okay, this is a story that is really about how not to meet or choose your future husband. it worked out for me, except for the sad death part that will not be discussed in this piece. it was early 1990s and i was reaching the end of my 'ho-ishness in So. CA.* well, now, the 'ho period was reaching its end, but i was in my early 40s and was really feeling my sexuality as 40something women are wont to do. and in a much healthier way since i had been clued in to my sexual addiction not being all that healthy, so i was in recovery. i wasn't and would never be recovered. no addict ever is. well, i'm pretty much recovered from being an accountant but every once in a while, i do get a craving for a nice ten-key.

i had moved north of hell lay, but i still had friends in the city, so one weekend a girlfriend and i went to watch the Doo Dah parade in Pasadena. now, for those of you who don't know about this event, i will try to explain. it's a very wacky and fun experience and the parcipitants are extemely creative and out there. my two favorite groups are the Briefcase Brigade. they wear suits and of course carry briefcases which they bang on rythmically while remaining in marching formation like soldiers in a drill. it is vastly entertaining. second favorite -- i'll have to google and see if this still goes on -- is the texas chainsaw massacre float. raw meat is flung into the viewing crowd and hilarity ensues as the massacre folks gun their chainsaws. today, people probably wisely pick up the raw meat, clean it off and have it for dinner.

okay, so, after the parade, my girlfriend and i went to find some lovely beverages, what the pre-pervert Letterman used to call drinks. we were blessed to find a jazz club with an ensemble playing some decent standards. we were both avid fans. i was blessed to have seen Ella Fitzgerald perform 5 times! George Shearing too, along with others too numerous to mention here. we got our drinks, found some seats and focused in on the musicians. they were lovely, and we were having a tired out beer-drinking post parade peak experience. well, then my eyes met up with the very hot and sexy guy playing jazz flute. i watched him for a while with increasing interest, then whispered to my friend, "shit, if he can do that with his mouth, what else can he do?" she nodded vigorously and i glanced around at the other female patrons. they were giving the flute player equally avid attention. later on, when he and I were together, i would watch the women in the crowd and want to yell, "it's twoo, it's twoo!!! (shout out to Madeleine Kahn and Blazing Saddles for the young ones on here. )

well, my sex addiction was up and barking again. i saw the flautist seeing me watching him and there was a moment. a sexy chemical moment and i knew that i was in deep deep trouble. he was exactly my physical type, that black irish thing like Gabriel Byrne or Aidan Quinn, with the dark curly hair and the green eyes and a bit of the rogue about him. i know, i know. okay, he was clearly a player of some kind. nothing happened. my girlfriend and i left and went home since we were exhausted from the sun and the lovely heat and all the merriment.

she, of course, had missed that Gabriel and i had had a moment. she turned out to be one of those passive-aggressive types who are so drawn to my assertive/aggressive extroversion. but whatever. i was heated up from the sparks that had flown.** i love that i knew that i was thin and hot and sexy when i was. that i don't look back and say to myself, "shit, i wish i'd enjoyed that body when i had it." fuck no, i delighted in that body. over and over again, in my 'ho-ish and later just plain sex-loving no pathology here a cigar is just a cigar way.

okay, so, my hot body and i were feeling extremely intrigued and sexed up by this guy. so the next weekend i went, sans passive-aggressive friend, to the jazz place. well, this is the part about the how not to begin a relationship thing. i got there, all dolled up in my favorite Come Fuck Me outfit. it was my late great part cotton/part spandex short black Betsy Johnson dress with the intermittent sparkles on it and the thin criss cross straps over a mostly bare back. this dress outlined exactly what was great about my body, that i was so freaking well-proportioned in those days, my c-cup breasts exactly balancing out my liposuctioned hips. and the great thing about sunny weather is that it heals all your b'acne, which helps immensely with the hotness factor. zits are just not sexy, sadly.

i've never ever been able to wear high heels without crippling and ridiculous pain, and i hate that women knuckle under and wear the high high ones and lie to the rest of us and tell us they are sooo comfortable, so i'm sure that i was wearing my black cowboy boots with the silver tips and silver detailing that i loved beyond life and that i still have and wear, 15 or so years later. i should have had someone re-create them for me because they are seriously comfortable and still cute despite the worn outness and the loss of some of the silver deet-tailing. well, shit, so i walk into the jazz place and wonder of wonders the same ensemble is playing and the flute/gabriel guy is there. this is where it gets kind of romance novel-ish but i think that if anyone has learned anything about me, it's that i am addicted to telling the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes other people, and, i've been told, limits my readership. well, fuck it. i yam what i yam.

okay, well, flute boy senses something and looks up to catch my eye. i find a seat, radiating sex sex sex i know, and order a lovely refreshing vodka gimlet. a minute later, the flautist is in front of me and he takes my hand and my gimlet and leads me up to sit beside him on the bench that rests alongside the not so grand piano, turns to me and begins to kiss me passionately. i kid you not, people. it was beyond. we are then fiercely making out -- i hate that term, btw -- and the jazz guys are looking on and nodding and smiling and god knows what the audience is thinking. probably, look at that slutty 'ho up there with that what else can he do with his mouth dude. but i am completely lost in the moment after delirious moment and not remotely thinking about calling my sex addicts anonymous sponsor.

now, there is nothing that i love or loved doing more than kissing. yes, fucking and all of the foreplay is a blast, but kissing someone who does it really well is pre-foreplay, when your body is blazing and you can feel it in your nipples and in your crotch, but you're not going to act on it yet because it's too amazing and crazy and the anticipation is the sweetest most sizzling thing of all. that's what i need now, in my dotage, an impotent man who's a fabulous kisser!!!

my first husband was a terrible kisser, somehow his freaking teeth were always there and clanging on mine, and he refused to give oral sex because he was a doctor in training and said that the grossest things he'd seen involved female private parts! can you imagine? whenever i think about his thousand year marriage to my blond replacement, all i have to do is ponder those two factors and my envy evaporates like it was never there. so i have never ever settled for a poor kisser since that time. for me, it's absolutely a dealbreaker if someone is inadequate in that area since it predicts lack of skills in the other hidden area.

well, eventually it got ridiculous, and we stopped the voracious kissing. my lips were sore, my lipstick was long gone, my red (that month) hair was beyond bedhead at that point, but i didn't care. i sat there on that bench watching, listening and bopping to the fabulous jazz standards -- green dolphin street? was that the one i loved the most back then?-- buzzed on this guy and on my lovely vodka gimlet. god, i've got to get me some vodka and some rose's lime juice.  oh, and i was in rapture as i watched my new friend play that jazz flute, knowing in that place between my thighs that, yes, it was twuuueee, it was so twuuueee.

oh, i forgot to mention that Gabriel was wearing a sea green maybe celadon shirt and some khaki cargo-ish pants or, well, whatever was cool before that style. the green matched his quite bedroomy eyes and he could not have looked sexier. i've always loved a man who can dress himself, especially since i had to do a complete makeover on first hubby. funny story where i eventually realized that i was grooming him for the blond bitch who was next in line. but whatever, right?and, shit, if a man doesn't know what to do, then a t-shirt and some 501s or the equivalent are just fine, or a flannel shirt and the same jeans in colder weather. i know, i know, that is not fashion. but i've always been partial to a more blue collar look and affect. probably because i was raised in such a fucking you have to go to an ivy league school and become a doctor upper middle class jewish way.

so it is the end of the jazz music, and the musicians are all packing up their instruments. they're cool and i've been introduced, but then i don't quite know what to do with my bad self. but gabriel comes to me and he's really called richard, it seems, and he comes with me to my parked car. we re-entwine ourselves and kiss and kiss and kiss explosively while leaning on my red toyota wagon with the atm machine looking thing on the back. eventually we come up for air, actually gasping for breath and reason. he miraculously doesn't ask me to come back to his place so i don't have to make the "to 'ho or not to 'ho" decision. i find out later that he is even more of a slob than i am and that he didn't want to scare me off with the crap/carpiness of his apartment. that was a good decision since i'm better at tolerating my own pigpennishness than i am someone else's.

but richard does take my number and promises that he will call and that we will get together very very soon. and i totally believe him, even thought he's a man, for once, because there is mutual need to explore this biochemistry for a loooong looong time and see where it leads. now, i never in my most wild dreams thought that these shenanigans were going to lead to marriage. fuck, no. i had no intention whatsover of getting married again, given the complete heartbreak and humiliation that was the end of my first one. what i would not realize for a long while was that he and I would be able to play dueling dysfunctions at a professional level and that he was the repetition compulsion man of my dreams, which meant that we could work through all of our demons together while having mind-blowingly outstandingly not-kinky but still hot hot sex with each other.

so two days go by and i'm jumping out of my skin. as carrie fisher says, instantaneous gratification is NOT quick enough. fucking A it's not. i was never good with any kind of a delay in any kind of gratification. a script that i'm writing, for an animated children's film, is due soon and i'm having to rein myself in from putting an x-rated scene right in the middle of it. "what is this about dexter the dragon having a huge erection?" i can hear the producer shouting.

Thankfully the phone finally rings and it's Richard and he invites me on the strangest first date ever. in three days i'm to come to his place and then we will go together to have dinner with his parents and his eight brothers and sisters. jesus christ. who does this kind of thing at the beginning of whatever this is? either someone who wants to get married right away or a completely passive-aggressive looney tune. well, of course richard turned out to be a little bit of both, but that's a story for another time.

shit, so now i have 3 days to figure out what to wear to please this guy but to also not horrify his family. thankfully, i have a vintage light pink sleeveless -- god, i had great lightly muscled arms back then -- embroidered dress with a waist and a skirt that billows a bit to just below the knees. it's sexy but also nicely appropriate for dinner and whatever else was ahead. i put on some espadrilles, not too high of course, and the fabulous pink heart chandelier earrings that i'd purchased on melrose avenue back when i lived only a 15 minute walk away. my favorite store was the Wound and Wound company where you could find a fabulous wind-up toy for only 3 dollars or so. i had Early Kindergarten taste back then too.

so i drive down to richard's apartment in pasadena and all the way there i'm in almost unbearable heat. now, i have to say here that i am not good at blow by blow, sorry, descriptions of sex. they embarrass me and end up sounding like bad romance novels with the throbbing members and engorged breasts. so what follows is going to be pretty soft core. there, i've said it. i'm sorry if i've led you on. okay, well,  i get there and he lives in one of a series of lovely little bungalows. he didn't tell me until much later about the nightly gunshots and the rats that he'd had to clear out of the space when he'd moved in, thank god. this was not the good part of pasadena apparently, but i was in no mood to hear about it.

and miracle of miracles, the place is spic and span. that was the name of a cleaning product back in the day, not yet one more un-pc term. whatever. there is no mess, no clutter of any kind. probably some cramned with shit closets somewhere. of course it never ever looked that way again, but i didn't know that at the time and i was hugely impressed that he's done all of this cleaning for me. it was sexy, i thought, all that cleaning, but at that point dick cheney would have seemed sexy, downturned half scowling smile and all.  

i admire the small bungalow and the very sweet cat. richard says he loves my outfit and that family dinner isn't going to be for an hour, so, well,  we kind of fall on each other and the ferocious kissing and moaning begins again as if it had never stopped. and it is all heightened by our knowledge that this time we are going to finish this sucker off and that we have a ticking clock to deal with. so we kiss and grope a little on the futon-type couch in his living room/drafting room/music room. then he grabs my hand and we scramble ourselves into the bedroom and on to his bed. he reaches for the tiny buttons on my pink dress, curses at how many of them there are and we laugh. i'm thrilled because i love being with someone else who doesn't take sex too damn seriously. it is supposed to be fun, for fuck's sake.

i love being undressed by a man. i hate hate hate hate those teen movies where they each take their clothes off and stand there naked and awkward. fucking A. roll around and take each other's stuff off. it's much sexier and much more fun. i love being naked with a man. (not now, but who cares about now, right?) the gorgeous gigolo i dated -- he was being paid to service someone else-- told me that i looked frumpy in a too long betsy number. of course he only said that after he'd taken the garment off me. he was crazy about the part spandex bare back black dress. but mostly he was delighted by how my unclothed body looked and felt, and he'd seen plenty of female physiques given his line of work. i already knew that i was sexy but having a gigolo tell you that you are, well, it's a big boost to the ego. go find one of your own. seriously.

so soon i'm down to my pink brassiere and my silkish pink panties. richard's shirt, this one teal colored, is off. we cling to each other then, marveling at that skin on skin tactile intense smooth pleasure that you don't even realize you've missed until you're reveling in it again. one of the marvelous things about being nude with someone else. i know that he can feel how taut my nipples are, and he slides his hand between my legs, smiling with glee when he feels how wet i am. (this is as dirty as it's going to get folks.) then he's reaching for those pesky little bra fasteners in the back and, snap, they are undone. this is a man with mad skills.  i can tell this already, and i'm hooked and eyed.