So Sad Today (7 page)

H
ERE’S WHY
I
’M AFRAID OF
life after death: What if there is no nicotine gum?

I must have access to my nicotine gum at all times. I kiss with the gum. I sleep with the gum. Anything you can do without the gum I must do with the gum. I am chewing the gum right now.

I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own. I can’t count on the universe to sate my many holes: physical, emotional, spiritual. So I take matters into my own hands. I give myself little “doggy treats” for being alive. Each time I unwrap a new piece of nicotine gum and put it in my mouth (roughly every thirty minutes), I generate a sense of synthetic hope and potentiality. I am self-soothing. I am “being my own mommy.” I am saying,
Here you go, my darling.
I know life hurts. I know reality is itchy. But open your mouth. A fresh chance at happiness has arrived!

I’ve been chewing nicotine gum for twelve years. I haven’t had a cigarette in ten years. So you might say the gum works, except now I have a gum problem. I am so addicted to the gum that I have to order it from special “dealers” in bulk on eBay. I get gum on all the bedding. There are many reasons why I don’t think I will have children, but the necessity of getting off the gum during pregnancy is one of them. When it comes down to anything vs. the gum, I always choose the gum.

Now let me just say, before we go any further, that if you’re thinking of using nicotine gum to quit smoking you should not let my experience scare you. I am the addict’s addict. Everything I touch turns to dopamine. I can even turn people into dopamine (ask me how!).

My first cigarette was a Marlboro Red that I stole from my dad and smoked alone in front of my bedroom mirror. I felt a sudden coldness in my lungs, exhaled sexily, and then the room spun around. The vertigo scared me, as do all abrupt shifts in consciousness (I prefer a steady high). I was fourteen.

My next cigarettes, at sixteen, were Marlboro Lights that I shared with a boyfriend under the stars. They were make-out cigarettes—cigarettes of romance, possibility, and freedom. I noticed that when I smoked I became less hungry, which I loved, because I really wanted to be skinny.

Cigarettes soon became meal postponers, or—when paired with Diet Coke and Trident cinnamon gum—meal replacements. I quickly became a pack-a-day smoker, often two, and required a cigarette smoked out my bedroom window just to leave the house in the morning. I smoked outside the gym. I smoked on Rollerblades. I smoked Marlboro Lights and Parliaments, vanilla bidis and cloves. During a Jim Morrison phase I smoked American Spirits.

My mom didn’t smell my cigarettes because of my dad’s smoking. She believed that my dad had quit, even though the car was full of ash, the garage was full of butts, and she saw him smoking through the window every night. My mom would watch my dad smoke and say,
No, he doesn’t smoke
. So the smell of cigarettes somehow equated a nonsmoker. So I was left alone.

I then went to college and the logistics of my smoking became an issue. I had a roommate who claimed to be a smoker, but she was a “social smoker” and I was a “never-not-smoking smoker.” When she saw and smelled the level of my compulsion she issued a moratorium on smoking in our room. The room then became an unsafe place for me, as was any place where I couldn’t smoke.

Thus commenced a cycle of smoking regulations by other roommates and friends. I preferred to chain-smoke in isolation rather than not smoke among others. I only felt comfortable around people who smoked
like me (every moment, back-to-back, like breathing). Cigarettes had become a problem, and the problem was: How could I consume enough of them while living in society?

I bought my first box of Nicorette at age twenty before a flight to London. I knew that I couldn’t get through the seven hours without some hits of nicotine, and I don’t like suffering. On the flight, a glorious new chapter in the annals of my addictions was revealed to me. I discovered that I wasn’t fiending. The gum even gave me a secret buzz. The best part was, nobody knew I was “smoking” except me. I had arrived.

For the next few years I both smoked and chewed the gum. Sometimes I alternated between the two and sometimes I did a simultaneous smoke ’n chew. Then, over time, the gum’s anytime-anywhere qualities won my heart. Nothing enhances addiction like access and secrecy, and the gum trumps cigarettes in both.

Imagine you have a special friend you can take with you into any situation. This friend makes you comfortable in your own skin. She helps you not need other people so much. The friend protects you from life and nobody has to know but you. Just put the friend in your mouth.

The way you chew nicotine gum is not to actually chew it. When you first pop a piece of nicotine gum, you give it one to two quick chomps with your teeth and then
park it, so the nicotine can seep in through your gums or tongue. I’m a left-side cheek parker, and my proclivity to stick to one side has led to some health scares.

There was a period when the whole left side of my tongue and cheek turned bright white. I was sure I had oral cancer, but the dentist said it was irritation from the intense flavor of the gum. I began rotating mouth sides and made the sad transition away from more intense flavors, like “coated fruit chill,” “coated cinnamon,” and “coated mint” Nicorette, into the gentler realm of Habitrol. Habitrol possesses a creamier quality—like a marshmallow vs. a candy cane. At no time did I say, “I’m giving up the gum.”

I’ve also spoken with some physicians about the gum. They said that chewing the gum is better than smoking, but the constant nicotine is probably bad for my heart. But I feel like I have two hearts, a physical heart and an emotional one. And while the gum may have an adverse effect on my physical heart, it does wonders for my emotional one. It ballasts and buffers, nurtures and excites. I guess I value my emotional heart more.

I do recognize that my dependence on the gum reflects an inability to be still with myself, to be alone in the present moment. Also, I feel that the gum creates a barrier to intimacy between me and other people. It’s never just me and another person, it’s me, another person, and the gum. But the present moment is scary. And
intimacy can be terrifying. So the dilution of my beingness, or dare I say, aliveness, is a sacrifice I am willing to make to have an ally in this world: something that gives me a feeling of control, excitement, meaning, structure.

Like, I just want to be okay in this world. I don’t trust myself to find that okayness alone. I guess I don’t really trust the universe to give it to me, either. I want to know exactly where my next peace of mind is coming from. And it feels good to know that something has my back, even if it makes my life really small and might kill me.

O
NE WAY TO FEEL ISOLATED
is to unintentionally develop an odd sexual fetish at a very young age. Next, spend your adolescence reinforcing that fetish through masturbation, until you can only reach orgasm in relation to that very specific fantasy. After that, live your teen years in fear of revealing your secret sexual preference. Eventually, you might want to let a few sexual partners know of your fetish, but definitely downplay it. Never invite any sexual partners to render your fantasies real, or to engage your inner world through role-play, thereby cordoning off a very important piece of you from ever knowing true sexual intimacy for the remainder of your life. Trust me, it works.

My fetish is vomit. Not vomit itself, but the act of vomiting. Vomiting is hot. It’s a primal, involuntary act—much like ejaculation. There’s guttural sounds and animalistic faces. It’s gross but it’s real.

I don’t like vomiting much, myself. But I want to watch people vomiting. Or I want to be a person who is not me vomiting. Mostly I want to do this in my head.

I think my vomit fetish started when I threw up in my sleep at three years old. My mother, who wasn’t the traditional nurturing type, behaved in a way that was very nurturing toward me. She cuddled me and gently bathed me. My own powerlessness, coupled with a new experience of tender care—her acceptance of me at my most disgusting—was intoxicating. Now, not only did I know that my mother really loved me, but she loved me at my most vile. When you have low self-esteem, to be embraced at your most vile is a marvel.

I had my first orgasm at age ten, humping a four-foot George Jetson doll while a homemade tape of vomiting sounds (my own, fake) played on my Walkman. I fantasized that I was Kimberly, a pretty, popular gymnast-girl. I imagined that I/Kimberly was running down the hallway at my school, not making it to the bathroom, vomiting all over the place in front of everyone. I wanted this pretty girl to know shame, the shame that I felt in my own body. This turned me on. At the same time, I felt that Kimberly—as a pretty and popular girl—was beyond reproach. Even when out of control, even at her most disgusting, she would be embraced. I wanted to experience that as well.

In retrospect, I may have simply been sexually attracted to Kimberly, vomit or no vomit. But it was easier to mask this attraction with a vomit narrative than to grapple with the terrifying thought that I might be into girls.

So I humped George Jetson and imagined that I was Kimberly vomiting. I also imagined that I was a girl helping Kimberly vomit. As I humped I felt better and better. Then, a miracle occurred. From my vagina to my legs, I was suddenly rocketed beyond the space-time continuum. For a few moments, I was taken completely out of my own ego into a soul world of pleasure. I couldn’t believe that this feeling existed. It seemed crazy that I had never heard about this before! Had I invented it? I patched up George (his stuffing was falling out) and joined my family downstairs for dinner. But I knew what I would be doing later. I was going to give myself this feeling forever.

Kimberly is still a lurking fantasy for me. I am very loyal to my fantasies, and once I get a good one I hold on to it for life. Here are a few of my other favorite vomit fantasies:

These are all fairly loving fantasies. What unites them, aside from vomit, is that each of them involves a complete acceptance and embrace. While some of them delight in the shaming of someone beautiful and/or powerful, the ultimate resolution of that shame is always self-acceptance by way of another’s acceptance. To me, that’s sexual fulfillment.

When searching for emetophilic porn (an emetophile is the name for a person with a vomit fetish) on sites like pornhub, you’ll mostly find women gagging and vomiting on dicks. This doesn’t do it for me. In those videos, the power is going in the wrong direction. It’s too forced. I like a natural vomit. I like a vomit that comes as a surprise to the vomiter. But the Internet has served to enhance my vomit fetish fantasies. I’ve just had to google a lot.

Ten years ago I found a wonderful website called Slaveboy’s Vomit Fetish, which featured videos, audio, images, and even erotic fiction (my favorite) of people vomiting. When I first discovered the website I felt like I had unearthed a treasure trove. I was excited that there were people like me out there and I couldn’t believe how openly they talked about their fetish on the chatboard—even when they did so anonymously. Sadly, Slaveboy’s is
now defunct. I wish I had saved some of the stories in a Word doc.

Since then, I’ve found vomitonline.com (also now defunct; it’s a fairly niche fetish) and vomitinbrazil.com (a paid site, but they used to have good previews), and I’ve also downloaded my fair share of pirated content.

Mostly I’ve scoured YouTube and collected tons of awesome videos of vomiting people. I have my favorites, usually videos that involve a lot of burping. Burping, to me, is the most sexual element of vomiting, because the sound is so primal. In my fantasies, the vomiters always burp a lot. I frequent the burp fetish forums, though I never leave a comment. One girl on the forums says her ultimate fantasy is a guy burping into her vagina as he gives her head. I’d have to agree that’s a sexual ideal.

If you’ve masturbated to porn, or just masturbated in general, you know that feeling of shame you sometimes feel immediately following orgasm. Sometimes you look at the scene on the screen—or the scene that was just playing in your mind—and feel like,
What? I got off to this?
Now imagine that scene involves copious vomit.

I don’t know if it’s that shame that has led me to never incorporate vomiting into my actual sex life. There is a big difference between what goes on inside my head and the tactile experience of that attempted fantasy. I don’t even know if I like vomit in real life. Whenever a person
around me is vomiting, I get kind of scared and avoidant. This is called emetophobia.

I’ve never been the “let me hold your hair” type. Instead I run away. This resistance to IRL vomiting is likely a defense mechanism I’ve built up over time so that no one finds out my secret. Like, I don’t want to appear too interested in vomiting people.

Most of my lovers haven’t known of my fetish. With my first lover, I faked all of my orgasms. With subsequent lovers, I’ve often secretly employed a vomit fantasy while he or she was going down on me, so as to be able to achieve orgasm. I’ve heard from more than one lover that one minute I’m present and then I am suddenly totally detached during sex. I just “drift off.” I think I know the reason why.

I’ve tried to privately “train myself” away from vomit over the years. I’ve masturbated to more vanilla fantasies so that I might better achieve orgasm with a partner without having to drift off. Some of my masturbation fantasies no longer involve vomit, but they always take longer. And when I’m with a partner, the fantasy is usually a requirement in order to climax. Vomit is my safe space.

I have told a few long-term partners about my fetish. These moments of bravery are usually then followed by years of backpedaling. When I come clean, I always end up eventually downplaying the fetish because of residual
shame. The worst is when I’m watching a movie with a partner who knows of my fetish and somebody vomits on-screen. In those moments, I always pretend the fetish isn’t a thing for me. I’m like, “Oh, look vomit, yeah that means nothing to me” or “Ewwwwww.” But in my heart, vomit is my everything. When people burp I sometimes get turned on.

None of my partners have ever offered to engage in my fetish. I haven’t pressed it. I don’t want to see those I love suffering. I’ve also never pursued any of the people looking for vomitsex on various chatboards. I don’t know that the smell of vomit would be sexy to me. Also, in my mind there are very specific vomit scripts that even the most well-intentioned lover would not be able to follow. Rendering one’s fantasies real is a tricky business. A break in the narrative might be a grave disappointment.

Having a secret fetish has probably led me to more promiscuity in my life than I might have engaged in otherwise. Like, all my life I’ve been searching for that one who could trump my fantasies. I haven’t found the person yet. But maybe that’s how sexuality is, regardless of what direction your fantasies take.

It doesn’t look like I’m ever going to get over my vomit fetish. In spite of the tape playing in my mind, I still hold a somewhat sacred sexual ideal: a union where I experience orgasm with another person based solely on what is happening in the moment, and not on what is
going on in my head. I’ve strived for this, and while I’ve experienced great pleasure with others sans vomit fantasy, it’s never at the level of vomit.

But there are dark, untouched corners within all of us. Sex can be very exciting in one moment and barely tepid the next. It can feel like love but not be love. It can feel like possession and then the person walks away. You can’t possess another person. You can’t make another person not die. If nothing else, at least my vomit fetish is mine. It’s mine and it’s real.