Hot, Bothered and Unhinged: A Memoir

Just kidding. But this is something I've wanted to write for a while

A note on this Substack making no sense whatsoever: I feebly tried to program this Substack last year and, well, it just didn’t work. I’m too undisciplined and choatic. Plus it’s nice to have a space to be totally unencumbered by sense and logic. I apologize if these are more ocassional than you’d like, less sensical than you desire, and more graphic than you care for. I’m considering a truly NSFW paywall but then I’d know who all you perverts are and you might not like that. So, it’s all going to be smushed together, the profane and the profound, the mundane and the oracular. If you’re offended — or just not into this — I’m sorry. But if you do like it, and want to support a procrastinating writer, please buy a paid subscription for a zillion dollars (or like $8/month).

On Random Sex and Modern Dance

Staying alone in a hotel makes me want to either kill myself, write or fuck. How else to hock the loogie of deep sadness and expectorate it? The depression of a nice bathrobe and a clean empty room, a tightly made bed, a view of a city of strangers is simply too much to sit with. If the despair hits just right, I rage against the dying of the light by filling pages with words at an almost frantic pace. (Outrun mortality with Promethean production!) But sometimes I don’t have a proximal deadline. Offing myself isn’t an option for a few reasons (kids, mom, Bourdain epigone, how even?).

So to the apps I go. As soon as the wheels touch down in Hartsfield-Jackson, I log onto Feeld. Usually, it takes a day or two to find a partner and I’m only in town for 24 hours but in Atlanta the horny gods are in a generous mood. By the time I check into the Forth Hotel, I have two suitable matches. One is a nice looking retro-ish tattoo’d lady in her 40s named Eloise; the other is a pro-domme body builder named Noemie. I make plans that night with both of them. [Names have been changed.]

One benign consequence of life on apps is that where previously I clung to plans with an annoying zealotry, flakiness is so much a part of app culture that I’ve been forced to adopt a more Zen attitude to meetings. If it happens, it happens. If not, that’s okay too. I am reasonably certain at least one of my matches will bail. But that afternoon, as I bike along the Beltline, Eloise messages me. She is getting off work — she works for a show that shoots in Atlanta — and wants to meet at the hotel on her way home. By 5 p.m., she is at my door. By 5:04 p.m. I am inside her. (Ew, gross, Stein. Write sex better. Non, je refuse!) I am edified and amused by the tattoo across her lower back. “Insert Candy Here” it says in Gothic script. I do as the tattoo commands. Afterwards, we lounge around and she explains to me that she had spent her day outfitting the star of her show with a prosthetic penis to fit over his actual penis. There were two: a fake erect penis and a fake flaccid one. It was her job to delicately fit both ersatz phalli over a merkin that, itself, fit over the actor’s actual cock. I enjoy the anecdote very much indeed.

Eloise leaves and I just have time to shower before I meet Noemie for dinner at the hotel. According to her profile, Noemie is a pro-domme and a professional body builder. In one of her profile photographs, her dark skin has been oiled to a high sheen. Every muscle of her body is striated, as if each fiber yearns for independence. “59” a number pinned to her sparkly bikini reads. Generally there’s a 15-20% negative variance between a profile photograph and the person. Sometimes it’s drastically more, something I found out a few months later in New York. That’s a story for another time. But when I meet Noemie at Elektra, the second-floor Mediterranean restaurant at the Forth, she looks exactly like her picture. The contours of her deltoids, traps and triceps are showcased in a spaghetti strap top. We eat mezze.

Over mussels and merguez, she explains to me that she is an asexual sadist. She is indeed a professional dominatrix and works at a local dungeon. She demands tribute from her subs. These can be creative in nature or intellectually stimulating but are frequently monetary. Whatever the form, they must convey devotion and submission. She does not like, or have, penetrative sex though she will peg. Reluctantly. (“A lot of guys think pegging is being submissive,” she tells me, “but it isn’t necessarily. It’s really just what a dom thinks being a sub is.”) As I dip the lily-white flesh of a branzino into an electric roasted carrot zhoug, the thought occurs to me that we are perhaps sexually incompatible. I am not a masochist; I’m definitely not asexual; I don’t sub. An asexual sadistic domme and I have nothing to do but…talk. And talk we do. For hours.

Noemie is absolutely fascinating, funny and a little brilliant. Both at Elektra and later, looking out at the electric quilt of the Atlanta skyline, at the rooftop bar. Noemie gamely expands on the activities she enjoys such as blood play, breath play, findomming (financial dominance) and CBT. Findom is new to me but, having been in therapy for years, I’m eager to discuss CBT. Actually, if I’m being honest, my therapist, who does not take insurance, feels a bit like a findomme. “Oh, cognitive behavioral therapy?” I say, proud of myself for knowing. “No,” she says, “cock and ball torture.” I am agog and instinctively cup my balls protectively.

By around midnight, it’s time to go to bed. My flight leaves the next morning at 6 a.m. Noemie comes back to my room to use the bathroom before hitting the road. (The Forth has nice Le Labo products.) As she’s walking out the door, I say, almost pro forma, “I had a really nice time. You know, I’d ask you to stay but I don’t know what we’d do.” I am being both honest and polite. She smiles, “No problem. Have a great night.” We hug and I crawl into bed. Ten minutes later, she texts me. “Well what would you want to do if I came back?” I draw a blank. I do not want my scrotum nailed to a board. So I write, “Idk. Choke me, I guess.” “Be right there” she says, “Parking.”

Now Noemie is back in my room. That lacy spaghetti strap top turns out to be a body suit. Soon she’s on top of me. Her thighs are extremely strong. Gee whiz, she can really squeeze me hard. I guess I’m into it. I don’t know. I’m not not into it. Her hands are around my throat. I’m kinda struggling but not too much. She’s extremely strong. We don’t kiss. Tighter and tighter she squeezes me with her thighs until my ribs ache and I am struggling to breathe. She’s a good strangler, too. (Side note, applicable both to BDSM and BJJ: Choking is a blockage of the airways; Strangulation is blockage of the bloodways.) As I totter on the cornice of consciousness, the last thought I have is…of iconic 20th century choreographer Merce Cunningham.

I got to meet Merce Cunningham once at a party in 2007. He was extremely nice and we talked about Aaron Copland. Lou Reed was a dick to me that night but then we made up right before he died. (Not that he remembered who I was.)

I forget when exactly I was first exposed to Cunningham’s work, probably sometime in the early aughts, around 2003 or 2004, when I was at the (modest) apex of my dance career.

There were five technique classes I remember taking at the time. Classical ballet, the base for all other movement; Horton, a technique developed by Lester Horton, that was the basis for Alvin Ailey’s company (I auditioned, another story); Graham, a study of contraction and release developed by Martha Graham; and the Cunningham technique, based on a movement vocabulary developed by Merce Cunningham which emphasized clarity of movement, precise rhythmic control and deviously hard torso tilts.

The more I learned about Cunningham the more enamored I became. He was part of the same mid-century milieu as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Jasper Johns and — though I wouldn’t realize this until much later — my favorite children’s book author Remy Charlip. (Raushenberg served a technical director and designer; Johns the artistic adviser; Charlip, the costumer and Cage a frequent collaborator.) Cock hard, body builder atop me, losing consciousness, the most salient part of Cunningham’s oeuvre was his use of chance came into mind. Many of Cunningham’s dances were generated with some element of chance: A dice rolled, a coin flipped, an I-Ching hexagram consulted triggered a set of actions, framed by Cunningham. Even in his collaborations, change and fortune crept in. He let Rauschenberg, Cage, Johns et al work with little guidance, trusting that the juxtaposition would itself prove fertile grounds for meaning, and, if not meaning, at least significance. As dance critic Alistair McAuley writes, “By shaking dice or tossing coins or using the I-Ching, he found himself in contact with forces much larger than those of his own mind.”

Because, however, those forces were stochastic in nature didn’t mean they were meaningless. In fact, their randomness was the catalyst for their meaning. As Carrie Nolan, author of 2019’s Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary says, “[Even if] he didn’t want to thread a romantic love plot throughout the entire dance, he was still interested in those moments when chance encounters on the stage suggest the germs of a romantic involvement. Chance procedures allowed him to discover these unplanned encounters and configurations as they occurred without his intervention; but chance procedures also allowed him to move quickly from one encounter to the next so that no plot could develop fully.”

All of this — though somewhat less hyperlinked — flashes into my mind as some stranger sits atop my rib cage, her hands around my neck, bearing down on me. That despair, the sadness of a strange city, the angoisse of a pristine room in which you yourself, the chosen occupant, seem to be an interloper, the font of all the heartbreak is an inability to make sense of what the fuck I’m doing in this city, in this world, alive. One remedy is extinction. The other creation. And the third, of which I am currently availing myself, is to match randomly, beyond the confines of my own mind and desire, find latent in these chance encounters and configurations something beautiful and moving.

Eventually we shift positions and blood begins to flow again through my carotid arteries. Noemie and I wrestle a bit more — she says, news to me, that I’m into primal play, of which I hadn’t hitherto heard but am definitely into — I promise her a haiku and then she leaves. I sleep for an hour then wakeup, neck sore and groggy, and make it the airport. She sends some really lovely text messages checking in “post-breathplay” and I check in with her, delivering her promised haiku:

Squeeze me hard stranger,

Hold my breath until moaning

Mercy comes at dawn.