I guess the one good thing about me, and I assure you there is only one good thing about me, is that while I may on occasion bullshit someone else, I will never bullshit myself. I should have known it was trouble when on our first “date” we went to a movie screening and afterwards I asked her, “So what did you think?” and her reply was, “Didn’t like it.” It took me a monkey wrench, two sets of pliers and a ball-peen hammer to get her to explore her thoughts deeper. Speaking of ball-peen hammers, is it just me or when you hear that word do you giggle like a little schoolgirl and think, “That sounds like balls and penis”?
I started seeing that we could talk about current events or what book we were reading but besides a general overview of the “facts,” Sara really seemed incapable of chewing and swallowing down and processing and allowing to become her own anything other than semen. I dropped down on my knees, and after a little cunnilingus, I begged to my fake God in the sky, “God why? Why can’t you keep me unconscious so that I can just friggin’ enjoy myself here? What business is it of yours what I do in the bedroom—or at the movie theater, or in the hallway, or dangling from a skyscraper window?” He responded, “Do whatever you want. I’m not stopping you. Hell, I don’t even exist except for you to speak to whenever you have an existential question!” He had a point. I was going to write, “…and it wasn’t just his penis,” but my fake God is build like a Ken Doll—you drop the pants and are like, “Those cheap bastards couldn’t afford a speck more of plastic down here?”
Soon Sara wanted to stop engaging. I don’t know how much was me trying to help her to break out of her conditioning and how much was me just trying to get laid, but I challenged her assertion on all fronts—philosophical, political, sociological. I even made up a few “icals” just to sound smart. She wasn’t having it.
You see my philosophy is more tantric. I don’t judge the ethics of whether having non-committed sex is morally wrong or right, I say that as long as one understands what it is, then it’s all good. To make an eating analogy, I don’t care if you eat SnackWell’s low-fat cookies or not. Just don’t call it “health food” and pretend that processed crap is “good for me.”
Sara had a lot of conditioning from a traditional Indian upbringing and I did question how much of her pushing away the sex was because it was not what she desired and how much was the imposed guilt of a culture that thinks it’s okay to marry someone through arrangement that you never met and who may just have a Ken Doll cock but God forbid you enjoy some free-wheelin’ sex—it’s off to Hindu Hell for you. Blah, blah, blah…no sex for the Swami.
The last time I saw Sara, we had gotten together for dinner and a movie. She was paying for dinner and I had a free movie screening (one of the only remaining theaters from which we weren’t banned for life); it was living a Jewish fantasy for me: all the food, none of the paying. By the time the check at the restaurant came, the manager came with it and said, “I just wanted to shake the hand of the only person to ever order everything on the menu as well as food to go.”
Throughout the dinner she talked about saving this money and using this coupon combined with this one and, once again, I had to pull out my ball-peen hammer <giggle giggle>, another influence of her conditioning as she told me that her family never really communicated and rarely even shared a meal together. I thought to myself, “I was raised in a Jewish family and this friggin’ dot-head is more Jew than any Hebe I’ve ever met!” But more important than realizing that compartmentalizing people by religion and culture limits one’s ability to call an Indian a “cheap Jew,” I realized that I was at a different place than I was the year before. It was now me who had she suggested we go to the bathroom and do the Porcelain Mambo would have been like, “Yeah, uh, not happening,” and only in part because I had eaten the equivalent of a hippopotamus’ daily rations and would probably puke on her and this would remind me of that Japanese puke porn video clip that my friend “Elks” sent me years ago which resulted in to this day me being dragged out of every Japanese restaurant I ever go to because I can’t stop myself from standing up and shouting, “YOU PEOPLE ARE SICK! YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT ANOTHER PERSON’S PUKE!” But I digress…
She told me how she had gone to a Chinese restaurant with a friend of hers and when they got outside he gave her a fairly nice Buddha statue that he had lifted from the restaurant. That part of the story I understood, as boys will be boys. But when she went on to say that she put it in a corner of her room and decorated it with flowers and incense because, “I heard that’s good for luck,” I was like, “Uh, I thought you dot-heads believed in karma. I’m kinda guessing that knowingly possessing stolen items might result in you coming back in the next life as a slug.” I offered to return the Buddha to the restaurant for her and she was against it. I even said I’d buy her another friggin’ stature of a fat chink if she really needed one. Incidentally, the term “rice dick” is not actually racist, originating in China when Chang Bo Zaq pulled down the pants of a Ken doll and placed a grain of rice where the penis should be located. “Chink” is racist.
I don’t make ethical or moral judgments. But I do question why someone would feel the need to possess something that would directly hurt someone else for some perceived self-enhancement. Then again, after spending five years trying to convince Sara that fucking me was a “moral obligation that surpassed her selfish need for feeling at peace,” perhaps I was attempting to “steal a Buddha” as well. Unfortunately, I got caught red-handed. In my defense, I swear I wasn’t aware that she was menstruating!
When you see the buddha in the road, kill him. Just don’t steal him from a restaurant.”
-Swami X, bringing an old Zen saying up to date