Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs

by AnonYMous

  “He’s a complete performer.”

  I looked furtively left and right as if giving out this kind of information put me at great risk.

  “He actually asked me if it would hurt my business if he sat there and then after a few minutes he started his crying routine.”

  “You’re kidding.” Her eyes were wide with disbelief.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not.”

  She looked at me longer than was necessary.

  Her disbelief was testament to his performance.

  “Well, he had me fooled,” she said and after another moment’s hesitation held the bag up.

  “You should take it. Turkey sandwich and french fries.”

  I feigned reluctance and mimicked gratitude.

  The next day he was already in position as I rounded the corner with my cart. The first thing I saw was his miserable crying head soaking up all the attention for miles around. Taking it away from me before I even set up. And even more annoying was the fact that he was completely within his rights since he had gotten there before me. Cursing, I unfolded my table as far away from him as was legally allowable. Which wasn’t nearly far enough. I’d get fined if I was too close to a hydrant or a store entrance. Caught between a mock-mourner and a financial fucking. And people looked at me accusingly. Why wasn’t I doing something about that poor man? Did I not see him? What kind of uncaring prick was I? The last thing they were thinking about was buying a book. He was ridiculously effective.

  Not selling books was bearable if people still took photos and posted them. But even that wasn’t going to happen with him around. In the end I went over and asked him nicely to move up the street a little bit, if he didn’t mind. Suddenly there was no indication of the uncontrollable sobbing and involuntary twitches he’d been subjected to only seconds before.

  “Why would I do that?’ he asked quite reasonably.

  “Well, because, people are asking me if you’re okay.”

  “No,” he said calmly. “I can hear perfectly, you’re cursing the customers out after they don’t buy nothin’ and that’s just not my problem. You need to change your pitch.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “I’m not doin’ nothin’. I’m just sittin’ here. They’re not askin’ if I’m okay. That’s just a lie.”

  But as he spoke he started to get up, so I wasn’t about to slow him down by defending myself. Plus I was stung into even greater depths of annoyance by the fact that he was right. I was indeed cursing the passersby and him too if his hearing allowed. As far as I was concerned, he was costing me sales and media exposure. People didn’t feel comfortable pulling out wallets and handing over $20 for a book when there was a wailing man on the pavement expiring behind them. Change my pitch? Did he have any idea who he was talking to? I had sold multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to some of the most revered clients on the planet and won awards doing it. Change my pitch? Where should I begin to explain to this subhuman just how superior I was? Did he ever manage teams of creatives? Had he ever shepherded international ad campaigns from conception to execution? Had he any idea who the fuck he was talking to? I was failing at being on the street. So much so, I was now being berated by a more successful beggar. I had thought in light of Marian’s latest revelations I had reached the rock bottom of my descent but it seemed like I had just found a trapdoor. I retreated behind my table while he made himself hoarse shouting at me. People physically ducked to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

  “You’re a fucking liar and you know it, I have done nothin’ wrong here, I even asked you …”

  It suddenly made sense that this stretch of pavement went uncontested by other vendors. Even after the Laurence Hotel’s enforced reshuffle, no one wanted to deal with this.

  “… you won’t even sell one fucking book today, I guarantee it.”

  It was the curse of the Lamenteer.

  I began to freak out.

  Would he suddenly reappear behind me with a homemade shiv? Would my paranoid prediction of appearing stabbed on the six o’clock news come true? He’d enlist the help of innumerable street felons summoned from hollow sidewalks. An unkempt man stopped and fixed me with what seemed to me to be an African American version of a Charles Manson stare. He looked like he had my eyes. I tried to hide the relief from my face when he resumed walking but then he turned suddenly as if remembering where he’d seen me before.

  He held my frightened gaze in his.

  I hoped he was another of Françoise’s orphans, bent on payback for the cynical little shit who had invented her. At least that would be better than street-fighting over patches of New York pavement. I was terrorized by my own wrongdoing. Was this really what had become of me?

  Waddling back toward my table I could now see that he wore his skinny jeans so low he looked like he’d shat himself. The hand protruding from his black felt poncho held a smartphone that he now positioned over my book. Suddenly two very pretty, slightly stoned-looking white girls appeared either side of him and began to browse aimlessly as he took photos, first of the cover and then, opening it, the first page. Without lifting his eyes he kept saying the same thing over and over.

  “I gotchoo bro … I gotchoo bro … I gotchoo …”

  The thumbs on both hands hopped up and down on his screen as the girls linked arms and nodded approvingly.

  “This’ll be good for you,” one of them said in a whisper as if she was afraid the caped one would hear. As if she was a prisoner smuggling a message out. She seemed almost jealous of me, as if this was what she hoped would happen for her.

  They didn’t buy a book.

  “So you sell more books when I’m not here? Yeah right.”

  I jumped as the Lamenteer reappeared behind me. Drawing on all the mock-concern at his disposal—which judging from his daily matinee was bountiful—he looked so sad I almost mistook his expression for sincerity.

  He’d been watching.

  Stunned by his supernatural ability to appear and disappear I had nothing to offer but silence. He nodded slowly and smacked his lips as if this new development tasted very good indeed, but he was merely collecting himself for the string of well-aimed abuse that would follow.

  “If you were a real writer there’d be no reason to be out here standing in the fucking cold … no reason at all. You’re just a little bitch. A little lying bitch.

  “You should write a book about a homeless guy who ruined your business.”

  His voice trailed away as he made his way slowly across the street and pedestrians changed pace and cars slowed down to accommodate him. As if they could intuitively tell who this section of street belonged to. He launched an afterthought over his shoulder.

  “Lil Bitch.”

  I’M ALL SOUNDTRACK AND NO MOVIE

  #TheOxygenThiefDiaries

  We’d like to stock your book in our stores as a matter of some urgency. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience.

  The letter, text, email, and voice mail from the Barnes & Noble head buyer were all identically worded. At first I was reluctant to respond. Where had they gotten my information? It felt too corporate. Like I suddenly had a job and this guy was my boss. Plus I needed to get my story straight. Was I the marketing director of G Publishing or the production assistant? Or the creative director? I certainly didn’t want him knowing I was the writer. But all he seemed to want was a contact person with whom to place orders. Someone called Eileen Flayed was cc’ed on the email and a quick google revealed her to be one of the most powerful people in publishing since it was she who decided which new books were placed on Barnes & Noble’s shelves.

  Could I please contact him at my earliest convenience?

  Replying, I tried to sound as much as possible like the female creative director of G Publishing. He responded almost immediately saying they were getting walk-in requests for my book all over the country. Did I have inventory on hand? Where should he send purchase orders? He would loop in his logistics guys
. Whom should he contact to send around a UPS truck to expedite shipping? He would loop in his transport people. As the stack of names cc’d on his emails increased, the answer to all his questions was the same.

  Me, me, and me.

  Drinnnnnggggg

  “UPS to pick up your boxes?”

  She was certainly stocky enough but would she be able to single-handedly carry seventy boxes down my stairs and load them herself? Barnes & Noble was paying to have them picked up from my apartment and I didn’t want the moment ruined by anything that resembled manual labor. I’d done my fair share of lugging those fucking things up and down the stairs, and she didn’t look like she could handle it.

  Not on her own.

  But at least I wouldn’t have to hump them all the way to the post office where, over the previous weeks, I had made myself deeply unpopular. I basically had to beg the staff to take the boxes from me. I didn’t tell them I’d ordered ten thousand more from Korea.

  Burrrrrrr

  “I like your numbers.”

  These were the first few words out of the mouth of a big-time literary agent called Quinn Whitaker. He didn’t even try to pretend he’d read the book, he was interested only in how well it was selling. And according to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook sales, it was now among the top sellers in the country.

  “My biggest problem will be to get you more money than you’re already making but what I can promise is, I’ll get twenty copies of your book into every store in the country.”

  The fact that pond-life like this was starting to show interest confirmed that I was doing something right. By now I was getting so many orders it no longer made sense to be on Prince Street. Pretty soon I wouldn’t need to go out there at all. I could stack eight boxes, each containing sixty books, on my cart and ferry them to the tiny post office two blocks from my apartment. That was 480 books per run. I was doing two, sometimes three runs a day availing myself of their very reasonable media rate, which applied to books and CDs.

  But I was visibly hated by the post office staff.

  I felt like an unpopular visitor in a low-security prison, desperately looking for an inmate to converse with. Any inmate. The Latina lady with impossibly long fingernails simply pretended she couldn’t see me. Or hear me. The one time I did approach her I had already overstepped my welcome just by speaking.

  “Whoa … hold up. One word at a time.”

  My Herculean adventures bottlenecked here?

  I learned quickly. You didn’t speak until spoken to and even then you needed to be so deferential you almost knelt. I watched as cocky professionals clutching manila envelopes sighed and harrumphed in response to what they obviously regarded as shoddy service. I winced on their behalf. They would be left there to ponder their mistakes alone and ignored. Not just by the staff. There was no way they were going to solicit the support of the rest of us standing in line, lest we be tainted by their stink.

  Meanwhile I was being contacted by the likes of Publishers Weekly, New York magazine, and even The Guardian in London, all of them wondering if I could put them in touch with Anonymous. They wanted interviews either in person or over the phone. Would this be possible? They would of course respect his/her anonymity. After creating yet another alias email address I responded as Cynthia Long, saying I would pass on their inquiries to the author, who was presently hard at work on a third book. There seemed to be doubt about Anonymous’s gender so I was careful not to come down on one side or the other. Fuck them. The more intrigued they were, the better. But where had all this attention come from? Black Charles Manson had posted photos of my book under an inspired caption,

  Ima check this out

  He had three million followers.

  * * *

  “Okay let me see …”

  My first date with Emmeline was going suspiciously well.

  I had just invited her to tell me everything and she paused now deciding where to begin.

  She wasn’t just a model, she was an art model. This meant she was comfortable baring not just her body but her soul. For a girl so beautiful and well read she was surprisingly down-to-earth. Would I soon hear how she had been abused or beaten or similarly mis-raised? I hoped so.

  The normal ones were boring to me now.

  I wasn’t surprised to hear she’d just been hired as the concierge for a newly opened über-trendy boutique hotel on the Lower East Side called the Palindrome. It went without saying that she lived in Williamsburg. Two weeks earlier she had arrived at my table with both books already in hand and posed with them, waiting for me to take a picture. It got 212 likes.

  “Okay I have it …”

  Suddenly inspired, she straightened herself.

  “One night when I was fourteen, my parents were at the opera and I invited a thirty-two-year-old man from a dating site over to my house. I blew him in the hallway and sent him away again. I needed someone to practice on … Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?”

  It was.

  “He thought I was eighteen. I texted him my real age later.”

  I winced on his behalf.

  By the time she really was eighteen she’d already offered herself as a nude model to a forty-eight-year-old alcoholic painter who bathed her in paint, filled her with absinthe, and pressed her onto canvases.

  “We lived together under a bridge in Austin.”

  She seemed to relish the phrase, presumably because it conjured an aura of bohemian homelessness, but when I asked her to clarify, it turned out they’d shared a large studio in the renovated arch of a railway bridge. And when, after eight drunken months, they broke up, he gave her the paintings in a self-pitying passive-aggressive attempt to be rid of her, she slashed them with a carpet knife, paying particular attention to the imprints of their copulation.

  “He was Irish too.”

  The use of too inferred I was already being included in her résumé. While working with him she met another Irishman, a photographer, who had a reputation for being a complete pervert. Again she offered herself as a nude model. She was already a veteran at nineteen. I couldn’t tell if she was just killing time with me on what was, after all, St. Patrick’s Day (an Irishman would surely want to get drunk and maybe even pay for the drinks on such a day), or whether she really was enjoying herself as much as she seemed to be. We were sitting in the café attached to the McNally Jackson bookshop and the quiet respectable atmosphere, as Noho’s well-to-do pored over books and phones, provided an inviting hush for our salacious conversation. Or at least it did until she described the sort of stories she liked to write.

  “Nazi porn,” she called it.

  Her favorite featured an innocent but rather better-looking Anne Frank being discovered and sodomized by two SS officers. Lost in the telling of the story, she seemed unaware of her surroundings, but I saw that we were becoming a source of free entertainment and potential controversy as our neighbors held their breath for the next development. When she got to the part where blood from the girl’s sodomized anus was being used to lubricate her virgin pussy I thought it prudent to intervene.

  “Shall we walk?”

  She was already standing.

  I held the door for her and as she brushed past I caught the whiff of a deeply musky scent that emanated from her like heat. She said it was a relief to be out with an Irishman because we were more intelligent and educated and generally that much more witty than Americans. I was so flattered by this I felt it would be insulting not to at least try to kiss her and so, grabbing those slender shoulders, I turned her toward me right there on the sidewalk. Her head tilted back like a film star ready for her close-up.

  I began placing well-intentioned fish-kisses on her pouting mouth but since such pecks were ridiculously innocent compared to the outrageousness she’d conjured inside, I felt the need to introduce my tongue, which she immediately met with her own. Pushing the envelope even further I sent a manual scout down the slope of her back to the firm round mounds of her magnificen
t ass.

  “Holy fucking shit,” I whispered.

  She looked worried.

  “That’s an amazing arse,” I said, using the Irish nomenclature to score more points.

  “Thank you,” she beamed.

  “I might have to devote a sonnet to it.” Again, it seemed like something an Irish writer might say.

  “I might have to hold you to that.”

  “Yes, hold me to it,” I said, pulling it closer.

  Her smile lit up the entire street and a couple of adjoining alleys. I accompanied her to Eleventh Street, a walk of some twenty blocks, stroking that young firm ass along the way and even managing the occasional caress of her dancer-sized breasts as she bounced along beside me flushed and distracted. She was loving it. I pointed out every lustful look she received from every man we passed and yes, even some women, and she was astonished at their frequency. Wasting no time on false humility, she openly regretted that she could never seem to witness the phenomenon for herself. Admittedly I did overdo it a little by projecting lustful intentions onto complete innocents, among them a young boy who was not yet out of puberty, but I wanted to keep her physical beauty alive as a subject and so, it seemed, did she.

  A woman won’t interrupt when you’re celebrating her looks.

  And yet I still couldn’t be sure if she was just tolerating me. Playing with the poor old bastard’s libido while he escorted her to her real date for the evening with some young stiff-pricked stud on Eleventh Street. I wouldn’t know for sure if I’d see her again until I received confirmation the next day.

  We discussed sexual etiquette as we walked.

  “It’s just rude,” I said, “for the guy to come before the girl.”

  I don’t know if she believed me but she definitely liked hearing it. So did a guy who happened to be passing at that same moment. It brought him involuntarily to a standstill. When I let her know he’d heard what I said she immediately announced to the air around her, “I’VE PERFECTED THE BLOW JOB … AND I LOOOOVE TO SWALLOW.”