Arlene, Catrin Striebeck, and Mrs. Robinson

Well, here we go again. Who picks those stupid names for these storms,anyway? I love the weather before the storm. Less heat and humidity, more gusty breezes. It’s almost like the sea breeze you get in a real coast town.

I gave Hank a bath in the front yard this afternoon--maybe his last ritual of humiliating public bathing on Philip Street. Now he is extra shiny and smells great.

That movie Head-on is hanging with me. It’s really a secondary character that’s sticking. I can’t remember the character’s name, but she’s played by an actress named Catrin Striebeck—I looked her up.

Briefly, the film is about two people who meet in a psychiatric hospital in Hamburg after they’ve each attempted suicide. One is a lovely young Turkish girl who is suffocating at home under the control of her father and older brother. She’s a budding wild child, and she wants to be free to explore the wonderful world of liquor, drugs, music, dancing and fucking around. The guy is an old punk on the skids. He happens to be Turkish, but his ethnicity doesn’t mean much to him. But because he’s Turkish he’d make an at least marginally acceptable husband in the eyes of her family. She convinces him to marry her so she can be free of her father’s household. The deal is they won’t be sexually or romantically beholden to each other, but she’ll take care of him in return for him granting her her freedom. Hey guess what!? They end up falling in love with each other. It’s no Hollywood romance, though.

Anyway, the character I’m semi-fixated on is the fuck-buddy (for lack of a better term) of the old punk. Partly maybe because she looks a bit like me—if I were skinnier and had a jawline to speak of. Nose, cheekbones, eyebrows, hair—god help me, forehead lines—she’s my homegirl. And since this is a European film and not so uptight about nakedness, I can report that her tits are quite like mine, too.

Watching the movie, I would have guessed the actress was five or more years older than me, but I discovered she’s only about a year and a half older. She shows her age, but she’s hot.

The character is not the one the man falls in love with. She’s not the one who inspires him to keep going. She displays a twinge or two of jealousy when she catches on to what’s going down, so at first it’s easy to identify her as the reject.

But the two leads spark like they do largely because they’re equally fucked-up and self-destructive. And the young Turkish girl needs him. And she cleans his apartment and cooks for him.

My girl doesn’t need him and doesn’t do anything for him but fuck him and play naked backgammon with him afterward. Which, you know, actually sounds like a great relationship to me.

There are two self-sufficient female characters in the movie. One is the bride’s divorced cousin from Istanbul, who’s a bit of a yuppie corporate whore type, and my girl, a rock’n’roll hairdresser with black eyeshadow and tattoos.

I noticed her, I guess, because my sexual personality or m.o. or something—I don’t know the word I’m looking for—is changing. I’m turning into an "older woman," but what kind of older woman will I be? I’m only becoming more of an independent loner, but I don’t want to be celibate, nor do I want to be an all-out tramp. Though I do think some women can pull off trampiness, I don’t think I have it in me. I don’t want to be a cold-hearted maneater, but even more I don’t want to be pathetic and needy and lovelorn. That balance between tough and tender is tough to maintain.

Since Anne Bancroft just died, there’s been a lot of conversation about her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. That movie is way overrated, but she’s the best thing in it, by far. She was sexy, too—I mean, she was only 34 when she made that movie. But that character, sadly, seems both cold and pathetic at once—which doesn’t seem fair, she should be magnificent.

Well, life isn’t a movie, thank god. Coincidentally, when I was writing this at the Rue, a guy started flirting with me quite shamelessly. I mean that in a good way, he was not too embarrassed and not coy about it. I love it when they have the balls to just make a move. Well—as long as they’re reasonably attractive and not too pushy and they don’t make it seem like it’s a habit they practice with every woman who goes by—oy, the more you think about this shit, the more complicated it gets. Still, I have to say that while a little bit of shyness is endearing, painful crippling shyness is not attractive in a guy past the age of 18.

So anyway, this guy got it right. I’ve seen him before and registered "cute guy," but didn’t really give it much thought. He’s got the big-nose-and-cheekbones thing I like. Come to think of it, he looks something like MM with hair. Wearing long shorts and Doc Martens.

He invited me to his birthday party at the Half Moon next week. So I happen to know that he’s going to be 37, which makes him almost exactly 5 months older than me—in other words, age appropriate. What a novel idea.

He seemed pretty quick and funny. But he also said he waits tables at the Trolley Stop Café, and I have to admit that might be a mark against him. I’m not judgmental about money or the lack thereof, but I am turned off by slackerliness. Plus, oy, restaurant people! Still, if he’s a waiter/artist, waiter/musician or something like that it’s cool. As long as he does whatever it is and doesn’t just talk about it. And is reasonably good at it. But maybe I shouldn’t be snotty about things like that, especially if I just want to get laid. It would help if I knew what I wanted.

Anyway, we’ll see how things look to me next week. Haven’t seen the UD, by the way, but I will tonight.

I was thinking about all this a few days ago when I read an essay by Edmund White in The New Yorker called "My Women." Since he was gay at a time when it was hard to admit that to yourself or anyone else, he writes that he was constantly attracting unhappy women who wanted him to solve their problems, and who he always had to disappoint. But the essay turns out to be about the happy women in his life who didn’t try to get something from him that he couldn’t give. The last paragraph describes the kind of woman I’d like to be:

"What I loved about Anne and Marilyn—and even Alice, Sally and Gretchen—was that they weren’t unhappy. Marilyn wanted nothing from me but my friendship, and she has it still. She believed in love but dreaded marriage. For her, the proper form of love was a short, romantic affair (followed by an eternal friendship), just as a sonnet is the best form for a love lyric. She wasn’t afraid to be alone. In fact, she preferred it…. And she gathered her friends around her year after year. Because she and the others I’ve written about here were the first women I knew who weren’t unhappy, who never once made me feel guilty, they showed me the way to friendship with women."