I laid in bed the next morning after I woke. “How did that happen?” The sequence of events that make up a person’s life are mind-bogglingly random. Meeting Sterre was a happy accident. It made me think of the first woman I met after my separation. I was having a beer on a Friday night at a neighborhood bar in Lincoln Park. It was the first time in four months I had gone out on a Friday night. I spent most days working, jogging, and cycling that summer, going out occasionally on weekday nights to bars that were dead or filled with locals watching Cubs or White Sox games.
Somehow I had been feeling better about myself that week so I decided to go out. I went out early, wanting to avoid the busyness of the later-evening bar scene, to a place I had been visiting occasionally during the week: The Burwood Tap. Nicki, my favorite bartender, was working the back bar where it was quieter. She poured incredibly stiff drinks for those of us coming in regularly or semi-regularly, those of us who tipped her well. She was all about the tips because she was paid shit wages. It was great for us because we paid way less than we would have if she had served the drinks straight up—even if we hadn't tipped at all. She also wore low-cut tops exposing substantial cleavage. All in all, she was a popular bartender. It didn’t hurt that tons of DePaul students went out to drink on Friday nights, either. They never tipped so they always got shitty service.
I was sitting next to a guy I had gotten to know casually, just a Joe at a bar. We were watching baseball and bullshitting about nothing, drinking beers. The place started filling up around nine and by ten it was packed, SRO. Another reason to hit the bar early. When I first saw it getting busy I took a leak because I knew if I got up again I would lose my seat forever.
I didn’t even notice the woman who had been sitting on my left. I was so far outside the world of hitting on women, trying to pick them up, that I was invested in drinking beer, watching baseball, and bullshitting with the Joe to my right. I didn’t even know how to talk with women as a single guy—I hadn’t been single since the early ’90s and there I was, out in the wilds again in the mid-2000s. Neither the Internet nor cell phones were en vogue the last time I had been single. What the fuck did I know about talking to a woman in this new age?
A cute Asian woman tapped me on my shoulder. “Would you mind moving so I can sit next to my friend?” I looked all around me. There wasn’t an open seat anywhere. I said to her, sarcastically and disdainfully, “You want me to stand up, lose my choice location at the bar, and never be able to order a beer again all night just so you can sit next to your friend?” She paused and said, “Well, yeah.” I scoffed. “Woman, I’m not moving a fucking inch. What, you think because you’re cute I’m just going to hand over the keys to the best seat in the house? I’m sure that works for you most of the time, but you picked the wrong fucking guy. I’m going to sit here while you wander around aimlessly trying to get guys to buy you drinks while your friend and I get to know one another better.” She guffawed and her friend who was sitting next to me, Shelby, laughed and told her friend to get lost. Shelby was wearing a baseball cap with auburn-red hair poking out the back in a ponytail; fucking sexy. I lost touch with my drinking buddy to the right—an unspoken male code of conduct that exists timelessly no matter the generation. Instead, I drank beers with Shelby for a couple hours, just letting it all fly. She was almost like a guy the way she talked baseball and gave me shit about anything and everything. A tomboy. Fuck, I had always had a thing for tomboys.
We ended up making out in front of her apartment later that night. She didn’t invite me up, but we lived within a mile of one another so we went out the next night. And the next. And the next. Soon we were going out, on the verge of developing some semblance of a relationship that extended beyond drinking and sex. I hung out with her friends, she hung out with some of mine, we went to movies together, all the makings of a couple. Being in a relationship was the one thing I really knew how to do at that point in my life. Unfortunately, it was way too soon and I fell too far, too fast, pretty much freaking her out. My first rebound, a random happening, first time out on a Friday night as a single guy in Chicago.
I got out of bed, showered, got dressed, and went out on my bike. My thoughts were wandering back to my chance meeting of Sterre and the sexy surprise of Auriana’s party. I rode toward the Oude Zijde and meandered down lazy streets, admiring the old buildings and canals. It felt like ages since I had been in the neighborhood. As I rode, new thoughts popped into my head, all related to chance encounters, how seemingly inconsequential events altered the course of my life. The night I met S. was a fluke, too. I went to a college buddy’s place to chill out for the evening without any intention of going out. It was a Wednesday night in February, cold, and I was broke. I wanted to veg out, play video games, and scam my friend into ordering a pizza so I could eat.
My friend wasn’t there, though. For the first time since I had returned to college after a semester off, I experienced anxiety. I didn’t want to be alone and everyone else I knew who lived in a dorm or off-campus nearby was busy or out. I walked to a popular bar and saw Georgianne, a friend of an ex-girlfriend, at a table. My thought was, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a pitcher of beer today.” I walked over and she said, “Hey” then introduced me to her friend, a woman I didn’t know: S. It was her twenty-first birthday. They each bought me beers and we had fun talking and laughing. I had no sexual interest in either one of the women; I was just looking for company to have a good time. Because of that, I was natural, myself as I was, and they invited me to an after-party. S. was flirting with me, sometimes so suggestively I thought she was desperate. I wasn’t on the same wavelength. The after-party was at my ex-girlfriend’s house, Georgianne's roommate, and I wound up messing around with another woman, a different friend of a different ex-girlfriend. But when S. left, her ass wiggling out the door, a damn fine ass, I felt like I had made the wrong choice. That didn’t stop me from continuing to mess around that night; there's just something about hooking up with friends of ex-girlfriends. Still, I thought about S. the next day.
I went out that night to a different bar and saw Georgianne again. As we talked, she asked me what I thought of S. I said she had a great ass. I asked Georgianne why she was asking. She said, “Well, I think S. is interested. She’s really nice, Mike, very sweet." I was thinking she was more sexual than sweet, but whatever. "We’re having a party tomorrow night and she’s going to be there." I said okay, I would swing by. This was the same house as the after-party, my ex-girlfriend’s house. I showed up around ten and S. was halfway in the bag. About eight people were playing a drinking game and I pulled up a chair to sit down. S. got out of her seat, hopped onto my lap, planted one on me, and generally acted the fool. It was embarrassing; the party was filled with friends who went way back and my ex-girlfriend was at the table with us—the same ex-girlfriend who a month earlier asked if I wanted to get back together. I said no; she had dumped me. I felt like I was rubbing my nose in her face, though, making out with two different women in her own house in a matter of days. Not my intention; it just worked out that way.
S. and I did everything but fuck on the fold-out couch in the living room that night. Kirsten, one of four roommates living in the house, walked into the living room the next morning. When she saw us under the sheets, she threw up her hands and said, “Jesus, Mike! You get more action in my house than I do. What the fuck?”
S. and I had our first “date” two days later on Valentine’s Day. I was wary—Valentine’s Day is for girlfriends and boyfriends, not one-night stands. Still, I liked her despite her social obliviousness and she clearly liked me. Plus, she was extremely sexual. I liked sex. Who doesn’t? I had intended to take her out to dinner, but we wound up having sex in her apartment twenty minutes after I arrived. What the hell? I had met the perfect woman, a woman who liked to fuck as much as I did! We started seeing each other often, our relationship almost exclusively consisting of night-long fucking, but after a couple months we started making love. We still fucked, but as we got to know one another’s bodies more and more, the sex became more intimate and that led to more open, honest, and vulnerable conversations.
That was a first for me with a woman, to expose myself emotionally so much. I don’t know how the myth started that sex is only emotional for women, but that wasn’t my experience. A real relationship with more balance developed as we discovered we shared a lot of the same values and outlooks on life. She was extraordinarily intelligent, valedictorian of her high school and valedictorian in college within the department of English. Later she went to a top ten law school in the Bay Area. While I loved passion and sex, I couldn't be in a relationship with a woman who wasn't extremely bright, creative in her thinking, compassionate, interested in helping others, confident while being humble, playful, and full of life. Her social awkwardness was mostly related to her inability to hold her alcohol--mostly because she rarely drank. She was good for me in many ways, not the least of which was keeping my wildness from running rampant.
If the friend I had intended to hang out with had been home that Wednesday night when I met S. then the course of my life … well, there’s no way to know what would have happened alternatively, but it would have been radically different. In terms of human relationships there is no probability. It’s unpredictable, random chaos that fizzles in moments and flowers in others. Gravity is predictable, but human affairs are immeasurably more complicated. We may be “small” in terms of size throughout the cosmos, but the course of a given human life is more complicated and unpredictable than anything else that's been discovered in the universe. Hyper-awareness and profound attentiveness have predictive capacities, but only marginally in relation to the flow of humanity.
I found my good old smart shop in the Oude Zijde and purchased a dose of McKennaii. I wasn’t sure if I would shroom later, but I wanted a dose on hand in case. I had to toss out the dose I had in the fridge because it had molded over the weekend. I was so distracted by my thoughts that the first time in ages I didn’t even notice whether the woman serving me at the counter was attractive. It was a smart shop so it was a given that she was. Still, not noticing was unlike me. I was immersed in a mixture of reflection and reverie.
As I biked back home I thought of Sterre. That meeting seemed even more random than the others. The sequence of events that led to the sex party were so quirky and unexpected that I would have thought myself insane if I had mapped out the course of action. “Let’s see, I’ll talk to this colorfully dressed woman since I woke up on the bridge after a night of shrooming, walk along beside her and ramble playful stream-of-conscious blather, discover she’s an autonomist who wants me to call her Che, meet her at a squatters' restaurant, talk social anarchism and political activism, hook up with her two weeks later for dinner and instead go to a party where I have sex with four women in two days, including a multitude of hot, diverse, and intimate sexual experiences with a lesbian, one of which involved a vibrator being plunged into my ass by the party's hostess. Ho-hum, another predictably typical sequence of events after a random encounter with a stranger.”
I whistled and sang as I biked home thinking there was no way I was going to get any work done that the afternoon.
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