Eve Marx

Word Count 953

Although I’ve done my share of wandering, notably in St. Barts, Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, St. Croix, the entire BVD, Oslo, London, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and basically every street in New York City, most of my wandering has been driven by my lustful eye. For what seems now like an incredibly short period of my life, I let physical desire guide me. I had sexual encounters with literally dozens of men. I did engage in a few actual relationships, but it’s more accurate to say I had conquests. One afternoon, very bored, I tried counting them. It was a very high number. I didn’t remember all the names, if I ever even knew names.
I remember a conversation one night at a Japanese-style restaurant on Third Avenue not far from the Bowery. It was past closing and I was sitting at the bar with the owner’s daughter-in-law who was a good ten years older. She’d been married to the owner's son for about five years. Our conversation was about our long list of sexual conquests. She'd racked up quite a few in her day even though I remember thinking she was old and unattractive. She asked me if I’d ever hooked up with an Asian guy or a black guy or anybody who wasn’t white. When I said I hadn’t, she took a long drag on her cigarette and made a dismissive sound that was a cross between a snort and a yawn.
“You’re a lightweight,” she said.
A therapist I was seeing at the time wondered if I had Daddy Issues. I saw where she was coming from, but her analysis of my philandering ways never sat right. ,WhatI failed to make her understand, was how interested I was in sex. I was extraordinarily horny, but that wasn't something you could politely talk about.
There were risks, of course, notably STDs. Not every partner could be convinced to wear a condom. People were just starting to talk about AIDS but no single woman I knew at the time gave it more than a passing thought. I remember one morning I was sitting at my desk at work, drinking take-out diner coffee and reading a tabloid newspaper. My desk phone rang. It was my friend Connie in a frantic state. Connie had a loud, naturally hoarse voice. She could stop a train dead in its tracks just using her normal speaking voice. She never uttered a sentence that wasn’t crammed with expletives.
“Fuck shit piss goddamn it,” she screamed into the phone, speaking incoherently for three straight minutes about vaginal sores and Acyclovir. “What are you talking about? “ I asked. “Do you have herpes?” “Goddammit,” she shouted. “How did word get around so fast? Does everybody know?”
I guess this would be a good time to list some of my conquests. There was a preppie guy from northern California who photographed weed for a living and sold his images to the magazine "High Times." There was a cowboy wearing actual cowboy boots with spurs I met from Oklahoma City. His brother, who he was visiting, lived around the corner. (I also fucked him). There was a musician I picked up on the subway. There were guys I met at cafes and poetry readings and guys I met at the Carmine Street pool. My only requirement was that they had to be terribly good looking. I didn’t care if they had money, although there was one guy who had a terrific apartment with a wraparound terrace on lower Fifth. I thought hard about trying to see if this could be more than a booty call since I really coveted his apartment. I remember a too nice guy I met when his Doberman knocked an ice cream cone right out of my hand on lower Sixth Avenue near the Bigelow pharmacy. He was a bit older and really well dressed. He was embarrassed by his dog’s behavior. He invited me to the opera because he had two tickets. Afterwards, we went back to his place which was a stunning floor-through apartment in Greenwich Village with a working fireplace. We sat on his beautiful tongue and groove wood floor and drank an expensive French wine. We fucked of course and it wasn’t very good. I still remember his grunting and groaning. I continued seeing him for a few more weeks until finally one day he said, very sadly, “I think you like my dog more than me," which was true. I’d fallen deeply in love with his big, gorgeous Doberman whose name was Sparky. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I still think about that dog.
My list of conquests grew. I stopped asking for or remembering names. It all came to a screaming halt when I met the man who became my husband. He started out as a conquest, too; we met when he was married and I was in what I would describe now as a very flimsy arrangement with a NYPD detective, Tom, who was pissing me off with his cocaine habit and his chronic lying. Tom kept introducing me to his friends as his fiance even though he never made the slightest move to put a ring on it. So my wandering stopped. My lust for fresh cock was sated. I got married. I had a baby. I stopped wandering. I became a homebody. All my wandering now takes place on real estate sites and dog adoption sites where I imagine future dogs and residences. The lust to wander is real. Now it’s just about far-flung locales and small houses and chic apartments. And Dobermans. Always Dobermans. Sparky, you still have my heart.

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.