I don’t know if there’s a French term for being told your future against your will, but I bet the Germans have a word for it. According to the stars, I was a clumsy animal that shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a double-beam scale. I tried not to take what she said too literally, but I was alone in that. Ramon broke up with me a week later. He argued that I was sucking him dry, and that his company and school-work were suffering. I couldn’t deny that I took up a lot of his time, but it wasn’t my fault that he couldn’t keep up. He said that I didn’t need a boyfriend—I needed a tutor and a masseuse. Clearly he needed an Aquarius or a Virgo, or whatever sign doesn’t value fun. We both know what his mother really meant to say: “Get the hell away from my son, slut; you’ll never be one of us,” or as the French say, “À bientôt!”
Well, va te faire foutre to you.
Everything sounds better in French.
MY FINAL FIELDWORK project came in my senior year. The catalyst was an old friend, Carol, who came to live with me after McGill hired her as its theater director in residence. We knew each other from working at a café back in Calgary and became fast friends once we discovered that beer foam looked like steamed milk if you poured your Molson into a café au lait bowl fast enough. Being around Carol was like being at an ongoing theater festival. She had a joyful laugh that she used liberally (making her the best audience member ever) and was the only woman I’d ever met who’d decoupage things and they’d actually look better. My roommates were immediately enchanted by her aura, and they agreed to throw a mattress in the middle of our living room for six months in exchange for a little rent money.
On her second night, while I prepared us a dinner of tofu and beans (I was a vegetarian back then because I didn’t know how to safely handle meat) and she constructed a modern art mobile, she asked if she could invite over her friend Sammy who was taking drama at Concordia, “the other university.” I didn’t know anyone studying at the other, more artsy university. It was like entertaining a Montague. Of course I said yes, and I was glad I did. Sammy turned out to be so adorable. He was a hipster before we knew what they were, striking the perfect balance between skateboarder and philosophy professor by pairing sneakers and an old concert T-shirt with tortoiseshell glasses and a full beard. His curly mahogany hair framed his face in such a way that he looked like a handsome version of the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz. He also lived in a headspace similar to Emerald City. It was all theater and puppets, masks and make-believe. His joie de vivre was infectious. I felt lighter around him. We all laughed recalling our favorite Muppet Movie moments, and when it was time for him to leave, I offered to walk him halfway home, pretending I needed to stop by the corner store to get some orange juice for the morning. Carol gave me a wink as I struggled to put on my winter boots.
Sammy and I kicked snow around on Parc Avenue, discussing how beautiful Montreal was in comparison with prefab Calgary, where he, too, had grown up.
“And have you ever seen so many amazing churches?” I said, stopping in front of a beautiful sandstone church with a carved steeple that happened to be right on the street. We stood in silence, staring at the ornate gargoyles and carvings, two Jews fascinated with the exquisiteness of a Christian house of worship.
“Maybe they left one of the doors open by accident,” I said, running up the stone steps.
“No church leaves its doors unlocked at midnight, Ophira,” Sammy said, as I tugged on the handles and one of the heavy wooden doors released and swung open. I looked back at him with a massive grin. I had this one.
The cathedral was pitch black except for dozens of red vigil lights at the front illuminating a statue of Mary. It was part eerie and part unbelievably seductive. Suddenly it became very clear to me what needed to happen next. When two single Jewish college students are alone in a church at night, it is mandatory that they get it on. I believe it’s written in the Torah. In the middle aisle, halfway to the pulpit, we started necking in front of holy Jesus on the cross. I wanted to take things a step further; when would this happen again? But Sammy insisted that we had pushed the donations envelope far enough. It was too risky and a little disrespectful. I didn’t want to piss him off, or the Lord, really, since he was so cool about leaving the door unlocked, so I backed down, and we reluctantly parted ways, with flushed cheeks and red noses. I needed to see more of this guy.
We held off from sleeping together for a while. Two days. Hanging out with Sammy was like entering into a children’s book. He asked me if I wanted to help out on opening night of his school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which involved getting dressed up as sprites and handing out beverages or hanging coats. Of course! We were both ecstatic about the invitation to get costumed. Sammy and I were a perfect match in the woodland fairy world, and we had the best sex of our six-month relationship while dressed as pixies, our silver and green eye shadow and lipstick mixing together. If we were going to role-play, it would be Elizabethan-themed and involve iambic pentameter.
Unfortunately we were mere mortals, not flying nymphs, and much like the acid and the ecstasy, Puck’s spell soon wore off, too. My pragmatic nature wore on him, and his whimsical demeanor frustrated me. Occasionally I wanted to commiserate about how little money I had, how much my roommates were bothering me, or how I was struggling with whatever the hell I was doing with my life without Sammy breaking into song, cueing the marionettes, or denying it by entering the world of make-believe. Like actors after closing night, we had no way of relating to each other once thrust into the real world. During final exams, which were always a torturously tough time for me, Sammy suddenly flew home to be with his family. I was furious and told him that he was like everyone else (meaning Michael), abandoning me when times got tough. He replied that the only common denominator in that equation was me.
I liked him better with the puppets.
Fieldwork was unpredictably hard, and informants were demanding and high maintenance. It was also impossible for me not to get a little emotionally attached. Sammy and I broke up over the phone during finals, a long-distance call that I paid for. With a month left in college, I got drunk at a party and made out with my best friend, Rebecca, to make sure I’d checked off that box and fulfilled my college duties. Her mouth was too small and too soft. It was like kissing a Precious Moments doll.
Having never learned enough French to be able to get a job in Montreal, and with no obvious application for my cultural anthropology degree other than sleeping around, I decided to move again, this time to Vancouver, where my older sister had offered me a free bed. I did, however, learn to understand a little Michel Foucault and even printed up a quote of his and pasted it above my Macintosh Classic for inspiration: “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
I suspected that I was on that path, even after I donated my black leather biker cap to the radio station.
CHAPTER 10
UNSEND
Everyone loves Vancouver: You can ski in the morning, windsurf in the afternoon, and smoke your buddy’s top-shelf hydroponic pot at night. It was the perfect place to be if you had no solid plans. No one cared if you had your shit together, were working toward a career, or were a productive member of society. As long as you recycled and were nice to animals, you were, as we Canadians say, eh-okay. So why wasn’t I drawn to a city whose motto is “By Sea, Land, and Air We Prosper”? Because I prospered in dark basements. I didn’t care about hiking or jumping off a cliff. My idea of an endorphin spike was persuading the cute guy at the end of the bar to come home with me.
I had no reason to hold a grudge against the place. Pivotal moments in my early sexual history took place in “The ’Couv.” The first was at sixteen when my oldest sister dressed me and my three best friends up in her spandex nightclubbing clothes, teased our hair, and took us to see Chippendale dancers. Her attitude was that if we were going to drink underage, it
might as well be on her watch, thus making her the coolest sister ever. I think she found us highly entertaining, the way we strutted around in high heels and fake lashes, pretending we were grown up and could handle our liquor, as if we were auditioning for Teens and Tiaras.
We may have had some experience with booze, but none of us had ever seen live adult men naked before. That Chippendale performance stuck with me over the years because it was so . . . creepy. The guys were more intimidating than titillating. They seemed too confident, too into their jobs as strippers, screwing up the whole power dynamic. I would have liked more sensitive men, guys who were broken down, vulnerable, and ashamed to be exotic dancers. If any of them had shed an embarrassed tear during his dance, I would have given him a twenty. Plus, I didn’t relate to their ridiculous job-related Halloween costumes: the doctor, the policeman, the fireman. Where was the professor, the bike courier, the barista? The headliner was the worst: a greased-up man in a ponytail and a leopard-print bikini yelling, “Me Tarzan! You Jane!” The poor guy actually placed a CorningWare casserole pot on stage filled with kerosene, lit it, and then seductively danced around and over his tiny campfire. All I could think was—would he use that later to make scalloped potatoes? Was that the smell of burning hair?
Two years later at eighteen, I spent a week on the beach in Vancouver with my new best friend from ballet, Michelle, listening to a single Violent Femmes CD and fooling around with random guys. Actually, I don’t think Michelle ever touched any of them. She was by far the prettier one and was saving herself either for marriage or at least for someone truly worth it. Not me. I was out there getting fingered in the ocean, which was about as orgasmic as watching a guy thrust his junk over a flaming CorningWare pot. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to have my own place where I could lie down.
DURING MY FIRST few months crashing at my sister Avigail’s place, I did absolutely nothing. I didn’t have a job or a schedule. I’m not even sure I brushed my teeth every day. At month five it became clear, by way of a sisterly ultimatum, that I needed to find my own place and make some money. The job came easy. It was at a business where I’d pictured myself working for many years: Kinkos. Sure, Montreal had poutine, smoked meat, and a great sense of style, but did it have a Kinkos? No. How was a college student like myself expected to get any major projects done if I couldn’t photocopy a book or print a paper after hours? Who did homework before midnight? It was a constant frustration. Then I moved to Vancouver and saw it in big glossy blue letters: Kinkos. I would have called mine ProcrastaPrint or something else more obviously fitting than a made-up word that sounded like a fetish club for clowns.
Impressed by my knowledge of Microsoft Word, Kinkos hired me on the spot and put me in charge of renting out computers by the minute and helping people with their word processing problems. The other computer employees, distinct from the copy people, were geeky boys still struggling with acne, twenty-sided dice, and what to say to girls. They were great when I needed to pawn off an unwanted shift, but that’s where the courtship ended. I needed someone more my speed. It was slim pickings on the copier side too. Let’s just say that Kinkos didn’t employ any handsome Fulbright scholars—it was the sort of job that attracted lost souls, extreme potheads, and me. I was delighted to discover that if you heard “safety meeting” announced over the PA system, it meant someone was about to spark up a joint in the back alley. Safety meetings took place multiple times a day. The regular customers must have thought that handling toner was extremely dangerous.
I fell into a convenient, one-sided flirtation with a very tall, very thin, half-hippie half-just-broke dude named Bruce. He had the most amazing green eyes and Mick Jagger lips, if only he’d cut his stringy shoulder-length hair to show them off. Although he had decent hygiene, he never quite looked clean, as if he were perpetually covered in a layer of dust. At the same time, he was one of those people obsessed with offbeat health fads and was currently drinking two cups of olive oil a day. Maybe that was why the dirt stuck to him. He doted on me with everything he had to offer, and as the rides home, the free beers, and the bummed cigarettes added up, I could tell he was getting impatient, wondering when we’d take things to the next level. The only thing climaxing for me was my guilt. I didn’t want to lose him as a loyal companion. I also didn’t have the faintest clue why he liked me so much.
It may have been a special occasion like his birthday or something that intensified my shame level, but I finally gave in and slept with him. I don’t remember the quality of the sex because I was drunk and high (big surprise), but I do remember how fat and round I felt next to his long, thin body. He was like a cricket, all elbows and knees knocking together. After, while he was getting me a glass of water and himself a cup of oil, I actually asked him, “Hey, why do you like me?”
“Duh,” he answered back. “Cuz you’re awesome.” It was nice to be awesome but it was not specific enough of an answer for me to draw any solid conclusions. I tried to avoid him after my bed surrender as I had no intention of duplicating that evening, and I didn’t want to have to be faced with telling him that. I needed to find a new job since it was becoming increasingly clear that I was in the top 1 percent of awesome at Kinkos. And when you hit the glass ceiling at the copy shop, it’s time to move on, at least to a Starbucks.
While still working there, pondering who I was and what I was doing with my life, I tried stand-up comedy. It altered me chemically forever.
There is a correlation between me and sex, and me and stand-up. There’s the obvious therapy angle—the bottomless well of self-loathing that no amount of adoration by strangers will ever fill, blah blah blah. Boring. The more visceral link between the two has to do with the deep connection you create with a person when you have sex and with a crowd when you get a laugh. Even if you can bond for a brief second, it’s a moment of bliss, a wave of pure release. Good sex that is. I would seriously rather do the worst stand-up show than have bad sex, any day.
I’d been secretly flirting with the idea of trying stand-up for years but didn’t know where to start. The most proactive, yet safe, thing I could think to do was volunteer as an usher for a comedy festival. It ended up being a good choice. A few of the other ushers were actual up-and-coming stand-ups, and after we shined flashlights in one another’s faces for ten minutes, they invited me to come check out a workshop for wannabe comedians. I guffawed at the idea. You can’t teach funny in a class. Yet I found myself signing up, with the intention of skipping out after the first hour, before they collected their money. Nice try. This outfit knew what they were doing and asked for the money at the door. I hemmed and hawed, then found myself taking out $300 from the ATM, still suspicious that I was being roped into a scam and being sold a lofty dream. In a way, I was.
In front of ten other hopeful amateur comics, I told a few stories, little anecdotes that I’d used over the years to try to amuse my friends. The teacher said he saw talent in me and suggested I do the “graduation show”—the next night. I couldn’t believe a weekend workshop had a graduation show. But those were the words I’d waited to hear my entire life, and it only cost me three hundred bucks! The following night I called in sick for my shift at Kinkos and stepped out onto the stage for the first time.
To be clear, I wasn’t anything special, just another person trying stand-up for the first time, so, pretty terrible. I believe my opening line was, “So my name is Ophira. People always ask me, what kind of name is that? And I tell them it’s Hebrew. I’m from the land of Heeb.” I heard a laugh, resulting in the biggest rush of my life. It was like jumping out of a plane while having sex with the guy people told Clive Owen he looked like. But I was paralyzed by the idea of actually pursuing stand-up comedy. The whole thing was so daunting. My family would never approve of my hanging out in bars all night, making no money, and dealing with drunk people. Then again, that was almost exactly what I did already. But there was also dying miserably in front of a crowd or having a heckler ruin you—it seemed too mu
ch for me to bear. The comedy teacher did nothing to assuage that fear. He warned, “When you die onstage, you die alone.”
So you could say that I was afraid of the truth.
On the advice of the stand-up teacher, I signed up for an acting class; it was a garden party by comparison. Not that I was a naturally good actor either, but the atmosphere was nurturing. The class was all about having faith in yourself and your scene partner, and everyone hugged at the end. One of my acting-class partners, Cindy, begged me to go out with her friend Phillip, claiming he was the “best guy ever.” Never believe a single girl who says she has the greatest single guy for you. If he’s so amazing, why isn’t she with him? I took her endorsement to heart after letting her slap my face in a trust exercise and agreed to have coffee with him. He insisted we meet at a “nonchain café,” as he referred to it, which I appreciated.
I looked over this “best guy ever.” He resembled Tom Wopat, Luke from The Dukes of Hazzard (or Johnny Knoxville, depending on your generation) but with a massive Jew fro. So like a Heeb of Hazzard. I could definitely work with it.
We both ordered a regular coffee with milk, no bullshit. The barista rang us up for $2.50.
“Do you need some money?” I offered, after watching him search through his wallet for many minutes.
He looked confused and then gestured for me to speak into his other ear. “I blew this ear out listening to Beethoven too loud when I was sick in bed,” he said.
What did that even mean? Regardless, he had my attention, and I had to know more.
“Do you need some money for the coffees?” I yelled into his other ear.
“No, I got it, but this is weird,” he said, delicately holding up a tiny piece of paper. “I found a couple tabs of acid in my wallet. I guess I forgot about them. I have no idea how long they’ve been there. Do you think acid expires?”
Screw Everyone Page 9