Chapter One: Escaping the Chicago That Didn't Show Up in a Sufjan Stevens song
I'm fairly certain I know the exact moment when things in my life began to start spinning in the opposite direction. It wasn't a slow and gradual regression, it wasn't a testudinal journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step, followed by more single steps, etc etc. No, it was immediate and absolute. It was that moment in the Wizard of Oz when everything went to color. It was those adolescent girls screaming in ecstasy at the Beatles as they were suddenly released from a post-war sentence of wholesome Leave It To Beaver suppression.
It was the exact moment I gave Brad at Paul's Coffee in the heart of San Francsico's gay district a massive, throbbing erection in the middle of the cafe.
But let me backup a minute. We'll get there. Patience, grasshopper.
I had only been in the Bay Area for three weeks when I transitioned from assiduous magna cum laude lab assistant at Portal, Inc to a sexual being with a hot, pulsating unquenchably thirsty pussy. Before this moment, I wouldn't have even had the word "pussy" as part of my internal lexicon, it wasn't a word I had ever entertained in my head and certainly not something to be said out loud. I am 100% certain I had never, ever, uttered that particular word. Or many other words, for that matter.
I grew up in the midwest, the under-achieving daughter of high expectation Chinese parents. Under their pettifogging proctorship, I was to graduate from high school with a 4.0, attend any Ivy League school of my choice, pick up a masters while working full time and then onramp to the fastest highway leading to a doctorate. I graduated with a 3.9, attended Case Western, and saw my father cry for the first and only time in my life when I announced I would not be continuing on to a Ph.D. ( "why do you hate us?", my mother tearfully opined ).
After falling short with a mere MS in Bioengineering, I started looking for a job in Chicago ( I was still living with my parents in Urbana ), which devolved into looking for an internship, which defaulted into working as a barista at Starbucks while endlessly pursuing any sort of assistantship in anything remotely related to my degree, anywhere on the continent.
This went on for two years.
Life is short. Unless, of course, you're living at home and you work forty hours a week serving coffee to lightly-bearded hipsters donning beanies and the preternatural wisdom inferred by using words like "cathartic", and "monotonic". They all want to customize their lattes, requesting gluten-free bagels in between the conversation with the hipster in line behind them, quietly debating Tame Impala vs Neon Indian and can you imagine Oh My God if they, like, toured together I would be so stoked.
If this is your life, two years can seem like two decades. But this was mostly a continuation of the scholastic purgatory I'd been in since preschool, the difference being that for the first time in my life, I actually had some free time. This would have been great, had I not been under the constant invigilation of my parents, who would thoughtfully inquire daily as to whether or not I finally found a career opportunity that would offer them a shame-reprieve from failing to raise a doctor.
But finally a former classmate's tip led to an inquiry with Portal, the meatless meat company in Foster City, which led to an interview which resulted in an offer. Not only did I land a job, but it was 2000 miles away from my feudal overlords in a completely new city with my own, studio apartment.
My parents drove me to O'Hare, with my father giving me sagacious admonitory warnings like "don't get AIDS (i didn't)! You get AIDS from toilet seats (you can't)!", and my mother accidentally praising me, "you don't listen, Melyssa, and now look, you get job in den of iniquity San Francisco!". I will never understand how between two university professors they can barely manage a single article per conversation.
( Dear reader, I am sorry for this backstory. I know you want to jack off to something, and I'm rambling on about my career, my mother, and the general audience at an Arcade Fire concert, but we are getting there ).
Chapter Two: I Didn't Mean To Turn You On
In twenty seven years of my existence on the planet, I had never had a boyfriend. I had never kissed a guy. I don't recall ever being curious about sex, nor did I go through that pubescent period where I discovered it felt good to touch myself "down there". The boy and sex obsession some of my (few) friends had was a completely foreign concept to me, one that I could not relate to in any way.
Physically, I had attempted to masturbate just once. I had just finished the scene in Black Swan where Natalie Portman's character is rubbing herself up against a pillow and thinking of whoever it is that Mila Kunis was playing, and wow, for the first time in my life, I felt worked up. It was the most erotic thing I had ever seen. I stopped the DVD (ok this was a few years ago), and decided to give it a go. I pulled off my shorts, kept my underwear on, and folded a pillow up in half, got on top and started rubbing away. And nothing. I felt nothing. At least, nothing physical. But the entire scene now appeared as a Hollywood-induced hoax, not something you could actually do in any practical sense. I gave it up, and that was the last time I even felt the urge to try.
Emotionally, I had experienced few crushes outside of my 63 year old Organic Synthesis professor who reminded me of slightly less-geriatric Harrison Ford. He had this odd cadence to his voice that made everything sound like a question, something I'm sure he'd been doing long before the Kardashians imbued us with this auditory tick proliferated by every high school female in the country.
But mostly I was just focused on other things. Love and romance, marriage and children, it was all outside the scope of the life that had been designed for me. My mother gently encouraged me ("you get Ph.D., then you get married and give me a son!"), but it still didn't compel me in any way to being open to the prospect of finding a partner. Plus, I had no sexual impulses, I just didn't feel horny. Ever. For whatever reason, that particular inclination did not motivate me; I just accepted that I was not a sexual being.
And men didn't find me attractive, at least not that I knew of. I was 150 pounds, straight black hair with straight black bangs, thick glasses, and I dressed for the weather, not to attract attention. I didn't flirt, and I didn't engage in a lot of conversation that wasn't related to my field of study. I learned to make small talk when I was pouring coffee, and I certainly noticed when a guy was good-looking, but it wasn't associated with any sort of longing to connect, it was more a pleasant aesthetic.
That's the way that I was. And it all changed in an instant.
I'd come off the bus, exhausted from a ten hour shift at Portal, Inc., my new second home. I'd spent the day preparing fibroblasts, I'd been on my feet, and made the unmeasured decision to wear a skirt, panty hose, and heels -- the equivalent of the female suit - as I was doing a presentation towards the end of the afternoon.
When we got to my stop at the corner of Market and Castro, I didn't feel up to walking the six blocks to my apartment, so I ducked into Paul's Coffee, got a weakly-made pour over and sat down on the couch. My feet were aching, so I pulled off my heels, crossed my right leg over my left, and began massaging my calves.
And at some point, I glanced at the guy who happened to be seated two cushions down from me on the same couch, and as fate would insist, I glanced at his big rounded bulge, pressing against the denim of his jeans.
