Sunday, September 12, 1999

A Few Minutes In The Life Of A Fudge Packing Fool (Part 4: Verb Present Tense)

I've got my left hand on the edge of the bed, my right on the small of his back. My lower body is in the altar boy giving "bless me Father for I have sinned" head position. And after six positions in about twenty minutes after a full day of work serving dead cattle to zombie tourists, I'm not just fucken (adj. form) tired, I am fucking (verb present tense) tired. Even though neither of us have come yet, I'm thinking of grabbing my briefs off the floor and waving them like a flag. Then Aaron starts bucking against me and ---- we're done.

"Shit." he says, stretching toward Mecca. "Are you as wiped as I am."

"Yea" is all I can really manage to say.

It's been four days since I hired Erin, three since I realized he was, in fact, Aaron. In those three days, he's spent a great deal of time in my bedroom.

"Do you have to work tomorrow?" he asks.

"Yea, but I'm the first one in, so I should get cut early."

"What time should I come over?"

"Are you leaving?" I ask. He has this habit of taking off directly after sex, which is okay by me. I don't mind being a booty call. I haven't had anything even remotely close to a boyfriend since Elvis, and even though it's been over a year, I'm not sure I'm ready. Add to this the fact that I still had an enormous crush on my best friend (and things like that ALWAYS work out for the best), and the employee with benefits package fits my needs perfectly.

"Do you want me to stay?" Here's where we might end up in tricky territory, if I ask him to stay I might be perceived as clingy, and if I ask him to leave...

I'm saved from making this decision by the sound of my front door opening. This is one of those out of the frying pan into the spinning knife blades dipped in acid moments. There are three people with the keys to my house: my mother, my best friend (Liam), and my sidekick/former coworker/kind of formerish crush Cute Straight Boy. So, who's behind door number one?

Thursday, September 9, 1999

A Few Minutes In The Life Of A Fudge Packing Fool (Part 3: Juice)

I can only fit 10 1/2 inches in my mouth when I've taken my socks off first. I have no idea how much I can take in the ass because no one has made an attempt to kick it since I was in junior high. While I think Aaron would be entitled to pull my foot out of my mouth and insert it up my own ass, I believe he has made other plans for that particular orifice.

"We should maybe continue this conversation at your house, with alcohol."

"Yes," I say, "lots and lots of alcohol." I'm not sure if there is an actual volume of alcohol that can be drunk to erase away the memory of gender identity confusion. But if there is such an amount, tonight I shall drink it.

Aaron rides my ass all the way home. I have a feeling he may continue to ride my ass once we get there.

"Nice place." He says when we've put the last shower-capped pan of fudge on my kitchen counter. "Beer in the fridge?"

"Yes."

"Where? All I see is hard lemonade, cider, and Zima. Are you sure you're not a girl?"

"There's Guinness in there somewhere. Let me see if I can find it for you." I reach in and start moving around the various togo boxes and Cherry Coke cans that have filled the lower two shelves. "Ah, there we are, one" penis presses firmly against my ass. "Hello."

"Just wanted you to be sure that it was there."

Apart from Randy, no one has ever been remotely as forward as Aaron is being. I am equal parts turned on and horrified.

He reaches over me toward one of the widget cans on the top shelf. "You, uh don't want one of those, let me get you a bottle."

"I prefer the cans, if you don't mind."

"No. They've been in their since R...they've been in there for a long time. The bottles are fresh."

He backs away from me. "Ok."

A Guiness for him, a Pumpkinhead Ale for me, and we are good to go. I go into the living room and sit in one of the cranberry wingback chairs that my mother left in the condo when she moved out. I am not terribly surprised when, instead of sitting on the couch, or the other chair, Aaron straddleds my lap. "Comfy?" He asks. I am decidedly not, but it is the type of uncomfortablity that I am growing accustomed to.

"So how many years have you been working at the faire now?"

"Three years."

"And all this time you thought I was a woman?"

Truth be told, I hadn't thought of Aaron at all until he approached me about working for us. I had taken the blank slate approach to working at the renaissance faire. I stayed in my little booth and did not very exciting fudge centered things, while the faire moved flamboyantly around me. In three years I hadn't learned the name of a single person who didn't work in my booth. "Well, to be fair, until last night, I'd only seen you from a distance."

"So you weren't interested in me at all? You were too busy drooling over Ben and CSB, I guess."

"Ben drools enough on his own, he doesn't need me helping him, and CSB is straight. I didn't notice you because I'm incredibly" He kisses me. Like a girl. His face is soft, like he just came from swimming in an ocean of aloe and vera.

"You're a pretty good kisser for a first timer."

"First timer?"

"Have you kissed a guy before?" His gaydar may be finely tuned, but his whoredar is apparently on the fritz.

"One or two" hundred.

"Anyone else from the faire?"

"No. Are there a lot of gay guys working there?"

"Most are trendy-bi at least."

"Like who?" I asked.

"Both nut boys, one of the mud men, the village drunk, three of the wax workers, three of the fudge men, one blacksmith, the jeweler, two of the leather & chain mail salesmen, the entire staff of the costume booth, and the red knight. The court jester, one of the guys at the fried dough booth, the other mud man, and about half a dozen of the actors are straight up gay."

"Jesus, is there any guy there that you haven't fucked?" I ask incredulously. Whether I am incredulous at the volume of people he had slept with, the shittiness of my gaydar, or the hypocrisy of me being shocked by someone's whoring, I'll let you decide.

He shakes his head and laughs at me. "I didn't fuck all of them, I just know they're gay or bisexual. I've only slept with" he began counting on his fingers, "most of them."

"Wait a second. You said three of the fudge men."

"Yea."

"I know CSB shows up on gaydar, but I'm reasonably certain he's bi. You haven't..."

"Well," he says, "I think he's at least bi, but I was talking about Brent."

"Brent's bi?"

"Yea," he says, "we work together at the hardware store during the off-season. Everyone there calls him Juice."

"Why?"

"Because when he gets drunk, he takes guys home and asks them if they'll juice themselves on him. You know, cum."

"Thanks, I got it." And I want to give it back. Brent is fairly cute when he isn't speaking or otherwise making a fool of himself, but I do not want to think of him spread eagled on a floor somewhere asking people to jerk off on him.

"I take it you don't want to invite him over for a threesome. It's just as well. I'd rather have you all to myself."

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/62770.html

A Few Minutes In The Life Of A Fudge Packing Fool (Part 2: The Little Lesbian)

At some point during the fifteenth century, a bunch of European artists thought it would be a good idea to start a movement. Donatello sculpted saints. Michaelangelo sculpted naked adolescents and painted God on ceilings, among other things. Raphael obsessed over The Virgin Mother. Leonardo daVinci chronicled Jesus's dining habits. Five centuries later we celebrate their influence by paying absurd amounts of money to dress up in outdated clothes and talk in pigeon middle english. If we're too poor to afford that, we rent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle DVDs.

I always imagined that The Renaissance was a fictional era created just for the purpose of pissing me off.

I attended a small private middle school where we spent several weeks of our mandatory Latin class discussing various Renaissance artists. My attempts to point out that Latin was spoken primarily B.C.E. and not seventeen centuries later were ignored. The following year, I returned to public school where our art teacher obsessed over the human versions of the TMNT. When confronted with the fact that there were other art movements throughout the course of history, she was often heard saying "Andy Warwho?" or "I think I've heard of Norman Rockwell, didn't he have something to do with Stonehenge?" After a year of the under funded over drugged public school, I went to a boarding school where my humanities teacher spent the first two months going over, you guessed it, Medieval history.

When I was at Sulfur City College, I made sure to avoid any class that mentioned the peasanty time period.

Why then, when I was free from the shackles of enforced American education, did I take a job selling fudge at a bloody Renaissance faire? Was I trying to match my poverty to a time period?

Whatever the reason, after two years of spending weekends and occasional week long vacations traveling the country peddling candy in parks, forests, museum gardens, and college campuses dressed in blue and purple tights, I had developed an intense hatred for thees, thous and sheep fucking jokes.

I had just finished training Cute Straight Boy on the finer points of not killing fat children who tried to steal lollipops, when he told me he'd gotten a job licking dog shit off asphalt or some other job that had slightly more dignity than renaissance faire fudge cutter.

"Dude. I thought you were going to help manage this stupid thing so I could take some time off."

"Sorry," he said, "It's a great business opportunity. Nobody there has ever stolen my keys, put it in their cleavage and asked me to remove it with my teeth."

"I thought you liked women's cleavage. Are you gay now?" I didn't succeed in convincing him to stay.

I spent the next day working with someone who I can only hope had been dropped on his head several times as a child. I racked my brains trying to think of who I knew that had low enough standards but high enough work ethic to hire as a replacement CSB (Cute Straight Boy for those who have trouble figuring out acronyms). No one. This was during the great unemployed cute boy drought of 99.

That night I decided to join the fair monkeys at a local bar. As much as I dreaded being surrounded by people who refused to change out of their personas in public, I liked the fact that they often bought me drinks. I was on my third Midori Sour when Erin approached me.

"Hey." She said. "What happened to your sidekick?"

"You mean CSB? He quit yesterday in order to take a job as an elephant gynecologist."

"Is he a vet or something?"

"No, he just likes sticking his head into gigantic vaginas."

"I see." She said in a tone that indicated that she didn't. "So are you looking to replace him?"

"Yea, do you know someone looking for a job?" I asked, trying unsuccessfully to restrain my glee.

It turned out that Erin wanted to quit her job at the face painting booth, but didn't want to quit the faire. Score! I told her she could start working with me as soon as she was ready.

She showed up the next day. I gave her the intense How To Resist The Urge To Throw The Fudgecutting Knife At No-Teeth Having Women Who Complain About The Size Of The Fudge training, and watched her interact with the rabble. She was great. She had a short temper that she accented with a sharp wit, and she knew how to smile while threatening to disembowel you. If she was a boy, I'd have been in love.

At the end of the second day, she offered to help me throw the tarp over the booth, and drive the unsold fudge back to my house, which was about a forty-five minute drive. "Are you sure?"

"Yea."

I packed each of our cars with fudge pans, and was about ready to take off when I noticed her pink triangle on the bumper. I couldn't say I was overly shocked. She was a tiny, buzz-cutted, sassy chick who played Ani Difranco CDs while we set up in the morning.

She smirked when she noticed me noticing her bumper sticker. "Yea, I'm gay."

"Cool. I figured."

"And it doesn't bother you?" Note to readers: I was not in any way, shape, or form out while I worked at the faire...too many aggressive unhygienic gay guys in kilts worked there.

"Why would your sexuality bother me? It doesn't effect how well you cut fudge. Dykes cut fudge just as well as straight boys."

"Dykes?" Uh-oh.

"I didn't mean it as an insult. I'm gay, I'm allowed." There, now we were on equal ground. We were each out to each other, and--

"You think I'm a girl?"

"I'm sorry, are you transgender?"

"No. I'm a boy."

"Boi. Like with an i?"

"No. Boy. Like with a penis."

Erin. Aaron. Short hair. Boyish face. "Oh. Wow, I'm really sorry, I thought..."

"I thought you hired me because you were trying to get in my pants." she said.

"No, I... you knew I was gay?"

"Yea, I saw the way you looked at CSB. And the only reason anyone would hire that meathead, Brent, is if they thought he was cute."

To be fair, I hired Brent because my boss made me. I've never had a thing for cute dumb guys. But I'd hired Aaron because I needed another employee. I'd even hired someone who I thought was a woman.

I tried to think of some way to gracefully turn the tide of this conversation. Not a single word came to mind.

original post: http://insafemode.livejournal.com/61352.html