“Of course I’m not. I just find it really, really hard to get laid.”
“Your life would be so much easier if you were gay.”
“How?”
“Gay guys, at least the ones who live in a city, can get laid almost any time they want.”
“Toilet sex?”
Another squeal. “What century do you live in? Sex is more like a handshake with the gays. You get it out of the way and then go on with whatever else it was you were doing before.”
“Seriously?”
“Pretty much. Imagine that every time you’re horny you can send up a little flare and soon be shagging someone quite plausibly way out of your league—and then two minutes later you’re back to regular life. And next time you see that person, there’s no drama, no nothing. Or so I’ve heard. I haven’t made it with anyone since the Clinton administration.”
“I see the point, but gay sex isn’t the answer for me.”
“Fair enough. Just wanted to check.”
“So, how would you make me appealing to women?”
“How would I do it? I’ve already been doing it, just talking to you, making sure you’re actually a good person and there’s not something toxic at your core.”
“Did I pass the test?”
“Yes, honey, you passed.”
“So, what next? Is it the way I dress?”
She sighed. “How you dress is pretty immaterial to the issue.”
“How immaterial?”
“Eighty-five percent.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Face is 30 percent. Body is 30 percent. Personality is 25 percent. What you wear? Honest, for a guy? Fifteen percent at most.”
“It breaks down that easily?”
“Yup.”
“Huh.”
“The one catch is that you have to have all 25 percent of the personality or none of the other numbers matter.”
As I took this on board, she added, “Don’t blame me. Blame the universe.”
I didn’t have the courage to ask her how she rated my personality; it would have been so much easier if she’d told me that if I just wore a new kind of shirt my sex life would explode.
After we landed, I trailed her to the luggage carousel, feeling boozy and reflective. The scene was suddenly as crowded and noisy as a medieval fish market. A dozen Airbus A380s seemed to have landed at once, and it was all I could do to text her so that she had me in her contacts before entering my brother’s bachelor party universe. From across the cartoon-like mob, she shouted, “Don’t worry, my little incel. We’ll get you laid someday soon!”
I turned red and thought everyone at the carousel would stare at me and judge me a loser, but nobody did, and it dawned on me that most people are totally lost inside their own lives, and that I’d better be getting on with mine really quick, before it was all over.
10
Team Building
CARL TOLD OUR BREAKFAST waitress it was Peg’s birthday, and so naturally she brought out pancakes adorned with lit candles. We all sang “Happy Birthday,” while around the restaurant people made that “Oh! It’s someone’s birthday!” semi-smile. At the song’s end, Peg blew out the candles to the sound of golf clapping. As you may have guessed, it wasn’t actually Peg’s birthday.
“Carl, this is so embarrassing!”
“Eat up, birthday girl.”
And that was that. Carl is not a funny person and Peg is humorless. The four of us, Carl, Peg, Lance and me, were trapped in Irvine, California, for a four-day conference called Big News on Genetics and Glyphosates. Because of our company’s new team building initiative, we had to attend all the seminars and eat all of our meals together.
Team building: does any term more joylessly conjure images of capitalism’s Achilles heel? Pretend you like people! Pretend you’re having fun! Stay at a hotel that’s terrifyingly anonymous! Eat scary hotel food with the same people three times a day when you know all of you would rather be hot-tubbing or napping or getting an erotic massage or even just sitting in your room and staring at a blank wall. (Unless you’ve tried it, don’t knock it.)
At lunch I looked around the restaurant and everyone there was eating, eating, eating, and I felt like I was in a feedlot: 150 chewing jaws; squishy ketchup squeeze bottles making biological sounds. It felt industrial. Lance told me that the main principle driving restaurant dining experiences is plate coverage.
“Plate coverage?”
“Basically, people only perceive value if their plate appears to be fully covered, but it doesn’t really matter to them what it’s covered with. The single biggest innovation in restaurants in the 1980s was the discovery that one or two melon wedges, properly arranged, can cover up to 25 percent of a plate at a cost of virtually zero.”
“How do you know this shit?”
“My dad owns a restaurant.”
The waitress emerged from the direction of the kitchen with a slice of cake, and Carl started to sing “Happy Birthday” to Peg again, and we all had to join in. I mean, it would look bad if we didn’t. And everyone in the room did the fake smile and, at the song’s end, golf clapped.
At breakfast, Peg had been good-naturedly annoyed, but this time she was plain annoyed. Lance and I thought Carl was taking a lame joke too far, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.
At dinner, Lance and I both watched Carl to see if he was sneaking over to the hostess to tell her it was Peg’s birthday again, but he didn’t. The meal was okay, if your definition of fun conversation is pretending songbird populations aren’t being decimated (glyphosates!), even though they are.
And then the cake arrived.
Lead balloon.
Peg was totally pissed off. “Carl, why are you doing this?”
“What’s the matter? Can’t take a joke?”
“Jokes are funny. This is weird.”
“Look,” said Lance, “the raspberry drizzle covering the plate makes it look like you’re getting way more cake than you really are.”
* * *
—
At breakfast the next morning, there must have been a rota change, because all the waitstaff were new. At our table, nerves. No eye contact between Carl and Peg, as Lance and I tried to pretend nothing was wrong, just like a family. We had a strained discussion about the day’s schedule. The highlight was Lance noticing that they’d misspelled his name on his ID lanyard. Woohoo!
We were almost ready to go when the pancakes with candles came.
Peg was scowling at Carl, but all the other people were clapping and fake smiling, even though they must have been a bit confused because they’d sung “Happy Birthday” to Peg the day before. Anyway, we delivered a cold rendition of the song, after which Peg stormed off.
At lunch, our regional manager, Randy, joined us, so we were on our best behavior. Then the cake came out with sparklers on it. Randy was so excited to sing “Happy Birthday” that Peg had to put a sock in it and smile. Peg and Carl didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the afternoon. It was totally Mom and Dad having a fight.
Then came dinner, and Randy joined us again. I had my toes scrunched into shoe fists, wondering what would happen. Randy made a big show of secretly ordering a birthday cake for Peg, and when the cake arrived, I really thought Peg’s brains were going to liquify and shoot out her ears, and she made a terrible show of pretending to be grateful while Carl smirked.
* * *
—
Breakfast again. Silence enhanced by hangovers, with strained banter about benzene and phthalate levels in the Missouri River. Peg stared at her plate most of the meal, and Carl tried to be la-dee-dah, as if it were just a normal breakfast.
And then…the waitress approached our area with a stack of pancakes with whipped cream, strawberries and sparklers, and Peg totally lost it. She stood up, grabbed the plate
and slammed it down in front of Carl, shouting, “What the fuck is wrong with you? I told you to stop! I’m sorry I didn’t return the fucking stapler I borrowed from you two weeks ago!”
The restaurant went deadly silent and then some kid a few booths over started to cry. The waitress went over to the child and said, “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll get you another plate of birthday pancakes right away.” Another waitress came to our table with dishtowels and spray cleaner and wiped away the mess with a neutral facial expression.
11
Vegan
IT WASN’T LIKE I’D PLANNED a big announcement. It’s just that Dad and I had to stop in at the 7-Eleven after the hockey game to pick up whipping cream for Mom. I find the store’s signature smell beyond repulsive, like snow tires and hot dog water melting together, but I came inside anyway to witness the remaining shards of the magazine industry dying on the racks. It’s so hard to believe magazines were once a thing. Man, Brad and Jen have been almost getting back together for the past fifteen years. Stop it, magazines, just stop it!
I was about to go out to the car when Dad stuck a hot dog (bun/mustard/onions) directly in front of my nostrils.
“Dad, what the—?” And then I puked. It wasn’t elegant. I was so embarrassed, I started screaming at Dad, who, to be fair, had only been making a lame dad joke about meat. I remember the confused, smirking customers all staring at me, and the face of a low-wage clerk hating his life.
I’d envisioned, instead, casually mentioning my new dietary regimen while driving with my family through the Sonoma Valley in an electric car that drove like a real car, and not my friend’s mom’s Prius (which feels like riding in a regular car being towed through sludge). My family and I would see a field of chickens or cows frolicking in the distance, and I would reasonably and calmly mention my opposition to eating anything that came from animals, and we would all discuss my new direction in a civil and pleasant manner.
No such luck. Of course, soon circulating on the internet was a CCTV video of my whole 7-Eleven episode, from three points of view, no less, expertly woven together in real time by those incels from down in the Digital Club, under the header: “Pampered Tween Has Vegan Weiner Meltdown.” If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that once people see you freak out, they can never unsee you freaking out. It’s no fun being the center of a meme, believe you me. At best, people just stare at you. At worst, they make freak-out gestures like the ones I made in the 7-Eleven, accompanied by barfing noises.
My mom told me that I should just hang tight. My meme would soon be replaced by some other meme. (My mother used the word “meme” correctly. Impressive.) After a few days of being humiliated all over the school, I couldn’t just stay low and wait for it to pass. I went down to the school basement and confronted the king of the incels, Dylan Hammond. I walked into their lair, saying, “Hello, virgins.” Then I went right up to Dylan and said, “Take it down, now.”
“Come on,” he said. “You gotta learn how to take a joke.”
“Not happening,” I said, and popped open a can of Pepsi and held it over his laptop keyboard. I told him I would make it my personal life goal to destroy every single piece of technology he owned, so help me God.
He said, “Jeez, don’t spaz out. I’m vegan too.”
“You are?”
“Yes.” And he took the clip down. I know the clip is out in the cloud forever, but the gesture mattered.
That’s basically the story of how, two weeks later, we ended up going out on Halloween together. I dressed as a Chicken McNugget and Dylan as a container of honey-mustard dipping sauce. They were really well-made costumes too…paper-mache overtop duct-taped cardboard, all painted that unholy McNugget color.
On Halloween afternoon we went to a McDonald’s and stood out front trying to pretend we were activists, but most people thought we were part of a McNugget promotion, not a protest. But there was this one woman driving by who saw us and stopped and asked if I was the Freak-out Girl from the 7-Eleven meme, and I was shocked that I felt kind of proud that I was.
Long story short, she was from the local TV news station, and she soon came back with a crew to do an interview, which they afterwards cut together with, ugh, that fucking meme. Dylan and I got to be the color story that night at the end of the local news, just before the weather woman came on. Insert fist bump here.
Is there a moral in here anywhere? Maybe own your notoriety?
I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ll discuss it with Dylan tomorrow afternoon while we make hummus and tofurkey for a special Thanksgiving dinner we’re throwing just for ourselves.
12
Gum
DEENA’S BUYING A PACK of Juicy Fruit gum, but given the shortage of checkout staff, she has had to spend five minutes waiting in line to buy it. She’s buying the gum to get a receipt that establishes where she was at the moment when the guy she hired to break her ex-boyfriend’s legs does the deed across town. Video evidence of the purchase will also establish her alibi.
The no-name biker behind her is carrying five massive bags of Styrofoam packing peanuts. He doesn’t look like the sort of guy who sells porcelain figurines on eBay that he has to ship to his customers. Still, he seems to be trying to act normal, which is hard to do when, with all of his bags of foam, he looks like one of those people you see in India riding bikes while carrying a thousand empty plastic water jugs. Soon our biker will be getting rid of a body that defaulted on a drug payment, along with the stolen BMW the body is sitting in. He’ll empty his Styrofoam peanuts into the vehicle’s interior to accelerate his carbecue’s speed and temperature.
The next guy in line, Wayne, is waiting to pay for a bottle of lube. He looks a bit squirmy. Decades ago, he read an article saying that super-intelligent people are genetically predisposed to enjoy nudism, and because he perceives himself as intelligent, he’s persuaded himself that he dislikes the feel of clothing on his skin. To be fair, he is very smart—he’s a pattern interpreter for high-end defense contractors. Tomorrow, he’ll be nude suntanning on his condo’s roof, and it will go all wrong.
Behind him is a woman named Sarah, who has a cling-wrapped tray of a dozen raisin muffins in her basket, among a few other small items. The woman right behind her is Beth, who will see Sarah at a café ten minutes from now. The café will be crowded, so Beth will only be able to find a seat back near the ladies’ room, and she’ll spot Sarah entering the washroom carrying her dozen muffins. Sarah will stay in there for almost fifteen minutes. When she finally exits, she’ll be carrying no muffins. When Beth goes to use the facilities, she will peek into the restroom trash can and find neither muffins nor muffin tray. What happened in there?
Behind Beth is Kellyann, twenty-six, who’s buying food for a simple family dinner. Hamburger, cream of mushroom soup, celery, some cookies. Kellyann doesn’t realize that earlier this morning she went to work and left her baby in the rear-facing car seat, but she’ll soon get back to her car and it will all come back to her.
Then comes Janelle with a home pregnancy test. It will be a boy, IQ of 103, born a week past the due date but with no complications. It is Janelle’s first pregnancy, and she and her husband will have a wonderful life with their son. It doesn’t get any better than this.
The last person in line is…you? What are you buying? Do you really need it? Are you buying it because there’s something soothing about buying it? Why don’t you steal whatever it is you’re buying? They’ll never notice. Nobody is watching you. Nobody looks at anyone, let alone you. Fill your jacket with a dozen bags of Werther’s caramels. Who cares! Steal a bunch of discounted Toy Story 3 plush figures—who gives a fuck? What actually prevents you from stealing this $2.99 crap? Your conscience? God? Habit? What if all of this $2.99 crap was never made in the first place? That might actually be a better world to be living in.
What’s this? Deena, our gum shopper, has just received her rec
eipt for a twenty-stick pack of Juicy Fruit. Next in line, please.
13
Unleaded
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE alcoholics? It’s because Mother Nature wants the seeds of fermenting fruits to be eaten and then scattered as widely as possible. We’re talking about 100 million years of evolution here. Birds do it. People sure as hell do it.
Simple explanations are best. Take it from me, as someone who once fucked around almost all the time: if you want to keep getting laid while keeping your spouse in the dark, don’t mess around with that woman from the Nordstrom’s perfume counter or the millennial gym trainer hooked on Old Spice. If you ever get hit with a surprise perfume bomb from someone you hook up with online, stop at the gas station on the way home and sprinkle some unleaded 87 on your hands. You can say you spilled it while filling up, but you can’t use that excuse too often.
Harder to conceal is lipstick on your briefs. Don’t risk the home laundry basket. Throw them out before you come home. If your spouse notices, confess that you sharted after a sushi working lunch with the software development team. Let laughter be your cloak.
I was incredibly unfaithful to my wife. I slept around while she was dying; the worse she got, the more I needed the sex. During the six weeks Leah was in palliative, I probably laid someone new at least once a day, as well as once by a repeater.
I’m good-looking, and I know it. I’m among the 5 percent who generate 95 percent of online hookup traffic. Our species needs reasonably good-looking guys like me to keep the species going or else we’ll all start looking like goitered hillbillies with pretzel teeth. The Queen of England breeds horses; nature has bred me to create hotter humans. I sound like a dick. I am a dick. That’s what I’m trying to tell you here. Leah was at the end of stage 4 pancreatic cancer and I was out behind the KFC, dumpster-fucking its day manager, Sheera. I walked away from that encounter with the memory of Sheera’s wicked smile and a twelve-piece barrel plus coleslaw, which I brought to the hospice, knowing that Leah could only eat Jell-O. Still, she said it reminded her of how much she missed real food, and we had a small cry.
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