by Lena Dunham
When I graduated and moved back in with my parents, the bed sharing continued—Bo, Kevin, Norris—and became a real point of contention. My mother expressed distress, not only at having strange men in her house but at the fact that I had an interest in such a thankless activity. “It’s worse than fucking them all!” she said.
“You don’t owe everybody a crash pad,” my father said.
They didn’t get it. They didn’t get any of it. Hadn’t they ever felt alone before?
I remembered seventh grade, when my friend Natalie and I started sleeping in her TV room on Friday and Saturday nights, every weekend. We would watch Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live and eat cold pizza until one or two, pass out on the foldout couch, then awake at dawn to see her older sister Holly and her albino boyfriend sneaking into her bedroom. This went on for a few months, reliable and blissful and oddly domestic, our routine as set as any eighty-year-old couple’s. But one Friday after school she coolly told me she “needed space” (where a twelve-year-old girl got this line I will never know), and I was devastated. Back at home, my own room felt like a prison. I had gone from perfect companionship to none at all.
In response I wrote a short story, tragic and Carver-esque, about a young woman who had come to the city to make it as a Broadway actress and been seduced by a controlling construction worker who had forced her into domestic slavery. She spent her days washing dishes and frying eggs and fighting with the slumlord of their tenement apartment. The conclusion of the story involved her creeping to a phone booth to call her mother in Kansas City, a place I had never been. Her mother announced she had disowned her, so she kept walking, toward who knows what. I don’t remember any specific phrasing except this closing sentence: She wanted to sleep without the pressure of his arms.
For a brief time I was in a relationship with a former television personality who, steeped in the tragedy of early failure, had moved to Los Angeles to make a new life for himself. I was living at a residential hotel in LA, in a beige room that overlooked the garden of two elderly male nudists, and I was lonely as hell and didn’t hate kissing him. He still vaguely resembled a person I had seen on my TV as a tween, and when we went out together, I often watched the faces of waitresses and cabdrivers, looking for a flash of recognition. But kissing was as far as it ever went. He was, he told me, scarred emotionally by a former relationship, a dead dog, and something related to the Iraq War (which he had not, to my knowledge, fought in). I liked his apartment. He had blown-glass lamps, a graying black lab, a refrigerator full of Perrier. He kept his home office neat, a chalkboard with his ideas scrawled on it the only decoration. Driving through a rainstorm one night we hydroplaned, and he grabbed my leg like a dad would. We took a hike in Malibu and shared ice cream. I stayed with him while he had walking pneumonia, heating soup and pouring him glass after glass of ginger ale and feeling his fevered forehead as he slept. He warned me of the life that was coming for me if I wasn’t careful. Success was a scary thing for a young person, he said. I was twenty-four and he was thirty-three (“Jesus’s age,” he reminded me more than a few times). There was something tender about him, broken and gentle, and I could imagine that sex with him might be similar. I wouldn’t have to pretend like I did with other guys. Maybe we would both cry. Maybe it would feel just as good as sharing a bed.
On Valentine’s Day, I put on lace underwear and begged him to please, finally, have sex with me. The litany of excuses he presented in response was comic in its tragedy: “I want to get to know you.” “I don’t have a condom.” “I’m scared, because I just like you too much.” He took an Ambien and fell asleep, arm over my side, and as I lay there, wide awake and itchy in my lingerie set, it occurred to me: this was humiliating, unsexy, and, worst sin of all, boring. This wasn’t comfort. This was paralysis. This was distance passing for connection. I was being desexualized in slow motion, becoming a teddy bear with breasts.
I was a working woman. I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect. And I could afford a cab home. So I called one, and his sad dog with the Hebrew name watched me hop his fence and pace at the curbside until my taxi came.
Here’s who it’s okay to share a bed with:
Your sister if you’re a girl, your brother if you’re a boy, your mom if you’re a girl, and your dad if you’re under twelve or he’s over ninety. Your best friend. A carpenter you picked up at the key-lime-pie stand in Red Hook. A bellhop you met in the business center of a hotel in Colorado. A Spanish model, a puppy, a kitten, one of those domesticated minigoats. A heating pad. An empty bag of pita chips. The love of your life.
Here’s who it’s not okay to share a bed with:
Anyone who makes you feel like you’re invading their space. Anyone who tells you that they “just can’t be alone right now.” Anyone who doesn’t make you feel like sharing a bed is the coziest and most sensual activity they could possibly be undertaking (unless, of course, it is one of the aforementioned relatives; in that case, they should act lovingly but also reserved/slightly annoyed).
Now, look over at the person beside you. Do they meet these criteria? If not, remove them or remove yourself. You’re better off alone.
1. “My nickname in high school was Blow-Job Lena, but because I gave NO blow jobs! Like when you call a fat guy Skinny Joe.”
2. “I only get BO in one armpit. Swear. Same with my mother.”
3. “I once woke up in the middle of sex with a virtual stranger!”
4. “Let’s meet for coffee, yeah. Well, not coffee coffee. Like a different drink, because coffee gave me a colon infection and I had to wear this paper underwear the hospital gave me.”
5. “Not to sound like a total hippie, but I cured my HPV with acupuncture.”
6. “He had no legs, and HE wasn’t into ME. But that’s not why we stopped being friends.”
7. “I’ve never seen Star Wars OR The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.”
8. “I was a really chubby teenager, covered in a thick layer of grease. Seriously, I’ll show you a picture.”
9. “You should come over. My dad is super funny.”
10. “I’m the kind of person who should probably date older guys, but I can’t deal with their balls.”
11. “I’m obsessed with the curtains in your van!”
12. “Come to my party! We can’t talk or make noise because my neighbor is dying, but I spent a ton of money on salami.”
13. “Get closer to my belly button. Does this look like shingles, scabies, both, or neither?”
14. “This one time, I thought I was petting my hairless cat, and it was actually my mom’s vagina. Over the covers, of course!”
15. “Sorry if my breath is kind of metallic. It’s my medication. Weird fact: I’m on the highest dose of this stuff on record.”
16. “I seriously don’t care if you shoplift.”
17. “I appreciate that you didn’t point out my huge weight loss. It’s exhausting, everyone being like ‘How did you do it? Blah-blah-blah.’ ”
18. “My sister went back inside, so I think we’re safe. Wanna sit on the rock that doesn’t have algae? Or the algae one is fine, too.”
THE COMPUTERS just show up one day. We come in from recess, and there they are, seven gray boxes on a long table in the fifth-floor hallway.
“We got computers!” our teacher announces. “And they are going to help us learn!”
Everyone is buzzing, but I am immediately suspicious. What is so great about our hall being full of ugly squat robots? Why is everyone cheering like idiots? What can we learn from these machines that we can’t from our teachers?
The boys especially are transfixed, spending every free moment tap-tap-tapping on the keyboards, playing a simplistic game that involves stacking blocks in an effort to make them explode. I stay away. I have only touched one other computer, at my friend Marissa’s house, and found the experience disconcerting.
There was something sinister about the green letters and numbers that flashed on the screen as the computer booted up, and I hated the way Marissa stopped answering questions or noticing me the second it was turned on.
My distaste for computers has an almost-political fervor: they’re changing our society, I say, and for the worse. Let’s act human. Converse. Use our handwriting. I ask to be excused from typing class, where we use a program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to learn which finger should touch which letter. (Pinkie on P, she says. Pinkie on P.) While the others try to please Mavis, I write in my notebook.
At parent-teacher conferences my teacher tells my mother and father that I show “a real hostility toward technology.” She wishes I was willing to “embrace new developments in the classroom.” When my mother announces we will be getting one of our own at home, I go to my room and turn on the tiny black-and-white TV I bought at a yard sale, refusing to come out for over an hour.
It arrives one evening after school, an Apple with a monitor the size of a moving box. A guy with a ponytail installs it, shows my mother how to use the CD-ROM drive, and asks if I want to see the “preinstalled” games. I shake my head: No. No, I don’t.
But the computer exerts a magnetic pull, sitting there in the middle of our living room, humming ever so slightly. I watch as my babysitter walks my sister through a game of Oregon Trail, only to have her entire digital family die of dysentery before they can ford the river. My mother types a Word document with her two pointer fingers. “Don’t you want to try it?” she asks.
Finally, the temptation is too great. I want to try, to see what all the fuss is about, but I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I already went back on being a vegetarian and was so ashamed I told the girls at lunch that my sandwich was tofu prosciutto. I have to be true to myself. I can’t keep rejiggering my identity, and hating computers is a part of my identity. One day my mother is in her bedroom organizing her shoes, and the coast is clear. I walk into the living room, sit down in the cold metal office chair, and slowly extend my finger toward the power button. Listen to it boot up, ping, and purr. I feel an exhilarating sense of trespass.
In fifth grade we all get screen names. We message with one another, but we also go to chat rooms, digital hangouts with names like Teen Hang and A Place for Friends. It takes me a little while to wrap my head around the idea of anonymity. Of people I can’t see who can’t see me. Of being seen without being seen at all. Katie Pomerantz and I jointly take on the persona of a fourteen-year-old model named Mariah, who has flowing black hair, B-cup breasts, and an endless supply of smiley faces. Aware of Mariah’s incredible power, we ensnare boys, promising them we are beautiful, popular, and looking for love, as well as rich off of our teen-model earnings. We giggle as we take turns typing, reveling in our power. At one point, we ask a boy in Delaware to check the tag of his jeans and tell us the brand.
“They’re Wrangler,” he writes back. “My mom got them at Walmart.”
Feverish with triumph, we log out.
Juliana is new to ninth grade. She doesn’t know anyone, but she has the confidence of someone who has been popular since kindergarten. She’s a punk: her nose is pierced, and her hair is spiked. She wears a homemade T-shirt that reads leftover crack, and her face is so beautiful that sometimes I can’t help but imagine it superimposed over my own. Juliana is a vegan for political reasons and seems to genuinely enjoy music without a melody. When she tells me that she’s had sex—in an alleyway, no less, with a twenty-year-old guy—it takes me a week to recover.
“I was wearing a skirt, so he just pulled my underwear to the side,” she says, as casually as if she were telling me what her mom made for dinner.
Two months into school she uses her fake ID to get a tattoo, a nautical star on the back of her neck, the lines thick and inelegant.
I ask to run my fingers over the scab, unable to believe this will exist forever.
A lot of Juliana’s punk friends live in New Jersey, where she often goes on the weekends for “shows.” At lunch, we look at their homemade Angelfire.com websites, one of which has an image of a decomposing baby carcass on the home page. But mostly they post pictures of themselves sweaty and piled high in front of makeshift stages. It’s hard to tell who’s in the band and who is just hanging out. She points out Shane, a pretty blond she has a crush on. His website is called Str8OuttaCompton, a reference I won’t get for another ten years. In one of Shane’s photos, a picture of a concert in a cramped basement, I notice a boy, tan with chubby cheeks and vacant blue eyes, moshing off to the side, a bandanna tied around his head. “Who’s that?” I ask.
“His name is Igor,” Juliana tells me. “He’s Russian. Vegan, too. He’s really nice.”
“He’s cute,” I say.
That night, an instant-message bubble pops up from Pyro0001. I accept.
Pyro0001: Hey, it’s Igor.
For the next three months, Igor and I instant message for hours every night. I get home around three thirty, and he comes home at four, so I make myself a snack and wait for his name to appear. I want to let him say “hey” first, but usually I can’t wait that long. We talk about animals. About school. About the injustices of the world, most of them directed at innocent animals who can’t defend themselves against the evils of humanity. He’s a man of few words, but the words he uses are perfect to me.
I am no longer opposed to the computer. I am in love with it.
No guys like me at school. Some ignore me while others are outright cruel, but none want to kiss me. I’m still distraught over a seventh-grade breakup and refuse to attend parties I know my ex will be at. At this point, my heartbreak has lasted twenty-four times as long as our relationship.
Igor wants to see a photo of me, so I send him one of me against my bedroom wall, on which I have drawn trees and nudes with a Sharpie. My hair hangs in a yellow, flat-ironed curtain, and I am cracking a glossy half smile. Igor says I look like Christina Aguilera. He’s a punk, so it seems more like a factual assessment than a compliment, but I am thrilled.
We message through dinner, through fights with our parents. He describes how quiet it is when he gets home, how his parents aren’t back until eight. He says “brb” when he goes to the door to get his delivery dinner, which is usually eggplant parm minus the parm. He tells me that he goes to the kind of school that has popular kids and losers, jocks, and freaks. A big public school with a class full of strangers. My school is supposed to be different, small and creative and inclusive, but sometimes I feel just as isolated as he does. I start describing kids at school as “bimbos” and “fakes,” words I never would have thought to use before he introduced them. Words he’ll understand and that will draw him to me.
When I go on vacation with my family, I ask the hotel office to let me use the computer so I can send Igor an email on Valentine’s Day. He tells me he doesn’t want to send me a new picture of himself because he’s had “some pimples” lately. My father is irritated that I take the time away from the beach to sit in a windowless office with a woman smoking Newports and send love notes to someone I’ve never met. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t even have email.
Juliana says that Igor’s friend Shane says that Igor says he really likes me. This emboldens me to ask him to talk on the phone. He seems eager and takes my number but never calls. Juliana says she thinks he may be self-conscious about his accent.
Trixiebelle86: If u don’t like the fone may-b we cud meet in person?
He agrees to meet me the following Saturday on Saint Mark’s Place. He’ll take the train in, and we’ll find each other on the corner. I go, in a tank top, cargo pants, and a shrunken denim jacket, even though it’s freezing. I’m so nervous, I arrive twenty minutes early. He isn’t there yet. I wait another half hour, but he never comes. I try and look relaxed as pierced NYU kids and pink-haired Asian girls stream past me. I go home and log on, but he isn’t there either.
The next day, he messages me:
Pyro0001: Sorry. Gro
unded. May-B sum other time.
Gradually, Igor stops messaging me. When he does make contact, it’s only to respond. He never initiates. Every time that ping sounds, signaling a message, I run to the computer, hoping it’s him. But it’s only John, a kid from a nearby school who excels at break dancing, or my friend Stephanie, complaining about her Peruvian father’s strict rules about skirt length. Igor doesn’t ask me any questions anymore. Our relationship had hummed with possibility: the possibility of meeting, of liking each other even more in person than we did online, of falling in love with each other’s eyes and smell and sneakers. Now it’s over before it began. I wonder whether I can consider him an ex.
One day, in late summer, Juliana IMs me.
Northernstar2001: Lena Igor is dead.
Trixiebelle86: What???
Northernstar2001: Shane IMd me. He had a methadone overdose, choked on his own tongue in his basement. Its fukked. He’s an only child and his parents don’t like speak English.
Trixiebelle86: Did Shane say if Igor stopped liking me?
I’m not sure who to tell because I’m not sure who will care, and I don’t want to explain the whole thing to anyone. It was impossible for my parents to understand the reality of Igor when he was alive, so why would they get it when he was dead?