Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

When we had sex, it became clear to me that in fact, I had never had sex before. What had happened on that futon on Great Jones had been a failed attempt; the young man from NYU had not completed my mission. This, now, was something else. It was uncomfortable, then pleasurable, but most of all it was different. It was different from the plodding loneliness of high school, and from the harrowing, cyclical fights with my parents that had become our routine. It wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t uncomplicated, and it wasn’t like taking acid. It was something that was better to do than to talk about doing. It was a door to another place, another way of being that didn’t have to do with language.

Your letter is long and complicated and sweet, but my answer is short and simple and sharp: it’s high time you get yourself laid, honey bun. And laid and laid and laid and laid. Do it bad. Do it good. Do it with drunk people and sober people. Do it with all your heart and only your body. Do it with people who stimulate you intellectually and sexually and bore you to shreds; with people who remotely piss you off and kinda sorta remind you of someone you used to know. Do it with strangers you met two hours ago and people you knew since you were twelve. Do it on the beach and behind a tree and while pressing someone up against the kitchen sink and so hard on the bed that when you’re done the blankets are nothing but a tangled mountain on the floor.

Just stop thinking about it and do it. Thinking about it too much seems to be a pattern in your life, a cocoon of doubt and trepidation that you’ve woven from your anxieties and sorrows. It’s a pattern I see you clinging to even now, as you simultaneously overly-analyze your dating options while claiming that you’d like to ‘just finally get laid.’ Break the pattern, hon. It isn’t serving you any more. You asked me to choose one among your list of options: a, b or c. But one isn’t enough. For you, right now, I choose all three.

The rules of decency and respect and loving kindness we adhere to in Sugarland still apply. I’m not suggesting you become a wildly promiscuous fuck machine, though becoming a wildly promiscuous fuck machine can be an enlightening experience (trust me: Sugar knows). Nor am I saying you shouldn’t eventually ponder the big questions about love and sex and romance. Rather, I’m suggesting that right now the most important thing for you to do is to work in opposition to the instincts that have led you to this place in which a vital part of yourself is like a starved little monkey in a box.

Feed the monkey. Of course you ‘want meaningful companionship and friendship’ and ‘sex of various forms’ and you ‘want the two in the same person.’ This is what we all want, darling. But there is time for that. You don’t get it right out of the gate. You don’t get it by hemming and hawing and making a, b or c lists before you’ve even been ‘in the presence of a half naked person’ to whom you’re attracted. You get it by getting it and seeing how it turns out. By taking it all off and facing your anxieties about sex that have bound you up for so long.

It’s time to unbind, my innocent little peach. It’s time to evolve.

After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don’t try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it’s nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death. After the briskness of loving, loving stops. And you roll over with death stretched out alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you…you don’t even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it’s obviously your own damn fault. You haven’t been able to—to what? To open your heart. You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anymore, to open your heart.

I could do some things well. Some things I was good at, like math or painting or even sports, but the second a boy put his arm around me, I forgot about wanting to do anything else, which felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck.

There’s something profoundly human about wanting to be sexually valued, and it transcends genders. More than one young man has told me he envies my life, too. I suspect these young men are hinting at the same longing for affirmation as the young women who e-mail me. We all want to know that we matter, and being paid is one way of knowing we have value. It may be inelegant and often impersonal, but because money is quantifiable, its message is indisputable. Where do you go for reassurance if you doubt your physical and sexual desirability? Talk is cheap, so you take cash instead.