The idea of being part of a community is daunting. Despite how open I am on the Internet, I am fiercely private IRL. Which is to say that I am often a hermit because I never want anyone to see my actual pores or clothes. I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with large groups of people, but this isn’t really that. This is more like “Why would you ever want to come inside where I live?” or “I just don’t get why we have to talk in your living room when there are dozens of perfectly good restaurants five minutes from here.” But this summer I am moving. To a neighborhood like one on TV. Where I have to keep a bra on all the time because kids are always just letting themselves in for impromptu playdates and you never know who might be dropping by with a bag of extra grapefruits from their CSA box or some vegan Korean food fresh from the farmers’ market. (That very specific example happened once, thank you, Sarah Hill!) In Chicago I have this tiny little universe that has a dead bolt and a door buzzer, but you’d never come over anyway because there’s nowhere to park and Opera Dude really does get in the way of meaningful conversation a lot of the time. However, in Michigan, we have giant windows with no blinds (WHITE PEOPLE), a skateboard ramp in the driveway, and a tire swing hanging from the big oak tree in the yard, and do I even need to finish this sentence? I will never be able to just let my tits hang ever again.
I tell anyone who is ever interested that my ideal long-term romantic relationship is one in which my partner and I have separate apartments in the same building. Or in buildings across the street from each other. Or in buildings on opposite sides of town. Or in buildings on opposite sides of the state. Or in buildings in different states altogether. I have very little interest in joint cohabitation. Seriously, almost none, save for the fact that if a person had a big television and was willing to pay for premium cable and give me 70/30 ownership of the remote, then I would maybe consider it. I mean, come on. Hers and hers houses?! Such a jam. Up until now, Mavis and I have spent two years in different states and that has been a dream—95 percent of the time I can watch Love & Hip Hop without pausing every five seconds to explain the difference between Yung Joc and Lil Scrappy, I can use a spoon to cut pizza, I can sleep like a fucking starfish spread across the bed: it’s glorious. I can keep my shit together for 5 percent. I can keep the laundry folded, the dishes put away, the lumps fluffed out of the duvet, and the bathtub spotless for 5 percent of the time. 5 percent Sam buys fresh-cut tulips and displays them in stone vases; 5 percent Sam throws out the expired yogurts and keeps chilled rosé in the fridge; 5 percent Sam is the kind of person you want to live with.
But 95 percent Sam is gonna be a problem. I’m not sure what I’m gonna do about all my gross habits. My cans of Mexicorn, my seventeen Q-tips after every shower, my irregular mopping, my dresser covered with pill bottles, my cat food everywhere, my cat hair everywhere, my pile of indiscernible black laundry, my dirty Birkenstocks scattered in corners far and wide, my dinner in bed (these people sit down to breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the table and I will literally die if they expect me to do that, by the way, who the fuck eats actual lunch). How can I really hide who I am from these people who only know a sanitized version of me if they are everywhere I am, all the time? I’m gonna have to start a swear jar at work in the few months before I pack my valuable belongings into one and a half trash bags and move them to a house with children running around it. No bullshit, I gotta figure out a way to stop saying “bitch” so much before one of these shorties rolls up on me while I’m cussing Helen out for being such a vile little piece of garbage and runs away screaming to tattle on me. Every morning when that naughty, uh, scamp bites me awake at five o’clock I’m really going to have to grit my teeth and say, “Good morning, cat!” instead of “I’M EUTHANIZING YOUR BITCH-ASS TODAY, YOU FUCKING BITCH” like I normally would.
I don’t know, man. I’m just dubious of spending the majority of my awake minutes with someone I show my privates to who also needs to know how much money I am making and is keeping a mental checklist of all the times I forget to drag the recycling to the curb. And also being in a town without real bagels. People are boring and terrible. I am boring and terrible. My funny runs out, my cute runs out, my smart sometimes hiccups, my sexy wakes up with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have an attitude. And a sharp edge! I’m impatient. I like the whole bed. I hate anyone touching and moving my haphazardly arranged possessions all the time. Plus, I’m a downright horrible sharer, and I can’t guarantee that I won’t write my name on something in the refrigerator I don’t want her to eat. These quirks, if I’m being generous, have had thirty-six years to consolidate into one giant mass of “mine.” How do you get over that? Am I going to need hypnosis?!
There’s so much single-person stuff I still need time to do! And, I know, you’re all “Fuck other people?” but I’m over here like “Nah, my dude. I mean eat lunch meats rolled up in a tortilla because I don’t have any real bread while watching Jackie Brown on my laptop” or “Try on all of the lipsticks in my apartment while taking a series of poorly lit selfies I’m never going to show anyone…again.” I do so much shit I don’t want anyone else to see, or know about, that I never want to have to explain to another human being. And I want to keep doing them. I enjoy listening to the Young Turks really loud in the bathroom while I take a long shower, then spending a considerable amount of time moisturizing my various parts. This is not a bad thing, it’s not even a particularly creepy thing, but it is the kind of thing that might be weird when other people are living in your house. Waiting for that bathtub. Wondering what’s taking you so long and who your imaginary talking friends are.
I want to still have time to sit staring at the wall for hours with both my headphones and the television on, daydreaming about what I would wear to the Golden Globes, as if I’d ever have a reason to go to the Golden fucking Globes. I want to watch porn by myself, and movies by myself, and Black-ish by myself. Basically anything I ever want to see is best enjoyed alone, under a blanket, with a hot-water bottle propped against my back and no other noise whatsoever. I like to dance to MIA while I cook, if you understand “cook” to mean “make food that I sample so frequently during its preparation that the end result is already leftovers.” I can’t do that horrifying shit if I live with some foxy lady and her kids! I mean really, do you think she’s going to be supine across my freshly changed bed linens looking hot and awesome and still want to rip me out of my chonies after watching me cry for hours at videos of people surprising each other? The answer is no. No, she will not.
But I still want to do it. So does that mean this next phase is doomed? Because I can keep my apartment clean and safe and inviting for a night, for a weekend, for maybe even a week, but that day-to-day shit ain’t happening. I am obviously destined to die alone, in giant panties that come up to my chin, with half a gallon of pasta sauce I haven’t even added oregano to partially digested in my stomach, mouth frozen in a silent “Fuck.”
Thirteen Questions to Ask Before Getting Married
Mavis and I are getting married next month and she just sent me this article from the New York Times like “LOL ISN’T THIS HILARIOUS?” but joke’s on that hoe, I’ma answer this shit without telling her and put it in the fucking book. I see you, bitch.
1. Did your family throw plates, calmly discuss issues, or silently shut down when disagreements arose?
The man whose ashes I ate punched me in the face once for incorrectly washing a cast iron pan, so I guess that qualifies as “throwing plates”? But here is the thing—in my haphazard and inconsistent childhood, I was never living with any person long enough to ever establish any sort of real patterns. In the Cooper-Irby household there was no such thing as, say, Meat Loaf Mondays. Or Christmas Eve at Grandma’s. (And thank God for that because my skinny, mean grandma would’ve set a plate of sardines and grits out for Santa and embarrassed my ass because homeboy was looking for cookies.) I come from a fractured group of individuals who don’t even all have the same last name, let alone any traditions, but, o
nce, my dad hit my mother in the head with a frying pan during an argument, so I guess that’s how we get down. Maybe you should pick fights in a room with a lot of soft stuff in it. HOLD UP, I THINK I FINALLY RECOGNIZE A PATTERN.
2. Will we have children, and if we do, will you change diapers?
HELLO, PATRIARCHY. I’m not having any babies. I want to give a smug answer about how much money and free time I have because I still don’t got kids (so much, so so much, and if you don’t get that reference go do your googles), but let’s talk about my real fears when it comes to my parenting a child.
2a. I pretty much stopped learning things after high school.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I read shit all the time. Even smart shit like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, even though it seems like it takes me four months to get through a single issue. I watch Rachel Maddow and listen to a couple of podcasts when I remember they exist, but I don’t know how to do trigonometry. And I cannot remember anything from a single history class I’ve ever taken, so unless tenth graders are being tested on BuzzFeed listicles and how to keep track of all the bogus e-mail addresses you’ve created to sign up for multiple thirty-day Tidal trials and ModCloth discount codes, I do not know anything of use to a modern-day child. I can show a kid how to make a satisfying meal out of stale saltines and leftover aloo gobi, but that is basically it. I wasn’t parented past the age of thirteen, and it shows. I once blew a car engine because I had no idea what an oil change was. I didn’t even have a coat last winter, I just doubled up hoodies and wrapped a scarf the size of a tablecloth around my shaved head. IN CHICAGO. I have a lot of what polite people call “life experience,” which is a nice way of saying I possess skills like “can find a café with free Wi-Fi blindfolded” and “able to spot an overdue bill from a glance at the back of the envelope.”
2b. I hate going outside, and talking to people can be excruciating.
I’m depressed, man. Lexapro gave me night terrors, so I stopped taking it and haven’t yet tried an alternative because I value my newfound ability to sleep through the night. I didn’t have outdoor parents, and I’m not all that mad about it. You say “walk in the park,” I hear “runny nose, itchy eyes.” You say “picnic in the grass,” I hear “bugs stinging and birds pooping on me.”
And exactly what am I supposed to do during soccer practice every week? Or during Girl Scouts? Have you ever listened to people with kids talk to other people with kids? It is a strange and confusing language that I don’t ever want to understand. I don’t ever want to listen to two people debating over whether school lunches should be non-GMO. I have absolutely zero opinions on things like that. Also, I would buy my kid a hundred TVs just to get him right on up out of my goddamned face. So many things that people have to do to make good, well-rounded people out of their children are such a hassle for the parent. If she has to learn to play the cello, I have to: buy the cello, find the instructor, and drive her to the lessons. Not to mention the half hour every afternoon I have to subject myself to living in a house WITH A CHILD TERRIBLY PLAYING THE CELLO. And sure, I would probably get a lot of reading done squashed behind the wheel of my sensible midsize crossover vehicle in the parking lot behind the ice-skating rink to avoid gossiping with the other moms about which of our standout left wings will be arrested first for assault, but then I’d be the type of person who was forced to purchase something called a midsize crossover vehicle.
We’re talking a minimum of sixteen years that I would be responsible for taking a young, defenseless creature out into the wild and protecting her from people who say damaging shit like, “Aren’t you a pretty princess!” Years of talking on the phone to women named Caitlin who want to make sure I know that my snack for the slumber party has to be gluten- and sugar- and peanut-free. Years of neighbor children being forbidden from crossing the threshold of my home because I let my son eat microwave snacks while talking on his personal cell phone and playing murder games on the computer in front of the television while I lie on the floor under the dining room table with an ice pack on my head with strict orders for him not to interrupt me unless the house catches fire. And even then, what the fuck am I going to do? Call 911, you stupid kid.
I could go on. I could add another 296 things to this list and still not even scratch the surface of why my having a child is a bad idea, the first of which is that you already have some, and if your white kids were to gang up on my black kid, I would have no problem starting a race war in our home. I can see it now: I come home from the bar where I spend my afternoons crying and wishing I had made different choices in my life to find White 1 and White 2 playing slave auction or some other horrible game with my baby. I burn the house down with all of us in it, screaming whatever lines I can remember from Django Unchained at the top of my lungs. So yeah, we’re not going to adopt.
3. Will our experiences with our exes help or hinder us?
Well, I can’t be hindered by dead people, so I’m all good. JUST PLAYING, WISHING SOMEONE WERE DEAD DOESN’T MAKE IT REAL, SAM.
4. How important is religion? How will we celebrate religious holidays, if at all?
I was raised in church. And you tried to hold my hand in the middle of that one service I took you to, the one during which my sister led the choir in a rousing rendition of a song I’m pretty sure was called “Jesus Does Not Like Lesbians,” so I’m confident in saying that you’ve never been to church a day in your life. If I had to declare a religion for a census, I’d probably choose “agnostic,” because the parts of the Bible I’ve read are just, like, a really boring soap opera that’s dragged on for too many seasons, but I refuse to believe it’s a coincidence that when R and I broke up in the front seat of his Pontiac “Breakdown” by Mariah Carey came on the radio at the exact moment he was avoiding eye contact and mumbling, “I don’t think this is gonna work out, dawg.” To which I very earnestly responded, in song, “I be feelin’ like you bringing me down, taking me around, stressin’ me out; I think I better go and get out and let me release some stress (stress),” in time with the music. If that isn’t the universe intervening to keep me from beating a motherfucker to death with a broken window scraper, I don’t know what is. I sat there for the last 1:47 of the song with the door cracked and sang my lungs out while R provided backing vocals before I got out. And then we never spoke again. LOOK AT GOD.
Even though I don’t care about organized religion, I still feel some type of way when people who weren’t forced to sit in stiff ruffles and too-tight patent leather mary janes for four hours every Sunday morning get to just, you know, buy an Easter basket without having done any of the work. Those jelly beans and Cadbury eggs were my annual reward for memorizing the Twenty-third Psalm and not falling asleep during Sunday school, and yet somehow there are kids who get to sleep in every weekend and have never had to identify Bible passages from memory who get the same number of jelly beans I do?! It doesn’t even matter, but I resented it. How did you earn those Christmas presents if you’ve never had to spend hours after school making a life-size diorama of the manger that will be displayed in the church’s vestibule three weeks past the time it should’ve been carted down to the basement?
—
Here’s how we’re going to celebrate holidays: Sunday mornings I’m going to walk around yanking curtains open at the crack of dawn, singing “Victory Is Mine” and cooking eggs and bacon while bumping the gospel station at top volume, then I’ll rush you to get dressed because we need to get to service in time to get my favorite seat behind Sister Augustine. We’re going to leave our phones at home, get to church at ten thirty on the dot, tithe our combined 20 percent, kneel before the pastor during altar call, “mm-hmm” during the good word, then go home at four to eat dinner and watch some wholesome TV. Touched by an Angel or some shit. After many months of this, then, and only then, will you have earned the right to call that dried-up spruce the cats keep launching themselves into a “Christmas tree.”
5. Is my debt your debt? Would you be willing
to bail me out?
Bail you out of what, jail? Yes, of course, especially since I like to keep a bail bondsman on the payroll at all times just in case.
The smartest decision I have ever made in my entire dumb life was dropping out of college. Other than a few early mistakes that are being excised from my virtually nonexistent credit file every year—why did I ever agree to have a home phone with a roommate who ran up $700 in international calls?—I don’t have a single crushing financial obligation. No student loans, no tax liens, no baby mamas snatching up half my check. And see, the way my money is set up? Your debt is gonna have to be yours, champ. Unless I get to claim that master’s degree, too.
This is not to say that I won’t lavish you with gifts and pay for exotic vacations to places in America that have large black populations, but I’m not filing my taxes jointly ever. First of all, I like to do that work on the Internet and keep it moving. I saw you sitting at the dining room table with your old-timey visor and graphing calculator adding up expenses and sorting through receipts, and, yeah, I’m never going to do that. It relaxes me to think that by paying the most possible taxes, I’m keeping my karma right, so just let me live with that delusion. Second, I want to have a secret bank account for emergencies like Miu Miu sunglasses and last-minute reservations at Maude’s, and I’m pretty sure you don’t live like that. You pay off your credit card balance every month and none of your bills are behind, so shouldn’t I really be asking this of you? I will give you whatever you need, provided that you catch me after my direct deposit clears but before the Old Navy coupon codes hit my in-box. If you need money the same day Lane Bryant does their semiannual bra sale you better wake up early in the morning to ask me for it, because as soon as I wipe the sleep out of my eyes I’ma be clickety-click clacking. Do you know how expensive keeping my nipples off my kneecaps is?! So do what you can to plan your emergencies around sale season.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 20