That old drunk Bukowski said to find what you love and let it kill you, and I suppose that is exactly what I have been doing, slowly, methodically, and with a terrifying amount of efficiency for the last decade.
You look at me and you see the disguise, the tall, white, handsome veneer of the “Good Guy,” the man who makes eye contact and holds the door and doesn’t use filler words because he isn’t afraid of the silence, and you think you are looking at safety. You think you are looking at the “Marriage Man,” the guy who will mow the lawn and pay the mortgage and never raise his voice, and that is why they approach me, these women with their broken wings and their checkbooks in the red. They see the 210-pound boy I used to be when I joined the Navy, the one fattened on my grandmother’s cooking, and they think that soft boy is still in there somewhere, just waiting to be mothered.
But that boy died a long time ago, starved out by the Navy and hardened by a twenty-year marriage where I played the good soldier, never cheating, never looking, never speaking to another woman until the foundation cracked and I found myself sneaking off to a strip joint to let a tall salsa dancer remind me that I was still a man who could hunt.
The separation didn’t just end the marriage, it unleashed the animal that had been pacing in the cage for two decades, and I became a horrible playboy, a man who realized that the world was full of locks and he was holding the skeleton key. I moved out of Bend and I stopped looking for a wife and started looking for a number, a sensation, a way to drown out the quiet.
There was the Ukrainian, Fidelia, the wildcat with the eyes like white tigers, and she wasn’t just a conquest, she was the first time I felt the blood move in my veins in years, and I trained her to tend to my needs but in the process I made the fatal mistake of falling in love with her, of actually wanting to marry her and build a fortress around that chaos, but the timing was a guillotine and I let the blade drop.
Then there was Carey in Gilbert, the closest I ever came to putting the shackles back on, the San Diego trip where the ring was practically burning a hole in my pocket, but I pulled the chute at the last second because the fear of the cage was stronger than the fear of being alone.
I moved to Hawaii not for love but for strategy, thinking that the mainland would offer a better return on investment, and I added notches to the bedpost like I was marking days on a prison wall. I tried the transactional route with the Asian massage woman, a clean deal of sex for rent where she would tug and wank and sleep in my house and tend to the machinery of my body, but even that felt too much like a job.
So I turned to the low-hanging fruit, the social workers making forty thousand a year with their dead-end degrees and their bleeding hearts, the women who were so beaten down by the world that a man who simply paid the bill and spoke in complete sentences looked like a god to them. I filled the empty spaces with the “dark meat,” the minorities, the women who lacked self-esteem and were aggressive to appease me because they weren’t used to being treated well, and they were skilled enough to satisfy the hunger without requiring the long, exhausting courtship that the “high value” women demanded.
It was a strategy of efficiency, a way to feed the beast without risking the heart, but here in Tucson I have finally slowed down because I realized this entire town is nothing but a breeding ground for that same low-hanging fruit, a buffet of mediocrity that I have lost the appetite to consume.
I have read the stories of my life, I have looked at the damage I did to my mother and my father and the women I used as stepping stones, and I know who I am.
I am a man who is tired of calculating, tired of manipulating, tired of trading their hearts for my freedom, and as I pack these bags for Vietnam I am hoping for the one thing I haven’t been able to engineer.
I am hoping that when I am finally done running, when the “Good Guy” mask is in the trash and the “Male Pig” is retired, that someone—a real someone, an equal, a woman who isn’t a project or a patient—will take the time to walk into my life and kill me with the one thing I haven’t been able to survive yet.
I am hoping she kills me with peace.
