The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (9 page)

It was not
not
depressing, cleaning up these magazines and/or watching the gentlemen clutch them to their chests. To lighten the mood, I’d spend my days off going to the movie theater that was also in the strip mall. I saw pretty much everything that summer, most notably a film called
Female Perversions
. I knew nothing about
Female Perversions
prior to seeing it. I just went because the show time worked with my Crown Books schedule.

Female Perversions
starred Tilda Swinton as Eve Stephens, an ambitious lawyer by day who, by night, performed masterful oral sex on other women.

I am eternally grateful to this film, for it provided me with four years’ worth of masturbation material. I saw the movie
once
, and it got me through
four years
. Androgynous Tilda descending into her myriad Sapphic entanglements beat out (as it were) all the other visuals I’d previously employed: John Stamos. A greased-up Ken doll. My pediatrician reimagined with the body of a greased-up Ken doll.

I am additionally grateful to
Female Perversions
because in more recent years, it has offered a compelling conversational entrée into certain social situations. Let’s say that I am at a cocktail party—this doesn’t happen much, but let’s just
say
—and I have run out of things to talk about. I will then turn to the woman who is closest to me, and I will ask a question on the subject of teen heartthrobs.

Mind you, I’m never that interested in her answer. It’s just that I want the question asked of me.

“So,” I will ask, “who was your favorite teen heartthrob?”

And she will answer Luke Perry, Kirk Cameron, or some other similar type.

And then
I’ll
answer, “Oh, really? That’s nice. For me, though, it was always Tilda Swinton. What? Yes. Her. I know,
right
? It’s like, ‘Why am I so weird?’!”

TEN MONTHS LATER
, what had been my Crown Books summer job was now my Crown Books weekend job. I worked all Saturdays and Sundays, and this included the Saturday of my senior prom. I had not been asked, and was therefore available to work from noon to nine p.m.

The situation had put me in a bad mood. To snap myself out of it, I decided to treat myself to a new CD. I would use my 10 percent company discount. I would peruse the Crown Books CD section. I would pick myself out something nice.

So there I was perusing. I’d been leaning toward “Tails” by Lisa Loeb when, for the first time in my life, I saw a k.d. lang CD. Its title was
Drag
, and k.d. lang appeared on its cover in a pinstripe suit jacket, silk cravat, and pinky ring.

Is that a
man
 … a
wo
-man? I thought.

Indeed she was, and I found her incredibly attractive.

I was wildly excited to be, well, wildly excited.

After all this time, Tilda Swinton had some company. Finally, she did.

K.D. LANG AND
Tilda Swinton served the same overall purpose, but my mind approached them both in different ways. I would masturbate to Tilda Swinton, but only in the context of
Female Perversions
. I would recall my favorite scenes, and those alone would do the job.

With k.d. lang, however, I would picture her and me together. No longer the voyeur, I was now a leading lady.

My k.d. lang fantasies would always take place in a sophisticated bar. The conversation would always start with k.d. lang asking me if I was thirsty.

“As a matter of fact, I am,” I’d say.

Then our environment would shift to an altogether different room that, for one reason or another, was decorated in an African safari theme. Once there, k.d. lang and I would begin aggressively humping as a precursor to compassionate, unintimidating oral sex.

Now, a lady simply does
not
masturbate to Tilda Swinton and k.d. lang without starting to wonder if perhaps there isn’t a bit of the lesbian about her after all. The fact of it felt significant. However, it also felt significant that I wasn’t attracted to any women I actually knew. Or met. Not ever. I had a particular taste for a particular type of dapper-butch lady and these types were not out wandering the streets of my Midwestern suburb. The lesbians I knew were Alison and Emily, who, while admirable in the aforementioned ways, were not to my physical taste. So too were there gentlewomen at my high school who I thought might be of a similar persuasion. But they were too … “granola” (I think is the word) for my liking. Where real life was concerned, I remained attracted exclusively to men. I’d outgrown my interest in the phallic vegetable, but a well-articulated male crotch was still the thing to turn my head.

The situation was perplexing.

The Soldier

In September of my eighteenth year, I moved to New York City for my freshman year of college. I brought with me a desire to dominate the Broadway stage, as well as a more latent interest in some real-life lesbian encounters. I
hoped the city’s bustling streets and homosexual-friendly acting classes would present me with a bevy of dapper-butch options. A Tilda or k.d. doppelgänger. Someone equally manly. But not, you know, a man. I hoped to meet a woman of this description and to make of her a ladylove. For to begin my lesbian exploits while I was in
college
? While I was in
New York
?

I could think of nothing more unique.

The one hint of potential came from Leah, a young lady in my Level 1 Emotional Arcs class. She looked like a tiny Tony Danza, and the first time I saw her I thought, How ’bout you and I head to Meow Mix for a round of Shirley Temples? How ’bout we go figure out what’s what?

The sad thing, though, was that in reality, I could not follow through.

At the root of my k.d. lang fantasies was this idea that
she’d
come on to
me
. Ideally, in a sophisticated bar. I had no real interest or ability in initiating flirtation myself, be it in an acting class or dormitory cafeteria. So it was that Leah and I fell into the standard friendship of all college freshmen in New York: we discussed how the city had changed us.

“The other day, I walked down
Fifth Avenue
, Leah. At
night
,” I might say. “That sort of thing changes a person.”

Leah and I would sit together and talk at lunch, and then at night, or rather, once every few nights, I would masturbate to the idea of her in a pinstripe suit, seducing me.

Where once were two, there were now three: Tilda. k.d. Leah.

I SPENT THOSE
first few months of college wondering if somehow, some way, something might actually happen between Leah and me. She was not a likely possibility, but she was at least a
more
likely possibility than either Tilda
or k.d. I wanted to measure an actual lesbian experience against my various heterosexual carryings-on. For I did carry on, as it were, heterosexually. There weren’t a lot of opportunities, but there were some. I met a guy to whom I eventually lost my virginity. However, he had a penis so big, I feared I would die, and this, in turn, prompted me to limit all future hetero experiences to bases one through three. Not forever, of course. But for a while.

On the subject of these experiences, I’d like to say that each one felt correct. That’s talking in terms of biology. However, they also felt mostly underwhelming, and this, too, fueled my lesbian curiosity. I’d held out hope that Leah might be the woman to help me work through these various issues, but then one afternoon she and I ran into each other on the street and hugged hello, and I felt the wider-than-a-mile straps of her brassiere beneath her shirt. And I thought, NOPE. I CANNOT DO THIS. I CAN’T BE TAKING OFF ANOTHER WOMAN’S BRA.

It was all so confusing! If a woman masturbates to Tilda Swinton and company, isn’t she surely a lesbian? And yet, if she’s repelled by reminders of the breasts with which she’d engage, isn’t she most surely
not
?

I decided to ask someone about it. I had a new friend, Glen, who, like Leah, I’d met in my Level 1 Emotional Arcs class. He too was homosexual, and thinking he might offer me some insight, I took him out for pizza.

“I think I might be gay,” I said.

Glen looked up.

“You’re not,” he said. “You’re in New York; you
wish
you were gay. But you’re straight. Like,
straight
. I mean, if I saw a vagina, and then I saw a penis go
into
that vagina, that is your level of straightness.”

“But I masturbate to Tilda Swinton,” I said.

“I masturbated once to Diane Lane. And what am I?
Not
gay?” Glen raised his hands to draw attention to this pair of vintage day gloves he had on. “No. I
am
gay. I’m a gay man who, for one reason or another, decided to try something new.”

“But I mean, like, a lot,” I said.

Glen thought for a moment. “So it’s not that you
have
masturbated to Tilda Swinton, it’s that you
masturbate
. Presently.”

“Yes.”

“Exclusively to Tilda Swinton?”

“Three times out of ten.”

“And what about the other seven?”

“It alternates between Leah from Level 1 Emotional Arcs, k.d. lang, and Tilda.”

“And no men? Not ever?”

“Not really. Maybe like once every few months John Stamos pops in. Or an anonymous set of broad shoulders.”

“But have you ever munched box?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Kissed another woman?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“And so, do you, like, want to?” he asked. “Do you genuinely want to?”

I thought for a moment. I said, “I guess it’s more that I, like,
want
to want to.”

Glen nodded.

“Right,” he said. “You’re straight. As for the masturbation business, I think it’s just that you’re, like, connecting with female arousal. So it’s sort of like, you don’t
want
the box so much as you’re identifying
with
the box.”

“That sounds … right,” I said.

“Because it is,” he said.

My conversation with Glen left me feeling disappointed. I would’ve liked to have had my lesbian streak confirmed
as lesbian-
ism
. Or, better yet, to have been deemed that rarest, most magical of unicorns: the True and Genuine Bisexual. Alas. Now I had the sense that I was neither.

TIME PASSED, AND
I accepted the reality. I had infrequent, exclusively hetero engagements. I made a point of having full-on intercourse again. This second time and second partner made the experience, as a whole, seem less traumatic. It led to more times with more partners, each one of whom fell along a spectrum: from
good-to-the-point-of-obsession-worthy
to
just-do-it-so-they’ll-go-away
grotesque. Despite where along the spectrum each occasion fell, they did all feel … right. And that, again, is talking in terms of biology. It was not my dream scenario, but there wasn’t much that I could do about it. I rarely met a woman in person to whom I was genuinely attracted, and on the biennial occasions when it actually happened, the lady in question wouldn’t pay me any mind.

Such was my real-life situation. As for my fantasy-life situation, Tilda, k.d., and Leah had, by this stage, all started feeling out of date. Ineffective. Stale. I let them drift further and further away until they reached the hinterlands, the Island of the Misfit Masturbation Fantasies, that sad but special place where out-of-use erotic dreams go to pass their final days. I replaced the old standbys with visuals and/or other fantasies that felt more current: Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. Some random stuff I’d seen on HBO’s
Real Sex
. The
Real Sex
stuff did involve women sometimes, but by now I knew better than to attach much significance to that. I had grieved the loss of my potential lesbianism, lowered my standards, and hoped for something new. Something less:
one
evening’s worth of experimentation at
any
point before I died. The prospect of lesbian experimentation was not as exciting to me as true,
authentic lesbianism, for I was older now and out of college. I had absorbed the information that experimentation would never prove as attention-getting as lesbianism itself.

A painful truth, yes, but not insurmountable. One just adjusts her expectations: If you cannot have the whole hog, well, then you take what you can get of her vagina. If only just once. If only for the night.

The Justice

By the fall of my twenty-fourth year, I had graduated college and was in the midst of a three-month stint as a glorifled busboy at an upscale restaurant. I wore a bow tie while employed, and shouldered the primary responsibility of serving rolls to customers. This sounds easy enough, but in the spirit of upscale service, I was expected to serve these rolls with fork and spoon, and the challenge this posed to my physical dexterity was on par with serving a tray of tennis balls with a pair of chopsticks. In any given shift, I’d catapult two to three into the heads of paying customers.

I was always being glared at by my coworkers, who seemed to think I’d been set down on this Earth for the sole purpose of cramping their fine-dining style.

There was, however, one exception to this rule. The exception’s name was Janet.

Janet was the pastry sous-chef. She ate cakes and tarts all day, and yet was tiny like a Kewpie doll: big features on a big head, atop a shapely but minuscule body.

Janet and I were different insofar as Janet enjoyed a decent level of at-work popularity. She was not only tiny like a Kewpie doll, but also sexy like a kewpie doll; if you were into that doe-eyed, small-waisted sort of thing, then yes, you would have thought Janet was sexy. In addition to
her winning physical appearance, Janet gave away scraps from her pastry department—misshapen cookies and so on—whenever her fellow staff was hungry.

These factors made Janet a popular lady. She had no real reason to be sympathetic toward me. Nonetheless, the first time she saw me mishandling the dinner rolls, she said, “You need tongs for that, right? It looks really hard!”