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Janet W. Hardy Leave a comment

The Third Child – 06/14/2021

I can’t write about Miles and Ben and me without writing about the third child – the one that made me famous and cost me some important relationships, that led me up to the edge of a nervous breakdown and made me friends all over the world, the one with whom we all shared our lives.

The ovum of that child was released, I guess, when I wrote an article distilling my three whole years of experience into a few thousand words, called it “How to Be a Sexually Dominant Woman,” and fired it off to Cosmopolitan.[1]

The sperm was the owner of a local erotic boutique. She’d invited me to teach a workshop for novice dommes and their partners. She asked me what name I wanted to use, and, more or less at random, I said “Lady Green.” I showed her my article, and she said, “This is great – can we use it as a handout?”

“I’ve already submitted it to Cosmo, so that won’t work,” I said. “But I could rewrite it and we can use that instead.”

And the zygote – I promise I’ll stop belaboring this metaphor now – began to form. The article grew and grew, and Jay said, “You know, that’s enough words for a small book” – and, well, things kind of took off from there.

But at the same time that Greenery Press was being born, my career in advertising was dying.

I was working as a copywriter at a small Silicon Valley agency specializing in high-tech clients. I’d been their cherished darling when they first hired me – the skills that later gave me a career in explaining weird sex to the masses served me well in talking to engineers, figuring out what they were trying to say, and translating that into fun, benefit-oriented prose that an executive or purchasing agent could understand.[2]

I was having fun, I was making more money than I ever had before, I adored my coworkers and they adored me. Until, gradually, they didn’t.

Having just joined the actual kink community, I was newly in love with being able to speak what had formerly seemed unspeakable. Like many newbies, I wasn’t being terribly careful about the boundaries between my erotic self and all my other selves. The kind of issues that would have been unexceptionable if I’d been putting energy into the PTA or my bowling team were a problem when they were about scheduling a play party or mediating a community conflict – and although I tried to be careful to keep my personal business personal, it seeped through.

Things came to a head at a mandatory company retreat. I loathe, as a matter of principle, such exercises in forced bonding (I already have friends, and the reason they’re my friends is that I chose them), but at this one we were being encouraged to drink. A lot.

By this point in the book, you have probably figured out that I am not very inhibited when I’m sober. So you can just imagine what I get up to with four or five drinks in me.

The weekend is kind of a blur, but I have a patchy memory of a series of skits in which we were asked to pretend we were one of our coworkers. Which somehow led to my bright idea that acting my part involved grabbing the assistant media buyer by the crotch.

In short, the weekend was the end of any illusions the company might have had that they had hired a nice girl.

What happened next, quite quickly:

  • A companywide memo went out forbidding personal calls on company time. It was summertime, the Dudes were in day camp[3] but home with Jay in the afternoons, and I had been checking in with them once or twice a day to forestall mayhem – but I obeyed the rule and stopped making those calls.
  • Jay began complaining that his work was being interrupted by six or seven hang-up calls a day.
  • I was called into the boss’s office, shown a phone bill that included six or seven calls a day to my home number, and fired on the spot.

I suppose I could have applied for other copywriting jobs, but I was too shocked and dispirited to try – plus, I’d only been in the Bay Area for a year, and I had no career support network there.

I already had the Sexually Dominant Woman piece drafted. Jay had a manuscript he called SM 101: A Realistic Introduction that he’d been working on for years, and had submitted to several mainstream publishers to no avail.

With my salary gone (and no hope of receiving unemployment, as I’d been “fired with cause”), we were staring bankruptcy in the face.

For his first book, The Bay Area Sexuality Resources Guidebook, Jay had already figured out a strategy that presaged today’s “print-on-demand” system: he’d get an order from an erotic boutique or leather store, then call the copy shop to order that many copies of the book, photocopied and comb-bound. We’d pick up the books, deliver them to the retailer, and rush the resulting check to the bank quickly, before our check to the copy shop[4] bounced.

So we had three books, and we had a (funky but functional) distribution system. I’d spent my decade in advertising looking over the shoulders of excellent graphic designers, so I had a smidgen of understanding of basic layout principles and techniques. I spent money we didn’t have on a copy of Quark XPress layout software and got to work – and within six weeks of my expulsion, we had camera-ready art on both Jay’s and my books.

We started out as two separate companies – Jay Wiseman Books and Greenery Press. It didn’t take long for Jay to realize that he had no ability or desire to be a publisher, so we combined the two companies under the Greenery Press banner, and I got busy.

Within a year or two, I was hearing from mainstream bookstores saying they’d like to carry our books, but couldn’t accept the comb binding – they needed books to be perfect-bound[5].

If Jay’s precognitive contribution to Greenery was print-on-demand, mine was crowd-funding. I found folks who were willing to front us money for a print run, in exchange for a credit in the book and repayment of the loan out of book sales.

The Sexually Dominant Woman: A Workbook for Nervous[6] Beginners was our first “real” book, followed in short order by The Bottoming Book and The Topping Book. Our next big step was publishing a book that neither Jay nor I had played any part in writing, Miss Abernathy’s Concise Slave Training Manual. (All four books are still in print in some form.) By then, we were well and truly launched.

This was about the time that the world, especially the Bay Area, got wildly excited about a buzzy new concept called the World Wide Web. Huge amounts of money were getting invested in startups, and I wanted some of it.

I’d met a man – a former member of the Kerista family[7] ­­– at a polyamory conference, where he’d announced himself as a financial consultant specializing in publishers. With his help, I crafted a (wildly overoptimistic) business plan, incorporated the business, found some investors, hired some employees, and committed to a minimum of four books a year.

The odd thing is that in that couple of years, I published more books that would go on selling well for years than I ever did afterwards – but it still wasn’t enough. Greenery Press made itself an ironic name by running constantly in the red. I got incredibly lucky in the folks assigned to our tax accounts – the guy from the IRS collected vintage Chinese erotica, and the guy from the California Board of Equalization was the biological son of a publisher whose obscenity case had gone to the Supreme Court – and they truly did want to help me. But the fact was that we were hugely, terrifyingly in debt, and likely to go on getting more so. I owed money to printers, to authors, to suppliers, to back payroll. (The authors were a particular source of tension, as many of them were personal friends. I started to avoid scene events because of the likelihood of running into people to whom I owed hundreds or thousands of dollars.)

The constant financial and emotional stress (this was also happening concurrently with Miles’s illness) spelled the end of my relationship with Jay. But the company owed him a lot of money that we couldn’t repay, and I couldn’t see any way to separate without putting him out on the street.

Then, I woke up one morning with an epiphany: If I rented an industrial loft and moved into it, I could lose the monthly cost of the office Greenery was subletting, and Jay could have our place[8]. I let go all but one employee and cut that one back to part-time, and started in on the next chunk of my life.

That was a very bad few months. I am not by nature an anxious person, but I’d been pushed far beyond the amount of stress I could manage. The breakup was the only really acrimonious one I’ve ever had; Miles was in and out of the hospital; I was drowning in debt; my closest friends were angry with me over the royalties situation. But slowly, aided by a lot of medication and the support of the friends to whom I didn’t owe money (and the few, god bless them, who were able to compartmentalize our friendship away from our finances), I gradually began to craft a new life. I sold my place in San Francisco, signed the proceeds over to the company, and paid off one debt at a time – first the printers, then the tax guys, and then the authors. Bit by bit, I clawed my way back from the brink.

I’d reached the point where I wasn’t living in a state of constant panic, but the company wasn’t in the black, or likely to get there anytime soon. After a couple of years of brinkmanship, I cut a deal with our distributor for them to buy the company from me over a five-year period. The proceeds were enough to get us caught up with the authors, and SCB took over all the company finances. They kept me on board as an editorial consultant, and we went on producing a book or two a year.

But the tide, inevitably, turned. We’d been very lucky to have caught the wave of kink culture just as it was cresting, and we rode that sucker for a couple of decades (with a huge boost, I regret to say, following the publication of 50 Shades of Grey). The Ethical Slut, which was our biggest title, had been sold to Ten Speed/Random House some years before, and the handful of other polyamory books we published never came close. Sales of all the kink books ebbed as BDSM stopped being a hot new trend (and as kink education became increasingly available on-line).

It was time. In 2019, I resigned my consultancy and Greenery stopped publishing new books.

There was, of course, the small issue of all the infinitely patient shareholders who had invested in us back during the halcyon days of the dot-com boom. I did eventually get them paid off too – I actually, no shit Sherlock, had a maiden aunt who died and left me some money. So that final debt was paid, and I was free to move forward into whatever comes next.

So, that’s how I raised Greenery to the ripe old age of twenty-seven. It’s still out in the world making a living off the backlist. Greenery made me famous (in my own odd way), and it supplied me with as much joy and as much misery as any human child could provide. It was a great run – but, honestly, I am so glad it’s over.

[1] Fat fucking chance. Cosmo accepts that kind of material now, but in 1992 its fare was more along the lines of “How to Make Him Like You as Much as You Like Him,” “Cover Girl Meets Rocker and… It’s Magic,” and “For That Fantasy Romance Among the Too Rich, Read Ivana Trump’s ‘For Love Alone’.” You can’t make this stuff up.

[2] This sector of the advertising industry is called “business-to-business,” and is looked down on as more workmanlike and less glamorous than consumer advertising. My talents have never been a great fit for consumer advertising. I was, however, a very, very good business-to-business writer.

[3] It may be relevant to note that only one other person in the company had kids, and he had a stay-at-home wife to take care of them.

[4] There was a small disturbance when the copy shop found that their practice of binding discarded pages into scratch pads for distribution at local schools had suddenly become a problem. Fortunately, it wasn’t our problem.

[5] The kind of binding you see on nearly all paperback books, with a flat, printed spine.

[6] Another Jay contribution: I was going to call it A Workbook for Eager Beginners. He was right.

[7] Too much to explain here. Look them up; they’re fascinating.

[8] He decided not to stay, but at least I’d made the offer.

Janet W. Hardy Leave a comment

02/27/2021

      I don’t do well without pets. Even as a college freshman, I had an illicit pet rat in my dorm room, named Prufrock1 and subsisting on smuggled cafeteria food.

      Why do we have pets, anyway? To someone who doesn’t feel the itch to tie their life to someone of a different species, pets make no sense at all – they’re noisy, smelly, destructive and/or dirty, and they arrive laden with the expectation of a future full of responsibility, expense, and eventual heartbreak.

      To some of us, though, all these downsides feel like upsides – our lives feel incomplete when they’re not weighted with the need to care for, and be cared for by, another creature or two (or five, or twelve…)

      A therapist friend told me about a theory of family dynamics that holds that we marry the person our family of origin needs to be complete. I’m not sure about that when it comes to partner choice (although I must concede that it took Miles’s wedding to bring an honest-to-god extrovert into our clan), but I think there’s something to be said for it when it comes to pets.

I got Prufrock at a time when I was intensely lonely. College was a strange, unwelcoming environment, where none of the skills I’d developed over seventeen years of life worked at all: not for making friends, not for passing classes, not even for maintaining basic hygiene for my body and my environment. If you’re too weird for UC Santa Cruz, you are very weird indeed, so I guess I was. Prufrock was someone who genuinely liked me, who I could take care of without being taken advantage of. He rode in my pocket or up my sleeve to classes and errands, so I didn’t have to be by myself. By the time he died – I smuggled him onto an airplane in my purse, and he ate the lining and was dead when we landed – I was feeling a little more able to get on with my life, so I was petless for the rest of that term.

By my sophomore year, though, Frank and I had moved in together, and we were both people who were used to having pets. He got Phoebe, a calico cat he had for many years after, and I got Mac, who acted out all the resistance I could not afford to let myself feel: against being half of a couple, against having our own place, and a few years later against becoming a parent – against getting older, really.

My reasons for choosing Mac had less to do with any particular knowledge of his breed than they did with Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, a favorite book: Mac was a big white Standard Poodle pup that I got for a few bucks from a backyard breeder.

 I know now that a wuss like me is not a good fit for an alpha puppy, and that feeding an animal that size was not actually practical on my student budget – but when Mac clambered over a squirming white cloud of littermates to lick my face, I knew he was my dog.

Mac and I did as well as could be expected, given that I had next to no experience in puppy training and that he was a big, high-energy dog who needed a whole lot more exercise and attention than I could give him. He was the charming homewrecker every girl falls in love with once, and he wrecked several homes in the years of our association. Fortunately, he loved baby Miles and was gentle with him…

… with the occasional hiccup. One afternoon, I was having a friend over for dinner, and didn’t have time to make dessert. So two-year-old Miles, who was just learning his letter sounds, and I stopped at the bakery to buy a small cake. The nice bakery lady even handed a free cookie to the cute little boy, and he was nibbling it slowly to make it last – until we stepped in the front door, and Mac inhaled it out of his hand in a single gulp.

You can imagine the wailing. And I didn’t blame him. I picked him up and tried to soothe him. “Is there anything that would make you feel better?” I asked.

The tears stopped like he’d found a shutoff valve. He looked me straight in the eye, then looked at the pink bakery box I’d placed on top of the refrigerator, and announced, firmly: “It begins with the letter K.”

In the course of Mac’s life with us, he:

  • Appeared out of nowhere to bite a cop (who we’d called to investigate someone camped out in our basement) on the inner thigh, an inch from his scrotum. The cop did not have a sense of humor, and Mac did two weeks of hard time in the Sacramento County Pound.
  • During a family gathering, disappeared every crumb of a large platter of sandwiches from a china plate atop a four-foot-high pass-through, without moving the plate an inch or making a sound that could be heard by the dozen people ten feet away.
  • Vaulted effortlessly over every fence we installed, including an eight-foot one with a jagged wooden top.
  • During the pre-Independence Day fireworks in our predominantly Latino neighborhood, tore an entire second-story window out of the frame with his teeth, and disappeared for two weeks. He eventually showed up in an industrial office just a few blocks away. The place had no open windows, and all its doors were locked. Nobody ever figured out how he had gotten in.

The last straw was when he began applying his formidable intelligence and dentition to the brand-new townhouse that Frank and I had stretched our budget to the max to purchase. We gave him away. I hope he landed with someone who had the knowledge and patience to bring out the good dog that was hiding somewhere in that curly, chaotic head.

After Mac, I was cautious about acquiring another dog. But then a friend told me about a couple who were relinquishing a female Basset Hound. I grew up with a basset, and I have a weakness for their gentle, loyal thickheadedness, so we adopted Gert.

I’m not sure about some of what was wrong about Gert, or what issue in our family dynamic she served. I think she must have been raised in a puppy mill – she showed no signs of affection, happiness, excitement – not even fear or hostility: she was a long, low blank slate that none of us could find a way to love. (The fact that the cracks in our marriage were beginning to show around then might have been part of it, but, honestly, I think nobody could really connect to Gert, including the couple who gave her to us.)

One thing I do know was wrong with her was that she had the most virulent flea allergy I’ve ever seen. Just one little black bloodsucker turned her into a frantic, scratching, balding, sleepless sausage stuffed with misery. This was long before today’s miraculous systemic flea prevention; we tried everything from professional flea baths to every brand of flea collar on the market to putting garlic oil in her food. Nothing helped. By the time she had no hair left from shoulderblades to tail and couldn’t sleep at all, we gave up and had her euthanized – to her relief and ours.

I think one of the reasons we have pets is that they’re practice for losing people. With the exception of parrots and tortoises, pets tend to have lifespans a great deal shorter than people do; to love a dog or cat or reptile or rodent is to recognize that you will grieve it someday.

The decision to euthanize a suffering animal is the biggest and hardest promise we make to our pets. They give us affection, entertainment, touch and love; we give them a painless and loving death. (“Painless” for them. Not so much for us.)

During both of my parents’ deaths, both chosen to the degree that the law made possible for each of them, I was forcefully reminded of the dogs and cats I’ve said goodbye to through the years. Human euthanasia can take as much as twenty-four hours between the moment the fatal draft is swallowed and the moment the body gives up its futile effort to keep functioning. With a pet, the same process takes seconds or maybe minutes.

I will never understand how we can be more generous to our pets in their time of greatest need than we are to the humans we love.

My dad’s wife Mona had to euthanize her dearly loved cat Scarlett, and was so distraught that she chose never to have another pet. That choice, to reject love because loss always lies at the end of it, is the saddest choice I can imagine. Love is a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, and there is no more demanding exercise than letting go.

After Gert, I gave up on dogs for most of a decade, although we had a series of unmemorable cats (Frank’s cat Phoebe went to live at his folks’ house after we adopted Jane, who we discovered had feline leukemia and was dangerously contagious). I tried having a canary – I love the happy sound of a canary singing; it brings sunshine into the household – but I knew nothing about birdkeeping, plus having an ornithophobic mother had rubbed off: I had a very hard time handling Zack2 at all, much less catching him during his numerous escape attempts. I walked in one day and found him dead in his cage, and that was that.

Then came Maynard, the first pet since Mac to become an integral part of my life. We got Maynard when he was a half-grown kitten and Miles was just starting to toddle, so they grew up together: Miles’s first word was “kitty.”

Maynard (named for the proto-hippie Maynard G. Krebs of Dobie Gillis fame, a longtime crush object/role model) was a handsome cream tabby with one of the strongest personalities I’ve ever encountered in a cat: if he did something he shouldn’t, I would correct him with a hiss or light swat, after which he refused to speak to me for several days – but he would never do that thing again, and would in fact completely and permanently ignore the existence of whatever temptation had gotten him into trouble.

Maynard was far better suited to life in suburbia than I was. He spent most nights out hunting, and unlike most of the cats I’ve had, did not bring his prizes home – later, I’d find a few scraps of mouse or bird in a vegetable bed. On one occasion, I looked out the window to see him carrying a dead rat in his mouth. He paused, glared at me with an unmistakable air of “mind your own business, bitch,” and disappeared over the fence.

The only time one of the Dudes wanted a pet of their own was when Miles asked for a pet rat for his tenth birthday, so we got Rocky3. The first time I saw Maynard go into a predator crouch near Rocky, I hissed at him and he ran out of the room. From then on, Rocky did not exist as far as Maynard was concerned.

Sadly, Miles shortly discovered what all rat fanciers learn too soon: they are smart, affectionate, terrific pets, and they don’t last long. He wept for Rocky but did not ask for another pet.

More than the kids or Frank or me, Maynard hated our breakup. I’d moved to the top floor of a funky old downtown Victorian; I was fairly sure he could manage the traffic, but not at all convinced that he could find his way back if he got out (I suspected that he’d head straight back to our old place, several city miles away; cats are often more attached to homes than they are to the people in them). The kids and I agreed he needed to stay indoors for a couple of months.

He was miserable. I’d found my independence but cost him his. He complained, he sulked, he tried to dart between our feet anytime we opened a door. Nevertheless, we remained obdurate, for most of the three months we’d agreed on…

… and here the narrative reaches a fork. My recollection is that one day when we were just back from taking Maynard to the vet, the cumulative misery of his behavior at home and his utter hysteria in the carrier finally got to me, and I said, “Okay, let’s let him out now,” and Miles opened the cage.

I learned when I started working on this book that Miles does not remember me giving him the order to open the cage; he thinks he did it under his own initiative.

The truth is lost in time (Ben, the only other person present, doesn’t remember). Two facts are certain: Miles and I have each spent three decades feeling hugely responsible and guilty, without either of us knowing that the other felt that way. And we never saw Maynard again.

I didn’t last long without animal hair on my furniture, of course. I adopted a pair of identical orange kittens, Biff and Happy4 . Shortly thereafter I met Jay, and the cats, particularly Biff, became more his than mine. Jay was inconsolable when Biff met his end at the fender of a passing car; we heard from a neighbor who claimed to have seen the car swerve to hit him, which added rage to Jay’s grief.

Both cats turned out to be diabetic (I don’t know for sure that orange cats are more susceptible to diabetes, but it does seem as though I’ve seen the disease more often in orange cats than other colors). Biff was gone before the disease got more than “special food” serious, but Happy – who one of our friends dubbed “the world’s least aptly named pet”; he was a sulker and a kvetch – lived on: we went through the special food, the insulin injections, the multiple vet trips for blood tests. Then, like many diabetic cats, he developed kidney issues necessitating a multi-thousand-dollar surgery, and that turned into one of the bitterest fights Jay and I ever had.

Jay, a former ambulance crewman, had “do not let things die” as his prime directive – he was appalled by the fact that many of our acquaintances with AIDS had chosen to end their lives on their own terms, and disgusted by the people who participated in helping that happen. I believed that keeping Happy alive would do little for his feline quality of life and would, as a secondary consideration, cost more than we could afford. Jay won, as usual, and Happy lived to grouse another day – but after Jay and I split up, I watched Happy get unhappier with each passing day, until he was no longer grooming himself or asking for affection, at which point I drove him to the vet and said, weeping, “End this.” I never told Jay; he may be learning it for the first time as he reads this book.

And then there was Amy, another character who really merits a whole book of her own. I’d said for years that if I ever got to design my own dog, I’d breed a Standard Poodle with a Labrador, imagining Mac’s intelligence and high spirits modulated by the phlegmatic lab personality. (This was long before “labradoodles” and other popular crossbreeds were a thing in the US, although Australia had discovered this particular combination years before.) And one day I happened to open a copy of the Penny Saver5, to find an ad for a litter of poodle/lab pups just a few blocks from our house.

Our lease firmly excluded any pets other than Happy, to whom the landlady had agreed reluctantly. But we figured we weren’t going to get our cleaning or security deposits back anyway, so we might as well get a puppy.

Amy was a scrap of black fur about the size of my two fists when we got her; when the vet estimated she’d top out at about 100 lbs., we snorted. (She actually maxed out at 120, but that was well above her fighting weight, which was indeed around 100.) After a couple of the usual loud sad nights with a crated new pup, she settled in nicely, sleeping in her crate and hanging out in the kitchen during the day while we figured out the whole housebreaking thing.

If Mac had been the dog of my young-adult years and Maynard the cat of my new-mom years, Amy was the dog of my becoming-a-famous-perv years. She was joyously friendly and welcoming to the more or less constant stream of friends and family visiting or occupying our house – years later, when I was recovering from surgery and Jay asked for a guideline about who I wanted to visit me during my recovery, I thought about it for a few seconds and responded, “Anyone for whom Amy makes the Wookiee noise.” (The “Wookiee noise,” a warbling moan of joy, was reserved for the folks she considered family; everyone else got an ordinary someone’s-here bark.)

Because I had Amy before people started being doctrinaire about leaving dogs alone in cars6, she went almost everywhere with me. She considered my car to be her apartment, and welcomed the opportunity for a ride even if it meant waiting patiently for me for a few hours while I shopped or visited.

Like all of us, Amy had a few gaps in her otherwise very high intelligence: to her dying day, she never figured out why it was a bad idea to walk on the other side of a telephone pole from the person holding her leash. But she intuitively understood a vast range of human language and customs.

  • She got very excited at one point when she overheard me telling someone that I was going to yoga. Yoga, yogurt – who can tell the difference? Similarly, she heard a dinner table conversation about a half barrel of fish we kept in the yard, and immediately came to the table to get her share of fish, a favorite treat.
  •  She figured out on her own that if she’d been scolded, a handshake was a détente. She’d sidle up, sit at your feet, cast a pleading look from under her shaggy mop, and lift one paw, until you relented and gave her a shake.
  • After raiding the garbage on a pouring miserable day, she was sent into the yard for a time-out. Now, the yard had a small porch with an eave that sheltered it from the rain, and we assumed that she’d huddle there for the twenty minutes or so of her disgrace. But when we looked out the window she was sitting in the pouring rain, head down, fur streaming with water, abjection in every line of her body: a posture that said quite clearly, “I’m the worst dog in the world and I wouldn’t blame you if you never let me back in.”

A question I often ponder about Amy is: “Does someone have to do BDSM to be part of the kink community?” (Given that I’ve done maybe three scenes in the last decade, this question is more than academic for me.)

  • Amy was known and beloved by a vast number of Bay Area pervs. She attended play parties (perpetual doorkeeper Brandie once said, “If that dog ever figures out how to work a doorknob, I’m out of a job”), salons, private play dates, and pretty much every other kind of gathering the kink community has created.
  • One of the tests Jay used to confirm that someone had been to our house was the question, “Name the submissive who sleeps at the foot of Jay and Janet’s bed.”
  • If Amy was at a party and a scene was being too loud or violent for her, she would calmly leave the room, returning when things were more comfortable: in other words, she had better party etiquette than many of the humans in our circle of acquaintances.
  • Jay and I were at the time giving biweekly salons in our home, offering a mini-workshop, demonstration or game for the first hour and then breaking into a freeform social. In one such demonstration – Jay had devised a new way to tie someone in a spreadeagle – our sweetie Lynn was playing victim, and several attendees were acting as bedposts. Amy wandered into the room and saw her beloved Aunt Lynn, who took care of her when we were traveling, spreadeagled on the floor and getting a lot of attention. She pushed through the crowd of onlookers, flopped onto her back next to Lynn, and spread all four of her legs as far apart as her anatomy would allow. The room, of course, dissolved into hysterics (Lynn sat up, rubbing her wrists indignantly and sputtering “Upstaged by a fucking dog!”). In other words, Amy even had some volunteer experience as a demo model.

So you tell me: kink community member, or not? I’m inclined to vote for the former.

When I left Jay’s and my relationship, he refused to see Amy again, saying it made him too sad. Of all the things that came up during that long and contentious breakup, this is the one I found hardest to forgive. She mourned him for months.

But a year later, when Edward came home with me after a date, she took one look at him and fell instantly in love. That got my attention (Amy had excellent taste in people), and our next date cemented the impression: that was the date during which Edward helped me clip away several little balls of shit that had formed in the place that dog groomers, with nowhere near enough irony, call the “sanitary area.” Not every potential sweetie is up for that, but Edward was.

Amy, perhaps even more than Jay or Edward, was an inextricable part of my life for thirteen years – from the rental house I shared with Jay and two friends/occasional lovers, to the duplex I bought with the same folks, to the industrial loft where I tried to salvage Greenery when it was trying very hard to circle the drain, to the little house in Oakland where Edward and I lived for the first phase of our relationship. When I was sad, Amy let me cry into her shaggy back; when I was cold, she let me shove my blue feet under her warm belly; when I was confused, she was a patient and dedicated listener; when I was busy, she’d curl up with a sigh and keep me company while I worked frantically on the save-my-company project.

But Amy had not been intentionally bred, the way the best of today’s Labradoodles are. Her mother was a championship Standard Poodle, but her dad was a rogue fence-climbing Lab who apparently suffered from hip dysplasia. By the time she’d been part of my life for more than a decade, she was starting to show signs of being in pain most of the time: the long walks that had once delighted her turned into geriatric shuffles. Edward and I decided that we’d know her time had come when she was unable to climb the stairs to sleep next to my bed, as she’d done since puppyhood.

That day came far too soon. We called a vet who could come to the house. The vet, who was our age, arrived, and we remembered just in time that none of us would be able to lift 100 lbs. of inert dog – so instead, we took her out to her beloved car, helped her into the back, and got her comfortably settled in the environment she knew so well. We presented her with the unbelievable bounty of three – three! – pig ears, and while she was trying to choose which one to munch, the vet slipped the needle into her leg and she was gone.

We buried her ashes under a bush in the front yard, and when we moved to Oregon a few years later, we disinterred her and buried her under a hazelnut sapling here.

There have been other dogs and cats since Amy, and I’ve loved them all and I still do. But she was my heart dog, and she was my loyal companion during the most kaleidoscopic, wonderful, awful years of my life, and nobody, dog or cat or human, will ever really take her place.

As I write this, we have Willow (graying Border Collie/Lab mix), Augie (Australian Shepherd/something with very short legs – Corgi perhaps, or caterpillar), Pearl (matronly gray tabby), and Nick (gangly cream tabby). So these are the pets that have found me for this part of my life, to support me as I retire from the publishing business, as I try to figure out my goals for my final decades, as I experience the inevitable aches and twinges of aging, as I gradually withdraw from the active travel and teaching that were so much a part of my existence for several decades. They cuddle, they amuse, they provide skin contact (well, fur contact, but still), they demand that I stay busy and aware. It is at least possible that one or both of the younger ones, Augie and Nick, may be the last pets I have; if things don’t get quite that bad, those two are well-suited to living in a senior complex, or in assisted living.

None of them have ever attended a play party, or withdrawn from a room where the smacking noises hurt their ears. They’ve never raised a baby, survived a breakup, kept me company when I was single and lonely. They are, in short, pets that belong to someone who is in the process of becoming an elderly person, and they are really, really good at it.

1 Yes, I was indeed that pretentious.

2 Short for “Muzak.”

3 I swear I never told him about Prufrock – the name resemblance was, as far as I know, pure coincidence.

4 I am pleased to report that I no longer give my pets pretentious literary names. On the other hand, I’ve always wanted a pet named Smee, and if I can ever talk Edward into it, I intend to have one, because every pirate needs a Smee.

5 A free weekly paper containing nothing but classified ads – kind of like Craigslist, but in print. God, you’re young.

6 Not that overheating was ordinarily a serious problem in cool gray San Francisco; on the rare occasions the temperature got above 80, I left her home.

Janet W. Hardy Leave a comment

11/09/2020

The only evidence I’ve ever had of my ability to write fiction was my creation and dissemination of a Christmas letter to my extended family, every year for most of a decade. The main thing this exercise in heavily filtered half-truth did for me was to instill a deep cynicism about the Christmas letters I got from other people.

In 2004, I wrote: “His name is Edward, and we’ve been spending most of our time together in the last year… however, a couple of years ago, an old spinal injury flared up badly and he’s now trying to find a kind of work ­­– probably writing or politics – that he’ll be able to do from home.” This was edited down from: “His name is Edward, and we’ve never had intercourse because his body is too fucked up, but we’ve done a few amazing scenes together, switching roles and exploring what fun is to be had with his sensitive tits and my iron butt.”

In 2006: “I decided this year to return to school to work on a Master of Fine Arts degree with an eye toward teaching writing at the university level. I’m in the Creative Nonfiction program at St. Mary’s University in Moraga, about half an hour from here, and completely loving it.” Edited from: “I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to write about sadomasochistic sex, gender-bending, polyamory, and traveling around the country to teach those things, for everything I write to be critiqued by a roomful of people – including most of my professors – young enough to be my children.”

In 2007: “Miles cashed in almost everything he could… and took off for six weeks of solo backpacking across Europe: London, Dublin and Galway, then across the channel to Paris and on to his ultimate destination, Prague.” Edited from: “Miles went to Europe and came home with a large bottle of absinthe in his luggage. His new girlfriend L was here waiting for him, and the two of them disappeared into the spare room for two days. Every time I tiptoed through there with a load of laundry, the level in the bottle had dropped another inch or two.”

In 2008: “I haven’t yet had any luck finding a home for my book; I had an agent for awhile, but we had very different visions for where the book was going, so I decided to move on.” Edited from: “My book Girlfag: A Life Told in Sex and Musicals has been looked at by dozens of agents and publishers, every one of whom has said, ‘I’m not sure what the market will be for this book.’ Well, that’s never stopped me before, so I guess I’ll self-publish. Again. (PS: The agents and publishers may have been right, but I still love the book.)”

In 2009: “Even by usual crazy standards, this has been a year full of rapid change, most of it due to this difficult economy.” Edited from: “We’ve been here in Eugene for six months and have already moved twice, renting while we wait for the economic chaos to settle and something to happen with our house in Oakland.” And, if I’d written one in 2010, I could have added: “The Oakland place went into foreclosure and we wound up moving four times in two years, and it’s looking like we’ll be renters – in a town where the rental market is tailored to college students – for the foreseeable future. And, oh, yeah, one of the ‘owners’ we rented from turned out not to own the house at all, which we didn’t find out about until her ex-husband showed up expecting to find the place empty.”

At that point I gave up writing the Christmas letters. I’ll probably never be much of a fiction writer.

Janet W. Hardy 2 Comments

08/26/2020

As I write this, late in the summer of 2020, Santa Cruz is on fire. The UC Santa Cruz campus was evacuated earlier this week, and photos showed the Boardwalk glittering against a backdrop of ominous orange, with a setting sun of otherworldly magenta.

Santa Cruz was a major character in the first half of my life, and has been an occasional correspondent since. Watching it suffer feels like visiting the hospital bed of an old but no longer dear friend.

Frank and I met when he was a sophomore and I was a freshman at UCSC: I saw a card posted on the dining hall bulletin board, from three people looking for a fourth for bridge. Given that I’d spent most of the year vacillating from depression to terror and back (the serial killer Edmund Kemper was picking off girls my age and leaving them strewn in pieces around the campus’s many forests, crevasses and ridges), the idea of an occasional bridge game was compelling. But I had no idea what a big part of my life the game, and the three of them, would become – we wound up playing cards more nights than not, often piling into a VW Beetle to go downtown at 2am and eat fresh donuts from Ferrell’s, a local haven. Sometimes we came back and played more cards after that.

Scott, our informal leader (and the owner of the Beetle), was tall and slim, with wavy sunbleached hair and an engagingly crooked smile. When you asked Scott what his goals were, he said “getting rich”[1]; last I looked, he was the Chief Technical Officer of a huge national media empire. Maureen, dark-haired and easygoing, was one of the campus’s very few female math students. Scott’s roommate Frank was taciturn and wry, and was majoring in chemistry.

I made a move on Scott, who gallantly pretended not to know what I was trying to do. (He knew.) So it was Frank who wound up in my bed – his first time, my eighth or ninth. And when I realized that another year in the dorms would be hazardous to my mental health, it was Frank who I invited to share a large off-campus room with me, near a campus bus route.

We lived together for a pleasant, if very stoned and sloppy, year. Then he changed his major to Civil Engineering and transferred to UC Davis, back in his hometown. I stuck it out in Santa Cruz for a year, working as an “usherette” in a movie theater and going to classes when I felt like it, which was seldom. Then I dropped out and moved to Davis, where we found an apartment together.

But Santa Cruz wasn’t through with me yet. Frank’s family owned[2] a huge old beach house on the west side of town, overlooking the vast stretch of the Pacific. So for all Frank’s and my decade and a half together, we spent nearly all our vacations – first with my big crazy standard poodle Mac, then with Mac and Miles, then with Miles and Ben – in that house, along with a shifting cast of a dozen or more grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. (Those vacations spurred my earliest impulses toward extended family: there was no question that both the kids and the grownups were calmer and saner with a lot of loving company to blunt the harsh edges of any particular relationship.)

It was also in Santa Cruz that Frank and I decided to end things. We left the sleeping kids with his folks, drove far enough out of town that we were unlikely to be seen by anyone who cared that we were sitting over coffee with tears running down our faces, and together sketched out our separate futures.

I was no longer welcome at the Santa Cruz house after that, but the kids were still spending lots of long weekends there with Frank and his family. Today, they both adore Santa Cruz in the way that any kid loves the site of repeated fun and affection: Miles had hoped to have his wedding to his wife Destiny there, although the logistics proved impossible – they ended up marrying in Long Beach, Southern California’s closest analog to Santa Cruz.

I tried, once, to vacation in Santa Cruz myself, building a few days’ break around a speaking gig at a downtown sex shop. But the topography of the town had shifted after the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, so many of my haunts and landmarks were gone; those that remained all carried a ponderous weight of memory. I drove home in an odd, sad, might-have-been mood, wondering if what I’d gained was worth what I’d given up.

Les Dudes continued to report back to me about the doings in Santa Cruz. Their great-grandmother was there and then she wasn’t, and then their grandmother, and then their grandfather. Cousins I remember as infants came, played, went to the Boardwalk and for walks on the beach, left for college and other towns, and their kids came back to Santa Cruz.

Over Labor Day weekend of 2006, Ben heard a noise from Frank’s room. When he went to investigate, he found Frank on the floor in the throes of what turned out to be a major stroke. But a few months later, he drove Frank back to Santa Cruz, where the deaths of the family elders had left the wheelchair-accessible bedroom available. The family, its topography changed by the earthquakes of life, still gathers at the house several times a year.

I’ve had one more visit to Santa Cruz. When Edward and I got married, we spent as little as possible on what was at our ages a fairly unexceptional rite of passage (the County Clerk’s office, then later a modest gathering in a church meeting room, with some cheeseboards and some champagne and a cake). With the money we had left, we took a “honey-asteroid”[3] at a place in downtown Santa Cruz that billed itself as a “bed, bud and breakfast,” run by a pair of dyke cannabis activists who turned out to know Edward already from the queer and activist communities.

Santa Cruz, on that trip, was the end of another story: the site of the last full-on kink scene I ever did, and also of the last time I had genital sex (making the place a Bed, Bud, Breakfast, Bondage and Blowjob). Another landmark, I guess.

By the time I get back to that part of the world, it will have shifted yet again: the fires are still uncontained, and whatever remains of the town and the campus will be irrevocably changed. But you can’t change the past, and Santa Cruz is a permanent part of my brain and my heart.

[1] Contemporary college students might not recognize how startling a statement that was in 1972, particularly at “Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp.” For comparison, imagine asking a fellow student in the 2020s what they want to do after college, and having them say “I dunno, man, just hang out, smoke a bit, figure out who I am, you know?”

[2] Still does.

[3] Too small to be a honeymoon.

Janet W. Hardy 2 Comments

Frank and I separated when Ben was six and Miles was eleven. We did it, we thought, because of an irreconcilable sexual difference – I was kinky and he was not. Bless him, he tried, but somebody has to occupy one end of the bell curve, and he was it. I was imagining orgies, dungeon parties, climbing to ecstatic heights with pain and role-play – and he wanted genital sex, which didn’t and doesn’t do much for me.

In hindsight, of course, our separation was a lot more complex than that. Each of us had gotten horribly dependent on each other to do things we should have known how to do ourselves: he had to ask me how one went about renting an apartment, and I had to borrow money from him to cover my missed quarterly self-employment payments. But he started writing poetry again, for the first time since we’d been in college (he would go on to become a skillful, published poet). And I began exploring play with partners of all descriptions.

Meanwhile, though, there were the kids. They dealt very differently with the news of our breakup. Miles matured overnight, and began relating to Ben more as an uncle than a brother, while Ben regressed a little bit – he started wanting to sleep with all his stuffed animals on the bed with him, which he hadn’t done for a year or two.

Frank and I had agreed that we wanted joint physical and legal custody. That required that we see each other at least a couple of times a week. At first it was difficult – the first time he came to my new apartment, I tried to hug him goodbye, the way I’d do with any friend. He stiffened in my arms, and stepped back to break the embrace .

Gradually, though, as the months wore on, we eased back into the friendship that was the natural setpoint of our relationship.

He had rented an apartment in our old neighborhood. I was never invited to visit, but I heard from the boys that it was dark and cramped – I was pretty sure that he’d fallen into depression, and it was hard for me not to try to fix it – but I’d sworn off trying to fix people[1], so there wasn’t much I could do to help.

I’d decided to do my best to atone for the separation by finding a place where they could, for the first time in their lives, have separate bedrooms. Given the realities of my budget, we wound up in a decrepit three-bedroom flat on the second floor of an elderly Victorian in downtown Sacramento.

Our weeks fell into a comfortable pattern. Monday through Friday, I’d pack lunches, drop the boys at school, do my work – I was a freelance marketing copywriter at the time – pick them up at their after-school program, supervise homework and TV, then tuck them in.

Frank would pick them up on Friday. As soon as I heard his car driving away, I’d get started spending my weekend slutting around with my new circle of what would now be called “friends with benefits” – kinky people of all shapes, sizes and genders, with whom I practiced both my own fantasies and theirs (and discovered that “spanking” was not synonymous with “S/M”). He’d drop them off at dinnertime Sunday, and it would all begin again.

There was one exception. On Wednesdays, we had Laundromat and Pizza Night.

Our weird little flat, unsurprisingly, did not include a washer or dryer. Fortunately, we lived a couple of miles from a reasonably nice laundromat – and better yet, there was a Round Table Pizza, complete with a video arcade, two doors away.

Wednesday afternoon, I’d gather up laundry: Ben’s clothing from the kids’ department, Miles’s from Young Men, mine from Misses (this was before I began acquiring the specialized wardrobe which included garments from the fetishwear store and the men’s department). I’d strip the bedding from all three beds, and pick up the unreasonable number of towels needed by two growing boys. I’d retrieve the boys from their after-school program at the Y, and we’d head over to Round Table.

Our order was always the same: one large combination and a pitcher of root beer. While the pizza was baking, we’d go start our laundry. I’d dispense the first of several handsful of quarters, then peacefully watch my laundry go round and round while they entertained themselves with electronic mayhem[2].

When the pizza was ready, one of them would come get me, and we’d scarf it down (only those who have never fed two growing boys will be surprised to hear that we were able to kill an entire combination pie in a couple of minutes). I’d sigh and pass out more quarters, and  go transfer the clothes into the dryer. My plan in creating L&P Night was that the boys would help with the folding, but that almost never came to pass – although I did insist on another pair of hands to help with folding the sheets. Full, wired and freshly laundered, we’d head home just in time for bedtime.

Later, when we moved into nicer digs that included a shared laundry room, Miles asked, “Do we have to stop doing Laundromat and Pizza Night?” Sadly, we did – the new place was pricey enough that my budget didn’t include all those weekly quarters – but we all missed it.

Adult Ben and Miles playing air hockey, with silhouettes of themselves as children.

[1] An oath that I still struggle with, 30 years later.

[2] To this day, anytime they get together they try to play a few rounds of air hockey.

Janet W. Hardy Leave a comment

09/14/2020

Author’s note: It seems to me that the things which didn’t happen to a person are as important as the things that did. Several of these “alternate realities” will appear throughout the book.

Alternate Reality #3

The marriage license in our filing cabinet says it’s really much too late to be coming out to anyone about anything – but in my own defense, I didn’t really understand my own sexuality for the first near-decade of our marriage. And then it takes me several more years to work up the courage to tell him, stammeringly, about my desires.

We play a few times. Although my fantasies are mostly about topping, I am happy to play bottom if it means I get to play at all – but as it turns out, neither role works for him.

We are at an impasse, and talking about divorce. We decide to try to spend more time together, and follow our reading interests to one of the early science fiction conferences. Together, we attend a discussion of alternative family structures in science fiction, and consider for the first time the idea of an open relationship.

That saves us. It isn’t easy – we often bemoan the lack of an informative how-to book that will help us over the hurdles. But eventually, he finds a girlfriend who likes vanilla sex as much as he does, and I find myself a couple of regular play partners, nad somehow it works, mostly.

He and I rarely have sex anymore, because that energy mostly goes to the outside partners who are better matches than we are. But all the things we like to do together – raising our kids, going to the movies, talking at length about books and music and theater – still give us great pleasure.

It’s not most people’s idea of marriage, but it works for us.

Janet W. Hardy Leave a comment

July 9, 2020

Ben had gotten kicked out of yet another preschool. He’d been swinging his lunchbox around, endangering other kids. The teachers took it away from him and put it on a high shelf.

The moment their backs were turned, he built a tower of chairs. He was at the top, teetering, reaching for the lunchbox, when a teacher came back into the room.

“I’m afraid he needs more supervision than we can give him here, Janet,” the principal said sadly.

I knew they’d done their best. They’d had Miles for a couple of years, I was a former member of their Board of Directors, and I believe they genuinely liked Ben – they just felt helpless in the face of his wild will.

I did, too.

We found a children’s therapist. He was a nice guy, and he actually did help a little. 

The therapist suggested that Ben was unusually sensitive to overstimulation, which I could see was true once it was pointed out to me. He added that, for a kid like Ben, eight hours a day in the noise and chaos of a preschool was simply too much.

The choice came down to this: either I had to cut my writing work down to part-time (which would also mean the end of my nonmarital dalliances), or I had to hire a caregiver.

That was how Edna came into our lives. I’d placed an ad in the paper, and gotten so many responses that I had to set aside two full days to interview them all.

Two of them actually showed up.

The first was a very nice woman who was profoundly deaf. As much as I liked her, she didn’t seem like a good fit for a kid who liked to sneak off and do dangerous things when nobody was looking.

Edna, the second interviewee, was a tiny, elderly lady with a thick mop of coal-black hair. (I was later to discover that the black hair came off and was placed on the table the moment I left the house.) She had several children and even more grandchildren, and she seemed kind and patient. I hired her to pick Ben up at noon, bring him home, fix him lunch and spend the afternoon with him until I could finish my work and become a mom again.

It was a perfect match. Ben adored Edna, and Edna spoiled Ben unconscionably, letting him get away with things I probably wouldn’t have allowed but which actually seemed to calm him down: once he discovered there was little resistance to his wildness, he stopped pushing. (This might not be the best strategy for other strong-willed children, but it worked for him.)

I got a call one afternoon from our pediatrician: “Mrs. Taber, Edna seems to be a very loving caregiver, but I think you need to be the one to bring Ben in for his allergy shots.” It took me a few minutes to pry the whole story out of him. Apparently Ben had decided he was not going to have another shot, thank you very much. He’d pulled a metal support bar out of its sheath in the exam table, and menaced the nurse with it while gentle Edna sat and watched.

I gave them free rein in the kitchen. One day I walked in to find the two of them, whose combined weight couldn’t have been much over 120 pounds, devouring the last bites of an entire full-sized watermelon.

Most days, though, she would fix his favorite lunch of Top Ramen, then settle down with him to play Atari or watch a movie, most often anime. His favorite – he watched it over and over – was Ringing Bell.

I only got the plot in bits and pieces as I moved through the house. It seemed to be about an orphaned lamb who was raised by wolves, and then had to decide whether he was predator or prey. I don’t understand why he loved it so – Miles, the future puppeteer, had preferred Pinocchio – but it was a weird movie, and Ben was kind of a weird kid, so we went on renting Ringing Bell over and over.

His favorite book was My Book About Me, one of those books for kids to fill in with the facts of their lives. One two-page spread was filled in with the child’s dreams, which he’d dictated to Frank or me. It includes the following:

The teachers tried to kill me. They put a bracelet that kills guys on me. First they put a star that kills guys, but I got it off. I saw Miss Tricia in my dream and Miss Judy. They were trying to kill me because I wasn’t obeying. They don’t call my mom or dad in my dream; they just kill me.

We overrode Edna and refused to rent him Ringing Bell any more (“Dad and I think it may be giving you bad dreams”) and, after some initial resistance, he actually seemed a bit relieved.

Ben’s essay about Edna won a district-wide prize. It was illustrated with a stick figure boasting a layer of white hair under a wild zigzag of black hair, and his love for her shone through every word.

My political consciousness of what it meant for a young white woman to pay an old black woman to watch her child was dim (this would have been around 1988). Even I, though, had some doubts about using money earned mostly by my husband to free my time so I could carry on with other men.

During those waning days of my marriage, I was exploring submissive men I’d found through the personals. I’d prepare for a morning visit from one of them, a stout little fellow with a monkish fringe of ginger hair and an avid shoe fetish, by scattering my high-heeled pumps all over the house so he could lovingly pick them up and return them to my shoe rack. Then he’d crouch in the footwell of my desk and paint my toenails while I worked. He’d blow them shiny and dry, then grab his jacket and be gone by the time Edna and Ben came home from school.

It was a lot of fun (although I remember wondering when I was going to get to spank him). What it wasn’t, though, was sustainable.

Frank and I asked Edna to add a couple of hours to Tuesday nights while we were seeing our marriage counselor.

Inevitably, it came apart.[1] We told the counselor that we were splitting, and that was the end of counseling (although Frank would go on seeing her for a couple of years as he tried to rediscover his personal boundaries after having me run his life for fifteen years). We told the kids the next day, and everyone else the day after that.

We had bittersweet sex one more time before he left.

Ben was five at the time. In some ways I felt worse about taking Edna away from him than I did about the separation – but there was no way we could pay rent on two places and still pay her salary.

I took Ben to visit Edna a couple of times, but the magic of their friendship was over. Maybe it had never existed, for her.

Kids have loved and lost caregivers for as long as there have been caregivers, which means as long as there have been kids. Ben was just one among millions of sad, powerless kids that have had to move on to the next part of their lives.

[1] I sometimes wonder if our story would have had a different ending if someone had given us a copy of The Ethical Slut.