Burning Desire

***I just found this piece I wrote many, many moons ago.***
I was hanging out at home on a Sunday morning, drinking coffee and reading the paper, the girls were happily arguing over something in their room, all was well until the phone rang. My good friend, Dara, whispered frantically, “You’ve got to get over here!” Dara and I had met in a ceramic class in 1990. I knew I had to get to know her after seeing her performance art piece in which she ranted at the pots and bowls in a raku fire pit as if they were her dead mother. She was so weird, I was attracted to her immediately. Tall with jet black hair, she had the body of a fifties country-western singer: slender, with huge breasts and no hips or ass. For me, Dara represented that kooky, bohemian side of San Francisco. Hanging out with her was always an adventure. Over cocktails and cigarettes, she recounted the stories that made up her life. As a child, she lived with her artist-mother, in a loft south of Market way before it became trendy. A teenage bad girl, she did it all: skipped school, smoked, drank, had a fake i.d. and dated older men. Dara married one of those older men at age eighteen and promptly had two children with him in two and a half years. By the time she was twenty-four, she was divorced. After telling the judge during her divorce proceedings that she would not stop smoking marijuana, she lost custody of her kids. The morning of Dara’s frantic phone call, her children were visiting her for summer vacation. I became alarmed that something terrible had happened to one of them. Something terrible had happened, but not to them - something terrible had happened to her. She could barely get the words out between her embarrassment and not wanting her kids to hear. “I can’t believe what happened," she sputtered. “I was masturbating with a small candle,” she continued in a whisper.
“A votive?” I asked simultaneously imagining what the possibilities were with a tiny church candle.
“No, a taper.” she said with growing anxiety. “Ten or twelve inch?” My fantasy life was really starting to run wild now. “Look I don’t know, I used it the last time I had someone for dinner, it burnt down to about three inches.” Okay, what harm could a three inch taper do while masturbating, hey, wait a minute, “Where were the kids while you were using this candle?” Dara was living in a small studio apartment. Her daughter slept with her and her son camped on the floor in a sleeping bag. I personally wouldn’t dream of masturbating in the same room in which my kids were, say, watching cartoons. She was losing patience with me and my fascination over her creative abilities, “I sent them to the store for cereal, look, are you going to help me, or what? This is a big fucking problem!” I grabbed hold of my senses and asked, “Okay, you were masturbating, what happened?” What she told me next really cracked me up, no pun intended. “The candle is stuck - " she moaned.
“In your twat?” I said authoritatively knowing that if a woman could get a baby out of her vagina, she could certainly get a candle out. “No, I’d be able to get it out, the god damn thing is stuck up my ass!”
“Oh! Oh fuck!” I said trying to sound sincere as I suppressed a burst of laughter. “Do you know of anything I can do?” she sounded desperate. I gave it some thought. The last time I had anything stuck up my ass, it was more of a natural problem. I asked, “Have you tried sitting on the toilet?” Exasperated she answered, “Of course, it was my first instinct.” Dara’s frantic words came out high and thin. This was not the relaxing Sunday I had in mind, but what could I do, she was, well, stuck. “I’ll be over as soon as possible.”
It took about an hour to gather up the girls and make the trip across town by bus. I’ll admit that on the way, I had hoped the damn thing had come out before we got there. Maybe she relaxed a bit knowing help, well, at least company, was on the way, and it slipped out as easily as it had slipped in. No such luck. We arrived and she whispered in my ear that she was still, so to speak, burning the candle at both ends. The first order of business was to get the kids out of there. The studio apartment was just not big enough for the four of them, Dara, myself and that damn candle. We sent the kids down to the park.
“I took a laxative,” she stated dejectedly. I on the other hand, found it hard to wipe the smirk from my face. “Have you tried squatting?” I didn’t want to get invasive right off the bat.
“I’ve tried everything, it feels weird,” she said, close to tears.
“I bet," I said still trying to look and sound serious. I put on my thinking cap, “Do you have any gloves?” (I was thinking surgical, not white at this point.) Fortunately she had a box of hair dye and we used the gloves provided by Lady Clairol. I crouched on the floor between my friend’s legs, about to use those Lady Clairol gloves in a way, I’m sure the company had never dreamt of. I put a couple of fingers inside her vagina and I felt the offending candle. Then I really started to brainstorm, “Okay, let’s try coaxing it out, I can feel the top of it, so when I say to push, I want you to push like you’re taking a shit and I’m going to gently push on the top of the candle and maybe we can get it out."
At this point, she was game for anything, so I said go, and she pushed and I nudged, she pushed and I nudged. We tried this routine for about fifteen minutes, but, no-go, the train wasn’t departing the station, the candle wasn’t going anywhere.
Hysteria was well on its way, before I realized it and made the mistake of saying, “Maybe you should go to the hospital.”
“No!” she cried. Dara was starting to lose it, (her composure, not the candle). “Look,” I said gravely, “plenty of people must go in there on a daily basis with all sorts of odd things stuck up their asses, this is San Francisco, for Christ sake!” She wasn’t buying it, “I can’t go in there like this, it’s way too embarrassing.” She moaned, looking at me intently, “Do you think I could die?” Hmmm, I tried imagining the death certificate, “Cause of Death: candle, a burned down taper, used at victim’s last supper, stuck up ass.” I told her I didn’t think anyone could die this way, but still, it couldn’t remain in its current location. It had to come out. We entertained the idea of melting the wayward romance enhancer, we thought that perhaps a nice hot enema might do the trick. But then, it would have to be a boiling hot enema, so we gave up that idea. “Get back on the toilet,” I ordered. She needed to get a grip, and at the same time loosen up. I on the other hand was starting to lose my patience with the candle and her creative use of home furnishings.
She was ready to do anything I told her. She waddled into the bathroom and shot me a very worried look before closing the door.
I sat down at the table in her tiny kitchen and noticed the unread newspaper thinking that she should have been reading it instead of masturbating with candles. But then, it was the Sunday Examiner, a notoriously bad read. Ten minutes later the kids came back, all rosy-cheeked and chatty. They had to pee. I had the unfortunate task of telling them to hold it, Dara had a tummy ache and was in the bathroom. Of course kids don’t care about anyone else’s toilet problems, when they gotta go, they gotta go! Another five minutes of pissing and moaning, or should I say moaning about having to piss passed, and then, Dara finally emerged from the bathroom, and one kid after the other charged in. By the look on her face, I could tell she had triumphed over her waxen enemy, it was pure relief, the look that said, “I have been spared telling an orderly that I have a candle stuck up my ass.”
We never figured out what it was that made the candle pop out. Whether it was the finger nudging, the laxative or just plain gravity. Maybe it was a combination of all three. As I hustled my children out of her front door, I turned and said, “Next time, use a zucchini!”
We walked down the hallway, and my older daughter asked, “What’s Dara going to cook, Mommy?”