My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands Read online

  "I'll be nineteen on January first," he told me.

  "I really need to get back to my friend," I told him as I lunged off the top bunk, naked with one hand covering my vagina and the other covering my right boob. My left boob was out for the taking, but in an effort to avoid it getting hit, I turned and quickly put on my clothes.

  In my drunken stupor I was still trying to figure out how I could have ended up in bed with an almost minor. This wasn't good at all. I had never slept with someone even a year younger than me and immediately felt like R. Kelly. How did a boy that young learn how to spank women? I feared that maybe he was lying about his age and wasn't even legal; images of the water police taking me off the ship in handcuffs and ankle weights swam through my mind.

  The next night was New Year's Eve, and we decided to see a show called Swing, Swing, Swing since my gambling streak was over and I was now down two hundred dollars. As we were being seated, I saw Rico a couple of rows behind us. "Hey, Rico," I yelled, "corno te llamas?" He looked at me and my roommate and then made a gesture that was similar to the middle finger, but the Spanish version that tells someone you're not interested in speaking with them.

  "You really pissed that guy off, now he won't even talk to us," I told Dumb Dumb. "Thanks for taking care of me!" I screamed out, and this time he made a gesture I hadn't seen before. I didn't understand why he was pissed at me. I never threw a shoe at him.

  As the mangy curtains separated to start the show, the first person out on stage was a bare-chested male wearing green tights with a long run down one leg and a fake wreath on his head. He sprang onto the floor with a combination of two back handsprings followed by a half pike into a somersault. I would have recognized those moves at sea or on land. It was official: I had now hit my all-time low at the tender age of twenty-six. Not only did I sleep with an eighteen-year-old who hit me, but he was the lead in an abysmal cruise dance show called, Swing, Swing, Swing.

  Maybe a real boyfriend wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

  OUT OF THE CLOSET

  I WAS ON the Discovery Channel's Web site trying to get my hands on a monkey when my cell phone rang. Nathan called to ask me if I would be his beard at his high school reunion.

  Somehow, Nathan still considers himself a closet homosexual even though anyone who has ever spent a late night at his apartment knows otherwise. You didn't have to clear a thousand on your SATs to figure out that when you were abruptly getting kicked out of his apartment at one A.M., and a tall beefy Latino passed you on his way in, that Nathan had ordered takeout from We Deliver Cock.

  All Nathan's classmates from high school and college, along with his parents, were still in the dark about his homosexuality. His parents had no idea that when they sent him to a child psychiatrist at the age of fifteen, he began a romantic relationship with his shrink that lasted for well over ten years. "Romance" isn't the word I would use to describe your psychiatrist giving you head, but Nathan insisted that the relationship was a two-way street and they had strong romantic feelings for each other. This was obviously the Jews' retaliation for not having access to the Catholic church and their pedophiles. Being as resourceful as we are, we developed our own system of child molestation and then added another layer by paying our attacker.

  After receiving this information from Nathan, I was thoroughly disappointed that none of my therapists had ever tried to go down on me. Nathan admitted this relationship to me only after we had been friends for many years, and when he did, it was primarily to convince me to accompany him on his family vacation and pose as his girlfriend.

  "Will the psychiatrist be there?" I asked.

  "No."

  "Then why would I want to go?"

  "Because my parents want to meet you. I talk about you all the time, and this way they'll think I'm closer to getting married."

  "But you're not getting married. Certainly not to me," I told him. In fact, we'd discussed marriage on several occasions just because we seemed to get along so well, but after thinking long and hard, I realized it was not in my best interest to waste my first marriage on a gay man.

  But Nathan convinced me to come along and I ended up going on many more family vacations with him after that. There was the trip to Telluride, ten days in Fiji, and a couple of weekends at his family's house in Big Bear. It was turning out to be a swell deception and I was getting a lot of frequent flyer miles in return. His family was fun, and I liked his overbearing Jewish mother who wanted to know everything about me, from my favorite sexual position to my rising sign. She would sit and play with my hair and stare at me like I was Goldilocks, saying over and over again how she couldn't believe I was Jewish. My mother is the antithesis of a typical Jewish mother; she is very soft-spoken and takes more naps than a cat. As a result, I've always longed for someone to really annoy the shit out of me.

  Normally I would say yes to a high school reunion, but I was still pissed about my sister's wedding. Thanks to Nathan's catastrophic visit to my parents' summer home, I was banned from bringing anyone home again.

  So when Nathan asked me to go to his high school reunion that wasn't really a reunion, more like an annual summer cocktail party for all the alumni who had attended his prep school, I refused.

  "Come on, pleeeease, it will be so much fun. It's at the Bel-Air Bay Club, there's an open bar, and there will be hot men." These were all valid arguments, but I wasn't giving in. I was seriously considering cutting him off for good.

  "I'm not even sure I ever want to see you again," I told him.

  "Don't say that!" he hissed. "It wasn't that bad, you're totally overreacting. I even got a thank-you card from your sister. She loved me."

  I felt unsure about believing him, but it was so typical of my sister to help me not make a point.

  "A thank-you card?" I asked. "Thank you for what? Ruining her wedding? How would she even get your address?"

  "It was probably on the bottle of Valium I gave her," he replied. "She was a real wreck before she went down the aisle. I only gave her a half because she said she'd never done any before, but after the ceremony she wanted more, so I gave her the bottle."

  Now I was fuming. How could I have missed the opportunity to pop pills with my sister who was purer than a Quaker? I was torn between being angry at Nathan and being proud of my sister for finally loosening up her sphincter. This was a girl who, when I was ten years old, used to wake me up after she got home from a party and whisper, "Chelsea, wake up. They had marijuana at the party and I didn't smoke any."

  I'd roll over, crack my eyes open and say, "Why not}"

  "Nathan, you are ridiculous, you have no respect for anyone. How many times have I been to your parents' house or on vacation and not only behaved myself but quoted actual verses from the Torah?"

  "What if I pay you?" he asked.

  I had always dreamed of being a professional escort but never thought that there was any real money in it. "How much?" I asked.

  "Two hundred dollars," he offered.

  I guffawed loudly and then pretended to choke. "Homo you don't!" I said. "That's not enough money to pretend I like you again."

  "Please, please, just come with me, it will be fun, we can both meet people."

  We had done this type of thing before, on numerous occasions. I would hit on a guy whom Nathan liked, and if he didn't respond to me, Nathan would move in. This way no one ever found out that Nathan was indeed a flaming homosexual, unless Nathan ended up sleeping with him, in which case he definitely knew. The problem with this approach was that Nathan was obsessed with huge lumberjack-type men, preferably with a pickup truck, so if the guy I came on to wasn't gay, I'd usually end up getting stalked and forced to make a quick getaway out the back entrance of some seedy bar.

  "I'm not picking up guys for you," I said. "Not for two hundred dollars."

  "These guys are all from my prep school, there won't be any dumb ones, I prooooomise," he said.

  "You're dumb and you're going to be there,