I Know What I'm Doing (13 page)

When I was married and people asked me how much sex I had I used to lie. One time, during a particular monthlong no-sex marathon, I told a friend that my husband and I got it on three times a week. When I told her that we were separating the first thing she said was, “What? But you have sex three times a week!” I lied at the time because I didn’t want to face the truth. So, if a girlfriend asks you how often you and your lover/boyfriend/husband/girlfriend/streetwalker have sex—it’s a cry for help! She needs to know if what she’s going through is normal. Don’t dismiss her question by lying and saying that you and Bob have sex five days a week, right after the local news, and you wake up walking with a limp. Tell her the truth. That you have sex every other week and that neither of you has the energy lately to stay awake for the eleven o’clock news. When you admit to not having sex that often, talk about what the sex is like. Are you doing it just to get it done so that you can say, “Well, we do it once a week.” What do you do once a week? Two quick pumps with a T-shirt on? Are you satisfied? Do you just pull your sweatpants down a little bit to save time because you have to get up early in the morning? That’s okay. Every relationship goes through phases. We all just want to know that what we’re doing is normal—yes, even that weird stuff with the strawberry-flavored body gel.

Here are a couple of things I wish I’d been told before I had to go figuring it out for myself.

I think once you’re of a certain age and there’s not a lot of time to waste, it’s okay to have sex on the first date. How else are you going to know if you’re attracted to someone? If you wake up and can’t stop thinking about him and want more—that’s good. If you don’t care, you just saved yourself another boring dinner. And if we’re talking heterosexual relationships, guys aren’t that different from women. Stop thinking withholding sex makes him want it more. He’ll just get it somewhere else. Once he sleeps with you, if he likes it, he’ll want to again. Whether you just went out for the first time that night or you made him wait a respectable three weeks.

If you’re in a relationship and it’s date night, have sex before you go out to dinner. Who wants to bone after they are filled with dinner rolls? You’re just asking for an accidental wind breakage situation when you mount your man/woman/streetwalker at the end of the night. And having sex before dinner gives you a secret to think about during the meal—
and kicks up your metabolism.

Some guys like it when you take your little vibrating thing out of your nightstand drawer and offer to make their inner thighs tingle, or something. But they’ll never ask, so you have to bring it up. No. I won’t elaborate. My future boyfriend could be reading this book and I don’t want to ruin any surprises.

Oh. And your vagina? It’s not weird. And if a guy tells you that your vagina is weird—he better be gay.

11

NO NEED TO BE ALARMED

If there’s anything worse than a woman living alone, it’s a woman saying she likes it.

—THELMA RITTER

L
iving alone can be intimidating, and I know it sounds cynical but part of me thinks that deep down people like to couple up and move in together because two people fighting off a home intruder is better than one. And a ghost most likely won’t haunt a couple in the same way that a spirit likes to prey on single people who are curled up in front of their fireplace alone.

I got to keep the apartment in my divorce but I also inherited a newfound fear of my once beloved floor-to-ceiling picture window in the living room. Why
wouldn’t
a deranged groper throw a brick through this window and just walk right in? Absolutely nothing is stopping him (or her). With the help of a friend who ordered the same Mace for his daughter, I was equipped with many canisters of the probably illegal stuff. I figured if I burned the eyes of my assailant, whether or not it was legal would be the least of my problems. Besides, if I got arrested for defending myself against an attacker there is no way that story wouldn’t get turned into a Lifetime Original Movie. Win-win.

But I worried that, should someone smash my front window, I would have to get pretty close to him to scare him with Mace, which is why I also purchased a state-of-the-art Taser that makes a horrifying electric zapping sound, lights up when I pull the trigger, and can hit a “perp” up to thirty feet away. I’m not a paranoid person. I don’t think that anyone is after
me
specifically. I’m just convinced that there are sickos out there. When I decide to give away a piece of furniture, a chair for example, instead of selling it, because I’m too lazy to deal with Craigslist or yard sales, I’ll just put it outside on the curb at night and it’s usually gone within an hour. That means that someone walked by who wasn’t necessarily looking for a chair but decided that they needed a chair just because they spotted one on a curb. By that same logic I am convinced that someone could walk by a window and decide that this is the night he’ll bust through that window and attack a lady. I’d like to think that it’s the writer in me who comes up with these murderous scenarios and it’s not that I have some latent desire to ditch my normal cotton/poly blend shirts and instead wear someone else’s skin.

One morning I smelled marijuana coming from my living room, because it was actually coming in my living room windows from outside. I opened the front door and found three kids, about thirteen years old, sitting on my stoop and just puffing on a joint, passing it around. I thought for sure that even the act of me opening the door would startle them and scare them away, but this must have been some good mellow shit that takes away reaction time and fear of adults. They stayed put like lizards on a rock in the sun.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you live here?” I knew they didn’t because
I
lived there and I knew that the two gay guys who lived in the other ground-floor apartment of the fourplex hadn’t adopted three teenaged children. Not that I wouldn’t fully support their right to. The little shits didn’t even respond with words, just nods of no.

“I’m not going to work until you get the fuck off of my steps!”

Remind me never to write dialogue for badasses in movies. If I’d been in charge, John Wayne wouldn’t have said, “Hey, pilgrim, you’re gonna need a couple of stitches,” but rather, “Hey, I have somewhere to be but you kids make me not want to leave my stoop unguarded!”

They didn’t move. I said, “I’m calling the cops. Get out of here.”

I slammed the door. I picked up the phone but didn’t want to call 911. This wasn’t a situation like cold Chicken McNuggets or any of the other reasons I’ve read people in Central Florida call for emergency assistance. I had the phone number to the local police precinct written down
somewhere. Where was it?
I knew that I’d put it in a place for safekeeping but now it was so safe I couldn’t find it. I went to get my Taser, and then stopped myself. I couldn’t pull a Taser on teenager. I wanted to but couldn’t. Since I never got it registered I would essentially just be calling the cops on myself.

When I got back to my stoop to issue one last severe suggestion that they leave—the teenagers were gone. Ha! I
did
scare them! They just didn’t want to show me how shaken they were. It would have been admitting defeat. Then I walked down my steps and saw them only a few yards away; slowly, casually,
confidently
sauntering down the street on their way to school. I hadn’t scared them. They had simply accomplished their goal of getting sufficiently high to start their day. I was never a factor in how long they sat on the stoop. It pissed me off. When I’m pissed off and feel like I’m not being taken seriously as an adult I pity myself and think,
Angelina Jolie is younger than me. She seems like she’s been on the earth since the beginning of time—not her looks, but her presence. She’s adopting kids, working as a UN ambassador, keeping that Brad Pitt and his wine vineyard in line, all while wearing her famous black T-shirt, aviator sunglasses, and bony arms. If she walked outside you bet those kids would have run. She’s Tomb Raider and I’m Stoop Failure.

The only delight I took in those brats and their wake-and-bake was that they were tiny, pimple-faced, innocent-looking
kids.
That delights me because somewhere their parents are bragging to other parents about what great children they have. “Oh, my Ashley would never do anything wrong. I’m so sorry that your Steven was caught skipping school.” I may be an undesirable member of the community because I’m a divorced, childfree renter, but “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Goody Two-Shoes who did everything right in life by owning, marrying, and procreating, YOUR KIDS are getting HIGH on MY STOOP!”

I decided that it was time I get a home alarm system. Because I’m a renter I couldn’t equip my vulnerable windows with protection from some of the standard places like ADT that have their own private security force who zap your unwanted guests for you. I went with a company called SimpliSafe. They sent me a giant Bluetooth sensor that I hid behind my TV and a bunch of mini-sensors to tape on the windows as well as a keypad for the front door. They threw in a panic button that I stuck under my nightstand. The only issue was that with SimpliSafe, a tripped sensor or a panic button hit in a state of panic wouldn’t produce privatized police at my door but simply a call from SimpliSafe headquarters. If there was a real problem SimpliSafe would then call the police for me. That’s certainly nice of them but it’s a lot of steps in what I assume would be a situation where time is of the essence.

A few times I did trip the sensor and SimpliSafe promptly rang my home phone and asked me for my password, which was “Judge Judy.” I picked that phrase figuring if anyone ever broke into my home, hearing me say “Judge Judy” into the phone might scare him or her off. But as President Obama says, “Let me be clear.” This was not a safe word, but a password. Me saying “Judge Judy” to a SimpliSafe phone operator lets them know that I am indeed the owner of the alarm system. It does not mean “All is well here.” Then after I say “Judge Judy,” verifying my identity, they ask, “Why was the alarm activated, Ms. Kirkman?” Usually my answer was, “I went to take the trash out and then it went off and I couldn’t run back in time to stop it.” But if there is a bad guy in your house you can’t say, “Oh, well, I would love to tell you that I set the alarm off by opening my door and taking out the trash but actually there’s a bad guy here with some rope and he’s about to tie me up.” So when I would breathlessly say, “It was just me taking out the trash,” they never once thought to ask, “Ms. Kirkman, are you telling the truth? Say the words ‘Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis’ if anyone is in your home and you’re lying.” They always took my word for it that it was just me setting off my own alarm, which never made me feel simply safe.

The night that I stayed home to try to figure out how to hook up my home non-invasion system was a bigger disaster than a creep smashing my window. I’m terrible at reading instructions. I zone out after the first sentence and usually just try to figure it out myself—which, as you can imagine, is not a strategy for success. Around eight p.m. on a Friday night I affixed my keypad to my door, turned on the sensors, and before I could pick a password—the thing started wailing. At least I knew that if someone broke in the alarm was so annoying that he would immediately leave. It’s like how I feel when I walk into a store in December and that awful Paul McCartney song “Wonderful Christmastime” is playing.
Not worth it. I’m out of here even though I could have finished all of my holiday shopping in one place.

The instructions on the box had promised me that this system was “incredibly easy to set up” and even “idiot proof.” It didn’t say anything on the box about what to do in case of a poltergeist that causes the alarm to go off before it is even programmed or how to stop it without a password because one doesn’t exist yet. I called the 1-800 number and was greeted with SimpliSafe’s answering service.

“Answering service? What does that mean?”

A cheeky operator said, “Ma’am, answering service means that I’m a service and I’m answering your call.”

“Well, I can’t turn my alarm off.”

“Okay, ma’am. Well, you can call back during SimpliSafe’s normal business hours, Monday through Friday, nine a.m. to five p.m., and a service technician can help you then.”

“Wait. So you’re a service that answers the phone only to tell me that no one can answer the phone?”

Silence.

My upstairs neighbors started pounding on the floor, their floor. My ceiling. It could not go on like this all weekend.

“Ma’am, just put your password in and it should stop. Any other technical questions can be answered nine to five—”

“Yes. I know I can call back on Monday—that is, if I take the day off from work.”

“Just put in your pass—”

“My. Password. Hasn’t. Been. Picked. That’s why I’m calling.”

“That doesn’t make sense, ma’am.”

“Maybe I’d have better luck calling Ghostbusters since you don’t fucking seem to—”

Click. She hung up.

Nobody hangs up on me.

I called her back.

“Hello, SimpliSafe. This is Sherri. How can I help you?”

“Sherri. This is Jen. I was just hung up on—”

Click. She hung up on me again.

I called back again.

Sherri skipped the official greeting and answered, “What.”

“Sherri?”

“Don’t you dare use foul language with me, ma’am. Jesus didn’t make your mouth so you could use foul language.”

“Sherri. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I live alone and I’m divorced. I’m just trying not to get stabbed. I have a big picture window. My neighbors are mad—”

“Hold up, ma’am. You’re divorced?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. I was the first one in my group.”

“Me too.”

“Okay, ma’am. If Jesus can forgive, I can forgive.”

“Okayyy . . .”

“I have access to the help manual and I’m not supposed to do this except in real emergencies but you’re going to have to listen to me. Are you ready?”