When a Woman Steals Your Girlfriend

Though no millennial metrosexual, I sleep next to my laptop, and this morning, an email came from a Japanese literary journal, Monkey, to ask me to name a short story I wish I had written. Editor Motoyuki Shibata also requested a one-hundred-word explanation, which I promptly knocked out while sipping Earl Grey at my kitchen table. Done, I had a breakfast of spaghetti with tomato sauce, SPAM, salami and chunks of cheddar cheese. You had to see it.

Though I immediately thought of Borges, Kafka, and even Walser, I decided on Hemingway’s “The Sea Change,” a rather obscure yet groundbreaking story about a man losing his girlfriend to a woman. It’s most pertinent to our time. As with “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The End of Something,” “A Very Short Story” or The Sun Also Rises, etc., macho Hemingway is dealing with male impotence. “The Sea Change,” though, is his most succinct, radical, funny and prophetic treatment of the theme.and a $1,000 Rolex watch, and she was just a nursing student. Her name means “fairy,” by the way.

“Tien was not just the best girlfriend I’ve ever had, she was also the best person I’ve ever known.”

Years after he had broken up with Tien, Joe saw her walking up the steps of an elevated train station, “I was with this prostitute but I said, ‘Go over to that park and wait for me,’ then I ran to catch up with Tien. I felt this small, man,” and he kept his hands about six inches apart. “I said to her that I was broke and really needed money, so she gave me a twenty. That was the last time I ever saw Tien.”

Consider 20-year-old Jay, an unemployed college dropout who lives with his divorced dad. Jay’s parents broke up mostly because his executive dad was jobless for three years. All day, Jay’s locked inside his room, surfing the internet or steering that joystick. Jay has no friends, much less a girlfriend. Not a bad looking kid, Jay was bright and confident enough in high school to win the California Speech Championship in thematic interpretation. Jay lives in a pleasant, well-landscaped Fremont neighborhood, which is nice, I suppose if you have somewhere to go each day. Otherwise, there’s nothing around to even be kicked out of. Even if Jay was old enough to drink, there’s no bar nearby. There’s Bombay Pizza, “Home Of The Curry Pizza,” but that’s no place to chill. In such a bedroom “community,” you’re lost if you’re not plugged into school or work. There are nothing and no one to resocialize you, so for a young man, this means that Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, and YouJizz will be your best companions. Since Jay already had a nervous breakdown, his dad doesn’t want to push him. “What should I do? What will he do when I die?”

A third of Americans under 35 now live with their parents, and half of them spend half of their incomes servicing debts. You’re not likely to get married if you’re living with mom and dad, that’s for sure, but soon enough, we will see three generations under one roof again, out of economic necessity. We will also see more couples with their kids all in one room. Poor people worldwide already live this way, and we are poor.

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