The Importance of Being... J.P. Bowie

Family... I haven't had a family in close to forty years. I lost my parents and both my sisters in a seven year span. You don't really know how important they are until there are no longer there. Yet, their importance lingers. Everywhere I look I see signs that tell me nothing is more important... some people even have it tattooed on their skin... Family First etc.I get a good laugh when I see porn stars with that inked on their chests... Hey Mom, lookit! Thinking of you while I fuck this uh, person.

This is my last post for OGG, so I don't want to get maudlin. And really when I think about it, I have been a lucky so and so for most of my life. Like most gay men and women, through the years, I have found myself surrounded by people I can honestly call friends, good friends, a surrogate family if you will. Forget the old cliche... you can choose your friends, your family is thrust upon you... sometimes your friends choose you, and your family thrusts you away. My family didn't do that, so they live in my memory with love. Again I was fortunate.

The wonderful man I am married to doesn't have such loving memories of his family, yet he remains true to the idea of a warm and caring circle of friends he can call family. It always amazes me that even out of the most repressive upbringings a soul can emerge, eager to forgive those who tried to smother the goodness within, and belittle the kindnesses so willingly given.

That does sound a little maudlin, so I will close with the wish that all of you have found love in some form or another... that there is someone close, friend or family member, you can share your hopes and dreams and troubles with. It's important.

(Dis)Connection: Vignettes

by Annabeth Leong

"I want to lock you in the closet at my job and just keep you in there," he said as I fucked him.

It was our last time together, and we both knew it. The story doesn't need much detail to be clear. He wanted me in the way that makes a person willing to make grand romantic gestures. I wanted to return that feeling, but didn't. We fucked well, so we were doing that before I left for the airport.

This is the last time I'm going to ride this fantastic cock, I remember thinking. I tried to memorize every good place it touched inside me.

He kept talking, fantasizing out loud about what it would be like to prevent me from leaving him. I get off on that sort of fantasy sometimes, so everything began to feel amazing. We were in perfect accord, connected by a mutual vision of me, helpless, forced to live a life I couldn't make myself want on my own. I came hard.

Then I got up and the disconnection set in. For me, it was just a hot fantasy. It was a thing I could walk away from. For him, it was a sincerely felt wish.

***

I decided to make her my friend, and then I single-mindedly pursued her. "It's like romance," I told my male partner confidently, unperturbed, because at that time in my life I was in denial about the fact that the way I felt about certain women wasn't like romance—it was romance.

One night, I convinced her to come out with me. We walked to the playground in the dark and kicked off our shoes and climbed onto a structure made of metal rope. We clung to it beside each other, our bodies vibrating as the metal hummed in response to the breeze. I was so hungry to know every little thing she was willing to tell me about herself. I could feel myself taking her sentences in deep, pouring love all over them, and reflecting them back to her. We stayed out for hours before I finally drove her home.

Before she left town a few weeks later, she called me over to her apartment and gave me her shoe collection and a bottle of good vanilla. I bought books I thought she would like and mailed them to her new address. I sobbed inconsolably. I still wear her shoes, though they are just slightly too small for me and hurt my feet.

***

There is a sort of love that defeats the constant concern I feel for how others see me. The only thing that matters when I love that way is what that one loved person thinks. And so sometimes I feel safe from almost everything, exhilarated by the freedom.

He talked slowly and hated to be interrupted. I learned to accept five-minute pauses in conversation as he pondered. I didn't know how much of myself I normally hold back until I found myself loving him without reserve. He didn't like smoking, and one day I thought about how if I really loved him, the feeling ought to make me better. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and haven't smoked one since.

One day we were at dinner in the college cafeteria, and we were playing a silly game we had just dredged from the depths of our childhood memories. We made a pact not to break each other's gaze. The goal was to try to trick the other person into making a noise. With an absolutely straight face, he picked up his bowl of hot soup and slowly poured it straight into his lap, and I laughed harder than I ever had in my life.

When he told me eventually that we didn't share Christ in common and couldn't be friends anymore, I stared at him blankly, with a child's innocent lack of comprehension. The world could not be that wrong. It could not.

***

I didn't like her; I liked her best friend. Her best friend was a singer with a big voice who never fixed the pronouns when she sang covers of old blues songs. But this singer kept throwing me at her friend, telling me to ride with that other girl to the party, enticing me to go to that other girl's house, promising that she'd show up there eventually, leaving me waiting for hours.

But I would get bored sometimes and kiss the girl I didn't like. She asked me to pour candle wax on her back, then blow it cool. Ever accommodating, I said I would, and then I got curious and asked her to do it to me, too. One night, we did that together with a guy we knew from a local bar, stripped to our bras, burning each other and kissing and giggling. Later, we walked out into the night. I was so warm inside and outside that I barely felt the need to get dressed to go out to the street. The three of us held hands.

He showed up another day at the bar with roses for each of us, thinking we were great friends, or that we were together, and I ducked my head because I was there waiting for the singer, as usual.

***

I wooed him by writing a poem, but then he went away for the weekend and I fucked someone else, probably because at the time I didn't really know how to say no. So we broke up, and he wrote me a poem, and when I read it I felt shamed and humbled, because I had to admit that his poem was better.

***

When I miss her with the sharpest sting, I am thinking of the moment when we were saying goodbye after the first time we had lunch together. We were standing on the street next to her car, and all I wanted right then was to spend as much time with her as possible. I was afraid of humiliating myself, but I needed her to know, so I asked if we could do this again. Like, soon. Like, tomorrow.

That was stupid, I thought. I was supposed to play it cool—pull out my smartphone and schedule something three weeks in advance. But the truth was, I would have canceled just about anything for another chance to be near her. And I wasn't busy tomorrow.

Her face wide open, she nodded at me with the sort of enthusiasm that adults rarely allow. I knew from her expression that she was with me all the way. We felt exactly the same about the lunch we'd had together.

I'll always hold that moment close, that experience of wanting in profound accord with someone else. Of being told yes in a way that wasn't just about lunch but also meant yes you are perfection and yes I think I maybe love you.

"Yeah," she said. "Let's do it."

The 80s Child Works Hard for a Living (or at least watches a lot of TV)

gisellerenarde: i need to blog about the 80s.
  i don't know what to say

Sweet: google the 80's see what you get ..
  maybe something will pop

gisellerenarde: what's a tv show from the 80s?

Sweet: Cosby, ATeam, Cheers, ALF, Knight Rider, Dallas, Whos the Boss

gisellerenarde: i'm getting nostalgic

Sweet: Dukes of Hassard, Full House

gisellerenarde: OMG i hated Full House. Leslie LOVED it.

Sweet: Miami Vice

gisellerenarde: oh yeah

Sweet: THE SIMPSONS

gisellerenarde: LOL premiered in 89. I remember it well...
  I wasn't allowed to watch it when it first came out, but i did anyway

Sweet: Happy Days, Growing Pains, Family Ties, Dystany, Hill Street Blues, Threes Company , STNG

gisellerenarde: i grew up on threes company. it's one of my earliest memories (although it started in the late 70s i think)

Sweet: 77 to 84

gisellerenarde: yea i looked it up once
  i watched it again maybe 5 years ago and i couldn't believe how terrible it was

Sweet: Taxi, Love Boat

gisellerenarde: actually i dream of jeannie is one of my first memories too
  watching i dream of jeannie at my grandparents' house when they used to take care of me during the day, which was before Leslie was born, which means i was under 2

Sweet: Golden Girls, Airwolf, Wonder Years, Mork and MIndy Knots Landing Fall Guy, Fantasy Island, Night Court, MacGuyver, Murder She Wrote

gisellerenarde: oh murder she wrote
  i told you my mom used to pay us a nickel to brush her hair during murder she wrote

Sweet: hahaha

gisellerenarde: it aired on sundays and sunday was bath night and my mom would get her bath then make that air-popped popcorn with half a cup of melted butter over it. you and she are the only two people in the world who like that grossness

Sweet: Bosom Buddies

gisellerenarde: i don't know what that is

Sweet: Moonlighting

gisellerenarde: you know what i remembered today?

Sweet: what

gisellerenarde: i've told you before that we sometimes spent overnights or a weekend at my grandma's because of my dad

Sweet: yes

gisellerenarde: but today i remembered there was about a month where my mom and my siblings and i lived in my aunt and uncle's basement
  an entire month

Sweet: wow

gisellerenarde: it was a finished basement, but it was just one big room. they lived in a small bungalow. the basement had a pull-out couch. that's where we all slept
  i honestly can't remember how old i was. jane wasn't born yet, so it would have been sometime in the 80s

Sweet: hmmmm

gisellerenarde: i wonder how my mom explained that to people. we just weren't living at our house? but my dad was? for a month?

Sweet: dont know .. ask her

gisellerenarde: my mom doesn't like to talk about the past
  it makes her really uncomfortable

Sweet: wonder where you get it from hahahaha

gisellerenarde: heh no kidding

For Spencer, From the 80s

The Abandoned Train Car

by Annabeth Leong

In the town where I lived when I was younger, there's a stretch of abandoned train track that leads to a line of graffiti-covered cars. I used to sneak out of the house to walk on the tracks at night, enjoying the game of spacing my steps to line up with the cross slats, and the train, coming at the end of this walk like a divine surprise, was the most special, most sacred place in town to me.

On this particular night, she came to my house, and we were pretending to everyone that it was a friendly sleepover thing, but both of us knew what we were actually going to do. We were having a snack together late that night, and I offered her my drink apologetically, not sure if she wanted to share a cup with me. "If I'm worried about your saliva," she said, "I need to stop right now." And we laughed because that was the closest we'd come to saying any of this out loud.

After that, I took her on this walk with me, down the train tracks, to the train. We climbed up the ladder on the side of one of the train cars and sat on the top together. The night might have been a little chilly, but I was shaking for a different reason. I remember stars. We had a package of Skittles and a bottle of Coca-Cola, and I think we had talked on the way there but once we got to the top of the train we fell silent because it was obviously time.

We shared the soda, and then we played a game arranging the Skittles on each other's forearms, and then I got bold and ate one of the Skittles off her arm. We were still too afraid to kiss, so she lay on her back on the cold metal roof and I placed Skittles carefully around her belly button. I don't think I had the guts to try to eat those off, though.

Then she turned to me, and we were kissing. I remember her thick, curly hair in my hands, and the taste of the soda and candy in her mouth. It was tentative at first—we had an awkward discussion of whose lips were supposed to be on the outside of the kiss, the man role—but then it was so obviously right that we stopped hesitating.

I had heard so many warnings from adults about boys and how they wanted sex so badly, how they would go half-insane from hormones and I should never trust them and always be sure to guard myself whenever I was alone with a boy. I'd always thought that was bullshit, some sort of racket, that surely no one was actually losing their mind over sex. Despite the experiences I'd had with boys pushing and cajoling me, I felt that this raging hormones thing was a convenient lie.

Then I kissed her, and I went half-insane, and I understood what those people had been trying to describe except that I wasn't a boy. I didn't really know how to think about what I was doing with her. It felt like there wasn't a rational thought left in my body.

I wasn't a virgin in the technical sense. I'd been with a number of boys by then. But recently, I've been thinking that night was my real first time because it was the first time I wasn't performing a role. Until then, I was always acquiescing to various coercions, making deals, feeling charged with being either the sexual gatekeeper or the automatic dispenser of magical sex favors. With her, we were both doing what we truly wanted to do. We were both excited but awkward but sweet but scared. Sex had never felt so mutual to me before.

I went to visit that town just recently, and I made my pilgrimage. It was eighty-five degrees, which shocked me since I'm used to New England now. I surprised a black snake sunning itself beside the tracks and it rushed away through dead leaves, into the overgrown swamp trees that line the space that was once cleared for the railroad. Its motion was so loud that I cringed, and the sky was bright and wide and watchful above me. I didn't know how I'd once had the courage to come to that place at night.

My mother had told me the old train was gone, but she was wrong. It was still there. I wandered along it, wishing I could recall which car we actually climbed. There was fresh graffiti—new tags, badges of pride for kids I'm way too old to recognize. My husband was with me, and I sort of regretted taking him there because I wanted that place for her.

I've been thinking about that moment a lot lately. That started long before this topic came up here at this blog. I try to write about it in my journal, and I wind up circling it instead, leading up to it and giving endless back story, or analyzing all the things that happened afterward. I write her name and I start to cry, and then I ask myself what I'm crying about. Surely something about the moment, not about her—it seems too naive to be crying about her.

But I think I'm crying about all of it. All the things we didn't know, the things I never had the courage to say or do. There were notes scrawled instead of paying attention in class, boyfriends, all sorts of messes. There were the nights she came to my house and made me feel that wild need no matter how much I wanted to resist her, and there's the fact that I no long have any idea why the hell I was trying to resist her. There were the nights she got me drunk in desperation, and always, always there was my lack of courage, my fear of being seen with her in school. Then there was her conversion and the letters she sent me detailing passages from Leviticus. Years later, there was the time she came to visit me but insisted we stand outside, as if crossing the threshold of a doorway would take us back to that same old feeling. And the last time I spoke to her, she kept a table between us, as if, without the object, we would fly together again.

Art For Art's Sake

By Lisabet Sarai

Give me your body,

Give me your mind,

Open your heart,

Pull down the blind...

The headphones you've given me as a Christmas present cocoon me from outside sounds, but you're speaking to me through the music. This is another gift, a live album by 10 CC, a band I've never heard of but whose name (you inform me with one of your arch grins) is based on the amount of seminal fluid in the average ejaculation. With you every choice is symbolic and every symbol is sexual.

It's morning, January. Chill winter sunlight reflects off the snow and spills in through the picture window, above the double mattress that serves as my bed in this low rent apartment. We're caught in the heart of a yellow diamond, glowing from the inside out.

My back is to the window and to you. I sit, naked, facing the Radio Shack stereo, hypnotized by the record's spin, acutely aware of your bare body behind me. You rest your big hands on my shoulders, leaving my nipples to tighten unattended and my cunt to ache. Your presence is warmth, power, potential without limits. You've already fucked me. You'll fuck me again soon, maybe tying my wrists first, or reddening my  bottom. Right now, though, your deceptively innocent hands keep me grounded and urge me to listen.

Give me your body,

Give me your mind...

I'm claimed already, but still you ask, and I answer without words. These are my gifts to you, gifts you know well how to use. You're in my mind now, whispering of all the trials and delights to come, though all my ears hear is the music. The headphones make the music solid, visceral. I'm drowning in music.

Are you hard? Perhaps. I don't remember the tease of your cock against my spine. I'm focused on the lyrics, breathless with desire, eager to yield everything to someone so expert in getting inside my head. Later you'll call me “suggestible” and laugh, but at this moment, I have no doubt that magic exists, that you are its master, and mine.

Giselle is not at home right now...

by Giselle Renarde's Christmas Elf

Even sitting on her mother's couch on Christmas night, Giselle can visualize the bookshelf in her living room.  It hasn't changed in years.  It's stocked with a good deal of fiction, but far too many university-era reads.  Why?  Because she revisits them every so often?  Nah.  She didn't read most of those books in the first place.  How she earned herself a degree, she'll never know.

Giselle wasn't always a bad student.  In fact, throughout elementary school she was an overachiever.  High school?  Even better.  She left her final year with a 96.8% average... or a 98.6% average.  She can't quite remember.  Her days since then have represented a slow process of stupification.

Or maybe "slow" is the wrong word.  A student's first year at university can be a difficult transition.  Giselle went from big fish in a small, coddling high school to an absolute nobody at a prestigious research university. 

Major depression hit.  She cried every day.  She cried all the time.  She cried on the subway, in the library, in the bathroom.  Nobody ever asked what was wrong.  Nobody.  Not once.

She sought therapy through the school's mental health initiative.  She cried there, too.  It didn't really help.

And so four years went by.  Giselle attended classes during the day and worked at night to pay tuition, rent, food... books.  When she arrived home at her tiny bachelor apartment, usually after midnight, she read her texts and wrote her papers as her little tabby curled up beside her. 

She tried hard, but not hard enough to earn the A's she saw in high school.  In fact, a B was cause for celebration. Mostly, she struggled to be okay with those dreaded C's. She didn't have time to beat herself up too much.

Last week, Giselle found a quirky Canadian TV show on Netflix.  Her sisters had told her "Being Erica," about a girl in her thirties who undergoes an unusual form a time-travel therapy, would appeal to her.  And it did.  There was an episode where the main character, Erica, expresses concern that she's one of those people who peaked in high school. 

Giselle feels that pain.

Wild Wedding

By Lisabet Sarai



His name was Kevin - or maybe Keith - anyway, I'm moderately certain it began with a 'K', and I guarantee that I did know his name at the time. After all, this was nearly thirty five years ago. He was the bride's kid brother, a skinny but surprisingly self-confident nineteen year old with messy dark hair and glasses. As for me, I was twenty four, an experienced woman of the world, I suppose, from his perspective, though most of the time I felt confused and awkward.

His sister was marrying my ex-housemate, the smooth-talking, golden-haired business student who'd flirted with me until I couldn't bear the sexual tension any longer, until I climbed into his bed one night while my steady boyfriend (also a housemate) was away. (I wrote about this encounter for another Grip post, on the topic of bad decisions!). Of course, that boyfriend (or rather, ex-boyfriend) was also among the guests at the posh wedding, held in the manicured garden of his parent's home in an upmarket Connecticut coastal community. The rest of the former occupants of that crazy group house attended, too. The whole absurd scene would have been hilarious in a film, but this was my life.

The groom graced me with a smug smile when I arrived, then ignored me. My bitter ex-lover wouldn't even say hello. My other housemates offered embarrassed greetings then moved on, clearly uncomfortable at being caught in the middle of a romantic divide.

So there I was, more or less alone near the edge of the tent, drinking wine and trying to look like I belonged, a middle class Jewish girl in the midst of wealthy W.A.S.P. guests I didn't know. Then Kevin sauntered over.

He wasn't the sleek, muscled teenage boy of a romance reader's dreams. I would have labeled him a nerd, if that term had been been invented yet. Still, he had a certain charm. He leaned against the tent-pole, engaging me in clever banter with a powerful undercurrent of innuendo. In ten minutes, he had me laughing. In twenty minutes, he'd suggested we adjourn to the motel where he and his family were staying. And I'd agreed.

I can't help blushing in retrospect, but at the time, there was no way I was going to refuse. So what if he was five years younger than I was? Who cared that he was a member of the wedding party and likely to be missed? He wanted me, I wanted him, and nobody else there seemed to give a damn about me or what I did.

That afternoon burns in my memory as one of the most perfectly entertaining sexual encounters of my life. It was pure fun. I doubt he was a virgin, but he was certainly less experienced that I was, young enough to be impressed by my boldness and grateful for my attentions. I recall giving him a blow job, probably his first, and the gleeful pride that added an extra sheen to my arousal. I saw myself through his eyes, mature, sexy, a daring woman of the world. His horniness turned me on as much as his lively intelligence.

He was no slouch, though. He surprised me by asking if I'd pose for him to take photographs. With an exhibitionist streak a mile wide, I was only too happy to oblige. I would really love to see those shots now!

By the time we returned to the reception, many of the guests had left, among them my old lover. I'm sure I got some strange looks, but honestly, I didn't care. Kevin grinned like the cat who'd devoured the canary. Nevertheless, he was unfailingly polite and solicitous as he drove me to the station so I could catch a bus home.

Of course I never saw or heard from him again. That doesn't matter. In fact, I suspect that any further contact would only have diminished the pleasure we both derived from our impromptu encounter.

I've done quite a few wild things in my life. I've visited sex clubs and gone to swinger's parties. I've had sex on the floor of a church, in a Greyhound bus, in a parking lot. Still, I'm not sure any of those experiences can compare to my slipping away from a wedding to fuck the bride's teenage brother.

Sounds like the premise for a wonderful erotic story, doesn't it? But now if I write it, everyone will know it's not fiction.

From the Depths

First comes the funeral, then comes the sorting-out.

Both my elderly parents died within six months of each other in 2009. In summer 2010, all the heirs (heiresses) gathered to sort through all the family belongings that were still left in storage. I chose a minimum of old things (mostly books) because I didn’t want to leave anyone else with such a massive job after I’m gone.

Summer 2011: the time of reckoning. My own basement was stuffed with the detritus of several lives, so I decided to sort out while I’m still here. It’s been three days, and I’m nowhere near finished.

Basements or cellars are such an obvious symbol of the subconscious that it hardly seems worth mentioning. In both cases, stuff that is simply ignored or left to moulder eventually becomes a health hazard.

“Closure” now seems to be what all distressed souls want, a kind of holy grail that leads so many into therapy of various kinds. It sounds like a great relief: after all the sorting and analyzing, a door can be closed. In some cases, the house can be torn down so that better use can be made of the space it stood on.

The longer I live, the more I see “closure” as a fantasy and a convention in fiction. Readers (and writers) want to know when they’ve reached the end of the story. Something needs to happen to wrap up the loose ends.

Real life, of course, is so much messier.

My mother kept every drawing, poem and story I ever made as a child. It was a mind-boggling collection that I couldn't afford to keep, so I shredded most of it this morning. The big themes of my artwork and writing were family love, patriotism and some vague but enthusiastic Christianity (including a picture of God as a smiling man with a brown beard, made when I was six.) There is even a romance involving three fairies who live in "cucumber cottages" (the actual cucumber plants in the family vegetable garden). It all indicates a happy-enough childhood and a degree of naivete that would probably be hard to find now.

According to most of the stories that were read to me when I was young, and the stories of "older girls" that I found in school libraries, a wedding was usually the grand finale of the life of a young girl exploring her options. Marriage was the conclusion, the end of loneliness but also the end of choice. Apparently there was nothing to say after that.

The ever-present assumption that I was a "normal" girl who would eventually marry and "settle down" to have babies and keep house helps explain the rage and despair that seem to appear suddenly in my sketches and jottings (often done in class) from my teens. School felt like an oppressive institution, but to become a "career girl" I would need to stay in school as long as I could stand it. Then I had to hope I could find a workplace that would hire a pathetic, unmarried woman. As a wife, I probably wouldn't be allowed to work for money.

Most of the girls I knew were hoping to get married as soon as they could get pregnant: at 13, 14 or 15. In Mormon country, this was both legal and expected. My reluctance to do this identified me as a freak.

My caricatures of middle-aged teachers (who look like zombies or gorillas) and my political cartoons about the War in Vietnam (more evidence of the stupidity of adult authorities) expressed my general resentment in a way that seemed trendy to me at the time.

My male classmates were understandably afraid of being drafted into the war and not living to the age of majority. I sympathized, and wanted to rescue all of them, including the ones who still clung to the patriotism of American childhood. (At an early age, I couldn't distinguish God from the President.) To my dismay, boys seemed to resent girls in general. We weren't being drafted, and they assumed we all expected them to support us for life. Except for ball-busters like me, who wanted to steal their jobs.

I realized that a wedding wouldn't begin a phase of "happily ever after" for anyone involved. In due course, I learned this by experience.

Being reminded of all this by fragile old documents reminds me that not only is the personal political (and vice versa), but that some sources of stress are really persistent.

While I struggle to rid the basement of black mould and useless, broken things, I've been told I am not only haunted by my parents and my own past. A psychic friend of my spouse said she "saw" an African man in our house, and asked her if he could be her ancestor. Spouse said she doubts it. She thinks he is my Nigerian ex-husband, who died suddenly of a heart attack on New Year's Eve 2006.

I don't know if I am haunted by anyone but myself, but I do know that relationships don't end with death. Only amnesia on the part of the living could end the silent conversation. I hope my Ex is at peace, wherever he is, but I don't want him back, not the way he was. I can't seriously imagine him any other way.

The mess in the basement leads me to messes on other floors. I can't be sure I will ever have a perfectly clean, well-organized house to live in. And I can’t find a way to bring this piece to a satisfying conclusion. It seems that life is a series of connected rooms, or chapters in novels that can always be followed by one more sequel. Stay tuned.