The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz Read Online Free PDF

anybody she wanted, and it never bothered me. She could’ve gone back to Charlie and his brawny shoulders for all I cared. Because Mandy and I had something more significant than just sex. Sex just for sex’s sake doesn’t mean anything. What would’ve made me insane with jealousy is if I ever found out that Mandy was cuddling with somebody. Oh God, the mere thought of it was enough to make my blood boil. Anything that seemed too romantic was off limits, as far as I was concerned. She couldn’t take a walk in the park with a guy and hold his hand, and I wasn’t crazy about candlelight dinners either. But cuddling was so out of bounds, it wasn’t even open for discussion. Cuddling was intimate. No, no, no cuddling! You put the dick in, you take it out, you walk away, end of story. You want to cuddle? Come see me.
    I thought we had the perfect arrangement, but apparently Mandy didn’t feel the same way. One day, completely out of the blue, she put her foot down.
    “I’m going to stop seeing other guys,” she told me. “And I want you to stop seeing other girls.”
    “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t argue with her. I didn’t like the idea of having sex with just one person, but I was too much in love with Mandy to protest.
    She gave me a disbelieving look, as if she knew I didn’t completely understand. “That means Karen, too,” she added.
    “O-okay,” I said with a gulp. “I’ll stop seeing her.”
    “That’s not good enough,” she said. “I want you to break up with her.”
    “Is that really necessary?”
    “Yes,” she said firmly. “You need to tell her in person. She won’t give you up unless you say the words. Do it today.”
    I was like putty in her hands. What choice did I have?
    So I slinked over to Karen’s house and told her that it was over between us. It took me a while to find the right words. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t know how to break up with her gracefully. She listened silently as I stammered and overexplained, trying to make her understand. She didn’t try to change my mind. She knew that she couldn’t compete with my feelings for Mandy. It was probably one of the most painful things I’d ever done in my life. I hated every minute of it.
    We sat on her bed, and she cried, and I was helpless to do anything to make it better.
    It was the first and only time that I ever dumped a girl.

    I ’m not sure why Mandy and I eventually drifted apart. There were a lot of reasons I could point to. For one thing, I graduated early from high school and enrolled in Queens College, where I was hanging out with a very different crowd. But more than that, our lifestyles were becoming increasingly disparate.
    A few years into our relationship, I learned that Mandy was taking drugs. Not just pot, but the harder stuff, like LSD. She had started experimenting when she was still dating Charlie, who socialized with Jamaican foreign-exchange students and had access to all the drugs he could handle. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mandy was regularly sneaking into the girls’ bathroom at our school to do drugs with her friends. It was a world that I couldn’t have known less about. I never tried drugs; I never even had an interest in them. I smoked pot a few times during school field trips and didn’t care for it. Mandy was a different story. She loved getting high, and I didn’t have a clue how to help her.
    She visited me occasionally at Queens College, and during the summers when I worked as a waiter at the Catskills. But her visits became less and less frequent. The last time I saw her, she was at a drug rehabilitation center in New Jersey. I heard from a friend that she kicked the habit and went to college, where she got straight A’s, and that she was now working at a lab for a major chemical company. But she never contacted me again. To this day, I still don’t know where she is and what she’s doing with her life.
    I still think about Mandy sometimes, and I remember