Refuel on a Fun-Filled Portion

I bore myself sometimes. I bore others sometimes, most times. I was talking to this stripper who said that her job, as she saw it, was to get me (that is, all men) to want to touch her. Good job. She also said – and I was listening, believe me – that she and the other girls (that is, the other strippers) take delight in the fact that the men they warm up, so to speak, will be thinking only of them (that is, the strippers) while later fucking their girlfriends/wives. It’s why I do it, to fuck other women over.

I was talking to this lesbian who. Well, who first of all told me that she wasn’t, in fact, a lesbian. She said: You know the Richard Briers character in Ever Decreasing Circles? You remind me, she continued, of him – what with your petty bourgeois notions of sexuality and your desire to remain in your narrow, and narrow-minded, comfort zone where all is as it should be and where straights like you (did she say straights, really?) force on to people like me your strict and reductive definitions of who we are, either gay or straight or maybe bisexual, but I’m none of those, I refuse to be boxed in, especially by the likes of you. Get fucked, I replied. Anyway, this lesbian had a girlfriend who, she said, made leather fetish gear, bondage rubbish, all that. Me: Yada, what, the sort of stuff, you mean, that only people who don’t like sex go in for, people who, you know, need to dress up like clowns in order to be able to enjoy sex, who also believe, with absolutely no good reason, that their dopey costumes and cretinous antics somehow make them radical, alternative, transgressive and who also believe that their pathetic preferences and dismal shebangs are something other than witless, clichéd expressions of their repressions and anxieties, rooted as they are in their utter conservatism, despite what they believe to the contrary?

You’re boring me, she said, this lesbian. Well, I said, you can’t have everything.

But I was talking to this lesbian stripper who said that she really liked getting the straight girls moist.

Moist?

Why would I pay you good money if I can neither touch you nor touch myself? If you danced naked in front of me – privately, in that booth you were talking about – I’d want to fuck you. And boy, would I be annoyed and frustrated if I couldn’t. Why would I want to put myself through that?

So you can think about me later, she said. Didn’t you listen to what I told you, earlier?

The stripper collapsed at the table, drunk. She wasn’t in the middle of stripping. She was off duty, in the pub. She was, in fact, out with her very good friends who love her and respect her and who, as it turned out, quite rightly took offence at the way I was referring to her, objectifying her, stripping her of her personality, reducing her to the status of mere sex object when, of course, I should have treated her with the respect that was, of course, her due, beyond her status as a stripper which, of course, I should have realised was a mere nothing as far as this girl was concerned, what with there being so much more to her than the business of taking her clothes off and telling me all about it. Of course. My apologies sweetheart, my apologies.

Collapsed at the table like that I imagined myself in quick scenarios where I was watching this girl, objectifying her to within an inch of her life. I put her in a cab. Home, you need to go home to your house of sin and debauchery. You need to ease yourself through beaded curtains into your boudoir of ill repute, satin sheets, soft lighting, music, perfume, a sick bucket, a drawer full of dildos. Sleep beauty, sleep ye, and I will touch you while you sleep. No, wait, I will masturbate over you, over your sleeping form before realising that I cannot even touch myself. How could I debase myself so? How could I think of you, stripper, in that way? Beast, rapist, disrespecter of women, foul fiend.

The next morning I heaved dry air and tiny scraps of stomach wall, green slime. I nibbled toast, drank tomato juice long and deep. Down bile, down.

Lesbians also. My apologies. Your oppression is widespread. Your grab for the good times, for acceptance, has been a long grab, so far a loose grab. But that grab will tighten, it will, someday, become a grip. They will have to prise you from all that you have grabbed and gripped, gotten hold of. Don’t let go, whatever you do. O sisters.

This lesbian walked into the pub. I waved as she passed, raised my glass. She repaired to a table behind me, joined her girlfriend, the fetish bird, sat down. I turned, smiled, raised my glass. She smiled, weakly, the lesbian, barely a smile, maybe a grimace, probably a grimace. She stood, went to the bar, leaving her girlfriend alone. I pulled up a stool and asked: how fares the fetish game? The leather fetish game, your bondage and all that?

Repaired?

Me, the phallocrat. Not the me me, of course. The this me, the me here, the me that bores sometimes, most times etc. The me who says things like:

I was in, late at night, fucking my wife when she popped in, the stripper, large as life, drunk at the table. Wake up, I pleaded silently, wake up, do the dance, help me out here. What you need, she said, is some of this leather gear here. It was spread out on the table, all manner of comedy get ups. I need, I replied, a pill of some kind. Aspirin maybe. It thins the blood. I was still fucking my wife, hanging in there, angling slightly, pressing in so that she wouldn’t notice. Give me a minute. Come on, I pleaded, dance. Say my name, she said, say it loud.

I was fucking my wife with this stripper right in my head. I stopped. Fiddled about a bit, brought her off elsehow. Sensitive me, different me. That fucking stripper, fully clothed, slumped at the table, home in a cab. Popped in.