Love Monkey (16 page)

The thing I need is
Blood on the Tracks
, Dylan's thesaurus of pain. Maybe every guy's. I make it through “Tangled Up in Blue.” No problem, that one's kind of funny anyway. (“She was married when we first met/Soon to be divorced.” Love that.)

She doesn't call.

I have no problem with “Idiot Wind,” either. It gives me courage even, because I hear a prophecy that never struck me before:

Righteous.

She doesn't call.

I make it, in fact, all the way to “If You See Her, Say Hello.” That's the one where you can hear Dylan's heart falling to the floor and being trampled by a pair of high heels.

And that's when it happens. It's getting late. And she still hasn't called. I break down and let the eye juice roll. Where is it coming from? There must be a Big Gulp–sized reservoir of salty liquids in my head because the storm lasts forty-five minutes. I will bear any burden. I will pay any price. She's my Vietnam.

At eleven: the phone.

“Hi,” she says. “It's me.”

“Hi,” I say, my voice like wet gravel. Do I sound casual?

“I just woke up,” she says apologetically.

“Okay,” I say soggily. The less I say, the better my chances of cloaking the bad thing in my throat.

“I just came back to the city and I lay down to take a nap and, out. For eight hours.”

“That can happen,” I say.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “Can we do a drink thing sometime?”

“Okay,” I say.

She half-laughs, in that dead-space-filling way she has. It says not,
This is funny
, but
This is embarrassing
.

But now that she has made a sound, the conversation has returned to my end. I have to say something.

“I thought,” I mumble, “you just didn't want to see me anymore.”

At the end of the comedy they'll make about life in New York in 2001, look at the credits. I won't be the leading man. I won't be the cynical chum or even Bartender Number Two. No, you'll find me ten thousand names into the crawl, under “Gaffer.”

Because of the State. The State: You don't rise to it. You fall in it.

F
or lunch I skip the usual nutritious cafeteria meal of veal parmigiana and Yoo-Hoo. Instead I gnaw on a pasty turd of a PowerBar and hit the pain palace. The grunt gallery.

Why do I go to the gym? To look better naked. Yet here is a complete list of all of the people who have seen me naked since that one time with Julia:

1. The guys in the gym
   

Basically, I am disrobing for black men with SUV chests and sequoia arms. Isn't this a bit gay of me?

In the locker room I meekly undress, trying but failing as usual to spot my schlong under the overhang of my big quivering Hostess Sno-Ball belly. I peek at the midsections of the other guys: Iron. Brick. Steel. Titanium. The way I put on a T-shirt, it's like Handi-Wrapping
a bowl of mashed potatoes. But I know deep down I'm not overweight, not really. I'm just three skinny guys trapped in the body of a fat man.

I hit the floor, which is writhing with mystery optimism. You ask: Why can't women and men understand each other? Look to the gym, where, by using the exact same equipment, women hope to become smaller and men hope to become larger.

This gym is for professional Midtowners in our thirties, so as I stretch, its sound system blares demographically appropriate musical quizzes from our youth: “Do you believe in love?” No. “Do you really want to hurt me?” No thanks, I'm busy hurting myself. “Is she really going out with him?” Grrr.

Huge guys—guys in
costume
, spandex singlets—balance barbells on their shoulders, with comical, cartoon-sized weights on either end. They bend their knees, squat deeply, then wobble themselves erect. Repeat. That looks hard. Pointless, but hard. How many girls are telling each other over their Caesar salads right now,
I want a guy with huge muscles in his lower back?

There are mirrors on every wall, mirrors on every side of every column. It's like a fun house, only for “fun” substitute “bone-cracking agony.” Everyone is exhaling and clanking in moist, puffy-faced determination, but what they're really doing is checking out each other. Worse: they're just pretending to work out so they can pretend to check each other out so they can actually check out themselves. Every time you look in one mirror—and you can't look anywhere without looking into a mirror—you can see reflections from other mirrors, which reflect on still other mirrors, and so on, into infinity. It's a whole lot more of me than I'm in the mood for.

Men loiter by the free weights, their T-shirts emblazoned with corporate pride (“Depends Runoff Central Park,” “Arthur Andersen Means Trust”). I slouch to the bench press, examining the dull silver
bar with corrugations that seem to have no purpose except to leave calluses. These you can then define as weightlifting inflicted if a girl notices them in a bar. I have no idea how much weight I can lift. I'm a newspaper editor. When was the last time I lifted anything heavier than a paragraph? When did I last push anything heavier than my luck?

A big guy and his neck come up behind me as I'm pushing and gasping. His chest is pneumatic hardwood. He has a
shelf.
I've heard that taking steroids makes you grow breasts, shrinks your nuts to sunflower seeds. It makes you so much of a man, in short, that you start to become a girl. That's what you get for caring about your looks. How dare we even try? Only girls are supposed to look good. We are here to admire.

“Hi, guy!” he says. “Want a spot?”

I look up. Either there is something in his eye or he just winked at me. His crotch is a foot over my face. I have a feeling there are gay porn films that begin this way. George Michael starts mincing over the stereo. (How could anyone have ever believed
that
guy was straight?)

I don't want to be rude. I also don't want any witnesses.

“No thanks?” I say. And I lie there breathing hard. He stands there behind me looking down, smiley faced. This is as awkward as most of my dates.

“Mind if I work in?”

The song: “I Want Your Sex.”

“No, no!” I say, overfriendly. I spring up, glad to get a break.

He slides my dinky bread plates off the bar with a thumb and forefinger and puts them back on the rack. He adds flying saucer–sized masses to each side and eases himself backward onto the bench, looking straight up at me. Now I'm behind him, trying to look at nothing.

“Spot?” he says, as he starts thrusting and pumping.

George say: “
Sex is best when it's one on one
!”

“Suurre,” I say.

He does about twelve of them quickly, but by fifteen he's running out of steam. This is my moment to step lively. I'm supposed to help him get that one last rep up into the air and back to rest on the rack. However, since my arms are like linguine and he is bench-pressing the approximate weight of Norway, I foresee comedy ahead. Actually, he knows very well he should never have asked me for a spot. But he is being fair. He is making an effort to be inclusive despite how I look. He's admitting me to the fraternity of sinew in some sort of affirmative-action program for weaklings.

He's got that last rep a quarter of the way up. My hands are underneath the bar, ready to help.

“You got it,” I say.

“Uh. UH!” he says. His elbows buckling.

“All you,” I say, my palms grabbing the bar.

“Aw! AWWWW!” The bar advances another two inches. I'm trying to help lift it. It feels like a Buick.

“It really is all you,” I say apologetically.

He emits loud vowels. Sweat jogs down his forehead. I'm putting my whole body into lifting the thing the last two inches (thinking, Cool. I can see the veins in my arms), but his spotter needs a spotter.

I lower my voice to a manful growl. “Let's do this thing,” I say. All Lee Marvin.

And we do. Which is lucky because I can feel my forearm tendons starting to pull apart like the caramel in a Snickers commercial.

He gets up, exhales the breath of a man. “Thanks, bro.”

“No prob,” I say. We lifters drop the last syllable of our sentences.

“It was cool how you made me do it all myself.”

Are muscle guys smart enough to do sarcasm? And if so, what are my options? Do I ignore the slight, or challenge him to a rumble?

“That's why I'm here,” I say.

As he turns his back to add more weight to the bar, I slip over to a scary apparatus called the “lat pulldown.” This time you sit upright and pull down from overhead a giant bar chained to a stack of weights. I pull the pin out and place it near the top of the pile. No. Nearer. A gum-chewing personal trainer leans against the windowsill nearby, his arms crossed insouciantly. His eyes don't leave mine. I haven't even sat down, and already his eyes say:
You're doing it wrong.

“How ya doin',” I grunt.

He nods slowly, once. Doesn't look away.

And I'm thirteen again. My high school weight room. Sometimes I would stop in there at the end of PE, after a lazy sixth-period trot from the soccer field or the tennis courts. The weight room was right next to the locker room, so guys would stop in and do a few curls or presses: extracurricular activity for physical geniuses, just like I used to show off by doing more book reports than required. So there we'd be: the captain of the soccer team, the first baseman of the baseball team, a couple of quad-and delt-and trap-trapped footballers entombed in their walls of muscle, and me. I was only here to kill time until the coast was clear in the shower, where I did not wish to parade my pubic Sahara amongst a dozen dirty-joke-telling, towel-snapping adolescents happily brandishing their jungly topiary. Why the occasion of being near denuded genitals of your own gender was supposed to be the green light for such merriment always escaped me. My visible cringing at such moments, though, would earn derisive cries of “fag,” which seemed ironic.

The varsity gang would be effortlessly moving their skyscrapers of weight this way and that while I stretched my calves. My hamstrings. My arms. My ankles: don't forget to rotate them. Oh yes, and the neck, waggle that one around for a while. When I ran out of things to stretch, I'd sit down and do some pathetic bicep curls. Gradually everyone else would stop lifting. They would wander
over to form a perimeter of hilarity behind me. All of them would contribute unsolicited play-by-play.

“What is he d—”

“—to use his whole bod—”

“—have to rest after each r—?”

“—some sort of disabil—”

“—my brother lifted weights like that, but he was elev—”

“Think he gets a lot of pussy?” Sniggering all around. It would have bothered me less if it hadn't been the gym teacher saying this.

The personal trainer on East Fiftieth Street doesn't have to say anything, though. All he does is chew his contemptuous gum.

I pull down the bar for my first rep as he watches stonily. I do another, and another. Little sounds burble out of me.

“Eep,” I say.

“Yaw,” I say.

“Ayyyyye,” I say.

“You're doing it wrong,” says the trainer.

“Really?” I say, letting the bar slip out of my hands. Kuh-lank! Heads turn. “I looked at the diagram.”

“No, man, I mean your
noises
. All wrong. You know, you don't even have that much weight on there.”

“Aren't you supposed to be encouraging to your clients?”

A shrug. “You're not my client.”

So: I have to hire this guy to shut him up. Personal trainers cost $50 an hour. It's not a lat pulldown. It's a lat shakedown.

“What's it to you?” I say huffily.

A nod over my shoulder.

And I turn around: several oxen have put down their weights and formed a whispering semicircle around me. This could potentially turn into “The Lottery” pretty quickly.

“Done!” I say, wiping my sweat off the seat.

I put in a few agonizing miles on the treadmill. By the time I'm
done, I'm as wet as if I'd been dipped in sweat salsa. My juices are all over the machine. My perspiration is probably rusting the gears. Plus I'm positive some of my body Crisco flew off and landed on the pretty little Asian girl on the treadmill next to me. For something to do while I gasp for life, I press a button. The calorie meter. I have burned…a third of a Big Mac.

Stumble to the scale. I've lost six pounds in a week. This is why men go to the gym: because it's always good news. If you gain, you think:
I'm adding muscle
. If you lose, you think:
I'm shedding fat
.

“Love Is the Drug” on the sound system. No, love is the drugstore. And Julia's the pharmacist dispensing my Viagra, ether, speed, Valium, heroin.

S
hooter offered me dinner. Anywhere I wanted, he said. Rao's? I said. The most exclusive restaurant in town. Seats about twelve, all of them celebrities or mobsters or both. Shooter gave them a call, but even he doesn't have those kinds of connections, so we settle for the Yale Club. Glum eight-foot portraits on the walls like something from Disney's Haunted Mansion, waiters with subservient mini-mustaches, big heavy oaken tables hewn for mead-quaffing Vikings. The average age of the members is: deceased. Men display important hair and ironed handkerchiefs. Their wives have ironed faces. Technically the club is open to everyone who ever went to Yale (or Dartmouth, or fratted for DKE), but it's really an endangered-species refuge for that dwindling minority, the nonironic big corporation white male who likes to chat about something he read in
Foreign Policy
over a lunch of boiled beef and boiled potatoes, which he washes down with a sidecar or a Rob Roy.

Shooter is in his element, issuing pronunciamentos on the thread
count of the napkins, the relevance of the wine, the fortitude of the crab-cracking apparatus. Occasionally he slips into an absurd British accent. While he talks, I drink. He talks a lot. Chance may have brought us together, but alcohol made us friends.

“How's your crotch traffic?” he says.

“There's this girl,” I begin.

“Stop right there,” Shooter says. “I know what this is.”

I wait for wisdom. Shooter will straighten this out. Shooter knows all. I take another sip of wine. Fortitude.

“It's Perrier,” he says. I turn, and the waiter is behind me. “I ordered Pellegrino.”

I turn in my seat. A hapless immigrant in a tux, his shoulders rounded, his neck bent in subservience. “I'll see, sir.”

“And take this with you,” Shooter says, handing him the glass.

Shooter has just sent back a glass of water.

“Shall we utilize some wine?” he says, opening the wine list. It's the size of a world atlas.

“Utilize…?” I say.

“Come on.
The Sun Also Rises
?”

“I've been meaning to read that,” I say. This statement is not quite true. I remember when I bought the book, but I didn't get to it right away; there was a lot of good stuff on HBO that year. Since then I have taken it on vacation with me, optimistically stuffed it in backpacks and carry-ons with every intention of reading it, or rather of at least being spotted pretending to read it in an exotic cafe in the Piazza Navona or the Khao San Road. After a while it acquired such a wonderful beaten-up look that I figured it was unncecessary to actually read it.

“Basically, it's a book about drinking,” Shooter explains. “Except that there are so many drinking scenes he has to keep making up new words for it. Like ‘utilize.' ”

“Good word,” I say.

“Isn't it? It really gets across the importance of drinking as a tool. We don't consume it; we
build
with it.”

“And, occasionally, drive with it.”

“If you can't hold your fill and drive home without inflicting heavy damage on a tree or others,” Shooter says, “you are not a man.”

There are times when I wonder whether Shooter's advice is absolutely the finest counsel a guy can receive.

“You know, except for your haircut, you look good,” he says suspiciously. “Not as good as me, but.”

Shooter knows he looks good. Big stevedore shoulders, a waist like a girl's. His arms are thick and gnarly. His legs are toned by decades of soccer. His skin is unblemished mahogany, his shoulder-length dreads pulled back into a ponytail. He appears not to be aware that he is black. He almost never alludes to it. When I walk down the street with him, every girl laser-locks on his eyes. He smiles back at them. I am invisible, of course. He once told me he had never gone more than two weeks without sex. This would be a preposterous claim coming from anyone else I've ever known. I am a skirt chaser; Shooter is a skirt catcher.

His clothes are Italian. His watch costs more than any ten things I have ever bought, combined. I was with him when he bought it, in Florence. The figure in lire was a phone number. With area code. Shooter put it on his AmEx without a second thought. He isn't so good with math. I'm pretty sure he never did figure out what it cost. On the same trip he bought a pair of pajamas that cost more than my best suit.

“Your Pellegrino,” says the waiter, returning.

Shooter nods like a Roman emperor as the waiter pours.

“What've you been doing with yourself?” he says.

“Been working out,” I say. “Eating less.”

“Drop another twenty pounds,” he says. “Maybe I'll let you have some of my hand-me-downs.”

“Clothes?”

A roll of the eyes. “
Girls,
” he says.

Then he tells me why the British should never get rid of the House of Lords. For forty minutes. He is strongly pro class system. He thinks America will never be truly great until it devises a better means of separating the lowborn from the mighty. When he was at Dartmouth, he founded a student newspaper that was so right wing he probably would have been cordially invited to transfer elsewhere if he had been white. But he carved himself a niche: the reactionary Rastafarian.
60 Minutes
did a piece on him once. He was nineteen.

“Speaking of. Viddy well, lit'l brotha. Viddy well.” He tips his head suggestively.

On occasion Shooter and I lapse into
Clockwork Orange
speak, especially when we're trying to encipher our hornier moments amid polite surroundings.

I turn. A long blonde slinks by in painted-on pants that don't reach her hipbones. This is the Yale Club, so I guess you're not allowed to expose your belly, but her shirt just barely reaches the tops of her pants. We leer at her thong print as she bends over to kiss some geezer. Could be her father. Or it could be her daddy. Either way, she is hastening his timely demise with a big heart-attack-inducing smooch. Possibly she is giving tongue.

“That,” he says, as if we've been discussing the subject all evening, “is a bubble butt. Rrrrrah!” He says, doggily, with a giant smile.

Shooter is a manboy like me, only he's a
man
boy and I'm a man-
boy
. Unlike me, he owns things. He has a car (a Range Rover. It's fire-engine-colored. It's fire-engine-
sized.
) and a Hamptons love shack bought from a third-tier celebrity (there's a heated swimming pool, a frog pond, and 1.7 acres of dog-friendly land so densely surrounded by pine trees that you can't see any other
house from anywhere on the property). Shooter does not work. His work ethic is: it is unethical to work. Instead he is getting a head start on his inheritance, the two-hundred-proof inheritance of an only child of only children. His father is the coleslaw king of the Midwest. You can't get coleslaw without putting money into Shooter's pocket. Coleslaw comes, unbidden, and goes, untouched, along with every meal you get in the big-eater family restaurant chains, the ones where they serve food by the trough. (When you go to the salad bar, please use a clean bucket for each trip.) Who knew that one of the world's least-requested foods (“More of that yummy cabbage and mayo, please, Mom”? I don't think so) could be as profitable as a midsized casino?

Shooter worked for his dad for a couple of years, but his big idea—a costly deal to include coleslaw with the Grand Slam breakfast—ate up a few mil in development costs. Shooter's dad decided his scion would drain the family treasury at a less alarming rate if he were gainlessly employed (studying painting, studying history, volunteering for quixotic political campaigns) and parked safely out of harm's way, in New York. Not that Shooter isn't creative about spending money: when I was at his apartment one time, he asked me if I wanted a coffee. Sure, I said. He called the deli downstairs and had one sent up, as his three-hundred-dollar German coffeemaker stood at forlorn attention on the titanium counter. His dog Alpha drinks only Evian. And he once left the AC on in his Upper West Side apartment while he went to the Hamptons for two weeks. Intentionally. “I dislike a stuffy flat,” he sniffed. I turn my air on for three miserly hours at a time, silently calculating the kilowatts in my head.

At the rate he's going, Shooter figures he'll run out of money by the time he's sixty, but he has often vowed to outflank that problem by drinking himself into an early grave. Moderate alcohol consumption actually has been shown to be linked to long life, Mike
once pointed out to us (I think he was reading aloud from an article in
The Wine Spectator
). But there is nothing moderate about Shooter.

“So there's this girl,” I say again as the waiter starts sweatily decorking a second bottle of Bordeaux. I tell him the story of the weekend of my discontent, edited for embarrassing details.

“What's your next move?” he says.

“Don't know. Hang around her some more,” I say. “Maybe familiarity breeds consent?”

“How far have you gotten with her?”

“Certain things have happened,” I say.

“Good,” says Shooter, and gestures with his right hand, which is the one holding his glass. About eight dollars' worth of wine sloshes onto the tablecloth. “What you need to do is tell her what the fuck the game is here. You have to stop being such a pansy. Tell her, look, this guy is a total loser and what the fuck is she doing with him anyway? The guy is never going to amount to anything. He's a newspaper reporter in Connecticut? Give me a goddamn break! He can't be making more than thirty-three! This guy sounds
stu
pid, he sounds
weak
, he is not going to be able to support her, he is not going to be able to get her into any cool parties!”

“That's right,” I'm saying. I sit up straighter. “I can get her into parties.” Movie-star wingdings. Music-industry revels. Book jamborees. Where she can meet lots of interesting people! And, possibly, leave with one of them.

“Tell her you are not going to be her fucking doormat anymore and that if she doesn't dump this
re
tard, then you're just going to find someone else. You have to make it clear that she cannot go on teasing you indefinitely.”

I'm not liking where this is going. “But isn't it better to be tortured than not to get to see her at all?”

“No!” He makes a fist. In slow motion I watch as the fist rises all the way up over his shoulder in preparation for slamming the table, but instead, he catches the tuxedoed Mexican in the solar plexus. The waiter coughs a little. Shooter scowls at the waiter as if to say:
What the fuck are you doing hitting my fist with your stomach?

“For dessert we have a mud pie, profiteroles,” says the waiter.

“If she won't drop-kick this guy, then you need to show her you're a fucking man! Are you wearing frilly lingerie or what?”

“Isn't that taking a chance?”

“Lemon meringue pie, key lime pie, ice cream…”

Some men seethe quietly. Not Shooter. When he seethes, the guy two tables over has to wipe Shooter's saliva off his tie.

“Yeah,” he says to the waiter. “Ice cream. My friend will have the TUTTI-FRUTTI!”

I look around nervously, wondering if any gay people present might possibly find this last remark to be offensive. But we are in the Yale Club, after all. Nobody is going to stand up in his pin-striped J. Press suit and polka-dot bow tie and say, Uh, excuse me, I happen to be treasurer of the American Queer Love Association.

“I will be a man,” I vow, or predict, hesitantly. I've always thought there would be some defining moment that caused me to shed my adolescence. It always involved me kung-fuing a mugger, though, or possibly leaping at the far corner of a Super Bowl end zone to pluck the winning pass out of the stratosphere.

When I ooze my way home with a bottle and a half of wine sloshing around in me, I look at my watch: it's now 1:15
A.M.,
July 26. Boot up the computer. I've got mail!

Zap. Zap. Zap. I double-click on the last one.

There's a cartoon of a slice of cake with a candle sticking out of it. The words are in chubby-hilarious cartoon font:

So now computers have automatic programs to send automatic e-cards to their automatic customers. If I set up my computer to respond automatically to these messages, they could dispense with the me part entirely. And then the two computers could get into an infinite loop of well-wishing. “Thanks for your birthday e-mail.” “Thanks for thanking me for your birthday e-mail.” “Thanks for your response to my thank-you note for your birthday e-mail.” Aren't manners one of the useless things that you would think computers would be able to cut out of life? Instead, the ATM barfs out its twenties and flashes, “It has been a genuine pleasure to serve you.” Computers have taken us one more step toward the complete feminization of American life. You have to remember birthdays now. Because what excuse do you have for forgetting? “Oh, sorry, I didn't
think you were important enough to enter into my Yahoo! date book.”

Which might raise a question or two about why no one has called to wish me happy birthday. But I won't think about that today. I'm tired. It's two in the morning. Tomorrow's another day.