I’m not big on regret—until time travel actually exists, it seems like a waste of making yourself feel bad—but I do wish I’d played hag to my own invisible wise, gay, companion in high school; my Jiminy Faggot. I’d have kept him on my shoulder during homeroom, shushing him merrily as he complimented the teacher for wearing the same reindeer sweater two days in a row. I’d have been able to listen to his droll sniping instead of my righteous vitriol every time some Deadhead said something asinine.
And I would have had somebody around to remind me, when I was sobbing into a tuna sub while parked behind the Borders Books in the Westchester Pavilion, that things were going to one day get better. Nobody knows about the promise of a new day better than gay people and Paula Abdul. It’s what gets closeted, picked-on queer kids through junior high—the hope that around the bend, you’ll be living in a major city, pulling in disposable income from your media job, fucking a gorgeous guy who loves you, and hanging out with people who went through the same thing you did and lived to tell about it. That there’s a time that exists when you can be who you are, and who you are is fabulous. I really needed to know that, then.
I HAD to wait until college to meet my best friend; the homosexual who would complete me. Nate came along my junior year, not a moment too soon, and taught me it’s more satisfying to laugh at idiots than to spend hours plotting their doom. Like me, he came from similarly embarrassing stock: Nate had long hair in high school, went vegan, chained himself to trees, and dressed up like Evil Ronald McDonald for a Greenpeace protest. He understood that only those who’ve been balls-deep in super-earnest ideology are really able to laugh heartily in the faces of its most orthodox devotees. It’s just a question of growing out of being sad all the time. And Nate and I had some satisfying belly laughs at the expense of the raw-foodists, transgender feminists, anticonsumerist performance artists, and assorted other East Village clucks we lived among once we’d finally found each other at NYU, in the belly of the beast. It felt so good to make fun of people for once, instead of silently hating them.
I told Nate about this time in September, after the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I decided I was going to dress like a beatnik from then on, and showed up to high school in a black beret, clutching a copy of Howl like a purse. Talking to him made it all suddenly seem really funny, and not like I was airing out a sanctimonious confession of how miserable I used to be. It was such a relief. I wish Nate had been with me the whole time when I was hurting and sweating every last piece of flotsam and jetsam that sideswiped me in high school. It would have been a blessing to be reminded, in the trenches of tenth grade, that I was Kate Pierson, not Aileen Wuornos.
Nate and I made up for all the time I lost when I was in high school hanging out with nobody, and dum-dums. We’d commiserate with each other when stupid boys would disappear after making us fall for them. Girlfriends will give you a hug and a pep talk when that happens—gay friends will merrily and artfully tear the guy to pieces, pointing out his awful haircut, his terrible clothes, and the love handles you didn’t notice when you still had a crush on him. It’s very comforting to have a boy be that mean to another boy when your heart is broken, and Nate and I made merciless fun of all the people we dated who didn’t work out.
I’D KEEP detailing the various ways in which Nate and I have made each other laugh and generally enjoyed each other’s company over the years, but I’m afraid you, as I, would want to heap generous loads of hot barf on your own lap. There’s something essentially revolting about stories about fun that was had or “you had to be there” accounts of the hilarious thing that guy did that time that end with, “We were laughing so hard, we couldn’t breathe.” They’re like the “Wow, that party last night was so fun!” kind of anecdotes. So, I’ll stop.
But Nate was the kind of present you get from someplace good, like Tiffany & Co. or the SkyMall catalog, and I felt like I could finally relax once he came along; like he was a harbinger of all good things, coming soon. I wish I could go back, Drop Dead Fred style, and tell Ol’ Teenage Beatnik Me that soon enough she’d burst from her emo chrysalis to attract wonderful gay guys from all walks of life. I’d introduce her to Nate and his boyfriend, and tell her that I’d one day be in the company of the most intelligent, funny, and culturally well-versed people in the world, who totally got me and loved me unconditionally. That I’d have friends like him who were actually rooting for me to find love and success and weren’t looking to undermine my efforts with their own intentions, like girlfriends can do. And if the crabby teenager version of me still wouldn’t stop pouting, I’d defer to Nate, who would tell her that at least I stopped sucking hippie cock before my twenties started. That ought to shut her up.
twin cities
When I was fifteen years old, I began exchanging letters and phone calls with a seventeen-year-old boy named Tom, who lived in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Tom was funny and charming in a way I wasn’t familiar with, and he gave me a glimpse into that distinctly Midwestern kind of polite awkwardness. Friendly with a twist of something missing; warm with a gust of cold. Tom and I connected nerdily on the Internet when it was still budding and dewy, like peach fuzz on a newborn’s hiney, during one of the loneliest times I remember being alive.
I WAS new to high school and desperate to make friends at the time, so I joined the Women’s Issues Club, whose after-school meetings offered various activities fueled by feminist intention. For example, one afternoon we would look for sexist ads in fashion magazines and write letters in ballpoint pen on notebook paper to the calculating Neanderthals behind the offensive Love’s Baby Soft “beautiful girls wear our perfume” campaign. And other times, we would just eat chips and complain.
One girl from the club, Reem, walked with a cane and had coarse, woolly hair she wore in a ponytail that lay slack atop the enormous backpack she strapped to both shoulders. She was Lebanese and misanthropic and she liked industrial music and puns. Reem was also one of the first people I met who was interested in the Web in its early stages. She was virtuosic with Prodigy e-mail, Netscape browsers, and Usenet, a message board with newsgroups for people around the world who shared common interests, like sci-fi and avoiding parties.
Reem had met her long-distance boyfriend, Duncan, from a newsgroup devoted to the band Throbbing Gristle. Duncan, a thin, Tim Burton stop-motion puppet of a boy, was moving to New York from Michigan to attend SVA after meeting Reem IRL (in real life) and falling hard. I was intrigued by the idea of the Internet as a shopping destination for a long-distance-turned-real-life boyfriend, and, as I mentioned, desperate to make friends, because fifteen is the worst age for everybody in the world to be, unless you are Miley Cyrus.
Reem invited me to her house one day after school, and together we dicked around with her computer. She showed me postings from the Usenet groups she subscribed to, and I asked her whether there was a newsgroup for They Might Be Giants, my favorite band at the time. Nerd alert? Oh, you bet. In retrospect, asking whether They Might Be Giants had an early Web presence is like asking Tom Sizemore if he could introduce you to a prostitute.
Reem pulled up a screen, then scooted aside as I hungrily perused the musings of similarly affectioned geeks across the nation. Before the Internet, I was hitting the microfiche to get my geek fix, printing out obsession- relevant articles in blue-gray ink from the archives of the Public Library. But now I was being exposed to an online community that offered instant access to both information and similarly minded fans! Quarts of dopamine flooded the tissues of my lizard brain.
I begged Reem to print out posts from three threads of my choosing on her old-fashioned printer paper with the holes on both sides so I could take the Internet home with me and read it in bed. Kind, Lebanese, awkward, acne-plagued, Duncan-beloved Reem did just that. And at home, I pored over those posts like I was looking for a job.
I found something better. One of the guys from the newsgroup, this fellow Tom from Minnesota, had weighed in on a thread and c
losed his communication with a quote from a Kids in the Hall sketch. I got his reference all the way from Scarsdale and nearly fell out of my bed in paroxysms of camaraderie.
The notion of finding another human being who liked not just one, but both of the two demographically similar institutions that I was dorkily obsessed with at the time was an epiphany. What were the odds of these two perfect human qualities converging in a Venn Diagram of romantic compatibility?! Wait a minute—he’s black, and he can dance?
Tom was the invisible boyfriend I wanted in high school. Even though I’d hook up from time to time, and I thought I wanted to be in a relationship more than anything, I don’t think I was ready for a real person to sop up my time. There were too many laps for me to drive around Central Avenue and tag sales for me to troll for vintage cookbooks that I could cut up for collages; all solo activities. Tom was perfect because he was a fantasy at half a country’s distance. I was beginning to learn that long-distance relationships are an exciting, fun way for your brain to masturbate.
During the school day, I’d jot down things to chat about with Tom on the phone later that evening. I went into our conversations with bullet points, knowing our time was metered; this was during the pre-Skype, Candace Bergen-for-Sprint’s dime-a-minute calling plan days. So, my dad would bug me about the phone bill and Tom and I would keep it brief. And after hanging up, I’d take to my pad, my pen, and the post office, and the two of us forged a lovely bit of old-timey correspondence back and forth, like Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but if the two of them mainly talked about Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Tom was dry; friendly but reserved, and rather affectless. He wasn’t in the business of lavishing attention on a tall poppy; his was the character of the gardener hired to prune it, out of courtesy to the rest of the flowers. I’ve since met other Midwesterners, and I know the drill: They can be witty, bright, and kind, but they’re not self-centered, grandiose, or emotional. They are even-tempered, even during shitstorms of winter weather that render their climate unfit for life. They use relative negatives when they’re asked how they’re doing, and say they “could be worse.” They’re polite enough to keep their feelings from bleeding over into messy ethnic territories. They hate margarine.
Most of what I knew about Minnesotans was gleaned from the movie Fargo, which came out after Tom and I forged our long-distance friendship. There’s a scene in that film in which Frances McDormand’s character, Marge Gunderson, is reunited with an Asian guy named Mike Yanagita she used to go to high school with. Mike saw Marge “on the tee vee,” and wanted to meet at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis to have lunch, while Marge was in town on business. After forced small talk, Mike oversteps his boundaries and comes around to sit next to Marge on her side of the table. Marge, unsure if Mike is hitting on her, politely asks him to go back to his own booth, and that’s when he breaks down. Mike sobs to Marge that he lost his wife to cancer but how he always thought Marge was such a “super lady.” They decide to meet “maybe another time, then,” and Marge determinedly sips Diet Coke through her mixer straw as a defense to the crippling awkwardness of inappropriate behavior from a lovesick stranger.
After months of chatting in high school, I was smitten with what I knew and didn’t know about Tom. I loved his wry sense of humor, his bordering-on-Canadian accent, his coy withholding of any indicative affection toward me beyond our phone conversations about TV shows and music we did or didn’t like. It was a perfect fifteen- year-old not-romance. Until he ended it one day, after I told him I loved him. He was Marge, I was Mike Yanagita.
“Er . . . well, I suppose I’m sorry, but I don’t feel the same way about you,” said a neutral voice from a sturdy teenager of Nordic descent, coming from the earpiece of my bedroom phone.
I was devastated. And of course, asshandedly back-headed to use the L-word in the first place. And not the L-word that references that show about ladies who love pomade. I used the one that describes what everybody wants.
So Tom dissolved, and that was that for a while. I meandered toward other imaginary boyfriends I could profess my love to, but they were mostly photos in magazines of Michael Keaton in Batman Returns and white-turtleneck-and-aviator glasses-clad-early-70s-era Mike Nesmith. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, a full twice my time on the planet since I’d first stumbled upon Tom’s Usenet ID, that I decided to look him up. This was last summer.
SINCE TOM was an Internet early adopter, he was easily Google-able. I found his blog, which, like our phone conversations at the time, mostly documented music he liked and the shows he watched. But I also gawked at the photos he posted of his family, because it turned out, he had one. Tom was married and had two little girls. Everybody looked robust and happy, and his kids had his eyes. He wrote about his and his wife’s efforts to lose weight, commemorated his girls’ birthdays, and posted wedding photos. I felt like a creepy tourist sifting through his personal information, however public he made it by putting it up on his blog. My blog mostly has plugs for my shows and sometimes I’ll post a YouTube video I find of a cat answering an office phone (julieklausner.com!).
I lapsed into callous New Yorker mode looking at Tom’s photos and summoned my sneering superiority, which is a reflex. In some respects, even though it had been forever since he and I had last spoken, I was still basking in that catty schadenfreude you get when you see somebody who once rejected you, looking less than Daniel Craig-like in the physical-attractiveness department. But a blog post Tom wrote on his wedding anniversary cut my smirking short. Its title was “8th Anniversary,” and its text read, simply: “If you get a chance, marry your best friend. Totally worth it.”
I cried actual tears when I read that. Not because somebody else had nabbed the one who got away—the one who was never mine nor here—but because this guy was in love and I was not! Jealousy always trumps schadenfreude! It’s a rule from the heartbreak version of “rock, paper, scissors.”
So, for my thirtieth birthday last year, I decided to fly to Minneapolis. I wanted to meet Tom. Fine, I also wanted to go to the Mall of America. But mostly, I wanted to meet this stranger with a family; the one I spoke to all the time in my bedroom grotto half my life ago. I decided we should meet for drinks in the bar at the Radisson Hotel, like Mike and Marge.
“It seems to be the place for awkward reunions,” Tom agreed in an e-mail.
Nate, who agreed to accompany me on the trip after I promised him we’d get our old-timey photos taken at the Mall, watched TV in our hotel room while I made my way down to the Radisson bar, wearing a nipple-concealing scarf over a tight white tank top and a fetching pencil skirt with a peacock print. I was certain I looked brake-screechingly cosmopolitan. I expected Tom’s brain to crumble like an Entenmann’s treat in the wake of my fashion forwardness.
He didn’t care. Soon after I arrived at the bar, I got a handshake and a hug from a tall, wide, living, breathing version of the photo of a young man with a Dwight Eisenhower haircut I’d been mailed years ago.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Tom said.
He was curt and rehearsed and clearly weirded-out. I was too, but I’d fueled my anxiety into hyper- friendliness, if only as an exercise in contrast. I’d say Tom was slow to warm, but I’m not sure he ever did. At least he made eye contact with me after finishing his second beer, curbing my “Wow, so there’s the Mary Tyler Moore statue” pleasantries with a blunt “Let’s start from the beginning.” He told me where he went to college, and how he met his wife his second day at school, married her, and then had kids. He told me about his tech job, about his in-laws, and that he doesn’t get to go see live bands as much as he used to, now that he’s a dad. So far, I could have been anybody. This was just his bio. I was aching for the kind of self-referential conversation that fuels any one-on-one exchange I’d ever been half of, whether it was on a date or at a job interview. This is what I’m about; how about you? But Tom didn’t ask me any questions, so I just decided to start talking about m
yself. My angle was: “I’m awesome!”
I gave him an overview of my career, and filled him in on my life in New York; my friends, my accomplishments. I asked if he’d seen any of my work online. He hadn’t. As guilty as I felt spying on his blog, I was sort of surprised—even insulted—that he didn’t have the reciprocal curiosity to cyber-stalk me ( julieklausner.com!). But I plowed forward, looking not so much for approval, but for some semblance of common ground. I asked him if he’d ever been to New York, and he hadn’t. He said he went to Vegas one time when he was getting good at online poker, and mentioned something about a strip club in passing, which made me feel gross. All of a sudden, Tom felt like a long-lost brother to me, and nobody wants to think of their brother with a stripper’s tits in his face.
I made a point of outlining the difference between our relationship situations. I told Tom in a matter-of-fact way, that people my age in Manhattan don’t tend to get married in our early twenties. That we get our careers figured out first and shop around for the right person. I was telling that to myself as much as him. He seemed perplexed.
“But what if you meet the right person at a young age?” he asked. It was like fielding questions from a caveman about outer space.
Then he asked what music I’d been listening to lately. I had to break the news to Tom that I didn’t follow new music as voraciously as I did when he knew me. That I sort of stopped caring about new bands shortly after alternative music became indie rock and an internship I did at Matador Records made me realize that I didn’t want to spend any more of my time hanging out with the kind of people who seem to love those records than I absolutely had to. And then, soon after that, how a band called The Sea and Cake came around, and how the tweeness of that indie-jazz fuckery indelibly alienated me from anything I ever wanted to do with new music again. How what was once crunchy and weird and fun to discover with partners in crime had become alienating and pretentious and competitive and exclusionary. And that around that time, I started getting bored of going to rock shows and found more pleasure listening to the cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar in my apartment than standing around at a club holding my winter coat and a beer in a plastic cup. By the time I met Tom in person, I was no longer the teenage girl who pored through the pages of the new Magnet or Paste magazine, starving for a fix from the new verse-chorus-verse ensemble. I was over it, and I had new things on my plate I wanted to talk about.
Julie Klausner Page 5