I Hate Everyone, Except You(40)
“They’d probably be in their midsixties by now.”
“I can see them holding hands and walking through a little park in Paris.” She turns her gaze to Preston. She touches his hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. It’s her signal to him that they should get going.
Preston removes some cash from his wallet and places it on the table, and before they depart we exchange pleasantries. I’m doubtful I will ever see these two again, but even if I do I will probably do my best to avoid them. I feel like some kind of youth vampire in their presence and I don’t like it. I fear I just might bite one of their necks if it would make me look five years younger.
While I eat my breakfast—everything my doctor has suggested I avoid due to my elevated cholesterol levels—the waitress clears the green-smoothie glass and white ceramic bowl, which contained oatmeal, I think, from the empty table and resets it. I ask for my check and extract a credit card from my pocket.
The host seats a woman in her midthirties and her young daughter, who is about four, where Preston and Maddy had been sitting just a few minutes before. Perhaps they were never really there in the first place. The mother’s eyes are glued to her cellphone, the girl’s wander around the room and land on me. I smile politely and lift my hand in a halfhearted wave. I usually don’t like children, but this one seems quiet and introspective, the way I like to believe I was fortysomething years ago.
She sticks out her tongue at me, just a little, probably because she knows she might get in trouble should her mother catch her. I return the gesture, very quickly, I don’t particularly want to be reprimanded by her mother either.
The little girl shrugs and for the first time in days, I laugh. Not too loudly, because it really isn’t all that funny, but the way she lifts her shoulders and rolls her eyes reminds me of something an old lady might do while saying, “Eh, who cares.”
Yes! That’s it, kid. So, I’m getting old. So, I’ve had a few failures. So, I’m gonna die, just like everyone else in this damn room. Eh, who cares.
TEXTBOOK PENIS
My penis is technically perfect.
I know what you’re thinking: Every guy says his penis is perfect. Well, that may or may not be true, but mine really is. Seriously. I’m not trying to be braggy or anything, just honest. Many things about me are not even close to being perfect. For example, my eyes are slightly too close together, I have a patch of curly hair only on the left side of my head, and no matter how much weight I lift at the gym, I still have forearms skinnier than Tori Spelling’s. We all have our crosses to bear, but luckily, my dick isn’t one of them.
By the time I was fifteen, I began asking myself the same questions every guy asks himself. Does this thing look like what it’s supposed to look like? Is this thing the right size? And what about those two other things? Are they supposed to just hang out like that all day? And why do they always seem to be moving when I’m just lying there in bed? (I still don’t know the answer to that last one. Balls are so weird.)
Most teenage boys compare wieners in the locker room, I guess, or maybe they talk to their guy friends about this kind of stuff. But I had successfully avoided all team sports and we weren’t forced to shower after gym class, so I wasn’t seeing too many soapy willies other than my own. Plus, my best friends were girls, and they only talked about their boobs and periods. I guess I could have gone to Mike with my questions, but talking to him about penises would have reminded me that he was boning Terri, and I would rather have eaten batteries than imagine that.
So one Saturday I got on my bike and rode to the public library to do a little research on male genitalia. The sexuality books were on the second floor in the science section, so I meandered through the stacks, pulling random textbooks here and there, just so no one who might cross paths with me would think I was a pervert.
“Hmmmm . . . Advanced Organic Chemistry. That looks interesting! I’ll take it. Animal Husbandry, sounds fascinating. Let me grab that one too. Human Reproduction. Ha-ha-ha. I already know everything there is to know about that topic, but let me flip through it just for a few laughs and cocks. I just looove the library.”
I sat in the far corner of the reading room, back to the wall like a mob boss, praying that no one from school would enter. If they did, my plan was to discreetly place the reproduction book in the trash can next to my seat, feign a coughing fit, and slip out the front door. And if I saw a librarian approach at any point, I would leap from my chair, heading her off at the pass, and ask her if she needed any help organizing the card catalog. “I just hate when people take the cards out and put them back in the wrong spot. The Dewey Decimal System only works when we all do our part.” As though 95 percent of people going near the human anatomy books weren’t pre-Internet-era pubescent boys.
As it turned out, I was uninterrupted in my research, and let me tell you, that book changed my life, especially the four-color, incredibly detailed illustration of the erect male penis. Because . . . it looked exactly like mine! I’m not kidding. It was like I had modeled for it. I had never felt prouder in my entire life. Not only was my penis a normal penis, it was The Penis. The writers of that textbook could have chosen any other penis in the entire world. But they didn’t. They chose my penis. It was the penis that all other penises should and would be compared to. It was the penis that inspired people to learn more about penises. It was the quintessential! The archetypal! The perfect textbook penis!