The vagaries of the human heart

My name is Ernesto, and I live a life of danger and intrigue and exotic foreign glamour.

My life is way more fascinating than yours.

For you see, I am a spy who is also a druglord who is also a pimp who runs a brothel stocked with exotic beauties.

I am both a good guy and a bad guy. But which one am I more? Or am I one more? Maybe it is like when you go to 7-Eleven to buy a Slurpee, and sometimes you are feeling cherry flavor and other times you are craving the Coca-Cola kind.

So it is for me, Ernesto. I change sides on a whim.

This dalliance with both good and evil makes for great pathos in my life.

I cannot count the number of times I have exclaimed, “Ah, the vicissitudes of life!”

Yes, I know that word, “vicissitudes.” That is because I, Ernesto, also went to college. That’s right. I was a Rhodes Scholar. And now here I am, spending my days among the scoundrels who populate the seedy underbelly in the lowest stratum of society here in Taco City, Guadalouparagua. Yes, it it a little-known Latin American nation. I do not expect you to have heard of it. You, who would rather fill your head with news of Heidi and Spencer, or monitor the fashion exploits of Madame Googoo.

As I said, I live a life of great danger! I must “pack heat” at all times. You never know; you could be sitting inside a hole-in-the-wall dive bar, drinking a glass of absinthe or somesuch illicit and storied tipple, your face in shadow beneath the brim of your Panama Jack hat, spinning your wedding ring on the oaken surface of the bar as you think about your sweetly devoted wife and your cadre of fetching nubile mistresses among your staff at the brothel, contemplating the vagaries of the human heart–when suddenly a Bad Guy whips out a pistol and fires it at you. Or you could be playing a game of cards, and winning, for you are cunning and shrewd and were a Rhodes Scholar and all that–and some drunkard gets tired of losing to you and he leaps forward with a blade to your throat.

These things–they are everyday occurrences for poor ol’ Ernesto.

I have many people who want me dead. From petty hoodlums to government officials in the highest echelons of world power. I even heard that Celine Dion has a hit out on me. Why Celine Dion? I cannot say. Part of being a spy is not revealing stuff to every Tom, Dick, or Harry who comes along asking questions. I am sorry. I do not mean to be rude.

I must go now. Be thankful that I took this time to illuminate for you a fraction of the world of danger and intrigue and exoticism that I inhabit. Go back to your small life now.

More Big News

1.  “It’s a great invention,” the brainless, blue suit-clad executive for Advanced Pet Products (“APP”) told the Evil Genius.  “Perfect for apartment dwellers who are short on space and long on love.”

The Evil Genius stifled a yawn.  “Of course it is. I mean, it’s a tiny dog that’s been genetically modified to produce ice cream instead of waste and a melodic chime instead of a loud yelp.”

“My daughter Emily would love a dog like this.  She wants it both ways, and your dog will let her have it.  One question, though:  Do you have to feed it?”

“Yes, you have to feed it,” the Evil Genius replied.

“Well, it seems to me that…”

“How could any living thing survive without food?”

The executive jotted a few notes on a notepad.  The Evil Genius hadn’t said anything worth writing down, but the executive wanted to look busy and important.  “No, but it would seem that that’s the next step.”

“It’s not the next step.”

“But it could be, right?”

“This dog already makes ice cream instead of fecal matter.  Isn’t that enough?”

“Sometimes Emily forgets to feed her pets.”

“Emily sounds like she’s got some real problems,” the Evil Genius said.

The executive sighed.  “She’s trying to figure herself out.”

“If she wants ice cream but doesn’t want to feed the thing that makes the ice cream, she should buy a machine that makes ice cream.  They sell those, you know.”

“Oh, she couldn’t do that,” the executive said.

“No, I don’t suppose she could.”

2.  Maggie McCleary squeezed all 132 pounds of her well-tanned beauty into the fat suit.  In conjunction with the prosthetic makeup that had been applied to her well-tanned and beautiful face, the fat suit made her look like a well-tanned, beautiful thin person who was wearing an elaborate Halloween costume.

“This is going to be huge,” she told editorial assistant Oscar Berkman.

Berkman, fresh out of college but boasting the crushed idealism of a failure three times his age, nodded his head because nodding was what was expected of him.  “Yes, I’m proud of you,” he said, even though those words meant nothing to him.

“I’m going to win so many awards,” she continued.

“Lots of them,” Berkman said.  “Thousands.  Millions.”

“Are you being fasshus?” McCleary asked.

“What?” Berkman asked. “What did you just say?”

“Fasshus,” McCleary repeated.

“Facetious, you mean,” Berkman.

“Yes, that,” McCleary said.

3.  I should’ve known we were doomed when she laughed at me for not knowing what a French press was.

“Oh, you people in the States are still drinking the kind of drip coffee they drank in the eighteenth century,” she said to me.  “Unless it comes from a cafetière, it’s just raw sewage.”

“You’re from Providence,” I reminded her.

“Pshaw,” she said. “I am a citizen of the world.”

Another time she refused to believe that I understood some pretentious film we had just watched.

“Unless you have seen Revanche-Comte’s Drumsticks, there is no way that your viewing of The Big Pig could be valid or authentic.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I asked her.  “Revanche-Comte didn’t even direct The Big Pig.”

“No, but it was an inspiration for his first film,” she said.

“This was his fifteenth film,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.  “You proved my point.”

Before the end, she told me in no uncertain terms that I didn’t know anything.

“You’re uncouth,” she said. “I tried to reform you, and this is what I got for my trouble.”

“I have a Ph.D.,” I said.

She sneered.  “From the State College of State.”

“I’m an assistant professor.”

“You’re lucky I even talk to you.  I almost never talk to people who went to no-name schools.”

Sure we busted up, but doesn’t every couple? Didn’t Brangelina?  Didn’t AOL and Time Warner? All that really mattered was that I was a lucky guy and she was my winning ticket.

What it is

I had brought him to a pizza place to break up with him.

He loved pizza. It didn’t love him back, and neither did I, but I guess one-way love is better than no-way love.

I watched him dig into his pie. He was a big eater, and had ordered a pie all for himself. It was covered with anchovies and onions and smelly things.

I had ordered a small side salad. I couldn’t eat much. I always feel queasy when I have to deliver a blow.

“Mmm… mm rrowr rrowr rrowr rrowr, mmmphlet mphlet,” he said and laughed.

Uh…

He gave it another go. As he spoke, I looked into his churning, cheesy maw.  How did it look?  Well, imagine a washing machine but full of melted cheese instead of socks and towels.

He wiped his lips with a thin cheap napkin. It left a greasy smear of a kiss-print.

“Sorry,” he said, his left cheek full of chewed-up mush. “I had my mouth full.”

“Oh, did you now?”

“Yeah. Heh.”

“So what were you trying to say?”

“I said, ‘I really love you.’ “

I let my plastic spork drop to the table in our booth. He was grinning and clueless.

I saw his eyebrows go up a bit at their centers, awaiting my response.

In the kitchen in the back, a cook twirled the dough in the air. He had been full of joie de vivre, singing about what it is when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie.

“That’s amore!” he bellowed, spinning the dough round and round.

Let me live in your cool house, please

I met a cool dude. I needed a place to live. This cool dude told me that there just might be room for me–at the coolest house in the world!

“The House,” as it was known, was actually a multi-storied apartment. And by multi-storied I mean it had stairs but also legends! Apparently Sid Vicious used to shoot up with Che Guevara right there in the upstairs hallway. Wowwee!

The House was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or downtown Portland, Oregon. I could never remember which.

The cool dude sized me up and said, “Hmm, maybe.”

He led me to the House one day. He said, “Be cool, man. Now, you have to know the secret password or they won’t let you in. Do you know the secret password?”

No, I did not. What was it?

He placed a hand upon my shoulder and looked at me most gravely. “The password is–” Wait, why am I telling you?! It’s the “secret” password for a reason, son. Nice try, though.

On our walk there, the cool dude stopped abruptly and said, “Wait wait. No, man, your look is all wrong.” So he fixed me.

He took me to a thrift store. He sorted through piles of distressed jeans, and sifted through a rack of T-shirts that had names of bands on them like the New York Dolls and the MC5. He frowned. “Hmm, no no. This stuff is too played out. Passé. You can get it at the mall, for chrissakes!”

So he took me to a Dumpster. We found a pair of crumpled pants. They were on a dead homeless man. He said, “Hmm, we’re almost there!”

Then he took me to a swamp, commanded me to strip, and slathered my naked body with swamp scum. He said, “Eureka, that’s it!”

I looked down at my new muck encasing, and tell you what, I had never felt so cool in all my life.

He then regarded my hair. “Oh no, man. It’s all wrong.” He first tried simply mussing it up. That didn’t look cool enough, so he whipped out a razor blade from god-knows-where and shaved my head. That didn’t look cool enough, so he scalped me. Yeah, that’s right. And I let him, too. I let him make me cool.

… I’m going to level with you here. This is going nowhere.

My whole point was to demonstrate the futility of trying to be “cool,” how ridiculously exclusive the world of the hipster can be, and stuff like that. But instead I wound up with my protagonist covered in swamp scum, with a scalped head.

How do I do it? How do I fail at everything I try?

What I Didn’t Write

1.  “Oh, you are so courageous,” Emily Twiggs said when she saw her friend’s short haircut.

“What?” asked her friend.

Emily touched her friend’s shoulder.  “Is everything okay with you?  You can tell me.”

“Everything’s fine,” her friend said.

Twiggs continued to stare at her friend’s haircut.  “Do you think I could do it?”

“Do what?”

“Get a haircut like that.  I mean, I’m going to Cabo next month with my boyfriend, and I want to do something different.  But what you did seems like such a huge step.”

Her friend shrugged.  “You just have to shave your head.  There isn’t much to it.”

“Goodness, you’re a pioneer.  I am so jealous.”

“I have to get up very early for work, and I didn’t want to spend an hour on my hair.”

Emily didn’t hear a word that her friend had said.  “Seriously though, do you need a shoulder to cry on?  Are you feeling confused?”

“What?”

“You know, confused in that way.  That certain way.  It’s okay if you are.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m proud and amazed to know you,” Emily said.

“Thanks,” her friend said, although she wasn’t at all thankful.  But you take what you can get, right?

2.  “What will matter most is what I didn’t write,” the eminent Professor Ruggleteapot said in the peroration to his Terminal Talk.  “I wrote seventeen books, but the books that you will study are the ones I could have written.  I realize that this seems counterintuitive, but that’s how it goes with these astonishing ‘death is imminent’ insights.  Writing is merely bricolage, bricolage that too often leads to catachresis.  Only in the pagus where writing and not-writing intersect can paralogical progress be made.”

Ruggleteapot’s peroration, which was meaningless gibberish dressed up in post-literacy jargon, soon crystallized into a serious academic movement.  Dr. Theodore “Ted” Tunnell, a feckless literary critic who had spent most of his career casting about for the faddish idea that would make him rich, produced an impenetrable manuscript entitled What We Don’t Write. In it, he argued that nothing worth reading has ever been written.

“Once we understand that more things haven’t been done than have, we can move beyond writing,” he told the twenty or so students who bothered to attend his lecture.

“What does that mean?” asked the one student who always paid attention to what Tunnell said.

“Think about it,” Tunnell said.

The student, who paid attention only because he wanted to go to grad school and get a cushy job like Tunnell’s, thought about it.  “I still don’t understand,” he said.

“Well, young man”—and here Tunnell said “young man” because he couldn’t remember the student’s name, even though he had spent at least ten hours talking to the student and was the student’s honors thesis advisor besides—“it means that it’s impossible to write a better novel than a novel that hasn’t been written, since it’s always possible to write a better novel, especially if you don’t.  You can always potentially write a better novel than even the best novels that have been written.”

“What?”

“Let’s take a cult favorite like the Prose Poet.  He wrote Would That I Were Your Pearl-Faced Wristwatch, which is probably still popular with you young folks.”  It wasn’t, but Tunnell kept going anyway.  Like most people his age, he was out of touch.   “But imagine the things he didn’t write.  Why are we studying the few things that he did do when we could study the many things that he didn’t?”

Because this didn’t make the least bit of sense, it went over like gangbusters.  In short order, thousands of dissertations were written on books that hadn’t been written and on the authors who had never written them.  In many ways, these dissertations were exactly like the ones that grad students had been writing before the “discovery” of Ruggleteapotism:  Other graduate students and faculty hiring committees skimmed them, and the general public ignored them.

Some intrepid scholar eventually one-upped Tunnell with a journal article that claimed that only the criticism written about these nonexistent works could be studied.  A movement coalesced around this article, a movement led by critics who criticized the extant criticism and moved this putative research further from any sort of center.  It was all very confusing, but the academic community did seem to reach a consensus that the Ryan Powell Story, which had never been written, was the greatest story never told.

“It took me years not to write that,” said Brian Powell, whose name had somehow become associated with the nonexistent manuscript.  “I spent three years in a creative writing program, writing one piece after another.  Short stories, a novel…I couldn’t stop.  But one day I felt inspired, and after that I never wrote again.  The rest is history.”

3.  “A person puts his money into my Miracle Money Machine, and the money doesn’t come back out,” the Evil Genius explained to the casino’s general manager.

“So it doesn’t ‘pay off’ or ‘hit’ or anything like that?” the general manager asked.

“Oh no.  God no,” the Evil Genius said.

“And you’re certain that people will put their money into it?”

“Sure.  It has some glowing lights, a keypad, a digital display, and the phrase ‘you’re a winner’ written in comic sans font, 72-point type, on top of it.  But other than the expense of keeping it plugged into an electrical socket, it doesn’t cost you a dime.”

“So we can set up a bunch of these on the casino floor and people will play them?”

“Well, they won’t really play them, because playing implies some potential for a positive outcome, but yes.  If it has a slot for inserting dollar bills or  swiping credit cards, your customers will use it.  And it doesn’t matter to them if the Miracle Money Machine does anything, because that’s not why they’re here.”

“This is amazing,” the general manager said.  “For years, we just took some of their money.  Now we can get all of it.”

“Yeah, it’s fantastic,” said the Evil Genius, who was bored by the whole process.  “These are exciting times for our great nation.”
4.  It was nice. Very nice.  Nice nice nice.  They didn’t have a better word than nice.  One of them looked up synonyms for nice, and none seemed to fit what it was.  So they settled for nice, only they weren’t settling at all.

5.  “I want my son to grow up to be an astronaut.”

“Oh, that’s not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Your son is stupid, ma’am.  He scored in the lowest quartile of his standardized test.”

“But I want him to be…”

“Yes, I know what you want.  It won’t happen.”

“He deserves the best.”

“Sure he does.  But his best won’t involve piloting a rocket.  His best won’t entail flying to the moon or Mars or wherever.  His best will probably consist of managing a gas station, which isn’t any worse than anything else.”

“You’re a terrible teacher, mister.”

And he really was, and he felt awful about it, and he knew better, and in spite of all that he couldn’t stop judging other people.  When his time came, he would beg for forgiveness.

Crying Time Again

1.  Well yeah, of course, if you’re going to be like that.  I mean, it wasn’t my fault or anything, but I’m apologizing anyway.  I think that says a lot about me.  It says a lot about me that I’m apologizing to you right now, in this very dramatic way, and you need to take it or leave it.  What? You’re leaving it?  You’re leaving it after I did all of this in such a dramatic way?  You heartless bitch.

2.  The little boy looked at each teacher as a surrogate mother or father.  He didn’t have a mother or father, so the teachers he had were all he knew in terms of role models.  Except each year he got a new set of teachers, so he never had time to open up to any of them.  God how he wanted to open up, though.  He wanted to say to each teacher, “Please, my mommy and daddy are gone, will you hold me for an hour or two?”  How ridiculous is that, right?  He knew it was ridiculous and after he reached his tween years it was worse than ever.  His insides were twisted into a knot, a knot he couldn’t untie or cut through.  But he could give thanks:  The television told the little boy it was fine to be this way, the comic books told the little boy it was fine to be this way, and the video games told the little boy it was fine to be this way.  They didn’t tell him, exactly, because inanimate objects can’t talk.  You can’t have a dialogue with them is what I’m saying.  But the monologue the little boy had with himself, oh wow was that something.  His later years were benumbed and meaningless, which was how it was supposed to be from the beginning only he didn’t know that.  There were a few moments when he felt a spark of awareness, but he would quickly attribute that spark to arthritis or hemorrhoids or incipient heart disease.  He died at a casino while sitting in front of a video poker machine.  For the day, he was down $46.13, money he would never have a chance to win back.

3.  “Hey Pillowface, I like you a lot.”

“A lot, huh?”

“Yeah, you’re a nice girl and I like you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t?”

“No.  You’re a liar.  You don’t like me because I have a pillow for a face.”

“Listen to me:  I like you for so many reasons.  I wouldn’t let the pillow for a face thing get in the way of my liking you.”

“Oh, go get bent.”

“Pillowface, why are you pushing me away?”

“I’m pushing you away because you seem sweet and trustworthy.  I’m pushing you away because you’re willing to accept me for my pillow face.  Why can’t you just cheat on me and use me like all of the rest?  At least I’d understand that.”

“You’ve hurt me so much, Pillowface.  I tried to be good to you, and you shut me down.  Now I hate your guts.  I hope I never see you again.”

“Oscar, will you marry me?”

4.  Davy “Brick” Shidaus, Chapel Hill’s most perfectly developed man, couldn’t believe his luck.  He had just deadlifted 1,045 pounds and set a new world record.  Five enormous men had watched him to do it.  His heart soared into the stratosphere, taking its irregular heartbeat and collapsed ventricle with it.

“‘Brick,’ I can’t believe it,” said Chayne “Link” Hughes, Raleigh’s most perfectly developed man.

“You’d better believe it, boss,” said “Brick.” “What I’ve done here is the most important thing that’s ever been done by anyone.”

Here’s the kicker:  It was the most important thing that had ever been done by anyone.  I searched the archives to find a more important thing that’s been done, but I couldn’t.  The setting of the previous deadlift world record was the only thing that came close, and that was done with 39 fewer pounds.

“Brick” Shidaus lived for another decade and never managed to top this feat.  He lived long enough to understand that once you’ve done the most important thing that had ever been done by anyone, that’s it for you.  That’s it for you, and you’d better start searching for some reagent that will cause you to forget.

5.  “Look at this latest gag,” said the fattest of the three uninspired draftsmen who worked on the Micah the Cat comic strip.

“Ha ha ha,” said the thinnest.  “That’s a real good one.”

“Oh goodness yes,” said the middle one.  “My sides are splitting.”

The single panel featured Micah the Cat, who was a pompous tabby and grad school dropout, insulting his boon companion Pawscar Wilde.  The insult wasn’t amusing but did contain several cat and dog puns, puns that signaled “mission accomplished” to the draftsmen.

“When do you think the big man is going to stop by?” asked the middle one.

The big man was Radcliffe “Rad” Barnstorms, who had created the strip a decade earlier.  Now that Micah the Cat was incredibly and inexplicably popular, he had outsourced the dismal work of producing new strips to this team of hacks.

“Next month, I heard,” answered the fattest one.

A month passed and “Rad” Barnstorms never showed up, but the draftsmen didn’t expect him to and the fans didn’t notice.  The jokes soon stopped being jokes or even making sense, but that’s how it goes with most things that people like.  People don’t care if their entertainments are good or bad, only that they’re stupid and nonthreatening.  I guess stuff like Micah the Cat is reassuring.  I wouldn’t know because I’ve never reassured anybody.  Maybe I should give it the old junior college try.

Safe Eyes

I went to a party with my superhuman boyfriend and his superhuman friends. I’m not superhuman. He says that’s OK, but I think he’s just being nice.

At the party there was this one superhuman girl. She did party tricks for the crowd. She shot lasers from her eyes that smashed a vase from across the room. She bonged a bunch of high-octane gasoline. She morphed into a sexy dragon and flew around the den. I had bought a new dress at Forever 21, but I couldn’t compete.

I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I willed lasers to shoot out of my eyes, thinking maybe it was simply mind over matter–”if you dream it, you can achieve it” and all that. But alas, no lasers.

I returned to the party, feeling dejected. My boyfriend hovered over to me–because he can do that, he can hover. Don’t get me started on all the stuff he can do.

“Where are you? I’ve been looking everywhere for you! That laser-eyed dragon girl is pissing everyone off, breaking shit with her laser eyes and flying around in her dragonic form, smashing into walls.” He patted me with his hand that can sometimes shoot knives out of it when he’s really mad. “I don’t want a girl who could kill me with her eyes. I like a girl with safe eyes. I like you.”

But a year later, he dumped me for the laser-eyed girl. They got married. He’s painting the nursery where their litter of hovercraft dragonbabies will sleep. I saw pictures on Facebook. I like the color paint they chose.

The Dogmom

The sweet little dog filled the dogmom’s maternal void better than any smelly old baby could.  The sweet little dog urinated and defecated all over the dogmom’s apartment and had numerous psychological issues besides, but the dogmom remained as kind and understanding as could be.  The sweet little dog went to the behavioralist and the veterinarian and wherever else sweet little dogs go when they are holy terrors.  The sweet little dog cost the dogmom a small fortune, but she knew that it was worth every penny.

The dogmom was a frumpy, unprepossessing woman in her early thirties.  Life had passed the dogmom by, and more’s the pity.   The dogmom tried to drown her sorrows in stacks of paperback romance novels but soon desired the attention of a living companion.  The dogmom’s thoughts turned to sweet little dogs, so she bought the one I’ve been telling you about.

When the sweet little dog wasn’t suffering from separation anxiety or having an allergic reaction to its dog food, it sat on the love seat next to the dogmom.  The dogmom cried and cried, like most of us do when we’re alone, but the sweet little dog’s presence made it so that she didn’t hurt as much.

The dogmom never had the opportunity to run her stubby fingers across a man’s hairy chest.  Instead, the dogmom contented herself by running her stubby fingers across the sweet little dog’s furry back.  The dogmom hated herself, in fact she wanted to kill herself, but there was this sweet little dog that depended on her.

The dogmom’s sisters were real moms, and they were proud of their children.  The dogmom had only the sweet little dog, and she tried to be proud of it.  Sometimes the sweet little dog would stare up at the dogmom with its saucer eyes.  What the sweet little dog saw reflected in the dogmom’s eyes was anybody’s guess.

The Truth

The truth was that John Climacus, MD couldn’t keep it in his pants.  He wanted to have sex all the time, sex with men, and he pursued this goal with determination and skill.  He had a wife and three children.

He would cry when he paused to consider the way he was, but please don’t feel sorry for him.  He understood his compulsion and didn’t resist it.  Yet he wanted that wife and those three children, so this was how things had to be.

He didn’t believe that he had a mental illness and he didn’t believe that he was committing a mortal sin.  As he huddled in a stall in the men’s room at the State University Lecture Hall, awaiting relief from these urges, all he believed was that he had a choice.  A choice, but not much of one.

He and his wife, who was a very sweet and very chaste woman, went to movies, took vacations, and discussed the books they read.  He loved her, in a way.

“Isn’t it always ‘in a way’ when you’re talking about love?” he asked me.

It was always ‘in a way,’ and maybe his way was better than the way I loved my wife.  I loved my wife, but I also wanted to ravish her. When she began to look worse, I began to love her less.  So yeah, there’s that.

The big problem for John Climacus, MD was that he was a public figure.  He taught psychology classes at the university, advised scandal-plagued politicians, and appeared on talk shows.   He wrote and lectured on a wide variety of topics, but on this particular topic he remained silent.

“I’m old now, and things were different then.  But even if I were younger, I wouldn’t change,” he continued.  “Is what I’m doing a lifestyle?  I always thought it was just a way of getting my rocks off.”

The Anytown Police Department and the Decatur Gazette forced him out of the closet.  The former arrested him and the latter told his sordid tale.

John Climacus, MD  fell from grace, and nobody tried to catch him.  Activists called him a coward.  Friends labeled him a deviant.   In spite of this, he refused to explain himself.

“What I was doing when they arrested me was such a small part of my life.”

Isn’t it a small part of most of our lives?  Some of us want it more than others, and in one sense it’s what we’re here to do.  Perhaps we should just fall into it and let it dictate every choice we make.

“I thought the rest of it was so much more important.”

He thought the rest of it was so much more important, but they didn’t.  They thought he was living a lie, which I suppose is something they could say.  I suppose they could say a lot of things.

Man of the Year

“Then I told this chick I was going to step it up for her.”

“Are you, ‘Toe?’  Because I can’t see that happening.”

“Man, I’ve stepped it up for lots of chicks.  Like when the last chick asked me to shave down there, and I did it.  I did it just for her.”

“You call that stepping up?”

“I call it what I want to call it.  Anyway, this girl is the real deal, Ohvuh.”

“Look dude, that is not my name…”

“She’s the real deal, I’m telling you.”

“How is she the real deal?  How is she any different than the last fifteen?”

“For one thing, she isn’t engaged or affianced or whatever.  This means I have to see her all of the time, or at least some of it.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s good if we have sex the whole time.  Sometimes she wants to talk, though.”

“What does she want to talk about?”

“The heck if I know.  Stuff about how this is nice, or how things are nice, or how we’re nice together.”

“She sounds nice, ‘Toe.’”

“Bro, screw that.  Plus, she’s bugging me to get a real job.  Says I’m not living up to my potential.”

“You’re working as a pro wrestler, ‘Toe.’  You make what, a hundred bucks a week doing that?  How do you pay your rent?”

“I got it taken care of.  Lay off.”

“How? From where?  The two years of Single-A minor league baseball that you played a decade ago?”

“Look, I’m taking life one step at a time.  And she keeps coming at me saying, get a job at the bank, my friend is the branch manager of the bank.  Do I look like the kind of guy who works at a bank?”

“ ‘Toe,’ I have no idea how to answer that.  Since I’ve known you, you’ve never actually worked.”

“I’m building to something, Ohvuh.”

“Oscar.”

“Whatever.  Oscar, I don’t wear ties.”

“You don’t even wear shirts, ‘Toe.’”

“Listen, I get enough of this at home.  I don’t need it right now.”

“At home?  Is that girl living with you?”

“Nah dude, I’m living with my mother.”

“What?”

“It’s just temporary, until I get this pro wrestling thing off the ground.  Then it’s a boat of gravy.”

“Last month you were talking about a singing career.  About how you were putting together a demo cassette or something.”

“I was probably drunk when I said that.”

“You were drunk for the entire month.  And you’re in terrible physical shape.  How are you going to be a pro wrestler?”

“Well, you don’t really wrestle.  That stuff’s done with mirrors, stunt doubles, and wires.”

“Have you ever wrestled a match?”

“I just signed a two-week contract with the premier local wrestling federation.  I’d think I know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah, you’d think that.”

“But getting back to Emily, she could be the one.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Heck no, man, you can’t pin the tail on this donkey.  I’m just saying, is all.”

“If she’s the one, though…”

“Well, I also need the other ones.  See what I mean?”

“ ‘Toe,’ you can’t just sleep with a bunch of women while you’re in a relationship.  I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“That’s how it works for me, Ohvuh.”

“How has that worked out for you?”

“It’s worked out just fine.”

“Has it?  Remember that time with those two other girls named Emily?”

“Oh right, when I forgot which one was which.  God, that was terrible.  I’d go on a date with one and be thinking it was the other.  I wasn’t even sure what their last names were.  One was prettier, but not by much.  I didn’t have a lot to go on.”

“Is that how you want to live your life, ‘Toe?’  Are you happy going from empty encounter to empty encounter?”

“It’s not like I’m hurting anybody.”

“You really hurt Brian Powell’s sister.”

“Besides her, I mean.”

“And you have a venereal disease.”

“Not a lot of one.”

“What?  What does that mean?”

“It’s not one of the big ones, you know.  It’s one of the burning discharge ones, not one of the dying slowly ones.”

“So you’ve probably given that to some girls.”

“Well, somebody gave it to me.  Fair’s fair, right?”

“Sure, whatever.  Don’t you have any regrets, ‘Toe?’”

“There was this time a girl from college called me and wanted to apologize for breaking my heart.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, how crazy is that?  I told her she didn’t and that we were cool, but she insisted.  She said that she had damaged me in a meaningful way.  Finally I just caved and said I was glad that she thought she broke my heart and thought it was meaningful for me.”

“Wow, that’s…I don’t have words, ‘Toe.’”

“Then there was this other time, back when we were living in the dorms, when a girl e-mailed me a long break-up letter.  Said we were through.  That she wasn’t waiting on me any longer.”

“Waiting on you?”

“I had hung out with her once or twice, then didn’t talk to her for ten months.  I guess she thought we were still dating or something.  I always wondered what she did for all of that time.  I didn’t know any of her friends or anything.  I mean, did she tell them she had a boyfriend?”

“Maybe she didn’t need a boyfriend.  Maybe she just needed to say she had a boyfriend to keep the guys away.”

“It doesn’t keep me away.”

“No, it doesn’t.  But now you’re talking about having found the one, ‘Toe.’”

“Yeah man, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.  This is big for me.  Really big.  So do you think I should give Brian Powell’s sister a call?”