Sample chapters from The Turn

Chapter 1: player handicap −36

My tee time is six forty. I set alarms for five, five thirty, five forty-five, and just to be safe, six fifteen. I know what’s coming. The pain. The game. My next chance at glory.

The Masters unfolded a month ago but continues to echo, with its eye-watering botanical glory, the players with their transcendent shots and unholy heartbreaks, the billiard-smooth greens, this great ode to tradition reminding me of my father even as the game summons me toward some indefinable greener pasture of my own. It’s early May, and each day is a little longer and brighter, filling with the promise of a better start, a swing secret unlocked, my new personal best. I’m ready to take the next step in my game. In my life.

I was so excited last night that even though I told myself I would go to sleep by eleven, I was practically twitching until two. Drinks and more drinks and headphones pumping N.W.A., Eric B. & Rakim, and a little Miley to make my head swim while I rehearsed my takeaway in the home office. I managed to drift for a couple of hours until the beep beep beep woke me, and now I pound water as fast as I can. Half a whiskey and Coke left warm by the sink. Shudder, finish it.

Hot shower, full-body rinse in three minutes. Getting clean isn’t the point. I stretch my back, letting the water pelt me in the ass as the steam loosens my sinuses. Hot, then warm. Then slowly dial back to lukewarm, cool, and finally ball-shocking frigid, Scottish-style. Brace myself against the tile, shiver out toxins.

SPF 50—check. Cool-dry underwear, ankle socks, joggers, the thermal-responsive Nike polo I scored at Marshalls for 80 percent off, my best quarter zip—check. Crack a beer in the kitchen, golf bag to the trunk, yardage watch charged and strapped on—check. Cooler filled with White Claws and a frozen Snickers—check. Balls, tees, phone, nicotine, cash for the cart girls and gambling—check, check, check.

Ready? Ready.

Peep my phone on the way. Ah, shit. The boys had to bail last minute. One forgot to tell his wife. Another is too hungover from playing poker all night. The third saw the forecast and said nope. A rare May chill in Colorado, a dusting of snow last night.

Screw it, I’m going anyway, can’t waste a day. This might be the one.

In the clubhouse there are men. Men who would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. This is a place they understand and are understood. The TVs are always tuned to the Golf Channel. In the bathroom, someone’s releasing their preround jitters explosively while a couple of the old dogs try to piss. “My dad taught me you’re supposed to wash your hands after you piss,” one says. “My dad taught me not to piss on your hands,” his buddy answers. They laugh at a joke they have made a thousand times.

This is where you meet a man whose wife was up at four thirty to make her husband coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, and one big Bloody Mary with the right number of olives and a pinch of celery salt because she loves him and wants him to be happy, and she wants him out of the house for the next six hours because she has a life too.

What about the women? They’re growing in number. Some are just along for the ride, reading books in the carts with blankets over their laps. But many more do play, in various forms: as one half of a young couple who’ve taken up golf as this season’s hipster activity, the widow who golfed with her old man for decades before the coronary took him on one of the fairways, the ones who come for the social benefits of the women’s league, and even the solo addicts, out here purely for the love of the game. Like the one we see here, dressed like a climber, small and geared for battle. Took up golf at her husband’s request, was surprised at how the swing came naturally to her, and in no time she was beating hubby. He was all butt hurt and quit the game, they divorced, and she soldiers on with her GPS trolley, one hundred lessons, keeps the ball moving right down Main Street on her way to a seventy-eight.

But those are rare, like spotting a kit fox. This is still mostly a boys’ club, a place where we get to dress up in bright athletic fabrics and strut around with high-tech weaponry, pretending our days of physical relevancy did not end after the varsity squad.

I check in, eyes barely open, hands a little shaky. I’m overweight and out of shape, on two different blood pressure meds. I drink too much. I always rent a cart. I don’t take work or women or my finances or anything else seriously, except the chance to break ninety today.

I set up on the first tee in a pair of beater running shoes because I can’t commit to real golf shoes yet, haven’t earned them. Temperature is forty-one degrees, might reach sixty-five. The frosty fairway crackles under my steps. I force the tee into near-frozen ground. Place the white ball atop. Set my feet. Empty thy mind. Clean white sphere: All I have to do is sweep through it, open my chest to the target. I hover, waiting for the confidence to manifest, and Jim Nantz narrates in his soothing bedtime voice:

The newcomer Sweet likes driver here, and why wouldn’t he? It’s only the straightest, flattest, widest par four within fifty miles. He’s got nothing to fear but his own inner demons, the noble fight all golfers must join. Tiger, Phil, Koepka, Rory, even the singular Bobby Jones—all the great ones had their dark days on and off the course. What he wants here is a nice easy swing, nothing too cute, just harnessing all two hundred and thirty pounds of his battered, beaten, and self-abused form to strike one clean. The entire golf world knows just how hard it’s been, shanking his career, multiple girlfriends, and that one hopeful marriage into the algae-covered pond that has become his sad-ass, self-defeating, shit-for-nothing, fucked-up life. It all comes down to this, friends. Will today be the beginning of a new era?

I bring the big dog barking—whuping! Center face flex, arms finishing high. The ball soars, holding a nice cut. Maybe 250 in the fairway, just past the white stick. Mmm, baby.

Don’t get too excited. One shot at a time. Let’s try the eight here—always liked the eight. Nice mix of loft, control, distance. The ball takes off high, drifting left, missing the green, but manages to catch the shoulder, and I get the member’s bounce as it kicks back across the dance floor until it rests maybe fifteen feet below right of the cup. Lucky, but we’ll take luck. There’s enough bad luck out here—gotta take the good when it comes.

So we’re on in two. It’s a par four. We have a real shot at birdie. Could start the day one under par. Skin prickling at the possibility. A gulp of that grapefruit White Claw as I unsheathe the flatstick and circle the glittering green, noting the slope from all sides. I probably won’t make it because the first two swings were a fluke. I trace a line from the cup back to my ball and don’t look up again, like Grandpa taught me thirty years ago.

Sweep. Listen for it, the sound like no other sound, that sweet plottle.

But no. It rolls over the left edge and keeps going; it won’t stop. Jesus! Fuck! The comeback is six goddamn feet. Un-fucking-believable.

Okay, we can still make par here. Par is nice. Par is great. Stay above the hole. Let it crest and topple over. Read it. Settle. Go.

Maybe . . . !

Not even close. Short-sided it by three feet. Nerves. What the fuck is wrong with me?

No one is watching. I could cheat. Call that last one a gimme on the warm-up hole. People do it all the time. But who am I really doing this for? What is the point? No one will know, but I will know. And if we’re not keeping the real score, why keep score at all?

Stop overthinking everything. Just putt the ball. Three feet straight uphill. A blind man could make this. Whatever. Tap.

It slides by the cup.

Tap in for a six.

I’m considering slitting my wrists as I press the plus sign on my watch twice. I am now plus two through one hole. Probably finish forty over. Sloppy mind, sloppy game, sloppy-ass life. I want to cry. Scream. Smash my putter into the cart and wreck everything. I should go home and go back to bed. I should sell my house and move to Guam.

I press on.

Over the next twelve holes, my life becomes a horror show. I can’t hit anything anywhere I intend to. I lose balls, duff drives, chunk approaches, and continue to putt like Mr. Magoo. By the time I reach number fifteen, all seven of my White Claws are gone. I haven’t eaten a thing. The morning is still cold, the frost giving way to wet muck. My lower back feels like a shattered beer bottle. The world has taken on a blurry sheen of simmering rage. I feel sick, cursed. The end is nigh. I don’t know what this is, but it isn’t fun.

Number fifteen is a short par four, 340 yards. Pretty little hole. A westward wind pushes at my back, makes my nose run. I decide to give this one hell, nothing left to lose. Everything drains out of me, including the ability to care what happens next.

I unleash and, beyond all reason, catch the sweet spot. The ball goes like a cruise missile, not moving an inch left or right, and the wind carries it way, way down there. I drive up and park beside the ball and look at my yardage watch.

Three hundred seven.

My laughter erupts. My dick gets an inch longer. A half-swing gap wedge lands me on the green, seven feet right of the cup. I read the bend and don’t hesitate on the birdie putt. Smooth tap. Ball goes over the top, and gravity sucks it back down.

Plottle.

Inside me, something brighter than a rainbow shines. Something more mysterious than a woman lowers her hood to let me see her face. Something more than grace enters my blood.

For a moment I am immortal, and a fleeting thought stirs:

The rest no longer matters.

Work and women and illness and terrorism and mass shootings and viruses and greed and sadness and addiction and confusion and every other tragedy perpetuating itself across this absurd and fragile world—they can take the day off. I don’t care about any of that. I only care about making this little white ball do more good things.

At last, I am home.

Chapter 2: The POS

I played some golf with my dad and a few friends here and there during my teens and twenties, but real golf—capital-G golf, that deliciously evil affliction that grabs you by the lungs and infects your dreams and empties your wallet, that golf—came to me later in life, right around the time basically everything else went to shit.

It was the time of the D-words. Dogs died (two). Divorce. Dad died. Diet (poor). Drinking way too much. Dick problems. I’d been drinking most of a bottle of whiskey nightly, a genuinely awesome (in the original sense: awe inspiring and scary) amount of booze for one man to consume. And the past ninety days had turned truly diabolical as I’d proceeded to suffer at least five panic attacks. Then there was that other number.

Forty-five.

Not a bad score for a recreational golfer on the front nine. But that was my age and not a golf score. You could say I was not playing well at the game of life, sliding into a moral and physiological decline from which I might never return.

I had a pretty good hunch my employment status would be the next domino to fall. Over the past fifteen years, I had been a copywriter, product-marketing writer, UX writer, content producer, whatever title was in fashion that year. Now I was senior content manager at Flagstaff Solutions, a software company just outside Boulder, Colorado. I wrote enterprise-network and personal-security applications, and I didn’t care about any of it. The job was boring but easy and paid well. I had been coasting in my career, but so what? Sometimes life is hard enough. Not everybody needs to become a filmmaker or entrepreneur or VP of something in order to sleep at night. I hadn’t been sleeping very well, either, but that was likely the sauce. And the women. And just the state of all things Casey Sweet in general.

My boss, Dave Strickland, knew we had nicknamed him Diamond Dave behind his back, and instead of being angry or hurt, he wore the moniker with pride, pretending to be a big Van Halen fan. The day of reckoning, I arrived a little after eleven, and he was hovering around the creative team. He spotted me at once and snap-pointed toward his office.

“Lemme grab a coffee.”

Dave looked displeased as I dropped my backpack and headed to the break room. I poured myself a large coffee and added three sugars and three creams. I sipped, burning my tongue. My hands were shaking, but only a little. I was still drunk, but the world felt normal, comfortably fuzzy, inconsequential. I was dreading the next six hours in my cubicle more than whatever Dave had in store for me.

“Hey, Casey!” Lauren said, entering the little kitchen. “How are ya?”

“What’s the story, morning glory? How’s the Arapahoe cart optimization coming along?”

Today Lauren wore a long sweater that looked like a duster or a cape, her tall brown boots, and a hat with an actual feather in the brim. Country chic. We’d been working together for almost three years, and there was a time when I carried a painful torch for her. But I’d never made a move, because even though she did not report to me, a relationship gaffe could nuke an entire creative team’s chemistry, not to mention my career. Or hers.

She swept by to refill her water bottle. “It’s almost there. We can chat later. I want to show you my new flow and some options for the CTAs.”

Call-to-action buttons. Cart flow. More complex than one would imagine, especially considering we were trying to convince IT pros that purchasing a ten-grand-per-month security solution really was as easy as buying a new pair of shoes on Zappos.

“Perfect. I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”

“Thank God it’s Wednesday,” she said, and I wondered when we had all started thanking God the week was barely half over. As an office, we were running out of banter.

“I like your hat,” I said on the way out. “It’s so you.”

“Thanks.”

“Have a seat, Casey.”

Dave wore a blue oxford shirt, khaki “work” joggers, and silver Adidas trainers, just to let the team know he wasn’t a total corporate dick. The only things on his glass desk were a small laptop and a wireless mouse. No monitors or files or paper of any kind. He was fussily neat that way, but it made you wonder how much work he really did. He was our senior vice president of marketing and had come from international banking. He was not great at product development, design, or marketing. He was a whip, a game show host, the enforcer. I knew he liked me on some personal level, but I also sensed he wouldn’t trust me to park his car.

“Casey, how are you?” he said as I sat down.

“Thank God it’s Wednesday.” I sipped more coffee. “How are you?”

“You went home sick yesterday?”

It was a little more dramatic than that. I’d had a full-blown panic attack in the men’s bathroom, on the toilet to be precise. But as funny as that may seem, it wasn’t. At that point, I had no idea these experiences were panic attacks. I had no idea what a panic attack was. I lost my breath, my entire body went into a tremor, and my vision darkened as if occluded by raging black drops of poison. Each time, I was convinced I was dying, having a stroke or a heart attack. Each was the most terrifying two hours of my life. Each was a new horror and always felt like the end.

“I had a headache, so I worked from home the rest of the afternoon.”

“Oh, so you were working. You should have told someone. We were worried.”

“I should have emailed.”

Now he went to his office door and closed it softly. “Is there anything you want to tell me, Casey?”

“About . . . ?”

“Anything. You can talk to me.”

“Thanks, Dave. I appreciate that.”

We had a standoff. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to say it.

“I need to be clear here,” he began. “And I am saying this with concern: You don’t smell right, Casey.”

I frowned. “I smell?”

“You smell like alcohol.”

“Now? I smell like”—nope, not gonna say it—“that now?”

He nodded. “Did you have a big night?”

My anger was rising. My personal life was none of his business. “What do you want?”

“I want to help.”

“Fuck off.” I think we were both surprised by this.

“Hey now.” Dave put his hands up. “Easy. We’re just talking.”

“Fire me,” I said. “Please. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

Dave scowled. “That’s what you want? To be fired?”

“I don’t need this,” I said. “So do what you gotta do.”

Dave sighed. “Casey, if I wanted to fire you, I could have done that months ago.” He stood and began to pace before his whiteboard, blue marker in hand. “Hear me out. I think this will make sense to you.”

On the board, he made a list:

Rock Star

Grinder

Average Employee

Cruiser

Problem

Piece of Shit

Complete Bag of Shit

“Do you know what this is?”

“A little early for my quarterly review, isn’t it?”

“Let’s call it a sliding scale.” He began to walk me through it. “You got your rock stars, the one-in-a-hundred killers. The people who are both super talented and hard workers. We’re lucky if we can find one of these every few years—they’re mostly extinct. Next you have generally excellent employees, the grinders. No geniuses here, but they’re our real workhorses. They put in hard hours, and they care about the mission. Below your grinders we have the average employees, self-explanatory. Next comes what I like to call a cruiser. Not an outright bad employee—the cruiser is a decent worker, not overly talented but dependable, kind of just always there. Hell, most companies run on these types of folks because they can be slotted into roles no one else wants.

“For my first two years here, you were a grinder, you had your teeth on the bone, and maybe, just maybe, you could have become a rock star. You made me wonder, I’ll give you that. Then gradually you backslid through average and became a cruiser. Okay, everyone has ups and downs. But you didn’t really pull out of the slump. You did your work. You skated the rules a bit, but essentially no one noticed or worried too much, at least until about nine months ago, when you became a problem. Coming in late, leaving early, setting a poor example for the rest of the team, several of whom look up to you. Your work turned sloppy. You looked increasingly annoyed, resentful of meetings—”

“Everyone hates meetings,” I said.

“You’ve taken twelve personal days this year—make that thirteen counting yesterday and this morning—and now here you are, reeking like a distillery, eyes like deviled eggs, and it’s time we acknowledge where you are on the scale. You’ve become a piece of shit, and most days you’re doing your damnedest to earn your next merit badge. The real problem I’m facing now is a simple question: Is Casey Sweet merely a piece of shit, or has he become a complete bag of shit? Because when you’re just a piece of shit, people see it, but they will still like you, they will forgive you. There’s still hope for you.

“But once you become a complete bag of shit, there’s no turning back. Family turns on you. Friends write you off forever. You get shitcanned. You stop paying the mortgage, the child support. Soon there is a default on the car lease. You develop gout, maybe have a stroke. You’ve somehow become all the things you never wanted to become, and you don’t care about anything or anyone anymore because you’re such a—” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me.

“Complete bag of shit?”

“You got it. Now you tell me, Casey. Are you merely a piece of shit, or have you become a complete bag of shit? Because one of these has a future and the other does not. I just want to be clear on what we’re dealing with. So I can help.”

He capped his marker and sat back in his chair, fingers laced across his chest.

I sipped some coffee. “That’s heartwarming.”

“We’re here for you. If you can convince me it’s not too late.”

Oh, this was good. Perfect. I had been unchained.

“I’m not in the mood to convince you of anything, Dave. I don’t like being here. The fluorescent lights make me feel sick. My cubicle is a litter box lined with felt. I’m under surveillance from the moment I walk in, yet you don’t have any idea what I accomplish in an hour, let alone eight. You’re a quota guy. You think what we do is the same as building trucks on an assembly line. How many rivets did he rivet today? You don’t have the first fucking clue how truly collaborative creative work leads to brilliant products. And here you are, trying to recruit me for a job I already have. You remember how the Folsom app began? Our first consumer product. No one asked me to do it. There was no creative brief. It was my idea. I pitched it. I wrote it in sixty days, and it was flawless. Folsom now has three hundred twenty-seven thousand four hundred fifty-eight users at five bucks a month, and it’s made you and this company a pile of money. So here’s the news about my status: You make ten times what I do, and I think you’re a phone-it-in cruiser piece of shit. I think you’re in above your head and you need people to blame. I think your silver sneakers are silly, and so does the rest of the team. And regardless, I’m too old for rah-rah shit like this”—I stood and pointed at the whiteboard—“to work on me. I quit, effective now.”

Dave barked a faux laugh and got to his feet. “There he is. The funnyman writer, using his words. Full of it now, aren’t you? You quit on us months ago, pal. So don’t tell me about quitting. You don’t get to quit! But here’s what you can do. Are you listening?”

“Probably not.” I dropped my coffee in his trash can, and it sloshed up the wall.

“You put some years in around here, so let’s call it a sabbatical. It’s April. I want you to take the summer. You will be paid for medical leave, seventy percent of your current salary. HR will handle all that bullshit. But you take a vacation, get some help, go clean yourself up, and don’t become a complete bag of shit. Come back and see me around Labor Day. If you still want to quit then, I’ll shake your hand and pay you out thirty days. But if you do come back, I want the Casey Sweet I knew two years ago. I want you to come back stronger than ever and become my next director. I believe you can, and I believe that if you don’t, things in your life are going to go very badly. You have a real opportunity here. Up to you.”

On the wall to the right of Dave’s desk was one of those generic corporate motivational posters that aspire to the profound. This one featured a mountain climber on some ridiculous snowy peak, his parka a red speck among the terrible elements. It said:

never give up

Your next step might change the world.

“I may not punch in at eight and stay till six,” I said, “because I am not a robot, and the work I shepherd and deliver is not something one of your AIs can do. Ask every person in this company if they’ve ever had a problem with me, if I’ve ever caused them to miss a deadline. You won’t find one. So I’m thinking, basically, the fuck else do you want from me?”

Dave put a hand on my shoulder and sounded like he might shed a tear. “Casey, I know you lost your dad a few years ago. That’s never an easy thing. But the bottom line is, you aren’t here. Even when you show up, you don’t show up.”

We had one last standoff. I realized I would not be free until I gave him some sign that any of this meant something.

I raised my hand to high-five Dave. “Today is the first day of the rest of my life!”

Dave stood there blinking at me, then turned back to his office and shut the door.

I fetched my backpack and considered making the rounds to bid the team farewell. I felt I owed them an explanation, Lauren most of all. But that was Dave’s responsibility now. I thought it unlikely I would ever set foot in this building again. My work was done here, and I was free to do whatever I pleased.

On the way home I stopped at the liquor store and bought a handle of Seagram’s Seven and a six-pack of Diet Coke.

Chapter 3: cord-cutting

I didn’t tell anyone about my sabbatical at first, not my mom, my friends, or my ex-wife, Blair. We’d been divorced for seven years but still spoke every couple of weeks, and it was always Blair who called me to check in. I harbored no delusions of getting back with her. She was remarried and had a family now. In our current reality, we were more like siblings—she the assertive and successful big sister, I the delinquent and disappointing younger brother.

But in the little amber sphere where I preserved her, she was still Ideal Blair, the Blair of our courtship through, say, the first two years of the marriage. Ideal Blair was the one who had brought out my A game, my first great lunge at a proper middle-class life and lasting commitment. She was the woman who could—all in the span of a Saturday—build a spreadsheet for our future, paint and refinish the cabinets in our first apartment kitchen, run six miles, paint her toes while idly reading forty pages of literature and watching me cook dinner, finish a bottle of wine without slurring, and then fuck me like she was trying to brand me for life. That was the Blair I tried not to dwell on, because she was as beautiful and painful as a Pearl Jam song.

After she left, I didn’t feel destroyed or act crazy. Instead, I buried my emotions and embarked upon a slow, years-long descent into numb depravity. I was stoic through the dissolution of the marriage. Rather than seethe, I mellowed. Instead of fighting over furniture, I helped her load the moving truck. I didn’t cry. I was too busy consoling my crying mother. Blair insisted on leaving me the house for a year. She wouldn’t be needing it, seeing as how she was moving in with Carl.

Every marriage has its star, and Blair’s light retreated slowly, leaving me cast in the role of recently divorced, not-quite-forty, shambling but still-marketable guy. Women, including some of our friends and colleagues, seemed to sense Blair’s cattle brand on me, a USDA stamp of alpha-woman approval lurking somewhere beneath the unkempt hair and hoodie rotation. I lost some weight and took on the nervous, tail-wagging gait of a shelter pup. Probably why I adopted Jojo then, my three-legged bulldog.

The consolation calls and offers to meet for coffee spurted forth through my phone, flirt-bumped through the aisles of the grocery store, sprayed over the mulch at the dog park. I had the Sport Clips lady do something different with my hair. I bought new clothes. One night on a vodka-tonic roll, I charged into the dating apps with fearless confidence. I’d just lost an amazing woman but still had game—she was proof. As a writer, I had the small advantage of being able to string together a no-nonsense profile with a few clever lines, and the messages I sent were constructed to let the women know I had actually read their profiles. For my profile pics, I chose six photos, the ones Blair always said were good, and those seemed to work fine. The one or two photos that Blair happened to be standing in with me worked even better.

That’s your ex-wife? Wow, what happened, dude? You must be de-VUH-stAY-ted!

It’s all good, we ended things amicably. I support her growth 100%.

Something about my data points pleased the algorithms. I matched with an array of women ages thirty-three to forty-nine, messaged many, and was soon guffawing at how quickly we reached the decision to plunge our tongues into each other’s mouths, take off our clothes, suckle and pet and probe, and hey, we’re already rounding third base, why not slide into home and tag fifth before we pass out? This happened at their place, my place, in cars, outside bars, and once in the women’s bathroom of a fancy brunch place in Denver where the champagne was flowing a bit too freely and the bartender shouldn’t have turned up Maroon 5 that loud.

There was little time for introspection and few expectations. Some were long-term single; others were similarly paroled from happily-ever-afters gone wrong. Some were still married, and some claimed Big Daddy was cool with sharing. They told me they were embracing life, working on themselves, up for adventure. They were unafraid to tell me over drinks what was going to happen next, probably tonight. They were unafraid to ask the hard-hitting questions. What did you do to make your wife leave? You’re not a psycho, are you? I already had one of those—he’s still stalking me, in fact. You seem like a nice guy, so are you? Am I going to regret this?

I don’t know. No. Yes. Probably.

Blair had always been generous in bed, willing to try most anything, and our sex life had followed a satisfying cadence right up until the last year. Still, after a certain amount of time with your spouse, you’ve seen and felt it all. You don’t imagine you will ever be close to another woman, ever have another first kiss, ever know a new scent. Then you get divorced, and every woman becomes not just a new experience but a whole new milieu, another planet. There was a lot to take in. It was hard to tell how long I should stay. Sometimes after only two dates I could imagine moving to this welcoming foreign country permanently, but for all I knew it was ruled by a dictatorship. But if I fled too soon, I might miss the next great scene, like Seattle or Austin before the corporate money put all the weird on lockdown.

These dalliances played out in terms of weeks, sometimes months, but never long enough to fall back into the L-word, the one we were not ready to utter again. I was having an absolute ball not thinking about the specific things that had really led to my divorce. I was content to dwell in this middle ground of almost-relationships, this space where sex wasn’t totally random and cheap but still felt weightless.

“We deserve this,” one of them told me after our second date. Heidi the real estate phenom, top-five agent in her hotly trending market and climbing. Oh, how she wanted to reach number one. “And I will, Casey. Don’t ever doubt me!” I didn’t. She was almost militant with her black pageboy hair, her biceps swollen like lemons, her thick little CrossFit feet. When the making out turned breathy, she seemed on the verge of angry laughter. “I’m done pretending to be the good wife. Ha-grrr. I just want to feel alive again, right? Get in here, dude! Uuungh-huh!”

It all felt amazing, until it didn’t. Somewhere around the two-year mark of my “swinging Larry from Three’s Company” days, everything that had seemed effortless became a slog. Frictionless communication turned into delayed texts, drawn-out phone calls, odd silences, poorly timed happy hours, morning headaches. All this driving back and forth to Denver—going out late, staying up later, actually having sex, and then sexting more the next day—took its toll. I was drinking more, at random times, because if you’re going to Monday-night bowling with fifty singles and the costume theme is pimps and hos, you’re not doing that sober.

So maybe I was getting tired, cranky, a little lost. I stopped trying to meet new people and settled into a few (I call them the Final Four) that could be lumped into the general category of relationships, if not serious ones. The Final Four lasted three months, six months, a year, tops. Sex got scheduled. Small gifts were exchanged. We began to fight as our commitments to one another waxed and waned. Intimacy issues, more than one said. Translation: I had become simultaneously emotionally unavailable, sex obsessed, and barely able to get it up except when they threw a particularly naughty curveball my way. And none of them liked me seeing other women, though some of them saw other men.

Okay, look. I sincerely believed we were just casually dating, that this was understood by all involved, and while there is probably something unseemly about a man in his forties chapsticking the platypus with four different women on a yearlong basis, I didn’t believe I was violating any specific policy agreement. But feelings were hurt, including mine, so I must have been doing something wrong. In my defense:

Elise was separated but not divorced and was still in pity-love with her not-quite-ex-husband. I was good for happy hours, hookups, and long conversations on the phone. But in the rest of her life, to her family and friends, I was a ghost, a secret. A dildo hidden in a drawer.

But maybe that’s just how not ready for prime time I was.

Katie had been ostensibly single but “just not really in a good place right now.” Ever. Her life was filled with tragedies, one after another. Like her cat being sick, her sister not supporting her arguments with their mother, and her tummy aching because the waiter lied about the gluten-free pasta.

But maybe that’s just how not sensitive I was.

Paige was always hiking, attending spiritual yoga retreats, and continuing her personal journey. She was one of those women who have a lot of male friends. I guess I was one of the lucky ones who made it through the gates occasionally. We never said goodbye. In a war of attrition, the calendar won.

Or maybe that’s just how not on the journey I was.

Genna was a woman I knew from a job I had ten years ago. After my divorce, I curiosity-pinged her on LinkedIn. We had sex like five times and realized we weren’t meant for each other but could still talk occasionally and sometimes have phone sex. She was moving to Japan.

And that’s definitely how not Japan I was.

In this age of apps and texting, it seemed to me that your exes were rarely ever truly your exes. We were all hedging, and no one was ready to invest their whole heart into anything but themselves (and even that was a hard maybe). We all wanted the semblance of a relationship, especially the attention, but with maximum freedom and minimal expectations. Also, everyone was “crazy busy.” Work was “so insane lately,” and the world was “ending any day now.” Who could deal with an actual relationship?

Eventually I realized they saw me as an easy hang. But once they started looking beyond the hang—to the commit, to the cohabit, to the rest of our goddamn lives—they didn’t like what they saw any more than Blair did. I couldn’t blame them. I was a piece of shit, after all. I was nice, even when I drank, but I drank all the time, and I had no idea where I was going or what I wanted. I was tired of romance, so I stopped trying. I stopped returning calls and texts, checking the apps. I stopped taking care of myself. This is a dangerous era one enters: male, single, wounded, hungry, with no woman or other governing forces in the vicinity.

Still wildly aroused, my spank bank chock full of recent material, I decided as long as I didn’t complicate other people’s lives, it was a free-for-all, “all” being me and my dick. The freedom in this was like going keto. Eat as much meat as you want, just avoid carbs, and get high on your body devouring itself. I opened the porn spigot wide.

First the dusty DVDs Blair and I had watched together, the tame Adam & Eve “romantic couple” stuff. Then the stuff I had only ever looked at when Blair was out of town, the direct stuff without storylines, churn and burn. Then new kinds of porn I had never considered, things that even scared me a little. But as the novelty of gonzo stepfamilies and glory tables wore off, I realized I had reached a Rubicon. Like Pinocchio after he smoked that nasty cigar and turned green, I scurried back to a Geppetto’s workshop of “mainstream” staples.

The kind of porn that didn’t seem so bad because the performers were authentic, consenting, progressive. Solo women sharing quietly. Hipster couples who seemed to be almost as in love with each other as they were in love with showing the world how depraved they could safely be in their own loving marriages. Porn made by women, for women. OnlyFans, where workers retained creative control of their content, and where I met regular girl-next-door types and eastern European types and yoga MILFs and had the pleasure of not only their porn but also their conversation. Lana Del Emotional became my primary virtual paramour. She not only sexted and video chatted me at what seemed value prices for this market (real-life dating had been costing me a helluva lot more than fifty dollars a week) but checked in during the day to ask how work was going, what shows I liked, how my cute doggy was doing. Pretend-girlfriend stuff. Sure, why not, at least everyone’s expectations were clear. And wasn’t a confused, recently divorced guy who feared the next major commitment even as he romanced multiple women also kinda, ya know, destructive? Wasn’t it better that I limit the damage to myself and my laptop?

As porn’s efficacy trended downward, I was forced to conjure new strategies. I would start with some of my top ten clips until my attention wandered, then close my eyes and replay a highlight reel of the most inspiring sessions I had shared with the real women. And when those stopped working, I returned to Blair. In the end, Blair was the only foolproof measure for defeating a sad boner. Sad Boner still loved Ideal Blair so much. Sad Boner was not about to let Ideal Blair (and by extension Ideal Vagina) go quietly into the night.

And that’s how it went for another year and a half (or two, three?). I could barely remember what a real woman felt like. I felt burned, and I did not expect someone else to lick my wounds. I had alcohol for that, but it took its toll on my libido. What had always been a healthy sex drive before and during my marriage, then had become a sort of inferno EDM rave postdivorce, was now a swaying balloon not unlike those flapping air dummies you see out in front of the discount-furniture outlets and used-car lots. Each time I inflated it for another clearance sale, it was a little less tumescent, until finally it melted across the hot deserted parking lot.

Which is why, on the first full day of my sabbatical, I deleted WhatsApp and all my porn: the bookmarks, the downloads, and the photos my hookups had sent me. I even canceled my OnlyFans subscriptions. Lana Del Emotional would hound me for weeks—Lana miss you, Sweet Boy, where are you? I’m so bored at home today, why you not entertain me no more? Admittedly, this was not a good time to abandon her. Her father needed a foot. Not foot surgery, a whole new foot. But if I wanted to cut clean, I had to be merciless. We all needed to sacrifice during this difficult time. Lana’s three children, the little Del Emotionals, were going to have to find another way to fund their gaming and vaping habits.

I had been done with real women for a while. Now I was done with the virtual. And my dick was done with me. The whole mess reminded me too much of what it was like to be in a real relationship, dedicated to someone else and something bigger than ourselves. You know, the good old days. Back when love was still a thing and I still had fucks to give.