I was out at a bar with a friend of mine the other night. This friend is a neurotic catastrophe (I don't mean that in a negative way) but has one indelible saving grace: he's really good looking. He's a tall, brawny, tanned work of physical symmetry. And he's also a warbling gyroscope of emotional issues. The benefit of going out to bars with him is that the frequency of being approached by random woman increases terrifically compared to what I would experience on my own. And it reminds me that hitting on people is stupid. This is a prejudice I've had for a long time. It treats attraction and the metaphysics of romantic affinity as if they were a sport that can be won or lost through the application of some obtuse skill. It's one thing to like somebody and not feel embarrassed about showing it to them publicly, but it's another thing entirely to pull out the hard sell and convince someone that you're the number one king pimpette.



So this night a feisty blonde woman ambled up to us and inserted herself into our conversation. Small talk was exchanged, some pretense was created to explain away her approach (it's always "Don’t I know you?") and it wasn't long before she had convinced us to take a sugary shot of something in the cranberry-watermelon family. Then she started telling us – I suppose I'm being generous at this point as most of this was directed at my friend, but indulge me for a few paragraphs—about what great blowjobs she gives. "It's true," she swore. "You can ask any of my ex-boyfriends."

I have never before met a stranger who tried to sell themselves based on sexual references. It might actually have been interesting to call a few of her ex-boyfriends and talk out just what her sexual pros and cons really were. But it's hard to be so clever on the spot, especially in the kind of a bar where people in pressed Banana Republic shirts dance with each other, waving hands over heads like elementary school kids awkwardly doing calisthenics. Next she asked us if we liked blowjobs.

How do you respond when someone asks you if you like oral sex? In my own overly-intellectualized and defensive posture, I think of sex as communication more than performance. It's great with people that you care about and increasingly uncomfortable with people you don't have any deeper interest in. Some of the best mechanical sex I've had has been during one night stands. Drawn out sessions of gymnastic vigor, that shakes the walls and leaves your bed humped off into a crooked angle halfway across the bedroom. These are also some of the experiences in my life that I'd just as soon not repeat. It's the depressing embodiment of small talk given a physical form. What can your body really have to say to a stranger beyond the pantomime of connection and feigned investment?

There are always the foreign smells of breath, armpits, and sweat to remind you of the relative foreignness of that body in bed with you. There are always strange physical quirks to reconcile with: toenails, moles, the sourness of the inner ear, stubble, acne, strange hands. None of these are physically revolting, but they're so uniquely personal that it always reminds me of how wholly unknown the person I'm with is (assuming they're a Saturday night trifle). And finally, the mechanics of sex aren't all that mysterious after all. Our underpants-areas are teeming with Hooksexup endings; it shouldn't be any great selling point for a grown person to be proud of their ability to manipulate them in a pleasurable way. If you can manage to get me off just by biting my love handles, then I might admit rhetorical defeat on the point, but being good at blowjobs is kind of like saying you're good at making sandwiches. I didn't realize it was all that mysterious a process.

All of which got me thinking about "The Brown Bunny," Vincent Gallo's movie about getting a blowjob from Chloe Sevigny. It's ostensibly about more than that, but that climactic scene where two celebrities consent to share the mechanics of their sex with the world at large is as direct a statement as any about the movie. Blowjobs come and go, but the people giving them are irreplaceable. Gallo's character can't stop reliving his last sexual encounter with his now-dead wife because sex is the only language we have to begin to articulate what it feels like to love somebody. You can use words, or images, or sounds, but the truest and most direct expression of love is physical. Sex is language and vocabulary.



Which brings me back to a bar in the Mission, drunk on fruit juice and vodka, trying to reconcile what it was about this woman who insisted on pitching her sexual acumen to a couple of random guys in a bar. What would we really have to say to each other physically? The gears and cogs might run together, but to what end? I assume I'm a total anomaly in this regard. I've got several friends with libidos that reach into the stars and take great relish in the variety and intensity of new sexual encounters. I envy them. I respect them fundamentally. But I don't think I understand their language.