My girlfriend George (short for Georgina) pulls on some stockings. They’re black, with little red hearts on them. Her coworker gave them to her.
“She got them as a kind of joke gift. But she didn’t want them, so she gave them to me,” George tells me, her thumb and forefingers pulling up and adjusting the welt of the stocking, thin and lacy.
“I don’t find them funny,” I say, checking out her legs. George looks up and eyes the bulge in my underwear.
“Huh,” she says, then smiles.
I decide to put something on too. I open up my lingerie drawer and take a look.
Now, not many boys have a lingerie drawer, nor do many boys have lingerie. But I do.
I’d wanted one since I was little. My mom had one, and she had great lingerie – patterned pantyhose, silky slips. It was great stuff. But my family, being quite regular, would have found it more acceptable to supply me with a year’s worth of beer than a month’s supply of stockings. But ever since moving out, I’ve been adding to my collection – a bra here, a bustier there – and now I have my very own lingerie drawer. I’m very proud of it. Sometimes I think that if there was a fire in my building, I would grab that drawer before anything else.
I decide on some black thigh-highs and a short black slip.
“Can you help me with this?” George asks, holding up my emerald green bustier. She’s worn it before, and I love the way it looks on her.
I go over and pull the bustier around her midsection, hooking the little clasps at the back. Then I bend down until my face is at bum-height and begin attaching the garter straps to the stockings.
“Woo! I feel sexier already,” George says, reaching into the bustier cups to adjust her boobs.
I kiss her bare bum, then tell her to turn around. When she does, I attach the front garter straps to her stockings.
“If you ever get a garter belt yourself, make sure to get metal clasps,” I tell her.
“Are these metal clasps?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve had ones with plastic clasps in the past, and they break too easily.”
“I like that you know this, boyfriend.”
“The areas of my expertise are video games and lingerie,” I laugh. Finally I’m done and I stand up. Then George kisses me.
It’s an interesting feeling to wear a costume before having sex. The other day I went swimming again for the first time in years, and turning the shower on while wearing my swim-shorts felt very odd. As the water ran down my chest and down into the shorts, making them wet and heavy, it felt very wrong, but only because the last several thousand times I’d stepped into a shower I’d been naked.
The same thing happens when you put on lingerie before sex. It feels weird to dress up for sex. Most of the time sex is a matter of taking off, rather than putting on. But sometimes putting stuff on is a huge turn-on.
Gently, George and I ease onto the bed, and our stockinged legs rub against each other.
In grade 11, I took a world religions course and my teacher, Ms. Friedlander, told us all about this Buddhist notion of the universe that impressed me greatly.
Basically, she told us that we were water.
I mean, I know that we’re supposed to be 70 per cent water, but the Buddhist idea is a little more abstract than that, but also a little more specific. We are the water near a rocky beach. In particular, we are the kind of the water in a particularly powerful wave hitting a particularly sturdy rock, when drops fly everywhere.
We are the drops. That is, our individual lives begin when a drop is formed by the incredible impact of a wave. Each droplet, and its arc – I don’t know, maybe it only flies a few feet before it hits the ocean again and is absorbed back into sea – is one life here on earth.
And that’s it. That’s the big idea. There isn’t really any heaven or hell. There are just droplets created by waves splashing on rocks, and these drops’ eventual re-absorption into the googelplex of drops that form the ocean. And the next time water hits the rocks, maybe we reincarnate into another life.
I like it. It’s very simple. It’s a nice metaphor. And I kind of carry that idea around with me every day.
It’s also a nice metaphor for coming.
The Hipless Boy would like to thank everyone who read the column this year. Comments and questions can be directed to inconsolablecat@hotmail.com. For regular readers of this column, please be advised that the Slowdance Night that I co-organize will be hosting its annual Prom on Friday, April 11, 2008. 9 p.m. – 3 a.m. at La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent). Your $10 ticket includes the latest Worn fashion journal, as well as your dance-card. Dress fancy!