I've Grown Accustomed to Your Cock (erotic memoir, edit 1)

The truth is Garth’s cock is in a class of its own and it moves me as none other. Mark’s balls have no separation between them and are positioned in a taut horizontal line. Even when I am away from Garth, if I sit still, I can visualize his cock in 3D, his spreading balls and cock resting on its bed of orange. But he has cast me out too many times and I need a man’s mouth and the softness of his lips, tonguing my way down his chest, past his abdomen and directly to his cock. Still and always, there is no cock in the world, I swear, like Garth’s. He is not a man to dance with or one who fills up spaces with fancy words. After all these years, he refuses to, cannot, understand me. He’s a hardcore man through and through, yet I have grown, like the song, accustomed to his cock.

I have never escaped. Not even in the giddiest most reckless fuck. Close—nabbed the cell door keys and like a shadow made it to the prison walls, the metal exit door glowing like heaven’s gate. I have yearned so hard I almost levitated. But with music, I slip inside swirling notes and I’m free. Music is my past, present, and future, my bird on the wire. Every Thursday I drop by Shopper’s Drug Mart or Blockbuster for my free copy of NOW magazine.

Morty Koppelt is a skinny little guy who weighs one hundred and thirty-five pounds, one hundred forty, tops. He’s the chief lawyer for the Ministry of Transportation and Frida Koppelt’s husband. When I started training him, I positioned Frida's kitchen chair on a step-up platform, secured a ten-pound Walmart dumbbell to his ankles with his leather work belt, and instructed him to raise and lower his legs to the count of three. We used a can of kosher peas for side laterals. Koppelt’s an opera and chamber music fanatic who scours Whole Note Magazine the way I check out NOW weekly. In between sets, he rests sixty-seconds between each set—he’s a meticulous stretcher even though his house is the messiest I have ever seen with last week’s dishes piled up, pits of laundry like a road under construction, the day’s shoes scattered, left foot in the basement, right foot at the top of the stairs.
“Morty,” I say as his body groans into a low back stretch, “I’d like to start a non-profit.”
“Oh yes?” he says his hands circling around the Smith machine post as he pulls back.
“Sink into the stretch,” I say.
“Like this?” he says and I say “Yes.”
I tell him about The Lapitsky Scholarship Fund. “I want to give back,” I say. “The arts kept me going. You know my story. I don’t have my grandfather’s cash, but I have his heart. You could say, I’m my grandfather’s daughter.”
He tells me to think about my mandate.

I exit the streetcar, check street signs, the flow of traffic, and skyline as my north-south guides and figure I'm on the north-east corner of Queen and Spadina. I've been to Healey’s before, so I know I have to cross the street two times now, west and then south. Lisa says I’m a sure target because I have this dazed look, but I think I go about my life like a tourist. It’s true I have no sense of direction, I’m constantly losing and finding my way and I like that since it gives me new eyes.

In line for James Cotton tickets—one-half hour in a moderate-compared-to-Montreal Toronto winter with my muscles and men’s leather jacket keeping me warm. When Caroline shivers from winter’s sharp edge, bundling herself in her faux-fur trimmed snood and purple winter coat and I talk obtusely about over-heating, she says “that’s because you’re like a dog, only you have muscles.” Her associations make me smile inside and out. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I say, winding my way from the room’s entrance to the line directly beside the left side of the stage. To secure a front spot in a jam-packed house, you have to act like you’ve already got one, someone’s there waiting for you, or you’re on a bee-line to the washroom. Main thing is you walk with purpose, apologizing all the way with no remorse on the inside and hey, isn’t that how I go through life? Though maybe I don’t really apologize, which is one of Garth’s complaints about me—that I don’t apologize or apologize too late or apologize with excuses. I tuck my jacket into my black leather gym bag. A drunk reaches out to grab the lead guitarist’s instrument and I grab the tattooed man’s bony wrist. “I got no feeling left in my arm,” the drunk whines. The bass player raises his eyebrows at the drummer. It’s a builder’s moment.

Intermission—“Isn’t the bass player cute?” says a frizzy-haired chick to no one in particular. “I’m going to have him.” She sways forward. Nearing the bass player, her stride blossoms into a ripe wiggle. I move to the bar. The gym has made me comfortable in my skin. Generally I order one white wine, two max. The whites taste cheap, so I always keep gum in my jean’s pocket. I flex my pecs (for the sake of pecs and not tits) and flare my delts. Subtle flexing is an art. The drummer, wearing a shiny gold chain and cross, orders lemonade.
“Thanks for the wrist thing. Man, you are strong!”
“It was cool, wasn’t it? It was like the Olympics, been training all my bodybuilding life for this moment. My arm was iron, man, one lead pipe. See I’m a certified hypnotist. So you got a witch and builder mix.”
The drummer stares. “My brother, Charles, he’s the bass player, he loved it. I know he wants to thank you. We got this thing, Charles and I, like if he sees you first—can’t have no fighting, two brothers on the road.”
“Seems like you got it all worked out. Still, I mean, where were the bouncers? My ex used to be a bouncer and he and his buddies would’ve been there in a flash. Probably broken the drunk’s wrist, not that he was brutal, he wasn’t wild, you know. He was cold, like a bouncer. But man, that was fun!”

Charles is a short guy with a navy blue cotton kerchief, shoulder length dreads, decent shoulders, also a minor paunch, but builders don’t give a fuck about fat in the off season. He says he’s getting ready for a photo shoot for a new album, blues with a jazz element, can we talk, and do I have a car, because if he could get a lift to his hotel, he’s sharing a room with his brother—we talk awhile and maybe go upstairs to meet his brother. So here I am taking a musician to his hotel and no way am I going to fuck this man.
“You should have taken the broad with the curly hair, man, she wanted you.”
“But I wanted you,” he says and I shake my head, laughing and almost sideswiping the mirror on a parked car.
“You alright?” he says.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. “I’m just not the world’s best driver— look at you, you’re in a car with a lousy driver and a female who’s not going to put out. You should have taken up with that groupie is all I have to say.”
“We’ll see,” he says.
“We will not,” I say and laugh again.

On Lombard Avenie, I park across the street from Quality Inn which is diagonally across from Gilda’s Club. Cancer across the street in a renovated fire hall and I’m sashaying around, hoarding every ounce of available nightlife. I step out of the driver’s side to wish him well.
“Have one?” he says, offering me a green mint.
“Sure.”
“Kiss me,” he says, “c’mon, just a simple kiss, just one.”
There are those chicks who’d fly across hot coals for a musician—skittering across, purse, waving tits, costume jewelry and all. But I’m an impresario and my own groupie. I prefer—I don’t know what except I have no heroes and I like it that way.


Long Distance with MT

I’m knackered on weed and hooked on hardcore. Mark says it gives him a hard-on when he reads my stuff. He thinks I’m composing directly for him and I suppose I am. A dirty scribbler’s got to have a home slice. Soon as I’m home from training the suburban whores, I check my stash of emails and love up these keys. It’s my fix and that’s the fucking truth. It’s like wandering the desert, skin and organs parched, and sighting water shimmering ahead. When the lake is finally within range, I break into a run, flapping my arms like I’m about to take off. I dunk underwater and surface gulping, laughing and whooping. Hot and high writing sex, pissing out words day and night. And coming, well, coming’s a brilliant flash in the pan—it takes you out of this world, earth’s exit swings open, you’re floating and it’s grand just as you thought and never could have imagined, and just as you’re settling in, ready to take the tour, the door swings open again and a wind from out of nowhere pulls you back, back to your standard fare, thirsting and yearning.

I’m watching "Before Sunrise," heavy with words, D cup at least. The French have this saying— il y’a trop de personnes sur le balcon—there are too many people on the balcony, and I, I have too many words and too many online men. In this Sunrise movie, a woman, young, meets a guy on a train. They have a fling and promise to meet in the same place six months later. Instead years pass. The man writes about the young woman, their chance meeting, and how it might resume or end. It’s better to have a fast fade than a drawn-out routine. So I have my men. One arrives out of breath and eager. We’re online and we fuck. Maybe he’s good, maybe he’s not. It always ends. So I have a stash, weed and men, men and weed.

The Photo Shoot

“Hold your hair up, chin up and to the left, look that way, now this, now twist a little, arc, that’s it—and twist,” Alex says, clicking away.
“I love this,” I say.
“I can see how you must have looked when you were an actress. It’s like you’re right there. Yes, absolutely. Doesn’t she, hon?” he turns to Lisa.
“Yeah, she really does,” Lisa says. “And she’s still beautiful.”
“You two are the best,” I say.
The base of the white studio wall curves into the wood floor. A black velvet cloth covers the Polaroid camera propped on a silver industrial tripod. I’ve packed a crimson silk kimono and black stockings. Lisa has wrapped my red silk kimono like a turban around my head and transforms my black stockings into elbow-length nylon sleeves. My muscles are for the most part not even in the pictures and I’m alright with that.

Around one in the morning, I drive Lisa home. It’s a freezing winter night and I don’t realize until I’m on the highway alone in my car that my cunt has actual weight to it. I’m an elitist when it comes to my cunt and I think there’s a uniqueness to the way I sense details and sequence. My cunt is a destination, what’s that expression? Something about Rome and all roads. Or—at the end of a narrow hallway, a room with pressure from the inside spreading out, and radiating from the hand-hewn wood door warped from the force of the weight is a glow, not white, but yellow, cadmium yellow light like the background in a watercolor of mine, “My Heart is So Unruly Truly Part 1,” like that one or maybe “My Unruly Heart Part 2, AKA Slipping into the Sweet Wilds.”

I have a new bit for the drummer man. I’m going to tell him, “What a fucking turn-on! Wow—it makes me want you— shit, you’re fine! Oh baby, sitting here at this early morning time, typing furiously and wishing to come for you, all quiet except for this shivering because there you are with your cock leading the way. And when you lean down to kiss me, I turn my neck causing you to kiss the side of, nape, and hollow beneath my throat, and I sigh ‘baby, baby, baby, you sure do that thang to me.”

I play them all and they just fall right into place. This one, this drummer one and the others, get hard and heated with these words, words, words. “So I ask you please fuck me and you ram in and in and in. Out my window I see my come all spruced up and shining, hovering at the edges of this early morning moon. I straighten my legs, which honey is what I do, tighten and tense, you hold my hair the way I like and your finger is up my asshole, I’m fucking your finger and your cock and I can feel the come inching up the insides of my thighs, swinging into my cunt, spreading and branching out while the moon’s hanging full and bright. Sex is such a wonder, isn’t it? Oh baby, I am hot for you!” Babies, fucking piss asses. Words turn them on, delivering how-to's so when they come into town and want some action, I don’t have to say anything and they know what to do.

Hooked (edit 1)

How to Keep a Man

In her lush garden, which is heaven on earth, Sabina reclines on her lime green chaise lounge. This garden is part jungle, English mansion enclave, pristine sanctuary, and natural yoga den. I bring all my men to Sabina. Straight off she worried about Garth. I should have listened. Maybe not, because I’m free now, still afraid of phones ringing and knocking at doors, but free of Abie and that’s all I have to say about that.

Beside Sabina, this new man perches on one leg, taking deep breaths and spewing them out, five times maybe more, pauses, then cries out in a shrill falsetto. William S. Grieves has been taken by the spirit. His hand hovering one quarter of an inch from skin contact scans Sabina’s wonderful legs. Her left knee has been making its presence known—the kneecap hurt, she cannot do squats with her Norwegian trainer. Sabina has marvelous legs with diamond-shaped calves, moderate muscle in her upper body, arms specially, cheek bones that demand attention, and a long ass.

William is intent on calling me his own, and even though he sends me packages of the finest music, bringing joy into my life, no fucking way will his dick enter my body or wind its way into my spirit. Any man wearing his pants so damn high that the sun glints off his belly might have a prick lying somewhere, perhaps on a mantle in an old musty rooming house—might—but that prissy prick will never find its way home to my door. Even a woman running overtime and late for her next fuck, has certain standards.

I know how to hold a man. When I phone Garth he answers in his reverse-exclamation voice. So I say “I miss your cock,” which settles him right down. We set a suck-off time. I’m always late. Garth doesn’t like to fuck right away; first he likes to talk, to get acquainted. He’s old-fashioned that way.
“What’s it called in church when someone starts shaking and screaming out, you know, and the spirit moves them?” I say. I plan to write about the new man.
“I don’t know.”
“But you should, your mother being Pentecostal and all. There’s a word or a phrase. Like what’s the verb—is it moved? Like when the spirit possesses someone? I’ve seen it on the evangelist shows, the ones you told me to watch so I could get my speaking voice right. Remember when I did all that NLP motivational shit with the B’nai Brith broads?”
“Why you asking?”
“Because,” I say, tracing his eyebrows with my index finger, “I was watching this show about healing, you know, and the effect of belief, religious belief, how it really can heal. Mind over body kind of thing and I thought it would cool to write about. But there’s a word I’m missing.” And I slide down between his legs to his famous balls. “So?”
“Maybe taken,” he says, his voice remaining constant. I can flick my tongue over his balls, taking one and then the other into my mouth, his voice and breathing never waver. He has great presence of mind. It’s his background of abuse, I guess, and having to be on guard all the time.
“So,” I lift my head, “taken by the spirit, then? That’s the expression?”
“Yes, yes, that’s the expression.”
“Mmm,” I say, twirling my tongue toward his cock. It’s an art, maintaining contact from one move to another—balls in the mouth, then tongue snaking around cock, cock in mouth, only the tip, more tongue swirling, more cock, until Garth touches the back of my throat and my soul opens.

I just don’t like the pressure, driving over, leaving Caroline, and worrying all the while. Sometimes I think—with Garth, I’m like Patty Hearst, when she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, joined them and became Tania. Like Che Guevera’s comrade. "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there," she said after she was sentenced for an SLA bank robbery. I don’t know why I think this way. I guess I’ll have to figure it out.

Hooked

I am hooked on my online men. They’re my morphine and D-Bol. They punctuate my life. When I’m high on a new man, I phone Sabina and leave her messages although she has no need to live vicariously. Men still flock to her. She doesn’t even throw out bread crumbs, the way I do with my profile and exuberant follow-ups. She just stands there and they fly in, detouring from their migrations.

Sabina has a local one for me, James who is in love with her. Sabina is a goddess and remains so at forty-five. James messages her back when she’s tired. She takes off her top and lies on her stomach, her small tits sticking to the burgundy leather sofa. Last time he massaged her back, she felt a bug crawl in her ear and swatted, causing James to yelp; he was standing beside her in his bare skin, his skinny prick pointing to the west. When I realized that I didn’t intrigue James, I was pissed off. It’s not that I wanted such a skinny flat-minded man who insists kinky and passion can be played as one word—kinkypassion—“In whose dictionary?” I ask him. Lisa and I have taken up Scrabble. She wins every time, knowing her way around that board the way I know a man’s body. “Props don’t thrill me,” I tell James. “And anyhow, if I’m desiring a prop, I just grab a man. You’re a prop, honey.” He laughs. “Really,” I say. He tells me I’m the embodiment of kink and invites me to a College Street peeper’s club.

James checks out two women kissing, each of their men seated on art deco leather love seat at opposite ends of their booth. “Do you mind if we come in and watch for awhile?” he says. James’s British accent and exotic dark skin serve him well in this Somerset kind of club. He takes his cock out of his pants and motions to me like a cop directing traffic. Patrons enter and exit. “She’s still at it! Wow, she’s really into it, isn’t she?” I shift my weight from my right to left knee, my throat feels raw, I have to pee. Meanwhile James is chatting away in his brisk English accent, adjusting my head, taking his time.

Sabina tells me James has a porno site with a 1-800 number and hook-up to Pay Pal. “Holy shit, our James—a fucking pimp!” I say, hooting and snorting.” “Don’t put this in your book,” she says. I tell her “of course not” and play her for details.
“He has about a dozen strong women,” she says.
“You mean builders?”
“He calls them strong women, but they’re bodybuilders, alright.”
“Holy shit,” I say. “You know I had this coach in my early days, I think I was forty-three. Yeah. I was forty-three and you and I had just met at Kelly’s Backyard Gym and this builder, Rita, was setting up my programs. I remember I was working out, we were in the Austin Terrace house, and this builder comes in and squats three plates a side, rock bottom, three sets of ten, so I go up and ask her if she coaches. Anyhow, Rita’s doing this threesome thing, with a female builder named Val and some guy, and on the side—I can’t say for sure, but John, you remember John my second coach, the one I put a down-payment on a motor cycle for? So what I heard was she was posing and doing tricks for guys with a thing for builders. You know, like Igbal had for me. Fuck! The shmuck’s a pimp!”And then I wonder whether he’s asked me to this peeper’s dive with his porno site in mind.

I know James and Sabina have fucked a few times—he’s wild about her and she adores sex. She says he’s quite skilled at cunnilingus and tones down his kinky side when he’s with her. I don’t think he’s so hot. I drive him to Cherry Beach where he rams his cock down my throat until I gag or up my cunt, my legs thrown over his shoulders, which causes my periformis to pull and tighten, that old injury from my deadlifting workout with Garth.

Lenny and a Few Others
Before Will and Lenny and others with their invigorating letters, there were two white Jewish men who brought sustaining warmth and friendship into my life. Late at night, I would spread out in my bed, wrapped in my words and warmed by theirs, rediscovering words could be round, not flat and brittle like Garth’s. I twirled on the tips of my words without fear of falling off, spun round and round sprouting random phrases as the sky changed colors, and they loved it—all these lines bursting out without any target in mind. And I thought if I were to look inside, my spleen, liver, all those organs would have disappeared. If I were to grab a corner of my skin and steal a glance underneath, I’d see stars instead, and I laughed. This is what I learned from a white Jewish match.com man, a gentle magic man, teacher of stuntmen and lover of life.

There were good men-souls: Bruce, a seventy-two-old professor of ancient English literature with a bird feeder on his balcony, a birder from Boston, who whispered “I wanted to be the first to kiss your eyes” in his morning calls as I struggled with my flaying Caroline. He wanted to drive to Toronto; I told him it was too soon. But the truth was he looked like Einstein and I couldn’t imagine him kissing my eyes in the morning.

Onegoodbro

“Didn’t you know this is a black dating site? Doesn’t the name say something to you?”
“Why do you whites think you can get in anywhere you want? How can you be so fucking selfish? And anyways, why do you want a black man? Relationships have enough challenges without adding mixed race."
“Why you after black cock?
“Get the fuck off territory that don’t belong to you.”
“Listen sweetie,” I wrote, “I live according to my beliefs. It’s one thing to talk about integration—it’s another thing to live it.”
“Damn straight. You got it now.” He said his black sisters and brothers were better off without guilty and jealous white people trying to sneak into the fringes of black culture.
“Look, I respect your devotion to your people and your sense of responsibility, but I’m sure as hell not moving,” I said. No one was going to bully me out of the neighborhood.

His Name Is Mark Towne

I saw his picture on “Black People Greet”— a man with earrings in each ear, beret, and James Baldwin eyes. He’d call, cruising down Highway 78, windows down, wind, music and his words whooshing into my ear.“Well, it’s been fine, really,” I’d say all foam and breathy, and he’d answer “I’ll squeeze you later” with a triple “e” in squeeze and upswing in later, and I’d laugh because I had no idea what to say to this smooth man. Instead, I left him a message of my coming― a score of escalating, sighing, swooning sounds with slices of dialog. “You are soo sexxxy,” he said, “that was so bee-u-teeful and sweeet of you. So so sexxxxy! My God! Babay! You are my JCT.”

But, even with my moaning into his cocked ear, when Mark arrives at Pearson National Airport on the coldest night of winter, I can’t recognize him. A man with a navy blue beret, two gold earrings, navy duffle coat, and tan leather bag slung over his shoulder strides by. Let this be the one. This one, this is the one I want. The man walks in a diagonal line toward a red exit sign beside which are two others, taxis and washrooms. I hide behind a post, watch the other arrivals, and unzip my ski jacket. Play it, honey, let a little tit show. The beret man reappears.
“JCT!” he says. “Are you my baby? You are so cute!”

Fucking shit. Cute is not a good thing. My ass, fucking shit, cute. But here he is, looking down on me, so I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him full on the lips, kissing and kissing him in front of Arrivals, and I’m nervous and shy and so fucking pleased. Shit shit shit I’m thinking all the while. Shit shit shit. There is stuff between Mark’s arriving time and the hotel room, paying the airport parking ticket, how to do that, do I have enough change and is my hand trembling? There are paint-free patches in front of my car and the license plate is held in place with rusty wires. I take the 427 south and then the 401 east into Toronto. “I’m always getting lost but my heart’s knows the way,” I say. “Sweet and hot, honey, sweet and hot.” He puts his left hand on my thigh. A Drake man, I decide. I can’t take him to a seventy-nine-dollars-a-night flophouse even with sax strains streaming from its lobby. There’s a reason sax and sex share all letters except the middle one, and there’s no mistaking what a woman grooving at a jazz club wants when she screams out, “Give me some sax, baby!” Mark is a Drake man. His face is leaner and more angular than in his photos—a different man than the one I had come with, saying, “Oh my god oh . . . baby, babay!”

Abie’s dating this psychiatrist he met on JDate where he posted a photo I took of him, standing on the rocks at Lajoie Falls. His hair is windswept and he’s grinning. Before he met the psychiatrist, he kept a running count of women responding to his profile. “Listen,” he’d say, “I have forty-nine women waiting for me and I can’t answer them. I know you have a credit card.” Three times I paid for his JDate membership. I didn’t want to alienate him. He’d call a week in advance. They were doing due diligence. A deal was closing. Funds were in escrow and release scheduled. Then he’d ask for cash. “I won’t forget,” he’d say and I’d look over at Caroline talking to herself and no one in particular.

Abie has a theory about these meet-ups. You have to kiss right away. You search out a spot, lie down with your arms each other, close your eyes, and you share memories—when you first saw his picture, first emailed, first spoke. You share. Occasionally you open your eyes and steal a glimpse. And so you slide beyond that online space.

The long-haired concierge flips through a glossy pamphlet. “What do you think, sweetie?” I say, my hand in Mark’s pant’s pocket. He taps The Den with his middle and index finger —“glass everywhere, JCMT,” he says and there is: glass bathroom door, glass partition between toilet and showers cubicles. Bathrooms intimidate me. The room’s purpose is clear, I know, but I like to be genteel about it, delivering a soundless stream. In private I’m this noisy slogger and I like that. But posing on the Drake pedestal, I’d have to deliver a controlled flow while reining in my abdomen. It would look silly to dress up just to take a piss. My mother used to wear a hat and leather or linen gloves to match her shoes and purse when she went to a movie. And what if a fart steps up to the mic, deciding its time for a solo?

I pay with my Gold card although I can’t figure out why the hell they gave it to me anyway. I figured I’d somehow pulled a fast one. As soon as I received the card, I called Garth, bought a leather three-seater, matching love seat, and TV stand at The Brick, botoxed my entire forehead, removed sagging flesh beneath my eyes, and here I am, whipping it out for a drummer standing first beside me, then with a sidestep turning away while I fork over my five C’s at the Drake Hotel on Queen Street West.



Something Slightly Kinky Perhaps

Mark brightens my life. Even with thousands of miles between us, I can feel his breath; he uses his voice like a cock when I need release as he calls it. He has these gifts.
“It’s my baby! How ya doing shugga?”
“You sure know how to make a woman feel good.”
“I sure know a good woman.”
I close my bedroom door and lie down on the standard grey wall to wall. The carpet like a lover brushes against the skin on the small of my back. There is a softening of my hips and my ass rubs into the roughness of the industrial carpet. The space at the back of my neck tingles. Sex and drugs have a way of setting a scene.
“Sweetie man, you leave a female who comes to words unable to locate any of her own.”
“Let me help you baby. Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I whisper.
“I didn’t hear you. You want what?”
“You. I want you, in me. I want you to fuck me. Please fuck me baby.” Men don’t give a damn whether they’re fucking a poet or a Forum freak.
“I am fucking you, baby. I am fucking the hell out of you,” his voice low and gravelly.
“Well sweetie, if that’s hell, heaven must be one eternal come.”
I love coming over the phone for him, hearing his jagged breath over all those miles, his steamy words sliding in space.

Once he wrote “lovie” and when I read that, something in me shifted over to his side and sighed with soft delight. I call him from my bedroom, lying down on my bed—I have trouble with smooth talk while standing. In our first days, I spoke to him while I stood in my kitchen, then walking around the condo, describing the images and colors of seventy-six of my paintings. I sashayed around in bikini underwear, a muscle shirt, and a pair of toeless high heels my mother had passed down to me. All other times I lie on this light gray carpet behind my bedroom door or on the tiled bathroom floor, and sometimes I single out the floor on the right side of my bed or the left. I can’t do it standing up. I mean I can lean against the bathroom counter and he can ram in from behind or I can hold my upper torso against his with my legs around his waist, his cock in its rightful place and my arms around his neck, but for coming, the build up and flow, I need a floor. Beds are fine, but a floor, a floor is hard and soft and inviting all at once.

There are black and white tiles on my bathroom floor. I am wearing a snug black t-shirt with “Adrenalin” written on the front and “PUMP,” part of a dial-up gym number on the back. My hair is uncombed. I unbuckle my leather and metal belt, pull my jeans down to my shins, keeping my socks and Blundstones on, and spread out a worn blue-and-white synthetic bathrobe. I weigh possibilities—if I lie constrained, can I spread my legs wide enough? Phone coming involves posture and timing: to lie down, to place the receiver on breast or belly, to spread legs and rub a clit—up and down or back and forth depending—while another finger pushes upwards inside. It’s an art. I rub, tensing my legs until I feel that low lurching as my come slides into place. A clock hand ticks out the seconds: one—fingers moving over and across; two—the sun starts to sink; three— sinking and shining still brightly; four—sinking more, quite brilliant and changing color, yellow to red; five— head arching back, a line forming from behind the eyes to the mouth, finding its path to the back of a throat, tracing across breast to breast with clear cunt intention. “Oh baby,” I breathe. Using a cheap rate, I dial the number 10159451, his area code and number that my fingers know so well, and press talk. I’m adept at timing. I hear his voice and my cunt swoons. “I wanted to call you,” I say all breathy like brewed foam, “I wanted to talk to you about sucking you off when you’re involved in commerce and I wanted to make you hard while you talked numbers or whatever it is that you do, when all that I want, baby, is you here with me and we’re fucking, honey, and shit, I am loving it.” And sure enough, I feel a snare drum brush on my thighs and the sun’s nighttime glow at the back of my cunt, and wanting to please this man who calls me “baby of mine, lovie, shugga,” signing “one love, yours to hold, one to one and one in one,” it happens. Five times, baby, five fucking sweet times. It’s simple, wanting to please a man—I start to come, smiling all the while knowing I’m almost home, with a pressing down, just a gentle kind of pressing down, one of those simmering volcanoes with the top opening and closing, ledges overflowing—something warm between my legs bringing me home again and again, all warm and wet from the pressing down. I test the wetness with my fingers and I laugh.
“Wet honey, really fucking wet!” Thick opaque wet, that smooth just oozing wet from which memories are made. From pissing. From fucking pissing.

I write, then release these words like homing pigeons to Mark, also Lenny, and my New York ex-con, Robbie. I wear my cunt on my sleeve, I tell them—listen to music, touch words, journey through life all with my cunt. And that’s poetry.

Cunt, Ass, Cock, and It's Not about Fucking

Two mornings before I gave him my cash offering I asked Garth, as I frowned at myself in the foyer's sliding door mirror, “Do you think my clothes suit me? Lisa says I should take more pride in how I dress, but what she doesn’t understand is I wear my muscles. The covering is irrelevant.”
“She’s right.”
“She is? What’s wrong with the way I dress?”
“You don’t dress in a way that suits you. You’re one of those women who look best naked.”
“Well, that’s alright then.”
“Women fuss so much about what they wear,” he said. “The truth is men don’t care. They look at a woman and imagine her without her clothes.”
“Really? You mean all that time, not to mention hard cash?”
“Look, I’m in a bit of a rush here,” he said.
And that was alright because I’d gotten what I needed, some attention and a compliment alongside. The way to sidle up to Garth is by serving him a plate of hot, spicy negatives.
The night before he left, Garth told me I’d miss his penis. “You have to admit you’re going to miss sucking me off,” he said.
“I’ll have to make that sacrifice,” I said.

After Garth Left

I send a moderately erotic tinged-with-romance e-card to Robbie, the ex-con from New York City, that he might not feel neglected and subsequently vacate. I thrive, still, with this one’s attentions, compliments, and pleasure with my words.

Garth must not find out. He would be too sad. And I would lose him. I am afraid of life without this big man. Every day he calls me. Why did I betray him, he says, bringing Lisa and Nefar into his home, over-running his house with enemies? I ask him about Sharon and Georgia. He says Georgia is fat. “That didn’t stop you before,” I say. “And what about the woman at gym, the one with curly hair.” He says either I make excuses or gather up any accusation lying around and hurl it at him.” When we talk, I cry and my throat aches. I am online, turned on by my mind, wandering through it awestruck the way I did with my Chapel Hill professor at the AGO exhibit, something about impressionists and light. Lean and cool he was, like those slouching clothes rich people wear, like a cashmere scarf wrapped and casually flung back, talking technique and history, drawing me into the canvas and then stepping back. Let’s be a live installation, my Lenny and I, I thought, a fucking example of performance art.

Fuck lives in my mind. Moved in, leather valises, some heavy-duty orange (green reeking of evictions and hard times) garbage bags crammed with souvenirs, rare antiques, a few newfangled gadgets. Just moved right in, a squatter grabbing vacant space and then some. I could fall in love with any floor; I see a sprawling space and I’m flat on it, masturbating my way through life, but then I have these flaring arms needing a man to fling around, hold my hand and warm this heart. I bait the lure with literary sex, cast out, wait, and reel in, reel in. Garth must not find out.

Garth says one of Georgia’s failings was she wouldn’t go on all fours. She didn’t know who the man was. I’m reading Malcolm X, Cleaver, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Fannon, Alice Walker, Norma Zeale Thurston, W.E.B. Dubois. Not Dubois, although on Wilder Avenue his book waited for me on my walk-in closet book shelf and kept me company on my bed’s headboard. Still, I mention Dubois because I have felt the texture of his words, my palm grazing over his book’s cover. My ex-con read Dostoevsky in prison and quotes passages in a voice so low and hushed I strain to hear the words. And when I look in the bathroom mirror with its row of dressing room lights across the top, I’m dismayed to see a white middle-aged woman staring back at me. Garth is right—I haven’t walked the walk. But I am shifting inside. I think a black woman would not play a slave game during sex, is that male/female thing separate from life, history, and politics, and is that why Garth has a white woman on her knees?

“I can’t be your mother,” I say. I tell him he can’t rewrite history, his mother on all fours as he knifes her with her cock. This last part I don’t say.

I worry about cash, counting off houses the way I used to list off my boys and men—“Soissons, Wilder, Cote St. Luc, Bourret, Highway 6, Edinburough Road, Rural Route 8 . . .” And this book, my book that loves me late at night, early morning, mid-day with words “cunt, ass, cock, dick, clit,” is about fucking, and also not, even with cocks ramming and ramming, cunt-, ass-, and mouth-up. It’s a story. Of a woman still a child and lost in this world.

“Question for you,” Garth says in one of his untimely calls (Caroline having supper, Lisa searching for clothes, and I hovering, split in parts—hands in the galley kitchen, one foot in living room, the other in front of the stackable washer-dryer tucked behind the foyer's slat doors).
“Yes,” I say, smoothing my voice and drawing out the “s” so he might think I’m with him, my body parts briefly linked.
“If I’m at a bookstore and pick up your book, will I be surprised?”
“What do you mean?” I say, one foot sweeping in from under the dining room desk and the other from the storage closet beside the front door, now side by side, shifting weight one to the other.
“I mean will I be surprised? Is there anything I should know, now, before?”
“Oh, that’s what you mean. Well, I mean, it’s all there, you know. I’m writing about everything, you know.”
“Yes, but, is there anything I should know?”
“Oh. Well, no. Except you’re in it. You are it. Except of course there’s me. But you should know you’re exposed. Your cock, the color of your pubic hair, your spreading balls, how you like to ass-fuck. Everything. I mean you’ll walk down the street and people will know.”
“Great,” he says. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Although I know it’s not. But his voice is lighter and I know he’s smiling, showing his disproportionate little teeth.