Opposites Retract

Forgive me for belaboring the point, but my experience with the “real world” thus far has been distressingly disappointing.  It’s kind of like you order a stripper, and she turns out to be your cousin.  Not that I would know, as my minimum wage and measly tips at the hotel don’t even afford me the luxury of online paying porn sites -- I have to cruise the visitor sections mostly as well as the user-generated... but I digress.  The point is that I have yet to experience the pleasure of pumping wads of sweaty ones into bulbous spray-tanned cleavage, and yet I feel that I can understand the crushing let down of discovering that those oiled-up orbs are your own flesh and blood... well, except the silicone, of course.

Let me preface all of this with the candid admission that the priorities of any warm-blooded eighteen-year-old, myself included, begin and end with indulgences of the flesh.  When I was in high school, my love life was like a volcano.  That is to say, it lay dormant for extended periods of time, and on the rare occasions it erupted, people ran away as quickly as possible.  It’s not exactly like that anymore -- I have an easier time finding dates -- but you know that old saying “The more things change, the more they stay the same?”  Well, I still don’t get quite what that saying means, but suffice to say that this new love life of mine sucks just as bad as my old one.

I met a girl the other day at the bookstore where my roommate Dan works.  I’ll call her Sarah Madden.  Because that’s her name.  I was leafing through Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and she had Confessions of a Shopaholic and some memoir proudly sporting an “Official Selection of Oprah’s Book Club!” star tucked under her arm.  I might have taken this as a sign that this was not meant to be, but hey, opposites attract, right?  Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.  What goes around comes around.  The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides.  Maybe we two could hit it off.  So, at the critical point that my eyeing of this fair maiden was about to tip over from flirtatious to skeezy, I mustered up the courage to approach her and stammer my way through an introduction which I don’t fully recall but which I think included such discursive gems as “I love this place because it has a lot of... books.  You know?” and “Shopaholic -- is that like someone who can’t stop making bird houses?  Because of, you know, shop class.  Like it was someone who was addicted to that class instead of, like, shopping... was the joke.”  Astonishingly, she agreed to go out with me.

So Sarah and I went out last Friday night.  To give you a better image of Sarah, she’s about a 7 and a 1/2 and bears a passing resemblance to the chick with three tits from Total Recall (Except for the third tit.  Regrettably.).  Sarah came to pick me up at 7pm.  I got home from work at 7:42 and found her watching anime with my roommate Tom.  After stripping off my faded navy trousers, clip-on tie and polyester bellman’s coat in favor of my trademark wifebeater, short-sleeved plaid shirt and faded corduroy cut-offs, I escorted my date down to her car.  Our first stop was Margarita’s, a serviceable Mexican joint by the Old Port, where my attempt to enjoy a nice adult beverage (”Pomegranate Margarita with a splash of pineapple juice”) was brutally rebuffed by our officious queen of a waiter.  Pah.  Sarah had a Caesar Salad.  I had the Ultimate Fajita Platter, an horchata, and a piece of tres leche cake.  The bill came, and she pulled out her credit card.  Ever the gentleman, as she went to pay I deftly stopped her hand and insisted that we split it down the middle.  She gave me an inscrutable little half-grin that seemed to whisper, “Oh, you little fox.”  Next on the agenda was a movie.  She was eager to see some saccharine romantic comedy starring whatever young starlet and male t.v. drama star were hot last week, but after I made my compelling case as to the vapidness of her chosen fare (”I wouldn’t watch that dreck to save my mother’s life.  And my sister’s.  And your mother’s and your sister’s.  As well as a bus full of orphans.”), we settled on The Girlfriend Experience, auteur Stephen Soderbergh’s latest starring real-life porn star Sasha Grey (of whom I am an avid fan) as a prostitute in a barbed indictment of materialism in modern America.  Leaving the theater, I sensed that the ice had been broken, the gears had been greased, and the evening was ready to really get going.

Pulling up in front of my apartment and leaving her car provocatively idling, Sarah uttered breathily, “Well, that was interesting.”  She then coyly closed her eyes and sighed without turning toward me.  Having missed too many cues in my adolescence to drop the ball on this one, I quickly swooped in and planted my lips on hers.  After a couple of playful bats at my shoulders (playing hard to get, I thought), she pulled back and turned her gaze from mine.  Perhaps the raw sexual energy flowing between us had overwhelmed her?

“What is it?” I huskily breathed.

“Um, Eric...” she replied, her chest heaving underneath her cotton top (Old Navy’s top of the line).  “Eric, I don’t think we should really go any farther with this.”

My heart sank through my stomach, around my spleen, butting up against my gonads and dropped down into the floor of the automobile.  “Why not?” I protested.

“Well... um...” Her eyes darted about the vehicle.  “I’m, like, a... uh...” and then she sputtered out rapidly, “I’m a born-again Christian, so I need to take it a lot slower than that.”

It all suddenly became clear in a flash of revelation.  I realized what was really going on here.  I realized my mistake.  I had totally misread all the signs.  I was off-base from the start of the evening.  What an idiot!  The truth was that this little coquette was just some JESUS FREAK who was leading me on the whole time!  How dare she!  She should have known what I was after all along.  I mean, when we met I was reading Henry Miller.  Henry Miller!!@#?!  She couldn’t have missed that signal.  And to string me along so... well, it was unconscionable.  I sheepishly exited the vehicle and took my walk of shame up the two flights to my apartment, where I was greeted with a now-nearly-comatose-from-alternating-shots-of-vodka-and-hits-of-ganja Tom gazing vaguely at the same anime DVD, evidently on a loop.

I slumped into the kitchen, where I warmed up some meatloaf leftover from dinner with my parents a couple weeks earlier.  Washing down the spongy, garlicky bites with my last few cans of Schlitz (mental note -- need to find a new gas station that doesn’t card), I pondered what had transpired that evening and wondered if I had missed even more than I realized.  Was I wrong for expecting my life, post-high-school, to be an undisturbed bacchanal of orgiastic delight in which bras would spontaneously unsnap, panties drop, and loins spread at the snap of my fingers? What had I learned from all of this?  Had this chick really misled me, or had I misled myself?  What could you learn from a one-night stand that hadn’t even gotten on its feet?  And how had I come to sound so much like an episode of “Sex And The City?”

The rest of my thoughts faded into a stew of beef, beer, ketchup and free pornography, and I tumbled away from waking life into pleasant dreams of clear expression, artistic success and fulfilling relationships.  I awoke, pants around my knees, with a note from Tom that read, “Dude, don’t fall asleep jerking off in the living room.  Especially when I’m there, too. [sigh]”

The wicked workaday world of the West.

When I graduated and moved to the city, I knew I was in store for what some warned would be a rude awakening. Despite these warnings, I strode headlong and cocksure into the world with that most foolhardy of chips on my shoulder called youth. I am ready, I thought, for whatever the world can hurl my way. Celestial aspirations, brute will, and fearless resolve will make up for my lack of experience and render success inevitable.

What I underestimated was life's capacity for rudeness and, indeed, the inventive methods it would employ to bend me over and violate, humble, and humiliate me in ways that defy the limits of imagination and human flexibility. In fact, the world wasted no time making its supremacy known to me with a swift and definitive smack-down. The vehicle life chose for this metaphorical cock-punch? A job.

Don't get me wrong, I've worked before. I've been everything from a "backroom boy" at a pizza joint (a job whose duties seemed to include all of the tasks too foul for anyone else to partake in) to a door-to-door newspaper salesman ("Would you like to subscribe to the SunScribe for the low price of...Yeah, I wouldn't either. See ya.") to a caddy for a lesbian, country-club golfer ("Will your husband be joining us this afternoon...Oh. She is quite a catch, ma'am."). In spite of this wealth of worldly experience, there was something missing from these jobs that effectively shielded me from the realities of the working man and allowed me to maintain a level of dignity and sanity: they were all part-time.

Now, lo these few months later, I am working full-time as a bellman (a "frontroom boy", if you will) at a local, faux-swank hotel. The hours are long, the work is by and large thankless, and the amount of time left to devote to my nobler pursuits -- be they honing my shotgunning abilities or perusing the culturally edyfying offerings at gapethathole.com -- is virtually nil.

All of that is to say that the world is pushing me hither and thither and what I've come to recognize is that (gasp!) it will continue to do so. My humble pledge to you, to myself, to whoever reads this little corner of the blogosphere (myself), is to return to my original goal...

I want to write. I'd like to be able to call myself a writer. And legend has it writers write. My small taste of the working man's life would lead me to wager that the majority of them do it in spite of and because of the external forces of the world threatening to pull them apart and push them under at the expense of the relentless stampede of survival. This is what I must do. It is my compulsory but self-inflicted millstone. And so I write...

The Morning After (a.k.a. Schlitz Happens)

Hoo boy, that was a rough one.   The spirits moved me a bit too, well, spiritedly last night, and this morning I awoke lying shirtless on the icy kitchen floor.  Were it not for the heat emanating from the oven (I evidently attempted to heat up some leftover lasagna in the wee hours), I might have gotten hypothermia.  Or worse.  I dread to ponder what might have befallen this poor body of mine.

I must ask you humbly to forgive the embarrassing conceit and incoherence of my second post yestereve.  Both pride and modesty bade me strongly to take it down this morning, but to do so would be anathema (just looked that one up) to the spirit of my undertaking here.

And now, in my diminished, hungover consciousness, with awareness something on the order of a hearing-impaired bat and suffering the distinct sensation of a host of gnomes hacking away at my temples with tiny, dull machetes, I must don my cotton shirt and twill slacks and coat of undisclosed synthetic fabric and go to work at the hotel.  This is what it means to be an adult.  To brace up against everything in me crying out to succumb to the loathing and agonies of the morning after, and to tap into a wellspring of fortitude that allows me to forge ahead and do my duty.  I am a bellman.  This is the charge that the fates have layed upon me, and by the honor of my fathers and forefathers and grandfathers and stepfathers and godfathers and Father Christmases and Godfathers of Soul, I will fulfill my obligation and work the 3pm to close shift for seven dollars an hour plus tips.

I think I'll just have one more beer before I go.  Just to take the edge off.

My feet are very big... very big.

Five more schlitzes in, things occur to me that wouldn't have occurred to an unlubricated brain. This has occcured to me before, but now I have realized the unfiltered lucidity that the sauce brings. My feet are very, very big. I wear, like, a size thirteen. I could be a baller if such trifles as athletic prowess, a competitive spirit, and years of practice weren't part and parcel of excellence at sport. That's right, I challenge ye lesser men to gaze at my enormous pedesticular phallices and not stand in right wonder and envy.

Excuse me for a moment, I must vomit.

I am back.

They (mostly alcoholics) say that beer is proof that God loves and wants us to be happy. This puts me in mind of...

Okay, I'm back again.

... Tom Waits. my buddy Greg turned me onto him lately. And Tom Waits says "you know there ain't no devil there's just god shwhen he's drunk.' That is it. That is IT! There's no more to say than that. That is wisdom. That is scripture. That is Melville and Beckett and Tolstoy all wrapped up in one (but not all gay or anything). I have, my friends, in my beer-induced unsilent lucidity discovered the ultimate non-answer underlying all things. Enlightenment, I embrace thee warmly. It has been a long time, my friend, as if summoned up from another life.

Lo and behold, a fresh cold can of Schlitz awaits me on the counter just around the corner from the desk at which I now sit. And having pieced together the root source of everything, at last, the whole of this outlandish pageant we call 'life', there is nothing left but for me to shotgun this can of beer.

You know what else Tom Waits says? "I don;t have a drinking problem except when I can't get a drink." The rest, as they say, is silence.

The spirit in me.

So I'm new to the whole drinking thing. I mean, I'll be honest, I went to some parties during high school where booze was present. Yup, there was some underage drinking. I'm not going to lie. But it never really appealed to me. I always wanted to be that mysterious guy who everyone talked about but no one really knew. The guy who would appear out of nowhere at a party, bearded, sober, and profound that would invariably -- in my brief appearance -- set girls' hearts aflutter and ignite guys' envy.

Alas, this was not me. First of all, I still can't grow a beard. Second of all, my classmates didn't care whether I was profound or as deep as an eco-friendly urinal. What they cared about was whether or not I could secure some booze, pot, or other foreign substance they could ingest and use to pretend they weren't who or where they actually were. But that wasn't me either. Suffice it to say I wasn't the most popular kid in the class. ...Scratch that, I was the most popular kid in the class until the class discovered mind-altering substances. After that the bloom on my flower quickly faded.

But that's neither here nor there (well, maybe there). I'm not in high school anymore. And I'm not that person anymore. This new person who has replaced that old person (the younger one), is someone who has come to appreciate the pleasures to be found in the bottle. Far be it from me to endorse underage drinking, but if I'm old enough to die for my country how is it I'm not old enough to gaze upon an unattractive girl through the miracle of beer-goggles and decide she's the one for me (that night) to be rejected by?

But that's neither here nor there (well, maybe here). The fact is I enjoy the occasional spirituous beverage. I don't drink every night. And I don't need to drink to enjoy myself. But when I do choose to imbibe, something takes ahold of me. And it's not just that I become socially lubricated to the extent you could pass a naval vessel through my metaphorical orifice, and it's not just that the crushing weight of reality is momentarily relieved...there's a part of myself that wants to... what is it, punish myself? Is it my Catholic guilt? Is it the newfound personal freedom to do this to myself that I'm indulging? Whatever it is, it's not unpleasant. That is to say, it isn't not pleasant. And I'm thoroughly convinced that it's a part of learning my limits, perhaps a part of making my mistakes, and ultimately a part of becoming an adult. Maybe not for everyone, but for me.

And so I'm sitting here, a can of Schlitz beside my laptop glaring at me, challenging me, and I'm up for it. I don't need it. And this challenge is a self-imposed one, but I'll take it up for now. I'll take it up knowing the risks. I'll take it up knowing what's at stake. I'll meet this challenge and I will conquer it. And I'll enjoy it in the process. Isn't that what you adults do? Whatever the answer to that question is, it's what this adult intends to do.