Comfort Sex

Posted by Lex Konrad in Sex | May 24, 2004

The four of us are crammed into a booth at Art Bar, downing potent cocktails. I’ve got one and a half martini glasses of Blue Sapphire in front of me and I’m struggling to keep up with Emma. How can such a tiny chick absorb so much liquor?

“So, who’s Ruben?” Natalia’s asking me.

Ruben Rubin: promoter extraordinaire—diminutive, personable, tirelessly devoted to good times. Anyone who’s anyone who gets around knows Ruben. We met at a shabby underground party in 1999 and I soon counted myself among his circle of revelers. In my heyday I worked 80 hour weeks and raged on the weekends—pre-game drinks at 2200h, hit a club at 0200h, wait for Ruben’s call at 0500h… after-party’s at so-and-so’s place on the UES, penthouse suite. Yeah, and bring some girls. Sometimes we’d line up three of these after-parties in a night, my eyes wide as saucers at the sight of it all: heaping plates of blow, nineteen-year-old models with sunken eyes and rusty pipes, Harvard grads dabbling in better living through chemistry—C, X, K, G—mixing and matching the alphabet. Stumble home at 1600h, get up at midnight and do it all over again. Those were lost weekends. Going home when the cock crows is for amateurs.

And Jimmy, the coke dealer who had a thing for sex toys and ladies’ underwear, who was every bit as erratic as Dean from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Jimmy always had four or five girls over and liked to make them beg for it—he was known for fishing his cock out in front of his female clientele. He couldn’t figure me out because I never wanted anything from him. “A-aleks, check this shit out,” he’d sputter, drooling over a lump of cocaine the way an entomologist might fawn over an exotic beetle. “This is my best shit. Watch how it crumbles.” I was more interested in his bizarre philosophical rants. But I did make introductions, and I suppose I enabled a lot of coke fiends back then. Pour a 40oz for the guys in rehab. Hoist your glasses, gents. You dodged the bullet. Whatever happened to you Jimmy? Ever get around to reading that book?

Everything was automagic. Me, stumbling penniless out of one of Ruben’s parties at Chaos, not knowing what to do next, when he comes through with a car service, presses a bottle of Skyy into my hand and tells me to head to Float. Not merely the VIP room—that’s for amateurs—rather the double VIP room, filled with doubly very important people. “But I have to hit an ATM,” I lamely protest. Doesn’t fucking matter—everything’s paid for. I was an artiste back then. What a decadent little pussy I am now! I feel old just thinking about those times, and when the kids talk about their pansied walks on the wild side, I fix a thousand-yard stare and say, softly, “you ain’t seen shit.”

I try to break it down for Natalia but I may as well be talking about Weimar Berlin. A ten-volume epic poem wouldn’t cut it. You just had to be there.

We head up to the ATM on 16th and then I make a quick stop at the Grill. Million stories about that place as well. Guns and mobsters and such. D is there and we play the same game we always play.

“Written that novel yet?” I say.

“Workin on it,” he sez.

“Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?” I say, attempting to be witty. I mumble something about David Foster Wallace, D’s favorite author.

“Been hearing rumors about you,” he sez.

“Lemme guess… Jorge’s given you an earful,” I say.

“Yup,” he sez.

“No doubt. Any rumors you’ve heard are certainly true. Next Thursday, eh?”

“Yeah.”

To Vela, then. It’s Ruben’s new Saturday night spot. And Ruben’s still got his whores, his odd assortment of trustafarians and hangers-on, his bottles of vodka, compliments of the house. I give Ruben that macho handclasp pseudo-hug that somehow seems gayer than the real thing. I run into T, formerly of the Quadrille-Hamptons set, who’s still prattling on about his crazy startup schemes. Then Stymie the deejay who’s currently stymied in the gig department. He feels it necessary to apologize to Leslie because he made a pass at her a year ago.

Emma and I huddle in the corner commenting on the music. “That’s old school.” Then another song comes on… a Prince ditty: “Oh shit… now that’s old old school.” Les walks over and we dance. I light a cigarette, my second act of civil disobedience this night (earlier, as we rode the train, I’d taken a blurry-assed snapshot of Les and Emma sitting together). Les talks about the time we stopped smoking for three months on account of a bet we’d made, and how we’d eventually circumvented the rules by having other people exhale smoke into our lungs. She demonstrates this on Emma and soon they’re in full lip-lock. Natalia and I watch the girl-on-girl action and make a show of rolling our eyes.

No apres-hours tonight. Ruben says next week, maybe. Natalia tries to get us to head to Midtown where she plans to meet a few friends but I decline—I have a sixth-sense about these situations. So Natalia leaves and later on calls to say the party was, indeed, lame.

Les suggests our place and Emma’s up for it. The implications sink in and I’m momentarily floored. Once we’re back home, I light candles and queue up Abbey Road. Everything is mellow at first. I’m lying on the couch with my head in Emma’s lap and I’m kissing her hands and letting my fingertips graze Leslie’s thigh. For a moment it seems like we might just drift off and that would be alright. Then our hands and lips and tongues grow frenzied and Emma’s telling us we’re not nearly naked enough.

Delirious in the pre-dawn light, I feel like I’m hovering above myself, like this is all lucid dreaming. I’m kneeling over her and thinking she’s so little, so little. I’m pushing it in, uncertain of my aim, trying not to accidentally bugger her, and later on so blitzed, so loopy, that I have to work at coming, her little cunt spasming against the force of my thrusts. How weird it is that I was sweet on her once and then we couldn’t have this and here we are again. It’s different now: familiar and messy and warm and relaxed. Comfort sex at its finest. All the sexual benefits of a relationship and none of the bureaucracy.

We wake up, the three of us, moaning, delirious, very much on the shit end of the stick hangover-wise. Emma showers as Les and I work in a quickie. Then we all head over to Barney Greengrass for smoked fish. In between mouthfuls of scrambled eggs with Sturgeon and Nova Scotia Salmon, I point at Leslie’s seat. “Alec Baldwin sat there.”

Later on we walk uptown, bellies full, and we indulge in post-prandial free association. “I met James Gandolfini once,” says Emma.

I smile, seized by an idea. “You know, Les, all this stuff we do… it’s like taking a shit.”

Les grins back at me, picking up on the cue. “I like to think of it as giving birth.”

Comments Off | Top ↑