the five guys you meet in hell

1. the russian spy

In February it snowed about four feet, schools were closed for two weeks, and everyone in the city was stuck in the house. This was a great time for me. When I lived in Pennsylvania, a serious snowstorm meant days of isolation, until I could get someone to come plow our quarter-mile driveway. For entertainment, I had a houseful of bored, hungry children and piles of soaking wet snow gear. Usually the satellite would go down too, so no television. Finally, after clearing the parking lots of the Wal-Mart, the Taco Bell, and the elementary school, the snowplow would come to my house. Hours after they had left with half my mortgage, the snow would blow right back into the path they had cleared. It had gotten to the point where I had a morbid fear and hatred of snow.

But now, in the joyous city of Baltimore, I had no driveway, my neighbor shoveled my sidewalk, and he and everybody else around here were giving potlucks and parties during this unscheduled two-week winter holiday. It was like World War II in France, when they figured they might as well just drink all the champagne in the cellar since God knew what would happen next.

Ken lost power at his house and had to come stay with us for a few days. I met Pam, a young artist/mom who lived across the back alley and plied her with gløg; she became my closest friend in the neighborhood. Then, just when we were about to run out of booze, some kids found the bottle of Sailor Jerry rum Ken had dropped when he fell into a snowdrift on his way to my house. And returned it!

The only negative about Snowpocalypse was that my being stuck in the house for so long caused a brief relapse into online dating. My old Greenfields pal Arnie had recommended a free site called OkCupid, and one snowy afternoon I sailed out there.

I was drawn to the photos and ironic comments of a guy named Mike. In our exchanges he turned out to be a funny fellow with a Russian accent who had emigrated to Baltimore as a thirteen-year-old. He was single with grown children—in fact, one of his kids was taking the New York bar exam. But wait. Mike was purportedly around forty. How could he have a twenty-five-year-old? As a young immigrant boy of fifteen, he told me, he had impregnated the secretary of his middle school and ultimately had two children with her. He lived with her for years but they had never married.

I thought this was quite a story, and I like a story. So I agreed to meet him for a bagel, though during our phone conversations I had become concerned about his compulsive ending of most sentences with an awkward, forced chuckle: “. . . heh heh heh. Anyway . . .”

I sat at the table by the window at Greg’s Bagels, watching as various elderly and infirm people who couldn’t possibly be him entered. I thought the guy who rolled up in the wheelchair with his atrophied legs folded into a half-lotus was one of them until he greeted me.

“Marion! You’re just like your picture!”

Because there was no possible correct expression of my own reaction, I said little as we proceeded to the counter to order our bagels. I was quite flustered by the whole procedure. Should I carry his coffee for him? Move the chair next to me out of the way? Should I let him pay for me? Well, no problem with that one, because they didn’t take cards and he had no cash. He insisted we go to the ATM afterwards so he could pay me back.

“Oh, come on—five bucks, big deal,” I said, wondering how exactly we would go to the ATM. Everything was awkward in my stunned, unprepared state.

After some ridiculous small talk about parking and traffic, he said, “Well, you haven’t fled.”

“No,” I said. Honestly, that hadn’t seemed like one of the options. If nothing else, I was hoping to find out the rest of the story.

Which was: At age twenty-four, living with the middle school secretary and their kids, he had had a motorcycle accident on a patch of gravel a hundred yards from his own front door. Right before he went into surgery to see if there was any shred of hope for his spinal cord, the middle school secretary declared her eternal allegiance to him and proposed marriage.

Which was funny, because he had at the same moment come to the conclusion that this was as good a time as any to break up. He would probably be living in rehab centers for months, or even a year—perfect. Sometime later in the telling of this tale he let it slip to me that he had since received two additional marriage proposals. “I guess I haven’t lost all my charms, heh heh heh. Anyway . . .”

Anyway, I was mad at him. While he insisted I wouldn’t have agreed to meet him if I had known about his wheelchair, I felt I would have been more positively disposed if I hadn’t been tricked. I don’t know if I would have been able to get over heh heh heh, anyway, the brown teeth, and the soon-to-be-revealed chain-smoking, but at this point it was a clusterfuck, and not a good setup for me to explore my flexibility vis-à-vis the chair.

I didn’t see Wheelchair Mike again, though e-mails and phone calls trailed off gradually. I took down my profile and quit online dating forever, for the second time.

2. the perfect gentleman

One night in March—actually, the day that would have been my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary if I were still married to Tony, and also Texas Independence Day—my friend Dudley took me to a party at an artist’s loft near the train station. To my amazement, the place was awash in Texas flags. It was a Texas Independence Day party. When Dudley introduced me to our host and I tried to explain why I was so delighted, he claimed to already know that this was my wedding anniversary, since he was an avid fan of my books. I’m still not sure I believe this, but it definitely put me in a good mood.

At the long table of tortillas from San Antonio and hot sauces from Austin (be still my heart), a tall, straight-backed man with thick, silver-white hair, kind eyes, weathered skin, and a bolo tie began chatting with me. I chatted back for a while, then wandered away. The next morning, I realized that this man was a prospect. He liked me. He was checking me out. So, maybe he was a little older than me. Maybe he hadn’t blasted my hormones into outer space. What was I looking for, another Doucher?

Repentant, I tracked him down through our mutual acquaintances and asked him to come and look at a construction project in my backyard, heh heh heh. Anyway . . . Let us call this mustachioed gentleman The Walrus, which became Jane’s nickname for him.

The Walrus was a fine and interesting man from a blue-collar Irish background who joined the navy at eighteen and has worked building houses since. He was also a talented stained-glass artist and visionary artisan, a freethinker, an in-line skater, a rock hound, bird-watcher, and conservationist, and very close to his grown daughter. He drank gin in the summer and bourbon in the winter. He had a costume closet for parades and masquerades and such. Jane absolutely adored him; nostalgic for his daddy days, he had nothing but rapt attention and silly jokes for her, and often showed up with little gifts.

He was the perfect family friend, but he was looking for something more substantial than that. I tried hard to get my feelings in line and to overcome what I knew was a lack of chemistry. On our first two dates without Jane I was quite aggressive, and things went well enough that he probably assumed we were hunky-dory. But I was losing focus. I guess I was looking for another Doucher, but one who wasn’t such a douche.

On our third date, he took me to a party of his old friends where I could tell everyone had been prepped that he was bringing a new sweetie. I nibbled the fresh mozzarella balls and felt like a schmuck.

He must have been surprised on our fourth date when I awkwardly announced over drinks at Bertha’s Mussels that I just wanted to be friends. I wasn’t ready for the romantic part of romance. It’s not you, it’s me, blah blah blah. He took this sudden brush-off with equilibrium and said he would be happy to be my friend. And he has been my friend, though Jane would tell you we don’t see him enough anymore. He showed up and sat at our table at a sock monkey workshop at the Visionary Art Museum last winter, and he made Jane a sock walrus.

I felt badly about this relationship. Meeting perfectly wonderful guys and treating them badly is not much less hellish than meeting jerks and getting dicked around. The Walrus deserved better.

3. the boy toy

While I was seeing The Walrus, Crispin went to Finland to address a philosophy conference and took his girlfriend. He and his girlfriend had been traveling a lot, to Walden Pond and to bluegrass festivals and other places I would have rather have cut off my foot than visit. It’s good he’s found a woman who lets him drive, I thought. A helpmeet, a sidekick, a muse: all roles pretty much out of my repertoire. This girlfriend was so different from me—not, thank God, a younger, cuter Marion Winik short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner—that I was starting to make my peace with the idea of her. She worked with special-needs children, she volunteered at the zoo; obviously, you can’t hate such a person.

But I had not made my peace with single living, and I was still looking for biochemical fireworks. Around this time I ran into Zach Silverman, a thirty-something ex-student of mine on whom I had developed a secret crush. Zach Silverman had a beautiful girlfriend he was crazy about, but things were not working out for them at the moment. I knew a great deal about it because one of my primary conversation topics with Zach was his love life, about which I’d asked many sympathetic questions in the timeless tradition of the covetous counselor. We also talked a lot about spirituality, which he was pretty interested in even though he’d moved away from his Orthodox background.

Back when Silverman was my student, I tried not to focus on my crush, which arose from his cool art, his big brain, and his weirdly sexy, uptight, nineteenth-century Talmudic look. Obviously it was not a good idea. But at this point, he was not my student, and I started running into him around town more and more, possibly due to my sudden increased attendance at the avant-garde art openings and other events where Zach and his posse were found.

In the early summer of 2010, I became a habitué of postmodern Frisbee tournaments and video festivals, taking too much time to decide what to wear to them and drinking Natty Boh like a pro. Zach was always pleasant to me, but since our former professor-student relationship seemed to dictate this, I could never tell if he was aware of my crush, and if so, how he felt about it. Then one night after a show, I found Zach outside the club and bummed a cigarette from him (I bummed about a carton of cigarettes from him over the course of this thing; I should probably send him a check), smoking it while preening about and probably emitting a visible cloud of estrogen.

“Put away those shoulders,” he said, both rudely and charmingly, since I do consider my shoulders one of my foremost assets.

At the end of the night he offered me a ride home; I was probably looking a bit unsteady. But I knew if I got in that car with him, all bets were off, so I refused and tottered along down the sidewalk.

Sometime in late June I was out with a single girlfriend of mine looking for something to do. Already a little tipsy, I texted Zach; he was at an MP3 release party at a place called The Taint, in a factory in a distant part of town. He said we should come on over but warned me that he was already very, very drunk. (Oh, no!)

We came upon the factory just before we would have been forced to go into a convenience store and ask if they could help us find The Taint, obviously the intention of the person who had named the place. (“Well, dear, it’s right between the scrotum and the asshole!”) We were halfway up the steps when my friend was abducted by pot-smokers in hats. As soon as I entered the party, Zach lurched toward me with a six of Natty Boh dangling from his index finger and asked me if I wanted to go look at the river.

He led me to a floodlit, garbage-swept concrete parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. I never saw any river; instead, with no further preliminaries, a furious make-out session was in progress. It was fun, but Zach and I had different ideas of what came next. I wanted to discuss our relationship; he wanted me to give him a blow job. This seemed beneath my dignity as a fifty-two-year-old mother of three, so I regretfully declined and we went back inside. He seemed to be about one millimeter away from either puking or alcohol poisoning, but was still on his feet when my friend and I left.

The next day my dignity went into remission and I e-mailed him to ask if he was having regrets, and if he wasn’t, would he like to continue where we left off.

He reminded me of his incredible love for his girlfriend, and his desire not to repeat mistakes that had driven them apart in the past.

What could I say? I commended him. And I really do.

4. rock hudson

While smarting from the Silverman debacle, I received a friendly missive on Facebook from a gay guy I have known since high school, Ken, now living in New York. I already had a gay Ken in my life who was a little piqued by this latecomer, particularly when my new gay boyfriend and I began to refer to him as the Other Ken, or the O.K.

“What do you mean?! He’s the Other Ken, not me!” Baltimore Ken said. He had a point; it was never settled.

Once a noted chef, a high-profile AIDS activist, and the hottest guy in the room, Manhattan Ken was running a little low on mystic powers. The erstwhile Pheromone King was struggling to live with HIV, hepatitis C, human papilloma virus, Meniere’s disease, hepatic encephalopathy, and the wildest case of hypervigilance I have ever seen, probably due to PTSD from burying so many friends and clients since the 1980s. He was also in the thick of a multiyear attempt to get off benzodiazepines (Valium-type drugs), a withdrawal which causes horrible side effects, among which was the fact that he was only awake from the hours of eleven-thirty at night to three in the morning.

Night after night I set my alarm to wake up at this time and listen to him tell me about all the bacteria he had wrangled that day. As he went on and on, I sexted him a picture of me lying on the couch in my bikini underpants. My pent-up desires had apparently driven me around the bend. I’d been around it before. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, super-hot gay guys: my favorite things!

Finally, I stopped in to see him when I was visiting Hayes in New York. I found him living with two roommates in a spectacular two-bedroom penthouse apartment filled with sock monkeys. Yes, again with the sock monkeys; I don’t know why they started appearing everywhere. If this was a novel, there would be some deeper meaning to it, but this is real life.

The Pheromone King was not explicit about the romantic arrangements of the household, but between the ratio of beds to people and the slightly weird vibes I received from his roommates, I came to my senses. And guess what, we are still friends. We are all friends, even the O.K., on Facebook.

Meanwhile, Vince had come home from New Orleans for the summer to try to make the money to pay me back for the fines and lawyer’s fees relating to a recent Mardi Gras mishap. He couldn’t find a job, so The Walrus took him on as a construction assistant. Oh Walrus, you are the man and I am a dickbag.

That’s only four, I know. One more, the last one, is on the way.