Run Catch Kiss

by Amy Sohn

  When I got upstairs I locked myself in the bathroom, ran a shower, and took off my clothes. The crotch of my suit was stained with blood and sand. I got in the shower and held the suit up to the showerhead, trying to will the night out of my mind. I had never expected it to be that ugly. I’d expected it to be perfect and clean like in all the movies. My devirginator was supposed to be as sweet and doting as John Cusack with lone under that blanket in the backseat of his Malibu. He wasn’t supposed to be a stoner moron.

  I dried off, put on my nightgown, and slid into bed, under the cool sheets. I heard this ticking out my window and looked down. It was him, wheeling the bike into the driveway. I put my nose to the window screen and he smiled and waved, and for one brief moment I didn’t feel so bad about the sex, because even though it had been awful, he’d been gentleman enough to look for the key. That was how it had been with almost every guy since then, too. They could be ninety-nine percent asshole and one percent sweet, and the one percent was always enough for me to justify staying.

  Evan pulled out, slid the condom off, and set it on the floor next to the bed. “I’m sorry I came so soon,” he said.

  “That’s OK,” I said. I got up to pee so I wouldn’t get a urinary tract infection, and when I got back he’d fallen asleep.

  •

  Friday night I invited him to see a movie at the Quad about these heavy-metal teens who murdered some little boys. In the middle of the movie he reached for my hand and stroked it. Suddenly I wasn’t so upset about the sex being bad. If he was stroking my hand voluntarily it meant he had to be thinking romantic thoughts.

  I immediately started fantasizing about the two of us spending the rest of our lives together. With my love to guide him he’d slowly evolve from junkie accordionist to responsible boyfriend. He’d go on Nicorette, join NA, and educate himself about female sexual pleasure. We’d buy a factory in Williamsburg and convert it to a living space, and have Jewish Scottish kids who were smart but tough, wise but rocking. He’d said himself he wouldn’t mind if I wrote about him, so my column would transform from a diary of a single girl into a portrait of hipster monogamy.

  I’d write weekly rants on the difficulties of finding vintage clothes for kids and earplugs small enough for five-year-olds. Thurston and Kim and Jon and Cristina would all become huge fans, the Week would raise my salary to a thousand a pop, and Williamsburg would replace Chelsea as the hottest celebrity ‘hood in the city. Evan would take care of the kids during the day while I wrote, and I’d take care of them at night while he performed. It would be an ideal, reciprocal coupling, and whenever people asked how we met, we would tell them the incredible story of how he started out as my fan, became my lover, then turned his life around and went sober all because of my pure and noble affection.

  When we got out of the movie theater, I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him long and hard. He writhed out of my embrace and said, “I think I’m going to go back to my apartment and practice for a little while. But my friend Kath is having a birthday party in the financial district tonight. Why don’t you meet me there around midnight?” He gave me the address and walked briskly down the street.

  It wasn’t so easy for me to imagine us having children after that. But I didn’t let myself get discouraged. I was as uninvested as he was. I wasn’t Just Another Desperate Single Girl Looking for a Boyfriend; I was Ariel Steiner, a highly successful young woman with her own weekly column in the hottest city in the world. I had strangers sending me fan letters. I was unlisted. Evan was nothing but a paltry, pathetic reader, lucky I’d given him the time of day. If anyone was the less besotted party, it was me. Besides, he’d approached me first. And it’s always the pursuer, not the pursued, who gets dumped in the end.

  When I got to Kath’s apartment, I found Evan sitting on the couch and groping along the floor. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Looking for my Valium. I’m coming down off smack. I dropped the Valium on the floor a few minutes ago and now I can’t find it.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “It’s small and white and has a little v cut out of it.” I looked around the room, found it a few feet away, and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said and swallowed it without water.

  After the party we took a cab back to my place. Once we got up to my room, he zonked out in my bed. I was kind of disappointed we weren’t going to get another chance to have sex, but I told myself it wasn’t his fault. He had drug problems. I couldn’t blame him for falling asleep.

  The next night he called at three-thirty in the morning. “I was wondering if I could come over. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  All my bad feelings about him flew away. This was romance right out of a John Hughes movie. He was stopping by in the middle of the night because he couldn’t get me out of his mind. It didn’t get much more sappy than that.

  He rang my buzzer about forty-five minutes later, and I went down to get the door. Al was standing in the foyer in his undershirt, peering out through the glass at him. “He rang my doorbell,” he said angrily.

  Oh God. This cat was going to get me evicted. “I’m sorry, Al,” I said. “It’s my, um, cousin. He must have been confused. I’m really sorry. I promise this won’t happen again.”

  “It better not,” he said and went back into his apartment.

  I opened the door. “You woke up my landlord!” I hissed. “Didn’t you see my name on the buzzer? It’s marked pretty clearly!”

  “I guess I didn’t.”

  We went upstairs and sat down at the kitchen table. “Thanks for letting me come over so late,” he said. “I’m high and I couldn’t sleep. Do you have any alcohol? I need something to calm me down.”

  “Evan,” I said, “did you come because you were thinking about me, or because you couldn’t fall asleep?”

  “Both,” he said. I heard the Jeopardy! wrong-answer buzzer go off in my head. But I poured him a glass of Carlo Rossi anyway, because I am a generous soul.

  By his fourth glass, he was babbling hard—about how he really should stop snorting h but it was such a good high, a much better high than coke, and so cheap, too. Then he said, “I’ve been having the weirdest nods lately.”

  “Nods?”

  “Waking dreams induced by smack. Jim Carroll wrote a whole book about it, The Book of Nods.” He started to detail some of Carroll’s nods. I tried to listen, but I didn’t give a fuck about Jim Carroll’s nods. The reason addicts make lousy boyfriends is not because they can’t get it up or commit, but because the only subject that interests them is how good their drugs make them feel. All they ever want to talk about is what geniuses Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Castaneda, and Jim Carroll were. A girl can hear only so much about Thompson, Castaneda, and Carroll before she starts to get a little bit bored.

  “Let’s go to bed,” I said, in the hopes that it might quiet him down. We moved to the futon and started fooling around. He rolled on a jimmy and I sat on top of him. This time I played with myself in the hopes that I might come, but I felt self-conscious, and he could only get half hard, so after twenty minutes it became clear that neither of us would be throwing a lump anytime in the millennium. Finally he sighed and said, “I don’t think I can come because of the smack.”

  “OK,” I said, held onto the rim, and climbed off. He took off the condom. We lay there silently. I wanted something between us to work. I wanted to excite him—even though I wasn’t so sure I liked him. I put my hand on it. It woke up. I crawled down and took it in my mouth. It was bitter from the spermicide, but I was diligent, and within just a few minutes he rewarded me for my efforts.

  “So, did you like that?” I said, sliding up next to him.

  “Yeah,” he said. And then he blinked and said, “Want to hear something really weird?”

  “OK.”

  “This afternoon I got together with this buddy of mine, Ray, and when he came up the street to meet me, I noticed he had Saran Wrap sticking ou
t the back of his shirt.” I tried to figure out how this related to the act that had just transpired. Was he going to tell me Ray had used the Saran Wrap as a prophylactic with a girl, forgotten to remove it, then shifted around in bed postact so it somehow got stuck on his shoulders?

  “Go on,” I said.

  “So I was staring at the Saran Wrap, trying to figure out what it was doing on his back, and then I noticed he had this tattoo under it, this huge black tattoo of a crow. I knew he was planning on getting a tattoo, but I can’t believe he got such a big one!”

  Suddenly I realized the story had no blow job connection at all. I had wanted him to say, “Want to hear something really weird? That was the best head I’ve ever gotten in my life!” or “Want to hear something really weird? I was in a relationship for three years and the sucking I got from her did not come close to approximating what I just got from you.” I didn’t want to hear about the crow on his stupid friend’s back. I had given him head and he had given me a tattoo tale. I’d witnessed postejaculatory temporary-retardation syndrome many times before, but never had I seen this dire a case.

  “That’s . . . a really funny story,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, rolled over, and fell asleep.

  The next morning we got dressed and went to a diner on Court Street for breakfast. He ordered coffee, eggs, and a Bud. “How can you drink a coffee and a Bud at the same time?” I said. “Don’t they cancel each other out?”

  “No,” he said. “The coffee is to wake me up and the Bud is the hair of the dog that bit me.”

  “I see.”

  “Ariel . . .”

  Warning number one.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea for us to keep seeing each other.”

  Sayonara city.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve been feeling really loopy lately, about h and whether I should keep doing it. It’s kind of a crazy time and I feel like I need to be on my own for a while.”

  “So you’ve been feeling loopy because of the heroin, but not because of me.”

  “No.”

  “No you haven’t been feeling loopy about me, or no you have been?”

  “I have been.” Oof. “I wanted to talk to you about it last night. That’s why I came over. But then I got kind of wasted and I couldn’t say it. When I first met you I didn’t think you wanted a relationship. I mean, you’re a sex columnist. Why would you want a boyfriend? But then it became pretty clear that you did, and I just can’t handle that now. I really need to focus on myself and my music. Let’s go out for coffee, though. I’ll call you.” He stood up, kissed me on the cheek, put some money on the table, and headed for the door.

  Suddenly I forgot about his meager conversational skills, bad habit, erection problems, and lack of head appreciation. I didn’t realize that by dumping me he might be doing both of us a very big favor. All I could think was, I can’t believe I let him end it first. I was tired of being rejected. I wanted to be the one to cut a date short because I had band practice or shelves to build. I wanted to cock my head and say a guy’s name in a faux polite tone, then dump him flat on his flabby ass.

  Because when it came right down to it, I didn’t resent Evan so much as want to be him. I envied my assholes. All they cared about was their work and themselves. They didn’t need relationships to make them happy. They were never looking for anything long-term, so they never got hurt. I wanted to learn to be that recklessly self-important, to have such incredible drive and direction that relationships were unwanted diversions. I wanted to be an isolationist commitmentphobe. A jaded jade. I wanted to be a guy.

  Maybe my column could help me sprout the penis I’d been envying my whole sorry life. I could view the column as my band, my shelves. My Main Thing. If I saw myself as a scientist instead of a sap, then I could turn the boys from my tormentors to my experiments. Just like Evan said, I was a sex columnist. What did I need a boyfriend for? I wasn’t a reject; I was a swinger. I wasn’t a loser; I just didn’t believe in monogamy. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get a boyfriend; if I got one, I’d lose my job.

  When I got home from the diner I wrote a column about Evan, but I altered a few of the relevant details: I didn’t mention that he’d been a fan (so my readers wouldn’t get any ideas), I changed his name to Kevin, said I’d broken up with him because of his heroin problem, and said the one time he’d been hard enough to fuck, I came. It was the last fiction that was most important. There was no way I could let my readers know my saddest true confession of all: ever since I was a teenager, my orgasms had been as elusive as the boys themselves.

  I didn’t have my first till freshman year of college, when I was eighteen. Not that I hadn’t tried before. Throughout high school I had diddled away under the covers late at night fairly frequently, in the hopes that I’d someday be able to join that Special Girls Club. But I was always so tense and angry at myself while I did it that I couldn’t get there. There were two main reasons I wanted to come: (1) I thought it would be the most exciting physical experience of my life and (2) all my girlfriends could. I’ve always wanted to be the best at everything, and it killed me that in the coming department I lagged behind.

  I tried to get my friends to give me specifics on exactly what happened when you came, but they all gave the same infuriating answer: “I can’t explain it, but you’ll know when you have one.” I hated hearing that. It was so vague. And the few girls who tried to be more articulate gave such differing explanations of what it felt like that they weren’t much help either. Some called it a wave, others a shudder or an explosion.

  The boys I fooled around with were even more clueless than I was. Most didn’t seem aware that there was a Red Button down there, much less seem interested in finding it. Instead, they’d utilize the plunger technique, which went something like this: (1) Shove as many fingers as far up as possible. (2) Move them around aimlessly for several minutes, as though tickling a kitten’s neck. (3) Stop whenever you grow bored.

  But because I didn’t even know what to do myself, I wasn’t able to give much coaching to the few guys who knew what a clit was. Inevitably I would let them diddle away for a while, then I’d sigh, pat their shoulders, and say, “That’s OK. You can stop now.” I kept hoping one of them would protest and say, “No, I don’t want to. It’s really important to me to make you feel good.” But instead they’d give me these relieved looks, then ask if I’d mind blowing them. And down I’d go. I figured someone should get some satisfaction, and if it wasn’t going to be me, it might as well be them.

  Will, my boyfriend at Brown, got me closer than any guy before. He tweaked and licked, tickled and poked for hours on end, to no avail. But as frustrated as I was, there was a part of me that didn’t really want a guy to be the first to get me there. I felt like it would be an injustice—because I’d always believed a woman should be master of her own ceremony.

  One late night in his dorm room, a few months after we started going out, before he found out about the Bo Rodriguez makeout, Will presented me with two paperback books: My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday and For Yourself: The Fulfillment of Female Sexuality by Lonnie Barbach. There was a picture of Lonnie Barbach on the back of her book. She was Semitic looking, mustachioed, and young. I was sure this sister Jewess could help me. The first sentence of the book was, “So you’ve never had an orgasm, or you don’t think you have.” I nearly wept with joy.

  For the next three weeks, with the help of Barbach and Friday, I embarked on my emission impossible. I tweaked myself as often as I could, anytime I had a spare hour—but without fruition. One afternoon Will came over to my room. We put on our favorite mix tape, the one with “The Weakness in Me,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Rock Me Again & Again & Again & Again & Again & Again,” and “Tell Me Something Good,” got in bed, and got to work. Those songs riled me up. When Will finally left to go to the library, I closed the door behind him, still feeling dazed and on edge, and decided
it was time to make the kitty purr.

  I stopped the mix tape, stood in front of my CD collection, pulled out Sly and the Family Stone’s Fresh, and slid it into the player. I got back under the covers and told myself I wasn’t going to try to come. I was going to listen to the music, relax, and enjoy the ride. I’d been going at it for about thirty-five minutes when suddenly, right in the middle of “Que Sera, Sera,” something strange happened. I began to feel like my cunt wanted to sneeze. I tried to relax into the feeling, and breathe slowly and calmly. I listened to the funk and kept wanking—not fast and mad, but slow and gentle, nice and easy. The sneeze feeling got more and more intense, until finally it happened. The clap. The wave. The shudder. It was this very slight, very brief eruption, and it didn’t last more than five seconds, but it was the biggest victory of my life.

  I raced to the library and breathlessly told Will the good news. He shut his book, we went back to his room, and got to work. It took almost an hour, but with my coaching and his persistence, he finally rocked my Gibraltar.

  That was the beginning of a new phase of our sex life. As I got better at making myself come, he got better at making me come too. I even got to the point where I could pop during sex—but only if somebody was buffing the muff while we were going at it. That hand reliance bothered me. I wanted my sex with Will to be exactly like in the movies. You didn’t see Tom Cruise reach down to diddle Kelly McGillis in Top Gun or Richard Gere tweak Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman. OK. Maybe Tom and Dick aren’t the choicest examples of raging male heterosexual power, but it still bugged me. I wanted to come from cock and cock alone, because I had this idea in my head that Real Women could.