MaxXxi: June 2012

Monday, June 4, 2012

The Spare Room

Bowling alleys are right up there with curling rinks on the list of the most unlikely milieus for anything chic. Yet, at The Spare Room, on the mezzanine level of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, both bowling and the bowling oxfords custom-designed for the newly opened lounge by George Esquivel are now decidedly in. Celebrities and notables are seen nightly at the venue, created by nightlife wizards Med Abrous and Marc Rose and cocktail king Aidan Demarest.

The design, by the Los Angeles-based design firm Studio Collective, combines vintage, custom-tailored and new to conjure up an atmosphere of by-gone affluence. There is the gaming parlor vibe, with its two vintage bowling lanes and custom-made sets of dominoes. And there is the speakeasy cocktail lounge scene with its lavish use of velvet, dark leather, polished dark wood, bronze, cast-iron and hardwood floors. Together, they form The Spare Room that oozes civilized illegality and pays homage to the real goings-on at the storied hotel in the 1920s. Tuija Seipell

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Misfit Marriage

If you have had an affair at anytime or if you are thinking of having an affair, you must believe this much: that fated love is a lie, and monogamous love a deception. Let these two sentiments be your guiding light. Doesn't mean you're incapable of love, doesn't mean you don't want what love —or even marriage —can offer. It's just a paradox. You have what you believe, and it is never the lie.

At home, I am attentive to the needs of my marriage. It is a kind of test, and men need tests. I love my wife, but it's nobody's business how I deal with that love. For some guys they escape by popping into strip clubs on the way home, jerking off to YouPorn, or prowling Craigslist looking for a lonely woman in the same spot. I don't do any of that. My local life is clean. I am focused and strong and suited to what is near me —my family, my wife, my job. In some ways, that's because I don't hesitate to cheat.

Of course men cheat, in part at least, out of frustration with their relationship with their wife. In some ways, this is justified, because when angry, when entrenched and implacable, a wife offers no succor. But this is not me. And believe me I know, that hell truly hath no fury like a woman scorned. I have made my mistakes. There are women who despise me. Women will never understand how men can cheat because they think of it in terms of themselves —as something done to them. They treat it as an affront first, as a breakdown in social order, then a wound, then a mortal wound. And this is a key. They do this because women are singular, in both their desire and their demands. This is why I serve women well. I treat them as planetary objects, individual and quirky, gravitational and unique. When I am with a woman, in a hotel or in her car, pressing her up against a soda machine in the stairwell, I let everything else fall away. I am with her without pretense, obligation, or fear.

I love women. I love everything about a new woman: her smell, her armpits, her wrists. I have fucked large, ugly women and small, fragile ones. I've had an ongoing relationship with a friend from college for sixteen years. I've fucked lesbians in a hot tub, hotel clerks in my room, and a cop in uniform. All while I was married. I wish the list were longer. Sometimes it is ridiculous and other times pure heaven.

You learn things when you cheat. It is fun. There are a lot of laughs. You can be more honest with a woman who has forty-five minutes than a woman with whom you'll spend forty-five years. It doesn't mean you must be; it means you are free to be. That is the freedom of having an affair. There is some thrill in it to be sure. Because more than anything, cheating is a chance for you to do what feels good rather than what feels compulsory.

That doesn't mean it's good for you. Or that I recommend it. I don't give a damn what you do. I am simply providing my explanation of why men cheat. It's what they are built for. It is a function of the mathematics of their reproductive function. It is the by-product of longer life spans, more-deadening careers, too much work. And it is the consequence of an instinctive refusal to give up one's own need entirely for the flawed and antiquated apparatus of marriage.