Men Are the Thing to Fear

By Robert Morrison

History sometimes suggests that the only thing worse than a man without a purpose is a man with one. Be that as it may, Danny Kaneen, failed novelist, womanizer, part-time gourmet chef and problem drinker, is unwittingly and hilariously failing his way toward a better understanding of the suffering world, right here in the benighted landscape of the American masses. He's stumbling toward a purpose. Together with his unscrupulous lawyer friend Dale Credenza, Danny is unwittingly on a collision course with human need. And with love. Look out. Be afraid. Such discoveries don't always have the effect you'd expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312377820

Book preview

Men Are the Thing to Fear

Men are the thing to fear

Robert Morrison

Copyright © 2014, Robert Morrison

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-312-37782-0

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Drew Morrison and Robert Morrison

Dedication

For my wife

Introduction

…the survival of an Irish psychological identity is one of the marvels of the Irish story. Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which they tended to wink at and enjoy…To this day, there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat presides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing, and varieties of sexual indiscretion are the principal entertainments… As late as the twelfth century – seven centuries after the conversion of the Irish to the Gospel – a husband or wife could call it quits and walk out for good on February 1, the feast of the Imbolc, which meant that Irish marriages were renewable yearly, like magazine subscriptions or insurance policies…

—Thomas Cahill: How the Irish Saved Civilization

Men are the thing to fear. Only men, and nothing else.

—Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Journey to the End of the Night

Prologue

In the American desert southwest people have packed themselves into the cities just like they do in cities everywhere else, so that the humidity of human breath and the evaporating water from sprinkler systems and the carbonic farts of automobiles can move up into the atmosphere when it is dense and still to create shells around the cities like hard mists clinging to fetid ponds, so that you might move about in your city and think, breathing, that you could just as easily be anywhere else in the world, until the high desert night wind wipes away this wrongness like so much residual snot from around a blown nose and leaves the night purple-clean and the air dry and sage-scented and the moon hanging high and crisp and white with her pull, and her old wild mystery, fully intact.

You can tap away at your keys in the midst of that night, clickety, clickety, click, writing your book that you think is about life, your life and everyone else’s—who knows what it is that’s driving you along, really, why you have to do it, what it is you want and have to have—while that moon is perched high and magnificent, silent and bemused outside your window.  You might take her for granted; you might forget she’s there. It’s not the moon you’re writing about, after all. At least you don’t think it is. But she’ll come for you, just the same. She’ll make you pay attention to her, if you’ve got blood in you.

And when she does, look out. It doesn’t matter what you’ve arranged around yourself, or how carefully.

*    *    *

Clickety, clickety, click:

Are we shaped so definitively by our pasts, or are we shaped, ever newly, by what we come to desire? 

Or do we come to desire only the things mandated for desiring by our pasts? 

Are only a limited number of predetermined and predictable responses possible for each of us, or do we arrive at new incarnations each time a new desire presents itself, growing new feathers, perfecting new dances, in response to the new birds that consume our attention, and our efforts?

Is the passionate individual condemned to forever define himself, or herself, in terms of newly revealed or newly discovered desires?

How could such a person develop knowledge of his or her own soul, his or her own unique and stable identity?

All desire eternity; but can such permutating souls remain intact on the way to the other side? Or will the turbulent interstices between life and death shatter these fragile crafts?

I stopped typing, staring at my computer screen. What the hell was I doing? You couldn’t start a novel like that. It was too didactic. Too philosophical. Too stilted. Who…what… was I trying to sound like? A weak spaceship-metaphor for the human soul? I was being a dick, I sounded like William Faulkner lost at Cape Canaveral.

I couldn’t do it. Who was I kidding? I might as well try to write a fucking opera.

Interstices. Was that a good word? The right word?  It sounded clinical; it made me think of stitches and Band-Aids.

It was no good. I left my office and went out to the living room. I expected to find Annie there. She knew I had been writing, and she had high hopes for me, so I tried to make myself look buoyant about it. But she wasn’t in the living room. I walked to the hallway, the sort of elongated hub in the design of my house, and I listened for sounds of Annie.

We had argued, sort of, briefly, the night before.

Annie had called into question both my ambitions and my productivity. Annie hadn’t criticized me often, and the attack, if you could call it that, had stung me a little.

I had promised earnestly to do better. She was satisfied with my promises, and proceeded to let me bang the bejesus out of her. 

I was remembering both things now. They were both still very much with me.

Her emasculating criticism.

Her re-masculating surrender.

My emasculating self-doubt.

My re-masculating pussy-pounding.

Annie, the provoking source of both feelings, really, the emasculating force and the re-masculating vessel, was somewhere in the house now, doing something or other, unsuspecting. I was alone in the hallway, silent, listening for her.

When I found her, I didn’t know which Annie I would face. The criticizing Annie or the surrendering one.  Then I wondered why these were the only two Annies I could now envision. The criticizing one, the surrendering one.  After our argument of the night before, these possibilities were all that I could see. The Annie that made me, in response, one simple way, or the Annie that made me, in response, another.

After so much time together, it seemed like there should be more to it.

I felt fleetingly that these thoughts deserved some serious reflection. But they were slipping away from me, now, quickly, as more urgent thoughts were displacing them.

I undressed myself in the hallway.

In a few moments, I was stealthily hunting her down, on my tiptoes.

I didn’t know which Annie I would face when I found her, but I knew she was going to face the naked me, and I was hoping for the best.

One

Annie has short but full-bodied and luxuriant blond hair. Her body is petite but extraordinarily well-formed. Big blue eyes, tawny brown skin, a sparkling, intelligent smile. She has great legs, and, as Steve Martin once said of a once prominent Hollywood femme fatale, an ass you could eat your lunch off of.

We met at a big Christmas party feted by the law firm she works for, Smith-Mandovitch. Annie’s a paralegal. The party was mostly for lawyers and clients, but I was on the guest list because I’d catered a few smaller events for the law firm. My friend Dale Credenza is a junior attorney at the firm, and he got me the catering gigs, and the invitation to the Christmas party, too.

I was unattached when I met Annie. Well, I was dating this woman who was okay, but not so great, her name was Brenda. I can’t remember her last name anymore, it was a funny name, I want to say Monk-something, Monk-house or Monk-hold or Monk-berg, but none of these can be right, I don’t think any of them are actual names. Despite being not so great, Brenda couldn’t escape the gravity of her own endless personal narrative. You can forgive a great, vibrant woman such self-absorption, but not a morose, not so great one. For Brenda everything had to mean something of heightened importance and seriousness in terms of the past history and unfolding story of Brenda, and the whole story seemed unnecessarily grim to me. Nothing was ever very easy or fun with her, not even the things that should have been. Brenda was like being stuck in a book you didn’t want to read, except sometimes during sex when both of us could forget who she was for a little while. At the time that I met Annie, Brenda thought I was attached to her, but I really wasn’t. When she found this out, Brenda was very upset, in her typical disproportionate way. She should have asked me about it, and not done so much assuming, but that’s the way Brenda was, she just liked to assume she was taking everything she wanted right along in her gloomy current without checking the facts too carefully. Anyway, vaguely remembering now how she was about things, I think Brenda must have transitioned pretty easily to her next relationship, adding me as just another chapter in the long dismal narrative for a pair of fresh, unsuspecting ears.

I had my work cut out for me when I met Annie at that Christmas party. She was some looker, and the room was full of big suits, and I felt overmatched because I was just floundering around as usual. I catered for a little money here and there. I wrote away at a novel now and then for no money. For my real job, for a real paycheck, I reluctantly worked as one of the managers in a large family-style restaurant. That job was like being dead, with barbeque sauce on top. When I met Annie I played that job down. I played up my gourmet catering, and the novel I was writing. And I pulled it off. The champagne probably helped me along a little, but I pulled it off. I remember having an odd feeling like it was too easy. Like maybe she was determined to be reckless that night, and I was just in the right place at the right time. But I wasn’t about to waste much time worrying about that.

I remember following Annie down the hallway in her apartment, ogling her body in the soft moonlight that fed in through the windows. She was putting one foot slowly and carefully in front of the other, walking an invisible kinky wire in high black heels. Her right arm was outstretched and her fingers were running along the wall for balance. A performance for me; she knew I was watching her body from behind. There was something strangely stalking in her act as well. As if together we were sneaking up on our own sexual future.

She knew I was following all the way, she had that kind of confidence, she didn’t have to glance back to make sure I was there or to gauge my expression. She knew the shape of her athletic legs, revealed to high up on her thigh by the little black dress, the way they looked in the sheer black stockings, she knew the flex of her full calves as she placed a foot down and nimbly transferred her weight to it. She knew these things and their power without doubt. She knew the cat-like way she was walking slowly along was making me need to get where we were going faster. I came right up behind her, to push her along. She still insisted on moving perversely slow, she giggled as my chest pressed into her back, as she pushed her derriere back against me in mock resistance. She was taunting me, but I could hear her quickened breathing.

I have revisited this strange intoxicating Annie in my mind often and ever since. This dark intoxicating Annie of our first encounter.

I wonder where her mind was in regard to herself. And in regard to me. You could not really say we were trying to get to know each other better. You could not say we had any big plans.

I put my arms around her from behind, got my hands all over her. She was half thrilled and half laughing at me.

I lifted her heels up off the floor and carried her play-kicking into the bedroom.

When it’s like the way it was that night with a woman like Annie you don’t even want to blink, to close your eyes for a second on the lecherous miracle of it. You want to see everything. Bear witness.

A woman like Annie closes her eyes frequently during the act and for long vociferous intervals, leaving you for long moments like she’s finding or reliving some atavistic memory that may have little to do with you beyond the archetype of your parts.

She’ll come back to you between ecstatic departures to let you know you’re still appreciated and cheer you on. Sometimes she looks a little surprised to see you again, like in at least one sense she temporarily forgot you were there, or maybe who you were.

But it’s all quite alright. You certainly don’t mind.

Nietzsche said sex is really a struggle for power. For one, the complete physical and mental dominance of another. For the other, complete physical and mental submission, surrender. Hence some of the talk of the trade, like I’m going to fuck your brains out.  Or, fuck my brains out, please. Hence some of the realities underlying the act: on the one side I want to witness my power over you, and on the other I want your power to blind me, what’s-your-face.

I’ve never really had a big problem with Nietzsche’s take on the matter. Women like Annie take all the sadness out of his perspective.

That’s how Annie and I got started, anyway. That night of the Christmas party. We started out lean and sweaty and happy.

Everything else seemed to follow as the result of inertia. The tendency of bodies to stay in motion once they are put into it. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. But during this movement all kinds of things got stuck to us, and quickly. I don’t know how it happened, really, I guess I should have been paying closer attention. It was like we were two fresh fuzzy tennis balls that got shot through a thicket full of stickers. I woke up one morning and realized we had all this new stuff sticking to us, that’s the only way to say it.

Two

Annie dreams these things out, and then she starts in with the planning that will fulfill her dreaming, and I am helping her do that, though I really don’t know why beyond the dull intuition that it’s what I need to do if I want to keep invading her loins.

There is this accumulation of stuff, this accumulation and organizing of stuff, this departmentalizing of stuff we’ve already accumulated and that we plan, in the future, to accumulate. We do a lot of shopping together, and we buy things that we don’t yet have a place for; we accumulate it and store it in whatever vacant places we can find within our two residences, her chic apartment and my small rented house. It’s like we’re hoarding things up for some comfy post-apocalypse that we’ve tacitly agreed not to discuss just yet.

Annie is buying little garden tools and putting them in the closet of her apartment. She has no garden, no garage, no shed. She’s collecting kitchen accessories that are not to be used yet. She’s got a lot of stuff piling up in boxes and bubble-wrap. What won’t fit in her place is spilling over into mine.

We are planning out a future city-state in miniature. There will be a library. We’re collecting the books for it. Certain subjects and authors are favored. People will look upon the titles when they are assembled together and gain a sense of what we are. There will be a movie library, too.  There’s more to the collecting than our own entertainment pleasure; every acquisition will someday tell people something about us. These things will go into cabinets, not closets. These things will be displayed. Annie is buying shelving, too. The shelving of the future. There can be no future without shelves.

She’s dreaming out gardens, lawn decorations, fruits and vegetables. A cuisine du maison. Certain dishes will become noteworthy. Certain wines will become wines of the house. There will be a China pattern, and a silver pattern. A signature style of crystal glassware. This is dreaming I get carried along with. Food and wine and presentation is in my soul. Don’t know why, or precisely when it started. I’ve just always loved these things, like a dog loves sticking his head out a car window into the wind.

There will be games, both sporting and sexual, that will become traditional within the walls. Rituals, secular and sexual and even religious. Celebrations, feasts. Entertainments, hospitalities.

Animals, one or a few or perhaps many, a menagerie, even, dogs and cats and birds, maybe, perhaps in time and with children turtles and guinea pigs, hamsters and lizards.

Annie makes the dreams into words for me and we make the dream-words into plans together. No matter how many dreams she brings forth, I feel that there are more in there, coming.

Her body was so small and smooth and tight and complete. I uncovered it, I looked at it from all sides, I felt over it and probed all around inside it. Where was all this stuff hiding? She was like this hot little horn of plenty. You picked her up and looked inside and turn her over and shook and thought you pretty much knew the whole of her. Then you set her down and stepped away, and all this stuff and all these ideas kept coming out of her. Proliferating forth.

I feared that if I snuck up on her sleeping and opened her mouth gently and put my eye up to peer deep inside I would see Kings and Queens dancing in there, princesses, scions, heirs galore, dukedoms and duchies, all of them eagerly awaiting their turn to come parading out.

I was beginning to feel apprehensive in a vague way. Annie was so little, but she had such infinite mass.

Three

Anybody could see what it was that was supposed to happen.

I stalled and avoided the subject and stayed in denial for a long time.

Then finally I asked her.

A few days after I gave Annie her engagement ring, my lawyer friend Dale Credenza took me out to celebrate. Just the two of us, his treat. He wanted to go to a nice place. We’ve been friends for a long time, Dale and I. Sky’s the limit, he said.

I was drinking Talisker, neat. I was just going to have one, but Dale kept asking me if I wanted another when one was done, and I kept saying yes. Dale and I tended to drink a lot when we were together. I drank Talisker through a long pre-meal conversation and through our appetizers. Then we had a bottle of robust Rhone wine that made a good foil for both my roast Provencal duck and his grilled Argentine beefsteak with chimichurri. After dinner we had dessert and several Armagnacs. Then I began to sweat heavily and lost my ability to speak for a while, but I kept drinking because it was something I could still do. Then I tried to get up to go to the bathroom, to splash some water on my face, and I fell down and rolled over on my back in the middle of the restaurant. I could still hear and see and think a little bit, my body had just stopped cooperating with me. Like I said, it was a nice restaurant, and people around us became very upset and vocal about me lying on the floor on my back. There were people sitting around me, and people standing over me. Dale started arguing with somebody in my defense. Dale is a lawyer, like I said. He’s a junior attorney in contracts, but he wants to get into the courtroom someday. He will argue any indefensible position just to get some practice.

Dale managed to get our bill paid, and then he and a waiter got me up off the floor. Dale is a pretty big guy, and he got me into a fireman’s carry and took me down the stairs and out to the parking lot to air me out a little. He propped me up against an SUV out there, caught his breath for a minute or two, then lit himself up a cigarette and leaned against the SUV with me. I let my head fall back to stare up at the sky.

Well, you’re set now, anyway, Dale said, exhaling smoke.

Huh?

You’ve got Annie. Your course is all set. I’m jealous.

No you’re not, I said.

I was tired of looking up at the spinning desert sky, so I bent forward, my rear end still against the SUV, and held myself up by putting my palms on my bent knees.  I was looking down at my boots when my right ankle suddenly collapsed sideways in the gravel and I fell sideways into Dale, almost knocking him down. After some struggling, with us kicking up the dust from beneath the gravel, he straightened me up again against the SUV. Dale hunted down his dropped cigarette and put it back in his mouth. My ankle hurt. I had sprained my ankle while standing still.

How do you know if I am or not?

If you am what?

Jealous. How do you know I’m not really jealous?

You shust afraid your mizzing somefing. Snot the shame.

I wanted to talk to those two women sitting over at the bar, but I don’t think they’ll let us back in now.

Mother and daughter, I said.

No.

Pretty sore, yeah. Wish one did you like?

I don’t know, Dale said dejectedly.

We could go somewhere else.

You sure?

I’m coming around. Jushed give me a few more mints. I’ll get some water.

Okay.

He wasn’t doubtful. Sometimes when we went on a bender together I could go down once or twice and pop back up again, just like old Joe Frazier.

Four

Annie and I have this Wednesday, hump-day routine going. The particulars were her idea, mostly. I’m off work from the restaurant on Wednesdays, so I cook dinner. Annie decided that as I love to cook, and that as I’m off on Wednesdays, and as I stopped soliciting catering work after our engagement, I should cook to the best of my abilities on Wednesday evenings to keep my skills sharp. That’s one part of our Wednesday routine. Another part is that Smith-Mandovitch has a quasi-mandatory hump-day happy hour gathering at Bailey’s, a swanky bar long popular with the local movers and shakers. Annie has to make an appearance there, however brief. It’s part of the culture. She has a cocktail or two there with the attorneys and staffers, and I have a cocktail or two while I’m making dinner.

Another part of the Wednesday routine is that we invite someone, or a couple, for dinner. These are usually people that we don’t want to see so much, but whom we are somehow obligated to see, or that we feel guilty about not seeing. These are people who are not on our A-list, and who do not get any of our premium, weekend time. These are people who are more tolerable after a couple of cocktails, mine taken over the stove and Annie’s at the bar. Annie’s strategy is brilliant; because I’m doing my best culinary work, these people feel like they must be on our A-list. Because Annie and I are always primed up with a couple of cocktails, we make them feel more interesting than we truly find them.

Lonely Joan is a frequent Wednesday dinner guest. She comes alone. She’s Annie’s friend, not mine. She seems to resent my appearance in Annie’s life. Annie says