Sex and Bacon (2 page)

But as much as I love
eating pussy
and
sucking cock
—and as many times as I’ve used both terms, rolling them around in my mouth deliberately like sips of fine, velvety Shiraz, really
tasting
them, sometimes to shock, sometimes for work, and sometimes, blessedly, with love—the part of each term that intrigues me isn’t the direct object, it’s the action words:
Eat
me.
Suck
me.

There’s nothing clinical about those words at all.

And all of a sudden, consumption is back where it belongs—in the mouth, in the heart, in the cunt and the cock—living as need, experienced in physical desire as sharp as hunger or thirst. You wrap your mouth around something warm and salty and wet and suck on it like it’s the only thing that will keep you alive. You taste the most intimate part of your lover. You gobble him or her up. You are a pig for him or her—your lover’s juice runs down your chin and you want more. It’s both simple and joyous, a communion during which your lover’s body itself transubstantiates into your Bread of Life. Eat this and live forever.

When you eat someone—when you
go down, suck dick, lick pussy
—you consume them. You’re taking them into your body and allowing their proteins, fats, and fluids to nourish you in an act intimate enough to be holy.

It is an act of love, make no mistake.

I WAS LONELY. I HADN’T HAD SEX SINCE I’D LEFT NEW YORK
, and that was six months earlier. Working as a stripper and a porn star while being celibate was like bartending without ever actually getting to sit down and enjoy a cocktail. I wrote a personal ad and sent it to
The Stranger
under Girls Seeking Girls.

Bad Girl Needs Spanking

My heart belongs to Daddy.

My ad had been out a week; I’d gotten a few calls. I was surprised and dismayed at how many women seemed to be deliberately ignoring what I thought was obvious: I wasn’t looking for a wife, I was looking for someone to smack me around and maybe fuck me. Also, I had used the term
Daddy
to indicate that I was looking for a butch, not someone androgynous or feminine. Perhaps I should have been clearer and written,
My heart belongs to Daddy
—not
to an annoying middle-management lipstick lezzy who shops at the Pottery Barn and lives in a condo on the Eastside who wouldn’t know kinky sex if it shoved a strapped-on dick right up her flat, bony ass
.

I couldn’t imagine being with a man after having worked as a lingerie model at Butterscotch’s Live Lingerie Adult Tanning, a sleazy adult tanning operation, for half a year. Frankly, I was sick of men’s shenanigans. No matter how attractive a man might look on the outside, it seemed like all you had to do was sit him down on a bath towel, walk into the room in your underwear, hand him some baby oil, and he’d turn into a greedy, leering pervert. Most of them just wanted to be watched while they shoved fingers or toys up their own butts, ate their own come, or tweaked their own nipples. It was as if they were
trying
to disgust us. The idea of dating one held no appeal.

And as much as I loved the way feminine girls looked, I didn’t want hours of kissing and all the soft-focus faux-“lesbian” tit-rubbing they showed on the Playboy Channel to excite straight men. I get off by being fucked, hard—not by being kissed and patted. Dating another femme just seemed like we’d spend all our time fighting each other for the bathroom mirror, eating salads, and brushing each other’s hair.

I wanted a butch. I wanted a strong, sexy, short-haired, cocksure butch lesbian who could lay me down on my back in the boudoir and make me feel like a woman. I wanted someone with a tool belt, a variety of toolish implements, and the know-how to get the job done right. I wanted someone who wanted to fuck me all nasty, the way I wanted to be fucked—who would know when to treat me like a slut and when to treat me like a little girl. I wanted Axl Rose crossed with Stanley Kowalski, with tits and a vagina. It was a tall order, but I had to trust that the clarity of my intention would generate the desired results. Also, what did I have to lose? It wasn’t as if I were in danger of becoming any
less
fucked than I already was.

I hadn’t bothered to call anyone back yet. Especially not the woman who specifically mentioned how much she loved the Pottery Barn in her voice mail message.

I HAD PRETTY
much given up on my
Stranger
ad after two weeks. Every person who responded sounded wrong. They were either too feminine, or too dumb. One left me a joke and laughed—a
haw, haw, haw
that I cut off immediately by pressing DELETE. I couldn’t imagine getting spanked by a woman who sounded like an extra on
Hee Haw
.

It was almost enough to turn a bisexual girl completely straight. I’d had boyfriends before. I considered checking Boys Seeking Girls to see if anyone seemed like a viable prospect. The main thing that stopped me—besides the thought of men sitting on towels and jerking their meat like unmedicated psychotics—was that a boy seeking a girl was more likely to have seen my porn, and to relate to me
as
a porn star. I didn’t want to have sex with someone who just wanted to have sex with a girl they’d seen naked on the Internet. Besides, I read through all the Boys Seeking Girls ads and nobody sounded good. They all wanted relationships or nostrings-attached sex. I wanted something somewhere in between.

I also didn’t want anyone who wanted me to be the decision-maker in the bedroom. At Butterscotch’s, I
worked
as a dom! The last thing I wanted to do was work without pay for some cringing, demanding submissive. I thought it might be nice to get spanked for a change, instead of always being the one holding the paddle. Too many of the Boys Seeking Girls ads seemed like they could be written by customers.

I decided to check my
Stranger
voice mail one more time before deleting my account. It was just my luck: I could
sell
access to my vagina, but I couldn’t give it away for free.

I called the number and punched in my code. I didn’t go with 6969, though I’d been tempted to. I figured too many other ad-writing perverts would pick the same code. Instead I went with your classic
6666:
the number of the Beast plus an extra six for
Extra Satanic Evil
.

I had one new call. A caller! A new one! Finally!
I pressed one for
play menage
.
I heard a low chuckle.

“Well,” the caller said. “Aren’t you precious? I think you may be what I’m looking for. I’m Mick. I wouldn’t mind spanking you, Princess. But you have to earn anything else.”

Another low laugh. It sounded so
nasty
. Then she hung up.

Press four to replay your message
. I pressed four. When it was done replaying, I pressed four again. I kept thinking I’d misheard. Was she really talking to me like this? “
Princess”?
I was breathless.

Press eight to return this call
. I pressed it.

At the beep I said, “Hello, Mick? This is Sarah? You—” I cleared my throat. I forced myself to breathe. “You called my ad. Would you like to meet me for, uh, tea? On Friday?” That was my next day off. I gave my phone number. My voice only shook a little.

Tea. I wondered if she liked tea. Her voice was so low and slow, it sounded like she drank a fifth of Scotch for breakfast, and chased the Scotch with a carton of unfiltered Marlboros.

I realized that I was wet between the legs.

Please call me back, Mick.

To distract myself I called the
Stranger
voice mail system again, punched in my code, and listened to her message five more times. Then I had to hurry up and bathe and shave to make it to my evening shift at work.

I felt wired, like I’d had too much coffee or cocaine.

I kept thinking of Mick’s voice, and her unbearably sexy laugh.

THE NEXT DAY
I got a message from Mick. She told me to meet her at Café Septième, on Broadway for tea. At four. “Be prompt,” she said. She sounded bemused.

Who the fuck was this Mick? “
“Be prompt”?
I was beside myself. I didn’t know if I liked being talked to like that or not.

I was used to customers and their insincere sycophancy. They attempted to stroke my ego in order to manipulate me, saying
You’re so beautiful
but meaning
Touch my cock
. The dom clients pretended to respect me, but that was only because they fantasized about their own lack of power and subsumed will. Their wormy pseudo-deference was 100 percent about them—not about me at all. I could be a cardboard cutout in a corset propped up against the wall, and they’d abase themselves to the image of me just the same.

Mick didn’t seem to give a shit either way, like I could show up or not—and if I did, maybe she’d check me out, and if I didn’t, maybe she’d just drink Scotch and smoke a cigarette and stare off into the middle distance, while the ash on her cig got longer and longer and then finally dropped off.

It was maddening.

I BATHED, SHAVED,
dressed, put on makeup. I was at Café Septième at 3:55 PM .

It was a chilly, white-skied afternoon. Gulls wheeled and shrieked, coming up to Capitol Hill from Elliott Bay, far from home. I wondered if they were looking for food or were just being adventurous. When they landed you could see the red spots on their beaks, the bull’s-eyes where the little gulls tapped to take food from the mommy gull’s mouth. The spots always looked like ketchup or blood to me.

I’d worn the wool coat I’d bought secondhand in New York. I hadn’t had a chance to buy a new one yet. The sleeves were too short and my wrists were cold. I kept pulling them down, but the second I moved my arms they’d shrink back, leaving my wrists naked and vulnerable. I probably looked like a hick, or some overgrown freak of nature.
Was this bad karma for laughing at the
Hee Haw
woman?
I wondered.

I sat at the bar. Ordered tea. It was warm enough in the restaurant that I could take my coat off. I put it on the floor beneath my feet. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and it was visibly dirty. Maybe they were too cool to mop here.

The service at Septième was legendarily terrible, but everyone who lived on Capitol Hill went there anyway. It was like you had to go because everyone else did. It was unavoidable. You could swear never to go there again, but eventually someone would say, “I’ll meet you at Septième!” and you’d agree, and then suddenly, helplessly, you’d realize you’d just made plans to go back, even though you’d said you never would. You’d tell yourself,
Okay, but this is the last time I’m going there
, but you knew you’d be back. It was like the Bermuda Triangle of restaurants: It pulled you in, again and again.

You could always tell the people who didn’t live on the Hill because they’d order the stale desserts that sat out on the table near the front door. Those desserts were always there—they never seemed to get wrapped up or put away. They were dry and sometimes moldy.

“Would you like a slice of cake to go with your tea?” asked my waiter. He was tiny, with one pierced ear.

“No thank you,” I said.
I’m no tourist, jerk
.

AT FOUR, EXACTLY,
Mick arrived.

She took off a cracked leather coat and put it on the stool next to her. Underneath she wore a series of men’s shirts, layered one over the other. She smelled like cigarettes. I inhaled her scent like a child.

Mick was handsome, but mostly she was
sexy
, lit up from the inside. She glowed like a candle. It was like she made her own light. It moved with her. How could someone be as bright as that, throw off so much energy? It almost crackled around her, like an electric field.

She took off her battered hat and shook out her hair. It was bleached blond, sleek and soldierly, shaved on the sides and falling in lank chunks over her forehead. My own mane was long and had a horrible tendency to curl.

Her complexion was olive, and her cheekbones were high.
All
her bones were apparent. I’d never liked skinny girls before, but Mick made it seem right. Her pants hung off her hip bones, her shoulders were angular—it was like she didn’t
need
flesh to be sexy. Her bones were her frame, and everything else was flayed away as needless.

Compared to Mick I was too tall, too fat, too fleshy. She was stripped down like a muscle car, compact—nothing but movement and speed and elegant lines. Beside her I felt horribly plush and decadent—all tits and ass. All
flesh
. She seemed like she didn’t need anything in this world to survive, except for black coffee and maybe the occasional bump of crystal meth or cocaine. In contrast, I
wanted
. I ate, I shat, I craved. Her distance from the corporeal world was alien to me.