At some point all of this ceased to be about desire, if it was ever really about desire in the first place, and became about something else: loneliness, or inner pain, or doing time or penance for some long ago hurt that had never healed but somehow found companionable misalliance here with all the other misfits and detritus. I don’t think anybody in that place was really capable of normal arousal anymore. They were dead inside and you could see it. They were in pain and sitting with it, looking for it, maybe even getting off on it, because when pleasure is used up, pain is all that’s left. It’s the only thing that lasts longer.
This place wasn’t just where men came to be beasts. It was also where women came to exercise some vestige of sexual power in the most unvarnished way possible. My pussy for your dollars. I say when, I say how, I say how much and I get paid for it. There was tremendous manipulation built into the rules under which these places operated. The provision against touching the girls could be bent or broken at will by each individual girl, and enforced by guys hired for the purpose, guys like the pierced biker at the couch-room door. This was an age-old whore-john-pimp dynamic, but more played at than truly enacted, and always in a controlled setting. It was a grotesque parody of what women and men did in real life, the mating dance with all the civilized pretense stripped away.
It was an unpleasant scene. There was a lot of anger in those rooms, and animus was always simmering beneath the surface. With the exception of the frat boy types who came in packs, and then only to the higher profile places, most of the men at the local came alone and sat alone nursing a beer or a whiskey. Everything about them said: “Don’t bother me.” They just slouched there watching the stage, leaking bad vibes like slow radiation. Even the girls often failed to wring a smile out of those glowering types, which explained why so many of them had given up trying long ago, and now came across like disgruntled cashiers at the all-night grocery. That’s about as much enthusiasm as anyone had for the process: cash in, cash out; beer in, piss out; leave me alone. Like I said, this wasn’t fantasyland.
The only time Jim and I ever struck up a conversation with another patron at the local, the guy started bellyaching right away about how the titty bar was just an expensive cock tease. He pointed to the pile of singles lying in front of him on the bar, telling us how it had dwindled from twenty to a few measly bills in a mere half hour. Jim commiserated in jest, pointing at our own diminished stack and suggesting that yeah, maybe getting a mail-order bride was a better idea.
“Not really,” the guy said. “I read about a guy in the paper the other day who got himself one of those, and one day he came home from work and found her fucking the neighbor, so he took her outside into the street right then and there and bashed her head in.”
The way he told it, it sounded like the moral of the story was that live-in whores are more trouble than they’re worth. Not exactly a surprising or minority opinion in that crowd, but jarring enough to put you off a propensity for chitchat.
After a few weeks of going to the local on a regular basis, I got to the point where I just couldn’t make myself go anymore. It was too much—all the accumulated pain of the despicable patrons who had nowhere else tolerable to go, and the injured dancers who could hardly contain their despair, and the surly bartenders who made shit tips. It all just fell down on you and piled up around you like the ashen, boozy smell of the place, until you just didn’t want to do that to yourself anymore.
Toward the end of our time together, while we were having a drink at a regular bar that he liked to frequent, Jim confessed that he was beginning to feel the same way.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m kinda through with those places for a while. They give me bad dreams.”
He’d told me a few weeks before about a particularly vivid and disturbing dream he’d had about going back into the couch room with Gina only to find that there were no couches back there at all. Instead there were only bathroom stalls with no doors and dirty old toilets in them. He dreamt that she was blowing him on one of the toilets. He said he woke up feeling really disgusted and disgusting.
All I could think was, how appropriate. Unlike most of those purgatorial scumbags, he knew this place for what it was, and that, for all his flaws, was why I liked him.
I’d been inside a part of the male world that most women and even a lot of men never see, and I’d seen it as just another one of the boys. In those places male sexuality felt like something you weren’t supposed to feel but did, like something heavy you were carrying around and had nowhere to unload except in the lap of some damaged stranger, and then only for five minutes. Five minutes of mutual abuse that didn’t make you feel any better.
One thing was certain, though. Everybody got his hands dirty and, politically speaking, nobody really came out ahead. It wasn’t nearly so simple as men objectifying women and staying clean or empowered in the process. Nobody won, and when it came down to it, nobody was more or less victimized than anyone else. The girls got money. The men got an approximation of sex and flirtation. But in the end everyone was equally debased by the experience. Everyone, no matter what his or her circumstances, had made the choice to be there, and chances were that choice was made in the context of a lifetime’s worth of emotional wreckage that had been done to their lives by people of both sexes long before they stepped through that door.
Whenever I think about my experiences in these places now, and the profound pity they aroused in me, I remember something that Phil said that first night when we went to the Lizard Lounge together. It was something that shocked me far more than the sudden vehemence of his guy talk about what women were for, and it was something that I now realize could have applied to the men in those places just as much as to the women.
“I go to some of these bars,” he said, “and this is the family man in me, and I say to myself, these girls were somebody’s daughter. Somebody put them to bed. Somebody kissed them and hugged them and gave them love and now they’re in this pit.”
“Or, maybe someone didn’t,” I said.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I’ve thought about that, too.”
4
Love
I thought dating was going to be the fun part, the easiest part. Certainly as a man I had romantic access to far more women than I ever did as a lesbian, and this felt like the best of all possible boons. I could partake at last in the assumption of heterosexuality and ask out any woman I liked without insulting her. Of course, I was in for a mountain of rejections, and the self-hatred that came with being the sad sack pick-up artist, the wooing barnacle that every woman is forever flicking off her sleeve.
Sadly, that’s how it went for Ned most of the time at first when he tried to meet strange women in singles bars. As I would soon learn, that’s how it went for most guys. It was just the way of things in the wild when you were male. You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge begrudging you the nod.
To be a guy I had to get out there. I had to play the game as it was played, no matter how bad it felt. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to enlist a compatriot for support, so I asked a friend, Curtis, to be my backup. He was perfect for the job. He was a handsome, well-built, gregarious type, secure and sensible enough not to take himself too seriously, or care much what a stranger might think of him. He had agreed to help me navigate the scene and work with me on my male cues, which were still in need of some fine-tuning. I was never quite sure, for example, exactly how low to pull my baseball cap over my eyes. I still talked too much with my hands, and sometimes I still applied my Chapstick with a girlish lip smack. Just the day before, while out shopping at a department store as Ned, I had rubbed the insides of my wrists together after applying cologne at the men’s fragrance counter. The woman behind the counter narrowed her eyes at me and then looked away as if she’d seen something indecent.
I needed another pair of eyes to correct me on stuff like this, stuff I did without thinking. Curtis had said he would
nudge me when I got out of line.
He spent our first night out together kicking me under the table.
We went to several places that night, all of them neighborhood watering holes that catered to young professionals who were either on the prowl or just out for a booze-up with friends.
At the first place, an upscale sports bar, I was ready to launch with abandon, though Curtis tried his best to dissuade me. He knew better, having come of age in a man’s skin. He’d gotten his nose pushed in one too many times after charging horns-first at an aloof beauty. He didn’t recommend the practice.
But I was on a tear, eager to test my new treads. So as soon as we sat down, I picked out a couple of twenty-something women sitting at a table across the room. I gave them a few lingering looks to check their interest. I caught one woman’s eye and held her gaze for a second, smiling. She returned the smile and looked away. This was signal enough for me, so I stood up, made my way over to their table and asked them whether they wanted to join us for a drink.
“No, thanks,” one of them said, “we’re on our way out in a minute.”
Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school. Rejection sucked.
“Rejection is a staple for guys,” said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. “Get used to it.”
That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would never come. This wasn’t some magic island in a beer commercial where all the ladies would light up for me if only I drank the right brew.
“Try again, man,” Curtis urged. “C’mon. Don’t give up so easily.”
Near our table there was a group of three women at the bar, clearly friends, chatting among themselves. He pointed in their direction.
“Right there. Perfect. Go for it.”
“All right. All right,” I said. “Jesus, this really sucks.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to my world.”
I swore under my breath as I got up to go. Curtis crossed his arms and leaned back against his chair, smirking.
When I reached the bar I could see that these women were absorbed in their conversation. I was going to have to interrupt, and the female me knew that my approach, no matter how unassuming, would be perceived as a little pathetic and detestable. Small-shouldered guy sidles up to cute chicks with a canned line and a huge hole of obvious insecurity gaping in the middle of his chest. I stopped at the thought of this. I didn’t want to be that guy, the nuisance guy that women always dread. I was embarrassed for myself. But then how to retreat with dignity? I was already lurking awkwardly behind them, lamely pretending to flag down the bartender.
As I leaned toward the bar with a bill in my hand, the women turned to look at me, the way you do when something unremarkable enters your peripheral vision. Their eyes took me in like a billboard on the highway, running the length of me, then moving back to the point of interest elsewhere.
Succinctly, I was put in my place, stuck there with no recourse.
I thought about what I could say that wouldn’t sound cooked-up, cheap or presumptuous. I decided it was best to be honest. I’d always respected that in men who had approached me. I’d once given my number to a young businessman on the street in New York simply as a reward for having had the balls to put himself out there and ask me for my number. I’d had no intention of going out with him, which, in retrospect, I see wasn’t fair. When he called I had to tell him I was a lesbian, which, like most interested men, he refused to believe was a real, sustainable state of being.
“Why’d you give me your number then?” he’d asked finally.
“Because I was proud of you,” I’d said.
Now, at the bar, it was my turn to make myself proud, or at least fend off crushing defeat. I decided, however, that Curtis was going to have to do his job on this one, so I went back to our table and yanked him up.
“You’re coming with me,” I said, dragging him across toward the bar.
He had a self-satisfied look on his face. He was enjoying himself at my expense. He knew he was teaching me a lesson and he was relishing every second of it.
When we got to the bar, the women were as absorbed as ever in each other, huddled together, trying to talk over the music. We entered their orbit abruptly, me still half dragging Curtis by the arm. I tried to smooth over the breach:
“Hi, ladies. [Ladies? Jesus.] I’m sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to meet you. I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass about this [God, I was groveling already], but my name’s Ned and this is my friend Curtis.”
Curtis and I had joked that he would play my wing man at times like this, my conversational stopgap. Like typical guys, we found the Top Gun humor disproportionately funny in this context. It made us feel better about the downsizing we knew we were letting ourselves in for.
At first the three women looked us over like inferior produce in the supermarket. Then they smiled weakly. They were well brought up. They knew enough to cover quickly with the kind of anemic politesse that we all use on bores at cocktail parties. We were in, but I could see that their patience was thin.
I focused on the woman on the left who said she had gone to Princeton and was working in a foreign policy think tank. I decided to drop the novelist persona that I’d adopted as cover with my bowling buddies, and switch to talking about my recent job as a political columnist. I thought this would make for common ground, which in part it did, but only of the nodding variety. “Oh, you write about politics. Uh-huh.”
She wasn’t going to bite.
As I talked on, trying to work with her clipped responses, I found myself, as I had on my first trip to the bar, switching again to her point of view. Seeing how protected she seemed, I remembered how protective of myself I had often been in encounters with strange men. I had always made the same assumption, one that my brother Ted had ingrained in me as a young teenager: all guys who make advances to a woman only want one thing—to get in her pants.
I remember him saying, “It doesn’t matter what they say. They’ll say anything. Just remember. They only want one thing. That’s how guys are.”
I took that assessment at face value, an assessment that was, I have to admit, mostly borne out by my experience in college, where I found that most young men who bothered to speak to me at parties did indeed only want one thing. To the rest of them I was invisible. Why bother, I guess they figured, if you didn’t want to fuck her?
Whatever veneer a man pasted over this intention, and it wasn’t usually a very artful one, I always knew or thought I knew what he was after. I had, I realized, treated most men with the same coldness that these women were showing me.
And therein lay the paradox for me. Even if (and this is an enormous “if”) it could be argued that most guys who chat up strange girls in bars or on the street only want one thing, it was equally true that I wasn’t most guys. I was a woman, with a woman’s sensibilities. Besides, I didn’t want to sleep with them. They were just another test case.
Still, it didn’t feel good to be on the receiving end of their suspicion. After all, there are plenty of guys in the world, the marrying kind, I suppose, who really just want to get to know a girl, but have no other means of doing so except to strike up a conversation on the fly. So should they bear the brunt of the majority of their sex’s bad behavior? And was the majority really that badly behaved?
There I was, caught square in the middle of the oldest plot in the world: he said/she said. It was the woman’s job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy’s job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all.
It’s a wonder that men and women ever get together. Their signals, by necessity, are crossed, their behaviors at cross-pu
rposes from the start. I was beginning to feel happier than ever to be a dyke. As a woman, it was a lot easier to meet women, because even in a dating situation there was always the common bond of womanhood, the common language of females that often makes even strange women able to chat amiably with each other, almost from the moment they meet.
I wondered if the same thing would happen here. Would these women lower their defenses if they found out I was a woman?
After another ten minutes of condescension, I realized that this was going nowhere, and that I might learn more about Ned if I let them in on the gag.
I had to repeat the phrase “I’m really a woman” four times before they got what I was saying. There was a moment of absolutely stunned silence, and then the inevitable “No way,” in chorus.
Then, with startling quickness we all began chatting like hens. Their aloof facade fell away, and not, I sensed, just because of the conversational fascination of the disguise, but because they felt disarmed enough, knowing that I was a woman, to let me in. The inclusion was even physical. When I’d approached as Ned they had been sitting facing the bar. They had only bothered to turn halfway around to talk to me, their faces always in profile. Now they turned all the way around to face me, their backs to the bar.
I understood this reaction immediately. I had predicted it. But still a part of me resented their prejudices. I was still the same person I had been before, just as any given strange man is a person beneath his blazer or his baseball hat. As a woman, I was accepted. As a man I had been rejected yet again. I understood intimately the social reasons for this, but it seemed unfair all the same.
As Curtis and I said goodnight and walked away, I found myself thinking about rejection and how small it made me feel, and how small most men must feel under the weight of what women expect from them. I was an actor playing a role, but these women had gotten to me nonetheless. None of these interactions mattered. I had nothing real at stake. But still, I felt bad.
Self-Made Man Page 10