Big Ed's Place

Recently, I’ve been thinking about some old, lost, intimate friendships.

Now I should be clear that I use the term “intimate” to be emotional rather than physical. I can have sex with someone without an emotional connection. That’s not to say there isn’t an intimacy there, but it’s rather different. The parts of my soul that I bare, if I do bare them, are rather different than what I share with emotionally intimate friends and partners. For me, the most intimate activities involve conversation. I bare my soul through words–not what I do in the bedroom (though I must admit, cuddling can be awfully intimate).

This should be no surprise to readers here. I often write about my life, and I try to bare my soul, sometimes hiding it behind a veneer of fiction, sometimes not. I believe that’s how we connect, and why not be the one to start? I think it strengthens my fiction and makes it more authentic and it certainly gives my other work here more style.

Given what I share here, it should be no surprise that I share pretty openly in my daily life. The people who reciprocate often become friends, if there’s enough of a connection or other relevant circumstances. It provides a deeper support community for me, and it allows me to be truly supportive of others.

The hard part, though, is that often life circumstances change and so must the nature of the friendship. I noticed this first when friends started getting married. Certain conversational topics, like sex, dried up. While they might have been willing to talk about what they did with their boyfriends/girlfriends, they wouldn’t bring up anything about life with their spouse. I “got it” when I got married myself (there’s a reason there are no stories about sex with my wife on this site).

However, it’s not just the development of new intimate relationships which can crowd out the intimate friendship. I’ve had several die because the awkwardness of sustaining it was too much to bear. We discovered some serious barrier, like politics, that made it difficult to maintain respect for each other and thus be able to share openly. Others saw the onslaught of life changes, such as kids or relocation take their toll.

But sometimes, a relationship will hit a level where there’s nowhere else for it to go. This has been most often occurred to me in friendships with women. We reach a point where greater intimacy would require sex, and that’s not going to happen, so we back off. Then we discover that it’s damn difficult to sustain a friendship at a lower level.

In some ways, that’s what happened with the friendship that was the inspiration behind Friends and Benefits. The actual relationship went differently than that in the story, but still ended with a dispute about the nature of the friendship itself. She didn’t want to date me, and called me “ugly” on more than one occasion. I was tired of the sex play that wasn’t escalating or being either physically or emotionally fulfilling.

Yet recently I realized that, at its peak, that friendship was more intimate than relationships I had with some former lovers who remain in my life. With the former lovers, there was a clear post-intimacy path. We kept some parts of our connection and let others go because they were clearly no longer appropriate. Some of those relationships have then faded, like all friendships do, until we just exchange Christmas cards. Others maintain smiles and wistful unspoken memories. At least one had a “whoa! Is she attractive! Wait a minute, I used to date her.” moment.

So, with my old friend, I can’t help wondering if we’d have stayed in better touch if we’d actually become lovers, and then ex-lovers. It’s an experiment that can’t be tested, of course. Nor would I want to if it meant missing out on meeting my wife.

There are other memories of past relationships that have flitted through, recently. There’s also some realization that some of those types of emotionally intimate relationships aren’t appropriate anymore. I kind of miss them, even though I wouldn’t trade what I have now for them at all.

So I guess it’s just nostalgia of the rose-colored glasses kind. Maybe that’s just a sign that I’m getting old.

Okay, I’m stealing the line from Pretty Woman, but it’s been so true that I realize that it may be distorting my views on how much of the rest of the population looks at sex as well as affecting my writing.

I came of age during the AIDS hysteria in the mid-80′s. We knew sex could kill you, but no one had any meaningful statistics to assess the risks of various activities. Sitting around my dorm room, we actually had discussions about dental dams for oral sex on women. Of course, by the late 90′s, we knew that the risks of AIDS transmission via oral sex on women were damn low. I looked them up in 1999 or so and there were only three cases of women catching HIV from other women and other cofactors were suspected. Gay men may have been dying of AIDS, but gay women were never a risk population. That wasn’t obvious, though, just a few years into the epidemic.

As a result, I’ve been tested for HIV a half dozen times, mostly as a precaution or a chance to reset my baseline. I could confidently inform the girlfriend du jour that I was clean. However, that didn’t lead to us giving up condoms. In twenty years of being sexually active, I had intercourse sans condom less than ten times. I’d say less than five, but it might be six. It wasn’t until my wife and I were actively trying to get pregnant that condoms were set aside.

I never understood the excuses people make for not wanting to use condoms. I thought it was brain dead stupid. A slightly better pleasure is worth risking your life for? Puh-leeze.

Now that safety consciousness did not stop at condoms. I never had sex with anyone without a conversation about STD status beforehand. I turned down some sexual offers because I didn’t know the person’s background. I was once in a strip club where a dancer was sticking licorice in her pussy and offering it to customers to eat. No way, my friend. It’s probably not a risk, but I just couldn’t get past my first reaction of “what are the germs on that?” I also was once offered full service by a dancer and I turned it down, to later discover she had active herpes. I never understood sex with complete strangers because a condom isn’t guaranteed protection against herpes and I’d just as soon do without that virus, thank you. The conversation beforehand was a must.

It also didn’t stop at STD’s. I had condoms break on me four times before a courtesan acquaintance recommended Magnums. I figured anyone who had to protect herself professionally probably had worked out the best brand to use and I’ve been happy since. So I also discussed pregnancy with all my partners and made sure we had a second birth control method in place in addition to condoms.

The end result was that I caught nothing. The only two pregnancies I’ve been responsible for were planned.

Which probably explains part of why my twenties were probably a bit less wild than some of my contemporaries. And certainly less wild than the generation that came before, where HIV and Herpes were unknown, and the generation that came after, where the true statistical risks were known and not just conjectured.

So there are things I don’t ‘get’ at anything deeper than an intellectual level. Dogging. Glory holes. Random hook ups. These are things people do and enjoy, but I just twinge enough inside to realize that I wouldn’t.

Furthermore, I’ve realized it’s difficult for me to keep the disbelief out of my voice when others talk about things I consider unsafe. I get the furrowed brow and my body language conveys, “well that was stupid” even if I bite my tongue.

This spills over to my writing. I’m not sure I could write a dogging story and make it fun and erotic. I do know I include condoms in my stories, which is a tad unusual for porn and erotica. I know that safety issues have contributed to me intentionally writing some sex scenes as non-arousing (Allen’s bachelor party in Friends and Benefits comes to mind).

All in all, being a “safety guy” has a price that I hadn’t quite been aware of before. However, I’m certainly glad I am.

This past week, respect for writers came up independently in two places I read regularly online. Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote a post that included a rant about disrepect from editors at major publishing companies. As an established successful writer, she was appalled at the way they were dismissive and fundamentally unprofessional.

Independently, Remittance Girl wrote about Circlet Press’s twitter stream in which they post snark about some of what they find in their slush pile (and Remittance Girl was following on Catherine Leary’s post here). Both of them make good points about how doing so is unprofessional. By posting their snark, Circlet Press is showing a huge amount of disrespect for the fledgling writers that submit to them.

Honestly, both cases hurt secondhand.

Yeah, I know there are crappy writers out there. And I know there are folks who are delusional about their own abilities. I’ve read many such writers. I also know that there’s a tendency to inflate one’s own worth and even blow off the ‘old fogies’ who aren’t in the trenches with you at the moment, even though they may once have been.

Disrespect is easy. My five year old nephew has mastered condescension and my peers had snark down before we got out of elementary school. It doesn’t take much skill to put people down. And it doesn’t take much emotional armor to feel justified in doing so.

But at what cost?

I posted my first erotica story to usenet back in 1991. I got snarky comments. Between 1991 and 2003, I wrote a grand total of three erotica stories–all for private audiences of one. The snark hurt and turned me off of writing anything in any genre.

Was my writing in 1991 good? Not really. I’ve grown quite a bit both as a writer and as an observant human.

But in 2003, with the encouragement of some very supportive male friends, my then-girlfriend-now-wife, and an online community, I started again. And look what’s happened. I’m not going to win a Pulitzer anytime soon, but my stories can certainly entertain. Sometimes they even touch people.

None of these stories would exist if the disrepect directed at me in 1991 had been all I’d received.

In my experience, good writing requires reaching into your gut and exposing a little of yourself. It might be your heart, your soul, or your fantasies and fetishes, but it’s out there. An astute reader of my stories could probably put together a sexual psychological profile of me as good as any therapist. Even if I’m just showing my creative side, I’m exposed.

And that needs to be respected. The words may suck. The story may be a disaster. There might be five typos per line. The writer still put themselves out there. They still stepped up and tried.

And that deserves respect. For new and old writers. We advance as individuals when we put ourselves out there. We advance as a culture when we encourage people to keep doing so.

Anything less just hurts us all.

This past week, I realized that three publishers are overdue on getting back to me. As a result, I get to write the “did you get it” queries. One of them I won’t write. It was a snail mail submission and their website explicitly says, “don’t stalk us.” Okay, I can do that.

The thing that irritates me is that not replying to someone is fundamentally rude. They’re saying that I’m not worth their time. If I’d been obnoxious or a stalker, that might be true. But polite communication on my part doesn’t deserve being blown off.

This is one area where I do my damnedest to practice what I preach. I’ve had an occasional email or phone call slip through the cracks, and there have been some that I’ve had huge emotional barriers to overcome in order to reply (a couple of calls with ex-girlfriends come to mind). But I do my best not to be rude.

True, politeness has social benefits. It’s also true that in some cultures politeness is more of a lubricant than others. But for me, this is about more than manners.

For me, it’s a matter of honor. Now I don’t mean reputation, which is what others think of you, but honor, which is what you know to be true of yourself. Honor is personal integrity, pure and simple.

For me, honor means striving to keep my word. I’m not perfect, but I’ve become very good at only promising what I know I can deliver. And then delivering it.

It’s actually gotten me quite far in my career. I’m not the smartest guy in my field. I’m not the best talker or schmoozer (actually I rather suck at the latter). But I deliver what I promise with a much higher percentage than the average guy in my field.

But I don’t pursue honor for the career benefits, nor the relationship ones (deeper, albeit fewer, friendships and romantic relationships). I pursue it for the sense of self and the way it makes me feel.

It honestly hurts when I’m dishonorable. My gut wrenches and I tend to obsess about what I did. Stuff I did decades ago can still haunt me on lonely dark evenings. I can usually find my way to self-forgiveness, but it’s a bumpy road and so it’s much better to not have to take that journey.

That’s not to say that honor and lying are incompatible. Sometimes lying is very honorable. And sometimes even rudeness is honorable. I can think of a number of people where I’d be more honorable to refuse to shake their hands than to pretend that nothing’s amiss between us.

But rudeness as an extension of sloppiness? Of considering others to not be worthy of simple courtesies? That’s not honorable. And I certainly would like to see more of that from publishers. An autoreply “we got your submission” is cheap. Learn to use it, and then actually reply to authors in the timeframe you put on your website. It’s not hard, and it’s both honorable and polite.

I recently read an erotica story that hit home a bit more than I expected. No link, because it’s unpublished, but the theme was on the crisis of middle age. Two couples, long time friends, recalled a time twenty-five years ago when they’d swapped partners. Now well into their forties, one of the men struggled with his life and kept wondering if that had been the era when things had been really good for them all.

It hit home in part because this is my birthday week. I’m 43 now, which is right in that midlife crisis sweet spot. On the one hand, life is good. On the other… I can definitely feel the tug and the swirl of the age.

Now I’m not likely to go through the standard trope crises. I already have the trophy wife, thank you very much. I bought the sports car eight years ago. I’m already going through life changes as kid #2 will be born this coming summer. It’s a little disconcerting to realize I’ll be eligible for my pension just as she’s graduating from college, but that’s what happens when you get a late start.

But I still wonder what I’ve done with my life at times. I still wonder, like the characters in the story, if I let the best times slide by.

Mostly these days, those questions are career oriented. I’ve already done the “maybe I should have fucked more women when I was younger” pining that so many seem to do. I know a wilder sex life won’t bring back my youth, or relieve the angst that sometimes shows up at bedtime on Sunday nights when I wonder where my weekend went.

Instead, I think back to my pre-teen years, and the stories I wrote then. I think back to the books I wanted to create, and my desires to be a reporter because that’s what writing seemed to be.

Of course in high school I discovered how little reporters make and how much of their job is pure scut work and went into a better field. I had an amazing science teacher which helped nudge the switch. Well, it’s been 25 years since I graduated from high school. The cynicism has set in and the utter frustrations at the mundane aspects of the day job overwhelm the pleasures.

And instead, I daydream about writing. I wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck with fiction from those early days. Would I have been happier? Would I have been more fulfilled? Or would I have been just as cynical and just as unhappy with the 9 to 5?

I’m all too cognizant of the difficulties in switching careers at midlife. The handcuffs around my wrists are pretty gold, after all. As long as I wear them, I can support a family of four. Following my heart and daydreams has a cost beyond forcing me to eat a lot of Ramen. It’s not a cost I’m willing to pay. So the writing has to be a ‘lunchtime and late nights’ activity until… when? Until at least a day that is not today.

Meanwhile, there’s all that time I can’t write when I can wonder. Getting dressed. Sitting in the back of yet another boring meeting. Sometimes story ideas float through my mind. And sometimes… sometimes I just wonder about the choice of career I made.

This past week, I received a rejection for my science fiction story. Like all rejections, it stung, but part of the business of writing is being able to shrug off such rejections and keep going.

So I did what I’ve found works best in dealing with rejection–I got back on the horse right away.

And I do mean right away. I resubmitted the story to the next publisher the same day I received the rejection.

In doing so, I basically cut past all the wallowing that often accompanies rejection. I’ve learned that rejection doesn’t mean “it’s me” like we all too often want to believe. Often, it’s about the fit or something else entirely. It also put me back in control of what I could control–keeping the story in submission somewhere.

‘Immediately get back on the horse’ was not an easy lesson to learn. The only way I really got there was to be rejected a lot. The first time I looked for a job, right out of school, I mailed 101 resumes before I got an offer. When I was engaged in internet dating, I probably got ignored by 80% of the women I emailed. I had a myriad of first dates that didn’t lead to second dates. At some point, the rejection lost it’s heavy import and was left with just a little residual sting.

And in the process, I started discovering that ‘getting back on the horse’ helped. I wasn’t too conscious of it, though, until my penultimate romantic relationship broke up.

I was madly in love with her, but it had become clear we were a bad match. After three months of struggling, we finally called it quits. I drove to her town and we broke up over dinner.

On the way home, I called one of my former ‘friends with benefits.’ I asked one simple question: “X and I broke up. Is that offer to share your bed still open?”

Wonderful woman that she is, she said yes. We spent the following Saturday night having non-stop sex until we were both too tired to continue.

And with that, the sting of rejection was gone. As far as I’m concerned, it’s definitely a great way to handle rejection.

This past weekend, the neighbors who inspired Babe in the Night threw another party. It wasn’t loud by objective standards, but I could hear just enough of the stereo and the laughing to keep me awake and cranky. I finally retreated to the guest bedroom where other ambient noises drowned out the distant revelers.

Of course, what was really annoying wasn’t their party, but my reaction. I’ll turn 43 in a month, but once again I was reduced emotionally to 13. It’s annoying that this happens and keeps happening. I’m damn familiar with the scars from that age and how they’ve affected me through the years. I’ve certainly done the counseling, inner work, and life rearrangement to move on. But every now and then… bam, there they are.

Like I said, it’s annoying. Why does it take so little to make 30 years of maturity disappear from my psyche?

I won’t rehash the scars and stories from that era of my life here–they sneak out enough into my stories as it is. Nor will I engage in the justifications and rationalizations and amateur psychology on what’s going on and why I do it. Been through all that. Have a few more t-shirts than most. Suffice it to say, sometimes the “popular kids” get under my skin and I feel excluded, regardless of reality.

But I do wonder how unique I am. Is part of the popularity of coming of age stories due to the fact that so many of us have similar early life triggers? Are stories about outsiders, like the TV series Glee, popular in part because so many of us recall not being popular and want to watch others where it’s okay? And are we picking at the scabs or actually doing some good when we revisit those periods?

I suspect that such issues spill over into far more than fiction. I once heard that if you wanted to understand Washington DC, the best degree to have was in Developmental Psychology. The implication was that too much of our country and our world was being jerked around to satisfy personal issues rather than anything that might be construed as for the greater good.

But I do hope that since I at least recognize when the shifts in mental age occur, I can avoid such jerking reality around. The night of the party, it was like, “oh, hell, here we go again” and by morning it was pretty much gone. After all 43, is a lot more fun an age to live.

In last week’s musing on lingerie, I told a story about my college roommate and lingerie. That reminded me of another story where the moral is about the value of being respectful.

It was early December one year in college. I’d gone shopping for a Christmas present for my girlfriend and, in walking through a strip mall, decided to stop in a classy lingerie store that happened to be there. Later I’d learn that it was the most high end store in town, but at the time, I was a bit naive. Nonetheless, I wandered in.

The store was impressive and the two older ladies working there were the definition of MILF, though that term didn’t come into being for a few more decades. I was clearly just a college student, in jeans and a sweatshirt, and definitely in over my head. Nonetheless, I knew my place. I was respectful to the ladies, and their wares. I wandered around and let them help me a bit, before eventually picking out an inexpensive purchase.

In the process, I spent some time talking with one of the ladies who turned out to be the owner. I expressed my admiration for the classiness of her store. As I was ringing up my purchase, she asked if I would like an invitation to a private lingerie modeling show the store was having the following week. I swallowed my surprise and said yes.

So the night of the party, I persuaded my roommate to come with me. I was a bit nervous and, well, he had a car and it would have been a long walk otherwise. We showed up punctually and nicely dressed. The owner remembered me, greeted us as I introduced my roommate and gave us each a glass of champagne.

Now, at the time we were under 21, which made it illegal for us to be drinking champagne. This was not, however, something we were going to call attention to. In fact, I consciously decided I would ‘act older,’ which meant doing my best to not appear like the neophyte I was. If we didn’t make jackasses of ourselves, I figured, no one would question what we were doing there.

To my then-surprise and now-not-surprised-at-all, the older men present weren’t under that constraint. Many of them were loud, openly lecherous, and drinking very heavily. The concept of ‘class’ was something I’m sure that some of them didn’t grasp. That was okay–it meant my roommate and I could just move away from them in the room, talk quietly, and not attract any attention.

So it soon became time for the modeling. The owner had the men form two lines that defined the sides of the ‘runway.’ The models (there were four) would change in the dressing rooms in the back, walk down between us, stop at various points to twirl and tell us what they were wearing, and then circle back after they’d completed the line.

That said, due to the layout of the store, it wasn’t a straight ‘runway’. It has a small jog, about eight feet long, to get past a heavy clothes rack. So the models would walk straight for a while, then make a 90 degree left turn, go about eight feet, make a 90 degree right turn, and continue forward again.

My roommate and I happened to be standing, quietly and respectfully, at the corner of the second jog. The most obnoxious older men were standing at the corner of the first jog.

This turned out to be unexpectedly significant, because when the models stopped at the other corner, they’d get catcalls and hands they had to bat away, and other immature behavior directed at them. When they stopped in front of us, they got smiles, comments like “wow, beautiful,” and the wide gaze of happy voyeurs. It took about two passes before every one of the four models was stopping in front of us instead of the other guys. They’d smile back, do their slow turns, and even flirt with us a bit.

Additionally, the women were wearing off the rack lingerie, which meant that many of the teddies and cammies and other silk tops were both scoop necked and loose. I’m 6’3″. That means when a model would stop in front of me and lean forward a bit, she’d give me a view straight down her top.

I saw many bare breasts that night. I even got caught, with one model asking, in a sultry voice, “do you like what you see?” I blushed, she chuckled, and she shook her breasts slightly to tease me even further. None of the models seemed to mind.

Now if this were an erotica story, one or more of the models would have gone home with me or my roommate. But, of course, I clearly had a girlfriend and they were clearly looking for their paychecks and then a chance to get out of there. So nothing much beyond the pleasure of looking at women in skimpy lingerie happened that night.

With one exception. Eventually the rowdy guys figured out what was going on and jokingly complained. The next model through told them that we were being respectful, and that’s why we were getting the better views. She then invited me to feel how soft the fabric of her outfit was. Which I did, to the envy of the other guys.

The experience stuck with me for some time after that. Being a respectful voyeur could pay off. And later, there were many times it did.

Early in life, I discovered that I was a voyeur. It may have been access to my dad’s Playboys or something more ingrained and natural. I just discovered I liked looking at naked women.

As I got older, the mere sight of bare flesh stopped being interesting to me. I started to discover that the energy conveyed by a naked woman was as or more important than the fact that her clothes were gone. Close ups of body parts became dull. Traditional nudism, which represses sexual energy, also lost most of its charge. I even remember, in my twenties, when a strip club trip felt empty for the first time. Despite being an enterprise devoted to faux sexuality and bare female skin, I was bored. The dancers were clearly just going through the motions and the motions themselves were no longer of interest to me.

Now that turned out to be somewhat ironic, because a few years earlier, I’d been a regular at a club where I’d spent more than a healthy share of dough. There, almost all of my funds went to a single dancer—a fact rather well known among the club staff. In fact, one day I walked in and before I even sat down another dancer walked over and said, “she’s not here.” I shrugged and decided to return another day.

What made that one dancer special? She took her dancing seriously. She constantly worked on developing new moves and new tricks. She often came up with new costumes. When she gave private dances (lap dances weren’t legal in that jurisdiction then), she had a whole host of moves and looks to draw my eyes exactly where she wanted them. It was a silent “look at me.” “Look at my eyes.” “Look at my hip.” “Now look at my bare breasts.”

I was entranced. I was enthralled. If they’d had an ATM in the club, I’d have been broke.

That “look at me” energy has turned out to be the charge I get from being a voyeur. Peeping Tom type voyeurism doesn’t work for me because, besides the consent issues, the energy isn’t there. The woman has to know she’s being watched. She has to want to be watched, or at least looked at for a while.

Sometimes that energy can be captured on film, but not always. There’s a coyness to it, an “aren’t you in for a treat,” that’s absent in most porn. It’s naughty, not nasty. The ‘view’ is a treat—not something that’s just a flaunt.

I think that the “look at me”/“I’m looking” energy exchange is similar to top/bottom energy in a good bdsm scene. It circulates and is reciprocal. My looking feeds her pleasure at being seen, which feeds my pleasure at looking even more. It’s sexual, but far beyond simple stimulation or the quest for an O. The thrill is both more intense and more subtle. Fine wine instead of a greasy burger.

There are of course many ways to enact this energetic exchange—lingerie, semi-public flashing, and even traditional burlesque can also pick up the same flair. It also doesn’t matter too much if the woman has model quality looks or not. I’d rather have an average looking woman who’s sending ‘look at me’ signals than a beauty who’s bored and taking my gaze for granted. There’s no magic in body language that conveys I’m just one of millions. Instead, a garter belt and a smile can overcome extra weight or physical ‘flaws’ galore.

For me, that’s the core of voyeurism, and the enchantment. She conveys “look at me”—and I comply.

I submitted Deep Dish to my first publisher. As expected, it was harder to hit ‘send’ than I expected. I intellectually knew that it wasn’t a big deal to do so, and I knew intellectually that if I got rejected, it wasn’t a big deal. That didn’t stop the nerves.

And the thing is, of course, that I’ve been rejected plenty of times in my life in a wide variety of venues before now. When I first started applying for jobs out of school, I mailed 101 resume’s and had 19 interviews before I got an offer. I probably went on dates with close to a hundred women before I met my wife. And that’s not counting the women who I tried to reach through online dating sites that never bothered to even acknowledge my email.

That hasn’t prevented it from being nervous and sweat inducing each time I step into a new arena.

For the pattern in each case was the same. I’m on edge about the first time. I get rejected and it stings more than I anticipated. But I pick myself up and try again. I get a second rejection which stings again. After a few more rejections, the sting gets less and less, as if I’m building up an immunity or a tolerance. And then at some point, it becomes almost a game and I find I don’t care.

This was literally true in the year before I met my wife. I was online dating and I reached the point where I said, before going on a first date, “either I’ll have a good time or I’ll have a story to tell.” The fear of rejection was long gone.

So I know I’ll eventually stop being nervous and submitting to publishers will feel like old hate. But damn, going through this again and again is getting old. My brain knows better but the gut continues to churn…