When I Was A Loser

For those of you interested in reading a little authorial humble pie, I suggest heading down to your local B. Dalton...er...Waldenbooks...er...Scribners...er...Bookstar...or, well you get the idea, whatever book store actually still exists in your particular shopping mall in Middle America and picking up the lovely anthology When I Was A Loser edited by John McNally and featuring a veritable potpourri of high school fucktards who've used their neurosis for the purpose of nonfiction reverie. Apart from your host here, the book includes hilarious stabs of loserdom from my pals Sean Doolittle and Betsy Crane, plus folks like Maud Newton, Brad Land and Don Delillo. Okay, Delillo isn't in it, but everyone else is.

After the jump is a taste of my contribution, from roughly five pages in:

       Forty-five minutes into The Symphony of Cunnilingus, the doorbell rang. Things had been going pretty well, apart from the raging case of TMJ I was experiencing, the way my tongue had lost all feeling and the upsetting notion that while I’d had an orgasm approximately forty-four minutes prior, Susie seemed no closer and, honestly, had begun to lose faith in my once vaunted abilities, asking every now and again for me to get more wine coolers from under the bed if we were to keep this up.

      “Shit,” I said to Susie. “Wait here.” I slipped on a pair of cut-off sweats and my favorite Bauhaus t-shirt (a band whose logo I regularly covered myself in but had never actually listened to) and walked out into the entry hall. I peered through peephole and saw a woman with an enormous shock of hair, huge teeth and an impossible tan staring back at me. She looked exactly like Zsa Zsa Gabor, but I was fairly certain Zsa Zsa Gabor was dead. Or was that Magda Gabor? Either way, it was a significant moral quandary: Should I pretend not to see Zsa Zsa Gabor and return to Susie and my pursuit of cunnilingus superiority? Should I alert Susie of Zsa Zsa’s presence? Should I put on some underwear?

      “Darling,” the woman said, “I hear you on the other side of the door. Are you going to make me wait here all day?”

       I cracked open the door.

      “Darling,” she said, “I can’t see you.”

       I opened the door wide and there was no mistaking it now: Zsa Zsa Gabor was alive and well and standing on my front porch.

       “Is your mother here?” Zsa Zsa asked.

      “No,” I said. “She’s at work.”

      “At work?”

      “Yes,” I said. “At the newspaper.”

      “They make her go in?”

      I nodded. There are moments in your life that, as they are happening, seem to already have the quality of memory, so that when you look back on them later on, they feel somewhat like a dream, like you’re not sure all the details are accurate because they are covered in a soft focus glow: Your first kiss. Your first dance. The first time you had a conversation with Zsa Zsa Gabor while your face was covered in the reddish – and fragrant – pubic hairs of your girlfriend, while your cut-off sweats were pitching Eagle Scout-worthy tents because your penis had, after forty-four long minutes, finally responded to the repeated stimuli you were providing it, while you tried your best not to shake hands with Ms. Gabor because both of your hands were covered in the sticky fluids of the same girlfriend in question, and perhaps a bit of Emotion Lotion as well, because you sort of lost your cunnilingus confidence about nineteen minutes ago and started trying to figure a way out of this unpromisable promise you’d made, but are, as such, determined to get back into that bedroom and prove yourself, Zsa Zsa Gabor be damned!        

Zsa Zsa seemed to understand this.