Interlude

Saturday, March 22, 2008

On the platform of the Inner West line at Central station a few nights ago, May grabbed my hand and pointed. “Look!” he said excitedly.

A few yards ahead of us, a tall, skinny boy dressed in black was walking slowly. He had long arms, long legs, broad shoulders, and his face, turned briefly, was pale-skinned and pretty. These things, however, I noticed only in retrospect.

He had thick hair the brilliant color of red gold. It cascaded off his shoulders and trailed down his back in wavy sheets, thick, curly pools of hair that ended just below the small of his back. It was the most beautiful hair I’d ever seen.

I stared, open-mouthed. My body tingled in simple lust.

May started off, deliberately tracking the boy down the platform. I hissed at him to stop, but followed. The boy paused by some benches, and May and I took up places a little ways away.

May was watching me, grinning. “Why don’t you go talk to him?” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m not going to go up to some totally random stranger.”

“Come on,” he urged. “Just say hello.”

I stood awkwardly, watching as the beautiful boy took his headphones from his bag and began to fiddle with an iPod. Behind me, our train started pulling into the station. My stomach felt tight, knotted up like wet rope. I dipped a hand into my bag and pulled a card from my wallet.

Almost collapsing from the sudden stage fright, I crossed the platform and edged into the boy’s vision. I flashed him a smile, and he returned it as he took his headphones from his ears.

“Hi,” I said. “I know you must hear this a lot, but your hair is really remarkable. I think it’s gorgeous.”

“I do hear that a lot. Thanks.” His voice was light. My eyes edged the clear lines of his cheekbones. His beard precisely matched the red-gold of his hair. “I hope I brightened your evening,” he said.

“You definitely did.” I held out the card. Behind me my train’s doors were opening. I could see May watching me, smiling. “Give me a call sometime if you’d like to get coffee or something.” I held out the card, and as he took it skipped back across the platform and nipped through the closing doors of the train.

I followed May to a pair of seats and collapsed, suddenly shaking. “Oh God,” I groaned, “I can’t believe I just did that. I’ve never done that before.”

“What’d he say?” May asked eagerly. I focused on relaxing the pit in my stomach as I told him. Suddenly I started laughing.

May was startled. “What’s funny?”

I wrapped my arms around my middle as I laughed. “Is that what meeting people is usually like?” I turned to him and made a face. “God, that sucks.“

Labels: Filed in Anecdotes, Beauty, Date Stories | Comments (4)

Postmodern? Part 1

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

This weekend May and I went to a play party. It took us three weeks in the country to find a place to play. It does, of course, help to know people.

The party invitation called for “Fetish formal.” Facing our new built-in closet, May wrinkled his nose in frustration. “I hate dress codes,” he repeated, pulling on a transluscent grey tank top that matched his pants. He posed in front of the full length mirror. “Is this okay? It’s not even black.”

“You look great, love,” I said. I enjoyed the way the shirt framed his shoulder muscles.

A party with a fetish formal dress code makes both of us wary. I wondered if there would be play, at what level, if we’d be interested, interesting. What was the age group, what was the space like, what was the ratio? Should we bring our whips, the rope, the knives?

When we met Ms160 and Sol on the corner, we had no large toys with us. I’d stuck my villainelles, tiny hand-made steel points that Switch and Boy so beautifully created, in my purse. We piled into the backseat of their car and drove the few minutes to the party through dark, small streets. We all laughed at Sol’s brilliant parking job in front of a high wooden fence.

Ms 160 led us to a row of nondescript doors. “Damn, I don’t remember which it is.” We stood awkwardly between two buildings, debating the decency or indecency of knocking on some stranger’s door at 10pm in full fetish gear.

Across the street some guys and girls were hanging off a porch, drinking from green bottles. I peered up the stairs behind a screen door that was propped open. A girl, one of their friends I thought, with more green bottles, saw me peeking in. “You’re the next one over,” she smiled, coming down the stairs. “You can knock. They’ve got a doorman.”

“The outfits gave it away, right?” I thanked her.

The doorman, in a tuxedo, ushered us up the stairs into a beautifully done up apartment, decked with candles, pottery, plants, dramatic lighting. I felt distinctly as though I should avoid moving quickly for fear of breaking the place, or burning it down. We dropped our coats, retrieved drinks from the elegantly laid table, and circulated through the building. Ms 160 introduced me and May right and left. Characteristically, names dropped from my head as fast as they entered. I complimented our hostess on her veil, made cleverly of metal wire and rhinestones and glittering like a Mardi Gras mask.

Eventually May, Ms160, Sol and I found ourselves in the dungeon, testing out the frames of the equipment and picking up toys from the rack to slap them against our arms. “They run this as a B&B,” Ms160 said, “So you can rent the whole thing out for a night, close it off and have your own private dungeon.” She pointed out the TV stand with a built in cage. There was another cage under the bed. The floors were hard tile, which I regretted, thinking of the possibility of flinging May against the ground.

At one point my boy ran up to me excitedly. “They have tie points in the shower!”

At another, I chatted in the hallway with a young blonde woman, laughing and enjoying a respite from feeling socially awkward. “I’m assigned to the door,” she said, “so I just try and snag people as they go by and get them to entertain me!” May joined us a moment later.

“This place is really nice,” he said, gesturing toward the dungeon. “It’s very schmantz” -our private word for fancy- “and postmodern.”

“You just called the dungeon postmodern,” I glanced at him.

He wriggled a little. “Yes, so?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You just called the dungeon postmodern.” Our new blonde friend dissolved in laugher.

After a little while we grew to miss our singletails. The boys were sent into the night to fetch them. Ms 160 and I climbed the stairs to the upstairs living room, settled on a couch and watched as a woman in a zippered black latex dress was tied to a beautiful wooden x-cross lacquered in red and hung with silk. In the meantime, Ms160 told me the amusing story of the male dom who had started a fashion trend of wearing leather chaps, thus confusing all of the dominant women at the party, who suddenly found themselves surrounded by dominant men with their bums hanging out.

A lovely boy in just such chaps passed by us occasionally, offering tidbits of food on a tray and occasionally stopping to say hello. Watching him leave, I decided I might very well be warming to the aesthetics of ass-less trousers.

Eventually our boys came back. The whips came with them.

Heads up, the second half of this story will be passworded.

Labels: Filed in Anecdotes, Art, Date Stories, Friends, Maymay, Scene, Sydney | Comments (10)

Broadcasting Live From Sydney

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

One thing I’ve never quite mastered is the art of making an entrance. I’m a bit too conscious and a bit too critical; the poise of such drama escapes me.

It’s been surprisingly difficult to find the time, the energy, and the inspiration for a big, juicy comeback entry for you all to chew on. Suck on? Is that too dirty?

First, there’s the culture shock I keep holding my breath for, the shock I never got when I moved to New York City, but which I kept expecting for months after I’d moved in. I keep thinking this time I’ll get it, this time I’ll be shaken by the differences.

Though my friends are resembling little aching gaps in my life which hurt dreadfully at times, thus far, culture shocked I am not.

Then there’s the nitty gritty, the thousand-and-one administrative items of moving to a new country. Every day I cross a few off, and every day more come piling on. Bank accounts, cell phones, Internet access, furniture. Where can I get a good cheeseburger at 4am? Does this city even understand the concept of mozzarella sticks?

Then, there’s the psychic weight of everything I’ve missed here online. Would you like to know how loquacious you are, my sexy friends? In the three weeks that I have been primarily offline, you have managed to push 984 new items through my RSS feeds. 984. For bonus points, I’d like to dare you to guess how many of those items belong to Richard.

The concept of catch-up is at this point laughable.

And finally, there’s all that tricky expectation. There’s the nagging thought in the back of my mind that I should manage a piece both delicious and spectacular, that in the months since I’ve seriously written here I should have garnered something that would make for a good re-entrance. I do have plans, to write about Sydney’s Mardi Gras and queer spaces and the visual representations of gender and power (again.) Also about the last play party in New York, the flesh and the screams and the sock monkey pajamas.

I am dreadfully out of practice. My narrative voice has gone all rusty and tangled, leading me down rapid tangents and far too eager to abandon me.

May and I spent the first week and a half here stressed out of our minds. We barely ate. We couldn’t stop fighting. We were staying in a tiny hostel room with bunk beds, going slowly mad from the nightly separation of skin and flesh. Now we’re in another hostel, another tiny room with bugs on the floor and our things in haphazard piles, but with a double bed that is devious and enchanting. I am having trouble waking up in the mornings, some sort of weird jet-lagged throwback.

I get caught up in the nasal reverberation of Australian voices. The coffee is better, the food is too expensive, the wind is warmer, the ocean is closer. The wireless options are pathetic. The grass is amazing.

Sydney is, as I remembered it, a fabulous city. But it’s also a real city, a home. That means it has quirks, disappointments, secrets, tricks that I have yet to master. There is a part of me that thought this move would be easy. Simple. The physical logistics of the adventure have been slow and frustrating, but they’re manageable. They’re working.

That part of me focused on the physical logistics with such ferocity that the all thoughts of emotional health were smudged out. Truth be told, I am a little lost. Perhaps more than a little. Perhaps my life has been through one too many massive upheavals in the past three months.

But lost or found, shocked or not, consider this my self-conscious, rambling, entirely pointless and decidedly undramatic re-entrance. I am online again.

Labels: Filed in Announcements, Maymay, Sydney | Comments (17)