Erotican't: Reviews of Some of the People with Whom I Have Slept.

"Lance" My first and most traumatic experience. He was a fifteen-year-old genius with a baby and hung like a...well, horse. Now that I'm older and less naive, I can see how this might have caused some pain. The next day on the bus to school,  I heard some annoying bitch from my algebra class screeching about how I made him stop before he finished. Lance swore he never told anyone, and I barely spoke to him for the remainder of the semester, when I gratefully graduated and sought shelter in celibacy for another year.

"Garth" A playah if ever there was one. He kept a mental count of all the women he had slept with, which, according to him was around 245 when he met me about six years ago. He also claimed to have directed porn videos and often lectured me on the importance of using condoms. He had a few cunning tricks up his sleeve and was once  moved to speak these fine words, "You find passion in the most surprising people." To this day, I am not sure whether or not to take it personally. Nevertheless, there was one encounter during which I opted to watch The Kids in the Hall on TV over his shoulder. Not that I was that bored, but I really liked The Kids in the Hall. I think of that whenever I hear the Liz Phair song that goes he said he liked to do it backwards/I said that's just fine with me/that way we can fuck and watch TV. Also of note was the fact that he was fond of shower play and refused to dry himself with a towel, preferring instead a hand-held electric hair dryer. When his shower was broken and he came to my house, Sandy was alarmed to walk in on him thoroughly getting himself dry, and told me so. "I know," I said. "He does that." "No," she insisted, "he was drying himself." Our brief affair ended when I met the sailor I would marry six months later. I occasionally run into Garth on the street. Last time I saw him, he informed me that I was somehow inadvertantly responsible for the death of one of his friends.

"Luke" So cute. We flirted coyly for weeks before we ever ended up in bed. The first time was a little awkward, due to the lack of privacy available in my house at the time, but just looking at him made my teeth sharp. I thought of him as a creamy vanilla truffle that needed frequent appreciation. That made him nervous. We were both a little neurotic at the time, but looking back on it now, he really was yummy.

"Pedro" Someone I had lost contact with for several months after three presumably promising dates. It drove me crazy trying to figure out why he wasn't as curious as I was, considering our fabulously compatible conversations. We finally reconverged for drinks and hit the sack under the pretense of contacting ghosts in his apartment. After all these years, when I guy says he wants to try to contact restless spirits in his apartment, I still expect to see a Ouija board, dammit. But, oh, that oft-regrettable drunken sex, when waking up in a strange bed with yesterday's mascara smeared across your face and your neck stained with hickeys are the only signals that anything physical might have happened. I swear I'll never drink that much again. I saw him two days later, cruising 'round town the top down on his car, and it finally struck me that maybe he was an ass.

"Dirk" One of those polyamorous, polysexual types, you know, with a distant clan of nymphs and nymphettes sharing a house on the beach and a suitcase full of fetishes. I gamely tried to help him fulfill his fantasy of public sex and found it much too uncomfortable. We ended up under a slide on a playground, and yes, it was nighttime, so no children were damaged. Ultimately, I think I was too "traditional" to carry on as such, but I have never found a better partner for watching documentaries. He was clever enough to warn me against the heady addiction of cyberexhibitionism. I decided to file that bit of advice wherever my brain stores the one about how smoking causes lung cancer.

"Raul" A middle-cass, blue collar suburbanite who worshipped Foucault's Pendulum and liked to talk dirty. He delivered letters unto me, some of them smutty, scribbled on his company's notepads. Things got contentious when he tried to introduce his teenaged neighbor in a not entirely wholesome manner, and when I blew up at him in some strip mall franchise restaurant for arguing with me about capitalism and the blatant falsity of advertising. He has since apologized, but I still look upon the System with contempt.

"Diego" The thing everyone always asks me about this guy is whether or not he was really into butt sex. Sorry. The frequent mention of all things butt-related is just part of the image he likes to project. The subject never even came up- so to speak- in bed, and in fact, he was only anal in the sense that he was most frisky when I was fresh out of the shower. He did, however, improvise the naked robot dance and do impressions of Stuart (from MadTV) in his underwear. This was all more entertaining than steamy. I still get sentimental when I think of the time I was sick and he brought me stuff...before I had even put out. He came bearing gifts of juice, medicine, Get A Life, and soup. It wasn't just nasty old canned soup, either, but udon with grilled chicken. Now that is class.Unlike this page.

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