I Wrote This Book Because I Love You

by Tim Kreider

  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king Gilgamesh dispatches Shamhat, a temple prostitute of the goddess Ishtar, to seduce a rampaging “wild man,” Enkidu. (Ishtar was the Akkadian name for the planet Venus, which the Greeks and Romans later named after their own sex goddess.) Enkidu, whose epithet is not honorary, fucks her for seven days straight without losing his erection. This has somewhat the same effect on Enkidu that eating the forbidden fruit does on Adam: his old animal pals suddenly get leery of him; he puts on clothes and moves to the big city. He is exiled from the natural world. Except that Gilgamesh was written a thousand years before Genesis, in a religious tradition that didn’t pit sex and the sacred against each other, so this isn’t some cosmic transgression that fucks over men, women, and snakes forever after. The prostitute awakens Enkidu to his humanity: he learns to understand language, and discovers friendship. She civilizes him.

  My seven days with Zoey wrought some similar transformation on me, although I am no Enkidu, and my problem was perhaps that I’d gotten a little too civilized, too repressed and polite. Zoey helped undomesticate me. Our whirlwind pornographic romance precipitated a phase in my own life of sexual adventure: the women I would meet in my thirties—installation artists, strippers, and insane German neuroscientists, women with names like Onyx and Fancy and Lady Tenebrae—tended to be less inhibited, more matter-of-fact about letting me know what they wanted. As was I. The archetype of the Sacred Prostitute, in Jungian psychology, still represents the reunion of sex and spirit. Zoey claims this is her true vocation: to help people out of their everyday disguises and let them act, if only for an hour or two, like themselves.

  Some men like to argue that hiring a call girl is no different from any other relationship, just more up-front and explicit; they’re all essentially transactions, they say. This is the rationale of people who can’t imagine any motives other than need, like Objectivists arguing that self-interest is the basis of all morality because they are themselves incapable of any drives beyond the reptilian. Prostitution is not the same thing as a romantic relationship, but maybe, if elevated to an art—a vocation—it can be something more like therapy, a safely bounded surrogate or rehearsal for the real thing. Remembering Zoey’s lament that a lot of her clients express sides of themselves that they hide from their wives, I can’t help but wish everyone could behave a little more whorishly, shamelessly using each other and letting themselves be used, with love.

  Zoey still jealously guards her status as my #1 groupie emeritus; she calls me her “grouper,” which I’ve given up protesting is a large, morose-looking fish. In what she called her Jesus year, thirty-three, she gave up waiting for circumstances to align themselves and went to a sperm bank. She now lives in Berlin with her daughter and, yes, she’s still in the same line of work; she occasionally turns up online bound in extremely complicated knots or gets jetted to Switzerland to breastfeed some diapered billionaire. She sometimes frets and second-guesses her career, but then again so do I, and for much the same reasons: it doesn’t pay much, there are no benefits, and it often feels like an unrewarding slog. Whenever we talk we get right to the big three a.m. fears: our frustrations as artists, our relationship troubles, our regrets about every life choice we’ve ever made—Oh, what is to become of us? We still tell each other “I love you,” and whatever it means, we mean it. The last time I saw her, she came up to my cabin and we sat on my couch watching old episodes of Dark Shadows, ate a whole box of fancy chocolates, and painted each other’s toenails with shoplifted polish. (Zoey favors brands with names like Pretty Poison and Daddy’s Girl.) That polish turned out to be surprisingly durable; I walked the streets of New York for the rest of the winter with my toenails an iridescent peacock blue, their gaudy splendor hidden from view beneath the dull black cover of my wingtips.

  * * *

  I. Insert preferred gender/s.

  II. Unknown whether this name was an allusion to the courtesan of La Traviata.

  Oof

  I recently received an email that was about me, but wasn’t for me; I’d been cc’d by accident. This is one of the hazards of email, reason 697 why the Internet is Bad—the apocalyptic consequence of hitting REPLY ALL instead of REPLY.

  I had rented a herd of goats for reasons that aren’t relevant here, and had sent out a mass email with attached photographs of my goats to illustrate that (a) I had goats and (b) having goats was good. There turns out to be something primally satisfying about possessing livestock: a man wants to boast of his herd. Most respondents expressed appropriate admiration and envy of my goats, but the email in question, from my agent, was intended as a forward to some of her coworkers, sighing over the frivolous expenditures on which I was frittering away my advance. The word Oof was used.

  I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical anarchic mind could devise would not be on the government, the military, or the financial sector, but simply to simultaneously make every email and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe: the fabric of society would instantly disintegrate, every marriage, friendship, and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions, and benign lies, would self-destruct in a universal holocaust of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces, bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds and litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets, and lingering ill will.

  This particular email was, in itself, no big deal. Tone is notoriously easy to misinterpret online, and you could’ve read my friend’s message as affectionate headshaking rather than a contemptuous eye roll. It’s frankly hard to parse the word oof. And to be fair, I am terrible with money, unable to distinguish between any amounts other than $∞.00 and $0.00: I always seem to have the former until suddenly and without warning it turns into the latter. But I like to think of this as an endearing foible, or at least no one else’s business, rather than imagine that it might be annoying—or, worse, boring—for my friends to have to listen to me bitch about the moribund state of the publishing industry and the digitization of literature while also watching me blow my advance on linen suits and livestock.

  What was surprisingly wounding wasn’t that the email was insulting but simply that it was unsympathetic. Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they will—making allowances, assuming good intentions, always on your side. There’s something existentially scary about finding out how little room you occupy, and how little allegiance you command, in other people’s hearts.

  This experience is not a novelty of the Information Age; it’s always been available to us through the analog technology of eavesdropping. Those moments when you overhear others describing you without censoring themselves for your benefit are like catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror without having first combed your hair and correctly arranged your face, or seeing a candid photo of yourself online, not smiling or posing but just looking the way you apparently always do, oblivious and mush-faced with your mouth open. I’ve written essays about friends that I felt were generous and empathetic but that they experienced as devastating. I’ve also been written about, in ways I had no factual quarrel with but that nonetheless made me wince to read. It is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed. It’s proof that you are visible, that you are seen, in all your naked silliness and stupidity.

  Needless to say, this makes us embarrassed and angry and damn the people who’ve thus betrayed us as vicious two-faced hypocrites. Which in fact everyone is. Gossiping and making fun of each other are among the most ancient and enjoyable of human amusements. And we should really know better than to confuse this with true cruelty. Of course we make fun of the people we love: they are ridiculous. Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be complicated, difficult, and exa
sperating—making the same obvious mistakes over and over, squandering their money, dating imbeciles, endlessly relapsing into dumb addictions and self-defeating habits, blind to their own hilarious flaws and blatant contradictions and fiercely devoted to whatever keeps them miserable. (And those people about whom there is nothing ridiculous are the most ridiculous of all.) It is necessary to make fun of them in order to take them as seriously as we do. Just as teasing someone to his face is a way of letting him know that you know him better than he thinks, that you’ve got his number, making fun of him behind his back is a way of bonding with your mutual friends, reassuring each other that you both know and love and are driven crazy by this same person.

  Although sometimes—let’s admit it—we’re just being mean. A friend of mine described the time in high school when someone walked up behind her while she was saying something clever at that person’s expense as the worst feeling she had ever had. And not just because of the hurt she’d inflicted, but because of what it forced her to see about herself: that she made fun of people all the time—people who didn’t deserve it, who were beneath her in the social hierarchy—just to make herself seem funny or cool or to ingratiate herself with other girls.

  A friend once shared with me one of the aphorisms of twelve-step recovery programs: “What other people think of you is none of your business.” Like a lot of wisdom, this at first sounds suspiciously like nonsense: obviously what other people think of you is your business; it’s your main job in life to try to micromanage everyone’s perceptions of you and do tireless PR and spin control for yourself. Every woman who ever went out with you must pine for you. The ones who rejected you must regret it. You must be loved, respected—above all, taken seriously! Those who mocked you will rue the day!

  The problem is that this is insane—the psychology of dictators who regard all dissent as treason, and periodically order purges to ensure total, unquestioning loyalty. Eventually a mob is going to topple your statues. The operative fallacy here is that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, whereas it really means pretty much the opposite. (In the story “Rebecca,” about a woman with green skin, Donald Barthelme writes: “Do I want to be loved in spite of? Do you? Does anyone? But aren’t we all, to some degree?”) We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves—the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.

  I finally had a talk with my agent about the Oof faux pas, in which, as so rarely happens, we actually got down to the real tension underlying our tiff. As usual, it had less to do with me than I’d imagined. It is, after all, my agent’s job to make money for me, but because I am as oblivious and self-absorbed as most people, the possibility that she might’ve interpreted my recreational complaining as a reproach had never occurred to me. That accidental glimpse of unguarded feeling had clarified and deepened our friendship. In the end, all parties apologized, reiterated their mutual affection and respect, and formally acknowledged the environmental and economic benefits of goats over mowing. It may be that it’s less exchanged favors or compliments than hurt feelings and fights that turns us into intimates. Months later I sent her a photo of myself at the Museum of Modern Art, glowering next to Ed Ruscha’s painting of the word OOF.

  A friend of mine once had a dream about a strange and terrible device: a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said first before you could get to the best things said about you, at the very bottom. This wasn’t even my dream, and my friend told me about it over a quarter century ago, but I’ve never forgotten it. There is no way I would make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but the dream-metaphor is clear enough: if you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

  Our War on Terror

  Political movements, protests and revolutions have always attracted romantics. Lauren and I were both cartoonists, who, as a genus, fail to abandon their childish enthusiasms and are undaunted by an endeavor’s self-evident futility. We met at a comic-book signing, events that tend to be all lull. At one of the slower moments, Lauren, who was one of the featured artists, gave me a sly sizing-up look from behind her table, over where I was slouched on the floor with my back against the wall. “So, Tim,” she asked: “what’s your deal?”

  We were each a little exotic to the other: she was a cool, grungy riot grrl from the Pacific Northwest, and, she told me later, she saw me as one of those moneyed, well-mannered East Coast prep-school boys she’d read about growing up, boys who were sensitive and read books—“not like the horrible boys of real life.” In her first letter to me she wrote: “I knew right away that I wanted to be your friend.”

  Back then, circa 1998, if you saw a minicomic or zine you admired, you’d write the artist a letter, and a week or so later maybe they’d write back. It was like radioing messages back and forth between star systems. Lauren’s and my correspondence was intimate right away, by which I mean not erotic or flirty but frank and confiding, dispensing with the bullshit and getting right down to matters of art, life, and the Big Questions. Like me, Lauren had committed herself to the impoverished and marginal life of an artist, and we commiserated over the Herculean feat of sitting down and beginning something, the need to practice a slogging routine while waiting for inspiration, and the shame, and illicit pleasures, of procrastination. She wrote about ambivalence: ambivalence about quitting her day job to draw comics full-time, about the worthwhile struggle of monogamy and marriage, about whether or not to have children (“Fuck motherhood!” she wrote in a passing moment of resolve). Our letters were stuffed with gifts: our smartest thoughts, unworthiest emotions, incidents and details curated to amuse. Whenever we met at conventions or expos we’d boringly hog each other’s company, ignoring roomfuls of colleagues to yak all night.

  Lauren and her husband, Lars, and I all moved to New York City in the winter of 2000, where we got to be friends off paper, out in real life. Lauren and I went on long walks, hung out in each other’s apartments, went to art films and galleries and museums together, had greasy diner lunches and afternoon tea, big Szechuan dinners and countless beers. It was at an exhibit called Surrealism: Desire Unbound at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Lauren mocked Dalí’s lobsterphone and we laughed at all the photos of bourgeois middle-aged artists in three-piece suits picnicking with naked ladies—the placards repeatedly described the Surrealists as “whisking away” young models to be their “muses”—that it occurred to me, with something like alarm, that there was no one in the world I would rather be there with than Lauren. Afterward we sat out on a steep, grassy slope behind the Met and talked about Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, a tragic farce about a man in love with an unlikely object, and about my transgender friend Jenny, who’d had to explain something that seemed just as absurd and indefensible to her own family—about passionate, irrational, ruinous love, something we’d both experienced firsthand. I’d dressed up in slacks and a shirt and silk tie that day, because it was Laundry Day, and I had nothing worse to wear. When I’d met Lauren on the steps of the Met, she exclaimed, “You look gorgeous!” No one had ever called me gorgeous before.

  After my first winter in New York, I accidentally called my girlfriend, whose name was not Lauren, “Lauren.” She asked me directly whether I was in love with Lauren, and I assured her that of course I wasn’t—we were just friends. It was a meaningless slip of the tongue, a little neural misfire. I, at least, believed me. Once, when Lauren and Lars and I were in a bodega, she called him by my name and got all flustered. Lars said to me, “I’m just not even going to
think about what that means.” The names of the people we love all seem to be stored in the same compartment of the brain, kept separate from more ordinary words but easily jumbled among one another, as if they’re all just different words for the same thing. I’ve read that endearments, along with song lyrics and curses, can withstand even the ablation of aphasia, like a handful of jewels left intact in a safe after the building around them has been demolished.

  It’d be easy to misremember that year as a last idyll before it all slid over the brink, like the summer of 1914. But in truth the nineties were a sordid and trivial decade in which our gravest national crisis was an act of unconstitutional fellatio. It’s little remembered now that one of the main issues in the 2000 election, on the eve of a barbarian attack on the capital, was prescription drug benefits. By that late, dynastic stage of empire, the hereditary candidates—one a president’s son, the other a senator’s—seemed almost interchangeable. So we were torpid and slow to react when the Republicans, in a historic display of poor sportsmanship, declined to accept the results of the election and just stole it, clumsy and unembarrassed as a junkie holding a gun to your girlfriend’s head.