Homecoming

I went to my college's homecoming party because I hoped I'd get laid.

It had been almost a year since I'd been on campus, despite the fact that I lived in the same town and still had one or two friends there who'd been a year behind me. I decided to go because I'd always had good luck at homecomings in the past, there would be free beer, and it had been long enough since I'd been there that I would just seem like another alum. I could pretend I had just come into town, and thus avoid the questions which would lead to me revealing that I'd been laid off and out of work for almost four months.

Additionally, my good friend Anastasia had invited me. She was engaged to be married, and this was one of the few times she'd be staying up late for a real party. I was an old hand at these things, even had a playlist that I listened to to get me in the mood as I got ready, walked from my house to campus.

Don't think of Constantine.

It's unlikely he'll be there, I said to myself, accessing the emotional risks. But in an obsessive nature such as my own, some fantasies are inevitable. With everyone half blind with alcohol, who knew whose bed I would end up in at the end of the night?

I won't go into any details--such fantastic thoughts embarrass me in the sober light of day. Anyway, by the time I was nearing campus, I had put such dreams away in the worry over the endless questions I might be asked: why was I still living in town? What happened to my plans for New York City? Had I applied for graduate school?

The truth was I was embarrassed to go, but it was the only party in town.

I solved this problem by downing a beer in my first ten minutes and going in search of something stronger. Unlike last year, however, there was no hard liquor behind the stage, only a couple making out beneath the emergency exit light. Good. If people were making out already, I'd be bound to pick somebody up, maybe some sweet 19 year old freshman boy with a private dorm room...

But at a party attended by almost 200 people, that was the only couple I saw.

Instead, there was Constantine.

I hadn't made any plans to seek him out, or even to notice him, but the moment I stepped onto the improvised dance floor he broke from the crowd and got as far away from me as he could. I had to brush past him when I wanted to seek someone on the dance floor or went over to the tables for a drink. When I left to go outside for a breather he'd be out there smoking, and when I tried to come in he'd decide to rejoin the party at the same time as me. In my increasingly buzzed state I began to wonder if he wanted something from me, or if this was some sophisticated form of torture. I tried to make a joke of it to Anastasia: "I'm seeing Constantine everywhere!"

"I'm sure he doesn't see you," she replied in a no-nonsense tone of voice.

But it was comforting to know that the social agony my memories from last year were colored with hadn't just been a result of overactive emotions. This place really was small, and the parties I had gone to mainly so as not to make it seem like I was afraid of him really had been difficult. After he stood right next to me and Anastasia as we danced, obviously "looking for someone in the crowd", I was glad when she suggested we take a break. I had had four beers, and in another minute or two I would have grabbed Constantine by the collar and either bawled out an apology or finished what we'd started 3 years ago.

I don't drink much. It's always social drinking, and lately I've begun to wonder if I should even do that. The reason is that a good drunk--that happy free floaty feeling where I want to hump almost anyone--can so quickly become a bad drunk. In the course of three or four hours I can crash into the dangerous round of thought that no one will ever fuck me again, nothing I have achieved is worth anything, no one will remember me when I die. Like when I was a child at my first IMAX theatre, I will become more overwhelmed than most people in the audience, unable to resist a powerful feeling of vertigo. "Easily overstimulated," says Q.

In the safety of Anastasia's dorm room I collapsed on her bed, hugging one of the huge squishy pillows she had there. She collects Klimt prints, has put up photos of her family and charming little drawings and trinkets she's made, has DVDs like You've Got Mail and The Hours. "This is peaceful," I said. She and her fiance, for all our ideological differences, are like a little island of calm compared to me. I wanted to tell her how the rising tide of bad memories had been quelled simply by a change of scene, of how a week ago I'd been surprised to notice that I hadn't thought of Constantine for ages, only to have it flare up again in his actual presence. Of how happy I was that she was there, when usually I have no one to save me from the bad drunk but myself.

Instead, we got into an argument about sex.

I have no idea how it began. I've told my closer friends and family part of the truth. Q. knows I have a blog, though not what it's about, and promised she has no interest in reading it. Anastasia knows I meet people online for sex, but has no idea why I do this when I could meet someone normal in a less dangerous fashion. Perhaps I had just quoted something someone had said on Twitter.

What are these people like? she wanted to know, "Do they have jobs?" From her tone she thought they were a lot of vagrants living off the back of the state--as I was I until very recently, for at the time of this conversation I had a food stamp card in my wallet.

"Well," I began, deciding to play for sympathy, "some of them have children to come home to--"

"Then they are obscene!" she exclaimed. "You think they don't know?"

I'm not sure how she made the connection between having children in a house and having wild sex in the same house without my saying anything, but the jump had been made. "Q. dated," I recalled, and tried to stammer out an anecdote about a trip to another state and adjoining hotel rooms, but the tone was wrong.

"This is too personal," she said, "we should stop."

So we did. But I wanted to say that you always kind of know, even in households where there are no orgies. There was an article in one of those teen magazines about funny "I walked in on my parents" stories, and my cousin had once complained to me about accidentally ending up in a similar situation: "Ugh, old people!" And knowing what I do now, was there really anything wrong with what Q. was trying to do? She'd gotten divorced when I was one, didn't start dating again until she was in her late 30s. I'd never actually seen anything, though I had my 12-year-old suspicions. When I teased her for going back to the laundromat with its cute attendant because she had "forgotten" something, she'd thrown a pair of socks at me.

But accidents do happen. And some people push and blur the boundaries in worrisome ways. Even Q. had said to me, long after she'd ended that stage of dating men that neither of us were very comfortable with, "I wasn't a very good role model."

"Is this really good?" Anistasia wanted to know, meaning, I guess, internet dating and the unspoken suspicions of bondage, beatings, god knows what.

"It's good and bad--"

"It can't be good and bad! It's either one or the other!"

"Oh come on", I said, "there's nothing about the Catholic church you don't like?"

"Well," she faltered, and I remembered we'd had the same number of beers, "it's really old..."

"So are we!" I was sure there were frescos of people having orgies and cross dressing going back hundreds of years.

"That's just debauchery," she protested.

"Same thing!"

Really, we were in no shape to debate about any of these things, though they needed to be talked about. The difficulty was that I didn't think we'd do any better if both of us were sober. This time I called a break in the conversation, and when we came back we hugged and swore eternal friendship. We decided it was time to go back to the party, forget all this, dance some more.

But really, she said as I got my things together, why do you do it?

"After Constantine, I said, pulling on my raincoat, "I had trouble trusting anybody--"

"--with good reason", she broke in.

"Do you know what a sexual surrogate is?"

She didn't, so I explained as we went down the stairs. How they didn't really have them any more, but that there'd used to be specially trained people who would have sex with dysfunctional people. Because if you're emotionally or physically screwed up, you have two choices: either never have sex again--

She tried to interrupt.

--or get with one of these people, who can help train you so you don't end up hurting people any more. These people are like sexual surrogates. In like six months, when I'm done--


"Are you OK?" Anastasia asked an unsteady couple who were coming up the stairs.

They're fine, I assured her, they just think I'm crazy because I'm talking about sexual surrogates in public.

Anastasia wasn't satisfied with this, and we quarreled about it until we got back to the dance floor, which, despite the longer curfew, was looking pretty bare. We decided it was time to part. We hugged, and I went out the front door, where Constantine was once again smoking on the patio. I didn't even look at him. I went home. The party was over.

Of course you want to know what happened between us, to make such a mark on me. And the answer is nothing: not rape, nor grey rape, not even some depraved realization of a Marquis de Sade fantasy. We had normal sex, with full consent between both parties, which I initiated.

It was the emotional fallout I couldn't deal with, afterwards.

Seriously, though, this is his last year here, as I hope it is mine. In a month he graduates, and will go back to his home on the other side of the country, or even across the sea. Then, like a pulled tooth, it might finally cease to ache.

Trigger

You know when you're on the top of the stairs and you can hear all the people at the bottom coming up? That happened all the time at the Manor. We had like three long staircases, so it always took a while, and if people were talking you always had a pretty good idea of who was coming up before you actually saw them.

So I'm on my way out of my room, buttoning up my cuffs, and I hear the usual gaggle of voices. And then a new one which nails me to the floor.

My thoughts start racing. Not her--hallucination--oh, God, it is, how--? Wait, they know each other from school, they must have invited her over--why, don't they know how she--me--

But it is inevitable. I can hear her voice coming up the stairs. So I stayed there, a sickly smile on my face, as they all reached the landing. Face the music.

Once on the landing, I could see who was actually there. Four people. One of my housemates moved aside and it wasn't her. Wasn't Constantine's short-lived girlfriend, and my useless desire. It was another girl altogether, with an eerily similar voice.

"Hi!" I said, too loudly, and offered my hand. Shake. The poor girl, she must think I hate her--she must think the sight of her makes me ill!

After introductions were made they all had something to see in Avril's room, so I let them go on. I stood outside my door and took deep breaths, trying to calm my heart. I thought again, This has got to end, sometime. This can't go on forever.

For a long time, the two of them were my own personal ghosts. My eyes would linger over people I saw that reminded me of them in public places. I would see things that reminded me of them, and my whole body and mind would twang with addictive and shameful memory, leaving me hardly able to work afterwards. A great distraction.

But now it's ended--or has almost ended, finally. I haven't had such a trigger in a long time, I've sought out new people, pleasures, faces, voices. But every now and then I will wonder what crack there was in my personality to let them take such hold...and how I can keep it from happening again.

Who is Constantine?

Constantine ain't a real person no more. He's fucking historical.

See, that's the thing about history, literature, celebrities, anything you study to write a paper on so you can sum it up in all it's parts and get at, you know, the truth. But in the very act of you looking at it, it fragments. People gathering up every little bead off a dress a woman left on the sunken Titanic, every chicken bone in the trash heap left by Viking crusaders, are killing the thing they love through their own desire to hold every precious fragment all at once. Instead of it making a clearer picture, it pixelates into eight million tiny details. And the big mist of details that begins to surround something, that's myth. When people come up with six or seven theories over one celebrity car crash, then you know it's a goner, no matter how many times you try to nail down the truth.

From the time Constantine said, "I'm ready for that bottle of wine" to the time when my fist met his head a week later, that's the font of everything. All my cybersex and fetish sex and one night stands and barebacking and gender experimentation and thinking BDSM is fucking normal...all of that, it started right there. And yet during our one night together (some eight hours), we did none of these things. By most people's standards, by internet sex blog standards, what we did was boring. If I took you back to campus and I took you out on the quad and pointed and said, "There, that's Constantine," you wouldn't think it was anything special.

You live in a little town, you get to know everybody. You go to a little tiny boarding school, you get to know everybody's clothes. I know all of Constantine's wardrobe: the tartan scarf. The pinstripe suit. The baggy green sweater he wore over dress pants. Shiny shoes. Gold toe socks. Black leather gloves. A leather briefcase.

All these tiny details that I store up, rediscover, creating their own web and spawning new symbols and histories. His clothes are why I now see every Versache ad as porn. The high narrow bones of his cheeks, the reason I love the Colt. His fingers between my legs are the reason I would fuck A. two months later. The reason I'll fuck anyone, anywhere, for the entire rest of my life.

Even know, two years after that one short night, the sight of a man in a long coat holding a briefcase will make my heart rate zoom up to a trillion beats a second.

When Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, she used only one bullet. But that one bullet ricocheted in his insides until it cut open his liver and lungs and spleen and stomach and it took six doctors five hours to put him back together again. And according to Gerard Malanga, my peeps, that was the end of the Sixties.

EDIT: I might write more about Constantine, or I might not. I find it difficult...and it might even need a whole other blog. But for now I'll post a few bits and peices when the mood strikes me.

Barebacking and Umbrellas

The BHM is enforcing the rule of silence, so we are officially done. Over. Finished.

Usually, the quickest way to get to the top of my shit list is to start fucking me, then stop. We've been screwing each other off and on since July, which is really the longest time I've ever had a casual relationship. Usually, right about now I would be getting into hissy fits over his refusals to answer my requests for Facebook chat, or maudlin over the fact that I really shouldn't have told him about Constantine last time we fucked.

But actually, I'm kinda relieved.

Why? It's because of the anal. The BHM, despite his size, has nothing to do with my particular fetish. He's an ass and pussy man, all the way. And he particularly likes giving a girl anal sex.

Now, I've nothing against anal. Read this blog--it's one of my favorites--and you will find reams in praise of anal. My hero, Marquis de Sade, declared that all women should only practice anal and would never go back to pussy once they had had a dick in their ass. I once had a one night stand with a boy we'll call the Jackrabbit which consisted of nothing but anal: a delirious romp where he pounded my ass so hard I had to brace myself against the headboard to keep from being concussed. The effect I experienced when squatting on the toilet the next day is one of my stranger fond memories.

So I like anal. Except with the BHM.

I couldn't quite pin the reason for this down until the first and last time we tried barebacking*. The BHM has a dick which matches himself: solid, squat, with a head on it like a mushroom. Really, there's quite a big lip of flesh between the head of his dick and the shaft of his dick. When you don't have a condom you can feel everything, especially when the flaring base of the head gets squashed down and streamlined on the inward thrust, then how it opens up again when it's pulled back on the backward thrust.

In short, when the BHM gave me anal, the feeling was akin to having a small umbrella opened and shut in my ass.

*This is anal fucking without a condom, kids. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER, NEVER DO THIS! You will get AIDS or something equally bad.

Insensitive Dicks

Whether by luck or by chance, I've had both lovers and acquaintances whose cocks didn't work they way they were "supposed" to.

We all have an idea of how a dick works, right? That is, it gets hard, you give him a blow job, and then he squirts. I expect the comments to soon be filled with exceptions to this rule, but I believe this is the general idea.

Or perhaps I have this idea simply because X., my first lover, set a pattern of expectation. I'd come in, we'd fling ourselves on one another for about ten minutes of making out, and then we'd get down to the business of sucking or fucking. It was inevitable that within an hour of my stepping in the front door he would have cum. In other words, his penis always worked the way I expected a penis to work: it was his main erogenous zone, and no matter which way you sucked it or stroked it, he was bound to come within a relatively short amount of time. (He also liked to put things up his penis and getting fucked in the ass, but we'll ignore that for the sake of argument.)

But in several of the boys I've known since then, it doesn't work that way.

The first experience I ever had with a penis that defied my expectations was with a blind date we'll call C. This was many years ago: I'd just entered college, I think I'd had sex once, and I thought the internet was where you looked stuff up on Wikipedia. You know, stuff like where Iraq was or the profile of Virginia Woolf.

But anyway, I'd had a few conversations over IM with this boy before I actually met him in the flesh. Somehow it came up that his penis was extraordinarily large, and he told me that it was also curiously insensitive. He claimed that he could squeeze it "until my knuckles turn white" and he wouldn't feel a thing. When I mentioned this to one of his guy friends, deploring C. for lying, the mutual friend exclaimed that it was entirely true. "I've seen C. hit people with it!" he told me.

The further confirmation that C. wasn't lying about his dick's cartoonish size came when I saw its outline through his pants leg later on the night of our first date, and this probably contributed to it also being our last. I had a irrational fear of big dicks, sex with X.'s normal dick still being an uncomfortable proposition at the best of times. But even though we never fucked, I never forgot C.'s truly gigantic dick and his admission of insensitivity.

I've known, too, males who couldn't come right away. Now, I understand lots of women will wonder why the hell I am complaining, but in my early days of cock sucking, when I wanted like mad to meet X.'s exacting standards (he himself claimed he had learned how to deep throat with popsicles), if a boy didn't come within twenty minutes or less I would worry that I was doing something wrong. That I am still prey to this fear might also have something to do with my one night stand with Constantine, but more about him later.

I don't know why, but it took me a while to realize that men could hold back their orgasms. Jaime calls it being "tantric", used as a verb. ("I'm still tantric", he'll say, if I ask him if he's cum.) The BHM is another one with unbelievable stamina. He gets hard and stays hard for the two to four hours we're usually at play, but hardly ever shoots. He has told me that he's always been this way, no tantric practice required. Usually we'll bang away, go to sleep, and then I'll suck him off the next morning, when I'll finally have the pleasure of watching his sperm flow onto his big belly with its peach-colored stretch marks. (Which is really quite a pretty sight, in my opinion).

And then there is Constantine, the Ur-boy of insensitive dicks.

I don't, oddly enough, remember much about his dick except that it was white and smaller than X.'s--quite natural, since I didn't get a very good look at it. The the whole time we were fucking, and that went for several hours, it was either in me or in my mouth.

In my mouth.

(I still remember this with anger.)

He couldn't get off when I had it in my mouth.

I sucked him until my jaw hurt, but he didn't even moan. I had mastered, I thought, my technique with X., even though I couldn't quite deep throat him. I don't think I quite knew all the niceties of using my hands and pirouetting all around the shaft with my tongue, but he should have come by now. He had moaned and writhed in the first few minutes when I had started, but now he was just lying there. Suddenly I felt my first empathy with X., who, despite his best efforts at fingering me, would often feel my vagina go bone dry. One time he had sat back on his heels and exclaimed, "What am I doing wrong?"

It's only sensitive on the very end, Constantine told me at last. I was supposed to just rub it on the head. All my painstaking deep throating techniques were worse than useless.

That's where the anger comes from. How long was he going to go on laying there, hands behind his head, while I worked and worked for no result? I felt like he'd been holding back deliberately, keeping from me the liquid I so craved (for even though I didn't yet enjoy normal intercourse, I loved swallowing sperm). I had the sneaking suspicion that he was enjoying watching me failing at the one technique I had.

He got up, we switched places. I lay on my back, watched him work his own cock. He came at last mounted atop my chest. It was awkward to stretch my neck to get my lips around the head of his cock before he came, but I had to, for my own pleasure. I swallowed.

That's usually how it is, he told me. The only way to get yourself off is to do it yourself. No one else knew the exact inner workings of your genitalia except you.

I read a lot of articles about the difference between men and women getting off. The conventional wisdom now is that men are more straightforward, just unzip and plunge in, while a female's sexuality must be coaxed and teased out...that her mind must be aroused before her the place between her legs can be.

But I have yet to find an article about a man's dick the way I envision it now: numb here and exquisitely fine there, piebald with sensation. And what must Constantine have envisioned all that time to keep himself hard, if my own technique, my very self and physical body, was not near enough to stroke him to his peak? Perhaps the way men and women get off isn't so very different after all.

Related:

◆ Confused as to who the heck it is that I'm writing about? Check out the Who's Who of Stuffies.

"You Can Do Better": Part 1

We're going to be doing a bit of time travel now, dear sexblog readers, so bear with me. This happened back in April 2008, when I was still in college. Like most colleges, the night we finished our finals was given up to the senior skit and drunken parties. And like most college students, I was horny and out for blood.

This is different from most stories I've posted on here in that there's a lot of lesbian making out. But if you're worried you might get bored reading about a pretty BBW getting some girl-on-girl action, just hang in there: there's also a BHM.

* * *


I woke up on Friday at noon. I put my arm over my eyes to shut out the sunlight as last night became present memory: I had gotten drunk, and I was still miffed about the girl.

Two girls.

* * *

Thursday was prank night, a secret that the entire campus already knew. I had been assigned no real job except to photograph the insanity, but ended up holding the ladder for one of the more shapely members of my class as she climbed up to hang banners. Her dress was sparkly, gold, and short. Very short. Dude, I thought, I hope she's wearing underwear and cursed the gods when my hopes were fulfilled.

Other than that, the pranks we pulled on the underclassmen went off without a hitch. Things were cheerful enough as long as the drinking was going on, but once they were all packed into an auditorium for the satiric skit the senior class had dreamed up, things began to get ugly.

First, one of the MCs was hit in the face with a cheap blue kickball. He leaped off the stage, jumped over the first row of seats and a fistfight began. Another senior grabbed hold of the microphone and called them off.

Then the audience started throwing beer cans.

I was trying to take photos of what was happening on the stage when one zipped by my head, spraying beer. Then others. Some of the cans were crushed, some full. Still the prank play went on. They hoisted V.-- the sexiest girl in school--onto their shoulders, her hands wrapped with chains. The gayest boy in school was crowned king and treated to half-naked men giving him a massage. Then he was overthrown and they hauled the shyest boy in school on the stage and crowned him instead.

The audience roared. They climbed out of their seats and onto the stage.

"That's it, that's it, it's over!" yelled the MC into the microphone. The auditorium emptied out, the outer lobby became dark, and the dancing began.

I went out, reloaded film, and realized that in all this screaming crowd I was the only one not yet drunk. I found the Atheist and his friends, dressed in black and smoking cigarettes and complaining about how bad the skit had been. Constantine was there. He had a paper crown on his hair, a feathery tinseled thing that would have been worn at a three-year-old's birthday or virgin's bachelorette party. He had his girlfriend on his arm, and as I talked with the Atheist their making out became more and more explicit. She touched his chest, they put their arms around one another, they came closer and closer until they kissed, he laughed, he caressed her ass.

"Atheist," I said, "you used to be an alcoholic. Tell me where I can get something to drink that isn't beer."

"Behind the stage," he said, "if it isn't all gone."

"I'll see you when I'm drunk," I said.

Behind the stage was a nearly full pint of gin. I hate tonic water so I poured it straight, tried to drink it. I found a half-empty liter of Coke and used that as a mixer. I on the way out I snagged a cold can of Keystone Light and took it with me--I wanted to see if I could shotgun it, later.

Then I saw the girl.

She said something about having lost her purse. Upon inquiry she had either left it in the lobby or somewhere else. I followed along without being invited.

She found the purse on the floor, dangerously close to the spilled drinks that marked the edge of the dance floor. She put it on without seeming to notice that I had followed her--I pulled on the strap to get her attention. "Are you really bi?" I asked.

She looked offended that I would doubt her. "Yeah."

"Are you really drunk?"

"Yeah..."

"How drunk?"

"I dunno..."

"Are you drunk enough to kiss me?" I asked.

'Well..." she said and her mouth bore down on me.

Ten minutes later my chin was slick with her mouth juices. I couldn't call it spit, it was too sweet and lovely for that. My arm was around her waist, feeling the muscles through her tight shirt. Then a well-meaning friend came and pulled her away.

"You ruined a beautiful thing," I told the friend later that night. Like all drunkards I was easily distracted, and my girl had seemed to disappear directly she was taken away. But I saw her once more, a long time later. She was trying to hold up a shorter blond girl.

"Tonight's not the night," she said, noticing me.

"I think it's a good night," I said, tracing my fingers down her belly.

The blond girl was hanging off her, they were so tangled up together each step taunted the ground with their falling.

"Later," she said, moving off. "I'll remember."

"Sure," I said, knowing that she would forget. They staggered off for a hundred yards or so before finally sitting down in the soccer field and I forgot they existed. I found myself with my arm around a girl with braces.

"So-and-so hit on me earlier," she said.

"So-and-so is a slut," I said.

"You're right," she laughed, "he is a slut!"

"I'm a slut too," I said, and then we were lip-locked.

"I have a girlfriend," she said when we came apart.

"Who's your girlfriend?"

"She isn't here..."

Since she was still kissing me I was sure we could work something out.

Then I felt a hand on my arm. I looked up to see the BHM, a very large boy a year below me, come to save the damsel from my clutches. He wasn't letting go, so I sighed and then smiled and released my prize.

"Ok, I'll let you go because you have a girlfriend," I said. "M.'s right there--go dance with her."

The BHM was turning me towards him. He was blurry from the Keystone Light, and I whined something about not having had a girl in years. He said that wasn't the issue, put my arm on his shoulder, and began to French me.

Oh, I thought. How long has he been like this?

* * *

Part two will be posted later.

Related:

◆ The Who's Who of Stuffies

"Once there was a boy and he was beautiful... "

My grandmother died two weeks ago. Or was it three?

I didn't know her very well, you see. She had a horrible deaf husband and feet crippled by arthritis and only one grandchild: me. Every time I came to her house I would feel crushed and smothered by all that outlet-less love. So, being young and not terribly receptive to her misery (past cure) I quit seeing her.

I learned of her death when my stepsister sent me an email: "I'm sorry about Grandma. I know you two were way closer than I ever was with her..."

Oh, the irony.

I called my father and after a while he finally said that she had in fact been buried the week before, he hadn't been able to tell me. I relayed this information to Max and he said, "Well, it's not so bad: my father waited a month before he told me my dog had died."

Quin told me another story, about his angry old grandfather who had called his son for the first time in twenty years. The grandfather had to because he was getting his legs amputated and needed someone to care for him afterwards. When he saw Quin and his brother for the first time he said to Quin's brother, "You're fat." Quin he seemed to like. Quin never made any attempt to contact him after that hospital visit because he didn't think much of his grandfather cutting out the rest of his family for 20 years. Now it was his own fault that he was a bitter man with no legs.

Even Q. said I would have to bear up--not because I would miss my grandmother, but because my father would call me for support.

So I felt better about my inability to call up tears in honor of the dead. But you see, mine is a strange family: we do believe in ghosts. And though I have never come near sensing one myself, Q. has seen several. At night she sleeps with all the lights off and doesn't think of it, but on me the effect is just the opposite. My grandmother was newly buried: what was keeping her, in her loneliness beyond the grave, from angrily visiting her only grandchild and demanding recompense for all my neglect?

I got sick (not from fear but not eating and late nights). Truly sick, with fever and chills and all after three days of yellow drainage. That night, shivering and looking for another blanket, I pulled one of my grandmother's creations off the shelf. It doesn't go with anything else I have, a quilt made of fabric emblazoned with the solar system and the stars, a quilt for a five year old.

I tried to think of the things my grandmother had done with her life, but all I could remember was this blanket and the chest of mementos from me and my father she had in her house, her most precious things. Not much, to leave after you. Still, the blanket reminded me of the love she must have felt for me, and I felt I could sleep under it unmolested.

I went to bed and coaxed myself to a glorious orgasm. Jaime, to cheer me up and to celebrate his discovery of The Tudors on BitTorrent, had sent me link after link of Jonathan Rhys Meyers pictures. Later I found still better ones. I was humping a pillow between my legs, massaging my belly--dreaming, as I am wont to do, that I am not female but male (Rufus Hex, a fiction I created, black haired and soft bodied and beautiful), that I am not empty but stuffed full (my belly growls).

"He was known...in his early career, for his androgynous appearance..."

Reading this sentence over and over in my head, my passion builds. Somewhere in the dull words there is a secret key fits into my libido perfectly. Androgyny, white skin, wasp-waisted, sharp faced--like the Colt--I am screwing the Colt, finally feeling his body, I am Rufus, I am fucking Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

And then I come. Simultaneously I am aware of two things: I am smothering beneath the blankets (all the excess heat) and I am positive when I look outside my nest of blankets I will see a spector.

Pile the blankets on and the fever will break.

Perhaps the stairs creaked. At any rate I lay feverishly trying to convince myself that there was no one standing by my bed. I don't hear anything, sense anything. But a part of me is scared nonetheless.

Eventually my heart slows, sanity returns, I throw off the smothering covers (my hair is wet, sweat-streaked) and turn on every light in my room and the closet too, just in case.

When I went to bed I was sick, chilled. Now I am wide awake and have nothing else to turn to but the trusty old computer. Only I've read all the new stuff in my RSS feed--what else is there to look at?

Then I suddenly remembered a blog that had been recommended to me, an archive list I had yet to plunder. So I began reading...

"Tonight a correspondence with a mutual friend of a ghost who's haunted me beautifully, proved my suspicions correct, she had "disappeared into her nuptials", he put."

...and as I read I became aware of a strange sense of familiarity, a cresting of remembrance, and whether it was the Robitussin to help me sleep or the crying over the Colt* or the orgasm or the blanket I'd pulled from my closet to help fight the night chills, it had all built up into something i almost remembered and then... crashing down.

Constantine.

Memory. I went and sat on the bed, holding my hands in my lap and thinking, I don't want to be here. It was the same position I had been in every night for months, thinking the same things over and over again.

But after a while I realized the sharpness wasn't going to come: it no longer cut my body, but had become part of me. My flesh.

The blog I was reading is not his blog. Not even close, from the things described therein: he is still a student, not a writer with a career. But Constantine also spoke in a beautiful rambling patios culled from too much Ulysses and Marquis de Sade and the sweet flowering of drugs, beauty, tormented love and alcohol. His words, his face, his voice... a prefrence for them had imprinted themselves into my everlasting longing so that even when I thought I had forgotten him I was unerringly drawn to whatever resembled him in words and pictures.

I cannot offer you his real face. I cannot offer you his real voice. I can only offer you images, sounds, and hope the puzzle they make fits together somehow into what he was and what he became to me. Because I know if I had not met him things would be different now--I would be a different person than I am.

_______________________________________

* I did that too, before the orgasms. I hadn't heard from him for about three weeks.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Stuffer Boys

Lots of sex bloggers will tell you that they aren't Casanova. For various reasons they started dating later than most people do, and thus their mistakes in dating stem from lack of experience.

But sometimes I'm sure the confusion stems from the system of dating itself. I don't know what higher power decides the way dating is supposed to go--how we went from our parents negotiating dowries to splitting the check--but sometimes I'd like to take issues with the designers. One of the most puzzling things about my experiences with dating is the rule that silence means no.

It's a curious rule that I've never quite gotten the grips of. When I was in college I screwed around for the first time (like a surprising amount of people, I've since discovered.) Only I could never figure out the aftermath. I don't know what my girlfriends did--they weren't the screwing around type--but the boys seemed to know the rule of silence so instinctively they seemed stunned when I had to ask.

One Halloween I dressed as Red Death. It wasn't a sexy Red Death, but a mess of fake blood and sores all over my breasts and down my arms--my face was enclosed by a skull mask. A boy I'd asked to dance gripped me so hard I could feel it through his boxer's gloves. When we got back to my room he whipped of his nerd's glasses and I tore off his pants to reveal one of the most perfect asses I had ever seen.

My first (and so far only) long term relationship happened before that. It was a fuckbuddy thing: X. would call me up, we'd fuck and then he'd leave--we never went to dinner or sought each other outside the bedroom. I think for a while I thought all boys were like this: fucking was so rare, so precious to them, that after one taste they couldn't help but come back for more. I knew my own raging desires made me like that: after a single taste, I could never stop until I had scored another.

The nerd boy who had a thing for zombie girls was different than the boys I'd had before. He took direction, put his hands where I asked him, and screwed me up the ass with all the vigor of a jackrabbit after a week of celibacy. We even talked for a while after he fucked me--about music, I think, and he asked me what I liked. He told me I was pretty. Which was all so much more than I had ever gotten from X. or Constantine I was sure he would seek me out again, just like X. had, only this time it would be better. Even Q. said it looked promising.

Instead, we stared at each other for almost two weeks. Not coming up to say hi, not speaking, just staring. He kept looking at me, in the gymnasium or when he practiced his fencing outside. Q. told me to be patient: boys might call you after a week, she said. Time was different for them, or something.

Finally I came up to him and whispered, "I can't stop thinking about you!"

He blushed. "I got back with my girlfriend," he blurted.

"Oh," I said.

With internet relationships it's even harder to tell. A month of talking every night will suddenly end in silence: his handle will stay firmly at the bottom of your list of contacts, he won't answer calls, even your wittiest text messages go unanswered. Often you have no idea what "went wrong"--though who would ever tell you straight out what didn't work for them?

The second boy I had--before the Jackrabbit, after the X.--turned all the dating rules I thought I knew on their heads. All the signs that Q. had taught me, the proofs that a boy was "interested" in me, were there. But they didn't matter. If he asked me about myself or asked what I wanted when we made love, it was only a means to an end, not an indication that he "felt anything for me". When I tried to talk to him the day after he shrugged me off, walked by me: my first encounter with the rule of silence.

Why didn't I know this? I said to myself, embarrassed and enraged. Why hadn't I filtered this rule in through my skin, picked up on the minute vibrations that would tell me that he just wasn't that into me? I don't know how else I could have known.

After the Jackrabbit I made a rule for myself. The turnover time, I said to Q., isn't a week--not by a long shot. If they don't seek you out after a day or two, it's time to move on.

Same goes with stuffer boys. If the boy with the cute pic still can't meet with you after the second phone call, if they don't IM after two weeks, if they don't call back after the first date in the flesh, that's it. It's not that they broke their phone while racing Go-Kart or got called away to Japan or ended up in jail for 45 days, after two weeks they will have moved on, and so should you. That's why I'm so grateful for that little mass-email button on my favourite dating website: with a single click half a dozen people can be told, clearly and succintly, that you're "sorry, not interested."

Unless you're the Colt. Who has in fact had his phone broken racing Go-karts, left it in an airport and had it's batteries die all within a month or two. Or after 45 days, frantic from not being able to say goodbye, he finally was able to log on again and break the rule of silence.

Or Alex. He dissapeared from phone and internets a month ago. Then on Thursday, just as I was about to go to bed:

ME: long time no txt message

ALEX: yeah i know, i got some bad news and kind of stopped talking to people for awhile

ME: what happened?

ALEX: i got orders to japan

ME: fuck

Dreamed I was kissing a boy...

...realized I must be kissing the sheets when I felt his face. Thrust in anyway.

His tongue was flat and tasted of linen.