Corrective Action – Jon Doughboy

November 7, 2025

My girlfriend likes to read me lines from the New York Times newsletter when we have breakfast so we can make fun of and sneer at and learn from and envy big city elites writing about big city culture and how it enriches their big city lives. Ha ha ha. Give us your apartments, fuckers. Ha. Your chic pants flowing down streets of photogenic urbanism. Stain our teeth with your artisanal lattes. Nuu Yawk. Ha ha. How’s the Dow Jones today? Ooh, what are they wearing to the MET Gala? Did they finish building the Freedom Tower? What’s in, up, new? How’m I doin’? Ha.

“The Museum of Modern Art is being sued,” my girlfriend says, reading the news from her phone as I sip my coffee, “officials neglected to take corrective action,” then I interrupt, “Corrective action? It’s a museum, not a police force,” and she continues, laughing to herself, “neglected to take corrective action after several visitors groped him during a nude performance for the 2010 retrospective,” and I interrupt, again, brain revving at the old East Coast speed after two big mugs of coffee, “Who’s him, huh?”

And she says, clearly enjoying my feigned outrage, “he’s a performance artist. It says here he stood naked in a narrow doorway for this installation. It was a piece by Marina Abramović. Don’t tell me you don’t know the Marina Abramović?”

“I know her. She’s some sort of celebrity influencer hack now. I heard on a podcast just the other day that she’s shilling skin creams and wellness crap. Like Goop for art nerds. Candles that smell like blue chip artist pussy.”

“He was sexually assaulted seven times by five visitors,” she says. “Why five? Repeat offenders?”

“Was there penetration? A stray pinkie in the bum situation?” I ask but then I remember I went to that exhibit and I tell my girlfriend and she only half believes me. I say “Why would I lie?” I can’t remember much else of the exhibit and know nothing about Abramović but I remember that doorway, its narrowness, the two naked people flush against the wall like pillars and passing between these caryatids of flesh as I entered and worrying my preppy wool topcoat might scrape the man’s penis or brush against the woman’s nipples. I still own the wool topcoat. It’s itchy but warm. “The coat is upstairs right now, I shit you not,” I tell my girlfriend, though it no longer fits.

“Did you see Marina doing her staring contest bit? I saw a movie on HBO about it. People broke down in tears.”

“No, I only remember the two naked people and some others, naked, all that nudity and all the museumgoers walking around looking but not looking, though some were openly leering too,” I say, but I don’t tell her—and I don’t know why, it’s not embarrassing or shameful or anything but sometimes it’s nice to keep a memory to yourself, or the background and context of a memory, a little keepsake as a memorial to the person you once were—so I don’t tell her that I went to the exhibit that day with a girl I had long been in love with but could never convince to see me as anything other than a goofy friend. She lived in Chelsea in this dingy little walk-up and I’d take the train from Jersey every weekend to hang out with her, hang around her, hang over her like a bad but not wholly unwelcome smell, the remnants of last night’s curry hardening on a plate in the sink, as she burned through her twenties living out her New York life, waiting on celebrities at bougie restaurants—Havey Keitel pinched my ass! Rick Moranis told me I have nice calves!—and fucking almost everyone she met, seemingly, if her stories were true, everyone, that is, except me.

“You? At MOMA?” My girlfriend says, smiling to herself, then heading into the kitchen to put the electric kettle on for her tea. She’s wearing faded green sweats, her at-home uniform, and no underwear and her ass looks great, loose cheeks swishing back and forth, a big soft green ass like a lush lawn you want to lie on.

I listen to her bang around in the kitchen, opening drawers and cabinets and saying “At MOMA” with continued disbelief and recall this girl I’d loved, hard and long and half-openly without being able to remember why. She’d been pretty. Smart. Funny. Full of grand ideas and grander criticisms of everyone else’s. But I think what I’d loved about her, obsessing as I did riding those old brown rattly NJ Transit trains into a city I couldn’t afford—and that much is even truer today than it was fifteen years ago thanks to some bad decisions and even worse luck—was her confidence, the way she acted like she belonged any and everywhere. And I’d hoped, trailing after her, she’d be willing to share some of that confidence for after all she had enough to spare.

Perhaps it did. Who knows? Is it confidence I have now or just a lowering of expectations, a lessening of pressure because I’m older now and a lot of the dreams which weighed me down have congealed from fluid, anxious hopes into impossibilities? If youth is burdened by the possible, I feel light and free at middle age. Though I’ve gained at least twenty pounds since then. The weight is camouflage. A Midwest paunch installed around the frame of my younger self. The thin coastal effetes wouldn’t survive an hour of our Minnesota winters. The old wool topcoat will never fit again yet I can’t part with it. Not that it matters. I’m a down parka man now.

My girlfriend comes in with her tea and blows her nose and I say “Come here” and she comes over and sits in my lap and she’s heavy and warm and smells like our bed, a lazy winter Saturday morning smell, ice forming cloudy patterns on the outer pane, and her shifting in my lap feels good and maybe it’ll lead to morning sex or maybe it’ll just linger throughout the day like a quiet promise and later, when we’re half-asleep, I’ll put my hand between her legs and kiss her neck and then I remember the performance artist’s lawsuit, those seven gropings perpetrated by five people. I remember the girl who lived in Chelsea and some of the random cocks that have flashed illicitly across my life: dozens of dongs saluting the sky in that onsen in Nagoya with men lying in a few inches of water in a darkish room, a mysterious installation in its own right, as my fiancé at the time was in the women’s bath thinking up a way to break our engagement; my father’s short and fat cock poking through his sloppy robe when he smoked cigarettes and read the paper, yes, the New York Times, while the phone rang nonstop with collection agencies trying to draw blood from a broke and broken stone; the man who flashed me from a second-floor window in San Francisco when I was sixteen and hitchhiking around like a wannabe Beatnik, a hairy and throbbing hard-on posting out of his open fly like a pole missing its flag and welcoming me to the West Coast; and the night on St. Mark’s Place with the girl I loved and lurked after like a lackey, the girl who lived in Chelsea, whose confidence I was drawn to, her shabby glamor, both of us a little drunk, a little high, while I searched for a discreet place to piss like a shadowy corner by a dumpster, and she said, pointing across the street, “There looks good” and I followed her finger to see a man pissing directly into the street, a steaming spray, standing proudly with both hands on his hips and a look of ecstatic release and though this had nothing do with it, I didn’t see much of her after that. And yes, I’m starting to remember a little more. I remember that aggrieved installation artist’s cock too, how it felt lying flaccid in my hand, a private member made extra puny in public. I’d been gentle though I wanted to wrench it free, tear this phallic apple from its groiny tree, because I saw in his cock, in the prestigious display of his cock, knowledge of my own failings, the pitiful flaccidity of my unrequited love made brutally stark by the success of the girl I’d loved as she hobnobbed with Oscar winners and acted, with her beauty, with her hipster elan, as if the entire city were hers for the taking. Was I wrong to lash out in such way, to traumatize a stranger whose only crime was that of making or being a part of art? What about the wrongs I’ve suffered? Who should I sue? Who’ll pay me damages or take corrective actions on my behalf? The hold, I maintain, was swift and courteous.

She lives in Maryland now and has a kid, the girl from Chelsea. Teaches sixth grade but I’m not sure which subject. St. Mark’s is still there albeit even more expensive. The onsen, I’m guessing, must be busy and thriving. My father is dead. I have no idea how the flasher is doing. And the installation artist? If the reporters are to be believed, his case is pending.

“I wish I had seen that exhibit,” my girlfriend says, shifting in my lap. “Wish I could have gone to MOMA with you.”

I hold her stomach with my left hand and cup her left breast with my right, trying to wipe my hand free of the memory and the guilt and any legal liability from nonconsensually groping—gently, mind you, with respect and curiosity and yes, a little envy, a dash of rage—that artist’s cock. “Maybe we can take a trip next year,” I say, though I have no intention of going to New York. It’s too expensive. Too far. Too much. Why piss the money away when we can read everything we need from the comfort of our St. Cloud kitchen?

“You? At MOMA?” she says again, shaking her head, grinding into my lap and laughing.

“Me. Can you believe it?” I laugh. She laughs. Then, I don’t know why, maybe the headlines have cracked my conscience somehow and genuine remorse has seeped in, but I say, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if I was one of the people who groped him? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

She laughs again. “You? A museum groper?”

“I know, right? Like maybe I took the train in from Jersey because I had a crush on some girl who just saw me as a sexless creature, a friend or not even a friend so much as a sidekick, a tertiary kick, a nuisance even. And I just skulked around her, after her, wanting to be appear smart and cool and cultured so somehow ended up at MOMA and just seeing this dick airing out in these hallowed halls felt like it was mocking me, right? Because it had been my dick that led me to New York. For my dick, my heart, my balls, my hopes—for all these futile things I kept crossing the Hudson for years and years and maybe I’m still crossing it now, decades and miles later, still stuck beneath that river, between two states, eternally looking for, longing for someone who doesn’t want me, who refuses to even see me, and so I grabbed it. His dick. Wouldn’t that be really pathetic and gross but also funny? Couldn’t we laugh about it now?”

She doesn’t say anything but I feel her body grow rigid in my lap. I take a breath. “Just kidding,” I say, gripping her tight, very tight, craving the weight of her. I stare into her back trying to take back the admission that had just tumbled out of me. I feel like crying. I feel like moving to Alaska. Like jerking off. Like killing myself. “Keep reading. What else does it say?”

She clears her throat and says, “something about the statute of limitations being extended. He wants compensation, it says, for emotional distress, humiliation, and other damages.”

“I hope he wins. No, seriously. He was violated. I hope he gets something for his trouble,” I say, not repeating anything about my role in this incident for as I said it’s nice, even necessary at times, to keep a memory to yourself and she didn’t believe me anyway so let’s consider it retracted, redacted, erased, and so much time has passed so if there are corrective actions now, all these years later, I doubt they’ll stretch all the way to reach this life we’ve installed for ourselves in St. Cloud.

I smile. I slide my right hand under her sweatshirt, walk my fingers up the rolls of her belly to her breast which is as cool as marble. I cup it and rub her nipple with my thumb. I rest my head heavily on her shoulder. With my left hand, I take her right wrist and maneuver her hand to my lap, resting it on the pajamas bunched over my own cock. She keeps reading about the suit, the installation. Her hand sits stiffly in place but she doesn’t withdraw it. I can’t see her face but I have no reason to believe she isn’t smiling.