We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

  At one point my boy came over to thank us for wolfing down his free food while making fun of his friends, and I was like, “Way to have only three black people at the party, David Duke.” He laughed and said, “I almost put you guys at the same table, but I thought it would have been too obvious.” It was a good thing he didn’t, because at that exact moment I glanced over to where ol’ girl and her man were waiting in the cake line and she glowered at me once again. I was like, “Who is that lady and what is her deal? Is this about her man? Because I can just go over there right now and tell her that I’m not feeling dude and she can keep her dirty looks to herself.” The last thing I ever want is a dude who is some other woman’s problem, because (1) I’m not a hater, and (2) I don’t need a bitch playing on my phone all night. Can’t we all just get along?!

  The big band in the corner started playing “Cheek to Cheek” and I took that as our cue to leave. We gave daps to the frat brothers at our table and took our customized cupcakes to go. People were lingering on the lawn outside the ballroom, chatting amiably about travel hockey and hating vaccines and other white things. We made our way to the parking lot, where men with stock portfolios clapped one another on the back and compared BMW interiors. It wasn’t even dark yet, but Amy pulled her dress over her head, showering the gravel below with sequins from 1995. She shimmied into her cargo pants and a plaid shirt as I painstakingly rolled my damp, expensive shapewear down over my lumps and bumps. I tossed it on the dashboard to dry out during the ride home and was circling around to the trunk to get my flip-flops to relieve my smashed toes when I saw it: a faded Bush-Cheney sticker on the back of Jerome’s grandma’s Buick. I hobbled over and cupped my hands to peer in the window in the fading daylight. A Walgreens bag with Flamin’ Hots and a can of Olive Oil Sheen Spray sat on the back seat: HELLO, NEMESIS.

  “I get it now!” I called out to Amy, who was sitting on her bumper packing a bowl for the ride home. “They’re Republicans! They hate us queers!” I wondered what the two of them had done during our intermission—enacted some legislation against impoverished children or maybe stripped some black people of their right to vote? It’s too bad they’d gotten away from us; I would have died to see their reactions back at Fort Sumter.

  Amy’s engine roared to life behind me and she tapped the horn twice. “Come on, hoss! Let’s go find you a drive-thru!” I took one last look inside the car (a Tim McGraw CD, really?!) and patted the hood. I climbed awkwardly into the truck and tried to find something good on the radio. Amy placed a cigarette between her teeth and passed the bowl across the seat to me. “Should I ram it?” she nodded toward their car. I shook my head and cranked up the music, remembering a quote from fake Abraham Lincoln on this old episode of Star Trek, marathons of which I used to watch on channel nine in the summer when I was little because I didn’t have any friends and I never went outside: “There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There’s nothing good in war except its ending.”

  Mavis

  I had ripped the tender flesh on my finger trying to open a piece of mail that wasn’t even fucking mine, a fancy wedding invitation on creamy heavyweight card stock intended for some girl named Alicia who lived downstairs in apartment 209. Blood splattered across the velvety envelope while I raced frantically around my kitchen, sucking my finger and snatching open drawers in search of your grandma’s favorite adhesive bandages, the thick stretchy fabric kind that conform to every wrinkly crevice.

  I am not OCD. I’m really not. Like, if I buy peaches? It is almost 100 percent guaranteed that a week later my kitchen will be humming with the low drone of ten thousand fruit flies. I bought this adorable fruit bowl and I put peaches in it because I like peaches, but then I probably got distracted by a gyro or some old chili and before you know it, a plague of tiny bugs is feasting on my rotten $7.98/pound Whole Foods white peaches. That would not happen to a meticulous person. I mean, really, sometimes I don’t even wipe that good. But if I have a bandage on my finger and am forced by crushing poverty and ever-mounting debt out into the real world to earn a living, I become fixated on it, watching its crisp, pristine edges wilt and dampen throughout the day, holding back vomit while handling customer credit cards and loose change speckled with influenza. I watch it grow loose and dirty throughout the day even though I changed it four times before lunch, repulsed by its fraying edge as I raise my hands to mock some dumb asshole with a well-timed air quote. It’s fucking disgusting.

  —

  My and Mavis’s modern romance had begun the same way as so many passionate love affairs before it: ON FUCKING TWITTER. Her initial tweet to me had read something like this: “reading your book and never wanna stop,” which is incredibly humbling and flattering and all those silly blush words. And who knows, I probably sent back a bunch of heart-with-the-arrow-through-it emojis or something. She responded, and our fledgling courtship took off, two modern girls falling in lust (or something?) one trending favorite at a time.

  We moved the conversation to DM, and I really need you guys to know that it physically pains me to both have participated in something called a DM and to recount what happened in one for you now. Don’t get me wrong, I love giant computer phones and talking cars and vaccines, but hashtagging and RTs make me motherfucking #crazy. I can’t follow that shit. Dude, I still have a house phone. And one of those old-timey answering machines that goes gurgle-scramble-gargle as you rewind the tape after listening to the customer service representative at ComEd, whose tone suggests that the $42.73 I am past due came from her account personally, express her shock and disbelief that I have an actual answering machine. Mavis and I talked about dresses and my favorite brand of matte lip stains, and when I asked for book recommendations, she sent me nineteen, give or take a few. (The Book of Unknown Americans was really good, by the way.) Then she asked me to mail her a letter.

  When we first met in person I knew immediately that she wanted to slurp me up like the finest cup of cold-brewed, pour-over Ethiopian coffee nine dollars could buy. I’m not sure exactly when things changed. We sent a handful of cards back and forth (mine handmade and purchased from Etsy because I’m twee like that), our texts shifted from informational to conversational to something bordering on intimate, and then there she was, lithe and lean and carrying a baby cactus to meet me for a bumbling and awkward first lunch. A lunch during which she housed a giant plate of huevos rancheros and potatoes and sausages in a matter of seconds. I mean, she wolfed down her food with such ferocity that I felt my pants go damp. I LOVE PEOPLE WHO LOVE EATING. Mavis was tall and skinny and I could tell at a glance that she’s the do-gooder kind of white people: vegan earth shoes and woven Mayan handbag and the kind of hair you get from using natural products. She listens to Black Star and Public Enemy and eats yard tomatoes that grow behind her house and bakes from-scratch pies and buys multicultural reading material for her children. I am very familiar with this varietal of grape.

  A few weeks later Mavis came back to town and got us a room at the Acme Hotel. I don’t know, man, I just didn’t want our first time to be in my little apartment, pushing the cat off the bed and trying to ignore the drunk college kids puking in the hallway outside my door. Better instead to get busy in a sterile hotel room downtown that looked like something out of a Real World house: trompe l’oeil paint on the walls, iPhone chargers in the outlets, a glowing red neon lip print on the bathroom mirror in lieu of a night-light. We drank French 75’s, the ingredients for which she’d thoughtfully packed in a cooler; I sipped mine nervously on the far side of the bed, flipping maniacally through the television channels and thinking about how I am never that prepared, for anything, ever. I knew her well enough to know that she is not a Television Person. A Multiple-Section Reader of the Sunday Times? A Listener to Public Radio in her Bumper-Stickered Volvo? A Learned Individual Courtesy of the BBC or Al-Jazeera or Some Other Unbiased Non-American and Therefore Inherently Superior News Source? DUH. ALL OF THOSE THINGS. But a Consumer of Daylong Pantsless T
op Chef Marathons? I’m no expert, but I don’t think a bitch who makes her own kombucha is the same bitch sitting around in her house bra for hours on end watching old episodes of Roseanne. Because I am that bitch, and kombucha is disgusting.

  Those people, the “No TV, Eat at the Dinner Table, Get Your News from a Reputable Source Other Than Facebook” people, are terrifying to me. I have a subscription to BUST and I read Matt Taibbi’s articles in Rolling Stone sometimes, but those people always want to talk about world events and I’m like, “Yo, my dude. I don’t know shit about Russia. Let’s go get some chicken.” I don’t know anything about the economy; I can barely keep track of who my elected officials are; I hate learning things; why can’t everyone just watch The Voice so we can all have something exciting to talk about?! God, I love those battle rounds. So I sat there and watched Middle Eastern explosions on CNN while Mavis busied herself making cocktails and chirping about smart shit.

  It wasn’t until I felt her definitely female fingers fumbling awkwardly with the zipper of my hoodie in that hotel room downtown that it dawned on me: I don’t really know how to fuck a lady. My stomach dropped as I tried to recall every article I’d ever read about G-spots and nipple sensitivity, my arms stiffening at my sides as she bent down and pressed her lips into my neck. I assumed it was up to me to do the man stuff because I have a fantasy football team and can grow a full beard, so I just lay there while she did stuff to me, waiting for her to yell at me because I hadn’t taken the garbage out. THAT’S HOW THIS WORKS, RIGHT? I expertly slid my female hand under her bra and unhooked it with the flick of a wrist in one smooth, effortless motion. JK, FOLKS. I wrestled with that clasp like an alligator, finally resorting to the use of a chain saw and my teeth.

  “Do some nipple stuff,” offered my dumb brain, and I did while peeking at her face to make sure I was getting it right. I don’t know, man. I mean, she didn’t recoil or punch me in the side of the head, so I figured I was doing pretty okay? But then I remembered she said her boobs were desensitized from years of having nursed two children and I promptly removed my mouth because BABIES. I tried to think of the worst thing boyfriends past had done in bed with me and actively tried to avoid doing any of that. I peeled off my socks (I hate when dudes wear socks in bed) and asked Mavis if there were any feelings she wanted to talk about before we really got started. “Has anyone in the patriarchy oppressed you lately?” I asked attentively. “Wanna read some stuff on Jezebel?” She launched herself at me, pinning my arms down as she scaled my body like the face of a mountain.

  I reached for the waistband of her jeans and there it was, in the flickering blue light of the flat-screen hanging across from the bed: that old grimy, tattered Band-Aid loosely affixed to my wounded forefinger.

  I don’t really know all the rules yet, but I am pretty sure you aren’t allowed to finger a woman while wearing a wilted, unraveling, dirty-ass Band-Aid. I tried to create enough friction between my sensible yoga pants and the scratchy duvet to slide it off without either tipping her off or starting a brush fire, but that stupid thing wouldn’t loosen up. The more furiously I worked at it, the more it wouldn’t budge. “Do we really need this on?” she asked, nodding at the television. Even though I wouldn’t have minded the dulcet tones of Anderson Cooper serving as the soundtrack to our first, officially official coitus—maybe I could learn something about midterm elections through osmosis?—I seized the opportunity. Plunged suddenly into darkness, I used my teeth to scrape that nasty Band-Aid from my finger and tucked it out of sight under my pillow. Then I slid my pale, wrinkled finger inside her vagina, rooting around in there for the rough and spongy G spot, just like all those magazines had taught me.

  Vagina Dentata

  MY MOTHERFUCKING TEETH. MY SIXTEEN-THOUSAND-DOLLAR SON-OF-A-BITCHING TEETH. That is what I was thinking about when my head moved between Mavis’s thighs, pretending to know what I was about to start doing. The carefully sculpted, realistic-looking crowns affixed to the dead stumps of hollowed-out bone jutting raggedly from the receding gum tissue inside my head; the hours and hours and hours spent horizontal beneath blinding lights as the dentist jammed a pickax between my pulsating molars and went after my eyeteeth with an old-timey saw; the ten-inch needles piercing through my skull, crammed into my sinus cavity, wedged into softened, bloody tissue already vibrant with excruciating pain. Ugh this is fucking Coldplay, I think as I try to figure out a sexy way to tell her to scoot her butt forward so that she’s positioned right under my chin without dislocating my goddamned elbow in the process. Now this hoe knows I have embarrassingly mainstream taste in sex music. “Inch your butt up, sister,” I say, patting her haunch like a horse. “Just like at the gyne.”

  —

  Eating pussy is easier than you’d think. I learned on the job and I am really quite good at it. Sometimes my disabled ass gets the angle wrong and I’m, like, sucking on a wet dreadlock or whatever, but for the most part I just sort of put my face where it feels like it should go and let my tongue do what comes naturally. It’s sort of like licking the inside of someone’s mouth? Except there’s hair and no teeth and you have to be really careful not to disembowel your girl with your wanton incisors. The first time was in daylight, and I really inspected everything up close, but in a sexy way so she wouldn’t feel like her labia were in a petri dish or something. And then, I don’t know, I just licked it like you would an ice-cream cone. A soft-serve one, though. Because sometimes you gotta get a little rough with the regular kind and use your teeth on the chunks or use your lips really hard to mold it into a lickable shape. Sometimes I use my nose or my chin and really I don’t think she can tell the motherfucking difference. The fingering was easy to master, because I basically just do what I do to myself when the vibrator is out of batteries while intermittently trying to feel what she had for breakfast from the inside. That part is easy; I was doing the Jay Z “brush your shoulders off” dance by the third time we got busy as Mavis was seeing stars and catching the holy ghost while having orgasm after orgasm. I thought it might take some time for me to get good at cunnilingus, but nah, I just get a supportive pillow for my neck (I’m old) and get all up in that soft-serve.

  I have always been above average at sucking a d, probably because I am the kind of person who excels at alone tasks rather than thriving in a group project. Like, I just want to make the diorama the way I want to make it, okay, Ms. Mitman? Then I know the shit will be right. So when I’m down there, face-to–open-faced medium-rare roast beef sandwich (picture it), it’s important for me to do a good job. I never much enjoyed being eaten out by dudes. One would slowly make his way down there, burdened by obligation, and I would literally clam up: I’m smelly; I’m hairy; I’ve got enough yeast in there to make dinner rolls; just stick it in my butthole and hurry up so we won’t miss our dinner reservation. But Mavis understands that my nose-searing musk is nature’s self-cleaning oven just handling her business. And that that coarse mouthful of hair I’m serving is payback for never having received my reparations when Obama was elected.

  $149.95

  The year I turned thirty-four, I decided to buy my vagina her first grown-up-lady sex toy. A Lelo Mona 2, from the Pleasure Chest, more expensive than the most expensive thing in my closet. It’s the Cadillac of vibrators, with its velvety silicone curved for the G-spot and its multitude of settings and speeds. And worth every penny, as one time I had Mavis lying on her side and was banging her with it and she was caterwauling like a crazy person then squirted for the first time ever, so hard and so much that it splashed on the goddamned cat. THAT IS FUCKING AMAZING.

  I always thought I would eventually end up with a woman. Men are too taxing, too mischievous, too restless, too naughty, and I don’t want to spend my Chico’s years with my stomach tied in an anxiety knot waiting for a dude to leave me for someone younger. The idea of spending my Social Security checks fussing over some goddamned man has never appealed to me; I want afternoons spent shouting at the television set with my best frien
d in our matching house sweaters and magnifying readers from Costco. I have always been sexually attracted to both men and women, although the sex part is more of an afterthought for me. My compatibility checklist is full of very important qualifications, like:

  • leaves me alone while I watch my shows

  • doesn’t leave globs of toothpaste in the sink

  • would never finish the ice cream without checking with me first

  • understands that I don’t like to touch while sleeping

  • isn’t an asshole to the cat

  And so on. I understand my limits, and my deficits, and I know that to get through life with some relative degree of happiness, we have to find someone who can figure out the taxes or make the lunches or whatever it is we aren’t good at doing. I don’t need a charming person with a good sense of humor who specializes in getting extensions on the cable bill, I got that covered; I need someone who balances a checkbook and remembers when her last tetanus shot was.

  I get tired. I work fifty hours a week, man. I wear compression stockings and orthopedic shoes, and most nights I fall asleep in the middle of my dinner. So when Mavis is nudging me in the ribs at 9:00 p.m., elbowing me in the kidneys to get me out of my end-of-day coma, it makes me feel like an asshole. My body wants to say, “LOOK, BITCH, I AM TIRED” but my brain is all, “Be grateful someone wants to see a body with this many varicose veins naked.” And my brain is right—I do have a lot of weird moles and shit. Halfway into the kissing, I usually realize that I’ve made the wrong decision, that I just should’ve stayed asleep and woken her up at three in the morning with twenty passionate minutes of finger sex, but then I remember the Lelo. Sure, it feels like cheating, reaching for that smooth piece of silicone on the charger next to the bed. But then, as I am the drooling, semiunconscious big spoon working my multispeed robot penis while little spoon is none the wiser, I think to myself, “Worth every goddamned cent.” ZzZZZzzZz