Somebody order beefcake with a side of desperation?
When she calls, I know I’m going to get roped into something unpleasant.
And whereas I am usually very good at gracefully extricating myself from ensnarements of this type, Yolanda’s tractor-beam desperation pulls me in. Like always.
I’m having a girl’s night out for my birthday, she says.
Yolanda’s ability to remain upbeat, positively joyful, in the face of what, it is obvious to everyone except her and a very few of her dimmer confederates (that is, people just like Yolanda), is a cruel, cruel joke on the part of some omnipotent and malevolent force (call it god, or whatever), it’s depressing. I’m embarrassed for her.
And the fact that were I to say, “I really can’t, Yolanda,” without providing any further explanatory excuse, she would cheerfully wish me well, with no underlying malice or disappointment, that’s her great strength. That’s why I can’t say no. That is why I find myself a week later–a week I spend wishing that something tragic and irreparable will happen to one of us, something of the long-and-painful convalescence variety of tragedies, such that there will be no birthday celebration–at one of those male strip clubs, strip clubs with shaven down and oiled up guys who are probably mostly gay but who gyrate around in thongs for dollars, men with cleft chins and sparkling blue eyes who allow secretaries–women like Yolanda and the other four women I am here with–women who have cats and ever-vanishing opportunities for life-partners, women who always smell nice and dress well for their size, women who order their caramel macchiatos with no whip like it matters, women who capitulate to Haagen-Dazs and make New Year’s resolutions to do otherwise–men who allow these women to grope them, a cruelty and kindness both.
Yolanda and her friends revel in their daring, their apple-tinis and chocolate-tinis–that lethal mix of sugar and alcohol (I drink vodka, rocks, one after another) going straight to their heads, flushing their cheeks, their hands full of overdeveloped muscle groups–pectorali and quadriceps, and of course gluteals, fingers curling in, disappearing into the cleft–and dollars.
Were they this daring with men who weren’t paid to pay attention to them–not groping and putting dollars in their underwear, per se, but putting themselves out there–perhaps they wouldn’t be here, now. Perhaps they’d be at home in the suburbs, their husbands mowing their lawns, their children watching Disney films, they themselves pulling lasagnas from the oven.
But we’re here. All of us, we’re here.
Towards the evening’s end, one of the dancers approaches me. “What are you doing here?” he says, under the music, safe from Yolanda and her friends’ hearing. He inclines his head towards them, as if to say these women belong here, not you. “And what are you doing later?”
“Fuck off, meat,” I tell him, a surge of righteous anger flowing through me, mixing with the vodka, stripping away the layers of self-revulsion. “If it wasn’t for ladies like this, you’d still be the best-looking guy at Jiffy Lube.”
Later still, when I’m holding Yolanda’s hair while she projectiles her Moons Over My Hammy into the toilet at Denny’s, her facade cracked, her mascara running down her cheeks, I wonder if it might not be kinder to just push her head below the water line, hold it there until she quits struggling. My hand tenses in anticipation, but I instead I tell her, feeling horrible for lying, “It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
