The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (7 page)

Why do women—decent, kindhearted women—like bad men? Why, when looking for that perfect other half that Zeus split off from them, do women who read books and brush their teeth after every meal gravitate toward men who shave irregularly and drink too much and don't even own any bedsheets? I didn't know the answer to that question back then, only that nice guys made me want to take a step or two backward whenever they talked too much to me.

Now, after all these years, of course, the answer is clear to me: the problem with nice guys is that they will never break your heart. They aren't going to just up and leave you for some other girl, prettier than you and more fun. A girl like my cousin Belle.

A bad boy, now—well, you can
count
on him. Deep in your subconscious, you are certain that the very minute you fall good and in love with him, he'll announce that he's gotten the preacher's daughter—hell, the preacher's
wife
—pregnant, and can he borrow two hundred dollars to take her to Vegas? And you'll give it to him—through your tears, you'll write him out a check even if it means using your last dime.

And the reason—even though you don't know it yourself
and would think someone was crazy if they told it to you—is that you're relieved, actually. It turns out that you're not ready, just yet, to give up your freedom. Your unerringly bad taste in men knows, even if you don't, that there are more kinds of paradise than just happily-ever-after, and that happily-ever-after itself sounds close enough to death sometimes as to make no difference.

And so you have to play your hand carefully here—choose the wrong boy and you could end up with a guy so nice that you can figure out no reason not to say yes when he asks you to marry him, which he will soon enough. That's what nice guys do. Choose well and you can drown your sorrows in peace and tequila with a clear conscience. You don't want to get permanently caught up with your wrong half when your right half is somewhere out there, waiting for you. But there's nothing that says, in the meantime, your wrong halves can't show you a good time.

Within ten seconds of meeting Danny, I knew he was a bad boy and that, although my heart was in serious danger, my freedom was absolutely safe. Whatever he would be to me, he wasn't going to be with me forever, wasn't going to be the one who healed the wound from Zeus. He made it pretty clear, right from the start, that he had no interest in forever. When he left my house at sunset that first day, I figured I wouldn't hear from him again anytime soon.

When I woke up a week later and opened my front door, a note that had been caught in the screen door fluttered down onto the porch. It was from Danny, offering to buy me another breakfast. I wondered then if maybe I had been wrong about him.

Early spring in the Piedmont can be bleak and wet, but as I stood there barefoot on the porch, holding that note, the world was a dazzling sunlit green, warm and promising. It didn't occur to me to do it at the time, but I probably should have kept that note. It might have been a talisman.

My second breakfast with Danny started at twilight and lasted until all the bars had closed. He came home again with me, without asking, knowing he was wanted.

I lay beside him in the ghost light before dawn, watching him sleep and memorizing the curved line of his upper lip, the flush of sunburned skin across his cheekbone.

I don't know if I'll ever see you like this again,
I thought, and held my breath so as not to wake him.

4

MADNESS

IN HIS DIALOGUE WITH PHAEDRUS
,
Socrates argues that it is Love that causes madness. We love what is beautiful, Socrates says, and are entranced by it so that the gods enter our souls and remind us of the Beauty we knew before birth, the perfect Beauty that cannot exist here in the world of flesh. Here on the earth, we see only the shadows of Beauty and hear only the echoes. But before we were born, Socrates says, we had knowledge of the world above, and we saw there true Beauty, in all its glory.

Now, in this life, sometimes it happens that Love can open for us the memory of our time before birth, when we walked with Beauty. And that remembrance is so profound in its power that we are captured by it and turn our eyes on it, unwavering and obsessive, heedless of the world around us and of the opinions of our fellow human beings, who will think we are mad.

Socrates says that this madness is a gift from the gods, well worth the price of scorn from mortals. But it is madness all the same.

Danny lived in an old green house called Boystown. I don't know who actually owned the house. Whoever it was clearly had a laissez-faire attitude with regard to irregularities and goings-on. In exchange, the tenants of Boystown had an equally relaxed attitude toward repairs, services, and basic amenities. There were locks on the doors, but the keys had been lost so many years ago that no one could remember a time when the locks had been used. This was general knowledge, and it was not unusual for the boys to wake up and find unannounced guests asleep on the broken-down living-room sofa or helping themselves to coffee in the kitchen—so much so that it was frequently a matter of conjecture as to who actually
lived
there and who did not.

Danny and I were eating chicken and biscuits at the kitchen table at 3
A.M.
when Jake wandered through. Whether or not he was an official tenant was unknown.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, and smiled. I don't know if he was feeling friendlier toward me since the pool debacle or whether he was just resigned.

Danny's bedroom featured teetering piles of papers and books, including coverless copies of Hamilton's
Mythology
and
The Dialogues of Plato,
volume two, which I assumed, like mine, were gifts from Tom. Danny was careful to hook the door behind us from the inside. This seemed to me at the time to violate the whole free-access ethos of Boystown, and I didn't know why he did it. I found out at 4
A.M.

It is a startling thing to be woken up by someone screaming,
“Motherfucker!”

Repeatedly.

In fact, the woman pounding on Danny's door at 4
A.M.
seemed to have a vocabulary consisting almost entirely of the word
fuck
and variations on the word
fuck.
Oh, and
bastard.

“Have you ever met Candy?” Danny whispered in the dark.

“I don't think you've mentioned her,” I said.

“I didn't think so,” he said, and then added after a pause, “She's sweet.”

Through the door, we heard Jake's voice sounding firm but reasonable, as if faced with a wild animal that was considering biting him. His voice was low enough that we couldn't make out the words. But after a while, Candy seemed to calm down, and awhile after that we heard her car drive away. Jake knocked once on Danny's door.

“You owe me one,” he said, and then went back to bed.

As it turned out, Candy and Danny had only very recently ceased to be a couple. Extremely recently. So recently, in fact, that it was possible Candy had not yet fully absorbed the news.

Two days later, after it had sunk in, she came back in the night and slashed Danny's tires.

Stinky saw it as his solemn duty to lift us Cave dwellers out of the ignorance and delusion we wallowed in. And out of all us wallowers, Commie Tom, in Stinky's opinion, wallowed the most. Or at least he wallowed in the worst type of mud.

“Look,” Stinky said, leaning down the bar toward Tom for emphasis, “you can't deny that there's a fundamental flaw right at the very heart of your whole ideological edifice. Put your whole head in the bag—right in!” (This last was said to Hank, who had a bad case of hiccups and was being run through a gauntlet of cures by Stinky.)

Tom smiled at Stinky in the benevolent way people have at the end of the second beer when the third one is just coming up from the cooler. “How's that, Stinky?” he said, and I could see the lines of his shoulders relax into the discussion. He put his foot up on the rung of the barstool next to him.

“Well, now, here's the basic premise of my argumentation,” Stinky said, getting excited because someone was willing to talk to him about his theories, which was not always the case. “I think it's obviously clear to anyone who's given consideration to the point that communism just won't work, not operationally. It goes against human nature. Against the very core of human nature.”

“Now tell me how you see that, Stinky,” Tom said, offering Stinky a cigarette out of his pack.

“Clearly, communism implies and necessitates some degree of selflessness going forward,” Stinky said, taking the smoke from Tom. “That is, some degree of man putting his own fundamental ontological interest aside.” (To Hank: “Here, drink from the back side of this cup.”) He paused to light his cigarette on the match Tom held out for him.

“I don't quite follow you there,” Tom said, taking his first drink of the new beer.

“Well, it's fairly self-evident to any halfway observant personage that altruism doesn't exist. That's just a given at this point in time.”