old stories

Sorry not to have posted anything recently. My brain is in a sleepless backlog right now. But I rescued some journal entries recently and found some stories that might distract you momentarily from studying for the bar/avoiding work/passing the weekday in an unproductive stupor.

Wednesday, 1/30/08 11:42am

I've heard a couple of good stories lately so I thought I should write them down.

1. Richard from the dog run. Richard was talking to some other stranger when I got into the dog run. I'd seen him talking to people in the run before, but I had assumed that they just knew him. Turns out people were just being friendly to a lonely, garrulous old man who attached himself to them and talked about himself. I had jogged to the run and was stretching out my hamstrings on the bench while Boo trotted alongside a Jack Russell who had a worn tennis ball. Richard said, "Keep going, you need to touch your toes!" I was irritated, and said only, "I'm doing the best I can!" Richard said, "When I was in the Marines, I could go six inches past my toes!"

This was his opening. From this exchange, he went on to tell me how he could do 120 push-ups in three minutes, and 100 sit-ups in two minutes, and most importantly, how he could do 48 pull-ups in a row in his heyday in the Marines. "But I didn't do it for my ego. You know how some guys just want to be big. I was the biggest and strongest guy in the Marines. But I did it for a woman." The winner of a company-wide pull-up contest would get five days leave in England. A few months before he had spent a weekend with a British girl named Audrey Hooper. "But it wasn't sexual at all. We had a thing - it was intellectual. Well, as intellectual as 18, 19 year olds can get. But it was just comfortable, you know? There wasn't any sex." He trained for the contest and won it, and as a reward he was the only enlisted man who was permitted to wear civilian clothes on their warship. He also got his leave, which began with him stepping off his ship, walking down the street and seeing a Rolls Royce, which stopped for him and his friends. A man inside said, "Come on in, Yanks!" and drove them into town.

Richard did not find Audrey that week and never saw her again. He said he written to her in the intervening years to tell her that she had given him the best weekend of his life. Richard proclaimed even in the dog run that that weekend was the best of his life. It was in 1964 or 1965, and he was young. "I sent her a watch - Bulova. I wrote to her." He didn't say if she ever wrote back.

I said, "That's a great story, you really should write it down" and went over to put Boo back on the leash and take him home. He was still eagerly chasing around a softball, so it took me a few minutes to pin him down. Richard took this as a slight and went up to the next stranger and said, "Okay! Who is my next victim! She doesn't want to talk with me anymore!" I felt bad and wanted to say that I really was preparing to leave, but I mumble too much and throughout our conversation he didn't appear to hear any of the things I said - things admittedly limited to extraneous interjections like, "Hm!" and "That's how it happens, isn't it?" - so I wasn't too confident that he would hear my excuse. He tried speaking to a woman he called "Jessica," but Jessica said, "Nuh-uh, you're speaking to him, not me, Richard!" in a jovial but firm way. I guess she'd fallen prey to him before. Richard then said, to no one in particular, "I'm lonely, you know? I'm just a lonely old guy who has no one to talk with so I have to talk with people here." I left.

2. SV's latest threesome. SV, a woman in her last year of her doctoral program in history at NYU and one of S and R's friends, told me and S this story two nights ago when we were at an afterparty for the NYU grad students who had seen the Jerry Springer opera at Skirball. I missed the opera because I didn't think to get tickets but I'm not sad to have missed British people mocking what they believe Americans to be like, because it only arouses feelings of jingoism which are usually so foreign in me, and I would only have gotten into a fight with some Europhilic self-aggrandizing liberal grad student about why England isn't exactly a classy lassie herself. Instead I spent an evening in the clinic offices typing up a memo for TLDEF about the possible claims a transgender student could make against his school district for being forced to home-school because the district could not regulate the bullies who tormented him, and afterward made my way to Nowhere Bar on 14th and Second Avenue, with Freddie Mercury's spinto tenor singing to my ears on the walk over.

The party was a combination of NYU grad students who had just come from the opera, and R's ex-boyfriend's M's friends - it was their first of (they hoped) many Monday night parties at Nowhere, with M's lesbian friend Carly "spinning" music on iTunes whilst bedecked in Shane regalia, which included eyes beleaguered by liner and shallow, short-brimmed hat, and a self-consciously sly approach to approaching women. I avoided her. I bought a $2 Pabst and sipped it with S while SV told us her tale.

SV is a recently-divorced thirty-something who is experiencing a second sexual adolescence in the sausage-heavy region delineated by the L stop at Lorimer, the NYU-side of the Village, and the Williamsburg bridge, with jetties reaching to basement speakeasies in the Financial District and strangers' apartments further south in Brooklyn. She lives with R and another divorcee named S_ in a newly-renovated apartment unit just a block away from one of Williamsburg's largest bars. S describes pictures of SV from the mid-1990s, when she was married, as images of an unhappy East German hausfrau. I guess marriage will do that to you, and getting out of a marriage will do exactly the opposite. SV now has a cute hipster haircut and wears tall boots with tight jeans that draw attention, as the jodphur-style of hipster fashion is meant to do, right to her ass. She also has this way of leaning toward you when you speak to her, which I found a little discomfitting at first (so I rocked back on my heels more than a few times).

SV told us that she had been at a bar with her friend D, whom she had slept with before. They were squeezed into a picture booth when D told SV that his new roommate Richard was interested in her. Richard had apparently just gotten out of a long relationship that was mostly devoid of sex ("The reason was supposedly that he was too big, so she would give him handjobs once a week," SV said), so D wanted to cheer his friend up by facilitating sex for him. SV turned around and said, "Well, that's great but you're the one I want to sleep with," and strutted away before D could think of anything to say. She found him lamely hitting on some other girl at the bar later. D, SV, and Richard left the bar together for SV's house, where she got into her pajamas and directed D to sleep in the middle of the bed, between SV and Richard. SV somehow managed to get between them anyway, and had concluded that nothing was going to happen except for sleep, at dawn. D got the hiccups and began describing what he thought was going to happen ("Does this mean that in *hic* five minutes *hic* Richard and I will be sucking each others' dicks?"). Richard, meanwhile, began groping SV from behind. She batted his hands away but he was persistent. The details get hazy at this point, but SV said, in confidence, again leaning toward me, "I sucked Richard's dick while D fucked me from behind." I gasped and covered my mouth with my hands. She could not remember who had the bigger penis ("because D is pretty big too") and the next morning closed her eyes and grasped bottles with each hand and called upon her motor memory to compare their two cocks.

Alan, another friend, was out in the living room on the couch. He had to catch a flight back to his apartment in Mexico City that morning, and his belongings were in SV's room, so at ten a.m. she got into her bathrobe and pulled all of Alan's stuff in to the kitchen. Then she got back into bed and ignored D and Richard and Alan as they milled around the kitchen trying to make sense of the night before. She told D if he was hungry there were English muffins in the fridge.

This was all very scandalizing, and I did not stay to have a second beer.