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That weekend, we hooked up for the third time, and this time passed out with our clothes on.
"What kind of fuck buddy is this?" James demanded the next morning. The genuine pique in his question took me aback. I realized I'd felt vaguely virtuous coming home and being able to say that I hadn't fucked her. It was as though I hadn't taken our open-relationship ground rules seriously, as though part of me didn't accept that it was really okay to have sex with other people, and that James really did enjoy the stories and movies I brought home for him. Faced with a confession of my chastity, he looked vaguely disgusted. A perverse question posed itself: was he envious, more envious than he would have been if I'd come home with a memory card full of dirty movies? Did he wonder if something more substantial and more threatening than sex was drawing me back to the lair of this feral forty-year-old drag queen?
In an effort to be faithful to James, I redoubled my efforts to have sex with Raya. I cut myself off at the bar a drink or two early, got her out of the club shortly after the show so we were in bed by half past two. I went down on her cock, arousing her to moans of ecstasy. But the moans turned to mock moans, pseudo-porn dialogue, a Raya mad scene.
"Yes! Yes! Suck my big fat tranny clit! Ooh! Yeah! Ooh! Yeah! Suck that tranny clitoris!"
I removed Raya's cock from my mouth. "Will you shut up?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm sorry, am I supposed to be taking this seriously?"
"Maybe if you did, we could actually have sex, and I wouldn't have to go back to my boyfriend and tell him we just cuddled again."
"You could lie."
I didn't lie to James about Raya. I continued to describe all the bad sex, the abortive approaches to climax, the tendency for both of us to pass out mid-blowjob when the clock struck four, the orgasmicidal banter.
"So I slipped my finger in her asshole, thinking it would help her come, and she said, 'Just to warn you, I ate a whole jar of corn salsa last night, so any minute I'm going to start shooting chocolate covered popcorn out of my ass—'"
"I really think I've heard enough," James said, wincing. But the pique was gone. I think James relaxed about Raya when he realized I was making a good-faith effort to have sex with her, and that the effort was failing for reasons beyond my control. When someone you're fingerbanging introduces the image of chocolate-covered popcorn, your options are going to be limited, and the variation has mostly to do with the speed of your fingers' withdrawal. Importantly, you're not likely to reinsert those fingers in the near future. Likewise, when your sex partner accuses you of sounding like a "whiny baby" when you come, as Raya did on our fourth date, you are going to think twice and very seriously before having another orgasm in his/her presence.
And besides, while no sex is cause for concern in a fuck-buddy relationship, bad sex, or at least
The badness of our sex life became its saving grace. |
some variety of badness is probably ideal. "I wish my fuck buddy could spell 'bored,'" James lamented the other day after picking up a text message. Actually, we're both thrilled this guy can't spell "bored." Extracurricular sex partners who can't spell are the very best extracurricular sex partners, because they are destined to remain extracurricular. Even for two people as devoted to each other and as casual about sex as James and I, the prospect lurks of the other one getting emotionally involved with someone he goes to bed with. And I'm sure that Raya, with her amalgam of creative madness, nightlife fluency, athletic prowess and middle-aged, Volvo-driving, loft-owning stability, sounded to James like a plausible candidate for this kind of fuck buddy. So the badness of our sex life became its saving grace.
After getting the assignment to write this essay, I returned to Raya's loft. I confessed to her in stages, first that I was writing about our sex life, then that the essay was for the Bad Sex series. She took the news well, but I approached the loft nervously, pad and pencil tucked into my back pocket. How blatantly could I take notes during our bad sex? Would either of us self-consciously make the sex worse for the purposes of my research? Would this be the worst sex of my life? Would she make good on the chocolate-covered popcorn threat, and would that be just a light snack before the evening's seven-course meal of bad-sex humiliation?
I worried needlessly. Moments after we got naked in bed together, we were fast asleep.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Paul
Festa's essays appear in Nerve, Salon, the Best Sex Writing
anthologies for 2005, 2006 and 2008, and other publications. He is
the author of OH MY
GOD: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever, which is based on Apparition of the Eternal
Church, his award-winning and critically acclaimed film about the
music of Olivier Messiaen. A violinist, he has toured extensively,
given the U.S., Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles
premieres of Messiaen's 1933 Fantaisie, and performed with the
Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and the North Bay Shakespeare Company. He
is the official historian of the Presidential Memorial Commission of
San Francisco, and is revising a novel. More info at paulfesta.com. |
© 2007 Paul Festa & Nerve.com
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