Diary of a s*x Addict

December 9-2

Auntie Flora is a rambling old showgirl. My visits to her began a few months ago. She had a mild heart attack which triggered a desire to get to know her “only living relative.” She’s my dead father’s baby sister and she’s stinking rich. If she doesn’t marry again (her husband, a mafia-connected Manhattan restaurateur, took a powder years ago) or if she doesn’t lose her mind or come to hate the sight of me, I will inherit her somewhat dwindling fortune. Her most appealing asset is the grand two bedroom apartment she owns on Manhattan’s elegant Upper West side, along with a s**t load of original artwork including a Pollok and a Warhol.

She’s a large, healthy-looking 80-year-old woman, with blue oval shaped eyes, glossy blonde hair and porcelain, precisely botoxed skin. She’s still vibrant, though at times, between vast silences, her mind will spread open like a cobwebbed fan and blow out incoherent memories. I don’t know if her tales are fact or fiction, most likely a mix. Her favorite subjects are a six year period when she made summer visits to my parent’s farm in Arkansas when I was child, and her brief time on the New York stage. I remember she’d come every summer when I was six up until I was twelve. Then the visits stopped, though I don’t recall why.

Auntie Flora’s grand theatrical career (Florence Tanner on a marquis) burned electrically in the early part of the 1960s, then went abruptly black once she married. I am pretty certain she chose to quit the stage. She’s a tough broad, so I can’t see her being bullied by anyone, even a mafia-connected brute of a husband. Truth is, her husband, who boxed before he bought swanky eateries, looks pretty steaming hot in the photos I’ve seen. I’d f**k him.

I’ve biked to her apartment this morning and am watching her now. Auntie Flora is seated in a throne-like chair in her living room, her head bowed in a short nap. I believe that, at heart, Flora is a tough backwoods Arkansas woman who faced wave after wave of brutal poverty and cruelty growing up, just like my father. Her harsh, warrior instincts are hidden under layers of expensive clothing, refined speech patterns and cash, but like an insect with a secret stinger, she strikes when threatened. She’s snoring lightly.

I say little during our visits, mostly because I’m afraid of offending her and losing the promised inheritance, but when she does speak, I feel like a secretary hired to jot her memoirs. Today, we’ve been sitting for fifteen minutes in silence. She is lifting her head, but her eyes remain shut. She licks her lips, like a tired cat.

Propped up like a doll on a fainting couch near her, I glance around the room and imagine rearranging the antique living room furniture for a chic little orgy. We face a bank of tall windows looking out onto West End Avenue. It’s always like this, the set up, and there is always a plate of ginger snap cookies on a small table dividing us. Neither of us touches the snaps. I imagine we are both watching our waist lines.

“I want to show you something,” she says snapping her eyes open, suddenly awake.

She reaches for one of her many photo albums. I have to admit that I am oddly comforted by these bland little visits. So little is expected of me and I honestly believe that at times she forgets who I am. It all feels slightly anonymous which I like. It’s also nice to spend time with someone I have no intention of screwing.

“Come sit here,” she says, patting a Baroque, tassel-covered foot stool next to her.

She’s opened the album to a black and white photo. On the left is a young Flora, quite striking in a floor length gown, her hair shellacked off her forehead and a huge diamond ring adorning one hand which is holding a champagne flute.

“That’s the cunt,” she says softly, pointing to the woman on the right.

I love when she cusses. She’s pretty raw as that goes.

Smaller and curvier than Flora, the woman in the photo is darkly exotic with a mass of black hair, a silver screen smile and an incredible pair of breasts pushing aggressively forward in a white, form-fitting bead-encrusted, very low cut gown.

Flora, both now and in the photo, looks bitter and a little broken. There is more anger than grief in her eyes, but I imagine one is simply masking the other and I suddenly feel an intense and hurried connection between us that I really don’t want to acknowledge. It’s got to be time to go. I don’t want to be too late for work.

“He took the picture, the f**k. He was doing her that very night,” she says.

She snaps the album shut, which hopefully signals the end of this week’s visit.

“I got them back,” Flora says to button the memory, her eyes fluttering shut again.

Waiting for an exit signal from Flora, I momentarily try to recall exactly how her husband died and also think of my parent’s double-headed funeral in Arkansas which Flora did not attend.

I had totally shut down through my parent’s wake, sitting in their modest, ramshackle country home in a hard back chair, shaking the callused hands of men and women who work outside most of the year, listening to a mushy trail of unknown voices saying useless things.

The funeral was even worse. I refused to look at the coffin, and that’s when the soft murmurs brushed around the place saying that I’d moved to the East Coast and gone a little crazy, which is really sort of true. The thing I remember most clearly is the boy I had s*x with, later that night, on my parents front porch. He was the son of some neighbor and he’d been dragged to the funeral parlor like everybody in town, looking dumb and sloppy in overalls and a dirty cap, missing a tooth and built like a linebacker. It was almost campy, I thought, watching him shuffle through the line to tell me something that would mean absolutely nothing like: ‘sorry for your loss’ or ‘they sure was some fine folks.’ Brutally stupid hicks, all of them, I thought.

But that boy. He gave me something that day. At the cemetery, I wouldn’t let go of his hand when we shook, because I remembered him from when I was in grade school. I remembered us doing things and I was in dire need of that sort of thing, to wipe the dark and dirty little funeral and my parent’s abrupt departure out of my head. I asked him if he’d come by later to help me move a chifforobe, which is another name for an armoire. It was a blatant lie as I had no chifforobe. I stole the idea from the move To Kill a Mockingbird when the trashy white girl asks the local black man to bust up her chifforobe before she tries to molest him.

My backwoods boy, who was clearly gay, closeted, and desperate for touch, was easy to seduce. It was warm for November and the moon was full and I lapped on that boy’s c**k on my parent’s porch so hard I choked, but I wouldn’t let it out of my mouth. Because the pain, the gagging push down my throat, the salty taste of his fat c**k and the stink of his boots smeared with country grass and cow dung so close, all that let me cry hard and loud and ragged and long. I cried harder than I ever have in my life. Crying like a man facing the electric chair or someone being gutted by a sadist serial killer. That stupid farm boy just kept f*****g my face, with a mix of pity and remorse and a sideways glance that said he knew I was grieving in my own f****d up way.

Flora is lolling her head forward, and I wonder if she might actually topple out of her chair. She opens then closes her big blue eyes, nods her head, and raises one hand in a ritualistic gesture which indicates I should show myself out. She does this every week when she’s had enough. I wonder if she’s dreaming.

As I go, I also wonder if I could copy her pose and use it to let tiresome s*x tricks know it’s time to get the hell out. The door snaps shut, and Flora and the past, dissolve, as I head downtown to work.