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

by Jonathan Ames

  So the party, held in Turtle Bay Garden and thrown by my generous and kind benefactors, was a smashing success—elegant, glamorous, and crowded. And my great-aunt Pearl was there (see New York Times article, opposite). She liked all the free food, and she was very proud of me. She said, “This is one of the happiest nights of my life.”

  The publisher dropped off thirty copies of the book for people to look at, and twenty-two were stolen, de rigueur at such events, but I also convinced eight people to buy the book from me at a discounted price of twenty dollars. Perhaps this was done in poor taste, but I have been living off that $160 for several days—eating out, taking taxis, and buying espressos. It’s a glorious time in my life right now. I almost feel like I deserve to have $160 in my pocket.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES METRO TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 1998 PUBLIC LIVES

  Book Has Extras

  JONATHAN AMES was wearing a seersucker jacket, just like the hero of his new novel, “The Extra Man.” And BLAIR CLARK, a former executive at CBS News, was denying that Mr. Ames had learned anything about “extra men” (a k a “walkers” who escort wealthy women to Broadway shows and dinner parties) from him.

  The things they talk about at those midsummer book parties.

  This one was set in a garden behind Mr. Clark’s townhouse on the East Side. Mr. Ames wrote much of “The Extra Man” in an extra room in the house; he has known Mr. Clark and his wife, JOANNA, for nearly 15 years.

  Mr. Ames’s 84-year-old great aunt, PEARL VINE, has known him even longer. “He devoted a whole chapter to me and he makes me out to be much older than I am,” she said. Mr. Ames laughed. “I’ve had a character in each of my books loosely based on my aunt,” he said, “and they’re always her age.”

  Drinking

  IN 1994, I SPENT MAY and June in Saratoga Springs. I was lucky enough to go again to the artists’ colony. I was supposed to write, of course, but I was also trying to use the place as a health farm. I was hoping to get sober, but I wasn’t having too much success.

  Saratoga is known for its track and for its water. The horses, though, only race the last week of July and all of August. So I didn’t do any betting, but I drank the water—it runs year-round. In the center of town, near a grassy little park, there’s a public spring. The water has a sulfuric taste and it pours out of two spigots twenty-four hours a day. It’s supposed to be good for your digestion; I was taking it for that and hoping, too, that it was good for my liver.

  The fountain is underneath an open pagoda, which provides shade, and there are several benches so you can sit and take your time while you take the waters. The basin where the water lands is stained a glistening orange color—the residue from the water’s rich mineral content.

  One day I went to the spring. I was sitting on one of the benches and I was just looking at the water and listening to it before getting my drink. I was resting from having walked into town. An old man was on the bench next to mine. He had already filled a dirty, plastic cup and he was taking sips. Beside him on the bench was a paper bag with a bottle of booze inside.

  He was wearing blue sweatpants with white stripes down the sides, a dark blue cowboy shirt, and old black leather shoes. He had closely cropped gray hair and the pushed-in nose of a bum. Only bums have noses that have been broken more times than boxers. His nose was like a crescent moon—the cartilage in the middle was all gone.

  I knew we were going to talk. In 1986, I spent the summer living on Chrystie Street in the Bowery and the bums there always wanted to talk to me, and I always wanted to talk to them. So I was waiting for this Saratoga bum to start, like waiting for a girl to smile to give you an opening.

  He made his move. He pointed to the water and said in a raspy voice, “It tastes like shit, but it’s done wonders for my stomach.”

  He took a sip from his cup and he patted his stomach through his cowboy shirt to show me how good the water made him feel. But his belly was swollen and misshapen. He had all the alcoholic symptoms. I stood up to drink and I said in a friendly tone, “I like this water. It wakes me up.”

  I ducked my head and drank a little. It was cold and the harsh taste was a shock, despite my having tried it many times. Then I took some in my hands and bathed my face and neck. Then I asked the old man, “What’s the matter with your stomach?”

  “Ulcers. Esophageal ulcers . . . from drinking.” He bowed his head and then said, “I add my vodka to the water, helps it go down.”

  I dried my face with my shirt and I sat down next to him on his bench. Somehow we were already friends. He moved the brown, crinkled bag that held his vodka to make room for me. He poured some of the vodka into his mineral water. I played stupid, as if I didn’t know about drinking, and I said, “But the alcohol is giving you ulcers. Why don’t you just drink the water?”

  “I’m fifty-nine. I’m on disability. I got money in the bank. . . . I’m ready to die. Ready to go at any moment.”

  What he had said was an alcoholic’s explanation of why he might as well keep drinking: He could afford it and he was waiting for it to kill him. But there were pitfalls to such a plan. A Bowery bum once said to me, “Somebody’s played a trick. I didn’t expect to live this long.”

  The Saratoga bum drank from his cup. Then he said, “Know what happened to me yesterday?” I shook my head no and he told me what happened.

  “I cracked a check for one hundred, and the first thing I did I went for a haircut to clean myself up.” He pointed to his close-cropped gray hair, which I admired; it made him look tough. He continued, “Then I got a liter. That left me with probably eighty-five dollars. Usually I get a pint, but I thought I’d go home, not come back into town, and I’d need a liter. But I drank the whole thing here by the fountain and passed out on that bench.” He pointed to the bench I had been sitting on at first. He shook his head with dismay. “I woke up in Saratoga Hospital. . . . Been there more than once. I came back here and my bike was gone.”

  “What about the eighty-five dollars, gone, too?”

  “Yep . . . and I need to get a new bike. And I don’t have enough money. I left it right here. And I leave my cup under that tree every day so I can get my drink.” Somehow the cup hadn’t been lost.

  “What time of day did you pass out?” I was trying to imagine who would take his money and his bike. I was just a visitor, but Saratoga, in my eyes, was a pretty nice town. Bums in the Bowery got rolled all the time, but this was a town with lawns and mansions, the New York City Ballet in August. If his money was stolen, it had to be at night, probably by kids.

  “I think I blacked out around three in the afternoon,” he said. “I went for the haircut around twelve.”

  “What time did you come to?”

  “At eight o’clock, in the hospital. Had to walk home, three miles. I live out in the hotel on Route Nine.”

  I was playing detective with no chance of solving the mystery of his bicycle and money, though I wished I could retrieve them, but I also selfishly enjoyed hearing the details of his story; it captured why I love bums: Things just happen to them. Crazy things. They’re like the white spores that dandelions become. They’re not really in charge of their bodies anymore. The wind just picks them up and carries them away. It’s tragic and doomed, of course, but I envy the caprice of it, the total lack of control. They just drift and land. They’re in the right place, they’re in the wrong place. They see murders, babies born, car accidents, fistfights, first kisses . . . trucks roll over them, banks fall on them, they lose eighty-five dollars, they find a wedding ring in the gutter.

  I stood up and took another drink from the fountain. I imagined it purifying me, helping me. I sat back down and I said to the bum, “Where are you from originally?”

  “Tennessee. That’s where I got involved with horses. That’s why I’m in Saratoga. Came here four years ago and fell in love with the place. On my bike I can get anywhere in twenty minutes.”

  “What do you do with horses?”

  “I’m a groom, trai
n a little,” he said, “but my arthritis is so bad, I can’t even get under a horse.” He bent a little and made the motion of getting under a horse and scrubbing. I imagined that he had washed thousands of horses, that he had gone to tracks all over the country, following the horses like following the circus. Drinking more and more every year. But the way he pantomimed washing a horse was beautiful. He had done it so much that the motion had become something perfect.

  Then he said, “I want to go to culinary school. I’ve done some frying at the track, but I want to be an institution cook. . . . A line cook has got ten waitresses yelling at him, there’s a lot of pressure, but an institution cook, that’s more relaxed. Cooking at Skidmore, that’s what I’d like.”

  He had claimed he was ready to die, but he wouldn’t be talking about wanting to cook if he didn’t have some hope left. I wondered if I could help him. But who was I to try and spread any word about quitting drinking? I’d had a binge two nights before and tried to drive my car into Saratoga Lake, chickening out at the last moment. It was private, drunken melodrama, and I spent the whole next day vomiting. I knew I needed to quit and I knew there were ways to do it, and maybe since I was trying to quit, I could help this man— he was only fifty-nine.

  But I dismissed the idea. I figured the best thing would be to treat him with respect and not insult him by acting like an old-fashioned Salvation Army member. I said, “I have to go, but it’s been nice talking to you.”

  “You too,” he said. And I got up and took a step away from him, but then I had to give it a try. I always have to do things one more time—like one last swim at the ocean. Or with this old man, always hoping for something miraculous to happen. It’s why I bring a baseball mitt to baseball games; maybe I’ll catch a foul ball, even though I’ve never caught a foul ball. I turned around and I said to him, “You ever think of stopping drinking?”

  “No, I can’t—” He looked down, shook his head, then getting some bluster up, he said, “I’m all right. . . . I just have to get a new bike.”

  “I know I’m young,” I said, “but I shouldn’t drink. I’m trying to quit. The other night I was driving drunk. I could have killed someone.”

  “That’s why I use a bike,” he said. “I’ll never get behind the wheel of a car drunk again. Even if I got my license back, I’d never take one drink and get behind the wheel.”

  “That’s good,” I said, but I knew he’d drive drunk if he ever got a license or a car again. It was easy to hear him lying to himself, but it wasn’t so easy to hear my own lies—I still had my car.

  “Well, I’ve got to get going,” I said. “So take it easy.” I was giving up as quick as I had started. I just wanted to let him be.

  “So long,” he said.

  I started walking away and then I turned back to him one last time and I joked with him, though my concern was real. I said, “You’re not going to pass out again, are you?”

  He knew I was kidding around. He smiled and said, “I only got a pint today.”

  The Mangina

  FRIDAY NIGHT, I WAS SITTING in the lobby of this theater in Tribeca called the Flea Theater. I was there to perform, to do some storytelling. I was one of several acts; the show was already in progress. I wasn’t too nervous sitting there—for the last five years, I’ve done a fair amount of performing. At least once a month, I get on some stage somewhere in downtown New York and I tell stories from my life. I’m not quite a stand-up comedian, though I do stand. If anything, I’m a stand-up storyteller. It’s a nice sideline to go along with teaching and trying to make it as a writer. It brings in a little cash—not much, but a little. So Friday night, I was waiting to go on and my friend Chandler showed up at the Flea lobby and sat next to me. He’s been to dozens of my shows.

  “I go on in fifteen minutes,” I said. “And thanks for coming. You didn’t have to. You’ve heard me so much.”

  “I always like your stories,” he said, and he smiled at me, but he didn’t look well. His thin shoulders were hunched, and his face was drawn. I could see he was making an effort to appear otherwise— he was wearing a clean blue shirt and his short blond hair was parted, neatly combed. And his forty-year-old face is always handsome in a worn, Grapes of Wrath kind of way, but I could tell this night that he was troubled.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked.

  He looked at me, hesitated a moment, then said, “I might really be losing it this time.”

  “What’s going on?” I wondered if he was having a relapse with his exhibitionism; it had been dormant, at least in its unhealthy expressions, for some time. When he’s being healthy, he goes to nude beaches, like on my visit to Fire Island; when he’s unhealthy, he goes to Dunkin’ Donuts and sits on the elevated stools at the front of the store. He wears shorts and no underwear and hopes that women seated at the tables might glance up and catch a peek of his testes. I think the likelihood of this is minimal, so it’s mostly just the risk that he is probably drawn to. “You haven’t been going to Dunkin’ Donuts again, have you?”

  “No, it’s not that. . . . I’ve been making vaginas for two weeks,” he said. “It’s all I’ve been doing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘making vaginas’?”

  “Sculpting them out of this stuff called friendly plastic. It’s this great material that I was using with the kids this summer.”

  “Sounds very pleasant—friendly plastic.”

  “You can do anything with it. . . . It’s perfect for molding—I’ve come up with twelve prototypes for a prosthetic vagina. I come home from bartending and I’m obsessed. All I do is make vaginas— experimenting with flesh tones, hair. I finally got it right—a realistic-looking one. I put it on last night and walked to the Now Bar because somebody wrote a letter to you in the Press saying that’s where drag queens go on Thursday nights. I figured I would show the drag queens the vagina and they might want to buy it, order one for themselves. But I went too early, the place wasn’t open yet. So then I walked back home and the vagina was pinching me a little and then it started raining and my foot was creaking. I thought, I’m walking around New York in the rain with a squeaky foot and a vagina on. I must be losing my mind.”

  “You’re not losing your mind,” I said. “You’re an artist, you’re passionate.”

  “This isn’t just about art. I think there’s a lot of money in it. I just have to market it right. . . . I need the money. . . . A lot of men will want to buy a vagina.”

  This part did sound nutty to me. I didn’t mind him making vaginas, but get-rich-quick schemes always betray mental imbalance and desperation. I had to disabuse him of this money angle, bring him back to reality. “Listen,” I said, “there are already a lot of fake vaginas on the market. I’ve seen them where they come built into a pair of panties.”

  “Mine is different,” he said. “I utilize my scrotum as labia. I have to show this thing to the world. I showed my roommate, but she screamed. I’m all alone with this vagina project.”

  “This sounds interesting, using the scrotum,” I said. “You’ll have to show me after my performance. So don’t worry. You’re not alone with this anymore. I am on the case.”

  Chandler smiled, reassured. It was time for me to perform, and Harry took a seat in the theater and I did my shtick. I hustled and hammed it up for the audience. Told three of my usual stories and plugged the book. A night’s work. Then a jazz band came on and Chandler and I slipped out and walked over to his place, just a few blocks away, also in Tribeca.

  We went into his bedroom, which is mostly his studio, and I said, “All right, let me see you in this vagina.” I sat at his cluttered drafting table and he started getting undressed by his bed. I turned my back to him to give him some privacy. I was skeptical that his sculpture would look like a real vagina.

  “It’s on,” he said, and I turned around and he ambled toward me completely naked. His vagina was mildly grotesque, but also quite authentic appearing. It was furry like a pussy and, sure enough, hanging ou
t of a disguised hole was his excess scrotal sack, looking like puffy labia. He had the whole thing fastened around him with an extremely thin, clear tubing.

  I was stunned on many levels. His body is sallow, boyishly hairless, reed-thin and yet muscular, though he has a slight paunch above the genitals. It is a handsome yet tortured body—from the left knee down is his rubber, prosthetic leg with its flexible rubber foot. So to see a vagina on this physique was rather remarkable. I felt both pity and awe. I was glad he was my friend.

  “This is really good, Harry. It’s amazing. You really are a great artist.”

  “Now I have a prosthetic vagina to go with my prosthetic leg,” he said. “And I’ve built a fake hand I can wear.”

  “You’re like that guy in the Dustin Hoffman movie Little Big Man who kept losing parts of his body. . . . You know, your scrotum really does look like labia. How does the rest of your penis feel?”

  “It’s not bad. I’ve put felt on the inside, so it’s pretty comfortable. It’s kind of like wearing a baseball cup. I want to call it the Mangina.”

  “That’s a good name for it. . . . Where are the other vaginas you made?”

  Chandler brought over to me a plastic bag and dumped out all the failed vaginas on to his drafting table. They were various shades of pink with differing amounts of hair attached (Chandler had taken the hair from real-hair wigs).

  “Here’s one without hair, for a shaved look,” he said, pointing out to me a very pink Mangina.

  “You’ve done a lot of work,” I said.