by Nic Kelman
But mostly it’s just that you’re not so afraid. You no longer need to worry about what the majority of people think of you because now they’re worried about what you think of them. Now you have so much money and thus so much power that even your parents can’t help but be a little afraid of you. So now, most of the time, you can do what you want and say what you want without fear. So now, most of the time, you don’t have to keep yourself hidden. Power hasn’t corrupted you, it’s set you free.
And you find yourself wondering if maybe that’s what your old friend meant, if maybe he meant he never knew you were this way, if maybe he meant he never knew you were just trying to avoid burning any bridges all those years. You find yourself wondering if maybe it seems like you’ve changed to him because he never knew until now who you really were.
Ah, Nabokov, you sly old dog, you cunt, you. Even though you call Humbert a pedophile, you chose a girl just after puberty, not just before. Why would that be do you think? Could it be that you knew even your staunchest supporters would desert you if she had been younger? Could it be that you knew because she was postpubescent there would be plenty of people that would understand but that if she were prepubescent you wouldn’t have found a single sympathizer? That if she were prepubescent you might as well have written a book asking its reader to pity a genocide? Could it be that all, yes all, the men you knew too, when the doors were closed, when the room was empty but for them, would look at each other and smirk and say, “Humbert was one lucky bastard, wasn’t he?” Could it be that for all your respectable, scholarly exterior, you had more than one male friend who knew you well enough to say with a grin, “I can’t believe you got away with that!” Could it be that you knew damn well there are plenty of people who, underneath it all, believe the saying “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.”
Because at the end of the day, what else do we have? After the rebellions, and the struggles, and the political endeavors, after watching our backs day in and day out, guarding them not just from others but from everything, what else do we really have? A dog like the Cavaliers? A month like August? A toilet-bowl cleaner like the tragic son of Telamon? What else do we really have? What else can really make us feel alive, even if it is only for an hour or two? Is there anything else, out of all we have, that we can actually say is worth living for?
“‘Achilleus, no man before has been more blessed than you, nor ever will be.’” — Odyssey 11:482
It is not you that we hate.
Sociopsychologists and pop culture theorists point to the annual increase in the popularity of misogynist media (e.g. the explosive success in recent years of gang bang, rough sex, and bukkake pornography) and most frequently claim this indicates that as women gain more and more power, men feel more and more threatened by that power and therefore direct more and more hatred towards women.
This is incorrect. It is not hatred we feel towards you, it is resentment. We resent you because you say you want us to treat you like men but when we treat you like men you accuse us of only treating you that way because you’re women. We resent you because you say you want us to behave towards you as we would behave towards ourselves when you mean you want us to behave towards you as you behave towards yourselves. We resent you because you say you can do business the way we do business and then tell us the way we do business is “inappropriate.” We resent you because you say you want things to be fair when you mean you want them to be unfair, you mean you don’t want ruthless men to subjugate you as they would weaker men.
And it is the resentment that is growing. Because more and more often we hear you say, “See? We told you we were equal. We told you we could succeed in your world if the playing field was leveled,” when we believe that, in fact, you succeeded in our world because we began to treat you unequally, because we unleveled the playing field.
Because it is not what is done but what is said is done that we, like you, can have problems with. After all, we are happy to use handicaps in golf or polo or video games, aren’t we? Satisfied to be on a losing team as long as it beats the spread, even?
No, it is not the unfairness itself we have a problem with, it is with your saying, “We’re just as strong as you, now stop punching so goddamn hard.”
And it is because of this that we respect you less and less and resent you more and more. Because those are precisely the feelings we would have for men who repeated such a thing over and over and you tell us to treat you the same as men.
“So why do you put up with it?” you ask. For the same reason so many of us put up with having to ask you permission to go out with our friends, for the same reason we put up with so many of you saying you don’t want us going to strip clubs any-more, for the same reason we put up with and sacrifice so many things. Because even though you may not be as strong as us, you can make us weak.
And this is why “misogynist” media is becoming more and more popular. Because the longer we keep our mouths shut, the more we want to show ourselves that, in the end, when it comes down to it, we are the ones with control over you. We desire not to suppress your developing strength but to deny our continuing compliance. We feel threatened not by your increasing power, but by our increasing weakness.
We do not hate you.
Vietnam was the only war we’ve ever fought where we could not expect participation or victory to bring us at least some immediate material gain.
Vietnam was the only war we’ve ever fought that took us into, not out of, economic hardship.
Vietnam was the only war we’ve ever fought simply for the sake of a cause.
How did we meet? Was it in college at some party? Did you stumble backwards into me and spill your beer on me from a plastic cup and apologize but giggle while I said it was OK, not to worry about it, even though if you’d been a man I would have picked a fight with you? Was it at our first job? Did we both start working at the same place on the same day and chance to sit next to each other when they served pasta salad and mineral water during orientation? Was it at a bar with some mutual friends? Did they mean to set us up together or did we just hit it off and surprise them all when they found out we’d been seeing each other? Was it on a deep-sea fishing boat, in a local fair-ground, at an automatic teller machine where you were briefly afraid I might be a mugger? Did we act shy, bold, combative because we didn’t want to seem like we liked each other in case we didn’t like each other? Was it cold or warm? Did the rain or the sun beat down? How did we meet?
I don’t remember. But I know I thought I was lucky to have a reason to talk to you.
And what word did we choose for ourselves at the beginning of the English language? What word was chosen as the earliest colloquial term for penis?
“Cock.”
From whence “cock”?
The Oxford English Dictionary seems to think it is derived from the compound word “stop-cock” meaning “a spout or short pipe serving as a channel for passing liquids through and having a crowning tap, the whole resembling the combed head of a cockerel.”
This is the meaning from which “cock” in its modern usage is derived?
This when the word “cock” was used to denote “male” as opposed to “female” as early as 1325 A.D.?
This when the word “cock” meant “one who arouses others from slumber, a minister of religion,” as early as 1386 A.D.?
This when the word “cock” meant “leader, head, chief man, ruling spirit; formerly, also, victor: said also of things,” as early as 1542 A.D.?
This when the word “cock” was used colloquially after 1639 to also mean, “one who fights with pluck and spirit”?
This when as early as 1300 the word “cock” also meant “war”?
This when as early as 1386, in order to avoid blasphemy, the word “cock” was substituted for “God”?
Please.
Or maybe you were born rich, maybe you are a forest guide, a dolphin trainer. Maybe you are even happily married. It is possible you have never even
thought of young girls in that way.
But then one day something happens, comes along. One day, God forbid, you have a child you don’t want or one you did want is born deficient in some fashion. One day, God forbid, there is an earthquake and you were late, a day late, on the insurance payment. One day, God forbid, something happens to her, to your wife. She gets sick. She has a breakdown.
But whatever it is, you can be sure of one thing. They will turn to you and you will shoulder the weight. Without thought, without question, without looking back. Because that is what a man does. A man pays for things.
It will cost you your time. It will cost you your life. You will enter a dark, dark tunnel and even if you are, one day, blessed enough to come back into the light like Lazarus risen from the dead, you can be sure of one thing. You will not be the same.
And you cannot describe the inside of the tunnel to those who have not seen it.
And no one who has been in the tunnel ever wants to talk about it.
And suddenly a breath of fresh air once in a while will seem like something you deserve.
The decadence of the Romans was starting to believe their own sophistry and forgetting what had really built the empire.
The decadence of the Romans was allowing themselves to become enslaved to the very propaganda they had invented to set them free.
The decadence of the Romans was not beginning to value materialism too much, but too little.
You are on a plane to Guangzhou. You sent your own jet to pick someone up so you are flying first-class instead. They are building a plant for you. It will cost more than a stadium, more than a subway. When it is finished, it will be nine times larger than the block you grew up on. You know this because last Tues-day afternoon you had your personal assistant find out how big that block was, still is.
Since you boarded the plane in Los Angeles, you have been going over the numbers. You have people that have already done this for you, people whose job it is to do this and only this — accountants, investment bankers. But, unlike the racehorses you don’t ride and the cars you don’t wax and the paintings you’re not sure you don’t understand, you only have two of these. This will be your third. So for this, you are checking the numbers yourself.
When you are done, you make a call. As you suspected, all of those people have been lying to you. You are not surprised, that is the way things work. You don’t even blame them, you will need to fire someone over this, someone who just leased a new car for their daughter to take to college, someone whose wife just quit her job to finally start sculpting “for real,” someone with a mortgage. They were afraid. They were only protecting themselves. You would have done, will be doing, the same.
When you disconnect, the woman sitting next to you says, “Are you going to Guangzhou?”
You laugh. She looks vaguely familiar. She must be at least five eleven. She has short blond hair a little thin from too many color treatments. She wears a white, sleeveless turtleneck sweater — cashmere — and a short silk skirt. These two items cost over a thousand dollars. You know because you’ve bought them before. Her exposed arms and bare legs are fit, athletic, shapely but full of sinew. She must have a personal trainer, follow a rigorous exercise regimen. When she notices your eyes flicker over her legs, outstretched on the legrest, she cocks her right knee over the left, points the toe. Her calf and thigh flex under your eyes.
Since you both sat down, she has ignored you. She has been sitting next to an empty seat. It was the calculator. The laptop alone would have been fine, she would have leaned back just a little to see what you were doing, who you were. But when you produced the calculator, began to add things up for your-self, you disappeared. Then she overheard your conversation and said, “Are you going to Guangzhou?”
And you laugh because it is a direct flight.
She tells you her name, you recognize it, can place her now. She is a model, has been a model for as long as models can be models. She is not as young as she used to be. You have a friend who would call her “used up,” especially if he saw her now, under the cabin’s fluorescent lights. She asks you where you’re staying in Guangzhou. “Oh,” she says. “What a coincidence! That’s where I’m staying!” It’s possible it was, that she isn’t going to go to the bathroom in a minute and get her agent out of bed and make him change her reservation. There are only three world-class hotels in Guangzhou, so it’s possible.
She wants you to ask her what she, a world-famous model, is doing in Guangzhou, an industrial port in mainland China, so you do.
“I’m doing a spot for the World Wildlife Fund at the Zhang Bird Sanctuary,” she says. This makes sense, you think, they often do things like that after thirty, when their careers are faltering, when the crevasses are too deep for the lights and the makeup to shallow out. It lets them hang on to the public eye, may even lead to some acting work.
But then, as she continues talking, you realize you are wrong. She really does love birds, can talk for hours about them. She tells you about the white-tailed eagles that live at the sanctuary. “They look like little Roman soldiers or something,” she says, “stocky little soldiers with worn-out plates of brown armor all over them.” She tells you how she watched a pair build their nest once, that the female — larger than the male — supervised the construction, that it made her cry. When the next round of food comes, a noodle soup, she tells you how chopsticks always remind her of the Eurasian spoonbill, this beautiful bird — as beautiful as a crane — with a spectacular crest but with a bill that looks like someone stuck a pair of chopsticks in its face. “Like this,” she says, holding the chopsticks they have given you up to her mouth. With them jutting out from her face, she turns, extends her neck, holds her head up high, displays an elegant profile, and makes a sound like a duck. Her eyes come alive when she does this. In spite of yourself, you are amused. Even though this is not something she is doing just for you, is something she has done before, and in front of other men.
This part of her is actually quite charming. This part of her that she has held on to since she was a little girl. This fascination with birds that has somehow escaped destruction. How did she do that? How did she shield even that tiny piece of herself? Or was it simply chance, simply a building left standing in the rubble after an atomic blast?
Suddenly, in spite of your disinterest, you find yourself wondering if she is bisexual like so many of the models you’ve fucked, find yourself wondering what she would look like with your cock in her mouth. You lose the thread of what she is saying, something about land reclamation near the sanctuary, about the expansion of Guangzhou chemical plants encroaching on the reserve, about migratory patterns becoming altered, about poisoning. Something about extinction. But she finishes with a “Don’t you think?” and so you are able to say, “Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more,” with confidence.
When you land, she pretends not to see her own car, thinks you won’t notice, complains nonchalantly that her car isn’t there. So you play along and invite her to share yours. Then at your hotel, if her agent hasn’t managed to change her reservation yet, she makes a big fuss, is very good at pretending they’ve made a mistake. When she’s standing at the front desk, as the bellhops take your bags upstairs, you notice that she really does still have a fantastic ass. So, wondering how many hours a day she devotes to exercising her ass alone, you tell the hotel she’s a friend of yours, ask them if there isn’t something they can do. She has a room within minutes. Someone else will find themselves without a room tonight.
She thanks you, of course, says, “I don’t know why they didn’t have my reservation,” tells you her room number even though she must know you heard it at the desk.
You spend all of the next day looking at the plant under construction, from very early until very late. You decide what has happened, the extra costs are Nathan’s fault. Nathan who’s worked for you for three years. Nathan who, you noticed a couple of weeks ago, just put pictures of his new son on his desk. You decide i
t’s Nathan who’s going to have start faxing out rásumás.
When you get back to your room, you have a message. Before you retrieve it, you know who it is. And you’re right. She wants to know if you’d like to go out to the sanctuary with her tomorrow, if you’d like to see the eagles she told you about.
You are supposed to be leaving in the morning but you call your assistant and see if there’s any reason you couldn’t stay an extra day. You don’t even know why you are trying to rearrange your schedule. She’s still beautiful, certainly, still worthwhile if you didn’t have other things to do. But she’s not worth changing your plans for, is she?
Then you realize why. It’s her interest in the birds, her concern for them, the way they can still delight her as if she were five years old. That’s why you’ve decided you’ll let her try to fuck her way into your heart.
So the next day she takes you to the reserve, shows them to you, the eagles, the spoonbills, points out how even from the middle of the sanctuary you can still see the smokestacks of the refineries, how the water changes color near the protected area’s boundaries. She points all of this out to you, then, after a dinner at a remarkable restaurant reserved for party officials and rich foreigners, after she bores you with the details of her flagging career, of her agent spending less and less time on her, then, after that, she fucks you anyway. She fucks you even though you are building one of the chemical refineries that is killing the only thing she loves. She fucks you anyway.
In college, you wouldn’t have had the courage to ask this girl for her number. Now, the next morning, knowing you are leaving that day, she volunteers to give it to you — her cell number she points out, the most personal of her numbers. She has to ask you for yours. You give her your card, tell her that’s the easiest way to get in touch with you.
But when she calls two weeks later, and again two weeks after that, you don’t return her calls. You lost interest after fucking her once. That undamaged part of her was so small, it was only good for one night. Nothing more.
