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Ophelia understood what I needed. I hated talking about the bad days, especially with people not in our world. I didn’t want to field their pity, their gentle suggestion that I “phase out of this lifestyle” or however they’d word it. Show me a lifestyle that feels good all the time, I wanted to shout. Prove to me that your lifestyle is insured against longing. Show me a pie chart, a breakdown of breakdowns, the data on anguish. Maybe then I’d consider going back to school. Maybe then I’d throw my Pleasers away (off a bridge, maybe?) and become a nurse or accountant, but only if someone could promise I’d never feel dirty. Until then, I had TV and blankets and rosemary oil to help with the bad days. I had good days when I felt divine and men cried in my arms. I had a duffel bag of singles hidden under the bed, an amount I couldn’t fathom. For however I felt about Charlie and the nature of our relationship, it was too late now. I was in it. Baby was born.
He stuck out his hand to hail a taxi, something no one did anymore. It was moments like these when he revealed his age, his thirty-seven years on earth. I liked dating older men because they were well acquainted with loss. They’d seen the rise and fall of rock and roll, good drugs, cheap rent. Their favorite bars had closed, their friends had died, the city had papered over their youth. Having weathered more shit, they were patient with me. They liked to solve my little dramas because it made them feel powerful. They couldn’t bring their friends back from the dead, but they could fix my radiator, hang my curtains, hold me until I fell asleep. Do you believe in life after love … Sure, they were less ravishing now, their bodies ragged and libidos blunted; their lady-killing ways had paled and now they valued things like Costco cards and narrative tension. I didn’t mind. San Francisco would forget them, but I would remember. Miraculously, a taxi appeared. Dino held the door for me and smiled like a millionaire. I thought you’d never ask.
lol
The words came so easily. I love you too. But I didn’t pull my hand away. It hurt me to see him like this, crinkled and grim. This was not a man who windsurfed at dawn; this was a man who could barely dog-paddle. Had he always been this pathetic? Maybe that was why he chased such young girls—they were easier to fool. He could siphon their optimism, their dopey hope. The name of the website we met on was Seeking.com, and I could still feel him seeking, like a cat in the dark. He wanted it all; he wanted out. He wore his disappointments like a rank corsage. He wanted to be sleek and bright, baptized by his nightly high. I glanced down at the coffee table, feeling my extremities tingle. I knew how to help him, to take the edge off. Did you take your pills, Daddy?
I hadn’t told Ophelia that my birthday was today. I was turning twenty-eight. Was that old or young? I didn’t know. When I was twenty-three, I wore heart-shaped stickers on my face. When I was twenty-five, I fell in love. I only drank tequila and pineapple juice, as if that said something important about me. At twenty-seven, I grieved and made bank. I felt tired when I pictured it, twenty-eight years contained in my body, an overstuffed carry-on. At the same time, it seemed like a sexy number, rounded and lush. Young for a writer, old for a gymnast, the perfect age for a bartender or anonymous fuck. I would throw away my flavored condoms and start reading about Bitcoin. I would buy satin sheets and retinol creams and carbonated water. I’d be sleek but fun, poised but game. I would dance with my eyes closed alone in a bar. All my shirts would be see-through, chopsticks in my hair. I couldn’t ever be embarrassed. From now on, I’d sleep naked with the windows ajar; that felt very twenty-eight. I took comfort in remembering what Simon had said, his eyes wet with meaning: You’re still so young!
As I walked, I thought about my answer to Nobody’s question. What would I miss most about being alive? It felt like bad luck to say what aloud. Instead I kept my answer close to my heart, like a locket containing my lover’s hair. It felt good to hold it there. It was both a secret and not, both hush-hush and public. I tried to imagine what my loved ones would say. Ophelia would miss sudoku, Dino would miss lingerie, Mazzy would miss Aperol. Or maybe Ophelia would miss yoga, Dino would miss ice cream, Mazzy would miss trashy paperback novels. The things we loved most were both elemental and petty. You squeezed them while you slept, these scraps. They made your body look beautiful, like the perfect accessory. Dog’s kisses, blue jeans. No one was dumb enough to say justice or family. No, we lived for Halloween and yard sales and driving at dusk with the windows rolled down. We lived for honeymoons and midnight snacks, blow jobs in chain hotels. We lived for paper valentines. It was garbage, but beloved. The devil’s in the details, my mom used to say as she stared at the TV. So too, it seemed, was heaven, or something just as good.
[...] The main reason I liked it was that it increasingly struck me as a very generative thing to do: to push through the embarrassment, to change your feelings about doing something by exposure, to wilfully enter into conversational territory where both parties felt vulnerable and to allow yourselves to be in a space of experimentation. I felt for myself how freeing it was to talk about this stuff, and I liked watching my conversational partners having the same realization.
This is more of a general observation that extends wider than just porn, but I feel that in the queer community – or maybe I should say among millennials and gen Z, because it’s just as much of a generational thing – the backlash against sex being taboo, and against unhealthy beauty standards and all that, has been to make it this friendly, approachable thing, and I don’t really like that either. The thing that I have an absolute loathing of is sex workshops. People go to fisting workshops! I honestly think that’s unhinged. Sex is not a group activity! It’s not recreational, you can’t learn fisting the way you learn to play volleyball, you know what I mean? I just think it’s crazy. But yes, I feel like there’s this push for that to be the new normal. You know: let’s not make anything taboo anymore, let’s not make anything private anymore. It’s now this social thing, and that doesn’t sit right with me either because sex is still something intimate.
lol
[...] A friend of mine, my cousin, stopped drinking alcohol, but he didn’t tell me that. We went out to a bar in Soho and he ordered a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know he was in AA at that time. He made me drink a bottle of vodka in front of him so that he could get a kind of thrill from it.
[...] I asked him why he was doing it and he said, I want to tell my sponsor at AA that I watched my cousin drink a bottle of vodka and I didn’t do it. I said, So what do you do now that you don’t drink or smoke? How do you get your kicks? To which he replied, I have my white noise. For three hours before I go to bed, I watch the most violent pornography I can find. I don’t masturbate. I don’t even feel anything. I just watch it, and I don’t think about anything. Hearing that, I thought: My God, man. Have a vodka. Which is all to say, there’s something numbing about it. It numbs relations. That’s what got me about those young women or old women that I slept with in America. I know I sound ridiculous when I say this, but I’ll say it anyway: I felt like I was not a person – I was a function. They weren’t relating to me as a person. They had their set of tricks that they want performed and then that’s it, and it just felt totally anonymous. I’ve never seen non-anonymous pornography. That’s my basic objection. Maybe there is some amazing feminist pornography somewhere.
lmao
The issue has to be: what lies beyond the current relationship our society has with it, and how does one get there? Can pornography be singular – can it escape cliché and script? One of the terrible things about pornography is that it’s so anonymous. It’s my cousin watching three hours of white noise – as he calls it – of people being tortured. What is that? But take it seriously, he literally doesn’t remember shit: pornography becomes not so much an experience of life as an a-experience, a chasm, a place in which life stops happening… I’m used to telling stories and they’re about human beings who have experiences, and they change, and the same is true of you and what you write. Yet so much of porn for me feels like it’s about – it’s not necessarily what it needs to focus on – nullity and boredom and forgetfulness and tiredness. How do you tell a story about that? How does one get at that? It’s not even the worst part of human beings. It is evil, but it’s not the evil of death or murder or something Dostoyevsky would write about. It’s the forgetfulness of someone who can’t even get a hard-on masturbating. How do you write about their boredom looking at the scene they used to masturbate to three weeks ago, their compulsive desire for new content, and their nagging realization that they have to go to the office tomorrow? That’s a strange scene to write.
The first time for me was maybe watching Boogie Nights? And like you with Rachel Ryan RR, the standout memory from that was seeing someone with an erection. Full-frontal images of women were incredibly common, and I’d seen people fucking in TV series, but seeing a man with an erection I thought: Oh wow, this is the real shit. I think I found it – again, like you – really arousing, but also a dangerous feeling and somehow unpleasant at the same time. I remember I had this tiny little TV with an integral VHS player, and for some reason I had the Boogie Nights video, and I remember watching it on that, and feeling this real sense of darkness and seediness. Being turned on by it and not really wanting to be turned on by it, the way that complemented the whole experience of watching that film.