Don't Wait Up

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Don't Wait Up Page 17

by Liz Astrof


  The airport in Mexico, it turned out, was no doubt the inspiration for every Mexican drug cartel movie where innocent, lonely women just trying to get over their ex-boyfriends and maybe have a cocktail always leave with their heads sawed off and their bodies stuffed with cocaine. Kara didn’t share the same worry. Why would she? In those movies, Julia Roberts makes it out alive along with the only good-looking guy in the cast—both of them with their hair perfectly coiffed.

  We got to the resort, where a giant wooden sign with the words “Club Med, The Way Life Should Be, Playa Blanca” hung on the gates. I figured someone had a tremendous sense of irony in naming the place, as it was clear from jump there was no playa and nothing about this—what appeared to be at first glance—shithole looked particularly blanca, which explained the discounted price and the “oodles of availability” quoted us by our travel agent.

  The palm trees and plants had been recently watered—in anticipation of new arrivals, I guessed—and the air was still heavy with humidity that reeked of sweat, hair gel, and despair. Hopefully not all mine. Dale’s temperamental hair exploded into an afro within the thirty seconds it took for us to hustle into the lobby while our luggage was unloaded. Once inside, we were greeted by the Gentils Organisateurs (Gracious/Nice Organizers). Unlike the female GOs, who were average looking and on the stocky side but super athletic and buff, the male GOs were each a page out of a calendar. Tan and fit, great hair, great smiles, not one ugly dude among them. All I could think was how much Andy would have loved the place.

  We found our luggage and made our way to our room, where meager accommodations were the name of the game. Two full-sized beds were separated by a teeny nightstand that was almost dwarfed by the indigenous bug giving birth in the lamp affixed to the top. There was a bathroom, a closet, and a bureau, on which there was no TV.

  No TV.

  This was bad.

  As I tried frantically to reach someone on the phone, which reeked of sunblock, I watched Kara unpack her camera equipment, bathing suits, and her “fall”—a precursor to extensions that you’d clip into your hair. Kara had it made at a fancy salon and it was . . . everything. Listening to the phone ring, watching Kara gingerly hang up her extra hair in a room with no TV, I noticed Kara had a genuinely amazing body and started to wonder if our friendship would actually survive the trip.

  Abandoning the phone, I decided to go down and complain in person—but not before a snack; my blood sugar plummeting, I was desperate for a candy fix. I grabbed my bag and threw it on my bed. It was only then that I noticed a damp, dark stain across the bottom and up the sides of my luggage. Apparently, my bag had been set in a puddle of water by one of the very hot GOs Andy would love more than me. My heart in my throat, I unzipped the suitcase and pulled out a dripping wet Duane Reade bag in which my entire candy supply had started to dissolve (the Circus Peanuts) and congeal (the Jujyfruits).

  Even Kara gasped. I was about to be trapped for seven days on an island with Julia Roberts and without both TV and my candy. This was officially worse than fat camp—at least there, someone had some spare gummy bears sewn into the sole of their shoes or Tootsie Rolls stuffed in a hollowed-out teddy bear.

  We both knew neither one of us could live like that. My “new beginning” could not be sugar free.

  Springing into action to triage my dying candy, Kara broke out her blow dryer while I scooped the dissolving clump of Circus Peanuts from the bag and laid them out on a towel. With the humidity working against us, our patient was disintegrating by the second, changing color from a light toxic orange to a darker toxic orange. Rigor mortis was setting in, and all the shouting and blow drying in the world couldn’t halt its demise. I knew that because both of those things were happening.

  The Jujyfruits were in even worse shape. Joined in a clump, the box had bled onto them and the colors were running together—not even the minty greens, which I usually threw away, were salvageable. Apparently, the water in Mexico was noxious enough—even the rain—to make short work on candy designed to withstand a nuclear winter. Which I was about to face at Club Med, The Way Life Should Be.

  In a self-destructive rage, I flushed my candy corpses down the toilet. Kara was now legitimately nervous enough to go after them as they made endless circles around the drain of our low-flow toilet and I sat on my bed in actual tears.

  “What’s awlda commotion?”

  Alysse, now in a hot pink cover-up, Gucci sandals, giant sunglasses, and sunhat, stood in our open doorway with a completely frizzed-out Dale behind her, gaping at the two of us.

  “My . . . candy got ruined,” I sputtered.

  “Oh my gawwwwwd,” Dale gasped.

  “I know,” I moaned. “No TVs.”

  “No,” Dale said, and pointed to Kara. “I just can’t gettovah how much you look like Julia Rob-bits!”

  • • •

  SOME PEOPLE PEAK in high school or college. Or when they move away from home. Or get married or divorced. Or never.

  Kara peaked at Club Med, The Way Life Should Be, Playa Blanca.

  Her high-pitched laugh that began with a scream wasn’t irritating south of the border, it was infectious. The way she said “un-regardless” instead of “regardless” was “adorable,” regardless of the fact that it made her illiterate. The fact that she pronounced “windmill” as “windmeal” was also not a problem (which she pronounced “prollem”). Her shoulder tattoo of the Chinese symbol for strength with a lotus flower in the middle was also a popular topic of philosophical discussion and examination. Normally just a pretty girl on any rush-hour subway, here Kara blossomed into an exotic new species of New York orchid.

  That she didn’t know how to swim at the age of twenty-eight was the cutest thing ever, even though it “flustrated” her to no end and to the adoration of most of the male GOs and nearly all the guests. Anytime Kara attempted to doggy-paddle at the deep end of the pool, the unenchanted—and I’ll grant you, there were very few of us—were shit out of luck if we needed anything, from a towel to a handgun, from the GOs. Staff and guests alike would convene at the side of the pool to cheer their darling on as she conquered her inner demons and outer accent.

  Kara’s ability to tie a maraschino cherry stem into a knot with her tongue was also a crowd pleaser. “Do it again!” one male GO shouted, elbowing me in the head to get a closer look. And no one seemed impressed by the fact that my teeth were stained permanently red from the four pounds of maraschino cherries I’d scarfed down just to elevate my blood sugar into Circus Peanut range.

  She was resort royalty, incapable of putting a tiptoed foot wrong. And lucky me, she was my roommate.

  Sidekick to the pretty girl was a familiar role—Rhoda to Mary, Ethel to Lucy, Laverne to Shirley. In my mental sitcoms, I’d always cast myself to facilitate the dreams of my more attractive partner in crime, cracking hilarious jokes in the process, deflecting the fact that my life didn’t matter as much. My character probably wouldn’t even have a standing “apartment set” on the soundstage—hey, no one ever made the trip to Potsie’s house on Happy Days, so why bother building a place for me? Of course, at some point, someone would have to build a corner of my bedroom or bathroom, for that one episode where I’d, I don’t know, refuse to leave my house because I was so depressed about the fact that I didn’t matter, and the cast of characters would have to come pry me out of a ball—proving that even though I was less attractive, I still deserved love (friendship-love, that is).

  Meanwhile, here I was . . . the less-attractive friend to Julia Roberts.

  To her credit, Julia (sorry—Kara) was worried about me. At first, that was due to my lack of creature comforts—in the absence of my TV and candy, and, as I learned later that first night, Diet Coke (“No Cokas Light,” we were told), my Club Med, The Way Life Should Be experience quickly took on all the comfort and pleasure of a rehab. Living on vegetables and fruit, I spent the first few days limp on a couch by the bar, weak from unrefined sugar (I’d burned through th
e maraschino cherry supply pretty quickly) and listening to Alysse complain about everything from the dearth of male options for her and Dale to the lack of air-conditioning.

  By the third day, Kara’s concern for me graduated from genuinely appreciated by me to personally humiliating for me. For Kara had fallen in love on Day One with Pete, a fellow “adorable” from Philadelphia.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in meeting a guy,” I’d said to her the second night as I watched her clipping in her fall before dinner. “You said you just wanted to take pictures of flowers.”

  Kara shrugged her perfect combination of toned yet boney shoulders, which she was just “born with,” and said she was just having fun, that she didn’t care where it went.

  Where “it” ended up going, however, night after night, was just outside our room.

  As stalwart a friend as Julia would be, Kara refused to leave her sidekick alone (much as I begged her to), which meant that I and everyone within eye- and/or earshot of the hallway outside our door were subjected to Kara and Chris’s “good night” marathon make-out sessions. The two of them took it to the very brink of penetration. There weren’t enough flimsy pillows in the place to drown out the mouth sounds and moans, the giggles and the “but you’re so beautiful, I just want to be inside you”s emanating from the other side of my door (I pretty much wanted to be inside a well).

  Not that I’d given up on meeting someone myself. That’s what I was there for—A New Beginning. Each bus that entered the gates of Club Med Playa Blanca, The Way Life Should Be, came bearing new hope for me. New Jersey rolled in, and I convinced myself that I could date a guy from Jersey; it was a stone’s throw from New York, and he’d no doubt want to stay in the city most nights anyway. Then Boston and Pennsylvania and Rhode Island would pull up, and I contemplated the thrill and freedom a long-distance relationship could afford, the veggie burgers on Amtrak, the frequent-flyer miles adding up to a free first-class honeymoon at—where else?—Club Med, The Way Life Should Be.

  But there was no one. Even the rare cute guy wasn’t interested in me, only Kara—attached or not. Even Alysse, who grew considerably browner by the second (1997 was also before skin cancer was a thing), wanted to know everything there was to know about Kara, so she could set her up when we all went back to the Cokas Light–filled world. Despite that, I liked Alysse a lot—there was something very maternal about her—especially the way she worried about the sunburn I’d gotten on my lips, which caused them to blister and then, well, pretty much peel off, exposing an alarmingly fragile, paper-thin layer of lip skin, making it impossible for me to close my mouth all the way.

  While Kara went off to the disco with Pete (where her aggressive, jerking, and bobbing dance moves were not only adored but actually copied), I sat on the couches by the bar with the other Club Med Playa Blanca, The Way Life Should Be, party poopers. By Day Four, like anyone else with Stockholm syndrome, I was starting to enjoy my nightly routine, and my fellow wallflowers were looking better. A flirtation had even begun to bud between myself and one of the hairy gentlemen from the plane—maybe my New Beginning was hiding underneath a carpet of back hair. My confidence was growing almost as fast as my new lip skin.

  That night, just as I was close to accepting his invitation for a late-night swim, Kara suddenly stormed past the bar, her heels in her hand, her mascara running, her fall . . . falling. I got up to follow, but not before seeing Pete emerge from the disco with the assistance of a GO.

  “Bat-shit bitch threw a glass at me,” he was saying. “She cut my fucking foot!”

  Apparently, Kara’s inability to handle either liquor or rejection very well, un-regardless of the fact that she didn’t “care where her relationship went,” wasn’t as adorable as her mouse-like sneezing fits or cherry stem tying skills.

  We now know, courtesy of reality TV, just what sort of fuckathon goes on at beach resorts packed to the rafters with horny singles and tequila. We all know that even Julia Roberts has to put out at some point, or her leading man is going to sleep with one or six of the other available bachelorettes. Which is apparently what had happened.

  So, with one screaming tantrum accompanied by a well-aimed wineglass, Kara went from the Golden Girl to radioactive, more feared than the bird-sized blind bugs that darted around slamming into everyone. Naturally, as her roommate, I became toxic by proxy. For the last two days of the trip, Kara and I were an island unto ourselves, with only Alysse and Dale remaining loyal.

  As we all finally headed home, I took some comfort in the fact that my inability to deal with the money system—cash was converted to beads or some shit I didn’t understand—had left me with all of the three hundred dollars I’d brought with me, which coincidentally was all the money I had to my name. I’d also clearly lost some weight, cut off from my mainland Cokas Light and Circus Peanuts supplies. My lips seemed to have grown back a pinker color. I wondered how much a fall like Kara’s would set me back, but Kara had become unstable to the point at which asking her if she wanted her smoked almonds on the plane home was enough to drive her to tears, so I let that one go.

  Back at JFK, Kara took off for Brooklyn, where she lived. I shared a cab back to Manhattan with Dale and Alysse. Dale was first to be dropped off, just a few blocks from her buddy, and in that short run to Alysse’s place, I decided to just come out and ask her the question that I hadn’t had the nerve to ask on the flight down.

  “So, who is it you think I look like?” I asked.

  Alysse hesitated. I assured her it didn’t matter who it was, that I just really wanted to know. I mean, what else could go wrong?

  She made a face and then apologetically said, “Molly Ringwald.”

  “Molly Ringwald, the actress?!” I exclaimed.

  Alysse laughed. “No, the podiatrist,” she said. “Yes, of course the actress!”

  “But . . . she’s pretty,” I sputtered.

  “So are you, honey,” she said.

  So are you.

  I asked her why she didn’t want to tell me that first day.

  “You nevah know how people are gonna react.” She shrugged. “I mean—she’s no Julia Robbits.”

  Alysse gave me her number. I put it in my Coach wallet with my total wealth and spent the rest of the ride home truly and finally uplifted. My Club Med Playa Blanca, The Way Life Should Be, mother figure thought I was pretty. I was totally going to call her.

  It wasn’t until I was back home a full ten minutes, rejoicing in the tiny splendor, generic bugs, and the stale Jujyfruits I had in my fridge, that I realized I’d left my wallet in the cab.

  I stayed up all night frantically calling the taxi company to see if it had been turned in (it hadn’t). The next morning, I went back to work, walking downtown because I was broke until payday.

  Entering the bullpen, my coworkers saw me and all cheered.

  “There she is!”

  “She’s back!”

  “Tan and rested!”

  “Was it amazing?!”

  “What happened to your lips?”

  All the faces, so happy to see me. So hopeful. As hopeful as I’d been a short week ago.

  I collapsed in my chair and burst into tears.

  It was terrible, watching their faces fall, feeling their vicarious disappointment. But I couldn’t stop myself—the tears I’d been keeping in for two months freed me, and I started to go into exactly how terrible it was. Moment by moment, insult by insult. Windmeal by windmeal.

  And something amazing happened.

  By the time I’d finished reenacting performing CPR on my dying candy, my entire office—from sales to IT to shipping to two messenger guys who had just wandered in—were standing or sitting around me, laughing their asses off. And they weren’t there because I was next to the fax machine (except for Wasim, who was waiting for a release from London to come through)—they’d stuck around because they wanted to hear more. I made them laugh.

  I was funny. I mean, I’d already known I was a
good sidekick, but now I had a crowd of my own. A rapt audience.

  Before heading back to her desk, my friend Joanna hugged me.

  “You really should be writing this shit down,” she said.

  At that moment, I decided to try. I was going to take that class at Chicago City Limits my brother was insisting I take.

  And a new beginning started for me for real.

  Water Is for Writers

  * * *

  My first marriage was a work marriage—a writing partnership, which in many ways is the same as a real marriage. We shared a paycheck, a job, success, failure, both good news and bad, criticism, a mind, and three beautiful children (our scripts). We represented each other on the page and in the writers’ room. In sickness and in health.

  Until the death of our joint career did us part.

  Samantha and I met in a Beginning Sitcom Writing class at the New School in Manhattan. I gravitated toward Samantha right away because she had similar features as my childhood best friend, Rachel: thick brown hair cut in a short bob, green eyes, and the overall appearance of a college futon—sort of generally soft and messy but comfortable. After class, we would walk to the subway together, decompressing and debating whether or not our teacher, Mort Scharfman—who claimed to have written for the greatest sitcoms of all time—had in fact actually written for All in the Family, Three’s Company, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Odd Couple, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. As this was long before Google, there were no immediate answers, so we decided he was definitely lying. He had to be—no one had a résumé like the one he boasted, and if they had, they certainly wouldn’t be spending their Tuesday nights trying to explain story structure to a bunch of New Yorkers who thought they were the next Seinfields.

 

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