Posted by Lex Konrad in Relationships | Feb 21, 2006
Fry: “Hey, wait! I’m having one of those things. You know, a headache with pictures.”
Leela: “An idea?”
Fry: “Mm, hmmm, hmmm.”
Saturday night I answered an age-old question, one that’s been on my mind ever since I hit my first real party in New York. Why do people always think I know where the drugs are?
When the third dude approached me looking for pills or coke or whatever I pulled him aside. “So what is it about me that makes you think I’m a drug dealer?”
“It’s the orange shades man.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah. And you smile a lot.”
Would-be drug kingpins take note.
It sure didn’t hurt that I wore my checkered seventies retro shirt unbuttoned half-way to reveal my ‘Porn King’ wifebeater. When I stood in the slow-moving bathroom line a young woman placed her hands on my chest, parting the shirt.
“Are you really a porn king?”
I had to think about this for a minute. “Actually, well, yeah. I don’t make the stuff though.”
I’m convinced Porno Jim is a minor deity: he seems to be everywhere at once, at least as far as these underground parties are concerned. I told him about the project Anya and I are cooking up.
“Have you seen her stuff?” he asked me.
“Oh yeah. She’s a freakishly talented and prolific writer.”
“Sounds like it’s gonna be great.”
“Listen, I want you to do a podcast for us.”
“About what?”
“About this. We need to capture this shit somehow—all of it—because this is the real New York. Plug your show at the end or whatever. For me this is about the love first and the money second.”
Our conversation segued into sex, as it always does. Porno Jim was telling me about his favorite position, in which the two girls soixante-neuf each other while the lucky guy fucks one of them doggy style. “I call it the winner’s circle,” he intoned.
“That’s the perfect term for it,” I said.
“Cause everybody wins!”
The night thundered on. The loft was huge, well-worn, cold in some places but comfortable nonetheless. People wore elaborate carnivale-themed costumes, giving me an eyeful of jiggly asses and breasts. Friendly faces lined the hallways. I milled about. I danced with Les and Emma. I ran into people and the conversations all ran together.
“I always dreamt of this New York,” I was telling Mort, a recent arrival to party central and a friend of Emma’s. Earlier in the evening we’d dropped by his birthday soiree in Manhattan. We returned to the conversation we’d struck up a few hours ago regarding the varieties and vicissitudes of hooking up in this city.
“I’ve learned a lot from you,” Mort said.
“I’m no prophet,” I replied. “I just have a certain… perspective on life. You wanna know the secret? Just connect with people in whatever way works for you—that’s all I care about anymore.”
By now I was clipping a pretty good buzz. I found Emma in the back room. She’d straightened her hair for the occasion and I’d been eyeing her all night, imagining myself plowing her from behind while knotting her ponytail in my fist. I pulled her close and slipped my hand down the back of her jeans, grabbing those little pale asscheeks—I was sorely tempted to take her up against the wall. She wrapped her arms around my waist and stumbled into me.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m just a little drunk.” She took a seat upon the window ledge.
“Just don’t fall out the goddamned window, alright?”
She laughed. I pivoted and saw Anya dancing by the deejay table so I shuffled over to say hello. “I love that man,” she sighed, gesturing at her boyfriend. He was busy working the turntables.
“You seem so much happier nowadays,” I said.
“That’s what a good relationship will do for you.”
I smiled broadly. It’s nice having her back in my life. You see, her journey has paralleled mine: we’ve both experimented and fucked up and been fucked up and been fucked only to tumble out the other side happier and wiser.
Nature called. As I reached the head of the bathroom queue a willowy young brunette materialized by my side. “I really have to pee,” she said in accented English. I raised an eyebrow. German perhaps?
“Darling, there’s a line.”
The girl furrowed her brow and hopped up and down for emphasis, pleading with me now, “But…”
I slipped an arm around her waist. “You can come in with me but you have to pretend you’re my girlfriend,” I said, cocking my head toward all the people queued up behind us.
“They won’t be mad?”
“Not if you’re my girlfriend.” She leaned into me and I buried my nose in her fragrant hair. We entered the bathroom together amid howls of protest. “No fucking in there!” someone yelled. Indeed, there was a sign posted on the door that admonished partygoers against using the facilities as a bordello—and encouraged people to fuck wherever else they pleased.
I went first—no need to be too charitable, after all—and when her turn came she matter-of-factly dropped her pants and plopped down. Evidently untroubled by my gaze, she looked up at me and grinned.
“Kannst du Deutsch?” I asked, figuring there was no need to address her formally at this point.
“Yes, but I’m Swedish.” Her task completed, she rose from the seat and gently dabbed her well-groomed cunt with a neatly folded square of toilet paper (funny how everyone’s bathroom ritual is different—Les, for instance, dabs first and then stands), then lifted her leopard-print thong along her creamy thighs, finally wriggling back into her trousers with a sigh.
“Nice pussy,” I said, and she laughed. People were already pounding on the door so we made exaggerated orgasm noises as she stood over the sink. I took her hand when we exited the bathroom. “You have to meet my friends.” In the back room we came upon Leslie, who was dancing with a fetching lass in pigtails.
“I have to go,” said my bathroom mate, “my friends are leaving.”
I winked at her. “That’s really too bad.” The girl gave me her number and we parted with a kiss.
By now the party was beginning to thin out, body heat no longer serving as a bulwark against the frigid air seeping in. I’d given my parka to Emma and was now missing it. And her. I checked in with the usual suspects—Les, Mort and so on—no one had seen her. Eventually I located my coat, stuffed next to Leslie’s in an oven that doubled as a turntable stand. And eventually Emma called from home, safe and sound; it seems she couldn’t find us and decided to make a break for it. Even though I had told her the bathroom would take awhile I couldn’t be angry. I’ve grown accustomed to her skittishness.
I located Leslie and her new friend Peggy-with-the-pigtails, whereupon we wound up in a darkened apartment downstairs chatting about everything and nothing while two naked people rolled around on the floor. The sun came up. The day brightened. The three of us gathered our things and took the F-train back into Manhattan, Les and I parting ways with Peggy at 14th.
I napped most of the way uptown only to be awakened, ironically enough, by a large group of Swedish students barking in a tongue that’s both familiar and frustratingly incomprehensible. Les and I shared stories of our separate adventures; I learned she’d shared a three-way kiss with Peggy and another girl, and that she’d licked still another woman’s buttocks.
“You know,” I told my sweetheart, “this is part of what’s so great about us: we take our own paths but we always find each other in the end.”
She peered into my eyes and we then made out like hormone-poisoned adolescents.
“By the way,” I said, pulling back from Leslie’s pillowy lips, “I finally found out why people are always asking me for drugs.”
