My friends who love to report miss the rush of the game, but for me, I miss my old home. I miss being young and hungry and convinced I’d found a spot for me forever, because it turns out no spot is forever, no matter how infinite a job seems when you’re twenty-five and on top of your own tiny world.
* * *
A few months after Ricketts shut down our blog, one of the New York public radio stations decided to restart it.
Six months after that, I found myself sitting alongside my old editors at a bar on the Lower East Side. “I’m trying to convince you to come work with us again,” one of them told me. “We want you to come back.” It was a tempting offer, and not just because he fed me free beers and a Scotch egg.
My old life waved at me, carrying with it all the blog posts and local “fame” and secret office affairs that once comprised it. I could be the old me again.
But I didn’t want all that old shit. You can’t really go back. Maybe today I’ll be Rebecca Fishbein, Drinker of Tea, Binger of BoJack Horseman, but last week I was Rebecca Fishbein, Celebrated Lady Blogger, and tomorrow I’ll be someone else. And in six months, I’ll be a whole other person. Maybe I will go to law school or flight school, or fight Nazis in the desert over a cursed biblical relic, now that they appear to be back. Maybe I’ll do none of those things, and move home with my parents and dissolve into irrelevance and bankruptcy on their couch. But I know one thing for sure. Next time I go to LaGuardia, I’m bringing a fucking flask.
Real Men Will Disappoint You, Date Fictional Men Instead
I am so old, I saw the first Star Wars film in theaters. Not the OG 1977 version (good Lord, I’m not dead), but the 1997 Special Edition re-release. The Special Edition films are controversial among true Star Wars fans, in part because they were the first hint that George Lucas was a CGI glutton who would stop at nothing to let gratuitous effects ruin his legacy, and also because Greedo shot first.* But in 1997, I was in second grade and had never before seen a Star War, so for me the magic was all new. My father took me to see Episode IV: A New Hope at the Lincoln Square movie theater on a school night, a special event since (a) he and I rarely went to the movies alone together and (b) I had never been to a movie on a weeknight. I was, at long last, a grown-up, and now I was going to see a grown-up movie.
I like to think of my childhood as Before Star Wars (BSW) and After Star Wars (ASW). I walked out of the theater that night a different person. I was still a weird, dumb little seven-year-old with big hair and a predilection for picking my nose and flicking the goo places, but now I knew about space. Space was a place with adventures and furry aliens and excitement. Space had loud guns, Carrie Fisher’s fake British accent, laser sword battles, bad men with bad respiration, slimy slug gangsters, the power-converter-filled Tosche Station, and robot people wandering an arid desert planet. Space had everything. Most of all, space had Han Solo.
Han Solo was the first man to take hold of my body and soul. He was a cocky thirtysomething space smuggler with a searing wit, a secret heart of gold, and a little tuft of chest hair peeking out of his space shirt. I loved the way he walked and the way he flirted with Princess Leia (like a second grader, which really worked for me at the time), and how sad, frustrated, and hurt he looked in The Empire Strikes Back after the Empire tricked him on Bespin and forced him to face the electric torture machine. He tortured me, after all, so watching him take on similar pain was a matter of emotional equality.
It was a difficult relationship for the two of us, as he spent most of it battling the Empire in a galaxy far, far away, while I was on planet Earth learning how to write in cursive. Also, he was fictional. But that didn’t matter to me. Han Solo was my first Man, and I spent many of my waking hours dreaming up stories about our tandem space exploits. I was certain that one day I’d meet a Man just like Han Solo in real life, and that he, too, would make life an adventure.
(Note that in these daydreams, Han Solo was my uncle, and I was his whiz-kid space niece whose secret weapon was a tiny handheld calculator I pretended was a mini-computer with internet access, because yes, I invented the iPhone. No, I have not yet received my royalties from the Jobs estate.)
My love for Han never truly waned, but as the years wore on, I developed a number of potent, if slightly less all-encompassing, crushes on celebrities and other fictional characters. These included, but were not limited to: Leonardo DiCaprio in Marvin’s Room, Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, Peter Pan, one of the more boring Backstreet Boys, Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp as Johnny Depp, Johnny Depp as Officer Tom Hanson on 21 Jump Street. These infatuations were prepubescent and deeply chaste.
They were so chaste, in fact, that when I developed my next full-on obsession—Michael J. Fox, thanks to a family viewing of Back to the Future in the fifth grade—I inserted myself into the BTTF series as Marty McFly’s made-up sister Maggie. (My understanding of love was limited to familial relationships.) I liked the way Marty looked in his plaid shirt and down vest, but I couldn’t see myself in Elisabeth Shue’s role as his girlfriend. I did, however, start waking up at six a.m. to catch reruns of Family Ties on CBS, and I threw a temper tantrum when my parents wouldn’t let me rewatch For Love or Money because someone dropped an F bomb. (I surreptitiously managed to watch The Secret of My Success. It had a lot of sex in it, but I didn’t get any of the references.)
I got over Michael J. Fox when I started middle school, preferring instead to imprint on the likes of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the aforementioned Captain Jack Sparrow. Even those crush fantasies never made it past first base. Then one day I turned into a young teen and got my hands on the sexiest book I’ve ever read. My fictive love switched to lust at full throttle.
The sexiest book I’ve ever read has zero sex. It has almost no touching. No one gets naked, not even once. The two romantic leads kiss a couple of times, but for the most part, they spend the novel looking at and flirting with each other, and more often, with death. It is chaste as a birdhouse collector convention, and pubescent me loved every minute of it.
The book is Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier, who more famously penned Rebecca, after whose titular character I may or may not have been inexplicably named. My mother lent me Jamaica Inn when I was in ninth grade. At the time, I was obsessed with the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, which had been released that summer, and was desperate for anything depicting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British vagrants with wild beards and bad teeth. “You’ll like this one,” my mother said, handing me her well-worn copy. “It’s about pirates.” She was right; I devoured it like a thirsty little monster. Which at fourteen is exactly what I was. But more on that in a minute.
This is one of du Maurier’s deep cuts, so let me delve into the plot, which takes place in 1820. After her mother dies, twenty-three-year-old Mary Yellan leaves the farm where she grew up to move in with her aunt Patience at the Jamaica Inn, located on a lonely stretch of moor on Cornwall’s northeastern coast. Patience’s husband, Joss Merlyn, is the inn’s landlord, and under his watch, the establishment has transformed from a respectable drinking hole into a gathering place for foul miscreants who wreck ships coming into the port to steal their wares. Mary’s a bit of a goody-goody and spends much of the novel trying to expose her uncle’s operation while simultaneously protecting her fragile aunt. She also befriends an albino vicar (a problematic character, though I can’t get into that further without divulging too many of the novel’s twists) and takes a lot of long walks in mud.
The real meat of the story, though, is that Mary strikes up a reluctant romance with Joss’s younger brother Jem, one that ultimately changes her life and invigorated much of mine. Like Joss, Jem Merlyn is a criminal, but a benign one; he’s a horse thief, and du Maurier makes it clear that he doesn’t share his brother’s propensity toward drunkenness and murder. But he’s just enough of a bad boy that Mary can’t help but be intrigued. He is also, per du Maurier’s description, quite handsome and charming, with
a quick wit and a good heart. Despite herself, Mary falls in love, as did I.
Jamaica Inn, which was written in the 1930s, was just accessible enough to introduce me at fourteen to that type of Gothic British romance, one rife with long looks and burgeoning desire, but no physical contact (or even first names). That kind of lust—stirring, unspoken, and certainly unacted upon—made more sense to me than the contemporary romances I saw played out on my favorite teen television programs, like The O.C. and One Tree Hill. Couples on TV stuck their tongues in each other’s mouths and took each other’s virginities. And though some of my peers were following suit, I was far more comfortable papering my bedroom with People magazine photos of the shows’ actors than with mimicking their behavior in real life.
Plenty of young teens aren’t ready to date, of course, but for me, the prospect was particularly chilling. I was in fifth grade when I hit puberty—the first in my class, in fact, at a particularly prudish Jewish day school—and while my mother and the American Girl body books explained what was happening to my outsides, nobody took the time to talk me through the hormone party raging inside. I was horny, and how. Every single non-relative with a penis set my nether regions aflame, and in a matter of months, my secret crushes turned from platonic to lascivious. But the ten-year-old boys I knew weren’t ready for my advances, and the ten-year-old girls who were my compatriots weren’t ready to commiserate or egg me on. I was left alone with my blossoming libido, and with no way to assuage it.
Since I had no friends or older siblings available to help explain all the emotions and urges jumbling within, I assumed I was some sort of damaged sex fiend, like the rapist in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or the creepy priest in the Disney interpretation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. What little I knew about sex had informed me it was a thing only men wanted and women reluctantly handed over, which meant, of course, that something must be wrong with me. No one told me that teen girls want to have sex, too. So I did the only thing I could do with my newfound drive—I suppressed it.
It’s hard enough to grapple with your hormones as a teenager. It’s even harder when you hit puberty so early the stores you shop at don’t sell training bras, so instead of addressing these urges, you stamp them into tiny, quiet shards and stick them someplace deep. The hormones I buried at ten stayed buried when I hit my teens, right when everyone else started experiencing and exploring their own. In ninth grade, my friends were starting to let boys feel them up during lunch period. But I was so afraid of accessing the feelings that had shamed me just a few years before that I refused to entertain the notion of going near a real boy, lest he figure out real quick that I was a freak.
By fourteen, I had traveled through time with Marty, sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic with Leo, and attended the Republican National Convention with Alex P. Keaton. And of course I’d flown from Hoth to Kashyyyk to Bespin with my, uh, uncle Han. I knew how to imagine a relationship, but I didn’t quite get what went into it.
Enter Jem Merlyn, fictional horse thief and throb of my celibate, um, heart. There is one scene about halfway through Jamaica Inn in which Jem tries to coax Mary into spending the night with him in the Cornish town of Launceston, but she’s far too proper to give in to more than a few smooches. The scene is as explicit as the novel gets, which, for my repressed little body, was about the maximum I could take. Here’s a passage:
“God, you’re as hard as flint, Mary Yellan. You’ll be sorry for it when you’re alone again.”
“Better be sorry then than later.”
“If I kissed you again, would you change your mind?”
“I would not.”
“I don’t wonder my brother took to his bed and his bottle for a week, with you in the house. Did you sing psalms to him?”
“I daresay I did.”
“I’ve never known a woman so perverse. I’ll buy a ring for you if it would make you feel respectable. It’s not often I have money enough in my pocket to make the offer.”
(Reader, when I first read this, I shrieked.)
Like Mary, I was too scared to give in—not just to sex, which wasn’t even on the table at that point, but to even admitting out loud that it was something I wanted, because I still felt sex was something I couldn’t and wasn’t supposed to want. To want in secret was transgressive enough. And unlike the boning teens on The O.C., the sexless duo in Jamaica Inn was safe. Like me, the furthest they’d allow themselves to go was to want.
Star Wars taught me the world of men would mean adventure. Jamaica Inn taught me the art of pining. Jem and Mary pine but can’t or won’t have each other, just as I pined for Jem and couldn’t have him.
As high school wore on, I dug deeper into works of fiction that predated Jamaica Inn’s virtuous romance. I pined for each sexless man I encountered: Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, Pip Pirrip, all of whom, like my beloved Jem, were either untouched or untouchable. Occasionally I managed to convert that pining into coveting real boys from afar—as long as they didn’t know I liked them, as fictional Jem couldn’t know I liked him, I was still safe, from them and from myself. Of course, my proclivities matured with age, and by my senior year, I’d fallen in love with Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises. It was a decidedly more risqué choice, since he ran with a racier crowd than I was used to. But thanks to his war injury, he was still an ungettable get, and therefore a safe target for my silent yearning.
I’d like to say that when I grew up, I moved on from pining for fictional Gothic men and television doctors, and certainly, in most ways I did. I left Jamaica Inn when I left high school, and in college and adulthood, my hidden crushes became hookups, flings, relationships, and inevitably, exes. Each real-life person helped unpeel some of the longing I’d secreted away as a child. But the bad and good feelings that consume us as teens tend to sit with us a little longer than we’d like as adults. Even now I often struggle to move from wanting to having, in part because the wanting still feels so good and so safe.
A crush—a real live one, or even one in a book or a film or a show—is at its best when it’s still just an idea or words on a page, when it hasn’t yet had the opportunity to mutate from crush to crash. It hurts to pine from afar, but at a distance the hurt is in your control; once you spend the night in Launceston with someone, they’ll know that you’re a freak. The key, of course, is to find a crush who doesn’t mind, and then once you move from wanting to having, you can cross over to keeping, which is the true goal of every good pine, whether it be Gothic, extraterrestrial, or solidly rooted on twenty-first-century Earth. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it. In the meantime, every now and then I check back in with Han.
Sex Is Good for Your Complexion, but I’d Rather Have Acne
I was at a bar one winter’s evening when I got a text from an old friend of mine. “Ian is single now,” she wrote. “He wants to go out with you.”
Ian was a college buddy of hers I’d met a couple times, and it appeared they were out drinking together, since he then started texting me from her phone. From what I gathered from a jagged line of texts, Ian got dumped two hours prior, and he now wanted to meet up with me at nine p.m. one night that week in my neighborhood. “He won’t be your boyfriend, but he’s a good lay and you’ll have fun,” my friend wrote, after Ian and I had cemented our plans. “I hope you like whiskey shots,” Ian wrote. And so it was settled: I was going on a Sex Date.
A Sex Date is very different from a real date, which usually consists of two parties trying to suss out whether they want to go on other dates, and perhaps eventually marry and divorce each other, over beers. A Sex Date is not about having more dates and/or weddings and babies. It is, as the name suggests, a date in which you meet up to have sex.
Though a Sex Date is not often explicitly stipulated when you’re scheduling one, the parameters are thus: (1) You meet late. (2) You meet near someone’s apartment. (3) You meet without having any intention of embarking on a relationship, unless that relationship solely comprises more sex dates
and/or a trip to the doctor for an STI test, an oft and unfortunate Sex Date outcome.*
Ian’s and my late-night plan checked all the Sex Date boxes. And certainly I was in the right state for a Sex Date. The week prior, the person I’d last been sleeping with had informed me that he’d wifed up with a hot former colleague, a revelation that rendered me immobile on my couch for a full twelve hours. They say the best way to get over someone is to put a bunch of new bodies between you and the old body you liked, and here was a fresh new body, begging to get me drunk convenient to my train stop.
Of course, just because you should want a new body doesn’t mean you do, and I wasn’t so sure where I stood on this upcoming Sex Date. Movies and television tell you it’s easy and fun to let a cute stranger put their naked sex parts into your naked sex parts, but the movie strangers are usually played by Chris Pine, and they absolutely love that you prefer to lie there like an old mattress until they’re finished. Chris Pine is perfect, and he thinks you’re beautiful just the way you are. Real strangers don’t like getting elbowed in the stomach when they try to cuddle you, or when you inform them, at two a.m., that the Q train is probably still running express if they hurry.
I’ve had far more non-magical movie sex partners than Chris Pines in my lifetime, and my body knows what to expect from itself during an ambivalent one-night stand. On the evening of the proposed Sex Date, the voice inside my vagina whispered that it was doing just fine without any new penile visits and did not feel particularly inclined to invite in Ian’s. Couldn’t we just stay home and watch the Winter Olympics instead? I considered its wishes, but then I saw a photo on Instagram of most recent ex-paramour and his hot successful new girlfriend at Springsteen on Broadway. I fed Vagina Voice two glasses of pre-date wine and told it to shut up. Ian was cute, he wanted to bone me, and nobody else was blowing up my phone. Besides, I could always end the night with a hug if I wasn’t feeling it. I am an adult woman, and I can sleep with or reject whom I please. Right?
Good Things Happen to People You Hate Page 2