Chapter 12: The Anointed

Lately I’ve been very concerned about my status as an advanced bachelor. There’s no question that I often wonder about those who are lucky enough to be dating or involved in some long-term, drawn-out relationship that will eventually lead to marriage, kids, and the quaint suburban home in towns well-known for keeping out all undesirables like myself, because this where a lot of dating couples wind up. And lately I’ve ruled out the possibility of this happening to me, because I’ve now hit one of these very lonely periods in my short life thus far where I just can’t seem to get a date or attract a woman for reasons that are almost mystical in their proportion.

I’m assuming that every man has a dry spell or two in their life, but my dry spell has extended way beyond what I even thought possible – which is why I’m so concerned nowadays that the options normally left wide open for most men are now closed for me. And so I must continue plodding along this road of life and try to forget about attracting a woman or getting involved in a relationship with one, even though not thinking about it is totally impossible to do.

At first I began to question what exactly was it that women found so wrong with a guy like me. I consider myself to be a good, decent person. I’m responsible in many ways. I’m a half-way decent conversationalist. For a man, I’m not that ugly at all. But then I started to wonder whether or not I was too short, for instance. Or perhaps I was too reserved and not anally expulsive enough. Or perhaps it’s because my skin is a bit tanner than the average Viking. Or maybe there’s something about my mind or my personality that women pick up on, thereby giving them some reason to turn me away when I ask them out. And considering that I’m neither too rich nor too poor, maybe it does have something to do with my income. Maybe it’s not adequate enough. I guess I can’t see anything that’s too terribly wrong with me, and I figure that women do like me to some degree, as I am a fairly likable guy. The problem may lie in the fact that they just don’t like me enough to date me. I’ve even tried exercising and lifting weights, but even this fails to attract them. And so this dry spell has lasted for several years now with no sign of it ending, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why this is happening to me.

When I look out of my window on a typical weekend night here in the city of Albany, New York, I see plenty of evidence of men cavorting with women, men getting into romances, and men getting into highly-involved sexual relationships with women all along the small strip of avenue that I have a view of from my small apartment. And these men aren’t exactly clones of each other either. I can’t say that they fit the mold of some generic type of male, or some standard model of a male that is more likely to find a girlfriend in this city. Actually, the men here come in all different sizes, shapes, colors, and varying degrees of handsomeness. They all seem to be actively dating and having sex while doing it. And so I am still left wondering why I am the one who is left out of the running. This predicament has given me good cause to invent a theory regarding my exclusion from the dating pool, and lately this theory has given me some solace on lonely nights such as this but not enough solace to withstand the threat of a perpetual singledom that I can’t seem to wiggle my way out of no matter how hard I try.

This theory I’ve invented is based on the assumption that, due to some mystical or quasi-supernatural force that I cannot see but can still detect operating in the universe, that there are men like me in a sexually-thriving and promiscuous population who are strangely ‘anointed’ by these mystical forces to attract women on a continual basis and, therefore, get involved in both romantic and even purely sexual relationships, reproduce, and fill the world with their eventual offspring as a result. This, in turn, leaves all of those who remain ‘unanointed’ with the problem of never attracting the opposite sex no matter how hard they try or how desperate or clever their strategies of pursuit become. And so there is a growing divide between those who can get laid any time they wish and those who are forever closed off from this possibility.

For instance, I once knew a man who, in his younger years, was an anointed male who could pretty much get any woman he wanted. He wasn’t terribly handsome, and he certainly didn’t make a lot of money either. But somehow the women flocked to him wherever he went, and from my standpoint, I still can’t tell why the women seemed to fall at his feet. He was one of those rare birds that could walk into any local bar and pick up any woman he wanted for the night. And it wasn’t the case that he possessed any special gift of language or speech. Neither was he any more well-endowed in a certain area of the male anatomy than any other of the males jockeying for women on any given night. But one thing’s for sure – the women fell at his feet for reasons that most lonely men like myself just can’t understand.

A story about this man that I once had the sad misfortune of hearing boldly illustrates the contrast between this man, who was mystically anointed, and another man who was not. One night this same man walked into a local Albany watering hole intent on having a few beers before heading home. It was no secret that many women from the local area hung out at this bar, and on that particular night in question, a local beauty from the nearby college was sitting alone at the bar and having a quiet drink all by herself. It was clear to the other male barflies who buzzed about her that this woman didn’t want to be disturbed by any of their vain attempts to pick her up. She was there to relax, and she spurned all the men who propositioned her and who would have loved to take her home. This included a young man at the far end of the bar who had a crush on this college beauty but was always rejected by her.

For our purposes, we’ll call this poor young man Kronski, which alludes to the famous Henry Miller character who suffers a similar plight in one of Miller’s novels. At any rate, in walks the anointed man after a night drinking in a few other watering holes around town, and perhaps he is even thankful to be entering the bar alone. All he wants is a solitary drink before he calls it a night, and so the anointed man simply walks up to the bar, sits close to where the young beauty queen sits, and orders his nightcap. But for some strange reason, the beauty queen suddenly breaks her terrible silence, and she immediately starts talking to the anointed guy about God-knows-what. It turns out that the beauty queen and this guy really hit it off – to the intense consternation of poor Kronski at the end of the bar who is lost in the swill of his own misery and drinking himself to death over how this mystery stranger appeared out of nowhere and just picked up the woman of his dreams.

‘This can’t be,’ says Kronski to himself, as he has been rejected by her too many times before. Kronski has offered her the world along with all of his devotion, and yet she has still refused him, only to find delight in this complete and obtrusive stranger. Well, it turns out that this anointed stranger takes the beauty queen home that night, and for every night thereafter the two are seen cavorting and feeling each other up at the bar – all of this to Kronski’s slow and deepening madness, because it is Kronski who truly loves her and not this stranger. But what’s very important to note is that Kronski has no idea why the beauty queen has refused him and why she suddenly gives all of her love to a slick-tongued stranger who just happens to saunter in one night.

It turns out that poor Kronski just couldn’t take it anymore. One night, after voyeuristically tuning into the newly anointed couple at the bar and the romantic conversation they shared, poor Kronski soon left in a fury, got into his car as drunk as anyone his size could get, and rammed his vehicle full-speed into a retaining wall at the shopping plaza across the street. He died instantly. He just couldn’t handle the fact that this other man was an anointed one and that he simply wasn’t. He couldn’t understand what made some men anointed and other men unanointed. The unanointed, like Kronski, are sentenced to a life of abject loneliness and despair for reasons they can’t explain. Nor can anyone else explain it.

Let’s take another example of this strange curse that haunts men who aren’t necessarily as woebegone or as cruelly excluded as Kronski. For this, we take a turn to the literary world and reexamine the lives of the poets Phillip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, both of them good friends during their notorious literary careers, but alas! – one poet was unanointed while the other poet received all of the privileges that went with his anointed status. And while we often tinker with insanity when we actually try to compare the talents of two different poets, after a cursory survey of these poets’ works, many in the literary world may argue that Phillip Larkin was truly an amazing poet and was even more talented at the craft than his good friend Kingsley Amis. And while it’s true that Amis was cut from a more princely and perhaps a more physically attractive cloth than Larkin, let’s make no mistake about it that Larkin wasn’t exactly too ugly to be turned away by any of the women he pursued. Larkin, in other words, was certainly no Kronski in this regard but a well-known and talented poet whom most men would think capable of attracting many young women. Unfortunately for the unanointed, however, this is hardly the case.

To much of his chagrin, the beautiful and wealthy women of the European continent tumbled into Kingsley Amis’ arms, and there wasn’t really any reason for this other than Amis had somehow been anointed at birth by some Bene Gesserit wave of the hand, or perhaps a tapping on the head of a good witch’s wand, that permitted the most attractive women in the world to express themselves sexually with Amis and many lesser-known poets like him – but not with Larkin. Somehow Amis’ good friend was excluded and left out, like a baby thrown out with the bathwater, because no matter how hard Larkin tried, no matter how many stunts he pulled, all Larkin could hear were the crickets chirping from his lonely position on earth to infinite and empty space above when he propositioned women. And in the next house over it was Kingsley Amis who orchestrated the orgies that Larkin was never invited to.

Of course, we members of the literary world often credit Larkin’s unanointed status with the grinds and frustrations that often produced his great art. But while Amis was also a good poet, we can easily say that because of his anointed status, he must have also been a much happier poet and infinitely more satisfied with his life’s calling as though no other line of work would befit a man so privileged in this regard. It should also be noted here that there have been very few poets before Amis who have ever been credited with attracting the sheer number of wanna-be poets to the profession than he. They looked to imitate – not his poetry necessarily – but certainly his satisfying sex life.