Writing About Writing About Sex
“Are you going to write about this?” She asks, lighting a cigarette.
BY JEREMY GLASS
“Are you going to write about this?” She asks, lighting a cigarette under the pale blue moonlight.
“Yes.” I reply, pouring myself a glass of scotch, “I mean, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Smoke pours out of her nostrils and she smiles. Her towel drops down, exposing a pair of mind-blowing lady-parts.
“Though,” I say, lighting myself a cigarette, “I’ll probably add some extraneous and superfluous details.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll change your name. I won’t mention the part about how it took me fifteen minutes to find a condom. Oh, and I’ll probably say we smoked cigarettes under the moonlight and drank scotch in the nude.”
“That’s stupid. No one does that anymore,” she says.
I'm suddenly back where we first started. In my bed, in Manhattan. No scotch, no cigarettes, no pale blue moonlight. It's cloudy outside and I've begun to realize that I've grown a reputation. I've written about my reputation to the point where my reputation has grown a reputation. I've dived so deep within my own wrong doings that I've successfully made my life one gigantic metaphysical joke. I hold my fingers out as if I'm holding my much needed cigarette.
“People still do that,” I say, guzzling down the rest of my grape juice. I look into the girl's eyes and see nothing. There's no feeling, nothing to write about. I'm almost inclined to ask her how it feels knowing that this is likely the last time we'll ever grace each other's presence.
“Name one place in America where you can smoke inside.” She says, putting her clothes back on.
“My parents’ house when they aren’t home?”
She sighs, clearly regretting the chain of events which lead me to end up inside of her.
“Seriously, don’t write about this.” I walk her to the elevator, saunter back into my apartment and lock the door. Goodbye, girl from the Chinese restaurant.
I tried. I really did. I tried writing about normal stuff for a long time. My attempts to write about music would come out as biased and disinterested, my writing about local events were too distant and uncaring, and my attempt to write about film birthed articles like “My Favorite Movie Moments In Semen.” I’ve always written about sex, because it’s one of the only things I like doing. I’m not agile enough for sports; I don’t camp because I’m afraid of bears, and board games make me want to shit out my own brains. I don’t like normal things and I don’t like writing about normal things. Considering sex is one of the most normal things a person can do, I find it ironic that writing about sex is kinda taboo.
I think the first instances of me writing about sex began after I successfully bedded my third lady. My typical routine of post-coital chicken nuggets from McDonald’s was put on hold because it was an especially chilly night, so I pulled out my little green journal and wrote down the names of the three girls I’d slept with. It didn’t seem especially important at the time but now, as I see the Google results from a search of my own name, I remember it as a type of milestone for the weird perverted shit that was to come. Do all guys document the women they’ve slept with? I began to think that was true when I started rifling through my late brother’s beloved journals and saw the very same system I used to list all of the girls he was with.
His was more specific, though, utilizing a not-as-complex-as-he-thought code to differentiate how far he got with the people he was with. F.B. didn’t stand for “friendly banter”, but I won’t get into it. One of the articles I've published was about an “open relationship” that didn’t work out and left me cynical and broken. I guess it was personal. It talked about my sex life with the girl and listed some details about her personality that a lot of my friends knew. I got text after text of my friends trying to confirm what they already knew. Yep, I replied. That actually happened. It was the first time I’d really been able to talk about it, even though I wasn't talking to anyone in particular. Writing about my failed relationship helped close a wound in my life which I was happy to suture.
Then I started getting especially promiscuous, which became the fuel for my “career” in writing about sex. I wouldn’t be present during the dates I’d schedule; I’d be talking, but I would be stuck in my head thinking about how the date would shape up in terms of a story. I should’ve stopped each one of these dates and apologized to the poor girl in advance for turning our bad date in a story about a bad date.
“Sorry this whole thing is getting so meta,” I should’ve said. But, truth be told, I never planned on experiencing this wealth of material. In fact, up until I was sixteen-ish, I was almost positive I would never even have a sex life to write about it. Not to mention, the Internet was still transitioning from not being a complete bastard. Back then, the most social type of media I encountered were the hopeful comments I’d leave on photos of pretty girls on MySpace and my LiveJournal. When I was growing up, I fully planned on being a TV writer. I had all these pitches that I would practice, outline, and occasionally write. One was about a multi-million-dollar company that didn’t know what they were selling, one was about a post-Y2K world had Y2K actually been a thing, and one was just called “My Two Dead Gay Ghost Dads.”
It’s funny writing about writing, because it really makes me think about what I want to write versus what I end up writing. Things are especially different nowadays since I’ve been in a committed relationship. For the first time in years, I love a girl and I can’t write a damn thing about her. On the other hand, as I try to explain when the subject comes up, I don’t think I want to write about her. Who wants to read a gushy story about some guy who loves his girlfriend? Though, who wants to read a story about the same guy having bad sex with random girls?
Maybe it’s always been the shock value that draws people to what I write. Hey, maybe people aren’t really drawn to what I write at all. After all, I’m definitely not a household name. The third thing that comes up when you Google me is some guy who died from a heroin overdose. Maybe this sex writing thing is "just a phase," as some have suggested. I say it's as much of a phase as strict bible-thumping bigots assume homosexuality is. I’ve always wanted to write about aliens, but like I said, sex is the only thing I know how to write about. I feel the brunt of this supposed block nowadays, two months into the first dedicated relationship I've been in since before I moved to New York. I'm happy; she's happy. She asks why I never write about her and I tell her there's nothing to write about. I calm her jangled Hooksexups and tell her that the Internet isn't the right place to showcase a relationship like ours.
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