The Creepist (Nerve.com)
(Originally published in Nerve.com, 2008)
I was a comic, and so was he. He was one of those Kaufmanesque types; more of a performance artist, really; someone who’d come out in a blond wig and dance spastically until the audience laughed from the sheer awkwardness of it. Whereas I was more of a set-up/punch gal, with bits and jokes and routines: the phone sex bit, the abortion joke, the younger men routine. I “worked blue,” as they say; I was bawdy, and talked a lot about sex, mostly about how I wasn’t having it. I was recently single again, after a failed five-year relationship, and I was trying to drown my sorrows in anonymous applause.
I didn’t like him. I didn’t hate him, the way I hated some other comics, with their racist, homophobic bullshit, but I didn’t particularly like him. A few of my female friends had made out with him – he had a reputation as something of a slut, a reputation he cultivated at every opportunity – and I thought he was a little handsy, a little bratty, a little look-at-me. But we traveled in the same circles, and often, after a late show or an open mic, a bunch of us would go out and get some three a.m. coffee and fries. We’d recap the night, gossip, put each other down; then I’d go home to my two cats and smoke a joint and fall asleep on my couch because my bed was too empty and far away.
We were out in a group at the diner after a show one night. It was four a.m., and everyone was getting ready to leave. “Hey,” he asked me, his voice low, “Is it okay if I crash on your sofa? I…I don’t really like taking the train this late at night.”
He sounded almost embarrassed, like he didn’t want any of the other guys to hear him, afraid they’d rip on him for being afraid of the subway – What’re you, a pussy? Which he was, no doubt – a self-proclaimed sensitive man, wiry and geeky, a mark if there ever was one. And I felt for him, briefly; I realized that he was just as vulnerable on a late-night subway ride as I was. “No problem,” I said.
I lived only a few blocks away; we chatted as we walked. He asked me where I’d grown up, where I’d gone to college, all that getting-to-know-you stuff we’d never discussed in our year or two of associating on the comedy scene. I let him into my place, where my cats sniffed his pant leg; I fed the monsters and started rolling my joint. “Nice place,” he said, putting his bag down on the rug. “Hey, let me show you something.”
He sat down at my desk like he owned the place, flipped open my laptop, typed in an address. Up came an amateur porn site, a topless, buxom Latina girl in red pleather pants turning around to glower at the camera. I raised my eyebrows, bemused. At least half of my act was based on me being a feminist, busting on men for being horndogs, claiming that women were the superior sex because “at least women don’t put cameras in the men’s toilet.” I was not favorably impressed by porn.
“Isn’t this hot?” he asked, spinning around in my desk chair towards me, his face eager, patting his thighs. “Here, come sit on my lap.”
“Um, no,” I said, still bemused.
“Why not?” he whined. “You’re no fun.”
“That’s right,” I said, and lit my joint. I offered him a hit, but he waved it away, turned back to my laptop.
“I can’t believe you’re not into this. Look at this girl’s ass! Look how hot she is! You don’t think she’s hot?” His tone was incredulous, almost accusatory, like I was anti-female if I didn’t admire this woman’s ass.
“She’s very nice,” I said. “Just not my thing.”
“What is your thing?”
My thing was smoking joints and reading true crime books about women who killed people. My thing was petting my cats and watching Survivor. My thing was fantasizing about my ex-boyfriend of five years begging me to come back to him, and me saying no. “Not that,” I said.
The comedian changed tactics. “It’s really cool of you to let me crash here. What can I do for you? Can I rub your shoulders?”
And…okay. I should have known, by this point, that the “too late for the train” thing was a ploy, that his showing me the porn site was not just an awkward gaffe, that he was trying to get into my pants via my shoulders. But the joint was kicking in, and my back did hurt, it always hurts, and I told myself that he was trying to be nice – he was trying to be nice, so I should try to be nice, and let him be nice to me. I didn’t have to be such a ballbusting bitch all the time; I wasn’t on stage right now. A little niceness could be nice. “All right.”
He sat behind me on the couch, and I rested my joint in the ashtray, already missing its comforting weight between my index and middle fingers. He smoothed my hair gently off my neck, placed his thumbs at the base. “Relax,” he instructed, and started massaging. “Wow, Janice, you’re so tense.”
“I know.” I sighed, and his hands moved downwards towards my shoulders, thumbs digging between the blades. “Uuuuuuuuuuuhh,” I groaned.
“Is that all right?” he asked softly, his breath warm against my ear.
“Feels good,” I said. “Thanks.”
He continued to rub my shoulders, and I groaned some more, started to let go – unclenched my jaw from its fake smile; let my head sag from its held-high position. Let out all the loneliness, disappointment, frustration of the past few months. Uuuuuuuuuhh.
“I can’t really get enough leverage this way,” he said. “Why don’t you lie down?”
I lied down on the couch and let him straddle my back, let him lift my t-shirt and put his hands on my skin. “There,” he murmured, soothing. “That feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Mmph,” I said into the couch cushion. It did feel good. He had strong hands, and he pushed hard against my sore muscles, and the pain was a release, a relief. He started rocking a little, sitting on my ass and grinding into it, his hands moving ever southward. I knew I should stop him, but I was enjoying my massage. Maybe he would move back up towards the shoulders again.
He didn’t. His hands moved over my ass cheeks, and I felt him getting erect against me, his breath starting to come hard. “Well, that was nice,” I told him, sitting up, pulling my t-shirt down over my back. “Thanks.”
He tried pushing me back down. “We could do more,” he purred. “I could keep it up all night.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But that’s all right.”
“Come on,” he insisted. “Doesn’t it feel good?” He traced his fingers lightly over my arm, and the hairs raised without my permission.
“It does,” I admitted, guilty. I had let him make me feel good. “But I don’t want to do anything else.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
“Are you…not attracted to me?” His voice was crestfallen. I felt a pang on his behalf. I’d been rejected enough lately; I wasn’t trying to be mean to someone else.
“It’s not that you’re not attractive,” I said, gently. “I just don’t have those feelings for you.”
“But that was nice, right? You were enjoying it.”
“Yeah, but…” Why was I arguing this? It was five a.m., I was tired and high; all I wanted to do was go to sleep. I didn’t want to sit there looking at his pinched, wounded face and explaining why I didn’t want to have sex with him. “I don’t want to fool around with you. I don’t like you like that.”
“Well, we don’t have to go out or anything. We can just have a good time.” He tickled my arm again, and it felt heavy, like the time I got hypnotized in a failed attempt to quit smoking pot. I started to feel resigned, like I was going to lose the argument anyway. Maybe I should just give him a handjob, I thought. Maybe that will shut him up.
Because he wouldn’t stop arguing the point. I’d raise an objection – “Look, I just don’t feel like it right now” – and he’d counter with logic – “But you liked what I was doing, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but…” But I don’t want to. I didn’t want to give him a handjob. I didn’t want him in my apartment at all, at this point; fuck the subway and its hypothetical muggers. I’d been trying to be nice, and look what it got me – screwed, as usual. I turned away from him and shielded my eyes with my hand. “I just don’t want to fool around, all right?”
“Well…” Now he was weighing it, deciding whether or not it was all right for me to not want to fool around with him. He sounded aggrieved, and I winced under my hand. Just let me off the hook, I pleaded silently. Leave me alone and let me get some fucking sleep.
“What if I jerk off?” he proposed, finally, like, that’s fair, right?
I kept my hand over my eyes, squeezed them shut. “Do whatever you want to do,” I said.
I sat there with my eyes closed for the next minute and a half, or however long it took him – not long – to jerk off next to me. The sound of his breathing, the wet smack of skin on skin, his shudder – I felt complicit in all of it, accused. This was something, I was giving up something by allowing him to jerk off next to me. Now he’d gotten this from me, and he could smirk at me the way he smirked at my girlfriends at comedy shows, that smirk that said, you gave it up.
I’d given up. And now he was finished. He sighed, and heaved, and it was over. He sat there, waiting for me to look at him. “Fine,” he finally muttered, and went to my bathroom to clean up.
I reached into the ashtray and relit my joint.
He came out of the bathroom, petulant look on his face. “I guess I’ll just sleep on your couch for an hour or two,” he said, injured. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
I said his name, which I won’t say here. “—…”
“No, it’s fine. I appreciate your hospitality.” He threw himself on the far end of the couch and closed his eyes.
I said his name again, and he ignored me. I went into my room and fell asleep.
The next morning, he was gone – no note, not that I wanted one. I saw him a few days later at a show, and he smirked at me. I felt like hiding; I felt dirty and used. I didn’t tell any of my girlfriends what had happened between us. I just kept my head high and showed my fake smile, the one with the clenched teeth.
It was a few months later that I watched him take an underage drunk girl, put one hand on the back of her neck, and steer her out of a party and down the block, away from her friends, who were telling her not to go. “Maybe…I don’t know…,” she slurred, as he pushed her into a cab. And I knew he’d get what he wanted. Because it was easier than putting up a fight, and he’d bought her some drinks and paid for the cab, and – did she find him unattractive? – she wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. She wouldn’t want to be a bitch.
He saw me watching from the sidewalk as he stuffed her in the taxi, and he paused for a second before he joined her. That smirk; that filthy reminder of my weakness, my complicity, the shoulders I’d let drop for him. Then he got in and slammed the door behind him, and they were gone.