Moodswing - The most sex I’ve had in six months

I finally got some dick the other day, but don’t freak out or anything. It’s not like I got to touch it or anything. I am still bummed at myself over that, because if I had not been late, I could’ve gotten closer to the stage and probably within reaching distance. But as it was, in order for me to reach it, I would have had to climb over my good friend George and his wife Judy, which, believe me, I actually did attempt, but George mistook my actions for the advent of a hug and hugged me back, a big bear-hug kinda hug, which hinders you from going forward in a situation like that. But the hug was nice, too.

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Anyway, I must say it was a huge surprise, because when I set out that day, I did not know in the slightest that I’d be within a big bear-hug distance of, you know, lovely fleshy nakedness. In fact, just hours earlier I was in Lary’s shower, with Lary. For the past year, he’s been building a new bathroom, and not just any bathroom, but a Saddam Hussein-palace of a bathroom that is bigger than a city block and tiled like the Taj Mahal. The shower itself is the size of my entire office, and designed in a complicated shape that I’ll describe as “Giant Alien Eye Socket” but with tile.

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I was there because I needed to learn to tile things myself, namely the bathroom on the one-bedroom side of my duplex. Yes, you heard me, I said my duplex. I figure if my sister is gonna dump this shit pit on me for three goddamn years, then the least I can do is take ownership of it.

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So the first thing I did after I fixed up the two-bedroom side was kick the tenants out of the one-bedroom side, because it’s a little hard to rent a vacant apartment with 12 young guys piled on the porch at all hours, drinking beer and flicking cigarette butts onto the lawn. I personally would not mind this, mind you, but I’m not a typical renter, and you’d be surprised at how picky typical renters are as a whole. So the boys had to leave.

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That was a month ago, and in that time I have not gotten past the bathroom as far as fixing the place up. Jesus God, is all I have to say. I have seen bathrooms in better shape in abandoned trailers down in Baja. I almost didn’t know what to do except take the pick ax I found in the back yard and tear the place apart. There were so many flying mold spores that I am probably still, as you read this, growing mushrooms in my lungs. Now that it’s all torn up, it’s evident this is definitely one of those occasions where you have to depend on friends to help patch it together. Hence the necessity to hang out with Lary in his shower.

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But the only problem is that Lary’s ability to converse goes to shit when he’s engrossed in a project. It was almost as though I was talking to myself. “Did Momma Cass die by choking on a ham sandwich or by choking on her own vomit?” I asked, because, you know, I had to humor myself.

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“Get out,” Lary hissed.

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“No, really, I know Jimi Hendrix choked on vomit, didn’t he?”

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“Get. The fuck. Out.”

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“I don’t think Momma Cass is any less cool just because the food that she choked on was less digested than Jimi’s.”

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At that, Lary got up and I thought he was gonna get more spackle or whatever, because there were lots of patches I made sure to point out to him that looked spackle deficient. But it soon became clear that he was getting his shotgun again, so at that I all of a sudden remembered I had to go see my friend Mike and the Dames Aflame in their big burlesque-apalooza they stage every month down at that new theater built by my other friend, Giant Michael. I had pretty much gotten what I needed from Lary, anyway, basically figuring out that you just patch it all together piece by piece until your bases are covered, so I thanked him for letting me in his shower and then high-tailed it up to Midtown.

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“Where the hell have you been?” Lucky Yates, the master of ceremonies, yelled at me when I finally arrived. Jesus, you’d have thought I was part of the show like I’ve been begging them to let me be for years now. All I’m missing is a hot body, which I swear is my next project after I finish that bathroom. Besides, the small theater was packed. I barely made it to the edge of the stage to position myself within distance to peep underneath loincloths and such. Anyway, thank God I went, because sometimes you don’t even know what you need until that need is met.

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In other words, by the end of the night, I’d gotten plenty of tits, ass, dick and dirty talk, not to mention the shower and the big bear hug. In short, it was the most sex I’ve had in six months — not all from the same place or even the same person, mind you, but this is definitely one of those occasions where you have to depend on friends to help patch it together.

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Hollis Gillespie is the author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories and Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”