Something Borrowed

Writing my SEXI back...

Me. Portland. 2017.

The year I turned Fifty was the sexiest year of my life. The kids were out of the house and I was roaring my way through the 20s I never truly had. The The Raven. Dante’s. Bounce housing in the woofers. Failing miserably at twerking. But hot damn—god damn! I had a blast! I was bartending at a hip Sushi place downtown where I met soooo many cool people. Everyone was vibing. Hyping. LIVING! Meee toooo! For the first time in my adult life I wasn’t working two jobs and soccer momming my ass all over town. I was doing exactly what I wanted. When I wanted. Because I wanted. I slept in late. I meandered through cemeteries. I started writing an erotic novel called Once Upon a Viking.

I mean…that title. 

Ciara sat on an ornate red throne. She ground her hips into the crushed velvet. A black leather corset with grommets and spikes pushed up her round naked breasts. Her pink nipples quivered with each breath. She wore spiked thigh high boots and her legs were parted and tied to the legs of the chair with golden rope. Her black hair curled over her shoulders.

Hey, I never said it was high brow Lit. It was the smuttiest of smut. And it was so much fun to write! And since I worked on the book for an hour or two each morning, it put me in a certain type of mood.

🍆 🍑 Yeah, so, I was turned on for LIFE every morning and it was fucking fabulous. I was all tits and hips with no shits to give. And damn. I miss those days. Because I don’t feel all that sexy anymore. Matter of fact, I don’t even think about it much these days. SEX. And that’s a bummer because it's always been a big part of who I am.

So, what happened to me? Welp. COVID. A hip replacement. Menopause. Got laid off. Switched careers. Twice. Part of me accepts that I’m no longer comfortable in my old skin. But I have so much life left to live. I want to vibe and hype again! So I’m on a mission. I’m bringing my sexy…back and I’m gonna use my writing to turn myself back ON for life! 

I’m writing my sexy back by starting with something old and something new. I’ll go back to 2017 when I untangled the wranglings of two marriages gone south with their curled toes and stalled-out orgasms. Turns out if you give me too much gas you’ll flood the engine. Pump the brakes. Pump pump the brakes. Good at first but not built to last. I forgave myself for those mistakes and embraced who I was.

Back then I fell in love with me. What I love. What I want. I love being a mom. But being a wife? Not so much. So I stopped beating myself up for those mistakes and choices. I just wanted to fuck around and have fun. It’s not for everyone. But it was for me. And once I embraced that I was freeeeee to be meeeeee! 

7/22/2017 journal entry from Portlandia: Turns out I’ve never been the marrying kind. The kind of woman who can stick a thing out through the thinned lips of till-death-do-us-part. I drink too much Rye. I light American Spirits in no-smoke bars. I don’t want to come home half the time. I can’t get out of bed some of the time. I like waking up in rooms in strange places. St. John’s Landing. 13th and Stark.

I love this wild woman. But where the fuck did she go? 

I’m going to find her. See what made her tick. So maybe I’ll start with the men I borrowed and something blue. Some city sex. The wilding out thing in the city of Bridges and its weirdo men. Portland. You. Oh. You. 

There was this Tinder guy with a French accent. He was. A Paris man. Sigh. And I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Snaps fingers. Tries to remember his name. His name was...his name was. It’ll come to me. Fuck it. Paris. Let’s call him Paris. Because. He was so very Oooh-La-La! Six-pack abs. Smelled like a Tom Ford ad. Fucking Fabulous. Notes of wood, almond, tonka bean. It was a dark and stormy night. 

Well here. Picture this. It’s mid-February in Portland. I’m sure you’ve heard stories. The never-ending rain and the way it knots the hair and makes you want to jump off a bridge. So raining. So depressing. Frizzy hair and a dive bar. My bar. A Lionel train spooling around a rooftop track. Juicy bacon burgers and a good pot roast special. Mashed potatoes with scratch gravy. And chicken tortilla soup you could die for. Secret recipe.  And I usually don’t shit where I eat. But this bar is the beginning of several short stories. So I want you to know it. Lottery machines jammed in a corner. Tattered red bar stools. Green carpet worn thin down the middle. 

Dive Bar sits right on the outskirts of the city in a teeny tiny bunch of houses in Burlingame. Crooked unpaved streets. Potholes deep enough to drown in. Two stop lights. One Shell station. Everything is just a lil bit shabby. But good. Homey. A lumpy recliner. A comfy pair of slippers.

I lived in a Fight Club house hidden by a clump of trees. I reference Fight Club so you’ll know how ridiculous it was and also because Chuck Palahniuk. He’s god around Portland’s netherworlds. Every writer in Portland wants to rub one off in a Palahniuk pork pie glory hole.  So I reference it just so’s you know I was on the serious side about my writing back then. Serious enough to move to Portland and live on the wild side. 

Anywho, so wire hangers in closets. Warped orange Tupperware. No matching lids. Or socks. A shaggy couch sagged in the middle. No central heat. Or air. Rusted water piped into a not working tub and a crooked shower in the basement. It was my never-never land. 

Paris drove up from the Pearl district. The Pearl is hip and lively. Cobblestone streets. Warehouse bars with echo-echo high ceilings. He was trending at a corner table, munching a burger. Duct tape patched a hole on the vinyl bench. I was late. He was hungry. He stopped chewing when I asked: Are you Paris? 

Yes. He was Paris. He was France. Would I would let him in my underpants?

Spoiler alert. I would.

Tu es magnifique mon amour! He said I was perfection! He did that flowery wooing-me-over French guy thing. Your hair is chef’s kiss. Your lips! Ooooh-La-La. You are. Perfect. Double Buffalo Trace times two and I believed him. I was fifty and fab! Pretty in pink. And that girl in me…that sweet sixteen who fell for hooks, lines, and sinkers. She came out to play in the rain. Oh, you. You.

Of course, I knew. But. It was 17 straight days of rain. It was him or the bridge. 

I hand-held him through the kitchen. Around the pots and pans. The petrified macaroni. My bedroom was the one clean room in the house. I’d bothered with clean sheets on my bouncy bed and swiped everything with a wet Swiffer. I’d even washed the chocolate lab. I was glad I took the time. Because he was stunning in that David Beckham European kind of way.

And to tell you the truth he was too damned pretty with his shiny black hair and his Eiffel tower. And so I sorta thought he’d suck at fucking. But he was spectacular. I really wish I could remember his name. 

Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. A three-night stand. In and out of bars around town. Lip sucking. An orgasm with our jeans on in the front seat of his Jeep.  What? That’s so high school. Gearshifts. Steering wheels. But yeah. 

Je t’aime! Croissants! Mouton-Cadet Bordeaux! 

My god. He played amateur soccer. His thighs were chiseled. And his cheekbones. I flung my head back like a romance novel. He talked and talked. I listened with my legs wrapped around his hips or his face between my legs. I didn’t understand a word he said. 

Until he said. Marry me? In English. On the way back from the Shell station. Stutter-stop. Pop the clutch. Oh. Wait! What? Oh, no. Noooooo! Swipe left. Block. Delete.

You. Oh, you. Weirdo Portland Paris man. You were the first but you were not the last. Ce la vie.

Thankfully the rain passed and the sky gave me something blue. I worked a couple double shifts. Ate the Sunday special—hot wings with a side of rye. And yeah, my crows feet wrinkles were starting to web around the eyes. And yeah, my skin didn’t have that 21 spring in her step. But I felt fucking fabulous. I felt fucking beautiful.

And I wonder about that now. What made me feel so sexy? So me? Because it wasn’t the man in this story that made me feel sexy. I can’t even remember his name for Crissakes.  

I see now that my 50s were a time of breaking free from what I thought I should be. I was my art. My writing. I wrote for the big Ohhhh. I wrote myself sexy with erotic fiction and journal stories of my first loves. My First kiss by the hockey pond with a kid named Joel (see I can remember names). Making out at the Clifton 5 during Jaws—The Revenge. NECKING (LOL that’s how old I am) on the clickity-clack uphill of the rollercoaster at Knobels Grove Amusement Park. Reading steamy Jackie Collins novels under the covers with a flashlight. Anything and everything. And most of all…mostly. I stopped shaming myself for loving sex. 

So here we are again. I am free to be meeee! And I’m writing my sexy back. And maybe it looks a little bit different now but I can’t wait to find out how great the tail end of my 50s will be and I feel better all ready.

Snaps fingers. Books flight to Vegas.

I can’t be the only woman of a certain fabulous age who wants her sexy back Can I? Do you feel sexy? Or. Have you misplaced your mojo? How do you keep the sexy alive in you? DM me! Or post a comment in the chat. Let’s write about it. Talk about it. Let’s get that fabulous twist back in our sheets!