Anyway, I was traveling in Europe that summer with my best friend from Princeton.  I had saved money working for a lawn-service in my hometown in New Jersey for two months and flew to London with my friend in early July.  We then took a ferry to France and hitch-hiked to Paris.  In Paris, we were planning on staying with another Princeton friend whose family was in exile from a country in the middle-east.  This fellow’s father had been an oil minister and the family was considered to be royalty, though they would never be able to return to their home.

After hitch-hiking for many hours, we arrived in the fanciest part of Paris and went to our friend’s apartment.  At the door we were greeted by a young, dark beauty – the sister of our friend.  She took one look at me and her face lit up.  She and I were photo-negatives of one another: she had jet-black hair and mine, from mowing lawns for two months in the sun, was red-blonde; and her eyebrows were thick and black, and mine were freakishly white and rather lush.

So she was smitten with me and I, in turn, was smitten with her.  She was sixteen and had a perfect, young, blossoming figure.  Her face was exotic to me and she had a gorgeous mouth, as red as a new fire truck.

That night she got me alone in one of the many rooms of the apartment and we made out.  It was wonderful.

My friend and I stayed with her family for several days.  There were elaborate meals every night with numerous guests, and the girl would always sit next to me and secretly touch my leg.  I learned that she was not supposed to be dating or kissing or doing anything with boys.  Our little affair was highly clandestine and I felt like a cad since her parents were being lavishly generous to me.  But the girl and I kept making out – going no farther than her shirt coming off.  We bought a single to make out to and played it over and over again on her little record player — “Every Breath You Take” by the Police.

One night close to when my friend and I would be leaving, the girl told me that she wanted me to take her virginity.  I said that I couldn’t do it, that if her father found out he would kill me.  She insisted that he would not find out.  Her brother even came to me and told me that he would like me to be the one to take his sister’s virginity.  It was all very odd.  On one hand the brother was being very modern, but his statement that he ‘approved’ of me felt somewhat medieval, befitting the country of his origin.  The thing is I really was scared of the father – he was a kind man, but he was very much from the old world and I kept imagining him taking this sword that hung on the wall of the living room and plunging it into my back.  In his country he had been a powerful prince, and so who was I, a strange blonde Jew from New Jersey, to deflower his precious daughter, a middle-eastern princess-in-exile?

So my friend and I left Paris, and I didn’t take the girl’s virginity.  We went to Montpelier where we enrolled in a French course.  I grew friendly with this sweet blonde Dutch girl who was seventeen and very innocent.  We kissed a few times, but that was it.  She, too, was a virgin.

I left Europe and returned to Princeton for my sophomore year.  The princess and the Dutch girl wrote me many letters.  At some point in our correspondence the princess urged me to return to Europe to take her virginity.  Then the Dutch girl wrote to me, asking of me the same service.  In fact, both girls though English was not their native tongue, used the phrase ‘the one.’  I have to say, the old ego swelled up quite nicely.  Two beautiful girls – without any knowledge of each other – had chosen me to be the one!

I decided to take the following year off from school to travel.  I spent several months making money as a male-model to fund my adventure, and then headed over to Europe in late August of 1984.  I had never been with a virgin and my whole traveling agenda was dictated by this call to deflower.  I figured I start in the north with the Dutch girl and then work my way down to the princess.

I flew to Amsterdam and took a train to the Dutch girl’s small town.  When I arrived, she  informed me that she had lost her virginity ten days before and now had a serious boyfriend.  I took this news in, and I figured I could at least be the second boy to have sex with her.  After all, hadn’t I come all the way from America?  So I made a pass at her and was duly rebuffed.

I spent two days in her family’s house: I was put in her little brother’s bedroom.  She spent the nights with her new boyfriend.  Her parents were quite permissive.  Each night, I lay there listening to the shallow breaths of her young brother and I felt like a fool.  On the third day, I told the girl that I was leaving.  I was supposed to have stayed for a week.  Oddly, she was hurt that I wanted to go, but I had to get to France.  I had to get to the other virgin who was waiting for me.

I took a train to Paris.  I was no longer worried about the princess’s father and was willing to risk getting that sword in my back.  But when I got to Paris the princess told me that she too had recently lost her virginity and was in love with her new boyfriend.  This was all before e-mail, when slow-moving letters were the only way to communicate (and international long-distance was far too expensive), otherwise I might have been informed by both girls to change my plans.

But once more, I hoped to at least be number two if I couldn’t be ‘the one,’ and I suggested as much to the princess, and, again, like with the Dutch girl, I was quickly rebuffed.  I spent two nights on a couch and then left, my tail, literally and metaphorically, between my legs.

This had to be the most pathetic start of a trip to Europe in the history of trips to Europe.  I had crossed the Atlantic anticipating thankful, loving virgins – it was one of my chief motivations for taking a year off from school; I was like a suicide-bomber but without the bombs or the suicide – and I ended up with nothing.  I went from feeling like a valued, golden penis-bearer to an easily replaced and dismissed little eunuch.

From Paris, feeling rather low, I headed for Barcelona where I met an American merchant marine on shore-leave.  We started talking at the train-station bar – we were both having a beer – and in the way that Americans abroad sometimes become instant friends, he took me under his wing.  I was twenty and he was in his late-thirties.  He had ten-thousand American dollars on him – his pay for six months at sea – and he was looking for a companion to ‘party’ with.  We both got rooms at a cheap hotel and then headed out.  After drinking for several hours, we went to a brothel.  There were two women to choose from.  Since he was paying for it, he got the prettier of the two and I got a very plump middle-aged woman.  She had fierce onion breath.  I couldn’t bring myself to make love to her, and so she just held me and put her enormous breast in my mouth and nursed me like a baby.  She was far from a virgin but it was a soothing experience.  She stroked my hair and cooed to me.  Later, outside the brothel, I thanked the merchant marine for treating me.  From Barcelona, we went to Morrocco, where I got dysentery and other strange things happened.

Twenty years later, I was on a book-tour in the Netherlands and one of the assistants at the publishing house found the number of the Dutch girl for me – she was still living in her small town.  I called her.  She was shocked to hear from me and we talked for about ten minutes.  She was divorced and had a young daughter.  She had some kind of office job.  She sounded depressed and defeated.  We didn’t get together.  I have no idea what  became of the princess.  I imagine I could find her in Paris, next time I go there, but it’s probably best to leave well enough alone.

**

This essay will appear in the collection entitled The Double Life is Twice as Good,  published this week by Scribner’s. Copyright Jonathan Ames.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

I was twenty-six and a single parent.  My son was four.  He smelled good all the time, the way little kids do.

So my son was real cute.  Red hair, blue eyes, ivory skin. Full of love.  I had him for the whole summer.

We stayed with my parents in New Jersey.  I needed their help with looking after my son for such a long stretch.  Because I was a writer and made my living driving a taxi I could just take off, so I did – all of July and August.

About two mornings each week, I’d go to the library to try to write from nine to twelve, and my mother would look after my son.  I felt guilty about those three hours, but I needed to work a little.

Around week five, I started to come unhinged.  I had no social life, I was playing with my son twelve hours a day in the humid Jersey weather, and on the two mornings I went to the library my writing was lousy.  Also, my father was still working back then, so he was tormented and insane and we weren’t getting along.  So, like I said, I was coming unhinged, which means I had to do something, take action.  And taking action usually means hurting myself.

So one day my son was taking a nap and I was looking at the local free throwaway newspaper and I spotted a curious ad in the classifieds:  a dominatrix with a transsexual assistant was offering $100 one-hour sessions.  What the hell was this doing in a throwaway newspaper in suburban New Jersey?

Naturally, I called the number

A youngish sounding woman answered the phone.  “What do you want?” she said.

“I’m calling about your ad,” I said in a whispery voice.

“Yeah, so?  You want a session, faggot?”

She was already in character.  “Yes,” I said.

“When do you want to see me, faggot?”

I told her what time I could get together and the girl laid down the law.  She’d meet me the next day at 11 a.m. at T.G.I. Friday’s, just off the local highway.  I was to stand at the bar and have a pack of unopened Marlboro cigarettes in my hand.  If she didn’t like the looks of me, she’d turn right around.  If I passed inspection, she’d come over to me and ask for a cigarette.  I wasn’t to give her one, but follow her out to her car, where she’d blindfold me and drive me to her house.  It was all very noir, metaphorically and otherwise.

“Do I have to be blindfolded?” I asked.

“You think I’m going to let a freak like you know where I live?” She was very mean on the phone, but I figured she was just being professional.  A professional dominatrix, that is.  They’re supposed to be mean.

The next day I was at the T.G.I. Friday’s by ten-fifty with a pack of Marlboros.  My mother thought I was at the library.  I should have been with my son.  I’m a terrible person.

The place had just opened when I got there.  I ordered a coffee.  At eleven she walked in – very short, maybe five-one, brunette, pretty, early twenties, jeans and a halter top, sunglasses.  We played the cigarette game, then out to her car.  My heart was explosive.  She didn’t have a blindfold but sunglasses that were taped over.

“I don’t want a cop stopping me because he sees that I have a faggot like you blindfolded,” she explained.  If I was lucky, she’d kill me fast and dump my body in the Meadowlands.  My poor parents; my poor son.

I kept trying to peer out the bottom of the sunglasses to see where I was being taken to be murdered.  Despite my nervousness, I asked her lots of questions.  She was pretty forthcoming.  I’ve always been good with the Q&A.

She was Italian-Catholic.  Ever since she was a teenager she had gotten off on dominating men, especially since all men were assholes.  Her high school boyfriend was her transsexual assistant; she had been feminizing him for a few years, feeding him hormone pills, making him dress like a girl, and, though he resisted at first, he was now happy with his transformation.  Eventually, they’d have his penis cut off and they’d be lesbian lovers.

The whole thing was so sick it was thrilling. She and this guy were actually living out a dream that millions – well, maybe thousands – of perverts wanted.  And I had found her in a throwaway newspaper!

She told me that when she and her boy/girlfriend had enough money saved they were going to move to New York and open a first-class dungeon.  Then from the dungeon they’d get enough money for his sex-change operation.

I got all this in a twenty-minute car ride, which I think involved her driving around in circles, in case I was peering out the bottom of the glasses.  I felt like James Bond being kidnapped.

We pulled into a driveway; she took me by the hand and led me into a house, which I could perceive from the bottom of my glasses.  Then we went down some stairs and she removed my glasses.  We were in a carpeted basement room which was just about empty – there was a radio, a futon mattress, and a big box with S&M paraphernalia.  A pole ran from the floor to the ceiling and all the walls were mirrored.  I gave her the hundred bucks.  Then she slapped me and led me to the pole.  She took some rope from her S&M box and she tied my wrists behind my back and around the pole.  She slapped me again and then left me alone in the room.  It was nearly eleven-thirty.  I told my mother I’d meet her at twelve-thirty at the lake where we took my son swimming.  I was going to be late!

She left me tied to that pole for ten minutes.  I imagined this was part of the torture, but I thought it was a rip-off, so I managed to free myself, just like James Bond.  I tried the door.  It was locked.  I could have busted it down, but I didn’t:  My James Bondness went only so far.  Then she came into the room dressed in black bra, panties, stockings, boots – usual dominatrix garb – and slapped me for slipping my bonds.  Her slaps stung but weren’t bad.  Then she put the radio on, WPLJ.  I had been listening to the station my whole life, but never in the basement of a dominatrix.

“What are you into?” she asked.  “Want me to flog you?”

“Can I kiss your breasts?” I asked. She looked pretty in her bra.

“No contact, asshole,” she said, and then she slapped me again – contact! – and looked at me like I was crazy.  But I didn’t want to be flogged.  I wanted to nurse on her breasts and maybe lick her pussy.  I wasn’t an S&M nut; I was just a nut.  My perversion is that I try everything once, even if I’m not into it

Then her tranny boyfriend – a tall, slender brunette wearing a negligee – came in and gave me a wide-eyed north/south.  I wasn’t bad-looking back then and so I think he was attracted to me.

The girl had the tranny undress me, and then they conferred in the corner while I stood there naked.

Then the tranny came over and started rubbing against me, trying to slow-dance with me to the music coming from the radio, and I didn’t mind – he was a pretty good-looking girl.  And I knew what was going on:  I was being tossed to the tranny-slave like a piece of meat and the girl was getting off on watching.

Then the tranny stopped dancing, got a strawberry-flavored condom from the S&M box, and knelt down in front of me to give me a blow job.  He rolled the sugar-coated condom on me and before he took me in his mouth, the girl came over and slapped me violently.  It hurt.  The other slaps had been warm-ups.  She went to do it again, but I caught her wrist this time and bent her arm behind her back. She was a little thing, even in her black boots.  The tranny just stayed on his knees, wide-eyed.  I held the girl’s arm behind her back, and slow-danced her from behind.  My penis, in the condom, pressed against her ass.  That vicious slap had done something to me, turned me into Robert Mitchum.  The girl didn’t say anything; I think she was stunned.  Maybe she liked having the tables turned.  The tranny watched and smiled.  Poor nutty slave.  He was going to lose his dick someday.

Well, after that, things got a little sordid.  An unlit candle – in lieu of a dildo- somehow entered the picture and the three of us rolled around on that futon.  At some point the girl did flog me two or three times, but I let her – I’m not an ungenerous lover and I had to build her esteem back up after I had manhandled her.

Then it ended the way these things usually end:  Somebody gets a paper towel and you wish you had never been born.  The tranny said to me, “I hope you’ll see us again.  You’re beautiful.”

I got dressed and the girl made me put the sunglasses back on. She drove me to the T.G.I. Friday’s in five minutes, confirming my suspicions about the circular method she had used on the way over.  She dropped me off and didn’t say good-bye.  It was a sunny day.  One shouldn’t do such things on sunny days.  I don’t know how the perverts in California live with themselves.

I got to the swimming hole fifteen minutes late.  My mother assumed that I had been working well in the library.

I took my son into the water and we were quickly joined by several other four-year-olds.  I was the only dad around and so I was like a pied piper for the kids.  They were crawling all over me, playing and splashing.  At some point, my son was really bounding on my back and it hurt and for a moment I wondered why and then I remembered.  My brief flogging had bruised me.

To be able to live with myself, I had immediately, upon getting into my car at T.G.I. Friday’s, blocked from my mind the lurid scene I had just engaged in, but then with my son bouncing on my bruises I couldn’t forget what had happened and I felt wildly ashamed.  In retrospect it doesn’t seem so terrible – so I cavorted with a dominatrix and a pre-op transsexual.  What harm, really, was done?  Isn’t it a sort of funny story all these years later?  Time softens everything, I guess.  But in that moment, I was disgusted that my beautiful son should come in contact with those bruises.  Why am I like this?  I thought.  What is wrong with me?  I hated myself, but I had to love him.

So I kept playing in the water.  To keep going and not lose my mind, I had to pretend that I was a good person – the generous pied piper.  It was the only way to cope, and it seemed to work – my son and all the other children were laughing and happy, and my mother sat in her beach chair proud of her son and her grandchild.  I played with the children for hours.  It was a beautiful day.

**

Art by Laurenn McCubbin

This is a Rumpus Reprint and was originally published in the New York Press.

Related Posts:

• Still Bored To Death
• Notable New York, This Week 12/14 – 12/19
• Literary Fashionables: The Showman and The Muse
• Notable New York, This Week 2/8 – 2/14
• A Notable Night with the Rumpus and Tin House