Jamie Callan - Talk About Sex - An Orientation

You feel a little excited about that. The dog part. Don't be embarrassed. I know these things. It's my job. I'm a professional. I'm absolutely attuned to all the nuances and subtleties of my work. I'm completely intuitive and psychic. I read minds. I analyze handwriting. I know the zodiac. I know your sun sign, your moon sign, your rising sign. I know when Mercury is going retrograde, and when Jupiter is entering your sun sign, and how you become so sensitive whenever Uranus gets anywhere near Pisces.

I know what you had for breakfast this morning. I know when you've had too much sodium, when you should cut down on the caffeine. I know what you did in the bathroom of the lobby. I know what you called your mother's sister when you were twelve years old and didn't know better. I know you feel guilty about the day you called your father a big fat jerk. I know when your moon is out of phase. I know about the lie you told when you wanted to get out of that engagement. I know when you last saw your psychotherapist. I know about the thing you did on the side of the garage when you were eight and you thought no one could see. I saw you.

And I know when you haven't called for your weekly appointment because you're sitting in the corner of your kitchen, crouched between the refrigerator and the stove, wearing nothing but your Calvins, shivering and shaking. And I know about that week you did nothing but watch Hitchcock's Vertigo for twenty-four hours a day, staring bleary-eyed at your television set as Kim Novak plummeted from the bell tower again and again and again.

Rule number ten. You are not allowed to buy clothes exactly like mine and then go out and get a wig and walk around New York City as if you were me, buying flowers in Chelsea, a latte in the Village, and a coffee-table art book at Rizzoli's in Soho. You are not allowed to pretend you are me and you are having a nervous breakdown, a kind of Vertigo remake with a little sexual identity confusion thrown in, where I become Jimmy Stewart and you're Kim Novak, and I follow you all around town while you buy flowers and visit an ancient graveyard and act very, very mysterious, and I slowly fall in love with you because I am heartbroken from accidentally falling off the roof of a very tall building, and I have lost my nerve, and you have lost something too-not exactly nerve, but the same thing in a way-you, a woman-slash-man hired by a faithless, murderous husband to do away with his wife, making me the fall guy, through my own cowardice the unwitting murderer.

Rule number seventeen-I will not murder for you. I will not commit a crime for you. I will not die for you. I will not pay your bills, get you out of debt, steal a brand-new car for you, talk to your mother, get your twenty-three-year-old daughter to move out of your house, and I will not, absolutely not, poison your wife for you. So don't even ask me.

Now, you're probably growing a little discouraged, thinking, all these rules-where's the fun? What's the point? Why am I paying these kinds of prices to be with a woman-and not even a movie-star type, but an ordinary woman-if there are going to be all these rules?

Here is my answer to that: these are the rules. And there is no fun. So get the hell out if that's what you're after. Get out! Hello? I said get the hell out! Why are you still here? I know why. I know exactly why. Yes, I do. Come closer. I'll tell you why you're still here. It's because you've been bad.

And you know it. And I know it. Remember? I know everything about you. I even know you like to make a squeaky grunting sound when you're in the throes of orgasm. That only the thought of a small mouse nestled inside a chunk of Swiss cheese and the cat, Sylvester, poised atop the refrigerator with a cartoon anvil, waiting to drop it on the unsuspecting Tom and Jerry, will get you in the mood. That when you are rubbing yourself up against a woman, you are thinking about Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies and Bosco-flavored milk on a TV tray, about that afternoon in February when you stayed home from school sick as a dog and your mother leaned down to kiss your steaming forehead and you inhaled the fragrance of day-old Chanel No. 5 as your eyes were glued to Looney Tunes, and your little boy heart went thump-thump-thump from the heat and closeness of your mother's breast.

By the way, I've talked to your mother.

In fact, your mother is waiting outside the door for you, and she's got a big paddleboard and bottle of castor oil.

Just kidding. I mean, about the paddleboard and the castor oil. Not about talking to your mother because I did talk to your mother. Would you like to know what she said? Of course you would. She said: get on with it. Get over it. Grow up. She told me she's gone to Tahiti to live out the rest of her life among the natives, like Gauguin.

Now don't go and imagine your mother prancing naked among the palm fronds. That's called regression. No, instead imagine this-she's gone. She's happy. She's dancing among the orchids and lilies, wearing a nice little modest floral muumuu. She's drinking a daiquiri with a little paper parasol stuck in it. She's writing a novel. She's taking up singing. She's painting pictures. She's scuba diving. Collecting sea shells. Making pottery. Writing a screenplay. She's bought a video camera. Become a lounge singer. She's taken up with a hotel manager named Maurice. She's happy, laughing. And she's not thinking of you. She's forgotten all about you.

She's not watching you. Therefore, you are free. Free. Yes, free. You don't have to make love to a clone of yourself. You don't have to have sex with a rubber doll, a pinup girl, a cyberspace babe, a voice on the telephone, an Internet surfer girl, a dominatrix in leather lederhosen, a girl in a fancy apartment on East 92nd Street who only wants you for your money because that's all you have to give since your heart belongs to Mommy. You don't have to look for a woman who is so different from Mommy-a different race or religion or height or hair color- that looking into her eyes at night will not send you into Oedipal Shock Syndrome. You don't have to run the moment someone mentions marriage because marriage means Mommy and Mommy means death.

I know, you panic as soon as a woman is nice, as soon as she kisses your steaming forehead, as soon as she coos in your ear. You think of mice and cats with an anvil poised above their heads. You want to kill. You don't want to kill. Or you want to watch the Super Bowl for twenty-four hours or read a 1,500-page science fiction novel, or take your weed whacker out and mow down innocent dandelions, their little yellow heads severed and lying lifeless on the edge of your driveway waiting to be flushed down the sewer with one burst from your big, long garden hose.

I never orgasm. Don't ask me why because I'm not going to tell you. But it's good for business, don't you think? If I were in the middle of a story, talking about sex, and I suddenly found myself aroused (I do occasionally get excited, but I can control myself), but suppose I was overcome by excitement and threw myself down on the floor, ripped off my panties, spread my legs and began fingering myself, frantically searching, groping, trying to locate the button that releases all this pent-up emotion and passion, and I were to scream as the rivers crash through the barriers of my psyche and pour down through my head and breasts and legs and the center of my being as I writhe and moan for a full twenty minutes about how good-good-gooood it feels to finally- -fi-nal-ly -let go, twisting and screaming on your hotel room floor, clawing at my own breasts, pummeling my center, tasting my own juices, as I press my fingers in and out and spread my own creamy substance over my thighs and breasts and stomach, my eyes rolling backward in their sockets as I speak in strange tongues and scream out my mother's name, to stop-stop-stop. Please.