Sexual Camels

We all have dry spells. (And by "we" and "all," I don't mean me.) But do you have friends who have not had sex in years? I do. We all do. How do they do it? I really want to know.

Does your memory of it fade over time, so that you become less pent up even though you never sate your desires? Or do you just become so expert at self-love that the loss is barely felt? Or do, as I fear, things shrivel up a bit, retract, slowly grow closed, until their use fades into a pleasant, but distant memory, like the memories of kayaking on Lake Titicaca in summer camp?

I know a guy, a very handsome, 6' tall, blue-eyed, blonde JFK-Jr. Hair kinda guy, who has shocked my friends with his confession that he hasn't had sex in over five years. He claims his celibacy is voluntary and an act of protest, because the world has grown too tawdry, too overt, and just plain too sexual for him. Instead, he yearns for the Victorian times when the mere glimpse of a woman's wrist was enough to set a pulse racing. Wuh?

Clearly, not everybody shares my appreciation for the "Birthday Sex" music video, but even the most devout celibate must occasionally feel the desire to look at the nudey pics on the Greek vases at the Metropolitan Museum.

I would assume that this guy is just gay, but even if he's closeting, he defies logic. Wouldn't a clever closeter fake a nymphomaniac beard to throw people off his trail? Listen, I know that if paranoia meant that I had to fabricate my entire sex life, I'd can assure you that I'd be fabricating threesomes with Clive Owen and Matt Damon in the back of a G5 pretty much every weekend. But that's just me.

In Manhattan, a good-looking guy (with a few shekels to his name) can drag home some kind of woman off the street pretty much whenever he feels like it. Even a guy with an extremely underdeveloped libido must get the urge more often than the corner bodega sells canned sardines, so please explain why a perfectly attractive man wouldn't just tag something (anything) once in awhile, just because he could?

I really can't understand any of this.

At the other end of the Spectrum of Horniness, my other friend had such a long dry spell that his unquenchable thirst overwhelmed him to the point that he actually rubbed one out in the stall of his office bathroom using liquid soap as lubricant. He must have glimpsed a wrist on the way to the bathroom.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Worst. Date. Ever.

And so, as you can imagine what happens when you select your friends for alcoholism, my friends are a pretty sorry bunch. But they make the guys I date seem like real catches.

I went out with this one guy, I actually knew him through a friends, so he wasn’t a stranger. He took me to dinner, at Nobu, no less. We had a perfectly lovely time, and he walked me home after dinner, and I invited him up for a drink, stating very clearly that nothing untoward was going to occur.

I dozed off in my chair while watching Letterman, and the next thing I knew, I woke up to the sound of him crying hysterically. Now while I knew this guy in a roundabout way, I certainly didn’t care about him very much, especially now that I had realized he was really loony tunes. But, because it seemed like the humane thing to do, I made a feeble attempt to try to comfort him without ever prying about what had made him so sad, because quite frankly, I just wanted him to leave and go to bed in peace, without having to administer psychotherapy to my dinner date. He wouldn’t stop crying, and I started feeling sorry for him. Again, I knew this guy, so he wasn’t a stranger. I told him he could stay on my sofa, and I went in my bedroom and went to sleep.

I woke up at 6 am to a funny sound in my living room. Sure enough, he was still there, all the lights were on in my living room, and he had singlehandedly consumed two bottles of wine, ordered up two pay-per-view porn movies, and was sitting on my sofa jerking himself off. Again, I reiterate, I am not making this stuff up. I say to him, listen, I’ve had a nice time and all, and you seem like a really nice guy, but I have to work tomorrow, so would you mind cleaning yourself off when you’re finished and seeing yourself out. And I tell you, he did not miss a beat. I went into my bedroom, locked the bedroom door, and never heard from him again. And again, this is somebody I knew.

Drunk Again

Let me tell you about the time I passed out. In the Holland Tunnel. In order to understand this story, you have to have a little background information: 1) I drink heavily, and 2) over the past several years, I have lived in various hotels in the Tri-State Area while renovating apartments that I have bought to redo and flip for a profit. At this particular time, I was living in the Comfort Inn in Jersey City, which as you can imagine, is not really where you would ever choose to live. One evening, while drinking heavily in Manhattan, I called for a car service to take me back to Jersey City, but by the time the car had arrived I was barely functioning. I told the driver where I was headed and then fell asleep. By the time we were in Jersey City, I could not remember where I was staying (Not my fault because it was only temporary and so not equivalent to forgetting your own home address.) and so we drove around for awhile at which point he decided to drive me back to the city, to the bar where he picked me up. This is where I start to get feisty.

At some point, I wake up from my blackout, and we're passing through the Holland Tunnel, headed back to the city, so I proceed to argue with him to get him to turn around, but he won’t. So I do the next best thing. I throw open the door to the car and get out. While it is moving.

Mind you, I am so blind drunk at this point that I've forgotten where I live and ejected from a moving vehicle.

The next thing I vaguely remember was waking up on that little track on the side of the road inside the tunnel while some EMTs loaded me onto a stretcher. Apparently, they put an IV drip on me, and I was fine by the morning. I actually went to work the next day. (After returning to Jersey City to change my clothes.)

Did you ever notice that the word shameful and shameless mean almost the exact same thing?

See, people who don’t drink can’t understand how things like this happen. But people who drink heavily do. For example, I have one Mormon friend and she came to a little brunch I had on my terrace a few years ago. I was nervous, wanted to make sure everything went smoothly, so I had a few mimosas. And some Bloody Mary’s. Next thing I know, some of my German friends were drinking schnapps and singing the German national anthem to the holocaust survivor next door. My neighbor called the cops at precisely the time that my Mormon friend called an ambulance, and that is when I realized one critical lesson: Drunks should only hang out with other drunks, and they should generally stay indoors.

Yes, It's All True

So, I have one of those relationships where this guy (let’s call him Pete) and I break up every few months. We will go through these spells where we are madly in love and it is all constant emails and hugs and love and marriage, and then we both get a little bored and one of us pulls the trigger and breaks up with the other. Just like that. Six weeks on, three weeks off, and this has been going on for almost two years. And when we’re on, it’s so serious that we basically move in with each other, so he has the key to my place and vice versa.

At various times when Pete has dumped me or I have dumped Pete, the dumped party will go way out of their way to try to win the dumper back. Long hand-written letters, surprise gifts, thoughtful voicemails, you get the picture. On three occasions, and all in the past year, I have gone even farther, ascribing to the theory that if he can’t have me, he will want me more. So, the first time, I decided I was going to go to Argentina for Memorial Day weekend. So, I call him at work, and I’m like, “Hey Pete. Not sure what you had in mind for the upcoming holiday, like whether you thought we’d be back together by then, but anyway, I bought a ticket to Buenos Aires, and I’m going.”

So, I go, and the food is great, and I call him weepy a few times from the hotel and when I come home, things are better. We’re in love again, we have a great summer, and then bam, August hits and we’re both like, “gosh, I have only a few summer weekends left, not sure I want to be monogamous this month, let’s see other people.” Seems like a great idea at the time, except that I keep seeing him out, but I am alone and he is actually seeing other people.

So I take my Memorial Day plan a step farther, and this time I say, “Pete, not sure whether you were thinking of taking an end-of-summer vacation, but I can’t take one with you, even if we reconcile, because I just booked a trip to Tibet.” And, the worst part is, I actually go.

This time, instead of being in BA, which is like Miami but farther, I end up flying 20 hours to the edge of nowhere, pass out from altitude sickness on my first day there, make myself eat yak meat and disgusting food, and just generally be repulsed by this beautiful, but not at all fun place to visit. And of course, while I am there, I call him, tell him what a wonderful time I am having, how enlightening it is to be in Tibet by myself, the clear air, the Buddhism, blah blah blah. We get back and have this amazing fall.

But by New Year’s Eve, we’re both at our wit’s end with each other--again, and we decide that another “break” is in order. Mind you, by this time, we don’t even bother to return each other’s things when we break up because we both realize that it’s a temporary situation. He keeps my key, I keep his, and his drawer full of stuff stays at my apartment. You get the picture.

So come late January, I am feeling pretty tired of being alone, and I am thinking to myself, “Where can I go to get this relationship back on track?” And so this time, I casually mention Rwanda, but in the end, I book a round trip ticket to New Delhi and take off by myself. By the time I land, I realize that this little game of brinksmanship has gone way too far. Not only do I find myself in a country where animals run wild in the streets, but I get the worst dysentery imaginable in a country that has yet to discover toilet paper.

Again, I call him, tell him what a wonderful time I am having, how at peace I feel in India. This time, he is not biting. He does not budge one bit, does not admit that he misses me even a little. He has had enough of my weird running off. So what do I do? Of course, I extend my trip.

By the time I get home, I have lost ten pounds and my clothes are falling off me, and although I genuinely did enjoy in India, I realize that as I am perusing travel brochures about Antartica that this little charade has run its course. And so, I am hovering over my sink, sobbing about my sad plight, scrubbing the diarrhea stains from my underwear, when in he walks. With my key. He came back! And we are still dating today. But eventually I learn that while I can win him back with all my exotic travel plans, the problem is that I actually wind up going to these places. And yes, I am a better, richer person for having experienced Argentina, Tibet and India, I realize that I actually like taking the trips alone better than I like hanging out with Pete. So, the moral of the story is that . . .

See, the difference between me and most other comic writers is that absolutely everything I tell you is 100% the truth. I am not making this stuff, nor could I.