aventure d’un soir

There were four e-mails, the last including the name of her hotel and the room number.

I glanced at the time. Ten o'clock. I had to be up early for work the next morning. I could think of several excellent reasons for not driving into DC this late at night.

None of them were enough to overcome my curiosity.

I dressed. At the door, I paused, went downstairs, and pocketed two leather cuffs and a metal hitch. Once in the car, it took me an hour to find the hotel and another twenty minutes to find parking.

There was no answer to my first knock; I stood in the hallway, idly planning my driving route home. She came to the door on the second knock, dressed in a bathrobe. The dark hotel room obscured the details of her face, but her short hair was slightly mussed; she had fallen asleep while waiting.

I followed her inside.

Details. She was from Memphis, in town for a convention, her second this year. She was a reader. She had a perfectly round ass; she jumped, as if startled, everytime I gave it a slap. When my hands slid the bathrobe from her shoulders, she repeated over and over again, "I can't believe I am doing this. I can't believe I am doing this."

I left three and a half hours later.

It wasn't until I got home that I realized I did not know her name.

Kevin

I met Kevin during Freshmen college orientation; we were doing community service, painting a local elementary school stairwell, and we fell into a discussion on science-fiction books and other assorted geeky topics. Which was interesting to me, because Kevin was not a geeky guy.

It wasn't until Junior year that I met up with him again at a battle of the bands event. He found out that I'd never experienced college drinking, and promptly arranged for me to buy a half-empty bottle of Bacardi. Six shots later, I was staring at the stars outside a townhouse, completely blitzed.

Kevin introduced me to his circle of friends and I began my education in real social interaction. Through him,  I learned how to behave in small groups of people; I couldn't sit in the corner and read my book all the time. If I wanted to be a part of the group, I had speak up, make interesting comments, be amusing and occasionally entertaining.

Kevin was the coolest guy I have ever met. At college, he started an underground literary magazine. He had a tumultuous relationship with a girl that involved 3am screaming matches in the dorm's foyer (culminating with the decapitation of Kevin's right baby toe one night when she smalled the door on his bare foot). He sang lead in a rockabilly blues band. He was cool, and for a year I hung out with him almost every night. 

By my last semester in college, I had my own room in the dorms and was spending time with NE. But I still made my way to his townhouse every week to watch X-files with Kevin and his crew, and on the weekends to party.

After college, he went on to film school and our contact was reduced to the occasional IM or phone call. He graduated film school and headed to California.

There is more to the story – I met up with him while attending a recent conference in Anaheim – but I'm going to keep the details to myself. There was one point, though, when he turned to me and asked, "What is the secret?"

"To what?" I really wasn't sure what he meant.

"Life. You seem to have it all figured out. You're happy. You know who you are. Know where you're going."  

"I don't. I'm…happy-ish. I like myself, I've got good friends, and a well-defined sense of what I want from life. But there's no secret. And if there is, it's something simple, like, accepting yourself and your desires and finding a way to live life in such a way that you don't deny them."

I don't know uf he believed me. But it was the truth. And I had to wonder – if the coolest guy I've ever met is looking to me for the answers to happiness, does that mean that being cool precludes being happy?

I don't think so – but then, I don't think it made life any easier for him. 

jewelry

I have three pieces of jewelry I wear.

 

The first is a chain with pendant; a gift from my mother, she gave one to each of her sons (four of us). The pendant is a circle enclosing a triangle; the triangle is engraved with a dove.

 

 

The second is a white gold ring, a gift from NE and Bear. I wear it on my right hand, ring-finger.

 

 

The last is also a gift from NE and Bear; a silver chain I wear around my left wrist.     

 

I am less attached to how they look, than to what they mean. I strive for a minimalist approach to possessions  (although my recent acquisition of an HDTV and pending ownership of a 30-year old motorcycle speak to the contrary) because possessions can define you as a person.

In wearing each of these items, I do so as a conscious act.

in Sickness and in Health

A New Start

The day after New Years I awoke, had a decent-sized breakfast, and sat in front of my computer to do some writing.

Four hours later I realized my food was not going to stay down. I went into the bathroom, put my hair into a ponytail, knelt by the porcelain goddess, and vomited up my breakfast, the previous night’s dinner, and any snacks I’d had in between. I waited until I was sure there was nothing left in my stomach and pulled myself to my feet.

I spent the next few minutes running cool water over my face, rinsed my mouth out, and went back into my study to wait out of the rest of the flu.

fever + Anthony Hopkins cinema

That night I was caught in a fevered ribbon of an idea. I was on the Bonneville Salt Flats speedway and was attempting to beat the current land-based speed record. I would awake every thirty minutes, curled against my pillow, with a renewed conviction to try again. I don’t recall my dreams. Around four AM, muscle ache outweighed my tenacity and I pulled myself out of bed. At seven, I called in sick to work.

I spent the day watching bad television and ate a bit of toast.

the loss of porn

I slept. The next morning I managed to dress and bathe myself without too much discomfort. I sat down to check my e-mail before work and found my computer in a state of distress. The hard drive was failing.

I went to work.

I came home.

The next six hours were spent trying to recover data from the dying machinery. I was unsuccessful. Six months of pictures, music, projects, writing. Gone.

But the most painful loss are those items whose existence I may never recall. Snippets of words and ideas cast back into the cauldron of my consciousness.

I went to sleep.

“Ah well, fuck it.”

You become complacent with competence. You forget how it feels to fail at something. To lose something of importance.

But without loss, you never understand what you have.

Time to start over.

Mr. Postman

I have boxes of letters.

These boxes are filled with colorful postcards, poetry and short-story crammed packages, pictures, lipstick stained pages, scented love notes, and letters so long they required creative origami to fit within envelopes.

Between 1992 and 1997, I spent a great deal of my misbegotten youth flirting on-line with pretty much any halfway interesting female I could find. Few proved interesting enough to talk with beyond the first few months, but their letters are testaments to my unrelenting mission to explore the female mind.

And by ‘explore the female mind’, I mean ‘engage in sexual conquest’.

This was before everyone had a folder on their desktop marked ‘personal pictures’ filled with an intimate reservoir of carefully selected photos ready to be attached to your most recent Craigslist correspondence.

No, back then it had to be done the old-fashioned way. Via snail mail.

Seduction occurred in the following progression:

1. On-line chat.
2. Phone conversation.
3. Letter with picture.
4. Real life meeting.

More often than not, I never actually got to step four; I was too shy or too busy to really push beyond step three. But I did reach step three a lot.

In truth, I did love receiving letters. There is something about reading handwritten words that has a solidity and elegance. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t partly motivated by my hope for a picture when I requested they write me.

And so I have stacks of letters. Most are filled with details of day-to-day lives that read like diary entries without the truly juicy parts. Some were more intimate, expressing love in the way only aspiring teenager writers can. And a few, just a few, wrote stories, erotic musings that filled my late adolescent fantasies.

Acolyte of the Written Word

I read my first real book at eleven or twelve. I’m defining ‘real book’ as a book longer than 300 pages. I’d done my share of reading adolescent literature, but up to that point books had existed primarily as a school-learning exercise. 300 pages was 200 more than I was used to reading.

My first book was a fantasy novel, the fifth in an on-going series. It wasn’t a terribly good book; against the blank canvas of my experience, however, it proved interesting enough. I finished it feeling over-full; I felt as if I was trying to digest an unusually large meal. I was stretching myself, testing unused muscles, and I spent the next day or two trying to figure out of it I liked the taste of it.

Apparently, I did. I was now a Reader.

The floodgates opened. I went back and started reading that series from beginning to end. It took me a while, but I was hooked and stubborn. My father was also a reader (it was one of his books that got me hooked) and we had a few bookshelves filled with a miscellany of sci-fi, fantasy, and spy novels. It took me about a year to go through those and then I started on my mother’s books (Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes, and even a few Sidney Sheldon books).

I got a library card and went through the local library’s fantasy section in six months. I branched out.

When my parents surprised us kids with a road-trip to Disney World, I walked down the main boulevard with my nose in a book. I read at restaurants. I read at lunch at school. At college, I read while I walked between classes.

I still read. Not quite as much, but enough to garner comments from those who see me reading at my desk or while waiting in line. It’s not about escape for me; I like my life. Reading books is relaxing. They entertain me, engage my mind, expose me to new ideas – and grant me the knowledge necessary for world domination.

Alright, maybe not so much the last part. But it was through books that I became an acolyte of the written word.

I write because I read.

Sainthood

When I was young, around ten or eleven, I got into the habit of blessing those around me. The blessing consisted of making a cross on their forehead with my thumb and murmuring ‘bless you’ (what? I was raised in a large Irish Catholic family. These things happen.).

In retrospect, it comes across as slightly creepy. But at the time I was convinced I was going to grow up to be a priest or a monk. It’s a goal I have yet to achieve (I still might make it; the simple uncluttered life of a monk has a definite appeal to me).

Really, what I want is to be nominated for sainthood. I want to be the saint of self-forgiveness and letting go.

Many of the wounds we carry around are self-inflicted. It’s not because we won’t forgive ourselves – we just ignore the pain and choose instead to shove it deep inside where they become a fertile breeding ground for all of our insecurities.

There is a lot of things in life worth fighting to hold onto: friends, family, sense of self. But most of what we struggle to hold onto becomes a burden we carry with us everywhere. We worry about job security. We condone our jealousy. We harbor anger towards those that wrong us. We keep a death-grip on our guilt (earned and unearned).

The blessing I want to bestow is that of freedom. To give voice to a truth we already know but have difficulty accepting.

Chapter and Verse, Part III

(Chapter and Verse, Part I is here, and Part II is here).

I was a busy youth.

But I wasn’t busy doing traditional teenage activities. I wasn’t on a high school sports team. I didn’t have a gang of friends to hang out with after school. I didn’t go to local parties, didn’t drink, didn’t get into trouble.

I spent my time on-line. This was back before it was cool. Back before the WWW. Before Al Gore invented the Internet super-highway (at the time, the ‘net was primarily used by the government, colleges, and UNIX geeks). Back then it was a gateway for me.

Once I had cracked the on-line door open at fourteen and became aware of the vast sexual candy store it provided in a medium that gave me the freedom in which to explore it, I was hooked. And when I say candy store, I’m not referring to pornographic movies, audio clips of women mid-orgasm, or even dirty photographs. In those early days, sexual content was limited to risque ASCII pictures and text conversations.

ASCII pictures did not flourish beyond those early BBS days. On-line chatting, however, remains fairly popular.

But this isn’t about ASCII pictures. This is about the women I met on-line and then later met in person.

The very first on-line woman I was to meet in real life was BG, someone I’ve touched on in earlier posts. I was about fifteen, she was mid-thirties and married (like many of my early endeavors). I met her at an Argus BBS brunch and stole my first kiss. No, really – it was my *first* kiss, chaste as it was in closed eyes and lips. What the hell did I know? We had taken a walk down the street from where the small get-together when she stopped, pointed to her lips, and waited.

Then there was the first ‘date’ I had. She was in her late twenties and drove an Eclipse. She had a raunchy imagination and when she got bored at work she would chat with me until she was driven to visit the restroom for relief. I still have a picture of her, somewhere, along with a card scented with her perfume (a hint of flowers that left an indelible impression on me). We caught Dead Again at the movies but I was too shy to make a move on her.

Yes. I was quite shy at that age. I’m fairly sure it was easy to make me blush.

I met the only girl my own age at her high school production of Grease; she was playing clarinet and got me a free seat. Once the show was over, I tried to steal a few awkward moments with her while my father waited to drive me home. Afterwards, we drifted apart; six months later, I logged in to find a note that she had been killed in a car accident. My parents offered to take me to her funeral, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. It was the first time in my life that someone I had had an intimate connection with was, in a irrevocable manner, removed from my life.

There was the woman I received a set of Tarot cards from. She was in her early forties and unlike the rest of the older women I played with, she embraced the age discrepancy between us. She enjoyed playing a nurturing role in my life while exchanging written fantasies about her seducing the young man next door. We met only twice. I can recall an empty playground, her in a swing while I stood between her legs and kissed her – this time, with parted lips, but not much more.

From these women, and all the women I didn’t meet in person, I learned how prevalent abuse was. One had a husband that hit her. Another had her first child in a bathroom because she was too scared to tell her parents. Several had been raped. It was a sharp awakening for me, coming to understand the forces that shape our lives; how easy many people find it to hurt those they love while intoxicated, angry, or simply ignorant. My youthful mantra had been ‘never intentionally harm another’; now it became ‘never UNintentionally harm another’. The edge of the knife I was learning to wield must never draw unintended blood.

I learned how easy it is to fall in love, the first rush of passion and emotionally-charged promises. I learned, too, how quickly those feelings passed. I tethered my heart that I not again be swept away by a rush of hormones and endorphins. With experience, I learned how to differentiate between lust and love and loosened the tether on my hunger while learning how to keep emotional distance (not necessarily a good thing).

I learned that every action, every conversation, was a thread, a connection with consequence that was often not felt for months or years. I learned the basic patterns of human needs.

Today, I know who and what I am. We are a product of what we do. Those who practice music every day become musicians. Those who spend their days in a kitchen become cooks.

Those who spend their time hunting, become hunters.

Footnote: Meeting someone in person is always a fascinating exercise. Whether you’ve seen a picture of them or not they always look different from what you’ve envisioned. Their personality is often both quite different and exactly the same from what you expect. Reconciling the differences is what makes these meetings interesting. Discovering which aspects of their personality remain true in person will ultimately determine if the relationship will survive.

Regardless of the long-term prospects, human nature being what it is, if the two people are even mildly compatible there is always a chance that the meeting’s emotional and sexual build-up will override any lingering issues. That, and a healthy dose of human curiosity, will often lead to a testing out of in-the-flesh sexual compatibility (kissing, groping, all night long sex marathon…)

Newton’s First Law

Sometimes when I am driving on a cool summer night, my window rolled down so I can thread the air with my fingers while listening to a mix of Leonard Cohen, Ella Fitzgerald, and Holly Cole, I want to just slide past my exit and keep on driving…

NE likes to tell this story about me. A few years ago, I told all my friends I was getting out of town for the weekend – my plan was to get in my car, drive southward, and see how far I could get. I gave myself a good three or four days to go and come back.

I got as far a Virginia Beach – a six to seven hour drive from where I live. It was dusk when I arrived, and being November, the area was pretty much deserted. I found a nice beach hotel and checked into a room with a view and a jacuzzi.

I went to the room and started the jacuzzi, setting it to ‘hot as hell’. I took a look at the last vestiges of a sunset, grabbed a book, and spent the next three hours reading in water hot enough to melt the words from each page.

The next morning I spent some time wandering the empty beach, watching the ocean waves take the sand and studying the odd person who, like me, was standing on the beach in the winter. I cruised the closed ocean stores trying to find a tattoo parlor that might, by some miracle, be open. I had no luck with that, but the drive, in the quiet still of an empty city, was oddly comforting.

Around noon I packed up and headed home.

During a recent conversation with Magdelena, I was reminded of something. It’s never been about the destination for me, but about the journey. I like to complete my goals because leaving too many things undone can become a habit – but I never start my way towards something because I need what is at the end of it.

NE likes to tease me that I only got a state away on my ‘big trip to nowhere’. But I never intended to go some place. I just wanted to go away.

The Girl I Didn’t Marry

Everything we say is a story. The jokes we tell, the complaints we utter; our histories shared, our promises made. We unravel our lives in our heads with an audience of one. We make our friends accomplices in the fictions of our lives.

Good stories, stories with meaning, are not true or false. They contain a self-honesty that does not require belief in a system of truths. They simply exist as a voice. And if it speaks to you, you may be changed forever.

You can read the first part of how I met NE here.

***

Let me be absolutely honest here. Under normal circumstances, NE would have been way out of my league. Not only was she beautiful, she could dance (a weakness of mine). She ran in entirely different social circles than I and was well known to almost everyone in my graduating class. At that point in my life, I was still becoming the social person I wanted to be. Even with my growing self-confidence, I knew, and she knew, that I shouldn’t be able to get her. (Today, I don’t see anyone as out of my reach – but back then I still had a lot to learn about myself.)

So why did NE keep coming back every night?

I had social proof in the form of the group of people who were always hanging around my room. I had romantic proof in the close relationship and I had to another member of the group – an attractive girl who would later create upheaval for NE and I.

And she was vulnerable. Not only was she emotionally reeling from a recently broken off relationship that had been so intense she had essentially locked herself in her room for a couple weeks (this was before we met in person), she had a need to be liked by everyone.

My last semester at college was my best. During those months, NE and I became an interesting team. In the evenings, we would host card parties. At night, we would talk.

But there were complications. NE was sort-of dating her high school sweetheart, Bear. It was during our discussions about him that our initial lines were drawn. Yes, we were intimate. But there were a couple of activities that would be off-limits. I don’t think NE believed we would be able to stick with them.

She was half-right.

The first time I met Bear, we sat on the steps of the dormitory and talked for a couple of hours while NE slowly went crazy inside the lobby. I explained to Bear how close NE and I had become and then made it clear that I wasn’t going to try to take her away from him. We talked about what it is that I offered NE, what role I played in her life.

I’ve never met anyone quite like Bear. Smart, handsome, confident, and the most giving man I have ever met in my life. He was devoted to NE and wanted her happy. We were two people who shared a passion for a single person – NE – and we found common ground that has since become the foundation for the best relationship in my life.