[
Editor's Note: A playful take on bedroom talk, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex is a smart, funny encyclopedia with entries written by notable contemporary writers. This week we're pleased to feature a different post each day from one of the book's contributors.Today's post is by
Maria Dahvana Headley, the author of The Year of Yes.]
After they handed me the third cucharacha, (not an insect, but a flaming drink, served in a snifter, and made of a mixture of what someone told me was Kahlua, tequila, rum, and Scotch ? and I still drank it, having apparently learned nothing from college) during the discussion of dynamic positioning systems as related to maritime charter in the oilfield, sometime before I burnt the tip of my nose on one drink and then lost the eyelashes of my left eye to another, in the middle of a bar in Mexico, in the middle of the night, I began my nightly questioning of my life trajectory.
A couple of hours later, around the time one of the guys hoisted his cowboy-booted self onto a teetery table and started to do a line dance/Chippendale pelvic-thrusting thing, I looked around and noted that I was the only girl at a table of good old boys. Worse, I was here by choice. I'd flown to Mexico City, and then, dragging a suitcase that outweighed me, skittered through the airport like a tarantula, in search of my plane to Veracruz. Now, as the clock struck midnight, I was in a bar, at what was allegedly a business meeting, drunk on cockroaches. I was surrounded by my clients, a dozen Mexican business men. Four flaming drinks into the evening, I'd lent (given?) my underwear to one of them. He'd said he was a transvestite. Or a bullfighter. Or something. The panties (bright red, g-string, why was I so dumb?) ended up tacked to a sales office bulletin board somewhere. It wasn't what it looked like. I wasn't a hooker. I wasn't a stripper. I wasn't even someone's long-suffering girlfriend.
I was a Temp.
It occurred to me to wonder what the fuck I was doing with my life.
I was working a dayjob in the maritime industry, and I was desperate to prove to someone, anyone, that I was a Writer and not a Flailing Temp Secretary/Charter Boat Saleswoman. I'm not sure why it seemed like a good idea to drink flaming drinks in pursuit of this goal, and I'm really not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to surrender my underwear, transvestite bullfighter or no. Should I mention that I was 23? Should I mention that I was so, SO drunk? Should I mention any of this at all, or should I have learned that publishing humiliating personal anecdotes in public forums is very much akin to allowing the posting of one's panties on a corporate bulletin board? Suffice it to say that there's no chance I'll ever be running for office.
None of this ? the cucharachas, the boats, the transvestite bullfighters ? had much to do with the life I believed I was meant to be living, the life I'd spent years in writing school trying to achieve. (Unless I was trying to write something along the lines of Under the Volcano crossed with Almodovar.) I returned home from Mexico and planted myself in my office, alternately highlighting Bird by Bird and desperately trolling the net looking for an Easy Way Into a Writing Career (something which I now know is a myth) when I stumbled onto an erotica website, read a couple of the stories, thought writing about sex looked easy (again, ha!), and dashed off a story of my own.
This story, while being pretty much entirely sarcastic ? it's about a woman who suffers from Bronte-itus, a condition that causes her to be fixated on a darkly handsome, cloak-wearing loser ? and containing a minimum of actual sexiness (I threw the word "pussy" in a couple of times, then, feeling dirty, deleted it, then, feeling mercenary, put it back), eventually ended up published in Susie Bright's The Best American Erotica 2005. I felt triumphant. Published! In a book!
I felt less triumphant and more nervous, when people I knew, including family members, bought the book. And quoted from it. The sky didn't fall, though, even as I morphed into the family smutmonger, so I followed it up with a nonfiction book about my love life, The Year of Yes. That book had sex in it, yeah, but it was literary. I carefully faded to black every time clothes started to come off. Most times, anyway. I had opinions about the kind of writer I wanted to be. I wanted to be Alice Munro. Or Lorrie Moore. Or Gina Berriault. All of whom wrote about sex, yes, but not generally with dirty words involved. I'd gotten it in my head that if your sex scenes were actually hot, you might end up getting categorized in some other section of the bookstore entirely, not with literature, but with Kim Cattrall. Also, writing about sex in any sort of sexy way was not as easy as I'd thought it would be. In fact, I sucked at it. The writer who can successfully write in any kind of hot way about good sex, without resorting to sarcasm, cliché or repetitions of four letter words, deserves a prize. Bad sex is so much easier. There's even a semi-regular Nerve column devoted to it, featuring depictions of woes both spectacular and small, by great writers including Steve Almond, Nick Flynn, and Neal Pollack. There's a yearly prize ? The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award ? devoted to bad sex scenes (these not depictions of actual bad sex, but to badly written sex), which has gone to luminaries like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. There are so many possibilities when it comes to bedroom horrifics. Surprise trapezes. Startling thickets of hair. Anatomical peculiarities. Shocking kink. Passive foreplay. Aggressive foreplay. Passive-aggressive foreplay. And of course, the all-purpose, too-late-to-get-out-of-it-now-lack-of-chemistry. Good sex, on the other hand, is hard as hell to describe, possibly because if it's any good at all, you're not taking notes on a future sarcastic depiction while it's happening.
The fact that most of the sex I actually went into detail about in The Year of Yes was bad sex did not keep my email inbox from filling with solicitations for sex that was not in the least literary and fade-to-blackish, but was, in fact, worthy of brown paper wrapping. Apparently, I was still smutmongering. Hell, I kinda like smutmongering. But now, with Ellen Sussman's new anthology, Dirty Words, I'm happy to say I'm finally justified as Literary Writer, too. Dirty Words is a Literary Encyclopedia. Both of these words are highbrow. Both of these words say Writer all over them, not Girl Who Gives Her Panties Away. I love this. And it's also a book about every imaginable kind of sex. It's full of four-letter words and otherwise: the essay I wrote can be found in C, for Climax. In it, with the meaning of the word weighing heavily on me, i.e. if it's ending with a climax, at least, for me, it must be good sex, I tried to describe a whole bunch of the indescribable. And yeah, I used some dirty words. And yeah, I hope it turns you on. Or at least makes you laugh. But if it doesn't, there are about a hundred other turns of phrase to look up, not to mention a hundred other fantastic writers. I might even wrap this book in brown paper (the cover is going to be daunting for my poor, beleaguered friends and family) and give it as a Christmas gift.
(Click here to read more blog posts from Maria Dahvana Headley.)