordinary it could melt a condom, and I knew little enough about the world of fucking to believe that it was I, of all people, who was capable of that extraordinary friction

You have to sort of love of naïve like that, or I should say that at least I have to sort of love him; in retrospect, anyway, I do, the way we will almost always grow to love the people we’ve been, and the way we will even grow to love the people we are now, softened by time and forgivable in it.

It didn’t fucking disintegrate, she said. She was a drama major and you could hear her stage training in the way she enunciated each syllable separate from the others.

Immediately I knew that she was right.

I’ll find it, I said. What else was there to say?

I wondered if I did if she would stop being distant and angry and if there were other things about her I had failed to imagine. I’d enjoyed the fucking and there was something particularly seductive about the seduction, the way her x had opened and then opened more and how she’d began to breathe and how her Mongol cut eyes had turned to me and how she’d finally whispered, Ok, let’s—I wanted badly to repair the moment and have it all again: that basement apartment with squat windows close the ceiling and the bowl of jellybeans and all the little distinctions of her life into which she’d invited me.

What made me eventually flip over the futon mattress, I can’t say, and how it happened that the condom came to be there is likewise a mystery, and what real good either of us thought finding it would do, I don’t really know.

Anyway, I held it and it hung there unwrinkling itself between us and what became clear was that all of this was over.

N

2005-06-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

They lived one floor below me, and her husband was a colleague I hardly knew. At a company party I stood with him on a balcony and told him honestly that we had in common beautiful wives. They’d come from Australia and my wife and I had come from somewhere. After she went back there without me, I sat in a hotel bar with the wife of this colleague and she told me that her husband had told her I’d said she was beautiful. Perhaps I knew when I'd done it what seed I was planting.

Or perhaps it just that sometimes things start before you even know they start.

I wasn’t even sure then we were starting. It was winter and so night had fallen but we were not out late. There was nothing overt in our decision to have a drink. We must have been talking about the idea of an affair because eventually she leaned toward and said to me, “So how game are you?”

Sometimes, we go forward for the smallest reasons. What I found sexy was her choice of words and the accent with which she spoke them.

They had a thirteen year old daughter and I heard N tell her once over the telephone to lie to her father about where she, N, was. Whatever the girl knew or sort of knew made her relate to me differently so that she began to smile sly at me in the elevator and look at me out of the corner of her eye, like a would be seductress.

By then, I knew it was all bad.

N’s breasts were heavy, her waist narrow, and on her ass I’d find a Gorbachev birthmark that gave a point of focus to my feeling that I didn’t really want to fuck her.

Her husband kept his head shaved, a very short and tan man, who one day knocked on my door during a downpour. He was standing in the hallway, holding a sock in his hand, wondering, he said, if it were mine.

His hands were shaking. The sock was dry.

His wife and I had been in my bed only once, and she’d noted that it was directly over her bed and we promised to masturbate about each other at the same time but in our separate beds that evening. It was afternoon and twice before we’d met in my apartment and gotten close to each other on the couch and she’d asked me to take out her breasts and I had. She was proud of them and for good reason. She liked fingertip circles run around her nipples and she liked them sucked in and out of a mouth.

Now she’d worn a matching bra and panties and I’d taken them off. The sun was coming in through the window and she lay nude on my comforter. Her x was neither shaven clean nor was it overgrown; rather, there was a look of five o’clock shadow wedging up from it.

In retrospect, she makes a pleasing picture, but I remember the feeling at the time that there was something obscene about her on the bed like that, the way you feel about pornography when you look but aren’t in the mood for it.

I’d kissed her x for a long while and she’d sucked mine briefly. I’d tried to place myself in the moment by watching her cheeks sink in and her lips part as she slid me and out of her mouth, but I felt awfully distant. Though I could focus on her x when I was touching or looking at it, I had trouble relating to her as a whole. Almost before it had started, I’d wished it were over.

She told me to lick her breasts and glad for a simple task I lay on my belly perpendicular to her and worked one nipple and then the other. With one hand she pressed against the back of my head and with the other she began to roll circles along her x. I could feel her moan and I watched her knees, half risen, push away from each other as her pelvis lifted. I was too solemn to feel like fucking, and so I waited until after she’d come before I asked her half heartedly if she’d like me to get a condom.

Sometimes things stop in near invisibility too, for reasons that we could probably know if we really want to but we don’t.

Now, a week or so later, there was her husband in the hallway, telling me that a dry sock had fallen onto his balcony in this pouring rain, and he wanted to know if it had come uncliped from the bare line on which I sometimes hung my clothes to dry.

Perhaps it was one of his own socks and he didn’t know where she was just then, or maybe she had another lover and he’d been to her apartment and left a sock.

In either case, the sock was a pretext.

I didn’t see her after that, but that was a decision I’d already made sometime before she’d even dressed that first time on my bed. In retrospect, and even at the time, my impulse would be to think of her as someone bad, but that isn't true. She was just another person out in the world with some hunger for some ill-defined thing that she'll keep hunting all her life without getting, and, of course, I'm no different.

She wasn’t with me and the sock wasn’t mine but everything was clear anyway. I like to tell myself that somewhere along the course of my adult life, I’d learned that I’d rather be the lion than the lamb, but the equation is never so easy as that. And I wasn’t playing an alpha male game, but if this is how it felt to win, then victory wasn’t that appealing.

b

2005-06-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

This was on the rooftop of the highrise in which I lived. There was a party in my apartment and B and I had only a few moments to spare. We worked together and didn’t like each other much but it had recently become apparent that there ought to be a fuck between us. I hung out a lot with H—a girl who will appear in this blog—then, and that was B’s best friend, and so we all three ended up together often. One of my roommates, J—who will also appear in this blog—sent me a picture several years ago that I don’t remember her taking. In it there is a version of me and there is H and B. We’re lying on the floor; my head is on B’s stomach and H is lying face down with her chin resting on my shoulder. My shirt is open and I look young and, according to J, this is a picture of who I wanted to be and I guess she is probably right.

There were too many people at the party who would be bothered by us fucking and so B and I did one of those things in which we told each other where to go and why and when without saying anything.

We found each other in the elevator. This was a strange time, though strange is either not the right word for any specific period of my life or it is right for all of them. In any case, it was different. I was twenty three and a year and a half away from anything I’d called home and I was about to quit my job and stop attending classes and dedicate myself to staying up and sleeping late, to a bottle of cheap champagne a day, to late afternoon weight room workouts, to grocery store visits in the early evening for sugar snacks that would pass for dinner, to nightly errands with my other roommate, also J—a girl who will also appear in this blog—and then to doing it all over again.

In short, I was about to drop away from everything but the things that pleased me, and most of what I remember from that time reflects that sense of me closing in on some kind of necessary period of transition.

In any case, there was a little glass window in the elevator and often when I got on it I would punch the window; perhaps one out of ten times that punch was magic and the window would break and the flesh would open on my fingers and I’d look at the cracked glass and the dripping blood and feel a little fulfilled.

I was fucking a lot then and you could say that nearly the same odds applied.

I didn’t punch the window with B. We stood on opposite sides, each of us afraid that if we spoke or even moved around a lot we’d blow it because as well as it seemed we got on when we hung out together with H, the two of us alone could easily argue and now was not a time for arguing.

I loved the roof and went there often alone. All around it was a three foot high wall with a ledge about a foot wide, and some nights I’d stand on it and catch my balance and begin walking along it, the palm tree tops and the green grass below, until I’d made the whole square of the building, and I don’t remember in all those times I walked that line feeling a real fear of falling.

Perhaps I wanted to have that fear or perhaps I wanted to know why I didn’t and that’s what took me to the wall. Or maybe I just wanted to do something like that so I could write about it eight years later.

I didn’t walk it with B there.

I took the condom out of my pocket and I put it on the top of the wall as B leaned against it. Maybe we had spoken by then. Maybe not. I kissed her and pushed my hand beneath her jeans and panties and worked a finger inside of her.

She has brown eyes and hair, and by most standards would be a plain girl. She acted more like a princess and I think that’s why the men at work were attracted to her. It was an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of thing. She pretended she was beautiful and so we all sort of assumed it was our perception that was off.

We kissed and I fingered her for a few minutes.

Then I suppose she spread her arms out, or just rearranged herself, but you could hear something scraping against the ledge and she lifted her hand away. We both looked. She’d pushed the condom and it was falling down now, twenty some floors, past the window of my apartment party, out of our sight into the darkness, to the ground.

Do you have another one?

Downstairs, I said.

She wrested her x away from my finger. Her face away from my face. My hand out of her pants.

We can do other things, I said.

I meant it. I imagined her sitting on the ledge with legs spread, me kneeling there to tongue her x. It was a pretty a night. It was always a pretty night, or so I remember it. This was where I went to commune with the moon and the stars and the idea that it doesn’t really seem possible for something, especially not me, to fall and semi-flatten and be dead.

For her, though, it was over. She was walking across the roof, and I was following her.

The party, as I remember it, was nothing extraordinary.

x

2005-06-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

Her husband was fucking my wife and almost as a matter of etiquette, I started fucking her.

This was a big girl, maybe pretty, and I’d stood up for awhile to better watch and she rose to her knees and began to suck me.

My wife and I weren’t swingers but this was at a swingers party and there were mattresses on the floor of a room and all around us people were fucking and sucking in pairs or small groups. My wife and I figured we’d pretty much do everything at least once and this was the second time but the first had been pretty mild.

Now it was full blown and she’d started with the woman but the man had worked his way in, fingering her while she continued to lick his wife’s inner thighs. They were big thighs, the kind you have to push apart with your hands if you mean to really fit your face in there, and her belly hung down, and why my wife had started things up with them, I wasn’t sure.

The woman was sad and I felt as she sucked my x this wasn’t really her scene but I knew also that they did this kind of thing all the time. I guessed that they hardly ever fucked except for in this context.

Now my wife was on her back and the man was fucking her and it was all vaguely exciting but I really didn’t know what to do with the large woman kneeling in front of me, my x in her mouth, her sad eyes all closed, her face and her movement dispassionate.

I pusher her slowly backward and her breasts fell off to the sides and she looked at me.

It’s ok, I told her.

There were a pile of condoms and I fumbled one open and I put it on. My wife’s arms were over her head and you could see how beautiful she is, but it didn’t seem such an odd thing to mount this other woman.

When I think about it now, it makes me realize that despite how large the differences between one human being and another, they are little too. These woman, from a great enough distance, you couldn’t tell them apart. These women just born would be not so unalike, and dead, just bones, they will be hard to tell one from the other. Peel them back to essence, to soul, peel any of us back, and are we so distinct as the bone and muscle structure of our faces and bodies?

My thin wife with her Italian cinema star looks.
This fat woman who never smiled.

I was in this woman for only a moment when my wife glanced over at me and then one of her hands rose slowly and she put it on my chest and pushed to tell me to stop fucking the other woman.

I did.

The woman was nonplussed.

I don’t remember if I’d kissed her mouth. Probably, I didn’t. I remember her x, that it was shaven, that there was a small mole just above and to the side of it, that going inside of her and being there was maybe the least remarkable of all my sexual experiences.

And I remember driving home, my wife dressed and pressed against my side with my arm over her shoulder, and perhaps she’d gone asleep, and I was thinking about the woman again, wondering what her life was like, what she did in the morning when she woke, what she liked to watch on television, if she believed in a god, if her parents lived, if she were kind to animals, what she cried about last and would cry about next, if she were Republican or Democrat, the details of her childhood and of her death, all the things you ought to want to know and can but won’t.

J

2005-06-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

If you were to judge by photos, you’d put her in the top three and maybe at the very top. That’s the way she looks. Nine siblings, I’ve seen pictures, and they are all beautiful like that. Scattered around the world, the way they grew up, the stories she tells, it is a family dreamed up by Salinger or Fitzgerald.

I expect nothing because I imagine she needs nothing.

We meet on a day I’ve gotten a haircut I don’t like. Everything feels off so I expect even less than the nothing expected before.

We eat at a vegetarian restaurant and she is quick about it and she has more of the shared platter than I have. She talks the entire time, and if I was tight before I sat down the simple drone she’s become and the way it humanizes her calms me.

Vodka tonics in the next door bar and by now I sort of know that she’s open.

Her legs are well shaped and pale, her dress high cut with a slit cut higher, and she sits with one thigh folded over the other.

She tells me to touch her and I do it even though I haven’t figured her out yet.

She hardly stops talking, over complimenting me, and I assume that she is using words with me that she wants me to use with her, but now I can’t say them because she already has.

I tell her she is nervous and she says she’s jittery and I don’t ask what the difference is.

We kiss in the hallway outside the bathrooms. She’s got my back against the wall and her hands up my shirt and I can’t quit feeling like I’m watching this in a film and trying to figure out the female character’s motivation.

Against my vehicle and in it, we press on each other, her fingers in my beltline, my beltline pushing down on my hips, my palms on the back of her thighs. I’m fairly subdued and probably this is something she likes about me but I’m not doing it because I think she’ll like it. There’s something here I still don’t get and it bothers me.

She’s got her hand on my x and when I move my fingers toward hers, she folds up.

I tell her for the first time that she should just tell me what her limits are and I won’t cross them.

We should just go get a hotel, she says. Then she laughs so that I know the spirit of this thing she hasn’t really meant as a joke was only a joke.

Driving to my apartment, she continues to talk. I realize she is eager to be known and why she thinks I will know her I’m not sure but everything must be based on that. We’ve had one other date, in the afternoon, for drinks, and it was cut short by a babysitter issue. Beyond that, we’ve talked on the phone a half dozen times.

I’m ill-prepared for company, have arranged my apartment nor my head properly for company in the dark.

Inside, she quickly takes off her dress, proud of her body and wanting me to look at it. Her build defies my logic and all the lessons I’ve learned about what becomes of a thirty year old woman who has children and whose only exercise is an occasional run. She’s thin, petite, even, though tall—but that always seems a possibility. What is surprising is that her skin is tight, her breasts upheld, her belly undimpled, her ass well shaped. Whatever you touch and press against doesn’t give far and comes back immediately and I openly marvel at this.

Then, for a moment, I stop. For a moment, I wonder if it’s been all lies. If she has no children. If she is not a sibling to nine. But then I remember her talking to her children on her cell in the bar, and the pictures she’s shown me of the family whole.

On the couch, she says the word’s “no” and “don’t” the way a woman usually says words like “more” and “yes”, almost secretly, into her arm, as if she means to seem like she is ashamed and doesn’t want me to hear.

I tell her for the second time that I don’t want to push anything. I tell her that we can sit on the couch and talk. That we can make out without touching anything but each others’ faces. That we can do whatever.

She says, I want you to do what you want.
She says, I want you to do everything.

And so she does want to fuck; she does want my tongue in her x; my x in her mouth; it’s just that for her there is a secret and certain way it must go, and I’ll have to stumble through it, like a man in a maze, stopping when I hit a wall and trying a different route until finally I’m accidentally right.

I’m getting a headache. What I’m thinking here with this woman—exceptionally beautiful and nude, mostly opened and definitely patient—is about a different lover and how easy and smooth things can be with her.
.

It’s one of those headaches where your scalp along the side of your head burns.

My only Tylenol are the PM kind. Fuck it, I take one. Then fuck it twice, another.

These pills can’t put me to sleep through my insomnia, but now I’m instantly tired.

The girl is moving from the couch to the bed and I’m standing in the dark in the kitchen with the bottle of water still in my hand and the aftertaste of the pills on my tongue, and what I feel for a moment is pure fatigue.

I still have to drive the girl back to her car. Before that, I’ve got to fuck her. Or maybe it is I get to fuck her. The distinction is fine and I’m too drowsy to try to make it.

I wander in.

The inner lips of her x are slightly pushed out and swollen, the way they are in some women after birthing. Small and resilient as she is, I feel that she is large inside, that where most women are mostly closed up all the time, I’ve discovered in her a little bubble of black that is never burst.

And I know this fucking is one I’ll enjoy writing about more than experiencing, that it will please me more to masturbate about later than it does during the actual occurrence, but then we get close to the end and I’m wrong about that too.

She’s face down on the bed, I’m behind her, her legs are together, his ass slightly risen, and she wants me to talk to her. She says, I’d do anything for you. Tell me what you want me to do.

And though it doesn’t it doesn’t seem to fit her, I know what she wants to hear.

I say: I want to fuck you in every way that I’ve ever fucked any woman, so that all the style of fucking can be collected in you.

I press my thumb against her xx, and her ass rises higher and she moans more loudly and I say, I want to fuck you here.

I want to fuck you while strangers watch and come just at the sight of you.

I go on and on about the ways I want to fuck her, and while I’m saying them, I mean it.

She starts to come and she yells for me to come and so I do.

When we’re both of us finished, she says: You’re a god. We’re leaning against the pillows, barely touching, and I know she doesn’t mean this, and I can’t imagine that she can have spent the entire night with me and not know better than to say it. If she’d only kept her mouth shut we might be in a good place but for a little while I grit my teeth against the absurdity of grown up lovers talking like that.

The pills keep pushing down my eyelids and I keep pulling them up. Somehow, a few minutes of this is cleansing.

She’s dressing and I tell her that it pleases me to watch a woman dress. She says she likes the way I talk about women. I say that most women wish I wouldn’t talk about other women at all.

She smiles because I’ve just told her that she’s different and that’s what she wants to be.

Driving her back to her car in the early morning, she continues to talk. She tells me that she likes to see her partner with another woman. She asks me if I’ve ever known a woman like that before, and I tell her honestly that I’ve known only a few.

I think of the way that throughout the night every time I decided she must be on a husband quest, she’d do something to suggest we were going to fuck to fuck, and how every time I thought she was playing hot/cold games because she really wanted only attention, she’d push it to the next level.

I’m your anomaly, she says.

Yes.

A

2005-06-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

She spends half her days rescuing cats and their litters in a Mediterranean city that is overrun with cats and kittens in need of rescue. Her clothes are from Paris and she wears a nose job bandage. It’s late at night and I’m somewhat drunk when she rustles out of the bushes close to my building as I’m walking toward it.

She’s small, apparition like in that darkness, completely unexpected, and before I see that it is just a nicely dressed girl cupping something in her hand, I feel a shot of fight or flight adrenalin.

This is one of those places where being an American can buy and cost you a lot.

We don’t fuck for the first time until after the bandages are off and the blackness beneath her eyes is mostly gone.

I’ve seen you leaving food for the cats, she says. You have to take these. I have no more room.

The kittens she makes me keep in boxes on my balcony, the kittens I feed with eye droppers for three days and nights, they all die.

The first time we fuck, she wears a camouflage mini-skirt. We meet for drinks to discuss a spade and neuter program we’re setting up for the strays. Her shirt is sewn over with sparkly scales and for days after, I’m finding glitter on my skin.

It is hard and sometimes necessary to keep a secret in this city.

This is the apartment of a friend. He’s gone for the summer and would not approve; the air conditioning is off and all we have is a fan. Her x is completely shaved, a petite girl with dark eyes, dark features. Sometime later, she’ll fuck around with me and another girl, the three of us on an Egyptian rug on a stone floor of a million dollar apartment, the two girls refusing to touch, but I’ll save those details for that girl’s entry.

This first night is unbearably hot and she never takes off her mini-skirt. Her breasts are small and very firm. Everything about her is smooth, so that you feel when you knead her flesh you could accidentally leave your fingerprints.

Perhaps we’re moving too quickly, she tells me. I’m sitting on the couch with my shirt open and she is standing over me with her legs slightly apart while my fingers slide in and out of her, small and wet and gripping.

I know and perhaps she does that neither of us can let this night pass without a deeper penetration.

She’s completely given over to the fucking and when I surrender to it, the heat no longer bothers me. Rather, I fuse with it, so that if anything, the fan, when it sweeps directly over us, is unwelcome. We’ve moved into the bedroom to fuck on the bare mattress.

There are unbroken moments from that night in my memory, but mostly there are images:

Her tiny panties. Her pink fingernails. The way she sinks her little belly toward the bed from all fours when we fuck in that way.

I have only a few months left before I return to the States, and she knows it. During this time, we’ll try most everything a man and a woman try. In my world, this is intimacy. I take your hand and we step over some boundary you never really wanted to exist. There are places we will go together that you have never been before, and what else does that produce but closeness?

I’ll let it burn out before I go, maybe because I don’t want some ragged break, or maybe I’m just naturally moving on. In any case, it fades for me. She’s small, and her ass is perfectly rounded, and even now in my mind’s eye I want to reach for her.

Everything you really hold is hard to let go but you learn to let things go just the same.

Close your eyes and pretend you are holding in your fist the girl like the string of a balloon, and now just smile and open your eyes and your fingers and let everything be free of you.

Let yourself be free of it.

And who knows if this addiction to release is born of necessity or habit; practicality or fear; instinct or reason?

She’s not ready for this breaking away.

Toward the end, we’re fucking in a way that is almost purely chemical, or maybe it’s spiritual, whichever of those things or whatever combination of them you believe in.

Just after she’ comes, she says: Oh God.

This is in the home of her parents when they are traveling. The things you do to keep your secrets. We’ve fucked in the bathtub and then in the bedroom of her childhood which her parents have kept in tact. She’s been to the States, studied in New York. She keeps cats here, too, in the garden of her parents' home, and you could hear them mewing all through the fucking, and you can see their outlines move across the window.

(Before A, I would carry boxes of cat food everywhere, leaving little mounds for the hungry cats. After A, after those first three kittens, I would never be so casual about my care again. There is a love born of that alone.)

Oh God, she says.

My hands are on either side of her face, the thumbs out across the cheeks, just below the eyes.
This is not exclamation of satisfied fatigue.

Oh God, she’s just said, and I know what she means.

She means: We’ve gotten in too deep and the end is in sight.
She means: Why did I let you this close, why did I let these feelings build?

And my heart is not quite in the same place. Already there are other shadows moving through it. Still, she’s beautiful. We’re bound by the lives and deaths of cats, and by the communion between my x and her x; she is small beneath me, her hands are small on my belly; everything feels more or less right.

Close your eyes. Close your hand. Imagine the woman inside of it. Imagine the string of a balloon. Just open everything so that everything may be free.

Oh God, she’s said, her voice near breaking.

And it’s such a fitting epitaph for this or nearly any affair.

k

2005-06-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

Somewhere this all breaks down.
Let’s say it is with the girl of a friend.

(Let’s say the somewhere is not a permanent condition but something that happens from time to time.)

Let’s say that somewhere in that fucking when you are thinking of finding the way she likes to be touched, the expressions she likes you to offer, all that particular ways you should go about pleasing this particular girl, all the distinct paths toward connection you must forge with this distinct lover, let’s say that in this performance you become aware again that it is a performance.

And what you feel like is an old actor who is no longer in love with acting.
Somebody who onceuponatime turned life experience into emotional memory he cold bring to a performance and then got so far into the method that he forgot it was a craft.

So weary you want to quit mid-scene.

But you knead the back of her neck and the muscles tighten at first and then loosen and she offers a sharp intake of breath and you know to do it harder.

You’re deep in her.

Intellectualizing the fuck.

Turning your head then dropping it to kiss her suddenly because it suggests to her that her eyes moving against yours overwhelmed you. You do this because you have come to realize that feeling that kind of power stokes her.

This is a second fuck and you’re working on being her ideal lover.

And for a few moments, you pause. For a few moments, it all breaks down.

Your x is so far in her x that it would seem impossible to pry you apart, but you’re closer at this moment to being a monk than anybody’s lover.

What this is really about is your death.
Or finding something else to live for.
This is a glimpse of your future and it is an abyss.

Your child will save you. For how long, you don’t know. Seventeen, eighteen years, a long time, until he’s all grown up, this baby.

Or maybe you can just forget that you remembered that you’re only pretending your heart is in it. That you’re so good at pretending it you might sometimes lose the opportunity to really feel it. That onceuponatime, all of it was real. That to fake it like this you have to have known it.

The way an actor to really cry on stage must know that kind of sorrow (and so then what is it that separates one set of tears from the others?)

Anyway, it’s only a moment. A fuck. The kind of fuck you have from time to time that causes you at least for a little while to see a life after x's and to fear it because it has no recognizable shape. These impressions don’t define your sex life and it is possible and even probable that a week later you will fuck without breaking character just as you did a week before.

In fact, you may even do that later in this fuck.

You’re holding your palm flat against her hip bone and pressing down and this brings her close to coming and you forget that you may be faking it.

Kiss the girl. Press yourself hard. There’s something in here you need to get. You have to get. You want to get. Get get get.

This can be a sacred mission.

(If you’re lucky, you’ll never think you got).

Never mind the other complications. That this is the girl of a friend. Just fuck.

She’s decided on that with you, and you with her. That’s what you here for. Don’t look too hard for the virtue (or vice) in it. Just be there, like a Buddhist.

Just kiss her again.

Just notice that she is human and that she is letting you inside, whatever it means, whatever it is worth. This rare thing.

This is her x, the second most private part of her body, and she has given you access to it.

Those are her eyes, a color like a snowflake, absolutely distinct, and she is looking at you through them the way she will look at almost no one else.

In this moment, through this woman, you are bound to some kind of existence. Let yourself go. She has come and she wants you to.

Let’s call it an escape.

Let’s worry about the rest of it later.

This is all more and less reasonable than it sounds.

K

2005-06-11T23:12:00.000-07:00

We worked for the same company but in different departments, and on three or four occasions, I left what I considered exotic fruit on her desk. Maybe this was an act of seduction or maybe I really just wanted her to feel what people feel when they receive secret gifts. Later, I’d see in her apartment a canvas on an easel, and over it, a painting of all the fruits gathered together. She didn’t say whether or not she knew I’d left them and I didn’t ask.

We’d gone casually for drinks though I didn’t think of it as casual. What I’d imagined after a semi-recent and first real heartbreak was that I found in her somebody who could reshape my world.

I was 23 or so and the pictures I painted in mind were of us blowing soap bubbles off a balcony and flying kites in the park. What I thought I saw in her smile and the expression of her eyes was a place where all my restlessness could end and where my pain would fade and never duplicate.

What I thought I was starting when I put three kiwi’s or a ice-cream peach on her desk was a love story, the kind people have in movies and songs.

This was a woman without edges. She was all grown up and pretty in the Irish way, with her clear eyes and pale skin. She looked good in clothes but there was something about her body that worried her, and that first night when we fell to fucking she kept a nightshirt on, letting me she roll the shoulder straps off her arms and all of it down her torso, but she wanted it bunched up on her middle always. Each of the three or four times we fucked, she kept some barrier like that.

I liked her breasts, the largest and hardest I’d then touched, and I was fascinated by the areola, which was smooth, and the nipples, which were soft and pretty and unobscene.

I think we kissed in the pub or maybe the car. There was a smell of sulfur from her mouth. I thought when that odor came off a woman it had something to do with her makeup, a particular brand or ingredient, and I’d learned by then that if you kiss it you don’t really smell or taste it. Later, I’d learn that odor has was a result of a lack of oxidization.

Over the next two weeks or so, we fucked a few times more and called it dating, and once I showed up with a rose at her door and put my finger to my lips when she answered it and handed her the rose and kissed her mouth and then went away without saying or hearing anything, but my image of what could be had been almost immediately fractured. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the penetration, and I can’t remember if either of us came, so I don’t know if I revaluated her in the sadness that follows all of my comings or if I reached some negative prognoses about us in the more general context of my life.

The first morning I awoke in her apartment before she did, and I was alone with her sleeping face, and there was the painting, which looked like a gateway into something magic, and there too were her panties, discarded, white, and very soft looking in the morning sun, and I held them, and they felt also like some kind of gateway, but for whatever reason I was certain by then that we were limited.

K came around during a time of growing pains, but what I felt was mostly shattered. Before her and after, I’d prowl bars with a false smile and an earnest desire for connection and you could find me mostly alone and half drunk and looking out my bedroom window at almost any five am.

Not long after the first time we fucked, a small group of people came to drink at my apartment and she was among them. I found her in the kitchen with several girls. I offered each a pastry and I remember how her eyes fell when I held them toward her. She shook her head and it seemed for a moment that everybody felt awkward, but maybe it was just her and me. I took two of the girls on a tour of the apartment. Coming back, we surprised K hastily eating one of the pastries and when she saw us she put a hand over her mouth. A look of shame came into her eyes and she turned immediately to the window to chew and swallow and put down the pastry in semi-private

The last time we were alone together wasn’t long after that, though I wouldn’t say our demise was related. Her shame both repelled and attracted me. Regardless, the clock was ticking on us. That last time, we didn’t fuck. We just sat on the couch and almost kissed.

She told me she felt it was over.

I said that she was right.

It was quiet as it always seemed to be between us, even when we fucked, when she’d lightly hold the lateral muscles of my back in her hand and guide or perhaps follow my motion. She felt big inside and comfortable and she always kept her eyes closed, a solid and solemn fucking, for which most certainly fucking is the wrong word.

She wanted to know if we would be friends and I told her we would. We sat for a long time. This was an apartment I shared with two girls, both of whom will show up in this blog, and the windows were large, the floor high. Palm trees stood out against the sinking sun and even the smog looked pretty.

K sat there on the couch and the sun fell down and I was aware of what I’d believed about me in the context of her and how it wasn’t true and I knew that I was headed back to what I’d recently been.

I took out her breast and she let me. I kissed the nipple and looked up at her. It was dusk and she was crying without any sound, and the sadness that seemed to descend on us was deep.

?

2005-06-10T17:40:00.000-07:00

I've no idea why there is no place to comment on the last entry.
Maybe this one?
New entry, tomorrow, late.

i

2005-06-08T06:42:00.000-07:00

She worked as a cocktail waitress at the club where R danced.

A petite Black woman with a British accent who had once been on a television program that reunited her with her father. This was the story she and her husband told us as we sat around on an afternoon waiting for darkness to fall. He was more interested in its telling and how we should understand her through it than she was. We were sober because I was fairly new back into the country and absolutely new to this part of it, and I hadn’t realized you couldn’t buy liquor in my county on a Sunday.

The husband, in essence, was a fool, and I don’t think that about every man. He couldn’t see the situation for what it was and this blindness gave him a sort of desperation that caused him to try to manipulate the girls into doing what they were there to do without manipulation.

There were no surprises but everything came to him as a surprise. Just as he’d realize he’d done or said another stupid thing and possibly blown the gig, the girls would take it another step and confused relief would move across his face. The evening unfolded despite him.

R took off her clothes and he undressed i except for her panties. Then R lay down and i kneeled on the carpet between her legs and peered at R’s x for a little while. The husband watched breathless, the way you’d watch a butterfly finally descend to the tip of your finger. Then i closed her eyes and lowered her head. There was absolute silence for a moment, just the motion of her head moving slightly in a short and repeating nod.

She was a bitch really, i, or that was what the dancers thought of her, but R has a way with everybody. It was clear that despite the rings, i was mixed up with this boy just barely: he was in love and she didn’t even like him.

I assumed their marriage had something to do with a green card.

In the conversations before the undressing, they’d referenced problems in the marriage, something they were trying to work past, and the way they talked around the problem made it seem as if she’d recently had an affair and he was one of those husbands who thought he could accept it and they could purge it in counseling, and she was one of those wives who always going to be thinking about that and other lovers.

He thought as boys tend to think that somehow two girls being together would be about him and not about them enjoying each other and using him as a witness excuse, but it was even worse than that because they had me and he was really unnecessary.

She was a thin girl with heavy but not false breasts and a nicely rounded if not overly supple ass. The time she was the prettiest, it was when before she knelt, before she bowed her head; it was when she was standing there with her panties on and her belly was sunken and her breasts hung heavily and her face was slightly turned. I have that moment and other in photographs.

She didn’t take off her g-string as she knelt there between R’s legs. R was mostly still, with her shoulder folded slightly in and her legs pressed slightly open and her head slightly risen so that she could look down her torso. Her belly was taut and the apparent difference in the girls’ bodies was exercise, though i was in a certain shape and had her own way of looking appealing. You could hear R breathing more heavily but it was still a fairly silent room.

I got behind i and kneaded her ass and then pushed the panty aside and fingered her for five or so minutes. I looked at the boy and I could see that he was worried not that I was touching his woman but that what I was doing might cause everything to stop, and yet he’d say nothing to get me off because this change too could cause a halting. He sat there staring, paralyzed like that, the way you look the first time you see pornography or real violence.

I knew her better than he did, and I knew that she wanted to get into some kind of deep water and that at this moment anything could happen and she wouldn’t mind.

I knew she was here for a full on baptism.

I kissed her x and she lifted her ass to better meet my mouth. After a little while, the boy came down to try his hand at being involved. There was something about him that disgusted me, his pathos, the way he wore his hair, his idiocy, and I couldn’t bear to see him touch my girl so I nodded him away.

I sat back myself.

We watched and I took a few more pictures.

I couldn’t tell you now how she tasted or felt inside. I remember that her flesh was overly soft. It was another x and around it another woman, one I’d known for a very short time but understood because she is a type and because I’ve known that type, and touching her really wasn’t important.

I’d seen it all before and been a deeper part of it, and though it didn’t bore me it didn’t do much for me either.

I knew that he’d sit shell shocked if I got behind her again and that he’d likewise remain motionless if I began fucking her. I knew that she would thrust herself back against the fuck as she continued to try to devour something which cannot be eaten.

Nothing in any of it really inspired me.

R and I, we were still ok then, though who is to say what will become of a restless heart?

This was the girl’s first time and you could see that she felt safe and you could see that she felt famished and she licked away and away and away, clinging to R like she’d never stop, like a tic who once attached seems to never find the occasion to unattach.

When it was all over you could see that i felt there should be more; you could see that the magic door she keeps on expecting to swing open was not open. She sat against the couch with her lips moist, her face perplexed. The boy, he kept trying to hold and kiss her, but I could see a sort of vacancy move into her eyes, and the room itself had gone cold.

And I felt in ways we were kindred spirits, though I did not like or respect her.

C and xx

2005-06-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

We drive country roads and she plays a game with me and three of my friends. The winner is supposed to fuck her. What she is really angling for is probably more than any of us but she can handle. I’ve kissed her before, more drunk than I am now, that first time in the back seat of another friend’s car and the liquor so high in my head that I can remember thinking as our tongues twirled around and around that I wished I could just calm for a moment and know I was really doing this with her. Or anybody.

That I was kissing a girl. That she was kissing me.

We’ve driven into the city and back and have been drunk and sobered and are drunk again, and now we take turns kissing her for a timed minute to see who she thinks deserves to fuck. Earlier, we rounded a bend and below us were giant people and for a fraction of a second my understanding of the world shattered and then I realized it was the drive-in.

Round after round and she's never really sure and then finally it’s finished.

I don’t win and take the losing not well, but at least it’s shared. By the time everything is settled, we’re all exhausted and the steam seems to have run out of her, as if she got all she really needed in all that kissing.

C and the winner and I get out at my car and without asking I drive him home first. We watch him scale the side of his house and go in the window and then we start off, into the mountains again.

Maybe I asked or maybe I assumed or maybe she told me to go back. I can’t remember.
By the time she and I pull off the road beneath a shelter of trees it is near dawn.

Her hair was tightly curled and I think I can see her face now and what I see I wouldn’t call pretty but she was known for her sex and I had never had any, the closest being a girl at a fair the year before who took me to the side of the church where she told me that I didn’t kiss properly. That girl, her skin tasted of salt and she was fleshy and when I put my hand down her jeans, I was surprised by the wetness. I believed it must be blood and told her to wait a second, that I thought I’d heard something. Than I went round the corner and examined my fingers in a streetlamp and smelled them before I returned to her.

This was experience but didn’t make me experienced.

C’s shirt disappeared into her pants and when I got them down a little ways I saw that what she wore was really a teddy. There were maybe three snaps and each of them was a little puzzle demystified with shaking fingers in a mess of hair that I felt would pull easily.

And beneath the hair the flesh.

It was bare then and the air around us was gray. Her x looked small and the hair looked too much. I think I touched it but I’m not sure. What I do remember is that I looked at it for some long time and it seemed to look at me. C was leaning back against the door with her eyes half closed and she didn’t move or speak. There were the barely open lips, the not yet hooded clitoris, pictures upon which I’d grown up, but I’d never seen something so ominously alive, and if you want to fill in a cliché about a hunter and prey, in this scenario I most certainty felt more the prey, looking at her soft thighs and hair-nestled x the way a young man looks at the bully he has been taught and encouraged to fight even though he’ll lose.

I was tired and I wished it weren’t light out and that I was drunk again or that I’d let the winner take his prize or that I’d never played or wanted to.

It was an awful car, my first, a Falcon Ford Future, all black, with a three on the tree, and this was 1987 or so, and I was a child, and the girl laid there against the far door with her eyes slit and on me, her breasts not bare, her teddy undone.

This is the second x and that’s as far as it went.

m

2005-06-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

I was nineteen and a virgin and still of an age where I though if a woman let you fuck her, she’d let you love her.

She was a major in the graduate drama program and had been in a film. She’d just kicked a lover out of her apartment, a man with sad eyes and thinning hair who probably knew the things about how it does and doesn’t works between a man and a woman that I didn’t yet know and couldn’t imagine.

What she saw in me, a boy, I suppose was some opposite of whatever he was. Every time I slept in her bed, I kept my slacks on.

I knew fucking was supposed to last longer, but I was just happy to be doing it. I’d apologize after I finished, the way a person who beats a loved one can only weigh her feelings after the release.

I said to her, I love you.

She said to me, Does it bother you that I can’t say that?

My father was away and so I took her to his house in the country. The dog of my youth was dead and the electric fence was supposed to be off, but when I leaned against it to close the gate, a jolt shot through me. My arms were loaded down with her things and I threw them involuntarily as I shot forward and I landed on my knees at her feet.

She was wearing a jean skirt. Later, we’d light a fire and we’d fuck in front of it for a few minutes and even later we’d fuck on the glider on the front porch in the cold air. Fucking for us was always face to face and was always quick.

It was dusk, and I’d been shocked and was kneeling next to her and looking up at her and she was looking down at me. In somebody else’s story this is that memory you laugh about over the years, but her face was stern and I don’t think I ever did anything that visibly amused her. What I see of that moment in my mind’s eye is a woman with a boy she didn’t want to take care of.

We lasted about three months. I don’t know how many times I came in her. Her apartment had a particular smell. Maybe some day I’ll come across it again and I’ll more fully remember what it was like to be with her, my first real lover.

Blond hair, sharp nose, blue eyes. I remember her head shot and the pictures her agent had her take in a bathing suit.

I remember walking home one morning after a night rain, from her apartment to mine, that university town, the bridge, the puddles here and there, my slacks rolled up, my shoes tied and thrown over my shoulder, my naivety on display. I didn’t know anything about fucking and I didn’t know how to read the troubled expression she often wore, not sadness but genuine perplexity, as if she were always asking herself: why did I let this person in? How do I get him out?

Toward the end, I was restless myself, but I didn’t know what it meant or that it would become so salient in me later. She would sleep and I would not and I would rise up quietly and get in my car, a sports car, all I had to show for the death of my grandmother, and drive the country roads outside the city, very fast, my stomach going hard on turns I might not make.

And she’d still be asleep. And if she knew I’d been gone she never asked me where or why.

I thought I was in love and when it was finished, I’d drawn lines with a razor on my forearms. Wounds like x’s of their own, the blood a different kind of coming, and the general sense of being unfulfilled, that whatever you’ve done, it hasn’t been enough.

l

2005-06-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

It would have been better if she at least acknowledged it. Or maybe if I were older and had at least experienced it before.

But as that point, even though I believed an x could do that, I didn’t know it actually would.
I hadn’t had enough lovers or loved any of those I’d had long enough to hear one of those sounds.

If she had said something about it, perhaps we could have laughed together, or perhaps we could have pretended to laugh, anyway.

As it was, her x was talking before we’d even started fucking. This was in a small room with a futon where we were supposed to be watching Tombstone on a little tv/vcr combo. She told me when she closed the door on her roommates that there was no way we were going to have sex.
And then, after just a little finger fucking, her x began to babble. I try to imgine what she saw on my face in those first moments of stunned non-silence.

It started before I went in and never shut up, not during the fucking or even afterwards.

She was a beautiful a girl and still might be. I’d known her briefly years before, a cheerleader for another school’s wrestling team. But now I was in college and she was a barmaid at a place I’d gone into and we were older and her face and body were sharper and I wanted her.

Now it was hard as I was having her to keep wanting her.

She put her hands on my face and held it close to hers and I was trying not to wince during each moment of silence that seemed like the mericful end but was followed by a sudden burst.

We fucked and I tried to go easy as if to calm her x, and we talked in semi-high pitched whispers about how this must be a certain kind of destiny, us bumping into each other these few years later, as if we could talk enough romance around this ragged fucking it would be transcendent.
As if if we talked continually neither of us would hear what was happening below, her x going on and on, like Donald Duck in a rage.

I’d see her a month or two after, riding in a grocery cart on the street between bars. She was drunk and two or three drunk boys were pushing her along. It was a late night and odd already, and I was alone and headed home and I stood still and watched. They had the look of some corrupt medieval morality dramatists purposefully lost between cycles. She stood up shakily, a mock goddess you could believe in after midnight, and the boys went hush and for a moment she held a pose. There was her ass in this atmosphere of mirth and lust and there was her hair and that wide smile and those half shut eyes, the streetlamp making her something more than she or probably anybody else ever was.

There are some things we can’t afford to know about a lover too early on, but at that moment, I could almost forget that I had touched and heard her. At that moment, it was, in fact, hard to remember that if I could actually sweep her away from those boys and undress her again the results wouldn’t really be magic.

S

2005-05-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

You reach a point where when you think about a woman you’ve met you think about it all. Her dresses in your closet, your name beside hers on a door. As if she could be the endpoint. You’ve had enough bodies to fill all of your tastes so you don’t lust after a woman bodily alone. It is not about the kill, but the capture, and your own surrender.

That’s what I tell myself.

And if I fantasy about the woman scanning my groceries at the store, it’s not just my hand sliding down her pants or up her bare leg. If I dream about the sister of a friend it is that she can be mine.

Most of the women I think about at this stage, it’s about a love life together. I want to put her into a magic house and me beside her and lead a magic life.

This is what I tell myself.

S I meet on an airplane when I’m going to visit my son. One of her eyes has a quarter of brown inside all the green. She lives on the other side of the country. I think that she is of Irish heritage but she tells me Scottish and the way she smiles must make everybody think about kissing.

We exchange email addresses.

She comes for a visit for a week and that is a week of fucking and when you coax her into photographs it isn’t because you collect trophies. These aren’t pictures to masturbate over later, even though you might masturbate over them.

I’m 33 years old and I see the apocalypse in the genesis and the goodbye when I say hello and though I think about a girl in terms of forever I know there is no such thing.
If you can’t reconcile or ignore your paradoxes, it is hard to function, hard to live.

And I take photographs of everything. You watch your son grow up, day by day. And those are lines on your face. And you are the cliché of that pre-midlife-crisis when you realize not so much that you’ll die, but that you are in decay, and that in fact everything is, that growth itself is a form of decay, everything moves away from innocence.

The way I look back on who I was five years ago and see a more innocent me and feel warm toward him. And that a decade from now I’ll do that with the me I am now.

You want every moment captured. This human desire to control what cannot be controlled.

She sits on the edge of the bed with her skirt hiked up and her panties off and in this picture is just a hint of her x, the kind of image that all alone would make a man crane his neck to see what cannot be seen. The kind of image that if you kept for a long time and looked at often enough would convince you of your love for a stranger.

At first, you position her. Later she positions herself. She sits like this and that. This shot is meant to highlight her ass, a dancer’s ass, her flat dancer’s belly. She was flying back from a show and she and the woman beside her were critiquing their performance on a laptop. How could I not want to try to capture her?

This shot is about the breasts. The one about the lips and the teeth behind them.

Really, all the shots are about the same thing, but you focus them differently. As if it possible to take a woman from every angle.

And then you’re bodily involved. Her panties back on but she is otherwise bare and your hand is beneath them. A freeze frame of the first sort of penetration.

Then it is your x in her mouth and her eyes rising up to you, the camera; your tongue against her x, her hand on the side of your face, the thumb over your eyelid; and your x disappearing inside of her from the front, from the back, all these ways there are to fuck.

These are the pictures that will make sad.
This is just another passing girl. This is just another lost wife.
The way every connection is just temporary.
The reason for the Sistine Chapel.

These are just pictures of how you connected and if you lie to yourself you will say these are pictures of what may be instead of what has been out.

If you don’t think I get into your head through your x, then you’ll never know me. The addiction for a woman starts in the bedroom but these are drugs I know I can’t afford to continue to buy and every day is a cold turkey day and every day you start something new and tomorrow’s poison is just an anecdote for yesterday’s.

And really, these are just pictures of me, the person who took them. When I look at S's x some time in the future, what I'll really see is some lost version of me behind the camera.

I take pictures of S not so that I may gloat over them later but so I’ll know for certain what was; I take these pictures because these moments between us will never exist again, even if we always know each other, even if we decided to keep on fucking, even if we bind ourselves one against the other for as long as two lives allow—which we have not done and will not do.
(If you really mean all those things you tell yourself why pick a girl on an airplane, a girl who lives 2000 miles away?)

But still, that time she kneeled on the bed with her dual colored eye looking back at me, in the billions and billions of seconds in the history of the world, it existed once.
Each of those shots, the close ups of her mouth, the close ups of her x.

If you can’t get nostalgic over a picture of an x, what kind of lover are you?

A

2005-05-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

She comes to you when you are tired, or maybe it is the opposite: that when you are tired you look for a girl like her. One who will try to make you still.

All stripped down, white t-shirt and jeans, both of you, driving in the night with nowhere to go, on some freeway you’ll eventually have to circle back against, and she’s leaning into you. Her breasts are big, her legs and ass are all muscle, and yet when she puts herself against you in the cab of your truck, she feels very small.

And you’re driving with nowhere to go, and when you say in that near dark that you ought to seriously shoot for Mexico as some fantastical getaway where you can really sink into each other, you mean it, and when she says ok, the scary thing is that she does too.

You’ll be Kit and Holly or Terence and Alabama. How many miles can you think like this?

This is A and she and others like her—not that there is anyone like her—have joined a group the bonding element of which is that they’ve all sworn to refuse sex before marriage. She’s all grown up but a virgin, and a Christian God means a lot to her.

So I try to avoid the fucking because to do so would mean that I have to take possession of her, the way in some cultures you do with someone whose life you’ve saved.

Anyway, it’s me that’s drowning and it’s both of us trying not to fuck.

Imagine the gray day when I try to do anything but take her to my apartment but eventually we go there. And card tricks and television shows won’t keep us from pressing together and at this stage in my life pressing is that one thing that must lead to another. And so there are her grown up breasts bared to male hands for the first time and she’s kissing with a hunger and I’m wondering: don’t you know that soon all the lines become invisible?

And there is thunder and there is lightning and I am nauseous with the effort to keep from pushing my hands below her beltline and move us then toward the fucking.

Imagine her weeks later at the apartment complex swimming pool where all my neighbors must think I’m a sex addict who hires women to visit me in the night: there is always some disheveled girl I’m standing with shirtless in the late morning by her car, a hug, a slight kiss, goodbye; and the security guard mixes up names and then stops trying.

And then, and now, I’m tried.

Here comes A, swimming, a smart girl who tries too hard and will outgrow that effort and then become almost pure grace, here she is very beautiful in her bathing suit and see the beauty around the scar a peacock gave her when she was a little girl from the middle of her cheek to her jawline.

Look at her in the sunlight and try then in the too cool apartment to keep yourself from untying her bikini bottoms.

Inside, she feels different, but every girl feels different. She’s is standing against the wall and her mouth is open and there is no “no” in her and my fingers are sliding in and out and her shoulder blades go all the way against the wall and her back flattens and she’s pushing her pelvis outoutout, as if to separate it from the rest of her, send it into the fires fully, but it is not separate and her face is contorted with an overload of sensation.

And this is easily one of the hungriest moments I’ve shared.

I wish almost out loud she wouldn’t make the denial all my work because I don’t know that I can do it.

I have to send her away. I have to dress her first. I have to push her off. Like a guard with a prisoner, I have to walk her to her car.

We have not fucked. After she is gone, I spend the evening on the floor in front of the television looking and feeling much like an invalid.

We meet anywhere where I can’t touch her like that because each time it gets a little worse and one time it will be all the way and I tell myself I want to save her from that because I would take her places the innocent never need to see and so it is better to leave her in that state which to some degree or another she might stretch out across a lifetime.

But what this is really about, my draining effort not to fuck, it is that I want to save myself from being possessed, tired like this and ready for some aggressive girl to pull my head onto her breast and keep it there as if I belong.

The last time we get together, she sleeps in my bed and in order that I might feel as frustrated as possible, before she drifts off, I peel down her gym pants. Her back is too me and her legs are pulled up and her ass is beautiful and there are the lips, moist and thin. I kiss them, just gently, not for very long, the way if you were trying to be chaste and half failing you might kiss a mouth. I resist the urge to put in my tongue or to peel apart her legs or to respond in any way to the way her body starts to move and her mouth starts to groan.

It is a false construct to link the moment, to say now that then I thought of us on one of our early meetings, when we’d go to the farmers’ market and eat bread and fruit in the bed of my truck and I’d talk about animal rights according to the Bible and she’d listen like a girl who meant to learn. And this is twilight and they had out all the flowers and plants and there was a week or two in the spring when there were hundreds and hundreds of ladybugs and we laid back against the bedliner and watched dusk and then its afterwards, the pale stars, and the ladybugs crawled on our faces, in our hair.

And it comes to me, maybe then, or maybe when I'm pulling my lips away from her opening x, or maybe neither of those times, maybe just now, that I'm always looking for somebody not to save me.

xx

2005-05-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

We met at bar and I couldn’t tell you the color of her eyes but she wore a red sweater to which I was drawn. We went out and fucked around in her car for some time and it was cramped and through repetition became boring. She was with two friends and the three of them drove me home. I told her to come back but I knew she wouldn’t. This was an apartment I shared with a girl with whom I sometimes grew uncertain of myself. Where she was I can’t remember but there was some brief break in which I wondered if I could make it with one girl ever.

The red sweatered girl’s knock surprised me awake. She’d changed her clothes and seemed plainer to me but that didn’t stop me, and the evidence of my girlfriend which must have been all over the apartment didn’t stop her.

We fuck around again.

It is completely unlike the awkwardness in the car, trying to know how much you can have and trying not to make it seem like you want it all and that that’s all you want. I’ve answered the door nude save the sheet in which I’m sleeping and she has really shown up in the light of day, so there is no question as to the carnality of the encounter.

In fact, there is little need for an exchange of words at all.

She lying on the couch, and with my sheet encasing us both I’m perched over her like some bird of prey of vampire thing, and though she really doesn’t play the part of prey, neither does she play the part of an active participant.

She’s come here to let me do what I want with her.

Eventually I lead her to the bedroom and what I remember best from there is that the line of her ass seemed overly red and that when I put my fingers to her mouth she sucked them.
There was laundry to do—a trip to the Laundromat—and it was on mind through some portion of the fucking. I imagine this near obsession was something akin to guilt. I don’t think either of us enjoyed it much and she left without trying to cling in any way.

Several moths later, I gave a public performance of whatever it is I perform as part of a New Year’s Eve celebration; it had been advertised with my picture and I suppose she recognized it because when I had finished she came up from the audience and shook my hand. She was in a party dress and she told me she had enjoyed what I'd done and I believed her; there was a sort of longing in her eyes I didn’t remember from before. Though recognizable she seemed a new person entirely and my context too was so different that I must have seen more recognizable as the picture than I did as an animate thing.

Still, it is her handshake that cements that night for me; it’s the only moment that stands out. This wasn’t so many years ago but I couldn’t tell you where I performed or exactly what. I just remember a face emerging from a crowd and then the recognition that I’d fucked this girl and she me and there we were in a room full of people who nodded their head a lot and presumably didn’t imagine that real people did things like fuck strangers at dawn.

Outside it was snowing.

That town for the holidays was covered in lights and there had been a winter carnival during which ice-sculptures were made.

It was cold and in my memory everything is pretty.

I don’t remember her name but I don’t remember half of my 33 New Year’s Eves well and a quarter of them distinctly at all, and at least she has given me this one.

M

2005-05-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

Everything comes back to you now, almost today, when she leaves you a message about the death of her ex- husband, a man you’ve never met. This you is me and the girl is not so far in the past and the ex husband always seemed to be on the verge of not getting his life together. He was the father of her son and her son is the friend of your son. How that father/ex husband died you don’t know but you talk to her the morning of the funeral and you picture the little boy, four years old, dressed in a dark suit and on this day everything seems to demand caution.

We get together when my son visits so that the boys can play. Beyond that, M and I get together when she wants to fuck. She calls me knowing I’ll come only so close and I suppose therein lies the attraction because she is the kind of girl who is spoiled with attention.

I love her smile and her ass but there is too much party in her and a decade between us and so though it is always my habit to try to think past the moment, mostly with her I can’t. Perhaps there was a time of potential and not even that long ago but of this I'm not sure.

Between us there is a pregnancy scare that I once believed was mostly manufactured and what I think of when I hear the message about the death of her ex husband is how on Christmas Day I was laid up in hotel with a serious sickness of my own and over the phone she was telling me she’d lost the instructions to her three pack pregnancy test she'd gotten some time ago for a frightened friend but she still had a stick left and after she peed on it two pink lines appeared.

What does it mean? she’s asking me.

And in the city where I’ve come to visit my son but fhave allen sick, this city that is mostly his home and once upon a time was my own, this city where I have chosen the hotel over the hospital, I find myself driving from closed grocery store to closed grocery store, from pharmacy to pharmacy, finally to find something open, and the last test on the shelf, and the directions on the back of the box, and quite clearly the idea that two pink lines means the girl is pregnant.

I don’t know how high my fever. I don’t know how clouded my lungs.

The ex-husband or some other boy called all night the first time I stayed with her and she insisted she was alone each time. I listened to her lie and I thought she did it well and maybe right then all the potential for something between us died, but in truth it was wrecked before that; in truth, I'm pretty sure there was never any real potential. Why not is something intangible. I find her smart and she’s got her charm. Physically, she’s a type I like, and I’ve got enough hubris to imagine that she couldn’t really lie like that with me and would never want to anyway.

In any case the phone calls kept us from fucking and kept me from calling again and it took eight months and Halloween coincidence at a bar when she was dressed as a GI Hoe and I watched her dance like that to bring us to our fucking.

There was a vase with condoms and a vibrator and everything felt purely sexual enough that when she knelt hands and knees on the bed I put it in her before I myself had been. As if we didn’t need sentiment between us but would not be satisfied with mere mechanics either. And true to that kind of form that first night of fucking many of the kinks you save for later worked themselves out between us.

She told me she was not the kind of girl that liked boys to stay but would I stay?

I’m not the kind of boy that always knows how to go and so I did stay, on a little bed in a pretty room with a ceiling fan that never stopped. I try to know now if there was a time during that night when maybe I could have imagined holding hands for awhile. She’s got dark eyes and the way she smiles makes you wonder what you don’t know and all of this I like; perhaps it was her moments of vulnerability that frightened me into distance.

She woke me in the latelate night with her ass against me moving and I understand from this that she wanted to fuck again and so I entered. She went afterwards into the bathroom and said in a cold voice that there must be something wrong with her because I did not come.

A man can always come, I told her. Any time he wants., I said. Or practically, anyway.

When she came out of the bathroom I told her lie to down and she did and I fucked her for five minutes face to face—the only time we had fucked in that position or ever would—and then I came.

She said, Were you wearing a condom?

I asked her if she thought I was sleeping in one when she woke me.

A month and half later, I’m wheezing and fevering and under prescription in a hotel room several states away and she tells me in essence that she’s pregnant. In a week she would leave an email that said she saw a doctor and he detemined she wasn't pregnant. There was hardly an option that didn’t cross my mind in that week, chief amongst them was asking for the baby and then proposing to and marrying a k not yet blogged who at that time would have done it. Such is our thinking at times of great sickness and panic.

And I still don’t know if M really peed on a stick and if it really showed two pinks and if she’d really lost the directions for reading the stick, or if none or even some of that is not true, what her motivation could have been. They say mystery is what keeps relationships alive but that was never it for me, and anyway, this was not a relationship.

That week I remember the way you remember nightmares, and I think about it first when I hear he ex-husband has died. I think about her little boy. I think of my own and all the little ones of the world. It makes me tread lightly.

I talk to her on her way to the funeral and her voice is solid, is brave, and I wonder if she is, and I think that even if she has all that courage, there is something she hides and I wonder what it is and for how long she can and I know that I’ll never get to it or try.

I think about all the times we’ve fucked, probably six in all, and how the last time I knew it was the last even though she did not know. She’d call me from a bar with the background loud and I’d pick her up. She’d come running out, once in the rain in a red shirt with her black hair flying and the faces of boys who wanted badly to touch her pressed against the windows. The energy she brought was always good.

She most liked to kneel on the bed with her back arched low. I would spread her black hair out over her shoulders and shoulder blades and drag my fingers through it until it became so smooth they met no resistance. We fucked like that for long periods and I’d look at her pornographer’s dream of an ass and I would wonder why we were not more closely bound.

This is M, a not so distant lover, and what she becomes in that instant I comprehend that a man she loved and married and made a child with has died is an emotional link to all the clichés you can think of about birth and death and orgasm.

M

2005-05-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

There are some people you want to find again but won’t, at least not specifically, and for me one of those is an Irish girl whose stint as a nanny was ending. I’d given her my number based mostly on her eyes which almost seemed to be colorless they were so pale. Sometimes, when you fuck a girl, it is only that thing that attracted you that you are really fucking: her pale eyes, or her red slacks, the way her hair fell across her face; you're fucking the way the sun looked on her body or the way her collarbone snapped forward when she turned her head.

Perhaps with M it started like that, but by the end it was more; by the end I was fucking not only her eyes but her accent and the stories she told with it and I was fucking the first charming thing she did, which was leave me a voice message with her number in which she spelled several of the numerals because she knew that Americans misunderstood her.

Her ass in jeans was misshapen and because of it I had my reservations. We agreed to meet at the Hard Rock Café and there she told me she was “Limavady woman”, which was the second very charming thing she did and the sound of it was something I would fuck when the fucking begin. We had one drink and she said simply we should return to my apartment and so we did.

She called oral sex taboo but she held my head in her hands as I moved my mouth against her x which at that time in my life was the hairiest I’d known and another reason for pause.

After awhile she worked at my stomach with a focus for what seemed an unwarranted amount of time during which I stayed perfectly still, afraid to even shudder. The tip of my x was beside her face. All she had to do was tilt her head to take me in and she seemed so intent on the work she was doing with her lips and her tongue it felt inevitable that she would turn to my x but she never did.

It was one of those nights where you fuck for an hour and then feel finished with fucking forever and lie back side by side and tell each other the stories that are supposed to give off your character. Then after you’ve talked awhile one of you or the other starts it all up again.

She told me that when she was a little girl her father instructed her to go into the cemetery when with a bucket of black paint and a brush to touch up the grave markers there. The way I saw it taking place was on some a stereotype of rolling green Irish hill. There was some little version of her in a little sundress and bonnet walking through all that beauty and decay with her bucket and brush and innocence and sincerity, solemn and beautiful, the kind of thing I always want to hold as a picture in my mind or something more firm in my hands.

What a clear night it was, the one fucking out of ten that really works, your doubts about the shape of her ass and the hairiness of her x smothered in some kind of lovely longing, so that when you remember it some other night caught up in some fucking you know even as you perform it you will regret, you think: I do this so that from time to time I’ll have an experience like that other one.

The way you never know with certainty how an apple will taste until you bite it. The way sometimes one of them is so sweet it keeps you digging through the bag.

I drove her home at dawn, through the streets of a city that for the most part hadn’t awaken, and when we stopped for gas I bought her lollipop. She was leaving the country in two weeks, maybe three, but her host family was taking her and the kids she watched to Hawaii for most of the rest of that time, and this was pretty much it.

If I wanted to fuck her again, which I did, and sometimes even these ten years later still do, it was for how she looked with the lollipop: not the overused film cliché of overly demonstrated and falsified hunger or the real world cliché of an attention whore working on a straw or a cherry or beer bottle in a bar, but this woman who I’d been inside of exposed in her innocence, enjoying her lollipop simply for the flavor: there wasn’t even a shadow of regret in either of us, and there was no shame in her.

If I longed for her which is silly thing to do for a one night lover, especially one with an x more hairy than I’d like and ass by my taste misshapen, perhaps despite it all, my longing was for something genuine, some not tangible connection.

Or perhaps it is only that her mouth had been so close to my x for so long and never taken it in.

C

2005-05-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

This one doesn’t count. There was no surrender here; no x was touched; nobody came; there was no seduction. And this blog is about all of those things: seduction; touching; sometimes coming. Still, this moment, somehow it fits.

The year my mother was drinking, the summer that drew her near the end of that, this summer I’d turned five, she came hungover out of the house when my friend S and I were playing in the yard. She was in her nightshirt though it was midday, and the sun shown through it and I saw S looking at what you could see, which was everything. My mother told us what she had to tell us, to keep it down or whatever, and she turned to go back in and S sat there looking at her, and before I’d even thought about it, I’d started to hit him.

We had other fights over other things. He moved about two years later and I went to visit him from time to time and then my family moved even farther away and so I didn’t see him again until we were both supposed to be adults and he’d turned into a bad ass. Maybe I thought I had too. We met up by accident in a bar his mother then owned and he was drunk and I was drunk and our reunion came closer to being another fight than anything else.

Who knows how she felt, my mother, this woman misplaced in a tiny town, this young woman hungover and just up in the middle of a hot day, watching her son beat his friend, a little crew cut boy smaller than me and famous in our town for having already had his father hit him over the head with a beer bottle so hard it required stitches. Maybe looking at us roll around like that in the dirt she felt a little guilty. These woman with husbands who were miners or cowboys, these women who’d young gotten in way over their heads, far from city homes and confused about love. Husbands who worked graveyard, children who seemed to sleep, what else was there to do but drink with each other across kitchen tables in the night?

In a couple of months, they’d take my mother away as if she were mad and not just alcoholic, and after she came back, she never drank again.

After she split us up, my mother called S’s mother and told her we’d fought and why. You could hear in her voice that it was more amusing than anything and that maybe she even took a measure of pride in it.

I don’t suppose it was fully out of my mind but I was at his house almost all the time and so was there the next morning or the one after.

His mother was dressing in the bathroom and putting on makeup. We were standing on either side of the open door, waiting to go do something I can’t remember with her.

She asked me if I still felt badly about what S had seen and I told her yes. I suppose then I knew where it was going. Maybe S did too.

A couple of years later, on a visit to their new house in their new town, I’d swing open a bathroom door and see her sitting nude with knees splayed and toilet paper in her hand on the toilet. She looked at me and I looked at that dark patch of hair which was really more than a patch. By then, I’d see that stuff in magazines, older kids leaning over weathered Hustlers and putting kisses on exposed nipples, open legs, but that was nothing like a real woman that much in the flesh and the startle of all that hair.

Still, what counted, what’s really stuck with me, it was the morning a day or two after my mother had been standing there before him in the sun.

His mother asked me if it still bothered me that S had seen my mother like that, and I said it did. She asked me if I would feel better if I saw her and I said I would.

S started to shake his head. He was standing in the shadowed hallway looking small and scared and some new feeling of power moved into me as his mother asked me again if I’d like to look at her.

They were all kids, his parents, mine, having babies at eighteen, nineteen, trying to figure out how to raise them, the early seventies, coming out of the love and war era, confused about much, but certain that the norms of their parents were even more invalid than any other previous generation had found the norms of the one that birthed it.

She told me to come stand in front of the bathroom door and look at her.

S had leaned against the wall. He was crying and chanting, “No, Mamma, no Mamma…”

I went and stood before the doorway. She was inside, in her bra and panties, and I looked at her. Even now I remember the semi-awkwardness of it, like the semi-awkwardness you feel at a strip club when you haven’t earned the thing with a woman it feels like you ought to earn if you mean to value it. I think I can remember what she looked like, the color of her bra, the color of her panties, but I’m not sure. What I remember with certainty is S, the pitch of his voice, and I remember especially his eyes, which shone, even in the dark of the hallway.

They were wet and there was hatred in them and what I like to think now is that the gulf that has almost always been between me and another man—that end of the day feeling that it’s still an alpha male world and you’re still looking to eat first—it wasn’t born, but it was recognized in that moment.

K

2005-05-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

She is the opposite of her friend, V, and what takes me in the end is the quality of her heart. Mostly, I know a good person when I meet her. Is there really a choice to be made in a situation like this?

In this story, the good girl will always win, depending on what you mean by winning—taking into account as we must that in victory some people are most lost.

So then the fucking starts in earnest and sometimes it bleeds into something transcendent.

She’s tall and her breasts and ass are almost overwhelming the way it almost always feels a little obscene to fuck a woman with the kind of body you associate with pornographic movies. What counts though are her eyes and not just the way she looks at you through them but just the eyes themselves as object of beauty, darkly sheened, Indian.

Each time you fuck everything gets a little deeper. She is always climbing to the top of the mountain and walking to the edge of the cliff but she rarely lets herself fall and this in and of itself breeds an opposite kind of hunger to what I felt with V.

Her period marks the one month anniversary of the second time we fuck, and all these things happen between menstruations—the drama has almost worked itself out and the choice has most certainly been made.

I’m exhausted in her bed from too much fucking the night before and no sleep and the long day of exercise and etc and then the two hours at a bar with K and other friends. She works early in the morning and our sleep deficit is high. It feels as if we should just collapse together. Just genuinely sleep together.

I watch her undress and put on her negligee and as see I her nude in the soft light and then sort of covered I go painfully hard. I'm drifing and she is leaning toward the mirror and her negligee lifts and there is her ass as fresh to me as if I've never touched it and half asleep I want her.

And then she is beside me and it is my face in her hand and my hand on her face and then we are kissing in the dizzy buzz of a little vodka and a lot of fatigue. She tells me she wants me inside and I want it to.

She gets a towel and puts it beneath us and the inside of her x is swollen the way they feel during menstruation. After all these years this is the x I’ve met that gets the wettest which gives it a sense of mystery and leaves me snake-fascinated.

On this night in this dark with the towel beneath her ass I’m not conscious enough for awhile to think of anything but the way she feels and I don’t even really think of that; this is just me moving slightly and her against me and honestly these are the moments people are closest to melting into a One.

We go on and on, slowly, and we build toward something and then let it slide away, a cycle that we repeat and repeat, until almost everything becomes good, until somehow we’ve reached and extended period of near coming, and she says in that quiet excitement, “You can do anything with me you want.”

What makes me go down eventually I don’t know. I’m sure I did this before with my first exwife, and I remember the first time L and I were together she had in her tampon and I licked her x far above the place the string fell...but burying my tongue like I do now with K is something that feels new to me, though I’m not doing it for the newness. And am I not indulging or trying to invent a kink.

It’s just, in this moment, what my body wants.

And the taste of it is not much of a taste at all, more aftertaste than anything, and anyway what I want from her in this moment has nothing to do with blood. I just want my mouth against her x in act that feels the inversin of birth.

I want to breathe into her. I want her to hold the back of my head. I want my tongue to go on and on and in an in.

Later, in her bathroom mirror, above the neatly stacked beauty products, in the filtered light where her jewelry hangs, I see my bloody x, my bloody hands, and around my mouth, in the stubble that she says she loves, there are the smears of blood. I look for a moment like a pet dog who has stumbled into doing godknowswhat primitive thing in the forest and comes uncertainly back to its civilized home and canned food to confuse its master with a vision of unnecessarily violence.

But I have no master and I feel no shame.

And there has been no violence here, and what I feel is warm. And when I lay down beside her again I feel closer than our bodies touching.

k

2005-05-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

This is one of those fucks that starts on the internet. It comes a few months after a girl I thought I wanted to go but probably really didn’t has finally gone, and I’ve spent the time I should be healing and taking stock of myself instead serial dating and serial fucking.

Then I reach a point where I’m weary but restless, and I’m looking for something more, anything different. I tell myself sometimes we do things not so much for the doing but for the memory of having done them. I tell myself that everybody is looking for rock bottom and I ask myself where I can find it.

K writes that she wants to be “fucked, spanked, and choked (lightly).”

This isn’t my scene but I’m not sure of that and so I write back that I’m up for that kind of thing. She wants to see pictures. I want to see pictures. A Black woman with unexceptional looks. She has written that she is 38 D and 5’6 and 135 pounds. She looked about all of that. She writes that she doesn’t play games. How big is my dick? I write back an exact measurement. She asks if I want to fuck.

Now?

It’s Saturday afternoon, the sun is coming through the windows, and all of a sudden, I don’t think I’m capable of purely anonymous and mechanical sex, of realreal fucking.
So I back out and spend a bad night at a bar, not liking my face in the mirror, my eyes too much in the shadows of their sockets, my lips too thin. My shirt doesn’t seem to fit properly. I brood for awhile over vodka tonics and then I go home.

She’s online. She gives me her number. I call. Her voice is flat and she wants to know if I’m coming. I have the urge to back out again but there is no sun coming in through the window. Out there it is all dark and cool and I tell myself this is what I’m supposed to do. In the movie of my life, I tell myself, this is precisely what the character of me would do.

The directions she gives are bad so I get lost and relost. Each street along the way I find not because it is linked to the street she gave before it, but because I stop and ask directions from people returning from clubs to their cars.

“AA5 Glendale Terrace.”

I thought I was looking for a street called Glendale and on it a apartment complex called the Terrace and in it, the apartment AA5.

Eventually, I run across a street called Glendale Terrace and began to drive hopelessly down it.
Then I stop.
A bald man walking a dog wants to know if I’m drunk.
“I’m tired.”
“THIS is Glendale Terrace,” he says.

I nod without understanding. He stares at me. I read out loud again what the girl told me, and in so doing, I see my mistake. It is not ‘AA5’ as I heard and wrote it. It is “885”. And I am standing in front of it, 885 Glendale Terrace. These are the kind of coincidences that trouble one.

“Very tired,” I say to the man.

I have no apartment number but somehow I know on which door to knock.

“Who is it?”
I say that it's me.

She opens the door. She looks something like her picture, but her face is more severe and seems less capable of animation than the one in the photo. She’s got bulgy eyes and her hair is in cornrows. She wears a tube top and a jean skirt with a tie for a belt. Her hips are large, her waist narrow. There is something almost pissed off about her and I wonder if she’s mad I’ve taken so long. I think we shake hands but I know with certainty that nothing warm passes between us.

This is a small apartment—one room connected to a kitchen and a corridor that leads into the dark—and a musty odor hangs over everything, but the odor is that of the building and not the apartment alone. I take several steps inside and see a sixty inch television turned on but muted. Across from it, two small couches, side by side. In the corner, a desk and a computer. On the screen are rows and rows of messages, all these other men she’s communicating with, I guess. She sees me looking at the screen but she shows no shame.

She tells me to sit and she gets me a Corona which seems an odd choice for the apartment, for the girl, for everything.

I know something is wrong. I’m ready for anything to happen. Mostly what I expect is for a man to step out of the dark corridor that must have lead to her bathroom and bedroom. I can imagine being robbed or killed or both. The only thing I can’t imagine happening is that we will actually fuck.

She sits on the other couch and presses some remote control buttons. We’ve hardly said anything. I drink. The channel changes. The DVD player starts. I read the writing on the screen that says all the performers are, in accordance with certain California state laws, over 18.
“This is a porno,” she says.
“I figured.” When I try to laugh what came out is humorless and abrupt.
I am not afraid but it is only the kind of lack of fear we feel in emergencies.

Her face has not changed since I’ve come through the door.
She gets up and goes into the dark corridor and a light comes on. Then it goes off. She comes back with a thin, checkered blanket that she spreads on the floor. She drops a condom on the couch beside me.

“What’s up?” she says.
I stand and unbutton my shirt.
“Let’s see it,” she says.

I open my pants and let them fall. She looks at my x, seeming neither impressed nor disappointed. She takes off her shirt, large breasts that hang, and over each of them a tattoo. She takes my x in her mouth and sucks half-heartedly at it and it gets half hard.

“What’s up?” she says again.
“Take you skirt off,” I say.
It seems obvious from even before I offer this order that she doesn’t like to be ordered, but she does as I ask. On the tv, a Black woman sucks a Black’s man’s dick, small and shiny. The woman on the tv is quite pretty. I look at the girl I am supposed to fuck. I look back at the woman on the television. The real life girl lays back on the blanket and I kneel between her legs and begin to kiss her there.
“How does it taste?” Her voice like her face never changes.
“Like soap,” I say, telling the truth. “Like you just got out of the shower.”
“Put on the rubber.”

I look at the tv while I unwrap it. The pretty Black woman fucked by the Black man with the shiny dick. They are in bed with a white comforter in a well lit room. It is dark were I am and I suppose I’m lucky for that. I put the condom on and get between her legs and push in.

“Do you kiss?”

“Yes,” she says, but she seems like she doesn’t want to. Her mouth tastes no good. We don’t kiss long.

“Nine inches?” Whether it is skepticism in her voice or not, I can’t be sure.
“Yes.”

If I’d any energy, I’d take something in all this dead she is offering and consider it a challenge. I’d tell myself that I had to fuck inflection into her voice. Expression onto her face.
I fuck, feeling glad and a bit surprised to remain hard. She seems to barely notice, her eyes half closed and her body rocking slightly with my movement. It is hot and I focus on a bead of sweat working from my forehead down my nose and hovering over her. I turn my head when it falls so that it doesn’t hit her.

“Do you want to fuck me from the back?” she says after awhile. Again, there is no enthusiasm in her voice, as if she is resigned to the idea that she’ll not get any more out of the experience if we fuck doggy style or not but thinks she ought to suggest it anyway.

“Ok.”

I pull out and she rolls over. I get behind her and begin fucking her. The sweat drops fall on her back and I don’t care to try to make them miss. Her ass is not bad. I remember that she likes to be spanked and choked. I put my hands on her throat. She shows a little life. I continue fucking and choking . She takes my hand and puts it on her ass and lifts it and brings it down, and I begin to slap her ass. It is hard for me to fuck and choke and slap at the same time, but I try. She makes some small moans as if maybe we might be getting somewhere.

“Harder,” she says. I fuck harder and slap harder and choke harder. I look at the tv. The Black couple is still fucking on that big bed. The woman on the screen has become more beautiful. Her x seems like the perfect x. I imagine that if I were the man fucking her or if she were the woman I was fucking then I would fall in love with her.
We go on like this for I don’t know how long.

Eventually, the girl I’m fucking asks, “Are you going to nut?”
“What?” I’ve never heard that expression before.
“Are you going to nut?”
I get it. “Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”

I don’t think she’s come, but it really means nothing to me either way. I fuck for half a minute more and then I sink my fingers into the flesh of her lower back. I tighten the muscles of my body and make a low sound in my throat and half collapsed forward. I stay still for a moment, mimicking exactly what I’d do if I’d really come. Then I pull up and out.

My x is naked.

“Where’s the rubber?”
“Inside of you,” I say.
My voice is flat too. I fear no reprisal. No hysterics. Whatever her negative reaction to this will be doesn’t bother me. I am in this moment completely nonplussed. She seems likewise nonplussed. I can see the ring of the condom hanging out of her and so I feel relatively safe. She gets up and goes to the bathroom. After a moment, I hear the toilet flush.

I put on my pants and shirt and look at my shoes sitting by the door. I consider putting them on and just going. But instead I go to the bathroom door. She is washing her vagina with a kitchen sponge.
“Did you come?”
I suppose she must by now know I did not but I say yes anyway.
She continues washing.
“I am going to fly,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Ok.”

In the living room I have trouble opening the door and her arm appears out of the dark to unbolt one of the locks. Startled, I leap backward. She opens the door.

“Later,” she says
“Bye.”

I walk out into the hallway with my shirt open. I walk down the staircase and out into the cool night and off to my vehicle. My shirt tails lift up behind me. This is how a man would look in a movie after he fucked a girl and then left. His face would be tired and his shirt would hang off of him revealing sweat on his chest. This is what I think. Maybe, anyway, from far enough away, I would look like that man in the movie. His expression would be less troubled than mine, but maybe from the right angle, from a graver distance, this would seem like that movie moment.

For more than half the ride home, I hold like a talisman the controller that opens the gate to my apartment complex.

K

2005-05-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

This is one of those times when it doesn’t work.

You find yourself not that far past the loss of virginity, a sophomore in college, on a mattress pulled from beneath a bed on which a woman you’ve never seen nor ever will sleeps, in a dingy apartment with a girl whose eyes are so vacant you know that though perhaps she once was once capable of intimacy she never will be again.

Beyond that vacancy, she is stunning, and even the eyes from any sort of distance or when they cut across toward you are movie star eyes.

And even the vacancy, in the proper context, can be attractive.

Deeply blond. Her skin a perfect tan, the kind that will never turn to freckle or cancer. Her body all accidental muscle and curve. She is shaped like a wasp.

If you went by photographs, perhaps J, the good wife, is the most classically beautiful; M the prettiest; another M the most cute; but K, this girl, she was what people would call the hottest, even more than R, the stripper wife.

The way K looked, if this blog were a movie she’d be cast to play herself.

She’d gone away from the small city to a big one and come back and what I heard about her was that bad things happened there and so I figured maybe that’s where her eyes went dead.
I knew little of her beyond that.

Her habits were hard. She was drunk when I met her and drunk when we went back to the place she was sharing and tried to fuck on a mattress on the floor and she at least became drunk every time I saw her but one. After she moved into her own place and asked me to come see it, a smaller and even more dingy apartment than the first, and there I saw her drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine. We stumbled out into a blizzard, on our way to a bar, and she threw up in the snow. It seemed an act as natural and obtrusive to her as a hiccup, and the vomit wasn’t much different to look at than the wine had been and it seemed somehow pretty in the snow the way sometimes blood can be pretty.

That was the second or third time I saw her and I saw her only half a dozen times spread out over the course of two years, and that first time was the only time I tried to do anything more than kiss her.

And that first time didn’t go well.

It was a one bedroom apartment shared and her roommate was already asleep on the bed and K told me to be quiet so as not to wake that girl. We undressed as quietly as we could on the mattress in the dark on the floor.

We’d met in a bar. She came up to me. I thought this was what she wanted. I was amazed and frightened by the idea that things could happen so easily though it had stopped feeling easy even as it continued to happen.

Something mechanical had slipped into it and all I could read off of it then was a sort of sense of doubt on her end but I’ve come to recognize it was like resignation.

I couldn’t really appraise her but I wanted to. I wanted to see her body moving. I wanted to admire her breasts, her collarbones, her x.

“If [] wakes up and sees what we’re doing, she’ll kill me,” she said.

I went down on her for a little while and something stirred in me but as soon as I drew my head away I felt as if I hadn’t been there at all. I was half excited at best and just opening the condom killed that.

“Let me help you,” she said. She went down on me. I couldn’t see it and I wanted to and I couldn’t really feel it. I wanted badly to grasp what she was doing and who she was and, for that matter, who I was myself in that situation, but I couldn’t grasp anything.

I was kneeling there, feeling desperate and sort of alone.
I asked her to sit up beside me.
She came up and I put my hands on her shoulders.
She said, “Are we going to pray now?”
That was pretty much the end of that.

We went back through the tiny living room into the tiny kitchen. It was very late. She showed me a painting she had done. I remember there was a cowboy nude save his hat and boots and a sky of all these different colors, some kind of surreal southwestern scene. It looked like nothing she could have done.

Then she was kneeling on the floor, digging out a pan from beneath the stove. Without turning to me, she said, “You know, I didn’t bring you here because I wanted to fuck you.” I was watching her ass and thinking about the painting and knowing as you always should know that there are things you might have gotten that you didn't get and never will.

S

2005-05-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

She had a boyfriend and a child. I was young myself and I can’t remember if the child had been born of that boyfriend.

This is the first lover after I lost my first real lover. I was twenty I met her at the university theatre box office where I worked. She was a student, and a class required her to see a play. Her little boy, I remember his name, he was with her and sick and he vomited on the carpet while she was buying her ticket. She was embarrassed but only slightly and I admired the vulnerability of her in that moment and also the strength. She asked me for paper towels and I brought them out of the booth.

This is a woman who looked like Joan Jett—the subject of my first masturbatory fantasies—with her black hair and dark eyes. I’d see her after the fucking, twice in fact, but only by accident, and she was more beautiful both times, the way a woman is most beautiful when you are saying goodbye.

She lived in student housing with this boyfriend whose name I also remember. He was gone for the weekend and she was one of those women who no matter how perfect—if there is such a thing—has moved into that phase with her man where he wants something different but thinks what he wants is just something more from her. So he tells her he wishes her breasts were larger or her middle less thick; he curses the length of her legs or construction of her nose.

And I was one of the men on the outside who couldn’t believe that he’d said anything like that about her because I found her breasts so perfectly fitted and her belly so taunt. Of course she was looking for a man who could see her like that.

And neither of us were probably far enough along in our understandings of the world or ourselves to realize that if we bound ourselves together we eventually would end up in the same boat as she was with her boyfriend, that we'd embrace that cycle just as they had.

There was a list on her refrigerator, the goals of her life and they were simple and earnest and she if accomplished them her life would be nondescript but good.

We tried fucking first in the bathtub but that didn’t work and then it was her bed. I was never unaware that a child slept in the next room but I was much calmer and more confidant with her than I had been with M in my previous and at that time only other genuine sexual relationship, one in which I was never sure of her or myself.

S and I, it was the first time that I fucked all night, with those pauses between coming and re-penetration when you lie side by side touching just the shoulder or the palm and telling things about yourself, stories from your childhood, fears about your future. Where you close your eyes when she speaks so you can picture what she is talking about. That kind of intimacy.

Once, the boy woke startled and she brought him in and held him for awhile and she was so natural with him and so suddenly adult again that I worried and began to feel I didn’t belong there.

Outside, it had started to snow. This was the night I somehow learned to keep myself from coming, and often I would stare out the window and the falling clumps which were, in their way, hypnotic. I remember that best, and certain songs on the radio, and how we went on and on and how since it was all still so fresh to me we seemed to be trying everything, every position, every combination of limb and torso and x. There is nothing specific I can say I remember learning that night but when it was over I felt I’d learned a lot.

At dawn, I walked beneath her window through the drifted snow, these heavy short steps in that cold, and perhaps an addiction is born or realized there. I wanted to see in but could not and I imagined that she was beneath the blankets, warm and at ease, smiling faintly, beginning to slip into sleep.

I don’t know what kind of vanity it is but I’ve never liked a lover to walk me to the door. I don’t know what kind of problem in my emotion and psychological makeup it is, but I like sometimes best that moment of parting, when I’m alone, but not far from her, when I’m moving off into the world but my life rewound by only a few instants would put me against her again.

n

2005-05-08T17:06:00.000-07:00

I thought when it came to N I’d write about the consummation, but what I want to write about is where it sort of begin, two years before, when she was still married and maybe even meant to keep it that way. Then we always met in bars because are actions were limited there and we were trying to limit what we did.

Sometimes we ended up sitting in her car, and what I remember best is the first time, when she was wearing a wide belt that I can still picture. What I remember is how it seemed to me, separating her shirt from her flesh and flattening my hand on her tiny belly, how it felt pushing beneath the waistband of her jeans and the thin line of her panty and that not undone belt, like some magic trick our bodies had contrived, the burying of some part of me in some part of her without even unfastening a button.

People were wandering by, just torsos from my vantage, their shirts and swinging arms, jewelry standing out along neck lines, their mumbled voices, and in our bubble, we couldn’t care and we didn’t stop.

What I remember then aside from that generalized and focused hunger is that I was asking myself why she was doing this, what she wanted from me. What I doubted was that it could be so simple as just my finger. As just my lips. Any part of me like that.

What does she do this for?

It’s a good question always, one I am habituated to by now, one that is like a mantra, a chant, but that’s the first time I remember asking it. In those days before her marriage unwound, before I returned to the city and we wrote words on the beach and fucked on her couch, in those days of the genesis of our intimacy, I tried to know why she’d let me do this. Or anything like it.

Why any woman would.

It took years for me to invert the question and begin to wonder why I want to.

We’re finger fucking in her car and I’m fairly young and her divorce is in front of her and so too are both of mine. People are wandering, all of them carnal to some degree or another, all them capable of finger fucking in a car and full on fucking on a couch and every kind of fucking you can imagine, in every kind of context you can imagine, these people that at the time were unreal, ghostlike, all of them having come from and going toward moments of penetration and orgasm and un-intertwining.

And when I think about it now, all of this desire, I realize that all of us, by instinct, were connection addicts, that almost all of us, we’re almost always fixated on trying to know and be known, as if something in that will save us.

And maybe it will.

r

2005-05-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

So try to write about love when you write about sex.
Try to write about loss when you write about penetration.
Try to make one of your anecdotes go all the way. Backstory. Beginning. Middle. End. Epilogue. Try to suggest not just plot but theme; not just incident but the emotional complexity of even a single moment.

Beginning: Why don’t you talk about the firs time you fucked, if you can remember that, and you can. Was there any prophecy in it? If you could see that future, would you accept it?

End: Or why don't you write about the last time you fucked, if fucking was what it was then. Was there any peace in it?

Middle: Or why don't you write about one of those middle times after she left and came back or you did. That particular way of re-bonding.

(You thought you’d save this vagina for lasts because it hurts the most.)

It can be said with certainty that I’ve been in few girls deeper and it can be truly said as well that few girls have gotten that far into me. The vacuum of her absence, the one I begged for, the one I demanded.

Write about a time when you literally weren’t in her at all.

Write about the time when things still seemed innocuous. When nobody was going to get pleased terribly much. When nobody was going to get hurt very badly. Write about a time before addiction.

We climbed to the top of a half renovated ancient building. This was in a Mediterranean town that had know war but now the neighborhood was fashionable and had become a club district. A Friday or a Saturday night. All along the street below the boys and girls walked from neon lit doorman to neon lit doorman, the lines of slowly moving cars, the sounds of laughter. This is a place where everyone wants to be pretty and pretty much everyone is. This is the spoiled generation that comes after the generation of those that suffered too much and wanted their children not to suffer at all. She was part of it and I was more a long term tourist and when it was all said and done we merged for awhile those two worlds.

We climbed the old building, stuck in the middle of all this progress, this building trying to reemerge, pockmarked with bullets from rifles that have been broken, this building of crumbling and new walls, of half completed staircases and haphazard ladders. Getting to the top was like solving a puzzle. Was like wandering away from the Minotaur.

We did it because at that point in our relationship we did dangerous things that didn’t seem that dangerous. Then there we were looking down on those people we had been amongst and would be amongst again.

We stood on the ledge but I don’t know why. I suppose because one always looks for the next step. It was cooler up there and she was afraid at first. Eventually--my idea or hers, I can’t remember--she unzipped my pants and took out my x and kissed my mouth hard as she stroked me. When I came, it was off the side, into the air, into that nothingness.

(Try to make something of that, in this blog about vaginas, this moment that seems to have nothing to do with hers).

Things happened from there. All of them are worth writing about, or none of them are and every word of any of those stories bothers me.

Epilogue: and nobody I know like that lived happily ever after, or happily even for long, but we all know that's ok.

v

2005-05-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

She was older, a tall girl, Japanese and Polynesian. We were in the same graduate program. This was in Southern California and during a class break I sat beside her on a bench beneath a palm and she said to me, I want you stop it.

And I said, What?

And she said, Relating to me in that way.

And I said, In what way.

(And God’s truth, I didn’t know.)

She took off her sunglasses and said, Sexually. Stop relating to me sexually.

(And God’s truth, it didn’t seem to me that I ever had.)

Perhaps it was two weeks later that we fucked. She took a shower first. She was a tall girl, from money, and the money showed in the way she dressed, in the style of her hair, her sunglasses, in how she walked, even. My apartment was very small: just a bed, a desk, half a refrigerator, a dresser, and a tiny bathroom, which was dirty. She showered because her period had just gotten over and she wanted to feel clean.

I was in over my head, in this girl, in this city, this kid from the country going to a private university on student loans, showing up in his cowboy boots and sport jacket with the pockets still sewn shut. It was ten years ago. I was twenty two. This was a time when you might still be able to call me innoccent.

I knew nothing about what I knew about seduction. Everything was accident then.

There was a moment while we were fucking when I knew I had to begin to stop but for reasons I can’t remember or fathom or at least can’t capture, I chose to go forward. And then I was coming and she was pressing my torso against her torso. It was the middle of the afternoon, but dark in my room, the single window, the heavy curtain.

Later, she asked me why. She wanted me to tell her that I came in her x because of some irresistible pull within her. In fact, I wanted to tell her something like that. It was probably the truth. But I gave no answer.

She’d brought me things, a basket of food. She’d let me drive her BMW. Her teeth were faded, the only part of her that seemed out of synch. Everything with her happened beneath the surface; I never knew where anything was going. It would get heavy between us and eventually break. She’d move out of her boyfriend’s apartment and I’d try to re-bond with my long distance girlfriend at the same time. We were at cross purposes.

Perhaps a year later, we forced a dinner together, then a fucking in the hot tub on the roof of her building, but everything was behind us and we were just going through the motions and there wasn’t even anything left to be sad about.

That first time, we lie there on the bed in the shadow of the curtain in the middle of the day and she said again, I’m not mad, I just want to know why you came inside me.

b

2005-05-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

She'd called me angel, once. I suppose that was what it was all about for me.

This was in California and my apartment was on the seventh floor. We gone on a drink date and now were moving with unexpected speed through the undressing. She seemed the type of girl that it would take more time with. I removed her panties and she was still and she told me something I couldn’t hear and I felt around and found the string of her tampon. It came out easily, and there was something satisfying about that, the way you feel when you remove a splinter or an ingrown hair. I threw it out the window into the dark.

She said she was a virgin and I said that to fuck, then, would be overly heavy.

A Pepperdine student with a lot of hair framing her face, a girl who knew how to wear her makeup and how to talk to boys, or at least to boys like me.

She kneeled on my thighs and sucked my x with persistence and consistency, in the manner of those girls who think it is ok to give head but not fuck and so have sucked a lot.

I hardly ever come in a woman’s mouth but there seemed nothing else to do. This was what passed for restraint on a night like that.

It was close to Thanksgiving. She was lonely, having just come out of a serious relationship breakup, I think. Me, I was an angel, and we were going to spend the holiday together. We weren’t supposed to be in this position so soon but we were in it just the same and even as I watched her work against me I knew that we weren’t going to make it past this night.

You never know how you feel about a girl until the first time you come with her and even before I came I saw all the ways I’d tricked myself into thinking even halfway seriously about her.

She wanted to stay the night, and on my bargain store double bed, I slept as far away from her as I could, aware of the weight of her and aware of her innocence to all the things that had changed.

I was in a period of blue during which nothing was quite working.

I was defunct and that bed was all I had—all through the day and night, the television played on a cardboard box at its foot. Some girl with me sometimes. It was a haunted place of reruns and talk shows and succubus and flesh, the sheets growing stale, my life growing stale, the bed itself becoming taunt like a springboard that will not for much longer bend.

I knew better, that this wasn’t the girl for me, but she’d called me angel and there we were.

T

2005-04-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

Her husband was fucking H, an ex lover turned half friend who was for this scenario supposed to be my girlfriend. I was fucking her, a Latina woman named T. This was in their basement on a sheet she had laid out on the floor. This was all the result of a curiosity about a phone personals swinger site. After a few calls, we’d met in a bar, H and me and the husband and T. I think H thought she was going to get to fuck the girl, which is something she always enjoyed, but it wasn’t about that for me. To work, this had to be a straight across swap—I had long since finished with H sexually.

T had a beautiful body, all pliable muscle, one of those asses, two of those breasts. Her husband and H were panting away in the dark but it didn’t matter to me. I’d lifted T’s dress off over her head. I’d touched her belly. She’d unzipped my pants and appraised and touched my x.

Now I was inside of her and I realized that as much as anything, people do what this couple was doing because they want to connect with other people. She was beneath me and we were fucking but it was more than that.

Perhaps it was half an hour, forty five minutes. Sometimes, almost no matter what, when you are with a girl, you feel like you love her; you are fucking her and looking into her eyes and you think, I love you, and you might even accidentally say it. It was as an especially strong urge with her and I wanted her to have it with me. We begin whispering things, about each other’s bodies, about beauty, about the quality of the sex. I asked her her middle name and she told me it and I told her mine.

Something had gone wrong between H and the husband. She wasn’t attracted. She was jealous on my behalf. She was just going through the motions. He had come and wanted to start again and she said they ought not. He called his wife away, whispering her name sharply in the dark. We were lost in each other. It took us a minute to un-intertwine.

The parting was soon after and awkward. In the mirror at home I found her blue eye-liner had stained my cheek and I knew I’d never see her again or have her completely and what I felt was hungry and sad.

v

2005-04-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

The first time you fuck, it’s drunk, and even then you know there’s something about her. This petite woman, Vietnamese, with her marble eye staring, a girl who can come and come and come again, wound so jackinthebox tight that it takes only a dozen or so strokes, the breathes you push into a balloon when it is almost full already.

She is content with you on top, a vision of near submission, doing all the real work of the fuck, all the work that is meant more for the brain than the body, the movement of her eyes, the way they fix, the opening of her mouth, the turn of her head, the raising of cords along her throat.

You are divided between her and her friend, two girls exactly opposite in frame and bearing and conversation. You want to think that you don’t have to choose. You want to think that you can bounce back and forth so often and so well that one day the three of you will walk the streets hand in hand.

You look down at her, V, beneath you, your x going into her x, coming out, her mouth opening wider, the rolling of her eyes. This fucking suggests a certain kind of addiction you mean to mostly ignore. On the second night, between sessions, you roll over on your back and she rolls her little frame atop of you.

You’re quiet, she tells you.
There’s nothing left to say, you answer.
And you feel like you can hear her mind searching in the dark.

In the morning, her little hand on your chest, she says, After all this, how it was, you’re not going to sleep with anybody else are you?

And she means K. They keep no secrets.

And you’re looking at the ceiling, you’re feeling her bed beneath you, you’re thinking how at this moment, how all through the night, this feels just right, feels just fine, feels like a choice, and you think about how later in the day, that will be gone, like the angles of her face in the morning sun.

Y

2005-04-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

I told her I’d watch her purse “like a hawk” while we danced but somebody stole it. She had a baby doll face, and that’s what I liked about her.

I was on a numbed and noisy journey away from a girl that I loved, a sort of panic run across the country, resting, if you can call that rest, at a dance club in a city where I had friends.

We met the next day for lunch, and in the sunlight, her face was not as impressive, her body slack. I’d stayed an extra day for this. When we fucked, she was the girl from the night before, the one whose hips and ass were tightly wound in her party dress, with her eyes and lips perfectly painted, the girl whose purse I’d let get snatched. That’s what I imagined as the sun fell and we undressed on her living room floor.

There was a hunger to her, when she sucked my x, the way she bit and scratched and even tore at me, as if there was something she wanted to get more of, or get at all. She was sitting on the couch with her abdomen thrust off of it so that I could fuck her.

I remember her panting and the darkness of her eyes and the way she peered at me.

I remember that she bit her own lips when I leaned away from her and that often she leaned toward me, doubled up

Her breasts were fake; hard, round, not so large, but unexpected. I’m pretty sure I’ve never touched breasts like that before. It didn’t bother me, or overly please me. I liked them best in that dress the night before, beneath her baby face, her baby teeth smile.

a.

2005-04-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

A barmaid.
Men always want women in the service industry.
You like to watch them at their craft. You see her bend in her black slacks. You see the eyes of the other patrons following her. This nearly eternal atmosphere of desire.

She said early on that her breasts were perfect, and, in fact, they were.

You watch her in her red shirt and think: I’ll never have that.
And then you have it.
And after it is gone, long gone, you want it again.

A girl with a boyfriend she half pretended not to have.

The first time was in my office, past dark, the afterfiveabadonned feel. There was a blizzard, the snow coming down so hard it made me think in the back of my mind that we might not be able to leave.

Florescent lights. Nobody likes to be looked at like that. Not the first time. I turned them off. It felt like we were doing something bad in our snow cave in the dark. The computer screen, in glowed the screensaver glow. Both of us are cheaters.

The chair was as low as it would go and she sat back in it with her pelvis to the front and she looked very small and pretty. She sat there bare from the waist down, her knees open, her shirt on, her face open and expectant. In some way or another, a picture of it would have passed for innocence.

I kneeled.

She told me her period was nearly over. Her eyes are blue and she is a vegetarian. There would be other times. The last time I saw her, it was by accident in a bar. She was with her boyfriend and a girl I’d only met once but who had to pretend to be my lover so that the boyfriend wouldn’t grow suspicious. All of them smelled of garlic and we had to drink together. .

In my office, my x coming in and out of her looked to be covered with blood. It was too early between us for something like that. I began to want to get it over with. All through the fucking, I was thinking of the blizzard. I was thinking of the blood.

I began to hurry. I forgot to memorize her body. I forgot to create moments I could revisit later, sitting at her bar, watching her when she seemed impossible to touch. Later, on different occasions, I’d create those pictures.

When were finished, in the bathroom, my x was clean, depending on what you mean by clean, and I realized the blood I thought I’d seen wasn’t blood at all, only shadow.