An Inhuman Condition

Fuck. The sunlight slicing through closed blinds jars me awake. My head feels like an overpowered subwoofer blasting trance music to drug induced patrons of some warehouse turned dance club – if one can classify trance as music and that epileptic ritual as dancing. I quickly bury my head under the pillow struggling to keep out the burden of daylight. My joints feel drained like they’re coming down from a triathlon high. I feel the sweat caked on the back of my neck and struggle to remember what new hell I’ve earned my way into. The records office in the back of my brain seems to be striking because I can’t remember a damn thing. The only thing I can do is listen to bass bursting from blown speakers. I’m so fucking thirsty.

My mouth is a very dry and rusty ashtray. The back of my throat feels like an exhaust pipe made from tanned alligator skin. I can feel some sort of doughy mass caught in my sinuses, and I need something to drink. As I peer from under the pillow, I notice the shards of light are acting as luminous wallpaper and outing every little cluster of dust in the air that would otherwise remain incognito. Once my eyes find furniture, I notice that I’ve redecorated or participated in a sleep-over. This causes me to look to the left, and the gently breathing cluster of blonde hair protruding from beneath the blanket confirms I’ve not suddenly become an IKEA fan.

The number of problems requiring solutions compels me to try falling asleep again. I wasn’t hoping to solve a mystery; I just need some fucking water. I have no clue where I am, the nearest sink could be anywhere, my legs are throbbing dead weight, the scaly exhaust gator that is my throat just shit a phlegmy mess into my ashtray, and now I have to worry about waking the blonde lump. There’s no way I’m going to swallow this snot, so I toss off my end of the covers and slowly stand. What little composure I had is immediately lost in the dizzy mess of my bassy brain blender.

I brace myself by leaning on hair-cluster’s dresser and stare down at my granite erection. It takes me a moment to remember walking, and I catch a glimpse of my disheveled look and bloodshot eyes. I take a step away from the bed toward what appears to be a bathroom, and my foot lands on something hard that responds with a crunching sound. I look down to see my own jeans with one leg inverted and a pocket flopping out onto the floor like a prey-filled net. The square shape is obviously my fucking Blackberry, but I’m not able to think well enough to be pissed about it yet. With a light grunt, I continue to the door and turn the pink-tank-top-covered handle.

In the bathroom I spit a large khaki colored glob into the sink and it slowly slides toward the drain like non-Newtonian blubber. The only cup I can find is the lid to her mouthwash, so I run the cold water and take countless shots that intensify the taste of rusty ashtray. I use the Scope, and my tongue burns with the mint fury of a gingivitis exorcism. I flip the mirror door and begin my search for pain pills like I’m Elvis at the end of a bender, and struggle to line up the damned little arrows to pop off the top. I dump out a quarter of the bottle into my hand and toss them into my mouth. With a hard swallow and a shot of cool, spearmint water, I feel like a fucking rock star. Now I know why The King died on the toilet.

I stumble on my pin-and-needle, waking legs to the shower and spin on the hot water. I climb in, look around and decide that I lack the supplies needed to properly cleanse myself. Among the scented bath products, fluffy loofas, and vitamin-infused-specially-balanced-no-frizz shampoo and conditioner, there isn’t a thing that won’t leave me smelling like a bag of potpourri. So I just lean against the wall while the water washes the sweat away and close my eyes for a minute. Somewhere between sleeping and waking I discover I’m still at attention on the lower deck and debate rubbing one out onto the lavender loofa. My mind tries to calculate the odds of making some sort of miraculous shower baby, and I decide against it. I switch the temperature to frigid tundra to and shrivel myself away before I shut down the shower and hobble out.

I grab for a towel and dry my face only to smell the bath-product bouquet of scents with which the blonde bulge seems so enamored. I ask myself if there actually exists a man who enjoys feeling like he’s fucking a flower arrangement and hop out dripping onto the bathroom floor. Semi-dry and semi-clean I go about my hunt for lost clothing and clumsily slip into my underwear. When I pick up my jeans, I remember the Blackberry blunder and wonder if there is a hangover clause in my insurance. I slip my hand into the pocket and find little plastic shards mixed with coins and a bit of lint – excellent. I check the phone and the screen is a vibrant abstract of lines reminiscent of O’Keeffe’s feminine flora. Calling for a cab seems out of the question, and I cannot remember where my car might be parked, but I need to get out of here before I’m stuck in another awkward breakfast or forced to lie to someone I haven’t actually met yet.

I make sure I have my supplies: wallet, keys, cigarettes, lighter and what used to be a cellular telephone. I glimpse back at the girl I don’t recall meeting and one little stir under the covers inspires me to split before I have to figure out her name. With an assassin’s silent precision, I leave her bedroom and walk down the hallway into the living room of her apartment. The furnishings suggest that she isn’t my typical impoverished college type and in fact is doing quite well for herself (in whatever her profession might be). I contemplate going back in and planting myself back in bed to be sure I have her phone number, but her cat pops out from the kitchenette and gives me a judgmental look. Fuck, I could really use a sugar momma too.

 

Walking down the hall to the elevator, the world seems to be a bright, semi-surreal satire where everything’s been shaded another color. It’s the sort of off morning where I expect to wake up from a dream and start my routine over at home. I’m starting to recall details from last night, but the only girl I remember chatting up was a confusing brunette who was a multiple personality disorder of hot and frigid rolled into a nimble nine of a body. My last memory is her tongue in my throat and her hand in my pants followed by a prompt slap across the face and a blown kiss goodbye. The part of the evening where I settled for a blonde is locked down in my beer-goggled blackout cellar along with all of the other dressed-in-pink, lilac-smelling, fuck-and-forget mistakes. When the elevator door opens, I remember her slipping something into my pocket, and I pull out a cocktail napkin with seven numerals and the phrase, “nunquam fidelis”: never faithful.

The more I recover, the more I think about the mysterious girl with auburn hair. She was the sort of type I preferred: dark hair, eyes, and glasses with olive skin. She walked around bouncing and ready to burst from every direction, from head to toe; she was the sort I could fuck without having to imagine someone else. I could just let go, stare deep into her, and slowly grind knowing that every stroke was against her skin, her lips, her everything and no one else’s. Girls like that were great as a solitary encounter or an entire franchise.

And the Latin – how could I overlook the most intriguing piece of this tawny cipher? The girl left me a note in Latin. Between her coy flirtation and interest in a dead language, this one has serious potential. Most of the girls I go home with are communication majors, teachers-in-training, artists; they were box-of-rocks un-intellectuals, filled with a save-the-world naiveté, or incredibly serious in their pot-and-patchouli inspired deepness. When I do find a smart girl, I try desperately to start a franchise until she realizes that I don’t want to have kids, get married, live together, be exclusive, etc. I always get the serious, lack-of-commitment speech, and I can’t say a damn thing. I just stare at them as they hope desperately that I’m about to confess some building, undying love for them and make everything alright, but I can’t. I can’t even fake it or say “I love you” in some lackluster way like I might say that I “love” Thai food. So I listen carefully, try to buy some time, say “I’m just not ready for that” and get another month or two if I’m lucky.

It always ends though. They will only tolerate lukewarm interest for so long. They might not be smart enough to realize that the ‘M’ in ATM stands for machine, that their previous boyfriends had “fewer” commitment issues and not “less,” or that the word nuclear only has two syllables, but they sure as hell figure out that I’m not the boyfriendfiancéhusband type. So we have the chat again; some of them try to reject me gently and others blame me for wasting their time. The pursuit continues again, and I try to find someone who doesn’t insult my intelligence and isn’t looking for a kids-and-ring sort of thing: a long-term fling if you will.

I’m the type others might describe as man-whoreish. I’m not saying that I would choose those words, but others have and might continue to do so. It’s not that it is my intention to sleep around as much as I do, but it just seems to work out that way. I had three abortions under my belt by the time I graduated college (caused, not performed), and the first one took an unsettling amount of convincing. In the end I learned that the lovey-caring-thoughtful approach doesn’t work as well on the apprehensive ones. If I can make them hate me by being an insipid prick though, they can’t line up at Planned Parenthood fast enough to cleanse my jerk-seed from their breeding hole. And condoms, it’s not that I have anything against them, it’s just that it’s difficult to always have one at the necessary moments. Sometimes one is forced to spin the chamber and let that hammer fall.

As I wait for the bus, the volume of my hangover techno fades and I attempt to Sherlock-Holmes my way through last night’s escapades. As the pre-booze events begin to come further into focus, I’m almost positive I left my car at Abuela Caliente – a trendy, little Mexican bar downtown. The music is pretty awful, but there’s a dance floor and the mixture of heat, salsa and top-shelf tequila seems to impart poor judgment and amorousness unto the female patrons. It’s no surprise that I was able to strike-out with the bipolar brunette and still find a blonde bosom to coddle before last call. I’m stuck waiting for the bus another ten minutes, and I’m not eager to discover what the overnight price of a downtown parking garage is.

The bus comes, and it is filled with the regular crowd of creeps, crawlers and commuters that plot paths around the city every day. Everything is always in motion with the same slice of faceless folks: traveling with steadfast purpose to nowhere in particular. They all seem identical in their impersonal banal androgyny, but I honestly don’t yearn to meet them anyway. Nothing bores me like the laborious task of listening to some grandmotherly figure telling tales from the thirties or likening me to one of her grandsons. Smiles from strangers are both awkward and unwelcome here, and I will be the last one to support such nonsense. I even hate small talk from the Starbuck’s baristas.

I spend my unnecessarily long trip on the bus thinking to myself, and the exotic neurotic from the bar floats to the top of my mental pool wearing industrial floaters that won’t let her sink to the bottom. I replay the encounter ad infinitum. She isn’t simply mixing signals, she is sprinting across lexicons. In the language of phone numbers and French kisses she shouts desire, but the native dialect of face-slapping is that of disgust. I should just write it off as drunken lunacy, but my inner anthropologist smells a saucy thesis and won’t be dissuaded from living amongst the locals for a stint. I sprint off the bus like a short distance runner in the Special Olympics: struggling to steady my steps. I find my fucked phone and immediately dial from the puzzling parchment those numbers written above a line in the taxonomical tongue: never faithful.

A sweet voice answers with slightly sleepy intonation and almost whispers, “hello.”

My fervent fieldwork has yielded some surprising results. The dusky dame has a name, and that name is Emma. Emma says she doesn’t remember meeting me at the bar last night or much of anything for that matter. She doesn’t sound like a party girl per se, but I get some heavy-drinking vibes. Not that it matters, because any girl who can remember to quote her Latin phrasebook while blackout drunk is one I must pursue. And pursue I will. Next weekend, Friday night, La Abuela Caliente – girls who drink tequila always make me laugh. It’s practically the Rohypnol of liquors.

After an hour of fighting with the small, Chihuahua of a man at the Sprint store, I finally get the insurance issue covered and will be receiving a new Blackberry. I convince the barking lunatic that I need to hang onto my phone until the new one arrives even though it’s fuck-useless for anything except direct dialing. The liquid crystals on the screen have all run to one side leaving it a disturbing mix of black and white like melted Oreos. The right side of the keypad is cracked to hell and most of the letter keys have fallen off and mixed with my pocket lint. Two days later I get my replacement from Sprint and go through the awful process of transferring my information over. I try to get my pictures off, but the damn data port was another casualty of war.

The weekend sneaks up with a garrote and nearly takes my head off as I remember halfway through another glorious day of commissioned sales that it is, in fact, Friday. I sell one last bit of insurance to a kindly old man living off in the suburbs before I duck out a half hour early and drive home. I hop on the computer and pull up my Pandora account. I’m looking for something a little Rhythm and Blues, and the Internet radio selects Down by Jay Sean. The man has a voice, I can’t argue with that, but the poor production sounds cookie-cutter cast by some record-producing robot. I start to take my shower, and the awful bit with Lil Wayne comes on at the end. I wish we could be done with all of this autotune, vocoder bullshit. It’s universally ruining what might otherwise be decent songs. As I towel off, John Legend plays through the speakers. Now he is a true vocalist and artist, the variety in his albums speaks volumes to his dedication to the craft. I grab his latest, Evolver, from the iTunes store in preparation for company tonight. I suspect I’ll want to bring this girl back here, and I don’t often think that.

I finish my routine, clean up a bit and leave a bottle of wine to chill before I dim the lights low and lock up. The drive to Abuela Caliente is filled with homicidal traffic and repeat stops. When I finally get to the damn bar, I have to drive three levels up the parking garage just to park. My new Blackberry tells me it’s just after eight, and I walk down to the street. I can hear the salsa music playing as I round the corner and Abuela comes into view. I feel nervous in a very strange way that I’ve not felt since I first started dating in high school. I check my tie and jacket one last time before I walk through the doors.

The bar is dark and the liquor flows. The dance floor is filled with tan, young bodies pressing against one another in rhythm with prescription beer goggles being nearly mandatory. I struggle to move through the crowd of college types, young businessfolken and stressed wait staff. La Abuela is mucho caliente tonight, and beads of sweat are already forming on my brow. I approach the bar and nearly plow over a sunburnt, frat-face with pink-polo and white belt. As the Neanderthal recovers, he nearly spills his pitcher of transparent beer on me, and I shoot him a look of derision as I pass. I get to the bar and it takes ten minutes for the male bartender to serve someone with a cock. I finally get my fucking scotch and soda and tip him nothing. Friday nights at trendy bars might be great places to pull tail, but they have no other redeeming qualities.

I begin to circle the crowd looking for my lithium lady, the bipolar brunette, Emma. I check all the tables and practically need a Maglite to see in the dark corners of this sweltering circle of my personal hell. No sign of the lass, so I continue to circle and mind my own business hoping to catch a glimpse of her somewhere. As thirty minutes pass and I assume that I’m being stood-up, I finally catch a glimpse of her dark skin and beautiful figure dressed in tight, black, fine form. I walk over to her and receive a casual nod of acknowledgement and a pointer-finger stuck to the ceiling signifying the wait-a-moment gesture. I stand dumbstruck as she orders a drink in less than a minute and then turns to say hello.

We introduce ourselves again, say pleasant, meaningless hellos and march toward a dark corner with an empty table. I ask how long she’s been here and am surprised when she says an hour. Apparently she was busy dancing with someone, probably one of her girlfriends, and I wonder why she doesn’t return to tell them I’ve arrived. We chat about the bar, our jobs, last weekend. I get an apology for the slap with another explanation that she was quite drunk and doesn’t remember a thing. I ask her about the note in Latin, and she says it’s one of the few phrases she knows. She said she keeps a slip of paper with it and her phone number pre-written in her purse.

I feel the jadedness of a child learning that Santa is a fraud or seeing how the magic trick is performed. The coy behavior that made this girl so interesting can all be summed up to coincidence and public drunkenness. I suppose she still has an excellent body, and she seems nice enough. There’s still a cheap and hollow feeling like the gamut of possibility narrows quickly and my hope fades. And yet, there is an odd fire in her eyes that compels and lures me forward. As we talk about our uninteresting lives, she mentions that, while she is a performance theatre major, she also waits tables at a small Mexican restaurant uptown. I ask if either of her parents are Hispanic given her job, choice of bar, and affinity for tequila sunrises. She says that both her parents are mostly German, but she lived in Morelia for four years and speaks fluent Spanish. With that my interest piques a bit, and we continue our little dance.

After a few more drinks, she drags me onto the literal dance floor, and we only stop to pour drinks down our throats. She is hot, firm and all over me everywhere. We dance close and her tongue slides into my mouth as her hand dances into my pants. I’m scotched up beyond repair and sporting some serious concrete downstairs. We have one more drink, and I’m amazed that she isn’t falling over because I can barely stand. She asks me if I’d like to take her home, and I can’t grab the check and my jacket fast enough. We stumble out into the cool night while the ground shakes and salsa quakes on in my head. The cab ride to her place is a short foreplay filled with tongues, touches and tousled hair. She nibbles on my ear as we pull up, and I toss some money at the cabbie not even looking at his face.

We’re not two steps into the apartment when she pulls me over to a couch. I trip over my own feet, and she quickly takes her top off while straddling me. The next half hour is one sweaty mess of grinding back and forth trying to stave off my drunken dick from interrupting the flow of things. I remember the squirms, squeals and screams in vivid detail, but the rest of the night is alien-abduction lost time interspersed with small flashes of our naked bodies and her sweet scent.

I wake up naked in her bed with no covers. I’m still wearing my tie, and Emma is distinctly not in bed with me. I sit up and check the floor for my pants and phone before I stand. She has folded my clothes into a neat pile with a note sitting on top. The little missive informs me that she had to work the lunch shift but didn’t want to wake me. There are apparently scones in the refrigerator and some coffee in the pot. Not that I know precisely where her kitchen is from the confines of a bedroom I don’t quite remember reaching, but I’m fairly certain I can find it without a map. She signed the note with a post-script of “BTW: nice tie!” I smile a little when I read that part and wander nude toward the elusive coffee pot. I could sure as hell use a cup.

I idle for two days waiting before I call when she takes the initiative and schedules another date. It’s the same loud-bar, liquor-induced, seizure dancing followed with untamed and inebriated intercourse. We spend the night at my place, but her disappearing act is a double feature. It’s not until the third date that I wake up next to her, and it’s an unfamiliar closeness that feels strangely comfortable. We have a nice chat over breakfast followed by a little bedroom dessert. We shower together and catch a quick lunch before her dinner shift.

The next few weeks we start to see each other more regularly until it becomes a nightly thing. I visit her at work and check out the rehearsal of her current play. We spend entire days together traversing the city, and I start to realize that she is every bit as intriguing and mysterious as our first encounter led me to believe. She has these slightly cruel and playful mannerisms that always culminate with a wide smile, and in those instants I can stare deep into a beauty that is separate from her physical, tangible beauty. The more I think about it, the more I feel like she is the best person I have ever met. I think to myself that if there was some sort of divine plan or other purpose for my existence that it would be to meet this Emma. She has an underlying intellect that can be lost in her effervescent personality. She can follow any discussion I start, and I find myself struggling to wade through her deep knowledge of art, music and theatre. She has culture in a way that nobody I’ve met born after 1980 comes close to surpassing.

She’s on my mind all the time like a nagging whisper spoken in a soft loop. I feel like a sugar-high child set loose in some thick woods with a stick for sword fighting and no cares to be found. I catch myself smiling with a small spring situated somewhere in my step. I find my old tricks are suddenly a part of some different game, and I think this might be worth more than a franchise. I have never felt such an alien thing for another person, but I find myself wanting to be a better person when she’s around. I’m embarrassed of all my past encounters, and I would be ashamed if she knew who exactly I used to be. Her beauty of spirit fills me with a high that has leaked into my work. I find myself waking up refreshed and paying attention on the job. I start to think about finding a career and doing something more with my life than idling through the bedrooms of drunk college girls. The weeks pass by and the feeling only grows. I could lose myself for hours in her eyes.

And just when I’m at my happiest and hooked with a junkie’s fervor, it all withers away. I consider us to be undeclared but monogamous: just on the precipice of exclusive dating. I have been waiting for the right moment to have the official girlfriend chat with her when I don’t get a response to texts or voicemail for a week. I think about going down to her restaurant, but decide not to be that weird stalkerish guy. I wait and wait while the myriad possible reasons for her silence grind through my head. Every shift of work is a weird, worrisome sadness, and I can’t help myself from sending more messages, making more phone calls. And just as I’m nearing insanity, I get a return text: “Meet me at La Abuela – 9ish.”

Nine p.m. cannot possibly come fast enough. I wear my nicest shirt, tie and jacket combination. I ponder the lack of a phone call or explanation of the disappearance, but I realize we haven’t clarified our relationship. Maybe she doesn’t feel like she owes me an explanation, and I try not to worry too much. I’m a stranger to real relationships, and it’s quite possible that things work differently than I would expect. I try to wait at my apartment as long as possible, but my eagerness wins. I leave about twenty minutes early and speed through traffic across town. The bar is running at full, hot, strobe-and-straddle fervor, and I can’t see a damn thing. I look around for her, and I finally find her dancing in a skimpy skirt with another faceless, frat-looking fool in the uniform white belt and pink polo shirt.

Their hands are all over each other, and he tries to stick his tongue down her throat. As her eyes catch mine, she stops him and walks over. I’m fuming with confused hurt and anger as she walks up and drags me to a corner table. Very quickly she explains how I strung along one of her friends last year for three months with no commitment and she doesn’t think we should see each other. She says the sex was fantastic and gives me a quick and awkward hug with a kiss on the cheek. Before I can process what has just happened she is already walking away from the table and out the bar door with that frat fucker. I try to make sense of everything in my head, and each scotch I order makes that increasingly difficult. I stumble home drunk and pass out before I think too much.

The morning hangover hurts in an all-over painful way that I’ve never experienced, and I feel like I’ve been wholly poisoned.

She left a cocktail-napkin epitaph in my pocket amplifying the sting of her departure as if it was her intent from the beginning. The words hurt in an unusual way, and I felt like I was simply the punch line of a joke I couldn’t understand. “Nunc scis quid sit amor,” she had written: now you know what love is.

Well, fuck.