Fifty Shades of 2014
S.E. Schaible
I got married for the first time in 1999, when I was 35 years old. I was pretty much the last of the Mohicans in my friend group – several of whom were already starting families in the mid-1980s after graduating from college. I had this notion that by waiting to take the plunge, I had figured out who I was and what I wanted and had the scaffolding to know “the one” when I met her. Like Morpheus knew Neo was, well, Neo.
In fairness to my ex-wife, we raised three amazing children and had some great times together, but by the time our 10-year anniversary came around, our relationship seemed to have run its course as far as she was concerned. The Great Recession had destroyed her once-vibrant retail business; she had derived much of her self-worth from salaries and titles during a successful professional marketing career, and she’d always opened another door when one closed. But when she hung up her Ann Taylor suits and opened a retail store, it was different. Her entire identity was baked into it. She introduced the Cherry Creek thirty-something women to athleisure brands Beyond Yoga and Lululemon, and G-Star and Seven for All Mankind jeans – and dozens of other fashion nuggets that the other boutiques could only marvel at – and by the time the competition found a knock-off brand to sell, my wife was onto the next big thing.
The wife of a friend – more a friend of a close friend – spent a Pretty Woman-like afternoon trying on everything in my wife’s store, surreptitiously writing down all the brands, my wife at one point texting me to tell me she was in the store with her friend and they were both in a changing room at the same time and whispering like teenagers. A couple of months later, this woman opened her own store a mile away. The copycat shop was always a notch cheaper (and considerably sluttier) than my wife’s boutique – a reflection of their personalities as well as a result of many of my wife’s top brands honoring the “nobody else in your ZIP code can carry it” exclusivity clauses, meaning on buying trips to LA there were many brands that were off limits to the interloper. The brand representatives would often dish to my wife about the copycat’s efforts to pilfer inventory – including a failed attempt to use her home address several miles to the south to pimp a locked-in brand, pretending it was a new location. We would see this other couple at parties for years to come and always had a knowing chuckle over the phony, fawning, happy horseshit girl-power routine –”We are the trend setters in Denver.” It was the retail equivalent of an author using AI - taking the credit for something that you didn’t actually create. The emulator could have shown some class and at least purchased a few items while pretending to shop – and no question should have paid for the $130 blouse she left unsalable, with what resembled a tablespoon of greasy foundation or bronzer, tossed onto the changing room floor.
Some of my friends began to talk about how their wives were reading some crazy new book around 2011, and soon you couldn’t watch 15 minutes of the Today show without some pop culture anchor talking about Fifty Shades of Grey and how scintillating the content was. The movie couldn’t be cast and filmed fast enough. It was Rated X gone mainstream, the next logical step for the Desperate Housewives set. David Spade would have snarked in an SNL Hollywood Moment that he liked it better when it was called 9 ½ Weeks. Many married friends of mine were suddenly getting more action in the bedroom than they had in years. Unfortunately, it didn’t work in my case. By then, my wife was sleeping in a guest room and had moved on to a decidedly platonic view of all things us. We ended up separating in 2014, and a funny thing happened on the way to my getting back out there: The 40-plus women I met through the apps or sometimes the old-fashioned way (at school drop-off) seemed to fit into one of the following categories:
Heartbroken and needing to know decent guys were out there – but not quite ready to date, or
Damaged from a bad first go and cloying for any dude who expressed interest in her, or
Dumped their husband after reading 50 Shades and became convinced she wanted a Dom – AKA a dominant, well-endowed man, an order which I was a few inches and a set of nipple clamps shy of fulfilling.
I regularly heard several versions of, “You can be rough with me,” including once barely a minute into a first kiss; she simply had to put it out there, like a secret she couldn’t keep for another moment. I had second dates where I was given leather equipment to put to its intended use later that evening, or driven to a sex shop to peruse the ball gags and restraints. Suddenly I was in an alternate universe where a number of the women I was meeting were less like Junior Leaguers and more like the bombastic Lacey Underall, Judge Smails’ flirtatious niece in the classic Caddyshack. I admit a curiosity over the years about some of the things I was suddenly being asked to do, and I am certainly not a prude by any measure, but it took some time to get used to reading texts like, “Can’t wait to see you later. Can you stop at Whole Foods to get the soy tapers – the other candles irritate my nipples when you drip the wax onto me.” I am five-foot-seven and fully afflicted with the Irish Curse, not someone who ever thought of himself as an Adonis or porn-star material, so this was new territory. I tended to rather quickly establish feelings toward intimate partners – even ones who had overactive libidos that were demanding sex in public places. I took my roleplay seriously, even though I knew it would be short-lived. Dating in that moment was, at times, like preparing for Comic-Con, a contrivance, being told to cosplay a salacious character and do specific things and say lines right out of a smut film. I thought dating meant offering the boyfriend experience, but ironically, I was put through the paces of a BDSM practitioner, at a time when I didn’t even know what that acronym meant.
This new dating trend reminded me of a summer 25 years earlier, when I was working in the Capitol and bartending a couple nights in Georgetown to supplement (double, actually) my paltry $15,000 salary. It was a fun, freewheeling time in the late 1980s, and several of my service-industry co-workers frequently went out after shifts and partied until 2 am. One Thursday, a new waitress named Ellen worked the outside bar with us – Tony and Joe’s was the joint, situated right at the foot of the harbor overlooking the Potomac River. After counting the drawers and tipping out credit card tips, a group of us planned to go to Chinatown for some late-night food and cocktails. Tipping me out two $20 bills from the $400 she’d made that night, Ellen asked if she could drive with me, and I said of course.
We got to my car in the underground parking deck; I released the handles above the windshield and pressed the button to put down the ragtop on my Mustang. She got in and asked if I wouldn’t mind putting the top back up because she was cold, and as soon as I closed the latches, I realized her top and bra were off, and she grabbed my face with both hands and gave me a deep kiss. She had no intention of meeting the gang in Chinatown, and she aggressively stripped and was on top of me, riding it like she stole it, her tennis skirt still around her waist, no underwear in sight, my shorts just under my knees. High on You by Survivor was playing softly through the speakers. There were only a few cars parked nearby. “What about protection?” I breathed through her brown kinky hair, a hint of Hawaiian Tropic and hair mousse mixed with sweat. “Got that covered, cowboy,” was her reply. Forty minutes later, I dropped her off at her car on Wisconsin Avenue and drove home to Old Town, Alexandria.
It was a couple of weeks before we worked another shift together, and at one point Ellen said she’d like to go to Chinatown with me again that night, a sly grin on her face, tanner and blonder than the last time I’d seen her. She’d been to the beach or a pool. Again, she stripped as soon as she was in the car and caught my eyebrows-raised stare, commanding, “Get naked, buster!” This was unbridled, she’s-the-boss sex like I hadn’t known since an older woman had taken my virginity when I was fifteen (no, she wasn’t one of my teachers). One minute after we finished, she surprised me, saying, “You need to take me to my car fast. I’ve got to get home, or my boyfriend will get suspicious.” Wait, what? I told her I didn’t think we should do this anymore as I pulled up to her car a second time. My quadriceps were shaking uncontrollably from being pinned under the steering wheel. “Well, I guess I will have to tell him everything then, and just saying, he is one scary guy. You’re going to screw me when I want it, or I will give him the bar schedule and tell him who he’s been sharing me with. Thursday and Sunday night Scotty, the bartender.” Suddenly it all felt trashy and transactional.
I don’t like being called Scotty. I especially don’t enjoy being threatened – although when I shared the story with some friends in the Dirksen Senate Building cafeteria, they were predictably aghast that I didn’t comprehend how awesome all of this was, like I was living out a Penthouse Forum storyline. A few guys called outright bullshit on the story, just couldn’t accept it. Similarly, some of my friends didn’t understand why I’d suggest it was odd to be playing a role, of being thrust into Christin Grey “light” by bored, recently divorced women who left their husbands – in some cases, it seemed – for no particular reason. Guys are idiots, even guys that are your good friends. I never saw Ellen again, thankfully. I asked Greg the manager about her one night while he counted thousands of dollars from the registers with uncanny speed. He told me something had gone down, and he had fired several servers, including her, for reasons he didn’t share. I hoped she didn’t think I’d had anything to do with her being fired, but her departure was a load off my mind.
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