The birth of Adam

Seriously, I can’t remember when it happened, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere around … no wait.

I had my first free, alone apartment when I went to Spain in ‘97, I was 22, and yet I shared a bathroom with a Colombian woman. I had snuck some pot in my bat box, covered it with perfume tear-outs of a girlie magazine, wrapped it in toilet paper and had in a plastic bag. I was obviously not thinking properly that I’d fly from Minneapolis to NYC to Amsterdam and would be groggy when passing a drug-sniffing dog. But I passed through and smoked a little bit over the year I lived there. I still didn’t know how to touch myself. But I had freedom from living with 6 or 10 roommates.

When I moved back in ‘98 I got my first solo apartment and spent too much time discovering the internet and dialing 1-800 hook-up-sex lines. I had a couple of those guys over but still didn’t know how to touch myself alone. I moved again, into Sheila’s old apartment. She was like 10 years my senior and taking photo classes at my uni. She left me her full couch and brought me as her photo assistant to Paisley Park to photo a guitarist - and we ran into Prince. It was in this apartment that I accidentally stumbled into bdsm online, when some 44-year-old guy from NJ mistook me for another girl on chat and over the days on his phone bill tried to entice me to pour candle wax on myself. I realized that I couldn’t do this kind of torture to myself but deeply wanted someone else to do it. I bought a pair of painful metal handcuffs, a ball gag, and a rabbit vibrator with a full body dildo and wiggly ears for the clit. I scared my then-boyfriend with the fact that I didn’t want just straight sex but wanted to be tied up. Still, I didn’t get off with the rabbit and didn’t know how to touch myself.

When I moved to Madison to live with a lover - which failed - I moved out, got my own place, on my birthday. Sometime around then, 2001, when I was 26, I was wandering drunk on State Street and ended up in the State St Arcade and was perusing the porn mags.

Porn stores are not women-friendly. Despite the fact that pdh and I fucked in one of the cabins, while some stranger guy jacked off watching us - before they closed the cabins down and shut the whole shop up - it was still not a welcoming place for solo chicks. Even A Woman’s Touch felt foreign, with their uber silence and origami waterfall zen atmosphere, showcasing all the dildos and vibrators and toys and books and lingerie like they knew better how to cater to chicks. It didn’t do it for me. Nor did the Arcade, where the gum-snapping college kid who cared less about you but still looked at you in disgust would run your dirty items through the check-out scan, give you free batteries and roll their eyes as they said thanks. Neither of these places made me feel very free to find myself. Still, I felt more pressure in the Arcade to buy something and try something - because I was a woman in a man’s store, because I was daring, because I was drunk and seeking. Where the Touch store made me feel like I should KNOW what I want and want what I KNOW.

In the end, I grabbed a couple of toys to try and when I tried the Doc Johnson’s egg vibrator, I was hooked. There’s no rabbit, no whirls or zings or big fat cock-wannabes, no zaps or pain or hums or whirrs. I just had to place it in my undies, turn the porn on, or select an erotic story to read, and went off. Yeah, yeah, men fear the clit factor - that they’ll be replaced by clitoral satisfaction or a girl who doesn’t need a dildo inserted is some kind of lesbian wannabe. So not true. I need men and I need male parts and touch and testosterone on my skin, but there’s really no comparison between a fuck orgasm and an alone vibrator orgasm.

The Doc Johnson, which I refer to as the egg vibrator, doesn’t burn out after a quick or long use. Actually, it depends on one’s usage, but mine lasted a pretty long time until I either burned out the batteries or broke the wire for bending it in certain ways for long hours in my pants.

But even in 2001, it wasn’t yet Adam time. It was just me, joyous and Christmas day happy that I’d found a way to get off when I wasn’t able to get off with a date. A completely new idea, a new feeling, and god I felt so late in the coming of finding it.

But when I did… well, it was certainly my drunken girl phase, when I was a waitress at the local historic theatre/restaurant/bar, fucking boys in the theatre after-hours, serving under-age kids, tossing shots, and sliding fancy food onto big payers’ tables. Around this time, I also registered to be a certified, ordained marriage official. I filled the boxes online, printed the certificate, and could marry anyone who asked. So, I married me to myself. I also fooled around with the Ouija board - not too distant cousin from the marriage officiator - and made my own board when alone and asked my own silly questions.

When the strangers came knocking on my door one night and asked if I’d seen my neighbor in a few days, and then we called the landlord to bring us the keys to his apartment, and when the landlord couldn’t open the door for fear and I did instead, and found Ze dead on the floor, well, it kind of signified the drunk world colliding with the dead world. I freaked out. And realized that yes, I do see dead people. And, yes, perhaps I should stop fucking with the Ouija board.

But it might have been too late.

I think that if I had to pinpoint, it would have been that time that discovering self-pleasure coincided with Adam’s incarnation inside me. After those days, I’d have no problem with taking vacation time to stay at home on a Thursday or Friday to extend the weekend, holing up with frozen pizza, Maker’s Mark, cigarettes, and the egg vibrator. My viewing became progressively naughtier. Porn stars fucking on couches, amateurs in beds, some chick and a dog, the cartoon Simpsons making on the Flintstones, and then… and then… breakfast of cereal at noon, whiskey at 4, coming 6 times before the sun set.

And it hasn’t stopped since. Only, it’s changed. I brought an egg over from the States and it recently died on me. Paranoid I wouldn’t find a replacement, I went in and out of sex shops at Pigalle, finally finding its cousin in a store overwhelmed with hookers and gigantic cock dildos for gay men or vacuous women. It used to be a span of 5 or 10 days that Adam would inhabit my life and disrupt my work pattern. Now, it’s almost guaranteed that he’ll visit on the last day of my period and stay for at least two weeks.

I’ve got a bit better handle on it. Employment affords daydreaming and who cares reports. But grad school requires late night research and 50% of a grade on class participation. I might show up to class in a low-cut hussy shirt and short shorts, but at least I’m able to discourse about the change in regulation of financial institutions and the shrinking of the state.

But, still, here I am, on one of two working days off from scheduled class, when I could be using my time wisely for research or tying up loose ends. Instead, I’m perusing the You Porn, posting horrible ads on Craigslist and AFF, eating chips and chevre, drinking the last of my grappa. Good lord.

I do have to say though, that I hope he stays around for a bit. I’m not at all excited by the prospect of menopause, drying up, or feeling less sexy. I actually prefer this strange fight of feeling like a dirty 18-year-old boy inside a 33-year-old woman’s body to being a tired old hag.