448: At that time, ...
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 2 continues
At that time, Matthew wanted to be a theoretical physicist, but after a year in college he discovered that, although he probably understood physics better than all but a few thousand human beings, he would never enter the small circle of people who really understood, understood well enough to advance the science. If he kept at it, he might keep chipping away at the flinty bit he didn’t adequately understand, but he didn’t want to be a plodder. There was nothing else he wanted to excel at, and so it no longer mattered what he did. Like a man in a rowboat who meant to row across a bay but finds himself exhausted in the middle, he let himself drift. In time, certain things came floating his way, and, drifting, he bumped into some flotsam now and then, and that was what had passed for progress since the day of his grand disappointment, the day when his real aspirations ended.
“Anyway, one weekend some of us took a trip to Juarez. Specifically, to Irma’s. This whorehouse. We walked in, and there were the whores. Just, bang, there they were. I don’t know what I’d expected, I guess I thought they’d be hidden or something, not just right out there waiting for us. But there they were. The first whores I’d ever seen. Dozens of them. Lined up along one wall, like a row of chorus girls. Or like a bunch of waitresses, for that matter. And what struck me right away was how different they were. How different one was from another. I’d never seen, or never noticed, such diversity in women. The girls I knew were all sort of alike. Or at least they seemed alike. Here was the whole catalog. Short ones, tall ones, big ones, small ones, just like the song. Some were so adult — not old, exactly, but women. Others looked like girls. Most of them were not pretty. They wore too much makeup for my taste, and they were — coarse somehow. Except one. One, I think, was quite pretty. But you know, as soon as I say that, I’m not sure if it’s right. Was the pretty one at Irma’s or was she at a strip joint we went to?”
“Matthew!” says Effie. “What revelations! Whorehouses? Strip joints? I never heard any of this before.”
“I’ve been saving a lot of stuff for my authorized biography. Anyway, I can’t remember just what this cute one looked like very well, which is kind of weird, because I remember other things from that night much better. There was a cop car chasing another car right down the main street, a big old Hudson. And there was a huge crash. I mean, the chase ended in a crash. Right in front of us. And we ate some chicken at a little restaurant, and it was kind of rare. Sort of green in the joints. And we bought western hats, straw. But none of that, none of those memories, comes back to me on its own, you know? It’s always this memory of the lineup of whores that comes back. The availability of all those women still sort of haunts me, as an idea.
“And did you choose the cute one?” It’s Effie who asks.
[to be continued on Monday, March 13, 2023]
In Topical Guide 448, Mark Dorset considers Rowboat, Drifting in, as Metaphor for Existential Crisis; and Quotation: Misquotation from this episode.
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