Bad Sex With Lisa Gabriele
Dead wood.
April 3, 2007
When Christian, the chiseled-jawed, soot-covered, mirrored-sunglass-wearing smokejumper punched open the swinging doors of the Triple Y Saloon, I had no idea it would soon be over between me and my boyfriend, Ewan, that it would be just a matter of hours before I'd find myself not only single, but homeless, all my belongings tossed out the side of the slow-moving Volkswagen van in which Ewan and I had lived happily for months like fleece-covered gypsies.
Initially, Ewan had to convince me that Dawson City, Yukon, was a good idea after our not-so-lucrative stint driving cabs in Whistler. But I loved Dawson instantly, loved its weird, lonely people, loved the dusty streets, and its garishly painted Victorian homes with the two-by-fours supporting the outside walls. They reminded me of old ladies wearing too much makeup. But as embarassing as it is to admit, the only thing I loved more than the twenty-four hours of summer daylight was the math of it all. In Dawson it was about nineteen men to every woman, a ratio that had a complicated effect on my moral makeup.
If before I was the recipient of the casual male gaze, in Dawson I was a frickin' neon supermodel, a horrible gift to hand to a funny, plain girl with an epic inferiority complex fuelled by years of boys picking my blond willowy friends over me. It was like I had been handed special powers, albeit temporary, geographically specific powers, but ones I'd utterly exhaust nonetheless. Men (always men) would come into town after weeks in the wilderness finding gold, paving roads, or fighting fires, to do what frontier men always did: sleep, bathe, gamble and fuck. They'd shave off bills from the fat ball of cash and shove them down my costumed bosom. I had regulars who'd slap my ass, whistle at me, and stare at my tits so often that I began to forget it was very wrong for men to treat women like that. While the attention, however sexist, was intoxicating, I never thought I'd act on my flirtations until Christian. But when I watched him clean his soot-encrusted fingernail with a fork, he instantly turned everything I once loved about Ewan into a set of twee tics.
"Hey, beautiful. Listen. We're going to the Midnight Sun later," Christian said, throwing money on the table. "You be there."
"Okay," I said.
It — I — was that easy.
After my shift, I said goodbye to Ewan, who was opening the bar, and a friend and I headed to the Sun to penetrate the tough outer corona of women surrounding the smokejumpers' tables. We felt like sperm wiggling towards the egg. After many drinks and heavy glances my superpowers seemed to be in full force, with the added effect of wiping out all memory of the boyfriend with whom I lived in a van that was our home.
I don't remember how I found myself out back smushed against the Dumpster with Christian's hands up the front of my T-shirt, but I know how I ended up back at his hotel room above the Triple Y Saloon. Christian said, "Let's go back to my hotel room above the Triple Y Saloon," to which I replied, "Okay."
We tiptoed across a few streets cursing the tattletale sun, and made a stealthy entrance through the hotel's side door, evading Ewan. Christian blared rock music on both clock radios and ripped off his T-shirt baring a ludicrously perfect set of abs.
"Let's take off all our clothes and fuck in the shower," he yelled over the Aerosmith.
"Okay," I yelled back.
Many things conspired to ruin the sex, and consequently my life as I knew it then: massive amounts of booze had crippled my judgement and rendered Christian completely flaccid. However, it did not dampen his heroic determination to have sex with me standing up. Never mind the assaultive shower water. Never mind that the water contained neither lubricant nor adhesive properties. It's difficult enough to slip a wet hand into a tight rubber glove, but doing it with boneless fingers is impossible. I felt like I was being hammered against the tiles by a life-size G.I. Joe who, instead of a penis, was given a small rubber duck we now soundlessly squeezed between us. I understood then how jaws like Christian's became chiseled into those manly, angular shapes. Concentrated masculine determination causes teeth to clench fiercely and neck muscles to spasm deeply, and it turns whomever the guy is fucking into a mission that requires accomplishment. Christian's handsome face seemed to be saying, "Must get my dick in that hole there. Must get it in that. In. Get in." He wasn't a regular firefighter after all. This was a man who jumped out of low-flying planes in order to arrive at the fire.
I was no help. I was too busy trying to prevent permanent paralysis — surely the result of us falling backwards, snapping my spine in two over the lip of the slippery tub. But mostly what wrecked the sex was knowing that my boyfriend was a few feet below while I betrayed him — something that played havoc with the four or five cells still fiercely squatting in my conscience.
In my drunkeness, I had pulled down the shower rod, dispensing with the bothersome curtain altogether. I was trying to be sexily destructive, but the Triple Y was not a historic structure. Rather, its false front saloon exterior hid four stacked prefab boxes, walls and floors made of Styrofoam. While Christian redoubled his efforts, the ceiling below us hung pregnant with shower water. After it burst all over the drunken patrons and their cuckolded bartender, the night-desk girl ran upstairs to bang on the door. The water and the Foreigner drowned her out, so she begged Ewan to take an axe to the door. While many people saw me naked for the first time ever that night, for Ewan it was the last. The next day, from the window of the jewelry store I watched as he tossed my things out of the van and onto the dusty sidewalk. I don't remember if I waved as he drove out of Dawson City for good, but I do remember I had been standing, my battered pussy as clean as it would ever be that summer. n°
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