Love Street

by Leah Rachel

  What is the name of your first crush?

  Benny Mendoza. Number 11. When I was in sixth grade our city spent every goddamn dime it had to build a Minor League Baseball stadium in an effort to revive our dying downtown. I had just gotten boobs and preferred to spend my time and money on Orange Juliuses and trips to the mall, so clearly I didn’t give a fuck about some new snoozeball team. But everything changed when I won a contest naming the new mascot of the Akron Aeros. “Orbit!” was my submission, pre–gum franchise, mind you. And lo and behold, whoever was judging that contest (no really—like, who the fuck was judging that contest?) chose me, and I was awarded season tickets for seats right behind the dugout. Even cooler? I got to throw the first pitch of the VERY FIRST GAME ever played on that second-rate AstroTurf. I wasn’t nervous—because again, who cared about baseball?—but my friend Ally accompanied me, along with my parents, so I threw that hard-ass laced snowball as fast as my skinny tan arm could. The crowd cheered, and as the announcer yelled, “LET’S PLAY BALL,” I saw him. “Mendoza,” his jersey read. I would proceed to become completely and utterly obsessed with Minor League Baseball for the entirety of my middle school career thanks to Benny “The Crusher” Mendoza.

  Ally and I rode the bus down to the stadium and used our season tickets every home game we could. We wore less and less as the summer got hotter, and we started collecting broken bats from our future husbands by hanging out at the dugout after the games. By August the lava lamps and Polly Pockets on my bedroom shelves were completely replaced by broken bats. A few of them were Mendoza’s, but those slept next to me, underneath my bedside table. He started to pick up on my crush about midway through the season and began saving dirty balls for me. It would take me 20 more years to realize that shoving your dirty balls into my face doesn’t mean you love me. Either way, Benny Mendoza was 26 years old and CLEARLY in love with me. Ally got bored with my bat-and-ball gathering and started leaving at the seventh-inning stretch. But I stayed the whole damn time. I was a REAL FAN. Benny was sweet and cool and tan and famous! Every day while hanging out by the dugout, I watched him sign at least ten autographs before I waved my wet n wild–painted hand at him. “Wassup you?” he’d always say. My heart melted into mush as I reached across the cage for whatever “collector’s” item Mendoza could scrape up for me. One day late in the season, everything had been cleaned up and all Mendoza could find for me was a red Solo cup encrusted with chew. “I love it!” I said, as I threw it into my mini backpack and blew him a kiss goodbye.

  When the season ended, I was devastated. Especially since Benny Mendoza left without saying goodbye after the last home game. I thought I’d never see him again (at least not until next year), so you can imagine my surprise when I saw him standing at the front of my third-period history class. “Hi, guys. I’m Mr. Mendoza. Mr. Saal’s out with the flu today, so I’m your sub. He left this movie about the battle of—”

  BENNY MENDOZA IS A SUB?! No, no! This is all wrong. I mean, I was happy to see him and all, but Benny Mendoza wasn’t a lame middle school teacher, Benny Mendoza was THE CRUSHER! Benny Mendoza was an athlete. Benny Mendoza was a star!

  “Hey. It’s me,” I said as I approached him after class let out. “Who?” He smiled. “Me. Broken-bat girl!” I’ll never forget the blank look on his face as he tried to place me. “Oh, yeah. Wassup?” I forced a smile and shot the middle school shit with him for a minute or two and then decked it to the girls’ room and locked the door and cried. I cried because I didn’t realize Minor League Baseball players had to have real jobs, too. I cried because Benny Mendoza didn’t remember who I was. I cried because Benny Mendoza didn’t give me a broken bat this time, Benny Mendoza gave me a broken heart.

  What is the name of your first pet?

  Rosie. A kindhearted box turtle we used to draw on, who once laid eight rotten eggs. We let her go in the forest behind our house because we could no longer take care of her and “she’d be better off in nature.” Two weeks later I found her crushed shell outside a sewer. Sometimes I still see Rosie and her rotten eggs in my dreams, but angel-Rosie promises she isn’t still mad at me. I tell her I’m sorry, that I was trying to do the right thing, that I would have taken better care of her as an adult, and I’m sorry about her rotten children—that must have been so hard. She says she forgives me, and I say I believe her.

  Top left image courtesy of the author; top right image sourced from Pixabay; bottom image sourced from Stocksnap

  “Guys like skinny girls, though, right?”

  “Depends on whether they’re talking about photographing them or fucking them.”

  Crossword Puzzle

  Across

  3.That weird hour of night when it’s too early to call off work and too late to text your ex.

  6.His glasses! He can’t see without his glasses!

  7.You washed your hair with this in high school, when there were no worries or choices but Pantene Pro-V or this. Even though it makes your hair feel like wire, it still smells delicious, and sometimes when you’re in CVS you sneak off and take a whiff and all your worries fade away . . .

  10.Wear these all day because they’re stretchy and comfy and make you feel like a real together type of gal, but NEVER, EVER do what they’re intended to make you do.

  12.The feeling starts in your body, right? The tingling, the loss of control, the rouge in the cheeks. Then, before you even know what’s happening, it spreads — it spreads into your organs. Your heart beats rapidly; you can’t eat. You have to piss all the time ’cause you feel so full of something, but you don’t know what it is. Your fingers start to feel the air. It’s thicker. The blues are brighter, and everything is suddenly on your side. A light sweat peaks on your face, causing you to glow, but you’re not physically hot, you’re just so alive that your body doesn’t know what to do with itself. You smile, it’s almost over, but in that moment, in those fleeting few weeks or so, curled up with the warmth of your severe emotional fever, rocking out to the sound of your own heartbeat . . . life suddenly makes sense.

  14.Guys think this is their position and we just do it to make them happy, but actually we fucking love it, especially when they grab our hips / pull our hair.

  16.Everybody is a little bit this. And if you don’t think you are, well, that’s when you REALLY are.

  17.McDonald’s has the best. Wendy’s are meh. In-N-Out, go fuck yourself. Rhymes with “thick thighs.”

  18.Had flat feet. Not as hot as Barbie. You secretly identified with her more.

  19.Strung Wendy along (and even made friends with her brothers, ugh!). Was always in love with Tinker Bell.

  22.Cranberry juice is forever ruined because of this. Also, fuck you for breaking up with me and leaving me with no car, no explanation, and one of these.

  23.Men-children from this continent (continent? country? surf resort?) will make you fall in love with them and then make it really hard for you to hate them when they completely fuck you over . . . because they’re such . . . such lovers of life! (Alcohol, drugs, traveling.)

  24.Most white girls are named this. This girl also probably kicked you out of the cool-girl group in middle school, accused you of being a witch, then hit you up on Facebook 15 years later, all “OMG, how have you beeeeeen???”

  25.OMG, you can order it on Amazon Prime now?! Fuck yeah, you can. Gone are the days of filling up your basket with shit you don’t need just so you can disguise it as “another casual item,” while the judgmental cashier with the Jesus necklace stares at you like you just ate her firstborn.

  Down

  1.The boy WAS HERS.

  2.They never have sales, but it doesn’t matter, because there’s something soothing about their nonaggressive approach. You have had multiple breakdowns in their changing rooms when you weren’t even trying on clothes. You just needed to be alone. You always leave having spent at least 50 dollars more than planned. You love their dollar bins right by the door and still shop in their teen section, because the women�
�s section seems sarcastically geriatric.

  4.You got one when you were 17. Or 21. Or 36. Maybe you got more than one. It’s okay, lady. It’s okay. Your best friend held your hand in the waiting room and then drove you home and let you cry on her shoulder while she ordered pizza. You guys watched Look Who’s Talking / Raising Arizona for comedic irony, and you cried some more but sort of let a few laughs out, too. You will love that friend who took care of you forever. Even if you’ve drifted apart.

  5.Pentatonix won a Grammy for this one, with a living legend (hint: ivory skin, eyes of emerald green).

  8.“Bastian! Say my name!!!” (The first fictional princess to make me feel bisexual. Later in life I dressed up like her for three Halloweens in a row, and once I met a Falkor at a party and we fucked.)

  9.Model / unemployed is to female as _______ / unemployed is to male.

  11.Her opening dance sequence in Do The Right Thing is the mental state I aspire to be in at most points in life. You are my queen and you are free as fuck. FIGHT THE POWER.

  13.Don’t ever tell me I look _______ after not seeing me for a while, because I will hands down assume you’re simply saying I look fatter.

  15.These rats of the sea have no nutritional value whatsoever but taste amazing as you’re eating them while sitting in a red leather booth with a dirty martini in one hand and your ex’s hand in the other.

  20.A cookout with your girlfriends where you burn your suffocating underwire.

  21.If they ask you out to this, they’re not trying to fuck you.

  23.Put this fancy mayo on everything. Fries, burgers, sandwiches. PUT IT ON EVERYTHING.

  Do I like him, or am I just lonely?

  * * *

  . . . IS ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA. It’s a chance to get back to that sparkle-puffed cream pocket place of love where you used to be, via a psychedelic one-lane highway. Full speed ahead on the road to nowhere! I mean, really, think about it. All the pent-up anger, the unsaid words, the lonely nights spent headfirst in some pad thai, playing your very first interactions over and over in your sodium-soaked head like reruns of your most favoritest canceled show . . . Fuck it. When life presents shortcuts, one must take them. After this “trip” down memory lane, you will come out of your chemically induced rendezvous either reunited and more in love than ever or ecstasy-puking in his disgusting parking garage, wondering what you ever saw in the goon in the first place. Either way, your feelings will have shifted hot or cold, and as we all know, hell hath no fury like a shower stuck on lukewarm.

  * * *

  . . . IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA. Ask yourself: Do you really still like him, or are you just lonely? Drugs should only act as an enhancer—never as filler. For when drugs become a filler with no solid ground to enhance (no love to exacerbate, no scenery to saturate), drugs become evil. Evil little trolls that rub up against your panties in just the right place and then disappear forever. If you scratch a nonexistent itch, it doesn’t feel good; it just fucking hurts. No matter how much “fun” you and your past lover seem to have while under the influence of illegal substances, that fun will come with the depressing realization that you’re living a dream underneath a beautiful filter that will inevitably be lifted, exposing the torn, undersaturated photograph below. You will feel great for two to eight hours, depending on your poison, and then you will wake up more confused than before, with a vague, unplaceable depression similar to that feeling you get after you eat a burger wrapped in lettuce.

  * * *

  On a scale of 1 to calling your ex-boyfriend for a ride after getting kicked out of Trader Joe’s for taking too many samples, how hopeless do you feel?

  I feel guilty, though; we only went over and fed it twice.”

  “Fuck it. It’s a cat. It’s fine.”

  “But what if we get there and it’s starving to death and Steve knows and he ends up hating us forever?”

  The truth is, my childhood best friend, Jessica, and I could barely feed and take care of ourselves, so it was Steve’s fault for trusting us with Ninja in the first place. Ninja was a nine-pound silver hairless cat that looked like an anorexic ballsack, and Steve was a six-foot-two blond ex-Mormon whose real name wasn’t Steve. He changed his name to start his life over in L.A., and although I always had a baby crush on him (so mysterious!), there was something murky about the whole name-change thing that always kept me a few feet back. I met him at a restaurant we both worked at, until I got fired for eating from a customer’s plate, and we remained close-but-not-that-close, so it was super weird when he asked me of all people to watch his hairless Sphynx cat. I told him I was allergic, but he assured me that he was, too. That’s why he got a hairless pussy! No dander!

  Fuck it, I said. Steve’s house was nice and secluded in the Echo Park hills, and I could use his place as a refuge away from the 500-square-foot Hollywood shithole I was staying in with Jessica. We had tension over a lot right then—too close to begin with (our moms were literally pregnant together as neighbors in Akron, Ohio)—and so lately, I guess the only thing we could do was start drifting apart. We were too similar, and living together made us hate ourselves . . . and thus each other. We always wanted to fuck the same guys and wear the same clothes and discover the same music. One time in high school, we didn’t talk for eight months because we got into a fight about who discovered The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Basically, we were always claiming one thing or another. Men, career paths, new snacks at Trader Joe’s—we were REALLY bad at sharing. So when Steve invited us over for dinner to thank us for cat-sitting Ninja, we REALLY didn’t know how to handle it.

  Because the truth was, creepy as he could be, Steve had become a bone of contention for Jess and me lately. He was our most recent stake to be claimed. He was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill of 2005, and both Jess AND I wanted to tell everyone that ONE of us had discovered him first. Quiet, mysterious, he flirted with us equally (“But I met him first!” “Not really! I visited you at work that night!”), he ignored us equally (“Have you heard from Steve?” “WTF, did he die?”), and he intrigued us equally. (He also starred in a few gay pornos and had a woodshed where he made coffee tables out of old rowboats.)

  Six bratwursts and four bottles of pinot grigio later, Steve looked hotter than ever. And better yet? He had no idea that Jess and I had completely neglected both Ninja and his houseplants. Sure, Ninja looked a little skinny and the houseplants looked a little dull—but that was because they missed Daddy! Right? Right!

  The more the merrier . . .

  Anywho, cut to later that night—my eyes were blurry and I think we were talking about wanting to fuck Forrest Gump, when Steve told us he felt left out. See, that’s the thing about childhood best friends: put some wine in us and all the bullshit disappears. The competition, the hurt feelings, the differently remembered history. Jess and I were untouchable when we got going. Our conversation moved so fast, outsiders didn’t stand a chance. Sometimes we’d find ourselves speaking in weird nomadic cockney accents we developed as children. When we were in the zone, Jess and I were a symphony of inside jokes, fucked-up memories, and shared dreams. When we were in the zone, Jess and I were impenetrable.

  “Psst! I can’t see!” I whispered to Jess as I desperately searched for my missing contact. Had it fallen on my cheek? On the silk sheets covering the air bed in this weird-ass backyard tent? Had it fallen on Jess’s ass?

  “Here, put on your glasses!” Jess said, like Vada Sultenfuss to Thomas J. As she passed me my glasses, I quickly removed the other contact and flicked it on to the nylon tent wall like a dart.

  “Are we really doing this?” Jess whispered, naked and thrilled.

  “Fuck it,” I casually replied. “Just don’t eat my pussy.”

  I had thought about having a threesome before. Just not with my best friend. And not in a tent. And not while being watched by a judgmental hairless cat.

  “He’s coming! Shhh.”

  Jess and I huddled together and giggled like fourth graders hiding in a game
of Sardines. When Steve arrived in his pajamas, we began to take them off.

  “We don’t have to . . .”

  I put my finger over his lips and made out with him hard, as Jessica awkwardly rubbed my back. Steve was just trying to let us crash in his guesthouse (tent in the backyard) because we were too drunk to drive, but Jess and I had other plans. Because Jess and I had broken through that night. We were finally ready to grow up. After a quarter of a century, a hairless cat, and bucketsful of pinot grigio, Jess and I were finally ready to share.

  I’ve learned the best way to prevent your heart from being broken . . .

  . . . is to act like you don’t have one.

  Food for the Brokenhearted

  Garlic Pesto Pizza with Cherry Tomatoes

  Ingredients:

  Dough (Store bought. Do not attempt to make dough yourself, or your 75 percent spiral will turn into a full-blown emotional tsunami.)

  Pine nuts

  2 cups fresh basil leaves, packed

  ½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

  ½ cup Not a Virgin olive oil

  1 cup cherry tomatoes, chopped