A Work in Progress - First Third

Manny Fagut and The Brief History of N.U.M.©

By N. M. Gelfond

06/15/11

“I can get anything I want and I’m only attracted to what I can’t have.”
(Obscure California Artist)

Story Summary

This story takes place in Southern California in whatever year you like. Manny Fagut has lived there for about two years and has been unable – as has been the case for most of his life – to sustain a career as a writer in any medium. Although it could be argued he is simply unable to complete anything he starts, his state of mind is compounded by a case of writer’s block, since he was fired from his last job as a newspaper columnist in the Northeast.

Which is what led him to L.A. Which is what led him to Nina.

His tempestuous and meteoric romance with Nina Alt, a poignant relationship with his mother Eleanor, the reassuring stability provided by his best friend Anin Robinson, and the short-lived but effective counseling by Dr. Arthur Spanksky are the defining relationships in this novella of his life and his story, which is not based in truth except when it is.

The converging roles of these three in Manny’s life help him in his attempt to achieve his breakthrough to complete the story of his mind – The Brief History of N.U.M. – which is Manny’s answer to everything and nothing.

Part I: The Break Up

Part II: The Break Down (page 121)

Part IIII: The Break Through - Manny Fagut’s Recovered Dream (page 191)

The Rolling Stone Interview: (page 290)

Appendices: Page 310

Manny Fagut and The Brief History of N.U.M.

Chapter 1 - The Break Up

“This journey, this life…[is like] a guy who just lost his girlfriend says, ‘God, I’m so angry it didn’t work out.’ The other guy says, ‘It worked out, just not the way you wanted.’”
(Director John Frankenheimer)

Naked in the Starbucks

“I’m sorry but I’m not going to apologize.”

Hmmm, where else had I heard those words before?

Ah yes, of course. Nina. Her last words to me, in fact.

But I’m already jumping ahead of myself.

I need to tell you this story, and it is going to take some time. It’s not because there are a lot of characters, because there aren’t. It’s just that my mind wanders and deviates, and it’s hard for me to tell a story in a straight line.

In fact, you may even notice that the font and typeface may change from time to time. And following perfect grammar? Fuhgedaboudit. I suppose sometimes that will be on purpose to make a point, but other times … who knows why these things happen.

For instance, even as I write this, I’m not sure if it will help you to follow the story by beginning at the beginning or to start at the end and rewind. And I can’t help but go from first to third person. I didn’t even bother to ensure continuity in the timing of the story, but I’m not big on details like that. So you’ll just have to deal. Really, when all is said and done, who’s gonna remember one way or another anyway. Not that I am in his league but it was said of David Foster Wallace’s last work “It’s potholed throughout by narrative false starts and dead ends. Characters appear without introduction and disappear without cause. You put it down and don’t always want to pick it back up. But you do.” My conceit is that if it’s good enough for DFW….”

As it is, I had to start this in longhand because my laptop was confiscated as a lethal weapon before I could board a recent flight to Africa to visit my friend Anin. Why is my laptop a lethal weapon and not all laptops? That’s what I’m wondering, too.

It took me a while until I could get semi-regular access to a borrowed computer, so I had to get this thing down before I lost my notes, and that’s why the story-telling itself may be as much a mess as is the story itself. As I’m writing this, it kind of strikes me that 25 years after computers first invaded the office environment there are basically three things you can do to fancy up your document (unless you are a graphic artist). There is the bold, the underline and the italic. The big decision for a “writer” like me is to choose from among these three. Some of my really clever friends have figured out how to drop in a box, but what do I need a box for?

All I know is, I had a stash of $5.99 whiffle ball sets confiscated by TSA because a whiffle bat apparently IS a lethal weapon and they would not allow me to board with it so that I could take it to the kids where Anin was teaching part time. He had transferred himself to Africa to sleep in, grow his hair long, play the congas. For good measure he became trained to lead safaris when he needed some extra cash.

So there I was stuck at the airport because I had committed my own cardinal sin. That of incorrectly calibrating the magazine-to-newspaper-to-short book-to-long book balance of needs on these long trips.

On this flight I had gone through the books at such a pace that I now found myself stuck at the airport with a major layover and just a few newspapers and magazines to hold me over. If you are anything like me, you find there to be just a reprehensible selection of book offerings at the airport.

No, I don’t want to know the One Way, 7 Habits, 12 Steps, and I don’t want any Chicken Soup, nor do I care where my cheese should be. Nor do I want anything from Ludlum, Follett, Turow, Cornwall or any other Oprah Airport Book Club winners.

Hmmm, now where might I find a good Hornby? Oh that’s right, NOWHERE, because this is an airport in the dead of night.

I need to get back to you about Nina. But first on to Anin, who I was attempting to visit until my mishap. Everyone should have a best friend like Anin.

Let me be real honest with you about me. While I have been accused of being a misanthrope, I’m not, I’m really not. Most of the time I have no patience for people, but that does not make me a misanthrope. Having said that, I am not the kind of guy who likes to be asked to house-sit. I don’t want to dog-sit or baby-sit or do any other kind of sitting except actual sitting. I don’t even like being asked to hold someone’s place in line at the movies.

But I do live by a gentleman’s code, and part of that code is that for Anin I would do anything. He needs a lift to the airport and I don’t say I will check, I just ask what time to show up. He needs help moving, same answer. He asks for some money, I don’t ask when I will get it back I just ask how much and how soon.

So this will sound really gay but Anin is my male soul-mate. My male-mate. That really is gay.

Anin is the guy who when I tell him that a girl I want to ask out was raised Catholic, which makes me nervous about how uptight she might be in bed, he says: “Brother, that girl was not raised Catholic…she was raised hot! Go after that like a dog goes after a slab of a bacon-slathered play-toy.”

Anin is the kind of guy who greets you by saying, “So who are you jerking off to these days?”

Anin is the guy who takes empty recyclable bags to the farmer’s market with no intention of buying anything – he actually hates fruits and vegetables – but as a way to meet women. And it works! “You have to fish with the fish” is how he always put it. And it sounds dumb, but he was right. “This is a volume business,” he’d say. “You do not meet women at ESPN Zone, you meet them at Discovery Zone.”

Anin is the guy that breaks conversation lulls with the most random observations, like:

--“Ever notice you don’t see a lot of left-handed Latinos? Unless they are major league pitchers.”

--“Ever notice that appealing and appalling are basically only a letter or two apart from each other but mean the exact opposite?”

--“Crunch N Munch. One of my all-time favorites. More than even Cracker Jack. But which is the Crunch and which is the Munch? I’d like to know.”

--“Don’t you hate it when you say that someone was using you like a pawn. Like, if you are going to use me, at least make it a bishop or knight or something. But a pawn, please!”

Another time we were eating outside and at the entrance there was a doggie bowl with water and a sign that read “Water for pooches only.” And I said, “How do the dogs know? They can’t read!” And of course he would deny me. “No. Try again.” I used to sometimes think that he would just do that because secretly he liked it so much he’d wished he’d thought of it.

Everyone’s entitled to their little idiosyncrasies, right? For one thing he throws a fit when you say “no problem” in response to a “thank you” by him. “The commonly accepted response is “You’re welcome. What does no problem even mean!” And I would start to defend myself but it’s not worth it. So when I have not gotten under his skin in a while, I always remember to pull the “no problem” card. Drives him nuts.

Now the other thing you should understand should you ever meet him is that he has a small dictionary tattooed on him. By that I mean there are certain words that he wants to remember or he gets confused, like “synchronicity” and “symmetrical.” I have no idea why it’s such an issue. But you should see him when he is looking up a word on his arm or leg. If you want to get on his nerves a little bit, just tell him there’s an app for that.

“Yeah, NOW,” is his likely answer.

We met for the first time during college on a whitewater camping trip with a bunch of random guys from school. And we were taking showers one day in these sort of semi-private showering stalls. It was in the open, but had private stalls.

I’m sure you are aware that young men can sometimes mess with one another. I entered a stall and one of the guys asked who it was so I identified myself, and he started a little friendly chatter and then says: “Hey Manny, we were just talking about Anin. Guy’s a dick, right? No one can stand him.” And as he egged me on further I innocently stood up for Anin and said whatever problem he might have with Anin is his own problem. That kind of stuff.

Well, not about a minute later we exit our stalls. Not just the instigator, but Anin too, who was in the stall next to the jerk all along, which the prick knew. Anin was not in on it. I was being tested. No, testing isn’t right. I was being set up.

Anin meets my eye, winks and gives me the thumb’s up.

That’s why to this day I have always hated the locker-room mentality, from the literal and metaphorical towel-snapping, to the limited universe of conversation subjects, to the pleated khaki and sun-visor look.

We shared the same hierarchy code when it came to addressing guys. Stage 1 is “Hey,” with no discernible history or affection. Stage 2 is “Hey buddy,” said with some familiarity. Stage 3 is “Hey, my man.” Stage 4 is “Dude” sometimes interchangeable with Stage 5, which is “Hey brother.” Stage 6 is when you are practically married and it’s back to “Hey,” which is packed with a million different potential unspoken conversations and moods (acceptable alternative at Stage 6: “Dawg,” as in “Hey dawg” or “You my dawg.”).

Or so I thought.

I walked over to him, chatted a little bit and then said, “See ya, brother,” and that’s when he flinched. He instructed me that a black guy must call a white guy “brother” before a white guy can do the same with a black guy.

“You can call me ‘man,’” he said, “but the safe bet is just to say hey or what’s up until I give you the all clear. We cool?”

“We cool,” I said.

“Now, hold up right there. You can’t say ‘we cool.’”

“I can’t?”

“No sir. You’re too white to pull that shit off too. And remember what I am about to tell you, okay? This is about as important as it gets. The handshake. If you were a good dancer I would advise you to just follow the brother’s lead but I can tell you are not that guy. So when you approach a brother and you start to get that tight feeling in your sphincter about how to handle the handshake, this is what you do. First, take an internal breath and relax. Then, let him extend the hand first. Grab it solid and you can go for the soul shake but only if you are coordinated and prepared to bring in your left hand over the brother’s right hand and hold for an instant. Got it?”

I hesitated, then gave him an army salute, and we laughed it off and went our separate ways. You have no idea how closely thereafter I studied the choreography of the brothers’ handshakes so I could memorize the array of sequences and permutations that seemed to exist. But those things are like the Bolshoi Ballet – it can be admired but never replicated except by trained professionals.

Whenever we saw each other on campus after that he always had a warm hello from me and as we neared each other I used to even to pretend to make several different hand gyrations just to needle him about the handshake business. But we didn’t stay in close touch and it wasn’t until a chance meeting several years after school at a gym that we got reacquainted.

But I think I got sidetracked there on the subject of pricks, and speaking of pricks, let’s go back to our friendly TSA and the confiscation. I assumed the guy was kidding at first. A whiffle ball set? In the ensuing debate I may have said something like…”you’ve got to be kidding me if you think this thing can hurt a fly…what about laptops? One swift blow is all it takes and I take this with me everywhere I go.”

“Not anymore,” the guy said. And he was right. He took it right then and there. No discussion. There ought to be a special place in this world – I mean like an actual country – set aside just for these morons.

So I have no whiffle bats for the kids, and now it looks like I don’t have to worry about killing 20 hours worth of flight time. Oh yeah, and they also took my passport, which is why everyone is looking at me with that walk of shame as I make my way back to the main terminal.

And that’s why I’m sitting in the airport Starbucks, and unlike everyone else in here all wired up, I am writing this in longhand, which makes me feel very naked in the Starbucks.

Which is also where my other mature encounter took place, before I skulked back home.

The counter girl at Starbucks - excuse me - the BARISTA, was just finishing up a grande two pump vanilla skinny extra hot latte (really?!) when she told me she did not have change to break my hundred.

“You should have told me that you were paying with a hundred. I could have told you then I couldn’t break it,” she said.

“Well, either way it’s a little late now for that. You’ve already made the drink, so either way it’s going down that drain or going down my drain. It’s not my fault that you didn’t tell me ahead of time that you couldn’t give me change.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m not going to apologize.”

She, who I knew not at all, and Nina, who I knew…intimately…apparently, had a funny way with words that way.

And like Nina, I don’t even think she realized the incongruity of it. I thought of pointing that out to her and then thought twice. And then thought of it again, trying to decide if I really needed the last word.

So I just kind of repeated it to myself with each word increasingly faint as the pain of the encounter increased.

And then I said it sternly one last time for finality’s sake: I’m sorry… but…I’m not…going to apologize.

Now someone with my linguistic breeding can pull that off and get credit for clever wordplay (I’m the guy that is fascinated by “referential” and “reverential” being one letter off). In Nina’s case, not clever and no word play.

Just one of our many differences I guess. And at the end that’s all we had in common – insurmountable differences.

How do I tell you all about Nina?

Let me start by saying there are two kinds of women: The kind that take things literally and the kind that take things metaphorically. She is, rather, was, the former. Well, she still is, technically, just not mine.

I had a difficult enough time as it was in staking out my place with Nina in our relationship, but language was at least the one thing I had going for me.

In fact, during our glory days she always told me that I would have had no chance with her but for the way I was able to express myself in writing through cards, letters and other notes.

And there was no question, that on the surface I did not have much going for me. Especially when you consider where and how we met. At the gym, I am the guy in a constant state of starting over to regenerate whatever former athleticism I may have had, and she is the perpetually in-shape gym rat and trainer. I would walk into that gym, and as I came through the doors and absorbed the cavernous scene of social activity and physical activity, I would snake my way through the hordes feeling a bit like that scene in “Goodfellas” when Ray Liotta as Henry Hill is making his grand snaking entrance through the Copacabana (except in my case, I am actually receding from the attention rather than basking in it, as is he).

Even as I think about it now, I’m not sure how I broke through, considering.

Considering that I had no great “story.”

Know what I mean about a story? We live in the era of the story. Every one’s got to have a narrative. I think it started with the Olympics and that “up close and personal” bullshit. You weren’t really an Olympic athlete unless you came from a small town, a broken home, a family of 12, a job at Dairy Queen, and a sister with lung cancer. Now everyone has to have a back-story if you are an athlete, an actor, a politician or the guy who saved the dog from drowning in the well. God help me for using Roger Ailes to help make my point, but he said, “If Richard Nixon was alive today, he’d be on the couch with Oprah, talking about how he was poor, his brother died, his mother didn’t love him, and his father beat the shit out of him. And everybody would say, ‘Oh poor guy, he’s doing the best he can.’ See, every human being has stuff – stuff they have to carry around, stuff they have to deal with.”

Now you can’t run for office or win some award unless you can talk about either all the hardships you experienced or all the fascinating talents you possess. In other words, it’s not acceptable to be normal or average.

Here’s one. There was a candidate for office and when the paper wrote a story about her the lead – the lead! – was: “She has been the CEO of a company, studied six languages, traveled the world to assist rural women in economic development, produced a best-selling book and battled breast cancer.”

Here’s another. Guy running for office grew up one of 10 kids, never graduated high school except with a G.E.D., volunteered in the Army, rose to the rank of captain, lost an arm in friendly fire, came back and with the GI Bill got his under-graduate degree, then an MBA at Harvard, became CEO and has the perfect family biography to go with the campaign photo.

One more. This guy’s a governor. The article describes him thusly. “What defined his childhood was loss,” and then it explains that his father died before the guy turned 7 and his mother was widowed twice by the age of 40. And just for good measure, we are told, this guy is also “slowed down” by dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. This did not stop him from going to Costa Rica to help poor farmers (is there any other kind there?), founding a free community health clinic and then building a micro-brewery from scratch. See, THAT’s a story!

We all know Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder were blind and Beethoven deaf. Impressive enough. But then there’s the legendary musician who says his distinctive piano style is partly the result of a malformation at birth of the bones in his head that made him slightly paralyzed on one side of his body, leaving his left hand stronger than his right. He can’t just be one of the most talented musicians ever to sit on a piano bench; he’s got to ascribe it to some crazy against-all-odds storyline.

Ailes himself spins the tale of his affliction with hemophilia. “You died. That’s what you knew about it. I was told many times I wasn’t going to make it.”

And then for kicks there this schmo who fancies himself a “lifestyle designer” and makes sure that in his bio everyone knows that he has written two best-selling books, speaks five languages, is the first American to hold a Guiness record in tango spins and is one of only a handful of foreigners to have ever practiced the art of yabusame. Yeah, I had to look it up too. It’s Japanese horseback archery. And just for good measure there is Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder who can claim to have been raised in the same Queens neighborhood that included Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Willie Mays and Malcolm X. At the same time.

Then I’m reading an interview that a reporter is conducting with a household-name famous actor and halfway through the reporter cannot even contain himself and enters into the record of the story that his own life’s arc includes his father, described as “an orphan, a gambler, a con man who never understood love.” What does this have to do with the richly lived actor he is writing about? Absolutely nothing. Apparently, though, no one can resist the urge, even when the story is completely not about them, to let us know that they have their own story, if only someone would cover that!

So beat any of that.

And I got nuthin.

No hobby, no advanced degree.

Never learned a foreign language (not even sign language).

Never played on any team that you had to try out for.

Can’t play an instrument, can’t sing, can’t dance (though I do own a mandolin just because it’s fun to say I own a mandolin).

Can’t juggle oranges or do easy magic tricks. Can’t remember the simplest card tricks.

Can’t impersonate accents. Can’t draw worth a damn. I just do the same freaking doodle over and over and over.

For the life of me I can’t remember the simplest of jokes, whether I just heard it the day before or have heard it a hundred times.

Can’t do those animal shadows except for the one easy bird thing, where you lock your thumbs together and wave.

I fumble with chopsticks, and I don’t know the first kind of etiquette exclusive to a foreign country.

I haven’t traveled anywhere that has an altitude higher than its population.

No heartbreaking losses or early deaths to speak of.

Didn’t have to overcome a stutter, ADD or some other learning disability

Never been with anyone long enough to break up with them.

Never been, ah, tied up.

Never thrown a punch. Never been a “person of interest” in a police investigation.

Never commandeered a vehicle.

Never dated a cheerleader. Not especially tight with gay friends (why do I think that couplet doesn’t really belong together?).

Never banged even a B-list celeb (though I did do a chick who did Bill Gates).

Only “safe word” I ever needed was when I had braces and tried kissing in high school.

Can’t really tell a good joke, though I’m told I’m funny, but in a spontaneous kind of way.

I’ve never even been overseas, and I am so non-ethnic looking I could pass for Canadian before any sort of in-fashion exotic heritage.

You don’t even want to know my SAT scores.

Never been in rehab.

Never cared for anyone with AIDS or Alzheimer’s.

Hate running and can’t swim, so I can’t do triathlons. Heck I’m not even bi-athlon-curious.

Have had friends with a damned pilot’s license and I’ve never even owned a convertible.

Never had a hot car. Or even a sunroof.

I was not born or raised in a place called Hells Kitchen, the Village, the South Side or anything else remotely dangerous or romantic.

Never learned Heimlich maneuver or CPR.

I’m not color blind

No visible scars. No tattoos.

There is no joint I can walk into where I would be greeted as a “regular.”

I’ve never known a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Peace Corps? Ha. I never even marched for anything, or spent so much as an hour in jail as part of any respectable social protest.

I don’t think I’ve ever even lived anywhere outside the Eastern Time zone.

Hell, I’m not even adopted or left-handed.

Can’t whistle, blow smoke rings or make that funny little fish sound you make by flicking your neck near the Adam’s apple.

But I know a guy who grows his own grape leaves. And owns several minor league baseball teams.

Another who is a sculptor in his spare time. And also builds his own homemade speaker systems.

And a color-blind cop. I don’t mean, like he has no racial issues, I mean he is literally color-blind, and you just don’t run into that many color-blind cops.

One who owns a fast food franchise, and not only is the company “headquartered” in Bermuda for tax reasons, but he lives in the Bahamas and has a yacht in the South of France while everyone else does the heavy lifting.

And another who owns classic convertibles. Excuse me. He is a “collector.” In his presence you are not allowed to say he “owns” these cars.

Then there’s the one who went to law school. AFTER he went to medical school.

I met this one guy who served in both AmeriCorps and the military. And once traveled with the circus during college.

I know a guy with a black belt, one who teaches yoga, another who speaks five languages, a guy who is a bookie, another who is a private investigator

I went to school with a woman who became the country’s most renown TV political pundit; another who is a judge and yet another who managed several well-known rock bands.

I had a buddy who was the authority on all things alcoholic – he could tell you some minor detail about 100 different beers and the origin of every hard liquor beverage. It’s not a career, but it’s something to hang your hat on. I always say everybody should be good at something.

The level of detail on a particular subject to which some can expound just astounds. There ought to be a country for people like that, so they can all live together and ruminate over their precious minutiae and esoterica.

A couple years ago my boss made me follow him around on some personal errands. We go to a clothier where he engages in a conversation about Nantucket reds and chambray button-downs. At first I thought he was asking about wines! Then we go to an upscale footwear shop. Asks if they carry any ankle boots with a Cuban heel. I mean, how much of a snob do you have to be to keep track of this level of detail? And he’s not even a mixologist. Or a drunk. It’s like when you find yourself in the middle of a conversation with a friend and somehow the subject of shoes comes up and they start giving you advice on pronation, and I’m like, really? You too? How the hell do you all of a sudden know so much about shoes?

Me? I GOT NOTHING. I know less about more than anyone. There’s not one subject that I know more about than anyone else. There’s always someone who knows more about the banking system or ornithology or repairing vintage watches or analyzing every major World War II battle, or engraving, or worms or something.

Y’know, I follow race-car driving just enough to be dangerous about it. I have heard about “restrictor plates” my whole life of watching stock car. Do I have the first idea of what it means? No. But there’s a guy who even if you don’t ask will tell you that restrictor plates are placed on carburetors to reduce airflow to the engines, which in turn lowers horsepower and keeps speeds from getting out of hand.”

Or like that character Miles in “Sideways,” who says things like, “I like all varietals. I just don't

generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California -- too much oak and secondary malolactic fermentation.” Who talks like that? People other than me, apparently. I couldn’t riff like that on anything.

All I got is a queer kind of last name that isn’t remotely suave or contemporarily ethnically cool. Just a last name that can’t be pronounced.

I’m Manny Fagut.

Yeah, I know.

Of the Russian Faguts.

The original name was Fagutschevsky and you know the Ellis Island drill. You think my grandparents were going to stop them and say in their non-existent English, hey you can’t make my name Fagut?

Every once in a while I would get this: “What’s the best way to pronounce that?” Mmm, how about the correct way.

Not that I think about this a lot, but you are familiar with popular party game that everyone has played, which is Googling yourself? Yeah, Google “Fagut” and here’s what you get: “A pregnant raccoon. If a male raccoon has sex with a female raccoon, the female gets pregnant and is called a fagut until she gives birth.” It’s in there, trust me. Even in those moments when I have been a good writer, I could not make up something that good.

My buddy Pedro used to tell me that I should legally change my pronunciation to Fa-goo, so it sounds French and exotic. How do you explain to your really close friend that you can legally change the spelling of a name, but there is nothing in the rich jurisprudence, not to mention logic, which allows you to legally change the pronunciation of a name.

If you think names don’t matter, just imagine how many of these films would have become classics if named, say: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Fagut. The Outlaw Josey Fagut. Willy Fagut and the Chocolate Factory, Mr. Fagut’s Opus, The Thomas Fagut Affair. The Big Fagut. And perhaps my two favorites – Butch Fagut & The Sundance Kid and Citizen Fagut. You get the idea.

So you can imagine how it goes over every time I’m introduced. Or have to introduce myself. Like to Nina, a trainer at my gym.

I had been noticing her there for some time. And to be honest I couldn’t be sure if she was the type that everyone noticed and I was just one among many, or if I had made a new discovery, or if perhaps this was someone that you fall for and no one understands why. Every once in a while I thought I was catching a smile my way, but then I remembered she’s not a professional trainer, she’s a professional SALES PERSON who happens to be selling training. So, of course, I get a smile once in a while, just as I get a head nod every once in a while from the other trainers – because I’m a potential customer!

In the past I’ve been bedeviled by women in so many ways. On the one hand there are the legions of women for whom I would have sacrificed an arm to get near but got nowhere. And then when on occasion I managed to attract the attention and interest of someone that I think is beautiful, then I immediately begin to question what I saw in her and lose respect for her judgment that she would be seen with me.

And so ensued the battle within myself over Nina.

I guess that’s because it’s not that she has one extraordinary feature that stops traffic. There was just a perfect kind of symmetry from head to toe. Even a kind of symmetry in how she moved. And I don’t even know what that means. But let’s just agree that she walked with no self-consciousness, but not in a haughty way either.

I was mindful of one of the precepts of “Anin’s Code,” which is that the length of time a guy stares at a hot chick is in direct counter-proportion to the percentage of chance he has with her. And yet, I recall conversations with women who have told me completely contradictory preferences. For every woman who is interested in a shy guy, there is another woman who likes a guy who is aggressive in his pursuit. I even saw this one woman who was completely aware that she was being eye-balled by a guy at the gym. He was so oblivious that he didn’t even realize that while he was pumping iron she had walked over, stood guard in front of him waiting for him to stop, and eye-locked him right back. He was completely flummoxed and didn’t even know what to do after he got what he wanted, which I guess was her attention. By the same token, I always assume if a stranger is smiling at me I am always suspicious that they are going to want something from me. Or my fly is open.

Don’t get me wrong. I am no misogynist, and no sexist. I like women. I love women. I much prefer their company to men, even for platonic relationships. Outside of Anin just about any time I am with guys I am bored. The conversations are always the same. Makes me feel like I’m talking with myself. I would much rather spend time with women and hear their stories and learn how they think. I had a friend in college who couldn’t hold a conversation about anything other than getting laid. “I don’t want anything to do with plants or flowers or history or scuba diving or any other subject thing that can’t be fucked.” That’s not me.

You would never know it from my first foray though. I went to a camp where we were blessed to have a camper nicknamed “Hot Sally.” She wasn’t really that hot but when you are a teenager and a girl is blowing any guy that wants it, you don’t have to be hot. When it was my turn, I fumbled around with her but never let her consummate her specialty. Instead, we talked the whole night through, and I’m sure she wondered what kind of crazy dude would rather talk than fool around. But that was me, and so I stayed while others were sent home (as was she, of course. Heaven only knows how long it took those guys to track her down.) That sure made my mom happy to find out that I wasn’t falling into that kind of crowd, but it wasn’t for any moral reason that I turned down the chance. I just didn’t feel ready. Which is probably also why my first concert ended up being the Beach Boys instead of AC/DC. I was a shy, unconfident teenage boy. Ah, how times have changed. Now I’m a shy, unconfident, unemployed adult. But that did not deaden my interest in women. If anything, it just elevated my interest in getting to know women on lots of levels.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional fling with a friend. In fact, to me there is a difference with a fuck buddy in that a fuck buddy is someone to fuck as opposed to a friend you are fucking.

Look at the ass! That’s what keeps the world spinning. There’s your God!

And yet, once in a while I still manage to play it cool. I am reminded of this woman I saw when riding the train once. We were all still boarding and taking our seats. She comes through from one car to my car and you can just see that at that instant every man is aware of her presence. She is so striking that I had to remind myself not to stare and so I challenged my depth perception skills by trying to stay glued to the paper. Sure enough she walks by every ogling, creepy dude, by an empty seat and then sits next to me, and I know it’s precisely because I did not give her the immature college boy eye-lock.

I was similarly transfixed by Nina at first sight, but I wondered if she was someone that every other guy looks at immediately and sees what I see. In that case, a) I have no chance and b) I don’t really like sharing in that way anyway. Or was she someone that nobody else notices? In that case, a) I have made a startling discovery or perhaps b) there is something either really wrong with her or really wrong with me. And does it even matter?

The only specifics I will tell you is that I am under 6’ and she is actually a touch taller than me (my mom nagged me playfully about how I walked – kind of slouched with my hands deep in my pockets: “it makes you look shorter,” she’d admonish, and I would always ask her, “so who’s measuring?”). She – Nina - has the most beautiful brunet hair, whether it is falling freely down her back, or falling down the front with each side massaging a breast, or even tied up in back. Olive skin. As for the rest of her, what’s the point? As I have learned from Anin and other friends, there really is no universality. Just think of her as someone whom would both grab your attention getting out of a cab, setting up a pool shot or trying on jeans at the store. Hard for me to look away.

Only other way I can describe her is that even in a crowd, when you are not even looking for her; you just gravitate to her. I could go on about her “frame” but it doesn’t matter because it’s the overall effect that matters, and my type might not be your type.

And, I can’t know for sure at this point, but, steady yourself, I think those are….REAL. In L.A.!

I’m not saying she’s Penelope Cruz, but upon meeting Cruz for the first time, a magazine writer captured my, uh, thrust, when he described her thusly: “She had just woken up, and she was fresh out of the shower, her wet hair still slicked back. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but her skin was flawless. Her eyes were bright, and her teeth were perfect, and she was wearing a top that revealed her brown shoulders. It’s hard to write about how beautiful a woman is without sounding like a creep or a pervert, but I defy any man to meet her and not wonder whether his Clarke’s nucleus has just exploded.”

Oh, and she – Nina, not Penelope - looked great in a Dodgers cap. I could get laid every weekend if I looked that good in a baseball cap.

Plus she had a tattoo right … there.

I will admit that I love the pursuit of the pursuit. Even the many failures, while enervating, are also sometimes energizing for the release of pheromones at the start of the chase. I imagine it is like an Indy car driver who floods the engine to make sure it’s working, but almost more so because he just can’t help but get a charge out of hearing the noise and the rattle and the pressure inside the car when a new race is about to commence.

As much as there was this startlingly strong physical attraction – I had already decided her skin would be flawlessly soft and warm with just a few nice freckles at the top of her visible breast line - she also had great patience with all the clients she worked with. From the time I was in grade school my mother had always told everyone, “He’ll be fine so long as he finds someone who will be patient.” Just like the “patient” teachers she sought out in school for me, and the “patient” bosses I needed.

Watching her was entrancing. I already imagined the kinds of romantically powered evenings that I could produce spontaneously, and the kinds of concerts and movies that I so desperately would find as an excuse for her company. So comfortable in her skin, I thought. I’d like to be around someone like that. Of course, it’s kind of difficult to be in someone else’s skin.

I started out simply noticing Nina training someone at they gym, and my attraction grew to the point of trying to figure out her schedule so that I could be there at the same time. This guy she was training drove me nuts just watching him. He was one of those guys who looked like he didn’t even need to be at the gym and knew it. He actually … preened. Plus, he was way too much of an exhibitionist when it came to bouncing around to the music on his headset. In a way that was an attempt to say: “if only you had the cool music I am listening to.” Jeez there ought to be a special country just for those kind of idiots. Speaking of which, half the time I wear my IPod to drown out loud people on the plane or train, but it’s also fun when a couple of chicks are yakking away to put the buds on and leave off the volume just so I can overhear their conversations. You never know what you might learn.

Anin’s advice to me with Nina was obvious: Just sign up for something. But that’s a death sentence. I asked out a woman who cut my hair, and because it’s so much easier to lie than to say she wasn’t interested she told me she didn’t date clients. Because, you know, the ethics of hairstylists is apparently akin to the very high bar of lawyers or dentists dating their clients.

I watched her sometimes come into the gym, I watched her at work in the gym and I watched her sometimes leave the gym after having showered and changed. And regardless, I could not take my eyes off her.

I actually hated the gym. I felt so out of place; like I was the guy that no matter where I stood in the weight rack area, I was always being forced or expected to move out of the way for someone else (for that matter why am I always the guy that has to get out of everybody’s way … on the street I have to step aside … on the escalator … in a bike path … in those long lines at the movie theater, I’m ALWAYS in the spot where we people want to cut through. As it is, my life is an obstacle course, and yet I’ve always got to be the guy to let a car in. It’s like my life is one big handicapped or maternity parking zone, and there is no place for me to find a spot. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who move out of the way and those for whom the rest of us have to get out of the way. But I kept coming back to the gym because I desperately wanted to see her and tried to get into eye-contact position. I figured if we could just get into the head-nod recognition zone, then I had a chance.

She now insists that I imagined the onset of the mutual head-nod, and I will admit that sometimes I am wont to see what I want to see, but I did see what I saw. The progression went from head nod to door-holder on her way out.

They were nice enough to publish the trainers’ schedule at the front desk so you could make appointments. Not that I had the guts to arrange one for myself.

As I started to contemplate a future with Nina – and by “a future” I mean the return of a greeting, something in the “hello” family – I remembered how my sorry ass was shit-canned by, let’s see, first the hairstylist, then the physical therapist, the lawyer (don’t ask) and the financial counselor (again, please don’t go there). All using the universally irrepressible “Sorry but I don’t date clients.” Where do these people meet to share notes on the rejection strategy?

I figured this time I would outfox the fox.

My riposte was at the ready: “Okay, then, if I stop seeing you, will you start seeing me?”

That stopped the physical therapist, I think it was, for a brief second, as if she were just aligning all of her kings in the final round of gin.”

“I’m pretty sure that the answer is still no.”

“Then what is your reason for saying no if your answer for saying no is no longer that I am a client.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” she said.

I knew that way too many times Nina was able to catch me catching a glance at her. And when I thought just maybe I caught here stealing a glance my way, I fantasized about her doing so in the hopes that I would approach, but deep down I just had to believe that she was just registering my image in her would-be-stalker database.

That’s all I needed. To move across country to L.A. trying to leave behind all my failures, and in trying to revive my writing career get published in a stalker database.

Did I mention I moved clear across the country?

Did I mention I was leaving behind some failures?

I’d most recently been booted from my job as a newspaper columnist because in a piece on Michelle Obama I made what I thought was an appropriate cultural and historical reference to the John Lennon song “Woman is the Nigger of the World” and the paper insisted on writing “Woman is the N-word of the World,” and I argued that you can’t just change the name of a song like that. It means what it means, and it wasn’t in any way offensive. In fact it was a powerful metaphor, and I was simply saying that he couldn’t write that song today. First I argued vociferously and then vehemently. Three yelling matches over political correctness later, I was out the door. Again my mother’s voice came to me like it did in junior high when I could not abide some stupid history teacher or another: “Manny, why do you always have to pick a fight?”

I always assumed that, like the women in my life, the employers in my life would come around to their senses and ask me back. Not so much. And in this case I was actually fired by someone named Manewer. Yeah, you got that right. Linda Manewer was the editor-in-chief, so it was ultimately her call. She’s not exactly Little Miss Charming to start with; kind of your classic uptight, puritanical, New England schoolmarm type. Relentlessly negative, always assuming the worst. A real bag of laughs. Even when she is in the act of editing, which she insisted doing by printing out the copy and then slashing her changes with a red felt tip pen, she squeezed so hard on the paper that it occasionally scrunched up or flew off the desk. If you were going out for lunch she’d ask you to grab her something. She’d also ask nicely, I’ll give her that, but she never once offered to pay for her own meal, not to mention ever offering to cover yours, just as a courtesy of running the errand. Not once. She’s the kind of person that you find yourself rooting against. The kind that you hope actually does get downsized by technology. More on the newspaper later, though that’s enough said about her.

I never had much of a clue what I wanted to do for a living. But from the time my mom started taking me to ball games and concerts I would eagerly wait for the newspaper the next day to see if the coverage matched the experience I had just had. And I used to day dream about how I would have written about the highlights and the sideshows and the characters and people watching. So when I got my column, I lived for the challenge of trying to transform and transfer my experiences and observations in a way that would make readers feel like they wish they were there or that they saw what I saw.

To be completely honest, I was already on probation at the paper for having written “insensitively” with some word-play around “paraphrasing” “parasailing” “Paralympics” and “paralyzed.” Don’t ask.

Truth be told, I was on already on one of my periodic downward spirals (is there any other kind?), and the events at the paper just kind of sealed it. Although I did not fall prey to a drinking problem (which is the usual bête noire in my line of work) I will admit to a few too many things catching fire.

So I moved on without any further aggravation. And when I move on, I … MOVE. ON. In this case to L.A. Believe me this was no easy decision. I’ve tried to restrict myself to cities with just one-stop-shop area codes. Those should be the best cities. Miami is supposed to be 305. Detroit is supposed to be 313. Boston 508. Chicago 312. New York 212. New Orleans 504. L.A. 213. San Francisco 415. Seattle 206. You get the picture. Now you have these atrocities like 617 in Boston, 917 in New York, 708 in Chicago. It’s just not right. Why can’t anything good just stay the same?

Besides, cities have histories. Suburbs have dumb festivals and events generically named and vanilla-produced as if they are actually unique, like First Night New Year’s Eve “celebrations” that occur in the town center, which is generally where most people flock for their shopping. Okay, so maybe my urban history wasn’t the kind of thing to make you famous, but it made for some good bar-stool fodder. And it was still life in a real city. And I was on my way to one of the most storied cities of all.

So there I was in my car playing and replaying and replaying again the one song that gave me direction – “Screenwriter’s Blues,” by Soul Coughing.

I know this seems like a cheap ploy to buy space and time, but if you know the song at all you know how intense it is. And if you don’t, well you need to get this. I have always envied screenwriters like Quentin Tarantino and others who were able to tell their stories through a soundtrack – not just random background music courtesy of Elmer Bernstein or Danny Elfman. And there’s obviously no room for that in a newspaper column, so this is my chance.

You should hear the whole play-list, especially since I had at least a couple thousand miles to cover. I won’t waste your time with the whole thing but it was everything from Charlie Musselwhite’s 1966 “Cristo Redemptor” to Isaac Hayes’ 1972 live 18-minute version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” Leon Russell’s live “Jumpin’ Jack Flash/Youngblood” from Concert for Bangladesh, Bruce’s “Spare Parts” and “The River,” Guitar Shorty’s “Story of My Life,” “Steve Miller Band “Look Through the Window,” (yeah, I was in THAT mood), Joe Louis Walker’s “I’ve Been Down” and a ton more. I have a lot more obscure music in my collection. There are times when I pick up an album that I know no one else has bought in at least 15 years and I often think: hey, shouldn’t someone be getting word to the artist, because I think he or she might want to call and thank me personally!

Music’s important to me, I guess you figured that. In fact, I guess you figured music and women are never very far apart in my life. In fact, and I am sorry if it feels like I’m stealing from Nick Hornby here, but it’s to the point that I had even aborted more than one dalliance upon discovering that the nature of a woman’s musical taste was just not up to my snobby tastes.

So I headed West. Way West. I forget where I saw it, but it has been written of California that it once was the destination to free yourself of the past. For grown-ups especially, it was the place to start again, and for younger people a place to go unencumbered by the expectations awaiting them from whence they came. for grown-ups. And considering the music scene out west, no one was surprised by my choice of California, but they all assumed I would go to San Francisco rather than L.A. because I hate phoniness so much. But San Francisco combines my two least favorite things to do – walking, and walking uphill. Besides, I believe that in this life we are given only so many steps to use and that basically you die when you run out of steps, same thing with your car ignition; only so many starts come with it, so be judicious. So I really hate the idea of random walking and prefer to preserve those steps for as long as I may need them. Everybody needs to believe in something; that one works for me.

I remember on a flight once, I was able to look over inconspicuously at the guy next to me banging away at his laptop, and he was writing a script of some kind. And it was funny. I found myself chuckling out loud and I figured if this guy could just make that happen with no seeming forethought, then what the heck I’ll go to L.A., and write stuff. How many others could there be?

Here are the song lyrics to “Screenwriter’s Blues.” This isn’t random or gratuitous, so please get yourself the music; it makes all the difference.

Exits to freeways

twisted like knots on

the fingers

jewels cleaving

skin between

breasts.

Your Cadillac breathes

four hundred horses

over blue lines

you are going

to Reseda

to make love

to a model

from Ohio

whose real name

you don't

know

You spin

like the Cadillac was

overturning down a

cliff on television

And the radio is on

and the radioman is speaking

and the radioman says

women were a curse

so men built Paramount Studios

and men built Columbia Studios

and men built

Los Angeles

It is 5 a.m.

and you are listening

to Los Angeles

And the radioman says

it is a beautiful night out there!

And the radioman says

Rock and Roll lives!

And the radioman says

it is a beautiful night out there

in Los Angeles

you live

in Los Angeles

and you are going to

Reseda; we are all

in some way or

another going to

Reseda someday

to die

and the radioman

laughs because

the radioman fucks

a model too

Gone savage

for teenagers with

automatic weapons and

boundless love

gone savage for

teenagers who are

aesthetically pleasing

in other words

fly

Los Angeles beckons

the teenagers

to come to her

on buses;

Los Angeles loves

love

it is 5 am

and you are listening

to Los Angeles

I am going to

Los Angeles

to build a screenplay about

lovers who

murder each

other

I am going to

Los Angeles

to see my own

name on a

screen, five feet

long and luminous

as the radioman says

It is 5 a.m.

and the sun has charred

the other side of

the world and come

back to us

and painted the smoke

over our heads

an imperial violet

It is 5 a.m.

and you are listening

to Los Angeles.

You are listening.

You are listening.

You are listening.

You are listening.

The truth is, unlike that guy on the airplane, writing does not come very easy to me. I like to write, it just does not come easy. And even though it’s easier for me to read than to write, I don’t really care for reading much. I was not really much into literature. Or much of anything else for that matter. I was so unsophisticated I really did not have much idea of much going on in the world. To me, literature was “Ball Four” and my favorite: “Sandy Koufax: The Legend, Arm, the Jew.” That’s why when I did start reading something other than the sports pages, I read biographies. I really wanted to understand who was who and why. Of course, most biographies are full of fiction too. Who knows what’s real, ever?

Every once in a while I’d hear about some famous names like Tammany Hall and not know whether that was a person or a….hall. Some characters were so rich, so legendary, so larger than life, and with such colorful names that when I heard others refer to them – Atticus Finch, Ring Lardner, Tennessee Williams, Jay Gatsby, Grantland Rice – I was never sure who was real and who was fictional. I could never even keep straight between Jekyll and Hyde, and which was the good guy and which was the bad guy (but Jerry Lewis as Professor Julius Kelp and Buddy Love – THAT I can tell you all about).

For that matter, I can remember favorite movies and books and whatnot, but I can only remember that I loved them, not specific scenes or lines, just a sensory recollection that it brought me a certain emotion – joy, laughter, sadness, pain, whatever. Saw Eric Bogosian’s one-man show on Broadway. Can’t remember a single line or even a theme. I just remember I was there and had a good time. Same thing with the Amazing Kreskin, which, I think, qualifies for a bit of irony.

As it turns out Los Angeles is a pretty good place to be when you are a little insecure about your scholarship.

In Los Angeles you will meet a woman who refers to the men’s room as “man’s room” and isn’t trying to be funny.

In Los Angeles you will meet women who have never read anything that isn’t held together by two staples in the middle and has a bunch of post card-like mailers drop out when you open it up.

In Los Angeles you will meet a woman who insists that the Dodgers were named because they were owned by the Dodge car company.

In Los Angeles you will meet a woman who refers to herself as a Californian-American.

Luckily, they are all different women.

And to be fair it’s not just the women. In L.A. you will meet a man who is so vain that he gets himself hard by thinking about himself.

And allow me to clear the air on behalf of my gender. We do not look at all women as potential sex partners. First, we eliminate those with whom we do not want to have sex before deciding whom we would like to pursue. And I wanted to pursue THIS one. Nina.

So imagine my surprise a few months later when this naturally stunning woman finally came up to me in the gym, with a printout of some kind in her hand and said, “Excuse me but are you…” and then looking down at her paper, “Uh, Manny, Manny…” then looking up at me and down again and up again “Umuh…..”

Fagut.

And at that point, as a million times before, I jumped in and said “Yes, I’m Manny,” because I just could not bear to hear the name again.

I figured they were going to either walk away with a great story for their friends or they would walk away wondering if they had a story. And I just could not go through with it, ever.

“I’m Manny,” I said again.

“Well apparently you have five free workouts coming, and they assigned me.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I don’t remember signing up for anything. I would remember that.”

“Well, it’s in the computer. It’s up to you, but you may as well take advantage of me.”

In L.A. you will meet a woman who says, “you may as well take advantage of me.” Without irony.

In L.A. you will also meet a woman, who, when you try to make an appointment – it might have been Nina too – says “I get tied up pretty easily, so it’s your call.” I smiled at that one.

I’m not much of a smiler, but I’m not sad. I think I’m just too busy observing and taking everything in, sometimes in degrees of intensity that are matched by others externally, but they just can’t possibly see it in me. I do however, always – and I mean always – light up around two people, my mother and my daughter. My mother used to say to people “He doesn’t smile much, but when he does that wide open smile, I like to catch that smile with a butterfly net and hold on to it.”

If The Shirt Fits

If I have any kind of “story” at all, it’s that I was raised by my mother alone. There was not so much as a picture of my father in the apartment I grew up in, so I have no details about him. I guess Mom did the right thing by not telling me anything because I have no bitterness about someone I never met. He didn’t leave me, because I don’t know him. I never met him. I didn’t even know what he looked like until I was probably about 13 when I was rummaging through the boxes in the basement and came across a couple of photos of him with my mom. I’m guessing they were in their 20s.

Actually, the photos were inside of a small, banged up silver steel box case with some stickers on it that were clearly from the era of Vietnam and Woodstock. A harmonica case.

In the photos, they looked like an exceedingly, richly, eternally happy couple. In one, they were kneeling, as if with great anticipation and eagerness, arms draped around each other, and in the other, they were casually sitting, she in his lap. In both cases there was some kind of boat pier in the background. He had a Jack Kerouac look to him. In both photos he was wearing jeans, sandals and one of those hip collared pocket polos or tees. Maybe like a Penguin brand? Like you might have imagined Arnie Palmer in his heyday, nonchalantly flicking a cigarette as he got ready to slam a ball down the fairway. The photos were those old square-shaped, white-bordered snapshots, dated about 40 years ago. I flipped it over looking for descriptive notes. It was well preserved, and I easily made out my mother’s clear script - “Catalina.”

I flipped it back over for a moment to see if I could detect any resemblance with him, and then I stuffed them in my shirt pocket. I took the photos to my mom and asked her about it. She kind of rolled her eyes and told me he almost never went anywhere without a shirt like that; but whatever the shirt, it always had to have a pocket. I asked her why, and she seemed either surprised in my interest or stunned that I had caught on to the similarity.

“Just in case,” was her answer.

“Just in case, what?” I asked.

“Your question is also your answer,” she said. She loved to give me cryptic responses, I think partly as a fun way to tease my imagination. In this case it also may have been that she just did not want to have so much as a superfluous conversation about him, after all these years.

You ever have those moments when you have indulged in some really unsavory or depraved activities? I won’t give you a prospective list but think about some of the things you’ve done on your own or with guy friends, girl friends … the kind of stuff where you are thinking, “man if my parents ever knew I was indulging in this kind of thing…” My mom’s response kind of made me wonder what was their equivalent. Or maybe I don’t want to know.

So I let it go until I was in a club one night, and right now I can’t remember if it was John Nemeth or RJ Mischo that night, and he was moving his harps with magician-like timing – from his hand to his shirt pocket as he juggled the harp he wanted for a particular song. All of a sudden I thought back to all the greats I had seen, like John Mayall, Mark Wenner, Paul Butterfield, James Cotton, and sure enough I could flashback and see them all making that same motion probably a million times, exchanging one harp for another in their shirt pocket. Mom never said anything about the old man being a harp player. Funny, how both he and my mom’s brother – my Uncle Chick (more on him later) – were both musicians. I didn’t get an ounce of musical talent from either one of them. I’d like to think if I had, I would have been the kind of guy who poured my soul into the musician’s life.

I guess he never came back for that silver case. I took the case and those photos, always assuming I’d give them back to her. I looked at them again one more time before putting them away and this time I looked at my mother not my father. Man, she was attractive. I can imagine why the old man was interested and tried to keep myself from thinking about his pursuit of her. Not in the creepy way. Just curious if it was it one of those on-fire, once-in-a-lifetime romances or a mistake from the start. I never asked her about it and never really brought him up again that I can remember.

As it turned out, I had a lot of great friends whose dads treated me like their own, so I never felt I was missing anything. About the only conversation I can remember where he came up was when I overheard my mom and Uncle Chick talking about him in some context that I could not make out except for my mom saying, “He meant well,” and my uncle saying, “That’s a pretty low bar.” My uncle did not use a lot of words in this case, nor most often, as I would learn, but he was as accurate as he was brief and direct. He also had a funny way with some expressions Though born here he sometimes spoke like my immigrant grandparents must have. That expression “brand spanking new” became “it’s spank brand” as in “I just bought this – it’s spank brand!” and “the damndest thing” became “that thing is the damndest.”

We never had any money. No extras whatsoever. But my mom said to me on several occasions: “Manny, I need absolutely nothing materially for myself. We will never have a lot to go around, but you will always have what you need. So I don’t want you ever to worry about how I am doing or how you are going to survive.” And I never once felt like I was missing a thing. She was the independent-thinking kind of mom who wouldn’t let me say “under god” in the pledge of allegiance in school and took all the heat from teachers and principals to uphold her right to do so.

My only torment was instead the name, so when my mom says that about me smiling … hey buddy, you try walking around with a smile when you had to survive school when every day some other numb-nut yells out “Hey Faggot” and everyone waits to see if I turn around.

Or the other geniuses who came up with “Heeey Fagg-ut” to the cadence of Bud Costello’s “Hey Abbott!”

And what am I going to stop them with? “You calling me a faggot?” since “yes” would be the correct answer.

I mean why didn’t my parents just get it over with and name me Francis or Sylvester, too. I’ll never forget coming home from school the first time I’d been taunted about it and my mom had to explain it all to me. It was like being told you’re adopted – you just never even see it coming and that’s when you start to try to make sense of it all.

So is it any surprise that I keep my smile in reserve? And when I do break it out it’s real and lasting.

Nina’s smile on the other hand is natural and lights up a room, and, of course, I was unsure at first when the smiles directed at me were really for me or the pro forma greeting that everyone gets.

You should know that I have a bit of a hearing problem that I will explain later. So it was on our first date that we ended up at a restaurant where the din bouncing off the walls made it difficult for me to hear Nina clearly.

As has been documented by Anin, this necessitated what he now calls the “Fagut lean-in.” Anin takes great pleasure at the re-telling of the origins, but since he’s not here…

As I found out quite by accident, years ago my need to lean-in to hear my companion had the subliminal – apparently charming – effect of transmitting a signal of great interest and concentration, when in fact I was just trying to make sure I wasn’t nodding and saying yes when the opposite response was called for. What a photo gallery I could create from those conversations when I answered in the affirmative (or negative) to a question that clearly demanded or at least expected the opposite response. If you remember the photo triptych at the bottom of the first page of Playboy interviews, I could create an entire scrapbook of just all the funny, weird and unexpected facial reactions. I’m pretty sure I never lost a job or promotion or god knows what over it, but then, how would I really know for sure?

My eyes are perfect though. In fact more than perfect; it’s probably the one literally extraordinary physical feature I have (which is how I was able to sneak undetected looks at the screenplay on that plane ride). I can see peripherally as if I do have eyes on the side. My vision is off the eye chart, so to speak (sorry about that one). The upside is you take in a lot more visual and behavioral information, but because It’s actually the opposite of tunnel vision the hang-up is that because you are so aware of well what’s going around you it can make it difficult to concentrate. That’s how I came to notice at the gym that red-heads don’t sweat and all women put their hair up in a pony tail but I also lost count of my reps on the leg lift.

As Nina and I were talking I noticed out of one of those, far off to the side, the stacks of weights. The fruit-loop variety colored kind. Light blue, pink, orange, and so on. Anin had always been warning me, “Whatever you do, don’t use the colored weights this time. Have some pride!” (He also has had to remind me to not sing out loud on the treadmill. And to try not to fall off of it for that matter. “How hard is it to stay between the lines…like driving….or bowling! You look like Buster Keaton out there.)”

After completing our series of sessions and exhausting every method to extend the session, I did finally squeeze all of my reserves and asked her if she was interested in doing something together. And when she consented I said:

“You do? You will?”

“I do. I will.”

And this time it wasn’t my faulty hearing but my faulty radar.

“I never really thought you’d be available,” I said, meaning it as a compliment.

And instead of either taking it nicely or perhaps returning the lob (and who doesn’t sit there waiting for THAT light to turn green), she in her characteristic sense of self-regard, responded, “Who says I’m available? All you asked is if I want to do something together. We can do something.”

I don’t do well with coy. Unless I’m doing the coying and here I was being coyed. A cunning coy, for I had no idea if her purpose was harmless flirtation or to make sure that I did not know what to think. Did that mean it was just a friendly get-together, as opposed to a date? Did she have a boyfriend and I was maybe just a way to make him jealous? Was she a liberated field player?

“Are you available for dinner? Does that count as something?”

“I am, and it does.” If this was going to be a habit of hers I realized I needed to stop asking her multiple questions at the same time. ANNOYING.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression that I am a dating machine. I have dated a lot, but not because I am a lady-killer. I’m just not that much of a communicator (ironic, right?), so the relationships tend not to go very far before it’s time to move on to the next one. There was even one woman who said “I don’t even know why you’re breaking up with me.” I didn’t even know myself except that I had figured it all out in my head over the few months we were together and I just came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be interested in any long haul.

I just had this feeling about Nina that if I could get anywhere within striking distance of her consciousness that this time I would be different.

Since I was still pretty new to town, I told her she’d have to pick the spot and she chose something called The TomCat in Venice Beach. Let’s put it this way, the TomCat is the kind of place that you go only if your intentions are completely known, or unknown, if that makes sense. But it was right by the beach and that’s really all that I cared about.

I ended up taking a nap before the big night. I wanted to really be refreshed and on my toes. A nap does a man good; there’s actually no such thing as a bad nap. The thing about napping is that the older you get the more you realize there is such a thing as a good nap and a bad nap. Napping through the ages is like sex through the ages. When you are in those teens and twenties trying to get every last piece of ass, it’s generally agreed that there is no such thing as bad sex – mostly because you just have no idea when the next piece is coming. You like to think you are JUST THAT GOOD that it will always be inevitable. But trust me. It ain’t inevitable. Anyway, everybody should be good at something, and I am good at napping anywhere, any time.

And then once you have finally had the kind of sex where your friend is not on auto-pilot you realize that there really is a difference, and when you have had the bad kind you know your dick will be plenty ready – and patient – for the next round of good sex.

Same thing with napping.

As a young man you think you are controlling the naps, but trust me, you aren’t. It just overtakes you so you have to go with it. In your 30s you start to appreciate the nap because you realize that any little thing could get in between you and your shuteye – babies…yapping girlfriend…neighbor’s lawnmower.

The best way to wake up from a nap is of course to not even realize you were napping. No tossing and no turning. The virtue of a good nap is to get from here to there without ever being aware of it.

You are probably thinking naps are just for really old farts, but I’m telling you there is much to be appreciated about the nap as a young man. Besides, not everything starts to go south in middle age. When my friend Niles was turning around 35 he developed man-boobs and his humiliation wasn’t only the adjustment and accommodations he had to make, it was the surprise of it all.

“Manny, any one ever tell you that stuff like this is going to hit you?” I gave him a look. The one that says, do you remember who you are talking to? Who was going to tell me, my mom? Niles went on to tell me that he would even occasionally find a woman sort of caressing and playing with his chest during sex, and once in a while there would even be a grabber. “I can honestly say,” he said with great honesty, “I never thought I’d be able to relate to all those chicks that I squeezed so hard in high school and college when I was ‘Mr. Hands.’ I don’t know why they didn’t complain more. If it was half as painful to them as it is to me when they grab I almost feel like I should go back and apologize to them all.”

And then he practically turned white (which is saying something given his swarthy background). With detectable trepidation in his voice, he asked, “What…ah, what the heck you think comes next?”

Of course Niles is the kind of guy who calls your cell to see if you got his text, so you can understand that much patience is required. He also has this habit of mixing up his metaphors. “Fucking like rabbits” becomes “fighting like rabbits.” He must also have some kind of animal fetish because, okay, “thirsty like a fish” makes sense, but he also says “hungry like a fish,” “tired like a fish,” “horny as a fish.”

That guy Pedro I mentioned … every time he calls he begins by saying “Hey I don’t have much time to talk …” I am always inclined to shout back, “Then call back when you do!” But then I remember that I actually prefer my phone conversations somewhere between brief and non-existent. You’ve heard of people who are not tactile? I’m not oral (nor aural for that matter). But by design I maintain a core of these friends that is actually less than one handful. And Niles and Pedro, like Anin, is on that list.

Also, Denny, who is the one we all go to when we need a movie reference. You can’t have a conversation with him without him not only referring to a movie, but quoting a line from it. He endeared himself to the rest of the group by semi-regularly beginning a sentence with “I can’t believe these words are about to come out of my mouth, but I agree with Manny.”

Fortunately, it is easy to get back at him because I don’t know anyone who is more wrong, more often with his predictions. If it’s cards at the casino, don’t ever double or split when he tells you too (trust me). If it’s predicting sports outcomes – whatever you do, and I am actually adamant about not betting on sports because there is no aspect in which you can control the outcome, my one exception is if Denny tells you someone is a sure thing to win or lose, bet the opposite.

Even within the game, he will say of a team that’s down by a huge sum (and with utter confidence: “Book it guys, they are coming back and it’s going to be the story of the week. I can feel it in my gut, and when I feel it in my gut I am almost never wrong.”) But he is never right. It’s just such sheer joy to be around someone who is so sure … so supremely confident so often, in the face of what is an undeniably damning track record. We rarely even bust him on it anymore because it’s just so plainly evident what is going to happen after he lobs one of his predictions. We just all start to smile a bit when he starts in to enjoy the process. Once in a while, just for kicks, we will call him on it and the answer always begins this way: “If that guy [insert player name] had only [insert alleged player error]. Ha! If Denny had been at the table when studio executives were voting on TV deals for “M*A*S*H,” “Cheers,” and “Seinfeld” they never would have seen the light of day.

He’s also one of the reasons I stopped betting on sports. Something like 20 years ago we were analyzing the week’s opportunities, and he said, “Who do you like in the Bears-Lions game,” and I said I really liked the Lions. This was back when Barry Sanders was playing – just the most exciting runner ever in the history of the game. So he bets on the Lions, who get crushed, and Denny comes after me about it. “Why did you tell me to pick the Lions?! I lost a bundle!” he yelled. “I didn’t,” I argued back. “All I said was, ‘I LIKE the Lions,’ as in they are fun to watch. I like to watch them. That was not enough to calm him. “You KNOW, that’s not how it works, Manny. There’s a language here, man. ‘I LIKE Team X’ means you are picking Team X to win, not that you get aroused watching them.’ It was too much aggravation to risk guys yelling at me over that stuff, so like I say, that’s one of the reasons I stopped.

That episode aside, the other great thing about having a friend named Denny is when someone asks where you want to eat and someone says, “Denny’s,” you get to always say: “Denny’s, Denny’s? Or Denny’s, IHOP Denny’s?” Ah yes, how we love a running joke.

These guys know me. When we are trying to figure out a restaurant to go to, I will say something like, “I’ll try anything once,” and they will say in unison with no opportunity for rehearsal, “NO YOU WON’T!” and then we all break out laughing. There is no room for half friendships. Only guys who are loyal to the end and at some point or another (often, multiple points) have had each other’s back when no one else would have. It’s a fun group because when it comes to The World’s Most Important Subject we are each in a different place – one is married (can you guess which one already?), one is a confirmed bachelor, one is divorced, and I am of course…um, between relationships.

Enough about naps and man-boobs and the trials of Niles. Back to the TomCat. We ate dinner outside. Perfect setting. Perfect temperature. Light breeze. The only little irritant was the waiter’s line about “I’ll be assisting you,” as if I’m a child who can’t get into his high chair. I don’t need assistance I just need someone to take my order and bring it to me. Could you imagine making a living where every five minutes your job is to answer the question “What do you recommend?” My standards on just about everything are so different than everyone else I wouldn’t last a day in a job like that. But on this night I was able to control myself. In high school my mom always told me that girls are watching how you treat help as much as how you treat them.

I had to run over to the place to check out the menu first because the food is so funky out here. And no, I don’t use an app to check out menus online. There is no such thing as just getting a sandwich or a salad out here. I’ve learned not to initiate too many conversations about the food because all of a sudden they are talking to you about the “flavor profile” and I’m already lost. Then you try to read a menu and before you can ever get a chance to find out what appeals to you, first you have to endure a written lecture detailing a level of specificity that I thought was only found in launching space shuttles. Shortly before collapsing from the hunger that brought you to this establishment you will learn if it’s natural, local, organic, unrefined, non-GMO, cage-free, hormone-free, additive-free, preservative-free, sustainable, what color it is, what time of day it was picked, the shape and color when it was harvested and probably who won the Dodgers game that night. I went to this one place because it said American cuisine. I just wanted some easy food. And they had a small menu so the waitrons read the menu out loud. After this meticulous rendering of every last detail, when she was done I just said – “do you have any food?” and then I left nicely.

I always assume everything is a lie anyway, so I don’t know why I get so worked up about that stuff.

I am just a burger, Coke and fries guy. Especially the Coke. No Frappucino, no triple-grande half-caf decaf, no espresso. Something straight out of a bottle will do fine. Nowhere will you find more hyphens than in L.A. menu literature. Somewhere I saw the following description: Hand-grown, pasture-raised and grass-fed on a hormone-free family farm, preservative-free, nitrite-free, MSG-free, minimally processed with lacto-fermented, organic, natural, local, sustainable, herbal fruit whey probiotic enzymes hydrating in a pesticide-free, cage free, free-range, fish-friendly, low-impact farming environment. I pointed out all the extra paper that was wasted spent on the copious descriptions, which kind of seemed in conflict with their sustainability goals. I left that one too.

By the way, here are real, honest-to-goodness menu items. I shit you not, these exist and apparently there are people that go to a restaurant like the rest of us, sit down like the rest of us, read a menu and then open up their mouths and say these words with the expectation that something will then arrive on a plate for them to eat. Here’s one: “Laughing bird shrimp.” Another: Whole Quinoa, Amaranth, Millet and Chia Seeds (like the Chia Pet). And trust me that’s just a couple of the dozens.

But I digress.

This is what I had been playing all day in the car, in fact, probably since Nina accepted. “Stitched Up” by Herbie Hancock. Again, the music helps.

Exactly how you hear it, is exactly how it all went down...

It was later in the evening

That the facts and the figures got turned around

True, there was a woman

Yes, she did advance my way

And I can't be sure exactly but I swear I saw her say my name

It was the right time

She was the real thing

I had to walk away

(See) Don't wanna be, stitched up out of my mind

Feeling strung out, laggin' behind

All trapped in, can't do a thing because I'm

Locked down

Stitched up, feeling the burn

All strung out, I finally learn that

Trapped in, can't do a thing because I'm

Locked down

I wonder where she came from

I wonder where she's gotta go

Who's to say she's single

And who's to say she's on her own

Girls like that don't sleep alone

(Alright here's the thing, here's the thing)

That girl is flawless, and I know I'm not the first one to think that

And since I'm not the first, I sure won't be the last

I'd spend my whole life looking behind my back

I just don't think I'm up to that

Stitched up, out of my mind

Feeling strung out, laggin' behind

All trapped in, can't do a thing because I'm

Locked down

Stitched up, feeling the burn

All strung out, I finally learn that

Trapped in you can't do a thing because you're

Locked down

Stitched up, out of my mind

Feeling strung out, laggin' behind

All trapped in, I can't do a thing because I'm

Locked down

Stitched up, feeling the burn

All strung out, I finally learn that

Trapped in you can't do a thing because you're

Locked down

Locked down

Stitch me up, string me out

Trap me in, lock me down

Stitch me up, string me out

Trap me in, lock me down

I don't wanna be

Stitch me up, string me out

Trap me in, lock me down

Stitch me up, string me out

Trap me in, lock me down

Because I'm down and down and down (oooh)

And sure enough, she was so dolled up when she arrived, and I was such a ball of nerves, that I wasn’t sure if she really did it for me or she just always really looked good. Because of course I wanted to think it was for me. She had her hair up at the time, and I could see her whole face, so fresh and wholesome.

I looked around at the available tables. Everywhere you saw a person in a chair you saw a Blackberry or iPhone next to their plate, like it was another piece of silverware. You just know that when everyone pulled out their chairs to sit down they placed their devices on the table like in the old movie westerns when everyone put their guns and holsters on the table. These things are so damn prevalent that when you go to a movie nowadays, the second the flick is over the place lights up like a meteor shower the way everyone reaches in a nano-second to turn those things back on. Like, god forbid they should go 90 minutes without a text or email.

Did I mention that in L.A. you will meet a woman who when you are explaining about your Russian heritage and you make a joke about Russian pogroms being the poor man’s Holocaust she will greet you with a blank stare?

Truth is she was anything but a bimbo gym trainer. She had a graduate degree from Stanford and was the director of fundraising for Phillipe Cousteau’s Earth Echo; it’s just that she only paid attention to what she paid attention to. And Russian history was not on the list.

“So what do you do when you aren’t trying to save the world … literally” I asked.

God I hated when people used that expression, and there I was violating my own rule – dropping in literally when it was quite apparent that the literalness was obvious and intended.

“And what about you, do you consider yourself socially conscious?” she asked.

I was caught unawares. That, and basically, I don’t give a shit about all that much. “I, uh…I have a couple Obama stickers on my car,” was all I could come up with.

I learned quickly that we each had our own idiosyncrasies. And despite her superior educational breeding and professional bona fides, hers was language.

She quickly had a charming way to mispronounce or misuse words. Actually, not even mispronouncing but just making up pronunciations. Like, she would say the word “formalized” as “formulized.”

In L.A. you will meet a woman who makes up words like “over–exaggerated.”

Some of it could be comical though. Whenever I was supposed to pick Nina up she’d say “What’s your estimated ETA?”

And every time I would say, “It’s not estimated ETA. It’s ETA. The ‘e’ is for estimated. “ It got to the point that she got me saying “estimated ETA.”

And, like I said, she was not dumb. At one point during dinner she said: “if external is the opposite of internal then why isn’t excrement the opposite of increment.”

And I had to admit she had a point.

We soon bonded over miserable relationship experiences and would-be suitors.

At one point it was clear I was having trouble hearing her, and she was trying to be charming in not making me feel bad, so she lobbed in that “I had a boyfriend who mumbled, and I would say ‘What did you say?’ because I couldn’t understand him and he would always reply: ‘What?’”

“Ah, that’s nothing,” I said.

“I had a girlfriend who talked in interrogatives…and answered her own questions! ‘Do I think there is a real career in retail? Yes. Am I really close to making my decision? No. Have I really considered all the options? Not sure. Should I….’”

“I get it. I get it,” she laughed. And I laughed. And we were on our way.

“I had a boyfriend who constantly kneed me in movies when he figured out the plot and made sure to tell me what was going to happen. Little did he know that everyone had figured it out a half hour before. He also had this annoying habit of eating the noisiest, crunchiest snack food like Nonpareils and Jujubes, during the darkest, intense movies when it was completely silent in the theater...completely disrupting the experience for everyone. God, I can still hear him smacking his gums. And the Milk Duds! Holy hell! During ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ he actually got up and went back for more! Why couldn’t he just stick with Junior Mints like everyone else. Even when you get them frozen there they don’t make a sound. Jeez-o-peet, it’s the perfect movie candy there is.”

I was really starting to like her. She wasn’t at all what I thought she might be underneath that stunning exterior. I just HAD to keep it going.

“Well, I had a girlfriend who was so controlling that when she made food for us at the apartment she would give me the same tiny portions she made for herself, even though I outweighed her by about 80 pounds.”

“I had a boyfriend who every day found a reason to yell at someone: “Not today, buddy! Not TODAY!”

I shifted about and cleared my throat self-consciously on that one before moving on with my next entry.

“I had a girlfriend who told me her ethnicity was Californian-American.” (That one is a lie in that it wasn’t a girlfriend. I hadn’t yet had a girlfriend since I moved, but I needed to buy time and had actually heard someone say that before).

“I had a boyfriend who called me ‘doll’ during our first date. He’s also the same guy that perfected the art of giving me advice after the fact. Like, ‘Nina I wouldn’t have taken that turn,’ only after it was clear we were going to be enmeshed in a two-mile back-up. I’m convinced he did it so that way he could always be right!”

“I had a girlfriend who only used terms of affection when she was mad at me, like: ‘What the fuck were you thinking babe!’ and ‘Not right fucking now honey!’ And my favorite was ‘Fuck you sweetheart!’ I always wanted to stop her and say, ‘which is it already?’ She was also the one that used to cut out the sex advice articles out of her Cosmo. Okay, it was bad enough that she was reading Cosmo, worse that she was cutting out articles from the sex advice column, but then she wouldn’t circle or mark anything so I had no idea if I was supposed to stop doing something or start doing something!

“I had a boyfriend who called me ‘my nigga’.’

“I had a girlfriend who got confused by double negatives.”

“Oh I get confused by that all the time,” she said, and she laughed so heartily I didn’t even worry about messing her up with one. But I felt compelled to throw out another one so we didn’t linger on my bonehead move.

“I had a girlfriend who liked to wear the jerseys of pro sports players when we went out.”

“I had a boyfriend who would not finish his sentences because he thought we were so in touch with each other that I could complete his thoughts. Which I couldn’t.”

“Hmmmm, I was going to say that I bet you hated that but then I’d be finishing your sentence.”

We smiled at each other. “The other really funny thing about it,” she added, “was that we had one of those deals where we were never positionally-compatible. Know what I mean?”

“Oh do I,” and I did. It’s that state of physical space where every time you think your partner belongs on one side of you when you are walking together, or whatever, they are opposite of what they should be. When I turn to speak to someone or grab their hand they NEED to be right…there.

“If it makes you feel any better I had a girlfriend who LIKED to finish my sentences. HATED THAT. Even I don’t know where I’m going when I’m talking and when I’m stopping, so how could she think SHE knew? She also was constantly making references out of sequence, like about stuff that had happened hours or days ago, but without any real segue, and she did it because she was convinced that we were each other’s muse and soul mate, and that I would know exactly what she was referring to. I also had a girlfriend – well, let me say I was with a girl – who was texting in between her, ah, magic tricks. I said ‘Can you just maybe not?’ and she gave me the heavy sigh and dramatically threw her Blackberry back into her purse on the night stand. ‘I just wanted to find out where my girlfriends and I were meeting after,’ she said. That one led to the inception of my “10-year-age-difference rule.”

Back to Nina.

“I had a girlfriend who constantly repeated lines from movies as if we’d seen them together. I said a hundred times: We did not see that movie together – that was someone else!”

“Um, you mean you had a boyfriend.”

“What’s that?”

“Your last one. You just said: ‘I had a girlfriend who…’ Not a boyfriend. A girlfriend.”

“Ah, I don’t think so. But whatever. What if that was the case. Would you care?”

“Certainly not. I just, just didn’t know if that was a slip or what.”

“I’m sure I just got confused because we were both saying these so fast. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, right?”

“Right. Of course.”

Color me confused at this point. No idea if that was a true Freudian slip or she was just messing with me. Whatever the case, we seemed to ebb on the outrageousness of our comparisons.

She started up again, I think mostly just to try to cover her tracks. “I had a boyfriend who called the remote a channel changer and he called the treadmill a running machine.” She swung her head in the regretful wistful way that you or I might recall squirrels tearing up your lawn.

I was thinking, well, they DO call it a rowing machine, so….

I waited for the punch line.

It was not forthcoming.

She could tell.

“Okay, never mind that one. He just was not a candidate for Mensa, let’s leave it at that.” Her energy renewed to keep the back and forth going she then quickly offered, “I also had a boyfriend who watched so much porn that seeing all those men ‘at attention’ made him gay.”

“Okay, I’m calling you on that one,” I said.

“But I had a girlfriend who farted.”

Uncomfortable pause.

“Then maybe I should tell you that I sneeze like a man.”

Thinking this meant the coast was clear, I said, “That’s alright, I cry like a woman.”

Another uncomfortable pause. This time, hers.

“Just kidding. Actually, I listen like a woman. I think that’s why I have so many women friends. I have little use for guys actually. Makes me feel like I’m listening to myself. Sports. Chicks. The boss. Sports. Chicks. The boss. Sports. Chicks. Burgers.”

“Wow, a guy who admits he likes to listen to women. That’s either the greatest come-on I’ve ever heard or you are truly fit to be studied by modern science. What else should I know about you? I had a boyfriend who always made it a point to buy Magnum condoms when we were at the drugstore together, but when we’d go back home, he was clearly installing one from a separate box of regular-sized. AS IF I WASN’T GOING TO NOTICE EITHER WAY. Hello? I am fucking him, I think I would know what size it really is.”

God I love a woman who uses fuck like that. Not the gratuitous swears-like-a-sailor type, because that seems forced, and really, if I want to hear that word a lot I can just go to a ballgame and listen to a bunch of guys in their 20s. No, this was nice. What guy doesn’t think that if the chick uses the f-bomb just right that he’s probably stumbled on someone with some nice tricks to share. I was going to then tell her about how I had once opened up a chick’s nightstand drawer looking for pen and paper during one of my late-night bursts of mental energy and instead found a box – like the size that could house a decent baseball card collection – with not only a pretty fair supply of Magnums but every imaginable brand, color, and magic trick (by the way, did you notice Magnum now does not only have Large and Extra Large but Double XL. I mean, come on, give us ordinary guys a break!). But I thought better of bringing it up for fear she might think I’m a serial drawer sniffer.

“I had a girlfriend who left me with a note that said only the following: “Everything you thought was a lie was true, and everything you thought was true was a lie.”

“Nice.” She said. Sympathetically.

I played with my food then looked up with an unsure smile and said, “Well if that doesn’t make you want to swallow a bottle of pills, there’s always my brain aneurysm story.”

“Your what?” she said incredulously, and, of course I realized I was way out of turn in trying to be funny. And at the same time she wasn’t sure if I was trying for a cheap laugh or not.

Another few painfully long moments of food playing.

“I’m sorry I brought it up, I wasn’t trying to be funny. I just sometimes lose control of my judgment when I’m nervous. There’s no reason to talk about it. And besides, it’ll just ruin what’s left of this meal.”

“No, no,” she said softly and reassuringly. I had no idea. Obviously. But I want you to tell me. If you feel comfortable.”

And she let her hair down at that moment.

Which was also the moment that there was still one other table going strong; a table of deaf people eating not far from us, signing to each other.

I couldn’t help myself because I was nervous. And when I am nervous I crack wise.

“And they say JEWS talk a lot with their hands!”

“Excuse me?” she said, not out of offense but thrown off by what appeared to be the non sequitur

“Uh nothing.” I turned back to her. “Sorry. Well I will just give you the short version and we can go into it some other time if you like.” So of course I gave her the long version.

But I will spare you and just give you the short version.

The short version is that it happened when I was about 25. A brain aneurysm is kind of like a burst appendix except it occurs in your head due to a blood blockage and in rare cases you can suffer a stroke or brain damage. No one knows how the blockage occurs or even when it starts. I was one of the rare cases in the good way in that I was given help quickly. I was playing basketball that night at the gym. The only reason I was there in the first place was I had just come off some big-time losses from a trip to Aruba and going to play ball at the gym was part of my therapy. I was fortunate that enough people were around for someone to act decisively. Brain aneurysms are pretty rare at that age, so you can imagine how unlikely it is that anyone would know what to do, beyond calling 911 at the sight of someone in great distress, which is what someone – Anin I later found out – was quick thinking enough to do. What are the odds we would be at the same gym that night, after not seeing each other for years. Since then we not only got reacquainted but he was the guy by my side throughout recovery and we have been tight ever since.

So the aneurysm ruptured, sending blood gushing into my skull and the hemorrhage caused enough damage that I essentially had to re-learn how to read, write, walk and talk. It took me several years to “fully recover.” In the first few weeks of physical therapy I had a pronounced imbalance and lack of coordination. If you want to measure the true depth of my relationship with Anin it’s that he started to calling me Kaiser Soze from the deformed Kevin Spacey character in “The Usual Suspects,” which he then shortened to just Kaiser. Now THAT’s affection, know what I mean? Even my mother got in on it. When she would call Anin to check in on my progress she would ask, “So how’s the Kaiser doing today?” I guess if there was any great luck involved, especially for a 25 year old, it’s that the long- term physical after-effects were only visible if you knew to look for them, so I could conduct just about any kind of activity or job without drawing any curious looks or questions. But there is no getting around that occasionally, especially when I was tired, I was a little more off balance than usual. My mother would of course deny that anything was ever visible but I live by the Cyrano de Bergerac rule: When your mother says one thing about a feature of yours and the rest of the world says another then you know it’s just your mother being nice.

“He seems like the loveliest of guys,” Nina said. “You are lucky to have a friend like that. You’d be surprised how many guys can’t get there with each other. To be really honest, I have had great girlfriends, but no one that really sustained that kind of bond. Maybe you could be MY Anin,” she said, laughing quite clearly at the absurdity of her having said that.

“Before you get carried away, just know the guy ain’t perfect. For one thing, he’s totally into slow jams. Has like a dozen slow jam playlists. And likes chick flicks. Don’t get me started. Also, into anime. His favorite actor is Michael Chiklis. He has a Twitter account. Worst of all, he’s never on time. Never once been on time. For anything. With me, every time I have to be somewhere, it’s like a contest to get there a minute early, defying traffic, finding a parking space, missing my turns, you name it.”

“Really, you are THAT competitive?”

“You should see me trying to get a spot at the mall during the holidays.”

But back to my brain. I told Nina that the other blessing in disguise is that you can’t remember the event and therefore the therapy you go through doesn’t seem out of place; it just seems like that is what you should be doing at the time – until you finally figure out that no one else has to do it! I did a bunch of research and talked to a few doctors about the potential for contributing to my writer’s block, and I got the medical equivalent of “your question is also your answer.” Ask enough doctors, and you’ll find whatever answer you’re looking for. I think the only one I really trusted was the one who said, “Some things are just simply unknowable and you have to choose to go on.” I think that was the most honest answer I’ve gotten from anyone on any subject. It sure beats, “It certainly can be a factor, but not necessarily.” Fuckers.

I went on to describe the painstaking process, including learning all over again what was funny and what wasn’t. And that in itself got quite a laugh from her, and at that point, she leaned in. Way in.

In fact, the one thing that I did kind of, sort of leave out was that the only real permanent damage was that I became a little slower in processing information. Like a half beat off, not enough that most people would really take notice of necessarily. Somewhere along the way I learned to compensate by developing a habit of leaning in to listeners as if I was hard of hearing – which I was not, but it became a subconscious way to find a way to receive information faster or more clearly.

As I learned in later years, that lean-in, which Anin generously named the “Fagut Lean” created a perception with women over dinner dates that I was especially interested and attentive, compared to most men. This turned out to be very helpful in “advancing the cause.”

On this particular night, I had no such conspiratorial intentions.

A skeptic would say that I cynically used that story to get falsely or more quickly intimate in an emotional and physical way but I can honestly tell you that this was different. But let me remind you, there were clear pitfalls to this particular condition, primarily in mis-hearing ordinary conversations. There were harmless mix-ups like the time I couldn’t get straight whether the punch line to a story was “gas station, period,” or “gestation period.”

And then there was the time that I inadvertently perpetuated the falsehood that someone was gay, because when I thought I heard “He outed himself,” instead what was said was that “He outdid himself.” THAT took a little while to repair!

In fact, I came to believe much later, when I replayed the evening many months later that in fact, it wasn’t at all a signal of nervousness but a truly mature feeling of comfort and freedom, and a desire to start a relationship that would be marked by honesty and openness. Yes, I wanted to pull up that sweater and pull down the zipper, but I swear I did not plan the night that way.

“Funnily enough, that’s how I ended up coming to your gym. I still do some rehab and the PT place suggested the gym you’re at. And Anin has been there every day for me since and I would do the same for him. He knows everything about you by the way.”

“Really? Everything? We’ve never even been out til tonight so what could you have possibly told him?”

“Oh, you know. Guy stuff.”

Her lips curled irresistibly playfully. “No, Manny. I really don’t know. Why don’t you tell everyone?”

I kind of looked around to see what she meant by “everyone,” thinking this was just another one of her endearing Nina-isms, and then I realized we had outlasted everyone else. She was not being dim. She was being…hilarious.

Suitably embarrassed, I said, “Well I guess you got me on that one. I probably said things I shouldn’t have said. I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s fine. I’d just really like to know.”

“Alright, I will tell you. But if I come clean, can we have an agreement that whatever happens between us we make a pact to be completely honest with each other? Because I will be completely honest with you now; I have never been completely honest with any of those girlfriends that I just made fun of. “

“I was going to say … that was quite a trail you left behind.”

“Et tu!” I said, not being sure that I would mortify her by either admitting that I had bounced around a lot or implying that she was a slut.

“Touché,” she said and raised her glass for a clink. From that moment forward, by the way, whenever we went out to a meal we commenced by toasting ourselves with a bent knock of the glasses and a mutual “touché.”

“So do we have an agreement?”

“Have I ever lied to you?” she said with that crazy lip curl of hers.

“No, you haven’t. We have an agreement.”

I proceeded to tell her in politely graphic detail that which really was true, which you by now know, because you were the first to know. I was flat-out smitten by her from the get-go. And I explained why.

And she became flushed. And I knew I had been true and it was the right thing to do.

We went back to my apartment together. Onward and awkward.

More on that in a bit.

The night of the next day I called Anin and recounted everything.

“So you gave her the old aneurysm sympathy story. Nice move Manny.”

“It was different this time. It was organic. No ulterior motive. I just thought for once I should be honest with someone from the start.”

“Plus …”

“Yes?”

“I gave her the Ed Drater.”

“You are shitting me, Manny.”

“For real.”

“Wow. This is something. You gave her the Ed Drater on the first night?”

I lowered my voice to adapt the fake-swinger/Ted Baxter voice he and Anin often exchanged.

“Oh, I gave it to her, but it wasn’t at night.”

“Why did I not see that one coming,” deadpanned Anin.

“Seriously Manny, how in the world did you work in the Ed Drater after one night?”

“Hey dawg, it just … seemed right. For what it’s worth we had this really intense moment during dinner about being honest with each other. And I just felt like I needed to show her. I wasn’t looking for affirmation or anything. I just really wanted to share it.”

Okay, I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m sure you are wondering what the hell is an Ed Drater.

Ed Drater is the other part of my back-story that led me to L.A. And I confessed the whole thing to Nina, so I’ll explain it to you the same way I told her.

You may have even heard something about this sad chapter in my life if you check the Internet close enough.

I had been at that newspaper that later fired me since I left college. And by the way, I hadn’t even graduated. I had interned one summer at the paper and just never went back to school because I liked the work so much more than school. By the way, that’s how I’d lost touch with Anin at that point, until the brain explosion episode in the gym.

My boss at the paper told me I had to finish my degree if I ever wanted to get a staff job and get anywhere there. But here’s the funny thing about the newspaper business. These people that are supposed to be correspondents of the record of the day? They can’t remember jackshit. They are also a very practical sort, and if you can fill space with the least amount of editorial intervention, well, you are in the clubhouse. Plus, this was Hartford – home of the Whale! – so it wasn’t exactly THE paper of record. Yes, I lived and worked in Hartford, Connecticut. I drove a Pontiac Aztek too, so shoot me!

Anyway, back when I started at the paper out of college they put me where they put most people. Fact-checking and background-searching for the obit writers. So like any other rookie I used what was then called microfiche to look up old obituaries. So it was basically a free lesson in history and biographies. And so when it came time to start writing drafts I went further back into the files to see how they were written. Partly because I didn’t know the paper’s style but also because I wanted to find my own style and I was curious if they’d always been the same.

I have always been a huge fan of the ‘40s and ‘50s. The photographers Robert Frank, Weegee, the graphic artists Saul Steinberg, and Bill Gold (classic movie posters) Bogart movies. Marx Brothers movies. Bettie Page. Sinatra and Chet Baker. The Giants-Yankees-Dodgers rivalry. Jim Murray and Red Smith. James Dean. Marlon Brando. Natalie Wood. You get the picture.

So I went way back in time and I found that the paper actually had a policy. Rather than publishing every death notice that was submitted, they treated it like true journalism and published a small handful of extended obituaries with real public interest. The paper was actually renown for these and even published several volumes as books.

I talked to an editor about it later, to help me understand how they came up with a point of view. This was a guy who had really lived through that era. A guy you would probably hate as your father but love as your grandfather. In fact, he really was a Guy. Guy Bonnafide. He said to me, “Manny, those weren’t deaths, those were lives. And that’s what I wanted us to write about.” This Guy didn’t settle for a standard horizontal comb-over; he went full Zero Mostel and started it from the top of the nape of his neck and combed forward. With all the grease that kept it in place, you could probably ski jump off his head. Nice guy, though. He certainly looked after me.

Although, I will say this, and if you are the least bit squeamish about scatological humor, you might want to jump the paragraph. While Guy was wonderfully nurturing, charmingly irascible, and ceaselessly protective, he was also a Loud Farter. So here’s the scene. Imagine yourself in a newsroom just like you’ve seen in the movies – lots of cubes and open spaces, the walls are lined with the offices of the editors, columnists and execs. If you are in the cube zone, it’s like being in the giraffe compound of the zoo...you can see just about everything. Frequently, during any given day, you would witness folks march towards Guy’s office in ones or twos for meetings of whatever kind. And just as they were about to reach their destination you would invariably see them stop, pivot and turn around. Silently, and…remarkably, without expression. This was the sign that Guy had detonated another bomb. I’m laughing as I write this just thinking about all the times I saw this peculiar kind of parade. I think there was once that someone finally had the guts to say something to him and he implored, “Take it from me kid, you don’t want to contain that kind of a poison in your system. It’s actually better for everyone in the long run to let it out. You never want to hold anything inside too long. Anything.” That’s the kind of drama we’ve sacrificed now that newspaper world has been turned over to The Huffington Post, Daily Beast and all the other online publishers. Remember the famous New Yorker cartoon – “On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog?” Well, in the online publishing world, no one hears you fart.

But I digress. The obits I was telling you about a minute ago? In some cases they read like pulp fiction or investigative pieces. I came across this one obituary that I printed out and just could not get out of my mind.

Man’s name was Ed Drater. Lived into his mid-70s.

Ed Drater was famous for one thing. For being something he wasn’t. It was one of the great hoaxes of any era. If you know about the Howard Hughes hoax and how long that took to unravel you can imagine how long you could pull one off if you really tried in an era when television wasn’t even in every household.

This is the story of Ed Drater.

Ed Drater was born into a loving but pathetically poor family. That much is completely true.

Because the family lived in such extreme deprivation the boy was given up for adoption and taken in by an elderly couple. But soon enough by just terrible luck they too were hit by an unforgiving financial reversal and were unable to care for him. They didn’t have children or other relatives capable of taking on the boy. So he bounced around from one foster home to another throughout his adolescence.

By the time he fell into the hands of the Woodinghams, Ed was 10. But the foster system was so arcane and no real files of substance existed, and the Woodinghams didn’t know much more about the boy other than the history of moving from one house to another. So it came as some surprise to them that Ed Drater was retarded, as it was called in those days. And you can only imagine what that meant back then. That was a time when the Kennedy girl was lobotomized for the same thing, and when her lobotomy made things even worse she was institutionalized.

But the Woodinghams learned after their first child, a boy named Yale, that they could never have children again, and they were desperate to have what they considered a nuclear family. Out of respect for all the transitions the boy had been through, they decided that despite the challenges, ultimately they wanted to adopt Ed and being preternaturally sensitive people decided he should keep his name for some smidgen of continuity in his life.

For his part, Yale could not have been happier to have a new addition even if it were not a natural sibling, and even wit the disability. He was just happy to be a big brother to someone.

In fact, Yale “adopted” Ed in his very own way, becoming – even more so than his own parents – the most protective person a retarded boy could ever hope to find. That was really saying something considering the taunts and even the physical abuse that occurred for being different. Mind you, Ed was a loveable child and a wonderful soul. The only behavioral issues were those that you might associate with what we now call learning disabilities. He was gentle, loving, sweet and generous to his family and anyone else who treated him with the least bit of kindness. Especially, to Yale.

And so it went. The two bonded as best friends. Yale always made sure to take Ed to the movies with him, to watch him and his buddies play ball, and when the time came, Yale even dispensed with college so that he could stay in town, and find a place to work that he could one day buy for himself to give Ed a place to work too, as he got older. And that is exactly what happened. Yale turned his savings into a bakery and when he went on delivery runs he would teach Ed the proper mechanics of hand-delivering food. Other times he had Ed work the counter, always making sure to be on the lookout for how he was treated by customers. If anyone mistreated Ed, they were asked not to return.

Now, every so often the two of them would just be idling, perhaps sharing an ice cream on the stoop and having a friendly conversation when Ed would look at Yale directly in the eyes and just focus like a beam of light for a few short moments. Yale had always figured this was just something that came with being retarded – a kind of momentary silent catatonic hold. It’s not like there was a lot of literature on the subject to look up. Alternatively, sometimes he thought to himself, that’s just Ed’s way of concentrating or trying to figure something out.

It was like Ed was looking into Yale’s very soul and communicating a secret in a language that only he could understand. It was a look that Yale never forgot, and in fact, he occasionally asked others – including eventually his wife, if they ever saw it and all claimed to have no such experience.

And then, on Ed’s 50^th birthday, Yale found out what he could never have suspected.

For on his 50^th birthday Ed told Yale that they needed to have a special birthday dinner, just the two of them. Yale had made a big deal to Ed about what a milestone 50 was, trying to explain the concept of a half century. So Yale was actually quite pleased at the invitation.

And that is when Ed Drater told Yale Woodingham that Ed Drater was a hoax.

Well, Ed Drater’s condition, anyway. And as was later revealed, so too was the name. He had named himself between foster homes.

Ed Drater is an anagram, which I’m sure you can decipher without much effort.

In other words, he was retarded in name only. Yale did not have a million questions, as you might suspect. He had two questions: Why? And How?

Not to mention how could this have happened to him.

Needless to say, they did not have dessert at the dinner. When it became clear to Yale that Ed was telling the truth (now) and in fact had managed to reveal his story in fairly “normal” terms (by now after all, between exposure to newspapers, radio and television Ed absorbed everything just like everyone else), Yale excused himself to try and get his bearings.

As Yale explained the events to his wife, he thought back to those momentary glares that Ed would seize upon Yale. Was Ed trying to send a signal? Was he on the brink of coming clean at those moments? Was that this other part of Ed? The “real” part? And what was the “real “ part?” After all, Ed had lived his life as a retarded person for 40 years now.

In fact, Yale and his wife (they had no children) reeled for years by the news. They simply did not have the wherewithal to know how to process that kind of situation.

And so it was that Ed’s secret soon had to become public. It was not long before Ed Drater became a sensation, but it was also not long after that when Ed met a violent end one night late at the bakery at the hands of some kids he surprised as they broke in. In a panic, one of the teenagers hit Ed over the head with a heavy baking pan. It was only meant to stun him so that they could make a getaway, but the blow was hard enough that Ed lost his balance on the slippery counter floor and fell back head first onto one of the ovens and then head first onto the floor where his head then bounced a couple times before rolling over on the rubber mat and resting there until Yale found him.

And that is how I came upon Ed Drater’s obituary.

Nina was stunned and wanted to know if Yale ever did learn why Ed created the identity hoax.

The answer is that he concocted the behavior in one of the last of the homes he was in. He had been moved around so much and there was such poor record keeping that there was little chance of monitoring any changes.

No one knows why he perpetrated it. The most common theories were that either he guessed that by taking on that identity it would minimize the chance that he would keep bouncing around (personally, even assuming my 10-year-old brain was that sophisticated – and it wasn’t - I would have guessed it would have the opposite effect) or there was some other kind of trigger that caused him to put himself through this kind of test. Once he was in, he either knew or decided he couldn’t pull out of it. Maybe the relationship he’d developed with Yale was so real and loving that once he began he did not want to lose that.

Either way he clearly had a brilliant mind and was a brilliant actor. You try and pull that off for a week. A month. A year. And of course there is no Oprah or TMZ or People for him to tell the story and get paid handsomely for it.

Well, I re-published the obit as if it were mine, a real April Fool’s Day joke, except the newspaper didn’t find it funny and all of a sudden they remembered that I didn’t have a degree, which made it easy to determine that since I was already on probation and they were desperately making cutbacks anyway, I conveniently became “non-essential.” And I was gone.

I went on to tell Nina that when you work at a newspaper you learn that there is a real sub-culture to the workplace. For decades, newspapering was a quietly noble profession; Watergate of course made it cool (or maybe Redford and Hoffman in “All The President’s Men” really accomplished that feat). And when you work at a newspaper, especially the really good ones, you learn they are a lot about ritual, and about the honor of passing on a certain code of conduct. Even though I’m not a “joiner,” I’d really bought into it and I felt like I really belonged. Once I found my place there I had no desire to go anywhere else. Well, one of those rituals, at least at my paper, was that whenever one of the real old time greats would pass, we would gather in the newsroom to toast them. And by design, the toast was brief and always identical: “Bob was a great writer … but he was an even better man.” And then the publisher would make a great show of announcing who would receive the honor of writing that person’s obit. Let me tell you, in our heyday that was about as competitive a gig as scoring free tickets if the local team was ever in the World Series or Stanley Cup. I always found the toast kind of funny. I mean, maybe I’m the only one, but how fast do we dismiss the guy’s writing by making him a “better person?” Couldn’t we celebrate his life’s work a little bit? We are a NEWSPAPER. It’s all about the writing, is that not what sets us apart? I guess that’s just me. But every once in a while I would daydream during those ceremonies about the day it might be my turn, first to write someone’s obit (not that I rooted for his death, but of course I wanted Guy to be my first) and then to build my own legacy and place in the world so that one I would have merited the same honor. Thanks to Manewer Lady that modest bit of immortality was gone.

Nina was stunned by the story, and I guess maybe even my demise at the paper. She seemed like she was gathering herself together. “So why haven’t you written anything since?”

“I’d like to think the firing didn’t hit me hard but it did. I drifted. There’s not much call for fired fabricating columnists these days in the newspaper business. I can admit now that it felt like a bang on the head. I’m a writer and I’ve got writer’s block. Here’s how bad it is. I watch movies, lots of movies. And I wonder as I watch, how are they going to come up with a plausible twist? I don’t even care about the ending. Just for one story-changing moment to another. And then, invariably, the transition or change comes quite nicely and naturally and I have a virtual slap-on-the-forehead series of moments. And are you ready for this? When I said I watch a lot of movies? I watch so many that half the time as I’m sitting there wondering how the heck are they going to connect the storyline I realize that I’ve already seen the movie before at least once. Do you get my point? It’s bad enough that me, a writer, can’t even devise a story movement point – but that I can’t even think of one when I’ve already been given the answer! It’s like in high school when the teachers started giving open book exams and as any high school boy determines – why even bother preparing if they are practically giving you the answers. But of course you still have to find the clues, and then you have to be able to express yourself. It’s not a childhood game of hide and seek. It’s real work.”

“I’ve only squeaked out a couple things since. There was some free-lance reporting I did for Heeb magazine, but that doesn’t really count, because, well it was for Heeb magazine. I cannot squeeze one single dollop out of me since. I love that word dollop and I almost never get to use it.”

“You think about it often?” she asked.

“Only every time someone brings it up,” I said, trying to force a smile.

“So why not just do some more free-lance?”

“It doesn’t work that way. You don’t just retrace your steps like when you’ve lost a set of keys. Besides, I had an apartment fire and every last note to myself that I had been collecting since I was in school went up in flames. Is it up in flames or down in flames? I guess it could be up because flames go up, but since it’s a negative and the ashes fall down, it could be down in flames. Watch out for those fires, they’ll get you every time, is all I can say. Do you know that I’m so blocked that sometimes when I have to engage in conversation and the subject comes up and I’m trying to talk about what I’m going through I actually block on the words ‘writer’s block’ and I can’t even name it. I carry around a notebook all the time to capture my flashes and all I have in there are my errand lists. Back in the day I used to have a shoebox of my notes on the back of receipts, newspapers, matchboxes, you name it. A million scraps of paper. And I don’t even have scraps now. The sick part is that I think I have been at my most creative coming up with ways to not finish what I’ve started. Or to not even start. I must have lost a cumulative total of three years going back and forth on the relative merits of song writing versus novel writing. For a time I convinced myself that songwriting was the better bet because, well, what are we talking about…a couple pages? God, at least my ass isn’t blocked or I’d really be in bad shape.”

“So what are you doing in the meantime? Are you reading? Wouldn’t that be inspirational?”

“No, it would not because I would realize I am reading something that someone else got published. You’d think if I were trying to be a novelist I would be the least bit literary. But I don’t know my Chandler from my Chekhov, my Baudelaire from my Voltaire, my Roth from my Plath. I have no influences and no preferences. Ask me about Melville and I can tell you ‘whale’ and that’s about it.”

“Sounds like you’d rather write, than read. That’s cool. If that’s the case, and you’ll have to apologize for my ignorance, but is being immersed in literary history really necessary? Can’t you just create your own style or voice, regardless of what you have read or haven’t read?”

“Not so far, is all I can say. Y’know The Beatles became the Beatles because they were influenced by Elvis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The Stones became the Stones because of Muddy Waters, Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. So I just assume every artist is the artist they are because of their influences. So I’ve substituted by killing time creating shapes of animals and faces by creating different lengths of subject headings in email and then turning it vertically/horizontally. Like emoticons. But mostly I write lists. Sometimes I even think in lists.”

“Lists? Like what?”

“Like movies where the soundtrack was better than the movie.”

“You have a list of those?”

“Two words. “Vanilla Sky.” “Jackie Brown.” I could go on. You can have a good movie without a good soundtrack but can you have a great movie without a great soundtrack? I don’t think so. And I don’t just mean music movies like High Fidelity and The Commitments. But a forgettable movie with an outstanding soundtrack….that’s gold.”

“Hmmm. What else have you listed?“

“Just random stuff. Nothing of importance.”

--Greatest live albums

--Best left handed third basemen

--Lives I wish I could have been a part of for the ride, like Sinatra in the ‘40s, Elvis in the ‘50s, MLK during the ‘60s, Muhammad Ali in the ‘70s.

--What places sound more exciting when you put “The” in front of it. The Congo. The Haight. The Castro. Is there some sort of special permit you have to apply for to get that?

--Best nicknames. “The Killer” (Jerry Lee Lewis); The Bambino; Say Hey Kid; Shoeless Joe, Sparky Anderson, Leo “The Lip” Durocher,” “Clyde” Frazier, Ted “The Kid” Williams. Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd. Frank “Sweet Music” Viola. Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams. And then there’s just the great names (and characters) of a bygone era – the boxer Butterbean, the Secretariat trainer Lucien Laurin, the sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun.

--Voices that would be fun to have had. Like Hendrix, Springsteen’s and Petty’s when they are talking not singing. Peter Wolf’s speaking voice. Robbie Robertson’s and Dylan’s too, when you could still understand him. Harry Dean Stanton’s drawl, Nick Nolte’s growl, Burt Lancaster’s gruff, George Clooney’s….Clooney. Robert Evans. Montgomery Clift. Steve McQueen. Bogart and Nicholson of course. Kris Kristofferson. James Coburn. Hal Holbrook. Gabriel Byrne. Eastwood, of course. Harrison Ford. Jeff Goldblum. Jeff Bridges, Richard Dreyfuss. Johnny Depp. Alan Arkin. Ray Liotta. Dennis Hopper, man. I would not like to have had the voice of Mickey Rooney, Ronald Reagan or Marv Albert. Or Peter Lorre. Or Jim Carrey. Or Sean Penn or Vin Diesel. Or Adam Sandler. Or Paul Simon (either one).

--Things I can’t live without. Like bacon. Is there literally anything in this world that does not taste 10 times better with bacon wrapped around it?

--Things I can’t live with. Are there any three worst cheeses than Swiss, Roquefort and blue cheese? THAT is not a meal fit for anyone even under the best of circumstances. And yet, each sounds so classy and sophisticated.

--Who got the most tail in the ‘70s. Nicholson, Beatty, Robert Evans, Burt Reynolds, Reggie Jackson, Jackson Browne, Robin Williams, any member of The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac.

--Ice cubes. There is a whole hierarchy going on there. At the bottom of the list are your crescent shaped hard cubes. At the top is your crushed and shaved ice. And in between is your round ice cubes with the hole at the top (I know, I know, round…cubes). And for that matter, the hierarchy of soda drinks. Cans at the bottom (so to speak), then bottles, then fountain.

--Things I can’t figure out. Like, what’s better, to be happy or happy go lucky? The difference between something being queer and being goofy.

-- Pontificating on little discussed pleasures in life. Like, gel. I love anything with gel. Gel shoes gel bike seat. There ought to be a gel line of products for hemorrhoids. If they had that, I wouldn't even wait for the hemorrhoids. I'd just get it and splash it on.

--Documenting when it’s OK to cry or be sentimental. Like, “Brian’s Song,” Jim Valvano’s “Cancer Can’t Beat Me” speech, the “want to have a catch” scene in “Field of Dreams,” any moment of your choosing in Toy Story and the Lion King, watching Obama on election night….all acceptable. Even one chick flick…never acceptable.

--Obscure people that I admire like the guys that tune the guitar for a major player and who does it live, on stage, while the band is playing, with no pitching or other instruments

--My pet peeves. Like, ‘constant talkers.’ The problem with constant talkers is total lack of awareness that between the two of us they are the only one that wants a conversation to ensue. Or people I don’t know striking up a conversation with me in the bathroom. Or people – whether I know them or not! – who make cell phone calls in the bathroom.

“Speaking of which, I’ve told you about certain rules that we make for ourselves. Rule number one is no cell phones when you are doing number one. Or number two for that matter. No cell phones in bathrooms except when securely stored in a pocket.”

“I’m having trouble following whether it’s the cell phones or the bathrooms that cause you so much agita,” she said (she gets points for use of “agita” by the way).

“The answer is yes. Both. So many things have happened because of cell phones. I feel like I am the guy with the worst reception regardless of where I am. I was on with this woman once, and all I could make up was ‘Manny, you’re breaking up,’ and I kept insisting that I was not in fact breaking up. She meant the phone connection; I thought she meant the relationship. Never heard from her again.”

“But getting back to the bathrooms – since you brought it up - have you ever thought of the grand irony of airplane toilets? They are the most miserable place to experience any bodily function, but you have to give it to those airline people – with everything that’s ever gone wrong with a flight, you have to admit you have never seen an airplane toilet back up.”

“And one last thing…”

“Manny, you think a lot about bathrooms, don’t you?”

Hedging, I said, “Well, if you spend enough time in one place, you are bound to think about it.“ Yeah, that’s a good recovery.

“I promise this will be the last one, but is it too much to ask to standardize the functionality of sink and towel dispensers? Y’know, like the telephone dial pad? You need a damned engineering degree every time you go to a different public bathroom. Especially airports and restaurants! This one is a motion detector. That one you have to move a track ball just…like….so. This one swivels. Another one you have to hit the top button for three seconds. The other one has a button on the side. That other one you keep tugging on until you realize it’s a hand dryer not a dispenser. There’s even one where you have to line up these almost undetectable little arrows on the sink knobs just…so or else they both keep dripping forever. I am not a trained air traffic controller. At a certain point you say, why bother!”

So yes, Nina had a point. I do think about it a lot. I don’t like music in bathrooms. I don’t like talking in bathrooms. Not with anyone I know and not with anyone I don’t know. There is of course no looking at each other, except with someone I do know. But even then I don’t like to look at folks coming out of the bathroom because I don’t want to know who was warming the seat before me, and I don’t even like people to see me going in. I don’t need them to know when I’m on the clock.

“Toilets aside, maybe you could do something with all of that. You know like those crazy stupid little books they used to have at Borders checkouts when there was such a thing as Borders, like “The Nothing Book” and “The Bushims.” I mean, it’s not even writing and there’s hundreds of those and people get them published every day.”

“Thanks for the inspiring words.”

“How about ghost-writing? Didn’t you tell me you used to write speeches and books for other people? Can’t you do that again?”

I suppose she was right on some level, but I didn’t really know enough people in town to scavenge the work and besides, I had come to hate the “ghost” part of ghostwriting. There was no way to prove I’d really written any of it. There are no credits for speechwriters like play writers and screenwriters get for writing the words that other people say.

Normally, you’d call this a crisis of confidence, except that you would presume that there was confidence to begin with at some point. No confidence whatsoever, which only worsens every time someone makes a literary or historical reference that I feel I should know since I was an English and history major.

Nina and I had been in bed through the night and into the morning. Playing, talking, playing. Constantly rejuvenated by what I was lying next to. In the morning we found ourselves falling asleep for brief respites, but then wanting to waek up again and talk some more in bed. Normally I could not wait to get out of there – even if we were at my own place, which is of course why the goal is to get to her place, for the easy exit. But this morning I didn’t want her to leave, so I did my best to keep the conversation going.

With Nina, when we would approach each other on the street or meet somewhere, I found that the closer I got to her, I drew in to my mind all the things about her that turn me on. Instead of getting tense, my face and body would start to relax slowly until we are close enough that we are almost about to embrace and then my smile would go to full bloom. Now, in bed, I like her even better when she walks away (say, to grab some water or something) and the ends of her long brown hair dance against her naked back.

“What’s your least favorite word?”

“Least favorite word? Hmmm. I have to really think. I don’t think I’ve ever had one,” she said. “Maybe you should start.”

“Ok. Hands down it’s ‘booger.’”

“Oh Manny, that is so GROSS. Yuck. I hate that word.”

“Yes, that’s my point. Hey, I could have said ‘pussy’ but I figured that would be your word.”

“Oh Manny, please stop!”

“You know I could have gone with penile-implant, but I figured that was two words and I would be disqualified. Unless you were going to permit me the hyphenated exception. And by the way, I really hate it when a woman announces she has to pee. I think you can tell there is a kind of scatological pattern here.”

I was already beating myself up for not being able to pull the brakes on my instincts. But I just wanted to talk and I didn’t know where to go. I keep forgetting that I can’t have the same conversation with everyone else that I have with Anin. Then I came up with it.

“Nina, you ask me a question then.”

“I think I can come up with something. Give me a second.” She pulled the covers up and moved in a little more to buy herself more time to think. “Okay, what’s the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?”

“When I lived in New York, I used to cross against a red all the time.”

“Is that your final answer?

And I started to think of this as another test. Is she looking for something that tells her she’s got a daredevil, a risk taker; or is she ready for stability.

I’d long ago been flustered by trying to guess that. For every woman who liked a shy guy there was one who liked an aggressive one. Just when you thought it was someone who wanted funny, they wanted intellectual. Felt like I could never win.

“I think I’m going to punt on that one.”

I could tell by her scrunched-up face she did not know the punt metaphor, and it’s quite possible that with what limited sports knowledge she had she might have even been thinking “bunt” and wondering what the heck I was talking about.

“Okay here’s an entry level question. Why did it take you so long to get up the nerve to approach me? Did I do something to turn you off?”

Oh, yeah, sure. You turned me off. TOTALLY turned me off. To the point that you were all I thought about. But that would have been too stalker-like to say out loud, even in jest.

“If you must know,” I said with mock seriousness, “When I saw all the other muscle guys you were surrounded by at the gym, I thought that’ I’d never match what they had and live up to your standards.”

“To set the record straight, those were never guys I was interested in. But more importantly, if you thought that I was the kind of woman who would be, then why would you want to be interested in someone like that?”

My head hurt from that question. And she could tell. So she said, ”Let’s change the subject. Just tell me something about you that might surprise me.”

I was ready. “Well, women like me because I like to shop. But not in a gay way. That includes flea markets by the way.”

“Of course not,” she wisecracked, rolling her eyes playfully. I want to say she did that to mean that it was an unnecessarily defensive comment, but I think she was just playing along.

“Anyway, I do love to shop with women. I would love to trail you in your favorite store and watch you try things on, if you must know.” She took the compliment well.

In the best relationships I go from wanting to be relaxed, to trying to be relaxed, to being relaxed. I was not there yet.

And she sensed it all.

“Manny, you just need to know you can ask me anything you want whenever you want. Don’t stress out about it. We’re in no hurry.”

“You’ve had threesomes haven’t you?”

“That’s a trick question because you made it plural,” she said barely able to contain her laughter.

“Okay, if I make it singular, will you answer?”

“No, but thanks for asking.”

“I thought you said I could ask anything at any time.”

“Then I am invoking the exception of 7:30 in the morning, the night after spending the first time in bed after the first date.”

“Then how about sex in a car?” I ventured.

“Depends if it’s owned or leased,” she said.

Note to self: sense of humor diagnostics systems check fully deployed and analytics displays completely passing grades.

“You think about sex a lot, don’t you,” she said plaintively.

“Mmmm, not a lot. Maybe a little.”

“Yeah, a little. A little every day.”

“Manny,” we don’t have to talk at all. We can just lie here and relax, OK? No pressure. Let’s just chill.”

“The funny thing is, I wasn’t sure at all that we would be compatible because during dinner you said that you were good and Catholic.”

“Manny, I said I was good …. AND catholic.”

And so we plunged back in. I reached for the remote.

“But in the interest of full disclosure, I have to be honest that I had noticed you at the gym because you were noticing me. So much. Not in the good way. I thought you were staring at me. It was kind of making me uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, I was probably doing that on purpose.”

“What?”

“Come on, women like you expect it.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Is that another one of those things Anin told you?”

“Yes, actually, but that’s not the point. Your type gets hit on so much that I knew if I just hung back you’d never notice me. Had to do something to make my presence known.”

“Well, it worked. But next time….”

“Next time? What does that mean?”

“Your question is also your answer.” Her too?

I still don’t know what that means, but she said it often enough that I felt like I was missing out on some key conversational code that she knew of that had somehow passed me by.”

Then she started kissing me again and, funny how quickly I stopped thinking about it.

“Okay, next subject. Soul mates. Fact or Fiction?”

“You really are in a hurry, aren’t you? Here’s what I believe about the soul mate thing,” she said. “I think if you have it then you don’t have to ask about it.”

She saw I had slumped and was visibly dejected and tried to lighten things up, but to little effect.

“Manny, can’t we just relax and have fun?”

“Sure, here’s a fun one. Worst break-up. At least that you can look back on and laugh about.” Yeesh, almost blew that.

“Well, there was the guy who always took forever to get ready, especially with his hair. One night I snapped at him to get it in gear and he says – and I am not making this up Manny – he says, ‘My hair is incredibly temperamental right now.’ I just had no filter at all for that one and I said right back, ‘Just like its owner.’ That was kind of the end of that. You?”

“I guess I can laugh about this now. There was this one that broke up with me while I was boarding a plane. I have so blocked out the details except for the part where I kept saying: ‘You’re breaking up with me now? Now? While I’m boarding a plane? That’s it?”

“Yikes, Manny, I’m really sorry about that. That’s awful. I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t mean to end up there.”

“No worries. Was a long time ago. And it really is kind of humorous when I think about it now. I mean, it’s certainly efficient. If you’re gonna do it….just do it without any room for drama, I guess. So I got one last one for you. While we are sort of on the subject. Just curious. No hidden agenda behind the question. You been married?”

“Do I seem like someone who has been?”

“That’s the thing. This is usually one of those things that I am never wrong about but I can’t get my divorce radar fixed on you. I can make a case either way.” Deep down I am thinking how can a person who looks like this have never been married. Even if it was a starter marriage, a drunken Vegas marriage, a power-moneyed-guy-can’t-resist-the-lifestyle marriage, whatever. There had to be one, right?”

“The answer is that I have never been married. Although I have been proposed to five times.”

I had to swallow a little on that one.

“Five times by the same guy?” THAT I could understand. That had to be it. Not five different times, five different guys.

“No not the same guy. That bother you?”

Even though she didn’t really say it or intend it arrogantly, it had a little bit of that tone lingering in the air.

“Not unless one of them was Larry King. Wow, so you’ve had to find five different ways to say no. That must have been quite a feat.”

At this point she sensed something in my voice, I’m sure wondering if somehow I was hurt or just mystified.

“If you don’t mind my asking, when was the most recent one?”

She never really gave me a straight answer. “The last big break up?” She asked out loud even though I hadn’t really asked that question. “He asked me to promise that we’d never end up like this couple that we knew who were perfect until they weren’t. Just kind of an ugly boring thing that they dissolved into after appearing to everyone that they were a couple built to last forever. I told him I couldn’t possibly make that promise.”

And it’s when she told me those kinds of details that I thought I am probably no match for her, like she was an emotional automaton. Truth is, I don’t want a whole lot of emotion. Fastest way to chase me is to start crying over a disagreement. But in her case I wanted to know she was capable of a deep attachment. With me.

“Your turn,” she said. “You?”

“Um, technically yes but it was over before all the gifts were opened. I, do, however, still have one of these to show for it.” I thought I was being cute but it probably came out like I was a cad. With that I rolled over, grabbed my wallet and showed her my favorite picture. Just me and my girl at the pool, smiling broadly, her arm around mine.

“Me and Harper,” I said. “My favorite picture.”

“Wow. I never imagined you with a child. Harper? Like Harper Lee?”

“It’s spelled the same way, if that’s what you mean.”

“Never married her mother though, huh?”

“Technically, yes. Or would it be technically, no? A Quickie. Let’s leave it at that. I gave it a gentleman’s try. That was the most intense relationship I’d ever had. So intense I don’t even know if you can call it love. When she became pregnant I went to her parent’s place and spoke with her father, who was not someone I’d met much and had talked to even less. I said, ‘Sir,”

“You….said ‘Sir’?!”

“Ahem. Yes, I’m capable. I said: ‘I’d like to marry your beautiful daughter.’ He says gruffly, ‘They’re all beautiful,’ as if somehow I was insulting all of his other children, when I was just trying to be nice and polite and sweet. Well let’s just say it devolved from there because we ended up fighting about how I meant it – I think he was a drinker it’s safe to say. And that turned into a fight with her and then just the whole thing fell apart.”

“So how long did it last after that?”

“Not much at all. Can we just leave it at that for now?”

Nina and I both had our idiosyncrasies and I guess that was part of our downfall. If I’m really honest I would say that I have so many that sometimes I can’t even remember exactly what they are. Like I keep forgetting if its dogs I hate or cats.

I’m a light packer and she’s a heavy packer (though I’m a heavy sleeper and she’s a light sleeper)

I hate raisins but I love Raisinets.

Love pistachios but hate pistachio ice cream (although I love both Oreo cookies and Oreo ice cream).

I always feel disappointed by movies, meals, plays and big trips. She thinks everything is a great experience because you wouldn’t know how you feel otherwise. I’ll give her that one.

“Aren’t you ever pleasantly surprised by anything?” she would ask.

“I was when you went out with me. Does that count?”

For you amateurs, that’s called melting the butter.

I ran my hand across the length of her body as she lay next to me. So smooth. And proportional. Man, this kind of thing has never happened to me before – at least not on a Thursday. Remember I said something a bunch of pages back about being comfortable in her own skin. It’s easy I guess when everything looks like it belongs together, like a perfect jigsaw puzzle. I cannot say the same about myself, and sometimes I even wondered if that was so because the proportionality of my body was off. If you’ve been with me at all, you may have seen me occasionally bump into walls when I make a turn because I guess wrong. Or I miss a step going up or going down. Life for me is an obstacle course and I am not a decathlete.

I actually don’t think of them as idiosyncrasies. I just know what I like. Maybe to everyone else it’s an idiosyncrasy because it’s just not how they are. I also have a theory that when someone is likeable, you call them quirks. When things go badly, then they become idiosyncrasies. I feel like the meal at a restaurant is going to be better the hotter the waitress is. Same thing with the quality of a flight based on the how hot the flight attendants are. Which means I need to fly Virgin a lot. Or not fly a lot.

Next time Anin and I talked, I practically walked him through the whole night in chronological order.

“So let me get this straight,” he said. “You spot this woman that you can’t keep your eyes off of. She goes out with you even though you are convinced she would never do so. You go home together on the first night. You have what sounds like a pretty good few rounds … which, touché, my friend. You have great post first-sex bed talk. And yet you walk away disappointed because she broke off five engagements or whatever. Are you at all capable of being satisfied, Manny? I mean, what more do you need?”

Ever notice that guys want all the sexual funk and kink in the beginning of the relationship when everything is new and exciting and we are bold and adventurous and free, but women want all of that after the relationship plateaus when by then we are just looking for a few Oreos and a healthy nap. Well, I was already wondering if Nina and I had just experienced our sexual peak and it was downhill from here. One minute you’re licking Chicklets off their ass and before you even realize it, and before too many weeks go by you’re falling asleep on the couch to the late night sports highlights. Yeah, Anin was right. My expectations are never really exceeded because I assume the worst.

And surprisingly, things continued to go so well that I started to drift about all the other times that I had a flash to previous sudden post-first-night regrets. The kind where you instantly realized what the heck did I just get myself into. The most recent one was a woman who started texting me – bad enough – but she was using these acronyms that weren’t even commonly known, like LOL and all that crap. I would get these texts like GOTB? Which stood for going out to breakfast. And HR2DA, which the short hand of the short hand was haircut appointment today. Drove me nuts. I would write back “huh?” (which is not an acronym btw) and then she stopped going out with me when I wrote a flurry of…WTF.

Before that, there was the woman I met online. Our emails began slowly, tentatively, itinerantly and then picked up speed and intensity. We finally met, had some gratuitous sex and the next morning after the first night, what seemed apropos of nothing she looked at me and said “You know you were a lot funnier in writing than you are in person.”

That’s only one reason I hate email. It sets up a false sense of hope. Also, I can never tell who’s supposed to “hang up.”

And just my luck, I’m finally now coming to grips with all the texting and everyone’s moved on to tweeting and facebooking. I am pleased to say that you cannot find me on either.

So if you wonder why I couldn’t ever really be sure that I would relax with Nina…

Oh we had some legendary all-night conversations. And we had some history-making sexual experiences and lived off the high for a short while each time, but over the months that passed, the physical attraction that became mutual could not be sustained. At the start I wondered if she would even be willing to show affection in public or was this just something private. But she could not have been more warm and affectionate in the outside world. Never failing to easily find my hand. Just like that first night, the first seduction, when nothing was planned. Completely mutual and natural (except for the part where I kept thinking to myself: holy heck, why me? She could have anyone).

That was before we went cold.

Nina Comes Clean
But before I get to that, there’s actually one part of the first evening that I left out.

I’ve resisted the urge to share many details of that first night’s intimacy. Mostly because there’s really no way to communicate it in anything other than clichés. I’m sure you’ve been there. I don’t need to tell you what it’s like to your being in all the senses. The physicality came in waves and just when we thought – or at least I thought – there was no more reservoir of energy, we would be rekindled. Sometime in the very early morning, had to be around 2 or 3 or 4, Nina got out of bed and as she walked away she turned her head and simply said “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I thought nothing of it beyond either a bathroom break or maybe to grab us some waters.

My mind drifted for a few minutes before I realized I heard the shower going. I let it sink in. There was nothing wrong with it; I’d just never really been in this kind of situation. I listened to the pelting water. I was enjoying the sound – I told you, all senses were firing. Then it crossed my mind – am I supposed to join her? It is after all, my place. Is this one of those moments where I am supposed to have symbiotic knowledge? Or if I walk in and pull open the curtain is that the moment that deflates everything. Can’t tell you how many times I have been with a woman and was completely in the dark about whether or not she was waiting for me to make the first move or I should wait for an unmistakable sing. But this? Nothing in my past to inform my decision-making here. And the last thing I wanted to do was make that one move that just destroyed everything that had gone so spontaneously, unexpectedly, naturally well.

I decided that nothing like this will ever happen again. It can’t. The door was still half open so I made enough of a noise so as not to startle her as I neared and then poked my head in, not wanting to make her uncomfortable.

“Nina, you okay in there?”

“Yes. Everything’s fine.”

“Okay, just checking. No worries.” And I turned to leave her.

“Manny? Stay for a few minutes?”

I could clearly see her outline through the curtain. I didn’t want her to think I was staring. She was irresistible.

She turned out to be nothing like I thought. And I mean that in a good way. She seemed as easy and comfortable around me as I first perceived she was with herself. I’d never been around someone who listened so intently to every story, drank in every joke and challenged me for the purpose of greater understanding.

I continued to just take her in and then I grabbed a full towel from the cabinet for whenever she was ready.

I was still torn about what to do. What kind of invitation is this?

“Talk to me, Manny. Please?”

Where in the heck do I start?

I found my sea legs and we talked for probably 10 minutes about the only shared past we had – recounting the little jokes and insights from the evening’s dinner. Then without prompting I handed her the towel just as she turned and leaned in to shut off the shower.

She dried herself off; her body completely dry, her hair still half wet, and went to sit on the couch.

Those meteoric first few weeks after Night One were liberating. I was game for anything. Going to places I hate going to (museums) and smiling the whole time. Going to places I simply had not business going to (zoo) just because it was a place to go to on a beautiful day. Going to movies and playing with each other we were practically sitting in the same seat. Showing interest in her interests in which I had no interest. I had a new series of lists to keep track of. Her favorite brand of coffee, cafes, restaurants, clothing stores, artists….whatever it was, I wanted to know it and record it so that I could be sure that any gifts or surprises or suggestions would be sure to please.

I will never forget the first time i went to her place. Even after all these years, the first time you are in a girlfriend’s space it’s a little like crossing over to the other side. They are just so…different.

I have no idea what women first inspect at our places. Then again, they probably don’t have to. They just KNOW.

We are not that intuitive. Putting aside what the most important room looks like – and by that I mean the bathroom (f I can’t be comfortable in there, well then all bets are off) I look for overall style in furnishings, what’s in the closets and potentially most important, what kind of a line-up of pharmaceuticals are we talking about. It’s silly to think that there will be nothing there – I mean we all got something, but nothing is scarier than seeing that line-up of medicine bottles the way a guy would line up his baseball cards. Ever been in one of those bars where every brew from around the country is stacked up against the wall? Yeah I’ve seen the pharmaceutical equivalent in a chick’s room. It’s not for the faint of heart. And that’s only half the challenge. The other half being….how much effort do I make to nefariously inspect the bottles to identify the contents. That’s just the software. Then there’s the hardware. I’m accustomed to it now but when I first started staying over at some of their places I’d find these….tools, there’s nothing else to call it, for manipulating parts of their face, head and hair that I could not have cooked up if I were trying to concoct stuff on my own. I’m used to seeing some of those now, but in my 20s? I was afraid to even touch them and risk having one of them clamp me and leave me a mark. I didn’t want to seem like the ultimate moron and ask, so once in a while I would make like I was walking past back and forth looking for something when I was just trying to sneak peeks at how – and where – some of these tools were applied.

Fortunately, I could give Nina the all-clear.

Her place was definitely the sign of someone who has thought a lot about how she wants it to look. Original artwork, no prints. Except for the William Claxton “Halima” photo from the Chet Baker album. At least I’m guessing that’s a print. Those kind of originals can run a fortune.

Her whole sheet-pillow-blankets-comforter-sham-throw-pillow concoction and the rest of her carefully managed bed covering system seemed a little over-engineered as if to warn anyone off from thinking they were getting in there without a struggle but I might have been over-thinking that one. A little. Of course, based on some of those gym outfits I should have expected no less. You ever seen some of those things up close and personal, like after they come out of the wash. Men? We go to the gym and it’s a t-shirt and shorts. Arm-arm, leg-leg and you’re done. These ladies? I’ve had to sit there and try to piece back together their outfits when they are out of the dryer and it’s like each is its own geometric teaser. It’s like Rube Goldberg meets Rubik’s cube. It’s amazing no one’s ever been injured getting in or out of one of those things.

So you might be able to guess how just possibly I could have, in the ensuing weeks and months proceeded to slowly drive Nina nuts. To the point that we eventually stopped going out to places anymore because we could never agree on a place.

I knew it. She knew it. And I knew that she knew it.

I went from eagerly anticipating the long evening’s phone conversations to fill her in on the exciting nothingness of my day to being annoyed at having to reveal the details of every activity.

I went from monitoring how she treated me at the gym like an advertiser tracks the Leno-Letterman ratings to wishing I could just get in and out of there without being interrupted (and to think how I once lived for those moments when she would occasionally wander over and gently, unobtrusively attend to me with a delicate hand on my back or shoulder to make sure I was steadied on one of the machines).

I went from buying an iron (a tip from my Uncle Chick) to showing up with the least amount of effort.

I went from changing for her to feeling like she was trying to change me. So I went from looking for ways to extend the weekends to finding other places I had to be.

She really became exasperated when we had what I know she felt like were the same conversation over and over in terms of how I was spending my time. “I just want to know my place in this world,” I lamented. “Everyone seems settled and knows where they are going. How long do I have to keep searching?”

“How do you know this isn’t it?” She said. And then she stopped me cold: “Manny if you could construct your own world, what would it be like?”

“Hmmm. Funny you should ask.”

“Why’s that?”

“Remember I told you a few weeks ago, on our first night, that I had a couple things that I’d written? Well I told you about the one stupid free lance thing. There actually was another. Something I started and could never see through and that was kind of my breaking point. So the funny thing is that it was kind of all about that – creating my own world. Well actually not necessarily a world just for myself, but…ah, forget it. It’s complicated.”

“No, tell me more. Do you have it still?”

“Oh it goes everywhere with me; just in case lightning ever strikes.”

“Can I read it then?”

“Are you kidding? It’s completely unfinished. It’s a silly concept as it is. Can you imagine a silly half-started concept?”

“Manny, I think it would help ME if I could read it. If you don’t mind. Let’s go get a bite and I’ll read and you eat.”

And she was irresistible again. I knew that it was a bit of ploy. Nina’s way of trying to find some way to re-connect. And I had nothing else working for me. So I gave in and here’s what I gave her at the restaurant.

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF N.U.M.

By M. A. Fagut

ANCHOR: This is BBCNN and we are reporting to you live on the death of former president Bill Clinton, but more recently and famously known as the Founder and Administrator General of N.U.M. – Nations United Movement.

He spent the better part of the last 10 years advocating for and then leading us up to World Moving Day, and it was at his desk at the NU building while eating pizza that he took his last breaths, having come ever so close to bring to life his final, grandest vision. Funny story first, though. Clinton, who always enjoyed great popularity with the Jews loved to meet with his guests at the NU HQ and ask them in a slightly exaggerated New York Jew accent: “What’s NU? This building is NU!”

NUM was the centerpiece and most ambitious undertaking of the Clinton Global Initiative, to transform the world’s countries into a new way of life – a life that some derided as a futile grasp at global nirvana, but which others championed as global nirvana. It is often said that Clinton’s revelation came to him as a result of the Republican takeover of America’s schools, airlines, restaurants and hotels. There are also those that contend that he simply ran out of stuff to do after solving the hunger crisis in Africa, peace in the Middle East and the McDonald’sWendy’sBurgerKing merger.

The reconstitution of the world’s map was a truly global effort in democracy. If you’ll recall, final balloting concluded just two years ago via the Web, SMS and TV voting. Clinton’s vision was for a world where everyone lived with their own kind – by choice.

It was Clinton’s vision that the world could vote on its own countries and there would be one place in the world reserved for those who were completely committed to tolerance – tolerance of thought, race, religion and lifestyle.

Perhaps his collapse is somewhat symbolic of the undoing of NUM. For now, we still do not have definitive word on the cause of death, the exact time or even what he might have been thinking at the time but word has circulated instantaneously throughout the world, thanks in part to us.

And it is in his final role that we memorialize Mr. Clinton tonight because while his gubernatorial and presidential careers have been most comprehensively covered in these initial moments of mourning, it may be after all that Mr. Clinton will ultimately be known most of all for NUM – or the failure of NUM, his final, controversial ambition that came to define the demise of the Clinton Global Initiative, and was in fact the final Initiative.

As with so much of his rich, storied life, NUM was classic Clinton in both its soaring intent and over-reaching execution.

As with anything to do with Clinton, always there was a fatal flaw. But more on that at the end of this broadcast.

NUM drew its share of criticism, some would say an unfair share. And therein lies the great irony. Mr. Clinton was for so many years himself a divisive figure…a lightning rod, and yet it was his clear stature as a global statesman that allowed the world to follow his lead in a desperate attempt to bridge the global divide that polarized so much of our universe. The haves and have-nots. The left wings and the right wings. Social issues, political issues, religious issues, racial issues, even sports issues. (Ironically, the most prominent dissenter was Hillary Clinton).

So it was that the Clinton Global Initiative proposed and funded NUM as a solution to halt the divide by, well, its critics would say by actually perpetuating even greater isolationism by re-ordering the universe’s geography and population.

NUM’s supporters argued – successfully it appeared – that at a minimum the concept would lead to a cooling off period, and at best would actually lead to greater understanding as the new world order learned to appreciate differences from afar, without causing further harm to human relations. Each side called it the ultimate social experiment with supporters claiming that society had come to a crossroads and opponents arguing that it defied how God had intended evolution to unfold.

Nation states were chosen via call-in votes to the final Larry King Live episode, subsequently referred to as “NUM: A Very Special Larry.”

The charter called for 180 new nation states of equal size and because each state would be homogenous there would be no need for centralized state capital but a 100 percent electorate-driven policymaking body via the same format that established the states – voting via the web and SMS.

Just as it had during Clinton’s presidential terms and Global Initiative fundraising campaigns, corporate America rallied to his side. Hollywood studios volunteered to create a scale-model set of the world order. After major consolidation of the world’s public relations and advertising firms the two remaining entities joined forces to promote, market and merchandise the change under the banner “We’re all NUMmer 1,” as you see here on these t-shirts and bumper stickers.

INSERT GRAPHIC

Educational guides were created for students to help explain the changes. Scholastic Magazine created a colorful new world map with comprehensive descriptions of each new state, profiling its name, population demographics and state song. Let me turn now to our official NUM geopolitical correspondent, Suzy Kolber-Namath to tell you more.

KOLBER-NAMATH: Thank you. As everyone is aware, NUM was not at first universally praised but eventually everyone seemed to agree that no other choice remained and voting during “A Very Special Larry” was heavy enough to convince CNN to bring him back after all.

Since time would not permit us to review all 180 states, though Mr. Clinton added to his legend by being able to do so without notes, we will offer just a few with a blurb about each.

Africa INSERT FLAG

This one name actually stays the same with all the countries within the continent merged into one; the only one that does. Figured being the cradle of civilization and all. Official song: “Our Roots Began in Africa” by Pharaoh Sanders (just barely nudging out “Am I Black Enough For You” by Billy Paul.

Asthmatica INSERT FLAG

Those with debilitating medical conditions were given priority geographic distribution so the Mojave Desert was selected. Official song: “Breathe” by Pink Floyd.

Diverse City (just beating out imaginaria and Lennongrad) INSERT FLAG

This is really the heart and soul of what was behind NUM; a home for those dedicated to peace, love and understanding; all thought and lifestyle choices accepted without challenge. Clinton wanted to commit space to those in the world most committed to a prejudice-free, inherently tolerant society. As a result this was given the largest plot of land with the most accommodating temperatures so it was placed in the former California (there had to be some kind of incentive). Official song: “People Get Ready” by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

Evangelica INSERT FLAG

To ensure that right wing religious zealots had somewhere to congregate undisturbed by “heathens,” this state was created in the warmest part of the world so as to replicate what Hell must feel like, since, after all, everyone in their book is technically saveable then let them do the heavy lifting. Official song: They agreed that music – all music, even Christian rock was essentially a gateway to the devil’s music, so they settled for The Lord’s Prayer.

Gotham INSERT FLAG

This may not be what you think. This community was actually created for those who insist on living a Goth lifestyle. Official song: TBD by Marilyn Manson.

Kinisonia INSERT FLAG

For men who hate the women they used to love. Official song: “I Hate You” by Prince.

NUM NUTS – This is actually temporary housing until additional room was made available in Evangelica.

Greenland INSERT FLAG

This is not actually the country that you are familiar with; this is the name of the new state for the environmentally conscious. Since this population is so self-sustainable, the location is the former Amazon forest. Official song: “If a Tree Falls in the Forest” by Bruce Cockburn.

GusHall - INSERT FLAG

This is home to the perpetual ultra-liberal socialist/communists who actually do believe in wealth distribution. Official song: “This Land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie.

Learyville - INSERT FLAG

This geography is dedicated to lovers of both organic and pharmaceutical aids, all made completely legal. Official song: “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. – open drug culture

One and Done - INSERT FLAG

The smallest geographic territory was set aside for this community of suicide bombers (after all, how much room do you need if you are renting not owning).

Pornocopia – INSERT FLAG

Do you even have to ask? Clinton took a personal interest in making the arrangements for this geography and had intended to be there for Opening Day. Official song: “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” by Rod Stewart.

XY – They already have their flag of course.

For the GLBT. Official song: Anything by George Michael and Indigo Girls.

ANCHOR: And now in closing, let’s return to the fatal flaw we referred to at the top of the hour. As you may remember, I conducted this interview with Mr. Clinton just a day before the demise of NUM.

FLASHBACK FOOTAGE

ANCHOR: “Just one last question, if we may, Mr. President/Administrator.”

CLINTON: “Sure. Anything at all.”

ANCHOR: ”Mr. Clinton, you have selected March 4^th as Global Moving Day.”

CLINTON: “That’s right.”

ANCHOR: “Sir, how are we all gonna move at the same time?”

# # #

She read the pages right in front of me. Took her about as long as it took me to go through a quesadilla and potato skins (all natural!).

“Manny, I like it! I really do. It’s funny, it’s topical and it totally sounds like you. You should keep working on it. Which one of those places would be the one you live in? And PLEASE don’t tell me Pornocopia.”

And I didn’t have an answer except to say that in my own imagination I’ve created a world for everyone else and I’m the only one I haven’t figured out a world for.

And she had the same reaction.

“Nina, it really is nice of you to say. You’ve always been very supportive. But the rub is this is as far as I’ve ever gotten. I’m stumped. Locked in neutral. And I can’t get it out of my head.”

My friend Pedro is always quick to jump in on these conversations and say stuff like “Bitter! Reservation for Party of One” or “Paging Mr. Morose, Call for Mr. Lonely, Withdrawn and Feeling Sorry for Myself.” If he were here now I could hear him say: “Relationship Metaphor Alert…Right This Way. Follow Me Please!”

I have this theory that when someone calls and wants to ask you about three things the first two are really a ruse for the third question and that third one is never good. It’s kind of the cousin to “We need to talk.”

So when Nina put the pages down and said “Manny I need to ask you something,” my heart skipped a beat as I waited to see how many questions she was lining up.

I always tried to break the tension (well, MY tension since I was the only one having the problem) with some goofy comment to try to head her off.

“If this is about my ordering from the kid’s menu again, I promise last night was the last time.”

That got me nowhere.

And in fact, the trouble at that particular restaurant was not my desire to order from the kid’s menu (which, I admit, just cannot be helped sometimes). We were waiting at the hostess table and she came up and asked “Are you together?” and I froze at the moment as I thought about the question in the existential sense as opposed to the isn’t-it-quite-obvious-we-are-having-dinner-together affirmation.

When I thought about her total self-confidence when we were together it sometimes made me think of Anin because he was the same way. Nothing really rattled him in a relationship. Whatever was gonna be was gonna be. It’s almost like Anin and Nina fit more neatly together.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the decline took on its inevitable conclusion. Is that something that most people can tell? I’ve always wanted to know if I’m like everyone else in these things or like no one else. And as I’m often reminded and advised – it is pretty unlikely that I am like most people in just about any category.

And as I got more antsy about things, I started to get antsy with everyone else. When I got home my mother called and asked how things were going. Funnily enough, she even asked me about NUM. Of course I had nothing new to show for it so I exaggerated about the progress I was making. We got into an argument about the name of one of the characters I was considering – a guy named Dodge.

“Tell me again dear, why you’re naming him after a car?”

“He’s not named after a car. And it’s just a nickname. Everyone calls him Dodge because he goes through life dodging bullets, like with women, close calls at the office, with the IRS. You know the expression, Mom.”

“Then why not name him Bullet? I’m no writer but that sounds a little more memorable. You know, catchy. Dangerous. Because he’s dodging BULLETS.”

Sometimes I hear her out loud and I know exactly where my cadence comes from.

“Yeah but he’s not a dangerous guy, he’s just a regular guy, that’s part of the joke of the plot. Besides, there’s already a movie called Bullitt. I think it could get confusing. Like it’s a remake or something.”

“Yes sweetie but it’s spelled differently. And honey, I think that movie took place in San Francisco. Aren’t you still in LA, Manny?”

“Yes, mom. Okay I will take it under advisement. I need to go.” And I always regretted the instant I hung up about how I talked to her so I’d always make up a reason to call her back in a couple days.

Admittedly sometimes I just couldn’t stop myself before talking because the thought was just too exciting to me. I probably should have kept a list of subjects and opinions with me to consult as I reminder that I am about to say something I will regret. It’s like when George Costanza went to Seinfeld seeking advice and Seinfeld told him: Just think about what you would do…and do the exact opposite.

Words to live by.

Because in our case it might have been that conversation where Nina said about me that all I ever do is fuck ‘em and leave ‘em. And I responded with what I thought at the time was a well thought response, that it was never my intention to fuck ‘em and then leave ‘em, it just happened to work out that way. Where’s the goddamn manual when you need it? Where’s Anin when you need him for an elbow to the side.

“Classy,” she said. “Classy.”

Hey I may not be classy all the time but I take pride in recognizing it in others. And you know what I always say – everybody should be good at something.

Under my own pressure, the shots did not sink. The relationship did.

Check out the music to these lyrics from The Tragically Hip and you will understand the intensity at the end.

"New Orleans Is Sinking"

Bourbon blues on the street loose and complete

Under skies all smoky blue-green

I can Forksake the dixie dead shake

So we dance the sidewalk clean

My memory is muddy what's this river I'm in

New Orleans is sinking and I don't want to swim

Colonel Tom What's wrong? What's Going On

You can't tie yourself up for a deal

He said" Hey North you're south shut you big mouth

You gotta do what you feel is real."

Ain't got no picture postcards ain't go no souvenirs

My baby she don't know me when I'm thinking about those years

Pale as a light bulb hanging on a wire

Sucking up to someone just stoke the fire

Picking out the highlights of the scenery

Saw a little cloud looked a little like me

I had my hands in the river

My feet back up on the banks

Looked up to the Lord above and said hey man thanks

Sometimes I fell so good I gotta scream

She says Gordie baby I know exactly what you mean

She said, she said I swear to God she said

My memory is muddy what's this river I'm in

New Orleans is sinking and I don't want to swim

Anin had been telling me for some time that I was missing the big picture and she was not going to stick around as my insecurities enveloped the relationship. The relationship was dissolving and I knew it and he knew it and I knew that he knew it but I could not do anything about it.

“Dude, you’re in denial. You’re taking on water with no working motor. Bail. Get out of there. And for fuck’s sake….be the one that jumps first. Save yourself before you sink. Cuz you know she ain’t gonna drown. She can swim on her own two feet.”

I took exception to only one thing (besides the exhaustive trail of non sequitir water-based metaphors. He gets that way when he gets all worked up. What do you expect, he’s a musician).

“Believe me, A, I am not in denial. I am completely aware that it’s over. I just don’t want to do anything about it. This could be the last good thing.”

“Manny, you are starting to talk like a bad blues song again. Please stop.”

Here’s the thing about Anin. I really do not like the company of men. I don’t have male friends and I’m not looking after I moved. Every once in a while I’d over hear my mother talking to one of her friends who was talking about her son and his friends and my mother would say “I don’t know why he doesn’t have more boyfriends. He’s such a good boy.”

Only my mother could refer to a guy having boyfriends with no irony and actually not even be aware of just how gay that sounds because I don’t think she even sees gayness. It’s just her way. Not many people left like that anymore.

I don’t like hanging around guys because they remind me of me too much and god knows I do not want to be spending more time with me, being reminded of me. If you put four guys in a room without a bar or a poker table or a TV and said you can talk about anything except sports, sex and their jobs, you would have a….very, very….quiet….room.

And that’s why it’s very different with Anin. I will dispense with the formalities of how old we are but let’s just say that we’re old enough to be lucky enough to have outlived James Dean, Buddy Holly, Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Bon Scott, Andy Kaufman, Chris Farley, John Belushi, John Lennon, Roberto Clemente, Freddy Prinze, Tim Buckley, Keith Moon, Jon Bonham, Bob Marley, Nick Drake, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Sid Vicious, Sam Kinison, JFK Jr.….and I have to double check on this but maybe even Lenny Bruce (and Gary Busey and Dennis Hopper should have been on that list; how in the world did THEY ever survive?).

So it helps that we are contemporaries. And we both felt the same way about other guys.

I found myself “breaking up” with men, while women broke up with me. Men always let me down. I always let women down.

Not so with Anin. And yet he had one thing working against him which was that he is one of those guys that would never steal your woman but that women want to steal from you. Strapping, charismatic, charming. The proportional and symmetrical build of the accomplished athlete that he was. And not a dollar to his name and it didn’t matter to them. But he never took a girl of mine. Not on purpose, not by accident.

So I don’t need an endless posse of friends but I do believe every man should have one go-to guy. And he’s that guy within the inner circle.

He’s also got some Cuban and Native American in him, besides the Black. Something like that. Maybe it’s just two of those three. Which allowed him to name his band Afrodisiac. A real bohemian; a natural musician and trained artist (hopefully I’ll get a chance to drop in one of his sketches here). Throw in the single total arm-length tattoo, requisite roguishly facial scruff and yeah, YOU try to compete with that. That’s the left arm down there. On his right bicep he has also got Elvis’ TCB, complete with the lightning bolt.

He is constantly having to ask me to remind him some chick’s name or some other distinguishing fact and it’s not because he is an arrogant prick.

There are just so damn many that approach him that literally there is no way to keep track. So the – very brief – conversation usually goes like this.

“Manny…she’s…”

I fill in name.

“And she used to….”

I fill in the missing detail like she used to house sit in Malibu and also drives a Malibu and how she thought that was so hilarious.

You get the picture.

I watched innocently and with great amusement when the three of us were out at dinner the first time and Nina asked him ask him about his name. God he hates that more than anything. We were out at dinner and as the words crossed her lips I just kind of slowly moved my chair a little further back from the table so I could enjoy the fireworks.

“Why if a name is unusual does it always have to stand for something or mean something?” he said.

“No one asks Michael or John or Melissa or Robert what they mean, but my name is just a name like theirs, it’s just they’ve never heard of it so it must mean something?!”

“Oooooookay,” said Nina looking at me as if to say: THIS is your best friend?

For the record, he was named for his father Anthony Nino and had always been called Anino for short and that got shortened further to Anin (rhymes with satin).

But other than that he is very hip and cool. I used to try to keep up but it just looks wrong when I try. Like Ryan Seacrest break-dancing.

He even had to scold me in advance to make sure I didn’t use the little colored weights at the gym because he’d seen me start out with those. “Have some pride!” he’d say. “I’m still laughing about that one,” he would remind me unkindly from time to time.

I am so not hip it’s a joke. I’m so average that I am mediocre in my own averageness. Average grades in an average school in an average state. You can’t get much more in-between than that. Even my size. I’m a 31 length in pants. Ever try to find a 31 length? Ever? There are three hundred millions pairs of jeans and cords and khakis in 30 or 32. Not 31.

As much as I loved the guy I kind of feel like I got cheated about being best friends with a black guy like Anin. Back in the 60s or even 70s you could get a lot of credit for that. Today…nothing! Hell, it’s practically expected. For that matter you don’t get credit for having gay friends anymore. That blows. You actually have to be one of them to get any kind of cred – it’s enough to be friends with one. I feel kind of cheated for being behind my time.

Over the years he added to the initial library of verboten words and phrases for me; what I called “Anin’s white-men-can’t jump rules” for me.

--Never say “I’m down with that.”

--You do not have a posse. Repeat that: white men do not have posses.

--Don’t refer to anything as a “gangsta lean” because first of all, you should just never try to be that cool but also you will always pronounce it gangsterrr lean (he would say it in my strict white Midwest tongue to rub it in).

--Putting aside that no real man has high fived in 20 years, please do not even try the low five or any fancy shake or embrace you may have seen by watching the NBA or movies that include Martin Lawrence or Chris Tucker.

--For that matter, please do not emulate those two in any way whatsoever.

--You are not Denzel Washington. If you think you are going to get chicks by being cool and aloof you will be cool and aloof….and alone.

--And never, ever sign off by saying “peace out” (though he did allow me to actually make a peace sign when saying goodbye.

When he was particularly aggrieved at my innocent attempts he would even say “Man, don’t go MLK on me. You have to do better than that if you are going to be a ‘blight’ (black white).

Of course, for my part I had to remind him that the word is pronounced “shtick not stick.” And that if you are going to pronounce it hutzpah with a soft “h” rather than a hard “ch” then just don’t bother.

He also just had some pretty good adages that were hard to argue with. We were in a Borders and he saw some middle-aged guy reading a Maxim with his bifocals. Anin said : “Check it:

if you have to use reading glasses with Maxim, you are too old to be reading Maxim.”

Then he said what he always says when he is offended by the crucifixion of the natural order of things: “If everyone just sticks to what they do we well we all win.” God I always love it when he gets so offended by stuff like that.

Suffice it to say he was right about all that.

And he was also right for sure that Nina was not going to sink because of this break-up.

When Anin Met Nina, Part I

In fact, he was always right about her. It was almost like they were part of the same person he knew her so well.

“Well for what it’s worth – and I admit I am being purely selfish here – I’m kind of glad it’s coming to an end,” Anin said.

“I know,” I said. “I know it’s interfered on us too because we haven’t been the same while I’ve been consumed with this crap.”

“That’s not what I meant, but sure that too.”

“Then what?”

“Okay, I never told you this so don’t get mad.”

I braced myself for the worst.

By that point, Anin had enough of living with intermittent electricity, intermittent internet, intermittent contact, even. He was returning to the States and in fact, I met him at the airport. We could have driven the California coast twice and not gotten through catching up. We were like a couple of schoolgirls. There was even a moment where he fell asleep almost mid-sentence. Obviously some of it was jet lag but I think he also just literally talked himself until his jaw was so tired the rest of this body followed suit. I was hoping I could convince him to move out here too, but I left that conversation for another day. Nina had practically moved in with me, which complicated my plan of having Anin move in while we both figured out our next move.

“Well, not long after she kind of planted herself at your place...”

And then he interrupted himself.

“I guess she never told you about this?”

“Dude! Please just say it. I have no idea what you are talking about and now you’re starting to make me really nervous.

“Well okay, this ain’t easy for me to say. Like I said it was not long after you moved in together and I was just so used to coming and going in whatever place you lived in without having to announce myself. And I, uh, walked in on her in the bathroom. Door wasn’t latched or anything and I didn’t hear the fan going.”

“Nice,” I said. You get yourself a good shot in the shower”? I said playfully.

“No man, I mean this was REALLY bad. Man, I walked in and she was on the seat. And brother, it was not pretty. I mean she was squeezing her face like she’d had some bad fish or something in there.”

At that point I started cracking up. And did I ever need that release. Meanwhile, he went on describing her contortions.

“What did she say?”

“Manny, it was the scariest thing I have ever seen. I mean she was so intense that she didn’t even noticed I’d walked in. I think she must have figured out after the fact that I was there because she never really looked at me the same after.”

“Brutal,” I said. It was like that time I came over to your place and I didn’t know Wendy was even over and she walks into the living room with that face mask shit on.”

“Yeah you freaked. Like you saw a ghost.”

“I did see a ghost! Man, why don’t they warn us? Although in her case I should have known because when she’d come over the weekend she had one bag just for all her prescriptions and creams and I mean more bottles than you see at a recycling plant. Hey did you ever find out what all those medicines were for?”

“No, and I didn’t want to know. At her place the top of the dresser was like a mini bar at a high class hotel with all those bottles.”

Then he made one of those face-shaking noises like Muddy Waters singing “I Got My Mojo Working.”

“Her face was like Jason or something! Brutal! I could never look at her the same again and who doesn’t want to look at Nina, right? Y’know, I knew you were kind of hiding her from me until you were sure it was going somewhere but I had no idea you were hiding her from me in the bathroom, like she was Psycho’s mother or something.”

There are some people that you just know recover quickly from a break-up. I knew Nina was one of those and that’s probably what made it hurt even more. If I was going to suffer I wanted her to suffer and I knew her well enough to know the truth – women….i mean Nina, (because you know how much I hated it when she generalized about all men or all women being the same way), yes Nina had completed the cycle of her emotions before hand and was already moving on. For her, all that remained were the formalities.

I really did think this was as good as it was going to get, and if I couldn’t get my writing act together in a blissful relationship, how would I do it when I’m at the land’s end of relationships.

If there is one thing I have learned about break-ups it’s that there are plenty of rules. One of the most important – and if I leave you with no more important lesson, dear reader, it’s this: never try hanging pictures together when you are thinking you are about to break up.

There we were in the apartment and we’d had a bunch of framed photos of us from a trip to the Canadian Rockies taken at our spiritual peak but somehow they ended up forever stacked on the floor in the guest room. I guess if you are thinking in terms of symbolism, the fact that those photos never made it from the floor to the wall helped tell the arc of our story.

So after each of us would alternate for weeks saying something to the other about hanging all the pictures we finally decided to spend a Sunday afternoon getting around to doing something that is clearly meant as a bonding experience.

Because when you can’t agree on where pictures should go, or if they have been hung level or if you are even using the right sized hook then god bless you when she decides that the hooks don’t match the paint or the room style.

So rather than finish an errand that should have freed us by 11 or 12 to go running around on a beautiful beach day we instead stayed sequestered in the apartment arguing. Over the size and style of hooks in a wall.

Okay I’m not going to pretend about my responsibility for the break up.

The doubts that I had about whether or not she was out of my league really got to me. When her blackberry would ring at the gym and I couldn’t resist but to look later on at home who was texting her. Not good.

I went from eagerly anticipating the blink of an incoming email or text in the hopes that it was from Nina, to dreading the hopelessness that permeated the emails and texts.

Her forthrightness went from disarmingly honest to dispassionately mean. Not mean, but blunt in a way that felt mean.

And of course the lure of new conversations turned. They went from each one being a new discovery to the point that one day she said she wasn’t learning anything new from me first-hand anymore, that it would only come when we’d be out in a group and I would tell a story to them that she’d never heard before that normally she’d be the first one I would tell.

Even worse when she caught me. Seemed kind of queer for me to get in trouble for suspecting her of cheating rather than her being in trouble for cheating but that was our world.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

In that instant I felt like I buzzed through at least three legitimate lies including my favorite – I thought it was my blackberry. We did have the same model.

Man, that reminded me of the time she caught me cheating. I told her I had to work all day at home on something I was trying to write so she went out and I end up watching porn while she was out shopping and I was so into it I didn’t even hear her come in. She walks in and I’m not even in the bedroom, I’m on the couch, that’s how preoccupied I was.

“Having fun?” she said. Kind of like in that disapproving way that, oh, I don’t know, your MOTHER might say it if she found you doing the same thing.

All I could think of was, “It helps me concentrate.”

“Really? It helps you concentrate? On what exactly?”

It’s times like that when no matter how hard or erect or appealing you might be at any point with a woman when it’s an attractive sight, you just realize all of a sudden how utterly unappealing you can look sometimes.

Yeah that was probably the dumbest, least likely answer to get out of that situation. At least if it had been in the beginning she probably would have just dropped the bags and jumped on me.”

Instead she just jumped on me. And not in the way I would have liked. “Manny please help me bring in the rest,” she snapped.

Anyway, there was no getting around the talk now.

“Manny, don’t you think it’s time we reconsidered?”

To everyone who knew us it was obvious. To us, it was like an episode of “Survivor.”

Not the incongruity. Although the lightning quick way we communicated with mutual understanding was quickly being drained of its energy. But now, after just a few months of remarkable highs the battle of wits had escalated (or is it de-escalated) to a battle of wills to get in the last word.

Each day was greeted with mutual dread about what we might clash. In the throes of love even the exasperating moments just seem to feed the beast of lust. But when things go in the opposite direction everything takes on a new meaning. Early on, even after something exasperating I was able to say to myself ‘god I love her when she does crazy stuff or say stuff that makes no sense. Now…it’s just…exasperating.

She told me that I needed to dote on her more. I wanted to say: Hey who does all the driving!

But in her own way, she was right. There was nothing I would not do for her in heat of pursuit. Any movie she wanted to see, any restaurant she wanted to go to, any family event where my accompaniment was requested. So in a way I probably set a standard that I just couldn’t maintain. Especially when some of the heat wore off as our idiosyncrasies transitioned from cute to annoying. She even tired of my “there ought to be a separate country just for those people” comments.

As we drifted and I knew that I was becoming less attractive to her, less appealing to her, I started looking at attractive women with nothing more in mind except to see if they look back. When a guy is busted by a woman he needs to know if he still has it. Doesn’t’ need to score, just needs to know he still has it.

I think when relationships are going great you can be the most lucid, clear, explicit person you’ve ever been because you are in such a rush to communicate and connect with what’s going on. And then when things go bad, in my case at least, I use a whole lot fewer words and I have even been accused of mumbling incoherently, like Brad Pitt in “Snatch.” Once things got really tense she asked me to repeat myself, and in her defense, no one could have made out what I said but of course I replied with something like “you heard me,” as if I was some bitter old man, in a disapproving way. God I hated even waking up together by that point.

And so in the midst of another argument that began in one place and continued on at her apartment, she teed up the last shot…

“You know,” she said.

And knocked it right in the hole…

“…You were not exactly my ideal either.”

Either?

“You…weren’t?” I said softly. “Well you were certainly mine.”

And at that I thought I detected the first bit of delicate and sensitive emotion in a long time. At least she actually knew when she hurt my feelings now. It had been so long since that was apparent.

“Don’t take this the wrong way Manny but I had a good thing going when you came along. So it was kind of disruptive. I mean, it was just unexpected and so I guess I will admit I had some trouble adapting to all the attention. Not to mention that you had some kind of preconceived notion about me. And I had none about you. Each is different and each is cool in its own way. Just different. So it takes time for us to meet in the middle.”

She saw my little hangdog face and that I’d kind of slumped a bit.

“Let me explain what I mean. After all, you have your story…I have mine.”

All I could think was: I have a story? I have a story? Someone thinks I have a story!

I could tell this was going to be a while so I went to her fridge. There was never much in there for me unless I had gotten it for myself. Tofu, yogurt, lots of leafy stuff. Fortunately in the freezer there was still a half-eaten tub left over from a couple weekends before.

I always had trouble launching into any deep self-revelation. To me it was like jumping off of a high dive. As much as it’s probably best to just run and jump, I thought about it all the way up. Not Nina. And to her credit, there was no half-beat delay to decide what she might want to edit out that could offend me.

As I nestled myself into the far reaching corners of her couch it then suddenly hit me – what if she launches into some awful daddy or uncle molestation thing. That is not something I’m prepared for. Need a couple bucks? I got it. A lift? I got it? Your dog just got run over? Uh…uh…uh

“Manny, let me ask you a question and I have no hidden agenda in asking this.”

“So let me get this straight. Sometimes you do have a hidden agenda but you can’t say that you do because then I would know that you do and might alter my answer. So, help me out here with how your mind works – do you actually end up with a better answer when you do have a hidden agenda or when you don’t?”

She kind of screwed her head a little bit like she had a sinus headache and said, “At one time I probably knew the answer to that question but in the time it took you to ask I think I have now forgotten.”

“So what’s the question?”

“What is the most important quality to you in a relationship?”

I did not have to hesitate. “Loyalty. Unconditionally. Nothing is a close second. I am so loyal that to this day I still cannot ever root for the Colts because of how they left Baltimore. In fact, I revile them. ”

“I had no idea you had a Baltimore connection.”

“I don’t. It was just wrong.” I’m sure she thought that was a little bit scary. “So what are you getting at with this?”

“I’m not getting at anything. I told you I had no hidden agenda.”

“Well you asked the question so I’m assuming you had something in mind besides sheer curiosity. And how would you answer your own question?”

“Honesty. Also, no close second.”

Gulp. Houston, we’ve had problems.

“Manny…” And the wind-up.

“Obviously your feelings for me pre-dated my feelings for you.”

And the pitch.

She could see I was already getting uncomfortable.

“Don’t make any judgments. Just listen to me. I had no idea what to expect of you. And that was part of the intrigue, the attraction.”

Did she just say, “attraction?”

“In fact, every time I saw you I feel like I was learning so much about you that I had to re-adjust my barriers and lower my guard. Do you have any idea how hard that is for me?”

Hey who is she kidding? I practically invented that whole thing about never letting my guard down.

“The thing you need to know about me is…Look, I don’t mean this to come out the wrong way but you obviously were interested in me…or interested in something. And I obviously was not where you were. You don’t hide that very well. I know guys may want women to telegraph that attention, at least in your fantasies, but you know, women are only flattered by that if it’s from someone they are already interested in ourselves. And over time, I found myself wanting to learn about you and as I did I felt like a new layer was being revealed, a new story. And I liked all the stories! But what you don’t know about me when you were infatuated…”

Infatuated? Was I infatuated?

“…is that you were falling in love with an ideal, in a way because of what you saw on the outside. And women want to be desired for more than that.”

I did recall mom saying something about attractive chicks – and she did call them chicks – that they want to be told how smart they are, and smart chicks want to be told how attractive they are, but where was Nina going with this.

“What I’m saying is that you were falling for strictly a physical ideal and I wasn’t always this way. Until I was at Stanford and even maybe through the first year at least you wouldn’t have looked at me twice. As I overheard what jackass say about me “She’s all books and no looks.”

Ouch. That had to hurt. I felt her pain.

“But the funny thing is I’m glad I heard it out loud because I knew that’s what people were saying, or guys at least. And it wasn’t long before I decided I would take control of my physical self, not for purely cosmetic or superficial reasons but because to me it was a way to assert control in a way so that no one could define me. Believe me I struggled with that because making the change is a kind of concession that I didn’t have control and I thought that changing myself that way is giving in to all sorts of post-feminist values. It was a real struggle, Manny. For identity. I need you to understand.”

Oh, I understand. What I’m debating in the moment is do I ask how much weight we are talking about. No. Definitely not.

“So now here we are and believe me I fell for you. Jeezus, that first night. I thought like I’d been drugged. In the good way! I still don’t know how you pulled that off.”

As a smile broke she made sure to tell me, “Um, I’m not even talking about the night…I’m talking about the evening. You captivated me by dinner’s end. I know you are only too eager to congratulate yourself for the acrobatics, so go ahead.”

Oh come on, just give me a straight out compliment. Is that asking too much? Just admit that it was something special.

“Do you understand the point I’m trying to make?”

By the way, this is why I changed majors in college to journalism so that I could just write rather than take multiple choice tests. I never did well on multiple choice tests. She bailed me out.

“Manny…I swore to myself then that I would never change myself for anyone. I found myself changing for you and in the beginning it was joyously because of all the discoveries but Manny…I mean, you have to admit, it’s nothing but a struggle to get you to communicate anymore. I’ve never even seen you cry. I don’t even think I’ve seen you choked up. If that’s not you then I don’t want you to change for me, but I need to know that you are capable of that kind of emotion, otherwise, I really am changing myself again because it means I would have to concede a lot of emotions knowing that you aren’t able to meet me on that level.”

And I was right back to bailing water.

“So I guess the bottom line is that I kind of worry how much you can really love me if I think you might not be capable of crying. Of being honest enough with me as you appear to be with yourself.”

Now, before I address that one, I will say I have copped to my share of insecurities. And to be honest, there was one kind of/sort of girlfriend in California before I met Nina. She was a model/urology assistant. And I admit it really bothered me. All the nudity, the staring, the focus on the superficial. Not the modeling; the urology. Each and every day that she was not doing some underwear posing for the department store in the local paper she was looking at penises all day long. Big ones I was convinced. Nice ones. Beautifully shaped with perfect grooming. And not just seeing them but holding them. I imagined the doctor in his deep doctoral voice: “Nina, you want to grab that one for me for a second while I prepare the gel. That’s right, use both hands if you need to with this one.”

There must have been a couple hundred of doctor offices in that medical building that she could have worked at and she had to go with the urologist? it was all I could do trying to get her to switch to the GI or the back guy or even a proctologist. Heck I even encouraged her to go to dental assistant school and make a real profession out of it. But I think the more I pushed the harder she held on to it.

So it did cross my mind that with Nina I was losing sight of what was really going on between us and that my inability to stay with a career was driving her nuts. In fact I had been unable to piece together any kind of lasting career. Or project. Anything with “lasticity” she used to say. I am pretty sure that’s not a word but she was convinced it meant “the quality of lasting.” Whatever.

But I was being dumped in advance of my inability to cry? Of all the things I might be insecure about I was actually pretty secure in that I did not need tears to express myself (and truth be told I kind of think that half of all crying fits by women are just for show anyway. That might be just me. If Anin were here he’d say “Oh believe me, it’s just you, buddy.”)

Wow. Things had deteriorated to the point that where we could once communicate almost by eye contact alone, now every conversation turned into a mystery. I didn’t even know what I meant anymore. I even said to her once, “Do you understand whatever point I’m trying to make?”

Another time we were having one of those arguments where what may have even started out as a healthy conversation or disagreement just goes so off track that you can’t even verbalize well anymore in real time and she said to me, “Manny, speak up…I don’t speak mumble.” Ouch.

I was so wistful for the early rush when we were getting to know each other so well so fast. And she really did know me. We were out with some of her friends and I was telling a story and I turned to Nina and said, remember that guy who really pissed me off that one time?” And she came right back with “Honey pie, you are going to have to narrow it down more than that.” Yeah, she knew me. As if there had only been one!

And let me tell you about those girlfriends. They are like one of those photos of the old guard at the Kremlin. Just try to penetrate THAT inner circle.

But somehow I did. In fact, at one point I was talking with Sabrina I think it was and this was still early on and I was trying to gauge where I ranked on the serious-interest-o-meter. “Manny, what the heck are you worried about. When Nina first started talking about you, we all asked the usual questions we ask and when I said something about what color eyes does he have, you know what she said? And I quote: ‘Dreamy. Like, it’s not even a fair fight.’ And then without being prompted she said something about spending a night with her hand in your hair. Believe me, normally you have to put a gun to her head to get the details. She was going on and on to the point that I begged her to stop. So you need to just chill, man.”

Looking for something more, preferably positive, I asked tentatively, “And, what about the hair? Did she say anything about my hair?”

“Don’t push it, killer,” she said friendly enough.

Sabrina always was my favorite of them. Of course, the bar’s not real high with that group. Talk about your irritating habits, one of them used to always pantomime out the major noun in whatever she was talking about. So every story about a phone call involves her doing that thumb-pinky thing to her ear. Double bonus when it’s about a call while she was driving and she does the steering wheel thing. She tells you about a band that’s playing and in describing the virtuosity of each band member she mimics the piano, guitar, drums, and….lord help me, a trumpet. Don’t even make me tell you about the sail boating story.

She’s almost as much fun as Angela who works for a company that…creates names for things. I said, what do you mean exactly, you create names for things? Like, did that company come up with Lucky Charms and Honeycomb? Because, I have to admit….those are really good names. You sit there all day in front of a computer and just type names on the screen and if you like it you do what, exactly…” She allowed me to finish bloviating. “No, it’s actually a very research and technology intensive process. It’s not a game, though we do create names for video games,” and she then laughed at her own joke. Alone. But then I had to dial it back because all I could think of was, holy shit, wait until she finds out my last name, if Nina hasn’t already told her. I will never hear the end of it from her.

I could swear another one of them, Anita I think it was, I was sure for a moment she was coming on to me and I was actually….offended. It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode when Jerry experiences tears for the first time and didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t believe I was actually feeling that way.

That should have been enough to satisfy me. But once again I fixated that on a certain level, even if somehow she was really interested, Nina would conclude that I haven’t done anything of note. No legacy. No “one thing” that people would remember about me. I didn’t finish school, self-destructed my career, couldn’t find anything in Cali to jumpstart.

There’s a point in a relationship where things are going so well that you are almost looking for a fight just to test the bounds of reality. Uh, and for the make-up sex. But then when you get to a point that you are fighting all the time there’s just no joy in make-up sex when you know you’re just around the corner from Round 12. And I was REALLY enjoying the make-up sex there for a while because I’d hardly been in relationships before that lasted long enough that you could have some quality time like that.

You can sometimes chart the lifecycle of relationships by the level of detail you share with someone privately. At the outset you will tell a chick practically anything just to start or maintain her interest. You almost can’t wait to see them just to share some sort of intimate detail about another friend or work or the shin splints you are experiencing. But at the other end of the cycle you are holding so much back that you find yourself revealing details, be they mundane or personal in front of other people to the point that someone – oh, let’s call her Nina – is wondering why you wouldn’t have shared that with her first, or in private. The surest telltale sign of all, is when in front of a group you say, “Honey I think I told you this…” as if it’s a preamble to share with the group what you have already shared with her, BUT YOU HAVEN’T SHARED IT WITH HER and she’s left sitting there holding the bag and wondering what the hell.

When she says, “It must have been the OTHER Nina,” you know you are in for a thumping.

Good times.

Like drug addicts I guess, I am a recidivist when it comes to women. How many others can say they proposed to their wives on the day they became divorced from the same woman. On the day my ex and I came home from divorce court (not Harper’s mother – that one’s a whole other book) we drove back to her place together, we went upstairs and we spent approximately 12 hours besting the best sex we had ever had.

So yes, I wanted to hang on to Nina. When I didn’t want to strangle her.

So there I was, on my own again, broke up, broke down and just flat broke.

The days when I could break our ice with a little word play were over.

There we were sitting in the apartment, site of the first 24 hours of nirvana and my words and word games were futile.

“Incense and incense” I said.

“Huh?”

“How could two words that are essentially identically spelled mean the opposite? If incense is all about calming smells and peaceful decompression then how could incensed mean stark raving mad?”

“Manny, not now. I’m serious this time.”

And I knew she was.

At the end, nothing was really very funny and nothing worked.

How special was Nina? We were together long enough for one birthday of mine and for my gift she had a graphic artist friend of hers create a book out of NUM that consisted of a specially designed front cover, review quotes on the back, an about-the-author page with her favorite photo of me, my existing text flowed in, and flag and other graphics filled in from my draft (she was even kind enough to change the “authorship” from M.A. Fagut to Manny Fagut, helpfully pointing out the difference). The rest consisted of about 200 blank pages and inscribed to me with her loving scrawl where my text left off….”TO BE CONTINUED….”

I was choked up when she gave it to me that night. I even tried to muster a tear. I asked how she ever dreamed that up and she said that she had a dream – a dreamlet she called it because it just came instantly one night in bed – she had a vision of relaxing at an outdoor café drinking from her cup, looking up and seeing a woman reading my book “The Brief History of NUM, by Manny Fagut.”

I’ve kept it ever since, sitting in my closet together with that silver harmonica case. But we were at a dead end. She pulled the dreaded “I’ve come too far” card. As in the heavily loaded “I’ve come too far in my life to let this relationship bring me down and set me back.”

Come too far? The implication being someone who has overcome something life threatening just short of the Holocaust. What the heck had she overcome? A bad hair day? A few broken engagements? I knew I was being rough on her. I never let her pick up a check. And I was in no position to do so but it helped create the façade that I was in control. I heard Dan Aykroyd telling a story once about his early days, before the SNL fame, and when he had visitors he never let anyone pick up a check. Not because he could afford it or that he was trying to show off. “Nobody drops coin in my town,” was his line. The code.

“Nina, I feel like I'm missing out on something when I'm with you and then I feel like I'm missing out on something when I’m not with you.”

“Are you looking for me to make it easy for you Manny?”

God no, anything but that.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not going to apologize.”

From the corner of my eye I could see on her desk the first love letter I wrote her. I dashed it off after that first night with nothing but pure heart and emotion, so it’s sloppy but it was real: “I wish you could know how it felt to be me; swept up in a wave of unplanned, unexpected, unending feel, touch, smell and taste; within hours I was captured by the contours of your fineness and your sweet smell. The honey hue of your skin. Intoxicating. Captured me, enraptured me but does not cage me. I want you.”

I took one last long (and longing) look at what was now just a piece of paper.

And with that it was over. If you don’t believe me then that’s why I wrote Chapter 2.

* * *