Love Monkey (2 page)

I'm thirty-two, only not. I'm a thirteen-year-old with a credit card. I am not a man. I am a manboy. Women know that boys will be boys; unfortunately for them, they must learn that men will be boys too.

I'm not the only one. You can be a manboy at any age, be of any nationality or race. Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks, Paul McCartney, Michael J. Fox, Bill Gates, Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Jackie Chan, Mickey Rooney, Chris Rock, John Cusack, Hugh Grant, Matthew Broderick, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Clinton,
and
George W.
Bush—hey, two presidents in a row, first ones since Teddy Roosevelt (one of whose cabinet secretaries once said, I read somewhere, “You have to remember that the president is about twelve.”).

So: manboys rule the box office, the White House, the Forbes 500. Why should I worry? Our day is at hand. And my life is my own. I'm the king of me. Nobody tells me what to do. I'm an independent soul, a wanderer, a questioner. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to call my mom.

“Hi,” I say. “It's me,” I say. Somehow it always feels necessary to add, “Tom.”

My mom is fifty-eight. She enjoys costume jewelry, strip-mall yarn stores, General Foods International Coffees, and Derek Jeter. Despite the fact that I have toiled in the ink racket for years, the only publication she gets is the Sunday paper, which she buys solely for the Q-pons that she carefully files in a little gray plastic box. Her dream is to retire soon so she can devote herself full-time to her hobby, which is cleaning the grout in her bathroom. My mother's bathroom does not look like any human beings have ever been in it. It's a showroom from a soap-scumless Tomorrowland. You could manufacture microchips in it.

It would be fair to say that Mom likes things to go the way they're supposed to.

“Hi, honey,” says Mom. “Weren't you going to call this morning?”

Yes. It's true. Yesterday I promised to call her this
morning
. She nailed me down via e-mail, which she uses as a global tracking device. For the first time since I was a teenager, Mom knows where I am every single day. She even makes me e-mail her daily when I'm on vacation, the rare adventurous weeks when I strike out for (and strike out across) Italy or England or France.

“Um,” I say. “Did you just call?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Why didn't you leave a message?”

“I asked you first why you didn't call me in the first place,” she says.

“Honestly, Mother, it's because I don't like you very much.”

I don't really say that.

“I'm sorry,” I murmur.

“I just don't understand it,” says Mom.

“I'm really sorry,” I say.

“Tommy, you said you would call before noon!” Mom is like the bad guy at the end of the slasher movie, only instead of killing her three times, you have to listen to everything three times.

“Mom, I forgot. It's just that I've been so stressed out at work lately…” I allow my voice to tail off pitifully.

I've-been-stressed-out-at-work (or school)-lately is my bulletproof excuse, ranked number 1 (still!) after 562 weeks on my hit parade of all-purpose Excuses to Throw at Women Who Are Guilt-Tripping Me. Mom is a dental hygienist in Rockville, Maryland, and as such does not lead a terribly stressful existence. Generally speaking, you go home at a reasonable time of day and the work is predictable. Nobody ever says to a dental hygienist, “Dammit, you screwed everything up today. You're gonna stay till midnight. Every one of those patients are coming back so you can jam those suck hooks back in every one of their mouths, only this time, do it right!” There is rarely an emergency in the field of dental hygiene. (Code blue! We've run out of spearminty stuff to smear on the little circular power tool!)

Is it a little unfair to keep trumping my mother this way, to keep rubbing my white-collar job in her creased blue-collar face, reminding her of how much more successful I am at thirty-two than she will ever be?

Yes. It is unfair. On the other hand, isn't it a little unfair of her to expect me to call her every month just because she gave birth to me? I have a better idea: how about once a year? No, better yet: once a girlfriend. Then we'll have something to discuss.

Mom has nothing to say to me. I have nothing to say to Mom.
When Dad was alive, she always had lots to say: about how awful Dad was. She eventually tired of that topic, though, a mere five years after his death. I don't call my mother because there is no personality overlap. We haven't read the same books about seething young men careening around London or New York; we haven't seen the same movies about hyperverbal gangsters who operate impossibly large weapons while making remarks about comic books.

She thinks I'm a Good Boy. This is my role. It seems to work for her. When I was thirteen, I didn't swear around her. Now I can't. It's too late. I had an opportunity: that first Christmas break home from college. Then I could claim life-status change, renegotiate the terms of my son-ness. My swear window closed. Now she must honestly believe I don't curse.

“So what's new?” Mom says.

I hate it when people ask this question. Because absolutely nothing is new. My life is in a holding pattern. Or, to be honest, a holding-onto-nothing pattern. I own no car. Never have. I own no real estate. Never have. The most expensive thing I own is this leather chair: $1,099 plus tax and delivery. So basically the most momentous purchase of my life has been a cushy parking space for my ass.

“Not much,” I say, dialing up Chipper Tone Number 3 for my voice. “So what's new with you?”

This is another risky stage of the conversation, because my mother's ears are not as sharp as they used to be and she always mishears this question. When I say, “What's new?” she hears, “Please furnish me with an itemized list of all the diseases currently striking our family members, mutual acquaintances, and people from your place of employment.”

“Well, you remember Henrietta?”

“No.”

“She's one of the girls from the office.” Funny, when my mother says “girl,” she means “fifty-nine-year-old woman with osteoporosis.”
When someone in Manhattan says “woman,” she means “twenty-four-year-old girl with a Hello Kitty backpack.”

“Uh-huh,” I say noncommittally.

“Well,” Mom whispers, “well, she has the leukemia.”

And off she goes, leading me by the hand through a bright wonderland of sudden unexplained nausea. Bone-marrow transplants. Projectile vomiting. Tearful bedside vigils. Of someone
I don't know
.

“Oh, and I just talked to Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa fell and broke his hip. Grandma is just getting over a cold.”

My grandpa and grandma have been married since she was seventeen and he was nineteen. That's how they did things in those days. No Sixty Dates in Sixty Minutes. No [email protected]. No Jewish singles night. No “And what do you do?” as you hand her a Heineken. Home for both of them was some dirt farm in Missouri, where if you were a man you'd be in a mine all week and then come out for air Friday night, change into your other shirt, and go dance in a barn and flirt with the pretty girls like there was no tomorrow. Because while there probably would be a tomorrow, it most definitely would suck. “Off to the salt mines,” we say in Manhattan as we skip off to our air-conditioned, carpeted offices with candy bowls and whimsical desk signs. My grandpa worked in a salt mine. (Or a silver mine, I'm not sure. I recall dire shuddering mentions of excavation.) He and Grandma have been married sixty-one years and not only do they love each other, they don't spend a single hour outside of the other's company. They literally cannot get enough of each other.

It's kind of like that with me and Julia. Except instead of being married for sixty-one years, we “hung out” for five months. Oh, and instead of never spending a minute outside each other's company? We don't see each other. Except once in a while at work.

But she's here anyway. She never leaves me. She's there right now, sitting next to me, reading
The New Yorker
. I talk to her all the time in my mind.

“Whatcha readin'?”

“A Steve Martin story.” She loves Steve Martin too. The only difference is that in my case, I want to see his movies. In her case, she wants to see his movies and then go home and have sex with him afterward. We once went to a “conversation” between Steve Martin and some schmo writer from
The New Yorker
. We stood in back and Steve, unscripted, kept firing off hilarious one-liner after woefully piercing observation after witty rejoinder. Julia was turning to butter next to me. She was wearing this little-girl flowery dress (she later revealed that she had specifically dressed cute in hopes of catching Steve's eye, even though she was far too shy to go up and talk to him) and she kept taking her left foot out of her khaki-colored sandal and rubbing it sensuously on her right instep. How am I supposed to compete with Steve Martin? On the other hand, in all probability she realizes that her chances with Steve aren't great. Maybe she'll settle for me. I could be a decaf, yolkless, edited-for-content-and-to-fit-the-time-allotted version of Steve. A mild and cozy guy.

“Funny?” I say to Julia in my mind.

“Yeah,” she says. “But it's more sweet.”

I'm sweet I'm sweet I'm sweet
I want to say to her. But you never can, can you? You have to show, not tell. And once you show them, say, by preparing an elaborate dinner with place mats and everything, they start to think:
This guy is trying too hard.
I know because I've been there, grilled that. Got the place mats to prove it.

“Are you there?” Mom.

“Oh, yeah, Mom, I'm sorry, I just zoned out. So what's the next step for Henrietta after the bone-marrow transplant?”

“No, honey, I just told you the hospital sent her home. She could
go
any week now.”

Looks like I'll never meet Henrietta.

“I'm really sorry about that. Were you good friends?”

I'm clicking the clicker: JFK and other black-and-white people. A
clenched-jaw speech. That comedy Yankee accent. “We will bear any burden. We will pay any price.” Meaning: We will do anything to stop Communism. Led directly to the Vietnam War. So this could be either a documentary or history's greatest bloopers.

“Wee-yell,” my mother says in that Midwestern accent she still hasn't shaken after forty years in Maryland, “to be honest, I always thought she was a little bit of a back stabber. She used to spread gossip about one of the fellas who comes in here, and I happen to know it wasn't true.”

So now I get it. We're talking about the impending death of a woman one of us doesn't know and the other doesn't like.

“Well, I'm sure she meant well.” This is me in Good Boy mode. Always ascribing basic decency and humanity to people when there is absolutely no evidence of it.

“Are you seeing anybody?” she adds.

Wee-yell. I didn't see that one coming. Normally Mom and I have a gentlemen's agreement not to discuss anything serious, except if it's about our relatives. She only springs this question on me about once a year, and normally it's around Thanksgiving. That, of course, is when I most need a girlfriend. Because you must have someone to hold by the hearth when families gather to share a glass of cheer. Or, in my case, to use as a Mom-deflector device. She doesn't nag me when I shove a girlfriend at her. You can see how happy she is when I'm hooked up.
My son is normal
is written all over her face.

“Actually,” I say, “I just broke up with someone,” though this is not strictly true.

“I'm sorry, honey.” How can she be sorry? She's never met Julia. I never even mentioned that we were together. (Correction. We were never together. We were just hanging out.)

“It's okay,” I lie.

“I'm sure you'll find someone,” she lies.

“I know,” I lie.

“You're such a wonderful boy,” she lies.

“True,” I lie.

“It'll happen soon,” she lies.

“Maybe,” I lie.

When the endearments are concluded, I start feeling hungry. I assemble a repast of Ramen Pride noodles and two pieces of stale white bread smeared with poor man's pâté: chunkless Skippy. I know. A guy in my position should not be eating Ramen Pride, but the store didn't have any Ramen Shame.

Why do I eat thirty-three-and-a-third-cent main courses? I make a fair amount of money.
I'm saving it
, I tell myself. For the family I might have someday. My sons will be tall, not small. They will eat foie gras, not Kraft mac cheez. They will play lacrosse, not wiffle ball. No:
polo.
And not “Marco Polo” either: real polo, with
outfits
. Plus, having kids you can cherish means paying a lot of incredibly high fees to get them out of your sight: for nannies, private schools, summer camps in the Poconos. Things I didn't have. And didn't need, since I grew up in suburbia. The city complicates everything. Did my parents crunch these numbers? No, they just had me.

At some level I realize I am becoming the Rickey Ray Rector of bachelors. He was the death row inmate who was missing a third of his brain after a suicide attempt, when he was executed anyway in 1992. His last meal was baked chicken, fried steak, brown beans, cherry Kool-Aid, and pecan pie. He put aside his pie. “Why?” they asked. “For later,” he told them.

I wash it all down with a glass of Nestlé's Quik, watch
The Matrix
for the fifth time, and have a glass of Scotch, which I chase with four glasses of Scotch. Then I pass out on my sofa. Nighty-night.

H
eadphones on, I'm leashed to the stereo. Playing excessively loud music. Like I said, I'm thirteen.

I'm doing the rock-and-roll chair dance, thrusting my head with each beat, thinking, as usual when listening to the words of Michael Stipe, both, This is brilliant! and, I have no idea what he's talking about! What is it this time?
Candy?
At least you can understand the words. In the chorus, anyway.

While I listen I paw through the tottering stack of CDs on top of the stereo. What's this? Must have had a Simon and Garfunkely moment last night, a little pothole for the streetcar named despair. I only require Paul's services when I'm feeling extremely, inappropriately, voluptuously sorry for myself. I am a rock. I am an island.
But which island? That's easy: England. Cold, rainy, and a hundred years past its prime.

Some albums I can no longer listen to.

• Murmur
  , R.E.M.
  Played it that time she came over on a Sunday afternoon.
  
• Automatic for the People
  , R.E.M.
  Played it that night, the night of The Dinner, the one with the place mats and everything.
  
• Up
  , R.E.M.
  From the same night. It was a long evening, begun while the sun was still shining, actually, and there was hope in the air. Long day's journey into blight.
  
• Wish
  , The Cure.
  Because she loves “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and we both love “A Letter to Elise” and I think I played the album once—success!—as preparatory make-out music in my apartment. The whole album's pretty depressing anyway.
  
• Parachutes,
  Coldplay.
  Because “Yellow” was playing at Swift's the moment I found out that Julia didn't want me.
  

Later I awaken from a nice unscheduled nap on the floor. Down here with my cheek pressed into the carpet I have a nice view underneath the sofa, where I spend a few lazy moments blinking at the sinister furry mounds, the shifting dunes of dust. Someone should really clean it up. But I am nothing if not an optimist, and I truly believe there's a chance that it'll go away by itself. What's this black thing? Well, well. Ninety-two percent cotton, eight percent spandex, seventy-five percent caked in dust. Not too froufrou. 34B. It could belong to any of ten girls who've been relieved of their bras in this vicinity over the last couple of years. It's like finding Cinderella's slipper. Perhaps I should wander around Manhattan asking girls if I could slip it on them for size? That could take a while.
They all seem to be 34B these days. I remember once when I dated a 34C. I bragged about it for months. (What was her name?) Then there was that horrible incident with the 34A, the one who used advanced deception techniques to make herself appear, from the other side of her sweater, to be a 34B. Of course I never called her again. False advertising.

What time is it? Shit, five-thirty. Where did this day go? The six hours since the first time I woke up, anyway. Have I eaten yet? Oh, yeah: at twelve-thirty I confronted the concept of breakfast. Decided to dine on Tylenol and a gallon of water.

Enough of this sitting around my apartment doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself. I put on my shoes, grab my keys, and walk around the corner to Riverside Park. Where I sit on a bench feeling sorry for myself.

Gotta have something to watch. There are kids' playgrounds in the park, of course, but although observing little kids frolicking might lift the spirits, given the sketchy way I look right now, I'd probably get arrested if I happened to scratch my balls or something while in the vicinity.

No, I get a bench by the dog run. It's a dog singles bar, really. Dogs cheer me. Dogs have no trouble meeting, chatting, mating. Dogs do not ask what other dogs do: “Professionally speaking, I am a dog.” Are their rituals less absurd than ours? Can I buy you a drink? May I sniff your butt? What's the difference?

I decide to get a copy of the
Times,
not because I have any desire to page inkily through its forty-seven sections but because I need the TV listings. Every Sunday I circle the best movies coming up on cable. This is one of the better parts of my week.

So I join the teeming weekend parade on Broadway, the Yupper West Side: where preppies speak hip-hop, child rearing has gotten more competitive than Rollerball, and Love is a pharmacy. I walk in to get some gum and a paper.

“Three seventy-five,” says the lady behind the counter.

“What's this?” I say, picking up a small glass bottle filled with cloudy fluid.

“Bite me,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“It's called Bite Me. Put it on your nails, you don't bite them anymore.”

She looks at my nails. Ravaged and bloodied around the cuticles, but only for the last twenty-five years. Over the course of my life, I have probably bitten off enough of me to make a new Tom, albeit one disproportionately composed of cuticles and nails; possibly this would be an improvement over the real me.

“Perfect,” I say. “I'll take it. What's with the signs?” Big cautionary cardboard everywhere.

“This is our last month,” she says.

Perfect. Love is shutting down. Going broke.

Paper in hand, I go back to the apartment. The smarmy professionals in my zip code make fun of “trailer trash” because our median household income is $86,000 but 90 percent of us could fit our entire living quarters on the back of a flatbed truck. Our trailer parks are vertical, that's all. In the trailer parks of Biloxi or Birmingham, they fry up a nice cat for supper. In our trailer towers, we just order Chinese takeout.

The sidewalk talent. Has there ever been a greater moment in history to watch girls? We have all come to an agreement on the hair: keep it straight, clean, neat, shiny, somewhere between chin and shoulder length. The hair. You can see your reflection in it, and the chemicals make it so natural looking. But if the hair is small, the tops are smaller. Some sort of T-shirt and tank-top manifesto has been signed out there in girl-land. Now every top comes in the same size: not quite large enough. Combine that with the low-riding pants and every time they bend over it's showtime. It's the summer of ass
cleavage, and any girl who elects full body coverage quickly starts to wonder if she looks like a first lady.

Then there's upstairs. So much on display, so little on offer. Check out the top floor on that girl, the pair of them harnessed, pulled up, pushed together, tightly sheathed—she has a
shelf
, in a scoop-neck—make that two-scoops-neck—T-shirt. Julia's weren't that big. Yeah. Who needs her?

Time to pull myself together. I've got a date tonight. With Liesl Lang, that slender blonde I met at a party in Park Slope. She's sexy, but when I took her to lunch a couple of times she wasn't exactly encouraging. She made me fight her for the check, and she didn't reach for it in super-slo-mo the way most girls do; she really wanted to pay her share. It could be that she has an overripe sense of fairness, though. This girl is so honest, she would never make use of the pictures, descriptions, and accounts of a game without the express written permission of Major League Baseball. I have decided to warm her up by taking her for a nice mid-priced dinner. My plan, of course, is to fill her with alcohol. This is partly for her, partly for me. Because I also need warming up, because basically without booze I have no personality.

Liesl and I have these conversations. I try to make her laugh and she doesn't. She just waits. So I try again. Then she doesn't laugh again. She has a serious life, a serious job. She works as the head paralegal for one of those wild-haired downtown public defenders who sign up for any cause, as long as it's lost. They defend guys who try to blow up buildings, guys who decide God wants them to clean out a passenger car of the 5:33 to Garden City, guys who burn down entire nightclubs because it seems easier than waiting around to kill the ex-girlfriend inside. I have a slight problem with public defenders: why do these people think they're so noble? The night I met her I asked, “Uh, aren't most of the people you defend guilty?” She said, “They all are.” Then of course she gave me the standard
everyone-has-a-right-to-a-lawyer line. Sure. I understand. But shitty people have a right to shitty lawyers. What attracts good people to saying, “Oh, you've got some glassy-eyed murderers who need help evading justice? I'm there!” The KKK has a right to hold their spring cotillion, but you don't see any bright-eyed young Bryn Mawr grads applying for jobs on their decorating committee.

And anyway, she's not Julia.

“So why don't you just move on?” Julia's sitting by the window, smoking. I even miss her smoking. How can I miss her smoking? It fouls the air. It makes my eyes water. If she farted, would I be hiking through the Rockies and go, “Ah, the mountain breeze is nice, but not half as sweet as Julia's farts”? If she jabbed me with a steak knife every night as I slept, would I caress the scars?

Yes and yes.

“You're smart,” she says. “You have a good job.”

“Yes,” I say, “but who wants to date a pasty-faced leprechaun shaped like a bowling pin?”

“I think you're quite handsome,” she says.

“See, that's why I can't get over you. Who talks like that? ‘Quite handsome.' Everything you say sounds innocently endearing.”

“Oh, come on. You've gone out with a lot of girls. You even went out with other girls while you and I were, um, hanging out.”

I never told her that last part, but Imaginary Julia knows everything about me. That way she can hurt me even more.

“That's true,” I admit. Why not be honest when you're talking to yourself? “But it was only because I needed an air bag in case I crashed and burned with you.”

See, then, I've scared her away again. Now I look at the window and all I see is the pane. Well, and the dirt on it.

I dial my friend Mike Vega, a guy who crossed over to the Other Side four years ago. Mike and I are friends because we once had a lot in common. We had lunch together every day at our Potomac
high school, played soccer together, contributed shaky fiction to the school newspaper (my stories were about vampires, his about Euro-spies who seduced beautiful women). The intervening years, for him, have been the story of decreasing embarrassment about having money. Too late, I figured out that the rich are very, very different from you and me: they have more sex. The new Camaro that suddenly appeared in his driveway one senior day hosted more deflowerings than the bridal suite at beautiful Mount Airy Lodge. In those days he said he never thought of himself as rich—his parents had the money, you see, not him, all he had was the right to spend it—but money knowledge is in the genes and by the time we were twenty-six he had himself a law degree and a position at a top M and A firm. Now that he's happily ensconced with a wife, every day his little household corporation boasts a new acquistion—here a teak dining table or a digital TV, there a Tag Heuer, a Steinway, a Lexus. I keep wondering when he'll tell me I clash with his lifestyle and order me to get an MBA. Or at least take up golf.

He's not there. “Hi,” he says on the machine. “We're at the hospital having a baby, so we'll get back to you later.”

Not that I have some sort of aching primal-chick need to have a baby or anything, but I do get the sense that Mike is accomplishing more than I am today.
Do something!

So I flick on the TV. Bugs is in a wrestling match with this huge villain called the Crusher. The Crusher tries various ways to subdue Bugs (shooting himself out of a cannon—cannons are easily had in cartoons, there's always one in your hip pocket—or building a brick-and-mortar cube around his hand to slug Bugs with) and then decides to run him over with a train. So the Crusher ties up Bugs on some train tracks that have suddenly appeared in the wrestling ring and then goes off to conduct a train that apparently he keeps parked in the upper deck of the arena. The choo-choo starts up. The Bunnyis scared. The Crusher is smiling maliciously. The choo-choo gathers
steam. Bugs is really sweating bullets now. The Crusher can hardly contain his sadistic glee…then suddenly the film goes all wobbly and stops, as if it has come off the projector. Bugs walks onscreen, which is now merely a white background. He apologizes but says the film broke. He says he has no idea how it happened. Then, grinning rakishly, he brings out from behind his back a pair of scissors. Snip, snip.

Bugs is always doing pomo things like that. Not only does he have access to a limitless array of props, makeup, and costumes, but he also has this surreal godlike ability to simply step out of the situation and overrule everything that's happened. I'm kind of like Bugs. Bad things keep happening to me, mostly of my own doing, but I show no scars. I show up for work every day and go to parties most nights and I make conversation and trade remarks about characters in the popular culture. And, like Bugs, I am a permanent resident of the Valley of the Bachelors.

Can I just cut the film and start over please? This is not my life. It's just a rough draft. I'll get it right next time around.

The phone. It's Liesl. To cancel, no doubt. Girls can smell failure, even over the phone.

“I'm going uptown to see the Dance Theater of Harlem,” she says in a cancellation tone.

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“What time should we meet up, or?” she says hesitantly.

Betray no weakness. Cover up the stench. Rub on some broken-heart deodorant.

“Why don't you just stop by after the dance?”

Slick. Get her in the apartment.

I hold my breath as she makes pondering noises.

“Um,” she says. “Okay.”

Now relax. I practice the piano badly—really, it's a $99 electric Yamaha; Schroeder had a better piano—and then read without
interest. I pick up the
New York Observer
. Throw away the articles. They're just the bread in the desperation sandwich. The meat is in the back pages. The small ads.