LIBIDO
Pull My Daisy
Word Count 1566
My first boyfriend was Peter Miller Hutcheson. Everyone called him Hutch. I called him Peter, because I thought this gave me some claim on him that all the other people he was then sleeping with didn’t have. We also sometimes called each other “kid.” Hutch was not only liberal with and honest about his sexual favors, he was something we did not then have a label for—a guy with a braid down to his waist, who often wore a skirt, and cavorted with both boys and girls and groups of both. He had a particular thing for redheads and seemed to think I was one, which was news to me—apparently the rug trumps the drapes in such matters.
A Warm Hand
Word Count 530
When I was eighteen years old, I moved to St. Croix for a year, filled with nothing more than the desire to experience the world. I worked at a restaurant in Christiansted called Rumors where the waitresses had to wear sarongs, and you know, at eighteen, you look the best you’re ever going to look, sarong or no sarong, so if sex was what you wanted, it was easy to find. I was far from home and could do what I felt like doing, and no one at home ever had to know.
The libido of an 18-year old is a restless and unfaithful thing. I didn’t much care about anyone. It was all about how I looked, how I felt, what I wanted.
Penile Implant
Word Count 1299
My first foray into computer dating brings a Harvard grad: Montgomery Kingsley Yardley Abernathy the fourth.
“I never cared for ‘Montgomery’,” he explains in the course of our one and only telephone conversation. “Didn’t care for Kingsley or Yardley either” – he pronounces it ay-ther. “Settled on K.Y. Like the jelly.” By the time I hang up, that old feeling, the one that rhymes with “torpedo”, is already ramping up.
A week later, “libido girl” takes the train to the Big Apple, followed by a cab to the Harvard Club, where a doorman ushers me up the marble steps and through a brassbound door into the crimson-carpeted foyer where K.Y. awaits. His thick, side-parted red hair is going white.
Movie Kiss
Word Count 789
The smoldering stare, the red lipstick, the man, always taller, always sweeping the woman up into his arms. The movie kiss. I can’t remember how old the first time I saw that kiss but knew one day I had to be kissed like that. After kissing enough fumbling adolescent boys, I reasoned that if I was going to get my kiss, I should become an actress and find myself a movie star. I went to New York and enrolled in acting school as soon as I could. There was nothing glamorous about the grubby rooms at the HB studio acting school on Bank Street in the Village. Nothing romantic. Only earnest students talking about motivation, about the importance of listening (who wants to do that!), and how their bodies were their instruments. I was fine with that one. Okay, I thought, play me. But all my scene partners were decidedly not movie stars.
Hip Replacement
Word Count 1114
There is nothing sexy about hip replacement surgery to a man who successfully online dates yet he found you, the only single parent with a vagina, at the Hancock House Hotel bar the Friday night of visiting day weekend.
You know he is hinting at the firm-for-his-age-body that lies beneath his Patagonia fleece, the striped button down shirt unironically tucked into his belted cargo pants, when he brags that he goes indoor mountain climbing every Saturday in Gowanus with his buddy.
He Can’t Help It
Word Count 76
He can’t help it
A catbird has gone mad
or is dangerously obsessed.
He keeps attacking his image
in a livingroom window.
So Bad It Was Great
Word Count 668
We fought, and then we had sex. This was our pattern for nearly three years.
We met late in the afternoon on an early fall day; I’d just exited the subway at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth. I was walking west on my way home from my perishingly boring job at a science publishing house when I saw him; tall, burly, curly-headed. Unlike any other guy I’d met in New York City, he had a full beard. He wore a sweat-stained green pocket tee, construction boots, and a pair of dirty white painter’s pants that rode low on his hips. He stood inside a step van delivery truck a quarter filled with fresh produce. His smile was dazzling as he held out an apple in one leather-gloved hand.
Taste this, he said. I didn’t hesitate and stepped inside the open back of the truck. While he held onto the apple, I took a bite.
Pavel, Paris, Prague
Word Count 1669
I left New York for France in September 1968, a few months after les évènements de mai — the student riots, the barricaded cobblestone streets, the Molotov cocktails—and the end of a two-year love affair. The civil unrest in Paris still made the news but no longer the headlines. In a mood as gloomy as mine and a cityscape as grim as la Ville Lumière, I would easily fit in, dressed in black, sitting in sidewalk cafés, drinking endless cups of exprès, and smoking Gitanes.
It was not to be.
Insatiable
Word Count 1706
It’s the Fourth of July, 1998. I’m 13. On a white sandy beach in Ogunquit, Maine, the fireworks explode above the ocean. I’m wearing a wrap skirt with pink hibiscus flowers and silver flip-flops. I’m with my best friend, Arley, and we’re escorted by Jeff and John, local boys we’ve gotten to know during our annual summer trip. . They work at Barnacle Billy’s so they have their own cash and always smell slightly of fish.
After the fireworks, the four of us walk across the street to The Meadowmere Resort, where Arley and I stay with her mom. Arley steps inside, and Jeff gives John a nod to leave as well. My heart skips a beat. It’s just us now. We awkwardly hug and almost say goodnight. I’m looking into his green eyes as he leans into me. I grab onto his honey-blond hair as his lips touch mine. It’s innocent, a touch steamy, romantic.
He’d Eat You Up
Word Count 1344
Michael undid the leather strap of his Cartier watch and flung it from the open window of his white Cadillac convertible into the Hudson River.
“Does anybody really know what time it is?” He belted out the Chicago lyrics. We swigged greedily from a bottle of Mt. Gay 151 rum and passed a joint.
We had collided on a red clay tennis court. He was married.
I felt cherished. The first night, we used my college roommate’s apartment in Manhattan. Michael drove in from work, an ice house in Brooklyn, some sort of managerial job, bearing red roses and Krug champagne.
“Miss Amy!” he cried when he came. He collapsed on my chest. I didn’t risk a breath.
F*** Anyone You Like
Word Count 437
I never got the sex talk; mostly it was campfire stories. The older women in my life regaled me with tall tales about near-misses with dangerous men. Forgetting to rotate your tires could land you with a flat, and that was a reliable route to being bound and gagged in some man’s trunk. Going home with one willingly was not much better; you would not be there at your own pleasure, but at his fatal whims.
A therapist once asked me to walk her through an abbreviated account of my sex education. I held out my arms like Lady Justice: in one hand, Our Bodies Ourselves, and in the other, the collected works of the crime writer Ann Rule.
Screwed Up
Word Count 221
There is nothing my husband would rather do than screw.
There. I said it. A simple statement, though not one normally used in everyday conversation.
My attitude towards sex: I can take it or leave it. Menopause has dialed back my hormones big time.
But making love is George's solution to any problem. If he's sick, sex makes him feel better. If he's sad, it makes him happy. If he's restless, it ensures a good night's sleep.
May/December
Word Count 191
Looking from you to me,
hotel clerk doesn’t see the man
I see, as you fumble
with water, pain pills
(your back, a grid of frayed wires).
Reservation lists one queen.
Parental Guidance
Word Count 936
I always did my homework after dinner at our kitchen table. Many of those nights, I couldn’t help but overhear Mom and her friend Pam discussing Pam’s husband, her lover, and the challenge of managing both. It all sounded very complex. While I had read books and seen movies where couples engaged in adulterous affairs, they rarely addressed the more practical considerations. I found these almost as interesting as the actual sex.
Up to that point, most of my understanding of sex was acquired through books. On our shelves, I had discovered the hard-boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and the noir fiction of James M. Cain. Men were remote and hard-drinking, while women were sultry objects of desire or “dames” to be rescued. I was drawn to the cynical heroes and pleasantly titillated by the implied—but generally not too explicit—sex.
Hot Teacher
Word Count 898
Most of the teachers in our high school were as dilapidated as the creaking floors of our classrooms. One day, an American History teacher appeared, wearing a mini-skirt as short as mine. We were lucky to have Annette Harvey for Home Room, which meant that we were in the company of a dead ringer for Petula Clark for an extra hour.
Although she wouldn’t divulge her age, I quickly sussed out that hers was a body like mine, a new continent, begging to be discovered. My braces were off, pony-tail swapped for a cropped Mia Farrow cut, charcoal lining my eyelids. Everything about her was a tutorial for the bait and tackle of desire.
The Arrival
Word Count 1486
I had forgotten what Jocelin smelled like until she kissed my right cheek, and Christian Dior's L’Eau Sauvage enveloped me. She murmured my name in my ear, her perspiration trickling onto my earlobe.
“Ça va?” Her blue eyes looked at me as I stood frozen in the arrivals hall of Paris’ Orly Airport.
I nodded and smiled, but my stomach hopped about and triggered a sickening aftertaste in my mouth. Was crossing the Atlantic the right choice? It was August 1980, and I had given up my flat in San Francisco and left behind all my friends in the City's thriving lesbian community, not to mention my family in Southern California.