Meeting The Suburban Playboy

Trying To Get Out More, Part 1. The first in an occasional series in which I leave the house, only to end up annoyed by a fellow human being.

The other morning I’d finished up in the gym, but a man perhaps ten years younger than me was blocking access to my locker because he was taking his stuff out of the closet above. No problem, I can wait. Except that he wasn’t really accessing his locker, he was just standing there checking his mobile device for new e-mails. Obviously an important bloke - he’d been in the gym an hour, and someone could have sent him a crucial communication in that time. Except you’re not that important that work doesn’t miss you when you skip out to the gym mid-morning, eh? Irritation factor: 5%.

I notice a tattoo near his ankle of the Playboy bunny. Blocking me from getting to my locker’s one thing, doing it while sporting a crass symbol of overt vanity quite another. If you’re such a playboy, why’s it not tattooed on your forehead, super-dick? Let’s show some conviction here. Or do women look at your face, snigger at your feckless expression, look down in embarrassment and then think, “Oh wait, he has a playboy bunny tattoo, he must be a stud-butt after all.” Irritation factor: a steep climb to 60%.

Once I finally get to my locker and pack up and leave, bunny boy follows me out to the car park. You know how it is - you’re trying to just get away from someone, for good, for ever, and they keep hanging in there, as though they’ve been specially commissioned to irritate the crap out of you for the whole day. Finally, he goes the wrong way round the car park’s one-way system in his SU fucking V and tries to cut me off at the exit. But I step on it and get in there first and leave him behind at the next light. Irritation factor: a climb to a cuss-gorging 90% before levelling and descending in the rear-view mirror to zero.

How can I judge this man without having heard him speak a single word? Perhaps he was checking his messages because a family member had been in a car accident and he was awaiting a health status update. Perhaps he had a Playboy symbol tattooed on his leg as the result of a cruel hazing ritual at college where he’d been tied down and branded, and now he was having it slowly removed through long and painful laser surgery. What if I’d run over a little toddler as I accelerated to stop him cutting me off at the car park exit, and he’d then testified that it was all his fault for acting like an arrogant, SUV-driving, Blackberry-checking, Playboy tattoo-toting twat?

Somewhere, maybe, there’s a blog entry at wannabeplayboyblogspot.com about a single man’s annoyance at the sneering, impatient, middle-aged, Passat-driving lowlife that cut him off aggressively at the gym’s car park exit. All bitter just because he lost the race, ha!

Great Suburban Traditions No. 4 - Asexuality

How do you act in the 'burbs: depressed
 and suppressed, or singing and swinging?

Not that anyone ever claimed the suburbs were sexy. That’s not what they’re here for. But sometimes you wonder if the whole concept of suburbia was dreamed up by Puritans to create sexual no-go areas where carnal thoughts are entirely confined behind closed curtains.

When I cross the city border into DC, I can feel something change. There are people walking about. There are people walking about who set you to thinking all the blazing, immoral, indecent, sweat, bump, thrust and grind thoughts that we’re helpless to prevent ,so we might as well mentally enjoy until we’re too old to feel the blood happily flooding out of our skulls (the original brain drain) and into the temporarily festive sluice of arousal. All those thoughts that are blanked out in suburbia until, with the doors double-locked, you can enjoy the furtive unspilling of your hardcore imagination.But flaunting yourself in suburbia only invites ostracism. Those rare human beings wanting to display their feathers will sprint in the dark from front door to car and speed off to the fleshpots of Bethesda and Friendship Heights, lest they be seen as homebreakers on the prowl. An attractive soccer mom is only a theoretical concept, because even if you could see through the dark glass of the SUV as it raced down your road, the cellphone-covered, accusatory sour face would have you reeling with guilt, like a Catholic choirboy caught fondling the rosary while inadvertently picturing the Mother Superior’s lips unpursed.

Not that I’m deluding myself the theoretical soccer mom would be in any respect excited at the sight of me unloading the groceries from the back of my car and shuffling up the garden path while scouring the front yard for Chelsea’s Last Crap (see GST, No. 3). The screeching of brakes, an unwound window, a leering wolf-whistle and a yell of, “Excuuuuse me, but you are one fucking hot house-hubbie!” would no doubt be as unnerving to your average ‘burb-imprisoned stay-at-home dad as a 3pm drive-by shooting. Though it would probably take something a little more special than my skinny ass in a thirty-buck pair of jeans to wrench a soccer mom from her cellphone.

At weekends, however, there are drunken swing and swap parties on every street. True, I’ve yet to be invited, but there must be something (or someone) going down when the lights do likewise at 10. New kids are born, and divorce suits get filed. Adultery must be conducted in secret, ultra-padded underground chambers – the same places where people drink alcohol. That’s all fine, though. Just don’t show up on the surface singing at midnight. In suburbia the golden rule is that all your simmering desires and leashed-in human frailties should be kept in a safe place where they won’t disturb the peace.