Feral: Meet Ash, and the Dildo Depot

I started this substack project a few months ago. When I did, I asked my best friend to choose a name. I got to choose my own work name, and I feel people I’m still in contact with should be offered that same choice. He took months—busy with work and family, and not enough time for the rest of life. Finally he decided; Ash.

I met Ash in the late winter of 2014 or early 2015. I was subletting in Red Hook. I’d fed the cats the previous evening before going out, and thought to myself “I need to get cat food on my way to where I’m going.” I then forgot.

So I woke up to a pair of hungry cats. Widjet trilled politely while Pixel stood on my throat and screamed like the spawn of a pterodactyl and a rusty screen door. I knew the cats weren’t actually starving, but they didn’t know that and it couldn’t be explained to them, so the situation needed to be rectified as soon as possible. I brushed my teeth, threw on some clothes and ran out the door.

On the way to the pet food shop, I passed a big box bookstore, which reminded me that Anne Rice had just released book four of her Sleeping Beauty series. I popped in. I had located the book when I heard a voice behind me saying “Are you…?”

I may have replied “maybe.” I might have said “depends on who you think I am.” I have various ways of handling this moment. Regardless, we established that I was who the man thought I was, and he asked how I was. I explained that I was harried over the cat situation. He was suitably concerned for the psychological well being of the cats and had two cats of his own. I was about to make my exit when he said “Do you have a moment for me to show you an essay my ex girlfriend wrote on feminism in professional wrestling?”

It was a great article, for the now-defunct XO Jane.

It turned out, later, that my lawyer was friends with this man. Ash.

It turned out, even later, that we’d become great friends. We started with coffee. We sat in my apartment and drank a truly excessive amount of coffee. I was, at the time, a floor-sitting human. He moved back and forth between the floor and the couch. I moved back and forth between the floor and the kitchen to make more coffee.

———

I was in Vienna for a film festival when one of Ash’s cats died. He was at the veterinary hospital when he told me the news. It was well after midnight my time, and the hotel wifi didn’t work in my room. I spent a couple of hours sitting in the lobby on a voice call with him. The producer and director of AI Rising came in from some kind of networking party and asked whether I was ok. I told them a friend’s cat had passed and I was needed for emotional support. They told me good luck.

———

Ash slowly became a confidant, and then what he referred to as a ‘wartime consiglieri’. By the time the pandemic and lockdowns rolled around, I was firmly in his friend group. He, my lawyer, and myself would go to events. I would go to Ash’s to watch pro wrestling. He and his group of male friends and I would go to pro wrestling shows.

Then lockdown happened. Ash and I spent absolute hours on the phone together. We would get on a WhatsApp call and do our work together, make food and eat it, tag in other people who would come and go because they didn’t have the tolerance for voice call marathons that the two of us did.

———

At some point we developed a few in jokes. One of which is “dildo depot”. When we call each other, we do a little riffing on Dildo Depot. It started with attempting to order dongs. Then it turned into searching for a lost shipment. When the Suez Canal was blocked we had an absolute blast with it (as did most of the internet, but without the phallic flair we layered over). Eventually, I was dealing with a difficult situation and called saying “ASH. I have found the box of dildos. It is a person embodying the spirit of a box of dildos. A manifestation of a human that is entirely dildo-based as a life form.”

Mostly, though, we process life together—both events in our personal spheres and wider events. We zoom way in, to what exactly happened. Then we zoom way out, contextualizing the occurrence with our combined knowledge gleaned from education, books, and lived experience. We compare and contrast. Then, often, we crack jokes too racy to repeat or I sing a little song. I almost always use existing tunes, and my singing voice is passable only to people who care about me, but I can almost always crack Ash (and myself) up with some creative wordplay.

Ash regularly forgets that I’m still occasionally Stoya. The last time we spoke, that happened. He apologized. I told him that were it not for the fact that I cover pornography a lot in my writing, I’d probably forget too.

“And you may find yourself, with a massive pile of lingerie

And you may find yourself, storing two boxes of Pleasers

And you may find yourself, having inside insight into a stigmatized field

And you may find yourself, with a beautiful job, and a beautiful life

And you may ask yourself, how did you get here

Letting the dildos dong,

Letting the lube slick me up

Letting the dildos dong,

Dildos falling off the truck.”

And that is what happened to the shipment of dildos.