Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  “AHHHHHHHHHH—BARUCH-ATAH-ADONAHHHHHHHH,” I yelled.

  It felt great, let me tell you. I screamed nonstop, I prayed, I gave thanks to God, and Patrick Ewing and Bo Derek and all the other important figures in my life. Anna tried to shush me, but I kept on yelling. And then I started seeing lights, shapes. Anna’s face glowed. I thought, wow, I’m pretty good—I’m seeing stars! This is what it’s about! This!

  “YESSS YESSS YESS AHHHHH—”

  The room grew lighter. And then I looked over my shoulder. The tent flap was wide open and three Israeli soldiers with machine guns, alerted by the cries I couldn’t hear myself making, crouched there in the ready position, their machine guns pointed on us.

  “AHHHHHHHH—”

  I froze, still orgasming. I looked at them. They looked at me. I looked at Anna. She looked at them, looked at me. They looked at Anna. I had a vision, then, a fearful one. Of bullets, of death, of a life unlived. What if they thought I was a terrorist? A Palestinian Orgasm Terrorist? The kibbutz was in a dangerous area. The orgasm terrorists—they get onto crowded buses and whip open their jackets and then: Aha! Try and turn the pages of your holy book now, old man!

  No! I wanted to live!

  I did the logical thing. I fell off the cot, pulling the sleeping bag with me so that Anna was naked. The soldiers apologized, smirked, closed the flap and stepped out.

  I lay on the floor breathing rapidly. Oh my God, oh my God, I thought, what a close shave. And then: Oh my God I had sex! Me—sex! A grin started to grow on my face, one that ended up staying there for a full day. But Anna, I thought, what about Anna?

  “Are you OK?” I asked her.

  No answer came from the cot.

  “Did you come?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “Want to do it again?”

  “No.” Loud and clear.

  We were silent for a bit.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  Two days later she dumped me—for an Israeli soldier, actually one of the ones who had walked in on us. His name was Dahveed, which always pissed me off—everyone knows you pronounce it David. I’m deaf and I know that.

  A couple weeks later, I went home. Hunter, Pat and Dan picked me up from the airport. “How was your trip?” they asked. “Awesome,” I said, and then I told them the big news.

  “You did it?” they said. “Wow. Really? None of us have done it! We were all joking. Susan doesn’t exist. Wow. How was it?”

  They gathered round. I took my time.

  “My friends,” I said. “It was so good I saw my life flash before my eyes.”

  The Anti-Mensch

  By Ophira Eisenberg

  I SCORED A STAND-UP GIG opening for a local headliner at a comedy club in Orange, New Jersey. I hadn’t met the headliner yet—some guy named Kevin. He made a big impression when he walked into the prep kitchen, a.k.a. our green room, locked eyes with me and said, “Can you get me a Coke, please?” Instantly I was offended and intrigued. Offended because he assumed that I was a waitress, but intrigued because he was in the 30 to 38 age range and pretty cute. Plus, he did say “please.”

  I told him that I didn’t work there. I was a comic on the show. He scanned me up and down. “Oh,” he said.

  The lights went down and the emcee hit the stage, wooing the crowd with Ronald Reagan impressions and a handful of Michael-Jackson-is-a-pervert bits. I began to get nervous that the audience would hate me and my autobiographical act. It didn’t include a single outdated impression, not even Sean Connery. Noticing that I was wringing my hands while watching the emcee moonwalk, Kevin taunted me. “Scared?”

  “No!” I snapped like a kid sister. I quickly matured my outburst with a get-over-yourself glare. I wanted to continue with the insulting flirty banter, but right then the emcee introduced me.

  My set went over badly. The crowd wanted me to talk more about blow jobs and less about my 75-year-old Jewish mother’s first e-mail, which she wrote entirely in the subject line. The polite applause sounded almost mocking, and I headed straight to the bar in the back.

  I gulped my cocktail and watched Kevin bring the crowd back up with jokes that centered on being angst-ridden, bitter and depressed. I felt depressed. I didn’t even have a boyfriend or a booty-call boy waiting to hear how the gig went, to reassure me that it was just one night in New Jersey, or just sleep with me to shut me up. With only two years in New York under my belt, the dating scene had taught me that if I continued to hold back on the first date, I was never going to have sex again. Sure, I wanted to find a nice Jewish boy like every other girl in the city, or at least a guy who appreciated the fact that I could make gefilte fish from scratch. Since that was working out about as well as my comedy set in New Jersey, maybe it was time to deviate from the plan.

  Maybe I should sleep with Kevin. He was miserable, disheveled and even disrespectful. In other words, attainable. Extra bonus: He had a car.

  Kevin’s big closing joke was a wince-inducing dog-farting joke, but the crowd howled and he left the stage to wild applause. I could tell he was feeling pretty good about himself, which was going to make my mission easy.

  I strolled into the prep kitchen and supplied the perfunctory post-show adoration. “That was great, man! Love that closer! Hey—can I catch a ride with you back to the city?”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

  His blue Datsun was well lived in to say the least. It took him a solid 10 minutes to clear off the passenger’s seat, cluttered with paper, balled up T-shirts delivered fresh from a T-shirt gun, and empty food containers. As we drove he mumbled about how he’d been despondent since some girl left him and the business had been wearing him down. He was considering meditation. I wanted him to stop talking. He was ruining the thrill of the chase. I asked him if he wanted to meditate over a drink or four once we got into the city.

  We found ourselves in Tribeca and passed by an old bar on the corner of a cobblestone street with warm orange light pouring out of its windows. It was getting late, almost last call, so we took our chances.

  Once inside, I realized that we had stumbled upon “magic bar.” That’s not the name of the bar. It’s a time when you catch a bar at its best moment. The lighting was perfect, dancing off of the mahogany bar and making everyone sitting near it glow. The music was at the ideal level to both listen to and talk above, and the other patrons were hip but not trendy, good-looking but still smart. It was Cheers, the Regal Beagle and the Village Vanguard rolled into one.

  I ordered a Grey Goose martini with three olives. I like to eat one at the beginning, one halfway through and one at the end, as if they were rationed snacks on my hike to intoxication. Kevin ordered an Amstel Light, the beer of champion lightweights. The spell of magic bar started to take hold. I found him irresistible as we bantered in a way you can only do with a one-night stand.

  “Really? The last four women you dated were underage? Good for you!”

  “You once escaped a mental institution? Wow! Exciting!”

  “Your grandfather was in the SS? Did he know Schindler?”

  He was different from other guys I’d dated—he wasn’t apologetic, he wasn’t a mama’s boy, he wasn’t even nice. And I had to admit, I kind of liked it. It made me feel like a delicate ray of sunshine in comparison.

  But my brain started to do this trick: Suddenly I’m picturing us together, 20 years in the future, at our summer house in Madrid. We’re sitting on our blue tiled patio, drinking espresso, waiting for our maid to bring out our paella. We’re staring out at the sea and laughing about the fact that he used to do a dog-fart joke.

  The bar started to close down. Finally, he asked me the question I had been avoiding since I moved to Manhattan.

  “Would you like to come home with me to Queens?”

  His apartment was a typical Queens apartment in the basement of an Italian family’s house. We crept down the brown shag stairs. The place wasn’t terrible, it was clean, but it definitely had that bachelor pad feel wi
th its beige walls and lack of decor, except for a vase of silk flowers sitting on a rattan end table near the bathroom. They were so out of place that I couldn’t help but think there was a webcam stashed in a rose.

  “I have something to show you,” he said flirtatiously and swung open the unfinished wooden door to his bedroom.

  In that one moment before light revealed the inner contents of his boudoir, I envisioned many things. A harness. A bunk bed. Another man.

  To say I was stunned by the actual contents would be putting it lightly. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and certainly nothing I ever expected from him. Kevin’s room was full of—I mean covered with—Garfields. Stuffed ones, ceramic ones, bronze ones, little ones in poses on a special shelf. Garfield playing golf, pool, Garfield wearing a beret, Garfield looking angry. Plus a huge Garfield, twice the size of me, adorned with Mardi Gras beads, propped up on his bed. There were so many of them, frozen in orange-and-black-striped action, it was chilling. A dead body would have been easier to deal with.

  The sight of this altar to Jim Davis’ dynasty killed any sexy, warm or even safe feeling. I stared at him. It just didn’t make any sense.

  “Um… How did… What’s up with all the Garfields?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’ve had them since college,” he explained nonchalantly, tossing it off as if hoarding Garfields was a perfectly normal collegiate activity. I was hoping for something more like “They were left to me by my sweet crazy aunt and I have to display them to keep my inheritance,” or even “They’re a childhood collection that is now worth millions!”

  My mind flashed to our earlier conversation at the bar. He went to Boston University, then moved to Providence for a while, then back to Boston, then to Manhattan, then Brooklyn, now Queens. All I could picture was him wrapping each precious Garfield in newspaper and gently placing them in a cardboard liquor box one after the other. He wasn’t a sexy man; he was a messed-up man-child. To top it off, I couldn’t leave. I was in Queens.

  I tried to work with the situation. “Can you take a few of them out of your room? They’re a little creepy!” He did, without question, like he had done it before for other trapped, desperate girls trying to make their love den less infantile. He removed the big cat from the bed and carefully selected two other ones from the top of his dresser, setting them neatly on the sofa in the next room. When he returned, he flung me onto the bed and pounced. At least the Garfields were working their magic on one of us.

  Turns out the only thing bigger than his Garfield obsession was his penis. It made perfect sense. Only a 37-year-old guy with a dick that big could get away with a bedroom full of stuffies. Without warning, he threw on a Magnum condom and just… stuck it in.

  The next thing I knew we were having the world’s worst, most unskilled sex I had ever had. He lowered his head beside my right ear and pumped furiously like a jackhammer. Like Odie in heat. It felt like he was punching me inside. Like he was fucking a stuffed Garfield, and not even his favorite one in the collection.

  I was so detached from the experience that I started making life resolutions in my head. “OK. Tomorrow I’m going to get it together. I’ll go to the gym, lose ten pounds, really stick to a disciplined writing schedule and work on my self-esteem. No, first I’ll work on the self-esteem. I still have a whole life ahead of me. It’s not too late!”

  I turned to look at him, but his eyes were shut. He had a tight smile on his face as he continued to thrust at a sprinter’s pace. He was lost in some fantasy world: a world of no Mondays and endless lasagna. And then it was over. He rolled off of me and wiped perspiration from his forehead.

  The following night, safely back in Manhattan, I rewrote my JDate profile. “Looking for a stand-up guy,” I decided on. “Must not love cats.”

  SJF Seeks Donor

  By Lori Gottlieb

  AFTER MY LAST RELATIONSHIP ENDED, I decided that instead of signing up with an online dating service, I’d cut out the middleman and sign up with an online sperm bank.

  There was no JDate equivalent for sperm—no JSpunk, for instance—but as soon as I typed in my search criteria (tall, Jewish, graduate degree), I had dozens of matches. This was great, but also a problem. You see, for me, ordering the father of my child on a website was especially difficult because I’m not a good online shopper. I can barely choose a blouse from BananaRepublic.com without calling customer service and asking, “When it says ‘blue,’ does that mean ‘aqua’ or ‘robin’s egg’?” Likewise, I kept calling customer service at the sperm bank with questions like, “When it says his hair is ‘curly,’ does that mean ‘wavy’ or ‘ringlets’?”

  I called so often that I became tight with this customer service rep named Maureen, who would describe donors to me like this: “He’s not unattractive, but I wouldn’t look twice at him in the subway.” Or “He reminds me of that guy on The Young and the Restless, the one who plays Victor’s daughter Vicky’s husband Cole? He’s also been on Days of Our Lives. Oh, and he was one of the Martin brothers on All My Children. He’s a hottie!” She was trying to be helpful, but our frames of reference never meshed. I had no idea who her beefcake soap star was; she had no idea who Jon Stewart was.

  It took months to find a donor, so you can imagine my disappointment when I hit “click to purchase” and learned he was “out of stock.” At 37, I was out of time. So I went through my Outlook and searched for any cute, smart guy friends with musical ability and a low likelihood of having any sexually transmitted diseases. I also didn’t want it to be someone I knew well, so I found the perfect guy: a hot 29-year-old cinematographer I’d spoken to for about five minutes at an Ivy League mixer.

  The thing is, I’d never even asked a guy to go on a date with me before, so I really had no idea how to ask a guy to be my sperm donor.

  The solution seemed obvious: a low-key e-mail. A “Hey, remember me, that girl from the Harvard-Yale mixer?” type of thing. I explained that I had “an unusual question,” and asked if he’d meet me for coffee.

  Which is how I ended up at the trendy Urth Café, making awkward small talk with a guy named Mike. But after dragging out a 20-minute discussion on the weather—in L.A., no small feat—he leaned across the table and said, “So, I’m really curious, what’s your ‘unusual question’?”

  Keep in mind that, as if this weren’t mortifying enough, we were on the patio at Urth on a crowded Sunday, where you’re about three inches from all the people at the surrounding tables. I tried to think of how an advertiser might spin this, like, “Hey, want to have steamy, mind-blowing, one-night-stand sex—without a condom?”

  Instead I beat around the bush, mixing lame metaphors like “not having all the ingredients for the recipe” with “It’s like donating a kidney, but without removing the organ.” I could see from Mike’s expression which organ he was picturing.

  “Actually, it’s more like giving blood,” I said, trying not to gross him out, “except there’s sex instead of needles, and, well, you know, there’s a baby in the end.”

  Mike stared back blankly, his chai mocha latte literally suspended midair. The silence lasted so unbelievably long that I became hopeful that maybe he’d just… forgotten the question. I hoped I could leave and he’d have no memory of the event.

  “Wow,” Mike finally said when he came back to life. “I’m really flattered that you thought of me.” But then instead of turning me down nicely, he said he’d be open to talking about it.

  Now it was my turn to say, “Wow.” Over the next few hours, we became oddly intimate, discussing everything from our dating lives to our dysfunctional families. It seemed that simply talking about having unprotected sex had the same effect as having actual first-time sex—the walls immediately came down.

  We even talked about whether he’d be OK getting a semen analysis (surprisingly, yes) and sleeping with me (not surprisingly, yes). By the time Mike walked me to my car, we were both giddy and infatuated—not with each other, but with the idea of making this ha
ppen.

  That night, he sent me an e-mail that said: “So far I am a yes, but with more questions.” I couldn’t believe it. I e-mailed back that I’d be happy to answer each and every one of them.

  So, we decided to meet again at Urth. In fact, over the next two weeks, we met at Urth so often that I started calling Urth my “sperm office” and my friend Linda started calling it, simply, “Spurth.”

  One day at Spurth, though, I learned something disturbing about Mike. He was a member of the Landmark Forum. What kind of Jew joins a cult like the Forum? To me, the Forum isn’t that different from Scientology, or heck, being a registered Republican. And I really wanted to avoid both religious and Republican sperm—in case these traits were stealthily genetic. I started having second thoughts, but my WASPy friend Catherine said, “Lori, you’re being neurotic. You overthink things. Besides, what a person does in his private life is his private business.”

  A very Gentile attitude, if you ask me.

  My Jewish friend Andrea screamed through the phone: “The cult will come and take your baby!”

  But I needed a donor, and Mike was cute, smart, talented, healthy… and most important, maybe willing to go through with it. So a few days later, Mike and I took a walk in the rain. It would have been romantic, had I not thrown in words like cervical mucus.

  At the end of the walk, Mike said he wanted to be my donor, and he even asked whether, like a script submission in Hollywood, I was out to others or this was an exclusive offer. Suddenly I thought I should have created a bidding war and played hard to get, sort of like The Rules for snaring a donor. “Look, Ben has expressed interest, so if you’re interested, you better get back to me by Friday. I’m also out to Steve and Mike. There’s a lot of heat around this.”

  But it didn’t matter, because Mike was in. Or at least, he would be.

  Then, right before I was about to ovulate, Mike inexplicably disappeared for five days. I got worried that he might, well, pull out. My WASPy friend Catherine said, “Lori, you can’t worry about a bad thing happening before it happens. It’s not like you can avoid the bad event by worrying about it.” Again, a very Gentile attitude. My Jewish friend Linda said, “Oy, vey. You’re about to be dumped by your donor!”