by Jenny Mollen
“I am so glad you guys are stuck dealing with this shit too. This would really suck if I were here alone.”
We all smiled. None of us could respond. We were also way too stoned to know how to use words.
* * *
The next day, my father married Kristen in an over-the-top ceremony on a golf course. The four of us were late because Amanda wasn’t happy with her updo. But we managed to sneak in just in time to see my dad ride up to the chuppah on horseback. Kristen was carried down the aisle on the backs of five topless dudes I recognized from the summer I worked at Bobby McGee’s, and her ten-year-old trailed behind her, doing the Running Man. The sense of impending doom I’d felt the night before seemed to dissolve in the daylight. Everyone was optimistic and blown away by the mini burgers. Kristen looked gorgeous and in love and not at all concerned with the fact that she’d just married a sixty-eight-year-old man who drinks his coffee through a straw and wears G-string underwear.
For me, the day signified the end of an era. I was no longer my father’s spouse. I was my own woman, with my own husband and my own ounce of weed.
After the cake was served, the mic made its way yet again toward our table. This time, however, I took it. And with a sense of relief, I said:
“Raise your hand if you wanna get high!”
10.
One Shade of Grey
Marriage is amazing. It’s like living with your best friend—someone you sleep with, laugh with, cry with, and eventually turn into the Crypt Keeper right in front of like it’s no big deal. But you know what’s hotter than having sex with your best friend for all of eternity?
Everything.
The truth is, people are perfect only when you don’t know them. I once dated a guy who in retrospect may have been a mannequin, and I still managed to base my happiness solely upon his approval for a solid three months. When you’re sleeping with a stranger, you aren’t really vulnerable, even though you think you are when you’re filling your iPod with songs you’ve secretly dedicated to them and writing in your journal about how you wish they really knew you. But alas, if they knew you, the fantasy would be over and you would be sleeping with a real person, which is, as I stated earlier, infinitely more complicated than fucking a mannequin.
Most of us can only hope to find that perfect person who accepts us for all that we are and all that we aren’t. Richard Bach wrote, “A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys and keys to fit our locks.” For Jason and me, it was more like he didn’t even try the lock. He just wrapped a big rock in some annoying Urban Outfitters T-shirt I never would have approved of and chucked it haphazardly through my bathroom window while I was picking a chin zit. But once he was in, he was in!
I wouldn’t classify our first meeting as love at first sight—unless I was speaking for him, which I have no problem doing. So yes, let’s go with, it was love at first sight (for him). As for me, I was a little taken aback by the fact that five minutes into our introduction, he excused himself to the restroom by saying, “I’m gonna go do some coke in the bathroom. Oh, and also, I hate black people.” When he returned, it was clear he was joking about the coke. We spent the rest of the night bonding over our Zoloft prescriptions and insane parents. Finding out someone is the same kind of crazy that you are is a special kind of turn-on. We didn’t sleep together until a week or two later, and when we did I think I made him bleed from how intensely I was clawing my way into his flesh. You know, the way you do when you really want someone to understand you. Our chemistry was electric, and even holding hands made my heart feel like it was going to beat straight out of my chest. But, like all relationships, ours matured into something more stable. And eventually, squeezing the pus out of his closed-up earring holes replaced sex as my favorite thing to do before bed.
Don’t get me wrong, my desire for my husband hasn’t weakened, just my own motivation to do anything about it. It’s kind of like the treadmill: awesome and rewarding once it’s over, but after a bowl of pasta, two Skinny Cow ice cream bars, and a Gilt Groupe flash sale, just sort of hard to jump into.
For many women (the ones who aren’t liars), it’s work to stay sexually stimulated by a partner who’s returning our phone calls and not mindfucking us into believing that we’re ever so slightly inadequate. In a healthy marriage there is stability, security, and individual packs of Pirate’s Booty. Sex is always an option—but so is getting stoned and watching Mad Men. Like anything that is available freely and constantly, there’s just no real urgency about it. Especially when Mad Men is on.
That was, until me and 65 million other women met Christian Grey.
* * *
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James crept into my life kind of the same way my husband did: while I was preoccupied with a chin zit.
I don’t typically read books that appeal to women who saw The Notebook, wear things from the Victoria’s Secret PINK collection, or happen to be my mother-in-law. I like depressed German authors who write stories about people whose lives start out bad and then get worse. The most pop I’ve ever delved into was that whole Dragon Tattoo book, and even then, I had to chew off the cover for fear that people in book clubs would start trying to recruit me.
I was browsing through a bookstore in Santa Monica, unconsciously peeling a layer of skin off an underground whitehead, when a salesgirl asked if I’d read the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.
“Really?” I said, more than a little disturbed. Was it the fresh blood gushing out of my face? My new bangs? The fact that the bottom half of my body was covered in peanut brittle? “Do I look like someone who’s read any trilogy ever?”
“Trust me, this isn’t your typical trilogy.” She handed me the first book with a look of confidence I’d seen only on the lady who does my filler. “It will change your sex life in a week.”
To be honest, I wasn’t necessarily convinced my sex life needed changing. I was over flying to Vegas and looking for hired help. I was perfectly okay with our dogs watching Jason try to get an erection, and equally fine with them sitting on my face while he was going down on me. (Just to clarify: We don’t fuck dogs. I just get distracted during sex and sometimes I talk to my dogs and braid their hair when Jason’s going down on me.)
It’s not that I’m not by nature a sexual person. It’s just that I’m never good at anything when I know I have to be serious. Sex with your best friend can feel like when you’re in detention and if one of you even looks at the other the wrong way, you’re gonna crack up.
Also, I may not be by nature a very sexual person. I hate being vulnerable, and intimate, or as promiscuous as my parents, who I assume have fucked more people than will buy this book. My husband doesn’t exactly help the cause when he says things like, “Smell my hands, do they smell at all like poop to you?” One day, he called me into the bathroom, beaming with pride to show me that he had shit my initials in the toilet. He has pulled tampons out of my vagina and farted into my mouth while I’m half asleep for his own amusement.
Not that all of that isn’t super hot. It’s just not exactly the kind of behavior that sets you up for an orgasm. So for sixteen bucks, I decided what the hell and bought the book.
Maybe it was the graphic sex. Or the graphic sex, or the graphic sex. I really can’t be sure. But within two days, I was finished with the first book and more sexually charged than I’d been since ever. My husband’s cock was a walking bull’s-eye. Of course, there are a million places online to find erotica far more sophisticated than E. L. James’s classic, “He touched me down there.” But the reason this book works is because it makes you wait for the payoff. And though nothing makes me more frustrated than waiting, the waiting is the best part. I think we often fail to recognize that by physically acting out our carnal desires, we are in that moment taking a chip out of the mountain of lust that got us there in the first place. Like every TV show from X-Files to Sex and the City, the minute the two main characters get together, we stop giving a fuck. Not to be a buzzkill,
but kind of the hottest thing about sex is not having it. It’s sort of like cocaine. The first bump is mind-blowing but from there, it’s sadly downhill. And it’s only at the end of the night, when you find yourself sweating from your head in some weirdo’s studio apartment in Palms pretending to give a fuck about his exercise blog, that you realize your initial high is never coming back.
I think anyone who is in a relationship lasting longer than three months has in some way chosen comfort over butterflies. That being said, I think each of us yearns to feel those crazy, psychotic, “Oh my God the sky is falling” pangs that come from a series of first encounters. And that’s what this book was able to give me. A vicarious feeling of newness and longing for a man who I’d seen eat his own earwax.
* * *
“What has gotten into you?” Jason asked one Sunday morning as I trapped him in our car outside a child’s bris, begging him to finger me with a Pellegrino bottle I’d found under my seat.
“I’ve turned over a new leaf. A sex leaf,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.
“Awesome! Let’s do this when we aren’t in someone’s front yard, yeah? God, this book really did a number on you,” he said, extricating his penis from my ravenous grasp.
Before you run out and get a copy for yourself, know this: The book is not good by any sort of literary standard. There is practically zero story. The heroine, Ana, is a fucking loser whom I’d never be friends with. And the love interest, Christian, is the type of guy who’d no doubt ask to fist me at a dinner party. My response, of course, being: “Dude, you’re twenty-seven years old. Get the fuck away from me.… Wait, you have your own helicopter? Okay, come back.”
The “story,” such as it is, revolves around the dynamics of a BDSM (Bondage & Discipline/Sadism & Masochism) relationship, something I’d be hard-pressed to seek out in real life. Discipline tops my list of most hated things, followed closely by portobello mushrooms and actors.
My father is a control freak and my mom is Cher from the movie Mermaids. Regardless of whose roof I was under, nothing was up to me. I was either being groomed for my future eating disorder by being told that I hate watermelon because it has too much sugar in it, or being left at a movie theater because my mom temporarily forgot she had kids. If a guy tried to tie me up, I’d probably freak out and preemptively bludgeon my seducer to death with his own butt plug.
Luckily, the BDSM merely provided entrée into a larger world of role-play and fantasy. The whips and chains weren’t the real turn-on; it was the power play leading up to them. The book initially hooked me with a scene in which Christian shows up at a bar miles away from where he’s purported to be, to swoop in and save Ana from a drunken encounter with an aggressive friend. It sounds absurd even writing about it now, but deep down I think every woman (including myself) is looking for her white knight. And when that white knight does something really white knight-ish but then refuses to fuck you, you kind of want to gnaw your own arm off after masturbating yourself out of an anger tantrum.
In real life, when you first meet someone, you can project all sorts of bullshit narratives onto them to suit your fancy. However, once you are married, that leeway goes out the window. There’s no room for a new story. You know the story.
By no means am I trying to dissuade you from getting married. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have my husband. But the hard truth is: You can’t have both. Eventually a woman has to choose between deep, meaningful, occasionally platonic love and hot, dangerous, “Please don’t break my heart, because I know you probably are hiding another family” sex.
Most men can pop in a low-grade porn and get hard the second they see a faceless pussy staring back at them. But women require more mental stimulation. We want a story to get wrapped up in. That’s why whenever I watch porn with my husband, I insist we sit through the beginning narrative. Look, if I’m gonna care about two dudes coming on a chick’s face at the same time, I at least need to understand how they all know each other.
Oscar Wilde said: “Everything in the world is about sex, except for sex. Sex is about power.” E. L. James knows about the importance of the power/sex dynamic. She understands that the hottest thing about fucking someone’s brains out is the psychological chess game you had to play—and win—to get there. Long story short: E. L. James is a hero. She is a goddamn humanitarian—and pretty much the Robin Hood of female libidos.
After zipping through Fifty Shades Darker, the second book in the trilogy, I was doing things I hadn’t done in years, like shaving all the blond hairs off the back of my thighs, closing the bathroom door when I peed, and seducing my husband with more than just a simple: “I feel like we’re supposed to be having sex.” I was a rabid, insatiable animal. And by that I mean I wanted sex more than twice a week.
* * *
Hot as things had become between me and my husband, something was still missing. Despite our best efforts, we still weren’t like the characters in the book. I was talking too much, and Jason’s hitting me over the head with a pillow felt more like he was trying to suffocate me so he could go back to playing with his iPad. Christian and Ana also had things that we didn’t have.
What is a sexual deviant without toys? I thought one afternoon while taking photos of my labia to send to him at work.
Admittedly, I go through phases where I get super passionate about something, throw myself 100 percent into whatever it is, and then ditch the whole thing a couple weeks later, when I’m waylaid by the next shiny object. And for the most part, my husband has always been supportive, even though the outcome is usually just me wasting a bunch of money on shit I end up giving to my maid’s daughters. Like when I went through my whole Nag Champa–burning, meditation-crystal-collecting, vision-board phase. Or when I got an arm tattoo, then freaked out that it made me look like a biker and started getting it lasered off. Or when I took up pole dancing and hired a guy sitting outside Home Depot to come over and turn our guest bedroom into a “champagne room” one night while Jason was on Ambien. Exciting as it was initially, that phase ended rather abruptly when I busted my knee, reenacting the scene from Striptease where Rumer Willis walks out on stage in the middle of her mom’s routine, resulting in a tit-heavy meltdown as Demi realizes the negative impact her lifestyle is having on her family and her soul. (Don’t worry: I always made Jason play the kid.)
Knowing full well where my overzealous nature could lead, I tried hard to stay rational as I sped into the parking lot of my local sex store.
My heart started racing the moment I got out of the car. No matter what your age, a sex shop has this uncanny ability to make you feel like you are about to get busted for every depraved thing you’ve ever done. Holding my sunglasses tightly between my teeth, I walked through the front door.
Before this, I went to sex shops only to buy slutty Halloween costumes, and batteries for my mom’s vibrators. This visit, however, was of a completely different nature. With determination, I walked past the sexy schoolgirl outfits and Pocket Rockets disguised as lipsticks and marched directly to the hard-core shit. I was browsing through the bondage aisle, filling my arms with weapons of mass seduction, when I came upon something called a “spreader bar.” Looking at the price, I gasped.
Three hundred bucks? I have a whole dungeon to decorate!
“Excuse me,” a voice chimed in behind me.
Guiltily, I turned around.
It had to be so obvious from the looks of me (nonthreatening person over thirty donning a wedding ring) and the contents of my arms (bondage fuck fest) that I was reading Fifty Shades.
“Would you like a basket?” a salesgirl asked, like we were at fucking Whole Foods. I hate how calm sex shop workers are, as if sex is the easiest thing to talk about in the world. I’m sure during training they get coached into talking about clits the way some people talk about coffeepots, but the rest of society doesn’t operate that way. And I just find it a little stressful to have someone looking at me with a straight face while asking questi
ons like, “Have you ever tried an ass egg?”
By the end of my supermarket sweep, I’d settled on one ass egg, forgiving nipple clamps, some reasonably priced cock rings, two giant vibrators, a latex bodysuit, and a blindfold. On my way to the register, I noticed some small golden orbs sitting in a case near the glass dildos. They were Ben Wa balls. In Fifty Shades, James writes about similar balls in a steamy scene where Christian forces Ana to insert them into her vagina and wear them to a black tie event.
Fun! I thought, grabbing a pair and tossing them into my basket of vices. The heavily pierced girl behind the register nodded approvingly at my choices, tested the batteries in my new Rabbit Pearl, instructed me on how to clean my gimp suit, and then rung me up.
Back in my car, I was already plotting how I was going to ravage my husband. I felt like Wile E. Coyote mapping out a plan to capture the Road Runner and then ass-egg him to death.
When I got home, I did what I always do when I’ve gone shopping. I ripped the tags off everything and put it all on. I danced around the room in pain, trying to acclimate to the teeth on my new nipple clamps, then busted out the strange gold balls and shoved them inside my vagina. They were cold and heavy and kind of made me feel like I had two super-plus blood-drenched tampons in at once. Feeling both pride and shame that my vagina was wide enough to fit both balls, I tiptoed around the room, waiting to have some sort of Sting–Trudi Styler tantric cum explosion.
Just then, I heard the garage door opening. My husband was home! And was he in for a treat!
I threw a pair of boxers and a T-shirt over my bondage gear and ran downstairs to greet him, like any good dominant/submissive wife with a surprise might do.