Robert P. is Offline
The only endangered species- White, male, Conservative heterosexual- nobody wants to protect. Ignored. Ghosted to extinction.
Success Junkies
Robert P. Always poised to Make It Big. The trouble is the world is- literally- run by adrenaline junkies. The more you look, the more you see. It explains everything. They marathon, they race, they game. They wear Lycra around their nether regions that is, just a little, too tight. From business to politics. From friends with benefits to enemies with even more. To “Adrienne”, the gushing blonde charity fundraiser at the tennis club, she whom everyone can’t help but like. The world is populated by The Manics. By spandex evangelists and social media street preachers for “Living Your Best Life”.
The world not even stopping doing “steps” waiting for the sign to turn green from “Don’t Walk” to “Walk”. They run. “Parks”, the world over now an E-scooter, sharp as a roller-blade Hazard Zone for that increasingly rare bird, The Spotted Dawdler. And Poets permanently in their second year at university. So, I may as well catch the wind, shoot the breeze, our Robert thinks to himself. When a man stops having adventure, as society is trying to confine him, he dies a little.
I think we may find, just too late, we needed our wasters. Our inferiors. The Dysfunctional were the punctuation, the full-stop, period, commas at least, to others busier if not functional lives. Robert P. certainly put the “Dys” into function. Determined, if nothing else, to be a semi-colon.
We all feel compelled to squeeze into Lycra. Never a good look after 51. Perhaps by guilt. By inadequacy. By not wanting to seem like an old, sceptical scrote. So, we pat them on the back as they return from another 10k, prep for the triathlon, and tell them how driven they are. The world is sleep deprived. Light polluted. Permanently on five hours sleep. Which explains a lot.
And silently- we do not ask for any thanks- pick up the pieces, and the dirty underwear, trailing after them in their brilliant wake. You know the hype-type. They make Lists. Prioritise. Packing every nanosecond of every dawning day into cantilevered plastic storage boxes. Stuffed olive of a life with some new goal. Hobby. Enthusiasm. Fit-bit Wife. Steps. Worse. They are nice and genuine. They are even good at being Good. And not shaving- no time- the men with perfect metro-sexual stubble. Using unisex facial skincare products, when we mere humans, can barely focus both eyeballs at nine in the morning.
No time to talk. Not like we Wasters. Dreamers. Avoidants. They Walk The Walk, even as they walk-and-talk. They would do, “Do lunch”. Except lunch is for wimps. First at the breakfast buffet bar for the 0800 meeting. Bushy tailed, as upstairs in my hotel room I plonk an aspirin into a tooth mug, tasting of last night’s, last Jack Daniel’s. Or rather drop both and an iPhone- uncharged of course- into the toilet.
The Walk of Shame as you take the last croissant and sit down scraping back the chair. Sit, as they tell us with that strained smile, “Hi, Dan. (You’re actually “Robert”, but why quibble about details feeling as you do. You’re just a walking Severance Package looking for an Exit Level Position).
“We're just finishing up on To Be Actioned, Page 3”.
Are they really Glad to have you “on board”. Or are they just being American? Do the company “Value Your Input”, only when they Add the Value. Whatever. We don’t give a half-eaten croissant.
As his little rebellion each day, Robert P. wrote. “Jan 3rd. Management Training is a day off with Danish pastries” … And hoped and feared The Boss, grandfather with face like a warm scrotum, would accidentally see it.
Robert had got so used to the narrative of his life. He knew it by heart. And what did he do? Senior Account Manager IT Digital Sales… He liked staying at the company hotels. The more Corporate and blander the better. Tall, and four, not Five Star. Five Stars and the staff noticed more what you did- and with whom. Trying to be helpful as you tried to quietly usher the Ukrainian blonde, whose false name you couldn’t pronounce even if you could remember it, past the concierges’ desk at three. AM or PM it didn’t really matter. It was all Tax Deductible.
Swimming pools on roofs in which to contemplate one’s failure at Life. Something the Lycra-clad “Goodies”, his more ambitious, conscientious colleagues, would no doubt even allot precisely 43 minutes to “Potion 3: Contemplation of Suicide”, under Any Other Business. Even planned time-wasting for them is just a means to an end. Like competitive surfing and skiing, off-piste of naturally. They do everything so well, doubtless like their aerobic sex life, without having to even talk about it. Or talk about regretting, not regretting doing it. They dream only in blue skies thinking to maximise their potential. Optimise their time on this Good Earth.
And whether they mean to or not, shrink us mere mortals who err… don’t do or probably will do, very much. Or even do not very much, very well. Those lesser mortals who refuse to “Improve our Game”. Step up to “plates”, whatever that means.
There is no need for tooth-sucking admonishment. The Winners Just Do IT. Because “They’re Worth It”. Living their Best Life in the Ad. campaigns they conjure for a living. Their slogan T-shirts scream your failure at you “ONE LIFE- LIVE IT!”. Car bumper stickers tell us what we should be, if only we weren’t so lazy. So ordinarily incompetent- at breathing…
Gone are the days when a man could slip his primrose E-Type into fourth, and then overdrive, and burn the afternoon and his life away in distraction. Without having to worry about his emissions. Counting carbs or measuring his guilt against his carbon-footprint.
Robert P. is Confused
Mother said she had a “Theory” on the phone last night. (“Just checking-in Robert dear”. Or so she said). She had obviously been spending the afternoon spending on 3rd Avenue and thinking about “Your Father”.
She began her Preface.
“I have come to the Revelation”. (Not conclusion you notice).
“Men only marry because they can't put plasters on. Take your father. A finger, cut when trying to straighten up that bookshelf over the bed that wasn’t put up right- five-and-a-half years ago…
“And don’t forget the “half”, she added. “It is the grounds for many a divorce”.
Mother always said, if you don’t know what to do with the rest of your entire life- have some tea. So, Robert sat and sipped. Let the miasma pass him by for a change. At women passing him by on the corner of The Park. (There was only one).
He decided to refine his confusion into types. It was easier to deal with his genetic, Beta disappointment that way. Like eating a slice too many of cheesecake. Life was simultaneously awe-inspiring, and beige, filing cabinet drab.
There was The Blonde. They came in two “Subs”- Type A and B. The Athletic. Long- limbed. Potentially South African. Always taller and eight years younger than he was. A “Gabi- with an “I”, he imagined. The new Intern who just looked through you on your hands and knees at the water fountain, trying to find that last paper cone you dropped. Ignored, much as he would have thought The Girl from Ipanema ignored him, because she was simply “short-sighted”. Ahhhh…
And Type B- should have a trigger warning sign, Beware the Petite Blonde. They threw objects and tantrums behind closed hotel doors. Who maintained only homosexuals “understood” them and their Challenging Food Issues. They always have a Token Gay Friend. And an F.B.- Fat Bestie girlfriend, to look better standing next to in doctored Instagram shots.
Oh, and they feel guilty about “avoiding” their mothers and idolising fathers for being “weak Betas”. At least, that’s what their Neo-Freudian analyst tells them, feeding the insecurity at $150 every other Friday.
Then there was The Blonde Bob- asymmetrical cut and neatly, cattishly aloof to our distant devotion across the office partition. She, Queen of Media Planning. Rumours wafted of sharing a loft-apartment with her lesbian Sorority Crush. We “Roberts”, meantime gets only to admire their outline. The high-heeled Louboutin sway of their lives. Pleased somehow that, that is all we get. Relived perhaps that her not-noticing is all we deserve. Bob Girls skip pudding. They Power Walk through other’s lives without realising. And promise devotion, with one eye on the door. We know what we are getting yet ask for less.
In another life he would have been his father. English. But he didn’t hold that against him. With his rituals, his old school tie, and his third-party humour. Robert wished he could have followed him into the Indian Army, the 1/11th Sikhs, and followed his star. But Mahatma Gandhi and Independence intervened. As his father had told him once, if he told him a thousand times, he must Do something- or die. Up to the “Northwest”, the frontier of India- and himself. Baluchistan where his father never slept “properly” for three years. Scorpions and boredom, they were the real killers. Bullets when they finally came were a kind of relief. Like a cold shower. You knew it was doing you good, even as it stinged.
And he Robert did die, just a little. He knew that. Time to book a flight. One-way. Fly Me to the Moon… Let me play among the Stars. Or visit his German Aunt in Coney Island.
What if he had been a planter at least. Malaya. Tea. Or something big “In Rubber”. (His father didn’t understand his American son’s flicker of a smile). Or pretended not to. “Up country”, with just a couple of sepoys between him and certain death. A native woman for “everything else”. Whatever that meant. Both knew exactly. Go somewhere, Dad said. Anywhere will do. Where you didn’t have to follow King’s Regulations to the letter but could “skip a page or three”.
But post-war sons like Robert chose 5th Avenue Advertising. KCK and Sons. Second Division. First Division salary. That was The Trap. Or rather it seemed to Robert now, just Watching Girls Go By, that Advertising chose no-quite Ivy grads, like Robert P.
But Empire had faded to grey memory even as Robert was born in Singapore. So, Robert Senior had washed up on New Jersey shore, with an American wife, half-Jewish, but still elected to the Ladies Country Club. And a father-in-law in-the-business. Dad, an Ad Exec, not the best in his Intake, but not the worst.
No wonder “Young Robert” didn’t know what else to be. So, he became a Junior Account in Grandpa’s firm. And could do no wrong in the old man’s eyes. He was half-English, after all. But had his grandfather already guessed, only half a gentleman. But which half Robert wondered, was which? He was supposed to be the son of a grandson of an Earl of somewhere unpronounceable in Ireland. An Irish Lord, as Grandfather told anyone who would listen, so it “didn’t count”. No tea with the Queen of England. But The Boy was class. In a class of his own. Robert had to agree with that.
Robert P. continues his sort of life in Robert P. is Unavailable- James Chanel AMAZON/KDP
Other Truths are Available.