Her Divinity’s Sweet Nectar encased in a Mason Jar
It wasn’t until I was twisting the key into an apartment in Brooklyn that I’d never been to that Mason Jar’s took on a whole new meaning. I pushed open the door into his home for the first time and stepped straight into the kitchen. Facing me was a small table where I had been left a note and a bottle of cold sparkling water. With the sparkling water was a mason jar. There was one chair and a cheap folding plastic table. The kitchen was sad. The floors were covered in an old off white lino and the sink had three mason jars drying with two plates and a few pieces of mismatched cutlery drying. I loudly threw the keys on the table that I’d picked up at the coffee shop on the corner and looked out of the window onto the fire escapes and backs of other typically wood framed houses. The sky was dense with continuity, it was cold. The lights weren’t on in the apartment so a clouded brightness dimmed the apartment.
I was in Greenpoint and it was a Saturday morning in January 2017 at 11.30 am. I felt bored, I had been nervous before I arrived. Not because of what was about to happen but because now I was here a feeling of tedium was infiltrating my every pore. This could be classified as an anti climax. I was jet lagged and had already been up since 5am so I was highly alert and my eyes bounced off the apartment's walls, engulfing every element of its meagre decoration.
There was a photo of Che Guevara framed on the wall.
I sat at the kitchen table and poured myself a glass of water into the mason jar. The water seemed like an energy that the room so desperately needed, its speed and temperature against the acceptably practical decoration of the space. I hated the glass, why does everyone in America use them? Are they recycled or are they created just to drink out of? The ridges at their rim only agitate me and who designed the facades decoration? If you were to use the screw top to transport whatever you’ve put in the Mason Jar wouldn’t the fact that its made of glass discredit this apparently useful feature? Because it could break so easily?Are these glasses meant to be practical in their possibility to various use? Do they make the owner look humble?
This wasn’t sexy. I thought it was men who are supposed to get more visually stimulated but the lack of care gone into this home was wiping any punctuations of excitement out of me. I knew that he didn’t arouse me, I didn’t have to meet him to know this. He has a tattoo of Jim Morrison’s face in a folk art style on his arm. I think it even says ‘Mr Mojo Man’ underneath it.
I opened his fridge and there was nothing in it.
The sound of my heels filled the narrow apartment as I strode past him to the other end of the apartment to his bookshelf. There were a lot of Bukowski books, some Orwell. A fair amount of David Foster Wallace taking up all the space both metaphorically and physically and other men. He even has a shelf dedicated to women. There were two books about Alcoholics Anonymous, the American’s favourite past-time. In the corner of the living room facing the window there was an acoustic guitar propped against the wall. My stomach turned.
He applies heavy filters onto his photos on Instagram, cosy hues of oranges and blues over the top of banal photos of Manhattan at sunset. I don’t need to show you this image for you to know exactly what it looks like. What emotion does this image evoke in you? He even takes photos of his coffee, from above so the rim of the cup would nicely fit into the photo sharing app’s square dimensions filling it with frothed milk.
I sat at the kitchen table and looked at his Instagram. He posted a still from Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas of Nastassja Kinski in her iconic off the shoulder pink wool sweater in the mirrored brothel room. Natasha is so gorgeous and she is making eye contact with the lens of the camera, although she is really just looking at herself. In the photo she is smiling, grinning her way through the enforced humiliation of her ex husband stalking her after she ran away from the responsibilities of being a woman. And here we are faced with her trauma and demonisation but the photo is so sensual, her femininity is so consumable. He has added a filter over the top of this still.
He is fully dressed because I really, really don’t ever want to have to see his Jim Morrison tattoo. I hate to tell you this but he also has The Rolling Stone’s logo on his wrist. These salivating red lips with obnoxiously exerted tongue are synonymous with the sex abuse we ignore that rock bands in the 1960s almost certainly committed and languished in. Men who can get away with anything, white men who even wrote songs about slavery and tried to make it sexy and made millions out of it.
I’d only arrived here because I needed to realise that I have erotic potential. My sex drive had plummeted into apathy after refusing to find anyone attractive and I wanted an orgasm however I didn’t want to become have to be enthralled with the person’s intellect just to find them desirable. I have never been the sort of person where you can let your animal instinct take over because things like Jim Morrison tattoos behead any minor, curious vibrations in my clitoris.
Another instagram photo shows Brooklyn after heavy snowfall and a coffee shop sandwich board drenched in white with the only discernible word left to be read being ‘Brooklyn’. Seven people have liked it.
It is a shotgun apartment and the bedroom conjoined the kitchen to the living room. His duvet cover is a dark beige. He was on his knees facing the wall wearing a blindfold in silence.There is nothing more erotic to me that possibility, and here in front of me there was possibility. But I wasn’t turned on.
I told him to take his shoes off. This meant that he would be less able to leave and that my safety felt marginally more secure. His hands felt the floor as he balanced his body and he slipped them off then kneeled facing the wall again with his hands behind his back.
Maybe being in power was sexy but it all felt too easy. I was telling him what to do. And that was pleasure for him. But then again I would have hated for the power to have been a struggle. You really can’t win.
He had approached me on Instagram after seeing that I was in New York to do a reading. His use of language automatically alluded to an eagerness to please. I had made him wake up at 7am to greet me good morning then go to a sex shop to buy my a vibrator and a blindfold. I had no intention of using the sex toy but I thought the process of making him buy it and then not use it would be good.
He had been wearing black trainers, they deserve no greater description than this. Sometimes when I go to a private view and the event is boring I try and get my friends to play a game where we take photos on our phones of the worst shoes worn by straight white men. When we leave we all look at the photos and decide on the most aesthetically anaesthetic of them. These men never think about people looking at their feet. I stared at the socked soles of his feet and there was something a little bit endearing about how vulnerable they seemed in comparison to the classic BDSM position that he was in.
His whole apartment had a musky smell of clothes and bed sheets that have been washed too many times with cheap laundry power. He wasn’t allowed to speak or see me, I felt as if minimising him to a body meant that I would be able to reassemble him into my own object of desire. But it became increasingly clear that I couldn’t pretend that he possesses the types of effortless brilliance that really turns me on.
I went over to his sofa and extended my long pvc boots on to his coffee table and went back to looking at my phone. This time I looked at his Facebook profile. There was a photo of him and an old white man with a slight mullet and dyed black hair. Both men are wearing Ray Ban sunglasses. He is wearing a black Levi’s jacket. The old man is Ronnie Wood from The Rolling Stones. This photo was clearly a chance meeting. Ronnie Wood has been married three times and has seven children. His current wife is 30 years younger than him. He left his longest marriage of 23 years for an eighteen year old waitress when he was 61. The one who aspires to be my sub is grinning deeply and giving the camera the middle finger.
I was in a situation where my actual dislike, or more like disinterest was playing alongside my fictitious one as a dominatrix. I looked over at him, staring at the soles of his feet and trying to connect with that earlier glimmer of vulnerability.
An invisible and mundane gravity was thudding through stifling grey apartment. I looked at him again and he was melodramatically trembling, as if his knees hurt and his body was under stress.
I lay back down on his sofa. I went back to looking at my phone and to his ‘fetish’ twitter account where he has a kinky alter ego. He seems to enjoy female bodybuilders and shares photos of them. These women’s natural softness has been solidified into chunks of oily muscle, their jawlines brutalized into stiffness and veins protruding from every angle of their glossed bronze frames. Their smiles emit bright white teeth but no joy.
He enjoys the fetish world in the most referential of ways. Women in shiny latex and dyed maroon hair which has been simultaneously straightened and curled with heels that have a platform at the toes. Often these women have cat eye’ flicks painted in black on their eyelids. Why is it that the kink world is continually stuck in a purgatory of the most painful kind of 1950’s retro mania? What was really so sexually liberating about the 1950s?
It was probably time to do something a bit fetish-y. I walked over to him and made him lick my boots. He was on his hands and knees and I stared at the acoustic guitar as his tongue run along the soles of my boots. I had to maneuver my feet around his face due to his superficial blindness. It was kind of hot but I couldn’t get lost in it. Instead my ankles felt awkward and rigid as they hovered in the air. I focused on trying to make sure that my boots were being cleaned adequately. Standing up was too laborious so I sat on the corner of his bed staring at his two 1960s Danish chairs as he jolted his neck up and down my ankles.
He’d left the vibrator in its box on the bed so I took it out as he carried on licking my boots. It didn’t seem that expensive and immediately turned me off. I turned it on so he would be able to hear the vibrating, then looked at his masked face as his face grimaced into a slightly more foolish impression of servitude. I was still wearing my coat and I let him touch it with his right hand by holding his wrist and placing it on the PVC on my lap.
I turned it off, the dildo was obnoxious and frankly embarrassing then stood up and walked back over to his kitchen, leaving him on his hands and knees. What was this emotion that I was experiencing? He is 38 years old and I am 26. He is Argentinian but has a German name and red hair.
I looked around his kitchen and noticed a mug that said ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’ on it in the style of those insidiously smug ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’ logos. I tried to refocus on the element of sex that was happening between the both of us instead of this visceral boredom that was becoming more and more undeniable. He had told me that he would dream of drinking my piss. That he would do anything for me, that he wanted me to remove his ego, destroy his potent and destructive masculinity, that he respects women above everything else. Over text message he addresses me as ‘Goddess’. He said he couldn’t believe that I was taking my time to speak with him and that I was above him. The compliments are endless and soon become stupefying. I suppose it is always interesting to see how far you can take it until the compliments stop being interesting.
He was still on his hands and knees where I had left him. I took a Mason Jar from his kitchen sink, placed it on the floor then crouched, pulling my knickers to the side and pissed into it. Steam began to evaporate upwards as I almost filled it. I put the Mason Jar on his kitchen table. Then I said to him
'I've left you something on the table' And walked out of the door with a melodramatic slam behind me.