by Lena Dunham
I don’t think I met a Republican until I was nineteen, when I shared an ill-fated evening of lovemaking with our campus’s resident conservative, who wore purple cowboy boots and hosted a radio show called Real Talk with Jimbo. All I knew when I stumbled home from a party behind him was that he was sullen, thuggish, and a poor loser at poker. How that led to intercourse was a study in the way revulsion can quickly become desire when mixed with the right muscle relaxants. Midintercourse on the moldy dorm rug, I looked up into my roommate Sarah’s potted plant and noticed something dangling. I tried to make out its shape, and then I realized—it was the condom. Mr. Face for Radio had flung the prophylactic into our tiny palm tree, thinking I was too dumb, drunk, or eager to call him on it.
“I think …? The condom’s …? In the tree?” I muttered feverishly.
“Oh,” he said, like he was as shocked as I was. He reached for it as if he was going to put it back on, but I was already up, stumbling toward my couch, which was the closest thing to a garment I could find. I told him he should probably go, chucking his hoodie and boots out the door with him. The next morning, I sat in a shallow bath for half an hour like someone in one of those coming-of-age movies.
He didn’t say hi to me on campus the next day, and I didn’t even know if I wanted him to. He graduated in December, and with him so did 86 percent of Oberlin’s Republican population. I channeled my feelings of shame into a short experimental film called Condom in a Tree (a classic!) and determined that the next time I was penetrated it would be a more respectful situation.
That’s when I met Geoff.
Geoff was a senior, a fair-haired meditator who once cried in my parents’ hammock because, he told me, “You are forcing sex when I just want to be heard.” He had his low points.2 But for the most part, he nurtured and supported me. We loved each other in a calm, gentle, and equal way. Geoff was not a jerk, but he also wasn’t for me.
We broke up, as most college couples do. I spent the next month bedridden, unable to stomach anything but mac and cheese. Even my patient father grew tired of my cartoonish heartbreak. But at my first postcollege job in a downtown restaurant, I met a different kind of guy. Joaquin was almost ten years older than me, born in Philadelphia, and possessed a swagger that seemed unearned, considering he was wearing a FUCKING FEDORA. His body was long and lean, and he dressed like Marlon Brando in Streetcar. He was my overlord, a cynical foodie whose favorite maxims included “It would suck to live past forty-five.” Even though he had a girlfriend, we flirted. The flirting consisted of him questioning my general intelligence and noting my lack of spatial awareness and then winking to let me know it was all in good fun. One night someone took a shit not in the toilet but on the floor in front of it.
“I hope you know you’re cleaning that up,” he said.
I didn’t do it, but I sort of liked being told to. Joaquin was absolutely impertinent and, despite my “why I oughta!” faux consternation, I was melting. He was Snidely Whiplash, and I was the innocent girl tied to the tracks, but I didn’t want Dudley Do-Right to come.
We started emailing. Mine were long and overwrought, trying to show him how dark my sense of humor was (I can make an incest joke!) and how much I knew about Roman Polanski. His were brief, and I could read both nothing and everything into them. He never even signed his name. On the night I quit, we met after work and smoked some pot I had hunted down specifically for the occasion. I didn’t have rolling papers (because I didn’t smoke pot!) so we wrapped it in a page of Final Cut Pro for Dummies. When I tried to kiss him, he told me he shouldn’t—not because he had a girlfriend, but because he was already sleeping with a different hostess. We went out to a twenty-four-hour Pakistani restaurant and, having been rejected, I was hungry for the first time in days. We ate our naan in silence.
We maintained our version of a friendship until finally, the following June, we kissed in the street outside the restaurant. I was disappointed by how hard his lips were and how silent he was once he had an erection.
What followed was two years of on-and-off ambiguous sex hangouts, increasingly perverse in their execution and often involving prescription drugs I’d hoarded from my parents’ various oral surgeries. He’d ignore me for months on end, during which time I’d ride the subway in a beret imagining I saw him getting on at every stop. When he did invite me over, his house was a suckhole. If I fell asleep there, it was often noon the next day before I got out the door. In the street I’d blink at the flat Brooklyn sunlight, cold to my bones.
This relationship culminated in the worst trip to Los Angeles ever seen outside of a David Lynch film. We spent four days in the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi’s ghost makes the tub run funny and they’re mean to you if you ask for a spoon. Highlights included him never touching me once, me falling asleep wearing only a thigh-high boot that belonged to my mother, and his confession that he didn’t think he knew how to care about another person.
As I gained some traction in my creative pursuits, I thought his respect for me would grow, but all it did was provide me with more money to slip out of dinner with friends and take a cab to his house. I hoped nobody asked me where I was going so I wouldn’t be forced to lie. We had sex one or two times after our LA excursion, but my heart wasn’t in it. If my heart was even in it before.
If I was writing this then, I would have glamorized the whole story for you—told you how misunderstood Joaquin was and how he was just as sad, scared, and lonely as the rest of us. I would have laughed as I described all the weird sexual liberties I let him take and his general immaturity (unassembled bed frame blocking the front door, cigar box full of cash, condoms in random pockets). Before entering Joaquin’s house I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they? I thought of myself as some kind of spy, undercover as a girl with low self-esteem, bringing back detailed intelligence reports on the dark side for girls with boyfriends who looked like lesbians and watched Friday Night Lights with them while eating takeout. They could have their supportive relationships and typical little love stories. I’d be Sid and Nancy–ing it up, refusing to settle for the status quo. I’d be cool.
I had a lucky little girlhood. It wasn’t always easy to live inside my brain, but I had a family that loved me, and we didn’t have to worry about much except what gallery to go to on Sunday and whether or not my child psychologist was helping with my sleep issues. Only when I got to college did it dawn on me that maybe my upbringing hadn’t been very “real.” One night outside my freshman dorm, a bunch of kids were smoking and shrieking with laughter, so I rushed outside in my pajamas, eager to join the fray.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Gary Pralick, who always wore a sweater knit by his great-grandmother (I later learned she was only seventy-nine). “Don’t you worry about it, Little Lena from Soho.”
What a snarky jerk. (Obviously, I later slept with him.) I tried my best to dismiss the comment, but it nagged at me, crept in during that nightly moment between eating three slices of pizza and being asleep. What was it that I couldn’t understand and how could I understand it, short of moving to a war-torn nation? I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had experiences to gain, things to learn. That feeling was the crux of my whole relationship with Joaquin.
Well, friends, learning about the “world” is not pretending you’re a hooker while a guy from the part of New Jersey that’s near Pennsylvania decides which Steely Dan record to put on at 4:00 A.M. The secrets of life aren’t being revealed when someone laughs at you for having studied creative writing. There is no enlightenment to be gained from letting your semiboyfriend’s bald friend touch your thigh too close to the place where it meets your crotch, but you let it happen because you think you might be in love. How else can you explain why you’ve spent so much money getting to his house?
The first few times Joaquin and I had sex, it was quick and a little sad. The overhead
lights buzzed. He didn’t look at me, and afterward he didn’t linger. I wondered if it was somehow my fault. Maybe I was a dead fish, uncreative in the sack, paralyzed by my desperation to please. Maybe I was destined to lie there like a slab until I was too old for intercourse.
Then, the night before Thanksgiving, I met him at a bar in Queens. Wearing fishnets and a little gray skirt-suit from J. C. Penney, I was dressed like a hooker dressed as an insurance broker. But something about the outfit inspired him, and he looked at me with a new kind of hunger that drove us back toward his house, where he kissed me on the couch, determined, maybe a little pissed. He guided me to the bed, where he turned me on my stomach. Alcohol, fear, and fascination cloud my memory, but I know my tights were balled up and placed in my mouth. I didn’t know where he was in the room at certain points, until I did. And he spoke to me, unleashing streams of the filthiest shit I had ever heard leave another human’s mouth. Impressive in its narrative intricacy, and horrifying in its predilections. This, I decided to believe, is the best game I’ve ever played.
I walked out into the street the next day bare legged and reeling, not sure whether I’d been ruined or awoken.
But I got no closer to enlightenment hiding in a bodega down the block from Joaquin’s house, pretending to be at a cool party “kinda near your place.” He was busy. With his other girlfriend, who, he told me, was “very well raised and even her dirty underwear smells clean.” Why did I keep calling? Because I was waiting for his mind to change, for him to talk to me the way my father does or the way Geoff did, even in our darkest hour. Intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn’t want to be spoken to like that. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left. After a long post-California cooling-off period, Joaquin and I fell in love for a week. At least that’s what it felt like. It was October, still warm, with a near-constant drizzle. I had a new leather blazer, bought with my first paycheck. With its silver grommets and wide lapel, it made every outfit feel like a uniform from the future. We met for drinks, and he hugged me tightly. We talked about Los Angeles, how sad it had gotten, and the fact that we were better off as friends. We lingered, drink after drink, then at his house we agreed friends could have intercourse if they didn’t kiss at all, Pretty Woman style. The next morning he rolled toward me and not away. He texted a few hours later to say he’d enjoyed the evening. It was like a miracle.
Two days later we met for a movie. I wore the jacket again, and he bought me a hamburger—he is the one who ended my vegetarian streak, for which I will be forever grateful because I grow strong on the blood of animals. He walked close to me, and I realized it was the first time he’d taken ownership of me in the street. Back in my bedroom at my house—my parents were away—we laughed and talked and returned to kissing. This is what it could have been like. This is what it had never been like. And so I was angry.
Emboldened by my new life as a woman with a meaningful job and a good jacket, I told Joaquin to fuck off forever. Well, I told him via the Internet. After the best night we had ever had, the first night he’d let me feel like myself, I wrote him an email saying he had hurt me, taken advantage of my affection, and made me feel disposable. I told him that wasn’t a way I was interested in being treated and that I wouldn’t be available any longer. And then I made myself sick to my stomach waiting for an apology that never came.
After sending that email, I only slept in his bed one more time, wearing a full sweatsuit. Baby steps.
When I’m playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the takeaway message of the scenes I’m performing—after all, part of the dramatic conflict is that the person I’m portraying doesn’t really know it yet. So let me do it here: I thought that I was smart enough, practical enough, to separate what Joaquin said I was from what I knew I was. The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that knew I deserved more. Different. Better.
But that isn’t how it works. When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.
I told myself I’d asked for it. After all, Joaquin never said he’d break up with his girlfriend. He let me know from the start that he was a rebel and a tell-it-like-it-is-onator. He never even told me he’d call. But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other. As a friend recently complained to me of the lawyer she was dating: “How could someone who cares so much about social justice care so little about my feelings?” I told her about my belief in this promise. That it is right, and it is real. Joaquin didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. And I didn’t learn anything about life that I hadn’t learned in Soho.
* * *
1 I think Joan and I are talking about slightly different sorts of self-respect. She’s referring to a general sense of accountability for one’s actions and a feeling that you’re being truthful with yourself when you lay your head down at night. I’m more talking about sex. But also what she said.
2• The time we took ecstasy and, right before it hit, he asked me what my thoughts on open relationships were. Cut to twelve hours of sobbing, not the eight-hour orgasm my friend Sophie had described.
• The time he made me drive three hours to his friend’s birthday party, then was too socially anxious to enter it.
• The time he invented a purple cat that lived in his cupboard and made general mischief. Or was this a high point?
I’M AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR.
Because I add an invented detail to almost every story I tell about my mother. Because my sister claims every memory we “share” has been fabricated by me to impress a crowd. Because I get “sick” a lot. Because I use the same low “duhhh” voice for every guy I’ve ever known, except for the put-off adult voice I use to imitate my dad. But mostly because in another essay in this book I describe a sexual encounter with a mustachioed campus Republican as the upsetting but educational choice of a girl who was new to sex when, in fact, it didn’t feel like a choice at all.
I’ve told the story to myself in different variations—there are a few versions of it rattling around in my memory, even though the nature of events is that they only happen once and in one way. The day after, every detail was crisp (or as crisp as anything can be when the act was committed in a haze of warm beer, Xanax bits, and poorly administered cocaine). Within weeks, it was a memory I turned away from, like the time I came around the corner of the funeral home and saw my grandpa laid out in an open coffin in his navy uniform.
The latest version is that I remember the parts I can remember. I wake up into it. I don’t remember it starting, and then we are all over the carpet, Barry and I, no clear geography to the act. In the dusty half-light of a college-owned apartment I see a pale, flaccid penis coming toward my face and the feeling of air and lips in places I didn’t know were exposed. The refrain I hear again and again in my head, a self-soothing mechanism of sorts, is: This is what grown-ups do.
In my life I’ve had two moments when I felt cool, and both involved being new in school. The first time was in seventh grade, when I switched from a Quaker school in Manhattan to an arts school in Brooklyn. At Qu
aker school I had been a vague irritant, the equivalent of a musical-theater kid, only I couldn’t sing, just read the Barbra Streisand biography and ate prosciutto sandwiches, alone in my corner of the cafeteria, relishing solitude like a divorcée at a sidewalk café in Rome. But at my new school, I was cool. My hair was highlighted. I had platform shoes. I had a denim jacket and a novelty pin that said who lit the fuse on your tampon? Boys had other boys come up to me and tell me they liked me. I told one Chase Dixon, computer expert with lesbian moms, that I just wasn’t ready to be in a relationship. People loved my poetry. But after a little while, the sheen of newness faded, and I was, once again, just a B- or even C-level member of the classroom ecology.
The second time I was cool was when I transferred colleges, fleeing a disastrous situation at a school ten blocks from my home to a liberal arts haven in the cornfields of Ohio. I was again blond, again in possession of a stylish jacket—this one a smart green-and-white-striped peacoat made in Japan—and I was showered with attention by people who also seemed to like my poetry.
One of my first self-defining acts, upon arrival, was to join the staff of The Grape, a publication that took undue pride in being the alternative newspaper at an alternative college. I wrote porn reviews (“Anal Annie and the Willing Husbands is weird because the lead has a lisp”), scathing indictments of Facebook culture (“Stephan Markowitz’s party journal is meant to make freshmen feel alone”), and a hard-hitting investigative report on the flooding of the Afrikan Heritage House dorm. One of the editors at the paper, Mike, intrigued me immediately, a six-foot-four senior with Napoleon Dynamite glasses but the swagger of a frat boy and the darkness of Ryan Gosling. He lived in Renson Cottage, a campus-owned Victorian famous for having been the college home of Liz Phair.