Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

I got a cab and headed back to the hotel. The cab driver, an elderly black man, had one of those beaten up '60s radios, where you pushed the black buttons to get the station. 1 hadn't heard such muted music since I was a teenager, and the contrast was all the more dramatic since he was tuned into the local hip-hop station, which plainly required a more contemporary form of amplification. 1 looked over at the odometer and 1 saw the car had more than 500,000 miles on it. That cab had been to the equivalent of the moon and back. It was a black Ford Fairlane whose chrome had rusted off. The hip-hop version of "1 Got a Woman" was playing and it made me want to cry. 1 was hot, my legs itched, and I missed her two hair-covered lips more than I had ever missed anything before. It was as if those lips were talking to me and saying I want to end the relationship, a projection that only increased the excitement that was building inside of me.

Most of the great revelations of my life have come to me when I'm standing on my head. I can stand anywhere, but when 1 do it for an extended period, I find a wall to lean my legs against; that way my legs remain absolutely straight. I removed the oil painting of Key West Harbor from the wall of our hotel room, cupped my hands around my head, and started raising myself up. It's at times like this that I'm grateful for my years of yoga. The only problem was, by now 1 had a hard-on. I looked like one of those totem poles where the carvings of the warrior gods jut out of the wood. My dick was so stiff I began to worry: If the phone rang or the fire alarm went off, I might fall on it and damage myself. I needed to free myself from the priapic state of mind to which I'd become enslaved. I gradually lowered myself to the ground. The dreaded scourge of impotence which I'd loathed and feared, the way the people of the Middle Ages feared the plague, didn't seem like the end of the world anymore. The hated loss of erection that had so troubled my adolescence in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the thing I'd run away from for years, in fact, now seemed appealing. When you walk around with a baseball bat in your pants, you live in perpetual fear of hurting either yourself or others.

I'm one of those people who has always gotten hard-ons in the wrong place at the wrong time-for example, in subways and buses and while standing in front of a room full of undergraduates when I was a teaching assistant. Finally I found a way to handle the situation. Like a lot of discoveries in the history of science, it came about by accident. I was on my way to the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Manhattan-with an erection that wouldn't go away. Stopping to take a piss didn't help matters; no sooner had I urinated than it popped up all over again. It was a particularly busy day for me. I have pyorrhea, and after the museum I had to get to my gum specialist. After that, I had an appointment with a Broadway producer. I kept trying to cover up my appendage by pulling my raincoat over it, which made me look even more suspicious. I was not only tired, but embarrassed. Then, magically, when I walked into the memorial and saw the images of the suffering in the camps, lo and behold, my erection went away. Ever since then, thinking about concentration camps has provided relief. It's not a long-term solution to the problem. The minute my mind wanders, my dick pops back up. If I keep reminding myself to think Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Thierenstadt, I'm in business.

This cooling down process allowed me to return to standing on my head. I stood on my head with images of emaciated concentration camp victims running through my mind. I thought of the piles of glasses, human hair, and gold extracted from teeth before I slowly rolled out of my headstand in order to pick up the ringing phone. It was a woman's voice.

"Hi." For a moment I froze. It was familiar. I felt a tingle down my spine. I couldn't place the voice, yet I felt it was someone I'd always known.

"I'm looking for Bill." I couldn't believe it. I was ecstatic and terrified at the same time.

"Is this you?"

"As far as 1 know I haven't left my body."

"It's me."

"Well I hope so. You see, that's the nature of syntax. You are you, and I am I. This is something we can agree on. Beyond this we plunge into the depths of subjectivity. I studied with Hilary Putnam at Harvard, but I still haven't been able to breach the idealist chasm. How do I know you exist? I don't, but 1 can answer your initial question proudly. Yes, this is nze."

"Maybe it isn't you after all. For a minute I thought it was."

"Well thanks, buster. Nothing like someone doubting your existence for you. Helluva way to wrap up my day."

"Sorry, I just thought you were someone else?" Whew, close call. I was dripping with sweat and my hard-on had returned. When 1'd gone through my periodic bouts of impotence as a teenager, I'd tried to think up sexy scenarios to get myself going, but 1'd be so nervous 1 couldn't even think, and when 1 could, 1 found 1 wasn't turned on by the things that normally, effortlessly did the trick. 1'd think breast or cunt, and the idea would occur to me they were no different from any other part of the anatomy. Pubic hair was just hair. A breast was just flesh. Vaginas were folded flesh. So what? Now I had the same problem in trying to get rid of my hard-on. Thinking of piles of emaciated corpses didn't do the trick. I was too aware I was thinking horrible thoughts to get rid of my hard-on. Self-consciousness overruled substance and I wasn't able to do anything about the hot throbbing hard-on bursting against my fly.

When I was a teenager, I was a constant victim of passionate and unreciprocated love. Everywhere I went, I thought I was seeing someone I had a crush on. My romanticism was aggravated by the impotence problem. It was safer to run after women 1 couldn't have. Eventually something had to give. My sexual life was a little like Germany after the Versailles treaty. My pride and my manhood had both been crushed-in this case by my own sensitive nature. My attempt to compensate for the constant feelings of defeat turned me into the satyr 1'd become. 1 made myself over in the spirit of those advertisements in the old men's magazines where the hundred-pound weakling becomes a total stud. Legendary womanizers like Pushkin and Hugo, the mystery writer George Simenon, who always fucked the chambermaids in the hotels he stayed in (amongst numerous other daily trysts), and Wilt Chamberlain, who had 10,000 conquests amidst his thousands of baskets, all became role models for me. I studied Henry Miller and Frank Harris and eradicated Goethe's Sufferings of Young Wl'erther and Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet from my memory. I became a tough guy, an ass man. I hung out at a boxing gym. I learned to treat women like objects. I realized my father was never going to come after me; he didn't have the guts since I'd grown bigger and stronger from all my working out. I found myself with the equivalent of a new set of wheels and chassis. The libido is a constant stream whose flow is only interrupted by mind. I was flooded with libidinous energy that had always existed in me, but which my psychohistory had never allowed me to experience before.

But now I was thrown back to my youthful romantic years when I'd been haunted by fleeting images of lost loves. I was flooded with the sensation of my hot throbbing cock pushing through thick bush to get to a pussy whose wetness and hotness, whose facility for invagination was unparalleled in my experience-a pussy that kept receding before me.

All spiritual seekers from Augustine onwards live in a certain blindness that requires faith. I didn't know what 1 would face when I went home. Could you have imagined the whole fucking thing? If you've been parking a bitch whose faceyou don't remember, something'r wrong. You don't remember howjoufoundjourselves in each others arms? C'mon! I couldn't stop the thoughts. Worse than finding she was tired of me, didn't want me, or didn't want to keep cheating on her boyfriend was the possibility that the fucking hadn't happened at all. Remember the girl in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)? She doesn't exist. The James Stewart character's fallen in love with a chimera. It's a passion predicated on impossibility. The haunting quality of the Stewart character's love is its unreality. I'm a Shakespeare buff and I'd read an essay comparing Vertigo to late Shakespeare plays like The Winter's Tale, where imagination triumphs over reality and the dead are brought back to life. Was I chasing a phantom pussy?