That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields (4 page)

I edged closer to her and thought she must be a professional break-dancer. I was in a long-distance relationship that was already over in my head—just hadn't gotten around to making the phone call yet. I wanted her (the break-dancer) immediately. I smelled her. I felt her already. She was a very pretty little boy. We exchanged names, smiles, lusty glances, and some dancing nice and close, but no touching. Without even thinking, I said, “Wanna come home with me?” “I think I'd rather take you to dinner,” Kelly answered back with the formality of a gentleman from the 1950s. I think I laughed. It was hard to take this little guy seriously, saying something like that. She was shorter than me but very confident. She had a little bit of a ghetto vibe going on, too (weird combo, I know—ghetto gentleman), that to me was completely unfamiliar and rough. It was weirdly sexy.

Since I wasn't able to get her to come back home with me, I had to make her see she'd made a mistake. Let her stew on it for a while, wondering if she'd missed her chance. I didn't call her for a couple weeks. I finally called and we met for a coffee that turned into hard alcohol and smoking cigarettes back at her flat. She told me she vacuumed every day, maybe twice. Things were in control there. (When she was little, her mom used to drag her out of bed by the hair at 5 a.m. and make her
scrub the walls. One morning, most of her hair stayed on the pillow.)

I don't think we kissed until she walked me back to my flat. We started to make out on my sofa and I went in for the kill. I remember her stopping my hands at every advance. Why? Again, she said she'd rather take it slow. She left me like a sixteen-year-old boy with blue balls.

The next time, we fucked on her living room floor to really loud, deep tech house. It was passionate and she was so open with her body. That impressed me. I wanted to be like her one day. I think right after, or worse, maybe even before, she told me she was still obsessed with her last girlfriend, Melanie. She still had a picture of her up in her room, covering the private bits but giving you very important information. Melanie was petite, blonde, and had huge tits—a sort of young Marilyn Monroe sex appeal, the total opposite of me. I was inadequate and now liked Kelly even more. She was unconquerable and fucking great in bed/on the floor.

She said we should just keep it simple: be friends who would sleep together. Okay! I wanted her to be my serious girlfriend but pretended I didn't. That went on for six months.

Kelly broke a supposed coke habit by joining the military. She went to boot camp, where she pretended to be straight, came back tougher and drug-free, and many days was really nasty to me. Six months in, she'd randomly show up after not talking to me for maybe a week, drunk (but still sharp) and sweet, and seduce me. Then we wouldn't talk for a few days. One day she told me she just wanted to be friends. She still loved Melanie. I cried (after Kelly left). She broke my heart, but I told her that was better for me, too. We managed to stay friends-with-benefits over the next eight months or so, sleeping together whenever we weren't dating other people. The rescue fuck.

One day she picked me up in her car and drove around, ripping into me—saying the cruelest things. There were several sessions like this where she would shout me down or laugh at me, tell me to go fuck myself, and leave me crying on the corner. I hadn't done anything but be there when she needed me for a laugh or a hug or a screw. She wanted only to hurt me, the one person who was a constant for her.

I remember kissing her and looking at her the way I looked at my boyfriends and thinking that was so weird and cool and natural and exciting. I loved her and she was a woman. That was the first time I'd ever looked at
a woman that way. I began to see boys walking down the street as little lesbians everywhere. I cut off all my practically waist-length hair for a production of
The Taming of the Shrew
. I think she was a little less in love with me after that.

She liked me to almost fist her but would never let herself orgasm with me. She couldn't go there. She had to dominate me or I had to be rough with her. That was so hot, these unspoken sex rules of hers. She was serious about it. I prefer serious. By just looking at me—her mouth slightly open, gauging me, leading me, pushing me, telling me how it was going to be through her stare—she could practically make me come. She decided she loved me and imagined us getting married. Too late. I was in love with someone else.

I'm definitely sexually attracted to a darkness. I want to win over the other. I do that even with William today.

Sitting downstairs in a café below our house, I'm feeling angry for no particular reason. Don't you love my constant mood swings? Sometimes I think I must be mildly manic-depressive…

I used to hate/love when this guy I was with would say, “You can't get enough of that, can you?”

Okay, you guys, I know it's your first day, but I can't hear you. You've got to make some noise, or these scenes are really boring to watch. And use some variation. Break it up with some “Oh yeah baby,” “Fuck me harder,” “Suck my dick,” “Lick my pussy.” You know. And she can come more than once. You can't just all the time be doing “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” You've got to break it up with “Oh, I'm gonna come! OH!”

Good question: Do I think of myself as hyper-sexualized?

Do other people?

Do you?

When I have a sexual desire for someone and it's not returned, I think I must be disgusting. My hidden grossness must somehow have escaped. I've been discovered.

I have only a few concrete memories of the abuse, which happened from when I was two to when I was five. There
was no penetration, to my memory, and according to the doctor, there hadn't been, but everything else that could be done was done. I have images/feelings, marking the ages, from two different houses we lived in, in West Bloomfield (Detroit suburb). The boys were from Dad's previous marriage. Carl and Jesse were twelve and thirteen years older than me.

Carl was always around the corner or about to come home or pop out from who knows where, but always waiting to freak the shit out of me, lock me in a closet, hang me by my feet over the railing from the third landing of the staircase, or put a plastic bag over my head—like a killer whale with a sea lion, playing with it, torturing it, loving it, laughing at my fear.

To this day I can't watch
Star Trek
because I remember it playing in Jesse's bedroom when he'd do his thing with me; I remember him identifying a pair of underwear as being sexy (they were orange and black and satiny and felt kind of adult-like), taking them off me, and licking me down there like a dog would lick a wound, asking me if I liked it. I felt tense and weird, as if I were supposed to like it, and I told him I did, to make him feel okay about it. I remember going numb when he did that to me and staring at the blue light glowing on the ceiling, focusing in on that and disappearing until he'd stop.

I felt sorry for him. He told me this was “our secret” and I should never tell anyone about it. There was a horrible, musky stench, of unwashed sheets and a fat, sweaty body. He wanted me to touch him and I remember thinking it was disgusting. It was sticky and smelly. I hated that part the most. Penises were the most disgusting things ever. His was. Jesse abused me while supposedly babysitting me. I asked my mom why white stuff came out of his penis.

Carol would drink herself into Kitty, shaking in terror of my half brothers and holding me as her teddy bear to calm herself down. She was pregnant and had begun teaching me how babies were made. She soon lost the baby after Carl beat her up one night in front of me. I stayed with friends for a few days while she was in the hospital.

I had a little blond five-year-old boyfriend I got caught with under the bed, naked. I told him how to make babies and he wanted to try, but I told him no because I might get pregnant. Upon being discovered, I was scolded and he wasn't allowed to come over again. It was my fault and I was a bad, dirty person. His parents now thought I was, too.

Yes, a girl can reach orgasm by age five, which is when I discovered I could masturbate. One day, when I started rubbing up against the dinner table, I was told very abruptly not to. The response from my mom felt
shocking; I'd done something wrong and was never to do it again. “That's something you do in private”—which could have been okay, but her tone was so harsh.

I did it constantly, in my own room; I was the only one who could make myself feel bad about it, which I always did. I thought my genitals looked different from everyone else's, and I was always covering up. I also remember always wearing underwear in front of my dad because I was a girl and he was a boy and that part of me was not to be shown to him. I thought he might do something to me, too, if he saw me “down there.” Whenever I went into my parents' bed in the middle of the night for a cuddle and they stroked my back to calm me, I always had the (quite irrational) fear their hands might wander to the wrong place. My body was everyone else's except mine.

My mom would say, “It's really important for you to be able to talk about it. You've been sexually abused, Sam. I want you to know you can talk about it whenever you want.” So I did: at age eight, I told all my friends I'd been sexually abused by my brother “when I was a child,” because this was supposed to make me feel better—talking about it. I knew how to talk about what happened but felt nothing; they did. I'd observe people's expressions when I told the story. It was as if it had happened to someone else.

Interesting that you should choose to ask me now how I view my own physical appearance, as that very same theme came up over the last few days and led to an explosion of tears the other night. I was cast in what will supposedly become a TV series. The guy who is producing it, directing it, and starring in it is an American actor I worked with last year on a film. The premise and script of the series are really sharp, and I was flattered that he cast me, felt/feel a pressure to do well, etc. He was going to introduce my character later on, but at the last minute he decided to put me in the teaser. I knew nothing about my character, and when I went for my makeup test, the costume designer said the only thing she knew was I was supposed to be very sexy—the first time anyone has cast me in a role like this.

I received the script for the teaser two days before shooting, and my lines didn't give me any more information about who I was. On the day of the shoot, I thought surely the director would let me know more about the role, but he was very busy running around, so I didn't dare ask him. Finally, I asked him in a sort of jokey way, “So, Thomas, ya know, any information about what I'm doing here?” He said, “Well, basically, let's just say you're the sex kitten of the show. Do all your lines with that in mind. Everything should have an erotic undertone to it.” Gulp.

I was supposed to say the first line staring directly into the camera, which for me is always the most difficult thing to do. I like to work off of people and forget about myself. I saw my reflection and didn't like the makeup job—bags under my eyes and a giant mosquito bite above my left eyebrow, which I immediately asked the makeup artist to cover up. She'd done what most makeup artists do: the minimal thing, making my tiny eyes disappear into my face. Eyes are everything; if the audience can't see them, you have no power, and I felt ugly. I could tell the DP was having difficulty lighting my face to get that sex-kitten look and I had to feel confident regardless.

To me, a sex kitten is a model, an Angelina Jolie. I felt short and squatty, my quads massive. One absurd Thanksgiving when I was nineteen, Jesse and Carl were invited to our house on Vashon Island. I hadn't seen them or talked to them since I was about eleven. My dad thought it was a good idea to get the darling boys back in the house after an eight-year absence, for a family reunion. I thought it was especially wonderful to catch up with them since Jesse had just made his TV debut on
Oprah Winfrey
, claiming to be a recovered rapist. He took me aside and apologized for abusing me, then he and my parents went to bed, leaving me up with Carl, who'd brought along his chef's knife collection, as you
do. He began to study my body with that look I was supposed to give the camera, telling me the reason brothers are always jealous of their sisters' boyfriends is because they really just want to fuck their sisters. And he wanted to smell me and lick me and make me come. After all, I owed it to him, as my dad had abandoned him and he'd been living on the streets for years. I was sitting in a chair and he knelt down in front of me, grabbing my calves, massaging them and saying, “Ahhh. Too bad you got the Matthews legs.”
The big, ugly, unfeminine legs
is what he was saying:
You're lucky I even find you attractive.
This is what I'm fighting in my head, trying to push away, as the camera rolls and the director calls, “Action!” Carl's look is nasty, wrong, and I'm supposed to give the exact same look now, but I feel everyone can read what's going through my head. I'm exposed—vulnerable, scared. I feel my face trembling.

I managed to battle my way through the first close-ups and the director said, “We got it. I know it feels really mechanical, but you'll see: it's just going to be quick flashes, and with editing it'll work just fine.” The whole thing has become a farce. They took a risk by giving me this role, and now they can see I'm definitely not a sex kitten. They're definitely going to cut me out of the series. (I'm waiting for an email from the director saying he's going to
go with someone else. And out of embarrassment, I don't dare “like” any of the Facebook photos of the shoot.)