We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Read online

  I tried to get into the whole “caring for an animal” thing, I really did. I bought a little carrier with paw prints all over it and overpriced food dishes and natural litter made from recycled newspapers. When I brought her home the day before Thanksgiving, Helen stepped tentatively out of her box, surveyed the landscape, and scoffed. “Where are we, the set of a horror movie?”

  Then she smiled at me as she hopped into one of my shoes and peed in it. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE HOUSEBROKEN!?” I screamed, racing over to dump her little ass out of my soiled New Balance. “I AM!” she shouted back.

  I hate this bitch and she hates me. For seven years we’ve been trapped in this mutually abusive codependent relationship, tearing each other apart emotionally while booby-trapping the apartment in the hopes that this will finally be the time those scissors just happen to fall on the floor blades up. Helen Keller doesn’t do any of that nice cat stuff you see on YouTube—no cuddling, no purring, no biscuit-making. She eats and craps and scowls at me judgmentally from her perch atop my pillow, silently critiquing my outfit choices through narrowed eyes. (“Sure, you look good in that”—she’ll snarl at my elastic-waisted QVC jeans—“I mean, if you think so.”) She doesn’t play, she doesn’t chase, and catnip doesn’t interest her. Occasionally she’ll sit on my desk, face pressed to the glass, chattering marching orders to the bird army assembled on the power lines hanging just outside the window, but other than that she doesn’t really do anything. She brings me absolutely zero joy. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and feel her hot body, nestled close, but never ever touching. If I move even an inch, she’ll jump up and move away mumbling some shit like, “It was cold in here and I was just stealing your heat,” because it would obviously kill her to admit she feels even the smallest bit of gratitude or affection toward me. I feel like I’m living with Mommie Dearest and nothing I do is ever good enough for her. More than once I have pouted and screamed, “But I’m the person!” while waiting for her to grant me access to the spot on the bed I like or clear the path between me and the bathroom. She has bitten me no fewer than 1,762 times, including once on my fucking eye while I was fucking sleeping, and another time she took an inch-long row of bites lengthwise down the inside of my wrist. (BITCH, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO DO.) Every single time I get a delivery, or the laundry service comes, Helen is right up behind me in the hall when I answer the door, banging her suitcase into my ankles as she tries to slip past me to start her new life with the college kid who spends his weekends driving a busted Tercel with a Domino’s light on top. And I don’t care, she can GTFO. “Have fun living in a studio with six other dudes!” I said the last time she pulled that stunt, slamming the door shut in her face.

  I got a Peapod delivery a couple of months ago, and she jumped into one of the cooler boxes they put all my Lean Cuisines in while I was awkwardly negotiating how best to tip the driver. Dude made it all the way downstairs in the elevator before either of us realized what she’d done. I was surprised when I heard another knock and opened the door to see your uncle Jim back in his green polo. “Oh, hi! Did you find those triple-absorbent extra-long overnight maxi pads I ordered that you thought were out of stock?” (Listen, I’m not going to rent a car to get groceries, so this is gonna have to be the way, but can we just talk about how awful it is when they go down the checklist of what you wanted that they ran out of at the warehouse and you have to pretend not to care that there aren’t six cans of SpaghettiOs with franks in any of those bags?! They never run out of the spinach you ordered, just to look healthy; it’s always the Popsicles or the Pizza Rolls that you have to be like “that’s okay” about even though NO, SIR, THAT IS REALLY NOT OKAY. I once had to stand in the hallway and sign the form as a grown man was forced to inform my actual face that the three bags of “sweet-and-sour watermelon gummy snacks” I had paid for would be refunded because they weren’t available, and I have never prayed harder to be struck dead in my entire life, can you even imagine?) Anyway, your dad’s best friend rolled his eyes at me and pointed into one of the boxes where I saw eighteen pounds of misery sulking up at me. I shrugged at him, heaved her into my arms, then dumped her out into my place. “Nice try, fucker.” I smirked as she immediately tried to lick my touch from her precious fur. “Too bad they didn’t have those nine bags of tropical-flavored Jelly Bellies you ordered,” she shot back. “If you need me I’ll be molting black hair onto all the white shirts in your closet.”

  I’m tired of this thankless bullshit. I’ve spent seven real years letting this fool sneeze all over my stuff while bringing basically no cheer to my life and I’m done with it. I know I should feel happy that she survived her harsh early life, but I had a bad childhood, too, and no one’s letting me sleep all day in the sun while they serve me delicious, portion-controlled meals and take all my garbage out. Could you imagine if Helen was your boyfriend? You get up at five thirty in the morning for work, tiptoe around so you don’t wake up His Highness, stub your toe in the dark multiple times while hastily dressing in clothes that you won’t realize don’t go together until you’re out in daylight waiting for the bus, and spend twelve hours slaving under a brutish dictator, only to come home and find that your companion is lying in the exact spot in which you left him. Except now that the sun is up, you see that his stinky body is curled around that sweater so new you haven’t even had a chance to take the tags off it yet. And then what does he do? Get up to greet you with a kiss and a shoulder rub? No, that animal yawns in your face before taking a shit with the door open and asking how soon you can get dinner ready. This is what my life with Helen is like, except worse, because she’s not even tall enough to change the battery in the smoke detector when it starts beeping. You wouldn’t put up with this from a human with actual earning potential for more than a week, yet I’ve been suffering with this ingrate “cat” roughly the size of a human child for the bulk of my good years. Enough is enough. I’ve wasted all my black hair and uncreased forehead on this monster when I could’ve had a fish or a lizard or, better than that, NO PET AT ALL.

  So I have one cat for sale. Scratch that, I’m giving her away. Free to even a marginally good home, but a terrible one is preferred. Black-and-white domestic shorthair, definitely part goblin, spayed (for the good of the species), fully vaccinated. Bites, hisses, growls when provoked, pretty malignant overall; won’t destroy your furniture or living space but definitely is in regular communication with dark spirits. Neither cute nor friendly, will rebuke all attempts at cuddling. Loves eating but nothing else, except maybe mayhem, as she is clearly a disciple of the serpent of old. Pros: FAT. Cons: TRASH. Inquire within.

  Do You Guys Pay Your Fucking Bills or What?

  I have no idea how people who actually have money talk to their children about it. But I sure as shit can tell you how poor people do.

  • “No you cannot have that.”

  • “The lights will come back on Tuesday when I get my check. Until then stop letting the cold air out of the freezer. I don’t want that ground beef to thaw out.”

  • “Wash those underwear out in the sink and hang them up so you can wear them tomorrow.”

  • “Put back that box of [insert name of overpriced boxed breakfast cereal] and get a bag of those [fruit circles/oaty o’s/wheaty flakes] from the bottom shelf. Don’t you look at me like that, it’s the same fucking thing.”

  • “Do you really need every Sweet Valley High book? Go back and read the ones you already goddamn have.”

  • *Removes package of Capri Sun pouches that the juice box fairy anonymously slipped into the grocery cart and replaces them with dusty bottom-shelf boxes of orange drink while glaring in my general direction* “Don’t try me, Samantha Irby.”

  • “Quit playing on my phone, you’re gonna run up my bill.”

  • “Who told you that you could order all these Columbia House tapes?!”

  • “Steer the car while I push it down the street to the gas station.”

  �
�� “DID YOU HEAR ME? PUT THAT SHIT BACK, I SAID YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.”

  The only time I ever saw my mother in an actual bank was the day my parents sat down at the kitchen table and decided, much to the relief of every family within earshot of our snarling-German-shepherd-chained-to-the-garage, Chevy-Caprice-on-blocks-in-the-yellowed-front-yard suburban home, to finally go get a goddamned divorce. After they shook hands amicably, Mom excused herself, collected me from the bathroom where I was trying to drown my Barbie dolls in the tub, then drove us straight to the bank to withdraw all but one dollar from my parents’ joint account.

  After moving out of my dad’s house, we moved from one cramped apartment to another, as the important business of my early life was negotiated in currency exchanges, Social Security offices, and food pantries run out of church basements, and transacted in WIC vouchers, money orders, and rolls of quarters for the Laundromat. I had no idea what a credit card was; I thought rich people just dove headfirst into the piles of gold coins they kept in their money rooms like Scrooge McDuck and then came up with enough stuffed in their pockets to buy things from the comfort of their gold-plated limousines. My only experience with credit was the dude at the corner store who would write down how many cartons of expired milk I was taking home so my mom could pay for them the third Wednesday of the month when the SSI check came.

  My first jobs in high school were all babysitting gigs, and let’s be 100 percent clear about what I spent that money on: many issues of Sassy magazine, Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Bjork’s Post on cassette, every brown and maroon drugstore lipstick I could get my hands on, and steel-toed Doc Martens that I would clomp around in all day every day, even during gym class. Not once did it occur to me that I should be “putting money aside” or “saving for a rainy day”; the first fifteen miserable fucking years of my life had been one great big, long-ass rainy day during which I gazed longingly at the material possessions of my classmates, scowling at their name-brand jeans and hating my broke-ass parents. As soon as I got my first envelope of twenty-dollar bills for chasing babies named Tommy and Caroline around playrooms big enough to dwarf our entire apartment, I started plotting all the dumb ways I was going to waste it, like trading my nondescript blue backpack for one from Eddie Bauer (an exercise that required two buses and much confused trudging through the “good mall”) and skipping my free cafeteria hot lunch in favor of overpriced bags of carbohydrate trash from the vending machines in the student center.

  I have never—and I mean ever—had a real desire to let otherwise-unaccounted-for money just chill in my bank account unmolested for more than maybe a week and a half. I barely have the willpower to leave other people’s money alone for the short time it’s in my custody. Money that isn’t earmarked for some pressing (transportation/pharmaceutical/credit card balance) need?! Why, yes, I do need fourteen nearly identical blushes, thank you. When I got my first real paycheck, I opened an account at the bank across the street from my job at the bakery. It was the same one my bosses used, so deposits would clear the same day and that was really the only thing I cared about. I ordered some cartoony checks that the teller had to show me how to fill out so I could pay the rent in my newly leased apartment (if either of my parents ever used a checkbook I never saw it—my dad kept a fat wad of bills held together with a rubber band in his pocket), I didn’t open a savings account or learn about making investments. That kind of stuff was for adults—adults who didn’t have years of deprivation to undo.

  So many ratty Kmart bras I needed to replace with ones that could actually hold my tits up; so many albums with actual liner notes to replace the ones my friends had dubbed for me. Finally, I could read the lyrics to all those Portishead songs I was kind of making up in my head! I wish I could say that I bought some fly shit and a fancy ride, but really I just bought a lot of Gap shirts and name-brand sodas. I’ma assume some broke people are reading this and you know what I mean. I was making it rain dollar bills as I worked my way through the aisles at the Jewel, filling my cart with grape Crush and DiGiorno pizzas and CINNAMON TOAST MOTHERFUCKING CRUNCH. I bought a lot of Converse and a genuine Sony Discman that I filled with bona fide Energizer batteries.

  I was trying to fill this gaping hole inside me with “stuff I couldn’t have when I was a little kid,” and I assumed that one day, when I had finally bought enough magazines and name- brand snack foods to feel caught up, the feeling would go away. But it hasn’t. And because I know the value of a dollar, when I get one, I want to buy the nicest thing I can with it. I’m still buying hardcover books and department-store mascara, still daydreaming about what I’m going to spend my 401(k) on when I withdraw that shit early, because who are we kidding? I’m not trying to live to sixty-five, are you nuts? Technically, I can afford it. I make good money, and I don’t have any debt, because I’ve never owned shit and I dropped out of college. I pay for everything in cash because I don’t understand APRs, and my credit file was so thin from so many years of living off the grid that when I finally got around to applying for a Discover card, Experian thought I might be dead.

  Will my yawning internal pit of desire ever be full? Is there any amount of cash that’s enough to fully satiate this ravenous beast?! I don’t know, man. Will Céline keep making dope-ass sunglasses every season? Will Netflix and Spotify and HBO ever stop providing me with unlimited access to hours upon hours of entertainment to distract me from the ennui that awaits in real life? Will the ghost of Steve Jobs keep putting out next-generation iPhones with that one new feature I absolutely must have no matter how many of my firstborn sons I gotta give to Sprint to get one? How many lipsticks is too many? Is a daily Starbucks run really that big a deal? Why do they keep making new shampoos if you’re not supposed to immediately toss the half-full one you’ve been using just fine for months and get the shiny new one advertised in one of the many magazines you’re always “wasting” five dollars on? (Side note: I spend a lot of time anxi-sizing [anxiety fantasizing] about jobs I would never be able to do, and number one on that list is definitely “inventor of new cosmetics,” because how many different eye shadow kinds can there even be, how many kinds of lip pencil have yet to be thought of?)

  If scientists could just cool out for a minute on the whole manufacturing of hot shit I will surely die without, I might be able to set aside some money for stocks or whatever, but I can’t right now, because did you know that for a scant $7.99 surcharge during off-peak hours, you can get Whole Foods precut watermelon pints and gluten-free vegan pizzas delivered right to your door by a dude named Jared driving a Smart car? That is if you don’t want to take an Uber there and back because fuck the train, a bitch just got paid!

  Do I need to cancel my Hulu subscription? And if I do, can I wait until this season of The Voice is over? I don’t want to suffer through the indignity of commercials!

  Ugh, I was feeling bad about my shoes at this fancy “cocktail lounge” the other night with this bitch I don’t like that much who I know for a fact is greater-than-slash-equal to me in levels of poverty, and she made an elaborate show of heaving her giant designer purse onto the bar so she could dig through it to find the laundry money she was going to use to pay for her Sazerac. “That’s a really nice bag,” I said genuinely, taking a sip of my light bill. “Did you recently receive a settlement of some kind?” She laughed heartily and poured her Obamacare deductible down her throat in one long swallow. “Girl, nah, I bought this with money I should’ve spent on my car payment.” I clinked the ice in my checking account overdraft fees and nodded solemnly in agreement.

  A lot of us are living like this, right? Taking cabs and ordering takeout Thai on payday, then walking the three blocks to work from the train with a bologna sandwich in our bags a week or so later? How does anyone do anything? Or, better than that, how does anyone do both the shit they want to do with their money at the same time they’re doing the shit they need to? Example from my own dumb life: I need to buy a plane ticket to LA on some last-minute
shit. If I buy it now, I’ma probably have to pay my rent late. If I wait, chances are I’m gonna have to fly out at 10:30 p.m. and pay $1,200 for a center seat or some equally undesirable thing. Every time I pay an overdue bill from a doctor visit so long ago I can’t even remember what was wrong with me at the time (WTF is the point of this insurance if it doesn’t cover anything?), I shed a tear for the half dozen quirkily adorable T-shirts I could be ordering from ModCloth instead. I want to be one of those people who feels satisfied when I pay my bills rather than cheated out of whatever frivolity was sacrificed in their place.

  The other day, while I was trying to figure out how I could work fewer hours yet still have enough money to buy something at CB2 called an alpine gunmetal bed (yes, I need that), a thought came to me: I SHOULD MAKE A GODDAMNED BUDGET.

  Then I thought, Fuck a budget. I grew up poor and now I have money, so I’m going to spend it on Chanel nail polishes. I don’t know how you can possibly have joy in your life when you do shit like “balance your checkbook” or “pay your minimum balance on time,” and if doing those awful-sounding things means I can’t see four movies in one weekend, then I don’t ever want to do them. I can’t go to the library. I mean, first of all, what if someone else checked out the book I want? I’m not the only one reading the book reviews in the Times, so now I gotta put my name on a list after your aunt Karen and my elementary school principal, then just, like, wait for them to be finished? I would rather be dead.

  But at some point you have to start thinking about saving up for something other than a lobster dinner, so I caved and read all the brochures in the after-hours ATM lobby while trying to loiter nonthreateningly behind a lady depositing what had to be 437 individual checks (hurry up) and tried to make a budget for myself, but it was as trash as you’d expect. I bought a Suze Orman book and remembered that I’d signed up for Mint.com in 2013, but I stopped using it because I felt too judged by all the expense categorizing (90 percent of the things I spent money on qualified as “amusement.”) Then I just googled “how to make a budget.” Essentially: At the beginning of the month, you make a plan for how you are going to spend your money that month. Then you write down what you think you will earn and spend. All month long you have to write down everything you spend, no cheating. At the end of the month, see if you spent what you planned.