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

by Jonathan Ames

  Our getaway successful, we pulled over a few minutes later and we calmed each other; we even laughed a little. Then back at her parents’ house, we had tea and freshly baked Christmas cookies with her mother in the kitchen. Her father was already asleep, since he still woke each day at five A.M.

  As I sat there eating cookies, my groin felt strange, oddly absent, so I excused myself and went to the bathroom for an inspection. My penis was utterly inverted and numb. The sudden withdrawal had done something to me. I was in some kind of genital shock.

  Later, when we were alone, I said to my girlfriend, though I was afraid to be saying such things in a Catholic, military home, “I think something has happened to my penis. I may have damaged it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  We went into the bathroom and she took a look at it. “It is very small,” she said.

  “Please,” I said, “don’t make things worse.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen it this small.”

  She tried to breathe some life into the thing, but this only frightened me more. My initial reaction that the shadow-head was her father hadn’t fully left me; my nervous system was still expecting to be shot. “Please, stop,” I said. “Your father is going to come in here and cut it off with a bayonet.”

  She laughed and I got out of the bathroom in one piece. I spent the night on the couch by the large Christmas tree, and the smell of pine needles was soothing.

  Early the next morning, we went to the bus station. I bought a ticket for a small town in Georgia, which was the closest stop to my son’s small town, even though it was forty miles away. Before leaving Charleston, I called down to Georgia, where my son lived on a farm with his mother, older sister (not my daughter), and grandmother, to let them know when I’d be arriving. The grandmother and my son would be picking me up; my son’s mother and her daughter were going to the coast and would return Christmas afternoon.

  It was to be a twelve-hour bus ride, but I had a book and several magazines. And my girlfriend prepared two nice sandwiches that I was to ration out over the course of the journey.

  I put the box filled with my son’s toys in the belly of the bus, my girlfriend and I had a chaste kiss good-bye—her mother was in the van watching—and then I headed out of South Carolina, glad to be alive, but still concerned with the strange absenteeism in my groin.

  The trip was fairly miserable. People in the last few rows could still smoke in buses back then and so I was sucking on the air that came through the edge of the window. Sometimes I lifted my shirt over my mouth and tried to filter the smoke that way. I was sitting near the front and I would turn around and give the smokers withering glances to shame them, but it had no effect.

  I ate both my sandwiches by noon and cursed myself for my lack of character. Then I walked to the back of the bus, into the inferno of smoke, and went in the ghastly toilet. I checked myself out and my penis was still in shock. I tried a little onanism, but the cigarette smoke and the toilet smell got to me. I returned to my seat.

  Around one o’clock a young, pimply, yellow-haired girl, about sixteen, got on the bus and sat next to me. She wasn’t much to look at, but she was wearing a short skirt and I could see Georgia peach fuzz on the top of her thighs.

  “Where are you going this Christmas Eve day?” I asked, trying to hide my lechery.

  “To see my grandparents,” she said.

  Then she promptly, almost narcoleptically, fell asleep, and the darling’s little head rested on my shoulder. I inhaled the raw teenagey smell of her scalp. This unexpected intimacy caused a rebirth of sensation in my groin. I was happy to be back to normal, but it was mildly uncomfortable to have an erection, which the rocking of the bus kept alive, as did the touch of her head on my shoulder. I tried a yoga breath to draw the air out of my penis, something I learned in a tantric book, but it didn’t work.

  Luckily, the girl got off the bus two hours later and I was able to relax. But not for long. Toward evening, a torrential rainstorm began and I was afraid that the driver was getting weary. To die in a bus on Christmas Eve seemed a lousy fate. I had a small child waiting for me. I coughed loudly a few times to try and rouse the driver. He needed all his powers of concentration on these wet, dark Southern roads.

  Around eight o’clock, it was still raining, and the bus pulled into a tiny station and it was announced that this was the last stop. But it wasn’t my stop. Something was wrong. The driver directed me to the manager of the station. A terrible mistake had been made. In Charleston, I had been issued the wrong ticket—on holidays the bus didn’t continue to my destination, and Christmas Eve was considered a holiday. I was fifty miles away from where I was supposed to be.

  I called my son’s house, but there was no answer, and no answering machine. My son and his grandmother had obviously left to come meet me.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked the station manager—a heavy man with a kind bald head and a company-issued narrow blue tie.

  “You’ll have to call a taxi. They’ll take you to the other station.”

  I called the one taxi in town—I was deep in Georgia farm country—but there was no answer. The taxi company must have closed for Christmas Eve.

  I started to panic. I couldn’t think straight; I had been inhaling secondhand smoke for hours on end. Then the lights in the bus station were flickered, like at a Broadway show. The station was closing down.

  “What should I do?” I asked the manager.

  “Your family will probably figure out what happened and come pick you up here.”

  Then he had the good idea to call the other station, so that they could find my son’s grandmother and explain to her the mistake that had occurred. So he called and there was no answer.

  “I guess they’re closed for the night,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but I got to lock up, too.” This was Southern Gothic hell. He then reassured me that my family would figure out where I was, or if they didn’t, that when they got home I could call them—there was a phone outside the station—and they would come get me.

  I explained to the man that this whole process could take hours: They lived forty miles from the other station, and this would mean driving ninety miles in pouring rain with a three-year-old eager to see his nutty daddy. The station manager said he was sorry about all this, but there was nothing he could do.

  Then he locked up the joint and I went and stood under the awning outside. It was a tiny bus station, in a small, Christmas Eve–darkened town. I stood by the phone with the box of my son’s toys, waiting like a tragic fool. I was utterly alone. Something out of a Flannery O’Connor story was going to happen to me. A serial killer was going to tell me I’d be a good man if there was a gun to my head my whole life.

  I watched the rain smash against the asphalt lot. I tried to count the drips off the awning. I was starving. It had been hours since I had foolishly eaten both sandwiches. God is punishing me, I thought, for trying to make love in the train bathroom, fornicate in the van, and masturbate on the bus. I had been sinning the whole way down to Georgia. I thought of calling the police. Let them throw me in jail for the night. Then there were headlights on me. Good, I thought, the police have responded to me telepathically. The car door opened. It was the bus manager.

  “I couldn’t let you just wait here in this storm. I’ll drive you to the station.”

  I got in the man’s car. He was sacrificing his Christmas Eve dinner for me. It was an act of unexpected, heroic American kindness. I thanked him as graciously as I could, then he bored me for an hour with tales of the bus world—as in all work, he was plagued by internal politics. But I listened with enthusiasm—it was the least I could do. We arrived at the other station, and in the still-pouring rain, they were there, sitting in the car in a darkened lot, waiting for me.

  In the car window, my son’s face, framed by his yellow raincoat, was so expectant and beautiful. No one in my life has ever been so happy to see me.

  I thanked the bus
manager heartily and asked for his address. I wrote him a thank-you note the next day, and also sent a letter of praise to his bus company. When I got into the car with my son, I was showered with kisses. “I love you, I love you,” he said repeatedly, which is what he used to do when he would first see me back then.

  His sweet grandmother drove us to the farm. The rain made the road slick and dangerous, and my son said, “Look, the lights are melting on the street.” It was the kind of thing parents and grandparents love to hear from their children, and indeed the lights did look like they were melting. By the time we got home, he was asleep and I carried him in. I thanked his grandmother for picking me up, and then she retired for the night. I opened the cardboard box and put my son’s toys under the tree. I went to sleep and when I woke up it was Christmas.

  The Shroud of Onan

  SATURDAY MORNING, the blighted sun came through my window, awakening me. Actually it came through the stained sheet that I had hung recently over my window to block out the sun. It’s a blue sheet from my days in Brooklyn, and the sun illumined all these islands of brownish discoloration, like liver spots on an elderly person’s hands. Back in Brooklyn I was in such a state of melancholy and slovenliness that I didn’t have a designated masturbation cleanup towel. So my onanistic eructations were absorbed by the sheet on the side of the bed where I didn’t sleep. And no one else ever slept on that side. Who wants to sleep with other people? It’s hard enough to get a good night’s sleep by myself.

  So I stared at the islands of stains, surprised actually that there were large clear areas, and the blue color made it all seem sealike. That sheet is a map of my former indiscretions and excretions. It looks like a chain of islands, like Indonesia . . . well, more like Hawaii because there’s one large blot that must have been a favorite spot for me. I studied this map, alternately amused and depressed that I should use a semen-stained sheet for a curtain, and then I roused myself, swung my legs out of my bed, and immediately stepped on a paper clip, which had just enough of a little point sticking up so that it was like falling in one of those pits in Vietnam with spears. I gave a healthy scream and thought to myself, I should step on that paper clip more often. It’s good for waking me up.

  Then the phone rang. It was my father. He was calling from Queens. He had just collected my great-aunt Pearl and now he was coming to get me to take me home to New Jersey for the weekend. Sunday was Mother’s Day and I was going home for two days to celebrate my good and dear mother.

  I waited outside my building and a strong wind brought to my highly developed nostrils the smell of the sea. All this recent spring wind and rain keeps bringing to my nose hints of salt water, reminding me that New York is surrounded by water, that it is an island—a huge stain of land and man and pizza parlors and massage parlors and banks and coffee places. Not a bad place to live except your soul dies from a lack of contact with nature. There’s plenty of human nature, but so much of it that it’s deadly.

  The smell of the sea in my nose made me want to travel. Call me collect—to add more abuse to Melville’s famous line—and take me on a trip, somebody, please. I’ll pay for the call, you pay for the trip. I’d like to go to Europe. I’d like to have a drinking relapse in Ireland. I’d like to go to Turkey, where I’m held in esteem as a writer— they’ve already started translating my new novel. My editor from Istanbul called me long distance. He said, “I think in America you get the recognition you don’t deserve.” Of course, he screwed up the English, but I know the true meaning of what he was trying to say. I do hope, though, he understands my book properly.

  My father picked me up; we headed for New Jersey. I yearn for the Continent and I get the Garden State. My great-aunt was in the backseat—tiny and a bit loony, her beautiful orange-red hair shaped in a bowl cut. She was smiling, happy. She was being liberated from Queens, going to Jersey, as she always calls it. I reached my hand back to her; she took it and kissed it enthusiastically many times. “I love you, I love you,” she said.

  I said hello to my father and he grunted. He’s often surly and hostile with me at first, and then he warms up. It’s our old Oedipal struggle. Ancient, classic anger between father and son. Jealousy and competition. Someday I’ll write a column about it; I already have the title: “Oedipissed Off.”

  We took the FDR. My great-aunt said to me, “What size neck are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I said. We’ve gone over this a thousand times.

  “Your arms?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “I’ll get you a shirt at NBO . . . Polo. Do you know Polo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want a dark blue or a light blue?”

  “Don’t buy me any shirts. Don’t spend your money.”

  “Do you want a dark blue or a light blue?”

  “Dark.”

  I always give in. She buys me ugly shirts, but it makes her happy, gives her something to do—a trip to the NBO near Queens Boulevard.

  We passed Yankee Stadium. “How’s my boyfriend, Davey Cohen, pitching?” she asked.

  I tried to tell her once that it was Cone. That he’s not Jewish. But she prefers her delusion. Ever since Koufax, the Jews need somebody. “Pretty good,” I said about Cone. “He only lasts six innings, but the Yankee bullpen is strong.”

  We arrived in New Jersey. The rain was coming down. I needed nature, but this nature was too wet. I kissed my mother and hugged her. “I’ve come home to be with you,” I said gallantly. Then I retreated to the basement to radiate myself in front of the television. That’s what I always do when I go home. I spend hours microwaving myself—my parents have thousands of channels. I have a TV here in New York, but it only gets Channel 4.

  I watched the Knicks win their game against the Pacers. Then we all had a nice late lunch. Then I went back down to the basement and watched Splash. I hadn’t seen it in years. I wept the entire movie. I hate it when Hollywood does that to me. I’ve spent so much time crying in the darkness of my parents’ basement.

  When I wasn’t crying during Splash, I was admiring Darryl Hannah’s ass when she runs into the ocean. Then at one point I wondered, Where is Darryl Hannah? She has disappeared, but I’m glad. That means someday Uma Thurman and Gwyneth Paltrow will disappear. My system can hardly tolerate the existence of these blondes. They make the average subaverage male feel like life will always be inadequate because you won’t get to bed one of these beauties. You end up bedding your own bedding and hanging it like a flag of your submaleness in your window.

  After Splash, I went upstairs to take a bath. Whenever I’m home, I watch television or I take really long baths. Before I filled the tub, I showered off so that I could kick at things I thought I saw on the floor of the tub and send them down the drain. It’s a neurosis of mine, more Oedipal stuff—I don’t want contact with detritus from my father. But once the tub seemed properly cleared of any offending flakes of unknown origin, I then filled the thing up and lolled in there a good forty minutes, meditating. I always practice a watered-down Buddhism in the bathtub. My great-aunt banged on the door at a particularly profound moment. My whole head was submerged except for my nose.

  “What are you doing in there? Are you alive?” she cried. Then she called out to my mother. “Maybe he knocked his head on something. He could be drowning.”

  “I’m all right,” I shouted. “Leave me alone. I was on the verge of enlightenment!”

  “Do you want to play cards?” asked my great-aunt, unfeeling about my spiritual development.

  I got out and we played cards, and then the whole family took a nap. We woke up at eight and had dinner and then my father and I watched Three Days of the Condor. What a great movie. I hadn’t seen it in years. I didn’t remember the great sex scene with Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford. It was very arousing. Dunaway was moaning realistically. I put my hand in my pocket and jiggled myself. And in the darkened silence of the basement, the hostilities between my father and myself seemed to evaporate. We don’t always
talk that well, but we watch television together quite nicely.

  Around midnight we all went back to sleep. I was lying in my childhood bed thinking about Darryl Hannah’s ass and Faye Dunaway’s mouth, and the old hand snuck down under the covers. But I didn’t want to go through with it. I had turned off the lights and I was too lazy to find something to clean myself up with. But the images from the movies were too powerful. I’ll just use the sheet, I thought. My mother won’t notice one stain when she does the laundry. But then I thought, How selfish of me to do such a thing when I’m home for Mother’s Day.

  But I was too weak and so I was biting Hannah’s ass and kissing Dunaway’s mouth and I was on the verge of explosion, but then my great-aunt burst into my room, which she always does without knocking. The light from the hallway put a glow around her. My blanket shielded me, but I yanked up my underwear and my hand flew away from my groin.

  “What are you doing in here?” I shouted. “I was just falling asleep!”

  “Do you have today’s paper? I need to read something.”

  “It’s downstairs. Leave me alone.”

  She came and kissed me on the forehead, almost putting her hand right on my erection as she steadied herself. Instead, her hand pinned down the blanket around my protuberance, causing a pleasing tightening sensation, and my penis must have misinterpreted this as a caress from Darryl Hannah—I had been right on the verge—and I ejaculated. I did so silently, just a slight physical and psychic shudder. Then my great-aunt left, unaware of my release. I had reached an unbelievable new low. A moment of near-incest with my octogenarian great-aunt. There was only one consolation: I had erupted in my underwear and not on my mother’s sheet—it was the least I could do on the eve of her day.