The Goalin’ Grrrls fans rose to their feet and started yelling. A yellow jersey passed the ball to another who shot a ball that grazed Greta’s gloves and dropped into the goal. For the rest of the game, Mike and Mullet Man bonded through beer and lawn chair coaching. Vicki and I were on our feet, screaming like a teen sighting of Ricky Martin. We had soccer fever and we had it bad. Vicki hungrily watched the tactics of the game, while I was simply interested in the Kickin’ Chicks winning. By the end of the half, the score was two to one in favor of the Chicks. Vicki and I were like mad women, chanting “Kickin’ Chicks!” like it was a battle cry. We recruited about a half dozen fans to join us, and unsuccessfully tried to start a wave of twenty people. The others thought we were simply insane as we screamed and hugged each other with every goal for the home team.
Chapter 20
Ditch The Bitch
—The Dog House, February
February is the shortest month of the year, but the first two weeks feel like eternal damnation for us guys. The countdown to Valentine’s Day begins, and women around the world are yapping to each other about what “special and beautiful” plans they have with their boyfriends. It gets mighty competitive, let me tell you. One girl says her boyfriend rented out an entire restaurant for just the two of them, then another chimes in that her guy is taking her to dinner in Paris. Soon, a third pipes in that her boyfriend is buying her a ring.
Normally, I’d say so what. Who cares what chicks are talking about among themselves? Most of the time it’s harmless chatter about period cramps and toenail polish, but when they start in with the battle of the boyfriends it affects us. It affects us because when they start playing in the romantic Super Bowl, guess who the only losers are? Men! There’s no way we can win because some woman is always going to exaggerate about how “special and beautiful” her Valentine Day was, and the rest of them are going to come storming back to you complaining about your meager box of cookies or fistful of daisies. These standbys won’t do anymore. Guys are expected to be creative. We’ve got to constantly jump a bar set higher and higher by women.
I say enough. It’s time to draw the line. This year, let’s turn the tables and make Valentine’s Day one that women will never forget. Now, this’ll only work if we all do it, so none of you better wimp out on me, got it? This year bag the flowers, eat the Oreos yourself, and ditch the bitch. You read right—ditch the bitch. If every guy dumps his girlfriend right before or the evening of Valentine’s Day, we’ve set the bar right where we want it—low to the ground (hell, on the ground!). It’s kind of like going on strike. Our union, Guys Local 428, is staging a walkout, brothers! This may sound cruel and inhumane, but management has abused its power long enough. I can hear you right now. Dog, if I dump my girlfriend how am I going to get laid? Dog, I kind of like my girlfriend, I’m not ready to dump her just yet. Or, the truly pitiful Dog, I’m married. I’ll address your concerns in reverse order: If you’re married, you obviously can’t get rid of her so easily. And hey, a guy does need his laundry done, so just skip the Valentine’s Day gift. No dinner and no card either: We’ve got to stick together and make this a dry Valentine’s Day for wives and girlfriends alike. Second, even if you dig your girlfriend, dump her anyway. You’ll get her back if you want. Just call a few days later and tell her you’re sorry, you were afraid of your own feelings, whatever line of shit you can come up with. And finally, you will get laid again. Don’t let the fear of never getting laid again turn you into a whipped man. You will get laid. As long as there are women in bars and booze flowing, you will get laid again. Have faith.
Why ditch the bitch? Because if every woman in America gets shunned this Valentine’s Day, guess whose carnations and Reese’s Pieces are gonna look pretty freakin’ amazing next year? They’re not gonna lower the bar for us. We’ve gotta do it. For ourselves. For our future sons and theirs to follow. Ditch the bitch for a better tomorrow.
The first time I read Mike’s latest column was in late January when it arrived in my mailbox, but I had to revisit it after Mike called just before 8 P.M. on Valentine’s Day—minutes after his new girlfriend dumped him. When I first read the article, it seemed like just another one of Mike’s chauvinistic musings, but now it really irritated me. Not just because it was unkind, poorly written, and completely devoid of any humor or insight, but because it was so unreflective of the Mike I knew. He swears that what you see is what you get with him, but what I was seeing and getting were two entirely different breeds of dog.
Mike and I were on the phone lamenting our respective failures with the opposite sex. My problem was lack of opportunities. Mike’s was that he screwed up all of his. Tonight, he proved that was true.
Kelly, the new woman Mike was dating, was in the midst of cooking a sweet romantic dinner for the two of them at her apartment. I imagined her taking Cornish game hens out of the oven and gingerly brushing soy sauce on the crisp skin. I saw her reaching into her cupboards for wineglasses, her long blond hair languishing down her arched back. I saw her excitement growing as her perfect body strutted to set the dinner table. Instinctively stepping, rolling, then dragging in her CFM shoes. I imagined Kelly pushing up her boobs, making her Wonderbra work double-time when the phone rang and her friend read Mike’s moronic column to her.
I told Mike I didn’t blame Kelly for dumping him, especially since she was guaranteed the same fate over a meal she slaved to prepare. Mike didn’t see it this way. He explained that his column was entertainment, not advice. “Mike!” I yelled. “You advised these men to go on strike. You said you were some sort of guy’s union going on strike. You were like Norma Rae standing with a sign over your head with a picture of a heart and a slash mark through it. What’s worse, your assumption about why women talk about their Valentine’s Day gifts is so wrong. It’s not so we can show off about how we’ve got you whipped. It’s because we love you, and when you do sweet things for us it shows you love us, too. What’s wrong with wanting to tell people about how wonderful your boyfriend or husband is? What’s wrong with wanting to shout from the rooftops that you found a real prince out there? Honestly, Mike, sometimes I don’t know why I hired you. You just spout out all these clichés about men and women, and I suspect any advice you have for me about Adam is going to be as useless as your column is to your readers.”
“I know.” He sighed. He sounded like a man who was exhausted by living the life he prescribed, but I’m sure that was just wishful thinking on my part. I’m sure he was simply hungry and bummed that he wouldn’t be getting sex that night. “I know I’m a fuckup, but I also know the difference between real advice and a humor column. When I give you a game plan for your boy, it’ll be effective, believe me.”
He seemed a bit down so I refrained from giving him my advice for future “humor” columns—try to inject something funny. “So Mike,” I said instead, “what happened with your ex-wife?” leaned back into my bed and pulled the blanket up to my neck.
“Whoa, that’s outta left field,” Mike returned.
“Not really. I’ve been wondering ever since you told me you were once married. What happened between you?” Backing off only slightly I said, “I mean, did she ask too much of you on Valentine’s Day?”
He sighed. “I don’t want to get into this, Mona. What’s done is over.”
“Don’t ever say that in front of Greta.” I laughed.
“Who?”
“My friend,” I reminded. “The goalkeeper, remember?”
“Oh, the dyke?” he· recalled.
“Greta’s not a dyke,” I shot.
“Yeah, you’re right. The femme.” he corrected himself.
“The what?”
“The femme, the femme,” Mike said impatiently, asking with his tone what rock I’d been living under that I’d never heard the term. “The femme. A pretty lesbian. You know, the girlie one.”
“What are you talking about? Just because Greta plays soccer doesn’t make her a lesbian.”
Mi
ke laughed. “Whatever gets you through the night, Mona Lisa. Surely your friend is familiar with the term denial.” He snickered again as if he pitied my inability to see what was so obvious to the rest of the world.
“You’re just avoiding the question. Whatever happened with your wife?”
He told me he was married for six years to a woman named Rachel he met in college. She had fiery red hair and green eyes with a look that was pure Irish. “She was really amazing at first. We clicked on everything. We’d go out and get so wrapped up in whatever we were talking about that after we got home, we’d sit in the driveway for an hour afterward. I almost killed us once by forgetting to turn off the engine.” Mike’s voice softened as he spoke about Rachel, then got heavy, and he stopped. I urged him to continue, and after a few protests, he talked for another two hours about all of the things he loved about Rachel. They met on campus where he worked at the student newspaper, and wrote a story, “Where the Naked Chicks Are.” One such place was Rachel’s art class. Rachel was revolted by his assignment (an idea which he failed to mention was his own), but couldn’t resist the chemistry between them. I imagined there was something about his rough arrogance combined with his enchantment with her that Rachel found irresistible. With her aspirations to become a professional glassmaker, she was an exotic delicacy for him. For her, Mike was, well, a hot dog.
“So what went wrong?” I asked. “D’you cheat on her?”
“No, Mona. I didn’t,” he said in a way that suggested it was she who strayed.
“Did she?”
He sighed a heavy confirmation. “Yep,” was all he said, but it sounded like the air rushing from the truck tire that had been slashed. “Said I was an ‘emotional vacuum.’ Didn’t ‘share’ enough with her. You know, a guy’s got problems and doesn’t want to dump ‘em on his wife. S’at a crime? So she signs us up for couples counseling, which is a disaster. The guy is sitting there asking me how I feel about what Rachel’s telling me about our problems. So I say, ‘Not good.’ I guess that’s not what he had in mind because Rachel rolls her eyes and he’s looking at me like, ‘Wrong answer, Tonto.’ So he goes on. ‘What I mean is how does it make you feel?’ So I tell him real slow, ‘Not. Good.’ So he says, real impatient, ‘Does it make you feel hurt, rejected, sad?’ I don’t know, maybe I should have said it did. Maybe that was the right thing to say, but honest to God all I felt was not good. After three times, I told Rachel I didn’t want to go any more because I thought we could work things out on our own. She seemed okay about it, but said she was going to keep going by herself, which was okay by me. Then, about ten months later, she comes home and tells me that she’s met someone else and she’s thinking about leaving me.”
“Thinking about it?” I asked.
“Yeah, she says she’s still in love with me, but I won’t let her in and she wants to connect with someone. She’s lonely, she says. Then, right after she tells me this, she says, ‘Please say something to make me stay. Tell me it will be different. Tell me you’ll try to make it different. Tell me you want me to stay.’”
“Did you do it?” I said, rolling onto my stomach to hear the rest of his story.
“I don’t like being told what to say,” he dismissed. “It’s fake and I feel like an idiot saying a bunch of shit Rachel’s therapist thinks I should say.”
“Did you say anything?”
“What’s there to say to a wife who’s cheating on me?”
I felt Rachel’s desperation in trying to get more from Mike. She told him a dozen times that they were drifting apart and she wanted to reconnect. She waited for years for things to get better between them, but they never did. And he never tried to make them better. Finally, Rachel resigned herself to the painfully inevitable truth that Mike wasn’t going to lift a finger to make their relationship work. What she didn’t know was that he had no idea how. When Rachel pleaded with Mike, it was like the stranger who approaches you asking for directions in a foreign language. She urgently tugs your arm, rattling off what sounds like Spanish or maybe Portuguese or Italian. You know she needs your help, but for the life of you, you have no idea what she’s saying.
“Why not? Weren’t you still in love with her?”
“Yeah, she was my wife, of course I loved her. But she was getting boned by some other guy and had her mind made up, so there was nothing I could do about it.”
What Mike didn’t know was that if Rachel begged him to say those things, there must have been more that she left unsaid. How could he not understand how humiliating it was for Rachel to lay emotionally naked before him, and have him counter with indifference? I imagined Mike shrugging his wide shoulders at her questions about what went wrong. Mike’s recount is that his wife cheated on him and left for another guy, but the reality is that Mike cheated Rachel of intimacy and left her for the cold comfort of macho detachment.
“God, you’re an idiot!” I shouted. “This is like a romantic tragedy with your big fat head causing all the trouble, Dog. She hadn’t made up her mind. There was plenty you could’ve done about it. You could’ve just said you’d try, then done it.”
“Nah. That would’ve bought me six months, then she’d’ve taken off with that other guy anyway,” Mike dismissed. “Mona Lisa.” He sighed. “Why do I always end up telling you more than I want?”
“Because you can.”
“That it?” Mike returned.
“You know it is. Know what else? I think we never tell people more than we really want.”
“Getting a little deep on me here, Mona Lisa.”
“Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“From what you’ve told me, it sounds like you left her long before she had an affair.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Are you ready to hear it this time?”
“I don’t know. Listen, before we switch roles entirely and you become my girl coach, I’m going to get my sorry, dumped-on-Valentine’s Day ass some chow and hit the sack.”
And with a joy I shouldn’t have felt, I smiled that he was going to bed alone that night. Before I went to sleep, I led the Adam Ziegler pep rally, enthusiastically listing all of the reasons it was him not Mike—who would make the perfect lifetime companion for me. Attraction is fleeting. Love is solid.
Chapter 21
I left my stomach on the ground floor of Adam’s office building as the elevator to the eighth floor of a mirrored downtown high-rise lifted the rest of me. The receptionist sat unassumingly at the front desk, humming as she stuffed envelopes, then lifted her head with its mass of white cotton candy hair.
“Good morning,” she honked. “May I help you?”
“Mona Warren to see Adam Ziegler, please.” I borrowed Mike’s introduction for his Claudia Schiffer visit.
“Ah yes, Miss Warren.” She smiled. “I’ll let Mr. Ziegler know you’re here.” I assured myself I was just being paranoid and that she was not smirking at me with pity, thinking that Adam was out of my league. I wrote it off to a one-two punch of fatigue and anxiety. Plus, I was looking pretty good these days, I thought. Even Mike said I had almost reached my “babe potential” thanks to shedding a little excess baggage, waking up my wardrobe, and applying a little color to my face. I was boxing twice a week, which scared the fat off of my arms entirely and left me with a nice little cut under my bicep. I was now able to make it through an entire class without inexplicable bouts of crying, but still crept off to the sauna afterward to drop tears on the hot coals. I was nervous that laser teeth whitening would hurt, so Vicki promised if I went through with it, she’d get me a special surprise. To complement my new pearly whites, Vicki bought me a lip pump, a little gadget that looked frighteningly similar to a speculum. After the first two disastrous attempts, I finally got it to work without bruising my face. I placed my lips into the mouthpiece and watched my lips get sucked forward like a duckbill. It was such a powerful force, the pump even sucked some saliva from my mouth, which should have let me know it was time
to release the suction. But I figured if the instructions recommended two seconds for “pouty, kissable lips,” ten would make me a regular Angelina Jolie. Instead I looked like the finalist in one of those blueberry pie-eating contests where people aren’t allowed to use their hands, much less silverware.
I loved Greta without question, but what I liked about Vicki is that she accepted my vanity without analysis. She didn’t automatically assume that because I wanted to improve my appearance, I was a shell of a woman, pathetically unaware of any inner life. I also appreciated that Vicki pulled no punches. When I told her I didn’t like my lips, she didn’t do the old Oh no, they’re lovely routine. Vicki agreed immediately, without even doing the pro forma examination before commenting. She wasn’t even looking in my direction when I told her I hated my lips. She didn’t need to turn around when she said, “They are thin.” Then she bribed me with a lip pump.
As I followed the receptionist back to Adam’s office, I adjusted the fluid filled “ex-plant” trying once again to escape from my bra. After the chicks-only Audrey Hepburn film festival in my living room, Vicki slipped me a Victoria’s Secret bag and advised, “Pop these babies under your boobs and they’ll give you an extra cup size,” as she winked. They definitely delivered the extra cup size, but seemed to have a mind of their own and had places to go and people to see—none of which were in my bra.
The door to Adam’s office opened and I swore a choir of angels sang. What was I ever thinking lusting after Mike’s silly shoulders? This man was very handsome and sturdy. If I told Adam I needed to talk to him, he’d be there, not busily, absently protecting his male ego. He glanced up from his desk and smiled brightly, genuinely happy to see me. Adam stood, then came around from behind his desk and extended his hand to shake mine. “Good to see you, Mona. Please have a seat.”
See! Talk about available.
Adam was shorter than I remembered, but I’m not exactly statuesque, so this wasn’t a huge deal. His red-and-blue-checkered tie arrived a full three seconds before the rest of him. Still, the sight of him was so incredibly welcoming, like an oasis.
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