Free Action: A Book About Sex by Amy Rose Spiegel

sexually viable people even congregate? Your first guess is correct: If you’re not feeling creative when it comes to striking out into the world, I have met many paramours in bars. So many bars, a cavalcade of bars, a city-populating-if-you-amassed-their-clientele amount of bars bars bars bars bars. If you’re sober and avoiding those places, disinterested in hanging out lounge lizard–style, or just bored of the bar barrage: I am happy to report that THE WHOLE REST OF THE WORLD EXISTS.
    Context matters here. You can meet somebody anyplace, hence my advocating that you create your own palatial life to hang out inside. Just in case you need initial ideas on this tip, though, here’s a selection of unlikely-seeming places where I have scammed on, or been scammed on, to good success:
    • Bookstores. If you see a babe milling around, ask them for recommendations. Done and done. I have met two paramours between bookshelves—and was also introduced to Dylan Thomas’s short fiction by one of my book-marks, the greatest outcome of them all. I thought that dude only wrote poetry! And I got laid!
    • The ever-lovin’ sidewalk. I had the best sex of my life, easily, resplendently, world-and game-changingly, with a person whom I met loitering curbside.
    I was at an after-party for an out-of-town work conference, and everyone was standing outside on the sidewalk because watching a group of writers dancing can begin to seem cruel after the first few minutes (keep in mind that mine is a breed of people who spend most of their time alone indoors). This should also persuade you that if I, a native to this taciturn, housebound clan,can get laid by a coincidental chance meeting, it should be cake for everybody else.
    On this particular evening, two editors walked up to my friends and me. One of these men I had not previously met. I interjected my hand and misunderstood the introduction proffered as he shook it: “Brafe? It’s ‘Brafe’?” I actually asked this , even though in no conceivable dialect or tongue is that an intelligible name for a human male, furthering the point that my getting laid can serve as a font of hope for the rest of the general population, and that maybe if, as a writer by career, I also lack the basic facilities of speech, maybe the dancing thing is more of a “me” problem than a professional one.
    The human male in question corrected me graciously: He was really called Jake , but we agreed that he’d keep my updated appellation, and that he, in turn, would call me “Emro,” close in pronunciation to “Elmo.” I noticed he was fiddling with his hair, which fell to his shoulders, and also that he had an abdomen reminiscent of an Italian sculpture. He watched me take stock of both and asked me for a ponytail holder, which he sent me a picture of after sleuthing out my contact information the next day. (I never give out my contact when I know someone can find it—it’s part of the fun, and they almost always make good on it.) As far as Brafe and I were concerned: It was absolutely on.
    Or, it would be. We met up later at a different party, and he rented a luxury sports car so we could drive through some nearby snowcapped mountains (?!??!?!!!), but I had an unforeseen conflict come up preventing the joyride. (I have cursed not having just canceled those less-fun plans for the rest of eternity.)
    All was not lost. A week or so later, when we had both returned to our home city, I agreed to meet him at his apartment. It was a mansion of a unit. The building had the name TRUMP emblazoned on its edifice, and it was dim and choked with paintings and pianos inside. Brafe emerged into the doorjamb, and he looked even better than I remembered—and my mental configuration ofhis features and body was already in its fullest overactive thrall. We didn’t even have time to say hello.
    (Brafe, if you’re reading this: Thanks for the follow-up texts, dude, but I didn’t want to see you again because it was so