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

by Jonathan Ames

  They took me to the train station. My mother sat in the back. We waited in the car.

  “We support you,” my mother said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for the check, and for dinner.”

  Then the train came. My mother leaned over the front seat and kissed me and said she loved me. I shook my dad’s hand and sort of rubbed his shoulder. He smiled at me.

  I got out of the car and I leaned in just a little and I said to both of them, “I love you.” And then I closed the door.

  I took the train back to Hoboken, and then the Path to Ninth Street. From there I walked home and I had an odd pain in my big toe. Something was in my shoe. Whenever this happens, I always remember that in health class in the third grade they showed us a film about a boy who was limping. But then he stopped trying to walk and took off his shoe. Out came a pebble. We were told to always do this if something in our shoe was hurting us—that taking care of one’s feet was very important. But I’ve always been too lazy to empty out the pebbles in my shoes, and this particular night, having gone begging to my parents, I thought I deserved a little suffering.

  When I got to my apartment, I took off my shoe and nothing came out. Then I took off my sock and out fell a hard, brown lentil. I hadn’t cooked lentils in years. Where had this lentil come from? It was all very strange. Then I thought of all the charity I had received in the last twenty-four hours, so I opened my window and threw the lentil outside. It wasn’t much, but I hoped that some poor pigeon might be able to eat it.

  Sex in Venice

  IN OCTOBER OF 1984, after getting my wart problem taken care of (for the time being, anyway), I settled down in Paris for four months, during which time I had several good adventures. To support myself, I got a job working as an au pair for a French family who lived in Montparnasse. I was given room and board, and I was something of a novelty in the neighborhood—a male nanny. I was referred to as the au pair garçon Americain, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. My French “mother,” whom I spent a great deal of time talking to in the kitchen, was a raven-haired knockout, and early on I stole a pair of her panties in a mad act of affection. They were a faded red with black trim, and I put them on one night and masturbated. Then I threw them away, wanting to destroy the evidence of my crime.

  My main task as an au pair was to escort my two children, a girl five and a boy eight, to school each morning, and to pick them up in the afternoon. To get to the school, we took a shortcut through a boulangerie on Boulevard de Montparnasse that had a back staircase that led to the road parallel to the boulevard—Rue D’Assas. I was going through a big Hemingway phase then, what with living in Paris, and I read with great glee in A Moveable Feast that the man himself cut through the very same bakery on his way to visiting Gertrude Stein. So it was quite exciting as I passed through the delicious-smelling store to think that I was walking in Hemingway’s actual footsteps.

  In the afternoons, I’d meet my two charges in their school’s courtyard, and I always had a snack for them that I had picked up in the Hemingway boulangerie, either a chausson aux pommes or pain au chocolat. So with their pastries in hand, we’d go to the petit jardin Luxembourg. They’d meet their friends there and I’d meet with the other au pairs—about a dozen lovely Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and German girls. The male-female ratio was heavenly, and I quickly took up with a German girl, who was very good at sneaking out of her family’s house to visit me (she had some kind of curfew). I, fortunately, had my own room—a chambre de bonne—on the eighth floor of my family’s building, and around midnight my German would come to me. She would be breathless after climbing so many flights of stairs, and she’d knock at my door and she could barely manage to whisper, but she’d always say, “C’est moi, c’est moi.”

  My room was the size of a large closet. All I had was a mattress on the floor, but it was good for lying down with that sweet girl. She was eighteen, had the tiniest, most adorable little patch of yellow pubic hair, and she loved sex. She would really yell, especially when I mounted her from behind. Her screams made me proud, and my neighbors didn’t complain. They were a quiet, mysterious lot—primarily Tunisian and Algerian immigrants, with whom I shared one of those French toilets where you put your feet on these two shoe-sized bricks and you squat over a hole. For someone like myself with toilet neuroses, this kind of toilet is quite excellent— no layering the seat with wads of paper that invariably fall into the bowl as soon as you sit down.

  Then Christmastime came and my girlfriend went home, and my French family went to Normandy for two weeks. I was all alone. I stole another pair of panties for some company, but that wasn’t enough. So I went out one night to a disco hoping to meet someone, and I managed, after getting quite drunk, to pick up a Danish fashion model. As she and I went to the coat check to leave, a French man got between me and her and he started flirting with the Dane. Liquored up, I told him to back off, that she was with me. He was dark-haired, tall, had a few inches on me, and he shoved me hard in my chest, which surprised me. It knocked me back a foot, and almost without thinking—except for this instantaneous reflexive thought that if another man shoves you, you shove back—I jumped forward and planted my hands on his chest, and I remember thinking that would probably be the end of it, that all I had to do was display one act of not backing down. But right after I shoved him, his fist came out of nowhere and hit me right in the mouth, spinning me around, and my lip split against my teeth. The pain was jarring, but I whirled to face him, without any plan, and he punched me right in the nose, breaking it. It was like a gun had been shot in my face and I saw a bright white light in my eyes.

  But then there was red, a blurry rage, and with blood pouring out of my nose like warm water, I managed to tackle the guy, but not bring him down. I had him in a sort of headlock, and I couldn’t hear anything, the world was silent, but I saw the Dane with her mouth open, screaming obviously, and everyone was backing away, leaning against the walls, frightened yet forming a natural voyeuristic ring. As I held him with my right arm (and I was a pretty strong kid from years of sports, so he couldn’t break loose), I tried to throw two lefts up into his chin. I vaguely remembered Hemingway writing somewhere that in a fight you should throw two left upper-cuts and one right cross. Well, one of my lefts landed without much power, one glanced off his shoulder, and then I loosed my right arm from around his neck and threw a wild haymaker punch, my cross, which missed completely. And the force of my failed blow had me partially bent over in front of the guy and he took my head in his hands like a punter with a football and he brought his knee up and I managed to turn so his kneecap didn’t crash into my face but the side of my skull. This sent me flying. It was like being hit with a bat. There was no white light this time, but a temporary painful blackness. And this blow with the knee spun me around just like the first punch had, and when I came out of the blackness, my back was to him. He’s killing me, I thought, and I knew I was beaten, but I wasn’t going to quit. Something asserted itself in me, some vain, noble, nihilistic pride, and I turned to face him, expecting in my defenseless state to be hit again. But several bouncers had him now, they had perceived that he was the bad guy, probably because he was killing me, and they threw him out. And the Dane was gone. Everyone was looking at me. A bouncer gave me a towel for my nose; he asked me if I was all right, and I said for everyone to hear, “Ça fait rien.” It means nothing.

  Then about a half hour later when I was alone in my little room, I cried. I felt this weird fear and sadness and aloneness about having been beaten up. I had a split lip, a cut on my head, and weird purple swelling on the bridge of my nose.

  About a week after the fight, it was Christmas Eve, and with my face having rather quickly healed, except for my nose, which was still tender and somewhat purple, I decided to do some traveling to cheer myself up and I bought a train ticket to Venice. I made my choice because of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Most of my youthful travels were inspired by literature—Berli
n: Isherwood; Spain and Paris: Hemingway; Morocco: Bowles; and the Côte d’Azur: Fitzgerald.

  I arrived in Venice on Christmas morning. Almost all the hotels were shut down until the new year, and the few that were open were booked. But I did manage to get an unheated room on the top floor of a small hotel. The room was only used in the summer, but the manager took pity on me and let me have it, which I was very grateful for, because otherwise I had nowhere else to go. He gave me extra blankets and it was extremely cold in Venice, but I slept with my clothes on and my winter coat, and it was somehow manageable.

  So I spent my days wandering around the freezing, empty city. I hardly saw other people. Everyone was hiding. I took a water-bus to Lido and looked for Thomas Mann but didn’t find him either. In all my book-inspired traveling, I would madly go looking for the writers I loved, somehow hoping to find them, as if they would come back to life just for me.

  What else can I say about Venice? It was gray, sad, and other-worldly. It was the most beautiful place I had ever been. I swore to myself that I’d return someday with someone I loved.

  At night there were a few restaurants open and I would drink a lot of wine, and one night after dinner and a bottle of wine, I went to the famous Harry’s Bar. I drank several gin and tonics because the bartender told me that’s what Harry’s was famous for. The drinks were incredibly overpriced—I didn’t realize this when I started—and I just about emptied out my wallet. I left the bar angry and feeling ripped off, but the cold air calmed me down and I went walking along the water, the open sea, near Piazza San Marco. I stopped at a railing just to look out and to listen to the water, and an old man suddenly slipped alongside me and scared me. I hadn’t heard him approach. He saw I was startled. He said something. “No Italiano,” I said. He knew enough English to say, “I want to kiss you.” He made a hand-motion toward my fly.

  “No, grazie,” I said.

  “Please,” he said. He was tiny, bald, wearing a nice coat. His eyes were not unkind. “Please.”

  “Si,” I said. I was speaking Italian and he was speaking English.

  I was drunk, but I knew what I was doing. He led me to a little, partially enclosed dock so that no one could see us. He knelt down and he was smiling beautifully. I unzipped. For once it was to my advantage to come quickly, but it took me forever. But eventually, standing on that freezing-cold dock, I did come. I helped the old man stand up and I got out of there.

  I walked back to my hotel. I took a scalding-hot shower in the bathroom down the hall, trying to pretend to myself that I hadn’t done what I’d done, and then I got back into my clothes and my winter coat—my Venice pajamas in my unheated room. I lay in bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I saw the old man in my mind getting down on his knees. I saw how happily he smiled. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing. I had come to this city looking for Death in Venice and Thomas Mann, and in my own way I had sort of found both.

  The Young Author

  I WAS WALKING DOWN A HANDSOME, brownstonish street in Brooklyn Heights and I came upon a fresh box of Q-Tips. It was a nice-looking box—very blue. And it was still sealed in plastic. I need Q-Tips, I thought. I picked up the box and looked around. There were no other pedestrians within fifty yards. I sort of waved the box in the air to signal to the world that I was willing to give the Q-Tips back to their rightful owner. No one claimed them. What a strange item to have fallen out of someone’s bag.

  I checked the seal thoroughly. It was perfect. And it seemed unlikely that the little sticks with their heads of cotton could be contaminated in any way, though I did imagine, for a moment, a madman dipping the Q-Tips in some kind of poison and then resealing the box and planting it on the sidewalk. He could be watching me at that very moment. But this was too preposterous. I pocketed the Q-Tips and headed back to Manhattan. I had wanted Q-Tips for some time. But it was a luxury item—I only spend my money on the most necessary goods.

  My unexpected find came in handy a few days later. The publisher of my novel, due out in five months, was taking me to lunch at the “21” Club. And the morning of the lunch, I did a thorough cleaning of myself, and I employed several Q-Tips. I wanted to look very good for the lunch; I prepared for it like an actor, because often when I meet people whom I have to impress, my personality is mysteriously vacuumed away. I become as boring as a piece of toast. But if I try to play a role, if I try to be someone other than myself, I can sometimes make a good impression. And so for my luncheon at “21,” where there were going to be several people whom I had never met, I geared myself up to play the Young Author. It’s what I did eight and a half years ago when I prematurely ejaculated my first book at the age of twenty-five. But at thirty-three I can still be the Young Author; the window doesn’t close on that title for another two years.

  The first step in my transformation was a bath and a shave. I also washed my hair and worked on my scalp with my rubber invigorator. I then used the invigorator on the soles of my feet to give myself some amateur reflexology.

  After the bath, I put sunscreen on my face to act as a moisturizer. Then I put a little dab of wheat germ oil in the palm of my hand and with some water rubbed this into my hair. I then combed back my front fringe of hair over my bald spot. The wheat germ oil held the hair in place quite nicely and gave me a wet look— very good for Young Authors striving for an allusion to Fitzgerald.

  Then I opened up my beautiful box of new Q-Tips. I again thought of the mad poisoner, but only for a second. I dipped a Q-TIP into my bottle of hydrogen peroxide (a very cheap thing, peroxide, only eighty-nine cents for a good-sized bottle, and it has so many uses) and I cleaned my ears. I did this very gently, because I have a great fear of puncturing the eardrum ever since I read some years ago that some baseball player had done just that with a Q-Tip while sitting in the dugout.

  Then I gargled with the peroxide and hot water—it gets rid of germs and cleans up coffee stains. I followed up the gargling with flossing, and then a gentle brushing of my teeth because my gums are receding like my hair.

  I was almost ready to get dressed, but then I inspected myself closely in the mirror—there were three long blond hairs coming out of my nostrils and several hairs out of both ears. I once had a small nostril-hair scissor, but unfortunately I lost it on a visit to New Hampshire in 1990, and I’ve been too cheap ever since to get a new one. So I tried trimming the nostril hairs with my nail-clipper, but it didn’t work. I then tried getting my razor in my nose and almost cut in half the little wall that exists between the two nostrils. So I took some wheat germ oil and glued the nostril hairs to the inside of my nose.

  I then tried cutting the ear hairs with the nail-clipper—even though it didn’t work on the nose hairs—and, naturally, I was unsuccessful, but I did manage to cut this little piece of cartilage at the front of my right ear. Blood was drawn. At this point I thought I was starting to overdo things, and sensed that if I didn’t stop myself, I might destroy my face as a way to sabotage my luncheon and my whole career.

  So I headed for the closet and removed my clothes. A few days earlier a benefactor of mine, an older writer, had taken me to Brooks Brothers. I don’t have any money left from my book advance, spent all of it in ’97, so my benefactor bought for me a beautiful charcoal-gray herringbone sport coat. This way I would have something good to wear for the lunch. The plan is for me to pay him back for the coat by doing copy-editing work on his latest opus.

  I got dressed and tied my tie perfectly the first attempt—a good sign, I thought. Then I put on my splendid herringbone, and to affect an Edwardian appearance—to go with my thinning, red-blond hair and blue eyes—I fastened all three buttons. I thought to myself, I almost look like a real person.

  I often don’t feel like a real person because my existence is dominated by fear. It keeps me from feeling alive. I am like a Q-Tip— my body is this stick that walks around attached to a head that is a cotton swab of anxiety. But I think that people who wear herringbone sport jackets must not be so fearful. They’re in
charge of themselves. And putting on my herringbone really helped me get into my role of the Young Author. In fact, I was a Confident Young Author. My sport coat was like a WASPy, Edwardian suit of armor. But the herringbone part makes it Jewish, so it’s perfect for me: WASPy in appearance, Jewish in spirit. In fact, I’m wearing my jacket right now to elevate my mood as I sit here at my wobbly desk. Even in the privacy of my own home, I often don WASP attire. I call this religious cross-dressing.

  So my whole toilet and costuming had taken almost two hours, but I had about forty-five minutes to kill before getting on the subway, so I studied my book of Oscar Wilde epigrams. I was hoping to use one or two during the luncheon conversation. Then promptly at noon, I sheathed myself in my Barracuda raincoat and headed out.

  When I was on the street, I found it to be an unusually mild February day, and it was also a little rainy, and as I walked to the F train, a man approached me and he sneezed convulsively twice in succession. And because it was so misty and drizzly, I could see the particles of his sneeze in the moisture—the way you can see dust in a sunbeam. The sneeze-motes spread out from his body a good three yards, and I was in their line of fire. I astutely jumped into the road to avoid contamination, but I was sure that some of the germs had gotten to me, and I was worried that I’d be sick by the time I got to the restaurant. Shaken, I continued on to the subway, and I did feel some concern that I was perhaps growing more and more insane on this issue of germs.

  Without further incident, and no sense of sore throat or any other symptoms of contagion, I made it to “21,” which is in this tiny, old building stuck between two skyscrapers. I went inside and the place is very much in the style of an old-fashioned men’s club— dark wood, low ceilings, deferential staff.