a chronological, complicated story

One morning, Jenny and I were lounging around (I think it was a Saturday because Bugs Bunny cartoons were on). She started talking all serious and stuff and wanted to know if I knew anything about the word commitment and if I did what it meant to me.

I recall lighting a cigarette and trying to stall by humming a popular song of the day. Which really pissed her off. And then she said something like, "Well?" which was exactly the kind of thing my mother used to say to me whenever she caught me stalling.

I told her I had read something John Adams said about commitment. "There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment and those who require the commitment of others," and I asked her if that was the kind of commitment she was talking about.

She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and made a weird hissing sound.

I didn't know what to say.

I mean, I knew what to say; I just didn't know how to say it.

Then she asked me one of those questions that make almost every guy like me squirm. "What do you want to do for the rest of your life?"

Questions like that can make you feel pretty down as soon as you hear it. Probably because it makes you realize how crappy your life really is. And it's doubly hard on a guy when a woman points out how crappy your life is. I don't know; it probably has something to do with our mothers and how we're always trying to please them. And how disappointed we are when we don't. Or can't.

Guys spend their whole lives trying to please women.

Well, guys like me, anyway.

I tried to think of a thoughtful, intelligent way of answering Jenny's question, but the only words that were forming in my mind were the kinds of words that you shouldn't say in a situation like that. Words like, "I don't know," "I'm not really sure," "I haven't really thought about it, to tell you the truth..."

And, anyway, when a woman hears words like that from a man, it's over for him. He might as well just thank her for a lovely relationship, pack his duffel bag, and move on. Because, if there's one thing I've learned about women, it's that most of them, I don't care how kind-hearted and caring they are, don't want to invest their time and energy in a stunted and plotless guy. I don't care how desperate they are.

"Well?" Jenny said again.

Damn. Two "wells" in less than two minutes. That meant Jenny was really serious. Even my mom would limit her "wells" to every three or four minutes. Two "wells" from Jenny, and I was beginning to wonder where my duffel bag was.

"Well," I said. Now I was saying it. Although my "well" probably had more to do with prolonging my adolescence than anything else. I mean, it's not like I was trying to get somebody to define some thousand-dollar word like "commitment" or make them figure out how they were going to spend the next forty or fifty years of their life. How could anybody predict with any certainty what they would be doing in five minutes, let alone fifty years?

"You're stalling again," Jenny said.

I had a few stock lines rattling around inside of me. "You deserve better," "It's not your fault. It's me," "I've lied," "I think we would be better off friends," "So long and thanks for all the fish," but I wasn't exactly looking to break up with Jenny. I mean, I still loved her, as far as I knew. Didn't I?

"You're really that into me, heh?" I said. I know; it was even worse than any of those stock lines I'd sort of halfway considered.

She reacted pretty much like I expected. I didn't really understand everything she said because she was talking so fast, but none of it was good. Every now and then, I'd recognize a word or a phrase. "Irresponsible and carefree," "a petulant and immature child-man," "aimless," "delaying adulthood..."

Really, if you want to know the truth, the only thing I remember were some of her facial expressions. Tense jaws, contorted eyebrows, wrinkles over the bridge of her nose, those kinds of things. I think she even started growling at one point, and that was a little weird. But I just let her vent. I figured eventually, she'd get it all out of her system.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, I noticed her voice was getting a little hoarse. It sounded like she could have used a nice, hot cup of tea sweetened with some lemon and honey. I think it really would have soothed her vocal cords, but she gave no indication at all that she was at a point in her monologue where she could have stopped long enough to even enjoy a nice, hot cup of tea sweetened with lemon and honey, so I just let her ramble on because I figured it would have only pissed her off even more if I was to interrupt her by asking her something as trivial as whether or not she'd like a nice, hot cup of tea sweetened with honey and lemon to soothe her vocal cords.

I've learned to choose my battles.

Oh, an interesting thing happens to me whenever I'm being harangued by a woman. I fall asleep. I realize falling asleep is not exactly the most mature way of coping with conflict like that, and it certainly doesn't earn me any brownie points with women who've chosen to spend inordinate amounts of time with me, but I can't help myself. It started when I was a kid. And yeah, this anecdote does involve my mother, who seems to be popping up a lot in this story, much more than I intended, but I still think you'll get a kick out of it.

In 1976, I was eleven years old. And I had this habit of ignoring my mother whenever she'd ask me to do something like clean my room va, vacuum the stairs, do the dishes fe, ed the cat, or mow the lawn. As you can imagine, this kind of subversive behavior didn't sit too well with my mother. She actually considered it an act of deliberate betrayal. But instead of directly calling me on my s**t, she'd go ahead and start doing whatever it was she'd asked me to do. I guess that was her way of trying to make me feel guilty, which it did, so I can't say her tactics were a complete waste of time because I'd usually end up getting up off my a*s at that point and completing whatever it was she was doing.

Then, on Saturday, July 3, 1976, around ten o'clock in the morning, after I had just settled into my favorite bean bag chair to watch reruns of Shazam and Isis, it happened. My mother became totally unhinged. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with all those acts of deliberate betrayal. A mother can only take so many acts of deliberate betrayal from her children before she becomes psychotic with rage and verbally explodes.

It began when she asked me a simple question: "Did you empty the dishwasher?"

Of course, it was a question she already knew the answer to, which was another one of her tactics. I had to admit, though, that for someone who already knew the answer to the question, she still put everything she had into asking it. My mother is very skilled as an interrogator.

Before I could even open my mouth to tell her I hadn't emptied the dishwasher, my mother began, quietly at first, to break down the meaning of the word procrastinate. It wasn't the first time she'd ever broken it down like that for me, but it was the first time she'd included the entire etymology of the word as well as the varying psychological causes associated with it.

Somewhere between her telling me that I might be suffering from a self-defeating attitude and a low sense of worth, she really began to get stoked. And when I say stoked, I mean I actually heard her heart beating at one point. And I'd never seen her jaws clenched so tightly before; she probably could have used her entire face as a weapon; that's how pissed off she was.

And that's when my dysfunctional little habit of falling asleep whenever a woman is yelling at me began.

The last thing I remember my mother saying before drifting off was, "What do you want to do, grow up to be a ditch digger?"

Anyway, long story short.

I fell asleep on Jenny and woke up about three hours later.

Naturally, she was gone.

A few minutes later, I found a handwritten note taped to the refrigerator.

It said, "God puts people in your life to break your heart...not to hurt you but to help you find that special someone."

I called Jenny and told her I'd never fall asleep on her again because, as far as I was concerned, she was that special someone, even though I didn't always tell her or show her. I told her I'd even drink a couple Red Bulls the next time she thought we should have one of her "talks," so I'd be able to stay up long enough to hear whatever it was she wanted to tell me.

"If you think I'm so special, move out of your parent's house, go back to school. Wear something other than camouflage shorts and Red Hot Chili Peppers tee shirts because this is a you problem that has now become an us problem."

I said the only thing I could say at that point, which was, "Wow." Then, I thought the only thing I could think of at that point was help.

"Life is not just about how you feel inside," Jenny said. "It's what you evoke."

I could feel my eyelids getting heavy again, and I wanted to close them and go to sleep, but I forced myself to stay awake.

"It's a simple choice," Jenny said, and she hung up.

I went into my bedroom, took two Vivarin, washed them down with a Mountain Dew, and began throwing out all my camouflage shorts and Red Hot Chili Peppers tee shirts.

It was the saddest day of my life.