The Bull Years

by Phil Stern

SOPHIA DANTON

  Right after starting work as a television journalist, I lived with a girl who liked having sex with married men.

  I was 24 at the time and still found such things shocking. One night, sipping tea in our cramped kitchen after a long day in the field, I asked her why.

  My apartment-mate thoughtfully stared off into space. A beautiful girl with blue eyes and soft red hair, her face glowed with youthful intensity. “Things are very clear with married guys,” she finally said. “They’re always excited when I show up, and think it’s a real coup to be with me. The sex is great, and they have enough money to do fun stuff. There’s no bullshit. I don’t have to do their laundry or make them breakfast in the morning. We never argue about the light bill. Their kids are somebody else’s problem.” She took another sip, then shrugged. “They know how lucky they are to have you, and they work hard to keep you. And anyway, married guys are far more centered. They can actually help me with some problem, while younger guys all want to get drunk and chase after other girls. In so many ways I just get the good stuff without all the crap.”

  I felt guilty even having this kind of conversation. I’d already decided not to judge other women on the basis of their sex lives, and indeed, had even suffered a mishap of my own along similar lines.

  Still, I felt compelled to press on. “But there’s no future. Don’t you want…something more?”

  “There also aren’t any expectations.” Picking up a pencil, she began sketching out a lovely flower on a pad with long, confident strokes. “Look, a married guy is focused on two things. Having a good time and making sure his wife doesn’t find out. It’s very simple. Very clean.”

  “But a cheater is a liar,” I persisted, again thinking of my own experience. “How can you trust…”

  “Of course they’re liars, Sophia!” Laughing, my apartment-mate continued sketching. “Hopeless, deluded, selfish, dishonest mega-liars. But that’s the beauty of it. I can live in the moment. What they say doesn’t really matter.”

  I thought about how this couldn’t clash more with her earlier comment about being able to rely on mature, married-prick advice. “And what about the wives?”

  “What about them?”

  “Don’t you feel…guilty, or something?”

  “No.” She briefly glanced at me before returning to the flower. “These guys would be cheating with somebody. I’m not making them do it.”

  “But there’s no hope, no permanence…”

  “Permanence is an illusion.” Firmly putting down the pencil, my apartment-mate then ripped the paper off the pad, handing me a gorgeous rose. She’d created it, out of nothing, in mere moments. “Anyway, nobody’s getting hurt. Good night, Sophia.”

  We never spoke of her sex life again. I kept the rose, though. It still appears as fresh and realistic as the night it was drawn.

  A few weeks later I made the mistake of mentioning this conversation to my mother. Ostensibly she’d come up to Boston to “see the sights,” but in reality wanted to continue waging her longstanding campaign to get me “settled down.” Unfortunately, for the women of my mother’s generation, the ultimate validation of one’s parenting skills was to get their own daughters married and pregnant. Clearly, my lack of cooperation in life’s grand scheme was a source of great existential angst.

  “My goodness!” Mom exclaimed after I’d finished recounting my apartment-mate’s views. (Exclaimed, by the way, is a word that should only be used by bad novelists and mothers describing immoral behavior.) “Where are her values!” Holding my eye far longer than necessary, Mom then began fussing with her salad.

  I should mention at this point that I’d lost my virginity at 18, during my first semester at college. Of course, growing up hardcore Catholic I’d held onto my “values” much longer than most girls. I can still remember a female-only freshman orientation in which everyone got drunk and began recounting exactly how they’d first done the deed. The ages ranged from 12 to 16, with the average age of deflowerment generally settling on 15. Unwilling to lie, and afraid of appearing stuck up, I slipped out the back to avoid revealing my still-chaste state.

  Yet, after meeting a nice guy and joining the sexual majority, my mother went off the deep end. How Mom became acquainted with my altered condition is another story for another time. To this day, however, she still darkly accuses me of “breaking a long line of virgins dating back to 1776.” This, of course, makes no sense, as her own great-grandparents came to America in the 1890's, and in any event virgins, by their very nature, would be incapable of reproducing, and thus powerless to create more virgins.

  As a young teen I’d actually pointed this out. Mom screamed for two hours and sent me to my room.

  But back to Boston. Obviously I was looking for a connection with my mother. I didn’t condone my apartment-mate’s behavior. Neither would she. This was an opportunity to mutually acknowledge some hazy, yet viable moral common ground, something we desperately needed.

  The waiter now came with our dinners. Mom waited until he left before dropping the bomb.

  “But Sophia, I’m confused. Surely you approve of this girl’s behavior?” Delighted at her own cleverness, Mom cut into her chicken. “After all, don’t you have similar…arrangements?”

  Stunned, I took a sip of water. I should have known she’d turn this around, take my offering and slap me in the face with it. “No, Mother. I don’t. In fact, I disapprove of sleeping with married men.” Mom didn’t know of my mistake, and it wasn’t pertinent to the conversation at hand.

  “Oh. I don’t know. It seems like the same thing to me!” With forced joviality, Mom dabbed at her blouse with a napkin. “You’re saying this girl has premarital relations. You also have premarital relations…”

  “Mom, we’re talking about two different things!”

  “Are we? I don’t think so.” Mom’s smile now evaporated, replaced by the hard glint I knew so well growing up. “What’s the matter, dear? Are we having regrets? Second thoughts, perhaps? But it’s a little too late for that, isn’t it dear?”

  I’d already decided we wouldn’t argue on this visit, so I carefully choked back a thousand different retorts, instead concentrating on my dinner. We grimly ate for several minutes, cutlery angrily clanking against our plates.

  But finally I couldn’t take it anymore. “No Mom, I don’t regret anything.” I now beamed at her like a good little girl. “Except having a judgmental mother who can’t deal with the real world.”

  Now she leaned across the table. “I’m not the one who acts like a slut!”

  “Neither do I!” Hissing like a maniac, I glanced around the restaurant. Being on-air, I had to be careful who noticed. “If you knew how other girls behave…”

  “But we’re not talking about other girls! We’re talking about you! Sophia Danton! My own…my own daughter…” With an anguished gasp, Mom now began sobbing, right there at the table.

  Sitting back with folded arms, I glared at her. “Mom. Stop it.”

  “How can I? With you…living this…this lifestyle! Good Lord…” Now she held the napkin completely over her face, weeping convulsively.

  “Can I help you, madam?” With grand formality the waiter rushed over, frowning in practiced concern. “Can I get you something else? The salmon, perhaps?”

  “It’s fine.” I said, motioning for the waiter to leave. “Thank you. My mother is just upset.” This was ridiculous. Once Mom calmed down we would leave. At that moment I never wanted to see her again.

  “But perhaps another selection?” the dummy persisted. Clearly, he wasn’t giving up on a nice tip. “Let me bring you the menu…”

  “No!” I snapped. “Just leave us alone!” The waiter dashed off. Mom lowered her napkin, fixing me with a red, bitter gaze.

  Just then a guy in a suit came up, leaning over and lightly touching my hand. “Aren’t you Sophia Danton? The television reporter?”

  This was very common. All kinds of men, especially the lawyer/do
ctor types, would recognize and try to pick me up in public.

  “You see!” Stabbing a finger at the interloper, Mom nodded vigorously. “He sees you as being available!”

  “Will you please excuse us?” Trying to smile regretfully, I then stared hard at Mom. “My mother isn’t feeling well.”

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy. “I’m a doctor,” the guy replied. “Perhaps I can help?”

  Somehow we got our meals packaged up and left. The young doctor called a cab, but we left him at the curb. Before he could even begin to ask for my number I told him to get lost, even though in retrospect he seemed kind of nice. My mother has that effect on me.

  The next day Mom calmly asked if, in light of my apartment-mate’s behavior, I’d be moving out of the apartment.

  “No,” I replied. “She’s a nice girl. We get along very well.”

  Mom paused a moment, staring out the window. “Of course you do,” she whispered. My mother wound up returning to Scarsdale a day early, saying the weather in Boston didn’t agree with her.

  DAVE MILLER

  Look, I know what Steve really wants out of this. When he and I stopped speaking, I had just married Jen. He wants to know the story. Well, Steve always told me Jen was bad news, and he was absolutely right.

  First of all, let me say that no one should ever get married before age 25, because that’s when people really become their adult selves. The early 20's aren’t adulthood, though many people (myself included) made the mistake of thinking they were. I often find it odd when people talk about where they “grew up,” referring to their childhood and high school years. To me, growing up is what you do between 18 and 25.

  This is all a prolonged way of admitting that the girl who’s good to go in college can turn out to be a complete disaster in real life. Jen definitely fell into that category. I mean, look, I love Mandy to death…she’s a really good kid, you’d like her too…but her mother was something else.

  Here’s the thing. When you’re a college guy, all you want to do is sleep with sexy, crazy girls. The sexier, and crazier, the better. It doesn’t make sense, but there it is.

  Perfect example. One day, before our sex life became imbued with reproductive overtones, Jen and I were in a bookstore. She immediately fell in love with a large, coffee table picture-type book on third-world architecture.

  “Dave! Look!” she exclaimed in that sexy/crazy-college-girl-having-found-something-else-to-be-sexy/crazy-about sort of way. “Can you get this for me?”

  I looked at the price tag and gulped. Whatever cosmic pleasures might be derived from gazing longingly at mud huts along the Amazon, it sure didn’t seem worth fifty bucks.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I slowly replied, flipping the book open at random to another display of mud huts adorning the Nile. “Should we call this an early Christmas present?”

  “Oh, how cute!” Eagerly she flipped the page to a dilapidated Burmese shack, leaning close to my ear. “How about calling it an ‘I suck your cock’ present?” she whispered, licking my lobe for good measure.

  Needless to say we got the book, though I didn’t see it again for five-and-a-half long years. Appropriately enough, I next saw it at the bottom of a closet I was cleaning out following The Night My Marriage Finally Blew Up, the Amazon mud hut glaring up at me from the cover.

  In retrospect the signs were all there, I was just too messed up to see them. For example, Jen talked constantly. Just on and on and on. Blah-blah-blah-blah. At the time, I mean, who cares? Look, on our first date even, she was just so beautiful, sitting across from me in the diner, methodically sucking on her straw, gorgeous chest bouncing ever so gently. She was babbling about…I don’t know, her mother’s knitting or something. You see, it didn’t matter. I just nodded, and smiled, and on it went. Talk, suck, talk, bounce, eat french fry, talk, yell for more napkins, talk, suck, bounce, talk, suck, put parsley in hair, giggle, suck, bounce, drop french fry down cleavage, talk, suck…blah-blah-blah-blah. Jen was off-the-scales sexy/crazy, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  As with most talkers, Jen loved to be listened to. She would even critique other people’s listening skills in restaurants and such.

  “You see those two over there? He’s not listening to her!” With a look of infinite disgust, she would stare across the restaurant. “That girl has something to say. Something important! And he’s not listening! I hope she breaks up with him!”

  I, of course, was an excellent listener. Jen often told me so herself, but I was simply pretending. Have you ever watched some bullshit sci-fi movie that makes no sense? There inevitably comes a point where you stop trying to follow the plot and just watch the spaceships explode, right? Well, that’s what I did with Jen. I would nod every twenty seconds, smile, and at some point we’d have sex. It all worked out beautifully.

  But, as besotted as I was, Jen’s insanity should have been evident from the very beginning. There are so many examples. Let’s start with The Great Airplane Fiasco.

  Jen was flying down to Miami to meet her family for Christmas vacation, and I was driving her to the airport. The problem was she kept delaying and delaying.

  “Honey,” I would call out from her dorm hallway. “We need to leave.”

  “In a minute,” she’d yell back. Another ten minutes went by.

  “Uh, Jen.” This time I dropped her bags, walking several steps back into her suite. “We need to leave right now, or you’ll miss the plane.”

  Dashing from the bathroom, still in her pajamas, she stared blankly at me. “What did you say?”

  “You’re going to miss the plane if we don’t leave right now.”

  “How can I miss the plane?” Bemused, she raised an eyebrow. “They can’t leave without me. I already bought my ticket!” Turning on her heel, she marched back into the bathroom.

  I contemplated this for about thirty seconds, then carefully walked down to the open bathroom door. Jen was sitting on a chair, carefully painting her toenails.

  “Hey, babe,” I began. “You know, the plane isn’t going to wait for you.”

  “I already paid for my ticket,” she slowly repeated, as if explaining some obvious point to an idiot. “Relax, babe. I could sue them if they take off without me.”

  To make a long story short, I somehow managed to drag her out to the car, almost literally kicking and screaming, forty-five minutes later. Settling into the passenger seat Jen immediately slapped the dashboard.

  “Jesus, are you an idiot!” she snarled, pointing at the clock. “It’s 7:45! My fucking flight doesn’t leave until 8:05!”

  “Honey, the airport is forty minutes from here. And then you have to go through security and stuff.”

  “What are you talking about?” Incensed, she punched me on the shoulder. “It’s only 7:45! We have plenty of time!”

  Needless to say, Jen missed the plane. Buffalo was a small airport, so I was able to find a space in short-term parking and make it inside by the time Jen reached the counter.

  “BUT I HAVE A FUCKING TICKET!” she screeched at the airline employee. “HOW CAN THEY TAKE OFF WITHOUT ME!”

  “Miss, that flight left, on schedule, twenty minutes ago.”

  “What?” Genuinely puzzled, Jen now turned to me. “Dave, what is she talking about?”

  Some moments later Jen began yelling again, dashing into the women’s bathroom only when Security arrived to arrest her for making terrorist threats. I was left to apologize and arrange a seat on a later flight.

  “Is that crazy-ass bitch on drugs?” the counter person asked. A stately black woman of about 50, she clearly felt Jen hadn’t handled the situation very well.

  “Well,” I mumbled, smiling inanely at both the counter woman and the security guards. “She’s had a tough week.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, it would have gotten a whole lot tougher with my boot planted up her tight white ass.” Now the ticket woman leaned close to me. “Listen, you tell Miss Crazy Bitch fancy clothes and pink nail
polish don’t mean shit to me. I’ll give her something to sue about if she ain’t careful. You got that?”

  “Absolutely. It won’t happen again.”

  “It better not.” Sighing, the ticket woman motioned the next person forward. “Miss Crazy Bitch ain’t getting on no plane of mine with that kind of attitude. That’s for damn sure.”

  I sat with Jen for three hours, making sure she stayed away from the ticket counter. Upon finally arriving in Miami she informed her exasperated parents that I was to blame for the missed flight. Mr. and Mrs. Canton then sent a cheap watch back with their darling daughter as a belated Christmas present for me “so that I might be more aware of other people’s schedules,” the card read.

  All right, enough about Jen for now. Steve said I could write about whatever I wanted to, though he did provide a list of questions. One of them is “What annoys you that you’ve never told anyone about?”

  The first thing that comes to mind are old college friends who ignore you for years and then come asking for favors. But then again, after what happened between us all…well, I never thought we’d ever speak again.

  But now I’ve got to go. A regular just came into the shop. He never buys anything, just talks my ear off about how Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitar player that ever lived. Someday I’m going to disagree just so he’ll leave me alone.

  STEVE LEVINE

  My parents came from a generation where happiness consisted of a simple formula. Meet some “nice” girl or boy, get married, move to the suburbs within a “good” school district, buy a house, pay your taxes, have kids, join the PTA, go to all the block parties, grow old, and then die.

  Boy, were they disappointed.

  In retrospect, both of my parents were bitterly unhappy, as, I think, were many of the Formula Generation. They just couldn’t understand why the game plan wasn’t working, how life became more grueling every year, the promised land always out of reach. It ate at their very souls, producing a rage often flaring both inward and outward with bewildering, debilitating frequency.