Gutsy but not Smooth (Part II)

Even though the brunette and I had made eye contact several times over the course of the weekend, I’d never talked to her.

The two halves of the wedding party never mingled enough to provide a natural opportunity for conversation. At the dozen or so weddings of which I’d been a part, the bridesmaids and groomsmen showed up ready to be friendly and have a good time, but by contrast, most of Bear’s friends were married and uninterested in getting to know Lauren’s friends, the majority of whom were in relationships anyway. The wedding rehearsal and hours leading up to the big event looked like a middle school dance, with boys on one side of the outdoor church and girls on the other side.

Despite this segregation, the brunette acted unsurprised when I said hello and introduced myself. I mentioned the peculiar aloofness on the part of both sexes, and she echoed my surprise. We agreed that people at weddings sometimes prefer to catch up with old friends and acquaintances rather than make new ones. That was especially true, she added, of families who get to see their out-of-state cousins, aunts, and uncles very often.

Our conversation got off to a smooth start. Her name was Emmy. Yes, she danced, and yes, she would dance with me.

Asking a girl if she danced would seem like a strange question to someone who grew up outside Church of Christ culture in the South where a truly sincere Christian must practice abstinence from the Big Five: Drinking, Smoking, Cussing, Gambling, and Dancing. However, at a wedding where both of the families attended Churches of Christ and at a reception where the woman in question was taking pictures, not dancing, I had no guarantee that this lovely young woman was an infidel like me.

Once she agreed—to my great pleasure and relief—I found myself in another pickle. The band was playing a country song, and though I grew up in Nashville and own cowboy boots and a guitar, I don’t know how to dance to country. Wildhorse Saloon was never my idea of a good time.

What kind of moron asks a girl to dance, and then asks her if she minds waiting until the next song? Brilliant, Austin. Fine show.

Emmy assured me that she didn’t mind waiting. God must be on my side.

While we were waiting for the song to end, I was trying to tell her that I hadn’t done too much time bumping and grinding.

I always found myself asking the following question: How does mimicing sexual intercourse on a beer-slick dance floor glorify God? Shaking my groove thing to booty rap would confirm what I already knew —that I found the way young women move their bodies sexually stimulating. Shoot, the way a woman’s body moves of its own accord was sexually stimulating. I’d known that since puberty. Don’t get me wrong, I love dancing, but I need no encouragement in the area.

Attempting to open up this thought process for Emmy was a tactical error.

What I meant to say was, “I haven’t spent a lot of time bumping and grinding with girls. When I go dancing with a big group of friends, we all kinda dance in the same space. I don’t dance with a particular girl so much as an area.”

This is what came out instead:

“Yeah, I don’t really dance with girls.”

Emmy cocked her head to one side and looked at me as though I’d just said, “Aliens are our friends.”

“Oh gosh, that didn’t come out right,” I said.

You would have thought English was my second language the way I was stumbling over my words. Those two degrees in English were really coming in handy. If I wanted to salvage the conversation, I had one of two options—1) scramble to explain what I’d meant and risk digging a deeper hole, or 2) say something even more absurd with hopes that I would make her laugh.

I went with Option 2:

“What I meant to say was that I really only dance with guys.”

[She laughed. Phew. A narrow escape. I have got to start thinking before I speak.]

I then explained briefly that I was talking about bumping and grinding, which seemed to make sense to her. About this time, her uncle, the father of the bride, sidled up and added to the fun:

“Stop talking and ask her to dance already!”

[Wow, Mickey, thanks! This conversation was going great, and you just made it even better!]

“I already have,” I replied. “We’re just getting to know each other a little bit.”

Let’s see, what had Emmy gotten to know about me so far?
1) that I had enough guts to walk up and start a conversation with her;
2) that my thoughts and words got jumbled;
3) that I may or may not have Tourette’s;
4) that I was a prude who couldn’t bump and grind without a guilty conscience.

No doubt, she was intrigued and ready to follow me around the world.

“Good,” Mickey said with a toothy grin on his face. He drifted off.

What did this brief interaction tell me? Her family was watching us.

That’s exactly what I needed! A bigger audience! I was so impressive to my audience of one, why not add another two dozen spectators? I always wondered what it was like for that one contestant in the Miss America pageant. One year, I was watching it with my family, and my Aunt Kay was entertaining us by pointing out which of women had breast implants—“Miss Alabama? Oh, definitely! You see how round they are? Real boobs that big aren’t perky.” Soon after Miss Alabama came Miss So-and-So, who tripped on her evening gown and tumbled head first down the steps.

What did that kind of humiliation feel like? Now was my chance to find out. Hopefully, the wedding videographer would capture some of it for posterity.

The country song ended, and the Dj put on something funky. Thank heavens. My goofiness is much less apparent on the dance floor. Emmy was fun. She obviously enjoyed dancing and was patient with my stiff gyrations. We danced for several songs, and I had a chance to ask questions about her work, her city, and her family.

She was a pharmacist, which meant that she was intelligent and had discipline. She described Winston-Salem as “a good Baptist town,” which meant that her faith was a priority. Her father was the hardest working man she’d ever met, which meant that she had respect for him. A Mississippi farmer, he’d moved his family to North Carolina to better support them by going to work for a trucking company.

Right about the time our conversation took stride, we noticed that we were the only two people left dancing. Either we could be the center of attention or walk off. We walked off.

****

Over the course of the evening, I kept asking Emmy to dance, and she kept saying yes. Mystery of mysteries.

At one point, I took a bathroom break, and while I was washing my hands, the stranger next to me broke the silence:

“Saw you out there dancing with my niece.”

[Yep, her family was definitely watching. ]

“Yeah, she’s a lot of fun.”

“She’s a pharmacist, you know.” Emmy’s uncle delivered this piece of information like he was giving away a secret: “Want to know where to get good moonshine?”

Apparently, I looked like the type of guy who needed a sugar mama.

“That’s what she said,” I replied.

“Sure is cute.”

Was he trying to sell me a car?

“Very,” I said, and wanting to change the subject, “How do you fit into this whole mix?”

He told me about his sons, how all the cousins had grown up together and were really close. I told him that I have ten first cousins on my dad’s side, and it was the same way with us. I liked big families. We shook hands outside, and he returned to his family.

This was getting better and better.

I walked with my friend Will and his wife Lacey to my truck where he was keeping his clothes, and grabbed a pen in the process.

I’d made up my mind: I was going to get her number. Taking risks is the fountain of youth, and I had nothing to lose. My cynicism needed a good punch in the mouth anyway.

Back at the reception, I picked Emmy out of the crowd.

When I touched her elbow, she turned and smiled.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“No, not yet. My family’s staying until Justin and Lauren leave.”

“No, I’m leaving.”

“Oh! Sorry, I thought you asked… .”

“I just wanted to say that I enjoyed dancing with you and getting to know you a little bit.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be in Winston-Salem, but if I am, I’d like to give you a call. Would that be okay with you?”

[Ambiguous and noncommital. Smooth move, Austin. Women love a man without a plan.]

“Yeah, that’s fine,” she said.

I reached into my jacket for my pen.

“Who knows…maybe in the next seventeen years, I’ll take a roadtrip there.”

[Just shut up, you cottonheadedninnymuggins. Shut up.]

She gave me a polite laugh. “Okay, it’s area code 803…”

I wrote her number down, and if I were smart, I would have said thanks, given her a quick hug, and made a graceful exit. Apparently, graceful exit isn’t in my repertoire. I like to make an impression, which means, I like to leave a girl feeling like she’s eaten some bad shrimp.

What I was thinking is, “It’s rare that I actually write down a girl’s phone number anymore. I always just put them straight into my cell phone.”

Is that what I said? Oh no. If I started out the evening with a moronic comment, I should finish it with another, put some pretty book ends on it.
“I couldn’t tell you the last time I got a girl’s number.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Oh gosh, I just made myself sound like a total loser.”

She laughed.

“What is I meant to say is that I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a girl’s number down rather than putting it in my cell phone.”

Why did I think my method for securing phone numbers was worth mentioning in the first place? Was this interesting? No. Would she think I was a weirdo for writing her number down on my arm? Probably not. Did I stand to lose something by flapping my jaw? Yes. “Hey Emmy, did I mention how boring I am? That I make banal observations all the time? Didn’t mention that? Well, I do. Wanna go out on a date? No? Didn’t think so.”

Luckily, before I could say anything else to make Emmy pity laugh, groan, or yawn, the Dj put on “Sweet Caroline.” I grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, we have to dance with this song.”

Thanks, Neil Diamond. You saved me yet again.

The song ended, and I said goodbye to Emmy without further incident. After doing some silly dancing with Joe, the groom’s 77-year-old father, and some of the groomsmen, I drove home.

****

A few weeks later, I was telling my friend Patrick’s wife Caroline about the wedding. The stories in which I say something stupid to a girl are her favorites. I wish I had fewer of them. After I finished recounting the latest series of blunders, she shared an insight:

“You’re not very smooth.”

She has a point. Other people don’t have these stories, and being bold and being smooth are not the same thing. In fact, unless accompanied by confidence, poise, and charisma, boldness may simply set the stage for bad jokes, not wit; awkward conversation, not flirtation and laughter; hasty apologies and retreats, not chemistry and the prospect of romance.

Of course, making conversation with a woman carries inherent risk. She could snub you, or she could give you the local Rejection Hotline. Or, she could be a complete psychopath and tattoo your face on her abdomen. You never know what’s going to happen.

However, swallowing my insecurity, complacency, and cynicism to walk across that cavernous room, or pick my way across that crowded dance floor, or maneuver around the tables at that coffeeshop, reminds me that though fear of rejection may cast a long shadow, it is innocuous when I stand over it.

Taking risks keeps the rust knocked off my courage.

The enduring value of those conversations, no matter how brief, and interactions, no matter how warm or forced, is what they teach me about myself. Embarassment cannot kill me.  Though enjoyable, the admiration of a pretty woman cannot tell me who I am as a man, and her affection cannot guarantee happiness or wholeness. Rejection may cut my pride, but it can say nothing about my worth in the eyes of God.

It took me a long time to realize that most girls are nervous when a random guy walks up: What if he’s a creep? What if he only talks about himself? What if he’s cheesy and I have to be nice and laugh at his bad jokes? What if he’s funny and sweet and smart but doesn’t ask for my number?

Their confidence is as imperfect and liable to falter as my own. They know they should just be themselves and offer an ultimatum, “Accept me as I am or leave me alone,” but they also have to fight the compulsion to impress.

What happened with Emmy? I’m not telling, but I’ll share what I learned:

If I sometimes lack heart-melting swerve, then perhaps I can offer a woman honesty, authenticity, and a willingness to admit my faults. These have more mileage in any relationship, and my female friends have reassured me that kindness and sincerity cover a multitude of amorous evils. Even saying the wrong thing can be endearing.

That’s good news for a man with plenty of guts and unreliable game.

Gutsy but not Smooth (Part I)

I’m a recovering cynic.

I’m getting to the age where all my friends are married, engaged, or in serious relationships, so when I’d see a girl my age at a wedding without a rock on her finger or a guy standing next to her, I’d assume that she was carrying around enough baggage to move to Europe.

About six months ago, I had the realization that if any of these single women noticed that I was wearing no wedding band and had brought no date to the rehearsal dinner or ceremony—the perfect way to ruin otherwise good friendships with females—then they were probably making the same assumption and concocting alibis for me: “He’s a player” or “He must be gay” or “He was born with both male and female genitalia” or “He eats children.”

A by-product of disappointments and heartbreaks that we’ve left unaddressed, this subtle cynicism uncorks the finest vintage of our creativity. I often overlooked the simplest, and most plausible, explanation, “Like me, she just hasn’t met the right one.”

I recently attended the wedding of a high school friend, Bear, which caused us to miss our annual flyfishing trip in central Idaho. His wedding was the first of four over four weekends in four different cities. He asked me to be an usher, which meant buying a summer suit for $100 at S&K. Now that’s what I’m talking about! Why ask your friends to pay $150 to rent a tux that they can only wear for one night when you can ask them to buy a suit that they can wear for ten years?

Bear always was practical, and there’s nothing like a suit or tuxedo to put me on my worst behavior. By worst behavior, I mean the type of boldness that has for years helped me entertain my friends and family with the cringe-worthy tales that result. I have a reputation to keep up.

Married men never cease to live vicariously through single men, and my friends at the wedding were no exception. They were all concerned with whether or not I found any of the women attractive.

My flyfishing buddy Rob was the most persistent:

“Dude, you need to be meeting these girls!”

“Why?”

“Hellooo, because some of them are hot.”

“Like who?”

“What about her?” He pointed out a blond girl on the dance floor, holding up her dress with one hand and punching the air with the other to The Commodores’ “Brick House.” She was more like a stone castle.

“Yeah, don’t think so. Maybe her?” I pointed out a really cute brunette on the opposite side of the dance floor. She was taking pictures of the other bridesmaids dancing.

“Why don’t you go talk to her?” he asked.

“Do you really think I’m going to meet somebody at a wedding? Does that actually happen outside of romantic comedies?”

“People do it all the time.”

“Well, I did ask Bear about her. She’s a cousin of the bride, and she lives in Winston-Salem. Long distance relationship. Don’t know how I feel about that.”

While I was talking, the brunette had walked around the dance floor with her camera and was now standing about fifteen feet away with her back to us.

“What have you got to lose? I think you should go talk to her,” Rob said.

I knew that Rob had no expectation that I’d actually do it. I wanted to see the look on his face, and he was right, I had nothing to lose.

“You’re right,” I said and walked over to her.

Here we go, I thought.

Sweet, Necessary Craziness (Part II)

Let me share an example from high school. I’ve already written about my first kiss, which occurred the summer after my eighth grade year, but my first relationship of any true depth—or trauma—began about halfway through my freshman year. This girlfriend was the first in a series of what my dad, with sarcasm that I inherited, calls “real winners.” Facebook, and perhaps good taste, prevent me from using her real name, so let’s call her Jezebel.

Spending time with Jezebel was like spending time in Colorado. I attended a wedding a couple of weekends ago in Breckenridge. I needed sunglasses during the ceremony, the sun was shining so fiercely at Ten Mile Station, 11,000 feet above sea level. During the reception, however, the sky dropped sheets of wet snow. Hot and cold, hot and cold, that’s what dates with Jezebel were like.

Unlike other cold-blooded creatures, she did not take on the temperature of her environment; the environment took on the temperature of her heart, meaning that temperature inside my car would drop about twenty degrees once she shut the door.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, she just didn’t like you that much,” and that would be a logical conclusion. You can, therefore, understand my confusion when her friends told me that she’d told them that I was the only guy she wanted to date. Hmm. When we actually spent time together, she welcomed my presence and conversation about as much as a rash.

I gained some insight into this frigidity later on, but between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, I bloodied my head—and my heart—trying to analyze my way through a wall of ice.

She lived a good forty-five minutes away from me, so on date nights, we’d meet at a halfway point, Bellevue Mall. After buckling up in the passenger seat of The Toast, my ’88 Honda Accord, she would stare straight ahead and say nothing.

“How was your day?” I’d ask.

“Fine.”

[Here we go again. Lucky me, getting to romance Jadis, the White Witch of Narnia.]

“What did you do?” I’d ask, trying to get some traction.

“Not much.”

[Maybe English isn’t her first language. Maybe she’s uncomfortable trying to form whole sentences with subjects, verbs, and predicates. I wish I spoke Spanish.]

“Were you just hanging out at home all day?”

“Yeah.”

As you can imagine, this kind of painstaking conversation would snuff out my excitement. Where does one purchase a down jacket for the heart, to keep out the cold? If I were smart, I would have gutted my savings account to acquire one.

On one particular night, I decided to take Jezebel to Calypso Café. By the time we drove across town and pulled into the parking lot, I was as love-starved as a man marooned on an island, Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway.

We sat down at a two-top where I ordered a Chicken Breast Pita with Aruban honey lime sauce and Jezebel ordered the Tropical Chicken Salad. After fifteen more minutes of extracting words like so many molars and incisors, our food came.

Maybe it was a desperate need for comic relief, or maybe someone pumped nitrous oxide into the room because there was a simple explanation: Calypso Café mixes curry into the mayonnaise used in its chicken salad. Whatever the root cause, when the waitress set down Jezebel’s plate, I lost it.

Ice cream scoops of bright yellow chicken salad? How absurd! This was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. Tears streamed down my face as I approached the border of lunacy.

I met Jezebel’s stony gaze. She failed to see the humor of the situation.

“Stop laughing at my food, ” she said.

“I can laugh all I want. I’m paying for it,” I replied.

I’m not saying that was a sweet thing to say, but even sweet guys—I was one of them at the time—reach their limit of patience.

What she said next shocked me into silence, though I should have known that her meanness would trump mine. She’d had more practice.

“And that’s your privilege.”

[Did I just hear her correctly? Did she just say that it’s my privilege to punish myself by taking her out on dates? No. She. didn’t.]

*    *    *    *

Whenever I tell this story, the listeners, especially the men, say, “I hope you took her home!”

I wish I had. I can’t even remember what happened later in the evening, but I’m pretty sure we ended up making out, which always left me with one of two feelings. Either I felt like I was kissing a mannequin because Jezebel’s face was frozen and unresponsive, or on the rare occasion that she opted to come alive at the stroke of midnight and kiss me back, I felt like she wasn’t sharing intimacy with me as much as using me for momentary escape.

If that scene in Forrest Gump in which Jenny prays, “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away,” were a physical gesture, kissing me was Jezebel’s prayer asking someone to help her escape.

From whom or what she never told me.

All I remember about that night are her words of entitlement: “And that’s your privilege.”

Behind what I have since dubbed her “Princess Complex”—her assumptions that 1) as a man, I was obligated to practice chivalry and bear the full financial burden of our relationship and that 2) she was under no corresponding or complementary obligation to care for me—was a deep reservoir of pain. Ghosts hovered above those waters.

Later experiences caused me to reflect back on my relationship with Jezebel, and I found reason to believe that they were the ghosts of men with ugly appetites.

Ten years passed before I began to understand that her treatment of me had almost nothing to do with me at all. Her inability to love and care for me said nothing about who I was then or who I am now. I carried that cargo of lies for over a decade, and if I hadn’t paid close attention to each new woman, then those lies could have shaped my perception of myself and my relationships with women for another ten years.

The point I want to make in this essay is that knowledge gained from an experience with one woman is not necessarily applicable to subsequent experiences with the same woman or a different one. Experiences with new women, however, can untie the knots of our past relationships. Becoming a student and choosing to learn from women rather than dismiss them as crazy persons necessary for sexual pleasure and procreation gave me greater access to myself.

Sure, you could argue that if I had avoided Jezebel’s crazy country, then I never would have picked up the cargo, but as a traveler, I want to carry myself with more grace and dignity than that attitude allows. It suggests a fundamental antagonism between men and women that I refuse to endorse.

Men and women need one another’s differences. Both sexes need the other’s craziness to stay sane. I should not have allowed Jezebel to speak to me that way, but neither should I have run away. I should have asked more questions, and without trying to save her, which was and is beyond my power, I should have left her country better than I found it. I hope I did.

I also hope to call one and only one country home one day. I will need a lifetime to learn how to appreciate her sweet, necessary craziness, and she, mine. We all need a lifetime to be changed.

Sweet, Necessary Craziness (Part I)

Men love to compare women to just about anything.

Cars, natural disasters, weather patterns, flora, fauna, precious metals and gems—you name it, women have borne the burden of these comparisons.

Ever since Adam woke up from his afternoon siesta, put his fingers in the space where one of ribs had been a mere thirty minutes earlier, and turned over on his side to discover that standing underneath an olive tree nearby was a new creature, Woman, men have searched their dark minds for a bright spot, the right analogy to shed light on woman’s mystery and to help them make sense of Adam’s and their own bafflement, relief, hunger, and even fear in gazing upon Eve, who was, most likely, lost in thought, winding a lock of hair around her fingers, and ignoring her slumbering counterpart who resembled her but whose anatomy was awkward by comparison and certainly not begging for poetry.

When was the last time you heard a woman say that a man’s skin was as delicate as a rose petal and his porcelain cheek blossoming with the faint flush of dawn? It’s probably been awhile. Women do use metaphorical language to describe men, but most often, their monikers and epithets fall in the categories of barnyard animals and uncomplimentary euphemisms for male genitalia.

Though I risk such categorization, I’m want to put forth a metaphor that has helped me explain why even though I grew up with the advantages of a good mother and two patient sisters, I was by no means prepared for the gauntlet of romantic relationships.

Each woman is her own country.

I can move to Paris or Lyon and spend months or years learning the language, the finer points of French cuisine, the country’s history, artistic movements, literature, etiquette, religion, social mores, and geography, but if I moved to Germany, none of this specialized knowledge would do me a bit of good. Could an intimate knowledge of Notre Dame’s architecture serve me at the Frauenkirche in Münich? Could I order a “le croissant au jambon et de fromage” at the Hofbräuhaus?

No, I’d be starting from scratch. The only thing benefiting me when traveling from one country to the next is a certain attentiveness to how one becomes immersed in a culture. I’ve been told that learning more than one language at a young age nurtures that part of our brains and keeps it active and vital. We stay adept at learning languages. The children of bi-lingual households have an easier time learning their third language and their forth and so on.

Gaining knowledge of one country, of one woman, is useful only if in the process the traveler, the man, learns to become a good student. After I learned to become a student of one woman, becoming a student of another was easier. The specialized knowledge I took away from one relationship—Charlotte’s favorite drink at Starbucks or the emotional and spiritual wounds she received from her parents—was worthless, but my heightened sensitivity to both the main storyline and the subtext prepared me for interactions with other women.

Even if the table manners and the Christmas traditions are different in a new woman-country, an intelligent man will cultivate the ability to listen well and observe her nuances and quirks, to remember precisely and adapt to her tastes and preferences.

We’re talking about the art of survival here, but we’re also talking about service and healthy compromise. Compromise is the grease in relationships founded upon sacrificial love and mutual service, but unfortunately, many men fall prey to a poisonous mindset that says compromise is weakness. Women must be contained. They must be mastered. They are countries that need conquering.

These same men say that women are crazy. Declaring that they’re crazy, as though one were delivering some sort of edict or universal truth, gives men the excuse they need to avoid entering the mysterious, infuriating, and intoxicating world of Woman; to avoid confessing our need of them; to insist on a reality governed only by logic and linear thought.

Needless to say, most men lack the courage to dwell long in a realm where they must seek to listen and understand, rather than dominate and control. Most men are afraid to become students of their girlfriends, wives, lovers, sisters, and mothers because of what they stand to lose in the way of power and authority. They choose not to feed their understanding and empathy, but their machismo, because patriarchy is the duct tape that holds their world together. Being in charge offers men the false guarantee of a coherent world: man knows his place, woman, hers, and everything makes sense. The earth continues to spin on its axis while men wear the pants.

What would happen if men relinquished the surplus fabric of their pants and everyone wore shorts? God knows.

That’s a subject for another essay. The point I want to make here is that knowledge gained from an experience with one woman is not necessarily applicable to subsequent experiences with the same woman or another woman down the road.