There’s also the Anti-Preservative/Hormone/Antibiotic/ Chemical Vegan. This group includes paranoid, antiestablishment kids or kidults eager to blame their problems on large corporate infrastructures, as though businesses that earn more than thirty grand a year had been designed to personally destroy them. This type makes up the majority of male vegans, from my experience, especially those who interpret their preference of beer to pork as some kind of deciding vote against The Man. That’s right, “The Man.” Politically, The APHAC Vegan is still at the philosophical evolution of a circa-1964 Lenny Bruce, one of the most overrated stand-up comedians of all time. (Most underrated? Mo’Nique. The END.) This category of vegans includes performance artists who run for mayor as a goof, bike messengers who sprout dreadlocks from Caucasian hair by not washing it frequently, and people who sneer in the face of science, consistently opting out of Western medicinal revelations like antibiotics, preferring instead to treat infections with herbal tea. There are also a lot of overweight people in this category who claim they went vegan for the sake of being healthier, and there is no population on earth—including people who traverse malls with the aid of a Jazzy Scooter—who consume more cookies, fries, cake, and breads, rationalizing that it’s OK, because their carbs are baked with soy butter, agave nectar, and carob chips.
Finally, there’s the Anorexic Vegan, delighted to be able to blend into her surroundings by adopting a style of eating that’s considered acceptable for reasons besides “I want to starve myself until I disappear and never have to deal with the time I was molested.” These include women who would put restrictions on what they consider acceptable eating no matter what, and have the book Skinny Bitch to thank for endorsing a diet with a socially conscious veneer when, in actuality, all these girls want to do is sip hot water for dinner until they look like a corpse. There are subtler variations of these girls; the Heidi Pratt types in stilettos and minis and people in fashion who don’t have a sense of humor. I met one emaciated Los Feliz resident who told me, over the eerie silence of her still-running hybrid, that she thought it was “heroic” to avoid dairy, milk, and eggs. “Uh-huh,” I said, then asked, “Do you know what words mean?”
SO, THOSE are some vegans I’ve met. And then there are the kinds of people who call themselves vegans, but eat cheese or fish on occasion, and those people are A-OK by me, one thousand percent, because those people are not vegans—they are vegetarians. And vegetarians are great, as long as they don’t try to convert me while I’m tucking into a shepherd’s pie, because that’s very Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and if I wanted to talk to men who wear short sleeved shirts with neckties and who read the Bible all day, I’d go to AA.
But Colin was the first vegan I ever met, and he fit into the second category—The Anti-Preservative/Hormone/Antibiotic /Chemical Vegan—because his eating choices very much reflected his political views, which had a lot to do with opting out of corporate culture, and other concepts that are really exciting to people going through puberty. The other thing that was distinctively immature about Colin was that he had no sense of what to say around women who wanted to sleep with him in order to keep himself, for lack of a better term, attractive to them.
“Boy, the flight out here was really long,” he told me over (vegan!) fries at the Cloister Café across from my dorm. “They didn’t have any meals without eggs or cheese or meat, so I brought a head of raw broccoli on the plane with me and munched on it the whole way over. I think the woman next to me was kind of grossed out by my broccoli farts after the first four hours.”
And so on.
But I, in my lonely days, reacted to most of Colin’s personality by plugging up my ears with my fingers and singing my favorite song: “I Can’t Hear You,” which I’m sure, by now, is in the public domain.
So we fooled around, and I got to watch Colin thaw into a slightly more attentive version of himself. As soon as we got physical, his monologues became conversations. The miracle of sex! It does help boys notice you! And my wastebasket was mercifully free of urine that whole weekend. Colin was also, incidentally, endowed with the most enormous penis I’d ever seen in my life, an appendage on behalf of which I actually had to run errands. I remember buying Magnum brand condoms at Duane Reade with a twinkle in my eye like Gene Kelly’s while he splashed in the puddles outside Debbie Reynolds’s house.
Soon, Colin and I were telling each other what we wanted in bed, and although he was uncomfortable at first with the kind of conversation that didn’t involve enlightening me about how the Australians are superior to Americans because they ban billboards in certain areas of their countryside, he slowly began to talk to me, more and more, about what he wanted to do with the baseball bat he kept in his pants.
“You know what else I imagine?” he said one night, confusing “imagine” with “request.”
“I would really like it if you took my cum in your mouth when you were done going down on me, and then you let me kiss you with my tongue so I could taste my own cum.”
Anybody unfortunate enough to have sat through Kevin Smith’s Clerks (the best of what is a largely reprehensible oeuvre) will know that the sexual act Colin described is known as “snowballing.” And while requesting that favor was a bit surprising, it was not something outright uncalled-for, like asking me to shit on his father’s face, a variation I believe was addressed in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. And because I was having pussy-stretching sex with a guy I was really attracted to, I did it.
It’s really a tribute to the female bonding hormones that are released when you’re getting good-laid that you’re pretty much up for anything exclusive of fisting your sister. I wondered what was in Colin’s semen, considering his diet. Was our affair just a nefarious scheme to get me to eat tempeh?
Anyway, that happened, and he was really turned on, and then, the next time, he told me he was going to come on me and lick it off, and then he did, and soon enough, he was just eating his own semen and I was there as a witness.
I felt like I did on the phone—unnecessary. I mean, what’s the point of having a girl in the room if all you want to do is dine on your own jizz? Why not cut out the middleman?
Colin was probably just starving for animal protein, poor guy. No wonder he was obsessed. It’s like how all dieters do is think about cupcakes, or how all Catholics do all day is imagine how much fun it would be to get an abortion.
COLIN SOON returned to whence he came—to his recording studio and his band and his ideas and his touring schedule. He called me a couple of times after that weekend, but our conversations went back to the way they were before. I was superfluous—an appendage, and not as formidable as the one between his gawky legs. He told me how much he wanted to drop acid with me in the desert, and how much he hated New York City; two things that pretty much make me as dry as a “Shouts & Murmurs” column. Soon enough, we went our separate ways. Me with the knowledge that our differences were insurmountable, and him knowing, wherever he is—probably Portland—that somebody once witnessed him feasting on the kind of intimate delicacy that is not technically permissible on a vegan diet.
turn down the glamour
During my last year at college, I decided to open my horizons, which is a fancy word for “legs.” I figured that if I was less picky about the guys I hooked up with—as though that was ever my problem—I’d increase my odds of finding somebody good. It is not an absurd philosophy by any means, as long as you’re not too emotional about it.
I tried dating boys from school for once: a pockmarked, handsome weirdo with Clark Kent glasses from my photography seminar; a schlubby, Jewish tall guy who lived in the dorm room next to mine who blathered on about De La Soul before asking me if he could use my bathroom, then taking an extraordinary crap in the toilet that was, ostensibly, right next door to his own. And then there was Jazz Matt, Nate’s nickname for the skinny Daniel Stern lookalike from my screenwriting class who interned at Small’s Jazz Club because he loooooved Jazz. Jazz Matt’s rea
l name was just regular Matt, but Nate and I came up with the bright idea to call him “Jazz Matt” because it rhymes with “Jazz Cat.” And few things were funnier to us than the idea of Matt “jazzing-out” to cool-be-boo-bebop-scat-a-tat-tastic, heroin-ific jazz, when in fact he was just this geeky white jerk who, given a chance, would like nothing more than to sit quietly in a room, sipping tea.
Jazz Matt fizzled out during our pitiful Gil-Scott-Heron- fueled make-out session, so he couldn’t throw his jazz hat into the ring for the boyfriend position I was interviewing intensively for. But something was coming together for me around this time that was new. I didn’t sweat J-Matt, and I didn’t stalk or fume once my crush had petered out its torque. Maybe my hormones had finally learned to shut the hell up for a minute, or maybe I’d shed some of the ego- fueled “how dare he not love me” vitriol that was conjoined like an evil twin to the star-crossed circumstances of every guy that didn’t come through. Either way, around that time, I began to get a little better at letting go. And there were plenty of guys around whom I walked away from before they even had time to express interest—the defecating neighbor comes to mind.
Then, right before I turned twenty-one, I met my first real boyfriend.
DAVID WAS just a year older than me, and his intelligence was visible from across the room. He was a particular kind of quiet, and there are different kinds—there’s shy/socially phobic quiet, angry and plotting quiet, blissful Zen quiet, illiterate farmhand quiet. David’s quiet was patient and smart—the kind you need to get through a ton of books. I wondered if I seemed too frivolous for him; I had pink leopard prints pasted all over my dorm room walls, and Spice Girls posters hanging alongside framed photos of John Waters.
But David liked me, and soon enough we got together. I loved falling in love. I loved the whole incubation period: all the lazing about in bed staring into each other’s faces, the midsummer hangouts on his fire escape, the activity of the night being listening to a record or taking a walk. I was having the time of my life being loved as what I gleaned was an adult. I would say to people, “I have a boyfriend. This is my boyfriend.” And after my mint-condom-sucking, Jazz Matt-chasing college days, I was ripe and delighted in the sensation of being courted in a proper way, by a boy who didn’t just think I was sexy. David thought I was adorable.
We went to Montauk together. We drank Mike’s Hard Lemonade in a motel room and read Penthouse to each other in the rental car back to the city. I let him take my picture without any makeup, on the beach. Around David, I felt cherubic and endearing.
It didn’t work out.
There were differences—the kind that have nothing to do with him liking that band the Mountain Goats when you feel like hearing that guy’s singing voice is like being stabbed in the eye with a shrimp fork over and over again. He loved me, but I also think he was infatuated with somebody in me I wasn’t so crazy about. If Nate was the one who saw Kate Pierson underneath my grubby disaffect when we met, David tried to strip away all of Kate’s lovely lashes and wigs and iridescent outfits to reveal what he was confident was the mousy, wide-eyed ragamuffin little girl that he wanted to love me as, and who he wanted me to be. It would come out in little things, like how he told me how pretty I looked in a T-shirt when I let my hair go into its natural wave, or in acts of faith in my talent, like when we’d try to collaborate and he’d write me a part that was more in his voice than mine.
After we split, David went on to reach his goal of becoming a successful television comedy writer, which was never a surprise given his talent and work ethic, and one day, I came into his office to interview for an on-air/writing position on the show he worked on. After the meeting, I stopped by his desk to say hello.
I wore what I always wear to interviews: a suit, with heels and makeup. I did not wear a ball gown and a beehive.
David asked how my meeting with his boss went, then did that thing he always does where he smiles and cringes at the same time. It’s sweet, but it also makes you feel a little awkward, so you’re compelled to counter it with false stoicism or cool. And when the neurotic Jew is the cool one, well.
Then David lowered his voice a bit. “Let me give you a bit of advice,” he told me, on his turf. And I listened for his tip because I wanted that job.
“When you’re around an office like this one,” he continued, “Well . . . you might want to turn down the glamour.”
I can’t pile on when it comes to David. He was a great boyfriend at a time when I needed a great boyfriend more than anything, and I broke up with him, then displayed a novice’s ignorance when insisting that we still be friends, unaware of the rule that the person who initiates a breakup has no say about what the relationship then becomes.
But that advice coming from him to “turn down the glamour” gave me a bedrock Legally Blonde moment that propelled me into sweet, revenge-fueled action. It is what has motivated me to succeed in my field. Because as frequently or insistently as nerdy, quiet guys may claim that they are outcasts, the reality is that once high school is over, they are the ones who get the jobs. And those jobs include but are not limited to writing for television, art direction, graphic design, songwriting, blogging, video editing, copywriting, filmmaking, working for public radio, and so on and so on, and whatever job you do can probably go here too. Right now, in the places where I live and work and date, the timid, geeky guy prevails. And the only way to pass in their world if you’re a girl is to play the game and blend into the herd. David illuminated something about the way things are that made me furious, despite what his intentions were when he gave me his two cents. And no, I didn’t get that job.
What I have since learned is that the girls who thrive in Boytown, professionally and personally, are the mousy ones. The ones who don’t know how to walk in heels or do their own eyeliner. The girls who don’t know how to play hostess to a good party or that they need to write a thank-you note and bring a gift when visiting someone’s home. They wear their “nice” New Balance sneakers when they go out at night, and a clean T-shirt when they go to work. They blend in with the guys they scare; the ones who hate them for not chasing them in high school.
“You wear too much makeup,” David would tell me when we were together. Like I had any business taking advice from a guy who’d wear a T-shirt with a Chinese-food restaurant menu printed on it to a dinner date. You can’t throw the first stone when you dole out what you assume are compliments, but what is really just backhanded armchair criticism from somebody looking to create the ideal girl.
I’M FASCINATED by what men think is the perfect woman. Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary is just one of many man-made dream girls. Remember? Mary was a sports surgeon, a beer-swilling football enthusiast, and a golfer, but she was also feminine, leggy, lithe, and blond, with a bottomless well of compassion for her retarded brother. She was basically a guy with a woman’s big heart, wrapped up in a “tight little package.” She wasn’t funny, but she had a great laugh, which is perfect for making funny guys feel appreciated.
Scarlett Johansson’s “Cristina,” in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is another creature constructed in a lab by a male mind. Cristina is sprung from Woody Allen’s dirty old ’mangination—a fabrication, really, of qualities attractive to him that no real girl has in one spot. Her lack of focus in tandem with her raw creative talent just crying out to be shaped by an elder. Her freespiritedness on matters of hooking up with women, men, or both at once. Her ridiculously full lips and tits evoking Marilyn Monroe, who, even off-camera, lived—or tried to—in a fable as America’s most beloved dumb slut. Marilyn was funny, too, by the way. But nobody noticed.
And then there’s Pam.
The archetype of the perfect girl for guys I see all around me is, I think, best understood by taking a look at the character of Pam from NBC’s The Office.
Pam started out on that show as a wry receptionist with a conspiratorial half-smile and wavy hair the color of milk chocolate that looks like it was wet when sh
e left her place, and air-dried on her way to work. She’s portrayed by the gorgeous and funny actress Jenna Fischer, who puts herself in the hands of makeup and wardrobe people who are responsible for making her look like less of a knockout than she is. And indeed Pam is not supposed to be the kind of beauty that turns heads in a room.
She is bright, but not ambitious. She has a crap job, but she takes it in stride: It’s good enough for Pam, for now. As a romantic pursuit, she’s a slow burn: the kind of girl who will only sleep with you after months or even years of wearing down with flirty jokes and one-of-the-boys-style teasing. The men in her office—most of them—pretend she’s sexually invisible. Her boss puts her down as a frump, an underdog.
Pam’s equivalent from the British version of The Office, Dawn, was a different kind of girl entirely. Dawn was also shy, but a bit slatternly and hyperfeminine; she was always trying to be something she wasn’t, quite. Her ample bust would strain the abilities of a button-down shirt, which she’d have to take in a size up or suffer cleavage. She was a little soft; like Baby-Fat Spice. Lucy Davis, who played Dawn, had those extra ten pounds of lager weight that’s somehow still acceptable on beautiful television stars across the Atlantic. And, like Pam, Dawn was the romantic lead of the series.
Julie Klausner Page 8