Sometimes when a dick is inside me I can’t help but think about my family. I know that sounds totally gross, but I don’t mean it in, like, an incestuous way. My dad never fucked me or anything; he’s never touched me sexually. If I had to diagnose myself, which I am constantly doing since my parents are shrinks, I’d say that they were pangs of guilt, you know, or I’m ashamed, for whatever nutty reason.
Like that time I had sex with that man in the bathroom at Flow on Varick – that guy who told me he was the guitarist for ______, and I guess I believed him, mostly because at the time the door at Flow on Sundays was really tight, with all of those NBA players jammed into the VIP section and whatnot, so I figured he’d have to be somebody important to be there.
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In the meantime, honestly, I can’t name a single ______ song, but whatever. Anyway, when I was in that bathroom stall in the men’s room fucking the guy who said he was in ____ but probably wasn’t, and the attendant totally knew what was going on and was laughing with the other guys at the sinks, and I wasn’t using a condom because I’m rarely good like that – I thought about my dad. Like, What would he think if he knew this me?
It’s not like I don’t hate my dad; I do. I went to boarding school to get away from him, you know? I don’t know. I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter; it’s just some weird thing that I think about.
You’re back in time with me, FYI, in 2002: My name is Cat. I am 19 years old, and you are whatever age you were ten years ago.
Literally as we speak, it’s 5AM, and I’m getting fucked by a graffiti writer we’ll call Mikey in an apartment in downtown Manhattan. I’m not trying to be gross or anything; it’s just a fact. He’s fucking me from behind, his hands on my hips, pulling me back and forth as my ass slaps against his stomach and half my face is mashed into my pillow. I’m sobering up from the champagne and vodka-grapefruits and coke, but Mikey keeps putting poppers under my nose and it’s getting me high again, over and over. My mouth is dry and bitter, and I have the same headache I have every night, like the front of my brain is swollen. So it’s not like I’m really in the mood to pretend I’m way into what’s going on. And Mikey is grunting, sort of, as I look around my apartment on East 5th Street, and even though I’m completely grossed out by my own thought process, I think about how my family pays for it all, on top of my college tuition and everything, because they don’t want me to have to live in a borough where I’d have to take public transportation late at night, or get in cabs with drivers who could rape me and rob me and leave me on a sidewalk in Bayridge at dawn without any underwear.
So here I am, getting fucked by this guy who grew up on the Upper East Side and is white yet speaks exclusively in ebonics and once went to Rikers for breaking a glass over the head of an NHL player at Chaos. (Seriously, right? It even made SportsCenter.)
And tonight, or technically this Sunday morning, I’m thinking about being a little kid – ten years ago I was, like, nine – which I think is the worst thing you can possibly do when you’re having really awful sex with a guy who’s only ever nice to me at Suede, in the back where it’s super-crowded and you’re squished into everyone and he’s drunk on free Ketel One. But I can’t help thinking about it. Like how my dad used to take me to all the museums in the Smithsonian every weekend when I was young, so that I would totally grow up smart about artists and things. Which is something I really value in myself, I guess.
And it’s so disgusting, you know, to think about your dad when you’re hooking up, but like it happened once and then so many times after I’m like, “Don’t think about Dad,” which obviously only makes me think of it, you know, because I’m trying not to?
So anyway it’s things like that – weird memories that come to me when I am having sex, and I mean the kind of sex that, like, I kind of understand is degrading but that I also think is typical? I’m for sure a feminist but I don’t hate men or anything, even though they really are such assholes sometimes. And so this is what I’m thinking about, and I’m wishing that I hadn’t done cocaine tonight at Pangaea.
I’m definitely coming down down down from it, because bad feelings are pumping through my body like blood and the coke totally dehydrated me, and I’m not really wet and Mikey keeps spitting on his hands and rubbing the spit on my clit, like, to lube me up, which I guess helps but is a little gross – but practically every guy I’ve ever slept with has employed this trick at some point.
Guys are such jerks about things sometimes – like, they totally are all about putting their hands on your lower back and guiding you to the friggin’ men’s room at clubs and giving you bump after bump of cocaine; I mean, they insist (especially if they’re like Euro-trashy or something gross like that – not that I’d ever do drugs with a guy with, like, a Greek accent; I’d sooner die; I only get with guys who grew up in New York, truth be told). And yeah, girls are such suckers about it, because, hello, coke is addictive! Even though in truth I’m on so much Adderall that I don’t even think I feel it, haha!
Anyway, so then you go home to a guy’s apartment on, like, Vesey Street or wherever, and when it’s time to fuck, he’s totally soft and just kind of forcing this pathetic thing that’s barely a dick into you, and when it doesn’t work, he’s like, “Why don’t you touch yourself to get wet?” Like it’s your fault he has ED at 24! And then he’ll try again, and he’ll always be like, “Get on top,” even though the sex is miserable and takes like literally 40 minutes, and even though he’s barely hard he’s asked you twice if he can put it in your ass and the sun rises and is glaring through the shitty Venetian blinds and you’re crashing off the drugs and exhausted from gyrating for so long and his roommate the New Jersey Net is getting up to use the bathroom and you’re totally sore, and it’s around this time you just wonder in this sensitive, horrible way if it’s possible for the world to be any uglier.
I guess, though, that I’ve never really had nice sex, except with this one guy. Last year when I was 18 I had this, I guess, almost-boyfriend, and he was incredibly kind to me. He was authentically part Kennedy, but not one of the main cousins you’ve heard of; his mom was English or something but she had just died. Anyway, he lived on the Upper West Side and had his mom’s Cavalier King Charles or King Cavalier spaniel or whatever, and both of them – Andrew and the mom’s dog – were just so nice to me. It was so much fun being with them. And he was smart, too; he went to Yale. But I totally wound up cheating on him with this guy _____ that I met at Pravda in Soho. His parents lived in this amazing duplex right next to the Missoni store on Madison; the whole apartment was decorated in cream, like a hotel, and we had sex in their bedroom under an (ugly) Chagall eight times in one weekend and watched like two entire seasons of The Sopranos on DVD.
After that ____ never answered my calls again. I wound up telling the Kennedy what had happened and he dumped me, obviously. I texted him a bunch of times after that and he never wrote back. I felt really sad for a long time. I mean, I still went out and all, but during the day I was totally bulimic and messy about it, I guess. Like all I did was watch Sex and the City, even though that show is obviously dumb, and skip class and puke (totally clichéd stuff like donuts and ice-cream and Gatorade). Sometimes I’m so Reviving Ophelia that it’s not even funny. I don’t know. Most of the girls I know are, even though they won’t admit it.
But anyway, Mikey is close to coming, and here’s the best part of sex: when it ends. Or, wait. Actually, I like when I first take my clothes off. I wear hot black-lace bras, and no matter how fucking mean the guy was to me all night – like tonight at Veruka; omigod, I can’t even get into it – whenever we get home and I strip down, the guy’s face softens.
Tonight Mikey was sitting on the bed and I was standing, and as I pulled my tank top over my head, he put his hands on my hips, real gentle, and pulled me toward him so he could kiss my stomach and unhook my bra. And it’s better, then, in the beginning than in the end. “I’m about to come,” he groans now, jerking me to and from him. I give him a few porno shrieks to finish off with, and when he pulls out and comes all over my back, sprinkling drops on my skin like pancake batter on a griddle, I just get up and go to the bathroom and towel it off.
My hands are shaking, and my mouth is dry and tastes like I’ve been chewing Aspirin or something, so I turn on the sink and cup water in my hands and drink.
Then I look up and stare in the mirror for a minute. Sometimes it’s really strange to see yourself when you’re fucked up, or even worse, when you’re sobering up. Being messed up like this, and sort of coming out of it, you know, back into the kid that I wake up as every day. I see myself like a stranger would see me, or like I’m looking in that freaky reverse mirror on East First Street.
It’s like my bones in my face are sharper; I have my father’s strong jaw, I have his mother’s small mouth and big eyes. But it’s crazy to be so tired and weird about yourself, so I come back in to watch Mikey light a Camel and inhale, exhale, smoke swirling in the slashes of sunlight coming through the blinds as he looks around the room for his boxers, his T-shirt, his shoes.
Previously – Dawn of the Dustheads
