didn’t I have sex with Mamadou? Why didn’t I have sex with him regularly and get paid? He was old and unattractive, but unattractive hadn’t stopped me during my run in San Francisco. There were 300-pound men and acorn penises I had sex with for free. There was a karaoke DJ who verbally abused me for not liking Tom Waits. He never bought me shit. There was a bartender with a bowl cut who I don’t remember sleeping with, but when I saw the used condom on the windowsill the next morning and looked at him inquisitively, he said, You were a disaster. You cried the whole time. When you’re lonely and blacking out in strange places, you let other lonely people do what they want to you. You call it free love.
Ultimately, I think I didn’t sleep with Mamadou because I wanted to believe that somebody would pay $500 for my personality. Free love sounds so beautiful. I have always fetishized the sixties. But something tells me that free love was a lot easier emotionally for the men—when they could actually get some—than the women.
I know that in her quest for the divine orgasm, Judy Moon had been hurt over and over by men. They had used her for her money, concealed their homosexuality, refused to become a primary partner (the equivalent of “he just can’t commit” in the polyamory community).
One time, on a spiritual hike, she stopped hissing for a moment to tell me that she was a second mother to me and wanted me to consider her as such. I looked at her like, Bitch, are you crazy? But it was also sad to me—that someone who taught legions of women how to access the divine goddess had such a lack of understanding for what the love between two women could be. It was also sad that Judy believed she could simply say she was my second mother and I would believe it. Like she could do it in an affirmation. I was far from home. I needed a second mother. But I wasn’t that needy.
I lasted a year at Electric Yoni. After that I got an internship at a hipster magazine in San Francisco, but any sense of workplace boundaries I may have possessed had been decimated. Two weeks into the internship I was let go for hugging the publisher, instead of shaking hands, in front of a primary advertiser. The publisher never explicitly told me what I had done wrong, but as soon as I came out of the embrace I knew it was bad. I judged myself for it.
Shortly thereafter I returned to the East Coast, where I continued to fuck around for the next year and a half, before getting sober. I blacked out in stairwells and taxis, tried to have sex with gay men, woke up with strangers and mysterious blood on the wall—just as I had done in San Francisco. I was still melting down. But New York—unlike San Francisco—had a stable ground on which to hit bottom.
I Want to Be a Whole Person but Really Thin
I AM AN EATER OF numbers. I prefer packaged foods, foods with a bar code, because they make the math simpler in counting calories and that gives me a sense of peace. It’s just an illusion of control, really, but that illusion is everything. It makes me feel safe. It gives me a stillness in my mind. All I’ve ever wanted is peace.
I am a vanity eater, a machinelike eater, a suppresser-of-feels eater. I save the bulk of my calories for the end of the day so that I have something sweet and seemingly unlimited to look forward to. I do not trust the universe to provide enough of anything to fill my apparently bottomless hunger. That’s the case with my consumption of a whole pint of diet ice cream with six packets of Equal poured into it every single night. It’s a way of offering myself something cloyingly saccharine and seemingly infinite. I don’t believe that the world, or god, will give me that sweetness. So I am giving it to myself. I am going to bed full of sweetness that the day may not have provided. And I am defeating the laws of nature by doing this with diet ice cream. Most nights I would rather curl up with the diet ice cream than be in the world.
I am an eater who enjoys structured magic. I don’t feel courageous enough to let myself