by Hazel Parker
I walked up and hugged them both.
“Gentlemen,” I said, nodding to them both. “I’m not a banker tonight. I’m just a club member.”
“Club officer,” Marcel said, a bit buzzed. “Club officer. It’s bad enough we have to get on your ass for being a rich fucker. Don’t humble yourself too much.”
That was oddly sweet of Marcel in his shit-talking way.
“He doesn’t know humility; he’s a banker,” Uncle said. “Here, let me give him some guiding advice before the party gets into full force. Marcel?”
“By all means,” Marcel said. “I’ll just sit here and wait for Biggie. Not like I’m going to be going to talk to the girls here.”
I had barely noticed the four girls and five of our club members in the corner, chatting and flirting. It was understood that at any moment, an officer could have gone over and taken one of the girls for themselves. Marcel, though, seemed intent on remaining faithful to his new girlfriend, Christine.
Uncle and I retreated to the corner.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Uncle, let me just lay it straight,” I said. “I want to quit my job at Rothenberg Banking. I want to work for the Savage Saints full time. Hell, I’ll be a mechanic if the club can’t support me. I don’t care. That job is just sucking on my soul, and I’ve been looking for a way out for as long as I can remember. If I have to stay another minute, I’m going to fucking lose my mind.”
I looked around the room. Marcel was drinking a beer by himself. The other club members, still with dirty hands and the omnipresent stench of motor oil, laughed with the girls.
“You’re the only person here who can even approximate what I’m going through.”
“And Marcel’s girl.”
“Right, but she’s not here, and she won’t be here. I just need some advice from you, Uncle. Should I?”
Uncle shook his head. That was not the response I’d hoped to see.
“How much you make at that job, with everything included? And don’t bullshit me. We’re both rich assholes here; we can share.”
“About six hundred grand.”
“And how much do you think a car mechanic makes?”
“About...fifty?”
Uncle laughed.
“In twenty years, maybe. We’re paying our crew twenty bucks an hour here. And they’re experienced. You are not. You’d probably start at fifteen an hour here. OK? Think about it. You would go from the equivalent of three hundred an hour—which I know is not the whole story since you work way more than forty hours, but let’s just call it two hundred an hour. You want to take a cut of over ninety percent of your salary? On a goddamn dream?”
“Uncle—”
“What’s your nest egg look like? Like if you were paralyzed tomorrow with no government help, how much money would you have to draw on?”
“About a million bucks.”
“In this town? That’s fucking nothing,” Uncle said. “I know we live by different standards than a ton of people, but I think it’s a mistake. Is the job really that bad?”
It wasn’t even that the job was that bad. It was more that the draw of being an MC officer full time, of having the freedom that came with being a biker, of being able to ride my motorcycle at any hour of the day, was an enormous appeal. The job wasn’t great, but I would have said the same thing for just about any other job in my spot.
“It’s OK,” I said.
“If it’s anything short of something that would shave years off of your life, then I say keep doing it,” Uncle said. “You’d have to take a serious step down in lifestyle to make it work, and, I mean, shit, when does your lease expire?”
“Eight months.”
“See? And what’s your rent?”
“Four grand a month.”
“I rest my case,” Uncle said.
But I still wasn’t convinced. I could ride out the eight months until I could go someplace else, and then I could move to Brooklyn. Marcel and I could even get a place together; I was sure that he was eager to move out of his brother’s place and have his own.
“Look, I’m an asshole, I know it. I hit on other guys’ women, I push people to take investments when they shouldn’t, and I can run over strangers. But with my friends, I like to think that I tell the truth. I help family and my close friends. You’re a friend, Fitz, and I love you. And I’m here to tell you that I think quitting is a really fucking stupid move, and I’m not wrong. Think long and hard before you do that. OK?”
“OK,” I said.
“Now, let’s have some fun, shall we?” he said. “We can steal some of the girls over there from the prospects. What say you?”
I sighed and just waved Uncle off on the pretense of needing to get my own drink. I really only needed space, though.
I needed space to think about what I was going to do next. I needed space to think about if I’d stay for a longer period of time than a month or so at Rothenberg.
I just needed space to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life.
Chapter 4: Amelia
It was a Friday night, which meant I got to leave earlier than usual at nine.
And, for some stupid reason, I had set myself up on a date with one of my Tinder matches. It was officially desperation time in Amelia Hughes’ life.
I wasn’t planning on sleeping with him; I wasn’t even planning on making out with the guy. I didn’t even remember his name—Jack? Josh? John? I had to pull up the app to see that, no, his name was Jordan. Jordan was hot, but there was little else about him that seemed appealing. He had scored a date with me almost entirely on the basis of the fact that he had been one of the few people not to send dick pics or otherwise ask me to fuck him.
In other words, Jordan got the date not because he was a winner, but because he’d avoided being as much a loser as the other possibilities. Things were fucking looking up in my world.
Still, though, I didn’t want to treat this date as a complete waste of my time. I wanted to at least try to trick myself into believing it had some potential. I told myself that I needed to at least hide my worst impulses for the duration of the first date, and if he was worth going on a second date, then I could start to reveal the normal Amelia.
Great plan. Fake who you are and see how that works.
Then again, who shows their entire true self on the first date?
I didn’t bother to change my clothes or head back to my apartment. As it was, I was going to be late for our nine-fifteen date at a bar called McCabe’s in northern Manhattan. I didn’t care about making John, I mean Jordan, wait a little bit, but I didn’t want to be so mean as to cause him just to leave before I even showed up. If I were getting a free drink out of it, then all the better.
I hailed an Uber with an ETA of nine-twenty-five. I looked out the window, one of the few opportunities in my life, let alone my week, that I got to relax and observe the city.
The city that I saw, even though I had lived in it for years, felt like a complete stranger to me.
The street numbers made sense as they climbed. 40th. 52nd. 61st. 70th. But as far as what they meant? As far as the restaurants there? As far as having an association with each street?
That didn’t happen. I didn’t live in Manhattan so much as I lived in a three-block radius, only occasionally venturing outside my bubble. Coming this far out to 72nd Street and 2nd Avenue might as well have been going to Connecticut.
I knew that for my sanity, I needed to get out more. But if doing so would distract me just enough to prevent me from becoming executive director…
“Here?”
I snapped out of my thoughts and looked outsider the Uber. I quickly found McCabe’s and saw the man that looked like Jordan standing outside in a suit and a sleek V-neck shirt. He had a nice five o’clock shadow, slicked-back hair, and a beautiful frame.
If people did judge books by their covers, then maybe this one would work out just fine. So long as he’s like Thomas.
“Yes, thanks,” I said, hurrying out of the Uber.
I walked over to the sidewalk, nearly getting run over by a bicyclist swearing at me to respect his right of way as he blazed past me. I patted my red coat down, caught my breath, and walked over with the most positive attitude ever.
“Oh, my goodness, Miss Amelia?” Jordan said, the expression on his face rising by the second.
I hated him already. Way too dramatic and expressive.
“Yes, Jordan?” I said, trying to counter his theatrical gestures with a subdued tone.
“The one and only!” he said, half-singing “only.” If not for the fact that I was forty-some streets away from my apartment, I might have just planted my heel in the ground, spun, and walked in the opposite direction. “It is such a delight to meet you; may I take you in for some drinks?”
“That was the plan, no?” I said, trying to muster a smile.
“Oh, yes! A funny one, you are!”
And a screaming one on the inside.
Jordan led me over to McCabe’s, placing his left arm over my shoulders. I know it sounded weird to say about someone in the context of a date, but there didn’t seem to be anything sexual about Jordan’s move. It felt more like the kind of thing he did with everyone, as if the world was his buddy. I hated him for it.
I guess work masked the fact that I could be pretty introverted out in the real world. I knew everyone at my job so well and was so driven that I didn’t mind saying everything that I wanted to, but it hadn’t completely erased the introverted side of me. It hadn’t completely buried the little girl who was painfully shy as a child, to the point that she had no friends.
Jordan sat me at the bar. The bartender nodded our way and asked what we wanted.
“I’ll have—”
“Let’s get the lady a glass of your finest red wine.”
I turned to Jordan with frustration written on my face.
“I can order for myself, thank you.”
“But my dear! Allow me to be a gentleman and order a drink for you.”
It might have been rude this early, but I did not care.
“Well, allow me to be a modern woman and order a drink for myself.”
Jordan recoiled in surprise, but he then did the one thing that might have pissed me off the most.
“Hahahahaha! Very funny, Miss Amelia, very funny!”
I ignored him, putting an order in for some whiskey. I was well past the point of regretting this date; by now, I just wanted to make the most of it with the drinks.
“Yes, a real comedian,” I said. “So tell me a little about yourself, Jordan. You live here in Manhattan?”
“Oh, don’t tell me you forgot what was on the profile!” he said with a boisterous laugh.
“Sorry, but my job mandates that I work far too much and stay in the office for far too long. You seemed cute, and you didn’t send me dick pics, which is why I’m here.”
That may have been too—
“A real comedian, like I said,” Jordan said, still laughing. He doesn’t get laid much, does he? “Well, Miss Amelia, I work in sales for a luxury real estate company here.”
And just like that, in the course of one sentence, it seemed like everything came together immediately.
“I believe in prizing our customers above all else—”
“Yeah, sorry, I’m not here for a sales pitch about your company. I’m here to get to know you.” And by now, just to get some drinks and unwind from the evening. “So, OK, you do sales in real estate. How does one get into that?”
“Well, it’s a journey that began when I was just a young boy in Maine. Back in the late eighties…”
I sat there for what felt like the next twenty minutes, just half-listening and nodding along to Jordan’s story. Occasionally, he said something interesting, like when he spent a year of high school in Spain or took a gap year in Thailand. But for the most part, he came across as the man who believed everyone needed to hear his story. If the world did not know the story of Jordan Tinder—how he was saved in my phone—then the world would suffer accordingly.
As for me? Well, I was rapidly reaching the point where I didn’t think we would even make it to the second drink, let alone the second date. I may have been blunt, but I liked to think that I wasn’t a bitch or a cunt. I wasn’t going to drain Jordan’s coffers just so I could get drunk on his watch.
“What do you think of that?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, what do you think of that? My story?”
“It’s...fascinating,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m not going to bullshit you. I’ve had a long week at work. My listening isn’t what it normally is.”
Perhaps that statement would get Jordan to back off, call it a night, and move on to some other workaholic girl who was more open to just having sex than I was.
Nope.
“Oh! It’s OK! Let me tell the story again. Back in the late eighties…”
Him repeating the story wasn’t even the worst part of this experience. Him repeating the story verbatim, like he had memorized it like some call script, was by far the most ridiculous part of it.
“Can I just ask you a question?” I said. “I don’t mean to be mean. But do you have that story memorized?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, absolutely. It’s part of my RSD training.”
“RS…D?” I said, my mind initially jumping to the notion that this was some sort of strand of LSD that hadn’t made its way into the mainstream yet.
“Oh, yes, it’s called Real Social Dynamics,” he said. “It’s a great program to generate leads for men and teach them how to convert.”
“Convert,” I repeated back.
This was almost too good to be true. At least I was about to be thoroughly entertained.
“You know, convert meetings into dates!” Jordan said with a laugh. “First, you start with some warmups. Generally, you want your warmups to create some cognitive dissonance in the woman so that she has some curiosity in you, you know. You want to look for some SOIs, and—”
“SOI?” I said.
It was probably a bad sign that this was the most curious and engaged I’d been on our date so far. I just wanted to learn how much I didn’t have to look forward to on my future dates and how much I would suffer with anyone and everyone.
Anyone not named Thomas Fitzgerald, seemingly the only man left in New York City who wasn’t either a magnanimous asshole, an awkward mute, or just a weirdo like Jordan.
“Signs of interest!” Jordan shouted. “Like, for example, your dress. The way you have dressed is one SOI.”
“And so if I told you that that’s just how I dress for my job and I didn’t have time to change out of it, would that be an SOI, or a SOD?”
“SOD?”
“Sign of disinterest.”
Jordan laughed, a little more uncomfortable than before, but still trying to remain engaged. My patience for him was running thin. I was probably one or two more stupid comments away from just getting up and leaving.
“You know, humor is an SOI.”
Strike one. And you only need two strikes in this game…
“But yeah, once she’s into you and you’ve established a connection, you tell your story. Girls love stories, you know. They read everything. Dudes? We’re just visual. So you can’t just show up dressed like a stud. You have to speak like a stud.”
“Is that so?” I said, now deliberately trying to show disinterest in this whole charade. “Is that why you’re in a suit?”
“Oh, well this is to represent the fact that I have money, and I know how to dress well.”
“So, let me get this straight,” I said, rising from my seat.
Yep, it’s time to go. It’s time to get the hell out of here.
“On the one hand, you don’t worry about your dress, because that’s too visual, and apparently all women are blind and don’t care how a dude looks. But then, on the other, you have to represent
that you have money and you know how to dress well. Do I have that all correct?”
“Yep! You are a smart woman, Miss Amelia! You—”
“I know that,” I said. “You know why? Because I grounded my education in real work. I graduated from Princeton. I work on Wall Street. I don’t base my insights or thoughts on silly nonsense like SOI or RSD or MTX or whatever bizarre acronyms you have.”
Jordan looked like I’d just told him God wasn’t real.
“And while it may be true that men are more turned on by visual appeals than women are, if you think I don’t care how you look, then you’re just stupid. In fact, one of the things I liked about you when I walked in was that you were hot and dressed well. Unfortunately, you’re also showing that beneath that smooth skin and slicked-back hair is a brain the size of a cut fingernail.”
“Oh, come on, Amelia, surely—”
“Come on what, Jordan?” I said. “Come on, you played the game so well, so you must, therefore, have success with me? Here’s a different idea for your next date, Jordan. Whenever you meet the woman, take the time to actually listen. We appreciate people who listen more than people who talk. And when you do talk, don’t talk from a script. It’s obvious, it’s painful, and it makes us think that you aren’t confident enough to say what you really want to say.”
“What the...but...that’s not what my coach says!”
“Your coach?”
I needed to get out of there. But like drivers rubbernecking at an accident, I couldn’t help but slow down to witness Jordan dig himself into a ditch further and further.
“Yes! I have an online coach from Brazil. He’s—”
“Stop, just stop,” I said. “If you think for two seconds that some guy from Brazil is going to help you get women like me, then let me tell you something. Save your money. Go out into the real world. Listen. Empathize. And then, just then, you can have better luck.”
I finished my drink and placed it on the counter.
“I appreciate you inviting me out. But there is zero chemistry. And no amount of peacocking, strutting, COIs, RMBs, or whatever other things you use as lingo will work here.”