Electroboy by Andy Behrman Read Free Book Online Page A

apartment because the paint fumes are so bad. My friend Lindley Boegehold, whom I met during a summer job at Macmillan Publishing a few years earlier, and who is a few years older and wiser, takes me out to Teachers Too, a neighborhood restaurant, for my Upper West Side indoctrination. I have the Thai chicken with peanut sauce. We talk about my plans for my film, which I imagine as a comedy set in the suburbs. I tell her I think I’ll ride the trend in filmmaking and raise the money independently and make a teenage movie. She is encouraging and believes that I can pull it off. After dinner I walk Lindley home and go back to my apartment. When I walk in and turn on the lights, it feels like a hotel. And it still reeks of paint fumes. There is no blinking red light on my new answering machine. Not a good sign for such a popular guy like me. It feels like the world is crashing down on me because I have no messages. Fuck it. It’s only 10:30 P.M. , so I decide to take a walk down Broadway and see what’s going on. It’s a Sunday, so it’s pretty quiet onthe street. I stop in at Shakespeare’s and look at some photography books. I don’t know anyone in this store. I feel like I’m in a foreign country. I leave and walk farther down Broadway. It’s extremely humid. At 79th Street, a light breeze provides me with some relief, coming up from the Hudson River.
    I take the subway four stops and surface at Times Square. It’s like a fucking desert. Just with a few thousand more people, and without cactus and sand. The digital thermometer flashes 94 in bright red, but it feels like someone has turned the heat up to 118 degrees. The streets are swarming with pastel-clad tourists from Warrendale, Pennsylvania, and Mansfield, Ohio, wearing baseball caps, eating hot dogs, drinking canned Nestea Iced Tea, and smiling up at all of the neon. Everyone is soaking wet. Flashbulbs bounce off the sweaty, pale faces of fat couples and their chubby progeny, pretzels shoved in their mouths like pacifiers. I could be at a county fair in Kentucky. The number of people on the sidewalks overwhelms me; I feel terribly turned-on and lonely. No messages on the machine, not even a call from Allison. And where were my parents tonight?
    In Times Square, beneath the veneer of neon lights, billboards, and theater marquees, is an entire supermarket of sex—porno theaters, live-sex shows, massage parlors, adult video and magazine stores, any kind of sex that money can buy. I’ve spent my share of time here, and it always feels like I’m on another planet. Planet Fuck. My model apartment is light-years away. I check out the row of porno shops on 42nd Street. I thumb through some magazines—old issues of
Penthouse
and
Oui
, shrink-wrapped packages with three or four hard-core fuck magazines in them for $7.99. Frustrating when they’re wrapped up. You never know what you’re going to get. It’s usually raunchy and kinky stuff. Women putting their triple-D tits in their mouths. Scrawny men spanking fat women wearing leather. Not a turn-on to me, but apparently to someone jerking off out there. The soft-core magazines are more my speed. Guys fucking gorgeous models from behind. All kinds of videos. Straight. Gay. Bi. Gang bang. Oriental. Amateur. Maybe I should raise money to makeadult films, forget the avant-garde. I browse glass showcases of dildos, vibrators, vacuum pumps, blow-up dolls, lotions and creams. Maybe what I need tonight is a blow-up doll. I could bring her to my aunt and uncle’s house in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. I shuffle around the video section and am overcome by the logical thought that everyone in this store is horny like everyone in a restaurant is hungry. I walk out with my discreet brown paper bag, which screams “porn,” and go into Howard Johnson’s at 46th and Broadway. I sit at a booth and order a clam roll and a chocolate shake. I spot two guys in their early twenties, definitely male strippers, sitting down in the