Pagan Boy’s Crush: A (’93-Present) Friend Story

Though neither I nor Pagan Boy would have used the word “polyamory,” there was sort of another presence in our relationship. Pagan Boy’s Crush was one of his cool friends who sometimes met us at Basement Rave Place. I looked up to her so much—in my memory, she-of-then is kind of a goddess sculpture, dressed in fitted silver or coral dresses as opposed to my grubby goth slips and too-short polyester dresses. Her boyfriend was a hippie-cute straight boy with glossy blond curls. He seemed a little out of place at the club, but maybe I was just biased in Pagan Boy’s favor.

One night, after we said goodbye to them outside the diner and started off on the long drive to PB’s, he said the most magical five words in my then-as-now love lexicon:

“I made you a mix tape.”

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

In some ways, the mix was totally us: “Let’s Go to Bed” by the Cure! (Robert Smith is a milkshake! We always said.) Sound bites from MST3K (“Mike! Mike!” from Manos, our fave.) and the campy pornos PB favored.

But a lot of the tape was…bitter. Crush bitter:

“Tempted”-Squeeze

“Wave of Mutilation” –The Pixies

“Boy”—Book of Love

 (OMG I need to make a Crush Bitter playlist from the nowtimes ASAP!) (I’m not really feeling like that but the songs would be treasures.)

I meeeeeeaaaaaan it was a good mix, but as he drove us through the early morning, he said sheepishly:

“I was thinking about (crush) when I made this.”

I really don’t remember his pining for her feeling like a problem, don’t remember being annoyed about my mixtape being a proxy bitter-love note. I was kinda like, yeah, I get it.

Pagan Boy’s Crush and I had our own thing going on—is there such a thing as platonic grinding? (If so, it would be a good name for my entire memoir.) She was the first girl I danced with in kind of a sexy way. I want to stress how much this wasn’t a for-his-gaze (only) Girls Gone Wild kind of thing. When we danced together, we were whole, and joyful, transcendent and so perfectly ourselves. We were beautiful and free on the checkered dance floor, definitely not giving the faintest fuck about anyone else.

Chaste though we (mostly) were, “our song” was all the raunch:

“You Suck”—Consolidated (feat. Yeastie Girls)

Mostly, Pagan Boy’s Crush seemed like a sophisticated dream, someone I wouldn’t have known how to really connect with because I was such a mess and she was so…her!

But then! Almost 30 years later! She reached out to me in a side-chat at Pagan Boy’s Zoom funeral! And it turns out we’re like emotional sisters. Our lives all these years have been so different, but it felt like we got each other’s whole deal right away. Now we talk once a month or so and I tell her my homebody adventures, she tells me what things look like in whatever state she’s traveling through (Very Nomadland but without the bucket situation!) and we compare notes on what hijinks our brains are up to lately.

I don’t believe in the afterlife or “divinely ordained” but it’s hard to not feel like Pagan Boy made us into a friend match. It makes me feel magical and hopeful about what other unexpected connections might be waiting out in the world for me, hopefully not just on Zoom.

BFF (Sweetie) Appreciation Post

First of all, it is LONG past time I changed her blog nickname. These days a “sweetie” only slips out if we’re under some kind of duress and forget ourselves. When we were divorcing (holy moly!) eight years ago I didn’t dare wish that we would still be this close. So close that I just texted her some concert info in case none of my more concert-enjoying friends want to go. It is our system and it works.

 Anyway, we were on the way to pick up our new glasses together (totes normal ex-wife activity) and I was reading her this post https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2021/07/wheres-all-my-body-positivity.html?zx=8607b6472509cebb about all of my recent/eternal fears and insecurities, and she just started to cry.

 I apologized immediately. It’s a real jerk move to read aloud paragraphs about feeling unlovable and unfuckable to someone who has loved me SO THOROUGHLY since just after 9/11 and who went every extra mile in the sexytimes department too. Since I made the shift to mostly preferring guys, I’ve always hated the way that preference could make her feel discounted, and could sometimes make me blind to the many, many kinds of love I’m steeped in every day. (Obvs I wouldn’t say any of that ever to someone ELSE who had a shift in gender-preference! In the words of Laci Mosley, I’m rude to me!)

 After a few minutes of me yammering my labyrinth of well-worn apologies, she sniffled and said “I just want you to get what you want!” 

That’s always been true. Even while jealousy, loss, and my own recklessness were tornado-ing through our marriage, she always rooted for me. If someone didn’t like me back, she was indignant like, how dare he! (Not TO him, of course.) If someone hurt me in a not-fun way, she could be relied upon to toy with the idea of Gorilla Gluing all of their car doors shut. If, say for instance, a venue broke my limits and I got stuck in a nightmare thread about it, she’d create a dummy FetLife account and argue with rapey Doms and victim-blamey, more-game-than-thou subs late into the night. 

Even in the fun, festive times, she wasn’t at ease out in the kink world. I mean, she sure tied knots like she was at ease! But she was often triggered and scared, often overwhelmed by the dicks and the screams and the bruises. But she did it all for me anyway, because love makes you brave. She just wanted me to have what I wanted! Maybe more than I did! 

I’ve always felt like kind of a dumbass, in the midst of all that love and still ACHING with longing, worrying I wasn’t lovable while I was so clearly being loved. In the now times, it’s a challenge to remember how to hang out with people besides BFF. We kept each other alive through Bernie and Trump and Covid and “stop the steal.”

But now, of course, the longing is back, my guy-crazy tendencies alternately coursing and cowering. I’m still struggling to accept my guy-liking self and muddle my way along to whatever snuggly future I might find. On the way, it’s good to remember how much I’ve been loved, in all the ways.

Just Some Sexy Fat!

 

Please note: I did use a pink filter. I'm not really this close to the color of an Animal Crossing peach!

It's not a CURE for a body-size freakout, but some time between the covers with no PJs on sure helps. I couldn't quite get the angles I wanted--I either need a selfie stick or a photographer or both. 

Where’s All My Body Positivity?!

 

But maybe a little. Because of the patriarchy?

 

I mean, I still have it for other people! I still think every kind of body can be sexy and spankable and lovable. Pagan Boy, at something like 400 pounds, was one of the sexiest humans ever to grace my life.

And most days, I can still look in the mirror or gaze into the Zoom screen and see cuteness. I can still ravish myself wholeheartedly and go to sleep with a cozy smile. Objectively, I still know my body is fuckable and maybe even loveable when the right one comes along.

But throughout this latest crush, depression brain has combined with post-quar lonely horniness to say things to myself that I would never in a million years say (Or think!) to or about a friend:

“I must be delusional to think anyone could be attracted to me at this size/age.”

“Am I officially too fat for all men? Have I crossed the point of no return? And same for my age?”

I could have been intuiting that I would be too fat for Poly Friends’ Partner in particular. “Wow it HAS been a while” he said he saw me at a gig a few weeks ago. I am quite a bit fatter than I was in my thirties (Like 320 vs 250) but I’d still felt gorgeous when I’d left the house that day! I’m a little freaked that maybe the gorgeousness will never translate anymore.

“Why can’t they see me?” Has been the thought-thorn in my side since Quarantine Crush. I always wonder if he didn’t tell me he had a partner because he just didn’t see 45-year-old me as sexual at all! I definitely don’t look like the 26-year old California person he knew when we were first friends!

I know some of this just-be-my-neutered-confidant stuff I get from guys just comes from good old fashioned patriarchal fat-phobia. It’s hard to get people to see a spark of desire when they’re programmed to see…nothing. No one. Or at least not the person I want to be.

Not looking to guys from the past should help, but they should be able to see me.

Should statements.

When I started this blog way back when, I dove into every body adventure I could find. I loved and learned so much, but of course it couldn’t solve the fundamental problem of feeling unwantable and unlovable. I remember, toward the end of the naked years, the horror of being naked in a crowded room and realizing that I could never be naked enough, skilled enough, game enough, easy enough, brave enough, share-y enough to really be seen. It’s an awful feeling to be naked in rooms that couldn’t perceive me as a whole human, and where I couldn’t reach others as whole humans either. Desolate. (I’m talking about literal nakedness but it occurs to me that it’s how I felt in my old poet life sometimes as well.)

And now, this more (mostly) private and reserved summer, life is still just really really hard. I’m remembering how to work full time, which, yay! But also I feel buried and lost and disoriented a lot of the time. I want to both run right at every human I’ve ever known and hide from everyone forever. I want to go to the movies every day but also just stay home with my Animal Crossing and my Friends rewatch. I’m processing grief and estrangement and wondering how to save voting rights. I don’t really know what my life is at the moment, as I sure don’t know if the freedom we have right now is just a respite from tyranny and new variants. Nobody knows.

So, no leaping, no bravery, no forcing myself to be vulnerable. I know how to be kind to my body: swim in the pool or ocean. Remember to put on sunscreen. Eat peaches. Go out for ice cream. Go sit in the air conditioning with my BFF and see Black Widow. Hug and high-five when it makes sense and hope to kiss a cute guy someday. Paint, write, sleep. I think I know how to love myself.

When (Awesome) Sluttiness Feels Like Armor

Possibly wine is stronger that it used to be pre-pando? My first going-for-a-drink since before quarantine was a really fun fiasco that kinda helped me get around to at least sort of knowing what my deal is.

When Poly Friends’ Partner asked if I wanted to hang out a few weeks ago there was no indication that it was other than friendly, but an OH MY GOD CAN I PLEASE JUMP ON HIM bolt of excitement came out of basically nowhere and made everything distracting and prolific and fun for a little while. I guess I could have asked him the above all-caps question in advance but I really did want to be there as a friend—we hadn’t talked in at least ten years, and it seemed like a friend-match that made a lot of sense.

So while he was telling me all about his various connections and I was feeling both covetous and compersiony, I did SUCH a good job of being Ms. Cheerleader of Other People’s Snuggling while he used the word “friend” like a BILLION times but was also pretty flirty so it was pleasantly confusing, but not too much so. He talked about music and domming and writing enough for me to wish we could be a thing, and the amount I was hitting on him was, in the words of Jack Donaghy, a lot to very.

Poly Friends’ Partner’s life is so glowy and connected, so warm and open, that I felt bowled over with longing to be a part of it, or rather, to be the kind of person who’d be a part of it. It wasn’t disingenuous when I brazened my way through stories about my slutty bunch of years or nudged him for more details of his own adventures, but I was trying to be brave, to be tough, to hide the all-caps sexy feelings behind gameness so I wouldn’t have to face rejection or seem like a threat to his lovely bubble of a world.

I found myself in a pinkly drunken haze sitting on a stranger’s stoop waiting for a Lyft that didn’t come and then finding coffee and my favorite busline. I ended the night yammering loopily on the phone to Sweetie about how I was 40% SO EMBARRASSED and 60% ELATED and how I LOVE wine and I LOVE my busline and how everything was very confusing but not really.

I knew all I had to do about PFP was..NOT.

This morning, when I got a text that read like “Hear ye, hear ye, this is your official notice that I don’t want to snuggle” followed by a winky face (How am I almost forty-seven years old and vexed by a winky face?!) (I know it was meant as a kindness but honestly poly people it’s too much with the communication sometimes. I can figure out you don’t wanna without the Magna Carta).I was hurt and sad and disappointed, but I also understood that I was trying to get back to a place where I definitely don’t belong.

All the adorable poly stuff feels like a (SO CUTE) should statement, as a therapist might say. It sometimes feels like a world I have to get back to in order to be seen at all, like in order to be good enough for men, that I have to find a place in the puzzle of poly. Like I have to figure out how to want both less and more than I do.

I want someone who just wants me. I want to be someone’s favorite. I can’t make myself be any less than the full Call Me Maybe, as frustrating as it is sometimes and as terrifying as men seem to find it. In a few days or weeks this crush will simmer down and I’ll find things to do with all this pent up energy. I’ll try to keep admitting that I want the rom-com even if it seems SO DUMB of a thing to hope for.

 

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part Three

 

This poster was at the top of the stairs to his apartment and is probably why the whole ribbons thing. 

At the Basement Rave Place, there was a long grimy beige couch across from the unisex (that’s Nineties for all-gender) bathroom where we’d go to recover after we danced too much. I remember it as sort of a heap of dance-tired limbs, four to seven people on the couch at any given time. He reminded me way later that once on said couch I handed him my underwear, no doubt soaked with sweat and excitement. (Gotta hand it to nineteen-year old me for the brazenness! Love it so much!) With a deliciously smug nod, he balled them up and put them in his shirt pocket and patted his chest happily. Ohboy that smile.

(Sidenote: Dear Pagan Boy, can you dirty-haunt me ASAP? If anyone can, it’s you. I don’t really believe in an afterlife but you’d be a makeout king there.)

I named him Pagan Boy, but really he was the first one to properly touch me like a MAN. Plus, my love of fat fingers has been well documented. (Are you there, Fireguy? It’s me, nostalgic!) Almost thirty years later, I can feel the warm confidence of his hand as he not-subtle-at-all pushed up my pink polyester dress. (Whenever I wasn’t wearing a black vintage slip, I was wearing something a diner waitress might wear in an indie movie. This dress had such a cute pointy white collar and little pearly buttons.)

I lay toward him across his lap as he slipped his fingers lazily up and down, sometimes thumbing my clit but mostly just meandering, leisurely. Absolutely no one around us cared, if they even noticed. Around us was a blur of fake fur and glitter and hot androgynous hairstyles—sort of a Bladerunner aesthetic except cuddly. The rhythm of his slippery fingers was tuned to the constant pulse of techno, mostly house. I don’t think it ever really left my ears from about ’93 to ’96.

He pushed his fingers inside me and I kissed him to quiet myself, though any sound I would’ve made would have been swallowed up by, I don’t know, the Mortal Kombat theme song.

The kissing was urgent, like we might accidentally devour each other down to the bones, but his hands stayed slow.

The drive from the club to his house was at least an hour long, but he was an expert at driving one-handed. In the 3am dark, I sat in the passenger seat with my legs spread and my sweaty, be-glittered head on his shoulder, breathing in his ears or just breathing in the smell of him—earth, beer, testosterone, cigarettes—a smell you could lay down and cozily die in.

We stumbled up the steps of his apartment, tangled in each other and losing clothes as we went. The sun was coming. As we cuddled into his too-small bed, he held my face, stared into my eyes, and kissed me some more. There wouldn’t be sleep.