horizontal does california

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Dear Ones,

After an afternoon of delight with an old lover in Portland (which felt sort of like closing a loop, since the last time we saw each other, I was still rather … angry), I drove south.

Portland, Oregon to Ashland, Oregon. Six hours. Quick overnight, stop in at the food co-op and a sex shop.

Ashland, OR to Weed, California. An hour and a half.

I arrived at Stewart Mineral Hot Springs around midday, and I was dismayed to learn that I was required to wear a towel or a sheet in the sauna, the common area, and the cold plunge. The only nudity-friendly zone was the phone-booth-style personal bathing room, which consisted of a tub of hot mineral water, a chair, a clock, and a few hooks on the wall.

The cold plunge was less a plunge and more, a dip in the creek out back.

Now, if you know me, you probably know that I abhor being cold. I stood on the deck overlooking the scene, the surface of the water partially covered by yellow leaves, watching braver souls splash on in and then, mostly, stand very, very still. I wavered, went back inside, and then out again, back in, decided on another dip in the bath, a sauna, a lukewarm shower, out to the deck again, and then steeled myself with the determination that I would do this thing. And I would do it — for horizontal posterity. In other words, dear reader, I cold-plunged in 53-degree water for you. In order to bring you this image. (I hope it was worth it.) I suggest you zoom in on my face.

Bahahahaha.

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Before this mineral bath experience, I don’t believe I had ever used the word “sharp” to describe water.

The bath attendant warned me not to move too quickly while in the tub. The sign in my booth clearly stated: if your skin begins to tingle or itch after too much time submerged (and too much time could be as little as two minutes), then get out immediately.

But. Well. Wellll… It looked so innocuous! It looked just like a regular bath! Perhaps a little greener. So when my lower back began to tingle, well. I didn’t get out immediately. Not exactly immediately. I stayed just a tinge longer… I thought that the water was, you know, doing its thing! Working its magic! Relaxing my 5,000 mile driving muscles.

And it burned me! Hot damn!

I had to own up to not following instructions and ask for a soothing gel at the front desk. It felt like a particularly gnarly sunburn for several days.

I felt sheepish. But now I know. Water can be sharp, kids. You heard it here. My waterburned ass got back in the car and drove.

I got to witness this before darkness:

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Weed, California to San Francisco, California. Five hours.

As I turned onto highway 80 from I-5, I started to feel rather … nervous. The drivers (pretty much instantly) became aggressive, antsy, pushy. I turned off the audiobook and sat up straighter and paid attention. (I think I was listening to More Than Two.)

This edgy nervousness continued throughout most of the week I spent in SF, and dissolved as I drove south to Monrovia.

I stayed in the guest bedroom of a pretty remarkable intentional community for an entire week, in a city with one of the most vibrant sex-positive / kink / maker / burner / intimacy cultures in the U.S. … and I hardly took advantage of it.

This was partly because the community was housed in a legitimately dangerous neighborhood. You could say that SOMA is kind of like my own neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, but first, I don’t know it (the devil you know/devil you don’t) and second, it seemed to have an exponential increase in the amount of drug-addled street denizens. I felt uncharacteristically afraid of walking around alone. The last time I remember feeling that way, I was at my godfather’s apartment in the pit of São Paulo. I didn’t even want to take the train! I’ve definitely taken BART before, by myself, on multiple occasions throughout my 20s and early 30s, without a single qualm. Something was up. This was an extreme reaction.

Right. So. My egregious dropping of the ball was partly that. Partly.

And it was mostly because I became wildly infatuated with one of the guys living in the community and wound up hanging round the place, hoping for more time with him. He was socially awkward and gorgeous and odd and erratic and brilliant and his room was full of insects and books and felt like a set created for the Lost Boys in the movie Hook, if the Lost Boys lost their eternal youth and became thirty year-old painter/scientists.

Why was I so enamored? All I can say is that I was fascinated. Such eccentric intelligence. In the body of a boxer. Lithe. With the face of a movie star. A face that he preferred to disguise with a beard and a body that he preferred to dress in “rags,” because he doesn’t want to be appreciated for his looks.

And he smelled. So. Delicious.

The last time I was that intoxicated by a person’s scent, I was a teenager. Standing at my locker. Flush with desire because I could tell, without turning to look, that Jonathan Moore had entered the hallway. Mmm! Big inhale. Bigger sigh!

This painter/scientist, he pursued me first. (I’ll have you know!) We spent a few hours rolling around in his bed that night. He switched subjects dizzyingly, and positions just as quickly. One minute, his tongue was between my legs, the next he was lying on his back playing guitar, the next reading me an excerpt from The Little Prince in Spanish while I tried to distract him. (That was a fun game.) And then, he spoke Portuguese! Properly! Without a gringo accent! I nearly wept with joy, being able to speak to a lover in my second language.

That was the only night, though.

Ohhh, I wanted another hit. I would have spent every minute of my time in SF with him if I could have. I would have given up the episodes I recorded, the meals out with friends, the fancy sushi dinner treat, the pretty horizontal photos, the walk-and-talks, anything I had scheduled or thought about having scheduled.

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But we had an odd miscommunication when he invited me on a walk to do errands, pressed for time and stressed and walking ahead of me, and I became frustrated and decided to part from him and head to the grocery store solo, because his stress was becoming my stress, and that “hint of drama” as he called it later, derailed his interest in me and left me pining.

“I’m not even that sexual of a person,” he said later. “So if I get a hint of drama, I’m like, forget it.”

I was acutely aware of the ridiculousness of this thing, the outlandishly disproportionate desire I felt for this erratic, (perhaps, on the spectrum?) unsuitable-for-me human. And yet I watched myself do the things that kept me from my work, kept me from my joy. Hang around. Wait. Try to turn his attention back toward me. I watched myself do it. And I couldn’t stop myself.

The night before I left, we had a tentative plan to meet. He broke the plan in a message that said he just wanted to be alone. He was sorry. But he was really hurt.

“By me?” I asked.

“No no,” he said. “By someone I really like.”

. . . . .

Fawwwwwk. Seriously? Ouch. Seriously?

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Due to infatuation, I dropped the ball on:

• at least four (4!) recording sessions
• visiting the Patreon offices (literally one single block away)
• a kinky cocktail party, annnd…
• the affections of a sexy, GGG, open, kinky, emotionally intelligent, intuitive, caring, present, and physically gifted person who made himself available to me from the moment we met

I did manage to get my head in the game long enough to record two episodes, with women I’d been courting for months. Brilliant women. Badass women.

Marcia, co-founder (with Reid Mihalko) of Cuddle Party, invited me to record at her home in Berkeley. Gee San Francisco’s lovely … when you see it from Berkeley.

I find driving in San Francisco positively terrifying.

There’s all these stop signs at the TOP of RIDICULOUSLY steep hills, and I’m white-knuckling and praying that nobody pulls up behind me but of COURSE they do, actually they pull up VERY CLOSE to my bumper because they don’t think there’s anything unusual about driving on a 45 DEGREE ANGLE and I’m stressing about getting my foot on the gas pedal in time and when it’s my turn I decide against using two feet because that didn’t work so well the last time and accidentally nearly floor it because I think “GAH I’M GOING TO ROLL BACK INTO THEM!!!” and then this trip will be OVER because I will have a totaled car and fuck fuck fuckety VROOM.

Okay. Okay. You’re fine. You’re fine. Car’s fine. You can do this. You’ve done harder things. You’ve got this.

Next block: same damn hill.

However, I made it to Marcia’s unscathed. (On the way back, however, I spent all my cash getting gas and forgot that they charge you a toll to get into San Francisco and then they gave me a toll violation and I cursed like a New Yorker and then spend the next hour in San Francisco’s infamous traffic and the next hour after that circling and circling and circling in Noe Valley, a known nice neighborhood where my friend told me to park the car if I had hopes of it not getting jacked, circling and circling because it was 6pm on HALLOWEEN and everyone was parked because they were taking their kids out for their YEARLY WALK.)

Ahem.

Recording with Marcia was delightful. The room we used houses all kinds of convertible furniture and books and nooks for making things and exceedingly soft blankets and a grand assortment of pillows. She often throws Cuddle Parties in there, but it also functions as office space and movie-watching land and serves all kinds of other intents and purposes, hence its moniker: the Room of Requirement.

Marcia has a project called Asking for What You Want. I specifically wanted to talk to her about boundaries, and my near-acrobatic attempts to avoid situations in which I will be obliged to say no.

We talked about the generosity of boundaries, graceful no’s, counteracting good girl training (Good Girl Recovery), and queerness. A gem from this recording was Marcia’s proclamation: “Nobody who isn’t queer sits around wondering whether they are queer enough. If you’re queer enough to wonder, you’re queer enough to consider yourself queer!”

Right before the (aforementioned) ill-fated errand-walk with the object of my San Francisco affections, I got to record with illustrious southern firebrand Dixie de la Tour. She is the host of the longest-running sex storytelling series in America, Bawdy Storytelling!

I first admired Dixie’s skills at the RISK/Bawdy Live! storytelling show at The Bell House in Brooklyn, right before I left town for this adventure. My dear Samia insisted these folks are exactly in my wheelhouse, and I simply had to attend.

[Samia hosts the podcast Make America Relate Again, in which she has respectful political conversations with women who voted for Donald Trump. It’s astonishing. I’ve never heard anything like it. Literally. I don’t think I’d ever heard a single respectful political conversation before listening to her podcast. She’s on hiatus now, but there’s plenty to listen to.]

Dixie is one of the finest storytellers I have ever personally seen. She spins tales about her sexual awakening in the dirty movie booths, men she’s loved, men she found through Craigslist, and her wild wedding, at which her Southern family met all her freaky friends. She is captivating. I tried to shut my mouth and listen. But! I was so excited I kept interrupting! When I tried to tell her the story of a longstanding unrequited love, and fumbled all over the telling of it, she said, “You just haven’t told it enough, is all.”

* and the clouds part *

Of course! As an actress, I wouldn’t perform in a play when I’d just barely memorized my lines! Of course the most impactful, distilled, punchy, succinct personal stories are the ones we’ve told over and over. We’ve honed them. Like a stand-up act. We’ve stripped them to their essential parts. Like a statue.

If I want to tell my stories on a stage, I have to practice them. The longer they are, the less I’ve practiced! Have you ever heard the quote, I have made this letter long, for I had not the time to make it short? (Don’t say it. I know this missive is long.)

San Francisco, California to Monrovia, California. Seven and a half hours.

Driving away. Infatuation detoxing. “We don’t know each other, at all. We’re probably never going to see each other again,” he said. “I was going to invite you to New York,” I said.

“Why would I come?” he replied.

Leaving town, driving away.

Before I left Brooklyn, my sweetest, craftiest friend gave me a series of six sealed cards, to open while on the road. Each was clearly labeled. One said, “open when it’s your birthday,” another, “open when you’re wondering if anyone’s out there,” and another…

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I opened when he was irresistible. It contained six condoms and a handmade card that read:

“Traveling is like flirting with the world. It says, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go.'”

Truly, by the grace of my friends, go I. I still have two unopened cards, and I’ve been carrying them with me every day. They read, “open when you end up someplace magical and want to share it with someone,” and “open when you feel proud of yourself.”

In Monrovia, I arrived in the safe space of this lovely human:

I rested there. Ate. Cooked. Talked about gender. Conducted several marathon horizontal conversations, and didn’t record any of them. Zounds!

We went to Cycles & Sex L.A., an event about menstruation and sex. I learned things.

(I had really and truly believed that it was impossible to become pregnant while menstruating. This is not so. GAH! So much to learn!)

I paparazzied Mal Harrison, sex therapist and founder of the Center for Erotic Intelligence. She is responsible for bringing research on the internal clitoris to the mainstream! She gave a presentation on the orgasm gap and what we can do about it. (One key suggestion: take the matter into our own hands.)

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There at Cycles & Sex, in the gender neutral bathroom, I bumped into Pamela Samuelson, whom I was scheduled to get horizontal with the next day!

She was on break from her Take Back the Speculum campaign, in which she demonstrated (while menstruating!) how to look at one’s own cervix with a speculum and a hand mirror, and then guided groups of women through the process.

I wanted to. I did want to.

But. I didn’t. I didn’t do it. I didn’t look at my cervix that day.

I blame it on the overalls.

They were adorable, but. If I had been wearing a skirt, maybe … Hiking up a skirt is rather different from entirely de-pantsing.

The truth, of course, is much closer to the fact that this was at the edge of what I’m comfortable doing. “But Lila, you’ve de-pantsed and spread your legs at sex parties before!” I know. It’s true. But.

I’ve never had a positive experience with a speculum. In fact, at every gynecological exam, I cry a little, because it’s just so uncomfortable. Which is, of course, exactly the reason to learn how to use one myself, so that I can advise my health care provider on how to make it less painful for me! Speculum knowledge is speculum power!

Well. Pamela will be in New York in January. I hope to get up my gumption by then. (I’ll be sure not to wear the overalls next time.) [Update: No Pamela sighting in NY as of March 2018. I’m still waiting to take back the speculum.)

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Pamela is a bodywork specialist— trained in sexological bodywork, holistic pelvic care, and the Arvigo techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy. She’s a bodycare witch, a sex ed teacher, a renegade, an instigator, a libertine. In our session together, Pamela taught me more about the anatomy of my vulva and vagina, told me the tale of her polyamorous family by design, and enlightened me about radical age-appropriate sex ed curriculum for children.

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The next day, coming out of the parking garage next to a Yoga Works, post-class, I knocked my side view mirror clear off the car. There was a BRIGHT YELLOW POLE next to the toll booth and I just didn’t see it.

My friend’s handyfriend wound up affixing it back onto the car with silver duct tape. And there it stayed, all across the South and back up the East Coast. Duct tape is miraculous.

It cost $250 to repair. Could’ve been worse.

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The night before I left L.A., I stayed at the apartment of the the sex therapist Dr. Cat.

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On the way, I stopped at the Museum of Broken Relationships and endeavored to read every single story about every object in the place. I closed out the joint, but still didn’t manage to read every story. I tried. The melancholy felt faintly satisfying.

Cat took me to a potluck with her tribe of folks. (More on that / the reason I went to Utah, in the next missive.)

I crashed hard on her couch.

We managed to sneak in a quickie recording on her furry living room rug in the morning, just before she embarked on a full day of client sessions and I left the state lines.

We talked about threesomes, about learning to express our discomfort in the actual moment that it’s happening, boundaries, and a few of our more challenging lovers.

May the snats spare you,
Big Love,
Lila

P.S. In the next missive, Las Vegas and Utah!