I Like You Just the Way I Am

by Jenny Mollen

At home, it was easy to get away with customizing each dog’s routine (Teets in bed, Harry in the canyon wrapped in bacon), but when we traveled it was a different story.

  In my single days, Teets and I had our flying routine down pat: I’d look all doe-eyed and vulnerable while he’d don a SERVICE ANIMAL vest and escort me straight through security. We’d board the plane in front of the elderly and always sit by the window. When my food tray was up, Teets slept on my lap, and when it was down, he requested the cheese plate. My behavior appalled my husband for several reasons. The main reason being that he is a total rule-dork.

  Jason is the type of guy who uses his blinker every time he makes a left turn on a green arrow. And he’s the only guy I know who’s never returned anything already worn to Nordstrom. He plays by the book and obnoxiously expects me to do the same. His other problem is that he is a celebrity and hates being seen getting preferential treatment. Once we were married, he made me promise I’d make a more concerted effort not to pretend to be blind, deaf, German, an English tutor, or diabetic just to make my life easier.

  As a gesture of love, I did something I rarely do. I compromised. We were headed back East for Christmas, and both dogs were coming with us whether I liked it or not. Jason didn’t want me lying about having a therapy animal, and I didn’t want to spend three hundred bucks to not even be allowed to have Teets sit on my lap. To be honest, I felt like the airline should be paying me to have Teets on board. He was a joy to be around, a spreader of light and goodwill. So I made Jason a deal. If he helped me smuggle the dogs on the plane, I’d keep them hidden in their carriers the entire flight and never make mention of the fact that Teets was a “working dog” or that I was mentally ill. I assured him that he didn’t need to buy the dogs tickets, because that just leads to more questions about paperwork I didn’t have. If we did things my way, nobody would ever know they were there, he wouldn’t have to deal with any weird looks or whispers, and our journey would go off without a hitch. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  The four of us were scheduled to take a red-eye out of LAX. Before leaving the house, Jason fed Harry his tranquilizer, and by the time we were going through security, he looked like a drunken Janice Dickinson. Just before boarding, Jason stuffed Harry into a carrier. I put Teets in a matching carrier and planned to transfer him onto my lap once we took off. I tried explaining to Teets that only service animals are allowed to be out during flight and since Jason wouldn’t let me use the therapy vest, he had no choice but to remain hidden under my blanket, like a third boob or a weird stomach pooch. Teets was offended but too gentlemanly to argue.

  Once we were midair, I reclined my seat, popped an Ambien, and pulled Teets out of his carrier by his head like I was delivering a baby. Teets settled happily into my lap after taking a moment to passive-aggressively step over Jason’s ball sack. Jason scowled at me, but he held back any objection.

  Natalie Portman was about to tell Ashton Kutcher she wanted to be Friends with Benefits when I passed out. Roughly four and a half hours later, I woke up to a tapping on my shoulder, presumably preparing me for landing. I opened my eyes to see Jason staring at me, panic-stricken.

  “Where’s Teets?”

  I looked down at my empty lap. The blankets I’d cocooned in earlier were strewn across the floor, and Teets was nowhere in sight. I quickly peered into his carrier. It too was vacant.

  “Do you have him?” I asked groggily.

  “Umm, no, Jenny, I don’t have him. I never had him. Where the fuck is he?” Jason stood up and looked down the aisle.

  “I should never have let you put him on your lap.…” Muttering to himself, Jason walked down the cabin toward the bathrooms.

  I opened Harry’s carrier to see if maybe Teets was inside with him. Harry sat up, hungover. He was alone. I then hung my head between my legs to check if maybe Teets was crawling under my seat. Again, I saw nothing.

  Like the cutest snake on a plane ever, he was missing. I tried to put myself into his state of mind, reminding myself that he was more person than he was dog. The only reason people get up in the middle of the night on an airplane is to pillage a free Bloody Mary off the drink cart or to meet a hottie in the bathroom for a mile-high quickie. I rushed to the lavatory, which was OCCUPIED, and pounded on the door.

  “Teets! Are you in there? Are you with someone? Can I come in?”

  A dude who looked like Joaquin Phoenix during his nervous breakdown stumbled out. I looked into the bathroom. No Teets.

  Jason came back fuming and rang the flight attendant buzzer.

  “You’re talking!” Jason reclined his seat and pretended to be asleep.

  Seconds later, a Tammy Faye Bakker–looking stewardess appeared out of the darkness. “How can I help you?”

  I looked back at my husband, who began fake snoring.

  “Ma’am?” the flight attendant continued.

  “Yes. Uh—I seem to have misplaced something.”

  Before I could finish, Jason shot up and started tattling on me like some grade school hall monitor with a fanny pack full of detention slips.

  “My wife can’t find our dog. We snuck him on the plane, and now he’s missing!”

  The flight attendant looked down to see Harry humping my discarded pillow like it was Jodie Foster in The Accused.

  “Oh, not that dog. Another one,” I explained.

  Jason looked at me, speechless.

  Armed with flashlights, the three of us moved from seat to seat. Thirty-seven aisles and six mini bottles of Jack later, we had nothing.

  At four in the morning, just above Newark, the pilot intervened. He came on the loudspeaker and gave a vivid description of our runaway mammal. People were instructed to check their laps, look under the seat in front of them, and to please remain calm. The passengers were assured that the animal was nonaggressive, hypoallergenic, and bilingual.

  “Found him!” a boy cried out over the announcement. Teets was raised up above a window seat only three rows back. He had a piece of cheese hanging from his mouth and, luckily, no condom hanging from his ass.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” Jason exhaled, relieved.

  The stewardess retrieved Teets and handed him to Jason while the rest of the passengers silently judged the fuck out of us.

  “Aren’t you Jason Biggs?” a guy looked up from his seat and asked.

  Tammy Faye gave Jason a once-over. It was Jason Biggs!

  And Jason Biggs was not happy.

  Thinking fast, I did the only selfless thing I could think of. I threw myself on the ground and faked a series of convulsions. Jason’s eyes bulged out of his head, horrified.

  “I need my medication!” I moaned.

  Eager to distance himself from the TMZ headline PUPS ON A PLANE, Jason backed away slowly. I dragged my gyrating body towards one of our carry-ons and whipped out a pill bottle. Tammy called out to a fellow flight attendant to notify the cockpit. Having no concept of how long it takes a person to stop seizing, I swallowed a Benadryl and stood up immediately. Reaching my hand into the side pocket of Teets’ carrier, I pulled out his PLEASE DON’T PET ME, I’M WORKING vest and waved it in the air like a white flag. I explained to Tammy that Teets wasn’t a stowaway but my trained medical aide.

  “And who’s that?” she asked, pointing to a postcoital Harry.

  “His assistant.”

  She gave me a skeptical look. In response, I started acting dizzy and buried my head in my seat. I heard a voice come on the loudspeaker asking for a doctor, but none of the passengers replied. The second flight attendant ran back and whispered something in Tammy’s ear.

  “It appears that you’re ‘sick and in need of medical attention,’” Tammy said mechanically, still studying Jason’s face like he was a mannequin at Madame Tussauds. “There’s a flight backup at JFK, and we’re currently twelfth in line to land. The pilot spoke to the control deck, and we have two options based on how you’re feeling: We can wait in line about thirty minutes and take our chances, or we can te
ll them we have an emergency and move to the front of the line.”

  I already knew Jason’s feelings on cutting in line, so I didn’t bother checking in with him. “It’s fine. I—”

  Jason put his wrist to my forehead like he was taking my temperature and finished my thought for me. “I think we better land.”

  The cabin’s hatred gradually turned to empathy and a request for a handful of signed cocktail napkins. I disembarked from the plane feeling proud of my husband for lying to get us out of an hour’s worth of doing circles in the sky. Unfortunately, I knew saying that would only piss him off. I still owed him an apology. Once in the car and safely on our way into the city, I told Jason that I was sorry for the entire situation and any embarrassment he might have felt. I admitted that he was right all along and that there was only one person to blame. And that person, obviously, was Harry.

  6.

  The Birthday Whore

  Thoughtful gifts can be so challenging. Especially for a spouse. There are anniversaries big and small. The holidays, real and Hallmark. And there are birthdays … every year. Fucking birthdays.

  My husband and I were married for about sixteen months when I ran out of birthday present ideas for him. After several failed outings to the mall, I decided a hooker just made the most sense. I knew it wasn’t something he already had, it wasn’t something he was going to buy himself, and if everything went according to plan, it wasn’t something that would end up stuffed in our basement for the next four years.

  Besides, I wanted to do something sexy, something dangerous. Something to remind him that even though I sleep in tattered, period-stained boxer shorts and zit medicine most nights, I’m fun and exciting and capable of turning him on the way I did when we first got together.

  I don’t have any real role models when it comes to maintaining a relationship spanning more than a few years, or experience holding someone’s full attention when I’m not constantly doing something outrageous. A hooker was so wrong that it just felt right.

  I went to my phone and e-mailed my friend Cassie.

  Being a talk show host, I knew Cassie was exposed to all sorts of freaks. She’d met heads of state, bearded ladies, monkey trainers, and even Candy Spelling. Even if she didn’t know somebody willing to accept cash for sex, I was certain she wouldn’t judge me for asking.

  “Do you know any masseuses who will also fuck, etc.? P.S. Great show last night. So glad they’re no longer dressing you like you live in Ann Taylor’s Loft,” I wrote.

  Cassie replied instantly with just the name “Becky” (clearly a daytime pseudonym to cover up her prostitute-y name, no doubt something like Chardonnay) and a phone number. Ten seconds later, I called “Becky,” explained the situation in vague terms, and asked if she could come over that night. She agreed.

  Unable to sit on the surprise that awaited him, I ran into the bedroom to break the news to Jason.

  “Baby, do you like hookers?” I whispered sweetly as I pounced on him.

  “Like them? Like how?” he asked, distracted by his iPad.

  “Like one is on her way over here right now to have sex with us!” I proudly exclaimed.

  Jason looked at me, laughed, and went back to Googling images of himself.

  “I’m serious! Becky is on her way. You need to shower and Vagisil your ball sack!”

  The mere mention of his Vagisil addiction jolted him back to reality. He knew I was serious.

  “Wait, a hooker is coming over? Why? How did this happen?” I watched him pretzel himself like a Chinese acrobat in order to test his current ball scent.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday, but I couldn’t hold it in, sooo—”

  He cut me off, which was good because there really wasn’t more to the story. “Jenny! A hooker? This isn’t the kind of thing you can just spring on me! The house is a mess.”

  “She’s a hooker, I’m sure she’s open-minded,” I assured him. “Don’t you think it will be kind of sexy and different? We don’t have to let her see upstairs if that makes you feel better.”

  “I guess,” he said. I watched him gradually come to terms with his new reality. He exhaled. “Okay,” he reluctantly agreed.

  And so, around eight, I set the mood. I turned on a Buddha-Bar CD and opened a bottle of Dom while Jason paced around the house, sweating.

  “Now, listen, I don’t want to fuck her, because I don’t want to get AIDS,” he said. “But maybe I could just watch her go down on you?”

  “On me? So you’re fine with me getting it?” I appraised my body in the hallway mirror, thinking about how much skinnier I’d be if I had AIDS.

  “Look, she doesn’t have AIDS,” Jason tried to assure himself. “She’ll go down on you while you go down on me.”

  “That sounds like a lot of coordination for me. You know I’m left-handed.” I was already buying a new AIDS wardrobe in my head.

  When Becky arrived at the proper whoring hour of 9 P.M., I opened the door in a see-through bra and undies and led her upstairs to the bedroom. Becky seemed unfazed by my getup, which made me instantly regret not opting for something crotchless. She was more athletic than I pictured her, as I never like to imagine people in better shape than me. She had short dark blond hair and struck me as one of those chicks who, even if she’s in a cocktail dress, wears zero makeup. I guessed she was around thirty, but in the right light, she could have passed for fifteen. I couldn’t tell if she was gay or straight but for the sake of my ego, I pretended she was gay.

  Jason appeared in the doorway several minutes later with the bottle of Dom and three glasses.

  “Who wants to go first?” Becky asked earnestly.

  “Oh … We can’t go together?” I said suggestively.

  “Well, I only have two hands.”

  “I have two, too,” I offered seductively.

  Rather than a sexy come-hither-let’s-do-this-thing look, Becky’s expression was quizzical. Puzzled. She asked me to undress and lie on her table facedown before excusing herself to the restroom. The minute she was gone, Jason shot me a look.

  “She seems kind of legit,” I said, hoping to distract him.

  “Jenny! She’s a masseuse! A literal masseuse! Literal masseuses don’t have sex with you!” He downed his glass of champagne, then mine, and left the room.

  He was right. Becky turned out to be an actual masseuse. (Real name: Becky.) She proceeded to give me a professional, non-sexual massage, all the while helping herself to the rest of the Dom.

  “So many people assume that just because I’m a masseuse, I’m down for sex,” she slurred. My massage was complete and Becky followed me back downstairs, wasted. “Can you believe that?”

  Yes! I thought. I am one of those people!

  Jason made up some excuse about why he was going to pass on his rubdown and insisted he’d take a rain check.

  Becky plopped down on the couch and kicked her feet up. Though I didn’t see her ingest anything else, her ability to form sentences continued to decline rapidly. She was so inebriated, I assumed she normally drank only noni juice or was maybe on Wellbutrin.

  “You guys are soooo cool. I get so many douchebags in my line of work. We should hang out sometime. My boyfriend wrote a pilot you’d be perfect for.” She pointed at Jason’s nose like what she was saying was meant only for his nose to hear.

  After deliberating through eye contact and subtle gestures, we (me, Jason, and his nose) decided the best course of action was to call a cab, then lure Becky to the front door and lock her out of the house. She protested at first, banging on the windows and screaming for her car key. But once we turned all the house lights off and pretended nobody was home, she got in the cab and left. After she’d gone, I packed her massage table into her van and left her key chain on the window in an envelope with her tip.

  Once the smoke settled, I turned the lights back on and called Cassie.

  “The whore you recommended sucked!” I screamed.

  Cassie was
in the middle of a dinner party and was laughing so hard she could barely keep the phone to her ear. “She isn’t a whore, you idiot!”

  “Yeah, I gathered that!”

  “What happened. Tell me everything.” Cassie put me on speakerphone so the rest of her party could revel in my misery.

  “I’m gonna save it all for her to tell you. She’s wasted in a cab, and the driver has your address. Bon appétit!” I hung up before she could respond.

  The next night, I was not only pissed off that my husband’s birthday treat hadn’t come to fruition, but also deeply ashamed that I didn’t have any friends with access to whores. I cried into my pillow before bed.

  Jason tried to comfort me by reminding me that I didn’t have that many friends. He also reminded me that we would be in Vegas the following weekend for his friend’s surprise birthday.

  “If you still want to do it, there will be more than enough opportunities in Vegas.”

  With Sin City on the horizon, I mitigated my inner rage. I’d pick up where I left off the second we landed.

  * * *

  That weekend, as soon as our plane hit the tarmac, I was on Cityvibe.com, trolling for escorts. I quickly homed in on a photo of a thin brunette with elbows for boobs and made the call.

  “Hello?” a cutesy voice chimed.

  “Hi, um, Eva? My husband and I are in town tonight, and we were wondering if you could get together with us?” I whispered, staring across the aisle at an elderly woman using Purell on her lips.

  “Sure!” Eva enthused. “What time were you guys thinking?”

  “How about four?”

  “Sounds good. Why don’t you call me when you get to your hotel, give me the room number, and I’ll be there.”

  We checked into the Four Seasons under the name Drew Peacock. There were about fifty people in town specifically for the surprise party, and Alan, the birthday boy, wasn’t to have a clue. On our way up to the room, I texted Alan’s wife, Gertrude, to notify her of our arrival. She wrote back that they were in staying in 3512. They were heading down to the pool shortly.

  “Shit!” I screamed, pulling my husband into an emergency exit stairwell. “We are in 3511!”