From: narkiewi@venice.pilgrim.umass.edu (Jan Narkiewicz)
Subject: The Artist, 4000 words
Organization: Project Pilgrim, Umass
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 04:35:49 GMT
X-Posted-From: venice.pilgrim.umass.edu
X-Posted-Through: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

                             The Artist 
                           J. David Narkiewicz 

                                    i.  

     I hate artists in general.  It's a fundamental hatred of Picasso that 
does it.  It doesn't so much bother me that Picasso became a millionaire 
by painting pictures of musicians whose noses appear on their guitars.  I 
can somehow relate to that.  It's his mistresses that really get to me.  
To seduce a woman, he would simply draw her picture.  The line, texture, 
technique was enough to get any woman in bed.  Hell, if he'd drawn a 
picture of me, I'd consider getting a sex change and I'm as homophobic as 
they come.  Picasso didn't have to use alcohol, false compliments, 
groveling or begging -- what a bastard.  

     My hatred for artists is a little more elaborate, but none the less 
petty.  It goes like this: Boy number one (that's me) meets girl.  Girl 
likes boy number one.  Girl is accidentally killed in art museum by 
sculpture entitled ``Virgin Mary with Avocado and Side of Fries.''  So I 
lied.  I'm a chronic liar.  That's not why I hate artists.  It's like 
this.  Boy number one meets girl.  Girl likes boy number one, but boy 
number one is actually not boy number one; he's boy number two.  See, 
there was a boy before boy number one, we'll call him boy number zero or 
maybe boy number one-real.  The nomenclature doesn't matter; it's the idea 
behind it all.  This other boy is an artist and he was romancing girl long 
before second boy number one.  Girl leaves boy number one (the 
non-real-boy-number-one) for first boy number one.  Actually, she doesn't 
leave; she returns to the real boy number one leaving the boy who thought 
he was number one number zero because he has nothing.  Put more concisely, 
major bummer.  

     The girl's original boy in all this is an artist.  He's the 
competition, the enemy, hence my hatred for artists.  As an engineer you 
spend long hours studying, bleeding to keep up with current technology.  
You didn't want to be an engineer, but you're practical.  You'd rather be 
a writer or movie star or anything but a computer geek.  No, life doesn't 
allow that.  So you have boy number one, the artist.  He can work in a 
Burger Palace, face drenched in French fry grease, but since he's an 
artist, that's cool.  As an engineer making a decent living and being able 
to provide well for girl number one, you're not cool.  

     I guess it's artsie-fartsie types in general.  They get away with so 
much in life.  If you read the New York Times bestsellers list you see 
that five out of the ten most popular books are a plot involving an author 
who must rent a house in the country in order to find the peace and 
serenity required to write the great American novel.  Books about authors 
writing books.  Movies about actors making movies.  Pictures of 
photographers taking photographs.  I hate that shit.  

     Let me take a more logical approach to it all.  As an engineer my 
math background is extremely strong, so I can basically prove anything.  
The Earth has a radius of roughly 3963 miles.  Trust me; I'm an engineer 
and I know these things.  Girl leaves me.  I'm miserable.  Since my 
current location represents the geographic center of all misery, I can 
only assume that as you head progressively further away from my location 
the interaction between men and women improves.  The point furthest away 
from me on earth represents the location of the perfect romance.  There, 
in Cheng Mai, Thailand is a young couple whose love kicks ass on Romeo and 
Juliet's.  It's akin to the Boston Celtics playing basketball against the 
Lima, Ohio, grandmother/granddaughter wheelchair basketball team.  We'll 
call this Thai couple Betty and Bob.  I know those aren't real Thai names, 
but no one knows what real Thai names are.  Actually, you can't pronounce 
them.  I know this Thai girl named Jirattikorn Sriboonchoo.  Talk about 
names.  It could be worse.  She could be Chinese.  The Chinese are unique 
in their culture.  Whenever a child is born, the father enters the 
kitchen, takes a wok and drops it on the floor.  The noise that the metal 
makes when striking the kitchen's stone floor is the name he chooses for 
his child.  Ling Tin, Bong Ping or Clang Plunk.  

     So we have this Thai couple, Betty and Bob.  Actually, on a scale of 
one to ten, their love is only a five.  On a scale of one to ten my love 
for the girl is a ten but hers for the other boy is a thirty, giving me a 
score of negative twenty.  With Bob and Betty a five isn't very high.  But 
you have to remember that they are only 6926 miles from where I'm located.  
In alternative universe 17, on planet Zworf there is a couple whose love 
is a perfect ten, but they are the farthest away from my location in the 
universe and really don't count.  We'd call them Abby and Arlo, because no 
one can pronounce names from the planet Zworf.  They probably use the 
Cyrillic alphabet and it's all Greek to me.  No matter what, Bob and Arlo 
are both artists.  I just know this.  No, I don't consider myself to be 
New Age and hence able to discern such knowledge by reading my horoscope.  
It's basic laws of probability.  I'm miserable and in order for me to be 
miserable in a maximal sense, Bob and Arlo are artists.  

     This is the beauty of it all.  I'm at this ice cream shop parlor with 
the girl.  She's holding my hand in her tiny little fingers.  She's only 
5'1" so she's entitled to have tiny little fingers.  She slides a thank 
you card across the table to me.  It's wrapped in tissue paper.  I open 
it.  It's a flower on perfumed paper, drawn in pink and blue pastels.  
Hell, when I was three, I took a Crayola midnight-blue crayon and drew 
scribbles all over the new wallpaper in the dining room.  When I was nine 
I could color and stay in the lines -- most of the time.  When I was ten, 
I could paint by numbers.  Very few people realize that the Mona Lisa was 
actual the prototype for the first paint by numbers product ever marketed.  
So I'm sitting in this wire-backed chair with a round cushion that goes 
``foof'' when you sit down, my ice cream has long since melted and the 
chocolate chips settled to the bottom, and she's holding my hand.  The 
card reads, ``Thanks for dinner.''  It's a sweet gesture.  I'm touched.  
Then she says, ``I made the card myself.  I like art.  It's what he and 
have in common.  I guess that's why I love him.''  Remember, she's holding 
my hand telling me how she loves him, giving me a card thanking me for 
dinner, which was actually just foreplay to a session of pulling off each 
others' clothes and rolling around naked on the couch and then a good-bye, 
thank you very much, all I ever wanted to be was friends, it was a mistake 
and I can't see you ever again.  

     Only friends.  Friends don't let friends drive drunk.  Friends don't 
peel off each other's clothes and roll around naked on the couch.  Friends 
don't peel off each other's clothes while drunk or something like that.  I 
did mention previously that Picasso never needed to use alcohol in order 
to remove a woman's clothes.  In the case of our dinner, I hadn't needed 
to use alcohol either.  For an engineer, I'm not a bad cook and, don't 
worry, my couch is cloth.  Could you imagine rolling around naked on a 
leather or vinyl couch? Not that I'd ever own anything vinyl.  You'd end 
up all sweaty and sticking to the damn couch.  That wouldn't be any fun.  
It would be sort of like a biker orgy without their wallets attached to 
their belts by chains.  

     She's holding my hand.  My heart's being ripped apart.  I can't say 
this.  I'm an engineer and not subject to emotions.  Emotions are just 
fluctuations in the chemical balance of your body and hence a change in 
the medium through which electronic current passes in your brain.  

     Then it happens.  It's one of those electronic current things.  My 
brain shoots out an idea along one of my neural paths and the next thing I 
know, I say it.  I don't know why I do, but I blurt out, ``He draws nudes, 
doesn't he?'' I knew it was the truth.  I know her little 5'1" frame posed 
naked for him before, after and during lovemaking.  With a piece of 
charcoal, textured paper, the right shading and soft lighting, he could 
make love to her like I never could.  Sure, we rolled around on my 
cloth-covered couch, but it don't compare.  

     He's an artist, so I'm a poet.  ``I want to hit him in the head until 
he's dead.''  So much for my Shakespearian prose.  So poetry isn't prose, 
but I'm an engineer, so the interpreted definition is within an acceptable 
tolerance.  As we left the ice cream parlor, holding hands for the last 
time, Bob and Betty kissed for the first time in Cheng Mai.  There the 
moon is full, the night breeze warm and the sky full of stars.  She and I 
walk down to the cemetery knowing this is good-bye.  The slush is leaking 
through the holes in my docksiders, but I don't care.  I take her to Emily 
Dickinson's grave and show her the tombstone.  Oh boy! Gee whiz! Golly! We 
start to head away.  My socks are soaked through.  I know my white socks 
will be stained yellow as the color of my tan shoes runs.  

     We stop, I drop her hand, take her face gently, turn it towards me 
and we kiss.  At first she resists and then her lips open, accepting my 
tongue.  After a brief eternity, our lips part.  She asks, ``Why did you 
kiss me?'' If I were the original boy number one, aka the artist, I would 
have responded with something deep, romantic and beautiful -- ``I longed 
to taste the nectar of forbidden fruit one last time before being cast out 
of the garden of Eden of your heart.''  It may sound corny, but if he said 
it it would have really meant something.  

     I'm an engineer, a techie.  When the words ``Why did you kiss me?'' 
get synthesized by my neurons, I want to say, ``What a stupid question.''  
I don't.  I stand there, mouth open, looking stupid.  People with their 
mouths open always look stupid.  It's as if they haven't evolved to the 
point where they realize they can breath through their noses and hence 
avoid the occasional fly getting trapped between their open lips.  
Actually, if they are less evolved, the fly might be a desirable form of 
food supplement.  For me, it's just because I'm at a loss.  

     We walk, more slush, and over the chain at the cemetery gate.  

     Did I mention that the writing inside the card is all calligraphy? 
She signed it Sincerely.  No, not love, sincerely.  Keats and Yeats are on 
her side.  I know this.  Again, logic over New Age philosophy.  

     I get back to my office, I sit at my computer, I smell her card -- 
yes, stupid me, smelling paper.  She'd perfumed the paper.  It's the smell 
of her soft body cuddled up against mine.  I throw the card in the trash, 
turn on my computer and get to work.  Keats and Yeats are on her side.  
Wilde is on mine.  Bob and Betty are walking hand in hand when suddenly a 
statue of Buddha covered with soy sauce and a side of lo mein noodles 
falls on Betty, killing her.  On Zworf a simto of Venzeer covered with 
hoo-hoo and a side of smoofesterine falls on Abby killing her.  I smile 
and get to work.  I'm an engineer and not subject to emotions.  


                                 ii. 

     I love artists in general.  Why? Because they prove my logic to be 
flawless.  Picasso, in his own right, can miff many a weak individual.  
The way I see it, he could get laid at the stroke of a charcoal pencil, 
but could he play basketball? The guy was just over five feet tall.  You'd 
never find him on a professional basketball team.  The best he could do 
would be to serve as team artist, making portraits that were turned into 
10,000 t-shirts for ``t-shirt day.''  Free t-shirts too all children 
twelve and under just for attending the game and bring your t-shirt to 
your local Pizza Cave restaurant and get twenty-five percent off a large 
pepperoni pizza.  

     Now the girl in question is around Picasso's height, but I wasn't 
thinking that when I phoned her.  It was late at night but I knew she 
wouldn't be asleep.  She picked up.  I said, ``Hi, it's me.''  It's what I 
always say -- the perfect egocentric greeting.  The world revolves around 
me, therefore I simply have to say, ``It's me.''  and by default it is no 
other.  I could call up the President and he'd know it was me.  Maybe I'd 
even call up Picasso and hang up without saying anything.  That would 
teach him.  Of course, it wouldn't work too well since he's dead.  I could 
always hold a seance, contact him in the afterlife and then abruptly end 
the seance just to annoy him.  I don't think the telephone company can sue 
you for making crank ouija board calls to the afterlife.  Considering the 
state of our court system and given that the phone company would hire a 
good Jewish lawyer from New York, they could probably successfully sue me.  

     If Picasso were bright enough to hire a good Jewish lawyer, he could 
probably successfully sue me from the afterlife.  This is by no means 
antisemitic.  Jewish lawyers are considered to be damn good.  Fearsome is 
the term that best describes them.  It's a sign or respect and very 
Gentile reverence.  I remember the neighborhood bully when I was eight.  
He was two years older and he walked up to me one day, knocked my lunch 
box from my futile grasp and said, ``My dad's tougher than your dad.''  Of 
course at age eight, I had an excessive repertoire of snappy retorts and 
immediately shot back, ``Is not!'' He must have studied under the same 
world-famous snappy retort coach, for he responded, ``Is, too.''  This 
sequence of eloquent verbal barbs repeated itself several hundred times 
before it dawned on him to back up his claim.  ``Well, my dad's a 
longshoreman and they're all real tough.''  At the time, neither one of us 
knew that the longshoreman's union was all mob controlled and damned 
tough, but that was irrelevant.  I shot back with the truth, ``Well, my 
dad's a lawyer.''  The bully just laughed until I lied, ``A Jewish 
lawyer.''  At that stage he promptly paid me back the two year's worth of 
lunch money he'd extorted from me.  It didn't dawn on him until fifteen 
years later when we met by mere chance in a local bar that he and I were 
in the same Sunday school class.  By that time he had the belly of an 
unemployed welder living in a trailer park, so I did the manly thing; I 
ran.  

     She didn't hang up.  She just said, ``Oh, I didn't expect you to 
call.''  Let us not forget that ``I engineer'' and I received the highest 
grade in my ``Writing for Engineers'' class -- yes, the epic college-level 
course that after two months introduced the radical and rarely taught 
concept of the verb.  Mustering the prolific abilities of an engineer, I 
replied, ``I wanted to talk with you.''  Simply put.  Graceful.  Lets see, 
there's a pronoun, a helping verb, a verb and a prepositional phrase.  
There are a couple more things in there but after adjectives I started to 
lose my grasp on the material in ``Writing for Engineers.''  

     ``I'm not dating Jack any more,'' she said.  I know ``Jack'' does not 
conjure up images of an artist, but that was his name.  Jack Van Gogh, 
Jack Rembrandt and Jack Picasso just don't cut it.  

     ``What happened?'' I asked as I waited for the punchline, like, ``Oh, 
I'm dating a Jewish lawyer who specializes in lawsuits from the 
afterlife.''  She was great at such punch lines.  

     ``He got a girl pregnant, a sophomore in high school.  They can't 
afford to get married, but they're going to live together.  She'll go on 
welfare and he'll keep the job at the gas station.''  Okay, she wasn't as 
succinct as that, but that's my engineering interpretation of what she was 
saying.  I just sort of sat there bewildered.  I was looking up and I knew 
God was looking down directly at me.  I'm an engineer and therefore I 
can't believe in Him.  Believing in God requires faith.  As an engineer, I 
require hard facts, indisputable evidence.  There is God.  He's staring 
down at me with that little smirking cherub Picasso next to him -- Picasso 
starting center on Heaven's basketball team.  

     What if she'd said, ``He dumped me for a sophomore in high school?'' 
That would have allowed me to die happy.  I mean, the guy should be a 
junior in college and he's going bang-a-dy-bang with a child.  Or if she'd 
simply reiterated that he was no longer at the Burger Palace and now 
pumping gas? Hell, I would have danced.  I would have written a quarter 
page essay and maybe even included some verbs.  But no, God wasn't 
half-assed with his miracles.  Instead, he offered me indisputable proof.  
Jack had knocked up, bun in the ovened, forgotten the old rain coat, sired 
his noble, artistic seed in a fifteen-year-old girl who was starting life 
as a welfare mother.  ``Why, yes son,'' Jack would say.  ``I was going to 
be an epic artist like Picasso, but since I couldn't play basketball, I 
became a petroleum transfer engineer.''  So there was a God and that is a 
fact I will never again dispute.  

     So we talked.  Her voice was melodacious -- even though that's not 
really a word -- and it was as if he'd never existed.  I'd never had any 
competition.  I asked, ``So do you want to get together sometime?'' 

     ``Sure.  When?'' I was being set up for a fall, but what did I care? 

     I joked, ``How about tonight?'' Remember, I'm in my office at school 
and as a starving grad student I don't own a car.  She's in her dorm room 
twelve miles away.  Between us is a damn dark and cold January night.  

     She replied, ``You're joking.''  

     I swore that I meant it.  She gave me another, ``You're joking.''  
Even though she was never destined to be a trailer park-dwelling, 
unemployed welder, we exchanged variations off the same theme for the next 
hour.  I kept promising her I'd walk down there and she kept telling me I 
was mad.  Finally, it was well past midnight and we hung up.  She had 
thankfully not taken me up on my absurd offer.  I turned back to my 
computer and was about to get back to work when the phone rang.  All she 
said was, ``I want you to come down.''  I replied, ``Yes,'' as she hung 
up.  

     There I was, faced by twelve miles of cold asphalt.  I was sitting 
there in my office, a writhing mass of testosterone and she, a young, 
supple nymphette, was sitting in her room awaiting me.  Jack was lying in 
bed next to a fifteen-year-old girl with a swollen belly.  The bedroom of 
their cockroach-ridden apartment stank of petrol.  He just couldn't seem 
wash the smell from his hands, his hair or his clothes.  And in heaven, 
Picasso boxed out a fellow center who had two feet on him.  The offensive 
rebound goes to Picasso.  He puts it up off the glass and it's good.  This 
one is going to overtime.  

     I did feel bad for Jack.  I sincerely did.  I felt worse for the girl 
he got pregnant, but there was nothing I could do.  I did what any normal 
young man in their mid-twenties would do, I called a friend.  I had to 
make sure that what I was doing was right.  I wanted to be completely sure 
that my motives were pure and just.  ``I called her,'' I explained to my 
friend-turned-mentor.  ``She wants me to come down.''  

     ``What about the jerk she's dating?'' he asked with a yawn.  

     ``He knocked some girl up.  They're history.''  

     ``Then go,'' he said.  

     ``I have to walk.''  

     ``I'll give you a ride,'' he offered.  

     ``No,'' that's not why I called.  ``I need advice.  Would you walk 
twelve miles in the middle of the night to see her?'' 

     ``No, she's not my type,'' he countered.  

     ``How about for the soccer player you met dancing last week?'' My 
friend, Zen master of the strikeout, had humiliated himself in front of 
the entire women's soccer team, but oh what a babe to grovel in front of.  

     ``You know I would.  I wouldn't think twice about it.''  It never 
dawned on me that he said this from the warmth and comfort of his own bed.  
He was a friend and I took him at his word.  

     With time running down in overtime, Picasso puts up a desperation 
three-pointer and swoosh, it's good.  His team is only down by two.  

     I put on my coat, grabbed hat and scarf and left.  I could describe 
the walk.  It wasn't even boring.  It was a contest.  I was fighting 
Person Nature.  Normally, I would have said Mother Nature, but given the 
politically correct malady this nation suffers from, it's Person Nature.  
It was dark.  Tax cuts had turned off most of the street lights.  Every 
drunken yo-yo was out as they closed the bars and set all the intoxicated 
fools out on the streets to run up their quota of traffic fatalities.  

     Picasso stole the ball.  He stole the ball.  He drives the lane and 
goes up for the dunk...  

     Suddenly I was there.  One hour and forty-five minutes and I'd 
covered twelve miles.  It's not Olympic time, but I was wearing shoes, it 
was January and it was pitch black out.  The record still holds today.  
Picasso would have done it in one hour and forty minutes, but luckily he 
was tied up in winning the basketball game.  She was sitting at the ``bell 
desk'' of her dorm, the place where guests check in.  Security had long 
since gone off to bed.  She opened the door, we both said, ``Hi.''  and 
then stood there looking at each other.  I kept thinking how damn pretty 
she was.  After a twelve miles in the middle of January, the blood was 
flowing, gallons of hormones had been released into my blood stream in 
order to give me the energy to walk and I was the ultimate warrior, I was 
unstoppable and you can bet I wasn't thinking about her intelligence or 
sense of humor.  I'd classify those as afterplay thoughts.  

     We inched together with hesitation.  We were both scared.  My fear 
was simple.  I was scared of getting burned again, a good sound male fear, 
a just fear, a fear respected and revered by nine out of ten religious 
sects surveyed, a fear paid tribute to by the League of New York Jewish 
Lawyers and the Pablo Picasso Basketball Fan Club.  She was experiencing 
those nameless, senseless female-type fears that women all have in order 
to piss men off royally.  Her fears had nothing to do with the guy she'd 
loved and admired for two years who had proceeded to let her down by 
getting another woman pregnant -- insomuch as a fifteen-year-old girl can 
anatomically be called a woman.  Nope, she was experiencing evil, 
anti-Christ female type fears: ``Will I break a nail?'' ``What if he wears 
white after Labor Day?'' ``What if we attend a wedding, I cry and my 
mascara runs?'' ``What if a mad scientist in some Third World country 
unearths a flying saucer and uses the technology he discovers to build a 
super-laser capable of destroying the world, but luckily the CIA, an 
institution known for its common sense and forethought, has developed a 
way to make people invisible and they successfully lead a raid on the 
super-laser without causing a Senate committee to be formed in order to 
investigate their actions?'' 

     Then my arms slid around her tiny frame and the fears in both of us 
vanished.  I leaned down and kissed her.  Then she did it.  I opened my 
eyes for the briefest moment and saw that one of her legs was bent at the 
knee -- the famed ultra-sexy, raised-foot kiss.  Scientists have shown 
that the distance the foot swings up off the ground is directly 
proportional to the sexual virility of the male being kissed.  It was 
pretty obvious that I was the ``ultimate stud'' or in laymen's terms, I 
had enough testosterone to jump start England, which hasn't had a sexy 
thought in several hundred years.  Lets face it, the British aren't known 
for their cooking or their preoccupation with making love.  It's a wonder 
they reproduce at all, especially their royalty.  During the Elizabethan 
era a man from Tunbridge Wells, England had the last known British sexy 
thought.  For a fraction of a second he considered, in a half-hearted 
manner, buying his wife a piece of lingerie from France, a country which 
has nothing but sexy thoughts.  The Thought Police were on him in seconds 
and he was quickly imprisoned in the Tower of London where he was forced 
to eat food that was neither boiled into an unrecognizable, flavorless 
lump nor deep fried until it became an oozing, greasy, 
cholesterol-breathing life form.  Obviously no Briton could handle such 
torture and he quickly died of starvation.  

     I always wondered what happens when two ``ultimately sexy'' lesbians 
kiss.  They'd both raise one foot off the ground and then promptly fall 
over.  There must be hundreds of lesbians out there with broken wrists or 
serious sprains.  It's going to become one of those trendy injuries, like 
Disco Finger, incurred by people who snap too much at the disco while 
wearing bellbottom leisure suits.  I can just picture the government-run, 
public service messages aired on tv.  ``Are you a lesbian? If so, we'd 
like to warn you against Bi-joinal, Oral Contact, Ultimately Sexy 
Participant's Disease.  This disorder can cause severe damage to the wrist 
and elbow when you and your partner kiss and fall over.  There have been 
documented cases of death and even people having their eye put out.''  
Putting you eye out is what parent's love to warn you about.  If you're 
doing something that is remotely unsafe in your parents eyes, which 
everything is, they'll warn of the repercussions.  I remember taking my 
first steps.  My mother picked me up and said, ``You don't want to be 
walking around on two legs.  You might fall and put your eye out.''  Up 
until age seventeen I crawled on all fours.  

     We were kissing.  The perfected kiss.  Lets face it, things are going 
too well.  It's a well known fact that I spent the remainder of the night 
in a warm, cozy bed with a grateful young lady who didn't care if I was 
artist or engineer.  In fact, I didn't leave that bed for three days.  The 
room took on that sweaty sensual smell of lovers in bed, even though we 
didn't make love.  We talked, laughed and peeled off each other's clothes 
to varying degrees, but we never had intercourse.  I guess that made it 
all the worse.  It was fun without intercourse.  Every guy knows that fun 
equates to sex.  If you don't have sex then you're giving her something 
for nothing.  Despite this, I was having fun.  It contradicted every known 
law of nature that applied to the male of the species.  Person Nature 
would have been throwing a fit at my digression, except that he/she/it has 
season tickets to Picasso's basketball games and could be bothered to 
throw a fit about anything that didn't directly affect the score of the 
game.  

     The next two months roughly equated to a cheesy romance.  We were 
kids.  We were young.  We were in love.  Yes, we even eventually had 
intercourse, but unlike Jack, I wore a rain coat.  

     We were lying on my couch.  We'd just made love.  Her tiny body was 
curled up on my chest.  She was crying.  She was telling me about how her 
family had escaped from Vietnam.  She was telling me how her grandmother 
had taken care of her because her parents each worked three jobs in order 
to save enough money for the boat trip out of the country.  She and her 
sisters had left Vietnam, but her grandmother was too old to go.  Her 
grandmother had died a week later.  She lay there on my chest crying.  It 
was her fault.  She never should have left.  Her grandmother died of 
loneliness.  I held her and after her tears were gone, she said, ``I love 
you.''  I held her tiny body as tightly as I dared and said the words back 
to her.  

     Now the punch line.  Donkey basketball.  There was no Picasso 
involved in it, at least not directly.  It was weird.  The weekend was on 
us.  She was nervous because her grades were faltering.  She and I hadn't 
been together for three weeks, not since the ``my grandmother died/I love 
you weekend.''  I really wanted to see her.  She said she had to miss me 
again, but she was going to take the time to watch her roommate's brother 
play donkey basketball.  For you uncultured barbarians, Vandals, Huns, 
Ostrogoths and Visogoths, I shall lower myself to explain the 
sophisticated sport of donkey basketball.  It's sort of man versus nature 
versus man.  You drag this damn donkey around the floor torturing the 
thing.  You can't touch the basketball unless your donkey is with you and 
you can only shoot while sitting on your donkey's back.  It's a way for 
high schools to raise money.  They bring in the donkeys, drag them up and 
down the court for two fifteen-minute halves and charge spectators five 
dollars a head.  It's students versus teachers in this epic test of skill 
and athleticism.  The money goes to the senior class so they can donate a 
tree or a bench or something to the school.  If they make a lot of money, 
maybe the class can buy t-shirts with a painted picture of the real 
basketball team on it.  The artist would be none other than Jack Picasso, 
the distant cousin of Pablo who played semi-pro basketball for a while, 
but not on a donkey.  

     And the highlight of donkey basketball is when the donkeys behave as 
the laws of Person Nature expects them to.  The donkeys dump on the floor 
and along come members of the high school's audio/visual club dressed in 
clown suits -- you know the types.  They're geeks, future engineers.  And 
no, I was never in the audio/visual club at my high school.  The two 
clowns ham it up with an oversized dust pan and a huge broom to match.  A 
rose by any other name would still be audio/visual member in a clown suit.  

     You see, she'd promised.  It made no tangible sense to me.  There was 
some obscure rationale based on her roommate's mother having breast cancer 
and therefore she should spend time with her roommate.  But donkey 
basketball? She'd explained it all to me over the phone.  Be both hung up 
mutually disgruntled.  Thirty seconds later she called back.  She promised 
to come up on Saturday and watch me play soccer.  I told her it was silly 
because it was only a pick up game and I'd rather do something with her, 
something that required interaction in the form of social intercourse.  
She completely out-maneuvered me with the most fearful of weapons in the 
human arsenal, female logic.  

     Donkey basket-ball was a sport and soccer was a sport.  She was 
watching a sport with her friend, so she should watch a sport with me, 
even though she was watching me play and not watching with me.  You see? 
You understand? It makes perfect sense based on female logic.  As the math 
world adopted from the Latin, QED -- it has been shown.  Why did I doubt 
it? Why couldn't my brain, the epicenter of all logic, comprehend why she 
wanted to watch me run around in a pick up soccer game? She did come up.  
She did watch.  I took her to lunch.  Afterwards, she suggested we go back 
to may place to talk.  I knew we wouldn't talk -- not with the 
love-magnetism of my couch.  I said no and sent her home.  She needed to 
work and I wasn't going to talk on my couch without first legitimately 
talking on my couch.  

     I stayed in that night to work while she did that donkey basketball 
thing.  The phone rang at 1:00 AM.  She wanted me to take her to lunch 
tomorrow.  I asked if she had the time.  She said yes.  We set up a time.  
Fifteen minutes later the phone rang.  She said, ``I just can't handle 
being in love.''  That was it.  She dumped me.  I haven't called her 
since.  I still run it through my mind.  Girl decides to go to silly high 
school ritual.  Out of some bizarre female guilt, she watches me play 
soccer and offers to make love.  I turn her down on the lovemaking and she 
decides that I should take her to lunch.  I agree and she dumps me.  In 
computer programming, there is something called self-modifying code.  This 
is where you write a program and the program actually changes itself as it 
runs.  It sort of makes up its own rules as it goes along.  It's very 
dangerous.  Then there are techniques for solving problems.  Some 
techniques generate a bunch of guesses and then slowly decide on what the 
answer to the question should be.  This is called convergence.  She was a 
self-modifying program not running a convergence algorithm.  If it had 
been a snake, it would have bit me.  

     Being dumped is a natural part of life unless you're Pablo Picasso, 
then you do all the dumping.  Being dumped twice by the same woman is 
proof that a man's frontal lobe is smaller than a woman's.  I'm young.  
I'll live.  But the second time it was worse.  Yes, I'd braced myself for 
the axe that I knew would fall, but I was expecting a Jack or Bob or Frank 
to surface and spoil it all.  Jack may have been a bag of wind who boasted 
art and flipped burgers and pumped gas, but he was a living, breathing 
entity.  He obviously had some charisma and charm.  He talked a good line 
and had a two-year head start on me, therefore being beaten by him was 
acceptable.  ``I just can't handle being in love.''  Who was I fighting 
there? Who was the competition? I'd been defeated by an abstract idea.  
I'm an engineer and I require hard facts, indisputable evidence as to why 
I'd lost.  God existed only because I believed in the miracle of Jack 
impregnating the fifteen-year-old girl and the girl from Vietnam is no 
longer a part of my life because I was defeated by a supernatural force, 
an entity she had faith in without tangibles or hard facts.  The evil, 
smiling cherub Picasso and I shook hands.  I'd make no more crank ouija 
board calls and promised to believe in God without the proof of miracles.  
Picasso, would promise to throw the next three games played by Heaven's 
basketball team.  Somehow I think he had the easier end of the bargain.  

     I believed in Hell, too; I'd dated her.  I'm an engineer and I 
believe in God.  Friday nights are better spent working.  Love may break 
your heart but there are stronger forces in Person Nature's arsenal.  I 
took a sip of coffee and returned to my work.  Love may have broken my 
heart, but without caffeine, it would have stopped.  Some lovers have 
Paris.  Others have Venice.  I had my coffee and therefore, ``I 
engineer.''  The steady rhythm of of the keyboard, the smell of coffee and 
the stutter of disk drives.  Life was good.  


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