Sun, 2006-10-08 12:35

Oh I know you get ‘em. Boatloads of spam with egregious spelling (carefully engineered misspellings, by the way, expensively designed to defeat your spam filters) all promising herbal versions of all manner of sexual enhancements. Most don’t work worth a darn but I’m here to tell you that there is one and I’m going to tell you the secret.

Alcohol: the metabolic waste product of single-cell fungi that reproduce by budding. You make it by taking simple granolas — mixtures of grains, some of them sprouted, and then roasted toasty brown — grinding them up, mixing them with (preferably artesian) spring water, adding dried flowers (flowers of a close relative of the marijuana plant, no less) and letting it go bad. Really bad. So bad it starts to bubble and foam. When the yeast’s metabolic waste (a.k.a. yeast poop) builds up enough to poison the yeast that made it you filter it, chill it, and put it in bottles or kegs. (Going further you can then boil the stuff at just the right temperature and drink what condenses out. You can do the same thing with grapes.) Anyway, when you’re done you drink it.

Note: you can also wind up with a 17% higher salary than people who don’t drink it but I believe I came here to talk about aphrodisiacs. This is a sex blog, after all, not a personal-finance page.

There are numerous explanations for the mysterious power of alcohol over the libido. Psychotropically alcohol suppresses cognitive centers of the brain associated with judgment, a.k.a. lowers inhibitions. Physiologically it slows your reflexes and relaxes your muscles. Hormonally it might temporarily suppress estrogen levels and/or increase testosterone levels in men and women alike. Whatever the mechanism (accounts vary) you wind up with less of the former and more of the latter, and temporarily high testosterone/low estrogen levels heighten libido. Women moreso than men, the theory goes, because while women produce plenty of testosterone in their paradrenals they also produce more estrogen so alcohol produces bigger swings. Like I say, numerous explanations. Some of which might be true.

Oh, did I mention there’s also a psychosomatic effect? Researchers have demonstrated that if you tell test subjects a beverage has more alcohol in it than it really does they (the subjects, not the researchers) appear to become more drunk” than people in a control group who are told the truth.

Now! From all this you might get the impression that I was either raised by teetotaler prohibitionists or instead that thanks to a genetic defect I lack a critical enzyme (alcohol deoxygenase) I can’t metabolize the stuff but that would be misleading. It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s both. So even if I did drink I probably couldn’t.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t drink. I do. Just not very often.

And if I drink just the right amount, neither too little or too much and not too quickly, I can get pretty horny. As luck would have it when I have drunk alcohol it’s usually been with a partner. Who also drinks. And that’s where it can get pretty interesting.

Many years ago on Valentine’s Day a partner and I decided to celebrate alone, at home. We went for a long walk in the still-wintery afternoon light. We returned to her place and prepared a lovely simple meal of, I think, poached fish with caesar salad and stemmed vegetables. We also had a couple of glasses each of chilled white wine. We had some really nice, very dark chocolate for dessert. We went to her bedroom and laid down to watchFranco Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet on a VCR we’d borrowed from friends. We smooched passionately.

The house — one step up from a student-slum apartment — was pretty chilly and she suggested we pause the video and take a hot bath. I said I’d do the honors so I sort of staggered in, turned on the tub, added a handful of nicely-scented bubble-bath crystals, drew back the shower curtains, and on a whim, I lit a bunch of candles and turned off the rest of the lights.

When the tub was full. I sort of staggered back to the bedroom. I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed her. I lifted the rest of her to my lips and kissed her again, which was very nice because she, of course, was kissing me back. Together we sort of staggered back towards the tub, kissing and undressing each other (also supporting each other.) We were naked by the time we got to the bathroom, and since the hallway was as chilly as the rest of the house her breasts were goosebumpy and her nipples fascinatingly crinkled. I almost always have warm hands and as we covered the last steps to the warm refuge of the bathroom I warmed her breasts with the palms of my hands.

When I opened the door she sighed with delight — billows of steam poured out, the ordinarily plain walls glowed oranges and reds from the filtered candlelight, and the shower curtains that I’d fairly carelessly pulled back somehow managed to frame the unusually long and very deep old-fashioned claw-foot tub like sultan’s silks.

When we gratefully sank into the suds the tub’s overflow drain gurgled threateningly but did it’s job. My arm under her shoulders, her arm around my neck we lay side by side, and — giggling like kids (or how kids might if they’d first split a bottle of wine) — we took turns puffing and blowing stray mounds of bubble-bath foam off each other’s faces.

With the more stubborn bubbles we had to get pretty close to blow, and if you’re that close to someone’s warm wet soap-bubbly neck it’s just as easy to kiss the bubbles away. So we did. A lot.

I don’t know if you’ve spent much time lying on your side with someone else in an old-fashioned bath tub but it’s tough on your neck. Plus with lots of bath soap everything’s pretty slippery and it’s kind of fun wriggling around together anyway. That’s fun but also hard on your neck… or at least mine. So we skootched around to face each other and since it was hard not to squish eachother’s knees she pulled her legs back and I got up till I was kneeling. Still a little wobbly from the mix of slippery soap and alcohol (which bartenders know better than to serve) I put my hand out to steady myself on the side of the tub… and knocked a bar of soap into the water. My partner giggled and dove for it with her hands, catching just as it slipped between my knees. Her eyes gleaming wickedly in candlelight she slid the bar of soap up the inside of my thigh, bumping it against my perineum. Startled I raised myself up higher and that shook stray bubbles away from my cock. Which was hard.

Which she noticed. Still smiling she explored everything she could reach with her bar of soap, and then her hands. She rinsed me With the little plastic pitcher she and her roommate used to rinse their hair (since there was no shower) she rinsed me. And repeated. And repeated again. After the last rinse she’d cleaned me so thoroughly her fingers squeaked as she pressed the underside of my once-slippery cock against my belly. Instead of soaping me again she dipped her head to lick away stray droplets of water first from just the tip and then further down, and then she popped the head into her mouth.

I’m going to take a quick digression here. ‘Member how I said alcohol reduces inhibitions? Ordinarily we were both a little shy about fellatio. She wasn’t that enthusiastic about it and, to be honest, neither was I. Though I loved eating her I never asked for return favors and she rarely initiated. And when she did I was usually too self-conscious to get into it. After several drinks neither of us felt terribly inhibited.

Oh, another quick digression. Have I mentioned that when people get really horny their mouths get very warm? It happens just from kissing but usually you’re kissing back so neither of you notice. My cock had been bobbing in still-cool air for a few minutes and when she slipped her mouth around it I noticed.

Her mouth on my cock felt heavenly, especially since she, feeling very frisky, was taking me way further in than usual, thrusting towards me and rolling her head from side to side. Her mouth on my cock felt heavenly but eventually the hard tub on my knees the cold faucet against my back, and the chilly air on my wet shoulders got the upper hand and I leaned back and away from her, dipping gratefully back under water.

Her back, shoulders, and breasts had been out of the water as well and she plopped down half on top and half beside me. I slipped back and up, making room for her to warm up and she seal-dipped her torso into the water and back up again, sloshing water all over. I slid further back and she porposed under again. And raised up again, up and up, rising out, leaned her shoulders against the side of the tub, and raised her lower body up onto her knees, candlelight gleaming highlights from the strong muscles of her back and the curves of her ass, vestiges of suds slow-gliding over and down her legs. She looked over her shoulders and pierce me with heavily lidded eyes… and then her eyes traveled down to my cock while she slowly wiggled her ass.

Another brief digression. I believe I mentioned that alcohol also slows your reflexes and relaxes your muscles. I was a little slow to react but she was such a vision of horny loveliness in candlelight I like to think I’d have been just as transfixed if I’d been sober as a judge down at the county seat.

My enchanted stupor didn’t last long and if I’d been transfixed I transfixed her. And if I my reactions were slow I transfixed her slowly, her moving hips as languorously in motion as my own.

The tough thing about alcohol, though, is that you forget things. For instance I know we didn’t finish up in the tub. I know the water grew cool and we got out and under the covers. I know we didn’t finish watching the video. To be honest I don’t know if we actually finished at all. And that’s one of my biggest beefs about alcohol. I have vague memories of warming each other up under the covers but I’m pretty sure she was very sleepy by then and so was I.

Humph!

I do know, too, that we woke up with wintery-brilliant sunlight streaming in, in a little haven of quilting. I remember I made coffee and we shared it in bed. I remember neither of us had hangovers. And I remember we had a lovely morning before going about our end-of-the-weekend laundry/shopping/bills/cleanup routines in our respective homes.

Anyway. Alcohol. A mixed blessing if it leads you to wonderful sex that you can’t quite remember. Even if it is made out of stuff hippies might have invented.