Saturday, April 15, 2006

My Breasts

Los Angeles is the cradle of global pop culture* and I love the tawdry gossip and fashion that springs eternal from the concrete and smog. But the disheartening truth is that I’m largely dissatisfied with its lifeblood: the movies produced within. They’re too predictable, too easy, and not that entertaining. There are, of course, notable exceptions: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Napoleon Dynamite, Dodge Ball, Wedding Crashers, Junebug, and Happy Endings all come to mind. But Memoirs of a Geisha? It’s completely boring. Or how about whatever that Civil War drama was with Nicole Kidman and Rene Zelweger: its multi-million dollar budget couldn’t keep me from wanting to barf. So lately I’ve turned to documentaries.

Breasts a Documentary was in my mailbox yesterday afternoon. I loved it and if I had to guess I’d say that it cost less than $100,000 to make. In it a group of women, most of them topless, sit in front of a camera and talk about their breasts. Some have implants, one had a reduction, some are flat, one is a transvestite and another weighs a little over 400 pounds. Two of the women have had mastectomies, one woman is old and a few are very young (the children are fully clothed). One of the women is a stripper with bleached blond hair, a pale creamy face, and big red lips. She looks like Betty Boop and she broke my heart. It’s good stuff and it makes you think about your own. So, for the record, here are my two most vivid breast memories:

I’m not a busty gal. I’m not saying that I don’t like my breasts because I do: they’re well placed and appropriately perky for someone less than my age. But they’re not even close to big. I fill a B cup with nothing extra to suggest that I should consider a C. I usually wear a push-up bra with very light padding for a little definition but even then my breasts don’t get much notice. I did, however, get them at the very early age of nine. So for a few years I was the one that all the kids noticed because I had the biggest boobs in my grade. There was a boy who sat across from me in my seventh grade French class who put a voice to his notice. His name was Ryan Fisher and he had a humiliating nickname for me that he would whisper forcefully in my direction during class: Breast. The boy called me Breast and each time he did he had something to show me under the desk: a condom, a condom wrapper suggesting a used condom, a piece of paper with a string of dirty words printed in pencil, or a soft-core magazine clipping. He humiliated me with his filth almost every day. But I had to look for the simple reason that he turned me on. His show-and-tell was the catalyst for my vivid, lurid, fantasies of sex with him in dirty secret places. And it was all because of my early breasts.

My other breast memory was seeded by a woman name Karla who liked to crochet hats and strip on armature nights at the local titty bar. I worked with her in a Chicago restaurant where the wait-staff was almost exclusively female. The exceptions were the pot-smoking trust-fund-fed owner, one flaming, HIV positive, nympho homosexual and one sexually very frustrated straight guy whose claim to fame was that he played football for Penn State; he brought it up whenever he could but he was a kicker, so no one really cared and it never got him laid. The atmosphere was openly sexual and explicit: the flamer would press his finger into the center of my tightly rubber-banded ponytail and say, “Let me feel your butt hole. I love feeling your butt hole.” I told the owner that I thought the salmon had turned because it smelled fishy when it came up in the window and he responded, “Are you sure it’s not the waitresses that smell like fish?” And any time Penn State spotted an attractive woman walking though the door he always said the same, “I want her to sit on my face. Do you think I could get her to sit on my face?” So when Karla, a lesbian with the biggest breasts I’ve ever know in real life, asked me if I wanted to go to a Vietnamese spa with her where we would get naked, scrub ourselves raw, and lounge in hot and then hotter tubs, it seemed pretty normal and I was game. On a Wednesday afternoon we met outside the spa, walked in together, paid $8, and navigated to the locker room. I was surprised that I was a little nervous and took my clothes off wondering why this didn’t seem like a good idea. The locker room was very typical with benches and lockers and was made a little “nicer” with carpeting, bright lights, and a mirrored wall. When we were both naked and walking toward the scrub/hot tub room Karla stopped me and told me to stand in front of the mirror with her. We stood side-by-side as she commentated on the differences between our naked bodies. She focused on the breasts: hers were large and mine small; her nipples were dark and mine pink. “Don’t you just love big breasts?” is what she asked. I was angry at her superiority and diplomatically answered, “I think almost everyone loves big breasts, don’t they?” The image of the two of us standing there like pornographic gingerbread women is branded into my brain, but what happened in the next room is less so. I vaguely remember that we scrubbed vigorously sitting on little stools, moved to the hot tub, the hotter tub, then Karla did some time in the sauna and I went to the nap room. Despite a verbal agreement that this had been a really good idea and that we should do it once a week we never went anywhere together again.




*I read those particular nine words, or something close to them, in the travel section of the New York Times last Sunday (the same section that had the article about Sedona). I’ve tossed the paper and don’t have the energy to look up the author, but it’s not me.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home