Lady GaGa Fucked Me Accidentally

She was raw. She was sensual. She was naked, except for her heels and her voice and her bra. She was lust. Sweaty, hungry, powerful, in control. The whip in her hands was not a prop. It was a tool. It was a part of her, just like the arch of her back and the curious crooked way she stood and the pout of her face and the curves of her blonde hair. She was more than a song or a sound or an image or a person. As I looked at her, she was everything I had never realized I wanted. She was my hidden fantasy come to life on a stage in front of me, in front of the world. It was the feeling of discovering a terrible wonderful magnetizing fetish the night I saw Lady Gaga in concert.

She stroked the piano softly with one hand and I shivered. Maybe it was the keys singing or the way her eyes were closed forcing her to feel her way to right spot or the sex in her voice. Maybe it was just in my head. No, it definitely wasn't just in my head. It was real. I could taste it in my mouth, like chocolate and honey and lavender. She licked her lips. I stood not of my own will but because her eyes told me to. I didn't breath because I didn't want to disrupt the feeling rushing through me or because I didn't need to anymore.

Moment after moment, movement after movement, heart beat after heart beat, it grew. I started to lose control of my toes as they curled in my shoes. My feet cramped and the pain was the best pain I had felt in my life. A brief pause between songs provided enough time for two or three gasps for air before she continued working me over. I didn't want or need any more rest than that. I was completely in her hands. She gave me a flash here and a moan there. She kept me guessing, stage left and stage right. The way she changed her pace kept me constantly on edge. I felt for a moment that I might float into the air with ecstasy.

Finally I exploded. When she reached the climax of "Do What U Want" from ArtPop, artfully remastered for an unexpected and soulful and passionate live performance, I couldn't hold it in any longer. I don't remember exactly what I did or said. I might have screamed. I might have kicked a beer over. I might have made out with the guy in the seat next to me. I might have taken off my bra and thrown it on the stage. I can't remember. I think I was bleeding. Maybe from stepping on a broken beer bottle. But I couldn't feel it. The pleasure gushing through my body left no room for any other senses to function. Nor did they need to. Somehow I still heard her singing, her voice touching my body, sending me into anther wave of satisfaction. And another, and another.

Then it was over. I stood at my seat, unmoving. People shuffled by. They murmured. I couldn't hear them. I didn't know where to go. I was left senseless. I forgot what purpose I served as a human being. In that moment, I didn't know who I was anymore. I had never before questioned anything in my life. But she made me re-evaluate everything. It wasn't the music or the sex or the performance that stuck with me. It was the way she showed me that anything is possible. Lady Gaga opened up the world to me. And for the first time, I was genuinely excited about what this life had to offer me. No. What I had to offer this life.

It was weeks later before I could talk to my boyfriend about it. He had noticed something peculiar about me ever since that night. He thought I might be cheating on him, but he never brought it up. I knew because I had been dating him long enough to know things about him he hasn't told me yet. That kind of connection was usually an exciting one. He knew something was different, but he treated me exactly the same. He came home at the same time. He kissed me gently on the cheek, on the spot that was probably a slightly different color now because it's where he had kissed me every day when he got home for the past ten years. He loved me. He told me he loved me. He fixed himself something to eat because I had already eaten. He sat on the couch and turned on the TV. It was Friday, which meant it was the day he watched the latest episodes of his two favorite shows that had aired earlier that week. He smacked his food as he chewed. I couldn't help but hear the smacking. It was a fight we had once about three years in and decided we would never resolve it. He told me I had to accept his smacking. As a trade-off, I got to leave my dirty dishes in the sink for one night instead of washing them immediately, which he hated. I never left my dirty dishes in the sink in spite of our agreement because I could feel his frustration the moment I did it, even if he was no where near the apartment. Eventually, his smacking had turned into something comforting to me, like an odd scent that becomes associated with a specific childhood memory. Usually that reassurance was enough to offset my annoyance. But today, I thought his smacking would drive me to insanity.

I stared at him sitting on the couch, watching TV, smacking his food. It was the same scene I saw every Friday night, but at this moment, I saw it like an outsider. Like a researcher surveying the local terrain. The twelve-dollar hair cut he got at the place down the street suited his straight brown hair. On some people, it would look too basic or too cheap. But it fit him. He was mostly handsome, usually on accident. He had made a few attempts to style his hair and dress in nice clothes during the course of our relationship, like our first date or anniversaries or birthdays. It was what he thought I wanted. I liked that he tried. His tall slender frame held clothes well, and it was hard for him to look bad in an outfit. Sometimes his sleeves were a little short because the standard store sizes didn't fit his long arms right. He almost looked good dressed up, except for how he wriggled when he wore something that wasn't comfortable to him. It was subtle, but I knew he hated what he was wearing and couldn't wait to take it off. But he did it for me, so I told him I liked it. And when we got home from our anniversary or birthday or whatever event had caused his discomfort, he even waited a few minutes before throwing off the clothes and putting on something more comfortable. He didn't want me to know he hated it, and he never told me. But I knew. But he did it for me. Even though I told him I liked it, I didn't like the way he wriggled.

For the first time since the beginning of our relationship, I wondered if he was happy. I wondered what he thought about as he sat there on the couch, watching TV, smacking his food. I'm not sure if he thought anything. He was smart. Way smarter than me. I was at least smart enough to know that. He remembered things from a statistics class we both took in college, and his acute memory made me feel crazy because I couldn't recall learning whatever fact or piece of information he had brought up like it was something I should know offhand. That was where we had met, he had told me later. I didn't remember him being in that class, and I felt embarrassed when it first came up. I tried to cover by telling him I had a bad memory, which is sometimes true. He made a face in reaction that I didn't know at the time meant he was hurt, and I only realized later after we had been dating for a couple years and I had all his subtle facial movements down. He would never tell me that he was hurt by the fact that I didn't remember him, but he didn't need to.

"What?" he interrupted.

"Huh?" I realized I had been staring at him through both TV shows. Only after the credits had he stopped to look at me. He could tell I had been staring at him. "Oh, sorry, I was thinking."

"Oh." That was his way of telling to me that he knew something was different but didn't know what it was. He didn't ask me to explain. I could if I wanted to, but he didn't need me to.

"What do you want to do?" I asked casually. I genuinely needed to know the answer, and I only realized how much after the question had been hanging in the air for a split second.

"I dunno, we could watch a movie." He didn't understand that I wasn't talking about tonight. Or tomorrow. Or any day in particular. But his answer was answer enough. He accidentally answered the question he didn't know I asked. "What do you want to do?" he asked back.

"I want to paint."

He looked at me for a moment, blank. His mind had to search for a response because this was a statement he hadn't been expecting. He didn't react with surprise; he just needed a moment to search his vocabulary for a way to adequately respond to a set of words posed in his direction that he wasn't used to hearing. "Okay." I guess that was a good enough place for him to start. "Do you want to go to one of those ceramic painting places?" I think he meant the places that kids went to for their tenth birthday with friends from school. It must be the only connection his brain could find to painting. He had a logical way of thinking that I found interesting. His had an earnest, kind logic, if logic could have any sort of personality. He always did his best to meet my expectations. I had loved that about him. I knew he cared.

"No, not a ceramic painting place. I want to be an artist. Surrealist art, I think."

"You've never been to a museum," he stated plainly, a fact that he felt the need to insert at that moment. I didn't see a connection.

We broke up soon after that. We were in the middle of sex when it fell out of me. I hadn't planned it. I didn't even know if I wanted to break up with him. I liked him. And I knew that he loved me. I had always thought we would get married one day. A small ceremony, maybe a friend or two each at our sides. A respectable wedding. I pictured it whenever he had sex with me. It didn't take much of my energy, mental or physical, and it was fun to picture. It made me feel safe and warm. It made the sex we were having feel like it meant something, knowing there was a reason. Knowing there was a future. We had never talked about getting married, but we both knew it was inevitable. And I knew he would be supportive of a small wedding, both because it would be my suggestion and because it was efficient. He liked to be efficient. Just like the sex, which I knew was two-thirds of the way done by now. Usually I liked the comfort of his routine. I knew where to move, when to make a moan, when to kiss.

Tonight, the image of the wedding wasn't there. I wasn't holding it back, it just wasn't there anymore. The moan I usually made around this point in the sex didn't come. I wasn't holding it in, there just wasn't a noise waiting in my body like usual. He kept going like nothing had changed. But I knew him well enough to know that he noticed. I'm not sure if he ever realized I made that specific moan at that specific time every time during sex. I don't know if he ever thought about it. But he could certainly tell it wasn't there. He could feel the absence of it. And he kept going like nothing was different. And that was the moment it came out of me.

He stopped. It was the first time our sex routine had changed in seven years. I almost took it all back, told him I didn't mean it. He had stopped right at the peak of a thrust, when he was inside of me. It wasn't intentional, but the surprise made him push a little deeper inside of me than he had ever been before. My toes tingled a little. It felt like the hint of a delayed wave of pleasure from the Lady Gaga concert. And that tingle, that little ghost of a wave, was what made me bite my lip, which meant I couldn't open my mouth to take it back. He pulled out of me, carefully still, and he got dressed like he did every morning for work, even though it was the ten o'clock at night and the weekend. I watched him, studying him, to see what he would do. I didn't need to because I knew what he would do before he did it. I didn't know the exact sequence of steps he would take or the precise order of things, but I knew what he would do. He was moved out by the end of the week, having taken himself off of the lease and turned in his keys to the apartment manager. I wonder if he had cried when I wasn't around.

I touched myself the first night I was alone. I started with my fingers, exploring my vagina to find all the untouched parts inside of me. I fantasized about Lady Gaga. When I had felt that every part of me had been touched by my fingers, I pulled out my vibrator. It had been sitting in the back of a closet, behind some old pictures I had never gotten around to hanging. I had put it in my top bedside drawer the moment he moved out, without thinking. I was glad I did, because I wanted it inside of me right then. The vibration simulated sound, and the sound reminded me of her voice. I pushed it in and out of me, trying to recreate the waves of pleasure I had felt that night. I thought I came close once or twice. I was chasing an incomparable high. I kept going until I realized it was nearly three in the morning. I hadn't stayed up that late since, well, I couldn't remember the last time. I put the vibrator back in its new drawer and went to sleep. I didn't dream, or if I did, it was something I couldn't remember when I woke up.

Quitting my job was easy. Redecorating my apartment was easy because I wasn't making any money, so I just used whatever furnishings were left over from my boyfriend's move-out. Ex-boyfriend. It sounded funny still, even in my head. My social life was easy because I kept all of my same friends. I had known them for so long, and they were nice enough. They thought I was going through an early mid-life crisis, and they told me so. "Jim," they would say. As if having the name Jamie wasn't enough to make me feel like I wasn't feminine. I left my hair long because of it. Then my friends shortened Jamie to James, jokingly at first, and then to Jim. It stuck, and I hated it. But I didn't say anything because I couldn't tell them it bothered me. They'd just start calling me Fred or something. "Jim, I just don't get you." I hated the name, but I loved when they said they didn't get me. It validated my decision to quit my job and quit my boyfriend. They told me how handsome he was and how I was lucky to have him and how they would have killed for a job like mine, which I found unnerving because not one of them had even tried to get a job like mine. They had expected everything to be handed to them. They didn't realize that they could have gotten a job like mine if they had tried, or studied in school, or applied for a job like mine. It was too painfully obvious for me to even say anything. I thought about finding new friends, but I kept seeing them because I still fit in somehow. I liked them well enough.

Buying a canvas was easy. I smiled walking around the art store because I had never been in an art store before. It felt odd and good and strange and happy. I felt like I belonged there. Until the paint section. I was a self-proclaimed artist who didn't know what paint she used. Acrylic. Watercolor. Oil. Pastel. I felt like maybe I had self-proclaimed too early. Maybe I should proclaim myself an aspiring artist. Saying "artist" implied that I made art, which I hadn't yet. I guess that also meant I couldn't say I was a human resources specialist anymore because I no longer did that either. I was glad about that. I would rather be an artist than a human resources specialist. I wasn't sure if I'd rather be an aspiring artist.

My first painting was okay. I tried for surrealism, but I couldn't tell if I really understood it. I oscillated between thinking it was good and thinking it was terrible. I think that's how art goes. I hope that's how art goes. I turned it on its side in hopes that I was just looking at it wrong. Maybe a masterpiece came in the form of a ninety degree rotation. It didn't. I read an article online about how to make it big as an artist. It wasn't helpful because it was filled with advertising that distracted me from the article. Or maybe the ads tried to hide the fact that the article wasn't useful. It didn't tell me what to do next. It didn't tell me when to wake up in the morning or where to buy my groceries or how to earn enough money for rent or when to brush my teeth. It barely told me anything about art. But it sure did have plenty of ads.

Maybe I should work in advertising, I thought, when realized I didn't know how I was going to make rent for much longer. I got a job at a local coffee shop. I didn't want to move out of my apartment. And that's what starving artists do, right? Work as baristas at coffee shops and have fights with their manager where they say, "Well I never wanted to be a barista in the first place!" because they are terrible at their job because they are so focused on their true artistic passionate that they can't focus on anything else in their life. I never had a fight with my boss. He was nice to me, and I was dependable and picked up shifts whenever I could. I wasn't doing anything else anyway, and I needed the money to afford the rent. I started dating a boy from work. He was younger than me by almost a decade. That's another thing artists do, right? Date younger men? He had a kind heart, and he had dark brown hair, and he was a hard worker, and he was tall and skinny, but not as tall as my ex-boyfriend, and not as skinny, so they were different. But still pretty tall. And more on the lean side, but definitely not skinny. We had pleasant conversations at work, and he was visibly nervous when he finally asked me out, which I decided to find endearing. He tried to look nice for our first date, which I thought was considerate. He didn't kiss me at the end of it, which I was okay with.

I didn't really think about my ex-boyfriend until I was trying to find inspiration. It had been a couple weeks since I last tried to paint. I thought a broken love affair should be cause for plenty of passionate, unfiltered, brilliant art. But he didn't lead my creativity anywhere. None of my old life lead anywhere. So I thought about a basket of fruit instead. That was what artists painted sometimes, right? I tried it and hated it. Maybe because it didn't look like fruit on my canvas. But it looked enough like fruit that it couldn't be abstract. I thought about the surrealism that was supposedly my genre. I guess I couldn't call it my genre if only half of my paintings were surrealistic. The other half was fruit, which I hated. That was enough to inspire me to paint something else, just to make sure less than half of my paintings were fruit.

I painted a couple more things when I found the time. I painted one piece of Lady Gaga on stage, which I actually thought was pretty good at first until my friends saw it. I know her face wasn't perfect, and her hair wasn't exactly lifelike and I couldn't capture exactly what I felt that night. But I thought it came close, until one of my friends told me she didn't care for it much. I couldn't tell whether she meant Lady Gaga herself or my painting of her, but she said it while staring at my canvas, so I assumed she meant both. The others nodded their agreement, some too bored to do more than gaze around the shoulders of the ones in front of them to see the top corners of my painting. "It's just not like other paintings I've seen," one of them mentioned. "I can't see it hanging in my house." I had been in her house, and my instinct was to take her comment as a compliment. But as an artist, I suppose I needed to satisfy even the most wretched of tastes if I ever wanted my work to be seen anywhere. I wasn't sure that I did. But I listened to her and tucked the painting under my bed after it had dried, along with the others. 

I let my new boyfriend fuck me because we had been on enough dates and I wasn't doing anything else. I thought about what to paint next more and more, which I liked thinking about. I bought a new couch because I got my old job back so I could start to re-furnish my apartment and make rent next month. I thought about moving, but the only place smaller than mine that was available was one floor below me, and there's a unit with similar square footage right underneath mine that my friends have to pass by on the way out of my place. They make fun of the guy who lives there. I thought he was nice at first, but I guess he could be kind of homely in the mornings, and he has a bit of a beer belly. When they joked about him, I laughed along, so I guess they were right.

"What's this?" my new boyfriend asked the first time he stayed the night.

"What?" I answered without looking up from my book.

I heard him close a drawer, and that's when I realized he was just looking in the middle bedside drawer, which was where I kept my vibrator now. I hadn't touched it in a month, not because my new boyfriend was having sex with me, which he was. I didn't mention that I hadn't used it recently. I didn't intentionally not mention it, it just wasn't something I felt like I needed to say.

"Oh," I commented, looking back down for the sentence I had stopped in the middle of.

"Well?" he stabbed, as if I already knew what the rest of the question was. I did.

"Well what?" I snarked. I wasn't snarky on purpose, but I didn't mind when it happened.

"Well what?!" he thrusted my way, more indignant than before. I looked up and put my book down. This was getting interesting. I think I accidentally smiled, which made him get angrier. I tried to be more neutral.

"It's just my vibrator," I stated in my most serious, explanatory voice.

"Why do you need it?" he fired back. "Aren't I enough?"

I paused. It was a smart question, unintentional as it may have been. I could tell my silence wasn't helping. I wasn't doing it on purpose, and I wasn't holding back. It was just that I didn't have an answer inside of me that was waiting to come out. "Of course you are," I said to keep him together.

"Well, where did you get it?" he choked out. It was a question he probably asked because he was out of questions to ask but still felt angry so he needed to find words to place underneath an indignant tone.

"Lady GaGa," I replied immediately, without a hint of humor. It was true.

And then he started laughing. He didn't think it was a joke, but the ridiculousness of my statement caught him off guard. I smirked. I didn't expect his reaction either, and it made me like him. At that moment, I was glad to be with him. My friends don't know what they're talking about, he's way different than my ex. And in the next moment, I thought about my ex, and how he had been a little bit taller and a little bit skinnier and I frowned. I picked up my book and looked for the page I was on. It was easy because I had been on the same page for a while and the book was bent a little bit more on that page than the others, so even though I closed it all the way, I could pick it up and get right back to where I had left off pretty easily.

That's when I realized that Lady GaGa fucked me. She probably didn't mean to. But I had been in a relationship with a tall skinny guy who loved me and wore clothes pretty well and maybe he smacked his food when he ate but we had been together for ten years and I liked him well enough. And now I'm starting at the beginning with a shorter fatter version, but he wasn't short or fat, just shorter and fatter, and I'm back to my same job and I have to re-fill my apartment with furniture and decorations. And what do I have to show for it? A few paintings that my friends don't like? I had thought I could be something. She made me think I could be something. Maybe we're best just sticking with what we know. Passion is something not everyone gets to find in this life, and that's okay. Not everyone can be a singer or a dancer or an artist. If the world was filled with signing dancing artists there would be no one to run companies and teach children and make laws and pay bills. I realized my book had fallen down again, so I picked it back up. I found the page I was on pretty easily, and I looked for the sentence where I had left off.