LitCrawl 2017: Nerds* On Surfboards and in Bikinis* Read Their Prose.

I'll be reading at the Kahuna Tiki (link below) along with some great talent.

Malibu Writers Circle | A Cool Buzz and Some Tasty Words

•   By infolosangeles@litcrawl.org

Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/25/2017
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
Kahuna Tiki

11026 Magnolia Blvd - Los Angeles

*I am a nerd

*My bikini is in the shop

Weekend Lover

The telephone rang twice before the machine answered. Lydia paused, fingers over keypad to hear who was calling before answering.

“Garry?”

“Hello. How are you?”

“I’m sooo happy to hear from you,” Lydia said, meaning every word of it. Garry had been her lover through three years of college and one year of graduate school thirty years ago. He lived 60 miles away and drove in on weekends, and usually midweek, as well.

“I left a message on your voice mail about a month ago,” she said.

“Oh, really.” He was flattered by her exuberance.

Lydia had dropped all pretense when she turned fifty. She never toned down her enthusiasm. People either basked in it, or thought she was faking.

“My home or cell?”

“You told me to call your cell,” she said.

He was married to his fifth wife. They'd met a year after his divorce from his first wife. During the weekend years, Lydia had thought she might become Mrs. Garry number two. They discussed it, but their timing was off. She went to graduate school out-of-state and they opted for an "open" relationship.

“Damn, I’ve been having trouble with my cell. Why did you call?”

“Check up on you, of course.”

They laughed. Garry was twenty years her senior. When he hadn’t returned her call, she’d worried that he might be dead, but she didn't say that.

“Probably something to do with politics,” she said instead. Garry and Lydia had always found it easy to talk with each other. Their weekends had been filled with lively political debates which added an unexpected sensuality to their lovemaking.

Their conversation now flowed from the presidential candidates to the economy to the environment to family, mainly the children: his and now, hers. They took care to avoid discussing their spouses. Garry’s wife was notoriously jealous. Lydia’s workaholic husband veered in the opposite direction.

Garry launched into a description of his latest entrepreneurial venture, something high tech. He was very creative, and extremely wealthy. He'd made investments in every state she'd moved to in order to write off his travel. While he spoke, Lydia imagined his head, now partially covered with silken white hair, bobbing up-and-down between her legs.

“So I just need to raise another million,” Garry said.

“Well, at least you have some,” she said, meaning hair on his head, not money.

“Yes,” he said, “but not enough.”

“But you’re sooo amazing with what you do have,” Lydia said, sounding like a love-struck nineteen-year-old.

Across the miles and years, they laughed again.

SaveSave

Sexual Frontiers: A Dental Story

My 30ish, newly married and rather conservative dentist, whom I'll call Dr. Q, reclined the chair in which I sat while his assistant readied the tools of their trade behind me. Dr. Q aimed a bright light at me, and while he examined my teeth, asked me this surprising question, "Are women now the hunters on the sexual frontier?"

Don't you just love it when dentists ask you questions while they have your mouth crammed full of sharp instruments? I've long suspected that they get special training in these oral interrogations. Perhaps part of dental school is a course in the Interpretation of Mumbles.They continue to talk as if a conversation were actually taking place. He continued, close-up and personal, with this story:

A good friend of his, thirty-two, good-looking and divorced, was having lunch atSunset Plaza, a posh area with several restaurants and sidewalk dining for those who like car exhaust with their meals, when three gorgeous women arrived and sat at the table next to him.

"They were young, but legal," Dr. Q said, pausing in his examination, "over eighteen." I looked up into his serious brown eyes, unsure whether I should close my mouth and offer a comment. He continued, his voice full of wonder.

The girls' conversation was giggly and silly, lightening the smoggy afternoon air (authorial conjecture). Turns out they were all nineteen, barely out of high school. Soon two of them rose and left. The remaining female did not look stranded, or scamper off to the safety of a fashionable boutique. She stared right at our hero, and asked if she could join him.

Dr. Q paused, searching for the right words to describe what happened next. Once again, I was uncertain what to do: close my mouth or leave it open. "So did they hook up or what?"

Behind me, the young dental hygienist laughed. Dr. Q joined her and I managed to laugh without dribbling down my chin. This was better than nitrous.

"Yes," he said, "they went to his condo that afternoon and after that she would call him and say, 'I want you to get undressed, get into bed and wait for me." Another pause. Another look into Dr. Q's soulful eyes. I closed my mouth, sure that my dentist was censoring the more colorful things our femme fatale said. 

"She would come over, they would make love and then she would leave. Just like that." Dr. Q could not suppress the amazement in his voice. I thought his friend must be good in bed, but a bit boring, and started to say so, but Dr. Q said, "Open, please," and, "Can you believe it?"

"Wait!" he continued, as if I were leaping to freedom. "It gets better. She tells him one day that she's getting married and won't be able to see him anymore, but that she's going to give his number to her girlfriends."

"I have girlfriends," I said, unselfishly, only it came out "eh hv gullfens." He laughed, the dental hygienist laughed, and I managed a heh-heh.

"So, the tables have turned," Dr. Q said, as if he'd just made an important scientific discovery. "Women are now the pursuers. The users."

The woman in his friend's story certainly seemed to have a plan, but she didn't invent it. I thought of my 19-year-old self when my goal was sexual exploration without guilt or commitment or sentimentality. I initiated an affair with a 32-year old man. My lover had been interesting as well as skilled in lovemaking, and my plan unraveled. I fell in love. That was almost forty years ago. He's been married four times since. I'm still married to the same man. My former lover and I still talk. Life goes on.

"I want to see you in six months," Dr. Q said.

Maybe this time I'll get his friend's number. Any takers out there?

Also at HuffPost Los Angeles