What the fuck is it with guys today? I mean, honest to God, men are all turning into pussies. First, we had "metrosexuals", guys who always dressed in the clothes all the magazines showed the male models wearing. I thought they were just gay guys who hadn't admitted it yet, but all the magazines said, no, they were just straight guys who liked looking like magazine models all the time. One even said they dressed like that so people would look at them, because people looking at them was the only way they knew they really existed. All I ever needed to know I existed was some really good scotch to go with my cigarettes, well, that and a half-way decent fuck once in a while.
The next thing that happened was all of a sudden, men weren't suppose to get gray hair like about all men do at some point. Women used to think gray hair on a man was sexy. They'd cream their panties over some movie star with gray hair. Now apparently they don't, because there are hair dyes for men to "target those embarrassing gray areas in the privacy of your bathroom". At one time there was spray paint you could use to make your bald spot kind of the same color as your hair there used to be. You can even dye your fucking moustache and beard now.
It got worse when guys started to let their beards grow out. He has to use a special beard comb, special beard soap, special beard shampoo, and special beard conditioner. The shaving department at Walmart is starting to look like the women's hair care department.
Speaking about hair, now guys think they have to shave their chests and some even shave their pubes. Like with beards, there's a shitload of special crap you need if you're gonna shave your balls. Me - anything with sharp edges close to my balls makes me cringe. Real men have hairy balls and chests anyway.
We also have men's makeup now, and that's going too goddamned far. They advertise you can cover embarrassing blemishes and color in your eyebrows. I mean, I know John Wayne wore makeup for his movies, but it didn't make him look like a goddamned woman like some guys do anymore. It made him look like a man you didn't fuck with.
Don't talk to me about guys who are twenty-five and getting braces so all their teeth line up perfectly. If they'd quit taking fucking selfies to post on the web, nobody would give a shit what their teeth look like.
It takes me all of thirty minutes to roll my ass out of bed, piss, shave, shower, and get dressed. It must take these guys at least two hours like it always did my ex.
Men have also changed for the worst in other ways too. When I was in my twenties, what men worried about were two things - did we have beer in the fridge and if Mary or Ellen or Judy or whoever was going to put out on at least the third or fourth date. Now, these young guys want to understand and sympathize with a woman instead of fucking her. They call it "rejecting their toxic masculinity", like being a real man means you should have to wear some OSHA label on your forehead, like, "WARNING, KNOWN TO CAUSE EXTREME STRESS TO WOMEN".
I have to deal with men trying to act more like women, but there's no goddamned way in hell I can respect somebody like Shelby Anderson.
They say first impressions are usually right, and Shelby wasn't giving me one I thought much of. His T-shirt said "Boys Cry Too" on the front, his shorts looked more like boxers than pants, and he was wearing those goddamned fucking plastic shoes they call "Crocs" with no socks, and the goddamned things were pink.
My first impression was Shelby was gay, but that would have been all right with me. Gay guys don't bother me at all - to each his own and all that happy horse shit. I've had a couple as clients and except for liking other guys, they were OK. I don't pretend to understand why one guy wants to fuck another guy, but if that's what they want to do, far be it from me to judge them. I have my own problems to worry about.
No, what turned me off about Shelby was the story he told me.
"Mr. Meers, I want you to find my wife."
"I can do that if you give me some information. What's her name?"
"Her name is Angela, Angela Marie Salvador-Anderson...with a hyphen."
He smiled then like he'd done something wonderful.
"The hyphen was my idea. I didn't want Angela to lose her personal identity."
I wrote that down on the notepad in front of me.
"OK, I need a description too -- age, height, weight, hair and eye color, and anything else that will help me identify her when I find her. If you have a picture of her, that would be great."
Shelby frowned.
"I don't have any pictures of her. I want her to always be happy with how she looks at the time. Pictures would just be reminders when she gets older of how she used to look, and if she'd changed then, she'd be sad.
"I think she's pretty though. She's nineteen, and she has long brown hair and brown eyes because she's Latinx on her father's side. She's quite a bit taller than I am, so she'd be maybe five feet eight inches. I don't know how much she weighs because a man should never ask a woman that question, but she's really slender except for her top. She's pretty big there."
"Any birthmarks, tattoos, anything like that?"
"Well, she has a birthmark that looks like a dove on her left hip, and she has a tattoo on her right ankle of one of those Celtic rope things. Angela said the tattoo made her feel free. I don't particularly like it, but it's her body and if she chooses to decorate it, she should have the right to make that choice."
I wrote all that down and then asked Shelby when he'd last seen her. He sort of wrung his hands together before he answered.
"Two weeks, three days, six hours, and...", he looked at his watch, "about twenty three minutes ago".
Now, I've heard some crazy shit before from people trying to find somebody. Sometimes they do wait a while before they start looking for that lost person. They'll usually screw up their face and then say something like, "I think it's been about a week", or, "Gosh, it was back in high school so it must be, let's see, about twenty years now". Not once has anybody ever given me a time down to the minute. I almost changed my mind about Shelby. If he had it down to the minute, he must really love her.
"What was she doing that time, anything odd or something she'd not usually do?"
Shelby smiled.
"No, we'd gone to march in a Pride march and after it ended, she said she'd met some new friends and wanted to spend some time with them. She said she'd catch a cab home because she didn't know how long it would take and she didn't want me to have to wait. She's always thinking about me that way, only this time, she just never came home.
"I wasn't too worried about her at first because when we got married, I told her that she was her own person and I was my own person, and that we wouldn't let our marriage get in the way of our own personal goals and needs. She's done this before, stayed over a few nights with friends in the feminist movement, but she always calls to tell me where she is. She didn't do that this time."
Well, that was odd too. Most cases where a spouse leaves they don't just leave. There's usually a fight about something and one spouse decides enough is enough. More often than not, they'll leave a note saying they're not coming back and why. I even investigated one case where the wife wrote "I'm fucking leaving you because I fucking hate your pathetic fucking ass" in big letters on the side of the guy's new yellow Corvette, and she used a purple permanent marker to do it.
The other thing was, if she did just disappear, most guys would have called the police at least the day after if not sooner.
"Did you talk to the police about this?'
