intro
This is another post I wrote in 2004 at the height of my “ho phase.”
This was also during my “I’m obsessed with the writing of Bret Easton Ellis" phase (I’m an L.A. girl who grew up west of Robertson Boulevard and north of the 10, and this man was writing about the kinds of people I went to school with and interacted with on a daily basis, and that appealed to me) and immediately after I had just read The Rules of Attraction.
The original iteration of this writing was presented in one long stream-of-conscious piece — an nod to the way the very first chapter of The Rules of Attraction.
I performed it as a spoken word piece, and a guy I was messing around with at the time was in the audience, and he got his feelings hurt listening to me talk about fucking someone else when I wasn’t with him even though he was fucking other people when he wasn’t with me, and isn’t that the way it always is?
For throwback Thursday, I have added paragraph breaks, corrected some typos and grammar errors that irk me, and generally tidied it up for your eyes.
I’ve also added some throwback pictures of me to break up the text because why not?
three minute sex
This is a story that might bore you, and you don't have to read it because I knew all along it would be like that.
It was May – Mother’s Day weekend to be exact — and a Saturday night in Los Angeles, and I got so drunk that I ended up in bed having three-minute-sex with a guy in the home of a dead man.
I was staying at my uncle’s house that weekend and would never bring a man back there, and I thought the guy was a talented poet who had appeared on Def Poetry Jam, but he was either a deeply troubled man or a pathological liar.
I actually had my eye on someone else that night: Mr. Chocolate, a thirty-ish movie studio employee by day and hip hop lyricist and producer by night – a charming mama’s boy with a great body, a fabulous penis, and an intense desire to please any woman he gets in bed with, but he was seeing some girl he met at work, and whenever there was a new girlfriend in his life he ignored my calls, only to come crawling back when the girl dumped him or treated him like shit. That’s a saga for a different story, though. Let’s stick with this one.
So this poet guy and I were sitting at a wobbly dining room table playing dominoes cut-throat style with the three other men that were present, and I was the only woman in the house – well room really – that was not attached to anyone else, and all the other women had gathered on the other side of the room – or “in the living room” as they called it even though it was like one step away from the “dining room” that we were sitting in – to watch a bootleg copy of some new movie that was out.
In between marveling at the fact that the home seemed to have wall-to-wall green velvet curtains and that kind of thin, cheap carpet that you only use if you are carpeting an apartment that you built in what used to be your garage and playing my hand at dominoes, I made conversation with him, and he found out that I liked to write, among other things, poetry, so he shared his interest in poetry, reciting pieces to me by first announcing their title, and then announcing the date (month, date, year) and time that each piece was written, and I kept listening to him, nodding and telling him that I liked what I was hearing, but in reality, I had tuned him out a few times on the pieces that seemed to ramble on about nothing.
All I was thinking was that he was no Mr. Chocolate, but maybe he would be able to do something better, and since the other women had seemed to settle in for the night, and it didn’t look like I was going to have any other options if I wanted to get laid, so I decided to take my chances because desperate times call for desperate measures.
He was all too eager to show his attraction to me, and he kept giving me what I suppose were meant to be meaningful stares each time he would catch my eye, and he kept asking me to recite some of my spoken pieces, but I was playing shy and hard to get because even if you are desperate, you’re never supposed to let him know that, so I sat there playing nonchalant, and the party was winding down because the hosts had hinted non-subtly that they are ready to go to bed, and everyone is discussing what to do next, so he not so casually suggested that the party continue at his place, and he even volunteers to cook something to eat, so because everyone is high and drunk, they agree that a free home-cooked meal would be much better than the late night fare at Denny’s, so a caravan to his dead father’s house is arranged and he, again not so casually, suggests that he ride in the car with me, so off we go to his house.
He draped his arm around the back of my car seat as I drove, reciting more “seductive” poetry as I pretended that my mind wasn’t already made up to have him for a casual fuck. We were the first ones to arrive at the house, and he gave me a direct tour from the back door, through the den, up the stairs and into the kitchen, out into the hallway and into his bedroom, where his king-sized bed straight out of 1972 not only had a “fancy” brass lamp built into the mirrored headboard, but was also decorated in a leopard print bed-in-a-bag set, the likes of which were often found at Anna’s Linens for $29.99 any size.
When the rest of the group arrived, we drank more alcohol and smoked more weed. The domino table was set up on his front porch. As cars whizzed by on Imperial Highway, we played dominoes, got drunker and generally made asses of ourselves, but it was all right because when everyone is drunk, everyone is an ass, and you are in good company.
He cooked baked chicken (with bell peppers and mushrooms), steamed broccoli, and macaroni and cheese that did not come from a box. And so everyone ate, and people coupled up and wandered off to different corners of the house, and he led me to his bedroom which was now dark except for the shiny brass lamp on the headboard, and as I sat down on the edge of the bed, he came over and kissed me with a little more tongue than I’m used to, and I had to keep myself from gagging because of the sour alcohol smell on his breath.
I remember telling him that I don’t like to kiss casually, which is actually a lie, because I actually love to kiss; I’m just picky about how I kiss because I feel like it’s very intimate, but he didn’t have to know that; I just didn’t want to taste his breath anymore, and he agreed that we could not kiss, and I was able to relax a little bit and try to get into what was going on.
He turned his attention towards my breasts, which, because of their size, are not a job for the uncoordinated, and when his first few attempts at touching them failed to elicit any type of reaction from me, he grabbed both nipples between his fingers and pinched, which wasn’t a pleasant feeling, and I made a noise this time because it hurt, but he thought I was enjoying it, and it seemed to get him excited, and he started to do it again, and because I was trying to say as little as possible, I simply grabbed his hands, put them on the sides of my breasts and stroked up and down a few times to show him something that would feel better to me, but he had all the sexual finesse of an overly eager fifteen year-old about to get sex for the first time (I’ll tell that story later too), and the gesture was lost on him, so I asked him to give me a massage.
And I remember thinking that this wouldn’t have happened with Mr. Chocolate, because he knows I’m sensitive on my shoulders, back, and arms, and he would have used his teeth to nibble on me until I was begging him to take me, begging him to give himself to me, and even then he would have held out because he knows that as much as I like the actual act, the build up is what does it for me, and we would have made mad passionate love and fallen asleep in each others arms only to wake up the next morning and do it again.
But I wasn’t with Mr. Chocolate; I was in some dead man’s house, in the dead man’s room about to have sex with his sexually inept son, and he went into his closet and pulled out some contraption (it looked straight out of 1955) that he plugged into the wall and attached to his hand with what I can only describe as spring coils, and he told me to lie down on my stomach, which I did, and he turned the machine on and it began to vibrate, and he proceeded to run his hand up and down my body.
I felt myself becoming more and more relaxed, and by the time he told me to turn over onto my back, I was lulled into a trance, so he used it on my breasts for a few minutes, and when his hand dipped between my legs (mind you, I still had my pants on) and I felt the vibration down there, I was more than ready to get the party started. Surprisingly, he picked up on this, and we quickly undressed each other, and as I rolled the condom onto him, I noticed a tiny red light out of the corner of my eye, and upon closer inspection, I discovered a tiny camera nestled in the corner of his room above the door, and this pissed me off because although I had agreed to some casual sex, I had not agreed to be in some low-grade porno, and I started to go off on him.
He took me in his closet and showed me that the camera did not point at his bed, and there were others in other rooms of his house, and the bank of monitors in the closet were for him to be able to tell what goes on in and around his home when he is not there.
That settled, we climbed onto the bed, and because he had gone soft during the process of explaining the camera, we had to work to get him ready again, and once he was ready, I had to put a new condom on him, and by this time I had gone a little dry, but instead of trying to get me ready again, he tried to force himself in, and again, it hurt me, and again, I made a noise, and again, he mistakenly assumed it meant I was pleased, and he started to go for the gusto, and I was trying to tell him to wait, but he thought I meant I couldn’t take it, like he was hurting me, which he was, and not in that pleasurable pain kind of way, but in that get off me you fucking asshole kind of way, and as I was about to lose my cool, I heard him panting, and he started to slow down, then finally came to a stop, and I asked him to get up, which he did, and he turned the light on, and I saw the reservoir tip of the condom was filled with his pleasure.
As he took it off, he grinned at me and told me that I felt good, and I laughed at this, and at the ridiculousness of it all, and he started laughing to, and that made me laugh harder because he was still missing the point, and then he asked me what did I think, and I simply said, “I knew all long you would be like that,” and he grinned at me and then grabbed a towel out of the closet and told me he was going to take a shower, which let me know that he was done for the night, and when I heard the water in the bathroom start running, I looked at myself in the mirror in the headboard and said it again. “I knew all along it would be like that.”
I don't remember this one, but you wrote about Mr. Chocolate in the past, and I would love to reminisce with you about him. It is hilarious how this dude so didn't get the point.
That you could write so fluidly and pointedly at that stage of your life and carry it so well into this stage is admirable and astounding. The dead man’s house was my favorite character.