“Nice Ass”

A woman who is used to getting a reaction, Samantha was dismayed when no one, not even the framer, commented on the nude photos she had commissioned.

When the photoshoot was over and the results hung in a pure-class, charcoal-matted frame next to the front door of her studio apartment in the meatpacking district, Samantha allowed herself a little fast food. She was, after all, extremely hungry after her diet of hot water and lemon. And since she was splurging on convenience-eating indulgences, Samantha even had her cheeseburger and fries delivered in a greasy paper bag.

The delivery guy caught sight of the boudoir portrait and told Sam: “Nice ass.”

“I didn’t tip you enough,” she said, handing him a twenty.

And just like that, Samantha formed one of the longest male relationships she had in the city: her late-night food delivery guy. Once in a blue moon, often with a post-coital companion, Samantha would order in from her favorite burger place, the only guilty pleasure she actually considered taboo.

Over time, Samantha would learn that this delivery guy, Ramone, moved to the city from Jersey, where he had worked at a wallpapering company. His former boss had almost gotten mixed up with the first lady of organized crime in the Garden State. The boss came to his senses in time to avoid any dangerous liaisons, and instead of the planned rendezvous, he sent his assistant, Ramone, to finish the contract at the mafia don’s McMansion.

A few weeks later, Ramone walked into the paint store and saw his boss chatting with the woman in question. After she left, Ramone’s boss turned to him and said: “Do you know who she’s married to?”

That was enough for Ramone. He was sick of his boss making out with clients while he was in the next room or lying that Ramone had backed over his lunch cooler with the company van to get clients to cook for him. Ramone quit that day. He moved away from Jersey to avoid any association with the “family” whose members could beat a waiter to death for complaining they had not tipped him enough.

Ramone took the first job he could find, running deliveries for a greasy burger joint. He met Samantha a year later, and as long as she lived in the meatpacking district, Ramone continued to deliver her beef.

I couldn’t help but wonder, why did we never see the nude portrait hanging in Samantha’s apartment again? Did she move it? I tried to google Samantha Jones nude photo, but I just got a bunch of results for pornography.

But that night, as Samantha tore into her cheeseburger, she looked out the window of her studio. It was still too early for her prostitute friends to be working their corner, so as she chewed, Samantha watched Ramone walking down the middle of her street. He threw his arms up, clutching the $20 in one fist, and shouted into the night: “I love New York!”

Photo of a TV. Like I said, this image is tough to google.

Postmortem Pucchiac

“They’re starting to die on us,” Miranda declared over brunch.

“No, Miranda,” I said, “I promise no more deaths.” And I meant it. I was running out of ways to resurrect certain gentlemen from New Jersey.

Unfortunately, Miranda was talking about a man who really was dead. Will O’Connor was an urban planner who Miranda met-cute at Starbucks. She thought he had stood her up, called to confront him, and learned from his mother that he had died of a heart attack at the gym.

At the wake, Miranda met Will’s college roommate—my old boyfriend, Asshole Jim. He said he and Will were very competitive, so I opined that they were the classic frenemies, and he praised my wordplay. He wrote his thesis on Robert Lowell and said he always read my column: quite literary for a civil engineer. When I dated him, Jim had hair down to his ass and sang in a band called Uncle Ted’s Ass.

I gave Miranda my blessing, however cautious and doubtful, telling her I thought Jim should be voted off the island of Manhattan. They went to dinner and a poetry reading. I happened to be present when the relationship rapidly imploded, and after hearing Jim childishly whine “the fancy lawyer lady is breaking up with me,” I got to gloat on the way home.

Miranda, who repeatedly claims trashy celebrity tabloids are “my thing, I love it, let it go,” despite only expressing interest in these magazine for like a month, was nevertheless flipping through one during our brunch. She landed on a spread about the anniversary of the movie Swingers, checking in on Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn and some of their other projects.

It got me thinking about my own stint in Hollywood, which involved taking meetings with Matthew McConaughey, watching a weird lip-dub thing happen with Sarah Michelle Gellar, and getting mistaken for a hooker and thrown out of bed by Carrie Fisher. The tall drink of water I dated out there, however, was just as cute as Vince Vaughn.

The tabloid reported Favreau had wrapped a movie with Janeane Garafolo and Sandra Bernhardt playing lesbian assassins whose silencers underscored their voiceless places in society. He got tired of people always asking about Vince Vaughn. A paparazzi photo showed Favreau standing with a production company vice president and her boyfriend: none other than Asshole Jim.

Miranda and I both decided to let sleeping assholes lie, and neither of us scrutinized why Jim would be going by Gregory or how long he had been dating the redheaded D-girl—er, I mean VP. Why perform a postmortem when everyone had gotten out alive?

“I’m staying way out of this one,” Miranda said.

“Way out,” I agreed. “New Jersey out.”

And just like that, I remembered Jim was from Jersey and had a cousin named Christopher Moltisanti. I kept hearing that name, and the man definitely had a weakness for women in Monolo Blahniks. I couldn’t help but wonder: Was he single?

Pinocchio e La Favolosa

After so much blood and gore and fecal matter, I was relieved when Samantha said she had a sweet story to share with me, one she promised would be dolce, dolce, Dolce.

This time, we met for Aperol spritzes in the West Village at Bar Pisellino…which is Italian slang for penis.

“Really?” I asked when I found Samantha waiting for me at the bar, cocktail already in hand, “Con te Partiro” blaring over the speaker system. “You couldn’t have picked a bar with a more obvious name?”

“Oh, honey, it’s just good PR. They know their audience. Best Aperol spritz in the city AND the name translates to ding-a-ling? Welcome to the cougar den.”

“Well ring-a-ding-ding,” I drawled as I looked around the room, indeed full of women of a certain age and promiscuity. One walked up to us wearing the most fabulous Dolce dress, strapless and turquoise. “Ciao.”

“Fendi?” I asked, petting her handbag and speaking my love language: Italian fashion design.

“Never!” The woman spit on the floor. “Roma has a war with us.”

“Carrie, this is Annalisa.”

I endured European air kisses. “Have we met before?”

“Bella, no, your column is about disposable men, remember? I come from Napoli and am such a, come si dice, favolosa character that I simply had to manifest in your little stories.”

“She’s like a cross between your friend Amalita and my friend Claire Ann,” Samantha said. “But so much more fabulous. Plus, she knows what it’s like to be a woman boss in the full Madonna-whore equation.”

I suddenly felt jealous of Annalisa. “Samantha, are we breaking up?”

“It can’t hurt to start seeing other people.” Samantha sipped her cocktail. “You never know what the future may bring.”

And just like that, I had to picture my world without Samantha.

“Annalisa and I have a mutual friend,” Samantha was saying. “Do you remember my short little lover, Jeff? The big dick with a little man attached?”

I did remember. Jeff had picked up Samantha with his charm and business acumen while seated at a bar, and it was only when he stood up to leave, having secured a date with Sam, that she realized he could only reach her nipples. He cracked her when he joked that she must shop at the Big & Tall Whore Store.

“You made it work with him for two weeks and then he just disappeared without explanation?”

“I get bored.” Samantha waved away the question. “Annalisa has informed me that Jeff was a real-life Pinocchio!”

“I’m going to need some details.” I leaned forward conspiratorially. “Did his pisellino grow a few inches every time he told a lie? If that was the case, all men should suffer the same affliction.”

“Sweetie, trust me, he needed no help in that department. And there is such a thing as too big, even for me.” I remembered: Mr. Too Big. If a woman of Samantha’s talents had given up, I worried about the poor guy ever getting laid.

“This man, Jeff, the tiny one, he is working as a waiter in my favorite restaurant,” Annalisa explained. She lit a Monopolio di Stato cigarette and began waving it around.

I had to ask: “Can we smoke in here?”

“I dabble in la stregheria, come si dice, witchcraft, like all women,” Annalisa said, ignoring my question and talking loudly with her hands. “Sibyls, curses with toenail clippings, herb gardens, psychic powers, animal familiars, yes?”

“Capeche,” I nodded, afraid to say anything else.

“This Goffredo, Jeff, he is such a good waiter while we are entertaining some Americans visiting from the other side. They make fun of the food and think we do not notice, ask for macaroni with gravy, worse than classless Germans. So I say he needs a vacation, I can send him anywhere he wants for two weeks. He tells me he always wished to be a big shot on Wall Street when he grew up.”

“So you made him a real boy,” I nodded.

“Who had to shop in the boy’s department at Bloomingdale’s,” Samantha added.

“This, he did not care about,” Annalisa shrugged. “He wants only to meet a beautiful woman and make love to her for the entire fortnight.”

I raised a questioning eyebrow at Samantha. She nodded in confirmation.

I couldn’t help but wonder: could Annalisa put a spell on me, too? If we all fantasize about living la dolce vita in Neapolitan novels or Tuscan villas, why are so many of us still stuck in the daily grind of the city? Without his strings to hold him down, Jeff had made his dreams come true, in the form of Samantha. Why couldn’t I?

Annalisa swished her Dolce into the kitchen, the staff too stunned to stop her.

“Let’s hope she doesn’t drop ashes in the moozadell,” I quipped.

Samantha lowered her voice: “Wouldn’t matter. She is acting boss of the crime family back in Naples.”

“The don is a Donatella?”

“Everyone thinks her husband is in charge, but she runs things while he serves a life sentence.”

“So the godfather is a fairy godmother, flitting around, granting wishes on stars.”

“Oh, honey, I am going to miss your little jokes.”

“Samantha…” I teared up.

“Let’s just make the most of the time we have left together, shall we?” Samantha soothed.

Annalisa emerged from the kitchen, heavy appetizers plated in both hands. “Mangiamo!”

Quick reminder and spoiler alert: this is a series of short stories connecting the shared actors between Sex and the City and The Sopranos…and, when I absolutely can’t help myself, another character that actor has played. These will probably only make sense if you have seen both shows…or in this case, all three.

Headhunted

Not long after I learned that I had accidentally set Miranda up on a date with a ghost, Samantha shared some equally disturbing news over sips of sake at the Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill on Columbus Circle.

“Do you remember my assistant Matt?”

“The rude guy you fired and then fucked on the front desk?”

“That’s the one. Did you ever actually meet Matt?”

“I can’t say I had the pleasure. Why?”

“Well, it seems no one did.”

“How did you hire him?”

“I was literally on the phone with Mitch, my headhunter, when Matt walked into my office. I just assumed Mitch had sent him and hired him on the spot.”

“Did you check out his references?”

“I checked out his pecs,” Samantha purred, “and honey, they were excellent.”

“Wait, didn’t this guy insult like half your client list over the phone?”

“That’s the thing. It was always just me and him, two alpha dogs in heat, caged inside an office suite. No one else ever saw him. He had horrible phone etiquette, even told some wannabe music promoter from Jersey that her parties sucked, but my career never suffered.”

“You have had some terrible assistants,” I nodded, thinking of Nina G. and the one whose leisurely lunch break allowed me to walk in on Samantha blowing the Worldwide Express guy. “I never understood why you kept him around for a whole week.”

Samantha inspected her flower cocktail ring. “He called me a boo-yah hottie and said he wanted to make sure I got the respect I deserved without having to get my nails dirty.”

“That reminds me: I still owe you a manicure for that time you fished out my diaphragm.”

“Oh, honey, I wrote that off a long time ago. We all know how terrible you are with money.”

“I am not.”

“Please. Have you paid Charlotte back for the down payment on your apartment?”

“I dedicated my book to her!”

Samantha smirked. “Did you pay her back?”

“She put me on a payment plan,” I said quietly.

“And I’m obviously paying for drinks and those secret-menu appetizers tonight. May I continue?” Samantha looked out across the rooftop bar toward the park. “He was always talking about someone named Matthew Bevilaqua, and maybe I wasn’t paying attention because I thought his own name was Matt, but it was actually Sean Gismonte. Matt Bevilaqua was his roommate and partner back in Jersey.”

“Were they gay?”

“That was definitely implied, but he was able to perform when I wanted him to, so no complaints there.”

“Good for you.”

“He did tell me they spent a lot of time hanging out in their underwear together, though, and Matt called him Jizz,” Samantha looked momentarily pensive. “You know, short for Gismonte?”

“If you say so.”

“So when I submitted all his I-9 information—because I am, after all, the sole proprietor of my own PR firm, Samantha Jones Public Relations—I got a call from my accountant that the information he provided was wrong.”

“Because his name was Sean Gismonte and not Matthew Bevilaqua?”

“Because he was dead.”

Now I was getting scared. I couldn’t help but wonder: are we so desperate for a decent date that we have started to unearth the undead? First Miranda and now Samantha had experienced this strange new phenomenon. Is the island of Manhattan in such short supply of suitable men that we have to import the recently deceased from New Jersey?

By the time Samantha had straightened all this out with her accountant and Mitch the headhunter, Matt/Sean had long since ghosted her. Sam learned that Sean Gismonte had been mentored into the DiMeo crime family by none other than Christopher Moltisanti, friend of Samantha’s tantric celibacy guru Brendan “Siddhartha” Filone (RIP). Both Sean and Matt had their stockbroker’s license and once beat the shit out of a fellow cold-caller.

“Three months before he walked into my office, an assassination attempt gone wrong resulted in a gunfight that left Moltisanti alive but in a coma. Jizz was found shot through the head.”

“Talk about bad head,” I opined, but Samantha gave me a withering glance.

“He was still strapped into his seatbelt, hanging out the passenger side of what was presumably his best friend’s ride,” Samantha nodded knowingly. “But the driver fled the scene.”

“Obviously Bevilaqua?”

“He said Matthew Bevilaqua always made him do the talking, which might be why he was so verbose working my phone lines. He also brought me a bunch of stockings as gifts; said he had loads of them.” Samantha took a deep breath. “And speaking of loads, the strangest thing happened after I fired and fucked him.”

“Something weird happened after you had sex with the ghost who worked as your assistant?”

“He squatted right in the corner of my office and…defecated.”

And just like that, I learned that Samantha could literally fuck the shit out of a man.

I stared at her for a moment. I had to admit, I was a little impressed, if also completely disgusted. “Is this a new fetish?” I finally asked her.

“Could be adrenaline? Irritable bowel syndrome? Who the fuck cares? All I know is I had to recarpet my office and find a new assistant.” Samantha drained her sake and poured us both another.

“So where is he now? Still floating around doing his unfinished business on other people’s floors?”

“My guess is he gigged as a plumber and joined the Fatberg Five, that task force that dislodges calcified waste from the sewers, before disappearing on his honeymoon to Italy.”

It sounded like Matt/Sean found his calling in the afterlife. I was tempted to make a bunch of body-waste puns, like when I dated that politician who wanted me to pee on him, but I was too stunned to utter a single quip that would glibly summarize my friend’s headhunting sexcapade.

Neither of us had much of an appetite when the waitress arrived with our pu pu platter.

The Freak Assassin

A wise woman once said: “I believe there is a curse put on the head of anyone who tries to fix up their friends.”

That woman was me, in 1998, after I set Miranda up on a date with a grown man named Skipper, who would be in and out of our lives for two years before disappearing entirely. I must not have learned my lesson, because in 1999 I once again set Miranda up on a date, this time with a guy who turned out to be the biggest freak in all of Manhattan.

Luke was a friend of Ben, the fellow journalist I met-cute in front of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Ben unceremoniously dumped me when, in pursuit of the freakish truth, I ransacked his studio apartment and uncovered a wooden box containing his childhood collection of merit badges. Ever the boy scout, Ben got in touch again recently to share some strange goings-on.

“I wanted to reach out to you because you’re the only person I ever introduced to Luke,” Ben said over the phone. Intrigued, I arranged to meet Ben back at the carousel where we last saw Luke. The double-date had taken a turn for the worse somewhere around the Häagen-Dazs cart, and even though a guy buying her junk food was usually on the expressway to Miranda’s heart, she evoked our “I have to feed my cat” bad-date code. When I selfishly tried to argue, she reiterated that she was leaving to feed Fatty, and Luke uttered, “Cat people: all freaks.”

“The man hasn’t left Manhattan in a decade,” Miranda hissed at me. “And by the way, if Luke’s a freak, Ben is bound to be a freak too.” Then off she went to feed Fatty, eating her frozen consolation prize and once again regretting that she had allowed me to set her up.

“The thing is, she was right,” Ben said as we retread our brief history together over those same Häagen-Dazs bars in the park. “Luke is more than a freak—he is a freaking ghost!”

“Excuse me?” I shouted, startling the children on the merry-go-round.

As Ben explained it, he only knew Luke from the park, where Luke liked to heckle Ben’s weekend soccer team. “We were really bad,” Ben admitted, “but this jackass in a black leather jacket would just mock us from the sidelines.”

“He never wanted to play?”

“He was always wearing that jacket,” Ben shook his head. “Anyway, it never occurred to me that I only knew this guy within the confines of the park, and I thought nothing of it when he suggested we meet here for our double date.”

“So when he said he hadn’t left Manhattan in over ten years…”

“It was a promise he had made to his mother, that he would never go back to Jersey and get mixed up in his father’s business. His father was a guy named Donato Paduana, who used to do murders for hire in the 80s until someone got the jump on him. Anyway, little Luca kept his promise and moved here after college.”

“And he didn’t leave for ten whole years?”

“Not until a friend of his father’s offered him a crazy amount of money to kill some guy real high up.”

“How high?”

“Like, this guy was nephew of the acting boss at the time.”

“Who ordered the hit?” I was quite pleased with my mastery of mob-talk, but Ben looked scared.

“The acting boss himself, the uncle, plus—get this—the guy’s own mother wanted him popped.”

“No!”

“So the guy you and I know as Luke is actually little Luca Donato Paduana. He went by Donnie back in Jersey where everyone knew his dad, Donato, and even though Donnie promised his mother to never try to fill his father’s cement shoes, he took the assignment. He was going to do this one job, just one, and even tried to farm it out to some subcontractors, but everything got snarled. So he caught a bus to Jersey, got lost driving around Newark in his old Pontiac from high school—because he hadn’t left the island or driven a car in ten years—and got himself shot in the head.”

“When was this?”

“March of 1999.”

“But we went on our double-date like three months after that.” I had done my due diligence and checked my past columns to verify dates.

“Right, and I had known him almost three months when I introduced him to you and Miranda. But he was already dead! I finally put two and two together when I realized the dude had never aged…or changed clothes.”

“At least a black leather jacket is a timeless style choice.”

“Donnie, aka Little Luca, promised his mother he would stay out of the family business while they were having lunch at Tavern on the Green, so now he’s doomed to wander Central Park forever with his unfinished business.”

“He’s still here?” I yelped again.

“He was supposed to shoot that mafia boss.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I know. Nobody can. That’s why I am here, Carrie, to make sure you remember him and can vouch that I am not losing my mind.”

“Ben, you were one of the sanest guys I have ever dated.”

“Do you think Miranda would verify that she saw him too?”

“Eh—”

“Please, Carrie, you know the Times requires two independent sources to fact-check.”

“Oh, you’re at The New York Times now?”

“Well, yeah—I’m a real journalist. I was editing that hip political magazine when we met, remember?”

“I’m remembering why we broke up…you’re kind of smug.”

“We were a non-couple, so we couldn’t break up. You turned into a freak right after we slept together.”

“And now you’re asking me to call my friend Miranda to meet a ghost for ice cream so you can write about it in the paper of record? I was wrong Ben; you are a freak!” I stomped off holding the Häagen-Dazs bar he had bought me as a bribe.

I couldn’t help but wonder: if a journalist from The New York Times was asking me to call up my friend so we could all wait for the ghost of bad dates past in Central Park, was journalism well and truly dead? If even the stately Gray Lady of newspapers has to resort to cheap parlor tricks and stories about the occult to resuscitate circulation rates, maybe my unfinished business would be the stories I would never get to write when my newspaper folded.

She already believed any date I set her up on was cursed, so I never mentioned anything to Miranda about Luke’s curse. I suppose she can just read about it here, in my lowly sex column, like everyone else.

And just like that, I scooped The New York Times.

I just watched The Sopranos all the way through for the first time, an undertaking that consisted of me yelling, through a mouthful of pasta, “That guy was on Sex and the City!” every other episode.

A fictionalized Michiko Kakutani, a real-life book reviewer for The New York Times, once wrote in a fictional review of Carrie Bradshaw’s fictional nonfiction book: “All in all, I enjoyed spending time in Ms. Bradshaw’s sharp, funny, finely drawn world, where single women rule and the men are disposable.” Indeed, men are disposable in both shows, although The Sopranos’ waste-management systems make sure most of those men are literally disposed of, while Sex and the City just regulates the cast-offs to the Island of Misfit Toys, aka the parts of Manhattan we never see in the show.

Written in the voice of Our Lady of the Voiceover and Patron Saint of Working from Home, Ms. Carrie Bradshaw, I present to you: Sex and the Sopranos, a column in The New York Star. I will have one for you every week of the summer, posting at 8pm each Sunday (real ones know why).

Samantha, Siddhartha, and Brendan

Remember that week Samantha was celibate? I do. We all do, what with the way she bitched and moaned about it.

Her latest boy toy, Siddhartha, was a voluntary celibate she met in our yoga class, hitting on him as he assisted opening her goddess pose while I lay on the mat next to her. They had tea at Tofu or Not Tofu, then practiced brachmacharya (or tantric non-sex) together for a few days until, somewhere between plow pose and horny warrior, Samantha cracked. She took home the first person in the room to agree to her proposition “Want to fuck?” (I, thankfully, skipped yoga that day.) Samantha left Siddhartha sweating bullets of lust down his chiseled cheekbone.

It turns out his name was not really Siddhartha. I know, I am as shocked as you! His real name was Brendan Filone, and he had traveled a long way to Manhattan: through the Lincoln Tunnel from the exotic land of New Jersey. His three-year stint into the celibacy experiment preceded and belied a much darker history of guns, violence, and an actual pork store in the Newark suburbs. His willpower was no match for the power of Samantha’s tantric tantrum, so seeing her run out of the yoga studio to enjoy meaningless sex was too much for Siddhartha. He first broke his vow of celibacy…and then he broke his vow of nonviolence.

Shedding the robes of Siddhartha, Brendan emerged and returned full-force to his life in the New Jersey underworld. He took up with a childhood friend, Christopher Moltisanti, and the two engaged in some sort of rogue operation where they held up delivery trucks at gunpoint. Now, no one appreciates fine Milanese craftsmanship more than I do, but stealing an entire truckload of Italian suits is taking the love of fashion a step too far.

Not long after, Brendan was found shot dead in his bathtub, the water in the tub diluted with blood. Brendan’s last cigarette floated in the tub with him for days, with that same Chinese character tattoo on his forearm resting just above the water’s surface. And just like that, both Siddhartha and Brendan ceased to exist.

Samantha expressed no remorse when learning of the death. “As far as I am concerned, a man who refuses to have sex with me simply does not exist—whatever name he goes by.” She said I could quote her on that.

I couldn’t help but wonder: With our sex lives comprising so much of our actual lives, is taking a vow of celibacy signing our own death warrant? Did Brendan die in that apartment bathtub, by the gun of a killer who has never been caught, or did he really die the day he changed his name to Siddhartha and willingly gave up sex? Sure, Sting tells us tantric sex is better than regular sex, and surely it’s better than no sex at all, but at what cost? In a city that never sleeps, is celibacy the big sleep?