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

by Jonathan Ames

  The depression started one day when this very famous older writer and I went to a racquet club to play tennis. He had just finished reading my novel, which was very generous of him, and as I drove us to the club, he told me that he liked my book very much, and then he asked, “Do people think you’re gay?”

  “I don’t know what they think. It seems to be my great strength that I appeal to all sexualities, which I imagine is very good for sales.”

  “You should try to make your next book more heterosexual,” he remarked, which was not out of line. He’s in his late fifties and he is allowed to dispense advice. He is a master of the novel and has had numerous best-sellers.

  “I’ve thought of trying to write more heterosexually,” I said. “It would really confuse people. Also it could help me get laid. But I’m currently working on this trilogy—you know, like what Henry Miller did, and J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s called The Lord of the Genitals. And the first book isn’t very heterosexual, I’m afraid. It’s called Cocksucker. The second book, though, Pussy-Licker, is quite heterosexual, and so is the third book, Ass-Eater.”

  The older writer seemed intrigued, and as we had a fairly long ride to the racquet club, I committed the cardinal sin of telling another writer what I’m working on.

  “The whole trilogy is about this one guy, a writer, named Amos Nathan,” I said, gripping the steering wheel as we careened on back roads through pine-covered forests. “In the first book, Cocksucker, the one I’m working on now, he’s down and out. Broke. Depressed. Living in Brooklyn. And when he has no money and he’s feeling suicidal, he has a yearning to suck cock. Specifically the cocks of young Puerto Ricans. He finds it incredibly humiliating yet erotic to have their penises in his mouth. Though after a few minutes, he also finds it boring. But somehow this cocksucking keeps him going, it’s his only connection to people. And it’s practically heterosexual cocksucking, because he sometimes thinks of the penis as an enormous, comforting, substitute nipple, especially since he’s too down and out to attract any women. But ultimately the penises are not comforting enough, and that book ends with him attempting suicide.

  “But he doesn’t kill himself, and in the second book, he begins to have some success—he sells a novel—and he starts getting women. And he goes through a real pussy-licking phase. Can’t get enough of it. All he wants to do is lick pussy. Just loves to be down there, their legs around his head, their juices going up his nose, his hard-on grinding into the bed, though after thirty or forty minutes of licking them, he does like to mount them and copulate.

  “Then his book is turned into a movie by Hollywood and he becomes really successful and gets even more pussy to lick. So it takes a Fitzgerald-like turn, and it ends with his soul being corrupted by too much pussy and Tinseltown.

  “In the third book, Ass-Eater, he meets a Danish actress in Hollywood, and one night while licking her pussy from behind, he eats her ass. Actually he licks it. But I don’t want the third book to be Ass-Licker since the second book is Pussy-Licker. So he licks her ass and he loves it. But he finds that he only loves to lick the asses of Northern European women. No other kind of asshole does it for him. It has to be German, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, or Swedish. Even the Belgian ass is too southern for him.

  “So he gives up Hollywood and moves to Stockholm, where he can have an endless supply of the right kind of ass to lick. His descent into decadence is complete. But the cost of living is very high in Stockholm, and so Amos, after two years of only licking asses and not writing, goes through all his money. He loses everything. It’s obviously a moral tale.

  “And when things get really bad for him, it happens to be winter, and because there’s no sunlight that time of year in Sweden, he becomes more depressed than he’s ever been in his whole life. But there are no Puerto Rican cocks for him to suck, which might have kept him going for a little while, at least until the sun came back, and also he doesn’t have enough money to fly back to the States, and so this time he does successfully kill himself, becoming another Swedish-winter suicide victim. . . . I see the trilogy as an homage to Goethe, Selby, Hamsun, and Goldstein.”

  “Goldstein?”

  “The publisher of Screw. Do you think anyone in the United States will publish this if I actually see my vision through to the end? I was thinking I could at least get it serialized in Screw— that’s why it’s an homage to Goldstein—or my own paper, the New York Press. But the Press doesn’t serialize. I could slip the chapters in as columns; I’d be serializing and they wouldn’t even know it.”

  “That’s not a bad idea—serializing. I see it as a salacious twenty-first-century Dickens or Twain. They both serialized a great deal.”

  With that we pulled into the parking lot of the racquet club and played three enjoyable sets—I thrashed him rather mercilessly. As an adolescent, I was something of a tennis whiz. Town champ in ’78, though my nascent tennis career was cut short in 1979 by my well-documented puberty problems. So it’s nice as an adult to get to employ the old serve-and-volley.

  But the next day, despite the good tennis, I was too depressed to work. By telling him the whole plot and scope of my masterwork, I had shot my wad. There was no need to write the thing now. It had lost its mystery for me. And I had given it to him on a silver platter, so now he was going to write it, steal it.

  That night at dinner I eyeballed him. He had been destroyed by me in tennis, and he had acted like he took it well, but writers are a ridiculously competitive lot, so he would exact his revenge by robbing me of my trilogy. I was sure that he was already hard at work on his version of Cocksucker. What had I done? I could hardly eat. He was sure to finish before me. He’s written dozens of books. He could crank out Cocksucker in two months. By the time I finished, if I even could after having ejaculated the story on him during the car ride, it would seem as if my work was derivative of his.

  So after dinner I read over the fifty-odd pages of manuscript I had, and in an irrational fit I threw it all into the fireplace, and then erased what was on my computer as well. It was all the writing I had done since coming to this damn colony.

  That night I hardly slept, and the whole next day, I wandered through the woods talking to myself. I was deeply depressed. I felt my brain slipping out of its casing and down my neck, like an egg sliding on a frying pan.

  So I skipped dinner, unable to face the other residents of the colony, especially the famous writer. I got in the car and went into the small town, to a diner, and then to a café. There I came across the free alternative weekly of the nearest city, Albany. In the back of the paper, just like with the Press, there was an adult section. Salvation! Sex listings!

  Prominently advertised were these places that offered private lingerie modeling. I called one of them and received directions. It’s one of the forms of prostitution—usually found in the American hinterlands—that I was aware of but had never indulged in.

  It took me about forty-five minutes to find the lingerie place, which was called Tres Joli and was located near a small airport. Houses of deviancy, I find, are often near airports. I guess the rent is cheap, and the location is remote, which is good for husbands not wanting to be spotted by family and friends.

  Tres Joli was in a white, aluminum-sided, one-story shack with an empty gravel parking lot. The little house was quite dark when I approached—it was around nine o’clock at night—but I fearlessly rang the bell.

  I was greeted by a gorgeous blonde in a bikini. She led me into a small reception room that had a display case filled with dreary, cheap lingerie. Another bikini-clad woman, a brunette, came into the room.

  “You’re here for a modeling session, right?” asked the blonde.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A half hour is forty dollars, fifteen minutes is twenty-five. Which would you like?”

  It’s always best to choose the lesser amount of time in these situations. When love is not involved, things quickly become redundant and a tad maudlin. “I’d like a fifteen-mi
nute session,” I said.

  “Okay, which of us would you like? I’m Suzie and this is Carly.”

  I hate it when they make you choose like that. I wanted the blonde, but I didn’t want to hurt the brunette’s feelings. All night long she must have been passed over. I almost chose her, out of misplaced sympathy, but after a moment of awkward silence, I said, “You, Suzie.” The brunette took it well and went back to the next room, where she plopped down on a couch and watched TV.

  Suzie then led me to a small room with only an easy chair and a boom box. I paid her, and then she put on some music and began to dance for me. There was to be no lingerie modeling. That must have been some kind of legalism, a front. It was basically a place for private stripteases. On the wall was a sign that said, NO TOUCHING. And next to the chair, I noticed, was a big bottle of moisturizer, a box of tissues, and a little garbage can filled with crumpled tissues. They could have at least dumped that out. I wasn’t supposed to touch Suzie, but I was expected to touch myself, to jerk off.

  Suzie was about five feet eight. She had small but perfect breasts, sharp cheekbones, and natural silky blond hair. I engaged her in conversation. She was eighteen years old, enrolled at a business school, and was rather jaded. She kept encouraging me to get comfortable—which meant I should whip it out, but I kept it in my pants. And as she danced for me, I thought how not too long ago, she was just a girl. I was worried that by working in such a place at such a young age, it would be hard for her to ever fall in love, that she would think for the rest of her life that all men are fools. Then I remembered that all men are fools.

  After that train of brilliant thinking, I then had my requisite spiritual crisis. I need more God in my life, I thought, not more sex. Then I realized that sex does bring God into my life. I’m always praying to be relieved of sexual obsessions. So having worked that out, I began to enjoy Suzie. She stripped and everything about her body was great, but her ass was a revelation. Each cheek was like a big pink ham, and because she was eighteen, the hams were firm. It was miraculous. Watching her ass was like taking a yoga class. Time slipped away. I became completely relaxed. Before I knew it, my fifteen minutes were up. She walked me out and gave me a kiss good-bye on the cheek.

  When I got out to the car, a little giggle rose out of me, from some lower chakra. My depression had lifted. My brain slid back up my spine and into my head. So what if I had given away The Lord of the Genitals. I had seen an ass for the ages. That’s much better than writing a trilogy for the ages.

  The Sex Card

  THERE IS NO WRITTEN RECORD of the 8,764 (estimated) working erections I’ve managed while making love to women. And I’d like such a record. A decent sexual performance is one of the most heroic acts that an urbanite or someone not prone to real adventure can achieve in this life. There are so many obstacles, both physiological and psychological, that one must overcome to simply mount one’s lover that such a thing should be acknowledged and kept track of. So what I’d like to have is a baseball card equivalent for my sexual performance. Unfortunately, my peak years have already passed, but I will start keeping track immediately, and perhaps the latter part of my career will be productive. Ted Williams, for example, kept hitting until the end of his playing days.

  I’m going to call this record of my lovemaking achievements the Sex Card, and if this thing takes off and others are interested, I’ll get Topps, the baseball card king, which already has a name loaded with sexual innuendo, to be a distributor of the Sex Card.

  On the front of the card will be a simple portrait photo, nothing pornographic, a cross between a yearbook picture and a mug shot, and on the back of the card will be the categories in which performance is judged. Like a baseball card, errors and losses will also have to be acknowledged. But I hope that my card, once I put it all together, will be of all-star caliber and a statistical wonder. As a boy I loved to look at a star’s baseball card, like Henry Aaron’s or Willie Mays’s. There was something magnificent about the consistency of year after year of strong, good seasons with beautiful numbers like 38 home runs, 123 RBI’s, a .324 average. For me, there’s a gorgeousness to good baseball numbers, and it’s the most fascinating way to judge a man’s life—his statistical output. So I want to have the same thing for the one area in my life in which I’ve put forth the most amount of effort—mounting women. And, too, I want to provide such a thing for my fellow men. There should be a card for women as well, but I will find a lady friend to come up with the female equivalent, since she will know better how women judge their own sexual performance. Also there should be a card for the gay community, and any other community that I can’t think of at the moment.

  The Sex Card, naturally, will be set up like a baseball card. On the top of the graph will be the categories, and running down the left-hand side will be the years—1999, 2000, etc. One’s height, weight, age, and birthplace will also be put down. But I think penis size will be excluded, since surely lying will abound in this area and the whole validity of the card will come into question.

  The first performance category that comes to my mind is what I will call the GHI—Gas Held In. So many times with women— usually during the first few weeks of our acquaintance, the time of seduction—I am overwhelmed with flatulence, such that I’m in a constant state of heroically recirculating and redirecting gas into other parts of my body. Often, when it seems I am just about to burst, I am able to suddenly channel a fart into some mysterious holding area—and who knows what damage is caused by this suppression—buying yet again more time to continue my seduction. In such instances, I feel quite the superman, like James Bond deactivating a world-destroying explosive with only one second to go. And I feel especially proud of myself while under the duress of holding gas in if I am able to produce an erection, which is some kind of lower-body muscular feat. But I’m also terribly annoyed with myself that I’m so gaseous during these times; it’s some kind of curse.

  Why I produce so much gas during the period of courtship is an interesting question, which I should briefly cogitate on. I can no longer tolerate the word intimacy, just as I find vomitous the hyphenated word self-esteem, but I think my production of gas at the outset of relations with a woman is some kind of literal smoke-screen to keep the woman away, to block intimacy.

  (About intimacy—what a nice word destroyed by the New Age; and furthermore, I can’t stand how all of life’s problems in this New Age are related to self-esteem, specifically low self-esteem. What if self-esteem is found not to exist, that the concept is completely wrong, like the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century psychiatric study of nose structure as a determinant of personality? What would those pioneering psychiatrists have thought of my long, bent, and bony nose? They would have classified me as someone sexually maladjusted and overwhelmed periodically by fear of things that are not fearful. Then again, nose study perhaps is good. In any event, I can’t stand the word self-esteem; it’s so limiting. The self is boring. I like to think of the soul. Much more interesting.)

  So every time I am able to hold gas in, or have a GHI, I feel that I deserve credit for it. There can also be the flip side to the GHI, the GLO—Gas Leaked Out. I have to say that I’ve had very few GLO’s. I usually steal away to the bathroom and pee and at that time fart as much as possible. Or when I leave a lady friend’s apartment, I walk down the street and happily fart for blocks, and when I do such a thing, I wonder how many of my fellow pedestrians are also wildly and clandestinely farting as I pass them.

  On to the next category—the FTWE, or First Time Working Erection. This refers to getting an erection the first time you make love to a new lady friend. What a relief to actually have a hard-on when you need it—after all, the pressure is enormous on opening night. The flow of blood to one’s brain, producing all that worry and anxiety, limits the blood flow to the penis, but if you are able to have enough blood to engorge the penis while at the same time being wildly self-conscious, then this should be noted on one’s card—it’s a
great achievement. Then there’s the APE, Avoided Premature Ejaculation, which doesn’t need explaining. But I am extending the time frame on premature ejaculation: If that first time is to be considered a successful mount, for the woman to think there might be hope for you as a lover, you have to last more than five minutes. (This is a very low number, and as you sleep with the woman more and more, you should almost never have an orgasm before the eleven-minute mark, unless you are impressing her with the fury of a quick and sudden attack, or if it’s decided upon beforehand that it’s going to be a short one—like the two of you are heading out for dinner, but you want to do it quickly, that sort of thing. In general, I advise my friends that if they want to be considered good lovers, they should maintain intercourse for at least sixteen minutes, with twenty-four minutes as perhaps an ideal amount for a mount.)

  Now, the flip side to the FTWE and the APE can be just one single category, the HE, Humiliating Embarrassment, which can be undone by the PYAA, Proving Yourself After All. I had a friend just recently tell me in an E-mail that the first night with a woman he couldn’t get it up, but compensated like a champion with a healthy dose of oral gratification for the young lady, which could also be a category—OC (Oral Compensation). He then spent the night, another noble deed, and in the morning, he reported to me, he was able to successfully mount her and prove himself. And I feel that such a thing should be recorded! Hence, the need for the Sex Card.

  Other categories will steal from the acronymic world of the baseball card: 2B, 3B, and HR will stand for, respectively, doing it two, three, or four times. And you can get credit for doing it twice if one was at night and one was in the morning. That shows a healthy ardor and should be noted. Doing it five times is enough of a rarity not to warrant a whole category, but can be mentioned at the bottom of the card in a little sentence: “On September 23, 1989, Jonathan made love to a woman five times over the course of three hours!”