I do not mean to disparage music. I am most definitely in favor of music, which you have to be, or else you’re not totally human. Just like you have to have a sense of humor, which is why most dancers aren’t fully human, despite what their amazing bodies belie. But being guilted into going to go see rock shows in my twenties felt like being dragged to a museum when I was a kid. And not the fun kind of museum, where you can touch stuff, and pretend you’re snot, and climb around a giant nose.
But nobody validates you! Everybody loves going to rock shows. Somebody will tell you “I got tickets for Girl Talk” and you have to say something like, “Wow!” or “I’m jealous!” even though you’re thanking God you don’t have to endure whatever that is exactly.
I remember the first time I realized I didn’t like indie rock—it was like I had taken my first deep breath. I felt like Lily Tomlin as Rose Shelton in Big Business when she realizes she doesn’t belong in Manhattan. “I hate New York in June!” she exclaims to Fred Ward, who was all too happy to take her back home to Jupiter Hollow and lavish one of America’s comeliest lesbian comediennes with the spoils of his redneck erection.
My advice to women who habitually gravitate toward musicians is that they learn how to play an instrument and start making music themselves. Not only will they see that it’s not that hard, but sometimes I think women just want to be the very thing they think they want to sleep with. Because if you’re bright enough—no offense, Tawny Kitaen—sleeping with a musician probably won’t be enough for you to feel good about yourself. Even if he writes you a song for your birthday. Don’t you know that a musician who writes a song for you is like a baker you’re dating making you a cake? Aim higher.
And this goes for women who’ve just gotten out of a relationship—but more likely a “situation”—with any creative guy; not just a musician. The supportive ones who were involved with an improv comedian who had to stomach his troupe’s shows. The ladies who had to read the scripts and short stories their aspiring writer boyfriends sent to their work e-mail and give generous notes and way-too-kind feedback on the terrible story arc or the cringe-inducing dialogue, thinking, “I can do better than that” and “This is embarrassing.”
But most importantly, even when you’re in the throes of an affair with a guy whose rock-star confidence made you melt in the first place, don’t forget that it’s you who’s the star. A successful relationship with any guy is going to ground itself in him knowing that he shines, but you shine brighter, and the two of you together are unstoppable. Because it’s about him deserving you, not choosing you at random from a harem of devotees.
And if you’re the one at the lip of the stage hoping to get perspired on or clamoring for an autograph, that doesn’t speak too well of your own inherent desirability. You’re sort of putting him in a feminine role up there, watching him decked out in eyeliner, singing a song, aren’t you? Remember: before there were groupies, there were stage-door suitors—guys who’d wait outside the dressing rooms of chorus girls with diamonds, sweating bullets.
Follow what it is that you love and makes you want to be better, always. But don’t get yourself tied up with any kind of rock star—musician or not—who makes you feel like you’re not made of star stuff. Because of course you are. Give me a break.
the kid
I was running late for my date with Noah, so I texted him.
“Hi! Sorry I’m running late. Can we say 9:45 instead of 9? I’m coming in from North Brunswick, New Jersey (DON’T ASK), and apparently NJ Transit likes to make up their train schedule as they go along.”
I was coming from a Memorial Day barbeque hosted by a couple of friends, one of whom dropped me off at the New Brunswick station a full hour before the train came.
Noah was an aspiring writer, so his texts were clever and impeccably punctuated. “No problem,” he wrote back. “But just know that, when you arrive, I will grill you mercilessly about what you were doing in North Brunswick.”
We met at a bar in his neighborhood for our lager date, which was supposed to have been dinner, but ended up being us drinking pints of beer after I got into the city late. I arrived to find Noah at the bar drinking solo, and my first impression of him was that he was the youngest person I’d ever seen inside of a bar. Drinking that beer made him look very “I learned it from you, Dad! I learned it by watching you!”
I’d met, or at least seen Noah in passing from the proverbial “around,” and we’d sent each other a few e- mails after a mutual friend introduced us at a show, but I didn’t remember him being quite so castable as apple-cheeked pedo bait on To Catch a Predator. I mean, he really looked like a teenage boy, and it was disconcerting. I tried hard to act normal, and he cracked a ton of jokes, and after a few beers, all was fine, as it tends to be.
I don’t usually drink beer, and if I do, I’ll pull at a bottle of Amstel like it’s an exotic liqueur. So because I was downing pint after pint like I was a British guy who liked soccer, it meant that I was going to be drunk soon with a boy who looked fourteen.
Meanwhile, Noah gave me his spiel—he told me that he’d gone to Harvard and he detailed his career ambitions. I soaked up his optimism like a cynical sponge and chimed in whenever I had a nasty thing to say about one of the people he talked about whom we both knew, because that’s what I think flirting is.
Noah was twenty-six, it turned out. And while I was just twenty-nine, I felt like I was picking up a middle-schooler from his karate lesson to get him home in time for dinner. He had the looks of a farm boy, complete with his strawlike bowl haircut and baby-fat face and bad jeans that he picked out himself once he left home for Cambridge. But what made Noah seem even younger was his boundless enthusiasm.
It must be a symptom of Ivy Leaguers who haven’t yet had their dreams crushed to broadcast their ambitions cockily. They are kids who’ve never been told “no,” who figure that the odds—and in the world of showbiz no less—were competitive, sure, but not for them. They knew from competitive: They got into those schools, right? They figured that the rest of their lives would be a cake walk. I don’t actively dislike Ivy League grads as much as the people who complain that Harvard brats suck up all the good jobs that nepotism doesn’t, but the cluck on this chick got on my nerves only because I’d been at the same game as him for what seemed like ages longer, and it’s tough, you guys. For those of you considering starting a career in entertainment, don’t! It’s the worst! They make you eat shit and you have to pretend you like it! That you like eating shit! Only dogs like eating shit, and that’s a bad example, because dogs are the best! Anyway, showbiz stinks and life is hard. But Noah didn’t seem to have wind of obstacle one.
He told me about a pilot he was writing, and about an agent he’d been introduced to, who was, at the time, the same agent I’d been working with. I told him that I’d put in a good word on his behalf, which seemed like a sucker move even as I heard the words leave my mouth. He thanked me, and I felt like his advisor. He told me about his actual mentors—all his former professors from Harvard invested in his postcollegiate success. I drank faster and narrowed my eyes, like Patsy on Ab Fab, wondering how talented this kid actually was. That’s one of the pitfalls of dating within your industry: Flirting turns into shop talk really fast, and then you’re competing, which is not a turn-on for me at all.
WE TOOK a walk when we were done with all that beer, and ended up near his place. Noah invited me up to his apartment with the exertion of a kid using every resource he’d been born with to seem casual. His voice sprung up at the end of his offer, like a curlicue. I said yes, and Junior chirped in with his eager soprano: “Cool!”
I decided that we would only make out as I ascended the front stoop of a venerable brownstone in Chelsea. What would have been a lovely old pre-war apartment was sullied by the fact that Noah shared his place with four other young guys who’d just graduated from college, so the place was predictably dormlike and filthy. While Noah peed, I perused his DVDs, which were displayed in
the “common area” alongside his roommates’ standard college-age titles in one of those media racks you see at Best Buy. When he came out of the bathroom he told me to “pick a movie,” and I promptly did not. I don’t like assignments when I’m being hosted, whether it’s “Take off your shoes” or “Choose from Pulp Fiction, Spaceballs, or The Big Lebowski as the movie we’re going to watch for five minutes before we start frenching.”
I told Noah that I’d rather watch the movie he spent a lot of time at the bar telling me about, but he only had it on his computer, which he kept in his bedroom, which was a relief, because the “common area”/living room was giving me a big case of the sads.
We sat next to each other atop the loft bed that he told me, pridefully, he built from scratch himself, like the famous carpenter, Jesus Christ, and he hit PLAY on the Quicktime file or whatever, then put his hand on my thigh. I surveyed the offerings of his tiny bedroom and found it just below my modest expectations of how a straight guy in his twenties might live with four other dudes exactly like him. There was the Ikea desk, copies of Woody Allen’s prose in milk crates, and tiny closets packed with sprawling, unfolded clothes nestled behind hung sheets in lieu of proper doors. A pigeon nested over the air conditioner that was wedged inside his tiny window, which lent us a view into a grubby alley. Dorm Life Forever, I guess. Thirty seconds into the opening credits of the movie, Noah attacked my mouth with his tongue.
I DON’T usually date younger guys, so I was taken aback by what I assume was age-appropriate Golden Retriever-like enthusiasm when Noah knocked me down with tongue-based affection. His eagerness, which I’d found annoying when he spoke of his career goals, was all of a sudden an asset to the action. He dove into my crotch and slurped at my groin like there was sap inside my womb he was tapping for pancake syrup, and I was impressed at the strength that came from what I’d assumed was a modest frame.
We made out for a while, rolling around athletically and smooching like robust teenagers. And then I fell off the bed.
I fell like a rock, too, and from the loft’s considerable height. There was a thump and everything. It really hurt. I still have a scar on my lower back from the impact of whatever pre-war nail or screw dealie awaited my sacrum on the floorboard below Noah’s handcrafted Loft Bed of Doom.
“Oof,” I said.
Noah didn’t miss a beat. He helped me up and kept fooling around with me, so there was no break in our make-out momentum. This is what twenty-six-year-old boys do when they have erections. Nothing gets in their way. I didn’t know how to react—I was still smarting from my fall. But then Noah took off his shirt, and I had a cougar-at-Chippendales moment when I saw his bare chest.
I forgot my lower back pain instantly, and all of a sudden, remembered Noah’s offhand remark at the bar about how he went to the gym every day before work. It was an anomaly among his otherwise typical slovenly comedy writer traits—his bathroom was dirty, his clothes were sloppy, and his bedroom pulled off that uniquely young male feat of being at once stark and messy at the same time. Back to his upper body, though. It is the star of this story.
Noah’s chest was V-shaped and adorned with a stippled hair pattern. There were muscles—not the veiny kind either—and the whole thing rippled hypnotically, like a 3- D Magic Eye drawing from the 1990s, though that may have been the fall affecting the equilibrium section of my brain. It was the Greatest Torso I’d Ever Seen—I wanted to give it a round of applause. We forgot about me falling, and kept making out until I had to pee, trudging bravely out into the hallway toward his gross bathroom. I washed my hands obsessively, then looked into the mirror. Enough time had passed and enough booze had worn off: I was then on the brink of what would be a decision.
I rejoined Noah on his dangerous bed to let him know that I thought it would be a good idea for me to go home. I figured we’d reached the point of no return in the make-out department, and were either going to get each other sloppily off, or I would leave like a lady, or at least somebody with the willpower to get herself back home after second base and regular third, sort of, over the pants.
I was very proud of myself for deciding to establish my boundaries. What a treat for us both! I’d leave him wanting more and get to make up for what I’d worried was an inappropriately early return to a gent’s boudoir without dinner and such. And it was our first date, besides. I was so proud of myself, like I was getting ready to order a salad at the pizza place. I returned to the bedroom and told Noah what I’d decided. I explained to him that I had to get up early and couldn’t stay, and he said he understood.
And then he bent me over the side of his bed and fucked me from behind.
YES, THAT bed. It was so high that my feet dangled an inch off the floor, but Noah, bless his mid- twenties determination, still managed to get behind and inside of me, and pounded for what seemed like a good forty- five seconds, muttering the whole time to me, the pigeon outside, and the abstract pattern- morphing screen saver on the laptop turned toward the bed:
“Is this what you wanted? Is it?”
And maybe it was. I guess I wasn’t sure. But once it was happening, I was OK with it. I mean, it didn’t feel good. I’m not a reticent rape victim or anything: It was consensual like a fox—and conceptually exciting, I suppose. The kind of action you settle for in high school because you’re not used to having an orgasm, and the youth of your inexperienced partner is not unique. It was actually funny, the abrupt timing of it all, after my weak protests. Maybe I could recommend his writerly instincts to my agent with more confidence than I had earlier in the evening.
Afterward, I took a moment to think about what to do. I’d been getting ready to pack up and head home moments before, but then, there had been sex. I figured, “Well, now, I have to sleep over, because if I don’t, then I’m a huge slut.”
So I did. And in the morning, when I got up to brush my teeth with my finger, Noah’s bathroom door opened with the sound of a flush, revealing a shirtless dude in his twenties with a half-up/half-down ponytailed hairstyle. I was taken aback: I usually don’t see anybody that early in the morning, and because I don’t live in Tampa, I never see hair like that.
“Oh, that’s Doug. He’s an investment banker/body builder,” Noah explained to me once I told him who I’d met. And of course it was. Of course it was Doug. I had to get out of there before I met more of his roommates with career/hobby hybrids. I slipped on the summer dress and jacket I’d had on in the bar ten hours earlier and raced home so I could take a shower. I felt sort of gross.
It wasn’t until I was back in my apartment when I realized how itchy and irritated my skin was. There were bites all over my legs and under my arms, and my eyes were red even after I showered. I looked more closely at the bites, and my heart sank.
Fucking bedbugs.
SLEEPING WITH Noah exposed me to the trendiest and most notorious of New York City’s formidable vermin population. He had given me the real estate form of an STD. I went to bedbugger.com and studied examples of the bites I was certain came from that stupid fucking bed Noah sawed and nailed together with plywood and capped with a mattress that probably came from the street. I pictured his cotton dorm room comforter and his flannel sheets. I remembered the pigeon’s nest outside his window; rats with wings defecating over the A/C. The filthy pre-war walls, mauve with lead paint. That bathroom. I took another shower and made an emergency appointment with my dermatologist, a nice man.
I started seeing Dr. Steingart a while ago, when I called the office of Dr. Nussbaum—the 9/11 herpes informant—to find out that he had died of old age. “I’m sorry to hear that. When can I come in to get this acne scraped?” I asked the grieving receptionist at the time.
Seven years later, after spending the night with Noah, I waited for Dr. Steingart to look at my bites while my favorite of his nurses made small talk with me, as she always does, about her favorite stand-up comedians, all of whom are black. Barbara is a tiny Italian American woman who lives in New Rochelle and has wor
ked as a nurse, seemingly, since the beginning of time. The only thing she likes more than reprimanding me for picking at a zit is telling me how much she loves Sinbad. It was comforting to hear her voice that afternoon: Barbara was suddenly the only person I wanted to be around that day, in the aftermath of an evening plagued with vermin bites and intercourse absent of clitoral stimulation.
When she asked what the reason was for my seeing Dr. Steingart that day, I told Barbara that I’d slept in a guy’s bed the night before and was convinced I was pecked to death by the bugs that dwelled in its crevices. She told me the doctor would be right in, and also, how much she was looking forward to seeing Steve Harvey at Mohegan Sun the following weekend. And soon enough, there was Dr. Alvin Steingart to look at my bites, shake his head, and remind me that I should be careful about whose bed I sleep in.
I felt like I did in college, going to the gynecologist for confessionlike absolution after each one of my sexual misdoings. Even though Noah and I used a condom, the Xeroxed New York Post article about the bedbug epidemic Dr. Steingart handed me was a black-and-white reminder that there are still sticky wickets besides chlamydia, to circumnavigate after the deed.
AND OF course I should have been more careful about whose bed I slept in. Because there are so many complications that come from sex you assume is casual and non-reoccurring—the “failed pilot” kind of sex. If something bad happens after what turns out to be a one-night stand, from heartache to bedbug bites, there’s an excellent chance you won’t feel comfortable contacting your one-time partner to report the somber findings, unless they are life-threatening and you’re at a genuine moral crossroads. But if you’re entertaining the idea of maybe seeing him again, and nobody has any oozing sores, part of you is still compelled to stay mute, because we’ve been indoctrinated by people who make the rules about how a girl who wants another date should keep it light.
Julie Klausner Page 18