Termite ParadeBy Joshua MohrTwo Dollar Radio |
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Mired’s Mt. Rushmore of Male Failures
Exhibit X? Y? Z? What came after Z?
There needed to be more than twenty-six letters in the alphabet to catalogue my litany of consolations. I needed a more complex alphabet. Hundreds of letters, letters like stars marking selfish constellations. Apparently, I had a fresh one to add to the list, and his name was Derek. Derek, my current catastrophe. His face needed to be chiseled into my Mt. Rushmore of Male Failures, those glib carvings, cemented sneers, all of the men and the ways they had taken advantage of me, hurt me, underestimated me, hated me, omitted the truth, twisted the truth to acquit themselves from wrongdoings, perjured themselves, hit me, raped me, the ones who told me what I wanted to hear, told me sadistic things no one should hear, pretended to be happy, pretended to be unhappy, pretended to be ambivalent, pretended to leave town, never called me after sex, never opened their eyes during sex, scowled at me during sex, never kissed me afterward, never collapsed into my arms afterward but fled to the shower, fled to their clothes and then to obligations outside front doors, the ones who dribbled emotional propaganda to get me into bed faster, so they could cum faster, so they could go home faster or send me home faster, not even offering cab fare, the ones who never tried to make me orgasm, the ones who couldn’t make me orgasm, the few that could but lost interest in putting in the effort, the one who wouldn’t drive me to the abortion clinic, the one who stole my Charlie Parker CDs, the one who dropped my toothbrush in the toilet and left it there, the one who threw a drink on a homeless man right in front of me, the one who swiped my favorite Hawaiian shirt, the one who crashed my car on a race to the liquor store before last call and didn’t tell me he’d dented it. The one who told me the earrings by his bed belonged to his male roommate, his male roommate who the following morning I noted did not have his ears pierced. The one who threw up all over the dirty dishes in my kitchen sink and didn’t clean it up. The one who put a cigarette out on the cover of The Bell Jar,a book that had traveled with me since high school. The one who liked to pick me up from the side of the road like I was a hitchhiker and drove to remote streets and wanted me to fight him off during sex. The one with the tiniest penis I’d ever seen who wanted me to tell him how deep he went into me. The one who lost his temper and punched a picture of Frida Kahlo on my wall, leaving his bloodied fist-smudge across her face, saying, “I wish I could hit you instead.” The one who didn’t say, “I wish I could hit you instead,” and just did it. The one who smashed a plant in my kitchen and stormed out, and I couldn’t bring myself to clean it up, leaving it there in a heap, leaves going from green to brown to black, as I stepped over pieces of shattered Terra Cotta for weeks.
It wasn’t only men who failed in my relationships. I’d failed, too, and the most painful was Robert. I’d met him in the grocery store. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he’d met me there. I was standing in front of the variety of bagged lettuces. They didn’t have the spinach I normally purchased, so I was comparing prices between the remaining two brands. I put the cheaper of them in my basket.
“I knew it,” this man, Robert, said, suddenly standing right next to me.
“Excuse me?”
“I knew you’d choose that spinach.” I walked away, but he trailed behind me, still talking, “Don’t you want to know how I knew?”
“No thanks,” I said, rudely, trying to help this dense member of the opposite herd accept the fact that I wasn’t going to have sex with him over a bag of spinach.
“I noticed it when you picked up shaving cream,” he said. “I noticed because I was standing next to you grabbing the same kind. Then I looked in your basket and noticed that we had exactly the same items. And since then, I’ve followed you around the store, and I have to tell you, we’ve bought exactly the same things. Isn’t that a coincidence?”
I stopped walking. I was standing next to a bunch of cans of black beans. “Were you going to buy any beans?” I asked.
“No.”
I threw a can in my basket, smirked, said, “Sorry to burst your bubble,” and walked away again.
Still, he followed: “You don’t want those beans. You’re only doing that to get rid of this outrageous man who’s following you around the grocery store. Listen, I’d do the same thing. I totally understand! But look at what we’ve got here.” He rifled through the items in his basket: “Salami, hummus, English muffins, sharp white cheddar cheese, broccoli, two bottles of the same red wine, shaving cream, spinach.”
“Don’t forget about my beans,” I said.
“Should I go grab a can?”
“I don’t care what you do.”
“You have to admit,” he said, “it’s an odd coincidence.”
I stopped walking again, turned to look at him. He had the oddest eyes I’d ever seen; they jetted out from the sockets like the tips of hardboiled eggs.
“But what if it isn’t a coincidence at all?” I said. “What if you’ve skulked behind me the whole time and picked out all the same things, so you could then come up and say what an unbelievable coincidence it was, in the hopes that I’d take you home and screw your brains out?” I started walking again.
“No, no. Please,” following behind. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I’m not some creep. I’m no deviant. I’m just a guy who was shopping and noticed you had the exact same things as me. I’m sorry if I offended you. I’ll leave you alone. Have a nice day.”
He turned and walked in the opposite direction.
I don’t know why, but I called after him, “What’s next?”
He stared at me.
“If we’re buying all the same stuff,” I said, “what was going to be the next thing I bought?”
“Chicken.”
“Legs or breasts?”
“Breasts.”
I smiled at him. “Are you some sort of poultry psychic?”
“Nope. But that’s what I’m going to get next, too.”
His eyes, those jetting egg-eyes were beautiful. Even if he was lying, and at the time, I assumed he was, he got credit for creative pick-up tactics. He tried harder than most men and their wilting one-liners. And besides, I was going to buy three more things after the chicken, and I wanted to see if he was telling the truth, if he knew everything I was going to get. I said, “You’re walking the wrong way if you need poultry.”
He dashed back to me and said, “I’m Robert.”
“Come on, clairvoyant-chicken-man,” I said. “Let’s go shopping.”
_____
Robert had been completely correct about the rest of my groceries, our groceries. After chicken breasts, we bought eggs, tamari almonds, whiskey. We checked out one after the other in line, and the girl behind the counter looked at us like we were crazy.
“Is this a joke?” she said.
“Ask him,” I said.
_____
Robert and I had left the store and were having a couple beers in a neighborhood bar. We were playing nice, enjoying our small talk, until I told him I was going to go out front to smoke a cigarette.
“Those things will kill you,” he said.
“Everything kills you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Even the sun gives you cancer. How screwed up is that?”
“Everything in moderation,” he said and smiled at me.
“I don’t believe it matters.”
“Don’t believe what matters?”
“The kind of life we lead. It’s all chance. Some people die young and some don’t. It has nothing to do with being a good or bad person.”
Robert agreed that chance played a role in our lives, but he didn’t think it was the only factor. He explained his belief in a pluralist fate, that people had many fates laid out before them like hundreds of fingers on a huge hand and through the course of our actions, the way we defined ourselves through deeds done and undone, our fates were narrowed down to a particular direction and finally pinpointed.
“What does that have to do with chance?” I said.
He took a sip from his beer. He was the first man I’d ever hung around who drank light beer. “We should try to lead lives that impact others in a positive way.”
“I don’t understand how it matters.”
“Why not?”
“Sometimes when I’m missing my dad, I look up the ages of horrid people to see how long they lived. I don’t know why I do it. Sounds weird, but it soothes me to see the appalling randomness of life, chance burning all around us like wicks. That it wasn’t something personal against him. Did you know Stalin was seventy-four when he died? Mobutu was sixty-six and lived with prostate cancer for thirty years. Charles Manson is still alive, in his seventies. And my dad barely made it to fifty. Explain that.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” he said.
“Brain cancer.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“Is your mother alive?”
“In her own way,” I said
“They’re anomalies.”
“Who are?”
“Stalin and Manson. I don’t know who the other guy is you mentioned. They are anomalies. I’m very sorry to hear about your father. He shouldn’t have died so young.”
“Shouldn’t have?”
“I’m sure the world was better while he was a part of it.”
My beer was empty; his still had two-thirds left.
“This is boring,” I said.
“What’s the harm in believing?” he asked. “How can believing hurt you? You’re going to live out your days regardless of how many you actually have left, so why not live them in a way you can be proud of?”
“Because you’re describing a pacifier. A security blanket. I don’t need it. I need the truth, and the truth is there are no rewards for goods lives lived and no punishments for our atrocities. We breathe; we get tumors; we die.”
He shook his head. “Why even get out of bed if that’s the way you think?”
“Bed sores,” I said.
_____
Robert and I had our first official date three days later. He took me to an upscale raw food restaurant. He was a vegan. We ordered an organic wine, which was so awful I wondered if pesticides made things taste good.
“I have to ask you something,” I said. “Not to beat a dead horse, but had you seen me in that grocery store before? Is that how you knew what I’d buy?”
“I hadn’t seen you before.”
“Why were you buying cheese, salami, chicken, and eggs, if you’re a vegan?”
“For my roommate.”
“It’s just so unbelievable.”
“Of course it is,” he said. “You don’t believe in anything, remember?”
“That’s not true.”
“Name one thing.”
I help up a bite of lukewarm parsnip puree wedged on a leaf of endive. “I believe I like my food hotter than this.”
He frowned.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s too much for me.” I was still holding up the bite of tepid food. “Are you using these vegetables to brainwash me into believing?”
“Of course I am.”
“Seriously?”
“Once you take that bite,” he said, “and there’s no turning back.”
We were laughing. He blinked a lot when he laughed, his eyelids stretching out like fish mouths breathing to cover up his jetting eyes.
I held the bite of food up in the air like it was a shot of booze and I was making a toast. I said, “Here’s to believing.” I put it in my mouth and chewed. It tasted terrible. I washed it down with a sip of organic wine, which made me grimace even more.
_____
After dinner, he drove me home, and I invited him into my apartment. “What would you like to drink?” I said. “I’ve got whiskey. And vodka. Some Pinot noir.” I reached into the back depths of my dirty refrigerator, its light bulb burned out for months. I grabbed a small bottle buried way in there and pulled it to the front so I could see what it was. “And one old beer.”
“Mmmm. Stale ale.”
He kissed me while my hand held the old beer.
_____
We had sex. Odd sex. It wasn’t bad, but I can’t say that it was good. It was so slow: I could feel each stroke as he slipped into me, and I’d never been fucked slowly enough to feel that before, normally only able to feel the collision of a man’s body into mine, never the calculated penetration of a cock moving into me.
And he talked during sex in new ways. He said, “You have so much life waiting to come out of you.” He said, “Do you have any idea how much better you make the world?”
I had my eyes closed the whole time; it was too civilized for me to cum.
_____
A few months later, Robert began growing weary of my dismal logic, my asthmatic viewpoint that no matter what we breathed all of the world would end soon.
He said, “Life’s too short.”
I said, “You got that right.”
He said, “You don’t get it. You really don’t understand. These are your only years on this planet and this is how you want to spend them?”
_____
He invited me to things I didn’t even know existed. “What’s a silence retreat?” I asked.
“It will be great. We spend the whole weekend meditating, never speaking a word.”
“Why?”
“To think.”
“I’ve thought before, and it didn’t really work out for me.”
“My little stand-up comedian.”
“I’m actually lying in a bath.”
He sighed.
_____
A few weeks later. “Would you like to hear some music tonight?” he said.
“What kind?”
“My friend Carlos’s drum circle.”
“I don’t do drum circles, Robert.”
“It will be a blast. A bunch of my friends from Burning Man will be there.”
“Why don’t you call me after they board the mother-ship and fly back to their planet?”
“This is getting tedious,” he said.
_____
“What do you enjoy about dating me?” he said, the next week. “We don’t like any of the same things. We’re not progressing.”
“I have fun when it’s just you and me,” I said.
“But I need a girlfriend who’s involved in all facets of my life.”
“Even the drum circles?”
“I need more from you!” he said, the first time he’d ever raised his voice.
“This is all I can give!”
“Extend yourself!”
“Spare me the new age bullshit!”
“If that’s really how you feel,” he said, “then this is good-bye.”
“Good-bye!” I said. “Have a groovy, totally righteous life, man!” hating that we’d finally screamed at each other and it wasn’t going to lead to sex.
_____
And that was it. He left. I left. We left. Someone left, and I went on to the next doomed relationship, maybe the guy who shaved my head, I can’t keep track of the timelines anymore. Might have been the one who put a cigarette out on my copy of The Bell Jar. Of all the men from my life, Robert was the only one I regretted, privately lamenting that I couldn’t get over my own stigmas to date a nice guy. Why did I see kindness in a man as some sort of character flaw? Why did I put self-involved misogynists on some sort of ridiculous pedestal, giving them a bird’s eye view as they treated me like a dog? I wasn’t sure, but I did know that after every miserable relationship dried up and sloughed away, I always thought about Robert, asking me to be more involved in all facets of his life, because no one else had ever wanted that from me.
I remember, after that other genius I’d dated had dropped my toothbrush in the toilet, thinking about Robert. I stood at the sink, rinsing it off because I was late for work and there was no time to go buy a replacement. I remember thinking that if I had to choose between putting Robert’s tepid vegan food in my mouth or a urine-drenched toothbrush, why was I choosing this?