So here it was that I had arrived at the mid-point of my life, more or less. Or at least that is where I shall start this story—and hope that it is indeed the mid-point, or else the end is very near for it is many years hence—none the worse for wear and tear upon my body. My soul? Well, that is another matter for the soul is the reservoir for love, and love is my domain. You see—I am a lover. I love. That is what I do.
Descartes said, “Cogito Ergo Sum.” “I Think. Therefore I Am”—but Descartes, if I may be so bold, had it all wrong—for it is love or passion, and not thinking, that brings about our existence. No man has ever filled a woman’s belly with Life by thinking. Men are incapable of thought when the blood is high.
“I Love. Therefore I Am.” Well, at least in my case.
I love to think. I love to read. I love my garden. I love my children, my family and my friends, and my dog. I love my life. But I especially love my women.
In this, I was very fortunate. Most people are incapable of love, but I cannot live without it. Not being loved, mind you. In this, not only can I live—I have thrived. And while women in this era do not have the luxury to engage in love, I do. No, I must love, and love I must, and I cannot seem to bear to be without a woman to love. I simply must be in love with a woman. This can be the only explanation—for everything—as you shall see soon enough.
It is a warm, South Florida evening in late October and I found myself sitting on a cement curb along a side street with only my dog for company. I welcome her attentions—but could do without the extra body heat—and regard the totality of my worldly possessions: a pickup truck crammed with my clothes, personal effects, and two guitars that I rarely, if ever, play anymore, and my dog. I consider my circumstances. I am homeless. Well, in fact, I do have a home—a rather beautiful and extravagant home. But my wife has asked me to remove myself from it, and I have agreed for the sake of my sanity and the well being of my—our—young daughter. My dog does not seem to care that I am homeless and after a brief reflection it occurs to me that I am not terribly concerned about this circumstance, either. In fact, I am salaciously and deliriously happy at the moment. After all, I am free. I have enough money to meet my immediate needs, and I have my health. I just don’t have anything else. Everything I own is in the pickup truck parked in front of me.
Oh, I could afford to go and get a nice hotel room or an apartment or even to buy a modest home—so being homeless was more or less a voluntary condition. I was enjoying the sheer freedom of it all, if only for a few hours. I wanted to wallow in the misery and joy of my absurd existence, and I needed a moment to think about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go—both for the night and with the rest of my life. And even in this moment of personal defeat and existential crisis, I felt I needed someone to love. A lover cannot bear the projection of love’s absence. Not for a moment.
I have heard it said that ‘there is no nobility in poverty.’ Whoever said that must not have lived through modernity, for the bargain we in modernity make in exchange for comfort and convenience—but not for love—is a Faustian bargain, indeed.
Ah, “love!” that joyous condition of emotion and passion that has ruled my life with an iron fist in a velvet glove. It wasn’t that I was naïve—far from it. By this time in my life, I had had lovers aplenty. I was reasonably attractive and somewhat successful, but more importantly, I had the gift! I was capable of listening. And that is what women want most of all—to be heard. Well, that and to be flattered. But there is a downside; an unintended consequence of listening: If you listen—really listen—you will hear the damnedest, oddest, and most outrageous things. Women are complicated creatures. I wouldn’t try to suggest that I understood them perfectly. But I did listen to them very carefully. One unintended consequence, for me anyway, was there were not a lot of lonely nights. I understood the buoyant surge of new love, and the desperate cravings of passion for the strange and unfamiliar better than any man in history, with the possible exception of a friend of mine who bordered on insanity. But he was incapable of love whereas that emotion came to me as easily as breathing. And as I look back, it is hard to tell which sort of man women truly preferred. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Sitting there on the curb, I was reveling in this moment and my freedom after ten years of marriage to someone I had absolutely no business to be married to. Oh, it wasn’t all bad. The first couple of years were pretty good. She was young and breathtakingly beautiful, and it was the 1990’s. Beauty and appearances mattered. And she was truly beautiful. Did I already mention her beauty? People would take one look at her and determined that I was a very fortunate man indeed—merely because she was beautiful. At first, I believed them. I thought perhaps I was lucky, but good fortune is squarely in the eyes of the beholder. All lovers—I did mention that I was a lover, didn’t I?—invest in the object of their desire a personality and character of the lover’s own creation. Time reveals the truth as the self-inflicted illusion fades. Only the love for a truly great woman survives the unmasking.
It is a brutal truth that most men will never know the wonders and charms of a beautiful woman. Fewer still will be blessed with a great woman as a lover. Sometimes these qualities—greatness and beauty—can be found in the same woman, but that is a rare circumstance, indeed. A man is far more likely to be struck by lightning than to be granted by fate a carnal event with such a woman. For better or worse, lightning had struck me repeatedly. But even though a great woman’s greatness will endure, a beautiful woman’s beauty will not. And that simple truth has been an existential tragedy throughout human history for all concerned. Since the dawn of mankind philosophers, writers, and poets—and more recently not a few lawyers—have tried to unravel this. And all of us have failed. But tomorrow is a new day, and our story is not yet done.
There. I have proffered hope.
In my case, I believed that I was married to Helen of Troy. Unfortunately, the truth was that I was married to a beautiful Genghis Kahn. And Genghis knew what she wanted from this life, and she was going to have it—or else. Well, “else” had happened and now I was sitting on a curb with my dog.
I was a fairly successful working professional pushing 40 years of age—radically successful given my origins—who had been trapped in a quotidian existence of computer screens and fluorescent lights and copier exhaust by the demands and expense of my loins. A captive of the accumulated burdens that served to keep me in bondage to a way of life that was grinding my very soul into the dust. In modernity, passion does not come cheap. Well, not for men who need to love women.
Why would any man sell his soul and the limited hours of his youth and strength for the boredom of the American suburban dream? Well, the answer to that is somewhat complicated, but two words come immediately to mind: Love and guilt.
Guilt is a terrible thing, perhaps the most powerful of the human emotions, though admittedly in an understated way. In my home, I had a wife, ostensibly for me, a nanny for our daughter, and a cleaning lady for the house. While I was busy running around with my hair on fire to pay the staggering volume of bills that showed up in my mailbox each month, there were three women operating in my home—and yet I still had to cook my own meals. I was enslaved. A doormat. Somehow, I had sunk to the bottom of the domestic hierarchy. When I pointed out this unfortunate set of circumstances to my wife her reasoned solution was to hire a cook during the workweek.
I wasn’t entirely sure why we needed a cook five nights per week as we typically dined out in restaurants in as many nights, but there you have it. The other two evening meals, though consumed at home, consisted of leftovers from the restaurants. Still, a cook was hired, for an outrageous sum, to deliver an evening meal to our house that needed to be warmed again before eating. It finally occurred to me that I was paying this cook the equivalent of a mortgage payment so that I might have the pleasure and experience of eating alone; heating up the leftovers that came in a fancy tray delivered to our, or really my, dining room table Sunday through Thursday.
I now had a wife, a nanny, a cleaning lady, and a cook. What I really needed, or wanted, was someone to love—or at least to have great sex with. This is what every man really wants, but more often than not this isn’t what he gets irrespective of his successes or failures. But if he has it just once, he will destroy himself and everyone around him to have it again—unless he would rather be a president. Eventually, I had the poor political sense to point out to my wife that with a nanny, a cleaning lady, and a cook, all I really needed were the services of an honest sex worker.
The response was predictable.
I was sitting on a cement curb with my dog, exposed to the elements, while my wife enjoyed the comfort of our home and the companionship of our daughter, the nanny, the cleaning lady, and our new cook. Well, I did get the dog.
But I was free, wasn’t I!? Free to find another woman to burden me with a huge and unlived-in house, property taxes, homeowners insurance, utility bills, car payments, boring sex, and no children while I ran my humanity into the ground striving to keep all of these balls in the air in my quest to become an evolutionary dead end. And yet the men of my generation remained daft enough to participate in their enslavement to satisfy the nesting instincts of a generation of women who did not want the burden of children. What was Ben Franklin’s definition of insanity again? I can’t help but think that perhaps a revision is in order.
Perhaps I might get lucky and have another only child who my next wife would use to compete with our nouveau riche contemporaries. In another decade I could claim “two-time loser” status after my second divorce.
No! This cannot be my life! Something has to give. I called my father to inform him of my status.
“Time is getting away from you,” said my father.
My father had little in the way of formal education. But his brutal insightfulness coupled with his expansive and worldly experience and frightening inability to finesse a point combined to make him a fearsome philosopher to cross swords with, working class or no.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You are getting up there. You will be 40 in a little over a year and you have been married for over 10 years. All this time with that beautiful girl and only one child?” said the father of seven.
“Pop, things have changed. Men have almost no say in any of this. I wanted children. We planned before we were married to have more children. But it just didn’t happen.”
I was punting. My father was the real John Wayne. That guy in those old movies was playing the part of my father. One doesn’t whine to “The Duke.” Or tell him that your wife wears the pants and holds your balls in her purse.
“What the hell did you buy a house with five bedrooms and four bathrooms if you weren’t going to have a family?”
I love my father, but tenderness was not his long suit. As far as he was concerned it would be an extreme embarrassment to have fathered only one child by my age.
“Pop, they don’t even build sensible houses anymore. This is the age of the McMansion. Every house we looked at had four or five bedrooms. I needed a house. So I bought one.”
I was trying hard not to gun-sling with “The Duke.” He was the fastest gun in the West—and he never missed.
“A real man would have filled that house up.”
My father wasn’t talking about Crate & Barrel furniture. He was talking about children—his grandchildren. And he wasn’t hurting for grandchildren. He already had seven. The problem was that he had been expecting at least 30, and with any luck 40. As far as he was concerned, if my brothers and I had been real men, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. What the hell is the problem with you boys? Seven grandchildren was an unmanly number—as was an only child.
“Pop. I called you to tell you what happened. I am out on my ass.”
“You don’t sound all broken up.”
He had his six-shooter out, and he was showing off with a couple of warning shots. He wasn’t shooting at me—yet. I figured I needed to get while the getting was good before I took one to the chest.
“I will call you tomorrow, Pop, and let you know where I’ve landed.”
“You can always stay here. I will leave the front door open.”
He had put his six-shooter away.
“Nah, but I appreciate the offer. I will be all right. I will call you soon.”
“You’re just afraid of your mother.”
Nope, he hadn't holstered his gun. That was just some slight of hand. He was still firing off warning shots.
“I just don’t want to get into it, Pop. I will call you soon. Love you, bye.”
I hung up before he got another shot off.
Descartes said, “Cogito Ergo Sum.” “I Think. Therefore I Am”—but Descartes, if I may be so bold, had it all wrong—for it is love or passion, and not thinking, that brings about our existence. No man has ever filled a woman’s belly with Life by thinking. Men are incapable of thought when the blood is high.
“I Love. Therefore I Am.” Well, at least in my case.
I love to think. I love to read. I love my garden. I love my children, my family and my friends, and my dog. I love my life. But I especially love my women.
In this, I was very fortunate. Most people are incapable of love, but I cannot live without it. Not being loved, mind you. In this, not only can I live—I have thrived. And while women in this era do not have the luxury to engage in love, I do. No, I must love, and love I must, and I cannot seem to bear to be without a woman to love. I simply must be in love with a woman. This can be the only explanation—for everything—as you shall see soon enough.
It is a warm, South Florida evening in late October and I found myself sitting on a cement curb along a side street with only my dog for company. I welcome her attentions—but could do without the extra body heat—and regard the totality of my worldly possessions: a pickup truck crammed with my clothes, personal effects, and two guitars that I rarely, if ever, play anymore, and my dog. I consider my circumstances. I am homeless. Well, in fact, I do have a home—a rather beautiful and extravagant home. But my wife has asked me to remove myself from it, and I have agreed for the sake of my sanity and the well being of my—our—young daughter. My dog does not seem to care that I am homeless and after a brief reflection it occurs to me that I am not terribly concerned about this circumstance, either. In fact, I am salaciously and deliriously happy at the moment. After all, I am free. I have enough money to meet my immediate needs, and I have my health. I just don’t have anything else. Everything I own is in the pickup truck parked in front of me.
Oh, I could afford to go and get a nice hotel room or an apartment or even to buy a modest home—so being homeless was more or less a voluntary condition. I was enjoying the sheer freedom of it all, if only for a few hours. I wanted to wallow in the misery and joy of my absurd existence, and I needed a moment to think about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go—both for the night and with the rest of my life. And even in this moment of personal defeat and existential crisis, I felt I needed someone to love. A lover cannot bear the projection of love’s absence. Not for a moment.
I have heard it said that ‘there is no nobility in poverty.’ Whoever said that must not have lived through modernity, for the bargain we in modernity make in exchange for comfort and convenience—but not for love—is a Faustian bargain, indeed.
Ah, “love!” that joyous condition of emotion and passion that has ruled my life with an iron fist in a velvet glove. It wasn’t that I was naïve—far from it. By this time in my life, I had had lovers aplenty. I was reasonably attractive and somewhat successful, but more importantly, I had the gift! I was capable of listening. And that is what women want most of all—to be heard. Well, that and to be flattered. But there is a downside; an unintended consequence of listening: If you listen—really listen—you will hear the damnedest, oddest, and most outrageous things. Women are complicated creatures. I wouldn’t try to suggest that I understood them perfectly. But I did listen to them very carefully. One unintended consequence, for me anyway, was there were not a lot of lonely nights. I understood the buoyant surge of new love, and the desperate cravings of passion for the strange and unfamiliar better than any man in history, with the possible exception of a friend of mine who bordered on insanity. But he was incapable of love whereas that emotion came to me as easily as breathing. And as I look back, it is hard to tell which sort of man women truly preferred. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Sitting there on the curb, I was reveling in this moment and my freedom after ten years of marriage to someone I had absolutely no business to be married to. Oh, it wasn’t all bad. The first couple of years were pretty good. She was young and breathtakingly beautiful, and it was the 1990’s. Beauty and appearances mattered. And she was truly beautiful. Did I already mention her beauty? People would take one look at her and determined that I was a very fortunate man indeed—merely because she was beautiful. At first, I believed them. I thought perhaps I was lucky, but good fortune is squarely in the eyes of the beholder. All lovers—I did mention that I was a lover, didn’t I?—invest in the object of their desire a personality and character of the lover’s own creation. Time reveals the truth as the self-inflicted illusion fades. Only the love for a truly great woman survives the unmasking.
It is a brutal truth that most men will never know the wonders and charms of a beautiful woman. Fewer still will be blessed with a great woman as a lover. Sometimes these qualities—greatness and beauty—can be found in the same woman, but that is a rare circumstance, indeed. A man is far more likely to be struck by lightning than to be granted by fate a carnal event with such a woman. For better or worse, lightning had struck me repeatedly. But even though a great woman’s greatness will endure, a beautiful woman’s beauty will not. And that simple truth has been an existential tragedy throughout human history for all concerned. Since the dawn of mankind philosophers, writers, and poets—and more recently not a few lawyers—have tried to unravel this. And all of us have failed. But tomorrow is a new day, and our story is not yet done.
There. I have proffered hope.
In my case, I believed that I was married to Helen of Troy. Unfortunately, the truth was that I was married to a beautiful Genghis Kahn. And Genghis knew what she wanted from this life, and she was going to have it—or else. Well, “else” had happened and now I was sitting on a curb with my dog.
I was a fairly successful working professional pushing 40 years of age—radically successful given my origins—who had been trapped in a quotidian existence of computer screens and fluorescent lights and copier exhaust by the demands and expense of my loins. A captive of the accumulated burdens that served to keep me in bondage to a way of life that was grinding my very soul into the dust. In modernity, passion does not come cheap. Well, not for men who need to love women.
Why would any man sell his soul and the limited hours of his youth and strength for the boredom of the American suburban dream? Well, the answer to that is somewhat complicated, but two words come immediately to mind: Love and guilt.
Guilt is a terrible thing, perhaps the most powerful of the human emotions, though admittedly in an understated way. In my home, I had a wife, ostensibly for me, a nanny for our daughter, and a cleaning lady for the house. While I was busy running around with my hair on fire to pay the staggering volume of bills that showed up in my mailbox each month, there were three women operating in my home—and yet I still had to cook my own meals. I was enslaved. A doormat. Somehow, I had sunk to the bottom of the domestic hierarchy. When I pointed out this unfortunate set of circumstances to my wife her reasoned solution was to hire a cook during the workweek.
I wasn’t entirely sure why we needed a cook five nights per week as we typically dined out in restaurants in as many nights, but there you have it. The other two evening meals, though consumed at home, consisted of leftovers from the restaurants. Still, a cook was hired, for an outrageous sum, to deliver an evening meal to our house that needed to be warmed again before eating. It finally occurred to me that I was paying this cook the equivalent of a mortgage payment so that I might have the pleasure and experience of eating alone; heating up the leftovers that came in a fancy tray delivered to our, or really my, dining room table Sunday through Thursday.
I now had a wife, a nanny, a cleaning lady, and a cook. What I really needed, or wanted, was someone to love—or at least to have great sex with. This is what every man really wants, but more often than not this isn’t what he gets irrespective of his successes or failures. But if he has it just once, he will destroy himself and everyone around him to have it again—unless he would rather be a president. Eventually, I had the poor political sense to point out to my wife that with a nanny, a cleaning lady, and a cook, all I really needed were the services of an honest sex worker.
The response was predictable.
I was sitting on a cement curb with my dog, exposed to the elements, while my wife enjoyed the comfort of our home and the companionship of our daughter, the nanny, the cleaning lady, and our new cook. Well, I did get the dog.
But I was free, wasn’t I!? Free to find another woman to burden me with a huge and unlived-in house, property taxes, homeowners insurance, utility bills, car payments, boring sex, and no children while I ran my humanity into the ground striving to keep all of these balls in the air in my quest to become an evolutionary dead end. And yet the men of my generation remained daft enough to participate in their enslavement to satisfy the nesting instincts of a generation of women who did not want the burden of children. What was Ben Franklin’s definition of insanity again? I can’t help but think that perhaps a revision is in order.
Perhaps I might get lucky and have another only child who my next wife would use to compete with our nouveau riche contemporaries. In another decade I could claim “two-time loser” status after my second divorce.
No! This cannot be my life! Something has to give. I called my father to inform him of my status.
“Time is getting away from you,” said my father.
My father had little in the way of formal education. But his brutal insightfulness coupled with his expansive and worldly experience and frightening inability to finesse a point combined to make him a fearsome philosopher to cross swords with, working class or no.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You are getting up there. You will be 40 in a little over a year and you have been married for over 10 years. All this time with that beautiful girl and only one child?” said the father of seven.
“Pop, things have changed. Men have almost no say in any of this. I wanted children. We planned before we were married to have more children. But it just didn’t happen.”
I was punting. My father was the real John Wayne. That guy in those old movies was playing the part of my father. One doesn’t whine to “The Duke.” Or tell him that your wife wears the pants and holds your balls in her purse.
“What the hell did you buy a house with five bedrooms and four bathrooms if you weren’t going to have a family?”
I love my father, but tenderness was not his long suit. As far as he was concerned it would be an extreme embarrassment to have fathered only one child by my age.
“Pop, they don’t even build sensible houses anymore. This is the age of the McMansion. Every house we looked at had four or five bedrooms. I needed a house. So I bought one.”
I was trying hard not to gun-sling with “The Duke.” He was the fastest gun in the West—and he never missed.
“A real man would have filled that house up.”
My father wasn’t talking about Crate & Barrel furniture. He was talking about children—his grandchildren. And he wasn’t hurting for grandchildren. He already had seven. The problem was that he had been expecting at least 30, and with any luck 40. As far as he was concerned, if my brothers and I had been real men, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. What the hell is the problem with you boys? Seven grandchildren was an unmanly number—as was an only child.
“Pop. I called you to tell you what happened. I am out on my ass.”
“You don’t sound all broken up.”
He had his six-shooter out, and he was showing off with a couple of warning shots. He wasn’t shooting at me—yet. I figured I needed to get while the getting was good before I took one to the chest.
“I will call you tomorrow, Pop, and let you know where I’ve landed.”
“You can always stay here. I will leave the front door open.”
He had put his six-shooter away.
“Nah, but I appreciate the offer. I will be all right. I will call you soon.”
“You’re just afraid of your mother.”
Nope, he hadn't holstered his gun. That was just some slight of hand. He was still firing off warning shots.
“I just don’t want to get into it, Pop. I will call you soon. Love you, bye.”
I hung up before he got another shot off.
Copyrighted Material All Rights Reserved Gregory Thomas Jeffers 2018
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