Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

Thus we started our little cat-and-mouse relationship. I figured maybe I’d get some pud-pulling tidbits. Cinch the ropes around my wrists, pour hot wax on my breasts, clamp me if I’m naughty, smack me if I’m nice… Blah blah blah, the usual stuff you’d expect from an S&M shatroom. But with her it was different.

She’d have none of that. Whenever I mentioned that I’d love to give her a tweak, she’d write something dismissive like, That’s not necessary.

It was as though some ponytailed Dorothy from Kansas had accidentally ventured into this Oz of Bondage and Domination. I could see why she didn’t get much action. No one else would have put up with her.

Do you realize that you advertized in an S&M chat room? I finally asked after weeks without so much as a slap or tickle in the endless exchanges.

Course I do, you randy lad.

And yet whenever I make any advances along that line, you seem surprised.

I have to get to know you better before I can fully reveal that side of myself to you.

This is the Internet! We’re never going to meet.

I pass a million people every day. You’re my only lovebug. A meeting of minds is far more intimate than a meeting of bodies.

So how long do you have to know someone for before we can get intimate?

The longer you can wait, the better it’ll be, she replied with all the smugness of a red-hot poker cauterizing my wounded heart.

Her e-mail exchanges always took something out of me. Afterwards, I’d have to nurse myself back to my indestructible self developing the innermost buds of fantasies that one day would blossom. On that fateful day when I finally had her, I could act out all my dreams. But even my dreams were hindered, until I found out what her dreams were. Without her realizing it, I had to learn what scared her more than anything else, to extract the sweetest nectar of her fear.

Occasionally I’d test her borders, nothing gross or icky, just little things, like Why’d you divorce? or, What are your measurements? Wondering if she was actually still married, or if she was in a wheelchair.

She’d invariably turn the questions into sarcastic come-backs.

I divorced cause I knew I’d meet you, or, You see me every night on cable, I’m Anna Nicole Smith.

So soon, in order to keep it earnest, our e-missives became little more than a line or so. One long banal conversation that lasted for weeks and then months. Whenever I turned on my computer, she was always right there. Like warm little homemade muffins just waiting for me, but they always had a little needle inside, some funny little dig. Slowly, like a voice in my head or a low-level addiction, I came to thoughtlessly expect it. I learned to eat around what used to get caught in my throat. At the end of a long, empty day, a day of resisting the urge to follow a thousand lonely ladies home and bring them to my ecstatic world, I knew I could read CATCHME’s little comments du jour. It became something to look forward to. I couldn’t go to sleep without an exchange.

One night about three months into our little chat, she must’ve had a little too much too drink, because she let out a slip: It’s three in the morning and I just made a big boo boo.

What kind of a boo boo?

A naughty one.

How naughty?

Very very naughty.

Naughty girls need to be disciplined, I pushed.

But who will take time to do that?

Just type in where you are, lost little girl, and I’ll come get you. When I hit send , I knew I shouldn’t have. I knew I was pushing too hard.

She didn’t write me back for a month after that — punishment by deprivation — and I thought I had lost her until one day I got a new message: Boy, it was a beautiful day today, wasn’t it?

I wanted to write back that she could eat my stinking shit and if I ever saw her I’d strangle her with her own intestines as I fucked her death wounds. Instead I wrote, Sure was With sudden regularity, the e-mails resumed. Though they took on a bit more depth, they still remained along the surface. She’d talk about her little garden, and soon she mentioned other potted plants of domesticity: the old oak trees on her block; the aggravating honks of trucks that double-parked in front of the supermarket around the corner, causing constant traffic bottlenecks. She mentioned that every morning while watering her rooftop plants, she could see the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock from the back of the building and the Jehovah’s Witness digital clock toward the front, and the two-minute discrepancy between them. She talked about how she liked going on strolls near the waterfront over the cobblestoned streets in her neighborhood.

I get dehydrated quickly when I go on walks, I replied, and hoping that she’d slip up and tell me the area she lived, I asked, You don’t get out much either do you?

I’m not agoraphobic, but I am a bit of a homebody.

One day, when I casually mentioned that I had a birthday coming up, she wrote back, Let’s do something for your birthday.

Like what?

A visual date, she proposed. At 6 p.m. tonight, I’m going to be on my rooftop holding a wine glass, toasting the western tower of the Bridge. You do the same.

Which bridge?

The Brooklyn.

It’s a date, I replied.

That afternoon I dropped a hundred dollars on a high-powered pair of field glasses. Because she said the western tower I thought that perhaps she was in one of the new high-rises around the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. I arrived a half an hour early and when I walked across the bridge toward the western tower, I spotted a middle-aged woman also holding binoculars. She was in her forties, small, dehydrated, in drab clothes. Nothing to look at, easy to kill. All I could think was, she had the same idea as me. When I approached to make small talk, she suddenly lifted her spy glasses and yelled, “Holy shit!”

When I turned to see what she was looking at, I saw a gentle cascade of grayish feathers.

“What happened?”

“The falcon just grabbed a pigeon.”

“What falcon?” I asked.

“A peregrine falcon nest up there with a fledgling.” She was pointing to a small stone doorway high above the second pillar. By her general demeanor, I knew this Audubon member wasn’t her

I still had fifteen minutes before her toast. I spent the time scanning both sides of the river for any glint of a wine glass. After an hour, feeling empty and pissed, I headed back to Brooklyn and walked to the F train stop at York.

A teenage girl was waiting all alone at the farthest end of the platform. I seriously considered dragging her a few extra feet into the darkness of the tunnel. But before I took a step, I realized the token clerk got a good look at me. If she screamed, there would only be one escape route. I was actually relieved when someone else finally showed up.

Upon arriving home, an e-mail was waiting for me: Happy birthday to you.

I wrote back that I was in agony for her.

Agony?

I know this sounds odd, but I think I’ve fallen in love with you.

That’s funny. Tell me another.

I’m serious. I can’t get you out of my head. I’m always thinking about you. Can’t we just put all the bullshit aside and meet somewhere like two adults? We’ll just have coffee and if you like what you see, we can go on a proper date.

To be quite honest, I’m nothing special to look at. Right now, you claim to be in love with me and we didn’t even meet. I’ve gone on dates with guys who’ve used me in the most degrading ways and then decided never to call me again. Frankly, I don’t even like sex. (I only like what it symbolizes.)

Me neither! We don’t have to have a sexual relationship. I can love you as a friend.

We can be friends on the Internet.