Now what?

I’m two miles outside Wanship, Utah, at a remarkable new hotel called The Lodge at Blue Sky. I’ve just met my host in the bar, a bear of a man called John Tuffman, or ‘Tuff’, as I’m told to call him by his assistant. Owing to my delayed flight, we’re running a little behind schedule. ‘Down the hatch’, he says, nodding to my beer while he repositions his Stetson. We climb into a car and are driven up to the barn. A few weeks ago, I received an email which I had every right to believe was a scam or an elaborate catfishing attempt. It was an invitation from an events company in San Francisco to appear as the World Perudo Champion at an executive retreat in Utah. At 6 p.m.

Future historians will marvel, if history is not abolished and historians themselves canceled — or worse — before then, how so many Americans at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st came so suddenly and with apparent certainty to believe in such human and scientific impossibilities as homosexual marriage and the multiplication of the two biological sexes into a unlimited number of them; the ability as if by magic to transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and for a man to give birth to a baby; the possibility for Homo sapiens to exert direct control over the terrestrial climate, as if the earth were a suite in a luxury hotel; and other manifest absurdities.

Recently, I got dumped by a woman I was crazy about. To cut a long sob story short, here I am 67 years old and facing the future alone. Gulp. Dumped. I can’t believe it! ‘Dumped’ has to be the most brutal word in the lexicon of love. To me it evokes a black garbage bag full of steaming excrement, wherein your bleeding heart lies, still beating. Anyway, I’m taking my date to the West End to an old-fashioned, dimly lit cocktail bar, the kind where wise-cracking metropolitan sophisticates once sipped martinis and smoked cigarettes to the sound of cool jazz. What’s my dream date? It goes something like this. I’m sitting in an elegant and quiet hotel bar opposite the most beautiful, intelligent, sexy and funny woman in the world. I’m not my normal self, thank God.