what purpose did i serve in your life

by Marie Calloway

I was relieved by the feeling I felt, walking next to him and making small talk. It was a little awkward, but he didn’t seem stiff or judgmental like I had terrifyingly imagined him as being.

  He told me about how he had been in Pennsylvania earlier that day, and other things about his car.

  “It seems like it would be really annoying to have a car here.”

  He said that it was annoying, but a car is necessary to escape New York, “And sometimes that is everything.”

  I wondered why he was unhappy living in New York.

  “Are you from Las Vegas?” he asked.

  I guessed he had realized it from my 702 area code.

  “Yeah…but then I moved to Portland for college.”

  I felt embarrassed that he knew I was from Las Vegas. Whenever anyone asked me where I was from, I always lied and said I was from Portland or Los Angeles. I felt like I was now at a disadvantage, like a hole had been torn in the image I wanted to present of myself.

  But then he talked to me about how he used to live there, in the 90’s. My mind reeled at the idea of this New York based intellectual having once lived in Las Vegas. At the same time as me, even.

  I wanted to change the topic, so I recited the question I had thought of to ask him before we met, “Where are we going?”

  He said we were going to take the subway out of midtown, and then he’d try to find a bar that wasn’t too loud.

  “I like just turned 21, so going to bars is still new to me.”

  I was dropping my age. I wanted to see how he felt about it.

  “Really? Well, going to bars is nice I guess. It gives you somewhere to go…”

  His response felt awkward, and I wondered if he felt weird about me being so much younger than him, rather than excited like I had expected and hoped for.

  For want of something to do, I reached into my purse and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

  “I’m going to smoke, too,” he said and reached for a cigarette.

  “I’m so glad you smoke. I thought I was going to have to ask, ‘do you mind if I smoke?’”

  I really was glad he smoked. It seemed to humanize him more in my eyes. Feeling more comfortable now, I tried to make myself vulnerable to him, to gain his affection.

  “I thought you would be like really stiff. I thought this would be like talking to a professor or something. I was like, ‘how am I going to impress this guy?’”

  “You don’t have to impress me! No. I mean, who wants to go through life being that guy?”

  I was hoping he would say something to the effect of how my looks made it so he was already impressed by me, which would ease the immense pressure I felt to be interesting and witty (which is what I always hope for from men), but he didn’t.

  We reached the subway station.

  He went through the gate, and I asked him nervously if I could use his Metro Card, as I had lost mine last night.

  “Of course,” he said, and handed it to me.

  We sat next to each other on the train.

  I asked if I could take his picture, mainly as an attempt to break the ice.

  “Are you going to publish it?” he asked kind of nervously.

  “No,” I said, fully intending to.

  I took and saved the photo. He looked over my shoulder at my phone. When I closed the picture I had taken of him, he saw my wallpaper, which was a picture of a guy from Montreal I had met on my plane ride to New York.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “This guy Ben, I met on the plane to here.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Um, we noticed each other while we were waiting to get on the plane. And then he ended up sitting next to me. And…” I started to laugh, embarrassed.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say.”

  “It’s fine. Unless you think it’s something the people here couldn’t bear to hear,” he said, motioning at the people on the train across from us.

  “We like made out and kind of had sex.”

  “What, in the bathroom or something?”

  “No, like under the tray tables.”

  “People fantasize about that…”

  “Yeah, Ben said he had fantasized about it. I never really thought about it, I guess.”

  He told me about how once he had ridden a Greyhound bus across the country, and the woman sitting next to him laying her head on his shoulder, and then gradually groping him.

  “I just went along with it…but I kept worrying about the end of the trip. When we both got up, would I have to say, ‘Hi, I’m Adrien?’ But then when the bus stopped she just got up and left without even looking at me.”

  I started to laugh really hard, and began to feel comfortable around him, since he had told me such an awkward, sketchy story.

  “You must get a lot of like fan letters from girls.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Oh, so it must have been ever weirder for you when you got that message from me when I found out I was going to New York.”

  “I thought it made sense, based on the writing you showed me. Which reminds me, I read that epic blog post you sent me.”

  I covered my hands with my face, kind of laughing.

  “Oh no, I wish you hadn’t.”

  “Why? I liked it.”

  “It’s just, what happened is that I got really drunk in Central Park with the guy I’m here with, John, and when we went back to the hotel for some reason I thought it’d be a great idea to send some long rambling blog entry I wrote to you and Tao Lin and Momus…and then I sobered up and felt so embarrassed. I send Tao Lin so much horrible, unsolicited writing. I think he used to like me, but he doesn’t since I kept doing that.”

  He kind of laughed.

  We got off the subway and began walking down a narrow sidewalk past street vendors and Mexican grocery stores.

  “What do you think about Tao Lin?” I asked.

  “I think he’s trying to do something, and what he’s trying to do is interesting, but personally I just can’t read that stuff. Maybe it’s because I’m older…”

  “Yeah, when you read it you kind of sink in this malaise. I liked Richard Yates, but I don’t like his short stories. You liked Richard Yates kind of, didn’t you?”

  “I haven’t read Richard Yates.”

  “But you reviewed it?”

  “Oh, Richard Yates…I guess I did read some of it.”

  “Do you think Tao Lin is Carles?”

  “I think there’s a few different Carles. There’s one who’s really funny and writes those long kind of narrative posts, and I think that’s Tao Lin. And there’s another one who just sort of knows a lot about indie music, and what he posts is boring to me.”

  “I don’t think Tao Lin writes it…but I do think there are multiple Carles. Because like different posts will be written in kind of different styles, and like the quality varies a lot from post to post.”

  He nodded.

  “Carles put you under his blog BFFs!”

  “I thought that was really cool. And also I would write things, and they—I assume it’s they—seemed like they were kind of responding to things I wrote which I also thought was really cool.”

  “You mentioned Momus earlier. Who is that? I’ve heard the name, but I don’t really know who it is,” he said.

  “Momus is like this Scottish pop singer who was kind of famous in the 80’s, like he had this song ‘Hairstyle of the Devil’ which was a hit, and he had a few other hits. And then in the 90’s he went to Japan and produced hits for Kahimi Karie and worked with other Japanese bands who became kind of big in Japan and even the West a little bit. And then he started making kind of like, post-modern songs I guess. And he had this blog, Click Opera, which I don’t know, was kind of like your blog is to me. Like I thought it was really interesting because he has this perspective on a lot of things that I had never heard before…so he and his writing and music had a big influence on me and my th
ought process, so I used to write about him a lot on my blog. And he’s really narcissistic, so he has like…”

  “He probably has Google alerts for his name.”

  “Yeah! He has those…so he found out I was writing about him a lot, and he saw that I had written about these rumors I heard about him, like that he was cheating on his long-term girlfriend with an 18 year old girl, and he’s like fifty…so he found out and made this song and video about it. And then we started kind of talking and flirting over email. I was really flattered at first, but I don’t know, I think he’s done that with like hundreds of girls over the Internet, so I don’t feel that special anymore,” I said, laughing. “I even started kind of seeing the bad parts of him. Like he talked about being in love with this 18 year old girl over the Internet, and he said he ‘relates to her searching for an identity.’ And it’s just like that seems kind of sad, to be like 50 and pining away for some 18 year old girl over the Internet, saying that you share a ‘search for an identity’ in common with her…”

  “That just means you have something in common with everyone on Earth.”

  “Not me.”

  “No?”

  “No, my personal brand is really well developed.”

  We laughed.

  We reached the bar and went in and sat at the counter.

  The bartender asked to see our IDs. I wondered if we looked weird to him, or if it was typical for girls to go to bars with men twice their age in New York.

  The bar tender asked what we would have, and both men expected me to order first, but I hesitated, so Adrien Brody said, “I’ll have a Sierra Nevada.”

  “I’ll have that, too.” I felt silly, but I was too scared to order what I wanted because I was afraid of him judging my beer choice.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “I’m 40.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Well, it said on your Facebook profile that you graduated in 1992, so I did the math.”

  The bartender put our beers in front of us. He paid, and we began drinking.

  I found myself just suddenly complimenting him without thinking about it, “I just wanted to meet you because you seemed really smart…”

  “Well, prepare to be greatly disappointed.”

  I laughed.

  I asked him about the conference in Amsterdam he said he went to.

  He talked about it, and what stood out to me was his frustration:

  “Some people knew the blog but I feel like they don’t take it seriously because of where it’s published. And they didn’t take me seriously because I don’t have a Ph.D. in sociology or philosophy. But it’s like, I’m smarter than these people. The only difference between me and them is that they’re teaching…”

  “Are you going to write a book?”

  He talked about how his friend was pushing him to do it, but how he didn’t really have the motivation. He talked more about his friend and his ambition, which he saw as him trying to force onto him. He went on to talk about “the circles that he ran in” and how everyone was always “bragging and self-promoting in that very humble way” and how he felt alienated from it.

  “Yes I could never take that. Like when I talk to other writers and they’re like so ambitious and always like bragging about getting published in different places and…” I shook my head.

  “Do you care about ‘n+1’?” he asked.

  “What’s ‘n+1’? I’ve heard of it before but I can’t really remember what it is…”

  He said he was relieved that it wasn’t a big deal to me.

  “It’s this magazine that’s really big in Brooklyn literary circles.” He talked about everyone being really excited about it, but him not really caring.

  I realized I had only heard of it because I had read an article that he had written for it.

  He talked about how his friends were always urging him to move to Brooklyn from Queens, where he lived now.

  “It seems like it would be good to not live there and be constantly surrounded by that culture,” I said.

  “That’s what I think. I love where I live…”

  I started to talk about being similarly alienated from the intellectuals and activists I knew.

  “Like I was involved with socialist politics for a while, but, like when I went to protests or whatever I felt really embarrassed. Like being surrounded by college kids saying things like, ‘we’re the vanguard of the working class.’ I don’t think there will be a socialist revolution.”

  This was the first time I had admitted that to anyone, including myself.

  “I don’t think there will be either. When I think about leftists I know, like my friend who is pushing me to write a book, I think about how privileged he is…like he says things like, ‘I didn’t go to an Ivy League, I went to the University of Maryland,’ like that means something.”

  “Are you talking about ___ ___?” He was another writer who wrote in the same places as Adrien Brody whose articles I read sometimes, who I knew enough about to recognize that he was talking about him.

  “Yes, ___ ___.”

  I gasped. “He’s only twenty two, right? He’s so smart!”

  “He’s a pretty smart guy.”

  He went on to talk more about ___ ___, and how aggressive and self-promoting he was, and how seriously he took himself. “But I guess that’s what you have to do to succeed…”

  “What if ___ ___ led the revolution?” I asked.

  “Then…there would be no mercy,” he said.

  He talked more about “the academic left” and how they acted haughtily towards him. It was surprising and interesting to me, this sense of superiority he talked about, because my experience with regard to the “academic left” had only been in the form of vicious attacks about how they were armchair revolutionaries or fakes who were secretly subservient to power.

  I started to feel like I really wanted to sleep with him.

  “I feel tipsy already,” I lied, so I could have an excuse to start flirting.

  But he just said, “Do you need to eat something?”

  “Okay,” I said, unsure of how to turn that around.

  We got up and walked out onto the street, and I followed him as he walked in front of me.

  “Does it have to be good food?” he asked.

  “No, I eat basically anything.”

  He talked about how he wanted to go to this diner close by.

  “Yeah, don’t worry, I’ve eaten at some pretty gross diners in my time.”

  I started to smoke another cigarette.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a medicine bottle.

  “What’s that?”

  “Adderall. I thought I would take some so I wasn’t exhausted the rest of the day.”

  “Can I have one?”

  “Of course,” he said, and gave me one.

  I popped it in my mouth.

  “Being around you smoking all the time is making me want to smoke a lot more than I should.”

  “I’m a bad influence on you. But wait, you gave me Adderall, so you’re a bad influence, too.”

  “Mutually bad influences,” he said.

  He started to talk about past relationships and crushes as we walked.

  He talked about an old roommate, who would pick up women and bring them back to his apartment, and after having sex with them, just leave. And he would be left to comfort the girl and “do the emotional work” that hookups/dating entail.

  He told another story about a friend of his, and how he was constantly successful with women by just being really domineering, and basically telling them they were going home with him.

  There seemed to be this underlying bitterness.

  “Do you feel like you resent women for wanting you to be dominating or aggressive when you can’t be, or don’t want to be?” I asked.

  “I’ve thought about that before. That’s kind of putting it strongly…”


  “Guys I like are usually like you, and I always have to be really forward and pursue them,” I said and smiled, embarrassed.

  We reached the diner and stood in front of the entrance.

  I looked inside and saw that it was really loud and crowded inside. I was dreading the idea of sitting through a long dinner with him in a place like that.

  I took a long drag of my cigarette.

  “Are you really hungry?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really want to eat right now?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked away from him and stared out at the street.

  “Do you want to go have sex?”

  There was a three second pause.

  “We could do that.”

  We started to walk away from the diner and down the street. I was walking really briskly because I was so excited.

  “I guess I just don’t feel like sitting in this loud diner right now,” I said.

  “I can understand that.”

  “How long will it take to get back to your place?” I asked.

  “We’ll just take a cab.” The excitement in his voice was palpable.

  He flagged a cab and we got inside and he gave the address to the cab driver.

  I slouched down in the seat, and rested my head on his shoulder and grabbed his hand.

  He looked at me.

  I could feel he was really nervous and excited.

  We rode in silence for a while, me laying against him and holding his hand.

  “How does that guy you’re with feel about you seeing me…?” he asked like he was worried, and I wondered why he cared about what John thought.

  “Oh, he doesn’t care. He’s meeting some girl from Taiwan or something today.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you having second thoughts about me? If we do this, I promise you won’t regret it…I’m sorry that probably sounded really stupid,” I said and started to laugh. I knew that was an embarrassing thing to say before I said it, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  He laughed too.

  “Because…it’s just…I have a girlfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  I sat up and turned away, towards the window.

  We sat in silence again.

  My first thought was that I wished he hadn’t told me. I thought it was unfair he was telling me about his girlfriend, and therefore making me partially responsible if we did end up having sex.