Pal Shagging A little while back, I fucked my old pal Pete. Every straight woman in New York has a friend like Pete.He’s
the one that you meet at a job, or the gym, or a party back in your
wild youth, or know as a holdover from college or even high school, the
one who always wanted you and never got you. Yet. Then there comes a
time …I don’t know that Pete actually starts to look good, but
everybody else is so bad and perilous, emotionally at least…
I’ve
known Pete for nearly two decades. We worked at the same company for
years. He was not long out of college, working in the production
department, while I did acquisitions, giving me the edge in status as
well as age. I don’t remember exactly when we started talking. I was
friendly with the editor who put out books on taxes, and Pete used to
come into the office while Jason and I were discussing recent games and
the NBA in general. Pete wasn’t much of a sports fans, but we had a
mutual interest in blues and jazz.He wasn’t popular with his boss,a compulsive, hyperkinetic anorexic, as he regularly wandered in late and spent most of his time reading the Voice or
surfing the internet. He wasn’t bad looking, just something of a dork.
He stayed at the same job level, never seeming to think of moving up or
changing fields, definitely not one of the driven, corporate slaves
colleges are turning out now. Anyway, prompted by a
negative annual review and the real prospect of getting canned, he
managed to find another job, at a big legal publisher. His
last day at work he left me an e-mail that said, “Now that I’m moving
on in my career, I hope we can get together socially from time to time.
I’d like to buy you a drink, or several. Not to mention show you the
bright lights of Jersey City.”
I
wasn’t surprised; I’d always felt the soundless panting at my heels.
His readiness to take time to do me favors like copying cds or running
errands told its tale. A couple of weeks later we met at Cancún,
downing margaritas and guacamole while he explained what I already
knew. And wasn’t interested in, except that it made me feel better in
the wake of the most recent devastation, the fallout of a lingering
affair with an cute, withholding type. To lighten the ennui, I
remember getting into a lengthy conversation with the people at the
next table, a gang of recent grads working at Hachette, about the ages
at which we’d all lost our virginities. Pete won the sad trophy for
hanging on to his till 22. The group got increasingly hilarious as the
night went on. Pete, on the other hand seemed morose. When we left we
said good night on the sidewalk before my heading uptown and he to Port
Authority, a depressing thought in itself. “I
really want to see more of you,” he said. “I’ve had you on my mind for
years since we started working in the same place. I just didn’t ask you
out because I don’t believe in dating co-workers.” That
seemed a pretty weak-kneed attitude, because what better place to
identify quarry than the watering hole you go to everyday, but my goal
at the moment was to nip any incipient fantasies in the bud. “Well,
I should tell you,” I said, “That I’m not in the market for any kind of
dating situation right now, probably for a long time. I just got out of
a painful relationship that really tore me up. I’m in friendship mode.
”“You?”
he said with a degree of astonishment I thought unsuitable. “I can’t
imagine your having that kind of problem. I figured you’d be much too
tough for anything like that.” Well,
you just torpedoed any chance you did have with me for years, you
insensitive jerk, I thought, as we exchanged the standard peck.After
that Pete got to be a slot – one of the people who have a regular time
in your schedule and function in your life. That’s the way being single
in the city is; you have friends, contacts, acquaintances. Some go
together, some don’t. A few you hang out with just because you like
them, but that's rare. Most of them are also useful in some way. Some
you only
see
alone; they belong to a discreet corner of your life, not exactly
secret, but not waved around or mingled with your mainstream crowd.
They’re there for peripheral purpose or because their usefulness isn’t
required on a regular basis. I
did find, as I got to know Pete away from work base, that he was a
pretty strange guy. We’d get together for drinks or dinner maybe three times a year, and each time he added a chapter or two to his peculiar life story. We
usually went to a pub or bar, since he didn’t like any food that
departed from the tradition of meat and potatoes – pasta was as
adventurous as it got. Invariably he drank beer, although at times he
spoke of whiskey hangovers from nights at an family bar in Jersey City. He had a deeply rooted case of inverted snobbery, linked to a conviction of social inferiority.Then
there was the running narrative of obsessive loves and continual
rejection. That started with a girl in high school he became fixated on
in ninth grade; she preferred a motorcycle gang member, as who wouldn’t
– Pete’s method of courtship appeared to have consisted mainly of
standing around, looking hangdog, in his object’s vicinity and slipping
the occasional lachrymose verse into her notebook. She married her
biker, and Pete followed her doings thenceforth through old high school
friends. Took him a decade or more, he said, to get past that hopeless
passion.
Later
came Lola, a young woman in our accounting department, who left him
with the axiom against dating people you worked with. She was seeing
him and some other guy at once, and promptly married the other
contender. “I guess she thought he was a better deal,” Pete said. “Can’t really blame her.” Stranger
to me was his continuing to consider Lola a friend, going over to
dinner with her and her husband, seeming to revel in the reiteration of
rejection. The husband traveled a lot, and after a time things seemed
to be degenerating domestically, to the point where Lola indicated she
and Pete might take up where they left off. This, he said, was
completely unacceptable. He wasn’t going to be the guy who led her to
fracture her marriage vows. He seemed to get more enjoyment out of
turning the sudden opportunity down than anything else in his history
with her. About the same time, he went to a high school reunion, where
his former idol appeared freshly divorced and accessible. That didn’t
appeal to him either – I guess she had her chance and blew it. These
probably should have been warning signs. When
he wasn’t working, Pete spent time writing – short stories, usually
about guys with grim family backgrounds, emotionally starved lives, and
lack of access to women. He also had a screen play going, a comedy
about the hopeless, self-defeating lives of a group of young guys from New Jersey – a sort of Entourage manqué.
He was a devoté of the films of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, and
spent a lot of time in chat rooms discussing the intricacies of their oeuvres, even things like From Dusk Till Dawn or Dogma. After
a year or two Pete let it be known that he had a girlfriend. He’d
invited me to a Net game, and mentioned the new presence in his life at
half time. The news was a relief in that it allowed me to relax my
guard when I saw him. He was reactionary enough in his ways that I
figured he wouldn’t hit on me as long as he was seeing someone. I was concentrating on the shootaround when Pete said, “She’s not much to look at though.
”“Oh?” “No,
she’s kind of chunky and big-boned. I thought she was a lesbian when I
met her. She’s a lawyer, but doesn’t like it, and she’s got all kinds
of credit problems” Further
reports on the progress of this romance were invariably negative,
regressive at best. Felicia didn’t like his friends, not that he seemed
to like them much himself, and when they took a tentative stab at
traveling together for a long weekend, it dissolved into acrimony and
recrimination. He recounted his surprise at her resentment upon his
telling her that he wasn’t physically that attracted to her, but that
she was a good person. Nevertheless, they stumbled along for over a
year, until she finally told him she didn’t think things would work out. “That’s the last time I’ll try to be honest,” he said in valedictory. His
next venture into human relations seemed even more fraught with dire
prospects. He often told me about his decided predilection for older
women – it seemed the older the better. Just rejected by someone he
described as “a really hot 66-year-old”, he found destiny in a local
bar in the form of an alcoholic divorcée, for many years the wife of a
minor mobster. According to Pete the guilt of the misdeeds she’d lived
through were what drove her to drink. Her beauty, he said, was still
great despite middle age and misfortune, and he quickly assumed the
role of guide, protector and rehab supervisor. I’m not sure this suited
her, because she just as quickly became combative and resentful,
playing out the drama of abstinence and relapse, excoriating Pete for
interfering and assuming authority he had no right to. The hot and
heavy beginnings, he said, degenerated into midnight tirades by
telephone and doors slammed in his face when he went to pay calls.
“Veronica doesn’t really like sex when she’s sober,” he said. In
a strange way he seemed relieved, even gratified, by her rejection,
continuing his efforts at limiting her intake, paying her rent when
eviction loomed, helping her find accommodations when she was thrown
out, huddling with members of her family to try to keep her from
bringing questionable characters back to her place. To some degree all
the angst livened up our acquaintance for me. He was still
pretty well saturated in dejection, but there was a lot of drama going
on as well, a welcome distraction from my own dramas, which couldn’t
begin to rival his in toxicity. He extended his entanglement even
further by getting Veronica a job in his company, where she lasted a
little over a month before sending a threatening e-mail barrage to
senior staff, ending her employment and putting an abrupt end to Pete’s
advancement.
The
toll taken on him by the uproar was also fatiguing enough that he
became marginally less of a pill about doing things that might be
labeled uppity or pretentious, like eating anywhere paper napkins
weren’t in use. He even met me at the stable one evening, to try a
Moroccan restaurant nearby, although he wouldn’t come within breathing
distance of a horse, his remarks when I suggested he give my mount,
Karma, a carrot, implying that all equines were carnivores.
This
should have been a warning to me, but around this time, an academic I
had started seeing proved to be married, and I began to cast around for
a distraction. That’s really about the only excuse I have; the best
cure for frustration with one man is a quick jump with another. In this
case, I probably should have known better.One
night after a movie and dinner, Pete was going on about how long he’d
been overwhelmed by my allure, and I interrupted with the suggestion
that instead of yammering he try kissing me.It
wasn’t bad. The next time we went out he popped for Morton’s and its
massive slabs of beef, hinting that he’d like to try one of the pubs in
my neighborhood soon. Ok, fine, I thought.
A
couple of weeks later we were sitting in Coogan’s, much more to his
taste, with its sturdy menu and raffish mix of patrons from
neighborhood and hospital. Now that I had allowed himto cross the divide of 125th Street, the evening’s outcome was a foregone conclusion.When we got to my place, I led the way into the living room, and switched on the Soap Channel. GeneralHospitalwas
just starting its daily rebroadcast, and Robin and Patrick were sharing
a steamy moment, which I thought would set the tone. The heavy
breathing had barely begun on screen, when I sensed a sudden lunge from
my right, and Pete was on top of me. He was a broad built, heavy framed
guy, not what you’d call graceful. The rapid assault felt desperate,
not necessarily a bad thing. The ensuing encounters were satisfactory from my point of view and apparently a huge success from his. I
woke up to see him lying awake staring mournfully at the ceiling.
Before I could pretend to be still sleeping, he caught my eye and,
sighing deeply, and clearly in the throes of post-coital despondency,
embarked on a litany of dejected speculations. He hadn’t been able to
sleep. How was he supposed to act? He felt like a beast. What did this
mean to our relationship?And his contact lenses hurt. “Why didn’t you take them out?” “I didn’t expect this.” “What? Of course you did. That’s why you came up here.” “But now, what happens now that the relationship is changed?” “Well, nothing particular,” I said. “It’s not changed. There’s just an added element.” I
had an early afternoon brunch, so it was not too awkward moving him
out. I did lean against the door for a moment asking myself why I’d
bothered. Monday morning, though, a pulsating e-mail landed in my in
box, a peculiar and disturbing amalgam of lust and self-flagellation –
it was all more wonderful than he could ever have imagined, the
full-body maneuver like nothing he’d ever experienced, but he still
felt terrible and had an ear infection. The
next few weeks were marked by a stream of similar e-mails, each one
more dispiriting than the last. Desire for a rematch warred with
resistance to an unrequested more “serious” relationship.
“You don’t know how hard it was not to call you every day and share all the tiresome details of my life,” said one of them.
Others
mixed further exegesis about his ear and digestive problems with
fretting over what I “expected from the relationship,” and how it
should now change into something more serious, and he wasn’t sure if he
could handle that. I
didn’t want to be brutally rude and say, “Where did you get the idea I
would ever want a more serious relationship with you?’, so I tried to
insinuate it delicately by writing things like, we already have a
relationship that’s just fine, friendship is a serious relationship,
and I’m not much for domestic partnering, particularly with stuff like
grocery shopping or getting the brakes relined if that's what’s
worrying you. Our next dinner fell, as it happened, on Halloween. Eighth Avenue was full of freaky people in bizarre costumes, including some ofthe
patrons of the brasserie where we ate; as the night went on, I began to
feel we fit right in with the strangest. Pete oscillated between
anxious and morose. Waiting for the C train, he suddenly asked , “Are
we going to your place?”“Well, if you’re not,” I said, “You’re on the wrong platform. That’s where I’m going.” At the house I gave him the remote, and he turned on a rerun of The Office,
a guaranteed downer in my view. A few minutes of murky lighting and
inaudible dialog passed, and the familiar lunge came. However, on
retiring to bed, tumescence abruptly dissolved and a species of
low-volume hysteria ensued. It wasn’t really a dialog, since my part of
the conversation was mostly silence. There’s not a lot to say to
remarks like, “I’m so attracted to you, I don’t think we can have a
relationship.” From
there the monolog went from his responsibility to see to Veronica’s
rehab, to his self-consciousness, lifelong pervasive despair, to
inability to relax and enjoy a friendship that had a sexual element. “I can’t get out of my head!” he said desperately. “And I can’t feel superior to you. That makes it hard. Anyway, don’t you think this should be more serious?“
"Um,
not really,” I said cautiously, carefully not saying, “Well, I kind of
had to suck it up to get with you in the first place.”
I did
mildly suggest he might want to check into counseling, and he said he’d
been thinking of it ever since things started going downhill with
Veronica. That had made him even more down on himself, he said. He
couldn’t, he continued, imagine what I could have found attractive in
him to begin with.I
was tempted to say that his vague resemblance to a down market Ed Burns
had tipped the scale, but thought that might give offense.I suggested sleep, but it was clear that while I might drop off, he was going to do no such thing. Next
morning, he was still analyzing his own shortcomings, and the contact
lens problem had returned. He stood leaning against the bed,
cataloguing his miseries over the decades, while I remained as nearly
silent as possible. Racing through my mind were thoughts of getting out
of this whole thing as quickly as I could. Clearly the pathology was
the biggest element now – Pete was saturated in his saga of
dysfunction. It never ceases to surprise me what havoc sex can cause. I
suppose it shouldn’t – I’ve seen its Jekyll and Hyde effect often
enough, but this case was noteworthy; I never hadcome across such rapid and sweeping disintegration. Gradually
I managed to edge him down the hall and to the door, he still rolling
through his peroration – need for therapy, troubles at work, family
disintegration (a newish theme).I
had the door half open when he leaned down to plant a kiss and say, “I
know I need help, and I’m going to talk to that counselor. This isn’t
good. I’ll be in touch.” “No,” I said, without thinking. “Don’t be.” He looked taken aback, but muttered ok as I slowly closed the door. Over a month later, I got a late-night call from him. In the meantime I’d spent Thanksgiving in Paris, a big boost to the spirits. I was taken aback hearing his voice again, especially the remembered hollow, melancholy tone.
“I meant to call you before,” he said. “I’m sorry it took a while. I guess I was just laying low out of embarrassment.” “Oh,well,” I said, “I wasn’t really expecting to hear from you again. I thought we agreed last time to stay out of contact.” “You
thought that was the finish?” he blurted. “But, why – my feelings about
you haven’t changed. I value your friendship. Can’t we go on as usual?”
“Not
really,” I said. “I mean, I’m not prepared to carry the weight of all
your problems. You acted like a jerk, you know. I didn’t know you were
going to turn into a basket case.” “I know, I know,” he said, “The asshole factor. You have every right to be mad. But why can’t we still get together sometimes?” I didn’t want to say it would simply be too tedious.
“Well,
I think you need to work on yourself, concentrate on your own life,
with some counseling maybe. Looking back, it seems to me we were a
one-night stand waiting to happen. We happened.” “So, I’ve really ruined it all? Lost the friendship?” “What did you expect? What did you think would happen with all the analysis and remorse? That gets tiresome.” “You’re right, you’re right. It must be a real pain. But I’m going to get some therapy. You’ll see.”
I
didn’t argue the point, just got off the line as soon as I could. Most
people say you shouldn’t fuck your pals, and the thing with Pete seems
to bear that out. On the other hand, I have found it on different
occasions, a good thing, adding new layers and depth to a friendship.
From my point of view anyway, it was psychologically
interesting. Without crossing the sexual boundary, I never would have
seen what Pete was really like, understood his motives or gotten a fix
on the underside of his character. What was there may not be socially
desirable, but in its own way, it has been useful.
