I WENT back to his apartment and recoiled at its details. It was spacious and in a lovely building, like Wendy had told me, but everything Josh had added to it spoke to his poor taste. There was bad art on his walls, The Family Guy on DVD, and only two books: a vegetarian cookbook and the new Oliver Sacks in hardcover.
“How is Musicophilia?” I asked my gradually sobering date.
“Oh, I haven’t read it,” he admitted. “It was a gift.”
Josh opened a red Netflix envelope and put in a DVD as I made myself as comfortable as I could on his deep velour couch. The movie he’d rented was a documentary called Paper Clips, and it was about the efforts of an elementary school class in Tennessee to collect six million paper clips in an effort to represent, with office supplies, the number of Jews killed during World War II.Yes, that’s the movie Josh chose to show me back at his place to set the mood for seduction. I’m as shocked as you are: Who knew they taught about the Holocaust in Tennessee?
He hit PLAY, and then began to give me a back massage, which is a coward’s way of making one’s way to the sexy bits that live on the front of a lady’s torso. As his hands migrated over my shoulders and onto my breasts, the audio from the movie morally distracted me from being sexually aroused. “Josef Mengele . . . paper clips . . . millions gassed . . . about an hour from Chattanooga.” The smell of sake on Josh’s breath and the coldness from the metal ring he wore on his thumb invited the comparison to the film’s subject as parallel atrocities.
I’m going to go ahead and say it: Paper Clips was a misguided choice for mood-making. But it was only Josh’s latest in an evening-long series of gaffes. The booze at dinner enabled him to tell me, over my protests, about a three-way he had with two women that he swore was “the most beautiful, nonjudgmental, natural experience ever,” which was sad and gross and not something I wanted to hear from a guy on a date, even if I were attracted to him. Josh just didn’t know when to shut it. Now that we were back at his place, I just wanted to close my eyes and pretend he was somebody smarter, while I made the best of a mediocre date and let him feel my boobs.
I grabbed the remote and muted the movie when they started showing photos of the ditches the Nazis used as mass graves, because I am a class act, and then we started kissing. It was tepid and twee; there was a lot of caressing and ear-breathing. I kept my eyes closed after noticing the persistence of his moronic grin. Things proceeded predictably, until Josh took his pants off and I noticed that he’d shaved all his pubic hair. I credited his grooming choice to the double-pronged influence of watching a ton of porno and thinking too much about one’s genitals.
Josh nodded at me while I beheld his shorn business with an imbecilic smile on his face, and maintained his facial expression as I removed my clothes, like I was stripping for a toddler with gas. I don’t like smiling or laughing in bed, by the way. I’m funny in real life: When I’m getting fucked, I’m off the clock. I prefer a little reverent solemnity, like in church. But once I was naked, Josh piped in again with his “What do you like?” shtick, and I said, bluntly, “Coming.”
I let him use the sex toys he got for me until I was done, and then began deferring his offers to sleep over. I didn’t like him enough for that kind of intimacy, and if I wanted to wake up to a shitty painting of a flower pot hung on an exposed brick wall, I would sleep in a college town coffee shop.
As soon it was clear to him I wasn’t going to be convinced to spend the night, Josh threw clothes on and insisted on walking me downstairs. I begged him not to, hoping he would get it that I was done. But soon, he had his Mets cap on and paraded me past his doorman, with whom he exchanged overly demonstrative pleasantries for my benefit. They high- fived each other, so Josh could show off how friendly he was with the guy who worked in his building. I wanted so badly to get out of there.
“Maybe I’ll call you about Saturday night,” he said, on what was now Friday morning.
“OK!” I said in an overly high-pitched voice intended to indicate an enthusiastically noncommittal “Maybe!” to an optimist, and “No, thank you,” to the layman well-versed in social cues. Josh, who was not moderately versed in anything, took my response as a cue to imitate me.
“OK!” he said, the same way I did, only exaggerated, and with a “funny” face.
What was once neutral about him, then annoying, instantly became obnoxious. You just don’t imitate people like you’re making fun of them if you don’t want them to hate you. He asked if he could put me in a cab.
“No,” I said. “I live four blocks away.” He insisted I call him once I got back to my apartment. It was, again, very, very nice of him, but at this point, his second chance was up.
I walked home feeling guilty and awful. Was there something wrong with me that Josh’s offer to hail me a cab made me so angry? What was my problem, anyway? A guy asks me to call him so he knows I got home in one piece, and I want to puke on his shoes and flee the scene of the crime, maybe stopping at the good deli on the way home for a cookie. Is that normal? How was I ever going to find a boyfriend, a husband, or a man who might actually be a good father from the pool of guys I actually found attractive? Would the guy who told me to come out to L.A. so he could slap me in the face while I sucked his dick laugh patiently at my cousin Sherman’s corny jokes on Passover? Would the guy who said with utmost romantic sincerity that “fucking me was like porno” be there to wipe down my sweaty forehead after hours of labor? To nurse me through panic attacks and career shifts and the alternating Saturday afternoons of crying in long stretches for no apparent reason other than that it’s simply a part of a messy, human adult life? Here was a good guy—a mensch—with the libido of a teenager and a nice apartment who makes a good living, who wants to take me out on a Saturday night, and I couldn’t even do him the favor of falling in love with him and teabagging his shaved junk.
I DID a lot of things in the mid-90s that were incredibly embarrassing. In college, I wrapped myself up in packing tape and read the last chapter of Ulysses backwards in order to get a passing grade in a performance art workshop. I took part in a potluck/play reading of an experimental musical written by a skater named “Piglet,” which was based equally in part on the music of Frank Zappa and the aphorisms printed inside fortune cookies. I wore blue fishnet stockings with green Doc Martens. I ate a pot brownie and saw a film about roller coasters narrated by Harry Shearer at the Sony IMAX Theater, which I remember being deeply confusing. But I also made the foolish choice to connect deeply with a Milos Forman movie about a filthy pornographer. No, I’m not talking about Amadeus.
In The People Versus Larry Flynt, the handsome, charming Woody Harrelson plays the decrepit, revolting pervert who founded Hustler magazine, and Courtney Love, when she was an emerging actress instead of just a mess with a melting face, played Flynt’s wife, Althea.
I remember nursing an adolescent infatuation with pornography when I first saw that movie in college. I was reading books mired in the philosophy of post-feminism, which bred in me a hefty contempt for the 1970s kind of feminism that held stripping, hooking, and posing for nudie photos as vocations degrading to women. “Don’t you know how empowering being a sex object is,” I would exclaim to sociology professors, expecting their hair to stand on end and monocles to magically sprout from nothing, only to pop out of their eye sockets in amazement.
Now my attitude toward pornography is markedly different; I don’t think the insane amount of crazy porn that’s instantaneously mass-accessed on a daily basis by men of all ages is so great for women, in general. Maybe I’ve gotten cranky in my old age, maybe I’m scared of the Internet, or maybe I’ve just concluded that life is harder for girls; that it’s more difficult for us to rise to any sort of professional prominence than it is for men, or to be taken seriously if we’re too sexy.
I’m not saying I don’t watch porn. Of course I watch porn, because I am not a nun. And I don’t watch “erotica” with a “story” or “period costumes” in it, because I am also not a
lesbian. The stuff I watch is not stuff I would ever do in my life, but I also know the difference between what I want to fantasize about and what I want to do with my weekend. If I were going to watch a man and woman of average height and weight grope and fuck one another, it would be a waste; like shopping at a chain store when you’re on vacation.
But I’m not proud of the porn I watch—I don’t talk about it with people I don’t know well or enjoy it in mixed company. I watch it alone or with a partner as a means to an end. I’d like to call my way of watching porn private or not a significant part of what I do for a living or who I am, but I am writing about it in a book, so I guess that’s pretty public, even if I’m grappling with how I feel about it out loud, because it’s complicated, Denise Richards.
But Josh’s “making porn legit” day job, combined with his story about the “awesome three-way” he had, bugged me beyond the fact that his story was not a polite thing to be discussing on a date. Nice guy or not, Josh, I thought, was barely good enough of a guy to get laid by one woman.
EVERY ONCE in a while, you do something that you know you’ve outgrown, just because it gives you déjà vu, or you think deep down you haven’t changed, or you’re just desperate to try something you think would have worked at one time. When I was set up with Josh, I was playing matchmaker to the twenty-year-old college student who thought porn could start a revolution, but only if women “took it back,” like we took back the night. Remember when we did that? And how afterward, nobody was raped?
In the final scene of The People Versus Larry Flynt, Flynt, paralyzed from having been shot in the face during his free-speech trial, sits in his living room, palsied and, ironically, unable to maintain an erection—the very currency of his industry! He wistfully views tapes of his late wife, Althea, who has long since died of AIDS. And as she wriggles around in her bra and panties in the grainy footage, Flynt hears his own voice in the background instructing his beloved, “Strip for me, baby. Strip for me.”
When I first saw that movie, I was devastated by this scene. It documented, to me, what was then my romantic ideal.
“She was the love of his life,” I thought to myself in between heaving sobs. “And now she’s gone! But when she was around, and he could still get hard, they had filthy sex. And then, they fell in love, or what counts as love between a dallying pornographer and a stripper addicted to heroin.”
In retrospect, the last scene of that movie was a cringe-inducing interaction between two unlikable characters, one of whom was portrayed by a woman who has made countless life mistakes, including but not limited to living at one time with Neil Strauss. But at the time, for me, Woody Harrelson watching Courtney Love strip may as well have been a Byron sonnet.
I’ve always wanted a loving relationship with hot sex. I didn’t know at the time that when you hop into bed right away, it can make things more difficult. Not because spreading your legs sends out a message that you can be treated poorly, but because your expectations get inflated when you do it and it’s good. Whether hot sex right away can flower into everlasting true love still remains for me to be seen, at least from firsthand experience. But what I do know is that that the opposite is true: a mensch is a schmuck if he can’t fuck you well.
My sexual fumbling with Josh was lousy because I wasn’t impressed by the guy attached to his dick. I can get a massage if I want my body to feel good; I don’t want to fuck a guy unless I think there’s a chance he may have read something other than a vegetarian cookbook in the last year. Or if his jokes are funny and his laugh is rare, or he calls me “kiddo” and it turns me into wobbly parfait. Or if his hand on my back feels like the relief of walking into a spot of sunny pavement; when all of a sudden, it’s not as cold outside anymore.
I SENT Josh’s call to voice mail the day after our night of Paper Clips and pubeless fumbling.
“Hey, Jules!” he said on his message. “I’m calling about our plans tonight.”
What plans? The tentative ones I demurred, before I was imitated?
“I just wanted to see what you liked to do. Heh heh heh.”
There was a pause. I sort of felt bad for him. But pity isn’t sexy; it evokes a totally different kind of squirming. Josh’s message continued. “You know, you don’t pick up your phone a lot. I’m beginning to think you don’t have a phone! Maybe you just have, like, a fancy answering machine!”
With my deletion of that message exited Josh—messily, loudly, but with good intentions. And the only time I think of him is when I open the drawer next to my bed and I see the travel kit he gave me—the one with the vibrator tucked inside of it. The design of the kit is indeed, however uncharacteristically, very discreet.
i don’t care about your band
A cute musician named Jonathan sent me an e-mail out of the blue. We shared a friend in common, and he saw me sing the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” one night in Brooklyn, at karaoke. He wanted to say hi, he wrote, but he was unshaven at the time, and didn’t want to make a bad impression.
OK. Cute. Fine. “An admirer!” I thought. So far, so good. He was certainly good-looking, which Google found out for me: lanky, thin, straw-colored hair, and cheekbones that could lop slices off a block of Jarlsberg. Google also told me he was sort of famous. Google, you auspicious matchmaker!
Jonathan continued, in all lower-case, to introduce himself. He found my website, he said, and loved my videos. Great! So? . . . I scrolled over his rambling exposition, waiting for the payoff. Was he going to ask me out? He didn’t.
“i’m at home absolutely spazzing out because we’re leaving in a few days to make a record and i have to/really should finish a long list of songs. so, waving hello and/or re-hello! all the bestest, jonathan.”
Huh? My enthusiasm tapered off. A hot guy in an indie band, well-known or otherwise, waved me hello and/or re-hello mid-spazz? And he was leaving in a few days to make a rock album? How old is this guy anyway? Nineteen going on forty? Still, those eyes drove me bananas and coconuts. He was really, really cute.
Maybe he needed a running start. I gave him training wheels and a ramp when I wrote back, making asking me out really easy for him. I even used all lowercase, mirroring his casualness.
“hi jonathan! let me know if you ever wanna get a drink sometime. it would be fun to meet up.”
A relationship book I once read told women to use the word “fun” whenever possible. They claimed it had a subliminal, aphrodisiac effect on men, who want a relaxed, easygoing, friendly girl attached only to good times; the human equivalent of Diet Coke. This is the opposite of me: I experience separation anxiety at the end of every episode of Top Chef.
I half forgot about Jonathan after that exchange, but over the course of the next month, I got a few texts from him, reporting on his band’s stay in the Pacific Northwest. I’d hear about how their album was going, the weather, and what he described as the M.C. Escher-like house they were staying in, which is the kind of reference a college student would make. I wondered if his love letters read like other descriptions of art posters you buy at Bed, Bath & Beyond. “I want to kiss you in a crowd in Times Square while I’m dressed up like a sailor!”
I never knew how to reply to Jonathan’s texts. They were postcards—he was broadcasting, not communicating. But I liked hearing from him, in the way somebody who isn’t juggling a ton of other prospects will shrug, “better than nothing,” and I wondered if he’d meet up with me when he came back to New York, or if he’d flake out. It was fifty/fifty with this guy: He was roundabout when it came to getting together, but pretty consistent about staying in touch, on his terms. I knew the odds of anything serious happening were slim, but I still wanted to go on a date with a good-looking guy who went through the trouble of getting in touch with me after seeing me sing in a bar.
While Jonathan was away, I did more research and asked my musician friends what they knew about him. Collette, a singer, told me his deal. “He’s an indie rock dreamboat,” she wrote in an e-mail. “
His voice is transcendent and he writes lovely lyrics. He has a nice face, he has a kid, and he tours a lot. He’s a star in his world.”
I was surprised to hear he was a father. I was twenty-eight at the time, and I’d never dated a guy with a kid before—I didn’t know whether I was OK with it at all, actually. “What’s the kid’s name?” I asked Collette. “Li’l Dealbreaker?” Plus, from what I gleaned so far about Jonathan, he seemed like sort of a kid himself. Babies having babies? Somebody tell Tyra!
SO HERE’S the thing with me and musicians. I know most girls go crazy for frontmen who close their eyes when they sing and nod their heads when the drums kick in, but I’m like Shania Twain with that stuff. That don’t impress me much. I’ll take somebody funny and brainy over a peacock with perfect pitch any day. You can teach a monkey to play the guitar, you know—and, as a bonus, watching him do it is hilarious.
Still, anyone who can make a living doing something creative is impressive. And that, reader, is the single most Jewish thing I’ve said in this book so far.
“Nu? He can make a living doing what he loves! That’s a successful man! What—would coffee hurt?”
Finally, I can’t emphasize this enough: Jonathan was extremely attractive. He did, like Collette said, have a nice face. I’d take her word for it about his lyrics, though, because I tried to listen to a couple of his songs online, and I got too bored by the melodies to pay attention to his words. It was typical indie rock stuff: droney, thick, exhausting; but obviously heartfelt. Bring a book. I tried to get to the end of one of his tracks, but a YouTube clip of a Basset Hound taking a shower was too tempting not to switch to, mid-verse.
Julie Klausner Page 16