by Ben Karlin
Darrel’s luck was better than mine, however. His second shrink suggested he try to get in touch with his long-lost nurse. He tracked down her address from a friend. She didn’t answer him right away. Months later she told him her story. She had gone to college and had become president of a nursing college. She had been married but her husband had recently died. Their correspondence led to a meeting. Their meeting led to a decision to marry. (Have I mentioned Darrel was luckier than me?)
He was calling to tell me the good news. When I told him I had gone online to purchase a document certifying that I was a reverend so I could officiate the wedding of another friend, he asked if I would officiate his. So, this fall I will preside over the vows of the man who has, in turn, married me twice and baptized all three of my children. Technically, I still owe him a few.
Darrel and I became friends in 1973. The year we met was the year I started in business. It was the year I got engaged. It was the year a peace agreement was reached in Paris that allowed our prisoners of war to return home from Vietnam. We had a lot to talk about. We talked about the war and the poets who knew it best. I remember sharing Cummings’ poem about “Olaf,” a conscientious objector who while being destroyed kept repeating this perfection: “There is some shit I will not eat.” It is a declaratory phrase I regret I learned too late.
We talked about love but did not trust ourselves to talk about our losses. These were too entwined with the dark and lonely places we shared with no one. Even the girl whose picture I removed from the newspaper remained a secret. My lost love and I never corresponded. We never met. The plane that took off from New York never landed in Brussels. It crashed killing all on board including my love, Laurence Owen, and the entire U.S. female skating team. I can still see her smiling face, sharp eyes, arched back, and confident spirit moving across the ice.
Lesson#43
Don’t Enter a Karaoke Contest Near Smith College; You Will Lose to Lesbians
by Jason Nash
When a man starts getting fine pussy, there’s a boost to his ego unrivaled by anything else in life. Unlike getting a good job—which, when all is said and done, is still work—dating someone hot makes you feel intoxicated. Blessed. Like winning the lottery or even better, finding a massive discrepancy in your checking account. You don’t know why you’re getting all that money, but you keep your mouth shut and hope no one notices.
Karyn was the kind of beautiful I wasn’t used to. Sort of alien looking, like a girl you’d see in a Prada ad, affecting a vacant stare while standing between two Wiemaraners. I always dreamed of dating a hot girl, but when I did, she didn’t look anything like Karyn. Thanks to my mom’s work in the cosmetics industry in the 1980s, my ideal woman has always been Samantha Fox, circa “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too).”
And Karyn was more than just unique looking. She was smart and said so very little, that when she did speak you would hang on her every word. She was impenetrable to trends, put absolutely no thought into her wardrobe, and was the first person I knew who admitted having horrible taste in music.
I saw her at the student union and I remember thinking, could I get this girl? Me? The guy who was a fat fuck in high school? The guy who was tormented for being the only Jewish kid and had the nickname “Wej”? (That’s “Jew” spelled backwards.) The guy who ruined Thanksgiving dinner once when he put too much toilet paper in the bowl, leaving his aunt and uncle’s shoes surfacing in an inch of shit water while they ate? That guy?
But things were going well for me in college. I had lost weight, had great friends, and scored an internship at Saturday Night Live. Most of all, I finally found my identity: the funny guy. The life of the party. And I loved it.
I approached Karyn at a bar. She was into me immediately, probably because I came highly recommended from a friend. I drove her home and we made out. It was goddamn heaven.
The final piece to my perfect college existence was there. A hot girlfriend. The only problem was, and I didn’t realize it until years later, Karyn thought I was a fucking douche bag.
In fact, she may have only dated me because everybody else thought I was cool. To her I was a Britney Spears record, something of appeal but little substance that you look down at in line and go, “Why am I buying this?”
And the worst part was, I was a douche bag. I thought I was so cool back then. My jokes were terrible. I’d put a cigarette in my belly button and draw eyes and nose on my chest as a gag. Was I in fucking Mumenshantz? I tried so hard to get into the coolest bars on campus. I even dropped names about famous people I had met at SNL. Who could blame her for hating me?
That’s not to say I didn’t try to make her like me—even love me. Early on in our relationship I had an important realization: “Oh right, she hasn’t seen me dance yet! Once Karyn sees what a good dancer I am, she’ll give herself over to me completely.”
I hatched a plan. I’d throw a party at my house, fully believing that once she saw my dancing ability things would turn around. Now, a word about my dancing. It is what I call “mock good.” In that, no, it’s not good, but I’m so serious about it I’ve convinced myself that it is good, and others seem to be charmed by that.
When the music came on I started moving and everyone began laughing and having fun. Everyone but Karyn, who just stood there, like a bored, unimpressed ice sculpture.
“Wait, no, you’re not getting it,” I wanted to say. “See, I’m being ironic. Notice me and appreciate the spectacle I’m making!”
I ran to her, trying to make it better but only doing more damage.
This, of course, is the curse of the insecure male. It’s not our glasses or balding head. It’s the fact that when the hot girl gets in our proximity, we simply can’t just be. Our methods of survival are the very things that will drive her away.
It’s like when you’re at a fancy hotel pool and a bunch of girls take their tops off and it’s no big deal. Well, I’m always the guy running to everyone else, pointing and yelling, “Did you see the topless girls? There are topless girls by the pool!” That’s not what a guy with a hot girlfriend does.
The end came when I asked Karyn to come cheer me and a friend on in the finals of a regional karaoke contest. I would be singing “Say, Say, Say” and doing my best Michael Jackson impersonation.
“I don’t think so,” she sad. “That’s your thing.”
What the fuck did that mean? “That’s your thing.”
Karyn had this way of answering questions that would leave me unsure how she felt. “That’s your thing.” Like you’re above my stupid college bar competition? Or like, you’re jealous of my time in the spotlight? I mean, shit, girl, I wear a fucking sparkly glove during the song! Isn’t that something you’d want to see?
Karyn never showed and we ended up loosing to two lesbians who sang “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The stage slid out underneath me during the best part of the song: where I come in with a lift of the leg and shake of the shin singing, “All alone I sit home by the phone! Waiting for you, baby!” It didn’t matter really. The contest was a mile from Smith College. We never had a chance against those lesbians.
As we rode to the movies the next day, I was furious. I took a deep breath and finally said it.
“I don’t get it. You don’t think I’m funny. I mean, everyone thinks I’m funny but you.”
“I know,” she said, with no emotion in her voice.
We lasted a few months after that, mostly because I was living in New York. I drove back to college to see her, hoping she would be impressed by the fact that I had moved to the city. She wasn’t.
Our sex started to go downhill, as she began not moving during the act. This made me unable to get hard, and then she blamed me for my lack of prowess. I was too much of a novice to tell her that half of this was her fault. I apologized repeatedly and convinced myself she had to have been molested at some point. Have I mentioned I was douche bag?
A few weeks later she dumped me. It annihilated me. I couldn�
��t understand why she didn’t like me. I had things going on. I mean, I cleaned David Spade’s apartment! I thought about her every day for almost two years, and prayed she’d return. She did an amazing job of giving me nothing, never calling back and just letting me die, slow, cold, and painfully.
When I started writing this piece, I hired a private investigator in hopes of getting back in touch with her.
“Gonna be tough,” said Detective Dave. “Single women in their late twenties, very transient group. Nothing holding them down.”
I’m not chasing Sasquatch, asshole. Just put her name or social security number or something into the computer and tell me where she is. Three weeks later, Dave sent me an e-mail with a subject heading, “Well, We Did It!”
Dear Jason,
I made contact today with Karyn Gadd!
She called me to ask what this was about and I told her you wanted to talk to her for a short story. I told her that you had no ill feelings about the breakup and that you did not want to hurt her in anyway.
I DID give her your phone number, so CASE CLOSED.
Sincerely,
Dave Dineen, PI
Hey, Dave, maybe she would call me back if he didn’t open with, “Hey, this guy’s not going to rape and murder you, so why don’t you give him a jangle.”
And that was it. I was out $250 and she never called. Perfect really. The girl who never gave me anything, doesn’t give it to me one final time. But what did I hope to hear? That I was obnoxious? That I was cheesy? That she started dating me because she thought I was cool, but quickly learned I wasn’t?
Karyn made me realize my greatest fear: that someone would see through my tricks. My own personal David Copperfield bullshit I’ve honed to make other people think I’m special. And that’s what she did, stripped me of anything valuable I had to offer.
More than her beauty, the thing I wanted most from Karyn was her calmness. Her ability to sit still, stare, and feel numb. I married someone equally as neurotic as I am and I love her and we make a very entertaining couple, but there is chaos everywhere we go. I slay dragons every day, or more to the point, I run from them, but I keep moving. Waiting, hoping one day I can rest and breathe easy. My wife is like Karyn in some ways. Smart, pretty, a tough audience. She hates when I need to be the center of attention. The difference is, I don’t listen to her. I walk around every day positive I’m a good dancer.
Lesson#44
Get Dumped Before It Matters
by David Rees
Unlike most of the “winners” in this book, I’ve never been dumped.
Let that sink in for a moment: never been dumped. A perfect record. What’s that thing in baseball, where batters are graded on some sort of numerical scale? Like, “Joe Smith is batting .300; he’s hitting one out of every .300 balls.” Well, when it comes to not being dumped, I’m batting 1,000.00. One thousand percent perfect. One thousand percent never-have-I-been-dumped.
You ask: “How did you get those awesome stats?” And, “Are your relationships available on baseball cards, so that I might learn from them?” And, “If so, what does the bubblegum taste like?”
The answers are, respectively, “Read on”; “Yes, from ToppsAdult”; and “Monogamy.”
Although I am proud of my remarkable statistic, there’s something you should know about it. Let’s turn it over like a nursing sow and take note: How many relationships suckle at its teats? One and . . . two. Ah! You see, I’m not such an intimidating badass, I’ve only had two relationships: A girlfriend in high school and a wife, presently.
My high school girlfriend never dumped me. Or, whenever she did, I made sure to resuscitate our relationship and counterdump her down the line—effectively canceling out her dumps, which is how I maintained my perfect figure. (Like how -3 plus -3 winds up equaling +16, remember?)
That is to say, our relationship ended without the definitive, full-glottal stop of an asymmetrical dump. It was more like the slow, years-long decay of a mighty oak tree, where every few months a woodsman staggers by and makes out with the oak tree when he’s tipsy, even though the better angels of his nature say, “Why complicate things in the forest, tipsy woodsman? Didn’t you promise to stay away from that ol’ oak tree?” And then the whole affair is immortalized in a mournful Appalachian fiddle tune.
Still . . . when all is said and done, I closed out my first “at bat” without getting dumped.
As for my second relationship, the one with my wife, things are starting to sound less like a mournful Appalachian fiddle tune and more like a Keith Moon drum solo being swallowed by a Cannibal Corpse song. Yes, sadly, my wife probably WILL dump me—and dump me hard, with extreme prejudice, like how Russell Crowe expresses his feelings in hotel lobbies.
The rub is, when you’re a professional, grown-up man with a wedding band, a Roth IRA, and a funny feeling about that mole on your back; when you see all teenagers as irascible enemies of the state; when you start enjoying toast—when you get to that mature, married stage, it’s not called “getting dumped.” It’s called “getting fucking divorced.” And unlike getting dumped, getting fucking divorced ain’t free. There’s a whole legal element involved. Namely, you pay a lawyer to notarize your life as “Failure, Pending Lottery Win.” He stamps your soul with his embossing machine so you can carry within you a legally binding bruise, for all time, to your grave, you colossal loser. Also, your tax return gets more complicated.
In short, divorce is an expensive, life-shattering, and inconvenient way to learn elementary lessons about life and love.
Lessons like these:
1. The fact that you mope around your “home office,” sighing and scratching the five o’clock shadow spilling down your neck, while you “work on your screenplay in your mind,” wearing sweatpants on a Wednesday afternoon, does not mean you are a tortured creative genius. It means you are a LOSER. If you’re old enough to drive, you may no longer wear pants with drawstrings—even if they are your “dressy sweatpants.” Look respectable for your woman, even while she’s at work. It will comfort her to know you are wearing a belt. And by the way, if it’s before noon, it’s not called a “five o’clock shadow”—it’s called a “shave, you loser.”
2. The fact that you used to bake bread back in college, and now refuse to do so, even when your wife asks sweetly, longingly, does not mean you are a post-hippie citizen trying to carve out new paradigms of consumption in a post-9/11 world. It means you’re lazy. Your depression has somehow turbo-charged your entropy. Congratulations! You are now the exact opposite of a Hadron Super Collider. If you don’t act soon, and show some initiative in the kitchen, your molecules actually will leech out of your toes and stain your socks. Then you’ll have to spend money on socks! Instead, bake a loaf of bread for your wife. In fact, shoot the moon and bake her a goddamn cake. She works much, much harder than you.
3. The fact that you spent approximately 40 hours last year watching goddamn-can-you-believe-I-actually-did-this Miami Ink does not mean you revel in the twenty-first-century agora as one node of the postmodern multitude. It means you have lost your mind and secretly want to die stupid. And alone. Turn off your television, unplug it from the wall, bury it under fifty pounds of sand in another country, and spend your evenings memorizing seventeenth-century love poetry for your wife. Think about it—which will be more comforting in your twilight years: the collected verse of John Donne (WHICH YOU HAVE TOTALLY MEMORIZED) or vague memories of a bunch of tattoo-people talking about their feelings on TV?
Now that I appreciate the stakes, and understand how my shortcomings have flourished in the confines of my most important relationship, I have come to loathe my special statistic. I would happily trade my perfect dating record—that satiny, unblemished, unbedumpled sheet—for a mangy, flea-bitten patchwork quilt of “lessons learned,” stitched together by women who dumped me.
I should have learned not to wear sweatpants from Siobhan, the vapid fashionista I should have met, and dated, and been dumped
by, right out of college. Siobhan would have taken one look at my “awesome” collection of “exercise trousers” and had them secretly rendered to a base in Uzbekistan, where they would have been boiled alive. (My “special scarf” would have been water-boarded.) Then, when I met my wife for an anniversary cocktail I would have represented in a sleek pair of tailored slacks, not in paint-splattered Russell Athletics with the drawstrings hanging out over my crotch.
And Starshine, the free-spirited vegetarian carpenter I should have bumped into and dated in 1999 (and been spectacularly dumped by on the eve of the new millennium because of the Zodiac!), should have sat me down and reminded me that baking bread connects me to all humanity. For I am MAN, provider. Why deny this wretched world my gifts? If Starshine had done her job, my wife would be enjoying fresh-baked focaccia as I write this. Not frozen bagels made by robots.
Then, of course, there’s Krystyn. Long-lost Krystyn. Lovely Krystyn. Sure, she had the world’s worst name, and I sometimes called her “Kyrstyn” by mistake. (How we would have laughed about that!) But I still would have wept when she dumped me for watching too much television. I would still be haunted by her final words: “You watch too much television. I’m marrying Jaysyn, my X-treme athlete frynd. Because you watch too much television.” I think that would have registered.
Alas, I have learned none of these things. Because none of those women existed.
You know those dummies with the black and yellow pie charts on their foreheads who are always smashing into windshields in slow motion? And in the slowed-down instant before impact, you can almost hear them say, in their mannequin drones, “Oh, I get it—I should have worn my seat belt?” I’m one of them, learning all these important lessons too late, in the melancholy split second before my head smashes through my marriage’s windshield and bloodies any hope I had of eternal bliss.