Repulsion and attraction are so closely linked that it's sometimes difficult not to imagine having sex with someone you find physically abhorrent. For some of us, anyway. If you're like me, you have slightly cross-wired brain circuitry and traces of deep-seated self loathing, and you seldom get off as well as when you're doing it with someone who makes your skin crawl.
    For years, I had excellent sex with people who made me slightly sick and only mediocre sex with people I found attractive. My first encounter with a Repulsive (and I use the term affectionately) involved a hippie named Eagle. It was the mid-eighties; I was sixteen. My father and I lived in a dour apartment above a horse stable that my father managed. Eagle was a groom who lived in a hayloft at the end of the barn. I had a mohawk that didn't flatter, and my heart had just been broken by a rodeo rider who was twenty years older, married and manic depressive. I'd been so infatuated with him that I couldn't relax; sex was horribly dry and furtive. Now, I was depressed. I listened to Joy Division and Brian Eno, and I hated hippies, mostly because they had long hair and liked guitar solos. So when I first saw Eagle the Hippie Horse Groom, I vowed never to speak with him. He had straw-colored hair down to his ass, fed his dog a vegetarian diet and wrapped a red bandanna around the dog's neck. Eagle would greet you by saying "Peace." I resented this, because as far as I could tell, there was nothing peaceful about life.
    After school, I worked in the barn mucking out horse shit. Eagle and I would run into each other while dumping our wheelbarrows at the manure pile. After a while, I had to actually grunt "hello" and acknowledge that he existed. But it's not like we got chatty.
    One night, I was finishing up my barn chores when I found a baby swallow. It had been stepped on by a horse. One of its wings was smashed, but it was alive and chirping plaintively. I didn't know what to do, but I knew that hippies were good with small animals, so I went to Eagle's hayloft. To my consternation, Eagle was lying on his mattress completely naked. I ignored this and blathered on about the bird. Eagle got up from his mattress and, still naked with his dick unceremoniously dangling down, found some bread and milk, soaked the bread and helped me feed the bird. Still naked, Eagle found a shoebox, stuffed it full of socks and deposited the bird in it. Then he kissed me. I was repulsed and totally wet. I kissed him back and took his thick dick in my hand. He took my clothes off, pushed me down on the mattress and entered me from behind. A few minutes later, my body stopped quaking from its first orgasm. I turned around and saw Eagle there, leering at me, his long straw hair in disarray. I was sincerely grossed out.
    The next morning, I couldn't look at Eagle when we passed each other at the manure pile. I was disgusted with myself for fucking a hippie, and the feeling of self-hatred gave me an extraordinary erotic charge. I went back and did it again that night. And many nights after that. We did it on the floor, in the horse pasture, on a nearby golf course. Sometimes, I'd get consumed with repulsive lust in the middle of the day and find him in the tack room, cleaning saddles. He'd shove me onto a trunk and screw me blind, with my head banging into a row of bridles. He went down on me, I went down on him. He inserted objects into me. I came constantly. And I was completely repulsed. I was sure that my few friends at school — depressed soon-to-be-dropout punks — could see it on my face: I was a Hippie Fucker. When my father and I moved to rural Maryland, I was immensely relieved. There, I was a complete outcast, but I befriended the keyboard player in the only local band. I loved him passionately. We had horrible dry sex because I was too smitten to come.
    After the keyboard player, I had a long string of nonrepulsive, short-term boyfriends, none of whom got me off all that much. Then came Glenda. At that point, I was pushing twenty-three and working at a box factory in Pennsylvania. I had acquired and kicked a hideous Valium habit and hadn't had sex in eons. Not that the sight of my co-worker sent me into convulsions of same-sex desire: she was large. She had lank, short, brown hair and a perpetually downturned mouth emphasized by a faint mustache. But unlike my other colleagues, she spoke to me. Sometimes, she and I would drive to the nearest deli for lunch. It was during one of these excursions that Glenda went bonkers.
    We were in the box factory parking lot and had just finished our sandwiches. Suddenly, Glenda whipped out a joint. I hadn't had anything in my system in months, so I took a hit and became more stoned than I'd ever been in my life. Glenda leaned over and licked my face. I was stunned. This was a mating ritual I'd never encountered. In fact, at first it didn't occur to me that she was trying to get sexy. I thought she had a brain tumor. She'd been complaining of smelling toast all the time, and somewhere I'd read that smelling toast was a sign of a brain tumor. Maybe licking your co-worker's face was another.
    I'd had a few goes of it with girls in the past, but they'd always been cute. Glenda was not a cute girl. She had Cheez Doodle crumbs in her faint mustache. It's a testament to the strength of my stomach, or the weed, that I not only kissed Glenda back, but I licked the Cheez Doodle crumbs off her whiskers. I guess I made her day. She worked much more efficiently that afternoon, feeding cardboard flaps into the folding machine at an astronomical rate.
    Glenda was horribly depressed and depressing. Just looking at the way her face sagged from inner turmoil made me want to kill myself. We never actually consummated our vague vehicular humpings, but for months after I quit the box factory, I'd straddle my pillow and picture horrible Glenda binding my hands and feet and shouting insults as she inserted multicolored dildos into me. The whole experience was so horrible that afterward, I vowed to have good sex with attractive people.
    I made some headway, having a number of longish liaisons with people who only repulsed me occasionally. Eventually, I became close friends with a girl named Julia. She was a rangy, blue-eyed goddess who played bass in a band I joined briefly. We confided all our deepest dirges to each other. When I told Julia about fucking people who made me sick, she empathized. She'd never gone so far as to actually do it with someone who made her skin crawl, but she found that once she'd been intimate with someone for a while, they suddenly made her skin crawl. It would come and go. We called it Emotional Idiocy and found that we weren't alone. A lot of women and men we talked to in our travels had the same thing. It was probably even normal. By now, I hadn't had sex with anyone repulsive in a few years but, like Julia, I'd find that someone I was involved with suddenly became repulsive in the blink of an eye, and then I'd have to leave them.
    Then, a change. I finally met someone who's not even remotely repulsive and I had, and still have, delicious decadent tender dirty good sex with him. But right before I started seeing him, I had a go with one final Repulsive. He wasn't bad looking, but he reminded me of Rain Man. He had that weird stiff autistic gait Dustin Hoffman has in that movie. Plus, he had an out-of-control ego. He had made several million dollars inventing a particular kind of ear wax removal system. He was very impressed with himself. If I happened to chide him about something, he would get upset and start fake crying. The man was forty. He had ridiculously long armpit hair and an absurdly large cock that, in spite of its pleasing girth, I found repulsive. But I loved fucking him. I'd get on top of his absurdly large and repulsive cock and rock back and forth, thinking about the long armpit hair and the fake crying and feeling so completely sickened that I'd come like Mount Vesuvius.
    Until one day, in passing, I said something about a leper colony.
    "What? What's a leper colony?" Repulsive Guy said.
    "You know, where they put lepers to live so they don't contaminate non-lepers."
    "What's a leper?" asked Repulsive Guy.
    I thought he was joking. I mean, it's not like the guy was a stone idiot. He did seem a little autistic, but he was successful: he had lived in four countries and made millions of dollars. How could he not know what a leper was? But he didn't. And he got angry that I was upset and started fake crying. In that moment I knew it was over with him and all the repulsive people in the world.
    Not more than forty-eight hours later, I met the guy I'm with now: the distinctly non-repulsive guy. When we first had sex, I was worried. There was nothing creepy about him. Would I be aroused as assuredly as with a repulsive person? Did I still have vast streaks of self-loathing dictating that pleasure could only be had if there was a price to pay, like utter revulsion?
    Apparently, I'd worked some stuff out. We hit the hay savagely and without a trace of repulsion. Maybe I had, without really being aware of it, exorcised the demons of self-loathing. Later, of course, I found this not to be true: they're not entirely gone. Sometimes, I meet someone sort of oily and leering and generally disgusting, and I have to imagine fucking him. But I don't have to actually do it anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Maggie Estep has published five books, most recently Gargantuan, the second in a series of "horse noir" novels. She is an obsessive bike rider, lives in Brooklyn, and likes to hang out at racetracks, cheering on longshots. Her website is www.maggieestep.com.