Nate Mancuso

Life Happens

Six hours after I delivered the valedictorian speech at my high school graduation ceremony in the Trinity School gymnasium, I fucked a transvestite prostitute in an alley off the corner of 44th & 10th. I didn’t know “Stevie” was a dude. For one, he had the same name as the unquestionably female lead singer of Fleetwood Mac (who had an ubermasculine boyfriend named Lindsey). I was also kinda buzzed after knocking back a bottle of Old Grand-Dad washed down by a sixer of PBR tallboys. But the warning signs were there. Stevie had an unusually deep voice … a disproportionately large adam’s apple … knew the name and alma mater of each of the Jets draft picks … and my best friend Simon’s mom told me that my dick tasted like ass after she blew me the next day at his graduation brunch in East Hampton. 

But gender and sexuality issues aside, I knew that Stevie wasn’t my type, and it would be a short-lived romance, when he wouldn’t shut the fuck up about urban renewal and gentrification driving up rents and pushing the working class out of Hell’s Kitchen while I was shredding him behind the dumpster. People shouldn’t have to listen to that annoying first-world petit bourgeois bullshit on a first date, especially on the night of their high school graduation. New Yorkers are so selfish, especially the poor ones.

I learned the truth about Stevie a few years later during my junior year at Georgetown when he showed up at my feminist theology class – disguised in a priest’s cassock and using the pseudonym “Father O’Finnegan” – claiming to be the professor. At least now I know where he mastered his M. Butterfly dick-tuck/butt-lube technique … and why he wouldn’t blow me.

During my gap year between undergrad and NYU Stern, I had a serious live-in girlfriend named Margaret who preferred to be called by her nickname, Peggy – which coincidentally was the same name as my eighth grade art teacher, who looked much better in thigh-high pleather boots and red lace panties (and sucked a better dick) than my Peggy.

Peggy ate with her mouth open and had atrocious table manners. It wasn’t until I took her to the free clinic for a pregnancy test that I found out she was a Peruvian Llama. I guess that’s why the test came back negative. 

But it wasn’t meant to be with us. Maybe because I could never figure out why “Peggy” was a nickname for “Margaret” – I guess it’s just one of those things in life that you’re supposed to accept and pretend to understand, like cryptocurrency or the electoral college or abstract art or the weekly New Yorker  fiction piece. It ended for good when Peggy got bounced from first class on our flight home to New York. Buh-bye, Peggy.

With my first Goldman Sachs paycheck, I bought a silicone sex doll customized into a combination of Posh Spice and Joan of Arc. Some nights I spoke French to her, some nights I spoke Cockney-accented English. Some nights I called her Joan Spice and we ate roasted lamb shanks and drank red wine and snuck into the basement laundry room and made love on the floor, watching ourselves reverently in the washing machine window reflection. Some nights I called her Posh D’Arc and beat the living bejesus fuck out of her. She didn’t complain as much as Stevie and Peggy, even when I snored and pissed the bed. She left me when I got passed over for a promotion.

My first night in prison after my securities fraud conviction, I shit myself to discourage the other cons from raping me. I had heard or read somewhere that’s what Ivan Boesky did, and he was a much better securities fraudster than I was. One of the guards laughed and told me that prisoners don’t rape each other in minimum security federal prison. When I asked him for a pair of clean pants and underwear, he winked and brought me a used, threadbare Smurfette costume. I had to give it back when I got paroled.

A few weeks ago, I met a nice girl named Carol at the coffee urn in the church basement at my Tuesday night meeting (I can’t remember for which group). She’s old as fuck like me – at least 43.  On our first date, she asked why someone with my education and experience was working as a dock hand. I said it was always my dream but life got in the way.

“Life happens,” she agreed.

I think Carol’s a keeper so long as she stops asking stupid questions.