Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  At the buffet, we encountered what was by far the most disturbing part of the night.

  They’d run out of tortillas.

  I went through so many emotions. First shock, then denial (“How can you run out of tortillas at a burrito bar? It’s the only crucial burrito ingredient. I can put lettuce into a tortilla and it’s a lettuce burrito. I could put my phone in a tortilla and it’s a phone burrito. I could go on, but I won’t. I’m too upset”), and then I just settled into anger and disappointment.

  Joe and I still filled our plates and sat in what would’ve looked like a break room at JCPenney if it weren’t for the woman at the next table whose breasts had mostly freed themselves from the prison of her bustier.

  Eventually I recovered from the tortilla thing and pulled it together, and sitting with Joe and Bustier Lady eating canned refried beans was the most comfortable I’d been all night.

  “So you’ve done this,” Joe said. “What’d you think?”

  “Of the sex or of all of it?” I asked, still a little mad at the refried beans for not being inside a tortilla.

  “All of it,” he said.

  “It wasn’t very sexy,” I said. “It felt really…performative. A lot of energy sent outward instead of shared, I guess.”

  “Some people find that sexy,” he replied.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “A little,” he said. “My wife wanted the membership.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I like my intimacy to be more…intimate.”

  “You’re so square,” he said, grinning.

  “I guess I am,” I replied.

  I know the concept of a sweet poly guy who has a sex-club membership might sound contradictory to some, but Joe was just that, and maybe even a little out of place in this world. A man who goes poly to make his wife fall more in love with him seems rare. And even though I’d decided poly guys weren’t for me, for those who are interested in emotionally lighter fare, I’d recommend dating poly guys like Joe, for a few reasons:

  First, if he’s married, you can be sure at least one person finds him attractive and interesting enough to agree to attempt to live with him for the rest of her life. And if the aforementioned wife is still alive, he’s probably not a serial killer, which, in the online-dating world, is a plus.

  Secondly, they’re pros at communication. They have to be in order to navigate all the complications polyamory presents, like setting the rules of their primary relationships, negotiating the emotional complexities of two to three to four different romantic entanglements, and organizing the borderline-nightmarish logistics of an orgy.

  And third, if and when you need to end it (like I had to), it’s less painful for everyone, because your ex-partner has a permanent backup person and can avoid the inevitable “no one will ever love me” stage of a breakup.

  At two a.m., after we finished eating our burrito ingredients, Joe and I stepped out of the club and into the cool air. He held my hand on the way to my car and kissed me before I got in.

  “Night, square,” he said, kissing my hand.

  I smiled and got in the car. He was right. In the world of shibari, ubiquitous porn, and dungeon monitors, I might have counted myself among the squares. But out here in the real world, I felt decidedly hexagonal.

  1 If you’re not familiar with him, Ron Jeremy is America’s best-known porn star, having done more than seventeen hundred pornographic films, including Orgazmo, Big Butt Cowgirl Pinups, and The Great American Squirt-Off (1 and 2). I am not making these titles up.

  2 The BDSM community is pretty strict about communication and consent—giving it and getting it. And if all the recent sexual-harassment allegations are any indication, they should be sending men and women in bondage gear and assless chaps to give workshops on both of those subjects at every corporation in America. (I’m only half kidding here.)

  3 I learned that there are various types of boot play, but the most common is when a submissive licks, sucks, and shines the boots of his or her dom (or “dominant”) partner. Sometimes the submissive is the one in boots with heels so high that it’s impossible to walk in them, so she’s at the mercy of her dom. This was my favorite fetish so far because it involved cool footwear.

  4 This information is actually true. At least according to the “Animal Sexual Behaviour” Wikipedia page. I’m going to believe it, because the world is a more interesting place for me if I do.

  5 Build-Your-Own-Burrito Night at the Sex Club is the title of my next book, so don’t even try to call dibs.

  An Hour with a Professional Cuddler

  Wherein I Learn Not to Hate Affirmations…As Much

  There are things in my life that I didn’t know how much I needed until I got them.

  Power steering.

  My first really good knife.

  A tiny computer I can talk into that has games, a calendar, and constant incoming messages to distract me from the ever-present knowledge that I’m going to die alone.

  Oh, and touch.

  I’ve known since my first relationship that physical affection was important to me. My first boyfriend had this insanely thick, silky head of hair that I loved running my fingers through.

  “You’re petting me again,” he’d say as he was trying to fall asleep, and I would slowly pull my hand away, embarrassed by my constant desire to show him affection.

  It was one of those situations where you feel like a total asshole until years later when you realize the asshole was the person who made you feel like an asshole.

  Joe and I stopped seeing each other a couple weeks after we visited Sesso because I had decided the poly thing, while admirable in the emotional juggling department, wasn’t for me. It ended amicably. I know this because we still follow each other on Twitter (#amicable). But being with Joe, I’d been reminded of what a priority touch was for me.

  So when the opportunity arose to visit Samantha Hess, I knew I had to at least consider it.

  Samantha is a professional cuddler.

  She offers cuddling sessions featuring nonsexual touch at one dollar per minute. Sessions run anywhere from fifteen minutes to five hours. She originally operated out of her home, but she got so busy that in 2015 she opened Cuddle Up to Me studios and hired three other cuddlers, each of whom trained with her for forty hours.

  You may ask why someone would need training to cuddle. Cuddling seems pretty self-explanatory. The only complicated part is deciding which spoon you are, which can get dicey. Being the big spoon can feel needy or overbearing, while some little spoons spend entire relationships cuddling against their will because they weren’t honest in the beginning about being anti-cuddling and now they’re trapped in a web of lies and their lovers’ arms.

  But I digress.

  Samantha’s snuggling apprentices needed training because her clients could choose from sixty positions of Samantha’s creation, each with its own purpose and level of difficulty. There’s the Blooming Lotus, where both participants are seated, legs wrapped around each other. There’s the Cloak, where the cuddler simply lies facedown on top of the cuddlee’s back. And of course, the Tarantino, where the cuddlee lies against a pillow and the cuddler sits opposite him, her feet on his chest, in an homage to Quentin Tarantino’s alleged1 foot fetish. (This one’s only done with clients who don’t sexualize feet, but if they don’t, I’m not sure why they would want it.)

  Samantha’s storefront (and a really good publicist) garnered the attention of media outlets across the country and around the world, including People magazine, Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, and CBS This Morning.

  This attention set off a virtual tidal wave of snark, and I get it—it’s such an easy thing to take shots at. As comic Hari Kondabolu said on Live Wire!, “You don’t have to be famous for people to say mean things about you on the internet. You just have to be earnest.” There’s nothing more earnest than offering yourself up to provide physical comfort. Add the layer of doing it for money, and you’ve got yourself some
primo material for countless jabs.

  Samples of comments on the stories about Samantha include Sixty bucks an hour and I’m supposed to keep my pants on? No, thanks; It’s really alarming if you have no one to cuddle with for free; and, simply, This sounds pathetic.

  While I didn’t feel strongly enough about Samantha’s profession to say something terrible about her on the internet, when my column editor forwarded me an e-mail from Samantha’s publicist with the note Are you interested in this?, my initial response was a resounding “Fuck no.”

  It’s not that I don’t think people should be able to pay for a cuddle if they want to. They should. It’s just that when I thought about how trapped I would feel cuddling with a stranger for an hour, my stomach dropped, my dread ball appeared, and my expression morphed into what I call the Grimace of Anticipatory Dread.

  I get it a lot. It’s not attractive.

  I stared at the e-mail for a few minutes.

  Goddamn it.

  Samantha was a stranger. I’d just had a breakthrough with a stranger at Sesso. Talked to him for a good five to seven minutes and then walked away as if it were nothing. Like a normal person. What if cuddling with Samantha acted as exposure therapy for my stranger problem? If I could cuddle for an hour with a person I’d never met before, then walking up to someone at a bar would be easy.

  I also reminded myself, for what seemed like the millionth time, that one of the goals of this project was to prove to myself that a little embarrassment or discomfort wouldn’t kill me. Most of us have had one-night stands (sorry, Mormons), and this would be, theoretically, a lot less intimate than that. Probably. Or maybe not.

  I could do this. In fact, maybe I could get some cuddling tips from her. The only cuddling rule I was aware of was the cardinal one: Farting while one is the little spoon is a relationship-ending move. I had a lot to learn.

  Turned out, this was actually the perfect time for me to get some cuddles in, since I’d decided to slow my dating life down to a crawl. I didn’t think I knew what I wanted, and even if I did, it didn’t feel like it was out there.

  I set up the appointment with Samantha.

  On the day of my session, I started feeling some creeping anticipatory dread early in the afternoon. Nothing that rose to the level of a panic attack, but the under-the-surface kind of anxiety that puts you on edge and makes you check your purse for Ativan before you leave the house.

  Samantha’s storefront was on Lower Burnside in Southeast Portland. A window display featured copies of her books and T-shirts with the store’s logo: a simple illustration of a red heart with a circle at the top and two crisscrossed lines across the middle, turning the heart into a person being hugged.

  Based on first impressions, I didn’t think this was my style.

  I arrived at the same time as my editor, who had joined me to take pictures, which only served to increase my level of discomfort, especially since he had clearly made up his mind about Samantha ahead of time (he was firmly in the snark camp). He looked pretty much exactly how you’d picture an editor would—a rail-thin man with five o’clock shadow, a fedora, and strong sense of irony.

  The interior looked like it might’ve been a gym in a past life. No-pile carpet, white walls. A curtain ran along one side of the main room near the back, and the furniture was sparse and mismatched, which I forgave since she’d just opened up. A woman in her twenties with short red hair welcomed me.

  “Are you Courtenay?” she asked.

  No? “Yup,” I said.

  “I’ll get Samantha!” she said. She seemed nice. Didn’t help.

  As soon as I met Samantha, I understood the draw. A five-foot-three impish brunette, she had a reassuring smile and a sweet, kind energy that would’ve put me at ease if I hadn’t come in, as my friend Stacey’s dad used to say, “wound up tighter than a clam’s ass.”

  “You don’t look excited about this,” she said, grinning.

  “I wouldn’t say that I am,” I said. “This isn’t really a thing that I’d…y’know, normally…”

  “Do?” she said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “I get that a lot,” she said. “We won’t do anything you’re not comfortable with, and we can stop at any time.”

  She sounded like my dentist.

  The buzzing in my chest had been at threat level 6, and that took me to about a 7. I tried not to imagine what we were going to do because that made it worse.

  Like all new clients, I was given a clipboard with a questionnaire to fill out, a map of my body so I could indicate where it wasn’t okay to touch me, and a waiver that lay down the ground rules. Among them were these: I was not to interpret the session as sexual; there would be no kissing; and touching would be limited to areas that were not normally covered by a swimsuit. (What if I usually wear one of those old-timey swimsuits? Then I could just leave, right? Because you could only touch my ankles, and that’s not cuddly.) Clients were expected to have showered, brushed their teeth, and put on only a minimal amount of perfume, if any.

  I don’t think the client before me had gotten the memo on that one, because the patchouli smell coming out of the Beach Room rivaled the back of a Vanagon at a Phish concert.

  Once I filled out the questionnaire, Samantha and one of her cuddlers-in-training came back to the consultation area behind the curtain for the pre-interview.

  Samantha interviewed all her clients prior to cuddling with them, and, amazingly, this has kept her from having to end a single cuddling session early due to sexual inappropriateness.

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  “I’ve trained my intuition,” she said. “After some interviews, I have had to let potential clients know that my service isn’t for them.”

  She said this generally happens with people who ask a lot of detailed questions about what’s appropriate and what’s not, and eventually it becomes clear that what they’re looking for is sexual touch.

  CLIENT: What about the butt?

  SAMANTHA: Nope.

  CLIENT: Right under the butt?

  SAMANTHA: No.

  CLIENT: The front butt?

  SAMANTHA: We’re done here.

  I was about to ask another question, but she answered it before I could.

  “Everyone always asks if men get erections,” she said. “And of course they do, but that doesn’t end the session.”

  “So how do you deal with it?” I asked.

  “I’ve gotten really good at redirection and positions where it’s not an issue,” she replied.

  I asked her why she thought she was so good at telling who might give her trouble. She told me that she’d watched her mother being physically abused when she was growing up.

  “I’ve learned to really pay attention to the world around me,” she said. “Those minute little cues people give you, like whether someone can look you in the eye or if they do that slow cat blink or look away a lot.”

  She said she used this same intuition in other ways, like sensing people’s level of comfort when they touched her, how they responded or didn’t respond, where they tensed up.

  “Every new interaction I have, I’m putting in my calculator and figuring out what makes the most sense for them.”

  I imagined being in a relationship with a person like Samantha. It would be like dating a need ATM, someone who always gave you exactly what you asked for, even when you didn’t know you were asking for it. It would be a little eerie.

  Her biggest question for me in the pre-interview was “What brings you here?”

  I told her about my discomfort with talking to strangers, my exposure-therapy theory, and how dating Joe had made me curious about physical affection in general—why I thought I needed it more than others and what that said about me. Was I overly needy physically? Was I cloyingly affectionate to my partners?

  I also wanted to ask her if there was a way to solve the issue of what to do with the bottom arm when you’re the big spoon—it’s always a problem fo
r me. But I decided that could wait for later.

  Samantha said she could tell, based on my story and the fact that I was wearing my shoulders as earrings, that I was comfortable with affection but very uncomfortable with the idea of getting it from a stranger. She assured me that I was in good hands.

  I still felt something very similar to dental dread, and I am terrified of the dentist.

  She showed me the four rooms I had to choose from, each with a bed and a bedside table, as my editor snapped away. The Beach Room was covered in seashells with blue waves painted on the walls; the Cascadia Room had trees, mountains, and wildflowers painted by a local artist; the deep burgundy Zen Room had the studio logo and an infinity symbol on the wall; and the Space Room had dark walls, a lamp with a spinning shade that threw a rotating aurora borealis all over the place, and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. I chose that one because it seemed best suited for imagining myself anywhere but there if the experience turned out to be utterly miserable. (I always plan for this eventuality. If I went on an African safari with Ryan Gosling, I’d bring my iPad just in case the tigers were busy licking their balls, and Gosling was a snore-fest, both of which were quite possible. When you’re that pretty, you don’t need to be interesting.)

  I took my shoes off and got on the bed. My physical and emotional discomfort levels were both at a solid 11. My forearms were tingling, which, as I’ve pointed out, generally happens at the outset of an anxiety attack. Samantha was saying something, but whatever it was couldn’t break through the buzzing in my head. She sounded like a teacher on a Peanuts special.

  “Wah-wah, wah-wah-wah-wah,” she said. “Wah-wah?”

  I was sweating profusely and I couldn’t look at her. I also couldn’t look at my editor, and I definitely couldn’t look at the camera. It’s difficult to tell where my discomfort level would’ve been if he hadn’t been in the room taking pictures. If I was already at an eight, the camera might have raised me to, say, a billion.