by Kyle Smith
“You all right?” she said.
“Try this wine,” I said, pouring her a big glass.
“I really didn’t expect all this,” she said. “New place mats? Really.”
“These old things?” I said. “Family heirloom. Passed down by my granddaddy Ezekiel Farrell.”
When we were done I shooed her away from the dish Everest in the sink (yep, there they were, pretty much every dish I own) and sat on the couch, swirling a glass of wine.
She went back to the table and just peered at me. From three feet away. Three miles.
And we talked about R.E.M. for a while. And the Cure and Radiohead and Nick Drake and why wasn’t she coming over to sit next to me?
“C’mere,” I said.
Shooter say: Do not ask. Tell.
She came over. I kissed her. Kissed her some more. Something in the kitchen crashed extravagantly. She flinched.
“The maid will get that,” I said.
Got my hands on her waist, up under her shirt, with ideas. She stopped me. Double elbow slam on my hands. Girl kung fu.
“Grrr,” she said, ducking and pressing her head to my chest. We sat for a while hugging. Not long enough. She oozed away.
“I really have to go,” she said. It was nine-thirty.
Michael say: Everybody hurts sometime.
That was two weeks ago. Today I walk home from the grocery store and shelve my dented hearts. I need something to take the edge off. When I’ve got woman problems, at some point I always turn to the thing that is guaranteed to please the senses even as it dulls them. It makes me feel better for a while, then it makes me feel worse. The next day I always resolve to put it out of my house and never use it again, but I know I’m lying to myself.
The thing I need is Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s thesaurus of pain. Maybe every guy’s. I make it through “Tangled Up in Blue.” No problem, that one’s kind of funny anyway. (“She was married when we first met/Soon to be divorced.” Love that.)
She doesn’t call.
I have no problem with “Idiot Wind,” either. It gives me courage even, because I hear a prophecy that never struck me before:
You didn’t know it,
You didn’t think it could be done,
In the final end he won the wars
After losing every battle.
Righteous.
She doesn’t call.
I make it, in fact, all the way to “If You See Her, Say Hello.” That’s the one where you can hear Dylan’s heart falling to the floor and being trampled by a pair of high heels.
Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart
They all went by so fast.
And that’s when it happens. It’s getting late. And she still hasn’t called. I break down and let the eye juice roll. Where is it coming from? There must be a Big Gulp–sized reservoir of salty liquids in my head because the storm lasts forty-five minutes. I will bear any burden. I will pay any price. She’s my Vietnam.
At eleven: the phone.
“Hi,” she says. “It’s me.”
“Hi,” I say, my voice like wet gravel. Do I sound casual?
“I just woke up,” she says apologetically.
“Okay,” I say soggily. The less I say, the better my chances of cloaking the bad thing in my throat.
“I just came back to the city and I lay down to take a nap and, out. For eight hours.”
“That can happen,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Can we do a drink thing sometime?”
“Okay,” I say.
She half-laughs, in that dead-space-filling way she has. It says not, This is funny, but This is embarrassing.
But now that she has made a sound, the conversation has returned to my end. I have to say something.
“I thought,” I mumble, “you just didn’t want to see me anymore.”
At the end of the comedy they’ll make about life in New York in 2001, look at the credits. I won’t be the leading man. I won’t be the cynical chum or even Bartender Number Two. No, you’ll find me ten thousand names into the crawl, under “Gaffer.”
Because of the State. The State: You don’t rise to it. You fall in it.
Monday, July 16
For lunch I skip the usual nutritious cafeteria meal of veal parmigiana and Yoo-Hoo. Instead I gnaw on a pasty turd of a PowerBar and hit the pain palace. The grunt gallery.
Why do I go to the gym? To look better naked. Yet here is a complete list of all of the people who have seen me naked since that one time with Julia:
The guys in the gym
Basically, I am disrobing for black men with SUV chests and sequoia arms. Isn’t this a bit gay of me?
In the locker room I meekly undress, trying but failing as usual to spot my schlong under the overhang of my big quivering Hostess Sno-Ball belly. I peek at the midsections of the other guys: Iron. Brick. Steel. Titanium. The way I put on a T-shirt, it’s like Handi-Wrapping a bowl of mashed potatoes. But I know deep down I’m not overweight, not really. I’m just three skinny guys trapped in the body of a fat man.
I hit the floor, which is writhing with mystery optimism. You ask: Why can’t women and men understand each other? Look to the gym, where, by using the exact same equipment, women hope to become smaller and men hope to become larger.
This gym is for professional Midtowners in our thirties, so as I stretch, its sound system blares demographically appropriate musical quizzes from our youth: “Do you believe in love?” No. “Do you really want to hurt me?” No thanks, I’m busy hurting myself. “Is she really going out with him?” Grrr.
Huge guys—guys in costume, spandex singlets—balance barbells on their shoulders, with comical, cartoon-sized weights on either end. They bend their knees, squat deeply, then wobble themselves erect. Repeat. That looks hard. Pointless, but hard. How many girls are telling each other over their Caesar salads right now, I want a guy with huge muscles in his lower back?
There are mirrors on every wall, mirrors on every side of every column. It’s like a fun house, only for “fun” substitute “bone-cracking agony.” Everyone is exhaling and clanking in moist, puffy-faced determination, but what they’re really doing is checking out each other. Worse: they’re just pretending to work out so they can pretend to check each other out so they can actually check out themselves. Every time you look in one mirror—and you can’t look anywhere without looking into a mirror—you can see reflections from other mirrors, which reflect on still other mirrors, and so on, into infinity. It’s a whole lot more of me than I’m in the mood for.
Men loiter by the free weights, their T-shirts emblazoned with corporate pride (“Depends Runoff Central Park,” “Arthur Andersen Means Trust”). I slouch to the bench press, examining the dull silver bar with corrugations that seem to have no purpose except to leave calluses. These you can then define as weightlifting inflicted if a girl notices them in a bar. I have no idea how much weight I can lift. I’m a newspaper editor. When was the last time I lifted anything heavier than a paragraph? When did I last push anything heavier than my luck?
A big guy and his neck come up behind me as I’m pushing and gasping. His chest is pneumatic hardwood. He has a shelf. I’ve heard that taking steroids makes you grow breasts, shrinks your nuts to sunflower seeds. It makes you so much of a man, in short, that you start to become a girl. That’s what you get for caring about your looks. How dare we even try? Only girls are supposed to look good. We are here to admire.
“Hi, guy!” he says. “Want a spot?”
I look up. Either there is something in his eye or he just winked at me. His crotch is a foot over my face. I have a feeling there are gay porn films that begin this way. George Michael starts mincing over the stereo. (How could anyone have ever believed that guy was straight?)
I don’t want to be rude. I also don’t want any witnesses.
“No thanks?” I say. And I lie there breathing hard. He stands there behind me looki
ng down, smiley faced. This is as awkward as most of my dates.
“Mind if I work in?”
The song: “I Want Your Sex.”
“No, no!” I say, overfriendly. I spring up, glad to get a break.
He slides my dinky bread plates off the bar with a thumb and forefinger and puts them back on the rack. He adds flying saucer–sized masses to each side and eases himself backward onto the bench, looking straight up at me. Now I’m behind him, trying to look at nothing.
“Spot?” he says, as he starts thrusting and pumping.
George say: “Sex is best when it’s one on one!”
“Suurre,” I say.
He does about twelve of them quickly, but by fifteen he’s running out of steam. This is my moment to step lively. I’m supposed to help him get that one last rep up into the air and back to rest on the rack. However, since my arms are like linguine and he is bench-pressing the approximate weight of Norway, I foresee comedy ahead. Actually, he knows very well he should never have asked me for a spot. But he is being fair. He is making an effort to be inclusive despite how I look. He’s admitting me to the fraternity of sinew in some sort of affirmative-action program for weaklings.
He’s got that last rep a quarter of the way up. My hands are underneath the bar, ready to help.
“You got it,” I say.
“Uh. UH!” he says. His elbows buckling.
“All you,” I say, my palms grabbing the bar.
“Aw! AWWWW!” The bar advances another two inches. I’m trying to help lift it. It feels like a Buick.
“It really is all you,” I say apologetically.
He emits loud vowels. Sweat jogs down his forehead. I’m putting my whole body into lifting the thing the last two inches (thinking, Cool. I can see the veins in my arms), but his spotter needs a spotter.
I lower my voice to a manful growl. “Let’s do this thing,” I say. All Lee Marvin.
And we do. Which is lucky because I can feel my forearm tendons starting to pull apart like the caramel in a Snickers commercial.
He gets up, exhales the breath of a man. “Thanks, bro.”
“No prob,” I say. We lifters drop the last syllable of our sentences.
“It was cool how you made me do it all myself.”
Are muscle guys smart enough to do sarcasm? And if so, what are my options? Do I ignore the slight, or challenge him to a rumble?
“That’s why I’m here,” I say.
As he turns his back to add more weight to the bar, I slip over to a scary apparatus called the “lat pulldown.” This time you sit upright and pull down from overhead a giant bar chained to a stack of weights. I pull the pin out and place it near the top of the pile. No. Nearer. A gum-chewing personal trainer leans against the windowsill nearby, his arms crossed insouciantly. His eyes don’t leave mine. I haven’t even sat down, and already his eyes say: You’re doing it wrong.
“How ya doin’,” I grunt.
He nods slowly, once. Doesn’t look away.
And I’m thirteen again. My high school weight room. Sometimes I would stop in there at the end of PE, after a lazy sixth-period trot from the soccer field or the tennis courts. The weight room was right next to the locker room, so guys would stop in and do a few curls or presses: extracurricular activity for physical geniuses, just like I used to show off by doing more book reports than required. So there we’d be: the captain of the soccer team, the first baseman of the baseball team, a couple of quad-and delt-and trap-trapped footballers entombed in their walls of muscle, and me. I was only here to kill time until the coast was clear in the shower, where I did not wish to parade my pubic Sahara amongst a dozen dirty-joke-telling, towel-snapping adolescents happily brandishing their jungly topiary. Why the occasion of being near denuded genitals of your own gender was supposed to be the green light for such merriment always escaped me. My visible cringing at such moments, though, would earn derisive cries of “fag,” which seemed ironic.
The varsity gang would be effortlessly moving their skyscrapers of weight this way and that while I stretched my calves. My hamstrings. My arms. My ankles: don’t forget to rotate them. Oh yes, and the neck, waggle that one around for a while. When I ran out of things to stretch, I’d sit down and do some pathetic bicep curls. Gradually everyone else would stop lifting. They would wander over to form a perimeter of hilarity behind me. All of them would contribute unsolicited play-by-play.
“What is he d—”
“—to use his whole bod—”
“—have to rest after each r—?”
“—some sort of disabil—”
“—my brother lifted weights like that, but he was elev—”
“Think he gets a lot of pussy?” Sniggering all around. It would have bothered me less if it hadn’t been the gym teacher saying this.
The personal trainer on East Fiftieth Street doesn’t have to say anything, though. All he does is chew his contemptuous gum.
I pull down the bar for my first rep as he watches stonily. I do another, and another. Little sounds burble out of me.
“Eep,” I say.
“Yaw,” I say.
“Ayyyyye,” I say.
“You’re doing it wrong,” says the trainer.
“Really?” I say, letting the bar slip out of my hands. Kuh-lank! Heads turn. “I looked at the diagram.”
“No, man, I mean your noises. All wrong. You know, you don’t even have that much weight on there.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be encouraging to your clients?”
A shrug. “You’re not my client.”
So: I have to hire this guy to shut him up. Personal trainers cost $50 an hour. It’s not a lat pulldown. It’s a lat shakedown.
“What’s it to you?” I say huffily.
A nod over my shoulder.
And I turn around: several oxen have put down their weights and formed a whispering semicircle around me. This could potentially turn into “The Lottery” pretty quickly.
“Done!” I say, wiping my sweat off the seat.
I put in a few agonizing miles on the treadmill. By the time I’m done, I’m as wet as if I’d been dipped in sweat salsa. My juices are all over the machine. My perspiration is probably rusting the gears. Plus I’m positive some of my body Crisco flew off and landed on the pretty little Asian girl on the treadmill next to me. For something to do while I gasp for life, I press a button. The calorie meter. I have burned…a third of a Big Mac.
Stumble to the scale. I’ve lost six pounds in a week. This is why men go to the gym: because it’s always good news. If you gain, you think: I’m adding muscle. If you lose, you think: I’m shedding fat.
“Love Is the Drug” on the sound system. No, love is the drugstore. And Julia’s the pharmacist dispensing my Viagra, ether, speed, Valium, heroin.
Wednesday, July 25
Shooter offered me dinner. Anywhere I wanted, he said. Rao’s? I said. The most exclusive restaurant in town. Seats about twelve, all of them celebrities or mobsters or both. Shooter gave them a call, but even he doesn’t have those kinds of connections, so we settle for the Yale Club. Glum eight-foot portraits on the walls like something from Disney’s Haunted Mansion, waiters with subservient mini-mustaches, big heavy oaken tables hewn for mead-quaffing Vikings. The average age of the members is: deceased. Men display important hair and ironed handkerchiefs. Their wives have ironed faces. Technically the club is open to everyone who ever went to Yale (or Dartmouth, or fratted for DKE), but it’s really an endangered-species refuge for that dwindling minority, the nonironic big corporation white male who likes to chat about something he read in Foreign Policy over a lunch of boiled beef and boiled potatoes, which he washes down with a sidecar or a Rob Roy.
Shooter is in his element, issuing pronunciamentos on the thread count of the napkins, the relevance of the wine, the fortitude of the crab-cracking apparatus. Occasionally he slips into an absurd British accent. While he talks, I drink. He talks a lot. Chance may have brought us together
, but alcohol made us friends.
“How’s your crotch traffic?” he says.
“There’s this girl,” I begin.
“Stop right there,” Shooter says. “I know what this is.”
I wait for wisdom. Shooter will straighten this out. Shooter knows all. I take another sip of wine. Fortitude.
“It’s Perrier,” he says. I turn, and the waiter is behind me. “I ordered Pellegrino.”
I turn in my seat. A hapless immigrant in a tux, his shoulders rounded, his neck bent in subservience. “I’ll see, sir.”
“And take this with you,” Shooter says, handing him the glass.
Shooter has just sent back a glass of water.
“Shall we utilize some wine?” he says, opening the wine list. It’s the size of a world atlas.
“Utilize…?” I say.
“Come on. The Sun Also Rises?”
“I’ve been meaning to read that,” I say. This statement is not quite true. I remember when I bought the book, but I didn’t get to it right away; there was a lot of good stuff on HBO that year. Since then I have taken it on vacation with me, optimistically stuffed it in backpacks and carry-ons with every intention of reading it, or rather of at least being spotted pretending to read it in an exotic cafe in the Piazza Navona or the Khao San Road. After a while it acquired such a wonderful beaten-up look that I figured it was unncecessary to actually read it.
“Basically, it’s a book about drinking,” Shooter explains. “Except that there are so many drinking scenes he has to keep making up new words for it. Like ‘utilize.’ ”
“Good word,” I say.
“Isn’t it? It really gets across the importance of drinking as a tool. We don’t consume it; we build with it.”
“And, occasionally, drive with it.”
“If you can’t hold your fill and drive home without inflicting heavy damage on a tree or others,” Shooter says, “you are not a man.”
There are times when I wonder whether Shooter’s advice is absolutely the finest counsel a guy can receive.