IT WAS AN EVENING dedicated to furthering my slow and painful healing process--picking away the edges of this awful bloody red patch of heartbreak scab i have left as a result of having my rope cut away while i was happily being dragged along the Highway of Love at a steady one hundred and ten miles an hour. the weekend had been dedicated to bad news, savage confrontations, mean spirited advice from well meaning and respected friends topped off by a fifty mile drive into the southern edge of northern california's ultra hippie kingdom at a place called "ectotopia" where i petted goats with tom bombadil and watched hippies shoot frogs between the eyes with bb guns.
i generally hate big movie theatres nowadays and pretty much all of the spew that emanates from the slime covered maw of the cesspool called hollywood almost five hundred miles to the south of the Flying Buffalo Ranch--but my mind needed at least two hours rest from thinking about the woman (and her new boy toy) that have been the source of all of my tears, agony and rage for the past two months, so i reluctanty agreed to make thirty minute bus trip into the financial district to see the new movie about the life and work of hunter s thompson with my longtime friend josh.
that's all well and good. i'm not going to tell any of you a damned thing about the movie except that i was very happy with it and have placed "gonzo" high on the list of movies that i would see again and maybe again after that.
i'll accept the right offer from the right woman for a movie date in san francisco...
speaking of movie dates, my tuesday evening on the town came to an end at yet another establishment i've learned to avoid during my twenty five long years here in Sodom of the North, mel's diner. now is not the time to go into the details of why the very idea of mel's makes me nauseous and angry, rather it is the conversation which ocurred in the booth behind us.
i hardly noticed the man who looked like a jesuit priest in his mid fifties and the well dressed young woman eating with him except that he was talking in a particularly loud and slow voice. he was not particularly odd looking in any way and there was nothing about him that suggested that he might have been a practiced pedophile or a man so desperate for teenage sex that he would place an order for a teenage whore from thailand. as the annoying mel's diner moments wore on, however, i noticed that our grey haired neighbor began to explain to his dinner date in his best sunday school teacher/mister rogers voice that she was now in america, and this is how we do things here, and everything was going to be OK.
the girl didn't do much other than giggle.
interesting.
this is about when josh began to notice the drift of mister "pimp" roger's conversation with the young woman whose face remained hidden from me throughout the entire conversation.
josh later told me mister rogers told the girl he was going to have her for dessert.
interesting.
what sort of strange and twisted human interaction did i bear witness to this evening? being newly single, i find it haunting that if i was indeed watching and listening to what i thought i was listening and watching, that men just but a few years my senior lack the social skills from which they are able to find a suitable sex partner here in the united states, on his own. what the fuck was going on here? i didn't see her face during the entire time i sat there and choked down my freeze frozen beef patty but it as obvious to both josh and i that this raven haired foreigner was considerably younger than "pimp" rogers.
has our man just returned from a vacation in southeast asia or central america and brought along a new chew toy for his hot dog to play with?
did he arrange a meeting with her from some secret web page on the internets and pay for her one way air fare from rio?
can lonely, desperate middle aged men just simply buy a young girl from any third world nation in the world nowadays and have her smuggled into california or even south central nebraska nowadays by simply clicking a mouse? one wonders.
perhaps the carefully spaced and clear words spoken by the man sitting in the booth behind us with a female some years younger than he WERE the calming words of some respected clergyman fresh from a three year mission in some poverty stricken hamlet in mexico or cambodia, who knows. many pure hearted and generous individuals have dedicated their lives to improving the lives of young people who lacked the good fortune of being born in what still is the wealthiest empires on the face of this planet.
but on the same token, many of those kind individuals have also been born with a penis that becomes somewhat elongated and stiff at the sight of some sixteen year old dark haired waif who barely understands two words of any language but their own and i'm thinking that my man "pimp" rogers having dinner tonight at the mel's diner on geary boulevard in san francisco is one of them.
after all, "pimp" rogers planned on having the black haired girl wearing a blue blouse as an sweet, brown after dinner snack. he said so himself.
somehow, for reasons i don't (and probably would refuse) to understand eavesdropping on this bizarre conversation has assisted my healing process.
i'm sure the love scab will still sting wednesday and probably the next hundred days after that but watching and listening to a man take desperate measures to jam his throbbing fifty year old member into the near-watertight virgin flower of a confused immigrant child makes me feel a hell of a lot better about myself today.
