Day 44: “Native Ingredients” or How I Learned How to Cook at 22 is BTS

 

Early mornings on Saturdays are sacrosanct for a 22-year-old, too precious to be spent on overrated, grown-up things like actually waking up and getting the day started. Thus, it was a little challenging to get around my cognitive dissonance about being up and about at seven on that balmy morning in late August. I was hoping to keep the noise down while setting up the pan, ladle and cooking oil in my tiny kitchen. But, as I’ve come to learn in the past week, the acoustics of New York City walls can amplify incriminating sounds and rustlings that it was a feat to keep my roommate from catching me, in a manner of speaking, with my pans down.

In a few minutes, my mom would give me a call from Cebu City (my hometown and the oldest city in the Philippines), where it’s just past dinnertime, and dictate the recipe of pork asado (pork roast) which, if things turn out as planned, would be the first proper dish I’ve cooked in my life. This sudden affinity for the culinary arts, though, is more akin to a shotgun wedding than a long and steady courtship. Since arriving in the Big Apple two weeks prior, the shameless ubiquity of burgers, fries and salads and the realization that rice was not the staple food this side of Sex and The City left me panicked. The sight of a McDonald’s outlet, until then an insufferable yet perversely endearing blight that was the punchline of “Super Size Me”, has begun to acquire a menace that rattled the core of my well-being. Something had to be done, and fast. 

If the morning’s cooking shebang was the wedding ceremony, then the call from my mother would be the exchange of vows — or whichever part of the ceremony signifying that I was fully conscious of what I was marrying myself into but was still willing to go through it. A conversation which involves my mother telling me what to do is fodder for Chekhovian tragedies; what is otherwise a chitchat about eggplants, string beans and patola (sponge gourd) becomes a loaded setup of innuendos and lovelaced manipulations that would do the Russian master’s women proud. The list of ingredients and the steps involved in preparing pork asado are nothing remarkable but it’s a dish that my mom has put her distinctive – and sumptuous – stamp on that I couldn’t help feeling a little pressure.

I was famished and the desire to cook something the same way my mother would, a dish whose flavors were comfortable and familiar, was tempting. But I was halfway around the world from the kitchen I grew up in, so I doubt it would hurt if I put half a teaspoon more of salt and simmer a little longer than it takes for the meat to become tender, would it? The proposed variations were kept undercover and I kept my banter easy and agreeable to keep my mom off the scent. It was I, however, who could not resist the scent of the pork asado that I know – there could be only one – and as I prepared the meal amid the cacophony of clattering utensils, I ended up recalling flourishes my mom used to do in her own kitchen and got a little annoyed at myself for mimicking them, my minor culinary insurgencies all but forgotten. Half an hour later, I had my first real meal in weeks.

Bollywood Dreams, Salami Nightmares

The success of my initial attempt at pork asado (it was a bit on the salty side, but this I kept to myself) augured well for more adventures in the ktichen. While I signed up for the student meal program at NYU, breakfasting on the ham and cheese omelets that the burly Dominican server whips up as briskly and adroitly as any halal food cart attendant and lunching on pasta marinara or alfredo, my palate still had a hard time taking cold foods seriously. At one of our pre-term events in business school, various selections of cold wrap were served for lunch. My wrap was a monstrosity stuffed with lebanon bologna, proscuitto ham and feta cheese. It was a good thing that my seatmate, a genial and chatty Indian Finance major, had just embarked on a spirited account of Bollywood cinema after I casually mentioned having seen Lagaan back in Manila and liking it. 

The 400-student MBA class was divided into six blocks and, for the duration of the two week pre-term, students become acquainted with their blockmates in a series of recreational and academic activities. Within the first few days of pre-term, I found out in quick succession that I was the youngest in our batch, that I belonged to the small, wayward group of students not specializing in Finance (I was going to major in Marketing and Media and Entertainment) and that I was the only Filipino international student. Being the youngest to get into one of the top US MBA programs was a fact I must admit to being fond of, though I doubt that it would ingratiate me to the thirtysomething Type-A Wall Streeters whom I suspect would be as Darwinian in the classroom as they are on the trading floor.

By the day of the cold wrap, I had become more discriminating about which of my classmates to divulge my post-business school plans to; in my application essay, I had written that I planned to eventually return to the Philippines and launch an independent film studio with an eye on the burgeoning international markets, and one of my productions would be an adaptation of “When The Rainbow Goddess Wept”, the spellbinding WWII folklore fantasia by the West-coast-based Filipino author Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, who happened to be Cebu-born. Sanjay, the Bollywood fan, did not roll his eyes when I told him; when your national cinema consists mostly of song-and-dance extravaganzas featuring star-crossed lovers, corrupt politicians and dramatic reversals of fortune, you’d probably be diplomatic towards other people’s cinematic indulgences. 

As he held forth about Devdas, one of the last few Bollywood epics he saw before moving to the US, a romantic tragedy about a wealthy young Brahmin who is devastated after being separated from his childhood sweetheart who belonged to a lower caste and flees into the arms of a ravishing courtesan, he managed to set aside his own unfinished wrap (the narrative yarn was not helped by wolfing down on baloney and salami). It was only a matter of minutes before he changed the topic and asked whether I had tried Indian food such as naan and saag paneer.

Menu Crazy

In between reviewing statistical concepts and the law of diminishing returns during the fall semester, I was able to add three more recipes to my repertoire, all transmitted over the phone: humba (a Cebuano version of pork stew), chicken curry and beef teriyaki. By then, I had already been to or heard of Filipino restaurants both in Queens and in Manhattan, a number of them having the unglamorous, scrappy, lived-in feel of carenderias or cafeterias. They would be Marty Scorsese’s diner of choice if Elvie’s, a Filipino bistro in the East Village, was transplated to Little Italy circa 1973.  Considerably more upmarket is the SoHo-based Cendrillon, celebrated for its rich, imaginative take on Filipino dishes, blurring the edges between kalamansi-marinated adobo and haute cuisine.

I first heard about Cendrillon at a marketing seminar organized by the consumer goods company I worked for; the speaker, a Filipino advertising director who had just come back from a stint in New York City, picked out the restaurant as a subject for an activity on branding. When it first opened in the mid-1990s, Cendrillon was marketed as a Pan-Asian experiment, its blonde ambitions made apparent by its name, a reference to a French opera about Cinderella. It was a few years later that the chef incorporated more distinctly Filipino flavors into the menu, which was well-received by the critics, although the Pan-Asian attribution has become hard to shake off.

Although the self-esteem of Filipino cuisine in a city of connoisseurs had been showing promise, the offerings were either too sparse or unremarkable for Filipino restaurants to merit their own category listing in guides like New York magazine. Walking past Elvie’s, which is a stone’s throw away from two major hospitals, I kept thinking that Filipino food in New York City would have turned out differently if it had had half the tenacity of the Filipino nurses who had doggedly sneaked their way into the city’s emergency rooms and medical wards.

Kitchen Confidential

Meanwhile, the infliltration of my own kitchen cupboards was still in progress. The dishes I usually prepared on quiet Saturday afternoons alone in the apartment, a ritual that was increasingly becoming a habit with me. I was more surprised at myself than I let on about how I had warmed to the idea of cooking; after all, I could easily hop on a train on a pilgrimage for Filipino food and reach my mecca not twenty minutes later. For the longest time, I regarded domestic chores, which I considered cooking to be a part of, with little more than condescencion. My erstwhile disdain for domestication knew no bounds. My 7-year-old sense of pride unwavering in my wide eyes, I thought that the drudgery of cleaning and scrubbing was best left to the weak-minded, the help or mothers. 

At that age, I usually spent my free time reading in the school library, pretending that I can make myself invisible like making up fantastical stories, which I would either write down or narrate to my clique at recess. It didn’t take long before more characters peopled my narratives with hysterically melodramatic plot twists not unlike those in “As The World Turns”. I would write scripts all through grade school and jump at the chance of adapting them into theatrical productions in class, modifying a plot point or two to suit the current topic in Religion or Civics and History and scoring it with the soundtrack of the latest Julia Roberts movie. The trio of theater, As The World Turns and Julia Roberts did not go unnoticed and had set more than a few tongues of Parent-Teacher Association members a-wagging. Adding a flair for domestic chores to that mix would have changed my status from quirky child prodigy in an all-boys Jesuit school into something else entirely. It would have been one bit of emasculation too many. My mother did not seem to care one way or the other about my interest in household chores.

Such preoccupations seemed juvenile and distant just then as I sauteed sliced chicken in garlic, onion and tomatoes for chicken afritada (chicken cooked in tomato sauce).  For the first time, my personal experience of cooking stripped bare its attendant contexts. Or rather, the contexts informing it when I was growing up were easily supplanted by new impressions, both intriguing and diverting, in those first few months in New York City. My insatiable appetite for the sensations and sensibilities that the city had to offer triggered an epiphany recalling the Zen koan, “When the Student is ready, the Master appears.” And, boy, did the student take down a lot of notes.

My repertoire of food appreciation used to be limited to chewing and swallowing; the art of eating was little more than the art of stuffing my dinner plate with as much motley assortment of entrees from my host’s birthday banquet. The “hunting and gathering” phase of gastronomic appreciation that I was initially stuck in gave way to a more sophisticated calibration of my taste buds, savoring the subtle gradations of flavor in one dish. A taste for fine dining (more of an aspiration, really, given my student budget), wine and cheese was the logical next step.

Foodie Faux Pas

While my attempts at cooking Filipino dishes went auspiciously, my early brush with Manhattan fine dining turned out to be something of a cautionary tale. In the Spring, I went on a date that I’ve come to call “Dinner at Tiffany’s”. It was at at Per Se, an obscenely swank and snobby French-New American restaurant frequented by the likes of Donald Trump and Sarah Jessica Parker and whose elegant rooms reward with an expansive view of Central Park.

The standard chef’s tasting menu, at a prix-fixe price of $200, is nine courses, including coddled eggs tipped with black-truffle purée and lobster tails, each one poached in butter, each one painted (with saffron-vanilla sauce, red-beet essence, or vermouth) in a seductively mouth-watering way. I was still a long way from mastering the gourmet’s vernacular; entrees nestled in this, dishes embedded in that or topped with a foam of the other leave me in a state. I have, however, nailed down certain New Yorker affectations that come in handy in such places.

A great example is describing wine, an exercise in conjuring metaphors and therefore always a treat for writers. Catching a whiff of gooseberries from a Sauvignon Blanc, or red currants from a Cabernet, or horse manure from a Shiraz is inspired but literal-minded. Paradoxically, the more over-the-top taste descriptions are, the more they can appeal to the layman, who you are trying to intimidate. Thus, in a tone of voice that was sober yet vaguely patronizing, I ask the waiter about which herbs and sauces are in this or that dish, checking to see that my date did not miss a beat, and smile beatifically as a barrage of high-concept desserts (thyme-infused ice cream, cucumber sorbet, a deliciously milky chocolate soufflé) is served in succession to our table.

The dinner lasted five hours and I thought I held my own impressively over dinner, the intoxication of having just tasted seventeen types of chocolate notwithstanding. The ensuing diarrhea that plagued me in the three days that followed was less than glamorous and the episode inspired my sharp-tongued close friend from high school, the knowing country mouse to my city mouse, to retort, “You can take one’s digestive system out of Cebu, but you can never take Cebu out of one’s digestive system.” 

New York Is My Oyster

Although my affection for Filipino cuisine was undiminished, my palate began to wander in search of other geographies after some time. Temptations abounded; the ethnic diversity of New York City was such that each new turn or corner promised to unveil yet another unique ethnic group and its cuisine. In the borough of Queens alone, Astoria is a hub of Greek and Mediterranean cuisines while Jackson Heights is a buffet of Latin American offerings including Colombia, Argentina, Peru and Mexico, not to mention that it is the epicenter of Sanjay’s delicious samosas and saag paneer. French, Italian, Korean and Japanese restaurants are scattered all over Manhattan, while Chinese take-out is practically as ubiquitous as Starbucks outlets. While I couldn’t help feeling venturesome toward other national flavors, I was accosted by a faint sense of déjà vu, of revisiting a long-lost relative.

In attempting to escape the clutches of Filipino cuisine, a mélange of Malaysian, Chinese and Spanish influences, I inevitably ran into yet another of its uniquely sublime incarnations and, good-humouredly conceding the inescapability of certain things like one’s mother, I was less inclined to lament the fact that my gastronomic excursions did not take me very far from my origins. Come to think of it, New York City was a museum showcasing the various episodes in the history of Filipino cuisine in a vast, resplendent diorama.

The first panel, mounted in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn and its preponderance of Malaysian bistros, depicts our Malay neighbors arriving in Philippine soil during the pre-Hispanic era and preparing food by boiling, steaming, or roasting. This ranged from the usual livestock such as carabaos (tamaraws), chickens and pigs to seafood from different kinds of fish, shrimps, prawns, crustaceans and shellfish. Our most significant heirloom from this phase would be rice. Certain fixtures of Filipino cuisine, including toyo (soy sauce) and patis (fish sauce), as well as the method of stir-frying and making savory soup bases trace their roots back to pre-Hispanic trade with China, Japan, India, the Middle-East and the rest of Southeast Asia.

The second panel, which stretches along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens from Jackson Heights to Corona (my neighborhood). Spanish conquistadores certainly knew their spices and introduced Filipino cuisine to chili peppers, tomato sauces, corn and the method of sauteeing with garlic and onions. Local versions of Spanish dishes flourished in the national culinary idiom  such as paella into its Filipino counterpart of arroz valenciana, chorizo into its local version of longanisa (from Spanish “longaniza”), escabeche and adobo (a close cousin to the Spanish dish adobado, and even by way of Latin America and Mexico which also have adobo dishes).

The final panel, a lofty avant-garde display that only the MOMA could undertake, showcases the galaxy of Chinese diners littered all over Manhattan. During the nineteenth century, Chinese food became a staple of the panciterias or noodle shops around the country, although they were marketed with Spanish names. “Comida China” (Chinese food) includes arroz caldo (rice and chicken gruel) and morisqueta tostada (an old term for sinangag or fried rice) and chopsuey. The concept of chopseuy evokes the very essence of New York City, a smorgasbord of cultures and flavors, embracing its motley assortment of ethnic influences yet remaining distinctly its own character, a marvel of appropriation and reinvention, not unlike Filipino cuisine.

When The Mistress is Ready, The Student Appears

As the fall semester drew to a close and I was getting ready to fly back to Cebu in December of 2005, I had very clear ideas about the Christmas gift I’d ask from my mom. By then, I had reached a certain level of comfort with my cooking and was feeling confident enough to jazz up traditional recipes with my zing. First, I needed the compendium that packed all these recipes and I knew exactly where to find it. Minutes after arriving home in a cab from Mactan Airport, I raid the mini-library in my mom’s cabinet and, right beside Healing Wonders of Medicinal Plants, pull out her copy of Let’s Cook with Nora by Nora V. Daza (the Julia Child of the Philippines) which first came out in 1969. The receipt taped to the back of the front cover shows that it was bought at a Paul’s Book Store in Sanciangko St. on August 26, 1976 for Philippine Peso 48.00 – quite a fortune she divulged at the time, costing as much as a leather-bound Bible.

At first, she was adamantly opposed to the idea of parting with the cookbook, the pages of which were all faded and yellowed, the ‘60s-chic black-and-white illustrations adorned by brownish smudges in every pages of so. She eventually relented, but only after getting me to promise to dictate recipes to her over the phone “if the need arises”. I offered to teach her how to email as it would be more convenient to forward the recipes that way; she wouldn’t budge. It seems ludicrous now how neither I or my mom initially did not want to part with the 30-year-old copy of the cookbook when I could have easily gotten other cookbooks – classier ones, more comprehensive ones – but it was hers that I wanted, and we were both against the idea of photocopying the book. She had already asked that I dictate to her the recipe for Royal Bibingka on page 169 come Holy Week, something I was actually looking forward to, despite myself.

During the few weeks I was home, I knew better than to attempt to take over the kitchen but I was hanging around the kitchen more often when she was preparing a dish, quietly absorbing and remembering how she would sprinkle pepper into a pan or blend together the ingredients in a cooking pot while doing this or that recipe. It will probably be more than a year before my next trip back home so I wanted to get everything right. I wasn’t quite expecting this act of observing my mom in her element to be a kind of enlightenment.

Whether it was set off by the purring repetitions of the cooking utensils, their warm, silken surface, or my mom’s incantatory gestures, or the voluptuous contentment in holding one pose for an impossibly long time, I do not know. For a second, I saw my mom transform into one of the women in Vermeer’s silence-drenched small paintings, totally absorbed in the minutiae of their unremarkable domestic chores. This epiphany took place for a mere second, and the next thing I knew my mother told me that the dinner of beef caldereta was ready.

Day 43: Fosse’s fancy footwork is BTS

In the cabaret of Fosse masterpieces, death and eroticism are old chums that can’t keep their hands — and rhythmic heels — off each other. 

Conjure up an iconic moment from any film in Bob Fosse’s oeuvre — from the slinky gyrations and vocal bravura of Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) in the bowels of the Kit Kat Klub in “Cabaret” to the feverish exertions of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) in the back-to-back showstoppers escalating into the climax of “All That Jazz” — and you’ll be hard-pressed to miss that maniacal display of virtuosity and neediness and damn fine footwork. It’s a mix that has not only induced many a cinephile’s le petite mort but also reveals a lesser-known guise of Fosse: a pimp with a heart of darkness. 

Desire is a pimp’s stock-in-trade and, in Fosse’s case, his drug of choice as well. In “Cabaret” (1972), a musical reworking of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories which set out to juxtapose the socio-political tenor of 1931 Weimar society with the smoky, kitschy milieu of a Berlin nightspot on the eve of German Nazism, Sally Bowles is a young American performer hoping to break out of the Kit Kat Klub and make the silver screen her stage as a UFA movie star. Sally is doggedly driven by need and neediness, often blurring indistinctly into each other. It’s the hunger to both dazzle and seduce her faceless, nameless audience that sustains Sally and ultimately makes her a casualty of the Weimar-variety sex, drugs and rock n’ roll she’s become chummy with. 

What’s remarkable about Sally (as played by Minelli, so staggeringly pitch- and pathos-perfect for the role that she’s never fully recovered from it post-”Cabaret”) is the dichotomy of charming naivete and seasoned worldliness in her inevitable descent. Who else is she, really, but Holly Golightly’s enfant terrible half who’s not above choreographing her own moral collapse to realize her potential (or legitimize her self-perception) as an artist. She beatifically surveys the carnage that is herself, buttressing her tenuous grasp on sanity by ricocheting between the affections of two men as the debris continues to pile up from under her. It’s a vision both macabre and captivating: Sally and her Kit Kat cohorts chanting “Wilkommen! Bienvenus! Welcome!” and morphing into goose-stepping Nazi soldiers. When Sylvia Plath, who fashioned her own dramatic exit within years of the film’s release, penned “Every woman adores a Fascist/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of a brute like you,” she couldn’t have crafted a more prescient postcard-quality bon mot. 

Sex, genius and self-destruction are again in play and transparently more so in Fosse’s thinly veiled autobiographical masterpiece celebrating his own larger-than-life persona, “All That Jazz” (1979). Film critic Peter Hemp calls Joe Gideon “not a character but a stage name”. Indeed. It is no accident that Fosse bathes his alter ego in reflected doubled images in case viewers miss the parallels. Gideon glories in his excesses — from his carnival of inamoratas to the madman’s passion for his art to more mundane types of poison — and expects the audience to drink in every abuse and be mesmerized by it. And for the most part, we do and we are. It is a testament to Fosse’s talent, which he pulls no punches in flaunting in this sensual overload of musical and choreographic delights. Quite simply, it’s all in a day’s work: Gideon works, fucks, gets high, and chainsmokes himself to death, literally. The angel of death pays Gideon a visit who, to no one’s surprise, can’t quite resist his charms. 

Fosse’s footwork might have gotten the ink — and deservedly so — in accounts of his cinematic legacy but it is his oceanographer’s investigation — and celebration — of the nether regions of the human id that need to be discovered. After all, it’s that cabaret the old chum has always invited us to.

The Year of Trapezing Dangerously

Taking a Flying Trapeze lesson. Answering a Strictly Platonic Ad on Craigslist. Taking a helicopter tour of Manhattan. These are just three of the 20 fantastic BTS suggestions of dating gurus Em & Lo for me in New York City. Check them out and let me know what you think I should explore as I (attempt to) scale the heights of asexual ecstasy: Em & Lo’s Better Than Sex picks! 

Day 34: Going on a Silent Date at the Cloisters is BTS

When it comes down to it, silent dates are a love-it-or-hate-it affair; there can be no middle ground.

If my date and I hit it off, it will be the meet-cute of meet-cutes – Two gay guys in New York City! The Cloisters! Blind date! No talking or touching at all!– easily beating runaway heiress Claudette Colbert and world-weary ex-reporter Clark Gable fighting over the last seat on a bus in “It Happened One Night” or bookshop owner Hugh Grant spilling orange juice all over megastar Julia Roberts’ white crop top in “Notting Hill”. And 38 years and 3 grandchildren later, this: “Grandpa, tell us again the story of how you and Popo [the nickname I’ve picked for my future husband, whoever he will be] first met!” Besides, the story of how the silent date got set up in the first place is destined to be a Craigslist-era classic in itself. (You can read it all over again here.)

If it flops…well, it will just be one long awkward subway ride downtown with someone I’ll probably hate to my last breath. 

Having said that, I’m sure that you, dear reader, would know by now that, as far as I’m concerned, the second outcome is not a possibility, not even remotely. True, it takes a lot of imagination for two gay men meeting for the first time without talking and NOT for a hookup to actually have a good time. But, with my sleeves rolled up and my radiant, pearly-white smile on autopilot, I’m determined to charm the pants off S.D. – in a manner of speaking – without uttering a single word.

The Train Rides They Are A-Changing

Back in the Big Apple after a grand time in New England with A.T., I was up at 7:30 AM for the silent date at 10:30. I’ve never been to the Cloisters, the Met branch located way uptown that was devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. While my mental Hopstop told me that in a perfect MTA world – but who are we kidding, especially since it’s the weekend – I could make it to the 190th St. stop of the A train (which runs express) in 45 minutes, I padded my estimate by half an hour more.  When I got to the subway station, I found out that “due to repairs on the tracks, the A Train will be running local for the weekend.” But of course! I resorted to Plan B: Take the express D train to the 145 st. station and transfer to the A line from there. However, I wasn’t prepared for the Twilight Zone episode that followed. On my three subway transfers, the right train would arrive less than a minute after I’d get to the platform, which meant that I was making very good time. Creepy. It was too good to be true and, like the few times I came close to thinking that I’ve found Mr. Right, I decided to wait for the other shoe to drop with this MTA-of-your-dreams business. Minutes later, it did, to the sheer delight of my schadenfreude: passengers were told that they would have to get off at 168 St. and take the shuttle to 190 St. With that, I breathed a sigh of relief and concluded that everything –its seductive fiction of the perfect man and the perfect train ride included – was all right with New York City.

The Meet-Mute

After a pleasant 10-minute walk through Fort Tryon Park, overlooking the Hudson River and New Jersey, I made it to the upper driveway to the Cloisters a few minutes after 10:30 AM. I wasn’t surprised that S.D. wasn’t there yet since I pretty much lucked out with three-quarters of my subway trip. S.D. finally got there at 10:50 AM, walking up the driveway and all smiles. He didn’t look much different than he did in the photo he-emailed, better-groomed in fact, which is good, though he was a bit shorter than I imagined he would be (not any fault of his). With his build, he looked like a cousin of Robert Downey, Jr. in the sequel to “Gladiator”. He was wearing a purple T-shirt, military shorts and rubber shoes and carrying a pretty big backpack. I flashed him my best “where-are-we-going-camping-and-did-you-bring-the-frisbee” smile before gesturing as if zipping my lips shut. He returned the gesture which, as touching wasn’t allowed, had to do as a handshake.

When we got inside and S.D. started gesturing to the girl at the ticket counter, I looked away, barely able to stifle a smile. I almost wanted to tap him, though, “We didn’t have a rule about not talking to other people, did we?” There were less than a dozen visitors at the entrance hall and, two short turns later, we were in the first of the museum’s five reconstructed cloisters, the Cuxa. A cloister, for those who don’t know, is the heart of a monastery, a covered walkway surrounding a large open courtyard, with access to all other monastic buildings. The Cuxa was partly reconstructed from a monastery in the French Pyrenees in the mid-12th century.

S.D. and I moved around the cloister separately, surveying the different pieces like the column capitals, doorways and a 12th-century French chapter house (or meeting hall for monks) on our own. We would look up every minute or so to see if the date was still around and ackowledge him with a nod or smile. Unbeknownst to S.D., I would snap pictures of him literally behind his back whenever he was close enough. S.D. then walked into the courtyard garden, abloom with flowers, and started smelling three or four different kinds. With a tonsure and a monk’s robe, S.D. could pass off as a Medieval-age saint in the wilderness, a friend of the animals but one who had a secret life where he knew about the birds and the bees a little too well. (Further proof that my lack of sex can induce bizarre, WTF fantasies.) 

Baby, Talk is Cheap

It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the Cloisters was the best possible place to have a silent date at – and also the worst. There’s a solemn, soothing vibe to the whole place; it feels like being on a spiritual retreat. But if you’re into medieval art – and the Cloisters has five thousand works of art from from architectural sculptures and stained glass to metalwork, illustrated manuscripts and tapestries – I doubt that you’d want to keep your orgasmic ecstasy to yourself. More than a few times, S.D. and I would signal to each other to come over and check out a sculpture or a painting. We have somehow coded a spectrum of facial expessions with enthusiastic approval at the extreme left and violent objection at the opposite end.

That was the silent-date dynamic we’ve pretty much established. We would enter a hall together, check out the pieces on display separately (and I’d snap pictures of the pieces I liked), look up to make sure that the other person was still in sight (otherwise, wait for him to get back for a minute or so) and nod off to each other when we feel like moving to the next hall.

When I first checked the time on my cellphone, we were about 50 minutes into the silent date, and we’ve seen a little more than half of the museum. We went downstairs where the Gothic Chapel, Glass Gallery and Treasury were, apart from two other cloisters. For the first time during our tour, there was a painting S.D. seemed totally excited about showing me. It was a portion of “The Mass of St. Gregory” (pictured below) which, I have to say, was about as distracting as the conspiratorial grin on S.D.’s face. Now we all know about the devil working with idle hands, but who knew he could work the same magic with a naughty silent date and an otherwise innocuous religious article?

About twenty minutes later, there was an announcement about a gallery talk starting shortly and that interested visitors should assemble at the entrance hall. I looked expectantly at S.D. and gave him the widest smile I could manage: “Let’s go check that out!”. He smiled back and jokingly threw his arms up in the air: “No, not me please.” I rolled my eyes at him.

When we got to the café (which had its own lovely courtyard), I realized that, in the realm of human communication, if people had to pick two things that they really needed to tell each other, they would have to be:

1)    I’m thirsty – done by patting one’s throat a few times and craning one’s neck and and gesturing as if drinking from a glass (me)

2)   I need to pee – done by pretending to unzip one’s fly (S.D.)

There was a bigger garden adjacent to the café and the flowers were beautiful. More flower-sniffing by S.D. ensued, reinforcing my “birds and the bees” theory about him. He told me to go over to the lavender bed and smell it. Then he asked me to take his picture a certain way. He was gesturing like crazy but I didn’t get what he was trying to say; the other museum visitors were probably wondering why two guys would want to play charades in the Cloisters garden of all places. Then I finally got it. He wanted me to take a picture of him with his hands covering his mouth: “Look, Ma, I’m on a silent date!” Voila!

Word!

At 12:30, we went to the museum shop and I noticed he hung out at one section for 10 minutes. It was the children’s section and S.D. was checking out stained glass coloring book and colored markers. (I remember him emailing about a family get-together the next day so I presume it’s for a niece of nephew.) We left the Cloisters shortly after that; I was actually hurrying to catch a show at Times Square at 2pm. At the bus stop across the entrance to Fort Tryon Park, there was a gay couple waiting with us. They didn’t know I was with S.D. since we weren’t speaking to each other though we were seated together. When S.D. and I started gesturing to each other and showing each other the books we were reading – mine was on Edward Hopper and his were the screenplay of Charlie Kaufman’s “Adaptation” and the new David Sedaris – I looked up and saw the gay couple give me a knowing, ingratiating smile: “Awww, a mute gay couple on a date! How cute!” There we were, the apparent epitome of unconditional love in our (faux) voiceless splendor. 

It took the bus forever to arrive so, when it did, we hopped on it right away. A few blocks later, it occurred to me that it might not actually be the shuttle bus but a regular bus, which goes on a different route. S.D. walked over to the driver and talked to him.  I started panicking and felt bad about breaking the vow of silence but I had to – our date was technically over anyway – and asked S.D., “What did the driver say?” It turned out that S.D. has a sexy, masculine voice. He got off at the next stop since he was spending the weekend in Jersey with family (hence the backpack). The next day, I got an email from him: “I just wanted to say thanks for being my silent date at the Cloisters. I got to fulfill a fantasy of mine – and it didn’t even involve lube! What a treat!”

The Post-Mortem

The fundamental question at the heart of a silent date is really this: Can you possibly establish a connection with another person without using words? As much as I’ve sung the praises of witty repartee as key in creating that spark between two people, my silent date experience made me realize that chemistry does go beyond the trappings of language. When it’s there, it’s there, and the silent date setup magnifies that, a one-of-a-kind experience that only the two of you share. Like an inside joke, but the sensation is much more gratifying. If done with the right partner, a silent date is a fun icebreaker that ratchets up the sexual tension nicely. You can’t wait until the second “speaking” date to debrief and compare notes about the experience.

It takes a certain kind of pair to pull off a silent date, I also realized. Having the same temperament or disposition is key. I could tell that, just like me, S.D. was in touch with his inner kid and had the ideal combo of curiosity, mischief and love of fun to make it work. (The silent date was his idea, after all.) It’s all about attuning to the rhythm of the other person. The silent date could work just as well for two people who are both thoughtful, quiet types. 

Despite my initial misgivings, a silent date is not much different from a conventional date; only it’s done in reverse. The traditional date often starts with dinner or a meal where most of the conversation takes place and is followed by an activity involving the arts, entertainment or a recreational activity, and conversation takes a back seat. Just the same, the shared post-dinner experience is intended to indirectly allow both people to get into each other’s non-verbal rhytym as well as provide fodder for more stimulating conversation afterwards. The silent date creatively upends that sequence, gives it an unpredictable spin and just might be — for romantics with a taste for adventure, like myself — better than sex. 

Day 33: Learning dirty words from George Carlin is BTS

George Carlin – God bless his soul (and he’ll probably hate me for saying so) – is a mouthful. Whenever I feel like expanding my vocabulary, I’ll leave it to Carlin, who lords over in-your-face wordplay as he riffs on civilization as its (most darkly comic) discontent.

I’ve never seen any of Carlin’s standup work – a crime, I know – until A.T. thought of renting one of his recent HBO specials, “Life Is Worth Losing”, for our post-dinner viewing. A.T. had prepped me earlier about Carlin’s stock-in-trade: His angry-man schtick skewered everything from greedy corporations and Vegas to people who send unsolicited pictures of their kids and cereal. The show started with Carlin putting on a master rapper’s show of buzzword-heavy razzmatazz, a fast-talking Derrida exposing how vacuous these catchphrases of the day are.

And then he talked about pussy farts.

That, A.T. said, was vintage Carlin for you, who’s best remembered for his groundbreaking “Seven Dirty Words” routine back in the ‘70s. After pussy farts, who couldn’t buy Carlin as an exceptionally astute observer of human foibles? Now I’ve never heard of such a thing before; I trust that you, dear reader, would know why not for reasons that should be obvious by now. He dished out two more words, which he said we could always hear more of. The first is “dingleberry”, not a cousin of the blueberry or strawberry but an affair that could be avoided with proper toilet training. Then there’s “cornhole”, a term of twisted endearment that may be used as a noun or a verb. Carlin graciously offered to use it as a verb in a sentence: “I love to watch CSI…and I would love to have the chief examiner say…well after they shot him, then they cornholed him about 34 times.” Certainly few men could surpass the brio of Carlin’s metaphorical allusions to the nether regions of the human anatomy and his flourish in delivering them.

Words like these probably won’t end up in your everyday lexicon, but I suspect that the reason why these words – and the ideas behind them – are so hilarious is that laughter dispels the cringes they would otherwise induce. As unsavory and discomfiting these things are, they’re gut-punchingly true. And these three words are just the tip of Carlin’s iceberg; dig deeper and he trains his sharp, unforgiving eye on subjects loftier and more perverted, like political entities and ideological systems.

Carlin is my kind of guy. A man who calls a spade a spade is one thing, but one who refers to the anal orifice as a cornhole is something else entirely – a blue-collar Rushdie who trades in taboos and the fringes of acceptable thought and speech, and one who’s hysterically funny too.

Gay men in New York City could learn a thing or two from Carlin. Forget about the dirty words. Here’s a guy who says what’s on his mind. If he thought something was wrong, he’d come out and say it. If only these basic rules of communication were as popular and highly regarded in gay dating situations, where the parties involved tend to shy away from “unsavory and discomfiting” subjects like, say, where the perpetual cornholing is actually headed. It’s all par for the course for gay men to sleep together for months and not give it a thought – or admit to having it; one of the cardinal rules of “fuck buddy” setups is to avoid letting feelings get in the way. Indeed, some things are easier said than done, but when it involves cornholing and its attendant ramifications? You’d probably hear a pussy fart first before most gay guys said anything. 

Day 31: A Day (and Night) in Provincetown is BTS

It happened while A.T. and I were having calamari at Pepe’s on the Wharf, one of P-Town’s many waterfront restaurants, visions of scallops, wellfleet oysters, and littleneck clams from the menu still swimming in my head. Our table was by the window overlooking the harbor and, when I looked up, there they were. Children, no older than five or six, playing on a boat by the shore. They were squealing in delight, far too engrossed in their late afternoon frolic to mind the cacophony of commerce a short distance away. Nothing remarkable about the scene, really, but there was a familiarity to it. I was viewing it through a window, framing the scene like a canvas, just enough shades of white and brown and blue brushed in to channel a different planet. It was the planet of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer. An hour earlier, A.T. and I had been in a couple of art galleries along Commercial Street looking at landscape paintings, thinly veiled homages to the idyllic coastlines and countrysides of the three masters. Those images and the sight of the children losing themselves in play at the beach, made me feel that I’d finally arrived – and not merely in the physical sense – in the New England. It’s a good feeling.

After dinner, we were back among the busy throng of vacationers walking or biking along Commercial Street: buff gay men in their muscle shirts (it was Circuit Week that week); college-age sweethearts; yuppies and straight families and their kids. P-Town was growing on me every minute. I knew very little about it before coming here; some friends have been here but said little other than being a gay resort town. I had imagined a Fire Island with its flashy pieces of real estate and underwear parties but quainter, less drugs, more low-key. While I can imagine the Pines boys itching to flaunt their tight asses at High Tea, Low Tea and a smattering of circuit parties, there was frankly little there that piqued my interest (save for the minor scandal involving local massage therapists slandering each other by way of lamppost announcements).

While I’m walking beside A.T., the revelry and flurry of Commercial Street, P-Town’s Broadway, make it hard to believe I’m in just one town. It’s a happy confusion of towns – of borders and vernaculars and sensibilities overlapping into each other – but never one town too many. Within a block, you can find a dive bar, high-end art galleries, jewelry and antique shops, a bike rental outlet and a fancy seafood resto. All the same, P-Town’s heritage as a hub of artists and writers dating back to the 1890s is intact., Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock have at one point called P-Town home; to this day, art galleries and theatre houses are strewn all over the main avenue. I know this sketch tries too hard, but I’ll make it anyway: gay men partying in Fire Island, sweat dripping down their sinewy bodies; P-Town a massive canvas for a drip painting, the frenzied, electric energy behind the random streaks and splotches of city folks, drag queens, lobsters, ice cream, leather and children playing in boats oblivious to the rest of these things, making for a dynamic, inspired, oddly Gestalt work of art. Just like Pollock’s action paintings, P-Town is pretty much all over the place.

It was getting late and A.T. and I decided to stay overnight at a place called Pilgrim House; it was lucky that we got ourselves a room on a Fourth of July weekend. We spend the rest of the evening checking out the different shops and having drinks; I spotted John Waters at least three times that evening. Back at Pilgrim House, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. At around four in the morning, I woke up to the loud sound of skin slapping hard against skin. Panicked, I looked down: “Chastity belt still in place, thank God”. I turned around to face A.T. who was wide awake and listening intently to something: “Shhhh. The guys in the next room are having a foursome. Somebody just took a shower and they’re now in the second round.” Ah, how could I have forgotten about P-Town also being the mecca of hormonally-driven party boys? Within the next twenty minutes, A.T. and I became acquainted with the erotic adventures of Justin (who got asked about the soap in the shower), Josh, Kevin and the unnamed fourth person who kept saying “Harder! Harder!” to alternate with the slapping and grunting sounds. I heard Kevin talk animatedly about something that “tastes like shit and yogurt”. When everyone – in the next room, let me be clear — has had their fill of the bacchanalia and two of the gentlemen left to go back to their own lodgings, the sky outside the window was starting to turn light. Before dozing off again, I remember thinking, “Isn’t it just lovely to wake up in a town that can make everybody happy!” 

 

Day 28: A Certain Sweet Guy in Boston is BTS

“Ok, good coffee. BTS? The headboard-slamming, toe-curling kind?”

“Tough one.” A.T. said, working his way through his third cup of Caffe Americano. Beverage-wise, the non-date was going better than the first one, where the repartee was at least distracting enough to survive rounds of atrocious Riesling before we got lucky with a Moscato d’Asti. “So finding a good cup of coffee,” he had pointed out, “That’s a hard one, too. I mean, aside from the usual suspects like Starbucks. I’ve been to some fancy restaurants that make terrible coffee but, you’d be surprised, McDonald knows a thing or two about it.” The way he’s sipping his coffee now at Joe The Art of Coffee at Waverly Place, the place didn’t bad either. Far from it. “Good job,” I thought to myself.

He finally made up his mind: “It’s all relative. I’m a coffee person so good coffee is way better than sex first thing in the morning. I wouldn’t able to function right without it. This late in the day, though, I’d say good coffee is better than, say, bad sex. The rote, mechanical stuff. But it’s a bit tricky, you see, this whole BTS business. It’d probably help if you have a BTS matrix where you qualify your different picks according to how much BTS they are, if they’re actually that. And the kind of sex, that matters, too.” He fixed his hand on a point in the air between us. “So here’s sex”.

It’s kind of a turn-on, this little brainstorming we’re doing. It was my first day without sex; later that night I would post my first blog entry about the Pork Ramen. I had told A.T. about my 100 days when we met two weeks earlier but, instead of running in the opposite direction, he was here with me, hours away from Boston where he lived, charting my Better Than Sex choices in the air with me. He went on with the point-fixing, “Good coffee (slightly lower than sex). Maine lobsters (three or four inches higher than sex). Seeing the Niagara Falls (his hand goes way up).”

“Okay, can I just remind you that I’m trying to find BTS things here in New York,” I cut in jokingly, before he could go through all the states in New England.

He pretended not to hear me. “And you know what’s totally BTS?” His eyes lit up, the mischief just peeking out. “Spending the Fourth of July by the Charles River in Boston!”

“But of course!” I snorted with my good-natured brand of sarcasm. I told him I’d be up for it though I wasn’t sure either of us was going to follow through. A few days later, I had forgotten about it.

Two weeks later, I got a text message from him about my trip and we thought perhaps I could stay four or five days there, maybe arrive on Wednesday night. I told him I didn’t care much for bars, but I’d like to check out the MFA and other museums. When I asked about hotels I could stay at while in Boston, he offered me the guest room at his place. (A.T. is 27, 6’2”, 175 lbs., swarthy and handsome; I made a mental note to pack my heavy-duty chastity belt.)

The next day he emailed a suggested itinerary:

 Wednesday 2 July: Vince arrive, quiet dinner at home…

Thursday 3 July: MFA during the day, and a little taste of Boston afterwards.  Touristy things, walking, lunch/dinner. . . whatever.  We just have to be home at a reasonable time 🙂

Friday 4 July: A day on the Charles. Basically, we will spend the entire day camping on the grass right up against the Charles River.  I like to arrive there no later than 830am.  This will allow us to find a reasonable parking spot and a front-row view for the fireworks at 10pm.  I know it seems like a very long day, but it moves along pretty nicely.  I generally take a nap in late morning anyway!

My favorite thing to do throughout the day is to observe.  I see all kinds of people, in all shapes and sizes.  VERY entertaining.  The BSO also throws a free concert and there are activities and music playing all day long, not to mention the fly-over by the blue angels.

Saturday 5 July: Plymouth Rock and Cape Cod.  From there, continue on to Provincetown if I can get reservation to stay a night there.  If not, Ptown will have to be a day trip on Sunday or an extension of Saturday (weather and time depending).

Sunday 6 July: Ptown and Race Point beach.  I LOVED RACE POINT.  You must see it.

Quite the planner, this guy. For days afterward, I would get a succession of text messages from A.T., either updating me about Ptown plans or what fruits I’d like him to get for our day trips. I felt bad because it would sometimes take me hours to get back to him. (During the time interval, I would have hummed “I Feel Pretty” from “West Side Story” at least a dozen times.”) But I appreciated all that he was doing, and told him as much. It won me over in the past, many times in fact, this sort of behavior from a guy. Won me over way sooner than was good for me just because I read too much into it. So I penciled in mental note #3 right below “Bring cute underwear to make butt perky, give host a boner”: Don’t let it go to my head – or heart – too quickly. There’s something to be said about delayed gratification, be it of the crotch or the cardiac area.

Fast-forward to today. It’s 3 A.M. and I’m in A.T.’s guest room. I suppose I should be exhausted after a grueling day but I’m not. Let me run it by you: frazzled morning at work, ran off to Chinatown to grab a quick lunch and catch the 1:30 PM Fung Wah bus to Boston, 4 ½ hours in transit, got picked up at the station at 6:30 PM by A.T. who, to make matters worse, had to look hotter and more handsome than when I last saw him. When we got to his place, I couldn’t help noticing that it was spotless. I even felt a little guilty about dragging my shoes on the floor. (I would find out the next day that his friend who stopped by feigned shock at finding the place so clean. A.T. then told me he spent the past two days making sure it looked immaculate, not that it was ever a mess.) It doesn’t hurt that he’s a superb cook, either, whipping up delectable stuffed mushrooms and steamed mussels to prove his point about seafood in New England. And like I’d requested, he served plump, juicy strawberries for dessert and poured both of us two rounds of what he fondly refers to as “grape juice”. 

At that moment, I looked up at the night sky (or what I imagine would be the night sky beyond the ceiling) and intoned in unbearable agony: Why does the universe have to throw me this bone(r) of a wonderful guy right when I’m not supposed to nibble on it?

This is what I think the Universe answered back (although I might’ve misheard the voices): Perhaps this guy is worth the wait, you never know. Give it some time; he just might turn out to be a keeper. And, FYI, I never made the decision about you NOT nibbling on it. YOU did! Chest hair, check. Sweetheart, check. Said you had a cute ass, check. And you’ve forgotten to mention so far that you’ve made out with him — from the neck up — rather vigorously sometime between the strawberries and the Simpsons episode.

So fasten your chastity belt, darling. It’s going to be a bumpy night. 

Day 22: Getting Todd Haynes to pose with Laszlo is BTS

Sometime in the last two weeks, my friend S.M. was telling me about a friend who came to visit from out of town years ago and gave him a smallish glass bunny as a present. He thought the whole thing amusing – they were getting ready to leave for dinner then – until she blurted out the caveat: he had to bring it with him to all the places they were going to that evening, including the restaurant and bars. Now Gotham Bar & Grill is not exactly the place you’d want to be seen with an animal figurine but nonetheless S.M., ever the accommodating host, obliged and, as the night wore on and they headed for drinks, Glass Bunny ended up finding groupies among the bar crowd who had their picture taken with it, including this obscure Spanish filmmaker who happened to be in New York for the NY Film Festival which screened his little film called “All About My Mother”.  

Not one to be outdone by some random bunny who got lucky with Pedro Almodovar, Laszlo has decided to launch a Great Directors series here in “Better Than Sex” where he gets to have a photo op with some of the most talented filmmakers around. And so, at the 20th Anniversary of the maverick indie film distributor Zeitgeist Films at the MOMA last Friday, who else does Laszlo run into but the extraordinary Todd Haynes, the genius behind last year’s Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There” and “Poison”, which was one of Zeitgeist’s early hits in 1991. And just like that, Laszlo has arrived. 

 

Day 14: Meeting Joel Derfner, blogger extraordinaire and author of “Swish”, is BTS

Despite evidence to the contrary, I’ve always thought of myself as chaste and virginal. Sure, I had allowed morally depraved, horny men to have their way with me in the past but this was only because I thought that rebuffing them would mean denying help to the needy, and Mother Teresa had never refused to attend to the blind and crippled, no? This enlightened take on things, however, seemed to have gone above the heads of my friends and Manhunt subscribers. So now you know why I’m doing this blog: To reclaim my true virginal nature and prove, once and for all, that one can be disarmingly innocent AND hot at the same time. If I were Eve, these 100 days would start as she and Adam are being banished from the Garden of Eden and rewind, in slow motion, back to that exact moment when the apple is placed strategically before her lips, the serpent cajoling her to take a bite, as she opens her mouth and…FREEZE! Voila, Paradise Regained.

Anyhow, as most screenplays go, such rehabilitative experiences are supposed to traverse an emotional arc where the protagonist starts out being an ugly, loathsome, shallow or ignorant brute and transforms into – after dramatic scenes of soul-searching – a wise, empowered, charming and fully-realized beauty. I already have the ‘beauty’ part nailed down but, knowing that I would eventually become a “wise, empowered, charming and fully-realized beauty” after 100 days, wouldn’t it just be fun and exciting to art-direct my own character makeover? So I asked myself: who should I fashion my transformation after? The usual suspect would be Eliza Doolittle of Shaw’s “Pygmalion” but that wouldn’t work as, medical researchers would be quick to point out, I’m more likely to develop a speech impediment after 100 days without sex, not to mention arthritis. And then an epiphany came over me, as I figured out the one character who could possibly be the role model for my “After” self: Joel Derfner.

Although I first met Joel at the launch of his second book, “Swish: My Quest To Become The Gayest Person Ever” last month, I had started reading his blog, “The Search for Love in Manhattan” four years ago and have been a fan since. It’s an uproariously funny, witty and insightful chronicle of his experiences living in Manhattan and covers pretty much everything that a gay man should know, from Egyptian hieroglyphs, knitting, cheerleading and — the pièce de résistance – orgy etiquette. The idea for his new book “Swish”– his first was “Gay Haiku” — came at summer day camp when Joel was six and he tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him because, they said, those activities were for girls only. That very day, he decided to embark on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. What ensue are delightful forays into musical theater, step aerobics and go-go dancing, among other things.

Even though he’d be the first to disagree, I say that meeting Joel Derfner over a light meal is BTS. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that “Better Than Sex” was inspired by “The Search for Love in Manhattan”. And Joel, who’s happily engaged, proves that – with humor, balls of acrylic yarn and an impeccable command of the English language – the search for love in Manhattan can be one that ends beautifully. 

Day 11: Being the witness to a wedding ceremony at City Hall is BTS

Admit it or not, everyone’s a sucker for “The One That Got Away” stories. But when  “The One” happened to get away in New York City, it becomes a tragedy of cataclysmic, epic proportions. Who could possibly not fall to pieces when Deborah Kerr got herself run over on the way to meet Cary Grant on top of the Empire State Building, leaving him moping and pouting over his lost ladylove? Didn’t your eyes just glaze over when Barbra Streisand walks up to Robert Redford and purrs, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell”, as the opening strains to “The Way We Were” proceed to yank at your heartstrings? Carrie Bradshaw, on the other hand, is the type of Manhattan gal who doesn’t take late bridegrooms sitting down – well, not when you’ve got a spread in Vogue’s wedding issue. She might not have gotten a man to the altar, alright, but that girl sure knows her way with an unused wedding bouquet.

With some research and better planning, these star-crossed lovers would have come across a place in New York City where the getting away is not only harder to pull off but both parties can be bound to each other — in two minutes tops! — ’til death do them part: the Office of the City Clerk. (One of the big-screen couples mentioned above eventually got wise to the government agency and exchanged “I Do’s” minus the Vivienne Westwood dress.) The people here mean business; this isn’t some fly-by-night drunken ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator.  When you take the woman in front of you in her tube and shorts after a long day in Manhattan that hasn’t been particularly flattering to either of you to be your lawfully wedded wife, it must be love.

And that was how I met Tom and Josie, a lovely couple from Southern Ireland who are in vacation in New York City for a few days and decided to tie the knot at the City Clerk’s office that day after years of being together and a morning at the American Museum of Natural History. They tentatively approached me in the waiting room by the “chapel” asking if I was there attending a wedding. Fifteen minutes later, after they’d paid $25 for the wedding ceremony and I’d signed a form saying that I will be the witness to their wedding, I was in the smallish chapel with the bride and the groom as they exchanged their vows in front of the judge faster than Jason Biggs could prematurely ejaculate in “American Pie.” Laszlo, darling as always, was fawned over by all of us and the newlyweds had a picture taken with him (above). Looking at the picture, it’s hard not to be convinced that Tom and Josie are content, maybe even ecstatically happy, even though her top was not by Vivienne Westwood. As June brides go, she could not have been more becoming.

I always thought wedding ceremonies at City Hall seemed a trifle impersonal and unwelcoming but my new friends had been so artless and at ease as they exchanged their vows that fanfare of any sort would have been missing the point. What I witnessed may have seemed too short for a formal ceremony but it was nothing short of heartfelt. If you ask me, I wouldn’t mind doing this sort of thing one day, where after not washing my hair for a few days and going on physically battering errands all day around Manhattan, I and the guy I’ll be calling my boyfriend take the 6 train down there* and, on a whim, ask a judge to marry us. If the boyfriend still says “I do” then and kisses me, then I’d think that I’ve really found “The One”. By then, this blog will be so over that my new husband and I can go home, have sex and live happily ever after. 

*If New York State still doesn’t allow same-sex marriages then, then we’ll take the Chinatown bus going to Boston not later than 11AM. 

Day 10: Having ice cream with a Buddhist Monk is BTS

It’s only my tenth day of celibacy and already I feel that I’ll be upgraded to a higher state of being when I’m reincarnated. The heavens seem to be conspiring it; why else would I cross paths with a Buddhist monk, have ice cream with him (raspberry razzle) and even get to second…cone? (Actually, the path-crossing part might seem a bit disingenuous considering that I orchestrated the whole ice cream setup and was gloating about it to friends for weeks prior.)

R.Z. is a former English professor in New York City and was ordained last February by the Dalai Lama himself. He is presently based at a monastery in the Southwestern region of France, about two hours away from the Pyrenees mountains, but is here for a week and he was a panelist for a literary event I put together. We got to talking about how one ends up making a vow of celibacy (although mine was admittedly the partial sort). Aside from one’s religious beliefs and neuroses about catching sexually transmitted diseases, the diagnosis we came up with cuts with a kind of penetration I haven’t felt in weeks. That my 100 days was an attempt to regain a sense of self and independence from other people. That I was avoiding being emotionally hurt. That I wanted to cultivate a relationship according to an ideal of chastity. And there I was, guilty on all counts. While Laszlo merely nodded vigorously, another attendee at the reading, after hearing part of my conversation with R.Z., appeared to be deep in thought before suggesting, “Have you ever thought of joining Sexual Compulsives Anonymous?”

While I have yet to get past the fact that the SCA was a running joke in the Will Ferrell roller-blading movie, I can’t deny that everyone is driven by a compulsion, a force that may be irrational and yet beyond our control. (In one’s teenage years, they’re called hormones.) Giving up sex for the summer is a compulsion in itself, absurd in the way that one’s sexual peak is perceived to be in one’s twenties and here I am putting my libido on hold. Which means that I’ll have to channel my appetites into something else. I don’t know what it is, but I have I feeling that it’ll be something unexpected, something incredible. 

When I got home that night, I saw that my friend R. had sent me an email, with the header: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It read:

Anthony Bogaert, Ph.D., in a 1999 Archives of Sexual Behavior article, “The Relation Between Sexual Orienation and Penile Size,” stated:

“The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied…

Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey’s original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men.”

And just like that, my campaign to reincarnate as a higher form of being got a little harder. 

Day 5: Sipping champagne with great friends on a rooftop is BTS

On any given Thursday in New York City, rooftops can be a stage for high drama.

For instance, a 46-year-old French stuntman could wake up on a different side of the bed and decide to, say, scale the 52-story New York Times Building on Times Square to protest global warming. A few hours later, a Brooklyn native fed up with malaria could suddenly grab onto the ladderlike horizontal rods of the same skycraper and venture his way to the top. Or a gay guy in his mid-20s, staunchly opposed to all manners of sexual relations, can work his way up, up, up (minus the King-Kong-inspired stuntwork) to the rooftop – the proceedings lubricated by champagne, strawberries and the company of new friends – and reach a different sort of climax.

While I did not get arrested for reckless endangerment or had to watch my father defend my mental stability on national television, I think I might’ve been on to something far more subversive: that a fully engaged conversation about frottage, fleshlight and Aussiebum underwear with people I had just met can be – you said it – better than sex. Lest you think that our conversation was limited to such abominable (yet undeniably droll) subjects, we chatted about more felicitous topics as well, from C.T.’s Francophilia or, to be more accurate, his love of Paris, which was all the entry I needed to overtake the conversation and recount my chance encounter with a guy I met while on the streets in Paris and walked around its  labyrinthine paths with for six hours, after which I was escorted to his lovely apartment in Le Marais where I was pleasantly surprised by a wonderful view of the Centre Pompidou and my man-friend’s very own baguette. Although it was not served with pate, the baguette did not disappoint.

Meanwhile, the amazing A.R. aired his frustration over the elusiveness of the gay bachelor in New York City and the excessive friendliness of couples on the prowl for a third playmate (a situation which might be easily remedied with a fleshlight, a dildo and a little imagination). J.P., on the other hand, grilled me on the parameters of acceptable sexual behavior during my one hundred days. My quick answer to people who ask me this is “Neck up, good; neck down, not good.” (It didn’t take him too long after that to work frottage into the discussion.  Obviously, I am going to have to write a separate blog entry about “the rules of the game”.)  A.Y. shocked me when he told he was 34 even though he didn’t look a day over 26, which I’ll say is better than sex and botox combined. Finally, C.S. – my own Edie Sedgwick – mused about how some bisexual men have a tendency to be a little more partial towards their male partners than to female ones. (Maybe they’re actually – shock! – gay?)

All in all, it was an evening that exhilarated me far more than I could’ve imagined, after such a long and eventful day. And while there have yet been no conclusive studies on the benefits of sparkling wine to one’s health vis-a-vis red wine, I say that a bottle of champagne — and five wonderful people — is always good for the heart. 

Glossary of terms:

Frottage – the act of rubbing against the body of another person, as in a crowd, to attain sexual gratification

Fleshlight – male masturbation device, disguised as a flashlight