Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs Read online

  And it was a Friday afternoon.

  They waited till Friday to make these sweeps because the judge didn’t come back to work until Monday morning. This meant that if you were arrested on Friday you were going to spend three nights in the Tombs and have your table and merchandise confiscated. It would take months to get them back, if ever.

  “Hahahahaha, oh now I get it,” he said at last. “Haha … that’s hilarious … I’m the one with the issues.”

  He showed me his badge like he was ashamed of it.

  “And you have your tax ID right?”

  “Yessir.” I lied and bent down as if to retrieve it from somewhere under the table.

  “No that’s okay. Good luck, buddy.”

  They were already walking away.

  But this was not such a good result for me. It was like being shown preferential treatment by the prison guards. None of the other vendors would have ever gotten away without producing state ID, tax ID, and a street-vending license appropriate to what they were peddling. In fact our long-suffering leather bags and belts vendor had earned his nickname from just such a situation. Arrest-Me-Dante would rather be choke-held and tasered than shown this sort of preferential treatment. I once watched him beg police officers to take him in. It had been a routine inspection probably initiated by a phone call from one the local stores. They were irked at having to compete with street vendors often selling the same or similar merchandise as themselves without having to pay the crippling monthly rent that is the cost of doing business in SoHo. As soon as the cops arrived at his table he greeted them with crossed wrists.

  “Arrest me … arrest me … go ahead … arrest me.”

  The cops smiled at each other sheepishly.

  “I come home after serving overseas and now I can’t even earn a living to feed my family?”

  The nearest he’d been to overseas was the Staten Island Ferry and I knew for a fact he didn’t have a family. But it was important to be seen to resist the man. Your status was proportional to your defiance. I could try to explain my good luck to each vendor within ten blocks but even at that they’d still see what they wanted to see. A white privileged little bitch. What I didn’t know was that they were happy having a white guy among them since it meant they were all less likely to be harassed. In the end they did cuff him and he spent the night in a holding cell. I know this because it was all on YouTube. He doubled his amount of followers and even more customers turned up at his table.

  Meanwhile I couldn’t even get arrested.

  * * *

  Drinnggggg

  I waited until Audrey had taken at least one sip from her tea before joining her on the couch. Since our phone conversations had already progressed beyond the need for small talk we melted into an embrace that was surprisingly affectionate. She felt comfortable and deeply erotic at the same time. Those cushioned lips pressed against mine.

  This was a new combination for me.

  I was benefiting from skills she’d developed in the arms of her husband where intimacy, affection, and sexual generosity merged. I felt guilty knowing as much as I did about her past and I imagined she was only able to hold me so affectionately precisely because she thought I knew nothing. I was reminded of Marian’s initially innocent affection for me before she found out what I was capable of. Meanwhile, cushioned kisses impacted my undeserving face.

  We were both liars now.

  We practically levitated off the couch and floated to the bedroom.

  It was obvious a large transaction had taken place in the vicinity of her groin. It was strange knowing she’d had a baby die inside the vagina I was now stroking through her soaking wet panties. And I couldn’t help but notice, while waiting for her to turn up, that the phrase “fatal car accident” described the fate of someone with the same name as her husband. The car had driven off a bridge. My fertile mind began to wonder if he had taken his own life. A stillbirth is a hard knock to recover from. Her oral talents suddenly evoked the determination of a dutiful wife’s attempts to reinflate a marriage. Most girls didn’t need to get that good at giving head because they were just providing one half of an equation, the other half being that the man would go down on them with equal fervor.

  But this felt different.

  This was a woman doing what she believed her man wanted before he asked for it. It felt important. If he had to ask for it then it was valueless. She should want to suck his cock and so this is what she wanted to want to do. But even as those Scarlett Johansson lips slipped up and down my shaft and her thick tongue, so tentative when we first kissed, now strafed the tip, I found myself unable to come. I took my cock from her and wanked it almost to the point of no return and then fed it back into a mouth so hungry it was already sucking and swallowing before it was even entered. When she did finally coax it all out of me I almost cried. My entire body weight seemed to shove itself through the eye of my cock as I leapt out of myself into a thick warm pond of darkness and didn’t wake until I heard the girl’s soothing voice whisper in my ear.

  “I came four times last night.”

  This was so much better than good morning.

  It removed any need to perform.

  Was this a Jewish thing? The matriarchal softness, the maternal bosom, the ease with which she was prepared to let the man take charge. Or at least seem to. The unconditional silences preceding your every utterance. The unwavering support, the preagreement.

  It was deeply seductive.

  Gale force winds shook the trees outside and branches bashed against the window. I wasn’t missing anything on Prince Street. Of all the weather conditions to contend with wind was the worst. Books flapped and signs collapsed. As I woke I felt her body shivering against me with lust. It may well have been what woke me. And at first I was flattered, thinking she was waiting politely for me to wake up so we could resume but when I asked her about it she said that this was how she was every morning. That sexual desire was a constant state for her.

  She brought an extra pair of panties to work every day because she soaked the first one through. She was always, as she put it, “in heat.” Over the years she’d learned to suppress the yearnings only because giving in to them would require more sex than was physically available. But didn’t this mean she couldn’t be satisfied? Having felt like a stud only moments before I now felt inadequate. The fact that she’d come four times meant nothing.

  Snowflakes to a furnace.

  She’d married in her early twenties and before that she’d only had a few partners. Early into the marriage there was unspeakable tragedy. Twelve years later I was the nearest she could get to fucking her dead husband. Maybe it was okay to unleash her limitless libido at me because I was somehow channeling him? Was it his cock she was sucking so ardently? Or was she so insatiable no amount of cock could ever satisfy the sexual famine inside her? I was happy I hadn’t had to hear about it all, but it was still weird she’d kept it from me. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had ample opportunity. For instance when I mentioned I’d never lived with anyone she reacted as if I had stumbled on a cute coincidence.

  “Really? Neither have I.”

  It ceased to matter because due to an unforeseen mishap I never saw her again. She was taking so long to arrive I began flirting with a twenty-year-old mother just to kill time. It was quite a luxury playing with this young thing imprisoned as she was in her apartment while I waited for my sexual virtuoso to arrive preceded by those nipples and lips. She texted to say she’d bought pillows because she had decided mine were somewhat questionable. I normally preferred a girl to be fucked and disposed of within a few hours but Audrey was timing her arrival so late that an invitation to stay the night was guaranteed. In fact this was probably the real reason she was taking so long. And now she was buying me pillows?

  Even so I couldn’t wait to get my cock back inside that mouth. I had felt unplugged all week. When she sucked and rolled her tongue at the same time she somehow managed to evoke abstract images in my mind
as if she had administered hallucinogens. She likened it to playing in a jazz band saying she “listened” for what worked. At one point with my cock already deep in her throat she began to hum on it so that resulting vibrations rippled up and down my very being, causing me to moan so deeply we performed a tuneless duet of sexual song. She loved my apartment and joked that she’d soon have me out of it and herself installed. This couldn’t have been less funny and I tried not to let the fear affect the cock momentarily out of her mouth. I had noticed that she liked to juxtapose deeply practical if not unpalatable utterances like this with the soul-soaring joy of a sucked cock. How devious. But if you can summon joy then you can also deny it. None of it mattered in the end because of a misfired text intended for the single mom in Flushing.

  So what do you paint? Landscapes? Portraits? Nudes hopefully?

  And that was that. No more cock-baths. I didn’t even get the new pillows.

  I hope you’ll be happy with your painter.

  It was probably just as well since there was nothing tangible there to begin with.

  Her husband’s ghost fucking Marian’s memory.

  * * *

  Hats-And-Socks-Tom told me he’d once rolled away from the kicking feet of an assailant not just to avoid injury but so the event could be captured by security cameras a few feet away. His agile mind was already thinking ahead to the court case even as the skull that contained it was being kicked.

  I never actually saw him handle any contraband but he was almost always high. He claimed he was on a combination of prescribed medications because of a back injury he’d sustained “over there” and that his doctors were perpetually adjusting the doses trying to get the balance right. Meanwhile he wasn’t complaining. He referred to himself without irony as an amateur anesthesiologist. So much so he was able to advise each new doctor assigned to his case which drugs and what dosages he responded best to. A table full of socks had to be a front for the drugs he must surely be selling. Occasionally he’d turn up with strangers. For $100 a day you could rent a veteran to sit with you and render your operation legal. He could ask for a percentage of sales if he thought you had a good product but this was rare. He usually took the $100 up front. But spending a day with someone suffering from PTSD exasperated by fluctuating doses of medication could be fraught with politics.

  Hats-And-Socks-Tom got very pissed at two ultra-cool-looking black dudes who hired him to lend legitimacy to their fashionable T-shirts. They were far too cocky for his liking. He turned to me to celebrate the fact that they hadn’t sold even one in over three hours and then to my absolute delight he jabbed his thumb upward and said, “And I’m not at all happy with the use of negative space in their logo.”

  One particularly slow Sunday when only three people walked past, loathed and laughed at him, Hats-And-Socks-Tom decided to share how he’d received the injury for which he now received a lifelong military pension. He’d been defending his position when his team came under attack. The opposition were well organized and relentless and though he fought hard to defend his position he just couldn’t hold them off. Before he knew what happened he went down.

  I was reverent.

  It seemed so generous of him to use the term “went down” as if he knew to spare me the horror of the event. Or maybe he had learned over the years to streamline the telling of the story so that it could be related without upsetting himself or the listener. I secretly idolized him. Here was a real veteran. This guy had actually been in combat.

  “I could show you the medal.” He squinted into the middle distance, presumably at the memories he saw there.

  “My back has never been the same.”

  I didn’t agree with the politics behind his being over there but it was hard not to respect someone who had seen action.

  “I hardly ever play now,” he added.

  He’d been injured in an soccer game and was sent home with the rest of the wounded.

  “So you know the author?”

  A tall dark-haired girl presented me with dog-eared copies of both my books.

  “You could say that,” I said, smiling way too widely.

  She studied my face.

  “No way,” she said at last.

  She handed me the books.

  “Okay, now you have to sign them … Catherine.”

  In the first one I wrote, “Hi Catherine, It’s so nice to meet you—The Oxygen Thief.” And in the second: “We should have coffee some time—The Oxygen Thief.” After reading each inscription and replacing the books in her bag she straightened herself and responded quite formally.

  “I would love that.”

  It turned out she was the personal assistant to Pulitzer Prize–winning author Terrence Holt. She said she wanted to show him my books. Then she said she was in AA. This gave me pause because I had never been with a girl from the rooms. Far from being noble it was a self-preserving tactic. I’d seen many of my peers fall on that sword. All I had to do was imagine myself with a vagina and it was easy to avoid. But this girl was not only gorgeous, she was a possible stepping stone to New York’s literary elite. Maybe she was a gift from my higher power. She could be my big break into mainstream literary success and as such, a road back to Marian. And if I got to fuck her all the better. She was telling me that her sister had recently married a Canadian and moved to Toronto where that weekend she was due to visit to “meet” her newly born niece … “You should show your books to Mr. Holt.”

  I looked at her, incredulous.

  Had I somehow audibly inserted those words into her mouth? Was she in fact still talking about Toronto and babies and I, out of boredom, had re-synched her mouth with words of my own choosing? Or had she recognized the same glaze in my eyes that had so often infuriated Marian and changed tack to see if I was listening. Listening? I was riveted. Of course I should show my books to Terrence Holt. But how the fuck was I going to do that?

  “Easy,” she said. “I’ll bring them to work with me.”

  When we met in Cafe Fiat the following Monday she was coming straight from work.

  Assisting Mr. Holt meant she regularly attended all manner of celebrity-infested gatherings. She dropped so many names with such nonchalance I had no choice but to pretend I was unimpressed. Harley James, Francis Swynn, Emerson Gray, Kevin Donaldson. We had what felt like an amazing chat. Mostly because every word she uttered now needed to be doted on in case there was another mention of my books. She was studying psychology and was able to ask all manner of searching questions relating to the AA program and recovery and whether this affected the voice in my books. She grew up in Switzerland in the nineties. Her father was an economist from Ohio attached to the American embassy. Her mother was a translator from Portland sent to Geneva to improve her French and German.

  “My parents didn’t really get along.”

  “It doesn’t show,” I gushed.

  She was the product of a beautiful liberal mother and a right-wing father. The most thrilling part of her biography, apart from the literary name-dropping, was the plight of her restless breasts as they fought heroically against the confines of her constricting blouse. A clause written into her father’s will insisted that she and her mother drink a glass of bourbon to see him off. She joked that it was just as well she wasn’t sober at the time or she would have been disinherited.

  Oh how I laughed.

  He became an international tax consultant. A booming business in Switzerland. They moved to the U.S. when she was fifteen. She was sent to a succession of boarding schools as her father moved from city to city. She didn’t have sex until she was twenty-five but until then she loved to dance. She charmed her way into clubs and bars where she reveled in being the eccentric-looking, long-haired girl who danced alone with her eyed closed. She never had to buy a drink. She was a regular at the Williamsburg AA meetings that I barred my sponsees from attending. Too many hot chicks and not enough sobriety. She said she liked older men because she had daddy issues. I nodded carefully. She’
d had a boyfriend until two months earlier who used to “stuff her turkey”—the term seemed so self-flagellatory it slashed the portrait she’d painted of herself.

  She quickly changed the subject.

  Was I familiar with a recent article titled “Has Modern Marketing Invaded Our Morals”? Apparently it listed countless ways we could now legally sell ourselves. For instance tattooing a company’s logo on your forehead would earn you $10,000. Fighting in Somalia (no experience required) paid a thousand a day.

  “It would be unfortunate,” I said, “if after having Target’s logo tattooed on your forehead you signed up to fight in Somalia.” Oh how she laughed.

  * * *

  Diary of an Oxygen Thief—The Walking Tour

  You’d take in some of the more notable locations featured in the book. Sit in the same seat where Anonymous squirmed as he was photographed by the dastardly Aisling. Exchange your printout for a pint of Coca-Cola just like his. Visit Cafe Drill, the Cat and Mouse bar, the Chess Cafe. Your charismatic tour guide, billed as possibly being Anonymous himself but probably not, but maybe, would intercept the Sex and the City Walking Tour and with the help of a few prebriefed provocateurs, an Instagrammable skirmish would break out. For those less willing to participate in the communal tour, a map app with an accompanying podcast featuring the voice of Anonymous would narrate your tour.