A few months ago, I bought an iPad for my wife. W had been hinting for a while that she wanted one, and when I say “hinting,” I mean telling me every day to buy her an iPad or she was going to staple my lips as I slept.

And boy was she happy when I presented it to her. For one short moment in time, I was the guy on the white horse in the Old Spice commercials who could do no wrong. Immediately after opening the package, she logged on to Facebook and boasted, “My honey just bought me an iPad! Isn’t he the most wonderful, greatest, bla bla bla and best husband ever?”

Naturally, this did not go over well with any of the men in our inner circle of family and friends— The Brotherhood, as I like to call them. In fact, it was my brother-in-law, Sage, who promptly Faceblasted me for going rogue.

What is going rogue, you ask? Going rogue is buying or doing something so wonderful, thoughtful, bla bla bla for your wife, that it causes all the women of the inner circle to blurt to their husbands, “How come you don’t buy me no iPad!?”

Indeed, in the few short minutes after W’s Faceboast, all the other wives of the inner circle—The Sisterhood—began posting about what lazy, rotten, cheapo bastards their husbands were for not doing the same.

Not that any of the members of our Brotherhood deserved it. They’ve all purchased excellent, spontaneous gifts in the past. In fact, it was shortly after the iPad debacle that Sage himself went horribly rogue. The little bastard—for no reason other than to express his devotion and bla bla blappreciation—brought his wife, Jessica, a bouquet of flowers accompanied by the following note, which she promptly posted on Facebrag:

“Dearest Buttercup, you are my sun, and moon, and gag, vomit, hurl. For you, I would climb to the top of the highest retch, sail the roughest bile, because I love you from the bottom of my barf.”

Make no mistake. This was a far more serious transgression against The Brotherhood because his gift came from a place of adoration, whereas mine was merely an effort to muzzle my wife so I could play Call of Duty in peace.

What followed was as hilarious as it was tragic. W was in the living room, scrolling through Facegloat on her iPad, when she saw Jessica’s post.

“How come you never do anything nice like that for me,” she snorted, holding the still-shimmering iPad in her greedy fingers!

Oh, well, that’s how it is with wives, I guess. You and she can be on the terrace of an Italian villa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and still she’ll figure out a way to say “You never take me anywhere” with a straight face.

It’s just what married men must deal with and, since we can’t change women, the best we can do is stop throwing each other under the bus, because, up to now, the concept of going rogue has been unclear and discombobulated. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to clarify and, um, combobulate, the rules and definitions of rogueism.

There are three basic ways to go rogue.

The first, and most common, is buying your significant other a spontaneous gift—for no other reason than to express your love and undying bla bla blavotion—and, sure as Herman Cain was dropped on his head as an infant, it’s an abomination unto The Brotherhood.

The second example is buying a non-spontaneous gift, you know, during those gift-expectant holidays (birthday, Christmas, etc.), but spending far more money than anyone else in The Brotherhood is spending. For example, if you buy the missus a two-karat diamond for Valentine’s Day and the rest are doing chocolate and flowers, you have gone senselessly rogue.

Last, any of those creative and priceless-type gifts—like writing love poems, or having “Happy anniversary, darling,” plastered across the stadium JumboTron, or building a red carpet made of rose petals that lead from the front door to the bedroom, where you’ll be waiting in silk boxers and grasping a bottle of baby oil—are especially disagreeable to The Brotherhood, as they require planning, effort and—shoot me now should I ever go the silk-boxers route—passion.

Of course, in a perfect world, no man would ever go rogue against his boys. But we live in the real world, with real women—women with hormones that rage like barbarian marauders across the continent of your marriage—making it sometimes necessary to wander from the herd in order to prevent your lips from being stapled together.

In these instances, just be sure to notify The Brotherhood of your intention to stray. This way, it gives them the opportunity to buy something of equal value, or begin the quarantining process— which is done by dropping their wives’ cell phones in the garbage disposal, hacking their social pages and infecting them with some sort of influenza bug that will keep them from leaving the house all week.

So, men, are we all on the same page? Excellent! Now let’s all take the Oath of The Brotherhood. Please put your hand on our bible—1001 Fart Jokes— and repeat after me: “We, the proud, brave—yet war-weary—married men of The Brotherhood, do solemnly swear to go rogue only when necessary, to alert The Brotherhood when deviation is unavoidable and to reject Satan—The Old Spice Guy—for it is he who will lead us into the shadow of the valley of the doghouse, so help me Hemingway, amen.

“They defended [Bill Clinton] for his indiscretions in office but want Anthony Weiner run out of town….”
—Michael Medved

“What Weiner did was worse than what Larry Craig did. So, why shouldn’t he have to resign as well?”
—Commenter on USAtoday.com

There’s a lot of this going around. A lot of these scandalistas like to compare Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s debacle to other famous political sex scandals, to determine how much he should be despised and what should become of him. Of course, the comparisons are mostly partisan and lack uniformity, which is why I have developed the following formula—so that we can objectively discern whose sex scandals are worse than whose and where Weiner ranks among them.

For the purposes of this formula, each scandal category receives a point value between one and 10. For instance, Standard Adultery—the offense of (yawn) regular old cheating with a consenting adult—is worth one point. Add five points if the spouse is terminally ill. Add five Hypocrisy Points for any Bible-humping, family-values politicians caught fooling around; add another five Hypocrisy Points if a politically active opponent of gay rights is caught consorting with a member of the same sex. Tack on seven Corruption Points for any laws broken in relation to the affair (not counting the crime of adultery because that’s an idiotic law). Add seven points if it’s one of those creepy, non-consensual sexual exposer-type of transgressions (like whipping out your phallus during a private meeting with the president of the local NOW chapter). Make it 10 if he touches or gropes her private parts, un-consentingly.

For siring a love child, the points range from one to 10, depending on how the child was treated by the offender.

No points will be added for lying (everyone lies about sex, so it’s a wash) or if the affair is with a prostitute. Yes, I know, prostitution is illegal, but let’s be honest: Blowing politicians during lunch breaks so they can stay focused on running the country is why prostitutes were invented.

Now, with that formula in mind, let’s analyze some modern-day political sex scandals:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: Ten points for being a creepy, non-consensual Genitalia Groper and five points for the love child. He does not receive the Standard Adultery value because he married a Kennedy-babe and federal law states that if you marry a Kennedy-babe, you must cheat on her. 15 points.

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig: As much as his Family Values and Gay Rights hypocrisies (10 points) turn my stomach, the only law he broke is a dumb one. I mean, seriously, why can’t you pick up dudes in the bathroom? Add one point for Standard Adultery, but subtract one point for the comic value of his hilarious “wide stance” defense. 10 points.

U.S. Rep. Mark Foley: This is difficult to grade because he didn’t actually fornicate with anyone (that we know of); however, he was sending sexually explicit messages to several underage male pages (which is illegal, earning seven points, plus 10 points for Family Values and Gay Rights hypocrisies). 17 points.

U.S. Sen. John Edwards: I never realized what a total douche-nozzle John Edwards is: He had Standard Adultery for one point, a love child for the full 10 points (Edwards pushed for abortion, then denied paternity), the Cancer Bonus (wife Elizabeth was very sick) and a shit-ton of (alleged) corruption—such as his spending thousands of public dollars on gifts for his lover and funneling more than $900,000 of campaign funds to cover up the affair. 23 points.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich: If Edwards is a douche-nozzle, Gingrich is the dirty, yeasty vagina it goes inside: We have Standard Adultery, the Cancer Bonus and a Multiple Sclerosis Bonus (he cheated on two wives—one with cancer, the other M.S.), a Family Values Hypocrisy and an Impeachment Hypocrisy (eight points) because he actively sought to remove President Clinton for doing the same exact bullshit he was doing. 24 points.

President William J. Clinton: It always bothered me how Clinton’s defenders persistently griped that he was “impeached for a BJ,” as if that were his worst or only infraction. Clinton’s sex felonies are so many, so egregious, that I don’t have the time or desire to add them up, what with the perjuries, the rape accusation, the fact that he used the state police as his personal sex-transit system, the persistent trapping of women in his office, the groping and the exposing of his tallywhacker like a coked-up monkey in a Vegas cathouse and, of course, how he deployed a team of operatives to viciously attack and destroy his accusers in the press. ? points.

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner: Well, there’s no Family Values Hypocrisy, no corruption, no perjury, no minors, no non-consensual touchies or exposies, no love children, no attempts to destroy the objects of his desire. There isn’t even a Standard Adultery deduction because he never actually had sex with actual women. At best, he receives a half-point for his virtual affairs. As for the recently emerged photo of Weiner in women’s clothing, don’t even try it, Malph! He was 18 years old. It could’ve been a prank. It could’ve been Halloween. Or maybe he just likes wearing women’s clothing—that’s his business. It’s all his business. They should have left him alone to do his job. 1/2 point

Ed Decker
06.22.11

On one particular night, ambitious-drunk blood coursing through my veins, I thought I’d go and get me a lap dance.

Not that I’m some sort of lap-dance addict. It’s just that, well, Mexico is the land of the permissive lap dances. Couple that with the fact that you just can’t get a proper lap dance in San Diego-what with all the bullshit restrictions and that confounded no-touch law, a lap dance that actually occurs on the lap is difficult to find. So I figured I’d treat myself.

But it was an awful experience. It wasn’t even a lap dance-it was really just an advertisement to go in the back room and get a blow job, because the whole time she danced, she kept asking, “We go back room, yes?”

“No thanks,” I would say. “This is just fine.” Then she’d wriggle and writhe some more and, after a few minutes, say, “We go back room now?”

“No back room, please,” I’d say again as her body continued to wriggle and sway.

“You like, yes?” she said, offering her breasts and nipples on a platter. “We go back room?”

“No,” I said, irritated. “No back room!” And I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, lady, don’t you know the second rule of the Strippo-cratic Oath?:

Thou Shall Not Nag (Which seemed like a no brainer to me).

Anyway, that was one bad lap dance. Not the worst, though. The worst dance my lap ever received happened last November, during my bachelor party, in a strip club in Las Vegas.

I was just sitting there with my pals, drinking and laughing and talking man-stuff when a blonde stripper approached and took my hand. “Let’s go, honey,” she said, leading me away. “Your friends just bought you a lap dance.”

She led me to a elevated stage that looked like a boxing ring but decorated with plants and aquariums and sexy lighting and HD TVs and several chairs, four of which were occupied by other strippers doing lap dances on other customers’ laps.

My stripper sat me on the chair, faced me, bent forward, bent her arms, placed her elbows against my shoulders for support, and put her face into my chest so that she looked like a preying mantis tearing into my ribcage.

Her bony elbows protruding into the fleshy area just below the shoulders made me wince in pain. She supported her entire weight with her elbows and the more she gyrated, the more her elbows dug in, making this the most pysically painful lap dance I’d ever received and a clear violation of rule number 8 of the Strippo-cratic Oath:

Cause No Harm (unless requested).

Just when I was thinking this thing couldn’t get any more miserable, she started chatting.

“So you’re getting married tomorrow?” she asked, her elbows finding deeper purchase into my upper breastplate.

“Yup.”

“Does your wife allow you to have lap dances?”

“She’s fine with it,” I said.

“I’ll never understand women like that,” she said with a sneer, her rump rotating, elbows digging. “I would never let my man go to a strip club.”

Oath Clause No. 13: No Wife Insulting.

“She knows it’s a harmless activity,” I said, defending my marriage’s honor as the stripper jeered. Then I realized, Whoa, wait a minute now. Why am I defending myself to a stripper? I mean, is this chick for real? A stripper is making me feel guilty for receiving a lap dance and insulting my wife for allowing it?!

Oath Clause No. 9: Camouflage Your Psychoses.

Once she was finished with her morality lecture, she launched into a soliloquy about her crappy childhood, and her crappy career, and her two crappy marriages that ended crappily. The woman was tri-polar, I figured, because she kept lurching in and out of three basic temperaments: Anger, sadness and joy.

When she talked about her ex-husbands she became red-faced and angry. When she talked about her new boyfriend (soon to be husband No. 3) her mood swung back to uncomfortable joy as she went on and on about how he was a great, good looking and he doesn’t go to strip clubs because he’s a man of character, and I’m thinking, Holy Christ, get me out of this freaking chair!

I looked across the room to see a red-haired fire goddess fanning her flames over a man with his head thrown back in ecstasy. She was running her fingers in his hair and burrowing her nose into his neck. Her elbows were nowhere near his shoulders. Her mouth was still. She wasn’t saying a word-a real student of the oath.

I looked back at my stripper-mouth flapping, elbows digging like the wretched mantis she was. I thought, but didn’t say, We have a stripper oath for a reason, lady–to preserve the illusion.

When you ignore the tenets of the oath, you shatter the illusion that you want me. You shatter the illusion that I am such a prime male specimen, random gorgeous women cannot resist undulating in my presence. When you ignore the oath, you shatter the illusion–you know–the illusion that I happen to be paying for.

And I looked back at the flaming red head and wondered, how did this happen? Of all the strippers in Vegas, how did I end up with this hypocritical, tri-polar, wife-insulting, elbow-digging, unrequested-pain-providing, non-psychoses-camouflaging, illusion-shattering, hypocritical, holier-than-thou morality lap-hag?

How, how, how?

Oh God, give it a rest already with this whole Tiger Woods infidelity outrage. For crying out loud, don’t you know? Everybody cheats: We cheat on our taxes, we cheat on our résumés, we cheat on our facepage entries for age and weight and, yes, we have cheated—or are about to cheat—on our husbands and wives.

According to the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 45 to 55 percent of married women and 50 to 60 percent of married men “engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship.” And that’s just those who admit to it. If you add 15 percentage points for those who are lying, 15 for people who would cheat but can’t—because they are too ugly, dumb and smelly to seduce somebody other than their ugly, dumb, smelly spouses—you’ve got a 85-90 percent chance that normal people in normal situations cheat.

“We wanted to believe Tiger was… true to his family values,” wrote sportswriter Jay Mariotti on Fanhouse.com. “[We wanted to believe] he was good and wholesome enough to help shape the world well into the future….”

Hey, Jay, are you daft!? You put the world’s future in Tiger Woods’ hands? Well, I say, thank God his wholesome image has been tarnished. Because it was a fraud to begin with. Wholesome images are always a fraud. There are no wholesome people, only wholesome reputations. And now that Tiger has shanked his, it means there’s less pressure for the rest of us to live up to a lie. It’s time for the cheaters of the world to come out of the closet. Stand and be counted cheaters! Let everyone see how normal and natural it is to stray. Let them see that cheating is human nature and there is nothing wrong with human nature. Let them know that maybe, just maybe, what is wrong is this unreasonable demand to be ever-faithful when every grain of your humanity is screaming, “Get some strange! Get some strange!”

Fidelity is so ’80s. Vows are for saps. Marriage is an eternity. Monogamy was never meant to withstand that kind of monotony. It’s unrealistic. That’s why I propose that all marriages should have an Infidelity Mulligan for every five years of bondage—er, marriage. That’s one affair per every five years of wedlock which I truly believe will help keep boredom at bay and be useful as a marital negotiating tool: “Honey, dear, baby—how about a two-hour hot-oil and full body massage in exchange for an extra Infidelity Mulligan?” If that isn’t win-win, I don’t know what is.

Of course, we are drifting into dangerous waters here. Guidelines must be established so as not to critically injure the marriage. Naturally, the rules would be slightly different for each spouse:

Mulligan Rules for Men (stepping out on wives):

1. Condoms Mandatory.

2. One Night Stands Only (emotional or romantic connections are prohibited. No returnsies).

3. No Friendsex (unless her friend is super hot and promises to keep her mouth shut)

4. No Sugar Daddying (purchasing expensive gifts for your mistress, such as jewelry or breast enhancements, is expressly forbidden. That money should be spent on cleaning and cooking appliances for your wife).

5. Ménage à Trois Management (if you manage to pull off a complicated Ménage Méneuver and convince the mistress to join you and the wife in bed, then it’s not really cheating, and the mulligan is restored).

Mulligan Rules for Women (stepping out on husbands):

1. Condoms Mandatory (two condoms are required: one by him and one giant, nonoxynol-drenched, 5-foot body condom to be worn by her).

2. Penis Inferiority Respect (size of lover’s penis must be considerably smaller than husband’s).

3. Re-Sanitization Procedure (every home should have a Marital Re-entry Decontamination Shower and Fumigation Chamber to eliminate any germs she may have picked up).

4. Sugar Daughtering Permitted (wife may receive expensive gifts from lover, especially big-ticket items, such as automobiles or jet skis. Breast enhancements are acceptable too, provided the husband chooses the shape and size).

5. No Lover Bringing-Homing (Bringing home a lover for a three-way is not acceptable, unless the lover is a woman, in which case, um, yeah, that’d be OK).

6. No Oral.

7. No Anal

8. No Vaginal

9. No Land Dwellers (wife may not have sex with any of your friends, nor her coworkers, nor neighbors, nor, for that matter, anyone who lives in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia or Antarctica. Basically, she may not have relations with any man who lives on an occupied landmass. She may have sex with an Eskimo from the Arctic ice shelf, on the ides of January, on an iceberg—populated by a flock of agitated penguins—if that’s the sort of thing she goes for. Perv!)

Ed Decker
12/09/09

Originally published in San Diego CityBeat

Aside from gay-pride parades and sloshball games, strip clubs are unrivaled when it comes to watching men make jackasses of themselves. The creepy crawlers; the gropers; the old-man golly-jolly seekers; the loser lonelies; the wannabe pimp gangstas; the misogynistas; the inside-the-bar-sunglass-wearing, big-Dan-on-campus, 20-something yuppie twits–all seem to have no idea how to act in a strip club.

Maintaining an exceptional strip-club presence begins with your approach to a strip club: What you think it is. What you think it’s for.

Some guys, the loser lonelies for instance, wrongly believe it’s a place to meet women. The misogynistas think it’s a place where it’s acceptable to be rude and/or act superior to women. The gropers believe personal-space rules of the outside world don’t apply because chicks walk around half naked and pretend to like them.

My approach to the strip club, let’s call it a strip-club thesis, is this: A strip club is a place to engage in a little harmless fantasy; but be cautious because fantasy can be addictive, so, like everything else, strip clubs should be enjoyed in moderation–oh and be cool when you’re in there, cool?

Cool.

My strip-bar modus operandi is as such: Round up friends. Enter venue. Sit at bar. Order drinks. Watch stripper dances from afar. Get drunk. Have fun.

I like to have a stack of about 40 or so singles ready so when the girls come up to my stool with their “Did you see me dance?” rap, I can slip one in the bra and send them packing as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they’ll want to chat that dollar out of me, and, honestly, engaging in stripper small talk can be excruciating–for both of us. It’s why I don’t bother much with lap dances.

To me, there’s nothing more absurd than having a half-naked hot potato writhing over you as she recounts her most recent DMV experience in detail. I’d rather sit at the bar with the boys, laughing and drinking and doling out dollars to the “Did you see me dance” dames, and every now and then, when my fantasy dream girl emerges from behind the purple curtain–the soft-light sheen on her perfect bosom, ass, legs and mouth further fogging my Rumple-sopped brain–I make my way to a seat at the stage and throw money at her heels until she crawls to me like a lion and swallows my entire head with her cleavage.

Afterward, I go back to the bar to do more quality drinking and sassing with the boys, and not talking any stupid shit to the girls, or the bartender, and just being a normal person. I believe this is how one should comport oneself in a gentleman’s club. For those who are new to the stripper experience, or just plain lousy at it, here are five things you should probably not do in a gentleman’s club.

1. Hitting on the Strippers: Oh, yawn. Could you be more obvious? The chances of pulling an on-duty stripper are about the same as your chances of getting hit by lightning while being eaten by a shark, in the same place, twice. The exception is, of course, The Alphaclops male. The Alphaclops is a massive, walking, one-eyed penis-like creature that can lay the females of an entire metropolis at once and induce clitoral orgasm in a woman with only the whisk of wind he creates as he walks by. If you are not an Alphaclops male–and I guarantee you are not–don’t even try it.

2. Rudeness: I despise the strip-club misogynistas. They call the girls bitches and sluts behind their backs and talk down to them as if, by virtue of their chosen vocation, they are inferior, when really, deep inside, it is the misogynista who is inferior and can only feel superior to women in a venue where they’re being objectified en masse.

3. Eye-Contact Abuse: There’s a theory that strippers will like you better if you make a lot of eye contact. But eye contact is good in stripper bars the way eye contact is good in the outside world: In periodic, medium-sized doses only. Don’t be one of these bozos who dreamily gaze into a stripper’s eyes like they’re trying to pry open the window to her soul, crawl inside and creep to where her soul is sleeping so he can climb into bed with it.

4. Dumb Questions: This is difficult for me because I have a hard time keeping my inner journalist at bay. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like stripper small talk–because I always end up asking them all sorts of mood-killing questions like, “What does your father think of your career choice?” and “Which is your favorite brand of stripper-pole grease?”

5. Stripper Gifts: Never bring a stripper a present. It’s too losery, too stalkery. And you should shoot yourself in the ear if you ever compose a poem for a stripper.
O’ Mercedes
How you writhe
On the dance floor of my heart.
I love you.
Now what is your address?
That I may deposit a dead bird
on your porch.
Ed Decker
04.15.09

A journalist I know was polling men for a feature story she was working on. It was one of those man-on-the-street type of articles in which everyone’s asked the same question and the responses are printed.

The question was this: “What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received about dating.”
I told her, “Oh crap–that’s easy!” The worst advice I have ever received was, “Don’t give up on love.”

It’s inevitable. Whether there’s some new girl you adore who’s not reciprocating or a long-term girlfriend who’s tired of your horseshit, there’s always some idiot in your life telling you not to give up on love, as though you’re John Cusack with a boombox outside love’s window.

“Don’t give up” is the second worst piece of dating advice ever. There’s another name for guys who don’t give up on their romantic interests. They’re called “stalkers” and stalking is wrong, unless of course, you’re John Cusack with a boom box, in which case it’s romantic.

Just about every time you turn on the Lifetime channel, there is another love-struck shoegazer waiting outside the apartment of some chick who won’t speak to him.

Eventually, and this is pretty much the whole of the program, the girl realizes that she is missing out on true love and goes bounding into his arms.

Balderdash!

In real life, if you camp out on some chick’s doorstep, she’s probably going to call the cops or, worse, tell all her girlfriends how you stood outside her window holding a boom box over your head. Then they’ll tell all their friends, and pretty soon everybody in town will know what a schmendrick you are–and you will never find anyone to love you for as long as you live in that town.

Even worse, your maudlin communications to the girl could end up getting posted on Internet for the world to observe the depths to which your schmendripity has plummeted.

Jezebel.com was introduced to me by fellow CityBeat columnist Aaryn Belfer. Jezebel is a popular riot grrrl blogger who has a section on her site called “Crap Email from a Dude,” to which her female readers submit correspondences from guys who, for the most part, refused to give up on love. Take, for example, this fellow who sent the following e-mail three months after the breakup:

“I know you cannot feel right now. Ashen and fallow. My love for you is about the bear fruit and thus I am about to put the torch to the crop in order to prevent any untoward pining for you in the future. Love is patient and I am willing to suffer and wait alongside you….”

Or this one, sent by a university student to a woman who was recently his professor:

“Is your [negative] response predicated on the assumption that older women shouldn’t date younger men, and by proposing to violate this anachronistic societal norm, I’m doing something inappropriate? If that’s the case, I can only say that I expected better from you.”

Or this:

“We may not have known each other over a long time period, but I really opened up my soul to you…. I thought we were really understanding each other and I don’t understand why you are willing to just turn your back on this.”

Or this now-infamous voice mail from Dimitri, who couldn’t figure out why Olga wouldn’t return his calls:

“Maybe you were abused in childhood…. Maybe your mother has cancer, and you’re going to chemo…. Maybe you’re just a person with an anxiety disorder…. I don’t know. But nobody says, ‘Call me,’ hands a person a business card and then doesn’t return calls. It’s extremely passive aggressive. You should actually look that up, passive-aggressive personality disorder.”

What all these men have in common is that they would not give up on love, largely because they’re self-involved putzes who forgot that the objects of their desires (emphasis on “objects”) are actual living, breathing human beings with their own needs and preferences that these guys simply did not fulfill.

I remember one time when I didn’t give up on love. I had fallen for this fiery Italian cocktail waitress with big tits and big tats who preferred badass biker guys with big tats and big lats. Lisa and I worked in the same bar together.

Periodically, after our shift, we would retire to my apartment to drink gin, snort speed and hump each other till sunrise. Naturally, I was smitten. I tried to romance her; I took her to shows and dinners and spent money, but she was merely having fun. She just wasn’t looking for anything serious. If she were looking for a commitment, it certainly wouldn’t have been with me. It would’ve been with Bear, her biker “friend” who frequented the bar. Bear was tall and muscular with long blond biker hair down to the top of his biker buttocks and tattoos of all the hot girls he nailed, or murdered, up and down his biker arms.

I, on the other hand, was neither tall nor built, and the only tattoo I ever purchased was a henna jobber of Donald Duck after a trip to Disneyland the previous summer. Simply put, I was out of his league. Still, I kept trying to make her love me. I kept calling and writing and playing the boom box outside her window, only to have her routinely blow me off to ride bitch on the back of Bear’s Harley Davidson.

Then I’d get all upset and call her up and say, “What the fuck, Lisa?” and she would respond, “I still really like you–can I come over?” and like a schmo, I’d whimper, “Yes, yes, my lovely tweaker biker babe. Come over,” and we’d hump each other till sunrise, after which she wouldn’t return my calls for a week, and it would be “WTF, Lisa?” all over again.

The whole affair, which lasted maybe four months, was a blood-let. But I learned the most valuable lesson of my romantic career. You can’t will somebody into liking you, and if you try too hard, it makes you a schlump.

OK, sure, maybe there is that one-in-a-zillion possibility that your perseverance will pay off and she’ll come bounding into your arms; you’ll live happily ever after behind a white picket fence and sell your story to the Lifetime network. But that only happens to guys like John Cusack, whom neither you nor I could ever be.

Ed Decker
07/18/08