SMUT STAND REPORT: Oct 26, 2016 (New Orleans)
WHEN: 5 hours (7:30pm-12:30am), Oct 27, 2016. WHERE: Frenchmen Street (in front of Bicycle Michael’s), New Orleans. OUTPUT: five full-length pieces, including a blissfully unconcerned fingering in a parking lot, a first-time visit to a sex club, and a lesbian, medium-softcore, clown-on-clown pie-splosh party out in the country (see below).
My old car rattles loudest on the days when I am feeling particularly poor and worn-out, and tonight I could barely hear myself think as I drove home from the Smut Stand.
No reason in particular; I did decent trade. I think it was just a badly paced night, coming in fits and starts, as opposed to the night before, which had kicked into gear at around 9:30pm and just didn’t really let up. Tonight I didn’t get my first customer until I had been sitting there for nearly two hours. So many couples passed by where one person wanted smut and their partner objected or talked them out of it; I’m sure that happens all the time, but I don’t normally hear about it. And there were herds of unaccompanied Australian men roaming around. For some reason, Australian men are some of the biggest jerkwads to come in contact with the Smut Stand.
For the last couple of days, I’ve also been feeling a little dry. I can still pound out the pieces, and people love them as much as ever, but I have to dig a little deeper and the sides of my brain get scraped a little from the effort. I remember having this feeling in other years, but I can’t remember how I replenished the well.
Part of it, I think, is that I miss Matt-the-Poet, who is determined not to have to come out and do poetry anymore. I think that’s a great idea for him, but I miss him. When he’s out there next to me on the sidewalk, I always feel good, like, there’s some regular social exchange going on. When he’s not there, there is no break in my creative exertion. I can feel the strain of the mental work. I can’t convince Matt-the-Poet to come back out, so I guess I’m going to have to figure out some other way to take the pressure off.
Things weren’t all bad tonight. Two customers from years past stopped by, including one from three years ago! The other came up and asked for a hug. “You won’t remember me, but my husband and I got a story from you last year, the day after we got married,” she said, gesturing at a man who was standing near a rickshaw and waving. “It’s our one-year anniversary, and we still have that up on our wall.” An hour later she came back with a pint-sized go cup full of wine. “We’re going back to the hotel to make some more smut, but do you want this?” she asked. “It’s a really good Chardonnay from dinner, but I just couldn’t finish it.” (It was amazing Chardonnay.)
On the other end of the marriage spectrum were the parents of a large Asian family whose giggling adult daughter (“our fifth daughter,” mentioned the mother) wanted to treat her parents to some smut on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. English was not their first language, so I had to go through my explanation twice, and occasionally had to repeat a question, but they got it. Oh yeah, they did. That old dude could not keep his hands off his wife; like, he patted her ass at several points throughout the interview. They both enthusiastically voted for “graphic,” but at the end of the interview, she said, “Please keep it classy, I don’t want it to be crude.” Well. I guess I did all right there, because their smiles were so big, and he patted her ass again and really let his hand linger. I love seeing lascivious couples who have been married for a long time! It gives the lie to the other married couples who insist on playing around with that old ball-and-chain, tired-of-sex trope.
As for the clown piece? I honestly thought the young woman was yanking my chain. I mean, girl clown-on-girl clown pie-splosh party out in the country? Gimme a break! But no, she explained that she had been in circuses and clown troupes for over a decade, was thoroughly bisexual, and had actually filmed some amateur food porn a few years back. Okay, then. When I read her piece out loud—complete with a bike horn, whipped-cream covered pies, and a pair of panties that squirted water in her lover’s face, like the flower in the buttonhole—she jumped up and down for a couple of minutes, laughing with glee and excitement until she almost cried.
*****
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