Sunday, April 23, 2006

 

ENTRY 213: IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD ENTRY


Guess what I'm doing in a couple of months?


I'm going to see Esther Mo Nonnie Mads the Queen of Pop Her Madgesty in concert.


That's right, bitches! Madonna! How gay am I?


In anticipation of this frivolously monumental event, I hereby announce the Official Accidental New Yorker Cinematic Madonnathon. And you're not invited.


Who's invited? Frank Beekman is invited. And you're not Frank Beekman.


I have selected an assortment of Madonna's worst movies (the ones I haven't seen, that is--the next best thing to watching The Next Best Thing again would be to jab a Phillips screwdriver up my urethra). I will watch them and then write a duly nuanced critical deconstruction of each one. While not all of Madonna's filmic output has been of the highest caliber, I promise that I will not be, as Ms. Ciccone Mrs. Ritchie put it so elegantly to her vain gay cokehead friend Rupert Everett in The Next Best Thing, "a meanie-bucket." But will I refrain from being a douche-bag? As someone wiser than I once sang, "I promise to try, but it feels like a lie."


###


I have become, as I often have before, the Office Thesaurus. Someone will be having a conversation outside my cubicle, and fumble for a word. If you were to wire my cubicle (hey hey, NSA!), the recording would sound something like this.


typing typing typing click click "Exacerbate!" click click shuffling paper click typing "Anadromous!"


The office is, if not exactly fascinating, quite pleasant, all in all. My closest coworkers and I have code words for nasty outsiders, little running jokes, sporadic lunch outings. We pronounce "Canal Street" as "KAY-null Street," for fairly obvious reasons.


I check personal email and surf the Web when no one's looking. On certain days I'm counting the hours until closing time. I take my position for granted.


Life is good.


###


I saw the Brit again last Sunday, when there was beautiful weather, and we went to the Klee exhibit at the Neue Galerie, a place I'd never visited before. (The verdict: nice space, nice if not particularly extensive exhibit, admission shouldn't cost as much as the Met.)


We wandered around afterward, and my feeling grew that I just didn't find him sufficiently engaging. He doesn't come forth with opinions in the same way I do, stuff about culture and film and art. I suppose it can be chalked up to stereotypical "British reserve," or to the fact that he is a scientist rather than a liberal arts type, but the result is the same. Oh, and I think he has stealth halitosis. By this I mean that every once in a while I will catch a whiff, then when my nose tries to confirm it the odor has quickly retreated, then a while later I might scent it again.


I once made a pact with a friend in Austin that, if one of us ever had bad breath, we would tell the other. I think it's a reasonably good idea to have such an arrangement. Anyway, I digress.


It seems to me that the Brit has a bit of an interest in me, but never fear. People who are interested in me seldom sustain that interest even if I want them to.


###


So I answered this personal ad online and....


Stop it.


So I answered this personal ad online and it was pretty weird. I suppose I did it out of idle curiosity, and the thing in question was something I thought would be amusing and that I could check off my erotic things-to-try list.


It was a guy who was totally into being spanked.


I went over to his place some weeks ago. It turned out that he had the entire penthouse floor of a building overlooking--well, a significant landmark of which he had incredible view. The elevator opens right into the apartment, which is a long continuous loft until you reach the bedroom door. One of those places with hardwood floors, minimal furniture, big skylights, tall windows.


The guy was attractive, but gave me the creeps. Not in a psychodangerous kind of way, but just a general awkwardness. He's the type that says maybe ten words in a whole conversation and hums during the long silences. Even worse, after I carried pretty much the whole conversation he would break the silence by asking, "So, what's on your mind?" and that pisses me off. "Nothing really," I kept answering.


I told him quite precisely what I do for a living, and when I asked him what he does he said, "Investing."


"Oh, you work as an investment banker?" I asked.


"No," he said. "At home."


"Okay," I said.


Silence.


"What's on your mind?" he asked for the third time.


I sighed. "Do you want me to spank you?"


We went to the bedroom, which was about half the size of my entire (three-bedroom) apartment. It had a skylight and a lit fireplace.


He lay himself across my knee and I tried to conjure up some kind of workable script from dim memories of a S&M story I had read years ago.


"Have you been bad?" I said, though I knew he couldn't have been nearly as bad as this dialogue.


"I have," he said, wiggling his butt in the air.


"You need to be punished," I said, inwardly rolling my eyes, and I smacked his ass. He jumped and made a small noise.


After a bit of this I told him to drop his pants, which he did. There was actually something interesting and perversely satisfying about the sound of my hand spanking a bare ass, especially since I had found our preceding "dialogue" so vexingly one-sided. It's no surprise to anyone, I'm sure, that I have some aggression to work out.


Yet as one hour stretched into two, my interest in the enterprise began to flag. I found myself spanking with one hand and checking my watch with the other, stifling yawns as I brought my hand up for a particularly good whack. I pretended at one point that I was listlessly playing the bongos. As nice as his ass was, I was quite bored with it by now. And I was definitely raising welts, which are not so tactilely pleasant. But he seemed indefatigable.


Finally I left, and after some private head-shaking and chuckling as I stood on the subway platform, I thought little more of it (though my hand did sting the whole next day). But Spanky continued to email me, saying he had a good time and really wanted to see me again. I ignored half the emails and told him I was unavailable the other half of the time. But last night, a dreary rainy evening when I had nothing going on, I received another email from him and decided I would go over there for a second and final time to try to figure a few things out concerning this odd duck.


He seemed in a peevish mood, which I did not react well to, but I think my adverse reaction made him relent a little, and we waited on the couch for the Chinese food we'd ordered.


"I had a party a few weeks ago. Do you want to see pictures?" he asked, breaking his all-time spoken output record in one fell swoop.


I accompanied him to one of his computers, and he showed me a slideshow of images.


"Wow," I said, "that's a lot of people," thinking to myself it was hard to figure how this guy had any friends at all.


"About 300 people," he said. "See that guy? We're kind of dating."


"Oh really?" I said. "Tell me about it." But he really didn't say much other than they'd met at the party and gone to dinner a couple of times, and then mentioned that it wasn't likely to go anywhere. Quelle surprise.


We returned to the couch in front of the big-screen TV.


"So who are John and Jeff?" I asked.


"What do you mean?" he said.


"The slideshow was titled 'John and Jeff's Party,'" I said, not adding that Spanky had claimed his first name was something entirely different than either John or Jeff. "Who are John and Jeff?"


"It's just a brand name," he said. "It sounded catchy." Even he knew this answer was beyond retardo.


"What kind of brand? For what?" I said, going into Ken Starr mode. As though his verbal house of cards hadn't already toppled.


"Oh, you know, things," he mumbled.


I was past being out of patience.


"Fine," I said. "Stonewall me. Go ahead. Whatever."


"Are you upset?" he mumbled.


"It's fucking rude not to respond to a reasonable question," I said.


"What do you mean?" he asked.


"You know exactly what I mean. That right there is what I mean."


Silence.


The rain poured harder, pounding the skylight.


"That's a hard rain," I observed, not really caring how banal it sounded.


"Do you like the sound of rain?" he asked.


"Sure," I said.


We moved to a couch situated directly underneath a skylight, with a window view of the skyscrapers in Midtown. He reclined and put his head in my lap. He asked if it was okay; I shrugged.


I stared out the window for a stretch, and then he turned over and lay across my lap, face-down. It could not have been any more obvious.


I waited perhaps 45 seconds, gave his ass a quick smack, and went back to looking out the window.


The buzzer sounded then, and we ate at a table in one corner that had a pile of financial newspapers and magazines on it, as well as a bust of a composer I am not knowledgeable enough to identify. Probably Beethoven. We ate silently in half-darkness. (Oh, I should mention that Spanky never turns on any fucking lights. When I was looking at the Chinese takeout menu, he went into the other room and I couldn't figure out how to turn on the kitchen lights, so I had to walk clear across the room to the lamp by the TV to be able to read.)


It occurred to me as I was eating that one of the magazines or newspapers was bound to have an address label on it with his real name. After he'd finished eating I was still lingering over my beef and broccoli, and when he went to the bathroom I quickly rifled through the pile. One magazine was labeled with someone else's address; the other actually had the label cut out. And none of the papers were addressed at all.


I took my plate to the kitchen and scrutinized the counter. No mail. I went to the table by the door. There was a big roll of twenties, but no mail there, either.


The toilet flushed, and I scurried back into the kitchen to dump my plate in the sink. I returned to the table, sealed my leftover food, and went to the refrigerator. As I opened it, my eye fell on a prescription bottle that lay facedown at the bottom of a large, otherwise empty bin in the door of the fridge. I couldn't turn it over because Spanky was standing right there.


We returned to the couch. He said nothing. I said nothing. I stared at him to see if it would make him uncomfortable. It seemed to.


We played the "What do you want to do?" game. It may be unreasonable, but people that passive totally fucking piss me off. It reminded me pretty strongly of Craig, actually.


Finally, of course, we ended up in the bedroom again. I was tired and irritable and sick of once again being commodified, not actually engaged with and treated as someone worthy of an honest dialogue but rather viewed in terms of what dark service I could provide. Everyone in New York ends up being so goddamn transactional.


I had odd strains going through my head among his moaning and the sharp, wearying sounds of flesh against flesh. Eurythmics lyrics. "Everybody's looking for something / Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused." And then an epigraph from a book. "Violence gathers in a small place: a room, a bed, a glove."


It had been 20 or 30 minutes, and I had had quite enough. I stopped, rolled over to one side, closed my eyes.


"Tired?" he said.


"Yeah," I said. "I'm tired."


On the way out I went into the bathroom next to the kitchen. As I emerged, Spanky's phone was ringing and he was going to answer it. This was my chance.


I ducked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Carefully I began to turn the prescription bottle over; picking it up would have rattled the pills too audibly, because the phone was close by and even now I heard him approaching again.


Gingerly yet hurriedly, I turned it enough to see the printing. My eyes wildly scanned for a name. He was almost to the kitchen.


He was too close. I gritted my teeth as I turned the bottle face-down again, sure he could hear even the faint jostling of pills as close as he'd approached and as silent as the apartment was.


Just as I lifted my hand from the bottle and began to reach for my leftovers, he appeared around the wall. "What are you doing?" he said.


"Oh, just getting my leftovers," I said. I had the name.


When I got home I Googled him. It turns out that he's a very senior employee of a very prominent person, someone even I've heard of. But, I mean, who gives a shit? I wouldn't have even bothered to investigate if he'd simply told me his real first name at the beginning. It's one thing to use a sexual pseudonym, but it's quite another to lie when the person you're with (who has been square with you from the get-go) clearly sees that you're not who you say you are. I get so fucking tired of being jerked around.


Spanky had rustled up a plastic bag for me to carry my leftovers home, and as I put on my coat and grabbed my umbrella, he rang for the elevator.


"Will you call me tomorrow?" he asked, as the car reached penthouse level and I stepped inside.


"Sure," I said, as the doors slid closed before me. What was one more lie?

5:41 PM

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