Intimacy Idiot

Online Dating Profile

Gender

Male

Height

5' 9"

Ethnicity

Tilda Swinton Caucasian

Body Type

Old Lady, Slouchy, or It’ll Do

Last Online

N/A—this presupposes that there are times when I am not online

The first thing people notice about me

If I play my cards right, nothing

Diet

Dairy and its consequences

Religion

Chris Pine

Sign

Scorpio, Nausea Rising

Education

The Hard Way, summa cum laude

Occupation

Narcissism, full-time unpaid internship

Turn-ons

Chest hair, indifference

Turn-offs

Affection, purpose

Exercise

Panic attacks

Have Kids

No, only Chipotle babies

Want Kids

Quiet ones

I am most passionate about

Dinner plans

I spend a lot of time thinking about

When I can sit next

Something no one knows about me

If you have a shirtless picture on Facebook, I’ve jerked off to it

Four things my friends say I am

Hungry, impatient, neurotic, and, why, what have you heard them say?

My typical Friday night

Wine in mouth, dick in hand, hope in heart

I’m really good at

Sleeping, worrying, busying myself between the thighs of men who have little to no regard for me, eating, ugly-crying to late-career Joni Mitchell, self-sabotage, being at home

I’m really bad at

Cooking, banking, respecting my therapist’s boundaries, small talk, big talk, public displays of affection, movies that seem like work to watch, quitting while I’m ahead

My ideal day

I wake up in a room that’s rapidly filling with Pringles and in order to survive I must eat my way out

Three things for which I am most thankful

Company, a dictionary, Tina Fey

You should message me if

You enjoy moods and trust levels that shift without warning and board games

How I Didn’t Learn to Drive

After using his little emergency wheel to pull the car over from the side of the road I was driving on—the wrong one—my instructor sat back in his seat, rotated his clipboard in four clockwise angles, and, once my sobs had quieted, very measuredly said, "You know, there are some people who just don’t drive."

I can just imagine him going home that day and saying to his wife, I told a student not to drive today, Ruth, collapsing into heaving sobs, choking out, "I’m a man who teaches. I thought I could teach anyone, but—oh, god, Ruth, I can’t," while she, with her back to him, lets her pots boil over and stares out the window at the line of woods along their property, longing to run into it and never come back.

How I wish he’d pushed me to try again, to try harder, because if you’re in the business of making metaphors, my not being able to get myself anywhere is pretty rich. But at the time, it felt like divine intervention. I made eye contact with him for the first time since the driving school parking lot, before he’d become what might in some states be considered my hostage. Really? I asked.

Sure, he said. You said you want to live in New York, right?

* * *

I didn’t get into New York University, and I bet they are really kicking themselves now, but I did get into Sarah Lawrence, which was only forty minutes north of the city. I spent my freshman year bouncing back and forth on the Metro-North between Manhattan and the dorm room I shared with two straight guys and the ghost of a Lawrence family servant.

I’d spend weekends in the city, visiting my friends who did get into NYU. We’d wait in line for discount Broadway tickets, eat in shitty chain restaurants because we didn’t know any better, and just walk around, because there’s nothing better than walking in New York. A friend and I were wandering aimlessly near her dorm above Washington Square Park, and I suggested that we go to the top of the World Trade Center. You can always go up in that, she said. The next week it was gone.

I still felt too much like a visitor, like the city’s houseguest, so the following summer I transferred to Fordham, a Jesuit university right next to Lincoln Center that would only every now and then have a pro-life rally out front. Cramming my hippy-dippy Sarah Lawrence credits into Fordham’s very square core curriculum was a hilarious task shouldered by my bone-dry admissions counselor. What was the name of that class again? she asked, her fingers hovering above her keyboard.

‘The Civil War: A Crisis in Gender,’ I repeated meekly.

She shook her head. Let’s call that history, she said, and hit the return key.

* * *

On my first night as a real New York resident I cried in bed. Earlier that day, my parents and brother had helped move my friend Melanie and me into our very first apartment, in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Windsor Terrace, with a super who dealt drugs and a homeless man who regularly went through our garbage and tried to sell it back to us. This area was terrorized a few summers ago by a man who kept sneaking up to unassuming women, groping them, and running off. Neither of us was groped when we lived there, but as they say, you can’t grope the willing.

Lying there that first night, I thought of my parents and brother in the car on their way back to Baltimore and felt alone and scared. Much like when I sat in the driver’s seat and put my foot on the gas pedal and felt the car lurch forward, a murderous mechanical mass, I, too, in that bed felt my life lurching forward, picking up speed.

Suddenly I heard a rapid thumping against my bedroom wall from our next-door neighbor’s apartment—his bed. My neighbor, whom we quickly nicknamed The Jackhammer, was less making love to his girlfriend and more belaboring a point. I listened for quite some time, appalled and comforted by it, until I heard his girlfriend shout, Slow the fuck down!

For the first time that day, I laughed. I stopped crying and I laughed.

* * *

The city hazed me quickly. On one of my first mornings a woman ran into Starbucks and shouted, Scram, you fucking losers!

You in line for the phone? a man asked me in front of a bodega on Varick Street.

I shook my head no and stepped away from the payphone.

He put a quarter in and dialed. You fuckin’ proud of yourself? he said. Don’t you fuck with me, kid. You think I won’t break into your place and start a fire? You ready to watch every single thing you love fucking burn?

He hung up and turned back to me.

Thanks, he said, and walked off.

In my second week, during a sweltering August, the woman standing across from me on the subway lifted her sundress, squatted, and pooped right on the floor of the train car.

On Forty-Second Street, I watched a beat cop break up a fight between a tourist and a sidewalk portrait artist. As I passed them I heard the cop say to the tourist, "Let me get this straight: you thought he was going to draw you exactly how you look?"

One morning on the long ride into Manhattan, a deranged homeless man paced the car, threatening a young woman standing by the doors.

Someone should beat the shit out of you, he said. Someone should bash your face in. Someone should push you onto the tracks.

Everyone on the train was listening intently, monitoring him, but she didn’t seem alarmed. She just ignored him and looked out the window. And then he said, I’ll do it. I’ll beat you up. He charged forward and stopped in front of her. If no one else is gonna do it, I will. I’ll knock you the fuck out, he growled. I’ll kill you. She continued to gaze out the window at the dark subway tunnel.

The train pulled into the East Broadway stop. She turned and looked directly at him. Well, she said, this is our stop.

He froze, just as startled as the rest of us.

No? she asked, and then tossed out a dismissive laugh and stepped off the train.

Coming home late from a movie one night, I watched a small child in a stroller start tossing the balloon he held at the people around him. At first people handed it back to him, but then he’d toss it at someone else, and finally someone tapped the balloon toward the person across from them. The boy squealed in delight and clapped his hands. An older man didn’t catch on quick enough, and the balloon landed at his feet. The boy’s face dropped. The older man leaned forward—an act no longer easy for him—picked up the balloon, and tapped it gently through the air to me. Again the boy clapped and squealed. For two full stops everybody on that train bounced a balloon back and forth, tasked with not letting it hit the floor. When the boy’s stop came and his parents wheeled him out, he waved, leaving the balloon for us to remember him by.

In terms of theatrics and mind-boggling intimacies, the subway cannot be beat—people you see every day and smile at, people who subtly protect each other just by shifting how they’re standing, people who compliment each other’s outfits, ask where they bought them and for how much. I’ve seen people meet-cute, make out, and break up. The day Michael Jackson died, a guy played Man in the Mirror on his phone and everybody sang along. I watched a woman unzip her jeans so her boyfriend could more easily finger her while their baby slept in its stroller next to them. A breakdancer accidentally kicked me. I’ve seen ventriloquists, mariachi bands, kid comics, sad clowns, and a guy dressed as a horse who juggled. I’ve seen people projectile vomit onto the doors and seats across from them. I’ve never seen a dick, but god knows I see enough of those at home.

* * *

The first date I went on in New York was with a film studies major at NYU. We had enchiladas and syrupy margaritas and went back to my apartment, where, after twenty minutes of probably iffy oral, he said to me, I’m not going to come because I’m on antidepressants, so just, like, whenever you feel done is fine. I didn’t know what to do, so I just started blowing him again and tried to count out what felt like a meaningful amount of time—maybe four or five additional minutes—and then, as if his dick was a book I was reading before bed, I just put it down.

Good night, he said, and rolled over and fell asleep. I lay there staring at his back, flabbergasted. Our passionless encounter hadn’t given me any false hope, but I was still shocked by the even less passionate sleeping arrangement.

In the morning we rode the train into Manhattan together. It was a long ride, and about ten minutes in we ran out of things to talk about. After another ten minutes of awkward silence I stood up and told him, This is my stop, said good-bye, and got off.

It wasn’t my stop, and I was late for work as a result, but as I stood in that station and waited for the next train, I felt liberated. He didn’t know where I worked; he didn’t know it wasn’t my stop—I was unknown, and therefore unencumbered. The train with him on it disappeared into the subway tunnel like the city’s tongue swallowing him up. I would probably never see him again, but there were several million more where he came from.

* * *

It wasn’t until after college that I started hooking up with strangers. The AOL chat rooms of my youth went extinct, replaced by sites like Manhunt, Gay.com, and, these days, mobile apps like Grindr, Scruff, and Tinder. You can upload pictures, describe what you’re into and what you’re looking for, and, in the very New York model of being able to get anything anywhere at any time, basically window-shop for sex from the comfort of your own home. You can swipe and click through profile after profile as if the men were down comforters. Gone are the head- and heartaches, in theory. If someone’s not interested, they simply don’t respond—there’s no chilly brush-off at a bar, no dull, drawn-out dinner. If someone is interested, they can be at your apartment within the hour and gone within the next.

The inaugural mate I squired through Manhunt was a graduate student who lived around the corner and, after a couple of messages back and forth, ran right over. It felt like a dream, two hazy but insistent ids conspiring in the night. We stood in the middle of my bedroom, pressed our foreheads together, and tugged at each other until we came. It didn’t feel particularly good, and I fretted over how to properly handle a penis other than my own, but after he left I realized it didn’t matter if I’d given him a shitty, bush-league hand job—I’d never see him again.

I set out to steady my grip. There was a married lawyer who swung by on his drive home to Connecticut, a Broadway understudy under whom I studied for a night, a junior firefighter who wanted to be peed on, put out like one of his fires. A violinist criticized the paint job in my hallway. A copy editor’s shoulders, sunburned from Chicago Gay Pride, peeled onto my face. A graphic designer hugged me hard and cracked my back and whispered in my ear, "I’m one of those guys in a relationship. If you see me in public, pretend not to know me."

There’s nothing quite like exchanging a polite nod on the street with someone who’s been inside you. Many were the mornings I’d see someone I’d knelt before a few nights prior, and we’d look right at each other and not say a word. What was there to say to each other in the daylight, freshly showered and holding iced coffees and on our way to our jobs, at the helm of twenty-four new hours in which we could behave better, be our best selves? No, we’d talk again when the hours waned.

The sex was fairly rote, but the moments on either side of it crackled with glimpses of who these men really were, as if in the scramble to fill the awkward silence they accidentally filled it with the truth. Text me when you get home or I’ll worry, said a guy I’d just blown who refused to kiss me. A stagehand, new to the union and same-sex experiences, rambled nervously about some property he had just bought in New Jersey and the resulting debt. An Italian college student, born and raised in the neighborhood and now raised in my bedroom, complained to me about having to go to Italy for a relative’s wedding and how he feared not living up to his family’s expectations. I sat up and talked about theater for two hours with a shy set designer who had, earlier in the evening, unzipped his pants and erected a stage you could do Medea on.

An individual-giving manager at a nonprofit, after managing to give individually to my nonprofit, kicked back and opened his arms to me. I crawled into them. What’s your sign? he asked.

Scorpio.

Ah. Moody people, Scorpios.

Sex addicts, too, I added.

Really?

Apparently. Every time I try to get into astrology I open up a book to the Scorpio chapter and it’s like, ‘You’re a jealous, petty sex monster.’

Oops.

Yes, well, my addiction is coupled with an intense fear of intimacy, so . . .

So basically you’re kind of fucked-up, he said.

Basically. I covered my face. Oh my god, why am I telling you this?

He shrugged. When I first moved to the city, I was going through a rough patch and was sitting on a park bench crying, and this woman who was also crying came and sat next to me. She told me all about how she was barren and how her husband was infertile and all they wanted was a child. And then she thanked me and said she only told me that because she knew she’d never see me again, and then walked away.

Oh my god, I said. That’s really intense.

Yeah.

We stared at the ceiling.

I should probably get going, he said.

All right, I agreed.

After a particularly enjoyable hook-up, I asked a short and scrappy medical student if he’d like to spend the night. Sure, he said. He went into the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth with his finger and some toothpaste, and I listened from my bed, thrilled by the sounds another man could make in my bathroom. He faced me as he slept, and I lay awake, marveling at him in the dark. I’d lean in, kiss his collarbone, and quickly lean back, lean in again, smell his shoulder, lean back again, lean in, and bite his hip. He’d stir and groan a little, and finally rolled over