After Joe climbs into Angel’s miniature coupe, they follow us in still another direction, north across town to Jumpers. As we approach the entrance, a doorman in a chair is checking IDs, standard protocol at places like these. Except upon reaching Angel, she throws a mild pouting fit at doing so, offended that he’s asked, for some reason, even though she is a little younger than all of us, and looks it. Legal drinking age, though, so we gain admission all the same.
She is already not our favorite person in the world, however, and will do herself no additional favors tonight. We’ve no sooner arrived, in fact, before Dylan, Pete, and Phil shoot one another knowing glances, and beeline it over to a dingy corner booth, where they will remain planted for the duration of our stay here. Viewing this as a slightly preferable option, I’m somewhat stuck here with these other two, although we have unexpectedly already bumped into a pair of Joe’s former coworkers, who hail him and then assail us with their idiotic conversation just inside the entrance. One, a short yet casually dressed and seemingly somewhat normal dude named Arnold, is introduced to me, while his sidekick, some smiling buffoon with this bushy, ridiculous looking mustache, is not. And let’s just say I am okay with that.
The club is halfway packed and becoming more so by the minute, as we four clods — and one knockout — stand in a circle here, hands tightly clutching our sweating bottled beers. Soon to become five, for Aaron then breezes through the door, a fake, ambushed smile frozen on his features for he too unwittingly becomes trapped in this tractor beam of inane chatter. To which the only alternative for us males is a not so secret rubberneck, with every worthy passing figure, even while knowing quite well that this accomplishes nothing. At least until we can figure out a way to politely extricate ourselves. For now, however, these goobers are on the subject of professional basketball, eyes glued with exaggerated interest to a mounted TV.
“I met Charles Barkley once,” Arnold boasts, eyebrows arched and grinning in a manner that I suspect he studied in the mirror.
“Nice, nice,” Mustache nods, questions, “where was this?”
“The Round Mound of Rebound!” Aaron calls out — though absent so much as a glance in their direction, I observe, as his eyes instead continue scanning the room. His smile has of someone half playing along, though finding this entire conversation absurd, and devoting no brain cells to this whatsoever.
“This was up in Cleveland. A bar in the Flats,” Arnold explains.
“Yep, yep,” Mustache nods again, though this time pulling on his beer bottle in dramatic fashion before declaring, “that’s exactly where you need to go up there. The Flats.”
“Yeah so anyway I’m standing at the bar and all of the sudden I notice this dude stroll up a few spots away from me and I’m like, holy shit, that’s Charles Barkley.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll bet. I’ll bet,” Mustache offers, giving Arnold a pointed, sober burst of eye contact.
“Yeah but see, I don’t actually say anything, I just stand there and act cool about it. ’Cause I’ve noticed he’s got all these people comin up to him, like, comin out of the woodwork, right? Asking him for an autograph and shakin his hand n’ shit. So I’m thinkin, eh, fuck that, I’ll be just cool about it, you know?”
“Totally. That is totally the way you play that,” Mustache agrees.
“Yeah so anyway after a little while, all these people clear out and somehow there’s just this open space between us. He looks over at me and says, lemme guess, you probably want something, too? And I’m like, huh? No. I don’t even know who the fuck you are. He laughs and points at me and tells the bartender, hey, yo, get this man whatever he wants to drink! It’s on me!”
As these two laugh uproariously, and nod their heads in riotous approval, I notice that Aaron’s semi-queasy smile has gotten a little more lopsided, and surely matches mine. As the other duo clink their beer bottles together, and Mustache offers, “nice, nice,” in appraisal of that tale, Arnold looks my way, and I feel as though this has made me exponentially dorkier in an instant, as though I too have unwittingly just signed off on all of it.
And then, after focusing intently upon these mounted TVs for as long as we’ve stood here, this all somehow gives way to passionate discussion of…….habanero peppers. I’m zoning out as much as I can, casting my mind away from this inane pablum. Which is clearly not enough.
“Oh yeah, that’s definitely where it’s at,” Arnold assures us, “I mean if you want the flavor and the heat, that’s the only kind that brings it.”
“I knew this girl one time who was into poblano peppers,” Mustache is saying, “and I’m like, get outta here, poblanos have no heat whatsoever! No heat! I mean, I guess there’s a little something there, you can taste it, there’s a taste, but…”
If a chick wonders how guys get on such imbecilic topics — and I too often wonder, rest assured — she need look no further than the intricacies of this nightlife game. How is it we end up discussing basketball and habaneros, rather than acting upon our deepest desires? Instead of chasing down the targets we’ve not so secretly scoped out all night? Well, part of you wants to look not so eager, and part of you wishes to cloak the reasons you’re standing around in a circle by the door. Engaged in some discussion which at least appears all consuming, the onus of making a move at this very moment is removed, hypothetically erases your obvious motives. You can’t just run off and accost every woman the instant she walks into the frame. So moronic conversation it is, for now. You tell yourself timing is everything, though that’s often yet another classic piece of fiction.
“Don’t we look like morons standing here?” I eventually ask Aaron.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” he agrees.
“We need to ditch these guys,” I tell him, indicating the smiling mustachioed dolt, currently getting way too excited about a job related story, “they’re killing our chances.”
Joe overhears only the last half of my comment but remarks, with a smirk and sidelong glance, “I didn’t even hear all of that, but I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I agree.” True, he alone does have a woman here, though she is looking equally bored, and Joe himself is no more engaged in this crap than we.
Yet when Joe inexplicably finds himself drawn into Arnold and the mustache man’s passionate workplace discussion, the two of us leave him holding the bag. Aaron and I move away from the pack, forming a smaller, only slightly less conspicuous one not even twenty feet removed, as we begin to observe the lay of the land. Then Joe and Angel eventually manage to extricate themselves and sidle up beside us, while we continue distantly surveying this splendid empire.
Angel’s presence makes us appear at least a smidgen more respectable, I will grant, although demographically similar to just about every cluster in sight. Everywhere we look, especially upon the dance floor, it’s one female surrounded by about six preppy cheeseball dudes apiece. The only exceptions are the many isolated clusters where it’s all dudes.
“Nothing but assholes n’ elbows in here,” Joe observes, breaking out one of his stock phrases, as we survey this landscape with waning enthusiasm.
Drifting closer to the ear shattering music source makes it that much more difficult to talk, the tradeoff as you near this pulsating nerve center. So this is the question, I guess. Presumably some guys must do alright in this setting, and what kind of creatures are they, how do they pull this off? For all his knowledge, what can even a skilled ladies’ man like Aaron bring to the table in an atmosphere such as this? In depth conversation rendered impossible by the thumping house beats, appearance assumes even greater importance. And I’m wondering if, considering a good 90% of us fall into the same category of just average looking guys, finding some gimmick isn’t the only valid path out of this maze. This is how the club self becomes a caricature of your true self, because your true self just gets swallowed whole in this kind of atmosphere; there is no other way to stand out from the crowd but to exaggerate all proclivities. Or so it seems to me. I don’t know anything. But it’s considerably soothing to see that Aaron has no answers, either, he’s reduced to ogling just like the rest of us.
Meanwhile, located at the polar opposite, you have Angel’s take on the situation. Not that she is explaining anything to us, only that we can hear her pouting sob stories as she relates them to Joe. She’s used to having every eye in the room upon her, whether on the strip club runway or in a regular old bar such as this, and is pissed off that such is not the case now, that she has considerable competition. I feel like telling her she’s not all that and to get over herself, but refrain from doing so, considering one of my best friends is dating her.
“Man, there’s more swingin dick here than the front lines at Normandy,” Joe groans to us men, safely out of earshot from the girlfriend at his other shoulder.
If there’s one consolation, it’s that we are no longer like this sea of dudes out there on the dance floor, or even more commonly, hanging in packs along its fringes. To think, we used to emulate these people, just a few short years ago. The robotic look or the clean look or the blank slate look, whatever you wish to call it. Uniformly amounting to the same thing, which is so neutral and identical it’s essentially anonymous. Because popular wisdom has always said those tactics will succeed. Maybe some of us have reason to suspect these ladies want everyone scrubbed and shaved and polished to interchangeable perfection precisely so they can forget we are guys, and pretend they are dating androids or something instead, but whatever. If it’s working, then it’s working.
Except then an exhausting amount of internal system maintenance went into this as well. Although I have to admit, there was a time much of it did seem like valuable knowledge. This pursuit of perfect guy status amusing and worthwhile, worldly even, these endless hours spent attempting to craft a bogus sophistication. You were learning some things and it was kind of fun regardless and besides, you needed a well-rounded versatility to hang in there alongside other chaps anyway, right? Knowing the right vodka to drink, the right lotions to use, the right comeback for anything a girl in a bar could ever possibly say. All practiced and committed to memory, seasoned alongside a healthy, broad yet passing knowledge in manly topics like cars and guns and sports. Feeling you relate to the smarmy twenty-something narrating the beer commercial — or liking to believe you do, anyway, that he’s one of your people, the kind of trendy fellow you’d choose as a sidekick. Or, more importantly, that you were the kind of guy he would pick as his sidekick.
For months, we attacked the nightclubs en masse, armed with a killer smile and this wealth of knowledge. Certain that we could and in fact had molded ourselves into ideal bachelors merely by adopting this featureless robotic look, by reading enough breezy little three minute articles and studying enough advertisements. Before, the image of the ideal guy we must become was fuzzy at best, but suddenly it had a shape, its borders were definable. The right cologne to wear, the correct whiskey to order in every situation, the perfect belt to match these shoes. We’ve memorized whole series of dialogue, ways to make our jobs sound cool, even — and if nothing else, any lady should appreciate our learned vocal dexterity, and that we’ve had the common sense to know which topics to avoid, too. We’re in our twenties and on the prowl, goddammit, but we don’t necessarily swallow every morsel thrown our way. We’re discriminate.
Just by studying what’s working for these other anonymous males, and aping that, surely any chick would be rendered helpless in our proximity. This is the theory, no? Advice on clothing, advice on staying trim. The perfect pickup lines, and a small clutch of tried and true jokes for every occasion. Those crucial sports trivia tidbits to toss around during that precious down time at the bar when we weren’t chatting up ladies, but didn’t dare risk appearing bored. In which a workmanlike knowledge of who won titles when, and the most legendary players in each, and the interview soundbites that blew up and took on lives of their own, these all became indispensable.
We thirsted for every scrap of nourishment, hoisting us to a state of ideal singlehood. Especially sex tips. We could never stockpile enough data in this category, one point upon which any girl we might land would surely agree with us. Although you had to play this one cagily, never admitting to the source, forever tossed out offhand as though always known and frequently utilized. Or how we inhaled the charming supermodels’ astounding wisdom columns, feeling this gave us invaluable insight into the female psyche and thus a heads up on the evening’s outcome. Brushing up on music we have no interest in and shows we’ll never watch just to broaden the hypothetical conversational palette. And detailed minutiae concerning exotic vacation hotspots, too, given with a similar breezy enthusiasm-yet-indifference, while deflecting any questions as to whether you’ve actually visited these distant lands yourself. Unless of course you actually have. All preliminaries, naturally, to the main objective, honed through ardent devotion: the art of seduction. The right kind of eye contact. Reading body language from across the room — and giving off the right kind, as well. Gambits for turning the talk to sex without seeming too obvious, or a total horny perv. And, should it go that far, the right moment to ask for digits. A one night stand? Absolutely, and all the proper etiquette thereof should this miracle ever take place at some point in the hazy but assuredly divine future. Commit to memory, lad. Don’t question. Just absorb.
But after a while, we eventually arrived at the same conclusion, at right around the same time: who cares? No matter how many articles skimmed, or amusing ads chuckled over, we still like Captain Morgan better than these expertly ordered martinis. We can pull off dressing well, if choosing to do so, yet the interest was always inconsistent at best and this really isn’t us. There is nothing I can do with my hair no matter what the advice given.
Truth is, we enjoy our normal fucked up, inconsistent selves more than we ever did angling for perfection. And most of all, paramount to all the other considerations, we’d yet to meet a girl who was impressed with any of this nonsense anyway. Despite this avalanche of information, all of it seemingly sounding good in theory, we had accomplished nothing except a certain tendency to speak like we were one of these articles ourselves.
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