Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  And she was right: Like a breakup about to happen, the signs were clear. When Mike resurfaced, he left a message on my voice mail saying we needed to talk—leaving his full name and number, including area code—as if we were strangers again.

  For our final meeting at Spurth, I wore sexy pink hip-hugger corduroys and straightened my hair. I wanted to look good, the way a woman does when she wants to leave her dumper with a sense of regret. Mike also treated it like a romantic breakup, using a string of breakup clichés: “It’s not you, it’s me.” “It wouldn’t be fair to use you just for the sex.” “I just can’t commit yet, so for your sake, I don’t want to string you along.” And the kicker: “I hope we can still be friends.”

  “Of course we can be friends,” I lied, then added with a wink, “Besides, there are other fish in the sea.” But he didn’t appreciate my pun. He never did get my sense of humor. Hugging good-bye, I felt reassured by the fact that maybe we weren’t right for each other anyway.

  Besides, there is a romantic ending. Two weeks later, Maureen called from the sperm bank. My first-choice donor—who, Maureen said, looked like “a Jewish George Clooney”—had stopped by the bank to make a deposit. Soon the goods were FedExed to me in a nitrogen tank and—finally—I got knocked up.

  Yesterday I learned that I’m having a healthy baby boy—who, being Jewish, will undoubtedly complain one day to his therapist that Mommy embarrassed him by telling the story of his conception to a roomful of Jews at a seedy club in Hollywood, all for the sake of “material.”

  And no, the bris will not be at Spurth.

  Me Make Fire for Lynn

  By Lynn Harris

  DURING WHAT TURNED OUT to be my last summer as a single person, I flew to Idaho for a weeklong camping and horseback riding trip through the 2.4-million acre Frank Church Wilderness, miles from the middle of nowhere. Through a freak scheduling accident, it turned out I was the only person on the trip. Just me, two horses, four pack mules and—oh, my!—my guide: Justin, a 20-year-old with a baby face and Wrangler jeans. Just the two of us in the largest wilderness in the lower 48, accessible only on foot, horseback or teeny plane. It was like Blind Date meets Survivor meets Who Wants to Marry a Horse Whisperer?

  When we arrived at our first night’s camp, Justin set about gathering wood. “Me make fire for Lynn,” he joked. Yes, we were going to get along fine. We stayed up late, talking and looking at the stars. I kept thinking, “Holy shit, I am alone in the wilderness with a not unattractive member of the opposite sex.”

  When the fire went out, I went to my tent. Justin slept outside. I didn’t dare join him—at least not yet. Sure, Justin could fashion a condom out of a squirrel bladder, but neither that nor the fact that I’ve got 12 years on him was the issue. Bottom line: You don’t want to hook up with your lifeline. And in the wilderness, there’s no way to avoid him the next day.

  I’m not saying I wasn’t tempted. The guys I’ve dated have been more Muppet than Marlboro Man, but I’ve always had a thing for cowboys, along with country music and shitkicker boots. My burning desire for men in chaps is, at least in part, a result of my frustration with the higher-maintenance New York men—those who are less likely to say, “Well, little lady, I will name you all the stars in the night sky and then fry you up that elk I felled with my pistol,” and more likely to say, “Sure, I can totally meet you for a Gardenburger after my facial. Oh no wait, I have Pilates.”

  For the next few days, Justin and I rode morning to dusk, through forest, over meadows, along creeks, over fire-scarred mountaintops spiked with sooty skeletons of pine. We sang Merle Haggard. We lay in a miniature meadow of tiny red berries, letting them pop in our mouths like caviar. I learned to tell deer tracks from elk, moose poop from bear. I learned to plot a course three moves ahead, over pick-up sticks of fallen trees, that was wide enough for the mules. I learned that Justin and I had different skill sets. He can hunt, fish, shoot, track, build, farm, break a horse, dissect an elk. I can read French. We talked about our religious differences—so vast there’s not much to say.

  Justin told me about growing up on a dairy farm, about branding and castrating the calves. “When we cut off their balls, we fry ’em right quick on the branding iron and eat ’em right there,” he said, grinning.

  “No, you do not,” I said. This had become a game of ours, trying to get the other to believe something insane about our foreign-to-each-other lifestyles. I’d made him fall for some tall tale about fighting off Rollerblading muggers, which wasn’t that difficult; he’d seen The Warriors.

  “Yes, we do,” he said. “I’m totally serious.”

  Of course I know people eat cow testicles—excuse me, Rocky Mountain Oysters—which is what made Justin’s fib so brilliant, I thought. It was based on fact, naturally, but he had invented the fabulous “fry-’em-up-on-the-iron” detail. Genius.

  “Lynn, I’m not kidding. I swear to God.”

  I thought about our earlier conversation when I rubbed my aching back and made some crack about humans “not being meant to walk upright.” And he said something like, “You don’t really believe that shit, do you?” Meaning evolution. Meaning that when he swore to God, he was not whistling Dixie.

  One afternoon, while we were riding along a ridge, a small (but big enough) bear stepped onto the trail 50 yards ahead of us. Jumping off his horse, Justin handed me her bridle and the mule line. The danger was that these animals would spook, which is one thing in a barn, quite another on a ridge. I held tight, watching Justin run toward the bear, yelling and throwing small rocks at it until it shrugged and lumbered away. It was the coolest, and hottest, thing I have ever seen anyone do.

  That night, Justin showed me his .357 Magnum. It looked like a prop.

  “You’ve never even seen one, have you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know anyone who owns one,” I said. Not even my Georgia granddaddy had a gun, though he’d been outlaw enough to make moonshine on the back stoop of a dry home.

  “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t,” Justin said. “I’ll let you shoot it if you want.” He showed me the safety, the chamber and the feather-light action of the trigger.

  “Why am I so scared?” I asked.

  “You should be scared,” he said.

  Justin fired first, to prepare me for how loud it would be. The sound bore right into my chest, through my gut, out my toes and back into the trees. Justin made me paper towel earplugs and handed me the pistol. It felt heavy and out of place in my hands. He showed me how to aim at the tobacco tin he’d leaned against a tree. I half-listened, focusing mainly on his instructions not to touch the trigger until I was about to fire. I also imagined the scenario: my finger slipping, the gun flipping, how a bullet would feel in my neck, how Justin would feel having to call my mother.

  I eventually chose a moment and pulled the trigger. Boom!

  “I’m proud of you!” Justin grinned. The tobacco tin was untouched but we celebrated my initiation with chicken-fried steak. Justin also dug up a bottle of vodka, which, it turns out, mixes perfectly with Country Time lemonade. We tore at the steaks and talked with our mouths full. Then we danced—Justin leading me in a humming two-step around the fire. Suddenly he was flipping me over his shoulder like they do on the country cable channels. I was over the moon, over the bright crescent moon that no one else could see for hundreds of miles.

  On our last day, we saw salmon swimming upstream after laying their eggs. Soon after they would become ashy white and fleshless like the skin of molted snakes, only without a new body in which to glide away. How can nature be so cruel as to make them swim upstream on the way to their death?

  Justin didn’t find this scene as heartbreaking as I did, which made me realize what is so damn attractive about cowboys. Yes, they’re macho and save you from bears. But they’re both hard as horseshoes and soft as flannel. They’re not unfeeling, just used to pain. Life cycle, food chain—they see it all closer than we do. They may not “share” so much, but they
listen, and they dance.

  When we arrived back at base camp, the two other guides, Jared and Shane, were making us margaritas. We drank them in the outdoor hot tub. My first thought: “Dear Penthouse Forum…” My second: We could totally make a porno called Laura Ingalls Just Got Wilder.

  Justin told the two guys how the city slicker could handle her horse, her rare steak, her two-step and her liquor, not to mention his gun. And I was glad that firing Justin’s gun turned out to be a metaphor for what never happened between us—not even that last night when Jared and Shane turned in, not even after Justin grabbed my hand and coaxed me into jumping with him out of the hot tub, into the freezing brook, and back into the tub, laughing and watching steam rise from our bodies. God knows when I got this mature, but sometimes, I figured, it’s better to wish you had than to wish you hadn’t. I unrolled my sleeping bag on some horse blankets, under the stars, next to Justin, who was next to his gun. And I slept.

  In a Different Light

  By Eric Weingrad

  I WAS 10 YEARS OLD and only three short years away from my Bar Mitzvah and my first joint. To keep me on the right path to one of those goals, my parents had enrolled me in Hebrew school at the local JCC. Every Sunday, I begrudgingly sat through Mrs. Cohen’s four-hour Hebrew class, counting down the minutes until I would be picked up by the carpool parent of the week. Mrs. Cohen wasn’t the friendliest of ladies or the most patient. She did, however, fanatically love her culture and religion, and wanted nothing less than for us to share her righteous adoration. Let it be known that we, fourteen little homely Jewish fifth graders, did not. At 5′4″, Mrs. Cohen was an extremely stout woman, but if she’d been a foot taller, she still would have been 30 pounds overweight. Her hairstyle probably hadn’t changed since she was a teenager in the ’60s, and every week she wore polyester brown math teacher pants and a different silky blouse with one desperate button struggling to keep her chest at bay.

  On one regular dreary Sunday, my class was about two and a half hours into studying proper pronunciations of vowel symbols when Mrs. Cohen announced that for the next six weeks she would host two kids from class at her house for Shabbat. “I hope this experience will shed some light onto the beauty of a Shabbat dinner. Now, who wants to be the first two to sign up?” Not one hand rose. It’s one thing to waste a perfectly good Sunday in Hebrew school, but to spend a Friday night at your Hebrew-school teacher’s house would be insanity. After an eternity, Mrs. Cohen sighed. “Obviously, anyone who partakes in Shabbat services with my family does not have to attend school that weekend.” Corey’s hand shot up mere milliseconds behind mine.

  That Friday night, my mother dropped me off at Mrs. Cohen’s home in a grittier section of the city. The roads, the sky, the row homes, even the few Orthodox Jews already walking to early evening services looked gray to me. Mrs. Cohen greeted me at the door wearing a long black dress that made her look like a human inkblot. I dragged my overnight bag, secretly containing my Game Boy and two boxes of Nerds candy, into the house. No sooner had I kissed the mezuzah than I was introduced to Yitzy, Mrs. Cohen’s husband. For as big as Mrs. Cohen was, Yitzy dwarfed her. He easily weighed 300 pounds and shook my hand with the force of a Silverback. From the permanent sweat stains on his white button-down shirt, I could tell he wore this very same specimen for every Friday night service. Corey had already been dropped off so he was waiting impatiently for me in the living room, but as I began to walk toward Corey, Yitzy practically yanked me off my feet and tossed me into the kitchen. “You and I will set up the dinner table,” he said. There, leaning over the hot stove, was a girl. She turned and introduced herself to me as Sarah, their daughter. I could feel my face warm up and fill with blood. Yitzy and Mrs. Cohen made her?

  At the Shabbat dinner, Corey stuffed his face with challah and brisket, eyes glued to his plate, unaware of my newfound reverence for the female body. I may have been wearing a yarmulke and reading Hebrew aloud, but what I was thinking was the furthest thing from religious. Sarah sat across from me in a tight red turtleneck sweater. All I knew was her cute, perky breasts looked like two potato knishes packed perfectly into her training bra. And I was still hungry.

  After dinner, Mrs. Cohen took me and Corey down into the basement den where we would be spending the rest of our night. Sarah had homework to do, so she was sequestered in her room upstairs for the night. I quietly revealed my fascination with Sarah to Corey, but he just said, “She’s gross and her mom’s grosser.” Corey and I were obviously at two different mental places at this point, so I lent him my Game Boy to play with while I plotted how to sneak up into her room. Around 9:45 p.m., Yitzy came down to get us into our sleeping bags and shut the lights off. “’Night, boys,” he said as he creaked back up the wooden stairs.

  But I wasn’t tired. I sat there in the dark listening to Corey make fart sounds with his mouth and tell nasty jokes that he’d read in one of his older brother’s books. They weren’t even funny, just an excuse to say “pussy” or “tit.” I wanted to do more than just say those words. After about an hour, I told Corey that I was hungry and was going to sneak into the kitchen and steal some pretzels—a brilliant cover for my real plan to sneak into Sarah’s room and steal a moment basking in her beauty.

  Upstairs was pitch black, but I could make out a thin line of light from under the kitchen door. I heard movement from the back of the house and concluded that it was Sarah still awake doing homework in her room. I scrambled into the kitchen, took the lid off of a container of hard pretzels, grabbed a big handful and stuffed them into my pajama pants. Then I quietly and expertly made my way down the hallway toward what I assumed was Sarah’s bedroom. Halfway there, I heard a faucet turn on and a stream of water hit tile in the bathroom ahead. As I got closer, I watched the steam build up and push its way out under bathroom door and into the hallway. Was I so lucky that Sarah was standing right there on the other side of the door, naked, preparing to take a shower? I got low to the ground and peered through the sliver of the opening. Someone in a robe was moving around.

  The door blew open a little more, then a little more. I was obviously meant to see this. I stood up. My eyes locked onto the display in front of me. There was no escaping. Inside, there, in plain clear view, it wasn’t Sarah at all. It was Mrs. Cohen. With her robe gaping open. That’s when I saw two of the largest breasts I’ve ever seen to date. They looked like two round, hairless monsters with single unblinking eyes. I imagined grasping one with both hands, flesh spilling out between my fingers. I was turned on.

  I was so turned on that I forgot I was standing right outside the bathroom door, fully erect and slack-jawed. I could hear someone coming toward me from another room, feet slapping on the hard wood floors. After one last greedy look, I bolted back downstairs and hopped into my sleeping bag. Corey asked where the pretzels were so I tossed him some and said to be quiet, we might have been caught.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, but my heart and penis both shouted at me, “DO SOMETHING!” I tested to see if Corey was awake by offering him $20 to say “hello.” Nothing. I went to work.

  I slid my pajama bottoms down to about thigh level and rolled onto my stomach. Something was happening. My schmeckel, as my mother often called it, was begging me to rub it. So I did, against my Transformers sleeping bag. I loved her. I loved this. Unaware that I was popping my masturbation cherry, I kept it up for about a minute when—flick—all the lights came on and I heard a very familiar voice say, “Corey, Eric. Come up here, boys.”

  I was mortified. I was sure she or Yitzy had seen me staring at her in the bathroom. Even worse, I was sure that somehow they knew what I was just doing in their den only moments ago. I was so ashamed. I felt so dirty. My hands were sweaty, my knees were weak, my mouth was dry.

  Mrs. Cohen, still wearing her robe, ripped into us. “I know you guys came up here and stole food. And Corey, tomorrow morning your mother and I are going to have to talk to you about your language. The jokes you were spewing out earlier are n
ot appropriate for a boy your age, and Eric, you shouldn’t laugh at everything you hear.” It turns out Mrs. Cohen could hear everything we said that night because a vent from the den went right into her bedroom. Lucky for me, spanking it against my sleeping bag was as quiet as it gets. My desperate love for Mrs. Cohen faded well before I was due at Hebrew school the following Sunday. But that night, I learned that falling in love can be as simple as seeing someone in a different light… or naked.

  All Eighteen Inches

  By David J. Rosen

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS 1996. The city air was thick with CK One. It was a simpler time: Most folks didn’t have cell phones yet, the “Macarena” was the #1 song, and I still ate my bagels without scooping them out.

  But I was feeling blue. I was in the second longest sexual slump of my life, the worst one being from age zero to eighteen. Plus, life had become routine. My days were transitioning from post-college alcohol-fueled shenanigans to something more mature, long hours at work followed by ethnic food delivery and whatever I could find on basic cable. I was working as a writer in advertising and had spent the last eight months toiling on a campaign for a sneaker company that was killed right before the holidays. When I pressed to find out why, I was told, simply, “The gestalt was wrong.”

  I was lying on my couch, watching Where Are They Now: Kirk Cameron, when my phone rang. It was my friend Darin Strauss, who was not yet bestselling novelist Darin Strauss, but just sloppy, whiny, former camp counselor Darin Strauss. He was all out of breath and giggling; his pitch made him sound like a ticklish castrato.