Let’s Talk About Sex

I’ve had some kind of sex with a lot of men. Most of them were filler and if I’d never done it with them, I wouldn’t have missed a thing.

Filler, like when you eat all the bread at the table waiting for the meal you really want to arrive. And by the time your real food shows up, you’ve ruined your appetite and can’t really enjoy your meal the way you would have if you hadn’t stuffed down all those rolls and garlic bread and so on [thinly disguised metaphor].

Filler, like when televised awards shows have some appropriately dressed rando sits in an empty seat¹I know this is a good analogy; a creative writing mentor stole it and used in in a piece she published in a respected lit journal. She said I should be flattered, that my writing was good enough to steal. I was not. Also, that is not exactly an apology.

In undergrad, another writing mentor wrote a sparkling recommendation letter for my grad school applications which included not exactly a backhanded compliment, but outing me while praising me. Jodi has completed a brilliant memoir about her years in the sex industry. I had, that’s true. But it was also under a pseudonym, Buick McKane (thank you, Mark Bolan) which as my mentor, she knew––and we shared the same literary agent who didn’t like the name I’d chosen and we’d discussed that. Her defense was it was time for me to be out and public about my history in the sex business.

Both compliments I could have done without. Both apologies that never came.

(even if someone has just gone to the bathroom!) until they come back so the home audience doesn’t see an empty seat. Done to create the illusion of a party, a happening, of popularity [another thinly disguised metaphor].

What Happens When The One That Got Away, Comes Back?

Do you even wonder what if the one that got away, came back? Forty years after my one that got away, got away, he called again. He’d been my actual boyfriend, and I’d been drunk through the entire relationship. I was drunk pretty much through everything from age 13-33, though, so it’s not you, it’s me, applied in pretty much all situations. Mom had always held him––let’s call him Bobby, because his name was Bobby––up as the good one. I’d seen it that way too and always felt I owed him an amends, the way you do when you’re sober and working what is known in recovery circles as the 8th and 9th steps. I didn’t know what to do with anyone who treated me well at that point. He brought me small peach-colored tea roses regularly, to which I said: Thanks. I really love white roses you know. I generally took him for granted, treated him badly (I thought) and pushed him to be violent.

The call was not what I would have expected. I made my amends and as it happens some times in these casesl, he told me some things about myself back then that I’d forgotten. The time we were fucking in a friends house and as soon as we were done, I grabbed my clothes, walked out of the room, and joined the crowd downstairs, leaving him there. I’d heard that before, in college. Apparently I left certain young boy in my car––we’ll call him Norm––I left this boy a little confused, because when we were done screwing, I grabbed my clothes and left the car, going back to join the crowd inside. Done, in both instances would mean the man had reached climax. Maybe I had. I was drunk and don’t remember, but my job was done.

I’d tried to explain to Bobby Who-Got-Away that for most of my life, certainly my teens and twenties, my only language was sex and seduction. It was what I was good at, what I knew how to do. I listened and learned and did things other girls wouldn’t. I did things young boys had never experienced before. I know because years later, when we were well past any sexual tension, after I’d been sober for a while, some of them have told me. Revelations that I was “the only one” or “the first one” usually preceding a weak attempt at a booty call, a sequel to our one-off, a second coming if you will, that I had no interest in.

Sex was my language, so when it was done, I was out of conversation. Imagine yourself in a foreign country where you speak only a handful of situation specific phrases: Where is the bathroom? How much is that puppy in the window? Is this gluten-free? Thank you. You’re welcome. Once you run through those, and everyone else at the table or party is still chatting away in that language you don’t understand, you drift away. Sometimes physically, looking for another group to show your linguist party tricks to, or in my case, the bar. Sometimes you drift away emotionally, shutting down, getting quiet, busying yourself with a cocktail in my case, hoping no one notices you have nothing else to contribute. That was me. If I’d already seduced you, fucked you, played with some boy body part you were not used to having a girl play with; if you’d already come, if it looked like I did, well, the conversation was over and it was time to go find a drink. Or a drug. Or something to entertain myself with. Even if I was crazy about you, like I was with Bobby Who-Brings-Tea-Roses, sex was my only language. But, I didn’t know that then. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have any idea how to say that, or that I even could say that. If I had been aware of it, I’d probably just feel even worse about myself. There is a upside to denial.

Sex was my Superpower

I thought of myself as a libertine, a bohemian, a wild untamable thing. I would tell you that getting me into bed was didn’t come with bragging rights, it was no great accomplishment.  Getting me to stay with you, well that was something. But, I wasn’t wild, or fearless or bold. The truth of it was I had no other way to feel good about myself. I believed I was unlovable and the answer was: keep moving. Like a magician using misdirection and sleight of hand, I’d learned to not only fool you, but fool myself.

I didn’t even really know what a libertine was.

Wikipedia defines libertine as “a person devoid of most moral principles, a sense of responsibility, or sexual restraints, who sees these traits as unnecessary or undesirable, and is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour observed by the larger society.” They cite the Marquis de Sade, Jim Morrison, Anton Szandor La Vey, and Aleister Crowley as examples. “The values and practices of libertines…are described as an extreme form of hedonism. Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses.”

So, maybe I did know, because in retrospect, that seems pretty like a pretty accurate description and much nicer that “self-destructive.”

Being drunk and high is not great for the memory cells. I started keeping a list when I began to struggle to remember the less memorable of my “lovers²Lovers sounds so much more like a concious choice, rather than a default I’m Just a Gal Who Can’t Say No There’s Another Notch on the Bedpost..” What began as a numbered list on a single page a journal grew to multiple pages, which I then went back and notated with where, when, how many times, and other details. It currently lives in an Excel spreadsheet that is sortable and color-coded.

Even with the list, I’m unsure, and feel badly for some of them that wind up with stuff in the notes column, because yes, of course there is a notes column:

• Brad? Is that right? (I have no idea who this is)
• Darren the hot cop goes in here somewhere
• The Italian was in here somewhere, no English at all
• JMR goes in here somewhere, 1985 maybe? (Initials only because we are still in contact now and then)
• Chinga goes in here somewhere. (He’s dead, so I can’t ask)
• Cal? Some time before I got sober and after he did, but before he died.
• Are Bosco and Leroy the same person?
• The lifeguard from Omega, who was either Michael Potter or John.
• Jerry Bierwieler? Where does he go?

In any discussion or article about how many partners³ Although really, very few on the list could be classified as partners, more like Dicks That Passed in the Night should a woman or man have (although men still get an entirely different reputation as their total grows) I know that my number had already exceded what was considered acceptable in polite society by the time I got out of high school.  And I graduated early. That list consists of a couple of hundred bells that cannot be unrung and only a small handful worth remembering.

What About the One That Got Away?

Bobby of the Tea Roses. Bobby Who-Got-Away. Bobby who my mother thought was my last chance at someone decent. We’d met when I was still in my teens. When he contacted me via LinkedIn and we finally made contact we were both well into our fifties and there was a sweetness to the surprise of it. A closing of a circle. I could make amends, apologize, we would laugh about who we were back then and smile at who’d we become. But we’d become very different people, not just from who we were then, but who we are now.

Instead of a call from an old friend, it was the booty call that came forty years later. Forty years too late. What made me feel lovable and essential in my teens and twenties had, thank goodness and after a lot of work, changed. I talked about sex having been my only language, he talked having jerked off to the memory of us for decades. I talked about the lovely roses, he talked about only having been there for the sex, the roses a barter. I asked about his wife and kids, and he suggested we have sex one more time, “for closure.”

Rather than the one who got away, he was Bobby The-Bullet-I-Dodged. A sweet boy, he had grown into a crude man. I am grateful to not have been around for that and that I have a different measure for what is and is not flattering these days. And that I had the skills to be able track down his home address, his wife, her work, and her old high school friends––it took me 18 minutes. I never used that information, but it got him to back off.

I was angry. Not because of the booty call, but I have so very few nice memories of those days and he’d taken away what had been a very nice memory, a fantasy that I hadn’t been entirely broken then. That I had attracted at least one decent guy, that at least one of my relationships was really a relationship. He shattered that.

I’ve never told my mother. I saw no reason to steal any more sweet memories, dementia was going to take them all eventually.

• 1
  I know this is a good analogy; a creative writing mentor stole it and used in in a piece she published in a respected lit journal. She said I should be flattered, that my writing was good enough to steal. I was not. Also, that is not exactly an apology.
  
  In undergrad, another writing mentor wrote a sparkling recommendation letter for my grad school applications which included not exactly a backhanded compliment, but outing me while praising me. Jodi has completed a brilliant memoir about her years in the sex industry. I had, that’s true. But it was also under a pseudonym, Buick McKane (thank you, Mark Bolan) which as my mentor, she knew––and we shared the same literary agent who didn’t like the name I’d chosen and we’d discussed that. Her defense was it was time for me to be out and public about my history in the sex business.
  
  Both compliments I could have done without. Both apologies that never came.
  
  
• 2
  Lovers sounds so much more like a concious choice, rather than a default I’m Just a Gal Who Can’t Say No There’s Another Notch on the Bedpost.
• 3
  Although really, very few on the list could be classified as partners, more like Dicks That Passed in the Night