The Great Cock Hunt. Alex

and name tags: I hate name tags. Well, actually I have a love/hate relationship with name tags. I hate them because I feel like a nerd at an electronics trade show when I have to wear one, but I love them because I’m not always so great at remembering people’s names. Sometimes I can be a walking oxymoron. Anyway, we registered and were looking around, waxing nostalgic and all that, when Lizzie practically punched me in the ribs.

      “What?” I said and I looked at her. She was staring straight ahead with a look of horror and titillation on her face. She was staring at the profiles of two men we all knew: John Doyle and the college tennis coach. I’d fantasized like mad about one and slept with the other. Shit, I thought, between seeing them and running into Liza in the hotel lobby, all the drama was starting too quickly. I wasn’t prepared.

      Back before I met Lizzie I was on the tennis team. And let me tell you, Coach Donnelly was a stud-fucking-muffin. He had an ass that wouldn’t quit in his tight, white tennis shorts and he always wore a shrunk-too-tight college T-shirt or polo shirt on top. He had an incredibly well developed chest and thick biceps and amazing legs. He would stand to serve and you could see the muscles of his body working to get the ball over the net and all I wanted was to get his balls in my mouth. But Donnelly was straight.

      Oh, and John Doyle was on the tennis team too. Still quite handsome, tall and lithe, lean with those great green eyes, the dirty blond hair, and that pert ass, a ton of memories were flooding back. He was the stud of the locker room after practice and he looked like he could still play that role today. But he was straight too.

      I looked back at Lizzie. She had her own issues with these guys, and we both turned a one-eighty and walked the other way, content to deal with seeing them later. Tommy just followed, lost in his own memories.

      11

      The Zoe Story

      I first heard the complete Zoe story from Lizzie. I mean, I had been involved as it had been unfolding; it took more than a year for the whole thing to play out. So I got some of the details—not realizing they were important details at the time—over the year. But it wasn’t until the shocking conclusion, and its aftermath, that Lizzie formulated a way to tell the story in its entirety, relatively succinctly, to those who didn’t have the balls to ask Zoe herself. The funny thing is, that if Zoe is anything—other than materialistic, shallow, and overweight—she’s a self-promoter and anyone could have asked her for the story themselves and she’d have gladly told them, ad nauseam.

      In all honesty, I didn’t write this part of the book (I did edit it a little). Lizzie and I talked about it and she asked me to let her try writing the story since I’d decided to include it and since it was “hers” to tell. Even though we both knew it was really Zoe’s to tell, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask her. Zoe doesn’t know anything about the blog, or the book for that matter, and hopefully it will stay that way. So if you happen to know the real-life Zoe, and this story sounds familiar to you, don’t tell her you read about it here! So without further ado, here’s how Lizzie tells it.

      Zoe and Todd dated in college for a while, a few years actually. She was in love with him, allegedly. At least she proclaimed it to everyone but him and assured all who would listen that he was in love with her too. The problem was that although he must have liked her on some level, everyone knew he was gay. She was totally blind to it. Like looking at a field of healthy grass and insisting that it was purple, she would ignore any of the glaring signs. Sadly, she used to have to get him wired or wasted or something just so he’d screw her. She thought she was pregnant once, but no one really believed her. She claimed he broke her heart when it finally ended. Then, when she found out he was gay, and that not one other person in the world was shocked, she went into a kind of depression. She didn’t get over it until after she graduated. It was tragic.

      Shortly after graduation Zoe met Danny. Or should I say, re-met him. Relatively instantly Danny became the new love of her life. Danny’s younger than us—than Zoe—so he was still in college when they met again. They ran into each other at the U.S. Open for the first time in years. They had gone to summer camp together a lifetime ago and they remembered each other while waiting in the wine line during a boring match. Anyway, they began this torrid affair. Two weeks later they were madly in love. She’d never been so happy in her life. No one had ever been so good to her; no one had ever made her feel that way. She went on an on. They talked every day, saw each other every weekend while he was away at school. Total bliss. You could vomit they were so fucking happy.

      Fast forward. Their relationship had been going strong for more than a year. They were still together, still madly in love. She was thinking about wedding dresses and caterers and he was finishing his five-year, undergrad-and-master’s degree combo deal. He was still away at school during the year, in Boston actually, and Zoe lived in New York City.

      Okay, fast forward again. Now it’s his graduation weekend. His parents, his sister, his brother and his wife, and Zoe all went up to Boston for the graduation. He was going to BU and had an apartment in the Back Bay. His parents were staying at the Four Seasons and Zoe loved that. Status is like oxygen to her. They all went out for dinner on Friday and then they spent Saturday traipsing around Newbury Street, leisurely shopping, having lunch and drinks: the basics.

      On Saturday night they were all at a trendy bar with banquettes, sitting in one of those semi-circle booths having drinks. Danny got up to go to the bathroom while Zoe was sitting there with his family, talking to his sister, appraising his mother’s jewelry, basically just passing time. Now Zoe had thought that Danny had been acting weird all weekend, but she wrote it off as just nerves about graduating and his parents being there and everything. So she thought.

      So an hour went by and Zoe and the family were still sitting at the table and Danny hadn’t come back. Then another half hour went by and Zoe was like, “Where the hell is Danny?”

      They all began to wonder for a while and by then it was almost two hours since he’d gotten up. The family didn’t really seem all that concerned. His father ordered another bottle of wine, but Zoe was about to have a coronary. So she got up to look for him. She glanced around the bar, peeked back by the bathrooms, glanced into the kitchen—you know, because there was such a likely chance he’d be in the kitchen. But of course she didn’t find him anywhere. So she went over to the bouncer and asked him if he’d seen a guy about so high, who looked like she described, etcetera, etcetera, you know the drill.

      The bartender smirked and he was like, “Lady, you just described every guy in the bar.” Then, before she had a chance to get annoyed at the less-than-helpful response, he said, “But…there’s been this guy in the bathroom for a while.”

      In no time flat Zoe whipped around and stormed toward the bathrooms. By the time the bouncer noticed she was gone, it was too late for him to tell her that she couldn’t go in the men’s room. She was never all that concerned with propriety anyway and she stormed right into the bathroom. There she found Danny, standing up, drinking a beer from a bottle while talking on the pay phone.

      When Danny saw Zoe, posed in her dense cloud of make-up, perfume and anger, he said, “Oh shit! I’ve gotta go. Bye,” and he hung up the phone.

      Now, Zoe loves to cause scenes almost as much as I like sex, and, well, she was in the men’s room. So she screeched his name at the top of her lungs to get his attention, not to mention the attention of the two guys over at the urinals and the grunting man in the farthest stall. Then, since she basically had the entire city’s attention, she screamed at him to tell her why he’d been in the bathroom for the past two hours. Why had he left her alone with his lecherous family, she demanded to know. Why was he not sitting with her? Paying attention to her? Why? Why? She didn’t ask Danny if anything was wrong. No, that would’ve been too selfless; in her world, everything had to be about Zoe.

      When she got no response to her barrage of questions other than a confused, blank stare, she lowered her voice to a mere howl and asked, “What the fuck is going on?”

      Danny just looked at her, still dumbfounded. By the way, this is exactly how Zoe told the story, chock full of all these nutty, totally daft details that make you realize she’s a little off her