I had a great time last night at Amnesia in the mission. I read this story at the open mic and then stayed for karaoke and was drunk enough to attempt Janis Joplin. Sure hope no one recorded it.
Here’s what I read.
Do Provocative Clothes Make a Woman Hot? (casual encounters)
The streets of SF are dripping w/ sultry, sexy women. High heels, short skirts, tank tops, push-up bras, and the promise of more lingerie hiding under silky fabrics.
My question is this: just because a woman actively or even aggressively shows her sexuality on the street, does this mean she’s actually hot in bed? When you get them home, do these women deliver on the promises of their clothes and fuck-me heels? In other words, are the ones who LOOK hot the ones that ARE hot when you get them out of their seductive trappings?
I’d been with a guy a few days before, and we were having a great time. During a break in the action, he said something like, “You’re not hot, but you are really nasty and fun and this is the best sex I’ve had in years.” I’m not hot? If this wasn’t hot, what was?
Coming from the land of snow and mud, where a fashion statement was a pair of insulated boots in a color to match your parka, I was unaccustomed to observing women in city garb. And having located this near-insatiable heat in myself, I wondered which of the other women on the street felt as I did. Could men see through my no-nonsense clothes to my willingness beneath?
MJ answered this post a couple of hours later, with a, “Hell no, most of them are too concerned with messing up their hair, makeup or nails.” He included a zoomed-out picture of himself and his motorcycle buddies. I hit him back with a picture and a bit about me, and he told me he was close to my age, a writer with a day job. He assured me he preferred a no-nonsense woman without the “hair neurosis,” who wasn’t afraid to don a helmet and strap her hands across his engine.
We were on the verge of making a date to meet when he broke the news about his own hair: he said that some people were turned off by his long, curly, red ponytail. There had been no sign of a ponytail in the picture he’d sent, and I had to stop and think for a minute. Did I care? I asked for a picture of it.
Well, it was pretty striking. At least halfway down the back of his leather motorcycle jacket, kinky and very, very red. A few more feet of it and it and Rapunzel could have used it to make her escape easily, using the kinks for extra grip. I was taken aback.
I emailed him back that I was indeed surprised to find myself a bit freaked, and offered him the option to dismiss me as a “shallow, time-wasting internet bitch.” He replied that he’d always wanted to fuck a shallow time-wasting internet bitch, and that he’d see me on Sunday. Well, then.
We’d agreed to meet at the Lone Palm, six blocks from my house, my equivalent of playing hard to get. When you meet someone at a bar a block from your place, you’re pretty much saying you’ve agreed to fuck him before you meet him. Six blocks seemed at least a bit more coy.
We had a good time at the bar. He was very funny, sarcastic and bordering on rude, but I was enjoying myself. Halfway into my second beer – the point where I’ve generally decided or not whether I’m going to fuck a guy – I leaned close to him and said, “Kiss me.”
“If you give me a dollar,” he snapped back. I grabbed a dollar off the bar and collected a very hot kiss from the guy. It was time to go to my place, for sure.
The sex was great. I was vaguely distracted several times when he would fling that ponytail out the way, but I found if I just held on to the thing, I could keep it from interrupting the flow, as it were, and used the control to regulate the depth of his kisses.
A couple of weeks later, he came to the city again, and we met for dinner at Cha-Ya, the Japanese vegetarian restaurant. As I approached, I saw a guy in what looked like a red coonskin cap entering the place, and realized with a start that it was MJ. The matted – almost felted – hair that topped the unlikely ponytail did indeed look like a hat from afar, and not a flattering one. He was already seated by the time I made it that last block, and didn’t get up to greet me.
He claimed to enjoy his tofu pudding, a nasty, gelatinous block of boiled veggies embedded in tofu. It reminded me of something my mother used to make called “Mildred’s Pink Salad,” a Jell-O, cottage cheese and diced vegetable affair my sibs and I used to slip under the table to the dog.
Tonight conversation was slow. I was aware of saying some inane things I can’t remember now, to try to keep things moving. After dinner, he said he wanted coffee. I said I had coffee, milk and sugar at home. “You’ve really got it all, don’t you?”
“Apparently,” I said, in a flirty, girlie voice I barely recognized. We headed toward my apartment, but he ducked into Muddy’s at 24th and Valencia before we got there, and ordered himself a large cup. We sat out front and shared more halting, banal chatter, and when I thought he had to be nearly finished his caffeine intake, I gestured in the direction of my apartment. “Shall we?”
“No, I don’t think so.” This said with the same smirk he’d worn most of the evening. “I just don’t see it happening.”
“See what happening?”
“Us.”
He said I wasn’t the woman he was looking for, that he didn’t see us having a life together. I told him that while I was indeed looking for someone to have a life with, I wasn’t looking for it in every moment, and certainly not in that one. I was just looking to get laid, and I’d sat through the mushy tofu shit and the halting conversation and was ready to overlook the ridiculous ponytail and the mat of uncombed hair that held it in place, in exchange for a good go-round. I didn’t say all of that, but I was thinking it. He stood and aimed himself at the BART station, not my apartment.
“See ya.”
It was a funny feeling walking that last block, a block I hadn’t expected to be walking alone. I was sort of relieved, and sort of embarrassed, and sort of stung. And of course still more than sort of horny. Damn.
