Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (17 page)

To read minds.

MOST HUMBLING
MOMENT

I’ll tell you later…it
involves farm machinery.

CELEBRITY I RESEMBLE
MOST

After being told I looked
like Jane Birkin so many times I looked her up, and it

turns out we have the same
measurements, so maybe there’s something to it.

MORE ABOUT ME

Ok, the farm machinery
thing. I realise it might be misleading so I want to
make

it clear. I wasn't
disfigured in any way...my summer dress was sucked right off
me

by a potato grader...not
as humbling in France as it would have been here

(the workers hardly even
noticed) but embarrassing all the same.

FAVORITE ONSCREEN SEX
SCENE

The best sex takes place
on the cutting room floor

No messages. A
twenty-three year-old purportedly French
photographer-assistant-model-writer with a gorgeous ass didn’t get
even one reply? Was it was because her face was hidden? Maybe they
thought she was disfigured. Even after adding the disclaimer about
the farm machinery she was still getting no responses.

If, as I told Marian, I’d
only been using datemedotcom to sell books I was now being asked to
prove it. Reporting back to her with a result of zero messages and
therefore zero sales seemed to confirm I’d been lying. Hotlisting
was a way of showing interest without actually sending a message.
It was also a great way to ensure Francoise’s profile was visited
by those eager to see who had hotlisted them. I selected every male
I could find in the New York area. All were eligible; from the
hipsters with clever headlines, (“This is your caption speaking”),
to the old farts who didn’t even fill out the questionnaire because
they knew they wouldn’t get a reply, (Just looking).

But still no messages. It
didn’t make sense. If I was hotlisted by a twenty-three-year-old
French girl with the body of a supermodel, in varying degrees of
undress, I’d feel duty-bound to reply just in case there was even
an outside chance of fucking her. I studied the profiles more
carefully. I began tailoring emails to specific profiles; “If you
liked Trainspotting, you’ll love Diary of An 0xygen
Thief.”

I was about to send this
message to an inoffensive-looking guy who most certainly didn’t
look like he was accustomed to being approached by beautiful girls
when I noticed under the option to; “Send Him A Message” there was
a subheading; “He Sent You An Email Three Days Ago” This was
infuriating because when I clicked on Beautifullylit’s inbox it
still showed, “0 Messages” Maybe he had been disqualified for
including his phone number and contact details. The site forbade
people from exchanging such details because naturally enough this
would put them out of business. But then below the inbox I noticed
another option entitled “Preferences.” I clicked on it and there,
slithering over each other like newly netted fish were hundreds and
hundreds of glistening emails; seven hundred and sixty three to be
exact. I hadn’t filled out the “Preferences” section because I had
no preferences. The site was designed to allow only your ideal
matches through and because I was looking for emails from anyone
capable of buying a book I had no need of it. There were so many
messages I couldn’t quite grasp the significance of what was
happening. My glee peaked and dissolved into fear.

Would I be the perpetrator
of my own undoing? It was flattering that all these men wanted my
girlfriend but would this be how I lost her? I was struck by their
good manners and etiquette. I was being given an insight into what
it was like to be a beautiful girl in a world of salivating men.
Hugely flattering but mostly frightening. I began to see Marian’s
position. Why she sometimes tried to make herself uglier. It was
degrading to be sought after purely because of the physical shape
of your face, body, hips and tits. But such ideas evaporated when I
thought of the books I could sell. It was the digital equivalent of
striking oil. I decided there was no need to tell her how many
messages she had received. Not yet. I couldn’t risk the possibility
that she might put a stop to it. And it wasn’t as if I was doing it
behind her back. It had been her idea. In the end, I told her there
were seventeen messages. This was flattering without being
overwhelming. Would she be curious to see if there was someone she
liked? I know I would be. But then the profile represented a
twenty-three year-old French photographer/writer not a thirty-six
year old sculptor from Poland Springs. Mind you I suspected most
guys probably wouldn’t give a shit once they actually laid eyes on
her but it would definitely be a hurdle. And the more hurdles I
could arrange around her the more fenced in she’d be and the safer
I‘d feel.

The book was already
mentioned under the heading “Last Great Book I Read” but nobody was
going to buy it just because it was mentioned. They needed more
incentive. Maybe I needed to flirt with them. I tried to remember
which emails had sustained my interest up to this point. I seemed
to like the hot and cold ambiguity of the replies. The way they’d
first agree to meet and then cancel
I’m soooo sorry
and take
the sting out of it by adding the word
baby
. Could I pull
this off? I strove to emulate this delicate paradoxical tone for my
first customer whose headline announced a fondness for the work of
Honore De Balzac.

“
I have a
friend who refers to him as Ballsack… if you like his writing you
might like Diary Of An Oxygen Thief”

Ballsack? Was I out of my
fucking mind? A French girl would never say that. No girl would say
that. I had been too obvious. When Stanley Kubrick created new
characters he invented childhood memories for them; the school they
attended, their first kiss, where they holidayed, their parents
relationship, a knee injury. I should have waited until the third
email before blurting out the title of the book.

“
Hahahaha
ballsack??? that’s hilarious, I haven’t heard of that book but it
sounds interesting, I‘ll totally check it out.”

He was thrilled to receive
any sort of reply from a beautiful twenty three-year-old French
girl. It was becoming clear that another foolproof method for
creating convincing life-like characters was ensure they had a
world-class ass. After a few more attempts I settled on an approach
that presented the book as a personality test, the reward for which
would be access to Francoise, as I now began to call
her.

“
Have you read Diary Of An Oxygen Thief? I find I can tell a
lot about a guy from his reaction to it. Are you game?”
One
guy asked me to elaborate on the farm machinery thing;
you were
in france? is that your home? j’adore la france
. The fact that
he ignored the salacious image I had inserted in his head just
confirmed how dishonest these exchanges were. Any normal guy would
be forgiven for at least referring to the idea of a semi-naked girl
in a field full of French workers. The omission was so conspicuous
it was like complimenting a stripper on her nail
varnish.

“
I’ll pick up
a copy of oxygen thief on my way home.”

Laughter
delicious.

The older guys were so
thrilled they didn’t care if it was real or not.

“
You’re young
enough to be my daughter but I’m ok with that”

If a beautiful sexy girl
recommended a book because it was a good barometer of character I’d
assume she was just protecting her interests. Online dating was a
treacherous conniving world where men would do anything to get into
the pants of a girl like this. She was merely filtering the bad
ones. It was a simple test to see if they were worth meeting. They
would never suspect it was a guy posing as a fictional character
suggesting they read a true story purporting to be a
novel.

I was getting a glimpse of
what it was like to be intelligent and female in a world of
drooling men. Guys who had ticked
financial
or
medical
felt comfortable offering tips on how to improve my
photography. Why did they assume they knew better than a student of
photography? Because they were men and I was just some little
bitch. One idiot suggested I
boost the levels
as if the shot
was mistakenly shadowy. Then another guy pretended he’d read the
book when it was obvious he’d only read an online review. I knew
this because I had written it under an alias. When he offered to
pose for me I asked him to send some pictures and he sent three
pictures of himself naked with a huge frightening pole of flesh
sticking out of his midriff.

“
So what do
you need me for? You could fuck yourself with that.” I demurred
before blocking him. It was fun being female and beautiful. To
actually be the object of desire. A living breathing potential
possession.

One young guy volunteered
to fly me to Mexico to see the Mayan villages while we got high on
shrooms. Another guy older but well-kept, offered private boxes at
the opera and dinner at Le Cirque, yet another, a businessman with
not a suit in sight wanted to know my preference in hotels and my
shoe-size so he could lay out some options for when I arrived.
Young couples invited me for drinks
no strings attached
.
Out-of-town husbands were careful to mention their
expense-accounts. Filmmakers gave me two thumbs up. Architects
wanted to know my plans. Journalists promised to report back. Chefs
said I sizzled. Applicants all.

On the other end of the
scale there were the less confident respondents. These were guys
who knew they didn’t have a chance but felt they better send
something because hey you never know, she might have a thing for
bald short fat older guys. I had the power to lift these unsunned
and gnarly gnomes aloft. To absolve them. And grateful to find
themselves within spurting distance of my mighty vagina they
wobbled away to buy my book.

I wasn’t sure how much of
this was legal. I didn’t want to get into any real trouble.
Mischief was one thing but crime was another. It was as if I’d
broken into some forbidden never-before-seen Pharoah’s Tomb
containing treasures untold. I felt an eerie sense of
responsibility. Mustn’t knock anything over. Just take what you
need. I reasoned that if I just confined myself to selling books I
couldn’t be accused of desecration and would therefore be spared
the wrath of the curse. It would be seen as artistic
experimentation. “Your Honor, I was researching a book.”

But it couldn’t last.
Marian would have to be told before it went too far. And when that
happened I knew she’d want me to stop, which I really didn’t want
to do. What I wanted to do was select each state and systematically
hotlist every guy I could find and recommend the book ceaselessly
until I exhausted the cities, towns and backwaters of this
wonderful country. After all, Barnes and Noble had stores in every
major city in the US and I had access to datemedotcom’s members in
all of them. And if I could sell that many actual books there was
no reason to believe it wouldn’t do even better as an ebook. Of
course I’d tell her. Just not right away.

I didn’t overtly need to
say Francoise was French in her profile, I merely included
French
in her
languages spoken section,
and being
female, there was no need to send out initial messages since the
men were expected to make the first move. Each email was subtle and
polite on the surface but trace it back to its source and there was
a stiffening dick. It was fascinating to watch these guys wrestle
the same subject I myself had spent so many hours trying to
perfect. They approached gently as if nearing a retarded lamb and
even though my headline was fairly bold;
Likes art culture and
sex, maybe even all at the same time,
very few actually made
any overt reference to it. There I was in my thigh-high stockings,
virtually waving my ass in their faces but these mealy-mouthed
modern males had been so consistently conditioned to conceal their
true desires under courteous cloaks they made a girl feel dirty
standing there in her underwear. In response to my beautiful
jaw-dropping ass all they could say was
I find you
intrigueing
? No mention of what they’d like to do to it or me?
One guy, after going on and on for paragraphs about some
excruciating pseudo-intellectual treatise on photography broke down
and got to the point;
by the way, do you like to be tied up?
By the way? Surely this what he wanted to know in the first place.
I responded;
no, do you like to be gagged?
Delete.
Block.

The guy behind the counter
at St Mark’s Bookstore was pleasantly suspicious

“
I know
you’re doing something, I just don’t know what”

“
It’s crazy
isn’t it?” I said innocently.

“
Well
whatever it is we’re burning through the copies.”

If he asked any of these
eager customers where they’d heard about this little literary
oddity they were not going to say
a hot french girl with a
gorgeous ass from an online dating site wanted me to read it as a
prerequisite to fucking her.
No. They were going to say a
friend recommended it. This would translate to the booksellers as
that most coveted of sales phenomenon.Word of mouth.

It was becoming obvious
that men would do or say anything to get into the pants of a twenty
three year French girl, and it didn’t stop at age fifty or even
sixty. There were no exceptions, only variations. One guy, a Brit,
tried to play on my insecurity when he accused me of
oozing
entitlement
He had guessed correctly that amongst the flurry
offawning emails such an approach would stand out. It was
interesting that a Brit should be the one to take this approach;
his first contact with the object of his desire was to attempt to
instil in her a feeling of inferiority.