OTAKU MAnKO: Sex and Fuel
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, something many of us have been dreading and anticipating for years finally happened this past week — there was a major, and possibly catastrophic, oil spill when a container ship struck the Bay Bridge and leaked 58,000 gallons of fuel oil into the Bay.
As the incident itself filled (and continues to fill) me with horror, I’ve found myself doing what I often do — turning toward sex, and specifically sexual memories, as solace. Specifically, it got me thinking about the sexual opportunities this magnificent metropolis has offered me, plenty of which come from its glorious physical location. I may not seem like the outdoorsy type, but I’ve got a vivid memory that makes me mourn for one of the beaches closed in the wake of the spill.
I went to school in Santa Cruz, another physically gorgeous beachside town, but the first time I fucked on the beach (and I use the term “fuck” loosely) was at San Francisco’s China Beach, in the early ’90s shortly after I moved to the City. I’d moved to SF because I believed it to be a torrid wonderland of rampant sexual pleasure, and was quickly finding out that I was right.
I’d been flirting with a female friend, whom I’ll call Jessie for the sake of her privacy, who was in an open relationship and hadn’t been shy about advertising that fact. Jessie lived in the Mission — a hip neighborhood a million miles away from my apartment in the Avenues north of Golden Gate Park — but she had some sort of political meeting (food justice . . . labor activism . . . who can remember?) out in my neighborhood and suggested she take the bus over when her meeting was finished late one evening. She said she wanted to hang out at my apartment in the Avenues north of Golden Gate Park and show me this great movie, which turned out to be a bootleg of the Franco-Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses. To anyone who’s seen that film, her movie pick doubtless sounds like a blatant come-on and a pretty freaky mode of seduction.
The impact of Jessie’s film choice was not lost entirely on me, but I wouldn’t see the damn thing that night. It turned out that my roommate, who had planned on going out with friends that night, was under the weather and planted in front of the TV.
“Well, whatever,” was Jessie’s reaction when she discovered that her treasured VHS tape wouldn’t work its magic on me. “Let’s go to the beach!” I believe she said something noncommittal about how we could “talk,” but the pretense was largely unnecessary at that point. My apartment was walking distance from China Beach, a gorgeous little spot at the north end of San Francisco. I had only moved to the area recently, so I didn’t yet know that China Beach offered gorgeous views and, probably more importantly, a few secluded spots.
Jessie demanded we bring a blanket and I whipped the tattered one off my bed. She warned me to bundle up, which was a good thing. When we got there, China Beach was fogged in, which anyone who had lived here longer could have told me it would be — and Jessie, undoubtedly, had expected. The waves rolled peacefully out of their wall of fog onto the freezing-cold, damp sand, and the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge stretched off into a world of gray far above us.
Jessie swiftly found a spot that, on the sunniest day, would have been only moderately secluded; as it was, we might as well have been behind a locked door at the No Tell Motel.
We spread out the blanket and sat down watching the waves; I kept thinking I was supposed to start the conversation with weak suggestions for unwanted topics: “Wow, it’s nice out here,” “The fog really came in,” “Is it always this cold?” That sort of thing. I’ll never know if Jessie was procrastinating her vigorous seduction of me, or was actually enjoying my inane banter. She waited for me to make the first move, which I finally did when she glared at me with an expression that said “Are you going to kiss me, you idiot, or am I going to have to kick you in the nuts?”
When I did finally lean forward and kiss her, her lips went gentle and her tongue found its way against mine. After the first tentative she kissed rough, her lips went from soft to firm. She fumbled with the front of my zippered air force jacket and ran her hand up under my T-shirt. I took her cue and got her leather jacket open, nervously lifted her blouse and found her bra clasp. I unfastened it inexpertly at best, but she pulled me on top of her and her skirt went high as I ground against her. Her breasts were high and tight like her mouth, and her nipple went hard from the cold and stayed that way.
I had kissed maybe five women at that point and had sex with three; I was not exactly inexperienced but still far from a China Beach Casanova and when I finally got up my nerve to slide my hand down Jessie’s tights, I was surprised, slightly freaked out and incredibly turned on to find out she had her clit pierced.
Jessie had other things in mind than my inexpert finger-fucking; she deftly flipped me, climbed on top of me, and kissed her way down my front to my pants, getting them open. We’d mostly rolled off the blanket, but sand up my ass was the least of my concerns. As Jessie gave me expert head at China Beach, I lay there staring up into the fog and listened to the mournful sound of the foghorns, and as much as I like head it was the whole thing — sand, surf, bridge, foghorn, and sex with a hot chick I barely knew — that convinced me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I was in the right goddamned place and that the San Francisco Bay is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I took big deep breaths of salty, fog-laden air and let the sounds of the beach mingle with my sounds and hers. Breathing the fog was like huffing the smoke in an opium den, only my drug dreams were spicier. She gave me head and stroked me, sometimes looking pleased with herself, sometimes looking impossibly turned on, whether by me, my inexperienced, or just the edgy freshness of the situation, I don’t really know. She got me off with her hand and we walked back to my apartment with both of us slightly sticky and a healthy dose of sand complicating both the stickiness and the later undressing. She was gone in the morning, like the fog and the foghorns.
That was the only time Jessie and I fooled around. I’m not sure if it was lack of chemistry, lack of opportunity, or just the fact that to a Mission dweller without a car, the Avenues was tantamount to Mongolia. Whatever the reason, we never got together again.
But that night was the first truly freaky sexual experience San Francisco handed me without my having to ask — the first of many.
When I think about all the sexual gifts SF has given me, I have a tendency — like many of the area’s perverati — to credit the culture. I utter thanks for those cherished gifts to the gay community, the leather community, the hippies, the clubs, the gay bars, the sex educators, the pansexuals, the sex parties, the freaks, the geeks and the general Fogtown culture of libertinism and acceptance of sexual diversity, not to mention SF’s healthy dose of if-it-feels-good-do-it.
But I think it’s more than that: I’m convinced there’s something in the water here. Every time I go to China Beach I remember that hot encounter, only I won’t be going this week because it’s closed due to the oil spill. There’s something in the water, and it saddens me that this time it’s not sexy.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 13 November 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Saturday, 17 November 2007 at 12:31 pm Help Birds! | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] As you may well be aware, the San Francisco Bay was recently the site of a major oil spill. Over 58,000 gallons of heavy oil was dumped into the bay when a freighter hit one of the supports of the Bay Bridge. Hundreds of birds were caught in the spill and covered with oil. […]