Test Driving #2

Over a year ago, I wrote about the difficulties and problems in buying toys without having tried them. Sometimes they just don't work, sometimes they are pleasurable but just don't hit you in the right spot or the right way, sometimes they suck...and they ain't cheap!!!

At some point, I had gone to my local branch of Babeland to buy multiple packets of lubes, so that She and I could try them out and find just the right one. She's so blocked that Her response to it all is "just go and buy the KY", and then her OB/GYN told her that Astroglide is the absolute best.

Let me be perfectly clear about this---Astroglide was absolutely horrible for us...we both thought it became tacky, sticky, non lubricating and more of a pain in the ass in general as we used it. So we threw it out, and went back to the sample packets, trying to find just the right one. And then we tried something European called Pur.

At the risk of being repetitive, let me be perfectly clear about this---Pur was absolutely horrible for me. The lube part of it was wonderful, great to the touch, very lubricating and easy to work with. But the clean up part is absolutely horrible...this stuff doesn't wash off, even after two soap ups and rinses. It just doesn't wash off...and I had to resort to drying it off with a towel. The toys themselves, both hard plastic and softer, will never be the same...they've been washed several times, and I will be boiling them tomorrow in a last ditch attempt to rescue them for any eternity of greasiness (and yes, I know you should always boil the hard plastic toys, it's just that these only go into me!!).

Caveat emptor.

The Other Blue Eyes

I live in New York City, at the very fringes of a neighborhood where mogul, captains of industry, Hollywood stars, and masters of conspicuous consumption also reside. And like all New Yorkers, when I see someone famous I tend to look at them once, and then studiously ignore them, respecting their privacy, and understanding that even though they're famous, in their own hometown they deserve to live a normal life.

Longer ago than I care to remember, She and I had taken her mother out to a neighborhood coffee shop, a diner with European asperations, for lunch. It was the middle of December, and her mother had come to the city for Christmas shopping. We were seated at a corner table, and I took no notice of the couple that was seated next to us. The waitress came over to take our order, and then turned to the table next to us. And then I heard that voice.

"Would you have anything as daring as iced tea?", the gentleman to my left asked, in a voice that I had heard hundreds of times, and I did the involuntary head snap to see just who it was. And I fell deep inside his incredible blue eyes...it was Paul Newman, having lunch with a friend. His smile was brilliant, the crinkles around his eyes magnifying his charm, and in an instant I was transported back to all the movies I had seen him in. And then, like a good New Yorker, I turned back, respecting his privacy, allowing him to have his lunch in peace the same way that I was having mine.

It was the first of many times I was to see him in the nabe and in the city...sometimes he was just strolling down 5th Avenue, sometimes he was shopping in the local Korean deli, trying to get the owner to stock more of his pasta sauces, sometimes he would smile or wink, giving the index finger on the side of his nose sign from The Sting, sometimes he just rushed by, hurrying on an errand. I saw him occasionally at the theater, growing visibly older and slightly more fragile looking and rickety, once talking to himself and referring to himself as Pops. I saw him at a Chantecleer concert in a church in Connecticut, visibly not wanting to be there as much I didn't want to either, but beholden, either to the church or his wife, owing the time and paying his dues.

His good work and his good works will live long into the future, and should serve as a model for others, both in show business and not.

And the Lad bears his name, because I realized at the naming time that all the Pauls I knew were the nicest people.

Playing With Old Friends-Epilogue

It would be nice to say that things reverted back to normal, or back to where they used to be, and it would be nice to say that things didn't really change and stayed the way they were before, but they didn't. We spent the next few days tiptoeing around each another, silent breakfasts followed by catch-as-catch-can dinners where each of us would fix a meal and eat independently of the other, each on of us working hard to be in the same place but to be invisible, sleeping in the same bed but not together or with each other, truly ships that passed in the night. Franny watched tv in bed, I watched many of the same programs in the family room, the sounds echoing through the house. Neither one of us really said anything about that evening to the other, limiting our conversations to the necessary sorting of day-to-day problems and tasks.

Until the night that I thought I felt her drape her leg over mine and reach across the bed, which by now felt as wide as a football field. I rolled over on my side, thrusting an open hand between her legs, letting my hand rest on the smooth parts of her thighs, and she reached down for my hand, seemingly ready to move it up to her crotch. But I had misread the situation, or just imagined it in my longing for her and for the intimacy of her touch, as she put her fingers around my wrist and moved my hand away from her body and back toward mine. She pivoted in bed, reaching over to turn on the reading lamp beside her, and then turning back to face me.

"You liked it, didn't you? You liked seeing another man making love to me, no fucking me, ripping the orgasms from me, didn't you? You liked it, you really liked it." Her eyes widened at me, a mixture of anger, fear, a tiny bit of lust mixed in as she remembered what had happened, her skin flushing slightly, the tiny pulse at the side of her neck beating away like a crazed metronome. She flung the sheet off, sitting up straight, crossing her legs as though sitting at a campfire, moving the sheet off me as well. And I could feel my cock jump at the shock of the cooler air...I was erect, hard, as aroused as I had been that evening.

"I can see how much you liked it, me getting the life fucked out of me while you watched...your cock looks like a fucking totem pole, it's so hard. It's what you wanted, isn't it? Look at how fucking excited you are by just my talking about it." And, embarrassingly enough, I could feel my skin begin to flush as well, the shame of what she was saying sinking in, the thought being said out loud for the first time that I had enjoyed seeing her with another man, seeing her doubleteamed by a voracious couple, not caring where the next touch or caress came from, only wanting to be used more and more and more.

And I watched the expression in her eyes change, the anger and fear draining away as she said the words, all the words, as she let out the feelings that she had kept in these past few days. Sly cunning and a look of calculated scheming replaced what had been there before she spoke, and I could see that although things were somewhat as they were, they weren't ever going to be the same. She reached across the bed, grabbing my hyper-erect cock and absentmindedly stroking it slowly up and down. "Now that I know what you want, what really lights you up, we can go forward from there, there have to be some changes. We're still together, but things have to work a different way."

And she just smiled, the cheshire cat smile, the cat who ate the canary smile, her face a mask of insolence.

Just Don't Get It

We've been together long enough so that She can pick out of a crowd the woman or women that I'm attracted to---for the most part, they're of a certain type, both in body type and in facial structure...on tv you'd see them as Jorja Fox of CSI, or the Montana Girl on CSINY...short or shortish, slightly longer than shoulder length dark hair, round face, high cheekbones, and the list goes on. And She's almost never wrong. We agree on them, and we agree in women in general who we think I find pretty or striking.

But what She, and women in general find attractive, is a total mystery to me...men will almost always respond to big boobs, long legs and short skirts, Playboy-type faces. There doesn't seem to be any unified concept of what's sexy for women---Slut No Bounds, among others, will only pick out hardbodies, and I can understand that---it's the equivalent of the kneejerk reaction that men have.

And then She tells me that She thinks Prince is sexy---and I just don't get it. He's not physically imposing, not particularly handsome, skeevy moustache or naked upper lip, OK he's got a tight body but not overwhelmingly impressive---and I just don't get what's sooo sexy about him.

And She can't quite explain it to me either.

Saving Grace

My good friend Jack and his wife know that I fall in love every day, both from afar and from up close. A couple of years ago, I fell in love with Holly Hunter on Saving Grace, a show currently on hiatus until next spring. She's tough, she's soft, she laughs and cries and seizes life with both hands, holding on for the ride of her life. She loves hard and returns love even harder. Here's her creed:

I want to bust the world wide open the way you do when you're filled with you. I want to engage with people and friends...I want to be physical and I want to ask the big questions. I want to tast the taste and fix the problems...I want to run headlong into chaos and bad guys and darkness and pranks and fun, and laugh laugh laugh. I want to best the best friend and I want to be the greatest aunt and the most complicated daughter.
I want to be the mystery in the room, and I want to be known.

Playing With Old Friends-Finale

And so we stood there, all four of us, fixed in a lurid tableau...Franny in suspended animation, her eyes closed and her arms and legs just dangling in the air, alone in her own private world of sensation, the voracious couple plundering her sexuality, their hands and mouths, their limbs and organs all working away to drain the lust from Franny's poor soul, I just standing there dumbstruck, my hand slowly going back and forth on my cock, watching my poor wife being driven to a place I had never taken her, lost in her surrender to sensation, worshipping her surrender with my own self pleasure, using both hands on myself in a vain attempt to convince myself it was someone else jerking me off and tryaing to find pleasure in the act.

I watched as Franny struggled to shake her head sideways, trying frantically to remove herself in the most elemental way from what was going on. She detached from Gayle's mouth, her lips spread apart in a rictus of expression I couldn't place or understand. She gasped once, twice, desperately inhaling, whispering out "Please, no more...no more. I can't, I just can't," and they stopped, the twin vultures of lust, understanding finally that a limit had been reached. Gayle dropped her hands away from Franny's nipples and breasts, sliding her arms under Franny's to help support as the poor shell tried to stand up, stumbling backwards from Tommy's lap, juices and moisture of all sorts running down her thighs.

I came, on the floor, watching her absentmindedly make her way to the back bedroom to collapse, and I wordlessly followed her, finding her laying on the bed. I covered us both with a sheet, holding her close, not knowing if she was awake or not, conscious or not, still with me or not.

Triggers

Most of us have five senses, the elemental capabilities that form the barriers of our lives and deliver to us the emotional enrichment that takes us past humdrum existence as an amoeba. Some of us lack on of those senses, and compensate by ramping up the other four. A blessed few have a sixth sense, can see or feel into the past or future, perhaps both for better and for worse.

I've long felt that each of us has one sense that is dominant over the others. For subs it might be the sense of touch. For an artist, it's the sense of sight, the ability to translate from what the eye takes in to manual performance. For Her it's the sense of smell, and I can watch Her travel far away when we enter an old apartment building in the city, and we smell the smell of old people. Neither of us knows what that smell is, a pleasant slightly lemony or perhaps talcum powdery odor, and She's gone, instantly transported far way in time and space, back to her grandmother's walkup apartment in the Village, knowing that her grandmother will feed her Arnold bread buttered toast with orange marmalade, and accompanied by tea with milk and sugar. I watch Her stand stock still entranced by the aroma.

Or we'll come home late at night, and the commercial bakery down the block is in full swing, the entire neighborhood awash with the smell of rising yeast and marzipan. Or we'll go into a bar, and suddenly we're both sooo many years younger, overwhelmed by the lingering odor of spilled beer and stale cigarette air, melancholy for the times that were and envious of the smell that's no longer ours.

For me the triggers are auditory. Certain music evokes uncontrollable washes of emotion, overpowering feelings of joy, longing, depair. The emotions don't necessarily follow the content of the music, either the lyrics or the music itself. As I was out and about this morning, doing errands with my Ipod buds stuffed into my ears, I listened to the song Graceland by Paul Simon. I had seen the Graceland tour when it first came around, went to see Paul Simon and friends recreate the concert this past spring at BAM. The music itself, even just the intro, the rhythm setup and the ringing guitar played by one of the African musicians, fills me with uncontrolled joy, and I play it over and over and over. I'm no longer walking in a straight line but swerving back and forth on the sidewalk, an unpardonable sin for a New Yorker.

And there are pieces of music that work in just the opposite direction. I can no longer listen to the Mendelssohn Octet for Strings, because it makes me sad beyond belief and weep uncontrollably. It's not a sad or tragic piece of music, but something in the tonal structure works its way to the core of my soul, fills me with a profound sadness and sense of loss.

I went to a high school that was essentially an experiment in the arts, organized by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia during the Great Depression, where we spent half the classroom time studying either music or art. And so, when we graduated from high school, in Carnegie Hall no less, the processional wasn't Pomp and Circumstance played by the marching band, it was the overture to Die Meistersinger by Richard Wagner, played by the senior orchestra. And I realized during the playing of that piece, sitting in what I now call The Big House, that high school was truly over, that I wouldn't see most of the faces int he future that I had seen for four
years. And so, when I hear the piece, I walk taller, but with an unerring sense of disaster ahead of me.

I'm interested to know about other people's sensory triggers, what sights, sounds, smell, touches, transport you instantly into another space and time. I don't often solicit responses, but if you read this post let me know.

PS-Despite what you might think, there's just a bit more to tell in Playing With Old Friends, but as I told someone earlier today, I have to write it right...and that takes the right mood. Patience, please


Earworm-Graceland, Paul Simon