Lover's Lane

The New York skyline is less than 100 yards away from me at the pier in DUMBO, a miniature boardwalk equipped with an ice cream shop, the world famous River Cafe restaurant and the assortment of tourists, couples and wanderers like myself, there for the view while making out, taking pictures and marveling at the splendor of the view are the more preferred choices on the menu. My bike is in clear view, chained properly close by.

I needed to get out of the lodge. Both living and working in the same space can get complicated, when its your vacation week but prior commitments hinder you from going anywhere, and you have a houseguest whose mainly into ESPN, E and 106th and 106th and Park while you prefer the Food Network, TruTV and the movie channels. One of the reasons the investment in my bike was worth is that it can get me anywhere in Brooklyn after the hours where the trains are plentiful. I needed to meditate. So I got to pedaling.

There's this kid who reached out to me on myspace. He's in his early 20s and trying to make a name for himself with the ladies where he lives overseas. Apparently, after reading my blog he assumed that I was some sort of authority on the subject of women, even when the timestamp on my emails usually coincides with the hours when most ladies' men are going in for their nightly kill.

He tells me that women reject him because he looks young and that he's afraid of getting involved with older women because he thinks their experience will give him the upper-hand. Then he asks me for advice.

I didn't know what to tell him. I mean I could have given him the speech my Dad gave me, but I'm not even sure if I can offer him that much insight. Dating for me in recent years has been a living experience in learning just how many women in this town I'm not compatible with. I have found myself catching dates in lies, shielding myself from the fallout of nothings that could have been something (had souls chosen to move on and not wallow in what was). I have seen vicious acts of selfishness, a plethora of unintelligence and a side of folks who were looking for a microwavable engagement that would get them to the altar just in time for their 30th birthday. Ding! I'm married. So for me it wasn't as simple as selling him The Secret.

Sitting out there on the boardwalk and watching the waves in the East River, I found myself studying the cadre of couples around me: Asian, Jewish, Indian. All still in the honeymoon phase. That-I-want-to-kiss-you-all-the-time-and-let's-hold-hands-because-life-is-short-and-I want-to-spend-the-rest-of-it-with-you-and-only-you glaze all over their faces. I found myself envying them. I thought back to points in the relatively distant past where I had been such a soul, entwined with a someone else to the point of public nausea as far back as the mid-90s, my being fool enough to revise my life in the name of L-O-V-E.

But if wisdom is a byproduct of experience, then the years I've seen since those times have shown me that it's not those honeymoon moments that matter the most, but the more uncomfortable ones, the moments where there are interlopers storming your mutual compound and the only way to fend them off is together. Unfortunately far too many of my own partners either couldn't or weren't willing to bear arms at crunch time. Now I see those moments at Lover's Lane as the easy ones, when intuition and attraction run the show like a business. And thus, I think back to the kid and his question.

I'm not bitter about the most of the highs and lows in my love life. So I wasn't going to hit a 23 year-old with some rant that could potentially scar him, some diatribe about my own failures similar to the worst and angriest of my entries here. Neither of us deserved that. So I ended up writing him from the vantage point of someone who understands karma, someone who has seen what happened to so many of those who fucked me over. Some have changed but most have remained exactly the same as they tread water in the dating pool waiting for their next hook to bite on.

The ones I loved, I love. The one's I didn't are relegated to the room in my mind I'm building for my children, a place I might happily open for them one day when they're grown, when they're trying to understand the fucked-up world in which they live and how Kenya or Kamal could have done them like that. All we can do is play the hands that we're given.

I remember the post-breakups when I was rolling through the streets stone drunk or high as a kite, bar-hopping and window-shopping in search of some sort Darius Lovehall-style rebound romance. Drunk dials to almosts who came close but never made it, trying to grab something in a headlock and drag it out of the pool with me once and for all. But it doesn't work like that. We punch our cards based on someone's clock. The watches on our wrists don't mean shit. I gained a good twenty pounds doing that shit. I looked in the mirror at my Mom's house one day and couldn't believe how many inches I could pinch.

Looking over my e-mail to him I thought about pasting the letter itself as a blog, but then decided against it. That's for him and only him. This is for me. Perhaps he'll keep my words someplace safe and review them years from now, long after I've given up social communities, long after anyone considers me still a young man. And if I'm lucky my words will make sense to him in a different way than they do now. He will love and live and learn. Until you do all that anything anyone says is just speculation.

I think I know a hell of a lot more about women now than I did when I was 23. Back then I was lucky if I got the nerve to ask someone to dance at some club and actually got them to hit the floor with me without any of the many club-hour excuses you ladies have all used at least once.

Now I'm saying things to my inner circle about my comings and goings with a kind of flippancy I never ever saw myself having. But like my father warned me long ago: "There are times when you won't want to be bothered with women at all."
There are other things I need to do first, other areas where my energy is needed. So those are the islands I'm setting a course for on my 20-speed. I'll let you know when I get there. Out.