ATOMIC DOG
Tragic Maturity
by TC

I don't think I've ever told you this before, but I have the word Adidas imprinted on my pecker. No, it's not a tattoo, nor is it some unconventional sponsorship deal arranged by the fine people at Adidas. Rather it's the reminder of an unfortunate accident; a reminder of the first time I met Eduardo.

I was on the soccer pitch, not because I like the game, but because I don't have much choice as most of my damn friends are from Europe and they couldn't throw a baseball or football if you offered them a kilo of Euros.

I'd offered to be the goalie, largely because I refuse to run aimlessly up and down the field in the heat while complaining to God in a foreign language, but also because, as a pure matter of physics, I take up more space in goal than my teammates, thus making it harder, in theory, for the other team to score a goal.

The action was on the other side of the field when one of the opposing team's Brazilian players stole the ball and broke towards the goal — my goal. Tall and graceful, Eduardo artfully dribbled the ball down the field between, around, and even over the defenders. It was if somehow he'd affixed the ball to his shoe with the gum of some sticky Amazonian tree. He was only about ten feet away from me when he blasted the ball as hard as he could.

As it knuckled towards me, he bellowed, "For Brazillllll!"

It hit me right in the crotch. It made a noise like a burly Russian cleaning woman using a baseball bat on a heavy rug to teach it a miserable lesson about her wretched asexual life.

I went down, not slowly, but in a crumpled heap like the victims of the nailgun killer in No Country for Old Men. There I lay for 20 minutes in fetal position, hands cradling my nads while the rest of the players either grimaced or chuckled nervously.

While I recovered soon enough, I have the unfortunate aforementioned imprint to remind me of that afternoon. To this day, I can't watch the BBC's World News because if I hear the word "Brazil, " I experience a horrific Pavlovian response where, instead of drooling, my pecker recedes deep into my body like the head of a frightened turtle.

To add insult to injury, Eduardo has since become an unwelcome fixture in my life. It seems everywhere I go, whether it be a bar, restaurant, cafe, or nightclub, the stinking, rotting, soccer-playing albatross around my neck; the Brazilian bringer of testicle death, Eduardo, shows up, giving a whole new meaning to the term, 'cock block.'

He's in his late thirties, amiable, and quite the ladies' man — at least he says he is. He has no discernible job. He gets up when he wants to; does what he wants to. Beyond that, he's a moron. He sucks the life out of me whenever he shows up.

He absolutely murders any conversation I might be having. He lingers and lingers, regaling me in his heavy Portuguese accent with tales of his alleged female conquests.

"Hey TC! I have a new line for the women. They lovvvve it! You want to hear it?"

"Sure, Eduardo, sure," I answer with all the enthusiasm of a weary parent who's been asked yet again to listen to his five-year-old recite Itsy Bitsy Spider for the umpteenth fuckin' time.

"I say, 'Hey, I'm a spy. I am James Bond!' Ha!"

Upon saying this, he stands up straight, grins mightily, and literally puffs up, proud as some weird Brazilian bird that's just laid a mangled cricket at a prospective mate's feet. The poor bastard is actually proud of himself! He doesn't realize he's Forresto Gumpo, but with an ego!

The oddest, and most difficult thing for me personally, is that he does do well with the women! But I have a theory.

It must be because fucking Eduardo, in the female mind, doesn't really count. It must be like those horny female teachers who sleep with their young, underage students, or like Jenny Fields, who fucks brain dead Technical Sergeant Garp in The World According to Garp.

Sure, if you fuck something with an I.Q. under a hundred, it's a freebie! There's no walk of shame! You just smooth out your dress and give the thing with a penis a cookie!

Most recently, I was at a local watering hole with my friend Jason and we're having a great wide-ranging conversation when, sure enough, Eduardo walks in to shake our hands and subsequently suck the life out of me.

"Hey TC, I saw your wife running. She has big breasts! Very nice!"

My God, he's the living incarnation of Georg and Yortuk, the two Czechoslovakian "wild and crazy guys" played by Steve Martin and Dan Akroyd on the old SNL!

Come on, American fox-es, we are hoping it is not long before all our clothes are off and we are holding your big American breasts in our hands!

Yortuk, a.k.a. Eduardo, even plagues me in the gym. He'll be in the middle of practicing Jiu Jitsu moves against some fearsome imaginary opponent when he'll walk over to fuck-up my deadlift session, even though I'm wearing my headphones and a scowl to ward off humans; even though my timer is beeping impatiently.

I ought to kill him, but I have a morbid curiosity to hear what's going to spill out of this buffoon's head, so I cover up my balls and listen.

Within minutes, I'm bereft of energy and the will to live. I look like one of the people whose blood feeds the vampires night after night. I swear I'd stick a shit-covered stake through his heart if he weren't so damn cartoon-character amiable. You can't kill a Portuguese Scooby Doo can you?

Ruh-row!

Eduardo is just the type of guy I often write about, the boy-man who never grew up, the ubiquitous non-entities who leech off the emotions and finances of others. They contribute nothing. They neither sow nor reap, but yet God — or poor bastards like you and me — feed them (or at least buy them drinks).

Just recently, though, I became re-acquainted with a Universal Law: every force has an equal and opposing force. This is the way of Newtonian Physics and, apparently, nimrods. I actually met Eduardo's alter ego; his moral Moriarty.

He's roughly 25. His hair is short, perfectly coiffed, and held in place with a dab of mousse or Brylcreem, if they even make that stuff anymore. He's wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with thin blue stripes and a little Polo pony above the breast pocket. The cuffs are not rolled up. His slacks, not pants, slacks, are also white, and he's wearing tasseled brown loafers with beige socks.

Of course his name is Andrew! Not Andy, not even Anj, which would probably qualify as Andy of Mayberry cool, but Andrew, which is what they always name the clones.

"Andrew 7, report to surgery. We need to remove your liver for transplant into the original Andrew."

Andrew asks me if I've thought about my financial future. He's interning as a broker at Merrill Lynch and he's worried that I'm not investing wisely.

My impulse is to kick the moneychanger in the balls, or at least grab his arm, put his hand down on the table, grab a knife, and Yakuza his finger off.

Instead I listen as uncomfortably as if I'm listening to a ten-year-old tell me how he's just given up breastfeeding. He gives me his lactose-soaked business card and walks over to his 325i Beemer, which is the introductory entry-level car for every wannabe snooty capitalist sonofabitch in training to become a full-fledged self-absorbed asshole.

Obviously, Andrew is the Bizarro version of Eduardo. While Eduardo never grew up, Andrew is an old man at the age of 25. He's tragically mature. He's already heavily invested in a 401K plan. He dresses like the guys in the Father's Day ad for J.C. Penney in the Sunday paper. He campaigned for Ronald Reagan when he was still in his mother's womb. He puts on hypoallergenic latex gloves before he beats off into a zip-loc bag.

Whereas Eduardo sucks the life out of me because of his exasperating slacker lifestyle, Andrew makes me want to take out my dick and stick it in his ear — only because he'd likely find it appalling.

When it comes to Andrew, who I've seen numerous times since first meeting him, I almost want to grab him by the lapels and scream at him, beg him, "C'mon, I ask you as a man, you straight-laced bastard, at least say something about my wife's tits!" That, or proclaim through clenched teeth, "Tassels...belong on...a...stripper! Not on...your...shoes!"

It's weird, on one calloused hand, I've always trumpeted the virtues of the Andrew types who work hard, study hard, and work out hard.

But on the other, I often revel in the Eduardo types who say fuck-you to convention, believe in the philosophy of not doing anything you don't want to do, embrace fun because you're going to die soon enough, who like to dance with Chlamydia, the Greek Goddess of promiscuous sex.

Of course, I may be giving Eduardo too much credit as the notion that this mutt actually has a philosophy of life is a little far-fetched.

But these two represent such extremes that I have zero respect for either.

The tale of Eduardo and Andrew is a lot like Aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper spends the warm summer months singing and screwing while the ant works June through September to store up food for the winter. When winter comes and the grasshopper finds himself dying of hunger, he asks the ant for food but is turned down because of his idleness.

Of course, if Aesop were writing his fable today, the ant would develop blood pressure problems because he neglected to have any fun. That, and the IRS would slap a huge capital gains tax on the ant because of his recently accumulated wealth. His wife would end up leaving him and shack up with Eduardo...er, the grasshopper, at which point the ant would kill himself in a botched murder/suicide.

In our modern day, parallel fable, my pecker is now a poster board for Adidas. In our modern day fable, Eduardo orders his Mojito "shaken, not stirred," and somehow gets hot women — sometimes two at a time — to actually do what we've been trying to get them to do since our sleepy fetal balls plopped into our scrotums.

In our modern day fable, Andrew's superficiality and fake sincerity will allow him to earn trust and obscene amounts of money in a financial world gone mad.

Adolescence, while it's a place I like to visit periodically, shouldn't be a lifestyle. Tragic maturity, while appropriate at times, will kill your soul if practiced perpetually.

The irony is that Andrew and Eduardo need what each other has. If you disassociated their molecules and reconstituted them as one person, you might have a legitimate human being there. Then maybe I wouldn't have to bear the penile scars invoked by a man-child and shake the hand of a prematurely old polo boy.

Becoming a self-actualized man is a helluva thing. Knowing when to do the right thing under difficult circumstances, or knowing when to do the wrong thing when it harms no one but reminds us of what it is to be fucking happy, is hard but essential. Unfortunately, neither Andrew nor Eduardo are capable of making either decision.

If you spend your days in the mind-set of a twelve year old or in the mind-set of a seventy-year-old, you miss out. You might as well grab your nuts and fall over now because the soccer ball of life is sooner or later going to hit you square in the nuts and unlike me, you won't get up.

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