I’ve decided to abandon anonymity and attach my name to these stories. One could google search the name of this blog and find out who I am anyway, and I think that perhaps my name may have some relevance in the minds of my readers. Here then is the story, please feel free to comment as always.
“He’s crying over a teapot!” said Johnson.
“You don’t think that’s possible?” I said.
“I think it’s possible,” Johnson said, “it’s apparently very possible. But it’s stupid.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s a teapot. It has no life. It’s a just a teapot.”
“I think he is crying because the teapot represents something about himself.”
“There is no good reason to cry over a teapot.”
The date was not going well.
Johnson invited me to his apartment on 18th and Sanchez to watch a movie. “I love movies,” I told him when we met at Billy’s house warming party. “We should hang out sometime and watch one,” he told me. I agreed, we drank to it, there was a kiss goodbye, sloppy with more spit than tongue, and three days later I arrived at his apartment to watch a movie. “What do you want to watch?” Johnson asked me, and by the way he stood next to a comfortable looking couch and watched me closely, I sensed that perhaps a bigger question was being asked. Was he really asking me if I wanted to dispense with the movie and just have sex? I decided to stand with four feet between us as I scrolled through the options offered by On Demand. We stood in his living room, I’m embarrassed to admit, for a full ten minutes as I. It was in almost silence. I was offered something to drink, which I declined since the last we met was over too many drinks, but as I continued to scroll and the silence thickened, I asked for a drink just to make noise.
It’s not that I am indecisive; quite the contrary. I had very quickly decided I did not want to just have sex. Rather, I just didn’t like any of the movies offered. When I settled on a documentary about Zen and Cooking, Johnson looked down at his whiskey on the rocks for a full ten seconds before saying, “Okay.”
We sat. His hips touched mine. His hand, which he’d previously been using to hold his drink, now rested palm down on his thigh, only centimeters from mine. I sipped my Crown and Coke as Johnson took a swig of his clinking whiskey. Just before the movie began, he sighed. “Don’t blame me if I fall asleep,” he said.
After ten minutes of Johnson fidgeting, a whiskey refill, and several touching, if vaguely histrionic, speeches about cooking, life, and the nature of all things, the Zen cooking instructor began to cry over a teapot. This teapot did not hide its dings and scratches and scars, but displayed them sincerely and willingly. Despite the careless violence of its handlers, the teapot, according to the Zen instructor, seemed to lend itself enthusiastically to more abusive use. The teapot was Zen. The instructor tearfully concluded that if the teapot could continue it’s taxing life, so could he.
Though touched, I concluded that the teapot must be masochistic, and thanked god it found an abusive handler. I was about to share this thought when Johnson burst out with his emphatic opinions. He then lay his head in my lap, facing my abdomen and looking up at me with suggestive eyes.
He pursed his lips. Doubtless, he was attempting the mask of a pout.
The date was not going well.
So I gave Johnson what he wanted, and after the sweaty, moan filled activity was over, I attempted to draw the truth from him.
“Did that guy really annoy you?” I said, while his face rested on my chest and the declining rhythm of his breathing signaled the onset of sleep.
“Huh?” he said.
“That guy, the Zen guy, were you really upset, or just horny?”
“Shhhh,” he said, holding a limp finger to his lips.
Once he was asleep, I left. I did not leave a note and I did not intend to call later. And the sex, though sweaty and moan-filled, was not satisfying enough to suggest any promise of future un-entangled encounters. The evening had served its entire purpose, as far as I was concerned. When Johnson woke up alone, I was sure he’d conclude the same. And the low growls of the San Francisco streets were far sweeter to my ears than Johnson’s gurgling snore. Why not sleep at home?
Yet as I wandered the streets I realized I was not quite ready to go home, and not quite satisfied with the evening. A familiar fear swelled within me. I wondered to myself whether I was truly ready to die. Of course, I was probably going to live well into my sixties at least, and that gave me another forty years of life—probably. But if those forty years looked anything like this day, then was it really worth it? A long day at a job which was only supposed to be temporary, yet had somehow lasted four years, a rush home to shower and shave, and prepare for a potential evening of explosive romanticism, followed by semi-trite metaphors, unsatisfying sex, and a walk home. If this were the last day of my life, what did my life matter? To some people, this kind of question shrieked through the air like a threatening trumpet, but to me it was more like a war drum; low, persistent, and suggestive of mortality. I knew I would not resolve this question. How could anyone resolve this question? I could only resolve to try harder to live a better life.
Then I realized I was having an existential crisis because of a difference in movie tastes and chemistry-lacking sex. Was I pathetic? Was this pathetic? Or was this the guarded little secret everyone carried with them, a fear of pathetic-ness?
I stood at a red light by a modern design furniture store and observed the window display. The display glistened with impossibly shaped glass sculptures, steel framed coffee tables, white leather sofas, a brick wall with installed shelving, and, on the top self, a row of chrome teapots. They gleamed brightly, and their polished chrome surfaces reflected the spackle of lights and if I looked close enough, I could see myself in them as well.
I decided to return tomorrow and purchase one of those teapots. Then I would give it all the abuse I could handle. Thus decided, I hurried home to bed.
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