The Stranger’s Ritual

Use beer as your excuse for fooling around. It is and has always been your ticket to redemption. Pretend that you are drunk, languishing in feigned trance, when you already have your hands on the girl, the beneficiary of that third bottle of chilled golden poison, financed by a wallet that has undoubtedly seen better days when the world was still a happier place to puke away your wages on someone’s foot — all in the name of getting laid, the closest cousin of desperation in these desperate times — and then completely ignore your friends when they bid you adieu for the night. They are about to leave the infamous watering hole but your modus operandi forbids you to notice them. Friendly competition is tricky business. You do not want to see them. You do not want to hear them call you. You are busy being busy about being busy. Besides, you have already rehearsed your alibi for their questions tomorrow: it was the beer, you had an erection inside those tight jeans at the time, and you just wanted a good fuck before calling it a night. The Sacred Heart of Jesus knows that’s all you wanted. They can ask all the questions the following day, but certainly not this evening. So if liquors can be convicted, they would be the first in line to take that single trip to the death chamber. The alcohol is the culprit, or so you would like people to think.

Try to massage the hands of the girl and send all the wrong signals for a one-night stand, which, in the language of promiscuity, is utter catastrophe waiting to happen. She’ll pretend to take the bait. She’ll wonder how in Oprah’s name it is possible for you to see yourself as someone who deserves all the women in the world simply by turning them drunk, too drunk in fact that it is practically rape you are belaboring at the behest of your angry bird. Of course, some women, like some men, drink the drink to get nailed, but certainly not by one who badly needs a bath by the first sign of rain, or anything that can wash away an anomalous odor that properly belongs to the sewers. It’s as if you exhumed a carcass that you want to drag wherever you go so that the world will know each time that the boss has arrived. It’s your concept of a royal announcement by way of scent.

Slowly, gently, reassuringly with each pressure, you channel your libido through your fingers, the masseuse that you have now become, hoping that they will somehow find their way into the lady’s pants by the end of the night. Do not think for one moment that the people around you do not know what you are doing. Kid, they can see your arm crawl its way up her back with amateur stealth and poor calculation, much to the chagrin of the unwilling witnesses to this ridiculous and sorry affair, spectators whose spines melt at the sight of the unbearable horror. You are not invisible, your hands most of all. It is only in movies where naiveté can be an invisibility shield for things better left unseen. Please keep in mind that your life is not a French film. And if ever it was one, no one is willing to watch it, especially if the only French the audience knows is croissant. It is a sad day for the human race each time a man confuses his raging hormones as divine energy that must be unloaded through the urethra and carted up the fallopian tubes where it will never see the light of day in the next nine months. My apologies go to the urethra, the fallopian tubes most of all, for having been dragged into this monologue.

It’s not romance when you simply make the hands roam the flesh. It’s just roaming. It’s human touch devoid of human affection. It’s just spreading the germs on your fingers without the faintest sign of guilt. It’s an abomination, a clear prelude to a heartless orgasm, an insemination that knows no love, no tenderness, only an assault on the genitals that are forever at the mercy of your lustful whims. It’s vanity in its exponential form. And yet you have the gall to speak of love as though your tongue is tied to your heart.

On a sweltering summer night, flex your biceps as you unbutton your tweed jacket that hasn’t been to the laundry after thirty days of sweat. Screw comfort when you can have fashion fuckyeahhashtag hipsters rule or whatever. Your black undershirt is wet at the armpits, which are now host to alien life forms that science has yet to discover, some unknown species clinging to those unkempt hairs that need to be raked than combed a thousand times over. For that, you owe the vanguards of science an explanation. For that, too, you owe the girl an answer. You missed her question because you were too engrossed over your biceps, the form, the hardness, as their veins pulsate with apparent rage that blood is sure to squirt out of them any moment you suffer a laceration. Suddenly, she gives you a favor by sticking a fork on your biceps. She drags the three prongs down to your elbow. You suffer a laceration and bleed like a heart suddenly freed from the arteries that have held it captive.

If you think this is all about you, you are probably right. Now if only you can choke on your own dick — but that would be asking too much for a cock that is most probably the size of a stubborn wart.