Girl beds and virginal young woman beds,
matronal expansively expressed beds
from the poem, Beds [1] by Charlie Smith
I started sleeping around when I was young and in the process, I’ve accumulated a catalogue of men, to whom I give bouncy names, so that my friends can easily identify them. Like “Gimme Two” for Greg, the editor, who is missing three fingers from his left hand. “Eighties man” was the name for Jeff, because in 2001, he sported a mustache and a jacket from the disco era, before the style became cool again.
When I was 25, flying east for Passover, I met Garry, the “Jew from Topeka,” on the airplane. (He was filed as such, because with my NYC-centric roots I thought it noteworthy to be a Semite from the Midwest.) We made eye contact across the aisle. He gave me his phone number, and within days after returning to California, I drove down dusty roads to his pot farm in Aromas, near the “artichoke capital of the world.”
What I remember most about the “Jew from Topeka” apart from his wanting to marry me after our first date so that he could have a helpmate to tend his marijuana crop in the middle of nowhere, was that it was the single, best sexual experience I’ve had. That is, if you had to narrow it down to one. I didn’t know anything about sex yet, not really. And Garry taught me to slow down and relax.
In the Japanese movie, Afterlife [2], the filmmaker invites you to consider one moment in your life that you would be willing to spend in eternity. The film is leisurely, with lots of time to think. For two hours, I imagined eternity on the hard floor of a farmhouse near the artichoke capital of the world, having mind-blowing oral sex with a pot farmer.
If I fast forward to recently, it brings me to “Kayak Man,” who I found on a dating site, and even though my stomach turned because in one of his photos, he’s in a wetsuit beside a kayak with the caption, “If you like to get wet, drop me a line,” I answered his ad anyway. More about that, later.
(Real names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty, except for Kayak Man because, really, how could I make that up?)