We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 3

  My joints are kind of a mess. There is arthritis in the metatarsal joints on the tops of my feet and in my knee joints and my hand joints, and I have nerve palsy and vitamin deficiency in my sciatic nerve. (I think? Sometimes when the doctor is rattling off a list of things it all runs together.) This makes my feet tingly, and when I stand up from sitting sometimes it takes a few seconds (read: an eternity in real life when people with normal legs are already hovering awkwardly near the restaurant entrance because they had no idea that it was going to take me so long, pawing awkwardly at the ground waiting to regain the use of my foot) before I can step down on my left leg, and you should’ve been bored with this twenty words ago. I walk like a marionette most of the time, which, despite being kind of hilarious, is the absolute worst; because I am a human being and doing in a real world where people grimace behind their windshields and look at you funny if you take too long to uncertainly step down from a high curb when it’s snowing. Hobbling clumsily around limbs akimbo is double the worst, because none of the real boys ever wants to take Pinocchio out for a glass of wine and a decent piece of meat, and what is my life if it isn’t filled with breathless, passionate courtships?

  I decided to wade back out into the choppy dating waters of the Internet a few weeks after Fred and I ended things, because I am not a person for whom meet-cutes naturally occur. I don’t have a dog to walk through a park of available single humans, no hip Laundromat in which to conveniently forget my dryer sheets so I can ask a handsome stranger for one of his. My dating profile was pretty perfect, I thought. My friend Jill says that I joke too much, that people are scared off by someone who tries to make herself seem so clever, but I swear to God that’s how I really think and not just some Internet shtick. I just can’t do the requisite “I love baby animals!” and feigned interest in “trying out new cuisine!” and pretending to “live every day to its fullest!” which doesn’t really even mean anything anyway. Why do people say that? What impression are they hoping to make? I watch TV all day and leave the house only for snacks: THIS IS THE FULLNESS THAT I AM LIVING. The last book I’d read at the time was Gods Without Men and that seemed really impressive to me, especially since I had to haul that doorstop pretentiously around on the train for a week while I finished it. Couple a handful of boring half-truths with half a dozen real pictures of my real body: weighty boobs and meaty backside and the outline of a belly in this one where I’m leaning over to blow out birthday candles on a neon-blue cake. No flattering Instagram filtration, no angled duckface surrounded by a group of my most attractive and nubile friends. The last thing I ever want to do is show up to a bar to meet a person who is expecting to meet the quarter of my sweating meatbeard I didn’t crop out of the one photo I wasn’t too embarrassed to post. BECAUSE POTENTIAL DATES WILL DRAG ME IN FRONT OF THE FIRING SQUAD, YES? I had read many a snarky think piece centered on blind dates derailed by the super mean lying liarface who’d broken some naive young man’s heart by having the sheer audacity to arrive at the predetermined meeting place fatter than she’d advertised. I wasn’t gonna be that lady.

  But I was going to make shit awkward. I clumsily knocked a bowl of mussels into prospective boyfriend Michael’s lap after wagging my tail at the bar, wildly happy that our fever dream of a courtship was starting to gel into something real despite the fact that I had worn a diaper to a De La Soul show we’d seen the week before, that I had successfully hidden most of my maladies long enough to win him over with my personality. Michael was a person who had lived in my computer for a Very Long Time before we Actually Met in Person. That kind of shit used to happen to me all the fucking time when I was trying to get the Internet to find me a goddamned boyfriend: superficial asshole with decent taste in music finds my dating profile witty yet approachable, sends me a message despite the fact that “plus-size” was the only available body-type box he hadn’t checked, starts lobbying in earnest to become my new best male friend. Except who the fuck ever got on OkCupid to find another one of those? “My best guy friend” is like the fat-girl consolation prize, and if we’re all being honest with ourselves, I’m not looking for another person to eat greasy cheesesteaks in my pajamas with. I have Brooke for that.

  But, like the inner thighs of my most beloved dark-wash, curvy-fit, slightly flared jeans, I wore Michael down. Not through any wizardry of my own—there’s just only so long you can keep having the best conversations of your life before you decide to get over your weird fear of bloated ankles and ask that fat bitch you can’t stop rushing home to e-mail to meet you in a bar you know your friends won’t be at so you can make each other laugh in person. And things were going okay, I think? We’d gone out a handful of times, already had a number of inside jokes, I’d given him my last two Advil when he got a headache at roller derby. Then BLAMMO! I’m wedged next to where he’s sitting at the bar making jokes while he tries to figure out a way to both eat mussels and look cool, and one careless gesture later the bowl is in his lap and people on either side of us are doing that horrified jumping out of the way thing panicky people in close quarters do, like if they don’t squeal and knock barstools over, the Ebola virus you just spilled is going to splash all over them. Michael didn’t text me ever again after that, and I get it. He’d suffered a lapful of lukewarm beer broth in the middle of a trendy restaurant at my hand, AND I GET IT; but I was disappointed nonetheless, because he’d made me a mixtape—an actual burned CD with the artists and song titles printed neatly on a sheet of accompanying notebook paper. That is the kind of thing that signifies the possibility of true love. I’ve been accused often over the years of not being romantic, but here is where it all oozes out: a list of songs felt by you and presented to me, rendering me flushed and swooning and poring over song lyrics to determine their hidden meaning. The week I spent afterward, one when I pretended to be indifferent to the deafening silence coming from my phone, created a self-consciousness in me that couldn’t be explained away by some imaginary event on his side of the universe. I had fucked that whole thing up royally. Back into my celibate cocoon I retreated. And I stayed there for two years, which, contrary to what you might think, made me realize how much sex I actually don’t need.

  I mourned that relationship with Fred. I mourned it hard. Wrote a eulogy, had a funeral, shed a few tears, put flowers on its grave. When you break up with an asshole, it’s easy to just set fire to the shit and move on. But no one talks to you about ending a relationship that never sucked kinda amicably with your homie whom you still love to a degree and for whom you sort of want the best. No, you actually want him to be prosperous and happy. Not more prosperous or happy than you are, for sure, or all up in your face with it, but you aren’t actively wishing for homeboy to wind up homeless or hit by a city bus. I felt robbed, cheated of my silly daydreams of scribbling manuscript notes in a Moleskine as Fred stood in front of a nearby easel painting while listening to Kind of Blue on vinyl, but I wasn’t really mad at him. And I found myself wondering what he was doing. A lot. I’d hear a Quadron song and have to resist the urge to text him about it, or I’d throw my phone across the room like a grenade to keep from calling him to talk about a hilarious episode of Black Dynamite. I wanted to see Hiatus Kaiyote at the Double Door with him; I wanted to take him to this Afghani spot I had found in the suburbs with the most delicious mantoo and murgh chalau; I wanted to get his opinion on holistic remedies for my shitty, failing knees: I wanted my fucking friend back.

  I dipped a toe in the water and almost got frostbite. In six months I’d gone from heartbroken baby animal to FACEBOOK DELETER AND BLOCKER, and the response I received to my “I’m ready to be friends again!” e-mail was terse and cold and suspicious. Because, in Fred’s mind, we still could’ve been friends all along. He didn’t not love me; I didn’t not love him: we just weren’t each other’s person. But, reasonable though it may have been, that talk had left me touchy and defensive, so I let his e-mails and texts go unanswered while I licked my “never gonna spend the morning cuddled at the Hyd
e Park library together” wounds. I didn’t take any parting shots before quietly scrubbing that picture of us at Big Star from my timeline, no nasty voice mail warning him never to call me ever again, and I assumed that guaranteed my seamless reentry into his life when I finally got enough distance from the hurt to allow him back into mine.

  I suggested Au Cheval for dinner, because that place is loud and sexy and dark and I knew that Fred would pay for however many $14 cocktails I ordered plus maybe a cheeseburger. I made sure to wear basic, dishwater-gray friendclothes and my house glasses. I probably didn’t even wear deodorant. Because this was a friend meeting, between friends. When he walked in I was flooded with relief, and when he bent to wrap his arms firmly around me I nearly burst into tears. I’m not often very good at exposing my innermost feelings: I am self-deprecating; I avoid tough conversations; I joke my way through uncomfortable emotional moments. But I stood in a corner of that restaurant and poured out my soppy feelings, and I listened to Fred pour out his, and we started laying the groundwork for a friendship. And I’m not even gonna front, I have never been able to navigate a postrelationship relationship with someone whose testicles have been in my mouth, but somehow this is working. Maybe in this life you get all kinds of soulmates, multiple people who vibrate at the same level you do. I think that’s what Fred is for me; I just don’t get to see his penis anymore. So, no, I didn’t get my happy-ending tongue kiss in the rain, but I did get my friend back. And I don’t have to worry about running these busted knees around after any babies.

  The Miracle Porker

  I never even wanted a pet. I’ve spent the last fourteen years of my life running the reception desk at an animal hospital, and do you know what that means? It means I can give you eleventy billion real-life reasons why letting a dog or cat take up residence in the shadowy corners of your home (scratching up your children, vomiting in your shoes, caterwauling all hours of the goddamn night) is a bad fucking idea. Right now, while I’m in Detroit drinking my very first Faygo in a sunny loft overlooking the river and glaring at people enjoying themselves below, my feline companion, Helen, is in Chicago, probably definitely pressing her moist butthole against all the clean surfaces in my apartment. She is a pig demon from hell, sent to my life as payback for all the vicious thought-crimes I have committed against people who listen to music on the bus without headphones. People who keep loose change in their actual pockets. People who host sit-down dinner parties in their young, marginally-successful-person apartments.

  Seven years ago, Ken, one of the vets at the animal hospital, rolled into work with a shoe box tucked under his arm. Inside was a shivering, hairy ball of mucus the size of a child’s fist. It was a baby cat, crawling with fleas and too small to even really have eyes, and the high-pitched screeching sounds it was making made me want to cut my own throat. I ignored it. I was standing in the kennel washing out my breakfast dishes in the dog tub and would be having no part of that mewling lump of roundworms and giardia. It was too small and slimy and gross to do anything: feed itself, pee on its own, look even remotely adorable. “Aw, it’s too bad that rat is going to die,” I muttered to myself as Lori, the head technician, gently placed it into an incubator. Then I went into the break room to make my oatmeal. I am not ordinarily immune to the charms of a cutie-pie kitten with its itty-bitty whiskers and teeny-tiny nose, but the minute Ken walked by, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and told me that something was up with that repulsive thing. It had the mark of the beast.

  Helen’s mother was a local stray that kept averting capture and was often spotted roaming the hood with a belly full of kids. Apparently she realized that she had just given birth under a neighboring porch to an infant prince of darkness and decided to bounce, taking her healthy, non-Antichrist kittens with her to a safe house down the block. Ken’s neighbor found Helen huddled near his steps, and, remembering he had a veterinarian on his street, rushed her over, wrapped in an old towel, and begged Ken to save her. Never one to panic, my man set her up in the garage away from his curious dogs and hoped she’d be alive the next morning so he could bring her into work and get her on some life support.

  A week later, that disgusting garbagemonster was still hanging on. She, as we eventually discovered when her body started to take recognizable shape, was pretty resilient. She drank ravenously from her bottle before passing out milk drunk on a heating pad, KMR infant cat formula leaking from the corners of her mouth, her eyes still gooey slits too premature to open all the way. Technicians would hold her over the trash can and massage her swollen belly until urine came pouring out. They’d dab her little butthole with warm cotton balls to make her poop, then rub ointment on the crusty tumor in her ear while she napped in their cradled palms. Sounds pretty cute, right? Well, fuck that. Every time I would get close enough to watch that little succubus stumble around her cage and search blindly for some unsuspecting food source to latch on to, she would sense my presence and stop cold, turning her thimble-size head and sightless eyes in my direction before emitting a tiny hiss.

  The techs and assistants named her Helen Keller because of that gnarly tumor blocking her one ear and the third eyelids that remained permanently glued over her constantly watering eyes (and also because, at our core, most people are terrible. HELEN KELLER, DUDES?! Okay, fine, whatever). That smelly little chunk probably couldn’t hear and definitely couldn’t see, but that didn’t stop her from eating tunnels through bowls of soupy kitten slurry and taking huge (now unassisted) dumps in the makeshift litter box we fashioned out of cardboard. She still reeked of rotting garbage and had the personality of old shoes, but that little asshole just refused to die. The power of Satan or Xenu or some other diabolical deity grew stronger within her and she’d gain an ounce and an inch by the goddamned day.

  One afternoon, as I was taking some samples to the lab, I tiptoed over to the cage where Helen was snoring softly atop a mound of pink towels and fluffy blankets. Just as I felt the ice around my heart begin to melt, she bolted upright out of a dead sleep, her head swiveling 180 degrees on an unmoving neck until her sightless eyes were on me and a low growl rumbled up from the pit of her distended belly. Horrified, I dropped the samples and backed slowly away from her cell, glass shattering as infected dog urine splashed on the moderately priced sensible footwear OSHA requires us to wear at all times in the hospital. I crossed myself and flicked holy water (I keep some in my pockets in case of emergency) as she levitated to the ceiling of the cage.

  “I hate you,” I whispered.

  “Bitch, I hate you, too!” she spat back.

  —

  “Is that horrible little thing dead yet?” I asked Ken a couple of weeks later. He had Helen on the treatment table, her slimy head cupped in one gloved hand as he carefully instilled drops into her eyes. “Actually, she’s thriving!” he observed, leaning down to peer through an otoscope into what were obviously ear-shaped devil horns. “Her eyes are open and appear to be fully functional.”

  I strained to look over his shoulder at where she’d hunkered down next to a wad of cotton bigger than her body. I picked her up—she began squeaking and yowling in protest—and cradled her in the crook of my arm. Now that the milky-white membranes that had covered her eyes for weeks had retracted, she was finally starting to look like a real cat. As she gazed up at me, blinking her eyes into focus, the corner of her lip curled into a barely perceptible sneer. “I’m underwhelmed,” she sighed, visibly bored by my face. I waited for Ken to go get something from the pharmacy before squeezing her so tight her body went limp and her eyes widened in terror. “I know where they keep the euthanasia solution,” I whispered into the downy fur on top of her head. A technician walked by with a load of towels fresh from the dryer and smiled. “That’s so cute! You guys are bonding!”

  As her eight-week birthday approached, everyone started thinking about trying to find Helen a permanent residence. Her eyes were open, the ear tumor was shrinking, and aside from a chronic upper respiratory infection (tr
eatable with antibiotics), she was ready to start her new life in the home of some naive, benevolent stranger. There’s a bulletin board across from my desk with flyers for missing dogs and sales pitches for needy kittens, and Laura, sitting at the reception desk, got to work on some prototype ads with little tear-off tabs. Should it be funny? Or maybe a serious tone would be better. Should she pull at some heartstrings? Or be straight up about what an expensive mess she was going to be? Helen’s chest cavity was too small and her tiny nose was chronically stuffed with green herpes snot, not to mention that she needed eye drops every night and her crusty ear growth was still, uh, crusty, and basically what kind of assholes would we be unloading this needy medical nightmare onto some unsuspecting cat lady? ALSO HER PERSONALITY WAS TERRIBLE. THAT BITCH DIDN’T EVEN PURR. What were we, heartless monsters?! Well, I am, for sure.

  “Don’t disclose any of that,” I snapped at Laura as she drew tiny angel wings on the cartoon rendering of Helen we were going to post on the bulletin board. “We need to make sure this bitch sounds adoptable!” I left to go to the bathroom and when I came back it had been decided: these jerks wanted me to take Helen home. The details are hazy: some bullshit about it being unfair to give her to someone knowing she’d need constant medical care, everyone had grown attached, and how would we know she was still doing okay if we gave her to a stranger, blah blah fucking blah. I didn’t have any pets at home (I am an expert at learning from other people’s mistakes), and I didn’t have any children (like I said, expert), so I didn’t really have any excuse, or so Laura informed me. I would be taking that smelly ball of excrement and fangs to destroy the tranquility of my home, and all I would get in return were a couple of cans of cat food and a free rabies shot.