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SMUT STAND REPORT: Oct. 6, 2015 (New Orleans)

Here, honey! This nice young man is for YOU.

Here, honey! This nice young man is for YOU.

WHEN: 4.75 hours (7:45pm-12:30am), Oct 6, 2015. WHERE: Frenchmen Street (in front of Bicycle Michael’s), New Orleans. OUTPUT: four full-length pieces, including a medium-core hiking vignette; a rare MMF threesome in a sex club (probably as rare in sex clubs as in Sidewalk Smut); and some reverse-cowgirl action at a daytime outdoor concert in which I totally downplayed the likelihood of the couple getting busted.

I was unaccountably nervous going back to Literary Row, the spot in front of Bicycle Michael’s where the poets-for-hire have all gravitated over the years. Last year there was a fair bit of inter-genre tension, if you recall, and I didn’t know which poets would be out. I didn’t realize until last night that I was still a little scarred from that experience, and not feeling very trusting/open with the poets. I want to work on that this season; that is not a good emotional place in which to spend the majority of one’s nights.

As often happens, the neighborhood took a little while to collectively “wake up” to my presence, which this night was quite okay, because I totally had a scare with the new ribbon that I had installed that afternoon. GAH, why does the ribbon keep slipping the guides?! I hate doing repairs and adjustments out there on the street, because the lighting is poor and people are staring and I’m sitting there sweating and all, like, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I forget for entire stretches of minutes that I have opposable thumbs. I flipped the ribbon a few times, rolled a little further down to adjust the tension, and … huh. Maybe that’ll work. Pushed the ink tab from red to black—when you have a red/black ribbon, this switches between colors—and voilà! SAVED.

All my customers turned up between the hours of 8:45 and 11:30pm—yeah, an hour is not that unusual of a run-up time—but they were good people. I got two small groups of girls-night-outs, which are great, because they will usually egg each other on to get pieces. The first one, she kept saying that she was too vanilla, but her cousins insisted that she had just been through a break-up and she needed this. When I finished her piece and read it to her, she was kinda wide-eyed and said, “Oh my god, I need to show it to my cousins!”

A little later, one of the girl cousins, the one who had been most insistent, came out of dba to get her story done. She was already pretty tipsy, but she knew exactly what she wanted: “I want my husband to have his cock sucked by a guy, and then get his ass fucked. This is for a Christmas present.” I… what? For all my time doing Sidewalk Smut and phone sex, I have never heard that sentence before. I squinted at her in the neon glow, trying to figure out if she was yanking my chain or trying to trick a novelty piece out of me, or maybe trying to get a piece of revenge smut, but she waved her hand at me and said, “No, no, this is totally what he needs. He’s bisexual, see, and hasn’t had sex with a guy in over a decade, and we’re totally swingers and nudists, and there’s this one couple we’ve swung with, and that guy is bi too, and it would be so good for my husband!”

She gave me a lot of hardcore details, to the point where I had to stop her and say, look, I’m only doing half a page. She said, “I will give you another 20 if you do a full page. Oh, and he needs to fuck the other guy, too. And can you mention Body Dew? That’s our favorite lube, we buy it by the gallon, it’s got pheremones in it, and it’s amazing. Can you fit that all in?” <short pause> For $40, yes, lady, I can fit that in. Seriously, I love doing homoerotic pieces out on the stand, especially in the middle of extremely heteronormative neighborhoods like Frenchmen Street, so I banged that shit out in record time. She LOVED it, and shoved the extra 20 in my hand and hugged me, and then asked for it to be sealed up: “I can’t let my cousins see that!” Probably not.

By 10 or so, two poets had shown up, and Matt the Poet rolled up at 11:30. I’ve never understood why he shows up so late, but I guess they don’t generally worry so much about getting drunk customers. My last customer was a woman who was in the middle of a divorce from a man who never ever wanted to eat her out or actually do much of any kind of sex with her—FOR TEN YEARS—but she was three months into a new relationship and wanted to get her boyfriend some exhibitionistic smut (I put them right up against the hotel window, in a lit room, at night). That was a good piece to end on; anyway, I could tell from the energy of the street that I wasn’t going to be getting anything else that night.

Matt and I had planned to go out for a drink after, but then he got a couple of commissions in a row, and I ended up hanging around for about 45 minutes. We walked down to The John, where the seats inside are repurposed toilets. Tradition has it that whoever makes the most money out there on the stand, buys a drink for the other person. I bought him a PBR, and I had a plain tonic water, while he told me about learning to do pyrotechnics at a major installation at Burning Man this summer.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t have adventures on a poet’s budget.

*****

There are lessons to be learned from Sidewalk Smut, and they’re all coming out soon in a brand-new sex advice column. Help support that and my many other projects, by becoming a patron of mine over on Patreon!

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