People I could hang out with

My senior year of college I was invited to be part of a national student delegation to the country of Kuwait. A week or so before I received that invitation, I found out I had been accepted to graduate school at Georgetown University with a full tuition scholarship. As our delegation was meeting in Washington DC for a week of briefings before heading to Kuwait, I went a few days earlier to visit the place I assumed I would be spending the next several years of my life.

The waiting room for my graduate program was lined with cherrywood paneling and upholstered in arabesque print. I remember worrying that my wet, squishy tennis shoes would somehow dirty the place after walking in from the April rain. I stayed the night with a recent alum from my hole-in-the-wall state university, but the next day headed to a posh DC hotel where we student delegates were to stay during the Washington leg of our journey.

It was the first time I'd ever hailed a cab. And I was surprised when a guy in a uniform picked up my suitcase as I checked in. I'd never been to a hotel with a bell hop before. The nicest place I'd ever stayed before that was at a Red Lion with a bunch of girls from my church youth group when we attended a winter youth festival. The bell hop led me to the room, opened the door, set my luggage on a rack, opened the curtains, and then stood at the door awkwardly for a few seconds. Was I supposed to tip him? Or was that just something they did on television but not in real life? The bell hop had mercy on me and left quickly. I felt terribly out of place in this new, fancy world I'd found myself in. And I tell you the truth, dear reader, I broke out into tears as I sat on the immaculate bed.

That is how I feel when I read most erotica.

But I didn't realize it until I read Jacqueline Applebee's story "What I do for my pain." When blogger friend Pandora mentioned that Ms. Applebee's erotica included disabled characters, I pictured blond girls dressed in hip retro dresses sitting in specially-designed wheelchairs -- you know, people with real disabilities, as opposed to someone like me with amorphous pain disorders and controversial multi-systemic diseases.

I was so wrong.

There was no mention of stylish clothes or hip apartments in the city or parties with canapes or exotic furniture where two people with perfect bodies have perfectly aligned sex.

No, instead I was met with a character who bumps into her lover's boob in bed. Who has enough flesh that it can be kneaded. Who wants a tattoo that looks like a sunflower. And whose disability was chronic period pain.

See, I'm clumsy in bed too (among other places). And have plenty of flesh to kneed. I don't know that I can get a tattoo now that I'm on anticoagulants, but if I were to ever get one, it'd probably be something cheery like a sunflower too. And boy do I know what chronic period pain is like as everyone of my periods since I started having them when I was ten years old have been dreadful.

Sometimes it’s a constant cracking against the back of my spine, sometimes it’s a top note sung by a soprano, but held against my groin for sixteen hours. Medication doesn’t seem to help, and heaven knows I’ve tried most of the alternatives.

It sounds a bit silly, but I started crying a little when I read that bit. I just never hear anybody ever talk about the ordeal that painful periods can be -- you know, outside of pamphlets from the doctor's office. And I certainly haven't see someone validate that experience by making it the primary conflict in a story. But it wasn't just a story, it was a damn sexy story.

As I continued reading, I found that this was a character I could so see myself hanging out with. Exchanging medical horror stories or sharing the alternative that has finally worked for me (Red Raspberry leaf tea, as impossible as that may be to believe, considering how exquisite the pain).

And that, that was when it suddenly dawned on me that I don't ever imagine myself hanging out with the characters in the erotica I generally read. Part of that comes down to just how effective Ms. Applebee is in creating such realistic characters. But a lot of it is that characters in erotica intimidate the hell out of me.

I'm not stylish. I'm five feet tall and fat. The last pieces of clothing I bought were a sensible white Playtex bra on sale this month online, a red shirt and a pair of jeans on sale at Walmart about a year ago, and a t-shirt from the Goodwill several months before that. I only own three pairs of shoes (that accommodate my orthotics). So, you know, no skin tight dresses or several hundred dollar fuck me shoes here.

I do live in a studio downtown, but I live in HUD housing with seniors and the disabled which sorta takes away any sort of glamour from the whole living in the city thing. And my part of the city is where the meth freaks and pimps hang out, though personally, I like the color they add to the neighborhood.

Being on Food Stamps means that canapes are never on the menu here, though I do make the best chocolate chip cookies ever. And Two-Buck-Chuck is about the only wine you'll find in my kitchen -- and then only when A. is here because I can't really drink much wine anymore.

Erotica is all about fantasy and so it is understandable that it will reflect what is most perfect in our society. Writing -- erotica or otherwise -- requires a certain level of education to both attain the skills necessary to create worlds on paper (or computer), as well as the ability to think originally about topics, particularly ones that are mostly taboo. And most of those who get that education come from a base socio-economic level and higher. It's hard to think and write about sex when, say, you just barely finished high school and you're trying to figure out how to pay the rent on your trailer despite working four jobs (a common predicament in my family).

I remember years ago listening to essayist Richard Rodriguez on the NewsHour talk about how little poverty makes it into our literature (aside from the Bohemian sort). That we needed people to write about the experience of being poor in the same way that writers such as Toni Morrison have talked about the experience of being African-American or how he had written about being Latino.

I remember thinking at the time, hey, I could do that. I know what it's like to grow up poor. Thanks to an illness which has left me incapable of doing any job in the national economy (as the vocational expert testified at my disability hearing), I still get to know what it's like to be poor.

And if Jacqueline Applebee can write hot, sexy erotica about chronic period pain, well damnit, I should be writing hot, sexy erotica about poor, fat, sick people.

You know, people I could totally hang out with...