Chasing God

(I am not Christian, but that is the language I know how to speak)


* * *

Every time I come here:

This is it. This is the time I have gone too far. He will not be here this time.

The cobbled streets are grey with damp and edged with snow that melts at my step. The Minnewater is before me, open boats laden with tourists even today, their umbrellas blooming over the gunwales, bottoms shifting on the hard bench seats as they dutifully point their cameras left and right, five houses in a row with five styles of roofline, history in a digital frame. I cross the bridge, the heavy wooden doors open, the whitewashed buildings of the Beguinage low before me.

There is a carpet of daffodils, where I expect last year’s green commons. They stop me in my tracks and steal my breath. They are a sign to me in all my arrogance, a sign that no matter how shitty a person I am, no matter how much of my holy talents I squander on the maintenance of Big Lies, God still gives with both hands, God still loves endlessly, boundlessly, God forgives the unforgivable and loves me despite my profound absence of loveableness.

Inside, the church is warm – signs entreat donations for “HEATING” in four languages. There is the chanting of vespers, and I know as I enter behind the German girls sharing an ipod that this is not atmospheric recording to aid in the parting of tourists and their money. The chant is slightly flat, in partial tune from daily use and not from anything so useless as practice – how can living this chant be practice? – it is round, perfectly incomplete, the edges soothed by acoustics, the nuns’ honking their noses through each others’ singing (older in full habits, those merely fifty- or sixty-something in fleece pullovers) coughing through the readings, they are not performing, they are not living a Big Lie, they are not lost and afraid all the time, depending on the hands that yank away. They are here. They reach for God as I do, but I am tentative, stepping to the edge of the crosswalk knowing in my head that cars stop here, but still unconfident enough to hover at the pavement, the drivers waving their hands in frustration – are you crossing? Are you stopping? These women, I am sure, stride into the road, the Bruges drivers accelerating to a stop just as they do in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris. These women stand at the edge of the table and fall backward into the arms of God.

I light a candle. I always light a candle. A nun reads in Flemish. The chapel is filled with the warmth of candles and expensive heat and the smell of wax. I do not have the right to pray, but I hope I can be good.

(Laughing)

So I have another pseudo-deep whiny-whiny post already written, and it will eventually see the light of day.

But not yet.

I am lounging in the syrup of once again being with someone where I replay what happened in my head in the car, the next day, as I fall asleep, it distracts me from eating, I pause with food on my fork and get temporarily lost in the warm glow of memory all the more precious for being fleeting, tenuous, likely to be recaptured eventually from mutual desire, but unlikely from circumstance.

Notes were taken, porn will be written - but I beg your indulgence for a few hours, while this swirl of sensations and skin-tingling memory settles into transcription. You'll excuse me if I am disinclined to reach that point...

Jealous

(A Paean to Beautiful Girl)

This is the girl who loves me no matter what I do and she is beautiful. There is a
scarf wrapped three times around her neck – there is always a piece of silk or amber there, in case her voice is stolen from her by the kind of spirits that respect talismans like silk and amber. Beneath the scarf, her skin is pale, she’s a hats and sunscreen girl, you’d never know she works outdoors except for the length of her stride. She’s from Appalachia. She was unpopular in high school. She has lived in tents and vans and little trailers with the original brown paneling painted periwinkle and violet and magnetic poetry on the tiny oven in which she doesn’t bake.

She still checks her ex-boyfriend’s email, and has lately been amused to note that someone else is checking it, too. She’s tempted to send the other checker a message, “Hey, sweetie, still the same blue-eyeshadowed slut?” but she refrains by thinking of her current lover, who, although he sighs and protests, will sometimes throw his arms out to look like Jesus when she straddles him. He is the Penis Flytrap, he is unmotivated and owns a dog and smokes too much pot and reads her journal and lies to her about things that don’t matter, and yet she loves him anyway, fucks him joyfully, lies there afterwards with the tiny nibbling feeling in her hindbrain that she is already tired of him, but is too trapped in the inertia of sweaty joy to send him away, tell him to slink off with his dog behind him, tails—well, you know. It wouldn’t actually be leaving him. You have to be at a destination to leave it, and she’s not there. Not from the neck up, anyway. The Flytrap has covered her with sticky botanical mucus from the neck down, and her body is so dissolved by him that she wonders if partial digestion by vegetation is really such a bad thing.

She wants to live in a Japanese garden, white walls and white rocks and pale pine benches weathered to a gentle grey, so calm that the space between breaths becomes important. Instead, her tiny studio in Ugly Southern City is cousin to the kind of used bookstore with a big metaphysical section and a brisk trade in secondhand crystals and sacred objects, a tarot reader in the back on Tuesday afternoons, mugs by the sink so stained with tea they never bleach, and really, when all you drink is tea, who cares? I think of her doing yoga in the morning, rising around 11 from a pile of throws and toss pillows and a puffy duvet with a cover made by a friend from textiles brought back from India and a clinging smell of a hundred nights on the road without a pause, the rhythm of non-home settling into the pulse that’s the feeling of home. I think of her in her pajamas, shifting through the poses, advho mukha svanasana, urdvha mukha svanasana, chatauranga dandasana, eventually reaching savasana, the resting pose, corpse pose in the literal translation, her hair fanned out like underwater, eyes closed, in the state of awareness and withdrawal.

I don’t know if she does yoga in the morning. Or what her bed looks like now. But her pajamas are old friends, veterans of mornings and tea and trailers and new locations for five weeks at a time, and I can see her pale legs in the light from the probably too-small window, pants sliding up her shins as she sits cross-legged in the wreckage of the bed.

I have met the succession of her boyfriends, invariably gorgeous or burning with passionate intensity, in inverse proportions. I know they have lived with her, slept with her, played in her succession of soulfully-named folk bands, taken her to swingers’ clubs, pierced her above and below the waist, and yet she remains virgin, the hymen of her heart firmly intacta. They’ve been down and pitched their tents in the valleys of the country, embarked on expeditions well-fitted or poorly supplied, returned home resigned or discouraged or embittered or confused or bewildered or simply tired, but they and all their sherpas have not made the final climb.

Don’t get me wrong – she’s been fucked. In many and righteously shagarific ways, just as she wishes on me. But there’s a note on the back of an envelope that begins, “My darling daughter, you are now two weeks and two days old,” a note from the woman who every day took her into the room with the changing table, and in the reek of her baby sister’s shit, told her, “This is what marriage does. This is what men do. Do you want to be anyone? Do you want to do anything? Do you want to get out of the mountains and away from boys with clumsy hands and girls who whisper as you pass because you’ve committed the ultimate sin of Not Being Like Them?”

Yes, she does.

And her mother’s hands swiftly diapering the baby who will be her sister, “Never marry. Never let a man do this to you.”

She is, of course, in therapy. She is also in school, and in the pit that is Ugly Southern City, and in thrall to the Flytrap, whose name is Sam. Sam is also beautiful, with a grubbiness that keeps him from being effete, and he plays the guitar with whichever group needs a guitar, and records with her, and works just enough to keep himself in pot and gas and dog food, but not enough to stop his ceaseless whining about being broke. This whining drives her crazy and makes her disrespect him as much as she disrespects anyone who whines without trying even the tiniest method of solving their problem, probably more so because after all, she’s still with him, and the self-loathing amplifies the disrespect. And yet they are committed, she is committed, not so much to him as to the next six months of work, Florida, Georgia, Chicago, Missouri, because singing for your supper beats working for it any day of the week, whether your accompanist is a whiner or not. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s uncomplicated, and if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that she could do better, it would be fine.

I am deeply jealous of Sam. Perhaps she is, too. After a day of Music Tech 385 and Arabic 110 and an hour at the Financial Aid Office trying to make sense of the forms that will not only allow her but pay her to go to Morocco where she will chant with dervishes and play her flute in dusty souks and sing with the voices of a hundred other travelers as filled with music as she is, her evening is unrestful still, her desire to burrow in the bed prevented by the pile of paper that must be attacked and subdued to feel like she is Getting Somewhere. And Sam? Sam on the floor with the dog is an indolent reminder of the ease of a life in which one cares much less. A life in which one’s beautiful, soulful, tender man does not look up and ask “why are you so tired?” at the end of the day.

But I am also jealous for another reason. I think she could do better. I think she could do me. Ridiculously, I think of playing Toklas to her Stein, or perhaps we’d take turns being the one who is merely ugly instead of jolie laide, the typist, the cook, the cleaner, the keeper. I think of sharing a house, on the outskirts of the funky, mostly-gay neighborhood in some mid-size city with a good Ph.D program. I think of sharing meals. I think – when I dare – of sharing her bed. I see us in the evenings, books open, or she with a instrument and I with a pen, and she plays me a verse, or I read her a passage, and she laughs, her hands slim in light of the death of the evening, her hands gentle in her lap, fingers strong on the strings, fingers strong or gentle in my hair. I see us in the train on the overland journey to Pamplona. I see her going to India, to Morocco, to Spain, to all the countries that grow oranges and hide women’s hair, free in her headscarf and long skirt, free of Sam, free of me. In the end, one of us would have to be the free spirit and one the anchor (or the brick, or the rock, or the leaden albatross around the other’s neck), one of us would have to be Sam.

I turn my face towards her as I read this at the sushi bar, she, and I, and the musician, and the girl from the Peace Corps who doesn’t quite understand what she’s in the middle of (but unlike us, willing to admit it), and I see her blushing, and smiling, and touched, and teary, and in the end, knowing me like I know her. And that is, and will never be, enough.



(written a few years ago)

Today I Am...

1) Crushing hard on a Kiwi who plays the ukelele.

2) Bitter that I'm not better at my job.

3) In another time zone.

4) Out of love.

5) Totally thwarted in #1.

6) Wearing a totally ridiculous outfit...

7) ...that I am paid to wear.

8) (Not like that)

9) Alternately loving and hating my hair.

10) On the edge of tears.

11) Behind on a big project.

12) Transported by said Kiwi playing "Sweet Child Of Mine" on said ukelele

13) (Including the guitar riff)

14) to another girl.

15) (Context is important)

16) Contemplating starting a Facebook.

17) Definitely out of love

18) and calling on Beautiful Girl

19) to help me stick to #17.

20) Because if he puts his hand on the back of my neck, it's all over.

21) Craving Thai salad rolls

22) which will be made for me by a tiny Laotian woman

23) whom I think understands how much I love them.

Precipice

Lately I have an embarrassment of riches…this fellow’s back in town and less pushy, another one has rung to tell me he’s in the next state over, I’m aiming for Fucked-Up Guy, Man Who Loves Stars is, improbably, in my town, ten states from his stomping grounds. I’m also supposed to see Lover again very soon. We are inches from a precipice, from I-don’t-love-you-anymore-goodbye, from the scene where I disappear into the crowd and the part of me that’s been his, for him, for him in me and me on him, fades and vanishes into a pleasant memory, the shining bauble tucked away in tissue and lost in a corner of the basement, when did we get this? Who gave it to us?

Aphrodite demanded loyalty from her many lovers, and truth be told I am lately less goddess-like than usual, busy with my other life, my work, closer than usual to Husband due to a working-out, gardening and evening walks for ice cream marital repair plan. I have not been there for Lover creatively as is our usual wont, we’ve been separated by distance and time zones and roaming charges.

These are all excuses.

What’s really between us is the Hershey’s Kiss. And not her, personally, but the idea of her and all her kind. The girls Lover should be healthily fucking, moving from one fun, unattached plaything to the next, enjoying his freedom from the ex-wife now that he’s recovered from the ex- part enough to enjoy the freedom.

I can’t stand this notion.

I’ve grown a lot where jealousy is concerned, I’m comfortable with Man Who Loves Stars having a strong tie to another woman (not the one who deprived him of head), I’m able to wrap my tiny brain around the idea that men who are quality enough for me to fuck might actually appeal to other women, too, and I’ve never had a problem with the permanent partners of men I, too, love.

But. Lover hits me, Lover holds me, Lover bends me over the counter in the hotel bathroom and takes me from behind, watching each others’ faces and our own in the mirror over the sink. Lover slaps me, pulls my hair, rapes me in the back seat, fills me with his hand until there’s nothing else in the world. There is blood, sometimes, and tears, and breathless laughter, and revelation of fears told only to him. There is letting go, letting someone else be in charge, releasing control, the bossy bitch stepping outside for a moment while the raw and naked girl writhes beneath his hand around my throat.

Lover tells me about the other girls, when I ask, when I want to know. Sometimes I didn’t really want to know. I can’t wish it to be bad, and the part of me that wishes it to be mediocre with them, nothing is as good as you, feels mean and shamed.

How fortunate to have found a way to “manage” my jealousy. Simple, really. Step back. Turn off. Disengage. Break up. And in the course of stepping back, the distance fills with all the questions love removes. Has it been too long? Is it only about the sex? Can I do better? Is he handsome enough? Successful enough? Is it worth lying to have this?

Two horoscopes in a row have told me, question the pattern of your intimacy, examine whether the love you need is still the love you thought you needed. And while I don’t really believe in horoscopes, I do believe in the subtle message, the guidance from the Magical Stranger on the path, fortune cookies and what the book you’re reading says that speaks to you. Perhaps Man Who Loves Stars calling to say he is in the next town tonight, the night I am to see Lover, in the same town as Lover, though thank goodness not the same hotel, is God’s banderilla.

It’s not what it used to be. Will it change, deepen, reframe? Or simply stop?

Bits and Pieces

...One of the greatest feelings in the world is, after resolutely remaining as asleep as possible while the children across the aisle watch a bad, loud dvd with their father hovering over them in the aisle, forcing everyone who passes to whack me in the head with their rear end (and damn, despite the bathroom being on the other end of the plane there are a lot of passersby) and then waking for real, bleary, dry, hoping against hope that we are more than three hours – halfway – through the flight, and hearing, “Flight attendants, please prepare for landing, crosscheck...”
...here’s what makes a well-paid job: 1) Providing services not available elsewhere (whoring, specialized medicine); 2) High levels of personal danger when carrying out the job (logging, drug dealing, whoring); 3) Lack of willing job applicants (air conditioner repair, whoring); 4) High level of personal responsibility for the service recipient (medicine, whoring)...
...On the continuing theme of Mandy’s Not A Very Nice Person Now Is She, I made an intern cry yesterday. In the middle of an intense part of our job, I sent her to get me something I urgently needed and used a nasty tone of voice. After the hoo-hah was over, I noticed her teary and apologized profusely, explaining that no, it wasn’t her and in fact she had done fabulous work all day, and my tone had nothing to do with her performance and everything to do with my hyped-up state of mind. There were more apologies and a cash bonus later for all as our client was very pleased, and other people who work with me let her know that yeah, sometimes Mandy does that and it’s so not you. Internship Lesson for the Day: sometimes the boss is a bitch. There’s nothing you can do but your job until it blows over...
...On the continuing theme of Mandy’s A Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac, one of my favorite quotes: “If everyone likes you, you must not be very good.” Discuss.

Very Idiotic Provincial

I’m surrounded by lesbians. Short, chubby lesbians. Tall, rangy lesbians. Old Lesbians For Change. Softball lesbians. Punk lesbians. There are more crewcuts than I can shake a stick at, and frankly, not much in the way of lipstick.

On the way back to VIP, flash my bracelet, Security in an orange shirt calls at me. It takes me a minute to realize what she said was, “I’ll have to frisk you first,” and a second minute to realize it’s flirting. She’s a foot shorter than me, rosy cheeks, sleek grey bob, smooth unlined skin and great tits on a buxom body, waist vanishing as she approaches fifty. Later, I flirt with the lesbian comedienne, the big name anchoring the show, joking that all the hot chicks out there are making me bi-curious. Nothing says Pride Day Celebration like a hetero whore, right?

Here’s the thing. I don’t “get” lesbianism. It’s not that I don’t support anyone’s right to be with whom they are born to be with. But I don’t “get” it in the way that I don’t “get” what it’s like to be black. Just as I can only get a glimpse of what Big City Lover or Circus Guy go through in their daily lives, and they can only speculate what it’s like to be in mine, I don’t understand how the feeling of wanting can be wanting women only. Beautiful Girl tells me, “I love being with a woman, but I can’t imagine living without cock.”

Um, ditto.

I felt really, really provincial and kind of homophobic when I kept catching myself staring at the lesbian couples. Not the gay ones – I don’t know why it’s different, maybe because they are already “not me”, what with the testicles and all. But the women, the strong and beautiful women, were a herd of ten thousand zebras, giraffes, gazelles (and the occasional warthog) around one very confused and outnumbered lioness.

My Mother. Oh, My Mother…

I get a forwarded email from my mother. She got it from her friend Racist Homophobette (who hasn’t yet figured out why her oldest son is unmarried at 45 and doesn’t date).

It purports to be a screed by Andy Rooney. It’s not – Rooney’s quoted on Snopes saying he’d like to sue whoever started this nasty, racist piece as he feels it’s damaged his name.

The gist: why can’t white people have things for themselves if black people have special things like magazines and TV networks – isn’t that reverse racism? Followed hard upon by no girls in the Boy Scouts, guns don’t kill people people kill people, homosexuality is bad, why don’t those immigrants speak English and why do they get any social services, tattoos and piercings are bad (it’s pretty wide-ranging) and wraps up with, “since 86% of Americans believe in God” (which one?) we should tell the other 14% to “shut up and be quiet.” It concludes with “If you agree, forward this, if you don’t, delete.” Ah yes – speak up and be heard, unless you disagree, in which case shut up and be quiet.

And me, I can’t let it lie.

I address the misapplication of non-specific pseudo-statistics, point out that my brother is gay and my friends (I avoid the words ‘lovers’ and ‘clients’, tee hee) are black, mention that I’ve been beaten (briefly) by cops so maybe they’re not always right, and ask if Andy Rooney really said this, or did someone else throw his name on it and start sending it around?

I get personal:

…naming a majority as a reason for rightness reminds me of "well, all my friends are doing it..." …I'm a little embarrassed that my mother, who taught me to stand up for what is right instead of what is convenient and popular, would send me this…Up to you whether you forward this back to Racist Homophobette.

I, of course, cc it to all the family members my mother cc’d it to.

My brother points out it’s not Andy Rooney. My aunt replies back that it doesn’t matter who wrote it, it’s their opinion, “some valid points, some invalid.”

And you know, it occurs to me that it does matter who wrote it. If it's a
public figure, we weight their words more heavily than if it's just some internet nobody taking advantage of not having to spend money to spread around their words. Would Homophobette have sent it to all her friends if it was from Joe Blow she'd never heard of?

My mother is from a generation where the internet is a way to do business and a fun toy, but I get most of my news and information in this way. It personally benefits me to call people on lies, misrepresentations, and lack of accuracy in the emails they forward to all their friends, because I'd rather have an internet that's more of a library and less of a bathroom wall.

More importantly, it matters who forwards it. Would my mother – or even her friend – write in a public newspaper, with their name attached, the same sentiments? It’s safer to mass-forward an email supposedly written by a funny columnist without thinking very much about the subtle hate speech involved. When you forward an email, you endorse what it says. In this case, explicitly, as per the last line of the email. I'm not comfortable letting my family think I'm willing to go along with gay-bashing, immigrant-bashing, and racism, and "just delete."

I write to my aunt (cc-ing to everyone, why withhold the potential for family drama?)

…casual hate speech is worse than deliberate hate speech, because we take it in without thinking when it comes in a funny email instead of from a guy in a white hood. Maybe I'm one of the horrible PC people the original writer alludes to - but if he had the guts to sign his real name and stand up for what he believes, his polemic would carry a lot more weight.

Which leads me to think, am I the pot? You are, after all, reading an anonymous blog. But there is a difference, not only in that I am not claiming to be someone more important or more established to give weight to my opinions, but also that I have a persona you can use for context. You may not know Mandy, but you know “Mandy”, and she accepts comments, answers emails, and engages in dialogue when people disagree.

Feel free to forward...the name is Mandy Muse.

OK, I don’t normally write about political issues, but I read about the Ted Klaut arrest over at Radical Vixen’s, and it made me wonder – does the anti-woman, anti-choice, anti-midwife legislation go hand-in-hand with the proclivity to child rape and molestation of young women and girls under one’s care because, well, perhaps one is so fat and ugly (there’s a picture) and mentally disgusting (my assumption) that he can only manage to fuck powerless women? Are Conservative Right Republicans so anti-woman because it increases their potential sexual partners? Are they so set on no-sex-before-marriage because then the woman won’t know that his penis is small and he’s lousy and/or selfish in bed? Anti-gay because it’s a whole new set of options that don’t include fucking them? It sure would explain a lot...



Prideful Parade photo accompanies a modern protest song over at the Huffington Post.

Theory (On Whoring, Privacy and Choice)

Part One is here.

A Gentle Reader, Anonymous Girl on the Verge, continues:

These privacy concerns [about sending out possibly identifying pictures] are all that keep me from following a comparable course as yours.

As a writer and artist (struggling, of course), I anticipate receiving some publicity at some point, hopefully some success. I intend to be very selective, taking the 'courtesan' route from the start. And although I would have no shame about any whoring or other sex work I do in the interim, I'd nevertheless prefer to keep those activities separate from my public work -- at least until I'm ready to connect the dots myself, which in fact I look forward to doing, but on my terms.

Damn straight.

As far as starting with the courtesan route, The Accidental Hooker has a lovely post on “Prostitution: The New Temp Job” on the difference between aspirational marketing and reality, and of course Gillette as referenced in Part One.

As far as doing this at all, well...I cannot advise. But I can offer both my response, and Jenna Jameson’s.

Jenna, on becoming a porn star: Porn is not a career, or even an option, for most women. But if you are seriously interested, consider what you will be doing with the rest of your life, because even if you become a nun afterwards, you will always be known as having done porn.

When you come out, on your own terms or otherwise, some of your friends will be upset that you did this, and some of them will be pissed you didn’t trust them enough to tell them about it at the time. I’m walking a fine line with Power Girl right now where I don’t know how much is right to tell her for her own peace of mind – she’s great at keeping secrets, I trust her judgment and value her input in this as in other things, but how much does one really want to know about one’s good friend’s sex life? Am I doing enough for her in return? How fair is it to put her in the position of Secret-Keeper? (We all know what happened to Peter Pettigrew)

...



Walking through the airport on the way back from seeing Be-My-Real-Friend, I’m craving something. Walk and look. Starbucks? Juice? A book? No, what I really want is to be writing. For the first time in my life I’m experiencing drive and compulsion to write every day. My days write themselves in my head in realtime, I’m one of those awful people at Disney, video camera strapped to face, I’ll watch my vacation at home later.

In the long run, this blog will be a book. Daily readers are the kick in the ass I need to write every day instead of when it’s convenient and inspired (almost never). Gentle Readers who ask if I’m OK when I haven’t posted – you help me be the writer I need to be.

But there’s a catch. If the blog becomes a book, a good book, sells lots of copies in the airport, someone will out me. It is, in this day and age, almost unavoidable. I don’t know enough about internet anonymity, and honestly, part of me must be willing to stand up and own what I write, or I’d have done more research. Fear for me is not fear of being outed, it’s fear of being insignificant. Unknown. If the book isn’t successful enough and good enough for someone to want to out me (and get paid a great deal for the information), then I will have failed.

And when I’m outed, when the book is huge and I’m on Oprah or probably someone more open-minded’s chat show, I will have made a choice.

I have based a lot of my life on not choosing.

Husband and Lover. And more.
Wife and worker.
Home and travel.
Writer and other job and other job and yes, one more job, to the point where I wonder, if I cut out the rest and focused on one, would I go up like a rocket, energy condensed?

In high school, my [one subject] teacher told me, you’re wasting yourself, you should go into [my field]. Another told me I was wasting myself if I didn’t major in English and become a writer. My graduate mentor told me eventually I’d have to focus on one aspect of my field. My writing mentor tells me I should write more, perhaps only. So far, I haven’t made a choice.

What happens if I’m Mandy the Whore instead of Me? If all I can get is another book deal instead of my life?

Right now, I am shrapnel. Will I be a missile? Or just explode at launch?

...

Good luck, Anonymous Girl. Let us know how it goes. And you’ll forgive me if I hope you don’t become competition.

10 Things About a Woman (Whether or Not She’s a Whore)

1) If she offers you a shower, it’s not a suggestion or a request. Many service providers have this on their website as a gently-worded section of the “What will our time be like?” page. Maybe you already are squeaky-clean…but she hates your cologne.

2) If your hands are empty, hers should not be full. This goes for when she’s got packages and is passing through doors as well as when her hands are full of cock. Put your fingers in her hair, your palm on her back, do something with them in return. Unless you’re acting out The Sultan and the Nubian Slave, in which case you’re paying extra not to carry her packages, so to speak.

3) If you’re not wearing a condom, she’s ovulating and HIV+. Don’t put your naked penis in a woman unless and until you like each other enough to hold hands in the waiting room.

4) Listening is not waiting for your turn to talk. If you have no clue what she’s babbling on about now, repeat her last sentence in a questioning tone. She’ll explain further. If you’re paying, you can say, “let’s not talk.” If you’re not paying – in cash or with commitment – try not to date her again if you can’t stand listening to her.

5) As discussed in my treatise on the one client who understood this, don’t ask her during sex, “What do you like?” The answer is either complicated or embarrassing – we want to pretend you automatically know, and if you’re paying us, we may not want what we normally like – we want what gets you off. Do something and ask “Do you like that?” If it’s personal, go for the play-by-play afterwards in the orgasm haze...

6) Don’t ask her where she keeps her money. Don’t ask what she spends it on. She may be saving up to be independent of you. Be a gentleman and wish her well.

7) No matter how tough she is, some days she needs to lean on you.

8) Apologize when you are not wrong. It costs you nothing and she may apologize back. At the very least, it defuses the situation.

9) Stroking her ego is part of foreplay. Telling her she’s hot makes her feel hot. Be as specific as you can.

10) Gentle Reader, your suggestion for number 10...?



(Note bedsheet marks.)

Art 1, Honesty/Chastity/Fidelity 0

One of the Gentle Readers comments:

The writing that's coming from your experiences is excellent, but what of the costs? Is the thrill worth having to lie to your husband, betray his trust and potentially put his health at risk? Is the creative product worth choosing to be an untrustworthy person?

I don't characterize what I'm doing as a "thrill", which I think demeans the ability of art to transcend the raw materials. I'm not in this for (cheap) thrills. I sleep around because I love the people I'm with and I'm not inherently monogamous. I whore for money and, as I am now discovering, to 'only connect'.

On one hand, I'm not Picasso. On the other, no-one said to Pablo, "Hey, you're a lousy husband and father and kind of a man-slut, why don't you give up this art thing and focus on your home life for awhile?" I suspect that this is in part because I'm female, but much more because I write about sex, which we as a society feel is unworthy of risk-taking to obtain, even while almost every popular depiction of "good sex" involves wild passion, adultery, one-night stands, violating social mores, obtaining the unattainable through heroic acts, near-rape, etc.

Right now, right or wrong, I identify the life I am leading as the major source of my creative power. I can no more choose between my husband and my writing than I could choose a favorite child. The other analogy that occurs is that of being in the military - is it fundamentally irresponsible to risk one's life in Iraq if you have dependents who will be widowed and fatherless if anything happens to you? This analogy presupposes that one finds making art to be as important and vital as serving one's country. I do find it so.

I said in an earlier post that

I think it’s worthwhile to do reprehensible things for the sake of making art. That’s why art must be good, why we cannot settle for average in our work. It must be worthy of the time spent cheating on the spouse, avoiding the friends, half-heartedly grading the students’ papers, ignoring the crying child kicking at the locked door of the room of one’s own.

And

I'd rather make great art than a great person

The struggle now is whether I'd rather make great art than be a great person.

So far Art has Human Kindness cornered in the Girls' Room with a pack of Sharpies and it's not looking good.

On Parenting

At the end of White Oleander, both the book and the movie (which I recently re-read and saw, respectively), Ingrid Magnussen admits to her daughter Astrid that when Astrid was a toddler, Ingrid left her with a neighbor for a year, “give or take a few months.” She confesses what a relief it was to be free,

To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To
make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not have
to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get
into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy,
clinging to me, like a spider…

Ingrid tells Astrid that she felt like a hostage. Astrid retorts, “That’s what babies are like.”

Fitch commented in an interview:

A child will take up 100 percent of you if you let them. It’s only
natural for them to want that, to try for that. So motherhood’s a dance
between individual needs and the needs of your child…Ingrid’s failing
is that she had a child but refused to dance with her.

When Janet Fitch originally wrote the short story that was the genesis for the novel, Ingrid was the protagonist. Everyone hated her, thought she was a monster, said you couldn’t possibly tell the story through her eyes, no-one wanted to empathize with her as the main character. And so the book took shape as Astrid’s story.

It’s a great book. And a lot of bad stuff happens to Astrid in a series of foster homes. But even after reading about the shooting and the foster-mother’s suicide and the blowing juvenile delinquents for weed and the eventual growing to adulthood without her mother, when Astrid confronts Ingrid at the end of the book, I think, well, yeah, no wonder Ingrid needed some time alone. She’s an artist.

I think it’s worthwhile to do reprehensible things for the sake of making art. That’s why art must be good, why we cannot settle for average in our work. It must be worthy of the time spent cheating on the spouse, avoiding the friends, half-heartedly grading the students’ papers, ignoring the crying child kicking at the locked door of the room of one’s own.

I suspect I will not be a very good parent.

In fact, I strongly suspect I’m not really fit to be a parent – I’d rather make great art than a great person (I think). I also don’t believe in an ideal childhood, and I actually hope I can settle for average in that field instead of frustrating myself by reaching for the unattainable. Everyone I know is, to some extent, fucked up by their parents. Not that they were beaten with coat hangers or burned with curling irons or molested in the kitchen while the rest of the family sat down to Sunday dinner, but that no matter how much love we receive, it’s never the amount we desire. The yearnings of unfulfilled desire are what make us discover and seek and create, in an effort to attain the recognition and love we feel we deserve. Survivors are a lot more interesting than the protected, and probably contribute a lot more to the world.

If you like who you are, you have to be okay with what you’ve come from. Bad times make us tough. We know we can survive. And if we’re inclined to making art, they give us subjects for our work.

My mother is a lovely woman. Pleasant, pretty, nurturing, handy around the house, cooked lovely meals, made some of the kids’ clothes, mostly a stay-at-home mom. But it’s my dad about whom I blog…

History: Marlene on the Wall

Marlene watches from the wall
Her mocking smile says it all
As she records the rise and fall
Of every soldier passing

But the only soldier now is me
I’m fighting things I cannot see
I think it’s called my destiny
That I am changing
-Suzanne Vega

It happened a long time ago.

Yesterday.

I was lying in the bed where we’d fucked, despite not having a condom between us, and I ended up faking it for the first time in a long time because he was insistent about it even though he didn’t come himself because, “It’s giving away too much isn’t it.”

Yes, it is.

I’d been prowling, walking alone, making eye contact with the last man in every pack of the Brit boys roaming the streets looking for cheap beer, getting thrown out of strip clubs by the same big black men in day-glo safety jackets who’d cajoled them inside with bigger and bigger discounts on cover, “Fifteen minutes free, you want fifteen minutes?”

The last man is always a little behind the others. He’s glad to be with the lads, he is, but he’s also a little bit sorry that all he’s seeing of Prague is the insides of pubs and bars and the restaurants that don’t have No Stag Parties signs. He almost always has pretty eyes, blue ones. And if I make eye contact and smile, instead of doing the quick, down and right, please-don’t-rape-me-I’m-a-tourist slide of the eyes, he’ll turn and look back when I’m fifteen paces past, which is when I turn and look back. And we laugh, because we’ve caught each other, and take another five steps and look again. Then I stop, and he comes to me, and asks me where am I going, love/sweetheart/darling (it sounds much less demeaning from a Brit boy, they all call all women their pet name of choice, eight to eighty) and I say, “I think you have beautiful eyes.” And he says, “I’d quite like to kiss you.” And I do, and his mouth is soft and tastes of fresh beer and sometimes cigarettes, Friday night tastes, and he puts his hands gently on my hips, careful not to take too much.

It’s safer to walk near a pack, on the way home. Not really. But I like listening to them tease each other and picking out their voices, Manchester, East London, Suffolk, Geordie, Scottish sometimes, best of all. They tell how hard they were for the lap-dancer, what an effort it’s taking to be faithful, how many beers they’ve pissed into the gutter or against the six-hundred-year-old walls. Tonight’s pack is Cheshire, older than the average, all with buzzed hair that they tell me later they got done this morning, to match the groom. When our paths part, they wave goodbye, but I want to see if I can hold them so I ask about the hair, end up patting and judging, Paris-like, whose is softest. Like to go to the last bar of the night with them? It’s quite near their hotel, it’ll be lovely, come on. I know I won’t pay to get in or pay for drinks; I’ll escape the metal detector wand and the bouncer’s frisking hands.

Orange juice, orange juice, orange juice, while they put away vodka and Red Bull and I cut out the one who dances in place like I do. We shout into each other’s ears, a good reason to be close, on a white dance floor, watch the plasma screens over our shoulders. “You don’t dance like an American,” Sean’s a barrister, he gets to wear a wig and argue before a higher court. He’s sharp enough to know when something I say is rehearsed, and that impresses me. I know before the last round of drinks I’m going back to his hotel room, and it only stings a little to see his friends give him the thumbs up. In all seriousness, the pack would walk me home and leave me at the door if I felt scared enough to need it. The coat check girl is sleepy, or maybe has something wrong with her left eye, and I leave her twenty crowns on the way out.

The room costs as much in a night as I’m paying for a month’s rent in my flat-share near Florenc, probably more. There is mineral water on the table and we drink it while he tells me about his dad in the SAS, and how he didn’t go into the army. Every two or three sentences, one of us has to repeat something, the accent, the phrasings tangling in our ears, making us listen harder. 3AM, showering, head, his hands soapy on my breasts, I’m thankful I’ve dropped weight, the water is warm and cool enough to feel like bed. In the bed, he wants to be an athlete, four or five positions, wants to please me, wants me to come, and finally I’m sore enough to fake it, hoping we can quit.

“How can I help you?”

“Hit me,” I whisper back. Below me, he shakes his head. Afterwards, I explain about hitting and spanking and the different feelings from constricting the windpipe and pressing on the arteries leading to the brain. He could never hit a woman, he cannot wrap his head around anyone wanting to be hit (today, there are bruises on the eyes of my elbows and the insides of my breasts from the strength of his touch).

He thinks I am asleep when he comes back from the bathroom, and gathers up his wallet and his cash, plucks his mobile from the charger, puts them in the room safe, I hear the buzz of the lock. By now I am bemused and angry, and as he lies back down beside me, still sweaty from the effort of faking, I say, “I’ll try to avoid rolling you for your wallet in the night.” Then I have to explain the slang.

In my travels, I have danced naked in two countries, planted my flag on nearly a hundred lovers, known good sport sex and can I please have a hundred dollars sex and hey, it’ll make him happy and what the hell, I’ve got twenty minutes sex, but whoredom is a foreign country. The buzz of the safe sends me beyond risk and power and the granting of secret wishes, past the first adultery of a barrister trembling on the threshold of middle age, past a good story to tell my lover who will hit me for the pleasure of the details, past penance and joy and detachment and tourism and sometimes even pleasure, into the hallways of the Renaissance Hotel and the realm of the girls who stand on the corner, waiting to be invited upstairs.



(I took this picture)

Family Tree

The last time I saw my sister, I didn’t recognize her. We hadn’t grown up together, she was really my half-sister and seventeen years older. Every year, my family drove to the state where my mother’s family lived, four households within three blocks of each other, a week at each house, all together out to the cabin with every bedroom full, kids on the living room couches, kids in tents on the lawn, bonfires, games of catch, skipping stones, the year the tree was struck by lightning, old home movies, the Bear Story, don’t tell when you’re taking a shower or you’ll get a bucket of lake water thrown over the top. Then we went to my father’s parents for two weeks. Then we went into the city and saw my half-sister and brother for one day. One lunch. Then we drove back home. I did not think this was weird until I was nearly twenty.

At thirty, I had not seen my sister in ten years. Or maybe I had for a lunch or two – I saw my brother as often as I could, we’re a lot alike, and I think he hosted some lunches when I was in town that included her, but I more remember his boyfriends and his nine-thousand-dollar-sofa (made in Italy, fabric made in France, both shipped to the US, then shipped back to the UK for putting together, then shipped back to him). They were trust-fund babies, from the first marriage.

My father arranged a little reunion – by coincidence, we were all in the same city, and we met up at a little steakhouse, an independent place with a private dining room. There was a patio just outside to smoke, though everyone but Husband and me smoked inside anyway, including my 15-year-old cousin. Husband and I were the first to arrive. Second. There was a heavyset woman, at least sixty, bloated, overweight, shiny-skinned, sitting with a dumpy older man in an ill-fitting shiny suit. Friends of Dad’s…?

“Hi…”

“Hi, long time no see, yeah?” And the voice is my sister’s, what is my sister’s voice doing in this stranger’s body?

There was dinner. It was irrelevant, saving only that I would have ordered a slightly more expensive dinner had I known my father was paying. My brother told the waiters to stop bringing my sister Bloody Marys, but she wasn’t far enough gone to miss the change in taste. It was only a small scene. After dinner, Husband and I were very quiet, both on the same page.

A year later, I went to the city to be the family member who was close enough to be family but untouched enough to deal with details. My sister’s estranged-but-not-divorced husband fought us for an open casket and won. Her boyfriend showed up in the same dumpy suit, the family cutting him as much as possible as he drifted around describing what she looked like when he found the body. At least we closed ranks. I arranged my father’s plane ticket and hotel room, I can’t remember where I stayed, it wasn’t with him despite him asking, at the end of the drunken night where he told me both that he didn’t think my other brother (still at home) was his child and that, had it been my face the lid closed on, it would have killed him. I couldn’t stand the smoke.

What’s the difference between a Muse family wedding and a Muse family funeral?

One less drunk.

How's that for Half-Nekkid Thursday?

Bits and Pieces

I'm still musing over what to write about my second appointment yesterday, so I'm invoking my girlish right to dissemble and I'll get to it tomorrow. It was good - good enough to need to keep it private for another 24 hours. For now, some sidenotes...

...Yes, Anonymous, you can hire a whore without references (from previous women you have seen). Some SP's are "newbie friendly" which can mean anything from "I don't care as long as it's green," to "yes, but we have to meet for coffee first," to "you have to make a deposit by buying me a gift card first," all the way up to "I'll be checking your home address, correct phone number and confirming your employment." No shit, there are ladies that do this. Alternatively, there are 'verification services' such as DateCheck, that verify your identity and employment, and the whore in question can check that you have been verified without actually seeing your info herself. My policy is that since I meet everyone in a non-appointment setting first, I'm working more on my guts than on your references...

...Sexual Athlete texts me about three times a day and sends me several emails a day, many of them one-liner 'hi' messages. He asked if it was ok to do this, I said, sure, fine, but don't expect me to answer them all. I've a day saved for him next week and I'm hoping he arrives with an ipod...

...After my mini-Bonkathon yesterday, I have decided I can't stand to be away from Husband on one of the few weekends we'll have together this year (due to my other job) and am going to just be a Bad Friend, failing to fly to another state to see my best friend who is arriving from another country. Though I have to admit, it's 50-50 not wanting to be away and not wanting to be around her 7-year-old twins...

...Also yesterday, the bad parts of whoring (driving, getting ready, dealing with the details, fucking someone I don't really love being with) were outweighed by the good parts of whoring (money, having a nice time, money, money) to the point where I thought, hey, I could finance a couple of major non-frivolous purchases with a few more days like this. So I think I am going to try and set up a Bonkathon in the next two or three weeks - try to see two clients in a day to ease the whole getting ready and putting together a cover story process, once or twice a week until I meet my goals. After all, as I said to PowerGirl, when she asked how it went, "The memory of fucking them is already fading, but the money is still in my purse." I think it's actually less traumatic to do them in a row...

I'll leave you with this, Gentle Readers - Bubblegum/Peppermint Candy was transformatory. Deliciously so...

Catch and Release

You might, Gentle Readers, observe the hour of this posting and conclude that the salmon has been landed...

PowerGirl and I drive outside the city, we have done twenty minutes exactly of shoe shopping and vowed to return, rushed into the slush and onto the icy highway by Folk Rocker’s show. We still miss the opening act. I am tired of being late for things, I’ve been so prompt until just lately, but it’s not too late, I will re-synch with the schedule of the world.

Folk Rocker is in rare form. I realize that clearly, his life has not gotten better. The protests, formerly a bit requisite, the angry white guy who truly does understand but can’t quite get the distance for irony, or the closeness for empathy rather than sympathy, have deepened, connected to something broken in him. Everyone makes better art when they’ve been broken. Not just the slog through almost-fame and almost-ease, but the place that bears the strain and fights and loses, the caryatid finally fallen under her stone.

(Lover’s art got better after we had a true breakup, not just a break. I don’t think it’s just practice. It was the only time I’ve seen him weep.)

He does not open with the song about love and the rose, he is no longer clinging to that illusion. He is in a different key, ‘a lover is more condoling.’ The venue is a church, and he frequently looks to God, who is, I think, in the best seats (in the bodily church, the uncushioned pews make our asses numb). There is a new song, about being broken, and wanting union and faith, and running out of everything, and when he sings it I want more than anything to go with him to the hotel, wash him, lie down with him, give him my body and all that he wants from it, no requests necessary, not even the effort of asking, receive, receive. It occurs to me that this is the secret to, if not good art, at least good tragic performance. The audience should want to fuck you until you feel better.

After the show, PowerGirl and I wait patiently in a pew, near the line of adoring admirers with CD’s clutched in fingers trembling to make the compliment, ask the question that will connect them. Folk Rocker sees me over the shoulder of a fan he hugs, I smile and wait, I am not part of the line, I am not a smile-and-hug, I’m with the band.

Sadly, the band is staying at the venue manager’s house.

She’s fantastic, a clutter of red hair and photography and teenage slightly insolent son and young getting-into-Shakespeare son and tea mugs that must be washed before Folk Rocker pours. PowerGirl anchors a sofa corner, I wash the mugs, and Folk Rocker tells me he’s being minded, he’s a guest, he reassures me, bless him, though I understand. I look fantastic. He notices. We touch as much as we can, and the unwatched pot boils damn fast. Yes, things are worse. I wish, I wish, I wish. I say, “I hope next time...” I think, I will purge you. I will absolve you. I will not heal you, but I will open the door to the recovery room. Part of this I voice, and he, also, knows it to be true.

Everyone watches everyone else’s videos on YouTube. Folk Rocker and I sit side by side. We walk out to the car, and PowerGirl warms it up as I go to him. Shaking in the cold, no time to waste, at least, in this moment only, we are in the same place at the same time. My mouth is on his, we breathe the same breath, I softly suck his tongue, he moves his mouth over mine.

“It would have been lovely.”

“It will be lovely.”

PowerGirl speeds us home, and I write this in the car, gloves insulating my thighs from the bottom of the cold laptop. We stop at 24-Hour Fine Food and gather yogurt, grape leaves, two-bite brownies. The deli guy flirts with me, I flirt back, Lebanese men always love me. I think of my brother, six blocks over, I have not called, he has not returned my calls in five months. The only way to see him is to leave a message: “I’ll be at Restaurant at noon tomorrow, call me if you won’t be there.” I want him, would have him were he not gay, HIV+, and my brother, in that order. I wonder if I come back in the morning if he will be there, organic this and that, swiping the bank card, perhaps meeting my eyes and smiling over gourmet cheese, both knowing that even a hundred lovers are not enough, we have to give, we have to receive, we have to matter and it’s the cock that tells us so.

Men in the World

I pause my car so that a man can cross to Pier One in front of me. He's middle-aged, slender, has one crutch.

Looks like a client.

In line at the bank, a 40-something lawyer flirts with the tellers, they tease him about his new haircut. He's tall, paunchy without being fat, his haircut is just a tad short at one temple, exposing his hairline creep.

I bet you've hired girls.

A young guy passes me my change at the mini-mart. Tattoos, earrings, probably pierced where I can't see.

You don't have the cash.

At the grocery store, I walk the aisles, looking for milk, Nyquil, kielbasa to cut up into the soup already started at home. I pass men in produce, bakery, the cola aisle.

You could have me.
You could have me.
You could have me.

In the parking lot, the standard looks, my standard response - smile, drop eyes, look left and down. One calls out, "Hey, do redheads really have more fun?" I laugh the fake 'Aren't you cute' laugh, a short bark, then think better of it and smile for real.

You could have me.

It's like a secret power, I'm invisible, I can fly, I can bend steel bars and you don't know it. Longing, hard-on, loneliness all around me.

If only you asked the right question I could solve your problem like that.