I was waiting for the subway after work the other day when I noticed a nervous looking woman glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. She had bleached blonde hair cut short and scruffy like a boy's. She was in tight black jeans and black eyeliner, meandering up and down the platform chewing on her lower lip. When she would come closest to me we'd look at each other for a second, then she would turn around. Then she'd come back and we'd catch each other staring again. I was about to talk to her when I looked closer and realized she was much younger than I had thought, probably nineteen at the oldest.
It's strange for me to think of age as a barrier to attraction, but it is. Men are supposed to want delicate young things. There's some vestigial proof of virility in the idea of bedding a young woman. If men are to project authority as the ultimate fulfillment of their macho-ness, then quelling a trembling fawn of a young woman with an assured stroke must be the very embodiment of all that is man.
It's hard to understand what ageing really is. I remember one summer I spent a week in a cabin with a friend and his parents. I was twelve. I remember sneaking out to the porch one night and looking out at the dark trees and impenetrable blackness beneath them. The air was just cold enough to excite the bare skin on my arms. I looked up at the stars and I felt a vast sameness inside. It felt like I was just as I was when I was a small boy. I felt totally unchanged inside.
I still feel the same way now, almost twenty years later. I have all those same questions I had before, the same excitements, the same longings, the same contentment in just being alive.
But I am older. I look older, my speech is more convoluted, my thoughts riddled with a gypsy trove of collected facts to support all my metaphysical hunches. When I look back on pictures of my nineteen year-old self it's hard to not feel stunned at how different my comportment was. If I felt the same then as now, why did I wear those strange expressions, have that embarrassed posture, wear those terrible clothes designed to make me a part of the unnoticed background?
Looking at the young girl giving me moon eyes in the subway, I felt a flush of ego. If I talked to her, bummed a cigarette, snuck her into some skanky dive bar, walked around the dirty cement corridors of the city letting her exorcise her nervous stories of anxiety and disbelief, we would eventually have sex. If that happened my inner caveman would surely sprout a new chest hair.
I went out with a woman several years younger than me a while back (I was twenty-nine, she was twenty-two). We went dancing and she tried to teach me how to dance, offering to show me what to do before we had even stepped on the dance floor. She had a similar kind of mania, filled with Hooksexups and bravura, confident in the fact that there was a right way to do something as personal as dancing. Being with her that night was exhausting, it was like having fun by algebra or assimilation to some social standard that finally amounted to her bouncing around on the balls of her feet to a 4/4 beat. Later, headed back to my apartment she assured me that she was going to blow my mind in bed because she was bisexual.
When I was younger, I felt like I had something to apologize for, but I wasn't sure what. I always felt like I was the one puzzle piece that was out of place. I overcompensated by trying to appear impenetrable. I tried to control my vulnerability and embarrassment by projecting it on other people. I believed there was a right way and a wrong way to do something, to dance, to talk to a woman, to wear some article of clothing.
When I think of having sex with someone so young now, all I can see is my own cagey self, full of mania and a constant fear of being discovered as a fraud. I would have kissed like a blender and had sex like a broken spring. When the subway pulled up I watched the young girl get into the last car on the train. I thought about following her for a second. Instead, I went into the car ahead of hers and put on my headphones. I tried to remember all those things I've always felt while the metal roar of the tracks shook the whole train around me.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: Making A Scene
Hooksexup Confessions: Oh Hai, You're Pregnant
Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate
Love Machine: My Mother
Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection
Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room
Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph
Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On
Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry
Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner
Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night
Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time
Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend
Sex Machine: Getting Laid
Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?
Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date
Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After
Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog