I didn’t want Greg to be my boyfriend. I just wanted him to be nice to me in public if we were going to keep having sex in private, or maybe call me on occasion to see what was up, after he was done with me for the night. Then, one day, when he decided he didn’t want to see me anymore—that it was over—I cried in front of him and asked him to reconsider. But he said no—that we were through. He was done and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. I met him at a sports bar near my apartment and asked him to come home with me, but he said no again, and he was cold when he cut me off, like my pleas really disgusted him, and I didn’t see him after that until years later, once he’d moved away.
WHICH BRINGS us to the embarrassingly recent past. It was between Christmas and New Year’s when I met Greg, again, at that same sports bar, where I’d been drinking with friends after a show. I was thinner and had more lines around my eyes, but he looked the same, except he had grown a goatee, which is the worst possible thing you can add to an ugly face. Seriously: a hockey mask or a Hitler mustache are better alternatives. A goatee, especially on a corpulent man, is like a hair ring floating atop a raw loaf of bread. Goatee-growers don’t understand that their beards do not obscure their double-chins—in fact, they draw attention to them the way a red circle on a math test shows you where you went wrong. Greg’s goatee had some gray in it, which reminded me of our age disparity. He was at least ten years older than me, and when we were hooking up like college students years ago, my only excuse of consenting to being roughhoused so shoddily was my relative age and inexperience with good sex. But what was Greg’s excuse? His being old never meant, as I’d then hoped, that he was an adult. There’s a big difference between a “grown-up” and an “old guy.”
Greg and I got to talking at the bar, and it got late, and he asked if he could “crash on my couch,” because he no longer had a place in New York. And because it was raining really hard, and for a lot of other reasons that have to do with going back in time and taking the temperature of the person you used to be, I said that he could.
He was polite in the cab, and there was no touching, but as soon as we got upstairs, he shoved his tongue in my mouth artlessly and groped me with the awkward passion of an entire high school marching band. Which I guess I was open to, having agreed to let him into my apartment and knowing what that meant, but I was surprised at just how awful his Shrek-like hands and mouth felt all over me. It used to be different; I used to like this.
I wanted to push him away, but then, suddenly, I felt the status shift. Now I was the one who had more power than him, if only because I’d belatedly realized how gross this all was. I was older and, if not wiser, at least slightly less of a dum-dum. Re-hooking-up with Greg, years after I’d had real relationships with men who treated me well and good sex with guys who did and didn’t, made me realize how different I was from me, then. Because what was, at the time, I thought, a rough, kinky, exciting, crazy S&M relationship with a masterful pervert, was, in fact, just bad sex with a creep who had no idea what he was doing.
His paws groped me blindly and randomly, and I pushed him back and asked him to slow down. I tried taking the lead in the kissing, and closed my eyes so as to better pretend his floating hair ring was a full beard belonging to a forceful lumber-jack of some kind, but to no avail. It was terrible. But when he asked to move into the bedroom, I said “OK,” because “next” is always easier for me to say than “cut,” and also, I was, at this point, getting a pretty remarkable education in how much I’d changed, and the only way to graduate was to totally concede to the revolting action about to unfold.
We got into my bed. Greg took his clothes off and his body was predictably abhorrent. And when I reached my hand down his boxers to see if he was hard, I felt a distinctly aberrant, raised area on the skin of his inner thigh, the hair of which had been totally shaved. I pulled my hand back in disgust, like I had been burned by fire, and decided the best course of action was to ignore it and proceed with the matter at hand, avoiding that area of Greg’s body. After the most disappointing bout of sexual intercourse I’d consented to since college, I got ready to go to sleep, wrapping a towel around my neck, in line with my osteopath’s then-orders. (I have a neck thing, it’s boring. Basically, sometimes it hurts and I have to keep it supported at night. Now you know!) And Greg—the walrus with the gray-speckled soul patch and the demon growth on his shaved inner thigh—actually made fun of me when I put my towel on. He said I looked stupid. He was teasing me, but it wasn’t playful—it was a distinctively ill-intentioned display of a person sneering at somebody who is nicer and better-looking than they are. Like Sarah Palin cracking to crowds in her RNC speech about Obama being a “community organizer.” I tried hard to drift off to sleep before Greg so I didn’t have to hear his snores, and in the morning, he showed me in the light what I felt underneath his boxers the night before. And it was terrible.
There was an extended, raised patch of black and blue where his leg met his crotch. It was dark purple and fuchsia and all these other awful colors, and indeed the pubic hair that crept down to that area was shaved bare. I felt my stomach lurch into the kind of panicked nausea you get when you accidentally flip past the medical channel on cable and you see somebody’s eye getting sliced open, and somehow, there is pus. Greg’s body was gross enough, but this new development was unfathomable. What was going on? Was he sick? Did he give it to me?
He told me that he came back to New York because he had to get a heart operation at Mount Sinai, and, for the procedure, the surgeon went in through his leg. His gory bruise was evidence left in the wake of the invasive tubes or needles a surgeon shoved up the rotting building that was Greg’s body, in order to fix his weak heart. I wasn’t surprised that Greg had cardiac health problems, not just because he was a heavy guy in his forties who drank a lot, but also because people that angry often get sick. It is a fact.
I quickly looked away from his scar, and from the incision on his calf, which was also shaved.
“It’s pretty gross, isn’t it?” Greg said, then pressed my fingers hard against his incision. I felt some other kind of firm protrusion underneath all that black and blue grossness and screamed, “Ew!” He laughed at me like he had the night before, and like he did all the time when we were sleeping together, whenever I’d try to ask him something personal or when I tried out a joke that he thought was stupid.
Greg didn’t know how many times he’d brought me to the brink of shouting “Ew” years earlier, just by being naked. He didn’t know that his ugliness only made a hook-up situation that was merely disadvantageous into something my young imagination decided was “perverse.” That because when we were in the thick of it, Greg never let on for a minute that I was beautiful and he wasn’t. Not even in our intimate moments did I ever wrench a single compliment out of him. And he never knew that because he never told me I was fantastic, I worked harder to prove to him that I was. Because twenty-two-year-olds, even the ambitious ones, don’t have much else besides that to do. They like drama, and they need projects.
I got out of bed that morning, after jerking my hand away from the latest installation of the visiting horror show, and got dressed quickly, so he would know it was time to leave. He was starting to touch me again, and I had to get out of that situation as soon as possible, so I could start pretending it never happened. I showered with hot water as soon as he left, then took to the task of cleaning up my apartment.
I decided over the roar of the vacuum cleaner to never again allow him into my space. I’d worked so hard to rid my apartment and my life of people who habitually made me feel bad. Maybe I’d told myself that bringing Greg home again was a history lesson, but that morning, it just felt like a relapse. He was as gross as he ever was, only now he was actually sick. And how much had I really changed if I took him home with me and let him give me the business, as usual, but didn’t even have the compassion to sympathize with what he’d been through after he showed me his wounds? I felt guilty fo
r not giving him the same kindness I wished he’d shown me years ago, and foolish for putting myself into a situation I knew I’d outgrown. I felt like an asshole and a sap at the same time.
As I Swiffered obsessively, I wondered whether people like Greg could ever learn to be better men from others patient enough to teach him—and I thought about how relieved I was not to want that gig anymore. Because even if it was possible, I finally had better things to do with my time than roll up my sleeves and make a mess of myself trying to change what was wrong with him. After all, I thought, as I threw the sheets we’d slept on the night before into the laundry hamper, it took the technology at the disposal of a team of Mount Sinai’s finest surgeons just to fix his heart.
SECTION FOUR
exile in guyville
“Sexual choice . . . is one of the only areas where women are indisputably in control. It’s not until they’ve made a choice, and submitted to it, that the relationship is inverted—and the man is generally back in a position of power over her.”
—Neil Strauss, The Game
“I want a boyfriend. I want a boyfriend.”
—Liz Phair, “Fuck and Run”
paper clips versus larry flynt
I was at the after party for a low-rent awards ceremony at a comedy club, because my writing partner and I were nominated for a short film we made. She and I made a mockery out of the occasion, drinking from the bottle of Bacardi Light we brought along with us and heckling the presenters, and I ended up having a better time than I expected to, because I quickly got drunk. I know stories about “how wasted you were” are little-league, but the truth remains that when you drink, stupid things become silly, and who doesn’t like laughing at things that are silly? That’s right: nobody, and assholes.
I spotted a friend of mine, Wendy, at the bar when I went up for another round, and greeted her sloppily. We were chatting about her new boyfriend, whom she seemed nuts about, and because I have no boundaries, I pressured her for details. She said they were set up by a mutual friend, and I interrupted, “Hey!” which is always a good conversational transition.
“You should set ME up with somebody,” I realized in Wendy’s general direction, loudly. Unfazed, she told me that she knew somebody fantastic.
“He owns his own company. He’s got an amazing apartment. He’s cute.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I responded. “But is he a pervert?”
At the time, I couldn’t congratulate myself heartily enough for inquiring about whether Wendy’s friend had the most important quality I could think of in a potential mate. I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t grooming me for an awkward evening of polite conversation about siblings and New Yorker articles with a bore over drinks. I’d had my fill of arranged social time and didn’t want to kill time in the company of someone who didn’t know how to pull a girl’s hair in bed. One guy I’d been out with recently actually tugged at the ends of my hair, not the roots, like a third-grader trying to get the attention of his babysitter, which is not how you do that.
I told Wendy, with Bacardi breath and no shortage of confidence, that I didn’t want to waste time with the formalities of matchmaking unless I was certain there was a hungry, hungry weirdo with a prevailing fondness for deviant sex at the end of the equation. I sloppily detailed my demands, and my friend assured me that he and I were perfect for each other and that she’d give him my number the next day. I gave Wendy a hug, told her she was my best friend, and somehow piled myself into a cab.
Soon after, I got a call from her friend Josh. From our first conversation, I learned he “had a thing for redheads,” knew Wendy from college, and laughed like “heh-heh-heh,” which is how people let you know they’re flirting, instead of expressing the kind of laughter you release like a sneeze, when you actually think something is funny. When I spoke to Josh, I didn’t laugh either way.
He told me about his company, which he said did branding and licensing for “all different kinds” of products, but that he got the business off the ground when his company signed on a pretty famous porn star, whom he took credit for “making a household name.” He put her likeness on clothing and energy drinks and hooked her up with spokesperson opportunities for mainstream brands, and now she was getting legit roles that didn’t require double penetration and HD makeup for her asshole. Josh told me, maybe to seem like less of a sleaze, that he used to have a lot more to do with what he called “the industry,” meaning porno. But he assured me that today he attended the AVN Awards each year just to promote his client’s new line of erotic novels.
I guess that was why Wendy was so confident we’d be perfect for each other. I drunkenly told her I was looking for a pervert, and Josh was obviously comfortable with sex. In fact, it seemed like he still worked in the sex industry, but from the standpoint of making it legit. Much of his career, he said, was founded on the mainstreaming of sexuality, which is a nice way of saying he made porn more popular. And, on top of that, he was a nice Jewish boy who grew up minutes from my native Scarsdale. Even if this guy was the total square I suspected—AVN Awards notwithstanding—I was at least probably going to get laid for the first time in what seemed like forever.
When it came down to our making plans to meet, Josh asked me “what I liked to do,” which seemed weird. Don’t you just ask somebody for coffee or lunch before getting written confirmation that your date doesn’t hate drinking or eating? I told him to meet me for a drink, and got to the restaurant he suggested to find a good- looking guy a bit taller than me in a newsboy cap drinking at the bar. He was wearing a vest, too, and a thumb ring, which is never OK, but I tried hard not to overjudge his overaccessorizing, and let him be nice to me, which he was. He was very, very nice.
For a guy who did so much work in the euphemistically generous “adult entertainment industry,” Josh was shockingly dull. He didn’t have much to say about our mutual friend except that she was “great,” and he hadn’t heard of the TV shows I wanted to talk about. He told me that he was close with his dad and wanted kids one day. He said he did yoga and tried to eat healthily. And when I asked him about his work, he bragged about being responsible for getting a travel kit with a vibrator, lube, and condom tucked inside a discreet makeup case sold at high-end Manhattan department stores.
He was, true to his goals of “mainstreaming sexuality,” very comfortable talking about porn and sex, which are not the same thing. And even though he mentioned having been more professionally involved with porn than he was currently, it was clear that Josh still considered himself in “the industry.” He wanted to talk shop about which actresses did anal and which only did lesbian scenes. He debated the merits of broadband versus DVD formats. And just like a teenager who’d fallen love with pot, it wasn’t enough for Josh to watch the occasional dirty movie—he had to wear his vocation on his sleeve, like the seventeen-year-old who brandishes the culture of his chosen vice, buying marijuana-themed clothing and taking up hacky-sack. Josh had taken what was unspoken into what was everyday for a living, and “everyday” is, coincidentally, another word for “boring,” which he was. We parted that night with a hug.
Josh called me a few days later, which was also very, very nice. It was clear he liked me and I appreciated that he followed up the way I think somebody should after a date, so I agreed to go out with him again. That’s a rule I made up that I think is a good one: If I’m iffy about being attracted to somebody right away, but he goes about pursuing me in a way I think is upstanding, I always give the guy a second chance. It’s a way to be strict about your standards, but open-minded about your contenders. Men are way more likely to become more appealing to you over time than they are to magically grow manners.
BEFORE OUR second date, Josh flirted with me in an e-mail, warning me that “If I was a good girl, Santa would bring me some presents.” Both of us were Jewish, but maybe he thought it was sexy to refer to himself as Father Christmas, in the third person. This time we both had dinner, because I guess he assumed that dinn
er was something I “liked to do.” He was right!
As soon as we sat down at our table, Josh gave me a shopping bag full of porno-themed comic books, tchotchkes with his porn-star client’s face all over them, a copy of her erotic novel, and that travel kit with the lube and vibe inside of it.
“I figured it was too soon to bring you the big glass dildo from my office,” he disclosed, tipping me off to his decision process and referencing our nascent courtship. “So I brought the travel kit. It’s really high-end, and it comes in a nondescript makeup case, so it’s discreet.”
I intoned the same “heh-heh-heh” he gave me on the phone, then watched Josh get way too drunk way too fast, which was embarrassing for both of us. He ordered sake, and fed me the cucumber garnish that came with it. The first time I bit into the cucumber, to be sporting, but the second and third time, I declined to play along, unwilling to stop midsentence to chomp on crudités.
Josh had a lower booze tolerance than me, which I did not believe was possible. It takes a Butter Rum lifesaver and a teaspoon of Dimetapp for me to wear a lampshade like a hat and forget I can’t dance to hip-hop. But after two and a half sakes, whatever inhibitions Josh actually had melted away like a suppository, and as soon as we got outside the restaurant, he impulsively decided he wanted to take me to a movie. He leaned on my shoulder while I helped him stumble to Union Square, only to find the theater was closed, to Josh’s cries of “Damnit!” He suggested we go to his apartment to watch a movie instead. Saying “sure” and meaning “why not,” I hailed a cab and pushed Josh into the backseat. He was a mess.
Julie Klausner Page 15