I was living in Sedona at the time, at the tail end of my sabbatical, and the goddamn quiet was starting to get too loud. The silence was screaming. I had to go down to Phoenix to catch a flight to go hunting with my organtic father, while I dealt with something about a lawsuit, my ex-wife’s lawyers still trying to pick the last few scraps of meat off my bones. A perfect excuse to get out of the mountains and back into the sewer where I belong.
So I did what any lonely, desperate man with a smartphone does. I got on Plenty of Fish. A real chaotic shithole of a dating app. A digital car lot full of Mormons, high-expectation single moms, fat ones, skinny ones, all of them with a little bit of rust and a story they’re tired of telling. You just walk around, kicking the tires, hoping one of them still has some tread left.
The problem with Sedona was the lack of young women. And by “young,” I mean anyone under the age of a goddamn sequoia. So when I saw this one, this girl who looked… acceptable, I was surprised.
Back in the Amalia’s days, when I was still a millionaire and the world was my goddamn oyster, I wouldn’t have even slowed down. Back then, I hadn’t had sex with anything over twenty percent body fat. I don’t think I’d even seen a stretch mark until I was in my fifties.
But here I was, in my mid-forties, coming out of the Sedona fog, my standards softened by a year of quiet desperation. This one, she was in her late twenties, according to the lies she’d typed into her profile. A cute smile with dimples, stacked heavy on top, with the kind of curves that promised a good, honest, stupid time. And she was aggressive. Her messages were short, to the point, and hungry.
And when they’re aggressive like that, you know what it means. It means it’s either going to be you, or it’s going to be the next lucky bastard in line.
“Look,” I texted her, “I’m coming into Phoenix. I’m staying at a loft downtown. Meet me at Angel’s Brewery.”
I told her I had an early flight. I was being transparent.
A real goddamn gentleman.
I got to the brewery, still arguing with the lawyers on my phone. They were picking at my assets in Idaho, in Utah. I was pacing back and forth in front of the place when I saw her. I think she was wearing a Members Only jacket.
And she looked absolutely nothing like her picture. Not even a goddamn cousin. She was definitely something I wouldn’t want to stick my dick in, not even with a ten-foot pole.
I finally got off the phone with my attorney. She just stood there, looking like a sagged, wet rat, even though there was no rain. No makeup. Little hints of what used to be large breasts, but they’d already dropped past the point of no return.
I gave her a hug. She warmed up a little. I invited her in, and we sat outside. And then I proceeded to enjoy my night, just like I normally do. One beer, two beers, three beers.
The poor girl was trying to keep up. I didn’t ask about the jacket. I asked her where she was from. “An apartment complex right down the road,” she said.
I was enjoying myself, in a way. The conversation was a lumpy, dead thing, but I was self-entertaining. The people at the table next to us were laughing at my jokes. The bartender, a male, was playing along with my weird, goofy flirtations. After about the fourth beer, I looked over at her. She was just staring at me, her eyes all glassy.
You’re going to be the oldest man I’ve ever fucked,” she said, and then took a long, slow sip of her IPA, her eyes never leaving mine over the rim of the glass.
I just looked at her. A real piece of work. “Really?” I said, my voice flat. “How old do you think I am?”
She gave a little shimmy in her seat, a cheap, drunken wiggle that was supposed to be seductive. “I don’t care,” she said, her voice a low, boozy growl. “But tonight, I’m fucking you.”
The way her eyes locked on me, the way her body shifted, you knew she wasn’t kidding. She was a goddamn predator who’d cornered what she thought was a lame antelope.
But the antelope had already left the building.
She was already three sheets to the wind, and I was already talking to the neighbors, a nice, boring couple at the next table, laughing at some stupid joke about their dog. I was putting my energy everywhere else in the room but on her. I wasn’t being coy; I was building a goddamn wall. No touching, no real conversation, just a quiet, steady stream of polite indifference.
She just sat there, sipping her IPA, staring me down while I talked about the weather. This train wasn’t just leaving the station; it had been dismantled for scrap metal an hour ago.
But in her head, the engine was roaring. She was already on her way.
She leaned in a little closer, interrupting my conversation with the dog people. “Yeah,” she said, her voice a little louder this time, for effect. “I’m going to fuck the shit out of you tonight. And I’ll be the youngest woman you’ve had in a long time.”
And I just smiled, a tired, old, graveyard smile, and turned back to the neighbors. “So,” I said, “what kind of dog was it
There was no way in hell that was going to happen.
The sun was long gone. I was about six beers and a basket of greasy chicken wings deep, a hundred-dollar tab staring back at me from the bar. And then I heard it, coming from somewhere in the back of the building, a beautiful, sloppy noise that sounded like something real.
I went looking for it and found this little shithole in the back, a real gem. An eight-piece band of Indian guys, all of them smiling, sweating, playing their hearts out to a room that was as empty as a politician’s promise.
So I went up to the bar, ordered another beer for me, another one of whatever the hell she was drinking, put it on my tab, and then I turned to the bartender. “A round for the whole goddamn band,” I said.
You’d think I’d just handed them the keys to the city. They loved it. They came over, crowded around my little table, started playing their songs right there, just for me. We sang, we goofed around. For the first time all night, I was having a hell of a time.
And then I heard the bartender, a weary-looking sonofabitch, ask her if she wanted another one before they closed.
“Yes,” she mumbled.
I looked over, and there she was, all by herself at a table in the corner, slumped over her drink like some sad bastard who’d just been served with divorce papers, a perfect, miserable little island in a sea of my own good time.
And me? I was getting shit-faced drunk with a bunch of musicians from a country I probably couldn’t find on a map.
I was having a great time.
The bar finally died around two in the morning. We all spilled out into the street, a bunch of drunks blinking in the sudden quiet. I said my goodbyes to the band, and she just sort of materialized behind me, a problem I knew I still had to solve. She didn’t say anything, just started walking down the road, back the way we’d come.
There was no hand-holding, no touching. Just the two of us, staggering a little, bumping into each other in the dark like a couple of broken-down robots. The air was thick with all the things we weren’t saying. There was no goddamn indication that this night was going to end with a successful sign-off.
When we got to her corner, I stopped. I did the gentlemanly thing, stood on the low part of the curb, put her up on the sidewalk like she was some kind of goddamn queen.
“It was really nice hanging out with you,” I said, my voice all flat and final. I gave her a nice, chaste, praise-Jesus hug and a quick, dismissive pat on the back. “Be safe,” I told her.
Then I turned and walked across the street toward my Passat. And I could feel it. The piercing stare of her eyes, like a couple of hot pokers, trying to burn a hole right through the back of my goddamn skull. She didn’t say a word, but I felt the heat. And it only made me walk faster.
I was almost jogging by the time I heard it, a sound that cut through the empty, two-in-the-morning street like a goddamn fire alarm.
A screech.
“Are you FUCKING kidding me?”
She screamed it three times, each one louder, uglier, and more full of beautiful, honest rage than the last. It was the only real thing she’d said all night.
The second I heard that scream, a switch flipped in my head. The hair on my neck stood up, and the low-grade buzz of the alcohol was instantly burned away by a clean, pure shot of adrenaline. I wasn’t a man anymore; I was just a prey animal that had heard the snap of a twig in the dark.
I broke into a run, fumbling for my keys like some virgin in a cheap horror movie, my fingers all thumbs and sausage casings. Every sound behind me was her, the monster, closing in. I finally got the key in the lock, the door open, and threw myself inside, peeling out of there like I was leaving the scene of a goddamn murder.
As I was driving away, I looked in the rearview mirror. And there she was. A perfect, beautiful, ugly painting of modern desperation. Standing all alone in the middle of the empty street, her hands out to her sides, that stupid Members Only jacket hanging off her like a shroud. Screaming at my taillights. A small, pathetic monument to a bad decision.
I remember getting back to the hotel and not just parking the car, but hiding it, tucked away in a dark corner of the back lot, just in case she had the energy and the insanity to go hunting for it on foot. I got back to my room, shot the deadbolt, and leaned against the door, the click of the lock the most beautiful sound I’d heard all night.
I was finally, completely, and gloriously alone.
What a disaster. What a beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary disaster.
