1994. Heady times in ‘frisco. The dot-com insanity was revving at all 18 Italian Scooter cylinders. Money, sex, more money, foosball tables and masseuses lurked in every office. It was the days of the $18 dollar Mandarin Martini, valet parking for lunch at the unashamedly overpriced brewpubs. Greed and stock options, new media and cyberspace. We all had a gig, OT was the norm, and the questions of who and what we were doing really didn’t matter. It was ideas. Concepts. Intangibility, but with catered lunches. One big sexy illusion.
So. New Years Eve. I was living in the artist loft, back when ‘Live-Work’ actually meant real artists living and working in the same place, not the overpriced cracker-boxes that soon choked the burg, with my then girlfriend and soon to be ex-wife, both in the same gorgeous form. Living down the hall was a photographer turned dot com cyber-director, whatever that really meant in the days of imaginative job descriptions, with his complex and adorable long time girlfriend. They were the warm, slightly twisted, wacky sit com neighbors. They’d drop by our digs to use the only bathtub in the building, robe wrapped and carrying a rubber ducky during a business meeting dinner. Fed the cats when we jetted to New York. All in all, lovely people.
And tonight, New Years Eve, we were in the spirit of the urban, sexually charged, money laden, go-go, nothing held back holidays. We were going to a party thrown by a local dominatrix.
Mistress Petra was knee-weakening lovely, sort of living proof that there was a God and he had a hell of a sense of humor. Think Michelle Pfeiffer in a leather encased rack of perfect proportions, wide spaced violet eyes to die for. Full lips. Silky blonde hair. But the joke was, like Anita Eckberg in ‘La Dolche Vida”, she’d been drastically short changed in the depth department and was at the very most, a quarter inch deep.
But who cared? The holy trinity of sex, money and illusion held sway. So Petra invited us, meaning the photographer, his girlfriend, and a wealthy guy the photographer knew and his lovely Brazilian model girlfriend who resembled Uma Thurman, and the soon to be ex and I into her place. Clad in latex and leather, she escorted us into her fully equipped dungeon in the rear of a unassuming apartment on Capp Street.
Picture a museum for escape artists. Cages, chains on the soundproof wall. Cuffs. Manacles displayed just so by the recessed lighting. Tasteful, really. Now, like a kinky visit to the OBGYN, she proceeded to clamp-down and dominate the Brazilian girl model on some adjustable table. Petra used straps, a riding crop, clamps, floggers, and Saran Wrap on that lovely girl with the combo quiet efficiency of a speedway pit crew and an Sigfried and Roy show, only more butch. Mind blowing doesn’t describe it. Epic cheapens it. As a boffo windup finish, she used a fleshy strap-on the size of a bratwurst and brought Uma to Jesus. We all watched in awe and quiet rapture, bathed in the holiday glow of a true artist that loved her work. Holy night indeed.
Then, as the saying goes, it got weird.
First off, others had arrived and were shambling about the rest of the apartment. Eurotrash, Ameriflotsam and Sycophants to be charitable. Tops, bottoms, switches. Leather and lime green suits. Petra changed costumes, from dom to a rubber clad June Cleaver and went into hostess mode.
Like most actors who want to direct, Petra naturally wanted to be a nutritionist. Maybe it was her unintentional sadistic streak, but she decided to lay out platters of turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, and stuffing to the newly arrived crowd. I smelled grief.
Now, as a payoff of the potent stew of overheated rooms and people nibbling on turkey, it was Triptophan city. Glazed eyes listlessly watched the Japanese Enema film on Petra’s 150 inch color TV of some woman tied up on a empty rocky beach, sea spray and other liquids peppering her dimpled babyfat flesh while she squirmed and protested with that typically Asian porn snivels and whines. Then among the sleepy murmurs of anticipation, the floor show was about to start in her living room.
Now, imagine if Fabio had a seedier younger brother with the intellect of a snow pea. He was decked out in the time honored traditional leather marble-bag and harness. With him was an inflatable female doll with stenciled on ‘do of spit curls and the usual expression of an air-drowing goldfish. At Petra’s stern urging, Fabio placed the inflate-a-date on the wall to wall carpeting, straddled her, unleashed his unmemorable member, and proceeded to pleasure the polymer without a hint of foreplay, strictly Protestant Southern Strategy sex.
Okay, maybe it was just the triptophan, the unsexy porn’s sounds of surf and squish, the oddly silent crowd… but both he and the doll were deflating gradually. He’d stopped a few times to re inflate his co-star while Petra bucked him up with a stern warning while straddling his face like a buxom Otto Von Stroheim topping Gloria Swanson in their heydays, a pneumatically enhanced Dale Carnegie, a blonde Gipper trying to get her team over the last few yards.
Now, I’ve been to art school and have sat through a series of mindless ‘performance art’ evenings consisting of flung meat, bad poetry, and costumes consisting of broken glass and fudge, so I didn’t bat an eye. Fabio was, I’ll have to say, a trouper and was giving, albeit dwindling, it all he had. Think of playing pool with a garden hose. Overcooked spaghettii. Silly Putty on a hot porch.
Here’s something else. Maybe Petra wanted to have more of a contrast to her corn fed beauty, but she had a habit of surrounding herself with ugly pets. A blobby, knobbly fish in a tank of water that must have come from Chernobyl or Love Canal, a tiny roach of a mutt that looked like it had caught fire in the recent past, and two hairless Sphinx cats that scurried from heat lamp to lap.
It was then I spied one of them near Fabio’s feet. The sticky, chamois textured beast was looking intently with dull, wide eyes at something wiggling enticingly between Fabio’s legs, something resembling a pair of mice snuggling in a sock. The cat’s bald, chimp-tailed rear crouched and was doing the rumba. Takeoff was imminent.
So, as I watched, I felt that it was one of those time-slowing moments that could’ve gone either way. One way, his performance would’ve gotten a little more interesting and might have woken up the party a bit. In another, a person I didn’t know, albeit past the plethora of information about his genitalia, was going to be humiliated beyond what he’d originally signed up for in his devotion to his mistress.
Something filled me then. Call it the Dickensian Holiday Spirit of charity. Maybe after years of watching through misty eyes a giddy Allistair Simms in “A Christmas Carol” or Jimmy Stewart’s flawless performance in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, I truly felt something. Call it a need to cut slack for the downtrodden, the luckless, the floppy Tiny Tims and Fabio’s of this crazy, mixed up world, but I felt that urge to help out another member of the great big Brotherhood of Man, sort of like Clarence earning his wings, albiet if George was in Fabio’s current position, I have no doubt that part would’ve ended up not being shown on Turner Classic Movies.
It was then that I decided that Fabio needed a break.
So I snatched up the bald, oddly hot feeling moronic puss in mid-pounce. Fabio continued to pump and blow, pump and blow. The Japanese girl continued her mewling. The surf roared.
Personally, I’d had enough of the scene. It’s one thing to watch something with an “well, you don’t see that everyday’ kind of attitude, it’s another when you’re calf-deep in it and needing a shower. A regular one.
So as I tossed the cat into the bathroom, I could hear a knocking at the door. More drop-ins and flotsam wanted to enter. The place just got a lot more crowded, so I made a turkey sandwich to go, grabbed the then girlfriend, and called it a night.
“God Bless Us All, Everyone” indeed…
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