This Is The Second Sex

by MEREDITH HIGHT

I was supposed to be eating some salmon sashimi, some California rolls. Instead, I got an earful of cock.

Let me be precise.

I walked around the block to the sushi place in my neighborhood. It has been hot in Los Angeles, wildfire hot. Maybe you heard. So I just threw some clothes on, but not a bra. This alone is probably asking for trouble, because I was wearing my Reading is Sexy t-shirt. And I don’t know how it happened, but I'm a D-cup.

It didn’t used to be like this. I was a B, then a C, and now a D. I thought it was being on the pill for so long, but I went off of that a few months ago, and still – D. It is what it is, but if you ask me, it’s a little unnecessary. But an adolescent girl who is lamenting the state of her flat chest might be inspired by my story. I don’t hope that she is, I am just telling you how my thirteen year old self and Judy Blume might think.

I usually just order at the counter and take my miso soup and my edamame, and my sushi, to go. But there was a seat at the bar, so I took it. As I sat down, the sushi chef enthusiastically clinked a beer mug against a customer’s, like a Japanese Cheers, like Norm. I read the menu, I drank some water.

The waitress brought me my miso soup and I sat and listened. Two overweight lesbians sat next to me, wearing camouflage and wedding rings and bandanas. We were married before the proposition, they were telling the pair of fortysomething men next to them. The men were congratulatory, emboldened, they wanted to know more.

You can feel the loneliness at a bar sometimes, practically see the veneer of sadness that lies just beneath the convivial small, smaller, smallest of talk. The men were not wearing Ed Hardy, but they should have been. They represented a faded California, their time had passed, the tans had turned to leather, the t-shirts were too small, all of it so tired.

They said to the lesbians, can I tell you a story? Sure, they respond. One of the men lights up and begins. OK, this one time I was in Thailand. And this guy comes up to me and wants to show me his tat. He pulls down and his pants and shows me his cock. And it says, right there on the head, “No Mercy.”

Can you believe that?!

Raucous laughter amongst the men, restrained smiles amongst the lesbians.

They wanted the lesbians to come out with them later, to someone’s house. It will be sick, they said. The lesbians politely declined, they were practically an old married couple after all. They paid their check, and then the twentysomething Asian girls sitting next to me left, and there I was, a sitting duck.

I could still hear them, saying something about she seems to be enjoying her solitude, something about pussy, something about something. Worse than hearing them, I could feel them.

How was your sushi? they asked, from across the bar.

Quack.

Fine, I said. I paid the check and I left.

Just the day before, I met some friends at the beach, at Will Rogers State Park. Well, they rode their bicycles, and I drove my car. Because I can’t ride bicycles, I fall off. So I got there earlier and I laid down my towel and took off my tank top and shorts. Like I said, it has been hot, and I was wearing my green and white polka dot bikini.

A mere moment after pulling the sunscreen out of my bag, a sixtysomething man appeared. Well, hello, he said. How are you doing today? Fine. Where are you from? Texas. Oh. You like it here? Yes. Are you a single lady? Yes.

He looked something like John McCain, or Betty Draper’s aging father on Mad Men. I stopped slathering my sunscreen on and looked at his small, pale blue eyes, set against his weathered, woven face, eagerly searching me.

Well, I’d like to get you know better, he said.

No, you don’t. You just want to fuck me.

That’s not what I said. I held back my laughter and I said, no thank you, I am flattered, but I am not interested.

I walked, I fell into the neutral, welcoming ocean. I returned to my towel only to discover that I had had set up camp next to a group of presumably gay men. Or at least, they were talking about the local gay interior designers and they were not looking at me like the sixtysomething man was looking at me. “Are you still living on Dick Street?” one asked. “No, it’s too hard to live on Dick Street,” he answered.

My friends showed up. How did you know it was her? a friend asked. Because of her booty, she said. I could see it from across the beach. Plus I know she has that green and white polka dot bikini. It’s true, I have a booty, applebottoms, badunkadunk, according to the Urban Dictionary. It is what it is, and it has always been this way. Every summer, as a little girl, my mom would sigh as she tried to find a swimsuit that would cover my entire bottom.

Having boobs and a booty suggests something sometimes. The problem is, sometimes you are just a person, and you are not trying to say anything. You are just trying to live, to go about your business, to be who you are and do what you do.

Years ago, in Sacramento, I went for a run. I was just there for a summer, for work. I didn’t know the neighborhood, I didn’t know the area. It was a Saturday, probably sometime around four o clock in the afternoon. I had stopped at a busy intersection, and hit the light to cross the street. It was a long light, and I stood for a minute or two.

I happened to glance over at the car parked on the street. There was a man inside, sweating. He was wearing plastic glasses and his bare, pathetic penis was in his hand, peeking out from below his sloppy stomach. He saw me, I saw him. The light changed. I moved apartments and neighborhoods the same day, disturbed.

Someone said, well you shouldn’t go running there. In broad daylight? At a busy intersection? I need to be concerned with perverts who might be jacking off?

Sometimes I hate being a woman. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a woman.

Meredith Hight is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

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