The Complete and Total Loser Sees Questionable Photographs

The Complete and Total Loser's flickr addiction has subsided but he still loves clicking on the reload button of home page and seeing what others are posting. He wishes that fewer people would use it to store every goddamn photo they take. There's little entertainment in twenty-five photographs of the same couple at a party, both with a red plastic cup of beer in hand.

Last night, a little thumbnail of flesh caught the Loser's eye. Golden, naked flesh. He clicked. The photos were of children, girls, from around age seven to fourteen. They weren't having sex, nor were they in sexual, come hither poses. They were more like photographs a parent might take of his own daughters at a nudist resort. But still.

The Loser, grateful that these photos did not arouse him, clicked elsewhere for a few minutes, then returned. The photos were gone. He clicked elsewhere again and returned again. The account had been deleted. Either justice or common sense prevailed swiftly on flickr.

Flaccid

The Complete and Total Loser has never felt more ... blah ... than he does now. He has no drive, no passion, no ambition of any kind. There is nothing physically wrong with him but if he could he would spend his days in bed, listening to his radio, doing crossword puzzles, reading magazines. There would be no reason for him to leave it.
This ambitionless ambition may come true one day. The Loser's parents are elderly, and have mentioned that when they die they will leave him their house, given that his two successful siblings both have several houses. The house is a two story house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms on a good piece of land in a good suburb within walking distance of a train station. By no means impressive in most of the country, its location in his part of the East Coast would have it selling for nearly half a million dollars.

The Loser is used to getting by on twenty thousand dollars a year. With the proceeds from the house wisely invested in conservative places, he would move far from his city, where the cost of living is low, buy a house far from others, stuff it with supplies, and sleep until he is dead.

The Loser's Skin

He has always had bad skin. As a child, The Complete and Total Loser rubbed dry parts into sores he kept going by picking at the scabs. He maintained one scab at the corner of his mouth for most of third grade.
When adolescence hit, it got worse. Large pores, always clogged. Blackheads. Pimples on his forehead and elsewhere. No true acne, its blemishes badges of hormonal rage and future passion; just greasy, dirty skin. Visits to a dermatologist for antibiotics kept the pimples minimized, but barely.
In his early twenties his face stayed an oily field of bacteria, while boils developed on his back. He'd burst them, his fingertips coated with pus.
He still, at 50, his skin has the worst of age and youth. Splotchy and slick. The tip and creases of his nose require regular squeezing, which the Loser schedules on days off so his coworkers will be spared the sight of the bruising this results in. He scrubs with a solution regularly, and his back needs a scrubbing to remove built up dead skin. He uses a prescription dandruff shampoo for what remains of his hair, winter makes most of his epidermis flake and itch, he needs to remember to scratch the pieces of dead skin from his eyebrows every morning.
Oh, to have good skin! To have been able to thrust your face close to a girl's with confidence, to not shrink away when under direct light, to appear a healthy animal, capable of siring young that will thrive, and to not yellow pillowcases and sheets with secretions even though you never fail to shower before sleep.

Young Flesh and the Loser

There have been warm days in the Complete and Total Loser's Mid-Atlantic city. Heavy clothes have been shed.
The Loser's route from work to his squalid apartment cuts through a park and he sees young women running. He's on a bicycle and too polite and aware of his ugliness to stare at them, yet his eye can't help being caught by their thighs.
Thigh. Such a lovely word to the Loser. It even rhymes with "sigh." 

He's struck by how robust those of a college age woman are. Powerful cylinders of muscle flashing as they propel firm torsos, ponytails waving behind. It stirs him. At times he has to take a moment to tell himself how ridiculous it would be for him to even consider something other than a workplace relationship with women that age, he being an aging, failed cripple, and the rising sap is blocked.
Each spring, he needs to tell himself this with decreasing frequency.

Getting Better

The Complete and Total Loser has been ill. Nothing serious. A cold, which came up suddenly and is now a week old, ending with a racking cough that has his ribs aching.
It has been all respiratory—none in the head—and has affected his voice dramatically. He has noted a progression of how he sounds. He started with Tom Waits, went to Rod Stewart to where he is now, Bob Dylan.
When your vocal chords are under this kind of duress, the Loser has read, it's best to talk as little as possible lest they develop nodes, which can permanently damage them.

The Honeycomb

Today the Complete and Total Loser found a honeycomb while walking from the train station to his parents' house. It took him back to his boyhood days, when finding animal technology like this was a wondrous hint of another world hidden yet surrounding him.

Whatever happened to animals? All they are now to people is pets, pests or food. It would be nice, the Loser thinks, if they presented real dangers to large numbers of humans. It'd keep us humble.

The Woman Who Hates the Loser

She's pretty. If she weren't, it probably wouldn't bother him. No, it would; he is pathetic and must be liked. If he's not, it must be by people hates. So, yes, it bothers him. She is slim, a narrow torso her breasts are large for but she's young and they're firm. Deep eyes, a melodious voice, a wry sense of humor and she moves her arms so gracefully when she walks that when he's walking behind her in the hall he loves to watch her turn corners and watch the way they arc around her body, the hands defining eddies of space in the air.

What happened? he wonders. Things were fine for weeks. She's new, he's not. They chatted, joked. She told him of her high school days as an athlete, when she threw javelins and ran. Then one day, the Loser said his usual hello and ... a one-word answer, face averted. Since then it's been brief, necessary phrases or less. What did he do? Nothing creepy. Not in a sexual way, at least. The Loser, being a loser, is twice the age of most of his coworkers and has never entertained notions of anything beyond workplace friendships. Honest. And she's not angry, exactly, so he can't ask her what he did. That would be uncomfortable for them both.

It's as if she just woke up one morning and decided she disliked the Loser. This terrifies him. What if everyone does that?

The Loser Has Sex

Despite his deformity, the Complete and Total Loser has had sex with five women. None of these relationships lasted longer than a few weeks and the last one was a dozen years ago, but that wasn't because the sex was bad.

The Loser found sex is hard to get but easy to do. He likes women. They're soft and have pleasing voices, usually. It stuns him when one of them lets him help her disrobe. When things progress and he feels between their legs and finds moisture he is as happy as he is astonished. It's as if he's rubbed a stone and it's produced water.

This will probably never happen again. He's poor now, with no prospects. Time has not been kind to him. Complexion splotchy, though he avoided sunlight from his teens on, sagging muscles at 50.

This is all right. His desire has waned. There's the surge when he spots a target, then the quick realization of how impossible it would be for him to get her (he is choosy, of all things).

He last tried a year ago. He was a disaster in bed and never successfully completed the act. This wounded her immeasurably, but she's since realized that it was indeed him and not her. The two remain friends. Sometimes, when he emails her, she answers.

Found Keys

Riding his bike home from a bar. Cool night, a Saturday. The Complete and Total Loser, ever the magpie, spots something outside a car, on the pavement, out of the ordinary.
Not trash this. Something else. A wallet? He looks. Keys. Car keys. A fancy set, two inches long, an inch-and-a-half wide. Several buttons on them. He pushes the unlock one. The car right next to them lights up. It's a Lexus. A nice one.
The Loser ponders this. You are what you drive, they say in L.A. He's on the opposite coast, but he has a few beers in him and thinks it might be fun to tool around in a decent car for a change. His last car was a '90 Toyota Tercel. A piece of shit. It was made when cars were all switched from carburetors to fuel injection systems, except for this one. It still had the old style set of lungs on it, and never ran right. At the end, it couldn't breathe and he sold it to a coworker with caveats for $100. She scrapped it in three months, no hard feelings.

So what to do? This is in the city. Multiple rowhouses all over. Knock on every door at 11 p.m.? "Do you have a Lexus?" "Get out of my face, dude." No thanks.
Lightbulb. Open the door, put the keys inside, but not in the ignition. On the floor. The Loser does this, then, when the door closes, wonders if this car, with its sophisticated systems, will lock the doors afterward. A cruel joke. But there's not time to worry about this; he has work Sunday, as losers do, and the clocks jump ahead.
He pedals home, and so to bed.

Why the Loser is Fat

The Complete and Total Loser got out of college in the early 1980s, a time when the economy was spiraling down and unemployment was soaring up much like it is today. He landed a job that looked at first glance like a respectable one -- art gallery employee -- but was really simple commission-based hucksterism. He had two sport coats, a few dress shirts and one tie.
One thing galleries had then was free food and wine. Nothing makes art lovers loosen their purse strings better than a belly full of white wine and cheese. And so on Fridays the Loser, being as unsuccessful a salesman as he is a human being, made gallery rounds where he would gorge. Crackers were, to him, tiny pieces of hard bread. Cold cuts were steaks, cheese solidified milk.

An attractive, healthy woman eats right on a train platform.

In the gallery he worked in there were often plates of food for varying reasons and after dozens of grubby hands had had their way with them the Loser would be asked if he wanted what remained. The magic words, "I'm only going to throw it out," quickened his pulse and he'd race to find a container or bag to stuff his booty into so he could transport it home in his decade-old car.
Even now those words prick up his ears and he struggles to resist stuffing his sagging body with free food.
His weight is reasonable now, but only because he has an iota too much pride to actually dive into Dumpsters.

The Loser's Parents Return from Florida

They are back from Florida, where they stayed on the coast and watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. The Complete and Total Loser went to a Midwestern college for four years yet in that time has never set foot in the Sunshine State like so many of his peers.
His parents used to go to St. Barts, but they're too old now to cope with the lack of banisters and cobblestone streets there. The Loser imagined all month they were better off in Florida, where he's pretty sure ambulances patrol streets like ice cream trucks and geriatric hospitals are minutes away.
"We didn't see one black face the whole month," the Loser's mother said. This is just reporting; she is no bigot. (If anyone's that it's the Loser, who lives in the city where a large percentage of blacks pose at least a degree of threat and where he has indeed been robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight by two of them.) They said also there were no Jews where they were.
The Loser's father found it extremely relaxing to watch the shore birds. Pelicans, gulls and smaller birds -- sandpipers? -- shared the same sea and shore. "How," he asks, "do they survive?"
This sounds like a dumb question, but it's not.
Twenty-first century Americans are so far from nature that when we observe animals close up, it is astonishing that they can live. No clothes, no shelter, no technology of any kind. No health insurance! Naked creatures with little beaks and webbed feet, surrounded by predators, chased by cars, filth and toxins they can't possibly adapt to quickly enough, their habitat torn down and replaced by inedible structures with confusing reflective surfaces.
Yet some of them survive. And even thrive.

A Woman Who Lives in the Same Building as the Loser

Her bicycle sits, locked to the railing outside the building she, the Complete and Total Loser, and four others inhabit. It has one speed, balloon tires, is heavy, low. When she went away for Christmas she left it in the basement, where the Loser stores his own bike at night. The tire went flat, a slow leak. He took it off, carried it upstairs and mended it. Some days after her return he mentioned it to her. She'd known of the leak and was baffled by its healing. She thanked him and left a card and a patch kit outside his door the next day.
She is small. When they chat on the stairs, a landing, she stands on a step above him and is still shorter than the Loser, but not much. (He, too, is short.) She is narrow, fine-boned, smart. She goes full time to a Seven-Sisters school and waitresses full time. The Loser has seen her boyfriend on the stairs, in the entryway. He says hello to him, the boyfriend grunts in return. Not unfriendly; he just doesn't know what to make of this older man, a loser, who lives in the same building as his girlfriend.
Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are for single families. Neighbors have asked the Loser if he would, perhaps, say something to the woman about her bike, which they'd rather not need to step around while walking past the building. He won't. She works so hard, she's so small, the bike's so heavy. She'll move before long. Up and out in a few years, if not sooner. He's going to print the photo of the bike and give it to her. She doesn't know this but one day, decades from now, she'll find it in a box or folder and remember the blue bicycle she had when she lived in that city where she went to that school and worked in that restaurant and had that boyfriend. She won't remember how she got the photograph and assume she'd taken it herself.

The Loser Attends the Theatre

Saturday night and the Complete and Total Loser is done work, just Sunday to go (losers work on weekends in their dreary little retail jobs).
He decides to go to a play for the first time in 30 years. He goes because the male lead—it's a two-person, 80-minute-long one act—was a very good friend in high school who since then has had some ups (Broadway, TV) and downs (addiction to something) and is now doing well and has gotten good reviews.
So it's on the bike and into the heart of the city for the Loser, who usually spends Saturday nights in his one-room apartment wishing he could afford cable TV. He sees couples in the city. Lots of them. On dates. What would it be like, he wonders, to walk on a sidewalk, young, wearing good clothes with a girl in a skirt who likes you? He has no idea.
He locks his bike to a pole outside the theater and enters. One ticket, $30. Cheap, he guesses, for live theater, but still ... $30 pays for three months of Netflix and leaves enough change for a cup of coffee at a coffee shop with comfortable chairs. Five minutes after buying the ticket a man standing two feet from him to buy his own is given one by another man who has an extra ticket no one will use.
The doors open, the Loser enters. Used to movies, he sits in the second row, one in from the aisle. Five minutes later, another man sits next to him. He is shabby, bald but what's left he has long, 1977-era glasses, plastic grocery store bags he puts at his feet. A dirty sweater.
The Loser politely moves in another seat in and puts his coat (there is no coat room at this theater) on the seat between them.
Two couples there together, one of which seems to be on their first date, converse behind him. The man with the bags insinuates himself gracelessly into their conversation. They are kind to him and talk. The man describes himself as an actor, but has only acted at his church, which is in the far north of the city where people who live downtown or in the suburbs never go. Introductions are made. The man's first name is the same as the Loser's.
Mercifully, the lights dim and the play begins.
It's all right. Thought provoking. A delicate topic (40-year-old man bangs 12-year-old girl who is confronting him 15 years later in workplace break room after work) handled without the Oprah cliche's. But who talks like this? Shouting, waving arms, sentence fragments. The Loser's old high school pal is great, as far as the acting goes, and the woman is too. But film is more authentic, he decides, once you accept the idea of images projected on a screen of some kind. If the Loser ever goes to a theater again, it will be for a performance in which the fourth wall isn't only broken, it doesn't exist.