Julie Klausner

by I Don't Care About Your Band

  Women, even when plagued with problems that transcend wanting to be liked by a cute boy, are still under the impression that you shouldn’t contact a guy after he schtupps you, especially the day after, even as you’re writing a check out to your dermatologist because nobody fucking takes Freelancers Union Insurance . But you don’t send the guy the bill, even though you’re tempted to, because you’re wise enough to know that as soon as you’ve consented to sex of any kind, no matter what you hope comes of it, as soon as it’s over, you’re back in the business of taking care of yourself.

  SO I sealed off the clothes I’d worn the night before in a Ziploc freezer bag and sent the whole mess to the cleaners, and after I cleaned my place like a Stepford Wife on the diet pills they used to make that had cocaine in them, I took a third shower and changed my sheets. And then I was done.

  As far as ailments go, I was relieved to have come down with the kind of sick that can be treated with some Cortisone cream and good apartment hygiene. And I was disappointed that Noah never followed through on his e-mails after that night to get together again, after what I’d had all intentions to be a proper date. I felt like I blew it by coming home with him in the first place, but I guess it was good to have Noah’s failed test of interest up front, so I didn’t waste more time wondering whether he was a long-term contender.

  But it still hurt to see him shift from caring enough to impress me with cute texts to ignoring my e-mail about the Nicolas Cage movie that came on late at night—the one we were talking about back at the bar. I blamed myself, but who knows if anyone besides the bugs were actually culpable. In the end, I made a clean break, and didn’t carry Noah into my thoughts any more than I carried vermin into my apartment. Sometimes you have to be your own preemptive exterminator.

  did i come to brooklyn for this?

  I substitute-taught a class one time and ended up going out with one of my students. It was a writing class—for adults, so calm down—and one of the students was a really good-looking guy in his late thirties. He was wearing a button-down plaid shirt and had a generous smile, and as soon as I saw him, I thought to myself, “Hello.”

  One of the things I do when I teach a class, whether it’s my first session or when I sub and I’m teaching a bunch of people I don’t know, is go around the room and have everybody introduce themselves. It’s a good frame of reference for me so I know what people’s backgrounds are, and everybody likes talking about themselves. Plus I get to engage in a conversationlike experience, which is the best part of teaching—when you feel like you’re not actually working.

  So, we went around the room and my students for the day gave me their bios. A middle-aged woman with eager eyes who half-smiled at everything I said, like she hoped I was about to say something funny so she could laugh, told me about her former broadcast journalism career and subsequent divorce. A heavy blonde in her early twenties said she just graduated from the New School, where she majored in creative writing. A bona fide freak—there is always at least one in any adult education class in New York City, God bless and keep them, rambled on about Bush’s war on terror, Monty Python, how he lived in the housing complex on Twenty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue, and how if it weren’t for his Latin neighbor’s loud macaw, he’d be able to concentrate on drawing his own political cartoons. And then, Alistair, the cute guy with the plaid shirt, said he worked at AOL as his day job, that he was an artist when he lived in Austin, Texas, and that since he moved to New York, wanted to do more writing.

  And that was, frankly, enough for me to know to decide I wanted to go out with Alistair. He was cute, and he could string a sentence together. That was literally it. It wasn’t like I heard “Austin . . . AOL . . . Art . . .” and decided “Yes!” It was more like “Sure. Fine. He’s not unemployed. Maybe he’s normal.” It is an optimistic assumption we all have about good-looking people.

  Alistair may have been able to speak lucidly, but the piece he wrote for the class, however, was absolutely incomprehensible. It wasn’t that it was bad—though I guess it was that, too. It just didn’t make any sense at all. It was a sketch that took place at a Senate hearing, and the premise of the whole thing was based on this really obscure FAA motion that had gone out the week before, and all the FAA chairmen were shouting at the senators, but not about anything I could understand. And there weren’t any jokes in it. Maybe there were lines in it that he thought were jokes, but it was all pretty cryptic. But sadly, at that point I didn’t really care how good of a writer he was. I just wanted to go on a date with him and maybe make out.

  I FOUND Alistair on Facebook and asked our mutual friends about him, and he got decent marks, so I wrote him and asked if he wanted to go to a show we’d talked about after class, during which I was certain we were flirting. “I can’t,” he wrote back, “I have a girlfriend. . . . I mean plans.” Then he used an emoticon—a sideways sticking-its-tongue-out smiley face. He continued. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I just find you really attractive, and wanted to be as upfront as I could. And I don’t think going out with you would be the best idea under those circumstances.”

  Adorable! I mean, I was disappointed, but I was also positively tickled at how Alistair showed me his hand. “Here’s my deal, here’s what I’m saying, here’s why I’m saying it.”That’s what I do! I’m totally transparent and excessively forthcoming too!

  Here’s the difference, though: I’m not crazy. Alistair was, which is something I should have known right away from the writing he brought to class. At first I just wondered if he was just not very bright. There were some inexcusable spelling mistakes in his piece, and not of the “you’re/your” variety. Plus, like I said, the content of his scene was totally bats. But handsome passes for normal and intelligent when you decide you want it to.

  I wrote back to Alistair, thanking him for being honest, and moved on with my life, only to hear from him six weeks later. He asked me out, and when I asked, “Wouldn’t your girlfriend mind?” He wrote back and told me that they’d gone their separate ways. That was fast! We made a date for Saturday night: I told him I wanted to see the new Indiana Jones movie.

  That was another premonition of bad things to come. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not only the worst movie of the Indiana Jones franchise, surpassing the one where they eat brains out of monkey skulls and there’s an “Oriental Little Boy,” but it’s also, quite possibly, the worst movie of all time. There are aliens, mind control, Russians, Shia LaBeouf playing a character called “Mutt,” and it makes no sense at all. It made Alistair’s sketch for class look like Lawrence of Arabia.

  Alistair didn’t understand why seeing that movie caused me to become psychotic. He thought it was all right, but wasn’t overly familiar with the other Indiana Jones films, which seemed odd, considering he was roughly my age and male. I had a hard time connecting with him over the abomination we’d just sat through, and so I changed the subject over the course of our walk to a restaurant.

  That was when Alistair told me about how much he was looking forward to going back to Burning Man that summer. And that was the moment when I figured that in terms of us not having anything in common, it couldn’t get worse.

  DON’T YOU love that expression? “How could this get worse?” If ever there was a transitional phrase that better telegrapheds a bit of storytelling, I’d like to know what it is. You’re planting a red flag into the ground, and printed on that flag is, SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. What could be a more obvious foreshadowing device? “Well, at least it’s not raining?”

  So, we’re at this Mexican restaurant. And over chips, Alistair, whose candor I’d found endearing in his e-mails about how attractive he found me, quickly lent itself to a Hall of Presidents- style illumination of all of his skeletons, which any half-sane person with the social skills of a high-functioning idiot savant would have had the foresight to know belonged safely tucked away behind psychological winter coats and formalwear in the hall closets of
our minds. He simply did not know what to keep to himself on a first date.

  He told me at length about his ex-girlfriend; that they met after spending a weekend together when one of his friends married her sister. After that, she went back to Cyprus, where she was from, obviously. And after a month of long distance flirting, Athena or whatever quit her job and broke up with her boyfriend in order to move to the States into Alistair’s apartment, and then, within two months, acquired a pretty serious Vicodin habit after she had his abortion. So there was that.

  It was a whirlwind romance, contained in a few months and told to me in the time it took for our enchiladas to arrive. I was almost impressed by how cracked this guy had to be, not only to live this reality, but to relay it with such ease to a first date—with no sense of shame or decorum at all. What a disaster was Alistair. It was like he was the living personification of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

  Then he told me about the time he was arrested.

  He was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time, so I figured he wasn’t incarcerated for any kind of offense that wasn’t adorable. I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest, but my impression of that part of the country is that it’s all café au laits and ironic lunch boxes. I figured he was arrested for shoplifting one of those Ugly Dolls, or a box of those Band-Aids shaped like bacon strips from one of their hipster gift shops. But then he gave me more data to add to the “Crazy or Stupid?” bar graph poll in my mind—the one that was quickly becoming a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. Alistair told me that he used to “party” a lot, which explained the impulse control he failed to exercise with the Cypriot, not to mention the cranberry juice and soda he ordered with his meal, and soon I was treated to the story that narrated his push into the twelve-stepiverse.

  He was wasted one night, which is a great way to start an “I got arrested” story, because you know already that the point isn’t how he got that way but what he did once he was. It was around four a.m., and wasted Alistair saw a car idling, its doors open and nobody in the front seat, in a Chevron Food Mart parking lot, where he ended up alone, though he did not remember how or why. At the time, because he was drunk, Alistair thought it would be really funny to drive around in that idling car. The one that wasn’t his. That’s what he thought would be funny. I thought about the sketch he’d brought to class before, and wondered if indeed there were jokes in it—only they were “Alistair Jokes.”

  So, he’s drunk and high on something too, and he’s taking this late-night joy ride in a stranger’s sedan at a high speed around Portland, when he suddenly realizes he’s being followed by a heap of squad cars. And then, once he sees their flashing lights in his rearview mirror, he also catches sight of what’s in the backseat of the car. He turns around to confirm what he saw, still speeding on the evergreen, drizzly streets of Oregon, and there it is: a toddler, asleep in a baby seat. In the car he ostensibly stole.

  Long, dreadful, horrifying, damning, humiliating short? He was charged with DUI, Grand Theft, and Kidnapping. Funny, right?

  I was still processing the news of the Cyprus girl’s abortion.

  BY NOW our dinner was over, and Alistair wanted to go to a bar to have a coffee, which is what alcoholics in recovery drink when they go to bars. So we did, and then he wanted me to come home with him. And you’d think I’d be in the “no way” zone, but, frankly, I was still in the “whatever” zone with this guy, who was clearly a hot mess in so many new and hilarious ways, but also inarguably cute. And besides, I’d already come out to Brooklyn to make out, and frankly, no disrespect to Deana Carter, but “Did I Come to Brooklyn for This?” is the new “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

  A cab took us to an unidentifiable, nightmarish section of what I was told was Prospect Heights, but looked like the set of The Warriors. There was a Chevron Food Mart across the street from him, and I didn’t even know there were any Chevron Stations in New York City. I guess he managed to find one out of the nostalgia he felt for the hilarious night he stole that car.

  He had a second-fl oor walk-up apartment—a railroad, in the confines of which I felt distinctively unsafe. There was no style to the place—he had hunter-green “teenage boy” tinted walls and a black leather loveseat behind a Target coffee table. I have to say, though—the novelty of going into other people’s apartments never gets old for me. Having sex with people is a great way to see what kind of furniture guys have and how their apartments are decorated. It’s replaced babysitting for me as the best way to snoop around people’s homes.

  We made out, and I’d say it was OK, but I honestly don’t remember, which probably means it was fine. And we kept going, not because I was turned on, but because it was so dull that I felt the need to step it up, just for the sake of getting the bang for the buck. Like when the food is bland and not so tasty, you just keep stuffing yourself, in hopes that the fullness will substitute for what you’re missing. Satiety for flavor swap. Quantity over quality. Lousy food in big portions. You get the idea.

  And that’s how I found myself on top of Alistair’s navy blue cotton comforter, with his dick and balls in my mouth. I needed to teabag him out of necessity, because Alistair was the kind of small in which you feel the need to treat his balls like they’re part of his penis, just to give the whole situation some extra length. Like when you let somebody keep their shoes on when you’re measuring their height. I pretended his balls were the lumpy, wide base of his underwhelming shaft, and he moaned in appreciation over the fat-skinny guy gut he blamed on his breakup with the girl from Cyprus.

  We finished, and I had him call me a car service, because there was no way I was going to sleep in that bed, nor was I going to go out and hail a cab in that neighborhood alone any time of day or night. He wrote me the next day and told me he’d had fun, but I saw no point in writing back until my birthday, a few months later, when he reached out to wish me a good one and called me hot stuff, and I let him take me out to dinner again.

  That was a bad idea.

  I knew it was, as soon as I got a call from him telling me he got lost, even though I gave him excellent directions to a restaurant in Manhattan on the corner of two numbered cross-streets. I’d made the mistake of delegating another evening of my life to this Burning Man festival-attending, pointy dick-having, Crystal Skull-liking, self-admitted kidnapper. Still—I’m glad I went. Because after bearing witness to what I’d later call his “Vagina Monologue” at dinner—about how he just isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life, whether it’s paint or write, and how he thinks he’s lazy, maybe, and also has a hard time setting goals for himself because he isn’t sure what he wants, and how he doesn’t know whether to look for another job or work toward a promotion—I had my answer to the riddle that plagued me since I first met Alistair in my class.

  “Is he crazy or stupid or both?” didn’t seem to be the most pertinent question anymore with this guy. I had my answer. Alistair was just a loser. Of course he was! Why hadn’t I pegged him sooner? I’d made out with enough by then to know one at first glance.

  HE WALKED me home after splitting the check, which was lame because the idea was that it was my birthday dinner, and when we got to my building, he asked to come upstairs. I was about to politely refuse, when he begged to use my bathroom. My bathroom! Do people still do that to get laid? “Please, let me come upstairs for sex.” No? All right, how about this: “Please let me come upstairs to move my bowels.” Yeah! That’s more like it! Let the boning commence!

  So he came upstairs and peed, and then he came out of the bathroom and looked around my apartment. He noticed that I didn’t live in a tenement apartment in the “apocalypse” part of Prospect Heights, My Ass, and that my furniture didn’t look like it had come from the “Back to College” aisle of a superstore, and, using classic Alistair judgment, he decided he had to comment.

  “Wow, what is your rent?” he said. “Like, a million dollars?” Asking New Yorkers how much rent they pay is like asking so
meone what she weighs. It is very rude. So at that point, I made the conscious decision to ignore Alistair, who had officially become a contaminant in my stylish and reasonably priced Manhattan one-bedroom, and instead of glaring at him or giggling or responding in any way at all, I silently turned on the TV.

  I flipped through the channels icily as he made his way next to me on the couch. He put his arm around me and I didn’t move. And soon enough, the small talk about the yogurt commercials faded into awkward silence, and then he said he was tired and should go, and I walked him to the door and decided he stunk.

  I got an e-mail from Alistair later that night—a rambling monologue about how he was sorry for not knowing what he wanted or something about being more “on it” next time, and instead of telling him that there was not going to be a next time or writing back, “That’s OK, good to see you!” or anything else, I deleted the e-mail and forgot about him all over again. Until the summer, when I saw some photos he posted on Facebook that he took at Burning Man. He was in a dress, alongside fellow freaks, behind the wheel of a float that resembled a giant rubber ducky with a disco ball for a head.

  I took in the scene: the sun, the pink smoke, the sand around the duck truck that went on for what seemed like miles, the girls in bikinis and tattoos in giant birdcages on deck. And for Alistair’s sake, I peeked in the back of the float to make sure he wasn’t accidentally transporting a toddler.