Girlfriend of a Surfer

by Bebe Wilde

  “Get in,” he said and leaned over and opened the passenger door for me.

  “Uh, Jed, I really shouldn’t,” I said.

  “Get in, Willa,” he said. “Please? We haven’t talked since your boyfriend tried to beat me up.”

  I thought about that. Bear had said he’d been the one delivering most of the punches. Well, what man would admit that he’d been beat? I didn’t blame Jed for trying to save face.

  “Well, come on,” he said. “Please.”

  “Okay,” I said and went to my car quickly, grabbed my purse, then got into his car. As I sank deeply into the leather, I breathed a sigh of relaxation. I’d never felt anything so nice before. Jed stared sideways at me. “What is it?” I asked.

  “You look hot,” he said with almost no emotion in his voice.

  I turned to him. “You’re not on drugs or anything, are you?”

  “Why do you ask that?” he said and pulled onto the street.

  Wow, this was a smooth ride. I thought about asking him to let me drive his car but thought better of it.

  “Huh?” he asked again. “Why do you ask that? About me being on drugs? You know I never liked drugs.”

  “Well, you’re acting really weird,” I said. “I mean, weirder than you used to act.” And he was. Well, back when I knew him, back in Tennessee, people thought he was weird because he was quiet and contemplative. Some even called him strange and my mom chastised me for going out with him in the first place. “He never speaks!” she’d yell whenever he dropped me off after a date. “Don’t you think that’s weird, Willa?”

  I didn’t. It was just Jed and that was the way he was. Of course, whenever we were alone, he was the one doing all the talking and he talked my ear off. But around other people? Not so much. It was like he was always sizing them up or something. Maybe it had something to do with him wanting to be a writer and director. Now, of course, my mother chastised me about how I should have never “let that Jed go!” and just ended up “settling with” Bear. “You should have never broken up with him for Bear,” she routinely informs me, even five or so years after the fact. “Why couldn’t you have stayed with him instead of going with that bum?” she lamented. “He’s famous!” Ugh! “You’re only with Bear because he’s so good looking,” she said. “That’s the only reason I married your daddy! Look at how that turned out!” I couldn’t win with anyone. She couldn’t stand Jed before and then suddenly she thought he was the bee’s knees. It was a bit too much to take.

  “I guess I’m acting weird because I didn’t expect to see my ex-girlfriend today,” Jed said. “One that never once contacted me after we broke up even though it would have been nice since we were both in this new, big city by ourselves.”

  I sunk into my seat, feeling bad. “Listen, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I did want to call you and smooth things out but then you left those awful messages on my phone and I got kind of scared.” It was true. I hated we’d ended things like we had but he’d said some really terrible things to me. Perhaps deservedly so, but still. But the fact of the matter was that we’d been on rocky ground for a while in our relationship and really just weren’t right for one another. If I hadn’t ended it with him when I met Bear, I would have sooner rather than later. Breaking up sucked. It really, really did. It was almost worth it to not get in a relationship with someone in the first place just to avoid the breaking up part.

  He stared at me. “Whatever. I’ll buy that, I guess.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to be friendly. “It’s good to see you. I just don’t know why you want to go to lunch with me.”

  “We never said goodbye properly,” he said.

  My mouth dropped. I’d just said that very thing to Quinn that morning!

  “So, let’s say goodbye,” he said.

  “Do you want me to get out of the car or something?” I asked.

  He turned to me and shook his head. “Not yet.”

  He was a dick. He’d always been a dick, only slightly less dick-ish with me. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to break up with him. He’d say things and hurt my feelings and act like he hadn’t said anything bad at all. Like one time I gained a few pounds and he just looked at me and said, “You look like you’ve put on some weight, Willa.” Just like that. I burst into tears and he said, “What’s wrong with you? You’re just fat, not dying!”

  In his mind, he hadn’t said anything bad at all. He thought something like that was a perfectly normal thing to say to someone. But he had really hurt me.

  “My God, Jed, you used to be so nice,” I said, even though we both knew that wasn’t true.

  “Times change,” he said and stopped at a red light.

  “They certainly do,” I muttered and began to remember just how much of a dick he could be. I turned in my seat to him, suddenly getting angry. I didn’t have to put up with this! “You know what, to hell with you, Jed. You were always a dick to me. You said shitty things and hurt my feelings and then you get pissed off when I find a nice guy who treats me well? And Bear is nice to me! He’s nice! You fit real good into this Hollywood world with your fancy cars and fancy houses but I know the real you from back in Tennessee and the real you is still that dork in high school begging me to go out with him!”

  I got out of the car, slammed the door and stepped onto the sidewalk. I’d walk back to my car. It wasn’t that far. Who the hell did he think he was ordering me around and talking to me like that?

  I heard him pull the car over and park on the street. I looked over my shoulder at him getting out of the car and hurrying after me. Oh, no. He still wanted to talk. I didn’t, so I quickened my pace and if I hadn’t been wearing that stupid skirt, I might have outrun him. But, alas, no. He caught up to me and grabbed my arm.

  “Sorry,” he said, slightly out of breath. “I know I’m a dick but I loved you, Willa!”

  “Oh, Jed,” I said and sighed. “We were high school sweethearts, that’s all. I’m sorry it ended like it did but I knew once you hit the big time, you’d dump me for some bunny or pumpkin or whatever those women are called. You always liked big boobs.”

  He gave me a look like he realized I was right, then cracked up. I’d properly defused the situation. I always could with him. I suddenly remembered how easy it had been to wrap him around my little finger.

  “You’re right. I do like big boobs,” he said and blushed a little.

  “And my boobs are nice, right?” I said. “But they’re not so big.”

  “They’re big enough,” he said and gave me an intense look.

  I smiled at him and touched the side of his face. “Jed, I hate that we broke up but you know it was the right thing for us to do.”

  He nodded. “I know,” he said and sighed. “I’m sorry I’m acting this way. I just didn’t expect to see you today.”

  “You think I expected to see you?” I asked. “Hell no! I would have stayed home if I had known.”

  “I’m not that bad, am I?”

  I thought about it. He was, kinda, but now wasn’t the time to go into all that. “No, no,” I said, hurriedly. “Listen. Let’s let bygones be bygones. Can we do that?”

  “We can,” he said, nodding. “Are we going to eat lunch or not? I’m starving.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I told him. “I don’t want to eat lunch with you.”

  He nodded. “I understand. I didn’t mean to come off this way.” He paused. “Well, it was good to see you again.”

  “Well, it wasn’t good seeing you,” I said. “Try to curtail that dick attitude every once in a while, okay? You’ll find that you can attract more bees with honey than vinegar.”

  “Your mom used to say that,” he said.

  “I know,” I replied and laughed. “Have you been back home lately?”

  “No,” he said and shook his head. “Not really. You?”

  “My mom comes out here to visit sometimes,” I said. “And I go there about twice
a year. Bear loves it. He and my cousins go frog gigging and squirrel hunting.”

  “I always hated all that shit,” he said.

  I also suddenly remembered why I’d liked him so much. He hated the same things I did. “So did I,” I said and sighed, then patted his arm. “Good seeing you. When you work out your anger issues, give me a call and we will go to lunch for real, okay?”

  He smiled. “Really? You’d go to lunch with me even after I was such a dick?”

  “Leopards don’t change their spots,” I said. “I never expected you to be any different.”

  He laughed. “I always loved your knack for straight talk.”

  “Too bad you hate me now.”

  He laughed. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I do hate your fucking boyfriend, though. That prick motherfucker.”

  I chuckled. “Well, sorry,” I said. “I have to admit, I’ve seen every movie you’ve done. I loved them. What was the first one? The short film that you turned into a feature that took over the world?”

  “Oh, it didn’t take over the world,” he said and his cheeks flushed a little.

  “Oh, come on now,” I said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  He grinned at me. “The Stick Bug Has Moved?”

  I smiled back. “And where did you get that title?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “You gave it to me, inadvertently, but yeah. I forgot what it was in reference to, though.”

  “You did not forget,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, smiling a little.

  “But, anyway, just to refresh your memory, there was a stick bug on the window for, like, a week and I got used to him being there,” I said. “And one day I looked out and said, ‘The stick bug has moved!’ I don’t know why. I just did. But your movie was the coolest thing ever. And I’m not just kissing your ass. If it sucked, I would tell you.”

  God, if Bear heard me talking to him like this, he’d die. Maybe I should stop. But his movie was good. It even won some indie awards. It was like this supernatural thriller of sorts. Of course, Bear hated it. The gist of it was this: There’s a young, beautiful woman looking out the window of a small house in the country who says, “The stick bug has moved!” Her boyfriend, who’s this surfer/skateboarder type dude comes up behind her and replies, “What?” And then he sees something strange move across the yard. “Oh, my God! Did you see that?” The boyfriend goes out and gets mauled by some wild animal that looks oddly like a bear. His girlfriend screams in horror and has to watch her boyfriend get torn to pieces. And the scene went on for like two minutes, this mauling. It was brutal. And then the girlfriend is accused of murdering him and has to get a court-appointed lawyer to defend her, who, oddly enough, looked a little like Jed. Well, he looked a lot like Jed. I don’t know where they found this guy. Anyway, they begin this torrid affair—the sex scenes were quite graphic—and in the end, she gets off but there was a twist. The lawyer had actually been in love with her and had arranged to release the wild creature in the yard that, once again, looked a lot like a bear. She finds out in the end but forgives him, telling him her boyfriend wasn’t right for her in the first place. The end.

  Yeah, I kinda had a feeling who the two main characters were based on.

  Bear hated it. I had to make him watch it with me. He sat there angrily, his leg shaking the whole time. Whenever he’d try to get up and leave the room, I’d pull him back down on the couch. Once it was over, he began to curse—and I mean curse—Jed. He called him every name in the book, and few I’d never even heard before, which he probably made up. It went on so long I started recording him with my phone. Then Trent stopped by and, seeing Bear go off, started to leave. I motioned him in and we both watched Bear spewing over Jed’s movie. “That fucking motherfucking piece of shit low life sorry excuse for a human…” And on and on and on… Trent and I were almost rolling in the floor with laughter, but Bear paid us no heed. He finally stopped, left the house and didn’t come home for two hours. I imagined he walked up and down the beach, still cursing up a storm. When he did come back, he said he was going to find Jed and settle the score, but I told him I’d looked him up online after we watched the movie and that he was out of town, scouting locations for a movie somewhere. This was a lie, of course, but I couldn’t have him and Jed getting into another fight.

  Trent promptly uploaded the video I had made of Bear to YouTube, calling it, “Bear Gone Mad” and it became legendary, getting several million hits. The comments were classic: “Looks like someone poked the Bear!” and “Yosemite Sam on crack!” and “Did someone just drop in on him or something?”

  Of course, the video got him even more fans. But I had to say, Jed got the final word with his movie.

  “Yeah,” Bear had replied bitterly. “But I got the girl.”

  Well said.

  But now Jed was smiling at me, very pleased at what I’d said about his movie. I mean, Bear hated it, but I didn’t. Then he sighed, went over and sat on a retaining wall, looking up at me. “You know when I pitched that movie, most people didn’t even know what a stick bug was. They were all like, ‘What’s a stick bug?’”

  We laughed then I thought about it. “Are there stick bugs out here?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “But I’ve never seen one.”

  “Listen to us,” I said. “We are too hillbilly, talking about frog gigging and stick bugs.”

  “We are,” he replied, then stared at me intently. “You know, I really need to thank you. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have made it.”

  “How’s that?” I asked and sat down beside him.

  “When you broke up with me, it did something to me and I became driven to be successful, even more so than I was before,” he said. “It was like I got this fever or something. I really began hitting it hard and finally was able to get a meeting with a big studio honcho, but he wasn’t buying what I was selling. However he did ask where I got all the drive from. He called it an insatiable need for success. And I told him about how this girl I really, really loved broke my heart and how I had to show her how wrong she had been to leave me. And he said he understood because he had a few of those in his past and so he agreed to produce the short film. It did very well and then, eventually, we turned it into a feature. And the rest is history.”

  My mouth dropped. I was always left holding the bag, wasn’t I?

  “So, thanks, Willa,” he said and patted my shoulder. “Thanks for breaking my heart. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” I said, trying my best to refrain from calling him a bad name. I stood. “For that, you are going to buy me the most expensive lunch in LA. Get up!”

  He got up and grinned at me. “I’d love to do that.”

  “And you will.”

  And he did. After a nice, expensive lunch at a bistro, we drove around in his car. He even offered to take me to Rodeo Drive and buy me something “nice,” telling me, “Because, you know, you did sacrifice a lot to move out here with me and I feel I owe you something.” However, I declined even though that Valextra bag did cross my mind. But I was afraid that he might think I owed him or something. I didn’t want to feel indebted to anyone, least of all Jed.

  Soon, it was getting late and I needed to get home, so he dropped me by my car and told me it was good seeing me.

  “You too,” I said. “I mean that, Jed. We should hang out sometime, you know, just as friends.”

  “Of course,” he said. “You always did want to keep me in the friend zone, even when we were dating.”

  He had a point, but I didn’t say that, though. The reason why was because he just wasn’t that good in bed. And he was a really sloppy kisser. So, I just said, “Well, let’s not change a thing.”

  “No, we shouldn’t,” he said, a little sadly.

  I felt really bad, so I motioned for him to give me his phone, then I put my number in his contacts.
“When you’re ready, I mean it, we can be friends again. You can call me.”

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really,” I said. “But don’t get any funny ideas.”

  He laughed and came towards me, his arms open. “Let’s hug it out.”

  “We shouldn’t,” I said. “If we did anything, Bear would probably kill you.”

  “Then I’d die a happy man,” he said.

  Rii-ght. Even so, I allowed him to give me a nice hug, then out of nowhere, he leaned down and kissed me. And I mean kissed. I wasn’t expecting it but it was a nice surprise. I found myself kissing him back and sort of enjoying it. Apparently, he’d improved over the years. I just went along with it, kissing him back, in part due to the memory I had of us as a couple kissing. He was a lot better than he’d been before, to say the least, and I felt my knees go a little weak.

  Once he pulled back, my eyes fluttered open and I watched as he backed away from me, throwing up one hand in a wave goodbye.

  “Later, gator,” he said.

  “After while, crocodile,” I replied. That was how we used to say goodbye. And it was quite fitting.

  * * * * *

  I did feel a little bad about kissing Jed, so I picked up Bear’s lottery ticket along with some wine for me. When I got back to the house, I heard the Stooges’ “No Fun” playing loudly. I was about to start grooving to it when I realized there were probably a bunch of asshole surfers in my house. Sometimes there were some female surfers, too, but usually it was a sausage fest. I went into the living room and confirmed my suspicions. Ugh! Every square inch was taken up by dudes smoking weed and telling lame jokes. They thought they were so cool. It was so annoying, especially with the plume of smoke hanging over the room. It was always 4:20 here, wasn’t it? I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was actually 4:20. On the dot. That figured.