California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

After a lovely day fucking around with my new girlfriend B at a local bath house, we return home to my apartment. Dave is there, he and B get to meet. She seems quite amiable with him, and he with her. They share a keen interest in pot, if nothing else.

B is about 5'3", trim, short dark hair, nice body. Soft butch. Early 40s. The mood is very amiable between us, and we look forward to future outings.

We make plans, again at B's behest, to head up to the Russian River for a weekend away. It's cloudy, rainy weather, but it feels appropriate somehow. Weather for indoor activities. A quick stop in Sebastopol for some sandwiches, then we roll into the town of Guerneville and check into The Inn at the Willows. It's an old, funky lodge on the river and just off the main road. We get a quaint corner room that looks out on three sides of yard. Large, grassy stretches in front with huge trees leading down to the launch platform. It's quiet and lovely, definitely off-season and a good time to be here.

We do the usual weekend things, stroll around the small town, check out bookstores. Bought B dinner at a local pizza parlor that features a pretty good cabaret with a big black woman who can belt the songs out.

That night we heat the room and play around. Back to that dildo and more sucking of said dildo. I notice B really likes to rub her clit a lot harder than I would care for, ditto her nipples. Again, I come when I am on top of B, with the dildo inside me. I love doing this, and since it works better with a female, I am going to milk this one, as it were, for all it's worth.

We nod off and sleep like logs. In the morning, B gets a massage, and I start my new Swedish thriller novel by Henning Mankell, The Return of the Dancing Master. The owner says we can stay another night, on the house, but we can't. Then he offers us 10% off our next bill. Cheap, that's what we think.

We drive westward from Guerneville, following the river until it hits the Pacific, then drive south. We get lost a number of times. It seems we are talking and enjoying the drive too much to pay attention all the time. A good sign. Back in San Francisco, we have club sandwiches in a little diner near the Sutro Baths, just above the Cliff House.

That night I reflect on a lovely weekend. Dave is so pleased I have met a woman who seems half-way reasonable, like a man, almost. He appreciates that. I do too. She has met Dave, she has no problems with pot, she likes sex, her ex presents no problems apparently, so, we're all a go, yes?

Well, no. The next day I send a thank you email to B but for some reason it gets stuck and can't be delivered. In the meantime, I get an email from B. Basically saying, I love all this, but I can't have a sexual relationship with anyone.

"I just don't need casual sex at this time," B writes. I am thinking....whaaaaattt?? Casual sex? Gee, I didn't realize it was just so casual. What is going on with this woman?

Like it or not, seems like we have some processing to work our ways through. Lucky us.

TO BE CONTINUED

So B asks if I can scope out some hot tubs around San Jose where we can play, and she will treat. I locate an interesting venue on Saratoga Avenue, called the Grand Central Hot Tub. It is somewhat rundown, more like an aging big motel that got converted into a bath house facility. For around fifteen bucks, we got a room with a raised bed, complete with hot tub, sauna and shower. Simple and functional, without pretensions. The black woman at the front desk barely bats an eye at the image of two women renting a room. This place is used to it. Perhaps they feel pride, who knows.

Before we get there, B wants to pick up some sex toys, so we stop off at a local toy palace on our way. She picks up a new dildo, and comments that the glass pipes offered in the store too are a really good deal.

B is an avid pot smoker. It is one of the bonds we have discovered we have in common. We take a little puff in the car first.

Well, the hot hot tub. I get to play like my partner Dave does when he goes off to the Water Garden here in San Jose. An absolutely lovely place from all his descriptions. We don't get that here, but that's ok. It has a funky quality that fits right in with our nefarious activities.

We start right in playing with the strap-on and the dildo, and even though B is pretty clearly a soft butch-identified woman, she does not object when I use the dildo on her at one point. But she clearly enjoys using it more with me as the bottom, and I am clearly happy to oblige.

She slips it in briefly inside me, then takes it out, then re-inserts it. I love this with guys, and for some reason this is what I get here too. Hooray for our side.

Then I get this strange inclination. Maybe it's just the dildo is right there, in front of my face, and I naturally do what many a girl does with a cock in front of her face. Be it bio cock or otherwise. I took it in my mouth and started to suck it like there was no tomorrow.

This is somewhat hypocritical of me, having just recently ranted and raved to some woman on Craigslist about how ridiculous it was for women to suck other women's "cocks." What's that all about, I screamed. It's so phony and pretentious and blah blah blah.

You know, crow tastes good, right along with that silicone, or rubber or whatever the thing is made of. I was ready to eat crow. Or whatever else, and it turned out that B was a dyke who loved her dick getting sucked. Perfect. This relationship could go somewhere, I'm thinking.

Then B turns me on to a new sexual maneuver, she gets on top of me and ever so lightly slides her body over mine, rubs her clit directly over mine. The sensation is soft and indirect, but amazingly stimulating because of that, probably. This is so new I don't think I can come this way, it would take me a bit longer if I were really going to go for it. But right now, it just feels very luxurious as it is.

I'm lying there thinking about how great women are, how with guys the sensations come at you so much more directly. Whereas with other women there seems to be a lot more subtlety involved, things come at you more indirectly, and I appreciated the difference.

I finally get myself off riding the dildo on top of B. I would like to do this with Dave, but I tend to like very little movement. Sometimes almost none at all. For guys, it's hard to do a lot of this and still keep an erection. So it's a fine line with men, but with women and a toy, the Slow Boat to China approach works just fine.

We finally check out of the Motel From Sodom and Gomorrah, and head home. Both of us seem aglow. But we're not madly in love, we don't need a U-Haul, our respective worlds have not split open. It was just good decent fun.

I was looking forward to the next round.

TO BE CONTINUED

A year ago last November I met "B," a gay woman in her early 40s who was in the same all-female hiking group I joined. I did not feel any attraction at first, especially given that I arrived on the first hike with another bi woman, and we found basically a hiking group of dykes, pretty much. We felt our chances of hooking up might be pretty compromised by that. In fact B made a remark about all the bi women posting under W4W on Craigslist, and whether or not they should even be posting there when most of the women are dykes otherwise on those boards. So I began to feel she was pretty much a hardcore dyke who did not care for bi women.

But as time went on, and she and I talked and walked and walked and talked, I got the sense she knew me from somewhere. It turned out she recognized me from my personal ads online, which tend to be very distinctive. B started making cute jokes about "pole-sitters," my term for bisexual people and whatnot, so I finally asked her if she had answered any of my ads. She did, one of them, I answered back apparently but then nothing further happened. I don't remember why. But it seemed like B was interested in dating, but then changed her mind.

Then we met in person(!) Small world, huh. Now we start with this undercurrent of flirting going on, and I gradually become aware that B is emailing me a lot, like, nearly every day. We start flirting and revealing more about our lives. I tell her about my break-up with J, the Berkeley woman I had met nearly seven months earlier. I mentioned how hurt I was when J ended our connection, I even told her about the strange mental blackout I had while I was spending a weekend with J. B seemed curious, and interested. We were on our way to forming a good and open friendship.

I wanted B to know, even though I am bisexual, that I am not a flake who's just scoping out women to throw into bed with her boyfriend. I tend to get rather apologetic around these women, and I will bend over backwards to reassure them. B did not seem to need the reassurance, but she got it anyway.

Then I tell B about my interest in going with Dave to sex parties. She's quite intrigued, and even asks me what I do at these parties. Then she sends me an email saying, "Well, I'd like to come on to you at a sex party...with your permission, of course..."

Upon reading this, I fly back with, "Dammit woman, you'd fucking better come on to me at a sex party or I will be so disappointed, and so will my mother and she probably won't ever let me play with you again, hrumph." Or some such phrasing. B laughs her head off at this. She finds me interesting and amusing, and I get the sense she is definitely attracted. But where do we go from here?

B lives with her ex, a pleasant woman named M who I have met on the group hikes. But they have no sex anymore, and are together basically because of the joint property they own and all their aged animals. This arrangement has worked because B and M have not really tried to look for other people. My coming along represents a bit of a change for B.

Yeah, I know I know, people tell you, "Don't hook up with women who are still living with their ex's." But since I knew both women, I could see the deal and understand it, I thought. B seemed free and clear to me.

More time passes, we are into the new year now, and getting more flirtatious. Then B proposes a date, she has just bought a snazzy new-used, bright red BMW and we tool up to San Francisco to take in the film, Vera Drake. And why not take an ex-Catholic girl to see a film about an abortionist? said I.

We really seem to get along. I find B very easy to deal with. She really appreciates my strange sense of humor, and that's worth a ton to me.

But where do we go from the movie? Well, next up on B's list of "Things To Do" is visiting a local hot tub establishment.

Okay, we all know what THIS means. I think I'm going to get laid. What do you think?

TO BE CONTINUED

In Berkeley in the late 60s I worked for a while as a medical transcriber in a local hospital. One day a medical salesman came in and happened to see me as I worked the front desk in reception. When I left to go into the back to begin my transcription duties, the guy followed me into the room.

He was my type for sure, but his level of aggression was way too much for me to cope with. How aggressive was he? Well, how about he locked the door, for starters, always a move designed to make a girl's heart go pitter-patter with fear, if nothing else. Then he plopped himself onto one of those little stools with wheels and spun himself across the room to where I sat at my Royal typewriter, nimble fingers ready to tap away. He wedged his knees around mine, pinning me into my chair, and he looked directly into my eyes.

"Hello," he says, in his best seductive manner. He wanted to ask me out on a date. But I was too flustered and mostly speechless. He finally left, and I breathed a sigh of relief, and wondered sadly why he had to come on so strong.

He really was my type. A slim, Robert Redford type of blond, with horn-rimmed glasses which happily did not make him look intellectual at all. But the aggressiveness really put me off, and he finally left.

Not long afterwards I went to a party at my friend A's place. Her usual interesting gatherings of friends, Berkeley students/professors. One young man was a violinist, but he came on like a big-game hunter. I remember he looked like Al Franken, only cuter. Again the horn-rimmed glasses. He was dark and good-looking with curly black hair and a very intense manner.

He asked me for a date, he begged, he was so honed into me it was scary. He literally chased me out into the street as I practically ran for my car, both of us uttering a trail of "please go out with mes" and "no I won'ts" and "go aways" and whatever else I might have yelled.

My friend A was rather amused by the story when I told her the next day. He really seemed like a decent guy, she said. So what is it about me that turned him into a far more...well, agile fellow?

Like I said earlier, I can understand aggressive guys, even if I don't care for it. The quiet, passive ones are even worse. They look at you with these adoring eyes, worshipful eyes. What did I do to deserve this? Somehow I end up feeling slightly guilty, as if I had bludgeoned their poor mothers to death or some such thing. I should be nicer to them, I tell myself, but why? What purpose would it serve?

I don't want a cave man, but I also don't want a guy who just leaves everything up to the woman. But maybe it works out that way no matter what.

For some reason my directing instructor's humorous quip comes back to me....

"A man chases a woman....until she catches him."

That's encouraging to know. No matter who much a woman feels under assault from a new male, as it were, nothing really will ever happen until the woman gives her approval.

End of that story.

- - - - - -

Usually people like to talk about their sexual conquests, the "notches on my belt" sort of thing, or the so-called "trophy wife." Not so frequently do people talk about the "ones that got away," or the ones we tell to go away.

Being my usual perverse little self, I of course am more fascinated by the ones I let get away, the ones I told to yallah, sod off, bugger off, or otherwise take a hike somewhere new. I was really surprised at the sheer numbers, men and women, I managed to diss over the years. And it was really about their attitude. If they had not been so assertively in my face, well who knows.

There was this Italian kid on the Lido in Venice, January 1967, where I went with several other American kids for a day of sightseeing. Personally I found Italy rather beautiful in the middle of winter, the crowds are gone and you actually get to mingle with some of the locals. I found the Italians are especially keen on mingling. They really do like blondes. Travelling throughout Italy, I got a lot of people asking, right off the bat, "Swedish? Are you Swedish?" with a hopeful air. I soon learned how to play it: those Swedish girls come to Italy and make trouble for the rest of us blondes. So I decided to make my Americanness front and center; after all, we're the women who boss our men around, and the Italians don't like that. So they think twice about us American girls.

So my friends and I ran into these two Italian guys, out for a stroll around to see what trouble they could find. One of them seemed keen on me and was not at all interested in hearing "no."

I seem to run across two kinds of guys: one kind tends to be very very passive, they hover around and try to position themselves directly under my feet, as it were. Hoping I will trip over them and discover the diamond in the rough, lurking just inside their silent demeanors. The other group does just the opposite: they come at me as if they were crusader knights storming a fortress. They seuss out correctly that I'm the sort of woman who can only be taken by seige. In a way I can understand this point of view. I would probably adopt it myself if I had to deal with me.

Now, the first group may sound easier to deal with, but I am probably more drawn to the second category of guy. Because they think like I would in this situation.

This Italian kid was in this category. Very aggressive, even though he spoke no English at all, and I spoke no Italian and neither did my friends. The fact we were a mixed crowd, with several males along, did not deter these two interlopers. They saw women they could bother, and they were going to bother them.

The aggressive boy was rather beautiful, I am wondering why the hell I did say no. He was slim and lean, with eyes of a light, dazzling blue color that you don't see a lot of in Italy, even near the northern border with Austria. His hair was longish and curling around his shirt collar, and it was as blond as mine. He must have thought we would make an attractive couple, and he zeroed right in on me. He said something cheeky-sounding in Italian, and that probably made me look sulky, because then he took his hand and placed it under my chin, shaking it playfully from side to side. He seemed to be scolding me. He was cocky. If he hadn't have been so cocky, he might have had a chance. But he was, so I scolded him back and we got away from them.

TO BE CONTINUED

After I left my friend E in the south of France and returned home to Berkeley, California, I never saw him again. We did not even stay in touch. We both seemed to sense that we had moved apart, and we let it go.

D had the lesbian relationship with her ladyfriend she had been searching for, but it did not last very long. Then she and I lost touch.

I wondered what E did with his heiress, finally. Then I moved on with life, until about two years ago, when I posted a personal ad looking for another woman on Planet Out. Someone wrote back to me, rather cryptically. Instead of sending a picture of herself, she sent one of a young man, nice-looking, around early 30s.

"Do you recognize him?" the mystery woman asked me. I certainly did not, I thought my lovely ad was being drooled over by male persons, and I did not like it.

Undaunted, the woman gave me a further clue. "You used to babysit him, about thirty some years ago."

Wow, that's when I pieced things together. It was D. She had recognized my photo, and she referred me to her ad. D looked just the same too, pretty much, which is why and how we recognized each other.

D and I met for lunch in the Piedmont section of Berkeley. We caught up, as if nothing had changed. Sadly, E was no longer living. Apparently he put on a bit of weight in his later years, and died of congestive heart failure. He had married the Milkmaid, it lasted for a number of years and they were rather compatible, after all.

E's death suddenly brought tears to my eyes as we munched our way through the Thai food. I had not realized how much emotion was still there. But little B had grown up rather well, his mother finally managed to track down where his father had taken him (to the Caribbean, apparently). For some years she lost touch with them altogether. This was a long and tortured story, she did not want to belabor me with the entire thing.

Little B was now over six feet fall, like his father, and he looked very handsome. He lived in Florida, and had fallen in love with a young woman who was leading him a very fast pace. I don't want to use the pejorative term pussy-whipped, but it sounded close. His mother supported him as much as she could emotionally, and I was very pleased to hear of the strong connection they had formed.

As to further relationships, D was looking, as I was. She was a year or two older than me, so we both knew what are chances were - at age 60 - of finding compatible, fit women. D was still very slim, very much a Sandy Duncan look-alike. Very pleasant and sweet personality.

Why was I not attracted to her, I wondered, as I did thirty years before.

One of the mysteries, I guess. We are still in touch with one another to this day, I am happy to say.

Maybe sometime she will get a chance to meet my Dave. Somewhere there she will see in him I think a continuation of E's spirit.

- - - - - - -

My friends E and D have separated, D left her young son with E in France and returned to the States to take up with another woman. Under French law, she lost all rights vis a vis her son. She knew that. She was ready. She gave me her return ticket. I flew to Paris in the fall of 1972, then caught another flight down to Nice. E was there to pick me up at the airport, and we drove westward along the coast to St. Tropez.

In winter St. Tropez is barely recognizable as the chi-chi place it becomes during summer. E's rented villa was up in the hills, about half an hour out of town. They even had their own pool, a rather large rectangular one. In this wintry time, it was filled with leaves. They sunk into the depths and cast weird patterns across the pool sides, reminding me of the French classic film, "Diabolique." I half-expected a body to waft up sometime during my stay.

I seemed to spend the first several days getting in sync with local time. On the first evening, E had some of his friends over, a couple consisting of husband and wife who ran a restaurant locally, and E's new friend M, a tall, good-looking young Frenchman who was into renovating old houses for rich Americans to snatch up.

We ate local food that first night. Real local, in fact. I was not yet a foodie, so it was lost on me. Wild dandelion salad, home-made camembert, little birds roasted and eaten whole, captured with cute little nooses that the birds stepped into, unsuspecting, so well concealed were they. I was so jet-lagged the evening quickly went into blur mode. But I was still alive enough for later, when E and I finally had sex together.

He was surprisingly small, but like several other small guys, they make up for it somehow, someway. He was a good lover for me. He showed me something I did not know before, that my body was ready to come again sooner than my mind thought it was.

But I soon discovered there was another presence in the villa, in the form of a woman living in England whom E had met, and was falling in love with. Her husband had died, she had her own family money. In milk cows. It was oddly appropriate, I felt, and soon took to referring to her as, The Milkmaid. But E was uncertain how real she was with him. He would discuss her with me, he valued my judgment. I tried to stay neutral, and what else could I do really, I had never met the woman, she sounded like quite a different person from me. I probably offered my standard line, "You never know what sort of person you really have until you start to share space under one roof."

It certainly applied to my situation. E and I probably both realized early on that we were different people in the two years since we had been together last. Gone was the more carefree spirit of San Francisco in the late 60s, with the carefree sexual identity too. Although E made a joke or two about M, our handsome new acquaintance, I could see that there was no room in his life now for bisexual space.

And he seemed more cautious as a person. D's leaving him was probably done at the right time, for both of them, but it must have stung a bit. It left him uncertain.

His fears were getting passed on quickly to his son, B, who was then three years old. He too had changed since I had played with him as a toddler in Marin County. E seemed to remind him a lot that his mother had left them. It was all done very subtly, of course, but you could feel the damage being done. E and I never degenerated into outright bickering, but we could feel the tension there. I had brought some of my art things along, I was copying a Van Gogh painting, of the Old Man in the Hat, with my box of oil pastels. I learned a lot at the time from copying the masters. Somehow being in that villa led me along a new view of the drawing, it got progressively darker now, the old man's brows acquired deeper furrows. He was not only gazing out as if over years of a life lived, but he seemed to be standing on the edge of an abyss, and what he saw below looked very dark.

It seemed an appropriate reflection of my situation. When the painting was done, I was ready to leave E and his villa, and his angry young child who now seemed fated to grow up feeling resentment toward
all women.

There was nothing to stay for here. Somehow I felt a huge chunk of my life had shifted, and I was now seeing it in the rear-view mirror.

TO BE CONTINUED

Bisexual men have always been appealing to me. Even before I knew what they were. Maybe they were always there, just around the corner, waiting for me. They began to mirror my own situation more fully than some of the women I was meeting at the time. I was feeling myself to be bisexual, more and more, and it was via men that I started to piece it all together. My friend E was one of these bisexual men I met in the late 60s, early 70s.

One thing I need to mention about E was that he had a weight problem before we met. He was quite huge. Then he went on a diet and took charge, and lost a lot of weight. When I met him, he looked pretty good. Still big, but in an acceptable way. I mention this because the weight loss made changes in his head. He started to look around and see that people would be attracted to him. And he would be attracted to them. It probably reworked his thinking about his wife, D. Not that he was a total philanderer at this point, but it gave him new ideas.

When they first hooked up, E and D went looking for another couple just like them, a bisexual couple. They quickly discovered such a item does not grow on every tree. That's when they started exploring individually.

It was not until they moved to the south of France to live, around 1971, that E and I finally ended up in the sack. We had come close before, his wife D had nearly interrupted us one afternoon by coming home earlier. She had no problems with me diddling her husband, but it did not sit quite well with me. D really liked me and wanted to jump my bones. But for me the chemistry just never came along. It was an odd situation. I liked him, but not her. Not that way. It was sad, and I felt sad about it. It should have happened, on paper at least. But it couldn't.

The pair settled in a rented villa outside the seaside resort of St. Tropez. They were going to hang out there for a while. B was then about three years old. My friend D's desire to be with women was now nearly overwhelming. It became this way after living for a while in France. Pulled up from her normal American roots - and D in many respects is more of a True Blue American woman than I am by far - she could perhaps finally face her desires and take the risk of finally choosing. She had met a woman through a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb. How she managed to land that in the south of France I have no idea, and did not think to ask. D was ready to leave E, and her son, to go and be with this woman, whom she had never met. She arrived back in the bay area, dropped by to see me in my Berkeley Hills lair, and gave me the return half of her roundtrip ticket to France.

"He really wants to see you," she said. D proceeded to embark on a relationship with this woman, which lasted for a while. And then like nearly all the lesbian relationships I have heard about, or witnessed, they break up. The whole thing takes on this ritualized kind of lesbian mating dance: they draw together in animated anticipation, they separate with appropriate angst.

At this point in time, I was beginning to think rather cynically I suppose that most lesbian relationships were inherently doomed to breaking up, because there was not a strong enough dynamic, like testosterone, say, to hold it together. I know I will get major flak for this, but I sense this is the area of the problem, even though I feel I have far to go in defining it.

I kept my mouth shut about all this though, and took the airplane ticket.

Soon thereafter, in the fall of 1972, I flew to Europe for my second trip.

This proved to be an extended vacation of several months. I had quit my job as a medical transcriber, and no unrequited love(s) were holding me back, I could move to my own personal agenda.

Maybe it was something about that villa, it's low-lying rectangular shape that made you feel like you were forever walking from one end to the other, it became kind of creepy there in the winter, when the cold winds came and the days were nearly always overcast. Hanging out there with E was not what I thought it would be.

He and I had become entirely different people in ways in the intervening two years. But that we had yet to discover.

TO BE CONTINUED