Wait. I’m listening to her breathing. She’s an athlete. I can tell by her long slow breaths as she dreams. Also, tonight’s games were exhausting and, if not for the little blue pill — not that I need it, you understand, but I do want it. The night would have ended too quickly and nobody wants to go home from the county fair before they say you have to go home. Besides, if not for the extra exercise, she would have kicked me out of her apartment and then Plan B would fail. Happy, happy! The vital part of Plan A had to include some pretty energetic gymnastics to make Plan B possible.
She’s still dreaming and restless so I stay put and listen till she settles down into deep sleep. She — what was her name? —was a real sport. Don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m a pig just because I didn’t catch her name. We were in a meat market. She was dressed for trawling. Lots of guys were drooling at her but none of them understood The Platinum Rule. Let me educate you for your future happiness.
The Platinum Rule really boils down to one admonishment: To get the pussy, don’t be a pussy. You see who you want. You stare at her. She’ll look at you and then look away. Look at you and look away, look at you and look away. You don’t break your appreciative gaze. You are staring at a buffet table and you are starving. Then you strap on your nuts and walk up to her. When you play tennis, do you think about each shot or do you just see where the ball is going and react? Of course, you keep moving forward and you plant your feet and you say your name like she should already know it.
Then, hot damn, you’re in business. If you’re hanging out in the club all night screwing up your courage instead of screwing, you’re not a man. You’re afraid of what you want, afraid of somebody saying no, as if that draws blood. Forget that strategy. That approach makes you spend your time dancing (which makes men look, at best, undignified and sometimes stupefyingly ridiculous.) Don’t be a pussy. Pussies spend too much money on drinks.
If your dream girl tells you to take a hike you haven’t wasted the night. Tell her that if her lesbian lover is also into men, maybe you could all enjoy a threesome. If that doesn’t light her up, walk away. The worst thing that can happen is that she takes you up on the offer. Telemarketers have it right. It’s about volume. Make your pitch and keep pitching. You’ll never walk out of a club alone. If you aren’t in business right away, you set your sights on the next woman, starting with the most gorgeous creature you see, of course, and work your way down the chain until you get a nibble on your ear.
Don’t worry about whether you’re in her league, either. You’re both human and she has needs, too. I know, everything you’re told is that she wants romance and flowers and three dates before you hold her hand. Everything you’re told is wrong. Let the girl know everything she thinks she’s supposed to want is wrong, too. The number one line that’s gotten me the most chicks is, “Hey, you seem like a really nice girl. Too bad. I was really looking to hook up with a bad girl tonight.”
Number two is: “I’ve got a small dick so you need not be intimidated plus I can breathe through my ears. I’m really hung if you count the length of my tongue.” If she’s disgusted, move on. She was never really in play. If she laughs, you’ve got the hook in. Give her permission right off to be as complex as she really is.
Everybody really wants to drop the façade and loosen up and howl. I don’t smoke, but I’ve always got a pack beside me and a lighter at the ready. To a woman who’s willing to risk lung cancer every day, what’s a one night stand? Alcohol lowers inhibitions, but don’t drink too much or you’ll be useless when it counts. You can get sidetracked with the means to the end. A sloppy drunk is crap next to an enthusiastic partner who doesn’t have to be drunk to let loose her inner freak. A flashy Rolex knock off and cufflinks on a crisp shirt will take you farther than most guys appreciate.
Oh, and dude, never wear sneakers to the club and think you’ll get laid. Sneakers are for the gym and for children. You need real shoes, preferably Italian but definitely something that will give you height and a nod to fashion. Ask your gay buddy and he’ll help you find what you need to wear. You don’t think you have a gay buddy? Ask the guy with the shaved chest who is always going to or coming back from the gym. That’s your gay buddy.
There are three other rules that are key in making for happy nights with exotic women. The Bronze Rule is smile with your mouth and your eyes. It’s the cheapest way to improve your looks and a happy guy always gets to the starting line faster than a guy who thinks he should look tough or cool. Smile like you mean it, not like the wolf you really are. That’s the Bronze Rule. You, my future Olympian, are so going to get laid.
The Silver Rule is, be a man. None of this stuff about being yourself. If being you were really so great, the shebas would be coming to you, not the other way around. Unless you’re a Hollywood star or a pro athlete in a sport that matters (basketball, baseball, football and maybe hockey in North America, soccer everywhere else) don’t be you. You are the hunter and you’re looking for fresh game. Girls in bars are in bars for one of two reasons. They either get to feel good by rejecting men and dancing and drinking with their friends or they are there to hook up. If they are there for the former, find out fast and move on. There’s plenty of fun to be had in the city. There’s no need to buy drinks all night for some uptight wench who’s laughing at you with her coven every time you get up to get her another drink. No free rides on this train.
The Golden Rule: do unto others as they would do unto you. In other words, get away clean. Every woman has one flaw that kills the ideal long-term relationship. That one flaw is that they aren’t every other woman. It’s biology. You want to spread the seed because there are so many women and only one lifetime — and for the last three fifths of that all you’ve got are those happy memories of all those chicks who got into your car. Seize the night, for soon you’ll be watching reruns of TV shows that weren’t really worth watching the first time around.
Getting away clean is essential to living another day to go hunting without encumbrances. Occasionally you can turn an ex-girlfriend into a casual sex partner but eventually she’s going to find somebody and start shopping for picket fences. Leave them behind so you don’t get left behind. Don’t fall in love. That’s God’s trick to make you perpetuate the species, the same power who gave you so many nerve endings in the tingly bits and then condemns you for wanting to use those tingly bits. That’s the divine bait and switch, like when you end up wondering where your sex kitten of a wife went and how she was replaced with another version of your mom.
So you reject the paradigm and become Bond, James Bond…or whatever name you like. Don’t give her your real number and don’t tell her what you really do. Whatever you choose, your profession for the night must at least sound glamorous. If you’re a cost accountant, who cares? If you have zero imagination, at least have the gumption to tell her your Will Smith’s cost accountant. Firefighter is always good. Troubleshooter for a foreign government — as long as and especially if you can fake an accent — is surprisingly effective panty remover. Model scout is cliché and worse, they won’t believe you, so refer to The Silver Rule again. You’re not a schmo, you’re a man. Be one and failing that, act like one and maybe it will take.
You are not interested in making friends. Friends make more money than you do and have greater career success so when you go to their house you’re reminded how shitty your life is. It’s like being stuck at a perpetual high school reunion where everyone but you is an astronaut, a surgeon, an orthodontist or Paris Hilton. If you get a really good friend, your grand prize is he asks you to help him move and if he’s your best friend ever, he’ll hit you up for money.
A real man stands alone but never lies down alone. A real man does not give a massage without the expectation it will lead to sex. He does not want to be friends. He wants everybody naked. Now.
Tonight, she returned my hungry look and had her tongue in my ear a couple minutes after I walked up and asked if she wanted company. The c
lub was loud so when she told me her name I tried to read her lips, failed, and let it go. After a girl has her tongue down your throat, to ask her name is bad form. It makes her feel like a slut and you feel like an idiot and once she’s heating up you don’t want to slow her momentum.
Ah. Lesson’s over for tonight. She’s down to a slight snore now. Karen? Taren? Marrel? Maris? Dunno. Any of the above. All of the above. Who cares? Time for Plan B.
I slip out of bed as quietly as I can. This is the toughest part of the plan and if it’s going to go sour, this is where it happens. I gather up clothes as I go, including hers. There’s a puddly trail from the door to the bed and I gather it all up. If I need a quick getaway, I don’t want her pulling up her handy jeans, chasing me out to the apartment parking lot and cracking the windshield with a garbage can. Yeah, that happened, but Daddy learns from his mistakes. Even while she was screaming at me in Spanish and hammering on the glass, she was still naked from the waist up.
I step out into the light of the hall and quietly close the door, but not all the way. I turn the hallway light off with an elbow as I head for the living room. It was kind of a blur when we came in. She’d wrapped herself around me in the elevator and I thought we were going to have lift-off right there until I pointed out the elevator might have hidden security cameras. They never do, or if they do, no one’s watching. Still, it cooled her down enough to dig out her keys as she dry- humped me up to the 30th floor.
The living room is coordinated everything. She must work in the financial industry or has a daddy who does because, despite her youth, she does not live like a student. There’s no cinderblock and plank bookshelf and the couches don’t look like they’re from the slightly damaged department. There’s a leather chair under a reading lamp that looks so nice I can’t resist running my hand over it to feel how soft it is. Then I pull on my underwear.
My god! There’s even a bar! Who has a bar in an apartment anymore? Have I slipped and fallen into 1966? I thought bars in apartments were for raging alcoholics who were members of the Rat Pack. Maybe she’s a Mad Men fan.
I look at her books. All that shit about the eyes being the windows to the soul is just romantic stuff to get you hooked into breeding and anchoring your life in the productive harbor of ordinary citizenry. The media is trying to make you into a tax-paying robot. They don’t know any better. They’ve just swallowed everything that’s ever been taught them about what it means to be responsible and nice and soulless like everybody else.
Karen Taren Merrill Maris Whatever is an intellectual. She has a stack of The Economist on the floor by her reading chair and at the bottom of the bookshelf holding it down is about 70 pounds of books about culture and politics: Noam Chomsky-type stuff. Karen Taren Merrill Marris Whatever is not without redemption. On the middle shelves, she’s kept her college reading and some good ones, obviously from her electives. Nietzsche, Spinoza, Dostoevsky, Sartre. Ooh, I could so go for a girl like this if I weren’t an emancipated man. She wouldn’t care for my philosophy. Libertine has fallen from favor with all the media’s counter-programming.
The top shelf tells a different story. Her latest reading is disappointing. I pull out a few and scan titles that disgust me. There’s a lot of self-help stuff here that denies who we really are as humans, emotional animals driven by hormones and ruled by fear. There’s so much less to us than The Secret. Self-help stuff uses home-spun corn to make complex things simple and simple things complex. As if you can stay attracted to one woman by sheer force of will and forget your raging hormones. Ha!
I slide back into my shirt and go to the kitchen. I go slow. Bang around through the cabinets at all and next thing you know she’ll be at your shoulder asking if you want eggs. It’s easy and quiet since Ms. Whatever is efficient and sensible. The coffee can sits beside the coffeemaker. I find the filters after a little hunting and set it up so the coffee will begin to brew at 7:15 AM. If all goes well, she will wake to the smell of fresh coffee percolating. Before she even opens her eyes, she will think of me and smile.
I put my shoes out in the hallway. They go on last because I’ve got to move like a cat now. I am an animal already, so predatory feline is a short trip. I am stealthy. I am a spy. I am the master. I am all these things because I know the secret: I am complex in my simplicity. I steal around the apartment. I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it. When I do, it’s an ah-ha moment that gives my brain’s pleasure centre — already so happily stimulated on this fortuitous night — an orgasmic tingle.
Don’t judge me. Some guys are into feet and some guys love nothing more than to screw the back of a girl’s knee or bone her armpit. I’m just being me. This is better than all that.
Got it! I slip out the door and Plan B is almost complete. I put my shoes on in the elevator. There is no camera in the elevator. I’m golden.
Half an hour later, I’m down the street from my house changing into fresh clothes in the car. I’ll wash these skunky clothes myself. No evidence is left behind. Lights off as I turn in the driveway. I’m back to the lair. I key the automatic garage door opener and slide the car in. I’m pulling my prize out of the trunk in the dark when the lights pop on and there she is. She’s got a look on her face like a sour plum and if this were an old comic strip she’d be carrying a rolling pin.
“You’re late,” says the warden.
“I pulled a double shift. Didn’t think you’d mind me doing some overtime.”
She looks down, pulling at her ratty nightgown. How old is that thing? I think I can still make out the stain from some baby puke. I’m going to have to get her a really nice robe to wear, but robes are hard. Women keep robes in the bedroom. Still, I take my responsibilities seriously, even the ones I don’t buy into.
“Bobby’s got a fever. I called the plant twice,” she says. She says it like maybe she’s saying something else, like she’s got a question on her mind. She’s afraid if she says it out loud it will contain the magic word that breaks the spell she loves. Suspension of disbelief is so hard.
“I was in the yards working on a boxcar linkage. I didn’t hear the page. Those speakers sound like the teacher on a Charlie Brown Special, anyway.”
I shrug. She shrugs and the light cast from the bare bulb above makes us both look yellow and older than we are. Maybe it’s not the light.
“Is he okay now?”
“Better since he threw up,” she says. “He’s sleeping.”
“I’ll look in on him.”
“Don’t wake him.”
“I won’t wake him. I just want to see him.” I stop and pull out my trophy for her. “Hey, I got you something today.”
She brightens a little. She always brightens a little when I bring home a prize. That little bit of hope and excitement and expectation reminds me of old times. I love that little fire in her that’s not quite snuffed out. There’s a fragment of a look in there that got me to break the Golden Rule.
“You got me a vacuum cleaner?”
“It’s a Dyson. Awesome sucking power. You know my policy. Overtime money goes to luxuries for my baby’s house and home.”
“Thanks. It’s very nice.”
“You bet,” I say and she leans in to give me a kiss as I pass her. She brushes her lips against my cheek. Our eyes meet for a moment and I think she knows, but I give her the smile that goes all the way up to my eyes and keep moving. She stands aside and, as I squeeze past her, I’m thinking I should have a shower and gargle before I let her this close. It doesn’t matter. We’ve been living like sister and brother for…when did I realize I’d been scammed? I forget. It’s been years now.
I go to your room and you are sleeping soundlessly. Even in the dim light from the hallway I can see you’re flushed red, glowing like a stop sign. You must have eaten something your body didn’t like, but you’ll be fine.
You’ll be even better when I write all this down. I don’t have much money. We rent the house and the car’s a
lease. Still, one day, when you start dating, just a few years from now, I’ll hand you an envelope. You’ll learn the Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum Rules. You will always be free.
Maybe I’ll divorce your mother before then but I doubt it. Momentum is what carries us through, and downhill, when the engine is out of gas. Think what you will about me, I do know love because I have you. Women come and go. Friends move on. Wives can stay or leave but fathers and sons can’t divorce. I am your constant guiding light and I won’t let them indoctrinate you. You will live in Eden where all the naked chicks will play with your snake.
Your first girl will tell you love is more important than freedom. You’ll know better. I better go have a shower and then write all this down. That’s Plan C.
When you finally do get snagged, and eventually everyone trips, your new wife will think I’m a monster if you tell. What I am is nature. I am real. I’m not the monster. Everyone and everything that insists you stay in your cage and be fake? They are the monsters.
THE DEEP REACH
My grandparents lived on an island. We visited them via a ferry named the Joshua Slocum. When the tide was low, taking the car down the long, slippery, seaweed-ridden ramp was terrifying to a child. I think it makes anyone with an instinct for self-preservation uneasy. A little seed planted long ago led to this story about choice and memory. ~ Chazz
On good days you could smell it on his breath. On bad days, most days, the sickly sweet liquor smell boiled out of his skin with his sweat. My father was propelled forward by instant decisions and compulsive actions. He announced we were all going to visit Grampa for a week on Slocum Island the same night we left. Dad burst into the rec room. You can live with someone who drinks too much and expect surprises, but you are never any less surprised.
Murders Among Dead Trees Page 19
