Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
– Oscar Wilde
When living in New York, gossip can be absorbed through your pores. Sometimes, when I meet someone new, I already know whom they’ve slept with, which jobs they’ve been fired from and why, how much they overpaid for their one-bedroom, and why they once spent a week in jail, in Atlanta.
For example, at a party, I once met a charming, ruggedly handsome guy who was making ends meet by working as an escort (he later became very successful in a completely legitimate business.) As we were gossiping, he told me about one of his regulars, a middle-aged talent agent who liked to be peed on. Before their sessions, the escort would have to remember to drink a lot of beer, so he’d be prepared. The agent would lie in the bathtub, so things remained tidy.
I try to never judge anyone else’s sexual habits. Instead, I try to understand the particular fetish. In this case, I mostly sympathized with the agent’s cleaning lady, or whoever had to scrub his bathroom.
Anyway, a few weeks later, I was invited to a cocktail party at the agent’s lavish Upper East Side penthouse. As I was introduced to him, all I could think about was pee, and I hoped, since I was shaking it, that he’d washed his hand.
Speaking of fetishes, I once received a treasured fan letter. The fan first said a few brief, complimentary things about my work, but then he got down to business: he’d noticed that in a photo of me, I was wearing loafers. Did I like wearing loafers, he wanted to know. How many pairs did I own? What were they made of? How often did I wear loafers?
He continued, for many paragraphs, to expand on his devotion to loafers. He’d also sent me a batch of photographs, of his loafer collection. In one photo, there were many individual loafers, riding atop the flatbed cars of a set of model trains. In another photo, at least fifty loafers were heaped atop a tree stump – this picture included the ominous shadow of the photographer.
I admire the confidence of people with serious fetishes. The loafer guy had no qualms about not merely confessing, but celebrating his fetish in a letter to a total stranger. I felt that I’d let him down, by not owning more loafers.
And wouldn’t Making Ends Meet be the perfect title for a male escort’s memoir?
And also: aren’t you glad that I illustrated this post with picture of loafers, instead of pictures of something else?
