She had vacationed at Saint Lucia with her sister. They lay on calico braided lounge chairs as she read a book, under an umbrella in a slightly undersized red bikini. As a senior in high school, she went to a friend’s unchaperoned house party, after midnight, in a white T-shirt and black panties, convulsing with laughter, she battled in a squirt gun fight, dripping wet all over her body and the cameraman looked up at her thighs from the floor. She had lain naked on her side on a green silk bed sheet, concealing herself with splayed thighs and cupped hands—
It was happening again—addiction! I would smuggle all the pictures back to my computer at school on a flash drive—
At a rock concert, she wore her little black dress beneath a purple haze and amidst military-tattooed men in fatigue tank tops with well-muscled, acned shoulders and arms. She had smushed against a foggy glass shower door with fingers over nipples and a carnal grin. She wore a black bra and jeans, curling her hair at some five-hundred dollar a night hotel with ivory door moldings. She had given the world a delightfully obscured profile of her diving topless into a swimming pool, her forearms and the crown of her sopping black hair submerged—green, string bikini bottoms. Another shot had her in green hotpants and grey sports bra, dripping sweat, sun rising, on all fours in green grass, panting, camera vantage: pointing down from the top of a small hill she’d just ran up for the last time that morning. And there was the obligatory French maid Halloween costume where she posed while waiting for the street-signal to change with a hip accentuating knee cross.
She looked her youngest, not a day over fifteen, in a photo of her reclining on a tattoo parlor’s chair. One wife-beater wearing guy tagged her upper chest with some Spanish word in black old-English while a black-bristled Mexican man of his early twenties crowded the camera’s lens with half his prankish mug. But it seemed fake somehow, like it could easily be a Photoshop hoax—some guy’s fantasy for this poised, sorority girl to be a willing participant in such a compromising situation. And she had said, explicitly, that she didn’t like tattoos. How could that have happened to her? Unless… well, like a friend of mine was known to say: sometimes people get got.
I wasn’t sure, for example, if Wilfred was taking advantage of me now that we were roommates. He had moved his cedar planked chest and his clothes into my room a day before I came back from Reno. I unpacked my suitcase. We made rules for the room and then ignored them. I had been fastidiously neat the past semester when I had been the only one in the room but now both of our clothes and accoutrements covered the floor in an indistinguishable blanket.
Wilfred was the best. The perfect compliment to my achievement obsessions. We made an antenna to his crappy TV with aluminum foil. We made fun of the banal infomercials as we watched them in their entirety. We moved my recliner out of the room and put a dingy maroon daybed below the loft. He took afternoon naps in this daybed and let the alarm clock on our desktop ring incessantly. I would turn it off and he would yell at me because I didn’t have the right to do this.
Our arguments were nothing compared to the fights Rex and Dubnicek had next door. Rex’s reign as Consul had ended with the past semester and, apparently, Dubnicek had been voted the next Consul. (I almost never went to the House meetings.) Nicodemus was gunning to excommunicate Rex from the frat for his part in what had happened to Ma Red’s suite. Dubnicek hadn’t been present for the ransacking and, therefore, his heart really wasn’t in the subterfuge that Rex kept demanding of him.
Nicodemus was close to his goal. He had bypassed the standard, member-elected Frat Court and convened a special executive committee meeting in our dining room that evening. At seven, Rex’s membership and residence in our house would be settled.
I planned to attend this meeting. It might be fun to see him squirm now that the tables were turned. But I had to finish my Calc III assignment. I was halfway through the assignment when Em texted me:
‘What are you doing today?’
It was completely out of nowhere. I paced the messy room. Over Christmas break it seemed I had made a number of mistakes in my text messaging with her. I thought the fact that I still couldn’t get her to talk to me on the phone was a strong indicator of my texting inadequacy. I needed to confer with Dubnicek before I replied but he wasn’t in his room so I sent out an IM:
‘Poet to Anti-Poet,’ I typed. ‘Poet to Anti-Poet Mayday!—Mayday! Package in hand. In need of immediate instruction to the text: “What are you doing today?”’
‘She texted you?’ wrote Drake. ‘That’s pretty sudden, huh, Victor?’
‘Yah, I guess it is,’ I typed. ‘I can’t figure it out.’
‘I’ll help you, Victor,’ wrote Drake,‘but in a different way than you’ll expect.’
‘Okay,’ I typed. ‘Maybe I should just field this one on my own but I don’t know. I’m sure I have a couple minutes to respond… Right?’
‘Victor,’ wrote Drake. ‘I belong to a newsgroup that dabbles in illegal websites…’
‘Thanks to the website of a disgruntled cellular tower employee in Des Moines I can tell you the following about Emily’s very recent cell habits…
‘Ten minutes before she called you she texted or called nine guys,’ wrote Drake. ‘Would you like their names?’
‘What?’ I typed. ‘Why are you telling me this? What possible good could come from this information?’
‘Victor, knowledge is power,’ wrote Thomas Clark. ‘How could more knowledge ever not help you? Let Drake tell you the names.’
‘I don’t want to know the names,’ I typed. ‘I’m just going to text her.’
We text-bantered for about a half an hour. There were strings of platitudes, pleasantries and witticism between us before we hashed out plans for her to join me in my room for some studying. Maybe texting wasn’t as hard as I had thought. Maybe any idiot could do it. Maybe…
She didn’t say when she’d be coming over. If she came over within the next half-hour I’d have a good three hours of privacy with her before Wilfred came back from classes.
Just then, Drake and Dubnicek barged in through my door without knocking, like escapees from a burning building: “She’s coming over here?” Drake huffed.
“Yes,” I said.
Drake slapped me on my back three times and bobbed his head in merry approval. Dubnicek stepped out alongside him, “you text-babbled her into coming over her?”
“Yes,” I said, “There’s a new anti-poet in town.”
Dubnicek gave me a look of surprise and incredulity. He looked to Drake and then back to me. “When’s she coming over?”
“I don’t know. Ten minutes? Maybe a half hour.”
“We gotta give this guy a crash course,” Dubnicek said.
“Yah,” Drake agreed. “Victor, when you talked to this girl last time, what happened?”
“She kept getting distracted by everything: her cell, her friends, her stupid football game. She made me feel like I wasn’t important.”
“Exactly!” Dubnicek said, “And, whether she knows that was what she was doing or not, don’t you think she likes that outcome of making you feel like a stupid loser?”
“Well,” I said. “I suppose she can’t help but like the outcome of making me feel insecure.”
“Exactly,” Dubnicek said, as he bounced a finger in my direction.
“Victor,” Drake said, “We don’t have much time, so I’m just going to hit the high points. All mammals,”—he looked to Dubnicek,—“That includes us, we’re mammals too, Churchy—”
“Shut up, Drake,” Dubnicek said, smirking.
“All female mammals,” Drake continued, “they all use one of two gambits to mate with a male. There’s the Domestic Bliss and the He-man strategy. The Domestic Bliss Strategy is just your standard female bird forcing the male to build a nest before they get it on. It’s a prolonged courtship with tasks related to child rearing for the purpose of proving that the male will stay and be faithful after the child is born. Now, if you fail with Emily
it’s going to be for the same reason everyone fails with a girl: they were using an old strategy. Everything you know about getting a girl to like you, every TV show, every movie, every stupid thing your grandpa or your aunt told you at Thanksgiving is old, based on outdated information. It’s all based on Domestic Bliss strategies and Domestic Bliss went out of style in the ‘50s. Ever since Women’s Lib., ever since women started entering colleges and the workplace in force, there’s been no need for a Domestic Bliss strategy.”
“Now, if you wanna use Domestic Bliss,” Dubnicek cut in, “You have to be rich or you have to wanna spend a shit-load of money on girls.”
“So that leaves us with the He-man strategy,” Drake said. “The He-man strategy is basically where the woman knows the man isn’t going to be faithful or help raise the child. But she doesn’t care because she wants to pick a guy that’s so studly, she knows that any sons she has with this guy will be irresistible to future females and her genes will be carried on at least as much as if she’d used the Domestic Bliss strategy.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s so crazy. So I’m just supposed to act like a real studly guy?”
“The main part of the He-man strategy,” Dubnicek said, “is making it seem like you’re too good for her. Which is funny, because that’s what she’s doing to you right now. Now, check this out, you’re going to fake like you’re too good for her but how can you ever really know that she isn’t also faking like she’s too good for you? There’s no way for you to ever know.”
“Yah,” Drake said. “It’s weird. She’s going to be acting exactly the same way as you act. The woman has become the new man. I repeat: The woman has become the new man. Seduction has become more like a fistfight than anything else. If you wanna seduce this girl you should take the lead from a book like that Samurai training guide The Five Rings instead of that wimpy, outdated Men are From Mars Women are From Venus.”
“So,” I said. “Let me see if I got this right. If I want to attract her, I should tell her how much better I am than her?”
“Yes,” Drake said. “That’s exactly what you should do… if you want to fail.”
“What?”
“Victor,” Drake said, “What did I just tell you a second ago? The main reason guys fail is because they use an old strategy to try to succeed with a girl. If this was the 1970’s and women were just beginning to enter the workforce and there were landline telephones and there was no Internet then you would be right. You could just tell her that you were better than her. But this is the Information Era. It’s not enough to be a He-man. You’ve got to be a Tecno-He-man—”
“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Look. She’s already doing it to you. She’s already being a Techno-She-ra—”
I shook my head, “Too many cartoons, Drake. Too many cartoons.”
“She’s already doing it to you. I bet she’s always texting and answering her cell phone around you. How fucking rude is that? She’s implying that she’s in more demand than you are and it weakens your position. She’s acting like a man. You’ve got to fight fire with fire. If you want to succeed in the information age where women are expecting to make as much money as men, you gotta be a Techno—! a Techno-He-man.”
“Victor,” Dubnicek said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. When she comes over here, we’re going to hit you up with a bunch of IM’s, text messages, and phone calls pretending to be different girl’s that are interested in you. And you’re going to answer them as if this Emily girl of your dreams wasn’t even in your room.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s going to be a battle royal,” Drake said with a smile, “Techno-He-man versus Techno-She-ra. The one who appears to be the most eligible wins.”
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
Rex Blauwern yelled through our thin wall, “Do it, Victor! It’s fucking perfect!”
I scratched my head. “I—” The Q vibrated in my hand:
‘Do it!’ Thomas Clark texted.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I have no way to know for sure if she isn’t doing the same thing.”
“That’s right,” Drake said. “With all the distractions and the breakneck pace of everything today, there’s no way to know what’s real anymore. You just gotta win. You just gotta win; that’s it. Let’s go, Dubnicek. Let’s go get in our positions.”
They started to walk out and Dubnicek passed through the doorway. Drake stopped to turn and face me. “One more thing, Victor.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s going to brag about how she doesn’t play games but remember the fundamental rule of game playing…”
“Which is?”
“Even the most cut-rate game player must disavow the games in her own mind and in her own environment before she can begin playing games.”
“Huh?”
“Ignore all games before you can play your first game,” Drake said. “A master operates at a higher level. A musician doesn’t see a bunch of notes; she sees melodies that she wills into being. A dishonest person doesn’t see a bunch of games; she sees outcomes that she wills into being.” He looked back one last time before he closed the door, “You remember that and you’ll be ready to do battle with this Emily Green-Portsmith.”
I sat at my desk and stared at the double and triple integrands inside my math textbook, trying to reconcile my desire for her with my Sunday school, Judeo-Christian ethics. There was no reconciliation available. I couldn’t wash away the whole world, all her past experiences, all her successes and her failures. If I didn’t play dirty, I would lose.
My nervous hand penciled out numbers, operators and brackets without me knowing. I moved left to right down the college ruled paper as I thought about her. I was some calculating machine. A calculating machine didn’t stand a chance against a sensual machine. It was predator/prey or it was a higher suite of cards—I wasn’t sure. I stopped my left hand from writing with my empty right hand and looked to the oak door, expecting to hear a knock. How could my integrity weather my desire? Why should integrity attempt to stand against desire? Was falling in love only a conscious relenting to change without foreknowledge?
Someone knocked gently on the door.
“Come in,” I said, weakly, and then I tried again, “Come, come in.”
The door slowly opened and she came in. Her black hair was teased in loose curls. Something about her appearance—her subtle mascara maybe—made me want to guess her fragrance but we were too far apart. A black wool overcoat fluttered around her shapely black shins. I couldn’t tell what kind of pants she was wearing. What was that—leather? It was a strange choice of pants for her blue and pink New Balance running shoes. “Hi Victor,” she unfastened her silver clasped overcoat, “Can I call you Vic?”
“Sure,” I said. “I prefer Victor, though.”
“Oh.” She removed a beige cashmere scarf and took off her coat to reveal some close fitting v-neck, white T with a black bra beneath. “Sorry. Victor.” She spoke to herself, “He’s partial to Victor.” She looked around at the loft and the daybed and the clothes strewn over the floor. “This is perfect,” she said. “The quintessential frat-boy room.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“What?” She stopped examining some of Wilfred’s dirty dinner plates. “It means I like your room.” She smiled and pointed at me, playfully, “Don’t be so suspicious, buster.” She set her corduroy shoulder bag on an open space on the desktop and drew out a psychology book for my appraisal and then set it down. “I have to finish chapter four by tomorrow.” She pointed to my computer monitor. “You still use a CRT?”
“CRT?” I asked. “C-R-T. Cathode ray tube? Yah, I still use a CRT.”
Her cell phone chimed like a wolf-whistle and she pulled it out of her shoulder bag. “If you spend a lot of time on your computer, you really should invest in a flat screen. The CRT screen is warped,” she held her phone in her deformed hand and
made a ‘C’ with her other hand, indicating the inferior shape of a convex, CRT screen, “It strains your eyes.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t feel like shelling out the money for a flat screen.”
She shook her head at me, smirking. “Victor,” she said, chidingly. “I’ve got a twenty-five inch flat screen you can just have.”
“Just lying around?” I asked, “That you’re not even using?” I wondered what she was doing. I felt like I was competing with a guy for technological superiority.
“People just give me things,” she said. “The last guy that built my last computer for me, he just gave me this flat screen and I’m not using it. Do you want it?”
“I, uh,” I scratched my head. “I, I guess so. Wait—I don’t know.”
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. She looked at her flipped open cell phone in her hand and smirked before laughing.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s just Marko, again.” She closed her phone. “All the girls love him. He’s going to help me get my head shots for print and ad media.”
“Oh,” I said. “Just Marko.” This was it, I supposed. The Techno-He-man versus the Tecno-She-ra. “Do you want to start studying?” I asked.
“Do you want to?” she asked, raising her thin, shapely eyebrows.
“Yah, I suppose we should get a start on it.” I took a seat and she grabbed a chair behind her. I thought to say something about her leather pants and running shoes but I stopped myself as I stared at the small black whale-tale of her thong while she leaned over my desktop. This was weird. My desktop chimed and I got out of my chair so that I could type while standing, if necessary.
Amanda147: Are we still on for Next Tuesday?
“Oh Amanda,” I mumbled to myself, wondering if the IM had come from Dubnicek or Drake. “Will you ever stop the chase?”
Emily looked up, “Wait.” She stood. “Let me see.” She walked over to lean over my inferior monitor and I smelled her lilac perfume and felt her round breast against the back of my shoulder. “Hmm. Maybe I misjudged you, Victor.”
Growing Up Wired Page 20
