Eating My Feelings (18 page)

“Are there going to be hot girls there?” he asked.

“Duh,” I replied. “I’m gay. I only hang out with hot girls. Just keep your mouth shut or none of them will want anything to do with you.”

After shooting the shit for a bit, Ricky explained what today’s workout was going to entail. I was going to be lugging shit up fifteen flights of steps and back, while he supervised.

“This sounds awful.”

“Just fucking do what I tell you!” he replied. As I began my journey, Ricky began ranting. The man had a way with words that was unbounded. That day I got to learn a little bit more about the man I had so quickly come to admire.

“You know what’s good about people who stink at the gym?” he asked.

“What?”

“Fucking nothing, man. They need to take a shower. When I was in the military we shared our gym with a bunch of fucking Germans and it’s like they never showered. They stunk like shit, man. I hate Germans.”

“So last weekend I got shit-faced at this restaurant with this Albanian girl. She was hot, but I got the feeling she wasn’t going to put out so I ended up getting head from the hostess at the restaurant we were at.”

“I just don’t get why Dominican people feel the need to always sit on my stoop. Get your own goddamn stoop. Also, have you ever wondered why people who don’t speak English feel the need to talk so much goddamn louder than everyone else? What the fuck?”

He just kept talking as I kept running up and down flights of stairs. The man would not shut up.

As I made my final lap up the stairs, I yelled, “DO YOU EVER SHUT THE FUCK UP?”

Again, Ricky began to laugh as if the devil was inside of him.

“No, man, I don’t.”

“Are you high right now?” I asked.

“A little,” he replied.

I crawled to the shower after our workout. Looking good for the ladies was more difficult than I had expected it was going to be.

Our final Tuesday together (because I was too cheap to pay
for more than three workouts) was pretty simple. Ricky took me around the gym and we lifted weights “the right way,” as he liked to say. After our workout, Ricky took me into his office. Hoping for another tour of China, I sat down in anticipation of a feeding frenzy.

“So,” Ricky said. “I started training this guy Mike. Mike Sinatra.”

“Is he related to Frank Sinatra?” I asked.

“That’s what I asked,” he replied. “And he was like, ‘No, I am not related to Frank Sinatra.’ I told him that the next time someone asked him if he was related to Frank Sinatra to tell them to go fuck themselves because it’s none of their goddamn business.”

“Uh, okay,” I said.

“Anyway, he’s gay and I thought you two could hook up.”

“Are you setting me up on a blind date?” I asked. “What makes you think I will like him?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “You’re both gay.” After not having been touched by a man in what felt like a decade, that was a good enough reason for me.

“Anyway, I told him all about you and he’s interested in meeting you.”

“Seriously?” I asked, “You’re orchestrating a gay blind date?”

“Yeah, why the fuck not?”

Ricky is like the straightest person I’ve ever known, and since I am the gayest person I know, I found our relationship very interesting. He was in serious contention for new best friendship.

“All right, well, set it up,” I said.

“Fine, but only if you find me some pussy.”

“Fuck off,” I said as I closed the door to his office after walking out.

Next week at the gym, I met Mike Sinatra and quickly learned that he had nothing to say for himself. I tried to get him to talk, but he was having none of it. Just because two people are gay does not a match make. Ricky, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ve learned a valuable lesson.

After spending hundreds of dollars on a personal trainer, I soon realized that if I want to be spoken to like shit and told that I am fat, I can just call one of my various family members on the phone and have them do that for me for free.

When I was trying to get my first book published, I took some pretty drastic measures. One summer evening, I decided to take a break and catch a movie. The movie I picked was
Julie and Julia
starring Amy Adams of
Drop Dead Gorgeous
fame. According to the film, some homely chick named Julie Powell decided that she was going to prepare every recipe in Julia Child’s masterpiece,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, and blog about it every day. Powell ended up turning her blog into a bestselling novel and subsequently into a film that made
a shit-ton of money. The only thing I got out of this movie was that the best way to get people to notice you is to steal someone else’s idea. Since I am not above stealing other people’s ideas, I decided that I was going to do precisely what Julie Powell did and put a new spin on an old favorite. All I needed to do was find a respected and well-known book that was familiar and that most Americans knew. After weeks of racking my brain and trying to think of whom to plagiarize, I realized that it was there all along. I could read Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex
and blog about every sexual position in the book.

After patting myself on the back for coming up with such an amazing epiphany, I realized that in order for me to blog about all of the sexual positions in
The Joy of Sex
, I would actually need a partner for this. I had cleaned up my alcoholic ways and got sober, and pretty much stopped having sex altogether. Granted, I had never looked better, but I had begun to hate people, in general, more than ever. I decided that the best thing to do would be to go online and see if anyone would be game. Since all gay men are pretty much whores, I thought this task would be effortless. I went to Manhunt, an online site where gay guys meet to get it on. Our generation has completely cut out all forms of personal contact in meeting, so I thought in order to find someone to go along with my latest scheme, Manhunt would be the way to go. However, I am too paranoid to actually seek out guys and usually get sidetracked, so I wait for people to seek me out. The only problem is that the only people looking for me are either men over forty or creepy-looking guys who look like they randomly drive by high schools with one hand on the steering wheel and another on their stick shift. Finally, after an hour of warding off weirdos, someone normal looking e-mailed me.

His headline read: “Gimme a Kiss.” I enjoy kissing strangers, so I continued. “Super chill and fun and polite and smiley. Open to dating but only guys under thirty.” He didn’t look like a complete tool; in fact he was pretty good looking, so I e-mailed him back. Got to love Manhunt, as conversations usually go something like this:

“Hey,” guy one says.

“Hey,” guy two says.

“What’s up?” guy one says.

“Me,” guy two says.

“Wanna come over?” guy one says.

“Sure, where are you located?” guy two says.

It’s nothing if not efficient. Anyway, I continued talking to my new friend, whose name was Tom. I found out that he lived in the West Village and was pushing forty. Now I usually do not find myself having much in common with people around forty. Little old Jewish ladies in their late seventies, I could have hour-long conversations with them, but with guys in their forties, I got nothing. I decided to meet Tom to see if he would be an apt candidate for my most recent scheme. He asked to meet me at a café near his apartment to see if we “clicked.” I think he wanted to meet in public to make sure I was not a complete psychopath. But I am crazy in public, in private, on a plane, on a train … so it really makes no difference where we met, I just had to make sure he didn’t catch on to the fact that I was totally using him for my latest project. I certainly could not let Tom know that if he was a fit, we would be getting it on
The Joy of Sex
style, every time we met. This first meeting was just going to be a “test drive.”

When we met at the café, he walked up, took one look at me, and said, “Let’s go to my place. There are no seats at the café.”

“Do you have croissants?” I asked.

He looked dumbfounded. After realizing we had just met and he did not know the heights of my gluttony, I shrugged my shoulders and followed him to his place. I guess he did not find me to be a psychopath because before I knew it I was sitting on his couch and we were chatting. We made the usual small talk, like: What do you do for a living? Where are you from? What do you like to do for fun? All I could do was sit there, wondering why we could not have done this at the café. At least I would have been able to have a little nosh.

Tom rattled on and on about how he loved going to Sandy Hook and all I could do was pray for all of this to be over. It’s a shame I love my art as much as I do. This was already taking too long. I had a week’s worth of
All My Children
saved on my DVR that was not going to watch itself. I was going out on a total limb in order to get some much-needed buzz for my career and all this guy was doing was yakking about some gay beach in New Jersey. Finally, I walked into his bedroom, plopped down on the bed, and waited for him to come in. I am a decent-looking twenty-six-year-old. Tom was pushing forty and should have been so lucky to have me in his apartment. He quickly followed suit and we did it.

Tom was a pretty okay guy. I had absolutely nothing in common with him, but if I was going to get published, and quickly, I needed to use Tom to get what I wanted. We text-messaged back and forth for a few days. Having already covered chapter 1 in
The Joy of Sex
, “Fellatio,” I quickly needed to see Tom again and move on so I could blog about it. But the next weekend, Tom told me he had plans and totally blew me off.

I’m never going to get published. Never! Never! Never!
I thought after getting blown off by Tom. But I was always told patience
is a virtue, so I decided to wait. I guess I could have just found someone else to have sex with, but that seemed like too much work and I didn’t want to get an STD before my first book even came out. Tom texted me that he would be free the following Monday, so I waited for him to make plans.

“Want to hang out?” Tom texted me that Monday.

“Yes!” I replied. I was desperate for material. We had been going back and forth for two weeks and we were still only on chapter 1 of
The Joy of Sex
.

“I just need to let you know something,” Tom wrote. “This is only for fun. I am not looking for a relationship.”

Ummmm … okay. I could not flat-out tell him I was using him for material, because I didn’t want to seem like the asshole that I actually am, but I was a little offended that he thought I was interested in him in the first place. He’s forty. The only thing I have in common with forty-year-olds is a mutual love of Vicks VapoRub and other various ointments, and perhaps a fondness for eighties prime-time soaps like
Falcon Crest
, but most homos these days don’t even appreciate the classics. Who the hell did this guy think he was? Suddenly, my latest project seemed less appetizing than Julia Child’s recipe for grilled intestines. I was inadvertently getting my feelings hurt by a guy I was not even interested in. How did this happen?

“Yes, Tom, I understand that this is just for fun,” I replied.

“Good,” Tom said, “because the last person I wanted to have a casual thing with turned clingy and it ruined everything.”

Who did this guy think he was? Annoyed, I said: “I understand, Tom. Just let me know when you’re free and we can take it from there.”

“Will do,” he said.

Thinking our exchange had ended, I turned on the TV and began watching the episodes of
All My Children
that were now backlogged on my DVR. As I glanced up to see Erica Kane in all of her glory, I received yet another text message from Tom.

“I just don’t get it!” Tom wrote. “Every time I start talking to a guy, they, like, fall in love with me.”

You’ve got to be kidding me
, I thought. Granted, I needed Tom to move on with my project, but he was thoroughly pissing me off.

“Yes, I get it. You’re hot. Talk soon,” I replied.

“Gosh, I don’t know how this
always
happens,” he then said.

“Right,” I said, “but I am in no way in love with you.” Meanwhile, who the hell says gosh anymore?

“Okay,” he said.

So many things can be misconstrued when communicating via text message. I took his “okay” as an:
Okay, sure you aren’t, Mark. I can tell you totally love me
. When what he probably meant was:
Okay as in Roger that, talk to you later
. This is why we all need to just start picking up the goddamn phone and calling each other again.

I was so annoyed that Tom thought his shit didn’t stink that I finally texted him back: “Dude, you’re like my dad’s age.” Which isn’t exactly true, but I think he got the memo that I wasn’t interested in listening to how hot he thought he was because I never heard back from him.

My plan had backfired. I was not going to blog about every chapter of Alex Comfort’s
Joy of Sex
after all, mainly because I was too lazy to try and find another guy to have sex with and I was planning on coming out of the summer STD-free, so there’s my silver lining. I did, however, learn a very valuable lesson:
Whether they’re eighteen or eighty-eight, all gay men are pigs and whores, myself included. I didn’t really need a failed writing project to tell me that. I was not above sleeping my way to the top in order to get published, but luckily it didn’t have to come to that. Instead, my first book came out from a wonderful publisher and it didn’t even involve an AIDS scare.