The Poet
“Age is an issue of mind over matter – if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
- Mark Twain
One night, my favorite DJ was playing at a club where my friend E has a standing bottle service table every Friday. I messaged him to ask if E and I could come to see the show, and that's how we found ourselves in the VIP line on a Saturday night, waiting to be let in. As the line grew, I turned around and saw a friend my sister and I had met before and waved at her. New York, as I’ve discovered, isn't nearly as big as you think - it happens often that I look up on the street and see a friend or bump into someone I know on the subway. Some days, it feels like I’m back living on 17th Ave in Calgary...
“I haven’t seen you in forever!” I yelled over a few people's heads, reaching for her hand to squeeze it.
She grinned. “I know! It’ll be a fun night! I brought some friends!”
I turned nonchalantly to regard her friends - they seemed rather young, and after the glass of wine E and I had before we got there, I was feeling more than moderately sassy. There was a tall young man in glasses standing beside her, and he smiled.
I pointed at him and laughed. “Is he old enough to get in here?”
She smiled, nodding. He tried to protest.
“Easy there, kiddo,” I said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get in.”
E and I sidled into our bottle service table into our favorite spots - a spot along the back where the seat was most comfortable. I declared ages ago they were our seats, and because we are generally pretty fun without being total messes, my friend will always acquiesce to my request for my seats. I’m high maintenance, but I’m also in my mid-thirties and don’t want to stand around in pain while I wait for a DJ to take his time to come on stage. The headliner normally comes on at 1:30 am!
We were in our groove, had made our drinks, and had been talking for some time before we were suddenly interrupted by a voice beside me.
“Hey,” it said. I turned to my right, surprised to see the same young man from the line with a smirk across his lips. He’d sidled into the bottle service table beside us so he could stand beside me.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. “Shouldn’t you be sitting with your friends?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said simply.
I looked up - the intensity of his gaze alarmed me. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he was quite beautiful, in the Abercrombie model kind of way.
This type of gaze was something I’d noticed once or twice before in my life but would soon become very familiar with in New York. But more on that in another post. Anyway, if he hadn’t been smiling previously, I would’ve assumed the kid was terrified of me.
“I’m old enough to be your teenage mom,” I pushed, trying to avoid staring at the way his shirt perfectly fit across his chest. “You should spend your time pointing that face at girls your own age.”
“I only see you,” he said, flashing white teeth. How long had it been since a guy looked at me like that? Ages. I can actually pinpoint the last moment - it was at a Morgan Page concert that my ex and I were at. He only saw me.
I tried to brush him off. “Then you should get those glasses checked, kid.”
He laughed, nonplussed. You had to give the guy credit.
I spent ten more minutes of the evening trying to divert his interest to anyone else in the bar, but he wasn’t having it. In the end, this was a rare case where persistence won out. I say rare because there are way too many men who feel it is important to try over and over again after our first answer is a firm no. Life isn’t a romantic comedy - we generally don’t say yes the 35th time around. Anyway, I digress. His persistence finally began to beat my resistance down.
He was, after all, very tall and handsome. To convince myself further, I reminded myself that my most recent ex had been secretly enamored with many girls who were around the age of 20 while we were still together, so maybe this was just my karmic payback. That’s how I justified it anyway - again, I am only human, friends.
We talked a little, and at the end of the night, I’d softened and said goodbye to him and everyone else in their group. Plus, if an old man didn’t work out, maybe a younger one would, right?
The next day, my phone buzzed with a text from my friend I’d seen the night before.
He wants your number. Did you want me to give it to him?
I played dumb. Who?
Her response was immediate. You know exactly who. He won’t stop asking about you.
I considered. He knows how old I am?
Yes, she wrote. But I have to warn you, he’s a player.
I have - what - over a decade of experience on him, I said. There’s nothing he’s got that I haven’t dealt with yet. If anything, I’ll accidentally play him.
Lol, she wrote. So - can I give it to him?
If you must, I acquiesced. Twist my arm, force me at gunpoint, make me talk to a handsome young man and all that jazz...
His persistence continued immediately over text, and it was a rare occasion where I was actually charmed by it (note, my male friends: persistence is a dangerous game - we’ll either give you little signs that we like it or we will block you. There’s no in between). He’d message nice things, call me when he was out with his friends to say hi, and generally just checked in more than most guys I’ve dated.
After weeks - and that’s not an exaggeration - I finally gave in and agreed to have dinner with him. I reasoned with myself it was the least I could do for someone who felt it highly important just to be alone with and talk to me. We made plans to meet in Brooklyn, and I waited, curious, to see how it would go.
Last minute, he called in a panic and canceled - he had lost his watch and was trying to find it. And it wasn’t just any watch - it was a Rolex. If you’re wondering what the hell a guy in his early 20s was doing with his own Rolex, don’t worry - I was too. After some curious questioning, I discovered that his stepfather was a famous professional athlete and he in turn saw some perks of that.
He apologized and promised to make it up to me, but my guard immediately went up, and our dates were postponed a few more times until he finally got me alone.
The night in question was one in which one of my best friends and I had ordered large glasses of expensive tequila only to be told by the bouncer that the bar was immediately closing and we’d have to leave. It wasn’t even that late, and to our dismay, we had to either leave the $40 drinks behind or take them down in one fell swoop. Being a sad, broke student, I decided the latter was the most appropriate for both of us.
I remember walking out of the bar and seeing a girl stumble, and we both giggled. Then suddenly, we were in a taxi, the weight of the tequila hitting us and causing us to argue loudly over our choice of music (even though we like the same damn music) and showing up at a bar - the same bar I met the guy at - to see a show.
As if on cue, he messaged me, asking me to hang out. It was the evening, and he lived farther away than I'm normally okay with, but thanks to my best friend tequila, my walls were down, and I acquiesced, saying goodnight to my friend shortly thereafter (there is a whole other story here on her end about a short handsome European man with a mustard-colored toque on in the summer, but we won’t go there today).
He greeted me and offered me a cigar (for those of you who don’t know me well, I love my cigar smoking) and we sat and drank some scotch while talking about what brought us to New York. I was immediately surprised by his maturity in terms of life experience understanding and emotional capacity. And so, my head light with cigar smoke and fuzzy from too much good liquor, it shouldn’t surprise you that when his lips met mine some time later, I kissed him back.
The times we saw each other were nice - it was refreshing to me to have a guy around who actively listened and wasn’t afraid to say what he was feeling or thinking. But always, in the back of my head, I was acutely aware that we were years and thus worlds apart, and so I began to grow distant.
The last night I saw him, I was feeling the age difference strongly. He’d been in the city for a work dinner and stopped by to say hi. We knew I was a writer, and we started talking about my craft. Then, to my surprise, he mentioned he was also a writer. For two hours, we sat and read poetry, and I was introduced to some amazing poets I had never read and also to his writing. He was good...good enough that I encouraged him to go to a poetry open mic and try reading some of his work. We made plans to go together but never followed through. It felt like on both ends, we realized that the difference was too present for anything to go further, and so we let it be.
If going old wasn’t the solution to all of my problems, I quickly discovered that going younger wasn’t either. In this case, maybe if there had been the same amount of life experience on either side to start with, there may have been potential for something more. As it was, thanks to the Poet, I began to realize that there was something of value within me even in this landscape and appreciated the valuable insight. On to the next.