by Janet W. Hardy
I cheated, of course. Like generations of married people before me and generations yet to come, I tried to reason it out: perhaps my desires were temporary, a craving that would vanish for good once sated; how could I know except to try? I waited as long as I could stand it, and then I did the only thing I could figure out how to do.
The first (but not the last) personal ad I answered turned out to be Marcel, a surly, scrawny little Frenchman who told me over coffee that my lipstick was too brown for my complexion but that he liked my shoes. It never occurred to me that this blithe assumption of the right to criticize my fashion choices might not bode well, because goddammit I was going to get to do real S/M at last.
I drifted dizzily through the next five days, learning that the idea of being too excited to eat was not, as I had always supposed, some peculiar sort of metaphor. (Of course I couldn’t sleep or work either, but neither of those was anything out of the ordinary.) Some residual vestige of common sense made me tell my sympathetic friend Laura what motel I would be in and what to do if I wasn’t back by 3:00.
I dressed in my best Macy’s-dominatrix outfit, close-fitting black knit dress, black hose, high-heeled black slingbacks, notwithstanding that it was Sacramento in August and the temperatures had been soaring into three digits for days. My abused credit card was sweating too as I used it to check in. Marcel joined me a few minutes later in the room and we embraced humidly. Neither of us, we discovered, could figure out how to work the hotel air conditioner.
I ordered him out of his clothes – well, actually, I suggested that he take off his clothes – anyway, he took them off. We looked at each other for a long moment. I hadn’t a clue what to do next.
Finally I sat in the desk chair and told him to lie across my lap. (This was the moment in which I discovered that the average female lap does not hold an entire adult male, even a very small French one; they’re always falling off the edge of your knees.) I began to spank him, eliciting extremely satisfying little Gallic yelps and moans. I was so turned on I could hardly breathe.
After about twenty spanks he stood up rather suddenly and said, “OK, now let me show you what’s really fun.” A moment later he was stretched out flat on his back on the glistening polyester wall-to-wall. I was, he said, to walk on his supine body. I was to place my full weight on him but to try to keep most of it on the toes of my shoes so that my sharp heels didn’t actually break his skin. He supposed that I could put my hand on the table for balance if I had to.
That was supposed to be really fun? Well, OK; I hadn’t liked oysters the first time I tried them either. I stepped aboard, precariously. His penis immediately flew up to vertical like the flag on a mailbox.
Walking on a man feels like a rodeo event with no audience. Flesh slides over bone under your feet and you’re constantly in danger of turning an ankle or falling ingloriously off. I felt myself growing dryer with every step, and developing a slight headache from the heat and the concentration. Marcel, however, was exultant and dripping.
“There, doesn’t that feel wonderful?!” he exclaimed. “Try putting your foot on my face.”
Eventually he must have noticed that I wasn’t matching his enthusiasm. “OK, let me show you the best part,” he said. “Get off now.” I dismounted, relieved and wondering what the best part was going to be, and he stood up. Then he placed his penis on the table. “Now stand on that,” he said, helping me with his free hand to climb up. Figuring nothing could be more ignominious than what had happened so far, I placed my foot on his penis and pressed downward. This part was arguably the best, because the head of his penis as it bulged out of the shaft reminded me of one of those little rubber heads whose eyes and ears pop out when you squeeze them. Or maybe a cannoli, when you stick your fork in the middle and the cream blobs out the end. Or maybe…
“You don’t like it?” he asked, crestfallen.
“Well, no, I’m not really getting much from it,” I admitted.
He affected astonishment. His last girlfriend, he claimed, was so turned on by this that she’d been willing to step on bugs and rodents while he watched. At that point some long-suppressed fraction of my intelligence floated to the surface and I told him I had to leave.
I drove home, stopping on the way for a large Diet Coke and a package of Ho Hos, and called Laura to tell her that I was OK.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Um, not so good,” I said. “Turns out what he really likes is for you to walk around on him.”
“Oh,” she said. There was a long pause while we both considered that.
“That sounds really boring,” she said. And then we talked about something else. And I never saw Marcel again.
(excerpted from GIRLFAG: A LIFE TOLD IN SEX AND MUSICALS)