Getting Off in 1998, by Maxine Stoker
When the angels watch me alone in my room, they see me diagonal across my bed, sheets in a pile at the foot. The angels watch sunlight hum through my sheer curtains, and my bare tits point down my chest like puffy pizza slices. The angels watch me warm one hand under the elastic of my satin pj bottoms. They can see that in the other, I hold this month’s Cosmo open to a page about coffeehouse-inspired lipstick shades. I want to be too feminist for Cosmo, and sometimes I am. With my head propped at an unnatural angle by an old embroidered throw pillow, I read the phrase “Biscotti” three times.
The angels watch me waste another day so sunny and beautiful it’s awful.
The angels watch me turn the page. They can probably tell I’m only pretending to read. The angels watch me roll over to reach for the plastic promotional cup of water on my nightstand. It changes color with heat, so my hand leaves a blue alien mark.
On this glossy page, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pit are shown laughing over a game of footsie at a little wire table outside a New York bistro. I try to imagine them fucking. It’s like trying to glue a syrupy pancake to a wall. The angels watch me put a finger on my slash and prod my zombie clit. The magazine suddenly feels so heavy, erect in my tight hand.
The angels watch my toes pinch the satin as I shimmy out of my pjs. Yes: I will rest my eyes and exercise my body with an orgasm. It’s like pushing a re-set button, is what I always tell myself—but it never is.
The angels watch me spit on my finger and attempt to revive my arid cunt. Horniness is the last emotion I can talk myself into or out of at will, and only barely. It is my last affective island in the sea of beige melancholy that is this friendless, new-city, post-grad year, this glamorless 22nd year, this year that flops around LA, sputtering in and out of bed, in and out of life.
The angels watch me shut my eyes and concentrate. My thoughts move in an abstract montage involving anal play, denim shirts cuffed at the elbow, an effortless dirty blonde pixie cut I witnessed earlier this week at the farmers market, and a variety of vague, overlapping sensory experiences involving the misuse of a stately, intimidating library.
The angels watch my face, so still I could be dreaming. The angels watch my knees spread gynecologically. The angels watch my two right fingers move in tight, rapid circles, while my other hand lazes on my belly. The angels watch a breeze outside blur the palm tress.
They watch my brow furrow with effort. The work of stringing together the necessary mosaic of erotic details is taxing. The Goo Goo Dolls’ lead singer—what’s his face, with the hair and the sadness—that fuckable sadness, watching the bright world from a tower. The nose-ringed, choker-necked girl at Sam Goody resentfully popping her gum at me. These meaningless features, fragile and unpredictable, move in a fickle stream over heavier themes I keep trying to tap. A strange hand probing my throat with two fingers: that’s a little closer. A pointed sense of shame, the kind of shame that blossoms beneath a truly damning gaze: closer.
The angels watch me barely get wet. They watch my cramping hand reach for the Hitachi Magic Wand in my night stand. A behemoth I purchased blushfully at Best Buy after reading about it in Bust, it’s loud enough to bother my downstairs neighbors, with whom I avoid eye contact. I don’t always use it because sometimes it just fries me—I end up numb and swearing I reek of burnt hair.
But today is a yawn begging for punctuation. The angels watch me roll over to plug it in, re-assume my position, and get back to work. If the angels talked, they'd have to raise their voices to speak over the noise. But they just watch.
The angels watch me push its roaring tip against my taint. Suddenly it’s a little easier to focus: not quite Scully, but a Scully-esque suit; Tom Selleck’s Daddy vibe in the shape of Courtney Cox; one petite creature riding my mouth like a cyclist, her face unfolding in bliss, and another berating me from below, flexed and whipping my pussy with remarkable precision.
I don’t know if the angels can see what I see: a bird’s eye view of my annihilation between two perfect, angry women who smell like cappuccinos. The angels have so much to watch, out here in the real, moving world—this apartment building full of people, this street full of cars. If any angels are in love with me, perhaps they’re tuning in. But more likely, they’re all settling for the eventlessness of this reality: my vibrating thighs on an otherwise motionless body; my face twisted with something akin to disgust.
Fighting to keep my mind trained on the foamy, feline bitches of my dreams, I’m finally coming up to the crest. As the pre-gasm moves its warning through me, I bend my back more than is natural, to give the angels something to look at. I whimper without needing to. The orgasm happens in a flat orchestration between my dissolving imagination and my desire to make this worth their while. The angels see my bare stomach phonily flex, my toes curl with intention. Inside me, my vagina spasms weakly, and my mind slumps back into this stupid, sunny bedroom. I feel so vaguely victorious. I switch off the Hitachi, and fake the kind of satisfied smile I know the angels want for me. I figure it’s the least I can do.
Maxine Stoker is a former/occasional sex worker and current writer living in the city of angels. She has an MFA from a New England university. She’s MIA on social media, but if you wish hard enough, she may return to her Insta @pleaseohplease_ms.maxine.