But I’m not
proud
of the porn I watch—I don’t talk about it with people I don’t know well or enjoy it in mixed company. I watch it alone or with a partner as a means to an end. I’d like to call my way of watching porn private or not a significant part of what I do for a living or who I am, but I
am
writing about it in a book, so I guess that’s pretty public, even if I’m grappling with how I feel about it out loud, because it’s complicated, Denise Richards.
But Josh’s “making porn legit” day job, combined with his story about the “awesome three-way” he had, bugged me beyond the fact that his story was not a polite thing to be discussing on a date. Nice guy or not, Josh, I thought, was barely good enough of a guy to get laid by
one
woman.
EVERY ONCE
in a while, you do something that you know you’ve outgrown, just because it gives you déjà vu, or you think deep down you haven’t changed, or you’re just desperate to try something you think would have worked at one time. When I was set up with Josh, I was playing matchmaker to the twenty-year-old college student who thought porn could start a revolution, but only if women “took it back,” like we took back the night. Remember when we did that? And how afterward, nobody was raped?
In the final scene of
The People Versus Larry Flynt
, Flynt, paralyzed from having been shot in the face during his free-speech trial, sits in his living room, palsied and, ironically, unable to maintain an erection—the very currency of his industry! He wistfully views tapes of his late wife, Althea, who has long since died of AIDS. And as she wriggles around in her bra and panties in the grainy footage, Flynt hears his own voice in the background instructing his beloved, “Strip for me, baby. Strip for me.”
When I first saw that movie, I was
devastated
by this scene. It documented, to me, what was then my romantic ideal.
“She was the love of his life,” I thought to myself in between heaving sobs. “And now she’s gone! But when she was around, and he could still get hard, they had filthy sex. And then, they fell in love, or what counts as love between a dallying pornographer and a stripper addicted to heroin.”
In retrospect, the last scene of that movie was a cringe-inducing interaction between two unlikable characters, one of whom was portrayed by a woman who has made countless life mistakes, including but not limited to living at one time with Neil Strauss. But at the time, for me, Woody Harrelson watching Courtney Love strip may as well have been a Byron sonnet.
I’ve always wanted a loving relationship with hot sex. I didn’t know at the time that when you hop into bed right away, it can make things more difficult. Not because spreading your legs sends out a message that you can be treated poorly, but because your expectations get inflated when you do it and it’s good. Whether hot sex right away can flower into everlasting true love still remains for me to be seen, at least from firsthand experience. But what I do know is that that the opposite is true: a mensch is a schmuck if he can’t fuck you well.
My sexual fumbling with Josh was lousy because I wasn’t impressed by the guy attached to his dick. I can get a massage if I want my body to feel good; I don’t want to fuck a guy unless I think there’s a chance he may have read something other than a vegetarian cookbook in the last year. Or if his jokes are funny and his laugh is rare, or he calls me “kiddo” and it turns me into wobbly parfait. Or if his hand on my back feels like the relief of walking into a spot of sunny pavement; when all of a sudden, it’s not as cold outside anymore.
I SENT
Josh’s call to voice mail the day after our night of
Paper Clips
and pubeless fumbling.
“Hey, Jules!” he said on his message. “I’m calling about our plans tonight.”
What plans? The tentative ones I demurred, before I was imitated?
“I just wanted to see what you liked to do. Heh heh heh.”
There was a pause. I sort of felt bad for him. But pity isn’t sexy; it evokes a totally different kind of squirming. Josh’s message continued. “You know, you don’t pick up your phone a lot. I’m beginning to think you don’t have a phone! Maybe you just have, like, a fancy answering machine!”
With my deletion of that message exited Josh—messily, loudly, but with good intentions. And the only time I think of him is when I open the drawer next to my bed and I see the travel kit he gave me—the one with the vibrator tucked inside of it. The design of the kit is indeed, however uncharacteristically, very discreet.
i don’t care about your band
A
cute musician named Jonathan sent me an e-mail out of the blue. We shared a friend in common, and he saw me sing the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” one night in Brooklyn, at karaoke. He wanted to say hi, he wrote, but he was unshaven at the time, and didn’t want to make a bad impression.
OK. Cute. Fine. “An admirer!” I thought. So far, so good. He was certainly good-looking, which Google found out for me: lanky, thin, straw-colored hair, and cheekbones that could lop slices off a block of Jarlsberg. Google also told me he was sort of famous. Google, you auspicious matchmaker!
Jonathan continued, in all lower-case, to introduce himself. He found my website, he said, and loved my videos. Great! So? . . . I scrolled over his rambling exposition, waiting for the payoff. Was he going to ask me out? He didn’t.
“i’m at home absolutely spazzing out because we’re leaving in a few days to make a record and i have to/really should finish a long list of songs. so, waving hello and/or re-hello! all the bestest, jonathan.”
Huh? My enthusiasm tapered off. A hot guy in an indie band, well-known or otherwise, waved me hello and/or re-hello mid-spazz? And he was leaving in a few days to make a rock album? How old is this guy anyway? Nineteen going on forty? Still, those eyes drove me bananas and coconuts. He was really, really cute.
Maybe he needed a running start. I gave him training wheels and a ramp when I wrote back, making asking me out really easy for him. I even used all lowercase, mirroring his casualness.
“hi jonathan! let me know if you ever wanna get a drink sometime. it would be fun to meet up.”
A relationship book I once read told women to use the word “fun” whenever possible. They claimed it had a subliminal, aphrodisiac effect on men, who want a relaxed, easygoing, friendly girl attached only to good times; the human equivalent of Diet Coke. This is the opposite of me: I experience separation anxiety at the end of every episode of
Top Chef.
I half forgot about Jonathan after that exchange, but over the course of the next month, I got a few texts from him, reporting on his band’s stay in the Pacific Northwest. I’d hear about how their album was going, the weather, and what he described as the M.C. Escher-like house they were staying in, which is the kind of reference a college student would make. I wondered if his love letters read like other descriptions of art posters you buy at Bed, Bath & Beyond. “I want to kiss you in a crowd in Times Square while I’m dressed up like a sailor!”
I never knew how to reply to Jonathan’s texts. They were postcards—he was broadcasting, not communicating. But I liked hearing from him, in the way somebody who isn’t juggling a ton of other prospects will shrug, “better than nothing,” and I wondered if he’d meet up with me when he came back to New York, or if he’d flake out. It was fifty/fifty with this guy: He was roundabout when it came to getting together, but pretty consistent about staying in touch, on his terms. I knew the odds of anything serious happening were slim, but I still wanted to go on a date with a good-looking guy who went through the trouble of getting in touch with me after seeing me sing in a bar.
While Jonathan was away, I did more research and asked my musician friends what they knew about him. Collette, a singer, told me his deal. “He’s an indie rock dreamboat,” she wrote in an e-mail. “His voice is transcendent and he writes lovely lyrics. He has a nice face, he has a kid, and he tours a lot. He’s a star in his world.”
I was surprised to hear he was a father. I was twenty-eight at the time, and I’d never dated a guy with a kid before—I didn’t know whether I was OK with it at all, actually. “What’s the kid’s name?” I asked Collette. “Li’l Dealbreaker?” Plus, from what I gleaned so far about Jonathan, he seemed like sort of a kid himself. Babies having babies? Somebody tell Tyra!
SO HERE’S
the thing with me and musicians. I know most girls go crazy for frontmen who close their eyes when they sing and nod their heads when the drums kick in, but I’m like Shania Twain with that stuff.
That don’t impress me much
. I’ll take somebody funny and brainy over a peacock with perfect pitch any day. You can teach a monkey to play the guitar, you know—and, as a bonus, watching him do it is
hilarious
.
Still, anyone who can make a living doing something creative is impressive. And that, reader, is the single most Jewish thing I’ve said in this book so far.
“
Nu?
He can make a living doing what he loves! That’s a successful man! What—would coffee hurt?”
Finally, I can’t emphasize this enough: Jonathan was
extremely
attractive. He did, like Collette said, have a nice face. I’d take her word for it about his lyrics, though, because I tried to listen to a couple of his songs online, and I got too bored by the melodies to pay attention to his words. It was typical indie rock stuff: droney, thick, exhausting; but obviously heartfelt. Bring a book. I tried to get to the end of one of his tracks, but a YouTube clip of a Basset Hound taking a shower was too tempting not to switch to, mid-verse.
A couple of months after he contacted me in the first place, Jonathan texted me when he was back in town, and asked me out for that Monday. I said yes, and he wrote back, asking, “actually, are you around tonight?”
“No,” I said, with a capital “N” and punctuation, belying my prior casualness. I felt like a mom establishing boundaries around a ten-year-old who already makes his own bedtime; too little too late. I heard back an hour later: “monday it is!”
He already annoyed me, and we hadn’t even met each other. I would soon learn a lesson men have known for years: it’s possible to be attracted to somebody you don’t like.
MAYBE “DON’T
like” is the wrong term; after all, I was still meeting him for a date. There was something I found clumsily endearing about him; or maybe it was just his looks. He was really handsome, like I keep repeating. And I don’t think looks are perceived to be as big of a deal for women, who are supposed to be immune to something as shallow as beauty. But the eye wants beauty, and what’s the eye a window to, again? Apparently, the groin.
Jonathan’s hair, the clothes he was photographed in, his smile, his symmetrical face: they were all signifiers. False beacons asked me to give him a chance. Don’t you want babies with that nose? Don’t you want to fall in love with a guy who looks that good when he smiles? It’s science: We want to mate with hotties. Finding out that somebody good-looking is bad news is always somehow surprising, no matter how many times you learn it. It’s like when you were little and you found out that candy was bad for you. “How is that possible?” you thought. “It’s so
sweet
!”
FOR OUR
date, Jonathan told me to meet him off the Bedford stop of the L train in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he lived, and thought I did as well. When he first e- mailed me, in fact, he suggested, “if you’re in later and want a low-key indoor or outdoor hello from a neighbour (maybe?), that would be ace.”
Jonathan’s British spelling of the word “neighbour,” his use of the adjective “ace,” and his proposal that he come over to my place for the occasion of our first meeting were all putz alarms. But what annoyed me most was his presumption that everybody he thought was cool lived in Williamsburg. I had to live in his “neighbourhood,” because, to him, I was obviously another girl planet in orbit around his star. In fact, I am a proud Manhattanite. And while Brooklyn is great for certain things, like dog-watching and artisanal chocolate, is there a Russ & Daughters in Brooklyn? A cab right in front of your building when you’re running late? A single Broadway musical? No. And, more to the point, I do not live there. But Jonathan sure did! And, to the credit of his cheekbones, I still wanted to meet him.
After we confirmed our Monday date, I let him take the lead in regards to our plans, because I think that’s the job of the person doing the asking out, which was still technically him, training wheels or not. So, with equal parts optimism, horniness, and plain old being a dum-dum-ness, I took the train into the belly of the beast. By the way, remember the nice things about dogs and chocolate I said about Brooklyn before? None of them apply to Williamsburg. Fuck Williamsburg. I hope it sinks into the East River.
I WALKED
up the subway stairs and saw Jonathan across North Sixth Street. He was way shorter than I expected him or any nonmidget to be, but otherwise very cute. I wore heels that night, and a dress, like an adult on a date. He wore corduroys and Vans sneakers, and crossed the street to give me a hug, with a hop in his gait like the top half of a bobblehead doll. We walked down Bedford Avenue together, me hovering over his shaggy blond head.
I found out soon enough that our agenda for the evening was as low-key as the “ace” indoor or outdoor hello he’d initially proposed. Jonathan took me for a walk around his neighborhood, which, I figured out soon enough, was the main activity of the night. I’m always suspicious when a guy takes his date on a walk, because it reeks of poverty and an inability to plan. Soon, we passed a rock club I said I was curious about since it moved to its new location, even though I wasn’t, and was just making conversation. Jewish girls, so you know, are terrified of silence. Jonathan asked if I wanted to see the inside of the club.