Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

by Jill Soloway

  If Los Angeles was stacked all on top of itself, New Yorkers would get it. But it’s not, it’s dribbled across too many miles, horizontal in the feminine way I like things to be, long and flat, not tall and phallic. If you zoom from appointment to appointment in your car listening to Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, you feel it. You pass through your LA vortex, let the warm weather and pink mountains and Elliot Smith smooth you, let the sunsets you can count on melt the blue icicles from your long winters. And don’t worry, you can still be sad here, even if your icicles are melted. Smog is like rain. It’s fun to be sad in LA.

  I traveled through my vortex all in one day, about six months after I got here. I had just started working on a new job. In the morning, on the way to work, I stopped at the bank to get a roll of quarters for parking meters and walked past the front. I made eye contact with the security guard, this sweet older fellow with sandy John Denver hair. You only find old guys like this in LA, still trying to pass themselves off as blond, as if we don’t notice the silver roots and leathered skin and coke bottle horn-rims. But he was a sweet old guy, and I always said hello to him, and he always nodded, rocking on his heels and stalwart, ever on the lookout for trouble.

  As I waited in the teller line, I started thinking about him, wondering about where he lived and what his apartment looked like. Was it small? Just one room? Did he cook on a hot plate? Did he know his hair looked like a wig?

  Maybe it was a wig. Maybe he had cancer and chemo and the bank only gave him his job back because he needed something to do or he’d die of boredom, and they didn’t want that on their hands. Or maybe he begged to get his job back, because the health insurance paid for the last few chemo treatments. He really did look very tired. God, what a horrible circle, his life: standing in the bank to pay for the chemo to keep him alive so he can stand in the bank to pay for the chemo to—

  I got my roll of quarters and stopped to get the bathroom key. The bathroom was behind the security guard, and when I passed behind him, I saw that he had something in a drawer, attached to a very taut nylon string. This must be where his gun is, in the drawer.

  Now this was really sad. They give him a weapon, but he has to keep it in a drawer. Maybe he’s so bad with weaponry that he needs to get a supervisor’s approval, like at Ralphs when you get your check approved. Poor guy actually needed a supervisor’s okay to get his weapon out. Would there be enough time in a bank robbery? Did they really feel confident he could do his job well, needing a person to bring a key to get to his gun?

  I looked closer and noticed that he appeared to be attached to the string and that the string was attached to the drawer. Now that was really sad. They keep him chained up here. Maybe he couldn’t even leave or go to the bathroom without someone else’s approval. God, it broke my heart. What a job, a security guard. But one who can’t move, who is literally a prisoner, just to keep all of us safe while we do our banking.

  When I came out of the bathroom I looked one more time. This time I noticed something else about him.

  I noticed he wasn’t real.

  He was made of wax.

  He was a dummy, a wax dummy in a security guard uniform.

  I had questions, so many questions. Did the one I know die to be replaced by a dummy? Or has he always been a dummy? But I’ve smiled at him, I’ve said hello to him for the past six months, he’s nodded and smiled at me.

  “Oh my god,” I said. The two big black human security guards just chuckled.

  I went to my car.

  Everything that looks like something can change in one day, by moving your vision one percent. I looked one percent harder than I normally do, and I saw that string. Still, I was unable to believe he wasn’t alive.

  If a judge had asked me before that day to swear on my life and my son’s life and everyone’s life, I would have said that was an absurd question and of course, the security guard in the lobby of the City National Bank was alive.

  At work that day, I found out that my whole life I had been spelling “simultaneous” wrong. My entire life.

  That afternoon I was leaving work, CBS Radford in Studio City. I was in my car, waiting at the light at Colfax and Ventura, right next to Killer Shrimp. My passenger door opened and a beautiful young girl got in. She looked at me and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I answered.

  “Can I come with you?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I thought maybe she was in trouble, that an abusive boyfriend was following her. She was so young and cute and white and pretty that I wasn’t scared, not at all, just worried for her safety.

  “Um, is everything okay?” I asked gently. She smiled and nodded. She seemed calm for someone who had just taken a seat in someone else’s car. Maybe she was having some kind of bipolar break and she needed me to drive her home or to her mom’s or to a phone where she could call her psychiatrist. Maybe god had put me in her path so that she wouldn’t get attacked by some freak who didn’t have the same compassion as I did.

  “What do you want?” I asked her.

  Why did I ask her that? What do you want? What kind of a question was that? Was I as crazy as she was?

  Dramatically, she whirled and looked straight at me, her eyes wild. “I want to be famous and I don’t want to go to school!” she said, hysterical. The light turned green. She looked at me and smiled again.

  “Take a left.” I did. She pointed to white pickup truck in front of her.

  “Follow that car.” Aha, I thought. A clue. The abusive boyfriend. Someone to make it all make sense. I took a left on Ventura and followed. But the white pickup took a left into a muddy abandoned parking lot work-site-type thing. I looked at her as if to ask, “You seriously want me to follow a pickup truck into an empty parking lot at night? Are you off of your crankin’ crank?”

  As if to ask. I didn’t ask. I was under her spell. As you know, I have a boundary problem I’ve been carping about. I said nothing, I just looked at her. She knew what I was thinking, I guess.

  “It’s okay,” she said. Still employing my horrible judgment, I did just what she said. I imagined the scenario unfolding. This was their scam. Her junkie boyfriend probably made her get into women’s cars and appear vulnerable, then direct them to the parking lot for some robbin’ and rapin’. What the hell was I thinking? And how was I going to get out of this?

  I pulled into the lot. The white pickup truck did a U-turn and faced the road. I pulled up next to the driver, driver’s side to driver’s side.

  It was a man. He rolled down his window.

  “It’s my father,” she said.

  It was. He was about fifty and Armenian-looking. He was very calm for a man whose daughter was in a stranger’s car. He looked at her and sighed.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “I wanna be an actress, and I don’t want to go to college!” she said.

  “So what are you gonna do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know!” she said. She looked into my eyes for an answer. Did she think I could tell her she should be an actress? I was a TV writer, after all. I guess I could try to get her an audition for a voice-over on the cartoon I was working on. Maybe that’s why I was in her path, maybe a young Angelina Jolie was sitting right here in my car and I, the Hollywood producer, would be her mentor, her shepherd, get 10 percent. Instead of saying all of this, I just shrugged.

  She looked at her dad, then at me. Her dad pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

  “Could I have a drag?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  Another few moments passed. He blew smoke out his nose and stretched out his neck.

  “Get out of her car,” he finally said. She looked at me again and smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said. She got out of my car and into his.

  “Thank you,” her dad said to me, then pulled it into drive and rumbled off.

  That night I went to dinner with a few friends, a whole bunch of the people I dig, Chi
cago friends. When Joni says she’s going to see the folks she digs, I’m right there with her. All of my really close friends are here, including one of my oldest and bestest friends, Wayne. Wayne brought with him this friend from work; I can’t even remember her name. She had blond hair, nothing special, just this girl you’d never even notice.

  We were having a lovely evening. I believe baked ziti was involved. I told everyone my story about the pickup truck, and they laughed at my imitation of the teenage girl’s hysteria. But I didn’t even remember to tell my wax security guard story, because about halfway through dinner, I started staring at Wayne’s friend’s face.

  I started to obsess on her nose and her mouth, and the way her nose connected to her mouth, and suddenly I was captured by the thought that she was exceedingly ugly. Everyone was busy eating baked cheese-covered dishes and chatting, and I was busy eating baked cheese-covered something, but I couldn’t stop staring at her nostrils. I hated the way they looked like perfect, tiny hearts. Her chin was too small. And her eyes drove me crazy. The distance between them was just so pedestrian. The only way to describe her face was to call it aggressively boring. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that this girl was the single most ugly person I had ever come across in my life.

  That thought obsessed me for the rest of the dinner, and I was relieved when it was finally over and I could stop thinking about how incredibly, annoyingly ugly she was. As we stood in the foyer and said our good-byes, Wayne’s friend went to the bathroom and Wayne pulled me aside.

  “Did you like her?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Oh, good,” he said. “I am so glad you finally got to meet her, Jill. I’ve always thought you two looked exactly alike.”

  I hugged Wayne and went back to my car and went home to my studio apartment with the yellow walls with big saffron diamonds painted on them. And the next day, when I got up for work, I forgot to wonder what I was doing here. I just made my coffee, took a shower, kissed my sunset pig, and headed out the door.

  7

  Jill of Finland

  Believe it or not, Neille—my blond companion and rooftop-deck partner in crime—and I are still best friends. After high school, she went to art school while I was in Madison, and we kept in close contact the whole time. I’d either return to Chicago to visit or she would come up to Wisconsin for a weekend. We shared the exact same sense of humor, some of the same guys, and a really bad case of crabs. Neille eventually upended everyone’s expectations that she would marry really, really well, and instead, held onto her singleness and started her own mosaic table empire, making scads of money.

  When we were in our early thirties, Neille moved to LA. We took up our old ways of going out on the town together to do our favorite show, the snappily sexy Blond/Brown Sandwich. In Chicago, when we would hit the Rush Street bars in my mom’s rabbit jackets, we were seventeen pretending to be thirty-three. Now in LA, we were thirty-three pretending to be seventeen.

  Neille is not a Jewess, but you would think she was if you heard her on the phone. If Jewish women really do have extra testosterone like I’ve heard, then she’s one of us. Neither of us can relate to letting a man feel smart so that he can feel more masculine. If a guy says something stupid, you have to point it out.

  She and I had traveled much the same path, being fabulous and beautiful and wondering why guy after guy after guy was never good enough for us. We ended up taking on the same shape in life, a shape some might call macho, but because we’re women, I’ll call eggo. We were both unbelievably driven to be successful, sadly aware that to make guys find us attractive we had to shut our ever lovin’ mouths, even for a few minutes. We really did much better trolling for men on our own. When together, we would eat guys alive, more interested in making each other laugh than making progress.

  Some guys were into my big-mouthed bossy side. It was not uncommon for me to begin a relationship with a guy who had been super-duper interested in me, only to find that when we got to sex, he wanted me to dominate him. For a couple-year span, guy after guy after guy would whisper to me in the dark, sheepishly, that he would get off more if I would take control. Anything I wanted would be fine, anything at all, spanking, bossing, standing on them in my street shoes. They’d lie prone, eyes closed, and thighs twitching, waiting for whatever punishment I chose to dole out.

  Sure, I guess it’s obvious to you that I come off as a know-it-all, Bossy Boots on Fire, but inside, I was a gentle flower and couldn’t figure out why this kept happening. I had no desire to violate anyone. If forced to choose, I’d rather let someone else do the bossing. It’s much less work to just follow orders, do what the nice man says. Like being drunk or high for sex, it’s yet another way to conveniently rid yourself of the responsibility and the contiguous, fun-squashing shame.

  In fact, to return to my lecturing about gender and consent, just when you’d hoped I was finished, it has always seemed to me that a certain percentage of date rape cases are ultimately about class. White educated upper-middle-class people who read Harper’s are very comfortable having a pre-sex conversation negotiating a power dynamic. They know a top from their bottom and they’ve read their erotica collections. Like their brunch, they feel no guilt about ordering up their sex platter with very specific needs—egg whites only, wheat toast no butter, I’m gonna need you to squeeze my balls really really hard right before I come.

  Do date-rapers know they could find plenty of women willing to consent to their dom fantasies, and, with a little imagination and polite negotiation, be as turned on as they want to be and not have to run the risk of going to jail? As long as it is within the confines of a caring, safe relationship, many women like thinking about being taken while they’re having sex. In college I asked my friends if it was easy or hard for them to have orgasms, but never asked anyone exactly what made them orgasm. But now, when the topic comes up, I ask as many women as will let me: What do you think about when you come?

  A huge percentage share that, whether they’re masturbating or with a partner, they like to think about being objectified (everything I ever took a stand against) or imagine it’s all happening against their will (everything every woman ever worries about). Did this evolve as a response to us always being objectified anyway? Would we fantasize about having our spirit cared for through lovemaking if this was the norm? Or do I just happen to know a lot of people who are writers and actors, weighting my sample toward women who never got enough attention as children and evolved into fetishizing it during sex?

  Boy, I think a lot, don’t I? No wonder everything’s so hard for me. “Jill, you think too much” has been said on many an occasion. I really don’t like when people say that, mainly because it’s always a man, and it usually means “Shut up and start suckin’.”

  In trying to escape this spinning in my skull, I tried some unexpected things. For a few solid years, I was high as a kite on marijuana. God, I love me some marijuana. I almost never do it anymore—I’m too old and I have way too much work to do and I always come down with a cold a couple days after I try it. But for a while there, it was the only thing that would shut off this ticker clicker clacker in my brain and let me have what I’d heard people talk about—this thing called “a good time.”

  I also found that I could relax my gears if I dated a certain kind of man—not Jewish. Maybe I’m too competitive. Maybe I’m too much like their mothers. Maybe I came of age during the wrong time—while Philip Roth and Woody Allen were authoring the shiksa fetishizing trend. Around the same cultural moment, Neil Simon wrote the movie The Heartbreak Kid, about a Jewish man whose annoying wife got so sunburned on their honeymoon that she had to hole up in a hotel room so he could lust after Cybil Shepard. In a strangely self-hating move, this was directed by Elaine May, a Jewish woman herself. Yes, Jewish men and women helped advertise the idea of the worthless Jewish wife. They taught Jewish men how to hate us, and taught us how to feel hated. And it worked.

  By the way, th
e tide is turning in this area. I predict a move away from the thin blonde withholding ideal and a tilt toward the warm, mushy brunette. It could be temporary, a result of 9/11, the social trend they call “cocooning”—a wish for nurturing protection—but I believe certain new movies might bode well for my kinda lady.

  James L. Brooks (who has had more power in my life than God, and who may in fact actually be the Jewish God) has, with the recent release of Spanglish, is perhaps turning the tide. Watching it made me think Brooks is sick of the hyper-exercised blond Tea Leoni and wants to go back to his roots, comfying up under the covers with a real live Jewess. Okay, they would never do that, but a real live Jewess in the costume of the dark and sultry Latina maid, with her bosomy maternalism and warm instinctual ways. Playing for the Latina-Jewy Darkies, we have a kick-ass starting line up: Penelope Cruz, Salma Hayek, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Connelly, and Rachel Weisz.

  Unfortuantely, this trend is shaping up is a little too late for me. When I was young, there was nothing more reviled by Jewish men than… me. A lot of Jewish men didn’t even bother hiding the fact that they never went out with Jewish women. In fact, they waved it as a point of pride. First there were the Jewish men who only dated Asian women. This drove me so crazy that I contemplated a stand-up act that centered on my hatred of all Asian women (except Margaret Cho). That was going to be part of the hilarity—saying “except Margaret Cho” à la Seinfeld’s over-repeated “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” way too many times.

  But I really did have a lot of anger toward Asian women. I felt they did white women a disservice. I despised the way they sylphed around town in their tiny, hairless bodies, turning up on the arms of the funniest Jewish comedy guys, guys who were my birthright. I called them girlcats, like they were a mixed breed, somewhere between females and Siamese cats. I scowled when Jewish boys I knew shrugged, saying, “I don’t know what it is, their pussies just taste… really, really good.” I couldn’t stand that their “otherness” turned guys on, because I knew that what they were “other” than was me.