It didn’t help that couples swarmed all over Victrola today. The sleazy male singles who usually populated the place were gone, and in their place were couples. Middle-aged couples with matching salt-and-pepper hair reading The New York Times. Teenage couples wearing headphones and doing homework. Married couples with toddlers in tow. There, in fact, was Hottie Dad, with a woman who appeared to be Hottie Mom, sleek and exotic looking in designer clothes, gazing with adoration at her beautiful child asleep in her stroller.
Gag.
Once upon a time, I had been part of a Happy Couple who frequented Victrola. Loser was the one who’d taken me here for the first time. We used to come here on Sundays together, full from brunch in Coastal Kitchen next door. I’d write, he’d read, and we’d hold hands or play footsies under the table. Happy to be together. Or at least I was. Who knew how long he’d been unhappy before he decided to fuck some other girl, lie to me about it, and dump me?
Stop it. Just focus on writing. It’ll make you feel better.
I logged on to Blogger, praying that blogging would have its usual therapeutic effect. Today, I was going to write about my date with Sexy Boy. I knew it was dangerous, seeing that GuyPal #1 was SB’s best friend, but he had promised, promised not to give away the URL or say a word about what I’d written. I didn’t trust him completely, though. Who knew what he might give away to Sexy Boy under the influence of some substance or other? But my readers, up to twenty-five a day now, were demanding to know how the date had gone. I couldn’t exactly let them down. Several more comments had appeared on my previous entry about SB, asking for details PLEASE.
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Your date was Thursday, now it’s Saturday, are you going to tell us what happened or WHAT? Delilah | Homepage | 9/21/02—12:33 P.M.
Yeah, come on, I need my Breakup Babe fix! We want to know what happened—don’t leave us hanging!
Little Princess | Homepage | 9/21/02—9:02 P.M.
“Little Princess,” I discovered, from reviewing the referral page on my hit counter, was a blogger from Ohio who’d put a link to my site on hers. She was an especially atrocious writer, who wrote about the very mundane details of her mundane life as a dental hygienist, but her comment delighted me no end. It was one thing for my friends to say they liked Breakup Babe—who knew if they were telling the truth, after all?—but another thing for strangers in cyberspace to beg for their fix.
Twelve years ago, as an unpaid editorial intern at Alaska Airlines Magazine, writing filler pieces like “Alaska’s History Comes Alive at New Museum” or “Portland Entrepreneur Puts the Fun Back into Office Supplies,” my editor and future writing mentor, Noah, had told me, “You have a distinctive voice. Keep at it.”
I didn’t know exactly how he could discern my “distinctive voice” amid the fluff, but I tried to believe him anyway. The confidence Mrs. Bloomstedt had instilled in me when I was ten had not completely disappeared, after all. It had only gone underground during college and the brutal, recession-plagued postcollege years, when I’d been forced to take jobs like receptionist in a chilly basement, receptionist in a gleaming high-rise, receptionist in a desolate industrial park.
That all changed when I fled California for Seattle and got a job selling sheepskin slippers at Pike Place Market. Sure, it was an unlikely choice for a magna cum laude graduate of U.C. Berkeley, with a degree in comparative literature, but it beat being a receptionist. At least I got to be in the thick of things, hanging out on the waterfront with artists and actors and musicians who treasured the flexibility that working at Seattle’s biggest tourist attraction gave them. I, too, benefited from this flexibility, because now that I wasn’t working 8–5 in some prison of an office, I had time to do the internship at Alaska Airlines Magazine. I didn’t know it then, of course, but that internship would launch my writing career. All I knew was that it was great to be writing—even if I wasn’t paid, and even if I had to hawk slippers to make it happen.
Now—finally—more evidence that I had a distinctive voice! Because, even though I’d published plenty since the internship days, this was the first time I’d put my real self out there on the page for people to see. And they liked it! They liked me! Hell, maybe my scintillating articles in the airline magazine had garnered reader adoration too, but in the stodgy world of periodicals, there was no way for them to immediately broadcast their feelings to me. All hail the Internet!
So, good little attention whore that I was, I wrote a thank-you e-mail to “Little Princess” and put her on my own, growing, Nice Peeps Who Link to Me list. And now, ignoring the fawning couples who drooled all around me, I delivered the latest fix to my addicts.
Sunday, September 22, 2002
4:40 PM Breakup Babe
When we arrived at his rambling rental in upper Queen Anne after a long dinner, Sexy Boy’s roommate Ganja King greeted us in the “music room.” “Hey kids!”
“The group housing situation is temporary,” SB had told me, anticipating that I might look askance at a man in his thirties who still lived with roommates in a dwelling straight out of Animal House. “Since I’m out of town so often, it doesn’t really make sense for me to have my own place. That way I can save my money to travel. I’ll have my own place soon, though.”
All the lights were on and Ganja King and his girlfriend, Ganja Queen, were wide awake, hanging out as if it were eight o’clock on a weekend, not midnight on a weeknight. Miles Davis blasted from the stereo. The room, full of keyboards and amps, reeked of pot.
We’d just returned from dinner at Marco’s Supper Club, where I’d been so thrilled by SB’s presence, I could barely breathe. With his bangs in his face, wearing a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater, he looked equal parts rugged and cuddly. Throughout the fried sage leaves with a medley of dipping sauces and the first vodka tonics, he hefted compliments my way. You look very beautiful tonight. I’ve always wanted to get to know you better. How did you get such shiny hair?
At one point, he complimented the necklace I was wearing (Something Silver, $18), and reached across the table to touch it, brushing his fingers across my neck as he did so. I practically fainted. Sensible Girl, clad in baggy overalls and sipping on herbal tea, guffawed.
“Could he be any more obvious?”
“Shut up!” said Needy Girl, rousing herself from her swoon and looking longingly over at SB, her mouth hanging open ever so slightly. “I haven’t been this attracted to anyone in a LONG time.” She was wearing a tartan miniskirt that looked suspiciously like the $150 one I’d coveted at Kenneth Cole’s the other day, along with a too-tight black cashmere sweater.
“Yeah, WHATEVER.” Sensible Girl rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and settled in for a long night. She was clearly conserving her resources.
Now, back at the ranch, as he called it, SB seated himself in a beanbag chair. I stood there in my coat, clutching my purse, and tried to look nonchalant, as if I were perfectly sure of myself and Sensible Girl and Needy Girl were not at this very moment putting on their gloves and preparing for another violent round in the ring.
“Hey, R.,” SB said, sensing my uncertainty, “would you like to go hang out in my room?” He looked up at me with those deadly green weapons and my knees started to buckle.
“No!” Sensible Girl got in the first jab. “You’ve got to work tomorrow! And look at this house—it’s a den of drug addicts! Go home now!”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Needy Girl’s high-pitched voice carried over the music. “After all she’s been through? You would DENY her this?!”
I looked into SB’s seductive eyes, which stayed fixed on mine. They promised all kinds of debauchery. My stomach fluttered. Yet, I hesitated.
At dinner, he’d made one comment that I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret. “R.,” he’d said, after we’d both had two cocktails and he’d talked a blue streak about his job piloting rich executives to and from resorts in Alaska, nearly forgetting to ask me questions about myself in the process, “th
at breakup hit you pretty hard, didn’t it?” He paused, took a sip of his drink, then looked at me with an expression that was part concern, part something else I couldn’t decipher.
I looked down at my dinner. Felt my cheeks flush. Why was he bringing this up anyway? “Yeah, I guess.” I moved some food around my plate with my fork.
“Well,” he said. I looked up. He leaned toward me. Around us, candlelight flickered and contented yuppies murmured. I wanted to reach over and touch the bangs that fell across his eyes. To run my finger across his cheek, which revealed just a trace of stubble. To touch his full, soft lips with mine. “It takes a while to get over that kind of thing.”
I swallowed. Nodded. What the hell was he talking about? I didn’t need time to get over it. I was over it!
He reached across the table and laid his hand on my arm. I could feel the warmth of his hand through the flimsy material of my revealing purple blouse (Nordstrom’s, $53). The warmth not only penetrated the sleeve of my blouse, it shot its way down my arm and through my torso to the crotch of my Victoria’s Secret underwear ($7), where it burst into flame. I started to sweat.
“This is a good time for you to just go out and have fun, then, isn’t it?” he said, giving me a smile that was so devilish, so alluring, that it threatened to turn the flame into a towering inferno. Quickly I took a drink of water.
“Yeah,” I said. But it came out hoarsely, barely a word at all.
Now, as I felt his silken web tighten around me, I rolled that “fun” comment around in my mind. Was he trying to tell me that I shouldn’t get too serious about anybody, much less him? Or was he trying to tell me that he would help me forget about Loser? And what kind of “fun,” exactly, was he talking about? Because if I have any dating rules in this post-Loser world it’s that I’m not going to sleep with someone until I have a f*cking rock on my finger!
Kissing, however, is a different matter. SB had definitely passed clearance for that, even though GalPal #1 had warned me to hold off as long as possible. “It can’t hurt to wait,” she had said. “Even just to kiss him. That way you won’t jump in without knowing what his intentions are.” (She herself had first kissed her boyfriend within ten minutes of meeting him at a party.)
Was it possible for me to wait? Could I look at those magnetic green orbs and tell SB I had to go home? SB always wants what he can’t get, GuyPal #1 had said.
I looked at Sensible Girl. She made a cutting motion across her throat with her finger, then mouthed a single word. Wait. Her eyes pleaded with me.
Then I looked over at Needy Girl, who was staring at SB with a starved expression on her face, like one of those malnourished African children you see on TV. Pity overcame me. I would pledge half my salary to this starving child to help her get out of poverty and into Harvard! Look at those wide, imploring, innocent eyes! She was a victim; she needed me!
“Okay,” I said to SB. “Sure. For just a little while.”
“Yes!!” shrieked Needy Girl, pumping her arms and twirling around in her pointy black cowboy boots. Instantly, the starving-child image was gone, replaced by an obnoxious Sex and the City wannabe.
“First, R.,” said Ganja King, who was tall and skinny, with a gaunt face and big hair à la Keith Richards, “would you like a little refreshment?”
I turned around from putting my coat in the corner to see Ganja King holding out the biggest bong I’d ever seen. It looked like a brass hookah, with a wide, intricately carved base, a narrow valve about a foot long, and a bowl at the top with a little lid. From the side curled a snakelike tube, one end of which—I guessed—you were supposed to put in your mouth.
“Um, no thanks,” I said, after recovering from the sight of the giant apparatus. I did not want to give Sensible Girl the opportunity to beat me over the head with it. Besides, if I took one hit off that thing, I would ingest enough to make me high for the next year.
SB, however, apparently had no such qualms. He took the bong from Ganja King, settled back in the beanbag, and inhaled. Deeply. He suddenly looked like the fat, lazy caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, sitting on his big leaf and sucking on his hookah. Grotesque and lethargic, his eyes half closed as he inhaled.
Still holding his breath, SB passed the bong to Ganja Queen and the caterpillar image disappeared. When all three of them exhaled, one right after the other, the room was so thick with smoke I could barely see. I held my breath so I wouldn’t get a contact high, and tried not to pass judgment. Who didn’t smoke pot these days, after all?
“Not everyone does, missy, and you know it,” said Sensible Girl, who sensed an opening now that Needy Girl had inhaled some of the secondhand smoke and was lolling on the floor, head nodding in intense concentration to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew.
“Aren’t you just a little old for this kind of thing now?” she asked, looking around the room with a sneer at the three adults with dilated pupils and dreamy smiles. It was true I’d dated several stoners in the not-so-distant past. Right before Loser, in fact, I’d dated a minuscule rock-climbing pothead, who could turn any type of fruit into a bong. I was more discriminating than that now. Or so I hoped.
But then SB said, “Shall we dance, madam?” All intelligent thought fled my brain, and next thing I knew I was sitting on a mattress on a white(ish) carpet that had seen better days. Soccer balls, tennis balls, baseballs, and other assorted balls filled the room, accompanied by a cornucopia of white(ish) socks scattered freely about. Despite the preponderance of socks, the room smelled surprisingly nice, of lavender, perhaps.
SB went directly over to the stereo, the most expensive item in the place. The speakers were nearly as tall as me. A few seconds later, to my surprise, Beethoven came blasting out of them.
“At least your father would have approved of his taste in music,” muttered Sensible Girl. Then she fled into the night, all hope abandoned. Needy Girl, on the other hand, sat on the edge of the mattress, her eyes wide, her expression trancelike, whether from drugs or anticipation I didn’t know.
I could barely believe what was about to happen. Finally my feverish kissing fantasies would come true! As SB fiddled with the stereo, I quickly ran my tongue over my teeth to eradicate any stray lipstick. Why hadn’t I brought any mints?
I took a deep breath as SB sat down close to me. He sat there for a moment, looking at me suggestively through dilated eyes. As he leaned toward me, smelling of Drakkar Noir and pot, I felt his soft lips on mine before they even touched me.
He never actually kissed me, though. Instead, as he leaned toward me and opened that soft-looking mouth of his, he started to talk. And he talked—nonstop—for an hour.
About how he didn’t like his job. About how he needed to move into his own place. About the ex-girlfriend (Summer) who had cheated on him numerous times and who he was still obsessed with. About how he was going to stop being obsessed with her any day now. About how he knew he smoked too much pot, but that soon he was going to stop and turn his life around. I listened, nodding vigorously (and then less vigorously, and then hardly at all), interjecting supportive comments, and all the while looking with an ache in my chest at his eyes, his lips, willing him to shut the hell up and just kiss me.
At 1:30 A.M., when I finally realized that kissing was not on the agenda, I claimed tiredness and excused myself. As SB walked me to my car, I struggled to find just the right stance between hope and despair. And then, with one little statement from him, a malignant tumor known as Hope-a-noma took over and erased any doubts I might have had about him. He said, “I’ll give you a holler this weekend.” And with that quaint little phrase, hope-a-noma took over. Stoner, so? Self-obsessed, so? Stuck in his life? Who cared? He would call me. Love would conquer all! La-de-da-de-da!
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After I hit the “Publish” button, I felt lighthearted. Free! I’d outed Sexy Boy for the big, fat flake that he was and laughed at myself in the process. Clearly, I could now care less about the bastard! Feeling g
iddy, I looked out of Victrola’s plate glass window at the scene on 15th Avenue. It was a mix of funky and generic. Safeway and Walgreen’s mixed with consignment shops and used bookstores. Sun had given way to drizzle, and half the people strolling around outside wore summer clothes and smiles that said they hoped it would stay summer awhile longer. The other half wore Gore-Tex shells and had guarded, winter expressions on their faces.
My euphoria lasted for all of a minute before the urge to check my cell phone gripped me again. Was it possible he’d called?
My mood plummeted.
No! I would not check my messages. So what if he’d called? I should go for a run. Work out. Do something else that would make me feel powerful. Build on this good feeling that writing had just given me. I stared out at the rain and imagined myself at the gym, feeling sweaty and strong, not checking my messages until later.
But what if he wanted to make a plan for tomorrow? Or even TONIGHT?
There was a reason I hadn’t told my readers about his failure to call. I was still hoping, of course, deluded idiot that I was. Unable to control myself, I turned my cell phone on. Stared at it. Yes! The little envelope floated onto the display! There was a message!
“You have one new message,” said the fembot. “To hear your new messages—” I pressed “1” without listening to her stupid spiel. I held my breath. Waited to hear his voice.
“Hello,” said my mother’s cheerful phone voice. “It’s your mother.” (Why, why WHY did she always say that? As if I didn’t recognize my own mother’s voice after thirty-four years, the mother who inevitably called and left messages at just such times, when the last thing I needed was for her to identify herself.) “Just calling to see how you’re doing. Give me a call back when you get a chance.”
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