Conquest Diverted

Here's a comedic satire which touches on the difference between matters of the body and matters heart when it aches for another.

“Just lower your standards,” Cutter advised. “I’m sick of you looking all bummed out.”

Bayani looked at him with a tired expression, and asked for clarification. “Lower my standards? How low?” They were sitting next to one another, fingering the black lids of their respective empty coffee cups. As they had nowhere to go, they’d been people watching, occasionally commenting on the various characters that drifted in and out of the Natch.

“Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere,” Cutter said. “Have you tried the online dating thing?”

“Not after being catfished. Face to face is the only way from now on. It’s too easy for girls to photoshop or slap on a filter.”

“You could video chat, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Either way, you need to snap out it. So what if Fragilique moved on? You were only together for a few months.”

“Six months,” Bayani corrected. “I hate her so much.”

“Um?” Cutter raised an eyebrow.

“No, I still love her,” Bayani admitted, and sighed.

“Well, get over it. Like I was saying, lower the bar. Drop your standards. Fragilique was a smoke show, but there are other girls out there that have given you the eye, and you don’t even give them the time of day. So what if they’re not as beautiful? Listen, I think what you need is some drunk chick to feel sorry for you. I bet around 2am, you’d meet a good looking girl. She might be wasted, but--”

“Bars are too expensive. Besides, for every girl there are ten guys, and how would I get home? I’m not gonna try hitch hiking at two in the morning. Especially not with some drunk barmaid puking in the bushes.”

“Well, maybe there’s no need. What about her?” Cutter pointed. They were sitting out under the sun at the furthest table. A blonde girl in a green sarong had just sat down at one of the tables under the tin canopy. She had a cardboard plate, some hot-bar items, and appeared to be solitary, far enough away that they wouldn’t be overheard.

“Out of my league,” Bayani contended.

“No she isn’t,” Cutter countered.

“Yeah she is. Look what she’s eating, and look what she’s wearing. You can’t buy hot-bar stuff with food stamps, so she’s basically Puna rich, whereas I’m broke.”

Cutter began to chuckle and shook his head. “I give up! You’re too much. Puna rich because she isn’t on EBT?”

“Richer than me,” Bayani reasoned, glum as a balloon in a mud puddle.

“Maybe she could take you out to eat. Maybe you need a sugar mama.”

“Gross.”

“Why? Don’t be so old school. Guys don’t need to be the ones footing the bill all the time.”

“My shack is ghetto. You’ve seen it. She’d run away the moment she saw where I live.”

“I don’t know about that. Starving artists--chicks dig em. That’s a thing.”

“Right now, I can’t even afford paint.”

“Why don’t you sell some of your paintings?”

“You don’t think I’ve been trying? I sold one a week ago, hence this coffee.”

“Yeah, thanks for fronting me one. I’ll get you back, and I appreciate it.”

“Not a front. This is on me.”

“Yeah, sorry you didn’t get that. I was trying to be funny, trolling you because I know you don’t front anything. With you, it’s a gift or nothing, I’ve heard your philosophy on fronting. Just trolling you, I guess it worked.”

“Fronting anything is retarded. Not in a derogatory way, I’m just saying that a trade on the spot is the only way to do business. People, friends, family, it doesn’t matter, people always end up disappointing you. It’s why the credit card companies--”

“Stop!” Cutter cried, and burst into laughter. “It’s too much. You’re repeating yourself. I’ve heard this a million times! You’ve got to stop, brah, please!”

“Just sayin.” They grinned at one another, then looked to the front of the store, and lifted their empty cups, simultaneously realizing that both cups were empty, and had been for a while, an awkward moment when they set them down, mirroring one another. It was a spurious synchronicity, one of those offsetting ones as the cups clicked on the table, a tandem clack. They looked down the sidewalk, as if absorbed by the newcomer in front of the store.

A dreadlocked guy wearing an enormous backpack took a seat next to the blonde girl. She smiled, her gestures tentative but friendly. As they began to chat, Cutter told Bayani he’d missed his chance.

“That guy carries his home on his back,” Cutter said. “And look at the way she’s responding. She doesn’t care if he has money or not. You should have made a move.”

“He’s better looking than me,” Bayani noted.

“With that bird’s nest on top of his head?”

“Maybe he’s Rasta.”

“He’s white.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t be a Rasta. Besides, look at his jaw. Women like guys with rectangle heads. He’s got that going on.”

“Where’d you hear girls like rectangle heads? Sounds like nonsense.”

“I forget, but I remember seeing my round head in the mirror and talking to Fragilique about it. She told me she likes Filipinos, that we’ve all got round heads. But, gone now, isn’t she? Snake has a rectangle head.”

Cutter stroked his own jaw, and asked, “What about me?”

“You look alright,” Bayani mused, and shrugged noncommittally.

“No, dumbass, I’m asking about the shape of my head.”

“Sorta like an upside down triangle, but that might be because of your hat.”

Cutter took off his hat. Bayani shrugged. Cutter frowned. “I think I have a rectangle head. It’s more rectangle than yours, that’s for sure.”

“If you say so,” Bayani permitted.

Under the canopy, the dreadlocked guy erupted into a belly laugh that carried across the fifty feet of sidewalk. The blonde girl, sunburned as she was, blushed a deeper shade of red, but was smiling at the dreadlocked guy’s outburst.

“I wish I could laugh like that,” Bayani lamented.

“You laugh.”

“Yeah, but not like that. I need to laugh more.”

“You are a rather melancholy fellow, but that’s why you’re such a damn good painter.”

The dreadlocked guy stood a moment after the blonde girl was up on her feet. He towered above her, and she looked up at his square jaw a moment before walking around the table and beyond the water cooler. After tossing her plate in the trash, she graced the hopeful looking dreadlocked guy with a brisk wave, walked across the parking lot and stepped inside a Toyota Tacoma. The new truck was glimmering green like an emerald, pristine as the lawn in front of the white house, or the green sarong with the white turtle she’d wrapped around her hips.

“There’s no way that’s her truck,” Cutter asserted, as she pulled out of the stall. “Gotta be her boyfriend’s.”

“Probably. Just because she was alone… I don’t know.” Bayani looked thoughtfully up at the truck.

“I knew it the moment I saw her,” he went on, “with the hot-bar food. And there was something about her sarong. Rich girls wear them too, not just the hippie chicks. She was way out of my league.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. But speaking of selling, you should get yourself a table at the Wednesday night market. If a girl like her saw your paintings, I’m willing to bet that--”

“Like you said, that had to have been her boyfriend’s truck, so even if she saw my art--”

“I didn’t say her, you idiot. I said “like” her, as in a sarong clad yoga chick, but totally bangin like she was.”

“My paintings aren’t that good. I mean thanks for the--”

“Oh, shut the fuck up! I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. Your art is that good. And you’re a handsome enough bloke.”

“Bloke?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, thanks for the English flavored hype, but all the good spots at the market are already taken down at uncle’s. You have to be in the main lane, or no one’s gonna see your stuff.”

“Bayani, enough with the black magic spell casting. Your league believing type of… well listen. Since Fragilique hooked up with Snake, you just smoke weed and play that minecraft game on your friggin phone and tell me how you need to find another woman.”

“I don’t need a meaningless bump in the night. That’s what I’ve got my hand for.” Bayani held up his right hand. “You really think some random hookup would cure my pain like some antidote?”

“Worth a shot. Your hand won’t. I can guarantee you that much.”

“You can’t guarantee shit,” Bayani scoffed.

“I know you think Fragilique was your soulmate, or whatever it was you were saying the other night, but--”

“I was drunk. Cut me some slack.”

“You were crying, and I wasn’t even gonna bring that up, but--”

Bayani delivered a solid punch to Cutter’s arm.

“Chillax!” Cutter cried, throwing up his hands in surrender.

“I was drunk. I don’t even remember half of what happened.”

“You wish you didn’t. You can pretend you don’t remember crying, but--”

“No, I remember that,” Bayani said, then frowned, unsure and said, “Kind of. It’s a bit of a blur.”

“I was being a dick,” Cutter recalled.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t stop talking about Fragilique and Snake. Wait, is that when I teared up?”

“No, you started to cry when you brought up the time Fragilique blew up your bathroom. You said it
was so bad, and then you started to laugh, and then, well, you started to blubber like an orphan elephant standing over its dead mother.”

“What?”

“Yeah, the other day I watched a video of this baby elephant making this crazy wailing sound when
its mother had just been shot by these ivory hunters in--”

“No, I’m not asking about baby elephants, I’m asking about why I was crying. Because she blew up my bathroom? What are you talking about?”

“She stunk it up, dumbass. Not literally ‘blew it up’. Your second date or something. I forget the exact scenario, but you started to talk about it, all slurring your words, laughing and then you got all emotional”

“Weird,” Bayani considered, squinting, but unable to remember.

“Right? But it’s cool,” Cutter said, casually. “In my humble opinion, before you go looking for another Fragilique, I think you need to browse the library. You don’t need to buy a book, just check one out for a couple weeks.”

“Books on how to pick up girls?”

“No,” Cutter chuckled. “You’re really slow today. I’m saying that you should probably date some girls, not get all serious, not right now.”

“And there’s books on that?”

“No, the girls are like books you check out instead of buying,” Cutter explained, a bit frustrated until he caught the gleam in Bayani’s eye. “Are you trolling me?”

“No, I’m just trying to figure out what books you--”

“You dick! You knew what I meant the first time. Browse the aisles, flip through the pages.”

“Now girls are pages?”

“You said it, not me,” Cutter said, and winked. “Video chat or OKcupid it up. Get on eHarmony or Tinder. Start swiping right like a madman, but for fuck’s sake, lower your standards.”

“How about Craigslist casual encounters?”

“Casual? Yes, but I don’t know about Craigslist.”

“Or we could watch her get accosted by the next dreadlocked guy,” Bayani suggested, nodding to a buxom brunette in overall shorts. She’d just taken a seat at the table under the roof where the blonde girl had been sitting.

“So, is she out of your league as well? She could have bought that sandwich with an EBT card.”

“Only one way to find out,” Bayani said, and swung his legs out from under the table.

“My God!” Cutter said. “Are you seriously gonna do this?”

“Probably not a good idea,” Bayani said, but began making his way toward the girl.

“That’s the spirit,” Cutter called out, grinning.

Both were unaware that the brunette was at her wit’s end, frustrated by all the unsolicited attention she’d been receiving, but so it goes in a place like Puna.