The Second Night

 Last year, my mother, sister, and I took a trip to Las Vegas to see the Korean pop band BTS in concert. It turned out to be auspiciously timed--we didn't know it when we signed up, but it proved actually to be one of the last opportunities to see the boys in concert before they parted ways to focus on solo projects and complete their mandatory military service. 

As part of our preparations for the trip, we had to decide how many of the band's concerts we wanted to see during our weekend in town. My sister was for attending both shows two nights in a row-- we were traveling all that way primarily to see them, was her thinking, so why not make the most of it? I, however, felt I could not tolerate that heavy of a dose. I would be bored to tears by seeing the same show and listening to the same songs two nights running. "You both go to the second show if you want to," I said. "I'll just do my own thing the second night."

My mother gave me a strange look. "Are you sure?" She eyed me with something like suspicion. I told her that yes, I was sure. She communicated the decision to my sister. "I guess it's just you and me for the second night," she said. "Josh is going to... do his business." Her eyebrows went high, signaling that some kind of insinuation was being made. "Huh?" I said. "You mean-- reading a book in the hotel room?" Because that was all I had planned to do during the second night on my own. 

I have to believe that, upon further reflection, my mother does not really believe that I would use a spare night to myself in a strange city to engage a prostitute--even if the city in question was Sin City. I'm sure that if she thought more about it, her lifetime of experience knowing me and the sort of person I am might triumph over the momentary assumptions she had made about the fact that I am an adult male and the city we were traveling to was in the state of Nevada. 

In that first moment, however, the weight of cultural associations with the term "Las Vegas" perhaps somehow overwhelmed her better judgment. I don't otherwise know how to interpret her comment. 

I shouldn't have been entirely surprised. It is something of a running joke in my family that my mother sees sex happening in the most unlikely places. Driving over the bridge to Siesta Key late one night, after the sun had gone done, we noticed the odd phenomenon of men fishing in the dark. "Why would they do that?" we asked. "Why not wait for the daylight?" My mother had a ready explanation: "Maybe they're trying to pick each other up."

She could of course be right. Hart Crane's indelible line from The Bridge -- "Under thy shadow by the piers I waited"-- is generally interpreted as a reference to gay cruising along the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe the fishermen off Siesta's pier were doing something similar. Perhaps they had become fishers of men. Or, then again... maybe they were just fishing.

It is one of the great contradictions and sources of misunderstanding in my family that my mother should see the world in these terms and I should see them so contrarily. I, of course, think she is the weird one. I tend to side with Will Self's father, who at one point in the author's memoir remarks: "I don't know why you boys're always going on about sex. [...] Not everyone is a sexual being you know." He then list members of the family who, he posits, "[n]ever so much as thought about it in their entire lives."

From another perspective, of course, I am the weird one. To many people, perhaps most, there is nothing more natural on earth than an interest in sex. 

Perhaps the truth is that we're both weird--my mother and I--and the fact that a mother who sees sex in more places than most people do should have given birth to such an unusually asexual son will simply have to be set down as one of life's great ironies. So long as it lasts, at any rate, this mutual incomprehension will continue to provoke scenes such as the one that took place while we were planning the Vegas trip. 

On the one hand, my greatest objection to my mother's remark is that I insist I be judged as an individual, not as a representative of a demographic. "I'm not just a generic adult male, mother; I'm me! You should know-- you raised me!" Whatever typical adult males might get up to on a free night in Vegas is no reflection on what I would plan to do. 

But also, I can't help but carry the argument a stage further. Is it really the case that I would be atypical in wanting to read a book in the hotel room? Or at any rate to do something else-- anything else-- than what my mother was implying? Would most other young men be getting up to something much more risqué? Or are my choices more common in practice, and the salacious ones often attributed to strangers less so, than people let on, or than popular culture would lead us to believe? 

There is a scene in William Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms (also known as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) in which a character speculates to a former medical internist: "These doctors and nurses. What a fellow hears about hospitals. I wonder if there's as much laying goes on in them as you hear about." His interlocutor, the novel's protagonist, replies succinctly: "There never is any place." 

I believe this is a truer picture of life than the one that imagines lots of sex happening everywhere. I may be unusually absent from the scene--fair enough-- but that also doesn't mean the scene is as active as people tend to imagine. More likely, we are prone to fill the gaps in the lives of strangers-- the vacant private times in their days we do not glimpse-- with sexual adventures and misbehavior simply because we can, because it's more interesting, and because nature abhors a vacuum. 

The truth, here as elsewhere, is probably more banal than what fantasy can invent. I suspect that more people than me are-- if the truth were known-- spending their spare nights alone in Las Vegas by doing nothing more shocking than curling up with a good novel.