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

by Jonathan Ames

  “Who said you didn’t?” said my father.

  “Tell me again what happened,” said my son. He has started puberty, but like a small child, he still has a great appetite for repetition.

  For some reason I was good at holding my niece and nephew—the little kids would stop crying and pass out as soon as they got into my arms. My sister, the doctor, conjectured that because of our similar genetic makeup, I must smell like her, and so the babies found my odor familiar and comforting.

  My son thought this was ridiculous. He said that the kids were passing out because of the toxic nature of my odor. He thinks I smell awful because I don’t use deodorant. And this is all very sad, because when he was a little kid, he loved my smell. When I’d pick him up at the airport, he’d hold my hand and his head would be level with my wrist and he’d always press his nose against my forearm. “You always smell the same,” he’d say happily, visit after visit. It was his way to get to know me again in some primal, essential manner. The smell must have meant that he was with his crazy dad again. Like me, he lives through his nose. Then about a year ago, he said to me, “I figured out what that smell is—B.O.! All these years I’ve been smelling B.O.!” He saw this as cruelly, though comically, ironic since his sensibilities have been formed by exposure to the Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead, Mad magazine, and my own worldview. So all this to say that my little son, who once sniffed my arm like a lover, is growing up.

  We had one moment of tension in L.A., my son and I. We were playing Marco Polo in the pool with my sister’s nine-year-old step-daughter, Andrea. I questioned my son’s bravery in the game and unwittingly embarrassed him in front of the little girl. He then quit the game and Andrea and I continued playing. This deepened his injury and he went inside. When he reemerged some time later, I asked, “What’s going on? Why’d you disappear?”

  He wouldn’t tell me. His face was near-trembling, he was almost crying. Somehow a game of Marco Polo had become a psychological piece of dynamite. I asked him again what was the matter.

  “I don’t know you well enough to tell you,” he said, fighting tears. I took a breath. This was important, crucial. He was trying to hurt me, but he also needed me. His deep resentment and pain at our not being together all the time, usually unvoiced, was coming out.

  “I can appreciate that,” I said. “Though I do think you know me pretty well, but what can I do to help you know me better?”

  No answer. “There must be something I can do.”

  “Send me one of your columns,” he said. This was unexpected. Then I remembered I had failed in my promise months and months ago to send him the shitting in the South of France column. And the columns in general must be a symbol of my life apart from him, a life that other people know about, but not him.

  “I’ll send you a column. Is there anything else I can do?”

  He was quiet, far away. “Listen,” I said. “I know I’m a part-time dad, but I love you very much and I’m very proud of you.”

  “Why are you proud of me?” The kid was giving me a good working over. Testing me. I was frightened that I would screw up, but glad that he was talking to me.

  “Well,” I said, “I like the way you think about things, talk about things . . . what a good guest you are here at your aunt’s. I’m proud of how you know everything about bicycles. I like your sense of humor. You’re fun to travel with. I’m proud of how well you did in school this year. And I’m proud of how big you are, how good-looking and strong. I’m just proud of you.”

  He looked me in the eye. “Thank you,” he said. Then we went inside and watched a video with Andrea. Midway through the video he and Andrea launched a tickle attack on me. Everything was all right again.

  Oedipus Erects

  IN THE SPRING OF 1991, I escaped from Princeton and the taxi stand for a few weeks and went up to this famous artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. They had accepted me because of my first novel, and I went up there to try to resuscitate my failed second novel, The Jewish Duke of Windsor.

  There were about twenty-five other people in residence, and it was the usual artists’ colony assembly of writers, artists, and composers. In the evenings, after a hard day at our creative labors, we would often seek some kind of diversion, and one night, several of us went into town for dancing at a bar that had a jukebox. At twenty-seven, I was the baby of the group; the residents at the colony, for the most part, are usually in their mid-thirties to mid-forties, though there are always some youngsters and some oldsters.

  I began dancing with one of the oldsters of our clan, Kaye. She was a lively sixty-four-year-old composer, whose hair was still blond. She was quite short, maybe five-foot-two. Short people, I’ve noticed, often age better than tall people because gravity has less to attack, and Kaye had bright blue twinkly eyes, a pretty face, and this really cute cleavage that she was always showing off by wearing T-shirts and a push-up bra. Her breasts looked a little old and freckled, but also firm.

  A love song came on the jukebox and Kaye and I did a slow dance. She put her arms around my neck and pressed her lovely bosom against me. But that wasn’t all that was pressing. Pushed into my crotch was something bulky and hard. Her T-shirts were always untucked, so you couldn’t tell what was going on with Kaye below the waist, and I suspected that the solid thing I was feeling was a hardened upper-intestinal bloating-pouch, which I had often observed in most older people.

  Nonetheless, we had a nice slow dance, and for a moment there seemed to be a current of Oedipal-sexual chemistry between us, but then the fast music came back on and the moment passed.

  At the end of the night, when we all came back to the colony, everybody quickly dispersed to their bedrooms, and Kaye and I found ourselves alone together, having a cup of tea. She asked me if I wanted to go for a walk and look at the stars. Sure, I said. But before we went on our expedition to this one sloping hill, which was good to lie on and look at the wheeling of the night sky, we sprayed ourselves with mosquito repellent, which was necessary because of some recent rainfall.

  So then we went to the hill and lay side by side and took in the hundreds of stars. It was quite romantic, and after a few minutes of feeling some unspoken tension between us—the taboo of it, our age difference—I eventually put my hand over her hand. And it’s that first gentle yet courageous touch between a man and a woman that sets in motion this tumbling of events, like the workings of a clock. She squeezed my hand back, and then she explored my fingers and the strength and width of my wrist, my arm. Then in time I rose up and came down and put my lips to her neck, to the side of her face. And her arms went around me, pulled me in close, and we kissed. She felt small and fragile beneath me. She felt good beneath me.

  But there was one thing wrong, and it wasn’t her pouch. The smell of the mosquito repellent was very strong and acting like an antiaphrodisiac for both of us.

  “I want to hold you,” she said, “but this smell is too much. Let’s wash it off.”

  I was staying that visit in my own private cabin, which had a studio for writing and a separate bedroom. It also had a bathroom with a large tub. So Kaye and I went to my cabin to wash off the bug spray.

  She then suggested that we take a bath together, and with this woman thirty-seven years my senior, I got into that tub. I let myself look at her whole body only once. The pouch was for real; it was like a shelf above her vagina; it was like she had swallowed a brick. But she was so sweet, and as we sat across from each other in the bath, she took such wonderful delight in soaping up my penis, which grew quite large under her expert administrations.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I love it.” And she was smiling happily. No girl my own age had ever seemed so unabashedly smitten with it.

  So after our nice bath, we climbed all pink-skinned into my bed. We kissed and held one another, but because I didn’t have condoms, we didn’t make love. What we fell into was me curled up alongside her, sucking on her firm and wonderful breasts, which had good littl
e nipples. And while I suckled, she was masturbating herself with one hand and masturbating me with the other. Occasionally, she would remove her hand from herself and put it on the back of my head, to encourage my nursing. It was all highly erotic. She was older than my mother.

  And I was murmuring in my mind, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” which I often do, though, with women of all ages. But for me—someone who’s had Oedipal problems his whole life— nursing on sixty-four-year-old Kaye was a great momentary resolution to the conflict.

  So after about fifteen minutes of this breast-feeding, she began to come, moaning and gasping, and I was engorged in her tiny sunspotted fist, and at the height of her orgasm, she removed her hand from herself and put it on the back of my head and said so lovingly, breathlessly, “Oh, you dear boy.”

  And when she said “dear boy,” it was like an electric cattle prod was put to my balls and the sperm shot out of me like a javelin. Normally it just kind of fizzles and burps out, but “dear boy” was so maternal that two nerve endings between my psyche and my testes must have linked up like two open wires, and the result was an ejaculation that went sailing over my head like a comet. Lord, it was spectacular. I only wish it had gone in my eyes and temporarily blinded me. Then it could have been the most Oedipal moment of a most Oedipal life.

  Bald, Impotent, and Depressed

  I USED TO BE A BREAST MAN, but now I’m an ass man. But I must qualify this—I like the ass, not the asshole. That’s too taboo. It scares me. Taboo!

  I still like to nurse on breasts, but it’s more fun to nurse on the buttocks. They’re like really large breasts. Also they have such a beautiful curvature, especially if you can get your lady friend to bend her knees while lying on her stomach. Then the ass is in the air and quite firm and delicious. The ass crack is also very nice, like a cleavage from heaven. So, in essence, if I am to be honest with myself, I must still be a breast man. I now simply pretend that the buttocks are breasts. There is the nipple problem, though. No nipples down there. That’s why I haven’t given up on the breast entirely. Regardless, it’s all madness. I should be out discovering the North Pole, or doing something decent with my life, but instead all I care about is sex and my financial problems. And what about my soul? I hardly think of it. I need to pray more.

  My problem is that I am surrounded by like-minded people— individuals who are obsessed with their genitals. For example, a few nights ago, I was at a dinner party in a dimly lit Tribeca loft. Halfway through the meal, my good friend Spencer, a therapist— in-training, announced with pride that he had used Viagra. Naturally, the conversation up until that point had been about sexual intercourse—why women like to have their hair pulled had just been covered—but this Viagra confession shocked all of us.

  “Why?” we all asked Spencer. After all, he’s a young, healthy, vital man with a full head of hair and a good-standing membership at a sophisticated gymnasium.

  “Well, it was the first night with someone and that’s often difficult for me. I get stage fright. So the Viagra insured a good performance.”

  “It worked?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Nothing out of the ordinary, but it was very solid. No jitters. Viagra removed the anxiety.”

  “Won’t you want to use it again? Might you not become dependent?” asked a woman at the table, a licensed therapist, who was pulling rank on Spencer, only a therapist-in-training.

  “No,” said Spencer, holding his ground. “I will only use it for opening nights when the critics are there. That’s the only time when I might have problems. And now with this new woman I have established my capabilities as a lover. No having to prove anything the second night if I had been lousy the first night, which would make the second night worse than the first night. . . . So I advocate Viagra use . . . but only for the first night. Unless, of course, there’s an emergency, and then one can keep the pill in a glass case and break it open like a fireman.”

  “Any side effects?” I asked.

  “A headache. But who doesn’t have a headache after sex?” Spencer lifted his eyebrow, indicating his utterance of a bad joke. And everyone found all of this amusing, except me. I felt betrayed by my friend. The whole world was going on Viagra. But I never will. I am against all pills and medications, anything unnatural. I have smoked crack cocaine, but I won’t take antibiotics.

  “This is terrible,” I said to my dinner companions. “I won’t go on Rogaine or any hair pills. And I won’t take Viagra. I am a natural person. But I am going to be the only bald and impotent man in New York. I’ll be completely alone.”

  “And depressed since you won’t go on Prozac,” said another friend of mine, a sculptor, and he laughed loudly as he said it, and everyone at the table joined him. My artistic friend knew well my legendary stance against Prozac despite my years of depressive episodes and suicidal ideation and compulsive masturbation.

  “My God,” I said, “I’ll be the only bald, impotent, and depressed man in New York. I’ll have to hang out in vegan restaurants. Only organically minded women will like me. I may become an acronym—a B.I.D. man.”

  After that there was a general discussion of who at the table had actually suffered from impotence. All of the men confessed to having had this problem at least once, though I’ve never really had this problem that I can recall, and needing to regain some stature with the ladies at the table, I said, “My problem isn’t impotence, at least not yet. My problem is too many erections caused by too many things.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the woman therapist, putting me on the spot.

  “He’s polymorphously perverse,” said Spencer, showing his superior that he has the goods.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ve tried every perversion and none of them have stuck. I am now working on my soul.”

  Then the CD player went haywire, everyone made comments about CDs, and then the wineglasses were refilled, except mine, since I drink only temperance beverages. The evening wound down without further incident.

  I walked home with Spencer. “I can see the future,” I said. “I am going to need a woman who won’t care that I can’t get erections.”

  “There’s no such woman,” he said.

  “I know one,” I said, and I told him the tale of this lover I had on the Upper East Side in 1993. She was fifteen years my elder and we met in Carl Schurz Park while sitting beside each other on a bench. There was a sympathy in our worldviews and a two-month affair ensued. But she had a tremendous paranoia about venereal diseases, AIDS in particular, so she wouldn’t engage in intercourse with me—she didn’t trust condoms. She only liked to do one thing: sit on my face and suffocate me for about an hour. She was a tiny dark woman of Greek heritage and very demure, but she loved this dominant position. She said it made her feel like a queen on a throne. She wouldn’t even move that much while I flickered my tongue and struggled for air. She even faced away from my penis, not very interested in it, and so without her looking at it, I could play with myself if I wanted. To her it was immaterial. After about an hour of just sitting there like a hen, she would have an orgasm. And the whole thing was so exotic and unusual that I enjoyed it.

  This one time, though, there was a problem. She shifted her weight and my nose, which was buried, seemed to make a cracking noise. Then I thought I was having a bloody nose. I’ve been prone to bloody noses almost all my life. When I was seven years old, a mildly retarded, violent boy, who was eventually removed from his home and put in some kind of training facility, attacked me and smashed me in the nose, and I’ve had a weak vessel in my left nostril ever since. It’s been cauterized many times, most notably when I really punctured the thing during that nose-picking incident when I was a teenager and almost bled to death.

  Anyway, while my Greek lady friend was sitting on my face that one time when my nose cracked, I thought I was having a nosebleed inside of her. I began to panic. If this was the case, she would go insane. Bleeding inside her would be worse than coming inside her. He
r AIDS paranoia was extremely severe. What to do? We were only about thirty minutes into our sitting. Naturally, I couldn’t see what was going on. I was deprived of almost all my senses. It was an incredible predicament; I knew of no one else who had suffered a nosebleed during oral sex. And I didn’t dare disturb my queen on her throne. It was a terribly long half hour that ensued. When her orgasm came and she removed herself, I ran to the bathroom, hiding my face from her. I studied myself in the mirror, and to my considerable relief, there was no blood coming from my left nostril, or the right. I had imagined the whole scary thing.

  Spencer was quite impressed with this story, and I added that I was thinking of looking that woman back up. His therapeutic side emerged. “Listen,” he said, “you can do better than a woman who just sits on you for an hour.” Then he told me that a pretty woman at the dinner party, whom I didn’t know very well, found me attractive.

  “But I’m going bald,” I said.

  He ignored me and gave me her number. I called her and one thing led to another and by the second date I was in bed with her. And once our clothes were off, I immediately became overwhelmed with gas. I don’t have erection problems the first time I’m in bed with a woman—I have gas problems. My nervousness produces flatulence. This woman was kissing me tenderly and I was trying to hold in farts. I excused myself from her bed to go to the bathroom. Luckily for me, the toilet had a fan, so there was no chance that she could hear what I was doing in there. I farted in safety.

  I returned to her bed. A new fart needed to be held in. This was torture. Then the woman said, “I have condoms.” The call of the wild. I tried to put a positive spin on things: I thought that my bloated abdomen might rub against her in a favorable way. I rolled on the condom, went to mount her, almost farted, and lost my erection. I rolled off her and removed the defeated condom.

  “It’s all this talk about Viagra these days,” I said. “It must be subliminal marketing; it has destroyed my confidence. Please forgive me. This is my first experience with erection loss. With mild impotence.” She was sweet and understanding. I let a fart slowly leak out. It didn’t smell. To rally myself, I crawled downward and nursed on her buttocks. With my hand, I reached under her and tried to find the clitoris, but I couldn’t locate it. I haven’t been able to find one in years. But I was rubbing against the bed and an erection announced itself. I quickly put on a new condom. I mounted her from behind and was so nervous about the whole thing that I had a premature ejaculation. I tried to fake a few thrusts, but my spirit was crushed and the flesh was unwilling.