You read about me in the tabloids. The New York Post called me the “Booty Gnat,” a nickname I earned in the summer of 2008 when I used a Chinese-manufactured aluminum blow gun to shoot bamboo darts into the butts of curvy professional women working in the vicinity of Wall Street. Over a span of several months my darts pierced the flesh of 15 women, none of whom, I should add, were seriously hurt or injured. Of those 15 I think fondly of each of them from time to time, but only one still haunts my thoughts, my dreams. Only one, if she were to cross my path today, might tempt me to take up my old illegal ways and send a dart sailing across the air between us. .
Her name was Samantha Martinez, and I can say without exaggeration her butt worked the contours of her slacks with an artistry that convinced me the brain is not the sole locus of our intelligence, that all over our bodies there must be little brains, little masters working their wills. Certain men from certain backgrounds might have described Samantha as “dummy-thicc,” but not me. I would have reached for the very opposite meaning: Her ass had a singular genius, the likes of which I had never seen before and which I have not seen since, for all my searching along the tired boardwalks and casino floors of Atlantic City, where I live now with my brother-in-law.
The blow gun was purchased at a novelty shop in the East Village. The seller insisted the darts were no more painful than a horse fly, though in retrospect it’s hard to imagine what benign use cases he had in mind. Because the moment I placed my lips on the mouthpiece of that primitive instrument, my entire campaign of harassment appeared before my eyes like a vision. I saw myself stalking the twisting colonial alleyways of the Financial District, launching dart after dart into the butts of those previously untouchable working women, who every morning passed the hot dog stand near the Seaport where he worked.
And while it would be a credit to my intelligence, if not my moral compass, if I could say I understood how villainous my scheme was from the start, sadly my self-perception was more forgiving. Rather than a sex criminal I saw myself as a merry prankster, enlivening the streets of New York City with my antics like many a boho-bum before me. My actions would be a nuisance, yes, but hardly a danger to the public. I would be a pain in the ass and nothing more—a far better outcome, I thought, than making them suffer my actual presence, as they certainly would have if even once I had stepped out from behind the hot dog stand and simply asked them for the time.
I don’t need to tell you, enlightened reader, that these thoughts were delusional, and yet I cannot wholly condemn the man I used to be. It is necessary to preserve some part of him and his awful reasoning or else I might struggle to live with myself today. What follows then isn’t an excuse but an exercise in trying to account for one’s self and perhaps explain how one comes to shoot darts into the butts of unsuspecting women—a scenario which should have remained in the crustiest recesses of my imagination, but which instead was realized in the most public setting imaginable: Lower Manhattan in the year 2008, weeks before the market crashed and everything changed, for me, for you, for the bankers, seemingly peripheral events which nonetheless cast a blinding spotlight upon my lowly crime and inspired one political cartoonist to imply that it was I, the Booty Gnat, who popped the financial bubble with my bamboo darts.
For all the talk of accountability, however, I will not discuss every detail of my criminal career—you can read about those in the digital archives of The New York Post—but rather pick up the story right before it ends, as the NYPD was rapidly closing in. It was a Friday morning in late August. The weather was hot, humid. No wind circulated between the buildings, and the atmospheric stillness seemed to clash with the feverish market activity then happening at the stock exchange. I had taken the day off, leaving the hot dog stand to an imbecilic Turk named Zayneb whose preference for big breasts was a topic of daily debate between us, and I was coming out of the subway when I recognized Samantha. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans that in a previous life must have been a saint, for no object on this earth boasted as choice an assignment as that divinely deployed denim. Her magnificent rear-end had been passing the hot dog stand every weekday morning for the past year, and now that it was level with my face would tempt me into a pursuit through the heart of the Financial District, which would end, disastrously, in the shadow of Arturuo Di Modica’s charging bull, while a family of Portuguese tourists took turns taking pictures next to its bronze testicles.
The chase commenced on the stairwell up to Williams Street, in that fraught moment of collective strain when every New Yorker is pushing up from their knees towards the light, swaying with their backpacks and briefcases, teetering between exhaustion and exuberance, because on the other side of their efforts is the opportunity to emerge once more into New York City, where a secretary can be as attractive as a pornstar and a hot dog seller can harbor a secret desire to penetrate her flesh.
On the street Samantha navigated the crowds with an instinctual knack for avoiding the touch of others, balancing herself between them like the precious object she must have known herself to be. My own movements were clumsy by comparison, but more problematically for my purposes, lacking in surety or commitment. In every nerve of my body was a painful sensitivity to those eyes which I believed to be staring at me from every direction: plainclothes police, unmarked vans, countless good Samaritans eager to catch the notorious Booty Gnat. Real or imagined their scrutiny weighed on me, and the gym bag containing the blow gun suddenly felt heavy, conspicuous. My already pinkish skin darkened to red, and my small, unblinking eyes were set with the concentration of a dog staring up at the dinner table. I tried to soften my demeanor, to assume the easy manner of those who belong where they are. But as we passed the front lobby of a branch bank, my reflection lumbering across the surface forced upon me a brutal realization: that I looked the part a predatory pervert, the kind of marginal, menacing figure we pretend we are constitutionally incapable of becoming, but which, in the course of time and tedium, we can and do become, as we collapse inwardly upon our most compromised selves, like certain towers on certain dates.
I remembered then something Zayneb would say during our arguments.
He’d say, “you with your big butts, you’re like an animal. The tits, the tits cover up the heart, but the ass is just a basket for shit. I’m telling you, brother: You spend your life looking at asses, and you will never see the sun.” What a hypocrite, I thought at the time, as if his fetish were more forgivable because his favorite female part was mounted a little higher on the frame. And yet now, as I pulled the blow gun out of the gym bag and slipped it up my sleeve like a dagger or some other more lethal implement, I was beginning to see his point. My obsession had gotten me into real trouble, the severity of which was finally becoming clear to me. Very soon I was going to get arrested, and when it happened my embarrassment would be so complete it would spiritually annihilate me. The pariah you read about in the papers would truly be born. The Booty Gnat would become my identity, and everything that preceded him, that made him, would be erased, all those subtle, explanatory episodes: the voluptuous Brazilian prostitute who took my virginity after my brother-in-law’s bachelor party; the 1997 cover of Smooth Magazine featuring Coco Austin, wife of actor Ice T, whose epically proportioned behind inspired an almost religious devotion in me; and Becky Wilson’s silver-grey thong, which I spotted in the 8th grade and which perhaps more than anything else transformed me into a lifelong ass-man. In a single reputational blow, then, I would be forever condemned, and no one would ever hear about my aborted dreams: the botched attempts at business school, the sous chef position at that Greek place where I was fired after a young woman accused me of harassment, the disastrous investment in the gourmet food truck, which forced me to beg my recently widowed brother-in-law for a loan.
“You gotta stop this, George,” he’d said. “You’re not a businessman.”
Of course, I wasn’t a businessman, I wanted to say. I was an ass-man.
I often think back to my first shooting. It was Halloween of that year, and a woman named Melissa who would actually talk to Zayneb sometimes was wearing a costume I can only describe as “slutty Spiderman.” That morning, after she passed the hot dog stand and turned up Fulton, I told Zayneb I needed a break. “Why?” He asked. “Because I need to take a shit,” I said quickly. “Again, you take a shit? What is wrong with your ass, George? For a buttman, you have a terrible ass.”
I ignored him and chased after Melissa, catching up with her as she was waiting for the light at Water Street, her ass bulging under the nylon costume. It happened quickly, almost thoughtlessly. The blow gun was already taped inside the sleeve of my jacket, so I gently ripped it free, aimed, and blew a dart directly into the center mass of her left cheek. She yelped softly and rubbed at the spot below the strike, knocking out the dart in the process without ever realizing it was the source of her pain.
It was a smooth operation, all things considered. But after that things got messier, more risky, more strenuous. By the time I’d found Samantha that summer morning the process was sapped of satisfaction. I had become a hunted man. The whole of New York City wanted me behind bars, and my paranoia intensified as Samantha turned onto Wall Street, which was and is as securitized a zone as anyplace in Manhattan, a fact that is immediately tangible as you pass between the pylons and rusted metal car gates.
At the same time two men fell in behind me who I sensed were either cops or stockbrokers. They had tanned skin and sharp, black eyes, and just by looking at them I could tell their wives or girlfriends had big, smooth asses, which catered to their every sexual whim. I could tell those men had power: ass-power, to use a phrase popular with me at the time. A famous wrestler once said, “real strength isn’t in the arms. It’s in the ass.” I would have said something similar about power. Real power wasn’t in money or fame or force. It was in the ass. The ass was a kind of currency, and women like Samantha were its highest-valued denomination. Every time she carried that immaculate butt up into one of those towers, where men like them held sway, she joined herself into that great nexus of ass-power, where big, beautiful asses were in abundance and where there was no opposition or friction, just the smooth action of two cheeks on the same ass, holding each other harmoniously while the rest of us rubbed and chafed and itched.
I can still hear Zayneb refuting my bizarre theory while squeezing mustard onto a hot dog: “You are one crazy guy, George. Everything is butts, butts, butts with you. But why, brother? You seem like a smart guy. Why is it that you only ever talk about butts?”
Because, Zayneb, I was trying to justify myself—even then.
Even then I was trying to find the words to match the deeds.
What I still don’t understand though is why I blew that final dart when I knew the police were scouring the Financial District looking for me. Even an animal tries to protect himself, but not me, not George. The best I can do to explain myself nearly 20 years later is to describe what I saw and what I felt in that moment before it all came crashing down. In brief: As Samantha approached the revolving door of an office tower, which I assumed to be her place of work, a fear gripped me that soon she’d be completely inaccessible to me, that the elevators would lift her into the heights of that unscalable building and I’d be left standing on the sidewalk with a blow gun up my sleeve and a half-hard cock smashed against my inner-thigh. Now usually this would have been a tolerable outcome, being only one more instance of a woman I couldn't have or of an ass I couldn’t touch. But on that particular summer afternoon a dangerous notion entered into my mind: If not now, then when? If not this very moment, wasn’t it possible I could be forever denied? And if I could be forever denied, if the door to even the remotest possibility of satisfaction could be closed and remain closed until I had died, then in a way I was already dead. The interesting part though was I didn’t feel dead. I didn’t feel dead because in my hands, in the form of the blow gun, was a power sufficient to reverse the slipstream of inevitably that had so far determined my life. Even if the alternate timelines it created were more disastrous than the current one, at least they were proof my future wasn’t totally set, that a change was still possible in a place like New York City, where everything is so bound up in steel and piled over with slabs of concrete that the lives spent there have a heaviness, an intractability, which is made all the more tortuous by those occasional breakthroughs in energy, genius, beauty that can transpire so near to us and yet miss us entirely, soaring out into the space above our heads, into the crystal blue air that hangs between the skyscrapers we never visit and can barely even see from the ground. In the end, the blow gun would not get me the girl. It would not even really allow me to touch her booty, but still my dart would graze her flesh, and for all the uncrossable distances that lay between our very separate lives, that contact would be a kind of kiss: a brief, stinging intimacy. Terrible, yes, but certain.
“You’re a weird guy,” my brother-in-law said as we sat in his living room on Friday nights drinking beers and watching television.
“Everybody’s a little weird,” I said back.
“Yeah but you’re really fucking weird, George.”
"It's okay to be weird, Jeff. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”
“In your case, I’m not so sure. In your case, I get a little worried.”
“Worried? Worried about what?”
“Where it’s all headed,” he said.
Well, Jeff, this was where it was all headed: a bamboo dart soaring in an invisible arc toward Samantha’s butt and sticking into her right cheek, causing a pain so subtle that her only reaction was to swat at the air behind her body; and then, in the shadow of Arturo di Modica’s Charging Bull, a bystander spotting me, because in my triumph I held the blow gun to my lips for far too.
“Oh shit! That’s the Booty Gnat!”
“The Booty Gnat? Where?”
“That fat motherfucker over there—with the blow gun”
“I see him, I see him! Watch your butts, people! The Booty Gnat’s here.”
“Fuckin’ Booty Gnat—pervert piece-a shit. Let’s fuck him up.”
The angry New Yorkers attacked me and probably would have killed me if not for the police stopping them. And while there are some days when I would like to thank those officers for saving my life, there are others I wish maybe they had let those people tear me apart. Tonight at least, as I’m sitting on a bench across from the Hooters where I now work as a dishwasher, scribbling my thoughts into a notepad, I suppose I can thank them for the chance to consider all this with a little hindsight. It is a uniquely human privilege to be able to look back at ourselves and judge ourselves, and I have tried to be worthy of that privilege by being less like the animal Zayneb once accused me of being. The butt is not the sole object of my attention anymore, and I make a point to look up when the sun is shining. As for what happened after my arrest, there are no words to describe the misery of my imprisonment. Suffice it to say that it was a long, hard stretch, and when it was over I left New York City and moved into my brother-in-law’s condo outside Atlantic City. Now there are no Samanthas where I live, no perfect posteriors to draw the attention of my more constrained and yet still-unrequited desires. Seemingly, there are no Samanthas anywhere to be found in South Jersey, not even in the casinos, which I sometimes wander in the hopes of finding a woman who is a half or even a quarter of a Samantha. I make these compromises in my head: I say, please God, show me someone who is even a quarter of a Samantha again, and I will be content to watch her from whatever distance you deem appropriate. This time I promise I won’t touch her, not even if I were whittled down to a needle-thin dart, not even if I were the tiniest, least lethal implement. I would only ever bear witness. I would only ever watch. Then there are other nights when I’m walking the boardwalk and I see among the crowds not a quarter or a half of a Samantha, but let’s say a tenth of one, and I think about crossing the distance between us not with a dart but with my actual body. I think about doing this, enlightened reader, but I never do. Instead I tell myself I must be content to be Samantha’s long-forgotten pain in the ass, because at least then I was something to somebody, once upon a time in New York City.
Now please, you’ve heard my story and you know the truth.
I am the Booty Gnat. Now kindly swat me into oblivion.
-- Alex Vuocolo is a New York City-based writer and reporter who hails from Philadelphia and South Jersey. He runs a monthly salon and is the publisher of Formed in Fright, a literary journal for weird fiction.
