Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked.
It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and a healthy heart. – Eknath Easwaran
Couple of stories. Guido Maldemarra and Barker Ajax would occasionally leave their nearby condos – this is in the Eighties – and cruise downtown hot spots. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
We were shoppers really, not buyers. Sometimes we’d get together, often with other buddies after work. At one point, I remember, we’d head home to catch ‘Miami Vice’ which was over at eleven. Guido would head to bed and I’d head back out again.
Guido got his name from the time we were sitting on tall stools at a wine bar on Northwest 23rd and this gorgeous creature sits down near us. Still light out.
Here is where one of us would usually look at the other and say, ‘This is as close as you’re ever gonna get.’ Which was usually true.
The woman starts a conversation with Guido. Damn his luck. I probably looked like her ex-husband. I got that a lot.
Next thing I know, I hear him going into disgusting ghastly lubricious detail about his seafood allergies. The gagging, the vomiting, whatever. His was not the gift of gab.
One time this stunning age-appropriate sweetheart with the best smile walks right by his front door to knock on mine. Auburn hair, we were together three years.
Guido loved her. And he could never quite get over her walking right by his door.
“I have never had a heart attack either,” Guido quickly retorts,
his explanation, in typical streetwise zen logic.
He thinks he knows all he needs to know
about connubial bliss.
Guido won’t ask a woman to dance
because she might say “Yes”
and the next thing, you’re dating,
pretty soon you start staying over at her place.
Or worse, you notice there are doilies
on your over-sized dark brown Italian leather sectional.
There’s a notice about a protest rally sponsored by Pegasus Nation,
The Politically Correct Lesbian Accountants
Against Knee-Jerk Left Wing Quotas,
stuck to your refrigerator.
One morning, she makes you some pecan pancakes
and your favorite little smoked sausage
with some bagels from Kornblatt’s.
She’s pours half and half in your coffee
until it’s white,
puts her tongue in your ear,
suddenly, getting hitched, such a telling image, Guido sighs.
Getting hitched, like a draft animal,
seems momentarily like a sane thing to do.
“It’s bad for your heart,” she says.
“It’s for your own good,” she says.
Before you can say “the beneficial co-signer has another sick headache,”
she’s got a better lawyer than you do.
So you only get to wear your favorite undershorts every other weekend
and you can only see your kids on alternating holidays,
unless they end in a Y.
Guido says he saves himself all that pain
by not asking the woman to rhumba with him in the first place.
He lives alone,
so, of course,
he has no nagging habits.
He can leave the toilet seat up
without somebody bitching at him.
Guess what? Guido got married. A sexy pretty smart Scandinavian saw that shiny head and those big blue eyes and basically forced him to come to his senses. He might not have been in his sixties yet. Doesn’t matter, he was always old. Never stupid.
So, yeah, he got married.
But he kept his old condo.