As though an omnipotent superbeing, Robby calls me for the first time in months, wondering if I might want to hit happy hour. Apart from the occurrence itself, the strangest aspect to this is that I was planning on calling him this afternoon as well, as soon I clocked out from work, with the same idea. He couldn’t possibly know that I have tomorrow off, which is a key component of my thinking. But it is also an atypically sunnier and not nearly as brutal, not quite spring day, which has everyone around here in a more expansive frame of mind.
This is part of the story, anyway. And possibly the only piece I will admit, even to myself. But I’m aware that Lily is in town, visiting from Chicago, and this is surely some deeply buried, subconscious strike, a preemptive stab at putting some plans together before I’m roped into others. Yet as it’s also a Friday night, I have no intentions of twiddling my thumbs alone at home.
If being truthful I already half suspect, somewhere, that we will wind up crossing paths with that crew regardless. But then why involve Robby? He’s a majorly volatile compound, and the last time those two saw one another, a screaming match ensued. A safer bet would involve Dylan like always, or maybe seeing if Joe or Pete or the equally distant Aaron have a rare clean slate, or maybe even pounding on Phil’s perpetually closed bedroom door and dragging him out of there. I do believe, however, apart from wishing to try and stay in circulation with everyone, and shake up these outings by so doing, on another hidden level — one nobody can quite articulate — we often have this intuitive sense for what sidekicks belong on which mission.
When I arrive to scoop Robby up, he’s already half in the bag — none too surprising considering he didn’t work at all today. En route to the agreed upon moldering dive bar, ye faithful old Triads Lounge, he’s giving me an earful about the recent breakup with Charity. His former stripper girlfriend is also no longer in the picture. I’m sensing another trend here. Once seated within the bar’s dim though inviting corridors, while discussions ensue about putting this glorious near-spring day to respectful use — in the form of a trip to the driving range — darkness has already fallen before we even come up for air. And even then only because Millie has dialed his number, demanding to know his whereabouts, current dealings, and future plans.
“I don’t know…fuck no…no I’m here with Sid…”
“Sid? Tell him I’ve been trying to call his crazy ass for the past two hours!”
Though we have no way of knowing this, it turns out that this entire mob has set up shop next door, at the seldom visited Sticks. I haven’t drifted through there in over two months, since the night we played bar trivia as HSBNDS and came home with Brooke. And it’s an odd, off the trodden path choice for them as well. This seems like a coincidence too cosmically ordained to ignore, and while I tend to chafe at the notion of “following” girls around — i.e. ones who haven’t contacted me themselves, requesting my presence — it isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that Lily asked Millie to call me, rather than doing so herself. Or at least this is how I’m selling it to myself. It’s also true that after a couple of beers, I don’t care nearly as much.
Robby and I take off on foot, although this involves a slight zigzag detour across the street, to a gas station, so that he may purchase cigarettes. En route he continues bitching about Charity, which can only mean that, despite his protestations and not exactly requiring a crystal ball to discern, he is going to wind up back with her in short order. And I totally get it — she’s a good looking chick. There’s an intoxicating allure to dating someone hot, that extends beyond the hotness itself, where you’re enthralled with the association to her entire world.
I mean, it did recently occur to me, musing on a subject that at least tangentially touches upon this one, that I too did get a lot more accomplished on that front when I was a little younger and cared to a much larger extent about what people think of me. Nobody will admit this, but half the inspiration we somehow manage to muster, it stems from landing someone that will impress other people. Once that goes out the window, so too does a lot of the motivation for sticking with the female in question. Although other factors are on the playing field, this is a missing piece in my current dealings with Helena. While we may have more in common now than we did for a few years there, I know we are not a tremendously good fit. Yes she is gorgeous, but she’s also a lot of work. Do I want to tarnish our legacy with some kind of tap-n-abandon strategy? Well, who are we kidding — of course I wouldn’t be opposed to that if our next chapter unfurled in that manner. As far as getting fully invested again, though, I’m not so sure about that. And one reason is that I can’t seem to get as inspired as much about the concept of parading her around for the sole purpose of impressing other people, not like I used to.
So yeah, I think it’s all but certain Robby will end up back with Charity. I pride myself on being a little stronger than he, or Joe, whom I’m still astounded has apparently permanently dumped Angel. Because they are not just addicted to the allure of parading these girls around, they are addicted to the drama as well. Well, no, I guess I wouldn’t say that about Joe, which is presumably one factor in his ability to ward off that particular siren call. But Robby most certainly is, he is a junkie for the drama of constantly fighting with his hot stripper chick. I have never had the patience for such, or at least, once again, this is what I tell myself during these little internal pep talks.
How will his attitude play out concerning tonight, however, away from Charity? This is the real mystery. I have seen him in a wide spectrum of moods during these occasions, ranging from despondent to playfully indifferent to hostile. Though he is angry at the moment, ranting about her, that phenomenon has already cooled somewhat into a moderate range where he’s more attempting to keep the anger afloat because it feels good. These gradations are rapidly changing ones. And as we enter the gas stations, more encouraging signs surface in that he is openly flirting with the acne scarred, pale, overweight and overall just not that great looking girl working behind the counter.
“Get him out of here!” she tells me, though giggling through her cavernous grin, “he’s off the hook!”
“I’m off the hook!” Robby announces, cigarettes in hand, as we are exiting the building, “I’m off the rooftop, I’m off the chimney! Woo!”
He’s laughing as he declares this, but these moods are not just subtly shifting ones, they also often overlap. Which is why, as we traipse across the parking lot toward the street, he turns darker once again, features visibly clouding over like a rapidly advancing storm. “Man, fuck that bitch!” he says, and somehow I know he means Charity, not the one we just left. Passing a utility pole with some sort of plastic box, chest high, on the side, he brings his fist down violently upon the top of it, enough to make a cracking sound if not visibly damaging the thing. And the rest of us our walk over to Sticks will pass in near total silence.
The flipside of this equation is that these girls are addicted to the drama, too. Of course they are. Sure, Robby is somewhat tall, somewhat funny, and somewhat averagely handsome in the same ballpark as pretty much all of us — yet also a bit damaged mentally and prone to these anger fueled outbursts. Nobody would put up with the likes of Robby if they were not starry-eyed over this drama itself. In the convoluted female mind, his willingness to spar with them means that he must be an in demand prize worth keeping. They all too commonly misinterpret this behavior as confidence, and whisper about such in awed, reverent tones.
On a somewhat related note, upon entering Sticks, it becomes immediately apparent that Lily is having one of her nights, too. Increasingly common pretty much every time she comes back from Chicago to visit, which makes me wonder why she bothers in the first place. Millie shouts out our names and waves from a corner booth, where she, Aaron, and some other gigantic whale of a guy I don’t recognize are seated around a pitcher of beer. We slide in to join them, and get the refill train rolling down the tracks as well, when a waitress flitters past. This is a pleasant surprise as I’d debated calling Aaron, figured he would already have plans, and didn’t bother. As for the other guy, he is quickly introduced to me as Millie and Lily’s cousin Michael, who is living in the basement now.
Meanwhile, Lily doesn’t say hello or for that matter even stop by our table for the longest time. Her pretext is that she’s bumping into so many familiar faces that she must make her rounds, and therefore doesn’t have time for us. And to some extent I’m sure this is true. However she mostly looks to me like someone who is making a concerted effort to establish that she has way more important things to do than associate with our pathetic table. This attitude has always been there, implied and sometimes even stated outright, that she is better than the rest of us. She has a college degree and is paying an astronomical amount for that Windy City apartment. But word on the streets has it that her employer is going out of business, and she has nothing else lined up, though the smugness remains.
It’s a complicated legacy, to be sure. I wouldn’t exactly call her a career highlight — nor, in all fairness, would she say that about me. Which I am well aware of and totally okay with. However this unfiltered assessment of the situation has led to my indifferent attitude, which I do believe has fueled her interest, at least on occasion, once it enters those aforementioned funhouse chambers of the female mind. My flippancy stems from knowing that she was way more interested in banging Joe when he was single than she ever has been in hooking up with me, on those few scattered occasions across the years. I know this and will call her on it.
If we are broaching this topic, then it means we are in a highly combative, verbal sparring mode, or should we say she attempts a highly combative approach as I mostly laugh in her face. It also means we are likely to wind up screwing later. She denies this, possibly because acknowledgment would require openly admitting that the guy she’s chosen to shack up with for the night is some leftover dregs, acquired in the absence of anything more substantial. Also, regarding people who take themselves way too seriously, I have a tendency to find them ridiculous — and she certainly fits this bill.
All of which leads to a phenomenon that Aaron and I are frequently discussing here of late: that what women want is not what they are attracted to. She wants someone who treats her well and takes her seriously and is quite the distinguished individual himself. However, if she ever had such a mate, she would be bored into an even greater alcoholic oblivion. Instead, what she is attracted to is a guy who is none of these things, because the challenge is the real allure, her attempts to force this irregular knot shaped peg into a nice neat round hole.
“I feel like every chick I know is, like, thirty-five, and single, and totally miserable,” Aaron is telling me now, “they’re all whining to me, where are all the guys? There’s no guys left! And I’m like, are you fucking kidding me? You had all kinds of guys coming around a few years ago, and you blew them all off.”
“Right,” I concur, “it was soooooooo hilarious, you know, when they were twenty-three and had their pick of the litter, and were dumping guys left and right for no reason whatsoever. Because they didn’t like his shoes or something. Now we’re supposed to feel sorry for them?”
“Exactly. Where are all the guys? Are you for real? You had a good guy. You had all kinds of good guys. Fuck that. I’m not coming anywhere near that shit.”
“I hear ya. I don’t have the least bit of sympathy for them.”
“Neither do I.”
“To be honest, I actually think it’s somewhat hysterical… and really what you might call just desserts,” I tell him.
“Exactly! See and some of them, I mean, they had, like, three guys going at once that they threw out for no reason. I’m like, are you for real? You don’t want a good guy. What you really want is a guy with money, why don’t you just admit it. And then they’re like, yeah but I dated this guy that had a lot of money, but he was an asshole. And I’m like, well, there you go. You can’t have it all.”
In other news: order the complete novel from my official site and save, versus what the big mean corporate ogres at Amazon are charging:
Well-Behaved Monsters paperback
Thanks and have a great week!
