Short Spring, Or: Leaving Los Angeles
Let me start at the place where I felt something give way.
The moment when the acute absence began to be acquired. That space that must be created before something new and fresh can be born.
I was at an orgy.
Among the rubble of bodies- tumbling, twisting witnesses to glints on the facets of the pleasures of ourselves. My joy lost in the smearing monkeyfist knot of creatures like myself, all remaking the garden of eden in our own living image.
He stood up. Daren.
A fully risen healthy gleaming tower in a rubber dress and a single gloved arm. His keen gaze directed across the steaming lot. Finding me as I looked up at him from where I crouched on the mat between copulations like a hairless feline.
He was flushed and vibrating with wetness. Veins standing out in his arms- a numinous damp beast of a firm pose whose stare, as he returned it to mine, said a litany of everythings and a low trickle of bittersweet nothings simultaneously.
That’s when it clicked.
In that glance was the sound of demolition. The language of purposeful destruction.
Memory reeled me back to the high spring of my college days. Just prior to break I found myself on a far end of campus rarely visited. Limbs heavy after an aimless walk- contemplating the anti-climax of graduation as I had already begun the transition to the master’s program directly that fall. My body chose a lone bench and sat.
Right before me, filling my view, a tall building was under demo.
With loving care the bulky machines pulled at its sides, like a woman of status being helped from her clothes, her flesh, by a series of attendants. Plumes of dust and metallic shards fell out and away with engrossing grace. I wondered if I could forget everything and still be the same person.
The edifice revealed itself in its gradual absence. It became a tumbling seed and root to a thousand small epiphanies had that day, before I returned, dazed and exhausted in the dusk, to my room and my bed.
Daren was like that pillar. The reinforced structure which required a precise application of dynamite to bring down.
He never physically touched me. I only learned his name in passing after the session.
But there it was- that ah-ha of being young again by choice. Clearing a slate. Devising a different desire. A new way to go about loving myself.
The perfect series of signs which read: “It’s time to break off the affair.”
I would take this moment now, just a moment mind you, to introduce TarRey.
He moved with his mother to California from Austria when he was 22. He is assumingly handsome the way a real estate broker might be because he is, indeed, a real estate broker. And he is married.
We were made acquainted at a dinner party in a fashion that could not be more yawn-inducing. Even then, as I knew I would bed him out of idle sport thus leaving my heart open to danger, he wasted little time in informing me that he was looking to replace his current mistress.
I recall that night for its raw sobriety. And with it, my unrelenting horniness. I seemed to be wholly unable to get drunk. Somehow, like so many other things, I made it Los Angeles’s fault.
The only way I could think to take it out on the city was to collect the hideous glassware left behind by my previous roommate, along with the trusty slingshot from my Bakersfield youth, and set up target practice in the driveway of a neighbor I loathed. The hood pariah whose dogs were oddly silent that evening, and whose property was so packed in with filth he really wouldn’t notice a thing.
I crushed what I couldn’t hit from a few yards by stomping on it. The 50 ft. woman putting glints in her skirt and skids on her heels. Streetlights caught on the mayhem and lent it the visual magic of a cluster of tiny galaxies.
Did I feel better? Sure. For awhile.
I hadn’t brought him home then, or anyone else, even thought I did sift once thru the numbers on cards I’d received. I felt fine until I realized the soft and homely hostess at a restaurant I’d frequented was his wife.
In the coach house hideaway bed he revealed he’d told her he was impotent. His mother had arranged the pairing. The thought of how he’d fawned over my chest just moments ago grafted a queer nausea onto me. I knew myself to be a platonic pervert with nearly-average urges. I had no business with a man who was looking to collect another mother in every woman.
But there I was, barbed in full by the few earnest hooks expertly placed on our date, which included a trip to his “favorite” dispensary for a handful of gorgeous edibles and a fat pre-roll, followed by an impromptu stop at my request to the sex shop for lube.
He bought everything and didn’t blink.
He strapped his fine watch back on after checking the time. I slid out while he tidied up as if I hadn’t even really been there.
On the curb I spied the yard sign staked cleanly. It featured his smiling face and phone number. He stepped quickly past me to the car and offered a ride but didn’t protest when I said I’d walk.
As he pulled away, my body burned. The parts of me swollen from sex were returning, pleasurably, to normal. I looked at the sign again and tried to picture instead his wife’s face there, smiling. The thought of her in bed, naked and lusting, came naturally. I turned away with a laugh. How absurd these roles in role-plays. Who could know what to do? I felt yanked along by the unknown down a path that seemed deliriously without true love.
For it is fucking, not love, that perpetuates life.
I moved along aswarm with ideas about what lay in the head of his wife. Keeping her in my thoughts saved off the hollow guilt.
Two hours later I was in my office, asleep, having cancelled my 8pm.
“It’s got to be the easiest thing in the world.”
“Like breathing.” A laugh.
“Yeah. I mean, no one is really paying attention all that much to what anyone else is doing.”
“Right. Even though some people want attention, they only want the right kind and when they want it.”
“Exactly, so it doesn’t seem like a stretch.”
“And anyway, isn’t this the kind of thing that “makes you feel alive” you know, in a sort of out-of-body way?”
“Well, of course. That’s what the female protagonist is alluding to at the end when her friends can’t get her up from lying in the street, so they leave her there. She doesn’t need or want them and their attentions after she has the ground behind her back. By shedding them she almost gets away with something.”
“OK, interesting. That’s where it ends, though. What do you think happens next?”
This last question is sidely directed at me. The students had been robustly discussing the reading leaving me a minute to drift- reimagining my own night-in-the-street-smashing-cups differently…
Laying by the gutter, the moon a glowing slingshot. My body covered in scintillating glass while my apartment burns and TarRey is dragged off by the neighbor’s dogs…
I reluctantly rearrive to the pause with an evenly banal sigh.
“Are you seeking validation for your current analysis, or simply speculating the ends justification of the means in the heroine’s drastic, histrionic course-correction?”
They stare for a mute moment. The old French philosopher in me wants badly to pick up a cigarette and awaken it with a match right now. But there are none to be found. Instead I correct my posture and fold my arms.
The blonde I keep wanting to call Carmen, TarRey’s wife’s name, when her name is Kathleen, pipes up:
“Dr. Jane, I don’t think any of us know what it’s like to have an extramarital relationship.”
Another student nods. I scan all of their helplessly young engaging faces that say “It’s true, and we’re not scared.” And damn do I suddenly hate this book that has become the darling of my curriculum. To think just two weeks ago my roster changed entirely. What happened? A couple of insane BDSM scenes in this thing and they’re still not frightened off. They are enamored in a way I haven’t witnessed in years and it makes me want to toss my own dog-eared copy into the wastebin this very second and tell them all to get out. Instead:
“OK, what does happen next? Pick a character and continue their trajectory for 2-3 pages front and back. Due Wednesday. Dismissed.”
I never let out early and here’s twenty minutes left on a Monday before lunch. After a beat they collectively scurry out. Their fresh chatter blasts the hallway walls with echoes.
“Dr. Jane?” Kathleen clears her throat in front of me, cautiously proffering a quarter page flyer. “I’m sure you know about this, but I’ll be in one of the performances and would love it if you could come.”
“Thanks.” I say, more to the desk than her.
She set down the paper and stepped out. I knew without looking it was an announcement for the annual iteration of ‘the sex show’. As a part of campus Valentine’s Day festivities, the art department sin falta put up a large scale interdisciplinary collection in one of its basement black box galleries. Based on the flyer, this year’s show was looking robust. And yes, I attended every year, without fail.
I arrive relatively unnoticed among the packed gallery in the middle of Kathleen’s dance theatre troupe’s performance. Something they’ve dubbed “The Power of Erotica.” A chorus of black-cloaked readers surround a platform where a nude performer is pleasuring herself. The readers are speaking aloud sections from the same book. One I’ve taught before.
The woman on the platform reaches orgasm and after a pause there is a rotation. One performer decloaks and assumes the platform where the cycle to climax begins anew. When everyone has had a turn, they place their gowns over their books on the platform before bowing and disappearing hand-in-hand in a chain of birthday suits. I spot Kathleen then, looking quite different from her typical classroom appearance.
The crowd roars and it is magnificent and deafening. With no help from me, a fat smile of pride crashes onto my face.
Students are on me suddenly, eager to chat and filled with the social charge of the night. My mood improves exponentially.
I had invited TarRey to come along, and at the last second he claimed his mother was having heart issues.
“Me too.” I wanted to say “more than you know.” But how could he possibly understand how much I’d felt lately. Heartsick- as if I’d forgotten everything at all about how to behave with a lover.
He thought he’d made it up to me the day following by instructing me to meet him at a modern four-bedroom in Glendale. Under a backlog of work and dreariness, I went.
The place, for all its newness, reminded me of my uncle’s house growing up. The fireplace, the gangways, the hue of the carpet, the slanted walls in the uppermost rooms. A west coast womb, private on all sides and gently remote. Ripe for the kind of open retreat and confession I’d been seeking. Natural intimacy without barriers or the pretense of anything self-described.
I’d never opened wide like a flower and really given myself over to him before. I had not let him see what my body could do and consequently, how I could take from him.
That evening I fucked like an earthquake in a Santa Ana windstorm.
Like I said- it never hurts to start at the place where something gives way. Or does it?
He retreated immediately to the shower and to dress. I cracked a beer he’d brought. Took it and my blissfully restored nudity to the patio where I basked- stunned as a newly transformed insect.
His voice came over with the sorry phrase “You’ll have to cover up.” And I knew how impossible that would be, having already sprouted wings. It was over.
When I returned home later my roommate informed me of something going on the following weekend in WeHo that sounded quite obviously like an orgy.
Self-pity again reared up. Surely a crash to the high. But it seemed ill-placed. A neat break in all manners had occurred. No real love had sprung from my enlightenments. No lasting change. No finding out. No exposure.
Once again, late spring approached and in the buzz of it I became a perfect slingshot. Stiff and concentrated at school. Loose and snapping at the edges of the city from which I’d taken so much and demanded much more.
More. Amongst tears streaming sideways across my face as I lay in bed as if it were the street… What do you think happened next?
You might not have guessed mostly dogs. Some pigs and horses. Ponies.
The used-up, stretched-out quality of actors and actresses hiding their visages and voices with overdubs of cheap music. Odd anatomy and atypical movements revealing strange distentions of fur and color.
I sat alone in the chamber of televised sins. The peepshow booth. Big enough for 1.5, punishing myself with a repulsive reel of soul-crushing beastiality. I made myself pay to be in the darkest and most unwholesome space imaginable and stay there.
I had never submitted myself to this ripe atrocity before and it opened my wrecked heart to a hidden history of darknesses.
In the spit-and-polished hell of this theatre of filth, I could meet the reality of my exclusive conscriptions to the unhappiness proscribed by that faceless doctor- Fate.
The curtain flew up and I started. The silhouetted figure there tall as a beacon in his shadow. He drew back.
“Ah. Wrong booth.” His frame softened away with a gentleness that matched his voice. In my startling I saw his arm was different. Without thinking, I sprung awake with: “Please join me.”
How he didn’t balk at my desperation says only that he also acknowledged a kernel of recognition. Recovering, I slid over on the bench as he came forward into the sordid glow. His gloved arm throbbed into my vision.
He uttered “I know you. Jane.”
Fresh tears bloomed in my hot face.
“Daren.” I whispered, pitiful and unbelieving. He eased in the seat and looked furtively toward the screen and back. Chuffing “What are you doing here?”
Instantly calmed by having him near, I gathered my breath and smiled into the lights in his eyes.
“Take off your glove and I’ll show you.”
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