A few months ago I went to a bar in Dallas with my Dallas wingman, Fabula. Fabula is tall young lady, dark haired, pierced (wherever you're thinking), mysterious and eats pussy about 6 months out of the year. The rest of the time she is, in her own words, "strictly-dickly." This is Fabula. Anyway, we walked into a bar I never heard of somewhere in the city on a ___day night. It was lightly crowded and quiet. It looked respectable. In other words, it didn't look like the kind of place you'd expect to find The Woman in White and her friends.
To introduce a theme… earlier that day, I RSVP'ed a polite "never" to the wedding invitation of a couple I knew in college. I had not seen them in years. The last I remember of them—this memory that, for my money, concluded our friendship—was sitting around a table drinking Aristocrat vodka sophomore year with the groom who delivered the textbook response of any man with no guts but a long-term girlfriend:
"Sooooo, aren't I winning the game?" he said. "I get laid more than any single guy. I get laid any time I want." He and his girlfriend (on his lap, seriously) shared a silly expression of undeserved superiority that has haunted me for years.
The Woman in White, a six-foot, black manslayer with tattoos down both arms and legs, shoot Fabula and I one long look of solar heat from the bar, then joined her girlfriends at a booth in our sightline. We grabbed drinks and joined them for cigarettes minutes later. After that, we sat down at her table. Her friends were all almost ludicrously cute, young, alt-blondes-and-brunettes and before we asked one said:
"Yes, we are Suicide Girls. We're on tour."
I went to the bathroom sometime after that and, on the merry trot back, ran into an old girlfriend and lost track of time. By the time I was back in sight of the table, Fabula had her purse in hand and was heading for the door.
"Where were you?" she said.
"Tripping to life nostalgic," I said, or something its equal in pretension or inanity.
"I'm going to meet our friends at [some other bar I don't know]," Fabula said. "That bitch is crazy."
"I'm not leaving," I said. Fabula was my ride.
"Good luck," she said. She pulled off her house key from its ring and put it in my shirt pocket. "Tell me what it smells like when you get there. The dog pissed on the carpet this morning. Don't wait up. I'll be out fucking someone sane."
Two hours later, I caught a cab with the Woman in White to Fabula's deserted one-bedroom.
"What do you think it smells like in here?" I said.
"I don't know," she said. "Cleaning products?"
We drank Fabula's booze and watched Devil Wears Prada. I asked if she'd seen the Anna Wintour documentary and she said she didn't know who that was. She did a bump of cocaine and I did not. When the credits rolled, her feet were on my lap.
“No, you just have really cute toes,” I said. I gradually segued from kissing to sucking—as natural as anything. When she moaned that she was wet, I slid my hands up her legs and pulled down her pants. Then I kissed up her left leg and onward until she came. When the moment passed she pulled me to her face and we experienced our first kiss.
We coupled twice, first on the floor beside Fabula's dog, then on the bed. I was drunk by the time it was over—not even drunk, but upon a stage of deep sickness that comes from many slow drinks over many slow hours. She rolled onto me again and pointed to a long window across the room and said:
“You know what I really want? I've never told anyone this before. I want you to handcuff me to the curtain road in front of that open window and abuse me for hours.” I asked what she meant by abused. “Beat me. Shock me. Bruise me.” We'd attempted a conversation during the movie. I found her petty, materialistic and arrogant beyond the low bar of intrigue. Frankly, what she asked for felt like a lot of work and responsibility.
"I'm not going to do that," I said, I think, without judgment.
"Well, what do you want to do?" she said, still on an upper. I agreed to fuck her one more time, provided there was no "abuse" involved and that I could film it and text it to my friend, Chelsea, back home.
“You could fuck me from behind and film it and then send Chelsea the video,” she said as soon as I mentioned her name, for the woman in white is the petty, possessive type. It was fine idea that I secretly had first.
As it turns out, it is not easy at all to film yourself fucking on a springy bed drunk and in the dark. My cinematography has only improved.
I tell this story for just one reason: I want to remind anyone ever considering saying something as lame in their little lifetime as, "I get laid more than any single guy—I get laid any time I want," that there is a big difference between getting properly laid and having sex. Don't get me wrong, sex with a committed partner is an innumerable amount of beautiful things. It is a way of celebrating highest intimacy, exploring the depths of your sexual nature, and having fun and having a good time. You get to practice and master each other. In a sense, it is "better."
Getting laid, however, implies that there ever be a significant chance of failure. Getting laid is also about novelty, adventure, and triumph. Understand that I mean "triumph" here not in terms of one human over another, but of two-or-more humans over the entire frustrating nature of Earthly existence, even if only for a night or for even less. It is a triumph over human disaffection and insecurity every time you let your guard down with someone new, every time you say yes when you could say "no." That is when we charm each other. That is when we get a little weird. That is when you get a story worth telling.
