Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs

by AnonYMous

  I HATE THAT THIS EXISTS

  —Marian

  2

  The irony is not lost on me, that my limp was caused by a lack of oxygen at birth.

  This was an email from a very pretty girl who invited me to go for a drive in her car. Why was the idea of a girl with a limp such a turn-on? Was it because the normal rituals could be dispensed with? If she was damaged I could be my unadorned self. Pictures on her Facebook page confirmed that she was creamy-skinned, long-limbed, and ladylike—but with a limp. And as far as I was concerned, a car was an upgrade from a wheelchair.

  We began to correspond.

  She had married impetuously because she felt lucky to be asked and she was now in the process of getting divorced. I allowed this to mean she was desperate to get fucked.

  Don’t ever get married.

  I made her wait an hour before responding.

  We’re seated opposite each other in a café … peering over your copy of my book you hold my gaze while you provocatively lick your fingers … but instead of turning a page your hand descends … under the table … under your skirt …

  If she replied even halfheartedly to such overt filth she was effectively agreeing to sex. She responded almost immediately.

  I love the idea of holding your … ahem … gaze under the table. I have an assortment of tables at my place. I mewed.

  I don’t doubt it, she replied, but remained adamant we go for a drive.

  I mentioned I wanted to post some flyers around Williamsburg and that maybe if she didn’t mind we could head out there. The readiness with which she agreed to this betrayed a sense of relief I was only able to make sense of later. She’d pick me up on the corner of Avenue A and St. Mark’s at seven PM. A night drive seemed promising. But making photocopies in a nearby deli took longer than I’d anticipated and I sensed frustration in her next text.

  I had to park!! I’m waiting for you on the corner.

  She was easy to pick out among the early evening flux of East Villagers on Avenue A and St. Mark’s because she was standing so incongruously still. Any movement on her part would require a demonstration of her disability and somehow I understood this as I approached fifteen minutes late. If I hadn’t taken so long trying to figure out the copier she would have been able to pull up beside me and remain seated for our first encounter. I had unintentionally wrong-footed her and I blushed on her behalf.

  We shook hands.

  She asked about my writing and I provided boilerplate answers aware that she was intentionally delaying the inevitable walk to her car.

  “You look so much better than your photos.” I lied.

  We stood there.

  Her not wanting to move, me not knowing which way to go. When the moment could no longer be postponed she nodded gravely in the direction of her car. I made up my mind that her first twisted step into my life would go unnoticed but in my peripheral vision it was obvious that the act of walking required her to raise herself up and lower herself down with each new step. I filled the silence with waffle about the streets in Williamsburg most suited to self-promotion, the idea being that she’d surely be aglow with gratitude to be in the company of such a considerate man. One who didn’t point at her leg and run off in disgust.

  Once inside her immaculately clean car, a paused punk track resumed on ignition and she opened her coat to reveal a ridiculously skimpy dress that showed more of her lovely pale body than was necessary or even advisable in November. As the Black Flag track exploded into its chorus she began to shimmy right there in her seat.

  In this environment she had no limp.

  It seemed to me like she was enjoying herself too much.

  As we took off up Avenue A, flash frames from David Cronenberg’s Crash and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof illuminated the inside of my mind like lightning.

  My paranoia leaned in close to counsel me.

  Okay so you’re being driven where? And by whom? What do we know about this freak? Maybe she gets off on crashing cars. Why is the interior so clean? Is it a rental? Is it because of forensics? Will you soon be sporting a limp like hers?

  The aggression with which she handled the gearstick and steering wheel seemed to confirm that she was some sort thrill-seeker. Was she going to drive us into a wall? Or the East River. Why not? If anyone deserved to be drowned it was the self-confessed misogynistic Oxygen Thief. Her first message took on new resonance. The irony is not lost on me that my limp was caused by a lack of oxygen. We hurtled across the Williamsburg Bridge into the unknown.

  The dress she’d selected to meet the weird Irish writer might as well have not been there at all. It was a token dress. And from the way she pushed herself around within it she looked like she was already having some sort of solitary sex inside it. As she checked her mirrors our eyes met for an instant and far from malice or madness what I saw there could only be described as a kind, delighted lust.

  Relief gushed into my groin.

  The glimpses of her barely covered breasts and shameless handling of the gear shift now conspired to produce a rigidity in my jeans that I made no attempt to conceal. I saw her glance at my bulge. I blushed with pride. I was not going to be a crash victim after all. She leaned forward offering me a view of nipples erupting against the thin fabric of her dress.

  I was being rewarded for not noticing her limp.

  We were now on Bedford Avenue and she made a show of checking the mirrors not for cars now but for prying eyes and having satisfied herself no one could see she reached beyond the gear stick to scratch the hot bulge in my jeans. I gasped with delight and after some impressive maneuvering on her part we were parked and tonguing each other with an urgency that would normally have culminated in the most uninhibited rutting.

  Only it didn’t.

  She broke away dramatically and between uneven breaths somehow managed to speak.

  “Not”—she panted trying to regain composure—“tonight.”

  I was left in no doubt that we’d go much further next time. But for now she needed to tell herself we hadn’t done it on the first date. There was a loud clunk as she pressed the button on the center consul to unlock the doors. They were locked? Just as well I hadn’t realized this or I would have begun scraping at the windows.

  But the sooner this date ended the sooner the next one could commence. I found myself in Williamsburg and suitably enough preceded by a hard-on. Memories of happy times spent with Marian in these same streets began to insinuate themselves into my already lust-clouded mind and threatened to overwhelm me.

  I was glad I had something to do.

  I set off up Bedford Avenue taping my photocopies onto lampposts and scaffolding. It was satisfying to get A4-sized photocopies of the snowman and angel onto spaces already occupied by some of the city’s most recognizable brands: Vans, Gucci, Levi’s, Me.

  One or two photos of well-placed flyers was all it would take to give the impression they were popping up all over the city. In this regard Instagram was the ideal accomplice. I was busy attaching one such piece of propaganda when a cab pulled up beside me and the passenger stuck his head out of the rear window.

  “Illegal bill posting,” he said.

  “Correct,” I said, shaking my head at the interruption.

  I thought he was the vehicular version of the sort of asshole who stopped to ask how he could get a table on Prince Street. Given encouragement he would pester me for tips about flyer-posting. Best to just ignore him. A shadow fell over my work and looking over my shoulder I saw the same guy was now standing behind me. Oh please. A blue-and-gold NYPD badge glinted on his belt as he filled out a pink form on a mini clipboard. Looking up from his administrative duties he addressed his latest case.

  “See some ID?”

  Undercover cops drove around in cabs?

  When he learned my age and occupation he seemed embarrassed for me. Would he take me in his cab to the police station?

  Meanwhile wasn’t someone getting murdered somewhere?


  He gave me a ticket and by the time he’d turned the corner I had taped it over the offending photocopied image of my book and uploaded a photo of the entire ensemble to Instagram. I made sure illegal bill-posting was legible. I warmed my scofflaw hands on the amount of likes received.

  Since I was already in the neighborhood and it had been a month since my last visit I thought I’d drop by the Williamsburg Bookshop to pick up a check. I had at one point loved going there to resupply them with books, but since one of their staff members had landed a publishing deal I tried to limit my visits to times I knew he wouldn’t be there. He got fatter and fatter every time I saw him as if his body was expanding at the same rate as his career. The last time I’d been there I was consumed with jealousy and self-loathing to see him brandish a proof of his book, which was soon to be launched. Marketing, publishing, editing, cover design. He didn’t even have to get off his fat arse, it was all done for him.

  He had been almost embarrassed to tell me how he was being flown out to LA to meet with directors to talk about making a movie out of his book. And he really looked like he would have preferred not to have to tell me that he’d already been guaranteed great reviews in Publishers Weekly and New York Review of Books. As if it was a great burden, one he would try to bear with some measure of dignity. But then he snapped out of it, as if suddenly remembering why I was standing there.

  “Oh sorry, remind me how much we owe you.”

  My lips smacked open to utter the paltry sum.

  He paused to calculate as if he thought I was trying to rip him off or perhaps was astounded at how low a figure it was and then, shaking his head, as if deciding to let it go, out of charity, began writing. Millennial girls, waiting to be served, held art books against their chests and looked away to save my embarrassment. I was in the fucking way as usual. Pen poised over my check, Buckley Harriman turned to me, genuinely annoyed at himself.

  “I should remember your name after all these years.”

  I never felt more anonymous.

  PANIC BEAUTIFULLY

  #TheOxygenThiefDiaries

  Drinnngg Dringg Dringggg Drinnnnnngggggggg

  Ursula commanded my doorway in a pair of thigh-high stockings and very little else. Far from being a disability, her limp only enhanced her attractiveness. I arranged her into a position that best suited my sexual needs and while I was doing this she clamped her mouth around my cock, suckling on it like it was life-giving. She stopped only once, to look up at me I think, so that I could register the anxiety in her face that I might take it away from her. As she resumed slobbering on it so noisily, I felt compelled to offer up a prayer of thanks.

  “Ohhhhh Holy Fuckkkkking Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  Her moan-laugh caused new, even more welcome, reverberations. There was a sort of retarded sluggishness to her tongue that seemed out of sync with its owner’s commands; this gap in transmission between order and act was exhilarating since neither of us knew what to expect.

  I was having sex with a gimp, how edgy of me.

  We talked for hours afterward. Mostly about how she should never have gotten married and how her divorce was progressing. She said she’d hired a private detective to follow her ex and that this was how she found out he’d been unfaithful. Hoping to hear a New York detective story I encouraged her to elaborate, but seconds later she confessed she had only said that because she was embarrassed to admit she’d copied the passwords from his phone and used them to track his GPS. I was impressed first by the effortlessness with which she had lied and then by the speed she had recanted. I flattered myself that the lie was what she told others but the confession was for me only. She trapped him into lying about being en route to see his mother in Brooklyn as she watched the indicator crawl in the opposite direction, across the Williamsburg Bridge to Manhattan. Even more damning was the call she made to his mother, who had no knowledge of his visit until minutes later she called back to say he had just arrived.

  Meanwhile the indicator showed him still on the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “Don’t ever get married,” she said.

  There was an element of therapy involved. I think she liked talking to me because my thinking was at least as twisted as hers, or as she put it: “Your limp is on the inside.”

  It was the perfect arrangement in that we each saw the other as the charity case.

  But I would soon regret having been so vociferous in my sexual release because it gave her the impression she had earned enough leverage to negotiate a proper date. Having mentioned earlier that she had always wanted to see Shakespeare in the Park, she made her pitch.

  “You can stand in line for the tickets, you like me,” she said.

  I said nothing, preferring instead to watch her squirm.

  She couldn’t help but try to groom me for a relationship. It was conditioning. And it fell to me to keep things casual. To deflect her attempts at domestication. This, I told myself, was why she liked to visit me in the first place. I was safe to like because I’d never want anything more than sex. And she was perfect for me because her limp ensured I’d never see her as a girlfriend. If I agreed to wait in line for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park the impossibility of us having any sort of relationship other than sexual would be thrown into relief. Meanwhile the combined gestalt of her shapely body, demoted by the limp and then compensated for by that filthy mind, continued to intoxicate.

  The limp just made everything dirtier.

  And her repertoire of endlessly inventive sexual techniques made me realize how lazy and unimaginative other girls were in comparison. If they put your dick in their mouths they expected a fucking medal. At one point I couldn’t figure out what she was doing so I opened one eye and peered over my chest hair. The sight that met me immediately ignited an explosive ejaculation that leapt from me into the air as I bayed at an imaginary moon. It was the image of a pretty girl brushing her teeth with the exposed tip of my cock. The sensation caused by the constricting pressure of the interior of her cheek on one side and the corrugated ribbing of her teeth on the other brought such friction to bear on the tip I was released from earthly concerns. This sort of dental dexterity could almost be viewed as a more chaste alternative to the traditional blow job since the inner mouth wasn’t even entered. It didn’t even require the use of a tongue. I think she practiced her ideas on me so she could decide what would work best on her Indian boyfriend Indra. I was glad to be of service.

  I insisted on walking her back to her car so that she could see I was proud to have people realize I just had sex with a disabled girl. Passersby nodded at us, compensating for their own embarrassment. A limping girl in torn thigh-high stockings has no easy definition in our culture.

  * * *

  I was always happy to receive an email from the Williamsburg Bookshop looking for more copies but I was more than a little annoyed to have to ask the new guy behind the counter for Buckley by name. As the only one authorized to write checks he would have to be faced.

  “You haven’t heard?”

  Was I about to hear how he had been flown first-class to LA to discuss the screen adaptation of his book?

  No, I was not.

  Buckley, it transpired, had been relieved of his duties after it was discovered that—wait for it—he had plagiarized huge chunks of his much-feted spy novel.

  Allow me a moment here.

  Researchers observing audience reactions to Broadway musicals discovered that at certain climactic peaks in the narrative an ecstatic demonstration of emotion was produced in males reminiscent of that seen at sporting events. Both arms thrust involuntarily upward. This phenomenon became such a reliable indicator of a show’s success, night-vision videos of men succumbing to “Superman Arms” began to be included in packages sent out to investors. Hearing about Buckley’s plight I held on hard to the counter lest I be recorded on the security cameras punching and repunching the air above me.

  But the feeling soon passed as I began to fret that maybe he had
intentionally choreographed the situation so that he could Tweet how he had tricked the publishing industry into exposing the reshuffled plots and storylines that passed for originality. He’d be celebrated as a cultural ironist and canonized by the millennial elite. He’d be even more of a success than he had almost been as a spy novelist. I knew he wasn’t that clever but he might have hired a publicist who was.

  The guy behind the counter turned his screen toward me.

  “Just type Buckley and plagiarism,” he said.

  And indeed there it was, all over the Internet. How he’d shamelessly lifted entire passages from existing books and passed them off as his own. This would attract a version of fame but not necessarily the kind you wanted. I had certainly wondered how he managed to write something that was getting such good responses. The answer was simple.

  He hadn’t.

  Compared to Buckley I was pure of heart, extremely talented, and very very slim.

  I WROTE DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF

  —Buckley Harriman, plagiarist

  * * *

  I was in exactly the right mood to meet Marian.

  She stood outside her apartment looking taller and more majestic than I’d ever seen her. She didn’t want me to come in? The body was still tight and her lovely upturned breasts were clearly defined under a French polo neck. Yes she was wearing a bra but not much of a one. I’d never seen her in a polo neck before. Jane Birkin in Brooklyn. But there was a marshiness around the eyes that I forbade myself from looking at for too long because I wanted very much to like what I was seeing. We were obviously happy to see each other.

  I had the feeling we hadn’t been apart for very long, like we’d seen each other the previous week as opposed to three months ago. We slipped back into each other’s rhythm. I had read, reread, and almost memorized the second email she’d sent where she said she’d shown Chameleon in a Candy Store to a friend who helped her see it wasn’t so bad after all. That there were some very sweet parts in it. She was big enough to admit she had mostly reacted to the fact that so many other girls were mentioned.