Sugar Momma

I haven't been laid in over ten months, and that was with a 39-year-old petroleum heiress from Houston.

Kinji ridiculed me for being with such an old woman. "What other services do you provide?" he asked, "do you rub her corns?" Thereafter, he referred to her as my "sugar momma."

It was an inaccurate characterization of my fling with C. Admittedly, it was one marked by a wide disparity in time-on-earth and financial holdings between its participants. C. bought me a lot of food, and once paid for a hotel room. She paid me $400 for a weeks' worth of brush clearing on her land, readying it for a fire-department inspection. It was a fair wage. I suffered poison oak all over my body for a month afterward. I never asked for donations. If I had, C. would have laughed at me. We were both in it for the sex.

The sex was excellent. I am like a prospective employer in my sexual tastes. Her real-estate investing prowess would arouse me. Once she told me that she had flipped a pair of condos in Manhattan's meatpacking district for a profit of several hundred thousand dollars. I immediately took her to bed.

Along with the sex there was an intellectual connection of medium intensity. C. was an architect with a second masters degree in permaculture design. We would discuss aesthetic preferences and our emotional problems with one another. She had gone through a series of unappreciative lovers, several pushy upper-class people she'd met during time she spent in Manhattan, Switzerland, Paris and Los Angeles. She had aborted their children.

C. was born into a family of waspy Texas Republicans with their tentacles deep in the energy industry. She told me of her obese brother-in-law who built coal power plants in China. He had five SUVs and a part-time jet. Twice he nearly died of a heart attack because he was so worried about stock prices. C. stopped speaking with her sister, his wife, after he stole a million dollars from their mother. Her nephews were vidiots with a keen sense of entitlement. The family's annual Christmas expenditures ran around $10 thousand.

She counted amongst her friends a medley of rich people with dramatic, miserable lives. Amonst them was an executive from Lionsgate Films. His wife would call C. and complain that she was suicidal, worn out by all her husband's infidelities. Their teenage daughter needed a heart transplant because of her anorexia.

Our fling lasted for three months, or about 30% of the amount of time it has been since I last experienced a legitimate orgasm. It occurred mostly in an A-frame house on her fifty-acre spread in Ojai, next door to screenwriter Caroline Thompson (of "Edward Scissorhands" credit). C. had stolen the parcel for around a million dollars. She planned to design and build a rammed-earth residential compound there. It would never to be. A gang of corporate attorneys outbid her for the neighboring parcel, offering far more than it was worth. She suspected that they would build something ghastly in her view, and she was thereafter totally soured to the prospect. Then the economy collapsed.

Once we went on a road trip to San Francisco. We camped in a tent behind a bent juniper tree in Big Sur, right next to the beach, drinking whiskey. She got drunk and told me that she liked me but that it would never be because she was sixteen when I was born.

She left me in the city while she went up to Napa for a weekend with her mother and her other sister, with whom she was still on good terms. That sister was a real-estate developer in Washington, D.C. They'd made some money together during the boom. C. disliked her mother, however. When the other sister had married, their mother had stood against it because he was a Mexican. C. returned to San Francisco complaining that the pair had dropped $300 dollars on a meal at one of Napa's toniest restaurants, dining beside the rich and famous, and she was weary of it all. Each evening she would down a bottle of wine, and I accused her of suffering ennui.

We went for dinner with her ex-boyfriend, a German technology columnist for the Economist website. He was in his forties. She had dumped him around the time I was in first grade because she felt that they had become "too much like friends." The three of us left his wife to worry at home. He and C. should have stayed together, I reckon.

I last saw C the other day at a cafe in Santa Barbara. I had been trying to contact her for months. One day in May she had dropped me off in her Prius, and I knew that that was that. She jetted off to France to sell her apartment in Paris and deal with some "tax issues." I became a traveling hobo. I called her from a gas station in Oklahoma once and caught her on her international Blackberry. I told her I was trying to work some Kerouac out of my system.

Months later she stopped responding to my emails. I finally called, and caught her on the slopes in Colorado. She was staying at her family's house in Snowmass. She ended the conversation by saying that she had to keep skiing in order to fully utilize her lift ticket.

The date went badly. We sat on barstools and ate a dry, overpriced meal of chicken and brown rice underneath cucumbers. She didn't talk much, would only make ambivalent grunts to my attempts at conversation. I told her I was in a rut and she was unimpressed. She was moving to southeast India to get married and have children, she said. Her fiance was another millionaire with residences in Morocco and Europe. I told her that marriage was a "patriarchal anachronism." When the bill came, it was $44, and I made the mistake of hesitating to contribute. She ended the date by saying she was late to an appointment. I gave her a hug and she disappeared to Asia.

I hope she's doing well.