You don’t get the privacy necessary to masturbate much when friend-hopping, spending nights on the couches or air-mattresses in friends’ busy living rooms. So it’s been a while for me, and all of the sudden mundane shit is starting to look real sexy – movie posters, sixes who pass me on the street, Internet ads.
“That waitress has some truly impressive cleavage,” I tell my friend Sigh in a nondescript sports bar.
“Stop staring at her,” she says.
I look at my drink. I watch the TV. I inspect the far wall.
A man comes over and hands the waitress five folders with about eight credit cards sticking out of them. I look over to try to figure out why he has so many bills.
“Quit staring.”
“I wasn’t! I was looking at the bills.”
“Whatever, just stop.”
“Whatever, fuck you.”
Sigh rests her head on the tip of her glass of whiskey ginger. It’s early but we’ve been day-drinking. “Fuck you right back,” she murmurs.
At another friend’s apartment, I watched Brief Interviews with Hideous Men while he was at work. (“Don’t watch any pay-per-view,” he told me when showing me how to set up the netflix. “My wife will think it’s me.”)
The movie hit me pretty hard. I left the exit music on as I scrubbed some dishes, thinking about the movie. My face contorted and my eyes blurred over a bit. Everyone in it had a creepy fetish or some dark secret (“judge me, bitch”). What was mine?
I’m still not really sure. I’m pretty vanilla when it comes to sexy times. But I imagine if I were one of the men interviewed I’d talk about a semi-frequent desire. I want to bring my special ladyfriend on a vacation to a tropical island. We’d lay out by the pool, her bikini scandalously revealing, and I’d lift my sunglasses to watch drops of pool water trickle down her stomach. ‘That’s mine,’ I’d think with pride. ‘That belongs to me.’ Then I’d smile smugly at the people walking past.
That’s chauvinistic, I think. The whole ownership idea. But I wouldn’t marry her or anything, I’d decide she was a bit too dim-witted for me and cut it off shortly after that holiday.
“Stop staring,” Sigh repeats, her head still bowed, her eyes still closed.
[You should probably buy My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.]
