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Bonobo and Chimp

            I had relayed Maya’s story, quite statistically, about the eight men in one week in Minnesota.

            Looking up from the piano, I met his glassy eyes and immediately felt almost as though I had been caught unawares by a predatory primate.

            ‘When was the last time you had sex?’ Frank asked with an ex-drug addict’s curiosity.

           

            He was a psychology major, drug past aside. He had a charming way of treating the sexual game as though it obeyed the kind of rules that Alcoholic Anonymous followed, except that he was not preaching abstinence but something a pole apart.

            Over the next hour, he managed to have me convinced that all of my emotional longings, so tender to me that I could not withhold them from my new friend with the kind of paranoid defensiveness which seems so epidemic of my generation, was a merely ‘obvious’ and readily visible (as though such a thing could even adequately be made a topic of conversation, as he seemed to disprove) Symptom of not Abstinence – a mark of moral fortitude and, as far as I could attest from having had experience with Happiness, Love, and Sanity – but Sexual ‘Deprivation’, and that, quite apart from this condition being attractive, it was likely to be a deterrent.

            Well, this was an astronomical fantasy on par with magical thinking to me. After all, if his argument that promiscuity was advantageous to the survival and health of the human species held any water by even Darwinian standards, then, if the survival of the species was his main concern and, hence, the chief interest of all of his respected female friends*, then wouldn’t a pattern of sexual behaviour that was likely to diminish Population Growth be the most attractive feature?

            Clearly, his point seemed a challenge to the classic heroic idea that one must, as a test of true grit so as to enter into Manhood, surpass the temptress and walk the long and painful road towards the goddess, collapsing, heroic(, probably thirsty,) and ‘deprived’ at her feet.

            But this would be quite a feat, on par with war and death in the family.

   *        ‘I know a girl who’ll go to a party and literally pick the nerdiest guy and have sex with him,’ he related to me with genial and vulnerable glee.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘There’s a strong likelihood,’ he replied with a comical poker face.

‘Does that bother you?’ I asked with not nearly as much the veneer of a preacher so much as the inquisitiveness of a good reporter.

‘Very much so,’* he continued, expression unchanging.

Had he been a temptor? The whole fantasy* that he presented seemed too much akin to the comic books that he had once loved, for whom he hid a burning lifelong passion from the world.

He had been with thirty-seven different women after one of his first and most memorable ‘stepped on his heart’. This he told me with almost dramatic irony.

It had been mostly unprotected.

‘I only got Climidia once*,’ he said.

Now he was due to be married. His fiancée called him on the phone. She sounded somewhat groggy and defensive, but they exchanged ‘I Love You’s’ without obstruction or self-consciousness.

I’ll never forget him. He was dressed like a pirate one day, a motorcyclist the next, and, at one point, we got on a brief tangent about semantics, wherein I corrected him on the etymology of a particular word, and, leather-jacketed and mustachio’d, he almost sniggered with congenial delight at the observation.

Dm.A.A.