For many years, I was a vibrator girl. I had a box full of toys. Dildos, thick and fleshy. Wands, angular and hard. Little vibrators and big-ass ‘massagers.’
I got all my toys at Babeland. I would sit for hours at their shop on 10th and Pine, reading books like Real Live Nude Girl, Sex For One, and True Lust.
When Miss Leather 2009 passed through Babeland on her World Tour, I volunteered to be her demo girl. I bent over and let her flog me as the small audience gasped and applauded.
My Eros has always been strong. My curiosity about all things sexual is insatiable.
But I wasn’t all hard plastic and synthetic lube.
I also have an organic hippie-girl inside.
Once, I fucked myself with a cucumber. I selected it carefully at Madison Market. I lifted and inspected a number of those phallic vegetables before deciding on the perfect one. I wondered if other shoppers could tell what I was doing.
At home, I cleaned it carefully, anointed it with oil and slid it into my body. I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, it’s okay. Nothing wildly exciting, but I do love that I’m communing with nature.’
I started traveling when I was nineteen.
London, Paris, Barcelona.
The Swiss Alps and Italian Riviera.
Moody hand-rolled cigarettes in Prague.
At The Greenhouse in Amsterdam, I fell in love with an olive-skinned bartender. She was tall and slender with long dark curls. She poured pints and washed glasses. Men flirted with her and I listened. I learned that she was a dancer. I could see it in her body when she reached up on tiptoes to hang glasses on the drying rack.
For three days I visited the Greenhouse, rolling joints and pretending not to watch her. I spoke with expats and got very stoned.
From time to time her eyes met mine, and we quickly looked away.
In between puffing and chatting with my neighbors, I sketched drawings on the backs of coasters:
Artistic waves
Sunbeams
Calligraphic letters
On the third night, I began to draw her naked. I imagined her rounded breasts and long, flat belly as she lay on her side, `a la Kate Winslet in ‘Titanic.’
Paint me like one of your French girls…
When I was finished, I asked for my bill. She hand-wrote it and passed it across the bar. I took it with a shy smile.
I pulled out a handful of heavy Dutch guilders and set them beside the coaster. The image I had sketched was unmistakably her, nude and staring back with dark eyes.
She looked at the coaster and then back at me. We held eye contact for a moment, and then I walked away.