DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF By Anonymous (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (9 page)

             
My first Summer was worse than my first Winter. At least, I had been forewarned about The Winter. I had to make my own decisions about Summer months. Also, Victorian houses don't usually have that coveted air-conditioning installed. It wasn't even invented until the 1960s or 1970s. How's that for an accurately researched fact?

             
It is my humble opinion that a lot of the civil rights protests and indeed, a good portion of this fine country's problems including the Civil War, and the assassination of more than one president, can be attributed to the absence of air-conditioning.

             
You innocently open your windows in the hope that a breath of a wisp of a breeze of a wind will exhale itself into the airlessness that has become your life. Instead you are prey to a procession of winged and world-weary insectoids trained in the art of psychological warfare.

             
During the Summer, these gaping mouths of Hades disguised as windows belched torture unheard of into my tepid home. I sought refuge in a bath full of cool water, but I needed to stay submerged for as long as lungs allowed. I could still be bitten on the face.

             
I learned.

             
Early evening was when I was at my most succulent to the winged carnivores. There are ten thousand lakes in Minnesota. That's a lot of humidity when it gets hot. Humidity means mosquitoes. There's a story going around. An elderly couple went camping. They’d been warned of the locust-like mosquito presence. They pitched their tent. They smeared themselves in what they believed to be mosquito repellent.

             
They were both found dead. A can of mosquito-attractant lay empty between the two corpses. The product was designed to be left outside the tent, thereby attracting the 'pesky critters' away from your sleeping body. According to the story, the husband woke up covered in bites and said to his equally be-cratered wife,

             
“Just imagine how bad it would be it we hadn't put on the cream, honey.”

             
No, I don't believe it either. But the Summer had its moments. Eleena was one of those girls with a caricature version of what a girl’s body should look like. She was also a member of St Lacroix AA and therefore more than qualified to attend the St Lacroix Annual Barbecue. She was tanning herself on a little collapsible sun bed when her mobile phone roused her.

             
Flicking it open, she squeezed out the following words in a voice at least three times higher than her IQ, “Hi Jimmy, I'm just lying here toasting my buns. Wanna come flip me over?”

             
She looked like Sophia Lauren juxtaposed on a Minnesotan lawn. It was difficult not to attribute the sizzle from the nearby grill to her. Later that day, I masturbated furiously over this image in the coolness of my own bath. Oh yes I did.

             
Summer, though, is not what we're here to talk about. Come September, things cooled down a little bit. It was the nicest time of the year. The leaves went all amber and the air got fresh and there was even the odd breeze. Oh happy day. Along with it came yet another BNV assignment. Not so happy day. At this stage, I was sick of working on the account. The very sight of one on the street (I've never owned a car) made me wince. Still does. But that doesn't matter, they'd spent all their money bringing me over to this fine country and they wanted me working on BNFUCKINV.

             
I had no offers on the house, so I had no leverage, so I bit my already scarred tongue and mumbled something about this being the last time I was ever going to work on this silly car account. They knew and I knew they were just nodding at me out of boredom. With a copywriter, I set to work on the project, and pretty soon we had something not half-bad.

             
Next, we needed a photographer. I took a notion, or the notion was gently introduced to me by clever account executives, that a still-life photographer called Brian Tomkinsin would be an interesting change. Still-life guys normally shot knives and forks and shoes and shit. Never or rarely, cars. This, of course, made BNV nervous, but not for long. I did a sell on them with my Irish/English accent, and soon I was on a plane to New York with a whole week of shooting ahead of me. This is my favourite part about working in advertising.

             
The shoots are superb. Even the print shoots. Normally, you get a cool hotel, you get everything expensed, you get a week away, maybe more, from Minnesota, you get a half-decent shot for your book (portfolio), you get some time off working on new concepts with which to feed the furnace. You get a breather.

             
All I knew about New York was what I'd gleaned five or six years before during St Patrick's week. Basically, I was out of my fucking mind the whole time I was there, and it struck me as a miserable dark and dangerous place.This, however, was not the New York that greeted me now.

             
'Twas October and Autumn was having its way in what I soon learned was Soho. Beautiful to the eye, comely to the touch, mesmerizing in abundance. To the starved eyes of one such as I, there seemed to be an excess of muchness. Colours, smells, textures, nationalities, you've heard all of this before. The studio was, still is, on Broadway right on the lip of Soho and the brow of the East Village and the cusp of Nolita. I can remember being afraid to look, lest I increase the inevitable sadness of having to leave.

             
I shopped. An unheard of luxury for me. Oh, they had shops in Minnesota, but in New York no one asked where you were from. They-just-didn't-give-a-fuck.

             
God, I loved that.

             
The shoot went well, and though I wasn't thrilled about the hotel they put me in, The Roosevelt on 31st and Madison (not very nice), I was enjoying the porn channels. Why not, it was on expenses. And my hotel was changed after the first three days. So anyway, the initial shots of the car were done in a different part of town housing a bigger "stoodio." I still couldn't tell you where that was, not too far way from Broadway, is all I can remember. So the next stage of comping needed to be done from Tomkinsin’s Broadway HQ.

             
Suited me. I turned up there the first day and was treated like a minor celebrity. Obviously, they were just licking my arse, but it was hard not to enjoy it. I’d end up criticizing how well they were doing it. Almost as if I were leaving my arse in the air and saying, “Excuse me, you missed a bit.” Terrible really. It was an unspoken thing. They knew you knew they knew, etc...recurring until infinity.

             
So after a particularly successful day of having my arse licked, a young girl approached me nervously and said,

             
“What part of Ireland are you from?” She'd heard me bragging I was Irish.

             
“Kilkenny,” I said, noticing how very pretty she was, if not a little young. I'd seen her around the place earlier, but naturally thought she was one of the many assistants photographers seem to need. She was.

             
“Oh that's gas.”

             
I've only ever heard Irish people use that expression.

             
“Are you Irish?”

             
“I am, yeah, from Dublin.”

             
Well, I can't tell you I thought much of it, but I've retraced these few moments

many times since. Looking for clues. Anything that might help me explain what the fuck was going on.

             
She went on to say that there was a whole gang of us over here and that if I wanted to, she could show me around. I really thought she was too young. Dangerously young, if you know what I mean. But after talking to her a little longer, I learned her mother was actually from Kilkenny and her uncle turned out to be the same guy I had a lot of money tied up with. He also happened to be someone my father used to speak very highly of. She was very pretty. Very innocent looking, and the fact that she was Irish and had connections in Kilkenny, and the fact that her uncle was my investment advisor seemed to mean something. I allowed it to mean that she was sent by my dead father as a gift to redress the balance for the suffering I'd endured in St Lacroix.

             
This was a grave error. I wasn't conscious of wanting to shag her. I still believed her to be too young, but I thought I'd ask her to dinner as a treat. She was, after all, virtually related, and what would her uncle think if he learned of our meeting and I hadn't even offered to take her to dinner? She gave me her number, and out of sheer lack of knowledge, I booked a booth at the same restaurant Tomkinsin had taken me to as his sociable statement a few nights before. Actually, I'd gone there with Telma too.

             
Who was Telma? Telma Way was a gorgeous girl who worked at the New York office and invited herself to dinner with me when she saw me hanging around there. I never really thought there was ever any chance of getting involved with her on any romantic level. She was a great character and very beautiful and very tough.

             
Aisling, that was the Irish girl's name.

Yeah, I liked it, too. Gaelic for dream. It's haunted me since. So Aisling left a message on my hotel answering machine saying,

             
“See you there.”

3.

             
She was about a half hour late, but she looked fucking lovely. Black V-neck sweater, black pants, black shoes. Very Prada. Long hazel hair billowing behind her as she came through the door. She looked familiar, like I'd known her before. Like some sister I used to have and lost.

             
So clean, young and adult at the same time. From the moment she walked through the door, my biggest challenge was to hide from her how strongly she affected me. She came towards me with, I think, the intention of leaning to my left for what I was to learn was the obligatory New York peck on the cheek. Never heard tell of such a thing in St Lacroix.

             
Those eyes.

             
This is going to sound awful, but I don't care. I'm way past embarrassment.

You can't hurt a man with a pinprick when he's already got a spear in his chest. I swear to you that she looked just like the pictures of the Virgin Mary in Irish Catholic homes.

I kid you not.

             
The Virgin Fuckin' Mary.

             
“You look great,” I said, motioning towards the hostess-stand.

             
“Thanks, so do you.”

That was her first lie. We strode into the arena. All brown leather and tea-stained tiles. This was Friday night. I was to fly back to you-know-where the next morning. It was quite busy so we didn't get the booth. But we got a nice enough table. She was not stupid. That much was very clear, very quickly.

             
This was no twenty-two, twenty-three or even twenty-four-year-old inexperienced bimbo. She talked older than she looked. I really was thrown by that. I was expecting to spend the evening deflecting compliments of such enormity that I would find myself hating her for her lack of subtlety. Instead, I ended up kicking myself for mine. And it was too late. I couldn't suddenly wake up and say, “Oh, I didn't realize you were intelligent. I thought you were a stupid fawning child unworthy of my best game.”

             
She must have seen everything she needed to see in the first fifteen minutes of my unbelievably self-centered diatribe. Slowly, almost considerately, she let me know how much I'd shown myself up. She’d already attended exhibitions I’d only begun to read about. Films I’d heard about were already memories to her. And I would never have realised that I’d mispronounced the names of foreign artists until she pronounced them.

             
Her superiority was graceful, though sympathetic even. Talk about being wrong-footed. Of course, I've since attributed every little nuance in that evening's conversation to her devilish manipulative skills, but the truth is that when someone outshines me, I hide my anger by putting them on a pedestal. This makes me seem generous so that when I want to put the knife in I’ll be trusted. Yes, sometimes I even scare myself.

             
Anyway, she went on to tell me that she was from Killiney in Dublin. I found out much later that this is an extremely well-off area. And that her brother worked in London and her sister was married in Spain and that she herself had been in New York over a year. She'd been assisting photographers on a freelance basis because it afforded her more time to devote to her own work between assignments. Forgive me, but I've always translated that to mean: “I can't get a full-time job.” All the while she was talking, I was falling totally and irrevocably in love. The long hands, the direct look, the head-flicks commanding the soft tumbling hair, the clear skin on her neck, the gentle slope of her small breasts.

             
Stop.

             
When she did appear impressed by something I'd said ( I was now realizing I'd need to dust off my china, so to speak) she’d seem to notice me, like you would a small boy “Oh really, gosh that's great.” or “They must think a lot of you.” and “I wish I had your problems.” By these remarks, I realized that I must have come off as if I was trying to impress her. I felt tricked into it. I wanted to start the whole evening all over again.

             
And I couldn't help thinking she was bored but acting. She had a Bacardi and Coke during dinner. A big one. I had the pork chops. I still have the bill. I do. I got it back on expenses, but I kept the bill. You see, that night changed my life. If it hadn’t been for that night, I wouldn't be sitting here in the East Village in New York City, writing this fucking thing. She said I’d like the East Village.
             
             
             
             
She was right.

             
But there you go. I fell totally in love with her. How could I not? My dead dad's gift to me and I was going to say no? No. We chatted easily about advertising and I generally tried to dazzle her as best I could. She was reserved, but mannerly, very mannerly. Old school. I'd never been allowed near that before. She even poured mineral water into my glass and twisted the bottle abruptly like you do with Champagne.

             
I got off on that.

             
She was very attentive. That was it. She knew how to handle a guy. She made you feel like it was okay to be a guy. To be yourself. This, it seems to me, is the most devastating weapon of all in a woman's arsenal. If you can encourage the man to be himself, to give you his character, his ways, then you know how to navigate him, and therefore, he will never be able to hide from you.

             
I already knew this.

             
I've managed to stay in the advertising business for ten years.This is one business that isn't known for its charity and even I, Mr. Jaundice himself, entered through her velvet drapes and signed the waiver. Mind you, I was ready, I hadn't touched a woman in five years, for fuck’s sake.

             
So, she did her well-behaved Irish aristocrat act and I did mine. Irish lost-boy-with-two-big-eyes-borrowed-from-a-cow. She glided across the floor and led me back onto Broadway and into Bleecker Street, which in my ignorance and to my everlasting shame, I asked her to show me because I heard it was quite cool.

             
She took me to a gay bar. I hadn't even been in a bar let alone gay bar for years. It took me about an hour to figure it out. There were a lot of, what appeared to be, very happy middle-aged men with dyed hair, singing around an upright piano.

             
Delighted they were. Not drunk, just happy. Cherubic. She went to the toilet and left me on my own for longer than what I would have thought necessary. For all I know, she might have popped across the street for a leisurely drink and come back just in time to find a burly man with the whitest teeth I'd ever seen leaning against me. I was relieved to see her and told her so. She liked that. Of course she did.

             
We moved on to another bar. Bit more cramped. On barstools clumped together, she told me through her hands, she seemed to have picked up the American habit of using her hands to shape the words coming out of her mouth, how she'd won a Green Card in the Irish lottery and she'd worked in New Orleans for about a year before coming to New York. She became quite animated when she talked about Mardi Gras and, more specifically, the dancing that accompanied it. She seemed far away when she talked about this experience. It was the only time she unclutched herself...yes, even when we were fucking or, should I say, when she was fucking me, I remember thinking how beautiful she looked, but that there was something else there, something unnerving, not quite hatred, maybe self-hatred. Yes.

More like self-hatred. Whatever it was, it was internal. She'd deal with it. I would never

get that chance.

             
That privilege.

             
So from there to a coffee bar, which I still can't find today. Must have been somewhere off Bleecker. There were mice under the seats. While I'd have been more than happy to leave it at that, she seemed so insistent that we stay out longer. She seemed to want to hang on for more. So I ended up saying I'd really enjoyed talking to her. More than I'd expected. She said she thought the same thing, with the hands again, this time reaching as if to say - Hold my hand - I reached forward and before I knew what was happening, we were kissing gently.

             
Nothing too graceful.

             
I was half-standing and leaning across a table with mice circling our feet.

But it was nice.

             
I felt all the cobwebs billow, then blow away in a warm flush of Summer air that seemed to close around me. Fuck knows what she felt, but I was in the bag right there. I would have been quite content to keep pecking her lips for another few hours. No problem.

             
Except she deftly raised the stakes with a little stiff flick of her tongue. It was amazing. Like the pilot light came on in the flue of my dick. You know that sound. Those of you with gas boilers.

             
Thuem or is it Pfftum.

Suddenly, I was looking at this sweet teenage innocent as if she were a cum-soaked whore. And I liked it. More importantly, so did she. I was supposed to be leaving the next day. But it was already the next day. I was probably not going to see her again until Christmas and that wasn't even for sure. We both intended going home to Ireland for the holidays.
             
             
             
There was nothing else for it.

             
“Want to come back to the hotel room?”

             
Epic stuff for me. Already, I'd packed about fifteen years of half-experienced adolescence into two hours, and now here was a semi-materialized thirty-five-year-old making the pitch of his life. She muttered something about it being a bit fast or something. And I retreated gratefully. Relieved. So we walked down the street, slowly, hand-in-hand looking-but-not-too-hard for a cab. In the end, she turned to me and said, “We can go back to the hotel room as long as we take it easy.” With that, we were walking quicker. She hailed a cab. We kissed a little bit in the back. How wonderful New York City looked to me through the shimmering strands of golden hair that fell over my face between kisses.

             
Allow me a moment here.

             
Thanks. Before long we arrived at 31st and Madison and the doorman of my hotel moved in slow-mo towards us. I have a great fear of these doorman creatures, because I knew one in St Lacroix and all he ever seemed to do was complain about how little he was tipped. I didn't tip them at all. For what? Standing there? So my young girlfriend and I slid past his smiling, in my mind, envious face and strolled to the elevator. I was very nervous in that mirrored humming container. Why were they always mirrored? There is nothing more frightening to me then the image of my own image from two or three different angles. So I stared at the floor.

             
Room 901 meant nine floors.

             
I prayed the key would work. I also prayed she was over eighteen. In this country, one does not want to be associated with, even jokingly, paedophilia. And this girl did look young. I satisfied myself that she was at least in her twenties, but I still couldn't get it out of my mind that the police were going to kick in the door at any second. At one point, she turned to me, we were on the bed at this stage, and blinked innocently at me.

             
“Tell me a story,” she said.

I must have gone white. She could have been fourteen. I told her a story about a woman who brought back a rat from India because she thought it was a dog. We kissed and caressed, and I ended up going down on her.

             
Now I don't want to get too graphic here, but I have to say it because it is true, and in my experience, rare. Her womanhood tasted better than her mouth. I could have stayed down there all night. 

             
No problem.

             
I only came up to see if she was as pretty as I'd suspected. She was. This went on until it began to get light. She said we should take it easy, so easy is what we took. I was adamant that we not go the whole way.

             
Memories of being with Pen, body memories began surfacing in me. I remember looking at Aisling while she slept and thinking, she’s back. I’ve got Penny back. I used to look at Penny when she was asleep. It was nice to just let my eyes wander unchecked around the smooth skin. A living breathing picture. Strange to be touching a naked body again after so long. I was so petrified that she wouldn’t find me attractive I didn’t even take all my clothes off. Secretly I was glad we were taking it easy since it meant I didn’t have to get into any performance issues. What if I came too quickly or couldn’t get it up?

             
I used an AA maxim, which helped.

             
When in doubt be of service.

So, I concentrated on giving her as much pleasure as I could. Pen had trained me to go down on her and now I was glad. Aisling’s sleeping face wore a gentle smile. She seemed happy enough.