Banging Bella

by Daddy X

When I managed a bowling alley bar, getting laid wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t unusual to get a proposition for after closing time. Something about a bartender (in certain circles) being somewhat of an authority figure. Someone to be looked up to. Such as it is.

I worked at the Bowl for twelve years and quite a few female bartenders and waitresses came and went, both attractive and not so. Although a certain amount of attrition is expected in the service trades, we had a core group of four women who stayed for the bulk of that time.

Key word being ‘bulk’. I managed to get a reputation for hiring … ahem … full-bodied women. One of them, a divorcee we’ll call Bella had been around the county working bars for years, including the only other bowling alley nearby and a restaurant at the local golf course. She knew lots of well-heeled people, and ran a quite successful house-sitting service, getting paid for living in luxurious quarters and never really having to pay rent. If she wasn’t living at an upscale client’s house, she stayed with her mother.

Bella was large but decidedly not fat. She wasn’t soft or flabby, but rather a ‘hard-body’, of a type we don’t imagine when we hear the term. Of Italian extraction, solid as a brick, and pretty much the same shape, Bella was aware of the impression large women could make, and always looked good, wearing deep red lipstick to accentuate her sensuous mouth and compliment a mane of wavy black hair. What Bella had that other women didn’t (and nobody realized) was a sense of adventure only matched by my own fantasies.

There wasn’t much room behind the bar, or in the little storage room in back where the ice machine and walk-in cooler were located. Consequently whenever there were more than one or two people in the employees’ workspace, there’d be lots of touching when crossing paths, creating a tactile sense of close camaraderie .   

It was also common for the employees to hug, either in greeting or in sympathy for whatever fuckup or weird scene might occur on any given evening. Kisses went down like handshakes, and we usually thought nothing of it. Until one night, in the back room, Bella and I kissed for real. The softest lips and mouth I’d ever experienced laved and sucked at my tongue, elevating us both to a state of arousal that surprised us. I came away from that kiss with an idea of what might happen to a cock in there, resulting in an obvious hard-on tenting the front of my trousers.

“Wow!” she said, surprised, “Did I just do that?”

Looking down at myself, “Looks genuine to me,” I said. (or something equally lame). I should say now that we’d both been sniffing coke, which for some people can be an aphrodisiac. Coke in itself wasn’t unusual on night shift, but this was the first time (to my knowledge) it had turned sexual. Or maybe I’m just naïve.

“Jesus,” she said. “I haven’t had sex in years. I’d pretty much forgotten about it.”

“Would you care to do something about that?” I said. “I could probably help with that sort of thing.”

She reached to rub the bulge in my pants. “Seems serious. Maybe we should. I’m house-sitting out near the golf course this week. You can follow me over after we get off … if you want.”

“I want,” I said, uncomfortable with my dick so constrained. “How convenient. That’s on my way home.”

What Bella possessed that other women didn’t was a sense of adventure only matched by my own fantasies. That first night, she told me her current client owned numerous sex tapes, and that she’d like to go and watch them together. That hadn’t happened since my twenties when Deep Throat and Devil in Miss Jones came out. We watched the films in a room with a floor-to-ceiling mirror, Bella taking as much pleasure watching herself suck my cock as I was in having the deed performed. At one point, she asked me to do her from behind so she could better see the film.

The homes she looked after were usually quite large, up in the pricey Marin hills, with great views. I remember having sex hanging over a balcony, sex in an outdoor hot tub under redwoods. Watching porn in a private theatre. We fucked in their beds, on their sofas, in their bathrooms, living rooms, roofs, kids rooms with dolls and high school pennants. In their kitchens. On a trampoline. In and on the cars in their garage. Something wonderfully sexy about just fucking or sucking on the spot, wherever you are.

We’d go for weeks without any fooling around, but sooner or later she’d say that she hadn’t worn undies that night or that she’d cut a slit in her panty hose. One time, I told her to go to the ladies room and cut the entire crotch out wide so that her luxurious bush was exposed to the humid air. I reached under to make sure she’d done it. For the entire shift, we’d whisper suggestive things to each other, tempting each other, intimate touching ensuing whenever she went behind the bar. She’d go under her skirt then smear her fingers on my mustache. She’d think up excuses to go into the back room, shooting eye signals and an enticing grin. I’d go in back and find her on her knees.

She’d be soaked. I never knew a woman to get so wet. Or perhaps it was because we’d be in each other’s presence, deep within a hypersexual bubble for hours at a time, driving our combined heat to fever peak. By the time we’d close the place, we’d both be so worked-up, we’d take chances. Fucking her from behind while she washed the ash trays. Hoping nobody from the bowing alley came in. Going in back to find Bella on the ramp to the walk-in, feet apart, blouse rolled up, situating herself at the right level so I could fondle her cunt and suck her tits through a bra that she’d cut the tips of the cups, leaving her succulent mauve nipples exposed and stimulated against the caresses of her blouse.  And my lips.

There were several close calls, which only added to the intensity. We didn’t work in a vacuum, so our surreptitious escapades had to conform to the fact that another bartender and three more waitresses were nearby. We’d often wonder what might have happened if one of them came back when we were compromised.

Bella said that she didn’t know what was happening to her. That she’d gone so long without sex, she’d figured it was something she’d never engage in again. She’d never even think about it.

In time, she’d come in and bend down over the pool table, asking me if somebody could possibly see up her skirt. “I feel so vulnerable,” she’d say. “What’s a 42 year-old woman doing running around without underwear? I feel like some slut.”

Perhaps stemming from her abstinence, Bella had about the tightest snatch imaginable. She said my cock was just the right size. Fit her perfectly. I had to agree; she truly was near a perfect fit. And STRONG. Once her powerful orgasmic contractions and flagrant twists of her substantial thighs approached an impossible level of abandon, it felt as though she could rip me out by the roots. An encounter with Bella could be an endurance trial of aches and pains fondly remembered for days.

My experience is that heavier women seem to have extra padding—not only on the outside—but inside as well. I’ve known (in the biblical sense) skinny girls who felt like the Holland Tunnel. If you yodel down there, you’ll hear the echo. :>) (I’ll probably get guff for that.)

The easiest part about the fling with Bella was that to her, fun and sex was all it was. From that first kiss, I told her in no uncertain terms that I was in love with my wife and that our private little thing was just sex. She honored that. The only miscommunication we had was the expense of all the undies and pantyhose we were trashing. Could I please chip in? And I bought the rubbers too. Never a possessive moment for either of us. In fact, when she started going out with a new boyfriend, she credited me with rejuvenating her confidence as a sexual being. I wonder what she taught him. ;>)

Later, Bella married another guy who truly loved her and stayed with her until she passed some years ago.

When worlds collide

Truth is stranger than fiction (or it makes a decent approximation)

All my stories are just that -- fiction, made up characters, situations I dreamed up, my own private fantasies made public. But from time to time something happens, something real and memorable or just plain bizarre – a person, an event, a chance meeting, and those nuggets just have to find their way into one of my books. There are several examples, but I’m going to share just one of them here...

The first meeting between my hero and heroine in Chameleon, a book I wrote about two years ago and still one of my favourites, is more or less exactly a recreation of an actual encounter I had in Turkey. Chameleon is set in Morocco, but we allow ourselves a little artistic license, naturally.

I had found myself alone on a coach, or more accurately sitting on a wall beside a coach, using the shade cast by the huge vehicle as a way of keeping cool in the absence of air conditioning. The rest of my party had disappeared somewhere, I forget where, but they would be back before long. I sat, in my universal uniform of the Western tourist – shorts, T shirt, sunglasses, flip flops and smelling of Ambre Solaire – savouring the solitude as I gazed across the arid Anatolian landscape. A metaled road snaked away into the distance, finally disappearing over the brow of a hill. As I watched, something moved at the crest of the rise.

Almost imperceptible, I watched and I waited until it happened again. There. Definitely. Something.

A speck came into view at the very brow of the hill, swaying softly, bobbing about, growing larger, longer. Then another speck appeared, and the two continued to grow until they merged into one. Intrigued now I peered into the setting sun and after a few minutes I could make out the shape.

It was a donkey, a woman seated on its back. The pair moved in effortless synchronization as the animal ambled slowly down the incline in the forty-four degree heat. She was cloaked, her hood covering her hair and most of her face. The reins were loosely twisted around the fingers of one hand though she made no attempt to guide the donkey. No need, he knew his way. Her other hand was tucked within her voluminous blue and red zig zagged cloak.

On either side of the saddle hung a panier, each with a lid concealing the contents. I wondered what she might have in there – an iPod, a mobile phone, a few loaves and fishes…

She could have easily passed for an extra on Ben Hur, transplanted straight from a biblical scene. This woman would have fit right in on the Mount of Olives two thousand years ago, listening to talk of Beatitudes or offering to wash the Messiah’s feet.  

As she approached and drew level with me I was struck be the sheer timelessness of our world. So much changes, whirls by in the blink of an eye, yet some things remain the same. Immovable, not to be improved upon. A donkey and a thick cloak served well enough two millennia ago, and they are still the right kit for that inhospitable terrain.

As she passed where I sat I looked straight at her, and she at me. Our eyes met. I lifted a hand in a timeless gesture of greeting. She returned it, tilted her chin in a slight nod. We exchanged a smile, then she was already past me and moving away again. I watched her until she was out of sight. She never looked back at me.

Where else, I wondered, where else in the world might two women, so different, so completely opposite, find themselves in the same place at the same time and both have a perfect right to be there? Neither of them out of place, neither one be in the least surprised to see the other? Where else would they exchange a polite nod and continue on their separate ways?

This memory has stayed with me for over twenty years now, and of course I had to enshrine that enigmatic scene in a book. Here it is, in an excerpt from the opening chapter in Chameleon.

Ethan straightened again and took another long drink. As he bent to place the bottle back in the car, something caught his eye. A glimmer, a slight tremble of motion in the distance. He squinted back along the road as it snaked away across the hillside, shading his eyes to focus. Something glinted, shimmered, right out there on the horizon. He walked around to the boot of his car, where his field equipment lay stowed, and opened it to grab his binoculars from his rucksack. He raised them to his eyes, adjusted the focus and blinked in surprise as the hazy vision solidified.

A head. A woman by the look of it, heavily cloaked, emerging slowly over the horizon. Her pace slow, sedate, rolling slightly. Ethan watched, puzzled, but soon understood the reason for the curious gait. Another head, this one grey with long ears pointing straight towards the heavens—a donkey. As they crested the hill, Ethan saw that the cloaked woman sat astride the animal, perfectly in tune with its leisurely pace as the beast ambled placidly along the ribbon of tarmac. Neither the woman nor her mount appeared to be in a hurry. As Ethan watched through his binoculars, a pair of shoulders appeared, also shrouded in a heavy cloak, the fabric enveloping her small figure. She didn’t appear to be guiding the donkey. She had tucked her hands inside the drapes of her clothing, perhaps for protection from the searing heat. Her feet, too, were swathed within the cloak. The ethnic details in the brightly coloured fabric crystallised as he watched. He suspected the multihued woollen fabric to be hand-woven. When the pair came fully into view, Ethan could make out panniers swaying on either side of the beast, one with a small, rolled up carpet peeking from it.

As they made their slow, unruffled progress down the road towards where he stood, Ethan dropped the binoculars onto the passenger seat, preferring to watch them with the naked eye. He stared, unashamed, as they drew nearer, taking in every detail of this pair, so incongruous almost anywhere else yet so perfectly placed here in this unchanging landscape. Ethan strolled to the rear of his car, resting his hip against the boot. He made no pretence of disinterest, not so much as a passing nod. His fascination was total.

The woman and donkey would not have looked out of place in Biblical times, and it struck Ethan that in many ways not much had changed here in over two thousand years—at least on the face of it. He watched as the woman reached up to rearrange her cloak slightly to cover most of her features, the traditional modest feminine gesture so common hereabouts. Now she gave off no clues at all, there was no way he could surmise what might lie hidden beneath the heavy shawl. Long minutes crawled past as the pair covered the distance separating them from Ethan. He regarded them solemnly during the whole of their journey.

At last, they were close enough for him to make eye contact. On impulse—and because it seemed impolite not to—Ethan removed his Ray-Bans and met the woman’s gaze. She looked him in the eye, direct, unafraid. And certainly not so much as hinting at the timid modesty he might have expected. Her eyes were dark, lined in the local kohl, but her Berber heritage was evident. Despite having no other clues to tempt him, Ethan found her eyes oddly beguiling. Intrigued, he would have liked to know her, to chat perhaps. But that would never happen, not here. In this magical, timeless place, worlds passed within inches of each other, beings such as she and he might co-exist, but their lives did not touch, would never touch. They were a million miles apart.

The woman and donkey drew alongside, and Ethan greeted her in the way that seemed natural to him. He nodded, offering her half a smile—polite, distant, acknowledging her presence in this remote place, and his. The woman inclined her head slightly, the movement almost imperceptible but enough. Just enough. As she passed, she dropped her gaze from his, returning her attention to the road in front of her as the donkey carried her onwards.

From the back cover...

When mining engineer Ethan Savage spots the cloaked, veiled woman riding a donkey in the Moroccan desert he could be forgiven for thinking that in some respects nothing much has changed in two thousand years. She would not look out of place in Biblical times.

They pass, nod, smile politely, and go their separate ways, two strangers a world apart.

But when, moments later she rescues him from his crashed car, from the first words she utters Ethan realises appearances can be deceptive. His little Berber peasant is not what she seems.

Shifting effortlessly between her traditional roots in the foothills of the Atlas mountains, and her professional life as the Totally Five Star hotel doctor, Fleur is a human chameleon, able to adapt and blend into any environment. At first irritated, then amused by the handsome stranger, Fleur knows full well the assumptions he’s made about her. As their paths cross once more at the luxurious Totally Five Star hotel where they both work she realises he too is not all he seems. This sexy Englishman holds the key to her most secret and sensual desires, dangerous yearnings she’s kept locked away for years. Now she has a choice to make.

Ethan is only in Marakesh for a few days, then he’ll be gone and she’ll never see him again. No one would ever know, surely it would do no harm? Can she pass up this opportunity?

And once she’s trusted him with her body, experienced all he can offer, will she be able to return to her old life. Or will the sensual chameleon need to reinvent herself once again to fit into his world?

Amazon US    Amazon UK   Kobo   Barnes & Noble  Totally Bound

The Truth about True Stories (#Lesbian Sex Stories #Lambda Awards #Calls for Submission # Best Lesbian Erotica)

Sacchi Green

Very soon I’ll be sending around a new call for submissions, but much to my relief, it won’t be like the one I wrote in 2012 for Wild Girls, Wild Nights: True Lesbian Sex Stories. After several years of resistance, I’d finally given in to my publishers’ plea to do an anthology of true stories. The first time they’d ever contacted me for editing, that’s what they’d wanted, but they’d put up with my reluctance through five other books, and this time, I knew, it was true stories or nothing. One of my anthos had tanked, saleswise, and I think they only kept putting up with me because that one hadn’t actually been my idea. I’d done it, with reluctance, as a favor when the boss’s wife had said a lesbian cops theme would be great (and the boss sent me a photo of the them doing a cops scene for Halloween.) It did, in fact, turn out to be a great book, and was even a finalist for a Lambda award, but apparently most folks who wanted to read lesbian cop stories didn’t want to pay for books, and I doubt that they wanted the kind of complex, well-written, non-cartoonish stories my writers provided. (Annabeth’s was truly outstanding.)

But back to Wild Girls, Wild Nights (a title I’d proposed for an adventure-themed book that was turned down) and the true stories. Yes, I keep almost saying “true” stories, but I was determined to do all I could to make the “true” part true, at least for some values of the truth. Here’s how I began my guidelines for ubmissions:

You put something of yourself into everything you write. You know you do. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, go that extra step, and write an erotic story firmly grounded in truth. Real encounters, real emotions, real sensations, real people, drawn from memory and transformed by your art into real stories as gripping as any fiction. 

Some degree of poetic license—or erotic license—is all right. Memories are inevitably filtered through time and experience, and telling a story can sometimes reveal the inner truth of feelings and actions better without a precise list of actions or a verbatim account of conversations. In the heat of the moment—and I do want the very hottest moments—certain parts stand out so vividly in your mind that everything before and after blurs and must be imagined. Combining events into a shorter time span can make the overall effect more intense.  Pseudonyms are fine, and even if you use your own name, you must use fictional names for any other characters in order to maintain some degree of privacy.  

Then I went on to list the kinds of stories I want for any of my anthologies.

The response was wonderful, but the responsibility weighed on me. How could I claim that everything I chose was truly true? Several of the writers were familiar enough to me that I knew something about their lives and backgrounds, enough to know that their stories were, at least, plausible, and a few I knew well and was sure they were telling the truth, or close enough. Some others told me details that were convincing; one writer from Germany wrote two stories, set in different periods of her life, and told me she’d been wanting to share them for a long time but hadn’t felt she could trust anyone before me to do them justice. Okay, I’m a sucker for that sort of flattery. In any case, I was reasonably sure that each story was “grounded in real life.” There was another writer, too, with more than one story worth telling—Giselle might know something about that. In both cases they used pseudonyms for at least one of their pieces;

I was even more sure after the book came out and I organized a “blog tour” for each writer to discuss her story. In fact I was amazed at what came to light. There was a lovely story about a bittersweet romance between a mid-30s-ish woman going back to college to earn a degree in education, and a very young student who pursued her. The author revealed in her blog that she herself had been the younger girl, long ago, and she’d reversed their roles to tell the story from the viewpoint of the older woman, the age she herself is now. True enough for me. And there was the young writer who had trespassed into her older partner’s computer, misunderstood a search item she’d found, and ended up being firmly spanked—and enjoyed it so much that as soon as she could she went online to tell her close friends about it. I believed her. There were other writers who made me realize that their stories were even more true than I had thought they were, and several who had been wanting a way to tell their stories (under pseudonyms,) including one who didn’t want her grown kids to know she’d written it.

The best story-about-the-story, though, concerns a submission that I didn’t accept at first because I really couldn’t believe it. There was a humorous orgy party involved, and animal-ear hats, and it took place in the San Francisco area. I had to drop one story I’d accepted (co-written by a couple who’d met recently, and broke up soon afterward) so the publisher asked if I had something else to fill in with. I explained my doubts about the orgy story, sent it in—and discovered that several of the young staff members in the publisher’s office (in Berkeley) had actually heard about that party, and it was, in fact, pretty much true. How could I have doubted it?

So that’s my true story about wrangling true stories for an anthology (which, in fact, won that year’s Lambda Award for lesbian erotica.) I don’t plan on doing that kind of thing ever again, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I do have a new anthology in the works—Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year Volume 2 (actually BLE 2017, but they’ve tweaked the title) with my call for submissions coming up soon, but unless I get some submissions within the next two weeks, I don’t think I can work that into the upcoming What Are You Reading topic. Sad.

 

Subjective

The older I get, the more I come to understand how subjective "truth" actually is. We recall moments from childhood with an exactness that cannot be questioned. Until someone else who was there corrects you on key points. Key points which were absolutely unquestionable in your own mind.
By that time, of course, it's almost impossible to know which of you has remembered it correctly, or at least the closest to correctly. By that time it really doesn't matter, either. You each have your truth.

I don't tend to get people asking me about my own stories, and the veracity of events within them. In a way that's kind of weird since nearly all of my stories are set within the real world, for the most part. I have a single paranormal story, and the rest are contemporary erotic romance. I know of people writing bear shifters and aliens who get asked if their stories really happened!

My answer, were I asked, would probably be some kind of vague half-and-half statement about stories being based on true events, or inspired by them. For the most part that's exactly how it happens for me, and I'm certain for a lot of other writers, too.

As I alluded to in my first paragraph, we're all writing fiction every moment of our lives. Our brains are processing "truth" through layers of memory and filters of emotion. Not just the emotion of the moment, but through the memories dredged up by any one event, we could be processing the "right now" through the emotions of "last time this happened" or even "the first time this happened". Plus we all have a tendency to remember events in the way which suits our own purposes. Either we make ourselves a victim or a victor, but we try like hell to avoid being the asshole of the story.

So if our everyday lives are essentially fiction, then it stands to reason even the truest of true stories will still be filtered and colored.

I've received a fairly scathing review recently for one of my characters acting in a way the reader thought was unrealistic. (Their review was far more emotive than I'm making out!) I actually agree with that reviewer to a certain degree. My character was behaving in a manner which was perhaps over the top, or perhaps inconsistently. My counter, were I to be silly enough to contact the reviewer, would simply be that I'm writing fiction. I strongly doubt people read erotic romance for its gritty reality and the way it shows relationships as being a long stream of waiting for each other to finish using the toilet. And waiting another ten minutes when your partner finishes in there.

Following from Lisabet's point on Monday, I feel the best service "truth" can do in our stories is to inform our characters. When I visited my friend and co-author, Katie Salidas, in Las Vegas last September, we were chatting about this very thing. Her example was one I thought summed up the whole concept very well.

Katie writes vampires. Not only vampires, but the great majority of her work is in various vampire genres. Now obviously, she doesn't know what it's like to crave blood. But as a smoker who's tried to quit, she knows only too well the sensation of a bone-deep craving that's just not good for ya. She channeled that feeling most directly into her character Alyssa, the star of the Immortalis series, and her teething (heh) troubles when she was turned. But it's there across the board. An authenticity to the blood-lust. (She also brings that same seed of craving, but with a different overall tone, to her werewolves).

For me, the most obvious and direct channeling I do is in the way my heroes revere the full bodies of their curvy heroines. His description of her body, and the way it turns him on, is always drawn directly from my own experiences. This is a constant in my stories, because it's a constant in my life. It's my smoking. It's my truth.

Secret, Sapphic and Spicy Confessions #truestory #erotica

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Memories of Her Long Lower Loops

My first job was as a bus boy. That was at a Shoney's Big Boy in College Park in Atlanta. I stopped by there last year, and now its a Simone's Steak and Seafood. I was about 17 years old at the time, and just out of high school. My mom had moved my brother and myself there, partly to get far away from Dad, but I think really because it was in her nature. She simply didn't know how to stay put.

Shoney's was the beginning of my journey into adulthood. The waitresses liked me, partly because I didn't steal their tips, and they took me in. I was a shy kid but I had a gimmick. I could analyse handwriting. I was good. It was my window into the world of other people. Studying handwriting was my first experience with studying sycretistically and asynchronously. I studied several books at once. I also studied different parts of the books in coordination with each other, not always just front to back. One day I would be studying middle zones, three books at once. The next day upper and lower loops, three books at once. This has an interesting effect of blending disparate ideas together into a natural and intuitive hash. When I looked at a handwriting I was experiencing it in an intuitive way, and though living inside the person's skin, the way a musician would read a sheet of music. Picking up a customer's receipt, or a person's scribbled notes I could hold my thoughts quiet and let some other part of my mind feel and speak the meaning of the person's personality. I could break down the process into cause and effect if I had to, but what I was seeing was more like an image of the person's interior world. A thin middle zone, and exaggerated high zone - an idealistic romantic person. If also leaning far forward, an emotional person, passionate in love, but flighty. Something like that.

One day a waitress named Vicky saw me looking at her handwriting on a napkin in a vacant way, and asked what I was doing. I told her I was getting to know her from her handwriting. People aren't creeped out by this, they love it. She asked what kind of sample I needed. I told her the best thing was a sheet of unlined paper, written top to bottom. The words didn't matter as long as it was the natural way she wrote. After the lunch rush, she came into the break room with her paper and I went to work on it. She was deeply moved by what I told her and told the other waitresses. Soon I was flooded with samples of their writing, and then their husbands and boyfriends. I never charged anything, because by then we were like family.

A new waitress showed up around the middle of summer. She was a little chunky, with large intense eyes. She had a silly, moronic giggle you could hear across the room and a way of being in a dozen places at once. Her name was DeEtta. I exchanged a few words with her, not much. I quickly wrote her off as a fool. She had a little girl named Cathy about seven or eight years old, who came in after school, took a back booth and did her homework on the table, waiting for her mom to get off. She was a quiet, intense kid who seemed close to her mother, but never a father in sight.

Somehow I didn't see how she would ever fit in. She was just weird. Vicky told her about my handwriting hobby. "Can you do mine?" asked DeEtta, and waved a napkin at me with that toothy smile. I really didn't want to. I knew there was nothing interesting about her. I didn't want to tell her anything bad, but at the same time I didn't want to snub her. She was tenacious, and finally I said yes, but I needed a proper sample and explained to her how to do it. She came back with it the next morning and I stuffed it into my apron pocket and kept putting her off. I told her I'd look at it after lunch.

That was an especially rough day. I got into a huge argument in the dining room in front of the customers with the assistant dining room manager, a guy from Egypt named Salim. I was fired. My first job, and I'd gotten fired for arguing with management. Vicky told me to stay right where I was, just get coffee and wait in the back. The lunch rush had begun. The waitresses went on strike.

Would people do that for me now? I don't know, it was a different time in 1972. I was a different person too. The customers came, the waitresses elbowed the dirty dishes to the wall and took their orders. They refused to clean the tables. When the main dining room manager came in he saw the piles and yelled for me. I came out and he hollered "Garcia what the hell is this?" The waitresses, including DeEtta who suddenly looked very fierce, gathered around him. Angry waitresses are like wolverines. They berated Salim and complained about how he'd fired me. The manger stomped into the backroom. "Garcia - get in there and clean those tables. Nobody's fired unless I say so." I had my job back. After the lunch rush had cleared out I went to the break room and thanked everybody who came by for standing up for me. I had my coffee and took out DeEtta's paper, trying to think of kind things I could make up to say. It turned out I didn't have to.

I had never seen a handwriting like this. It throbbed with power. Everything was written with a pressure on the pen that pressed letters through the paper like braille. It was the hand of a brilliant mind, an intense and passionate soul. I would have never have imagined it could have come from the woman with the dumb grin, but her name was on it. A middle zone which showed critical thought, soaring imagination in the high zone. Full swelling erotic lower loops, a woman a man dreams of having in his bed. The words, the few I could even read, turned out to be a brief, slightly rambling discourse on Albert Camus.

DeEtta came in and threw down her apron on a chair. She sat down across from me with her Shoney's Big Boy coffee and folded her hands. "How are we?"

"Thanks for sticking up for me out there."

"Workers have to stand up for their rights or they'll run right over you. There should be a union."

"Right. Listen. I need to tell you something," I said. "This is embarrassing for me."

"Something wrong?"

"You know, I had this idea about you. I don't know. Like maybe you weren't too bright or something."

Her eyes twinkled. "Okay. So?"

"Actually, you're really smart."

I had hoped she'd laugh. Instead she looked serious. "So now you think I'm smart? Should I be flattered?"

"No, I think you're like - really smart. I had you all wrong. At first I thought maybe you were like sort of a goofball or something. I'm sorry I guess is what I mean. I've never seen anything like this in my life." I waved the sheet of paper. She gave me an appraising look as if deciding whether or not I was worth rescuing. She took the paper from my hand and glanced at the little notes I'd scribbled on it.

"People sometimes think that about me until they know me. So you can really do it. That's nice." She folded the paper and put it away. "You going to be a bus boy all your life?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do. How'd a smart girl like you end up here?"

"You think the other women aren't smart?"

"I - "

"You should use this talent to change the way you look at people. Don't you think so?" That was a phrase I would hear a lot from her, that Socratic challenge - Don't you think so? "Well, I'm about thirty and I just got divorced from Cathy's father. I don't know what I'm doing here, but I probably won't stay."

"This thing you wrote. Who's Cam -us?"

"Ka - MOO. Have you ever read Camus?"

I told her I'd never heard of Camus, who was he? Existentialism? No, hadn't heard of that either. Did I read? What did I read? Ray Bradbury? She used to read him, but she'd outgrown him. Had I read any of the classics? Did I read poetry? Shakespeare? Not even in school? Mark Twain for god's sakes?

She invited me to walk home with her and Cathy. We went up a long flight of wooden stairs into a rented second floor walk up that looked at first as if someone had broken into it and trashed the place. Clothes were tossed around, including a very impressive bra . A small TV, some toys. And books. Books everywhere. There was a box of encyclopedias it turned out she had carried with her hitch hiking from Arkansas. There were books in Italian. She loved Italy, had spent the last few years living there. When no college would admit her she had jumped the iron fence of a prestigious school run by nuns and demanded admittance and they had accepted her on the face of her determination to learn. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, King Duncan says "There is no art to read the character in the face." How true in her case. But I didn't know anything about Shakespeare. Not yet. DeEtta would fix that. While Cathy played with their cat "Poo" (short for "poop"), DeEtta sat me down on her bed. She reached under and hauled out a box of old paperbacks and gave me two of them. "You're bound to like one of these." One was "The Stranger" by Camus, her favorite book at that time. The other was "The Last Temptation of Christ" by Nikos Kazantzakis. "Try Camus first. If you don't catch on to him, try Kazantzakis."

I never did get Camus. The Kazantzakis book set me on fire. Even today, it is still the only book that has the power to make me weep.

For two years, we were inseparable companions. Although I felt a secret passion for this exciting, earthy woman, she kept everything very chaste, a scholarly elder sister and her obtuse but bright younger brother. In those two years she became the great teacher of my life. She was working on a novel, which she showed pages of to me from time to time. I was the only one she trusted with it. It was hard to write, she said, she hadn't found her voice. In time she would.

One day we were walking the railroad tracks, discussing the songs of Woody Guthrie which she had turned me onto, and the subject of poetry came up.

"Which poets have you read?" she said.

"I don't read any."

"Oh, hell."

"I don't get poetry, I tried in high school, but nothing sticks."

"That's because you need to read good poets."

"I tried a few. I just can't get into it."

We went to her apartment and she made me jasmine tea and sat me back down on her bed, which in its way had become our classroom. From a stack on the window sill, she pulled out a paperback of Dylan Thomas. "This is how you learn to read poetry. Listen. You and the poet have to meet on the same level. You can't do that in the beginning, because you don't have the experience. Find a poem in here that catches your eye and memorize it. You don't have to understand it, just remember the words. That's all. It has to be a poem you like. Someday you'll be doing something or going through something and the words will come back to you and then you'll get at the what the poet has experienced. It's telepathy, it's the only telepathy there is." I took her book home that night and memorized most of "Fern Hill".

We took meditation classes together. We visited a psychic together who said that she had been my mother in a past life. She schooled me in different writers in those celibate evenings laying on her bed together, hips and elbows touching, Cathy next to us, talking and debating the great questions of life. Meanwhile the world was moving on around us. Karma was calling. We were on our way somewhere else. My Dad offered to help me get into college if I came back to Minnesota. DeEtta told me this would be a good idea and she was going to Seattle to start over again. There was nothing for either of us in College Park, which is neither a college or a park. She had a sister and a brother in Seattle. So ist das Leben, as Nixie says. So it goes.

She went to Seattle. I went to Minneapolis. We wrote letters every week, sharing the news of our lives, and our rambling ideas. I lived for her letters. I sent her stuff I was writing. I wrote down my dreams for her. She met a guy. I met a religious sect and moved in. DeEtta didn't like the theology which was too fundamentalist. The sect didn't want me corresponding to strange women who didn't want to join up. They were my life now. The old world had to be cut off. DeEtta wrote furious letters, objecting to my leaving her out of my life. But what could she do? God was calling me away from the world, or so I thought. She called me Icarus, flying too close to the sun. My wings were doomed to melt. Twenty years later they did and I fell a long ways down.

A few years ago, though a lifetime later, I was loafing on the Internet, looking through books on Amazon. I wondered if she had ever written her novel and I did an author search on "DeEtta", since I couldn't be sure of her last name. There aren't many women in this world named DeEtta, which helps when you're doing a name search. Only one name came up. This author DeEtta had lived an adventurous life, she had lived in Italy and written screen plays. She had a new book "The Force of A Feather" detailing her search for the life history of a freed slave named Biddy Mason. (Which turned out to be an excellent book on the subject of slavery.) A search through the libraries of San Antonio where I was living turned up a copy at a library near me. This would be a hard back book, which would mean there would be an author's photo. I drove there after work and found it on the shelf. Even after a gap of thirty years, she didn't look that different than the way I remembered her. It was my old friend.

I bought a copy and sent it to her through the publisher, with a long adoring letter detailing how she had changed my life, and turned it around more than she could know. After a long time Igot my book back with an autograph. A terse post card, polite, coolly friendly, but without invitation. She wished me well.

The world had moved on. Timing is everything, and time had separated us beyond healing.

The young single mother with the demeanor of a bimbo and the penmanship of a steel trap mind. The earnest young man, looking for a great purpose to devote himself to. But she had left her thumbprint on my brain forever. There is not a book I ever open without remembering her with longing. She had opened doors to me and given me the gift of a life of the mind.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would

take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

from "Fern Hill" Dylan Thomas

See - I get that now.

Thanks DeEtta.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Every Word is True (#fiction #imagination #autobiography)

By Lisabet Sarai

“Is it a true story?”

When a reader asks an author this question, she usually means, “Is this autobiographical? Did this really happen to you?”

When it comes to my tales, I can answer yes in a surprising (or possibly shocking) number of cases. Yes, I did drive topless in a sports car along Mulholland Drive, as Ruby does in Nasty Business. Yes, I was fucked with the wooden finial unscrewed from a bedpost, like Kate in Raw Silk. Yes, I got up on stage to dance with the go-go girls in 1980’s Bangkok, though my costume was somewhat less revealing than my heroine’s. Gregory’s emails to Kate quote word for word from the letters my master sent me during his long-distance seduction. The sex clubs and orgies I describe in Incognito borrow heavily from my experiences in New York and Amsterdam.

The settings of my stories, especially, are true. My characters walk the streets I’ve walked myself. They live in apartments I rented. They shop where I shopped. When they travel, they visit the same attractions and eat the same food.

However, even when I create stories that deviate from my personal experience, I work to make them “true”, in the sense of “genuine”. As I’ve matured as an author, I have moved further away from autobiography. At the same time, I’ve learned to create more complex, nuanced and plausible characters. Ironically, these characters are more true than my early heroines, who tended to be somewhat shallow fantasy versions of myself.

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten better at allowing characters to speak for themselves. Rather than consciously “designing” them beforehand, I set my protagonists (and my villains) free to act and react as the book unfolds. If I am successful, these characters acquire a sort of organic quality, a consistency and depth. If I told you these characters were based on actual people in my past life, you’d probably believe me.

There’s another kind of truth in some of the stories that are closest to my heart—the truth of what might have been. Quite a few of my shorter tales are set in an alternative reality in which I did not split up with my master, but instead made a life with him. I’ve imagined, again and again, the trials and joys of living in a committed D/s relationship. In these stories, I can express the emotions I’ve mostly had to stifle in real life. I can also consider the difficulties involved in such a relationship, as it is tested by time, external circumstances and the inevitability of imperfectly aligned desires.

In fact, I’ve spent so much time in this parallel universe that sometimes I forget it doesn’t exist. I smile when I think about that long-ago kinky trip to Rocky’s Ace Hardware. I remember the time I came from just a spanking, without any sexual stimulation. I recall, with queasy excitement, the night my master cut his initials into my flesh. These incidents are as real to me as yesterday’s news—more so, really, because I care more about them than about politicians and movie stars.

I’ve shared some of these visions here at the Grip, so I think you’ll recognize what I am talking about. My post from the last topic cycle is a perfect example.

This vignette, like much of the BDSM I write, is fueled by fantasy and wishful thinking. Still, it bowls me over whenever I re-read it. Maybe I am flattering myself, but I suspect most readers will sense the depth and power of the feelings in that piece. It’s totally fictional. Yet every word is true.