Lessons of Verbal Intercourse (LA,Part 2,Continued)

I walked Hollywood and Vine Saturday morning, a week ago, at dawn.
A Friday night out with the girls, and an essential 2:30 a.m. breakfast at Mel’s, forgot that LA rolled-up its streets and parking lots. Spent the wee hours sleeping on a black couch at Avalon, while hip twenty-somethings actually danced until 7 a.m., the same time the car lot’s posted sign said it would re-open.

It was Cinderella-ish actually, this unexpected little adventure, high-heeling at 6:55 in the morning, in step with a curious menagerie of Gloria Swanson, Art Linkletter, Gypsy Lee Rose, Fay Raye and Tony Orlando on the very cleaned-up Hollywood Walk of Fame, wearing my night club jeans and flounced baby doll halter (last in style in the 70s, when I was 13— they had matching panties back then).

My car was locked adjacent to the Greyhound station, and Kermit the ticket master and Armen, a taxi driver waiting for his pick-ups, took turns sheltering and conversing with me in their workplaces. We laughed and appreciated the humor in my situation; spoke family and politics, life in their native Mexico and Armenia/Russia, respectively, and they opined the parking attendant’s usual Saturday arrival time, as the clock passed over each of their previous guesses. We shared a communion, these men who were protecting me in a limited but valued way, as they offered their jackets to warm me and I gave them my girlish morning-after-nightclubbing smiles.

The parking lot attendant, Jose, showing up at 9:30, smiled at me, too, and told me the White Lotus next door had my keys. Buzzing their back door by propping a long stick through their closed back gate (resourceful Survivor that I am— after pounding on the trash bin didn’t get any attention) I was told the manager would be in at 10:30 (a.m., thankfully, not p.m.). The next hour whiled away at the newsstand down the block, discovering mono-“command”-named alternative magazines: Go, Yes, Up, Shift, Dissent and Conscience, my clothes, flattered by Duan a handsome, soon to be retired cop, already father of two young adults, looking not more than 30 himself, handing out flyers for his sister’s new store. It was a good day.

I drove home on Sunset, winding the curves through Bel-Air to the background sounds of Daniel Powters’ perky “You work at a smile and you go for a ride ..You had a bad day.” Was this a movie in the making or what? …. Da- da- da- da-daa ---- da ----da-da-da-da-da --- da-daaad-da- DA-daaaaa…an updated choreography to “Singing in the Rain” was ready.

My sister-in-law said my face beamed when I arrived. Yes, I was late for an event, and had moments of being annoyed this morning waiting, but a morning like no other. I had spent just two nights before and will have spent two nights later in various intimacies with male friends; Both, as well as my encounter earlier in the week, provided momentary sensual awakening of comfort and well being and ahhhhh. And yet, the lesson is that in sex, even condoms don’t protect fully. It is often the simple verbal intercourse— of shared acknowledgement on an out-of-the-blue day, that brings me the most contentment and belonging, without the worry of the morning-after.

Side Notes— Carlos, a percussionist I also met last week gave me a Nemo squeeze toy as a cute hello gift, noting its multi-purpose functioning as a hand de-stressing squeezer, comical animated face changer and squishy sound maker, along with a throw ball of sorts. Playing with it tonight, my thumb found itself pushing between the young clownfish’s eyes inside through its tail, transforming his shape from cartoon fish into a PVC latex-soft, rubber filled penis head. My thumb, stroking back and forth, which squished the gel, sounding like a Sponge contraceptive, nonetheless, felt consumed within the enclosing elastic material surrounding it. I could only imagine the much stronger sensation a penis must get from the responsive give- and- take of the vagina. Hmmmmm. On the other side, last night on Real Sex, they had a segment on fucking machines for women. Noted one woman on how amazing her orgasms, “But it can’t cuddle you afterwards.”
To have sex — to not have sex. This blog is about ironies, and sex is ripe with that. And if state governments increasingly have their say, like the Supreme Court has recently ruled for Alabama, sex toys, but not guns, will increasingly be illegal. No toys, no free-love, no verbal intercourse either. Will they cut our fingers off when we do it solo… hey, Mr Nemo…..