What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer
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I came back to New York in February of ’85, and my picture was in Fernando Sanchez bus stop ads all over the city. I stood next to the poster one time, waiting for a bus in a fiberglass shelter on the Upper East Side, and nobody knew that I was the boy lying there in the picture beneath the three beautiful women. And I went to the Whitney Museum Biennial because Bruce Weber was part of the show, he had a whole wall, and there was the picture of me in that swing, my white ass showing. And I saw the other men from that day. Some of them hadn’t been afraid that their penises were small.
I was twenty years old and I was lauded for my appearance on the streets and in the museums of New York, but I never tried to model again. And over the next eleven years, my drinking got worse and I sort of ravaged my looks. And I was so nervous all the time about going bald that I probably brought about my worst fear myself—I did get a big bald spot.
So I didn’t look at my modeling pictures very often—they made me too aware of how I was squandering my life, my health—but once in a while if I did manage to get a girlfriend, I would often show her the pictures. I was always hoping they would think, Well, he was good-looking once. I guess I’ll stick with him. Unfortunately, one of my girlfriends, upon seeing all my old muscles and hair, said, half-jokingly, half-forlornly, “God, you were a stud. I wish I could cut your hair out of those pictures and paste it on your bald spot.”
I didn’t think she was being cruel because I felt the same way. But these days I’m doing better. The drinking problem is for the moment in remission and the hair problem, like the nose problem before it, has started to fade. I don’t seem to mind my thin hair. Currently, I’m not distorting anything too much. But when I look at the modeling pictures, I do feel sad. I pity that pretty boy. He didn’t know how lovely he was and I want to save him from what’s going to happen. I sort of love him. I remember him. I want him to come back. I must want to be him again. I must want to be beautiful again. What would it be like to be beautiful and know it?
Insomni-Whack
FIRST THERE WAS a homosexual fantasy. It happens whenever I’m low on money. I feel weak, humiliated, pathetic, so then I see an erect organ, not my own, presenting itself. What follows is an imagined moment of cruel sensuality. Then the thought: It would probably hurt. And then I think about disease. By now the whole fantasy is shot, so I’m just sort of beat around the head by the thing or it stares at me in a menacing way. Then I’m reaching for the hand towel, which I’ve hidden under my pillow, and clean up the unfortunate mess.
It’s the same fantasy every time with very little change; it all occurs in a shadowy void, though once in a while there’s a prison cell as a backdrop. Last night it happened, and, as always, I regretted the whole thing. But I am weak, weak. Always giving in. I’ve been destroying my body and my mind and my hair and my soul with masturbation for eighteen years. I’m wasting away. People often say to me: You’re so thin. It’s because I’m on a steady diet of jerking off. I wonder if it would work for women. I could become rich. Solve my money problems. Write a book encouraging women to lose weight through masturbation.
I tried to fight the urge last night, but I did it because I thought it would help me sleep. And I need sleep. Four nights in a row, I’ve had terrible, relentless insomnia. It is a symptom of my growing depression, which, like the homosexual fantasies, has been brought on by my financial troubles. Somehow I was doing all right in ’97, probably because I received my advance for my second novel, but I’ve gone through the whole thing, and it wasn’t much, and now everything’s fallen apart here in early ’98. I’ve paid my January rent, but that’s it. Haven’t paid the phone bill, electric bill, health insurance, minimum charges on maxed-out credit cards with interest rates at 21 percent, and now I’m getting letters and phone calls about making payments on my enormous graduate school loans. And I don’t even remember going to graduate school. It was a three-year drunken blur in the early nineties resulting in a useless degree. It couldn’t possibly be worth fifty thousand dollars.
The whole thing is crushing, debilitating. And like all of my problems, it’s entirely my fault. So I’m depressed, defeated, morbid, and I have insomnia. Each night I’ve woken up at four A.M. The first night I felt like my whole life was a lie—the kind of thought one has at that hour; the second night I kept saying to myself, Maybe I should just die; and the third night I was resigned and less full of self-pity and I read a whole New York Press and the first two chapters of The Brothers Karamazov.
Then last night, even after the masturbation, I slept for only a few hours and again woke up at four A.M. I pretended that I must be thirsty and I took a drink from the water bottle next to my bed. Then I closed my eyes. Snuggled against the pillow. But I couldn’t fool the insomnia demons. They knew I wasn’t parched. Oh, God, I’m up again, I thought. To try to fall back to sleep, I played two of my usual hero fantasies through my head: (1) I save a woman from rape, but I am stabbed by the assailant, though I still manage to knock him unconscious. The police and EMS arrive and I’m rushed to a hospital. I survive, and the next day I’m hailed as a hero on the front pages of the tabloids: WRITER SAVES WOMAN. (2) I wake up one day with incredible jumping powers and I get a tryout with the Knicks, make the team, and I’m hailed on the back pages: 5′11″ 33-YEAR-OLD WRITER CAN DUNK!
But I was too depressed to really work up the hero stories and fill them with pleasurable details, so I turned on the light and saw the Dostoyevsky, but couldn’t face it, the long names. So I read two Graham Greene short stories. The names are easier. And then I was too tired to read anymore, but it wasn’t the kind of tired that lets you sleep. That kind of tired is like a book closing gently; insomnia tired is like the pages of the book are slowly burning, curling inward, turning black. There’s no rest, just the torture of nerves coming undone, fraying.
So then I started to whack off again. I was hoping that two sessions in a four-hour span would put me out. This time the fantasy was heterosexual. I thought of this unnamed beauty whom I often see on Second Avenue. I imagined us talking on the street. I say to her, “I’ve seen you for months. I find you very beautiful.” She invites me up to her apartment. She lies on her bed. She’s naked. My head is between her legs, she pulls me in tight, my nose is inside her. I cry and weep and take comfort in her delicious womb. Then the thought intrudes: Since I’ve picked her up on the street, she probably hasn’t had a chance to shower for a few hours and maybe she’ll have a bad urine smell. I don’t judge her for this, but what if it’s genuinely unpleasant? I push this thought out of my mind, but I seem to take heed in my fantasy. I rise up from her pussy and her arms are over her head. The full bounty of her breasts is revealed to me. I pounce. We join. Splendor. Enchantment. Rapture. I reach for the towel.
The whole thing, like the homoerotic masturbating session, lasted about forty-five seconds. I never give myself any foreplay. I’ve been prematurely ejaculating while masturbating for years. The images come lightning fast, and then I come lightning fast. As soon as it’s over, I don’t remember if there was any pleasure. It happens too quick. Also the thing must be worn out like an old needle on a record player. There’s probably not much sensitivity left. Masturbation, for me, has become purely a nervous habit, like cracking my knuckles.
I was hoping at least that it would help me sleep—two debilitating releases in four hours—but no, I was wide awake and yet exhausted. I got dressed and decided that I would go to the Kiev and pollute myself with an enormous sleep-inducing meal.
It was five A.M. I trudged up deserted, freezing Second Avenue. I felt limp-dicked from the masturbating. My nostrils burned from the cold. My beautiful woman was asleep somewhere. The avenue was sort of lovely in its emptiness. I bought a Post.
Paula Jones was on the cover, and I was saddened. I love Clinton. I once dreamt that he said to me, “You’re going to be all right,” and it was very reassuring. And I don’t care if he’s libidinous. Alpha males—leaders—are supposed to be that way. I’m a zeta male
and I’m sex-crazed, so I can imagine that the sex drive at the top of the alphabet must be unbearable.
I went into the Kiev and an adorable, light-haired Polish waitress approached with a menu. “Good morning,” she said. “How are you?” Her smile was real, endearing.
“Lousy,” I said. “Insomnia.” But she was already walking away from me, not listening. I wanted her to mother me. I want all beautiful waitresses to mother me. And they are like mothers—the good ones; they’re sweet to you and they bring you food. Just two nights ago, I borrowed some money from a friend and went into a Thai restaurant and ordered a bowl of soup. These two Thai waitresses, with beautiful exposed arms, were so solicitous. I didn’t deserve such kindness, I felt. If I could have a harem, I’d compose it with all the beautiful waitresses I’ve known and worshiped.
I studied the Kiev menu. I decided to get the Breakfast Sampler. It was weighty and noxious: ten slices of kielbasa, bacon, krakus ham, a single pancake, and a piece of French toast. I was raised kosher and I hardly ever eat pork except when I’m feeling self-destructive.
The waitress-angel floated back over. “How’s the Sampler?” I asked.
“It’s good,” she said in her delightful singsong Polish accent.
“What’s krakus ham?” I asked. “Is it from Krakow? Is it Polish for carcass?”
She smiled at me. She spoke English well, but nothing I was saying made sense to her. “Do you want coffee?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I have insomnia.”
She looked at me tenderly. I could have kissed her. She walked away. I imagined her hiding me out during the war years in her barn. She’d bring me krakus ham. We’d make love. I’d survive the war and she and I would come to America and open up the Kiev. I was delirious.
My food came. I ate, and I read the sports section. There was another article on my new hero, Keith Van Horn. I can’t help it— I do root for white basketball players. I ate all the pork and found that it was waking me up. All the nitrates in the meat must have been energizing me. I stayed in the Kiev until six-thirty. I paid my bill—it was all of $4.87. I left a dollar tip, like a valentine.
I stepped outside. The sun was up. I was wide awake. I walked down Second Avenue. It wasn’t so lovely anymore. Vulturish taxis filled the road. I trudged home. I came in and a cockroach jogged across the floor. I thought of Kafka, which made me think of writing. I sat down at my desk and wrote, “First there was a homosexual fantasy.”
A W on My P
I WAS IN COLLEGE, my sophomore year. A girl I had dated for a while, a sweet girl, came to my dorm room.
“I have venereal warts,” she said to me. “I’m supposed to tell you so that you can get yourself checked out.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
She was sitting on the edge of my bed. This was 1984. We had engaged in a fair amount of condomless sex, which went on quite a bit back then. Nowadays, I don’t even like to come on myself. I wear a condom when I masturbate so as not to get something from one of my other personalities. But back in 1984, you didn’t wear condoms unless you thought you really had to—like you were deeply concerned about getting the girl pregnant, that sort of easy-going thing. Generally, one did a lot of pulling out, like a retreating army, like Germany from Paris in 1944.
So either I had given the warts to the girl or she possibly had given them to me. I went to the infirmary and got checked out. I didn’t have any warts.
She told me about the warts in May, and in August I went to Europe with money I had saved from working as a model, and I wasn’t going back to Princeton, I was taking a year off. I traveled extensively, saw most of Europe and Morocco, and then when I was in Switzerland, in mid-October, I saw a little something on my penis. I happened to be on top of an Alp. I then spent a day and a half rushing back down the Alp. I passed a glacier where a James Bond movie was filmed. But who cared? How could I enjoy nature if there was a small piece of skin protruding from my penis? I immediately went to a Swiss hospital. The doctor didn’t know what it was. They didn’t have warts in Switzerland. It was too clean.
I took a train to Paris. In Paris they knew about warts. I was shown the word for wart in my French-English dictionary. Verrou. A nice woman doctor, who looked like the French actress Nathalie Baye, painted my penis with a little brush that she dipped and redipped in a brown liquid. I loved her because she didn’t make me feel like a leper. She smiled at me while she painted my penis.
“Ça va?” she asked.
“Oui, ça va,” I said, and I thought, Je t’aime.
All the skin on my penis peeled off that night because of her painting, but at least the wart was gone. And it made my penis look new. It was like a facial.
A few months later, I returned to the U.S., to New Jersey, and I thought I saw the wart again. I was now living at home with my parents, still on my year off. I didn’t want to tell my parents about the wart, so I secretly went to a free V.D. clinic in Hackensack on a Friday afternoon. While I waited for the doctor in a little room, I could hear him, through the door, talking to the nurse about the previous patient.
“You should have seen the last guy,” he said. “He was loaded with bugs.”
Then the doctor came in to see me. He had a large nose that was mottled and Swiss-cheesish from too much drink. His gray hair was unkempt. He was probably an alcoholic, demoted to the V.D. clinic. I lowered my pants and he looked at my penis: It was extra small the way it is for all officials. He rolled it around in his callused, swollen fingers. I looked at his hairy wrist.
“That’s probably a wart,” he said. “If I was you, I’d go to a dermatologist. I could put a topical solution on it, but that just removes the skin, it doesn’t really kill the wart effectively.”
“Is the solution brown?”
“Yes,” he said.
“They used that stuff on me in Paris, France.”
“You’re a lucky young man. I’ve never been to Paris. I’ve never been west of Pittsburgh.”
His nose was destroyed by alcohol and I was better-traveled, but he had the upper hand: He was a doctor in a V.D. clinic and I was a V.D. sufferer. I had a wart, a tiny little grain of flesh protruding from the middle of my penis. It was no larger than one of those white clouds on my fingernails. I was going to have to find a dermatologist. I drove home from Hackensack and I was depressed and disgusted.
The next morning I felt an itchiness in my crotch. I went in the bathroom and examined myself. There were tiny white formations at the roots of my pubic hairs. They looked like microscopic sacs. I wondered if it was some kind of pubic dandruff. But it was too uniform; the sacs were too consistent, military even. Then I saw a little dark thing, like a spider, embedded in my skin in the middle of my crotch! That doctor had given me crabs! He didn’t wash his hands! There must have been a crab in his wrist hair from the patient with the bugs, and the little crab, sensing that it couldn’t survive on a wrist for very long, had spotted my crotch and leaped into it for dear life. What did I expect? I had gone to a V.D. clinic and picked up V.D.
I tried to scratch off the tiny crab-spider, but it wouldn’t budge. Then I got my fingernail under it good and the thing actually moved in front of my eyes and then redrilled itself into my crotch. I screamed.
My parents were out of the house. It was Saturday and they were away for the weekend.
I called a drugstore in a neighboring town, for reasons of discretion, and a woman answered. I said in a muffled voice, “Do you have anything for lice?”
I thought that lice sounded better than crabs.
“What? What did you ask for?”
“Something for lice, a shampoo.” I was still disguising my voice, whispering, though I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me.
“What kind of shampoo?”
I hung up. I called another drugstore in another town. A tough woman with a cigarette voice answered: “Jameson Drugs. How can I help you?”
“Can I speak to the pharmacist?” I asked.
“I want to speak to the pharmacist.”
“Why?”
Give me the goddamn pharmacist, I wanted to shout. I kept my voice even, but I didn’t beat around the bush with this drugstore lady: “I want to speak to the pharmacist because I think I have pubic lice.”
“You mean crabs?”
“Yes. Crabs.”
I heard her say to the pharmacist, “There’s somebody upset on the phone about crabs.”
The pharmacist came on with me. “Can I help you?”
I adopted a patrician, Ivy League tone. “I think I might have pubic lice.”
“What do they look like?”
“Most of them are extremely tiny and white.”
“Attached to the pubic hair?”
“Yes.”
“Those are nits. The eggs. They’re not actually crabs yet.”
“I did see a black spiderlike thing in my skin.”
“That’s the crab that laid the eggs. You only need one and they lay a thousand eggs. You don’t want them to hatch. You better come in right away.”
“Will I have to shave my pubic hair?”
He laughed. This wasn’t a laughing matter. “No, you don’t have to shave,” he said. “The shampoo I’ll give you comes with a little comb. You comb out the nits.”
I drove to the pharmacy. It was a small, old-fashioned place with dusty blow-dryers for sale and weird little gift statues. The store was quiet. There were no other customers. That would make things easier. I walked toward the counter, and I was expecting the cigarette-voiced matron who answered the phone, but there was a young high-school girl. This was her weekend job. I approached her cautiously, pausing to look at toothpaste as if I were a casual shopper. Then I stood in front of her. I tried to spot the pharmacist behind his elevated white wall, but he wasn’t there. The girl smiled at me. She was around sixteen. She was a redhead. She had tiny little breasts and her lips were coated with sugary saliva from her chewing gum. I was a monster with crabs and I was attracted to a high schooler.