The Last Romantics(48)
So I did. It was the grand transformative fantasy of every pudgy teenage girl who’d been overlooked, taken for granted, ignored by the many and diverse objects of her affection. Over the next year, I flirted and slept with every type of man I’d lusted after in high school and college—the jocks, prom kings, bad boys, stoners, and class presidents—and then I moved on to all the others. I dated some men for a few weeks here and there, but I happened upon a relationship only once: Eli, a tall and earnest publishing intern who broke his leg in a spectacular bike accident that required a twelve-week convalescence. During this time I brought him groceries and toilet paper. I held his cast outside the shower curtain to keep it from getting wet. Something about this vulnerability and need made me want to stay, plus the knee-to-thigh cast and the pulleys installed above his bed made the sex interesting and acrobatic. But once Eli’s physical therapy ended and he was walking again, I broke up with him. Eli cried.
“If you’d put up with all of that,” he asked, “why leave now?”
He had thick, sensitive lips and dark eyebrows marked on the right side by an unexpected shock of premature white. He was in fact a good guy.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said at first. And then I realized the problem. “I guess I just don’t want things to be normal.”
It was natural that I’d take my experiences into my poetry class. I wrote almost exclusively about sex, because sex was the most interesting thing that was happening to me.
My poetry teacher’s name was Kevin Kealey.
“I like the sex poems,” said Kevin.
Emma, an almost-model, almost-artist in the class, sighed extravagantly and rolled her eyes.
“But?” I asked.
“Listen, the idea isn’t entirely new. You’ve got Ana?s Nin, Erica Jong . . .” Kevin looked confused.
“Sylvia Plath,” I reminded him. “Sharon Olds, Eileen Myles.”
Kevin was nodding. “Yes, yes, of course. And . . . others. And your work is appealing. I mean, it’s fresh. It’s very honest.”
Again Emma sighed, louder this time, and was joined by a distinct groan from the back row. I ignored them. My class was composed of fourteen antagonistic strangers with day jobs and the kinds of literary ambitions that grew from personal torment and a scattershot idea of what might make it all feel better. Their critiques were not kind. (Soulless. Demeaning. Empty.) They all seemed to hate me, or maybe they just hated my work. Only Kevin thought I was onto something.
I submitted my sex poems to and was summarily rejected by ninety-nine literary journals and poetry magazines, and I told Kevin that was it. The number one hundred was simply too demoralizing, too symbolic. How would I ever recover from a hundred straight rejections?
One night I stayed late with Kevin after the others had trickled out. The class was held in an NYU building in what appeared to be an abandoned classroom designated too drafty and dangerous for tuition-paying NYU undergrads. There was some halfhearted graffiti on one section of the blackboard and what looked very much like asbestos pushing up the floor tiles beneath the room’s only window, which was cracked. We all kept our coats on during class.
“Kevin,” I said, pulling up a chair beside his desk, “why do I even care about getting published?”
“I don’t know. Why do you?” He was peeling an orange, and the fresh smell of citrus filled the room.
“Because people tell me I should care. You tell me that!”
Kevin looked wounded. “Fiona, I am all about the purity of the process. Don’t listen to those bozos at the Paris Review. Just write what you want to write.” He paused. “Maybe you should start a blog.”
“What did you just say?”
“A blog!” Kevin’s mouth was full of orange.
“Bog?”
He chewed and swallowed. “Have you been living under a rock? A blog. It’s like if you put your diary online and invited people to comment on it. Not for the faint of heart, Fiona.”
I considered his words. “I’ve never fainted in my life. Really.”
“I mean, I love these lines.” Kevin picked up the poem I had submitted for that night’s class. “You could turn this bloggy. Easy as pie.”
Kevin wrote down some website addresses, and I took the subway home. The year was 2003. I spent the weekend taking notes on Gawker, Dooce.com, Belle de Jour, and The Daily Dish. By Sunday afternoon I figured I had read enough. I downloaded Movable Type version 2.6 onto my iMac and, after an all-nighter of mouse manipulation and profanity, became a blogger.
Because I was a little bit chicken and because I didn’t quite trust that Kevin totally knew what he was talking about, I did not use my name. I called myself the Last Romantic.
On the blog I described the project like this: “The Last Romantic aims to record in Full Truth the Sex Life of a Young Woman in a Great City, the woman being myself, the city being New York. Or, in other words, the process of providing myself with a sentimental education, unsentimentally.”
My first post, an earnest and semi-erotic poem about kissing a man with a mustache, drew 7 hits. My next post, a wryly detailed account of oral sex with the same mustachioed man, titled “Ticklingus,” drew 288 hits. I was hooked. I could say anything in a few short paragraphs, and anyone with a computer could read it. I told only Kevin when I posted something new, and yet week by week, month by month, my audience grew.