inconvenient

four men, one friday night, and the only girl who actually showed up

I have a confession.

I’m apparently a very inconvenient man.

Not because I’m particularly demanding. Not because I require elaborate romantic gestures, expensive dinners, or declarations of undying love. At this stage of my life, I’m actually pretty easy to please.

Show up when you say you’re going to show up. Mean what you say. If we’re going to take our clothes off, at least have the courtesy to remain conscious long enough for us both to enjoy the experience.

Apparently, these are unreasonable expectations.

I learned this over the course of one spectacularly ridiculous Friday night.

Four men. Four different encounters. Four entirely different ways of making me wonder whether I had somehow become the supporting character in everybody else’s life.

And one song that practically wrote itself.

the first man: three hours late and a cat

The evening began with a man who had been staying with me while he looked for a place of his own.

I’d invited him to stay with me while he looked for a place after the renovations of his place fell through, and because frankly the state of the hotel he had been staying in was deplorable. It was supposed to be temporary, but that didn’t stop me from making him feel at home. A comfortable place to sleep. Space for his belongings. Even accommodations for his cat, which meant installing pet gates and rearranging parts of my apartment.

Because that’s what I do.

I make room for people.

Sometimes quite literally.

And somewhere along the way, I committed the apparently catastrophic error of developing feelings for him.

Worse, I told him.

I know. Reckless behavior. Imagine having feelings for someone you’ve welcomed into your home and then having the audacity to be honest about them.

To be clear, he didn’t owe me those feelings in return. Offering someone a place to stay isn’t a down payment on a relationship, and I would never want it to be.

But I couldn’t help but notice that a housing search that had previously been taking some time suddenly became remarkably efficient.

He found somewhere else to live.

Very quickly.

Apparently, the San Francisco Bay Area housing crisis can be solved with three little words (“I like you.”).

Who knew?

And so, on this particular Friday night, he was supposed to arrive to collect the rest of his things.

He was three hours late.

Three hours.

Now, I understand that life happens. Traffic happens. Unexpected complications happen. But three hours isn’t running late.

Three hours is an entirely different appointment.

And it wasn’t the first time… just two nights before, he was six hours late returning my borrowed car.

When he finally arrived, there wasn’t some grand conversation. No moment of acknowledgment for what had happened between us. No particularly satisfying explanation for why I’d spent a significant portion of my evening waiting.

There was luggage.

And a cat.

And there was a man collecting the last pieces of his life from a home I’d made room for him in.

I watched him gather everything and leave.

Including the cat.

And there I was, surrounded by the little adjustments I’d made to accommodate someone else’s life, watching that life walk back out the door.

Without even so much as a thank you for having let him stay.

The pet gates were still standing.

There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

Subtle as a brick.

the second man: business before pleasure

Determined not to surrender the entire evening to disappointment, I decided to see someone else.

A hotel room. An attractive man. The kind of chemistry that makes you forget, at least temporarily, that you’ve already had a spectacularly irritating evening.

Things were going rather well.

Clothes were becoming increasingly negotiable. Personal space had ceased to exist. And I was beginning to think the evening might finally deliver something other than material for my therapist.

Then his phone rang.

A business call.

An actual business call. On Friday night.

And he took it.

Now, I’m a professional. I understand that work sometimes interrupts personal life. I’ve certainly had enough of those interruptions myself.

But there is something uniquely humbling about being in the middle of kissing a man and realizing that whatever is happening on the other end of his phone has suddenly become more compelling than the very available man standing directly in front of him.

I didn’t make a scene.

I didn’t demand he hang up.

I simply gathered what remained of my dignity, made sure I had all of my clothing, and left.

Apparently, I’d been scheduled between conference calls.

the third man: two more hours

As I was leaving the hotel, a man I occasionally fool around with called.

And yes, I realize how this sounds.

Before anyone starts keeping score, let me remind you that I am a newly single gay man emerging from a relationship that occupied nearly half my life.

I am allowed to have a Friday night.

Preferably one that includes something more interesting than watching other people manage their calendars.

This third man was supposed to come over.

So I went home.

Again.

And waited.

Again.

Then came the message.

He was going to be another two hours late.

Two. More. Hours.

At this point, I was beginning to suspect that my apartment existed in some previously undiscovered time zone where everybody else’s clocks operated on a completely different schedule from mine.

I looked at the message.

I looked at the time.

And I decided I was hungry.

So I told him I was going out to get something to eat.

Which was true.

Although, admittedly, I wasn’t necessarily talking about dinner.

the fourth man: sleeping beauty

The fourth man was at another hotel.

And for a little while, things actually seemed promising.

There was kissing. There was touching. There was that delicious sense of anticipation when two people are clearly interested in finding out exactly what the other looks like without the inconvenience of clothing.

We found out and made it to the bed.

Progress.

Actual, measurable progress.

And then he fell asleep.

I am not speaking metaphorically.

He fell asleep.

I was right there.

In bed.

With him.

And he went to sleep.

I’ve spent years being told that I’m attractive, desirable, sexy, interesting, and any number of other flattering adjectives. I have also spent enough time to begin to believe some of those things about myself.

But there is something almost comically effective about having a man fall asleep while you’re trying to seduce him.

It does wonders for the ego.

By this point, I had moved well beyond frustration in a strange sort of philosophical acceptance.

Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something.

Maybe I was being punished for attempting to have too much fun.

Or maybe four grown men had simply managed to demonstrate, in four different ways, that wanting somebody’s attention is not the same thing as receiving it.

I got dressed.

Again.

And went home.

Again.

the girl who couldn’t tell time

When I walked back into my apartment, it was quiet.

The cat was gone. The luggage was gone. The men were gone.

And the pet gates were still standing.

Those ridiculous little barriers I’d put up to accommodate a situation that no longer existed.

So I took them down.

And I let Zoey out.

She came straight to me.

No excuses. No business calls. No messages explaining that she’d be another two hours.

Just that wonderful, unfiltered enthusiasm dogs have for the people they love.

She was happy I was home.

That was it.

That was enough.

We went to bed together, and she curled up beside me, completely unaware that she’s just succeeded where four adult men had failed.

She showed up.

And somewhere in the middle of holding her, she play-bit me just a little too hard, and I realized something that was both funny and unexpectedly painful.

She doesn’t know her own strength.

And that night, I realized I didn’t know mine, either.

Because for all the jokes, the flirting, the ridiculous circumstances, and the increasingly absurd sequence of disappointments, something had changed in me.

I wasn’t angry because I hadn’t gotten laid.

Well.

Not entirely.

I was tired of feeling as though my time, my affection, my availability, and my willingness to make room for someone else were the things people could simply assume would always be there.

I’d spent a very long time being accommodating.

Understanding.

Patient.

The man who adjusted. The man who waited. The man who made it work.

And somewhere along the way, I’d started learning that being easy to love shouldn’t require being easy to disregard.

how the song happened

The next thing I knew, I was writing a song.

And the funniest part was that I didn’t want it to sound miserable.

I wanted it to bounce.

I wanted a chorus that would get stuck in someone’s head before they fully registered what I was saying.

I wanted something cheeky, catchy, a little bit filthy around the edges, and just self-aware enough to admit that I was absolutely part of the absurdity.

Because there’s something wonderfully liberating about taking an evening that made you feel small and turning it into something you can sing at the top of your lungs.

The title came naturally.

inconvenient.

That’s what it had felt like.

As though the simple act of expecting someone to follow through had somehow made me the problem.

But the chorus turns that idea around.

I’m sorry I’m inconvenient.

Guess that’s something new for me.

I used to come with no conditions.

Now I charge a waiting fee.

And there it was.

Not a bitter declaration.

Not a threat.

A boundary, wearing a very catchy melody.

I still want connection. I still want passion. I still want the kind of chemistry that makes two grown men forget what time it is.

But I don’t want to be the only person making time.

And I don’t intend to apologize for that anymore.

Four men helped inspire this song.

But the only one who showed up when I needed it was the one who couldn’t tell time.

And she got the whole damn bed.