by Una LaMarche
I think the fact that we were co-ed helped us a lot. At the risk of making broad generalizations across gender lines—get ready!—women and men tend to approach friendships . . . differently. Women, in my experience, assess potential friends based on a wide variety of factors, including but not limited to emotional intelligence, sense of humor, vocabulary, aerobic activity level, last-minute plan cancellation percentage, number of shared enemies, rate of mood swings, and DVR queue (both length and content). Men, on the other hand, when meeting someone new, pretty much just need the other person not to punch them in the face right away and they are instant BFFs.
In high school, my friend Anna and I once came up with a math equation for deciding whether we should be friends with a given person.
“If someone sucks more than twenty-five percent of the time,” Anna said, “then that is not cool, and we should not be friends with them.”
“Unless,” I countered, “they suck so much that it becomes kind of fun to witness them sucking so hard.”
“Agreed,” Anna said.
We went back to our anagrams.
So, the Una and Anna Friend Assessment Chart reflects the priorities of human beings and other highly intelligent animals/machines who are at least a little bit petty and mean.
The Male Friend Assessment Chart, I suspect, has much less guile.
I learned this firsthand when I lived full-time with Kabir, Bajir, and Alex one summer when I needed a place to crash, before I moved in with Betsy and Ellaree. Rooming with boys was incredibly refreshing psychologically and unbelievably unrefreshing physically. There were never any passive-aggressive power plays, and yet there were also never any towels or dishes that didn’t smell at least a little bit like ass. Kabir once made a huge pot of chili, accidentally substituting a half cup of cayenne pepper for the half cup of paprika the recipe called for. The result—totally inedible, even by the boys’ low standards—sat on the stove for weeks, growing mold, until they finally just duct-taped the lid shut and left it on the curb outside.
But aside from the smells, my exile in Guyville was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. The boys enforced a set of whimsical house rules that made little to no sense, like “anyone can force another roommate to do ten push-ups at any time” and “if one roommate takes his shirt off, everyone has to.”* Alex, a film major, had rigged a NASA-level sound system for his DVD player, and so most nights we ordered in Thai food and bonded over our shared love of high culture. I introduced the boys to Sex and the City; they showed me Debbie Does Dallas. Ironically and unexpectedly freed of self-consciousness, I happily ate myself out of all my pants.
But the best thing about living with the guys was the “Stairway” Clean.
The deceptively simple goal of the “Stairway” Clean was to clean the entire apartment in the eight minutes it took to listen to “Stairway to Heaven” at a ridiculously loud volume on Bajir’s record player. In situations of extreme filth (i.e., always), playing the song multiple times was allowed, although a two- or three-“Stairway” Clean was considered a failure.
Of course, one of the cardinal rules of the sitcom is that when a group of people cohabitate, assuming they are over eighteen and not related, romance and/or sexual tension must ensue. I need to pause here to make a quick appeal to television writers and show runners across the globe: Please please please please please if you are doing a will-they-or-won’t-they story arc with two lead characters, do not let them hook up until the series finale. The buildup is deliciously intoxicating and sometimes actually makes me squee out loud, but then once they get together, after an initial surge of elation there is a long, boring plateau of meh. It’s kind of like having a few years of foreplay with your most lusted-after crush, finally getting laid, and then having him continue to hump your leg for five more seasons as you lie there, slowly developing a urinary tract infection.
I would say that we wisely made the decision not to get involved with one another on a genital-to-genital level, but I think it wasn’t so much a “decision” in retrospect as it was a collective “complete lack of ability to effectively hit on anyone, let alone a close friend.” We all fell in love with one another, but we tended to express that love in pajama-clad cuddling and bummed cigarettes or, if we were feeling bold, meaningful Beatles songs strummed ineptly on Kabir’s guitar. One lonely weekend when Alex and I were the only ones in town, we engaged in a brief, awkward dalliance, but within days we were back to being platonic friends again, as if the Bergen-Butler group dynamic was so powerful that it could absorb and eradicate any emotional fallout from ill-advised sex acts between its members. Now that’s what I call friends with benefits.
THE “STAIRWAY” CLEAN: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ACHIEVING ROBERT PLANT–LEVEL CLEANLINESS
1.Put on “Stairway to Heaven” at the loudest volume you can tolerate (should be able to drown out vacuuming, stress weeping).
2.Begin slowly, in keeping with the Renaissance Faire-y recorder intro. Pick up stray socks, underpants, and desiccated french fries from the carpet as if gathering wildflowers in a serene meadow.
3.During the first chorus, make your bed—but don’t fold any corners. Drape decorative shawl over desk clutter; throw errant objects into closet or nearest trash can.
4.During the fifteen seconds of instrumental music before Robert Plant first croons “Ooooooh, it makes me wonder,” sprint through the house holding a feather duster outstretched in each hand.
5.Use second and third choruses to drown bathroom in as much Scrubbing Bubbles as you can pour with one hand while simultaneously plunging toilet.
6.Stop for a high-five with your co–“Stairway” Cleaners (if applicable) at the halfway mark, and remove shirt, per house rules or just because you are filthy. (Shirt now becomes acceptable rag for all-purpose cleaning.)
7.During fourth and fifth choruses, vacuum all carpeted surfaces or strap scrub brushes to feet and pretend you are Apolo Ohno (tip: watch out for pets and electrical cords).
8.The guitar solo around six and a half minutes in is your cue to attack the kitchen with a head-banging vengeance. Wash dishes, throwing away any that are too grime-encrusted to be cleaned in five seconds.
9.As Plant wails the final chorus, wipe down kitchen surfaces and tie trash bags, shoving them into a mudroom or hallway if possible.
10.Shriek in panic as music begins to slow down; throw any remaining mess into closets, purses, or fridge. Liberally spray Febreze.
11.By the time Plant sings the last line, collapse on the couch in a sweaty heap.
12.Repeat every month until smell becomes overpowering and you have to move.
Achilles’ Wheel
How I Learned to Drive
There are a lot of things the members of my family aren’t known for, like being able to throw a Frisbee reliably, using an at-home waxing kit successfully, or agreeing to go on a hike without first making a lot of attempts to get out of it. But if I had to pick just one thing at which we overwhelmingly fail as a team it would probably be driving.
My mother didn’t learn to drive until she was thirty-eight. This, combined with the sort of overly cautious nature that leads her to arrive at airports three hours early, has resulted in an anxious road temperament. Every car, mammal, and stationary object that enters her peripheral vision has the effect of a hideous jack-in-the-box. She will literally gasp when another car approaches to merge into her beloved far-right lane, even if the driver has a yield sign. She brakes for everything.
On the other side of the genetic pool is my dad, who drives in a manner that suggests a deeply ingrained death wish. This started in 1970, when my then-sixteen-year-old father, behind the wheel of an especially choice 1964 Rambler American, rear-ended another car in the middle of the Gold Star Memorial Bridge in Connecticut. At the time, he was wearing a pair of star-spangled overalls that he liked to unfasten while driving due to the fact that they
were (in keeping with the style of the times) uncomfortably snug in the crotch. As he stepped out of the car to assess the damage, the overalls fell to the ground . . . which doesn’t say anything about his driving, really, but which is integral to the telling of this story at cocktail parties. He is an easily distractible driver, prone to looking over his shoulder to make direct eye contact with backseat passengers or swerving between lanes while attempting to answer a seemingly endless stream of hands-free phone calls, though on paper he has a surprisingly clean record.*
Like every American child of the eighties raised on Knight Rider and Billy Ocean, I have an entire album’s worth of photos of myself posing behind the wheel of various cars, trying to look cool. I don’t look cool, at all, in any of them. Maybe it’s the unibrow, maybe it’s the corduroy jumpsuits, or maybe it’s because my parents seemed drawn to the types of jalopies you usually see balanced on concrete blocks in abandoned junkyards. When we lived in suburban Texas we had a cute, reasonably clean baby blue Volkswagen Rabbit, but when we moved back to New York in 1988 it got hit on the street while parked and my parents traded it in for a used 1979 Datsun 210 the color of a jaundiced polar bear.
When we brought the Datsun home, there were jugs of gasoline rolling around in the food-stained trunk. This was during a period when car radio theft was rampant in New York; you’d often see parked cars with their front window smashed in and the cassette desk missing from the dashboard. Lots of people made hand-lettered signs to warn off would-be thieves, promising that there was no radio to steal, but our Datsun didn’t need one. “I bet I could leave the key in the ignition with the engine running and it would still be here in the morning,” my dad would brag to our neighbors, patting one of the ripped, pus-colored imitation leather seats with pride while my sister and I gulped fresh air through cracks in the windows.
Since we lived in brownstone Brooklyn, around the corner from a major subway station, we hardly ever actually needed the car to go anywhere. Mostly it was used for quick trips across the street a few times a week to avoid being ticketed. (New York City gets its trademark sparkling cleanliness from street sweepers that patrol the streets every other day at the crack of dawn, shoving used condoms, abandoned hair weaves, and dead squirrels into the gutters while urban car owners idle, double-parked, cursing loudly in their pajamas.) Even when we did take the rare road trip to visit relatives in New England, I never paid attention to the mechanics of driving, since I was too busy singing Madonna’s entire Immaculate Collection at top volume. Thieves might be able to steal our radio, but they would never take my passionate rendition of “La Isla Bonita” away.
By the time I turned sixteen, when most kids my age were lining up to get their learner’s permits, the Datsun had finally been jettisoned after failing to pass a routine inspection. There was no driver’s ed at my high school, and no one I knew seemed to care all that much about acquiring what was, at least within the city limits, a nonessential skill. So I focused my energies on loftier pursuits like studying for the SATs, clipping eye makeup tutorials out of Cosmopolitan, and amassing a soon-to-be obsolete VHS archive of every single episode of Melrose Place. Two years later, when I turned eighteen, my father personally escorted me to the local Board of Elections so that I could register to vote. Some things were important according to our family ethos, and some weren’t. The latter category, based on generations of athletic underachievement, included pretty much any physical skill that wasn’t automatically taken care of by the central nervous system. In related news, I still cannot whistle, snap my fingers, or do a cartwheel. But hey, at least I got to cast an absentee ballot for Al Gore.
If the movie Clueless had never been written, I might never have learned how to drive. You know how sometimes you look back at your life and you realize with awe and wonder that hundreds of tiny, fated details had to line up just so for you to be where you are today? Well, if I hadn’t fallen down the stone steps of the outdoor amphitheater during my group tour of Swarthmore College and been forced to attend Wesleyan University for shame avoidance purposes,* and if Wesleyan hadn’t then randomly placed me in the dorm room directly above a sassy gay boy from Georgia named Charlie Meyer, and if we both hadn’t had the same unironic appreciation for Alicia Silverstone, and if he hadn’t gotten me drunk on Southern Comfort and made me confess my stunning lack of sexual exploits up to that point, this essay might not even exist. But as it was, all those things came to be, and that is how Charlie Meyer took to tormenting me with the bitchy zinger “You’re a virgin who can’t drive.” (Don’t worry, I got him back eventually, by projectile vomiting vodka-spiked Kool-Aid into the backseat of his prized Toyota Land Cruiser.) Anyway, it took four years of college and then another three of sheepishly handing my passport to smirking bartenders, but eventually I got tired of the jokes and decided it was time for me to literally and figuratively take the wheel.
I finally got out of my dreams and into a car (well, not my car, but I’m sure Mr. Ocean will understand) when I was twenty-five years old and suffering/slothing my way through a six-month bout of unemployment.
I’d signed up for driving school on the Internet, precharging my credit card for ten lessons so that I couldn’t wuss out. This kind of online shopping roulette can backfire, as when I designed a personalized crystal whiskey decanter from Pottery Barn after drunkenly watching an entire season of Mad Men on Netflix and played chicken with the order button (it is now a very expensive, monogrammed piggy bank). But a trunkful of crocheted shortalls from Anthropologie can’t honk outside your apartment for fifteen minutes, and so I was forced to follow through when the frigid February morning of my vehicular baptism arrived.
I aced the SATs, I reminded myself as I stumbled downstairs on shaking legs for my first lesson, my heart threatening to stall inside my chest. I was Fidel Castro in my high school’s mock UN, and I convinced Jesus to strip human rights away from dissenters. I made Phi Beta Kappa! I can fucking drive a fucking car. I ignored the fact that these were all intellectual achievements—which had nothing to do with the large motor skills or directional acuity that were conspicuously absent from my DNA. I felt sure that if I talked the talk, I could maneuver a huge hunk of metal and rubber through morning rush hour city traffic. At least without killing anyone. Probably.
My instructor’s name was Mr. Council. He was exactly how his name makes him sound: judicial, instructional, taciturn. Since he was a middle-aged, world-weary-looking black man and I was a young, eager, and inept white girl, I thought there might be buddy-comedy potential for us, but he was not amused by me. That became clear from the very first moment, when I got into the car and attempted to pull out into traffic without taking the gearshift out of park. He sighed heavily. I would come to know this as his primary form of communication.
Mr. Council sighed when I nervously abused the clutch, inching toward stop signs as if I were using the tire screeches to send messages in Morse code. He sighed when I clicked the wrong turn signal or accidentally turned on the windshield wipers. Sometimes he would trade the sighing for a long, annoyed stare, which I would get when I lost control of my inner monologue and began to frantically narrate my every thought. (“Aaaah! Sorry, I should have pulled out farther for that left! Ha-ha! . . . That trucker is honking at me! Is that, like, road flirting or is he mad because I cut him off? . . . Okay, now I’m putting on my signal to park. . . . Oops, reverse! Aaand I almost hit that biker. But I didn’t! Phew. Wait, how did I just pop the hood? Is this not the air-conditioning?”) He used his passenger-side brake liberally and liked to give me deadpan criticism without looking up from his newspaper.
“So what were you just practicing?” he would ask as we sat in a dead-end lot in Red Hook.
“A three-point turn,” I replied in my best teacher’s pet voice. “Also known as a K-turn or a broken U-turn. Or, in Ireland—”
“And how many points did you just hit?”
“I don’t know exactly. I got con
fused by the backward lettering of that No Trespassing sign in the rearview.”
“Take a guess.”
“Um . . . nine?”
“And what do you call that?”
“. . . A nine-point turn?”
He slammed down his paper. “A failed driving test. Do it again.”
My fellow New York drivers were not particularly sensitive to my plight. Although I was driving a vehicle marked clearly and one might even say humiliatingly on all sides with the words “Student Driver,” people saw no reason to let me take my time. Halfway through my first lesson, a burly man leaned out his window to tell me, “Learn how to drive!”
“I am!” I yelled back.
Mr. Council sighed.
Soon, despite the eight hundred dollars burning a hole in my credit score, I started skipping lessons out of pure cowardice. I hated learning to drive, mostly because I was not immediately good at it and also because parallel parking had replaced my previous, long-held greatest fear of a rat swimming up through our toilet. And so, when eight o’clock on Tuesday rolled around one especially self-esteem-challenging week, I buried myself under the covers and pretended not to hear the beeping outside. My boyfriend, getting dressed for work, peered out the window.
“Isn’t that your car?” he asked. I poked my head out of my tent of shame.
“Uh, it shouldn’t be,” I mumbled. “I canceled.”
“Well, he’s definitely out there waiting,” Jeff said.
“I don’t know why, because I called and canceled.” I was unreasonably indignant in the way that only a liar can be. I did not call and cancel. I woke up feeling terrified, knowing that each driving lesson was an exercise in failure that would inevitably lead to the truly horrifying experience of failing my road test.