ElimiDate Among the Mammals

 

“If we aren’t God’s children, sculpted into form by His hands to resemble His own image, what are we exactly?”

That’s the third question I asked my date, Katie, at a shitty dive bar last week. We were sitting in a horseshoe-shaped booth, and I thought she was utterly repulsive, perhaps even a transvestite. Five minutes into this date, which we arranged through the internet, I had given up. Most girls post pictures on their dating profiles that merely conceal how fat they are. Katie had posted photographs of an entirely different person.

So I decided to broach a topic I was sure would infect our date with a case of the plague and bring the night to a quick end: I’d tell her about how we’re monkeys.

The first two questions I asked her were about God. She brought the topic up as an icebreaker and was going on about it while we got our drinks from the bar and settled in the booth. The story was that her dad’s an asshole, except on Sundays when he attends Catholic mass.

“Are you religious, too?” I asked her. “No.” “What do you think of your dad being religious?” “He’s a fucking idiot.”

Cue my third question. She took longer to answer that one.

“Umm...I guess we are…mammals?” She did these little head twists as she spoke – closed her eyes, in fact, right as she guessed “mammals.”

Here was a monkey who has lived for 29 years, who stares at her own teeth as she brushes them morning and night, who has a pair of tits, a set of ribs, hands just like a monkey’s – and she was guessing at what she is.

Not unusual at all. Pretty much every monkey on this planet thinks they are something other than animal. Hell, I spent the first 24 years of my life blissfully unaware of this most obvious facet of human experience. Once I made the discovery, I spent about a month wondering why no one had ever told me this before. I spent another going back and rereading the writers and thinkers I admire to make sure they hadn’t said anything I missed. I spent a third month very pissed that not a second of my K-through-college “education” had covered it. Then I went through a stretch during which I decided no one talks about this because They’ll Kill You if You Do. Really, that’s what I thought. But I’m past that now.

And now that I’m on the other side – now that I Know – my relative wealth and good looks do nothing for my sense of superiority over the rest of the monkeys out there compared to this knowledge and growing faculty to articulate it. It’s typical monkey behavior to lord what you have over everyone else, including knowledge that you are one.

I also know that once you talk about this monkey stuff with people, there’s no going back for them, ever. They will never forget what you said to them, and they will think about it for the rest of their lives, ready to drop whatever human theater’s going on in a flash to hear more.

But to get back to Katie, I was in full gloat mode, breathing heavily, eyes bulging as I asked her that third question. I told her it sounded like she was saying that we’re animals. She looked at me and opened her mouth halfway and nodded. “I guess so, yeah.”

Katie is a whale of a girl. She’s a shade under six feet, and I’d weigh her in at 195 lbs. She has barrels for legs, very thick wrists, and a gut. Her tits are big, but they look small on her hulking frame, which looks kind of pouty from the back. That’s Katie’s monkey body. The decoration that she covered it with that night was, as she described it, “Lauren Bacall” – a throwback wool skirt with pleats, lots of gold bracelets and rings, dyed and curled chin-length blond hair, and lots of mascara.

I concluded that only a 29 year-old man would mention the fact that he was dressed up like Lauren Bacall, and the thick wrists all but nailed it down. I’m a bit of a coward, so I didn’t have the guts to ask Katie if she was a guy, or why she didn’t look a thing like the girl I’d seen on the internet. Odd, right? I had no problem giving Katie a quick biology lesson.

But when she retrieved her wallet to give me $2 for the Jukebox, I did tell Katie the puffy Chanel purse that she was sporting looked just like one that I’ve seen trannies carrying around. I just blurted it out. The purse - not the animal stuff - was the punch that put Katie on the mat.

“What did you mean by that?” she asked.

After lying to Katie about why I’d made the tranny comment, I felt okay sitting next to her. Somehow the next hour went by pretty quickly. We had two more drinks, and I decided I was going to kiss her and feel her body to make sure.

She drove me home, and did I kiss her, managing to run my fingers along her face and feel her tits before she stopped me. No stubble. Smooth, soft breasts. Katie was a girl, after all. I realized I still wanted to see her naked. I told her so.

“I’m not that kind of girl,” Katie said.

“You mean, kind of monkey,” I corrected her.

“Yeah,” she said, “Kind of monkey. Bye.”