Good friends celebrate your birthday with gifts. Great friends celebrate your break-ups with vibrators.
It all started when one of my oldest and dearest friends took me to Good Vibrations in San Francisco to help me get back in the game following a bad break-up. He’d been through it all with me and my broken relationship: the good, the bad and the ugly. In fact, he was privy to the ugliest secret of all: it had been over two years since I’d had sex. And I wondered why I was so tense all the time.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that chilly May San Francisco afternoon when he picked me up and began serenading me with the words to a familiar Crosby, Still & Nash song: If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with, love the one you’re with.
Shortly after his mini-concert, he whisked me through the doors of Good Vibrations. Both of us had recently been laid off as part of the dotcom bust so we had no business blowing our unemployment checks on sex toys. But what else was there to do after you’d done your daily networking and resume-sending? We decided to share an educational DVD to help jumpstart my re-entry into the dating world and pass some time for both of us. We bought The Art of Oral Lovemaking, the perfect choice since this particular video instructed viewers on the particulars for both men and women.
He must’ve noticed me looking a little too longingly at the Rabbit Pearl vibrator because the following week he surprised me with a wrapped gift with a suspiciously familiar shape. A break-up vibrator! I tore the wrapping paper off like a woman on a mission, bade him a hasty goodbye, and scurried home to use my new gift.
We had some good times, the Rabbit and I, though the early days were a little awkward. There were (I think) three different sets of controls for the two different extensions on the Rabbit. And every time the Rabbit and I rendezvoused, I’d end up pressing the wrong button at the wrong time, causing a tremendous amount of frustration. I’d try to change the speed or rotation, only to hit the wrong button and completely stop all movement. I don’t think I need to explain the tragedy of this situation.
Eventually, I figured it out. The Rabbit became my nooner, my Afternoon Delight, my All Night Long. I used the Rabbit so much that one day, it just stopped working. I hit the on button and…nothing. So I did what anyone in possession of a non-operational sex toy would do: I wrapped it in an old pillowcase and threw it down the trash chute. I wish it could’ve worked out, old friend.
A few years later, I was living in Paris and decided to extend my stay through winter. I called upon my same dear boy friend to send me a box of warm clothing from San Francisco.
“Are you dating anybody over there?” he asked me.
I paused. Should I try to paint an optimistic picture or just be truthful?
“What do you think?” I replied.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “That’s why I included a little surprise in your box.”
I was giddy with excitement. I hadn’t brought any vibrating goodies with me for fear of having them publicly discovered while going through Customs. And because I was in grad school, I was broke and couldn’t treat myself to anything new.
When the box arrived, I ripped it open, turtlenecks and sweaters flying through the air in a woolen frenzy. Nothing. I picked up the empty box, shook it, then looked inside, as if it would speak to me and tell me where my special toy was. I picked up the box again and looked underneath. I shook it again. No vibrator.
