Here’s another one about a pathetic loser. It all began as another one of those awful nights preceding a devil’s holiday. There’s Conner Murphson: faithful and habit-proud, milling about drunk and in listless circles in his small, monkish apartment during the vertiginous, thin hours of the morning which seemed only hypothetical—only a suggestion of a cursory outline of something called time. Milling, walking, seething, endlessly reviewing the same tragic events of another tragic night at a popular urban club like a ruthless little accountant figuring sums of doom. He had yet to take off his Pulp Fiction costume, and his Sam Jackson permed hair stood on end like confused, angry punctuation, ruefully black.
It was sloppy drama of a night complete with missed catharsis and brutish, oblique soliloquies—he had vomited green and oatmealy on his shiny black shoes outside of Le Risque on 2nd. Seven pomegranate Negronis. They were his own White Russian, he had thought, sly and drunken, as he haunted the packed venue, rocks glass in hand. His own trademark drink, a staple of his diet: these were the trappings that made a man. He had far too many of them and drunk them far too quickly, as it goes.
He had hoped, in doing this, to partake in the storied vice economy; that, by imbibing one sin, he could more easily attain another. And is it really such a mystery as to what he wanted? No, that brutal, small fascination with endless sexual coercion is almost noble in its creeping consistency in our race. He had gone out wanting to meet a girl.
To our little Edison’s credit, it was an experiment massively supported by years of prescribed media entertainment and common sense. All he had to do was simply loosen his inhibition curve and allow cool bravado to amass slowly from his feet up, to cloud his brain against a troubled, fearful conscience. But the courage plateau is unyielding, and fearlessness cannot compound exponentially. There is a limit to the reaches of our soul. What remains becomes pure expulsion.
First, there are swigs of Fireball alone in the apartment, for that first glimmer of hope and joy in the world. It was an outlook adjuster. Then, there are shooters packed tightly against his thread-bare polyester suit, ordered from “WeiCostume,” just to bide time in the line to the club. Confidence boosters. Liquid gold.
He had a hell of a time getting in the place, first of all. When he faced the bouncers he assumed a smiling deference, meek and ultra-cordial, as if by the sweet simple logic of the situation alone, human experience aside, he could finagle his way in. “Of course, of course,” he said smiling and genuinely happy as the slightly fat bouncer who looked like an insurance adjuster shooed him away, a simple, unheeding shake of the head, an absolute denunciation of worth. Alone, uncoordinated, unloved, essentially in blackface with this costume—what was there to say about his getting in? It was a non-question. This was a storied institution, holding up the ideal of our culture’s values—it was exclusive.
But for Conner’s sake, the shooters might have really done the trick, because when the bouncer turned him away for the fourth time, keeping him waiting towards the front, all he could do was smile, and think, “We’re in this together, and we will get through it somehow.”
He was meek and kind of like Jesus, all like Jesus, ready to be crucified, sure of the reward, ready to pay the twenty-five-dollar cover charge. And on some nights, like this one, he would be allowed in, seemingly by a clerical error, and he would be carried through the doors as if upon a cloud by this Kafkaesque miracle.
Once inside, the music blaring, the lights dazzling, it all promised to be that maudlin cliché of “intoxicating.” He went around to have an exuberant “night out” on this holiday weekend, to partake in the effortlessly normal activity of sex and love and memorable, riotous experiences. He talked to girls about “hello” and “I love your costume.” He danced towards girls. He tried forgetting himself, allowing the blaring music to lull his body and mind together towards unified action. The walls seemed to light up. There was smoke creeping along the floor. He tried embracing himself and his lust, pursuing girls, “putting himself out there,” creating a fun-loving personality, which, by its sheer magnetism, would be attractive to all kinds. He drank a lot at the bar.
The disorientation the drinks caused did not wholly ruin him. At his height, he found himself, astonishingly, dancing with a girl he had said hello to. From what he could make out, she was a very cute, small girl, with a small dress on. They seemed to have diffused toward each other and were now carried away by the moment. It was all correct because it was all happening. They danced to some obnoxious blaring bass—rather, they rubbed and gyrated rhythmically, jumping at certain intervals. She pressed her ass to his crotch, very softly and quickly, and he responded in kind with tentative movements. This sort of courtship ritual was common, permitted, and casual, but he was elated. She turned around and smiled at him. He did the same. And so, the introduction was made, the dance afoot.
As this particular song ended, she led him away from the group to a corner near the bathrooms, engulfed in darkness. She pressed against him, hugging him, her speech whirring, brain seeming to buzz audibly. The feeling of being desired, just this knowledge alone, flooded Connor with warmth and security. It was a great gift. Her breath was sweet and hot. She said something like “this is just yes.”
They separated and orbited each other around the wall, still half-bobbing dimly to the vestiges of music, all girthy bass. The bathroom doors flung open every few seconds revealing tens of half-hidden dangling dicks and stalls packed with three or four jittering pairs of feet. Roars erupted intermittently.
She smiled at him again, and they yelled some pleasantries—non-words composed into sentences—then, she made a signal to the bathroom as if someone had called her name. Ignoring the errant dicks, the brief light shining from the bathroom allowed Connor to see her clearly for the first time. She looked like she would be more comfortable in some kind of perfectly edited video, with fast cuts and well-timed music. She had glitter all over her face and smiled like she was from some small city whose minor sports teams’ she pledged absolute allegiance to. She was innocent in her own way. Her hair was a dizzyingly dark black which bobbled atop her small head and round nose. She looked of her age. She most likely worked a job that did not exist fifty years ago, like him. Social Media Manager. Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Search Engine Optimization. He was a little confused about her gesture towards the bathroom.
She did it again, her whole body leaning towards him then towards the bathroom, her face determined, knowing, headstrong. He sort of tapped her shoulder, and brushed up slightly against her breasts in the process of leaning towards her, screaming, “What?”
“Let’s go,” she screamed, as if repeating it for the fifth time, exasperated slightly but still in good fun. She grabbed his hand with the same secret smile, gnomish and tight-lipped. She took rapid, jumpy steps into the men’s bathroom, where none of the dick-holders at the urinals batted an eye and walked towards the row of stalls still crammed with restless, shuffling shoes.
He followed, bewildered and still loyal like a dog. He saw a close future of a naked woman, and was glad; Still, he was fearful of the time between then and now, and the momentous barriers, both mental and physical, which he envisioned would meet him upon attempting to get there. She led him, and he followed, and with one last look at the full, loud, echoing white of the bathroom, they were locked inside.
“I wasn’t sure what she wanted. I mean, obviously I knew, as one always knows everything, about the possibilities, even the likelihood. It was almost certain. But standing there in that stall, I suddenly didn’t know anything.”
Still milling about in his studio, two-thousand steps into the night, to be exact, Connor was mumbling aloud to the walls and to the ceilings, to a therapist he never had and probably would never have due to inert laziness—the therapist of his sore and wound-sick conscience provided the same, if not better, narcissistic affirmation as a real, living, human being would, someone who, even through her pity and her validating, might be liable, he shuddered, at suggesting any practical, radical steps forward to heal his life. The monologue ensued.
“She was standing near the toilet, back facing me. In times of perceived precariousness, I must approach life tentatively and mechanically. Was she going to pee? What would I do if she peed? Watch her, pee streaming out? Should I turn away, gentleman-like? Was she going to throw up? Should I hold her hair back like a high school best friend, like we’re all going to buy fucking tampons later?
“Probably, no, actually, certainly, 100% certainly the correct action was to kiss her, quickly, right then. Of course, I considered that heavily, seriously. She was still facing slightly away from me, looking for something, I could only see the corner of her lips and her eyebrows.
“And if I kissed her? Well, we were alone in a fucking night club bathroom… I’d have had less of a scandal if I made out with her in a doctor’s office—there were people doing worse than that on the dance floor. So then, what? Would we have sex? Was that legal? If not legal, permitted? Would I be put on some kind of list? Would I find myself at people’s doorstep, profusely assuring that I do not rape children? More importantly, did she have a condom? I did not, in my hesitation and retardation. I am not a very smart man. I’m worried the friction will create microtears if I keep them in my pocket or wallet. What am I supposed to do, keep them in a fucking plastic protector? Is that what she was looking for, condoms? Searching through her impossibly small black leather bag with the metal insignia of some fake fashion brand? If she didn’t have one, would I fuck her raw? Would she let me? Would I cum onto the gritted cold tile of the floor, the toilet seat, her dress? No, no, no, probably none of those things. AIDS has left its scar on our generation. Antibacterial resistant super-gonorrhea is the coming pandemic. Moreover, need I even mention it? The possibility of pregnancy, of a real human baby, for which besides their life, their elimination I could scarcely afford. So then, what? Would she take me in her mouth? Probably. Probably she would.”
“Then I looked at her, arriving suddenly out of my own apprehension and into the physical world, and even in that very second, I knew I had waited too long—you always know everything immediately and completely, when you are doomed or wrong or silly, you always know when all is lost, when your hesitation lasted just an increment too long. She showed it in a brief flash of impatient confusion—all in her eyes, and then a smile. But of course, I knew. But you can’t very well leave, can you?”
In the end he hugged her, quickly, as if it was impertinent or taboo. He “stole” a hug from her, shoulders only, and their chests didn’t even touch. She was more than disappointed, and it was terse and cold, mechanical.
The moment was too fleeting and the man too… what, scared? He hadn’t felt very scared. He had felt real fear, both existential and animal. His brother had died young, and he had then, standing in the corner of the room at twelve held by his mother as men came to collect the small thing from his hospice bed, for the first time understood those frequently vexing things which occur to all people at one time of another. Alternatively, he had nearly collided with large trucks on the highway multiple times—he had gritted his teeth and remained silent, bound with cortisol instigated by real terror. If anything, this was purely intellectual, hypothetical.
He felt nothing resembling that primal fear in times like these, frequently romantic or social situations which required deliberate, concise actions. In these moments, it felt he suddenly had to approach life manually, that every word and motion was an attempt for which he always fatally paused. He understood that if you act a certain passive way: nice, helpful, caring, fair—even being playfully charming, stealing glances, feigning reasons to touch—then, “good things will come to you.” But there was always a fatal moment where love had to be made through choice, and he always fatally failed. It was a problem of biology and environment.
Some people describe a call to action, an immediate outrage of the soul in times of immense stress, which seem to run contrary to the very rules of physical wellbeing. “I wanted to rage against fate, assert my will, make my own future, create the world, wage a war to destroy it. I needed quick and decisive action which, as if in a movie, would contain the material necessary to change her heart and her mind, against nature, against the world, against every instinct, against conformity and social norms…”
Well… he was a problem of biology and environment.
“… and so, I pulled out my dick and sort of, well, oddly put, I sort of waggled it around and pressed it into her torso area while really laying my mouth on her, brutally kissing her neck, cheeks, kind of breathing into her ears. At first, she wasn’t really moving much, but sort of mutely considered the scene, eyes wide open, for about a minute, as I stepped back and just kept waggling it, I mean it, around.
“And then it all came to me, as if a premonition, I guess, though in this case this is about the past. I hadn’t even kissed her on the lips yet. I didn’t even really know her name. I think it might have been Diana. We both stared down, and, well, I was really drunk. I kind of dimly understood I was trying to get an erection but failing miserably. I was holding and thrusting my soft, shrunken dick with my fingers into the cloth of her dress behind which her midsection lay, taut and perfect, seemingly waiting. She looked down at this little ludicrosity, and just laughed, outrageously, unconscientiously.
“I acted like a barbarian. I thought that for weeks after I would be scared to death of opening the door to be hit with a sexual assault charge, or, worse yet, to wake up to my phone overloaded with notifications, my name, and a photo of me fishing and smiling two years ago branded with those phonologically hideous words like ‘predator,’ ‘assaulter,’ ‘rapist.’ I shudder to think of it.
“But worst of all is that none of that will happen because she left the stall doubling over, grinning, on her way to tell somebody, anybody. While not a pleasant experience, I think she will look upon the memory as comic—it’s a story that gets passed around among women well into their fifties as exemplary of their wild and promiscuous youth, long put behind them for the more noble callings of careerism and/or motherhood. Actually, worst of all is that I masturbated in the stall afterwards, feet shuffling all around me, finally able to sustain an erection thinking about her laying eyes on my dick, no matter how terrible, how humiliating.”
Man is the perfect middling force of the world. Or at least, men are. A species of shame and apprehension, characterized by a brutal, small existence. At least their chimp cousins have the old practical decency of “saying what they mean.” The better primates are direct and instant in their unfeeling violence, their endless hierarchical struggle, and equally forthright in their empathy, maternal and brotherly love. They at least understand that in cruel nature the most honest, and thus most correct, way to live is with a native intelligence, and an unshakeable verisimilitude. We, the radical off-cropping, the mountain levelers, are perhaps better suited to things like religion and urbanity than the law of the jungle. Our behavior vacillates endlessly to a neutral terminus. Our acts of cruelty, at least among those with some degree of cognitive functioning, beget the utmost remorse, brain-frying guilt, the need and the inability to repent. And our love is so often only noble repression of base instincts. There’s maybe still true love… somewhere… but not here, not now.
Connor recalled the scene now, walking the twenty heel-to-toe path that was the length of his room, impassively, calmly paralyzed by the idea of “balance.” It could have gone no other way, he decided.
He had left the stall and gone to the bar and given up the buck. He was terrified of seeing her again. Gone back to the bar to drink, to attempt scornfully to attract the women who maintained a wide berth around him, almost as retribution.
Those self-same women laughed from the line quietly under the whir of the crowd as he later vomited. They were full and bright types like farm girls misled, cruel in that good old fashioned honest humanism. They were mainly angels; one was a cat.
…………………………………………………………………
Now the light was burning, his bare and burnt bulb sprouting up in the corner of his room. He stopped walking, sat on his bed in the unfurnished apartment.
Hope was not lost. It was Friday, only Friday—the beginning of Halloween weekend. Still other costumes, other girls. The world seemed full of girls. All kinds of girls, all kinds of situations. The sheer potential of all of those bodies made his mind reel. The previous events of the night receded as if into a dream, and its effect on him was just as mundane. All of life, it seemed to him dimly, had been far more mundane and plausible than he could have ever expected, despite its humiliations and trials.
He seemed now, assessing things clearly, brow cold like rain, to understand the terms of engagement and his own limitations— each failure was an experiment; he was an eternal work in progress. It was Friday, only Friday. The weekend had palpable potential energy. He would do this again, something like it, varying mildly in details, words, bodies, interchangeable archetypes of shame. And finally, the hope never fades. Love, or whatever he was looking for with his world full of girls, remained free and endlessly new, and therefore endlessly pleasurable. There were thousands of nights left in his life, thousands of nights until the eternal return, or the great simplification.
It was hard for him to fall asleep that night. He dreamt of mice and pigeons thriving under the subway, consorting with each other, the litter and general dilapidation creating a bounteous, joyous feast with ample room to enjoy it, until a new direct fixation rail system began to be installed, uprooting their social and economic bonds deleteriously. They were forced into smaller, isolated groups, living frugally in little outcroppings under old, blasted bearings, dancing and dancing endlessly and quietly under the intermittent lights of the passing construction crews, so many bodies hiding at certain intervals.