Bad Sex With Paul Festa
My nights with Miss Trannyshack.
April 30, 2007
She wore a torn dress, and a neon blue wig whose braids were tied with multicolored condoms. Her pupils were feline-ovoid, her irises pale yellow. Below the unblinking eyes streamed a lava flow of red-glitter tearstains. Her pubic hair under the torn dress was a second wig, black and wiry — an Afro, and it seemed to expand through the sad striptease, from Gary Coleman to Richard Pryor to James Levine, until it finally detached from her body to reveal a gold sparkly painted penis.
"That's the one," I said to the cheering woman beside me, "who I want to have sex with."
After the show, minus two wigs, the performer stood there looking simultaneously vulnerable and hazardous in her glitter-bedraggled makeup and inhuman contact lenses. I was a little starstruck as I started a conversation. This was no ordinary post-gender, PTSD-addled, violated-clown drag queen, this was
the reigning Miss Trannyshack, the highest title attainable in new-wave drag north of Sunset Boulevard and west of the Hudson River. That night's performance had been my first exposure to the drag confection known as Raya Light, and standing there before what was left of her, I felt a powerful muscle of instinct — the one that impels me toward the mucous membranes of celebrities — go into a full seizure. The impact reverberated up my torso and through my organs of speech, which blurted, "So, do you want to go downstairs?"
Downstairs, in the sex dungeon, we found a spot on the far end of the upholstered room and reclined. As we lay in each other's arms with various sex acts going on around us and the occasional limb gratuitously grazing ours, Raya fed me a series of absurd, mostly unflattering falsehoods about herself and lightly barbed
insults directed at me. All I remember is laughing while I cringed, and the more I laughed, the more I wanted her. So I kissed her. She didn't kiss like a cat person, or a psychotic animated horror doll; she kissed like a guy, and she had a hard body. Then I went down on her, and a bitter taste filled my mouth: gold paint.
So much for oral sex. And anal sex in a basement dungeon on a first date, as everyone intuitively knows, is uncouth. After an hour of light foreplay and kidding around about icky subjects now forgotten (child molestation? open sores? the unsolicited caresses of adjacent dungeon dwellers?), it was nearing three in the morning, well past time for me to get my rocks off and go home to my boyfriend. But whatever impaired my memory that night had also made it difficult for me to come. I let Raya try for a while before I took matters into my own hands. I tried light and fast, hard and slow, without lube, with lube, more lube; I tried spiral strokes and bending it back, butt simulations, Raya's hands on my balls, her tongue in my ear and my nose in her armpit. Finally, I resorted to brute force, and ejaculated just at the point I thought my forearm might burst into flame.
Like many people who have sex in front of other people, I don't object to being watched. But I have my limits. Having half the room shout encouragement as I approach orgasm is pushing a boundary; having someone nearby bellow, "And the Oscar goes toÉ" when I've finally come, as happened in this case, is crossing it. Raya made a crass remark about my scenery-chewing ejaculation. "Thanks a lot," I said. She just laughed, and licked something off my chest.
"How was your night?" asked my boyfriend, James, the next morning.
"It was okay," I said. "I had sex with Miss Trannyshack 2006."
"Who is it?" James asked.
I told James about Raya's tragiclown persona. "She's forty," I said.
"How's the body?"
"Kind of amazing," I replied, thinking of the muscled hemispheres of her ass, the smooth and defined chest, the firm, gentle swell of her belly. "She said she was some kind of professional tennis player. But I'm not entirely sure — I could never really tell when she was bullshitting me."
James Googled Raya's boy name, revealing that she hadn't been bullshitting about the tennis. The previous year she'd ranked No. 2 in the U.S. senior men's division.
"He can beat your ass in tennis," James said, quoting a favorite song, "before you fuck his ass in bed. Did you get any pictures?"
James doesn't ask a lot in return for my sexual carte blanche. If I meet a guy I think James will like, I can bring him home to share. Otherwise, our policy is one of Do Ask, Do Tell: details, pictures and, if possible, video are the price of sexual freedom. I'm not sure my tricks actually believe me when I say I have to take the videotape for my boyfriend, but they usually relent.
One morning a few days later, after my second encounter with Raya, I came home to James without even an anecdote to justify my absence the night before. Raya and I had met at Trannyshack, which gets going at about 11:30 on Tuesday night. We'd hung around through the last act of the midnight show, had a few drinks and danced a little before heading back to her place. She drove a big boxy new Volvo and brought me back to her big boxy new outer-Mission loft. Inside, the place had the clutter you might expect from a bachelor-tranny tennis champion: unwashed dishes and bras strewn about, wigs and rackets, the Miss Trannyshack tiara and a few tennis trophies. Upstairs, the bed was positioned beside a full wall of closet-door mirrors, but all they reflected that night, before we passed out near four in the morning, was a futile search for condoms, the exhaustion of a minute supply of lube, the subsequent retrieval of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Spray from the kitchen, and finally my passing out, smelling of margarine, after the weight of yet another withering remark about Oscar-worthy orgasms broke my will to come.
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 leastsome 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°
©2007 Paul Festa and Nerve.com