THE MEN'S PLANET I:

Me, Jane and the Men's Planet

Jane listened to all my complaints while I was going out with Martin, a former rock drummer turned video store employee. His wife had left him, ironically, for a successful rock drummer, so he lived in Brooklyn with his half St. Bernard/ half Gordon Setter dog and his pottery collection. The pottery was insured for theft but not for breakage. The dog had an enormous fringed tail, like the trim on a Davy Crockett jacket, and the vases and bowls were displayed on the coffee table, but the dog never knocked any of it down, bless her little canine heart. "Pottery," Martin told me, "is a very high aesthetic." In her "good-bye and drop dead" letter, his wife wrote, "It was practically kinky the way you would sit for hours, gazing at your goddamned dishware." I asked him about their sex life. "She didn't want to do it in front of the dog," Martin told me. For the first three months, we really got it on and the dog didn't seem to have an opinion either way. Periodically, his mother, a tiny but domineering modern dance teacher with a high, squeaky voice, would telephone and ask, "How come you never call us?" "I don't know what it is you want from me!" Martin would scream back. Eventually, I became suspicious of Martin's sexuality. We couldn't just fuck, we couldn't make love, sex couldn't be an expression of, say, tenderness, he had to always be looking at me from behind with my legs spread really wide and my tits hanging down. He often verbally compared the vista to scenes in the porn videos he took home daily from the store he worked in. As he lost the few inhibitions he had, he grew progressively more fixated with sticking his tongue up my ass. Finally, I told him, "You've been living alone with a dog for too long.

"Meanwhile, Jane had auditioned for a commercial and on the set met an amnesiac named Gerard who had been in a bicycle accident in France. He had also been kidnapped as a child. He sent her a greeting card addressed to "my little snowflower of tragedy." She had to tell him what restaurant he had made reservations at five times. Next there was Jeremy, the self-hating Jew who insisted his last name was pronounced "Sha-pie-ro." A former San Franciscan and doubtless member of a "men's group," he boasted to Jane that he had a chance to go to L.A. for a week to make a couple of thousand dollars as an art consultant or something, but had decided to stay in New York and care for his friend's cat instead. Jane is a black belt in karate, and talk of cuddling up with little kittycats is not the way to her heart. Along came a dreadlocked jazz musician with an enormous tongue that he maneuvered halfway down her throat, but he never called back. "Be wary of the black jazz musician syndrome," l advised. Then I gave her a nugget of wisdom gleaned over two decades of fucking. "Don't sleep with them on the first date. Men like to go out with a woman, and then go home and jerk off, fantasizing about doing it with her. If you deprive them of this opportunity to pull their puds they get resentful."

Jane was becoming seriously depressed when her aunt invited her to attend a ritzy wedding in Scotland, held by business associates of her late husband. Tom, the brother of the bride, a handsome and witty accountant, told her "the angels stopped in the heavens when they made you" and Jane was charmed. The next day, he sent orchids over to her hotel. They spent the night together, using fresh figs and papayas from a giant gift basket of fruit as accessories. Jane returned to New York with pheromones spritzing all over the air and announced, "I'm getting married and moving to Glasgow." Bonnie said, "Can I start an artist's colony there?" Maryann asked, "Is he politically correct?" I decided to reserve judgment and watch how things developed when Tom came over to stay with her for a couple of weeks. Jane, Bonnie, Maryann and I all worried about how an accountant from Glasgow would adapt to Avenue C, but he acclimated just fine. Jane reported that he was self-reliant while she was rehearsing her performance art and entertaining when she wasn't. Suddenly, she called me in distress. During a dinner party with four of her friends, Tom had lapsed into a catatonic state, complete with closed eyes and junkie-like nods. Could he be a borderline schizophrenic? "Honey," I told her, "Remember that he is from the Men's Planet so you have to expect a little weirdness sometimes. At least he isn't sticking his tongue up your ass. Let that be our litmus test." This mollified her, and she and her Scottish beau explored all of Manhattan's finest sex shops, since Tom was possessed of a fervent desire to buy her a super premium, state-of-the-art vibrator. Partly he wanted to watch her get off with it, and partly he hoped it would enhance whatever erotic phonecalls they had when he went back to Glasgow. She could just plug it in and buzz away. Inspired, she started sending him erotic faxes, suggesting many creative uses for kilts. Fortunately he was the boss and could send his employees out of the office. He sent her poems by Byron which he had copied in longhand and I said, "Byron! Jane Darling! This is major-league. This is Mr. Right! No jaded New York guy would ever dare to send poetryno less Byron!" A week later, Jane turned thirty-five-her sexual prime-and quite naturally developed an urge to get tied up and spanked. I recalled with fondness my first inclinations in that direction as well as memorable scenarios. But when she faxed Tom images of punishment rooms in Victorian boarding schools, he was appalled. He whined that he "didn't understand" the impulse. Good-bye, Tom. Jane started seeing a neighborhood playwright, an ex-alkie and ex junkie with a face that was rusted as an old beer can, who worked, as so many ex-alkies do, as a bartender. He lived in a furnished room and had a large tattoo of abulldog with a rose in its mouth on his left forearm. They were fucking and spanking zestily until she invited Tattooman over for pasta and he told her he couldn't make that kind of commitment. "Tell her that there are a lot of guys out there who would tie her up and eat pasta too," said our Mature Friend, a literary agent who followed each action-packed moment closely. "At my age, it isn't often that I get a chance to listen to pretty girls talking about their sexual problems," he admitted. But by this time Jane was truly distraught. She asked, "Har, is something wrong with me?" "Absolutely not! " I adamantly repliedI regaled her with tales of just a couple of past amours. There was Saga, the Yugoslavian journalist whose lineage could be traced to Tito, who spoke constantly about how his retired father would go out fishing in a boat, and his retired mother would come outside and ring a giant bell for him to row back when she wanted to ask him a question. He had been married and had two sons, but he told them that he was going around the world fighting for peace and justice and split. Meanwhile he was going around the world fighting for drugs and pussy. Then there was Charlie, the communications professor who had the audacity to criticize my writing. He was half Italian and tried to uphold his macho image by hanging out in pool halls. He usually got involved with neurotic tight-assed Wasps who had hysterical fits and rejected him, but he would deign to see me occasionally for "non-committal sex". "No, Jane," I told her, "We are legendary-type babes whose every conversation is worthy of a Henry Jaglom filmscript and they, darling, they are from the Men's Planet."