On my way home, I call Jonathan Brandstein at 3 a.m. “I keep seeing all these celebrities,” I slur, “and it made me think of you.”
So classy.
My very last night at the Waverly, before I’m about to leave, I befriend a young man and a blonde I recognize from around 1211 Avenue of the Americas. They are both determined to keep up with me as I try to set a world record for alcohol consumed—bottle after bottle of Bordeaux and endless amarettos on ice—on a single expense account.
Before too long, the man suggests we all go to his place around the corner. The girl and I are the best of friends at this point, building buddy co-conspirators. We move to the second location, and it is not long before we are having what I would characterize as the world’s most tepid orgy (because I’m still not having sex). But when my phone calendar reminder interrupts us, I realize, Oh shit, I have to leave to go meet Rick the busboy.
I sneak out, stumbling to the Blind Pig, where I meet up with him in his metallic studded silver ’80s jacket. He is so eager to meet me. He thinks this is a real date. I am a terrible person.
“I’m actually a reporter with the New York Post,” I say.
His eyes narrow for a split second. Then he recovers.
“I knew something was up, with you there every night,” he says. I pull out my sketch of banquettes, and he helps me peg celebrities to tables and tells me the deal—reluctantly. “Graydon is the only person who has a fixed table,” he says, and then explains the rest of the seating-chart hierarchy in this Darwinian little clubhouse.
After we’re done, I resist the desire to fool around with him, and excuse myself to head out to the nearest cheap pub I can find. I order a Philly cheesesteak sandwich to try to sober up. Minutes later, I am puking it up outside on the street corner. A man and his girlfriend begin talking to me, making sure I’m okay. I guess at some point we exchange email addresses?
The next day I wake up and find, along with my scratched-on-a-napkin notes from my meeting with Rick the busboy (and the phone number of a doctor named Knut, who says I can call him “cunt”), my now-cracked BlackBerry. I check it. There’s a new email. It’s the guy who talked to me when I was puking in the street.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but we met last night/early morning. Hope to hear from you soon.”
Wow. That’s a first. I drag myself out of bed, somehow make it to the office—and who is the first person I see? No, it’s not the woman who said she works in the building with me. It’s the guy from the tepid orgy.
“So,” he says, “is that like a typical night for you guys?”
“Wait . . .” I say. “You work in the building?”
“TV Guide,” he responds. We exchange cards.
It is the single longest elevator ride of my life.
* * *
MY PIECE ON the Waverly Inn—“Secret Scene of the Inn Crowd”—is a big hit when it runs, and it’s fun beating other publications, who soon follow suit with their own Waverly insider pieces.
But the best part is impressing Lauren, the Sunday editor. We keep talking after it publishes, she puts me on a few other long-range stories (“50 Most Powerful Women in New York” and, later, even a Michelle Obama profile), but it’s the small talk that leads to a dating column.
I tell her about my never-ending ridiculous attempts to try to set my friend and editor Katherine up (of course, Katherine needs zero help—and is within a year married to an amazing guy she meets at one of music writer Mary Huhn’s parties, but she endures my efforts). My latest matchmaking attempt for Katherine involves setting up a joint date with a guy who works in media whom I’m not interested in, but I tell him about this great girl I know. Would he want to meet her? We agree that the three of us will get together at Jimmy’s Corner and see if anyone likes anybody.
Of course, after more than a month and twenty emails going back and forth trying to schedule it (at one point, Katherine even writes “witty repartee totally tapped out”), the date is a failure. Not because we’re fighting over the guy, but because both of us exchange a secret glance within the first few minutes communicating the exact same thing: This guy is the reason women give up on dating entirely. He’s not even a bad guy—at all. He’s just so boring. Once you reach your thirties, a fifty-minute date can feel like a lifetime, where the biggest thrill is silently inventing what your excuse is going to be to leave.
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.
r /> 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.
When I’m in his office, though, I drop the act. Something about doctors and people in authority has always caused me to break down and cry. He is the gentlest physician I’ve ever met. He tells me I never should have had that laser to begin with. He helps me dramatically reduce not just the ankle scar but my chest scar too with Fraxel and never makes me feel like an idiot or a hysteric. Most importantly, he is the first person to convince me to see a shrink in a long time.
The last shrink I saw, the best thing I got out of the experience was the psych intake form (which revealed, of course, that I am very depressed). It consisted of 175 true-or-false statements that started off mildly crazy, like, “People have never given me enough recognition for the things I’ve done” and then just got crazier: “I watch my family closely so I’ll know who can and who can’t be trusted.”
After the appointment, I proceeded to take all these statements from the psych inventory to mess with guys in sex chat rooms (and to use the resulting material to audition for a show called Shelarious for which Julie Klausner was helping to arrange casting). The results were for sure entertaining:
Robert_hard: what do u look like?
Sexy_lady: I believe I’m being plotted against
Robert_hard: I have 8'' and am stroking it
Sexy_lady: Someone has been trying to control my mind
Robert_hard: do you like anal?
Sexy_lady: I have not seen a car in the last 10 years
Robert_hard: damn girl you makin me horny as a bitch, why you talking that wild shit
As entertaining as that performing experience was, in terms of actual therapy, I am not getting very far—at all.
I spill all of this to Dr. Colbert, and when he suggests I see his good friend and colleague Dr. Marianne Gillow, I tell her that because of my experience with my mom and how medication just kind of knocked her out, I’m definitely not going to take any psych drugs. She does something that I’ll never forget. She tells me that she respects where I’m coming from and doesn’t try to pressure me into anything. This makes me instantly like and trust her and want to maybe give Zoloft a try.
When I do, it’s like another world opens up to me. That crippling anxiety that has plagued me all my life is lessened so much. I’m able to give myself more of a break. And thank God I do, because the men I’m meeting for About Last Night require more self-esteem and resilience than I ever could have mustered otherwise.
The column affords me the perfect way to superficially seek love while never exploring the more difficult questions about what true love for oneself and others really takes.
Before too long, I am writing off Brazilians on my weekly expense report. I have only one goal: Get good material. And I am determined to find all necessary, even if I put myself in danger during the process.
* * *
A HANDSOME, GREGARIOUS man approaches me at the Apple store one day when I’m taking my Mac in to be fixed. He tells me that I am charming and intriguing, and that he must get my number.
“You must see the TV show I host,” he says in his heavy French accent, beckoning me over to a giant HD screen, which he tells me he owns one of at home. “Here, I will show you.”
His name is Hugues-Denver Akassy, and he pulls up his website orbitetv.org on the screen, which features segments of him interviewing everyone from Angelina Jolie to Bill Clinton. He is a French journalist come to New York to bring his TV show to America.
When Hugues and I finally arrange our date, he meets me wearing pink gingham at what he calls his favorite “cozy little wine bar,” Shalel, on Seventieth near Columbus. He asks for a table with the curtains closed so we can have privacy.
I start to talk about work, and he reprimands me, then orders a thirty-five-dollar bottle of chardonnay and a single appetizer because “we are not hungry.” He asks me what I want most in life, but I don’t know, so he brings it back around to love.
“Most men are shit,” he tells me. “They just want to sex in your pants. And I can tell you are a woman of romance, style, complexity, and many passions. Is that true?”
“Sure,” I say, nodding distantly and scribbling notes on my reporter’s pad when he’s not looking. “That sounds good.”
We split the bottle of Hess Napa Valley, and without food in me, I’m rather smashed rather quick.
He literally grabs me and kisses me underneath the chandelier on the burgundy pillows. His tongue is all over my chin, but I’m trying to keep an open mind.
“We go for a walk in the park?” he asks afterward.
As we walk into Central Park past Strawberry Fields, he holds my hand. This is nice, I think. Sweet even. I like hand-holding. Then he begins kissing me by the water, and when he reaches down into my pants, I tell him, “No, no, too fast.”
Then he does something I’ve never had a man do before or since. He pulls out his penis and places it in my hand.
“No, no, no, no,” I say. “I don’t want to. It’s not what I’m looking for. I’m sorry.”
We walk along, and when we are hidden behind a giant rock, he says, “We kiss?”
We kiss a little more, and then he whips his dick out again. I’m pleading for him to stop, and then I finally say, “I feel uncomfortable.”
He seems to understand. I have, perhaps, hit upon the international safe word. But he is angry. He yells at me: “You are a sexy brat provocateur!”
We walk along farther, to a small stone house in the park.
“I want to show you a trick. It is nice. It is nice,” he says.
He unzips his pants and puts my hand on his dick once more. I feel outmatched. I turn around. “Jerk off on my back,” I say. “I just don’t want to touch you.”
He does, I close my eyes, and we walk away. I’m stunned and disgusted.
“Why are you so quiet?” he asks.
“It’s just confusing being a woman,” I begin.
“Let’s not get into all that,” he says, and then launches into the world’s most boring story about his cell phone provider, and as we walk across the gravel, I am counting steps, grateful for the gift of disassociation.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks.
“Busy,” I say.
I leave him, and walk zombie-like across the street to use the bathroom at the Sherry-Netherland to wash the come off my dress. I am so revolted with him and with myself. Why didn’t I just get out of there? Why was I so willing to dispose of my own sense of safety in order to not create a scene or make a man angry at me?
I tell the story to Mackenzie, who cannot believe it, nor the insulting texts he sends me afterward when I say I don’t want to see him ever again. He says I am a bitch, a typical American, etc. Not only that, but he’s put me on his stupid fucking email newsletter, and every day I get some new message saying that I have not confirmed my membership with a donation to help Africa or something.
I finally write him back on a whim one day. I’m sick of his fucking newsletter with the tagline “Whatever You Can Do or Dream You Can, Begin It.” I don’t want to think about this guy ever again.
“Hoping you’ve been able to keep it in your pants!” I email him back.
He responds immediately in hilariously garbled English, “Ms. Stadtmiller: This letter is to inform you that our database indicates record of your email communications and profanity comments. You are also inform that due to your insanity and unprofessional conducts, you have been deleted from our newsletter list.”
I forward it on to Mackenzie, “I’ve finally been unsubscribed—hooray!”
I write about him in one of my earliest columns and call him Mr. Whip-It-Out.
Three years later, I get a text from Mackenzie: “You know how I have this thing for remembering names . . . Wasn’t that crazy whip-it-out guy named Hugues-Denver Akassy? Because he just got arrested for rape.”
My stomach sinks. Holy shit. I contact Steve, tell him about what happened, and he has me write a story that ends up on the front cover of the newspaper: “A Date with the ‘Rapist.’ ” The ejaculation-on-the-back part is withheld—for my sake and for the newspaper’s. “Doesn’t really pass the breakfast test,” Steve explains.
But I am so glad it is deleted—because the next day, I am barraged with the most racist email I have ever received in my life. I’ve been put on some white-supremacist site with the headline “Unattractive Post Reporter Dates N—er Rapist.” The disgusting emails and even letters pour in. I am a ruined, filthy, disgusting woman, my corpse should be spit on, they tell me. I am a race traitor.