The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men & One Woman (2 page)

I’m wearing black jeans and a black turtle neck. My hair is shoulder length and straight. I look so L.A. This sure beats my blah old life of buying and selling Florida real estate.

The waitress appears, a slender young woman with skin the color of creamed cocoa, and sets a jumbo iced tea in front of Kurt. Me, she gives the standard size.

“Make them both this size.” Kurt touches his knuckle to the glass, smiling graciously. She leans over him, her arm brushing his shoulder as she whisks my glass away. “Sure,” she says, to him ... not me.

Kurt tortures his lemon slice into a submissive knot and plops it into the big tumbler. He seems to be in a hurry to talk. Happy to examine the issues, he’s happier still for the audience. “My mind’s like a bad neighborhood,” he explains. “I don’t like to go in there alone because I might get mugged.”

I laugh. He’s obviously joking as his personal life is known to be a far cry from the fast-lane image he projects. He’s managed to remain happily married to the same woman for fifteen years. Impressive especially in a place like Los Angeles, where relationships go into a turnaround faster than development deals.

“So,” I begin, “what are you doing that makes it so right?”

“It’s simple,” he replies. “Relationships are all about ... your word. In the end, the only thing you’ve got is your word. If you build your word on your emotions, you’re building on a weak foundation that is going to shift and change. It’s going to all fall apart. It just doesn’t work that way. See I don’t think that love is a feeling, that’s not it. Love is my word. When I say
I Love You,
I’ve given you my word, and now I have to create that love, not on how I feel, but because I say so.”

At the sound of the “L” word the females at the next table turn as a unit to look at Kurt. I squelch a laugh. Kurt continues, ignoring them, but I can tell he’s secretly pleased.

“So when I’m angry, I have to still create love.” His voice gets louder. “When you piss me off or you do something that makes me not want to love you, I have to say, ‘I still love you.’ People don’t know how to ... no one keeps their word anymore.”

I think about men who place no value on their word, juxtapose it against the thinly veneered female competition raging around us. I wonder about the cost of cloning Kurt.

“From one day to the next, I don’t know where my job’s going to be,” he says. “Every time we make a date, it ends up getting broken. If Annie didn’t know I was committed to our relationship, she’d go ‘this guy’s a flake.’ So I have to make it work. There has to be some kind of intention that glues it all together.”

Once again Kurt is using his eyes to pin me down.

I blush ... for no good reason.

“It’s the difference between me making the world fit my word or my word fit the world. It’s really what it comes down to. You understand? It comes from inside, I make it work because I say so. For me, it’s strictly because I say so. My word is more powerful than everything else.”

This all sounds great ... almost too good. This is L.A., and maybe his rap, as genuine as it seems, is just a prop – real on the surface, but plywood thin and phony as a back lot set. I probe his lines, testing. “You mean once you tell someone you love them – you
make
yourself love them?”

“No, but if I finally do tell someone something as important as ‘I love you,’ then all I have is my word on how I say it’s going to be. And I stick to my word.”

“So what happens if you change your mind?”

He knits his fingers together thoughtfully, leans in for emphasis. “The difference is, do I change my mind or do I change my commitment? A lot of people let their feelings dictate their lives. They wake up, they don’t feel good, they don’t want to work, so they don’t go to work. They feel like they’re in love the night before, they wake up and they don’t feel in love. If I let all that stuff around me dictate how I am or how I act, I’ve got no power. I’ve given my power away. The only fact that I have is what I say.”

“Where did you get all this self-discipline from?” I ask him.

“My mother instilled it in me by her example. The whole thing has to do with self-respect. You have to find something to pull you on. She gave me that. You give your word – you keep your word.”

“But how did you know your love was real?”

“You just do,” he says. “You can’t imagine it into being. It’s just there ...”

“Cheese omelet?” Our waitress is back, all but serving up her breasts as a side dish as she waits on Kurt. She positions his plate with great delicacy and hangs for his approval. It’s clear she thinks he’s a celebrity of sorts.

“It’s fine, fine.” He waves her aside, gently.

“Oh, I forgot your food,” she tells me off-handedly. “Be right back.”

I shoot her my best glare just as Martin Scorsese steps between us and settles in the booth behind Kurt. Martin – Holy Cats! – Scorsese. I forget about the ditzy waitress and I forget about my food. One of the all-time greatest directors is breathing the same pickle-scented air as me. I bite my lip and try to concentrate.

Kurt continues. “I know there are other women out there who might be more my physical type, you know, bigger women. I’m a big person and Annie is small. I think that you can have everything you want in life, but if your vision of what that is, is attached to some picture ... you’ll probably get disappointed.

“There’s a certain distraction that I see in all my single friends. They could be twenty or forty, they could be sixty-whatever. They’re always chasing this elusive train. They never really get to where they want to get to in their lives because they’re always chasing this thing they don’t have. Even with sex, if you think sex is going to be this big ‘pay off in a relationship, you’re out of your mind. The payoff is in hanging in there. When you really start to build that friendship that can’t be broken, no matter what, that’s the pay off.”

I feel my eyes sliding to the booth over his shoulder and force myself to look at Kurt.

“Annie and I have the ability to create a new relationship every time it gets old. Soon we’ll be ready to have a baby.”

“That’s great,” I say as I sneak at full-on peek at Marty. Someone in dark glasses has joined him. My imagination goes loopy. The new guy’s got jet black hair and high cheek bones. The air around him crackles with energy. What if it’s Johnny Depp?

Kurt stretches one leg and tips back in his chair. “Annie and I need to change. We don’t want to have a kid built on the old relationship. It won’t work. We need more of a commitment, with a common thread that the relationship hangs on that allows us to swing and dangle without breaking.” I try to pay attention. What would Barbara Walters do?

The mysterious stranger slowly removes his shades. He’s not Johnny. Darn.

I return to Kurt and our interview. “Why have you lasted this long with Annie? Can you sum it up for me?”

“‘Cause she was my first love, and you can’t replace that,” he says. The words are soft and sexy as they leave his lips.

Kurt and I shake hands as I thank him for the interview. Marty gives me a questioning look as I stand to leave. Maybe there’s something familiar about me? Maybe he’s casting for a role that Goldie Hawn turned down? I hesitate thinking I could ask him if I might schedule an interview with him. And in that moment of my hesitation, ‘Not Johnny’ picks up the thread of their conversation. Now it would be rude to interrupt. She who hesitates loses Scorsese.

Female heads turn as Kurt and I exit. It’s always nice to be followed by a hunk. Great for a girl’s ego. It beats wearing the latest fashions.

Once on the street, Kurt heads right and I turn left. I do heel-kicks in the parking lot. Oh happy day. Annie was Kurt’s first love and they’re still in that magic zone.

“Fasten your seatbelts as we begin to time hop.”

~ Barbara Silkstone, Love Investigator

You’re wondering how I zip from the cancer-inducing environs of Sal’s apartment to lunch with a hunk in Jerry’s Famous Deli. After I choke down Sal’s coffee, which might also be cancer-inducing, he gives me a list of eight guys he thinks are willing to be interviewed. I call the first name on the list and trot out with my trusty tape recorder and a feeling of excitement. My project, my journey, is underway.

The thought of sitting alone with strange men in their man-caves doesn’t frighten me, but I’m happy my first interview is in a public place. What does scare the bees out of me are the freeways. I sit behind the wheel of the little rental car and accelerate up the on-ramp into the mass of aggressive metal wondering if I’ll survive the notorious southern California traffic.

The rules for the interviews are simple. I sign a one page agreement with each man promising to never divulge their names and to disguise their identities. Otherwise, I’m free to use anything they say. Their only obligations are to tell the whole truth and not hit on me. We agree to have no further contact after our meeting. My thought is if they know they have no future with me they’d be more likely to open up and get completely naked, emotionally.

My interviewing uniform is a sweater, jeans, and black boots. I don’t want to look judgmental or shrink-like by wearing a business suit. And a dress of any sort might convey vulnerability. The men should be completely at ease in my company.

The great interview with Kurt increases my excitement. He opens up and confirms my feeling that first love can’t be topped. This is going to be a piece of cake and a lot of fun. Well not so fast, frog eye. I don’t realize that my first interview is not exactly a pattern for how things will go.

One interview leads to another and the eight willing men soon become eighty spread across the country. I feel a little like a cop who volunteers for a dangerous investigation – part translator, part emissary, part spy.

I’m hardly qualified for such a critical task. I’m not a clinical psychologist or a self-help guru. I have no institutional pedigree to announce me. I’m simply a woman looking for answers, trying to find my way back to trusting men, to trusting myself.

The lack of letters before and after my name allows the men to relax and speak freely, that and my promise of anonymity. I can be their wife or girlfriend or sister. But the good part is I’m not. I’m merely an unknown lady they’ll never see again.

The men are waiting with open arms, if not necessarily for me, for some woman, a surrogate everywoman, who will listen and
learn.
All I have to do is sit there. I give them the gift of being the center of the universe for the space of one interview.

And I do find out – why we love who we love. I also discover in listening to other people, we often learn about ourselves. In the beginning, I have my work cut out for me with guy-gal communications being so gummed up. Many times I see the picture the men didn’t see and a few times I even encounter guys who seem to know the secret. I become a quick draw artist with the tape recorder, crossing demographic lines at will.

The interviewees range from an eighteen year-old high-school graduate and short order cook, to a thirty-seven year-old film producer, to an eighty year-old retired business executive, married fifty-five years and the grandfather of six. I travel coast to coast and back again paying my own way and taking tons of time off from my career as a commercial real estate agent. I’m hot on the trail of true love no matter the cost.

Businessmen, lawyers, doctors and judges, construction workers, car salesmen, private detectives, and exotic fish dealers, film directors, producers, writers, musicians, street hustlers, celibates, transsexuals, priests, rich men, poor men, beggar men, and thieves, they all open up to me. I figure it will take a year to interview 1000 men – one on one.

I meet men who have sex with married women, and men whose wives have sex with other men. There are multiple generations within the same family and men who have only ever known broken homes. I listen to men who have no idea how to approach a woman, and men who have it down to a science. I discover many men who went to unbelievable lengths in search of love.

And far from the strong silent stereotype that we’re trained to expect, this wildly different cross-section of American men invariably start spilling their souls before I even have time to hit the record button. I know it’s been a good interview if I hear – “I told you things I’ve never told a single person, not even my wife. Thank you. This has been very good for me.” I don’t smoke, but many times I felt like lighting up afterward.

It’s an extraordinary experience. Never once does it occur to me I might be in any danger – physical or emotional. I keep a steady course despite wanting to strangle some of the men, some of the time. I laugh and cry with them – often in the space of a single interview – as I vicariously experience their joys and victories, and their dreams and nightmares.

The results of my journey you hold in your hands, the characters homogenized and blended, disguised to protect their lives. For a single period in time these men have a woman with no strings attached focused completely on them. I have no excuse and no explanation for what they confess. I’m willing to listen and they’re more than willing to share. I’m not qualified to comment on their feelings. I’m just a woman who became a love investigator. All I can say is: this is what I heard – this is what I felt – this is what I perceived.

“This happens all the time. These girls will go out on my boat with me, take off all their clothes, make me have sex with them and then when we’re done, tell me ‘I’ve got a boyfriend, forget it.’”

~ James, 49, single

Case 93 / James

An Atlanta Singles Club offers a class in “How to Get Married in a Year.” I’ve been at this for a year and know by now where the more interesting characters hang out. The registration line is long and I feel breath on my neck. The hot air belongs to James. He’s successful, good-looking and driven to marry. He’s eager to be heard and quickly schedules an interview.

The following day James and I are eating take-out at the coffee table in his living room. This real estate agent’s home is a pleasant brick ranch on a tree shaded street in Buckhead, a pricey neighborhood just outside downtown Atlanta.