Running Naked with My Hair Flying (erotic memoir, edit 1)

The Woman Is Tired

Two months have passed since I first met my Atlanta man, my American online steady. The thing is I’m in love with myself even though I once read when self-love walks you down the block, despair lurks around the corner. Meanwhile I’m just a worn-out circus trainer throwing out emails like raw fish to keep my men in line.

Mark sends me an email from work. He wants to swoop in on the twenty-eighth to deliver fresh protein, “is it a good time to cum?” he writes. I wince. Anyhow, there is no fresh protein shortage—Lenny, Robbie, Mark, the kinky little one James, Garth—miserly with his cash and generous with his semen. They’re babies with their cocks, these men. When I kneel before a man’s cock, he plants his prick at the back of my mouth, his bare ass pumping. And then he says you love it, don’t you and I say yes, I do, but the truth is it’s about being expedient. Kneeling facilitates the art of deep throat and siphoning off semen. I like showing off, but mostly I want him to get trigger happy and shoot his load. Because I work with invasive chatterers and I’m tired. And because I know I’m not going to come and I don’t really give a damn except I’ve got this persona, so I toss an exotic image to the part of his brain wired to his cock, which is his entire chunk of grey matter. I’m thinking females allocate specific brain cells, and after all these decades I am beginning to understand myself. I’m like a guy in this mad life, working the room with standard socializing and how-do’s, all the while inching toward the exit door connecting directly to my crotch.

“Not my JCT!” Mark says when I tell him there is no moaning in me, no ooh baby and all that phone shit, I say, and as for my words that used stay up all night, always wet and eager, well, they’re tired, cannot not remain awake, have grown pale, possibly anemic. He says I mustn’t work so hard, I should rest.

I miss Lenny. Online men gorge on my passion and exuberance, but it’s Lenny that I like. After he kissed my cunt and flew back to Chapel Hill, he left me a phone message playing “A Kiss is Just a Kiss” on his electric kazoo. I dashed out in hunt of an adjective for beyond cool. “You’re the one, you’re velvet” I wrote, even though the sex in me was all used up, like my fridge when I’m low on cash.
Hardly any weed left. I tell Lenny my birthday is coming soon and a party might revive me. He develops a plan: I should rent a studio, display my erotic art, a band should play two types of music. While all I’m wanting is to lie in bed on a Sunday morning with the weight of a man’s arms around me. This emptiness is an unwelcome visitor, one that stays on and on, refuses to exit, consumes. Maybe I’m depressed. I write maudlin blues lyrics and send them to Mark. I can’t think of a tune.


It’s All Too Fucking Predictable

We were consumed with each other. In our peak season, emails and phone calls taking off every hour, every seat was taken and charter flights were fully booked. The weather was warm and balmy. It was one of the best seasons I could remember. But I slacked off and Mark placed himself back in the online hunt. I’d set the man up at the Drake and fucked him in every way. Twice a year on New Year’s and also on my birthday for the seven years following, he’s still pitching a remake.

James wants me to accompany him to a swinger’s party. I’ll go, I say, if I can stay dressed and write about it, the way an artist sketches court proceedings. He says I can stay dressed, but he doesn’t think my scribbling would go over too well, we could go out for coffee afterward and share mental notes. We’re on the phone “after midnight” like that Monk tune on the tape from the wacky Bostonian, I having repaired to the sunroom since Caroline is sleeping sprawled out in my bed. “You’re telling me swinging exhibitionists wouldn’t flock to me? All I need to say is I’m doing a piece on swinging, my big break possibly and I would so appreciate. . . ” James says there’s a certain etiquette, this being a franchise. I sit up. “You mean like MacDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken?” Then I email Mark, who zips back an immediate response even though it’s Monday and he’s a working engineer. I leave a message on Sabina’s machine: “Remember Anais Nin had this client she wrote erotic stories for, like the ones in “Little Birds” and those books. Anyhow, she and Sartre and Genet would sit in the café at Monmartre, well, maybe not Monmartre, I just put that in because it enhances the picture—the truth is I’ve never been to Paris and you know about my intellectual gaps—so they’d drink and fashion up scenarios for her dollar-a-page gig. Now here’s this engineer emailing me in the morning with his ‘hon, sucking me off would be a good thing right about now,’ so I tap out a page or two, but he’s still hungry, could I give him an old-fashioned missionary on the side, like at a restaurant, you know, ‘and I’ll have some fries to go with that.’ And what I want to know is when the fuck does the man work?”

In the morning I send Mark his missionary and throw in an extra sixty-nine. He’s fired in the afternoon. But Mark believes in God and he’s a Southern stoic so I know he’ll manage. Before phoning him, I slip into the ensuite for a few tokes. I was a fine actress and could fake consolatory tones and dialog, I’m a passionate and creative liar and excel at delivery although I have never forged a come, being more of a process than a product-oriented type. The man is given the boot for his fixation and I’m thrilled. “More for the book,” I tell Sabina.

It’s a small fucking world. Garth goes out with some work-related types to a steak-house in Scarborough, the client Garth is courting turns out to be a musician, a pianist with a steady gig and cash to invest, and as he’s opening his silver attaché case, the orange and black postcard for TUZA, which just happens to be Swahili for “to pay tribute to”—and isn’t that what Relay of the Arts for the Next Generation is all about?—falls out or comes into view. Garth comments and the musician says yeah, he’d heard about the festival from his Chicago drummer friend who’s coming into Toronto to spend the weekend with the broad who’s running the whole thing. “Question for you,” Garth says when he calls. I decide to do a partial-accept, full deny and tell Mark not to come in for my birthday; I am sick, depressed, crashed and weirded out from smoking up.

Garth phones the morning of my birthday. “By the way,” he says, “it’s your birthday isn’t it? “Yes,” I say and wait. I figure he’s decided to cast me out of his life again. On my birthday. He is determined to make me sad on mine and to feel guilty on his. Come to think of it, all the holidays we share are like that. And most days. I don’t know why I let him fuck me up the ass. Still, it’s my birthday and I’m crying because I love him and hate him, and then love him all over again even though I’m fifty-six and should know better. Loving Garth is like the wild come I never had, although once I grabbed Abie’s shoulders on the Austin Terrace Street bed which had a built-in grey bookshelf headboard for night and early-morning readers. It freaks me out to think of Abie’s cock on account of his doing such injustice to the appendage.

Garth says he wants to be more involved in my writing life. But what he really wants is to check out his performance record. He’s matured over the past nine and a half years, I tell him. He is almost an accomplished lover.
“Why almost?” he says.
“First, tell me five things you like about me.”
“I feel attached” is all he’s willing to say. Oh, and he’s reconciled to having me in his life in one form or another. When he fucks me, his eyes never soften or deepen. He kisses really well and he has soft lips. He has taught me what rimming feels like and I think he’s good at it, he ass fucks with gentleness when required and knows when to ram hard. But he can’t project love. If he could add love and affection, then he’d be accomplished. On my birthday, a dozen online men send me birthday greetings. I lie in bed on my side with my back to my bedroom door and refuse to answer the phone.

I trim my pubic hair to add flair to my emails. Online love makes me feel like Paris where couples kiss on street corners and I like that. It’s my peaceful place and my refuge from the storm. But now Mark says I haven’t lived up to his expectations, haven’t paid my part of his long distance bill or sent him a Canadian beret. I slide into monotones and dream in black and white. Only my fingers move as I type. My salmon and grey Mexican blanket wrapped around my shoulders, I strike these keys and remember my old Hermes typewriter.

I talk to myself. You’re just lonely sweetheart. You’re sliding, honey. Hope leers and flaps off, and I am Madame Lafarge typing, typing, worrying all the while about money, adding up what I have, what I need, what small amount I earn these days. My head is full of numbers. I sit at this heavy black wood desk facing north while Caroline, gorging on TV, runs her zigzag commentary. My writing is a steaming kettle spewing cunt, cock, fuck, ass and come, with words strewn in between.
What do you think I need? Who do you think I am? Why am I still alive?

Doubts peck at me. Cantankerous geese. I stay alive to take care of the girls—filling in spaces with art, writing, assorted inspirations, and men. I type because if I stop, the world will freeze in its tracks and I might fall off.

Garth is a killer. I have never met a man like him nor will I again. He tears my heart apart, but I can’t let him go. I phone him since he is well-versed in the art of lethal weapons and assorted homemade death-inducing methods and a clinical effect’s list. I tell him I am full of loathing and he likes that.

I send Mark acquiescing emails while I question my life, the men, the wish and
need for, the hunt, the letters. Sometimes I skip words and my voice drops to a whisper. I take adavan, smoke up, and then it comes to me. Robbie! The understudy strutting out of the wings.

Life is soft and hard—a summer’s sun in an Arctic winter. The ex is floundering again, his body flabby, flesh washed green. Skin like rising dough hangs from his chin and flakes off his eyelids. I will not stand around his grave. He’s afraid, he says while I worry for myself even with my cloak of muscles. All that has passed between us, all the losses and pain—I try to think grief as an old war wound from another life time. It never works. Memories are like a pop-up clown-in-a-box. Wind and wind and the clown pops up. Slam the red metal cover down, wind, and the damn clown pops up again. I stare in the ensuite mirror. Opening my eyes in nineteen-twenty’s mock horror, tears fill and spill as the old piano player performs his tired score. The air is porous and dense. There are terrains on this earth where land lies rolling and smooth and air is perfume and gardenias, but this land of mine threatens treacherous and steep with air like thin ice. I’m cold. Wearing a faded red-hooded sweatshirt and my father’s old wool cardigan, and I’m still cold, typing, typing for all the homeless and the despairing. When you’ve been a member of that group, you can never walk away or revoke your membership. You’re a member for life.

I want to write about loneliness and fear, the struggle of grasping dreams as the only worthy living remnants, like hanging onto the ledge of an unseaworthy cargo ship—what such an effort does to a mind and body that could once move with grace and adapt effortlessly to any angle. Now all I can write about is love and cunt fucking, love and ass fucking, love and sucking off—love.

I save what is left, managing to get out with some of the old dreams intact. My raft is a daughter whose mind has tunnels with tests of fire and monsters. She carries around the unshakeable belief that I can fix whatever is broken or at least maintain it, and she is dismayed, scared when I cannot. But if you’re in a crunch and you need a woman who sits and types in a man’s size large leather jacket in the hope its toughness will rub off on her, then you’ve got the right broad. Then I discover Abie is in quicksand again, flailing about and sinking deeper and will that ever change? There is no one else to care for Caroline who sits watching TV and knows all the shows and related times. There is no one else for her.

Mark requires three thinking days to make up his mind. On the fourth day, I can contact him, he says. I send him an email on the first day. “Mark, I am a good woman. My grandmother was a strong Russian peasant with long blond braids in her youth and a powerful singing voice. My grandfather was an earnest man with an amputated trigger finger, this grandfather who taught himself letters so he could read Tom Paine, Bertrand Russell, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Nehru, and Einstein and gave Wanda Landowska’s recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos and Beethoven’s Piano Concertos, especially the Emperor, Number 5, my favorite, air and sunlight. Moyne, my skinny wired cousin who smoked three packs a day said there was not a kinder man than my Zadi. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, except that he teased his wife something fierce, every day of their marriage. A man, Mark, who gave away half his fortune so ink might stain a writer’s fingers, whose grace gave Shiva oils a canvas and a voice to the sweetest arco. This is the man who grew my embracing heart. My Zadi. And you will shortly leave.”





Alone

Maybe I’m spinning too fast. Maybe I never learned how to spin at all. Never lay on my back warmed by the noonday sun and watched the passing of clouds, images spreading and shifting, slipping away. No chance for me—silly spinning with arms sparkling like dew on the points of grass, shaping myself into an “S” with you whoever you are. Not for me, twirling until the world becomes dizzy. Maybe once, dressed in a white poplin sundress and scallop-edged ankle socks in Cape Cod, I felt the part where after delighted, after twirling, you stretch out on stalks of grass, their tops prickling the skin on arms and legs. And I am so full to brimming that I’m empty and all around searching for love more and more.

I write to Lenny. I tell him he’s the best of who does what and who says what. He says he’d like to be a fly on the wall. I create scenes for him and he believes he has access to my naked soul. He has sucked my cunt, his mouth vacuuming an orgasm right out of me. When I came and trembled afterward, he spread his body over mine. “I like to watch,” he said, would I masturbate for him and would I mind if he jerked off? I laughed and climbed on top of him. “Oh now she’s climbing on top of me,” he recited and “oh, now she’s using her tongue. Baby!”
Love has ravaged him, he says, so I ask whether he would prefer to be in love or to have some loving in his life. I write to Lenny because, in some way, we are sharing this book I’m writing. “Hey baby,” I say, “I had this new online fling, set him up with my letters—remember the one about ass fucking and my bathroom come? Oh, and I threw in an old deep throat for good measure. And left messages, erasing and repeating five times maybe more because, you know, intonation is everything.”
“You’re a crazy woman,” Lenny says in his light Mose Allison voice.

I sit down in front of my keys, playing the letters—keys tapping, dancing side to side, up and down, the rhythm sometimes halting, searching, slowing down, gathering up speed, commas, commas gathering up speed, linking letters sending messages about love, heartache, yearning to a New York man with a cock like a divining rod. “Come take me, I’m on that tour” I’ll scream running naked with my valise in hand and hair flying.

I’m stoned when I read his emails. His words appear broader, thicker. I set out my word traps. I want to teach him about hardcore kink, about bonds that never claim wrists or ankles, when a mind spreads its legs. “You can see it in the eyes,” I tell him, “they’re haunted, you know, and the lids are like mourning veils. My eyes.” I’m a junkie checking out hotmail: has he written, what has he written, and if he hasn’t, why not? He should be sliding in my come by now. When he writes, I’m high. “Oh,” I say. “Oh,” my fingers suspended above the keys, headphones filling my head with an old sax tune. I dress in layers; as soon as you think you’ve hit my undermost layer, there is another one beneath and then another. Even I don’t know what’s at the bottom or when I’ve reached it.

Four times a week, I train a three-hundred pound middle-aged woman, a suburban mouth who claims that she comes twelve times in a row. Her pale skin is veined and hangs in sacs. She has clear blue eyes, but the skin above and below is purple. At fifty-three, she’s hooked up with married Norwegian she met on the fourth pay-what-what-you-can day of my music and arts festival. Toronto Lennox used to fuck fat women. There was no work involved, they were just so grateful, he said. Harriet parades her bedroom details to Women’s Workout members—how the Norwegian taught her to take piss and rub herself, how it made her come and who would have believed it. He’s a hunk, she says, but I’ve seen him in person and he’s just a tall man with a small nose. We Jews still worry about our noses. Garth says that white noses are a mutation and I think he’s right. Harriet’s an obese woman with a belly rolling out like an old carpet that’s been spooled for decades and then unraveled. I never liked her although she has a good heart. Also, eleven years ago, groggy from a night’s sleep and mid-night binge and needing to take a piss, she bumped into her husband hanging from a bathroom fixture. So I felt sorry for her in spite of her being a three-times-a-week-guaranteed on account of her longstanding affair with food. Harriet has a talent for quality multiple orgasms. But then she’s got thighs like Garth and her massive comes could cause earthquakes. No way would I trade places. Even with my quest to reach my orgasmic potential. Besides, she has owl eyes like John Diefenbaker.