No Stamina: The Story

I don't mean to sound falsely modest here, but I wasn't always as cool as I am now. I may have appeared a lot cooler to the casual observer when I was 19, or even 25, but my actual charismatic temperature was a lot higher back then. So that was one thing that held me back, this fundamental lack of coolness, which I was able to mask to some degree with wise choices in music and wardrobe, but never entirely. Fortunately, I was able to compensate in part for my personal tepidity with humor. I always knew how to be funny--maybe not quite as funny as I am now, but pretty damn funny--and that at least kept me in the game. It was a good thing that I knew how to be funny, because I sure as hell didn't know how to be tall or how to have good hair or any money or any self-confidence.

But being funny is exhausting, and that was a big problem. It was a big problem because I have no stamina. Sure, I knew how to be funny, but I couldn't sustain it for as long as it takes. And, I eventually learned, it takes a long time.

My stamina deficit was first diagnosed by Doc Bayless, who was not a doctor, but just a fellow student and fuck-up. He was awarded his nickname in jest by high school basketball teammates, as in Doctor J, the Fellini of the finger roll, whom Doc resembled about as much as he resembled an attractive, well-coordinated human, which is to say not at all. Doc was--and I want to stress here that I feel nothing but warmth and affection for the guy--one ugly cuss. He used to say that he and I were the only truly weird people in our crowd. All the others were only "pseudo-weird," according to Doc, having implemented a weird persona in order to achieve a desired effect. He was incorrect. We weren't all that weird, although given the incredible normality of most of the people around us, it is easy to understand his mistake. But we were not weird; we were pathetic. And while it is certainly possible to be pathetically weird or weirdly pathetic, we were neither. We were just pathetic, and not entitled to use weirdness as an excuse.

The context in which Doc delivered his diagnosis had to do with a young woman named Danya, or Daynya, or something like that--I can't remember exactly what her name was, but I remember that it was one of those names that is just one letter away from being a normal name, but that one letter might as well be another whole alphabet of Mandarin or Cyrillic or some other collection of non-Roman characters. It simply was not a name that was going to tumble effortlessly off of anybody's oral sound-producing structures.

Danya or Daynya was the ex-girlfriend of Doc's goofy friend Dobie. She was an unremarkable woman, or if she was remarkable it was for something that was lost on me. But she was nice enough, and reasonably attractive, and that was all that mattered in a social universe as sparsely opportunitied as mine. It was not a big party. Just Doc and me, Danya, and a handful of other acquaintances of the affable Doc. I can't remember whose apartment we were at, probably Dobie's. I'm certain we drank a lot of beer. We probably smoked a lot of pot. I do not recall the presence of any other festive substances, and I feel fairly confident that this nonrecollection is due to there not having been any rather than to there having been an overabundance.

With the ingestion of the available festive substances well underway, and in the absence of anything else capable of sustaining my attention, I turned said attention to Daynya, and to my mild surprise, Danya appeared to be responding positively. I was being funny, and she seemed to be appreciating it. It would be appropriate here to pepper the narrative with recreated dialog and colorful details pertaining to the event in question, but that is impossible, since to do so would require considerable time and effort, and, as I have already indicated, I have no stamina. So instead, I will merely summarize what further transpired, and leave the hard work of imagining the sounds and smells of that evening to the reader.

So there we were probably at Dobie's apartment, all present being intoxicated and I being humorous for the benefit of the probable host's ex-girlfriend. I stayed funny until about 2 in the morning. By 2:15 I was noticeably less funny. I had begun to run out of gas. Of course, running out of gas is not a perfect metaphor for what I had begun to do. There are some key differences between humor and gas. An internal combustion engine does not get sick of gas, even if it has been fed the same octane gas from the same pump at the same gas station over and over again for its entire lifespan. In other words, the recipient's attitude toward gas is a constant. The only variable is the presence or absence of gas. The perception of humor, on the other hand, has a major subjective component. Its usefulness is largely dependent on the fleeting, ever-evolving characteristics of the audience. So the same humor directed at the same audience can be perceived quite differently from one moment to the next. Humor that works at 11 cannot be expected to yield the same result at, say, 2:25.

So here I was at 2:30, running out of steam, which is different from both humor and gas, but let's not get into that right now. Steamlessness rapidly setting in, I struggled to formulate a plan. One of three things had to happen. The best option would have been to enact a transition into a new, mellower mode, less comedically draining and more conducive to the onset of physical contact. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to affect such a transition, so that was out. A second approach would have entailed pressing on in spite of creeping fatigue, persevering with the existing strategy, which had thus far met with a certain degree of success, in hopes that the transition to a contact-conducive state would somehow miraculously take care of itself. But, of course, as I had no stamina, this path was not truly available to me. And so I was left with choice three: admit defeat, submit to the melancholy tug of exhaustion, and go home.

Slinking sullenly homeward through the musky collegiate air of Iowa City, Doc broke the musky collegiate silence: "You know what your problem is? You have no stamina." He was right. And I have no more stamina today, 17 years later, than I did the night Doc delivered his damning diagnosis. Many quantitative aspects of my life have changed since then, but stamina level, unlike waist size and overall coolness, is not one of them.