What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer

by Jonathan Ames

  I was finishing up my iced coffee and I could feel my hemorrhoid worsening, but my balls weren’t elevating.

  “That must have been humiliating,” I said.

  “I tried a lot of things to make it look like I had hair after that. I glued on Barbie doll wigs, but they fell off and didn’t look very good. And I tried mascara, but sweat would make that run off. One time, I was in our basement and there was this window and I was gluing on a Barbie doll wig and this guy walked by and looked down at me. I felt gross, but it excited me, too.”

  “That and the shoe store were early important experiences.”

  “I think so. I remember both very vividly.”

  “So this is interesting,” I said. “Your late puberty sent you into exhibitionism. And my late puberty, according to my counselor, contributed to my fascination with transsexuals. He says that because I was in limbo and unsure of my sexuality and gender during a crucial time, that to this day I identify with transsexuals, who represent this limbo period. But I seem to be outgrowing it now, finally. I simply appreciate transsexuals.”

  “I think I could get into transsexuals,” he said.

  I felt a little territorial. “You better stick to one problem,” I said. I had been with Chandler for several hours at this point and I needed to go home. I told him I’d return the next day.

  “Do you feel okay about all this talking?” I asked.

  “I feel great,” he said. “It’s good to confess to someone.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “I’m probably going to write this all up. Is that all right?”

  “Everyone knows it anyway. It’s good to get the truth out. And the I Ching says that to be the clown is the wisest path and that the critics are the real fools.”

  The second day I was with him, Chandler was wearing shorts. A black elastic knee brace kept his flesh-colored prosthesis attached to his still-healthy thigh. We sat on the concrete stairs. Our legs were splayed out. “I see you’re wearing shorts. You better have underwear on,” I teased.

  “I do. I have boxers on,” he said.

  “Your testicles can slip out of boxers,” I said.

  He smiled at me sheepishly. “I’m trying,” he said.

  Then we started talking quite a lot and I got his life story. Born in Great Falls, Montana, and raised in Tacoma, Washington. Mixed background: Irish, American Indian, Southern Baptist. The youngest of six children. Moved with his mother to Shaker Heights, Ohio, after his parents’ divorce. Went to art school in Kansas City and California. Spent his summers working for his father on the Weyerhauser Railroad in the Pacific Northwest, loading ties, pounding spikes. After art school, he lived in L.A. for four years. Spent a year as a small-time flimflam man. That came to an end when he stole a Chinese artifact, a scroll, from the Berkeley Museum. He arranged to sell it on the black market for five thousand dollars but chickened out. A year later, he tried to return it and claim the reward. He said it had been given to him by a girl. He was arrested and in the interrogation room they asked repeatedly, “Harry Chandler, did you steal the scroll?” He broke down after thirty minutes. He spent some time in jail and most of the charges were dropped. The judge ordered him out of the state of California, but he stayed. He made the newspapers: ARTIST STEALS ART.

  He got married and ran an awning repair business and destroyed several famous Los Angeles awnings after using an improper sealant. Moved to Rhode Island with his wife. After a year in R.I., they moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, to try to get into the movie business down there. Their marriage was breaking up and his wife was taking care of a dog actor (a dog trained for movies) and the dog pushed her down a flight of stairs and she broke her arm in seven places. Chandler hadn’t made it with the studios in Wilmington, so he was leading illegal tours of an old, haunted Masonic temple. He believes that he insulted the ghosts present in the temple, causing disasters for him and his wife. The week after his wife broke her arm, he was at a party at a beach house drinking tequila. After two bottles, Chandler took off all his clothes. He went running out of the house and down a road to the ocean and stepped in a hole and snapped his leg back one hundred and eighty degrees. Drunk, he popped it back in place, but he couldn’t walk. He was taken to Cape Fear Hospital.

  “This Southern doctor said to me, ‘You had enough alcohol to kill a man. You were nekked on the beach. My assistant is going to amputate you at the knee. I’m going fishing.’ They called my mother for permission. They said, ‘Do you have a son Larry Chandelier?’ But she wouldn’t let them do it. I was taken in a helicopter to Duke, where maybe they could save the leg, but the gangrene had already set in. I watched my foot turn black over a month.”

  Over the next two years, Chandler lived in Durham and had fifteen operations on his leg.

  “They say you lose five years of your life for every operation. That makes me a hundred and three. I look pretty good for my age, but my immune system was killed by all the morphine. That’s why I have so many allergies. And it’s why I’m so thin. I don’t retain any vitamins, but the herbs are building me back up. But for years I’ve felt like the man who fell to earth. Getting thinner, dying . . . They cut off my foot on my twenty-ninth birthday. It was powerful astro-logically; nines are birth years, can be a good thing—you start over. For me it was a bad thing.”

  “Did you ever think of suing? There was that hole in the road.”

  “No, I don’t want to sue anyone. . . . I’ve been receiving disability for ten years, though. Five hundred dollars a month. It’s supplemented my art career. I can survive on almost nothing. It’s great to be supplemented—I can just paint. It’s worked out quite nicely, actually. I could almost say that it’s worth it.”

  After Durham, Chandler came to New York. He lived in an SRO hotel, and before he started selling his paintings on the street, he worked as a bartender. He’s had twenty-seven restaurant jobs. One night while bartending on the Upper West Side, he was arm wrestling a patron and his arm was snapped in half. He thought he was going to lose his arm, but he didn’t.

  At the end of our second day together, Chandler packed up his paintings and table and managed to get it all on a small luggage carrier. He’d had no sales all weekend.

  I walked with him while he wheeled his paintings to his loft in Tribeca. On Church Street, a famous painter staggered out of a bar, incredibly drunk, and he hailed Chandler: “There’s a real artist!” We shook hands with the drunk and went to Chandler’s building. In his vestibule there’s a window that faces the street. Chandler hung one of his smaller paintings in the window; underneath the painting, stenciled on the glass, is Harry Chandler. Paintings. 966-6113.

  We carried his large paintings up to his loft, which he shares with three roommates. In his room, which is also his studio, he showed me many of his paintings and his cutouts—paintinglike depictions made from slices of colored paper.

  For several years, Chandler was a regular at the Blue Angel strip club. They let him in for free and he would paint and draw. They hung his work on their walls. He’s the Degas of strippers—he has many portraits and nude studies of the girls: It’s his Blue Angel period. There are also dozens of his New York street scenes. His paintings are raw and they’re full of sex, but there’s also an undeniable sadness in his work. His subjects are always remote, lost, lonesome, looked at from a distance.

  We went up to his roof to see if his voyee was there, but she wasn’t. I saw his yellow pup tent. He told me that I could come up there sometime and lie in his tent and pretend to be him and that she would strip for me. I told him I’d take him up on it.

  “So you walk around here nude? I still think it’s amazing that no one calls the police.”

  “The police know about me. They see me from their helicopters. It’s okay to be naked in New York City.”

  He paused a moment, contemplating the legality of what he does, and then he added, matter-of-factly, “But an erection is a felony.”

  The next day, Chandler came over to my apartmen
t to give me a painting. He also brought over something for me to rub into my scalp to grow hair, and an herb for my hemorrhoid. I thanked him for his presents and he was sitting on my bed and I said, “I’m going to write about you, so I’d like to see your stump.”

  He rolled up his pants and removed his prosthesis. His stump was covered with layers of socks for padding. He leaned the prosthesis against my bed and it looked like the sawed-off leg of a mannequin. The calf part, he explained, is stiffened fiberglass and it’s hollow and Chandler puts his stump inside. The foot part is rubber and very realistic looking. “It’s top of the line, made in Seattle,” he said. “There’s even a thong split for the toes for wearing sandals, and there are toenails and even veins.”

  He slowly removed the socks from the stump and piled them neatly on my bed; there were at least ten pairs. “I usually have special stump socks, but they get dirty. This stump can really get smelly. Like rotten sauerkraut. Most of the time, I can’t smell it, I’m used to it. These kids I teach on Fire Island, I don’t know how they put up with it—cigarette breath, rotten stump sauerkraut smell. I guess they must really like me.”

  He removed the last sock and held his stump in his hand for me to look at. He rubbed the heel to show me how cushiony it was— the doctors were able to save his heel. His stump looked like a bone with no meat, only skin. The heel was like a rubber stopper at the bottom of a cane.

  Chandler was smiling at me. He looked handsome. He lay back on my bed and extended out his stump. “It’s not bad,” he said. “It’s like a fifteen-inch penis. I wish I had this back in high school.”

  Roxanne of the Jersey Shore

  I WAS EIGHTEEN, and in the middle of July of 1982, I was down at Seaside Park, New Jersey, for the weekend. A friend and I had rented a twenty-dollar-a-day room overlooking the boardwalk, the beach, and the ocean. We were on top of Mike’s Clam on the Half-Shell, and the smells were perfect for the Jersey Shore: frying grease, old fish, and ocean breeze.

  We lay on the beach sunburning ourselves all day on Saturday, and then late in the afternoon, we went to our room and drank beer, which I had managed to buy with my older sister’s doctored driver’s license (I had changed her name from Donna to Donald).

  Our room had one big double bed and we sat on it and wiped our sandy feet along the walls. Many others had done this before us and the walls were covered with footprints.

  Around my fourth beer, I was feeling pretty good and I leaned my head out the window and I saw two girls walking up the boardwalk in that beautiful six-o’clock-in-the-evening sunlight. They were wearing tank tops and their shoulders were dark brown and they had trim teenage figures.

  “You want to drink some beer?” I called out to them.

  I was expecting to get the finger.

  “Sure,” one of them called out.

  “You do? . . . Well, come on up!” I said, and I pointed at the wooden staircase on the side of the clam bar.

  “No, you come down.”

  “All right.”

  I told my friend what was going on. We both couldn’t believe what was happening. It was a Jersey Shore dream. Two girls wanted to drink beer with us. We quickly put on our jeans and washed our faces in the bathroom in the hall. I put the beer in a paper bag and we flew down the wooden steps.

  The girls were gone.

  We started walking up the boardwalk. We both knew that we weren’t cool enough to have a Jersey Shore dream. We sat on a bench. We stared at the ocean. Our young souls had been so happy in those brief moments of putting on our jeans and washing our faces.

  We’d been sitting there about five minutes when I happened to glance over my friend’s shoulder and I saw the girls approaching us. The cuter of the two was carrying a little brown bag.

  “We went to get a bottle of rum from my brother,” she said. I was so happy that I probably had a growth spurt. I was only eighteen and didn’t reach my full height until I was twenty.

  The four of us went and hid under a pier and we drank our beer and rum. Eventually we paired off. I was better-looking than my friend, and I ended up with the very cute girl, who actually had the name of Roxanne. She had honey-blond hair and she was waif-like, with delicate features and a rose of a mouth. She did have a strong Jersey accent, stronger than mine, but I didn’t hold that against her.

  My friend’s girl had an all-right body, but she had bad teeth, which made her face sort of jowly, not pretty. My friend was pissed off that I got Roxanne, but I was lead dog in our little male pack of two, so I got the better girl.

  Roxanne and I started making out and grinding into the wet sand. My friend put his arm around his girl and the two of them stared at the surf.

  When it was fully dark out, we all went up to the boardwalk and played some of the games in the stalls. We took secret sips from the rum and Roxanne and I were holding hands. I felt on top of the world. I tried to win her a stuffed animal but failed.

  When we were all bored with the games, I went to my car and got two blankets and I bought some more beer. We put the two blankets on the beach about twenty feet apart. Roxanne and I made out and my friend and his girl sat on their blanket and didn’t kiss. It was a little depressing to feel their gloom so nearby.

  I said to Roxanne, “Do you want to go to my room?”

  She did. I was having the best Jersey Shore dream possible. We got to the room and I kept the lights off so that she wouldn’t see so clearly all the foot marks on the walls. There was a nice silvery light coming in the window from the boardwalk, and the footprints were obscured and looked perhaps like a wallpaper design.

  The bed felt wonderful after being on the beach and we held one another and she was a gorgeous young girl. She was only sixteen and her shirt came off and her erect nipples were like extra-long rubber pencil erasers. They stuck out at least an inch and a half from her tiny, nearly flat chest. I hadn’t seen many nipples in my life, but I knew that these were unusual. (In fact, I’ve never seen nipples like that again.)

  So it was a little freakish, but also very inspiring. Her pants came off and there were no panties. It was the greatest night of my life. I lavished her whole body and the pencil erasers with kisses. In the nooks and crannies of her knees and elbows and in the sweet pucker of her belly button, I tasted Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil, and it was like an aphrodisiac.

  “You can do it,” she said.

  It. I had only done it with two girls, and that had been after months of dating. And here above the boardwalk in Seaside Park, with the smell of frying clams in the air, a girl I had just met who had the longest nipples in the world was offering herself to me.

  I kneeled above her and she opened her thin, smooth legs in a shy and endearing way. I peered down at her in the silvery light. I was nervous—I had made love maybe ten times in my life and had almost always experienced premature ejaculation—but I was also happy.

  “Just pull out before . . . you know . . .” she said.

  I lowered myself and I kissed her and I was about to enter her when there was a fierce banging on the door, and then I heard my friend say, “I’ll go in.” And then he was in the room, staring at me. I rose up and was kneeling between Roxanne’s legs. Roxanne screamed and covered herself with the pillow.

  “Oh, my God,” my friend said. He was a virgin.

  “GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE,” I said. I’ve never been quick to anger, but this was one moment when I did feel rage, rather than depression, which is my usual response to conflict.

  He backed out, a goofy smile on his face, and I felt sort of proud that he was really seeing what a lead dog I was. As soon as he closed the door, Roxanne’s girlfriend with the funny jowls started screaming, “What’s he doing in there? He’s raping her.”

  Roxanne closed her legs and started crying.

  No, I thought, this can’t be. “We can still do it,” I said to her.

  The girlfriend was banging on the door. “Roxanne! Roxanne!”

  “I’ll be right out,” Roxanne scr
eamed through her tears.

  “I’m coming in,” said the girl, but there was some scuffling outside the door; my friend was obviously keeping the girl away from the door handle. I still had a chance. I was still maintaining my erection. Roxanne scooted to the end of the bed and started pulling on her pants.

  “Let’s do it really quick,” I said. It was going to be quick anyway.

  “No,” she said angrily.

  The halter top came on, the nipples were somehow pressed down, no one would suspect what odd treasures were hidden there.

  “Are you all right, Roxanne?” the girlfriend called out.

  “I’m all right,” she answered.

  She began to tie one of her sneakers, she was about to leave me, but I was still naked and still crazy with desire.

  “Could you give me a blowjob?” I asked in a sympathetic voice. I thought this was the kind of thing that a man might request under these circumstances. Also, I wanted to be able to report to my friend and to my friends back home that I had scored something significant on a dream of a Jersey Shore night.

  “Fuck you,” she said, and she stood up and slapped me; it hardly caught my chin and it didn’t hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think it was a bad thing to ask. I didn’t mean to be rude. . . . Could I have your address? I’ll write you.”

  She sat back down and she tied her other sneaker. She stood up to leave.

  “Please, could I have your address?”

  She scrawled it on a piece of paper for me.

  “I like you,” I said. She didn’t say anything back.

  She left the room and I wrapped a towel around my waist and sat on the bed. My friend, the idiot, came into the room.

  “Why did you come back here?” I asked.

  “That girl said she was going to go to the police if I didn’t bring her here. We saw a cop on the boardwalk. She thought you were raping her.”