I discovered Jana Hocking and now realize I’ve been in the wrong profession for twenty years. Jana Hocking is a sex and relationships columnist at the New York Post. Her articles chronicle flings, pubs, parties, lovers, seductive messages, and heartbreak. They carry titles like, “I thought I was on a date with a normal, wholesome guy — then he showed me something that horrified me,” “New York City’s Peter Pan men: They’re fun, flirty — and gone by morning.”
I would like to go on a date with Jana Hocking, not to flirt with her, but to share work experience.
Jana is beautiful and she reminds us of it in every article by truffling her text with selfies. She is elegant, her writing is funny, and strange things happen to her because she interacts with very strange people, like the guy who a few weeks ago proudly showed her a bracelet filled with his own dehydrated semen. Mysteriously, Jana managed not to vomit, which makes her a survivor, a perfect candidate for a war journalist on the front lines, or at least a candidate to feed smelly beasts in an African zoo.
What I like about her particular style of column writing is that getting drunk and fooling around with cute guys is just part of her job. I do that too (with girls) when I’m in the creative process of a novel, but I never imagined I could specialize in recounting my love successes and failures every week. Although I would focus on the failures, because the successes sound too pretentious and would arouse envy in my colleagues. There seems to be something messed up about flirting and drinking with pretty women, and earning the same as, I don’t know, Paul Krugman with his brainy columns on economics.
The last few weeks have been full of failures. Drinking can help you loosen up and hook up, but it can also play tricks on you. A few weeks ago I went into a pub I usually go to on the weekends. It’s one of those typical places where the entire city’s fauna, from my age down to early twenties, hang out, and it’s always full of girls, and they’re always surrounded by guys wearing vests who, you can tell by the look in their eyes, spend a lot more money in gyms than they do in bookstores.
One of the waitresses loves to fool around with me (and everyone else, but I like to think not). I always make her laugh because I like her smile, but we don’t talk much because, to be honest, there’s not much we can talk about, and if there was, the infernal music they play, diabolically loud, would prevent it.
It was Friday and I was coming straight from a work dinner, nice suit and well perfumed, drunk like a teenager, and as I entered the pub seeing her so elegant, instead of giving her two kisses as usual I took her hand in mine, as if I were Cary Grant with Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, bowing subtly, and kissed her softly as parsimoniously as possible. I thought she would find it cute and funny, but no, she turned red as Kamala Harris’ soul, dropped her smile, and made a point of finding my gallant gesture offensive.
Later I understood everything. The girl is pretty, but despite her very feminine appearance, she is more brutish than a buffalo, and the most elegant thing she has ever seen in her life is a guy dressed as a reggaetonero dancing and rubbing up ordinarily against her, probably while carrying a bracelet of his own semen in his pocket. My behavior was to her culturally unfamiliar.
I guess that to win her over I would have to hit the bar, howl, spit on the floor, and use drug dealer street slang to communicate with her. Luckily I’m not so desperate to flirt, I don’t spit even when the doctor asks me to, and I’m only capable of howling when playing soccer, and I get hit in the balls.
I would like to go on a date with Jana Hocking, not to flirt with her, but to share work experience. I suggest it happen here in Spain, it’s beautiful in spring, and half the country is always partying and never sleeps. Besides, maybe she can introduce me to her friends, and afterwards, we could write about it in our respective columns. For you, Jana, I might even change, as long as you don’t ask me to put on hair, learn to dance salsa, or become a Democrat. There are lines we don’t cross.
It’s true, I don’t have a bracelet with any fluid of my own to show you in the middle of dinner, but I can do a very funny magic trick with two ping-pong balls, and I can do a reasonably good impersonation of the brown pelican’s nuptial squawk. I can see it now. When all’s said and done, in her article, she will write full of contempt about how I am a fossil, more old fashioned than Clark Gable‘s ties, and I will write of how complex ideas just bounce off her beautiful skin as she exudes the liquid of eternal frivolity as a natural defense.
If we don’t end up yelling and screaming at each other, we’ll end up getting married. I don’t think there is any middle ground. In any case, Jana, don’t worry: It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.
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