Manly?

Boy.  I guess you are hungry for this sort of tell-all fare.  Well, then. . . perhaps I might continue.

The night went weird, but that was at a time when I was in the mood for such things.  The girl I was dating was a student at Country Club College, young and a bit nutty in a modest way.  She was just what I needed then, wild and talented and sophisticated.  You will call me a liar in your hearts, but I swear to you, it is all true.  She came to my door one night when I was lonely and quite alone for a good while.  You might remember the story.  She worked for my tenant and had come to request a key to get into the apartment to get something her boss/my tenant needed for work.  I gave her a hard time and then the key and told her to let herself in when she came back.  I would be where I had been--on the couch with a movie and a scotch.

When she came back, I asked her if she would like something to drink, and much to my surprise, she said yes.  I was well stocked and when she asked for a Blue Moon, I was able to provide.  Impressive, perhaps.  She stayed and chatted up and down, me rising more and more to the occasion.  She was a violinist, she said, and played first chair in the city's symphony orchestra.  She had her violin in the car, and so I asked her to get it.  And the walls of my home were thrilled.  We had not heard the likes here before.

When she left, I told her that I would not bother her, but if she ever wanted to play for me again, she could call.  And she did call--from the car about ten minutes later.   She was busy the next night, she said, but would like to see me the following.  Oh, I said.  That would be fine.

The loneliness was ending, I thought, and now there was this.  She was from a good family, it turned out, her father a semi-famous architect.  Her most recent boyfriend was a music major at the college, too, and not long ago had graduated and was currently playing bass guitar on some very famous albums.  And now. . . me?  I thought about what the famous doctor prescribed.  Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I met her that next time at a downtown cafe that I knew well.  She was with two of her friends.  They were equally young and sophisticated and crazy it seemed to me who was not.  And so I sat in paranoid wonder waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop.

The next night was her birthday.  I had a night shift at the factory that ended at nine, and when it was over, I took a bottle of wine and some flowers to her apartment.  Why was she there alone, I wondered?  I knocked.  She answered.  She asked me in.

By the time we met the couple at the Italian restaurant, we had been together for quite some time.  A couple years, really.  And you know what happens.  Things.  And stuff.  And I could never really take it all very seriously anyway as I was older than her parents.  We had gone to visit them once.  They were pleasant enough to me and even invited us to lunch at the Country Club the next day.  That, I think, was some sort of literary coup, but I have yet to write about it.  I will, one day.  I will write it, but you will call me a liar.

Dinner done and Carrot Head departed, the couple asked if we would like to go for a drink.  I knew just the place.  It was one of our favorite places to go because it had an eclectic juke box and a run-down redneck crowd right in the middle of a gentrified part of town.  And they had pool tables.  We would go there every few weeks and play Frank Sinatra albums and buy cheap pitchers of Budweiser and play pool in between dancing, me crooning loudly along with Frank. . . "Fly me to the moon. . . ."  Yes, it would be perfect.  It would be fun.

My girl was all bright eyed about it, too.  I will not, of course, tell you about the secret lives of men and women, but I like to think that I am the opposite of what I most dislike.  I mean, I am very wicked, but I have an extremely good heart.  And though sometimes what we want may not be the best thing for us. . . oh, we can let those things play out in words in the darkness without ever bringing them to light.

But my girl, as I said. . . she had bright eyes.

The first part went as planned.  There were rednecks and there was beer and pool, and there was that seducer Frank Sinatra in dollar after dollar's worth of seductive song.

We played doubles, me paired with the restaurant beauty and my girl with her boy.  He was a new attorney and as full of all that as he could be for he had begun late and was now in his mid-thirties.  He was with a big firm downtown and was bland but for that, so he used what he had like gold.  And he was reasonably successful to some extent.  But the gorgeous girl was not his yet, and they were on a date to "try it out."  As far as I could tell, it wasn't working the way it might.  You could feel it in the air as the attorney stood too close to my girl to help her line up a shot.  He was younger than I, and, I thought, I might have to give him a whipping, though size and age were not giving me much of a hand.  But oh, we were drunk, the gorgeous girl most of all, and I was not at all far behind.  So as Frank sang in his most earnest way and she leaned a little too close into me, I might have tilted my head--you know, as they do in the movies.

And that was when things began to go wrong.  Suddenly I could see that she was a born problem maker.  She was not a nice girl at all but one who liked to cause trouble.  I had been blinded, I admit, but suddenly I could see it all clearly.  Nope.  This was her fault.  It was wrong.  She had planned something like this all along.

"Do something," she yelled to the attorney.  "He tried to kiss me!"  I looked at my date who was on the verge of laughter.  "O.K." I thought, and turned a slow look to Our New Friend, Esq.  What the hell.  Let's just do this now.  I hadn't liked him all night long anyway.  But for all the wanton male tales he had regaled us with in the course of the evening, he was finished.  Done.  It turned out, I could tell, not to be his best night.

He looked at her and said, "Get a beer."  And with that, she went undone.  Something had snapped. The last of the Xanax had kicked in maybe.  But her body could no longer hold itself upright.  She went limp.  Tired.  Loose as a goose.

I walked over to my girl.  "I think we should leave," I said, and she giggled in reply. "You think?"  I liked her more just then.

With Frank Sinatra singing about Brazil, we put away our cue sticks and went to say goodnight.  Gorgeous was sitting at the bar now, slumped, one hand to her cheek, her eyes somewhere far away.  And our new attorney friend?  He had been hopeful, but now all that was left was a girl on empty who hadn't much use for his brand of masculinity and a bar full of hostile redneck men.

Outside, I looked at my girl.  She seemed quite happy given everything.

"Well, um. . . I thought they would be better than that."

"Yea.  They were both after me all night."

"What?"

She looked at me like I was retarded.

"He was hitting on me from the start.  He kept asking me out.  Said terrible things about you.  Here.  Look.  He gave me his card with his home phone."

On the back he had written a number in pen.

"When I went to the bathroom, she came with me into the stall and started kissing me.  She was a mess."

"Well that's just awful," I said, feeling quite the fool.  "Why'd you let him do that?"

But my girl liked me, and I took solace in the fact.  I just wanted to get home.

"I hate going out, don't you?" I asked her.  "It is not worthwhile."

She just laughed the way you can when you are young and pretty and all of life is still ahead of you and there seems never to be any real consequences.

"Sure," she said.  "Let's go home."

And I was full of resolutions that night, and there was no talking in the dark.  Only the deep and desperate desire of one who has only that and nothing else, who still has one last thing against someone who still has many.  And then the silent nothingness of late and needed sleep.

I know--that tells us nothing more about Carrot Head.  But there is time.