Free The Best American Essays 2014 by Robert Atwan, John Jeremiah Sullivan Page A

Soon I met a man at the bar across the street. He was gentle with me but angry at the world’s rules. He made what little money he needed by less-than-legal means, and owned only five short-sleeved T-shirts, four long-sleeved T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, and a pair of Converse with holes in the soles. We saw other people and talked all about it, which made for a rare kind of understanding between us. The first woman he and I slept with together was tall and thin with long, expensive black hair. When we laid her down on the floor of my new loft and undressed her, we found, tattooed across her abdomen, just above her neatly waxed pussy, the word
Freedom.
    I’d found Freedom on a South Williamsburg street corner at two in the morning, unlocking her bicycle from a lamppost. She was in a filmy white blouse over shorts and thigh-high stockings, and when I said hello, she started kissing me. I said would you like to meet my boyfriend; do you have a problem with facial hair. He was not really my boyfriend at the time, but that’s how it was clearer to talk in certain circumstances. She locked up her bicycle and walked inside the bar to meet him, and she didn’t mind the beard. I said do you want to go home with us and she said yes. We walked up the six flights of factory stairs to my loft. We undressed one another and all ended up on the floor rather than on any comfortable piece of furniture. She and I were making out and he was kind of stroking his beard and watching us. And then he moved in and started eating her pussy, at which point she started saying these two sentences: “I want to steal you. I’m gonna steal you and take you home. I want to steal you. I’m gonna steal you and take you home.” I was stroking her hair and kissing her neck and when she started saying that I said, “No, you’re not gonna steal him, no you’re not, just relax and let him make you come.” And I held her so he could.
    Actually, he didn’t make Freedom come; I did. I reached inside her and did what I’ve only ever done before in secret, that is, away from the world of men, and he watched me. He’d never seen this, the way women can fuck each other; it is quite something to have a man who loves you watch you do it.
    The next morning he and I ate egg-and-biscuit sandwiches, drank coffee, and went over the details of the previous night and morning. Then we talked about our childhoods, our dead parents, and other people we were seeing at the time. He was obsessed with a Mississippi girl who had trouble coming, and I offered some strategies. I told him about something sad that had happened to a man I was seeing. We moved on to discussing which of our friends were fighting, or having problems with love or sex, or depressed.
    This man had also spent time in a chair, in a dark room, staring at a wall. We tried to remember how it happens, the giving up: how the mind turns on itself and pinions the body to furniture and then convinces you that it is the furniture that has pinioned your mind. The furniture, or the girlfriend, or the husband, with their supernatural ability to cause your feelings. But it is so hard to remember the demonic logic of the place. For our friends we should remember, when they think they’re stuck with sadness forever and we’re trying to shine some small light on the way out. But mainly it is a blank, like women with babies say labor was.
    At one point we stepped outside for cigarettes and were quiet for a moment. It was spring and a new sun was shifting light across the brick buildings on every corner of the intersection. The air felt kind and the neighborhood good, down under the Williamsburg Bridge, just across the river from Manhattan. But it was more than just a nice day: there was a peace immanent and tangible as a body, some kind of giant embrace in the air, and it was most definitely not coming from my mind. I didn’t tell him about it or ask him if he