Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs

by AnonYMous

  “So was there any overlap?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there any overlap with him, when you and I were together?”

  She looked at me quickly.

  “No. I would never do that.”

  She’d been able to keep him secret for three years, why not four?

  And why was it suddenly okay to tell me now?

  Now she looked deeply uncomfortable, squirming inside her tight dress. Had she worn it purposely? Of course she had. Turning sideways she momentarily hypnotized me with a profile view of those upturned breasts. She moved with the confidence of someone whose body is capable of dissolving logic in lust. Or of a duelist presenting less of a target.

  She described the breakup as unexpected so it was safe to assume he’d dumped her and not the other way around. At least I could take some solace from the fact that she would now, at last, suffer like I had. No wonder she’d been able to resist my advances so adamantly. There was never any question of us getting back together. That position was taken. And now that she was suffering from losing him, she thought why not spread the pain around to make herself feel better. If nothing else she’d have someone to talk to about it. Did she think I was going to sit and talk it out with her? Help her get over the fact that she’d been dumped by a guy I didn’t even know she was with?

  “We talked about me going out there,” she’d said quietly.

  Going out there as opposed to moving out there because moving out there would be too painful for me to hear. She was minimizing the blast. Muffling it for me. How very considerate. It was the emotional equivalent of lying about the amount on the check. She had been as good as married to him. All the more reason to have told me.

  I was only hearing it now because she was in shock. In her reeling mind I was the nearest she had to a confidant. I could never have conceived of such a devilishly clever comeback. There I was thinking I’d dealt her a coup de grace three years earlier only to find that I had merely been a distraction from the real love of her life. The big-cocked Californian silversmith. But now that he’d ended their relationship she needed someone to talk to. She couldn’t hurt him back so I was getting it instead. She probably thought I was now recovered enough from breaking up with her to be able to help her get through her breakup with him.

  I had been far too chirpy the previous evening. The happiest I’d been in recent memory. Was I healed enough to hear the truth? That had been her litmus test to see if I’d be able to console her. Or maybe she was just reaching out like a drowning person. I hated that I now had to revisit the three years after our breakup under the new heading of Marian-Had-A-Boyfriend-All-The-Time. My only consolation was that she was suffering.

  But why hide it for all that time? She even hid it from her Facebook. I would have thought she’d be delighted to tell me. And that previous night she’d spent twenty minutes talking about how she had begged her sister not to let their mother know she was alone on her birthday. But she hadn’t been alone. Was she trying to give me the impression she was free so I’d still be interested? Or could it be that she couldn’t continue to make me feel guilty if I knew she was getting fucked regularly by a guy with a good job and yes, yes, we know, a big dick. Maybe the real reason she had hidden him from me was because she didn’t want to read about their intimate details in one of my books.

  Too late for that.

  3

  To prevent street vendors from setting up outside their hallowed doors, staff members from the Laurence Hotel positioned tasteful shrubs in cast-iron urns along the sidewalk. Their black attire and economy of movement gave them the air of stagehands arranging props between scenes. They retreated one after the other through a door held open by their manager, who, satisfying himself no one had been left outside, removed himself from sight.

  It was a provocative move.

  At least five well-established regulars would now need to migrate up the hill and I steeled myself for all manner of territorial dispute in the coming days. The law stated that the first to arrive on any given spot had the right to occupy it for twenty-four hours. This meant that the earlier you got out there the more confident you could be of getting a spot. But I wasn’t going to get up at four AM, especially now that I had learned that being out there was having no effect whatsoever on my chances of getting Marian back. I wouldn’t have wanted her now even if she was available. But I had to fight the urge to isolate. Alcoholism loves a straggler. I needed to be among people and my fellow street vendors just about qualified.

  And there was the small matter of ten thousand books.

  They weren’t going to sell themselves.

  But putting those urns on the sidewalk was an illegal act so it was generally agreed the situation wouldn’t last long. Meanwhile the human flotsam would need to be dealt with.

  Previously, to dissuade newcomers from setting up beside me, I had invented a much-feared mythological vendor who had just been released from Rikers Island. I helpfully informed the doe-eyed novice that the spot they were about to take was usually occupied by a guy called Turk who sold leather jackets and boots. They should of course feel free to take the spot since it was legally permissible but all I was saying was Turk might choose that day to come out and … well … they had been warned. This was usually enough to shoo the uninitiated but it wouldn’t work with the veterans.

  Like the guy who sold screenplays.

  Sun-Tan-Tom (not to be confused with Hats-And-Socks-Tom) had people on his payroll who kept spots for him. Spots plural. He oversaw a franchise of tables that served the entire downtown area. Multiple tables, manned by minions, were furnished with the latest screenplays before the corresponding movies even opened. It was reverently whispered that Quentin Tarantino had turned up at his flagship table outside the Apple Store and threatened him with legal action if he didn’t stop selling his scripts. It was also whispered with equal reverence that Sun-Tan-Tom could have given a fuck. So much so, a photo of the exchange sat framed on that same table, which, taken at face value, gave the impression the great auteur had actually endorsed the sale of his scripts.

  Then there was the German T-shirt merchant who you only needed to look at to know he was not to be fucked with. So fight-faced and muscly (he flexed needlessly as he rearranged the T-shirts), he repulsed assaults on his sovereignty while they were still conceptual. Then there was the dodgy-looking Iranian guy who materialized in the gaps left by others. He set up next to me once but sold so little he moved on in disgust. He managed to make it seem like a comment on my spot. Like it might be good enough for white trash like me but he had more self-respect. The closer you were to the Apple Store the more sales you could expect. And the more you needed to defend your spot.

  The Laurence Hotel was only three stores away from Apple so Operation Shrub-Block was most disruptive. Arrest-Me-Dante tried to unite the vendors, saying we should form a union. He began canvassing up and down the street looking for support. He walked past me because he didn’t like me. He did, however, like having a white guy on the roster since the cops were more likely to behave around white people. If this had not been the case I would never have gotten such a good spot to begin with. There were lawyers who had helped the vendors fight cases in the past and apparently they were now being consulted to get the shrubs moved. I respectfully approached a fat-backed vendor.

  “Erm, excuse me sir?’

  He spit out his coffee.

  “Motherfucker I’m a combat veteran, you don’t wanna be creepin’ up on me.”

  But in reality he was too fat to get up off his milk crate.

  Then Arrest-Me-Dante really freaked me out by actually talking to me.

  “You better get here early tomorrow or they’ll take your spot.”

  It was interesting he said your spot not our spots.

  * * *

  Drinnnnng

  Caitlin came over again and this time I really got into it. I was shaking with lust and I could see she was loving the effect she had
on me. She stood to attention this time in a skimpy French maid’s outfit, arms by her side, while I mauled, sucked, bit, licked, and tongued her where she stood. From certain angles, most of them from low-down looking up, she was intoxicatingly pretty. Her milky-white thighs disappeared into black woolen knee socks that dragged my very soul after them into the murky moral complexities of a pair of glossy-black stilettos.

  I was halfway through whipping her and calling her a dirty little cocksucking cunt when the doorbell rang. Since I was naked and holding a riding crop I decided against opening the door, but squinting through the peephole I could just make out the top half of the white-haired head of Barney’s mom from the apartment below. She obviously wasn’t interested in talking to me since she was already halfway down the stairs so her intention had been to stop the disturbing sounds emanating from my apartment rather than discuss them.

  I returned to Caitlin’s molten ass.

  I blew cool air on it, providing a contrast that would be all the more startling when the next fusillade fell. It was virtually aglow.

  “You little cunt … shake it at me … raise it up … no point in pleading … Daddy’s heard it”—I interrupted myself with the sharp compact smack of the leather crop against her hot shuddering globes—“all before.”

  Her cries were those of a little whimpering girl and she sobbed as if distraught beyond imagining. But even as she flinched she was already maneuvering her crimson hemispheres back into position in case she missed anything.

  Later on, after she’d squirted all over my face and I’d come all over her tits, she was enjoying a cigarette, which she insisted on exhaling out the window, as we chatted aimlessly about movies and TV shows and mock-lamented the time we wasted binge-watching them. I was still marveling at how flush-faced and refreshed she looked after being caned, paddled, whipped, licked, and facially fucked, when …

  Drinnnggg Drinnnnnnnng

  I was sure it was my downstairs neighbor again ready to complain about the noise now that it had stopped but when I opened the door there were two uniformed police officers looking very serious, if not a little nervous, standing in the hallway, and another one stationed strategically further down the stairs in a black bulletproof vest over a white T-shirt. They were all doing their best to look past me into the apartment.

  “We got a call saying there was an argument,” said the younger one.

  I looked at them all, standing there, prepped for serious action. I had answered the door in only a T-shirt so I wasn’t keen on opening it too wide.

  “Erm, it was actually the opposite of an argument,” I said.

  The guy down the stairs understood immediately and began to look away as if already thinking about his next case, but the other two were still hosting thoughts no longer applicable. When Caitlin appeared behind me in knee socks and stilettos, holding a tote bag to her chest, her blushing face was almost as red as her ass had been earlier. I opened the door a little wider so they could see exactly how I’d spent my afternoon.

  “Hahaha, it’s okay, officers,” she squealed delightedly, “there’s no trouble here.”

  The two cops grimaced with embarrassment and perhaps even disappointment. They thought they were coming to rescue a damsel. I was grateful for her cigarette because if she had already left I might have been in handcuffs. On her way out she stopped in the doorway and raised her right hand to high-five me.

  “I can’t wait to tell my friend Stefan,” she said.

  Whack.

  Barney barked as she descended the stairs.

  * * *

  Having nudged my cart like a dung-beetle all the way over to Prince Street, I was stunned to look up from my padding feet to see a group of strangers in my spot. Too drenched in sweat, confusion, and self-hatred to make a scene, I continued on to the next block and set up there instead. I tried to make it look like I did this every day but secretly I was furious and terrified.

  It looked like an entire family had descended on my precious spot. There was a Mongolian-looking woman, or at least I think it was a woman, and horizontal-eyed men of varying ages, none of whom acknowledged me as I passed.

  It was the fallout from the Laurence Hotel’s anti-vendor policy. It wasn’t a permanent arrangement but its effects might be. What if these people preferred their new spots? I still had far too many books to get rid of. And yet as I looked around me I realized I had the entire street to myself. I had never seen anyone set up on Crosby Street and for the moment it seemed like I had stumbled on a new frontier.

  If not greener grass then concrete less gray.

  As I rumbled past Stone Cold Joe earlier he shrugged as if to say, “There was nothing I could do.” He was incapable of refusing anybody anything. He probably helped them set up and handed them a “yellow.” He didn’t even seem perturbed by the fact that the jewelry and scarves displayed on their tables looked similar to his own. This had to be why he had lasted so long out there, he just didn’t have an ego.

  But my very livelihood was being threatened, my homestead was overtaken, my territory seized. Shouldn’t I do something? Because they were eating when I passed by they actually looked like they were having a picnic on my spot. It added to the affront.

  I wasn’t thinking straight.

  I was rebounding between Marian’s news and the Laurence Hotel’s strategy. Why was I out here at all? What was the point in continuing to humiliate myself if Marian was no longer an option? To sell books? The books weren’t selling. At least not as well as they had using her ass.

  I would have loved to hear Christine’s opinion on both matters but I couldn’t risk the humiliation. I had laughed openly when her Wall Street guy had walked out on her but now it was starting to look like I might be the source of similar if not superior entertainment. All those fellatio-induced confessions about how I was hurting Marian by not contacting her. How I had been such a terrible boyfriend by refusing to ask her to live with me. How she must miss me.

  How embarrassing.

  I couldn’t bring myself to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was right. That Marian had in fact been systematically punishing me. For years. Three years to be exact. Even more unsayable was the fact that she had been getting on with her life while I was still frozen to the moment we broke up.

  I consoled myself that at least now I knew she’d been dumped she would suffer like I had.

  It was merciful to have found out. Otherwise my state of confused self-flagellation would have continued indefinitely. The longer I marinated in guilt (Marianated?) over the wrongs I’d done her, the longer she owned me.

  In fact I had more in common with her ex now since we had both dumped her. He’d obviously had enough of her shit too. Actually he’d dumped her twice. We’d certainly have a lot to talk about. I imagined the two of us meeting for coffee like a scene from a French film where jealousy and rage went unrecognized in the service of highly unlikely scenarios. But I then was repulsed by the realization that any dialogue between us would have to take place in the shadow of his dick.

  Not going to happen.

  Pedestrians flowed around me like dirty water as I stood there frozen to the pavement. I was afraid to move in case I caused some new calamity. My literary aspirations and my ruined relationship were intermingled: find a girl you love, hurt her viciously, dump her unceremoniously, and then immolate yourself trying to win her back by street-selling your self-published books recounting the entire story.

  “I like that you’re out here doing this.”

  His name was Jared and he was saying something about how I represented the death of the bookstore. He turned out to be a writer for Esquire and Vice and GQ. He stroked his chin as he considered me and my situation.

  “What exactly is required to be ‘out here’?”

  Madness, self-hatred, and masochism presented themselves as possible answers. But before I could answer he began to talk about his own self-published book and how he felt “this” might be a good way to get it see
n and what did I think about it. I thought he should go fuck himself but out of sheer habit I feigned interest in case there was the chance of a post on his Instagram. As it turned out there wasn’t. In New York you were only allowed to pitch to someone while they waited to pitch something to you.

  I called Ursula and tried in vain to convince her that she wasn’t a sex addict. If I could gaslight her into thinking she was just codependent there might still be a chance of having my balls siphoned. But she was adamant, she’d already been to three SLAA meetings and she was talking about going to a Buddhist group.

  “No, I’ve reached rock bottom.”

  There was a pause after she said this and it took me a few moments to realize she was referring to me.

  I was her rock bottom.

  But I made some decent money that day.

  I sold books.

  I even began to get the hang of the card reader, swiping credit cards like I was running an actual business. Availing themselves of my bulk price they almost always added an extra book when they paid with the card. What’s another $10 when you’re already spending $20? If this continued I wouldn’t need a publisher at all. This was more lucrative. And more importantly it was cooler. Better to be a self-published-street-vending-underground-anonymous writer than yet another corporate bitch. And as if that wasn’t enough, on the way back from taking a piss in the Apple Store I’d see Stone Cold Joe, Arrest-Me, Forgive-Them, and even the Mongolians looking miserable and unvisited. I forced a sad expression into my face so that they couldn’t glean from it that my new spot was so much better than where I’d been and they still were. I didn’t want to have to fight them off when they tried to muscle in on my new territory.