My Cheating Art
IT'S MY GIRLFRIEND calling. I can tell it's my girlfriend, because it's the only girl I'm currently fucking whose real name is displayed on my cell phone when she calls.
No other potential fuckdolls have my current number. Instead, I give them my old voicemail number and let them think I don't answer my phone very often. But I check for their calls about once a day and always feel better when they've called.
Cellphones are made for cheating. My camera phone is also good for taking pictures of my cock, which I forward to my email account and then on to other women in the hope that I'll conduct more and more covert affairs without my girlfriend's (or mistresses') knowledge.
I currently have 17 pictures of my cock loaded on my web server. The first one was taken by my girlfriend as I reluctantly posed in her bed. At the time, I felt like I loved her. And yet while she was sleeping, I emailed the picture to a dozen girls. Half of them I'd already fucked; half of them had made clear they'd fuck me if we were ever within striking distance of one another.
And though my girlfriend had a habit of grabbing my cock, closing her eyes and chanting the word "mine," I would have shared that cock with a dozen other women?or a dozen times a dozen.
So long as she doesn't know.
I want her to suspect, but I don't want her to know.
There's too much trouble when they know.
I'VE SPENT THE LAST three hours washing the bed sheets and sweeping the floors and emptying the wastebaskets and running long strips of clear packing tape over the couch and pillow covers, hoping I caught every last strand of Mistress #1's hair. And just when I thought I'd cleared all the evidence, I saw one of her hairs stuck to the toilet while I was pissing. And as I was showering all of last night's sweat, come and girljuice off me, I found one of her hairs tangled around my fingers.
Can't ever be too careful about hair evidence. Could sweep the place a hundred times and there'd still be one renegade strand out there.
After Mistress #1 left a couple hours ago, I hung pictures of my girlfriend back up all over the apartment. I vowed that when she came over, I would not accidentally call her by one of the other girls' names. I turned on my cellphone's ringer and removed all suspicious middle-of-the-night calls from "Steve" and "Phil" from its history log. I cleared my email inboxes and outboxes of all flirtatious correspondence with other ladies, especially the married one who flew cross-country to stay at a hotel a block away just so I could fuck her. I purged my web-browser history of Mistress #1's naked pix and weblog, plus the blogs of the girl in Minnesota who pretends it's me when her boyfriend's fucking her and the gal in the Bronx who PayPal'ed me $25 just to see my cock pictures.
But it's impossible to hide all the evidence. My girlfriend and I were in my bedroom a couple weeks ago, and I'd done an immaculate cover-up job except for the big crumpled ball of come-encrusted paper towels sitting on the dresser.
I know she saw it, but she didn't say anything. Not like the hell she gave me about a month ago for the big scratch on my left shoulder.
"Your other girlfriend give that to you?" she taunted while biting my flesh around the scratch, creating a strawberry patch of hickey-like "turf marks" as a warning to all other females. "Tell the ugly cunt I said to stay away from you."
I told her the truth, which is that my hyper pet dog had scratched me. But jealous girlfriend wasn't buying it, so she bit me some more.
In my long years of cheating, I've found that when a woman suspects you, she's usually right. Yet when she's absolutely certain, she's almost always wrong. I once had a girlfriend who found a pair of panties under our couch cushions, and-whatever God is out there can strike me dead if I'm lying-I had no idea whose they were or how they got there.
I'm telling the truth about the panties, but even you probably don't believe me. And that's my problem. Nobody believes me about anything anymore. And after reading this, there won't be a woman on Earth who'd ever believe me about anything again.
LAST THING I DO before answering my girlfriend's call is hide my notes for this article. When she asks me what I've been doing all day, I can hardly say, "Writing an article about cheating on you."
My diary entry, April 3, 2003 (names have been changed in the interest of self-preservation):
4:39 AM?Still awake from one of the girl-friendliest days of my life. Spent the afternoon in bed with Stephanie. Then Grace and Sheena from the vintage store came up to the apartment for a bit. Then Paula knocked on the door and drove me down to Dante's [a bar]. Then Trina came into Dante's roaring-drunk and forcibly tongue-kissed me more than once? Then Paula pulled me next door and, for the first time in my life, I was forcibly kissed by two girls in the same day? Then Linda called. Then Lori called. Then the second Linda came into Dante's and gave me her number. That's some level of "action" with eight girls in one day. I'm sick. I need to work more.
Had the above paragraph been written by a high-schooler, it may have borne a goofy charm. But the fact that I scribbled it when I was comfortably into my forties bespeaks a rare level of chumpy immaturity.
More than a year after writing that passage, I still find my fingers stuck in too many pies. I'm not proud that I'm a triflin' man and a serial philanderer. A sociopathic pig-dick. An infantile, trashy rapscallion. It makes me feel all ghetto-and not in the cool, MTV kind of way. I know it's juvenile. I know it's contemptible. But I don't know whether it can be cured.
I mean, I promised myself I'd be a good boy at least while writing this article, and I couldn't even do that. I nailed Mistress #1 last night and Mistress #2 the night before. And as I'm typing this, if some naked chick were to fall out of the sky and land on my cock, odds are that I wouldn't pull her off it.
A freelance writer's life provides ample time and little money. I don't have many belongings, so I measure my riches in women. I collect them like dolls; the more dolls in my collection, the better I feel about myself. The Byzantine Dating Maze I've constructed for myself, my seeming inability to stick with one woman and keep my dick in its holster the rest of the time, has reached a point of absurdity that finally drove me into therapy. For one hour a week, I blab to a woman about my troubles with women, my all-scorching brush-fire drive to have as much sex as possible while avoiding loneliness on one hand and commitment on the other.
Let's just say I have a bad history with women.
Imagine the worst, because it's far worse than that. I'm a serial faller-in-lover. I fall in love easily, fall out of it even easier and fall in love with someone new while the old relationship is still flailing and half-alive. And in the end, they all hate me. I start off collecting their love letters and wind up documenting their death threats.
There are several reasons why I cheat.
Sex. Boredom. Spite. Ego.
If my girlfriend begins withholding sex, I feel a near-moral obligation to cheat on her. Even if she doesn't and her pussy's starting to taste a little stale, I'll snag some action on the side. If she's being bitchy, I'll subvert her little power play by fucking someone else. If she's trying to make me jealous, I'll fuck her mom. Or if some other girl is making moves on me, nine times out of 10 I'll take her out for a test drive.
The vagina is a wonderful thing. Some are better than others, but most are fairly spectacular. But none is so good that it made me forget there are more than three billion other vaginas out there. Women wield considerable power over men due to the fact that we crave their pussies. But the surest way to short-circuit this power is to remind women that their li'l fishy isn't the only one in the ocean.
I'm a strong man. I can usually last a few hours without female company. After that point, I become achingly, gnawingly, desperately lonely. It always feels worst when I look outside, see the sun going down and realize no one will be sleeping next to me tonight. My crushing fear of romantic isolation sends me out into the darkness, seeking to pair up, to find a body, any warm body with a slit, to drag home next to me. Soon enough, sooner than I'd prefer, I'll enter a postmenopausal void of pain and decay. Loneliness is the true death, and I flee it like a shrieking woman.
But as much as I fear being alone, I also dread being smothered. I use women to stave off loneliness, but I never let them get too close. I walk a tightrope strung between isolation and suffocation. I'll keep one girl at arm's length until I find another one within arm's reach.
I believe in love. I know I've felt it. And I've found a way to destroy it every time. Love-when it's good-is the best thing in the world, the only thing that feels better than sex.
But love is unstable like plutonium, and I won't allow myself to get hurt. So I wrap myself in armor and seek love. I'm a steel-claw-equipped lunar land probe, scuttling over cold rocks looking for someone to cuddle. I'll risk STDs and legal charges, but I won't risk a broken heart. Better to be a bastard than a sucker.
I have found, against my better wishes, that the nicer you are to women, the less they desire you. Their pussies are more likely to lubricate if you forget their names than if you send them flowers. If you were to become the sensitive guy they say they want, they wouldn't want you anymore. So I never spend money on them. I never make the first move. I never make them feel remotely secure that I'll be around tomorrow. And precisely because-not in spite-of all this, I've never been dumped.
"He's a great fuck, but emotionally unavailable," one of my exes told another girl. "He's absolutely worthless as a human being, but the best fuck of my life," said another.
Why can't I simply be honest with them? Most of them wouldn't fuck me if I were honest. So I maintain the charade. I don't trust myself to be trustworthy. And I don't trust any of them, either. I don't believe that absolute trust is possible. During nasty breakups when all the mean things are said, you realize that most of your suspicions were right. There's always something-even if it's only a mildly negative opinion-that you're going to hide from them, and something they're hiding from you. You really can't share everything. If you tell the whole truth, the whole world will fall apart.
DAD NEVER CHEATED ON MOM. They stayed miserably together for nearly four decades until cancer gobbled him up like a Pac- Man food dot. I observed firsthand their faithfulness. And their unhappiness.
I never cheated on girlfriends as a teen, possibly because none of those blessed unions lasted for more than a few weeks. And I can proudly announce that as an adult, I never cheated on my first long-term girlfriend. And, uh?that's about it. Cheated on all the rest.
I don't think it ever occurred to me to cheat on the first one. We had shacked up as college students for a year. When it inevitably crumbled, we time-shared our apartment, each living there a week at a time. When she found a Cyndi Lauper cassette I'd borrowed from my new girlfriend, she smashed it to pieces with a hammer. I noted the tremendous power one could hold over a woman by introducing another woman into the picture.
Less than a year later, as Cyndi Lauper girl grew colder and more demanding, I wound up cheating repeatedly on her with a big-booty black girl. I felt a savage electric thrill the first time I did it, stealing away with her and another couple for a weekend in New York City, feeling her lips against mine as the spring air rolled over us in the backseat in some Staten Island badlands, getting off on the fact that it would hurt my bitchy girlfriend. And when I finally broke up with the bitch I made sure to tell her all about Big Booty, and I relished the pain in her eyes and how she implored me to never do that to another woman again.
Big Booty naturally became my girlfriend, until I met the first girl I ever felt I truly loved. I broke the news to Big Booty over the phone. I felt bad about it, but not bad enough.
About a year into my relationship with First True Love, I got a drunken late-night call from my former college girlfriend. She told me that while we'd been together, she'd fucked my best friend when I was visiting my brother in Florida.
I felt bludgeoned and naked and furious. I'd been patronized-they'd done something behind my back and kept the secret because I presumably couldn't handle it. I'd been betrayed and infantilized and erased.
And it was that night I decided to marry One True Love, certain she'd never do anything like that to me. She didn't. Over nearly a dozen years, she didn't.
Of course, I did it to her. But I stayed faithful for 10 years. And then, after all of the lust and tenderness had been squeezed dry, I went on the prowl. When I finally told my wife about a dalliance that had blossomed into more than a one-night stand, she demanded a divorce.
"I never even thought about cheating on you," she said, looking straight in my eyes. "I would rather have been split in half with an axe."
Speaking of axes, when I got divorced and cheated on my new mistress-cum-girlfriend, she used a wooden axe handle to smack the skull of the girl I'd cheated on her with, requiring a hospital visit. I was conjuring the forces of chaos by cheating on my goddamned mistress, the first eruption of the multilayered infidelity that has pockmarked my later years.
I MET MY CURRENT GIRLFRIEND and the two mistresses in the same bar. All three of them had boyfriends when they met me. And all three of them made the first move, leaving their boyfriends when I took the bait. At different times, I've called each of them my girlfriend. And I've cheated on all of them with all of them.
Mistress #2 had been my girlfriend for a year and a half. Within 12 hours of our breakup, I'd already had two separate girls in my bed. A few weeks after we broke up-and after I'd neglected to change the locks on my apartment-she busted in on me and Mistress #1 only seconds after we'd finished rutting. She lunged at Mistress #1, who narrowly escaped down the hall in her panties.
Screaming, #2 kicked my shins, smashed a coffee pot against the wall, threw all of #1's belongings out the window, then summoned the strength to carry my mattress out of the apartment and into a nearby parking lot.
I felt so bad seeing the pain in her eyes, I dumped #1 and made #2 my girlfriend again.
Months later, when #1 saw me walking downtown hand-in-hand with #2, she cried so much I dumped #2 and made #1 my girlfriend again.
And then for a while, I was calling both of them my girlfriend.
Then I met the current girlfriend and dumped both of the others. She and I were evenly matched in terms of narcissism and our indefatigable will to make our partner jealous. She never let me forget about all the B-level rock stars who wanted to fuck her, and I made sure she knew about all the mentally unstable literary groupies who'd been batting their eyelashes at me. Possible infidelity became the obsessive focus of our relationship, and many was the night we spent together not because we enjoyed one another's company so much, but merely to prevent the other from cheating.
For more than six months, I was faithful. But at one point during an argument-we'd gone a month without having sex-I told her I was headed back home to fuck the best piece of pussy I'd ever had. Mistress #1.
She didn't handle that news very well. She threatened to call the cops and lie that I'd raped her.
She apologized days later, after I'd already shagged #1?and #2?dozens of times. And I took her back.
For most of the past summer and into the fall I juggled all three of them.
Then two weeks ago-after I'd started writing this article-we quarreled into the night and finally spat it out: We'd been cheating on each other for months with exes.
Within an hour, Mistress #1 was back in my bed. And now she's no longer Mistress #1. She's my girlfriend again.
The old girlfriend-the one who a few paragraphs ago was the "current girlfriend"-sent me relentlessly nasty text messages about my new ugly, pudgy, loser, prostitute, stripper, satanic girlfriend until I finally changed my phone number. And although I hadn't contacted her, she then emailed a threat to take out a restraining order against me.
I'M HAPPY WITH THE NEW GIRL. But right now she's across town working, and I feel a little restless.
And I'm here all alone.
And here's my cellphone and the internet, begging to be used.