During college, there were a couple of occasions when I learned that parties I’d attended had turned into orgies after I’d gone home. Maybe they weren’t real orgies – they were more like spontaneous adjournments to the shower – but I think I would have enjoyed them. Over decades of regretful recollection, I blamed my early bedtime: Ten thirty or eleven was when I was ready to head back to the dorm to go night-night – just at the time a party starts to get interesting. Curse my body clock!
More recent ruminations, however, have convinced me that blaming my body clock is overly generous. It’s not that the parties turned into orgies after I left: The parties turned into orgies because I left. That’s how orgies work, with the real swingers lurking in the shadows, waiting for the shmendricks like me to clear out. My departure is a signal for the real party to get started.
When I lived in New York, I was typically isolated. If by some miracle I ever found myself having lunch with someone, man or woman, I would be overcome with gratitude and begin enthusing along the lines of “Wow, I’m really glad I met up with you. I don’t get out very often,” to which my lunchmate would invariably respond with a “Whoa,” sometimes accentuated by a raised pointer finger. “This lunch is a one-off,” he’d inform me. “I don’t usually have time to get together like this. Besides, we’re not friends or anything.” Mulling over such experiences, I concluded that I was coming on too strong for New York. You could get away with the presumption of companionship in a low-stakes environment like Baltimore, but not in the Big Apple, where space and time are at a premium. My roommate once told me, “I don’t have time to be your friend,” to drive home the point.
It has finally occurred to me, now in advanced middle age, that the problem was neither space nor time but hierarchy, which, as I failed to recognize when I resided in Gotham, is the governing principle of life there. Hierarchy, alas, holds few advantages for me, so of course I never had a chance. The message had always been clear enough: “I don’t usually have time to get together like this” meant “I don’t usually have time to get together like this with someone like you”; “I don’t have time to be your friend” meant “I don’t have time to be your friend.” Now I get it.
While doing research in Beijing, I once visited a dance club near the University. The music was playing, and the beat was heavy, but the floor remained open, for all of the copious young people in attendance stood lingering at the periphery, watching and waiting. My assessment of the situation was perchance a bit racist: “Chinese people are too shy to have a good time. Good thing Captain America is here to break the ice. Leave it to me.” I strode to the center of the space and commenced gyrating and frugging in my inimitable manner, expecting to trigger a like motion from the natives. But the song ended with no dance support. Another number went by, and then another. I was twisting all alone, with none of Beijing’s youth inspired to join me. After fifteen or twenty minutes of flying solo, I gave up in disgust. “You people are hopeless. What more can I do for you?” I sat down on a bar stool, at which the entire body of clubgoers promptly swarmed onto the floor and began dancing individually, in couples, and in merry clusters. It was one of the most humiliating occurrences of my life, and I slunk out of the club and trudged home in disgrace, too defeated to retrieve my bicycle.
Apparently, I’m a schmuck in Beijing too.
Yellow Crane in the Rain 