GIRL 93 ~ ISRAELI AIR FORCE GIRL
It was frightening that I had no memory of the build-up to this date. Usually I remember everything. Who hit on whom, the factors of attraction, the warmth or aloofness of the female's profile, the humor exchanged on the pre-date emails, even the negotiation for which candlelit table we would meet over and when, but with Girl 93 I had no memory of any of that. My other personality simply told me where to show up and what to wear.
People think I'm just being cute when I talk about my relationship to my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex. I suppose they imagine this six foot tall veiny mushroom-headed thing walking beside me talking about the weather. In reality, the part of me that is Rex is as separate and distinct from my consciousness as a wife's personality is from her husband's. Certainly there is a knowledge of the other and a closeness and the ability to predict how the "other" will react. Rex is a voice in my head, and sometimes he's an apparition as real as another person walking beside me.
So then I'm asked what Rex looks like. He looks like me, except me dolled up as a tough guy. He's got better muscle definition. His face is a bit more gaunt, his jaw a bit straighter. He always has a five o'clock shadow. His hair is perfect, slicked back Sicilian style, a little longer than you might expect. He's six foot one, weighs exactly 200 pounds, and the general impression is of a striking, good looking, aggressive, outgoing, macho guy. He wears Ray•Ban sunglasses, so dark that his eyes can't be seen. He's dressed in an Indiana Jones, brown, worn leather jacket, no matter the weather, a starched Polo shirt unbuttoned at the top, a gold chain peeking out below - though there's not a single chest hair - jeans, and brown Timberline hiking boots.
On some occasions he chomps on a lit Cohiba cigar, clamping it between his incredibly white movie star teeth, and his voice is surprisingly gravely, as if the bourbon and cigars have made him sound older than he looks. His age is indistinct, perhaps mid-forties, though he's youthful. The overall impression is of a man who seems bigger than his physical appearance, whose energy can fill a room. Despite his machismo, Rex impresses as someone with a playful sense of humor, but he is also intense. He gives the impression that if he doesn't get what he wants, that his anger is just beneath the surface, and that anger would be volcanic if let loose.
But, someone once asked me, if he looks like you, in your mind's eye, what do you look like? I shrug, as if it is beyond me to describe it to you. I suppose if you took Tyrannosaurus Rex, put ten pounds on him, gave him cancer so that he looked sickly and washed out, then took the fight out of him and made him somehow wimpier, so that your overall impression would be that of a harmless geek, that would be what I'd expect to see if I turned the corner and ran into myself.
It's not a good self-image, and perhaps explains a hell of a lot, but my eyes avoid mirrors at all costs. When, during my affair with Girl 6, my beloved Alayna, I would fuck her in the missionary position, face to face with a woman for the first time in my life during sex, she would say, "Oh my God, you are so fucking gorgeous, I love you on top of me." My built-in lie detectors said she was serious. She'd look at me with this all-consuming lust, like a tiger would look at a juicy steak, and say, "you are so fuckin' handsome, I need you to fuck me right now." I tried to inject that into my self-image, but somehow I thought that during my relationship with her I must have looked different. I must have been more handsome then and since we broke up, I lost it somehow. There's a part of me that misses being looked at like she looked at me. That misses being told I'm "gorgeous" and "fuckin' handsome," and with my crazy mental wiring, a woman saying the F-word completely turns me on. But the guy who was "fuckin' gorgeous" just doesn't seem to be me. Perhaps I'm like the ugly duckling who doesn't realize he's become a swan, or I'm mentally built like the anorexic models who are certain they're homely but in reality they are beautiful.
It only matters in that there is an understanding going into this tale that there are two separate parts of me that communicate at arm's length.
Then there's the God factor. I hesitate to broach this subject, but I suppose it will only make sense to do so now. I don't know that I'm particularly religious, but I have had a sense of someone external to me who seems to want to use my life as a Powerpoint demonstration. When things go wrong, I hear this voice in my head saying, "see, see where you fouled that up?" When things go well, and it's not by chance but by deliberate intention and hard work, I can feel a figure standing next to me, a personality simultaneously fatherly and motherly, and it is smiling.
Then in the late 80s I began my career as a writer, and the strangest thing was this sense of being a passenger. I would write the story till four in the morning and then I'd be late for work the next day so I could reread it and find out what happened. What do I mean by that? It was more like reading a great suspense story than writing one. I had no idea what would happen next. The plot and characters took on a mind of their own, and I was simply along for the ride. Soon it became evident that I was merely a conduit, a channel, for someone writing the work who passed it through me. I finished the last 200 pages of my third novel in one sustained 60-hour continuous all-nighter. An hour after typing "The End" and the printer shot out the last page, I boarded a train for "the city" to meet my publisher. It was my fourth novel. He had seen it at the 75% point, and he couldn't wait to read more. In his office, he smiled, shook my hand and asked in excitement, "how did it end?" I looked him square in the eye and told him the truth. I have no idea, I said. He didn't understand. He loved the book, but thought I was flaky. The point is, when I read the ending, it was as fresh and new as if it had been written by someone else.
As indeed it perhaps was. The last novel I wrote was mostly done in a ten day sustained writing sprint in a log cabin in the southern Pennsylvania hills. It was like going into a trance. There were twelve hour stretches of "lost time" as whatever it was that took me over did his thing. To this day, I have only read the novel once, and I thought it was amazing, but I have no memory of writing it.
But although this had been going on for fifteen years of my writing career, God doing the work while I took the credit, I had never actually seen him.
Until after Girl 6. It was around the aftermath of Girl 14, Piano Girl, that I first saw the supreme being in the flesh.
That's what he likes me to call him. The supreme being. No capital letters. No capital "H" in "he." He doesn't like pretentiousness. He's a humble entity, if you can imagine God the Father, the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of the Universe, Jehovah, the God of Abraham and Isaac, I Am That I Am, being humble. Too much of a stretch for many people, I assume. But, forgive me for saying this, the supreme being is a regular guy. He's a friend, more in the sense of a true friend than anyone I can point to on earth. It's like he knows me, he puts up with me, he loves me, but it is more than that. He genuinely digs me. He thinks I'm hilarious. When I write a blog entry that is done without his help, he laughs his ass off about it. I've seen tears come to his eyes from his laughter. He's slapped my back in joy before and shaken his head as he looks at me, as if he's glad that I exist. There are times the supreme being looks at me like any of us would stare up at the stage at Chris Rock doing an explosively funny stand up act. The supreme being gets a tremendous kick out of me, and he always acts like he's at once glad he created me and astonished at the things I do.
This is where I and most religions disagree. Most religions would tell you that God is both perfect and omniscient and omnipresent. That's not my experience. Let's take perfection. The supreme being scoffs at the word.
"What is perfection?" he asks. "For one thing, perfection would presuppose something unchanging in time. If God is perfect, then he doesn't change, because he has perfect comprehension from the start. Not true," he continues. "Hey, look at the old testament - do I act like that anymore? No way. I come off like an abusive father in that work of art, and in fact, I kind of was, but face it, humans were like celestial two-year-olds back then. They could hurt themselves, so for safety reasons I yelled at them not to run on the pool deck. That's all the Ten Commandments were. None of those apply anymore. Think about it," he says. "Today, as an adult, is it STILL a rule that you have to hold Mommy's hand when crossing the street? Duh! No! So do the Ten Commandments have any relevance to today? Maybe as a study of morality, or the foundation of man's laws, as they progressed from the ancient Mesopotamian Laws of 2250 BC to the Magna Carta all the way to the U.S. Federal Code of Regulations. But as a day-to-day, hour-by-hour guide to behavior? I don't think so. That commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a bit primitive. Nice thought behind that one, as in, it's not polite to go to your friend's house and slaughter his three year old for running around and making noise. But how do you apply that simplistic commandment to a checkpoint in Baghdad when a car-bomber speeds toward you? You think you should turn the other cheek to that?"
I actually asked the supreme being, if he felt that way, how did he feel about the Dirty Harry movies. He grinned and did a passable imitation of Clint Eastwood. "Go ahead, punk," he said, "make my day."
You want to know what a conversation with the supreme being is like?
I asked him, so, if you're not perfect, how can you be the supreme being?
He said, "you define perfection in human terms, which makes it imperfect."
You change with time? I asked.
"Of course I do," the supreme being says, "I made you in my image, and I learn and grow just as you do. And as humanity grew up, so did I. As you progressed from stone knives to nuclear weapons, so too did I mature as a guardian spirit. After all, did I let any nukes go off after World War II?"
No, I said.
"Well, there you go. And stop numbering your wars. It makes it seem like the next one is inevitable. And it's not."
You think we can have a society with no wars? And can you see the future?
"As to war, it won't seem like war as you know it today. There will still be police and criminals and arrests and raids, but more on a global scale. But one nation arming and fighting another? Not really."
Will there still be separate nations?
"Not as you know it today. History marches on."
How will that happen? What will it be like?
He shrugged. "Turns out your constitution got popular. It caught on. It spread. The European Union added a little flavor to it, a few more cooks came on the scene. Three thousand years from now? The law of the land then will be like comparing the Code of Federal Regulations to English Common Law. Similar, but one is the great-great grandfather of the other."
You really like law, don't you?
He smiled again. "I love a good lawyer joke, same as anyone else. But yes, I get a kick out of it. The very concept that human behavior can be changed and governed by things written down by other humans is amazing to me. I frankly didn't see that one coming. I was psyched to see it happen."
Oh, I said, so you can't see the future?
"I can detect trends," he said, "but human free will is a dark curtain. All I can do to imagine an individual's future is to use a sense of their personality. I'm a good psychologist, but I've been fooled before. But given the right demonstration in their lives, people can change their own future."
So, is there destiny for each of us?
"I don't define the concept of destiny like you do," he said.
See? You could go in endless circles talking to him. It's like being four years old and having a loving and patient big brother who's 18. He thinks in terms that are much bigger than we are, but he plops down on the floor and plays the same game we're playing. And notice I didn't say "father figure" or give his age as 35, because in so many ways he has a childlike joy to him, and he always says that he is developing and learning just as we are. Blasphemy and heresy are the words people will mumble, but I don't care.
But my comment here goes to his sense of humor. He's a comedian. Here's how I know. You asked me what Rex looked like, and I told you he's a Hollywood version of me. Now you ask, what does the supreme being look like? He's Rex's identical twin. Is this some weird failure of my imagination? Or God's sense of humor? If you've heard of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know they have a Twelve Step program, and peppered through the Twelve Steps is the idea of "God as we understand Him." That's the key here. The supreme being knows I have a self-image problem. He sent me my firstborn son, who looks a lot like me, to remind me to love myself just as I adore my son. But it wasn't enough. So he made Rex appear to me as a sexy version of me, to remind me that my sexuality is a beautiful part of who I am, and to revere that part of me. And when that wasn't enough, when the supreme being made an appearance in the room with me, he came wearing my costume, perhaps to remind me yet again of how highly he thinks of me, as if the headline is that I've been hating myself for far too long, and that the cosmic struggle is really to free myself of that.
But when I consciously try to think of the meaning of that, a headache blooms behind my eyes and I can't think about it anymore. I'll save that for another day.
The point here is that all the pre-date prep work for Girl 93 was done solely by my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex. I had no memory of it. And that disturbed me. For one reason, it had never happened before. Always it was I who hit on the girl or received the hits. I was the one who either set the early relationship on course or wobbled it badly. If Rex were there, it was him leaning over my shoulder giving advice that I frankly ignored most of the time. After all, what the hell did Rex know about matters of the heart?
Not this time. From the initial flirtation to the ending of my pre-date shower and dressing ritual, it was all Rex. I was absent. I remember walking out of my townhouse surprised that I had the wrong car keys in my hands. The SUV, an old black Toyota 4Runner, was parked ten steps outside my front door. The keys in my hand had a polished stainless steel tag that read "SALEEN."
It was August, but suddenly the summer melted away and it was April again, and I sort of "came to" at my computer and stared at the Ebay screen. I had just bought a fingernail polish red Saleen Mustang, an aftermarket bastardization of the Mustang GT, with a Hurst 5 speed, a tricked-out engine and exhaust, and gigantic 21 inch bright chrome racing rims at all four corners. Now what the fuck was I doing staring at an Ebay "congratulations for buying this car" screen?
It had been Rex, buying a sexy penis-mobile for himself. Making the enormous payments was only one of the problems this car presented, though that would soon become a bigger issue. It was that this sleek, exotic barely-legal street racer was in my parking lot and the ex-wives, both furious with me for a laundry list of ex-wife bitches, now had hard evidence that I was more affluent than I told them. How could I explain this? Tell them that Rex had bought it? Both exes hated Rex, and I think the trauma of that is what led to him becoming a separate personality.
I walked up to the red Saleen. It was hard not to smile at it. It was gorgeous and sexual, with a raw, blistering confidence. This car said in block capital letters, SUCK MY COCK, BITCH. And since I'd had it, women did. Perhaps not on the first date, but by date two, there were wet lips wrapped around the grinning face of Tyrannosaurus Rex in that glove leather bucket seat.
Still, I was furious at Rex for this disaster, both financially and socially. It was hardly the car a 47-and-a-half year old drove. Why couldn't you get a Porsche like every other mid-life crisis guy, I asked him one day. He smiled and tossed off this answer: "This is what I would have bought if I'd ended up attached to that pro football player God promised me. But no, I get an impoverished, starving writer/artist geek who should have been given that tiny weeny that never worked." Somewhere, there is a pro linebacker who has been compensating all his life for his shortcomings in the penis department. The car had been for sale since I had taken delivery, but who in his right mind would want a hopped up Mustang for an amount of money that you could buy two Mustangs for? Rex didn't give a shit about money, I realized. He only wanted eight things - female mouth, pussy, asshole, left breast, right breast, left hand, right hand and face, the places where he loved to paint his sperm murals in heavy, rich, creamy cum.
I looked around me, then down at myself. I was dressed in a black sport jacket, jeans, Timberline boots similar to what Rex and the supreme being favored, dug up from a closet somewhere, and a black Polo shirt with a black T-shirt underneath. It was like waking from a dream. I knew I was supposed to drive the Saleen to a first date, but other than a dim memory of talking to Rex about Girl 93 before, I couldn't remember her.
As soon as I climbed in and fired up the V-8, the rumbling exhaust seemed to summon the spirit of Tyrannosaurus Rex to the shotgun seat. He was clipping the end off a Cohiba cigar with a solid gold cutter, then lighting it with another gold accoutrement of his cigar-smoking lifestyle.
Shouldn't you not do that in the car? What if someone wants to buy it, I asked.
The usual Rex grin. "That'll make it much more difficult to sell my baby, now, won't it?"
Asshole, I said.
"No, asshole is my next door neighbor," Rex replied. The joke was getting worn.
Where to, I asked.
"Brew Pub," his deep voice said as he puffed the cigar to full power.
I threw the Saleen in gear and laid a patch leaving the parking lot. Goddamned drive train was simply too powerful to keep the tires on the pavement. This car could burn rubber in fourth fucking gear.
We arrived at our parking space and together we walked toward Nassau Street, across from Princeton University, the famous locale of the Triumph Brewing Company. Sure, it had been a hangout of mine and Girl Zero's, but what the hell, it was too damned good to leave to her side of the ledger.
Tell me again about this date, I said.
Rex puffed the stogy as we stood out front. "Israeli Air Force Girl."
Wait, didn't you tell me something about her before? After Anal Third Base Girl when we were fleeing the scene of the crime?
He smiled. "Yeah. I showed you just a glimpse of her."
I didn't remember.
"Wait till you hear her voice."
Why?
He rolled his eyes so far back into his head there was nothing but white. "It's this impossible-to-describe part-European, part-South African, part Middle Eastern lilting speech. It's enough to make me trip, fall and spill the cum long before I'm ready. You think French accents and British accents are sexy? Wait till you hear Israeli Air Force girl. You'll lose it."
You like her, I said. It was a statement, not a question.
He clapped me on the shoulder. "Mikey, this is The Girl. Capital T. Capital G."
I took a deep breath. Okay, I said. Tell me more about her.
"Jet black hair. What's that phrase you're always ripping off from Hemingway?"
'Her hair was black as a raven's wing,' I quoted. I put it on the head of every love-interest female in my books and waited for an editor to say, um, how about not stealing the description straight from Hemingway this time, but so far, no one had caught me.
"Well, imagine that framing the face of Cleopatra. She has eyes so wide and so dark they will swallow your heart. Cheekbones so perfect she could be a covergirl for any of a hundred fashion magazines. A complexion so smooth and creamy and adorable, the ideal canvas for some of my cum artwork. The cutest, most elegantly shaped nose the supreme being has ever crafted - he knows you dig the nose." He smiled at his alliteration. "And thrown in as a bonus, a superb jawline and cock…sucking…lips." Rex's tongue shot out for just a moment, wetting his own lips.
Is she tall, I asked.
"No. A bit over five feet. She'll fit right here, just like Eve did in the crook of Adam's arm."
Is she fat?
"You'll like this. Her tits are so perfect they could be in a sculpture. You'll long to hold them, touch them, lick them, kiss them, suck them - "
Are they fake?
"No way, man. Real as I am."
I wondered if he were joking.
And what about her legs, her ass, her hips, her arms?
"All textbook perfect. She was a trainer for the Israeli fighter pilots. She spent years being an adventuress like her father, who dragged the family through the wilds of Africa as a bush pilot."
So she's still wild?
He shook his head. "She has a teenager. Full custody."
Jesus, this one was goddamned marriage bait. Maybe I could find a flaw.
So there's a divorce in her past?
My follow-up question brewed in my mind. Did she cheat on him or did she shut him down sexually, provoking him to cheat on her?
"No. Sister's kid. They live in Israeli Air Force Girl's house in a swanky neighborhood not far from here. Not sure what the deal is, but now Israeli Air Force Girl is a model citizen. She's got a career with her in the big chair. Finance type. Mover and shaker. You'll love her."
I frowned. How old is she?
Rex grinned an evil grin. "Thirty."
The color drained from my face. Thirty. You brought me here to meet a heart-breakingly beautiful thirty year old. Who has jet black hair, Cleopatra's perfect face, a gorgeous toned body, and a kick-ass career that supports her and her teenager. The panic must have shown in my voice.
"What's the matter?"
YOU FUCKING MORON! I screamed. A dozen people on the sidewalk of Nassau street suddenly turned and stared at me. I tapped my ear as if I wore a Bluetooth earpiece for a cell phone and started walking away. The crowd nodded as one - I was going off on a business associate on my cell phone, not screaming at an invisible apparition.
"What?" Rex asked, looking for the first time in a year like he'd been slapped. The last time I saw that look on his face, it was when he was mourning the loss of Girl 6, the lovely, sexual and immortal Alayna.
Does this bitch remind you of ANYONE we know, you fucking IDIOT? I couldn't help screaming, but I'd grabbed Rex by the sleeve and dragged him down the alley behind the Schwab building where his ridiculous red sled was parked.
"No," he said, confused. "N-n-no." When he was slapped, like he'd once been by the stuck-up bitches in high school, he stuttered.
I was furious. Goddamned Tyrannosaurus Rex had set me up. He'd taken over my personality completely to conceal this from me. Had I known any of this I would have wobbled this hard and aborted it before it began.
"Mikey, listen to me."
It was too late. I was already hurrying to the Saleen.
"Come on, we're almost late, we gotta get in there!"
I walked on, ignoring him, until he spun me around ten feet from the car. Before he could say a word I screamed at him.
Hair black as a raven's wing!
"Yeah," he said, sheepishly.
Cheekbones that could sell Oil of Fucking Olay!
"Well, yes."
Beautiful as Cleopatra!
I kept pounding the nails into the coffin of the date.
Creamy complexion!
Wide dark eyes that could swallow your heart!
Cocksucking lips!
A perfect set of perky little THIRTY FUCKING YEAR OLD tits!
A perfectly round, smooth ass! A heart-shaped pelvis! Adorable legs! Small feet! All that perfection in one, dark haired, thirty year old package! With an amazing accent to go with it all! Right?
Rex stared at the asphalt. I'd never seen him cry, but his eyes had swollen and he wiped at them so I wouldn't see moisture.
AM I RIGHT?
"Yes," he said sheepishly. "What's so wrong with all that?"
Oh fuck you, I said as I pointed the remote at the Saleen and unlocked the door. I turned away but he spun me to him again, his face a mask of agony.
"Please," he begged.
Behind him a second version of me walked up, but he was dressed in the brown leather jacket and Nike black wrap-around shades.
You, I said accusingly to the supreme being. YOU sanctioned this?
But the supreme being ignored me and just took Rex aside for a moment, then returned to the side of the driver's door.
"Rex's description reminds you of someone," the supreme being said.
I was more respectful to the creator of the universe than I'd been to Rex.
Yes. You know who.
"No," he said. "Tell me out loud."
Girl Zero, I said. Same age, same appearance. She's a Girl Zero clone.
"Don't call her that," he commanded. "She's one of my better creations. She has a name."
Sorry, I said. Her name is - I swallowed, realizing I could barely form the sounds with my mouth - Patricia.
"No. Say her name."
Puh. Puh. Patti. There. I said it.
The supreme being looked at me.
"The new woman isn't Patti," he said. "You can't run forever from thirty year old women with dark hair and dark eyes."
Oh come on. Every single detail Rex just described is HER. It's 1994 all over again. What is this, some kind of sick joke? Do either of you realize how much this hurts?
"She's your type," the supreme being said. "All your life you loved women with dark hair and dark eyes, who weren't too tall, with nice bodies."
No, that's not my type, I insisted. I like tall slender blondes with big breasts. Don't you remember, even on these very streets, from 1995 to 2003, every tall slender blonde who walked by us, nay, every blonde whether thin, fat, short or tall, made me break my neck staring at her. Girl Zero - I mean Patti - constantly hated me for it. She used to say, 'why don't you just leave me for a fucking blonde? Blondes are your type, not brunettes!' So why can you look me in the eye and admit I love blondes?
"It was I who loved the blondes with the big tits, the skinnier and taller, the better," Rex suddenly blurted. "YOU were the one who loved the brunettes."
I didn't understand. So why are we here? If I don't want to see her, and Rex's type is blonde, why don't we leave? We'll stand her Israeli ass up.
"Because, I changed Rex's type for you," the supreme being said. He was about eleven years late with that miracle, I though.
As if to confirm the claim, Rex nodded eagerly. "I want her, Mikey. I really want her."
Well, gentlemen, I said, making the toughest face I knew how, fuck you both. I'm not going in there.
In that tenth of a second I thought I'd gotten away with it, with telling the very creator of the universe, to shove it up his holy ass. In that moment I weighed every ounce of pain I felt at the loss of the woman I'd loved so much that I'd taken her to the altar and put a platinum, sapphire encrusted, diamond ring on her finger despite the horror of my first divorce, and the total was ugly, it amounted to the tonnage of a supertanker so overloaded that its gunwales skimmed the waves.
And then my consciousness winked out. One second I was reaching for the door handle of the Saleen in the fading sunlight of a Saturday afternoon in August, and in the next my hand was in the exact same position in front of me, but the outdoor light had faded to the sepia mellow glow of the front of the bar of the Brew Pub, and I was reaching out to take the hand of Girl 93, Israeli Air Force Girl.
* * *
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I felt the skin of her hand touch the skin of mine, and I writhed and twisted in the agony of ten thousand volts shooting through my body as the thunderbolt hit me. Through a filmy fog I could see her gorgeous face and her amazing eyes looking at me, and in that instant I knew that her face could launch a thousand ships, and that I'd seen her before in my dreams and I'd known her before in half a dozen previous lives, and that for all I knew, Girl Zero was just the opening act, shelling my beach to pave the way for the main battle invasion force of Israeli Air Force Girl.
Like the aftermath of a deafening grenade explosion, there was no sound for a few minutes, until the third or fourth sentence she uttered to me. And that speech was caressed by her mouth, her words in front of me hanging in the air like the red and green lights of a lovely Christmas tree. Her accent was beautiful, it was a sound that had put me to sleep for three thousand nights and awakened me three thousand times at dawn.
She was a goddess.
The evening, to my altered consciousness, was a series of snap shots, each one frozen in time as if by a supernatural strobe light. She laughed at what Rex was saying as he took pictures of her face to put by her phone number in the cell phone, and though she hated the pictures, one was more perfect and beautiful than the next. And as the anxiety would rise in me over the marriage bait and her resemblance to Girl Zero, time would stop and I'd go to that blackness again, waking up suddenly with twenty minutes having passed, but eerily I had total recall of what had happened since I had faded out. It was as if Rex had a sort of "live feed" to my memory as he conducted the date, and at one point I floated silently out of my body and watched Rex operate its machinery as he spoke in animation to Israeli Air Force Girl about adventures from my distant past. The near drowning during Navy Scuba School, the flooding at test depth on my submarine, and the time they scrambled the entire east and west coast submarine forces to sea on a Sunday night, so suddenly and with so little warning that we all were convinced it was World War III. And Israeli Air Force Girl's face was bathed in the warmth coming from Rex, and then filaments of fire seemed to pass between the two.
I looked at myself and thought it odd how good I looked with Rex at the helm. It was as if he fully inflated my sagging corpse and I was young again. He was all confidence and animation and certainty. He was funny and intelligent and slick, and then I looked at this perfect woman who so reminded me of the woman who pulverized my heart, I realized that she was falling in love with Rex as well.
In the next instant Rex moved close to Israeli Air Force Girl as she leaned against a dark wall in a deserted parking lot. The bastard put his - or rather our - hand on her smooth face and pulled her toward him, and in slow motion I saw her lips part, and he kissed her and it was like a scene in a sappy romantic comedy. The kiss went on and on, and although I floated ten feet above the couple, I could feel her lips and mouth as if they were on me, and suddenly I was back inside myself, alarms shrieking in my mind as I felt the skin under her panties as my hand moved past her waistband and fondled her. I expected to hear anger and feel a stinging slap on my face, but there was only a soft moan in that tender, lovely voice as her hand came up and caressed me. And then she said the only words I remember from that whole night.
"I know you would be an amazing lover," she said, that east-of-civilization accent melting my heart.
And suddenly I was behind the wheel of the Saleen a mile from Nassau Street heading back to my townhouse. Rex was riding beside me, with a smitten, dreamy expression on his face. I locked up the brakes, shrieked to a halt and ordered him out of the car.
"You're serious?"
Out. I was ready to punch him, and hard. I guess he realized how furious I was.
"Fine."
Once he was gone, that sallow, sick feeling returned, but a moment later the supreme being had taken his place.
Why do you do that? I spat, as furious as I could ever remember being, and very near my breaking point.
"Do what?"
Dress like me, look like me. It's not funny anymore. It's fucking disturbing.
"You ever go to a Chris Rock concert?" he said calmly. "For three days afterward you're talking like him, straight from the ghetto. Or watch George Clooney in the movies, and on the way home you're walking like him, with that wicked cocky walk of his, rockin' your head back and forth?"
Yeah. So what?
"Mikey, you imitate what you think is cool."
I stared at him, almost going through a red light.
What?
"You heard me. I'm imitating you because sometimes I wake up in the morning wishing I were you. You're like, I don't know, like a real life James Bond."
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
He smiled and shook his head slowly, as if it were the funniest thing he'd heard all day.
I decided to cut to the heart of things. Why did you put Rex in for me on this Israeli Air Force Girl thing? What the hell was that about? You've never done that before.
"Rex could do it right, that's why. You're hostile and licking your divorce wounds still."
This isn't a football game you can just send a replacement player into. This is my fucking consciousness we're talking about. It's my life, for God's sake.
"For your sake, you mean. Listen, you want to know what the funny thing is?" He smiled even wider, that movie star grin of his making me even more irritated. "You said YOU were the one who wanted a relationship and that HE was the one who just wanted to go from girl to girl. Turns out HE wants a girlfriend, a satisfying girlfriend, and YOU just want to remain disconnected, playing with one girl after another. Between the two of you, YOU'RE the player."
He was right. We'd reversed roles.
So what now, he'll take over my life and I'll be relegated to looking over HIS shoulder every now and then? For an instant I felt fear, that fear of no longer existing.
The supreme being banged my thigh with his fist. "What do you want?"
Hell, I don't know. But I did know.
You know what I want, supreme being? I want a tall, sexy, adoring blonde with stripper tits who fucks like a porn star, but I don't want her to be China-doll delicate, but more, I don't know, overtly sexual. I want to look at her and just want to bend her over and fuck her, not paint an oil portrait of her face. I want this sexual, sexy blonde to be my girlfriend, a blonde who won't make want to kill myself every time we have a lover's quarrel. I want to be in charge in the relationship. The leader. I don't want her to be thirty, that's too young, and I'd lose my soul yet again and m3arry the bitch. Give me a woman who won't be laser focused on getting married. Give me a woman without a damned biological clock ticking away like an armed suitcase nuclear weapon. Give me a calm healer who's a maniac when she's naked, who will share my quirky sexual fetishes, who will watch porn with me and love it, who will get turned on by this freakish sexuality you gave me, not be repulsed by it.
A steno pad appeared on his lap, and a Monte Blanc pen, and he scribbled quick, efficient notes to himself. He asked me forty questions, like:
Intelligence level?
Cheekbones?
Eye color?
Height?
Breast size?
Nationality of ancestry?
Siblings?
He wrote it all down.
And then I was in bed and the sun was rising, and I was certain that the last woman I'd dated had been Anal Third Base Girl.
**************************
It had all been a dream.
But as the coffee brewed, I dropped my jaw as I saw the email:
"Tonno, it was so wonderful to meet you last night. I haven't had a night that fun - or romantic - since college. Okay, perhaps that wasn't quite true. I haven't had a night like that since I was born! I would love to see you again, and thank you so much. I'm sorry I missed your calls last night, I had to get into a bubble bath to calm down enough to go to sleep, but I will call you back in the morning. Thanks again, darling. Love, Israeli Air Force Girl"
Oh my fucking God, I thought.
It took four days of emailing to get it done. My hands shook as I typed each email. But as the hours went by, it got more and more under control. I alienated Israeli Air Force Girl as quickly, intensely and convincingly as I could, trying to act like Rex as I did so she wouldn't suspect it was me trying to sabotage this budding relationship.
Finally it was done. I said good-bye to Israeli Air Force Girl over something as stupid as when we'd schedule the second date. I lied and managed to come up with some lame excuse as to why that was such a deal-breaker that I would never see her anymore.
I wiped sweat off my brow as I closed her last good-bye email. I could almost sense how upset she was as she typed it.
I turned off the computer and shut my eyes, and her image mercifully faded from my brain.
Rex sat on the kitchen counter when I stood to go pick up my daughter at day care.
What do you want?
His voice was cold and hard. "You are a ruthless, cruel, unfeeling, inconsistent, immature, fucked-up, son of a bitching asshole," he said. I'd never heard him more hostile.
He'd lost. And there was nothing he could do about it.
I just looked him in the eye.
Like that's news, I said.
"You want war?" he asked. "You got it."
I came across the room at him but he'd vanished again.
Since Israeli Air Force Girl, the episodes of lost time have increased. My memory lapses are becoming more matters of concern. When I wrote of Rex before, I thought it was interesting - while still being true - but I never imagined that the bifurcation of my personality would go this far.
Was it possible that I had multiple personality disorder? I flew off the handle in a freakish spaz on my senior partner - by boss - a week after I saw Israeli Air Force Girl, and the fallout was so severe that I didn't get any work assigned from him for months, which was his punishment for me, because no assignment mean no money. In my business, you eat what you kill. And while the harsh, aggressive and unfriendly characteristics of me usually belong to the "Mikey" personality, I think Rex started imitating me as imperfectly as I'd imitated him to push away Israeli Air Force Girl. I had a technical memory of each event, but it was a dead memory. Information, not emotion. Rex had taken over my body and my mind the day I'd blown a gasket on the boss and dealt me a blow in retaliation, and it was severe enough to take me almost to bankruptcy.
I had the vengeful thought that I'd make Rex watch as they repossessed his idiotic Saleen, and I'd remind him that it was the money from the business that paid for the damned Viagra for him and his sex addiction, but like I said, the son of a bitch doesn't understand or give a damn about money.
But it got worse. I gave up on the idea of a girlfriend. The people I was corresponding with were universally rejecting me now, as the madness took hold and grew deeper. And as the financial situation grew worse, I found myself thinking more and more about suicide. And then it occurred to me that the suicidal thoughts were really just Rex's way of trying to murder me.
There had to be a way to end this destructive conflict, I realized.
We had to make a deal. We had to do it over the next six women. One way or another.
But you don't just sue Tyrannosaurus Rex for peace. He's as vicious as his name would imply.
And fighting him meant the end of me. He could take my mind over and toss us off a bridge, and I might not "wake up" in my body until half way down.
It had to be in what I told the supreme being, I thought. Because Rex liked raven haired girls, but he also liked blondes.
It had to be a blonde. Over a blonde we'd sign a peace treaty.
* * *
In the gauzy haze, I reached down for an ornate gold door handle.
The heavy mahogany door opened. The plush interior of the room was lit by candles. Off in an unseen distance, incense burned. The carpet was a deep red, the walls a dark, rich color. Everywhere there was old wood and seemingly older leather. The room seemed centered around a fireplace cavernous enough to roast a pig in. Logs as big around as whole trees burned with a warm, mellow glow. There were comfortable leather gentlemen’s club arm chairs facing the fire, with small walnut tables between them. Dim light, no brighter than candles, emanated from the sepia-tinted art-deco lamp shades of ancient brass lamps on the tables. In one seating area adjacent to the fireplace, three chairs were arranged in a square, so that two chairs directly faced each other, and the third in between them faced the hearth. Two men sat in the chairs next to each other, their faces close as if sharing intense, serious secrets. There were two rocks glasses on the table between their chairs. On another table was a third drink, its owner seemingly missing.
Though I didn’t say a word the two men in the chairs, dim figures both, rose as one and walked toward me. I remembered thinking they must be brothers, as they were the same build and height, and when the reached me I could see that they were twins, both the same image as in the mirror with one exception - the mirror image always looks at me straight on. I noticed how odd I looked from a different angle. In some ways more handsome. In others, disappointing.
The eyes of the man on the right crinkled into crows feet as he smiled. "Come on in. Sit down. We’ve been expecting you." The other man’s face was neutral, as if he were trying to mask an old hostility, but he nodded at me with a serious expression. It was an unmistakable gesture of respect. I remember being surprised by that, and a second emotion - relief.
I took a seat in the empty chair with the waiting drink. My chair faced the dour brother. The friendly twin sat next to me, on my left. I noticed that all three of us leaned forward, our elbows on our thighs. It was difficult to tell who was imitating - or mocking - whom.
The friendly one reached for his glass. "Twenty-five year old scotch," he said, smiling. "Balvenie."
We all raised our glasses.
"I propose a toast to progress toward peace, and perhaps even the hope of peace itself."
I nodded as seriously at him as the angry twin had at me. To peace, I said.
"Peace," the other said. Odd how the twins’ voices were so similar in timber, yet so different in expression. The light twin’s tone was singsong, almost British. The dark one’s pronunciation could have been that of a Sicilian gang member, guttural and dangerous.
"Let’s talk," the light twin said. And suddenly I recognized him. It was the supreme being, with his usual costume of my flesh. Which meant the other man was my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I took another pull of the scotch and sat back in the chair.
"Rex, why don’t you explain to Mikey what we’ve come up with." The supreme being smiled encouragingly at Rex.
Rex drained his scotch and put the glass down, wiping his lip with one hand and gripping the arm of the leather chair with the other. He leaned forward, his brows rising, his expression serious, but also just barely threatening.
"Israeli Air Force Girl," he said. He looked at the dark antique wood floorboards, which were wide and thick, as if we were in a colonial inn somewhere in New England. When his eyes rose again, they were duller, as if the scotch had suddenly hit its mark. "I was wrong to conduct that meeting without you being on board."
I was amazed. Rex, the supposedly stronger, more aggressive of us, was admitting he had made a mistake. It turned my insides. Where before there had been enmity and hostility, there was only fatigue.
I thought about this a lot, I said, my voice calm and deep. Rex leaned forward, as if I were a judge about to render his sentence. Maybe I went too far. Maybe I overreacted to simple dark hair and dark eyes. I mean, come on, how much could she look like Girl Zero? The supreme being frowned over at me. Sorry. Like Puh, Puh, Patti. I was mocking myself. Imagine being so upset that I couldn’t say the woman’s name. I’d been an idiot. But that was then. This was now. And maybe Rex should be more in charge of the process. I think I’m too analytical. And agonized. I think it might be a good thing to let you alternate with me when we’re in the field.
"Really?" he asked.
I nodded. After all, what did I have to lose? It certainly had to be better than ceasing to exist if the supreme being, as referee, decided I was the sinful party and Rex was righteous. And God knew, I’d done some bad things, some very wrong things.
"So you think you could work with Rex in the future on this enterprise? You’ll relinquish control when he asks? Then request to come back when you think you’re needed? Or when you’re asked to?"
Again I nodded. After all, I thought, we’d been doing this in business for a few years. Rex was the sales guy, I was the worker-bee/analyst. I wrote the opinion, Rex talked about it to the partners.
The supreme being beamed, then took another sip of the scotch.
"There is one thing," Rex said haltingly.
I raised an eyebrow.
The supreme being nodded solemnly. "You need to listen to this, Mikey."
Go ahead, I said.
Rex took a deep breath. "Israeli Air Force Girl. I need - we need - to see her again."
Why? I asked him.
"Go ahead," the supreme being coaxed.
Rex’s hand shook as he nervously adjusted his bow tie. "I want her. I just want her. I have to see her again."
My face hardened. There’s no way.
"Why not?" the supreme being asked. "Why are you afraid of her?"
Because I could fall in love with her. And she’ll break my heart in the same places that Girl Zero did.
I caught his eye. The supreme being frowned again.
Fine. Patti.
I didn’t even stutter that time.
"She won’t have us," Rex blurted. "Not for the long haul. Not for love. For sex, but not love."
Like that would convince me. If she even so much as touched my cheek, I would be lost. My world would revolve around hers.
"It’s just one more date," Rex said. "But you have to keep an open mind. You have to let her in long enough to consider being with her. We have to look her in the eye and talk about making love."
Rex? The primordial dinosaur, talking about making love instead of fucking? This had gone too far.
I shut my eyes and her image came back to me, and I started to shake. I felt the supreme being’s hand on my sleeve. It was only then I consciously realized that the three of us were wearing tuxedos. I looked up at his face for a long time, and his strength and courage seemed to flow from his hand into my arm and up to my heart. It felt warm and soothing as it filled my bloodstream.
One date? And then we’re done?
One date and then I might be done, I thought.
There was a long silence. I remember standing up. Both men stood with me, but the supreme being kept his hand on my forearm, and the warmth kept coming.
* * *
It seemed much later, as if months had passed. I had hoped the craziness in my soul would die down, but it never seemed to. On an afternoon when my "Mikey" personality seemed in charge, I text messaged Israeli Air Force Girl.
She seemed surprised and pleased to hear from me. It was broad daylight. Less chance of anything feeling romantic that way. That and the fact that since I had seen her, Israeli Air Force Girl had gotten herself a boyfriend, and she was planning on a night of long, slow, romantic fucking.
When I first saw her, I noticed her aura. It was dark. A black halo surrounded her short but perfect body. I looked at her hard, as if studying an organism in a microscope. It was three in the afternoon on a sunny day. There was no twilight, no romantic starlight now. All her flaws would rise to the surface. The slightest blemish, a single pound over her ideal weight.
But there were no flaws. Israeli Air Force Girl was the most physically perfect specimen of a human female I’d ever seen. Her hair was gleaming and jet black. Her eyes were as dark as the winter sky. Her skin glowed. Her lips glimmered.
And yet, there was darkness surrounding her. It was an anger. There was a grudge inside her that even she couldn’t get to.
She sipped the margarita and after a few minutes, a few colors of the rainbow sneaked into her aura. She smiled at me, warming slowly, as she described her boyfriend, and how she loved him, but wasn’t in love with him. And how she longed for the man she dreamt of to be with her. And after she said it, those black eyes drilled into me.
I took one last risk.
So a black bag team comes, I said.
"What’s a black bag team?" she said.
That voice. That goddamned, accented, melodious, beautiful fucking voice.
Think burglars, I said. Think CIA black ops. A covert operation group. Something from one of my novels. Anyway, they come to your bedroom at three in the morning and you wake up duct taped to a chair doped up with sodium pentothal so that you cannot lie. And one of the men asks you, if you dated this guy, this Tonno guy, would you love him? Would you want a relationship with him?
She looked down a the table.
Don’t answer, I said, panicked. She’d just rejected me at my most vulnerable. But there had been a moment, just one moment, when I had opened myself up to her. When I had offered her the one thing that I had to give to a woman. Myself.
"No," she said. "I want to answer."
I tried not to listen, but the phrases came down a tunnel toward me and hit me with stinging, salty blows, even though I tried to dodge them.
I want my own children.
I want a man who will love me, only me, forever, and you can’t do that.
The woman who called you a Land Rover, going from vagina to vagina - she was right. You are. You would find some flaw in me. Some birthmark I’d always had. And you would blow it up in your mind until it became big enough to be a door through which you’d make your escape from the relationship. You’d become unhappy and you would leave me. And then I would be here again.
No, I won’t love you, but I could have a sexual fling with you. You could fuck me all you want, but I’ll never love you.
I’ll never love you.
Never love you.
Once her words floated in the air between us, like summer fireflies. Now her words were nails banging into a coffin.
She paid the check. Every time a woman did that I felt anguish, as if I weren’t a big enough boy to pay for the girl.
I watched her leave the restaurant. Her image faded slowly in a blur.
It was over.
There would be no more black haired girls, I said to myself.
Only blondes.
Only blondes.
Only blondes.
It was frightening that I had no memory of the build-up to this date. Usually I remember everything. Who hit on whom, the factors of attraction, the warmth or aloofness of the female's profile, the humor exchanged on the pre-date emails, even the negotiation for which candlelit table we would meet over and when, but with Girl 93 I had no memory of any of that. My other personality simply told me where to show up and what to wear.
People think I'm just being cute when I talk about my relationship to my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex. I suppose they imagine this six foot tall veiny mushroom-headed thing walking beside me talking about the weather. In reality, the part of me that is Rex is as separate and distinct from my consciousness as a wife's personality is from her husband's. Certainly there is a knowledge of the other and a closeness and the ability to predict how the "other" will react. Rex is a voice in my head, and sometimes he's an apparition as real as another person walking beside me.
So then I'm asked what Rex looks like. He looks like me, except me dolled up as a tough guy. He's got better muscle definition. His face is a bit more gaunt, his jaw a bit straighter. He always has a five o'clock shadow. His hair is perfect, slicked back Sicilian style, a little longer than you might expect. He's six foot one, weighs exactly 200 pounds, and the general impression is of a striking, good looking, aggressive, outgoing, macho guy. He wears Ray•Ban sunglasses, so dark that his eyes can't be seen. He's dressed in an Indiana Jones, brown, worn leather jacket, no matter the weather, a starched Polo shirt unbuttoned at the top, a gold chain peeking out below - though there's not a single chest hair - jeans, and brown Timberline hiking boots.
On some occasions he chomps on a lit Cohiba cigar, clamping it between his incredibly white movie star teeth, and his voice is surprisingly gravely, as if the bourbon and cigars have made him sound older than he looks. His age is indistinct, perhaps mid-forties, though he's youthful. The overall impression is of a man who seems bigger than his physical appearance, whose energy can fill a room. Despite his machismo, Rex impresses as someone with a playful sense of humor, but he is also intense. He gives the impression that if he doesn't get what he wants, that his anger is just beneath the surface, and that anger would be volcanic if let loose.
But, someone once asked me, if he looks like you, in your mind's eye, what do you look like? I shrug, as if it is beyond me to describe it to you. I suppose if you took Tyrannosaurus Rex, put ten pounds on him, gave him cancer so that he looked sickly and washed out, then took the fight out of him and made him somehow wimpier, so that your overall impression would be that of a harmless geek, that would be what I'd expect to see if I turned the corner and ran into myself.
It's not a good self-image, and perhaps explains a hell of a lot, but my eyes avoid mirrors at all costs. When, during my affair with Girl 6, my beloved Alayna, I would fuck her in the missionary position, face to face with a woman for the first time in my life during sex, she would say, "Oh my God, you are so fucking gorgeous, I love you on top of me." My built-in lie detectors said she was serious. She'd look at me with this all-consuming lust, like a tiger would look at a juicy steak, and say, "you are so fuckin' handsome, I need you to fuck me right now." I tried to inject that into my self-image, but somehow I thought that during my relationship with her I must have looked different. I must have been more handsome then and since we broke up, I lost it somehow. There's a part of me that misses being looked at like she looked at me. That misses being told I'm "gorgeous" and "fuckin' handsome," and with my crazy mental wiring, a woman saying the F-word completely turns me on. But the guy who was "fuckin' gorgeous" just doesn't seem to be me. Perhaps I'm like the ugly duckling who doesn't realize he's become a swan, or I'm mentally built like the anorexic models who are certain they're homely but in reality they are beautiful.
It only matters in that there is an understanding going into this tale that there are two separate parts of me that communicate at arm's length.
Then there's the God factor. I hesitate to broach this subject, but I suppose it will only make sense to do so now. I don't know that I'm particularly religious, but I have had a sense of someone external to me who seems to want to use my life as a Powerpoint demonstration. When things go wrong, I hear this voice in my head saying, "see, see where you fouled that up?" When things go well, and it's not by chance but by deliberate intention and hard work, I can feel a figure standing next to me, a personality simultaneously fatherly and motherly, and it is smiling.
Then in the late 80s I began my career as a writer, and the strangest thing was this sense of being a passenger. I would write the story till four in the morning and then I'd be late for work the next day so I could reread it and find out what happened. What do I mean by that? It was more like reading a great suspense story than writing one. I had no idea what would happen next. The plot and characters took on a mind of their own, and I was simply along for the ride. Soon it became evident that I was merely a conduit, a channel, for someone writing the work who passed it through me. I finished the last 200 pages of my third novel in one sustained 60-hour continuous all-nighter. An hour after typing "The End" and the printer shot out the last page, I boarded a train for "the city" to meet my publisher. It was my fourth novel. He had seen it at the 75% point, and he couldn't wait to read more. In his office, he smiled, shook my hand and asked in excitement, "how did it end?" I looked him square in the eye and told him the truth. I have no idea, I said. He didn't understand. He loved the book, but thought I was flaky. The point is, when I read the ending, it was as fresh and new as if it had been written by someone else.
As indeed it perhaps was. The last novel I wrote was mostly done in a ten day sustained writing sprint in a log cabin in the southern Pennsylvania hills. It was like going into a trance. There were twelve hour stretches of "lost time" as whatever it was that took me over did his thing. To this day, I have only read the novel once, and I thought it was amazing, but I have no memory of writing it.
But although this had been going on for fifteen years of my writing career, God doing the work while I took the credit, I had never actually seen him.
Until after Girl 6. It was around the aftermath of Girl 14, Piano Girl, that I first saw the supreme being in the flesh.
That's what he likes me to call him. The supreme being. No capital letters. No capital "H" in "he." He doesn't like pretentiousness. He's a humble entity, if you can imagine God the Father, the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of the Universe, Jehovah, the God of Abraham and Isaac, I Am That I Am, being humble. Too much of a stretch for many people, I assume. But, forgive me for saying this, the supreme being is a regular guy. He's a friend, more in the sense of a true friend than anyone I can point to on earth. It's like he knows me, he puts up with me, he loves me, but it is more than that. He genuinely digs me. He thinks I'm hilarious. When I write a blog entry that is done without his help, he laughs his ass off about it. I've seen tears come to his eyes from his laughter. He's slapped my back in joy before and shaken his head as he looks at me, as if he's glad that I exist. There are times the supreme being looks at me like any of us would stare up at the stage at Chris Rock doing an explosively funny stand up act. The supreme being gets a tremendous kick out of me, and he always acts like he's at once glad he created me and astonished at the things I do.
This is where I and most religions disagree. Most religions would tell you that God is both perfect and omniscient and omnipresent. That's not my experience. Let's take perfection. The supreme being scoffs at the word.
"What is perfection?" he asks. "For one thing, perfection would presuppose something unchanging in time. If God is perfect, then he doesn't change, because he has perfect comprehension from the start. Not true," he continues. "Hey, look at the old testament - do I act like that anymore? No way. I come off like an abusive father in that work of art, and in fact, I kind of was, but face it, humans were like celestial two-year-olds back then. They could hurt themselves, so for safety reasons I yelled at them not to run on the pool deck. That's all the Ten Commandments were. None of those apply anymore. Think about it," he says. "Today, as an adult, is it STILL a rule that you have to hold Mommy's hand when crossing the street? Duh! No! So do the Ten Commandments have any relevance to today? Maybe as a study of morality, or the foundation of man's laws, as they progressed from the ancient Mesopotamian Laws of 2250 BC to the Magna Carta all the way to the U.S. Federal Code of Regulations. But as a day-to-day, hour-by-hour guide to behavior? I don't think so. That commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a bit primitive. Nice thought behind that one, as in, it's not polite to go to your friend's house and slaughter his three year old for running around and making noise. But how do you apply that simplistic commandment to a checkpoint in Baghdad when a car-bomber speeds toward you? You think you should turn the other cheek to that?"
I actually asked the supreme being, if he felt that way, how did he feel about the Dirty Harry movies. He grinned and did a passable imitation of Clint Eastwood. "Go ahead, punk," he said, "make my day."
You want to know what a conversation with the supreme being is like?
I asked him, so, if you're not perfect, how can you be the supreme being?
He said, "you define perfection in human terms, which makes it imperfect."
You change with time? I asked.
"Of course I do," the supreme being says, "I made you in my image, and I learn and grow just as you do. And as humanity grew up, so did I. As you progressed from stone knives to nuclear weapons, so too did I mature as a guardian spirit. After all, did I let any nukes go off after World War II?"
No, I said.
"Well, there you go. And stop numbering your wars. It makes it seem like the next one is inevitable. And it's not."
You think we can have a society with no wars? And can you see the future?
"As to war, it won't seem like war as you know it today. There will still be police and criminals and arrests and raids, but more on a global scale. But one nation arming and fighting another? Not really."
Will there still be separate nations?
"Not as you know it today. History marches on."
How will that happen? What will it be like?
He shrugged. "Turns out your constitution got popular. It caught on. It spread. The European Union added a little flavor to it, a few more cooks came on the scene. Three thousand years from now? The law of the land then will be like comparing the Code of Federal Regulations to English Common Law. Similar, but one is the great-great grandfather of the other."
You really like law, don't you?
He smiled again. "I love a good lawyer joke, same as anyone else. But yes, I get a kick out of it. The very concept that human behavior can be changed and governed by things written down by other humans is amazing to me. I frankly didn't see that one coming. I was psyched to see it happen."
Oh, I said, so you can't see the future?
"I can detect trends," he said, "but human free will is a dark curtain. All I can do to imagine an individual's future is to use a sense of their personality. I'm a good psychologist, but I've been fooled before. But given the right demonstration in their lives, people can change their own future."
So, is there destiny for each of us?
"I don't define the concept of destiny like you do," he said.
See? You could go in endless circles talking to him. It's like being four years old and having a loving and patient big brother who's 18. He thinks in terms that are much bigger than we are, but he plops down on the floor and plays the same game we're playing. And notice I didn't say "father figure" or give his age as 35, because in so many ways he has a childlike joy to him, and he always says that he is developing and learning just as we are. Blasphemy and heresy are the words people will mumble, but I don't care.
But my comment here goes to his sense of humor. He's a comedian. Here's how I know. You asked me what Rex looked like, and I told you he's a Hollywood version of me. Now you ask, what does the supreme being look like? He's Rex's identical twin. Is this some weird failure of my imagination? Or God's sense of humor? If you've heard of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know they have a Twelve Step program, and peppered through the Twelve Steps is the idea of "God as we understand Him." That's the key here. The supreme being knows I have a self-image problem. He sent me my firstborn son, who looks a lot like me, to remind me to love myself just as I adore my son. But it wasn't enough. So he made Rex appear to me as a sexy version of me, to remind me that my sexuality is a beautiful part of who I am, and to revere that part of me. And when that wasn't enough, when the supreme being made an appearance in the room with me, he came wearing my costume, perhaps to remind me yet again of how highly he thinks of me, as if the headline is that I've been hating myself for far too long, and that the cosmic struggle is really to free myself of that.
But when I consciously try to think of the meaning of that, a headache blooms behind my eyes and I can't think about it anymore. I'll save that for another day.
The point here is that all the pre-date prep work for Girl 93 was done solely by my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex. I had no memory of it. And that disturbed me. For one reason, it had never happened before. Always it was I who hit on the girl or received the hits. I was the one who either set the early relationship on course or wobbled it badly. If Rex were there, it was him leaning over my shoulder giving advice that I frankly ignored most of the time. After all, what the hell did Rex know about matters of the heart?
Not this time. From the initial flirtation to the ending of my pre-date shower and dressing ritual, it was all Rex. I was absent. I remember walking out of my townhouse surprised that I had the wrong car keys in my hands. The SUV, an old black Toyota 4Runner, was parked ten steps outside my front door. The keys in my hand had a polished stainless steel tag that read "SALEEN."
It was August, but suddenly the summer melted away and it was April again, and I sort of "came to" at my computer and stared at the Ebay screen. I had just bought a fingernail polish red Saleen Mustang, an aftermarket bastardization of the Mustang GT, with a Hurst 5 speed, a tricked-out engine and exhaust, and gigantic 21 inch bright chrome racing rims at all four corners. Now what the fuck was I doing staring at an Ebay "congratulations for buying this car" screen?
It had been Rex, buying a sexy penis-mobile for himself. Making the enormous payments was only one of the problems this car presented, though that would soon become a bigger issue. It was that this sleek, exotic barely-legal street racer was in my parking lot and the ex-wives, both furious with me for a laundry list of ex-wife bitches, now had hard evidence that I was more affluent than I told them. How could I explain this? Tell them that Rex had bought it? Both exes hated Rex, and I think the trauma of that is what led to him becoming a separate personality.
I walked up to the red Saleen. It was hard not to smile at it. It was gorgeous and sexual, with a raw, blistering confidence. This car said in block capital letters, SUCK MY COCK, BITCH. And since I'd had it, women did. Perhaps not on the first date, but by date two, there were wet lips wrapped around the grinning face of Tyrannosaurus Rex in that glove leather bucket seat.
Still, I was furious at Rex for this disaster, both financially and socially. It was hardly the car a 47-and-a-half year old drove. Why couldn't you get a Porsche like every other mid-life crisis guy, I asked him one day. He smiled and tossed off this answer: "This is what I would have bought if I'd ended up attached to that pro football player God promised me. But no, I get an impoverished, starving writer/artist geek who should have been given that tiny weeny that never worked." Somewhere, there is a pro linebacker who has been compensating all his life for his shortcomings in the penis department. The car had been for sale since I had taken delivery, but who in his right mind would want a hopped up Mustang for an amount of money that you could buy two Mustangs for? Rex didn't give a shit about money, I realized. He only wanted eight things - female mouth, pussy, asshole, left breast, right breast, left hand, right hand and face, the places where he loved to paint his sperm murals in heavy, rich, creamy cum.
I looked around me, then down at myself. I was dressed in a black sport jacket, jeans, Timberline boots similar to what Rex and the supreme being favored, dug up from a closet somewhere, and a black Polo shirt with a black T-shirt underneath. It was like waking from a dream. I knew I was supposed to drive the Saleen to a first date, but other than a dim memory of talking to Rex about Girl 93 before, I couldn't remember her.
As soon as I climbed in and fired up the V-8, the rumbling exhaust seemed to summon the spirit of Tyrannosaurus Rex to the shotgun seat. He was clipping the end off a Cohiba cigar with a solid gold cutter, then lighting it with another gold accoutrement of his cigar-smoking lifestyle.
Shouldn't you not do that in the car? What if someone wants to buy it, I asked.
The usual Rex grin. "That'll make it much more difficult to sell my baby, now, won't it?"
Asshole, I said.
"No, asshole is my next door neighbor," Rex replied. The joke was getting worn.
Where to, I asked.
"Brew Pub," his deep voice said as he puffed the cigar to full power.
I threw the Saleen in gear and laid a patch leaving the parking lot. Goddamned drive train was simply too powerful to keep the tires on the pavement. This car could burn rubber in fourth fucking gear.
We arrived at our parking space and together we walked toward Nassau Street, across from Princeton University, the famous locale of the Triumph Brewing Company. Sure, it had been a hangout of mine and Girl Zero's, but what the hell, it was too damned good to leave to her side of the ledger.
Tell me again about this date, I said.
Rex puffed the stogy as we stood out front. "Israeli Air Force Girl."
Wait, didn't you tell me something about her before? After Anal Third Base Girl when we were fleeing the scene of the crime?
He smiled. "Yeah. I showed you just a glimpse of her."
I didn't remember.
"Wait till you hear her voice."
Why?
He rolled his eyes so far back into his head there was nothing but white. "It's this impossible-to-describe part-European, part-South African, part Middle Eastern lilting speech. It's enough to make me trip, fall and spill the cum long before I'm ready. You think French accents and British accents are sexy? Wait till you hear Israeli Air Force girl. You'll lose it."
You like her, I said. It was a statement, not a question.
He clapped me on the shoulder. "Mikey, this is The Girl. Capital T. Capital G."
I took a deep breath. Okay, I said. Tell me more about her.
"Jet black hair. What's that phrase you're always ripping off from Hemingway?"
'Her hair was black as a raven's wing,' I quoted. I put it on the head of every love-interest female in my books and waited for an editor to say, um, how about not stealing the description straight from Hemingway this time, but so far, no one had caught me.
"Well, imagine that framing the face of Cleopatra. She has eyes so wide and so dark they will swallow your heart. Cheekbones so perfect she could be a covergirl for any of a hundred fashion magazines. A complexion so smooth and creamy and adorable, the ideal canvas for some of my cum artwork. The cutest, most elegantly shaped nose the supreme being has ever crafted - he knows you dig the nose." He smiled at his alliteration. "And thrown in as a bonus, a superb jawline and cock…sucking…lips." Rex's tongue shot out for just a moment, wetting his own lips.
Is she tall, I asked.
"No. A bit over five feet. She'll fit right here, just like Eve did in the crook of Adam's arm."
Is she fat?
"You'll like this. Her tits are so perfect they could be in a sculpture. You'll long to hold them, touch them, lick them, kiss them, suck them - "
Are they fake?
"No way, man. Real as I am."
I wondered if he were joking.
And what about her legs, her ass, her hips, her arms?
"All textbook perfect. She was a trainer for the Israeli fighter pilots. She spent years being an adventuress like her father, who dragged the family through the wilds of Africa as a bush pilot."
So she's still wild?
He shook his head. "She has a teenager. Full custody."
Jesus, this one was goddamned marriage bait. Maybe I could find a flaw.
So there's a divorce in her past?
My follow-up question brewed in my mind. Did she cheat on him or did she shut him down sexually, provoking him to cheat on her?
"No. Sister's kid. They live in Israeli Air Force Girl's house in a swanky neighborhood not far from here. Not sure what the deal is, but now Israeli Air Force Girl is a model citizen. She's got a career with her in the big chair. Finance type. Mover and shaker. You'll love her."
I frowned. How old is she?
Rex grinned an evil grin. "Thirty."
The color drained from my face. Thirty. You brought me here to meet a heart-breakingly beautiful thirty year old. Who has jet black hair, Cleopatra's perfect face, a gorgeous toned body, and a kick-ass career that supports her and her teenager. The panic must have shown in my voice.
"What's the matter?"
YOU FUCKING MORON! I screamed. A dozen people on the sidewalk of Nassau street suddenly turned and stared at me. I tapped my ear as if I wore a Bluetooth earpiece for a cell phone and started walking away. The crowd nodded as one - I was going off on a business associate on my cell phone, not screaming at an invisible apparition.
"What?" Rex asked, looking for the first time in a year like he'd been slapped. The last time I saw that look on his face, it was when he was mourning the loss of Girl 6, the lovely, sexual and immortal Alayna.
Does this bitch remind you of ANYONE we know, you fucking IDIOT? I couldn't help screaming, but I'd grabbed Rex by the sleeve and dragged him down the alley behind the Schwab building where his ridiculous red sled was parked.
"No," he said, confused. "N-n-no." When he was slapped, like he'd once been by the stuck-up bitches in high school, he stuttered.
I was furious. Goddamned Tyrannosaurus Rex had set me up. He'd taken over my personality completely to conceal this from me. Had I known any of this I would have wobbled this hard and aborted it before it began.
"Mikey, listen to me."
It was too late. I was already hurrying to the Saleen.
"Come on, we're almost late, we gotta get in there!"
I walked on, ignoring him, until he spun me around ten feet from the car. Before he could say a word I screamed at him.
Hair black as a raven's wing!
"Yeah," he said, sheepishly.
Cheekbones that could sell Oil of Fucking Olay!
"Well, yes."
Beautiful as Cleopatra!
I kept pounding the nails into the coffin of the date.
Creamy complexion!
Wide dark eyes that could swallow your heart!
Cocksucking lips!
A perfect set of perky little THIRTY FUCKING YEAR OLD tits!
A perfectly round, smooth ass! A heart-shaped pelvis! Adorable legs! Small feet! All that perfection in one, dark haired, thirty year old package! With an amazing accent to go with it all! Right?
Rex stared at the asphalt. I'd never seen him cry, but his eyes had swollen and he wiped at them so I wouldn't see moisture.
AM I RIGHT?
"Yes," he said sheepishly. "What's so wrong with all that?"
Oh fuck you, I said as I pointed the remote at the Saleen and unlocked the door. I turned away but he spun me to him again, his face a mask of agony.
"Please," he begged.
Behind him a second version of me walked up, but he was dressed in the brown leather jacket and Nike black wrap-around shades.
You, I said accusingly to the supreme being. YOU sanctioned this?
But the supreme being ignored me and just took Rex aside for a moment, then returned to the side of the driver's door.
"Rex's description reminds you of someone," the supreme being said.
I was more respectful to the creator of the universe than I'd been to Rex.
Yes. You know who.
"No," he said. "Tell me out loud."
Girl Zero, I said. Same age, same appearance. She's a Girl Zero clone.
"Don't call her that," he commanded. "She's one of my better creations. She has a name."
Sorry, I said. Her name is - I swallowed, realizing I could barely form the sounds with my mouth - Patricia.
"No. Say her name."
Puh. Puh. Patti. There. I said it.
The supreme being looked at me.
"The new woman isn't Patti," he said. "You can't run forever from thirty year old women with dark hair and dark eyes."
Oh come on. Every single detail Rex just described is HER. It's 1994 all over again. What is this, some kind of sick joke? Do either of you realize how much this hurts?
"She's your type," the supreme being said. "All your life you loved women with dark hair and dark eyes, who weren't too tall, with nice bodies."
No, that's not my type, I insisted. I like tall slender blondes with big breasts. Don't you remember, even on these very streets, from 1995 to 2003, every tall slender blonde who walked by us, nay, every blonde whether thin, fat, short or tall, made me break my neck staring at her. Girl Zero - I mean Patti - constantly hated me for it. She used to say, 'why don't you just leave me for a fucking blonde? Blondes are your type, not brunettes!' So why can you look me in the eye and admit I love blondes?
"It was I who loved the blondes with the big tits, the skinnier and taller, the better," Rex suddenly blurted. "YOU were the one who loved the brunettes."
I didn't understand. So why are we here? If I don't want to see her, and Rex's type is blonde, why don't we leave? We'll stand her Israeli ass up.
"Because, I changed Rex's type for you," the supreme being said. He was about eleven years late with that miracle, I though.
As if to confirm the claim, Rex nodded eagerly. "I want her, Mikey. I really want her."
Well, gentlemen, I said, making the toughest face I knew how, fuck you both. I'm not going in there.
In that tenth of a second I thought I'd gotten away with it, with telling the very creator of the universe, to shove it up his holy ass. In that moment I weighed every ounce of pain I felt at the loss of the woman I'd loved so much that I'd taken her to the altar and put a platinum, sapphire encrusted, diamond ring on her finger despite the horror of my first divorce, and the total was ugly, it amounted to the tonnage of a supertanker so overloaded that its gunwales skimmed the waves.
And then my consciousness winked out. One second I was reaching for the door handle of the Saleen in the fading sunlight of a Saturday afternoon in August, and in the next my hand was in the exact same position in front of me, but the outdoor light had faded to the sepia mellow glow of the front of the bar of the Brew Pub, and I was reaching out to take the hand of Girl 93, Israeli Air Force Girl.
* * *
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I felt the skin of her hand touch the skin of mine, and I writhed and twisted in the agony of ten thousand volts shooting through my body as the thunderbolt hit me. Through a filmy fog I could see her gorgeous face and her amazing eyes looking at me, and in that instant I knew that her face could launch a thousand ships, and that I'd seen her before in my dreams and I'd known her before in half a dozen previous lives, and that for all I knew, Girl Zero was just the opening act, shelling my beach to pave the way for the main battle invasion force of Israeli Air Force Girl.
Like the aftermath of a deafening grenade explosion, there was no sound for a few minutes, until the third or fourth sentence she uttered to me. And that speech was caressed by her mouth, her words in front of me hanging in the air like the red and green lights of a lovely Christmas tree. Her accent was beautiful, it was a sound that had put me to sleep for three thousand nights and awakened me three thousand times at dawn.
She was a goddess.
The evening, to my altered consciousness, was a series of snap shots, each one frozen in time as if by a supernatural strobe light. She laughed at what Rex was saying as he took pictures of her face to put by her phone number in the cell phone, and though she hated the pictures, one was more perfect and beautiful than the next. And as the anxiety would rise in me over the marriage bait and her resemblance to Girl Zero, time would stop and I'd go to that blackness again, waking up suddenly with twenty minutes having passed, but eerily I had total recall of what had happened since I had faded out. It was as if Rex had a sort of "live feed" to my memory as he conducted the date, and at one point I floated silently out of my body and watched Rex operate its machinery as he spoke in animation to Israeli Air Force Girl about adventures from my distant past. The near drowning during Navy Scuba School, the flooding at test depth on my submarine, and the time they scrambled the entire east and west coast submarine forces to sea on a Sunday night, so suddenly and with so little warning that we all were convinced it was World War III. And Israeli Air Force Girl's face was bathed in the warmth coming from Rex, and then filaments of fire seemed to pass between the two.
I looked at myself and thought it odd how good I looked with Rex at the helm. It was as if he fully inflated my sagging corpse and I was young again. He was all confidence and animation and certainty. He was funny and intelligent and slick, and then I looked at this perfect woman who so reminded me of the woman who pulverized my heart, I realized that she was falling in love with Rex as well.
In the next instant Rex moved close to Israeli Air Force Girl as she leaned against a dark wall in a deserted parking lot. The bastard put his - or rather our - hand on her smooth face and pulled her toward him, and in slow motion I saw her lips part, and he kissed her and it was like a scene in a sappy romantic comedy. The kiss went on and on, and although I floated ten feet above the couple, I could feel her lips and mouth as if they were on me, and suddenly I was back inside myself, alarms shrieking in my mind as I felt the skin under her panties as my hand moved past her waistband and fondled her. I expected to hear anger and feel a stinging slap on my face, but there was only a soft moan in that tender, lovely voice as her hand came up and caressed me. And then she said the only words I remember from that whole night.
"I know you would be an amazing lover," she said, that east-of-civilization accent melting my heart.
And suddenly I was behind the wheel of the Saleen a mile from Nassau Street heading back to my townhouse. Rex was riding beside me, with a smitten, dreamy expression on his face. I locked up the brakes, shrieked to a halt and ordered him out of the car.
"You're serious?"
Out. I was ready to punch him, and hard. I guess he realized how furious I was.
"Fine."
Once he was gone, that sallow, sick feeling returned, but a moment later the supreme being had taken his place.
Why do you do that? I spat, as furious as I could ever remember being, and very near my breaking point.
"Do what?"
Dress like me, look like me. It's not funny anymore. It's fucking disturbing.
"You ever go to a Chris Rock concert?" he said calmly. "For three days afterward you're talking like him, straight from the ghetto. Or watch George Clooney in the movies, and on the way home you're walking like him, with that wicked cocky walk of his, rockin' your head back and forth?"
Yeah. So what?
"Mikey, you imitate what you think is cool."
I stared at him, almost going through a red light.
What?
"You heard me. I'm imitating you because sometimes I wake up in the morning wishing I were you. You're like, I don't know, like a real life James Bond."
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
He smiled and shook his head slowly, as if it were the funniest thing he'd heard all day.
I decided to cut to the heart of things. Why did you put Rex in for me on this Israeli Air Force Girl thing? What the hell was that about? You've never done that before.
"Rex could do it right, that's why. You're hostile and licking your divorce wounds still."
This isn't a football game you can just send a replacement player into. This is my fucking consciousness we're talking about. It's my life, for God's sake.
"For your sake, you mean. Listen, you want to know what the funny thing is?" He smiled even wider, that movie star grin of his making me even more irritated. "You said YOU were the one who wanted a relationship and that HE was the one who just wanted to go from girl to girl. Turns out HE wants a girlfriend, a satisfying girlfriend, and YOU just want to remain disconnected, playing with one girl after another. Between the two of you, YOU'RE the player."
He was right. We'd reversed roles.
So what now, he'll take over my life and I'll be relegated to looking over HIS shoulder every now and then? For an instant I felt fear, that fear of no longer existing.
The supreme being banged my thigh with his fist. "What do you want?"
Hell, I don't know. But I did know.
You know what I want, supreme being? I want a tall, sexy, adoring blonde with stripper tits who fucks like a porn star, but I don't want her to be China-doll delicate, but more, I don't know, overtly sexual. I want to look at her and just want to bend her over and fuck her, not paint an oil portrait of her face. I want this sexual, sexy blonde to be my girlfriend, a blonde who won't make want to kill myself every time we have a lover's quarrel. I want to be in charge in the relationship. The leader. I don't want her to be thirty, that's too young, and I'd lose my soul yet again and m3arry the bitch. Give me a woman who won't be laser focused on getting married. Give me a woman without a damned biological clock ticking away like an armed suitcase nuclear weapon. Give me a calm healer who's a maniac when she's naked, who will share my quirky sexual fetishes, who will watch porn with me and love it, who will get turned on by this freakish sexuality you gave me, not be repulsed by it.
A steno pad appeared on his lap, and a Monte Blanc pen, and he scribbled quick, efficient notes to himself. He asked me forty questions, like:
Intelligence level?
Cheekbones?
Eye color?
Height?
Breast size?
Nationality of ancestry?
Siblings?
He wrote it all down.
And then I was in bed and the sun was rising, and I was certain that the last woman I'd dated had been Anal Third Base Girl.
**************************
It had all been a dream.
But as the coffee brewed, I dropped my jaw as I saw the email:
"Tonno, it was so wonderful to meet you last night. I haven't had a night that fun - or romantic - since college. Okay, perhaps that wasn't quite true. I haven't had a night like that since I was born! I would love to see you again, and thank you so much. I'm sorry I missed your calls last night, I had to get into a bubble bath to calm down enough to go to sleep, but I will call you back in the morning. Thanks again, darling. Love, Israeli Air Force Girl"
Oh my fucking God, I thought.
It took four days of emailing to get it done. My hands shook as I typed each email. But as the hours went by, it got more and more under control. I alienated Israeli Air Force Girl as quickly, intensely and convincingly as I could, trying to act like Rex as I did so she wouldn't suspect it was me trying to sabotage this budding relationship.
Finally it was done. I said good-bye to Israeli Air Force Girl over something as stupid as when we'd schedule the second date. I lied and managed to come up with some lame excuse as to why that was such a deal-breaker that I would never see her anymore.
I wiped sweat off my brow as I closed her last good-bye email. I could almost sense how upset she was as she typed it.
I turned off the computer and shut my eyes, and her image mercifully faded from my brain.
Rex sat on the kitchen counter when I stood to go pick up my daughter at day care.
What do you want?
His voice was cold and hard. "You are a ruthless, cruel, unfeeling, inconsistent, immature, fucked-up, son of a bitching asshole," he said. I'd never heard him more hostile.
He'd lost. And there was nothing he could do about it.
I just looked him in the eye.
Like that's news, I said.
"You want war?" he asked. "You got it."
I came across the room at him but he'd vanished again.
Since Israeli Air Force Girl, the episodes of lost time have increased. My memory lapses are becoming more matters of concern. When I wrote of Rex before, I thought it was interesting - while still being true - but I never imagined that the bifurcation of my personality would go this far.
Was it possible that I had multiple personality disorder? I flew off the handle in a freakish spaz on my senior partner - by boss - a week after I saw Israeli Air Force Girl, and the fallout was so severe that I didn't get any work assigned from him for months, which was his punishment for me, because no assignment mean no money. In my business, you eat what you kill. And while the harsh, aggressive and unfriendly characteristics of me usually belong to the "Mikey" personality, I think Rex started imitating me as imperfectly as I'd imitated him to push away Israeli Air Force Girl. I had a technical memory of each event, but it was a dead memory. Information, not emotion. Rex had taken over my body and my mind the day I'd blown a gasket on the boss and dealt me a blow in retaliation, and it was severe enough to take me almost to bankruptcy.
I had the vengeful thought that I'd make Rex watch as they repossessed his idiotic Saleen, and I'd remind him that it was the money from the business that paid for the damned Viagra for him and his sex addiction, but like I said, the son of a bitch doesn't understand or give a damn about money.
But it got worse. I gave up on the idea of a girlfriend. The people I was corresponding with were universally rejecting me now, as the madness took hold and grew deeper. And as the financial situation grew worse, I found myself thinking more and more about suicide. And then it occurred to me that the suicidal thoughts were really just Rex's way of trying to murder me.
There had to be a way to end this destructive conflict, I realized.
We had to make a deal. We had to do it over the next six women. One way or another.
But you don't just sue Tyrannosaurus Rex for peace. He's as vicious as his name would imply.
And fighting him meant the end of me. He could take my mind over and toss us off a bridge, and I might not "wake up" in my body until half way down.
It had to be in what I told the supreme being, I thought. Because Rex liked raven haired girls, but he also liked blondes.
It had to be a blonde. Over a blonde we'd sign a peace treaty.
* * *
In the gauzy haze, I reached down for an ornate gold door handle.
The heavy mahogany door opened. The plush interior of the room was lit by candles. Off in an unseen distance, incense burned. The carpet was a deep red, the walls a dark, rich color. Everywhere there was old wood and seemingly older leather. The room seemed centered around a fireplace cavernous enough to roast a pig in. Logs as big around as whole trees burned with a warm, mellow glow. There were comfortable leather gentlemen’s club arm chairs facing the fire, with small walnut tables between them. Dim light, no brighter than candles, emanated from the sepia-tinted art-deco lamp shades of ancient brass lamps on the tables. In one seating area adjacent to the fireplace, three chairs were arranged in a square, so that two chairs directly faced each other, and the third in between them faced the hearth. Two men sat in the chairs next to each other, their faces close as if sharing intense, serious secrets. There were two rocks glasses on the table between their chairs. On another table was a third drink, its owner seemingly missing.
Though I didn’t say a word the two men in the chairs, dim figures both, rose as one and walked toward me. I remembered thinking they must be brothers, as they were the same build and height, and when the reached me I could see that they were twins, both the same image as in the mirror with one exception - the mirror image always looks at me straight on. I noticed how odd I looked from a different angle. In some ways more handsome. In others, disappointing.
The eyes of the man on the right crinkled into crows feet as he smiled. "Come on in. Sit down. We’ve been expecting you." The other man’s face was neutral, as if he were trying to mask an old hostility, but he nodded at me with a serious expression. It was an unmistakable gesture of respect. I remember being surprised by that, and a second emotion - relief.
I took a seat in the empty chair with the waiting drink. My chair faced the dour brother. The friendly twin sat next to me, on my left. I noticed that all three of us leaned forward, our elbows on our thighs. It was difficult to tell who was imitating - or mocking - whom.
The friendly one reached for his glass. "Twenty-five year old scotch," he said, smiling. "Balvenie."
We all raised our glasses.
"I propose a toast to progress toward peace, and perhaps even the hope of peace itself."
I nodded as seriously at him as the angry twin had at me. To peace, I said.
"Peace," the other said. Odd how the twins’ voices were so similar in timber, yet so different in expression. The light twin’s tone was singsong, almost British. The dark one’s pronunciation could have been that of a Sicilian gang member, guttural and dangerous.
"Let’s talk," the light twin said. And suddenly I recognized him. It was the supreme being, with his usual costume of my flesh. Which meant the other man was my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I took another pull of the scotch and sat back in the chair.
"Rex, why don’t you explain to Mikey what we’ve come up with." The supreme being smiled encouragingly at Rex.
Rex drained his scotch and put the glass down, wiping his lip with one hand and gripping the arm of the leather chair with the other. He leaned forward, his brows rising, his expression serious, but also just barely threatening.
"Israeli Air Force Girl," he said. He looked at the dark antique wood floorboards, which were wide and thick, as if we were in a colonial inn somewhere in New England. When his eyes rose again, they were duller, as if the scotch had suddenly hit its mark. "I was wrong to conduct that meeting without you being on board."
I was amazed. Rex, the supposedly stronger, more aggressive of us, was admitting he had made a mistake. It turned my insides. Where before there had been enmity and hostility, there was only fatigue.
I thought about this a lot, I said, my voice calm and deep. Rex leaned forward, as if I were a judge about to render his sentence. Maybe I went too far. Maybe I overreacted to simple dark hair and dark eyes. I mean, come on, how much could she look like Girl Zero? The supreme being frowned over at me. Sorry. Like Puh, Puh, Patti. I was mocking myself. Imagine being so upset that I couldn’t say the woman’s name. I’d been an idiot. But that was then. This was now. And maybe Rex should be more in charge of the process. I think I’m too analytical. And agonized. I think it might be a good thing to let you alternate with me when we’re in the field.
"Really?" he asked.
I nodded. After all, what did I have to lose? It certainly had to be better than ceasing to exist if the supreme being, as referee, decided I was the sinful party and Rex was righteous. And God knew, I’d done some bad things, some very wrong things.
"So you think you could work with Rex in the future on this enterprise? You’ll relinquish control when he asks? Then request to come back when you think you’re needed? Or when you’re asked to?"
Again I nodded. After all, I thought, we’d been doing this in business for a few years. Rex was the sales guy, I was the worker-bee/analyst. I wrote the opinion, Rex talked about it to the partners.
The supreme being beamed, then took another sip of the scotch.
"There is one thing," Rex said haltingly.
I raised an eyebrow.
The supreme being nodded solemnly. "You need to listen to this, Mikey."
Go ahead, I said.
Rex took a deep breath. "Israeli Air Force Girl. I need - we need - to see her again."
Why? I asked him.
"Go ahead," the supreme being coaxed.
Rex’s hand shook as he nervously adjusted his bow tie. "I want her. I just want her. I have to see her again."
My face hardened. There’s no way.
"Why not?" the supreme being asked. "Why are you afraid of her?"
Because I could fall in love with her. And she’ll break my heart in the same places that Girl Zero did.
I caught his eye. The supreme being frowned again.
Fine. Patti.
I didn’t even stutter that time.
"She won’t have us," Rex blurted. "Not for the long haul. Not for love. For sex, but not love."
Like that would convince me. If she even so much as touched my cheek, I would be lost. My world would revolve around hers.
"It’s just one more date," Rex said. "But you have to keep an open mind. You have to let her in long enough to consider being with her. We have to look her in the eye and talk about making love."
Rex? The primordial dinosaur, talking about making love instead of fucking? This had gone too far.
I shut my eyes and her image came back to me, and I started to shake. I felt the supreme being’s hand on my sleeve. It was only then I consciously realized that the three of us were wearing tuxedos. I looked up at his face for a long time, and his strength and courage seemed to flow from his hand into my arm and up to my heart. It felt warm and soothing as it filled my bloodstream.
One date? And then we’re done?
One date and then I might be done, I thought.
There was a long silence. I remember standing up. Both men stood with me, but the supreme being kept his hand on my forearm, and the warmth kept coming.
* * *
It seemed much later, as if months had passed. I had hoped the craziness in my soul would die down, but it never seemed to. On an afternoon when my "Mikey" personality seemed in charge, I text messaged Israeli Air Force Girl.
She seemed surprised and pleased to hear from me. It was broad daylight. Less chance of anything feeling romantic that way. That and the fact that since I had seen her, Israeli Air Force Girl had gotten herself a boyfriend, and she was planning on a night of long, slow, romantic fucking.
When I first saw her, I noticed her aura. It was dark. A black halo surrounded her short but perfect body. I looked at her hard, as if studying an organism in a microscope. It was three in the afternoon on a sunny day. There was no twilight, no romantic starlight now. All her flaws would rise to the surface. The slightest blemish, a single pound over her ideal weight.
But there were no flaws. Israeli Air Force Girl was the most physically perfect specimen of a human female I’d ever seen. Her hair was gleaming and jet black. Her eyes were as dark as the winter sky. Her skin glowed. Her lips glimmered.
And yet, there was darkness surrounding her. It was an anger. There was a grudge inside her that even she couldn’t get to.
She sipped the margarita and after a few minutes, a few colors of the rainbow sneaked into her aura. She smiled at me, warming slowly, as she described her boyfriend, and how she loved him, but wasn’t in love with him. And how she longed for the man she dreamt of to be with her. And after she said it, those black eyes drilled into me.
I took one last risk.
So a black bag team comes, I said.
"What’s a black bag team?" she said.
That voice. That goddamned, accented, melodious, beautiful fucking voice.
Think burglars, I said. Think CIA black ops. A covert operation group. Something from one of my novels. Anyway, they come to your bedroom at three in the morning and you wake up duct taped to a chair doped up with sodium pentothal so that you cannot lie. And one of the men asks you, if you dated this guy, this Tonno guy, would you love him? Would you want a relationship with him?
She looked down a the table.
Don’t answer, I said, panicked. She’d just rejected me at my most vulnerable. But there had been a moment, just one moment, when I had opened myself up to her. When I had offered her the one thing that I had to give to a woman. Myself.
"No," she said. "I want to answer."
I tried not to listen, but the phrases came down a tunnel toward me and hit me with stinging, salty blows, even though I tried to dodge them.
I want my own children.
I want a man who will love me, only me, forever, and you can’t do that.
The woman who called you a Land Rover, going from vagina to vagina - she was right. You are. You would find some flaw in me. Some birthmark I’d always had. And you would blow it up in your mind until it became big enough to be a door through which you’d make your escape from the relationship. You’d become unhappy and you would leave me. And then I would be here again.
No, I won’t love you, but I could have a sexual fling with you. You could fuck me all you want, but I’ll never love you.
I’ll never love you.
Never love you.
Once her words floated in the air between us, like summer fireflies. Now her words were nails banging into a coffin.
She paid the check. Every time a woman did that I felt anguish, as if I weren’t a big enough boy to pay for the girl.
I watched her leave the restaurant. Her image faded slowly in a blur.
It was over.
There would be no more black haired girls, I said to myself.
Only blondes.
Only blondes.
Only blondes.