Senseless pleasures

Used to know a famous writer of books and movies when he was a Philly
journalist, guy by the name of “Zeke Parker.” Parker, as he was
worshipfully known hereabouts before he high-tailed it to an island off
the coast of some country or other resembling the United States, liked
his liquid refreshment, his ladies, his late-night lies, his fire-engine
red jeep squealing around street-corners on two wheels, and just about
anything stupid that drinking guys did while they were drinking.

I remember Parker, who I must confess looked like a young Ernest
Hemingway/Clark Gable type before their real decay set in, relieving
himself of yards and yards of beer he had imbibed earlier in the evening
against the side of what I will call a “sacred building” at 4 a.m. after
the Pen and Pencil Club closed each night. The Pen and Pencil Club was a
former locus of Public Stupidity for the hapless miscreants and aspiring
gutter scum, otherwise known as newspaper reporters, who hung around
there. And we wonder why the press isn’t held in higher esteem.

Why not ask Barrett, not his real name, a journalist who peed in the
window of a police car. Or Benson, not his real name either, another
journalist who urinated out the club window two stories up. Or Solly
Green, still another journalist whose name I’ve also changed because he
was packing heat the night he crawled under a urinal and didn’t want to
come out. These activities, I should add, were among the various zany
pursuits I am sure they’d wish classified in the realm of Adult Fun. But
to me what they showed was perhaps an unimaginative overly close reading
of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and an ensuing possible
preoccupation with putting out fires with a bodily part.

I didn’t understand why at the time, but Parker always used to
bitterly complain in print — after he stopped drinking forever — that
the older he got, the harder it was to have simple, uncomplicated
fun. By then, he had also abandoned the inebriate notion of hijacking a
small plane at 5 a.m. I recall thinking all that was a Guy Thing, that
women could always be counted on to have their brand of simple,
uncomplicated fun doing one pleasant thing
or another. But what did women do that compared to the Public Stupidity
of Guys? Shop till they dropped? Get too tan at the Shore? Lose their
boyfriend’s car-keys? Do aerobics till they got a hernia? Gorge on
Double Decadent Death-by-Chocolate Gateau? Get silicone breast implants,
liposuction, nose-jobs, or collagen pouts, and then change their minds?
Overdo the mimosas at brunch? Fall for their stalkers? Have good sex
with bad men? Become anorexic, bulimic, or Republican?

Years later, I’m still asking myself that question. For instance, a
man I know slightly, let’s call him Armitage, an unrepentant rocker now
a quasi-respectable businessman running his own company and getting
dragged kicking and screaming into middle age, confessed to me he was
rather off his feet. Why? He had purchased what he thought was “some
recreational speed” from a Generation Xer which turned out to be
something very bad for you called, Rohypnol, a.k.a. “Roofies,”
usually used to
“transform the most violent psychotics into pussycats,” as he so
saliently put it, and he was too wiped out even to flirt. Roofies, I
have recently read, are also among the preeminent or at least current
favorite “date rape” drugs. No, women do NOT feed them to men, if that’s
what you are thinking.

This same hedonistic friend — I guess I can call him that, except I
hate to admit I know people like this — recounts seeing a fellow he
knew, in a restaurant, who hadn’t been around any of the old places
lately. “I’ve changed my ways. I’m trying not to have the dessert,” the
fellow announced. My friend Armitage observes rather mournfully,
“Everyone is so proud of what they DON’T do. Another guy told me he
had just quit this and was going to quit that and then he was going to
stop another thing later on, and I said, Hey, why don’t you just
stop doing anything bad and start doing everything good, and be done
with it?”

Yes, I reply, except that is such a non-accomplishment!
“Well,” Armitage goes on, “there are ways to enjoy yourself without
becoming a cliché. Maybe I will exercise and eat right and abstain from
all intoxicants and just rule the world! And then,” he adds
glumly, “die like a dog.”

Walking my dog one morning — the same dog who at age 15, or 105 in
doggie years, was teetering somewhat unsteadily between this life and
the next, as usual — I’m in a haze of innocuous reverie. Until I see a
filthy, cracked-up, drunken woman apparently passed out on a
litter-strewn quilt on the exact spot we were headed in our
perambulation. Suddenly, the woman sits up and opens her mouth. She has
no upper or lower teeth. Growing on her chin is an actual goatee. I am
not making this up. Words seem to emerge from her chapped lips. I can’t
tell what she is saying, or to whom. As she speaks, I look around. Yes,
she’s speaking to me. But I still can’t understand one bit of what she’s
saying. I walk closer, thinking she’s asking, no, BEGGING, for some
water, some food. Already, I am planning to go around the block to the
supermarket to get her some provisions.

I lean closer, the better to hear her plea. Finally, I understand
her. I can decipher what she is asking me. “DO YOU HAVE A CIGARET?” she
croaks. That is really what she asks, though I am not, nor have I ever
been, a smoker. I murmur an apology — I’m always the wet blanket,
aren’t I — regretting to myself that I could not contribute to
accelerating her demise, and then I go home. Soon a Washington, D.C.,
man I barely know writes me that he has quit his construction job in a
fit of pique, went from booze to crack to heroin, and was wondering if
he and his 7-year-old son can come live with me for a year or so.
Think of all the fun we could have.

I can’t wait.