Fuck Ups: That 'Sex and the City' Moment

Samuel Fuckett has been out of commission for a while. We aren't really sorry that we treated you badly, dear readers, but we are sorry that we missed out on the opportunity to be that guy at the party that everyone crowds around so that they can be exposed to the best stories, the best insights, and the best moustache. To restore the balance, I now bring you a Fuck Up with a happy ending that's totally worth the forty minute wait in line at that extra special Koreatown spa.

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Face it, we all move to New York because we want to be fucking awesome. We want to go back home to our high school reunions, look around with contempt, and feel all the self-satisfaction we never obtained in our adolescences. It's not just some cool facade we are trying to obtain, though. We truly believe that this city is home to the best and the baddest; if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere.

Now, why--when we live in lead-paint apartments run by known slum lords, spend our days smelling urine everywhere we walk, and occasionally have to pick mystery fish scales off our backpacks on the subway platform--would we believe something so unabashedly stupid? The answer is really simple: Sex and the City. It started when we were in elementary school, and thus completely perverted our worldviews, making us believe that we can, and in fact do, live in the most enriched, erotic, esoteric pop-reality ever projected onto the city of New York.

Even as the sorta-kinda-adults we are now, we still wake up every morning, look at ourselves in the mirror, and think, "This day, goddamnit. This is going to be the day that I leave the house as Samuel Fuckett and return as Carrie Bradshaw. This is going to be the day that I have my Sex and the City moment."

For one lucky friend of Samuel Fuckett's, however, that Sex and the City delusion has just become a sex-in-his-city phenomenon.

A works for one of those megalithic publishing companies that one can definitely imagine held board meetings at coke-dusted gentlemen's clubs in the eighties. Today, the ship is a little more tightly run and a lot more woman-friendly, but they still occupy multiple buildings throughout the city and millions of bookshelves around the world. Rather than buying lap dances for book buyers, A's employer now hosts optional lunchtime seminars on how to streamline shipping costs. (A really missed out on the golden days of marketing. Que será, será.)

A is the kind of guy who knows well enough that picking up a free sandwich in exchange for an hour of texting in the back of a sparsely populated presentation room while somebody yammers about FedEx means that he can buy two extra tequila shots at happy hour, so A skipped the line at Hale & Hearty in favor of the seminar.

The presentation was as boring as anticipated, but between texts of "Le sigh," to his galpals, A noticed a cute face across the room. A cute face with a familiar moustache. "Did this man solicit me for sex in the bathroom at Splash," A thought to himself, "or did I maybe give him a handjob in the sauna when I was on my third free trial at that gym in Chelsea?" Alas, no. After forty-five minutes of instructions about the difference between a DHL label and a courier label, A still could not identify the mysterious Moustache Man.

Disappointed and sorely in need of caffeine before his return to his cubicle, A abandoned the final five minutes of the shipping cost seminar and made a break for Starbucks.

Not a minute into his wait on line, someone said to A, "How about those statistics on how many employees make typos in the addressee's zip code?" A jerked his head up to look at the speaker. Moustache Man. In the flesh. And flirting.

"I know, right?" A said, and the men's feeble attempts at coy witticisms continued until both of their cappuccinos were hot and frothy.

Here, I could end the tale and let you think, "Ah, the beginning of a beautiful office romance." But alas, it was not to be. A and Moustache Man walked out of the Starbucks together, and each started walking in different directions only to realize that their big-ass employer occupies two buildings across the street from one another. Like the Romeo and Juliet of mass market paperback, they said, "See you around, I guess," and went their separate ways.

A returned home that night, put on a mud mask, looked in the mirror and thought to himself, "Tomorrow maybe. Tomorrow I will meet my Mr. Big." Ten minutes later, he crawled into bed with his laptop, cruised his favorite New-York-centric intellectual queer porn blog, read a few revolting messages on Manhunt, jerked off, and fell asleep.

A went back to Starbucks at the same time every day for the next week, looking around sheepishly for Moustache Man. After a while, the combination of coffee and consternation was giving him stomach pains, so he called it quits. Moustache Man was just another missed connection in the big city, and A was going to have to get the fuck over it. He spent the weekend binge drinking at straight bars and eating tacos with his girls. It worked moderately well.

The following Monday, A came home from work, put on a face mask, and curled up with his laptop for yet another night in alone. He opened up his favorite New-York-centric intellectual queer porn blog again, and clicked on a video interview with a gay performance artist so he could have something to talk about if he was ever fucking asked on a date.


There, right on screen, holding a microphone out to the artist, was Moustache Man. "Oh. My. Sonofabitch. Jesus," A thought, "I knew I recognized him from somewhere."


A thought some more: "What would Carrie Bradshaw do?"

Thirty minutes and two emails later, A had leveraged his sexy-city serendipity into a breakfast meet-up with two of his gay coworkers and one of his favorite geeky porn stars. Forty-five minutes and four emails after that, A had a date with Moustache Man that promised to end with a lot more than company-approved instructions for package weighing and envelope-licking.

When A woke up the next morning and looked at himself in the mirror, he thought, "Damn, Carrie Bradshaw, you doin' it up right today."