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

by Jonathan Ames

  “I think I was obsessed because it’s a new way for me to exhibit myself. All these years, I’ve been wanting to show my testicles, but testicles are ugly. But a vagina is not ugly. So wearing this vagina, I can exhibit myself and not feel like I’m hurting anyone.”

  “So you want people to see you in this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to dress as a woman, too?”

  “No, I just want to be a man with a vagina sometimes. That’s why it’s the Mangina.”

  “Let’s go visit my friend Lulu,” I said. “She’ll look at you. She’ll love it. She’s a beautiful transsexual and very wise.”

  “I didn’t show you that I can finger myself,” said Chandler, and he pushed his finger into his scrotal labia and it disappeared.

  “Maybe there is money in this,” I said. Then I called Lulu and I told her about the Mangina and she said we could come over. Before we headed to her place, Harry showed me a video he shot of himself. You can only see him from the waist down, and he’s wearing the Mangina and lazily playing with his labia and then inserting his finger.

  “This is completely depraved,” I said, deeply impressed. “This makes Karen Finley look like a rank amateur.”

  It was only a two-minute video, and then Chandler got dressed and we took a taxi over to Lulu’s, and when we got there, she was wearing a tartan skirt, stockings, and a white blouse. As always, she looked quite beautiful. She is elegant and tall and her skin is a lustrous dark brown. She was born in Africa and raised in Paris. She is a dress designer, with a steady, private clientele of queens and downtown divas.

  I introduced these two good friends of mine, and then Lulu graciously offered us a choice of beer or apple juice. Chandler and I, both having no head for booze, opted for the apple juice. On the TV, playing silently, was the David Bowie classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth.

  We sat there drinking and I said to Lulu, “Wait till you see this vagina Harry has designed. It’s a work of art.”

  “Please show it to me,” she said.

  So Harry went to the bathroom and stripped down. He came out shy yet happy. He loves to be seen naked.

  “Oh, my,” said Lulu, laughing. “What have you done?”

  “You should touch it,” I said to Lulu. “It’s very realistic.” I hadn’t had the courage to touch it myself, but I knew Lulu was much more liberal than I. Harry stood right in front of her, and she touched his labia.

  “This is warm,” she shouted. “It’s real!”

  “Can you believe it? It’s his scrotum.”

  “Your finger can go inside,” said Harry, and he demonstrated this. Then Lulu put her finger inside.

  “This is really something. You should have a show, a performance,” said Lulu.

  “Let’s go to Edelweiss,” I said, “and show the girls there Harry’s vagina. He needs to have people see this.”

  The three of us left Lulu’s and took a taxi to Edelweiss. It was midnight and the place was quite crowded. The owner’s lawyers had somehow got it opened up again at its grand Eleventh Avenue location. We went to the large downstairs bar and Lulu pointed out queens whom she thought would be receptive to seeing Harry’s Mangina. I’d then approach the queen and say, “I don’t mean to be rude, but my friend Harry here is a crazy artist and he’s sculpted himself a vagina that he’s wearing. Can we show it to you?”

  About five queens agreed to look at it, and we’d take them to this semiprivate corner of the club. Harry would then drop his pants and they all found the Mangina fascinating. At one point, a beefy security guard came our way—it’s his job to make sure that no one is having sex—and I explained to him the situation and he shone his flashlight on the Mangina. The guard smiled and laughed, and the queen who was checking it out, a blonde, who’s actually had the surgery, said with good humor, “Why did I bother spending twenty thousand dollars?”

  Then it was getting late, so Harry and I said good-bye to Lulu—she was staying on—and we took a taxi downtown. We were both kind of quiet, spent from our exertions. I stared out the window of the speeding taxi—I was in a contemplative mood— and I took particular notice of all the Korean markets with their brightly colored displays of fruits. They were beautiful, but who would eat all those grapefruits and oranges and watermelons? It seemed to me that most people ate poorly and those fruits wouldn’t move off the displays, the way one’s novel (like mine) might not move off the shelves of bookstores. And then I thought how my novel, like a fruit with its bright green cover, and all the real fruits in New York would go to a terrible waste. I pitied myself and the owners of the Korean markets. But I had to not indulge in such thoughts, and the best way out of self-pity is to think of helping others. I looked at my friend Harry on the other side of the car seat. I had an inspiration.

  “You know, Lulu is right,” I said to him. “You should have a show. Maybe you can make money. Sell the Mangina as an art object. I want you to come onstage wearing it at my next show, which is October seventh at the Fez. I have the club to myself the whole night—no bands, just me. You can talk about the Mangina and then hand out cards with your number and people can order one if they like, or come to your studio and see your paintings. You can promote everything you do. Are you free on the seventh?”

  “I am,” said Harry, excited.

  “Well, if it’s a hit, since I’m the impresario, I’d like a ten percent commission on every Mangina sold.”

  “All right . . . Maybe to help sales, I’ll play my accordion and dance.”

  “No, just come out there and stand in your Mangina. That should be enough.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “My accordion hangs low, might block the view.”

  “And the Mangina deserves to be seen! On October seventh, history will be made!”

  Chandler smiled at me. I had truly come through for him, and I felt better, too. He wasn’t alone with this anymore.

  On October 7, 1998, as I predicted, history was made. That night, during my storytelling show at the Fez, the legend of the Mangina was born.

  After my own ritual dance to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Comic Strip,” and a few introductory remarks, I asked Chandler to join me onstage. I had a good crowd, about one hundred and thirty people, and Harry was hiding in the wings. When I called him to come join me, he was brought out by my gorgeous and statuesque friend Gigi. I wanted him to be accompanied by a lovely woman to lessen the audience’s shock and so that they wouldn’t have a knee-jerk politically correct response to Chandler’s Mangina—“How dare a man wear a vagina! It must mean that he hates women!”

  Gigi, I figured, was perfect for the job of Mangina escort—she’s an artist and also a world traveler and an expert on the unusual behaviors of primitive tribes. One of her claims to fame is that she rolled around on the jungle floor and made out with a cannibal in Indonesia who had shaved teeth. She showed me once his handsome, smiling picture. The teeth were very pointy and brown. “You could have cut your tongue on those teeth,” I said. “I was careful,” she said. “How was his breath?” I asked; the coloration of his chompers and the nature of his diet had me concerned. “Fine,” she said.

  So I felt that Gigi was the right woman to accompany Chandler and his Mangina. She’s been to the heart of darkness and found love there—thus the Mangina wouldn’t scare her, and her lack of fear and horror would be transmitted to the audience. It may seem as if I was being overly cautious, but I was going to have to perform after Chandler’s appearance and I didn’t want the audience to be killed.

  So Gigi led Harry onto the stage and he was completely naked, wearing only his prosthetic leg and homemade, prosthetic vagina. Gigi discreetly walked off and Harry was showered with loud applause and lots of happy gasping. He stood beneath the lights and smiled sweetly. His two passions were merging—exhibiting himself and exhibiting his art. As the applause quieted, he began his speech, in his signature sincere, humble tones: “My name is Harry Chandler. I’m an artist and an exhibitionist and an
amputee. I’m also a live Jonathan Ames story, which is not easy, let me tell you.”

  Unfortunately, no one laughed at that last line. It seemed scripted, which it was. Not by me—by Harry—but with my ego-gratified approval. Oh, well, that is the nature of theater—the occasional flat moment. So then Harry talked briefly about his career as an artist and his love of nudity—his own nudity and that of others —and how this love of the naked form led him to create the Mangina. Also, he disclosed that there was an emotional element: “My girlfriend left me,” he said, “and I became obsessed with sculpting vaginas.”

  He showed the audience the various early prototypes of the Mangina and described at great length the various materials and elements he uses—friendly plastic, paint, wig hair, crushed velvet and elastic velvet.

  Of course, the material that really sets the Mangina apart from other prosthetic pussies is one’s excess scrotal sack, which Chandler pulls through a hole in the Mangina and utilizes as labia. He now calls this new organ the Lotum. This is a better mixing of the two words (scrotum and labia) than his first name for it: scabia (with a hard a). Lotum, he feels, implies something beautiful, because it sounds like lotus. And one of the benefits of the Mangina, Harry explained to the audience, is that he can expose himself in an attractive way, since he perceives a man’s testes to be unattractive and a woman’s labia to be attractive. I tend to agree with him, though there are countless others who must certainly prefer the scrotum. Also, I think that one shouldn’t forget that there’s a penis lurking somewhere in this whole thing, but Harry doesn’t take the penis much into account, since it’s mostly his balls that he was always trying to expose.

  So Harry went through all the Mangina prototypes—they were piling up beside him on the stage like grotesque fish carcasses—and his lecture was getting a little tiresome, but there was no way for me to politely interrupt him. I couldn’t give my own friend the old vaudevillian hook, but just when he was on the verge of really going on too long with his Mangina lecture, he finished up and I rejoined him onstage. I announced to the audience that we would do a little dance to celebrate our friendship. In my mind, I wanted us to appear like the naked women dancing in the circle in the Matisse painting, but I didn’t tell this to the audience. The image, I hoped, would be subliminal.

  So the Gainsbourg came on again and we held one another and hopped around. Harry did quite well with his fake leg, and a friend of mine told me later that the image of a naked, one-legged man wearing a Mangina and holding hands and dancing with a nicely dressed man in jacket and tie (me) was a great moment in performance art. “A new low,” I said with a puffed chest to my flattering friend.

  After the dance, Harry departed to wild applause. I was a little concerned that the night had reached its climax, but I began to tell my stories and the audience reassured me with their enthusiastic laughter. Though midway through my first story, my “Dueling Yentas” tale, in which I become a yenta, three people in the front row got up and left. It was rather ungracious of them, but luckily I was in character and so I verbally chastised them in my yenta accent: “Who are these terrible people? How rude! Who needs you, anyway. Now I’m all alone, I’m always alone. No one calls. No one cares. You three are horrible, selfish. Get out of here!” And so they slinked off, and I carried on—a pro, a trooper.

  The night came to an end and I stayed onstage to peddle copies of my novel, and Harry was up there to show people the Mangina prototypes and the Mangina he was wearing. He was outfitted in this blue, long-underwear jumpsuit, which unzips down to the crotch, enabling him to quickly and efficiently expose his prosthetic genitals. This outfit is now called the Mangina Suit, and he looks like a superhero in it.

  The two of us were quite happy up there on the stage—we were surrounded by females. Women began to finger Harry’s Mangina, which he was loving, and cute girls were buying copies of my book and looking at me, I felt, with a certain adoration. An attractive brunette said I looked like Santa Claus—I was sitting on a stool, signing books propped on my knee. So I said to her, “Why don’t you sit on Santa’s lap.” So she did, and she had a great little ass, but I had used up so much energy performing that I didn’t get an erection when she sat on me. My penis was gelatinous and dead, almost liquid. I was mortified. I had a female fan on my lap and I might as well have been wearing a Mangina. I’m sure she felt how liquidy my penis was, but she didn’t seem to mind, she slid off me smiling. I wanted to give her rear an affectionate pat as she walked away, but I wasn’t sure this was appropriate, and my confidence for pulling off a rear-smack was feeling a little limp because of my limp penis, and then she was gone.

  Then a blond girl took my hand and held it for a rather long time and took her other hand and put it on her attractive breast and said, “Your story about your son touched me here.” I wanted to touch her there, and then she, too, was gone. Gone. Into the night.

  I wish these groupies would linger. I wish I could take a whole group of them back here to my apartment and look at them naked. They are all so lovely and different. I’d kindly ask them to strip and then I’d line them up against my wall. And while still wearing my jacket and tie, maintaining my dignity and not frightening them, I would study them and memorize their beauty.

  When the memorizing was done, I would begin with the girl on the far left and first kiss her left breast, then the right, each time taking the nipple in my mouth like it was the most glorious pink grape, and then I’d go down and kiss her sweet triangular mound of sex—completing the triangle of kisses. Then I’d move on to the next girl and do the same. My wall can accommodate about six girls—if I move my sitting chair—which is probably six more than the number of groupies I have, but it’s fun to fantasize that one has groupies. And for some reason, in this little fantasy, I need to have myself moving from left to right—my brain must be structured that way from all my reading and writing.

  Then after all the tender kisses, these girls would surround me and hug me, and I’d smell their hair, their different perfumes. And I’d have some kind of spiritual and physiological eruption while still wearing my khaki pants because, as I envision all this, there’s no intercourse. That seems too personal and brutal and selfish. Lately intercourse has been striking me as brutal, which is all right if you’re brutalizing a friend. That’s why men and women get together. The woman comes to trust the man enough to allow him to rape her but not hurt her, and the man comes to trust the woman enough to rape her but not be accused of rape. This is called a relationship.

  But these fantasy groupies are strangers and I don’t want to take advantage of their sweet attentions, I just want to be surrounded by their love and be petted and then have an orgasm in my underwear. Also, it’s hard enough to please one woman, let alone six. And if I failed to please them, then they would no longer admire me—I would fall off my pedestal, off my authorial stool and seat of power.

  But enough of the inner workings of my immature and lonely mind. After everyone left the club, Harry and I went upstairs to the restaurant above the Fez, the Time Cafe, and we had tea. He was subdued, and I felt my usual postperformance emotional devastation, but I fought it off. We recapped the night and compared notes; we were trying to suck a little more glory out of the whole thing.

  “This blond girl was really fingering my Mangina,” Harry said.

  “Really? I think that was the same blonde who was touched by my story.”

  I felt a pang of jealousy that Harry got fingered by the girl, but I let it go. “Well, we made history,” I said. “Beginning with the one hundred and thirty people who were in the audience tonight, word will spread rapidly about the Mangina. It will be whispered everywhere on the streets of New York. Your fake lips will be on everyone’s lips. Once a thing becomes a word, it is alive, real. This is my prediction. Not too many people invent something worthy of a word. You should be proud, Harry.”

  “The Mangina now has life of its own,” he said solemnly, almost sadly.

  “A li
fe of its own,” I said. And we sipped our tea.

  All I Had in Me

  I’VE ONLY SLEPT WITH one postop transsexual. This was a couple of years ago, back in February of ’96. I was on a real bender. It began when I had to meet this editor at the Rainbow Room. The fellow was interested in my work. My head was still shaved back then and I felt funny going to the Rainbow Room with my shaved head. I was being let out of Brooklyn, where I was living off my credit cards to pay for my room right next to the BQE. The damn Robert Moses BQE, which sliced through my Navy Yard neighborhood and made me seasick for two years, rocking my bed, rocking my desk. But the rent was cheap. But not cheap enough. There had been cutbacks, and so I only taught two composition classes at my business college, which didn’t cover the rent. It didn’t cover much. Except maybe the hundred dollars I ended up giving the woman, the postop transsexual.

  So it started at the Rainbow Room with this editor. He was a sweet guy, a little fey. A little gay. A nice face. A nice smile. We got a table right next to the window. It was like flying over Manhattan in a plane. It was decadent. So much money. So many lights. So much fear of the dark. So many buildings. But I did like it; I was charmed. Schoolboyish.

  “It’s beautiful,” I gushed. “Like a man-made Grand Canyon. God. New York. What a city.” What a dope. Me.

  “You’ve never been here?”

  “No.”

  “I love taking people here for the first time,” said the editor. “It’s the best place in the world to get drinks.” The waiter, a stern mortician of a fellow, came over.

  “What would you like?” asked the editor. The waiter waited.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Did I risk taking a drink? This was business. If I drank, I could really screw up. I was trying controlled drinking at the time, which meant not doing cocaine. “What do you think I should have?”

  He looked out the window. “Let’s have Manhattans,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said. This time I’ll drink like a normal human being, I told myself. Also I’d never had a Manhattan and I was curious. In my drinking life, I hadn’t ordered too many fancy mixed drinks. For the most part, I stuck to beer and wine. If I drank hard liquor, I tended to black out too quickly because I drank so fast and mixed drinks are small but potent. Wine and beer come in larger glasses and I could enumerate them with some control. Two bottles of red. Twelve bottles of beer. Those were numbers I could handle, keep track of.