Weakness

I’m always the last person to fall asleep. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired, if the lights are on or off, if I take a Valium chased with two or three bourbon and Cokes. I lay with my eyes wide open in between long, hard blinks and listen to the house creak and sigh. This place is weathered and brittle, an ancient brick monolith converted into a townhouse that is a contrast of new and old. We have high speed internet service, but my roommates and I cannot take consecutive showers without the hot water running out. Cable television in every room, yet the floors sag and the paint is chipping. Progress, huh? I guess so. But most of the time I think I’m just running in place, moving just enough to avoid being swept into the past. Today was a perfect example.



I woke up with a fuzzy brain and a tongue that felt like it weighed ten pounds. I rubbed my eyes with my palms and walked down the stairs without bothering to put on my robe. Roxanne, my female roomie, has seen me in my boxers enough times and I didn’t even care about the half hard-on I was sporting. If she wanted to alleviate the pressure, fine. If she didn’t, I didn’t have a problem with that either. Whatever.

I started coffee and was surprised when I looked at the kitchen clock and it said that I had a full forty-five minutes until I had to be in class. I doctored the coffee and plodded back up the stairs, took the coffee into the shower with me. I heard Roxanne stumble out of her room and into the bathroom, was both aroused and disgusted when I heard her sit down on the toilet and release a long and loud stream of urine, totally ignoring me though I was but a few feet away. As I shampooed my hair I debated on whether I should beat off or not, then decided that I shouldn’t press my luck. It wasn’t often I was early.

I didn’t say goodbye to Roxanne and my other two roommates, Randy and Paul, were already gone. Randy and Paul have given up on any false pretenses of getting a degree and settled in a comfortable life of twenty-something stoners. They mow lawns in the summer, plow snow in the winter, and smoke weed the rest of the year. I envied them a little as I scraped the frost off the windows of my ten year old Ford Escort and hoped I had enough gas to make it to class and then to work. I was short of cash, as usual. Story of my life.

I endured maybe the most boring lecture of my less than illustrious academic career and really debated skipping my second class. I didn’t, not because of any sense of duty, but I had already used up all my free passes and didn’t want to risk flunking out and have to pay back my umpteen thousand dollars worth of student loans that are waiting for me in the unlikely event that I graduate. I amused myself in my second class by staring at a blonde whose panties were peeking out of her low-cut jeans. The blonde caught me staring and I didn’t bother looking away or feigning embarrassment. She didn’t seem fazed and I wondered if maybe she would give me her phone number if she decided not to charge me with sexual harassment. The blonde left class quickly and did neither, which made me feel even worse than if she had been offended.

It’s not like I’ve gone out of my way not to fit in. I dress the same as most of the kids here, speak the same language, go to the same bars. But something just hasn’t clicked. I didn’t grow up in a subdivision and I don’t give a shit about V.I.P. rooms or who in Hollywood is fucking who. And I’m not some bourgeois pseudo-intellectual fuck who watches foreign subtitled films with other bourgeois pseudo-intellectual fucks who think capitalism is the scourge of mankind while they’ve never had to make it on their own dime. But I’m not angry about it. Really.

So I’m a zero, a cipher. Oh, I can cozy up to girls of either type. The ditzy girls with highlighted hair at Happy Hour or the horn-rimmed, close-cropped girls who hang out at cafes and sip drinks that are supposed to resemble coffee. But after I talk myself into their pants, that’s about all I have to offer. Nothing to grab hold of, nothing of substance, nothing worth talking about. And all they have to offer me in the morning is that look, the one that says, “I can't believe I took this guy home.” And I bail and that’s that.

Okay, so I was through with class and I made my way towards work, filling up my Escort on the way and hoping my charge card wouldn’t max out before the end of the month. I added a Slim Jim, a bag of chips, a Mountain Dew, and a box of Marlboro Lights to my gas purchase and sighed thankfully when the receipt printed out. I was partially glad because the card went through, but also a little disgusted that I couldn’t spend fifteen dollars without looking over my shoulder. The hundred and fifty bucks it would cost me to fix my exhaust? Even the sixty dollars for a pair of shoes that weren’t scraped and flimsy with age? Maybe when I hit lotto.

I changed in the car and made my way into the restaurant. I could’ve changed in the back room, but most of the other waiters are fags and I don’t feel comfortable undressing in front of them. No, I don’t think they’re going to hold me down and anally rape me, but these guys are worse than fifty year old divorcees at Chippendales as far as the innuendo and lewd commentary. It’s like a game to those guys, and I’m made either to feel very inadequate or very violent, depending on the day. Again another club I don’t belong to, another place I don’t fit in.

Tips weren’t too bad for a weeknight, but still I was glad when the dining room closed down and I could belly up to the bar for a couple drinks. I ordered a double shot of bottom shelf vodka with a splash of 7-UP and buried it with a slow sip followed by a long pull. The bartender shook her head at me and smiled and I tried to smile back. Her name was Sherry.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Not a lot,” Sherry said. “Doing what I do.”

“I hear that. How’s school going?”

“I’m taking a semester off. Bunch of bullshit with my ex.”

“Not paying again?”

“Nope. Sixty fucking dollars a week and he says he can’t come up with it. But a few weeks ago I see him and his whore girlfriend out at the mall in a new Jeep. So I confront him right there, embarrass the shit out of him, and you know what he says?”

“What?”

“Says it’s not his, it’s hers. Like he’s not giving her any money.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said, regretting the conversation already.

“I ought to take him to court,” Sherry said.

“You should,” I said. “Definitely.”

“So when are we going to go out again?”

“Whenever you want.”

“That’s what I need. A good guy like you. Maybe someday I’ll learn.”

“I’m not that good.”

“Sure you are,” she said, and hit me with another double shot, didn’t bother with the 7-UP. “You just don’t know it.”

I just smiled and lifted my glass to her, then pounded it. Sherry and I had gone out once, like an actual official date, and I guess it went okay. We had dinner, decent conversation, more than enough chemistry. Then we ended up at a bar, pounding shots and having a grand old time, except somewhere along the way we each realized how pathetic we were and gave up any pretense of trying for a meaningful relationship. Sherry’s eyes began to fog as she told me about her life and I knew right then I could never be what she needed, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I thought a real connection with a three-dimensional woman might bust through the armor, break up the iceberg. But we just ended up back at Sherry’s apartment she shares with her mom and we fucked and that was that. I made sure I was gone before Sherry’s daughter woke up. One less hassle. Every once in a while Sherry will call me on a drunken Saturday and she’ll come over and we’ll have sex and talk and smoke cigarettes in the dark. And even though she’s right there next to me we’re still miles apart and we both know it. We give each other what we’ve got to give and don’t ask for anything more.

“I’ll set ‘em up, you knock ‘em down,” Sherry said, and I snapped out of my flashback.

Sherry nodded towards the other end of the bar and I saw three women sitting together being way too loud with way too much makeup on. Sherry set the women up with another round of drinks and then pointed to me, like I had paid for them. The women, all in their mid-thirties and all with soccer-mom highlighted hair, looked over at me and I smiled and they all smiled back. Then I sipped my drink and looked back into the bar mirror, wondering if what I saw was what a predator really looked like. I knew what would come next and it wouldn’t be pretty.

Because getting women is like petting a cat. If you see a cat and you want it in your lap, what do you do? If you chase the cat, it will run, hissing at you while it scrambles underneath the nearest piece of furniture. Even if you catch it before it gets away, the cat will scratch and claw until you let it go and will not understand that you only wanted to pet it, to hold it. No, what you do is look away, act like you don’t want anything to do with the cat. Then you stick your hand out, offering an obvious invitation but still feigning indifference. Then the cat will poke around, put its head under your hand, perhaps purr a little.

Still you wait. You reciprocate with a little heavier petting, then pull away. Then the cat hops into your lap and butts against you and now it wants that hand, needs it. And then the cat is yours. You can throw it across the room, kick it out the door, disdain it in favor of another kitty. The cat’s indifference is turned against itself and there you are, wondering if it’s really that easy and if you really want it to be.

Whatever.

Enough with the metaphors.

Let’s go back to the bar.

“Thanks for the drink,” the woman closest to me said, and I just smiled and held up my glass to them in recognition. The woman closest to me motioned for me to come over and I could tell by the slackness in her wrist and the glassiness in her eyes that she wasn”t going to feel too perky the next morning. I sauntered down the bar with a shit-eating grin on my face and debated whether I should just toss my drink on the bar and run out the door. For an instant I wanted to be anywhere else than in my own skin. The moment passed.

“How are you lovely ladies this evening?” I said.

“Just having a little girl’s night out,” the drunkest one, the one closest to me, said. She grinned and pointed toward the woman in the middle, the better looking one. “We’re trying to cheer this girl up.”

“Really,” I said, and slid closer to the three drunk soccer moms but away from the bar, so they could all see and talk to me. “What’s not to be cheery about?”

“Her piece of shit husband,” the one against the wall, the least attractive one, said.

The woman in the middle looked away sheepishly and poked the woman on the end in the arm. The middle woman wasn’t hammered, but I could tell she had a nice buzz and I wasn’t sure if the redness in her cheeks was from embarrassment or the liquor. Then I decided I didn’t care all that much.

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He fucking left,” the one closest to me said. She shook her head and took a long slurp of her margarita. “They all fucking leave. Men suck.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I fucking hate men.”

All three women laughed and then I laughed and scooted my barstool closer to the woman in the middle. I gave her and the rest of them a little of my background, college kid waiting tables to earn some extra bucks, blah, blah, blah. I slid closer to the woman in the middle and eventually her two friends excused themselves, had to get home because they still had husbands, still had a life. The woman in the middle told me about the gradual dissolution of her marriage, how things were going great and then all of sudden her and her husband got busy and they grew apart and he started staying late at work and now he was fucking someone almost ten years younger and now her self-esteem was on life-support. You’ve heard it before.

And this is where I come in.

I tell her she’s beautiful and I can’t believe she’s a day over twenty-eight and her soon to be ex-husband will come to regret his decision. I nod and shake my head at all the appropriate times and try to look thoughtful and sympathetic. I eventually put my hand on her elbow, then work it down until I am holding her hand. Every once in a while her hair falls down in her eyes and I brush it back, barely touching the back of her ear before pulling away. She knows what’s up but she falls right in and I nod and smile. Nod and smile.

Sherry takes the woman’s Visa card and puts all my drinks from the night on it along with a twenty dollar tip for herself. Money for sex, like it always is, like it always has been. The woman says that maybe she should call a cab, that she probably shouldn’t be driving. I ask her where she lives and it’s something like Woodhaven or Havenwood and I tell her it’s not far out of the way if she wants me to drop her off on my way home.

I don’t mind.

Really.

We get to my Escort and the woman takes one look at it and asks if I want to drive her car instead. I tell her no, that’s okay, her car will be fine overnight and I’d hate to get pulled over in someone else’s car but the real reason is because I want to be able to bail at any moment if things go sour. I toss my school shit in the backseat and the woman slides in, looks a little shaky but not over the edge. I fire the Escort up and we’re both shivering as the defrost struggles to heat up. I dig in my console and pull out a third of a joint I was saving and push in my cigarette lighter. The woman watches me intently as I take two short puffs, hold it, then audibly exhale the smoke towards the floorboard. The woman looks sheepish for a moment as I hold out the joint to her and then she grins and takes it.

“It’s been a long time,” she says, and I hand her a lighter out of the console, give her something to fiddle with during the ride. She takes the lighter and flicks it alight, sucks delicately from the joint as I take off. I figure the weed will be enough to push her beyond the brink. The woman flicks and puffs the whole ride, usually having to try a couple times before she gets the lighter to light. She finally gets a pretty good toke and then tells me to pull in at the last house, the one at the end of the cul-de-sac. We’re home.

You really want to know the rest?

It’s not pretty.

Okay, so here’s how it went....

We go inside and she asks me if I’d like a glass of wine. I say sure and she grabs a bottle from the wine shelf under her immaculate island with the marble counter top. She hands me the bottle like I live there and I wedge the cork out with my car keys in just a few seconds, an old pro. The woman gives me a smile as I hold the bottle out to her. She blinks once, hard, and waves the bottle away. I take a long pull off the bottle, an expensive Shiraz I had seen at the restaurant but never entertained the thought of drinking. I ask the woman about her house and she offers me a tour.

We go upstairs.

We stop at her bedroom.

We do it, me on top, the lights out. No music. No candles.

At first the woman is receptive, but then I’m pumping and she starts to cry. I try to whisper in her ear, tell her it’s okay, tell her I’m sorry, but it only makes the woman sob harder. I kiss the woman’s tears, stroke her hair, keep pumping until I’m finished. I pull away from her and she rolls on her side, mumbles something, then is quiet. I lay in the dark for a few moments until I hear the woman snoring, then I wipe myself off with her pristine down comforter and start to put my clothes back on. I pick the wine bottle up from the woman’s night stand and take another long pull as I creep down the steps, creep out the door. I take another couple of drinks from the wine on my way home and think about keeping it, like maybe it’s something I can impress somebody with later, but end up breaking the bottle against a guardrail as I go around a curve.

I’d like to think I gave the woman something she needed, that I provided some kind of emotional service. But I know she will slink into the restaurant parking lot tomorrow morning, embarrassed that she spent a night slumming, disgusted at the dried wet spots on her expensive sheets. She will probably check her belongings to make sure I didn’t steal anything. And again I’m just a fading mistake, a slip-up, some sordid diversion that has no meaning or importance.

So now I’m here, in my own bed, still unable to sleep. I’m going to try for a few more minutes to nod off on my own. If I can’t do it, I’m going to go into Roxanne’s room and see if that helps. Sometimes it does. I’ll lay behind Roxanne and wrap my arm around her belly, feel the warmth of my legs intertwined with hers. She doesn’t mind. Sometimes I just need to hear someone else breathing.