Years ago, a friend brought me to her 10-year high school reunion. We had slept together a number of times during the months leading up to the reunion—but we never got serious. Although I can’t claim to have been amazing in the sack, I was one hell of a date the night members of the graduating class of ’90-something got together in a small catering hall on the east side of Manhattan. I was social, entertaining, the type of wingman you’d want riding alongside you on any mission into your past.

Even though it wasn’t my alma mater, by the end of the night I felt like one of the popular kids in school—except I was “returning” with a full head of hair and a little more youth than my “classmates” (my 10-year was still some years away).

Eventually, my friend wrote a story about that night. It was one of those memoirs-masquerading-as-fiction thingamajigs. I was a character in it. She named me Otto.

In the same story she also wrote about another guy—with whom things had been more serious than they had been with me. And he had these eyes. Although I don’t remember the exact words she used to describe them—something about an aquarium—I do remember being envious of her description of his eyes. Both as a writer and a lover.

She let me read the story, and I gave her notes. I was able to distance myself  a good amount from “Otto”—maybe because she had chosen to leave out a lot of details. I’m not sure if it was because she didn’t want to hurt me—I had been such a great date after all—or she felt that those specifics didn’t serve the purpose of the story. Or maybe it was just that I saw a different story.

I met the guy with the beautiful eyes in real life a couple of times and didn’t see in him what she saw. And I tried to, I did—but who gives a fuck? Those eyes she described were all that mattered. What she saw in them. What they made her feel. What she learned from them. Lessons about herself, about love, about always kinda being in high school. 

Maybe a part of me, in spite of the distance I gave to the story, wanted to understand why she preferred The Eyes over Otto. Damn, I really wish she wouldn’t have been so careful with Otto. Otto should have suffered some more in the story. He did in real life. But I guess I have the opportunity to tell Otto’s story, if I want to.

We are material, ladies and gentlemen. The storytellers in our lives have us in their outlines. Most of the time they’re going to draw us either uglier than we truly are or more beautiful than we can ever imagine ourselves being. Sometimes they’ll get us dead-on.

I’ve been mining my past relationships for material for a while now. This shit basically writes itself. I approach the subject matter with humor and a confessional spirit I attribute to my exhibitionist tendencies (“Look at me, everybody! Why ain’t cha lookin’?”) and to the Catholicism of my youth.

My first Confession was huge. Corpus Christi Church. CCD. Sometime before my first Communion. It’s bad enough to lie to a child about the nature of the universe; it’s downright disgusting to make that same child confess his “sins” to some stranger in a box. The Church gave us a choice—ha!—to sit behind a partition and confess, or to sit facing the priest, with no barrier between us and just enough room for the Holy Ghost.

I chose to face the priest. It was funny—only now, looking back—how God’s bureaucrat and the neophyte sat facing one another on identical chairs. I don’t remember if my feet could touch the floor, but I do remember how tears were boiling on my cheeks before I even told him how sorry I was for disrespecting my mother, cursing, and whatever wrongs a second grader commits. In the end I was forgiven. I can’t say the same for the priest.

Now, through comedy and writing, I confess my sins. But I do it without looking for forgiveness—at least not from the Big Voyeur upstairs. I’m looking for something else. I’m looking for the Eyes.

And should you find yourself in one of my stories, or scenes, or jokes, please understand that I mean you no harm. I’m not your confessor. And it’s not your story.

Best,

Otto

Talia was training for a half-Ironman when she messaged me on OkCupid to ask:

“…Of all the erotic sentences you wrote during that post-college stint, would you mind sharing your all-time favorite?”

It turns out my favorite line of smut is also the best line I’ve ever written:

“I felt like I was all dick, and no humanity.”

Mom: I worry.

Son: Please don’t. We were safe.

Mom: Did you wear a condom?

Son: Yeah, that’s what I meant.

Mom: Why? You don’t like this girl?

Son: What? No, I do like her. But you still have to wear condoms.

Mom: Why? She don’t wantta have a baby?

Son: I don’t wantta have a baby.

Mom: Then how you gonna be a father?

Son: I’m not…yet.

Mom: We’ll see.

Son: You seem certain that I can even produce a child.

Mom: You’ll never know if you don’t try.

Son: …

Mom: You hungry?

Son: No.

Mom: We’ll see.

Fight stories are like sex stories: all you need are a couple really good ones, and people will think you’re doing it all the time.

This is one of my fight stories.

Read all about the epic night a comedian, a Tool cover band, alcohol, and a homeless man collided. Only in Sabotage Times.

My ex-girlfriend has a crush on James Franco. She’s not the only person who does, I know, but that didn’t make it any less annoying when we were dating. Because anytime James Franco would pop up on the television or we’d pass his image on a billboard or cover of a magazine, my ex would giggle. A grown woman giggling.

“I’m sorry,” she’d say for my benefit, then attempt to contort her mouth out of a smile. Her face neutral, it would still take a minute for the freckles on her cheeks to stop glowing.

Although she never outright told me her James Franco fantasy—we didn’t have that kind of openness in our relationship—I knew what it was. Because I know what the “James Franco fantasy” is—it’s every woman’s fantasy. (Sure, there are slight variations here and there, depending on the gal, but it’s more or less the same.)

My ex has had her typical long day at the office. It’s late when she gets to our front door. Will she be able to make it to the last yoga class of the night?

She opens the door and sees James Franco lying naked on our couch…with his head in my lap.

I’m running my fingers through his hair.

She giggles.

I shoosh her.

James Franco is sleeping.

But I’ll wake him for her sake.

Did you know that James Franco can only be woken up with kisses?

I bend so that my mouth meets his lips.

Like a baby responding to a nipple, James Franco responds to my lips.

I feed him kisses.

I feed my ex’s deepest desires.

I bend James Franco over the arm of the couch and proceed to do indescribable violence to his asshole.

 My ex’s freckles are aglow.

 I don’t stop, until James Franco bleeds out…

Hey, it’s not my fantasy. Typical girl stuff. Does he always have to bleed out, ladies? Really? So annoying.

I’m happy we never got to play that fantasy out. Because after the breakup, I know I would have been stuck with that couch.

(Originally published March 16, 2011 on my old website)

The following commentary didn’t make it onto the Mad Atoms “Biggie vs. Tupac” page. I hope you enjoy the rejected piece. I wrote it back when temperatures were a lot lower in NYC.

Question: What do New Yorkers think of L.A.?

Answer: We don’t.

Now this may be hard for some Mad Atoms readers to accept at first. I can understand the hesitation. The Biggie vs. Tupac section lays out evidence for an ongoing beef between the East and West coasts. In their rap battles of the mid-90s, Brooklyn-born Biggie flexed some stupendous and lispy fuck-yous. And Manhattan-born Pac talked a lot of (poetic) shit. But we New Yorkers—unlike the two eponyms for this section—don’t care enough to craft comebacks or make cases for our supposed superiority.

Take “Street Cynic: New York,” where R. Will Burns writes about his first trip to New York City. Here is a man who cares so much about making “fun of the biggest city in America” that he books a flight across the country, it seems, just for that purpose. And during his trip, what’s the best takedown Burns can come up with? A guido. Burns flies all the way to New York City and meets a guido.

And how about Hillel Aron’s “Yankee Go Home!”? Another Mad Atoms contributor, Aron takes a more vitriolic approach in his rant. He doesn’t hold back when he takes impatient, car-less, “cavemen” New Yorkers to task for “this whole macho thing going on with cold weather.” Oh yeah—and according to Aron, the biggest assholes seem to be the ones who did not die on September 11,2001!

It’s 26 degrees Fahrenheit today. New York City is a cold, lip-chapping motherfucker. But the low temperatures—which always surprise New Yorkers, even though winter returns each year—aren’t the reason we don’t think about you, Los Angeles. (Hey, we don’t think about you during the warmer seasons either.) The thing is that while reflecting on the differences between L.A. and New York might fill five minutes at an open mic, the whole exercise is pretty hack. Isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong; we don’t think about Tokyo or London or Paris either. Of course, we’ve been to those places—we’ve even been to L.A.—and we have plans to go back. But we don’t measure ourselves against other cities. I can’t imagine even a speck of my identity resting on whether my city has tastier Mexican, worse traffic, or hotter women (that other men are fucking)…

You really think about this shit?

*

But now that I think about it some more, New York is kind of like the father who abandoned you. You grow up wondering what you did wrong. Later, your guilt turns to hate. And you script out the encounter you want to have with the man. For years you work on this scene, rewriting it so that you’re stronger on each pass. You’ve even shown the script to your close friends, and later, to strangers. You’ve worked on it for so long that you can only accept one ending to that destined encounter: your father begs you for forgiveness.

But what you can’t imagine is that the man who abandoned you—contrary to the story you’ve crafted—hasn’t thought about you at all. No love. No hate. No regret. That motherfucker’s cold.

Yeah, New York’s kinda like that. And I don’t see it warming up anytime soon. Sorry, kid. Stock up on the ChapStick®.

One regret I have about quitting my job as an erotic fiction writer so many years ago is that I never explored the eroticism of a perfect Caesar salad. I never even compared the dressing to semen. And the simile is so obvious!