They lived in shallow sexual climax, in the pointless spasm of gratification, these men twice your age.
Because they feared all that came before your ecstasy, and all that lay after. They Feared The End of the World. They feared the Birth of the Universe. They feared bookends and afterwords and irresolution. They feared what they could not control.
They didn’t have real jobs, instead mysterious sources of income, dressed like pseudo-landlords in Bushwick, grasping at their middling status of long-time Leaseholder. They lingered in bars they should have long ago abandoned, slurping vodka tonics with extra lime while they bemoaned the disappearance of all their friends to Responsibilities, placing a weathered hand on yours, telling you that Really, They Shouldn’t.
They flailed under the untenable rules of the telephone, thinking they knew them, changing their keyboards to all lowercase. They were in the dark. They could never understand the complexities of Liking A Message, couldn’t know what Not Replying for Fifteen Hours meant.
So they couldn’t take No for an answer. They didn’t understand it. Could never understand the specificities between two letters. They didn’t know that sex could be conditional, ephemeral, forgotten. They were beings warped by heaving, paralyzing Middle-Age. For them, all endings were death. Apathy was dissolution. No was nonexistence.
It was hard not to pity them. Because how can you not feel pity for a man who’s chasing his tail, chasing invincibility, chasing girls who were born the very hour he was handed his college diploma? How can you feel anything other than disgust for them as they wipe the cum off their sun-damaged skin with the only clean napkin in their partially working Prius? As you watch it cling and shred onto their once-beautiful stomachs?
And you wonder why they fear endings.
It’s really the fault of this city. Can you really blame them? Because nothing can create a Loser like this city can. A Loser in adoration of all the beautiful young women who crawl across the city like a plague (Yes, we are a plague!) Those forty-five-year old men with their overgrown features who exist in a playground of twentysomethings with undergrown features, too bored and mistreated to tell them No.
Well, until you do. You see the deflation of tissue, the impregnation of beer, the creasing of an over-eager forehead, and so they meet their end. And it kills those men. It kills them.
So they point the finger and yell that All They Ever Wanted Was To Be Nice. They Only Wanted to Be Kind and Be A Friend. They were Just Trying to Get to Know You. And now you’re a Mean Bitch, a real Soulless, Heartless Cunt, because they’re facing death itself. They’re staring right at the End of Life without you. And you’re just a star, too bright to be fucked at their ex-wife’s house again. And they’re just pathetic side effects of a city that never makes you Grow Up.
The thing is, they don’t know this. They don’t know that they are symptomatic, not determinant. That’s what makes them creatures of sympathy. They don’t realize their own vampiric reasons for adoring Bright Young Women. That their fruitless attempts to stay young, to avoid death and their own middling accomplishments after nearly half a century of life are simply symptomatic of a greater cultural evil, and actually not about them at all.
So yes, pity is the best way to describe it. Because they die if they can’t make you come. They need it to survive, those poor things, to avoid a chasm of unremarkability. They die when you see them for what they are: actually Nothing At All, only a reflux of economic stagnation.
Remind yourself of that the next time you see a Silver Fox on the L Train. Remind yourself of the sight of a napkin on a flaccid cock. Remember that the next time you see them all buttoned up in French Workwear, pretending to run an art gallery, which is really just their friends’ art hanging in the living room of their Shared Artists’ Space (their over-occupied, underdecorated warehouse apartment).
Beware them. Beware the men in cable-knit sweaters trying to pry you open over a glass of wine they know nothing about. Beware the men with unexceptional, false Careers in Investment telling you they’ve never Seen Such a Beautiful Thing. Beware a wrinkled eye, a yellowing tooth, a thinning scalp. Beware the men who fear death; as such, they can never truly know life. Can only glean its power from in between the legs of a Woman Out of Their League. From a Woman at The Beginning of It All.
So God bless the poor men twice your age, still deciding whether they should get a master’s degree. God bless those unfortunate creatures seeking Fertile Young Women to bury themselves in, and maybe impregnate, in an effort to extend. To ascribe significance to their mediocrity. To make themselves human through the flesh of a star. Yes, poor them. Poor, poor them. Pity the poor men twice your age. Pray for those wretched creatures.
EL is a writer based in Bed-Stuy.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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