I spent the last twenty-four hours with my Black Pearl. It wasn’t a date; it was a goddamn marathon, a twenty-four-hour session in the gutter of the human animal. Small talk, deep talk, and in the bedroom, a kind of beautiful, ugly, and completely honest warfare that went on until the world started to go gray outside the window. Then the repeat claims, the soft, desperate whisper in the dark: “Are you hungry? Are you hungry?”
So we ended up at a Waffle House at one in the morning, two ghosts under the fluorescent lights, the air thick with the smell of cheap coffee and quiet desperation. I was exhausted. We got back to my place, and I managed about three hours of sleep before the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary session started all over again.
There’s a reason she drives here from Phoenix. And there’s a reason I enjoy having her here in Tucson. We are two beautiful, broken animals, and for a little while, we get to lick each other’s wounds in the dark.
And in the middle of all this, in the quiet aftermath, she asked me a question. And I gave her the answer, the whole goddamn, ugly, beautiful truth of it.
Dating women at this age, I told her, in your fifties, it’s like going to the dog shelter.
You walk in, and the first thing that hits you is the smell. A quiet, sad perfume of piss and disinfectant and a whole lot of bad luck. And there they are, in their little cages, all the long-in-the-tooth dogs that nobody wanted. And they know it.
So they put on a show. The second you walk by, they’re all smiles and wagging tails. They’re not twenty anymore. They’re not the cute little puppies that get snatched up in a day. No. These are the old soldiers, the ones with the scars and the bad habits. And they know this might be their last goddamn chance.
So they do their tricks. One of them is standing on its hind legs, waving a little paw. Another one has a whiteboard in the back of its cage and is doing long-form arithmetic. They’re all performing, a desperate little tap dance for a scrap of affection, for a chance to get out of the cage and into a warm house, even if it’s just for one more night.
And a man like me, a man of “influence,” a man with a full set of hair and a few bucks in his pocket, he’s not supposed to be shopping at the shelter. He’s supposed to go to the breeder. He’s supposed to be the guy who says, “I want a black lab, with papers. I want something pure.” I paid twelve hundred bucks for my basset hound because I wanted to know what the hell I was getting.
So why would a man like me be hanging out at the shelter?
Because I’m not looking for a goddamn pet. I’m just enjoying the show.
I walk down the row of cages, and it’s just like a dating app. A1, A2, A3. All these beautiful, broken animals, with their sad eyes and their hopeful, lying smiles. I swipe right on the lowest-hanging fruit, the ones with the best pictures, the ones who know how to sell the product.
And then you meet them. And of course, they don’t look like their pictures. There’s always something missing. The desperation is a little more real, the sadness a little less poetic. And God forbid you get them into bed. That’s when the real deconstruction of the lie begins. The war paint comes off. The wig gets hung on the bedpost. The push-up bra with the wire reinforcement, the one that was holding up a beautiful, twenty-year-old lie, it comes off. The spandex, the girdle, the whole goddamn scaffolding that was holding the beautiful, crumbling building together, it all comes off.
And in the gray, honest light of the morning, the thing you wake up to is nothing like the thing you thought you were buying.
And that’s the game, isn’t it? In your fifties, you’re all just shelter dogs, putting on a little red lipstick, trying to catch the eye of the one man who might be dumb enough, or lonely enough, to take you home.
And my job, as I told her, the job I’ll be doing until I finally get the hell out of this country and go to Argentina, is to be the professional shopper who never buys a thing. I get all the benefits. I can walk down the aisle, and every one of these beautiful, broken animals will come up to the bars and lick my hand. They’ll offer me their head to pet. They’ll offer me the best of the cream, the prime, uncut, top-shelf version of themselves, in a quiet, desperate suggestion that says, “Hey, if you take me home, if you make me your girlfriend, if you just get me out of this goddamn cage, I’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you. This is what I have to offer.”
And you take the sample. You taste it. And then you just walk away, on to the next cage, to see what that one has to offer.
And don’t tell me it’s a disgusting thing to do. Because you’re not the only one shopping. Every woman, from the age of thirteen, has had a line of men outside her door, all of them trying to get a look at the product. They’re just trying to find the best deal, the one that will give them the most for the least. This is just the same game, played with a few more scars and a hell of a lot more desperation.
You might find a good one at the shelter, sure. A real diamond in the rough. But she’s going to have the scar tissue. She’s going to be traumatized by some abusive owner from her past. She’s going to have been cheated on, or maybe she just didn’t get the right nipple from her mom and now she has regrets. Who the hell knows what the story is.
But here’s my final, beautiful, and completely honest piece of advice.
Don’t do it.
If you’re a man who is still, against all odds, free, then don’t you dare walk into that shelter and sign the goddamn papers. You might feel good about it for a little while, a real hero, saving a poor, broken thing from a life in a cage. But you’ve just signed up for eight years of someone else’s bullshit. You’ve just adopted a beautiful, sad, and completely broken animal that you now have to feed, and clean up after, and pretend to love.
And that thing, that beautiful, pathetic, and completely grateful thing you just saved?
It’s just another goddamn anchor. And it’s only going to hold you down.
