Two years into my first marriage I wrote a story about sex.
It had been ages since I had written anything close to naughty, but I sat down in the living room with my laptop and it poured out of me in minutes. It wasn’t a journal entry or a letter to a far off dream, but a short, blunt, and very dirty story about a young woman fucking her ex-boyfriend on a subway at four in the morning. And the same day I wrote another one. And then another.
“What are you writing?” Madeline asked, looking over from her seat on the couch.
“I just wrote four sex stories.”
“Are they any good?” she asked with a laugh. I smiled and nodded unsure if it was true, but knowing that it didn’t matter. She finished with a question that was even bigger. “How come?”
And this part I remember clearly, because I come back to it over and over again. And maybe it’s because nothing for me ever stayed for very long and few things remained the same. Maybe it’s because dad was rarely home, I moved between my two houses, Madeline travelled all the time, and even at work I never had two clients that did the same thing. I was still bouncing between this and that, my mother and my father, my old hat and my new pressed shirt, and dirty jeans or my Wallace kilt handmade in Scotland and imported for my wedding.
But whatever the reason, I turned to her and answered honestly.
“I’m curious to see how many I have in me. How many sex stories can I write? I don’t feel like I’m out of ideas, so I’m going to keep going until I can’t think of anything new.”
And now looking back, I smile, because last year I put out an eight hundred page book of close to a thousand short stories that begins with those simple words of story number one.
I’m stuck at a dying party with no one to talk to and a missing g-string.
And it’s still there, sitting at the beginning of the blog I started, because these days everything sticks around. It’s been eight years since I started that little project I called Quickies in New York, and I’m still working on it even if it’s moved to the side to make room for what I always dreamed of.
I’ve been writing books.
As a thirty-two year old man, recently married but open, polyamorous as the kids like to say, I found I had plenty to write about. And since my perpetual habit is to go back through my visual rolodex of every sexual experience I can remember, there was even more to work with.
So I wrote about meeting new friends in the city and my partner in DC. I wrote about flirting, coming home and arguing about what we were doing, what rules we had set up and broken, and handling our own jealousies and insecurities; it was beautiful. It was a big beautiful mess that let me write all that desperate tension that I loved so much.
And once I found a friend who was a photographer, we started incorporating his work into the blog as well. It changed everything. I met models who were willing to take off their clothes for us. I moved into a fetish world that would never become mine but I would still be connected to, and more importantly than anything else, I made friends. Because if you’re going to do something that most people will tell you is stupid at best and immoral the rest of the time, then you better have some fucking friends who understand you and can relate.
And writing made all of that easier. The world of micro-blogging, tweeting, and otherwise sharing my thoughts with a few thousand interested people made all of that easier. Sitting at a party one night, someone might come up to me and say, “I read that thing you wrote last night and the same thing happened to me recently. How did you deal with it? I’m still struggling, but here are some thoughts.”
Of course there were also the occasions when someone might slink up next to me, put an arm around me and say, “That story you wrote last night was super hot. Let me know if you ever want to do that with me.”
Two years into blogging, writing short stories nearly every day, and spending my time surrounded by authors I decided to self-publish a book just to test the waters. We had designed a wedding book at work, and I was helping to promote Frank’s books as best as I could, and I was neck deep in the world of publishing. And it just so happened that a few years earlier Amazon had announced their KDP program which meant that anyone could write a book, upload it in an afternoon, and have it available to millions of customers around the world in less than twenty-four hours.
And that was fucking awesome.
At this point my brother and I had long since moved our business in with another agency near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. We met our new colleagues volunteering on a project, and after a month or working together they invited us to move in, share their beautiful space, and see where the world might take us. Together we designed books, built ad campaigns, created websites, and more importantly, we sat around the table everyday at lunch and we talked. It helped that Frank–who was married to the owner of the agency–was one of the world’s greatest storytellers, because those lunches could go on for hours at a time and who cares if that meant we didn’t have quite enough work to get by?
But the office was once again my childhood, and I was constantly aware of that fact. We were struggling to get by, barely paying our bills, and showing up each morning to a beautiful, immaculate, and impressively wealthy office where we’d talk with clients about how to spend their millions of dollars before riding the bus back to our small apartments, our used cars, and our mounting debt.
We were once again the poor kids in the land of rich people and my god we could do it! All those days of chopping wood in the morning and then swimming in our friend’s heated pool at night before a steak dinner and a ride home in their Mercedes had taught us well. So we continued onwards, getting as much work as we could even though we were constantly sliding backwards instead of moving up.
But illusions are powerful, and admitting that they lack substance is in poor taste. And besides, we were meeting with publishers, agents, and booksellers as well! We were talking to two brilliant writers, and as Frank took me under his wing, proffering advice on a daily basis, I knew that my moment had arrived. I was not going to avoid the editor at Penguin, and I was not going to let the words and the books sit on my shelf. I had every opportunity I could ever ask for, and I was finding my calling.
The only problem was, my calling was about sex, and my god is that still complicated.
But one afternoon, I decided I would test out this new Amazon author thing, and so I told them. I sat them down and said, hey I have this blog or dirty stories and I want to pull a bunch of them together into an ebook and publish it on Amazon so we can figure all this shit out. And they begged for the URL and for some reason I gave it to them, so before long my colleagues and sometimes bosses were reading my porn and let’s just say it’s good that we didn’t have an HR department.
In truth, I still had my own business, and while we worked on projects together, it was not what you would call a traditional work environment. The bar, the grand piano, and the floor to ceiling bookshelves notwithstanding, our office was different in every way possible. Which is to say that Diane wrote my first review on Amazon when I published the tiny tome, and the following year when I finally hired an editor and got that old Greek novel of mine ready to go, Frank wrote a blurb from me, so I might have a quote from a New York Times Bestselling author on the cover.
I took everything I had learned in my four years of an open marriage and took that little story about a lost young man burning his pages and turned it into a fictional manual for how to fuck other people. If I’m being kinder to myself it was a story of finding love in unexpected places, and a story of how to navigate jealousy, fear, and forgiveness when each one feels impossible to survive let alone thrive in. It was a sweet book and a kind book, and it was also my first published novel, which should feel like everything, and still fell flat to my precious ego.
If I can long to be famous even though I know it will make me miserable, and I can long to be rich even though those kids at school drove me mad, and if I can long to fuck every single person I know I shouldn’t, then I can also long to have a publisher even though I have a desperate need to do it all on my own and a desperate fear of having my work examined under the knife and found wanting.
But self-publishing was easy since I already had all the skills, and so those books were followed by other books, and the royalties began to quickly supplement my income far more than I ever expected. Five or six e-books in and I was suddenly making actual money that I could pay my actual bills with and it was invigorating as much as it was scary. Because, of course, as soon as you have a thing, the fear of losing it rears its ugly head.
But I kept on writing, and I kept on fantasizing about a life I almost had, because my new persona, my pen name, my avatar and my armor, was far cooler than I was. He drank at the right bars, went to the right parties, and more importantly he fucked whomever he wanted wherever he wanted with only half as much fear as I did. He negotiated his anxiety with grace and he and his partner (he was close enough to me as to also be married) navigated the minefield of marriage beautifully if at times messily.
A group of friends and I started doing readings a few years later, The Dirty Boys we called ourselves, and we drew a crowd each time. I stood up in public and shared my filthy mind with like minded folks, and they clapped and applauded and that part of my life, that pseudonym began to fill more and more of the space that I had carved out for myself. I did go to the right bars and the right parties, and I was having more kinky sex with more people than ever before. I had a wife, two girlfriends, and a boyfriend, and my god who does that? We’d sit together, sometimes all five of us and marvel at our luck and our prowess. We managed to do things every single day that would ruin other marriages if they happened just once, and we were fucking good at it. Madeline and I were poly masters, negotiating our way to hot sex and true love with the skill and strength of a porn star with a Phd.
But still, each time I was out in the city, and that hideous question arose, I would falter. What do I do for a living? Well, you know, this and that, I might say. Sometimes I’d answer that I was in marketing, and if I felt good about it that day I would add that I’m a partner in a small agency. But on other days, when my boots were polished and my hat was askew and the commercial world of advertising felt like a crime and a sin, I would tilt my head up and tell them I was a writer.
And my god did that feel different.
On those days I could wrap New York around my finger and carry it with me in my pocket. I could walk into any bar or restaurant and charm the pants off the maitre-d and I could write up a storm until three in the morning my head clouded with whiskey but still certain that I was on the right path.
When I was a writer, I was myself and everything that meant. I was the wood burning stove and the buried bottle. I was the old typewriter, the hidden office on the second floor full of dirty books, and the vest of my grandfather's old suit. I was the flowers in my mother’s kitchen and the fingers unsnapping a thousand pairs of jeans, their fruits offered to me with an eager and willing bite.
And then, one day in February, just months before I left my marriage, I decided to pull my world closer and do something I had put off. Of course I wrote about my life, especially as it was then, but I held those fantasies close to home and they were generally brief. But that day or maybe it was night, I started something new because I had a dream and a curiosity that wouldn’t let me go. The story started with me, driving home from college after a senior year which left me both lustful and afraid as I made my way through the winding hills of Pennsylvania. But then, the book took me away with one simple question. One single change.
What would have happened if I didn’t go home?
And my god did the words come. Instead of turning north up the Palisades Parkway to the comfort of the tree and the familiar smell of the hammock, I drove over that damn bridge, down the West Side Highway and into the arms of an old friend. And from that moment on the book became a marathon run as a sprint. I wrote page after page, creating a new timeline and a new life of what ifs. And I wrote it so fucking quickly, that I didn’t bother to change names or locations, and I pulled my friends in without any thought except that it felt so damn good. I wrote and I wrote, the book growing longer and longer until finally, exactly two weeks later, I put it down with a bang because I was done.
In fourteen days I had written one hundred and fifty thousand words which came out to more than three hundred pages. And it was filthy. It was disgusting and it was sweet. I called it Disgusting Beautiful Immoral.
It was full of want and lust and a fear of the same, but my god did I love them all. I loved Thomas and I loved Kelly too. Jane, of course was my favorite, but Brent and Jason and all the rest of them lived there on the page in a swirling alternative universe where I had made one simple decision that changed everything.
And still now, even after the book has been out for years, my first marriage has ended, and I’m on to writing other things, I look back and I wonder. Ever after the hospital and my father’s first amputation, even after my visit to the old house, and even after my changed life in my tiny apartment on the Lower East Side, I think about that simple question.
What would have happened if I hadn’t gone home? What would have happened if I had driven over that damn bridge and changed everything?
And once that thought had reared its head, after the book was done and published, it wouldn’t leave me alone. Because once I began to wonder, and admittedly regret that decision to go home instead, I had to question myself then and there. I had to hold the book in my hand and wonder if I was at another crossroad with another choice in front of me.
And this time, I was going to make the right one.