by Holly Lorka
Handsome
Copyright © 2020, Holly Lorka
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2020
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-783-8
ISBN: 978-1-63152-784-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020907228
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
This book is dedicated to my father,
whose sense of humor and stalwart belief in me
have made this life of mine possible.
I’m really sorry about some of these stories, Dad;
we don’t ever have to talk about them.
And to George Michael, whose sweet ass keeps
showing up at important times in my life.
the captain of some ridiculous ship
When I was four years old, my friend Mikey told me that when he went downhill fast, like in a car, it made his pee-pee feel funny. I didn’t understand what he meant until it happened to me. I was on a roller coaster with the Seven Dwarfs. All eight of us were sitting politely in our little cars, chugging up a steep incline with our hands on our safety bars, and when we descended rapidly while screaming and smiling, I got the greatest, most excited sparkly feeling in my pee-pee. It woke me up immediately. It was easily the best dream I’d had up to that point in my young life.
With some time and experimentation, I figured out how to make that feeling happen on purpose while I was awake. My mom had to take me to the doctor with frequent urinary tract infections because I was too young to understand the need to have clean hands when I had them stuck constantly down my pants. The doctor asked me, “Have you been touching yourself a lot down there?” Like I was going to admit to manually rubbing out thirty or forty sparkles every single day. I shook my head innocently and realized that I was either going to have to start washing my hands or figure out something else. So I made up humping, because I was smart.
I began rubbing around on my bed and bedroom floor with the fervor of someone on fire. My bedroom was upstairs, though, and in an effort to be more efficient, I discovered that the downstairs bathroom was also a fine place to hump. The floor was covered in blue shag carpet, and there was a lock on the door. The only problem was that because of the size of the bathroom, when I lay down on the floor to do it, my face ended up just behind the closed door. Unfortunately, this meant I could see everyone’s shoes in the space under the door when they walked between the kitchen and the family room. Do you know how hard it is to keep your hump concentration on Shirley from Laverne & Shirley in the episode where she gets hit in the head, gets amnesia, thinks she’s a stripper, and takes her clothes off at the Elks Lodge, when you have to watch your mom with her big toes scoot-clapping on by in her Dr. Scholl’s?
But I would not be deterred. I humped soundlessly, all the while keenly aware of how long I was taking so as not to raise suspicion about what I was doing. When I was through, I’d make sure to fluff the shag back up. I was a careful little humper.
By some lucky fluke, I discovered that if I put something down between my legs while I rubbed around it felt even better. New and improved sparkles!
At first I used the My Size Barbie I won in the fourth-grade softball throw. I was pretty pissed when they gave it to me. I mean, what total jock wants a stupid My Size Barbie? The answer was: this horny little kid. Barbie was great, and the kind of pretty I liked, but I was lanky and I outgrew her quickly. Soon after, I started humping the hamburger pillow I sewed in sixth-grade home ec. It was just the right size and shape to fit where it needed to fit, so I got down with that pillow for years. I went on so many secret nighttime dates with that thing that I eventually rubbed one of the sesame seeds clean off the bun. Sure, it was a hamburger, but we had a good thing going.
Eventually, like when I was eighteen, I broke up with my hamburger, which by then had zero sesame seeds left on it, and I started exploring the possibility of making sparkles with other people, because that’s what normal folks do. Things became awkward very quickly. I initially blamed it on the boners.
The first boner I met belonged to a cute bodybuilding guy. It was our second date. I was still living with my parents, and my dad was taking a nap in the bedroom next to mine. I brought my date into my room. We started making out and things got a little out of control, perhaps because our date was spent lifting weights at the gym. Next thing I knew, I felt his boner on my leg. As this was my first experience with a boner, it very quickly became the only thing in the room. I swear, it rose up and blocked out the sun. Everything became just bonerbonerbonerboner. My brain began shouting, WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS BONER WITHOUT WAKING UP MY DAD? The obvious answer, of course, was defuse the boner. Or, in other words: hand job.
I’d read about hand jobs. When I hadn’t been busy humping shit on the floor of my bedroom, I read a lot. I tried to learn about having sex with other people from reading books because there was no Internet yet. In those books, the sex always seemed so amazing, hot, and perfect. I went on sleepovers where we stole my friend’s mom’s paperback novels like Wifey or Endless Love. As any curious kids would do, we turned immediately to the ends of chapters, where men’s kisses set the skin of women’s milky white breasts on fire and women handled the heavy throbbing of a man’s member against her thigh with finesse and expertise. Their sparkles seemed easy and abundant.
Those books were obviously not written about a naive, eighteen-year-old honor roll shortstop whose only sexual experience up to that point had been with a doll and a hamburger.
I did a hand job with as much finesse and expertise as I knew how. Unfortunately for my date it was probably something close to yanking his dry penis off of his body while making sexy groaning noises and wondering why nothing actually throbbed. Luckily, he was a nineteen-year-old boy, so it only took him about three minutes to come. When he did, I closed my eyes, because no way did I want to see that. The problem was that he closed his eyes too and neither of us saw where his come went. It wasn’t on my hand or on either of our pants. It had disappeared. I still lived with my parents. Sometimes they came into my room for stuff. WE HAD TO FIND THE COME BEFORE MY PARENTS DID.
Looking for come with someone you’ve only been on two dates with is a little awkward. My dad was still sleeping in the next room while we scrambled around in mine searching for it: on the bed, on the carpet, in my hair, on the ceiling (he convinced me it might be there). This was horrible and the least sexy thing I could imagine, aside from doing a hand job. We never found his magical disappearing come, which is how I always thought of it, until a girlfriend pointed out that maybe it was the worst hand job ever and probably it was so awful that he faked coming just so he could get out of there before I gave his dick an Indian sunburn. I was pretty sure no one was going to be flipping to the end of any chapters to read about this.
Which brings us to Boner Number Two. It belonged to Michael, a pretty fry cook who worked in the kitchen at my job. His eyes were very blue
and I thought he was sweet. He asked me out for a drink after work. I assumed this meant he liked me and wanted to date me. I surely didn’t think he was trying to get me into the back seat of his Pontiac to meet his boner, which he called his “Little Friend.” But there’s where I found myself. He kept pointing to his boner and saying, “Say hello to my Little Friend,” as in “Suck my creepy dick.” As I was incredibly naive and still thought we might hold hands at some point, I did my best to defuse the boner again. This time I made out with it, because I’m sure that’s what Judy Blume would’ve wanted me to do. Maybe it was that I had thought we were just going to talk, or maybe it was that I was in the back seat of a Pontiac with Scarface who smelled like French fries, but my first blow job was so much worse and more awkward than my first hand job. There was no come, magical or otherwise, and Michael never talked to me after that. It was Boners: 2, Holly: 0. Clearly, everything I’d read in those books wasn’t helping me at all.
As boners weren’t doing anything for my quest for sparkles, I eventually weaned myself off them and hoped that the awkwardness of sex would go away too. But it turns out that boners weren’t the problem. Sex was actually the problem. Those sparkles could be elusive motherfuckers.
Shortly after I decided that boners weren’t for me, I started having sex with girls. While my pants became much happier, there was still plenty of the awkward to be had. One night, I was sitting up in bed naked with a girl when she suddenly shimmied underneath me, pulled me up over her, and told me to sit on her face, because I obviously looked like a person who wants to sit on a chick’s face???? (If I look like any part of a face-sitting bonanza, it’s definitely NOT the sitter.) I was stunned and found myself holding onto my headboard, like the captain of some ridiculous ship, cautiously lowering myself down like I was about to dip into icy water. I reluctantly made it down onto her expectant mouth and realized I didn’t know the first thing about face-sitting protocol. I’d never sat this close to someone’s eyes before. What is the maximum weight load for a face? Was there supposed to be a safe word? How would I hear her if she were to say it? This was worse than boners. There were no sparkles here.
It was the same feeling as when I was scissored by a girl. She was very athletic. She maneuvered herself around and managed to slide a leg up under my back so that she could spread her legs and smear her parts all over my parts in that most ancient of Sapphic mating rituals. It was like having a women’s studies class right there in my bedroom. I kept almost taking a foot in the face while she writhed around and eventually got off while Ani DiFranco wailed in the background. Why couldn’t we just finger bang, rescue a Chihuahua together, and make some hummus, like normal lesbians? Things were much simpler when it was just me and my hamburger.
But I can’t go back to simple. None of us can. We grow up and into a world beyond the Seven Dwarfs, Barbies, and humpy pillows that Judy Blume never bothered to tell us about, that E. L. James just flat-out lies about. It’s a world where translating making sparkles by ourselves into making them with other people is awkward. No one tells us the truth about it, and that’s not cool. Some horny kid’s going to find and sneak the BDSM atrocity Fifty Shades of Grey under the covers at night with a flashlight and be fucked up forever, especially when they discover boners for real. We can’t keep doing this to people. We need to stop being chicken shits and just tell the truth, so folks know how important it is to watch where the come lands.
This is a book of non-chicken-shit stories about awkward sex, great sex, imaginary sex, and being the wrong sex. It’s about some normal stuff too, because even the best life can’t be all about sex. Sometimes there are also things like school and jobs and banjos.
P.S. Don’t let your kids actually read this.
Photo by: Michael Lorka Jr.
off by just a little
I remember Halloween when I was in kindergarten. I was dressed as a cowgirl, which was the closest my mother dared get to my request to be a cowboy. The grade school parade preparations found me sitting on the carpeted steps of the library in my little red cowgirl outfit trimmed with black fringe and completed by the white handles of my pistols. I wished I could wear that outfit forever, except with pants instead of a skirt. I wished I could eat campfire beans and sleep on the ground instead of the bed I shared with my sister, wished my father drove a palomino horse instead of a Buick, wished I could worry about the sunrise and sunset instead of whether or not I would pee my pants that day. I wished I were a cowboy out in the desert—tired, dirty, and lean—so I could be alone and not worry about what I was or was not. I would ride out on the range and hear only the crickets and coyotes, my belly full of beans, grit in my teeth, the fringe hanging from my arms rolling in waves with the creosote breezes.
But instead I was in the library in a skirt. I was not a cowboy, I was not a boy at all, and I would probably pee my pants again that day. Goddammit, Mom. Goddammit, life.
the truth about cookies
The loss of your innocence always comes as a surprise, I think. I doubt anyone wakes up and thinks, Today’s the day that something tender and beautiful, something swathed in Pixy Stix sugar and copper penny shine, will be ripped away from me like a scab. There is no warning. For me, it happened on a fall night in 1993. I had no hints of the events to come, unless we count too many Zimas and songs from the new Wynonna Judd album as the ample omens they were.
In 1993 I came out as a lesbian. Up to that point, I’d had sex with numerous men, and it was mostly okay: a bump-and-grind hundred-meter dash where the only thing I was concerned with was crossing the orgasm finish line as fast as possible. The sex was always at least cordial. They had too much body hair, and my imaginary dick kept getting in the way, but generally it was nice, despite the messiness. Really, any would-be lesbian/straight man trapped in a woman’s body who’s ever walked to the bathroom with come running down her leg without being displeased with sex has had it pretty good.
Though I didn’t really want to have sex with men. What I really wanted was to have sex with girls. I’d fantasized about it for nearly my entire life. In 1993 I finally did something about it. At the age of twenty-three, I dumped my fiancée, cut off my legendary perm, and sauntered on over to Homoville.
I remember sitting at my desk and writing in my journal after I came out about how wonderful my life was now going to be—about how women are so lovely and sweet and kind. I was sure that from then on, my life would smell like fresh-baked cookies and that tiny bluebirds would bring me my robe in the morning while the Indigo Girls serenaded me. It would be like an all-girl Eden, but with Bud Light longnecks growing on the trees instead of apples. There would be no more come running down my leg, ever.
When I became a regular at the gay bar, the bartenders there gave me a nickname. They called me “The Ivory Girl.” I was shy and polite, I looked young and always showed up all scrubbed and shiny with my shirt tucked in and buttoned up to the collar because I believed that even if you have to be a gay, you can be a clean and nicely dressed gay. My nights at the bar were generally uneventful. I was nervous, and all I could muster were brief conversations with women that I didn’t want to know. Mostly, I sat at the bar, drank a few beers, and kept to myself. It seemed being gay was kind of like being at the airport, except with less sex.
Then I met Jaime. She was my age, was cute, sweet, and funny. She bought me a drink and let me kiss her in the parking lot that night. We, both so very shy, barely touched each other except at the mouth, which was enough to melt us down to the concrete under our feet. Sweet Jesus, that kiss was better than any orgasm I’d ever had with a man. It was better than any fantasy I’d had about Stefanie Powers. It was when I discovered that my mouth was connected to my pants in ways I had never before imagined.
The next time I saw her we went to her place and had sex. Actually, I dropped her off at her place and drove away to park around the corner and wait because she lived in an apartment attached to her parents’ house. They had no idea she liked girls, and I
didn’t look like a handsome young man yet. I had to wait in my car for an hour, then sneak under their front window around to the back of the house to rap softly on her glass-paned French door.
She let me in and we went to her room. I remember that we were listening to George Michael and trying to be quiet and it was all very sweet and very hot and maybe a little clumsy because we were both so new at gay. We spent such a long time together, exploring, moving against each other, listening and singing to “Father Figure.” It lasted years or glorious weeks or just a few hours, I wasn’t sure. That night was like watching a beautiful sunset that lasted forever. I left in the whisper of 4 a.m. to crawl back under the front window and around the corner to my car and drove away feeling light and buzzy-buzzy on what had happened.
We saw each other for a few months. She was a professional tennis player and out of town much of the time, so she’d send me affectionate letters from England or Australia. If she was in town, we’d meet at the bar and then we’d go back to her house and I’d park around the corner again to crawl under the front window. The classic romance story. I simply adored her, but her sponsors began to question her sexuality. Back in 1993, large sports companies weren’t keen on sponsoring a lesbian. Jaime had to cut off anything that might look suspicious, which included our budding romance.
It hurt, but I certainly couldn’t blame her. Playing tennis was her dream. Mine was to have more sex with women and maybe even to fall in love. I still believed in the bluebirds and the cookies, and, although I was sad, I believed I’d get to have those things with someone soon. So I went back to the gay bar to find them, because everyone knows the gay bar is where cookies and bluebirds live.
It was a Sunday night, and there weren’t many people there. I was heartbroken and blue, the beer was flat, and I remember thinking I should just go home. Then someone sat down beside me.