Then I stand up, triumphant—and proceed to fall into a bush. My neck now looks like that of a slashing victim, and Blaine and I pass out on our bed soon after. I wake up, cringingly remembering the night before, and say, “Oh my God.” I proceed to give what can only be described as an apology blow job and say how sorry I am.
“I thought it was cute,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”
Then he takes me to an exclusive beach club, where the first thing he does is show me a sign posted on the wall directed at anyone in the press that they are not to write about the club—ever. Yeah. Got it. Later in the day we go to brunch in town, and we run into the same bleached-blond woman from the night before. I give her my best dude “sup nod.” Remember . . . from before?
On a casual sailboat ride later that day with some of his friends, a woman points out the largest house in sight and says, “You know that’s Blaine’s family house.” Good Lord. It’s the first time I really make the connection. Yeah, I am way out of my league here. On a positive note, I do not fall into any more bushes—female or leaf-bearing.
As the year progresses, so does our romance. Weekends in the Hamptons and Newport become the norm. And so does my observation of his patterns. Blaine keeps pictures of his ex-girlfriends up. “They gave them to me,” he says. He doesn’t throw anything away. He is a multimillionaire but is always stressed, and I frequently provide comfort and solace. He is incredibly paranoid about people finding out he is the one I am writing about in his column—that it could “hurt his career prospects . . .”
He didn’t need to say the rest of the sentence. I knew how it would go: . . . because he was dating such an embarrassing slut.
Before he meets some of my colleagues he asks, “They know to keep my identity quiet? God, I feel like Deep Throat.” If he feels like Deep Throat, I feel like Nora Ephron wanting to burn her ex-husband Carl Bernstein to the ground in her famous roman à clef Lovesick about what a bastard he was during their marriage.
The worst part is that Blaine isn’t even a bastard. He just is terrified about me somehow sullying his rich-dude super-exclusive status or reputation. And I put up with it.
A few months into dating, we travel to Phippsburg, Maine, and spend a weekend at the Small Point Club, roaming the beach and getting to know his mother and her sisters. I wear a skintight white dress, and, ever the lady, not wanting to show any panty lines, I go commando.
The picture his mom snaps of us sitting on a wicker chair is so adorable, I proudly send it on to everyone I know. After I’ve sent it on to a good three hundred people in my address book, Mackenzie pulls me aside and says, “Hey, this is awkward but . . .”
“What?” I demand.
“You can see up your dress in that photo.”
Fuck. Of course you can.
Among the many mishaps that befall me as the non-prostitute version of Julia Roberts dating Richard Gere in Pretty Woman are those that could only occur in the alternative universe of dating a guy like Blaine.
One day I’m heading down in the elevator and a member of the Strokes is in there with me. “Going . . . down?” he asks with a sly grin. Another morning Katie Holmes is breastfeeding Suri in the lobby. The most over-the-top experience, though, is when I walk out front and there is a sea of paparazzi, all waiting for the new power “friend couple” of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, and their besties, Victoria and David Beckham. One of the paps who I’m friends with even snaps a shot of me as I walk out of the building, and he emails it to me later. I’m wearing shades, a baseball cap, and a Burberry trench coat the lovely fashion editor Serena French has kindly gifted me from the fashion closet, which features our designer overstock. I look very on the DL, and it provides me another perspective on how the world might see me.
I look . . . powerful. Like I have my shit completely together. It’s amazing what a photograph can show.
But there are also many evenings out with the Post crew, along with Blaine, where some of my true drunken colors start to come out. One night I fall off a stool at Langan’s after “playfully” biting photo editor Dave Boyle’s finger out of the blue, accusing one of the editors that his girlfriend is flirting with Blaine, and then on the way home demanding that Blaine have sex with me in the cab. Another night at the Soho House, I break a chandelier after a raucous evening spent screaming “vagina” and singing “Rock Me Ahmadinejad.” What a nightmare person I am when I drink too much—which is most of the time.
The day after Soho House, Blaine says, “If someone didn’t know you, they might think you’re a little unstable. Surly . . . and unstable.”
Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. It’s so annoying that other people don’t seem to have the same problems that I do when I drink. But normal people drink. I know that. So I drink, just like everyone else. It’s fun, except when it’s not. I just have to remember to keep it to two or three glasses of wine a night. I don’t know why I keep losing track.
I see some “doctor” during this time who bills himself as a healer, and I show him all my bruises from falling down. He tells me that I just need to “clean my blood” by detoxifying and not drinking for three months. I can do that, I think. Blaine is a little concerned, though. Am I done drinking forever? No, no, don’t worry, I tell him. It’s totally temporary. It’s not like I’m going to retire from ever having fun again.
When we travel to Miami for Art Basel, Blaine gets recognized by a Vanity Fair reporter who asks, “Wait, are you Super Preppy?” He looks a little mortified, then shrugs and says, “I guess I’ll have to get used to it.” Later in the year, we travel for the holidays to a fancy party with his relatives, and even though I am on my best behavior, I receive two edicts passed down to me via Blaine: “Kindly do not write about the family.” And, regarding my fitting in, “She’s not even trying.” Not long after this, I also hear back that his mother thinks I’m “a little strange.”
My strangeness is only compounded by small chat with her. When I do a story about a bad-boy New Yorker for my column, revealing this guy’s strange experiences with women, I quote to Blaine’s mom one of the lines he told me, that he once spent the evening “somewhere with an industrial-size tub of Vaseline, a dead horse, and an underage Thai hooker.” Blaine’s mom laughs along with me, but later Blaine scolds, “That wasn’t appropriate.”
“But it’s in the column,” I say. “She’ll read that exact same quote on Sunday.”
“I know,” he says. “But it still wasn’t appropriate.”
When Blaine and I make plans to fly to San Diego to meet my family, I think of all the stories he’s let slip when he was drunk. Like about one ex-girlfriend’s family he met who was so crass and expletive-prone, Blaine knew it would never work.
I anxiously relay to my parents some of this “please do not embarrass me like that one girl’s dad did” oppo research and beg them to be on their best behavior. My mom says not to worry, she plans to just “prostrate herself on the floor at Blaine’s feet when he arrives,” and I can’t help but love her for it. My parents don’t give a fuck. They never have. A huge part of me respects that.
* * *
TO SAY MY parents are themselves crass and expletive-prone is the understatement of the year.
When we were growing up, my parents let my sister and me curse as much as we wanted. They both swore in spades. As part of their therapeutic teachings, my parents studied at the Esalen Institute, birthplace of the human-potential movement, where they were taught “bad” words are “just words.” As a kid, I was allowed to say almost any obscene word or phrase there was (I once named a cat that I adopted “Buttfuck” without even knowing what it meant), and I relished the freedom. Part of me just wants to list a bunch of swear words right here because I can.
My ever-irreverent father at one point started the tradition of referring to fellow blind folks as “blindfuckers.” It somehow made the tragedy of losing your sight into this darkly comic absurdity—and banished the deep wells of victimhood and pity my d
ad never chose to live in. My mom followed suit in taking up his catchphrase.
“Daddy’s going to his blindfucker training today at the VA, so you guys are going to be watching each other,” she’d tell my sister and me, and we would nod, understanding. “It might be a while, because you know how those blindfuckers get.”
My parents are a gotcha journalist’s wet dream. They live their lives leaving a heavily bread-crumbed trail of self-indictments, and I’ve always loved them for their defiance. Who cares? You could get shot in the face tomorrow. Enjoy today.
“My dad is different,” I warn Blaine over and over. “So is my mom. But they are great. You will see.”
One of the more illustrative stories about my dad came early in my parents’ marriage. Walking along with my uncle Bob and the rest of my mom’s family in the airport, my dad accidentally walked head-on into a giant concrete barrier, smashing his head and crying out in pain. A major scene soon unfolded. He began yelling uncontrollably, his frustration morphing into a full, unbridled screaming session at the people who hadn’t prevented it, and at the world in general.
“GODDAMMIT MOTHERFUCKER SHIT FUCK COCKSUCKER!”
This went on for a while. Later, on the plane, my uncle Bob came over to my father and said calmly, “You know, Jerry, I think we were with you. All the way up until ‘cocksucker.’ ”
Humor, as it always does in my family, provided relief from the pain.
My dad never censored himself, including when he came to speak to my seventh-grade class about Vietnam. One of the kids raised their hands. “Mr. Stadtmiller, what do you think of Rambo?”
He paused to give his response the maximum impact. “I think it’s pure shit.”
“They are kind of unlike any parents you will ever meet,” I repeat to Blaine.
I always tell the following story so people will know what to expect when they meet my dad. One time I watched from the sidelines as he chatted up his female boss and waxed on about how much the two of them had in common.
“We’re both from San Diego, we both have no siblings . . .” He rattled off his list, and then his supervisor interrupted him.
“That’s not true, Jerry,” she said sharply. “I had a brother. He died.”
Without pausing a second, my dad replied with a big grin on his face, “Well, fuck him!”
My dad could not see his boss’s reaction, but I could. I stared red-faced down at the concrete.
Would I have laughed if someone said this to me? Absolutely. Jarring, fearless, funny, unexpected, a reprieve from the tragedy at hand. But most people are not Stadtmillers.
“They aren’t really about fitting in,” I tell Blaine. “Never have been.”
Both of my parents worshipped at the altar of the taboo and the inappropriate.
My mom often gave jaw-droppingly honest—and specific—answers when I was a kid. In middle school, I once asked her, “What are you going to do today after the parent-teacher conference?” My mom replied casually, “I’m going to smoke a joint and masturbate.”
After I went to mandatory D.A.R.E. training in school, I confronted my mom in hysterics. Whipping out my mom’s marijuana from the refrigerator, I told her she had to throw it away or she was going to go to jail. I even threatened to call the cops, like the little snitch I was. But inside, I was really just scared. She finally relented. She even disposed of it across the street to ease my fears that the cops would catch her in the major manhunt I imagined would soon unfold.
As I write all this, I feel so guilty.
Do you know how terrible it feels to criticize your combat vet hero of a father and your emotional warrior of a mother? It feels terrible. But my parents taught me it is okay to recognize and name and examine your flaws and mistakes—and that those flaws and mistakes do not have to define you.
And for all those hypocrites who actively seek to string you up by recounting some hijacked, partisan, purely malicious curation of your worst moments?
Well, fuck them.
* * *
I ARRIVE HOME in San Diego before Blaine does, and I do a thorough sweep of my parents’ home for anything potentially embarrassing—weird New Agey magazines, crafting supplies, and the like. Meanwhile, my mom torments me by talking animatedly to her teacup poodle, Shady, who is dressed in a Santa outfit.
“Are you excited to meet Blaine, Shady?” my mom asks, glancing at me to see if I am reacting. “I know I am!”
I shake my head at first, but I can’t help but laugh at everything my mom says and does.
My mom is honestly one of the funniest, most original, most guileless people I’ve ever met. She is dry as a bone and knows how to cut to the quick in every situation.
When I asked her what she got for Christmas one year, she replied, “Well, I got a twenty-five-dollar gift card that I resented.” In a normal conversation (like that Christmas one), when I am busy journalistically extracting whatever gem she is uttering, typing into my phone, she’ll say, “Why don’t you tweet that, you cunt.” There was the time I told her all about Pussy Riot, the Russian all-female punk band creating a stir overseas, and she observed, “My pussy is a riot.” And when I eventually set up a Facebook profile for my mom, she absorbed my listing all the profile options (“Let’s see, hometown . . . relationship . . . are you interested in men or women?”) and my mom replied, deadpan as ever, “Women. It’ll be a whole new life.”
So, she is aware of how non-Blaine she is. And, more significantly, so am I. My love for her morphs into something like false concern. How will she be perceived?
“What is your poodle even wearing, mom?” I ask her.
“It’s Shady’s Christmas ‘pretty,”’ my mom says with a smile. And I can’t help myself—I crack up again. I love my mom for being such an individual, so playful and silly but also so wickedly acidic in turns.
She is the exact opposite of Blaine’s mom, who is steeped in propriety and controlled perception and by way of small talk asks me in a thick upper-crust accent, “Tell me, Mandy, are you in involved in supporting the arts?” I stammer in reply, “Um, I interviewed Jamie Foxx recently. How’s that?” Don’t get me wrong, Blaine’s mom is cool and all—funny, intelligent, warm at times—but she’s also a bit above reproach.
I look at my mom, and I love her, but I also wish I could quickly give her a makeover the same way I have fraudulently given myself one with the Lilly Pulitzer and Kate Spade costumes I am now wearing as if that’s what I totally always wear, not just because I’m dating a guy I call “Super Preppy” in a newspaper.
I get a text from Blaine. “Just landed,” he writes.
I nervously kiss my mom goodbye on the cheek, and we make plans to meet later for dinner.
When I pick up Blaine at the airport, my defensiveness is turned up to eleven. Blaine is a bit out of the loop when it comes to pop culture, so I play music on the radio, singing along, naming all the bands, trying to grab any bit of superiority I can.
“Do you know this song?” I ask, sort of ignoring him and driving straight ahead.
We arrive at a hotel that my dad has purchased a stay for us at with the thought that Blaine will reimburse him, but my dad has made the same mistake I often do about people with money. One of the reasons they’ve held on to it is that they are on the precipice of cheap. Blaine warns me more than once that he won’t be my “gravy train.” If anything, rich people don’t recognize the meaning that a few hundred bucks can have to the middle class versus the chump change it is to them.
I remember once borrowing $20 from a friend to get through the week while I smiled, nodded, and empathized as Blaine talked about how annoyed he was at losing $20,000 on an investment.
When Blaine and I arrive at the restaurant my dad has selected, my stomach drops a little bit. My last dinner with Blaine’s mother was at Jean-Georges, a three-star Michelin-rated restaurant, where she knew the celebrity chef personally.
The restaurant we are meeting my parents at is a literal piano bar. Like,
a scene out of Saturday Night Live, Bill Murray-hamming-it-up-in-a-tacky-suit piano bar.
To add to this, my dad hands me a corsage like I am going to prom. It is so beautifully sweet and so horribly embarrassing I feel like splitting in two from the inner conflict of loving my parents so dearly and being so ashamed of them.
I feel like such a narc, such a sellout, such a dating-a-rich-guy whore that I actually have the gall to feel anything but adoration for my one-of-a-kind, well-meaning, utterly bizarre parents. What kind of asshole am I turning into?
“Nice to meet you,” Blaine introduces himself, reaching across the table to shake my father’s hand. Being blind, my dad sticks his hand firmly out in the opposite direction. That childhood feeling is rising inside of me. Of wanting to protect him. Wanting him to be someone different. Wanting him to be exactly who he is. Wanting to just disappear completely.
We settle in to order, and my dad turns to us and says thoughtfully, “Tell us about yourself, Blaine.”
I suddenly catch a shared look with my mom, who knows how worried I am, how uptight, how afraid I am that everything is going to turn into a disaster. She tries to stifle it, but the shared knowledge is too much, and she lets out an inadvertent laugh.
Then I do, too.
Have you ever had one of those laughing-crying-fit epiphanies because you know you are not supposed to be laughing, it is the last thing you should be doing, and so it makes you laugh even harder? Yeah, my mom and I are in the throes of that.
My dad and Blaine both look so confused.
“Sorry,” my mom catches her breath and apologizes. “It’s just, no one makes me laugh like Mandy.”
Blaine and my father eventually feel the infectious laughter and join in, and the rest of the dinner goes by without much of a hitch. There are no major tantrums, no swearing jags, no big scenes. Even my dad’s guide dog is on his best behavior.
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