Boy's Life
By Howard KorderPhil, an anxious and nervous self-dramatizer, regularly meets with his college friends to complain about his lack of success in meeting the right girl. Here, he shares the latest chapter in his unsuccessful pursuits with his best friend Jack and describes the brief fling he recently had with the equally neurotic Karen.
PHIL:
I would have destroyed myself for this woman. Gladly. I would have eaten garbage. I would have sliced my wrists open. Under the right circumstances, I mean, if she said, "Hey, Phil, why don't you just cut your wrists open?" Well, come on, but if seriously... We clicked, we connected on so many things, right off the bat, we talked about God for three hours once. I don't know what good it did, but that instensity... and the first time we went to bed, I didn't even touch her. I didn't want to, understand what I'm saying? And you know, I played it very casually, because, all right, I've had some rough experiences, I'm the first to admit, but after a couple weeks I could feel we were right there, so I laid it down, everything I wanted to tell her, and... and she says to me, she says... "Nobody should ever need another person that badly." Do you believe that? "Nobody should ever...!" What is that? Is that something you saw on TV? I put my heart on the table, you give me Dr. Joyce Brothers? "Need, need," I'm saying I love you, is that so wrong? Is that not allowed anymore? (Pause.) And so what if I did need her? Is that so bad? All right, crucify me, I needed her! So what! I don't want to be by myself, I'm by myself I feel like I'm going out of my mind, I do. I sit there, I'm thinking forget it, I'm not gonna make it through the next ten seconds. I just can't stand it. But I do, somehow, I get through the ten seconds, but then I have to do it all over again, cause they just keep coming, all these... Seconds, floating by, while I'm waiting for something to happen, I don't know what, a car wreck, a nuclear war or something, that sounds awful but at least there'd be this instant when I'd know I was alive. Just once. Cause I look in the mirror, and I can't believe I'm really there. I can't believe that's me. It's like, my body, right, is the size of, what, the Statue of Liberty, and I'm inside it, I'm down in one of the legs, the gigantic hairy leg, I'm scraping around inside my own foot like some tiny fetus. And I don't know who I am or where I'm going. And I wish I'd never been born. (Pause.) Not only that, my hair is falling out, and that reallys sucks.
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