Run Catch Kiss

by Amy Sohn

  Drool #3: Call him at least four times a night, just to say hello. While you’re at work, leave messages every hour or so on his answering machine or voice mail. For example, “Hi. Can’t get you out of my mind. Being with you makes me feel like a pig in shit.”

  Drool #4: Try to see him three times a day. If he’s not sure he wants to see you that often, tell him he has no choice. If he tries to break up with you, send him black balloons that say, Hell hath no fury. Find out which new girls he’s dating and hire somebody to off them. Lurk in the back rows at their funerals. Don’t give in to getting over. Fight and fight until he’s yours. If he leaves the state, follow him. Never let him get more than half a mile away. Change your identity. Wear a wig. Get a face-lift. Move in right next door to his new house. Approach him in a bar the exact same way you did the first time, explaining how you have not been fucked in a very long time. When he says you remind him of his old girlfriend, throw your head back and laugh. Heh heh heh heh heh.

  4

  AFTER READING your last few columns, Ariel Steiner, my initial conclusion was that you must be suffering from a total lack of confidence. But after further consideration, I realized you’re not the one at fault. Your parents are! I cannot fathom what type of abuse they must have heaped on you to make you grow into such a miserable, self-destructive hussy.

  FRED SADOWSKY. West Village

  P.S. Why aren’t you listed?

  The reason I never called Ariel Steiner back after we hooked up (“The World Series Struck Me Out,” 10/30) was because she’s completely deranged. I might have been interested in seeing her again if she hadn’t called and hung up on my answering machine so many times right after we met. Who wants to date someone that obsessive? And for the record, my cock tilts to the left, not the right. Evidently, Steiner’s mental problems extend beyond the realm of emotional instability into penile dyslexia.

  AARON “DARREN” WALKER, Lower East Side

  It was the day “The Drools” came out, and Sara and I were on the Met Life bleachers listening to an opera singer. “Say something comforting,” I said, putting down the paper.

  She thought for a second, then said, “It was an honest mistake. Do you label the cock tilt from his perspective—or your own?”

  “That was supposed to be comforting?” I sputtered.

  “What do you want me to say? You chose to take this job. You have to live with the consequences. Just try to remember what Dorothy Parker said. ‘Better to—’ ”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  •

  When I got back from lunch, my dad called. “Who is that asshole Sadowsky?” he growled.

  “Sadowsky?” I said. “What about Aaron?”

  “That letter didn’t bother me so much. It must have been humiliating for you, but he didn’t mention mom and me. So, what should I do? Should I write a response, saying we raised you well?”

  “No!”

  “Did we raise you well?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you really that unstable?”

  “Does the word satire mean anything to you?”

  “I knew it was satirical. I just wasn’t sure how much.”

  “Remember that conversation where I asked you not to tell me what you read?”

  “Yes, but you’ve got to throw me a bone. Larry Stanley’s beginning to drive me insane.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “This guy in my office. Every Wednesday afternoon he walks up to my desk with the paper, says, ‘Hey, Leo—listen to this!’ and reads the raciest portions of your column to me in a very loud voice so all the other systems analysts can hear.”

  “What do you say when he does that?”

  “I say it’s not fair to quote you out of context.”

  I had to hand it to my dad. He was holding on to his sanity in the face of an extremely difficult situation. He was in a horrifying Jewish parent predicament: his child had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize . . . in pornography. The proud-father side of him must have wanted to gush to his coworkers about my newfound success, but the staid conservative side must have been deeply ashamed about the area of my expertise.

  “I know this is hard for you,” I said.

  “It’s not me you should be worried about. It’s Mom. She wants us to get buttons that say, IT’S ALL FICTION, SO we can flash them at dinner parties when people ask how much is true.”

  That night when I got home, I found a City Week envelope in my mailbox. Inside were three letters addressed to me care of the Week, which Turner had forwarded:

  Dear Ariel,

  My friends call me Mary because of my milky-white status. I am thirty-two years old and have yet to penetrate a woman. But it’s not because I’m gay. I’m just shy. Do you have any advice on how I might gain some confidence when talking to the fairer sex? Perhaps we could discuss this over a drink. But don’t get me wrong. This is not a come-on. I’m far too shy to be capable of coming on to you. I just think you might be able to help me out.

  CHRISTOPHER HINKLE

  Dear Ariel,

  I await your column each week like a junkie awaits his fix, like a dog awaits his walk, like a baby awaits his mother’s teat. Each Wednesday after work, I race to the City Week distribution box at the corner of my office building, my forehead glistening with sweat, my lips moist with expectation. I open the metal door, withdraw the paper with trembling fingers, then get on the subway, open straight to “Run Catch Kiss,” and indulge myself in your latest tale. When I reach the final line, my heart grows heavy as I realize with dismay that seven long days must pass before you can be mine again.

  TED BARROW

  P.S. Don’t print this in the paper. I have a girlfriend.

  Hey Ariel—

  It seems pretty clear which side of the banquet table you sit on, generally speaking, but do you ever switch?

  MYRA GALITSIS

  I didn’t feel so lousy about the letters in “The Mail” after that. I had fans—even if they didn’t write in to the paper to say so. And I had friends—even if I’d never meet any of them face-to-face. I read each letter a few times over, stuck them in a file folder, and slid it under the futon in case I ever needed something to cheer me up.

  Then I went out to meet Sara. Her accordion teacher, Evan, was playing at BarBie, a rock club on Avenue B, and she’d invited me to come. When I got to the show I found her in the front row, smoking and dancing wildly to the music. The sound was unlike anything I’d heard before—circusy and jazzy both, with weird instruments: violin, mandolin, cello, electric bass, bassoon, and drums. Evan was tall and emaciated, with stringy dark hair and pale shiny skin. He played with incredible intensity, his fingers moving like lightning, his head bowed and intent, a cigarette dangling from his lips. In between songs he would lean down his head, speak shyly into a tiny microphone planted inside the accordion to introduce the next number, then ask someone in the audience for a light. He came off as a cross between a twelve-year-old girl and a bad-ass rocker, and that combination sucked me in.

  At the end of the first set Sara and I went up to the bar to buy drinks. Suddenly I spotted Evan coming toward us. “Hey, Evan,” said Sara, pulling him over. “This is Ariel.”

  “Sara told me she knew you,” he said. “I’m a huge fan.”

  “Really?” I said, my upper and lower mouths both widening with glee. It’s a major ego trip when you go from being a groupie to having one—all within the span of a few weeks.

  One of Evan’s band members signaled him from the stage and Evan nodded back at him. “I should go,” he said. “But after the show a bunch of us are going to head over to BarNey Rubble to hear two hard-core bands play. You girls want to come?”

  “Actually,” said Sara, “I’m meeting Jon, but maybe Ariel wants to.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Good,” said Evan and went back to the stage for the next set.

  •

  “I really liked the gig,” I said as we headed up th
e street together. He walked in one of those effeminate swaggers that’s more often a sign of Bowie worship than any latent leanings. “It was funny when you spoke into your accordion.”

  He smiled. “That’s funny you thought it was funny. It wasn’t planned. We just didn’t have enough mikes.” He took a packet of Drum out of his jeans with his right hand, removed a rolled cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it, all while keeping his left hand in his pocket.

  “Are you doing that with one hand to impress me with your manual dexterity?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, pulling his left hand out. He was holding a key chain attached to a small canister of Mace. “I keep my finger on the trigger at all times, so I’m ready if somebody fucks with me. I’m so skinny that ruffians tend to seek me out. I was mugged eight times before I got the idea to carry Mace.”

  “That’s horrible. Have you always been skinny?”

  “Yeah. Most people think it’s because I snort h, but it’s really because of my Scottish ancestry.”

  “So you don’t snort h?”

  “No, I do, but I was skinny before I started.”

  Now, I’d gone out with my share of stoners and drunks, but heroin was another thing altogether. It was enough to freak me out in a big way. He must have noticed the shock on my face because he quickly added, “I don’t do it that often. Just once in a while. I’m trying to stop, actually.”

  At least he was trying to quit. At least he knew it wasn’t good for him. Maybe I was making a mountain out of a molehill. This was modern-day New York City. I couldn’t be too judgmental.

  “It is such a thrill to be meeting you in the flesh,” he said. “But I’m kind of embarrassed I told you I was a fan. I feel like maybe I gave you the wrong idea about me.”

  “What would that be?”

  “That I was some sort of loony who was only interested in you because he wanted you to write about him.”

  “Are you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind it if my name appeared in the column,” he said, blushing, “but that’s not my main motivation.”

  “What is?”

  “I just thought, I mean, from reading you, you sounded like someone I wanted to know.”

  “Biblically?” I asked hopefully.

  He smiled. “I just mean you just seem like an honest person. I’ve been wondering what you looked like since I started reading you. And I guess I was a little scared when Sara said you were a friend of hers, because I thought I might meet you someday and not be attracted to you, and I didn’t want that to happen. But then when she introduced you to me, I was relieved, because, I . . . was.”

  This guy was stroking me in more ways than one. Boosting my feminine ego and artistic ego all in one fell swoop. But I was nervous. I felt like I had some sort of vampish reputation to live up to and I didn’t know if I could. What if he only wanted me because he thought I was easy? Maybe it was best not to jump the gun in the make-out department. I was hot for him, though. I didn’t want to have to pull a Pollyanna on principle, then miss out on decent action. I decided to play it by ear. Forget the fact that he’d read me before he met me, and pretend it was a sweet, normal, Our Townish kind of date. With a sex columnist Emily and a junkie George.

  •

  BarNey Rubble was very hard rock. The music was way too loud and the crowd tattooed and leathered. It wasn’t my scene at all. But I bopped my head to the music so Evan would think I was as tough and downtown as he was.

  When the set ended, he said, “You want to come over to my place?” His apartment was a huge, beat-down loft above a restaurant, on First between Third and Fourth. There weren’t any posters on the walls, the floor was covered with dust, and the only thing to sit on was a ratty tweed sofa with the stuffing coming out. As I headed for the couch, I realized I was shivering. “Why is it so cold in here?” I asked.

  “My heat and electricity got cut off. My roommates and I haven’t paid our bills in a while. So we’re stealing the upstairs neighbor’s electricity”—he pointed to an extension cord stuck through a hole in his ceiling—“but we haven’t figured out how to steal heat.”

  I nodded and sat down. “I think I’m going to snort some h,” he said. “Do you want some?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m kind of a prude when it comes to drugs.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. He went over to a card table on the other side of the room. I turned my head to the side so I couldn’t see because I was afraid it might be too upsetting. I’d never seen someone snort coke, much less heroin. The hard drug scene at Brown was pretty private. If you didn’t partake, you didn’t witness.

  A few minutes later he sat down next to me. His pupils were a little dilated, but aside from that he seemed the same.

  “Have you ever shot up?” I asked.

  “No, never. I’m stupid, but not that stupid.” I believed him because I wanted to fuck him and I had to believe him to fuck him.

  “Have you been tested?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah.” I’d been tested three times, but the last one was fall of freshman year, when I first started going out with Will. Since then, I had sucked the unrubbered cock of four guys who claimed they were negative—but let only one of them come in my mouth; let two guys enter unprotected for about four seconds before I made them pull out and put on condoms; and got eaten by a guy who used to shoot up but had gotten tested regularly since and claimed he was OK. So I wasn’t lying, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my current status, either. And I didn’t think Evan was lying, but for all I knew, his last test had been too long ago to matter. The presex sexual-history discussion is a pretty bogus exercise. You each say you’re clean, but you don’t discuss when the tests were or what you’ve done since, and you pretend telling each other you’re disease free is as good as knowing for sure.

  Evan got up and put on a CD—Fred Frith, he said—sat down, covered our laps with a blanket, and took my hand in his. I rubbed his thumb. It was cold. He leaned in and kissed me. His lips felt good but his tongue was slightly bitter and suddenly I got scared I’d get high from tasting the smack.

  “Could I get high from kissing you?” I asked.

  “No. It’s already been metabolized into my bloodstream.”

  We kissed more. He caressed my breast, outside my shirt. I put my hand on his crotch.

  “It’s the smack,” he said, pulling back.

  “Oh.”

  “But maybe tomorrow, when I’m not . . . what are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why don’t I come to your place, then? I tend bar till midnight and I can come over right after.”

  “OK,” I said. I wrote down my address for him, and then he walked me to a cab.

  •

  As soon as he came over the next night, we got on my bed. Things were getting pretty steamy when he leaned to the side and reached for his pants.

  “Are you getting a Drum?” I asked.

  “No. A condom.”

  He unwrapped it, rolled it on, got on top of me, pumped for about three minutes, then collapsed on my chest. It was the first New York City, postcollege, independent-single-girl sex I’d had, and sad to say, it was pretty disappointing. Sex is often that way for me. I’m much more entranced by the idea of it than the act itself. Not that I haven’t had good sex. I totally have. But only with Will. That was because (a) I cared about him and (b) either I jerked myself off during it or he did, so I came.

  My first time was awful, though. I met the surfer on the boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach on one of my nights off from babysitting the twins. He was eighteen years old, from rural Pennsylvania, and he was spending the summer smoking pot, surfing, and living in a house with some friends. We would meet at ten or eleven, play Skee-Ball or ride the Ferris wheel, and then make out on one of the benches on the boardwalk. One night he suggested we go down to the beach, and we lay on the sand in the dark. He fingered me for a few minutes and asked if he could put
it in.

  I was incredibly curious about sex because I had done everything else with Flip Goldin at camp and I had this idea that it would feel like fireworks—gorgeous and explosive and romantic all at once. But I was scared, too, so I said, “I’m a virgin,” hoping he might retract the offer.

  He didn’t. He just said, “That’s OK.”

  “Do you have a condom?”

  “No, but don’t worry. I’ll pull out.”

  And even though I had learned in health ed never to do it without protection, I was afraid that if I told him no, he would never offer again and I’d lose my chance to learn what it was like. So I said, “OK,” and closed my eyes. He moved my bathing suit to the side with his hand, then heaved himself onto me and put it in. This searing pain shot right through me. It wasn’t a fast pain, like a Band-Aid rip-off, that came and went instantly. It was slow and grating and it didn’t wane with time. I tilted my head back and gritted my teeth, praying it would get better, but it didn’t. Finally I started to cry. He didn’t notice.

  “I think you should stop,” I said. He pulled out and lay next to me with a loud sigh. “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s just that I really want to come.”

  And I wanted him to be happy. Even though I hardly knew him, I didn’t want to stand in the way of him having his way. I wanted him to like it even though it was killing me because then he would like me and I wanted to be liked.

  So I said, “Maybe we can try it again,” and he got back on top of me and kept going. It hurt a little less, but it definitely didn’t feel like fireworks. After a few minutes he yanked it out abruptly and left a warm wet spot on the stomach of my bathing suit. I pulled my shorts up and stood to go, but when I reached in my pocket for the key to my bike lock, I couldn’t find it. It had slipped out into the sand.

  The bike wasn’t mine; it was the twins’ mother’s, and I was terrified she’d fire me if I told her I’d lost the key. So the surfer and I spent twenty-five minutes running our fingers through the sand, trying to find it, and I started crying—not just about the key but about the fact that my first time had turned out to be such a whopping disappointment. He rubbed my back and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll find the key and walk the bike back to your house.” I told him where I lived and went home.