All I want to eat right now is grapes and I just dropped one on the floor, where it has camouflaged itself nicely in the red carpet that covers my closet-turned-office. Today I awoke form 12 hours of sleep; before that I slept for 15 hours, which I think is a record. I was supposed to be in LA for Carly‘s birthday, but there was just no way. (Happy birthday honey!) Instead, the flu hit me like big angry fist, pounding my head into the pillows.
I am coming off being a sex ambassador for a Frenchman with shoeboxes of cash who is publishing my books in French, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The furthest back I can go right now is the 13th. Oh, I remember — the weekend before that I finished a book and started another and it felt great. When I write like that my heart feels good and my brain feels clean for a minute, and I don’t think about my parking tickets or the election, or porn performers using my name and doing gangbangs. But on the 13th I stopped writing and went to a friend‘s bachelorette party. These parties are such a strange tradition, where women are thrown together who do not know each other and I always dread them — except this one was a lot of fun. Yes, there was a male stripper; he was hilarious and cheerful. Dressed as a pirate, he invited the bride and I to walk the plank, admire his Jolly Roger and we both got facefulls of booty. I sat next to a woman; another woman told her. "Violet watches porn for a living." The woman looked at me as if I had a conjoined twin fetus attached to my head; her eyes seemed to say, "Oh, that’s what one looks like." I had nothing to say. Later, the party persuaded me to do a demonstration; I put a condom on a zucchini using only my mouth, and I wonder what she thought of that. I am a pony that does tricks at parties.
Next day I was flown to LA for a meeting, one of several this month. The sky down there is always grey. I can never see the horizon. No wonder I have collapsed so dramatically. This meeting was porn bigwigs and a few TV people, and I guess they just wanted to meet me because I did little talking. They were all about the "making porn for women" thing, because, I’m telling you, female voyeurism is the new black. No, it is, but strangely, no one understands what that means. They were older. Mostly women. Why are they always older? Where are the young girls, girls like me? I felt small and like I looked weird not having facelifts and cheek implants, and I do not have a stick for a body. My hair was not styled or streaked, as was theirs, and I think I stuck out.
Lady Producer said, "It’s almost better if Bush wins. We’ll get more attention and they won’t come for us because we’re doing something noble." Lady Producer said, "I spend all my free time trying to figure out what women’s fantasies are." I thought, *you live in a fantasy*. Lady Producer said, "Women don’t respond as much to visual stimulation as men do." I thought, *yeah, and there’s a lot of data to back that bullshit up*. (The data actually backs the opposite.) I wanted to scream. I wanted to get up on the mahogany table and yell, "Don’t you know that if you travel in a straight line you end up right where you began?"
I decided then that do not want to spend the rest of my life running around in tight little circles. This week I have journalists trying to get me on TV (they asked me not to say, but think three letters) about women and porn, porn and women, and more. I was relieved to discover that these major networks run into the same frustrations I do, talking to women in the industry who insist that women don’t enjoy watching porn — but they want to make a buck off the trend. One intern even had a run-in with the same woman who told me angrily and point-blank that a book on porn for women would never sell, and that it was a bad idea. It’s frustrating beyond description to hear such antiquated views. I spent the plane ride back wondering just how my life got so out of control, and wishing I could just go back to working in a café. Would you still read my blog if I worked in a café?
My return home catapulted me into the weekend, to lectures to SFSI students on oral sex and sex toys, then right into the car and off to Cupcake’s wedding in Northern California. The lectures were hectic; the co-presenter for oral sex didn’t think it was necessary to return my emails or calls prior to the talk, and I went in cold. Then, the co-presenter for sex toys couldn’t make it, and I was lecturing for 40 min. cold with notes I’d gotten that morning and a Power Point presentation I’d never seen (and didn’t match the notes). I think I did okay; from working in the GV stores and giving pleasure parties I know the wide world of sex toys and its history like the backs of both hands. But I gave the sex toy lecture in my outfit for the wedding, and I don’t think the 8-inch fetish heels or aqua mesh-and-beads dress hurt, either. Still, I felt rushed and clumsy, like I didn’t smile enough.
I was late to the wedding, but the dinner was wonderful. I cried anyway — I cry at weddings, movies, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The dinner table I was at had a notorious hacker, his *very* young girlfriend, a researcher from SLAC, his uber-smart girlfriend and a bear and his boyfriend — who was the biggest, most uptight queen I’d ever met. The queen hated the hacker, hated his hair, his outfit and his shoes with a fevered passion that kept him from being barely civil. The queen also hated that we were talking about sex so much. The hacker chastised me for not making it to a potluck on Friday, and I said I know, and my dip really rocks. Hacker: "Yeah, right." Me: "My dip is so fucking good, it would blow *her* clit clean off!" (I point at his girlfriend) Hacker Girlfriend: "I love dip!"
Sex Tour
Then the Frenchman came. I found out a while back that my oral sex books were being translated into French and was quite excited — I got a little bump in my royalty check when my publisher made the deal. I don’t know if I get anything beyond this, other than the blissful feeling knowing I contributed to a world with a few more orally incited orgasms and sighs with French accents. But the publisher, who allegedly showed up with a shoebox of cash or something similarly La Mafia, was to be in town this week, and entertaining was in order. My main publishers feigned old age and marriage as excuses not to show the man the "libertine San Francisco" he desired to see, so the task fell to me and my pal CrankyPants (not his real name), who works for a major distributor.
A sex tour of San Francisco. Easy, you think? Not really. Well, if he was gay, it’s like fucking Disneyland, or Disneyland for fucking and sucking, but in the emails I was told the Frenchman "was interested in the bi but likes more the woman." Straight. So no Eros or Blow Buddies. I know — Power Exchange! Great for sexual tourists; but only open Thursday through Sunday, and I had Frenchie duty Monday and Tuesday. All the swing clubs and S/M clubs are in the East Bay, reservation only, and pretty much only happening on the weekends. Not to mention all these clubs frown on single men attending, and I really didn’t want to add to the problems of guys as looky-loos in the clubs. I racked my brains. All fetish clubs are on the weekends in SF, too. I researched, and even the damn Spectator‘s website is woefully out of date — a calendar of events for August, so sad.
Luckily we got a late start. Hornboy and I decided that North Beyatch was the way to go; a tour of the strip clubs there is pretty much a nice historical tour of SF sex and politics, of sorts. It’s raining, and I have to practically beg CrankyPants to come along — only to discover within minutes of parking the car that old CP is a walking encyclopedia of North Beach’s seedier sex stops. "And this — here, here, everyone come in here — this is the sleaziest video parlor in The City." The dirty white walls were lined with dirty VHS tapes of shit porn, animal porn, and all sorts of yucky things. Hornboy was astounded — he lived around the corner from this place for years and had no idea this was even here. Neither did I. CP gave animated descriptions in loud broken English to the Frenchman about what went on the in the back room, even smacking his hands together, before herding us over to the Lusty Lady. (There was a quick stop where the glory hole video booths are!) We thrust the Frenchman into a booth at the Lusty with a handful of ones and shut the door, huddling over to the side to discuss our next moves. Me: "I’m thinking Hungry I, then Hustler." Hornboy: "Great idea." CP: "I’m tired and I missed the baseball game."
Next stop: the Hungry I, scene of my first and only lap dance, and one of the more comfortable places to drink beer, talk and check out topless women dancing to bad music. We sit all along the back wall, and watch the dancers come on one by one, then come over to us one by one. My eyes light on Apple, the woman who gave me my first unforgettable lap dance. As I expect, she doesn’t recognize me at all. I ask her to dance for my "friend," the Frenchman; I slip her a twenty and she leads him off. When they return I try to tip her again and she ignores me; another dancer tells me she’s just rude like that. Well, I have my memories. We continue to drink and talk until we are besieged by a coked-up blonde stripper with a pie-sized bruise on her ass. She rants to me about her toe tattoo and how much it hurt; CP is looking at me with pleading eyes; the Frenchman is rapt with delight, and Hornboy is being chatted up by a brunette cowgirl with a big tattoo on her thigh (she looks like she’s straight out of Frank Miller’s Sin City). A dancer takes the stage in black and red stripes, totally Goth, and wearing black ballet shoes — CP’s eyes glaze over and he mutters, and all I can hear is him saying "Selma Blair." The coked-up blonde takes the Frenchman into the back room. I seize the moment — I ask the cowgirl, "Will you dance for us?" She says she’d love to and takes Hornboy and I to the back couches. The Frenchman is nowhere in sight.
Cowgirl asks us what we want. I say, "Well, since we’ve never done this before, I think I can say that we have no idea what we want." She laughs. "Okay — you can touch *him*" (puts my hand in Hornboy’s swelling crotch) "…and you can touch *her*" (puts Hornboy’s hand up my skirt, against my moistening panties) "…but neither of you can touch me. I’ll do all the rest of the touching. You guys are gonna have great sex tonight — oh, but I guess you already have hot sex," she grinned. Then she proceeded to writhe and grind all over us to the tune of "Sweet Child ‘O Mine," which was really quite romantic in a Baldwin movie kind of way. She took turns riding both of us, then splayed across us, then took turns again, which sounds silly but really worked — just try not to get turned on touching your lover’s crotch while a pretty girl crawls all over the both of you. C’mon, try it.
When the song was over she stood up and I tipped her big time, especially because the dances only cost $20 and I’m sure she has a stage fee. Then we made our way out to the stage area where CP was pacing frantically, alone. Girls were dancing and he was pacing. In a monotone droll that you’d use when you painfully have to acknowledge that kittens are cute or puppies are fuzzy, CP said, "The couple that plays together stays together. <dramatic sigh> Where is the Frenchman?" "He’s not with you?" As it turned out, Frenchie was still in the VIP with the coked-up, bruise-assed blonde. CP was beyond it all; "I’ll go get him."
CP came out alone, while Selma Blair took the stage again. He sort of winced in her direction, like a candy out of reach. "What did he say?" I asked. "He said, ‘I am fine! Thank you!’ Apple yelled at me for coming in the VIP — she was grinding all over this corpulent fucker and said ‘take that the hell outside.’ It was surreal." We turned and made a beeline for the door — CP tossed a five onstage at Selma as he strode quickly past the stage. She shouted, "Thank you!"
The next day I felt the flu coming on, but was determined to show the Frenchman a good enough time that he’d throw me a book party in Paris. We took him to dinner at Asia SF, which is pretty much the coolest place (and the yummiest) to eat dinner in SF. Here, we got the best seats in the house, up against the bar and adjacent to the stage, which runs the entire length of the restaurant. And every so often, the lights go down and the music comes on — and beautiful trannies lip-sync and dance sexily to tunes like "Hot Child in the City," "Like a Virgin" and many others. The Frenchman was losing his composure with me and started telling me what girls he thought were hot; I gently made him aware that they were transsexuals. He didn’t believe me. Then he did. And he became uncomfortable, which amused me to no end — especially because Asia SF is practically a "family" restaurant. There were birthdays, a long table of Italian conventioneers (shouting "We love you!" at the girls), and moms with their (adult) daughters out for dinner and a drink. Plus, the girls there are hot; way better dancers than any others I’ve ever seen, and what’s wrong with being attracted to them? Nothing, that’s what. Hornboy and I had a blast, and we can’t wait to go back — plus the waiter kept us full up on free shots because we’re local. ("Locals make this place great," he said.)
Next stop: Trannyshack, which was very fun for Hornboy and I, but a mistake for the Frenchman. He became agitated and bored, homophobic, and his body language made me uncomfortable — I think he kept standing too close to me so no one would think he was, you know. Heh. Hornboy thought it was amusing. So sadly, I crossed my next stop off the list — I’ve never been to Nob Hill All Male Theater (one of two all-men strip clubs in SF), but that kind of fun wasn’t gonna fly. The trannies seemed to be closing in on Frenchie, and while Hornboy and I were having fun listening to the catty jokes from the queen onstage, it was time to go. We dropped the Frenchman off at his hotel, and I asked what his plan was for the next few days. "I theenk Janat es teking mee to a moonch." "A what?" "A minch?" "Oh, a *munch*." This is what gatherings are called where S/M or kink-friendly people (usually in a club) get together to meet, have coffee and snacks, and make plans to beat each other. Perfect.
So au revoir to the Frenchman, and hello to a three-day fever. I am coming out of it now, and have in fact behaved in a compulsive manner before even making it back to work. Like a child who *has to* chop off Barbie’s hair, I think I have a problem. I signed another book contract. Fuck! I can quit anytime. But the offer was just too good, too juicy — and I’ll reveal this tasty morsel of a book once the publisher gets their press releases ready, as they want to make a big announcement out of it.
Then there’s this weekend, and thankfully I only have to do one thing that has me putting on false eyelashes: Exotic Erotic. I am supposed to do a book signing at 9:30, but to my frustration and chagrin, guess who else is on the bill, doing a porno performance — the impostor. That’s right, though I began writing over seven years ago (and yes, Violet Blue is my true, legal name), a woman came along three years ago and started doing porn using my name. Then she started doing interviews, openly stating her homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. I was made aware of all this thanks to fans and readers of Tiny Nibbles, and in fact when I read the interviews I was spurned to email the writers and ask that they please, please, please make a distinction between the two of us in print. And they did — they were very sweet and cool about it. One of the writers I have become close friends with since the incident, and we discussed on the phone what I should do at Ex Erotic about VB version 2.0.
I said, "I know her real name."
"Oooh! Then you have power over her, just like Harry Potter!" Me: "Yeah, but that still doesn’t solve my problem."
He: "I’m ready to help prank her. I’ll wear my turban, my yammika, and my rainbow hat. Just tell me what to do."
Okay, now back to bed for me. I was starting to get emails from readers wondering if I was still alive — thank you. More soon… (yes, I know it’s spelled "yarmulke")
