So this seasickness gave me a good excuse to abandon the desk and lie on my futon and masturbate. Because of the seasickness, I pretended I was a sailor, and this helped rationalize all the masturbation, because a real sailor who worked on a Greek tanker once told me that a sailor’s life consisted of three things: rust, sperm, and beer. They spent all day battling rust—chipping it off and painting over it—and in their free time they jerked off and drank beer. Sailors are adventurous, romantic figures, so I was glad to think of myself as one, to qualify as one, since I was such a wanker in my little tanker of an apartment.
Sometimes, though, when I masturbated, I wanted company. But the snowdrifts were enormous outside and made leaving my house too daunting a task. So I took solace in phone sex. But because I was broke and cheap, I would call this fifteen-cents-a-minute homosexual line. All the heterosexual lines were much more expensive. This is where it’s handy to be polymorphously perverse—you can save money.
So I would call the sex line, and it was some kind of telephonic bulletin board for men seeking sexual partners. And I liked hearing all the wacky messages. There were so many desperate people out there that I felt less alone.
Then one time I discovered that on this bulletin board line there was a live option, which I hadn’t realized. I checked it out and I started talking to this fellow, and after some basic introductions— our names (I gave a false one: Jim), appearances, and penis lengths (I added an inch)—he said to me, “Are you into chicken fights?” He had a thick Bay Ridge accent.
“You mean illegal cock fighting?” I asked. I thought he might be into such an activity because of the word cock.
“No, chicken fights. You know, where one guy gets on the shoulders of another guy. You into that?”
“Well, I haven’t done it for many years,” I said.
“It’s what I like to do. We could get together and I’ll climb on your shoulders, naked.”
“But who would we fight?”
“Nobody, but you could carry me around,” he said, quite earnestly in his rough Bay Ridge tones. “We could practice, and then in the summer we could go to Jones Beach and have chicken fights with other guys.”
He had really thought this out; it was a strange, sad little fantasy. I figured that as a boy he must have been having chicken fights and got an erection while straddling the neck of a good friend, but had been unable or too embarrassed to articulate to his pal what had happened. So who knows for how many years he had been fruitlessly trying to recapture that moment.
I thought I should try to help illuminate my phone partner. Perhaps if he contemplated the origins of his fantasy, he wouldn’t be so ruled by it, which seemed to be the case. “You must have had a good experience with chicken fights as a boy,” I said, like a therapist.
“No,” he said angrily. “It’s a fun thing to do now. It’s like foreplay. You’ve just never tried it.” And then the line was dead. He wanted sex, not therapy, for which I don’t blame him.
A few days after the chicken-fight conversation, I was listening again to the bulletin board and one message was very intriguing. This man wanted to get together in a hotel room and box while only suited up in underwear. This sounded more reasonable than shadow chicken fighting, and though I had never called anyone from the bulletin board—much to my amazement, the men gave out their home phone numbers—I wanted to call this boxing enthusiast. I happen to have a great interest in boxing. I studied it in 1992 at the Kingsway Gym on Fortieth Street. At the time, I thought I might want to write about boxing, and I had a great desire to be in a fight. To be hit and yet keep standing. To strike a perfect blow. But I only trained for one month, and to be allowed to spar at Kingsway, you had to be a member for three months. So for several years after my boxing lessons, I still had a hankering to apply the Queensberry rules to someone’s chin. I called the man on the bulletin board.
“Hello,” he answered in a gruff voice.
“I heard your message on the bulletin board.”
“You like to box?”
“Yeah,” I said, matching his gruff, conspiratorial tone.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked. He probably was hoping to tangle with a construction worker, something rugged.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Me too,” he said, and after that our voices became much less rough and more articulate. We talked about the loneliness of a writer’s life, the constant struggle, though at that moment his career was on an upswing. He had a nonfiction book coming out in a few months with a reputable publisher. It occurred to me that he might be a good contact. I was networking on a homosexual phone-sex line.
“I’m writing a novel,” I said. “But it’s going slowly.”
“Maybe you need a break,” he said. “Let’s get a room at the St. Mark’s Hotel and box. It will loosen you up. I have gloves and headgear.”
Offers like this don’t come about too often, and an hour later, I met him in front of the hotel. He was standing with one foot on a snowbank. He was a tall, rangy man in his early forties with a handlebar mustache. He had a duffel bag filled with the boxing gear. We shook hands and I felt shy, but not too shy—I was with a fellow writer. He rented the room and I didn’t offer to split the cost; he was the one with a book coming out.
Our boxing suite was tiny and narrow, hardly an official-sized ring. Following his instructions, we stripped down to our underwear, laced on our gloves, and strapped on our headpieces. Then he said, “Whoever gives up first has to suck the other one’s cock.”
He hadn’t mentioned this over the phone. And I had been naive to think that he would only want to engage in fisticuffs. But this notion of cocksucking didn’t appeal to me at all. Even though he was a writer, that handlebar mustache gave him a dirty look, which to my germ-sensitive worldview was not appealing.
“I’m really just into the boxing,” I said diplomatically.
He was disappointed, but then we began. I think he was hoping to beat me into submission, into cocksucking. Suddenly the fight took on grave consequences.
He crowded in and started off with body blows, which I deflected with my elbows. But then he began pounding me on the side of the head and pushing me around. I was in shock. I was in a fight in a hotel room. What was I doing? How did I end up here? He caught me in the stomach, winded me. If this kept up, I was going to have to suck a cock. I was in danger. I should have met up with the chicken-fight guy.
He backed me into the corner by the door. My gloves were protecting my face. He caught me on the side of my headgear. It made my head ring, but it woke me up. Fight back, Ames! Show some spirit. I pushed him off me so that I could fire my jab. I threw two quick jabs in succession, which he blocked, but I followed the jabs, as I had been trained at Kingsway, with a blow to his stomach and I got him good. And I felt good. His eyes narrowed with pain and surprise. Maybe my mouth wasn’t going to get sodomized. I threw two more jabs rapidly, which he blocked, but that was my plan—I then threw a lightning bolt of a right cross that caught him in the side of the head and he went tumbling onto the hotel bed. Maybe I’d make him suck my cock, though I didn’t like that mustache.
He got back up and charged me and pushed me against the wall. He tried to rub his underwear against me a little, and he threw an unskilled tantrum of punches into my rib cage. I let him have his fun and then I pushed him off me and did a quick one-two and caught him again with a cross on the side of the head. And my blow was so fierce that it knocked off his headgear and sent him stumbling backward, and he gouged his hip on the corner of the bureau, screamed, and fell to the bed in genuine agony.
Our tiny little boxing ring had worked against him, and I felt terrible about his hip. He was in the kind of pain where you stub your toe and you wish, momentarily, that life would end. He lay there clutching his wounded side, his face tormented. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I think we better stop,” he said in a pained whisper. “We don’t have good chemistry.” Chemistry
? It was a first-round knockout.
I got dressed and he just lay there on the bed. I felt bad seeing him defeated, his dream of victory and a blowjob destroyed. But sometimes I have to look after myself. “Good luck with your book,” I said as I opened the door to leave.
“Good luck with yours,” he said. And so we parted amicably— two writers wishing each other well.
I Was a Son, I Was a Father
IN 1988, MY PARENTS almost died, I met my son, and I finished my first novel.
Some things happened in 1987 that contributed to 1988. In June of ’87, I graduated from Princeton. A few days after graduation, I received a book contract for a novella I had written during my senior year. The contract stipulated that I was to expand the novella into a full-length novel by December of 1987. This was a dream come true—I was going to be a published writer. I moved to New York City to write my book.
In July of 1987, I received a letter from a woman whom I hadn’t spoken to in two years. She was someone I had slept with once. She was quite a bit older than me, thirteen years. She lived in Georgia, but we met in Vermont the summer I was a camp counselor. She taught music at the camp and one night we got a little tipsy and I was alone with her in her cabin. And a bat flew in the window. We both screamed. It was flying around madly, and I said, “I don’t think bats can see in the light.” I said this out of some vague recollection that bats are blind, so I turned out the light and we waited, afraid, scared, and then I turned the light back on and the bat was gone. I said proudly, feeling like a real outdoorsman, “See, I was right,” and as soon I said that, the bat flew right between us, like some kind of blind-bat cupid, and once more we screamed. I turned the lights out again and put my arm through hers, to protect her, for protection, and the touch led to another, and then we were on her bed—the lights never came back on—and we made love. The next day, she felt embarrassed because I was so much younger, and we never did it again. And when camp ended, I never thought I’d see her again.
So two years later, she wrote me this letter and with it was a picture of a fifteen-month-old baby boy with red hair and blue eyes. My red hair and blue eyes. She wrote that I was the father of this child, and she said she was sorry for not writing me sooner, but she knew I was in college and she didn’t want to burden me, but that as time went on, she realized I had the right to know. She made no demands of me. She said I could do whatever I wanted to do, meet him or not meet him, but that she just wanted me to know. It was a simple, beautiful letter, and I held the picture of this red-haired baby. I knew he was my son and I wanted to see him.
But I’ve always been the kind of person who can tackle only one problem at a time. And the first problem, in my mind, was the book. I figured I could finish it in a month, two months at the most. After all, I had written the first half in eight months—while taking classes. Without classes, it would have to go quickly. Then when the book was done I could go see my son.
I wasn’t able to write at all. In September I moved back to Princeton, thinking that New York was the problem. I rented a small room in a house with some graduate students. At the end of October the stress of everything led to a week-long drinking binge and then a month-long hospitalization.
By January of 1988, I still hadn’t written a word. And I hadn’t gone to see my son. I couldn’t go see him, in my mind, until the book was done. It’s not entirely clear to me why I thought this. I think I imagined that if I was with him that it would be impossible to work. Subconsciously, I guess, I was simply too overwhelmed by it all and didn’t know what to do, and so could do nothing. Couldn’t write, couldn’t go see this baby.
The third week of January, I rented from this old couple an attic room, which I was going to use as a writing room. A writing room was the solution, I thought. The old couple gave me a wooden chair and I bought a little card table for a desk, and there was already a cot up there in the attic for taking naps. My first day at the card table, I still couldn’t write anything for my book. So I wrote this long confessional letter to my teacher at Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates. I told her about my son, my drinking, my hospitalization, and my writing block. Essentially, I was begging for her help. It was a humiliating letter, but I didn’t know what else to do. I swooned away from my card table and I took a nap on the cot. When I woke up, I read the letter. How can I mail this? I wondered. How can I burden her with my troubles? But I didn’t know who else to turn to.
I put the letter in an envelope and addressed it. Then I opened this little Hazelden meditation book that a friend had given me while I was in the hospital. For each day of the year there was an aphoristic quote from a famous person and then a little paragraph that expanded upon the theme of the quote. I opened the book to the day, to January 23, and the aphorism from the famous person read: “No person can save another.” It was attributed to Joyce Carol Oates.
I slid back violently from my desk as if a ghost had yanked my chair out. I hadn’t even mailed my letter, but I had received my response. I hid the letter in a book. It was never sent.
From January 23 on I began to write every day. My life settled into a very good routine. I read the diet book Fit for Life, not because I needed to lose weight, but because my sister had recommended its methods as a way for me to deal with my difficult (constipated) digestion. Following the book’s regimen, I became quite regular every morning—and if I was behind schedule in the A.M., I would wait until the toilet beckoned. I couldn’t write in the morning until I had first released my bowels. Usually I was in the attic by nine. I’d work until noon and then repair to my vegetarian restaurant, the Tempting Tiger. Every day I ordered a hummus salad that cost $2.50. Sometimes I splurged and had avocados added for seventy-five cents. My money was tight back then, as it has been for the last ten years. It’s so fatiguing to be broke all the time. I’d like to lie down right now thinking about it.
Anyway, after lunch at the Tiger, I would take a brief nap in the attic and then write until five. I would then go to the university gym, where I still had privileges, and play basketball for two hours. Then it was home and a sober salad. Fit for Life had taught me that if I wanted to be alive, I had to eat food that was alive.
Then I’d write letters and read until ten. I followed this schedule for months. I had no social life and I had once again sworn off sex. I was frightened of it. I had come to see fornication as my downfall. I had misused the gift of sex and had created an illegitimate child. But I was working hard on my book, working like a monk, so that I could go see this child, my son.
One day in March, though, I went to the supermarket in the middle of the day and this thirty-something graduate student picked me up. We went back to her apartment and she gave me a blowjob. As soon as it was done, I was so racked with guilt that I went running to the enormous, cathedral-like university chapel. I was all alone in there and I prayed to God for forgiveness. But I became so distraught that I lay down on the cold, stone floor of the chapel and hid under the wooden pews. I started writhing there on the floor; it was sort of a strange spasming, swimming motion. Then I thought I felt God opening up my back like an envelope, and this fierce, burning red light was entering me to purify me and to remove my sins. I lay on that floor for at least an hour. I knew I was losing my mind, but I couldn’t stop myself.
I wondered as I lay there if I was becoming like the other mad-men in town. There were several strange fellows in Princeton who lingered around the campus, like sick birds who can’t fly. No one knew their exact histories, but they appeared to be graduate students whose minds had been broken by academia.
There were two such men whom I was particularly fascinated by. One was this tiny, well-dressed fellow with a perfectly circular bald spot on the back of his head. He was forever approaching girls and asking them, “Do you go to Rutgers?” Why he was asking Princeton University coeds if they went to Rutgers was a great mystery. And if they gave him any kind of response, he would then ask them out for dinner. It was harmless enough, but he did this at
least a dozen times each day.
He also had the peculiar habit of walking all around Princeton early in the morning while drinking from a pint of milk. Often, because I had insomnia, I would see him out my window at six A.M., tilting back his pint carton. As the months went by, his bald spot seemed to grow larger, and the heels of his shoes were worn down ferociously by his constant walking.
The other broken graduate student who had caught my eye was this man who spent his days in the main library. He was always in this small study room, jokingly called the Hunting and Killing Room because there were watercolors of hunting scenes. He was tall with a yellowish, egglike bald head, and he had this grotesque wreath of stringy black hair that hung from about the level of his ears down to his neck. He looked like a classic pervert, and when I was an undergraduate, the girls called him the Onanist because he would sit in the Hunting and Killing Room and look at the girls and rub himself, but somehow discreetly enough that he was never arrested.
(Years later, because of this man, when I had to come up with a name for my New York Press column, I suggested to the editors “The Onanist.” And they were very pleased with this, but then I chickened out and asked for it to be called the more elegant “The Boulevardier.” But they thought this was too pansy, and they went with my third suggestion, “City Slicker.”)
So after my incident on the chapel floor, I thought I might be destined to become a campus ghoul, but somehow I rallied and I kept working on my book all through the spring. I had only one other sexual incident, and that was with the tree outside my attic window. When it flowered in May, it gave off the most erotic odor. I would get unsolicited erections just sitting there at my card table. I fell in love with that tree.
What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Page 12