Unwifeable(34)

I email Lauren all this, and she writes back, “Sounds like it’s time for a new dating column!”

Immediately, I begin pitching her—the way I’ve been pitching Steve for months now. I have endless ideas. “Who Is on Your Secret Husband List?” “The New Intimacy: Using Your Real Email Account.” “Googlebating: aka First-Date Oppo Research.” (Oppo research meaning “opposition research,” a term for the practice of political operatives gathering dirt against an opponent. The fact that I regard men as the “opponent” kind of gives insight into my fucked-up perspective on dating at the time.)

To support my campaign, I try to show all the editors how fascinating and bizarre I am. Boundaries? What boundaries? I have plenty to write about because I take all comers for fodder. Standards start loosening, men who are “jokes” are suddenly entertained as prospects again (I call this an “unjoking”). I’m still a youngish-looking thirty-one, and I am determined to exploit it.

I spend weeks trying to think of names for the column. My sister helpfully offers up “Penises on Parade.” Mackenzie suggests “Love Patrol,” with me in a cop uniform winking. My dad suggests “Mandy’s Place,” which leaves Steve in hysterics (“See you at Mandy’s place!”). My contribution is either “Daddy Issues” or “I Was Going to Call My Column ‘I Take It in the Ass’ but I Found Out It’s Already Been Done by the Wall Street Journal.” But it’s a consortium of editors who settle on About Last Night.

I still have not had sex for a year since swearing it off. This promise I made to God is starting to get old.

One night out with work friends, I am pounding back a record level of whiskey sours, which brings out a rollicking level of libido. Before heading home, I hit another bar by myself and keep drinking, Bombay Sapphire and soda water.

I still have in the back of my mind good ol’ Rick the busboy and his awesome ’80s studded silver jacket. My texts with Stephen Falk kind of tell the story of the night.

Me: I just came 2 a bar & some strangers are hitting on me. And I am drunk & akone. It is pathetic. Fuck. I have not dared look at who is hitting on me. Fuck. I am a caricature. Fucj fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck I’m scared 2 look. Fuck

Stephen: Do you need to call? Are you ok? Who are you with?

Me: I’m ok sorry I just really need 2 get laid. Maybe I will xall fone sex that won’t be awkward at all. Tonighr I found out this girl I rthought waas my firnd hates me this is the besst txt message of all time. I’m floating, floating into the pancake place. See here’s the thing I miss being regularly fucked. I know its not coy & um well anyway bye. KIT. Bye.

Stephen: Stop. I’m going to call you in a bit.

Me: ithe busboyr is coming over hoorah cobgratulations

That’s right. I finally reached out to the busboy I had crushed on weeks earlier. Before Rick arrives in Park Slope, as I walk home, I call Kyle Kinane in LA, rambling on, talking about all this self-created drama, crying and knocking over the TV on the shelf near my bed. “Stadtmiller,” he says, “get it together.” Then I call Stephen, telling him I am now playing with myself, surrounded by the scattered CDs of the Richard Pryor box set I had ordered along with $500 in other comedy albums I bought when I bombed onstage recently.

“Mandy unhinged,” Stephen says. “I like it.”

When Rick arrives, he takes a look at me, smiles, and says, “You are crazy.”

I do not disagree.

The sex is pretty great (I suppose any is when you haven’t had it in a year), and he does something no guy has ever done before, which is finger me in the ass, which provides the biggest orgasm ever.

I wake up the next morning, rub my eyes, and see the condom wrapper lying next to the world’s sweetest postcard my mom has sent me that says: “Love from California, Hope your writing is in high gear!”

Boy, is it ever. I stumble out of bed and run into my roommate Lola. Do I tell her? I should tell her.

“I slept with the busboy,” I tell Lola confidentially.

“Yes,” she says, with a huge look of amusement, standing next to her hot-pink espresso maker as Juanita comes out and joins her. “We know.”

“Oh God . . .” I begin.

“That’s all right,” Lola says. “It sounds like you had a really—”

“Please,” I say. “That’s okay. So sorry, so incredibly sorry.”

“We’re going to do a reenactment tonight,” Juanita says.

I email the two of them from work that day. “You’re getting ‘I’m sorry I fucked the busboy so loudly’ apology roses! What’s your favorite color?”

“Yellow,” Lola replies.

When the lesbians are gone for a few nights, I invite Rick over a second time, and to my disappointment, he does not finger me in the ass again.

I tell Stephen how disappointed I am in this and that I am considering writing about it, and he responds, “Sorry, Curb already did Cheryl Fucks Graydon Carter’s Busboy and Is Let Down When He Doesn’t Give Her Any Anal Play episode. I think it won a WGA award.”

The best part about the Waverly Inn story, though, is not Rick the busboy. It’s that one of the nights I met a doctor at the restaurant by the name of Dr. David Colbert. Since we did not meet in a doctor-patient scenario, it is the blossoming of a friendship that I never anticipated. He tells me to feel free to come in sometime and tell him about my new weird scar that the freebie laser treatment doc provided.