I believe in the philosophy of rock ’n’ roll. Like, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, don’t make a pretty woman your wife.” I mean, who can refute that? Can Immanuel Kant refute that? How can you refute that? I mean, really. Any guy knows this is true, even a shallow, superficial guy like me. Of course, I think almost all women are pretty. You have to make them feel special, make them have the best day of their life, and what woman doesn’t look good on the best day of her life?
Don’t get me wrong, I go for the really pretty ones, but it all falls in cycles, like the phases of the moon affect my style, or something. I mean, I can go out feeling like I’ve got a certified guarantee in my pocket that I’ll get laid and come home empty, especially in these precautionary times of AIDS. Whenever I’m having a dry spell, I don’t really push myself either; you have to take it slow and know your limitations. You have to know what they want and how to treat them. You have to make them come to you and you just can’t get emotionally involved. I mean, it’s her ball game when you do that, when you start having pet names, knowing one another’s favorite color, and she starts springing little anniversaries on you. The next thing you know, you’re a daddy, with all that responsibility. You have to play that noninvolvement theme, and work that. Give them a little James Dean or Montgomery Clift or a little Rudolph Valentino action, and when they know they can’t own you, they want you all the more and you’re the victor. It’s very simple. It’s just a matter of style. And in this age of Prince and Michael Jackson, affecting the style of the old masters smacks of originality and flair. Rent a bunch of old movies. Check out some Jimmy Cagney, you’ll see what I mean.
Anyhow, I was having a dry period. (They aren’t bad if they’re short, but you get to thinking about your life and all that when they endure and you don’t want to dwell on this kind of thing for long. It can make you miserable.) I was overdue, horny, and looking for a sign.
I changed my environment a little and started hitting the state library at lunchtime. It’s a good place: lots of females—state workers running the gamut from research assistants to attorneys. You can find young ones, fresh ones there, and as one thing leads to another, on the second afternoon I spot a likely prospect, a brown-eyed girl—medium height, nice figure, no engagement ring, looks about thirty, she’ll be just about right, I prefer blondes, but she’ll do.
I’ve got my head down like I’m reading but I’m really watching her through a pair of dark Porsche sunglasses from my post near the card catalogues. I’m wearing a twelve-hundred-dollar Italian suit and standing there with an air of European elegance about me, with a certain devil-may-care flair, an irresistible sort of psychopathic charisma. Waiting for contact. She looks up once or twice and then, bingo! She gives me the look. In another minute she goes upstairs into the stacks, philosophy section, and I think, Philosophy, how interesting, you know, this is a little bit different, I like this, I’ll just trust myself and go with this. I’m following her upstairs, and she knows it. Both of us browse for a while, rows apart, and then she begins to select some books. After she collects an armful, I catch her coming around a corner and blam! plow into her. And then I do James Dean doing Montgomery Clift doing Rudolph Valentino doing a Garfield.
I learned how to do Garfields as a little kid watching the “Garfield Goose Show” on television. What you do is get this astonished look on your face and simultaneously jump back suddenly, like you’ve been surprised or scared by something. Fraser Thomas, the host of the show, who was some sort of dignitary who used to talk to Garfield, who was this goose puppet, the king of this faraway goose kingdom, actually, and whenever Fraser Thomas said something that would astonish Garfield in any way, the goose, who was a mute, would open his beak, arch his neck, and hop back, all in one move, this emphatic double take.
So, like I said, I catch this brown-eyed girl coming around the corner with a pile of books and I slam into her, really suddenlike, give her the double Garfield, knocking the books out of her arms and she says, “Whoa!”
“Oh, boy, am I ever sorry.” I say, “Here, let me help you. Oh, brother! What a dummy I am. What a knuckle-head!”
Right away I pick up on the fact that she smells clean, her breath is sweet. This is good, this is good, I think, and she felt firm, this is good, this is good! My precious little heart is pumping out the drum roll from “Wipeout” by the Safaris.
“Jeez, I’m really sorry, I thought I was all alone up here; you scared the living crap out of me.”
“I was being loud,” she says. “I’m a clomper. I’m not a mouse. People hear me when I walk in libraries.”
“My mind was a million miles away,” I say, a little too much like Columbo. I pick up her books and then box her in against a shelf and look her square in the eyes, big, beautiful, bright brown eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say, “what’s this? The Critique of Pure Reason!” I say, “You can’t read this,” I say, “you’re a girl.”
“But of course I can read it,” she says, bristling.
“I mean, I’m not saying that you can’t read Kant. What I mean is, women don’t usually go in for philosophy, as a rule, whereas men don’t go in much for… sewing.”
“Have you read Kant?” she says icily.
“Of course,” I say. “I mean, after Kant, what’s left to be said? He was the best. The last word.”
Her tone begins to soften a little. “Lots of folks are big on Wittgenstein these days,” she said.
“That effeminate little pansy,” I say. “ ‘Don’t think, look’; the folly of language, of concepts. He ripped that off from the Buddhists. And let me tell you something, I think the proof is in the pudding. Guys like Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard—they were little ninety-eight-pound weaklings. Didn’t they have weight lifting in those days or what?”
She laughs at this.
“How can you talk about superman, or soaring with the eagles, when you’ve got eleven-inch biceps?”
More deep-basso laughter from her.
I say, “Tell me something, who do you think would win, Madison Square Garden, fifteen rounds of boxing, the Dangerous Dane and the Wicked Witt?”
She laughs. “Kierkegaard had a bad back, Wittgenstein would prevail,” she says. She had the scariest laugh I had ever heard since The Exorcist.
I knew I had an alpha female here, I had an amazon. This chick was tougher than nails. A chick like this can turn the tables on a normal guy. When you go out with an alpha, they think they’re screwing you; they think the guy is the piece of ass. This was Emily Brontë, and she was looking for Heathcliff.
Well, good, I thought, a wildcat would be nice for a change, and I can do Heathcliff. Heathcliff comes naturally.
Her name was Simone. Came here from Paris at an early age. She was a lawyer. She liked Plato, she liked the ballet, she played the piano and violin (yawn!). She liked horseback riding. She ran marathons and could swim five miles. She practiced Zen.
I took her to a prizefight and to the track. She took me to see Wagner’s Ring. I made her read Lucky Jim and A House for Mr. Biswas, she made me read Pale Fire. She had traveled the globe to places like Zanzibar and Rangoon, Burma; she could match me drink for drink, and when we arm wrestled, her right arm could beat my left two times out of three. She had zest, spirit, energy.
And it was like I figured, she was a wildcat in bed, which made all of the horseshit about the opera and the ballet worth sitting still for. She was good.
She put the glide back in my stride, my juices were flowing again. I fell into my rhythm and got all loose and jangly again. I began to pick up side action—a Danish blonde, a redhead from Ireland, a divorcée, a married chick, a couple of them from way back when (never break off harshly with them, it’s cruel and unnecessary, and you never know when you might want to replay a golden oldie).
The dry spell was over, I had the ball rolling at last, and when you’ve got a few of them going like that, you can relax and be yourself. You don’t have to put up with any bullshit, because you’ve got your reserves.
Things were going so well, in fact, I was booked up so heavily, I broke things off with Simone, just quit calling, really—the initial spell had begun to fade, and it’s important anyhow to get gone at this point. They really can’t take it, being rejected like that, before you get to know the real and wonderful person they are. It’s a crucial move and timing is all.
I let a couple of weeks go by and showed up at a regular Friday-afternoon pub get-together Simone had once mentioned. I showed up with Jeannie, the Irish, as if it was entirely coincidental, and there was Simone with a party of her friends from work. We were barely seated way back on the far side of the pub when Jeannie said, “Don’t look now, Herbie, but that gal over there just did one of those Garfields of yours and then gave us the most bloody sardonic glare since God told Adam and Eve to pack up and clear out of the Garden.”
“Be more precise,” I said. “How would you gauge it?”
“It was quite clearly a triple,” Jeannie said.
I imagined Simone was thinking something along the lines of He had her all along, they had a fight, now they’re back together again—he was just using me! When I finally dared to sneak a look over, Simone was a study in nonchalance, but I could see that her breathing was rapid, angry, and barely under control.
I was pasting together just the right sort of improvisational intrigue that would start a real fire. I was cooking up some real passion. (Sometimes it’s even better to be seen with a plain one so there’s that what-does-he-see-in-her-that-he-doesn’t-see-in-me? to it.)
Jeannie and I cleared out pretty fast (you never want to linger), and then I laid low for a couple of weeks so she could soak up what she’d seen until finally I called, all innocentlike, before she’d given up hope completely, and turned the corner on her feelings for me. I called up and asked her to go horseback riding. There was the slightest pause and then she said with a French accent, “Fuck you, you asshole, go fuck yourself!” Blam!
How completely and utterly predictable.
At times like this it’s important to become traditional. I sent volleys of roses, special candies, poems (free-and-easy steals from Byron, Shakespeare, and Rimbaud). Every day for a week I sent her a plastic statue of Jesus—a dashboard Jesus. I don’t know why, I don’t know how such a thing occurred to me, I just did it thinking that if you keep doing the same thing, over and over, no matter how crazy, you can break them down. I mean, picture her alone in her apartment with seven statues of Jesus.
She held out for three weeks, about ten days longer than average, and then finally she picked up the phone.
“Hi, how have you been?…”
In no time we were back at it again, candlelight dinners, sensitive intimate talks until dawn, horseback riding, English style, the sun and the wind in our faces, Heathcliff and Catherine, frolic on the moors, cloud-nine exhilaration and steamy, hot-and-heavy passion. Body Heat passion. Passion, like you’ve never known passion.
It went along nicely all that summer and into the fall and then I got the flu, really got sick with it, and Simone suddenly got domestic with chicken soup, vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, and this Louis Pasteur thing—sterilize the apartment. She wasn’t like Louis Pasteur, she became Louis Pasteur. She was out to kill every germ in the world. Lysol spray mist. Bleach and ammonia. Boiled cutlery. Microwaved toothbrushes. She even microwaved the pillows. Then she caught the flu and I had to do the nursemaid thing with her.
Lord, have mercy! What a hassle! She looked like hell sick. I mean, they look bad enough in the morning or when you see them sitting on the toilet, but when they get sick it really puts you off. I resolved to get rid of her once and for all, I had fathomed all her mystery, her every dimension, and while she had lasted longer than most, now I was really through. This coupled with her obsessive-compulsive perfectionism—it was irrevocably over. I mean, like, “So long, pretty baby, comprendez?”
Before I got around to dumping her, I got sick again. It was worse the second time. It was like bone-break fever. We had to get a doctor to come over and everything, and it was around then that I saw that she really loved me; I mean, I didn’t look so hot sick either, but she was there with the soup and back rubs and reading to me and all with a lighthearted touch—with gaiety, wit, and charm. With complete and utter selfless devotion. Meanwhile she’s having some kind of lease hassle, and the next thing you know some of her friends haul all of her stuff over, and she’s moved in. Quite presumptuous of her, hey, compadre? Enough to suffocate you, no?
She’s had really nice stuff, including a copy of Paul Gauguin’s famous Tahitian painting Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? She hung it up in the front room, where I lay deranged with an outta-my-mind fever, and I could not take my eyes off this painting. It seemed to say everything to me, and this “everything” had sinister overtones. Either I was paranoid or she watched me watching it, she was using it as a test. I had fever, I’m talking fever and it’s like, “The horror! The horror!” looking at this painting. Things seemed to change in this fever. I was suddenly vulnerable, a tenderhearted sentimentalist. I was on the verge of turning human and having feelings and so on.
I had really gotten to like her, I mean like you like a friend—you just like them for what they are, and yet I couldn’t help feeling that she was testing me for weakness, that she was setting me up most diabolically to break my heart. I knew that over the years I had established a lot of bad karma along these lines. She would have been within her rights. But this was all fever, paranoia, and psychological projection. Actually, she was faithful and true and she loved me and I loved her and what got me was that I acted mechanically. I reverted to form. It wasn’t really me talking when she said she was pregnant and I told her to pack up her shit and get the fuck out of my life. I couldn’t believe the cruel words that spat from my vicious filthy mouth. There was this sense of unreality.
She walked out without a word, without a tear, without a look back. There’s a Zen chick for you.
I had a hard time stopping myself from rushing after her and begging her to stay. It was so much worse the weeks after, coming home every night, hoping to see her, wondering where she had gone, what was she going to do about the baby, and so on. Hoping that it had only been a bad dream and that I would wake up with her by my side. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t have done to get her back, but she was gone—like in the FBI federal-witness-program sense of gone. I mean, like, UFO-abducted—Bermuda Triangle–vanished! Gone without a trace.
I was plagued with insomnia. I couldn’t eat. I lost fifteen pounds in two weeks. The whole world had lost its meaning and color for me. I was filled with a generalized sense of loathing, bitterness, remorse, self-pity, and despair. Life was so lonely without her.
But you have to be true to yourself. What I did sprang from my deepest instincts. The scorpion stings, it can’t help itself. There are no choices.
And there really isn’t any sense moping. When the word got around about what had happened, I had it better than ever. They like an element of danger. I had more action than ever before. Chicks coming and going. You know, you really can get it down to a perfect art.