Chapter One
Revenge!
I just now decided I’m writing this book for revenge.
Revenge works for me.  Technically?  Writing this book is an assignment from my therapist, Jessica.  Dr.  Jessica.  But I’ve been putting it off for the last couple weeks and going downstairs to this bar near my place called the Mermaid Inn.  It’s Summer so it’s easy to just go out to the sidewalk and hang for a smoke between beers.
This book, writing this book, this assignment hanging over my head was like every other homework assignment I’ve ever been given, all the way back to the original Evil Twat in my life, Mrs. Carol Marquette.
She was a Sunday School teacher.
The Evil Twat used to dig her chin into my shoulder when I owed her something and didn’t deliver.  Usually this was shit I had to memorize, like the names of the twelve apostles or the books of the New Testament.
That’s what popped into my head tonight when I was in front of the Mermaid, smoking, and looking across the street at this fenced-in playground, ten-thirty or so at night, before the revenge thing clicked.
Then it was like I woke up and said, “Fuck this.” — This doesn’t have to be about my therapy, this can be about what I want it to be and I want it to be about revenge.
Jessica said:  “You don’t have to polish this or worry about publishing it, Paul.  This book is for you.”
But that was exactly wrong.  What I want is revenge and to get revenge I pretty much have to get my story out there where it can break some glass.
And who do I want revenge on?  Pretty much everybody at this point except of course the two boys – my two sons – Harry and Sam.  We’re a team.
Maybe not everybody else.  But definitely on my wife, who stuck me with the kids so she could go spend a month in Southern California sucking the cock of the other person I definitely want to get revenge on:  Tony Parp, the human turd.
It’s justice, not just revenge.  I just thought of that.  And you know why?  Because all I’m going to do is tell the truth.  If the truth about the cocksucker and the cocksuckee were pretty, well, then they’d be proud.  But it ain’t pretty.  Get ready for it.
Justice.  Fuck yeah.
Between that last sentence and this one I ran downstairs to have another cigarette.  I’ve never lived much in my head so now I know what it’s like to be all writery and have some idea making you get up and pace around and run downstairs and smoke and get a drink and then run back up and pace.
When I was down there I saw they were getting ready for one of those street fairs on Eighty-Eighth Street near Amsterdam, where I live.  You can tell beause of the rolls of signage and the smell of cheap street meat, which is definitely not part of the normal Upper-West-Side-Near-Amsterdam ambience.
Anyway, when I was down there I thought up another reason why I like the revenge angle.
Namely, now I know where to begin the story.
Chapter Two
The Beginning
The story begins almost five months ago, in March.  That’s when I met up with future wife-baller Tony Parp to talk about this project he was working on.
I’ve known Parp for decades.  We went to college together.  We were supposed to be buddies.
We met up at  a Starbucks, the one on Ninety-Third and Broadway.  I had a medium something.  It was the day after St. Patrick’s Day and they still had some of the green coffee left.
We talked some shit for awhile and then he said:  “We’re about to shoot this music video around a jazz tune called Little Round Jewish Hat. – Sinatra would have done this song if he’d lived and had the stones.”
“Huh – haaaaaaa ...” I gave him my obligatory ho-ho-ain’t-that-funny laugh.  You know, because it wasn’t funny, just tasteless.
“No, seriously,” he said.
“Uh-huh.  The name of the song is Little Brown Jewish Hat.”
“Round, not brown.  Little Round Jewish Hat.  – Why is that so strange?”
“Well for one thing,” I said, “it seems to lack taste.  I mean for Sinatra or for that generation.  Sinatra’s generation.”
He gave me this grin that looked extra stupid because he was wearing round purple shades.  Ozzie Osbourne shades, although personally I think they made him look like the chick on the poster for Almost Famous.  You know, the head groupie.
“You know what I mean?”  I went on.  “It sounds a little off.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Like ... it doesn’t seem like it has enough mass appeal.  I mean, a jazz tune about a yarmulke.  It’s like you’re making fun of it, too, by calling it a little round Jewish hat.”
He sipped his coffee and looked around.  There was a barista there with a nice rack who called him “Mr. Tony” and stroked his hand when she gave him change.  They were staring at each other while I was trying to be analytical.
I waited for him to pay attention to me again.
“Sounds a litte off,” I said.
Parp laughed.  “I know,” he said.
“Sounds vaguely anti-Semitic,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah ... Seems hard to believe that ... you know, Sinatra ...”
“Well,” Parp laughed, “it’s not like he actually recorded it.”
Okay, look.  I know by now you’ve probably all seen Little Round Jewish Hat on the Internet.  It’s “viral.”  They even complained about it on Fox one night and MSNBC too, I think.  Those strippers wearing the yarmulkes?  I guess the kids think it’s funny but ... you know.  – Taste, anyone?
But back then when he was telling me about it all I knew was the title.  And he said “Sinatra.”  I didn’t know it was supposed to be funny.  — I’m pretty sure he was leading me on just so I’d feel like an asshole later.
“Does it have a tune?”
“It's a song,” he said. “Songs have tunes.”
Even though I couldn’t see his eyes too well I figured out he was looking over my shoulder at this guy with a white curly wire leading from his ear to a square thing in his chest pocket and having a conversation way too loud.  Like it was his office and his secretary was right outside and he was trying to impress her with his alpha bossness.
“Haaaaaa ... haaaaaaa ... haaaaaaa” it was a laugh that brayed.  A donkey laugh.
“Jules,” the fatboy was saying, “you tell Erica I want her tushy down at that audition at ten-fifteen sharp.”
Parp laughed.  “Will you listen to the fat fuck?  I wonder who the show is for.”
“You never know,” I said.  “Something young and fit with no bush and a tat walks in, thinks he’s an agent, good for ... two blowjobs before she finds out he does the PHP for the MTA  website.  – You see how he’s watching the door?”
“Porky fuck,” Parp said.  “Spend some time in the gym, chimptwat.”
Parp hated porky fucks.  Which was a little awkward, because I was kind of on the paunchy side myself.  At the wrong angle.  In bright light.
This is Parp:  long hair, dyed an unnatural black.  Tanned face.  Leathery.  Amateur body builder.  Thin waist.  Always wears compression-fit t-shirts, even in the Winter.  Jeans, sneakers, the aforementioned round shades.  He has a collection of these same-style shades in an assortment of colors.
A complete asshole.  Calculating.  Evil.
As will be demonstrated in this tale of vengeance.  And justice.
“I'll send the song to your email address,” he said. Oh yeah. Little Round Jewish Hat.  “Bobby’s shooting it.”
Bobby Whispers owns a tobacco store on Sixth Avenue, but he had been a comedy writer for a long time and now he directed and produced indy flicks.  He’s also married to Mondi McDade.
No shit.  Married to a fucking rock star for fifteen years.  Sometimes I think it’s worth it to hang around him just to see if she’ll show up and make eye contact with me.
But if you’ve been alive and on the Internet in the last three months you already know all about that.  Whispers has some issues too, that I won’t go into.  Much.  I’m not out for revenge on him, necessarily.  It isn’t like he’s blowing his load down my wife’s throat every night.
For a second it was quiet, except for the “agent” on his cell, then Parp asked:  “So you want to be in it?  The video?”
“Fuck yes,” I said. “Babes on the set?”
“A bevy,” he said.
“So who would I play?”
“Okay, the video is about a guy who loses his yarmulke on a windy day. A girl finds it and she gives it to him and wow, he looks like a model, you know?”
“I’m not playing that guy, am I?” I said.
“Fuck no,” he said, the asshole.  “We have Lenny Paine lined up for that.  You know Lenny Paine?  Sings down at Vider’s?”
“I don’t get down to Vider’s much.  So who do I play?”
“I see  you as a passerby who does one of those great doubletakes you do.  Maybe two.  One closeup.”
“Um ... compensation?”
“It’s a SAG micro-budget deal.  You get a hundred bucks for the day plus carfare to and from.  And lunch.”
“Deal,” I said.
Chapter Three
Shit Happens
My wife's name is Corrinne.  She was named after an African-American lady her mother says she “took in.”
In reality, the original Corrinne – Corrinne Senior – was renting the room over Corrinne Junior’s parents’ garage.  So when my mother-in-law says she took her in she’s just being a big fat lying racist if you ask me.
And if that isn't bad enough, my mother-in-law also smells like socks.  Just ask my kids when she visits.
Plus, she is the obese person’s idea of a lardass.   A monstrosity of steaming guts, with little breakfast sausages for arms and legs.  She’s one of those people you see walking down the subway stairs at rush hour taking each step on a ten-count, oblivious to the fact that she is being assassinated in the imaginations of everyone blocked by her gigantic ass from reaching the train.
Anyway, Corrinne Senior – the black lady – and Racquel – my mother-in-law – became really tight friends.  They did everything together.  If Racquel had looked slightly more human they may have even licked each other up and down every day.
So what I’m saying is: they were tight.
Then they had a falling out.  Nowadays, whenever Racquel visits, smelling like socks and pissing off commuters, she relives the break-up in the same whining detail, ending with:  “And I named you after her.  My only daughter.  And she knew it.  And she went right ahead and blew your father anyway.”
Right, she's divorced, and Corrinne's dad is I guess still pounding the exquisite cunt of Corrinne Senior, who I met a couple times and who has a really thin waist and wide hips that have never borne children.
I think about her sometimes.  Like most black chicks, she has a mouth made for pipe.
So like I said, Corrinne Senior has a tight little waist and thin little hands and a really cute face.  And a big ass and rack.  I first met her at our wedding, where her infamous husband, my wife's dad, was sitting in the corner with his feet up on a divan, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth, and riffing with his pals on the factoid that “guano” means bat shit.
Fuck, and she probably calls the retard “daddy” while he puts his tongue up her asshole.
(That  happened to me.  Yeah.  The whole daddy/tongue/asshole thing.  But more on that in about a jillion chapters.)
Shit happens like that.  One day you’re married to a greasy meatball and you have no hope.  A great day is when you don’t cut yourself shaving and you get a big smile from a chick attractive enough for you to think about later when you beat off.
Then one day, a day like any other, you find out the greasy meatball’s hot friend thinks your cock is a Happy Meal.
And you realize that the world has colors, beaches, and sunshine, and you don’t need the fat lady after all.
It kind of happened to me once.  Or almost.  I lived on this block where this woman passed me everyday on the street like she had no idea who I was. Sometimes she even looked away and grimaced, like I was some toad-thing.
Then one day, one fourth of July, I was walking down this same street and she came out to meet me.  She ran.  She actually ran to catch me.  And she was all smiles and wavering.  Drunked up, as my uncle used to say.
She just stood there for a second then she said: “I wanna fucken fuck you.”  And I just know for sure I would have fucked her too only she slurred her words so badly that I had to ask her to repeat herself twice before I knew what she was saying.
And by then she was annoyed.
Chapter Four
Feel the Hate
When I told Parp about the lady who chased me and said she wanted to fucken fuck me and how she got annoyed when I said, “Beg your pardon, what?” a couple times, he said, “Ya know Paul I've never known why any woman would want to fuck you.   I mean, look at you.   Your abs suck, you have toothpick arms, you’re pale, you have a stupid laugh and a square haircut.   It’s an offense against reason that you should arouse desire in a woman.   That somebody thinks she has to get drunk to tell you she wants you to fuck her ...  well, it shakes the foundations of reality as I know it.”
I’m pretty sure Parp saying things like that is one of the reasons why I'm in therapy still.
“And that tells you what?” Jessica asked not long ago.
“It tells me I'm not sure what I'm doing hanging around Parp?” I asked.   It sounded better than “I dunno.”
“You’re asking me?” she asked.
Not exactly what you would call witty ripostes, but I like to call it therapy.
This is Dr.  Jessica: tall and a little androgynous.   Long brown hair.   Like she should be hiking someplace.   Looks that sneak up on you, like no makeup and plain clothes that make her body look like a flat plank.   But after awhile of watching her move and smile and you’re noticing stuff, like her great legs.   And rack.   And pretty soon you’re thinking about how her ass is the perfect pear shape for a tall, thin tomboy and how if you bent her over her desk that pear-shaped ass would make such a plateau that just the sight of it would pull the cock out of your pants.
Sometimes I like to imagine her blowing me on top of a bedroll during a hike through a national park.   She takes my dick out of her mouth just long enough to say, “You have no idea how long I've wanted to do this.”
She always says those exact words.
“So you've known Tony Parp for how long?” she asked in the real world.   “It's something like twenty-five years, right?”
She inherited me from the therapist who inherited me from the therapist who inherited me from my college therapist, so she had a butt-load of notes on Parp.
“I guess I keep thinking he'll change,” I said.
(I really wanted to smoke.   That isn't legal indoors in New York.   I liked it when it was legal because I didn't get as nervous.)
When she heard me say I thought Parp would change she hung her head like her neck had been broken.   Her hair fell across the desk the way it falls across my chest when she's sucking me off in the bedroll fantasy.
Jessica’s been my therapist for a few years.   We’re friends, which adds a nice dimension to the bedroll fantasy, because in that fantasy we're both cackling about how stupid my wife and her husband are.
She calls her husband “the hubster” in real life.   In the bedroll fantasy she calls him “no-cock Bob.”
“I'd like to know how you expect Tony to ever get any better,” she said.   “Don't answer that.   Just ...  just let me remind you that you can't get a smoothie from Starbucks.”
I thought she could do better than that, metaphor-wise.   I mean, it’s only a matter of time before Starbucks starts selling smoothies.
Am I right?
“Parp is Starbucks ...”
“And the smoothie is something besides what he always says, which depresses you,” she said.
But it isn’t just what Parp says that depresses me.   In fact, the noise that inevitably and invariably comes out of his mouth contributes only a small fraction to the shit-swamp that is the experience of knowing Parp.
The rest is the simple fact of his existence.   For some reason, through no effort of his own, just through numb, blind, retarded luck, none of the karmic rules apply to him.   If you don’t play by the rules you’re supposed to end up sucking metaphoric balls.   You’re supposed to pay a price.   A fine.   Jail time.   Social ostracism.   No sex.   Disease.   Nervous breakdowns.  Something.
Except if you’re Parp.   Then you can burn down churches and children will hand you flowers.   Add to that the fact that he’s convinced his dumb luck is something the universe owes him and I think you can start to feel the hate.
“You know why I hang around Parp still?” I asked Jessica when I had time to think about it.   “I want to be there to see the look on his face when his luck runs out.”
Yeah.   But in the meantime the rest of us have to watch while some quantum mechanical glitch lets him live like something between a sloth and a shark without ever paying a price.
For example, jobs.   If you’re constantly blowing off jobs you’re supposed to end up in the poorhouse, or in a little room over a grocery store in Brooklyn, or in a residence hotel in Harlem collecting welfare checks.
But Parp blows off his day jobs — his income jobs — right and left and what he gets in return are offers for higher-paying day jobs.
No shit.   Parp and I had this friend, Teddy Peltham, who decided to help out his old pal Parpy by giving him a job.   I was sitting with the two of them outside on a Summer day two years ago.   It was the sidewalk in front of some restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen that sets tables out whenever the temperature gets above sixty.
It turns out Teddy’s pretty ...  mmm ...  annoyed with Parp, so the conversation for about five minutes after we sit down is pretty terse.   “Hey.”   “Hello.”   “Cool.”   — One-word shit.   Then Teddy tells Parp to do something the next day at the job and Parp refuses because it’s beneath his dignity or something.
So Teddy really bears down on him and says: “Dude, it’s your job on the line.   You understand?   It’s your job.”
And Parp says: “Then I guess I can either find a new job or bend over and take it in my ass.   Now which one would you choose if you were me?”
I thought Teddy was going to burst into tears.   Then he got really mad and said: “You fucking loose cannon!   You are fucking dead meat now!   Do you understand!?   You have no job!   You are fired!”
Yeah, Teddy’s not what you would call the strong, silent type.   Picture a short, flabby guy with glasses and a haircut like the one you see on the Universal Mexican Immigrant in the movies.
But it gave me hope for mankind, seeing Parp get reamed like that.   I was sort of expecting the ground to open beneath his feet and swallow him up.
But it didn’t.   Parp looked pretty sober for a sec, like somebody’d slapped his face.
“Hey Teddy ...” he said, kind of quiet.
“What?!”
“Anybody ever tell you you scream like a bitch?”
Teddy shook his head and pushed his glasses up on his nose.   “You are such a fucking asshole, Parp,” he said.
Parp laughed.   Then Teddy laughed.
They were laughing!
“But of course you are still fired,” Teddy said.
So Parp took a month off, slept until two every afternoon, and dicked around in Hell’s Kitchen lifting weights and bitching about the “state” with his libertarian pals.
Then when the month was over he got a call offering him a better paying job than the one he had with Teddy and Teddy gave him a reference.
And Parp doesn’t think it’s strange!   It’s what he thinks he has coming to him!
Can ya feel the hate?
Can ya?
Okay, that was the jobs example.   Here’s the sex example.
We — me and Corrinne Junior and Parp and a friend of Junior’s named Christine who Parp wanted to fuck — showed up one night at Cleopatra's Needle on Broadway.
The Needle is a jazz club with a horseshoe bar in the center and a gigantic TV screen hanging above it.   The sound is turned down on the TV so you can watch hockey while listening to live jazz.
The Needle is always dark.   It isn't big.   It doesn’t have a lot of tables and the ones it has are all small, so when four people like me and Junior and Parp and Christine come in they have to slam two tables together.
So right at the beginning, we haven't ordered yet, Christine — who was this hot blonde forty year-old who spent all day on a treadmill — says to Parp, “Hold on, hold on.   Let's slow it down.   I ...  you know ...  I have a boyfriend.”
And she gives him this big grin, like a hard plastic dome just dropped out of the ceiling to cover her and now she can’t be touched.
Anyone else would have slowed down and gotten chatty, you know?   I mean, chicks have boyfriends.   They might be interested in an eventual fuck-on-the-side, but if one says, “Slow down, I need to size you up first” then you slow down.   I mean, assuming you want to get it in her.
But not Parp.   First he just stares at her.   Then she looks down at her salad and starts back into the conversation they were having about politics.
Now, I’m watching this and I know that nothing good is about to happen.   I know this because I see this look on Parp’s face that I recognize from decades of Parp nuttiness.   It’s a look where you can see he isn't really listening to the conversation any more but to a stream of ideas making noise in his head.   Like the look a cat gets when it’s just confirmed that yes, there is something moving in that corner.
“Wait a minute,” Parp said after she got into why she's Green.   “You just got done telling me that my skin isn't worth touching and you expect me to care what you think about the fucking wind farms on Cape Cod?”
She stopped talking and leaned toward him like she hadn't heard him.   He kept going.
“I don't care what you think about Obama or how your day went.   If you were fucking me maybe I would care, but what, I 'm going to listen to you talk, then I'm going to talk, then you're going to say, 'Oh look, eleven o'clock, gotta get home and blow my boyfriend before he dozes off'?”
For some reason Junior thought this was really funny, even though Christine was supposed to be her pal from someplace.   “Tony?!” she said with this great big smile on her face.
Ball-tasting twat.
At that point Parp, who never smiled during the whole thing, just stood up and put the napkin in his chair.   “I'll settle up with you later, Paul,” he said to me, the dramatic turd.
And then he turned around and walked for the door and everybody, I mean everybody sitting under the hockey and waiting for the jazz musicians to come off their break, watched him go.
“Wait, wait ...” Christine said as he went.   Everybody watched him go all the way out, like it was a play and the curtain didn't fall until he was all the way out of sight.
When he was gone Christine turned around.   Her face was burn red.   “What a fucking asshole!” she said.
Then she got into an argument with Junior, who seemed to think that Parp had just busted her and she should take the busting like a grownup.   They ended up laughing about it and the three of us agreed that Parp needed to get a lot less caffeine.
Then a few days later Christine called up Junior and said she was busy dislocating her jaw on Parp's cock.
“That’s what’s really pathetic about this,” I said to Jessica the therapist when I told her the story.   “Parp thinks she owes it to him to bend over and take his cock.   Like it’s the least she can do.   — And she does it!”
I sat down and twisted my fingers around.   It’s what I do when I don’t have a cigarette to shake out of the pack.
“You know who I feel sorry for, Jess?”
“Who?”
“The boyfriend.”
Jessica laughed and laughed.
Chapter Five
SpongeBob Interlude
Just so you know?  Life didn’t stop for me so I could write up this book this Summer.  I typed out that last chapter about a day ago during a SpongeBob marathon with the kids.
And SpongeBob takes his toll.  When I lived in Brooklyn back when Williamsburg was a slum there was this alley the building superintendent used to call Cat Scrootch Alley, because every Summer night you could hear some cats in heat screaming to get porked and then screaming even louder during the pork proper.
It was easier concentrating in an apartment over Cat Scrootch Alley than it is in an apartment with that asshole SpongeBob.
I know what you single kids are thinking.  You’re thinking, SpongeBob sounds good to me.  Instant babysitter. — Sure, as long as you can tell yourself that SpongeBob isn’t really melting the kids’ brains which, let’s face it, he probably is.
But forget what SpongeBob might be doing to the boys.  The point is I get to overhear the whole marathon and it’s definitely melting my brains.  “I’m ready!  I’m ready!  I’m ready!” is what I hear bouncing around inside my skull.  Even when I’m out trying to get some cigarettes.  Even when I’m listening to my Ramones.
I’m in New York.  I should be in a nightclub downtown with a drunk-but-hot chick, somebody wised-up with realistic expectations, hearing a saxophone moan like a woman about to pop.
It’s not like the wife is here to watch the boys this Summer, which I think I might have mentioned.  I’m kinda laid off and trying to write this tome out with barely more than two fingers pecking away.
So get off my back.
And it’s hot here, too.  The air conditioning is just for shit when you have virtually no wall-padding, you know, insulation.  But I love New York.
Here’s how desperate I got last week.  My boys are seven years old (Harry) and five years old (Sam), and I tried to get them interested in watching the movie All About Eve.
Don’t laugh.  You may not admit it, but if you’re a grownup who lives with small kids I know you’ve tried something like this.  You can’t break out of the playpen they’ve turned your home into, so one day you get this brilliant idea to bring the outside inside.
It’s a sanity move.  It never works.  But you keep getting the same flash of inspiration, year in and year out, never remembering until you fail that you’ve had the same idea a dozen times before.
So. All About Eve.  Of course we didn’t even get through the stage door.  Eve didn’t even get her raincoat and hat off before the carping began.
Harry: “Do we have to watch this?”
It was really quite a plaint.
Sam: “It’s too talky for a movie.”
The Bruckheimer Fallacy.
Me: “You kids are lucky Daddy doesn’t make you watch Kind Hearts and Coronets. ”
I was putting gravified utensils in the dishwasher.
“Ewwww. ”
“Ha!  Wait a minute Harry, you know that movie?”
“No.”
“Then why did you say, ‘ewww’?”
“I don’t know.  Is it talky?”
“Uh huh.”
“Yuck, ” said Sam.  “I bet it’s all gray.”
“Is it all gray, Daddy?” asked Harry.  Like he just heard a rumor he was going to have to work his way through community college because his daddy is a deadbeat.
“Yup,” I said.
Sam: “Yuck. ”
Harry: “I like color.”
Sam: “When is Mommy coming back?”
“Time for bed, kids.”
That was what did I say?  Last week?  Well, last night they got brain-melting SpongeBob because they remembered not to ask Daddy when Mommy was coming home.
Okay, so I left off with me and my therapy and Dr. Jessica.  Fasten your seatbelts ...
Chapter Six
Lord of All Tail
So I have this issue with Parp, but he isn’t the reason I got into therapy.  I have to remind myself of that sometimes.  Jessica says I use Parp to avoid the main problem, which is ...
Okay.  My major problem – the problem I talk about most with Jessica when she can make me get past my own bullshit and the problem I started out with twenty-five years ago in college in Upstate New York – is simple yet profound:
I need to be lord of all tail.  My condition dictates that my friends think of me as the cunt lord.  It’s okay if my friends have the attentions of females, but only if they know I could have said attentions if I wanted them.
It also helps if their girlfriends are dumpy.
You may think this is a trivial problem.  It really isn’t.  It’s a big damn deal.  Somewhere in my youth the proposition was fused into my consciousness that if I am not the group cunt lord then I am no one.  All of my other drives and ambitions, it turns out, are in service of this need to have – as Fritz Koch, my original college therapist said – “le droit de seigneur. ”
Literally that means the right of the lord to ball le wife of any tenant on his land.  I have no land and no tenants so I make do with my friends.
Don’t ask me how I got this way.  Some guys, you know, some guys have to be the funniest guy in the group.  Group clown.  Some guys have to be group jock.  If they aren’t they become alienated from themselves, strangers in their own lives, desperate.
That’s the way it is with me and needing to be lord of all tail.  If a guy I know gets tail that I couldn’t have first ... well, he can’t.  He’s not allowed.
Don’t judge.  I’m in therapy.
Fritz – Dr. Koch – never judged.  Out loud.  Who knew what he was writing on his pad though?  When I first showed up in his office and told him my problem, a fraction of me thought he might say:
“But Paul, we all need to be lord of all tail.  It’s a man thing.  Tell you what, buy me a drink and I won’t charge you for the visit.”
It didn’t seem so far-fetched at the time.  All men need to be lord of all tail.  I would have bought it.  And I would have felt a special, unspoken camaraderie with my brother lords.  Or maybe I would have killed them all.  Who knows?
But Fritz never let me think that it was a common problem.  He was almost grave about my condition.  And he was pretty grave when I suggested – jokingly -- that a real therapist would lie to me about all men needing to be lords of all tail.
“Do you think that describes the reality you live in?” asked Fritz.  “Do you think people lie to you like that, to make your life easier for you?”
“Nahhh,” I said.
“Let’s try the opposite.  Do people go out of their way to make you feel uncomfortable?”
Funny he should ask.
“There’s this kid in my class.  Tony,” I said.
“And what does Tony do that makes you feel bad about yourself?”
“Nothing,” I said.  I don’t remember what I was going to say.
I would tell you if I could remember what exactly made me think of Parp right then.  All I remember now is that he was a mean little prick in those days.  A hanger-on.  George Vider’s toady.  “Parp twists the knife,” one of the smarter chicks in play analysis class said.  “Vider puts the knife in and Parp twists it.”
But I nearly digress.  What’s important is that I figured out, with the help of Fritz, that I could deal with my need to be lord of all tail.  It was a huge relief, because it was really starting to hang me up with my man friends.  Just a few days before meeting Fritz it almost caused me to get punched in the face.
See, in those days I was regularly banging a couple girls – not at the same time, but serially, like a regular guy who loves the one he’s with – and they had some great tails on them.
Great tails.
Then this one day I was just off campus at a place called Pizza Meatsa with Kurt Libby, the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, a little tubby blonde-haired guy who in spite of being a chunky little putz got on the wrestling team in his high school in Ann Arbor and won a letter for it.
Who knew you could letter in wrestling?
But he was also pretty shy back then, and chicks kind of scared him, so unless a babe made the first move – and the second move – he was going to be beating off until graduation.
Which by the way makes him the ideal friend if you’re somebody who needs to be lord of all tail.
But just a few days before that – a few days before we met up at Pizza Meatsa – some babe grabbed him, told him something like, “I’m going to blow you now you pasty fuck,” and the next thing you know he’s in a closet at a party while somebody on her knees is unbuckling his pants in the dark.
Now, Pizza Meatsa was this cavernous place with rows of heavy, wooden, varnished tables in wide booths.  Aisles of booths.  And a jukebox.  Disco was big back then.  When Kurt Libby was sitting across from me in the booth at Pizza Meatsa I’m pretty sure it was the BeeGees playing.
Kurt told me about the blowjob – the fantastic blowjob, this slow, slurping, blowjob-from-heaven – that he got from this new love of his life, and his voice and his face are all, “Shit really happens, Paul!”
Now here’s the part that means I have to be in therapy.
See, when Kurt told me he’d gotten swooped down on by a chick who just had to have his cock, and that he spent the weekend with her regrowing poundable bone, I didn’t feel good for him.  Even though I was getting laid by babes with fantastic tails.  I had no reason to feel ... slighted.  But I did.  I’m thinking, “There was available ass at this party and Kurt Libby caught it because I couldn’t be there.  Fuck!”
And what really bugged me is that I got no sense from him that he knew he’d only scored because I wasn’t there.  That tail is my turf.
I’m thinking, what is he, stupid?  I’m funny, hip Paul!  He’s butterball Kurt Libby!
I resented the little shit.  What did he mean springing this on me while I was eating French fries with ketchup at Pizza Meatsa and the BeeGees were playing on the jukebox?  I had him pegged as a safe conversant.  If I wanted to hear someone rage on and on about the sweet piece of tail he scored I’d be hanging with ... well, I wouldn’t be hanging with Kurt Libby.
He ambushed me!
He looked at me funny.  “Something wrong, Paul?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, it’s like, is it okay if somebody likes me?”
Asshole.  How presumptuous is that?
“I don’t get it,” I said.  “What’s that supposed to mean?  Of course you should get a piece.  You should get more than one.  The more the merrier.  When my friends score, it is a joy unsurpassed.”
He laughed.  “Sorry,” he said, “I guess I’m just a little nervous ‘cause I’m with her now and I’m kind of funny about how you guys are going to react.”
“De nada,” I said.  “So you’re still seeing this girl?  You’re not onto the next conquest?”
I laughed really hard right there.  But still no indication that he knew how funny it was to imagine him moving on to another “conquest.”
“Oh no,” he said.  “She’s coming here now to meet me.  You can meet her.  Her name is Constance.”
“Connie?”
“Constance.”
So I get to meet this twat that thinks Kurt is a score.  Oh look, here she comes.
I could see her shadow hovering over the varnished table-top while Kurt Libby the tubby ex-letterman turned and said, “Hey Constance,” with this stupid, are-you-my-new-mommy look on his face.
“Hey Paul this is Constance.”
I could feel myself not looking up at the caster of the shadow.   It was a palpable non-movement.  I could see a pink scarf with gold bangles in it getting thrown into the booth beside Kurt, and hands moving to take off a ... coat?
Then I looked.  She was cute.  She wore a sweater with tits in it and had red hair in a bun, but not too tight, so some strands of hair flaked off the nape of her neck in that way that you just know they know makes you want to fuck them, but because it isn’t tits or ass or cunt they can say, “What ... what are you talking about?”
But they know.
“Hi Paul,” she said.  She looked at me for a split second, then turned right back to fat Kurt and dragged her sweater, tits, and nape over next to him and kissed him like I wasn’t even there.
That pissed me off.  She didn’t see that I was alone?  She didn’t think that might mean I was available?  Look, I’m not saying she had to jump me, but hey: eyes on the big boy. It was like she was going out of her way to make me feel undesirable, nobody, a stranger in my own life, desperate.
Or maybe she just thinks I’m out of her league.  That’s right.  She’s small-time and she’s trying to be realistic about what to expect.  Admirable, in a way.
I was just getting comfortable thinking she must know I’m out of her league when for some reason I opened my mouth and this came out: “I hear you just gave this tubby fuck his first blowjob ever.”  I kind of laughed.  I actually have a very high giggle.  “Or wait, I guess it was more of a weekend blowathon.”
I almost made a remark about how the basketball team must not have been in town, but something stopped me.  I’d like to think it was what people call “better judgment.”
Better late than never, but not much better.
Chapter Seven
Wake Up Call
I was on my way home that night – right after coining the term “blowathon”  in a public place – thinking about what humorless prudes Kurt and Constance were, while the idea slowly soaked through my skull that the real problem was with me, not them.
When it – the idea – finally touched my brain it made all of my spit dry up.   I was on Kelso Street, which was this street filled with little shops and food places like the Main Street of a Christmas village.   It was the middle of winter and I had on these stupid leather mittens.
“Fuck these!”  I said pretty loud and threw the mittens in this wire trash bin conveniently only a couple feet away from me.   Right then I figured I’d rather let my hands freeze than see myself in public for one more second with leather mittens on my hands.
A red-haired guy in one of those padded windbreakers heard me and laughed and kept walking past.   It wasn’t a shocked or suprised laugh or a laugh that asked a question.   It was like he knew why I hated those fucking mittens.
It was like he could see I was a preposterous character.   A buffoon.
Back in those days I was renting a big house off-campus with two guys and three girls.   We all thought we were bohemians.   But right when I ripped off my leather mittens I had this epiphany where I knew we were only pretending and we sucked at it.   We were nothing but big posers.  We whimpered like six year-olds if our parents’ checks got delivered a day late.   We couldn’t write poetry for shit but we thought getting hangovers gave us some sort of kinship with Dylan Thomas.   We put a big poster of Che Guevara over the bookcase in the living room for a whole semester before any of us knew who he was.
And we went out in public wearing stupid fucking leather mittens!
I sat down on a green bench on the sidewalk.   It was twilight.   Lights were coming on.   People were walking past.   I just thought about the scene in Pizza Meatsa with Kurt and Constance.   I thought about it over and over.   I obviously could not let anyone else have tail without resenting them for it.   I looked back over my life, the part of it with hardons in it at least, and realized that this was a distinct pattern and it was getting worse.   I’d never actually blurted out my thoughts like that before, the way I did that night.   It still didn’t get Kurt off the hook for thinking he was now some sort of cuntsman or Constance for inflating his ego or both of them for acting all indignant and put-upon, but ...
The Kurt and Constance episode was a wakeup call!
So I called up my mom who said I should talk to a shrink and that’s how I ended up with Fritz Koch.   It helped, talking about it and figuring stuff out about it and being able to laugh about it, but I never really did all the way get rid of it.   Meanwhile I found out a butt-load of other crap that was wrong with me that felt good to talk about.
A butt-load of other crap.
So remember when I said Christine the hot blonde forty year-old from that night at Cleopatra’s Needle called up Corrinne Junior to tell her that Parp was dislocating her jaw with his cock?   I resented Parp for getting to fuck a hot blonde.   And what made it even worse was I was being loyal to my wife at that point in time and at that point in time I think it was going on a year since I got a blowjob from her that could be described as verve-having.   And several months since I’d had any mouthular contact at all with the wife.
Chapter Eight
Junior's Gothic Chasm
This is Junior: dark brown skin, almost mulatto, creamy, like a dark peanut butter.   Great rack.   Tits out to here with massive brown nipples like big chocolate cookies that turn into hard little rocks when she wants to get plowed.   Thin waist.   Lollipop ass that’s started to spread just a little.   Short, so not much in the legs department, which is kind of unfortunate because long slender legs are great cunt stems.   Dark hair, no curls.   Cock-gobbler lips, like the ones you see on some Spanish and Portuguese chicks.
The whoring twat.
The dark skin was the source of a lot of jokes when I first found out how black Corrinne Senior literally sucked Junior’s white father out of his marriage.
“Are you sure you’re not the black chick’s daughter?”  – Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.   Yes, I said that at least once every two days for a month.
And then when I got it that she had a sense of humor about the irony of her dark skin and Corrinne Senior I started saying, “Mighty white of me”  all the time.
The first time I said it was right after balling her doggy-style.
Her: “I love it that you thought to pull my hair.   It made my cunt want to explode.”
Me: “Mighty white of me.”
She laughed her ass off.
She even joined in a few times.   Once I told her I’d let her have the seat in the sun on a cold day at an amusement park and she said, “Mighty white of you.”
I loved that back-and-forth.   I could have done it for years.   It could have been our signature banter as a couple.   But Junior got tired of it pretty quick and right after the wedding she told me to shut the fuck up about it.
In spite of the fact that this book is about getting revenge on Junior for being a sadistic slut, I have to admit she’s a pretty wild fuck.   She has a great mouth when she’s motivated.   The mouth and I used to get along real well.
Junior’s cunt though ...  different story.   The cunt and I have one of those polite, awkward relationships.   She used to make the cunt available, but I haven’t been on good terms with it since I made the mistake of seeing Sam get born.  
Boys.   You boys out there.  Listen to me.  Never do that.   There are some things you can’t unsee, and you will want to unsee childbirth.
I mean, after the kid got out of her Junior worked her cunt back into great shape by flexing her snatch muscles on that little metal egg, but still I’m at odds with her cunt.
Way at odds.
This gives Jessica and me one more thing to talk about.   And the union health plan covers it, so everyone is happy.   Except, you know, I have a social conscience too, so, America’s skyrocketing health care costs, blah, blah, blah.
“You really want to unsee your son’s birth?”  she asked.
“Please don’t make me ...”
“Don’t you think it’s important?”
“There is nothing beautiful ...”   I really want therapists and chicks to understand this, “there is no way I am going to find that beautiful.”
“Oh, I’m not saying you should do that,”  she said.
Yuh-huh.   She’s not saying I should do that.  – But if I don’t do that she’s going to stare at me all misty and pouty like I’m some sort of sad throwback who wants his wenches to pipe down and poach him up some eggs.
I guess it’s highly evolved to take some grotesque biological event, call it a “miracle”  and “mysterious,”  and expect me to find something beautiful about seeing my wife’s guts dragged out through the gothic chasm that used to be a sweet place to put my dick.
Jessica tried to help cancel out that image by giving me a book filled with nothing but pictures of beautiful cunts to look at.   It’s therapy so what the heck, right?   Problem is none of the cunts in that book are Junior’s cunt.   They are the gorgeous, round-mounded, usually-shaved, sometimes embushed, no-doubt-snug, no-doubt-sweet places to put one’s dick of women who have not had their insides dragged out of them.   And see, I don’t have a problem with any cunt I suspect may not have been stretched into a hangar door by some red slimy brat who has to get out now or else.
I loved that book of unchasmed cunts.
Ladies, I’m not saying don’t give birth.   I’m saying think twice before you insist on the man witnessing the miracle.   Unless you’re trying to punish him.  For life.
I’m saying nature is not always beautiful.   In fact, it almost never is.   Have you ever seen a preying mantis bite the head off a grasshopper?
I grew up in rural Massachusetts.   I saw that a few times.   You get a grasshopper, toss it in a jar with a preying mantis, and wait ...  wait for it ...  chomp!   Headless grasshopper.
“The head must be the tastiest part,”  a kid said once.
The whole preying mantis-grasshopper thing?   Ladies, it’s a beautiful miracle.   You don’t think so?   What ...  what’s wrong with you?

But I rant.   Meanwhile you’re thinking, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, your wife’s gothic chasm of a cunt.   Whatever happened to that video from Chapter Two?   What about the Little Round Jewish Hat story?”
See, I would have gotten around to that story sooner, but in order for it to make any sense you had to know some things, like my issues with Parp, my need to be lord of all tail, and the fact that Junior’s cunt and me are on the outs.
And now you know.
Chapter Nine
My Wife Works for Hed
That day in March – the day right after St.   Patrick’s Day – when I met Parp and he told me about Little Round Jewish Hat, I got back to my apartment around five-thirty.   It was my day off from work tending bar so I got to come home at a regular time.   Dinner time, or as close to a regular dinner time as we ever get in my house.  
“Somebody wash me!”   I shouted when I walked through the door of my apartment.   “I’ve been hanging with the human turd!”  
I wanted to be solicited and consoled by the wife, who I couldn’t see at first but who I knew was lurking someplace.   (There’s this really short hallway in my apartment so standing at the front door I could only see about a third of the living room.  )
The place smelled like bleach.   More importantly, it didn’t smell like food.   So right away I knew we’d be ordering in that night.  
“Are you talking about Tony?”  
It was Sam.   Astute for five years old.   He popped his head up from behind the arm of the sofa he was lying on.  
“Yup!”   I said.   “But you remember our plan, don’t you, Sammy?”  
“It’s not our plan.   It’s our policy.”  
He grinned.   Such a learner.  
“Oh yeah.   Our policy.   What’s our policy?”  
“Never tell Tony he’s the human turd?”  
“Ding ding ding ding ding ding!”   I said.  
He did one of those squeals he does like when I’m tickling him.  
“Where’s Mommy?”   I asked.  
“She’s heeeerrrrrre ...”   he grinned.   “She’s right ... there! ”   He pointed to a part of the living room I couldn’t see yet and looked in my eyes.   Deep.   Like he never heard of not trusting people.  
My boys and I are a team.   I call us the Man Squad.  
“So what’s Parp complaining about now?”   Junior asked.   I rounded the corner to catch her sitting at the computer on the desk in front of the exposed brick in the cul-de-sac of our livng room.   She was still wearing her black suit from the day job.  
All of Junior’s day-job suits feature nice cleavage exposure, and Junior definitely has the tits for it.   – You may as well get all the advantage you can in the dog-sniff-dog world of Manhattan day jobs, and hey, we all know that everything else being equal no man will want to make an enemy of a woman with suckable knobs.  
“Parp’s in the basement mixin’ up the medicine,”   I said.  
I bent over and kissed her cheek.   Oh look, she’s writing an email.  
“Who you writing to?”   I asked.  
“Hed,”   she said.   “I got in a discussion with him about the spelling of ‘burqa’ and I have to send him a link.”  
I went over to get something comestible from the fridge to hold me until we ordered in whatever we were going to order in.   “Holy crap,”   I said.   “Will you let it go?”  
She sighed.   “I know ...”   she whimpered.  
I found a bag of walnuts near the back of the fridge and fished it out.  
Junior had come to New York twenty years earlier to be an actress.   But last March, when we were having this conversation, she was managing the wait staff in the restaurant at the Museum of the Humanities on Fifty-Fifth Street.  
Her boss at MoHum was a guy named Ed Borogan.   Ed had a mushy, round body with a skull so massive that it still managed to look disproportionately huge on him, so all of his employees called him “Hed.”   He looked like a bobblehead of Karl Marx with glasses and an unwashed beard.  
“It’ll just take a sec but if I don’t do it I’ll be thinking about Hed’s smug smirk all night,”   Junior said.  
“Hed wants to drill Mommy deep,”   Sam volunteered.  
Junior and I froze and then turned to him in unison.   No shit, it was like we were synchronized swimmers.  
Sammy giggled.   Junior looked at me, crestfallen.   Such a sad, defeated look on her face.  
“Oh God I said it on the phone ...”   she moaned.  
I just stared at her.   So.   She’d said something naughty in front of the boy.   Maybe in front of both boys.   It was exactly the sort of bad behavior she was constantly giving me shit for.   I just stared at her without smiling and ate walnuts from the bag and let her think about it.  
“I went into the bedroom and closed the door for that conversation,”   she said, like she was throwing herself on the mercy of the court.   “But ... it’s a small apartment.”  
“I get it,”   I said.   “Extenuating circumstances.”  
She looked at me and grinned this big grin and batted her eyes.   “Please?”   she said.  
God, if only she’d had someone else’s cunt I could have so fucked her right then.  
“Well,”   I said, “I think it just means we need to have a new policy, right Sammy?”  
“What?”   he asked.  
“Our new policy is we never ever say that ‘drilling’ thing in front of Mr. Borogan, okay?”  
“Okay!”   he said and giggled.   What a kid.  
I turned to the wife.   “Sammy’s never going to meet Hed anyway,”   I said.  
She sort of smiled, I think.   I’m not sure, because she wasn’t even looking at me any more.   She was looking at the damn computer screen.  
Me chomping walnuts behind the counter that separated the kitchen area from the living room area.   Sammy lying on the sofa giggling and swishing his plastic light saber.   The wife polishing off an email.   – It was quite a family portrait, except that Harry wasn’t there.   I stared at the wife’s rack in profile for awhile.   She didn’t notice.  
No wonder Hed wants to fuck her, I thought.   At the time there was a part of me that kind of suspected he was fucking her.   I mean, why not?  After all, she is a ball-sucking adulteress (as I now know for sure).   In fact, the only reason I was pretty sure she wasn’t fucking Hed was that he was a greasy fat-boy who looked like he had on a t-shirt with a marinara stain even when he was wearing a business suit.  
On our refrigerator door, tacked on with magnets in the shape of little red devils, we have this list: “Top Ten Cholesterol-Fighting Foods.”   You might have a list like that on your refrigerator door.   “Top Ten Belly-Flattening Foods” or “Top Ten Things To Do This Week.”  
On Hed’s refrigerator door I’m pretty sure he has: “Top Ten Excuses For Farting In a Public Place.”  
So yeah I was pretty sure Junior wasn’t fucking Hed.  
Which kind of begged the question: Where and how is Junior getting her cunt filled?
I didn’t know what the wife’s theory was about my not wanting to fill her cunt myself.   I guessed she had some prefab explanation from a magazine or a blog.   But I was also pretty sure she knew more about my gothic-chasm aversion than she let on.   She never said a damn thing about it directly, but she had ... intuitions.   I’m sure I tipped her off unconsciously.  
And she must have also known that I was ready to ball anyone who showed the right kind of interest in me.   I mean, maybe she thought I’d changed, but for crying out loud I waswith someone the night I met Junior and ended up fucking her in the bathroom stall at Freddy’s in Brooklyn.   And the person I was with was my fiancee, Janey, who had superior snatch muscles but a mouth like an egg-beater.   So Junior knew there were definite limits on my regard for the virtue of fidelity.   She knew me better than to believe me when I swore to God I’d changed.   See hon, I have kids now.   Your kids.   Our kids.   I could never risk all of you – all of this – for a fuck in a bathroom stall.  
“What makes you think she reads you like that?”   Jessica asked me once.  
“She just broke out crying yesterday and said, ‘Paul, I had this very vivid dream last night and in it you were fucking that slut Lucille!’”  
Lucille was this co-worker of mine who spent forty-five minutes a day just working out her ass muscles.  
“Hm,”   Jessica said.   “Well, you never know.   You could be giving off a vibe.”  
A vibe.   That will be one hundred and fifty dollars please, or whatever the insurance company is paying.  
“Where’s Harry?”   I asked the wife after she clicked “send” and came back to the world of solids.  
“He’s over at Fox’s tonight,” she said.   “They’ve had a beddums planned for three weeks.”  
“A beddums?”  
“Some character on one of these programs has sleepovers with gorillas and pixies – all other little boys and girls of course – and they call them ‘beddums.’”
“Sounds vaguely effeminate,”   I said.  
The wife stood up and stretched and said: “Only vaguely?”   – And she gave me this big grin that I didn’t really understand but which in retrospect I can see was definitely of the shit-eating variety.  
So who knows?  Maybe she was fucking Hed.  
Sam laughed.   “Mommy’s funny,”   he said.  
Chapter Ten
Biz Trumps Ex-Hooker
The wife said something about going out for dinner, I said I don’t wanna, the boy laughed, the wife said okay I’ll change my clothes and we’ll order in some Chinese pizza, which is just Chinese food piled on a pizza.  Harry was out of school for two weeks with pneumonia last year and he invented Chinese pizza one night while I was trying to explain The X Files to him.
The only problem with CP is it’s two deliveries, which means two tips.  But what the heck.  A little tiny splurge now and then wasn’t going to drain our shallow pockets.
So Junior put on jeans and a pink t-shirt with a huge, indelible hair-dye stain on it and the three of us heaped pork fried rice on a cheese pizza and divvied it up.
Tasty.
The wife seemed happy.  Just chirping along.  We were all noshing away, not talking about day jobs.
That’s the rule.  No talking about day jobs at the table.  That night I kind of wanted it not to be the rule though, because I knew that the rule meant there could be no more talking about Hed and the MoHum gang.  It meant I couldn’t talk about Kenny the beertard, who was this incompetent so-called bartender I sometimes had to share a shift with.  It meant Junior’s head would be ranging around for crap to kill the silence with.
“So what did you and Parp talk about?”
“Same old Parp shit,” I said.
“Same old Parp shit,” Sam said.
“Sam!” Junior said.
“Daddy said it.”
“Daddy says a lot of things,” Junior said.  “I do not want you repeating words you know are bad.”
“Sorry, Sam,” I said.  “I shouldn’t have said it, either.”
“You shouldn’t have said it, either,” Sam said.
“I thought Parp had a project he wanted to talk about,” Junior said.
I forgot I told her that.
“Yeah, some Parp thing going on.  Nothing much.”
She picked up this tall glass of diet cola and stared at me over the rim and across the table.  A shark’s-eye stare.  A stare that wanted to know if I had blood in me or if I was just some trash floating the surf.
I knew exactly what she was thinking: Do I nail him now for what he’s hiding about the conversation he had with Parp or do I wait until the boy is in the sack?
“Just some thing he’s got going,” I said, like: nothing to worry about, give me some credit for protecting your brain from the musings of the human turd.
So we talked about other stuff and it was deadly trivial.  Every time Junior opened her mouth to talk about Obama or her big fat mother or the movies it was about some molecular detail, a neuron-killer, like she wanted me to know we would be talking baby talk until I agreed to tell her about whatever it was Parp told me.
She couldn’t wait to climb up my colon.
Right after the Chinese pizza she put the boy to bed.  It was like she ambushed him.  No TV time, no chit-chat, no listening to Daddy’s Dylan with him for a little while first.
Even Sammy noticed.  “Why are wegoing so fast?” he asked her at one point while they were in the bathroom.
“It’s bedtime,” she said.  “Bedtime is like a deadline.  You always race to meet a deadline.”
A lame crock of shit, but kids are stupid so he bought it.
When she was finally done with him and turned out the light in the boys’ bedroom and closed the door really gently so Sammy wouldn’t be traumatized by the sound of a latch clicking, she turned around and looked at me.  She stared at me for a sec then ducked her eyes away and went over to the sink in the kitchen area and picked up a dish rag.  The faucet, the suds.
Now you single kids.  You listen up.  This going over to do the dishes was not about Junior wanting to get tidy.  No sir.  It was about giving me the assignment of starting a conversation she wanted to have.
And something you should know about me from Chapter One is I don’t like getting assignments. So fuck the presumptuous twat.  She wants to play games, hey, Daddy loves a good game.
“Here hon, I’ll do those,” I said, like I had no idea she’d given me the assignment.  “Daddy’s a bartender, after all,” I kind of sang in my falsetto daddy-voice.  “He swabs the deck for a living while Mommy argues about burqas with deep-drilling Hed.”
I pushed my glasses up on my nose.
She gave no sign of being entertained.  She didn’t say anything or look at me.  She just went into the living-room area and sat on the sofa.
“Hey hon?” I said.
“What? ”
She was getting pissed off.  You know, the way chicks get when you don’t read their minds fast enough.
“Hey Baby, Daddy’s doin’ your dishes for ya,” I giggled.  I think I mentioned I have a high giggle, a girlish giggle, like a cross between a giggle and a cackle.
“Paul, are you going to tell me what’s going on with Tony?”  She asked, like making her start her own conversation was an act of misogyny.
“I was kinda waitin’,” I said.  “Right now is pretty much the best time to talk, don’tcha think?  Kids are snoozin’, Mommy and Daddy can do some serious ... stuff.”
I wriggled my eyes like Groucho Marx, like I was telling her if she played her cards right she might get her cunt opened extra deep later on, but that wasn’t going to happen and she knew it.
“And ... you know ... yeah ...” I continued in my high tentative falsetto.  In my head I was starting to sound like Jimmy Stewart with clothespins on his scrotum.  “I did want to mention something ...”
She sat there like a statue.
“Looks like Parp put together a crew and some actors for a music video – and oh yeah, and Bobby Whispers is in on it.  You know, he’s–”
“Mondi McDade’s husband,” she said.
I may have mentioned Bobby to her a couple times before.
She was sitting bolt upright, perfect posture, on the edge of the sofa.  If she had a school desk in front of her, her little hands would have been folded on top of it.
“Yeah, well, looks like they, um, they ... ” the clothespins tightened on my balls “ ... need another actor, and they want yours truly.”
Then I gigcackled.  It was a reflex.
“Oh my God, Paul,” she said, and she hugged her arms and started rocking back and forth on the round of her ass.  “You are not leaving me here alone for another week.”
So that’s what she was worried about.  The last time I had a project it was with Rob Crystell, and we spent three days – not a week – down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  Most of the time I was up to my nuts in salt water while me and another guy and a couple Cuban babes made funny for the cameras in a satire Rob was shooting.
It was called Guys and Girls In Surf At the Beach.  It won a couple prizes.
It’s great being the New York actor out-of-town.  The local “actresses” automatically want your cock, except in this case Rob let them bring their boyfriends to the shoot to chaperone.
What a fucking waste.  Three days of blue balls while beer-bellies walked off with the otherwise-available ass.
Anyway, while I was gone Junior got to find out firsthand what it was like to be a single working mommy with two small boys.  I guess you could say she found it harrowing.
“Babe!” I said.  “Is that what you’re thinkin’?  No!  It’s one day of shooting here in Manhattan!”
I gave her my big sunny smile.
She slumped.  Then she smiled back.  “Oh, thank you!” she said.
Although now that she told me I couldn’t go away I of course wanted her to know that if I had an offer to go away I would fucking go.
“So when are you shooting?” she asked before I could make that point.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Saturday?”
“Well ... yeah.”
Pause.
“Is Mondi McDade in the video?”
“I – I don’t think so.  I think Parp would have said something.  I don’t know.  Maybe as a cameo.”
“Well Paul, you can’t do it Saturday.   I’m sorry but not this Saturday.”
“Huh?”
“You know you promised the boys you were taking them to Chuck E. Cheese this Saturday.”
Long pause.  I fumed.  There was no fucking way I was going to be sitting in the middle of toddler screams under snot projectiles when I could be hanging with New-York-actress cunt.  I mean, you want to know why I’m in New York as one of the world’s best-educated midtown bartenders?  Because I didn’t want the banker money, or the broker money, or the doctor money?
“Come on!  The only reason we’re living in this dump is because we came to New York to be in the biz!  The boys are going to understand that Daddy needs to do some things to keep from blowing his fucking brains out!”
“Shhhhh!” she said.  She jumped up and padded over to me at the sink.  Then, “This is not a dump.  You take that back.”
“It’s not a dump,” I said.
Another long pause.  I turned back to the dishes while she stared up at my left ear.
“You can’t take the kids Saturday?” I asked.
“I’ve already scheduled a play date for Saturday and I’ve really been looking forward to it,” she said.
“A play date?  I don’t get it.”
“I’m meeting Sue.  Sue Gasparino.”
Sue Gasparino was an ex-hooker Junior met at one of those acting studios downtown.  Junior was trying to hone her acting skills for re-entry into the biz, and she hit it off with ex-hooker Sue.
This is Sue: long, kinky black curls.  Big nose.  Minimal rack.  Firm ass with an exaggerated gape, like she has a spring between her cheeks pushing them open.  The one time I met her she was wearing really tight low-rise jeans over a black leotard.  Her hair smelled like almond mint.
I turned back to Junior.  “So you’re going to ... play with Sue Gasparino.”
“We’re going to go shopping,” she said.  “And go out to a movie maybe and eat lunch.”
“But calling it a play date sounds like somebody plans to ... you know ...”  She stared at me.  She was so convinced I wouldn’t go there.  “Sounds like somebody’s going to suck mound.”
Her jaw dropped.  Her face turned red.  “Paul, you are not going to get away with shirking your responsibilities by making me feel filthy.”
You may have noticed that was not a denial.
I didn’t actually think Junior had it in her to get slurped out by Sue Gasparino.   Calling it a “play date” was probably just an example of Sue’s ex-hooker sense of humor.
But I was also pretty sure that if she was even slightly bi-curious Junior would spend the afternoon looking at Sue’s mouth and imagining that ex-professional tongue butterflying her clit.  After all, my gothic-chasm aversion means I pretty much only eat Junior for her birthday and Christmas, and I missed last Christmas.
You know, it’s a kids-and-Santa day.
“Well,” I said, “do I have to bring up the rule?  Are ya makin’ me play the rule card?”
She looked blank.  It was a studied look.  Rule?  What rule?
“Biz trumps vacation.  Biz trumps holidays.  Biz trumps day job,” I said.
It was an old rule, but we always lived by it.  If an opportunity comes up for us as actors we have to take it.  No excuses.
She padded back to the sofa.  She sat down for a second and thought about it.  But I knew I had her in a corner.  You can’t beat the damn rule.
“You can’t get him to change the day?” she asked.
That took me off guard.
“I think there are too many people involved,” I said.  “He’ll just use somebody else if I’m not there.”
Then it started to rile me.
“So you’re saying you think if I’m involved in this it must be such a small deal that I can just ask the producers to change the date so you can go shopping with Wide-Gape Sue.”
“What?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s like when I made that short with Rob Crystell.  It won two festival prizes and still whenever you bring it up it’s to talk about how I stuck you with the kids for a week.  – And it was really three days, by the way.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Paul.”
“Well this thing we’re doing Saturday is a SAG deal.  Micro-budget, but it’s a union deal and the guy shooting it is the husband of a bona fide rock star ... so, biz trumps play-date with Big-Nose Sue,” I said.
She looked up at me, grim.  “Okay Paul, I guess you win,” she said.
She stood up and walked over close, so she could be extra sure Sammy wouldn’t hear.
“But you can go fuck yourself anyway,” she said.
Chapter Eleven
Xanax Interlude
How’s that for wifeliness?  Or spousalness?  “You can go fuck yourself.”  Charming.
Yeah, yeah, I can understand the frustration of not winning every single argument and having to give up a “play date” with a wide-gaped, big-nosed, minimally-racked, ex-hooker gal pal, but there are just some places that husbands and wives are not supposed to go and telling your significant other to go fuck themselves is definitely one of those places.
It is beyond the pale.
At the time we had the actual argument I was willing to give Junior some leeway.  But just now, typing it up, when I know she’s the future Parp-chomper ... well, it added to my stressors.
And what really added to the ol’ stress-pile is that I know for a fact that if I had lost that argument – if Junior and Wide-Gape Sue went out to “play” that Saturday while I watched the boys be boys at Chuck E. Cheese – there is no way I would have walked up to the twat and told her to go fuck herself.  You know?  It’s uncalled-for.  More than that.  It’s unmanly.
No shit.  That’s what it boils down to.  If I’d sidled up to Junior and told her to fuck herself it would have been the emotional equivalent of punching her in the face.  Yeah, emotional abuse is what the sistas would call it.  They would have worn black and held vigils outside my door banging little finger-drums and shrieking.
I speak the truth and you know it.  Ya cunts.
Now ladies ... if my ranting has offended, think but this and all is mended:
The twat is off on a play date with Parp right now and it’s been going on for over a month.  And she stuck me with the kids.  And we’ve been to Chuck E. Cheese every damn Saturday.  And – did I mention? – she’s sucking the guy’s cock.
So thinking about all that and typing it up made me pretty pissed off, as you can probably tell, so I wasn’t able to write any more about it for awhile.
I tried but I ended up surfing the ol’ web instead.  HuffPo.  DailyKos.  NYT.  WashPo.  MSNBC.com.  Yeah, I’m kind of a news junkie.  And yeah, I tilt a little to the left.
Chicks dig that.  Or they used to anyway.
Screw it.  I tried a few times to pick up where I left off but the thought of the wifetard telling me to fuck myself sent me searching for the Xanax.
That and a Vicodin and a St. Pauli Girl can be a real cool hand, like they say in that movie where Paul Newman eats all the eggs.  I didn’t have any Girl in the fridge, but the boys are in bed and the bars downstairs are open so I went down to the nearest one, the Mermaid Inn.
Now a lot of you ladies – and I’m pretty sure this book will be read by millions of women, you know, women who have no desire to run off and blow their husbands’ human-turd ex-colleagues – a lot of you ladies are sweating the welfare of the poor little mop-tops snoozing in the other room.
What happens if they wake up in the middle of the night while Daddy is washing down his drogas in a West Side saloon?
Well, the first thing you should know is that no damn kids were harmed in the making of this tale of vengeance and justice.  Not yet, anyway.  When I got back from downstairs just now the little lads were still in their bedroom snoozing and their Daddy was feeling a lot better.
But what if they had awakened?  What then?  Poor little sobbing kiddies in the middle of the big bad city, their drunken sex-fiend Daddy downstairs ogling street ass under Amsterdam Avenue lamps ...
Fuck that.  Happens all the time.  I’m always coming upstairs to find the little bastards scurrying back to their HQ.  They love it when Daddy’s gone.  So go ahead and call the social workers ya crybabies.  Deprive my kids of their summertime fun.
The one thing I do worry about vis-a-vis the boys when I’m down at the bar is: what if I should hook up with a lovable slut?
The thought of hooking up with a lovable slut is pretty much what keeps me going through these humid days of the whoring wife.  But where would I take her?  I can’t bring her upstairs to where the boys are.  And unless she lives nearby, I pretty much can’t risk going home with her if I want to be back before they start knocking on the neighbors’ doors for breakfast.
Yeah, I know.  Bathroom stall.  The Mermaid has some nice ones.  But still.
Not like that mattered tonight.  There was nobody down at the Merm worth raising a dick to even though somebody in the back was getting her ass felt up while she bent over a table.  Short.  Blonde hair on a black chick.
That’s okay, but she talked like she could kick the living shit out of me which turned me on a little bit.  — A fraction, but like I said not enough to raise Admiral Ballsy.
It took me awhile to finish fuming about my remembrance of the wife’s go-fuck-yourself advice, but three beers and a couple little white pills later and I was ready to float back upstairs and land gently behind the ol’ keyboard again.
And I thought, “Shit, is this what writers go through every day?  Is this what Dylan Thomas went through?  I could do this.  I could get paid to have problems like these.  Now I just have to find some way to have the wife or somebody screw me over again next year so I’ll have something to write about then.”
You think shit like that with drugs and alcohol in you.
On my way out of the Merm I got flagged down by one of my neighborhood drinking chums, Daryl, who was talking to one of his pals at a table.  “Hey Paul, wife back yet?”
Oh yeah, I think I told him Junior was visiting her parents this Summer.
“Nope.”
“Gettin’ it sucked?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.  What we gotta do to get it sucked?”
“Gotta get some abs, Daryl,” I said.
“Abs shit.  I gotta get a gut-ectomy then maybe I can get me some abs.”
I gigcackled.  “Okay.  Gotta be a rock star, I guess.”
“It ain’t that, man.   Bitches just don’t like suckin’ it.”
Tell me about it.
I mean, aside from the whole Junior-blowing-Parp irony, there was a more profound truth that I’m one day going to have to introduce my pal Daryl to.  Someday I’m going to sit him down across from me and tell him the horrifying truth: that the city is filled with chicks who like nothing better than to suck cock and who think about it all the time.  Square chicks don’t want you to know they exist and Oprah isn’t interviewing them anytime soon so as far as poor chumps like Daryl are ever likely to know, “bitches just don’t like suckin’ it.”
I thought about that as I reached the steps to my apartment building and I just broke out laughing.
Chapter Twelve
Let That Be a Lesson To Ya
Okay.  So.
The wife said, “You can go fuck yourself anyway” and then she just hung there looking at me.  For some reason looking back on it I don’t think her arms were folded across her bulbous tits but in my memory of the event that’s where I have them.
Arms folded.  Like a mommy.
It riled me a little that she could just say ”fuck yourself” to me and then look me in the eye.  That she didn’t scurry off like somebody who knew she was being spoiled and bratty about a fight she lost fair and square.
I should have just let it go.  I knew it at the time.  But you know what it’s like sometimes when you’ve won and you know you’ve won but still it didn’t end right so you just keep talking.  I wanted her to appreciate firsthand that I was right.  On the merits and not because I was bull-headed and she was tired or more evolved or something.
“Ya know, when I think about it,” I said, ”I didn’t have to do this much tap-dancing for my parents when I told them I was moving to New York forever to be an actor.  Who knew I was going to end up being a career bartender begging his fucking wife for one stinking day to live my dream in.”
What a pussy.  Yeah, I shouted.  I whimpered.  I pled.  I’m sure my eyes were all wide the way the boys’ eyes get when they shout and whimper and plead.
It took a few sessions in therapy but I finally figured out with Jessica’s help that I’m scared of my wife.  Maybe it was more like a few dozen sessions.  At first I really resented Jessica for even suggesting that I might be scared of Junior.  I resented her so much that for awhile I stopped fucking her in my fantasies.  I walked down the street talking to myself and I smoked way more than I should have and I tried to act all manly in front of the wife.  You know.  Lay down the law.  Prove I wasn’t scared of her.  But she’d furrow her brow and I’d shout and whimper and plead some more.
Finally I threw in the towel and admitted it to myself.  Then me and Jessica started working on getting me un-scared.
Jessica started appearing in my sex fantasies again.  It was great.  In real life Jessica was trying to get me to be a little more open and honest and blunt with the wife.  But in my fantasies she was a little more ....  mmmm ...  hands on with Junior.
In one version of my fantasy where Jessica’s blowing me on the bedroll she tells me not to worry because she’ll find the wife and beat the shit out of her for me.  And then a second later we’re not on the bedroll anymore but in the garage of the house I used to live in when I was in grade school.  It was great because there was this little workshop in it with a loft and the loft had a sofa and a TV.
In this extended version of the bedroll fantasy Jessica pounds the crap out of the wife with her bare fists and the wife is blubbering and pleading on the garage floor and Jessica stands over her wearing nothing but a black thong and says, “Let that be a lesson to ya, chasm-snatch!”
It’s the best sex fantasy I ever had.
Anyway, back on the day we had the argument and I just finished shouting and whimpering and pleading, Junior stood there and stared for a few seconds and then said, ”Well, do you think you can at least tell me what you’re shooting, Paul?”
That was a good sign.  I was so relieved I over-explained.  Not only did I tell her about Little Round Jewish Hat but I also told her what color t-shirt Parp was wearing that afternoon.  ”That guy is such an asshole,” I gigcackled.
It was all good.  At least I thought so at the time.  The wife ended up drifting down to the bedroom.   Alone.  Leaving me alone.
With my thoughts.
I quickly put on some Dylan and my big padded headphones.
I looked around and smiled.  Yeah.  It was good.
Chapter Thirteen
Ladies and Gentlemen: Bangalore Springfield
One of Parp’s pals back then was — and I guess still is — an “Indian” stand-up comic named Bangalore Springfield.  You haven’t heard of him.  Or hell, who knows?  By the time anyone reads this he may have had his Friar’s Roast already or whatever it is they call that thing they do on that channel.
I saw his act down at Vider’s once.  It was okay.  You know.  At least it wasn’t embarrassing to watch like a lot of live comedy shows.  His act is pretty much about what it’s like to be a goofy foreigner in a goofy country with goofy parents and a goofy job while trying to fuck somebody with a sweet ass.
In his act he’s got this thick Indian accent.  In real life he sounds like he comes from Brooklyn or maybe Providence, Rhode Island.  He also has this almost permanent squint in his right eye that everyone notices but nobody mentions.
On that first day of shooting Little Round Jewish Hat — two days after vanquishing the wife in the previously-narrated, no-holds-barred domestic smackdown — Bang and I were standing sort of next to each other while the film crew did film crew work just a few feet away.  He had this big grin on his face like he was thrilled to be there.
Amateur.
Parp was up on a ladder twisting a bolt into a big theatre light.  I just finished asking him if he was still enjoying Christine, the hot blonde forty year-old.
“I was seeing Christine for a couple months,” he said, “but she kept telling me that women don’t like guys with really long hair.  And women don’t like guys who spend a lot of time shopping for moisturizers.  And women don’t like guys who look at themselves in the mirror all the time.”
“Wow,” I gigcackled.  “In other words, women don’t like you.”
“Uh ...  heh-heh! ” Bang laughed.  The laugh took me by surprise. It was like hearing a goose hiccup.
“Yeah,” Parp said.  “Finally I told her to stop calling herself ‘women.’”
“Ha!” said Bang.  “I tell my wife, ‘I’m a man, I haven’t got the slightest idea what men want.  You think because you’ve got a g-spot you get to speak for the four billion other people with g-spots?  I have a nose.  And speaking as the haver of a nose, I’d like you to stop talking and start blowing.’”
“Start blowing your nose?” I asked.
“Good catch,” said Bang, “I should definitely change that to ‘sucking’.”
Fucking comics.  Every conversation is a rehearsal.
“Or make it about something besides your cock,” said Bobby Whispers, who was up on another ladder next to Parp’s.
“Oh no,” said Bang.  “This is show business.  It has to be a blowjob.”
Bobby gave him a funny look.  Bang gave him a funny look back.
Parp was grim.
“What’s really funny,” he said, “is that they think they know what women want because it’s what they, their friends, and Oprah want.  They don’t know you can walk three blocks and find women who think Oprah is a frigid twat.”
“Yeah,” said Bang.  “Any bar on the Lower East Side.”
Then Bobby said: “Mondi pretty much thinks Oprah’s a frigid ...  y’know.”
“You’re shitting me!” I laughed.
“Maybe not in those words, but, um ...  ya know what?  I’m going to tell her that and she may put it in her next tattoo.”
Parp laughed.  Bang did that goose-hiccup again.
Lucky bastard.  Whispers, I mean.  In case you don’t know, Mondi McDade wrote Not on the Hood of My Car which was on the radio five times an hour in the Summer of ’83.  And she had tattoos, which were not really that common on babes in the eighties.  In his Rolling Stone interview Derek Mool of the Belly Shells said that the best blowjob he’d ever gotten was from Mondi McDade.
“I think Oprah’s a frigid twat.”
It was a chick’s voice, so we all turned to look.  The voice belonged to a stand-in sitting on the set getting lights on her.  Pretty.  Dark.
“Hey!” she shouted to a bunch of chicks sitting out in the chairs, “is Oprah a frigid twat or what?!”
They all shouted “twat” and “fuck Oprah.” Some of them clapped.
“I’ve got a rigid twat Oprah can suck,” one of them said.
“Rigid?”
“I’ve got a stiff little post the twat can lick for me.”
I think I may have shivered a little.  It was like: this is my home and these are my people.  Babes who say things like “suck my snatch” and “gimme that cock.”
I cursed myself for all the times I’d taken them for granted.
And right now, remembering those girls, those lovably sloppy girls who I later denounced in a fit of middle-class hauteur brought on by a reawakened “spirituality” (oh God if I could only go back in time and kick myself in the balls!) a tear nearly comes to my eye.  Just remembering that day we shot Little Round Jewish Hat ...
That first day.  — I’m getting all misty just from thinking about it.  It was a whole mind-set.  God I wish I could go back and hug every single one of the little twats.
But enough of that.  Back to the damn story.
Actually, that first day we were shooting only a couple scenes from the video.  They were going to shoot a couple more down at Vider’s the next day.
Here’s how that first day’s location was laid out.
We were at a tiny theatre in the garment district of New York City about three blocks from Madison Square Garden.  Shooting in a black box off-off Broadway is a lot cheaper than renting a soundstage someplace.  All the sound was going to be re-recorded in a studio anyway so nobody cared about the sound of the car horns and the sirens and the pneumatic drills that bled in from the street while shooting the image.
The tiny off-off theatre?  It was called Hannibal’s Demise.  That’s where Parp and pals decided to do their shooting.  Our shooting.
Picture this.  You walk into a small office building.  You go to the elevator bank at the back of the lobby and there’s a big door next to the elevator doors.  Over this door is a sign that says, “Hannibal’s Demise.”
(The guy who rents the place out pronounces it, “duh-MEEZ.” Yes, he is a pansy.)
You go through that big door.  Suddenly you’re surrounded by risers.  On the risers are chairs like movie theatre chairs.  There’s an aisle through these risers that leads to a so-called stage that’s really just a platform one foot off the floor and painted black.  Everything is painted black.  If you took the stage and risers out it would look exactly like the empty cellar in the house of a suburban dominatrix.
The stage walls were draped in bright green fabric so that a different background could be composited in later like they did with Star Wars. They can do that shit on a Mac.  Parp ended up doing it for Little Round Jewish Hat.
The stand-in — the pretty dark chick who screamed out, “is Oprah a frigid twat or what?” — was sitting right in the middle of the stage about five feet in front of the green screen.
And the chicks who called back to her were sprawled out in the theatre seats on the risers like a bunch of mostly-fuckable girl-slobs.  Coats everywhere.  A prop table.  Big boxes of crap ...  a portable freezer for sodas and a table with donuts and coffee.
Gotta have your donuts and coffee.
And Whispers and Parp?  Like I said they were climbing around on ladders along the green screen with some blonde Brit-boy they called the “gaffetographer” because he was both cinematographer and gaffer.  They had tape and twine and a big stapler they kept handing back and forth.  There were two guys with black t-shirts adjusting settings on the camera really carefully like it was a nuclear weapon.  These guys and the camera were between the stage and the risers.
Me and Bang were standing kind of next to the camera guys.  We each had a cup of coffee in our hands.  Makeup babe was about to get to us.  Costume babe had just checked our inseams.
Ever meet one of those chicks who is essentially an armpit in a jumpsuit? That was costume babe so ...  no inseam titillation that day.
Sitting just behind us was Lenny Paine, the “star” of the video — the guy who sings the song and loses his yarmulke.  He was getting all made up and wearing this costume that was just some lame suit that a college prof might wear.  His jacket-with-elbow-patches was pitched out on the risers somewhere behind him until he was actually needed on set.  Some young girl — maybe fifteen with an incredible rack and exposed cleavage — was making up his hands for Christ’s sake.
“So what are you doing here?” Bang asked me.
“I’m an actor, hence the makeup and threads,” I said.
“Oh yeah, me too.  No makeup though.  For some reason my skin is brownish-colored already.” He took a sip of his coffee from the donut-shop paper cup.  “Maybe they could make my eyebrows darker?”
“Nahhhh ...  your eyebrows are to die for.”
“So what do you do in real life?” he asked.  “What’s your job?”
“What — what do you mean?”
“What’s your job, how do you make a living?”
“Well, I’m an actor-slash-model.”
“And when you’re not modeling actor slashes what do you do?  I heard you were a bartender at one of the Blarney Stones in midtown.”
“Nope.”
“Oh.”
I cleared my throat.  You know, a self-deprecating cough.  If you watch sitcoms you know the kind of cough I mean.  “I tend bar at one of the Irish Taverns at midtown.  The one on Fiftieth near Broadway.”
“And of course you would not want to be mistaken for a Blarney Stoner.”
Shit, I’m thinking, a second ago I was an actor.  Now I’m a fucking bartender.
“Did Parp tell you that?  That I’m a bartender?”
“I don’t know.  Is it a secret?”
“Well ...”
“Why are you so touchy about it?  We all have day jobs.  Although the comedy thing is kind of picking up for me.”
“Well ...  I’ve been getting some good bites at auditions,” I said.  He smiled at me like he could tell I was full of shit.
“So,” I said, “were you born in India?”
“I’m Jewish.  I was born in Astoria.”
“But you do such a great Indian accent.”
“That’s why they call it an ‘act’.”
“Jesus,” I said, “now who’s being defensive?”
“I’m not being defensive.  I’m yanking your chain.  Perhaps you know it as busting your balls.  Or your chops.  Or your shoes.  — Stop me when I hit a noun you recognize.”
“Hey,” I said, “don’t you find this whole video vaguely ...  insulting?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t find it just a touch anti-Semitic?”
“Why?  Because the Jew gets the girl?  Because he sings and dances in broad daylight in the middle of Soho?”
“I was thinking the whole thing about calling a yarmulke a ‘little round Jewish hat.’”
He laughed.  “What, so he should call it a large square Arab hat?  ”
This was starting to piss me off.  Bang looked up at Parp on the ladder. “Hey Parp!” he laughed.  “You anti-Semite you! How dare you call it a little round Jewish hat?!”
Parp looked at Bang and furrowed his brow.  Then he looked at me.  He rolled his eyes.
Bang laughed again.
I really wanted the spotlight off me at that moment.
“So what’s your real name?” I asked, thinking I might get him on the defensive for a second.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“It can’t be Bangalore Springfield.”
“Of course not.”
“Then what is it?”
“Ringo Calzone.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Yes,” he said.  “I am shitting you.”
How do you talk to a guy like that?  I was all ready to find someplace else to stand when he said: “Hey, doesn’t Kurt Libby work at the Irish Stone Blarney?  You know him?”
Wow.  A sentence that wasn’t trying to kick my ass.
“Yeah,” I said.  “Went to school with him too.  He tends bar in the restaurant at the Commodore Hotel, though.  It’s kind of down the street from where I work.”
Bang crushed his cup.
“Libby really hates Parp, huh?” he said.
“Sure seems like it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Live and Learn!
I didn’t know why Bang was interested, but it was something to talk about while waiting for the sweaty film boys to get things squared away or their shit together or their film all on a roll or whatever they call it when their asses are finally in gear.
“Yeah,” I told Bang.  “You could say Libby hates Parp.  In a way.  After a fashion.”
And yeah, it’s the same Kurt Libby I told you about way back in that early chapter.  Chapter five or six or something.  You remember.  The tubby-fuck ex-wrestler from Ann Arbor who got the serial blowjob from Constance that weekend so long ago when we were all just barely out of high school.  Kurt Libby of the Kurt and Constance Episode, the event that drove me into therapy and made me come to terms with my need to be lord of all tail.
To the extent that I have come to terms with it.
Kurt’s around.  He’s in the city.  Like I told Bang, he tends bar in the restaurant at the Commodore Hotel, the big one on Sixth Avenue.  He poured Bill Clinton a drink once.
Wife, no kids but three cats, lives near Riverside Drive in the Nineties.
When we graduated from college Kurt belonged to that little group of kids I decided I could live without ever seeing again, so it was a good decade or so before I ran into him even though we only lived about thirty blocks from each other in Manhattan.  In 1994 I went down to Soho to auditon for Depth Charge Repertory Theater and boom, there was Kurt Libby on the other side of the table: a lot thinner and almost no hair.
Kurt was a member of Depth Charge Rep and after my interview and audition he recommended me to be a member, bygones being bygones and water being under the bridge the way it often is when time passes and you wonder what happened to your old chums and you wish you could see them again just to to tell them it’s okay.
So there we were, me and Kurt Libby in the mid-1990s, members of Depth Charge Rep, which back in those days used to call itself the “Home of Literate Theatre” and produced almost exclusively Oscar Wilde plays.  Critics found that weird – a bunch of Americans off-Broadway doing British comedy from a century earlier.  So then it became the “Home of Dangerous Theater” and every production we did was pretty much a new play about people in square relationships who end up having strange sex with partners they later have to kill.
Critics thought we were a lot better suited to that kind of play than we were to Salome and Lady Windermere’s Fan.
We did a few critically-acclaimed shows, too.   See, right about then was when the New York Times hired a guy to go around reviewing off-Broadway shows instead of just Broadway.  And a couple years later was when theatres started having websites.  – Before that you had to advertise or get publicity in newspapers and magazines and that was a struggle in and of itself – raising money for advertising and press agents – never mind mounting the actual show.
So in the Eighties you could make magic and pretty much be ignored by everyone – unless you had connections.  And if you didn’t have the connections yourself you could pay out the ass for a press agent’s connections – which he or she delivered on maybe half the time.
But like I said in the mid-to-late Nineties all that started to change.  You could actually get a public presence and a New York Times review without having to pay extortion to some reptile who left slime wherever she fed.
Depth Charge did three or four shows that the New York Times guy – I forget his name right now – just loved.  The last one – the biggest deal – was this play called Smileshine, which was sort of a sequel to Death of a Salesman only not written by Arthur Miller, so the writer had to be careful about not using the same character names and other legal stuff.  Kurt and me played the late Billy Corman’s aging sons, Riff and Slappy.  It was great.  At the end of the first act, Riff (me) drills Slappy’s wife up the ass while she begs him not to, and in the third act, just before the lights come down, she blows his brains out with Slappy’s twelve-gauge while he begs her not to.
We did ninety-six performances and got great reviews.  Celebs came to see us.  I have the clippings.
Then right after it closed a lot of ego shit happened and envy shit and bottom line? We all got pissed off at each other and the company broke up.  Kurt and me were pretty down about it but we kept the friendship going.  Off and on we still talk about maybe putting another troupe together or maybe just doing another show but so far we haven’t really done anything about it.
When we first hooked back up – back in the Nineties when I ran into him at Depth Charge – we had a lot of laughs about the ol’ college days.  Of course we had to deal with the Kurt and Constance episode.  Put it behind us, get it out of the way, laugh about it.
“I needed to be lord of all tail,” I confessed, although putting it in the past tense made it less of a confession.  “It’s what got me into therapy.”
I told him all about Fritz Koch and my problem. He seemed really sympathetic, almost ashamed, like you get when you’re really hard on somebody for being a jackass and later you find out they’ve got valid emotional issues.  It was like he realized that even though it was my fault for acting like a paranoid freak, in another sense it wasn’t my fault that it was my fault.
He laughed.  I laughed.  We got a little misty.  We drank beers.
And over those same years Libby and Parp got pretty tight, even though Parp had zero to do with Depth Charge Rep except to come to a few performances.  I think he was trying to fuck one of the actresses at one point but I never found out what was really going on there.  All I know is one night she was crying and the next night she said she was going to nail Parp’s cock to the call board.
And even though I was tight with Libby and Parp was tight with him the three of us never hung together, except maybe for one Christmas party where Parp showed up for a few hours. He was starting to click with some short chick with spiky hair but he split before he got any info on her other than her first name, so later he called up Kurt for her phone number or email or something.
And Kurt turned him down.  “No can do, Parpy,” he said.  “She’s got a boyfriend.”
Now, that might not sound like such a terrible objection: Loyalty is important.  Maybe you could say that Kurt was being a little presumptuous.  He could have let the girl speak for herself.  But at least his heart was in the right place, right?
Well, here’s the thing: for about a year before that Kurt had been fucking an actress from Depth Charge, and I think I might have already mentioned that he was, how shall I phrase this: married.  Now who’s a guy to turn to when he needs to fuck around on his wife and not get judged for it? Parp , of course.  Not only is Parp not married himself but he thinks marriage is a feudal institution that kills the souls of the participating humans.
So Libby goes to Parp, tells him his marriage has turned into a big gray photo of life in prison, and by the way can he use Parp’s apartment to bang his babe in?
Parp says yes, of course.  The amoral turd.  Six months later Kurt and the actress get tired of fucking each other and two months after that Libby tells Parp he won’t give him a chick’s phone number because she has a boyfriend.
So I asked Libby when I heard about it: “You don’t think that was a weird place to start taking a stand for monogamy?”
I gigcackled when I asked it.  We were at a diner on Ninety-Second and Broadway.
He seemed taken off guard.
“Well, ya know ...” he said.  “I mean, some, some things, I mean relationships, have to be respected,” he said.
He stared at me like it was real important I buy it.  I just gigcackled.
He sighed.  Then he laughed.  “Okay, look, it’s like this, okay? I guess I had a bit of a crush on this girl.  What you call a crush, you know? And, you know, there was Parp acting like I wasn’t even there.  Sort of like, ‘Yeah, Kurt couldn’t be anything to this girl, the only thing Kurt could be good for is getting her information for me, Tony Parp.”
He took a long quaff of beer, then said: “It’s like I wasn’t even there.  Like I’m a fat guy or out of it or I don’t have a dick.  You know what that’s like?”
Indeed I do.
Even after Kurt refused to give Parp the girl’s number, the two of them still worked on a bunch of crap together.  Mostly short films.
But their friendship had definitely reached itsdenouement.
“One day I’m sitting over on that big green couch with a scotch in my hand and I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck is wrong?’ Ever have a moment like that? I’m like, ‘Shit, something’s been wrong for a long time.  What.  The fuck.  Is it?’ And then it came into my head, like a little message handwritten on a post-it.  It’s Parp.  You know what I mean? He’s just fucking depressing the shit out of me.  Look, I was around this guy for a long time.  I was starting to feel like a sell-out for having a wife and cats and not fucking the first slut he pushed my way.”
He waved at the waittress for another beer there. Or maybe he wanted the check.  I forget.  I remember him waving. “You know how he does that, right?” he asked.
“Parp pushes sluts your way?”
“You know how it’s like ...  okay. You’re hanging with him.  You’re just talking about normal day-to-day shit, then suddenly he’s like, ‘You gotta have a gym in your apartment.’ And you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s an idea, where do I put it?’ and he’s like, ‘You’ll have plenty of room as soon as you get rid of the wife and cats.’”
“The cats, too?”
“Huh-huh-huh,” he laughed.  “You know, okay, not the cats, but you know Parp, man, to do the littlest thing you have to change your life completely.  So, bottom-line, end-of-day, take-away thing? Parp depressed me.  Day in, day out, no matter what I wanted to do I was starting to think I had to change my whole life to do it.  One day – no shit, this honest-to-God happened – It’s Sunday and real quiet and I’m out getting a Red Bull and I’m thinking, ‘I have to audition more.’ And that makes me sad because the next thing I think is, ‘How am I going to tell Kandace I’m moving out?’
“So I stopped returning Parp’s calls and after awhile I got back to feeling like, ‘Hey, I like my wife and cats.’ It made Kandace happy.  She was sure Parp was going to roll some piece of snatch my way and I’d end up popping it.”
“So Kandace didn’t trust you, huh Kurt?”
“She didn’t trust Parp.  Know what I mean?”
Parp’s side of the story was shorter: “Kurt and Kandace Libby remind me of Jude the Obscure only with cats instead of kids,” he said.
I never read Jude the Obscure but when I mentioned to Libby that Parp said he and Kandace reminded him of that book Libby kind of freaked.  And ever since then whenever Parp’s name comes up all he can say is, “Fuck that guy.   Fuck that guy.”
I dunno.  Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.
Live and learn!
Chapter Fifteen
Little Round Jewish Hat
Back to the black box theatre at midtown and that first day of shooting Little Round Jewish Hat.
Bang – that’s Bangalore Springfield, the faux-Indian stand-up comic who asked me about Libby and Parp – decided he needed the eyebrow lining after all and went to find makeup babe.
I went and got some more coffee from one of the coffee boxes on the donut table and stared at the pretty, dark stand-in under the light that Parp was focusing.
You remember the stand-in.  The one who said she thought Oprah was a frigid twat.  Yeah.  She was a babe.  She was sitting on an aluminum chair with her legs straddling the back.  Only the back wasn’t solid, it was like a frame with thin, metal slats so you could see through to the tight jeans over her spread legs.  I was staring at the thin layer of denim over her cunt and she caught on.  I got a smile from her but I didn’t do anything.
Fuck me.  I forgot all about that until just now writing it out.  I was at the beginning of a flirt with this babe and then stuff happened and I’m just remembering this loose string now, five months later.
(I bet I could’ve balled her.  If I can find the contact sheet I bet I still can.)
Right then all I could think about was how great it was to be in that theatre instead of in square world.  I was in a place where I could glance at a cunt and get caught by the owner of said cunt and have her smile instead of start screaming like I raped her.  I was safe.  I was home.
And I had to beat a bitch just so I could spend the day here instead of at Chuck E. Cheese, I thought.  Somebody give me a gun so I can blow out my fucking brains.
We were all sweating.  It was March and getting toward April so it wasn’t what you would call “hot” in New York, but the lights were pretty intense in that small space so somebody’d clicked on the air conditioner and makeup babe did another round of touch-ups on the actors.
“So okay one thing I’ve always wanted to ask you libertarians is this,” Lenny Paine called up to Parp.  I had navigated back to where I was standing with Bang only now Lenny was standing next to me.
“What?”
“How do you defend countries like Guatemala and El Salvador?”
Parp didn’t say anything for a long time, just kept playing with this big light aiming it down at the sweet snatch in the aluminum chair, then finally he said: “I don’t get it.”
“Hey Lenny,” said Bobby.  “We’re about ready for you and Theresa so why don’t you do something like get into character.”
“Dude, I am my character.”
That’s where I tuned out.  Bobby was coming down the ladder to have a conversation with Lenny, Parp was still screwing with the lights, I was trying to figure out the connection between libertarians and El Salvador. I mean, libertarians are nature’s nutjobs, but I don’t think they’re in charge of any countries that I know of.
And if there are any libertarians reading this, sorry about calling you nature’s nutjobs – especially you libertarians not getting blowjobs from my wife, except you know it’s true.  I mean, heroin should be for sale at Wal-Mart?  Really?
“Why shouldn’t heroin be for sale?” Parp asked me once.
“Um, because, it eats the brain?”
“You mean like gin?”
That’s pretty much the gist of any conversation with a libertarian.  You have to just smile and ride it out and have the real conversations with people who know that gin is not heroin.
“So do you believe in legalizing marijuana?” Parp asked once.
“Yeah,” I said.  “Medical marijuana, why not?”
“What’s the difference between medical marijuana and regular marijuana?”
“Doctor,” I said.  “A doctor says you can have it?”
“Why should it be illegal to buy drugs unless you pay a state-licensed doctor to write it down on a piece of paper from the magic pad?” asked Parp.  “If you want to see a doctor first, okay, nobody’s stopping you, but why should you have cops on your doorstep if you want to buy drugs without getting a permission slip first?”
“Because it’s fucking dangerous shit out there!” I said.  “Not everybody thinks first, they have to have a brake on them before they do something dangerous.”
“Ya know what’s dangerous?” Parp asked.  “Trusting doctors because they have the magic pad.  Just ask Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson.  Oh yeah, you can’t ask them.  Ya know why?  Their doctors killed them. ”
Fuck it.  Libertarians.  A doctor killed Michael Jackson so now let’s put the cocaine back in Coca-Cola.
So even though Lenny was pretty wrong about Guatemala and El Salvador, at least he knew that Parp was kind of a laughingstock.  You have to admire that.
After Bobby got down to talk to Lenny, he called over Theresa to have a chat.  That’s Theresa — the leading lady, who like, I don’t know, had two words to say and a lot of dancing and silent acting while Lenny sings — and holy fuck, if you’ve seen the video you know already: what a sucktastic rack!  That is not a trick effect.  Those tits werenot added in post.
Definitely a gorgeous babe in spite of being a nasty bitch, which you’ll find out about in a minute.  I’d say she was late twenties.  Blonde hair and a super-dark complexion so you know the hair is dyed but who the fuck cares, am I right?
And the most tremendous cock-gobbler lips in the cock-gobbling biz.
I already mentioned that Junior has CG lips, but not like these.  It’s like God had a hardon when He made her mouth.  – A set of warm, wet, suction pillows for your dick.  You see these lips and you’re ready to forgive any other imperfection that is not morbid obesity.
I walked up to her as she was coming down to the stage.  We hadn’t met yet so my smile was at its shiniest.
“So,” I gigcackled, “what’s it like to be doing something Frank wanted to do?”
“Huh?”
“You know, the ol’ Chairman of the Board wanted to do this song.”
“No he didn’t.”
“Oh, well, I have it on pretty good authority ...”
“Parp wrote the lyrics and George Vider wrote the music.  I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re talking about.”
“Huh,” I said, like she just pointed out that I wasn’t good-looking enough to speak to her.  It stings, but you can’t really argue.
She pushed past me to get to the stage.  When she was like five steps away from me she turned around to give me one last “you-are-a-bug” look.
I resented that.  And from that moment on I changed her name in my head from Theresa to Main Cunt.
It helped.  It still does when I think back on it, the cunt.
Now get this.  Just as this stuck-up bitch is about to hit the lip of the so-called stage in this so-called theatre, in from behind me strides this new chick I hadn’t seen before.  She sneaks up on Main Cunt and surprises her with a kiss on the cheek.  Main Cunt stops, smiles, and starts chatting with her pal.
Now, you have to remember that Whispers is waiting to talk to Main Cunt. The director is waiting.  The husband of Mondi McDade is waiting. She had her little conversation with me on the fly, while she was moving, but her pal shows up and suddenly she forgets where she is and starts to chatter.
So Bobby gives her this dull, holy-shit-you-can’t-be-pulling-this-amateur-crap look.  She sees this look and turns away from her pal who gives her kind of a little wave while Main Cunt gets on the stage next to Lenny to rehearse the master shot.
The pal has a goofy broad-brimmed hat on, like she should be wearing a serape, for Christ’s sake, only she isn’t because it’s seventy-five in the shade (in March!) and in midtown Manhattan there is no shade, only hot pavement and guys pushing closets on wheels.
She looks up at me for a sec – the pal does, I don’t know why she looks up at me but there I am and we make eye contact and ...
She makes a face!  And looks away!
I’m thinking, ya damn cunt!  Like I need that now!
And then I’m thinking: fuck it, Parp is right, I gotta get a gym in my house and to fuck with what the wife says!  And these fucking abs!  I gotta do the diet and fuck what the wife cooks!
I was frustrated.  My shitty body.  Chicks used to dig me!  And now my wife is fucking ruining any chance I might have for a fuck on the side by making sure I never work out and that I’m always pounding down steaks and roasts and cakes and beers.
Cunt!
Oh, I was so pissed off at the world.  Only Tony Parp seemed to be my friend.  Parp, who knew that wives were the enemy.  Parp, who knew what I had to do to get my cock drained, and who told me, and how did I repay him?  By scoffing ...
Yeah, right at that second – before I knew he had his eye on my wife’s cock-gobbler lips – I knew exactly why I was still hanging around Parp. It was so clear to me, right then, that I couldn’t figure out why I ever had a hard time answering Jessica when she asked me.
Parp was the anti-Chuck E. Cheese.  Ithelped that he hated that shit that everyone else thinks is clean and wholesome and that he hates talking about it.  Makes him more of a dividing line.  Around Parp it was like I wasn’t too old to live my dream without people giggling behind their hands or tsk-tsking or rolling their eyes.
It’s the way I felt when Depth Charge Rep was still going.  It’s the reason guys like me and Libby have Parp in our lives, even though we know he’s an evil fuck.  I have a wife who decided that letting me live my life instead of playing the role of The Man in her domestic fantasy was a favor she was doing me, and when she got tired of doing me that favor she sat me down and informed me that all I had to do to pay her back was give it all up and be a happy, pension-earning bartender.
Ask the twat if I could please put a gym in the corner of the living room or could we please put the family on a low-carb diet so Daddy could lose some fucking weight?  I’d be lucky if she didn’t break down and cry.  I’d get another long-distance call from her father telling me how disappointed he was.  I grew up with dreams and now I have to beg some cunt’s forgiveness if she overhears me talking about them in my sleep.
If I’d listened to Parp a year ago I’d have pecs and abs right now, I thought, instead of looking like such crap that hot chicks cluck their tongues at me.
I wanted to split right then and run around the block.  I wanted to get to a clean stretch of floor and do push-ups and sit-ups until I puked, and whatever other exercise I had to do to look and feel pumped.  But I just stood there and kind of looked at the space where Main Cunt’s pal had been standing when she made the face at me.  I still had that stupid cup of coffee in my hand.  And some stupid costume that made me look like some yuppy jerk with crappy abs.
“Hey Paulmanheimer.” It was Bang coming up the aisle.  “Parp is looking for you.”
So I found Parp.  He was off the ladder now and standing on the stage, just kind of looking at everybody.
I looked crestfallen when he saw me.  I know he noticed but he didn’t ask why, the callous prick.  He just wanted Bobby to know where I was and told me not to wander too far away since they might need me in a minute.
“So Theresa said you wrote the lyrics and Vider wrote the music for this,” I said.
“Oh yeah.  You didn’t know that?”
“You said Sinatra wanted to sing it!  I look like a, well, like a damn idiot.”
Parp laughed and said: “I can’t believe you believed that!”
“So I’m the only one who thought it was a Sinatra tune?”
“You’re jerking me around, right?  Wait, you really thought I was serious about Sinatra?”
Now, if you’ve seen the video, you know they went way out of their way to make it seem Sinatra-esque.  The jazzy tune, the finger-snapping, and Lenny was pretty much doing a Sinatra impression.  – I’m just saying I don’t think I was the only person who might have been fooled.  I really don’t.
“Well, now Theresa thinks I’m a retard,” I said.
“You told her Sinatra wanted to sing this song?” He shook his head and laughed and stared at the floor, like I was the guy you could always count on to break wacky.
“Hey.  Dude.  You told me Sinatra wanted to sing it.  I believed you.  I’m not some dumb-but-lovable sitcom character.”
Just then the assistant-director dyke waved her clipboard over her head and screamed “Rehearsal!” like somebody just stabbed her in the ass. People ran around for a few seconds, stopped, then a shaved-headed guy with headphones turned on an audio player and the melody of Little Round Jewish Hat started playing over the theatre loudspeakers.
It was on a piano.  Just the melody, so Lenny’s lips could be synched to it later in the studio.
Then Lenny started to sing.
It was a sunny old day
Just a funny old day
I was makin’ my way
Down to Broome Street
When a breeze came by
Kinda ruffled my tie
Blew some schmutz in my eye
There on Pitt Street
I lost my little round Jewish hat!
It blew away — just like that!
I forgot to wear the little clip,
Now it’s swingin’ down the Soho strip!
I was runnin’ like heck
Coulda broken my neck
How’d I step in this drek?
Somebody tell me!
When next thing I knew
She was chasin’ it too
Straight outta the blue
She tried to help me
I lost my little round Jewish hat!
It blew away — just like that!
I forgot to wear the little clip,
Now it’s swingin’ down the Soho strip!
Well, it blew down a lane
Then it blew down a drain
Then blew into a train
Man it was movin’
Wherever it sailed
She stayed on its tail
Up hill and down dale
Yeah she was groovin’
Now hatless or not
It was almost Shabbat
Didn’t wanna get caught
Out at sundown
When who should appear
Grinning ear-to-ear
With my little head-gear
That she’d run down?
She found my little round Jewish hat!
And she brought it back — how ‘bout that?
And I know she thinks I’m pretty hip
‘Cause we’re swingin’ down the Soho strip!
She found my little round Jewish hat!
And she brought it back — how ‘bout that?
And I know she thinks I’m pretty hip
‘Cause we’re swingin’ down the Soho strip!
Lenny and Main Cunt rehearsed it a couple more times.
“Smile at each other,” Bobby said.
“Smile?” Bang laughed.  “Like breeders or blowers?”
Nobody else laughed.  It was that lame.
Whispers gave him a look that said, Dude, we’re trying to make a film here. Bang stopped laughing and scratched his head.  The assistant-director dyke looked at him like she just caught him crapping on the sidewalk.
“Jesus, ya clown,” she said.
We rehearsed it some more.  All of us.
Lenny and Main Cunt smiled at each other, right, then they’re “swingin’ down the Soho strip.”
By the way, kids, there is no “Soho Strip.” If you think there is because you heard about it in the video, consider yourself a victim of one of Parp’s many lies.  That’s right, he made it up so he’d have something to rhyme with “clip,” the lazy shit.
So down on this “Soho Strip,” Lenny and Main Cunt walk past other people like me and, as it turns out, Main Cunt’s pal with the string-shoulder tank top and gaucho hat.
Really, you could look at the video.  There we are, see us?  Only she took the gaucho hat off before they started shooting.  I’m the guy next to her doing my famous “nonplussed” look.  It’s kind of a one-take double take. Bobby thought it would be cool if me and the pal were pretending to be out on a date, which was okay with me.  It gave me a chance to act suave.
So there we are in front of the green screen, swingin’ down the Soho “strip,” when we see this zany guy lurch for a small piece of felt pulled off his head by some fishing line.
I gigcackled on one take.  That could have been a mistake.  But Main Cunt’s pal just smiled like we were on a date and she loved my strange little laugh.  I was really starting to admire her ass.  In the low-rise jeans with the black tank top that didn’t quite reach all the way she had a bare midriff and I could almost – almost – see ass-cleavage.
“Cut,” Bobby said.
“CUT!!!!!” the assistant-director dyke screamed.
“Paul,” Bobby said.  “Don’t be checking Cameron’s ass when Lenny’s hat flies off his head.”
“It’s ...  it’s a character thing,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
Chapter Sixteen
No More Wheaty Charms
I look back on that day now and it was a great day.  It was the start of something big that I screwed up weeks later because I trusted Parp and he sabotaged me.
Ahhhhh ...I dunno.  Maybe I fucked it up all by myself.  Maybe I’m ...
Nah, it was Parp.  You’ll see.  Sabotaging me, selling me out, sinking my hopes, stabbing me in the back. These are all hobbies of Parp’s.  More than hobbies.  Avocations.
“Yeah, yeah,” you’re thinking. “The people in your life have nothing better to do, I’m sure.”
Well, you’ll see.  You just don’t know Parp and how much of a life he doesn’t have.  You don’t think he takes the time to plan out how he’s going to fuck me over?
Like I said: you’ll see.  I mean, the guy is fucking my wife while I’m typing this, all right?  What more do you want?
So right now my life eats monkey balls.  I started coughing today.  An old-man, smoker’s hack that started me obsessing on the odds I’ll get cancer.  But that day back in March.  That day at Hannibal’s Demise.  With Cammy and Bang and Lenny and Bobby.  That was a great day.
Jessica says one of the reasons I have so many lousy days is I  expect each day to be lousy.
“Why not try this,” she said about a year, maybe two years ago.  “Just – when you get up in the morning?  – this is what some people do: they start out assuming every day is going to be a great day until they, you know, something happens.  It’s just ...not every day is going to be great but at least when you start each day you’re giving it the benefit of the doubt.  You think you might want to give that a try?”
Sounds great, doesn’t it?  I tried it for a few days, and yeah, it kind of worked.  I smiled a bunch.  Me and Sam went out on walks while the wife was at work and Harry was at school.  I trundled him around Riverside Park and smiled real shiny at all the hot single mommies.  Great day!  Isn’t it? Smile!
“Someone’s in a good mood!” one of them said.
“Hey, it’s a great day!” I yelled back.
The boy laughed a lot.  That was great.  I think I mentioned we’re pals.  When the three of us are out, that’s the Man Squad.  When two of us are out, that’s the Man Quorum.  I even invented a new breakfast for the Squad: Wheaty Charms.  See, Mommy doesn’t want them eating Lucky Charms so I invented Wheaties with a Lucky Charms frosting, you know?
I’m the good guy!
But, you know, shit comes down.  Chicks you’re not supposed to be balling tell you to stop balling them and you can’t complain because they could tell the wife and you could get divorced and only see the Man Squad every other weekend.  The bank calls up because the co-op mortgage is late and the wife is pissed off and you’re a nobody bartender with some clippings waiting on asshole actors who have careers and hanging with Kurt Libby the loser and Tony Parp the prick and meanwhile in just a few decades you’ll be either dead or some old man showing his incisions off to strangers.
But yeah, give every day the benefit of the doubt.
You tell yourself, “Be in the moment, I’m a trained actor, I can do that, look at the lovely shine on this porcelain plate, is there anything lovelier?” And you hate yourself for being such a happy-pill-gulping, Chopra-quoting , mantra-chanting monkey.
Maybe some Zen will fix it ...there is no ego, there is no linear thought, it’s all an illusion.
Then you make the mistake of telling Parp and he says, “Zen is just another slave philosophy.  Like all Eastern religions.  Give up your ego and reach a higher plane.  You know what the higher plane is?  It’s where you’re finally content to sit on your knees and never look up unless it’s to kiss the tax-collector’s ass.  And if you ask why?  Hey, that makes you a linear-thinking ego-haver.  You don’t want to be one of those, do you?  No?  Then ...pucker up and no questions!”
And pretty soon the whole give-each-day-the-benefit-of-the-doubt attitude is something that lasts for the first five minutes of each day until the wife says, “No more Wheaty Charms.”
“But — ”
“No more Wheaty Charms!”
Still, that first day of shooting  Little Round Jewish Hat?  That was a great day and I had no idea while it was happening.
Chapter Seventeen
Lounge Act
There are lots of takes and re-takes in movies. You probably know that already.  Actors get into character, do some lines, stop, do them again until somebody says okay, fine.  If the director is really nervous, it could be forever before the “okay, fine” comes.  Meanwhile, said director is starting to get defensive because he can see production assistants rolling their eyes.
The best way to keep that guy from turning a fun day into a nightmare of “one more time” is to have somebody standing close to him – the cinematographer or audio person or assistant director –say something like “Wow!” after the fifth or sixth take.  You know?  A “wow” that says, I’ve seen this so many times I could puke but that last time through made me a believer again.
That’s pretty much what the director is looking for anyway.  Audience reaction.  Approval.  Stroking. Assurance.
So all I’m saying is, crew: Do you want to go home?  The word is “wow.”
See, there’s no such thing as labor laws in movies.  Actually, there are but nobody pays attention to them unless you’re a kid, including the union.  So twelve hours into your eight hour day you will start to have psychotic impulses. For example, moving in on Lenny’s face means moving all the lights close, the camera close, then somebody says, “Doesn’t look like the same light,” and out come the bounce boards.  Or the cloth suspended in frames like sails, and these contraptions all sit in a four-foot square area.  Then these boards go up by his face and they shoot.
Again.  And again.  Until somebody says, “Wow!” and the director says, “Okay, fine.”
Think about it the next time you see a movie.  See that shot on the desert island?  Any shot.  Guarantee you if the camera moved one foot to the right of the castaway you’d see some sweaty guy in a Willy-Nelson get-up holding a big piece of cardboard.  And if you could read his mind?  There’d be a better than even chance you’d get a visual of the director with a plastic fork in his eye.
But the filmtards just do what they’re told and keep their mouths shut, like the guys who dragged slabs for the pharaohs.  It’s what they do.  Meanwhile, for the rest of us it’s just a butt-load of waiting and drinking coffee and not being at Chuck E.  Cheese.
****
I thought I noticed some gratuitous squeezes on my arm when we were walking down the so-called “Soho strip.” — And I looked at Cammy and she gave me kind of a little smile and I gigcackled kind of quietly.
(Oh yeah.  Main Cunt’s pal?  Her name is Cameron.  I call her Cammy now.)
Of course, I wasn’t sure right then that she was coming on to me, but I was hoping, in spite of the completely uncalled-for face she made at me when we first made eye contact.  I thought, “Is shit happening?  Or is she just acting?”
But the more I thought about it the more it seemed like shit must be happening.  Why else would she be squeezing my forearm and pressing her ass cheek up against mine?  To stay in “character”?  It just didn’t seem feasible.  So I gigcackled softly some more and I thought about it.
Then Bobby got the great idea to do a close-up of my famous “nonplussed look” – the one-take double take – when Lenny’s yarmulke first goes flying off his head.
(No, it’s not in the video.  Parp cut it out because he’s a vindictive prick.  “Timing,” he said.  “The footage was running longer than the song so something had to go.” What a wipe.)
So suddenly I got to be the center of attention. For a long time, too.  Remember what I just got done saying about close-ups and people surrounding the actor and staring at him and making sure his light is just right for take after take after take? Well, that was me in the center of it all.  I was all alone up there on the stage in front of the green screen with makeup whore patting my face and cameras and crew closing in.  And best of all I got to show Cammy that I had wit.  That I was urbane if not dashing.  That I was a somebody, and not just a somebody with a day job rubbing glass mugs.
At first, when Bobby said he wanted to get the close-up and everyone should get off the stage but me, I gigcackled self-deprecatingly and said, “You sure you don’t want Cameron up here?”
“Nope, just you,” said Bobby.
“’Cause she’s a lot prettier than I am.”
I looked at her as she was stepping off the stage when I said that.  She turned around and gave me the smile that said I’m such a sweetheart.
I gigcackled again when I saw that.
Parp and Whispers caught the exchange gave me the look that says, Somebody’s trying to put his penis in the blonde girl.  But they didn’t say anything.
I had a great time.  Holy guacamole.  I was like Noel Coward playing a Las Vegas lounge with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other.  In between takes while the crew was making adjustments, people kept lobbing softballs at me and I kept parking them and all the babes were laughing.  Even Main Cunt laughed, but if she wanted a piece of this now after her last little tirade she was going to have to work for it.
Ya know?
For example Bobby said: “Looking good.  Did you know you were getting a close-up?”
And I said: “Ah, so this is a ‘close-up’?  Do you think anyone will notice my eyes are in fact tattoos?”
And somebody said: “Would you move closer to the light?”
And I said: “I’ll move closer, but if I see dead relatives and Jesus I’m backing away again.”
And Bang said: “Hey Paul are you gay?”
And I said: “Not even a little.  But if I were persuadable on that head I’d fuck your brains out, sexypants.”
And Parp said: “Is this your Noel-Coward-playing-Las-Vegas routine?”
And I said: “Fuck you.”
Really, I was on a roll.  And like I said, chicks were laughing.  It was like the time in dialects class when for my midterm I got up and read the first chapter of Giles Goat-Boy with a Scots accent.
It killed.  I can credit that performance with the blowjob I got a week later from Sela Krissman.   It killed.
And up in the risers, facing the stage, there was Cammy, with her beautiful blonde hair and funny nose and round ass ...  a babe who pumps iron to stay perfect, who refuses to allow her body to follow the implications of her unfixed nose.
I could see her over the heads of the crew.
At one point, during my rapid-fire exchange with the filmtards, she was standing and facing away from me, then turned around, caught me looking at her, sat down, opened her legs and grabbed her thighs so that her hands framed her cunt while she gave me the smile that said, Want this cunt?
Someone giggled and said “Cameron!” but she was far enough back in the risers that most people didn’t see.
I looked away.  Bobby said, “What’s going on?” and he and Parp turned around for a minute to scan whatever it was I might have been looking at.  But by then Cammy was yawning a great big exaggerated yawn.
They didn’t catch on.
“You okay, Paul?” Parp asked.
“Yup, just ...” I trailed off there, “...  distracted ...” I said finally.  I could only see Cammy with my peripheral vision but I’m pretty sure she was smiling.
Oh, Cam.  It’s harsh remembering this.
Chapter Eighteen
Hopes and The Getting Up Of Them
Note to Jessica: It’s not helping to remember how Cammy got my hopes up.
Note to students studying this work of vengeance and justice a hundred years from now: getting your hopes up is what we call one of the cruelest things a human can do to a fellow human.  In the industrialized world, anyway.  And not counting things humans do to other humans with pliers and piano wire.
Maybe they still do it in your century and they call it something more modern.  Like cyberdream-jacking.  Or digital de-hoping.  Maybe you’ve made it against the law.  I’d like to think that you have.
Getting your hopes up means someone deliberately makes you happy, optimistic.  It means they make you visualize a future in which something wonderful has come true for you. And once you come to believe in the likelihood of that wonderful future, the person who got your hopes up tells you it was a big fat lie, so you have to watch that happy future disappear.  So you can feel like you lost something you never really had to begin with.
Getting your hopes up.  It’s something you can do to yourself: then it’s just stupid.  But when you do it to someone else?  That’s evil, man.
When I was a teen me and my pals paid a chick fifteen bucks to tell a fat pig named Ricky she had a crush on him.  Her name was Marcy.  She was a slut.  She wore garters to school with this really wide gap, like a hooker, and we kind of made fun of her for being loose but we all wanted to fuck her anyway and she knew it.  I can remember her sitting at the table in the cafeteria looking at me with this big smirk on her face and her elbows on the table while she tore a piece of bread apart with her fingers in front of her face.
“I know you want to fuck me,” she said.
“Do not,” I said.
She laughed and put the bread in her mouth. “Okay, well, my pussy’s nice and tight ...”
Anyway, we knew that Ricky was beating off to her and didn’t even have the smarts to know that he wasn’t supposed to act like he didn’t want to fuck her.  I mean, lookit you kids: he was a fatty.  A girl with a nice ass and a garter gap said she wanted to grab his cock.  What was he going to do, get coy?
Anyway, Marcy got his hopes up.
Then – while he was watching – she came over to our table in the cafeteria to make us pay up.  We could see the look on Ricky’s face when we were all laughing.  You know that look.  That horrible look that says you can’t even trust your own happiness any more because it might be just a bunch of assholes fucking with you.  It’s the feeling that says you were a chump and the whole world saw it.
That’s what it’s like for me now, remembering that first day Cammy came on to me.
Now how is that supposed to be therapeutic?
You think Ricky was a chump for letting a paid-off teen-twat get his hopes up?  He was nothing next to me.  When Cammy framed her cunt at me?  I loved Parp right then.  Hey, he delivered, right?  If it hadn’t been for him I’d have been at Chuck E. Cheese that day and fingering the barrel of the metaphorical revolver.
So I was glowing all over with esteem for my old pal the Parpster.  How’s that for chumpiness?
I stood there in front of the green screen at Hannibal’s Demise that day last March, doing my patented “nonplussed” look for the camera and thinking about Cammy’s cunt.  Her just-framed cunt.  Her no-doubt-sweet cunt.  A cunt I’d never seen but was pretty sure I’d see pretty soon. I thought about what a pronounced, meat-friendly mound it must be.
I was standing there thinking that as soon as they were done with my close-up I was going to mount the risers to where she was sitting and close the deal.  The head of my dick was moving against my thigh.  It was the start of the days-long serial hardons you get when you first meet a chick and you know you’re going to fuck her unless one of you gets arrested or disfigured first.
And in case you’re wondering, no, I wasn’t afraid I’d have to explain Admiral Ballsy’s sudden muscularity to the wife.  See, about a year after Sammy was born I had an online babe I was IM-ing for months before it blew over.  She lived in Kansas City and she could really talk some filth.  She sent me a pic that showed her having this uber-thin waist but with a really huge ass with a thong on it that had no chance for survival; a thong that disappeared into her butt-crack like it was lint between sofa cushions. And she stuck that ass out at the camera, like she was saying, Yeah, my ass is huge, now shut up and put your cock in it.
Hey, I’m pretty sure that’s a mainstream fantasy.  If it isn’t, just remember: I’m an artist.
She sent me a sound file of her voice saying, “I wanna lick yer balls, Paulie,” over and over.  At least, I played it over and over so I could get her voice down — the lowness, the breathiness, the Midwestern accent — before I deleted it forever.
I mean, the hard drive is in my living room!
We kept chatting about meeting up and for about two weeks I had a cock I could have pushed open French doors with.  I was pounding Junior’s cunt every day while that was going on, until finally she figured I was so into fucking her that it might be worth it to try withholding sex again to see if she could make me do stuff.
And it might have worked, too.  No kidding.  If Junior had asked for a clean exchange of services then fuck it, she’d have been the boss.  “Spend Christmas and New Year’s at your mother’s in exchange for a month of anal? Sign me up, babe!”
But Junior could never come right out and tell me what it was she wanted me to do in exchange for the sex.  She needed me to guess, and I suck at guessing, so all she ended up doing was driving me into the shower for half an hour twice a day.
And through all of that she never had the slightest clue that the hardons were for the ass crack of some babe who tortured me through my computer.
I guess if that happened now I could IM my Kansas City babe all day.  I could leave anything I wanted on the hard drive forever, like I was Parp, who has a screensaver of SuicideGirls all bent over with their cunt lips hanging.
Nah, I couldn’t even do that.  Not unless I wanted to to explain cunt lips to the boys and I’m really not up for that.
Oh yeah.  This is the life.  Taking care of the kids in the Summer heat, pounding cock to Internet porn while the wife bites dick in California.
But back on day one of Little Round Jewish Hat it was all about Admiral Ballsy.  And the wife was just a, well, she was just a good team player when it came to raising up the kids.
Chapter Nineteen
I Flirt With Cammy
When I got done with my close-up the filmtards immediately started setting up the next one without even a five-minute break.  That was pretty cool because no break meant they wouldn’t be bugging me and Cammy with chit-chat.  So I jammed up to where Cammy was sitting on the risers.  I practically ran.  I would have run, too, but I didn’t want to lose that cool, Noel-Coward ‘tude just yet. So in my mind I still had the cocktail glass in one hand and the cigarette in the other.
But as soon as I got up to her for some reason I forgot all about Noel.  “Hee hee heeeeeeeeee ...” I gigcackled.
She furrowed her brow at me, so I cleared my throat and lowered my voice.
“Rather a lot of fuss, no?”
She giggled.  whew.
“Would you mind frightfully if I took a seat?” I asked.
Now, it’s a tiny space so up on the risers we were kind of in earshot of even Lenny and Main Cunt on the stage.  I mean, unless we wanted to whisper really low – which is no way to continue breaking ice that got started breaking by a chick framing her cunt at me – there was no way we could have a private conversation in that theatre.
And what made my mind up for me was the fact that I could see Bangalore Springfield looking around for somebody to chat up.  I figured it would be a matter of seconds before he horned in. So I said, “Ya know what?  They’re not going to need me for awhile.  I’m going out to grab a smoke.  Want to get a coffee or something?  I mean, it ‘s what, half an hour till we’re done for the day, anyway?”
She said okay and we jammed out of there before Bang or anyone else could interrupt.  Yeah.  She jammed out after me.
So there we are on the sidewalk and I unpack a smoke and light it up while we’re walking.  “Ya know,” I said, forgetting all about Noel Coward again, “I can remember when we used to call these fags.  Hee-heeeeeeeee ...”
Right then I’m thinking: Look, she followed me out.  I’ve been getting pussy for decades with this same gigcackle.  Maybe I shouldn’t try to hide it. Besides, trying to remember to be all suave and low-voiced was starting to bruise my forehead.
“Where we going?” she asked.
Fair enough.  I just started down the sidewalk with a kind of swagger.  “Thought we’d grab a coffee,” I said.
“Yeah.  I heard.  But where?”
“Bux?”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.  It’s three blocks away.  I gotta get back for Belinda before she wonders where I went.”
“Belinda.  She’s the photog?”
“Yup.”
Okay, this Belinda chick she was talking about was the still photographer.  If you’ve been out to LittleRoundJewishHatTheVideo.com you’ve seen her work.  It’s all that “behind the scenes” crap.  Pretty much all I knew about her back then though was that she had an ass like my Kansas City babe’s: nice and big.  A big, firm, thong-devouring cock cushion under a thin waist.  She was wearing the same style low-rise jeans as Cammy: bell-bottoms, except Cammy’s were button-fly.
I’ve always favored buttons on the cunt gate.
And Belinda had really curly red hair and was hanging aloof from the crowd and clickety-click-clicking away, and every now and then laughing with Parp.
When I saw that – Belinda laughing with Parp – I was afraid it meant she might be wanting him to fuck her sometime soon.  Of course I felt the urge to intervene — for her sake, but I was distracted by the cock-gobbler lips of Main Cunt and then, of course, the whole Cammy thing happened.
“She doesn’t drive,” Cammy said.  “I’m her ride.”
There goes the blowjob.
“Yeah, all right,” I said.  “Ya wanna just stand here and talk while I smoke?  Is that okay?”
“Sure,” she said.  She squinted and pushed her hair out of her eyes.  I swung around so she wouldn’t be looking into the sun that was pretty much down already anyway.  Sometimes I’m thoughtful like that and I bank on chicks noticing and remembering.
“Definitely like your jeans,” I said.  I started to gigcackle but caught it in time to turn it to a hiss. A friendly hiss.
She smiled kind of shy.  I think it was the first and last time she ever blushed in front of me.  Then she giggled and I noticed she had a kind of odd laugh herself.  Sort of between a giggle and a chuckle.  I didn’t find it objectionable, but I knew that I could pretend that I did if it ever came to recriminations.
“So you’re Parp’s friend?” she asked.
“Yeah.  So is it just my imagination or did you frame your cunt at me?”
She gigchuckled.  “I framed it,” she said.  “You wanna lick it.”
Now we were back on track.  “Well, it kinda crossed my mind.  With some other stuff.”
“Other stuff?  Gonna teach me some stuff, Daddy?”
That was weird.  I may have gulped.
“Does that bother you?” she asked. “Want me to pretend you’re thirty?”
“Nah,” I said.  “I’m pretty good in my own skin.”
“How you gonna be in my skin,” she said.  “That’s what’s important.”
I gigcackled.  She furrowed her brow.  Again.
“That’s such a weird thing you do, that laugh,” she said.  “It’s like you want to be taken seriously, but then the laugh says you’re just kidding or it’s all lighthearted or something.”
So the gigcackle was definitely out.
“It’s just a laugh,” I said. “It’s nothing psychological or anything.  It’s just the way I laugh.”
“No, it’s fine.  It’s just ... it sounds like what a little boy does when he wants to be taken seriously and not seriously at the same time.  Like, he wants something but he doesn’t want to get blamed if it turns out that what he wants is bad.  You know, ‘Hey Susie, wanna go out in the woods so I can fuck you in your butt?...Hee-hee-hee.  Only joking Susie!’ or ‘Hey Auntie Karen, you wanna lick my cock shaft?  ...  Hee-hee-hee. Kidding Auntie Karen!”
I couldn’t believe she was riffing on me like this.  It’s a laugh, for fuck’s sake!
I was quiet for a few seconds after she said that and just puffed my cigarette.  So she said, “Hey.  I’m sorry.  I do that a lot.  I think it’s ‘cause I’m, well, kind of a writer so I’m always like trying to figure out what it means when people do stuff.  You know, the stuff they do.”
Oh look.  A chick in Manhattan who’s kind of a writer.  What are the odds?
“That’s okay,” I said. “Parp thinks he’ s kind of a writer and he’s always doing that kind of stuff with me.  It’s okay, really.”
“I’ve never really met Parp,” she said.  “So what’s he like?”
Fuck my life.  I had to mention Parp.
“He’s wound a little tight.  You want to set him off?  Tell him you won’t put any pill in your mouth unless it’s FDA-approved.”
“He has a really thin waist.  It’s like a vee.  And with that tight shirt it’s like you can see the muscles in his abs.”
“That isn’t muscle, it’s loose skin.  – But gay men are into him.”
She laughed.  “I’ll bet.  So is he bi?”
“He says he’s straight,” I said.  “But who knows?  I can definitely see Parp with dick in his face.  Big, black dick.”
I thought that would get a big laugh out of her but she looked at her watch instead.  “Belinda’s lookin’ for me!” she sang.  Then she laughed.  “I better be getting back to that theatre.  We gotta be in Nassau County at seven-thirty.”
“Okay,” I said.  “So when are we gonna, you know ...”
“We have plenty of time ...” she sing-songed again.
“I know,” I whined.  Kind of like a little boy.
She gigchuckled at that.
“Your email is on the contact sheet, right?” she said.  “And don’t you want to tell me something first?”
“Oh yeah, hey,” I said, “I’m really glad we met, you know?  You’re, um, you’re –”
“Oh Jesus, I don’t want to hear that.”
“Oh.”
“I mean aren’t you going to tell me that you’re married or something?”
“Yeah, I’m ...  married or something.”
“That’s okay.  Guess you won’t be telling my boyfriend that I’m yours, yours, yours, huh?”
I gigcackled.
“And you better fix that laugh.”
“Okay,” I said.  “Marriage in, laugh out.”
“Yeah.  Married men give the best rim jobs.  — See you tomorrow!”
And she turned and dashed away to the theatre.  I kind of gulped and watched that perfectly round ass as it went.  I mean, for me actual rim jobs are definitely out, but hearing her say those words gave me a cock that could punch out sissies.
Chapter Twenty
A Man Thing
About an hour after Cammy ran back into the theatre we were done shooting for the day.  And about a half hour after that Parp and I were in a bar.
“Her ass is almost perfect ...” Parp said when I told him about Cammy and the cunt-framing.
“Nope,” I said.  “It is perfect.”
There was this long pause while he stared at me and shook his head.  Parp was drinking soda water.  Me, Budweiser. It’s the king of beers.
“How can you look at that ass and not be tempted to put your tongue in it?” he asked.
“It’s ass.  Q.E.D.,” I said. “While you’re thinking about putting your tongue up a chick’s ass, I think most men are thinking about putting their cocks up it.  You know?  Cock.  It’s a man thing.”
“So you’re going to disappoint her in the rim job department.”
“I dunno.  Maybe if she really wants it and she’s really made me come hard.  Maybe then Daddy can butt-dive.”
“Daddy?”
“What, she should pretend I’m thirty?” I swallowed suds.  He gave me a look. “Don’t give me that look.  You think you’re better than me because you like the taste of ass?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let it be here noted that the blonde chick with the perfect ass framed her cunt at me, not you.  In fact, the only time your name came up was when she said she thought you might be gay.”
“Fuck that.  Why?!”
“She didn’t say.  I put it down to the no-cock-for-ladies vibe you give off.  They get the sense that you’re all face and no dick and the next thing you know the phrase ‘probable pansy’ is crossing their minds.”
“I bet you eat cunt only grudgingly,” he said.
“Not grudgingly.  I definitely do it to be polite.  Sometimes with gratitude, if she’s already blown me. It’s an exchange.”
“A kind of mercantilism.”
“That’s what’s so great about genitals,” I said.  “When you bang those up against each other it’s a win-win.  You’re both there for the feeling.  But cunnilingus?  Not so much.  It’s more like a reward for a job well done.  Blow me slow, I’ll eat you slow.  Give me egg-beater head, I’ll give you a quick peck on the clit.”
“So you’re saying you never crave eating a cunt?  You never see a chick’s legs slightly opened and think you’d love to have that muff grinding off in your mouth?”
I gigcackled.  “Of course not,” I said.
I looked over at the bartender to see if I might be getting some moral support from him.  You know, a roll of the eyes or a little laugh to show Parp that yes, he is the freak, not me.
But the bartender was down at the other end of the bar, leaning on it, on his elbows, talking to some brunette who brought her baby in with her, for Christ’s sake.
The bartender seemed happy.  Maybe it was his wife and kid.  Maybe she didn’t make him watch while she gave birth to it.  Maybe he doesn’t have those images in his head when it comes time to ball her.
“See, that ‘I-crave-eating-cunt’ horseshit is horseshit,” I said.  “I don’t think anyone actually likes the taste of cunt.  I think you maybe tell yourself you do to make having to eat it less of a chore, but you don’t actually like it.  Think about it.  A disembodied cunt.  Any old cunt.  It appears in front of you.  You want to eat that?”
“No, it definitely has to be embodied.  And the body has to be pretty nice.”
“So you would agree it’s not like craving a steak.”
“No, but it’s still craving.”
I had to have a smoke.  We took our drinks outside and I lit up.
“Well, let me put it to you like this,” I said.  “After you’ve frenched cunt, sucked clit, and so on, don’t you run in and take a shower? At least wash your face real good?”
“Nope.  Sometimes I like to leave it on all day.”
I gigcackled.  “Be serious,” I said.
“I like to give the girl a piece of cloth to soak in the juice so I can carry it around and take hits off it throughout the day.”
“Oh yeah?  I call bullshit.”
“Call whatever you want.”
“You fucking freak,” I said.  I gigcackled and took a drag off the dying cigarette.
“So I guess by extension you’re saying no woman really likes the taste of cock,” he said.
“By extension of what?”
“By extension of the argument ...  the reasoning that eating cunt is a favor you do.  A givin’ thang.” (I’m not making this up kids, he said “thang.” See what I put up with?  It’s like having a friend who says “nigger.”)
He said: “No man likes the taste of cunt, ergo no woman likes the taste of cock.”
I lit up another one and took that first gorgeous puff.  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.
He seemed surprised.
“It’s different with chicks and dicks.  It’s that whole penis-envy thing and the whole human phallus fascination.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.  See, I wouldn’t expect you to understand this.  You live in this good-and-evil, black-and-white, symmetrical world and reality isn’t always that cut-and-dried.  It’s more nuanced.  It doesn’t follow that because all men are genetically revolted by the taste of snatch that all women hate the taste of dick.  There’s the whole psychology and anthropology thing you have to think about.”
“So you’re saying that when you eat a woman out you’re doing her a favor, but when she sucks your cock you’re just giving her what she wants.”
“It’s psychology and anthropology,” I said again.  I might have been getting a little peeved here.  There are certain things you’re supposed to know as grown-ups.  You’re supposed to read certain books. Magazines.  When people don’t read those things, then what? It’s up to me to fill them in on all the why’s?  Come on.  You know what I mean.  It’s psychology and anthropology. I’m supposed to give Parp a crash course in both right now on a sidewalk outside a bar because he doesn’t know about women and penis?
“You have to know that there are women who believe the exact opposite,” he said.  “There are women who are convinced that men think eating them is the main event, and that no woman really craves the taste of dick.  They are the female Pauls.  The Paulines.”
“The Paulines,” I said, “are dykes.”
We went back into the bar and Parp got Coke Zero. I got a St.  Pauli Girl.
“Hey Tony,” I said at the bar. “I gotta big favor to ask.”
“What?”
“You gotta let me come to the shoot tomorrow.”
“So come.”
“But I have to have something to do, be part of the scene.  I can’t just be hanging around for her, you know how that would look.”
“Like you want to fuck her as much as you want to fuck her.”
“I don’t want her to think that, though.  I want her to have the idea that hey, I’m getting plenty, but I’m always willing to try out a rookie.”
“Okay, then show up, there’ll be plenty to do.  Hey, you know what, in fact?  You could get the coffee and donuts for breakfast.”
“Then breakfast is over and why am I there?”
“You can be a driver.”
“Not enough,” I said.  “I can’t just be lugging stuff.  I can’t be in a position where I could conceivably get yelled at and have to take it.  I should be in a position where I could conceivably yell at someone and they should have to take it.”
“You want to be a producer.”
“That,” I said, “would be righteous.”
I swigged some Girl.  Me, producer.  I should have thought of that before, when I was fighting with Junior. “Gotta go, hon, I’m a producer.”
“Okay, well, producers generally make more of an investment,” he said.
“I know, but, this isn’t really being a producer,” I kind of chuckled.
“It isn’t?”
“Come on,” I said, “you mean that to be a producer on this I have to put money in?”
“You could donate your actor-time.  How about that?  Give me the check you get from SAG in a few days and we’ll call you a producer.”
“Can’t do that,” I said. “I’ve got to bring that check home.  Junior knows I’ve got this gig, and she’s going to expect that check.  You know, we’re trying to raise a family here.”
Parp just sipped his Coke.  He couldn’t give a fuck about my family.
“And besides,” I said, “getting that check is such a sense of validation for me.  You know?  It makes me feel like I’m really doing what I said I would do when I grew up.  I really need that check.”
Having to explain all this was starting to annoy me.  I mean, I’m his friend, for Christ’s sake!  He can’t just tell people I’m a producer so I can look good for a chick I want to fuck?  Asshole.
“Okay,” he said.  “What do you want to do?”
What do I want to do?  Fucking fuck-faced fuckhead!  I want you tell people I’m a producer! Shit!
“See, she knows you’re an actor already,” he said.  “So what’s she going to think, you’re a producer who acts?  An actor who produces?  Why weren’t you a producer today?  How am I going to work, ‘FYI, Paul’s a producer’ into the conversation? You don’t think Bobby’s going to want to see your investment?  Something tangible?”
I sighed.  “Fair point,” I said.
We sucked drink in silence for awhile.
“By the way, Cameron may be somebody you can get work from,” he said eventually.
I gigcackled.  Sure.  Cammy the employer.  Boss Camsta.
“She’s the artistic director of the Milestone Theatre Company.  They’re doing a staged reading of Democracy My Ass in about six weeks.  If the company likes the reading, they’ll probably mount the full production this summer.”
“And Cameron is the artistic director?”
“Yep.”
“She knows literature and shit?” I looked back on it.  She really didn’t seem like an artistic director.  Her ass is super tight, like she almost never sits on it. Plus she wants a rim job.
“I’ll have to be careful not to seem condescending,” I said.
“Shit.  She was talking over your head all afternoon.”
“Yeah, right, like you were there,” I gigcackled.  But it was a forced gigcackle.  I was thinking two things at the moment.  First, Parp is always putting me down like that, like I’m stupid or something, and I’m this far from telling him I think it’s uncalled-for.  And second, what if she was talking over my head?  What if that whole riff on my laugh had references to pop culture or a new play and I just didn’t know and now she’s pretty sure I’m stupid or a square?
“Oh yeah?” I said.  “So what about the photographer and you?”
“Bay-leen-da,” he said.
“Bet she wasn’t talking over your head.  Huh?  Uhhhh???  Hahahahaha ...”
“Yeah, she’s a babe but she was just taking pictures.”
“You didn’t hire her for the bend-over potential?  I mean, did you see that waist-to-ass ratio?”
“You should see her with her pants down,” Parp said, and he gave me this little grin that makes you want to bash out his teeth.
I was crestfallen.  Lord of all tail hates hearing this shit.  Sure he fucked her, I thought quickly.  But she hadn’t met me yet.  If she’d seen me first then shit, we’d—.
“She’s naked on the Internet,” Parp said.
“You fucked a naked Internet chick?”
“Relax, cunt-master.  I didn’t fuck anybody.  I just saw her naked on the Internet.  That’s how I found her.  She has this photo blog and she poses naked for it. Sexy.”
What a relief.  “This has nothing to do with my droit-de-seigneur complex,” I lied.  “I was just interested because hey, she has this nice big butt and it’s on the Internet.”
“It’s a big one all right.”
“Can you send me the link?”
He hesitated.  And he made one of those faces – like an exaggerated wince – that said, Oh shit I really don’t want to.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “It’s a naked chick on the Internet.  You’re sharing with your bud.  I might even get interested in the blog part of it.”
“Okay, look.  I’ll send you the link but like, don’t send it to anyone else in the shoot or tell anybody what I just said, all right?”
“Seems a little paranoid.”
“I don’t want it to get back to her. I hired her for the photography and I don’t want her thinking that I’m going around telling my ‘buds’ where they can go to see her butt-crack.  That might make her think she’s here because she’s a novelty instead of a, you know, colleague.”
“Yeah, I guess I get it.”
“Tell me you’ll keep it a secret, okay?”
“It’s safe with me,” I said. “So what about that producer thing?”
“What about it?”
“You can’t just say I’m a producer, huh?”
“Nope,” he said.  “There are real producers on that set, you know?  People who are investing in the project.  Mostly time, but a couple put money in too.  What do I tell them, that you’re a producer because you really want to impress somebody so she’ll be easier to fuck?
“Fuck that,” I said.  “Why do you have to tell them anything?”
“Because they’ll ask.  Wouldn’t you?  If you were kicking in something in exchange for a producer credit and somebody else was getting the credit just because they were my chum, wouldn’t you want to know what the reason was?”
“But it isn’t like I want a final credit or anything,” I said.  “I just want to be, you know, called a producer for a day.  I mean, how is that going to hurt anything?  Producer for a day?”
“Look,” he said.  He was getting steamed, which was starting to get me steamed.  I mean, I’m asking for a tiny favor here, and after I gave up a day with my family so I could be a fucking walk-on on in his dinky little video.  “You want to be called a producer because it’s a big deal and it will impress Cameron.  Well, if it wasn’t a big deal, it wouldn’t impress her, right?”
I fumed.  The bartender wandered close and had an ear cocked.  I could tell.  He was pretending to be checking out the stack of checks at the cash register, but I knew he was listening in.
“Right?” Parp asked again.
“Fuck!” I said, “I just want a tiny favor and you’re going to make me do what, beg for it?”
“We’re done talking,” he said.
He stood up, threw some bills on the bar, and walked out.
The bartender watched him go out and then looked at me.  “Wound a little tight, ain’t he?” he asked.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-One
While Mommy's on Vacation
It’s hot in this apartment.  I don’t know how they used to do this book-writing shit back in the typewriter days.  When we all got out of college and moved to Manhattan I remember Parp and Vider typing up their little comedy sketches all the time on one of those click-pound-whiteout machines and never complaining about the damned ribbon or the paper crinkling up or any of it.
Libby used to live with them in those days, when he was going out every night to clubs and parties and he said he’d get home at like six in the morning and there’d be Parp or Vider or both typing up and talking about and laughing at and sometimes fighting over their little comedy skits which got them exactly nowhere.
Well, Vider went somewhere.  Sort of.  He did stand-up with Parp and Bobby Whispers writing for him and he got all the way to Letterman one night where he just froze up in front of the microphone.  You don’t remember it because they cut it out of the broadcast.  But that was it for Vider’s career.
He had stage fright for a couple years after that.  He'd be fine until you showed him a flat riser with a microphone on it. Then suddenly he was Curly in a haunted house.  Who knows why? I guess maybe his shrink knows.  Something dark and scary, a lobe-roach nesting in gray brain crinkles.
So he took all the money he had and bought a little comedy club and called it “Vider’s.” And it got famous and then later he made it a regular nightclub with bands and singers in addition to the comics.
I guess Parp was always kind of behind the scenes, like Whispers was, only Parp didn’t meet, fuck, and marry a damn bona fide rock star the way Whispers did.  Parp and Whispers always had day jobs, the losers, which gives them some balls for looking down on me.
Am I right?
It’s hot. A little while ago I had to cook up some ribs for the kids because it’s BBQ Ribs ‘n Lucky Charms Night here at Casa Man Squad.
Yeah, that’s right.  Etiquette says that when the mommy goes off to lollipop the head of someone else’s cock for a month, the daddy can pretty much say to fuck with all of her little rules.  Of course, I can’t be too bitter about it in front of Sam and Harry since they think Mommy’s off on a vacation.
“And while Mommy’s on vacation from us, we’re going to take a vacation from Mommy,” I told them.
I’m pretty sure they said yay.
So they get to eat pretty much anything they like and watch anything they like and stay up as late as they like or until Daddy needs to get some grown-up sanity back.  Usually they get tired around nine.  Ten at the latest.  So that isn’t a problem.
Then Daddy can download porn and chat with online cunt.
So thanks for the free time, ya damn slut.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Problem With Party Girls
After Parp’s hissy fit in the bar I finished my St.  Pauli Girl and ordered another.  I just didn’t want to go home to the world of wife, kids, and no chance for fresh snatch.
I just.  Didn’t.  Wanna.
I was savoring my freedom.  Now that I think of it, I don’t think the word “savoring” has enough tension in it to describe what was making my hands shake.  I wanted fresh snatch, and hanging there alone in a midtown bar meant that technically I still had a shot at it.
But nothing happened.  I didn’t even chat with anyone.  Saturday night but still too early for any real action.  And I had a bus to catch.
I walked uptown and west a few blocks.  I didn’t want to take the chance that anyone in my new world would see me getting on a bus.  — And when it came I got on fast.
It was crowded but nobody bugged me.  I looked out the window in this way that’s a universal sign to New Yorkers that you’re not available for chatting.  You know. You’re not really seeing the sights or anything but you’re in your own world and you’d like to keep it that way.
Usually New Yorkers respect that.  Usually.  But every now and then you get some urban Andy of Mayberry who thinks mass transit is a hayride and everybody’s there to say howdy and eat salami in front of strangers.  New Yorkers have a code-word to identify a person like that.  That code-word is:  asshole.
There weren’t any assholes riding with me that night so I got to have my thoughts all to myself.  Mainly my brain was just this gigantic support system for my cock, feeding me fresh images of Cammy bent over with my cock in her cunt-lips, Cammy on her knees with my dick in her mouth, Cammy trembling a little while I rubbed the hot lube into her asshole.  Cammy...you get the picture.
(Sorry if that montage lacks poetry, ladies, but in case you didn’t know it already there are no pictures of sunsets in the male libido.)
But even in that condition — and I guess you could call it “fevered” — I knew that I had to get my head back into Junior world.  Junior’d spent the day at Chuck E. Cheese with the boys.  She’d done it the whole time resenting me and wishing she was off with Sue Gasparino traipsing around town and complaining about the male monopoly on penises.
So Junior was going to be pissed.  And if I was all head-in-the-clouds over some chick who wants me to see her with her pants off, well, Junior had radar for that.  Maybe all chicks do, what do I know?  But once l let Junior get a whiff of it she’d be on me till I confessed to something believable that she could get on the phone and cry to her old man about.
Keeping her in the dark meant I would have to be real careful about making sure I gave her all of the details about the day except for the details humming with fuck-noise.  I decided that I would make my encounter with Bang Springfield larger. “Gee, Hon, I met this really funny guy!  He’s a stand-up comic at Vider’s!”
Et cetera.
I was also thinking about those last few seconds with Cammy.  I wasn’t sure we parted on the highest note we could have.  I think it’s because she didn’t laugh when I said that thing about me being able to picture Parp with a big, black dick in his face.  I mean, she didn’t laugh at  all.  Not even politely.  So what was she thinking?  She pretty much split right after I said that.  Did she think I was a racist or something?
And then there was Parp.  I was going to have to call him up tonight and be all self-deprecating and pretending I’m sorry I offended him by asking him for a friendly favor that didn’t cost him anything.
I really hate that.  The pretending to be all chastened, like a dog smashed on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.  But I had to do it because I didn’t have any other way of getting to see Cammy the next day, and I was pretty sure if I could see her then we could at least work a blowjob into it. Maybe I could even get her to bend over in a bathroom stall or something.
And no, I couldn’t just leave it up to contacting her at her number or email on the contacts list.  Like I told Parp: I couldn’t have her thinking that I was thinking about her this much after encountering her for what, a half hour?  Forty-five minutes?  I wanted her to think I could get ass any time I wanted it but because I’d taken this shine to her I’d be willing to work her into the rotation.
And I also knew there was a chance that Cammy was just bluing my balls for the afternoon.  You know, to feed her own ego.  Chicks do that.  It’s like they don’t want to actually  get fucked, they just want to know they  could get fucked so they’ll have more confidence the next time they get in a fight with the boyfriend or so they can come harder when they masturbate.
I’m not saying all chicks do that.  But I’m definitely saying most chicks do it.  You chicks?  You know you’re busted.  You know I’m right.  Don’t write your little exclamation marks in the margin, just move along.
Once, about twenty-five years ago, I spent the summer in the Berkshires acting at this place called the Lost Rustics Summer Theatre and there was this chick with a cock-eater grin and a tight little athlete’s ass and this short kind of page-boy hair so you could really see yourself sucking the back of her neck and she was flirting with me man.  I thought I was going to pop in my pants she was word-fucking me so hard.
But I had to go back home to the other side of Massachusetts for two days before we could get anything done sex-wise.  I had to finish painting my mom’s house.  Maybe you think I was pissed off.  I really wasn’t.  I was still in college and my mom said she'd let me have her car for the summer if I finished painting her house, and that was a pretty good deal.
But getting on into the second day I was sitting there on ladder with white primer all over my pants and all I could think about was how I had this babe in the Berkshires all primed for a pound.  It was agony.  So I went back without actually finishing my mom’s house.  I did most of it.  I mean, I did the most important part, the part people could see from the road.  Then I split early in the morning on day three while my mom was still in bed snoozing.
Yeah, she was disappointed and it was a pretty shitty thing to do but I was young and there was a cunt with my name on it so I got in my mom’s car and drove.
When I got back to the Berkshires I was looking for her and thinking about this fantastic summer of fuck I was in for when she comes stumbling out of this dorm (the theatre was on the campus of some little college closed for the summer) drunk at like eleven in the morning with her arm around the waist of this fat fuck with a little goatee and a t-shirt with the word “Alcoholic” written on it next to a picture of a cross-eyed guy with a wacky grin.
I’m watching this and I’m thinking, “Party-girl.  I like a party girl.” I was pretty sure she didn’t hook up with this guy for the whole summer and, well, she had to have been thinking about me.  She  met me.  I turned her on.  I couldn’t pay attention to her for a couple days but hey, now I was back.
So she walks past me with this guy and I’m like smiling at her and she’s laughing her ass off till she gets right up to me and then she looks at me looking at her and she sees me smiling and she says, “What are  you so happy about?” and she and this guy laugh like they’re sidekicks in a road movie and they just keep walking past.
So I felt the usual trifecta of emotions: stupidity for sneaking out of my mom’s house and driving for hours with ass on the brain, blue-balled disappointment at the sudden evaporation of said ass, and anger at the twat for being so stupid about it.  Really, I wanted to find her and argue with her about it.  I mean, it’s me, babe.  I’ll ball ya long and strong.
It was before I started seeing a shrink so I didn’t know about my problem yet.
A couple days later one of the wealthy locals who was the main contributor to the summer theatre threw this big party at her house.  She was this forty-five year-old divorced chick who every summer had a new harem of twenty and thirty-something men she tried to seduce.  She was pretty frustrated that summer because look, she was dumpy.  Forty-five can be hot if you stay on the treadmill and do your squats and lunges but dumpy forty-five is like banging your aunt.
Anyway, so this rich, dumpy, forty-five year-old slut wannabe throws this party and we all go.  And by the time I get there my would-be summer babe is already there and all drunk again and I notice that she and these other actresses are standing around in the kitchen part of the party area and they’re like laughing to each other whenever I get like, close, and then this one time when I go up to the fridge for a screwed julius (it’s an orange julius with vodka, kids) she gets all silent and then she mutters something I can’t hear and they all start giggling.
I kind of skulked away.  But this guy — the guy she was fucking a few days before, the fat fuck with the goatee —now he’s pissed at her for fucking some  other guy.  So he sees me skulk away and he tells me to get some balls and go over and confront her.
I liked that guy.  Can’t remember his name but after I realized she’d fucked him over too?  We had kind of a sympatico going.
Anyway, I took his advice and walked over and said, “What up, Moira?”
Oh yeah.  Her name was Moira.  Funny how that shit comes back to you.
And she said.  “I don’t have a crush on you.”
And I said, “Shit, ya don’t?”
And she said, “I don’t have crush on you so stop acting like it.  Okay?  You can stop acting like you think I want to fuck you.”
“Wow,” I said.  All the chicks got really quiet, like they were waiting to see what I would come back with.  Then I did the worst possible thing I could do to her.  Right when everyone was waiting for me to crack snide, I played the mature card.
“Oh, shit, babe,” I said with a voice all low and adult.  “I really didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable tonight.”
There were a couple giggles from the onlooking babes but they stopped fast when I didn’t crack a smile.  I just stared at Moira, caring.
“Fuck you,” she said.  Then she kind of jerked herself away from the counter she was leaning on and stumbled away into another part of the party.
“Oh shit,” I sighed, sort of to myself, like I really did give a gnat’s thick crank about her feelings.
“Don’t worry about it,” one of the other chicks — Rita — said.  “She’s been fucked up since last Wednesday.”
That night I fucked Rita and pretty much had her for the whole summer.
So on the bus ride home from day one of shooting  Little Round Jewish Hat I knew, even though I really wanted to screw the brains out of this Cammy chick, I knew there was a good chance she was just going to flake on me the next day.   That’s why it’s never good as a rule to give a chick a night to think about it.
Oh yeah.  That guy who told me to go confront Moira that night?  The guy with the little goatee?  I just remembered his name was Chet.  If it wasn’t for him I might have ended up being just this joke that chicks laughed at all summer and I probably never would have nailed Rita.
So Chet, if you’re reading this?  Thanks dude!
Chapter Twenty-Three
Produced By Me
If I didn’t want Cammy to flake on me the way Moira did then I’d have to show up on the set the next day.   Showing up on the set meant I had to get Parp to let me show up, and ever since he stormed out of the bar it was in the back of my head that I was going to have to call him on the phone and eat shit.
But...full disclosure?   I knew that eating shit probably wouldn’t be that bad.   Parp was a sucker for a good, self-deprecating gigcackle and I had a throat full of them. So before I got off the bus I decided, yeah, call up the ol’ Parp and gigcackle my way through something he might think was me eating the ol’ shit.
In this day and age of cell phones you don’t have to actually get up the stairs before you dial somebody up.   You don’t even have to wait to get off the bus. But I figured waiting to call Parp from the stoop to my apartment building would give me the time I needed to think it through and maybe time for Parp to cool off if he still needed to cool off.
So when I got to my stoop I sat down on the cold concrete and dialed.   It rang a couple times before he picked up.   But he did pick up.   A good sign.
“Hey Paul,” he said.   Another good sign.   In fact, when I heard my name I knew that the shit was as good as eaten.   Something I know from decades of Parp nuttiness is that if he hates your guts he won’t say your name.   If he’d just said “hello” I would have known my shit-eating session was going to consist of actual grovelling.
“Hey Tony,” I gigcackled. “Sorry things got a little carried away there in the ol’ bar...”  
“Yeah, me too,” he said.   “So you wanna show up tomorrow and Monday?”  
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!
“Yeah,” I said.   “Wait.   Monday too?”  
“It’s a three-day shoot.   But we should be done on Monday before your shift at the Tavern.”  
“Okay, sure.   I guess I can be tired for that shift.   Hey, you know what I was thinking?   Libby told me that he rented the cars on one of your shoots.   That’s how he got his one producer credit in IMDB.”  
No shit: that idea about renting the cars?   It exploded into my brain a split-second before it came out of my mouth.   It’s a skill that comes from decades of needing an excuse on a moment’s notice.
“Oh yeah,” Parp said. “That’s right.   He did the car rental on Bending Mrs. Franklin.   I paid today’s rental already.   — Had to have someone else drive though.”  
Parp doesn’t have a driver’s license.
“So how about this,” I said. “I’ll rent the vans tomorrow and pick one up myself.”  
“There are four vans.   That’s going to come to a lot.   I mean, it’s going to come to more than your wages for today’s work, so I don’t think Junior is going to much like your footing the bill.   Do you?”  
“Okay, then how about we go with your original plan?   I promise to give you back my check for today’s acting gig when SAG sends it and you make me a producer and I show up tomorrow to, I don’t know, protect my investment.”  
“Great!   And could you do me a favor?”  
“What?”  
“You bringing up the vans kind of reminded me we’re short a driver tomorrow.   Could you pick one up and drive it to the set tomorrow morning?   It would be a big help.”  
“Sure!” I said.   “Be there at...?”  
“Eight is good.   Pick it up at the garage on Seventy-Fourth and Broadway.   It’s under my name.   Drive it to Vider’s club and stay for the shoot.”  
“Cool.”  
“See you then.   And thanks!”
I mentally checked the box next to “eat shit” and bounded up the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Not Even Then
“I’m not judging you or anything,” Jessica said, “but why is it you don’t want to put your tongue in a woman’s ass?   You don’t find that erotic?”  
“No.”  
“Not even a very sensual ass?”  
“Not even a very sensual ass.”  
Chapter Twenty-Five
Flaky Shades
Cammy wasn’t there!   Plus I forgot to pick up the van I said I’d get!
The whole day sucked gorilla mound.
I know.   Forgetting the van made me a dick.   There’s no escaping it.   Mea culpa.   But being a dick wasn’t totally my fault.   See, when I get up in the morning it isn’t like when Parp gets up.   When Parp gets up he just has to shave and brush his teeth and split.   Me, on the other hand, I have to do that fighting-for-the-bathroom schtick with two sons and a wife who’s really pissed because I can’t convince her I didn’t know all along that I’d have to do this for three days instead of one.
“I’m a producer, hon!   Parp begged me and fuck, I couldn’t say no!”
She sipped at her coffee and said nothing, like my reasoning wasn’t good enough to deserve an audible reply. When we were younger and she pouted like that I always ended up begging her to engage.   Ya know?   Stop making me guess what you think!
“I guess you can say no to me and your kids though,” she finally said.   “You can say no to your family on a Sunday.”  
“Gotta go.”  
“You’re not leaving until you explain to your children why they don’t get a father this weekend.”  
“I’ll explain when I get home.”  
“You’ll explain now!”
“Why are you going, Daddy?”   Harry asked.   “Don’t I get to ride on your shoulders to church?”  
He started to sob.   Then Sammy started blubbering.   Jesus, what a pair of pussies!
I started to explain it to them but I figured out fast that a cheap bribe would be quicker and easier.
“Hey boys, I’ll tell ya.   When I get home?   Chinese pizza!”
“Yay!”
I made for the door while Junior muttered something with that flat “a” sound.   You know, like “asshole” or “bastard.”  
That’s what I had to go through to get downtown to Vider’s.   It’s why I forgot all about the van until I was approximately five steps away from the front door of Vider’s club.   I figured I’d go back uptown and get the damn thing, but since that would make me an extra hour late I walked into Vider’s to find Parp and tell him what I was up to.
He was standing with Bang and Whispers and some of the crew and George Vider at the piano over by the stage where they’d cleared a lot of tables away.   A few yards beyond them a bunch of guys were hanging another green screen while the assistant-director dyke watched and screamed out stuff like, “I still see a shadow, retard!”
I told Parp I screwed the pooch van-wise and that I’d be back in an hour and plop the keys in his hand, but it turned out he’d sent somebody to get it already.
“Oh,” I said.   “So you just assumed I screwed up?”  
“We gave it a half hour then pretty much the consensus was yeah, Paul screwed up.   You just missed Terry.   He split like three minutes ago.”  
Terry was the kid they sent uptown on the subway to get the van.
“I kind of resent that,” I said. “You couldn’t pick up the phone and call me?”  
“Tried that,” Whispers jumped in. “Junior picked up.”  
I winced.   Okay, so I forgot the van and the phone.
Whispers saw the wince. “Ha-haaaaaaaa...”   he laughed.   He started to slow-clap with his hands cupped so the sound would boom.
What an asshole.
Then Parp and Vider just started laughing really hard and when Bang saw Vider laughing he joined in with that goose-honk of his.
I was outnumbered so I added in a gigcackle.   Self-deprecating.   Again.
“You know you can’t be trusted, Paul,” Vider said.   I almost never see Vider any more but when I do see him he always talks to me like he just saw me yesterday.
“Well, I’ll get it tomorrow.”  
They laughed some more.   It was starting to piss me off.
“For real,” I said.
They stopped laughing in there somewhere and Parp told me that they’d let me off the hook and all would be forgiven if right now I would take one of the cars and drive out to Long Island to get Belinda, the photographer.
“I thought Cammy was her ride,” I said.
“Cameron can’t make it today,” Parp said when we were alone on the sidewalk on the way to the car. “She just called.”  
“So ...”  
“The whole producer thing?   All for naught,” he said.   “But she says she’ll be on the set tomorrow.”  
“Okay, so...tomorrow...”  
“Same deal.   You give back your check from yesterday and you’re a producer all three days.   So you want to hang around today?”  
“May as well.   It’s either this or church.”  
Parp gave me the keys and Belinda’s address.   It was going to be a three hour round trip.
“She can’t take the train?”  
“She has a weird thing about trains and elevators.”  
And just like that he turned around and walked back to Vider’s.   No “thank you.”   No “good-bye.”   Just turned around and split, like it was my job to chauffeur cunt for him.
That’s when it hit me.   My delayed reaction to the news Cammy wasn’t going to be there.   I’d fought the wife and the boo-hooing brats and got here and now it was going to be another agonizing twenty-four hours before I had another shot at her and there was no guarantee she wouldn’t just decide to sleep in tomorrow, too.
Flaky shades of Moira.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Bitch For a Day
I was feeling pretty damn low driving out to Hempstead to pick up Belinda, Parp’s on-set cunt.   In case you haven’t been paying attention, Parp tricked me into being his bitch for a day so now I had to drive out to pick up the cunt so she’d be available later when he needed to stick his tongue up a big butt.
And I do mean big.    Maybe you know the type.   Thin waist, giant ass.   How do they do that?  Like they’re wearing corsets twenty-four hours a day.
I was picturing Parp explaining to her apple ass how in Parp World sex has to last for a couple hours or it’s not worth having.   I was picturing her listening to him with this big grin on her face because she’s thinking about all the orgasms she’s in for.   Then in my mind I cut to an hour later and pictured her with her face in a pillow and her ass in the air just wishing it would end, for Christ’s sake.
I had to laugh at that, but as I plunged into the bowels of Queens I was back to kicking myself.   How did I get into this fix?  I blinked and the next thing I knew I was promising to give Parp my wages from yesterday.   —And now I was driving crew around like a damn cabby.
But asking myself how it happened was just rhetorical.   You know, for the gods.   I knew what happened.   It was my own fault.   I set myself up.   I felt guilty for forgetting the van so I let Parp railroad me in exchange for forgiveness.
I pounded the steering wheel I was so pissed.   Cocksucker!
I settled down a little bit after I got into Nassau County, even though at one point I lost my way.   Hey, it’s no big deal.   Asking for directions from strangers is a time-honored American tradition.   Pulling up alongside another car, rolling down the window, smiling while the other driver rolls down his, shouting, “How do I get to the highway?” — The sense of comunity derived thereby connects me with my fellow travellers, including my father and his father before him.
GPS, on the other hand, connects me with jack shit.
I found the road to Hempstead again without the aid of mechanical voices and just settled into the drive.   Ever been to Long Island?  A string of little towns hung on semi-highways.   Gas stations, malls, cheap little houses.   The worst sight of all?  The funeral parlors.   Every time you see one it’s like a big sign saying, “Some people never get out of here.”
That shit started haunting me back in the early Eighties when we all first moved to the city.   They didn’t used to bug me — the funeral homes — until Vider pointed out what it meant.   See, we were all living in these bad neighborhoods.   Ghettos, where the supermarkets smell like rotting food and cat box and you can’t wait for that part of your life to be over.
We were standing on the sidewalk on a summer afternoon in Washington Heights with the sunlight blazing off the pavement and white brick and car metal.    We were counting our change to see if we could afford to buy a couple drinks.   We got done counting and I turned to go but Vider just stood there stock-still because he noticed we were standing in front of a funeral home.
“Some people here don’t get out,” he said.   Swear to God, the guy was trembling. “You know when you’re getting out?”
“ASAP,” I said and kept walking for the nearest bar.   I just wrote the episode down to Vider spookiness. You know?  Out of nowhere things would haunt the guy.   Like a few years later when he froze in front of the microphone on Letterman. But as the years passed the thing about the funeral homes stayed with me and even amplified as I got older.   Now when I see one it’s like it sees me back and says, “Passing through?”
There are a lot of funeral homes on Long Island.
So I finally got out to Hempstead to pick up this Belinda, who was officially the still photographer.   Low-rise jeans again and a black camera-bag slung over her shoulder.   I tried not to look too hungry watching her over the steering wheel as she walked out to the car.   But it was hard not to stare.   She was kind of a puzzle and I was trying to put the pieces together: she’s naked on the Internet, she’s a photographer, she likes wearing fuck-me jeans to work.   She had on a little red t-shirt and these big round tits poking domes so big they lifted the shirt off her midriff.
And I’m convinced Parp is bending her over.
I hated the prick right then.   Surfs the Internet, finds cunt he wants, calls it up, bends it over.   What an egomaniac.
She got in.   “Hi,” she said.
“So, ready for day two?” I asked like her uncle.
Turns out she’s shy.   Yeah.   Kinda sweet, too, but the ass and the pants and the ol’ Internet nudity says she was already sizing me up for my drill potential.
I resisted the urge to say, “Blowing Parp?” and tried to make chit-chat about bullshit things instead.   “Unseasonably humid, huh?” I asked.   “For March, I mean.”
“Yeah,” she said.   “I smell fecundity in the air.”
“Wow.”
“Fecundity.   Fertility.   Spring!” she smiled.
“Cool,” I said, probably a little distracted.   All I could think about was her no-doubt-shaven snatch burning a hole into the upholstery of the seat next to me.
She really didn’t seem like an Internet nude poser.   I made a mental note to check out her blog that night after the wife was in bed.
About ten minutes into the drive I made her giggle for the first time.   See, the only thing we had in common that we knew about was Parp and the shoot so we got onto the subject of Parp nuttiness pretty quick.   “Ever notice the missing toe on Parp’s right foot?” I asked.
I was watching the road but out of the corner of my eye I could see her looking at me.   “He has only four toes?” she said.   She giggled.   “Is that true?”
“Yup, you just have to look.”
“Well, he’d have to take off his shoe, wouldn’t he?”
“Nope,” I said.   “You can see through the sneaker.   Four little lumps, not five.   You never have to take clothes off when you can count lumps.”
That killed.   She laughed her tasty ass off.
And that’s how we rode: me joking, her giggling.   Every now and then I was able to take my eye off the road and get a look at the belt buckle that just covered her mound.
And all I could think was: man, am I married.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Neighborhood Carnality
It was late last night when I finished that last chapter.   Now listen: I still have a lot to tell about that ride with big-butt Belinda but I had to get some sleep because I still get some pretty busy days even though I’m laid off and the wife is out of town on a cock-sucking gig.
Oh.   Did I mention I got laid off?   I guess maybe not.   So I’m kind of stuck with no money coming in right now except unemployment.
Shit.   It used to be bartending was what you did when you lost your regular job.   Now it’s the regular job you lose.   Is that insane or what?
Some people blame the union.   Not me.   Thanks to the union I’ve got some great benefits.   Like the bennies that pay for Dr.   Jessica.   So every couple years or so the bosses push back with a raft of lay-offs.   Big deal.   It’s just a matter of time before the union gets us reinstated.
Just.   A matter.   Of time.
In the meantime I’m sweating my ass off in the summer humidity and taking the kids to morning Bible Camp.
I know.   Bible Camp.   Seems unlikely a full-blooded blue-stater like me would take his kids to a summer church thing, right?   It was Junior’s idea but I have to say I pretty much went right along with it.   First off, it keeps the kids out of trouble in the non-school months.   Second, it gives me a few hours off to be a grown-up on my own among my fellow grown-ups.   Third, it teaches the boys some of those basic morals and things about compassion that they probably don’t get enough of from anyplace else.
That’s three good reasons.   So fuck off.
Bible Camp in the city is a couple of rooms in a church basement.   So the “camp”   part is more of a prayer than a real place where you can go and cook meat over a fire.    It’s pretty pathetic, too, when you see how they take these little sunless cement rooms and decorate them with cardboard cut-outs of trees and one or two teepees made of blankets with the profiles of animals etched into them.
This morning’s walk to Bible Camp featured a brush with the neighborhood carnality.   Me and the boys were walking down the sidewalk in a steamy morning torpor when we made a stop to pick up Carol Anne Hurdy — Harry’s seven year-old “girlfriend”   — out in front of her mom’s apartment building.
“Your mom lets you stand out here all by yourself?”   I asked her.
“Yeah!   So?!”
“Nothin’.   Just askin’.”
And the three of us commenced our drowse down the hill between Amsterdam and Broadway toward the church that has the cellar that is Bible Camp.   We were the Man Squad Plus One.
Jackhammers were jacking.
“I smell boogers!”   Sammy said.
“Oh God!”   Carol Anne shouted at Harry.   “You have a McBoner!”
And she stopped and pointed at that part of his anatomy where a little boy is wont to get a McBoner.
“I do not!”   he shouted back.
“What’s a McBoner?”   Sammy asked.
“It’s — uh — ”   I was struggling here.   I was tempted to say it was what McDonald’s made out of the bones that didn’t make it into Chicken McNuggets.   I might even have been stupid enough to say that, too, but Carol Anne jumped in first.
“It’s his fuck stick!”   she screamed.
I expected Sammy to ask me what a fuck stick was, but he didn’t.   Instead, he and Harry marched on in silence, their jaws stern and their brows furrowed, as if they were little justices deliberating on new evidence.
Carol Anne was only seven like I said but the little bitch was miffing me.   You parents know what I mean.   Harry has only a few years before his own balls sell him out to the nearest tramp a shiny skirt.   Just a few years before he wakes up to a brain full of ass.
Just a few years.   Less than a decade.   I wanted to go to Carol Anne’s house and grab her stupid mom by her camouflage print blouse and say, “Just what do you think you’re doing, talking about boners and fuck sticks in front of your daughter like it’s normal banter so she can come over and laugh at my kid’s dick?!   Don’t little boys deserve a chance to rest up before the slam-dance?   Don’t they get a few years to read comic books?   Don’t my boys get a childhood?!”
I ranted thus mentally on the way to morning Bible Camp while Carol Anne Hurdy looked at my face and giggled.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Normal Male Curiosity
See, that day I had to talk to the shrink pretty bad.   It was my regular appointment day.   I’ve been known to blow those off but today I was desperate to talk and Carol Anne’s loud mouth just made it worse.   So at one o’clock I was in Jessica’s office blubbering for the sixteenth time about how my life was shattered beyond recognition when the wife announced she was going to spend the month of August chomping plank in L.A.
And swear to God?   When I finished puking self-pity into her ears and onto her desk and all over her rug she looked up at me and said: “So how are you today Paul, not so good?”
Like I’d just spent the last ten minutes grunting and pointing!
That kind of made me angry at her so then she had to sit there while I told her how shitty it was that she obviously wasn’t listening to me.
“Do you ever hear a word I say?!”   I asked.   “What are you, you...you’re like...you know what you’re like? You’re like the shrink in Portnoy’s Complaint who waits till the end and then says ‘so now vee may to begin?’”
She just sat there and took it, looking real concerned and saying she was sorry, she didn’t mean for it to come out that way, until pretty soon I started to feel like a heel and sat down.
Then we talked about what a sadist Junior is for calling up and rubbing my face in her infidelity every night under the pretense of wanting to speak to the boys.
Finally Jessica said: “Are you working on the book?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it helping?”
“Mostly,”   I said.   “I think I could really get it published, you know?   Stick it to all of them.”
“When did you last work on it?”
“Last night.   I’m working on it all the time.   It’s an obsession now.   I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have the book to write.”
“So what did you write about last night?”
“I’m at the part where...Remember I told you about the second day we were shooting Little Round Jewish Hat at Vider’s and Parp made me go out to Long Island to pick up this big-assed Internet pornographer Belinda?”
“Right, Belinda.   Remind me again, she was the cinematographer?”
“No, the still photographer.   You know. Behind the scenes, candid shots of cast and crew.   If you’ve ever gone out to LittleRoundJewishHat-dot-com you’ve seen her work.”
“Do you think that has something to do with how you’re feeling today?”
“Yeah, I guess.   I mean I guess it’s not the best memory.”
“Would you like to tell me about it”
So I started telling her the Belinda/Hempstead story but I kind of free-associated and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the couch like a caricature from a New Yorker cartoon.   I started sobbing about how I didn’t have a vagina to call my own and how I was afraid I might never get another one.   Ever.
And while I’m lying there with my heart hanging out like a monkey-brain piñata, Jessica says: “Having a hard time meeting women?”
I just looked at her.   She looked back at me for a few seconds and then raised her right eyebrow as if to re-pose the question.
“Do ya think?”   I asked.   “I mean I’m a stinking bartender who’s been laid off from his union job with two kids and a wife who’s somebody’s road fuck.   I’m a real catch.”
“You’re a male model.”
“And my last gig was modeling a metal finger up my nose! Meantime, I’m watching on the news about Bobby Whispers and his damn tobacco that tastes like cunt and I’m not a part of that, either.   I was this close to being a part of that phenomenon, too, but I bailed because I couldn’t stay focused.”
“Focused on...?”
“Focused on what I need to do...”   — I was just then sorting it out — “...what I need to do long-term to attract ass.”
“There isn’t more to it?”   she asked.   “Are you sure you walked away from the tobacco project for the...that the only reason was that you lost focus on sex?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,”   I said.   “It’s a tobacco that tastes like cunt when you smoke it.   I just wasn’t that interested in it for itself.   Trust me, it was about the chicks.   I suppose if he made a tobacco that tasted like dick I’d at least have to smoke some to settle the longstanding male curiosity.   Straight male curiosity, I mean.”
“About what?”
“The taste of dick.”
“Huh,”   she said.   Then there was this long pause while she looked at me with this really exaggerated poker face.   “Let’s go with that.   You find you’re curious about the taste of penis?”
Suddenly it sounded wrong.
“Let’s not make a federal case out of it.   I’m no more curious than the next guy.”
“Huh,”   she said.   Another long pause.
“What’s with this ‘huh’?   You’re a therapist for Christ’s sake. You never heard about male dick-taste curiosity?”
“Well...”   she trailed off and sat back in her chair.   She put a pen in her mouth.   “Huh,”   she said.   “Well, how far does this curiosity go with you?   I don’t remember seeing anything about it in Dr. Selsa’s notes, or Dr. Koch’s.”
“That’s because there’s nothing to put down.   I know it came up but Koch told me not to worry about it because every man is curious about the taste of dick. It’s a Freudian thing.”
“Dr.   Koch said that?”
“Yes!   What, you’re saying he made it up?   Because I’m telling you I’m not a queer.   I don’t actually want to suck on a dick.   I’m not even slightly gay.”
“No, no,”   she said. “I’m not saying that you are.   But you know, sexual identity ...”   She cut herself off and then said: “No, no, no, it’s nothing to worry about.   I was just thinking that there are a lot of theories about sexual identity that are a little strait-jacketing.   You know, some people — and I think they’re wrong about this — some people want to say that if you ever think about a member of your own sex then that makes you gay, and if you don’t accept yourself as gay then you’re repressing, and I really don’t think that’s true.   At least, it isn’t necessary for you to believe that, Paul.”
What a relief.
“It seems...”   she said, “...well, I believe I know what you’re saying, that some men want to taste other men’s penises —”
“I don’t want to taste another man’s penis, I’m just—”   I took a breath “—I just have the normal male curiosity about what dick tastes like!”
“Have you ever tried to taste your own penis?”
“I can’t bend over that far.”
She tapped her pen against her teeth. “All right,”   she said.   “I think you should consider the point of view that even if you did want to taste another man’s penis it wouldn’t necessarily make you gay.   It just makes you a man that wants to taste a penis.   And right now you’re not even that.   You’re just a man who has a curiosity about it.”
I didn’t feel mollified, consoled, cajoled, or whatever she was trying to make me feel.   I was shocked, perturbed, and disnoyed.   I mean, I thought this was a settled issue. Any of you chicks reading this may have to take my word for it but hey, guys, you know what I’m saying.
Right?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
My Ride with Big-Butt
Big-butt Belinda was pretty surprised when I let it slip that Parp was physically deformed.   I mean, I’m pretty sure when ladies fantasize about blowing a guy they picture him having all of his fingers and toes.
I felt sorry for the sloth.   No fooling.   It isn’t his fault he was born with a foot that looks like a talon, but hey, even really hard pecs won’t stop a girl from puking when she looks down at the end of the bed and counts...and recounts...and realizes she’s lying next to something that would have been burned at the stake in simpler times.
I’m not saying those were good times.   Those days back when Parp would have been lit on fire in a public place. I’m just saying that generally chicks don’t fantasize about blowing devil-boy.
(There are freakish exceptions to that rule.   My wife, for example.)
Big-butt: “Wow.   Really?   You’re not kidding?   Nine toes?”
Me: “Yeah, the chick he’s with now? She’s got some weight problems so I guess she figures it’s a trade-off.”
Big-butt: “He’s got a girlfriend?”
Me: “I think she’s his girlfriend. Maybe he doesn’t call her that.”
Silence.   She looked out the window at the funeral homes whizzing past.
For the record — and because I’m being absolutely truthful in this tale of revenge and justice — Parp didn’t actually have this other chick in his life.   I made her up on the spot.   Pretty smooth, right?
Don’t be acting all shocked.   If you know anything about me by now — if I’ve gone out of my way to tell you anything about me — it’s that I need to be lord of all tail.   Cock-blocking is more than just a reflex with me, and slightly less than a raison d’être. That’s why I’m in therapy.   I’m trying to deal with it.   I’m trying to be a better person and usually I am. But see Parp sent me out on this errand when he knew all I wanted was my Cammy, and she didn’t show up so now he thought he could make me into his gofer and besides: I had to talk about something on the ride back from Long Island, didn’t I?
“He looks like Iggy Pop,” she giggled.
I wasn’t ready to change the subject.
“Maybe,” I gigcackled.   “I bet Iggy has ten toes though.”
She kind of shut up after that and stared out the window some more.   I could smell her.   She had this scent of almond mint coming off her, probably off her hair.   Almond mint, just like Junior’s ex-hooker gal-pal Sue Gasparino.   It was right about then that I started to wonder whether big-butt Belinda was game for a roadside fuck.   Swear to God, it started out as an innocent speculation.   A rumination on the evidence at hand.   In the first place, I knew she posed naked on the Internet.   In the second place, I knew she was wearing jeans so low-cut I could practically see snatch cleavage.   So how could I not wonder if she was just waiting for an invitation to pull over and slam for awhile?   What if she was telegraphing it to me so hard she was vibrating and I was just too damn dopey to pick it up?   What if she’s sitting there thinking, What the fuck is he waiting for?
And then the old, dark suspicion set in.   The ancient male suspicion.   Primordial, even.   Back in the ooze, male lizards suspected they might be banging a lot more female lizard ass if only they spoke up more and weren’t so afraid of getting shot down.
Like I said, that suspicion?   That suspicion that goes back so far it’s branded on our DNA?   I felt it creeping up on me.   So the next thing I knew I was opening my mouth and shit was flying out.
“Parp tells me he found you on the Internet one night while he was browsing for porn,” I said. “Says your ass is fan-tab.”
I gigcackled.
“He said what?”
“Fantabulous.   He didn’t use that word, though.   That’s pretty much my word.”
She got really flustered, which I was completely unprepared for.   She started to talk a few times but cut herself off before she could get out more than an “um—” or “sh—” or some other sound that wasn’t a whole word.
I gigcackled to try to make it seem like I was harmless.   Like I couldn’t have meant I’d like to see her ass up close and bent over.
“What are you laughing at?!” she finally asked.   “What, well, I hope you liked my ass.”
“Hey, it isn’t me, Bindy!” I pled.   “I don’t think about your ass, it’s Parp.   He just told me about it.”
“Oh right.”
“Yeh-esssss!”
“Well, if you’d taken the time to see the pictures yourself then maybe you would have realized they’re art.”
Classic.   Looking at her big naked butt makes me an asshole.   On the other hand, not looking at her big naked butt makes me an asshole.   Meanwhile she’s missing the entire obvious point that Parp is the asshole for going around telling people her ass is sweet so check it out.
I decided to play the mature card.
“You see,” I said, my voice getting all low and adult, “it’s just that I’m the father of two pre-teen boys and sometimes they ask me questions about my friends and I’m, well, not always sure what to say to them.”
“Um, I thought—I thought you said this was because Parp said my ass was fan-tab.   Now it’s your kids?”
Sometimes they make you earn the mature card.
“I was using Tony as a jumping off point,” I said.   I was kind of terse, you know?   The way mature people are when they’re disappointed you weren’t mature enough to understand them the first time.
It was quiet for a sec, then she said: “Okay, what kinds of questions do your kids ask that make you have to tell me how fan-tab my ass is on the Internet?”
“Well, I’m an actor and a model.   I have a lot of artist friends who participate in activities that a couple of very young boys wouldn’t understand, so I ask for them.   And also -” I chuckled here “- for myself.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, in your case, I’d like to be able to tell them how a photgraphic artist decides to become her own nude portraiture subject.”
“How old are your kids?”
“Seven and four.”
“Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell them not to browse the Internet before they’re old enough to reach the keyboard?”
I chuckled serenely at the snide twat. “Point taken,” I said.
That just sort of hung there in the air for a few seconds.   She cleared her throat.   I was sure she was going to tell me I was full of horseshit, but instead she said: “So what are your kids’ names?” and we got onto a conversation about the fam.   I thought for a few minutes that there might still be some cunt in it for me.   I thought maybe the mature card turned her on.   It says I’m stable.   Sophisticated, even.   Maybe she and Cammy talked about me last night on their ride back to Long Island.   Maybe they both have fantasies about doing married men.
But no such luck.   We fam-talked for awhile and then suddenly the subject shifted to her childhood in Nassau County and how she wanted to be a photographer since she was eight and her Uncle Jeffrey gave her an old polaroid.   Then we had to talk about her cool boyfriend and how they live together in the little house with the pit bull and how the pit bull stares at them every morning while the cool boyfriend eats her out.
(That’s right, I can’t bring up the subject of her ass because that might signify I have one of those disgusting male libidos, but she can blithely mention that she comes in her boyfriend’s face every morning.   Ladies, if this game had rules there would be flags all over the field.)
Oh, and get this, she’s a libertarian, like Parp.   “Cool,” I said.   “So you’re in favor of legalizing marijuana?”
“Yeppers.”
“Me too, but I’m just a lowly Democrat.”
“Democrat, huh?   So that means you think the poor should be protected from the marijuana agribusiness, right?”
“Huh?”
“If marijuana is legalized, right?   Then you’ll have a whole bunch of growers and sellers out there and each of ‘em is going to want you to buy their marijuana. Think they should just be allowed to do that?   You know, put profits before people?”
“Well, I think that they should be strictly regulated of course.”
“Of course you do,” she said.   Oh, my friends, her contempt for my reasonable views just oozed.   “And the FDA should have to approve all the weed before anyone gets to smoke it first, right?”
“Huh,” I said.   “Interesting. Ha!   Ya know, I remember once in Syracuse we were scoring a bag...”
I thought the reminiscence would throw her off the scent, and it did, thank God.   We talked about pot and pot-smoking and how Parp and Vider used to just sit there and never smoke it, just pass it to the next person, sober as wet clams while everyone else giggled.
She was curious about Parp and Vider and Whispers and how they all got together, and what their stories were.   I told her Whispers was married to Mondi McDade, and then I had to tell her who Mondi McDade was.   “You remember 1981?” I asked.
“Um, I actually wasn’t born in 1981.”
“Oh, well, but you know the song, Not on the Hood of My Car, right?”
“Mmm.   Maybe.”
“Well she wrote that and it was recorded by her group Blynx, which was pretty hot back then.   They used it in the soundtrack to the movie Surviving Chappaqua High.”
“Oh, I saw that movie.   What was the name of the song?”
“Not on the Hood of My Car.”
Pause.   I saw her arm lurch as it started to reach for the non-existent radio, then aborted.
“I can’t believe you never heard of Mondi McDade.”
“Sorry,” she said.   Then she kind of giggled a scoffing giggle.   “I’ll take your word for it.   So.   Cool.   Bobby’s married to a rock star.   What about Tony and George Vider?   How did they hook up?”
So I told her how Parp and me and Vider went to school together.   How when Parp and Vider got out they did a summer at a resort doing a mind-reading act.   – Parp was the mind-reader, Vider worked the audience.   Then later they came to New York and Parp started up a theatre company and Vider did comedy.
That’s where Vider met Bobby Whispers, in the comedy clubs.   Whispers was a member of a four-man comedy troupe called Max Yux.   He wasn’t that great a performer but Vider liked his material so Whispers ended up writing for Vider after Max Yux split up over who got to fuck their one groupie.
Vider’s career really took off after that. Then, like I mentioned before, came the night when he froze in front of Letterman’s microphone.   That by itself didn’t kill him, but his confidence was gone.   He couldn’t get a laugh.   Other comics would sit at the bar watching him and wincing while he choked.
While Vider was on the upswing, Whispers was living large.   – New apartment, rock-star girlfriend, leather blazer for every day of the week.
So when Vider’s career exploded, Whispers was kind of caught holding a scotch and looking stupid.   He might have tried some stand-up himself but right around then his old man died and left him the tobacco shop on Sixth Avenue.
Suddenly his dayjob was making sure porkchops in suits got fresh fat cigars.
“Vider’s been in therapy ever since,” I told big-butt.   “But he’s been making a comeback on cable shows.   If you’ve got HBO you’ve maybe seen a couple specials he’s done.   But he mainly performs at his club now.”
“And the place we’re going today, that’s Vider’s?”
“Yep, and Whispers is directing and Parp wrote it and I’m producing.”
“Oh, whoopee-doo,” she said, with a petulance that came out of nowhere.
I was too tired to fight with it, so we rode in silence for awhile.   Just before we got to Manhattan she started taking pictures of me and giggling and I said, “Now you stop that!”
You know.  Playfully.
I still can’t figure out exactly where the turning point was.   You know?   The exact point where she decided, “Nope, no cock in this car.”
But to this day I try to figure it out.   The male lizard in me needs to know.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty
A Public Service Announcement
I’m pretty sure big-butt Belinda was biting Parp’s pipe on the sly.  Not that Parp ever admitted it. But I know the putz.  If Parp is talking to a chick and laughing with her it means he’s getting mouth.
At least mouth.
The guy’s a misogynist.  There.  It’s been said.  Feel free to kick his ass, ladies.
And he’s crafty.  See, when I made that run at Belinda that I described in the last chapter?  When I did that I was running at her straight on.  I wasn’t holding anything over her head.  I wasn’t intimidating her.  I wasn’t her boss asking for a “favor.”
And she shot me down straight on.
But see Parp doesn’t have that kind of honesty.  Here’s what he does.  Let’s say you’re a hot young chick.  What he does is he hires you to work on one of his crummy little films.  You don’t know any better so you get all grateful and think it’s rock ‘n roll when he tells you he really, really needs to put his cock in your face.
But it isn’t rock ‘n roll. It’s pathetic and predatory.  Just ask your boyfriend.
So ladies, watch out for the Parps.  You don’t have to blow them. You don’t.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-One
Two Babes in Hot Pants
A lot later in the day I got to hear Vider say this: “What I frickin’ can’t stand is the woman who wants to jump from the friend phase right to the nag phase without the intervening fuck phase.”
He was sitting at a piano on the stage in the club right after the shoot was over for the day.  Everybody who hadn’t left already was either just sitting out at the tables staring at the people on the stage, or on the stage staring at the people sitting at the tables.
I guess there were about fifteen of us.  Vider had shut the kitchen down for the day so the only coffee you could get was the tepid crap from the almost-empty Dunkin Donuts boxes on some of the tables.
Belinda’s hipster boyfriend had swung by to pick her up about three hours before so she was long gone.  Lenny Paine was still there.  Whispers and Parp and Vider and Bang were there.  So were these young chicks with really tight asses who played the dancing strippers in the “Soho Strip” riff, the part of the video where they all come sliding down poles that magically appear on the sidewalk while Lenny is singing about how great it is to have his yarmulke back.
These chicks were all Black or Cuban or dark Puerto Rican maybe.  Maybe Dominican.
The “Soho Strip” riff was what they were shooting that day at the club.  They shot this big splashy song-and-dance bit in front of a green screen and Vider got the dancers cheap.
Parp was leaning against Vider’s piano and Whispers was sitting on the floor of the stage next to him.  Bang was sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling off like he was a kid on the edge of a pier.
After Vider’s mini-rant about chicks skipping from the friend-phase to the nag-phase without having the decency to fuck him, Lenny said: “Yep, if you don’t fuck, don’t nag.”
“So who nags?” said the dancing stripper sitting right next to me.  “I just fuck.”
Bang said: “Awright!”
Everybody just sort of shut up and looked at Bang for a sec.  He shrugged.
I gigcackled at his discomfort.
The chick next to me who said “I just fuck”?  She heard the gigcackle and smiled at me and I’m thinking, see, some babes love the way I laugh.
I was thinking I might have an opportunity here even though dancers kind of scare me.  It’s a well-known backstage universal that dancers will make you eat their cunts all night and whiplash your neck with their dancer-thighs every time they pop.
“You funny,” she said to me, almost in a whisper.  “You like my boyfriend.”
“So do you really just fuck?” I asked.
“Look at you,” she giggled. “You married and old enough to be my daddy and you still bad.”
Nobody else was listening to us.  Vider sat at the piano and whenever anyone cracked wise he would play a chord or a snatch of a melody.  Somebody ordered pizza about an hour before so there were a bunch of open pizza boxes.
“Are you hitting on Mallory?” Parp called over to me when he saw me chatting with the I-just-fuck babe.
“Trying my best.”
“I don’t know why you bother.  Your wife is tasty.”
Vider perked up.  “Oh yeah?  Parpie says your wife is tasty, is she?”
“Tastes like a wife,” I said.
A lot of oooos from the dancing strippers.
“You sick,” said Mallory.
“I’m not saying she isn’t tasty,” I said.  “But, you know, we’ve been together ten years.”
One of the dancing strippers jumped up and headed to the bathroom.
“Men suck!” she said as she slammed the door.
“Well, hey,” I whined in a way I hoped would be taken for pitiful, “I’m willing, but, you know, the wife is...  ”
“Not impressed you’re a producer?” Whispers asked.
Everybody guffawed.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“I’m impressed.”
Whoa.  Out of the blue it was yet another babe in hot pants.  She was standing against the wall by the stage. She giggled.  Everyone else laughed.
“You made Paul’s night,” Vider said.
“Not yet,” I said.
More laughs.  I wished Cammy was there but this new babe was looking right at me.
“You real sick,” Mallory said.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Two
A Tobacco That Tastes Like a Lady
It turned out that Roz-the-assistant-director’s dayjob was working up at Whispers’s tobacco shop with a bunch of other chicks who I think were all somewhere on the proclivity continuum between bisexual and dyke.
“If Paul’s wife is so tasty,” Roz said to Whispers, “then maybe you should name the tobacco after her.”
Lenny: “Tobacco?”
Vider: “You had to ask.”
Lenny: “Well, sure I did.   Roz made a statement intended to evince the question ‘tobacco?’ or ‘what tobacco?’ — Isn’t that right, Roz?”
Roz: “Yep.”
Lenny: “So what is it?”
Roz: “It’s a tobacco that tastes like snatch.”
She grinned this really wide grin like she was Pandora announcing her box was now open.
Everybody laughed because of course they thought it was a joke.
“No shit,” she said.  “Exactly like snatch.”
“You gotta be blowin’ kidding me!” Bang said.  “Do you have some?”
“Not on me,” said Whispers.   Suddenly he looked a little shy.
“What I want to know,” Vider said, “is how did you get tobacco to taste like vagina?  And it better not be the way I think.”
“All I did was mix up a new blend of tobacco from some of my favorite leaves mixed in with a new leaf that comes in a tin marked ‘Ciao Bella’.”
“And this new mixture tastes like pink?” asked one of the dancing strippers.
“I thought it was my imagination when I first lit up,” Bobby said.  “But I gave some to Mondi and she said yup, tastes like a lady.”
“You’re shitting me.   Mondi McDade said ‘a lady’?” I asked.
“I bet she said ‘cunt’,” said Roz.
“It sure tastes like cunt,” said Vider.  “That is some of the cuntingest tobacco I’ve ever tasted.”
Suddenly everyone in the room, male and female, had to have some.  Well, a couple of the ladies begged off and let’s face it I don’t smoke a pipe but if I did...I dunno...Cunt?
“I ain’t into that shit,” said Mallory.
“So are you going to start selling this tobacco in the store?” Lenny asked.
“Yup.  And the girls up there think it would be a good idea to market it on the Internet.  You know, starting with Twitter and Facebook.”
“So what are you calling it?” I asked.
“Good question,” he said.  “We’ve got some candidates.”
“He hates my name, what I want to call it,” said Roz.
Parp: “And that is?”
Roz: “I’ll tell if Bobby lets me.”
Whispers just hung his head and shook it, like how is he going to stop the inevitable?
Roz: “I wanna calllll ittttttt...Camel-toe-bacco.”
Big smile.
Some giggles from the gang.
“I don’t believe it,” said Mallory.   Then she belly-laughed.
“Yeah, that sucks,” said Lenny.
“There is no way it goes out with ‘Camel-toe-bacco’ on the label,” Bobby said evenly.
“What’s wrong with just plain old Cuntbacco?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Bang.  “Cuntbacco.  ‘Git me a chaw of that Cuntbacker, Coach, and I’ll pitch me up another three innin’s.’”
“What?” Mallory said, more to me than to Bang, like I might be able to translate for her.
“I do kind of have a name for it,” Bobby said.  “I’m thinking of calling it ‘One for the Road.’”
Silence.
“I don’t get it,” Bang said.
Mallory touched my arm.
“I like your name better,” she said kind of low.
The other dancing stripper, the one who said she was impressed by me a minute or so before?   She looked at me right then and started to walk over to where I was sittiing.  I cleared a spot for her on the chair next to me by pushing some coats on the floor.
The girl — Cynthia — put her pretty ass in the chair and just sort of sat there in her tiny pink lycra hotpants.
Then she giggled.   I gigcackled.   My cock lurched.
By the time I was able to tune back in they were onto the subject of how “One for the Road” — the tobacco that tastes like cunt — raised the inevitable question of whether or not it’s possible to eat cunt while the owner of said cunt is driving an automobile.
“How is that the inevitable question?” Vider asked.
“You’ve brought together the taste of cunt and the image of roadway travel,” said Bang.  “I think that most people are going to wonder how you’ll enjoy that taste in a car.”
“By lightin’ up the tobacco,” Roz said.
“I don’t think it raises that image at all,” said Parp.  “I think it conjures the importance of that one last taste of cunt before you hit the road.”
“Yep,” Vider said.  “If you ask a bartender for ‘one more for the road’ you don’t mean you’re going to drink it in your car.”
“Good point,” Bang said.  “Good point.  Nevertheless, we’re all just hangin’ here and so I’m asking: how would you, if it’s even possible, eat out a woman while she’s driving a car?”
“I don’t think it would be that hard,” I said.  “You could get her to scooch down in the seat, then you bend over and perform a facial probe.”
“Yeah,” said Cynthia.
Mallory kind of looked at Cynthia then got up and walked away.   New girl wins! I thought.
“So you’re assuming her pants are off at the start of the drive?” asked Vider.
“Sounds a little risky,” Lenny said.  “She’d have to have her pants off for the full ride.”
“Maybe not,” I said.   “Maybe she’s wearing a short skirt and no underpants.”
“So they have to be planning this from the beginning of the trip.”
“It can’t be spontaneous then.”
“Okay, okay,” I said.   “Let’s say the underpants are on.   She could get the urge, pull over, take them off, get back in the car, come, pull over, and put them back on.”
“Nah,” Parp said.  “That reeks goofy.”
“I like it,” Cynthia laughed.
“If she’s pulling over to take her pants off so you can eat her, why don’t you just stay pulled over and eat her on the back seat?” Parp asked.
“Maybe, I dunno, she likes the danger?”
Then, because I’m playing cunt-licker’s advocate, the conversation gets around to Junior’s cunt.
“Ever do that with Junior?” Parp asked.
“I love that you call your wife Junior,” Bang said.  “What, is her mother named Corrinne too?”
“Nope,” said Parp.  “She was named after her mother’s close friend who was such a good fellatrix that a year after Junior was born her father dumped her mother to marry Corrinne Senior.”
“Huh?” asked Bang.
“Bang didn’t hear anything after ‘fellatrix’,” said Vider.
“What’s a fellatrix?” someone asked.
“A dick-sucker,” said Roz with a big grin on her face.
“Is that true?” Cynthia asked me.
“That’s what it means,” I said.
“Wow,” she laughed.  “She must really know how to suck on a dick.”
“That’s the legend.”
“So have you ever eaten your wife on the road?” Vider asked.
“Nope,” I said.  “Not that I have anything against it but, you know, Junior’s a traditional gal.”
Cynthia laughed.  And I began to notice that her laugh was something of a gigcackle.  I looked at her and grinned.
“She doesn’t look traditional,” said Bobby.
“She looks tasty,” said Parp.
“Ya know,” I said, “a guy could get pretty defensive about that.  I mean, if we were marines we’d be fistfighting right now.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bang.  “Marines are a lot more open-minded about sex than you think.”
He was dead serious.
Then they started talking about marines and I started thinking about a way to get out of there with Cynthia.
“Gotta be moseying,” I said to her kind of low.  Nobody heard but her.   I stretched back then leaned forward with deliberation.   Out of the corner of my eye I could see she was moving to get her stuff together.
Oh yeah.   The fuck was on.
“Leavin’?” Parp asked when I stood up.
“Gotta mosey on home and see the boys,” I said.
“And your tasty wife,” said Bang.
I looked at Parp.  “See what you started?” I turned for the door, which was behind me and through a vestibule.
On my way out I could hear the conversation make a turn for the stupid.  “Did Oscar Wilde write Kind Hearts and Coronets?” Bang asked.
“Oscar Wilde died in nineteen-hundred,” Vider said.  “He pre-dates the cinema.  He was pretty young though when he died.   He was forty-six.”
“So if he’d lived to say, age seventy he could have written silent film scenarios,” Bang said.
Whispers guffawed and clapped his hands slowly.   “If there’s a hell and Oscar Wilde is in it I’m sure they have him writing silent films,” he said.
Then a voice I didn’t recognize said: “There is nothing so spoken as the vulgar word.”
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Three
It Isn't Complicated
So I’m out on the sidewalk reaching for a cig and out walks Cynthia about twenty seconds later.  She just missed seeing me flip open my lighter in that nonchalant way I have.  It was a missed opportunity but I was pretty sure I’d be doing it again in a few minutes.
She walked right up to me and just stood there at first.  I was trying to hide the fact that I was looking at her rack but then I saw her looking up at me and baby the fuck was so on.  So I thought screw tact and I just looked slowly down the front of her.
“Yeahhhhhhh,” she said.  She did a slow spin for me.  When her back was to me — she was wearing short jeans that crawled up her gape over thick tights (oh and she was wearing leg warmers, too) — she kind of glanced at me over her shoulder.
She said: “You like the shit-cutter, hah?”
I took a pull on the cigarette.  “Yes Ma’am,” I said on the exhale.  “I do.”
She gigcackled.  I gigcackled.  She turned to face me again.  Jesus, her tits were muscle balls.
“You got a cigarette for me or what?”
It was weird.  Right at that second I realized she was Dominican.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Dominicans.  I just, well, in the club I thought she was a Brooklyn-variety black chick.
“What?!” she said.  I guess I was staring.
I gave her the cigarette and lit her up from the ember on the end of mine and she looked at me and said, “So you want to come home with me?  Hah?  I live just up the blocks near the theatre hardware places.  Know the places I mean?”
Sorta.
“Hah?”
“Yeah,” I said.  “Hell’s Kitchen.”
“You want me to suck on your dick for you?”
“That...that would be super,” I said.
“Super?! You being sarcastic or what?!”
I pulled her over to me and said low in her ear: “Sarcasm is for pussies.  I’m going to fuck you deep, like in a prison cell.”
“Yeahhhhh...”
We both gigcackled.  Then she said in a soft voice, “You gonna lick my holes for me?”
“Sure am, babe.”
“Your wife don’t know what she missing I bet.”
We shared another gigcackle.
See, that’s what I like.  Chicks who dig me and walk right up to me and lay their cock-sucking cards on the table.  It isn’t complicated.  The licking-her-holes thing?  I could make up a solid excuse for not crossing that bridge when I came to it.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Four
Why Chicks Dig Me Sometimes: A Theory
I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “Paunchy guy with toothpick arms and a stupid laugh and a lousy job and this is two days in a row some chick is offering to help you with that nasty bulge.  Parp is right: What’s the attraction?”
Hey, I’m almost as surprised as you are.  I guess you could say it’s the married-guy-is-ass-bait phenomenon.  Maybe, but I’m pretty skeptical.  I mean I wish that’s the way chicks worked but like you saw on the ride with big-butt Belinda, being married doesn’t automatically make a babe want to blow you.
In fact if you took every other day of my life as a guide you’d probably conclude it doesn’t attract hardly any of them.
I have my own personal theory.  An alternative one.  The Paulie hypothesis on why babes want me sometimes and not other times.
Here it is: For around three-hundred and fifty days a year I’m a bartender and a husband and a father.  But the reality is I’m completely out of place in that world.  The whole reason for me to be in New York is to be around actors and theatres and cameras.  I dreamed it.  I trained for it.  It’s why I’m in the City.  It’s where I met my wife.
So it’s my element.  And for maybe one month out of every year — two or three back when I was really working at it — I get to be in my element.  And when I’m in my element I find that the babes do respond.
Or maybe it’s the married thing.  Maybe actresses and dancers more than any other class of female take a perverse pleasure in blowing married guys.  Maybe it’s just show biz.  Or art.  Mabye art is a perversion or maybe it just hates things like marriages.  Maybe marriages are a perversion, like business suits.  How the fuck should I know?
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Five
A Short Walk to Cynthia's
So we’re walking “up the blocks” to her apartment.  She just turned around while we were talking and I followed her and while I was following her she told me everything about herself.  And it was a short walk.  She just talked fast and never lost sight of the subject, which was her bio. Neighborhood girl moves to Manhattan from the Bronx to be a singer-slash-actress-slash-dancer and to get as far away as possible from Papi who slaps her face and who’s afraid she’ll spend every night in the City getting her ass pounded.
And she loves getting her ass pounded.
“Yeah, you see like my mother?  She got married way too young so my father the only dick she ever taste.  And so later she want to taste other dick.  And so she and my father?   They split up.  You know what I’m saying?”
“Oh yeah.”
“So while I growing up my mother have these boy friends?  And when I was like fifteen?  This one particular?   One day he come over when my mother not there after school and he telling me all how pretty I aaaaaammmmm and how he like me so muuuucchhhh and can he call me and me not tell nobody.  And I’m like ‘Okay but if my father find out he gonna kill you’ and Ramon?  He smile and soon he start asking me can he fuck me in my butt.  And I’m like ‘What?’ — ‘Cause like then?  I never been fucked in the butt before.  And I’m like, ‘Ow.  I don’t need no dick in my butt.’
“So he leave and I don’t say nothing about it but he keep at it, sniffing around after school when nobody there, asking can he fuck me in my butt.  So when I move to the City?  I here about a week and I got a roommate — oh, my roommate the best, my ex-roommate — anyway, I living there for oh a month and Ramon he come over and my roommate won’t let him in so he standing on the stoop with me and he tell me my mother broke up with hiiiiimmmmm and can he please come in and fuck me in my butt.
“But see Ramon?  When he get naked he all fat and he have this teeny little dick but my roommate like him so I give him to her and they just fucking and fucking for days.  Now they living together in Riverdale.”
She paused like it was the end of the story.
“Wow,” I said.  “Way to go, Ramon.”
She laughed.  “Yeahhhhh...And when she move in with him?  He give me this present in a shoe box and you know what it was?”
“Were there holes in the lid?  Was it a...kitten?”
She laughed that cackle and said: “Kitten.  You crack me up.  Well no it weren’t no kitten.  It was butt-plugs!”
She laughed and laughed.  “Four butt-plugs for training your butt.  See, there’s a thin one and a wide one and two that are in between.  You start on the thin one and work your way up to the wide one and then you ready to butt-fuck!”
“And so...did you use them?”
“Yeahhhhh...” She kind of nuzzled her shoulder against my arm as we walked.
So that whole story about Ramon and her mother and her roommate was just her way of letting me know she had a spreadable ass.  — Kinda sweet, when you think about it.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Six
Like on a Farm
The story about Ramon and the butt-plugs got me thinking that yeah, Cynthia could be just what Paulie needs on the side.  Shit, I didn’t think about Cammy once during that whole walk up Ninth Avenue.
We walked past a big theatrical hardware store and boom — right next to it is her brick apartment building five steps up off the street.
“Oh my God I got to crap,” she said as she yanked the keys out of that tight little pocket in those tight little pants.  We went through the first door into a tiny vestibule and then through another door on the other side.
But as she worked the locks I noticed she wasn’t urgent.  You know.  Like somebody who was afraid she was about to load into her pants.  In fact, she said “I got to crap” kind of low and breathy, like it was supposed to make my hardon harder.
She looked at me and licked her lips and started working the lock on the first door on the left.
“Wow,” I said.  “Ground floor front.”
She stared in my face until I stared back.
“I crap big,” she said.  “Like on a farm.”
I gigcackled.  It was a reflex.  But a big exclamation point was taking over my brain.
She grinned at me and opened her door.  I followed her in.  Right in the middle of the room was a big black metal dumbell and some sneakers that I tripped over.
“Oh those my boyfriend’s.  Don’t worry.  He in L.A.”
“Your boyfriend’s?”
“Yeah.  Don’t worry though he gone all week.”
She rubbed her ass and winked at me but at no time did she move for the bathroom.
“I don’t know though,” I said.  “You didn’t say you had a boyfriend.”
“Well you didn’t ask, Papicito.  And why you care?  He don’t care.”
“It’s part of the code.”
She broke out laughing.  “The code!  You married and you gonna lick my holes for me!”
“Still.  It’s a guy thing.”
“Ugh,” she said.  “Get out.”
I almost ran the two blocks to the subway.  On the train there were seats but I couldn’t sit. I just leaned against the door and looked at my reflection in the glass of the door across from me.
Then out of nowhere I shivered like I’d shaken hands with Dahmer.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Big Crap Enigma
It’s been a long while since I thought about that evening with big-crap Cynthia but last night when I banged out her story the old curiosity got ahold of me again.
Back then when it happened I only talked about it with Parp and Jessica.  Jessica thought I was overreacting so I wrote the episode off to me being stupid and maybe missing out on a series of great blow-jobs and anal sex just because I didn’t understand some Bronx colloquialism about crap and farms.
But there’s stuff about the whole adventure that I never could make sense of and still can’t.  I fell asleep last night thinking about it.  If I dreamed anything I forgot.
Then today I had to go down to the Commodore Hotel for a meeting with management on when union members like me were coming back to work at the Tavern.
Oh yeah.  I didn’t mention I’m going back to work in a few days.  Less time to crank out the book but I also get a paycheck again which is pretty handy when it comes time to feed the boys.
And while I was down there in one of the auditoriums at the Commodore listening to some guy in a suede jacket and sneakers talk about the bad economy and how the tea party sabotaged Obama and how it’s great to still have job, blah, blah, blah, my mind wandered back to Cynthia.  I was sitting next to Jonno, the main chef at the tavern, a big black guy from Puerto Rico who’s had rude and raucous adventures all over the world like he was an ass-pounding Forrest Gump.  I thought he might be able to help me figure out the big-crap enigma.
So after the speeches which I guess were supposed to indoctrinate us to the new world of labor relations down at the Irish Tavern me and Jonno adjourned to the hotel bar but when we got up on the stools the absence of hookers reminded us it was too early for drinks so we got some sodas from one of the shops in the concourse and sat down in the corner of the lobby off the Fiftieth Street entrance.
A quiet corner in a quiet lobby.  Furniture with dark burgundy upholstery.  It looked out of place in sunlight.  Like it was there for the people who had jobs.  People who wouldn’t be around until it was dark.
Jonno sat in a chair and put his leg over one of the arms.  I sat on the sofa at an angle to him and resisted the urge to put my feet up on the coffee table in front of me.  — An urge almost as bad as the urge to light up a cig.
We talked shit for a few minutes then I mentioned I was wondering if he could help me figure something out that had been bugging me for awhile and he said okay and I told him the story about that evening with Cynthia.
When I was done he just looked at me for a few seconds and then he grinned and said: “Why you asking me, man?”  
He smiled like it was a friendly joke I was having with him.
“I haven’t thought about it in awhile but last night I had a dream about it,” I lied.  I didn’t want to tell him about the book I’m writing to get revenge on my cock-sucking wife.  “Now it’s on my mind, ya know?  I never really did get it figured out back then.”  
He looked at me again then laughed like my uncle.  No kidding, if Jonno was the only fat guy you’d ever met you’d think the cliché about all fat guys being jolly was really true.
“Scat,” he said.  “You know it’s scat, man!”  
“I knew you were going to say that, but I don’t think it makes any sense.”  
“Why not?  Some guys love the big turds man.  Ladies shitting on them, ladies shitting in front of them ...”  
“Yeah, I know, I’ve been out to the Internet.  But what would make her just assume I’m one of those guys?”  
“You didn’t say nothing to her?”  
“I’m really really not into scat.”  
“Yeah.  But what did you say to her?”  
“Swear to God I didn’t say a thing. I’ve been over it and over it in my head.  The only thing we talked about was that my wife doesn’t like head that much but I really love giving it.”  
“Tig-ha!”   he snort-laughed.  “Well lemme think about it lemme think about it.  You sure you told me everything you said to her?”  
“Every damn thing.”  
“Okay, lemme think.”  
He folded his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling.  Then he looked around like he wanted to make extra, extra sure we wouldn’t be overheard and said: “You didn’t say to her nothing like, ‘My wife got this big butt I wanna lick but she’s too uptight’?”  
“Nope.”  
“I still say scat.  I don’t know what you did?  But she thought you wanted a load, amigo.”  
“Hey hey.”   Around the corner came Kurt Libby, who I thought I saw there earlier.  I may have mentioned in chapter six or eight or something that he tends bar at the Commodore.
“Hey Kurt,” I said.
“Mr.  Libby,” Jonno said. “What’s life like in Harlem?  Still got the wife and three cats?”  
“Livin’ the dream, boys,” Kurt said.  Then he giggled like an ass and fumbled out a cigarette. “You guys mind taking this out to the sidewalk so I can light up?”  
I was all set to say “yeah sure” because I was aching to light up myself but Jonno beat me.
“As a matter of fact I do mind.  I was just gettin’ comfortable.”  
“Okay,” Kurt said like it was no problem, no problem at all to forget about his nicotine fix.  He put the cigarette back in the pack and grinned at Jonno while Jonno laughed like he’d just made the fat kid do ten more push-ups.
Kurt sat down on the coffee table in front of us.  Really not supposed to do that but nobody who’d squeal was watching.
“I’m trying to help Paul figure something out,” Jonno said.
“Yeah?  What?”  
So I told Libby the story.
“Wow,” he said when I was done. “So what like makes you think she didn’t just have to shit?”  
“The bathroom was right there and she didn’t move for it.”  
“But you’re only there for like thirty seconds.  Maybe she was holding it.”  
“Yeah,” Jonno laughed like a maniac, “she was saving it to dump on his chest!”  
“Huh-huh, huh-huh,” Libby laughed.  “So Paul you’re saying this freak is in the Little Round Jewish Hat video?”  
“Yep.”  
“They’re re-shooting that out in L.A.  now right?”  
“Yeah.”   I was getting a little irritated.
“So how come you’re not out there re-shooting it with them?”  
Fuckhole.  I just stared at him.  Man, I wanted a smoke.
“Which one was she?”   asked Jonno. “I seen that video a few times.  Now I’m gonna have to see it again.”  
“She was the...you remember when they’re doing that big dance number down the so-called ‘Soho Strip’ and there’s this fat guy at the piano?”  
“Vider,” said Libby.
“What?”   asked Jonno.
“George Vider,” Libby said. “The comic.  You never heard of him?”  
“Yeah.  Maybe.”  
“Me and Paul went to school with him. He’s the fat guy in the video playing the piano.”  
“Right,” I said.  “And there’s this pole on the piano and these strippers in yarmulkes and hot pants are dancing around on it?  She was one of those chicks.”  
“What did you do, close down that whole street?”   Jonno asked.
“Nah, green screen, right Paul?”   Kurt asked.  Yeah, if he and Parp hadn’t parted ways he might have been there last March instead of me.
“Right,” I said.
“Oh, I get it,” Jonno said. “That’s what you were saying about you were shooting in the restaurant and she followed you out.”  
“I don’t get it, what does ‘like on a farm’ mean?”   Libby asked.  “Did she mean like a farm animal?  Like a cow?”  
“Maybe she meant like a campesino, you know?”   Jonno said.  “Like a peasant.”  
“Peasants crap big?”   I asked.
“I dunno,” Jonno said.  “I guess out on the farm they get more fiber, right?”  
“Seems like a stretch,” I said. “I think she meant like a cow.”  
“Float like a butterfly, crap like a bee,” Libby said.
I laughed but I really didn’t get it.
Jonno shrugged.  I don’t think he got it either.  So Libby changed the subject pretty fast.
“Hey-hey Jonno, word around the town is you’re back banging Fat Fern, huh-huh-huh.”  
“You mean Fern,” Jonno said with this big grin.
“Yeah-yeah, Fern.  Huh-huh.  Sorry.”  
“Yeah, I’m seeing her again.”   He looked at me.  “Man, she is pissed at you!  Ha, ha, ha...”   and he rolled with the laugh but he never broke eye contact.
“Still?”  
“Holy shit, yes!  I’m supposed to kick your ass if I ever see you!  I have strict fucking instructions, so I guess today we never met!  Ha, ha, ha...”  
Now Libby was giggling, too.  “He ruined it for eight guys,” he said.
“Eight?!”   Jonno laughed.  “All right, Fern!”  
“I gotta go, guys,” I said.
“Yeah,” Libby said.  “Fern works in this hotel.  Huh-huh-huh.  If she sees you she’ll chase you down and sit on your head.  Huh-huh-huh.”  
I looked at him for a second before Jonno laughed and said, “You crack me up, Libby.”  
I split while the two of them were talking about fat Fern and Kurt’s wife Kandace who is now enrolled in a seminary of all places.  That’s right.  Kandace Libby: blonde hair, round ass, and her cunt belongs to Jesus.
But here’s the really fucked-up part.  As soon as I step out of the elevator in my apartment building the cell rings and it’s Libby.  And what does Libby want?  He wants to know if I’ve still got Cynthia’s phone number.
I gigcackled.  “No can do, Kurt. She’s got a boyfriend.”  
“Huh-huh...what?”  
“Jesus.”  
“You’re really not going to give me her number?”  
“You don’t remember Parp asking you for some chick’s number three Christmases ago?”   The retard.  “You don’t remember what you said to him?”  
Long pause.  “Oh yeahhhhhhhhh...huh-huh-huh.  But that was different, man.  Parp was being an asshole stalker.  So...I dunno.  Can I have her number?”  
“So you’re just going to call her up.  A complete stranger.”  
“Yuh.”  
“Well, I’d give it to you if I had it Kurtz.  I just don’t have it.”  
Had to keep my voice low.  Couldn’t go into the apt because I didn’t want to have to explain this end of the conversation to the boys.  Christ.  Narrow walls painted the same yellow as the naked lightbulbs and the smell of catbox coming from three directions.  I wanted off the phone and in the apartment.
“Wasn’t there like a contact sheet or something?”  
“Oh yeah.  Wait.  I think I might have that.  It was a Google doc.  But if there’s more than one Cynthia you’re shit out of luck if you know what I mean.”  
“Guess you’re thinking I’m kind of a, you know, freak,” he said.
“Because you like getting crapped on?  I guess there’s worse kinks.  Like the one with the twenty-foot-tall women who like to jam little men up their butts.”  
“I don’t, uh, I didn’t say I liked getting crapped on, man.  I just like...Okay, I just like seeing a honey with a nice tush rap one out now and then.”  
There was a long pause.  I was just beginning to think we were disconnected.  Then he said, “Don’t judge, man.”  
“Hey.  Your wife is in the seminary. I’m just glad I could do you this solid.”  
“Yeah?  Huh-huh-huh.”  
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Eight
No Sympathy From the Devil
The night of the Cynthia incident I got home — I’m taking you back in time again to last March — and I climbed up the steps to my front door and remembered I better call Parp before going upstairs.  I wanted to tell him about the Cynthia thing and didn’t want the wife to overhear.
Logical, right?
So for the second night in a row I’m out there on my stoop dialing up the old phone to call Parp.  And yeah, Parp is an amoral perv but he was the only person I could tell about this.  And even if I could tell someone else I mean...who’s going to believe it?  Parp was my only choice.  At least that’s what I thought.
I thought: Parp knows what kinky freaks women are behind that fake straightness.  I’ll call him up.  We’ll connect.
It bugged me knowing I automatically thought of turning to Parp.  Like a reflex.  Like reaching for Daddy’s hand.  Remember way back at the beginning when I told how Jessica couldn’t believe I was still turning to Parp, still confiding in him?  I thought of her right then and I thought about how I always reached out to Parp because there was a part of me that was an amoral perv too and I just naturally expected him to have my back.
I was in the doorway to my apartment building. One of my neighbors — Mrs.  Liang, who’s really short but has these fantastic tits — had to get by me to get into the building.  We did some cordial giggling and then when I was alone again I leaned against the brick entryway opposite the black-and-white tenant directory in the metal frame with the buzzer buttons.
I sniffed the air.
Eighty-Fifth Street in that warm early spring smelled like fried chicken and falafel and...corned beef I guess.  I love the smorgasbord that is my neighborhood.  Upper West Side smorgasbord.  And I don’t mean just the food.  People, too. People mostly with cash in the bank and those little signs on their doors saying their apartments are protected by alarms and cameras and electric death.
And strollers.  Women of all races pushing little white kids around in strollers while Mommy goes to the gym and does the four-hundred lunges.
That’s my Upper West Side.
I got out of the doorway and sat on the stoop and snapped open the cell and stamped out the cigarette on the step below the step I had my feet on.
Oh yeah.  I was smoking a cigarette.
Parp picked up and I blurted out the whole story. I gigcackled frequently so he would think I was telling him about it because it was funny in a “what-the-fuck” kind of way and so he wouldn’t think I was scared.
When I got it all out he said: “What, were you scared of her?”  
“Nahhhh.”  
“Yeah you were.  You were afraid because she was young, right?  Afraid of what that dancer ass was going to do to your poor, frail vascular system.  Afraid she might want to get pounded a little harder than you can pound.”  
“Uh, nooooooo,” I said.  “If I was afraid of anything it was that she wanted to drop a deuce on my face.”  
“I don’t get it.”  
“You didn’t hear what I just said?”  
“Yeah.  I heard.  And I also know there’s a million miles of broken links between ‘I crap big like on a farm’ and ‘I crap big like down your neck.’”
“So why do you think she told me?  Think that’s just something she shares on dates as a kind of, ‘oh-by-the-way’?”  
“Nope.  Sounds like she just found another way to let you know she has a wide asshole.”  
“What?”  
“This ‘big crap’ thing? Probably just another way of letting you know how the butt-plugs have transformed her ass for anal.”  
“Then why would she say ‘like on a farm’?  You think she was saying they have a lot of anal sex on farms?”  
There was this long pause and then he said: “Jesus Christ...”  
“Well don’t you think you could give me some credit for actually being there?  Shit, if it was about a butt-fuck I think I would have known.”  
“So you couldn’t wait until the crap was imminent and then say, ‘I’m sorry I’m just not into watching a lady load’?”  
I knew somebody was going to ask me that.  I asked myself the same question on the train-ride back from Cynthia’s.  So I had an answer ready.
“Hey, people who want to do that to you aren’t all there,” I said.  “I don’t know the chick.  What if she’s a psycho?  What if she drugged me, like Dahmer, and when I woke up I was all tied up —”
“— with her asshole aimed at your face?!”   Parp laughed and laughed.  “What if she had a cunt with teeth in it?”  
“Sure.  That happens all the time.  I’m always reading about some guy who went home with a stranger and got his dick bit off by some cunt from the X-Files.”  
“She’s just a girl who worked on the video!  I don’t know what she’s into but I don’t see any of those girls slipping guys mickeys so they can tie them up and shit their lights out.”  
“You weren’t there! I mean, a girl’s into weird shit!  How do I know she’s not into biting my dick off!”  
“Teeth again!”   Parp said. “Really.  Vagina dentata.  Ask your therapist.”  
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I have an education.”  
I wanted to just kick the guy in the nuts right then.  He couldn’t be a little sympathetic?  A little?
“Okay.  Look.  I don’t know her that well so I don’t know maybe you have a point about her upgrading you to the premium funk.”  
“Gee.  Thanks.”  
“But I’m ninety-nine percent sure she wasn’t going to tie you up and make you take a load you didn’t want to take.”  
“Well, the remaining one percent looked pretty chancy when I was standing there in her living room watching her rub her butt.  — Ya know she calls her ass a ‘shit-cutter.’”
“A what?”  
“A shit-cutter.”  
“Ominous.”  
I just sighed really loud and stood up and brushed the seat of my pants and started pacing back and forth on the painted, cement top of my stoop.  There was a really long pause while I tried to think of how I could tell this prick that the Cynthia situation wasn’t one he could have just fucked his way out of if it had been him instead of me.
“You know the real reason you bailed?”   he asked, interrupting my train of thought.
I sighed loud again.
“You bailed because you have absolutely no idea why this hot young girl would want to get fucked by a chunky pale old geezer like you.”  
“Oh, bullshit.  I know why she was into me. It was because I told her I loved eating cunt but that Junior was too traditional to satisfy me with the flavor I crave.”  
“Which was a big fat lie.”  
“So?  I’d’ve crossed that bridge —”
“Now I get it,” he said.  “It all makes sense now.  You were afraid of getting her cunt jammed up in your face.  You were looking for any out and then this poor chick who thinks she’s got your head for the night mentions that she loads large and bam!  Just the excuse you need to run.”  
I was seething.
“Your therapist is going to park that when you pitch it to her,” he said.
“I gotta go.”   I could barely get the words out.  I had that much rage in me right then.
“Whoa, wait!  We’ve got one more day of shooting at Vider’s tomorrow.  Are you going to be there? Cameron is.”  
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.  You gotta promise me not to tell Cammy about big-crap Cynthia though, okay?”  
“Come on, she’ll think it’s cute.  Maybe she’ll get jealous.”  
“Dude.”  
“Maybe we’ll see a catfight.”  
I froze.  “Cynthia’s there again tomorrow?”  
“Nahhhhhh...”   he laughed.  “No dancers tomorrow, which I have to say kind of sucks.  And don’t worry about your secret.  It’s safe with Tony.”  
I gigcackled.  I was relieved.  See, back in those days — five months ago — I knew that Parp was a human turd but the legend about him was that he was really good at keeping secrets.
Everyone said so.  — Even Carol Weiser who we called “the Doll” because she was this girly girl who looked like a Barbie doll and dressed like a sitcom mom from the fifties.
Now, lots of people hate Parp but nobody hated Parp and talked shit about him like the Doll did.  I guess it kind of makes sense because she and Parp used to be great pals.  The greatest pals.  But the Doll was a no-dick-ever dyke so they never fucked and that pretty much was the kiss of death on their paldom.
See ladies, Parp will never love you just for being you.  With Parp you’re either biting his pipe or packing your bags.
So, yeah, Parp wanted to fuck the Doll and the Doll said no.  But she still liked sleeping with him.  And by sleeping I do mean sleeping.
I think she got away with it once and then halfway through their second platonic snooze Parp told her to wake up and fuck off.
See, the Doll was hot.  Those fifties-style dresses she wore?  On the one hand they made her look kind of traditional.  Maybe even like your mom.  On the other hand she wore them cut high so you could tell just by looking that she was inviting your mind’s eye to flip the hem up on her back.
It was a look that said Wally and Beav were asleep and June had plans for Ward.
It was all just a lure for other dykes.  She was advertising her majora and minora to ladies who love muff.  But the side-effect was she was also advertising them to Parp.
Nowadays I just laugh at the asshole when I picture him lying there staring at the ceiling with this sweet babe snoring into his chest, but back then I could kind of see his point.  I mean, when you’re married to a bitch for ten years you get used to not touching her even when her ass is out.  But a hot chick who flirts with you?  Who strips down to her tiny panties and gets in your bed and then yawns and says, “What do you think you’re doing?”  
I’m not saying a guy has to be a dick about it.  If you’re a decent human being you don’t want women just for sex.  You want them for, you know, all that other great stuff.
But in case you haven’t figured it out by now, Parp is not a decent human being.
I was backstage with the Doll a few nights after the night he kicked her out.  It was opening night of some show she was in where she played an angel who comes down from Heaven to help out this motorcycle chick who starts out thinking she’s straight but ends up licking the angel’s clit like it’s a revelation and an epiphany and Christmas all rolled into one sweet set of bucking hips.
Kind of an It’s a Wonderful Life for dykes.
So anyway me and the Doll’s girlfriend Maria went backstage after.  The Doll was pretty drunk already even though she was wearing her angel outfit still.
It was a little tense because Maria was already annoyed at seeing her girlfriend getting eaten out in public by somebody else, even if it was fake eating out.
You know.  Funnilingus.
The Doll started in on Parp as soon as she saw me.
“I said to him, ‘Hey, what the fuck, we’re friends!’ and he said ‘Tell it to my unsucked cock’,” she cackled.
“Why were you in bed with him anyway?”   Maria asked.
“Mariaaaaaa!  We talked about thiiiiiiiiiissssss!!!  Sometimes a girl needs man-snuggles.  It doesn’t mean she wants to kiss one-eyed Pete.”  
“Fuck that guy,” Maria said.
“So I said to him, ‘You’re telling me suck your cock or get out?!’ and he says, ‘Yep’!  Can you believe that shit?!”  
“Sounds like Parp,” I said.
We went to this diner called Moonstruck in Chelsea and an hour later we were still at the table and she was still dishing on him.
“If he’s such a fucking dick then why were you in bed with him?”   Maria still wanted to know.
“You know, he really is an anal fissure but what you can’t take away from him is that you can tell him anything and he’ll keep it a secret if you ask him to.”  
“Like what?”   Maria asked.
The Doll hesitated.  That was a mistake.
“Secrets about who you FUCK?!”
Wow.  I just watched while Maria went up like Vesuvius — if you can picture Vesuvius pounding a laminate table top with chapped-knuckle dyke-fists.
The guy from the register had to come over and ask us to leave.  Maria called him a cocksucker and we were out on the sidewalk fifteen seconds later.
The reason I’m telling you that story is so you’ll know why I trusted Parp with all my secrets.  It was part of his rep even with people who hated him.
I was in such a good mood when Parp said the dancers wouldn’t be there and my secret was safe with him that I made the mistake of offering to help out again with the vans.
I was pretty sure he was going to say, “No we’ve got it handled,” but instead he said: “That would be great.  One of the vans is filled with props and in that lot on Eighty-Third and Amsterdam.  Can you meet me tomorrow morning at six to drive it out?”  
“Yeah sure,” I said.  “See you tomorrow morning.”  
“Hasta la later.”  
I hung up and went upstairs and googled “vagina dentata.”  
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ten is Early Enough
The next day.   I guess overall it was great, but it started out on an ominous note that I didn’t know was ominous at the time.   When I came out of the bedroom to grab a muffin or something for breakfast I caught the wife sitting at the table in the kitchen area all quiet and sipping some coffee with her tits hidden in the folds of a big gray sweatshirt.   I was looking for my favorite cup — the one with the extra-wide bottom — when out of the blue Junior asks me if Jessica can recommend a therapist for her because she can’t stand life any more and needs help coping.
She said it just like that.   “I can’t stand life any more and I need help coping.”
In hindsight I know I should have paid a little more attention to that statement.   I guess you could say it was a warning sign.     I’m pretty sure that this juncture or crossroads or whatever in Junior’s life is what set her spiralling into the abyss of life as Parp’s fuck toy.
“Well bay-yabe,” I said in a sing-songy way that was me trying to sound really understanding of her feelings.   I had Cammy’s ass on the brain like Newton had calculus and there wasn’t much space for any other input.   But hey:   at least I was trying:   “Can I do anything to help?”
“Can you recommend...can Jessica recommend somebody?”
When she asked that the second time my brain kicked in and suddenly I was able to put Cammy’s ass on hold with no problem, like pressing pause on a video player.
See, I’d always thought it would be great to have Junior in therapy with Jessica because even though Jessica is a therapist and ethically couldn’t tell me anything Junior said, I also knew she was my friend and that as my friend I could probably get her to tell me everything Junior said.   Maybe I could even get her to give me a transcript.   It would be the next best thing to reading the wife’s mind.
“Well, why don’t you just see Jessica?”
“Is that allowed?”
“You mean because she’s already seeing me?”
Silence.   The wife had recently taken to rubbing her temples when she thought a question was too stupid to answer and she was rubbing them now.
“I’m pretty sure it happens all the time,” I said.   “In fact, it may help her analysis to be treating us both.”
“Oh Jesus.   I really didn’t need to hear you say ‘treating us both.’   Like we’re both going to be in the same room getting the same medicine.”
“Oh.   So...do you wanna do it or what?”   Silence.   “Babe?”
“Yes, yes I want to do it.   I just...I’m sure whatever treatment I need it can’t be the same as yours, please God.”
I knew she was trying to needle me into starting the argument she was dying to have so I played the mature card instead.
“Well dear, have you thought about how we’re going to pay for your therapy?   I mean, I can afford mine only because it’s in the union health plan.”
“That plan covers wives, doesn’t it?   Or is that just something else you forgot about along with the rest of your obligations to this family?”
Yeah, she really wanted to fight.   And that last line was delivered a little too un-bumpily, like she’d been rehearsing it.   But she was right about the wives-too part of the insurance plan so it looked like the stars had aligned for the wife’s Jessica therapy.
Right then was when the boys woke up.   They got out the plastic light sabers.   The wife started to cry.   I tried to hug her.   She pushed me away like my skin was made of turd but by then I was back to banging Cammy’s ass in my brain and didn’t care.
So Mommy changed her clothes and went to work and Daddy made breakfast and escorted the boys to school and showed up at Vider’s at about ten to put in some producer time in front of Cammy.
While I was on the subway down to the club I began to question how much I could actually trust Parp.   I mean, what if Cynthia was there even after he promised me she wouldn’t be?   Bad.   What if she was telling people I ran like a weasel from the prospect of tasting her clit?   Uberbad.   What if Cammy heard about it and wrote me off?   What if she got interested in somebody else on the set and I had to watch today while she framed her cunt at him?
Then I thought: what if everyone hates me?   What if...what if everyone else on the shoot hates me for not getting in until ten while they’ve been there since six?
That last part?   The part about them maybe hating me because I wasn’t there since the crack of dawn?   As soon as I thought it I thought: Fuck.   Them.   Ya know?   I’ve got kids and a wife who works.   In fact, I closed my eyes for a second and imagined myself giving them the finger.   “Fuck.   You,” I told them in my brain.   I’m a producer.   I’m kicking in the bucks.   Ten is early enough.
When I got into Vider’s they were in the middle of some setup that never made it into the final cut.   Some bit where the guy who lost his yarmulke and the girl who found it are dancing on a nightclub table.
Anyway, the whole crew was in a circle around this table that Lenny Paine and what’s-her-name the actress were standing on top of.   When I came in someone saw me and signalled someone else and then it was like a siren went off on my head.   Everyone just dropped what they had in their hands and turned around and looked at me and applauded.   I mean, not one of them hesitated.   They were all in on the gag.
Including Cammy.
“What?!” I said.   I was getting steamed.   “So this is all because I’m late?!”   Man, I would have loved to have given them the finger like I imagined but Cammy was there and she was laughing at me with them.
Cunt.   I wasn’t ready for that.
“Forget something this morning, Paul?” Vider asked when the hoots died down.
“Fuck no,” I said, “I—”
Then it hit me.   I was supposed to pick up Parp with the prop van at like six or something.
Now, you don’t know me but swear to any god you want if I’d remembered Parp in the parking lot on Eighty-Third I would have definitely been there.   I mean, I would have broken my ass to get there.   It’s just that I didn’t think of it.   It just never went across my brain.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Forty
I Try to Look Busy
Later when I had a chance to think about it, I realized that what made me completely forget about picking Parp up that morning was him ridiculing me the night before for not knowing what “vagina dentata” meant.  So the only thing I could think about was vagina dentata until I Googled it and found out it was just some old pagan legend about a cunt with teeth in it that I guess would bite your dick off if you tried to fuck it.  Then after I found that out the wife came out of the bedroom to pout in the living room and shush me whenever I spoke because the boys were already in bed.
But right then on the set at Vider’s I hadn’t had time to think it through that far so I was feeling pretty guilty about not picking Parp up.  I winced.  I looked around to see if I could see his face.  Oh yeah.  There it was almost right in front of me.  It was kind of smirky.  — Like he’d been expecting me to fuck up all along so he could tell everybody what a schmuck I was.  I looked down at my feet.  I looked up at him again.  He still looked smirky.
“Fuck man,” I said.  “I’m really sorry.  Were you waiting long?”
“Nahhhh.  Terry was there.  I called him up last night so he could come down in case we needed a backup.  We waited for you for about ten minutes then we just figured you forgot.”
“So...you lined up two drivers?”
“Well, yeah.  After you hung up the phone I got a little nervous because, you know, yesterday you completely forgot.  So I called up Terry.”
I was starting to get steamed again.  “So what was all this clapping and humiliating me about if everything was okay?”
“Well...it’s kinda funny, don’t ya think?  I mean two days in a row you promise to pick up production equipment and then completely forget?”
I just seethed.
“It’s funny,” he said.  “Lighten up.”
Right then Whispers shouted: “Hey Tony, got a minute?”
Parp went over to him and I stood there staring at an empty column of air.  The prick knew I was trying to impress Cammy.  He could have kept my little faux pas to himself but he made sure I was the object of community ridicule and he made sure Cammy took part in it.
I wanted to strangle the nine-toed turd.
But I was trapped.  I mean, what would Cammy think if I tore Parp a new butt-hole right there in front of everybody?  I just had to stand there and take it while he got his little public revenge.
And it turned out to be a good thing that I kept my mouth shut. By being the wound-up back-stabber that he is, Parp managed to get me sympathy with babes.  Especially the Camster.  She walked up to me and gave me this big sad grin.
“Hate to be you right now, huh?” she said.
“Fuh-huuuuuuuuuuuuck,” I said.
She gigchuckled.  “Dumbass.”
She pronounced the “b”.  — “Dum-Bass.”
I gigcackled.  She gigchuckled some more.  “Quiet on the set!” shouted Roz the assistant director.  They were off to the races.
So now that I was there I was kind of stuck about what to do next.  I didn’t have many options.  First I figured I could be the “producer” and not do anything but drink coffee and try to look like I was watching over my investment.
I tried doing that for about five minutes when they were setting up the next scene and it didn’t work out.  First off, nobody seemed to get it that I was a producer or that I had an investment to watch over.  Two young guys came by lugging some locker filled with heavy lighting gear like they were eighty year-olds with hernias and set it down right in front of me and sat on it.  They panted.
Whispers came over and said to them, “Yeah, maybe I should give you girls a hand here...”  They hopped up and he grabbed one end of the locker — the heavy end.  He pulled.  It didn’t move.  Then he laughed.  Then the two guys laughed.  Then I laughed.
When he heard me laugh, Whispers looked over at me and said: “So how’s life treatin’ ya, Paul?”
“Oh, pretty good.”
“Yeah?  Ya likin’ that donut are ya?”
Oh yeah.  I was eating a donut from the donut table.
I was pretty glad Cammy didn’t see me getting all self-conscious about the donut.  I jerked my head around looking for her and there she was, lugging her pretty ass off with the other grunts-for-a-day and not paying attention to me at all.
So after I scarfed down the rest of the donut I skulked around trying to look busy while I sorted it out.  I figured I could try just hanging out with the masters and creators — Parp, Vider, and Whispers — and people would think I was busy working on the more creative parts of the film.  I was pretty sure that my background as a, you know, a talent meant that if I volunteered creative input then that input would be valued by the aforesaid masters and creators.
Maybe that sounds like a stretch.  It really wasn’t.  Bang — Bangalore Springfield, the comedian — was getting away with doing exactly what I just described.  I mean, you should have seen it.  Everybody around him was busting his or her hump and what was Bang doing?  Cracking jokes with Parp about the next series of takes!  And Parp is asking his advice and whatnot and Bang comes up with an idea and...shit!  I went to school with Parp and Vider.  I knew them from way the hell back.  Bang didn’t know anybody from back then.  He was a newcomer.  A hanger-on.  An interloper!  He didn’t have any money in the so-called film.  He wasn’t a master.  He wasn’t a creator.  He’d simply insinuated himself into Parp’s company so he could look like a bigshot in front of fuckable babes.
So I decided I’d sidle up to Parp and pull the same shit.  But when I got close enough for him to notice me I could see there was no smile in his face for me.  No smile at all.  Not even in his eyes.  I guess he was still steamed at me for yelling at him.
Okay, so no sidling up to Parp.  At least for the time being.  That left Whispers and Vider.  Actually, that left Vider.  I figured if Parp was still miffed at me then Whispers might still be holding against me the whole standing-there-eating-a-donut-while-other-people-worked thing.
So Vider it was.  He was standing over at the piano with a Starbucks cup in one hand watching other people work.  He was my bud.  From college.  We were even dressed a little alike.  We both had on the same white canvas sneakers and jeans.  He was also wearing a gray sweater with silver buttons that looked like castle doorknobs and a big sportsjacket to help hide his big fat gut.
He saw me coming.
“Hey, Paul.  What’s new?”
“Oh, you know.  This film I guess.”
“Oh yeah?  Hey Paul, mind if I ask what you’re doing here?”
“Got some money in it.  Thought I’d, you know...”
“Seriously.  What are you doing here?”
“Thought...thought I’d come down to help.”
“But you’re not helping.”
I gave him my look-who’s-talking look and then quickly tried to hide it.  He noticed anyway.
“I own the place,” he said.  There was a pause while he just stared at the worker bees and sipped his coffee.  Then right when I was thinking I better go stand somewhere else, he said:  “Why don’t you see if you can help someone who’s trying to get something done. — Like that kid over there who doesn’t know how to roll cable.  You do that, and I’ll ask Bobby if he can use you in the next shot.”
Wow , I thought.  Use me in the next shot.
“Good deal,” I said.
Vider grinned and sipped his coffee.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Forty-One
Producer On the Set
So I bit the bullet and put on my grunt hat.  Hey, if it meant time in front of the camera later I was pretty sure it would all even out.  People might see me dragging shit and think, “Oh, look at the crewtard.”  But later when they saw me in front of the camera they’d say, “Hey, it’s the actor guy from Saturday.  He’s funny!”
Or something.
I found the kid Vider was talking about and yeah, he was struggling with the cables.  As I was walking over to him this other guy carrying a bunch of bounce-boards shouted to him:  “Hey, Skizz, ya know it can’t hurt ya if it ain’t plugged in, right?”
“Yeah, fuck you,” the kid moaned.  He looked so forlorn, all alone next to a big cardboard box filled up with big thick wires that wouldn’t unclump.
When I got up to him I said: “Skizz?”
He said: “Charles.”
I said: “Oh.  I’m Paul.”
He laughed this snide little laugh.  “Yuh-huh,” he said.
He looked like an overfed goat.  He was chunky and blonde — curly, blonde ringlets under a Red Sox baseball cap and a big fat baby face with whispy little whiskers.
“There’s a trick to that,” I said.
“I know.”
“Here, lemme show ya.”
He gave me the cable.  I showed him.
“Um, wait a minute,” he said.  His left eye wandered a little making him look vaguely insane.  “That isn’t the way Mike says to do it.  Mike says go over-under.”
He said that in a really loud voice so a split second later crewtard number two steps over and says, “What’s up guys?”
“This guy says wind the cable switching hands.”
So suddenly I’m fighting with two twenty-somethings about the right way to wind cable like it was the right way to suture brain.  That and a sudden craving for nicotine made me want to bite through my own cheek.
It was getting a little too loud when Parp shouts from across the room: “Hey hey hey...What the fuck?!”
“This guy is telling Skizz to wind the cable wrong!” Mike screamed like a girl.  I just rolled my eyes.  I could see the cigarette pack sticking out of my pocket on the table where I’d thrown my jacket.
Parp didn’t even look up from what he was doing — which was helping to drag a large metal cabinet across the floor.  “Paul’s a producer on this project,” he shouted really loud.  “Do it his way.”
When Whispers — who was standing on a ladder focusing a light — heard Parp say that he erupted in laughter and did that annoying slow-clap of his with the hands cupped so they’d boom.
But Parp didn’t crack a smile and no one else but Whispers thought he was yanking me.
Mike turned on his heel and stomped away and Skizz handed me the cable.
For two minutes I completely forgot about wanting a cigarette while I showed goat-boy how to wrap cable like a mensch.  When I handed it back to him I looked to my left and there was Cammy in her brown NYU tee under an unbuttoned pink-pinstripe man-shirt.  She had the low-rise jeans.  And the brown half-boots that pushed her ass nice and up.  I winked at her suavely and went for my cigarettes. Yeah, my stride said.  Producer on the set.
“Be right back,” I said in the mature voice while I walked to the door and dug the lighter out of my pocket.
When I hit the street I half expected to turn around and see Cammy following me.  — But she wasn’t, the little twat.  I hate being left alone when other people are around — it’s too much like getting a table for one in a busy restaurant — but this time it gave me a chance to think while I sucked smoke.  And what I thought about was how Parp had just taken the sting out of the day for me.  Just by yelling out what he yelled out.  Now I could do any humiliating manual task on the menu and people would know I was just this producer who wasn’t afraid to pitch in.
And on top of that Vider was going to get me into one of the upcoming shots.
Yep , I thought.  It’s all locking in.
I stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and went back in the door to Vider’s.  I knew exactly which card to play now.
Notes from the Upper West Side
Chapter Forty-Two
The Egalitarian Card
I pulled it off.  It was great.  I really got into the whole egalitarian thing.  Like, “Hey Mike, don’t wanna lug that yourself?  Let Uncle Paulie do it for ya.  Therrrrrrre ya goooooooo.”
I was avuncular.  That’s the word.  Like at lunch.  The lunchbreak.  Filmtards don’t like it when people split for lunch even in the middle of Manhattan where there’s an assload of restaurants right near everything and nobody has to drive anywhere.  Getting you back is too chancy and their damn schedule is sacred so they usually have food brought in.  Kurt Libby said that when he worked on one of Parp’s movies a few years ago Parp made the cast and crew go out to eat at the exact same restaurant a block from the set and they all marched there and back like a damn parade every day.
At Vider’s this was a lot simpler since Vider’s is a club and they serve food anyway and even though it was closed that afternoon for the shoot and all the tables were shoved against one wall Vider opened up the kitchen and the chef came in and cracked wise while he cooked.
But here’s what I did, getting back to the point of me being appreciated for my awesome regularness: instead of sitting on the floor along the wall with the masters and creators — which I definitely could have done, being I’m a producer and I know all of them from way back — I sat on the floor along the opposite wall with the crewtards.  — Except for the half-dozen or so crewtards who sat with the masters and creators.
The traitors.
I don’t think I’ve ever been cooler.  They talked about the Knicks, I joined in.  They told stupid jokes, I guffawed with my mouth open.  I laughed with them, not at them.  I went out of my way to tell this sniffly chick with zits like tits that I thought she had a really good point.  And when it sounded a lot like I was criticizing Parp?  I made sure I finished up by saying: “Ya know, he has a point of view too, and hey, he’s great don’tcha think?  What a great guy.”
I took a mouthful of spaghetti after saying that (oh yeah I was eating spaghetti) and I could sense them inching closer to me mentally.  It was like I was this hip uncle who had taken them in after their square parents got killed in a car accident.  Even Cammy who had been staring at me from the buffet table came over and sat next to me after telling the bearded boom operator to skootch over.
It was right then that I started noticing it was a really great day.  And I thought: “It better be great for the bucks I’m kicking in to be here.”
Then Vider came up to me and said, “Paul.  Talk to  Bobby about the next shot.”
He winked at me and walked into some back room.
Awright , I’m thinking.  Me on camera!  But it turns out Whispers had other plans.  Or maybe Vider wasn’t specific when he told Bobby the deal was I get to be in the next shot, because a few minutes later we were shooting again and I was standing just off camera holding a big piece of white cardboard next to Lenny Paine’s face to reflect light into the shadows made by the bags under his eyes.
At first I was miffed and felt all back-knifed but it turned out it didn’t really matter.  Cammy stood behind me during the shot and squeezed my butt-cheek once while the camera was rolling.
On the next break we made the date.  Yeah, not that night, but a definite date for Saturday night when we were all rested up and could ram like Ben Hur boats.
I did not gigcackle.  And we all broke for home without Big Crap Cynthia showing up.
A great day.
Notes from the Upper West Side
(Chapter Forty-Three coming soon!)
Notes From the Upper West Side Copyright 2010-2012 Dan Roentsch. All rights reserved.
A novel by Dan Roentsch
1. Revenge!
2. The Beginning
3. Shit Happens
4. Feel the Hate
5. SpongeBob Interlude
6. Lord of All Tail
7. Wake Up Call
8. Junior's Gothic Chasm
9. My Wife Works for Hed
10. Biz Trumps Ex-Hooker
11. Xanax Interlude
12. Let That Be a Lesson To Ya
13. Ladies and Gentlemen: Bangalore Springfield
14. Live and Learn!
15. Little Round Jewish Hat
16. No More Wheaty Charms
17. Lounge Act
18. Hopes and The Getting Up Of Them
19. I Flirt With Cammy
20. A Man Thing
21. While Mommy's on Vacation
22. The Problem With Party Girls
23. Produced By Me
24. Not Even Then
25. Flaky Shades
26. Bitch For a Day
27. The Neighborhood Carnality 
28. The Normal Male Curiosity 
29. My Ride with Big-Butt
30. A Public Service Announcement
31. Two Babes in Hot Pants
32. A Tobacco That Tastes Like a Lady
33. It Isn't Complicated
34. Why Chicks Dig Me Sometimes: A Theory
35. A Short Walk to Cynthia's
36. Like on a Farm
37. The Big-Crap Enigma
38. No Sympathy From the Devil
39. Ten is Early Enough
40. I Try to Look Busy
41. Producer On the Set
42. The Egalitarian Card new!
Table of Contents
Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction.

The people depicted in this work do not exist.

To paraphrase Spock, the characters and events in this work are unreal.

Appearances only.

They are shadows.

Illusions.

Nothing but ghosts of reality.

They are lies ... falsehoods ... spectres without body.
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