Essay # 26
My life in the city was bipping along pleasantly. I don’t know if this is a Cancer thing, but I always feel most aligned when I have good money coming in. Thanks to Robert K., and his pool of Chinese buyers, my bank account was being nourished. The green in the plus column with a few zeroes attached felt like the most wonderful emollient to my unprofitability of Q1. Not since Woody filmed Manhattan had someone paced those streets on such a timber of neurosis. Not since Cher in Moonstruck had someone flounced them in such a spirit of renewal.
Spring 2015 is dog-eared on my internal syllabus as a time of great wonder. I was living what the Dixie Chicks crooned about in ‘Wide Open Spaces.’ I felt like Steve Perry’s personal muse when ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ inevitably played in the bar. I was learning and experiencing life like a beast with ten eyes and three hearts. I still wasn’t used to having so many things to look at. From my belvedere of the 6 train, there was decadent squalor and delicious squander; conversations begging to be had; drinks bidding for my bloodstream. You can’t imagine my greed to know it all. Only a hedonist in the vein of the Marquis de Sade could compare.
One thing that immediately struck me was how ephemeral city connections were. I assumed that the friends I made it bars would stick, because, well — why not?? I hailed from a land where people were protected and verified by their associations: what neighborhood they grew up in, who their family was, whom their sister dated. These networks overlapped like a mutant genome, creating an ethos of voyeurism that pervaded our core. At home, the question posed upon first acquaintance was, “Where did you go to high school?” The question helped to place each other in our shared ecosystem, affirming our allegiance to the same family-owned pizza shop or auto mechanic, and thus engineering feelings of unity. The Social Contract was rigorously upheld in my town, and no one could truly “ghost” anyone when we were all damned to haunt each other into the produce aisle of Wegman’s.
In the city, the first question was, exhilaratingly, “Where are you from?” Or, “Where do you live?” I learned this quickly, and quickly learned how to pitch myself from the ground up in 45 seconds. It was scary — and exhilarating! — not to have “townie talk” to fall back (i.e., “I think I graduated with your sister.” Or, mentioning some popular bullet in the town cryer). I learned what to say in conversation with someone who said they worked in “consulting,” (“wow, okay! Like for a bank, or for one of the Top 4, or…?”). If someone hailed from another country, you could ask what brought them to the US, and how long they had been here for. I had reams of snap-crackle-popping convo in bars with strangers, fueled by an amber rivulet of Jameson, put on my debit card (and occasionally that of a cute new friend). Many times, this culminated in puppy pile up hugs, an exchanging of numbers, an avowal to meet up again — soon! But after the preliminary text of, “hey, this is Carson!! Sooo good to meet you tonight!” the convo swiftly miscarried. In two days, they were destined to become another unsaved number in my phone; a wispy Daguerrotype on my mind’s eye.
That’s what happened with Ryan, the Irishman. He’s the primal illustration of this parable. It’s not a story with any sinew whatsoever, but it was my first instance of this happening, and for that, he occupies a full-page on my annals of 2015.
Ryan was properly Irish, Irish in citizenship, not just last name, like me. I met him at some Irish bar in the East 70s, the ilk of which had a shiny red door, Shepherd’s Pie on the menu, and a sign behind the bar that said, “No Danny Boy!” (Irish bars always beckoned to my like the Isle of Calypso did to Odysseus — they’re my ports; my docking stations; my embassy in a foreign republic). Ryan, with all his baby-faced, blond cuteness, approached my friend and I at the bar. He told us he owned another bar up the street, and we ought to visit him sometime. “I’ll hook you up,” he vowed, winking as though he had the map to El Dorado in the back pocket of his corduroys. I thought this held a rom-com’s worth of promise. An Irish man who owned a bar — and had an EU passport?? I briefly imagined him as my husband, as all giddy women do, even us commitment-phobic rolling stones.
As it transpired, Ryan didn’t “own” the bar up the lane — he managed it. Maybe that was why he acted so standoffish when my friends and I showed up that Saturday. (It was St. Patursday, the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday that my friend Caitlyn and I invented. Basically, you wore green, went pub-crawling, and tried to spread the good gospel to as many bystanders as possible. Like Hilary Clinton’s presidential ambition, the holiday didn’t survive 2016).
I proudly brayed to the hostess that I “knew Ryan.” She shrugged with an apathy that was so foreign, I didn’t know how to process it. In my hometown, “knowing someone,” was like flashing your badge. Here, in this city of eight million, it was as valuable as a fucking gum wrapper.
The entire transaction was a rude awakening. Ryan brought us shots of Jameson on the house, with the gravitas of a divorced man paying spousal alimony. Then he left us, “busy with work,” never to return. His texts to me, once embodied with the music of fife and fiddle, were reduced to staccato farts. And then…he simply ceased to exist.
It was a cold new world. If I didn’t have Caitlyn’s arm to grasp onto, I may have floated away, unbuoyed on a sea of such nothingness.
I saw that this was a difficult city to be in without alcohol. Something was needed to muffle all the honking and jack-hammering; to dead the despair of delayed trains and precious weeknights slaughtered by trips to Trader Joes; everything costing 30% more; the urine-stained asphalt seeming to gaslight you into believing you asked for all this. But even more important to one’s survival was friends. If you didn’t have them, this life was like a spice rack smashed upon on a cold slab of stainless steel.
Lovers, like friends, have always been another wonderful source of my upliftment. I generally liked to have three boys texting me at once, a standard set when I was 18, and a giggling coquette at community college. When I saw girls my age fall in love at 25 and stay there, I always wondered if they had considered my alternative. To me, it was like deciding to live in one town for your life. Why not go to France, San Diego, Zimbabwe? Why be Katherine Heigl in a rom-com when you could be Catherine the Great, or Countess Meurteuil?
I wished I could ask girls if their choice was bitten with the old fallacy about, “getting the guy before your eggs die.” I despised the thought of biological fatalism being at the control panel of our dreams — especially if it was unconscious, sprung off a fulcrum of what others your age were doing, and what you thought you “should” be doing.
I saw us girls as having all the power to choose: we were the renters, drawling off our requirements, and men were the 16,000 agents vying to fulfill them. I did not see men, however, as a means to get the things I wanted — I was raised in a matriarchy, where women had the wallets and the wisdom.
Millenials were talking about burning the patriarchy, but men weren’t all that powerful in my world. They were a shot of whiskey, a new skirt, a nice tip, a day trip to a cute town. A compliment to a bigger narrative. When Gwen Stefani sang about being, “just a girl in the world,” because, “that’s all that you’d let me be,” I felt sorry for the residents of that world, because I knew better: no one “let” you be anything, you had full autonomy to decide for yourself what you would be. When James Brown sang about this, “being a man’s world,” it was like listening to Old English, something made unintelligible by the fact that it was so antiquated.
But I could feel the gravitational pull of a man when he focused on me. The force of it was paralyzing, and I fought it like a space-traveler against a black hole. I worried what would happen if I gave myself fully over to this tide. Would I wind up losing my independence and my identity? Would I wake up at thirtysomething with a mortgage and a balding bedfellow, my dreams deferred; my writing subsumed by what was easier for coupledom??
I suppose that’s why I never got in too deep with them. And I was joyful in my commitment-phobia. Every time I cut off a guy who was too “cloying,” I felt the exhiliration of a wild horse galloping down the beach. I wondered if I would be this way at 50, but I didn’t worry — this wasn’t a monastic, meditative environment I was in.
In the city, my man magic multiplied. Boys were as common and quenching as Diet Coke. My ADHD and Venus in Gemini ran on pure plutonium. I cherished my collection of XX action figurines. I had a line back then: Ooh I may even save you in my phone. 😉 Male validation was my favorite drug, and I snorted it, free-based it, and rubbed it on my gums. I absolutely cherished the way a man could gaze at you, five minutes into a conversation, his eyes as warm as a fireplace, a blissful, adoring smile on his lips. I imagine that’s what life would’ve been like if I had grown up with my father, also a writer: us reading each other’s scribbled quatrains, sharing gazes that radiated the solar puissance of Helios himself.
In short, I wasn’t mourning Ryan-the-Irishman with a prayer card and a giant candle purchased at a 99 cent store in Spanish Harlem.
There was Chase, “the married guy.” I thought he was such a babe when I met him at a pub near Grand Central station. He had curly hair and glassy eyes like a doll that watches all. I thought the mystery he exuded was something better than what it turned out to be: he actually had a wife at home in Jericho. When I set him a screenshot of his profile picture, featuring him in a wedding tux, dipping his bridal belle like they were at a hoe-down in Branson, he wrote back, “sooo is it a problem that I’m married??” I told him that only a Frenchman could deliver that level of insouciance without skeeze, and he wasn’t French. Before you say, “But at least he didn’t lie!” I have no idea if Mrs. Chase was privy to what sorts of convos her husband was having before boarding the LIRR each night.
There was Mike, the baseball bro I met one weekend (also in a bar). I consider him the salutatorian of the Best Looking Boys I’ve Ever Gavotted With. He was an Aries, and had a body to prove it: muscular, Spartan, but wielding a bat stick instead of a spear. He was a dirty blond with blue eyes, the combo my brain shamelessly zooms in on in any Hollywood Square of physiognomy.
To talk to Mike for five minutes, you would think he was a garden-variety, wholesome, wannabe cop with a heart of gold. (Take his musings on kids: “I want a son and a daughter. But I want the boy to be older, so he can protect the girl.” ❤) There was a lot of jejune mischief between us, but our conversation wasn’t the neural orgasm that my Gemini brain commanded. (Him: “Do you have to work today? No? Lucky.”) The tryst would have died with dignity after a fortnight, had he not had this intriguing kernel of quirk to him:
Mike had a fetish.
Now, if you asked me to tell you what I like in a man, I’ll tell you that, a certain brand of weirdness made my neurons light up like a switchboard during Tammy Faye power hour. My boys could be categorized by items like:
-Illness, (see: Peter, the diabetic)
-Duel citizenship, (see: also Peter, whose insulin-soaked heart was halved by Belgium)
-Addiction (see: Heroin John)
-Being a twin (see: James and Jeff)
-Any kind of neurodiversity, (see: everyone),
-Knowledge of astrology (see: Luke, the redhead)
-Any kind of spiritual hunger (see: Alberto, whose grandmother was a Santera).
If a guy was French, plus had any of these yummy oddities, I would declare him a Golden Albatross, and automatically go blind, deaf, and mute to the rest of his species — except for him (this hasn’t happened — yet).
Through Mike, I expanded my rubric to include “kink.” For as bro-y as he was, he wanted something that the entire canon of Cosmo hadn’t prepared me for...
(I’m going to say more in the book, but I’ll leave this a… for now).
After a while, I felt a dull, dutifulness when Mike’s SnapChats came in. I didn’t particularly want to engage him, but I felt bad that no he had no other port for his freakiness. His exes, all girls who looked like contestants on the Bachelor, with the church-on-Sundays, Disney hygiene to match, had apparently balked when he tried to broach the subject. I was stuck in a bizarre No-Man’s-Land between girlfriend and unpaid sex worker, when I wanted to be neither. Especially not “unpaid sex worker” (your girl might be keto, but she sure likes her bread).
My problem sort of resolved itself, as many problems tend to do. Mike boarded the Trump Train in 2016, and started Reply Snapping me with pro-Trump sentiments. When I tried to argue him, he said he saw no flaw in the man, and was ready to follow him into hell, police sirens blazing all the way.
I deleted Snap, not because of this, but because it was a zero sum additive to my life. What was I doing on there but fielding #donnyt messages from Mike, plus staring through the quotidian peepholes at the frat boys to whom I once rented houses? (whose Greek letters had gone from SAE to KPMG).
I haven’t spoken to Mike since 2017. But I am very certain that, if I were to send him a picture of that part of my body right now, he would send me those drooling Emojis in less than 30 seconds.
