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The Moth
Jonathan Ames: From Boyhood to Fatherhood
00:15:03
A young man spends his formative years unable to find permanence, until permanence finds him. Jonathan Ames is the author of eight books, including ‘Wake Up, Sir!’, ‘The Extra Man’ and his most recent work ‘The Alcoholic’, which comes out on September 30.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:21]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. Hi, I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the Moth Podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Jonathan Ames was recorded live at the Moth mainstage.
- [01:44]
Jonathan Ames
My story is about a number of jobs that sort of shaped my life and shaped my whole destiny. And it was a couple of jobs I had during the ages of 20 to 21. So the story begins in Yes, I was employed back then. Okay, I don't know why you laughed, but I'll accept that. It's a good sign. Okay, I'm thinking out loud here. All right, so in 1984 I was a sophomore at Princeton. You can laugh at that if you like. All right, so in 1984 I was a sophomore at Princeton. I wanted to take a year off because I had a very bad reputation at school. I was drinking a lot, getting in a lot of trouble, so I wanted to take a year off. Also, I had joined the army to pay for Princeton, and I was looking at four years of active duty after school and eight years of reserve duty. So this was my last chance at freedom was after, you know, taking this year off from school. Later, just for the Harper's crowd, I did become a conscientious objector. And so I got out of the military and avoided the Gulf War, unlike my fellow ROTC guys, which is a good thing. All right, so. But this was before I knew I was getting out of the Army. This was going to be my year of freedom. I needed to make money, though, during this year off. And a friend of mine, I know it's going to seem absurd, suggested that I be a model. And he took some pictures of me. I know I have rings under my eyes that go all the way to the back of my skull and I have no hair. But at 20, he had it in his mind that I should be a model. So he takes some pictures of me. And I must have been. I thought I was ugly, but I was vain enough to try it. I don't know what I was thinking. So I go, I look up in the Princeton library. They had a Manhattan phone book. And I look up modeling and I choose a modeling agency. And I go into New York with these pictures. This fellow takes them, he says, can I hold these overnight? I said, yes. And the next morning he calls me. Come into New York. We want to sign you to a contract. He had sent my pictures to the photographer, Bruce Weber, who does the Abercrombie and Fritsch and Vanity Fair, however you say, Abercrombie, whatever. And that this fellow wanted to photograph me. So suddenly with this small agency, which existed for about a year and then there was a scandal with young female models from Minnesota closed down. But so suddenly I'm a model and I'm going off to this Bruce Webber photo shoot. And I remember we met early in the morning, a bunch of us, a bunch of male models in a van. And as we're going off to the Hamptons for this photo shoot, it was like 6am this one guy looks around, he was from Texas, he goes, hey, we're all blonde, you know. It just had dawned on him sort of. It was kind of interesting. And so we get out to the Hamptons and we're at this farmhouse and it was like a scene out of Christopher Isherwood's the Berlin Stories. All these blond boys, about 10 of us, running around doing push ups so that our muscles would stick. And in and out of the pool and a big buffet and everything, waiting for the light to change. And so I get my picture taken by Bruce Weber. Wonderful guy, very talented, obviously. And he wanted me to drop my shorts. And I felt embarrassed. I didn't think I could do that. And so anyways, I hid everything and I wasn't able to expose myself. So anyways, he took these Pictures of me. And I have one, and I'm going to pass it out as a sort of gift for you. I only have 150 of them, so I have one per table. But this is the Bruce Weber picture of me. And I was. Anyway, the physique was looking good then, and you can see I had hair. It's so depressing to look at that now. I don't know what happened. But anyway, so I ended up in the Whitney Biennial. I like to say to my artist friends, I've been in the Biennial. But it was in this picture. And on the back of this is the thing from my nursery school. Just so you can study that if you like. So pass those around. So maybe one per table, since there's only 150, so it could get to the back. All right, so here I am, a model. I got several jobs. But at that photo shoot at Bruce Weber's farmhouse, I met a very pretty girl. She was his assistant, and she gave me her phone number. So about a week later, I'm doing my modeling appointments, which are called go sees, which was made very simple for the models. It was go see someone. And so this is what they called appointments or go sees. So I'm on a day of go sees, and I found myself in the West Village, right by Cornelia Street. And I remember that that girl lived on Cornelia Street. And my high school love was a girl named Cornelia. And so suddenly, it was all fusing in my mind. So I call her and I get her roommate. And I explain that I'm in the neighborhood and is. I won't say her name. Well, I'll say her name because I can't think of a new one. I said, is Erin home? No. And I'm her roommate. And I said, oh, I'm right in the neighborhood. She said, well, if you want to come up and wait for her. It was late in the afternoon. She should be home soon. I go, okay. So I go up to her apartment, and I meet the roommate who was about 30 years old and very beautiful and very exotic to me. I was 20, she was 30. And she offers me a glass of wine. We end up drinking two bottles of wine. Not only has my life been shaped by jobs, but also by liquor and sex. So we drink some wine. We drink, like, two bottles of wine. The first girl never comes home, and I end up making love to the roommate, which these things happened back then. So we're making love, and she was older, and this was all very intriguing to me. And at a Penultimate moment, the moment before, an ultimate moment. I said to her, I said, can I have an ultimate moment? Because I wasn't using a condom. This was sort of before the whole condom hysteria and AIDS hysteria. And so everything was more about birth control. I thought of a bad line earlier, death control. So this was all about birth control. And so I said, can I have an ultimate moment? And she said, of course you can, in a very sort of condescending way. Which was a bad thing to hear, right at a penultimate moment, because, I don't know, it destroyed my confidence as a young lover. Oh, of course you can. Why didn't I know that? And so it wrecked my ultimate moment a little. Some short circuited happened, but it happened. And so I thought I learned a valuable lesson, which is you never ask a woman if you can have your ultimate moment. You just go ahead and have it. You don't ask her unless she tells you beforehand that you need to be careful or something. So I thought this was the valuable lesson. I learned to be a lothario. Never ask. So I go off to Europe to be a model because I've done very well. I ended up being photographed by this guy named Horst, and I was in bus stop ads all over New York and Fernando Sanchez lingerie and a pair of bikinis or something. So I go off to Europe, to Milan, to be a model. But I travel for about a month and a half and I get in a terrible bar fight in Paris, France, and I get my nose broken and my lips split and my skull kneed and everything got really beat up. And I was supposed to report to Milan, Milano, whatever, five days later. But my nose was all purple. And I thought, you know what? I wanted to be a writer. I thought a writer shouldn't be a model. So I'm not going to go to Milano, and that's not a dignified job. So I became a male au pair. And in Paris, in the Montparnasse neighborhood. But that was kind of a good job because I was right near where Hemingway would hang out and even pass through the bakery that he used to pass through to get to Gertrude Stein. And so I had my two little charges. I think they were like 6 and 3, and it was wonderful. And I was the only au pair garcon in the whole quarter. So I was with all these Swedish and German girls. And it was even better than being a model and going to Cornelia Street. So I did that for five or so blissful months. And then I come back to the States and it's late spring and I go visit some friends at Princeton. And yet again I get completely drunk. And then the next morning, I'm lying on the floor of my friend's dorm room and I'm totally drunk and destroyed and debauched. And I'm lying on the hard floor and the school newspaper comes flying underneath the door. There was like a bit of an inch comes flying under the door and opens up to a page to the classifieds as it sort of wafted across the room. And it was right in front of me. And I look down at and there was an advertisement saying, come spend the summer in New Hampshire at Camp Thoreau on an idyllic lake. And I thought, this is what I need. I need to stop drinking. I'm only 21, but I already want to stop drinking. I'm sorry. And let me go off to New Hampshire to Camp Thoreau. That's what I need to do. So I go off to Camp Thoreau and I got the job because I'd been in au pair, so I knew how to deal with children. I'd been a camp counselor during the summers in New Jersey at a day camp. So I get the job, I go off to Camp Thoreau and I'm doing pretty well. And then a friend of mine sends me Lolita, which I had never read before, which is not the best sort of reading material when there's like 12 and 13 year old girls running around. It completely distracted me in the wrong way. So one night I got very drunk as always and ate some food. And the whole next day I was hungover the whole day, had a terrible headache into the night. And I was sort of walking around the camp, you know, trying to clear my head of this headache that had lasted all day. And I see a light on at the art counselor's cabin. And so I go to see her and she's in her. She was 34. And I said, do you have an aspirin? And she gets me an aspirin. And I had admired her down by the lake because I had noticed that you could see some pubis sticking out from the sides. And I thought this was a more appropriate target for my affections than these young girls and the Nabokov influence. So she gets me an aspirin and we're sort of chatting and right in that moment a bat flies right between us and we both scream, you know, out in the woods there in New Hampshire. And I said, well, maybe if we. And it's flying around. I said, maybe if we turn the lights off. I think bats are blind. But if we turn the lights off, it'll see. I don't know what my reasoning was. So I turn the lights off and we wait. I turn the lights back on, no bat. And I felt very much, you know, oh, I really am a woodsman, a very much a Camp Thoreau fellow. And right in that moment of hubris, as always, the bat flies right between us like some sort of mad cupid. Goes right between us and. And I turn the lights off again and I put my arm around her and one touch leads to another. I think Blake has a poem about that. So anyway, we end up in bed. And I remember the rule that I had learned the year before with another older woman. Do not ask if you can have an ultimate moment. Just go ahead and when you're ready, have your ultimate moment. You know, appropriately, perhaps after she may have had one. But I don't know if I knew that at 21. So I had two ultimate moments that night. It was quite lovely. But the next day it turned out I was terribly ill and I ended up having salmonella poisoning because I'd been drinking the night before in some bar and ate something off the floor, who knows what. So I had salmonella poisoning, ended up in Dartmouth Hospital. And the camp year came to an end. I never made love with the art counselor again, but we parted amicably. It was very sweet. And I go back to Princeton, become a conscientious objector. I sell a novel. After senior year, I moved to New York to work on this novel and. And I get a letter from far away in the United States. And I open it up and it turns out it's a letter from the art counselor. And with the letter is a picture of a 15 month old baby boy with red hair and blue eyes. And I'm told that it's my son. And nine months of pregnancy, 15 months of his life. It was exactly two years ago. And I was like, oh my God. And he looked exactly like I did. So sure enough, this moment that had begun on Cornelia street, and of course you can. And then being an au pair and getting a camp job and all this drinking had led to me looking at a child. I was 23 now. And so I went to where they lived and I became his dad. And it turned out, you know, all this au pair and counseling had been wonderful training. And I don't mean to be sentimental, but that's why we have the word, because sometimes it happens. So I became his dad. And I have to say it's the best job I've ever had and my son is now 17 and he comes up in two days to be with me for 10 days and I see him about every eight weeks and he's a beautiful boy and we've had an incredible father son thing for 15 years now. So that's my story. And it all began with these jobs and somehow ended up there rather beautifully. So I'll do a Harry call.
- [13:34]
Dan Kennedy
Jonathan Ames is the author of seven books including Wake up sir and the Extra Man. The Moth is a non profit organization. Consider supporting our free podcast by going to our dedicated podcast contribution page or by becoming a moth member@themoth.org where you can also buy moth stories on CD, including today's story, which which is featured on Audience Favorites Volume one. And don't miss the annual Mothball in New York City on Tuesday, November 18th featuring John Turturro, Garrison Keillor, Andy Borowitz and many others. To learn more about this and all of the Moth's upcoming shows and our corporate events and training program, Visit our website themoth.org and please tell us what you thought of today's episode. Tell us what you think of the Moth podcast in general. What do you love? What do you hate? What would you like to hear more of or less of? Email us@podcastthemoth.org thanks to all of you for listening. We hope you'll have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Network.