LITMIR.BIZ

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there’s a picture out there somewhere in which there is not only far too much leg, there’s a dyed-pink lapdog and a maraschino cherry.

      Despite all these dates, I still hadn’t gone out with anyone from my program at NYU. And I was glad. Dating in the Dramatic Writing Program was incestuous, on a Greek tragedy level. One mistake made at a party could find you putting out your eyes during your next playwriting workshop. Anything you did was destined to trail humiliatingly behind you, like toilet paper attached to your shoe, for the next four years. Even if you didn’t remember it, everyone else was writing it down. It’d appear in the classroom the next week, translated into a scene in someone else’s play. You’d end up sitting around the workshop table, impotently explaining why it was not good dramatic logic to include the scene in which the character based on you made out with the character based on the most flamingly gay boy in the program. Why were you making out? You were a girl. Yes, okay, he was a boy, but a boy who, if not for the joint influence of controlled substances and pure desperation, would’ve had no interest in girls. Not that you could even comment directly. All the people in my program were repression made flesh. We sublimated all our vitriol into pages, becoming not just backbiters, but backwriters. I’d dated a bunch of other NYU students, both during the months of my yes policy, and prior, but thus far I’d evaded any of the messes in my daily classes.

      However, if someone from my program asked me out now, I couldn’t say no. When I’d put my yes policy into effect, I’d neglected to think about that. Post-Handyman, I’d felt somewhat virtuous. A foray into the nonintellectually bound male. Hadn’t turned out terribly well, but that wasn’t really his fault. I felt comfortable taking the blame for that particular failure, whereas, if I was going to date a classmate, I felt that he should take equal responsibility for any tragedy. He, after all, would have the same frames of reference I did. A Doll’s House and The Three Sisters, The Misanthrope and Long Day’s Journey into Night. A shared vocabulary of this kind of material seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster.

      There were several categories of male to be met in the Dramatic Writing Program, and, with the exception of the last two, I was critical of them all:

      The Rainbow Bullets. As in, gay like Liberace. One of these was writing a response to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, entitled The Penis Monologues. He claimed that the penis had been marginalized, too.

      The Gayts. Gay-straight men. Obviously gay, but in denial. Usually, these guys would spend their time at NYU writing five or six scripts featuring characters that everyone knew were gay, except the playwright, who’d finish things up with a hetero wedding.

      The Strays. Straight-gay men. Dated girls, but used hair products that made girls suspicious of them. Always prettier than any woman in the department.

      The Comedians. Interested only in fart jokes. No one ever got a good look at them, because they never removed their scraggly baseball caps. Traveled in packs. Deadly serious.

      The Tragedians. Usually strikingly handsome, and in possession of appealingly troubled souls, and extensive knowledge of French new wave cinema. Interested only in making experimental, Warhol-esque films consisting of five hours of footage of the Empire State Building. At night.

      The Cult of Personality. Generally, slam poets. They paired wildly mismatched 1970s shirts with nylon workout pants and Converse high-tops, and vacillated between above-it-all silence and rabid ironic monologue. Asexual.

      The Do-Overs. The thirty-something guys who were happily beginning their youth again, this time as the only “real men” in a program full of hot eighteen-year-olds.

      The Gurus. The thirty-something guys who didn’t notice the eighteen-year-olds, and therefore were fervently desired by all of them. Usually yoga teachers on the side.

      The Professors. Though there were rules against dating one’s students, they were not well enforced. A side effect of writerly repression was that several people in the program were obsessed with scripting sadomasochistic onstage sex. The rest of the unlucky workshop participants would have to pretend to be actors, and read the scenes aloud. “Ohh, ahh, yesssssss. Pleeease, plunge my head into a bucket of pee.” Nothing could have been more unappealing. Except for the semifamous professor in charge, lech-erously informing my friend Elise that she looked as though she’d been really turned on during her reading of a rape scene.

      Zak. Lovable, but not dateable, given the roommate situation. Zak had his own in-program dating woes. He’d had a brief interlude with the blonde Russian babe that all the straight boys in the program followed around. Something undisclosed had gone wrong. Now he was forced to hide every time he saw her.

      Griffin. Lovable, but not dateable, given that, other than Zak, he was my only male friend in the department. He, Zak, and I formed a triumvirate of late-night intellectual obnoxiousness. When Griffin was in our kitchen, Zak and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be, because he’d charmed Vic and could do no wrong. Griffin was a small Greek guy from Indiana, and in possession of a talent for making anyone, in any room he walked into, fall instantly in love with him. All of his female friends had tried to sleep with him at some point, and I was no exception. In my case, I’d hung out with him one night until 4:00 a.m., eating his trademark bad pasta and drinking wine. When it was too late for me to go home, he’d given me his bed.

      “You can stay in here with me, you know,” I’d said.

      Griffin had taken a couple steps toward the bed, then a couple back.

      “I can’t. I’m from Indiana,” he’d finally said, and flew from the room, his pillow clutched to his chest. It wasn’t that he was confused about his sexuality. It was that he was one of the last men on the planet who believed in sleeping only with people you loved. He’d later revealed that he’d spent the remainder of the night conflicted. We were close friends. It was possible that we might really get along. Should he go back in? Should he not? What was really being offered?

      “Yes,” I’d told him. “It was what you thought.”

      “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he’d replied, but the moment had passed, and we’d never been inclined to get naked again. Soon after, I’d hooked Griffin up with Elise, who’d conquered his resistance through a combination of sexy ankles, fishnet stockings, and braless stirring of pumpkin risotto. Now, she was taking him shopping for small, soft sweaters in the women’s department, and introducing him to the joys of high-thread-count sheets. He was slightly ashamed of how much he loved this, and worried that he’d be recategorized into a Stray. He wasn’t. He was his own thing. There was no one on earth like Griffin, and that was half of why I adored him.

      THE ABOVE CATEGORIES, combined with my work overload, caused me to keep my head down whenever I had to make an appearance on the seventh floor of 721 Broadway. The boys of the DWP weren’t even on my radar. Therefore, the first time I met the Boxer, I was dismissive. He was part of the Do-Over category, and in the grad program. Not bad looking. None too tall, but making up for it with great arm and chest muscles, due to the fact that he worked out at a boxing gym. Blondish, close-cropped hair. Sexily broken pugilist’s nose. It did not occur to me to be interested in him. The thing that made me reconsider the Boxer was his voice. I heard this great, raspy boom echoing across a crowded classroom, and I looked around in spite of myself.

      The class was taught by a famous avant-garde playwright. He’d assigned us the first page of Kafka’s The Castle, not a play, mind you, an unfinished novel about a poor guy trying in vain to get into a very low-rent heaven. We were supposed to do we knew not what with it. The playwright sat in the back of the house, grimacing his trademark sexy grimace. We were not experimental enough for him. His plays involved dreamlike realities and absurdist dialogue seeded with spectacular one-liners. He was a superstar for a select audience. I pretended I’d read the play the teacher was known for, but I lied. I was only interested in Sam Shepard, and I had too many day jobs to spend any time on my homework. I was getting by solely on my smile, which I spread indiscriminately around the department, hoping it would

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