• Read a Review

Chapter One

Saturday, July 7

My day.

8:00 A.M. Arise.

8:00–8:15. Light stretching. Don't forget those hamstrings. A
few push-ups to warm the blood.

8:20. Out the door, hit Central Park Reservoir. Do six laps. Pace:
seven minutes per mile. That's ten and a half miles in seventy-five
minutes.

9:45. Back home. Shower, reread The Brothers Karamazov
("Grand Inquisitor" episode only).

11:45. Call Mom.

12:30. Lunch. Grilled quail, wild rice, spinach salad,
fresh-squeezed oj.

1:00. To the Met. Check out Vermeer exhibit. Strike up conversation
with cute twenty-five-year-old Dutch graduate student I meet
standing in front of Woman Wearing Doily Around Her Neck;
obtain her numerals, agree to meet for drinks at the Carlyle "early
next week."

4:00. Back home. Work on my novel till dinner. One interruption:
call from superagent.

8:30. Quiet dinner with a few friends at Le Bernadin. No really,
fellas, it's on me. They all know about my huge advance. We
laugh about it.

11:45. Village Vanguard to hear some jazz. Exchange dirty jokes
with compadres, trade saucy banter with cocktail waitress who, as I
sweep out the door, slips me her digits.

2:00. Cab back home, practice piano for half an hour, and so to
bed. If can't sleep, read a chapter of that John Adams bio
everyone's talking about. (Was he really cooler than T.
Jefferson?)

That's what it says in my Yahoo! appointment book for today,
anyway. But back here on Planet Manhattan, I creep out of bed as
dawn breaks over Honolulu and skulk in the shower for forty-five
minutes. (I know it was forty-five minutes because I had Pink
Floyd's The Wall in my Raindance CD player, and I got all
the way through disc one.) Then I pick, off the floor, a few more
dead flower petals from The Dinner and plant myself on the sofa
that still bears my ass print from last night, surrounded by my
twenty-first-century entertainment- and sodium-delivery devices:
four fiendishly over-complicated, girl-proof remote controls; two
near-spent crinkly bags of salty snacks. There's a white crumb on
the couch. I am too civilized to just leave it there, so I pick it
up. And I put it in my mouth. Pfft. Dandruff. At best.

Some notes on me.

The name is Tom Farrell. I'm from That generation. You know the one
I'm talking about. The one after the one that discovered the
Beatles and nonbinding sex, the one before the one where
seventeen-year-olds asked to be excused from Phys. Ed. so they
could launch their IPOs. Yeah, that'd be us: the Lamest Generation.
Cultural anthropologists of the future will remember us primarily
for nonblack tuxedos, Valerie Bertinelli, and Men at Work. Our
grandfathers won World War II. We can't even tie a bow tie.

I'm not in great shape. I do, occasionally, complete one gasping
lap around the reservoir. When I run, it's prose in motion. My abs
are a one-pack. My arms are steamed licorice. My teeth are carved
of wax. I've been compared to a redheaded Winnie the Pooh, an Oompa
Loompa without the self-tanning lotion, a slightly elongated
Teletubby. For one formative grade -- fifth -- I was known
exclusively as "Doughboy." The first time some playground wit poked
my tummy hoping to elicit a girlish giggle, it was funny. The 100th
time it was less so. By the 500th time, I was developing a complex,
and at 603 (I counted, oh how I counted), I entered therapy. At
607, my late father opened a glassine-windowed envelope, began a
five-second argument with my mother ("What the hell is this
shit?"), and therapy was concluded.

I'm defiantly average, studiously okay, the Gap of bachelors. You
know how when you go into Duane Reade and there's a generic product
next to the one with a logo and a memorable back story of amusing
and informative TV commercials? IBUPROFEN. MOUTHWASH.
ANTIHISTAMINE. That's me: the man without a brand. The one you
would never pick after you won the lottery. I contain all the same
ingredients, and I'm a bargain. But I have no shelf appeal. If
someone saw me in your medicine chest, you'd die.

I'm thirty-two, as healthy as any other Spam-raised American male.
I look pretty young. Hair is disappearing from my scalp, but
fortunately it hasn't deserted me: It's just relocating to my
nostrils and ears. My face -- my patriotic mug of red hair, white
skin, blue eyes -- is doing okay. I have no laugh lines (what's
funny?). I'm not short, not really. I stand the Minimum Acceptable
Height for an Adult Male. (Some celebrities I know to be shorter
than myself: Redford. Stallone. Pitt.) But the only way I could
ever be labeled tall would be if I became a Starbucks beverage. I
don't play sports much anymore, so I compensate by watching extra
sports on TV. Australian Rules golf, anyone? Need a rundown of the
favorites at this year's Tour de Luxembourg?

I have a one-bedroom apartment, a refrigerator containing (solely)
beverages and condiments, a Manhattan-sized mini-microwave deployed
only for popping corn, a supply of Cheez-It crumbs that I store
under my sofa cushions, stacks of dusty black stereo equipment, and
an increasingly avalanchable Matterhorn of CDs. (Single women in
their thirties accumulate cats; I stockpile home electronics.) I've
got the requisite panoply of Banana Republic shirts in assorted
colors (dark blue, light blue, blue). I own forty-three T-shirts. I
watch The Simpsons 3.7 times a week, and I floss 3.7 times a
year. When the house lights go down before a rock concert, I am
often the first to shout, "Freebird!"

Excerpted from LOVE MONKEY © Copyright 2004 by Kyle Smith.
Reprinted with permission by William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.