The darkness of the nightclub is an airborne aphrodisiac, a medium fixating through more or less “real” encounters among empaths of mind, emotion and body. At their center is the glitter globe, rotating the room with Saturnian rings. The backlit liquor casements retinge and refract colors room-wide to omni-whirl and infinitize loops of desire. These harmonize into hormonized minds the projections of objects. From personal to interpersonal, in this space the effect is, at heart, not merely encased and enshrined through codes of language, but an “actual” Tantric (skin and breath) experience.
Worming to the bar, I nab a stool next to a figure in mesh top and white gauze sweater. This translucence balances olive green eyes – firm, fixed, peering. These are framed below whisps of doom-blonde bangs: Among the looks of the demimonde, certain styles aspire towards signifiers. Retro-Laura Palmer locks at core may – with the eyes, and clearer than words, say – “I’m free in both brain and body.” And as deeper identifications, may declare, “Desires are defined and heightened by the control games, and ritualized force that is the root of human (and only human) eroticism. Succumbing to another’s, my will is fulfilled.”
She’s Helena. She seems to know me. Sure enough, Helena skips all pretense with this ice-breaker: She attends Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. SLAA. This is not a confession. She’s not ashamed. She’s based in desire. She goes weekly. She meets guys. Not that she’d ever have trouble getting them. Even now, men hover her hotness. Leaning into me keeps them at bay.
“Some of them are gay,” she says. “They want me for friendship. Intense friendship is, for me, very close to the intimacy of sex.”
I confess that I too am both of those: A sex and a love addict. Which phantom joy is juicier? This may cause me to “act-out” in hubris, and later cringe-out with insecurities. I can’t prevent it. Or I don’t want to. Female-embodied opposites somehow elevate into an elastic love, an ineffable core experience that telegraphs as “real.”
Reciprocating, I tell Helena I’m a pleasure dom. I lost my partner of five years when Covid hit, and since then I’ve been searching for a new sub. “I’ll be your sub,” Helena states. She’s on her third Galliano. She presses into me. “Bartender just cut me off.” Congratulations! I hand her my Tanqueray and tonic and order another. She asks, “Do you want to put your hand in my pants?”
Because the Mirror Ball is trancing – an encompassing/controlling and crystalline surrounding to a (Ptolemaic) body-universe – it’s not until days later I realize that Jacques Lacan has stuff to say about the zone we now orbit. We’re totally testing the impossibility of a “real” experience within bounds… both the probing of what we want, and the edgy pleasure of apparitions implied in the seeking itself. Objet petit FX.
For some future meeting, we fumble each other’s phones to input our numbers. Her nails are perfect. Thin, pink almond-shaped gels. I fucking love manis. In this case, it’s fair to catalog them too as signifiers. A manual alphabet. A body language that self-interprets. Elongated, shaped, buffed, glittered and – outragously – elaborated with mini 3D dioramas of butterflies, flowers or Sanrio characters, these fingernails say, “I ransom dexterity to the charms of artifice. Watch me press my keypad with the ball of my index finger – the distal phalanx, itself an index of arousals – the length of nails forcing fingers to display themselves, like bare, out-stretched legs. Not that this is an invitation. In fact, it may denote a level of autoeroticism more than a need to attract others. But you can’t help fantasizing this tactile elegance (formed by the faith of spirit) in the act of touching. Imagine these acrylic tips lightly scratching the veins of your elongated cock, or pinching the swollen hood of your clit, depending….”
I type “Hi Helena.” Heart emoji, spark emoji. She replies “I love you and I want you.” Since she’s offered herself as my sub, I explain how I “kiss” my sub: I molest their mouth, take it. Then and there she yields it. We’re deeply tonguing. Or, more accurately, I pry the lips and overtake that hole. Own it. To leverage probing, I cradle the back of her head.
It’s dark in here, but I’m sure people see us in action. That’s embarrassing, but why? Eff ‘em, says the Mirror Ball.
She wants more. Though I’m the one nominally in control, she guides me to the mens room. There’s no lock on the door but there’s a toilet stall and we lock that. I press her against the wall, but she doesn’t need much direction. She complianty lifts her blouse. There are her boobs. Magnificent. She’s proud to proffer them. “Push them out. Arch your back, arms behind you.” I slap them. I slap her face. Affectionate-firm, with force. Again the mouth molestation. Fingers and thumb gripping neck and chin. She’ll give me anything. I slide my hand down her pants, swirl her clit on the way to her cunt. She’s moaning. She’s wet enough to squirt. I alternate the press, scoop and twirl, tenderly in synch with breath and heartbeat. She’s cumming. Now she drops to her knees. She’s going to blow me. That’s when I stop her. Somehow, despite the liquor and ego intoxication, despite the air of eros we gulp in pants and groans, I default to reason: People know we’re in that stall. Even if they’re not peering through the crack, they hear our transgressions. I lift her from the floor. I assist in reassembling her white sweater, but it’s hopelessly tangled around her arms and shoulders. We return to the bar. Suddenly, amid the crowd, she’s gone.
Bataille says, “Once the transgression is permitted, it is often prescribed.” And so, because I halted our transgressions, for hours afterwards, Helena’s pussy tang annoints my fingers. I won’t wash it off. It is a window to larger worlds…
The Mirror Ball revolves. At its chrisanthemum center is the passion of Helena: un-encrypted, unbounded, elevated. Orbiting. A love anima. Scriptured in gush. An embodied and femme’d language. Alive to both inner and interpenetrative relations. In what may seem a craving for flings, I sense as a soul at one with the substance of life. While her blessings of physicality are the vehicle of her quest, her heart is her attraction. The feelings she returns exteriorize the spirit and interiorize the body. You can see it in her smart and archly ironic smile. In the mix of self-confidence and self-consciousness. And the bangs, the nails, the glassy gloss and gauzy top, (another time we can talk about shoes)… these enhancements are “just” proxies for biology, and yet they unlock into herself – and fleetingly into me – an evolution of being. An individuation.
The fierce desire of this cutie bubbles up from consciousness warped/wrapped in the sacraments of body language. The crystaline spheres of a girliverse reflect in her flesh, by way of compulsions, an oracle, an exaltation… which is a kind of hot divinity-in-humanity that circles into the everything.
-end-
