Bad, Man!

When I came to New York, it was with an ambition to get ahead and to have sex with charming, sophisticated women.

Instead, my experience has been akin to stepping through a movie screen into a traumatic psychological soap opera directed by Woody Allen in which all the characters are an emotional mess who are letting all their unsightly aspects hang out, like going onto a nude beach full of atrocious, blubbery people.

When I go to the gym, I like to take exercise classes because I find I get more done in a shorter space of time instead of schlendering around on my own.

Also, since the classes are mostly filled with women, it gives me a little bit of a thrill when they bend over in their spandex tights, which is a lot more fascinating then looking at a bunch of men’s butts, let me tell you! Ancient cultures, in their wisdom, determined that the world was composed of four elements: wind, water, air and earth. I would like to humbly propose a fifth primal element – women’s butts, which have the destructive force of a hurricane (as can attest anybody who has ever had a hat or a pair of sunglasses destroyed by one) or the alluring charm of a Venus fly trap. Ask Marc Anthony, the general or the salsa singer. I submit that it was not Helen’s face that plunged Greece into war, but the posterior end of her torso!

Yesterday I arrived a half-hour early by mistake, so I figured, rather than stand around like a house plant, I would find a pen and write a blog entry on the back of a class schedule.

I went over to the trainers’ desk intending to glom a pen that might be hanging around there, but, obviously, all the pens were hidden from sight. There was a knot of trainers standing nearby, so I went over to them and asked, “Does anybody have a pen or a pencil I can use for a coupla’ minutes?”

One of the trainers, an attractive, fit brunette woman, said “I have a pencil.” Then she asked, “Why do you need it?”

Duh! Well, nobody ever said you had to be a mental genius to be a fitness trainer. I said, “I have to write something.”

“What are you going to write it on?”

“I thought I would write it on the back of a class schedule.”

“What are you going to write?”

Unwilling to share with her the fact that I was going to stand there like a dork writing a stoopid blog, I became obstinate and closed, tightening up like a pair of testicles entering into a cold pool of water. “What do you want to know that for?,” I complained.

“Well, it’s my pencil!”

Now, when you ask me if I have a pencil, I either do or I don’t. I wouldn’t dream of forcing you to submit to a third-degree interrogation and reveal your most closely held boring secrets.

Finally, she relinquished the pencil. I walked over to the trainers’ desk to write. When I turned around, she was standing right there.

“What?!” I asked.

“I need the pencil.”

“Here! Thanks a lot!” I went around to another part of the gym and finally found a pen.

Maybe she was interested in me – I’m not too shabby. Maybe she figured she could interest me in some training sessions at $80.00 a pop, which is probably closer to the point. How come women always pick the most inopportune moments to get to me, and when I am all dolled up and hanging around in a bar, I get treated like methanol byproduct?

But it provoked in me a larger question, namely: whatever happened to the concept of “cool” in society, where you behave with restraint and finesse all the pieces into place?

Everywhere I go in New York I see people coming apart at the seams. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t like a piece of art, so he tries to destroy the museum. Neighborhood groups in Brooklyn try to scuttle a development project at the Atlantic rail yards, preferring an ugly gash in the earth to a new sports stadium and business complex. So-called “conservatives” try to block distribution of condoms in high schools because their hormones have dried up and they can’t figure out the logic of being young, so they try to prevent kids from having sex against all logic. Democrats defend the system of social promotion in schools even though the ultimate result of it is college graduates who can’t even read at a third grade level, rendering them useless as employees.

Everywhere you go, you see evidence of Loose Booty-ism: employees who refuse to focus and blame it on Attention Deficit Disorder: bosses who bring their personal problems to work and harass their subordinates; judges who blatantly solicit bribes; cops who frame people whom they know to be innocent; whole newspapers (I’m referring specifically to the Times) that are so disgracefully self-serving and corrupt that they deserve to be put under trusteeship for betraying the interest of millions of readers. The Times is so far over the hill with their Jayson Blairs, Judith Millers, Bill Kellers, Maureen Dowds et al, that it is no longer a viable vessel for relating news. If the Post or the Daily News behaved like that, with spoiled, self-indulgent neurotic twits running rampant and spilling their personal neuroses all over the place, they would have been laughed out of existence. Somehow, The Times still survives, resting on its past laurels (though if those were held up to scrutiny they might be found wanting as well).

Maybe New York is beyond salvation. Maybe they should just build a fence around it and declare it to be a toxic dump of self-indulgent dysfunction. Certainly it is not the New York I thought I was moving to, one of sophistication and artistic fervor; an economic and cultural powerhouse where new ideas and art forms could gain currency, instead of a dreadful pool of conformity and puritanical political correctness.

A long time ago I saw a television interview where the WASP moderator asked a couple of black jazz musicians, “Based on the fact that artists are good prognosticators of future social trends, what is your feeling about where we are heading?”

One of them responded “Bad, man, real bad!”

That’s how I feel right now. Bad, man!

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Posted on 11/12/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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