Julie Klausner Read online

  “You fucking pervert!” screamed Melissa into the speaker phone, ruining everything. She hung up and we all laughed. I felt bad for Alan, poor guy, but hope, in retrospect, that hearing a room full of laughing twelve-year-old girls made him come harder.

  Hannah went next. She decided to go with an accent for the voice of her character, Tatiana. Tatiana was of Balkan descent, based on Hannah’s Boris/Natasha throatiness and habit of skipping articles in her speech.

  “My name Tatiana,” bleated Hannah, on the party line, to another fresh rube. “How big is your boner?”

  Hysterics.

  When it was my turn, I felt desperately guilty that I was pranking this man on the other end of the line. I wasn’t used to talking to somebody eager to at least pretend to find me attractive, and I loved it. He flirted, he was friendly, he wanted to have phone sex with me, and I wanted to try out all the new vagina euphemisms I learned from the Forum. But the girls were in the room, pressuring me to land a zinger so we could all enjoy the folly. So, we hung up on the guy, and then, retired to our sleeping bags. And as soon as Ronit’s snoring filled the dark room like the scent of a pumpkin candle, I, once more, Grinch-like, silently crept into a friend’s backpack. I copied the number from the phone sex ad onto the Loebs’ memo pad by their phone, ripped out the page, and took it home with me for later.

  What followed after that night was a year of calls of my own into that phone-sex line, which I made from my bedroom when my parents weren’t home. I spoke to at least a hundred different strangers from the Tri-State Area, describing myself, like Ronit did, as the girl I hoped I’d one day become. I made myself an art school student in her freshman year: sometimes I went to SVA and sometimes I went to NYU. I was wearing stockings. I was bare-legged. I had red hair with blond streaks in it and was “curvy, not chubby.” I said I was nineteen or twenty-one, even though I was not yet old enough to get a learner’s permit.

  I spoke to all types—from the guy who said he looked like Kiefer Sutherland and lived on the Upper East Side, and that maybe we should get a coffee at Barney Greengrass, to the man with a snarly voice you’d think belonged behind bulletproof glass at an OTB, who told me about how much he’d like to rub my “clitty,” which, to this day, remains the creepiest word I’ve ever heard in my life, ranking above strong contenders like “cunny,” “diapey,” and the term “pop-pop.” I mastered the sequence of events that belie the exposition of any sex-themed conversation: outfit description and bullet points detailing one’s physical appearance, command to one’s phone partner to slide his/her underpants off and play with one’s own genitals, and then, a detailed play-by-play of sex acts, starting at tit play and culminating in fuck-based ejaculation. I got good at it. And my formative phone sex experience is also responsible for the only orgasm I’ve ever faked in my life. I wanted to get off the phone in time for dinner (salmon croquettes!).

  I’m good at keeping what I decide is a secret, so nobody ever found out. It was one of my suburban diversions—I wouldn’t even tell Ronit. I kept it to myself. It was like Second Life, I guess, or whatever contemporary teenagers do on the Internet to pretend that they’re not living through the most awkward years of their lives. I guess I didn’t share the same sexual hang-ups as my peers, but whether that’s chalk-uppable to being raised a healthy distance away from any sexual guilt or just being ravenous in general is anyone’s guess. I just knew that masturbating along to a human voice describing the future was way more exciting than spreading my legs under a bath faucet and thinking about Dan Larroquette. And I got to meet people, sort of ! It was almost like dating. All of a sudden, there were so many real men in my life in a fake way, and it didn’t even occur to me that many of them were not who they said they were, just as I certainly wasn’t who I said I was. I remember when one guy confided to me that he was married, and I was shocked. Wasn’t phone sex cheating? I certainly wasn’t eighteen with C-cups and a tiny ass, but at least I wasn’t attached.

  I learned a lot about men, and what sort of things they like to hear to get turned on. I figured out that the penetration and the violation of it all was the money shot—sex wasn’t about food photography or college students on the beach. And just as some people will swear to you that a man’s stomach is the best route to his heart, I was under the impression that the better I got at learning what titillated guys sexually, the closer I’d be to straddling my life goal of being in love with a guy who wanted a wife he wouldn’t have to cheat on.

  After a year or so, the novelty of calling into that number wore off. But at its best, my time on the phone allowed me to imagine a time in which I’d be sleeping with actual men who would gape at me the way they ogled Penthouse pets—or their actual sex partners—and do dirty things to me that we’d come up with together. It seemed like a far-off time from then, when I was beholden to Melissa and invisible to Yehuda, Josh, Ben, Eytan, and everybody else in my grade—even the kid who came dressed up as Spock every year for Purim. But hearing about sex, and talking about it, even to strangers, helped me practice for what I hoped would come soon, and be the real thing.

  be your own gay best friend

  “High School is fun,” my mother lied to me in the kitchen one evening after dinner, rinsing plates. I was about to leave the Hebrew day school I’d attended from kindergarten through grade eight for the local public high school, and I had a sneaky feeling that the transition from small to big pond was going to be absolutely terrible. I didn’t like change in general, and I worried that high school would be like the video for “Jeremy”—an overlit tableau of frozen pointers and laughers, with Eddie Vedder scatting over the whole affair.

  There were things about high school I was looking forward to, but not many. I was eager to move on from the Jew womb (Joom?) I’d had my fill of. I was excited about no longer having a daily Hebrew language requirement or mandatory morning services, which I spent reading the parts of my prayer book that detailed concentration camp atrocities and fantasizing sexually about Steve Buscemi. Also, I figured, attending a new school with kids who never met me would give me a fresh start. Maybe I’d finally have an opportunity to promote myself from my current social rank of “sexually invisible.” And at age fourteen, all I wanted to do was get laid. It was all I thought about, when I wasn’t thinking about how cool it was to be agnostic, and how much I liked the Violent Femmes.

  So, I trudged off to Scarsdale High School in my JCPenney jeans, penny loafers, and Eddie Bauer flannel shirt, unbuttoned over the Sub Pop Records T-shirt I’d bought in a men’s Large from the back of Bleecker Bob’s on a school field trip. I’d never even been French kissed, but now the backdrop was different. I was breaking ground on a new chapter of my life, and this one, I decided, would be sweet, effervescent, and a little dangerous—the Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola phase of my adolescence.

  Well, it was all a big disaster. The opposite of fun. Sure, I got to first base my first year, with Jed, a redheaded junior so ugly I thought he was deformed at first. He did me the favor of sliding his fat, soft tongue into my mouth, while we, along with other drama club nerds, watched Heathers. The lights were down and I sat behind him, cross-legged, on the floor. He asked for a backrub, and I obliged, only to field a Linda Blair-style head turn from Jed, who made his move over his shoulder. He was gross, but there’s something about open-mouth kissing, even with somebody who looks like the kid from Mask, that wires directly into your libido. Frenching is like the cross-shaped wood that connects with strings to the marionette that is your privates. I got immensely excited feeling Jed’s mouth on and in mine, but declined when he asked if I wanted to go into the next room. Kissing this gargoyle in the dark, in a sea of other kids watching Winona Ryder and Shannen Doherty play croquet, made it easier for me to pretend it wasn’t happening. If we went into the next room, I might have had to touch his penis, or see his face. But like so many hook-ups in the dark, the incident was never spoken of again.

  The second time I made out with a boy was also the first
time I gave a blowjob, and that was a far more magical, fantastical experience devoid of Christian Slater movies or a roomful of people who know all the words to Miss Saigon.

  I was hanging out at the time with this girl Reneé, a Jersey goth chick who went to see Rocky Horror on Saturdays and listened to New Order. She and I made plans to go into the city together one night with her friend Nick, a kid she knew from Rocky. Nick was tall and thin and wore gray eyeliner, and I thought he was really sexy. He gave us a ride to the Knitting Factory on East Houston Street, where we drank vodka cranberries and watched musicians play free jazz while Nick and I groped each other’s junk outside our respective pants. When we came back to Jersey, Reneé went into her house and Nick and I hopped into the backseat of his grandpa-style car—a Chevrolet or something. There was groping—I felt his finger dive past my tits and torso and sink into my vagina—and my mouth on his mouth, and then, my mouth on his dick. And here’s the thing, reader. Here’s where you have to cue the music that plays during the third act of Full House, when Danny Tanner sits DJ down and explains to her that who you are on the inside is what counts.

  I remember thinking the moment I felt Nick’s goth penis in my mouth that I. Was. Home. That this was what I was meant to do. It all felt so natural, so right. I imagine it was an experience that gay men relate to: the first time they suck a cock and cup a pair of balls, they hear bells. They just know exactly what to do. The guy is so happy.You’re so happy. My own thumb, which I’d sucked until the embarrassingly late age of twelve, had finally found its glorious replacement. Hallelujah! I thought. This is who I am!

  After Nick, every time I got the opportunity to make out in high school, I felt like guys were doing me a favor letting me suck them off; like I was the one who deserved high fives afterward, because I enjoyed it. Ben Spiegel took me upstairs to his parents’ guest room during a Friday night kegger and took out his angry, purple cock from the fortress of his 501s, and I acted like I’d been elected student-body president. “You like me! You really like me!” But after sloppy third, I rarely spoke to any of those guys. It wasn’t because I didn’t like them anymore; it was because once it was over, they weren’t seeking anything more. It was a pattern I got used to, even though I always wanted to hook up again. Just as my favorite style of dress is “new,” my favorite kind of sexual activity, at least at the time, was “more.”

  AFTER THAT peen parade had marched through my mouth and the street workers had swept up the copious ticker tape in its wake, my sex life in high school shriveled up and killed itself. The blowjob party of ninth grade was pretty much the majority of the action I got in high school, and I blame the A-School for that. I transferred to the Scarsdale Alternative School, or “The A-School,” after my freshman year. SAS is a subset of the high school not for the behaviorally challenged, but instead for the progressive-emotionally-minded. And that decision begat an unequivocal disaster—a real didgeri-don’t. I blame hippies for everything, but most of all for preventing me from getting laid until college.

  The A-School was cozy and hands-on, with its fuzzy learning techniques and nosy, socialist-minded procedures seemingly designed for the sole purpose of making me angry all the time. We sat on the floor and called our math teacher “Cheryl.” We held community meetings every Wednesday and confronted one another for smoking pot before Spanish. Classes were small and teachers doubled as advisors. If you seemed like you were in a bad mood, they’d confront you about it, or ask you rhetorically how you thought your actions were affecting the community. It was like est, but they let you pee. A lot of people wore Patagonias and hiking boots, and everybody seemed to have a Phish sticker on his SUV.

  This environment is precisely where I lost my mind. It seemed like some kind of sick experiment, finding myself in the company of self-designated flower children of the upper middle class while I grappled with hormones that made me at once angrier and hornier than I’d ever been in my life. I hated everybody around me so much, and at the same time, wanted to have sex with them.

  Alas, I was not sporting the most approachable, sensual look at the time. I shopped the more esoteric sections of the Salvation Army for postal-service uniforms I’d pair with T-shirts that commemorated christenings of babies I did not know. I circled the “A” when signing my last name so it made an anarchy symbol. I wore a chain wallet. I tenaciously sought out all things “counterculture,” including small-press publishing, true-crime literature, home recording, “outsider” art created by the mentally ill, and at least three other areas of interest strategically designed to alienate myself from other A-Schoolers. Nobody in their right mind would have tried to fuck my mouth; they’d be too scared of getting their dicks bitten off.

  There were a couple of fluke hook-ups beyond the Ginger-headed Frencher, Purple Dick, and the Rocky Horror Picture Blow. They were hippies, mostly. A bong-hitter with a frizzy ponytail who used to bring his wah-wah pedal to jam sessions at the A-School Fair took me to a construction site off Heath-cote Road one night, then came on my leg in the back of his Saab. He dumped me later that week after giving me a ride to school in icy silence, the humiliation of which hurt only until I saw him shotgun a cheerleader at a party after she took a hit from a skull bong.

  There was Eddie Ashe, one of those drama-club guys who wears fedoras and trenchcoats, whom I met at Tower Video. Eddie had complicated, feathered hair, and I thought he was really cool until he suffered a panic attack after ejaculating in his chinos while we made out to Glengarry Glenn Ross. Another tip-off that Eddie may not have been cool was his incessant talking about how much he loved the sweet, funky sounds of the bass guitar. He forced me to give Les Claypool “props,” and listen to that band Fishbone before suffering one final flip-out in front of me, after the Glengarry Cum Pants incident, during which he wondered if he was “maybe not scared of rejection as much as scared of, you know, acceptance?”

  There was a boy from New Rochelle who felt my boobs in the vestibule of a diner, near the chalky dinner mints and the lotto-scratch-ticket machines. He smelled like tuna fish and had a mushroom haircut, but I convinced myself I was in love with him as I watched him skateboard away, unaware it was the last time I’d ever see him.

  Taking these guys’ tongues in my mouth, even moments before being sloppily jilted, was sweet, distilled ecstasy. Making out brought me into another state of consciousness, even though I was just getting Grade- D play from sixteen-year-old wankers with dancing bears stickered to their rear windows. But when it didn’t work out because of myriad duh-fueled reasons, I was devastated. Furious. How dare he?! I hate myself! All-or-nothing stuff, with too much rage and too little perspective. You’re familiar: you were an adolescent too.

  When I think today about what it was like to be a teenager, I want to go back in time just to put a warm washcloth on my fifteen-year-old forehead and hold my own hand. I have a weak spot for any movie that shows a character’s adult self going back to reassure herself as a child, including but not limited to Drop Dead Fred. Seriously: I will cry like a baby when I see old Phoebe Cates reassuring young Phoebe Cates that everything will be all right. I think it’s because I really do want to go back and tell myself that the good things about me will stay the same, and the bad things will change.

  Of all the things that have changed, the biggest difference between me now and me then is that, when I was a teenager, I didn’t seem to have a sense of humor. Even in my silly thrift-shop clothes, obsessively taping episodes of SCTV and Saturday Night Live, nothing was funny about my own life to me—which is what it really means to have a sense of humor, comedy nerds.

  And do you know why it is I didn’t have a sense of humor? It’s something I’ve figured out only recently. I was such a miserable sack of humorless gristle because I was, at the time, without a Single. Gay. Friend.

  I AM always suspicious of women who aren’t friends with at least a few gay men; it doesn’t speak well to their wit, glamour, cultural tastes, or whether it’s fun to be around them at al
l. It’s imperative that women keep the company of at least one gay man, not only because they make the best friends you’ll ever keep, but because the alternatives have built-in leaks. Straight male friends are mostly guys you want to sleep with or want something from professionally, and straight female friendships are incapable of not being wrought with jealousy and drama. Show me a woman who doesn’t have at least two former best girlfriends she now hates, and I will introduce you to a convincing tranny.

  Gay men appreciate what is feminine about women, and what is funny about being feminine, which is why they appreciate funny women, and bring out the sense of humor in girls more than anybody else on earth. It is extremely important to be friends with at least one gay man, and even more so when you are in high school. If yours is the sad fate of growing up in a part of the country in which the word “fag” is used by popular kids as liberally as freshly ground pepper is by bistro waiters—or, even worse, if you are too dull to retain the interest of the smartly dressed boy in your AP history class who calls Margaret Thatcher “fierce”—then you need to learn to be your own gay best friend. It is the only thing that will keep you from going insane, or possibly cutting yourself, which is a cowardly plea for attention and unsightly at the beach.

  Looking back, I should have been more diligent in finding a homosexual companion. I should have been Chasing Gary that whole time, instead of throwing myself at Wah-Wah Pedal and Riff Raff. My Hypothetical Gay Best Friend would have changed my outlook on my whole situation. Sure, high school was horrible and gross, and the people I went to school with, for the most part, were fugly and retarded. But what if, instead of saying to yourself over and over: “That Amy Shelov is such a dipshit—she’s never heard of the Galapagos Islands? What a dumb slut. I hope she gets hit by a bus,” you had the singsong sarcasm of a wry male voice cracking wise: “Wow. Amy Shelov seems really cool. You should be more like her.”