by Jill Kargman
Two weeks later, I heard some commotion downstairs. I took Sadie on my hip to scope the sitch. Two guys were cutting the bolts on the door to the brothel and opening it up. Somehow the landlords paid whatever fine had been levied and wriggled out of the charges. Now they were getting ready to redo the whole apartment and get some new tenants to cough up cash for them.
I looked in the doorway. It looked like some kind of Italian bordello: lavender paint, a velvet rococo settee, and a coffee table with Jugs magazines spread on it.
“Can I check this out?” I asked the contractor. “I’m obsessed.”
“Sure,” he said with a shrug.
I walked in and saw they’d set up each of the four bedrooms as a series of stalls with twin beds. On each headboard were scarves tied onto the posts and the bedspreads were cheesy pastel rumpled linens. I almost gagged thinking people were streaming in getting their rocks off next to other pairs on the other sides of the flimsy screens that separated the stalls. So gross. I mean, couldn’t they hear the other people’s moans and sighs? Vom.
I left within thirty seconds and needed to loofah my entire body. I felt so disgusting I couldn’t deal. But over the next few weeks the whole place was dismantled. The furniture was removed, an industrial cleaning crew came in, and the whole floor was given a gleaming-white fresh coat of paint. When brokers began showing it, I asked to take a peek. I was astonished to find it was gorgeous. The once purple moldings now looked beautiful and they had way higher ceilings than we did. Maybe we should move in, I thought. It would be kind of fun to live in a place with such a storied past.
But it was too much of an effort—I mean, packing and unpacking is the world’s biggest hassle; whether you’re moving across town or downstairs, the headache is the same. So we opted to stay put.
Then the frat boys moved in. Four roommates, all analysts on Wall Street. They slaved during the week and then went fucking shithouse on the weekend. They rolled kegs up the stairs and threw ragers that went until dawn.
One afternoon, I knocked on the door and tried to make nice with the sweet Tom Hanks–y one who had a serious girlfriend in Texas and was the mensch of the gang. I explained we had a baby and if he could please keep it down we’d be so so grateful. On my way out, I smiled and said, “You know the story about this apartment, right?”
They hadn’t heard. I then regaled them with the whole history. There was a lot of high-fiving as if they could make a huge deposit into their spank banks if they were privy to what had gone on in there. If only their exposed brick walls could talk.
But our little bonding sesh didn’t help with the nice neighbor thing. They were so dickish, in particular the bitter schmuck named Matt who played guitar (badly) for his gal pals, whom I spied starting their walks of shame as I left for my morning coffee with the BabyBjörn.
The last straw was the Middle Eastern joint downstairs. When our landlord let them move in (after promising on our tour that the space would definitely not be rented to a food place) it was during the summer months when I was still pregnant. Now the next summer’s heat was upon us and ’twas the season for rats.
The first summer they were open they were relatively clean (though the stench sickened me), but as the months passed they became increasingly cavalier about chucking their waste on the street outside in poorly tied bags. Soon the critters came. Tons. And they made their way into our building. One day, I came downstairs with a bag of Code Brown diapers and opened the garbage room door. There, staring at me and my Björned baby, was a cat-sized rat. The tail alone must’ve been eight inches. I screamed so loud Sadie burst into tears and I ran outside hyperventilating. That night, I announced to Harry that we were out of there.
We packed up and headed for the place that’s now our home. But we know it was folly to think we’d miss our old haunt where we brought Sadie home from the hospital. I drive by now, wondering who lives there, wondering if, on occasion, a penguin-suited drunk buzzes for a BJ or if they spy the occasional rat despite the falafel store’s exodus (it now houses a fancy jewelry store). I’d love to meet them and tell them what went down, share with them the story of their nondescript New York apartment. Maybe one day they’ll get the 411.
15
For the first chunk of my adult life, I lived by a simple mantra to solve any problems that arose through the cracks in the Jill pavement. And it goes a little suh-in’ like this: There Is Nothing That a Glass of Red Wine and a Blowout Can’t Fix. Mommy’s tired, crack that K Syrah! Mommy looks like ass, get a cheapie wash ’n’ style at Jean Louis David, the McDonald’s of hair care. (Like those golden arches, it hits the spot!) My locks, like the fries, are straight and shiny. But unlike fast food, fast hair leaves you beaming instead of barfacious, and without the violation of food rape. I used to say I was bulimic but without the purge part. I actually tried, after a couple over-the-top Thanksgivings, to pull the trigger, once going so far as to shove a pink toothbrush down there in epiglottis territory, but no such luck. I don’t have the gag reflex maybe. Thank god, says my husband.
That was the cure to what ailed me, precisely *one* glass of vino rosso and a defrizzed noggin. Instant bliss.
But then . . . motherhood began to take its toll. I started to see why Kate Winslet was shoving a Dyson up her ute in the ’burbs in Revolutionary Road. I told my hubby to fucking DROP IT with the conversations about a fourth child, that I could barely handle my three. I told him there was a red opaque Ghostbusters sign on my uterus and that no womb with a view was available for a tadpole tenant. And if he didn’t quit bringing it up, the do not enter sign would migrate to my vag and I’d start scoping eBay for a vintage chastity belt. Wait, is that redundant? Yeah, I guess; it’s like saying “vintage typewriter.” Or “assless chaps.” Anyway, I totally froke one day when I thought I was knocked up. I took a pee test literally on a playdate and confessed the reason for my long bathroom break to the mom, Eeling.
“It’s negative. Thank the fucking lord!” I said, elated.
She high-fived me but then grimaced and looked at me knowingly.
“Is there a small part of you that’s a little bit sad?” she asked.
“HELL TO THE NO!” I swore, hand to god. I would have spazzed. I know it’s a “miracle” and a blessing and whatnot, but holy shit, I would have been in a one-way car service to that Girl, Interrupted place. Why? Because I had this strange sense, at thirty-five, that I was starting to lose my marbles. They were spilling out and rolling all over the floor in all different directions. And I didn’t know what the fuck to do.
It began when I went to Frédéric Fekkai for what I thought was a trim of my bottom-of-boob-length hair.
“Can I ask how old you are?” Stefanie the stylist asked me.
“Um, thirty-five, actually!” I said sheepishly. “Just turned. Kind of freaking, total hagatosis maximus,” I added in my best Latin.
“ ’Kay . . . ,” she said, putting her long Liv Tyler–y fingers through my stringy hair, which my mom tells me looks like “wet linguini” when it’s too long. “You know, I’m thinking we should really . . . cut it. Like chop,” she said.
“Like how, like more than two inches?” I said, eyes bugging out like Rodney Dangerfield’s.
“Well, your style is cool, like your clothes, your earrings, but . . . honestly? Your hair doesn’t go with the rest of you. Your hair actually makes you look older. I think it would be really chic and really fresh to have an angled bob.”
Pause.
Mac rainbow wheels spinning for a moment.
Okay, so . . . not even top of boob. Not even collarbone, which I hear is the new shoulder. Not even shoulders. Fucking bob?!
I took a deep breath. It’s just hair, right? Exhale. Fuck it.
“Done. I trust you.” I shrugged coolly with the confidence of a badass woman who isn’t attached to looks ’cause I have bigger fish to fry. What a load of shit. I knew I was
merely an actress in my little one-woman show. But I delivered my nonchalant line with Tony-caliber panache: “Let’s do it.”
So that is how I chopped seven inches off my hair. It was swiftly lopped to my chin without so much as a text to my husband.
When he saw, his jaw was on the floor and had to be lifted off with small cranes.
But not as much as when I announced that at thirty-five, I would be getting a tattoo.
My desire was sparked as a child; I was somehow attuned to inkage on other people and my dad confessed he’d always wanted one. My mom, who was raised Ortho, never would have gone for it, but my Reform dad wore her down a bit, and by the time my brother moved to L.A. and got a bunch, they were fine with it. So fine, in fact, that on one trip, about ten years prior, we all spontaneously decided to get Ks on our asses.
The four of us—Mom, Dad, bro, and I—wandered into Body Electric, home of Tommy Lee and the gang’s tattooists, and the dude was just unwrapping a huge foil-encased steaming burrito.
“Aw, man, I just got lunch. If you come back in twenty, I can do ya.”
“Okay, great, we’ll come back in twenty!” my dad said enthusiastically.
And then . . .
Bok bok bok bok bok!
The Kopelman Klan chickened out in that mini time period.
Fast-forward to my thirty-fifth birthday and my brother and I decided it was time to fulfill my dream of being a BAMF. And that he would accompany me to the needle. But not on my butt or above my ass crack, tramp-stamp-style—rather on my back, like where Angelina Jolie has the coordinates of where her adopted Mohawk children were conceived or something. Above bra strap so that when I wore a black-tie dress it would show and I’d be all naughty and nice. Sugar and spice. Leather and lace. Velvet and ink.
Even though I am a grown-up, my mom vetoed it. But not how you think, throwing some kind of hissy fit; she announced that back tattoos were cheese and instead I should get it on my wrist. I explained to her that the back was kind of semi-sinful because I could cover it up when I chose to, but the very public wrist was a full-on plummet into scumbaggery for all the world and their country club pals to see. No matter, she said! Wrist somehow felt more dainty and delicate and feminine and sexy. Done. I would get a thread-thin ethereal, swirling letter K, for my last initial, both married and maiden.
Willie, my brother, came with me to Saved Tattoo in Williamsburg, where celeb tattoo artist Scott Campbell talked me down from freakage over potential pain. My heart had been pounding out of my chest all damn day in sonic booms that were so deafening I almost uncorked some vino, but I was informed that alcohol thins the blood and can cause a gusher. So yeah, no wine. Fuck me. How was I gonna get through this?
I followed Scott across the studio, passing huge ripped muscle guys lying on gurneys wincing in pain as their blood was dabbed away with gauze. Motherfuckercocksucker, I was so dead. Toast. These megabeefcakes were buggin’ and li’l ol’ me was getting my little wrist stabbed? Oh, jeez. I watched one (whose tat was snakes crawling in and then out of the two eye sockets of a skull) actually get up and walk it off, he was in such tortured agony. I almost shat. I somehow suspected that I would be one of those losers who end up with just a small dot because I wouldn’t be able to take the pain and would give up. Willie looked me in the eye and told me that I could do this. I’ll never forget it. I took a deep breath. My brother took my hand in his as Scott injected me. And . . .
“That’s it?!” I marveled.
“Yeah, not so bad, right?” Scott said.
“Oh my god, these guys are all a bunch of lame-ass pussies,” I said, jutting my chin toward the dudes weeping at the other stations. “This is nothing next to childbirth!”
Allow me to say right here and now that it’s a good thing men don’t have vaginas, because having a bowling ball cruise through a straw that barely holds a Playtex slender regular tamp is so much worse than some ink shot under your skin!
One word to all ye considering a tattoo but fear the stick: cake. It didn’t hurt at all! Okay, maybe that’s a lie; I mean, of course it hurt, but nothing like babies trashing your vag wall, so yay! Now I want more.
The preppy Lilly Pulitzer set shat twice on Nantucket, where I went later that summer. “Um, is that . . . real?”
“Yup!”
“Wait . . . like, permanent?”
“Uh-huh!” Yeah, that’s usually how it works, Muffies.
I didn’t get it to shock the preppies and separate the wheat from the edgy chaff, but it doesn’t suck to sort through the varied reactions. Some of the most librarian stick-up-the-ass girls are the first to admit they’ve always wanted one. Others, of course, recoil in horrified disapproval, saying, “What will you do when your daughters want one?” And I tell them what I told my kids: “Get whatever you want. When you’re thirty-five.”
There will be no ankle butterfly or Grateful Dead bear on hip because I have made it clear that I changed as a person from teenhood and so will they. So knock yourself out! Once you’re married with kids and know who you are. Sort of.
And, by the way, my kids dig it and Sadie even wanted my wrist for show and tell at school. I feared at first some of the yummy mummies would be mortified that I got it, but little by little foot vines and suns on hips were revealed to me, badges of a former life when they were following bands instead of applying Band-Aids.
But then the final symptom of what I now real
In my asexual bathrobe I call Grover because it looks not unlike skinned Muppet hide, I logged on to the West Side Pistol website. I filed for a background check, which obviously was spotless, perfect mommy angel that I am. I went in for my first lesson and fit in nicely, as my instructor John was sleeved in tats. I felt my wrist gave me street cred with the pistol-packin’ posse. He took me in a back room, where he gave me the tour of the gun and gave me my “eyes and ears”—i.e., goggles for protection from flying shrapnel shards and giant noise-canceling muffs for the bang-bangage.
I reeled the target out to its beginner spot. BAM BAM BAM! I felt like I needed vintage Batman-style starbursts with the exclamations in primary-colored bubble-font blasts. BAM! KA-POW! SHAZZAM BAM!
Sorry for the self-horn-tootage, but I must brag . . . I rocked it. It was me and tons of older cops and I blasted that target like it was everything bothering me: diapers, Momzillas, pressure, deadlines, cleanup, wrinkles, boobs at half-mast. BAM! Spilled wine. BAM! Crowded subway. BAM! BAM! Beeyotch on the school steps who told me I “look exhausted.” BAM! BAM! BAM!
I felt like a million bucks. For the first time in as long as I could remember (or rather, since my friends Josh and Shoshanna’s 1980s theme party), I felt high. I knew this was for me, and finally I had a sport I was good at. I was the shittiest athlete my whole life and now I finally aced something. Target after target was smithereens. One was a total 1970s-looking thug with too-tight trousers with a bulge in them, and he looked really rapisty. Well, I shot his ween clean off. No pinball-machine ravaging for me! Fuck you, asshole, BAM! Twenty holes marked where his paper dick once was.
I filed for my handgun license in New York City, which, BTW, is no small deal. Four visits to Police Plaza and laser fingerprinting, an investigator, the works. I bought a charcoal-gray Glock bag and my own eyes and ears.
It’s not like I’d been wearing Saturday Night Live pleat-front Mom Jeans and JC Penney pastel-threaded tapestry vests, but for the first time in ages, I felt sexy and cool, not a mom but a badass with a killer shot. People still don’t quite get why I do it, but to each her own. Some do Pilates; some go boxing at Punch; I pull the trigger, pulling myself to a calmer place as I do it. And somehow, as thirty-six dawns while I type this, I feel a little—just a little—bit more centered. Somehow all the changes of the past year have sharpened who I am, helping cement what I want to do in my limited spare time, helping me be happy, helping me hit the target of adulthood.
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br /> 16
While firing guns does make me feel like La Femme Jillita, nailing rounds of bullets into targets emblazoned with an angry rapist with a big hungry bulge in his pants, it doesn’t take care of the crows’ feet marching across my lined face. I was starting to feel extra old, especially when I looked at my mug in the mirror after waking up. Puffy, creased, spotted, tired. I’d examine each new wrinkle, cringing as I plucked a gray hair. As with all things in my life, I am black or white. Impulsive. Extreme. I went from my mirror to my address book to phone my dermatologist, one of the best in New York. I took the first available appointment.
“So I’m thinking,” I said to the man who was used to just checking my countless moles, “I’d like to get some Botox, please. On my elevens. The two vertical gashes above my nose where I seem to hold my stress. I need them gone. They’re so deep I could canoe down them with my family.”
He looked at me through his glasses, horrified. He took them off and stared at me, shocked.
“I would never, ever inject Botox,” he said. “I’m a medical dermatologist. I could make a fortune doing it, but I don’t feel like injecting poison in people’s faces. If you really want this, you need to get what I call a scumbag dermatologist.”
I shrugged.
Okay!
So I found one. A pal of mine has six kids and got the ’tox; she looks earthy and pretty and so not plastic. Sold. She made the intro to Dr. Anita Cela, who was not at all a scumbag but rather a cool, attractive, un-Barbie New York mom with a thriving practice, chill bedside demeanor, and relaxed, natural vibe. She instantly put me at ease as I explained I was craving a fountain-of-youth fix to freeze the wrinkle sitch. It was not only the number 11 engraved by the burn of time but also four perpendicular lines above it that looked not unlike Freddy Krueger had dragged his razor claw across my forehead.