Craving Escape

by Jean Roberta

Cravings, by definition, are generally assumed to be intense but momentary and not completely rational. A desire for fame and wealth is not usually thought of as a “craving,” compared with a sudden appetite for dill pickles, heroin, or the feeling of a warm mouth on one’s most ticklish parts.

At the moment, my most pressing physical craving is even more basic than a desire for sex. In the early depths of a Canadian winter in a dry climate, I crave warmth and an absence of itchiness on my skin. I could enjoy being an olive in a delicatessen, soaking in oil.

Despite slathering myself with moisturizer after every shower, I need to slather more goop on myself before going to bed; otherwise, the feeling of army ants biting every inch of my body prevents me from falling asleep. You might assume all the slathering would make me greasy enough to slide right off the sheets, but no. In the morning, my skin is dry again.

My physical craving to be somewhere else, where sunshine and moisture in the air would enable me to feel comfortable, feels like a metaphor for my fear of being useless.

University instructors, especially those of us who teach mandatory first-year English classes, have to motivate ourselves to keep going. Responses from students tend to be inconsistent at best.

Yesterday I met a class that has thirty students registered. There were about fifteen in the room, and most had 1) not done the reading assignment, and 2) not brought their textbooks. I only had one copy of this book to lend out while I gave the class twenty minutes to read the damn short story and jot down answers to my questions about it. Two students on one side of the room had no books, so they occupied themselves sending text messages on their cell phones. I didn’t interrupt them, since I wasn’t sure what I could tell them to do instead: stare into space? I could have told them to leave, but I was afraid this would trigger a general exodus.

Meanwhile, I have several piles of student essays to finish marking. Grammatical correctness seems to be a thing unknown.

Dry skin, dry and ineffective writing.

I fantasize about having the power to intimidate students into paying attention and doing the work, regardless of whether they care about their grade point averages. Thus was born my alter ego, Dr. Athena Chalkdust, a small but scary academic domme.* In a fantasy world, she breaks all the rules and gets away with it because many students secretly crave being forced to do things that will benefit them in the long run.

I doubt whether this is true in real life. I remember being a nineteen-year-old first-year university student, and realizing that I needed to motivate myself to do whatever I thought needed to be done. How little has changed.

In my first year of university, I was raped by a man (not a student) who haunted the campus. This was predictable, and so was the aftermath: I was told to think long and hard about how I had brought this on myself, and how to avoid attracting such negative attention in the future.

In the wake of recent celebrity sexual-assault scandals (Jian Ghomeshi, formerly popular program host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, comedian Bill Cosby), I am reminded of how little has changed in the culture of North America (or of the world) in the many years since I was young. Some of the allegations against celebrities are from a previous era because the alleged victims were afraid of the consequences of becoming publicly known at the time. They still have cause to worry.

By now, I seem to be too old to be a rape magnet. I probably seem useless to predators. Does this mean I’ve reached a safe state of invisibility? This could be a good thing in some contexts, but there are no guarantees.

My female spouse is usually a great source of comfort and validation, for lack of a clearer word (we assure each other that we are both worthwhile members of the human race), but lately, she has been going through worse upheavals in her job than I have in mine. My situation is nothing new, so I really have no right to make my usual complaints to someone who might as well be living in a court of the Italian Renaissance. (Plots, cabals, scapegoats, smear campaigns and poisonings seem to be part of the culture.)

And before long, I will be expected to summon up some holiday cheer. That’s hard to do when one feels like an itchy Grinch.

I would like to be a hibernating bear in a warm, cozy cave. That’s what I crave now. I might not be meeting anyone else’s needs that way, but I could afford not to care.

--------------------


*My published stories by/about Dr. Athena can be found in these anthologies:
- She Who Must Be Obeyed, edited by D.L. King (Lethe Press, 2014)
- Slave to Love, edited by Alison Tyler (Cleis Press, 2006)
- Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 (Cleis)
- Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica 2 (2005, reprinted from Best Lesbian Erotica 2001) (Cleis)
- Best Lesbian Erotica 2005 (Cleis).

Branded By My Craving

by Annabeth Leong

If you look closely at the right side of my lower back, you'll find a faint scar in the shape of a stylized flower. My partner hates it, because it represents a night when my cravings got out of control. I feel like I should hate it, but honestly if I had it all to do over, I might very well do the same. That was undoubtedly one of the most erotic nights of my life. I know I was being stupid, but I'm not exactly sorry it happened.

There's a club night I go to where there are sometimes demonstrations of kinky things. On this particular occasion, I walked in and saw a demo going on in a roped-off area near the bar. A woman in a pink latex nurse's outfit was using a violet wand on a shirtless man in leather pants, and I just about skipped over there in my excitement.

I love violet wands. I tried one for the first time at that very club, and I'll never forget the thrill and mystery of that moment. For those who don't know, a violet wand is a device that can apply low current, high voltage stimulation to the skin. It takes various attachments, and the sensations it produces can range from a light tickle to mind-erasing pain.

The first time I saw one in action, everyone at the club was decked out in neon and glow sticks, and black light glanced off people's shoulders as they danced. Behind a velvet curtain, a thin woman with punky hair and multiple facial piercings wielded attachments that pulsed with weird colors. I got in line to try one and discovered I got along with the brand of pain the wand administered. It burned in a way that made me feel tough and sexy. I could take it better than I expected to be able to. Once she started running that device up and down my arms, I would have done just about anything she'd asked. I would have stayed in that booth all night if she'd let me. As it was, the next morning, thin lines of scabs covered my arms from shoulder to wrist and cris-crossed my chest.

My brain pretty much turns off when a violet wand is in use. All I want is more, and all my nice knowledge of best practices for BDSM basically dematerializes. I have no idea what that woman's name was or where she'd come from. We had no safeword, no aftercare in place, no game plan of any kind. My partner was out of town, and I told myself I wasn't making out with her so it was fine, but Jesus being hurt like that is probably a bigger deal for me than any sort of making out could ever be. Even as it was happening, I knew I could spin it to a tale of technical devotion, but that in my heart I was being unfaithful.

But that isn't actually the night I'm trying to talk about. I'm just trying to explain the craving with an anecdote that probably doesn't make sense to anyone who doesn't already understand the craving. This, to me, touches on one of the central mysteries of BDSM. What is it about pain that makes me crave it? As a brief aside, here's one of the best passages I've written on the subject (this is from a story that's supposed to come out in a Cleis anthology at some point):

She pressed a sweet kiss to my cheek, and that's when I knew I was in trouble. Sweetness, for D, was useful as a weapon of contrast. My body tensed, anticipating pain, and, inside my panties, my cunt twitched and squeezed tight. I'd never understood why genuine anxiety did that to me, but until I learned how to use seemingly negative sensations for pleasure I'd always felt as if my clit were buried beneath a layer of cotton. Every touch seemed dull and distant unless pain and fear first stripped me bare.

So, given that, understand that the violet wand is the best device I've found for delivering just the type of pain and fear I need to activate my ability to feel. I now own one, but before I did, it was also a rare and expensive device that I encountered only rarely. Maybe that helps explain why I rushed over to that latex-clad "nurse" on the night in question.

I had my partner with me, as well as a friend, but everything melted away except for that nurse and that device. "Do you guys mind?" My friend assured me she did not. My partner followed me as I headed for the nurse.

Talking to the nurse, I discovered she and her compatriots had the violet wand turned up high enough for branding. The marks they would leave weren't supposed to be permanent, but they could be, and they were supposed to last at least a month.

From my current relatively sane perspective, I can easily summon the questions I should have asked and the hesitations I should have had. Again, I didn't bother to get the nurse's name. I didn't ask for any details about what she was doing or what sort of safety measures might be in place. I only asked two questions: Would she do that to me, too? When?

The answers were yes, and right then. I picked a flower stencil for the brand at random and pulled off my shirt. My partner stood in the demo area, holding onto me while the nurse approached me with the violet wand set to searing.

At home, I often surprise my partner with how skittish I can be. My pain tolerance isn't so great when I don't have an audience, and I'm as likely to fight as to submit. But when people are watching, that just adds fuel to the flames of my craving for pain. My pain tolerance becomes terrifyingly, dangerously high so long as other people are there to witness me getting hurt.

I've learned this now, and I try to make provisions for the way I'm going to lose my head if I'm playing where people can watch. At the time of my encounter with the nurse, however, I was living with a pent-up craving for pain that I'd built to the point of explosion during an eight-year relationship with a partner who wasn't okay with BDSM, and I was unleashing it wildly. I hadn't learned my limits, and I thought reading erotica had prepared me for how to be safe, but it hadn't really.

So I stood there, too aroused to care about any sort of safety, and when the nurse touched me with the violet wand, I saw white light and came while bracing myself against my partner's arms. I have never felt pain like that before or since. She giggled maniacally, which probably wasn't a good sign but turned me on even more. I knew this was too much pain, and that I was probably doing something I shouldn't, but I loved that, too. I treasure the memory of every second of her drawing that flower. Endorphins coursed through me. I could barely stand, but I had reached that elusive place where pain and pleasure become one, intensifying and perfecting each other.

She told me the wound looked so pretty, and I wanted to follow her like a puppy dog. I wanted to be hurt like that some more, possibly forever. But I went off and danced with my partner and my friend, and it was only in the morning that I looked at the wound and saw how serious it was and felt ashamed of how reckless I had been.

My partner did not want it to scar, and absolutely hated the idea that I might be permanently marked by something as random as that flower stencil, at a time we hadn't agreed upon, by a person we didn't know. But no amount of aloe or vitamin E could stop a scar from forming, so I've still got that flower on my back.

I taught a workshop on the violet wand a couple months ago and showed that scar as a cautionary tale. But then I had my partner demonstrate the violet wand on me for the edification of the class and that craving returned at once and my ridiculous pain tolerance kicked in. The attachment that terrifies me at home became a fun toy, and despite my efforts to rein the craving in, I still wound up covered with those thin lines of scabs, my torso burned and aching. It is better than it used to be—I've learned to negotiate, and I do try to keep myself safe and avoid playing with strangers. On the other hand, the violet wand activates a special, reckless, wild need in me, and I'm sure that wasn't the last time I'll go overboard while in the grip of its allure.

A Matter of Degree

by Daddy X

Cravings aren’t necessarily bad things, not as far as ‘things’ go. Cravings keep us alive and vertical. We crave food. We crave liquid. Our bodies need protective warmth from the cold and to be cooled in the heat of summer. There’s a human need to alter our consciousness in some way to experience alternative perspectives. We crave physical contact, the love of others, and the wherewithal to communicate our feelings to someone special. All necessary, important elements of survival that speak to our quality of life. But which other manifestations of craving prey upon us when taken to their next logical (or illogical) steps?

Habits can go both good and/or bad. Although some of us do well on a random schedule, I’d venture to say we all work, to some extent, on a habitual basis. It’s not unusual to wake at virtually the same hour every day, or to eat the same breakfast for months or years on end. That’s not going to be a problem unless you’re in the habit of scarfing down a dozen glazed jelly doughnuts on any given morning.

I like to equate the habit phenomenon with inertia. At best, it can act as a working tool, enabling us to organize our lives into a seemingly linear trajectory. Habit can and does prepare us for the more random ways life seems to line up, often like an Escher landscape, in this day-to-day world. I don’t really know if today’s lives are more complicated, when compared to our early primate ancestors who had to feed, clothe and shelter themselves on a daily basis, using their wits to deal with not only the elements, but with their own kind as well.

At their extremes, habits can generate obsessive-compulsive behavior, clan and religious hatreds. Bad actions with no excuse, only that those others are other than us. People kill simply because their great-great grandfathers hated each other. For the same reasons over centuries. What were those original reasons? Not everyone can trace hatreds like the Sunni/Shiite split back in the seventh century.  Whatever it is, it’s all realized within a habit of a sort. “We kill because they killed before us.” That seems to be a good enough excuse. WTF???

 Obsessions are destructive to our well being. Sure, we like to write of the heroine ‘obsessed’ with her lover. But in real life, obsessives and their habits can make for the worst pairings possible. How many times have you known a couple, people delightful to be with without the other party present? Individually, they can be perfectly well suited to conversations, other friends, and their general demeanor pleasant and appropriate. Then when the couple is encountered together, they’re completely different, noxious in fact. At each other’s throats, one or the other totally repressed, withdrawn, uncomfortable, toxic to each other as well as to the greater group. When combined with the enabling old ‘habit’ thing, couples can go on like that for years.

How often do we see the saga of  ‘bad boy meets good girl’. I don’t mean in books or movies, but in real life. There’s that phenomenon that makes someone think they can ‘change’ someone they’re infatuated with. (Which actually worked for Momma and me, but how often does it, really?) As an observer, I’ve seen too many sad, even battered examples of serial bad matches, people and personalities who seemingly welcomed the worst, spending their lives stumbling from crisis to crisis. I guess people can get into the ‘habit’ of thinking life’s a shit pile and so be it. Wallow in it for the comfort of that familiar devil it is. Life becomes something to ‘get through’. How long does it take for some partners to realize they just aren’t suited to one another?

Addictions. Whoops! Now here’s when I get to write what I know. Over the years, I’ve been strung out on about everything a guy could get strung out on. Not all of it as good as it sounds. Of course, I’d been too old and beyond all that by the time AIDS and crack arrived on the scene (by sheer luck). By then, I’d abandoned most of my poor choices, except for the booze. Ummm… and maybe a little cocaine. Which are what aggravated the Hep C to the point of cancer and subsequent (and supremely lucky) liver transplant in 2004.

So how do we evaluate how deeply we dwell within our cravings and our needs? Do we really crave what we need, as nature intended, or have we just become sucked into a silly or destructive habit. Do the habits we nurture actually accrue to our benefit? Or do we allow our obsessions and addictions to detract from our quality of life? That’s one of the biggies.

It’s probably all a matter of degree. As are most things. 

And, speaking of the darker side of cravings, here’s a little 200-word flasher for your … er … enjoyment? Perusal? … Endurance.

                                                 Re-charge             Copyright 2012 Daddy X

My wife’s burning eyes remain locked on mine. She kneels, straddling a guy with his dick up her cunt. Another man sodomizes her from behind. They can feel each other inside her; I’ve been in both places. She’s up on her arms, mouth wide. Semen from the recently fellated transvestite congeals on Samantha’s chin. I know she’s close, but it’s so hard for her. It always has to be different.

I’m on a sofa, a street hustler with a yellow mohawk sucking my cock. A woman wearing a huge strap-on forces the thing in his ass. We didn’t get their names.

I come first, bucking into the pimply face in my lap. He loses my dick, but tries to catch it by mouth as it waves around, spurting in his eyes. 

                                                              

That triggers Samantha’s low moan; it builds to a high wail as she comes. Finally finished, she keels over, flopping to her side. Two distinct slurps emanate when the cocks slip out.

Now it’s time to bundle her up, take her home. I made some soup this afternoon. I’ll sponge her down and put her to bed. Samantha should be okay now, for at least another week or two.

Cravings—they can rule your life

    I think we all crave certain things, no matter how disciplined we think we are. That's the trigger that leads people into alcoholism or drugs. It's what makes shopaholics and hoarders. Craving can take us to extremes of behavior.

Cravings - powerful desires - are part of the human condition. Our brains are "hard-wired" to appreciate and to pursue natural rewards such as food and sex because of their critical survival value.

A food craving is an intense desire to consume a specific food, and is different from normal hunger. It may or may not be related to specific hunger, the drive to consume particular nutrients that is well-studied in animals. In studies of food cravings, chocolate and chocolate confectioneries almost always top the list of foods people say they crave.

For me it’s—get ready—pizza. I will consume almost ay kind of pizza. If you put an entire pizza in front of me I’ll probably do my best to eat the whole thing, even though I know it’s not good for me. For one thing it packs on the pounds. I mean, I might as well just roll it in a ball and slap it directly on my hips. But can I resist it? Not very likely.

Drugs used by addicted people activate the same circuits that motivate food and sexual behavior. Signals, called cues, can be sights, sounds, smell or thoughts. Cues activate the brain's powerful "go!" circuit creating cravings, whether for food, drugs, alcohol or sex.

In BEYOND ADDICTION  I explore the disastrous pitfalls of sexual addiction.

Blurb:

When Fallon Crowe discovered her submissive side, she indulged it fully, reveling in her erotic nature—until she stepped into the brutally possessive world of Brian Willoughby. More than a year after she was literally dragged away from his abusive clutches, Fallon is finally building a new life with Cord Jamieson, a Dom who reminds her that punishment can be loving, pain an aphrodisiac.

But when Fallon unexpectedly runs into Brian, he reawakens an addiction that never quite died. Now she’s torn between the caring relationship she’s established with Cord, and Brian’s darkly mesmerizing lifestyle that goes beyond safe, sane and consensual.

The choice is Fallon’s—the wrong one might destroy her completely.

Excerpt:

Fallon forced herself to breathe evenly. Heat burned her skin where his fingers rested on her arm. His touch was light but it might as well have been steel talons. She wanted to jerk away but the message didn’t seem to filter down from her brain.

“You heard wrong.” From somewhere she managed a hint of defiance in her tone. “I’m not hiding at all.”

“Oh?” He lifted one eyebrow in a too-familiar gesture. “I’ve missed seeing you.”

His fingers stroked her arm where they held her.

Ohgodohgodohgod.

She wet her lips. “I was just—reordering my priorities.”

His eyes raked over her. “I’ve missed you.” He took a step closer, shrinking the space between them. “You’ve missed me too. I know you have.” He bent his head so his mouth was at her ear. “You’ve missed me fucking you when you were bound so intricately you couldn’t move a muscle, and I could plow into you at will.”

His tone had that same compelling quality she couldn’t forget. She trembled at his words and the gush of fluid into her panties disgusted her. Yet at the same time, vivid images of the scene he described flashed into her mind and all the months dropped away. She found herself being lulled by him again. Falling into the same trap.

No! Cord! Think of Cord!

She extricated herself from his hold—but damn it, she missed his touch as soon as it was gone. “I have a new life. A better life. I could say it’s been nice running into you, but I’d be lying.”

He reached out and touched her cheek, his knuckles grazing the skin. The contact sizzled and another kaleidoscope of memories and sensations bombarded her.

No!

Finding courage she didn’t know she had, she backed away two steps and glanced at her watch.

“Sorry, Brian. I really have to run.”

She deliberately used his given name rather than the honorific. She had a new Sir, a better one, and she couldn’t muddy those waters. Turning quickly, she strode away, never looking back, heels clicking on the pavement. She managed to make her way through the door and to the restaurant’s ladies’ room but the moment she was inside, she collapsed against a wall, heart racing, pulse pounding. She brushed her hand over her forehead and discovered it covered with perspiration. She leaned over the sink and looked at herself in the mirror.

God!

Who was that woman looking back at her? Not the strong, vital, sensual woman who relished Cord’s mastery. No, this woman looked as if she’d been in a fugue state for a month. Her eyes were glazed, her skin pale, her hands trembling. She reminded herself of the way she’d looked when Claire had literally dragged her out of her high-priced prison. And yet…

And yet for an instant, all her defenses had threatened to crumble and she’d been ready to fall on her knees right there in front of the people milling around them.

What rotten luck running into Brian, especially after her conversation with Claire. It should have been a good test, a way to prove she’d gotten him out of her system. Instead, seeing him made her body vibrate with need and gave her the sense that she was perched on the edge of a precipice. And if she fell, it wouldn’t be Cord who caught her.

Even now, as Cord’s image swam before her, it was Brian’s face she saw.

Sick. It was a sickness. She knew it yet she couldn’t seem to find a permanent cure. So what did that say about her?

Cord will take one look at me and know. He’ll paddle my ass and it’s no more than I deserve.

She ran cold water over her wrists and dried them, lightly patting her face. Fresh lipstick helped, as did a swipe of blush. Glancing at her watch, she realized she had only moments before her client meeting. Afterward, she’d go home and immediately make herself presentable for Cord.

But he’ll know. Oh god.

AMAZON

BARNES & NOBLE

KOBO 

ALL ROMANCE eBOOKS

Adolescent Cravings, the Second Time Around

Sacchi Green

A few days ago in a comment on Giselle’s post I mentioned a phenomenon I’d read about long before I experienced it, a surge of libido that some women are swept by in their forties or even their early fifties. It feels in some ways like a second adolescence, but one where you have much more life experience under your belt—so to speak—than you did the first time around. Hormones probably have something to do with it, sort of a final prodding of the procreative drive while it might still make a difference, even though actual procreation is not at all what’s on your mind. I think there must also be at least as much of a psychological factor as a hormonal one, a subconscious sense that those daisies had better be gathered in abundance while they're there, and you can still reach for them, even if there are very good reasons why you shouldn’t. Come to think of it, I began writing erotica in my fifties, and I can't say for sure which was cause and which was effect.  In any case, the state of mind and body is about as close to irrational craving as anything I can remember—except, of course, for that first adolescence.

Don’t worry, I won’t get any more personal than that. Instead I’ll take the easy way out, and share two excerpts from one of my earliest erotica stories, my third appearance, I think, in Best Lesbian Erotica, which would place it in 2001. Here are just a few pages from the beginning, and then from the end, which still makes it much too long, so it’s just as well that I’m skipping all the sex in the middle. (It’s all fiction, really it is. Only the craving is real.)
__________

[The beginning]

Of Dark and Bright

     How did it ever come to this? What am I doing here? The opening of my show, and I'm lurking high on a shadowed stairway looking down at the bright rectangles on the gallery walls, at my photographs, my visions, my studies in light and dark. And my whole bone-shaking desire is to step back into that sun and shadow, that scintillation of sky mirrored on rippling water, that light as it strikes so harshly even the smoothest of stream-worn granite, but flows like a lingering touch over the angles of your body.
     What I'm doing here is watching for you. Without any reason to think you will come, though you recognized the name of the gallery when I mentioned so casually that I sometimes show here. Or any idea of what I will do, if you do come. So much for the wisdom of age.
     Nature is playing tricks on me. Not that I'm complaining. A second adolescence is a torment I'm in no hurry to escape, and my body still gets me wherever I want to go. But where does this surge of raging hungers fit into life's cycle? Where's the archetypal progression from maiden to mother to crone? I've made it almost through the first two, not without joys, not without scars, not without clawing at the boundaries. You'd think some wisdom would have been gained, in all that time; but not enough to ease me through this turmoil. Or even through the next few hours. How will I bear it if you don't come? How will I bear it if you do?
           
     The first time you saw me, you retreated.
     I should have been glad. These few days to myself had been hard enough to pry from a life of too many entanglements. No matter how graceful the undulation of your line out over the stream, how elegantly precise the settling of your lure onto the water, barely creasing the tension of its silvered surface, you were an intrusion. Good fly fishing form, skilled hands, nice balance, but--go away, kid. You bother me.
     I watched, unseen, as you moved upstream, searching out the deepest pools among the rocks. No closer, I thought. Go back. Even at a distance, even before I understood, I was reluctant to let your serene concentration be rippled by a chance encounter.  
     My elkhound Raksha tensed on the opposite shore, gray fur blending imperceptibly into the rocks and driftwood. A low growl rumbled in her chest, a prelude to whatever menace might be required.
     I signaled with my eyes to be still, since my hands were occupied with balancing stone on stone, building structures to be photographed--some as cover art for a book set on a distant planet, some as a sequential study of "ephemeral art" showing the effects over time of wind and water and ice, and some for my insatiable obsession with aspects of light and dark. I should have wondered at how quickly she subsided, but I had forgotten, for the moment, that her savagery was reserved for unknown men.
     Then the trout struck. Your lean, intense face transformed with joy--and I knew. I watched you play the fish, draw it carefully, inexorably toward you, stoop to deftly grasp and then release your prize. The lines of your body revealed what the multi-pocketed fishing vest, the baseball cap over close-cropped hair, had at first concealed. But I already knew.
     The stream swirling past my hips might as well have rammed a log into my crotch. A hunger raw as pain, irrational as the jerk of a hammered knee, lurched deep and low inside me. I cursed at my old-enough-to-know-better self; and in that moment of distraction my balance wavered.
     One stone shifted, then another. I tried to restore the equilibrium of my construction, but the pebbles in the streambed turned under my feet. I staggered, and stones from the disintegrating tower bruised me on their way to the bottom of the river.
     You heard the avalanche of rocks and looked up. In a calmer moment I might have enjoyed your expression as your gaze traveled over the surreal array of stone circles and pillars, the camera and tripod on the shore, and Raksha observing you with a lupine grin. By the time you saw me I was pulling myself up onto a wide, sun-warmed boulder, and then wishing I hadn't, realizing how mercilessly revealing my soaked t-shirt had become, how inadequate my denim cutoffs had always been. Damn it, how far into the wilds did I have to go to be spared seeing myself through someone else's eyes?
     Expressions shifted across your dark-browed face like the drifting shadows of clouds on the mountainsides. I knew you were cursing the shattering of solitude, and considering what, if anything, of yourself to reveal. I saved you the trouble of deciding.
     "Raksha, stay!" I commanded, turning toward the shore, knowing that she had no intention of doing otherwise. I stepped from rock to rock until I stood beside her. Then, one hand on her shaggy neck, I faced you again, smiled, and nodded in casual acknowledgment of shared humanity.
     Your answering smile was brief, startled, and lit with a sweetness you would have cursed yourself for showing. You could pass, in the right circumstances, but never with that smile. Then you turned away. I watched you retreat downstream, leaping from boulder to boulder with a long-legged, impetuous sureness that sent a shiver of delight across my skin.
     So I've done it, I thought, gone completely round the bend. Fantasies, delusions...and delusions of what? I wasn't even sure which I wanted more, to fuck you, or, in spite of the scars the world could be counted on to inflict, to be you. Not that it mattered. My chances of one were about the same as of the other.
     But then, in the morning, you came back.
     Extension of my dreams or not, I went with it. Those dreams had left me sweaty, slippery, tangled in my sleeping bag, and utterly without relief. Raksha sniffed at my crotch with interest. I pushed her nose away and headed for the river.
     Mist rose from the water into the early coolness of the July morning. I eased into the deep cascade-fed pool between the largest boulders. The current here had often swept away tension, pain, everything extraneous to pure being; but I didn't even want it to cool this fever. Some aches are to be savored.
     Raksha stood above me on the bank, testing the breeze. I knew by her focused stillness when she caught a human scent. There, across the river, half-hidden by hemlock branches, you stood, watching her wolfish form, and watching me balancing breast-deep.
     This time I wore nothing but my river sandals. Fantasy, delusion, whatever; I chose to pretend that you cared. "Good morning!" I called across the rush of the water. "It's all right, I won't turn you into a stag."
     You grinned, not startled this time, and came down in easy strides to the riverbank. "You sure? Might be too late. Kinda feels like you already have, antlers and all. But I would've taken you for Venus, not Diana."
     "Venus?" I said. "That manipulative bitch?" If this were delusion, I'd make the most of it. Your deliberate drawl and uptake on the Actaeon myth made my skin tingle; your voice, low and with just a hint of huskiness, would have done the trick all by itself.
     "Nothin' wrong with a little manipulation," you said.
     Damn, why hadn't it occurred to me before that this could be fun? Whatever else it turned out to be. It was a gift you offered, your willingness to play the game, to take the risk of sharing this self with me.
     "Could be," I said. "Depends on the hands." I turned and waded to the shore. Slowly and deliberately I stepped up onto the flat rock where I'd dropped my towel and stood there drying myself, concealing nothing, regretting nothing. What you see is what you get. On the off chance that you might care.
     You didn't try to hide your frank gaze, but there was a trace of wariness in your stance. It made sense to be unsure, yet, how much I understood, how much I intended, how crazy, after all, I might be, building towers and arches of river rocks in the wilderness. Just as it made sense for me to wonder whether my eccentricity was all that drew you.
     "Come on across," I said casually. "I'll make some coffee." Without watching to see whether you were coming I stepped onto the bank and headed toward my lean-to shelter. My shorts and t-shirt still hung damply on a branch, so I pulled on jeans and the old flannel shirt that doubles as a pillow. I didn't button the shirt, just tied it up under my breasts for a little support; it's been twenty years since I could comfortably go braless. Not that fullness of flesh doesn't have ample compensations.
     By the time I had the fire going under the kettle you’d found the upstream ford where, at this time of year, legs as long as yours could negotiate a crossing on rocks. When Raksha went to meet you, you took her inspection serenely in stride. I had to struggle a bit myself for any semblance of serenity. Something in the way you moved, with the sureness and grace and wariness of, yes, a stag, made me shiver in places the cool breeze couldn't touch.
     I saw, with relief, that you weren't quite as young as I had thought at first. Old enough to know what you were doing; but damn, still so young! What the hell did I think I was doing?
     "Invisible antlers or not," I said, when you were close enough, "you don't seem in any danger from my hound. Raksha seldom shows her fangs to women." Just so you'd know, in case you still wondered, that I knew.  "Raksha is, in fact, a slut," I added, as she rolled on her back and wriggled for a belly-rub. "Not that I don't understand exactly how she feels."

[The ending]

I hear your voice before I see you, and the petulant reply of your companion. I struggle to be glad you aren't alone. I watch you move slowly through the gallery, studying the pictures, while she fidgets with her hair. Then you stop before the central work, the one that makes everyone stop. Your body takes on that blend of stillness and tension I remember so well; and this time you see it, too, in the photograph before you. You lie there on a wide, flat rock in midstream, leaning on one elbow, looking down into the rushing water. Sunlight slants across your naked, smoothly muscled back and buttocks, your long, lithe legs, but your head is in the shadow of a higher boulder and your face is turned away. The arm you lean on hides all but a mere, subliminal trace of your curving breast.
     Your companion pauses, says, "Ooh, sexy!" and moves on. She doesn't recognize you. No one could recognize you unless she truly knew you, truly saw you.... You should be with someone who will always know you, always feel her heart jump and her breath catch at the sight of you, at your least movement, at your stillness, all through a long, long life. It can't be me, but it won't be her, either.
     You lean forward to read the caption, then turn and scan the gallery. I have retreated up around the curve of the spiral stairway, but you come unerringly toward me, and your movements as you climb quickly and easily up the stairs make something lurch deep inside me.
     I look into your face, watching for anger, half-wanting to see you angry, at least once--your anger could be as breathtaking as your joy--but never hurt. Though your expression is casual, detached, your dark eyes are intense. "Nice bunch of stones," you say, gesturing below.
     "I'll take it down," I say, "if you want me to. You could sue me for not asking your permission, but I didn't know how to reach you." I had deliberately refused to let you tell me how to reach you, for fear that I might descend into stalking. You, sensing that my life is not elegantly simple enough to be all my own, had let it go at that.
     "You might as well leave it up," you say. "Just another pile of stones."
     "No! That's not how I think of you!" My throat is so tight I can scarcely breath.
     You tilt your head slightly, considering. "Where did you get that title? 'All that's best of dark and bright.'" You glance down briefly toward the photograph. "Sounds familiar. From a poem, isn't it?"
     "Byron," I say. "'She walks in beauty, as the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies,/And all that's best of dark and bright/ Meets in her aspect and her eyes.'" I manage a slight smile. "On top of everything else, you've turned me maudlin."
     You give me that sudden, blindingly beautiful smile, and relax, and lean your shoulder against the curving wall. "So, will you be going back to get more pictures of those 'ephemeral' towers?"
     "Next month, over Columbus Day." I'm still far from relaxed, but at least I can breathe again. "I was hoping you'd ask."
     Your wide grin makes my heart leap. "I kinda feel an urgent fishing trip coming on," you say, ignoring the querulous voice from below calling your name.
     Then you're gone, leaving me throbbing from a quick, hard, incendiary embrace. And a promise.

Cravings

Spencer Dryden

Cravings

As an erotic writer, a natural topic for this post might be my sexual cravings. I've stated here and  other places that my interest in erotica is an expression of my seemingly life-long enslavement by female allure. However, outside of my fantasy life in fiction, I can't act on those cravings and hope to remain outside a prison with real bars, or worse, dead at the hands of a jealous lover.

I'm currently on a blog tour promoting my latest book. (look to your right) If you really want to know more about my sexual cravings, you can find my posts all over the blogosphere. I think I've done twelve in the last two weeks. My friend and crit partner Meg Amor (yes, that's her real name) and I have done a series of discussions on all manner of things. Our latest is on fantasy guys and girls. I have a thing for tall women that we explore on her blog. It's lots of fun. Go there if you like and tell us about YOUR FANTASY LOVER. (You'll have to scroll down to the Nov 4th post)

I could also write about my twin jones of coffee and doughnuts. I  am an insufferable coffee snob. My wife and I pack our own beans, grinder and coffee maker whenever we travel. I have driven miles out of my way to get a cup of  good coffee. I have circles on my trip map to Florida showing the Starbucks locations. (They don't all appear on the smart phone). Once you get south of Indianapolis good coffee joints get harder to find. In my handyman work at home I have a map in my head of the location of a coffee shop in relation to assigned jobs, which take me to all corners of the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

Don't hate on me. It's cheaper and less obnoxious than being a wine snob—that would be my baby brother, who is about one class short of being a sommelier . Don't go out with him unless he's buying. He's a food and beverage manager at a five star restaurant. He really knows his stuff because he has to. He chides me for my love of cheap oaky Chardonnay's. I've made him into a coffee snob.

Doughnuts. I'm trying my best to part with them. At times it seems hopeless, especially considering how they enhance a cup of good coffee. But the scale is telling me it's time to try again. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

My fellow writers here have been so forthcoming about the trials and demons in their lives that I thought I should try to explore my most destructive craving—fame and fortune.

Now it's not a bad thing to be rich or famous. It's the motivation that causes one's undoing.  I don't know what men grow up wanting today. When I was growing up, a man was measured by two things—how much money he made and what kind of position he held. Then comes the twist—those two things had a big impact on the kind of women he could meet. (Back to my life long allure thing.) Vonnegut explains the two primary male motivations succinctly in the opening of "Breakfast of Champions"-gold and wide open beaver.

It started around age ten for me. Come with me for a moment to my neighborhood barbershop-a place where men gathered to talk, and, if a ten year old boy was lucky, someone left the Playboy Magazine open to the centerfold when he was called to the barber's chair. I remember so clearly the first time I got the money/male/power connection. A guy had just left, pulling out in a well appointed new sedan. The barber who attended him said in a low register. 'He (name withheld) told me he paid over four thousand dollars in personal income taxes last year.' This was 1960. Four thousand dollars is a lot of money now. It was nearly a fortune then, at least in a working class community like mine. Most of the men in the shop didn't make four thousand dollars a year. The look of awe and admiration on the faces of the other men imprinted on to some permanent scoreboard in my mind. I wanted to be that guy. It wasn't really the money. I was too young to have an appreciation for money beyond what I needed to feed my doughnut jones. It was the admiration and even envy I found as enticing as the pictures in the Playboy Magazine I kept peeking at. The Freudian twist. If other men admired me, maybe I could admire myself.

As I said, there is nothing inherently wrong with wealth, if it is a natural result of dedication and excellence. However, since that time, I have craved wealth as a tool achieving a positive self-image. It's perverted motives not perverted ends. Isn't that a recurring topic in Shakespeare?

Wealth and fame seem to travel together like coffee and doughnuts. I came to crave fame as much as wealth. Again, all I had to do was look at the way men responded to the athletes of the day to make me practice harder at what ever sport I was mastering. And the girls, oh the girls liked the athletes. The athletes got the prettiest girls.

I had a brief brush with fame in high school. If crack is as addictive, it's no wonder there is so little hope of recovery. I was an accomplished athlete from early on—pick a sport, I excelled at it. I finally settled on basketball—probably a bad choice as I hadn't picked the right parents. I was small, even for my age but I got good enough that the older guys would let me play in playground games. As a high school freshman, I was nearly drilled  to death in basketball fundamentals by one of the great coaches/mentors of my life. I had the tools, just not the size. My sophomore year I made varsity, a fete only a handful of sophomores had done in the school's history. No fame, no girls, it was hard, humbling and at times, humiliating. I was so burned  out by the end of the season I had planned on quitting sports.

In between my sophomore and junior year my parents moved the family from Milwaukee to the Madison area. We settled in a near-by farming community that was ten minutes and thirty years from Madison. It was a place where high school sports was the main entertainment in the community. I had decided I wasn't going to try out for any sports. I had grown a lot physically over the last year but emotionally I was shot. Then reality came to visit. I didn't have anything in common with farm kids who'd grown up together. I was lonely. I decided to try out for basketball and made the team easily.

I was invisible at the local barbershop, listening in to the talk of the town and still trying to get a peek at the Playboy. If I'd been killed in a hit and run accident, there would have been no one who could identify me. That all changed a couple of weeks later when I played in my first basketball game. They'd never seen the likes of me before. The local radio announcer once described me as the biggest 5'9" guy he'd ever seen. I had a thirty six in vertical. I could almost dunk a basketball. I had learned to do tip-ins both left and tight handed, I dribbled just as fast left handed as right. My coach used film of my jump-shot as training material.  I'd learned an aggressive, physical style of play. I was an on-court leader with a attitude. My older sister told me I looked so menacing she wanted to root for the other team.

In one day I went from being nobody to the talk of the town. Suddenly, everyone at school knew who I was, and yes, I got to talk to, and even date cheerleaders. The next time I went into the barbershop, the conversation stopped and every eye in the place was on me. The barber greeted me by name. I got so busy talking to the patrons I couldn't look at the Playboy. I loved being in the spotlight. For just a little while I was "that guy."

After high school, the fame disappeared, but not the craving for it. Fame made my life easy and for a while it raised my self-image, but it was fleeting, like the cheerleaders. I'm sorry to say I spent most of my adult life chasing after fame and fortune. It lead to poor career choices, poor relationships, a terrible first marriage. It took me years to realize that basketball had made me famous because I had worked at it and developed the body and skills to compete at a high level. I never developed the tools to carry me into the adult world. I failed at everything. But it was because of the wrong motives.

Still, I got close to fame and fortune on several occasions with insurance product design, a television show, and inventions. Just one more break in any of these endeavors and you wouldn't know Spencer Dryden. As my writing mentor, John Leicht says, "Marketplace success is a convergence of highly improbable events." Too true. The motivational speakers I worshipped never gave enough credence to perfect timing and extraordinary good luck to go along with the long hard work and a positive mental attitude. 

I spent my white collar years feeling invisible, vulnerable, and perpetually anxious, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It did, mostly on my head.

Time has brought some wisdom. One day, in total despair,  I found myself asking why I had to do all these things to get people to like me just so I could like myself. Why couldn't I skip all that achievement stuff and simply like myself? It was the start of the journey that brought me here.

Along the way I discovered that I had a natural talent for the mechanical trades. The basis of my life changed from external to internal validation. I'm very good at what I do. I am homo habilis rex. I have more work than I want. A while back an old high school friend made this logo for me.

 

 I'm not over it by any means. The challenge of my writer's life is trying to keep it from triggering a relapse into my fame and fortune seeking mode. When I got my first book contract, I saw myself being interviewed by Charlie Rose. Thankfully, I can look at the Playboy now without recrimination.  Would you mind passing the doughnuts?