Ryan was a really good-looking guy in a potato bisque kind of way—he had blue eyes like turquoise jewelry and creamy, starchy skin. But he was a lousy kisser in the worst of both worlds: sloppy, and a pecker. Maybe it was because he was one of those handsome guys who aren’t great in bed because they don’t need to try hard. So, in the interest of salvaging our make-out experience, and because I’ve never considered myself cute enough to be able to “just lie there,” I started talking dirty, narrating the action and its potential. He got excited, and it was better. We fooled around for a little while longer; my butt nestled between the writing surface and the built-in corkboard of my dorm-furniture desk. Later that evening, I walked Ryan downstairs, signed him out with the NYU security guard, and he went home to sleep underneath a table that doubled as a playing field for horizontally shiftable wooden players grafted onto steel handles able to flip completely.
LATER THAT night, I got a phone call. I squinted out my eye crunk to see the clock radio staring a red “4:45” back at me and picked up quickly, before my roommate woke up too. It was Ryan, and he was breathing deeply.
Here is me: [groggy, croaky] “Hello?”
“Hi,” said the random guy I met at the gym, in a tiny, faltering, intense voice; timid and urgent at once.
I was actually scared. I never heard him speak in that voice. What if he had a split personality and I was on the phone with “Stabby” Ryan? As frequent as my interactions with the mentally ill are, I still react with fear at the moment they reveal their characteristic abnormal behavior. I got scared immediately because now I knew Ryan wasn’t just weird—Ryan was crazy. I could hear it in his voice. And he was calling me in the middle of the night. Hoping that he was the harmless kind of crazy, I tried to pretend on the phone that I didn’t know Ryan was nuts.
Me, Again: [cranky, squawky] “Ryan, is that you?”
Ryan: “Yeah.”
I waited for whatever a sane person would give as a reason why he was calling me in the middle of the night. When that didn’t come, I said instead: “All right. Well, hi. What’s up?”
There was a pause here, and some whimpering, like he was trying to get himself to say what he’d called to say, shy around his intentions. Like what you hear when a dog is making the decision to do something he’s not supposed to, but really wants to do, like steal a scrap from the kitchen counter or drop the sock in its mouth to howl at a high-pitched sound. From his urgency and his hemming, it seemed like Ryan had been thinking about what he wanted to say since he left my dorm.
He continued, in his itsy voice. “I’m just . . . I’m just up, and I’m thinking about you, and . . . and . . .”
“Yeah?” I prompted, impatient and vocally beginning to sound a little like Joy Behar, which is what happens when Jewish girls decide they have no more patience. He could have said anything at that point. “I want to be a tiger.” “You smell like German Potato Salad.” “Let’s rob a train.” He was a crazy person. It didn’t have to make sense. I just wanted him to be out with it.
“Well,” Ryan continued, “I was thinking about what I wanna do with you.”
Oh, there it was. Ryan was calling about sex. That was the emergency. I’d started something with our ribald discourse earlier in the night, and now his erotic expression was flowing. I wished he’d figured out what he’d wanted to say earlier in the evening, when I was sitting on the desk, his tongue wedged in my ear like a slab of clay. Now he was creeping me out and it was 4:50 a.m., and there was still a good chance he could say something bonkers about how his mom is made of celery or that he wanted to wear my neck skin as an ascot.
“Uh-huh,” I coaxed, less Behar-like, but still wary.
“Well,” Ryan said. “I’ve been thinking, like I said, about what I want, and. And . . . well. Here’s the thing.” He inhaled deeply. Then, he continued.
“I really want to share a cock with you.”
Here is where the long pause goes, and a couple of rapid eye blinks until I’m super-awake, and then, now, also, the disappointing music they use on The Price Is Right when a contestant overbids on the Showcase Showdown or puts the disk in the wrong slot on the Plinko board or otherwise screws up her chances of winning a prize. Bom-bom-ba-WOOOOOOO.
“What?” I asked, which is the only way to respond to what was said.
“I want to share a cock with you,” Ryan repeated. “I want to have a three-way with you and another guy. So badly.”
So, that was it? He’d had a sexual epiphany in the middle of the night, and suddenly it was my responsibility to vet his fantasy, just because I had him over and unleashed the beast when I started yammering? It was at once the most artless and poorly timed request for a three-way I’d ever borne witness to, but at the same time, a huge relief. Now that I knew why he was calling, the odds were considerably diminished that Ryan was outside my dorm with a crème brûlée torch and a hacksaw. He was just awake, and pleading me for a cock-share, or at least an ear to lend.
NOW, I’VE thought about having three-ways before, because I’m an American. But there’s a wide gulf of difference between thinking about something that seems like a hoot and actually going through the steps to make it happen. For example, I used to joke about how “fun” it would be to drop acid and see Rosie O’Donnell play the Cat in the Hat in Seussical, when it was still on Broadway. Sure, it seems like it would be hilarious, but once you’re in the Richard Rodgers Theatre, and your armrests are melting, and Horton is singing a ballad about how nobody understands him, all of a sudden it’s not so funny anymore.
But Ryan wasn’t joking, and I needed a moment to sort out his request. I’d never dated a guy who wanted a three-way with a “guy-guy-girl” ratio, which, admittedly, holds the most appeal to me, of all possible permutations. Being the only girl seems like an awful lot of attention, and I was used to feeling like I did backflips for the interest of the one attractive guy who came around every second solstice. The bounty of two erections seemed decadent. I imagine I’d feel like a starving refugee at the hot bar at Whole Foods, except the steaming curried chicken would be rubbing its groin against my butt and the garlic potatoes would be slapping its balls against my chin. It’s still more appealing to me than the popular alternative. I’ve always taken offense to the “girl-girl-guy” arrangement, because, with the exception of maybe Oskar Schindler, I don’t believe there’s a man who’s ever lived who has deserved sex with more than one woman at a time. I don’t mean to disparage men: I’m just saying they’re way more advantaged than women in pretty much every department, but especially when it comes to having their pick of great girls. Do they really need two of us at a time? Isn’t it enough that they “run society”? A guy claiming he’s entitled to a three-way with two women is like a chubby kid demanding frosting on his Snickers bar.
It was also Ryan’s phrasing that turned me off. He didn’t want to share me. “Me” was not the object of his sentence. He wanted to share an as-yet-unprocured cock. Besides being alerted to what may be generously described as Ryan’s bi-curiosity—and sure, to this day, Nate and I still refer to him by his nickname, “Ry-curious”—I think it was the concept of sharing itself that turned me off most of all.
Because what’s the point of going guy-guy-girl if you’re not the star of the show? Fuck sharing. I live alone, I don’t have any sisters, and I grew up the younger of two, my older brother a substantial eight years my senior, which afforded him “third parent” status in our household. I don’t like sharing anything, including clothes, sandwiches, and attention. I relate to Daffy Duck’s “mine mine mine all mine” policy. And also, I mean, please; like anybody’s cock is so big that you’d be like, “I can’t finish this! Let’s split it.”
Also, as I mentioned, there was the bi thing. Bi doesn’t always mean gay, but when I hear it from men, I take it to mean “gay soon.” It’s like when you meet an anorexic who’s still eating ice cubes. So when I got Ryan’s phone call, and he said what he said, I thought to myself right away, �
��Wow, that’s pretty gay” and, also, “This is over.”
Nobody loves gay guys more than me. But you can’t date them, and even Liza has learned by now that you can’t marry them, even if they love you so much they can let themselves forget that you have a vagina. They never forget that you have boobs—everybody likes those, and they’re fun to put in rhinestone dresses. But closeted gays who end up turning their hags into beards are capable of confusing themselves to the point of becoming temporarily blinded to their true orientation, in the name of loving everything about a woman except for the hole between her legs. (The other one.) But straight girls deserve to be with men who can’t stop thinking about pussy, even when they are giving a eulogy or changing a diaper. And gay guys can’t give us that.
It’s a double standard, because a little bit of bi in a boy turns the boy gay. But even a heap of bi in a girl can still mean you’re just dealing with a straight woman who happens to be super horny. It’s not the same. And while plenty of girls are open-minded when it comes to kissing their boyfriends in “grunge drag” lipstick, I don’t think that even comes close to getting turned on seeing your beloved with a dick in his mouth.
Ryan was hardly my beloved at that point; he was just some random cutie I was getting to know. And I guess there’s something shitty about being so knee-jerk in my ideas about what makes a suitable male partner. After all, isn’t the idea of a guy getting fucked only degrading because it makes him more like a woman?
Maybe that was just it. I didn’t want to date a bisexual guy any more than I wanted to date a woman. And I don’t want to date women. The closest I ever came to hooking up with a girl is when I went over to Regina Mancini’s apartment to smoke pot and order Chinese food, and ended up feeling her boobs because Vivian, the girl she had a crush on, didn’t show up. I played makeshift second fiddle to absentee Vivian, getting bossed around by Regina, a petite Sicilian who would go on to become a traffic cop. It wasn’t hot. I played with Regina’s tits with benign curiosity, like a child fooling around with pizza dough or Flubber. I played with them the way gay guys feel up their prom dates.
I POLITELY got off the phone with Ryan the night of his confession, explaining that I had to get up for a History of Television class in a mere fourteen hours, and soon after that, we went our separate ways. I imagine he figured out that we were not what either of us wanted, and I hope he found what he did.
I ran into Ryan five years later, in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn where my then-boyfriend lived at the time. Ryan was sitting next to a pretty girl—another redhead, as a matter of fact—on the same side of a booth at a burrito place on Smith Street. I said hello and introduced my boyfriend, and everybody was very nice, making mannered chitchat in what would have otherwise been an awkward interaction. My boyfriend and I left with our take-out, and I couldn’t help looking back over my shoulder to see if Ryan and his new girlfriend were joined, after our departure, by a third party, maybe returning from the men’s room to sit across from them in the booth. That wasn’t the case, but I did notice they were sharing a burrito. Good for them.
white noise
There are two major things you need to know about Colin.
The first is that he was the frontman of what was at the time considered a very important noise band. The second is that he loved the taste of his own semen.
Colin and I spent a lot of time talking on the phone when I was a sophomore in college, at first because I was interviewing him for a school magazine, and then because I had a big fat crush on the guy. Colin was forty-one to my nineteen, which paralleled our physical distance. He lived in Northern California, and I was in New York. We spoke on the phone frequently during what, today, I can assuredly dub the loneliest period of my adult life. I hadn’t met Nate yet, I was starting to grow apart from Ronit, whom I’d remained friends with since Hebrew school, and the only person in my life besides “punk rock enough to eat food out of the garbage” Eve was my roommate Jodi, she of the missing row of knuckles, a hand deformity I never got used to. Jodi played the first two Ben Folds Five albums around our dorm constantly, and I blame that music for permeating what was already a melancholy, twee sort of “Billy Joel meets Pippin with a yeast infection” period of my life. I’d listen to Colin’s band to cut the aftertaste from all that cascading, piano-y Chapel Hill pop. His music was alienating, clever, and practically unlistenable; Colin’s albums were castaways in my CD collection, left over from high school.
But this isn’t a story about music. This is a story about how I was so lonely that I spoke every-other-nightly on the phone with an eccentric string bean who got so excited about whatever he happened to be talking about—politics, music, art—that he would end up lecturing me on subjects for hours. I couldn’t tell if Colin was brilliant or even smart; he made sense, so he wasn’t totally bananas. But enthusiasm and loquacious-ness can be a decent guise for what is otherwise a mediocre intellect. I couldn’t tell. I was just so glad to be on the phone with a guy I thought was kind of interesting, who made music that I’d listened to in high school. It’s a popular fantasy to get with a guy you used to think was attractive from afar, and at the very least, talking to Colin distracted me from the millionth repetition of “Selfless, Cold and Composed” that blasted from Jodi’s room, ten feet away.
My “conversations” with Colin would have been more two-sided if I were taking notes: our relationship was an accidental correspondence course in Colin 101. He’d get himself worked up about some abstract concept rooted in the discipline of new media or transcendental meditation or why it’s wrong to advertise junk food to children, and the next thing I’d know, I’d be peeing into the plastic Bed, Bath & Beyond wastebasket I kept in my bedroom instead of interrupting him to ask whether I could call him back after I used the bathroom.
I understand if you need to go back and reread that last part. But indeed, peeing in the garbage can is what I did—on more than one occasion—because I would feel self-conscious stopping Colin in the middle of his impressive flow of enthusiastic discourse in order to start a flow of my own. It’s out of character for me not to use a toilet like a civilized person with no desire to mark one’s territory or to save one’s body fluids in the name of eccentricity, agoraphobia, or sloth. But I didn’t want the flush to gross out Colin (though apparently I have no qualms disgusting you), and I couldn’t just leave my urine in the tank for Jodi to find later. No, clearly the best and most socially considerate thing to do in deference to my long-distance professor/imaginary boyfriend and my disfiguredly digited roommate was to piss in a garbage can, wipe myself with Kleenex, then pour the fluid waste down the communal bathtub—a relatively silent endeavor.
I told you this was a dark period of my life.
So, even though I didn’t feel technically necessary when I was on the phone with Colin, he still figured that it would be a good idea to buy himself a plane ticket to come out and visit me for a weekend. I don’t know why he felt compelled to meet me, honestly. Short of a dial tone, I was the most passive phone audience I can imagine. But maybe that’s what appealed to him about me. Plus, my fandom, my age. My vagina. No, I’m not bragging—I had one, even then.
So, Colin came out to visit. And I remember being attracted to him right away. He was tall and thin, with salt-and-pepper hair, and tattoos all over his arms. He dressed like a kid, in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers, as all musicians do, whether they’re forty-one or sixteen. And in person, he was similarly gregarious, geeky, and oddly indifferent to my presence. Until we fucked each other.
It was tough to get through to Colin, even once he got to New York, that my principle interest in him was romantic. I think guys like him are preternaturally oblivious to connections beyond the pale of the casual. It’s a musician thing, I think. Those guys are just happy to make friends, and they seem to have a bevy of different kinds of relationships across the country. All those amicable connections prove resourceful for touring because they’ll always have a place to stay, wh
ether it’s with fans, peers, idols, groupies, or fellow freaks. Part of being a musician is the ability to form and release weak social bonds, if only because of the travel involved in making one’s living. Then, there’s the task of navigating boundaries with the fellow guys in your band: the fittest survivors in that racket tend to be the easiest-going. It’s a big reason why I, Captain Intensity, am fundamentally incompatible with those of the Wah Wah Brotherhood.
But whether he’d known or not, I’d already decided, in my typically impudent, freshly adolescent fashion, that I wanted Colin to fuck me, under the covers of my twin-size dorm bed, even though one of the only things I knew about him personally—as opposed to what I knew about his music—was that he was not only a vegetarian, but he was a vegan. And Colin was one of the first vegans I’d ever met.
NOW, I am probably about to alienate the remaining six or seven young women who like Sleater-Kinney and confused this book with The Veganomicon just because it landed in the Alternative Women’s Studies section of your locally owned independent bookstore, but I have to go on record about the following. I haven’t met a lot of vegans who aren’t a little crazy, a little dumb, a bit of both, or a lot of either. And I’ve met plenty since Colin.
I love animals, and I watch what I eat. I’m the furthest thing from Ted Nugent you can be while still loving Dolly Parton. But I think of veganism as a counterculturally sanctioned eating disorder. There are different kinds of people who go vegan for different reasons, and here’s a rough working field guide.
Firstly, there are Animal Rights Vegans. These include misanthropes who prefer the company of their pets to conversations with humans, and people who love starting emotionally heated fights that nobody can win. Some “adopt” feral cats off the street—even the ones that will claw your face into skin ribbon—because they feel so bad for the homeless cats, they forget that they are wild animals, like crocodiles or kangaroos, which have no place inside of an apartment. Animal Rights Vegans have no problem with PETA—its objectification of women in its ad campaigns, its KKK campaign for which protestors wore white sheets outside the Westminster Dog Show to protest the “eugenics” of purebreds, or that poster they ran comparing chicken farms to concentration camps. That’s how much the Animal Rights Vegan can actively dislike people.
Julie Klausner Page 7