When I turned 30 I threw myself a big party. I convinced a bunch of friends to come to LA for the weekend.
It was like a big slumber party for two nights, air mattresses. Sleeping bags took over the living room floor and my bedroom was filled with everyone’s luggage. I was worried about turning 30 for a long time. I was 25 when I abandoned my career in the movies to join Peace Corps. I was almost 29 when I finally returned. I had to start my life over from scratch. I did odd jobs for a few months before settling into a job testing video games with a bunch of high school students earning $290 a week.
Most of my college friends had made formal moves out of the earnest squalor phase of their lives. They were lawyers, geologists, teachers, and homeowners. I wasn’t worried about turning 30 because I felt old or decrepit, but I was aware that I’d sacrificed any real vertical achievement for the sake or a series of barely connected horizontal ambles. At 29 I was driving my father’s 1994 Geo Metro and putting 3 weeks of my monthly salary towards rent.
The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t care. I was doing what I wanted to be doing; there was nowhere else I could have imagined myself. I wasn’t exactly winning the fight, but I was engaged in the one that I wanted to be fighting. When I realized that, I decided that I had something to celebrate.
This was also around the time I started seeing a 37 year-old woman. I thought about our age difference all the time. She graduated from college the same year I started high school. She never gave any outward signs of being uncomfortable with our age difference. I would make a point to avoid anything that drew attention to it. Every now and then she would reference her college days, or some high school stories and I would try and look straight through her, rapidly hitting the fast forward button in my mind.
I liked her. She was curious, giving, spontaneous, she had a pink streak in her hair and good taste in shoes. We got along well, and entertained each other with our differences. It was a great friendship with sex thrown in as a perk. Still, it was strange confronting the edge of a generation gap. Her favorite music seemed outmoded to me, and she spent money in a way that I had only seen middle-aged housewives or children of privilege match.
When we kissed her taste was neutral. There was no lingering musk, no trace of the fecund sex hormones flowing through her body. Her saliva tasted literal, perfunctory, not suggestive. Her neck always smelled of perfume, but there was a twinge of the medicine cabinet underneath. The bottoms of her feet were flattened and permanently callused the way my mother’s feet were. She had the same white sunspots and thick knotty calves I’d seen on my mother growing up.
I don’t know if my reaction had more to do with the fact that we were better suited as friends than lovers, but I sensed her age in everything. Even when I wasn’t thinking about it directly, the age difference hung between us.
When you’re in love with someone you can get over a lot. The other day my friend S told me about her husband’s penchant for trapping her under covers in a cloud of his flatulence. If I could one day learn to live with the stench of my lover’s shit, I’m certain that a waft of the pill box on the nape of her neck would be manageable.
Her age hung between us because, in retrospect, there was a lot of distance between us to hang things in.
A few months later I hooked up with a 22 year-old. I wonder what I tasted like to her? I wonder how I smelled for her? Was there the germ of grandfather’s old A-shirts in my sweat? Did my mouth have the beginnings of the staleness of an old man gone a few too many hours without eating?
Sex is a window of opportunity. The farther apart yours ages, the less incentive there is to go through that window together. You have to be in love with someone to make up for it, or else it becomes stilted and ghastly. When I turned 30, I realized that my own window had shifted. But I wasn’t ready to let it shift that far ahead. Not without a better reason than being “good friends.”
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Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores
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