So I'm hanging out in this shithole nightclub. Dark, smelly, everything stinks of stale alcohol and tobacco products. The college morons are sniffing drugs and trying to pick up girls wearing Wonderbras and thongs. And I'm just wandering through. Not even wasted, just immersed in my self-loathing.

I pass this gaggle of idiots who are teasing two model wannabes, or maybe they were models -- who can tell anymore? I don't even glance at the girls, not a sliver of a glance. I had already checked them out from 20 feet away and fuck me if I'm going to give them the satisfaction of looking at 'em. But I knew one of them was checking me out as I passed by.

Of course, the one guy who doesn't look at her, she's going to notice. Later I'm smoking a cigarette, propping up a wall doing nothing, because in those days I was nothing. Empty. A void. A vacuum. And she sidles over to me. I'm so hip, it's silly. She's got to test me. She's got to see if she can get a rise out of me, see if I'm the real thing.

And she can't. Not because I'm trying to be cool, because if I were trying, it wouldn't work. It's just because my cool is beyond sex. It has to do with some tremendous ambition I have to become somebody someday. And I want it so badly that any moment-to-moment distraction like sex is only a hindrance to my ultimate grandiosity. Or something like that.

She won't relent. She has to know about me. She wants me to buy her a drink. I say, "Whatever." She's humming with delight. But I just take her by the hand and steer her past the bar, lead her downstairs where the club keeps the aluminum kegs of beer. What was she going to do? Call my bluff?

I led her into this tiny washroom they've got down there for the bartenders, bumped her ass into the filthy sink, pushed her head down and opened my fly. She kept trying to look into my eyes like she was going to learn something. I didn't care if she got off or not. I just did it and, when I was done, pulled a wad of toilet paper off the roll next to her thigh, wiped myself off and gave her a quick, hard kiss. It was OK, considering how incredibly beautiful she was. But that's the sad thing, wasting all that on a numb and treeless asteroid like me. Too bad.

Read No. 24

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk