Have you ever played that drinking game where a person says something like, “I’ve never eaten cat food, hee hee,” and if you have in fact eaten cat food, you drink? Well if I were playing that game and someone were like, “I’ve never had naked sex for a million hours on top of a grave, in a cemetery, in broad daylight,” I’d have to chug-a-lug. A few years ago I met a girl online and we had our second date at a cemetery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Our first date had started off at a BBQ place in Williamsburg and ended with us slamming each other against someone’s garage door until 6 a.m., so we decided to keep it nice and mellow this time around and have a picnic on top of some dead people.
This girl had stopped at Whole Foods on the way over to pick up a selection of pasta salad, bread, something I don't remember and birch beer, so we sat against a tree eating these things, not having shit-all to say to each other. Then we walked around the cemetery making lame jokes and references to things we would never have said out loud or considered funny in non-uncomfortable situations, and after an hour or so a little buzzer must have gone off in our heads because we started (without saying as much) to look for someplace to make out. We made a beeline for a huge headstone towards the back of the graveyard, and as we were approaching it I dumped my half-full birch beer in a trash can because I was tired of carrying it around. As I did this, my date looked at me with what I can best describe as a “Kathy Bates in Misery” face, and pulled the drink out of the garbage, saying something about how it was expensive. Looking back, this is when I should have run at top speed for the subway, perhaps stopping at 7-11 for a celebatory Snickers to eat on the way home, but no, even in the face of true bat-shittery, the promise of seeing boobies always wins out.
We sat against the huge headstone and made awkward convo about how weird it was that we were able to talk about all sorts of freaky/nasty shit via email and texts, and yet didn’t have a thing to say to each other in person. (Operating at full-capacity, this makes perfect sense and can be explained with the understanding that it’s easy to “open up” and get all turned on talking to someone online because your brain is making them into whoever you want them to be, but when they’re plopped down in front of you, they/you see you/them for the bloated turd that you/they really are.) So yeah, we talked about this for a while, and I stared at my shoe for a few minutes until I said “close your eyes” and started kissing her. Once we were kissing I felt a little more comfortable, and perhaps I became so comfortable that I fell asleep a little bit and didn’t realize that I was allowing someone to remove all my clothing right there in the grass on a sunny afternoon, but there we were: me, my butt cheeks, and the blue, cloudless sky of Brooklyn, like it was truly NBD.
It would be enough to say that I had “a little bit” of sex in a cemetery in broad daylight, and find a way to stretch that into seeming like a normal thing to do, but this went on for hours. Literally a full day. We would take breaks to smoke cigarettes, or to pick at the leftover picnic food, and then go right back into the grave humping. My date broke away at one point to go pee behind a tree, and when she returned she handed me a small white flower that I assumed she had peed on to be kinky. I don’t know why I thought this, and it mayyybe wasn’t true, but given the sort of day we were having, I just figured as much.
The early afternoon turned into late evening, and we got cold from all the being-naked stuff and started gathering up our crap to leave. I couldn’t remember the way to the exit, and the cemetery was humongous, so I came up with the master plan to just walk straight in one direction until we hit a road or a fence or something that signaled “out.” We hit a fence after walking for about 20 minutes, and the opening was locked. All the openings were locked. Having not had a concrete reason to climb a fence in many many years, I was oddly pleased with the opportunity to do so, and proud of myself for being able to clear it without any major injuries. My date required the help of a makeshift ladder of boxes and a clear patch of ground to land upon, but she made it, too.
The minute we left the confines of the cemetery I immediately started feeling like the crustiest ho-bag ever. All I wanted to do was get home ASAP and watch something clean and good like Gossip Girl to make myself feel like myself again. On our path to the subway we DID come across a 7-11, and so I suggested we stop in to buy snacks and use the restroom to assess how insane we looked. There was a line for the restroom and I stood there avoiding eye contact with everyone, straightening my hoodie and casually brushing little twigs and clumps of dirt from my clothing. Once I got into the bathroom and looked in the mirror I realized why everyone in line had been giving me fish eye and whispering to one another: My face was smeared with dirt from ear to ear, my hair looked like every picture you’re ever seen of Nick Nolte, and my neck was one big hickey. Like, the entirety of my neck was a hickey. I zipped up my sweatshirt as high as I could to conceal whatever could be concealed and mentally sunk down low into my safe place until I got home.
Because I am an actual moron, I went on a few more dates with the cemetery girl. I had to eventually cut things off, though, after she house-sat for me while I was out of state and sent me a serious of hysterical text messages threatening to open my mail. When I came home from my trip I crawled around my apartment sniffing all the fabrics, assuming that she had once again (or maybe just for the first time) peed on something.
