White Collar Criminal: “Diamond Flakes For God’s Sake” (from TLV #161)

Thurston Moore once sang “Time takes its crazy toll / And how does your mirror grow,” and now he’s divorced.

Pursuant to rules established eons upon Neon Deions ago, I only chase smart broads. In 6th grade, I dated the smartest, tallest girl in the class. She was reading on a 12th grade level and admonishing her peers for diving into the trials and tribulations of Sweet Valley High. Her catty remarks were cutesy to some, flippant to others, and galvanizing to me. Her hands were always wrapped around a hard cover or the neck of a boy. Pull her hair if you dare, but expect swift retribution. Why she liked me, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was because I snapped her four-week winning streak in Battle Cards (long story). Perhaps it was because I accepted her as an intellectual giant, a true whiz kid, whereas the other cub scouts didn’t care for the lady in pink cracking their skulls on vocabulary tests. In 9th grade, a senior impregnated her and she never graduated from high school.

In college, my ability to blow off class and skip right to the bar became less a habit, and more of a ritual. Is it Wednesday? Party On! Part: XXVII. To stabilize my crumbling interior, I crystallized a failsafe plan to plant a kiss on the nearest Honors College kitty within a two barstool radius. Often times, my attempts were plagued by extraneous factors such as “last call” and “boyfriend is in the bathroom.” Really weak crap, ya know?
Eventually, it worked, but not for long. These girls weren’t auditioning for the next episode of Real Housewives of Madison County. These girls were championing new frontiers: teaching in South Korea, cooking in Italy, witnessing in Sudan. No hope for African-based girlfriends, hell-bent on restoring order to a land unblessed by God’s sickly green mirth. So I moved on as they moved away.

If true romance evades the common man during his four-to-seven years cooped up in undergrad, it completely ignores him while he travels from hotel-to-hotel, client-to-client. Free HBO and a consolation breakfast; it’s first class for the lowest class. Then I walked into The Delgado, a five-star blast from the surreal past with $40 appetizers and milk made from mommies. I didn’t see her sipping there because the lounge was dangerously dark. But when the perfect match marches into the doldrums and casts a blinding shadow over the monotony of crunching impenetrable spreadsheets into slabs of uniformly abhorred data, the eyes take notice. She introduced herself. Her voice was porcelain. Her eyes were glass. She spoke volumes. Her beauty was and still is rare in that she doesn’t believe the mirror. Cram the chit-chat. Save the romcom compliments for the other girls, please. Just be real with me, she begs. Be you, she says. Please see.

And we were real. We grew close. We’ll call her Gloria. Our phone calls were marathons and our collective fatigue finished second to our warmest dialogues. We educated one another about our passions, our struggles and our sense of purpose. She delved deep into philosophical conundrums, and though our views were differing, we agreed to disagree. We exchanged knowing glances while crashing on couches and listening to the baby birds chirp outside weekend windows. Absent were the dramatic interposes that conflict any burgeoning relationship. No quarrels to contaminate our peaceful existence. Bliss, blooming bit by bit.

Thurston later sang, “Look into his eyes and you can see / Why all the little kids are dressed in dreams,” and Gloria and I broke up.

She said something didn’t feel right, and for once it wasn’t my fault. The constant travel and excruciating hours spent nesting in a cubicle played no role in our demise. Her compliments were expressed through a poem, placed delicately in a text message. In the end, she blamed our philosophical differences in rhyming form. Enigmatic, sure. Flaky, maybe. Crystal, clear. Now I see.

White Collar Criminal is a twenty-something working for the 1%,
whether you like it or not.