Do me? Do me! Do? Me!

Rare is the two-word construction that inspires such expectations of pure, visceral joy. Perhaps You’ve Won, or I Do, or Yes, Lower (uttered in a breathy voice, with a dramatic pause between words) come close, but in my experience a minimum of three words are used when one hopes to elicit such reactions. “Yes, please honey. Do do me.”

Why point out the two-word oddity? This collection of short stories is as unusual as its two-word title because I liked nearly all the stories contained within (reprinted from Tin House, 2001-2005). I attribute this to the editorial standards at Tin House, and of course, my obsession with all things sex.

With such a title, you might think these stories would start with openings such as: I never used to believe these kinds of stories were true until the following happened to me. You probably won’t believe what you are about to read, but it all really happened exactly like this, and my god, I really hope it happens again. You see, I’m a cheerleading coach at a small midwestern college. We have a great cheerleading program and we get some of the best—and most beautiful—girls to come to our school. Besides being a great coach and mentor, I’m also a lesbian, but you can’t tell by looking at my fit and tanned 34-26-32 to-die-for body and the tight, fashionable clothes I wear. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve teased the young guys by brushing against them in the hallways on campus…

Nope, none of that stuff in these stories.

In fact, the emphasis in the stories in Do Me is more on the Me than the Do, and the sex is usually just one facet of a complicated and rewarding story. Less important than a dying parent, rooming with a blind gay man on a cruise, or the roles of body and soul in the act of kissing.

For example, the third story in the collection, Bill Gaston’s A Forest Path, was the first to truly captivate me. It combines a riveting tale with the obligatory modern, ironic narrator who sees it all through his twisted recreation of the past. And, apropos to the collection as a whole, the Do Me part of the story is an aside rather the main event in a three ring circus.

I love these lines, as the narrator who has rejected obsessive, flowery, pain-packed verbiage, attempts to distance himself: While walking the identical path, I saw beauty too, certainly, but not Lowry’s bombastic brand. I, too, saw rustling dainty foliage of one hundred shades of green. I saw sturdy stoic trees, and mountains with their awesome noble mysterious élan. (It’s easy to be Lowry).

Or take Victor LaValle’s Class Trip. This tale of young boys venturing to the city to partake in their first sexual pleasures, intoxicated by the promise of their quest: We walked to 27^th, where the hookers were a populace. This was their beauty: almost nothing worn, skin. We stood at a corner to watch these women move. The worst looking one was more gorgeous than the rest of the world.

Or, Elissa Schappel’s Sex and the Single Squirrel, her exploration of the world of furries. The opening says it all: I have been a lot of very different people in my life—a cheerleader and a coke fiend, a good daughter and a bad girl, an exhibitionist and a shut-in, a religious seeker and a nihilist. It is my sickness that I can imagine doing, or being, just about anything. This is complicated by a desire to inhabit the lives of people much unlike myself, to see how they really live. How else do I explain why I would willfully dress up in a raccoon suit and let strangers grope me?

In short, if you are even remotely concerned with how sexuality relates to the rest of your life, or you’ve ever stood naked in front of the mirror and wondered what it would be like to have an extra genital or two on your chin, I recommend this collection of very doable stories.