People are always asking me what it’s like to look like urine.
These are the people who laugh at me. Who walk away snickering and high-fiving each other and thinking they’re all that.
Men usually. Teenage boys. Fraternity members.
Assholes.
Women, on the other hand, are more likely to ask me how they look in me. Personally, I wish they’d ask the question in reverse but for some reason, most women tend to think I’m gay. Maybe not as many who think the same thing about Pink, but then that’s kind of a no-brainer. He’s Pink, for Christ’s sake.
Then, of course, there’s Red, Pink’s cousin, who most women find totally hot. Fucker. He’s all show and no substance. But it’s kind of hard to compete with Red when your complementary color is Purple.
So I’m doing my first round of edits on my novel and although the suggestions by my editor are, for the most part, benign, there are a few places where she suggests that I delete phrases or sentences that I am in love with.
Enamored.
Infatuated.
They make me laugh, these lines. They make me giggle. They make me wonder how anyone could even think about excising them from my manuscript. But after taking the lines out and putting them back in and reading them out loud over and over and over with and without the edits, I realize my editor is right. These lines are not necessarily enhancing my story but distracting from the relevant prose.
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put it: “Whenver you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
I walk into the room.
Into the bar.
Into the club.
Music pumping and bodies sweating and alcohol lubricating libidos.
I see women clustering together in two and threes for safety. I see single women forcing false smiles and looking uncomfortable. I see the reason for their discomfort moving through the room in a wave of testosterone — aggressive and tactless and completely devoid of class.
Men hover over the women. Leer at them. Force themselves upon them with alcohol on their breath and sex on their minds — their hands grasping, their pelvises thrusting, their mouths speaking in coarseness and vulgarities.
This is my quest. This is where I belong. To teach these brutes the fine art of romance.
I am Captain Charm.
