Posted by Lex Konrad in Sex | Jul 18, 2006
I had a dream, or rather a very specific premonition that came to me in a dream. I awoke with the unsettled feeling one has when one has a dream that’s a little too real. I shuffled around the apartment in a daze and then, hours later, came across the prophesied letter. Les must have retrieved it from the mailbox.
My dream replayed. The letter said exactly what I thought (knew?) it would. The crisp stationary was a slightly different shade of white.
I consider myself a rational being. I was educated in the hard sciences. I have the German’s surly disposition towards mysticism: I’m not swayed by self-serving preacher-men and psychics, nor does magical thinking hold much interest for me. Certain phenomena in quantum physics notwithstanding, I do not believe in spook-like actions at a distance. But physics and metaphysics failed me here.
So I did what any sane, reasonable person would do when faced with an urgent metaphysical dilemma: I drank heavily. Emma, recently returned from Europe, told us of her adventures as we sat in a godforsaken Upper West Side bar. “Did you have an Italian stud at either end, or what?”
Emma laughed. “No. They were all too young. And too clingy.”
“That’s a shame. If a guy wants to get laid it’s better not to give a damn.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“But then not giving a damn defeats the purpose of the exercise, doesn’t it?” I was like this all night. Speaking in koans.
We wound up in Emma’s living room. She straddled Leslie, applying warming gel between my fiancée’s legs. In the dim light of the bedroom Leslie said to me: “I want to see you fuck her.” And I did. And Les watched, stroking my balls as I took out my frustrations on our playmate’s cunt. I turned into a raging hardon. I’d annihilated the self.
Later on Leslie told me: “You fuck like crazy when you’re angry.”
It’s a straightforward biological mechanism: anger produces testosterone, which in turn produces the aforementioned raging hardon. And the letter produced the anger. And the dream produced the letter. A deterministic universe, as logical as a clockwork orange.
The next morning Emma woke up late for work (the poor girl had to go in on a Saturday) in spite of my nudging and prodding. I discovered, much to my dismay, that I’d developed a rather profound kink in my neck. Leslie was kind enough to feed Emma’s cat, upon which Les and I said our goodbyes and strolled home in the sunlight. My Dinner with Andre had arrived in the mail, so she popped it in and we curled up on the couch together.
WALLY: And I mean, you know, it’s the same with any kind of prophecy or sign or an omen, because if you believe in omens, then that means that the universe—I mean, I don’t even know how to begin to describe this—that means that the future is somehow sending messages backwards to the present! Which means that the future must exist in some sense already in order to be able to send these messages. And it also means that things in the universe are there for a purpose: to give us messages. Whereas I think that things in the universe are just there. I mean, they don’t mean anything. I mean, you know, if the turtle’s egg falls out of the tree and splashes on the paving stones, it’s just because that turtle was clumsy, by accident. And to decide whether to send my ships off to war on the basis of that seems a big mistake to me.
ANDRE: Well, what information would you send your ships to war on? Because if it’s all meaningless, what’s the difference whether you accept the fortune cookie or the statistics of the Ford foundation? It doesn’t seem to matter.
Viewing the film (for the first time in twenty years) it occurred to me that the way you approach life depends very much on whether you identify with Andre the wide-eyed mystic or Wally the jaded realist. And though once I might have sided with Wally, at that moment I wasn’t sure what to think.
I wasn’t terribly thrilled about going out that night—aside from being brutally hungover, I obviously had a lot on my mind—but I didn’t want to cocoon at home either. Les and I met the date at a wine bar in the East Village and stayed just long enough for the fumes from the fryolator(!) to burn our eyes, sending us fleeing to the comfortably air-conditioned Niagara. Try as I might, I couldn’t work myself out of a fugue state. The girl seemed distant—mercurial was a word that kept coming to mind, although it might not have been the right word—yet I might just have been projecting a bad vibe. My neck was still stiff from the previous night. I felt as if I were being pulled under by the cosmic undertow.
Later on, at the warehouse party, I asked the girl whether she’d be interested in having carnal relations on a semi-regular basis (there ought to be a less juvenile and retarded term for this than ‘fuck buddy’). Ordinarily I’m not one for such formal proposals but that night I was hardly my usual charming self. The girl was intrigued. Later on I found Leslie dancing by herself and I held her for a moment before we took to the street to find a car. The girl joined us and as we rode back into Manhattan, fluff-talking about nothing in particular, I rested a hand upon each of their thighs.
A couple days later I was on the train and I thought Am I dreaming? I wanted to tap the guy standing next to me on the shoulder and ask him “Do you think any of this is real?” but he probably would have thought I was nuts. When Leslie got home from work we talked about Kant (we were in the same philosophy class back in school) and I felt a little better. Even if reality is an illusion, I reasoned, there must be some basis for the concepts we share as a species (e.g., that we inhabit three spatial dimensions plus time) and therefore our scientific intuitions about the nature of the universe need not be invalidated by occurrences we (as of today) lack the proper tools to understand. That is, unexplained occurrences don’t necessitate the existence of dragons and fairy-dust.
That evening I visited the park and found some smooth rocks to sit upon for a while. When I got up to leave I spied a book propped up against a tree trunk. “This is the Dream” read the book’s title. Not a dream but the dream. Whose dream? I wondered.
Because right now I’d just as soon forget about dreams altogether.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Relationships | May 20, 2006
Kif, I’ve made it with a woman. Inform the men.
-Zapp Brannigan
“Dude, these girls are killing me.” That’s what Emma’s friend Doug says. We’re lounging in Emma’s small living room watching the taped episode of Saturday Night Live, Leslie and Emma lying stretched out beneath the television like cats, cuddling and purring and pawing at each other a little bit. In all honesty I hadn’t really noticed. SNL is funny again and I’m squinting hard at the teevee trying my damndest not to see double. I kinda nod and grunt and then fall silent because it’s six in the morning and I’m too tired to indulge anyone’s sapphic fantasies.
“I mean, you two have been with her before,” he continues. “I dunno what she wants.”
This produces another grunt from yours truly. By now I could probably write a book, nay, a series of books about what Emma wants, appropriately titled What Emma Wants: Vols I-IX, by Lex Konrad, the (in)famous knower of women. I suppose my surly disposition owes something to the fact that Les, Emma and I have been through a lot together. What we have is more emotional than hardcore—I feel I’ve earned that shit somehow, the old fashioned way, and when dudes come sniffing around looking for some of that magic mojo I get a little territorial. Emma’s, well, sort of my girl now and I’m trying to decipher what, precisely, that means to me.
“Should I—should I leave you three alone?”
“Naw, don’t worry about it.” The truth is it doesn’t matter: Emma’s out of commission for tonight so nothing’s going to happen anyway (as a young lad I’d never imagined how prominently women’s menstrual cycles would feature in my life). Nonetheless, when Doug slips into the bathroom I crawl over to the girls and grope Emma’s smooth little rear end—being the recipient of my affections entails a great deal of grabassery.
I suppose people can be forgiven for believing everything in a small radius around Les and Lex turns into a sex party, but on the other hand their assumptions remind me of a t-shirt slogan I saw on the internets once, something along the lines of “I’m bisexual, polyamorous and kinky… but I’m still not going to sleep with you.” Since there’s nary a whiff of orgy in the air Doug does eventually decide it’s time to leave. When the door closes behind him I whip out my dick and Emma treats it like a friendly snake at a petting zoo—patting it on the head and, like, talking to it. The three of us burst out laughing and I realize this is precisely the kind of moment the people who perv on us wouldn’t understand.
I’m way past the fantasy-fulfillment stage with Leslie and Emma. I know each of them too well and I’m too comfortable in their combined presence to make a fetish of what they do together. For some familiarity might take the bloom of the rose but to me the rose only turns a deeper, more fragrant shade of red. Communicating this to someone who’s not in a relationship with two females is like shouting across a chasm. There’s just no getting beyond “Dude! You’re with two chicks at once.” Five years ago it was funny to hear—over and over again—that I’m the luckiest man alive, but nowadays I shrug. There’s just so little overlap between real life and pornography.
And sometimes, in this city of boys who are so unsure of themselves, whose heads explode upon the sight of two girls kissing, who even in their bravado are terrified of going beyond anything skin deep, I wonder whether I’m not the last man standing.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | May 04, 2006
I’ll confess to a certain skepticism when it comes to musical theater. Perhaps I’m not wired for it; perhaps I’m just too heterosexual. Whatever my problem is, song-n-dance routines usually put me to sleep. Derek was in town, however, and Emma was kind enough to get us all tickets to a late night performance of the Kiki & Herb show at Joe’s Pub. I figured a couple hours of camp and circumstance wouldn’t kill me.
A funny thing happened though. As the stage lit up and Kiki strutted into the audience, growling into her microphone, I found myself immediately entranced by the spectacle. The performance—a postmodern mélange of Rock-n-Roll, cabaret and spoken word—was so raw and energetic it felt as if the whole production would come flying apart at any moment. I laughed. I cried. I clapped.
“Rome was more interesting as a crumbling empire,” intoned Kiki in her gravelly voice, “and we, ladies and gentlemen, are living in a crumbling empire.”
In a word, the show was fabulous.
After the show Emma introduced me to Justin, Kiki’s surprisingly soft-spoken and very male alter-ego. He and Emma embraced before Justin strolled off into the night. I peered into my not-quite-second-girlfriend’s dark eyes. “I swear Emma—you’re a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.”
Because it was only 2AM on a Tuesday night, we of course decided to go clubbing. Happy Valley was the place. The bouncer let the girls in free but shook Derek and me down for a ten-spot each. The place was packed with boys who looked like girls and girls who looked like boys and, well, people who looked like neither. On the way in I ran into Mort, who sported a stylish Boy George chapeau—appropriate, I suppose, for a club where everyone looked like they’d been cryogenically preserved in the Eighties and thawed out, like, yesterday.
As I chatted with Mort on a spacious balcony overlooking the nearly-empty dance floor, I turned to see Leslie walking toward me with a tall and comely Indian girl on her arm. I cocked an eyebrow. My fiancée smiled. “She told me she wanted to meet you.”
I was flattered. And stunned. My eyes traversed the girl’s slight frame from head to toe. “Damn you’re tall,” I finally blurted out, upon which the raven-haired beauty beamed at me.
Leslie wrapped her arm around the girl’s waist. “Have you ever kissed a woman before?”
She laughed. It was an infectious laugh, the kind that makes you want to come up with a silly joke so you might hear it erupt once more. “Oh no. But I’ve always been curious.”
When Leslie turned to face her companion I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing. The women’s lips met momentarily; then the tall girl grew shy and freed herself from Leslie’s embrace. She still held Leslie’s hand as she stood at arm’s length, smiling yet uncertain. When the woman left us I finally exhaled. Les and I joined our friends in another section of the balcony, and after a little while I’d forgotten about our encounter.
And then, miraculously, the beautiful stranger returned, gliding across the balcony into my fiancée’s arms, cradling Leslie’s head in her hands and pressing their faces together in what can only be described as a cinematic kiss. Time stood still, the way it does in the movies. I nearly choked on my drink. After they’d exchanged numbers, when the Indian girl had gone downstairs to gather her friends and leave, she kept stealing glances at us from below.
“Care to explain what just happened here?” I asked Les.
She shrugged. “I really don’t know. That was—”
“Fabulous.”
And the moral of the story, ladies and gentlemen? Give musical theater a chance.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Relationships | Apr 28, 2006
It’s late and I’m watching The Twilight Zone—the original and not the crappy remake. Leslie isn’t home yet. I think about what she and Emma might be doing right now and I smile. All the same, I’m a little saddened that I won’t get the chance to spoon with my woman tonight; to press my erection against the cleavage of her warm, round ass.
It’s only fair, however. Freedom is more than just a word. I turn in, pushing the lazy, purring cats off the pillow to make room for my head. Sleep comes quickly.
I awake to the sound of a key turning in the apartment door. I alight from the mattress and greet my girl with open arms.
“I meant to come home last night, but I fell asleep over there.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her, rubbing my eyes and yawning. God it’s early.
“If you want I can tell you what Emma and I talked about.”
Les and I had discussed seeing people separately under certain circumstances, and we’d recently taken our first baby steps in this direction. Naturally, our experiment hadn’t been without its complications. Right now I’m too tired for words. “Naw, we can talk later.”
I lead Leslie to bed and press up against her, drifting off, happy to have her back.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Sex | Apr 14, 2006
We sat in a gay bar uptown listening to the trannies, the dykes, and the midnight cowboys belt out karaoke hits. Emma asked me whether I was going to take a turn. I told her there was no way I could compete with the Gay Men’s Chorus.
The night wore on. I doubled the two-drink-maximum I’d set for myself. I placed my hand upon Emma’s thigh and then, remembering where I was, withdrew it (alas, when in Rome…). “I should go,” I said. It was a school night. Leslie was out of town.
“Just one more drink,” Emma insisted. How many times have these words been uttered? How much trouble have they caused?
I ordered a beer. Emma pulled her blouse outward and showed me the reusable latex pasties she had on, accessories which seemed to serve utterly no purpose under her sweater. “You’re a strange chick,” I told her.
She pressed my hand to her mannequin breast. I peeled the latex circle from her tit and tweaked the firm nipple underneath. Mr. Penis got a little hard and I remember thinking it had been a while. “Your place or mine,” I intoned.
“I have to work early.”
“What’s early to you?”
“Eleven.”
I laughed. “Your place then.”
Emma almost never explicitly assents to anything—it would ruin the air of nonchalance she’s so carefully crafted over the years. So I followed her home, and when we arrived at her door she held it open for me. She stood in her bright living room, expectant perhaps but not letting on if she was.
As we lay naked, entwined upon the comforter in her darkened bedroom, I was struck by the thought that being with her alone wasn’t all that different. I pistoned into Emma, twisted her little body into a series of improbable positions, searching for that perfect angle—the ideal configuration of hips and limbs that might let me have her properly. Smooth and deep. Maybe I was searching for something else too.
When Emma’s alarm cried out I awoke with a start, disoriented, swiveling my head in search of familiar surroundings. It’s a panic I used to associate with marathon business trips, when I’d tumble out of bed only to find myself in Tokyo or Helsinki or—God forbid—Little Rock, Arkansas. Lying there in Emma’s small bed, I realized that perhaps my overnight visitors sometimes feel this panic too.
And so, on a bright, beautiful spring morning, I walked from West Side to East Side across the top of a flowering Central Park, sneaking into my building in the clothes I wore the night before, avoiding eye contact with the neighbors, and finally opening the door to an empty apartment that looked just the same as I’d left it.
Turnabout is fair play, I guess.
