By R. CHASE
Bachelor Behavior
Sitting at Basa, watching the little jalapeno float gracefully in my highball glass, I started to get nervous.
Was I overdressed? Was I wearing too much cologne? Insecurities that hadn’t occurred to me since 1998 were starting to creep into the back of my consciousness.
I was going on a Man Date.
There is a time in every bachelor’s life that he looks around and realizes there is a distinct lack of male company. For an adult man in his prime, available women are not that hard to engage. They expect you to pursue them. They go out and wear sexy clothes and high-heeled shoes in hopes that you (or at least a wealthier, handsomer version of you) will come sniffing around.
But men are pack animals, and that pack is established early in life through shared transformative experiences. It might be your high school buddies, or the guys in your fraternity pledge class. It may be the soldiers in your platoon.
When you endure hardship and life-changing experiences with other men, the bonds that are created are incredibly strong. Men you don’t know are just competition.
But even a man without a pack needs some male bonding. You can buy female company for the night, but where the hell is the rent-a-bro service? Tinder for bromance, anyone?
I had guy friends, but our common ground was limited. Ivan was an ex-special forces solider from Ukraine with an enormous head and a Cossack scowl that said he’d be far more likely to beat you into a bloody pulp than smile. He was a great guy for a bar fight, but he refused to go anywhere with dance music or “those art people.” He preferred the shady, late-night crowd at the Outlook Inn.
Sven was a well-dressed, handsome guy, until he had too many vodka/red bulls. Then he would slip into a fit of alcohol-induced Tourette’s and start shouting “Toots McGoots!” whilst smacking himself on the arms and face repetitively.
Perhaps I was in need of some new men in my life.
I met The Dude at Nowhere Bar on the patio. He had long hair and a Zen casualness that seemed to lighten your burden. He’d just moved here from the west coast, and we immediately had that in common.
What I liked about him is that he was a talker. He had no problem conversing with anyone about anything and everything. There’s nothing worse than being out with a buddy who is awkward or anti-social.
The point of your buddy being there is to be less awkward. People don’t really trust a strange drunk guy in a bar, but two strange drunk guys is another story. That’s downright American.
I had a business gig going on, and I needed some help putting it together, so I made plans to meet him and discuss the possibility of working together.
Let me explain something about a Man Date: you’re never meeting for social reasons. You are meeting for business. We are men. We are kings. We must conquer. We must expand our dominion, so we form alliances with other kings.
Even if that global domination scheme actually ends with urinating in a dumpster somewhere between Cahoots and Taco Bell at 4:30 a.m., it’s still a pretty damn good strategic alliance.
He showed up, a little late, with his girlfriend, who dropped him off after glancing me over. It is standard operating procedure for the girlfriend to give her approval before the Man Date can commence.
After she left, we got down to a serious Man Business, which mostly hinged around doing shots, exaggerating sexual conquests and staring at the waitresses’ cleavage as often as we could get away with it.
While there are several aspects of manly behavior you can count on being common ground (drinking, women, sports and stuff with engines), a Man Date can’t go well unless there are other shared interests. The Dude and I had common ground in art, business, literature and basic Dudeism. We quickly began working on our plans to conquer the Universe (or, at the very least, that dumpster behind Cahoots).
Being on a Man Date is a lot less precarious than the regular kind. Things that would be an instant dating disaster won’t warrant a second glance from your dude.
Lost the keys to your car? He’ll call you a cab.
Spilled ranch sauce on your shirt? He was too busy checking out that chick to notice.
Accidentally missed the urinal and peed your pants leg because you were drunk? Guess what? So did he!
Even though we never made it to that dumpster behind Cahoots, it was the best date I’d been on in years.
Was it the testosterone? Maybe.
I walked home (OK, maybe stumbled) and after one small pit stop at the dumpster behind Cahoots, I made it to my bed and fell into the first deep, untroubled sleep in months.
There is often a tendency to imagine the “bachelor life” as one dealing mostly with woman, but a well-balanced bachelor must spend a good portion of time doing guy stuff.
Your perfect Man Date is out there, somewhere, stirring his drink, in need of some dude who can make him feel sane for not being the only one with dirty thoughts of Miley Cyrus creeping around his mind every time “Wrecking Ball” pops on the TV.
Go find him.
C’est la vie.