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

by Jonathan Ames

  I rolled off. We lay there silently. Then I said, “My new book is coming out soon.” I had to show her that I had some worth. She smiled at me in the darkness. Women are quite kind to men.

  I didn’t spend the night. I went home around two A.M. and called Spencer. He’s an insomniac and can be reached at indecent hours.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “She invited me up and I had gas. I got an erection but lost it. Then got another one, but I had premature ejaculation. My only recourse was to brag that my book was coming out.”

  The other end of the phone was silent. The study of object relations had not prepared him for this. Perhaps if he were a Freudian, he might have been equipped to help me. Finally he spoke. “I can’t think of anything consoling to say.”

  “I’m going to call the woman on the Upper East Side.”

  “Good idea,” he said.

  Crack-Up

  THE FIRST TIME I SMOKED crack was Christmas night 1992. The morning of that day, I had taken my six-year-old son and my parents to Newark Airport. They were flying him back to his mother in Georgia so he could be with her for Christmas. He wasn’t able to fly by himself yet, and usually I flew him back down, but my parents were taking him this time, and after staying a little while with him in Georgia, they were going to visit old friends in Florida.

  After I saw them all onto the plane, I drove back to the small furnished room I was renting on the Upper East Side, having moved out of Princeton a few months before to go to graduate school at Columbia. I was relieved that my visit with my son was over, but I was also devastated. It’s the nature of part-time single parenthood. You fall in love anew with your child every visit; you give everything you can during this brief, intense period until you have nothing left; and then the child goes away and you return to your life, but you’re emptied out, lost. You don’t feel like a parent anymore, you don’t feel like anything.

  During this particular visit, I was with my son at my parents’ house the whole time. Our schedule was simple: He’d wake around seven-thirty and we’d play all day until he went to sleep around nine. Sometimes my mother would take him grocery shopping, but for the most part I was with my son nonstop for two weeks. I was a young father, only twenty-eight, but my time with my son was exhausting.

  When I got home from the airport, I immediately went to sleep. I woke up in the late afternoon and I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was Christmas and my few friends were either out of town or busy with their families. Then I came up with something to do: I took the subway to Times Square.

  I began in an Irish bar on Forty-third Street. I’m supposed to be sober all the time, but for several years I was periodically trying to see if something magical might happen to me and I could handle alcohol. I couldn’t, but I kept trying. It’s strange. I’m Jewish, but I drink like I’m half Irish and half Native American.

  After a few drinks at the Irish bar, I walked down the block and went to Sally’s, a transsexual bar across from The New York Times. I was new to the transsexual world back then; I had been going to Sally’s for about a month, ostensibly to do research on a book I wanted to write.

  There were only a few older queens at the bar—old in the drag world, that is; they were in their late thirties, early forties. They were survivors of the first wave of AIDS and they were like a strange, happy family gathered together for Christmas. They allowed me into their circle and I drank with them. I felt good. I told one of the queens, who was named Baby and looked like a Latin Elizabeth Taylor, all about my son. She bought me a drink and said, “You’re sweet, Papi.”

  At some point I blacked out. I didn’t fall off my stool, I just lost about an hour, and when I came to, a young black queen was sitting close to me and kissing my neck. I switched to club sodas for a little while and this young queen kept kissing me. She was nice-looking, thin, and she was wearing a black cocktail dress. For some reason she had taken a liking to me, and I was too embarrassed to ask her her name since I had probably been told it. The older queens were smiling at us, like we were some young couple in love.

  I switched back to beer, and then the young queen whispered, “Let’s go to my room and celebrate. I got some coke. Then we can come back here.”

  That sounded good to me and we put on our winter coats and headed out. It was around ten and I’d been drinking for several hours. We took a taxi to her hotel on Jane Street by the West Side Highway.

  The hotel lobby was dirty and fluorescently lit, and an Indian clerk was asleep inside his bulletproof cage.

  We sneaked past the clerk—if he saw me, I’d have to pay twenty dollars as her guest—but we stopped at the staircase, where there were boxes of canned foods, obviously left by some goodwill organization. My friend glanced to the cage—the man was still asleep— and she began to gather up some cans and asked me to grab some. “You can’t be too proud when it comes to food,” she whispered.

  We took the cans up to her room, which was small and cold. There was no heat. We kept our coats on and she hugged me, part out of affection and part to warm up.

  “Let’s party,” she said. “That’ll give us some heat.”

  She got the coke out of her bureau drawer. But what she took out was a little plastic bag with tiny white pebbles inside. I had thought we were going to do lines.

  “Is that crack?” I asked, scared and middle-class. She sensed my fear—the stigma that I associated with smoking crack—so she lied to me and said, “No, baby, it’s freebase.”

  It was insane logic, of course—that freebasing wasn’t as déclassé as smoking crack—but it was the kind of logic I needed in a flop hotel on Christmas night. And I knew she was lying, I knew it was crack, but I pretended to myself that I didn’t. I thought how Richard Pryor had freebased and he was a genius, so it was okay if I freebased.

  We sat on the edge of her bed and she took from her purse a thin glass tube about five inches long, with a piece of wire mesh at one end. “This is my stem,” she said. She put one of the white pebbles on the mesh and put the other end of the stem in her mouth. She took a lighter, held the flame to the coke, and inhaled. The stem filled with a milky smoke, and there was an acrid smell, like the burning of plastic. She pulled until the stem was clear. Then she took the stem out of her mouth and her eyes rolled a little. Then she parted her lips and exhaled the smoke. She smiled like somebody relieved. She passed me her stem.

  “I’ve never done this before,” I said.

  “You’ll love it. But don’t inhale. It’s not reefer. Just hold the smoke in your mouth. That’s how you get high.”

  I held the tube in my mouth and she sparked the lighter. I pulled down the smoke and watched it come at me. Then she took the tube out of my mouth and I held the smoke. Then I exhaled.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “I don’t feel anything,” I said. I was embarrassed. I was a loser at drugs. She had me try again. This time it worked. It was like a soothing wash had been applied to my brain, my mind, my soul. A lifetime of anxiety was momentarily erased. I felt peace. And all over, too, there was this magnificent happy-sex feeling, as if the girl whom I had loved unrequited in high school had finally come up to me and kissed me with the sweetest kiss ever and told me she loved me.

  We kept on smoking. I felt the smoke seeping through the roof of my mouth and going right to my brain. I gave my friend all of my money, around sixty dollars, and she went down the hall and bought more. We had no intention of going back to Sally’s, and we smoked until it was all gone. We were out of money, so she searched the floor for crumbs. We smoked what was probably pieces of lint. Then we got under her blankets, still in our clothes because it was cold, and we held each other and rocked. She tried to touch me, and though I was still feeling sexy, I was numb down there, dead.

  Then we both fell into some kind of hazy crack drunk sleep. When I woke up, it was four o’clock in the morning and I was sweating and panicked. I had to get out of there. I was in big troubl
e. She woke up.

  “I have to go,” I said. She could tell I was nearly crying.

  “Don’t freak, baby. I wanted us to have a nice Christmas.” Her voice was pleading. She tried to hold me, but I got out of bed and put on my overcoat. “I can’t let you go like this,” she said. “Just wait. Sit down.”

  I sat on the bed and she grabbed a washcloth and left the room. The bathroom was down the hall, and she came back and put the damp, warm washcloth to my forehead. Then she bathed my face. In the midst of what felt like the lowest point in my life, she was kind to me. I calmed down some, but I still had to go. She let me leave. I never got her name.

  I had one token in my pocket and I made it home, but I felt so fragile inside, like a wafer that could be snapped. On the answering machine was my son, prompted by his mother, telling me about his Christmas gifts. “I love you,” he said at the end of his message.

  I didn’t feel much like a father, but I saved his message so that I would remember to call him back.

  n a Dark Wood

  I WENT ON AN EXCURSION to Fire Island with my friend the painter Harry Chandler, who is famous for three things: his ingenious paintings, his sexual exhibitionism, and his prosthetic leg.

  Our trip to the island began at Penn Station early Sunday morning. While waiting for our train to Bay Shore and drinking two large cups of coffee, I noticed that there were many beautiful girls who weren’t wearing bras. The shapes of their breasts were lovely and their little nipples looked so nourishing and inviting. It was incredible: just a layer of cotton between those nipples and the world.

  I wanted to fondle myself right then and there, which has been happening all summer. I walk down the street and see all these lovely half-naked girls and I want to commit onanism every ten paces. It’s maddening. But I don’t think the solution is to cover women the way they do in Muslim countries. Rather, I should be blindfolded and given a Seeing Eye dog. I love dogs almost as much as I love women, and so I could play with my dog and take out my sexual frustration by wrestling with my canine friend.

  “Look at all these girls with breasts,” I said to Chandler. “What’s going on here?”

  “It seems to be a trend,” said Chandler.

  “I know. There didn’t used to be so many breasts, but now they all want them.”

  We got on our train and we were both admiring a beautiful Indian girl, who looked to be about fifteen years old and had a luscious, swelling bosom.

  “Like the many and varied spices that their land is famous for,” I said, “I think Indian women are the most beautiful in the world because they seem to have the ingredients of every race.”

  “How so?” asked Chandler, engaging me platonically.

  “Well, they have the delicate, birdlike limbs of the Asians, the handsome straight noses and high cheekbones of the Caucasians, the dark brilliant hues of the Africans, the chaste and mysterious expression to the eyes of the Middle Easterns, and the full hips and breasts of the Nordics. Yes, I believe Indian women are the most beautiful. I wonder if it’s because of their country’s geographic placement—the center of the world, the bridge between the East and the West. Or is it because they burn all the unattractive ones?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chandler, and we both pondered in silence the profundity of my speculations. Chandler was wearing shorts and I glanced meditatively at his flesh-colored prosthesis, which goes from the knee to the foot of his left leg, and I wished I could strike his prosthesis with a stick of some kind to test it. “Where are the handsomest men in the world from?” he then asked, reviving our discourse.

  “There’s no such thing,” I said. “All men are intrinsically ugly. That’s why God created Woman, to compensate for the ugliness of Man. He screwed up with the first sex and improved with the second.”

  “Do you really believe everything you’re saying?”

  “I don’t believe anything I’m saying. I only spit out what others have said and written, but in slightly different syntax so that it all sounds mildly original and we can pass the time pleasantly on this overcrowded train. You should know by now that I don’t believe anything I say. How can I believe anything when I don’t know anything? I only know one thing—I feel nervous most of the time. I am nervous, therefore I am.”

  The two cups of coffee were causing me to pontificate and I apologized to Chandler for this. He accepted my apology—he’s very tolerant of me. Then across the aisle from us a fat man with a bald head began to kiss his chubby middle-aged girlfriend. I assumed that it was his girlfriend and not his wife because of the passion they were exhibiting. And it was uplifting to see two older members of society enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, but the man’s kissing style was too much. His mouth was practically devouring the woman’s whole face. “It looks like he’s eating a piece of watermelon,” I whispered to Chandler.

  “You don’t see that every day.”

  “You certainly don’t. I may have to complain to the conductor.”

  Much to my relief, the two lovers eased up and ate bagels that the woman had packed. I stared at those bagels with envy. The two cups of coffee had dug a deep hole in my stomach.

  So we made it to Bay Shore and then took a ferry to Fire Island. We were seated next to a nuclear family of four, who had a beautiful golden retriever. I nuzzled and made love to the dog and he responded happily, and his owners didn’t seem to mind. The dog sported a pink hard-on and I sported one, too, but it was in my shorts.

  We disembarked at Ocean Bay Park and went to Chandler’s summer abode, ate a quick lunch, and changed into swimming trunks. Then we took a water taxi to Kismet, which has a famous nude beach. Chandler enjoys nude beaches as a healthy expression of his exhibitionism.

  We looked for sexy women who we could sit next to and ogle, and we came across two gorgeous, sleeping lesbians—one was on her belly with her arm draped across her lover, who was on her back. We parked our blanket about ten feet below them. Chandler stripped down—I didn’t look at his penis—and he ambled into the water, prosthesis and all. He’s a graceful and courageous man.

  I stripped off my shorts and lay on my belly. I looked right into the shaved genitals of the lesbian who was on her back. It was beautiful—like the folded, purple underside of a conch shell. The world at that moment was a place of great charisma and radiance. Chandler came and lay down next to me. We admired together that Sapphic womb.

  After several hours on the beach—my ass got burned—we went back to Chandler’s compound, which has clay tennis courts. We played two sets. I won 6–0, 6–1, though he does move exceedingly well for a man missing half a leg. Then I treated him to a $9.95 lobster dinner.

  The next day, he had to work as an art instructor at the compound’s day camp, and so I, following his suggestion, went to Cherry Grove, the famous homosexual community of Fire Island. Chandler told me that there was this primeval forest in Cherry Grove where men cruised one another. He had gone there and witnessed many incredible sexual acts. So I walked three miles along the beach and found these woods. It was frightfully hot and I was devastated from my march along the ocean because stupidly I had packed no water. So I staggered around in the woods on these sandy paths beneath the boughs of thick pines, and it was Eden-like in there, but I could hardly appreciate it—I was dehydrated and feeling hysterical.

  I would pass men, but I was too scared to look at them directly. I wanted to witness sexual acts, but there was just a lot of staggering going on. Then I got lost in that shadowy yet hot forest, and I thought of Dante and his dark wood. And for the first time it occurred to me how my mother is named Florence, and was I always wanting to get back to her the way Dante wanted to get back to his Florence? Then I saw a pretty deer go walking by and I wondered if it was cruising for other deer. Then I worried about getting a tick.

  All this thinking and cruising was very tiring, so I leaned against a tree, exhausted, and a man approached me. He mistook my heat prostration for a come-hither posture. He was short and
dark. He wore sunglasses, covering his eyes, masking his soul. He went immediately for my nipples through my white T-shirt. What was the etiquette in such a woods? How to say “Hands off”? He found no reaction in my nipples; they are notoriously unresponsive. Then he made a grab for my cock, but it receded like a turtle’s head. Disappointed with my lack of nipples and penis, he pressed on. With the dog on the ferry I got a woodie, but with the fairy in the woods, my own little dog hid like a pussy.

  I made it out of there, and in a blind, confused state of dehydration, like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, I dragged myself for three miles on the beach and made it to Chandler’s. He was back from camp, and after drinking directly from the tap, I told him what had happened. “No one ever touched me,” he said, “but I kept moving. You really took a risk.”

  “That’s because I have more homosexual tendencies than you,” I said. “But those woods are dangerous. You can get Lyme’s disease and VD all at the same time.”

  That night I returned to Manhattan, sunburned, but quite content with all that I had seen and done. I require varied stimulation. Then two days later there was my book party for my recently published novel. I wore my seersucker jacket (bought on sale in Princeton years ago, though I didn’t have enough money at the time for the matching trousers), khaki pants, blue shirt, and my one Brooks Brothers tie. Because of all the sun on Fire Island I had a deep, reddish tan and so my bald spot appeared to be the same color as my hair, which gave to those around me the illusion that I had a full head of hair. Many people remarked on how young I looked. I knew it was the camouflaged bald spot, but also something about my book being published was having a slight Dorian Gray effect on me.