But we’re not here to judge you/We want to be your friends now/And we can make you feel like everything that’s gone wrong… it happened for a reason.
“Nothing is Wrong,” Gomez, Split the Difference (2004)

“What? What’s your problem?”
“My problem? You’ve got the fucking problems!”
“You’re a head case, you know that?”
The shouting came from above, from the bedroom directly overhead.
Fuck. I listened to the shoes on the hardwood, praying they wouldn’t come downstairs. One of them had said something wrong. And I’d no doubt who was the culprit. Jerry wasn’t hearing shit. Brynn could have wished him anal cancer and he’d have sipped his drink and laughed. Men can’t be turned off with an insult. If fucking someone’s on our mind, and we’ve reason to think we’re close, it’s all just dirt off the shoulder. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I’m shit. And you could do a whole lot better. But I promise you, with every bit of sincerity I have, I’m going fix all of that, every last issue… Just as soon as we’re done fucking.
The footsteps came a few minutes later. Two sets down the back stairs, turning in the kitchen, pausing, then stomping down the hall to the front. “Pa sent me money now/I’m gonna make it somehow/I need another chance… You see your baby loves to dance/Yeah…yeah…yeah…” I focused my head on the music. No use guessing what was said. The story’d be on us soon enough.
When he appeared in the room with that grin, the first instinct was rage. I’ll kill you for this, Jerry. Bludgeon you with this scotch glass. Throw the corpse in the Charles. His sole obligation as wingman was to close the fucking deal. With a woman he’d been screwing for years. It was landing in the clearest of weather, as close to a sure thing as exists. But no… Jerry’d found a path to failure, defeat from the jaws of victory. And here he was, facing Bernice in the front room, tucking his shirt in his pants, stifling laughter and pointing a finger in my face. “Can I borrow him for a second?”
This is where you want to stand up, cross your hands and scream “CUT!” Put a replay of the scene on the TV and give it the John Madden treatment. See this, right here, Jerry? Fixing the shirt, smirking? This is killing me. Giving Bernice an image – of a hook-up gone horribly wrong. Of a loaded degenerate mess fondling, finger-fucking her friend… Then disgusting her with some rotten line – some vile, hideous request for a demented, unnatural act. It’s late, everybody’s pasted and now you’ve got my chick thinking, ‘What’s his friend’s ‘Mr. Hyde’ look like? Do I want risk finding out? Isn’t sleep a better idea?’
And worse than any of that, Jerry was dragging me away, leaving Brynn and Bernice to talk. This I was sure was fatal. People talk of “one night stands” like it’s an everyday sort of occurrence. Sex and the City, Maxim, Cosmopolitan, those goofy “pick up artist” books… The media would have you believe screwing strangers is just like buying shoes. Walk in the bar, flash some cash, try on a few styles and leave with the pair you want.
Myth and nothing more, even for the volume dealers, the guys who’ll target anything breathing. Doesn’t matter how she looks, or how attractive or smooth you are. Getting a woman who barely knows you to allow you into her place, her bedroom, her vagina, is never an easy endeavor. You’ve got a million little gate keeping tests, a litany of loaded questions. The way you laugh at her jokes, the references you use… the way you hold a glass. On any given night it’s true, you can find one desperate and horny, aching for any random dick. But the chances of that aren’t in your favor. And to sleep with an attractive chick, a man has to dance through a minefield. The slightest of bad moves can shift her, from Yes to Not Sure to No. To sleep with someone like Bernice, you all but had to throw a perfect game. Be the top of a sliver of men who’d ever stand a fighting chance. And even if you reached that height, the triggers had to align – the hormones, the buzz, and that fickle, judgmental thing… what at our basic chemical levels distinguishes women from men. The capacity to want to fuck, to be attracted to someone intensely and, for reasons I’ll never comprehend, still be able to stop, freeze, and call it off.

(more…)

Bernice and I hit it off from there. She’d known all of Jerry’s friends well, well enough to focus on me, as somebody new to explore. Damned if I knew all we said. It was one bar after another, each getting louder than the last. Then some basement joint in the Back Bay, serving the “late night” crowd of Boston.
“They all close at one? What kind of Irish live here?”
“That’s a great tie.”
“I thought this was a late night joint – the ‘Last Stop.’”
“Last Drop.” Jerry shouted a correction. “The Last Drop.”
“I don’t see many guys match patterns. You know… stripes with crisscrosses.” A steady stream of drinks seemed to be working on Bernice. She was in her own conversation, which I was struggling to hear. If she hadn’t leaned in and fingered the fabric, I wouldn’t have been able to guess the words. Call it damage from wearing headphones, or listening to Sabbath, Zeppelin and AC/DC at 11 on the car stereo since high school, but any time I’m packed in a crowd, anywhere there’s background noise, I’ve a hellish time discerning conversation. I’ll hear a pin drop across an empty home; in a bar all but what’s shouted is mumbles. If not for reading lips, for translating body language and catching a clear word or two in those moments where things get quiet, I might as well be deaf in loud taverns.
“I don’t know. I got the tie as a Christmas present.”
“They always go with white shirts and patterns. Hermes.”
“A maze? I thought it was polka dots.”
“‘Hermes.’ You know, sailboats, elephants… little flowers.”
“Riiight. Of course.”
“You’ve got a pattern on a pattern.”
Neither, of course, was a pattern, but that wasn’t worth pointing out. And there was nothing to gain by explaining, You might be assuming style in what’s largely a utility selection. Nothing hides coffee stains and grease spots from morning egg sandwiches like stripes, patterns or dots. And I wasn’t the focus of her comment. Conscious of it or not, she was making a broader point. To work in a field banking, to travel in the circles Jerry did, you had to wear fraternity letters. And those letters have always been the same – conservative white shirt with a tiny inoffensively patterned tie of a thin European cut, to advertise its high grade print, and its $175 price. Black belt, black socks, black shoes – lace ups with minimal stitching. That was the only way to look, to announce you were in the club. A man who made money from money, far above the everyday shnook. Except exactly like a boxed lunch Joe, a uniform was the norm.
“Here. Finish this.” Jerry handed me a new drink.
“I already have one.”
“Now you have two.” As he downed the last of a greyhound with his right hand, he grabbed another from the bar with his left.
“Where are we going?”
“You done with that yet?”
“What is this? Lighter fluid?”
“Bourbon.”
“Fucking well bourbon. I wouldn’t clean tires with this.”
“Like it matters now. Down it and shut up.” Jerry was armed for bear, but I still didn’t know his plan.
“So where do we go next?” I choked back the rotgut, feeling that sour taste in the stomach that comes before a vomiting fit.
“You have any dope?”
“Any what?”
“Dope!”
“Dope like… pot?”
“Pot. Weed. Marijuana? Do. You. Have. Any. Dope?”
“Of course! I always carry dope on planes.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Yes! I always carry weed on planes. At least an ounce, just to be sure!”
“You brought an ounce of weed?”
“You fucking moron.”
“Perhaps you two can get bullhorns.” Brynn grabbed Jerry’s collar. “Debate this atop the bar.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, Jerry. Where do we go now?”
“It’s the wrong question. The question is, ‘Brynn do you have any vodka?’”
“I…” She wavered for a second, then conceded. “Yes. I do.”
Enough with the frowns, Brynn. You knew this was part of the bargain. What’d you think? I’d bring out a hidden, quiet side of Jerry? That we were in a campus a capella quartet together back at school? That’s not what you really want, anyway. You’re like most of the women at your age. You want the life of the party, but you also want to control him. And you know as well as I do, it doesn’t work that way.
“Then we’ll be going to your place, sweetheart.”
“Because you really should have another.”
“I should stop smoking. I should stop eating steak. This is about will.”
“And you’re flush with that.”
“I will be having a vodka, and it will be from your liquor cabinet.”

(more…)

Read Part I here.
But back on that night I’d visited Boston, Jerry was on good behavior. Or at least offering the appearance of it. He was loud and loaded early, but I could tell he was staying in check, maintaining a surface composure. And the reason for that came quickly – walked into the bar about an hour after I’d arrived.
Let’s call her Brynn to make it easy. Not because her name was Brynn. Just because the name seems to fit. She was pleasant, attractive and personable. All of it, however, was formal, involved but disconnected – Waspy most would say. I’d say downright icy. Nothing absurd, of course. Not like Winthorpe’s terminally constipated fiance in Trading Places, or Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, but carrying that same detached air – a collection of contrived smiles hiding judgmental frowns.
“I thought you two were broken up.” I whispered in Jerry’s ear.
“We are.” He hugged her hello and turned back to introduce me. “But we mess around a bit. You know. It’s easy.”
It’s easy. Of course I understood that. Everyone understands that. The hard part of fucking is the first – screwing somebody new. It’s always the biggest risk. Will the other person be good? Will this thing turn into a relationship? What if they’re terrible in bed and refuse to leave my place? Force me to take them to breakfast and regale with me tedious stories, the whole time compelled to remember, choking down eggs benedict, just how awful they were… how fast and mechanical or lazy and selfish they’d been? Do I want to assume this risk?
If you’re a man and you’re going to her place, the answer’s always yes. You can leave whenever you want, pull the cord and run when you’re done. But whatever sex you are, if you’re going back to your apartment, you have to assess the downsides. And let’s face it – that’s rarely a man’s issue. You always go to her place, and this leaves the woman to consider, “Do I really want to have this guy over? Seems attractive and funny right now… but I’m seriously fucking loaded. Will he fart all night in his sleep? Snore like a chainsaw, be hung like a Chihuahua or too damned drunk to fuck? Is he a possible closet pervert? The kind who’ll try to assfuck or fist me? Is this a potential Marv Albert?” The list goes on and on, which is why women rarely screw sober, at least the first time around.
And that’s also why exes keep screwing, long after the love part’s dead – long after they’ve reached the conclusion there’s as much dislike between them as there ever was affection, and no prayer in hell of a future where they’d grow old as a couple. It’s easy. People want a simple fuck, and the only way to get that for certain is to fuck what you’ve fucked before. Might not be great or even good, but if you’ve screwed someone they know how you like it. They’ll scratch that nagging itch.
You’ve just got to always remember – keep the interaction light. Don’t be a robot, of course, or act in a transactional fashion. Friendly and nothing else. There was once more than fucking between you, and too much or too little emotion can throw the whole thing off kilter – turn what should have been a simple “session” into an ugly dissection of the past, or a painfully awkward brunch you’d both rather run from than finish. It’s a tightrope walk in high wind, but as those of who’ve fucked exes know, in a dry spell the option’s a lifesaver. Always keep it open.

(more…)

We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.

- Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

What was said? Nothing, for at least a moment too long. And I knew I was done right there, that the apprehension was fatal and I should have just turned and left. But I had to go for the save – grasp at the prayer of a chance I might just salvage the mess.
I fucked that up even worse.

‘I knew I should have brought other shoes’? What the fuck kind of line is that?
Of course it made no sense. Of course it was half-stuttered, and no, the tongue-tied, doe-eyed act, however real in that instant, was nowhere near endearing. I’d only sounded stupid. Fumbling and imbecilic, as loaded and clueless as Jerry, teetering in the street, sucking furiously on a half-lit Marlboro red as the snowflakes coated the street around him.
“Hey, are we supposed to get an ack–” He hacked in the background. “An acc-cumulation?”
“Your town, not mine.”
“I don’t watch the weath–”
“Does it matter?”
No response, thank God. He was sober enough to catch the message in my deadpan inflection: Shut the fuck up. You’re screwing me over here. Again. In truth, though, Jerry was no longer an issue. I’d already missed my opening, the instant where it’s do or die. Where I should have taken the wheel and instead had looked like a fool. Or possibly far too drunk. Either way I was learning the lesson – the one that’s not supposed to hold true. The one that goes against everything they teach us as kids about being careful, acting deliberately, cautiously – that little’s ever lost in impulsiveness, and often much gained. That the meanest regrets in life are all born of hesitation. Of thinking when you should have been acting.
That and when she’s insanely, ridiculously hot, and luck hands you at a chance at a score, it might be the smarter bet to order your whiskey with water. Limit yourself to five, rather than seven or eight. And choose your wingman wisely. Where one drunk shoots himself in the foot with amazing regularity, two aren’t prone to do better.
. . .
The corkscrew drop into Logan drives your balls into your throat. One minute you’re at 20,000 feet, the next staring at the tarmac. I’ve never asked why the airport has such an approach, but it seems to prepare you for the rest of the city. Everything in Boston feels tight. Every turn on every cramped street negotiated on a dime. Every narrow alleyway squeezed by red brick buildings and office towers. Where Philly’s nothing but sprawl, spreading across the southeastern edge of Pennsylvania like a patch of rust, Boston’s dense, like San Francisco. Only minus the hills and vistas, and trapped under the iciest tunnels of the Jet Stream.
“Fuck, this is brutal.” The cold cut through my jacket as I jumped out of the cab and ran into the bar to meet Jerry. Had to be at least fifteen degrees colder than Philadelphia. I’ve never worn a topcoat with a suit. Seems like a “basket case” concept. If one jacket’s not enough, you need to get your circulation checked. But then, I never lived in Boston. Here, I could understand the practice.

(more…)

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
- H.L. Mencken

It took a few phone calls, but eventually Martin and I tracked down the rest of the group and met up with them at another bar across town.
“This sucks.” Erin was running a wet napkin over Victoria near the front door of the place.
“Did you get egged, too?”
“Egged?” She looked confused, understandably so. I turned to ask Martin to explain, but he’d already spotted Samantha across the bar and broken loose in her direction.
“Henry bumped into Victoria in his ‘getaway’ and left a streak of sour cream all over the back of my dress.” Erin wiped at the stain furiously. “I have to wear this tomorrow.”
“She’s wearing your dress?”
“Victoria forgot her evening clothes in her car at the train station.”
Of course she did.
“We’re the same size.” Victoria slugged back a glass of wine. “So it fits.”
Funny how those concepts tend to mesh.
“What happened to you?” My Flock of Seagulls hairstyle and soaking wet shirt caught Victoria’s eye.
“I wasn’t fucking around. I got egged.”
“Like, with ‘egg’ eggs?” Her boyfriend appeared on the scene.
“Faberge.”
“Ha ha. Nice. Like those are those real expensive ones sheiks buy, right?” Victoria’s boyfriend appeared at my left. “I saw one once… at this museum. I think it was in Europe. It had, like, all these rubies–or, no… emeralds. Which ones are orange?”
“Hold that question.” I spotted Bennett across the bar.
“You chickenshit.”
“What?” He stared at the jukebox, knowing I was there, but refusing to acknowledge my presence. “I waited for you outside. You cut right. I was on the left.”
“They’re never going to let you back in that bar.”
“This should upset me?”
“I thought it was your favorite place.”
“I just said that. Somebody told me it had good nachos.”
“Nachos?”
“What?” The music slammed out of the machine, a deafening wall of noise – a half dozen bone-crunching, low register riffs buttressed with crashing cymbals.
“Nachos!?”
“You know what’s fucked?! What’s really, really fucked?” As he shouted, the opening notes faded for a moment and an immediately recognizable bass-line kicked in the rest of the song. “You can get anything here, anytime you want it, right?!”
“Right!”
“Can’t find decent guacamole! Anywhere!”

(more…)

Up on the roof, in my car/
Up all night, I’m pulling through signs like Dolomite/
The mack, I’m the Egg Man/
Taxi Driver, I’m the Egg Man
- “Eggman,” Paul’s Boutique (1989)

“Get over here! Stop! Now!” The words cut through the chatter all around me, through the noise of a crush of friends by the bar, laughing, passing rounds of Beam shots through the group. I was feeling that early numbness, the initial full-body novocaine sensation of the liquor, but even in a sedative state, the voice was deeply alarming. “Now! Stop right now!” It was foreign – Turkish, Moroccan… perhaps Lebanese. And it was Bent – angry and looking for blood, and headed in our direction, louder as the syllables kept coming. “Now! I’m calling the police!”
I didn’t need to guess at the cause.
“Hot stuff.” “Whoa.” “Coming through.” “‘Scuse met there, ladies.” “Pardon me.” “Sorry about that.” Henry was cutting and slashing through the lines of people near the bar, holding a plate over his head with one hand and shoveling what looked like a quesadilla into his face with the other, bobbing, twisting like Barry Sanders in heavy traffic, firing the engines and gunning ahead in the occasional empty spaces.
Turn your back. There is no way this is good. I saw what looked a line cook or manager five or six feet behind him, screaming and waiving his arms. Don’t look at him. Don’t let them connect you to the crime. After a few years in the company of people like Henry (well, in fairness, like me… like most of the people I knew), you understand the informal “joint and several” form of liability management applies to the group of friends, or as they see it, enablers, who come along with these miscreants. Whatever they destroy, steal, or soil in a fashion that renders the thing useless under state health regulations, You Now Own. That’s right. Though they’ve no legal right to do so, if your buddy vomits onto the pizza display or cheese steak griddle at the late night place you took him to after a margarita marathon, management looks to you to pay for the lost inventory or cleanup expenses. Or get beaten in the alley next door by a couple of line cooks or bouncers. Poor man’s indemnification – you make the establishment whole in the moment, then collect it all back from your asshole friend in the morning.
I turned, tipped my head down and waved at the bartender. “Another round of bourbon shots, please. Yes, Beam.” Don’t you know by now, goddamnit? Jack Daniels is not a bourbon. It’s a sour mash whiskey, made in Tennessee.

(more…)

When a man has joined a party, he is likely to stay in it. If he changes his opinion – his feeling, I mean, his sentiment – he is likely to stay, anyway; his friends are of that party, and he will keep his altered sentiment to himself, and talk the privately discarded one. On those terms he can exercise his American privilege of free speech, but not on any others. These unfortunates are in both parties, but in what proportions we cannot guess.
- The Privilege of the Grave, Mark Twain

Bennett, of course, ignored my request. His tiny apartment was filled with ten or so of our college friends, passing around two fifths of Beam and attacking a single case of Dos Equis – woefully inadequate provisions.
“What the fuck? I asked you to grab at least another bottle.”
“That’s right, you asked.”
“That’ll never be enough. We’ll get like, four, five shots out of that with all these people.” The aim with downing bottles of Beam was drinking the whiskey fast. The rule was the person who cracked the seal had to “pull” from it, preferably down to the label. Then he passed it along with a shot-glass, every person in the chain pouring a shot for the next person in line until the thing was empty. And to ensure the speed of the process, the bottle was never allowed to rest on any surface. You took your poison, poured for the person next door and moved “the works” along immediately. In a crowd of ten or so veterans, two bottles wouldn’t last twenty minutes, and nobody’d have enough. To get a quick, starter blast from a bottle of eighty proof liquor you needed to hit it hard – eight shots in a half an hour, ten if you wanted to be certain. Then you wait a little while, until it hits you like a haymaker twenty minutes later.
“You should get a faster car.”
“I had to pick up Hen–”
“A convertible… BMW. You’d look good in that. Tanned, wearing your Vaurnets. You could blast Crash at stoplights, score mad betties.”
“And you last got laid — Let’s see… Jerry Garcia was still alive?”
“‘All the lit-tle ants are marrrrching…’ Hey ladies, you all headed to the Big Todd show?”
“Big ‘Head’ Todd, ass.”
“My friends call me ‘Hollywood.’”
“‘Hollywood’? Really? Resurrecting that?”
“This is my boy, Chad, here in the passenger seat. People call him ‘Marley.’ Hey, uh, any of you ladies got a Marlboro Light I could bum?”
I gave up trying to reply. Just smiled and sucked back a shot. In the corner of the kitchen I could see Henry filling a tumbler with Bennett’s oldest, most expensive bottle of Bushmills, and promptly soiling it with tonic water. Seemed an adequate karmic brush-back.
That and I’d been here before, and didn’t have a decent response. The crux of Bennett’s joke was the fount of an endless dispute, an argument we’d had since college: Was I more ‘Keith’ or ‘Mick’?

(more…)

We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no “vision thing”… All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people.

- The Liberty Manifesto, P.J. O’Rourke (1993)

Mondays… They’re always so chatty on Mondays. In every office I worked, it was always an ironclad rule. Standing in the doorway, stopping you in the hall… cornering you at the goddamn urinals. “So, how was your weekend?” “Do anything exciting over the weekend?” “Wow. I’m still feeling Saturday! How was yours?”
Amazing. In the past forty eight hours, so much incredible happened. And yet somehow, it all remained just close enough to stasis that here I am again, talking to you in the hall, waiting for elevator to take me to 17, so I can take a shit in peace in that hidden executive washroom nobody ever uses… God, how I love this routine.
They’re not really asking anything, or even waiting for an answer. The questions are nothing but openers, so they can tell you everything they did. In the longest, most agonizing detail.
This is fine, of course – part of the Ritual of Monday, of easing back into the grind. Gives you a point of focus other than the tension all around – that endless punching of keys, the ringing of phone after phone and all that incessant babbling… those vital, urgent discussions and critical negotiations, the sudden death decisions of the litigation game. “We need to ask for a sixty day extension, to make sure the judge will at least give us the thirty we need.” “Brilliant. I’ll have an associate make the edits to the motion and proofread it. Then I’ll proof it again and send it to you for final proofing and approval.” All the bodies in the hallways, marching, pacing, fidgeting – heads pressed to cell phones on their shoulders, scanning papers in their hands. “Paragraph thirty-seven, subheading eleven needs a full colon at the end, not a fucking semi-colon!” And hiding in the quiet moments, that ceaseless droning hum… the low pitch terminal tinnitus from the fluorescent bulbs above.
When I worked in a larger office, in those ancient pre-Bush years, I heard a lot of tales on Mondays. Stories that would normally pain you, like listening to someone’s dreams. (“…[A]nd then, then, like, you were there. But it wasn’t you. I mean, it was you in that it looked like you, but it was also kind of like a dolphin. But sort of like Liam Neeson, too, and you spoke to me in a voice sort of like… like you were barking. You were warning me, ‘Careful with that axe, Claudette.’ That’s all you kept saying and then my cat woke me up. It was really freaky.” “Indeed. You don’t have a pistol I could borrow for a second, do you?”) But at the start of a brand new workweek, and specifically in the morning, they serve an important purpose. They buy you time to adjust, to build that veneer of engagement – the “interested” you of the workplace, cloaking your deeper inner thoughts:
If my office were all mirrors and I fired a laser over the top of my doorway at a sixty degree angle, it’d probably bounce back off the wall behind me, right over… there. Then it’d bounce left, and hit the other wall over there, then bounce back over… here, in that corner, then ricochet back toward the door. How many deviations it would take before the room was one big ball of red laser light? Can you even have that? One big ball of laser light made up of a single beam?
I wonder what Greenland’s like. It seems so… big.
You can smile and listen and laugh, thinking of a way to reply when your boss or co-worker ends the story of his weekend with that inevitable polite hook: “So what did you do? Have any adventures?”
What are you going to say? You have to offer something. And it has to fit your image, the character you present… the archetype the listener expects. Everybody thinks he’s unique, of his own singular mold. We fancy ourselves distinctive, and maybe deep down we believe it. But that isn’t what we project. On the surface we act to a type, a kind every person knows, and thinks he understands. You have to do that in an office. Management likes what’s safe, and “predictable” gets a premium. It’s good to be apparent, overt – with your interests worn on the sleeve. Gives the people who hire a set of easy clues, so they can pick up the loyal soldiers, avoid all the mercenaries.

(more…)