Clutter.
My skeletons make for nothing but clutter. I
have so many skeletons in my closet, that
you might mistake it for a cemetery. The
bones buried there are generally hard, and
I have touched each one individually,
fingered each one languidly. There is no
flesh to be found in this fantasy, so sorry
Mr. Idol. I have been a slave, a pristine
daughter, a virgin and a goddess. I have
played a bitch, the four legged variety, and
howled on command. I have been a
cheerleader in bed, though I never was
good enough to make it onto the team in high school.
Bones. Nothing but bones.
I have a lover. We are monogamous. He thinks he knows everything about me, my life and my sexual escapades. He loves that I have tasted other women. He is encouraged that I am prone to spontaneous roleplay. He feigns embarrassment when I start to dance erotically on a busy street. Later, he will fuck me, telling me how hot I looked doing what supposedly brought him so much shame. It is part of the hypocrisy that is so distinctly male. Don't wear red lipstick, baby...that's for whores. Yet every model he downloads online licks the tip of her own nipple through distinctly red lips. I like you without makeup, baby. You don't need to wear such a short skirt, baby.
Translation: I don't want other men looking at you, the way I look at their women.
Back to my closet.
I have had well over three hundred lovers. He knows about fifty or so. We have had the "so how many have you had" talk that all lovers are prone to now and then. He feels cheap and sleazy with regard to the eleven he has tagged in his tender twenty-six years. I have accumulated two hundred in one single year. 1985. What an amazing year. If it had a pulse, I fucked it. Man, woman, beast. It didn't matter. If I could have combined the efforts of each one of these species into one huge fuckfest, I would have.
I cringe writing these words.
One person in my life knows about my closet. He is my ex-husband, and a large part of that closet. He has rummaged through it, and been horrified by it for the most part. Out of love, once upon a time, he closed and barricaded the door, so that nothing accidentally spilled out at inopportune times. Once we divorced, however, he ripped the door open and laid the contents on the table, much to the delight of his lawyers. Bones everywhere, with no meat on them for the sharks. You can't penalize someone for having a past, except in our legal system. According to some, justice is blind. This is not so when your bones are on the table and custody of your kids are given to one of the skeletons. The hypocrisy once again. So I fucked a lot. Sue me.
He did. He won.
I am amazed at how I have accumulated these bones without dying of the diseases that come, when they come. I made it through the STD era. I made it through the AIDS era. I was not entirely unscathed. I had two abortions. Those tiny skeletons are buried in another part of the closet. One I refuse to open, one I refuse to remember. The bones of their fathers are buried in there as well. One father I didn't know. The only time we spoke was at his arraignment. He was my rapist, though, I consider him nothing more than just another lover. I was with him longer that night than most of my one night stands. It shames me to know that while he was violent and demanding, to me he was nothing more than a roleplay gone awry. He cut my "cunt" open with a beer bottle and left me on the side of a road to bleed.
I've had lovers do more damage to me with their words.
The other father of a set of baby bones was a lover I coveted. He was a vampire, metaphorically. He sucked me dry in every fashion someone can suck the life from a person. He drained my blood, because he was kinky. He drained my emotions, because he was an emotional cripple himself. He drained me financially, because he was a leech. He drained me physically, because he fucked me until I would laugh and cry simultaneously. I told him I was pregnant about nine months into our lust-fest. He told me to purge myself of the "bag of cells" within me.
It was the first time I ever considered killing myself.
I did a quick inventory of my closet around that time. There was no room for my own bones in there. I couldn't make them fit if I tried to. I opted not to kill myself, but the progeny within and with it, my relationship with its sire. I wrote a poem about it, and he read it matter of factly. He laid it down alongside his crypt and fucked me non-chalantly. He smelled like stale cigarettes to me. It disgusted me, and I gathered my things and left him. The image never left me. He is married now to a rotund little girl he met online and who enjoys playing Holly Homemaker with him, while he skulks the nightclubs of N.Y.C. looking for a new freak to replace me. He calls once in awhile. At least I know I am not easily replicated. I hear the lock on my closet door rattle. I hang up the phone before the door bursts open.
I have a lover now who thinks he knows me.
When we make love, I would swear it was my first time. I am in love with him, but he is not in love with me. He likes me to tell him about the things, the people, I have done in my life. I keep the count under fifty. I repeat stories over and over again that I have told him before, lest he think I have many new ones still in the library. He doesn't like me to use the phrase "make love", but is aghast when I suggest we fuck. He keeps me intrigued continuously, because he is like having several men in one. Or, perhaps he keeps me intrigued because I am now in my mid-thirties. Opportunities to screw younger men don't come along consistently now the way they once did. He doesn't give head, but doesn't mind me doing it to him several times a week. In fear of losing this thing I have found, I pretend to be satiated by that. Sometimes, I pretend that I don't think he is selfish. Sometimes I want to push his head down there and demand it. Sometimes, I want to tell him that I have had the tongues of three men on my clit simultaneously. I'm not brave enough to tell him this story.
Sometimes, I wish my closet door would burst open and save me the trouble.
©2001 by Cher Ladd-Vuolo
