Sexy Dreams with Famous People: Arnold

Really? We were in the same place at the same time, that’s all. There were other people around. I must have been younger because I felt like I used to, not like I do now—I was more malleable, insecure, attractive. I had not yet found my big sword. He didn’t have an accent. All of a sudden he pulled me up against him and kissed me like he cared, and then whispered in my ear, “I’ve grown to love you very fast.”

BLECH! (Hang on, I have to take a cheese grater to my tongue—scrap, scrap, scrap, ow!)—and spray the area with insecticide. How do you get this damn button to work? Oh, there. Sphish-sphish-sphiiiiish.) I won’t describe his body because it’s not fair. It really wasn’t Arnold. I’m sure his body is nothing like a soft mattress with one yucky lump.

Anyway, when I interviewed Arnold in the nineties, he said he liked my boots. And it’s true: they were really nice, expensive, brown suede ropers from Bergdorf Goodman. The thing was, though, that I’d read a bunch of interviews other writers had done with him before I went to see him, and in them, he complimented the writer on something about their appearance. So it was his PR move; or maybe it was his chick move, I don’t know. His facade, in any case, was seamless—it was meant to be charming, but instead, at least for me, was gruesome. (It didn’t help that he was orange.) I just don’t find inauthenticity attractive.

I’ve grown to love you very fast. Poor Arnold. Poor Deitch.

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Sexy Dreams with Famous People: Me and Richard

When I don’t write to you, you can bet that I’m lost—speeding down some road I shouldn’t be on with a Quarter-Pounder in one hand and a shotgun in the other, empty cans of wine in the backseat.* You know how it is when, instead of doing things that make you happy, you do things that don’t make you happy for money or status or security?

This is actually quite a serious subject, but right now I want to apologize for not coming around, and also start this new category, Sexy Dreams with Famous People. Julia actually came up with it, though she says she’s more sympathetic to its sub-category: Sexy Dreams with Famous People Who Aren’t Sexy. I dream about Richard Gere, you see, and she dreams about Steve Buscemi.** She, however, does not find herself driving down a dark road with a Whopper and a shotgun, so maybe we’re even. I’d take a sexy dream with Steve Buscemi over the waking sell-out anytime.

About the dream: I will spare you the details, except to say that we were in a fabulous Japanese restaurant—all sleek and low-wooden—where the proprietors were falling all over each other to get Richard Gere comfortably situated. I was sitting across from him, and he was playing with the tag of the expensive, black Donna Karan bra I’d bought that day [in real life]. I don’t know how he got the tag, because, in the dream, I was sitting across from him naked from the waist up.

The great thing about this dream, though, was that the tag was on a black string, and Richard was, for my amusement, untying the knot on that string with one hand. That was the sexy part—it was a slow and sure experience of untying. I said, “Where’d you learn to do that?” And he said, smiling his coy and sultry Richard Gere smile, “Superman taught me.”

P.S. I interviewed Richard once, for a Shambhala Sun story, but, before that, I had a strange and literally fantastic chance encounter with him. I wrote about this encounter in my Sun story, and I’ve pasted that excerpt onto the jump page, in case you feel like checking it out.

*This is symbolic.
**This is symbolic, too.