I didn’t get laid enough to be called a sex-addict.
And yet the name felt right.
In the same way a junkie spent all his time thinking about his next fix, my life had become something I did between orgasms. I joked about it, saying I was a Vagitarian but I knew it wasn’t normal. It was starting to look like giving up booze was only the beginning. I wasn’t free. The prison had just gotten bigger.
But I couldn’t meet girls in bars anymore. And dating within Alcoholics Anonymous was out of the question since the last thing I wanted to do was wake up beside a version of myself in a skirt. So it was ironic, that my fiancé should be the one who inadvertently introduced me to online dating.
Bobbing and swaying in front of my face as we ascended the steps to her fourth floor Elizabeth Street apartment was the reason we’d been together so long. Our evening stroll had been cut short by a rainstorm and so once we got inside we shook off our wet things and lay across her bed and chatted and ordinarily this would have been enough to get the ball rolling but I was still not confident enough to make a move. Was she still pissed at me? I had work the next day and she didn’t.
Maybe she wanted me to leave. Time to call her bluff. While making the dramatic announcement that I had better go if I was to be in decent shape for work the next day I began to say goodbye to her magnificent world class ass.
“You hug it like it’s a separate person,” she said thawing a little.
“You’re accusing me of having an affair with your ass, behind your back?”
A smile.
She was pissed because I hadn’t picked up on her latest hint that we should live together, get married, have children and die of old age in each other’s arms. These hints had more recently taken the form of exaggerated street mimes. The huge crazy-eyed smile she reserved for babies was subtle compared to the impossible affection conjured up in the presence of every old couple we encountered. Especially, for some reason, if they were Asian. I resisted the urge to respond or acknowledge because I knew that once recognized the subject could never be put back in the box. There was no way I was going to marry her but there was no way I’d be allowed access to her ass if she knew this. It was only a matter of time before something would need to be said.
I felt sufficiently encouraged by that half-hearted smile to spank her gently through her cotton knickers. This led to touching and tickling, pecking and pouting and after she broke away to brush her teeth, turn out the lights and close her laptop we progressed to sensual half-lit sensitive sex. She fluttered up and down on me with such agility I was reminded of a nymph whose gossamer wings allowed her to hover and dip at will.
The rain persisted outside and as she leaned back to scratch gently under my balls the colder light from outside contrasted with the ochre glow from the desk-lamp backlighting her small perfect dancer’s breasts. I stiffened inside her and her body immediately straightened as if we really had become one.
I wanted to say I love you but it was too risky. She would surely see through it for the manipulation it was and stop what she was doing. I toyed with saying you’re lovely but this just felt childish. I adore you was merely I love you-lite and oh baby was completely meaningless.
“Fuck yeah,” I said at last.
Well at least it was honest.
On a monthly showreel called Shotz, in the New Directors section, I was presented with the fact that a copywriter I worked with at my former agency had since become a commercials director. Nestled there amongst the self-conscious up-to-the minute-motion-graphics was a link to his finished commercial which, if it was a piece of shit would have been fine but it wasn’t. It was quite good. The reason is was quite good was because it was my idea. He and I had talked about making the same commercial for BNV at Killallon Fitzpatrick but for some reason we never presented it. I think because we decided it was too British for the American market. And now adding disgust to discomfort I saw that this commercial was for Olaffson.
Olaffson was my account.
Was this his way of getting back at me for leaving him in Saint La Croix? I thought I was being paranoid until I saw the casting. The guy in the commercial looked exactly like me. He knew I worked on Olaffson. It was weird because it wasn’t even a real ad.
It was a spec commercial, the kind of thing a new director puts on his reel to show he can make a concept work in thirty seconds. But this concept was much better suited to BNV because Olaffson didn’t make flashy cars they made safe boring cars. He had shot it exactly as I related it to him like a pastiche of a British Public Service Announcement.
It began with a title.
The Beginner’s Guide To Lip-Reading
A young woman looks earnestly into the camera.
“Bastard,” she says.
“Bastard,” she says again.
Cut to an extreme close-up of her mouth as she pronounces the word soundlessly now so we can recognize it when spoken.
“Bastard,” she says again.
Cut to a street-scene where a young trendy man, looking suspiciously like Jason, strolls confidently up to a new Olaffson and jabs his electronic key at the sleek crouched vehicle before disappearing inside it. On the other side of the street a pale young man with a shaved head, looking suspiciously like me, watches the car drive smoothly away just as we see him say something. It’s a two-syllable word.
Sitting there watching the commercial I couldn’t help it, the word had already left my own mouth before I realized it; “Bastard.”
A title appears across the bottom of the screen.
Everybody’s Talking about the New Olaffson.
I casually mentioned to Yvette that it might be a relief to get out of advertising.
“How are you going to bring up kids if you haven’t got a good job?”
There was no way to answer this truthfully without robbing myself of sex and so attempting to redirect the subject I told her I wanted to go back to London and write a book in my newly paid-off flat. It had been her idea to pay off the mortgage on my flat in London so that the rent received could be treated as salary and then with no rent or mortgage to pay I could always go on the dole for pocket money.
“A man who goes on welfare by choice is a disgrace.”
Obviously her vision of my future involved me working my ass off to keep her in expensive dinners and clothes. Her reaction confirmed what I was already thinking.
That I should never tell her what I was thinking.
My continued presence would be understood as an agreement to marry and there was no way this was ever going to happen. Up to that point I had feigned interest in whatever she pointed me at, as long as I was sexually rewarded. And the sex was so influential I had managed to convince myself I wasn’t even acting. I was more than happy to pay for the restaurants, the Broadway plays and even the clothes she picked out as long as we continued with our unspoken agreement that I would be sexually compensated. And for the first year we had been very fair about this distribution of sexual currency.
Her first. Then me.
But more recently a new worrying pattern had begun to emerge where my orgasm couldn’t even be contemplated until she had come not just once, but twice.
It was starting to feel like my second high-stress job. And it wasn’t as if she was scorching hot. Yes her body was fabulous and yes she was French (that accent alone got me hard) but her face was far from perfect and I could hardly admit it to myself but she had some sort of skin problem where hard-headed yellowy protrusions would periodically emerge without warning. Why did I have to settle for that? I was living in New York where I regularly encountered four or five life-changing women on the way to the subway.
When we first met I was still reeling from a romantic catastrophe that would eventually become the subject of my first book so I wasn’t even remotely looking for a girlfriend. But Yvette knew what it was to be foreign in the US and this was something that immediately drew us together. And like all Europeans we enjoyed the luxury of being able to encapsulate the world’s problems in one word.
“Americans.”
We rolled our eyes knowingly.
It was obvious even in her staid work clothes that there was a great body under there but I honestly didn’t see her as a sexual possibility until months later. The fact that she was French was something I couldn’t ignore. She loved toilet humor. Anything to do with piss or poop and she began to giggle like a sneaky schoolgirl at the back of the class. Her pet name for me was Poopie-Head. She sometimes even repeated the word during sex; “Poopie, poopie.”
She loved to show me the contents of her mouth while she ate. Especially in expensive restaurants. She’d beckon me towards her as if she had a secret to share, with her hand supposedly directing her voice into my ear until at the last moment she’d open her mouth wide revealing mashed bouillabasie and bread. When I appeared sufficiently disgusted her hand morphed from horror-shield to giggle-guard and she sat back satisfied into her chair.
She was impossible to sleep with.
I’d lie motionless at 3.30am in her moonlit bedroom her arm heavy as a fallen beam across my chest, afraid to move for fear of initiating a wee-hours discussions about how distant I was. Did I feel I was distant? Why was I always so distant?
“Distant? What? Yvette I’m right here”
Then fondling my balls she’d whisper, ”you’re not nice with me,” and I’d find myself inside her. How ridiculously easy it is to get inside a vagina when the owner actually wants you in it. And as her weightless silhouette gyrated above me I knew better than to come. That was the ultimate act of selfishness.
Not yet fully awake she is moving like an animal silent and sure with her palms pressed flat on my chest so that her groin insists itself against me scratching some unbearable, unreachable itch inside her. To prevent myself from detonating I conjure up John’s shit-eating grin as he admires his own reflection in the monitor during the few seconds of dead space preceding each showing of his new Olaffson commercial.
My present agency wasn’t capable of producing anything good enough to wipe away that grin but most New York production companies would at least listen to an idea from an on-staff creative like me working on an account like Olaffson since they were always keen to develop a relationship that might lead to a lucrative job.
Above me naked and shining Yvette might have been peering into a well.
Open on a shot of a young man who looks exactly like Jason.
He’s playing the part of an Olaffson dealer as he hands the keys to a happy looking customer who looks exactly like me. We get a nice sleek shot of the car as I drive away.
The voiceover says; ‘At Olaffson our work doesn’t stop when you buy a car …”
The car swings out of the dealership into the street and the Jason-a-like follows alongside still waving. Cut to inside the car.
”Yes thank you ...yes thanks...goodbye,” I say, but Jason is still hobbling along beside the car even though it’s now starting to speed up.
The voiceover continues; “…our after-care program ensures that you have a personal relationship with one of our staff who will help you with any questions
that might arise”
In my role as the driver I wave goodbye to John in his role as the dealer and push the gear-stick forward. Close-up of my foot stepping on the gas; cut to a close-up of the speedometer pointing to 25mph but Jason is still out there.
He’s under pressure but he’s still there.
Close-up of the Jason’s tie caught in the door.
The car brakes suddenly.
There are embarrassed apologies back and forth
Olaffson. We go further.
Shuddering over me Yvette leans forward and exhales roughly in my ear.
“Ohhhhhh oui…ouiiiiii”
I would have been very happy to go back to sleep but I was now owed an orgasm. Declining her offer would be regarded as a callous misstep and would require a more carefully worded explanation than I was capable of delivering at that time in the morning.
It would be wiser to accept her manual advances. She had become very skilled in this department so I knew it wouldn’t take long and I’d make sure my gratitude was audible.
The next day I was due to become a certified New Yorker. Not because my green card was about to come through, God forbid that should ever materialize, but because on Yvette’s insistence, I would start seeing a therapist.
I told myself that I’d be more open with a woman but the real reason I chose her was because I could fantasize about fucking her. I already had a story in mind that would, I felt, set the tone for our sessions. It was a story that touched on many of the areas I felt were pertinent to my case and it would give her succinct overview of where I was coming from; A girlfriend invites her man to share his deepest darkest fantasies. He is reluctant at first since deep dark fantasies are often best kept that way, but his girlfriend, intent on getting to know him better, assures him that no matter what he says she won’t be shocked because after all it’s just a fantasy. Falteringly he begins tell her about how he’d like to be gang-raped. By Japanese schoolgirls. Wearing strap-ons.
She nods understandingly.
“Now you, what’s your fantasy?”
It’s her turn to be reluctant.
“It’s too… out there.”
“Come on, I told you mine.”
“Ok, to get married and have kids.”
Yvette was simply not willing to continue seeing me until I dealt with my intimacy issues. Fearing an impending sexual embargo I agreed. I wouldn’t have even entertained such pusswhippery if she wasn’t so sexually adept and in certain lights and on certain days and in her own way, quite beautiful in a non-conventional sort of way.
When she turned up looking terrible I’d feel a jolt of shame as if somehow it was my fault and carefully disguise the emerging grimace under a smile. And on the rare occasion she arrived looking carefree and beautiful like a happy pretty sixteen year-old I’d stifle my glee. The idea being, that either way I was expressionless.
Yes, I was looking forward to therapy.
Dr Jessica looked directly at my crotch and played with her hair as I talked.
She was tall and thin and big-titted and always wore sensible grey skirts and jackets with shiny broaches and sometimes blindingly white blouses over those lovely bulging…oh to do her. The knowledge that everything would need to take place within the allotted hour only heightened my fervor.
“So, how was your week?” she’d say.
“Fuck my week,” I’d say.
“Fuck me weak,” she’d say.
I’d fold her over that big beige armchair and talk about my fantasies of fucking her while I fucked her. That would be worth the $350 a session at 8pm every Wednesday and she wouldn’t have to worry about cancellations.
But as she creased her smooth buttery forehead in my honor I could sense her willingness not just to witness my pain but to inhabit it. Between imagined bouts of being butt-fucked, cock-spanked and ass-tongued she somehow managed to point out patterns I hadn’t realized were there. For instance it was natural she said, that having used a safety pin to prevent Brother Ollie from fondling my pre-adolescent balls, I should seek out similar solutions with anyone else who tried to get in.
Maybe my desire to butt-fuck, cock-spank and ass-tongue was an example of this. Perceiving her thus would keep even my therapist at bay.
Why was I so distant?
She asked me to bring in the recently written ending to what I kept referring to as my book. I couldn’t see how any of it related to our therapy sessions but because I hadn’t shown it to anyone else I thought I might as well get some feedback since she was already on my payroll and so in our next session after reading the last thirty pages of what would eventually become the ending of Diary Of An Oxygen Thief my therapist confidently proclaimed I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
At least she didn’t say it was badly written.
*****
Yvette opened the door to her apartment before I got the key in it.
”I look like shit,” she said.
The idea being, that because she knew she looked like shit she was relieved of any responsibility for it. If anything it became my problem since I was now expected to make her feel better about it. Whenever she kissed me her hand would automatically stray to my dick to monitor my affection for her. She hated when I got hard without her knowledge. And that night for some reason maybe because I’d spent the previous hour being investigated or perhaps it was because she did indeed look like shit there was nothing stirring.
“You’re not affectionate.”
"It’s because your stomach is hurting. I didn’t want to…"
“You’re distant.”
It was a question of theft. There was no hard-on where a hard-on should be.
Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been a problem. If anything, I was as surprised as she was. The long silence that followed, was punctuated by the sighs of a martyr and the whipping back and forth of glossy magazine pages until at last she slipped wordlessly away to bed. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket and made for the couch.
The next morning I was woken by the sound of spigots being turned on and off until finally she appeared in the living room in her uptight formal bank attire looking pinched-face, unfucked and even uglier than the night before.
Pausing at the door she turned to look at me on the couch.
"You can go back to bed now.”
I was lying on a smoldering hard-on.
*****
Paedophilic clergy, punishment-beatings, mental abuse, domestic violence, two near-drownings and a recurring nightmare of the little boy I saw mangled in a farm accident.
“You had a brutal childhood.”
Dr Jessica looked directly into my eyes to make sure I heard her.
There, it was official.
But none of it felt like it had happened to me. I was detached from these events.
Had she confused my case with someone else’s? Maybe she was exaggerating my trauma so I‘d keep coming every week. And yet I began to enjoy our sessions mostly because it was becoming clear I wouldn’t be expected to marry Yvette. That I wasn’t so much in love with her, as terrified of letting her down. I was about to marry her out of politeness. Why do that to myself? Or to her? She had her own agenda and her own time-frame. At thirty- three her body-clock was sounding the alarm. I told Dr Jessica about an unusually calm stretch of water on the Niagra River called The Deadline. Once passed there was no way to avoid the pull of the falls three miles ahead.
Without looking up from her lap Dr Jessica asked a seemingly unrelated question.
“Have you ever tried online dating?”
*****
Yvette’s recently becalmed hell-raising father, was separated but not yet divorced from her artist-mother who for some reason, liked to argue in airports. Her ridiculously handsome brother was a geologist and so, in a way, was her privately-educated sister, being as she was, a professional gold-digger. The grandfather on her mother’s side made a fortune producing champagne bottles and lived in a small compact stone edifice that could without irony be referred to as a castle. The other grandfather was a retired Judge in the French Judiciary and even had a Parisian street named after him; Rue Du Honore Gumont - Sutre. He owned a summer-house in Ille St Therese where they holidayed at the slightest provocation. Yvette had been abandoned in her fair share of airports and when she wasn’t waiting in the lost and found she was watching Papa chase Maman around their antique-laden Parisian home with an ornate poker.
Her therapist forbade her from telling me too much about her upbringing presumably because she thought I‘d be shocked but she couldn’t know that having experienced certain childhood eccentricities of my own such nursery tales had a certain soothing effect on me. Anyway, by the time I was formally introduced to Maman I was very well-disposed towards the mass of neuroses, complexes, impulses and moods that now stood collectively before me.
“Bonjour I’m Veronique. It’s so nice to meet you”
With her aquiline profile, long coal-black hair and leathery skin she looked more like an Apache brave than the mother of a systems analyst from the Bank of France.
I had already heard about the legendary debates with airport staff, the aborted attempts to liberate cute little pigs from zoo enclosures and the commandeering of microphones from singers considered unworthy of the title. She bent almost in half to kiss me.
Veronique was an artist.
A pretty good one actually. If I hadn’t been so consistently afraid of being fired I might have even bought one of her paintings which to my eye, were heavily influenced by Henri Rousseau. I didn’t dare tell her that though. We were en route, en famille to the Metropolitan Museum Of Art to see an exhibition of paintings by Gauguin, because logically enough, he was one of Veronique’s favorite painters.
Yvette, though nervous about this meeting was pleased it was happening. She had wanted us to meet at Thanksgiving but this idea had proved too much for me loaded as it was with so much significance. I knew that meeting the parents, or even one of them, at Thanksgiving was tantamount to a marriage proposal. Even if the celebrants were French and Irish there was still an unspoken implication that I was agreeing to something other than just a plate of turkey.
But I was ok with primitivism.
In fact Gauguin was a hero of mine too, since he’d given up his job as a bank clerk to shag French Polynesian girls. Confronted suddenly by an almost life-sized sepia photo of the artist’s tight-faced wife and children I felt like I myself had just arrived home late and what time did I call this and who were these two women I’d brought home with me?
“Can’t blame him for leaving,” I said, and immediately regretted it.
It was exactly the wrong thing to say, touching as it, did on Yvette’s sensitivity about being abandoned. I braced myself for the public humiliation that would surely follow.
I myself was about to become an exhibit.
“Ahh she is so afraid of being abandoned, no?” said Veronique bending even deeper now to kiss her daughter. Yvette’s cheeks beamed embarrassment outward into the exhibition space and I suddenly realized Maman was Papa too.
She had to be, because Papa had fucked off. But Gauguin had fucked off and they called him a genius. He can’t have been the most considerate of men to dump his wife and kids and take off with Van Gogh, that other famous family man. But the Swedish wife took the children to live with her wealthy parents so there was no need to dwell on them too much and they did look pretty fucking boring compared to the technicolor windows into paradise on the walls ahead.
I refused to believe that he wasn’t fucking every little Polynesian trollop he could get his hands on. Painting all day between orgasms and shagging all night between paintings. Art historians count him amongst the most notable Post-Impressionists but to me his most significant achievement was that he lived in an aftershave commercial before aftershave existed.
“You have found she can be difficult, no?”
We were on the roof patio of the Met Museum and Veronique was talking about her daughter as if she wasn’t standing next to her. I mimicked a man testing the ground with his foot and then leaned back in mock-horror as an imaginary explosion leapt from the tiled surface of the roof garden. Veronique smiling eyes met mine and we turned to enjoy Yvette’s confusion. The moment felt good and strangely just.
This was my cue to produce the glossy book of Gauguin prints from my shoulder bag and hand it to Veronique
“Pour toi Maman.”
I had been forewarned that she loathed people who tried to speak French to her but I had spent $185 on the book so I wanted my money’s worth. Inhaling loudly and ooh-la-la-la’ing she bowed to kiss both my cheeks again. Real full-on wet kisses not make-up-saving facsimiles.
She wiped my face like I was a rascal and stepped back to regard me.
Later, back in her apartment Yvette put away her phone after a long muffled conversation in high speed French.
The verdict was in.
“Maman says she thought you loved me passionately and that it was clear to her we would be married. She also said that she herself liked you very much and that you were of superior intelligence.”
But then she went on to say that her mother’s boyfriend was using the fact that she was too old to have children as an excuse to end their relationship. He was thirty-nine (same age as me) and she was forty-nine. Mother and daughter now shared the same fear of abandonment. Yvette was worried that Maman was on the prowl. It was true she flirted with me but I just assumed this was what French mothers did. She said I would look great in an ornate suit of armor that had been commissioned by the wife of an Austrian count. The sexual possibilities of being the filling in a mother and daughter sandwich were not lost on me but I couldn’t suppress the thought that her clit had to be at least as big as my dick.
.
*****
“Dare to be average,” said Dr Jessica.
Dare to give me a fucking break.
If I succeeded in being any more average the likelihood of her getting $350 an hour would be somewhat diminished. We had agreed that I would write down my dreams and so when she asked me if I had anything for her I took out my notebook and read her the following scenario.
“I’m setting out chairs in the gym for my Sunday night AA meeting when I become suddenly conscious of making too much noise. I look around and there, between the stacks of chairs are at least seven or eight young boys arranged in sleeping bags on the floor. It’s a strange sight but I assume for some reason that they are a junior basketball team who made bad travel arrangements and need somewhere to sleep. As I continue putting out the chairs they begin to wake up and without speaking they stand up and bunch together by the wall waiting for me to finish. This is when I notice they have no arms. I wonder how their vests can possibly remain in place on those smooth rounded shoulders. And because they are well-behaved and respectful it somehow feels ok to introduce them to some of the AA members who by this time are starting to arrive.
I feel proud of these boys even though I have no idea who they are.”
“That’s so beautiful,” said Dr Jessica, “can you see what it is?
I stared at her.
“It’s your sub-conscious telling you it’s ok now to bring your younger self into the AA meetings. The boys have no arms because that’s how you felt when that guy was touching you.”
The boy was contacting the man.
Later that night Yvette called me an asshole with such conviction I almost felt grateful to hear such an honest utterance. Advertising had all but gutted me of any genuine emotion. We had been talking about us. Or rather she had been talking about us while I stewed.
“Do you want to be that guy who has to keep changing his girlfriend every three years?”
Silence.
“Because they’ll all want the same thing.”
Silence.
Every three years didn’t sound so bad to me. If anything, it was a little optimistic.
I prayed that I might be struck in love with her. She was a ready-made, highly cultured, French, great in bed, (if not a little demanding) her mother was an Aristocrat and an artist and so well connected in France I could already see the scenic summers in Belle Ille, the publishing deals in Paris and the French-speaking children showing me the contents of their mouths. But as I tried to talk myself into it I just couldn’t conjure the required flutter in my chest. Or if I did it was more like a twitch. Yes, the sex was the best I’d ever had. No doubt about it. Guiltless soaring orgasms that felt like time-travel. So what was wrong? Other girls I’d met were boring in comparison or older or uglier or worse; American. Was I was in denial? Would I only find out how deeply embedded I was when I tried to pull out?
I thought more clearly when we hadn’t had sex.
In the time we’d been together the orgasms were so intense and so regular they’d had the same effect as medication. Once every two days after meals; and depending on the dosage-level I’d see Yvette as gentle, beautiful and kind and myself as loving, caring and truthful. But now that she was on sexual strike I couldn’t find this girl or that guy. Maybe lust was all I’d ever felt for her. There was no point in making us both miserable just because she wanted to have a child. I knew I’d find it impossible to love a creature whose first act on entering the world would be to demolish the one thing I really did have genuine feelings for. Her ass.
******
Open on a classroom full of boys supervised by a Christian Brother.
He walks between the desks craning his head to read the copybooks and pauses to point things out. He stops next to a ginger-haired boy and slides in beside him. The other boys exchange amused looks. Beneath the desk in a close-up shot we see the priest’s hand emerge from a pocket-slit in the side of his gown and crab-creep towards the boy’s crotch. The forefinger and thumb pull at the fly fastener but it doesn’t budge.
He tries again.
Nothing.
After one more tug we notice the boy’s zipper is pierced by a safety pin. Cut to a close-up of the boy’s face as he allows himself a barely perceptible smile. Match-dissolve to the same boy now wearing an outrageous punk outfit complete with a daisy chain of safety pins from his ear to cheek. The music returns at full volume; I am an Anti-Christ
The boy gives the finger to camera.
40-Pack Of Safety-Pins Extra-strong. Boyles Chemist.
******
Browsing menus of single willing women was intoxicating at first.
Pornographic even. Beautiful girls with cocked heads and laughing eyes competing for my attention in a modern day harem. I toiled over half-written messages and deleted them in disgust only to start anew. Finally after agonizing over every comma, period and apostrophe I’d send one out like a dove into the night. Annette87 was absolutely gorgeous but believe it or not it was not her beauty that caught my attention. She listed Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, in her last great book I read section and for which superpower would you most like to possess she’d answered; “I’d like to read minds.” So yes, I wrote her a poem.
Look ye to these blackened leaves,
Deathly froze ‘neath icy screen,
Neglected thus by suns and moons,
These worried words seek news of you,
Thine eyes to them are planets bright,
Whose orbit brings the gift of life,
Sayest not thou art bereft of powers sublime,
Thou canst read words and therefore minds.
No reply. Maybe she never received it. Should I send it again? Maybe the internet was down. In many ways a fleeting glimpse of a beautiful girl in the street was more merciful. You saw her and she was gone. Here you could ogle what you couldn’t have for days on end. Meanwhile capitalizing on your disappointment, ads for cars, aftershave and clothes promised to make you more attractive. But I wasn’t about to give up.
Intelligence, height, wealth and wit.
These were the most commonly sought qualities on datemedotcom. I already had three of them and I could mimic the fourth in the right shoes. I was never going to attract many replies on my looks alone but I was confident that most girls were going to at least feign interest in a guy who made $250,000 a year as an Advertising Art Director.
And as such, having worked with some of best digital retouchers in the
world I couldn’t help but notice that many of the photos had been modified. Skin lightened, blemishes blended, legs lengthened, weight reduced, children removed.
It quickly became clear, after only a few dates, that if a seemingly
gorgeous twenty-five-year old girl was willing to meet a guy nearing forty, it meant he was going to have to pull up an extra chair for her ass. Witnessing a girl rearrange the table in front of her as she waited for her anatomical entourage to catch up was not something I wanted to repeat. I felt like the victim of a crime but with no emergency number to call because legislation had yet to catch up with whatever this was.
Scrutinizing the profile photos even more carefully I realized to my horror I had been deceived by three very basic methods of in-camera trompe l’oeil.
(1) Lying face-down on a plush carpet absorbed all manner of immensity.
(2) Holding the camera high up created a false perspective that funneled even the most amoebic madness into a neat vanishing point (3) Posing between two friends converted a milk-churn silhouette into an hourglass figure.
I was looking at this all wrong.
Instead of being the customer, I needed to become the product.
Instead of buying I would sell.
At first I didn’t catch the significance of profile names like Erin76, Shannon12 and Colleen111, but it soon arrived in me like a smile. As a walking, talking, realistically rendered, three-dimensional, life-sized export of that mythical faraway land called Ireland I had something to sell after all. These misinformed females, having grown up with stories of the old country strained through generations of omission and embellishment, were ripe for the romantic advances of a native-born Mick.
An Irishman with a girl’s name?
Yes, that’s going to be my headline for this e-mail. You probably get a lot of messages (gorgeous girl like you) and as you trawl through them going…DELETE...DELETE... DELETE….I thought I’d at least grab your attention with an eye-catching line.…and let’s face it, it must have worked because you’re still reading. But why would my parents give me a girl’s name? Well, since they had me late in life they knew I’d grow up with less attention than my siblings, and like the Johnny Cash song -A Boy Named Sue- the hope was that I’d grow up independent and tough (imagine the playground taunts).
Did it work? You can judge for yourself when we meet.
Girlsname
At first I only copied and pasted this message to girls who referenced Ireland in their profiles but pretty soon I began to send it out randomly. Why not? Irishness was attractive to all cultures except the British and there weren’t too many of them over here. And anyway I could always screen the responses later. The objective was to see just what kind of quality I could attract.
It was revealing how grateful they all were, beautiful or not, for being referred to as gorgeous. Seemingly, this was enough to blind them to the fact that what they had received was a form letter. And almost all of them wanted to meet, or at least learn more about the man behind it.
“You have two new messages. First message.”
Beep.
“I hate you…I hate you…I hate you…I hate you... I hate you…I hate you…I hate you…
I hate you...” It continued, with a few breaks for inhalation, until the tape ran out.
“New message.”
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you….”
Yvette had obviously felt a need to underline the passion of the first message with the comparative composure of the second. Why was she so aroused? Talking on the phone earlier I had made the mistake of mentioning Dr Jessica’s suggestion that I might want to think about online dating and she immediately hung up. Which was just as well because I was about to remind her that it was she who insisted I see a therapist in the first place. If it hadn’t been for her I would never have even considered online dating. But when she called back I let the call go to voicemail. Twice. When I felt an urge to call her back I listened to those messages. They were my equivalent of a fat person-picture on the fridge.
Dr Jessica said I looked for conspiracy everywhere.
“Whenever you’re stressed or overworked you look around for the enemy. That’s your pattern. You learned it from childhood; abuse from your teacher, denial from your mother and now you’re doing the same thing with this guy Andy”
Andy was the creative director on Olaffson who very rarely left the building.
It seemed to me that if you were any good at what you did you should be able to go home every now and then. But not Andy. On weekdays we worked into the early hours and on weekends we just worked late. He needed me there because of my experience writing tv commercials and yes I had a better showreel than him but was there really any need for us both to be there at 1am on a Friday night? He’d try to make it all seem like we were two friends hanging out. Just two guys checking out chicks.
“Look at that ass,” he’d say as one of the junior account girls walked by ‘look at the swagger, it’s innate.”
“It’s a nine,“ I said.
He shook his head in awe.
“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, buddy.”
I had actually misheard him but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
I suddenly saw through him. Why go home to a complaining wife and screaming kids when you could hang out in trendy office with gorgeous account girls and your witty Irish art director? I was his creative butler.
I assured Dr Jessica that I’d welcome the idea of being fired but she sighed loudly.
“I’m sorry. You’re stuck.”
This new candor amazed me. Was it some sort of technique used by therapists?
Remain silent for the first five sessions then open up with all sorts of observations?
And by encouraging me to remain employed was she thinking not just of my job but her own? I was after all, her misery-mortgage.
“You look smaller this time, last time you seemed taller, you stood more erect, you had greater presence.”
This wasn’t at all like her. Ordinarily she was much more tactful about making comments of any kind. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that last time I’d worn my Brothel Creepers. They add at least an inch to my height. I was sparing my therapist’s feelings now? This was the equivalent of neatening the apartment before the cleaner arrived. Something was wrong. When I first lowered myself into the chair at the beginning of that session the cushion and arm-rests were scorching hot. Re-evaluating my near-collision with a huge mannish-looking woman in the hallway I couldn’t help
but wonder if I had inherited some of the mood from the previous session.
“Look,” she said, shuffling forward in her seat,” what do you do when you come to a fork in the road?”
Was I expected to answer?
“Take it.”
I was paying $350 a session for this. Previously, she had appeared all the more intelligent because she had said so little.
Bridgit’s invitation to inspect the Celtic pendant around her neck allowed me to touch her cleavage which ignited the kiss that led to her bed where, in the throes of fucking her, I noticed a picture of her dad on the bedside table..
He looked exactly like me. My thin-lipped and blue-eyed head lurched forward to fit perfectly over his before retreating and reappearing.
Still a novice, not just to online dating but dating in general, I agreed to meet her mother who lived in Syracuse. After an exhilarating train ride where she made me come under a newspaper right there in the seat as the pylons rushed past; I pretended not to notice her mother’s expression of euphoria when wide-eyed and hungry for her returned husband, she welcomed me into her house.
I sat at the head of the kitchen table with Nuala, the younger sister, on my left Bridgit on my right. Mom sat at the other end flanked on one side and then the other by Paddy the dog. On the wall, a portrait of dad looked down on us from within a gold-frame. He also looked down from the fridge, the hallway, and even from a picture in the toilet where at one point I sought refuge. But there was no escaping it.
I was dad.
Bridgit became spokesperson.
“So what do you think of Nuala’s progress? Is she heading in the right direction?”
Everyone at the table blushed.
“She still has a few years to fuck around,” I said.
This was met with squeals of delight.
“And the dog?
“He looks fine to me”
“And what about Mom?”
“I’d do her.”
Hysterical laughter punctuated by hand claps.
Bridgit respectfully requested that I remove my profile from datemedotcom and I respectfully implied that I might like to keep it up and that was pretty much that until
we met again two years later.
*****
In what turned out to be my penultimate therapy session I found myself telling Dr Jessica that everything had improved, that my fear of intimacy was obviously due to my paranoia and that my paranoia was a result of being abused and that yes, it was still there but I was now able to recognize it for the burden it was, as opposed to the good counsel I had imagined it to be. I acknowledged that as a kid I had drawn a map that had reflected the world around me and that it had been a very useful navigation tool at that time. But now thirty years later I was still using it and wondering why I was bumping into things that according to my map shouldn’t be there.
I heard myself acknowledge the success of the sessions while indicating a desire to end them. I shared my vision of a therapy-free existence where it was possible to be well-adjusted without a weekly outpouring of neuroses and cash. I told her, perhaps too honestly, that I spent the intervening days thinking about what to say in the next session so that we wouldn’t both have to endure the excruciating silences and shifting-in-seats. And then in an ill-fated attempt at alleviating the timbre of the room I submitted a work-in-progress-tag-line that would work well on small-scale media like fridge-magnets and bumper stickers. I paused for effect.
“Therapy? Enough said”
She smiled at this.
“You wouldn’t stop going to AA would you?
Predictably enough, she began to suggest that I might want to continue the sessions precisely because they were working. I immediately felt uncomfortable. Guilty even.
Like I was suddenly extricating myself from a relationship. I waited for her to say I was avoiding intimacy. That I was being distant. That she hated me. I didn’t want to continue seeing a therapist when I was already going to a minimum of four AA meetings a week and anyway I felt that what I’d gotten from her was about all there was to get. And let’s not forget I already had a sponsor. I did have to admit though, but not to her, that I could see the logic of continuing the sessions since they would at least provide me with someone to bounce ideas off. Someone who could prevent me from making a mistake. Like discontinuing therapy.
After agreeing to meet Nora on the steps of a church on eighteenth street I was amazed when she led me inside to attend a mass that was just starting. Imagining all manner of pagan possibilities I was happy to oblige. But once inside the cavernous candle-lit interior it quickly became clear that six o’clock mass was a gay singles scene where well-dressed young men eyed each other up between the Benediction and the Consecration. My father would sooner die than live in a world where this could happen. In fact that’s exactly what he did.
But Nora didn’t seem to notice. She was there to imitate her version of an Irishwoman. To her it was just a look, like Cowgirl or Gypsy. An excuse to wear tweed. She was in a Catholic church with figures kneeling and standing and that was enough for her. It was Ireland by Tommy Hilfiger. Apparently she had gone on a few dates with some guy called Ray. It was pretty clear he hadn’t fucked her yet but she mentioned his name often enough that it was clear she wanted to see how I’d address my competitor. This was more of her Irish posturing. I needed to win her. If she hadn’t been so pretty I wouldn’t have bothered. I emailed her that night.
On the west coast of Ireland, in a city called Limerick, in the shadow of King John’s Castle, a black leafless tree inclines itself towards the ochre glow of a streetlamp. In the absence of any natural source of light this gnarled trembling hand reaches for the nearest manufactured equivalent. To imagine so natural a yearning squandered on so cheap a facsimile is too heartbreaking to contemplate so instead dear Nora let us turn our attention to the future. Yours and mine. But before we do that and to help you adjust we might need to get you some Ray-bans.
When I did eventually get her clothes off she was so pale she looked like a corpse. And she pretty much behaved like one. She lay there looking up at the ceiling as if she hadn’t noticed I was about to fuck her. I thought about coming on her face just to see her expression but since she had obviously gone to all the trouble of waxing either side of her jet black bush I thought I might as well go down on her. Pretty soon she wouldn’t shut up. “Thank God. Thanks be to Jesus. Oh, thank God!” It was as if she had misheard the instructions. Oh Jesus or Oh my God was fine but Thanks be to Jesus was just frightening. I felt the sting of her juices on my just shaved face.
“Oh poor thing,” she said, “don’t worry I never come, it’s the anti-depressants.”
Viewed from the front Sheela was very aristocratic looking, but as soon as she turned even slightly sideways there was a dizzying moment of re-focus while her nose announced its dimensions. Not unlike an aerial view of a ship’s mast. She had lovely, clean, pale skin (her parents were Irish), and a beautiful, compact little ass. Tragically though, her hips protruded like a concentration camp survivor. Was I after a relationship or a few fucks? This was a constant source of concern for her. She was looking for chemistry, I was looking for biology. She smiled dreamily into baby carriages, I winced at the back of her head. It occurred to me that had her nose been any bigger and my dick any smaller a blowjob would have been impossible. In the end it was academic. I knew we were finished after a particularly frustrating session trying to keep up with her breathless directions on how to fuck her. She eventually came very loudly, but far from the audible reward I had hoped for I was sure I heard her say; “Blaahhhhhh…blah.”
It summed up our time together
I decided I would never see her again before she even sat down. Her profile picture showed a beautiful girl in a white t-shirt and high heels taking her own photo in a full-length mirror. The scenario had a Helmut Newton-esque feel to it and I assumed this was why she had used the old Leica to capture it. A witty prop for a tongue-in-cheek shoot. Having described herself as a hybrid photographer/assistant /model/writer it made sense to present herself in this way. It also made perfect sense to meet her for a coffee. But as she approached I realized her decision to use a Leica was more than just a retro-chic affectation. It was a mask. A digital camera would have required her to hold it away from that face.
She was a hybrid alright. The world-weary head of an Irish politician surveyed the cafe from the body of a lingerie model.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
I tried not to stare.
“…for being late. I couldn’t find the place, I almost walked past.“
“Don’t worry, you’re worth the wait”
A lie so enormous a car probably crashed somewhere.
“Thank you,” she said reaching into her shoulder bag ‘you don’t look anything like your picture.”
I hid my rage as she took out a small black wallet and began to show me badly composed photographs printed on cheap paper. Even if she had been stunningly beautiful I would have been unhappy about this, but under the circumstances I was breathless.
“Really?”
While she talked, mostly about her photography, I tried to summon a version of myself that could somehow ignore her from the neck up, or more precisely from the chin up, because there was something there casting a small shadow, I couldn’t quite tell what it was and though I wanted to study it, I didn’t dare.
“Do you still want to meet in Ireland?”
She didn’t actually have any Irish connections but because she loved everything about the country I had suggested a romantic rendezvous in Deelford. I hadn’t told her I was already due there the following week for a visit home because I had wanted to make it seem like I was planning the trip around her.
But that was before we’d met.
“Yes” I said involuntarily and threw in a nod to make it more believable.
“Yes? But it’s very expensive? No?”
Was she was offering me an escape route or was she trying to get out of it herself?
Or was she pretending she didn’t fancy me so I wouldn’t feel obligated? Or was she angling for a free flight? I couldn’t read that face one way or another. The fact that she could use a camera to hide her face might well have been the reason she got into photography in the first place. There was an ad for cameras in there somewhere. You get more detail with a digital camera. I tried to summon a version of myself that could somehow see it as a large pimple. A chin-nipple perhaps, but it was useless.
The wart wagged the woman.
After an overnight flight to Dublin and a joyless train ride to Deelford I was jolted from a virtual sleepwalk into the kitchen of my childhood home to find my brother and mother touching my jacket like Bangkok peasants. It would not have seemed surreal if I thrown coins to the floor. Only slightly more dignified I placed a fifty-Euro note between the salt cellar and the sauce bottle and emptied my caressed coat-pocket of coins into my mother’s wide expectant hands. This secured my first compliment.
“Doesn’t he look great?”
This was the Ireland I remembered.
Before I‘d even sat down she warned me not to call the fire brigade since the last time I was home I had needed their services to extinguish a chimney fire. Having recently taken to counting each separate rock of coal my mother was hardly going to welcome the cost of having the chimney swept. The last time already mindful of her sensibilities I had very carefully placed one diamond-in-waiting on what appeared was no more than a pathetic sputtering flame but apparently the chimney couldn’t deal with the increased traffic and the smoke began to back up. I had no idea the fire brigade charged by the hour. I thought they were a government service like the postman or the police.
My laptop was met with oohs and awws.
My mother began dropping the first of many hints that she needed to pay off one thousand Euros on a car accident she’d caused. There was a silence after this which I suppose I was expected to fill with money and when I pretended not to understand she stopped making me cups of tea. Brian said I was paranoid about my money, that I was obsessed with it.
“I’m not the one obsessed with it,” I said.
There was another silence after that.
Due to the prohibitive cost of oil the central heating was never on for more than an hour a day even in December. Brian had discovered that sleeping with a pair of underpants over his head afforded the warmth of a hat but with more ventilation. He helpfully began to explain that seventy percent of your body heat escaped through your head. He had obviously forgotten that it was I who told him this after serving two years of my life in Minnesota. I was about to suggest he’d be even warmer if he shut his fucking mouth, but I didn’t. I pitied him living in that house with that woman.
She was really pissed off that her husband was dead. She couldn’t see that she was in fact very lucky to have someone, anyone, at home with her, even if it was only Brian.
The house had gotten worse since dad died. There were pockets of unwiped goo everywhere. It was all too familiar and yet it was like some sort of dream. Brian without his wife and my mother without her husband. They’d become a sort of sexless bickering couple and I was the umpire. In the mornings I’d hear them stiffly descending the creaking stairs. The undead.
I gave my mother an autographed copy of The Potter And The Rose and joked that it would be worth a fortune some day because it was a hardback and the author was quite reclusive. She was happy about this until she noticed my inscription wishing her a happy Christmas. I had obviously devalued it. I looked past her annoyance, like I had done so many times before out the kitchen window at the black defeated trees and I felt fortunate I could leave.
When she got sad about me leaving I was reminded of all the times I’d left home for Art College in Limerick or London or Saint La Croix or New York. My tears became easier and easier to hide until there were none.
My constant state of sleeplessness was like some sort of torture technique where my eyes were sewn open and I was forced to watch something I didn’t want to see.
My mother’s decline and my brother’s misery.
I got up early the next morning after another sleepless night. I crept quietly around the kitchen so as not to wake them. The less conversation the better. There were only two more days before I flew to Las Vegas but I desperately tried to think of excuses to leave earlier. I’d been sitting in exactly the same spot when I first told my mother about Brother Ollie thirty years earlier.
I remember waiting as she drained yellowish green water from a saucepan of boiled cabbage. I was about to inform on the coolest Brother at my school. At nine years of age I couldn’t even be sure that what I was about to tell my mother was controversial.
Mostly I was looking for a reaction. Shock. Disbelief. Laughter.
For all I knew I might have been leading the him astray. After all, why would a man dedicated to God want to play with the thing I peed with? The only satisfactory explanation was that I was evil.
Some weeks after I had established the habit of going to school with my trusty safety pin in place I experienced what I would later realize was a sexual stirring. As Brother Ollie approached preceded by the smell of his hair cream and aftershave I actually wanted him to sit beside me, to touch me, down there. I even removed the safety pin just in case. This means that my very first sexual yearning was not only co-opted by the Catholic Church, it was rejected.
But the cabbage was more important.
“Oh,” she said, “he’s just being friendly.”
She dissolved momentarily as the steam enveloped her. I was her fifth Caesarian in a row. She barely had time to heal between births. It must have been difficult for the surgeon to find fresh skin for his blade. Each of us literally left a huge scar on her. Mid-century Ireland was a moral-middle ages where Priests, Nuns, Brothers and Bishops were feared like Gestapo and contraception was the stuff of science fiction. The way things were back then she was lucky she didn’t have four more children. So were they.
******
Open on a rainy farmyard somewhere in Ireland.
A potato grader juts out of a barn as underage workers try to keep pace with the conveyor belts. Cut inside the barn where a young boy pitch-forks potatoes into the funnel of a grader as other boys positioned on either side of the machine busy themselves separating rotten specimens from the healthy. They all wear hooded anoraks against the rain and black potato sacks around their waists like makeshift aprons. In a close-up we see the uncovered cog and chain mechanism that powers the conveyor belt and we realize now as we pull back that the boy with the pitchfork leans dangerously close to it as he works. Another small figure scurries along in the rain edging past the others as he makes his way towards the boy on the end. A shock of ginger hair protrudes from one of the hoods and we see his face we realize it’s the same boy from the safety pin commercial. He has noticed something strange about the newcomer. His hood is larger and darker than the others and oddly he carries a scaled-down scythe which appears custom-made for his stature. Suddenly the conveyer belt lurches and shudders. Something is jammed in the mechanism. The ginger-haired boy looks in the direction of the upset just in time to see two little legs swing impossibly into the air and fall away again. The grader continues to lurch and grind until the ginger-haired boy finds the switch. There is no sign of the strange little hooded boy with the scythe.
Voiceover; “Tragedy comes in all sizes so keep protective guards on all moving parts.”
Issued by the Irish Government for Safety in Agriculture.
******
My mother’s technique for coping with the grief of losing her husband of 43 years was to refuse food in the hope that she might join him. On her way up to bed that night as she carefully closed the living room door so as not to disturb my television viewing, I had the strangest sense that I was seeing her alive for the last time. In stark contrast a memory of her whooping with laughter flashed into my mind.
What the fuck did I care about the television? I was only sitting there trying to postpone another sleepless night in my freezing damp bed. An urge to save her suddenly rose within me. I’d bring my intelligence, energy and wit to bear on the situation.
I won’t let you die ma. Don’t worry I’m here. I‘ll save you. But then I realized I was powerless. I couldn’t make her want to live. It was her decision.
The living room door was like a coffin-lid closing over her.
“You don’t have a vocation, you should start a family.”
Being sent home from a seminary before you’d taken your final vows was the kind of thing that was whispered about in fifties Ireland where, having a priest in the family was better than a relative in government.
But for my dad it was not to be.
The Bishop himself had just ordered my father to go forth and multiply.
This was no mere whim it was an ecclesiastical directive. Had he been around today he probably would have signed up for online dating. The speed with which he found the one he wanted seemed to suggest that he might have had his eye on her for some time.
Brenda Sullivan was pretty and well-off and promised to another. And it didn’t help that her family were aiming higher than a failed priest. So when he received an invitation to her wedding his faith quaked. Not good enough for the priesthood and certainly not good enough for the Sullivans.
“God only breaks your heart so he can get in,” he would tell me many years later.
The Bishop was God’s representative on earth and my father would do his bidding.
In wide-shouldered suits that hung vertically from his thin frame and well-spoken after his six stint in the seminary he must surely have cut a dash in the countrified dance-halls of downtown Deelford. My mother certainly thought so. She was taken with his manners and poise and of course his looks. He and his two brothers had strong intelligent angular foreheads with brows that sheltered deep-set mostly blue eyes and whenever they met they took turns throwing their heads back in loud uncontrollable guffaws.
All dead now of course. Except for Frank, the youngest at seventy-nine. My mother couldn’t bear to let him into the house during those first few weeks following the funeral looking as he did, so much like a skinnier paler version of her dead husband.
He was like a ghost knocking at the door.
Her nickname for Brian was “Flash” precisely because he wasn’t.
She complained constantly that he couldn’t be arsed to find real work and that therefore he was a depressing influence. Divorce seemed like such a glamorous word to use in connection with him because nothing had happened to Brian since well, nothing had ever happened to Brian. He was receiving back-pay from fate
I once walked in on him in the toilet and found him pissing not into the toilet but in the sink. He did this so he could continue watching himself in the mirror.
It wasn’t vanity so much as self-surveillance.
Directly after his divorce he was so bereft of ideas about what to do he was like a life-size doll between positions. Brian making a cup of tea. Brian watching TV.
Brian sitting. Brian standing. Talk about teachable. If my mother hadn’t managed to fuck him up the first time she was getting a second shot at it. They very quickly became an eccentric modern couple. Her bringing over fifty years of marital experience to the table and Brian bring nothing at all. He didn’t pay rent. Her friends remarked on how closely he resembled my father and how lucky my mother was in effect, to have him back.
But she didn’t see it .
When he drove me to the station on a morning so moist it might have been regurgitated, I was so elated at the prospect of leaving that damp rotting ancient island I almost fell out of the car when it stopped. He mock-saluted and drove away eyeing himself in the re-angled mirrors.
But it wasn’t over yet.
From the platform I could see the farm where Timmy was killed.
Much was made of the fact that I broke into the farmhouse to call the ambulance.
Like it was an act of heroism. But I would have done anything to get away from the image of my friend dangling by the throat with the hood of his duffel coat woven obscenely into his pale skin. Breaking a window was the cowardly thing to do. I should have stayed and helped him. But as it turned out there was no escaping the horror of that day. Turning around with the phone still in my hand I was met by an equally disturbing sight. One of the other boys, busy robbing the place.
As the train pushed the damp empty buildings aside I realized my Christmas had consisted of four freezing days and nights in a damp house with a bitter old woman and a divorced unemployed barman. No wonder I was relieved to get out. I left five hundred Euros on the mantle-piece to ease my guilt. Brian joked that my sister and I should pay him since he was basically running an old folk’s home for one. He can’t have known that if he had insisted I would have been happy to set up a standing order. I looked up and down the train to see if there were others like me who couldn’t wait to leave this wet washed-out, rained-on place. The train was full.
Erin a pale red-haired beauty looked out at me from the just opened jpg.
She was young. Twenty-nine is young when you’re almost forty. I had already fed her email address into Facebook to see if she had a big ass in tow and here she was not as clear-skinned in an un-photoshopped version of the same photo she’d posted on datemedotcom but her body was visible now so that didn’t seem to matter. I leered over profile for a while before calling her. She had been married before she said and now wanted kids. She had a little dog she’d bought from Puppies on Lexington. She was going to a wedding that Saturday and was doing her laundry on Sunday and hiring a car for the weekend. She lived in Nassau and though she loved having sex she was allergic to condoms and so could only do it with a specific condom made from lambskin.
“They’re expensive and not easy to get,” she said.
“How much is expensive?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Each?”
“Yep”
There was something refreshing about her lack of finesse. She encouraged me to speak so she could hear my accent. She wanted me. Pure and simple. No games. She invited me to go to the wedding with her that Saturday. It would be a two and half hour drive with and a six-month old puppy on my lap and three hours being paraded around like a captured American serviceman. I was thankful to be able to truthfully tell her I had to be in Las Vegas for work. This impressed her. She was not quite white trash but getting there. Off-White maybe. Eggshell. She bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t drink at the wedding since she was driving but she would make up for it the following night. She’d recently had a few one-night stands with a Texan who bought drinks for everyone in the bar wherever he went. She said this kind of behavior embarrassed her but she couldn’t refuse a man who bought her drinks all night.
And yes, she had sex with him.
“Did you use a custom-made lambskin condom?”
“Well no, not that night silly, we were, you know, drunk.”
“I like the idea of the lambskin condom because as an Irishman it satisfies my desire to shag sheep and women at the same time”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.
“I‘ll pretend I didn’t say it”.
Hearing her laugh I imagined her covering our child’s ears in her version of our future. Isn’t daddy awful? I had a headache after forty minutes of listening to her.
I had only stayed that long in the hope that I might step into the toilet for some phone sex But she was obviously thinking further ahead than I was. She wanted to get into my genes. So when she asked if I had the Orish Curse I pretended not to understand.
“Well yes, I suppose I do. I’m an alcoholic. In fact I’ve been in AA now for fifteen years.” It seemed like as good a way as any to extricate myself.
“Good for you,” she said, obviously winded. “Congratulations” she said after a pause. “Fifteen years? Why how old are you?
“Forty-eight,” I lied.
“Your picture looks a lot younger’.
“Well that’s what happens when you don’t drink”
Another pause.
”So you’re 14 years older than me?”
She was audibly disappointed. She had just lost a house in upstate New York, three children, two rabbits and a dog. All I wanted was a wank and that was still possible without her.
*******
Open on a shot of a railway tunnel somewhere in the Ireland.
Birds chirp, bees buzz as the voice-over begins; “At the age of 16 you are legally entitled to two of life’s greatest pleasures…” suddenly a high-speed train thrusts itself into the tunnel and continues to disappear into the small snug-fitting opening. The voiceover resumes with a snicker; “…the other one is the Young Person’s Railcard.”
Cut to a still-life shot of the Young Person’s Railcard with an id-photo of the same ginger-haired boy we saw in the farmyard commercial earlier. He has grown up a little and now sports ginger sideburns to match.
Irish Rail, How Far Will You Go?
*******
I was so tired after my sleepless week in Ireland all I could remember about Air Lingus flight 1444 to Las Vegas was a very unattractive girl on my left saying there might be empty seats up front and a toddler imitating the sounds of someone being brutally killed on my right. From behind me unseen knees pressed urgently into the small of my back. I must have passed out because at the moment of landing I jolted awake in a stupor of self-hatred and dissatisfaction in Las Vegas McCarren International Airport.
A small neat Mexican man in small neat suit waited with a sign on which the word Miss preceded my name. When I pointed at it he just smiled like I was joking and continued scanning the incoming hordes for the real me. I stood there waiting for him to understand. He stepped away. I stepped closer. I was too exhausted to do anything else.
It took longer than usual but when he realized his mistake he placed the sign in a nearby trash-can and looked for a moment as if he might get in there with it.
“I’m very sorry sir,”
Having established my identity he took me in his darkened car to a cultural abattoir known as The Merchant Of Venice Hotel where in room 12225, after enduring forty-five minutes of taped messages and bad ads I was so relieved to hear a live human being, I shouted at him. After a half-hearted, half-heard apology I was thrust back into Tele-purgatory. I slammed the phone down in disgust and picked it right back up again. This led to a conversation with my mother who was at that moment watching re-runs of the A-Team and I knew without having to be told that I’d have to call her back. Far from wanting to hear my mother’s voice I wanted to avenge myself on the agency by running up as big a phone bill as possible.
”It’s freezing cats and dogs here,” she said when I was at last deemed worthy of an audience. “What’s it like over there?”
But before I could answer she began telling me how Murdoch in the A-Team reminded her of my brother and the rest of the “conversation” was about how sad it was that he couldn’t get another woman and what did I think about that. Did I think he’d be able to get a woman on that thing that I did on the computer because after all I seemed to be doing alright by it and I let’s face it I was no looker. But again, before I could get a word in she was off again.
“Do you know Mrs O’Shaughnessy?
“No, Ma I don’t think so.”
“You do, you met her.”
“Did I?
“Angela O”Shaughnessy.”
“No, I don’t know her.”
“Married to Seamus O Shaughnessy.”
“I can’t say I know her.”
“You do, I’m telling you.’
“Where does she live?’
“Cuff’s Grange.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“You do, you do, we were there once.”
“Does she have red hair?
“No, you bleddy eejet that’s Nuala, you said she had to throw her boobs over her shoulder before she could tee off.”
“Ahh. Yes. Now I have her yes, what about her?”
“She’s dead.”
Now I wanted to shout at her too. I actually did a couple of times but my cell phone service provided gaps into which my expletives fell and rendered me civil. Not that she would have noticed, she just kept talking and talking as I paced around the horror that was my room; imitation books fashioned from fibre-glass, mass-produced carpets with badly done fleur-de-lis and marbling even on the air-conditioners.
I had to get out. But I soon learned the interior was tasteful compared to the outer façade. Standing outside in the blazing sunshine I could see only too clearly now the full-scale formaldehyde replica of St Marks Tower with its digital screen presiding over plastic gondolas ruddered by stocky blonde women in khaki cut-offs. The canals looked like they were filled with blue paint and for all I knew maybe they were.
On that short unforgettable walk to a desperately needed AA meeting I encountered in this order; a scaled down version of the Eiffel Tower, The Brooklyn Bridge and yes, the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Why visit Paris, New York or Cairo, when you could pose in front of these effigies and save yourself the journey. A digital crawl attached to a skyscraper announced “Paintings By Pablo Picasso….Eduard Manet…Paul Gauguin….and many… many ….more…. “
My old friend Gauguin, here?
Seeing the names of these artists presented in the same manner as Tony Bennett got me thinking that it would be great to enclose Las Vegas in a glass dome and present the entire city as a post-modern post-ironic work of art. A geosphere of what-not-to-do.
A metropolitan objet trouve.
But this wasn’t art. It was life. My life. And I hated my presence in it. I was being swallowed whole by a sort of daylight darkness. This wasn’t just a job any more. It was a condition where affection, friendship, honesty, and kindness were co-opted to lever a purchase. I needed an AA meeting. On the way there I called my sponsor and begged him to let me resign.
“Go in until lunch-time tomorrow,” he said, “and call me then.”
*******
Open on a shot of me at work listening to headphones when suddenly we hear a booming voice.
“Sell. Your. Apartment.”
Maybe I downloaded something weird. It’s probably some creative real-estate commercial aimed at iPod users. I shuffle to the next track.
“Sell. Your. Apartment.”
I remove the headphones. Strange. Maybe there’s a virus in my computer.
I carry on working until lunch-time and just as I’m about to get into the elevator I hear the voice again.
“Sell. Your. Apartment.”
I look at the guy in the elevator beside me.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A voice saying, sell your apartment.”
He looks like he’s disappointed in me. This continues over the next few days.
I hear the voice saying the same thing at the most unexpected times; on the toilet; just before going to sleep.
Cut to a SOLD sign being taken down outside my apartment.
The voice seems to have stopped until…
“Put. The. Money. In. A. Bag.”
By now I’m starting to look pale and underslept.
In quick cuts I first enter and then exit a bank with a flight-case full of cash.
There must be $300,000k in there.
In the park I take out a $100 bill from the case to buy a sandwich.
I’m looking up now waiting, hoping the voice will say something but nothing happens.
Some dodgy-looking characters starts eyeing me up.
I’m getting nervous.
Finally, the voice says “Flight.”
I get up and run. I am followed by three sketchy guys who can’t quite keep up.
Cut to an airport departure screen Flight 1266TRV
In close-up we see I have the matching ticket. The flight departs for Las Vegas.
I’ve become very philosophical at this point. I fall asleep clutching the flight case. After landing in Las Vegas I step out of the terminal, slip into the back of a cab and wait.
“Where do you…?”
I put one finger to my lips.
“Wait.”
The cab driver looks at me in the rear view mirror.
“The. Merchant. Of. Venice. Hotel.”
Arriving outside the hotel I am welcomed by porters and ushered inside.
Still clutching the flight case I again wait for instructions but none come. I wander around the hotel lobby sauntering between the roulette tables and slot machines. One hugely overweight man in a t-shirt that says In the Zone has fallen asleep in front of a slot machine. I look around desperately. What am I doing here? Maybe I’m losing my mind?
I start to cry.
“Third. Table. On. The. Right.”
Without hesitation now I push through the gamblers till I reach a roulette table surrounded by people already in the middle of a cycle. The ball clatters to a stop and two people walk away dejected leaving a gap in the crowd. I heave the flight case onto the table. This must be it. The moment that makes sense of it all. I open the case and tip the contents onto the baise. There is a loud groan of pleasure from the onlookers.
"Put. It. All. On. Twenty-four.“
I make an ineffectual attempt at grouping the cash into one area as if to ensure it straddles the number twenty-four.
“Red. ” the voice says.
Accordingly I shove the mound of money a little to the right.
“No more bets.”
The croupier is adamant. The wheel is spun.
All eyes on the little metal ball as it revolves inside the roulette wheel for what seems like an eternity. There is at least four hundred thousand dollars in cash on that table. People saunter over from other tables and a quiet descends as the croupier flashes a look at the security camera overhead. In black and white extreme close-up we see the little metal ball bounce, hop, skip, skidder and wink. At last the wheel slows down and the ball seems to be trying out random compartments for comfort before leaping out to try another. Finally as the spinning subsides the individual compartments move slowly enough to be discernible. The ball sits in a black compartment numbered twelve.
A collective groan rises from the spectators and they immediately disperse as if such misfortune is contagious.
“Aww. Shit,” the voice says.
The croupier drags the stack of money towards him and begins stuffing it into the slot in the table. A title appears on the screen.
“For more reliable investment advice call Belvedere Bank Services 0800 244 78648
******
“...now push your hips up to me because I want to shove my stiff cock inside you….but I’m going to make you wait… you’ll have to beg me….I want to hear you beg me…
I held the phone to my cock so she could hear it squelch as I pummeled it.
“Can you hear that?”
Silence. She wasn’t sure if she should be doing this and yet she wanted me to continue
“Yes.”
“That’s what your cunt will sound like when I fuck it with my stiff cock”
“Ohhhh.”
It was interesting to note that the word cock on its own didn’t seem to have any effect until it was accompanied by the word stiff, hard or rigid. A cock was just a cock but a stiff cock was a compliment. The power of the adjective.
“Ohhhh.”
I’d experiment sometimes and leave a long silence inviting the caller to guess what I’d say next (I’d have to resist throwing in something surreal like lawnmower or tupperware just to see what would happen) These silences would sometimes bring forth surprises.
”I want you to come in my mouth.“
The dirty little cunt. She would never have said that if we had just met in Starbucks.
“You’re a dirty little cunt,” I said.
“Ohhhh. “
Over the tannoy system the stewardess asked passengers to return to their seats.
“You’re on a plane? I’ve never done it on a plane.”
“You have now.”
As I left the toilet cubicle I must have looked like I had just received some excellent news. This was better than real sex. I would definitely be calling her again. A jpg arrived in my phone of a picture she’d taken seconds earlier; a close-up of two glistening fingers inside herself. We were approaching New York and I had a date.
She turned up at Cafe Mozz looking so gorgeous and tiny and cute I absolutely wanted to have sex with her there and then in the street against a lamp-post. In her profile, she looked like a ten-year old boy with tits and so I was already a little ashamed of the explicit nature of my intentions towards her before she even turned up. But she seemed to enjoy the attention. Or was it my discomfort? She looked so young a siren went off somewhere inside me.
All her clothes came from the children’s section of Old Navy and she had become quite adept at removing cartoon characters and bunny rabbits but sometimes she said she liked to leave them on. There was a pause here as she waited for my reaction. Sometimes she left them on? Why would she tell me that? An unspeakable sexual sea-creature caught the light for a second a slithered silently back into the murk. Such a sighting could never be reported. Maybe it was a diversionary tactic designed to sway me form the fact that her interest in me was purely professional. She couldn’t mention that what she really wanted was a photo assignment and I couldn’t give voice to my illegal longings.
“I love your emails,” was the first thing she said to me in person. This of course was clever of her not just because it was flattering but because my emails to her had been predominantly erotic in nature.
Here are my balls,
This is my penis,
My hopes are high,
It’ll come between us.
She let me believe I might have my way with her that very night if it weren’t for that fact that she needed time to get over her ex-boyfriend. What she didn’t mention and what I found out later was that she was already living with a man and would go home to him that very evening. She was very pretty in a pointy sort of way and even though she did her best to behave like a lost little girl in a world of wonder the prominent nipples under the tight white cotton of her skin-tight t-shirt seemed to suggest otherwise. That she had chosen amongst all the clothes in her wardrobe to wear such a revealing t-shirt to our first date gave me a thrill that must have informed my features. I assumed it was one of the items of clothing she had referred to earlier. And since I was the one doing most of the talking the conversation seemed to sparkle. At the end of an excellent evening after a faux argument about who should pay the bill (I won) she jokingly punched the air between us and I angled my cheek mimicking impact. But misreading my intention she leaned forward to kiss me there instead. Suddenly in danger of rejecting a kiss I hadn’t expected I clumsily kissed her cheek as she tried to kiss mine. This was particularly dishonest of her since she had effortlessly conjured up one of those awkward romantic moments that so often occur between people still unsure of the others’ affections.
It seemed like a good time to tell her that I had been working too hard and it would be nice to slow down a little.
“Yes, you should be kinder to yourself,” she said, ingratiating herself with someone that could lead to a seventy-thousand-dollar-a-day photo-assignment.
“My first act of self-kindness will be to see you again on Wednesday night,” I said camouflaging my desire to rip off her child-sized knickers and fuck what I found there.
“I’d like that,” she said, blushing at her own dishonesty.
“Excellent,” I said, mortified by mine
I googled her name and a blog came up featuring the daily trials of a fixer-upper as she renovated a brownstone in Bushwick. There was a picture of her in a check shirt cuddling a huge wild-haired fucker in a newly delivered claw-footed bathtub..
“Me and my man,” the caption read.
The plumbing alone would cost a fortune.
*****
Back in the agency the following day just before lunchtime I was printing out fifty pages of Diary Of An Oxygen Thief as requested by a potential literary agent when suddenly standing there beside me was Andy. He was waiting for something of his own to print and he just kept turning over my emerging pages and smirking to himself.
I couldn’t stop him. He was entitled to look for his printout. I couldn’t stop the printer either I would have pulled out the plug if I had known were it was.
Click whirr….pffht
“I liked hurting girls….”.
Click whirr…. pffht
“…your cunt is loose” …..”
Click whirr…. pffht
“…call that a head-butt…?
Slivers of my life being served up like Prosciutto.
Eleven pages in the tray meant there were thirty-nine more to go.
Sweet Jesus make it stop.
“So. This is your big break-out novel?”
He didn’t look up from the pages as he spoke. I shouldn’t have been printing anything that wasn’t work-related. Before I could answer our account director Perry walked over with some other guy in a suit I’d never seen before. Andy looked quite handsome when he was enjoying himself.
“Do you want me to call you when it’s done?”
“No that’s ok, I‘ll wait. So do you have a publisher?”
“Not yet, I’m sending this to an agent”
He raised his chin and smiled as if I had just explained absolutely everything that had preceded this moment in the history of time.
I decided to hide in the men’s room for a few minutes and then when I felt enough time had passed I’d come out and retrieve my vileness from the printer and retreat to my office and call my sponsor and beg him to let me resign.
But after only a few seconds of pretending to piss Andy seemed to spring from the floor at the urinal beside me.
“So, do you have these in Europe?”
He was referring to the flushers on the urinals which might or might not have been particular to the US and I suspected he already knew the answer before he asked me. I turned to look at him mostly in disbelief. Was he going to work in some witty remark about me being flushed down the toilet and never getting another job again?
This fucking guy.
I pretended to misunderstand.
“Penises? Yes we have them, but they’re much bigger”
The easy smile froze.
“Remind me not to set you up like that again,” he said.
Had I lost my mind? This guy had the power to fire me.
Without a job, I’d be an illegal immigrant.
******
Open on a shot of me with my own shoe-shine stall.
A suited executive is talking on his cell phone as I finish giving him a shine.
The camera finds my sad forlorn face in the refection of his shoe. In that same reflection somebody steps into view behind me. I look down at the pavement and instead of another pair of men’s shoes I see what appears to be a pair of ladies high-heeled boots. But as
the camera follows my gaze upwards we realize the girl is wearing a one-piece leather cat-suit stretched tantalizingly over every contour of her gorgeous body. And though she’s flawless in every way the leather looks lacklustre and uncared for.
She needs a damn good buffing.
Keeping her eye on me she gingerly steps up onto the shoe-shine-stand and dramatically dusts off the seat before lowering herself into position. Passers-by stop to look at her. She‘s that beautiful. I try to remind myself she’s a customer but it’s impossible to hide the effect she’s having on me. Is she naked beneath that body-hugging leather? Obviously enjoying my discomfort she uncrosses her legs and offers me a foot.
I reach for a piece of cloth but when I try to spit on it I realize my mouth has gone dry. Unperturbed she leans provocatively forward and offers me her bottle of Perrier.
Perrier. Thirst for Life.
******
But I wasn’t fired. Instead I was assigned to oversee yet another shit commercial, this time being shot in Canada where all five cars in the Olaffson stable demonstrate their snow-traction capabilities as they converge at a ski-lodge for the holidays. Each member of this unlikely family drove an Olaffson and it is only due to this that they could be together for the Holidays. A lesser car would have careered off the road. This it turned out was the script Andy had been waiting for that day at the printer. And this assignment it turned out was his way of punishing me for being so brazen as to announce my ambitions of being a writer. All advertising creatives have at least one screenplay, book, musical, play or children’s book hidden under the bed but it’s considered very bad taste to talk about it. Why talk of escape when you’re in a maximum security prison?
The freelance producer found some idiot French-Canadian director to shoot it on the cheap because he was as desperate to get into the business as I was to get out of it. Before we even landed in Calgary I couldn’t wait to leave. The director, Jean-Philip, asked in his thick French accent if I needed anything shot for my reel. He must have guessed I was so bored with this shoot that he needed to offer up something extra to keep my interest.
Creatives often asked directors to shoot a personal project on the back of a fully paid-up production like this but even if I had something I wanted shot I wouldn’t have trusted
him with it. But because he was eager to please us anyway he could he had already thought of something else. That same evening after the so-called shoot, (it was all over after two hours) our client, Ken ( or No-Ken-Do as I called him), our freelance producer
(I forget his name) and myself were picked up in a huge SUV outside the hotel and taken to Calgary Adult Club.
Within seconds of being ushered into the VIP area and offered drinks I didn’t want,
I realized I had no prior reference for a rabbit-fur bikini.
Why would I? It had never occurred to me that a bikini could be made from
such material. It wasn’t practical. It contradicted itself.
It was like a candle lit by a lamp.
The contrasting textures of fawn-colored fur and the clean white skin almost got
me going. I say almost because the lighting was too harsh and the interior too cavernous and let’s not forget that getting even a hint of a hard-on in the same room as No-Ken-Do was an imponderable.
“She’s a former Miss Canada.” The sideways shift of his eyes was all he could afford to confirm that I was indeed there beside him. I could hardly believe it myself as I risked a sideways glance of my own at the leaning tower of red chips surging upwards from his table representing only too graphically his desire for the alarmingly young girl on the stage in front of us. As he lobbed, flicked and tossed these plastic discs, the artist formerly known as Miss Canada positioned herself expertly to catch each filthy thought above her now fur-free and hairless vagina. This, it turned out was Canada’s real attraction. Not the strength of the dollar or the endless available snow but the fact that the strippers were allowed to go nude.
“In Canada the beaver goes free,” said Kenneth Berg, Olaffson’s recently promoted Marketing Director who at that moment was busy scrunching up his nose like he was making faces for a baby.
But her vagina was dry and uninterested. I knew this because I could see right into it.
Its owner made absolutely no attempt to appear aroused by what she was doing and as a result neither did I. I slipped away and hailed a cab back to the hotel where I had a Posh Wank (I used a condom) and fell sideways asleep still clinging to my dick. In a dream I was reciting a customized version of the right to bear arms motto; You’ll have to take it from my cold dead hands when I was awoken at 4am by a knock on my door
“Your early morning call sir.”
The producer must have arranged it because apparently I was due to fly back that same day. And so it came to pass that one-third way through a half-understood 5am flight to New York I was stopped by immigration officers in Toronto Airport.
“I’m sorry sir, your visa has expired.”
I feigned wakefulness.
“My what is…what?”
The producer had already gone ahead and I couldn’t call him because my phone was dead and now I was being escorted away and my bags were being recalled. I remember feeling only the beginning of a surge of panic which then immediately subsided and settled back into what could only be described as relief.
Something significant was happening.
My work visa was out of date and there was no way in the post 9/11 environment they were going to let me back to New York where, set loose amongst the unsuspecting public I might put the finishing touches to yet another crap commercial. They were right. I had to be stopped.
“So, I can’t go back to New York?”
“No Sir. You’re staying in Toronto“
Harsh punishment indeed. I was shown into a windowless room where a huge testicle-faced man in a blinding white shirt did his best to behave like he was asking trick-questions.
“But, you just said you’d flown in from Calgary.”
“Yes.”
“So where were you going?
“New York.”
“What for?
“I live there.”
“But you have an Irish passport.’
“Yes, but I live in New York.”
“And you say you were shooting a commercial.”
“In Calgary, yes.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an art director.”
“What does that entail?
“Making the copywriter look good.”
His eyes remained on my passport.
“And you don’t drink?
“What? No.”
“Nothing at all.”
“No.”
“Not even at Christmas?”
“No.”
“And you’re Irish?”
“I am Irish.”
“Conas a ta tu?”
Were they fucking serious? I was being asked questions in Gaelic now?
And how did he know I didn’t drink? Had they looked up my profile on datemedotcom? It was true that anyone growing up in Ireland would have at least a rudimentary understanding of Gaelic but how the fuck did he know that? I had always been terrible at Gaelic. I never managed to get even a pass on all the test papers I’d taken and now because I couldn’t think of the response to this basic question I was going to
be incarcerated in Canada.
Slowly from somewhere uninvited, maybe because my internal editors were not yet at their desks, a deep sense of dread began to overtake me like some huge abstract ink-stain widening within me.
Would I be strip-searched by this gargantuan?
Each of his fingers was bigger than my dick. He reached into a drawer where I suspected he kept his rubber gloves.
I was about to lose my virginity to a Mountie.
He took out a stapler.
When I was finally allowed to make a call I was so happy to hear our receptionist mispronounce the initials of the agency, (there were too many egos jostling for attention) I almost cried. She put me through to our legal guy and suddenly it was as if the Lord God Himself spake unto me.
“We’ve had this happen before. You can help Silvestro and Lucien in our European office while we figure this out.”
It certainly seemed like a reasonable solution but I was surprised he was able to suggest it with such confidence. My Irish passport allowed me to work anywhere in Europe but did the agency lawyer have the power to just send me there? Surely such an idea would need to be run past Andy. Not if he already knew about it.
Either way I had just agreed to be sent to the most precarious place on the planet for a recovering alcoholic and budding sex-addict. Or the most convenient depending on your point of view.
“Hi, I’m a newly arrived writer from New York, and I’m sitting out here on the balcony of my Prinsengracht office looking out on the canal. As I type this, I'm having to half-close my laptop because there's a squirrel ( or at least I hope it’s a squirrel) above me munching on something left out by my upstairs neighbor and as a result there is some serious crumb-spillage onto my keyboard… so if I stat to moss up my werds as I tip I'm hape you’ll firgove me??? But what has all this got to do with you?? Well I don’t want you to feel bad but I’m supposed to be working on my second book, the Notoriously Difficult Second Book (hey, that might be a good title) but after seeing your beautiful picture my concentration went out the window. You could say I'm out here trying to find it. Write soon or I won't be able to.”
The profiles in the Amsterdam section of datemedotcom were mostly made up of East European immigrants and British expats working for international companies lured there by tax concessions. And judging from the repeated references to books, films and music by artists like William Burroughs, Lars Von Trier and Leonard Cohen, it was obvious to even the untrained eye that a morbid intelligence prevailed. Unlike their American counterparts who took great pains to appear companionable and contented, the attitude here was openly suicidal.
Maybe it was all that rain.
I had hoped that my happy-go-lucky impersonation of a newly arrived writer might go some way towards alleviating the mood but my empty inbox seemed to indicate that I would have to do better than squirrels if I was going to get laid in Amsterdam. And yes the red-light district was minutes away but paying for sex was unacceptable. It took all the charm out of it. If anything, it was too honest.
Earlier that Sunday afternoon, before letting myself into our elegant Prinsengracht offices, I attended an English-speaking AA meeting on the Oude ZijdsVorrburwal (good luck pronouncing it) and after a brief conversation with a local man called Erik I was able to glean that online dating wasn’t nearly as accepted in Amsterdam as I had hoped.
In fact when Erik finally managed to absorb the idea into his comprehension his nose twitched involuntarily like he had just smelled something awful in the air around us.
This from an alcoholic-ex-junkie-wife-beater. Online dating didn’t just reek of desperation. It was worse than that. It smacked of America. Meanwhile these immigrant girls were unfucked and far from home in a country where it rained hourly and fits of coughing stood in for conversation. Of course they were miserable.
From downstairs, the sounds of pedestrians on the Prinsengracht mingled for a moment with the muttering of two men’s voices before the front door closed again.
Next came an insistent pounding which I quickly learned was the result of two people ascending the stairs. Lucien, with his black lifeless eyes scanning the floor ahead of him, was first to enter the room and he continued apparently unaware of my presence to his desk. Equally intense and similarly preoccupied, he was followed by Silvestro Da Gemi, the black-bearded creative director of the Amsterdam office.
I hoped that what I was witnessing was the silence that follows a heated argument since any difficulty in their relationship might be an opportunity for me, but watching them settle in at adjacent desks without so much as a nod of recognition to me I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, the velocity of their agreement would soon become apparent in the form of an award-winning ad campaign called The Life Less Driven. I coughed and shuffled in my seat and when neither of them looked up I had to assume I was being ignored and that my presence was indeed an inconvenience. It was true I had been sent there by their so-called superiors but they were obviously above all that. This was Amsterdam. Lucien was a Parisian, Silvestro was a Roman and I was just some guy who had fucked up his travel arrangements.
A homeless person.
Sat there bathed in the pink glow from datemedotcom’s website I understood now why Frida, our HR lady, had been so reluctant to give me the alarm code for the building the previous Friday. I thought it was because nobody worked weekends in laid-back Amsterdam but it was obvious now she knew Silvestro and Lucien were coming in and would not welcome distractions. I couldn’t tell her I only wanted to check out the local pussy and she couldn’t tell me they didn’t want me working on the new campaign.
But I was there and even though I wished I could disappear I couldn’t.
I knew what they were working on because I had been cc’d on the brief. It was the same brief as always Make Safety Interesting. I was expected to work on it with them but I knew they’d kill any idea of mine before I even uttered it. And yet if I was to justify being taken into their fold I’d need to at least pretend to come up with something.
I stared at my screen.
Now I was miserable too.
“Norwegian summers are short and the resident reindeer needs to make the most of the newly sprouted pastures. The more he fattens in preparation for the cold months ahead the more attractive he becomes to the other local resident, the mosquito. Before long, the huge antklered animal is barely visible through a whining hovering haze; not so much a reindeer being harassed by mosquitoes but a cloud of mosquitoes in the shape of a reindeer. The humidity combined with the moisture from the fiords provides the ideal breeding ground for the mosquito. And for the reindeer-herders, a swarm of mosquitoes is better than a sheep-dog. They wait chatting and smoking on higher cooler ground for the exhausted beasts to shuffle meekly into harness. But this one, not content with being bullied uphill kicks and bucks as he tries to unseat the multitude. He escapes into sharp focus only to succumb once more to the blur. This is repeated until the energy expended requires a return to grazing which is apparently unacceptable because suddenly the reindeer-shaped mosquito-cloud ejects a real-life reindeer into one fresh, clean, breezy moment of freedom and the fiords below.”
“I love the reindeer story I can definitely identify”
In all of Deadkween’s very black and very white profile pictures she appeared luminously beautiful in sultry poses wearing an assortment of black leather and lingerie. In one particularly successful picture she paid homage to Charlotte Rampling’s famous pose from Night Porter complete with long sleeved evening-gloves and Nazi hat. She was lost-looking in a soon-to-be dead-sort-of-way. As if her last earthy exhalation would be
in orgasm. She owned a small gallery in Berlin called Poisoned Resevoir and visited Amsterdam regularly “for inspiration.” She wrote poems and attached them to her hand-made dead-baby-dolls. I was allowed to know this much over the phone but she waited until we met to tell me she was an Albino who dyed her hair black and wore contact lenses. I never met an actual albino before. She certainly was extremely pale but no moreso than I’d seen on a Dublin bus. It immediately explained why all her pictures were black and white and why she looked so good n them. We were on her black leather couch at this point in her black-walled apartment overlooking the Vondelpark and though it was no more than 6.30pm it was almost totally dark in there because she’d draped veils over all the lights and closed the blinds. She could only be exposed to daylight for a limited length of time. All signs indicated that I was about to fuck my first vampire until I declined a beer in favor of a water.
“You’re not in AA are you?”
“Well…actually yes. I am”
I left a gap for the inevitable gush of admiration.
“I. Fucking. Hate. AA”
While her alcoholic-heroin-addict-ex-husband had been in AA his sponsor had insisted that she attend meetings too and while she sat in Alanon meetings her husband sold the furniture. When she confronted him about it he threw her down the same stairs we’d just ascended. She pointed almost proudly to the areas of her face where she’d had extensive surgery. The rhinoplasty had cost extra. If she ever tracked him down she would round up some of the boys and have the word Rapist tattooed on his forehead. It was at this point that she mentioned that her best friend was President of Hell’s Angels
in Amsterdam. I could have used that water now but I was too afraid to speak. Still recovering from the shock of uncovering an AA member in her own home on her couch no less she seemed now to need reassurance.
“But you do have the job…” I nodded carefully ’…and the apartment?
The Job? The Apartment? Like two out of three wasn’t bad. Like I had lied about everything else. She continued as if none of what she had just said could possibly have any effect on what she was about to say. She wanted, she said, to settle down and
have a child. She was ready. Was I ready?
Somewhat calmed now that she was talking about her future she sank back into the couch revealing a tattooed white star only barely visible against the white skin of her midriff. It was a Pentagram. Of course it was.
She would obviously be demonic in bed but a good fuck was a small reward for what she really wanted. Luminous babies and eternal darkness.
Suddenly my natural paranoia, which until then had been gathering facts in a half-awake, half-interested manner awoke with a jolt. She was obviously pregnant and the plan was to first fuck me and then dupe me into bringing up the her pasty progeny as my own.
What was happening here? Was it the suicidal reindeer? I looked down at my feet to find that I was descending the stairs with only slightly more dignity than she had when she’d been thrown down them.
*****
“I never got to thank you for all the work. It’s going well isn’t it?”
Johnathan, our very British account manager, appeared genuine enough but an account man’s work was never done. He might need me to work late, or let him kill an idea he couldn’t sell or come in to work on a weekend. This was his way of sounding me out. So when I redirected his gratitude to Silvestro, his eyes narrowed. A creative who didn’t gloam at easy praise was something to be wary of. Did I know something he didn’t? Was this campaign about to be received less favorably than he’d been led to believe? Why would I deflect the credit for a potentially award-winning campaign?
The preliminary research results indicated that The Life Less Driven was a winner. It had already tested through the roof in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York. The idea was simple. Demonstrate safety by showing the driver and passenger conversing freely. Real conversations. The more relaxed the conversation, the safer the car. The client loved it because the car was in every single shot and creatives aspired to it because the conversations were real. It went beyond advertising.
It was reality with a logo.
Christoph our German producer had referred to it, in an all-staff email as the irishman’s campaign. This was something he would only do if Silvestro had already sanctioned it. My first impulse was to tell everyone I’d had nothing to do with it but if the creative director wanted it said that I’d had a hand in this campaign then who was I to object? Maybe it was his generous gesture of welcome? His way of including me. I also had to tread carefully since my visa-situation had become extremely delicate. The lawyer was now saying my “little hiccup” at the Canadian border could effectively halt my green card application and because of this there was a very real danger I might not work in the US again. This was not the time to distance myself from an award winning campaign. And anyway hadn’t I perpetrated enough good work of my own over the years to piggy-back just this once?
Across the room Lucien sat expressionless and straight-backed watching me carefully as if he might draw me later from memory. Without taking those button-black eyes from mine his fingers began typing so fast I thought at first he was joking. The screen in front of him was as indecipherable as he was. Macro enlargements of half-tone photography woven into layers of transparent type, ground up against jagged slabs of flat black and white. All strangely haphazard and definitely non-commercial. It was like an aerial view of some unforgiving alien landscape, impenetrably obscure, airless and unwelcoming. It was obvious from even a distance that it wasn’t agency work. It soon became clear from the galleys and layouts strewn over every available surface of the three-story canal house that Lucien’s book of black and white photography (mostly black) would soon be published thanks to agency funds set aside by Silvestro. It would be his reward for past services and, as far as I could see it was the only reason he tolerated any of us at all.
What I didn’t know was that he had already resigned. As soon as his books were delivered he would be gone. Was it just co-incidence that I should end up in Amsterdam just as he was leaving? It might have been paranoia but a scenario began to emerge that seemed to explain everything. Maybe Andy had intentionally orchestrated the shoot in Canada knowing that my visa was up for renewal. He wasn’t exactly pleased when he caught me printing out my book and even less so when I made that comment in the toilet. And with Lucien leaving they needed someone to help Silvestro. Andy could get rid of me and find a use for me at the same time. It made sense. As creative director it would have been easy for Andy to find out the status of my work visa. If this was true then I might have to accept that Amsterdam was now my permanent home.
Pippa was an upper-class British girl whose idea of slumming it was to fuck someone like me. She was fat little fucker but her accent seemed to indicate otherwise.
As if body fat was something only the lower classes suffered from. Daddy, a politician in the Hague would no doubt be suitably livid when she inferred between the Dover Sole and Gooseberry Fool that she’d bedded a Mick. I probably made as much money if not more than he did but I wanted her to see me as a bohemian writer mostly because I wanted to believe it myself. She drove a little MG sports car that she constantly felt the need to apologize for. She said in a faraway voice that I looked like a Labrador and I somehow knew by this that we were going to have sex. When she took her clothes off she expanded like dough and at one point I inserted myself into what I hoped was her pussy but there was a very real fear that it might be a sweaty fold in her lower bellies. I tried to give the impression I was enjoying the sensation so much I had to close my eyes but she wasn’t having it.
“Open your eyes, would you?”
The nubile girls I had conjured in my mind exploded and I suddenly became a sexual plate-spinner trying to keep her nipples erect so that at least I could tell what was tit and what was not. When she got on top of me I had to suppress an urge to fight. I was beginning to doubt if I could actually orgasm under all that heaving girl-flesh, until she had the decency to reach down and insert one of her fat fingers in my butt hole.
I ejaculated immediately.
Flushed with relief, I turned to her, grateful that I’d never have to see her again.
“I felt something in there,” she whispered. ”You might want to have it looked at.”
My hard-won swirl of endorphins soured inside me.
*****
“Apple-sick duck the fuck?”
The receptionist thought I was Dutch.
“I have an appointment with Doctor Van Amersvoort.” I explained.
“I‘ll tell him you’re here.”
It would seem silly later, childish even, but the thought that I was going to die from stress-induced cancer of the colon had for the two preceding weeks occupied the width and breath of my being. Advertising had killed me. Pippa’s post-coital concern merely confirmed what I had already feared. I’d die elegantly in nearby France while my medical insurance was still eligible. At least I wouldn’t have to be insulted by spoken Dutch ever again. But my almost comforting death-wish was short-lived when, after administering a gentle lunchtime probing to my virgin sphincter, the doctor declared me benign. I felt relief and then joy. And then relief again. It occurred to me that I had been at least as frightened of getting an erection as a bad diagnosis. You could say I got the all-clear in more than one sense.
Mind you, he was an ugly fucker.
******
This commercial opens with an over-the-shoulder-shot of me writing on my laptop. The camera zooms in on the screen until we are looking at what appears to be an extreme close-up of two equal sized dots positioned one on top of the other.
:
It’s a Colon.
Voiceover: “Getting checked early can seriously increase your chances of survival.” The camera finds and settles into the next extreme close-up, this time, one dot positioned over a comma.
;
A Semi-Colon.
Voiceover; “Getting checked when the disease has already set in can prove more difficult to treat.” The next frame shows only one solitary dot..
.
A Period.
Voiceover: “Get checked early for colon cancer before it’s too late.
Issued by Center For Cancer Research
******
With Silvestro, Christoph and Johnathan away in Rekyiavik shooting the first installment of The Life Less Driven I was left to look after the agency. It was the first of five more shoots that would follow in Hong Kong, Berlin, Lisbon, and Rome. He had offered me the chance to go instead of him, but it was wrapped in an unspoken expectation that I should stay. It was pure diplomacy. Olaffson had just signed off on a pan-European campaign that had no script and they weren’t about to have it supervised by a guy who couldn’t even remember to bring proper documents with him on his last shoot. I knew this and Silvestro knew this. But it needed to look like my decision because this was supposedly my campaign.
I had far more important issues on my mind. A date with the beautiful Valeryiya.
After a giggly visit to the Reich Museum with me popping out from behind statuary like a child surprising his mother Valeriya opened her lovely full mouth and changed everything. We were sitting in the café downstairs and she was telling me about her many trips to Florence while at the same time sympathizing with me for never having been. She teased me that I couldn’t call myself a writer until I had visited Florence at least once.
She went on to say that she would have gone there even more often if the choice had been hers to make but that’s what life is like when you’re….
This is where I experienced what Hitchcock liked to call a reverse-smile.
When he couldn’t trust an actor’s skills he relied instead on certain tricks.
For instance beginning a shot with an existing smile and then asking for it to be removed.
This gave him the option of playing the sequence in reverse. Actors were understandably upset by this practice and no doubt performed a perfect reverse-smile when they were introduced to the idea.
Anyway he would have loved the effect on my face when I heard the word “married”
I felt sick and tricked because there and then I realized I had been effortlessly manipulated into wanting her more than I actually did.
The options were Single, Separated or Divorced. She had selected Single.
The person sitting opposite me suddenly seemed second-hand, used even. Of course you’re married my expression tried to say. Isn’t everyone?
I tried to effect nonchalance. It would buy me some time to think. Maybe this kind of behavior was standard online. And maybe, just maybe, my instinctual knee-jerk response of you fucking lying cunt didn’t apply. At least not yet. Then it occurred to me that if she had lied to me it meant I didn’t need to be so respectful any more. I had spent hours between dates daydreaming about us making love but now I just wanted to fuck her. And soon before I found out something else I didn’t want to hear. I suggested we drop by my place for desert and when she agreed I thought even less of her.
There was a pause in my doorway as if there was a chance she might not go in but I took this to be just another lie, her playing the part of a timid girl so I could feel more powerful. So be it. I pushed the door open and before she crossed the threshold I had peeled away her coat and blouse in one. Her nipples seemed strangely sunken like those of an older woman but otherwise she was a like a fucking movie star.
“You’re like a fucking movie star,” I said.
Her long slim girlish legs shivered apart under my touch and I licked her out and she gave me a sloppy slippery blow-job. She’d been very sneaky about not telling me she was married. In fact she was still married. We were committing adultery. Or at least she was. I wanted to ask if she had really been a figure skater or was that lie too? I couldn’t be sure what was true and what wasn’t. Confusing matters even more the sex was beautiful and loving and dirty all at the same time. She was married. So what? As she teased the tip of my cock with the tip of her tongue I didn’t care if she turned out to be a man. She had a great energy and was cheerful and full of life and laughter and her pussy was the most beautiful I had ever seen in real life.
It was so perfectly symmetrical I dubbed it “pussuq.”
She stretched her foot down to stroke my dick as I lapped at her.
Was this a trick she used on her husband? Of course it was. I could have stayed down there all day. There was never any need to explain anything to Valeriya she intuitively understood. At one point I sat with my pants around my knees, half crouched to absorb the shocks as she smashed her “pussuq” down onto my cock like she was trying to kill something. As she began to exhaust herself on my midriff I gathered her to me and waddled ankle-panted across the floor and laid her down so I could feast on her. But I wasn’t allowed. Springing back up on her bare feet she bid me kneel and immediately began pummeling me mercilessly with spat-on hands like some sexual laborer.
“Come on, give it to me.” It was as if I was withholding her property.
Until then I felt it would be rude to unload the contents of my loins at a girl but from the look on this girl’s face it began to look like it might be insulting not to. Three white arcs loosed themselves into the void between us. The first two disappeared out of view but the last clung like a smile to her heaving breasts.
I bayed like a dog at an imaginary moon and we hugged for so long after coming I felt like we’d been stirred together like milk into tea. No sugar.
And because she was unavailable it was ok to fall in love with her.
“Come on, be honest, wouldn’t you be a slut if you were a girl? “
The question didn’t seem fair because everyone knew girls just didn’t think like that.
Here was a girl, a beautiful girl asking me a question that demanded the reorganization of everything I’d ever thought about women. I was suddenly seized with a desire not so much to have her but to be her. I was jealous of her freedom. Her power. A great looking girl could fuck anyone she wanted. Surely such power was intoxicating.
She was like a guy with a girl’s body
And girls weren’t supposed to think like this.
Or maybe every girl thought like this but Valeriya was willing to admit it.
She accused me of analyzing everything and pronounced it anal-izing
I couldn’t tell if this was because English was second language and therefore a coincidence or whether she had effortlessly out-punned me.
Was she fucking with me?
“If you were a girl wouldn’t you be a slut?” she repeated the question as if it was a natural progression from what she had just said and in the full knowledge that I was defeated I conceded reluctantly, that yes, I would.
“Well there you go.”
She said this like it explained everything but all it did was confuse me even more. She saw herself as a slut?
She knew how to adapt to whatever conditions presented her. It was classic behavior of abused children. We learned how to keep the peace at the expense of our own needs. We merged into any given situation. When two chameleons successfully take on each other’s hues there is nothing there. I supplied her with some contacts in film production in Berlin and her response pretty much said it all.
“I don’t know how to thank you, well I do, but let’s pretend.”
Especially the last two words.