The great love of my life marries today, the woman who bobbed her head up and down on my large and throbbing cock anytime I commanded her (both in reality and in my fantasies), and I am not the groom. I, Andrew Cohen, have at long last seen my egotism, my narcissism, and my rampaging douchery, vaster than the greatest expanse of human possibilities, crushed in a single go. Please mourn for me, for I may not fully recover. The sweetness of my life has demonstrated a capacity to make decisions, something I thought exterminated from the female species. I had thought the uppity bitch best confined to popping out babies from her uterus (my children, not hers!), cooking multicourse meals in the kitchen, massaging my feet when I was tired, and cleaning up my castabout black socks in the bedroom. I had thought that such variables were the basis of a lifelong relationship. But I, Andrew Cohen, finally now understand that my casual misogyny, even sweet casual misogyny, is not enough. Sometimes, as the romance novelists know, living in the wrong century is everything.
But today is not a day for remorse. It is not a day for lost causes. For I might still find some throwback minx to cater to my every whim. Today is a day for celebration! While my great love is getting hitched, this is merely one minor tilt in the Andrew Cohen Masterplan. The woman I once promised to keep oppressed is oppressed. For she has once again encountered the institution of marriage! She tells me she is marrying a wonderful man, a man more wonderful than me. A man who has actually read Gloria Steinem and bell hooks. A man who recognizes the equality of gender. I do not understand such strange concepts. For I only exist within my own universe, which is filled with nothing more than little versions of me jumping up and down screaming my name. It’s a bit like a Beatles concert, except the four bandmates are Andrew Cohen (vocals, guitar), Andrew Cohen (vocals, bass), Andrew Cohen (the quiet one, guitar), and Andrew Cohen (the drummer). Every one who has paid a ticket to this show is named Andrew Cohen. All that’s left for me to do is consider a potential universe (is there one?) in which there is someone not named Andrew Cohen. I presume that my love, my true love, the woman who has filed a restraining order against me, the woman who told me that sixteen voicemails a day was too much and twenty text messages every hour was a tad excessive, is happy. I must wish her well and find another old hag — perhaps one who dares to question my specialness — to suck my cock without question.
The present I humbly send my sweetheart today is this column: this public note, which comes with a photocopy of my penis, which came courtesy of the AOL photocopy machine, along with a series of measurements from professional surveyors (upheld by several affidavits) indicating that my penis, much like my ego, extends well beyond nine inches. No one ought to have dealt with a cock that was bigger than nine inches for so long. But my love, my glorious ex-wife, certainly did. I demonstrated my great affection by performing one-man bukkake upon her fresh lily white face whenever I wanted to. And I hope that my affections, rendered here by the magic of the keyboard, will elicit the same response.
I want to thank her, mostly, from knocking upon the doors of my neighborhood and informing the kind men and women — but mostly the men — that I was not, in fact, a creepy sex offender. When we met, back in the spring of 2005, I was nearly 40 and my days revolved around masturbating to photographs of myself. I had lost faith in relationships. Other people had grown noxious and smelly. I had given up on love. She arrived, with a sympathetic heart, and showed me what was possible. Eleven years younger than me, I figured that she would be young enough to fall for my commanding tone. Young enough to forget that Naomi Wolf had ever happened. Young enough to be fooled into thinking that Katie Roiphe and Caitlin Flanagan represented the way women felt and thought.
It wasn’t too long after we met that I began imagining what our wedding day would be like. She would have her feet bound together like some maltreated Chinese courtesan. I nonetheless pictured her not taking it too seriously, for surely she would see the situation as I did — through the singular prism of my almighty hubris. I pictured me slipping her a mickey if she got, pardon the pun, cold feet. There, at the altar, she would capitulate to my male empowerment and say “Yes” even within the dewy-eyed emptiness of unconsciousness. My sweetest love would be my own personal Girl Gone Wild.
Well, dear reader, I was wrong. She has married some other man. So at last my wedding toast today is backhanded yet sincere: I wish the deepest and most profound love of my life. I will confess that there is little else to my life than creepy Politics Daily columns and casual misogyny. But it is my happiness to give. Even if, as some of our friends have opined, she is much happier than I am. Even if I have not quite understood why she didn’t invite me to her wedding.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Absolutely brilliant!
This is one of the funniest things I’ve read online in a long time.