What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Read online

  I wore a hat all through July, and then in mid-August I saw an ad in my very own paper, New York Press, that intrigued me. Hair Club for Men wanted men with thinning hair to send in photos. If they chose you for a commercial, the reward was five hundred dollars. I needed the money, and so my father took several pictures of my head from different angles and I mailed them in. I also included a cover letter, stating that I thought I would make an excellent poster boy for balding.

  Several weeks went by and I didn’t hear from them and I forgot about the whole thing. In the meantime, I was busy regrowing my hair. I had done some research on the subject and I was taking certain actions. I was trying to quit coffee since it robbed my body of hair-related vitamins, and I was avoiding masturbation because I read a book on Eastern practices of semen-retention, which told me that masturbation dried up my spinal fluid and made my hair fall out. I’ve now come to see my bald spot and the bald spots of other men as the mark of Cain for excessive self-abuse.

  I also purchased rosemary oil, which is very good for scalp health, and a rubber scalp invigorator. And I started eating lots of sea vegetables because I read that people in Asian cultures had very good hair and that their diet was rich in seaweed.

  So now every time I relapse on coffee or masturbation, which I do with appalling frequency—coffee is so difficult to give up—I quickly run into the kitchen and fetch from the cupboard some seaweed. Most convenient, in a vacuum-sealed bag, is dried dulse, which is salty and tough, but I eat it to apologize to my hair and to try to convince it not to fall out. It’s a mad game of tug-of-war (sea vegetables vs. onanism and caffeine), but I think the seaweed is winning—my hair looks pretty good.

  Then the other day, I was poring over my enormous credit-card bills and I remembered the photos I had sent to Hair Club for Men. I called them up to find out what was going on. I needed that five hundred dollars. I spoke to several operators, and then I was put right through to Shari Sperling, the daughter of Sy Sperling, the founder of the company. I was excited to have made it to the top, and she was wonderfully friendly and vivacious over the phone. I asked about my pictures, she said she remembered them, and I asked if I was in the running for the commercial. I also mentioned that I was a writer for the New York Press, hoping that she would take me more seriously. After all, I wasn’t just another desperate man with thinning hair—I was a journalist with thinning hair.

  “Did you write an article about having crabs and venereal diseases?” she asked, referring to my essay in the Press, “A W on My P.”

  I wasn’t counting on her actually having read me, so I wasn’t sure if her familiarity with my work was good or bad for my credibility. But I pretended that it was good. “Yes, that crab-piece was some of my best work,” I said.

  “I love your stuff,” she said.

  “Well, thank you,” I said, flattered, but then I pressed on with the more important issue at hand. “So what do you think of my pictures? Can you use me?”

  She said that my hair was too short for what they were looking for. I told her that it had grown in some and that my fringe certainly would be a good selling point, that other men with fringe problems would identify, which I thought was a compelling argument and sure to get me in position for that much-needed five hundred dollars.

  “I know that fringe thing can be bad,” she said sympathetically. “We had one guy in here with a fringe and it looked like armpit hair at the front of his head. That’s why I feel good about what we do for people. We make them look better, feel better.”

  I took some offense at this armpit remark, but I didn’t let on. I tried to convince her to use me for the commercial, but it was to no avail, though she was very sweet about it. So since I had her on the phone, I asked her how Hair Club for Men did what it did. For years, I had seen the ads where they stated with pride that they used real hair. I had always wondered where they got this hair. I figured that they took it from your chest or your legs or the back of your head or, even better, your lower back, which is such an unattractive place to have hair—I even repulse myself when I scratch that area and find my little nest of down in that unusual spot. I feel terrible for the poor women who have to grasp me there during our sexual congresses. Anyway, I wasn’t sure where exactly Hair Club got its hair. So I asked, “Where do you get that real hair? From the back of the man’s head?”

  “Asia,” she said.

  “What do you mean Asia?”

  “People sell their hair over there. It’s the strongest hair in the world. We deal with hair brokers.”

  “That’s interesting. I’ve read that people in Asia have good hair, but it’s a bit strange that they sell it.”

  “Don’t think it’s just an Asian thing,” she said, worried perhaps that I was going to accuse her of Third World cheap-labor exploitation. “American women sell their hair to wig-makers all the time.” This last statement produced in me a vision of attractive Midwestern women going around with closely cropped heads. I thought of the Midwest, I guess, because that to me is America, and Shari Sperling had said American women.

  “What do you do with the hair once you get it?” I asked.

  “We dye it and put it through processes to change the texture and then it’s attached to your own hair with a nontoxic skin-compatible fusion. A fringe is good to have, by the way, if you become a client, because you can attach hair to it.”

  “I’m glad my fringe is good for something,” I said, though I had no intention of joining the Club since they didn’t want to use me in their ad campaign. Shortly thereafter we rang off and I was a little disturbed by the thought of poor people in Asia continually growing and shaving off their hair. But then I realized it was not unlike what I had been doing for the last few years. And at least they were getting paid for it, and it was probably a good part-time seasonal job—grow it in the winter, shave it in the summer. It was practically agricultural.

  Then I thought how I was doing all the right things for my hair: I was living like the people of Asia—I was retaining my semen (well, at least making an effort) and I was eating sea vegetables. Then it occurred to me that if I moved to Asia, I might get all my hair back. The total cure for balding was to live in the Orient. I could support myself by teaching grammar again. And then when my hair was the strongest in the world, I could have my revenge for not being used in the commercial. I’d shave off my beautiful hair and sell it to Hair Club for Men, and I’d get a lot more than the five hundred dollars I had originally been hoping for.

  The Playboys of Northern New Jersey

  MY FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE with a woman was rather old-fashioned: It was with a prostitute. I was sixteen years old and I was living where I had always lived—in the tranquil and dead and middle-class suburbs of northern New Jersey. It was February of 1981 and a friend of mine, who was seventeen and thus had a driver’s license, was working for a florist as a deliveryman. For some reason, his last delivery on this particular Saturday night was all the way to Brooklyn—to a funeral home. He called me up and suggested that I come with him. After we dropped off the flowers, we could go to Manhattan and drink; he had the store’s station wagon and his bosses would never know what time he brought it back.

  I hesitated. Brooklyn, in my mind, was very far away and was where Jews, like my parents, used to live before fleeing for New Jersey or Long Island—so who would ever go back to Brooklyn? It must be a dangerous place now, I thought; a place that if there was such a thing as a Jewish tourist map would be circled in red, and a red circle in the map’s legend would mean: There Used to Be Beautiful Jewish Neighborhoods Here— which was a sad refrain I had heard all my childhood while being driven through such environs as Paterson, upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and, of course, Brooklyn.

  “Don’t be a wimp,” said my friend over the phone. His name was Werner.

  I didn’t want him to think I was a coward, so I said, “All right, I’ll go,” and he came to pick me up. My parents were out of town—I could come home as late as I want
ed.

  I had known Werner for a very long time. He was always tall and thin for his age; his drawn-in cheeks gave him a malnourished appearance, but he was good-looking nonetheless, with blue eyes and sandy blond hair. I considered him to be a good friend but not a great friend. Our association seemed to peak around the first grade, and after that our closeness was sporadic. My parents, though, were always proud of my friendship with Werner. They saw it as a sign of their liberalness and capacity for forgiveness that they let me play with a boy of such obvious German descent— Werner’s father had been an innocent, teenaged foot soldier in the Third Reich, but was a very nice man. And I think Werner’s parents saw it as a sign of their assimilation that their son should have a little Jewish friend. So everyone was happy.

  At the height of our friendship, in the first grade, Werner and I played this game one time that we called the Playboy Club. Neither of us had ever seen a Playboy magazine, but we had heard from Werner’s older brother, who was in middle school, about this club where men drank and had the most amazing experiences. These experiences weren’t elaborated on by Werner’s brother, but we perceived that they were sexy. We weren’t entirely sure what sexy meant, but it was an exciting word. So Werner and I went down into his family’s paneled basement and sat at his father’s bar. We poured Coca-Cola into shot glasses and we ate pretzels and listened to the radio. We thought we were doing everything that one should do in a Playboy Club and we waited for something sexy to happen.

  So we sat there for some time, waiting, and I remember thinking that the game was rather disappointing. And Werner didn’t say anything, but I knew he was thinking the same thing, but we both didn’t want to admit that we had come up with a bad game and that we didn’t know why, that we didn’t know what was missing. When we finally gave up and got down from the bar, we engaged in some seven-year-old wrestling and rolling on top of one another to relieve our frustrations, though it was unclear to us why we were frustrated.

  Then almost ten years later, we were still frustrated, but now we had more of an idea why, and that’s how we came to be driving across the Brooklyn Bridge together, hoping to find a funeral home in Bay Ridge. We wanted alcohol, but behind the desire to drink was the desire for sex, love, a kiss. I was completely inexperienced with girls, Werner a little less so, but we had both heard and were learning that the way to meet women was through drinking.

  So as we drove through Brooklyn, I thought for sure we would get lost, but Werner, being German and capable, was able to read the map and locate the final resting place of our flowers’ recipient. It was a small Italian funeral home with a low ceiling, and there was a bald man in a black suit sitting by the closed, shiny coffin. It was cold inside the home; it was a freezing February night, and the man had an ancient, orange-glowing electric heater for company. He appeared to be some kind of professional coffin-guarder (he didn’t even have a newspaper), and he took the flowers from Werner and put them with several other bouquets by some stacked chairs in the corner.

  Our morose delivery accomplished, we were eager for our adventure and Werner navigated us back to Manhattan, where we asked somebody on the street how to get to Greenwich Village. We figured that’s where the good drinking was. We made our way to Thompson Street and West Third and went to a bar called Googie’s, which I believe still exists. Inside was a hardy crowd seeking the warmth of company and alcohol, and luckily for us, the bartender didn’t ask for any proof of age.

  Werner almost did expose our youth, though, by ordering a pitcher of Alabama Slammers, but we got away with it. We sat at a little table and the drink was a grotesque, red-colored, sweet-tasting concoction, and I became completely intoxicated. We thought of approaching two single women, but we lacked courage.

  Then midway through our second pitcher, I stood up to proclaim something and I knocked over our table and I fell down and the pitcher came down with me and made a blood-colored pool on the floor. “I’ve been wounded,” I shouted. I was hoisted up by the back of my coat and thrown out the door by the bartender, just like in the movies. Werner followed after me, laughing, and we weaved in the cold to the car.

  For some reason, I didn’t vomit. We did jumping jacks to sober up and then we drove off. We tried to find the Lincoln Tunnel, and as we came down a street, in the Thirties, near Tenth Avenue, we saw, like a hallucination, about half a dozen women standing on a street corner. Steam came out of their painted mouths and they were in miniskirts and stockings and fur coats. They beckoned to us and smiled. They wanted us.

  “Oh, my God, whores,” said Werner, excited.

  “They look sexy,” I said.

  He pulled the floral wagon to the side of the road and rolled down his window. He entered into rapid negotiations with a dyed blonde—“A blowjob is ten dollars, sweetie,” she said, “Okay,” he said, “Pull into that lot,” she said, pointing, “Okay,” he said—and he backed up a hundred feet and then turned into this abandoned lot. He drove into the dark, far corner and we turned around and watched the whore come to us on her high heels, like a woman on stilts, it seemed. As she got close to the car, he said, “Get out.”

  “Can’t I sit in the back?” I asked. It wasn’t that I wanted to watch, but I was a little scared to stand in a dark lot in the freezing cold.

  “Don’t be fucking crazy,” he said, and then he softened his tone. “You can go after me.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said, with some disgust. I was taking the moral upper hand because it wasn’t pleasing to my ego to be second, but more important, I was covering up my fear. I was intimidated—I had never kissed a girl, so I was hardly ready for a blowjob.

  I got out of the car and held the door open for the blonde. “Thank you,” she said. She had nice manners.

  I went and stood next to an old metal trailer—a truck with a body but no head. I thought I would be safe in its shadows, and it all felt romantically dangerous since I was still quite drunk. I shivered in the cold and I leaned against the truck and tried to see what was happening in the station wagon, which was about ten yards away, but there wasn’t much to see, only Werner’s hands on the steering wheel, his thin face staring straight ahead, looking at nothing. The blonde had disappeared. Then I glanced to the street corner and saw that a big black woman was approaching me. She was all hips and red lips.

  “You want a blowjob, baby?”

  “Okay,” I said quietly. One doesn’t think to say no in these situations—at least I don’t.

  “You have ten dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “You pay before we play.” I took out my wallet. I had exactly ten dollars left. It seemed like kismet.

  I handed her the money and she put it in her purse. Then she squatted down in front of me like a baseball catcher. She had me open up my winter coat so that she could get at my fly. She took out my penis and it was rather small because of the freezing temperatures, and because I was afraid—she was the first woman besides my mother and sister who had ever seen my penis.

  “I’m kind of cold,” I said, explaining my small stature.

  “That’s all right, I’m gonna warm you up,” she said, and then she put her mouth on it. Oh, Lord, I loved it. No one had ever touched me so nicely. I closed my eyes.

  Prostitutes didn’t use condoms back then, and I responded to the warmth and heat of her mouth, and I came rather quickly. I opened my eyes and she stood up.

  “Okay, baby,” she said, and she turned and walked away, done with me.

  I felt giddy and happy. Doubly drunk. Drunk now on sex, on life. “Thank you,” I said, calling after her, and then I added, since I was smitten and drunk, “I like you.” And it was true. I did like her. I felt even that I loved her. And I thought she must like me after doing what she did. But she didn’t turn around. She kept walking. I figured she couldn’t hear me. Then the car door slammed. Werner’s blonde walked across the lot. I ran over to the station wagon.

  “I got a blowjob,” I said with pride.

  �
��Me too,” said Werner, but he was quiet, sullen, hurt by it somehow.

  He raced backward out of the lot and onto the street. I looked for my new girlfriend with the others on the corner. Then we pulled up to the corner, stopped by the red light. I saw her; she was drinking tea out of a Styrofoam cup. Several of them were drinking tea—I could see the strings of the tea bags, the steam coming off the tops of the cups.

  I was happy to spot her. I rolled down my window. She looked at me. I waved to her and she approached the car.

  “I don’t think you heard me before,” I said. “I really like you.” I was innocent, stupid, a fool. What did I hope for by saying such a thing? But I wanted to express my affection. I was sixteen and had never kissed a girl.

  She threw her tea in my face and turned her back to me. The other whores laughed. Werner laughed, too. The tea wasn’t scalding, just hot. The light changed and we drove off. I didn’t say anything. Werner held in the rest of his laughter. I dried my face with my shirt. I regretted my ten dollars. We found the tunnel.

  I didn’t know if she thought I was taunting her or if she was simply teaching me what I needed to learn. And I didn’t know if they drank tea to stay warm or to wash the taste of sperm out of their mouths.

  An Erection Is a Felony

  I HEARD ABOUT THE ARTIST and fellow pervert Harry Chandler before I ever met him. It was the spring of 1995, and I was in bed with a girl I was dating, and I was telling her parts of my life story. I regaled her with the trauma of my late puberty, recounting how it didn’t arrive until I was fifteen and a half.

  “That’s nothing,” she said. “My last boyfriend didn’t start puberty until he was twenty-one.”