I Can't Help Myself

Today is the one year anniversary of "Client Nine and a Half". It has been an amazing and wonderful journey. While I can grouse and moan about not making enough "progress", this writing has connected me to many wonderful and amazing people. It has been a way to take some of the frustrating, terrifying, painful, exciting, and astonishingly fullfilling experiences I've had and create something. That some of you actually seem to come back post after post and read me has been so gratifying I cannot begin to thank you enough.

Writing has inspired me to try to be honest about who I am and where I want to go. Sometimes I think it's all just an indulgent "dear diary" extreme sports event. Then one of you will comment on my most recent e-scrivener offering and say something funny or smart or sad or confrontational - and in a revelatory instant I know I'm a charter member of an incredible community. In a way that I've never experienced, "Client Nine" has hitched me to each of you out there in an effort to illuminate, entertain and understand. Thank you all so much for sharing it with me.

Well, I booked four days in a hotel in South Beach and "She-Who-Visits" might join me. Then again, she might not. Ah ... the exquisite tension. A friend told me to give up my idea of writing The Great Kinky Romance Novel because my wife would literally kill me if I published it in my real name. Will I ever move out? Will I ever meet Mistress Right? Will I ever graduate to the intermediate class at RopeShare or attend another munch? Will this year see me attend my first ever fetish party? What will I wear? Is Motown the quintessential bdsm romance music?

The saga continues ... "I Can't Help Myself" is about on-my-honor chastity, right?

"When you snap your fingers
Or wink your eye
I come a running to you.
I'm tied to your apron strings
And there's nothing that I can do."

This Ain't No On Golden Pond

I read this morning that the only drug in sight in Steven Tyler's dressing room during the current Aerosmith tour was Gaviscon. With a birthday coming up I love reading stuff like this. While my own recreational prescription for Levitra sits prim and chaste, still stapled into its pharmaceutical frock and locked away inside my office desk, She-Who-Visits reassured me that everything is still in working order during her recent stopover. After a couple of glasses of wine, even She - who loves a "belittle-me" style banter - allowed as to how I was rather richly awarded in this department. A comforting compliment as I prepare to throw myself headlong into the backyard slip 'n slide toward my sixth decade. All guys of a certain age worry about their wood. And I'll always have our parking lot goodbye.

With another year almost gone and the next barreling in without even asking if I'm ready, I wonder if I shouldn't be pushing myself more to resolve the thorny issues in my life. I was out recently with an ex-girlfriend. One of the three significant relationships in my life. The bass player in my trio of dommy-girls-in-the-street-but-bottoms-in-the-sheets. She asked about my wife and I told her if business were better I'd be moved out. I told her I thought I had spent my life trying to convince attractive, smart, bossy, vanilla girls that my kink was cool. I said I couldn't do it anymore and wanted an honest-to-goodness kinky woman. She laughed and said if I just waited another ten years, it wouldn't matter. Objection, I grumbled. There are pills for that.

Yeah, and mine sit in a drawer softly moaning to be unbuttoned, unzipped, and unhooked.

As my fragmented and random thoughts produce scalped tickets at my gate and make a play for the box seats to pass for reflection, I'm truly convinced my process is necessary and vital. My marriage deserves respect and my wife is worthy of compassion. But in an often frantic free-for-all, my need for a dominant woman is dropped like a puck at center ice - and a fateful faceoff must occur. I hack and slash in vain without being in postion to really take a shot on goal.

I've got game in the intimate clinches and daily tribulations of a long-term relationship. My kinks don't drive me to hunger for extreme sport marathons in a beautiful Disneyland dungeon of wires, tubes, and leathered suspension predicaments. Pour me a pair of black patent stilettos and a high-waisted retro panty girdle peeking out the back of faded, form-fitting jeans and I'll stop dead in my tracks. Stir in a smart, snarky, sassy, sensibility and I'll follow you down any street. Garnish with a fondness for getting your way by imposing three week stints of on-my-honor chastity and you'll wrap me around your little finger forever.

In the end, there's just no pill to gulp and magically transform my romanticized and idealized vision of She-ness into a real domme girl who wants me. The doctor has ordered down and dirty life. Its chronic prescription - joyful terror and horrific elation. Sometimes I just need to remind myself to keep showing up in honor of all the She-ness I seek and the She-ness I already have.

But hey, I'm just biding my time, pining to audition on the casting couch for the subbie-guy lead in my very own kinky Elmore Leonard novel. You know the one - gracefully aging mean streets mouthpiece meets dominant femme fatale with the twenty-four karat heart. Maybe Steven Tyler, acid reflux in check, will make a cameo appearance.

Edie Athens and Chili Palmer - World's Coolest Couple.

Beautiful Menace

So I'm talking to my shrink. I share I really want to make progress on being more out with my kink. More friends, a connection, some play? She claims she's got an idea - so I'm game. She suggests I take my writing and do something with it in my own name. Join the inspiration of my pervy wordsmithing with something I pen for a public dawn.

What part of I want to play does she not get? Does she not understand that I'm wild for the nasty, dear, and intimate? But I humor her and think it over. I mention to my wife that I'm thinking about writing something and she becomes sneering skeptic. She just got a Kindle which she pours over all the time. Accuses me of never reading much of anything and where am I going to get the time to write anyway, she snorts derisively.

Wait a sec. I've been writing for a year. Regularly. Hey, maybe my shrink was onto something.

I decide for inspiration I'll read some short stories, so I grab a copy of some by Ernest Hemingway - a veritable role model for submissive men everywhere. I begin with "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".

The story is about an American man in his thirties who, with his beautiful wife, goes big game hunting in Africa. Hemingway is the master of the sparce and direct. The story is about how the guy chickens out on a lion hunt. Me? I like my lions where I can admire them from afar - in the Bronx. Anyway, the great white hunter who serves as maitre 'd for endangered species murder is telling Francis about how the help needs discipline to keep them in line:

“What were you telling him?” Macomber asked.

“Nothing. Told him to look alive or I’d see he got about fifteen of the best.”

“What’s that? Lashes?”

“It’s quite illegal,” Wilson said. “You’re supposed to fine them.”

“Do you still have them whipped?”

“Oh, yes. They could raise a row if they chose to complain. But they don’t. They prefer it to the fines.”

“How strange!” said Macomber.

“Not strange, really,” Wilson said. “Which would you rather do? Take a good birching or lose your pay?”

Actually Papa, I prefer to part with my pay for a good birching!

I suppose I can find inspiration anywhere. Maybe I do have a beautiful, impassioned, kink-love story in me. Maybe I do...

But now, a word from our sponsor.

I Think I'm Goin' Off The Rails

I was in a meeting and my phone pulsed on my hip. I reflexively grabbed it and stole a peek. "She-Who-Visits" had caught me in mid-sentence. Grudgingly, I banished her to voice mail. Later, as I greedily listened to her cheerfully christen me useless for not being around when she calls, I learned she was here. In New York!! Did I want to have dinner!!! A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned that it was possible she'd be here for just a few days in June to visit her parents, but I had heard nothing. And you'd best believe I'd asked. Usually when she visits she gives me plenty of lead time so I can work myself up into a slavering frenzy.

I called her back. Did I want to have dinner tomorrow night? Up north by her? Get back to me, gotta finish shopping - go way!

"She" is very present tense focused. I was a day away - the mall was here and now. Her recent personal parsimony aside the sting just made me smile. I told myself she meant it with love. But over the next twenty four hours with each unanswered email, unreturned phone call, and ignored text I knew in my heart it was another excruciating exercise in the unrequited.

"I just need to be free", I muttered under my breath to nobody in particular. This just doesn't work for me. Finally, as the clock approached three in the afternoon, I called her yet again. An answer.

"Oh god, the cut is wrong. The color is awful. Auburn!! Can you imagine? It just makes my whole face look red. Dinner? Well, if you want to. Call the restaurant and see if you can get a reservation. And get the little table in the corner on the banquette. Can you be here by seven?"

I called, I cajoled, I reserved. I cleared decks, trimmed sails, and battened down hatches. At 5:15 I jumped into a black car on a corner near Wall Street and set off at the height of the nascent summer crush for Northern Westchester. An hour and change later we passed the George Washington Bridge. My phone rang.

"Are you almost here? No? Well I'm going to do an extra wash and rinse, maybe that will help this mess. Just thought I'd tell you. I might be late in case you were wondering where I was."

She's always late. A trait I adore since I love waiting - way T&D. From the Bridge my driver sprouted wings and flew. We were in the restaurant parking lot only five minutes late. I got my beloved anticipation. I sat and I decompressed, wondering if this trek was really worth it. The MIA, the hot and cold, the incommunicado. It all just sucked.

Then she walked in and it became an evening from heaven.

We've always done dinner in the most intimate and romantic fashion. Dinner with She is how I became more comfortable in my subbie guy skin. Dinner with She changed my life. We chatted about the banal and shared our deepest personal problems and concerns. Our eyes misted and we cracked each other up. We reminisced about our increasingly substantial past and conspired about our oh-so-priceless future. And in an intoxicating swirl from fried avocado with mango coulis to her favorite chocolate mousse souffle it was over. We held hands like teenagers. I caressed each graceful finger.

"I'm syphoning your fortune, one dinner at time", she smirked. "Time to go."

In the parking lot she leaned against her mother's car, drew me close and kissed me softly. I held her, never wanting to let go again.

"Move your hands down my back," she murmured.

I did.

"Put your hands on my ass," she sighed demandingly.

I did.

"Take your right hand and hike my dress up."

Boy did I!!

"That's it. Now put your hand on my ass."

I shook and buckled into her, breathing hard. She had no panties on.

"Put your hand in there, in between, in deep," her breath husky in my ear.

As I shyly probed a single digit, she reached around and thrust my index finger home, her hot whisper - I didn't wipe well.

"That's enough.", she cooed. "And don't touch me with that hand. And don't wash it. You can smell me for awhile longer."

I told her I was never washing my right hand again and was going to tape a plastic bag around it forever. She collapsed with a wonderful case of the giggles.

A final kiss and she drove away, into the suburban night. Gone.

Until again.