Grandma's Got a Boyfriend... and I Don't

“How’s your love life?”

“Not as exciting as yours, Grandma.”

My grandmother is 86 years old and she has a long distance boyfriend. She’s just been telling me about how every night at 8 pm her time and 10 pm his time (she lives in New Mexico, he lives in New Jersey), he calls her and asks, “Ready to pour?”

They drink one gin and tonic and talk for an hour before bed. This happens every night. She tells me that he’s started calling in the mornings too, “Just to say Good Morning.” I ask how they constantly find things to talk about.

“I don’t know, honey, we just do. We talk about politics and the people we used to know. We tell each other about what we did that day.”

I remember that feeling of wanting to tell a partner everything—purposefully remembering things from your day just so you could tell them about it later, every mundane little detail. I had that with Mr. Intimidated, which is how I knew I actually really liked him. Grandma tells me that her boyfriend admitted to making notes throughout his day so he wouldn't forget to tell her things.

“He makes me feel like a girl,” she tells me earnestly. “I never thought I’d feel that way again.”

My grandmother and her boyfriend, Bob, grew up together in the same tiny New Jersey town where he still lives. They knew all the same people, most of whom are now dead. Bob remembers more than she does about their high school days together—he remembers things about my grandmother that she doesn’t remember herself. Like about that time they were playing tennis in gym class and she got a cramp in her leg and had to sit down and the gym teacher came over and asked Bob, “What did you do to her?” Or when she fainted outside the school and knocked down a professor.

Bob remembers these details because he’s been in love with my grandmother for 60 years. My grandfather died three years ago and this man—a widower himself—waited a respectable two years before swooping in on the long lost love of his life. She wasn’t sure at first and she resisted him for several months—I think she felt some moral obligation about being faithful to the memory of my grandfather. But Bob just kept on coming, undeterred by her reticence.

“I feel silly now about resisting him,” she admits.

When Bob came to visit her in Santa Fe several months ago, my grandmother laid down the ground rules: “Hopper seat down” (she calls the toilet a hopper), “you have to help with the cooking, and... NO SEX.” Her boyfriend joked: “If you wanted to have sex, I’d have to bring someone in.” At first I interpreted this to mean a prostitute and I was momentarily shocked. Then my grandmother laughed, apparently charmed by his little joke. I guess he meant a doctor or something. Someone to administer the Viagra? I don’t know.

One of her favorite things about Bob is the fact that he can keep the names of her three daughters straight. The fact that he remembers that her granddaughter lives in Los Angeles.

“He has a good memory and he obviously cares about you,” I say.

I consider telling her about the guy I had been chatting with on OKCupid for a couple weeks who then, a year later when I got back on the site, opened with the same pick up line he’d used on me the first time around. I remembered the line and I remembered him. We had gone so far as to exchange numbers and had texted on a daily basis—we were pretty close to actually meeting in person before it fizzled out. He’d apparently forgotten all these details and was starting from zero with me. I wondered if he still had my number in his phone. I consider telling her about the chef I was chatting with recently and was really excited to meet. We had made a date, he had to cancel at the last minute, he wanted to reschedule. I said okay and then never heard from him again.

When my grandmother asks about my love life, I’m tempted to mention the fact that I recently deleted all my dating apps after reading a particularly depressing article about Tinder in Vanity Fair. Midway through the article, I grabbed my phone and promptly deleted ALL the apps: Tinder, OKC, Hinge, Happn, even Bumble. I decided I didn’t want to feed into this culture that was turning men into sociopathic pussy-monsters and women into simpering attention whores. I decided I would meet someone the old fashioned way: IRL.

I can’t explain any of this to my grandmother because it simply wouldn’t make sense to her. On a fundamental level, her generation doesn’t understand having a game on your phone where you swipe through millions of human faces trying to find someone to have sex with. Her boyfriend has been in love with her for 60 goddamn years! They talk on the phone every night. She’s living in some nostalgic Nora Ephron romance flick from the 90s. Every time she tells me about Bob, I get off the phone and quickly jot down some notes.

“I have to write this story!” I tell myself. It’s too good to be true. This isn’t real life. It’s some relic from a sweet unattainable past.

I remember my grandmother watching this short film I made in which the three young women gather in the kitchen explicitly talking about sex and masturbation. I had been nervous to show it to her, but her reaction was amazing.

“Do you girls really talk like that?” She asked, intrigued.

“Yeah, we do,” I told her.

“That’s really great,” she said to my surprise, “In my day you simply didn’t talk about that stuff.”

I think about the fact that my grandmother has only had sex with one man her entire life. The fact that she got married right out of high school, didn’t go to college, and had three daughters. I think about how she was the star of all her school plays, a real beauty, but didn’t have enough belief in herself or encouragement from her parents to pursue a career in acting. The fact that she is also a poet and a painter, and considers these talents to be just hobbies. And that she never really liked to cook—my grandfather was the one who loved being in the kitchen. My grandmother grew up in a generation where women were expected to stay home and bare children. And that’s it. And I think if my grandmother had been born of my generation, she wouldn’t have chosen that path. She probably would have been an artist. Maybe an actress. She would have had a choice.

When I ask my grandmother if she has any plans to visit Bob in New Jersey, she says she doesn’t have any desire to, that she really doesn’t want to stay with him. She insinuates it’s because she doesn’t want to have sex.

“If I were your age maybe I’d want to visit him…. You can guess what I mean.” She laughs. I laugh too. Last time I saw my grandmother she declared that she’d never have sex again. I just stared at her, mouth dropped open, like ‘how could you ever say that?’ Especially after having had sex with the same man for my entire life, I feel like I’d be chomping at the bit to see what else was out there.

“I just don’t want to anymore,” she said at the time, resigned. I guess it makes sense. Biologically speaking it makes no sense at all for a woman to still want sex at age 86. Still, I can’t imagine myself ever saying the words, I’ll never have sex again. Maybe on my deathbed.

Considering the generation my grandmother grew up in, it’s not totally inconceivable that she never actually enjoyed sex in the first place. It’s even possible she’s never had an orgasm. When I sent her a DVD of the first season of Masters of Sex for her birthday, her response was that she found it “silly to even study these things.” I explained to her that before the studies of Masters and Johnson, female sexuality was cloaked in shame and misunderstanding and that, although imperfect, even just the fact of their study was a step in the right direction. Despite finding it silly, she still said, “I’ll probably watch the rest of the seasons.”

Although I don’t idealize my grandmother’s generation and I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a time when women had no sexual freedom to speak of, I think something has been lost in this age of endless choice. I’m nostalgic for a time when, if you wanted to talk to the person you had a crush on, you had to call them on the phone or drive to their house. You couldn’t just send them a text or stalk them on Facebook. There was more risk involved, and therefore more investment. You couldn’t swipe through a hundred potential dates a night. You had to talk to one person at a time and risk actually liking that person. Is romance dead? No. But it’s definitely old and potentially dying. 

The Bartender's Brother

On Saturday night I find myself all riled up with nowhere to go. I’ve just had a couple drinks with some friends in Hollywood. One of these friends is a DILF on whom I’ve had a persistent crush for quite awhile. The crush remains because there’s just enough flirtation to keep it going and yet absolutely nothing can be done about it because he’s in a committed relationship and has, well, kids.  So the crush just lingers weakly in the background and flares up from time to time when conditions are right. This particular night, emboldened by alcohol, I find myself pulling his hair, leaning into him, and generally taking it a little too far.

That chapter ends without incident and I drive home, energized and not at all sleepy. I come to a fork in the road where I can either take a right to my house and my bed, or left to the local dive bar where I always make poor decisions. I head left. I park and purposefully walk into the bar. It is last call and the lights are coming up. The drunk crowd is streaming out. I blow past my friend the doorman and swim upstream towards the bar. The bartender I tried and failed to make out with on New Year’s Eve (he also lives with his gf) is working and I make a beeline for him. He looks happy to see me.

“Where have you been?” He beams.

“Hey John, you still live with your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” he says, “but my brother doesn’t.” He gestures to the bar where his brother sits drinking a beer. I smile and sit down, introducing myself with the line, “I tried to make out with John on New Year’s but he was very resistant.” I laugh. John shrugs.

“Don’t you know that kissing doesn’t count as cheating?” (Side Note: this is something my mom told me when I was 18 and I’ve been using it to my advantage ever since.)

His brother smiles, unperturbed by my verbal diarrhea—I like him already. He is built like a brick shit house, big muscular arms and a wide torso. He tells me he used to work at this same bar, now he’s a trainer in San Francisco. My haven’t-had-sex-in-over-a-month self is happy to see him.

John makes us some delicious lime-tasting shots and the three of us throw them back. The crowd has thinned to real locals and friends of the bartenders. Aggressively loud wall-of-noise death metal blasts from the speakers. One of the bartenders has stripped down to his underwear and is smashing glasses on the floor. I’m not sure why any of this is happening but it’s pretty hilarious. As John counts the night’s tips, I canoodle with his brother. I feel on his arms and put my hands on his chest and back. I ask if I’m bothering him and he assures me I’m not, smiling.

“I have a pretty girl touching me.” Then he adds this feminist-adjacent sentiment, “God knows we objectify you guys [women] enough.” He’s really batting a thousand with me.

John keeps refilling our beers as he counts his cash. At some point I grab his brother’s face and start making out with him. After this first kiss, he looks at John and flips him off.

“Fuck you, man,” he says, laughing.

I join in, also flipping off John. It isn’t very nice but I’m really enjoying this game. Despite the pissing-contest-ness of this moment, the brothers obviously have genuine love and affection for one another. There is the sense that John is happy for his brother in this moment, even if he does have mixed feelings about the scenario. I express this to them, saying that if I had a sibling, this is how I imagine we would be. We would share men and be cool about it.

At some point, John plops down next to me so I’m now sitting between the two brothers who are a year apart in age and both ridiculously good-looking. This night has really taken an excellent turn. John occasionally glances at us sideways, watching us make out, and when I catch his eye sometimes he smiles and sometimes he looks playfully hurt. When his brother walks off to go to the bathroom or to get cash from the ATM for John’s tip jar, John grabs my leg under the bar. I suppose still wanting to stake some claim. I was here first. I really don’t mind.

Both of the boys enjoy dancing and I enjoy watching them. John goes off to take the mini-stage with some of the other bartenders who have now connected a mic to the speaker system and are singing along to music that vacillates between abrasive metal and 90s hip hop. John’s brother stays with me at his seat and dances with his muscular little arms over his head like a go-go boy. It’s absolutely adorable.

While his brother is off peeing or something, I turn to John and ask how he’s doing. He starts talking about the night of New Year’s.

“You know, just because I didn’t make out with you doesn’t mean I didn’t want to,” he says. I know this already but it’s satisfying to hear him say it. I ask how things are going with his girlfriend.

“I’m trying to get her into other girls,” he says. I try to school him that this is not the direct path to what he wants.

“You need to be honest with her,” I say.

“I don’t know if monogamy is for me,” he states the obvious. I ask how long they’ve been together. Two years.

“And you already feel this way?” I want to tell him this is not something that’s going to get better with time.

I tell him, “John, this is my jam. I will be here for you as a friend.” I might be a little drunk.

But then he says, “But I wouldn’t want her to do the same thing.” Wait, what?

“So, you want freedom in the relationship but you don’t want her to have the same?”

He nods.

“Well then, go fuck yourself.” I pat his back. I’ve encountered this before. Men who want to fuck around but can’t deal with the idea of their partner doing the same. The obvious hypocrisy and need for control is infuriating. How do they expect their women to be open-minded about this if they refuse to be?

I return to his brother. We keep making out and now I’m feeling on his crotch. He is very hard in his jeans. He cups my ass and puts his hand up my shirt. I lift my bra so he can slip beneath it. I take his finger in my mouth and suck on it—this is apparently too much for him and he holds me back, which only makes me want to do it more. He suggests we leave and go back to my place. Why not John’s? I want to say this as a joke but think better of it.

For some reason I’m not sure I want to take him home. I’m enjoying the dynamic of making out at the bar with John watching and I’m thinking about the uphill walk to my house. And then there’s the fact that I’m trying to cool it on the one night stands. But he’s leaving on Monday and if I want to have sex, this is probably my only chance. I’m on the fence, trying to decide what I want. I’m not sure why what comes out of my mouth is, “I’m not sure if we should have sex. I actually like you.” He looks confused.

“I mean, I don’t know you that well but I’ve enjoyed our time together,” he says, diplomatically. Then he turns away to talk to another bartender and I think I’ve blown it. Why did I say that? I guess what I meant to say was, “I’m trying not to have sex with strange men because my female body and brain sometimes create attachment feelings that take a lot of energy for me to deal with.” Or, "If I have sex now after having not had sex for so long, I feel like the dam will burst and I’ll need it all the time. And you don't live in town and I am currently without a reliable slam piece. If I just keep not having sex, I won’t need it and will be able to stay more focused on the other, more important things in my life. I’ve got shit to do! And the longer I don’t have it, the less I need it. Also, I haven’t been grooming my lady bits really at all lately."

I don’t say any of these things out loud.

“Give me five minutes to decide,” I say. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. He tells me he feels like a creep for pushing it. This is not the turn I wanted the conversation to take. We keep drinking and making out. Eventually, I decide we should probably just follow the natural projection of where this night is going.

“Okay, let’s get out of here.” He heads for the door.

I turn to John and tell him I’m leaving. He makes a face.

“Why?”

“Because it’s time.”

I lean in to hug him and he grabs my face and tongue kisses me. He tastes like his brother. This is my favorite moment of the night. I turn to leave. His brother hasn’t seen the kiss. He is already outside, apparently without saying goodbye to John.

We walk to my house. He takes my hand but this weirdly feels too intimate and we eventually drop it. We walk up the monster hill I live on. Even though he lives in San Francisco, this is still a struggle for him. In my house, I pour us two glasses of ice water and turn on the fan in my room. I head for the bathroom, where I do some quick crotch grooming. Just a little bit. It’s a rush job so fortunately I have the lights set nice and low in my bedroom.

When I return to my room, he has set up the fan so it’s blasting from the foot of the bed. He is in his briefs. They are tight and accentuate the bulge of his crotch. He looks even better with his clothes off. I crawl on top of him and start kissing down his body. I take off my shirt and bra and run my nipples over his chest. I suck on him and he’s got a really nice penis. He doesn’t go down on me and that’s slightly disappointing. Again, as always, I’m tempted to ask why this is, but I don’t want to ruin the mood. He’s pretty good with his fingers. We have sex and it’s fun but I don’t come. Afterwards, I turn off the light and try to go to sleep. It’s five a.m.

At six a.m, the sky is already beginning to lighten and I’m woken from half-sleeping by him groping me from behind. He spoons me and slips it in. Then he rolls me over onto my stomach and finishes like that. I enjoy the spontaneity.

At nine a.m, I’m fully awake. And I have a splitting fucking headache. I get out of bed, put on my PJs, and head to the bathroom where I take two Advil. My mouth tastes like garbage so I brush my teeth and wash my face and remove my eye makeup. It’s rare that I don’t do this before bed, but I haven’t had that much to drink in awhile. I pound some water and return to bed where he has put on his briefs and is chewing gum and looking at his phone. I crawl in next to him and put my arm across his chest. He moves in closer to me. We start making out again. He lifts my shirt and sucks on my breasts. My PJ pants come off and he crawls on top of me. This time I do come. He’s really good at grinding on top of me in just the right way. He doesn’t do the jackrabbit pounding preferred by so many porn-raised dudes of 2015. The orgasm magically disappears my headache.

Afterwards, I ask if he wants any tea or coffee. He asks what kind of tea I have. I tell him about my hippie selection.

“I’ll take coffee,” he says. I put on my PJs again and head for the kitchen.

I ask if he wants a piece of toast.

“No, thanks. But that’s nice,” he says. I know I’m breaking one night stand etiquette by offering to feed him. It’s an uncomfortable negotiation for everybody.

I return with the coffee and he scoots off the bed so as not to spill any on my sheets. He stands and peruses my walls. He asks about a painting of a woman’s naked body from behind.

“There’s a lot of naked people up here,” he says.
“I’m kind of obsessed with nudity,” I explain.

He asks about a calendar I have of three naked women in different shots doing various tasks backstage of a theatre. I explain that this calendar was a fundraiser I did for a theatre I’m involved with. I point myself out, topless and wearing a giant blond Afro wig. He tells me he too posed for a calendar, for one of his clients who is a drag queen. He takes out his phone and shows me the picture. He is dressed as Santa with his shirt open and is flocked by four drag queens dressed as the Golden Girls. One of them (presumably Blanche) is perched on his lap. He wins so many points with me in this moment.

“You were born to do this,” I tell him.

We finish our coffee and he gets dressed. He goes to the bathroom and I change into shorts and put on a bra under my T-shirt. We walk together down my hill, heading to retrieve my car. As we pass the bar from last night, a guy is opening the door and John’s brother knows him. He crosses the street and gives him a big hug. The guy takes us inside where there is glass all over the sticky floor. And a mirror over one of the booths is shattered. This guy is tasked with cleaning up the mess. We laugh at the wreckage and continue on our way.

I offer to drive him home (to John’s house).

“John’s going to be pissed at you for showing me where he lives,” I joke as I round a corner.

“Are you going to stalk him now? Don’t get weird,” he says, teasing me.

“Last night I thought I was going to roll in, have one drink at the bar, and head home. I had no intention of staying until 5 a.m. and then taking home John’s brother.” I laugh. He does too.

I pull up in front of John’s house and he gives me his number for when I’m next up in the Bay Area. We kiss goodbye and I drive off.

It is not lost on me the fact that I began this night lusting after one unattainable man, only to move on to another unattainable man, only to finally settle on an attainable man whom I wasn’t sure I wanted to sleep with. Why was I unsure about this third man? Because it was too easy I didn’t have to fight for it? Friends of mine have told me that I enjoy the chase, that I like the challenge of an unavailable man. But do I really? That’s not at all what I think I want. But then why is it so tempting for me to try to lure said man out of whatever current situation has him lusting after me and unable to do anything about it?

The last memorably good sex I had was with Burly Man in the elevator—because we both wanted it so badly and we knew we shouldn’t have it (again, his girlfriend), which only made us want it more until the tension built up to such a boiling point that when we finally did fuck, it was explosive. That is what I want—that level of passion and spontaneity that feels undeniable. I want my rational mind to be too overcome to get involved. I want to feel out of control. And what tends to come with that feeling of late is unattainable men in relationships.

When I ask John why he’s still with his girlfriend, he says, “She’s the best person.” Not, I’m so in love with her, or she’s my best friend. But, “She’s the best person.” Burly Man gave me a similar response when I asked about his relationship. And to me this sounds like each of these guys has put their respective woman on a pedestal where they can view her from below as this perfect being. And, not to take this analogy too far, but in this scenario, if she’s the Madonna, I’m definitely the Whore. I guess this justifies why John doesn’t want his girlfriend fucking other guys—if he sees her as this Madonna figure, the idea of her sleeping with other men would spoil her for him.

“I’m not a Madonna and I’m not a Whore. I’m your wife and I’m sexual and I love you.” Forgive me as I quote Sex and the City. When I went to look up the exact wording of this quote, I found that my memory of it was word perfect—either I have watched way too much Sex and the City or this phrase stuck in my mind for some reason. Probably it’s both. Charlotte says this to Trey as she’s trying to get him to have sex with her (he’s having trouble performing in bed, but likes to yank it to Playboy in the bathroom). This is an old story. In Masters of Sex, Bill Masters sees his wife as this perfect woman and the mother of his children—and he can’t bring himself to have sex with her. Meanwhile, he sleeps with flirtatious, sexually-liberated Virginia Johnson at every available opportunity. There’s always a sense in these illicit affairs that once it stops being illicit, the mistress becomes the wife and inevitably the free, spontaneous sex stops and “real life” begins. In this scenario, it is definitely more fun to be the woman outside the relationship tempting the man away from his quaint home life. But even as I’m playing the role of the Other Woman, I can relate to the wife/girlfriend back at home. I can see myself in her shoes and I wonder what’s her story, what are her fantasies? And I hope that she’s having some fun, that she’s taking care of her own needs. And my hope for myself is that when I am on the other side of this equation, I will be with someone who sees me not as a Madonna or a Whore, but as a multi-faceted person who has qualities of both these archetypes, and more.