We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 5

  I made it through two days before quitting because it was too embarrassing. I don’t like knowing how much of my rent money I’ve spent downloading children’s games to play on my phone. If my plan is to die peacefully in my sleep before my hip inevitably slips out of place, do I even need to worry about a retirement plan? Do any of you guys think about that shit? Wait, don’t tell me. No, I mean, only tell me if the amount of money you’ve spent on bottled water this month is more than you set aside for your savings. I prefer to admit my inadequacies to assholes who can relate. So after I burned the notebook I had halfheartedly dedicated to my frivolous daily expenditures I googled “money-saving tips.” Oh, don’t worry, I HATE MYSELF, TOO.

  Pack a lunch!

  House lunch is so boring, though. Also, packing it the night before feels gross, and the prospect of making it in the morning before I leave feels impossible. Sometimes, if I cook too much dinner for one person, instead of trying to cram the excess down my throat so I don’t have to rifle through all the mismatched plastic containers in my cabinets to find a top that fits with a corresponding bottom, I will wrap those leftovers in foil or toss them in a ziplock bag and vow to myself to take it with me for lunch the next day. But the next day that Bomb-ass Dinner just looks like Half-a–Sad Lunch and will inevitably need to be supplemented by a few stolen bites of Someone Else’s Break Room Sandwich. And then you’re that person.

  Save your loose change!

  Can we have a serious, vulnerable, heart-to-heart talk for a minute? So I have very few phobias. Like, almost none. Clowns, spiders, flying, public speaking, balloons, needles: NO PROBLEM. But if you try to give me a handful of coins, I will literally burst into tears. (Cue strangers throwing nickels upon recognizing me on the street.) I cannot stand any little metal thing, especially if it’s clinking together and making noise, and touching disgusting change makes me want to peel the skin from my hands like an orange and then soak them in bleach. The thought of a piggy bank sitting on my dresser makes me want to cry. Once, my boss put a swear jar on my desk, and because I never have change in my pockets, I had to pay a dollar every time I cursed. I lost twenty-seven motherfucking dollars the first son-of-a-bitching day.

  Use coupons and take advantage of discounts!

  Oh no, this makes me so sad. And is it even possible if I have Cody from Instacart doing all my grocery shopping?!

  Buy items in bulk!

  A few years ago I went to Sam’s Club with my friend’s mom. I am not capable of things like “having memberships to places,” and also, it was maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life, so I will never be going there again.

  (1) All of the produce—and I mean all of it—rotted before I could even make a dent. I am one person who lives with one salty garbagecat, and the two of us have pretty much zero use for four real pounds of spinach. Even now that I’ve traded in rib tips for fennel bulbs, I can’t use that much fucking spinach. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH SEVENTEEN APPLES, SAM WALTON?

  (2) I am an obsessive bathroom cleaner, so imagine my joy when I happened upon a six-pack of Clorox toilet bowl cleaner just chilling there all shrink-wrapped and begging to live under my kitchen sink! I still have one of those bottles. Years later. Under my sink. Because I am one person with one ass and one toilet and buying things in bulk is for people with guest bathrooms who are responsible for snack day at the elementary school. What was I even thinking? Also, I’m pretty sure it took me six months, minimum, to recycle the boxes they make you take your stuff home in.

  Take fewer cab rides!

  Uber is going to bankrupt me. Did you know that for sevenish dollars, you can ride to work in the luxury and comfort of the backseat of a 2009 Toyota Camry driven by a bored old guy who will ask way too many questions and will safely deposit you right at the door of your destination without your having to dodge a single double-wide stroller or knife-wielding bum? Compared to the threeish dollars it’s going to cost you to run-walk—a backpack full of three-for-$10 frozen dinners and the (now soggy) library book you’re going to read in the closet you eat lunch in jostling against your shoulder blades—through pouring rain to the unpredictably late or early elevated train. You will ruin your top with anxiety sweat, the expensive cotton of your best work shirt clinging wetly to the hairs at the small of your back, as an increasingly angry rush-hour mob forms behind you and your ineffective swiping of the Ventra Card you put twenty bucks on last night. The train rumbles into the station overhead, and you step in what you’re pretty sure is liquid human waste as you hustle up the stairs, only to have the doors clamp shut just as you reach them. Yes, that woman in the fur coat pushing a grocery cart heard your strained pleading for her to hold the door as you limped across the platform, and, yes, she absolutely chose to ignore you. So now you’re shivering, soaking wet, and you can’t sit down because someone left a soiled baby diaper next to a dirty hypodermic needle on the bench. The announcer just informed everyone that the next six trains are running express past your stop, so, yeah, maybe it’s a better idea to just jump onto the tracks in front of one rather than continue with this miserable day. I lost a perfectly good hat one winter as I walked from the brown line to Union Station when a 75 mph blast of arctic wind blew it off my head and across three lanes of traffic. Standing impotent on the corner as icicles hung from my lashes, I watched a grimy cab squash it into a pothole thick with muddy slush and whispered softly into my scarf, “Man, fuck the train.”

  Socialize at potluck meals instead of at restaurants!

  WHAT DO THESE WORDS EVEN MEAN? You know how I know my friends love me? Because they’ve never asked to come over to my apartment. Going to other people’s houses is terrible. What if the food they made from one of those thirty-second instructional videos is gross? What if their dog is super annoying? What if you have to poop and the bathroom opens into the room you guys are all chilling in, so you’re basically shitting with an audience? You can’t just subject innocent people to your butt! The real problem with going over to Craig’s Saturday night for a little get-together is that there is no way for you to leave without looking and feeling like an asshole. You wouldn’t have to worry about holding in a turd all night if your homie would just let you bounce after dessert (i.e., a half-eaten box of Girl Scout cookies he found in the freezer, because people our age never remember to buy a fucking pie when they invite you over). But nooooooooo, he just set his projector up and you have to watch a movie on the living room wall and I’m sorry you hated that movie but don’t leave yet! We haven’t even played Cards Against Humanity!!!

  I just want to go down to the bar, listen to three beers’ worth of your problems, then claim that my stomach hurts so I can leave and get in bed before nine. And, yeah, we could probably get a case of home beers for the price of the ones I’m tipping two dollars apiece on, but then I’d have to sit in your house for the time it takes to drink all those beers. The cost-benefit analysis of brunch versus trying to find a polite way to tell you I’m about to fall asleep on your couch has shown that twelve-dollar eggs win every single time.

  Clearly, what I need to be is rich. I need to invent something rad or get hit by a city bus so I can get enough zeros in my bank account to ensure that I will never have to touch any icky loose change. I gotta start playing the lottery. Except if I win, I definitely need a trustee or Britney Spears’s dad to get me some municipal bonds and dispense a weekly allowance, because I am not to be trusted. I would buy half a dozen pairs of glasses and legally download a bunch of movies I don’t even like before the check even cleared. I would buy that Rainbow Brite doll I never got Christmas 1986 and drive her around in my new car full of gasoline with my windows electronically rolled down and the air conditioner blasting, eating fistfuls of Life cereal and sipping a motherfucking Capri Sun.

  You Don’t Have to Be Grateful for Sex

  I saw my first adult human penis when I was thirteen years old. My mom had been gone for approximately thirty-seven seconds, and I heard a lilting patois call fr
om the bathroom: “Sweetheart, come in here and give me a hand. I want to show you something.”

  This maintenance guy had been working in our apartment all morning; his work boots thundering down our hallways, his aggressive stench filling my nostrils every time he swaggered past the bedroom where I sat, blissfully ignorant, in a backward Kansas City Chiefs cap with a library book held an inch from my face. Even though I was five-foot-eight and had my motherfucking period already, I was not allowed outside without adult supervision, and the multiple sclerosis that my mom was diagnosed with before I was born left her too disabled and too tired to properly supervise. I spent my summers indoors on hot, musty days like these, watching Cubs games on WGN and earnestly singing “More Than Words” along with the Top 9 at Nine countdown on the radio every night.

  I carefully folded a corner of the page and slid off my bed. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, handy. I cannot:

  Fix a flat tire.

  Change the battery in my smoke detector.

  Correctly hang a picture on a wall.

  Tell you which cord goes into its corresponding hole on the back of my television.

  I am also not sexy. At least not in the traditional sense, not in the way that makes erections jump to attention the moment I walk into a room. I feel like my sexiness is a thing that creeps up on you, like mold on a loaf of corner-store bread you thought you’d get three more days out of. One day you’re slapping me on the back like I just pitched the shit out of a Little League game, then the next you’re like, “Holy shit, this lumbering laundry bag full of damp tennis balls actually has reproductive parts, and, boy, do I want to touch them.”

  Which is why the dick thing was so weird. We’d had a passing introduction when I walked past the door as my mom was letting him in, certainly nowhere near long enough for him to graduate from slyly convincing me to write his social studies paper to awkwardly putting his hand up my shirt in the far corner of the playground. But when I rounded the corner to see what he needed, dude was just standing there with the damp slug of his thick penis stretched across his palm, a smug, satisfied smile plastered across his face. He’d obviously been peeing in the toilet he’d just fixed.

  A champion masturbator by that point, I recognized what I used to think of as “the sparkle feeling” stirring to life in my flooded basement as I studied it from root to tip: tufts of dark curly hair nestling a ridged, veiny shaft that curved to a pale, smooth tip, still glistening with drops of urine. My immediate reaction was a desire to stroke it with my fingertips before gently taking it into my mouth, but other than a limited knowledge of some of the dirtier passages in an illicit copy of Wifey obtained from the library down the street, I didn’t know anything about sex or men or where a penis goes in your actual acne-studded, oily T-zoned body.

  Theoretical television penises slip painlessly into women as they moan and writhe in ecstasy beneath someone they obviously love very deeply, but I had read enough magazines to know that it can be bloody and clumsy and embarrassing in real life. Also heterosexual intercourse definitely leads to fertilized eggs, and my mom and I were still sharing a bed, so where the fuck would we even put a baby? And while it might be good to have a baby with a skilled laborer who could stop leaks and put up drywall and apparently come to work in a freshly ironed shirt, I had gotten a B minus in science at the end of the school year. I was a thirteen-year-old who still sucked her thumb and was definitely not ready to be anyone’s mother.

  “You wanna touch it?” he offered hopefully.

  “Oh, no, thank you!” I replied with a forced cheerfulness, like I was at a friend’s house turning down his mom’s offer of a second helping of peas. (JUST GET TO THE DESSERT, DIANE.)

  “No? Really?!” he asked in disbelief. “Not even a chubby girl like you?”

  What does that even mean? It’s not like he was standing there holding a warm loaf of banana bread—I might have taken him up on that. But it was just an old, semi-flaccid pervert penis: What the fuck did my chubby have to do with his chubby?!

  I stood on the threshold of the bathroom, trying to gauge how mad I should be at his insult. Why was he so shocked by my refusal—do fat girls like sex more than skinny ones? Does touching a penis lower your blood pressure or lessen your risk of developing type 2 diabetes? As a fat, gawky adolescent who was surely destined to live the rest of her life as a fat, gawky adult, would this be my last chance at sex? SHOULD I JUST TAKE WHAT I COULD GET?

  As one of the few early possessors of breasts, I had certainly had them furtively felt up in various dark hallways and unmonitored bedrooms, but I wasn’t interested in racking up more physical conquests. I used to read a lot of dreamy romance novels, and so who cares about touching a cock if the person attached to it wasn’t going to fall madly in love with the beautiful princess buried under these unlovable layers of processed foods and self-loathing? Years of watching shows like Degrassi and Fifteen alone in my bedroom while my friends were trying out for the cross-country team taught me that it was okay to keep eating Cheetos for dinner because, one day, some hot young man would transfer to our school, and I’d trip adorably in front of him. I’d drop my adorably unorganized books and papers on his socially acceptable footwear, our eyes would meet as he crouched to help me pick them up, and he’d realize he should take me to prom and love me for the rest of my life. I spent the entirety of 1993 to 1997 biding my time waiting for Drake to get out of that wheelchair, slide my glasses off, and see the real me.

  A semi-detailed manifest of a few smoking-hot dudes I’ve banged who thought I should have thanked them for the pleasure:

  1.

  “You really don’t know how lucky you are to be with me.” M was talking to me from the bathroom doorway, pulling his dick and balls taut so he wouldn’t nick them as he attended to his pubic hair with an electric beard trimmer.

  I took a bite of my night doughnut, pensive. “Why, because you have six percent body fat?”

  He laughed, which made his pecs flex, causing me to feel sorry for us both. “Man, kind of? I’m just, like, a really good catch.”

  “But you wax your eyebrows. And you work at Best Buy.”

  I’m not shitting on people who work in mass-market consumer electronics, because I have an hourly job, too, but dude, you were wearing a shirt with your name on it when you met me. What is all this “you should be grateful” bullshit? Also, you are the type of person who doesn’t understand that artfully styling one’s pubes is a shameful thing that should be done in private.

  I’ve had sex with a lot of hot dudes—surprisingly hot dudes. And I’m sure you’re all, “Yeah, but they were pity bangs,” and maybe? I mean, probably?! But there have been so many! They all couldn’t have been trying to star in the John Hughes movie of my life! The first time I got a super-ripped bonehead naked in my bed I couldn’t believe my luck—I thought my life was going to completely change the second he wedged his rubbery penis into my vagina. Because I watch a lot of TV, and if nothing else, TV has taught me that if you are a positive person who is kind to the tiny woodland creatures who burst through your open window to help you clean your room and make up your bed, then one day the hottest prince in the kingdom, the one with a foot fetish, will find you after that house party you had to bail on early and fall madly in love with you.

  So that first time: I lifted up his Sean John polo and used my tongue to trace every single groove in the unyielding ice cube tray of his abdomen while waiting to feel a change in my outlook and/or social status. After I sucked his dick, I reached over his taut, glistening body and dug through the crumpled parking tickets and past-due ComEd bills and fished out my wallet, surprised to find that hundreds of dollars hadn’t miraculously materialized within. Earlier in the evening, while we’d been making googly eyes at each other over dinner, my granddaughter had shyly approached our corner table with her hand extended, smiling at M. I’m pretty daft sometimes, and also there was a cheese plate involved, so I didn’t pay her any mind. It took a coupl
e of minutes to realize that she was hitting on a dude I was on an actual date with—not asking what time it was, or if he had any quarters for the parking meter. HILARIOUS. He gestured to me as he informed her that what she was interrupting wasn’t a meeting between a troubled young man and his dowdy social worker, but that we were, in fact, eating a meal of a romantic variety. Her disbelief was palpable. And I just sat there with an exploded cracker in my hand because the goat cheese was too cold to work with but I kept trying anyway. I sat there with pieces of shattered cracker down the front of my sweater registering this beautiful woman’s unbridled shock while the wheels turned in my brain to come up with a suitable explanation for our inconceivable pairing. “Lucky lady,” she said as she walked away.

  OKAY, SURE. But why, though? It’s not like he’d made her laugh or rescued her cat out of a tree. He just had glorious cheekbones and a magnificently crafted beard. Lucky people win the lottery. Or fly to California with no one sitting in the seat next to them on the plane. Or get the movie theater to themselves. What did she know about my luck? Was I going to wake up a millionaire after I had sex with M?! I flagged the waiter to bring us another bottle of expensive wine.