What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (2 page)

But my mom will be pleased to hear that my addiction
to sexy people in sexy places really grew out of a nonsexual obsession: I love to do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it. That means
always
getting the specialty of the house. That means smoking cigarettes I don’t smoke at the perfect corner café for hours at a time in Paris, and stripping naked for group hot-tubbing with people you don’t want to see naked in Big Sur. It means riding short, fuzzy horses that will throw me onto the arctic tundra in Iceland, or getting beaten with hot, wet branches by old naked women in stifling
banyas
in Moscow. When these moments happen, I get absurdly happy, like the kind of happy other people report experiencing during the birth of their children. And getting romanced by a Brazilian in Brazil, or a Cretan in Crete … this, to me, just happens to be the gold medal in the Do the Thing You’re Supposed to Do Olympics.

I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily:
Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks.
But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us.

Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.

“Drugs Make You a Better Person”

The first time I blew off steam internationally was not born of carpe diem. It was born of deep despair.

I was twenty-six, and I traveled to Europe with my childhood friend Hope on a “girls’ trip” in the wake of a breakup with my first and most consequential love, Vito. (This is obviously not his name. I let him name himself, though, so, for our purposes, I had a six-year relationship with a man named Vito.) I handled the heartbreak like many twenty-six-year-olds handled big breakups at the beginning of the third millennium: I pierced my belly button, got a Meg Ryan–circa–
French
Kiss–
style bleach job and haircut, and went to Amsterdam.

First, a little more on the man behind the body-reclaiming
piercing: Vito and I met our freshman year of college, had a close friendship sprinkled with drunken make-outs and missed connections for two years, then finally fell madly in love in the way it turns out you only fall in love when you’re twenty and doing it for the first time. (It took me fifteen years of unsuccessfully chasing that first high to understand that. Slow learner.)

We fell in love in the early nineties, and so Vito and I thought a lot of Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder movies were
about us.
(Also Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy movies. Vito had a goatee and hated The Man, so basically anything with Ethan Hawke.) After graduation, we laughed at our friends who went straight to work at ad agencies and consulting firms, and instead backpacked around Europe for the summer, then spent a dreamy fall, winter, and spring working and skiing in Vail, Colorado. In Vail, we sublet a room from two racist brothers who talked a lot about their Scottish ancestry, and who were trying to become “alpine models.”

“You just gotta be a rad skier and be super good-looking, and I really think my skiing’s there this year,” the younger racist explained.

After Vail, Vito got into grad school at UC Santa Barbara, and I moved to L.A. to try to write for television. It turned out that meant spending eighty hours a week driving around town with carloads of film and fetching coffee for writers. It meant squeezing in time to work on my own writing, only to have a male writer notice and say, “Awwww, you’re writing something? That’s so cute!” It meant spending lunch hours giving a high-level writer
ideas for his script that he jotted down word for word, getting more hopeful and proud with each “Great idea!” he gave me, and then being told over the check, “Someday you’re going to make a great producer’s wife.” It meant pitching jokes in a writers’ room and hearing, “Aw, isn’t she pretty?” before being told to pitch it again while doing jumping jacks or, perhaps, sitting on the showrunner’s lap. It meant always, always laughing all of it off.

Anyway, while I navigated the world of Hollywood, Vito moved to jasmine-scented Santa Barbara to learn how to surf, and became a part-time forest ranger and environmental studies grad student who couldn’t wrap his head around ever living in Los Angeles, where TV writers have to live. For the next three years we commuted the hundred miles between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to see each other, and I tried to think of something else to do with my life. I racked my brain—it certainly wasn’t like long hours of drudgery and sexual harassment were so satisfying that they seemed worth losing the love of my life over. But, despite the massive motivation to come up with an alternate life plan, I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do. And, eventually, I realized that meant something.

So Vito and I spent our early twenties planning our retirement. Really. There was no version of the next thirty years that enabled us to both get the lives we wanted and be together, so we just skipped to the part on which we agreed: retiring on an avocado ranch in wine country with a lot of Saint Bernards somewhere around 2035.

But ignoring the reality of the here and now didn’t last, and that’s when the relationship, as Vito said, “became
about talking about the relationship.” We went to couples’ counseling at twenty-four, weeping to what must have been a highly amused therapist about our enormous troubles.

“I just don’t picture myself as the
type
of person who lives in L.A. Plus, it kills me how much fossil fuel we’re burning by driving back and forth every week,” my tortured environmentalist would say to the therapist and me.

“Do we
seriously
have to add fossil fuels to our list of problems?!” I would wail.

“I’m just saying, it really bothers me.”

The therapist would pause. “So … you spend three nights a week together, and Kristin lives in Santa Barbara full-time for three months in the spring,” she would say, trying to paint us the ridiculous picture she was seeing. “That would work fine for some people. Do you think there is something about identifying this as a ‘problem’ that is working for you?”

We scoffed at this. But, years later, I would realize it was the truest thing any therapist has ever said to me. Coloring Vito as ultimately unavailable, all six years that he spent telling me he wanted to be with me forever,
worked for me.
It made it easy as pie to be 100 percent sure about him. I would learn from many subsequent
available
men that that is probably how Vito and I lasted six years.

But I wouldn’t learn that for a
long
time. And hence we have this book.

The struggle finally broke us, and Vito and I ended it all one day after Y2K didn’t happen in Santa Barbara. We wept and hugged and said we’d love each other forever, and then he put me on a train to Los Angeles, and I spent the
entire ride back crying, knowing that he was The One and that no one would ever understand or love me the way he had ever again. I hoped that he was racing along the road next to me in his car, and would be waiting for me at the train station in the Burbank night. But I got off the train, and the station was empty.

A couple of months later, a girls’ trip presented itself.

H
ope and I met on the first day of eighth grade, when we were both new kids at the same school, and so huddled together for warmth in the chilly waters of junior high. We stayed friends when I went to Northwestern, to go to football games and gain a lot of beer and pizza weight, and she went to the University of Oregon, to ride her bike in the rain and lose a lot of drug weight. By the end of college, it looked like I had eaten her. Hope, however, could always keep a lot of balls in the air, so still managed to spend a semester studying abroad in Ecuador, and graduated with a double major in business and Spanish in four years, while some of her fellow college buddies ended up living in boxes in San Francisco. By twenty-six she had grown into an adventurous, sporty, constantly cheerful woman who worked hard and played hard, so when she invited me to tag along on a business trip to Amsterdam for some girl fun she said I desperately needed, it was easy to say yes.

A
fter four years of assistant work on a variety of television shows, I had just been offered my first writing job, on
That ’70s Show
, beginning the following June. That miracle meant there was a date on the horizon when I could start to pay off my credit cards. (Four years of assistant pay had led to debt caused by splurges on things like socks and groceries.) So I bought a plane ticket—girl fun, here I come! Then Hope invited her boyfriend to come along.

“You don’t mind, right?”

I minded. Feeling like I’d be a third wheel, I tried to bow out, which is when Hope’s boyfriend decided to fix it all by inviting his best friend.

“Oh, God, not Mike!” Hope and I both protested.

But Mike, a very sweet, short drug addict and high school dropout with blue hair, pink skin, rodent-like eyes, and a prison record, was
in.

“Ahhhh, sounds pretty cozy,” Mike’s friends would say to me knowingly. “I think Mike’s about to help you get over your breakup!”

“Mm,” I’d reply, as Hope peeked at me apologetically over her adult beverage.

W
e started our trip in Paris, where Mike provided us with scintillating commentary during our cultural tour of the city’s landmarks, like Notre Dame:

“So this place is so famous they named a school after it!”

… and the Louvre:

“What’s the Louvre?”

… and European ambulances:

“They sound different!”

We were all piled into one room in an ancient, crumbling
hotel on a little park on the Seine, directly across from Notre Dame. At like thirty dollars a night, with a view of the cathedral, it had to be the crummiest hotel in the best location in the world, and I had stayed there four years earlier on my postcollege summer trip with Vito. The place
sang
with memories of my first trip to Europe with my first love, and so my mood was not particularly
en rose.

Because of my dark cloud, and the fact that I hadn’t kissed anyone besides my ex in six years, the idea of a “palate-cleansing hookup” was oft suggested by my travel companions.

“A sex sorbet!” Hope clarified.

“What’s sorbet?” Mike asked.

It made me feel like Vito and I were breaking up all over again to even picture such a thing, but sex sorbets did always seem to make people feel better in movies. So I put on a little ditty one night, and we headed out to find some fun.

We found a lot to drink. And a big, hot Australian bartender who invited us back to his friend’s groovy, velvet-filled apartment, late at night, for what turned out to be an extraordinary amount of hash. Things were looking good for the bartender and me as I threw back drinks at the rate you do when you are trying to flirt for the first time in six years … And then I don’t remember anything else besides waking up the next morning in our little room on the Seine.

“The bartender helped us carry you down the four flights of stairs,” Hope told me. “He was very sweet.”

So, my palate was still not cleansed. It tasted like wine and bile, in fact. But the trip was not over.

A
fter a few days with Hope and the boys, I decided to spend a little extra time in Paris, and sent them on to Amsterdam without me. Because I needed a break from Mike, but also because I wanted to be the girl who hung out alone in Paris. You see, over the years, Vito and I had fought many times over conversations like this one:

“I want to go to Hawaii for my spring break,” he might say.

“I have to work that week,” I’d reply.

“Okay, I guess I’ll just go on my own,” Vito would decide.

And then he would.

Now, 2013 Kristin would find this to be a completely reasonable thing to do. 2013 Kristin would do exactly the same thing, and would love that she was with a guy who could head off on a solo adventure as well as she could. But,
boy
, did 1998 Kristin feel differently. I had no urge to go on trips without Vito. I wanted to spend every spare minute with him. I would drive as fast as I could up to Santa Barbara to see him the first moment I could, refusing to stop even when I needed to pee and my car was running on gas fumes. Vito, on the other hand, was closer to where I am today—thrilled when I could come along on adventures, but excited about going alone, too.

Which made me furious.

I wanted to be the girl who could have fun alone in
Paris. It scared me a little, but I remembered the lesson my mom taught me at age seven in a swimming pool in Hawaii. I was a shy little girl and an only child, so on vacations I was usually playing alone, too afraid to go up to the happy groups of kids and introduce myself. Finally, on one vacation, my mom asked me which I’d rather have: a vacation with no friends, or
one scary moment.
So I gathered up all of my courage, and swam over to the kids, and there was
one scary moment …
and then I had friends for the first time on vacation. After that, one scary moment became something I was always willing to have in exchange for the possible payoff. I became a girl who knew how to take a deep breath, suck it up, and walk into any room by herself.