Read More: A brief Q&A with Chloe Noland
The overwhelmingly popular adjective is mind-blowing. Mind-blowing experience. Mind-blowing sex. Mind-blowing physical sensation.
“I’ve become one with my own body and self in a way I never imagined possible,” one lady states on the clinic’s site.
“There isn’t really any true way to describe it,” one guy notes. “You just have to experience it.”
All these testimonials are frustratingly vague and lacking in detail, to say the least. But, once people started having sex with their plexi, inevitably much more variations on it emerged. Tantric, Guided Spoken Word, MMM (Muscle Memory Masturbation).
They have diagrams, online. Or more like hand-drawn illustrations, like the ones you see in sports injury books, where a stick figure demonstrates the physical therapy exercises. I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of them, because most of the time it just looked like two people: chest to chest, or stomach to stomach, her hips deflectively enveloped by his longer torso, her face pressed away, down into the skin of his collarbone. His own face arched up and out of the frame. Arms spread wide, usually, which made their postures look in imitation of some kind of religious impalement ceremony. Maybe not in the best taste?
The one I find the most interesting, actually, is of two girls squatting on their knees, face-to-face on a bed. One has a singular, pencil-thin smirk, benign and holy almost in a Mary Magdalene way. She’s gently grasping the other girl’s head in her hands, and they appear to be rocking, their stomachs jutted out toward one another so their plexi barely touch—an undulating kind of motion that perhaps speeds up with time? Who can tell. But they look happy, serene. Almost in love.
Doctors are not incredibly helpful here, either. They describe the hole like it’s a piece of equipment and state often that there are many inconclusive results, that there are a myriad of exciting and promising studies coming out, was I on the mailer for clinic XYZ? Yes, was I sure? They like to have a phone number with every prod or vial of blood, ask almost constantly. Fifteen emails a week, just for going in for a physical.
Once I got out of the hospital, it was a few weeks of sifting through forms, filling out the required paperwork. It was almost like becoming a citizen of another country, the legalization process. I needed to provide census data and tax information. Like a donor, I now have to keep a special card in my wallet at all times. But once life began returning to normal—or whatever version of normal now existed—I started perusing some of the message boards the hospital staff had recommended. Support communities, RSS feeds, a weekly newsletter, thousands of multicolored threads on a long listserv. You could spend hours, days, pouring through those, reading the success and horror stories of others.
There’re even groups you can join—initiation groups. I’ve always been shy, never good in group settings, preferring the one-on-one interaction. But frustrated with the chaos of the site, I do eventually decide to go to a group event, just a meet-and-greet kind of thing. Inevitably people would be cruising, for sure, but no one had to do anything they didn’t want to.
It’s at a hotel bar in Sherman Oaks. I’m early, and sit in my car for fifteen minutes, smoking cigarettes and reading Buzzfeed articles on my phone. I watch a couple of people walk across the parking lot towards the entrance, then three more, before deciding to go in.
There’s a lot of leisure-wear and corduroy. People mill on the hotel patio, enclosed by a white trellis fence with makeshift bars at either end. It looks a bit like an AA meeting or a singles convention. Most of the people are in their mid-thirties, a few younger, some older.
I get myself a beer and then park myself at an empty table to survey the crowd. I’m fascinated by a trio in the corner for some time: a man and two women, one of which is placed, very purposefully it seems, in between them. She is younger, and wearing a sleeveless black top that shows off a dark bruise on her bicep, the color of molding fruit. I keep staring at them, unable to figure out if the three of them are together, or if the two flanking parties are the couple and they are perhaps “initiating” the girl. At any rate, they move around the patio in a triad, never letting the girl slip away from them even for a moment. It is she I want to talk to. I wonder blandly what the rules of initiation are when it comes to the specifics, and whether I’m in over my head or not. I’m just about to suck it up and walk over to them, when someone taps me on the shoulder.
“Excuse me?” A guy about my age, wearing a red baseball hat and a Kings t-shirt, is standing too close. “Hi. I’m Andy.”
“Hi Andy.”
Andy waits for me to offer more, but when I don’t, he allows himself to stare, sipping his beer and eyeing me up and down. “First time here?”
“Uh—yes. First time.”
“Mm.”
“You?”
“No—been a couple of times, actually. Been coming since May. Not a lot of luck yet, but…” He allows himself to trail off.
I’m about to politely excuse myself when he blurts out, “I have a room upstairs. In the hotel. I mean, if you’re interested.”
This doesn’t do anything to change my mind about poor Andy. I look past him across the way, to the girl with the arm bruise. She’s eating something the other woman has handed her, and laughing in between bites. Something about her ease makes me feel even worse. I toss the rest of my beer back.
Andy is hovering, waiting for my response. I smile at him, closed-mouthed. I picture him alone, in bed at night, sticking objects into himself, trying to feign that human touch. I feel sorry for him; I feel sorry for all of us.
“Look,” I say. “I’m hoping to find —” but the word eludes me.
“Something more?” He asks sullenly, taking a drink. “Love, perhaps?”
“Dignity,” I say. He is silent to this. “No offense,” I add.
“News flash,” he says, waving to an invisible person and edging away from me, “When it comes to this, there’s no such thing.”
And then I’m alone. The weak come-on and the way people are standing around like they’re all stoned at a petting zoo is making for a pretty depressing evening. I shoot one glance back at the trio before I exit for the parking lot. The girl with the bruise is now whispering in the ear of her female companion, whose smile widens as she takes in the secret.
“If this works out,” I tell JERRY WEARS JERSEYS pointedly, like I’m not sure it will, “My boyfriend might want to watch.”
The boyfriend is imaginary, and I’m not sure if he even has a plexi. Maybe that’s the problem, I decide, right there on the spot. Brilliant.
“Fine by me,” he shrugs, like I’ve asked if it’s okay to use his bathroom.
We caravan from the bar to his apartment—my Toyota Corolla following his Honda truck—which is at the dark end of a cul-de-sac in Van Nuys. Huge piles of trash and old patio furniture are piled out at the curb, as if someone’s been renovating.
Pushing away my nerves and the growing sense that this isn’t’t the setting for making profound and lasting memories, I walk toward the figure standing in the driveway, waiting for me. I follow JERRY WEARS JERSEYS down a dark side path that runs parallel to the house, opening out to a shared backyard. In the gloom I can see two doors that lead out from the patio, one of which is made of dirty, glazed glass. JERRY WEARS JERSEYS ushers me toward the other door, which is wooden and plain.
The room (it’s really just a room, with a sink and a mini fridge in the corner, and the bathroom door off to the side) is gray and sad, with a sheetless queen mattress pushed against the far wall, and some wooden shelving, atop which several Star Wars and Dune tchotchkes are lovingly displayed.
JERRY WEARS JERSEYS has pulled a fold-out chair from a corner and placed it in the middle of the room for me. He takes the mattress, flopping down with legs outstretched.
“So,” he says, “Do you want anything to drink? I have beer, water.”
“No thanks,” I say, circling the chair, pretending to look at the walls, which are bare. With nothing left to do, I take a seat. We stare at each other.
“Do you live here…alone?” I prompt, gesturing in the direction of the backyard.
“No,” he laughs. “I rent this from the owner of the house. Old lady who’s been here since the 70’s. She’s nice, though. Let’s me do my thing. We rarely have to interact.”
I nod, still looking around the room as if I’d missed an obvious theme or design.
“I’m not going to bite,” he says.
I slide off my chair and take a seat next to him on the mattress, the spot he’s patting with his hand.
“Not too bad yet, huh?” He asks. I can smell him now, old coffee and cigarettes, Baked Lays on his breath.
“Nope,” I say. “Not too bad.”
“Let’s try—this.” He puts a hand on my arm, and starts massaging me from the side. He pumps my shoulder awkwardly for a few minutes, before saying, “I think this would be better if you lied down.”
Woodenly, I sink my head down to the mattress and stretch out, my bent knees bumping together. He is hovering above me, smoothing the contours of my hips through my t-shirt, moving up to my waist, then breasts, then back down. He hovers, almost politely, on the edge of lifting my shirt.
“Come on, baby,” he says softly. “Let me see it.”
It’s then that my brain freaks out a little. Supine on the mattress, inhaling the smell of stale sweat and potato chips, I see it all happening here, in the next few minutes, and I know if this is my first solid memory of the experience, it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life.
I pop up like a cork, surprising JERRY WEARS JERSEYS.
“Yeah,” I confirm the look on his face, which is going from seductive to bored with me in ten seconds or less. “I think I need to be going now.”
He doesn’t argue with me, which I think is nice, just lights a cigarette and thankfully doesn’t offer to walk me to my car. I close the door to his room like I’m closing the door on a life, sight unseen: JERRY WEARS JERSEYS sitting in his barren apartment, surrounded by Star Wars figurines, smoking and watching TV, quietly plugging himself.
As I navigate the steps down the side path and out to the street, every step becomes an escape from a terribly mismatched fate. When I get to my car I sigh like the winner of level three in a bad video game, and drive home.
DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA is the host of a local radio show that highlights stories on the future of technology and art. He meets me at a juicery on Ventura Boulevard, a few blocks down from the Studio City station.
“I hardly ever come to the valley, unless I’m working,” he tells me, eating shrimp nachos with his fingers. He calls the waitress by name, as if he comes here often. He’s an adamant west-sider, despite seeming to know everything about every business south of Cahuenga and Vineland—the Zagat ratings, the seasonal cocktail menus, the name of the guy who bought the wine shop from so-and-so before they turned it into an artisanal cheese store—and so on.
I sit straight-backed in my seat, taking in all the information he’s throwing at me. DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA is on the board of the Venice Symphony Orchestra, works with Santa Monica public school kids on environmental issues, gives money to Jewish institutions, and proudly explains his mixed heritage to me. The conversation is so lively and one-sided that I barely notice we’re winding down before he’s pushing back his seat. He’s just been telling me to listen to an interview he did with the author of the last book I read—he’s going to email me the link, he’s sure I’ll love it—when he realizes he needs to get back to the station. Going over post-production reels with Tony, he says, is going to take the rest of his evening. Where had I parked?
Walking to my car, we stand next to it for a minute or so, and DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA surveys the privacy of the street before bending to kiss me, open-mouthed. He nimbly slides a hand inside my t-shirt, but in a way that no one watching us from a socially accepted distance could tell. I’m too surprised to stop him before he’s handling one of my nipples with an expert forefinger, softly circling, and, in fear of him continuing to move any further, I forcibly jerk away. We stare at each other for a moment, nonplussed.
He texts me twenty minutes later, saying that he enjoyed our lunch and appreciated the time I took to invest in it. Feeling mollified, I stare at the text bubble, which is still being typed out. He asks that I email him that evening with a more thorough analysis of how I thought the date went. Then we can take it from there, he says, sending along a happy face emoji, a rocket exploding, and a couple dancing.
It is within this subsequent email thread that I find out the specifics of DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA’S situation: he has a live-in girlfriend, a Japanese ex-swimwear model who attempted to get her plexus removed and experienced permanent scarring and complications. For the next two years, she must take special extracts and not participate in any kind of sexual act. Thus DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA’S search for a second and willing mate.
After some quick deliberation, I agree to a follow-up date. We wind up canceling this, however, because DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA has a prior obligation to his contact at the Marina Del Rey’s Coastal Cleanup project, which he completely forgot about. He also drives to Mexico and back in one night for a “footage piece” his producer needs immediately. We’re still in the throes of rescheduling when I find myself, somewhat arbitrarily, in the vicinity of his neighborhood on a weeknight. This isn’t a regular occurrence, but I happen to be visiting a friend who works the bar at a restaurant down by the Santa Monica pier.
By the time I’m walking to my car, it’s pretty late. Feeling emboldened, I decide to text DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA, but cagily, neither revealing nor expecting much. He answers after seven minutes, causing me to pull a U-turn away from the 405 on-ramp. He says he’s wrapping up a dinner party, but I should come by. We can take a walk.
When I find the apartment, it’s on a dark and tree-lined suburban street mostly consisting of fancy glass-and-wood buildings. The silence is palpable save for the gentle swishing of the faint sea wind through the trees, kicking leaves and a fast-food bag into the street. I park and let him know I’m downstairs. He says he’s cleaning up, and will come down soon.
I check some apps on my phone, pick up a magazine lying on the passenger seat, put it back down. I play Solitaire for a bit. After twenty minutes, I get out of the car and sit on the hood, which is still warm from the engine. I spot what looks like a possum, hiding under the shadow of another car, hesitate before shuffling into the street to inspect the fast-food bag. The possum scatters when a couple emerge from the shadows up ahead, making their way down the street. As they get closer I see it’s a boy and a girl, both hands thrust into the communal pocket of the boy’s hoodie. They lean toward each other conspiratorially, their eyes sweeping right over me as they pass by.
After their footsteps fade, the street is again hideously quiet. I yank down on my skirt which has ridden up, wanting to look cute, like I haven’t been nervously waiting out here. As if I’m just relaxing on the hood of my car for my own enjoyment.
I picture DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA inside, wiping counters down and bundling the trash, surveying the apartment through my eyes, hoping to see what I see and finding satisfaction in it. Then I see him taking the elevator, smoothing his hair, having kept me waiting long enough for us to both be excited about what will happen next.
My mind, warming to the fantasy, moves further into this romantic initiation: me, standing in the doorway, his apartment clean and sparkling, a single white candle lit on the coffee table. The experience in his eyes is comforting as he leads me to the bedroom, his fingers adeptly finding my hole and soothing the craving that boils up, so forceful as to make me want to double over — but no, his fingers slowly crawl the exterior of the spot, keeping me uncoiled, breathing slowly. Then: pushing himself against me and locking us in, making it all, finally, worth it.
As the minutes tick by, it is getting steadily colder out here. I glance at my watch, realizing it’s ten to midnight and I’ve been sitting on the hood of my car for a good forty minutes. After one hour, I decide, I’ll leave. I refuse to wait longer than that for anyone.
At the hour, I send him a nasty text, then practically dive back into the driver’s seat, pulling out of the spot and executing a hurried three-point turn.
My sense of self-righteousness is validated when DANIEL FROM SANTA MONICA, the next day, is hardly apologetic at all.
I needed to clean up my apartment, he tells me coolly over text message. I had some guests over and there was a mess.
I don’t have a maid, he further informs me. I clean up my own messes.
It doesn’t matter, I tell him. You invited me over. You should’ve had me come up—I could’ve helped you clean.
That didn’t occur to me, he says. I was focused on finishing one task in order to go on to the next.
We have several more back-and-forth and largely pointless exchanges, in the culmination of which he informs me that I’m hot, but not ‘supermodel hot.’
I could be dating a supermodel right now, he tells me.
Please do, I tell him, almost singing with my justification, cured and comforted in the knowledge that no, I would never ingratiate myself to such a pompous individual, divine plexus or otherwise.
I’m about to give up—feeling that a sexless existence would be superior to reading internet debates on the efficacy of “poly-plugging”—when Choice #3 responds.
He’s a TV producer in his mid-fifties. I’ve never encountered anyone over forty with the condition. What must it’ve been like to live your entire life normally, to the extent that it can be defined that way, and then have this happen? Would you be beside yourself, entirely eager, or simply terrified? I feel that I wouldn’t even want to bother. But then, those cravings.
We meet in Atwater Village, at a bar called Club Tee Gee. It’s a small place, five pleather booths and a jukebox in the back playing some kind of 90’s pop music I can’t identify. A lone male bartender wipes glasses and stares at the door. My date’s already sitting in a booth, second to the end, when I walk in. He’s looking down at the table, but as I come toward him he looks up and watches my progress calmly. He’s drinking a whisky neat, and something about its simplicity is appealing. He gets up to order another, and I tell him I’ll have the same. The drink is surprisingly dry with a sharp edge to it, and makes me feel like a grownup, sitting there taking small sips and nodding at his opening remarks.
He has startlingly blue eyes, a soft smile, and is losing his hair. When he talks he sometimes rubs the back of his neck, like it’s hurting him.
“What do you think people will be nostalgic for, in forty more years?” He asks, waving a hand in a general sweeping manner which seems to imply all the red pleather, the jukebox, the out-of-place music.
“Hopefully just liquor marts and libraries.”
His laugh is really more of a cough. I feel a stab of emotional pain looking at him, not unlike the feeling I have when seeing people eating alone in restaurants.
“Where did you grow up?” He asks, surprising me by sounding genuinely interested.
“Here,” I say, taking another sip of my whisky. “The valley. Tim Burton grew up in my neighborhood. I think that’s my biggest claim to fame.”
“Not bad.”
“Could be better.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Never married, apparently. He’s not from here, something I find refreshing. He sold a script and moved out from Minneapolis, at his agent’s urging, only a few months ago.
“Well, so what do you think of Los Angeles?” I ask.
“I think I prefer it Polanski’s way,” he muses, after frowning into his glass for a moment. “After dark and from a distance.”
We go back to his apartment, a gated townhouse in the hills of Echo Park. I get lost for a bit because he sends me to the wrong address, using the incorrect street abbreviation. He lives on a Court instead of Boulevard. He apologizes for the error, saying he’s only been here a few weeks, had up until the beginning of the month been living out an impermanent, nomadic existence at an Air BnB in Burbank.
I am getting used to touring people’s apartments at this point, and judging them based off a series of subtle micro-observations. I find the ritual fun, pretending that I’m in some sort of after-hours version of a Cribs episode for the perverse middle class. This place, however, encompasses a new category. Walking up to the gate, a twelve-foot terra-cotta wall shields the property from view, and even inside, climbing a steep set of white-washed stairs, I can’t make out the entire building, because it seems to still be in the process of extending itself, growing vertically above me into the side of the hill.
I knock on the front door. No sign of life inside. Peering through the side window, I can make out what looks like a study off to the left, with French windows and built-in bookshelves. I turn, surveying the succulents that line the stairs I just walked up, and am wondering if I beat him here, when I hear a lock sliding back. He stands there sheepishly in the open doorway, as if he knows he’s about to be pranked.
Inside, a bamboo fan whirls softly above our heads. The room smells of cold hardwood flooring and the sort of empty sterility that comes from lack of occupation more than a really thorough cleaning.
I want to wander around, investigating every room as if he weren’t here, but he’s leading me forward, suggesting a glass of wine. I notice he’s barefoot now. We pivot away from the living room and turn into a massive, green-tiled kitchen, which includes a gnarled oak table easily large enough to seat seven or eight people. It’s just beginning to turn a softer shade of dusk outside, the light through the floor-to-ceiling windows tinting the glass orange. He’s leaning against the sink and asking me if I like white or red, his head cocked like he’s doubtful about the preference, or if I’d rather have another whisky. I ask for white.
He suggests we sit out on the terrace, and I follow him dutifully: through a side door off the kitchen and outside, up another flight of stairs built into the hillside, which twists left and opens into a large, fenced deck, situated directly above the townhouse. Looking out, we have a view of all the neon dotted hills of Echo Park. Identical clay pots stand at all four corners of the deck, holding enormous rubber trees plants. It’s all very immaculate and somewhat official, like a stage set or empty vacation home.
He leads me to a colorfully tiled table at the center of the deck with three wicker chairs, the only pieces of furniture. He pours me a glass of wine, then disappears for a minute to return with a portable lantern, the kind used for camping.
“It keeps the bugs away,” he tells me, a little unnecessarily, lowering his head to insert a long matchstick into the wick chamber.
With the lamp glowing between us, we toast our glasses, falling into an eerie silence as we gaze out at the hills. A dog barks faintly, a car alarm switches on and off. I am experiencing a detached sense of relief, one that I feel doesn’t really belong to me, and should be fleeting, if anything. I suddenly feel very sleepy, and want to ask if it’s okay if I stay a while, just sit here for a bit, but I fight the instinct down, knowing that it would make me sound ridiculous—especially since I just arrived and we’re supposed to have sex with our plexi before the evening ends.
When I look over, he seems to be in a similar realm of isolated contentment, his eyes staring out half-mast at the rooftops, fingering his wine glass. His face seems to be asking of itself, how long could I stay here and be happy? An hour, perhaps longer?
When our eyes meet, we both smile, embarrassed. He’s not someone I would talk to on the street, in a bar, a natural setting, and I feel that we both know this. I realize, afresh, the recklessness of what I’m trying to do. He’s a stranger, from the Midwest no less—what’s the culture surrounding the condition like out there? I sense I should’ve considered these things earlier, but now, sitting here in the silence, I realize I could never have anticipated a moment such as this, whether it was two hours ago or two years. There’s a tiny hole of acceptance in this. I get up and ask to use his bathroom.
There are no pictures on the walls, I note, on my journey back downstairs. The high ceilings and lack of carpeting also make everything especially echoey. There’s a slight bend in the short hallway, so I can’t see all the way to the room I’m leading myself to, which turns out to be the study with the French windows. It’s a small room, with an 80’s-era television set in the corner, and a stack of VHS tapes on top. I wish later that I’d inspected the titles, but, nervous that he’ll find me poking among his things, I quickly reverse out into the hallway again and double-back to find the bathroom.
I decide to get a glass of water before the return journey, and stand at the sink in the kitchen, leaning my elbows on the green countertop. The room is abominably silent, a freeze when you first walk in. I think about my date coming in here later for a snack, after I’ve left: the muted hum of the fridge, the slow whop-whop of the living room fan, the black shadows gradually filling in the edges of the windows.
I must’ve been taking a long time, because suddenly there he is in the doorway, watching me. He’s shorter than I am, with a bit of a stocky build, I can see now. He’s leaning against the doorjamb and smiling at me—not shyly, but almost contemplatively, as if encountering a favorite endangered animal at the zoo. […]
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Chloe Noland is a fiction writer and information professional. She received her BA in Literature & Creative Writing from California College of the Arts, and her MLIS from San Jose State University. Her work has been previously published in Acid Free Magazine and Medium. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Chloe Noland