My search for completeness has brought me here. To a club on Friday night. To a dingy cellar with rumpled cocktail napkins and a muffled sound system. I met a girl at a place like this once, which is such a tired concept, I know, but it worked because the line I used will never ever be duplicated in the history of mankind. It is so good that I cannot disclose it, for fear that men in Gap sweater vests and clunky shoes, men with baseball caps pulled over their eyes, men with bulging biceps under ribbed T-shirts, men with Caesar haircuts, men with flannel shirts and sneaks, men in Tommy Hilfiger with false glasses perched on the end of their pedigreed noses will use it until it does a “What’s your sign?” kind of death. I could probably make money by going public with it. I could probably pick up a book deal, maybe an appearance on Larry King, or my own show on a youth-oriented network, counseling lovelorn 19 year old boys with the assistance of my sidekick, the goateed singer for a nu-metal/rap band who has a nasty habit of referring to women as “holes.” But there is something better about having the greatest secret in the world.
I dream of completeness. In my search for answers, I quote lines from Jane Austen novels and Woody Allen movies. In my search for answers, I pursue women who have lips like sandpaper and legs like crooked branches, who have trouble forming complete sentences, women who watch Sunday night TV movies, women with teeth like dirty Tic Tacs ,women who are so terribly off-center, so glaringly imperfect, that it makes me falling in love with them seem like the desperate gesture of a man with no perspective, no future, no reason to go on living. And then the next day, I wake up, and I’m standing in the supermarket, checking out the prices on Lipton noodles, and this redhead with a flip in her hair and purple stockings is buying Minute Rice and I am standing next to her, muttering the fail-safe line in her ear, and she crushes the box of rice so hard that it sprays open and scatters across the tile floor, which has just been waxed, amplifying the rice’s trajectory. And it starts all over again.
So the quest for completeness has brought me here. To a club on a Friday night, a place where men fawn, where women swoon, where the mating dance culminates under hot lights, on a dirty floor. It’s so uncouth, but each week that my yearning goes unrequited, my level of urgency elevates. Soon I will be like the rest of these men in this bar, these apes, the animals, these hormonal freak-shows, awash in desperation. Until then, I stay cool. I do this by biting on my tongue or by pinching the kin on my arm so hard that I look sufficiently pained. Pair this with a shiny suit and a tie and the latest shoes from Kenneth Cole, and I have the countenance that every girl surveys this greasy atmosphere hoping to find. I am a hybrid of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I am a sexy, sensitive guy who could explode at any minute but still sends his mother flowers on Valentine’s Day. I am everything they are looking for, and when I mouth the pickup line, they cannot resist. They don’t stand a chance.
I meet a girl at the bar. She makes eye contact first. I stare back. I am pinching my arm. She smiles at my anger. She turns away. I whisper the line in her ear. She turns back slowly, stiffly. She smiles again. She stand there, grinning at me like she is vanna white and I’ve just solved the damn puzzle without buying a single vowel. She has teeth like dirty…“My,” she says. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”
There is a problem. I have dated this girl before. I met her, where, in a restaurant, at a movie theater, on the train, in my sister’s house? Where?
“Of course it does,” I say. “Hello…”I know I must say something more, because she is looking at me. The bar is swirling around us like this is a hoary television flashback, and I am starting to feel a night’s worth of Tanqueray and tonic water creep upward. The whole hellish catalogue is dripping in front of my eyes. Women with black pupils, women with dandruff, women who order from J. Peterman, women who cry during movies, women who chart their period in their day planers. Have I reached the end of the line? Have I seen them all? Is there no one left? Am I now in the recycle bin of life?
“Pardon me,” I say to the women, swimming toward the front door, tasting bitter gin on my tongue. “I must be going right now. Right this very moment.”
Outside someone has forgotten to turn the heat up and my Armani jacket is too thin but it looks good and my head still burns like a stick of incense. I am thinking of all those women who have dipped into my life, like the quick-hardening chocolate substance that congeals on the ice cream, and how I’ve just eaten away at their armor until there is nothing left but creamy, milky, white soft-serve, dripping down their chin, exposing them in all their flawed glory. This should be the best part, gentle on the teeth, cool on the tongue, a feast for the senses, but here is where I discard the cone, run outside and buy another.
Someday I will be content with my own shallowness. It will be part of the territory, the pickup, the disposal. It will be my privilege. It will be my obligation. Until that day, my conscience follows me as the subway doors swallow me whole and I sit on a cold, hard bench at three in the morning, head in my hands, wishing I could cry, yearning for a single moment of serenity with a girl who is exactly like me but completely different, a girl who does not succumb so easily and does not give up so readily.I met a girl once. Where is not important. I was very young, perhaps nineteen, perhaps twenty. I was in college, and I was not the man I am now. I fillowed her for an afternoon, to the cafeteria, where she talked to her friends about journalistic ethics, about how prosaic horror novels could be, about how fart parties really did serve a purpose. She was concise and convincing. Her words were well-chosen. I followed her all the way home. She was wearing a short skirt, and she had a mile shaped like a comma on her left thigh. I think I could have loved this girl just from that single day, I really do, as far-fetched, as John Cusack movie-esque as it might sound. I never needed to see her again, to feel her, to touch her fire-engine red cheeks, for this to last.
But that girl and I fell in love, and it was never the same. Intimacy ruined us. I tried to fight though, but I just couldn’t. when we broke up, I told her I was looking for something she could not give me. She asked what it was. I told her I couldn’t describe it, that this idea was intangible. Was there even a word for it? I had no idea.
“Until you can describe it yourself,” she said, “maybe it doesn’t exist.”
There are times when I wonder what happened to her. I would like to use my pickup line, to gauge her reaction. I miss her. I miss that mole. Someday, when I write my book, I will include an entire chapter on that mole.
Someday.
