x, J, (T, A )

The thought process starts almost right now, on this napkin in a bar on this night that is not quite the present.

It goes first to x. Call it a blind date, though that description is not precise. Call her a reporter, though she was not a reporter any longer. She was a good postmodern media mix: Polynesian/Anglo, tall and well breasted, with what we’d call no accent though everybody who doesn’t talk like you has an accent; she called herself a gym rat—there was something unattractive about the phrase—and her sense of humor was sophomoric; her beauty was just a little off so it is fitting to imagine her a broadcasting rather than being broadcast about.

(There was another reporter. This in a foreign country, and there she is well known. Imagine a sharply dressed woman, petite, with perfect hair, a woman who had come to the States, to Atlanta, for her broadcast training; you can see the Mediterranean in her, a pretty but not beautiful woman. Imagine that to walk with her is to have her name shouted out over and over, right past your face, right through you, TM¸ TM! The way people want to be recognized by the recognized. We fucked only briefly and not very deeply, her x so narrow, so shallow, it felt more like a point of victimization than a pleasure, this in the apartment of a a, a friend, if you can call him a friend [we went one Halloween as Caesar and Brutus, me all bloody, and later A would remark of that particular a that the costumes were apropos (a colleague, he’d try to betray me professionally), and I’d tell her not to worry, that that a is one of those men who only wants to be a bully, that however he tried to fuck with me, it was ineffectual; one of those men who resent the power they perceive in other men the way some women resent the beauty they see in their friends, he couldn’t really do me damage—but A was kind to want to notice, this lovely girl with her deep set eyes and that caricature of a stripper’s body, A and I, twelve hours before my flight taking me forever away, we were finally coming clean, and A was pressing and I was pressing, me to her, saying it was meant to be, asking my fingers into her body, though it was daylight and we were outside, Syrian workers leaning into the fence, trying to see what they could, those last desperate hours, there were so many to so goodbye to say that I did not properly say goodbye to much of anyone, and to one I did not say goodbye for real, this haunting girl r who would sometime later follow me to the States and reek all havoc (she would dance under Karma and you know I deserved it) but A, this lovely girl, her tongue (how strange a thing, I’d seen it touching her teeth, seen her mouth, seen her body, for months, thought about it vaguely, and now it was upon me) in my mouth (and how strange it feels to kiss and touch when you reallyreally know that it can go no further, not this day and not tomorrow and, speaking practically, not ever), six months of preamble, of foreplay, you always wonder, or you always should: is this real? Am I here and is it now? this girl in the Mediterranean sun, her flesh damp, her shirt open, and the flight on which you’ll leave now en route to touching down and waiting and we lean against the coarse building wall, there are palm trees and there is the sea and this is a goodbye and if you see it as I do this is like a scene from a love film, though there is no real love, only real longing] and T, that reporter, and me in the apartment of a, a friend that had yet to openly and ineffectively tried to betray me but knew he would, the way all people’s motives and where they’ll lead are known to them if they dig hard enough, A she’s kneeling on the bed, her x too tight, so my x in her mouth, and I think of her moving with me from trendy club to trendy club, where for us there is never an entrance fee, where we never pay for drinks, and I am not her accessory, she really likes me, and in this crowd of youth there is nothing to hide, but in this country of tradition all affairs are dangerous, and my apartment, we cannot go there, so here we are in the bed of a friend, he’ll find the condom wrapper later, and maybe his hate will be born for me then; quite late, I walk her out, past the guard gate to her Range Rover, she is more sure of herself than pretty, she has the ears of half the people, strange power, but I’m with her not because of it but because she is terribly interesting and her breasts stand out sharply from her little body; those nights we walked from club to club, the stain of wine on her breath, and it goes on and on and it goes off.)

And I know who I am. I’ve had the luxury of too many choices; I am a spoiled man. I’m scribbling on a napkin at a bar, making an outline, as if it is more interesting to write about fucking than it is to fuck.

Vodka tonics, and some people say they drink to forget, but sometimes I say I drink to better remember. This bar to I go out of habit; wherever I live, there is such a bar, not far away, familiar, and I feel safe there and most of the time sure. This one is populated primarily by divorcees, or at least women that feel like it, thirty and beyond, for the most part. And here, I stand out. The middle aged men with their bellies pushing against their expensive shirts. Boys show up, but they are too clearly boys in this atmosphere. And I get to straddle the line. I get to appear all grown up but not all grown out; there will be two or three like me in here in a night. And there will be some standout girls. In the club next door, I would fade quickly, though they wouldn’t.

There is nothing here that interests me. Or next door either. Maybe much of anywhere.

I think primarily of the second reporter, that not quite blind date, a place called the Dark Horse, we got very drunk. I was nervous at first, and she never has been.

In the crowd, in that good light, she was aggressive. Kiss me, she said. And I did. There was some game she was playing, trying I think to bowl me over, whatever power that would give me, and I was trying to go almost stride for stride, like a man in the wrong kind of match but trying to fit anyway.

She pushed her hand beneath my beltline. I don’t know what she was trying to prove against me but I am certain this had little if anything to do with attraction. I am not erect or close. All around us are people but I don’t imagine that she’s doing it for there benefit. I don’t imagine she’s doing it for mine.

She tells me to touch her in the same way. I do it, the x completely shaved and only slightly wet, and for whose benefit I touched it I can’t say for certain

There is another girl in the bar, J, my leasing agent, a woman I’d made out with in a different bar a week before, and then, sober, the next day, she’d told me, as I fantasized about how she’d spend her lunch breaks romping with me in my apartment, she told me she was too young for me, which was, of course, another way of saying I was too old for her.

It had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as a woman for whom I was too old. Now it did. Now it does.

Call it a meridian. There is the you that you are before you consider that you’ve actually moved too far away from the next generation to touch it, and there is the you that become when you realize you have. You can trace the lines on my face with the tips of your finger, but I’d never done that before J.

So she’s in the bar, and she’s said hello, and I don’t know what all of this she’s seen. I stand there with my x feeling very limp in small in x’s unfriendly grip and with my hand hanging dead in her pantyless jeans, and I think about J, about her x; I think that I will get close to it, the way I think of it now as well: one untouched x amongst the billions of untouched x’s, some small fraction of the overwhelmingly large group that you will never ever known.

The reporter, x, I walked her to car. We kissed there. In private, she was less aggressive. I knew not to push it. She was going to call me when she got home. She did not. She did not return my call the next day. I let it go. You picture things as butterflies in your hands and you just unfold your fingers.

The first reporter, the people in the streets, she took me from club to club, this little version of fame.

I’m scribbling about them on napkins. There is nothing here that I want, and that is a particularly damning type of frustration, not wanting anything.

My father used to mark the milk carton so I would not drink more than I had been allotted. I remember how it was when I first left the house and had money, and I could walk in the grocery store and buy whatever I wanted. I marvel at it sometimes still, despite all the restrictions I’ve put on myself, not unlike my father’s restrictions, the way it feels to know that anything you want is yours if you choose to take it. I walk the aisles and I could have this or that and all and more and it doesn’t mean as much to me as once it might have.

If I let them put ice in my drinks, I’d crack it with my teeth.

And there is a moment, a blond woman, I’ve seen her before and felt no real attraction, but then she was still and now she is dancing with not grace but abandon, and whatever you call it, she can move in a way not many women can move, and we want many rare things. My glass, it may as well be filled with arsenic and I’d drink it just hard—I’ll never have this woman, and when I do, she will not be enough.

(Most blogs like this end in death of self, depending on what you mean by end, and depending on what you mean by death of self.)

The men, they sit with their sucked in bellies still over their belts, their drinks in arms cocked and forced toward flex, or the skinny boys who look around faux tough, and I stand here, alone as alone as alone as alone. But I know my destiny. I know about the death of us all; I believe in it.

And I know there will be a girl first. In my bed. In my space. In my life for real. All of that again. And I know her name, or so I think. I’m aware of my path, where I’m going, and how I got here, too. I’m standing in bar not really wanting anyone that it seems I might be able to have.

So it seems as if everything is worked out in my mind, but it’s not—I know too that I will have to work hard to not resent the woman who will inevitably grow to represent the conception of death of all other choice, even if it is not choice I think I need.

The peace I can find from walking out of the bar, the peace in fact I feel in so doing, will not always be with me.

And you—youyou—the real you—you’ll be here. You’ll know what it is like, how it feels when you sort of hate who you’ll be more than you sort of hate who you’ve been.