Post-Script: A rough draft of this, I believe, was the first time I played the Ten Sentences game with myself. It’s a faithful rendering of what was, in reality, one of the most existentially depressing, grotesque, and sorry ordeals I’ve ever seen. Though over my years of recreational self-medication I so commonly went to work high on several substances that there were periods when I would find myself too disoriented to engage in paid labor if sober, I learnt early on that, even if I could wait tables stoned or blown apart by meth, I couldn’t execute the routine when boozing. Still residually tripping from a psilocybin- and swiss-topped Whopper: Yes; with half a glass of Black Label in me: No. Point being, I think the only time I decided to get drunk while working (and damn the consequences) was while waiting on these folks, who seemed to’ve had half the blood wrung out of them.
***
It was the end of summer, when the city was sick of the sun, and I was waiting tables for two score of fortysomethings, local lonely souls who’d connected on a website for desperates and eventually agreed to meet in the Real for what they called a “Singles Mingle,” though it was, to almost every attendee’s chagrin, not a situation conducive to mingling, but orchestrated as more of a sit-down dinner, where the women were divvied up, one to each of six tables, where she presided over five men, lips all dressed in tremulant smiles. My contemporary began to deride them, the whole group, and stoop-shouldered, unproud, head down, I found myself defending each pathetic respective retinue by explaining the obvious but unfortunate truth that, once grown—freed from schools and every day more bereft of both the requisite patience and compatriots that make regular bar attendance a reasonable idea—it becomes with every additional winter one weathers an exponentially strenuous venture to meet new people with whom one can sustain a conversation or, at the very least, stand the sight of. Eventually, the only totally unknown folks that one can meet without the awkward interpersonal equivalent of cold calling are new coworkers or the little kids of old friends now coupled; after a while, finding someone lovely and like-minded becomes a luxury for which one cannot afford to look and instead, prone to the sociosexual instincts of the species, the mission switches from finding somebody to finding some body willing perhaps to play the other necessary part in producing offspring, some body who might share a domicile and split the bills, some body to whom you can quietly run for company when you find yourself frightened by the moments of satori which occur (perhaps unconsciously or in not-so-many words) to everyone, unexpectedly—say during an episode of Happy Days—that we are all always alone and that this earthly existence we’ve built is, in actuality, ridiculous.
This explication of the sorry situation was met with friendly head-nodding and silence ’til a second contemporary slunk up and said it was all bullshit, declaring the assembly of losers losers for a lack of effort, and citing herself as exemplar: An “older” woman still capable of making friends fast, one who chooses to date discriminatingly, instead of from a place of panicked desperation, accepting whatever thug or glutton happened to next make her acquaintance; I noted that, though she was indeed single and in the early middle-age neighborhood, she was still exceptionally svelte, quite clever, sometimes friendly, possessed of a healthy sexual appetite, and that women in her condition could run what would essentially be a series of auditions, a hundred dates for which they’d probably not even have to pay, ’til they stumbled across something approximating what they’d wanted—the situation may get increasingly difficult and dismal, that approximation a little more distant with age, but in the end it was likely what she’d end up doing, if ever she chose to marry or enter into any other sort of domestic pairing, could still be a step above simply settling for anyone if she chose to put in some effort. ”Hell,” I yelped, correcting myself, admitting my error and amending my declaration: Age always makes the meeting of people increasingly arduous, it becomes tougher for everyone, but in America, once that hurdle’s overcome, it’s the mating that’s actually the painful labor, and one in which men, for a change, may find themselves remarkably powerless—”Check the internet,” I said, “men everywhere are begging for everything: Amputees and idiot women, the sickly thin, midgets or those over six-feet tall; women with hair like George Costanza; hearing-impaired and septuagenarian; the obscenely obese and even those who only were zaftig, have since dropped the weight, but yet carry enough extra flesh to resemble sharpei-human hybrids.”
“They may not have a Cusack courtship, a wedding like Jasmine, Cinderella, or Ariel, or a marriage like those implied in the epilogic segments of Hugh Grant movies, but odds are good in a bet on the eventual sniffing out of someone who won’t smack them around or otherwise intentionally demean them, someone who may be a bit of a disappointment, but who genuinely cares, who will love them; in this country it’s become tricker than this for aging men without much money.”
Together we scanned the damaged menagerie that was the six women in attendance and discovered, with only a little distance observation and, over the evening, some eavesdropping, it was possible to execute a guess as to the underlying malady creating in each case their matelessness: One lived in the thrall of an intrusive and obstreperous mother whom any potential mate would have to face in an at least passive-aggressive confrontation by the end of the third date (she set off her daughter’s cellular four times before dinner was served and instead of powering down the device, each time the woman ran into a corner and begged to be let go); one never made eye contact with anyone and was of a kicked-kitten demeanor that strongly suggested she’d segued seamlessly from childhood incest perpetrated by a bulky but younger sibling to a series of casually abusive relationships with evidently milquetoast men who, fretting on a deeper level about their own machismo, grew moustaches, and only then worked up the nerve to hit her with a closed fist; one was obese enough to reek of the skin mildew that forms in the rugose crevasses of corpulent flesh—not enough in itself to completely deter the right fetishist for whom, it can be assumed, this odor is a redolent perfume, but she was overheard twice making the claim that some would-be suitor’s wallet was probably smaller than his already insufficient genitals (and a jerk is a jerk, no matter her gender); one kept her bent knees together, crossed her legs at the ankles, her hands were folded in her lap, oddly unused for gestures, and she’d donned an ostentatious, awkwardly displayed crucifix over the completely buttoned high-collar of a billowy cornflower cotton blouse—semi-Mennonite garb belied a bit by her Susan Powter flat-top buzzcut, but much more by her total indifference to the men attempting to introduce themselves, and roving, longing eyes that settled sometimes in a tight-jawed gawking at the restaurant’s sexier lady patrons and waitresses: She had, from youth, placed religion at the center of her life and found herself later unable to reconcile or admit lesbianism (all three of us atheists watching had, in essence, met her before, but once again cursed the church); another was well into her fourth glass of lukewarm, straight-up rotgut by the time her tablemates had selected seats, had to be told thrice that there was no smoking indoors (each time she’d forgot), and her ceaseless, raucous drunken chuckle was chased by an emphysematic cough that sounded like a thousand 1950s fathers simultaneously snapping into straightness the blood-soaked pages of a thousand splayed newspapers.
With the exception of several predatory lotharios, the men in the crowd were all variations on a theme: Everyone was unsteady and unsure of what to do with his hands, and so fists slipped abruptly into pockets, were suddenly withdrawn with frantic sidelong glances, then after some fidgeting (ring-twisting, watch-winding and -flicking), just as suddenly stuffed back in; posture was an obviously conscious affair, but slowly every gentleman inevitably began to slouch until something in his head or the proximity of women made him snap again to attention like a first-week Marine; flopsweat was common; some moved to pull out a wayward lady’s chair, then retreated, unsure of such boldness; many overcompensated for nervousness by laughing loudly, fraudulently, often, and in accompaniment of thunderous perfunctory claps made by damp, cupped hands; their shirts were unattractively rumpled and their sideburns, equally unappealing, severely shaped or truncated; their sweaters were covered in pills; paired with new Nikes, which they understood to be indicatory of “still with-it”-ness, they wore Vaudville-short slacks—some tapered, some pleated—and old Polo shirts with curled collars and discolorations where the Izod alligator had long ago fallen off, likely the last garments a woman, maybe their mothers, had bought them; the arrangement of their hair was hideously deliberate and, put into a well-ordered queue, the men would comprise an oft-paunchy timeline of male-pattern baldness.
But no matter their shape—pear, carrot, cattail, meatball—they were all featherweights in a way, 98-pound weaklings despite what they might bench-press, and none of them had ever had occasion to exercise the muscles of their metaphoric hearts; or, better metaphor, these men had, as children been stricken with emotional polio: None of them, even those who had weathered one or several tenuous relationships, even the divorcées, had ever found himself able to love up close, in any manner more immediate than “from afar” (many of them—ugly, carbuncular, acne-scarred, impecunious, timid, rigidly habitual as autistics—seemed somehow forever furled: standing, walking, living like bats wrapped in their wings, heads hidden, and had never been given the chance); every one of them, I knew, had probably fallen for a fictional woman (chilly ex-cyborg from Star Trek or lip-licking vixen from the porno flicks: it didn’t matter) and, with her, engaged in a safe, stable and, sometimes in sleep, satiating love affair that lasted longer than anything more regular which they, hideous/pathetic soul-cripples, could achieve.
I exhaled a held breath with a whimper, gripped my own growing love handles, then let my hands make their way to my head, preventatively shaved; I considered the women with whom I’d found myself so much in love that I’d had no choice but to run, and I wondered if some day the isolation in which I lived would become too much, if this Mingle was a situation in which I’d find myself stuck—I was already twenty-seven, friendless, and no end to my table-waiting days lay in any but the most panglossian view of my future—I wondered if this was something I might soon enough have to do, if I would find myself too cowardly to head towards death alone; but aloud, and to more amenable head-nodding, I only said, “Euthanasia is the most merciful end for most of these fucking men.”
