Since pandemic-time I’ve been doing surveys for the City’s Health Department. It’s not about the gift cards. They are worth $10 a pop making my time worth about 50¢ a minute, or $30/hour. The surveys take far less than a full hour. I do the surveys with the illusory feeling that I am contributing something of value to something that matters.
In the earliest surveys, peak pandemic, there were questions about anal sex and non-traditional sexual practices. Why? I never answered those questions. But one question seems to linger in my mind. Almost every survey, as far as I would attempt to recall, asks if I am capable of washing and cleaning my “whole body.” As in, “not just the easy parts.”
I do, in fact, use bar soap to lather as much of this immaculate creature’s bucket of bones and water as there is to be cleansed. I didn’t used to. A few years ago I knew a woman who, besides being an almost insatiable sex addict, learned to love sitting together in the bathtub. She had always showered standing but I introduced her to the simplicity and calmness of sitting instead. She said she may never stand for a shower again. We had very little basis for a meaningful relationship but I was happy to have brought that fundamental and positive change to her diurnal routines. We don’t talk anymore and I don’t know why we ever would but I bet she thinks of me every single time she sits down in her bathtub.
From watching and talking with her I discovered I was not scrubbing clean the bottoms of my feet, or the spaces between my toes. My legs, too, which now get the full treatment, were largely ignored before she would lecture me on the importance of cleaning your appendages. She would admit that, thanks to me, since she began sitting in the tub it made proximity to feet and legs a lot easier and even safer than trying to reach those areas while standing.
She let me wash her feet but only if I did so thoroughly, getting in between those conspicuously tiny toes and scrubbing everything from heels to ankles up to the knees and beyond. The only reason I do that myself today is because she made me do it for her. I also wash behind my ears more aggressively than I used to, though I do seem to remember always doing that. It is said to help prevent certain types of acne and maybe even Rosacea, the latter of which I’ve experienced but eliminated with prescription Metronizadole.
Something else I brought to her shower/bath routine was anal hygiene. People cringe when I mention it, but it’s no big deal. You just blow water up your ass for a few seconds, as you might with a bidet. The difference in simply being seated in a chair is like night and day since I started doing that. It’s kind of disgusting to think about it in detail but it goes without saying that stuff gets wadded and chunked up in that space. I actually think heavy toilet paper like Charmin might be a partial culprit but I don’t know. Diet is everything. Just blow it all away with a few seconds of shower. It’s easy and makes such a difference. I wonder if that is implied in that Health Department question about washing your whole body. Your hole body.
She liked to play around with the showerhead settings. Part of what makes showering on the floor work was my procurement of an extra-long shower hose and a showerhead with 6 settings, only 2 of which I ever use, but she liked to go through all of the settings in what came to feel like a ritual. One of the settings, we both agreed, seemed to make the hot water feel a bit colder. The two gentler settings, accessed by clicking the switch to either side of the central setting, are my favorites, but she used different settings on different parts of her body. The jackhammer, as I called it, was a setting I never used but she aimed that sucker at the back of her neck, sometimes for several minutes. The softer settings were saved for her crotch and face.
When I do these Health surveys for the City I always stop at that question: Are you able to wash your whole body? Will answering yes to this question someday become a lie? When will I become unable to reach my feet or arrange my body for that buttwash flourish? Will even raising my hands to wash my hair become painful, or impossible? Will I ever be able to find another woman like this one?
Suddenly I am restless and pacing. I am at home. I seldom write anything at home anymore. ANYMORE. There is a word with associations that ring through my head every single time I type the word. I always used to type it as “ANY MORE” with the space but a woman I knew whose grammar and spelling were virtually impeccable only wrote it as a single space-free word. She never pointed out that I spelled it differently. I simply changed my spelling of the word by following her example. This always reminds me of the way we kissed, and the times I stroked her legs while we made out on the couch. I really don’t know why, because frankly the memories of sex with this woman are not the highlights of our time together. But somehow the word anymore spelled without a space where there used to be a space feels like a kiss to me.
I’m going to go outside now for some air and my daily 10,000 steps. My route will likely be the usual. I soldier past the stripper’s house with no hopes of rekindling a toxic, unhealthy relationship but just with the dim hope that if she sees me she will be reminded that she once said I was evrything she wanted, everything she needed, and that everyone in her circles agreed. We were a sure thing. Until a day came when we were nothing. I believe she might have tried to kill me had a weapon been available. But true to my tendency to fall into abusive relationships that was not the end for us. Not quite. But it finally ended with decisively mutual ghosting. I pass by her house frequently, feeling like that ghost.
No, I don’t write here in this space too much. I should. It might help purge the demons more ritualistically and therapeutically than masturbation or walking 15,000 steps in a day. But I’ve truly come to dislike this space. There is clutter, easily removed, but it’s not that. It is the years of invisible clutter, the permanent unease of ever being here in the first place when the landlord has harrassed and threatened me, even stolen money from me, behaviors that have been consistent the entire time I’ve been here. I don’t feel like I live here. I temporarily occupy Tom’s building. Of course all things are temporary. All residences are transient. But being here has always felt like I’m not supposed to be here. Fucking angry landlord.