We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 6
2.
H had a job—I’m not exactly sure what it was, though—and this beautiful apartment in Hyde Park that I only ever saw at night. It had high ceilings and massive windows big enough to curl up in with a book, but since he didn’t seem to read a whole lot, he must use it for something else. The first time I ever heard him sing, we’d just had sex, and I was lying in bed watching thunder and lightning rage outside while holding my asshole tightly closed because I knew I would have to shit soon and was going to try to make it home to avoid a clumsy “what’s that smell?” type of situation. Suddenly H slid out of bed and into a pair of gauzy white lounge pants, padding across the room to where a couple of guitars and a keyboard stood sentry in the shadows.
I pulled the blanket up to my chin and watched his skin glow deep purple in the moonlight, his biceps rippling beneath the surface as he tuned the strings of his guitar. I closed my eyes as his rich baritone filled the room, momentarily forgetting that I really needed to get a move on if I was going to get out of his place before the 6 bus stopped running. But his voice was so beautiful, and lying there smelling his lingering scent in the sheets while he sang one of Usher’s slow jams was an intoxicating mix, what with the steady rain and flashes of lightning, and yeah, I totally missed that bus and ended up running the shower so I could take a dump without his listening to my farts.
H also had a for-show girlfriend and a for-after-the-show girlfriend, and I’ll let you guess (A) which one I was, and (B) just how humiliated I felt when I figured it out. No, it wasn’t at his daughter’s fourth birthday party, where I stood awkwardly on the perimeter of the festivities sipping sun-warmed prosecco out of a child-size paper cup, the stranger whose inexplicable presence justified relegating her to supervision of the craft table. “I don’t know who that woman is, so let’s put her in charge of the pipe cleaners and the paste.” It also wasn’t during his mom’s annual July Fourth cookout, which I’d grudgingly attended even though I don’t like eating corn on the cob in public. That day, after I’d hauled bags of ice to a beachfront park under the punishing summer sun, I was rewarded with heaps of fawning praise from all the aunts and cousins who’d gathered round to poke at me with kebab skewers, inspecting my tender meat. I was approved!
For a giant slothperson, I am always amazed at how many rooms I can slip into unnoticed; I attribute this to the force field of negativity I project at all times. So when no one spotted me in the back of the café on “Undiscovered Soul” night, it was fine, because I could just chill in the shadows and not distract H from that song I’d heard him rehearsing when he thought I was asleep. He was performing in front of approximately seven people, five of whom were visibly irritated that their free Wi-Fi was being interrupted by a dude super-earnestly singing Donell Jones’s “U Know What’s Up.” At the end of his set I went to the stage to congratulate him and was intercepted by a woman who introduced herself as his girlfriend, a speed bump I hit going too fast but pumped the brakes fast enough to ensure a smooth landing. She’d heard of me, you see, his good friend the writer, and she wanted me to know that she enjoyed my work. As I was thanking her, H broke away from a crowd of admirers and said “Oh! Hello!” too enthusiastically, swiftly ushering me to the other end of the café, where I put on my I COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT THIS PERCEIVED SLIGHT AGAINST ME satisfied smirk mask and waited for his explanation, which sounded like, “Words words words words words”—deep breath—“words words words words words.” In that moment I wished that I’d ordered a coffee so at least I would have something to do with my hands. “…value our time together,” he continued. “It’s just that with this whole music thing she just fits my, you know, my image better.” And I do know. Which is why I gracefully stepped aside so he could pursue his dream of singing outdated urban contemporary hits in empty coffee shops for people who don’t care. And it’s a good thing I’m so selfless and full of gratitude, because if I wasn’t, the universe would never have been introduced to the modern hero also known as D’Angelo.
LOL JK, THAT DUDE WORKS AT A GROCERY STORE NOW.
3.
I was standing in my tiny bathroom, waiting for the poisonous-smelling Veet I had dripped all over the floor to eat through the hair on my legs, when my phone rang. I was using it as a timer so that toxic slime wouldn’t burn through the top two layers of my skin and start incinerating vital organs, and, because I was in a charitable mood, I answered. It was J, and he immediately launched into a long, convoluted story about a whole bunch of shit I didn’t give a shit about. No one ever tells good-looking dudes when they talk too fucking much, which is why I always end up looking like a bitch when it happens to me. “I have to remove my leg hair,” I interrupted. “This is why I never answer the phone when you call.” And just as I was about to hang up on him, he asked, “Would you go to a Weight Watchers meeting with me today?”
Despite the fact that I could feel the thioglycolic acid starting to cook the tender meat on the back of my calf, I hesitated, then said, “Weight Watchers is for quitters who are in denial about how good ribs taste.” At that moment, smelling my seared leg flesh, Helen Keller slipped into the bathroom brandishing a knife and fork.
I’m not sure what compelled me to eventually go, other than my bubbling undercurrent of self-hatred and fear of further alienating myself from a sanctimonious vegetarian who believed I had a greater appreciation for jazz than I actually do, but twenty minutes later, my chemically smoothed legs and I were watching him fasten his seat belt snugly over a nonexistent belly. I looked down at where my left thigh spread a little bit over my seat, coming perilously close to grazing the gearshift.
I’m not friends with the kind of people who suggest going to dinner and then agonize over whether to get a little oil in addition to the lemon juice on their vegetable-only salads; my friends get the chips. And the queso. And the tacos. Unless I’d begged for an assisted suicide, no one I know in real life would ever propose to me an hour of horrified weight checks and guilt-ridden calorie tabulation disguised as social activity. “Is this because I got bacon on my burger the other night?” I demanded of the sleek, hardened profile, its darkness standing out in sharp relief against the blazing sunshine outside the car window.
“Of course not!” he lied unconvincingly.
“Mm-hmm. I saw you give the waiter a look when I asked him if the restaurant had a set of defibrillator paddles.”
“SAM, THERE WERE THREE DIFFERENT PROTEINS ON YOUR PLATE.”
Aha! There it was: BACON SHAME. From someone with a preternaturally high metabolism who looked very good in the inappropriately tight turtlenecks he was fond of wearing. I should have never given my number to a man I’d watched writing his name on the clipboard for open mic at a poetry reading, but I was momentarily dazzled by the perfectly aligned, piano-key teeth revealed when he smiled and pointed at the book I was reading (The Devil Finds Work) and proclaimed it his favorite Baldwin. I should’ve rolled my eyes and told him to keep it moving because that is no one’s favorite Baldwin, but this is the beauty of being beautiful: people just let your dumb shit rock. So, ignoring the inner voice screaming at the sight of his scribbled-in notebook full of Deep and Meaningful future song lyrics, I heaved my backpack off the seat next to me and let this walking stereotype talk to me about Fela Kuti.
“How many points are in an entire pizza?” I stage-whispered to J halfway through the meeting. All 1,287 chins in the room turned to glare at me. “You know, what happens if I just can’t stop and I eat the whole thing? Do I just add up twelve pizza-slice points and not eat for three weeks?”
THAT IS A REAL QUESTION, OKAY. If you can have one square of triple-thin-crust pizza and happily close the top of the box and put it in your refrigerator until the next day and not wake up periodically throughout the night asking yourself whether or not you made a huge mistake, then maybe this is not the book for you. BITCHES GOTTA EAT. J was hoping that the riveting world of calorie counting and cheat meals would spark a desire to get with his vers
ion of healthy so that we could, in his words, “be a better match.” And I kept a notebook so full of formulas and calculations that it looked like Good Will Hunting wrote that shit. I was crabby and terrible and went to sleep dreaming about pudding every night, but I lost ten pounds. J was happy; I was hungry: all was right in the world. Until I asked him if he was ever going to not have three roommates and maybe get a checking account. You know, so we could be a better match. Then it was over.
I know a lot of hot, unconventionally beautiful ladies who kick ass and have sex with rock-star dudes and aren’t sorry about it at all. I need to say this loud for the girls in the back of the class: if a dude doesn’t want to have to use both hands to grab your ass that’s totally cool; it’s his choice. But that doesn’t make you a piece of shit. You hoist up your saddlebags and go find some dude who thinks you’re rad and doesn’t mind wiping the sweat off your bottom stomach when you switch sex positions. Don’t be all down in the dumps (like a truck truck truck) and let opportunists and perverts take advantage of some low self-esteem you’re absolutely too awesome to have. When I couldn’t catch a goddamned cold for two-plus years after Fred and I broke up I DID NOT GIVE A SHIT, because I vowed to stop fucking around with people who hate me or don’t laugh at my jokes or want me to be thankful for the opportunity to split a lunch check on a Tuesday with a man who was in one motherfucking Old Navy shorts ad in the summer of 2009. He was sexy and everything, but, I mean, he didn’t even know how to CC an e-mail to multiple recipients. I don’t have to be grateful for shit.
A Christmas Carol
My freshman year of college I accidentally became best friends with a couple of grade-A douchebags. I didn’t even want to go to college. But I couldn’t fix cars, and I couldn’t do hair, and I hadn’t had a baby sophomore year, so an accredited university was the next best choice. What I really wanted to do was pull a blanket over my head and listen to Pearl Jam’s No Code on repeat while eating snacks and pretending to be searching for myself all day (fuck, that’s all I want to fucking do now), but I couldn’t find anyone willing to pay for that shit. The state, however, was offering me $15,000 to sleep through English 102 and watch The Young and the Restless. HOW COULD I REFUSE?
The bro was called Adam and his brah went by John, and it was my first experience with the species inside its natural habitat, a medium-size state school with a, uh, flexible GPA admissions requirement. I ran into them, literally, while getting off the elevator on the sticky-hot freshman move-in day. Adam reached for my large cardboard box full of grunge CDs and an economy-size bottle of Head & Shoulders, while John grabbed the small television tucked under my arm, and they marveled at my minimalist approach to dormitory life. “You don’t know any poor people!?” I asked as I struggled to keep up, the backpack stuffed with my two good pairs of jeans and a handful of T-shirts shifting uncomfortably across my spine. They were seniors, John told me over his shoulder as we pushed past the crying parents and exasperated teenagers dotting the hallway, and had been roommates for all three years prior. He was inordinately proud of their novelty disco ball and “fridge full of brews” and promised to show me their room later.
Adam, though Jewish, was from the north side of Chicago and considered himself a homie, as was evidenced by his low-slung baggy jeans and the insertion of out-of-context Snoop Dogg lyrics into almost every conversation. (I hate the fucking word “wigger” more than I hate anything else on earth, but if I’m being totally honest, that’s exactly what this dude was even though it grosses me out to say so.) He had large, sleepy brown eyes and a slow smile and was the kind of guy who hit on black girls by demonstrating his encyclopedic knowledge of Luster’s Pink oil hair lotion and BET prime-time programming. John was your typical west suburban, chest-thumping meatbag, with a body built for date rape and a giant shellacked auburn head that remained defiantly empty, save for a handful of professional baseball statistics and whatever Greek letters you need to learn to pledge the fraternity with the most lenient academic prerequisite. John was the kind of dude who already looked like someone’s dad; you know what I mean? Like, the kind of dude in mirrored shades who chews bubble gum really hard with his arms crossed over his chest, the kind of perpetually tan, leathery-skin motherfucker who always looks like he’s standing on a sideline somewhere. The kind of asshole you are continually surprised to find without a whistle around his neck; a gentleman who should be shouting red-faced into a Bluetooth or standing on a deck he proudly built flipping burgers on a grill he got on sale at Lowe’s.
They weren’t bad dudes, though John’s slicked-back hair and unironic gold chains sometimes made me want to punch him in the dick. I kind of felt bad that these dinosaurs were still working on BAs in communications and eating cafeteria lunch with eighteen-year-olds despite their visibly graying beards. Over time the three of us became friends because, in exchange for my discounted tuition, I had to post up at the overnight desk in the lobby of our dorm as part of my work-study package, checking IDs while trying not to fall asleep or get vomited on. It was not glamorous work, and I was not very good at it. Mostly my job was blocking drunk dudes from entering a dorm they didn’t live in and keeping the Papa John’s guy company as he waited for girls in topknots and printed pajama bottoms to come down and collect their cheese-only pizzas. John and Adam loved what little nightlife DeKalb, Illinois, had to offer, and after several nights of staggering in at 2:00 a.m. totally shithoused and with no identification, they started to recognize me on our floor and would call out, “Hey! Amanda!” every time I walked past their open door with a giant bag of Doritos on my way to watch Jerry Springer in the communal lounge, because I would risk the tenuous grasp I had on that job to give them a pass.
I was having a hard time finding my groove. I had a handful of friends to eat dinner and go to the movies with, but I grew up with nice kids in a nice town that had a nice school with a college-and-career center filled to overflowing with brochures from idyllic liberal arts college campuses across the country. I was dumb enough to be hopeful that something nice would finally happen for me. The earlier part of my lackluster senior year had been filled with daydreams of escape and reinvention: my cool New York feminist Sarah Lawrence–self or my crunchy/artsy Bennington-self or my sexually free Oberlin-self. I could see the sprawling lawns and smell the libraries full of old books. I had pored over all of the hip college guides, the ones that skipped all the percentages and statistics in favor of “real talk” about what kind of jeans to wear to class and the best local bars at which to test out your fake ID. I wrote thoughtful, honest essays trying to explain how a person with a 1520 on the SAT was also the same person who never took physics (or trig, for that matter) and hadn’t bothered with any AP courses and had just barely held on to a 3.2 GPA because they let me take Spanish and choir for honors credit. I went through my sweaters and boots looking for ones that might work in New England in the fall. I filled page after page with my handwritten good intentions, exchanged my saved babysitting cash for money orders to have those applications processed, then enclosed them in fat, creamy envelopes and sent them off just before the deadline to lovely sounding places like Williamstown and Northfield and Gambier and Claremont.
Months later, as names like Stanford and Wesleyan and Princeton bounced excitedly off the walls of the student center, I was coming home every afternoon to skinny rejection letters mixed in with my sister’s subscriptions to Essence and Cooking Light. My counselor skimmed my list of colleges over her reading glasses while I thumbed through one of the many astrology books lining her shelves. She reassured me that there were colleges out there that would look past the C-minus in Latin American history and into the core of who I really was as a sensitive, creative air sign, but she suggested I probably should add a couple of safety schools to my list so that I definitely had somewhere to enroll come the following autumn. This is the problem with neither applying oneself nor working up to one’s potential, these moments when you are reduced to a bunch of abstract letters and nu
mbers whose unflattering reflection cannot be charmed or joked aside. On paper, I am an asshole: a National Merit Scholar who barely passed chemistry and had to take three different gym classes senior year because I failed one freshman year and dropped out of the summer-school makeup class. Three summers in a row. I led an insurrection of my classmates and refused to read The Grapes of Wrath, for which I should have been expelled. The schools I daydreamed about going to? You know, the ones with the lawns and the sweaters? They were looking for girls who got As and volunteered at homeless shelters after school; I got mostly Bs and a lot of Cs and spent my afternoons watching Ricki Lake and sleeping until dinner. My acceptance letter from Northern Illinois University, NIU, received two weeks before graduation, basically read, “Our condolences. Here’s where you pick up your books.”
“What’s my name, fool?” Adam said, letting himself into my room without knocking. Because I had let that dummy cheat off my biology final, he’d offered to drive me back to Evanston for the two-week winter break, where I was going to grudgingly listen to people I passive-aggressively hated whining about how oppressive their course loads were at Harvard and pretending I hadn’t just taken a 300-level math class at Northern in which the professor had used rhymes to teach trig. My roommate, Cara, had already gone home for the holidays, and Adam made himself comfortable on her bed, his long legs dangling off the XL twin mattress as they’d done dozens of times before. We’d spent many nights just like this, in beds opposite each other as we shoveled Chinese food into our mouths from cardboard containers and watched trash TV or listened to records with a bag of greasy Taco Bell. College was surprisingly lonely. It turns out that I am not very good at making friends unless I am already trapped in an insufferable hellscape with someone who doesn’t mind my cracking a few inappropriate jokes as we circle life’s drain. I kept being introduced to people who didn’t know any black people or, more often than not, any black people like me. Which they exclaimed while taking me in with eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, as if I’d just hopped off a motherfucking spaceship with my cheesy black-light posters and newfound interest in sexual experimentation.