Hunger.

That's the word we use for it. And feeding, we use that word too. We use these words not because they are accurate, but because they best describe the process: the craving before, the savoring during, and the refreshed, satisfied drowsiness that follows.

I am so hungry.

I can feel it in my skin, this desperate need for touch, warmth of human contact. Warmth that reaches out to me, seeps into me, teases and taunts until I draw it in. Then there's no going back, a guttural snarl rises from my throat as something dark and predatory stirs inside of me-- dark but not evil, at worst simply parasitic.

My limbs feel like they've merged with the bed. The sheets smell thickly human, a scent I cannot get out no matter how hard I try and now I've just resigned myself to it.

The sun is coming in through the window, bathing my whole body in the purest whitest light. Light that is bright and redeeming but also makes me tired, which is not improving things as far as the hunger is concerned.

After minutes of lying there I finally will myself off the bed and wander out through my apartment, pulled inescapably towards the most convenient fix. Barefoot, I leave my home, cross out into the hallway and past the elevators. My high-rise neighborhood-- a mere collection of doors with unknown and unseen people hiding behind them-- passes by me as I plant one foot in front of the other, bare skin touching cheap, generic carpeting patterned in abstract smudges of orange, gold and purple, until I finally arrive at 11B.

Lily opens the door before I finish knocking on it. He seems startled, but not surprised. When I say startled I mean not just jittery or high strung but unstable at the core, whirling inside at strange uninterpretable events. He's holding his breath, I realize. He's holding his breath in wild anticipation because he knew I was coming before I did.

I can taste him from here, in the hallway, two feet between us. There's something about his scent that is already driving me nuts.

Seconds pass before he moves to let me in. He moves and he closes the door behind me, locking it and then pausing at the deadbolt. I think it's difficult for him when I'm this hungry. Difficult and maybe even a little scary. He wants it, but he thinks he shouldn't and he worries that secretly he's a weak or a foolish person for not resisting more. But in a few moments when his fingers leave the various locks on the door and he turns around, those thoughts will be the furthest from his mind.

He turns around and gives me an expression that looks copied out of a thug magazine-- not violent, not intimidating, just a tough and smug don't-mess-with-me look.

I smile slyly, coax my way into his arms, open him up with my touch and feed.

---------------------------------

I first met Illya Ivanchuk in the fall of 2007. I was moving boxes from the elevator to my new apartment ... or trying to anyway: the boxes were overloaded and I couldn't shuttle them all out of the elevator in one shift, causing an initial scramble before the elevator door closed and the machine ran off with a stack of my possessions. Stabbing the elevator call button did nothing and running down eleven flights of stairs to catch the elevator as it picked up passengers in the lobby did not seem practical.

I tried to remember exactly what was in those boxes: dishes? cooking tools? souvenirs from a lifetime lived too fast? clothes?

My apartment building has three elevators servicing the building, all standing in a row. Recalling the correct one turned out to be a frustrating Marx Brothers level endeavor: first the left one would come, then the right, then I had to wait two or three minutes for the right elevator to lose interest and go pick someone else up because if I pressed the call button again while it was still right there the doors to wrong elevator would open up with an enthusiastic ding and the center machine-- where my stuff was being held hostage-- would escape again.

But finally the correct brass colored doors opened and I came nose-to-nose with the owner of a startled gray pair of eyes.

“Excuse me,” I grunted, pushing past him and grabbing the first box off the pile. He wisely stumbled out of my way and into the hallway where he watched me drop the first heavy box against the door to hold it open. See? In the twenty minutes I spent wrestling to get the elevator back I had gotten smart, that would keep the machine from escaping until I had unloaded all my stuff.

He watched me scramble paranoidly as I rushed with a box to my apartment and back as quickly as possible to avoid giving an advantage to the invisible thieves that seemed to lurk in every corner of New York City. He watched, which I thought was very creepy, and then he picked up one of my boxes and started following me down the hallway toward my apartment.

I glanced quickly over my shoulder, not entirely comfortable with the gesture but understanding that in most cultures this is considered helping. “Thank you.”

Nevertheless I gave him a sharp look when I reached for my door knob and he stopped short about two feet away from the door.

I kicked the box I had in with its friends and waved for him to hand off what he had as well. He did and quickly turned around and left. I thought that would be a end of that until I closed the door and ran to collect another load, only to nearly pass him with another armload of my stuff.

Lily looked confused and conflicted as I rushed past him. On one hand I obviously didn't want him anywhere near my apartment, and wasn't especially comfortable with him being left with my stuff unsupervised. On the other hand, he couldn't follow me around like a puppy as I collected the box holding the elevator door open and came back with the key. So he just stood there in the hallway with a stack of two heavy boxes in his arms, looking like he wasn't sure what to do with himself.

When I came back I passed him again, scanning with another scathingly critical glance. He was cute, I thought. Young ... maybe 23? 25 would have been extremely generous. He was dressed in a whiter more middle class version of the current hip-hop styles: low slung jeans, graphic T-shirt, unironic baseball cap, a scruffiness that was bleached of all traces of poverty and struggle. I thought as I twisted the key in the lock one final time that maybe I was being too harsh.

“Hey,” I said as he handed me the last box over the invisible line I had forbidden him to cross. “Would you like to come in for some tea or something?”

It sounded stupid even then, but after a moment of thought or two Lily nodded quickly and carefully approached the door.

I introduced myself, kicking the door closed behind him and rattling off the typical small talk things-- “I just moved in” “Sorry the place isn't put together yet” “Thanks for the help, I should have made my friends come down and help me but I didn't think I needed it”-- none of which he responded to. Not that you're really supposed to respond to stuff like that in a meaningful way, but still the way he sat down on the bar stool waiting for him by the kitchenette island and listened like he was slowly taking this all in was curious.

Finally when I looked at him for a reaction he extended his hand awkwardly and said “I'm Illya Ivanchuk.”

Illya ... Elijah.

“You're Russian.” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you speak English?”

He shook his head with a smile.

“Oh...”

“A little.” Then with some difficulty added: “I understand, but I only speak a little.”

“Oh.”

“I live,” He pointed toward the door. “11B.”

“With your family?”

He shook his head.

“You live alone?”

“Uh-huh.”

 

“Are you a student?”

He didn't nod right away, that's how I knew that it was a lie. He considered telling the truth, but maybe the truth couldn't be captured in a few key words and phrases stolen out of a phrase book.

...............................................................

“So tell us about the new apartment.”

I pushed a leaf of lettuce around the plate and through the gooey residue of egg yolk before stabbing it firmly with my fork and plopping it into my mouth. “What's to tell? It's not my parents house.”

“Yes,” my friend Jamie pipped up on my left. “Thank god, 27 and still living at home. Good God you must be glad those days are over!”

I shrugged. “It wasn't so bad really.”

What I didn't say is that unlike Jamie I had lived with my parents well into my 27th year only to move into a nice sized two bedroom while she had forced herself out at 19 and was living in Brooklyn with nine roommates.

“It was sad.”

Depends on your definition of sad.

“Oh shut up Jamie,” Stani, impossibly thin brunette across the table, rolled her eyes. “I still live at home, am I sad?”

Jamie retreated, and moved down another path. “Has Jake spent the night there yet? It isn't official until the boyfriend spends the night!”

“God no!” I nearly choked on my Mamosa. “And he's not my boyfriend.”

“Suuureee...”

My friends could be so annoying sometimes. No, sorry, change that. Jamie could be so annoying sometimes. She's smug and condescending the way truly unhappy people usually are smug and condescending. She finds a little rough edge of your life and just picks at it until you want to go nuts. She's not a bad person really, most of the time I think she just doesn't get that others find it mean spirited.

Stani-- short for Stanislava-- was Jackie O hidden carefully behind beautiful brown Eastern European eyes. She could be a little bit ditzy, a little bit distant, but she had left her poor peasant village conditions as an exchange student and dutifully mesmerized Ms Manners Guide to Comportment the way most teenagers study for their SATs. As a result she pulled off an old world grace and sophistication that very few of us could even parodize.

Sunday morning brunch is a New York institution, that at least everyone knows, but it's an expensive institution which is something that isn't obvious. Not immediately anyway, a $14.99 decadent breakfast with champaign cocktails included may not seem like much, but add the tip, the transportation to the prime brunching spots (a normal breakfast in a normal residential eatery simply will not do!), and then doing it regularly-- every week, every other week, even every three weeks-- it adds up.

“He's not my boyfriend.” I said. “I like him, I wouldn't want to put him through that.”

They laughed, the light clinking and scrapping of utensils across the plate providing enough subtle background noise to maintain privacy from other groups in the human traffic clogged Essex Street brunch.

But Jamie wouldn't leave it alone. “So... what, are you friends with benefits?”

And before I could answer she firmly put down her knife and gasped. “You're not his beard are you?”

“What? NO!”

Jamie looked at the two of us, surprised that we didn't find this comment to be a perfectly natural thing to ask over eggs benedict and breakfast greens with mini danish on the side. “Oh come on, you've never gotten a little vibe from Jake? Just a little?”

“A gay vibe?” I tried to daintily recover from putting a too big piece of spinach in my mouth and failed utterly, sounding like a sputtering, crunching mess. “No. I get the bisexual vibe from him sometimes though.”

“Ummm... hello? What exactly is the difference?”

“You've never slept with him.”

Perhaps that was the wrong thing to admit.

“Ah-ha! So he is your boyfriend!”

“I never said that.”

“But you've slept with him?”

“Well...” I glanced briefly at Stani, who shrugged and nibbled on her danish. “Yeah.”

“So he's either your boyfriend, or you're a total whore.”

“No, he's not my boyfriend. But yes I like having sex with him. What does one thing have to do with the other?”

“Do you sleep with other people?”

I cleared my throat and reached for my napkin to wipe a bit of sweet lemon pastry filling off my lip. See here's the difference between Jamie and I and Stani. When we eat flakey pastry we come up with a lap full of crumbs and lips glossed with sticky sugar glazing. When Stani eats a flakey pastry it's as if the danish melts and separates from the whole in one clean bite. No mess, pure elegance.

And yet it's weirdly normal to have a conversation like this in front of her.

“No.”

“Then you're monogamous.”

“You're confusing a correlation with a causation. We're sleeping together because neither one of us has someone else to sleep with, not the other way around. If he were to find another girl he wanted to be with, we would stop sleeping together.”

“So it's casual.”

I could never explain it. Not accurately, not to her anyway. The truth was Jake was my current donor, that he willingly, voluntarily allows me to feed from him. The sex is simply an efficiency issue, it floods the body with energy and makes it easier to draw it out. Easier and less stressful for the donor. Just about any high energy activity will do, but sex is particularly useful because it's physically pleasant for both parties. Besides he's really really good at it.

But I could never explain that to her.

“Hey, no judgement.” I said instead. “Least we bring up your sexual experiences.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

 

Every New York woman, whether native or transplant, at some point harbors certain romantic notions about liberty and empowerment through lovers. It's an idea that has taken root after being fertilized by the failed assertions like “being worshipped/loved/desired is empowering”, “you'll love yourself if someone else loves you”, “guys don't want commitment” and other generous loads of shit. And so while no one denies millions of New York women are looking for love, a few of those millions are looking for something much more basic, much more epidemic and not easily expressed on a Hallmark card.

But you know, having sex with someone doesn't make him (or, let's be fair, her) a lover. There's a whole courtship and borderline victorian level pageantry to it that girls receive little education in. Perhaps the number one rule of lover-taking is that you have to be okay with not having sex. If you think virginity is something to be ashamed of, you count the days since “the last time you got laid” and gasp in humiliation as dry spells develop, or are already training to improve your numbers in the sexual Olympics, then get a boyfriend because having lovers is not going to work out for you.

If you can't handle not having sex than you can't honestly enforce any standards about who you have sex with-- let's face it, there are so many single women in New York because there are so many completely undate-able men in New York-- and without standards you're not taking lovers, you're having easy, meaningless, cheap sex. Hardly the romantic fantasy.

I think most women in New York realize that after a while and shyly move back the endeavors they are better suited for: the career building, husband hunting, and children spoiling ways of a life sculptor. But in the transition leaves one with a half a dozen ugly, semi-gross war stories to bear. And like all traumatized veterans, New York women go out into the world to unburden their souls among those who were there.

Preferably across the internet.

The great overshare phenomenon. Cashing in on life mistakes and tragedies by converting them into street cred' among an audience always willing to pull over to stare at a train wreck that is your life.

You might know my friend Amy, she's kind of famous. Or at least famous in that very abstract sense that plagues the 2.0 decade. Web 2.0, Government 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Philanthropy 2.0, Porn 2.0, the familiar blend of social institution, cultural construct and the unique ability of the internet to aggregate us into mob rule. Fame 1.0 were your movie stars, artists and significant figures, whether talent was actually involved was up for debate, but you could rest assured that somewhere out there, someone thought this person produced quality work and was willing to pay for it. Fame 2.0 has no such hang-ups, because the bulk of stuff on the internet is free. It's a new form of fame that people achieve simply by being as talentless and pathetic as possible.

“Are the cameras off?” I asked before even crossing the threshold.

A long dramatic sigh echoed around the loft as Amy marched down the foyer, grumbling something about something or other. She returned a few seconds later, her mouth drawn up in a tight impatient line. “You don't get the point of Lifecasting!”

“You can Twitter through this if you want.” I offered, even though I'm pretty sure I don't mean that.

Critics kind of miss the point of Fame 2.0 I think. Fame 2.0 feeds off our narcissism and the inevitable void between a dream and a reality shaped by unreasonable expectations. Year after year twenty somethings move into the big city thinking that they will live in amazing apartments, eat at all the hot spots, club every weekend, wear the top designers, spa on Sundays, and ultimately indulge in a few years of the most wonderful, adventurous social calender before they land an amazing boyfriend who becomes a husband and new delusions are picked up. Even though the average salary in New York City is a hefty $50,000 a year, it doesn't take an accountant to see that for a normal girl this is beyond an unsustainable course.

The problem is New York currently has a small infestation of upper class scions and insanely upper class scions living this life who are portraying themselves as “normal girls” instead of exactly what they are: children of privilege. Factor in artistic license from romances like Sex and the City, and you have a whole lifetime of want eating away at the minds and common sense of a generation.

Strictly speaking this isn't Amy's problem. She is one of those children of privilege, true, but rather than simply living off her parents in absentia she has used their support to create a business plan to make a small fortune off of this divide between dream and fiscal reality.

I really admire her for that.

“I don't understand why you're so camera shy,” she petted my hair and cooed affectionately. I tried very hard not to flinch. “You're pretty.”

“Maybe I don't want my existence broadcast out into the ether for anyone to track down ... like, for example, future employers.”

“Oh please,” she sighed.

Having completely unrealistic expectations doesn't take any of the burn out of failure. The feeling that everyone is watching and judging, that your inability to have the lifestyle that would yield Minolos and Rum laced mousse is a sign of incompetence, that not turning out to be the glamazon with the romantic career and the wit to surf the social currents with elegance and grace is a personal shame. As if it's so easy to have elegance and grace in a world where it's easier to find a public bathroom with a working condom vending machine than a tampon one.

What I'm saying is there is a overabundance of truly miserable people in this city and maybe beyond it. I know this because I can literally taste the heartbreak through the slight tickle of even the lightest touch.

In that sense, New York really is a very hard place for people like me. Miserable food is rancid food. Better off starving, I think.

But to all the truly miserable people in this city, Amy is their heroin. What is going to numb the shame of your own failings faster than watching someone completely humiliate herself for attention? Nothing. There is nothing in this world more satisfying than watching talentless people behave pathetically.

Except...

Except watching talentless people behave pathetically and then succeed anyway. Success is the hook. If you're just talentless and pathetic eventually everyone short of the sociopaths is going to have a little tinge of guilt about mocking you sour the experience. But success highlights the universal unfairness of the world and makes it okay to continue to punish you over and over again for being the beneficiary of nepotism, classism, racism, nyphomanian, gun mollism, sexism, VAXism or practically any other form of -ism.

The other possibility is to simply be a horrible human being. That works too.

“So when are we having the house warming party for your new apartment?” Amy's voice was perky and clipped like a bobbing cheerleader gone business exec. She was typing on her laptop-- smooth, expensive, and the output of hundreds of hours worth in design meetings and consumer tests that she was more or less oblivious too ... like everything in her apartment-- which made me think she wasn't so much listening as she was waiting for me to stop answering.

“That depends. When do I get the release forms I know are coming?”

She laughed, her bouncy and shiny brown hair sliding from her shoulder. She sparkled. Really she did. If she wasn't always throwing herself into the photographs of strangers and trying very hard to become the muse of a never ending string of tech-geek entrepreneurs, or dressing up in outfits made entirely of ruffles she would be charming. But mostly you leave with the impression that you've seen this movie before and the rabbit ends up boiled.

Still ... sparkles. She tastes a bit like the mini buttercream dabbed cupcakes she's obsessed with, sweet and delicious with just a small bite but stomach rotting and nausea inducing if you have more. Well, at least she's not miserable. There are some underlying insecurities, but not to the degree you'd probably expect from a blatant exhibitionist. In fact, as I drew just a little bit of it in (just skimmed the surface of the essence around her) I was struck by the calmness and steadiness of her thoughts. Flickers of things came to mind seemingly out of nowhere: party dresses, tree houses, tea parties with little bakery cookies. Her skin was soft and her lips flushed under a thick coat of fuchsia lipstick.

It was nice.

“I'll leave the camera at home, but trust me when our reality TV deal comes through you'll be begging to get air time.”

“I doubt that.” I was not going to ask who 'we' was. Amy seems from time to time to be able to hire people to work for her self-exploitation company despite the fact the company has no revenue to speak of.

“Have you given any thought to where you'll have this house warming party at least?” She still hadn't looked up from her computer where-- I'm sure-- endless twits are still twittering at this very moment.

“Ummm ... at my apartment?”

“No! Then you have to deal with neighbors and stocking the bar yourself. Here, I'm emailing you a list of hotspots to consider. Pick one, and we'll reserve a private room.” She stabbed the keyboard with her fingers and with a satisfying beep the email was already away. Finally she looked up from the machine.

The problem with people saying things like that, is that talking like you are going to become the biggest cog in the shifting machine behind some grand life event for me doesn't actually seem to stop anyone from losing interest and going galloping off towards new adventures at the last minute instead. So inside a part of me freaked and ran into a little steel panic room that the comment.

“Uh, sure. But I think I'd still rather have it at home. No cameras. No blogs.”