24
Tinder
M: 28
Some people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. I’m thinking of those drivers who try to be super-nicey-nicey—Hi! Look at me! I’m a nice person!—prissy morons who leave a trail of confused and pissed-off people in their wake and, not infrequently, accidents.
What’s that? I have the right of way at a four-way stop? I won’t take it, because that would look greedy. Instead, I’ll sit here not moving until the other person decides to go, and just then, I’ll start driving and fuck things up. And then they’ll yell at me, but in my heart I know I made the world a better place.
Today I screech to a halt at a four-way stop. I’m in a hurry, but I stop nonetheless, and this soccer mom in a white Toyota minivan to my right should obviously be going first, but she just sits there—so, okay, if you’re that clueless, then I’ll just turn left in front of you. Have a nice life, you ill-trained, useless deadweight.
I mean, what taught you to behave like such a hesitant little doormat? Was it 9/11? Was it ISIS? Was it COVID? Was it—fuck that. Maybe you just want to pretend you’re that goody-goody woman in a sugary TV ad for some unnecessary product like air fresheners. Go for it. Ooh! Look at me! Little twinkly stars are following me as I walk around a perfect world!
Then I see that this useless soccer mom is tailgating me as I get on the freeway, and I feel sad that, after having been so useless, this victimy driver has decided to ride my ass as if it’s going to change my mind about doormatty chimps like her. I speed away and that’s that.
Me: 1
Human Race: 0
F: 34
I’m at the four-way stop when some jerk lunges into it like he has the right of way, which he doesn’t, because I do. So I take my sweet time, but the sociopathic idiot turns left in front of me even though it’s totally not his turn. Where do people like him get off acting like the world owes them a crown and scepter? So I follow him onto the freeway and tail him for awhile, but he’s too fast for me.
*Poof *
Gone.
Jerk.
M: 28
Before I meet anyone from Tinder, I always do a real-world check to make sure they’re not psycho: I put their photo into Google images to see if they stole it from someone else, and then I scour Facebook and Google for any dirt I can find. Most of the time, I end up with a reasonably hot, slightly drunk woman, and a reasonably good lay. Of course, like anyone, I’ve had a few crazies I instantly ghost. “Do you want to scientifically draw my pussy before you enter it?” Brrrrrr. Everything is 100 percent apps, and I love eye contact and flirting. For me it’s the sexiest thing of all.
So anyway, I finished doing my last-minute checks in my car out in front of the Starbucks, and then I sucked in a breath and pushed through the door.
“You!?” I hissed.
“Me? What? Wait—was that you driving like a jerk back there?”
“No, it was me driving like a confident human being.”
“No, it was you driving like you own the road, which you don’t.”
“No, it was me reacting to Miss Priss taking her sweet time to exercise her right of way, so I took it for you.”
“So I was a bit slow. Whoop-de-doo.”
“You weren’t a bit slow. You were being a hostage-taker.”
“I—I what?”
“Dawdling with your thumb up your ass while you hold real drivers in real cars hostage.”
“You actually think like that?”
“Don’t deflect it back to me. The need to hold strangers hostage in day-to-day situations is the second-biggest indicator of psychopathy after the impulse to remove the wings from flies.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Being a bit defensive, are we?”
“I—wait…you’re wearing a red plaid shirt. You’re the one I’m supposed to be meeting here.”
“Holy shit! You’re saying you’re the same woman in that photo you sent me? You look nothing like your photo.”
“Well, neither do you. You said you had a toned body and a swimmer’s build. You look like you eat exclusively from vending machines.”
“You said you were twenty-eight. There’s no way you’re twenty-eight.”
“So I fudged it. Everyone does. You certainly do.”
“Deflecting again. Nice try.”
“You’re probably into sick shit. I can tell.”
“Can you?”
“I bet you want to get me pass-out drunk and then knife me and stuff my body into that cargo carrier on top of your car. And then you’ll drive around for days knowing I’m up there, yet another one of your dead conquests.”
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?”
“Actually—I am.”
“I kind of am too.”
“Tall Pike Place Roast, no sugar, no dairy?”
“Dairy? No way. Dairy is the devil.”
“It is. I stopped eating it three months ago, and my skin cleared up and my sleep is great now.”
“I can’t believe you just quit dairy too.”
“Look, the vegan lemon loaf is on sale.”
“Sweet! I’m buying.”
25
NSFL
I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I wondered if something fishy was going on. Wait—do I want some coffee? No. It might interfere with my meds. I’m super-clear right now, so I want to get this done before I go fuzzy again.
So, yeah, it was my junior year and I was in detention for being a wiseass in class. I was Mr. Wiseguy back then. Hard to believe when you look at me now, I know. It was just me in detention and I was reading an Archie comic, wondering why schools even bother with detentions, because they sure don’t change people, just bore them to death.
So I was reading this Archie comic and Mr. Hart, my football coach, who was supervising detention, came over and sat on top of the desk in front of me, which was kind of creepy because his jock was right there inside his shorts at my eye level, and he looked at the comic and smiled. “You know, every time Archie sees Betty or Veronica he’s always surrounded by cartoon hearts,” he said, “but the real truth of it is that the hearts ought to be boners, because that’s what’s really going on there.” I laughed because, I mean, it’s true. He rubbed me on the back of my head and said, “Detention’s over,” and I said, “Yes, sir,” and that’s when it began.
I don’t want this to sound like porn. It’s so seedy, and I can’t get any of it out of my head no matter how I try, and it’s been over a decade now. I mean, man, how did that fucker get so inside my head? My family’s pretty normal and I have a great dad, so it wasn’t like I was looking for a father figure or anything. Anyway, pretty quickly, Mr. Hart became something I could never tell my father about precisely because Dad is such a great guy.
Actually, can I get a bottle of water or something? Thanks. Sorry for the hassle.
* * *
—
Online they use the term NSFW for things that are unsuitable to open at work, but there’s another expression they have, NSFL, meaning Not Safe for Life, which flags things that you can never unsee after you see them. All my Mr. Hart stuff was NSFL. I’ve already said more here than I’ve said anywhere ever. If it wasn’t for these new meds, I don’t know what would have happened to me.
He did all that grooming shit with me. I got to sit beside him when we bused to games. He became friends with my folks. He shared his hotel room with me to save my parents money, he said. He was always telling me how great I was, and he listened to all my problems, and he became the closest friend you could ever hope to have. I dropped my other friends, kids my own age, because Mr. Hart said I needed to totally focus my energy on helping the team win the state championships. I was his quarterback.
I’m not going to share the pervy shit he did. I’ll just say that the first time was in a mot
el in Denver where they magically only had a double bed for the two of us. And then he…oh man…he came on to me about the way in which men become champions, and the energy and responsibility they have to the other men who came before them. I fell for it. I’m not going into details. You can probably imagine. I should stop here, maybe.
How long did it go on for?
Maybe a year, until it became clear we weren’t going to get to the state finals, and then he was suddenly too busy to see me. It wasn’t like he was ghosting me, but all of the stuff he’d done to show me he was really my friend was just him covering his ass for when he dumped me. He knew I couldn’t accuse him of doing all the shit he did. What was I going to say?
Was I planning on killing him? No. I dropped by my old high school’s fair, trying to scrape a few good memories out of that dump. I was kind of doing okay, watching these two smartass kids run some kind of Lego challenge where you could win a Starbucks card. I guess I started whistling—I’m not even aware I’m doing it when I do—and one of them said, “Tuneless whistling? You know, it sounds to me like someone here got molested by their football coach.” How the hell did that kid nail it? I basically lost it.
I knew where Coach Hart lived. All the shit he’d done to me during those years, how could I not? In no time I was climbing over the fence into his backyard, cutting my hands on some nails protruding from the wood, but not really feeling a thing. It was like I was a zombie in a zombie apocalypse. Then I saw that every single item in the yard, including the pool and all the pool furniture, was still the same as it was in 2010. It felt like at any moment he was going to walk out in his bathrobe and give me a champ’s massage.
You know what happened next. I’m pissed I didn’t get the job done. I expected to find something sharp in the garden hut at least, but all I could find were some tiki torches.
How am I ever supposed to unsee all the shit he did to me? Oh, be a man and get over it. Well, it doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t. Even if I had killed him, I wouldn’t have been able to forget.
26
Gender Reveal Party
I’M NOT SURE IF IT was ultimately a good thing, but here’s how it went down.
The four of us had been isolating for six weeks and were going squirrely like everyone else. Time dragged and then it magically sped up and then it dragged again. We basically abandoned the kids to play their brainless video games while Christian and I drank way too much. When we weren’t drinking, I made lumpy sourdough baguettes and Christian locked himself in his workshop in the basement, a sort of isolation within an isolation. Families aren’t meant to spend so much time together. They really aren’t.
Are we nice people? Somewhat. We’re not churchy or squeaky clean. We cared enough about each other at least to try to make it work. We didn’t think we had any big issues to deal with, at least. My friend has a drug-addicted son who lasted about four days in lockdown before he took off. He slithered home a couple weeks later, coughing and feverish, and, of course, his family took him in and soon everyone was sick. What were they thinking? They should have locked him outside and thrown rocks at him from the windows. Instead, he got a hug and a houseful of people to infect.
Maybe if the virus had actually turned people into zombies, we could have seen the real impact. It would have made isolating feel a lot more purposeful if we were fighting off zombie hordes. Sometimes the whole pandemic felt like another Y2K. I knew people were dying, but for a long time I didn’t know anyone who had. Maybe I’m retroactively justifying.
The first thing that happened to shake up our new normal was that the parents of our kids’ friends bought a trampoline and posted videos of their kids having the most fun any human being has ever had at any time in human history. Our kids, Brandon and Kellie, had only ever seen trampolines on TV and were desperate to go over and jump on this one, but Christian and I said no effing way. We thought elasticized nylon trampoline material was the equivalent of an IKEA ball pit. The kids might as well go to the mall and lick the escalator handrails.
But it’s all about temptation, right?
One afternoon, my best friend, Macy, was having an online gender reveal party. We’ve known each other since kindergarten, and I was really sad she couldn’t throw a real-life celebration. I’d spent half of my isolation Zooming along with her and my Chardonnay collection. The thought of not being with her in person at this big moment was too much to bear. So…I told my family I needed to take a sanity walk, a long walk of at least three miles. Nobody even gave me a second glance as I went out the door.
The stroll to Macy’s was nice. If I squinted my brain, I could almost pretend it was normal everyday life again. When I got to her place, she was so happy to see me. I sat in her little courtyard area with only a glass sliding door between us—much better than a computer screen, that’s for sure. When she set a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a glass outside her door for me, I teared up at the sight. I poured myself a glass, then toasted her through the window, and I lost all track of time.
It turns out that while I was gone, Christian also went out for a “mental health walk.” His was a booty call with his personal assistant, Janeen, who lived in a condo about a mile in the opposite direction from Macy’s place. He told the kids the same thing I did: “Off to do a walk, just like your mom!”
Christian was gone for maybe ninety seconds before the kids hopped on their bikes and teleported to the trampoline. To their credit, they did stay six feet away from their friends, and took turns, but after an hour or so of bouncing, Kellie got motion sickness and had to go sit on our friends’ deck until she got over it. Brandon kept bouncing and, like me and Christian, the kids lost all track of time.
Pretty much the moment the kids left, the soldering iron in Christian’s workshop short-circuited and eventually set the house on fire. Ours was an old wooden house and was basically a torch. I noticed the smoke and heard the sirens as I walked home from Macy’s. Brandon and Kellie caught up with me just as I rounded the corner. We saw Christian coming from the opposite direction.
The beam at the top of the staircase fell into the basement. It looked like an orange Popsicle lit from within. The four of us stood in shock as we surveyed the glowing remains.
The fire chief approached. “You the folks who live here?”
“Yes. I—yes,” I said.
“All of you accounted for?”
“Yes…yes!”
“Were all of you out together?”
“Uh…yes.”
“Can you tell me where you all were?”
“Out for a walk,” I said.
“Okay.”
Christian said, “Me too.”
“It looked to me like you came from different directions.”
“We didn’t walk together.”
“Ma’am, why do you have blue confetti in your hair?”
Christian looked at me. “You have blue confetti in your hair?”
“I was at Macy’s gender reveal Zoom party. I was on the other side of a glass window the whole time!”
“Except when the confetti blew,” my husband said.
“Fuck off, Christian. Where the hell were you?”
“I actually went for a genuinely real sanity walk.”
The fire chief asked, “Sir, would CCTV cameras along the street confirm your story?”
Christian became flustered. “Uh, well, yes, I suppose.”
“Were either of your children with you?”
“No.”
I stared at them. “Where the hell were you two?”
“We went to use Sarah’s trampoline.”
“You what?”
* * *
—
None of us came out of this thing smelling like roses. Insurance did cover our losses, but we became the poster family for isolation-shaming on the cover of the suburb’s shoppers’ paper. “Local
Family a Cautionary Tale for Isolation Breakers.” The one good thing that came out of it was that we bought the kids a trampoline. Not much of a silver lining, but it’s something.
27
Dad-Dancing
HI. I HAVE TWO KIDS: Nate, who is fifteen, and Ella, seventeen. I am a complete dad’s dad. My dad bod has been sculpted by two decades of barbecues, takeout food and sleep deprivation. I make dad jokes and do all of that dad stuff that makes my kids cringe, especially when they have friends over. The kids and their friends will be downstairs listening to some boomp-boomp-boomp-bass-line modern crap music, and I’ll walk in and snap my fingers. “Hey, you know, this is really cool,” I’ll say. “I think I can really get into this. Turn it up louder. YOLO!” And then I dad-dance while they all look on in horror.
Here’s something else I do—or, at least, I did it once. Ella was having a sleepover, and she and her friends were in her room using a Ouija board. Right in the middle of what I knew was a really fraught moment (“Is the devil listening?”), I pulled the main fuse, plunging the house into darkness. You should have heard them scream! And then, when the lights were back on and they’d recovered enough to ask another question (“Evil, are you here in the room with us tonight?”), I pulled it again. Two of the sleepover guests called their parents to come pick them up early. So. Incredibly. Satisfying.
Still, I actually think that dad-dancing is my superpower. To be frank, I can’t stop myself when the urge hits. A little while ago, I was coming out of a Starbucks and there was some kid—at most twenty-one?—parked in the lot in a blinged-up car with his stereo blasting that anonymous algorithm-generated boompy noise that kids have been tricked into thinking is actual music.
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