Sunsets Ripped By Crows

I’d been talking about death and the pointlessness of life for about an hour. I was drunk and in the depths of an incredible funk. She had heard about as much as she could take.

“You just need to get laid,” she said, matter-of-factly.

I paused and looked at her inquisitively. Was this an offer? We had been borderline lovers many years ago. Now she was just my drop-dead beautiful “friend”, who would flirt with me incessantly, secure in the knowledge that she was “taken” and I was too much of a chump to act upon anything.

I studied her eyes. They didn’t belie any secret want to sleep with me. She was not trying to subtly tell me anything. That was merely her assessment of what was ailing me. I needed to get laid. And then the world would be right again. Right?

I shook my head and turned away.

She really thought that it was that simple. That all I needed at this stage of my life, to cure me of my morose outlook, my debilitating self-loathing, was to go out and get laid.

It was a simple panacea that I had overlooked all these years. Why hadn’t I just gone out and gotten laid, she wondered.

And that was certainly a part of my condition. But beautiful women will never understand the complexities encountered by us lay-people in our attempt to “just get laid”.

It all seemed so elementary to her. If I was so lonely and needed companionship and was so hung-up on my interminable solitude, why didn’t I just go and have sex with someone. Clear my head. Connect with another person for a brief, flickering instant.

But what she didn’t understand, because she was beautiful, and would never, in her life, have a short supply of men who wanted to sleep with her, was that “getting laid” did not come naturally to guys like me. Whether it was my low self-confidence or my complete and utter lack of upward mobility, I was severely handicapped in this game. I had a lot to overcome.

Her summation of my “problem” was insensitive to the tribulations I had endured.

The attitude was akin to a trust fund kid telling a homeless woman, “Just go get some money. Then you won’t be so poor.” It was fundamentally true. If you had money, you wouldn’t be poor. But it didn’t offer any steps to achieving that end.

And so I snapped.

I swung around and stared at her, nose to nose.

“You got three options, toots,” I said. “One: you and I leave this joint right now and go make love. Two: you give me $75 to find a cheap hooker. Or C: you buy the next round and hope I pass out soon.”

She called the bartender over and ordered a pitcher of beer and four shots of Jameson. I laughed, plopped my head on the bar and woke up several hours later as she and her boyfriend were helping me out of their car and walking me to my apartment.