11.12.00 2 a.m.

Tonight I rejected a published writer. Check me out. I looked great -- I had on a new outfit, very '60s Carnaby Street with some '70s thrown in for my own comfort, all red and black and white and silver hoops. I even had on red lipstick, and had gotten someone else to cut my hair for the first time in months -- how could he resist?

The Published Writer was reading at the Jerkwater. He and another, possibly slightly more famous writer (or actually just a Slightly More Hyped Author) were in town for a local paper's "festival of reading." What a concept -- I picture misanthropic, Society for Creative Anachronism types all done up like the Bard and Emily Dickinson, or perhaps like Gatsby in spats, fingering their dog-eared favorites like tree-pulp genitalia. My favorite local prick, JOURNAL MAN, had booked the two hip writers for a gig at the bar, probably mostly for his own gratification. Some people showed up and, after some music, the writers read, gratifying us in turn. The Published Writer went first. He talked about his baldness, his experiences screwing post-op transsexuals and general perversity.

I could relate.

He was obviously drunk, but flushed from a tawdry trip out to the parking lot with a blah chick writer from the reading fest. The Slightly More Hyped Author had joked that The Published Writer had gone out to the parking lot for his "50,000 mile service." He'd also asked me to be sure and jot down a journal entry for the memorisists to use later. Arrogant, yes, but they're both arrogant, and self-centered. Of COURSE they are;, par for the course, as it were. They're WRITERS. It's an occupational hazard, like carpal tunnel syndrome or runner's eye -- Journalman's got it, I've got it, and these guys have got it in spades. They're higher on the lettered food chain, though. It's effortless and compulsive in either case, Journalman and me or these two guys, but instead of it falling off them as it does from us, like acrid sweat, they play the literary ladies and GLOW. But still, it stinks a little.

The Slightly More Hyped Author went on after another set of music. He let fly with exaggerated accounts of his own illustrious career, his city-sized delusions morphing seamlessly with his supposed real self, turning him into a great, ironic shadow of himself, turning in on itself. He also read poetry, god bless him. At one point, he called upon me, by name (I had met the two the night before, at another bar) to silence a local drunk. I was flattered into action and obliged, my hand on the drunk's spitty mouth and my lips on his ear: "Sshh, Dave, sshh," like the Scene Mother I sometimes wish I'd become, that perhaps I could have been in a more magnanimous town, or if journalism hadn't pulled me onto a bitchier path.

I should add here that The Published Writer had seemed mildly interested in me the night before. I should also add that he had asked me to have an e-mail romance with him. As this has been my primary method of dating this year, I readily slid my e-mail address into his pocket -- like the regular Marty Maraschino I'm turning into these days.

Most ladies in the reading audience will remember Marty -- she was Dinah Manoff's character in "Grease," the girl with the arm-length list of long-distance lovers. But where she had a billfold of photos ensconced in plastic pockets to show friends during sleepovers, I have only an e-mail Inbox to unfurl. At my next slumber party, my pals will crowd around the CRT screen and shriek in unison, "Ooooh, a Published Wriiiiiter!!"

As he got drunker, he was a marvel to watch -- he would dance and flirt, and as soon as the current object of his affections would move away, he would simply turn 10 degrees in either direction and begin talking to the soft-smelling thing, unconditionally lascivious. Exhibit A: Educated, almost famous middle-class white guy, out on a rock star trip. It was marvelous, in this sea of apathy that I'm used to, to watch someone whose libido was so relentless. After all, he'd just read aloud his own account of fucking a woman twice his age, readily admitting that he'd all the while been murmuring "mommy, mommy" in his mind. Yet still, he had the presence of dick to expect women to accept his advances.

At some point he turned his attention to me exclusively. He managed to get me in a corner and lean me up against him, and he began to say "all the right things." As I'd only had two drinks, I was very much aware of his action-working acumen. I called him a pro; he stroked my cheek, kissed my hand and pulled me to him, complimenting me on ephemeral qualities that every woman -- hell, every human -- wants to believe they possess. Surprising youthfulness, innate maturity, a nice ass ... sweet things poured from his lips, a booze-fueled hooey, calorie-rich but nutritionally bare. His erection was obvious; his voice was intent. He even stopped for a moment to give me writerly advice. Still, I played it coy, gently attempting to disengage my wrists from his grasp, sticking a toe out of the circle of pale darkness that barely bathed us, not quite hiding us from the rest of the bar.

I found myself growing more attracted to him -- theoretically. He admitted to being an Aries, and 36. These things, coupled with his Jewish heritage, convinced me to kiss him -- once. My clit's in my brain, anyway, so the idea of being naked with him -- a Published Writer -- was not a stretch. But my mind is such a jumble, these days, of nervous regret and confused intention that I couldn't readily locate the cerebral knob. In the end, I could only go with my gut, since what normally seemed natural -- fuck first, ask questions later -- seemed as faraway a possibility as, well, as this guy actually meaning a word that he was saying.

But I kept stepping slightly out of my body, looking on the scene and saying, "who is that? who is that girl saying 'no,' telling him that this behavior is 'inappropriate'? Where is the slut that I know and love?" Lord knows I've gone home with less. One time I hooked up with a waiter at a theme restaurant in Oklahoma City, where I was eating dinner with my immediate family on the occasion of my brother's graduation from law school. His work uniform was that of a sultan. Later that evening, I fucked him in the backseat of his car, in the parking lot of his therapist's office.

Yet here I was, pushing The Published Writer away, claiming that my ride wanted to leave, like a squirrelly high school virgin, saving herself for the captain of the football team.

But then there's the public aspect. He was dry-humping me in the corner of the bar, for chrissakes, with 50 of my closest friends in attendance. One girl even took a picture. Paparazzi, Tampa-style -- someone you know with a disposable camera. One male friend said that he had to walk outside, because the scene was making him uncomfortable. And this is not the first time this bar has seen me do this. How important is my public persona in this town? At least important enough to make the events transpiring in that half-dark corner not exclusively my own.

So I held my ground -- I slipped out like a schoolgirl, and now I'm home. I'm writing this down, trying to justify the whole thing by putting it into words, and it's not quite working. Everything I do these days casts everything I've done into further doubt. I denied myself this experience because of another long-distance entanglement, purportedly. Will this feeling ever go away, I wonder, this fear of giving up on the illustrious possibilities of ever-expanding experience, on the countless men that lay in wait for me to lay?

But what did I really miss out on by not going back to The Published Writer's hotel room? That would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to do -- easier than turning on the television and watching "VIP" till I fall asleep on the couch, when I could be slaving away on a short story or a poem. And I would prefer to think of Fucking a Published Writer as something that would add to my internalized legend, would change his life as well as mine. And then there's always the fact that he would have fucked anything that stood still tonight. So what is there to regret, besides the not knowing for sure? And the need for sleep at 2:30 a.m., instead of toiling till dawn at this unfriendly machine.