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| It was definitely the fifth of May that I got the commemorative
calendar. We were in Santa Fe. I remember the adobe; the window;
the busted screen curling back from the paint-peeling wooden frame,
long flakes of white. The stark terra cotta landscape with twisted
naked trees, some vivid with the chartreuse slivers of new green.
Yes, it was Cinco de Mayo. I was smoking a cigarette just because
my husband hated it. I really wanted to quit, I just couldn’t
relinquish my remaining vice. I looked at the paper wrinkling
white to black to the pale gray of ash and thought of sand on
the beach, the silicon grit of it, not the soft gold that coats
the oh so photogenic Southwest. I resented Santa Fe, its quasi-spiritual
miasma, its quartz crystal-sucking neo-hippies, its Kokopelli
kitsch, its Coyote Trickster tchotschke shillers lining the highway,
our hostess’s bad sculpture and frequently explained extreme sensitivity
to environmental toxins. The entire place made me want to wear
nothing but PVC or black leather, eat raw beef, and stuff any
proffered turquoise or obsidian bear fetish up the offerer’s asshole.
So instead, I snuck a cigarette. How slowly my blood plods pulsing through my limbs, unrolling with the industrial certitude of the double-red-line depiction of the interstate system on a pastel map. A document, yes, my body is a chart of fluctuations, incessant demands, consistent needings and excretings, all quantifiable. Everything can be weighed, measured, calibrated by the ounce or by the pound. I need a pound of flesh, a good pounding, the hell pounded out of me. My spouse mi esposo my husband, Otto Wistler, is not doing it for me. I consider this as I suck on the cigarette, the dry vegetable dust of the burning tobacco amplified by my discontent, sensitive to the ricochets of every particular molecular pellet plummeting to my lungs. If touched, I will explode. I could tell you everything about the calendar. Sometimes, my memory is okay. It’s for ‘El Rincon del Amor’ the country of love. A restaurant promotion. The place was too nauseatingly scenic and picturesque and served green chiles. Everywhere in Santa Fe served green chiles. When we picked up the white Ford Taurus at AVIS they were serving green chiles. The gas station where we tanked up had stone bowls of green chiles on top of the pumps. The roadside stands with Kachina figures, rocks with dancing exploited flute wanker Kokopelli engraved upon, huge clay pots, turquoise jewelry, and inevitable obsidian bear fetishes also sell green chiles. I seethed against them all as I smoked the illicit cigarette and stared out the screen “So, it’s time to go to dinner,” he said. “You coming?” I nodded and took one final deep inhale, letting the smoke roll out of my lungs as slowly as possible. We were in constant passive-aggressive battle. If he’d been standing close enough, I would have blown smoke on him, just to see him flinch and sputter. Instead, I flick the butt out the window and grab my sunglasses. It’s overcast, but I know that he hates them: two too small too square shades of reflective funky bright blue. I grab the bare hide snap jacket, a hand-me-down, that I also know that he loathes, but whenever he complains about it I point out that if someone wasn’t in grad school maybe I could afford a new one. Such pettiness and recriminations constitute the glue of our partnership. But at ‘The Country of Love.’ The company includes my spouse, Otto, our hostess, the inept and environmentally sensitive sculptress, Daria, and her husband, Bushnell. Everything is rough-hewn timbers, stucco, wrought iron, dramatic paintings of Aztec warriors with vanquished swooning maidens, and green chiles. Daria talks about her work and my eyes glaze over instantly. I pass the meal in a daze. For dessert, we are served flan with a green chile coulis, gratis, for Cinco de Mayo. Otto drives us back to the house. His Adam’s apple repulses me. The calendar on the wall covers a crack. I don’t know why I kept it. For comic effect more than sentiment, most likely. The dancer wears a huge magenta skirt. It twirls from her experienced hips, a flower as big as the rings of Saturn. There are white underskirts. Her ankles are not dainty. The plaza is decorated with banners. It is vintage photostock, so all the colors fall into round flat patty-cake monochrome shapes. Black hair. White teeth. Blue skies. Violent swath of rose red skirt. Bushnell’s motorcycle was parked on the rutted drive. I went outside and stood next to it, lit a cigarette. I belched the flavor of green chiles. He appeared. I said “Hey,” my voice dropping an octave. The kind of “Hey” that means “Hello, Cowboy,” or “Hey, Sailor,” that means “You could have me” and “Do me now,” or even, “I’m in season and I need to get laid this instant.” With an uncharacteristic display of decorum, I instead say, “Nice bike.” “Thanks,” Bushnell replies. “Would you like to go for a ride?” That translates as “You’re on, Mama.” “Let’s go fuck” generally strikes me as the appropriate degree of social investment in males, so I feel relieved. At this point, I actually look at him. Reasonably attractive, although long hair and beards generally don’t do anything for me. At least the turquoise ring is a thunderbird, not a bear fetish or paw-print. At this point, it’s a dick and a motorcycle. I’m there. And I’m there. We’re there, at the crest of the ridge, looking down at the trees thinking about first leaves, the ones that already have them, scattered houses, some with a barn or outbuilding, water tank for the livestock. I am nothing but hungry creature, and am fine with that, inner thighs nicely warmed up by the machine, familiar hum lingering, sharing a cigarette for the ritual of it. The state is one of the poorest in the union. The tourists are obnoxious, but they buy bad sculpture. The green chiles are abundant. The colors are astounding. There is the consolation of nature. “Oh, is there?” I reply. And we both smile. This is the dance that comforts me, the ritual exchange, the mutual recognition, as reductive as it might be. Something elemental. It defines me. In some way, the only form of contact that I understand. The bemusement at how each one unfolds, the minor variations on the most basic theme. How will this one touch me first? Bushnell goes for the throat: two fingers stray over my carotid and land on a clavicle. The moment of pressure is like hitting an ‘on’ switch. The smell of him makes me alive. So many buttons to touch. I enjoy the mammalian mechanism, the decent, perhaps, past mammalian into reptilian, so it seems like no surprise when he bites me in the first kiss, beard hairs scraping the corner of my mouth, mouth on mine, tearing a strip of dessert-dried skin. It is so good to be wanted in this way, to be touched. A tawdry common place, but so compelling. I know that I’m thinking too much as I go through with it. Conscience is jettisoned and the id steps in. All systems go. Endocrine system. Check. Nervous system. Check. System system. Check. Things are moving too fast for me to keep track. One hand’s on the back of my neck, my skull. Another hand’s on my left breast, hollow of a palm circling to make the nipple rise. It politely complies, not much effort. Our hips are attached. This leaning against the poured concrete lookout post dry humping seems a bit juvenile, but I’m in no rush to get back. The denim over our flies collide. Look out, post. His hand goes to my waist and races up under the shirt, pulling the bud of my left breast into a nugget. As if by some precisely determined inverse ratio, the hardness there means that my cunt goes soft. “No, not soft,” the part of my mind that can still think registers as I grab Bushnell’s hips, his ass, grinning like a wolf as our mouths grind. “Just liquid. Hot. Concentrated.” I consider pussy juice; concentrated, sold in the freezer section at the grocery store next to plastic packs of freeze-dried jizz and have to count Bushnell’s fillings with my tongue to keep from laughing. The cardboard cylinders would have a stylized 50s kitty on them, curlicue tail and pretty whiskers cartoon cat, very retro, very cute, very not pink lemonade. Wringing out the brine in my shorts could irrigate the Mojave. I wonder if Otto’s banging Daria at this second. I don’t care, or at least feel spiteful as I recall his particularly vapid cum-face, not that anyone looks terribly dignified in that situation. Then I think what the fuck am I thinking dignity and composure for you the adulterer trying to get tapped at look-out point cursing the fact that the Honda parked to your right has two wheels instead of four although the idea of two adults doing it in such cramped quarters seems quite silly but oh well I’ve done worse and take my tongue out of Bushnell’s mouth to gasp “The right one’s jealous” and Bushnell catches on and stops gnawing at my face to dive to my chest and inhales alternate mammaries, flicker-taste, a soft pull, a hard one. My hands release his ass and fly to the railings to steady myself, bucking out my pelvis and growling like a beast. They like that. Apparently Bushnell likes that, because despite my hands now holding his head to my chest, my face leaning down to lap at his ears and temples in encouragement sometimes I just need to taste skin despite the fact that I’m torn with him playing with my breasts some more and throwing me down on the gravel and fucking me with a prick as big as a saguaro but hopefully not dry or spiny, his face migrates down my abdomen, no subtle little pecks, just a long wet lascivious sliding down my torso. The beard scratches. I reach under his chin to unbutton and unzip my jeans, then gently stroking his hair, tracing the shell of an ear good boy before I stretch back to coil fingers around the railing once more, my vertical lips screaming for his horizontal ones as my hips jut forward. I will howl like a coyote if a park ranger arrives. As Bushnell peels the fabric down and wedges three fingers into the flood, left thumb grazing the bud, taking a breath before he dives down, I am past caring about anything at all. In a moment of corporeal absurdity, I burp, and the surfacing trace of the low-fat free-range turkey fajita that was dinner at La Rincon del Amor also carries an echo of green chiles. The distraction does not last. The selection of scenic views is happy accident. It occurs with the coincidental conjunction of breath-taking awe-inspiring landscape and some human stumbling by. So many good things are chance. You never know. I know that what I’m doing is wrong but I don’t care. Who am I to decline a host’s generosity? A personal tour of some more memorable locations on the outskirts of Santa Fe? And after all the hard work of some Wobbly-anthem-singing WPA-era construction crew to build it? I try humming “Joe Hill’s Body” through clenched teeth to avoid yowling a barrage of inarticulate appreciation for the devotional lapping between my thighs. Bushnell surfaces for air and his beard is drenched. I take advantage of the pause to pant like a dog and demand, “Now.” Clothes can be so inconvenient, sometimes. I hunker down on the asphalt and take off one sneaker, the left, to remove a pants’ leg, and nip the tip of Bushnell’s nose and hold it for a moment as we’re crouched in front of one another. He stops unbuttoning his fly. This is not good. I release his nose and lick his open mouth. Some of the most pure, living, defining moments are the furthest from intellect. I like being animal. I like being bad. I lick Bushnell’s mouth, again, pull a tuft of beard with my teeth, and then actually kiss him. “Now, “ I say, again, and rise to turn and claim the railing to the left of the post with my waist, smiling big at some far-off mesa, too clichéd in its fade from lavender to tangerine to earthen brown. I bend and present with glee, right leg still encased in my jeans, then concerned that I was too hurried to inspect whatever was about to be inserted in me. The bulge was promising. If a guy’s too short, backwards isn’t viable, he’ll keep falling out, and if a guy’s too thin, forget it. Not to worry. I draw a sharp breath in and take a side-step to widen, wishing that I had eight arms: one pair to squeeze my breasts, another to reach back and push Bushnell deeper into me, a third set to stray in praise find hair, find arms, find the nape of my own neck, graze his thighs, push my clit down on the sliding shaft, sweetly chuckle his balls and a fourth pair of arms to grab the railing. Just stick a reasonable dick in me and I become every Goddess in the history of human myth. And it is divine. Almost as lovely as the view. Snippets from consciousness arrive like ridiculous telegrams as Bushnell grabs my hips, seeks and repeats. “What a lovely view,” I think, tilting to the right to maintain an angle. (Pound, pound.) “The fifth of May.” (Pound, pound.) “When Otto asks where we went, I’ll have to take the fifth.” (Pound, pound.) “Cinco de Mayo.” (Pound, pound.) “Independence Day!” (Pound, pound.) “Viva la Revolu?ion! Viva la Mexico!” And then a jolt against my cervix and a slow withdrawal that makes me cry out and want to cry. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. Whatever your name is, stay this moment forever. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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