What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  After four years of assistant work on a variety of television shows, I had just been offered my first writing job, on That ’70s Show, beginning the following June. That miracle meant there was a date on the horizon when I could start to pay off my credit cards. (Four years of assistant pay had led to debt caused by splurges on things like socks and groceries.) So I bought a plane ticket—girl fun, here I come! Then Hope invited her boyfriend to come along.

  “You don’t mind, right?”

  I minded. Feeling like I’d be a third wheel, I tried to bow out, which is when Hope’s boyfriend decided to fix it all by inviting his best friend.

  “Oh, God, not Mike!” Hope and I both protested.

  But Mike, a very sweet, short drug addict and high school dropout with blue hair, pink skin, rodent-like eyes, and a prison record, was in.

  “Ahhhh, sounds pretty cozy,” Mike’s friends would say to me knowingly. “I think Mike’s about to help you get over your breakup!”

  “Mm,” I’d reply, as Hope peeked at me apologetically over her adult beverage.

  We started our trip in Paris, where Mike provided us with scintillating commentary during our cultural tour of the city’s landmarks, like Notre Dame:

  “So this place is so famous they named a school after it!”

  … and the Louvre:

  “What’s the Louvre?”

  … and European ambulances:

  “They sound different!”

  We were all piled into one room in an ancient, crumbling hotel on a little park on the Seine, directly across from Notre Dame. At like thirty dollars a night, with a view of the cathedral, it had to be the crummiest hotel in the best location in the world, and I had stayed there four years earlier on my postcollege summer trip with Vito. The place sang with memories of my first trip to Europe with my first love, and so my mood was not particularly en rose.

  Because of my dark cloud, and the fact that I hadn’t kissed anyone besides my ex in six years, the idea of a “palate-cleansing hookup” was oft suggested by my travel companions.

  “A sex sorbet!” Hope clarified.

  “What’s sorbet?” Mike asked.

  It made me feel like Vito and I were breaking up all over again to even picture such a thing, but sex sorbets did always seem to make people feel better in movies. So I put on a little ditty one night, and we headed out to find some fun.

  We found a lot to drink. And a big, hot Australian bartender who invited us back to his friend’s groovy, velvet-filled apartment, late at night, for what turned out to be an extraordinary amount of hash. Things were looking good for the bartender and me as I threw back drinks at the rate you do when you are trying to flirt for the first time in six years … And then I don’t remember anything else besides waking up the next morning in our little room on the Seine.

  “The bartender helped us carry you down the four flights of stairs,” Hope told me. “He was very sweet.”

  So, my palate was still not cleansed. It tasted like wine and bile, in fact. But the trip was not over.

  After a few days with Hope and the boys, I decided to spend a little extra time in Paris, and sent them on to Amsterdam without me. Because I needed a break from Mike, but also because I wanted to be the girl who hung out alone in Paris. You see, over the years, Vito and I had fought many times over conversations like this one:

  “I want to go to Hawaii for my spring break,” he might say.

  “I have to work that week,” I’d reply.

  “Okay, I guess I’ll just go on my own,” Vito would decide.

  And then he would.

  Now, 2013 Kristin would find this to be a completely reasonable thing to do. 2013 Kristin would do exactly the same thing, and would love that she was with a guy who could head off on a solo adventure as well as she could. But, boy, did 1998 Kristin feel differently. I had no urge to go on trips without Vito. I wanted to spend every spare minute with him. I would drive as fast as I could up to Santa Barbara to see him the first moment I could, refusing to stop even when I needed to pee and my car was running on gas fumes. Vito, on the other hand, was closer to where I am today—thrilled when I could come along on adventures, but excited about going alone, too.

  Which made me furious.

  I wanted to be the girl who could have fun alone in Paris. It scared me a little, but I remembered the lesson my mom taught me at age seven in a swimming pool in Hawaii. I was a shy little girl and an only child, so on vacations I was usually playing alone, too afraid to go up to the happy groups of kids and introduce myself. Finally, on one vacation, my mom asked me which I’d rather have: a vacation with no friends, or one scary moment. So I gathered up all of my courage, and swam over to the kids, and there was one scary moment … and then I had friends for the first time on vacation. After that, one scary moment became something I was always willing to have in exchange for the possible payoff. I became a girl who knew how to take a deep breath, suck it up, and walk into any room by herself.

  So I took a deep breath, put my three travel companions on the train to Amsterdam, and settled into my first time alone in a foreign city.

  It didn’t go all that well.

  I kept getting on the train in the wrong direction, and finding myself in restaurants without a book. (It’s almost impossible to have a meal alone without something to read. Try it. It’s terrible.) There is no time or place in Paris where a woman is safe from unwanted advances from a Frenchman. I was constantly followed by creepy men in the streets, and a man in a turtleneck (harmless, but ick) approached me in a park at ten in the morning, and asked if I wanted to become his lover. I was nervous and lonely, and wrote Vito postcards from cafés we had visited together, furious that I was nervous and lonely. Vito would have had a great time in Paris alone for two days. I needed to figure my shit out.

  And that was how I found myself walking by the bar where the cute Australian bartender worked. I had never gone into a bar by myself before, but I decided to “drop in” for a drink. Oh my God, I was just walking by and here’s your bar! Paris is such a small town! The Australian was very sweet, and laughed off my poor reaction to the hash the night before, and poured me a beer. And then another one. And then even one more. I just kept sitting there, feeling awkward but needing a win, and not knowing where else I could find one.

  At the end of the night, the bartender closed down the bar, and put me in a cab. Strike.

  So, feeling like a bit of a failure, but proud of myself for trying, I got on a train going in the right direction and went to Amsterdam.

  It turned out that while Mike might not have been the ideal travel companion for a cultural tour of Paris, he was just the ticket in Amsterdam. You know how beautiful it is to watch someone in his element? LeBron James playing basketball, Pavarotti singing, Ryan Gosling breathing? Taking Mike from Paris to Amsterdam was like watching an elephant seal flopping around on the sand, dragging its monstrous, awkward body inch by painful inch across the land until it reaches the sea, slips into the water … and glides off in one majestic swoosh, jumping and diving gracefully effortlessly.

  We had been in our first bar in Amsterdam for thirty seconds when Mike pointed at someone in the back, and said:

  “That guy.”

  Was Mike taller than he had been in Paris? I found myself thinking. He made a beeline through the thousands of people who had not caught his eye, up to a thin, average-looking, twentysomething dude we came to know as Peter the Dutch Drug Dealer. Peter the Dutch Drug Dealer gave us a napkin on which was written a list of bars and clubs where he could be found at various hours of the day. All twenty-four hours were accounted for, so apparently his wares were good enough to eliminate the need for sleep. He had a friend with him, a black prostitute named Victoria, who was wearing a dress of a length such that passersby could see her three labia hoops dangle when she walked. Later in the week we watched Victoria climb onto a table at a club, insert her ring-clad fingers into the mysterious place from whence those hoops dangled, and then
remove her fingers … now stripped of jewelry. I believe this happened at around eight on a Tuesday morning.

  But back to less seedy topics—drugs. After a moment of discussion, Peter the Dutch Drug Dealer handed Mike a little baggie of treats, which we spent the next week watching Mike smoke, or swallow, or snort. Then, after watching to see how our human guinea pig would react, we would make our decisions about whether or not to follow.

  Now, I was twenty-six, but before this trip, my experiences with drugs had been limited to a rare sleep-inducing joint, and one crazy day of mushrooms at Northwestern where I raced armadillos and learned what love was. One of my dad’s best pieces of parenting advice had been very simple: wait. He didn’t tell me to abstain from sex and drugs forever, which I’m sure would have made me try everything immediately. He just told me to take a beat, watch my friends try things out, learn what to do and what not to do based on their mistakes and triumphs, and then try out what I was going to try.

  Without consciously deciding to, I took that advice to heart in many elements of my life: just wait. With marriage and children, but also with drugs and men. I was a social drinker, but had skipped the normal youthful drug experimentation in which most of my single friends had participated. I had a boyfriend. Vito and I cooked dinner, and went to farmer’s markets, and, when we were feeling crazy, made fondue. We had visited Amsterdam during our postcollege summer of backpacking, but had mostly indulged in handfuls of Dutch pancakes that you could get to go in adorably wrapped tin-foil packages. Sure, we had smoked a little pot, but usually during the day, while riding bikes along the dykes, or dangling our feet into what we thought was the North Sea (it wasn’t) and singing “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” more times than sober people might have. We hadn’t immersed ourselves in the dark underbelly of Amsterdam.

  But now I had a friend named Peter the Dutch Drug Dealer.

  Hope, her boyfriend, Blue-Haired Mike, and I had planned on staying in Amsterdam for three days, before heading out to see the outrageous color of Holland’s spring tulip fields on our way to the Hague, where we would learn about international tribunals. Instead, we got stuck in Amsterdam for a long, dark week, in a world where we saw the sun for about forty-five minutes per day, usually in the late morning, during the journey from the back door of a club to our blackout-curtained hotel room. Mothers would be bicycling their children across the charming bridges of Amsterdam on their way to school when we were dragging ourselves home, shaky and exhausted and hours from being able to sleep.

  I should be clear that, throughout this revelry, I was still in deep, dark, brokenhearted pain. Even Mike was irritated with the amount I was talking about the loss of my first love, and his body should have been drugged past the ability to feel irritation (or surgery). But even he grew weary of how much I needed to talk about whether I had done the right thing a few weeks earlier, when I turned down my very first marriage proposal.

  The proposal came six weeks after Vito and I broke up, and one week after I checked his voicemail (I know) and heard a message from a girl who turned out to be a freshman student he had just started fucking. I was heartbroken and lonelier than I’d ever been in my life when Vito showed up on my doorstep with roses and asked me to marry him.

  A few years earlier, in a panic about the many bikini-clad undergrads with whom a UC Santa Barbara grad student spends his time, I had broken down and read Vito’s journal. (I know.) In it he said that, in two years, after he got his master’s degree, he was going to propose to me. Great news, right? No stories of deflowering teenaged surfer girls! Sadly, I did not see it that way.

  Despite how desperately I loved him, I panicked. To me, marriage was an ending, not a beginning. A stone on my chest. A giving-up, a decision to walk away from an interesting life for one just like everyone else’s. Much more “ever after” than “happily.” Why did it feel that way? Well … I’ll get to that later.

  After reading Vito’s journal, I made sure to mention to him early and often that marriage was not for me. I talked about how I wanted to spend my life with him, since a life without him felt like a life without my favorite limb. I said that I wanted to someday waaaaaaay down the line have kids, but that marriage was for other people. Conventional people. People who overpaid for T-shirts when babies were starving, people who worried about whether or not their artwork matched their sofas. People who had to put some weird legal stamp on something we already had.

  “Why do people need to put some weird legal stamp on something we already have?” Vito eventually started saying, too.

  So when he proposed six weeks after our breakup, I knew he didn’t actually want to be married to me and living in Los Angeles—he just wanted to jump in his car, drive too fast to get to me like at the end of a movie, and alleviate our suffering. (And make up for sleeping with his freshman student.) But the problem had never been our commitment to each other—it was the fact that we wanted to live different lives. So I said no, and he didn’t seem surprised or particularly upset.

  “Consider it a standing offer!” he said cheerfully, before getting back into his car.

  And then he drove back to Santa Barbara, and soon went back to the nineteen-year-old student whom he had started seeing about five minutes after we broke up. Meanwhile, I spent a few months in both a metaphorical and literal fetal position, and wondered, like so many ex-girlfriends of forest rangers before me, if I would ever be able to use the tent he gave me for Valentine’s Day again.

  I was really sad about it all. And that’s why one night in Amsterdam, Mike gave me Ecstasy.

  That’s not really true. Mike gave me Ecstasy because the four of us could barely stand each other. Hope was mad at her boyfriend for going to a sex show without her. (The tip-off was the ten fingernail scratch marks down his chest. Audience participation. The boys were subsequently kicked out of Hope’s free hotel room.) Mike was mad at me because Hope’s boyfriend tattled that I stayed behind in Paris because I wanted a break from Mike’s asinine questions. Hope’s boyfriend was mad at me for being a snob about his friend. I was mad at Hope for being a crying, angry mess all as a result of bringing two stupid boys on our girl trip. And we had another week to go.

  “We need a chemical bridge back to friendship,” Mike reasoned.

  And, because the subject was drugs, he was right. Damn, look at that seal swim! So we all thought for a moment about how little we wanted to spend another week with the people around us, and then reached for the bag of pills.

  Several months later, Mike admitted that he had found this bag of pills on the floor of the biggest coffee shop in Amsterdam, the place at the top of the Let’s Go Europe list of big, college-kid drug bars. And that he wasn’t absolutely sure that what was inside the bag was Ecstasy, and not, say, the kind of poison that isn’t really, really fun.

  It wasn’t that other kind of poison. It was really fun. So much fun! We all loved each other again! Amsterdam wasn’t sad and dirty, it was filled with light and joy! Hope’s boyfriend and I shared a transcendent dance moment to “Bésame Mucho,” our bodies attracting an audience with a perfect merengue I still think about. I saw Mike’s sweet heart for all of its sweet sweetness, and my judgmental nature dropped away as I floated out of my judgmentally judging skin, finally understanding that drugs make you a better person. Hope and I cried on each other out of joy for our lifelong friendship. And, somewhere in some bar in Amsterdam, we met Fiona, the twenty-year-old doughy British girl on crutches who wanted to make out with me.

  So I grew up just a couple of years before the generations of girls who all kiss other girls and like it. When I was in college, Katy Perry was a toddler in a romper and knee socks, decades away from being a grown woman in a romper and knee socks. A social scientist might argue that the girl-on-girl trend started with rave culture … and Ecstasy. Which is an argument that can certainly be supported by my very first experience with raves and Ecstasy.

  Now, if taking pills and then having one’s first lesbian exper
ience with a crippled British girl isn’t the thing to do in Amsterdam, I just don’t know what is. I’d never been hit on by a woman before, probably because I’d never beamed love in all directions simultaneously before. But that night Fiona (like everyone) got hit in the face with a big handful of Kristin love, and so zeroed in.

  We sat together for a long time, talking as closely and intensely as only two people on hard drugs can, and I started to realize that this woman was flirting with me! And … was I flirting back? As I watched our nose-to-nose conversation from somewhere above and to the left of my own body, I wondered if I would have the courage to do something so dirty, so experimental, in front of people who would bring the story home with us.

  Ultimately, it was the intense talking and sharing that was the undoing of Fiona. She shared with me that she had had more than thirty sexual partners in her twenty years. Since, at twenty-six, my sex number was three, this caused me to see little cartoon STDs float around her head, like pink hearts that might go pop pop pop around a cartoon character in love. And while I thought Fiona’s pierced tongue seemed like a good addition to what might be my only lesbian sex experience (lesbian sex being so tongue-reliant and all), she really was so very doughy. And that sticky, shiny, clammy sheen on her face, that wondrous thing I like to call “drug sweat” … that didn’t bode well for what I might find elsewhere. And there were the crutches, and the broken ankle that she couldn’t remember how she broke, which seemed unwieldy in a naked wrestling scenario (which was basically what I gathered lesbian sex was). Plus, for the rest of my life, Mike, of all people, would have a ridiculous story to tell about me. But, at the end of the night, I just felt like too many people before me had decided Fiona was The Thing to Do in the Place You’re Supposed to Do It. She was probably crippled from it.