Last month, I took my girlfriend to Charleston, South Carolina. We were out on the main drag when suddenly, from around a blind corner, a squad of drunk College of Charleston fratheads staggered into our path. One of them—a sweaty, overweight Sack Lodge replica with Croakies around his neck and a bloodless sneer for a face—was bellowing to his buddies and flailing his arms in a frenzy. He wasn't paying attention, but, like, who does, when they're white and healthy, surrounded by friends and full of light beer? But I was and it looked like this fuccboi was going to inadvertently clock my girlfriend in the face.
I tensed and moved to intervene, but I never had to. Low-Rent Sack Lodge sailed by blissfully without incident, never realizing just how close his forearm came to my girlfriend's head. What were you even going to do if he HAD hit her, I scoffed at myself. I'm no fighter and the crew was big enough to shoot a Vineyard Vines catalog without repeating models, so I couldn't have thrown hands even if I wanted to. Yeah, but if someone hits your girl, you'd HAVE to punish them, I countered. Outnumbered or not. Accident or not.
As I walked away, I thought of alternatives to violence and it dawned on me that I could make this young buck ache without ever throwing a punch. I knew it because I ache the same way. "You'll never again in your entire life be as happy as you are right now," I'd murmur to him quietly as I pulled him off my girlfriend, sprawled on the sidewalk below. His eyes would flicker with the glimmering, uncomprehending flame of youth, wondering when I was going to punch him so he could punch me back even harder. "Never." Without another word, I'd gather my girlfriend and ooze off into the humid Carolina ether.
Five years later, in an apartment full of shiny appliances in the middle of a too clean city, that same fuccboi will be watching Netflix, or eating takeout, or jacking off, when the tidal wave of dull agony finally makes landfall on the vacant shores of his mind. He'll open his mouth and say nothing because this isn't college and he doesn't live with his friends anymore. Half a decade later, he'll understand why I didn't attack him on that perfectly manicured street when he carelessly decked my girlfriend beneath the Charleston moon. The certainty of his own irrelevance—'til this point, an occasional specter that he dismissed with a cigarette or a Tinder swipe—will grab hold. And then, finally, he will ache.
I have a dark joke that I like to bring up if context bears it or if I've been drinking or both. The cue is tattoos. When the conversation turns to ink (who has it, who wants it, whether #millennial #creatives have finally curbed its professional stigma, etc.), I admit I've got none. "But if I ever did get a tattoo," I say, swollen with self-satisfaction at the punchline forthcoming, "it'd say, 'youth is wasted on the young.'"
This is not a particularly funny joke. It's not much of a joke at all, really. It's just a George Bernard Shaw aphorism and I'm just a 26-year-old white kid with a lot going for him who holds it close in the feeble hope that speaking it will exempt me from its inevitable fulfillment. Of course, it won't. It can't.
That said, a tattoo of it would be pretty fire—a permanent reminder of the impermanence of my own vigor etched on my skin, each word proving its veracity merely by its existence. What a smooth paradox, right? It's not the sort of thing you find fascinating unless you're a former English major filled with the conviction that the worst of your todays will be the best of your tomorrows, as I am (you're damn right that's a reference to Jay's verse on "Forever Young"), so it never surprises me that my audience doesn't laugh when I bring it up. Who would, when they're out here on the wrong side of college graduation, knocking back Fireball shots and trying to dismiss the very same ghosts?
The conversation will shift nervously away and my private chuckle will dwindle into a black smirk. For a few precious moments, the ache is manageable. But tomorrow I'll wake up one day further removed from the carefree bliss of adolescence and I'll remember that I'm not even thirty yet.
Dave Infante is a writer living in New York City. Read more of his work on Thrillist and follow him on Twitter here.
