But Enough About Me (22 page)

I tried to eat a few sweet potatoes but the lump in my throat prevented me from swallowing. What was I thinking? Trevor, who rolled his eyes whenever I talked about my family, would have loathed Thanksgiving at my folks' house. He would have been twitching and mouthing
Let's go
at just about the point when all of us went around the table and announced what we were most thankful for. I looked down at my plate, trying to maintain control. I had thrown up in front of him after one whiskey-soaked night, but I had never cried.

It hit me: Being hip was a full-time job, and I was only a part-timer. The rest of the time, I wanted to put red hots on a gingerbread house with Heather and Dinah at my folks' dining room table. I was a geek. When I first met Trevor, he told me teasingly, “I'll bet you're a cat person.” I denied it, but the fact stood that if I happened to be at a newsstand, I surreptitiously peeped at
Cat Fancy
magazine as though it were a dog-eared copy of
Juggs.
I couldn't hide forever that I liked county fairs, particularly the goat booth at the 4-H tent, or that I once spent a week with my grandmother at her house in the giant retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, and it was one of the most carefree times of my life.

Every morning “Ma” (she didn't like the term
Grandma,
which made her feel old) would pad into my room in her slippers with a glass of orange juice for me. Then she would pilot her mammoth, cream-colored Buick to thrift shops, where she was always on the hunt for elasticized polyester pants in pastel colors. After pawing through the racks, we'd indulge in a buffet lunch at her favorite Mexican place or, sometimes, Chuck E. Cheese's, because she liked to “watch all the young people.”

Then, after a trip to the mall, we'd head back to her house, where she would show me various favorites from her extensive doll collection, or maybe my great-aunt Lucile would come over for “a nice visit,” or, if I was feeling particularly wild, I'd put on Ma's flowered bathing cap and stroll
down to the community pool for a little aqua-robics. Ma would make dinner promptly at six, after which we'd retire to the living room and thumb through copies of
Ladies' Home Journal
while we watched
Murder, She Wrote.
After every meal, we helped ourselves to dessert (candy bars, she declared, were good “for strength”).

I was a geek, with a healthy dose of Old Lady. 'Twas ever thus, and I couldn't keep pretending forever. Guess what, Trevor: Soon enough you'll discover that lurking behind my Wire albums is Rick Springfield's
Working Class Dog.
Maybe we'll put that on the turntable at your next party.

Trevor picked up the game hen. “Don't eat me!” he squeaked, making it wiggle around as if it were running.

Your first order of business is to compile a database of different ways to say “have sex.” Some useful terms are boinking, making a deposit, doing the humpty dance, getting parallel, raw doggin', having a bit of the old in and out, lancing, swapping gravy, oofing, and—my personal favorite—spelunking.

This will avoid redundancy. It is also helpful to accumulate inventive ways to describe a man's equipment, because you will be referring to it a great deal. Some good ones to try are schwantz, hose, anaconda, bratwurst, badajo, kickstand, flagpole, joystick, and—my personal favorite—cob.

Finally, if your sex life is about as exciting as a televised oil-painting show because you have recently broken up with your boyfriend, Trevor, ply your more adventurous friends for material.

I stared bleakly at the computer screen. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. A crony of mine had recommended me for the job of
GQ
's sex columnist, and despite my stunning lack of credentials, I took the gig, especially after I
learned that I could hide under the pseudonym of Dr. Sooth, which was some sort of amalgam of “soothsayer” and Dr. Ruth.

Readers were to send in their questions, which were forwarded on to me. Then, being spectacularly unqualified to answer the question myself, I would phone up an expert. For some reason I thought that I would receive bags of letters, like in the scene at the end of
Miracle on 34th Street,
but usually there was only a trickle. I was puzzled until I met a fellow sex columnist at a party (New York, in its way, is a small town).

“Please,” he said. “My column is aimed at both sexes, but ninety percent of my letters are from women.” He laughed. “Most of the time, men assume that nothing is wrong and that they're doing just fine.”

Worse, the few letters that I did receive had a distressing uniformity, usually along the lines of
How can I pleas
[sic]
a woman?

Or, alternately:

I was wondering how I could make my dick bigger. Not that the ladies complain. Thank you. Peace out.

It never seemed to occur to the advice seekers to wonder why, if I knew the magical secret to enlarging a man's cob, I would be slogging away at a sex column.

Sometimes, however, a doozy would arrive from heaven, like the question about nipple color (I checked with my doctor, who torpedoed that theory by saying that there was no pigment inside the mouth). So much to learn about my fellow man! His colorful proclivities, his wonderfully exotic foibles!

A friend of mine claims that most men put on a condom before receiving a lap dance to prevent stains. Can you fill me in?
(“That's a new one,” snorted one of the many strippers I consulted on matters of adult entertainment.)
My johnson is covered with hair, almost up to the tip. Can I use laser hair removal on it?
No, you cannot, as no hair-removal emporium will go near genitalia due to a justifiable fear of lawsuits. Buy yourself an at-home waxing kit.

I have always wanted to try water sports. How can I get my wife to go along with it?

“Water sports, commonly known as ‘peeing on each other,'” I wrote insanely, “are harmless, as long as they are consensual.”

I met a girl through a personal ad who seemed perfect for me, but when I went to her house to pick her up, she had a huge macaw perched on her shoulder. That freaked me out a little bit, but I still thought she was cute, so I put it out of my mind. After we went out for dinner and drinks, I go back to her place, one thing leads to another, and we had sex on the couch. The problem is that that goddamn macaw was watching the whole time and it gave me the creeps. What do I do? Also, the bird sheds “macaw dust” all over everything.

Naturally, I speed-dialed the proprietor of Dick's Macaw World in Thomasville, Pennsylvania, the preeminent macaw expert in the Thomasville area. I had the good fortune of getting Dick right on the phone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he angrily sided with the macaw. “When you've got a macaw, you've got a friend for life,” he huffed. He recommended that the guy make nice with the bird, said that macaw dust was harmless, and added that macaws can live dozens of years. “Longer than most relationships,” he said pointedly.

I sighed. “Dick,” I said, “you're absolutely right.”

It was time that I started fixing my own affairs. I phoned Julie, dialing her number quickly so that I wouldn't lose my nerve. “Can I come to your house?” I blurted when she picked up the phone.

“Sure,” she said. I could tell she was treading lightly. “I'm just going to walk the dog and then I'll be here.”

I hurried up to her house, light-headed with nerves. We hadn't had a real conversation in half a year.

When she opened the door, her face was a slide show of different expressions: happiness, doubt, suspicion. Her new dog, Otto, capered around my feet, but she stood still. “Hi,” she said.

“Oh, Jul,” I said, and gave her a hug. Tears squeezed out of my eyes. “I'm so sorry. I've been such a jerk.”

“Come on in and let's sit you down,” she said. “You need a Kleenex?” I shook my head and took a seat.

We sat, facing each other. “So how are things?” she asked lightly. “How's work? How is Trevor?”

“It's over,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I told him I didn't want to go out as much. All of those late nights just started to get old. He continued to go out, of course.” I shrugged. “And then one time I realized that I hadn't seen him
in a week. Then two weeks. He never did want to stay home, even though I was there. Maybe he wanted a drinking buddy more than he wanted me. Anyway, the phone calls kept getting farther apart until they stopped altogether.” After Trevor was gone, I felt like I had recovered from the flu—I started getting up early again, and my skin lost its sallowness—but a fog had descended around me that just wouldn't lift.

I sighed. “I know no one liked him. Which, of course, made me rally to his side, rather than realize that perhaps it's worth paying attention if someone is reviled by everyone you know.”

Julie smiled wanly. “You'll probably start dating him again in a month and you're going to hate my guts, but I just have to tell you that it seemed to me that he was only in it for what you could do for him.” She sighed. “Remember your birthday party a few months ago? I had gone with my dog to get your cake at the Cupcake Café, which for some reason is right underneath the drop-in center for the homeless shelter near Penn Station. I didn't want to tie up Otto because those people would eat him alive. You know how difficult it is to pick up a gigantic cake and keep the icing flowers nice so they don't get smushed with a dog?”

She looked at me fiercely. “Trevor did nothing for the party and put no money in, and at one point you were thanking him and he had this shit-eating grin on his face, taking credit for the whole thing, and I hated him.”

“Why didn't you tell me this?” I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“You're right,” I said. “It wouldn't have made a difference.”

She went on. “I remember being in your apartment after the party was over and we were getting ready to go to a bar, and you and some girls from
Rolling Stone
were in the bathroom putting on makeup and I was on the couch,” she said. “You were all wearing Daryl K low-rider pants and you were super skinny and I was hiding my extra ten pounds in an Eileen Fisher outfit that my mom had picked out, and you were all looking in the mirror and laughing and I didn't even know what was going on in there. I was
completely out of it.” She shrugged. “That was the beginning of the end for a while. I saw that you had turned into a rock and roller. It wasn't bad, but one of the things that we bonded on was that we were very cool people, and lots of people wanted to be friends with us, but we loved our geeky parts. You know? And you just seemed to turn on that.”

I nodded. “I don't know how to make this up to you,” I said.

She waved her hand. “Let's forget it,” she said. “I just miss talking to you every day. There are so many things I wanted to tell you. I got a job, for one thing, at VH1. I'm going to be a writer at
Pop-Up Video—
you know that show? I start in a few weeks.”

“What? Oh, Julie. That is so great.” I fought back another gush of tears as she filled me in. Four hours later, I was still in the same spot on her couch. When I finally rose to leave, I gave her another hug.

“I'll call you later,” I said.

As I rode the subway home, it occurred to me that I had no plans. After my protracted Lost Weekend with Trevor, I had begged off of plans so many times that I received few calls. My pride prevented me from trying to reconnect just yet. Maybe it was time to stay in for a while.

I got off at my subway stop and headed to a gourmet takeout place that was popular with all the single people in my neighborhood. I never cooked for myself, only for others. Left to my own devices, my dinners were random assemblages. To celebrate the relief I felt at seeing Julie, I decided to get a decent meal. Maybe I'd go completely crazy and get a few side dishes.

I joined one of two lines and furtively checked out my fellow singletons: four women in their thirties, and one frat boy type, still in his suit from working on a Saturday. I caught the eye of one of the women and we exchanged a look.
Single? Right. Me too. Let me guess, you're going home to eat that Savory Tamale Pie in front of the TV. And you'll do the laundry because on a Saturday night, the laundry room is empty. Oh, you have a cat, too? What's his name? Mr. Purrbox? That's cute.

I shook my head to clear it. Why did I have to cast things in such a gloomy light? Maybe those people were all perfectly happy being unattached. I certainly had enough married people tell me that they envied my footloose life. Heather always accused me of attaching a dismal backstory to anyone I saw who happened to be alone. If I spied an older man having a solitary meal at a coffee shop, I inevitably thought,
Sad widower, directionless since his wife's lingering death from cancer two years ago, spends his allotted monthly splurge from his Social Security check at the roach-ridden diner before going home to his ammonia-and-fried-onion-scented apartment, where he has cold tea and wonders how to most efficiently end his life.

“Maybe he's wealthy and likes going to coffee shops,” Heather would point out. “Maybe he is finally free to eat cheeseburgers and watch sports all day since his nagging wife is gone.”

I wandered out of the shop. What to do? I walked aimlessly along before ducking into a grocery store. Grocery stores always cheered me up, even the cramped Third World one in my neighborhood. I grabbed some cereal—my usual lunch and dinner—and a few pears and got in line.

The cashier scanned my food without looking at me. She stopped at the pears, frowned, and picked one up.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Bartlett pears.”

She sighed. “Cliché, I need a price check on Bartlett pears,” she hollered to a coworker.

I looked blankly at her.

She slammed down my pear. “Cliché!” she yelled. What was she talking about?

I glanced over at the cashier next to her. Her nametag said
CLISHAY.

Fantastic.

I ran home to tell Heather.

“I have a new favorite name,” I said, flopping on my bed with the phone.

“That's good, because I'm in the market for names,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She laughed. “Well,” she said slowly. “I'm pregnant.”

“Heather!” I said, jumping up. “I love it!”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Whatever.” Heather downplayed any of her major life events. Like the Brits, she was discreet, had a caustic sense of humor, and ran from overt attention. “It sort of happened on our first try, believe it or not,” she said.

I slipped into my pajamas, even though it wasn't yet six o'clock. Why not? “Are you excited?” I asked.

“Yes. Seriously, I really am. And Rob is especially excited. He's so ready to have his own family. He's already told the world. The dishwasher at his restaurant knows, and I haven't even let Mom know yet. He already bought a little photo book to carry around in his bag.” She sighed. “The only downside is that I just feel sick all the time. The one thing that seems to help is pressing my face up against the cold file cabinets in the office at the restaurant when no one's around.”

“God, my little sister is pregnant,” I marveled. “All of a sudden I feel as old as Methuselah.”

“Yes, but look what you do for a living. You travel all over and interview all these interesting people. You can do whatever you want.”

I sighed. “I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes it gets a little old to do whatever you want, all the time,” I said.

Silence. “I can see that,” she said finally.

“One day I woke up and I was in my midthirties,” I said. I told her about my cringe-inducing visit to
Rolling Stone.
“I have just been thinking a lot lately about what my plan is,” I admitted. “I really have no idea. What's your plan?”

She thought for a minute. “I've always seen myself with kids and a family,” she said. “I'm a homebody, I always have been. I guess if I had a plan, it would be to relive everything I grew up with—catching fireflies and Flash-
light Tag and playing dress-up and birthday parties. Going to get ice cream after swim meets. Divvying up my Halloween candy and trading away the boxes of raisins and the Tootsie Rolls that you get a hundred of. I don't know, I see myself as a grandparent with lots of family around. So I guess it depends on what you want.”

“Boy, Heather,” I said. “You sure know how to create a mood. Well, I'm going to think about it for a while. And in the meantime, no more bars.”

“Good. You don't want to get haggard. Stay in, and read, and take baths, and write, and take long walks. Eat dinners out by yourself. Ask Lou to come over. He always makes you laugh.”

He came to my apartment a few nights later, dressed in sweatpants for a night in. “I brought you a Whitman's sampler,” he said, tossing it onto my kitchen table. “Everyone loves a Whitman's sampler. And it's no mystery—they have a diagram inside of what's in each chocolate. At a time like this, you need certainty. Nothing's going to let you down.”

He held up a tape. “I also brought over a movie that will really resonate with you right now. It's called
Touched by Evil,
starring Paula Abdul in her first and only TV movie. She plays this single career woman, like you. She doesn't want to be in a relationship because she had a bad experience, but then she meets this dashing stranger, played by Adrian Pasdar, who in real life is married to the squat one in the Dixie Chicks. She opens up her heart to him and soon they go into business together.” He sat down on my couch and grabbed my remote control. “Then it turns that he had actually raped her several months earlier,” he said. “That's the bad experience I was talking about.”

“That's supposed to be inspiring?”

“Yes, because in the end, she kicks his ass back to jail.”

“Look, I've decided to embrace being single, so I don't need cheering up,” I said, settling down next to him.

He rolled his eyes. “You? Right.”

“I'm serious.”

He shook his head. “I don't know why you're so terrified to be alone. You're actually calmer when you're alone. Whenever you're around people, you're like a cat inside a carrier on his way to the vet. ‘Frantic' is the word that comes to mind.”

I sighed. “I just get depressed at the notion of spending each day surrounded by nine million New Yorkers and then going home to my little box. I just feel like I'm in a kennel.”

He jumped up to retrieve the box of candy and cracked the cellophane. “Maybe you should try to actually enjoy the solitude,” he said, inspecting the diagram to locate a vanilla cream. “Maybe you should entertain the possibility that you might be alone for a very long time. Maybe forever. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's better than cancer.” He shrugged. “You could be with Trevor. Why are horrible relationships so much better than being alone? I've been in bad relationships and now I'm single. Single's better. Sometimes I'm a little depressed because I know what it was like to be with someone I cared about, but the older I get, the less depressed I get, because I really don't see that many relationships I'm envious of, anyway.” He held out the box to me. “You've got to move forward,” he said. “You've got to find some other reason to be happy, just because you need that, anyway.”

 

On weekends, I started to leave my apartment early in the morning with no agenda. All day I would roam Manhattan, stopping whenever something caught my eye. I spent hours in museums and bookstores and found that I liked my own company.

As I headed out one Saturday morning for a long jaunt (breakfast, an early movie, an exhibit of Lewis Carroll's photography, maybe a swing by the farmers' market at Union Square), my father called.

“Hi, kid,” he said. I was becoming the world's oldest kid. I felt like the forties radio act Baby Snooks. “Haven't heard from you in a while.”

“I know, Dad. I'm sorry.”

“Listen, I've been thinking. I'd like to invite Trevor for dinner at the house.”

“Too late,” I said. “I broke up with him.”

He exhaled in a whoosh. “Thank God,” he muttered.

“Let's not get into it,” I said. “I know he wasn't right for me, but I guess I just had to do it. It's the only way I'm going to learn what I don't want.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn't have said anything. Over the years, you've basically proved that your instincts are right and maybe we should trust them more.” He sighed. “We've always been careful not to oversteer you girls. We kind of had to let you bruise yourselves and make mistakes. That's what my parents did.”

He paused. “I don't know half the bruises you've gotten, but on the face of things, it seemed that you were doing fine and handling it, and I guess I was hoping that you were. And we think about things in our generation's terms, unfortunately. If I had my way when it came to your career, you'd still be at that ad agency. To me, working at
Rolling Stone
did not sound like a good move, but we didn't want to control your life. And you were right. So I'm sorry if I stepped on your toes with that guy. I just want somebody for you that's challenging. I always felt you were artistic, and if you had a real stable partner to ground you, then you could explore your artistic side, which would be terrific.” He laughed. “I know you don't want to date anybody like your old dad. I'm sure you want a snazzy New Yorker, not some quiet guy from the Midwest who likes vanilla ice cream with his pie.”