Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
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On our first date (which took place in my bedroom, which is always a good sign), we spent a couple of hours talking about the unsexiest things we could think of. That time, a decade ago, when I had kidney stones. His recent treatment for rectal cancer. Getting The Applause from MisterHotPostiveLoad. The fact that Zach (the new guything...which is an incredible step up from the previous boything) has also slept with MisterHotPositiveLoad, but he didn't get The Applause. But he did get crabs. "And not hermit crabs." He said. "Alaskan King Crabs. The bitches braided my pubes with one claw, and tickled my ass with the other. These were some seriously gifted crabs."
Is it wrong that I was turned on by our conversation? I assumed our discussion was leading nowhere. That I wasn't his type. Who talks about STDs and medical mishaps as foreplay? Apparently, us. I was so shocked by his tongue, and the feel of his hands on my face (though, that had a bit to do with my having shaved off my beard for the first time in fourish years), that I banged my head against the wall next to my bed. And, of course, my sheets and bedspread got all twisted and misplaced before we were even doing anything interesting with our bodies. And thanks to my roommate's inner-senior citizen, our house is always incredulously cold (heat's expensive! wear a sweater!). So when Zach said I should probably get the condoms, I got my right ankle all twisted in the covers, and whoof! Down I went on the marble floor, which was not what I'd intended to go down on. I got up, uninjured, secured condoms and lube, and we got into the sex. And it was good. A couple of days later, we were invited to one of my friend, Emily,'s parties. Zach, being the only person I've ever maybedated that she has ever approved of. On our way home, he got real quiet, and said, "I have something to tell you." And, certainly he couldn't be into me, I'm not his type, he felt sorry for me; these could be the only things he'd have to say. I recognized his tone of voice. I was thinking Sexual Karma 76, Self-Esteem 0. "There's no way for this to come out right." God damn it. "My doctor wants me to thank you." Huh? "Huh?" "Well, you know, I have the whole rectal cyst thing, and...well...since you fucked me, I had the first solid stool I've had in six months." So. Very. Awkward. And yet, somehow adorable.
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When airing dirty laundry, make sure to describe it properly. No, I didn't break up with my most recent ex because he slept on Pokemon sheets, they were just one of the many neon signals that we weren't a good match. The manipulative lying, the partial indecisiveness (he couldn't complete anything), and the fact that all of my friends have been telling me for over a year to get around him were other factors. Also, technically, he dumped me. Via e-mail. Twatwaffle.
The Pokemon sheets were a factor, though. Eleven year age differences are entirely too much to deal with, which is why the guy I'm currently crushinating on, is only nine years younger than me. Shut up. As it turns out Zack and I have much in common. We've both lived in Arizona, we both hate nice people, we've both slept with Mr. Hot Positive Load (though only one of us got The Applause), we both love watching trainwreck comedy, and we're both awesome. You have no idea what a relief it is to spend hours talking with a guy, have sex, and not immediately start writing a bad_sex entry in my head. Although... After we got done, in the midst of perhaps the best cuddle of the current millennium, Zack said "I have something I want to say, but there's no way for it not to be weird." I knew this was too perfect to be real. "Thank you." Awww. "You know," I said, "on the list of weird things people have said to me in bed, that doesn't even rate." He giggled. "Hot positive load." "I once dated a guy who said 'You're better than my brother.'" More giggling. And then we give each other walking tours of our previous lust lives, mine ending with Sora. "I mean, the Pokemon sheets. Pokemon. I asked if he had anything that wouldn't make me feel like a child molester, and he mentioned having Digimon sheets. Which is less okay. Anyhow, sex with him was weird anyway. He was really good at it, but whenever he came, he used to say 'Squirtle!'"* And then we laughed until the sun crawled in through the window, desperate to explore the gaps between my chin and his neck, and the knot of our fingers. *-this is not true, at all For years, I've had a No Fly Over rule with another gay, redheaded poet from Boston, Asterisk. This rule made dating in Boston increasingly difficult, as he has slept with everyone who's ever even thought the word Boston. It's one of the reasons I'm glad things with Ben never worked out.
A few months ago, Ben, Asterisk, and I were involved in a spoken word show. Among the crowd was an amazingly hot guy that Ben was trying to bang. "He grew up in France." Ben said. "He was going to be a prostitute, but he had a curfew." When Asterisk started hitting on said Curfew Boy, I was legally obligated to chastise him. He and Ben had both ripped me apart over Sora, who was eighteen to my twenty-nine. Asterisk was comfortably in his thirties, and Curfew Boy was eighteen. Barely. And, despite some major triangle trauma (by the time it happened, I was, fortunately, well out of range), Asterisk ended up with the guy for the night. (Ben ended up getting him several times later.) But before Ben slept with him, Asterisk was chiding him about how good Curfew Boy was in bed. "Man, that kid's ass tasted like gold." "Eww." I said. "Who wants to lick gold? Now, if his ass had tasted like Golden Grahams, you just get me a spoon and some milk, and I'll be over that." Yesterday, I was cutting my nails in the house of a thousand mirrors, when I tripped over a black cat, and dominoed each of the thousand ladders I was walking under into each of the mirrors. I opened up my umbrella to beat away the bats and owls, and the three butterflies who were flapping around my head. I am tempted to blame the pussy for all my bad luck, but, really, there is enough blame to go around.
It is not often that I'm left speechless. I've got words for just about everything. They say certain Inuit tribes have over one hundred and fifty words for snow. The Swahili language has no word for boredom. And, according to various websites and books, there are a variety of languages that don't have a direct translation for love. Which makes me wonder if they're inundated with thousands of words to describe manipulative, lying ex-boyfriends. If not, they can borrow a few of mine.
Thanks to an internet stalker friend, I started a profile on what is, essentially, fagspace. Even the coding is similar to Myspace. So, instantly, I hated it. When I, further, discovered that they have old school AOL-style chatrooms, I contemplated deleting my account all together. And then I started talking with a cute guy, who was Interesting and Interested, and that was all fine, well, and good. Later, while I was putting up some pictures, I got an IM from someone familiar looking. Maybe someone from the poetry scene, or the comic book store. A passing acquaintance. One that I had possibly imagined naked. We were small talking about Boston, and why he hates it, and why I love it, when I asked him why he left. "I'm more of a small town guy." He said. "Too many people in the city know me, or think they know me, and things get really awkward." I decided not tell him "You do look kind of familiar." Damn it, fingers, don't type without consulting my brain. He sighed. (We were chatting via webcam, so I could see him. {Don't judge me! I have three hundred and fortyteen words for fuck off.}) "You probably know me from the clubs. I used to be a gogo dancer." No. "I don't go to clubs. I must have just seen you around." And we small talked, and he asked me if I minded if he friended me. Of course, I didn't. So when the invitation came, I clicked on his profile, and...and then I knew. I can't imagine there are too many inoffensive ways to say "On my bookshelf, I have four DVDs of you getting fucked. Including a birthday orgy scene, where you were, by the way, amazing." So, I'm speechless, because, believe it or not, porn stars intimidate me. Not because of their huge cocks, or perfect asses (I have ninety-twelve hundred words for those...some of them overlap with the words for ex-boyfriends); I am intimidated because I know that they've had better looking, better endowed, paid professionals in their ass. And knowing things like that is much different than imagining things like that, suspecting things like that, or being told things like that. I know exactly what frequency he moans in when he means it. And, if the whole derivation of porn names is true, I know the name of his first pet, and what street he lived on as a kid. And I want to move to that street. I want to find thirtyleven words for the way his bare feet scraped against the cracked pavement, twenty-twodred ways to describe the way the air smelled the first time he noticed his neighbor's cleft chin, surely the trees in his neighborhood have an infinite amount of terms for the way he peeled back their bark with his fingers. Understand, I don't have very many words for love, and none of them describe the way I feel for this guy who's real name I just learned, at all. How (fill in one of the thirtillion words for desperately naive stupidity brought about by the confusions of lust and love here) do you think I am? The word for the way I feel is a lust I am all too not unfamiliar with. And I am acquainted with more variations of the feeling of lust than heterosexual male teenagers have words for breasts. Recently, my lust was called into question by Sora, who never did get a grip on the way I felt about him, so he let me slip between his fingers. As though love and lust were like binary. There is only 0 and 1, there is no 3.14etc. Square roots are right out! And since his language had no direct equivalent for my feelings, he could never hear them quite right. All my explanations were babble and gobbledy-greek. They say that when your ears ring, you are hearing that frequency for the last time in your life. It's the sound of a frayed nerve ending giving out. From that point on, every middle G sharp will sound just a little bit flatter to you. You will probably never notice this. There are fifteen foursand things I would have liked to express each time Sora and I have said goodbye. They all mean something like fuck you and please don't leave. What they boil down to is "I'm sorry that you were never able to be honest with me, though really, I shouldn't be the one apologizing since that isn't my fault; and fault isn't exactly the right word there, but language is weak and cowardly sort of like packing up all your belongings and moving while I was out of state; or the way you only really talked with me when you were drunk; and precisely the way a goodbye e-mail feels the day after you left with my come on your ass and a smile on your lips like nothing was wrong anymore." I don't want to name that feeling after him. He has already infected too much of my vocabulary. His name already too reggaeton. The last thing I said to him, not knowing anything was wrong, was "I love you." May those words ring in his ears until he can never hear them again. |
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