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more punk rock than any bastard son of Iggy Pop
Wednesday, March 3 1999
Towards the end of work, I was happily lost in my robots and I ended up leaving work kind of late. It was enough to cause Kim to request that I start carrying a pager.
Since we don't have a working television, and since tonight was the big Monica Lewinski interview with Barbara Walters, we decided to get dinner downtown. It was Kim's idea, and she offered to pay, so we went to the Newport Street sushi place, Sapporos. First, though, we stopped to check out
the television situation at a bar we've never frequented. What a simply dreadful place. The bouncer was a huge bullet-headed muscle guy, the kind with whom it's useless to converse unless you can talk fluent sportsese. All the patrons were baseball-cap wearing Schteves with their appropriately cheesed-out girlfriends. It was surprisingly similar to certain sports bars in Charlottesville, but it also presented something of a conundrum. Why had I never seen any of these people on the streets of Ocean Beach?
I was famished, and the wasabi did little to slow me down, though it was strong and I applied it with reckless abandon. A few times I felt as though the back of my head had been blown off. Kim saw to it that both beer and saki were in continual supply, and by the time Monica Lewinski came on, we were both rather drunk. I told Kim a few nostalgic stories about girls in my past, especially Jenny Mothershead, my best friend during my early childhood (up until I moved to Virginia at the age of seven). I usually run the risk of being interrupted by Kim's jealous fits when I tell such stories, but for some reason this time she let me ramble on. I told of how Jenny and I swore to each other to be together always, and of the sad day my parents drove me and my family away, leaving our childish love to whither and die over the U.S. Postal System. It occurred to me in the midst of telling this sad tale that, in pursuing all of my subsequent friendships, I must have been trying to recapture what I'd lost with Jenny. This explains, for example, why I most prefer friendships with women. I male friends are okay, but there's clearly something missing there. The heterosexual qualities of a mixed-gender relationships are definitely interesting to me (my friendship with Jenny, though innocent, was also fairly physical considering our age). Also, since Jenny was clearly the most interesting and intelligent of all my half-dozen or so childhood friends, she became my early model of the ideal intellectual companion. Her example wired my brain in such a way that I've never doubted the capabilities of women. Talking about Jenny led me to mention Leslie Montalto, my girlfriend from late 1992 to late 1994, and Kim sensed that I was also nostalgic about her. This made Kim miserable; she thought she sensed that I actually do have the capacity to truly love, but my love wasn't for her. How could she know that I was much worse to Leslie Montalto than I have ever been to her (which takes some doing, considering there was far less "cultural tension" between Leslie and myself).
Monica Lewinski. Now there's a sweet girl. Tonight we finally got the chance to watch her head do the talking instead of trying to picture Bill Clinton pressing it into his crotch. Kim and I moved up to the bar to be close to the television while the various Sapporo employees came by to watch for short spans of time, often punctuating the chit-chat with catty comments. I was no better, of course. When Monica revealed "the big secret," that she had gotten pregnant and then gone to get an abortion, I joked that her spawn was "half-cigar, half-human." Seriously, though, most women - it seems - get abortions at some point in their lives, and it was good to have Monica, a fairly powerful self-made woman, if you will, admitting to getting one recently herself. In our at-times stiflingly puritanical society, there needs to be less shame attached to abortion (as well as fellatio). Surprisingly, I found Monica imparting a certain legitimacy to every shocking thing to which she cheerfully admitted. The foil, of course, is Bill Clinton, the man with all the power who will admit to nothing. I think Monica did our country a great service. She quietly slipped into and entertainingly shook up the system, getting everyone, even Kim's grandparents, talking about the act of giving head. In her own way, Monica Lewinski is more punk rock than any bastard son of Iggy Pop.
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