“I’ll get a water,” I say, and then apologetically offer by way of explanation, “I stopped drinking a few months ago. I’m just so over the top as it is, you know.”
He looks at my six-foot-two frame.
“You’re a pretty big girl.”
“Whoa.” I laugh. “Don’t ever tell a girl she’s ‘big.’ I’m tall. And I fucking hate it when people give me shit about my height.”
His eyes twinkle.
“Why?” he says. “Just because your height makes you a mutant, is that what you mean?”
I laugh. I am amazed, horrified, delighted. I like dickhead funny when it is actually funny.
“Yeah, I just try to look like a model,” I say. “That’s what I can only hope a guy will fetishize, you know. Being pretty and skinny.”
He glares at me. A glimmer of a smile.
“But you’re not,” he says. “Pretty or skinny.”
“Man,” I say, laughing louder than I have in a while, “I love what a cocksucker you are. That’s hilarious. It’s fun to be eviscerated in such a clean, asshole-y way.”
That night he requests me on Facebook, and we keep in touch.
When I write a satirical piece in the Post giving advice to men on how to have an affair—based on the shit show of a tabloid story that is ESPN talking head Steve Phillips’s cheating scandal—not too long after, with perfect irony, I get a message from the Married Man.
“Excellent article,” he writes. “You certainly know your infidelity.”
I lie to myself and think: Wow, this guy thinks I’m really funny and what a great ally he’ll be to me in the entertainment industry. Instead of the truth of the situation: This is chum. He wants to have an affair.
This guy doesn’t like my talent. He likes my insecurity—and my fear that I have none.
Soon after, the text comes. “Want to get together tonight? My wife is out of town.”
“Wait,” I text back. “You’re married.”
“Yes, I am,” he replies. “Want to come over?”
So now the moral question is laid out in front of me with perfect transparency.
I can’t decide to do something like this on my own. I need some kind of magical realism outside person to blame for what I do or don’t do. So I duck outside of the Post and call an old married friend of mine who is the perfect husband, thinking he can talk me out of it.
“I don’t know,” my friend says. “I don’t necessarily think it’s such a bad thing.”
“Wait,” I balk. “Do you cheat on your wife?”
I can hear his hesitation on the phone, and because I’m a human bullshit detector, I know.
“Well, clearly you do,” I say. “Let me just give you some advice. If your wife ever asks, don’t pause—not even for a second.”
I end the call, stare at my phone, and write the Married Man back asking what time I should come over.
I’ve just been given the “everything is shit anyway” mental justification I was looking for in talking to my friend. When in reality, I’m the one who is actively making things shit myself.
When I was married to James and found out about my ex-husband’s affairs, I recoiled, emailing these women years later at 2 a.m. from my work computer at the Post with the one-line message “Just wanted to say you’re a cunt.”
Oh, how wrong I was. I am the cunt. The Married Man is the cunt. We are all the cunt. Anyone who has ever cheated (and the statistics are utterly depressing) is a huge fucking cunt.
That night, the affair begins. When I arrive at the Married Man’s apartment in central Manhattan, his eyes are already ablaze from several bong hits. He leads me into his study, overflowing with Emmys. One of the globes has come off, and he rolls it around in his hands.
“That’s the problem with these things—they break,” he says.
Then he tosses it to me to catch.
“Nice move,” I say.
Then he hands me his bong.
I haven’t been drinking or drugging for a few months now, but I know I’m about to do something wrong—really wrong. I need some plausible deniability as to why I did it, right? Alcohol and drugs are so great for that. Without a moment’s hesitation, I lift the bong to my lips—and inhale deeply, feeling the wash of simpleton fluidity. Such a relief not to think.
Just like that, my weak-ass attempt at sobriety is blown. I cough, and he hands me a beer to wash it down.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” he says.
I nod through my coughing fit. Yes. It’s good.
He keeps checking. “Are you high yet?” he asks. “Want some more?”
“Yes,” I finally say. “I’m high.”
He comes over to the couch where I am sitting, looks at me with sickness and excitement in his eyes, and kisses me.
“I was afraid that might happen,” he says. He starts taking off my clothes and says, “Let’s go to the bedroom.”
He is so hungry, so out of control. He presses his face into mine, asking, “Did you think about me all day? Did you feel it the instant we met? I want to fuck you all the time. Say it. Say you’ll fuck me all the time.”
That’s when it hits me: Oh my God. This is an ego fuck. I am fucking his ego.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
Afterward, we smoke cigarettes on his balcony.
“Holy shit,” he says. “Now I’m thinking about what I’ve done. I just did a horrible thing. You are a temptress.”
Not really. Just a fellow self-sabotaging depressive, but whatever.
The next time I see the Married Man I meet him at a Thai place near the Post for dinner, and he dryly brings up the newest cheating scandal dominating the headlines.
“Can you believe this Tiger Woods thing?” he says with an angry straight face. “What kind of a scumbag cheats on his wife?”
I laugh, hate myself, feel aroused, and hate myself some more.
Any moral high ground I ever held over the Other Women who fooled around with my ex-husband is wiped out. Everything I’ve done—everything I’m doing right in this moment—is unjustifiable, unredeemable. It provides such a surprising sense of relief, too. It feels like freedom. No burdens. No moral questions. Say yes to every bad idea and accept that you are a bad person. You can’t get lower than that, right?
But eventually my conscience does catch up. I ask the Married Man if we can just be friends. No, he tells me. He’s not interested in that.
This makes me angry in a very specific way. Why do I have to lose out on this guy’s friendship when I try to do the right thing? Fuck it. I’ll just make things even worse then.
So instead of shutting it down, I bring my three-way companion Bianca into the mix.
“Want to get a hotel with me and my friend?” I text him one evening after one of our most recent trysts at the St. Marks Hotel. His reply is instantaneous. When and where?
I’m riding high now on just shrugging off any kind of consequences or responsibility. Because, I mean, society is so fucked-up and a guy who I thought was the perfect husband is cheating and the gun control problem and 9/11, so why bother, right? Everyone is terrible and we’re all going to die. When you make everything into this big awful incredibly gallows humor joke, you can pretty much justify anything.
“Let’s go shopping,” I suggest to Bianca. We stroll into American Apparel, and the young gay clerk keeps bringing us boring outfits until we finally tell him what’s up.
The clerk smiles. “Three-way with a married guy? I know just what you’re looking for.”
I buy a sheer body stocking and Bianca gets a barely-covering-her-ass blue mesh dress. Now fully costumed, we meet the Married Man at the Standard in the East Village.
“I told my wife I was at Avatar,” he says.
As I kiss and undress Bianca, I ask in a nauseating infantilized voice, “How do you like the movie?”
We all get stoned, and it is fun for about a minute. But when he begins fucking Bianca, it’s like I have disappeared completely.
Of course that happens. What the hell did I think would happen? She’s fresh meat. So after a few minutes, I just bolt completely.
A few weeks later, Bianca comes to see me perform at Jon Friedman’s Rejection Show at the Bell House in Brooklyn, and she comes up to me at the bar, glowing and flush with the scent of sex.
“Dude,” I say. “Did you just come from seeing him?”
Bianca beams and says, “We have a new place. The Liberty Inn!”
I snatch my phone and send the Married Man a text with just the name of the hotel and a question mark. He doesn’t write back, which is unusual.
It is Valentine’s Day. His wife found the phone. His wife read the text.
I have just completely devastated this man’s marriage.
Neither Bianca nor I ever see him again.
Of all the shitty things I’ve done, I think hurting his family is perhaps the worst of all. But I also very much believe that it is the hiding of our secrets that create our sickness. There’s no excuse for what I did. There’s no excuse for what he did either.
It wasn’t all for naught, though. Because I am positive that after that disaster, the Married Man never cheated on his wife again. Most men never do—when they realize just how close they have come to losing everything that really matters.
* * *
FORTUNATELY FOR MY career at the Post, I have nothing that really matters.
One day I get a more-urgent-than-normal email from my new editor.
“Let’s discuss a nutty adventure story that’s come up,” she writes. While I highly doubt there could be any adventure that’s nuttier than the state of my current personal life, my editor quickly proves me wrong.
It turns out everyone in the media is talking about the an- nouncement of “Markus,” the very first legal male prostitute in America. Markus just gave an interview to Details about his thoughts on his role, an interview in which he, no lie, compared himself to Rosa Parks and Gandhi. They’ve stopped letting him do press because of this, so instead I book an appointment posing as an excited sex tourist.
Within the next seventy-two hours I have made a flight and car ride, eventually arriving at the tiny dusty yellow brothel known as Shady Lady Ranch in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Markus comes out to greet me, wearing a blue satin shirt, and guides me into a humble suite with a little Buddha statue. Then he asks me for $500 and tells me that we will first need to “inspect each other in the shower to make sure there are no discrepancies.”
Holy crap. A shower immediately? I’ve already decided I have no interest in sleeping with this guy. Hookers just don’t really do it for me. I’m all about the ego fuck, too, when it comes right down to it. But who am I kidding? I’m not going to blow this assignment just because I don’t want to stand naked in the shower with the guy.
Dignity? Never met her.
The two of us stand together awkwardly in the water, and I do a barely glancing “inspection” of this twenty-five-year-old Alabama native with an eight-and-a-half-inch dick who looks a bit like Steve-O. I know how the sex worker industry works. They keep tighter standards than most guys you meet online. Markus looks me up and down and shares his assessment.
“Wow,” he says, “you’re like an eight or a nine.”
So good. If I did write a Yelp review of the experience, I would be sure to add: If a lady is paying half a grand for your time, maybe just go for bust and say ten.
I quickly put my clothes back on, and we move to the bed, but his unrelenting pressure for me to touch him is irritating. There’s something bittersweet about the fact that even when you hire a guy to be your companion, it still feels like a shitty second date in New York.
“I love oral,” Markus says, showing me various ribbed prophylactics. “I love eating. I’m telling you, you’re not getting the full experience. You will come your pants. I’m serious.”
As romantic as that sounds, I decline. So he tries a different tactic.
“Or I can put a condom on, and you can give me oral? Or . . . I love to be stroked.”
“Yeah, it’s just . . . I don’t think I’m that good at it,” I say, thinking about how good at it I am. “But I think it’s hot when guys get themselves off. I want to see how you touch yourself, because every time I’ve done it I’ve messed it up.”
“Sweetie,” he says, beginning to jerk himself off, “you’ve paid for this. You just stroke in a slow rhythmic motion.”
I fully embrace the virginal rube character I’m doing now. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I ask.
“No, that doesn’t hurt at all,” he says, laughing. “This is a learning experience for you. It’s soft and hard at the same time.”
As he jerks off, Markus waxes on philosophically about politics and psychology and literature and Buddhism. Then he asks me to “stroke him off”—once again.
I’m starting to get a little worried he’s suspicious about my complete lack of interest in doing anything sexual. So I give him a half-hearted hand job and call it a day.
When I fly back to New York, I am immediately put on deadline for the story. Around 6 p.m. I sign off on the final proof of my pages. But while reporters are shown the mock-up of their story inside the newspaper, if the story ends up on the front page—or “the wood” as it’s called in tabloid parlance (because it used to be set with wooden slabs)—we don’t really see it.
While I never have reason to go up to the tenth floor where the A-1 page is set and designed, Mackenzie does. So, as she’s upstairs doing some important editor stuff, she just happens upon the next day’s cover all mocked up and ready to go. “Would You Pay $500 to Have Sex with This Man? Our Reporter Did!”
Mackenzie does a double take and finds the designer. “You guys, Mandy didn’t sleep with him. You guys know that, right?”
It gets changed last-minute to “Spend the Night.” Better. But it doesn’t really matter. Because the next day, the pickup on the piece translates like an international game of telephone. By the time it reaches Turkey the translation is “US Reporter Sleeps with Male Hooker for News” and leads to a lot of fan mail in broken English saying things like, “Best journalism! Very hard working assignment looking good.” In Asia, one of those creepy yet hilarious animations is done, featuring me and Markus taking a shower, making passionate love, bickering—and making passionate love again. The press requests are insane, and within a span of a couple of hours I’ve had to turn down The View while making appearances on Inside Edition, Joy Behar, and tons of radio from around the world.
At the end of this very long day, I head to Langan’s alone to get a drink. I’ve gotten only a few hours of sleep and am fried. As I sip on a Maker’s, I check my email at the bar and get a Google news alert that Gawker has written a follow-up piece to their morning link to the story.
“Should the New York Post Hire Hookers? Media Types Spend the Day Jeering.”
Meanwhile, Markus, whose real name is Patrick L. Norton, actually loves the attention. He writes on his Facebook, “If I can help and be satirized so be it. . . . I’ve never felt so important in my entire life.”
I feel happy for him and betrayed by whoever the hell is sending in tips about me. But whatever, that person at Gawker is just doing their job, too. I get it far too well.
Over at the other end of the bar, I spot a Fox reporter I’ve chatted with before, and we joke around about the prosti-dude until I realize how spent I am. Which means I have two choices: self-care . . . or ensure that the night provides a distraction enough from the self that so badly needs caring for.
“Give me one good reason to stay,” I tell the reporter.
He has an answer at the ready. “I have really good drugs.” Yeah. That sounds right.
So we head into the Langan’s bathroom and begin sharing an eight-ball, and I feel that same spinning, speeding rush of asshole invincibility I love so much. When I tell him I need to head back to the Post to pick up all my shit, the two of us have the brilliant idea that I should de
finitely do a bump off my desk. Because: story.
When we get back to his place in Midtown, I can’t stop rambling. Everything about the day is so preposterously heightened already, but that’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough for me. I want to go darker, weirder, sadder, kinkier, more. So I ask him if we can role-play.
“How about I pretend I’m . . . fifteen,” I suggest. “And let’s, like, make it really crazy.”
He “yes ands” my shitty sexual improv in the most hilarious way possible.
“Okay, yeah,” he says. “Yeah . . . and, uh, if you don’t sleep with me . . . I’m going to fucking kill you!”
I fully burst out laughing.
“Okay, maybe not that extreme,” I suggest.
“You’re a whore,” he says.
“Sure,” I say. “That works.”
* * *
DURING THE COURSE of writing the prosti-dude piece, I become friends with one the Post’s top lawyers, and soon, sexual partners with him, too. It’s becoming clearer and clearer what a dangerous game my life is becoming.
Back at his place, as we are sixty-nining in his bed, I whisper in a sickly little girl voice, “I’m going to file a sexual harassment claim against you!”
“Just . . . please . . .” he says, “stop . . . talking.”
Is it fun? I don’t know. Is self-harm fun? You be the judge.
When I leave his place, I limp back home and try to figure out what the hell I’m even doing with all these degrading hookups.
I can’t help but remember what a friend once told me about how he had been sober for several years. At the time, I surprised myself with my reaction. “Huh,” I said, “I should probably do that.” He told me if I ever wanted to check out a “meeting” to give him a call.
This time, I think I might finally be ready.
Because things are getting weird. I can see that. I’m acting rashly. I’m making stupid decisions. Not only have I hooked up with a company lawyer, I have also fooled around with News Corp’s very hot maintenance guy in his giant office (no idea why that dude had such a giant office) while he told me secrets like knowing who was going to get fired first because he handled key card deactivations.
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