8
I HAD A DECISION TO MAKE. I was tipsy from a few whiskey-gingers, and I had over a hundred dollars of drugs in my bag. On top of that Dan had just invited me outside to smoke some weed he had on him. He always had weed on him. Was I going to go home early or take advantage of this lovely summer night? My money was low, and Midtown is notoriously expensive. I was already fucked up enough that I could make it through the night on just one more beer, especially if I had a little weed to carry me on.
Dan whisked me away a few feet from the bright lights of the bar’s entrance to a spot under some nearby scaffolding where he pulled out his handy pipe. It was an old fashioned glass pipe, the kind I’ve broken on many occasions, ones that usually weren’t mine. He took a big hit and passed it to me and I sterilized the end to not get any of his germs as I got in the habit of doing, and looked around to see if there were any cops nearby or suspicious civilians. I had too many drugs on me not to justify a little paranoia. The years I’d spend in prison for getting caught briefly flashed in my mind. No one around me aroused a second look, so I took a big hit and held it in like a champ. Much more smoke than I expected came out of the exhale.
Within a minute I has high as fuck. My tolerance had gotten low. But Dan took a few more hits to satisfy that urge. At this point I was definitely going to make it through the night without much need to drink more. The things is though, I generally liked to drink heavily on the way down from weed. Tonight that was most likely not going to happen given my money situation.
“Are we going back into the bar?” Dan asked me.
“I have no plans to go back into that bar,’ I said. “It’s dead in there.”
“So where are we gonna go?”
“Good question,” I said. I pondered that excruciating thought while trying to maintain my grip on reality due to the high. I couldn’t make sense of anything. “Let’s just walk around,” I concluded. And so we did. Midtown Manhattan on a Thursday night in the middle of the summer was more lively than most American cities on a Friday night. The streets were bustling with people. Scantily clad darlings in groups of three or four walked arm-in-arm with each other on their way between bars.
“Most American cities have no street life,” I said to Dan. “Everyone drives. That’s why I hate most American cities.”
“That was done by design,” he replied. “The automobile makers and the oil companies lobbied to have our mass transit removed so people would have to buy their cars and use their oil. That’s why you have to drive in almost every American city. Shit isn’t like that in Europe. It’s a travesty.”
We kept walking, and drifted to where there seemed like a lot of action. Yuppies wearing boat shoes were congregating in large groups in crowded sidewalks outside thoughtfully named bars on the avenue; their female equivalents nearby doing the same. They all looked full of themselves and quite ugly in the radical lense of the weed. I didn’t want to go near them.
“I’ve always wondered if weed makes you see reality for how it really is rather than distorting it,” I said turning to Dan.
“I always wondered if Schizophrenia is like being high all the time and paranoid,” he relied. “What about we go here?” he said looking at one of the more popular bars.
“Too many yuppies for me right now,” I said. “I can’t deal with them when I’m this high. And too expensive. I’m short on dough remember.”
“I got you on a beer,” Dan said cordially.
“That’s awfully nice of you but we should find something a little bit quieter. I can’t stand loud bars.”
While we walked Dan started rambling about some conspiracy theory he had been fixated on. I tried my best to stay focused but my mind kept drifting away. We spotted a bar with two women smoking outside. They were each not exactly my type, a little on the chunky side, but one gave me that look that told me I could fuck her tonight if I put a little effort into it.
“Yo” I said to Dan. “Let’s go in here.” Without hesitation he complied. I passed the ladies smoking their cancer sticks, and felt the one who was eyeballing me from the side as I held open the door. The bar was semi-crowded, not as many yuppies as before, though not as many women. We went straight to the bar and stood there like idiots for an extraordinary amount of time waiting for the lazy preoccupied bartender. Dan complained as usual. He was always the complainer when things didn’t go right. When the drinks finally came I ended up leaving the mandatory dollar tip, but Dan stiffed him because of the wait and put his crumpled change back into his pocket. “Tips have got to be earned,” Dan said. “You don’t show effort, you don’t get tipped.” I admired Dan’s adherence to principle.
“You know in Europe they don’t tip,” Dan said as we took our first sips. What a refreshing taste cold beer is when you’re high on a hot summer night. “Yeah, if it says three dollars, you pay three dollars,” he continued.
“I hate tipping,” I replied.
“You know, if you think about it,” he mused, “tipping is a way for employers to push the cost of workers to consumers. It’s like saying ‘I’m not going to pay my workers. You pay them.’”
“Exactly,” I said. “It’s one way in how our current system is rigged against the worker. At my job I had to work a whole extra week every month just on unpaid overtime. That’s like a month of unpaid work per year.”
“It’s insanity,” Dan said, shaking his head. “I’m sometimes glad I don’t have a regular job. I don’t deal with bosses like that. That’s why I’m thinking I might never go back to work. I’m gonna buy a winnebago and go ‘cross country, and settle out West somewhere, and live off the land like the way God intended.”
Dazed and confused, not just in numbness, I listened to this ramble. This was another one of Dan’s big dreams. But something caught my attention.
“Do you really think there’s a God out there who wants you to live a certain way?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure there is,” he said with unflinching confidence.
“How do you know that?” I asked, a little cockiness showing. Dan looked up, took a big swig of his beer, turned to me and said, “It’s just one of those things that you know.”
“So you just feel it inside that it’s true.”
“Yeah. God is something that you feel, it’s like a presence.”
“Really?” I said. “It’s like being touched by an angel.”
“I guess so, though I’m not sure what that feels like. I’ve definitely had moments in my life where God was with me.”
“Like when?” I asked, deeply curious. Dan thought for a second looking down at his rapidly disappearing beer.
“When I was in jail down in Atlanta. I was sittin’ in a cell with a meth head and my roommate and let me tell you I wanted to kill him. So we got into a fight because I was so pissed at him, and they put me in another cell by myself. When I was sitting there, all by myself, I let go.” He paused. I looked at him begging for more information from this abrupt stop.
“What do you mean you let go?”
“I cried. I just broke down and cried. And then I felt the presence of God telling me it’s going to be all right,” he said pausing for a moment. “And then I immediately felt calm. And eventually the charges got dropped because they didn’t have a warrant.”
“And you think God had something to do with that?
“Totally.”
“How do you know it was God and not just circumstances, or luck?”
“Dude you have no idea how this felt,” he said looking at me seriously. “I’m sitting in a jail cell, I just got arrested, nearly killed my roommate, and I managed to calmed down.”
“Yeah but people can calm down,” I shot back. “It doesn’t mean it was a miracle.”
“Dude I’m telling you, there’s no way God wasn’t there with me that night. No fucking way.”
“There are other people who calm down when praying to other gods. Does that mean that their gods exist too?”
“You know, there might be more than one God. I’m open to that.”
“So you think Hindus have their own God who listens to them and Muslims have their own God who listens to them? Aren’t you a Catholic?”
“Yeah, I am, but I’m flexible. There could be one God who speaks to different people different ways, or many gods, I don’t know. All I know is that there’s at least one.”
“You know there’s evidence that we have the tendency to quite easily feel the presence of things that aren’t there. They can recreate this in a lab with magnets.”
“Well until you felt what I felt,” he said, apparently undeterred from my skepticism, “you don’t know what God feels like.”
I had been eyeballing the two women who I saw outside who were together a few seats away down the bar. There was some light eye fucking going on but I had my reservations talking to them. Perhaps the weed made me overthink things, but I had suddenly lost confidence in myself. The fact that I had no money for the rest of the night and the fact that I had no job made that possible.
Then suddenly Dan asked me, “Are you gonna talk to those chicks?”
I looked down at my beer and shook my head. “Not really.”
“C’mon dude,” he insisted.
“I don’t know” I said, clearly indicating a lack of confidence. I looked over at the girls again. They weren’t anything special, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind fucking the dark haired one I originally made eye contact with.
“You don’t have any confidence, I can see it,” Dan said. “You lost your job and now you don’t have any confidence. It’s sad. You see there’s a huge problem with putting your confidence in a job.”
“Well you certainly haven’t done that,” I fired back.
“And for good reason. See, this is why men commit suicide more than women. Men tie their confidence to social status and how much money they make, which leaves it vulnerable. If you lose your job you lose your identity. D’you know there were over forty-thousand suicides last year?”
“Wow, that’s a lot,” I said in disbelief. “And you’re right. I’m just not feeling confident right now due to my situation. Because if I go talk to those girls what’s the first thing they’re going to ask me? ‘What do you do for work?’ And then I’m going to have to tell them I’m unemployed. In this city you are what you do for a living.”
“If only women were like us men and just cared about looks,” Dan said enthusiastically. “That would make things so much easier. I wish women were like gay men: cock craving maniacs always down to fuck. You see gay men have it easy. They don’t have to do anything to get laid. They just go to a gay bar and pick a guy who’s their type and go home and fuck. That’s it. They don’t care about money and status, it’s all about getting laid.” He took a sip of his beer and continued. “Women don’t do that. They need to make sure you got money or you have this or you have that. They need got a checklist of ten things they have to get confirmed before they fuck you. That’s why I’m a little jealous of gay men. I mean I would never want to be gay, but I’m just saying. They got it easy compared to us.”
“I agree,” I said. Still with a hint of depression left over from my acknowledged lack of confidence. “But who do you think has it best today? Women or men?”
Dan thought about this quickly. “You know I’ve been thinking about this. I think gay men have it the easiest. Then heterosexual women, followed by lesbian women, and then straight men. We have it the worst.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Today women have it better than men because women no longer have to rely on men for anything. They got their independence. And women have to do very little to attract men. They just go out and they’re bombarded by options. But men have it much harder. Unless you’re a really hot guy, it takes a lot of effort to get a woman. We have to try and try and we deal with a shit ton of rejection. Many women can get by entirely on their looks. They don’t have to be funny, they don’t have to make money. Dick is always available. Same thing with the gays. Gay men and women are attracted to men, and men are easy. Men are always looking for a fuck. It’s the new sexual hierarchy. And straight men are at the bottom.” He took the last sip of his beer and slammed it down hard. “Think about that while I go take a piss.”
I thought about it. Could it be true? Could heterosexual men be at the bottom of a new sexual hierarchy based on the apparent laws of supply and demand? Could sexual liberation have resulted in men going from having basically all the power to basically none? Was I just another guy offering dick to a woman amidst a sea of other dicks? I finished my beer and suddenly got more depressed.
