The New York City unmarried, heterosexual man
over age fifty who resides chiefly in Manhattan is an evolving species, an
improvement over the Neanderthal but not quite on a par with the average Twenty-First
Century Homo Sapiens (“HS”). In my admittedly unscientific sampling, I’d have
to say such men are still evolving lackadaisically to make it all the way to
HS. “Hetero Sap” might be a good evolutionary point at which to begin our
analysis.
Some say such men have been spotted in Central
Park since the early 1900s, rarely making fires but rather occasionally jogging
slowly around the park with glazed eyes and limping gait. When not moving, they
may be spotted carrying The New York Times as well as books about
manhood, America, sports, politics, and sex, according to Esquire. They
are generally easy to identify since most are balding and wear caps and sport
unkempt beards and sparse long hair to compensate.
I can’t remember the other details of their
sartorial appearance, especially the ones over age sixty-five. Their clothes
are often nondescript, unironed, occasionally unwashed, and may well have been
plucked from the chaos of a dusty, darkened closet. These men tend to own a
favorite bedraggled sweater or college jacket with frayed necklines and
sleeves.
Most of the time their socks match. I try not to
look at their feet if they are wearing only sandals.
Ties, a relic of their bar mitzvahs, are nowhere
in evidence.
And they have about as much sex appeal as
orangutans.
Some say most aging New York Hetero Saps are
either exploding with self-importance or halfway to comatose. They remember the
cute young things that got away, wishing they were still twenty-five and didn’t
need Viagra. Any female over forty is dismissed as Over The Hill.
On the plus side, they get their pants hemmed,
unlike the under-forty crowd, male and female, who would rather walk all over
the bottoms until their pant legs become dangerously rent trip hazards. Even
more important, these aging men tend to live in rent-controlled or
rent-stabilized Manhattan apartments, frequently in fourth- or fifth-floor
walk-ups where they moved forty to fifty years ago and hence cannot be legally
forced out, and as a result pay rent that is significantly lower than the
average struggling young family.
Many have nice pensions and Social Security
Retirement checks. They can eat out every meal. They may not be living on Easy
Street but they will never be homeless or have to patronize soup kitchens.
Most live alone with either a dog or a couple of
cats, their most recent significant relationship with a female Homo Sapiens
having ended fifteen or twenty years earlier. The dog walkers consider their
fellow dog walkers to be their real best friends, and plan the walks to
encounter these fellow canine exercisers with whom they share the cherished
bond of Cleaning Up The Poop.
They also tend to believe that being able to
cook one good dish demonstrates that they are accomplished chefs. They may cook
that same dish for three months at a time before altering their cooking
rotation.
They are less prone to pepper their emails with
LOL, prolly, IYKWIM, or thx, but use real words. They
rarely text, if they even know how. Most of them can spell rather well,
especially as compared to their younger counterparts, excepting young
Indian-Americans who generally win the Scripps Spelling Bee.
Many Hetero Saps watch porn on their computers,
tablets, and iPhones. Others prefer fantasy card games such as Hearthstone:
Heroes of Warcraft; Ascension: Chronicles of the Godslayer; Star Realms; and
Hex: Shards of Fate—titles worthy of escapist adolescents. Still others play
video games including the most popular (League of Legends) for hours at a time,
most of them violent and misogynistic. Nearly all these games feature
omnipotent heroes, otherworldly villains, dragons, dangerous animals,
voluptuous maidens in distress, in short, the animated stuff of early comic
books come vividly to life on a small dark screen and sold as software on
playing platforms.
For those of us who are unfamiliar with the
gaming culture, it is a huge world unto itself, lucrative, apparently
mesmerizing, with all failures remaining online—not visible to real people.
After all, Hetero Saps fear public humiliation above all things.
The men who spend so many hours watching porn
and participating in gaming tend to be proficient in utilizing the hoards of
new apps flooding the electronic market. They enjoy technological challenges.
When I was a kid, they might have been trading comic books or blowing up
chemistry kits in the family basement.
Which is to say, they’re not ignorant, merely
dumb.
It’s when they try to relate to people,
especially those of the female persuasion, that they fall short of the mark.
Pretty damned short, if you ask me.
So I’ll put it to the Hetero Saps of the city
with whom I cross paths from time to time: Why won’t you make an effort to have
a real conversation? What emotional distress are you sublimating that needs to
be aired? Why are you so afraid to be part of the real world? And what
childhood/young manhood traumas trigger adrenaline and other stress hormones to
send you running from your female contemporaries without a backward glance or
farewell?
Did a favorite aunt try to smother you with a
pillow in your crib? Were you forced to help your mother do the laundry? Did
your father humiliate you for your inability to hit a baseball further than ten
feet? Were you generally the last to be chosen for games at recess? And have
too many marriages dissolved when your wives walked out on you or dates ended
when your female companions simply disappeared?
What caused you to quit evolving all the way to
Homo Sapiens and regress to your childhood? Was Darwin mistaken in his
groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection? Or have the Manhattan Hetero Saps simply been overtaken and left
behind during the selection process?
