Bounders then and now

Cads.

Dying breed, performance art, stock character, myth?
I would have thought dying breed, since I’d like to think I’ve run into one or two somewhere in my distant past. A smooth, attentive customer, an interesting but shaky resume, one too many passports.

A gentleman who would woo, court, show you an excellent fine time, then disappear one day with your bank account, wardrobe, safe deposit box and/or heart. Making for wonderful stories with which to entertain your girlfriends, bore any future children and demoralize all boyfriends yet to be.

But I’m afraid the concept of cad is most likely a myth made up by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers to rationalize and whitewash the simple, time honored behaviors of men everywhere. Even the language we use to describe them haunts other decades.

These behaviors seem to inevitably revolve around another woman and a very tall tale. The ex-girlfriend with whom he is not speaking, dining or bonking. But to whom he must suddenly return that night after one has taken the train up to NYC, gotten madly drunk with him and been thrown out of one very famous literary bar, only to be dropped unceremoniously off at the Gramercy Park fucking Hotel. She was young, very young, and she hopped back onto a train at 6 in the morning, still dead drunk, and wept all the way back to DC.

The next time this happened, a couple of decades later, another louse had two of them. He admitted he was “living” with the other women [his work involved dual countries/residences], but the one was, and I swear...”like a sister” to him, but her flat was huge and cheap and what was a boy to do? The other, installed at his other location, was very young, deeply disturbed, she needed him, would expire without him. Unluckily for him, he had mistaken her for the girl at the Gramercy, and all she could do was howl with laughter.

I imagine men had life much easier in those older days, with the ready-made cover of cad, but the world, as we hear if we listen, has changed. Have a peek at this, if you will, and enjoy the very new playing field.