Notes, from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 58, New Man It Is. So the next day I had a session with Jessica, and I guess I would say it was a godsend if I believed in God, which, okay, I sometimes think I might, kind of.
I mean, I don't think he's particularly interested in guys like me, but what do I know? And hey, that doesn't mean I'm some sort of Red State Jesus freak. For the record? That's just nutty.
It takes a lot of balls to say, you know, that God exists and what he wants and who he likes, but being an atheist. Saying you've seen enough of the universe to know there's no God in it, I think some stones too. Parp is an atheist. The presumption was shit.
See, that's one of the main differences between me and Parp. If you told Parp you believed in God and maybe one or two prophets and that these prophets could turn lobes into fishes and whatnot, and that if you laughed at one who happened to be bald as she bear would rush out and eat your kids, he'd laugh at you and make jokes about your frontal lobe. Me? I just think you might know something I don't.
It's called knowing your limitations or maybe knowing your human or maybe just humility. Am I right? So my session with Jessica. I was sitting in the chair across from her stealing man's stairs at this plaid shirt she was wearing and it was open a few buttons down from the neck like she was hoping I'd look.
I could see that under the shirt she was wearing this tight black, strappy thing that I at first thought was her bra that she wanted me to see. And then I thought, hey, maybe it's a leotard and she has yoga class right after our session. But as I kept stealing glimpses of it, I began to think it might be made out of rubber. I definitely started thinking of the possibilities in parallel.
I was having three different fantasies at once, all triggered by the sight of rubber against my therapist's tits when she looked up at me from the pad she'd been writing in. I made sure I had this chilled out or laid back or I don't care look on my face like yeah, I'm staring in your direction, but I'm pretty much just waiting for you to finish up writing whatever you're writing so we can get down to business. I told her about the inaugural ball and about how parp helped me with the roundabout in gold card and how he was going to help me out with the diet and the exercise and my general physical improvement, but that the thought of selling my soul to him just so I could make me have a hard on when I boned can me next time was making me more than a little depressed. You know, she said, it seems, well, a little unusual based on what you said in the past that Tony would go out of his way to help you like that.
Is there something about this whole, I mean, are you sure there's no quid pro quo in this for him? Fuck if I knew, I don't know, I said, I thought he was just helping a guy out because of, you know what he said, it's all a big adventure with him. It's all about the oppressed having a rebellion and overthrowing the rich and exercising their cocks. Like those kids in Les Misérables on the barricades fighting the bourgeoisie which in this case happens to be anybody who wants me to stay with junior.
And that's all, she said, it's just kind of an aesthetic interest, he's an anti-marriage romanticist. It was like she was trying to sound over the top ironic, you know, the way parents and therapists and wives do sometimes when they're trying to make you think something through. Like they have a criticism they think is as obvious as math and they want you to use your brain to figure it out for yourself. I hate it when people do that.
Maybe he's just this lonely guy who wants to believe that anyone living with a three-dimensional woman is some kind of hostage who needs liberating, I said. I definitely wanted her to see Parp as the basest element of human, well, baseness. But I didn't wanted to start asking me again why I was his chump, why I hung around and pretending to be his chump. I've been trying to answer that question for years and it just goes nowhere.
It's like the hamster that jumps in the wheel thinking this time he might just make it to Jersey City. And after a day of running and running and running he realizes again that he hasn't moved an inch. Yeah, I had a hamster when I was eight. Lenny.
And swear to God if Lenny could have slapped his forehead I'd have heard it three rooms away every afternoon. Well, I'm done being Lenny. I'm done kidding myself that one more run in the wheel will have me and Parp all figured out. You know what I mean?
I continued. It's not that he hates my wife and kids I don't think. He dreams of the day when all men will be emancipated from their family so they can join him in his faux French drama with Jean-on-Wie and Pauline Rhaaj. I gigcackled.
But seriously, she said what's in this for him. I really think that's it. I said it annoyed me that she thought her professionalism required her to pretend by jokes Merit Whitty. I'm not making up excuses for him.
On the one hand he's this incredible malcontent who thinks the whole world is doing everything wrong and that he Tony Parp knows how to make it all right. And on the other hand he's always looking for ways to pervert anything normal. So in some hot piece of ass like Cammy comes along he sees his chance to roll it my way and destroy a relationship I've taken years to build up. A relationship with children in it.
Children! Jessica gave me this look like... Okay. If she'd been wearing glasses she'd be looking over the tops.
You know what I mean? The rims. It was the look that said we both knew I was full of horseshit. Okay okay I said.
I said that was one way of looking at it. I distinctly said on the one hand. Actually she said you gave me both hands. Huh?
You said on the one hand he thinks he can improve everything and on the other hand he's trying to pervert everything. I looked at her. Jesus. I said so you want me counting hands now?
No no. I just want to understand so there's a third way of interpreting Tony. Yes, there is another way. She just stared at me, pen on her pad, waiting for me to explain myself.
It's kind of like I said before. He's maybe the loneliest guy in the world and you know what would make him happy? Next to having somebody have his own, somebody to wake up with and talk to and you know all that other good stuff. The only other thing that would make him happy is to see everybody else just as lonely as he is.
Yeah, that's it. She kind of laughed and swear to God the laugh started out as a sneer she couldn't stifle for some reason. Now here's the part that made this session a godsend. First, she totally put my mind at ease about parpen whether or not doing his little experiment with the things meant I was selling my soul to him.
She said a lot of people do the parp stuff. Maybe they don't do the super foods or the compression fit t-shirts and they definitely don't wear the ridiculous round purple shades. But otherwise it was pretty normal stuff. I felt relieved.
In fact, I felt so relieved I almost forgot she sneered laughed at me just a few seconds before. There was this one thing she said that for some reason really calmed me down. She said even squares go to the gym and they don't think twice about it. Guys in suits you see walking down the streets.
They're at the gym a lot of times except for the really broken down skinny ones. Maybe you think I'm a jackass for not knowing this already. Okay, let's say in your world squares going to the gym is common knowledge. Here are even some square who meets up with your fellow squares at the gym and you have this ritual where you simultaneously take off your ties and pull on your sweats.
Fantastic for you and your world. But in my world, shit the only guys I knew who went to the gym every day were underwear models. Like I said, knowing that the gym thing was completely ordinary made me feel a lot better. If Libby or John O gave me shit for jimming it up I'd just say hey dude millions of people go to the gym it's not like I'm stacking dumbbells in my apartment.
That's just nutty. Yeah, that'll shut them up. I thought. I thought the vitamins?
Jessica kind of said the items I told her about probably couldn't hurt just as long as I didn't take this thing called MIMBY or HIMBY and that was made from tree bark and that I guess is famous for giving guys hard-ons but only after giving some of them heart attacks. I was pretty sure none of the stuff on paraps list had an inby sound in it but I could check again and oh yeah check to see if there was any tree bark mentioned on the labels. So I thought new man it is. I wonder what I'll be like.
Notes from the upper west side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist. Notes from the upper west side copyright 2013 to 2017 by Dan Rench.