What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer

by Jonathan Ames

  “My God,” I said. I thought of how I nearly went insane waiting for pubic hair, but at least I got it by the time I was a sophomore in high school. This poor fellow would have nearly been a senior in college. “How old is he now?” I asked.

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “Is he still severely affected by his late puberty?”

  “He’s pretty crazy. But I don’t think it’s the puberty issue. He lost a foot eight years ago. I think that made him crazy. He thinks he has all these allergies because he lost the foot. He doesn’t eat wheat or sugar, and he didn’t like it when I ate sugar. He said it made me pasty-looking and puffy. Can you believe that?”

  I glanced over at her in the moonlight that was coming through her bedroom window. She did look pasty and puffy. I was also against wheat and sugar. She didn’t know this yet about me; we’d only been going out for a month. I felt a secret kinship with her ex-boyfriend.

  “Was it strange to be in bed with someone who was missing a foot?”

  “It wasn’t too weird. It’s like he has a pole from the knee down. It’s phallic. I got kind of crazy one time and I took off his prosthesis and I had him touch me with his stump, but it didn’t really work out.”

  “What’s your ex-boyfriend’s name?”

  “Harry Chandler. But he’s not related to Raymond Chandler, in case you’re wondering. Everyone always asks that.”

  The girl and I broke up a few weeks later. That was two years ago, and New York being a small town, I met Harry Chandler a few times and there was always this feeling that we desperately needed to talk to each other, but every time we crossed paths, we were in crowded social situations. Only once did we have a conversation of any length. We were at a birthday party and we spoke for ten minutes and for some reason we exchanged stories of being raped by dogs. As a boy, Harry had been pinned down by a Samoan husky who rubbed his exposed penis on Harry’s face, and I told Harry about being pinned by an English sheepdog when I was a boy, and how the dog bit my neck and rubbed his wet, pink penis between my bare thighs. I was only wearing shorts. My sister had laughed and watched my rape, and then my uncle came and yanked the dog off me.

  But it was only recently that Harry Chandler and I finally sat down and talked the way we needed to. He invited me to come sit with him in SoHo while he tried to sell his paintings.

  “It’s not bad,” he said to me over the phone. “You just sit there and wait and hope that some tourist will want one. . . . It’s a lot like fishing.”

  So on an unbearably hot July Saturday I went and found Harry Chandler at his regular fishing spot on the east side of West Broadway, just south of Spring Street. He had a table with three watercolor paintings, a chair, a sun umbrella, and two large oil paintings, about five feet high with temporary wooden supports. The watercolors were beach scenes Chandler had done while on Fire Island. They were light and beautiful, aimed at the summer tourists. The oils were city scenes, eerie and imbalanced portraits of New Yorkers and the street.

  We sat on concrete stairs across from his work. Tourists streamed by, some of them pausing briefly to glance at the paintings. The sun was beating down on us, and I was wearing a baseball hat to protect my bald spot from skin cancer, and Chandler was wearing an old white bandanna. He is deeply tanned; he teaches art to children during the week on Fire Island and comes to SoHo for the weekends. His dark brown color and the tautness of his skin give him the look of a 1930s hobo, the kind of good-looking man who was set adrift in the Dust Bowl by the Depression.

  He is thirty-nine years old, about five-foot-eleven, and he has high cheekbones, a clear brow, a beautiful nose, green eyes, and short, cropped blond hair. He is handsome, but there is also a terrible privation in his face; he’s gaunt, and his crowded teeth are stained from tobacco, and there’s a sad humility in his eyes that I’ve only seen in old bums on the Bowery, a humility born of self-inflicted pain and defeat. But he is quick to laugh at himself, his face can be loony and hopeful, so in some moments Chandler looks like he’s in his twenties, and in other moments he could pass for a man in his late fifties.

  So we sat there on West Broadway and I admired Chandler’s face, but I was uncomfortable on the concrete stairs. I had developed a hemorrhoid recently and the hard, flat surface was putting pressure on it. I mentioned this to Chandler.

  “Do you drink coffee?” he asked.

  “I do, but I’m trying to quit. It’s not good for hair.”

  “You have to give it up. I had a hemorrhoid once and I stopped coffee and it went away immediately.”

  “I’m afraid to give up coffee, even though I want to,” I said.

  “I’m afraid to drink it,” he said. “I get too sexual. Can’t really control myself. Makes me a little insane, I think. . . . When did you get this hemorrhoid?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “You must be all tensed up inside. You should try this kava kava herb. It’s like Prozac. It’ll calm you down, help you sleep. But it might not work if you have coffee in your system. . . . I’m on a lot of herbs now. It’s wonderful. I feel great. My brother is a homeopathic doctor and he’s prescribed everything. I did it because my kidneys weren’t working, and if you have a major organ in crisis, your whole system is affected. It can make you feel insane.”

  Once in a while a tourist paused for more than a second to stare at the paintings, and Chandler would get to his feet and hobble over to them and would say to them kindly, “I’m here if you have any questions.”

  But there were very few questions; the fish weren’t biting. We talked about his career. He’s been selling paintings on the streets of SoHo for the better part of four years. He’s out there, sometimes seven days a week, from April to October, and he estimates that he has sold about two hundred paintings. That’s not a bad rate of success, and a lot better than most working artists. He just about makes enough to pay his rent, buy food, and buy paints.

  “I like the idea of fresh-air painting better than street artist,” he said. “That’s what the French call it, fresh air. There’s nothing better than painting from life. That’s what Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, and Cézanne all did, painted from life. And being on the street to sell”—he gestured to West Broadway—“I think of this as my gallery. Every day is an exhibition, a show. . . . But it’s also a curse to be out here. You get black-listed. They think if you’re desperate enough to do this, then something’s wrong with you. They label you as a street artist and they don’t take you seriously. No gallery will look at my slides. . . . There is this one guy who might want to bring me indoors; he came by and gave me his card the other day, told me to call. He used to own a gallery. He’s got one in Westchester now. But I’d still paint outside, I’d just rather not have to sell outside. It eats away at you. One time, I set up in front of this gallery, and this woman came out, turns out she was the owner, and she said, ‘No peddlers.’ ‘I’m not a peddler,’ I said, ‘I’m an artist.’ ‘You’re peddling your paintings,’ she said. ‘I’m painting my paintings,’ I said. ‘I don’t care, I want you out of here,’ she said. I crossed the street. It was humiliating. . . . But I’ve never been arrested for being out here. The cops sense that I am a sincere artist.

  “One time, though, they did make me leave. I had just set up— twenty paintings. Had taken me an hour to get here, rolling my cart real slow. Then I had to pack everything back up. So then I was rolling the cart home and it tipped over on Canal Street. The light changed. Cars almost ran over my paintings. They were trying to get to the Holland Tunnel. Tears were streaming down my face, the failure of it. . . . But I’m used to crying in the street. Every couple of years the foot on my prosthesis just snaps off and I have to hop on one leg to a cab. I cry every time. It’s upsetting when a part of your body snaps off.”

  Chandler was wearing light cotton pants and I looked at his left leg. There was a swelling under the material where the prosthesis is attached to the knee. But if you didn’t know about it, you would never notice. And he was wearing
sneakers on both feet, the real one and the fake one, and his limp is such that you might think he’s had an injury, but not that his whole foot is missing.

  I looked away from his leg back to the sidewalk. A beautiful girl walked by. There had been many. They all looked like they were from Los Angeles or Spain. And the angle from our stairs was very good; you could see a lot of leg and the sides of breasts in loose halter tops. “There certainly are a lot of beautiful girls out here,” I said.

  “It’s what keeps you going,” said Chandler. “How often in New York do you have a really gorgeous girl smile at you? It’s great. They like the art. They’re moved.”

  I went to get an iced coffee, and when I came back with it, Chandler asked, “You sure you want to drink that? If you’re going to drink coffee, I’m going to smoke. I thought I’d quit today, but I say that every day.”

  For the next two days, Chandler chain-smoked American Spirits, a brand he chooses because the cigarettes are made without chemicals or additives.

  “It’s my last vice,” he said as he enjoyed his cigarette. “I’ve given up everything. . . . I’m trying to, anyway. Everyone always knew I was a sneaky pervert, but it was okay. I thought it was all right to be a pervert if I was honest about it. But it’s not okay. It’s my worst vice. If you’re going to be a great artist, you have to be a good person. So I’m trying to stop being a pervert.”

  “What’s your perversion?”

  “I can be honest with you. I’ve read your work. I know you won’t judge me. I’m a voyeur. But I’m not a sneaky voyeur. I’m an in-your-face-voyeur.”

  “You like to spy on women?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they know you’re watching?”

  “Oh, yeah. I want them to know. For every voyeur there’s an exhibitionist, a voyee. A lot of women don’t like it when they find out I’m watching them. But then a lot do. Or they come to like it. It can be kind of healthy. It’s like a friendship. It becomes concillated.”

  “Where do you do this?”

  “Mostly I go to the roof of my building. I always gravitate toward roofs.”

  “So they know you’re watching? They don’t call the police?”

  “No. I can’t believe it, but I’ve never been arrested.”

  “Do they strip for you?”

  “Some do. And I like to be naked for them. I walk around naked on my roof or in my apartment. I don’t know what the neighbors think. They must be like, There’s that lonely, naked, one-legged guy again. For a while I had these Dutch girls as roommates and they walked around naked. It was great. The neighbors probably loved it. It’s okay when there are beautiful girls. But now it’s just me again, a lonely, naked guy.”

  “So you’re a voyeur and an exhibitionist, a combination.”

  “You could say that.”

  “When you’re naked and looking at the women, do you masturbate?”

  “No, that’s being a wanker. I don’t want to be a wanker. I want to keep it healthy. I don’t want to scare them off. I like it to be concillated.”

  “What’s this word, concillated? What’s it mean? Are you sure it’s a word?”

  “I don’t know, I heard it once. I always think of it. For me it means that they want to do it, too. . . . I recently started something with this new voyee. She’s an older woman, in her fifties, but beautiful. She’s in the building behind mine. I watch her several nights a week when she comes home from work. She undresses for me. I set up a tent on my roof and I lie in there and watch her and she looks at me. One time she was on the phone and I had my cordless phone with me. And while she talked, I pretended to be talking to someone. I wanted to be doing what she was doing. But who was I talking to? God? It’s gotten pretty intense with her. She started touching her breasts the other night and she was looking right at me. I was lying in my tent and I got erect and started fondling myself.”

  “Wait a second, you told me you didn’t wank!”

  “It was social wanking. It was concillated.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Wanking is wanking.”

  Chandler laughed. “You’re right, I am a wanker. But I don’t want to be. It’s bad. I feel sick after I do it. Debauched. I hate myself. But it’s because there’s been no sales, and when there’s no sales, I can’t paint, I can’t buy materials. I get so frustrated. I figure I might as well go up on the roof. I sleep up there. They see me naked in the morning. . . . I’ve always thought there was a curious connection between exhibitionism and art. The more frustrated I get with not being able to paint or show my work, the more prolific I become with the exhibitionism. It’s a way to have an exhibit. . . . I used to think the sicker you are, the better the art. I wanted to be the best, so I took the sickest road and now I can’t get off.”

  “When you’re up there in your tent, are you in a trance?” I asked. “I know when I’m in my sex perversions I call it the sex trance, and nothing can shake me from it.”

  “Oh, yeah, when I’m doing it, lying there naked watching her, I could die in that moment. I don’t need anything else.”

  Chandler’s voyeurism/exhibitionism is not limited to rooftops. Every few months, if he has some extra money, he takes a train out of the city, either two hours to the west or an hour to the north. He finds small industrial towns and he looks for a hotel, preferably one with a courtyard where he can look into windows. These towns provide him fresh locations for his paintings and for his perversion—hotels have lots of voyeuristic opportunities, and also he likes to be found naked in his bathtub by maids.

  “It’s a water-purity thing. I’m debauched and cleansed at the same time, neutralized,” he said. “And it’s also an ethnic prejudice thing with the Spanish maids, which I feel bad about. . . . But at least I’m not perverted around kids. Even my mother said, ‘You’re not at all creepy around children.’ ”

  “What kind of backwards compliment is that?” I asked. “She’s praising you for not being a pedophile. I guess she was trying to look on the bright side.”

  “I guess she was,” Chandler laughed. “She senses that I’m the sneakiest one in the family, and we have a pretty weird family.”

  In addition to rooftops and hotels, Chandler also likes to exhibit himself while driving. Two years ago, on two hits of Ecstasy and dozens of cups of coffee, he drove to Seattle in three days; he was naked the whole time. “I would stalk cars to find someone, a woman, to look in. I was fondling myself and driving. Sometimes they would look in and smile, sometimes they would look in with disgust. The Ecstasy and the coffee caused the masturbation, I think, and the danger factor that I might be caught and killed was appealing.”

  “What do you think your face looked like when you pulled alongside those cars?”

  “Terrible, frightening,” he said.

  Like most perverts—like myself—Chandler has periods of great self-loathing and wants to be punished for his actions. For many years he had a fantasy of going to the roof of the Novotel hotel in Midtown and sitting on the ledge and then just slipping off to the alleyway thirty-three stories below. And he pictured the alleyway instead of the street so that he wouldn’t land on anyone.

  His exhibitionism is not without consequences. A recent girlfriend broke up with him because she perceived him to be a failure as an artist, and also his so-called friends told her about his visits to the roof. And one time in a hotel in Arkansas, on his way to meet another girlfriend’s parents, he was in his bathtub and he looked out his narrow window and he saw a woman walking quickly down the street. He stood up in his bathtub, hoping that she might glance up and see him through the small window, and he fell in the tub. He severely sprained his good ankle and had to meet his girlfriend’s parents with a painful double limp.

  His exhibitionism began when he was fourteen years old. He would go to this one shoe store where the clerk was a woman. He would wear shorts but no underwear. When the woman would put the shoes on his feet, she would glance up his leg and see his testicles. He went to th
is store for a number of years. Later, as an adult, he would do the same thing on bus and train rides and hope that girls would look up his shorts.

  “That’s horrible,” I said. “That’s the grossest sight in the world. The balls look like red growths. It sickened me when I was on sports teams and we’d be stretching and I’d see everyone’s testicles.”

  “I know it’s horrible,” Chandler said. “I’m the worst exhibitionist I know. But one time in Oregon on a train this girl liked it and we ended up making out in the bathroom.”

  “If you’re going to get over this,” I said, “you can’t think of the success stories. What I try to do is think of how low and disgusting I feel afterward. It works about half the time.”

  “I do that,” said Chandler. “The other thing is to come up with healthy expressions of it. I still like to be naked, I think it’s beautiful, but I can go to nudist colonies instead of my roof. And if I want to look at a naked woman, I can just hire a model. But I’m so sick—I had this model one time and she was beautiful, lying right in front of me. But I was looking past her out the window across the street to a fogged-over window where I could see just a little bit of a woman’s leg, and I kept looking out the window and ignoring the beautiful girl right in front of me.”

  “How do you think all of this got started?”

  “My parents’ divorce when I was fourteen, but mostly it’s because of my puberty.”

  “Oh, my God, I forgot. That’s right—you didn’t start until you were twenty-one. Of course, it makes perfect sense; you want the world to know that you’ve matured, that you have pubic hair. Did you ever go to a doctor to find out why it was taking you so long?”

  “No. My dad kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to look young when you’re old.’ ”

  “How did you deal with it? I couldn’t take showers with other men for years.”

  “I tried to take a shower once in high school. I was a jock, a top wrestler at one hundred and four pounds, I figured I could do it. But the wimpiest kid in the school came up to me and said, ‘Hey, hairy,’ because I had no hair. And my balls were up, hidden and small. That still happens to them when I drink coffee.”