SexSW

(fiction)

It was the kind of night you experience only at South by Southwest.  On the heels of a million hipsters, spring floods Austin with its sweet, humid scent.  The air is charged, like lightning is about to strike.  Your skin tingles and your hair stands on end.  Anything is possible.

Tina was saving me a spot in line by the time I got to the Austin Music Hall.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.  “The doors are about to open.”  She lifted the rope and pulled me next to her.  The bouncer pretended not to notice, and our fellow “laminates” didn’t seem to care.  My Morning Jacket was this year’s hot band, but those of us with badges around our necks would all get in, we knew.  Not so the poor wristband crowd, the little people off to one side in a long winding line that stretched to the street.  The fire marshals were out in force, and no amount of wheedling would convince the organizers to sneak in a few extra souls.  The wristbanders were wasting their time at a showcase this popular.

Tina had decided to go Goth tonight, sporting electric blue highlights in her raven hair and a black and white polka-dot dress that cut her like a corset.   Me, I wasn’t about to leave my cowboy boots in the hotel closet.  I had my black-and-white striped socks pulled up to my thighs, leaving a gap between them and the oh-so-short denim skirt I had fashioned out of jean shorts.  A careful watcher would catch a flash of red between my legs, but this was hardly the time to worry about that.  In an even more deliberately trashy twist, I had chosen a matching, and flattering, red bra to go under a white sleeveless collared cotton blouse tied at the waist.  A crushed straw cowboy hat topped my brown shoulder-length hair and set off my green eyes nicely.

Hey, when in Texas….

Our line had just started to move when I spotted him.  Tall, not too skinny or beefy, dark eyes smoldering under his shaggy bleached bangs. He hadn’t primped for the event — no, he was a true believer, there for the music, wearing what seemed practical at the time: faded black t-shirt and jeans, canvas sneakers, wide leather watch band.  As our line snaked next to the rows where he waited in vain, he smiled and gestured.

“Can I cut in line too?” he said to Tina, but his eyes were on me.

“Sorry,” said Tina, smirking.  “Quota’s all used up.”  And then we were past.

“He’s cute,” she said.  “Too bad we’ll never see him again.”

“Yeah.”  The sight of him had thrummed up my spine like a long bass note, almost too low to hear.  Too bad, indeed.

But the line turned again, and he had us one last time.  “What about you?” he said to me. “Your quota’s not used up.  Can I hitch a ride?”

“I wish you could,” I said.  “Really.  You have no idea.”

And then we were inside.

We had it all to ourselves for a few moments.  Tina strode toward the bar.  “I’ll buy.  You grab a spot up front.”

I was front and center when Tina caught up, but I waved off the drink.  “Gotta pee.”  She rolled her eyes, said, “Hurry,” and sipped from the glass she had offered to me.  I headed up the right aisle along the stage, where I knew the ladies’ bathroom was.  The line in the bathroom was blessedly short, and I praised my foresight once again.  The badges paid for themselves in little and big ways.

I came out of the bathroom in a rush and almost bowled over a roadie with an amp on his shoulder.  A closer look gave me a shock; it was the cutie from outside.

“How did you—”

“Shh.”  He managed to put one finger to his lips without dropping the amp.  “Wait here.”  And he took off confidently, as if he actually were a roadie.

“No,” I said, but he didn’t hear me as the swelling crowd noise filled the hall.  I stood there uncertainly, blocking the path of a half dozen people, before I came to my senses.  The show was about to start.  I was not going to miss it.  Tina had my drink.  Nice try, Mr. Hottie.

A hand came to rest on my arm just as I was turning to go back into the hall.  At his touch I knew, without a doubt, that the lightning had finally struck.

“Follow me,” he said, taking my hand into his warm, strong, slightly sweaty grip. Soon we were threading a maze of backstage crap.  He stopped in front of a low door.

“In here.”  He held it open like a gentleman, waiting.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Come on.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Terp.”  He smiled.  “Nice to meet you.”

“My friend—”

“…will forget to worry as soon as the music starts.”

He was right about that, I knew.  Before I could protest further, voices approached from around the corner.  That settled it.  I planted a hand against the small of his back and pushed him in before me, crouching under the low ceiling.

In the dark it was hard to tell for sure, but the space seemed surprisingly tidy.  Occasional beams of dusty light streaked down from cracks in the wooden ceiling.  A bunch of amp blankets were thrown in one corner, and he pulled me toward them.  We found a place to sit. The crowd roared from what sounded like a thousand miles away.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Under the stage.”

“No way.”  As I settled in next to him, I could hear footsteps in various directions above as the band, assuming it was the band, took their places.

“Holy fuck.”

“I hope so,” he said, running a gentle hand up my leg.  And as the music exploded into what could only be “Evil Urges,” I grabbed Terp’s hand and guided it further upward.

By the time the band finished the first song to raucous applause, my thong was somewhere on the floor, my shirt open, my bra unsnapped in front and dangling down my arms. My hat had rolled off into the shadows somewhere. My hips were bucking in time with the tongue between my legs.  And when “Off the Record” started, he grabbed that rhythm as an anchor and took me with him.

“So fast,” I moaned, “I’m coming so fast,” as my head tilted back, my back arched, and my hips shivered in quick time.

I fought with his belt and zipper, and then I sucked his cock feverishly while “Gideon” soared and roared above us.  Terp might have been moaning, but nothing was going to drown out Jim James belting out those lyrics.  The air around us vibrated with passion.

I felt him begin to twitch before he eased my forehead back.  Taking advantage of the quick break, he pulled out a condom, ripped it open, and skillfully rolled it on with one hand.  I nodded approvingly.  I was in the hands of an expert.

At the end of a lovely date, with the whole night before us, we might have had time to linger and laugh, to fumble and find ourselves.  This was not that night.  He braced himself over me while I lay back, digging my heels into his ass to pull him in.  When he plunged into me, I felt as if a white-hot spotlight had pinned me to a stage.  He ground the loose, low riffs of “What a Wonderful Man” into every cell of my body.   And when we came, writhing together, I closed my eyes and thought I could see everything — the stage, the crowd, Tina with my now-empty glass, and the angelic face of Carl Broemel staring over his guitar, through the cracks in the floor, into my eyes staring up at him.

“What a wonderful man,” I murmured into Terp’s neck.

We found our clothes and scrambled into them.  “Ready?” he said, and I nodded.

We opened the low door and found ourselves staring into the sour face of the club’s stage manager.  Long gray ponytail wagging behind his shaking head, generous paunch, tired eyes that had seen everything twice — he knew exactly what was going on.  So much for a discreet exit.

But there was only one of him, and two of us.  In a chivalrous outburst, Terp confronted the manager while I managed to slip past.  The strains of “Thank You Too” rendered me conveniently deaf to anyone calling after me.

I found Tina still at the front of stage, swaying with the masses.  And yes, my glass was empty.

“Where the hell have you been?” she yelled over the music.  “The show’s half over.”

“Long line.  Don’t worry, I could hear it just fine.”  The lips between my legs were still puffy and slick.  I didn’t know if my thong was up to the task of keeping it all in, but this was hardly the time to worry about that.

As the set was ending, Tina leaned over to me and said, “Want to sneak into the back?  I think I know that guy over there.”  She had spotted the sour-faced manager, whose eyes were directly on me.

“Um, we’d better get to the next showcase,” I said.  I dragged her through the nearest exit before she could protest, feeling those eyes on me all the way.

We made it to Pangaea in record time and got in line behind the other laminates, who were already starting to file in to see Perry Farrell.

“Look over there,” said Tina.  “Isn’t that the cutie we saw in line at the last show?”

Terp was standing with the other wristbanders behind a cheap yellow rope, hoping in vain to get in.  He had already spotted us, and his grin was huge.

“Stop stalking us,” said Tina, grinning back as she passed him.

“What can I say?  I have good taste.”  I wasn’t sure if he meant the music or us.

As I passed him, he touched my arm again in just that way.  “Hey.”

“Hey what?”

“What’s your name?”

I thought a moment.  “I’ll tell you inside.”

“See you there,” he retorted.

“I hope so,” I said.  “Really.  You have no idea.”

And then I was in.

 

As I’ve said before, “Jamie Stayhouse” is not my real name, but it is a real name. This story is one of the reasons. It appeared about a decade ago in a now-defunct online publication called cleansheets.com. At the time I was an established writer just tiptoeing into erotica. My background included music journalism, which inevitably led me to the world’s biggest stage, South by Southwest. “Write what you know,” say the gurus, and it seemed reasonable to tap into my knowledge of SXSW to give this sex fantasy a plausible shape.

I’m not the sort of person who finds it easy to flirt and seduce in person, so maybe this story was an attempt to exorcise some frustrations about never having had such an adventure. Maybe my main character is the partner I never found but wished I had. It’s fun to imagine what might have happened if Sophie and I, whose active times at SXSW are roughly parallel, had crossed paths back then.

Today the clubs mentioned in this story are long gone. The musicians are on hiatus or pursuing other projects both in and out of music. SXSW has changed and grown radically from the days described here, which already reflected radical change compared to my journalism days, which were themselves far different from the event’s inception. But the energy is the same. The air still tingles with possibility.

When this story first appeared, the response to it encouraged me to believe I could write about sex in compelling ways.  Material success remains on the horizon, but thanks in part to this blog, we’re now striding toward that goal instead of tiptoeing.  This story is a nostalgic paving stone on that road.