Teach Me to Be a Man or I’ll Explode

A Short Story from A Murder of Prose
Copyright © Jon Cor

He wakes up morbidly late in the day and on the floor at thirty-one, clutching a guitar to his chest the way a mother would a son who won’t come to amount to anything in terms of time immemorial, let alone any semblance of baseline, so-called societal contribution, either.

You should smell his breath.

The wall behind him is made of records. Ever so carefully selected. Even more carefully affixed. The Doors. Son House. Radiohead. Next to the shipyard, all of this exposed brick, the linoleum he sleeps on, the pigeons, the shit, this apartment, all of it he felt had become some kind of superlative joke; a life now far too shameful and only occasionally sublime for its cliché and obviousness.

Of course the dishes weren’t going to do themselves.

He’d slept on his own arm again, risking crushing the radial nerve which causes wrist drop or the inability to extend at the metacarpophalangeal joints. If you don’t know what that means, well, nowadays you can Google it but suffice to say it’s just like, you know. No bueno for a guitarist.

Did he care anymore? Did he really expect to make it as a musician? Pfft. He hadn’t even made it with Melissa, who’s holy shit here right now, going, “You have the rest of your life to kill yourself. What’s the rush? Where did all of that music go? You need to achieve some measure of success to soulfully validate a suicide. That or a scandal of significantly artistic proportion. And you, well —”

He goes to the window, hangover swelling, shoulder-length 90s curtains bangs blotting out the Sun.

“— you’re too predictable and disaffected to get anything done. That’s why you self-isolate and it isn’t compelling anymore, this self-destructive nonsense. This… procrastination. Do you realize that even the new counterculture, the kids nowadays, harbor a mad respect for work ethic and personal development through focused self-discipline and brave, humble, old-school trial and error? Look at this place. What’s a choice when it turns into a routine when it turns into a need when it turns into slaver—”

Opens it.

“—y? Like the cigarettes I can smell in your beard that you keep lying about? I mean this sincerely and finally, Connor. I told you. I won’t do this teenage, like, tragic and interesting nonsense. Not anymore. You’re addicted to your own melancholy and apathy because you, you just fucking sit here draining glass after glass, toking up and who-knows-what-else, reinforcing all kinds of negative yet self-multiplying and -compounding neural pathways despite all of the talent and passion and drive that you really, truly have. …Had? I dunno. I mean, shit. We used to have fun, remember that? ‘Fun?’ Now you’re just like your father! I’m sorry. …No. You know what? I’m not. At all. And I’m not going to manage you anymore either. Tell the band. Tell your slutty little groupies and Raya-Tinder-Match-dot-com-ers that I’m done, too. I’m taking the dog and I’m—”

And then slams it. Once, twice.

Three times.

…

There.

And just like that, after whatever it is that could be to time as the galaxy is to the stars, he sees Melissa leave the room once and for all through his tears and immediate embarrassment and regret, tossing a cascade of hair over her shoulder as if to express severance and antipathy with grace and calligraphy. Her figure, such a beautiful ass, the kind with a hole so hot and clean you could brush your teeth and then kiss it goodbye before heading out for work.

Why, why did he act out like that?

She was going to be OK in no time wasn’t she and even though that’s a very good thing, there it was, already, right in his face, in slow what-have-I-done motion. Maybe where it belonged. Maybe where of lot of things belonged. Like the flurry of punches he thirsted to grin into if only they’d come and then too many shots of some shitty rail tequila served from a gnarled old hand connected to a heart probably even more irreparable and burnt than his own.

He thought of his hometown, of his brother dying of accelerated cancers in high school with a neck looking like it could give birth to a balloon. When the first of Mark’s tumors were removed, it weighed as much as a three-month old child and resembled the size of a regulation football. Mark, having to write instead of speak, all he wanted to know after the first surgery was did his hair still look cool, could he still pull chicks.

Connor’s inner monologue did this snowballing thing a lot, lumping each and every injustice together, the big, the small, the extant, the imagined, every problematic incident in his life as best recalled, first Melissa and now his brother’s grisly fate, stubbing his toes and everything, into one enormously inflated, narcissistic, self-indulgent and oh-so-well-rationalized sense of especially-targeted cosmic despair and victimhood. I mean, that’s what being an artist is all about, right? Hitting bottom and living to tell the tale, no trust funds or handouts, no safety nets, no fucks given but damn is it all ever a front?

…

Pieces of glass snowfall from the window.

He blocks her on various social media platforms fastidiously, fingers shaking, shoulders up and downing, perhaps unable yet definitely unwilling to face the humiliation he already imagines as if properly perceived or experienced; which, really, whether he’d admit it or not, is just a defense mechanism against an extra-large propensity for jealousy and Roman Catholic guilt.

Sentimental, like his father, everything has the potential to bring him to tears. Everything beautiful seems tainted with the eventuality of suffering because time is motion is friction is particle decay is a motherfucker.

Sundowns. Children playing.

It’s hard not to be a hedonist when you’re a pessimist when you’re a nihilist. When you were raised on Ché and Kurt and totally missed the point.

Used to be he couldn’t even see Melissa off at the airport without losing his desperate, dependent, drug-diminished mind. Without mistaking his own mounting insecurities and loneliness and fear for an otherwise would-be attractive expression of love and vulnerability, of the strength and courage it takes to relinquish control, to give one’s heart to another. Too bad you’re no good to anybody if you’re no good to yourself.

He cried. She cringed.

Anyway, in an effort to handle the current situation like a healthy and well-balanced adult might, insert your version of whatever-that-means here, would he creep her various pages? No. He’s not stupid. He’s not out to punish or to hurt himself any more than he already does. But would he be able to avoid seeing her, an actress who models who’s a popstar in her own right who’s also a lawyer acing neuroscience courses remotely whose vibrant personality, enormous talent and escalating success goes on and on in various professions, mediums and political arenas? No. Not in the news. Not on the internet. Not at the postered bus stop or the awards shows or as featured on a suspiciously high number of products at the supermarket. Not driving along, billboard after billboard. He guessed he would never end up finding a way to unlove a single one of his ex-girlfriends entirely, no matter how much time might pass between and after each. His… once upon a soft-skinned, sweet-smelling, precious beacons of hope.

It’s not polyamory.

It’s a respect and an appreciation for just how unique and incomparable to one another so many of the girls he’s been fortunate enough to cross paths and spend time with simply and magnificently are. Like video game characters with beautifully imbalanced but highly-specialized skill trees and cleverly distributed stat points. Beauties. Beasts. Which one’s best, for lack of a better word? Well. That, unmagically and anthropologically-speaking, is probably an almost purely contextual choice whether we like it or not, based very much on simple out-of-control factors like timing and convenience and whether the way they chew their food reminds you of your mother’s live-in boyfriend. You’re both wounded or something like that when you come together, misconstruing this for compatibility and justification enough to begin to compromise and settle, or maybe you’re married to your respective jobs, or, or, or. Whatever. Then? You’re not, and that rose-colored, covalent bond or whatever you end up calling your own relationship dynamic breaks at the slightest sign of a power imbalance.

The lover loving the other the least is always in control.

Still.

He knows. He’ll always pine for and encourage an attempt at something monogamous and functional, at a wanton and Shakespearean romance; even if it goes against his better judgement and cynicism and conditioned belief that as soon as he’s not perfect for a minute, as soon as he shows too much weakness, the people he loves the most will leave him.

Passing freight trains shake the building.

…

“This is why I’m alone…” he sputters softly, staring ahead as if coming up for air. “This, existential lack of emotional resilience, of self-command. I’m just like my father. She’s right. I have to break the cycle. Even if all that doing my best is tonight, is howling at the moon. Tomorrow? I blame nobody and nothing for my own faults and failures. Tomorrow? I reinvent myself. …Only, like. How? What’s the first step?”

He hadn’t set a realistic goal in years.

Pushups?

He felt harmless and lost instead of harmful and measured, not at all like a protector or a provider or a main attraction.

As these realizations crashed in, one by one, increasing in depth and detail, he wanted dreadfully to explain, to apologize to Melissa. To chase and to woo and to prove that so many of her various observations and opinions of him would remain only temporarily accurate by not remaining at all. He wasn’t being self-deprecating for once. He was holding court with himself, doing his best to self-parent, more or less. To have… real talk.

Would his cyclic depression disappear so mercifully however, at the click of his heels, the drop of a pharmaceutical hat and some quality time spent with the Holy Book? …Yeah, no. The more you feel the need to tell somebody that you’re going to change or that you’re extremely talented and hirable or loyal and reliable and so on, well. You’re probably not. Not right then, at any rate. Even he knew from experience, from losing his friends and colleagues in the industry, his fucking brothers and sisters, his family, his health, his skills, his career, his financial solvency and especially his self-respect, that a shift like this would call for some serious reconditioning. He would have to break his back to break his habits, to retake and to retrain his thinking and perspective; which is probably why, sadly, it usually takes a pretty heavy tragedy or ten to trigger our most necessary and triumphant stages of personal development. So long as we’re fortunate enough to make it through, and to listen to whatever the moment has to teach us, of course.

Melissa leaving, he understood, wasn’t what he wanted, but it would be exactly what he needed.

…

“Hmph. How easy it is for you,” he unfreezes, turning to the empty beer bottles twinkling against each other next to the fridge, the trains outside zooming past like everything else, “to dance in happy little pairs.”

Smash.