There are many thickets in the garden of delight. It can be difficult to see your way out, and after a time, you might not want to see. The poet Graves wrote, “There is one story and one story only / that will prove worth your telling… To it all lines or lesser gauds belong / That startle with their shining / Such common stories as they stray into.” For me, those gauds are long, red carpets, and I find my loins pulled inexorably down them. My life’s narrative cannot be called complete until I have been given a handjob by an Emmy nominee.
Details of my fantasy vary. Sometimes I’m naked, sometimes I’m wearing tuxedo pants. My sweet nominee, though, is rarely naked. No, she sports the uniform of her aspirations: carefully selected gown, borrowed jewels, the up-do. She smells of lilac, fear, and reporter spit.
Perhaps we’re sitting alone in the brash Nokia Theatre, the exotic Shrine, the grand dame Palladium, the girl-next-door Pasadena Civic. Or maybe we’re in one of those dumpy East Hollywood restaurants where no one looks twice at a handjob. We could even be on the set of her show, watched by three cameras.
She might initiate something more than a handjob, because she’s wonderful like that, she’s a trooper. Everyone who has ever worked with her says she’s a real trooper. But I would refuse. I would gently take her hands, kiss them, and lower them to my pre-opened fly. I want only for her to grip my shamrod like she imagines the winner grips the statuette; to hold my testicles like the winged woman holding that golden ball aloft; to feel the warmth flowing between her fingers like the tears of an acceptance speech.
Susan Lucci used to be the queen of my handjob fantasies. Alas, she won her Emmy. Her beauty has not faded, but it has lost a… specific dimension. I mean, a handjob from an Emmy winner? May as well move to the suburbs. I still play tapes of Susan’s old ceremonies, loss after loss, and I still throb like the All My Children theme song when her professional, cemented smile cracks just a little. Look at her hands clenching each other in her lap. Mmm. Just imagine.
Take your failure out on me. My lap is the soundstage. This performance you can nail. Which is preferable, you ask: a handjob from a failed nominee, or one from a nominee who has yet to discover her fate? Each has its allure. I can hardly describe the adorable flutterings of the pre-ceremony actress, her fingers shaking with the nerves of a virgin. Am I a cad for promising that I’ve got the “lucky juice”? For almost drooling when her face changes from “he’s lying” to “but you never know”? Perhaps. But am I not worse for reveling in a loss? Am I a sadist for loving the wanton wankery of defeat?
Take your failure out on me. My lap is the soundstage. This performance you can nail. This throbbing juror you can win over. Your bitter memories and revenge fantasies add a spicy frisson to the act. The failed Variety campaign, the pitying phone call from your agent, another year of denied feature films, the strangled neck of the Academy president, his purple face becoming bloated—oh, throttle on, my dove!
These images are my delicious shame—my schadenhorny—and I fear that other women have become mere seat-fillers. My statue has no wings but those an Emmy nominee creates.
I watch the telecast content to dream. But the flame burns on. The day will come when one of those Ladies of the Shortlist reaches into the Emmy swag bag on my lap with a hole cut in the bottom, whisper, “I promised I wouldn’t cry,” and fap me senseless, going well over her 40 seconds, not stopping even when the music tries to play her off.
No one remembers the nominees? One man does. One man does.
The allure of an awards show is not the thrill of victory, but rather the anticipation—and of course the potential for a handjob.
