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.
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
