Sex and Bacon (19 page)

TH £ MINI BABY
Ruths I left in the lounge were gone in two days. I ate a few myself. I was relieved to find that they were just as delicious as always.

The Agape feast was one term used for certain meals celebrated by the early Christians
. Agape
is one of the Greek words for
love,
particularly applied to selfless love or God’d love for mankind, and so “agape feasts” are also referred to in English as “love-feasts.”

—Wikipedia

Her milk is my shit; my shit is her milk
. —Nirvana

THREE YEARS AGO
, I had a customer who used to buy Dixie Cups of my pee.

I charged him $60 for the pee, and another $90 to watch him drink it. He wasn’t a fiend or an obvious pervert: In fact, he was tall, clean, and handsome, with a neatly shaved head and educated elocution. My guess is that his girlfriends were proud to bring him home to their parents—he was a “good catch,” a man running his own successful business, a home owner before the age of thirty. He worked hard and couldn’t make time to see me often, but when he did, he had no trouble paying the sum I requested. He usually charged his sessions on his business MasterCard, writing my pee fee in carefully on the “Tip” line.

After the first few sessions during which I served him my warm pee in the disposable Dixie Cups I used for mouthwash, he began to arrive with an assortment of wineglasses for me. “It looks prettier,” he said. “And there’s no waxy aftertaste.” I appreciated his sensitive palate, though I had to wonder how objectionable the taste of a wax-lined paper cup actually was to a man swirling his stripper’s liquid waste on his tongue like Sémillon Blanc.

He explained the pee thing to me with fetching embarrassment: He’d lived in Europe for a few years, he said. Pee was “really big” over there —everyone was into it, and most of their pornography featured erotic peeing. Pee-drinking was far from uncommon. He’d had a British girlfriend, he claimed, who was particularly turned on by pee-play. She’d taught him to spread out a plastic shower curtain on the floor, then to carefully cover the plastic sheeting with an ordinary cotton bed sheet. The sheet, he said, trapped the pee and prevented it from running off the shower curtain onto the floor. Cleanup was a cinch: you simply threw both the shower curtain and the sheet into the bathtub and rinsed them both until they no longer smelled of urine. After that, you could run them through the washer, if you liked. You dried the sheet normally and hung the shower curtain over the shower rod to dry.

I was impressed with his European girlfriend’s trial-and-error ingenuity. It would have taken me a long time (and a lot of urine-sodden carpeting) to figure out the bed sheet thing, I knew. But then again, I wasn’t a true pee aficionado. Maybe when you’re into playing with piss, you have an instinct for how to contain it. Or maybe European porn flicks come with pragmatic instructions, like the San Francisco safesex videos starring the most terrifying lesbians we have here in America. Kveryone always says that Kuropeans are more matter-of-fact than Americans about sex.

The one poetic indulgence my clean-cut pee customer allowed himself was that he loved referring to my pee as “golden nectar.”

“Let me drink your golden nectar, Mistress,” he begged. I felt like the Tree Top company. It was really amazing how much urine in a wineglass resembled apple juice, even down to its occasional cloudiness. And after one Day-Glo mishap, I tried to remember not to take B vitamins on the days I had my pee guy scheduled. I didn’t want to ruin the golden hue of my nectar.

I wonder where Pee Guy is now. I hope that -herever he is, he’s happily slurping up as much golden nectar as he wants. Maybe he’s moved back to Kurope, the land of free-wheeling pee-lovers, and found a girlfriend who hates asparagus.

The thing about Pee Guy is that his kink doesn’t seem that out of line to me. I mean, I’m not into peeing on anyone (or getting pissed on) in my personal life. I don’t go out of my way to incorporate pee into my erotic activities—my only shower curtain hangs over my tub, and when I pee in the shower, I’m usually alone and just too lazy to get out and use the toilet. Peeing feels good to me—but it doesn’t feel
orgasmically
good, and I’m okay with that.

It’s not that I’m antipee, though—in fact, ‘without even trying (or living in Europe), I’m sure I’ve swallowed my share. I don’t baby-wipe my lover’s crotch before I dive in: I’d rather risk a few drops of golden nectar in pursuit of my lover’s sexual fluids than insist upon pee-free, laboratory-sterile conditions. I mean, they’re
genitals
—peeing is what they
do
. They’re supposed to! Cunts and cocks are only used for sex a tiny percent of the time—the rest of the time, they’re the end points in your body’s drainage system, nothing more. If you don’t want to lick them, don’t lick them, but don’t get grossed out thinking about what they do when they’re not being licked. That’s like refusing to kiss someone because they threw up a week ago.

We lap up tiny amounts of piss when we suck our partners off, we swallow their spit when we kiss deeply, and we eat their shed skin cells every time we run our tongues along their bodies or nibble their sensitive bits. Having a girlfriend who menstruates means devouring trace amounts of blood and other reproductive effluvia every month, and having a boyfriend means gargling his come at regular intervals (or at least once a year on his birthday, if you’re prissy). Sure, you can use barrier methods —dental dams and condoms—but for most of us, the point of oral sex is the communion you get when you take someone into your mouth. It’s the trust and the wet squelchy hotness and the nastiness and the close hairy personalness of it, the tang of ball sweat and pussy stank that’s unique to your own dear partner. You love them, so you love their rich gamy smells and salty tastes. They love you, so they surrender their bodies to you to be savored, trusting you not to leave visible bite marks.

When you get right down to it, we eat a lot of our partner’s extrusions without giving any of it a second thought. No matter how clean we are, we’re human monsters that shed copious amounts of ourselves constantly, marking our territory in shed hair and sweat and eye-gunk and the oil of our fingerprints. Wlien we make love we end up consuming each other, wearing each other under our nails, wallowing in each other’s stink like piss-soaked bed sheets. And it feels good, that’s the thing, otherwise we’d all stay home and masturbate instead of trying to get it on with each other despite the inconvenience, potential for humiliation, and risk to our health. We are human animals used to pack life, not cold, solitary machines. Don’t babies instinctively pop curious items into their mouths in order to learn what they are?

We mouth to gain intimate understanding of our partners. We eat to love.

I WAS USED
to customers trying to buy bits of my body for their sensual delectation. Their requests rarely surprised me, though their shamelessness usually did. They’d ask for pieces of me or of my waste like restaurant-goers ordering from a menu in the blithe assumption that every aspect of my body was for sale.

Pee Guy was no big deal to me. His desire to guzzle my pee was almost flattering. Besides, it’s not like I needed it—why
not
make $150 for something I was just going to flush away?
If I made $150 every tune I went to the toilet
,I marveled,
I could put myself through medical school
.What I needed was a stable of pee-lovin’ customers and a contract with the local spring-water delivery company. I could invest in a few glass goblets and plastic shower curtains, and I’d be good to go. Pee Guy’s sessions were easy and almost festive, with his fancy glassware and his tales of European licentiousness.

Spit Guy was something else entirely. He, too, paid me good money for my precious bodily fluids, but instead of sampling my nectar from a Dixie Cup or wineglass, he liked me to hawk and spit directly into his face. I’d usually get cottonmouth halfway through our sessions and have to excuse myself to drink warm water. I charged him per session, not per spitball, since it was easier to keep track of how long I’d spent with him than to tally the times I snorted deeply, cleared my throat, and let fly.

Spit Guy begged me to hawk oysters directly into his mouth, but I drew the line at that—it was bad enough to watch him lick up my saliva secondhand without serving as both nectar
and
•wineglass. Besides, I had a screaming horror of letting a big wad of spit go and having it reach his lips and tongue before it completely separated from my own mouth. If that happened, we’d be momentarily connected by a shimmering rope of saliva, and that was far too much like kissing for my taste. It was one thing to pee in a glass and watch someone drink it—that only went one way and that direction was
away from me
. Swapping spit with a customer was a two-way street of depravity, horrible to contemplate.
¹

Though Tampon Man was never my customer, he was legendary for pushing tampons through our tip slots at the peep show. Girls doing business with Tampon Man knew to insert the tampons into their vaginas, then to push them back through the slot to him. He held the cotton plugs in this mouth with the strings dangling out like tea bags while he masturbated. He was cheery about his habits, rewarding his entertainers with smiles and enthusiastic thums-up signs when they were able to smear the tampons with actual menstrual blood. I was leery of him and his Kotex fetish. Again, watching a customer suck on my sloughed-off vaginal cells—even through glass—seemed like more genuine contact than I felt comfortable providing.

I was never asked for nail parings or dead hair—but I wouldn’t put it past customers to want those things from the women they pay for erotic interaction. I’ve certainly sold my share of sweaty, extensively-worn socks, smelly boots, and pussy-scented panties to know that pretty much anything the human body sheds naturally,
someone
will be willing to pay lots of money for. Customers want what all of us want: They crave oral communion and consumption, intimate smells, the taste of various physical nooks and crannies. They’re only different in the fact that they’re willing to pay a stranger for their physical relics, and that for them, the eating is enough—love never comes into play.

I’m a sentimental cannibal, though: I only eat the ones I love.

THE HUMAN BODY
is a strange thing—we sweat, we fart, we blow snot, we rub deodorant under our arms to stop smells, we powder our feet, we blot our facial oil. We’re so
messy
. We spend huge amounts of money on things like breath-freshening toothpaste and dandruff-control shampoo, but we know that our attempts to control our smells and secretions are essentially doomed to fail. You can scrape your gums raw with Comet and gargle with Clorox bleach every night if you want, but the next morning your tongue will be just as coated and your breath will be just as stinky. You can wipe your ass with triple-ply quilted luxury bathroom tissue that costs as much as embossed linen-weight stationery but your shit will still make your bathroom reek like a biker bar outhouse. You can spray as much vanilla-scented air freshener as you like to cover up the shame of your successful peristalsis, but you’ll just be inhaling vanilla-scented shit molecules. It’s the human condition—we stink, we fuck, we eat, we shit. We’re dirty animals with crusty eyes and smelly asses and rich, fruity farts that we sniff, curiously and delicately, when we’re alone. We’re not only filthy, we’re sneaky, too: We wash our hands ostentatiously in public restrooms, then dig boogers out of our noses and wipe them on the undersides of our desks. We’re all monsters.

But now my relation to the things human bodies do is different. I look at what I’m doing now working in an office two days a week transcribing business documents where nobody knows me as a writer or a sex worker or anything other than a tired spinster with a slightly higher-than-average typing speed—versus my decade in the adult entertainment industry, and it’s almost as if I’ve traded in one set of body things for another, entirely different one.

For the very first time in my professional life, my coworkers are unaware of whether I have pubic hair or not.

Nobody gets close enough to me to know if I’ve bothered to shower that morning, or if I’m showing up to work steeped in a bitter brew of last night’s whiskey-sweat or covered in the light salt-crust of my boyfriend’s ejaculate. My tattoos are covered, my shoes are flat and spraddling, and my body language is sedate, not sensual and beckoning. Sitting in my office chair for eight hours a day wilts my spine and flattens my ass.

In the forest of cubicles in which I now conduct my professional life, none of us ever touch. The days when I playfully slapped my coworkers’ bottoms and pinched upper arms and kissed cheeks and traded makeup and drugs and food and tampons and magazines are long gone. Now when I bump into someone, I say, “Kxcuse me.” Collisions are awkward, and we move around each other in arcs to avoid them. “Let me move,” I say when a coworker needs to attend to my computer, vacating my seat and edging away miserably. There’s a secret formula for how much space there must be between us all at any given time, and we all react in continual adjustment to that formula as we orbit each other in rotation between copy machine, coffee room, supply closet, and restroom. “After you,” I say, holding a door and tilting my body away as much as I can to give my boss the maximum amount of passage between us. We both look away as she steps over the threshold, as if politely choosing not to mention an unpleasant odor.