Apparently some poor bugger had fainted and was carted off to the hospital in an ambulance. He had taken too much or not enough of his blood-pressure medication, and as an impossibly large object was inserted into a willing ass, he hit the deck faster than Anna Nicole Smith on a fistful of Vicodin.
There was another special announcement to be made: that day was the one-year anniversary of Peter and Madeleine, who had wed at Leather Camp last year. Applause all around. Peter then grabbed the mic and presented the camp organizers with a plaque conveying heartfelt thanks. It was really touching. The four of them got a two-minute standing ovation. I got a little choked up myself.
After dinner, everybody filed outside for the stripping competition. Aimee was the first contestant. She did a perfect dance, ending with a headstand, split, and precisely executed bridge. The crowd went apeshit. Peter was up next. Despite his formidable bulk, he did some tantalizing leaps and landed in a split, soliciting oohs and aahs from the audience. Perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser was a man named “Pluto’s Revenge,” a six-foot-four member of the Oink cabin who wore a Mohawk, handlebar mustache, and wraparound shades. He threw his lanky frame around for two minutes while wearing a leather thong pouch. During the routine, he launched his sunglasses into the pool. For the finale, he recklessly somersaulted into the shallow end. When he didn’t come up for five seconds, everybody thought the worst. There was uncomfortable silence, then murmuring. But Pluto reemerged victorious. He was wearing the sunglasses and holding his marble sack high above his head.
Another routine of note was Samantha and Craig’s. As well as being boyfriend and girlfriend, they were both blonde, skinny, and tall. Dressed identically in pigtails and Catholic-schoolgirl uniforms, they did a naughty take on a mirror dance, backed by Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer (I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal).” At the end, they writhed on a section of indoor-outdoor carpeting wearing nothing but knee-high boots.
It’s worth mentioning here that out of ten entrants in the stripping contest, six of them chose “I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal” as accompaniment. After it was played three times in a row, the DJ declared the song banned. The other strippers were chagrined. “That’s fucked up!” one of them cried behind me. Attention was momentarily deflected from the stripping when a woman in a Mardi Gras mask and front-mounted dildo went down on a fellow audience member. The contest ultimately ended in a tie between Aimee, Pluto’s Revenge, and an Audrey Hepburn–type performer known simply as Dancer. Each prize was a bundle of Leather Camp dollars, which could be used at Casino Night or the next day’s slave auction.
Aimee’s boyfriend finally came to camp, and she couldn’t have been happier about it. They’d only been dating for a month, but she was already wearing a collar that indicated she was, in some way, his property.
After the stripping contest, I bumped into Claudia, and we strolled past the torch-lit pony races and down to the pavilion, where Casino Night was being held. Blackjack, poker, and roulette were being played at tables all around. Attendees wore differing degrees of fetish wear. I learned how to play blackjack and even came away with hundreds of (fake) dollars.
Being away from the city’s energy made me lethargic, and I was fading fast. In addition to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a midnight snack was provided. That night it was cold cuts and rolls. I start talking to Claudia about how she got into the scene. She was really attractive and in her mid-twenties.
“I was a sorority girl,” she said and smiled. “That’s how I learned to top and bottom. It set me up for being a switch. I didn’t know it at the time, but a few years later something was definitely pulling me toward the scene.”
My curiosity was piqued, to say the least.
“But you know, I was a great pledge too,” she said. “I was all, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.’ I loved it, even the really evil shit.” Apparently, in one hazing ritual the pledges had to strip naked so the seniors could use a permanent marker to circle each girl’s less taut body parts.
I said good night and went back to the cabin. The remaining two unoccupied beds had been pushed together and an inflatable bed had been put over the top. Cliff and Liz were our cabin’s only couple. They were in their fifties, and they brought everything but the kitchen sink to camp: a night-light, two drink coolers, an electric blanket, a collapsible coat rack, a set of those plastic drawers on wheels with all sorts of medical and cosmetic supplies in them. The woman looked like Olive Oyl, and her husband was the spitting image of Mr. Kotter. I lay in bed wondering about their relationship. I wondered if there were vanilla couples where one partner had discovered the scene and the other just kind of went along with it. That’s how Olive Oyl seemed. She looked like she wanted to be anywhere else but in this cabin.
Unlike the night before, I fell asleep immediately. I kept my clothes on and used two towels as auxiliary blankets. It was still bone-chillingly cold, but at least Dan wasn’t making such a racket. I woke up at 6:00 on the dot, freezing. I went into the shower room and found that Cliff and Liz had even brought their own massaging showerhead. Unbelievable! I took advantage of their creature comfort and hung out under the shower for the better part of an hour. The majority of my cabinmates were still asleep. It was 7:30, and the rain outside was nothing short of torrential. Breakfast wasn’t served until 9:00, but the kitchen staff already had some coffee brewing while they prepared eggs, bacon, and oatmeal. I sat down at one end of the huge dining hall, the only person there. I started talking to a kitchen staffer who was wearing a David Beckham jersey. I guessed he was English, but he was actually from Poland, on one of those Camp America programs.
“I’m from Gdansk,” he told me in perfect English. Not only did Stacek nail my country of origin, but he could identify what region I was from by my accent.
“What do you think of America?” I asked him.
“I much prefer England,” he said. “This place is weird.” I hoped he had seen other things than camp. “Next week, there will be more people here that will be naked and having sex everywhere. It’s a strange place, America.”
“This isn’t normal,” I said.
I was about to argue the case for my adopted homeland, but as I opened my mouth, I caught sight of a sexagenarian male dressed as a female toddler and applying rouge at the other end of the dining hall. I shook hands with Stacek, the only person I had met outside of the scene in days, and I stared out at the gloom.
Before I’d left for camp, my editor had told me there were three categories of kids who went to summer camp. Some kids assimilate immediately, disappearing into the throng before their parents have left the parking lot. Others might feel lonely and uncool for the first few days before falling in with a like-minded crowd; they ultimately had to be dragged away. Then there are the kids who piss the bed and want to go home.
I had pissed the proverbial bed. As I sat in the dining hall, watching the rain drive against the window, I was overwhelmed by the need to leave. The continuing monsoon threatened to compromise the rest of the weekend’s events; it had driven people inside, into more intimate, insular activities. Everyone at camp seemed to be having the time of their lives, and I was not included. Not being straight up about what I was doing there was starting to become a massive burden; I would make a useless double agent. I just wanted everybody to get on with having fun.
As soon as I had made the decision to go, I felt a massive sense of relief. In fact, the end of every sexual situation related to the column was marked by a feeling of dread, anguish, and insecurity being suddenly lifted. Making a break from Leather Camp was that feeling multiplied by a hundred.
I ran through the downpour to camp HQ and checked in my bed linen. There were only two trains to New York that day, and I was determined to catch the earlier one. There was no precedent of people leaving camp before the diabolical activities had reached their heady zenith at the Renaissance Fair, and consequently the camp’s organizers were reluctant to let me go.
Jorge, one of Claudia’s crew
, who I’d meet in the group grope, very kindly offered to drive me the twenty miles to the nearest train station, through torrential rain, after I’d explained that there’d been a family emergency that I had to get back for.
“Well, family is very important,” he said with his thick Venezuelan accent. “We’ll make sure you get back to New York okay.”
I got on the train, thankful that I’d made it back undetected and in one piece, though I doubted that I’d ever really be “okay” again.
FISH AND CHIPS ON MY SHOULDER
BASED ON THE CONVERSATION I know will follow, I often dread to open my mouth. My diphthongs, my glottal stops, my singsongy inflection conspire against me and commit me to having the same conversation, every day, two, five, ten times a day since the late nineties. I’ll have to write off the next ten minutes.
I love New York City. I belong to it and it belongs to me. Like most adopted New Yorkers, my love informs my politics and worldview, my lifestyle and relationships, my dress sense and street smarts, my hopes and aspirations. I walk the walk just fine, but whenever I talk the talk, I am stopped dead in my tracks.
“Hey, where are you from?”
I’ll say “here” or “New York,” depending on where I am. I’ll try to neutralize my accent, but it’s too late. I know where this is going and there’s no way out.
“No, I mean really from?”
If I have the energy to make them guess, just less than half of people will say England. The remainder will guess either Australia or New Zealand. Every twentieth person will guess South Africa or Ireland. I’m not sure if this corresponds with the commonly held view that in general Americans aren’t all that worldly, or that by accident or design my accent has morphed over time.
“I was raised in England.”
My choice of words is conceited. If I can’t be identified as a New Yorker, I’ll accept “citizen of the world.” Anything but being backed into this one again.
Now, I’m aware that my accent has done me infinitely more good than harm at this point. It’s opened doors, created opportunities, allowed me to jump the line, endeared me to otherwise indifferent people; it’s kick-started thousands of conversations, it’s gotten me laid well and often.
In major U.S. cities, being English is almost always relatable.
People always want to tell me that they spent a semester abroad in England, that they have family who live there, that they love soccer, Monty Python, Benny Hill, and Mr. Bean. An effective conversationalist uses first impressions to find common ground. It’s cruel to derail a person’s line of questioning but I attempt in vain to do just that, every time. It’s not malicious; I’m trying to avoid being defined by a place that’s never really felt like home and instead be allied with a place that does. No one lets me.
“What town?”
“A small village outside of London. I’ve lived here for years though. How do you know Brian?”
“West, north?”
“East of London. Hey, are you wearing Issey Miyake?”
“What’s it called?”
“You would have never heard of it. I can barely remember it myself.”
“Seriously, what’s the name of your town? I lived in England for a semester.”
Oftentimes my inflection, the cadence of my voice starts to feature in their sentences. My accent is almost always contagious.
“What did you study?”
“Economics. What town?”
“Corringham.”
“Never heard of it. Are you a cockney?”
He or she is almost always trying to be friendly, personable, yet it’s got my blood boiling.
Bad teeth, gray skies, warm beer, pale skin, blood pudding. I am always overcome with the urge to create distance between me and all that; to prove that that’s just not me. I wouldn’t identify myself as a self-loathing Brit. In fact, I’m slowly beginning to like myself. Oblivious to my attempts to sever the national umbilical cord, people often introduce me to other Englanders.
I don’t dislike British people per se. I just don’t like them here.
“This is James,” says the ruthless man introducing his friend. “James is another bloody Brit!”
Other “Brits” are my kryptonite. Well-meaning Americans always manage to conjure up an estranged countryman and set me up on a sort of expat playdate, unaware that their very presence strikes at the heart of my special powers—my presumed wit and charming accent. The intermediary will watch us shake hands and leave. Probably thinks we must have a lot to talk about, but I am instantly transported to my unhappy place.
I’d always railed against the archetypal Brit as portrayed in the American media, but I confront it whenever I meet an estranged countryman.
“Where are you from then?”
James’s accent is always clipped, if a little slurred; nonregional. His hair is foppish and curly.
“Just east of London.”
I always give a vague response and hope that his or her concept of geography is thrown off by the alcohol that’s causing him or her to sway. Nope, it’s clicked. It usually does. Oh shit. He’s pointing, smiling.
“Essex boy!”
In England and throughout the package vacation zones of southern Europe, the county of Essex has the unenviable reputation as a capital of utter barbarism, the nexus of tackiness and uncouth. I’ve referred to it as the New Jersey of England in the past, though in reality it’s not nearly as quaint.
It’s frosted hair, souped-up cars, bumper-to-bumper traffic, gangsters, random violence, ecstasy dealers, binge drinking, tanorexic girls, vandalism, designer-brand clothing, shopping malls, funky-house and theme-pub franchises. The urban areas smell of sulfur, the countryside smells of pig shit. Depending on the prevailing wind conditions, the odor in Corringham changes hour by hour. Essex is a cultural blind spot, a geopolitical punch line.
“Au-right, geeezaah!” James apes an Essex accent and slaps me on the back. The performance is too theatrical but technically accurate.
“What are you doing ’ere then?” James continues the impersonation.
I was blissfully unaware of the British class system until I moved to New York and met the Jameses and the Tobys, the Nicholases, the Emmas, the Sebastians, the Brunos. They are all in media, PR, or finance; overpaid, oversexed, and over here. The men have the Hugh Grant thing going on and use it night after night, whittling their bedposts to toothpicks.
“I’m a writer,” I’ll say.
“Oh, you’re a wri-ah!”
I make a fist and think about throwing it into their crooked teeth. All that money spent on boarding school, summer vacations in the Dordogne, winters skiing in Val D’Isere, and to have a mouth that looks stuffed full of smashed crockery. Twisted bicuspids, discolored canines, and unruly incisors aren’t the only things they bring with them from Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Surrey. They bring their colonizing instinct and stick together, a clan, a posse, a clique. Every year there’s more of them. Tarquins and Olivers and Annas and Bridgetts. They meet to drink and watch cricket and rugby, only they call it “Ruggah.” I have more in common with a house cat than these people and no one can see it but me and them.
THE LONG FRENCH KISS GOOD-BYE
IN HEELS, the supermodel seemed a good foot taller than me.
“What did you just say to me?” she said.
It was the third time she’d asked me to repeat myself.
She sounded German, perhaps Dutch. The pickup line would have sounded garbled even if there wasn’t a height difference, a language barrier, a pulsing bass beat, or the effects of drugs and alcohol to contend with. I balanced precariously on tiptoes and yelled in the general direction of her eardrum.
“I said, Your daddy doesn’t have a penis, he has a paintbrush!”
Even as concepts for my “I Did It for Science” column went, this one was patently preposterous. In an editorial meeting the previous week, I’d inadvertently leaked that despite being a kamikaze s
ex writer, I’d never used a pickup line on anyone. In fact, though I was checking off bizarre once-in-a-lifetime sexual experiences at a dizzying rate, I’d never done the normal stuff like ask for a girl’s number, French kissed a complete stranger, or had a one-night stand. I still haven’t. Within an hour, a short list of twenty of the most egregious lines had been made for me to unleash at a Ford model party that Wednesday night.
The model jumped back and held my shoulders at arm’s length.
“You…”
I braced myself for a stinging slap or knee to the groin.
Brian laughed and took a picture.
“…are so funny!”
She wrapped her arms around me, shoved my face to her clammy breasts, and swiveled at the hips several times.
“A paintbrush! Ha ha ha!”
She snapped her fingers at the bartender and pointed to me. Another free drink.
This was the fourth. I’d been making models laugh all night and they’d been rewarding me by buying me drinks on their boyfriends’ tabs and promptly disappearing. I tried not to take it personally, reminding myself that models are required to flit in and out of clubs all night. I’m not a big drinker and was only now realizing that my humiliation and my drunkenness were inversely proportional.
The night had started with Anna and me sharing several flasks of sake at Decibel. It was one of the semiannual occasions when we have a drink and talk about the tumultuous year that we dated each other. I walked her to her friend’s place on 3rd Street and Avenue A and was asked to stay for a glass of Riesling and a few chunky lines of coke. I left to join Brian and Vin at Cherry Tavern for a Tecate and tequila shot. Outside, I wretched twice. Nothing came up and the three of us headed over to the model party at Plaid.
I surveyed the dance floor for my next glamazon. If my liver could take it, I still had eight or nine pickup lines to bust out. In the distance I saw Brian threading himself through the crowd toward me.
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