“Yeah, and then I said ‘Fuck you!’” I yelled, just to clarify the timeline. It wasn’t that I’d missed his apology. I had heard it and rejected it.
I was uninterested in whether he wanted to offer another response. I didn’t want to fight this guy, and our conversation seemed to have reached a stalemate. I was proud of myself as I ran, like I’d finally gotten comfortable enough to lay into someone who legitimately deserved it in true New York fashion. In his retelling of the story, I am probably the asshole, which is another typical New York City feeling: the other guy is always the asshole.
But that still didn’t make me a local. After all, people curse each other out on the street all over the world. The feeling of belonging came two years later.
I was walking across the street (at a crosswalk, with the light on my side, despite my Boston-bred love of jaywalking), when a woman quickly gunned her engine to muscle past me in an expensive SUV. Reflexively, I flipped out my middle finger and held it up to her driver’s side window until she’d passed me. I felt nothing. I was at peace. In that instant, I was a Real New Yorker.
Gap Years
When my sister, Jenna, was born, I was just about three weeks from my third birthday. For twenty-four hours, I was 1,078 times older than she was. Mathematically speaking, it was the most older-than-her I have ever been. Practically, though, there was not a ton of meaningful difference between our ages. Yes, I had become a proficient walker and talker as I approached my third birthday. And not to toot my own horn, but I’d gotten pretty decent at eating solid foods. But I couldn’t read or tie my shoes, and I stood barely tall enough to operate the average doorknob. So any edge in maturity that my head start in the world gave me was slim at best.
Over the course of our lives, those three years dilated and contracted, sometimes feeling like a decade, other times like an instant. On occasion, time seemed to reverse its flow entirely.
In any functional sense, the age gap between Jenna and me was most pronounced while we were both in high school. Even though our age difference has technically always been almost exactly three years, Jenna was fussy and brainy enough as a toddler that she skipped a year of preschool, and from that point on we were only two grades apart. By my senior year, the two of us had such full calendars of extracurricular activities that our schedules functioned only if I took over a little of the responsibility that had previously fallen on my parents.
Some of the outsourcing was informational. My mom and dad, to an extent, considered me their eyes and ears on the ground that was our social landscape. So if Jenna asked permission to go to a party, they would consult me, their honest and boring son, regarding whether the gathering was appropriate for their daughter. She, being not much more fun or exciting than I was, rarely tried to con her way into attending any event that was too rowdy or unsavory, so the answer was almost always “Sure.”
My chief task as an older sibling, though, was to transport Jenna to and from dance class. Two or three times a week, we’d rush from our last classes to the high school parking lot and then race to the little dance studio in the next town over. “Race,” I admit, is a strong word for the way I drove. I was a timid pilot of my dad’s 1986 Honda Accord (the kind with the headlights that blink open and close like a robot face), and I never exceeded the speed limit. In fact, often, just to be safe, I drove three to five miles per hour below the legally allowed speed. Other drivers commended my safety by beeping their horns in solidarity and waving to me with one finger (so as not to obscure their vision of the road with a full open hand, I imagine). Usually I’d then have to putter back to school, rehearse for a play or attend a yearbook meeting or pretend to be sad to miss a math team practice.
Because of our frequent trips in the car and the length to which my deliberately paced driving prolonged them, we had plenty of time to complain about our coursework and gossip about Jenna’s friends. And, in the grand tradition of older brothers, I forced her to listen to the music I liked. It wasn’t the classic older brother stuff. (I never took a rip from a bong and said, “Fuckin’ Zeppelin, man. Get ready to shit your brain out your ears.”) But I certainly imposed on her with plenty of Weezer and Ben Folds Five (a Stoneham High School drama club mainstay). She operated the Discman connected to the car’s speakers through an adapter shaped like a cassette, the way Rube Goldberg might play music in whatever fanciful, impractical car he drove. We stumbled through wordy verses and belted out choruses together as I drove, hands dutifully at ten and two, knuckles white from the effort of gripping the steering wheel. From school to the dance studio, then later from the dance studio back home for dinner.
Our family, whenever possible, ate dinner together until I left for college, which felt very Wonder Years, even at the time. I almost wanted to ask my parents: “What’s your deal? Are we doing this because you saw it on TV?” Presence was never demanded of me and my sister, but it was expected if at all possible. I don’t know what there was to talk about five nights a week with people you saw every day, but I do know that I did most of the talking. A family dinner with me was like the experience of listening to the audio version of this book, plus spaghetti.
I didn’t realize quite the extent of my dominance over the dinner table conversation until I’d gone away to college. Soon after I’d left for Brandeis, Jenna, the more reserved of the two Gondelman siblings, and I were talking on the phone.
“Mom and dad have a lot more questions for me at dinner now that you’re not around,” she said.
“You mean like they trust you less?”
“No, it’s just like . . . there’s a lot more silence to fill.”
Jenna enrolled at Brandeis two years later. The gap between our ages both stayed the same and began to close. The difference between a college freshman and a college junior is so much smaller than the difference between a high school freshman and a high school junior. Mostly it’s that the junior can legally buy alcohol and has started to feel the creeping dread of the real world beginning to take hold.
“Isn’t it weird to go to college with your little sister?” friends would ask. And honestly, it wasn’t. We had very few overlapping academic interests; she took mostly science classes, while I avoided any course that involved numbers (besides the ones that tell you what page you’re on). So it wasn’t like our professors were comparing us. And, just as in high school, neither of us really drank, so the chances of one of us stumbling across the other doing something embarrassing on campus were slim, with the exception of her choosing to attend my improv shows. She and her friends often came to my shows on campus, and I proudly went to see her perform with the school’s tap-dancing ensemble, HOT (Hooked On Tap). Mercifully for both of us, neither she nor I decided to pursue a cappella.
There were a few awkward moments. My childhood best friend and freshman-year roommate, Ethan, nearly passed out when Jenna showed up at a keg party in his dorm our junior year. (Jenna Gondelman, he gasped. No no no no no.) But mostly things were very nice.
Then, in a brief reversal after college during my late twenties, my little sister became (effectively) older than I was. When Jenna received her doctorate at age twenty-four, I was twenty-seven and had been living in New York City for almost a year. New York, if you’re unfamiliar, is the urban equivalent of a tapeworm for your bank account and self-esteem.1 While my sister finished grad school and parlayed an internship into a full-time position at a major hospital, my income came in dribbles through my various gigs tutoring, doing stand-up, and freelance magazine writing. And while cash trickled into my bank account, my savings hemorrhaged back out the way beer gushes from a can that’s been stabbed with the key at a frat party.
It wasn’t just my bank balance that was moving in the wrong direction. My stand-up career, which had crept steadily forward while I lived in Boston, had taken a step backward as well. Though I had some paid work on the road, I spent most nights in New York shuttling from open mic to open mic, performing for half-full rooms of other comedians, many of
whom half paid attention to the same jokes from the same people several times a night in different venues across the city. Every night played out like the first half of Groundhog Day, after the despair set in but before Bill Murray became suicidal.
I’d also been dumped just a few months after my move, and I was a lot lonelier than I realized. My roommates were night owls who always stayed up until one or two in the morning. Several nights a week I’d fall asleep in the living room while they watched movies or old WWF pay-per-view matches. I often woke up to the sound of the TV turning off for the night, and I got up and put myself to bed in my actual bed. At the time, I assumed I was just too exhausted to get up and brush my teeth once I’d staked out a spot on the couch. Only years later did it dawn on me that I was doing that because I wanted to be near other people as long as I could.
Throughout that period, Jenna helped keep me on track. Mom and dad’s anniversary is next week, she’d text me. Did you get them anything? Should I put your name on my card? Or, Are you coming home for Aunt Barbara’s Hanukkah party this year? She needs a head count.
To return the favor, I’d gift her albums over iTunes whenever I stumbled across an artist I thought she might like. It was a small way I could still big brother her from afar.
Those years were like grad school for me, too. Except instead of tuition, I spent my money on rent and bodega cold cut sandwiches and Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffees. And instead of a degree I got . . . You know what? It wasn’t that much like grad school. But the work over my first few years in New York did (eventually) pay off. I now have a steady job writing comedy for television. I perform at many of the city’s fine comedy clubs, often earning dozens of dollars in a single night. I rarely fall asleep on the couch anymore; I sleep in bed with my wife, Maris, and our dog, Bizzy, who weighs only twenty-four pounds and whose only trick is dominating 50 percent of a queen-size mattress.
Now Jenna and I are basically the same age again. Once you hit twenty-five, three years isn’t a meaningful difference anymore unless you’re on opposite sides of a legal presidential run or the ability to collect social security benefits. We both have full-time jobs and do our own laundry. We often split the cost of birthday and anniversary presents for our parents down the middle. I have a dog, but Jenna owns her apartment, which feels like a stalemate on the adulthood front.
Early last year, I decided to make a quick visit to Massachusetts to see my parents. Jenna picked me up at the Back Bay train station downtown. I hopped into the passenger seat of her car, and she began to navigate the city’s ludicrous tangle of one-way streets with calm expertise. (We were just a few blocks from the impossibly Bostonian intersection of Tremont Street and Tremont Street, a traffic pattern seemingly designed to inspire existential despair.) We moved through the city in short bursts, the way you work a blob of toothpaste out of a nearly empty tube, and Jenna remained calm as she drove and we caught up. I’ve been gone a long time, I thought.
But my big brother instincts quickly kicked in.
“Do you mind?” I asked, but without waiting I dug out the aux cord from her car’s center console and began to pick the music.
Third Time’s a Charm?
The Three True Stories of How We Met
I can’t recommend this strategy to everyone, but once I resolved to start drinking more, my life improved right away.
My specific resolution was to embrace new experiences and make more of a point to accept friends’ invitations to fun social events. But people kept inviting me to bars on weeknights, so saying yes to life took the form of a lot of well whiskey (short for “well . . . it’s technically whiskey”) on the rocks, chased the next morning with vats of Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee clutched tight in my gloved hand (and after the alcohol but before the caffeine, I slept on a bed with no sheets, just a mattress pad and a comforter). It was already March, but winter in New York City lasts as long as it wants. And I, equally stubborn, refuse to not drink cold beverages, even when it’s untenable to hold them in my bare hands. I was a frigid mess, which is like a hot mess, but cold.
At the same time, I pretty much stopped cleaning my room, which is also not usually a decision that comes concurrent with major life improvements. After almost three years of cohabitation with three friends in a large but poorly maintained apartment, I decided that by my thirtieth birthday, I’d find a place of my own. And the best way to make sure I followed through was to make my personal space progressively less livable, until I couldn’t bear it any longer and had to move. And as a recently single serial monogamist, I hoped that lowering my standard of living would cause me too much shame to invite anyone back to my place. I’d stay unattached and focus on my career and relearn how to live like a human being in my future home.
Two months earlier, adopting a libertine lifestyle wouldn’t have been a problem. I had nowhere to be in the morning, since I was making a living (a generous description of my level of income, by the way) freelance writing, tutoring in the afternoon, and doing stand-up on the road. So I could have slept in to my heart’s content, or at the very least until the sunlight poked me in the eye through my borderline-translucent blinds.
But then I got hired at the first full-time day job I’d had in three years (the impetus for my decision/ability to move out of my apartment), which meant that I had to be at a place, on time, five days a week. It was, in my opinion, a bit much.
On the other hand, though, the job did provide me with enough money to have as many undergraduate-quality cocktails as I wanted (usually between zero and two) and the occasional taxi home, a major step up from the NYC subway, which, after eleven p.m. arrives on time as often as a divorced dad who can’t keep track of when it’s his week to pick you up from soccer practice. So, on balance, full-time employment was a slight negative in terms of the quantity of fun I was able to have in the last year of my twenties, but a huge positive in terms of the quality of that fun.
Anyway, that’s why, depending on who’s asking, there are the three different versions of how I met my wife.
The Short-and-Sweet Version
First there’s the story we tell to strangers and distant relatives. It’s quick and to the point. The details are well rehearsed, and there’s no messiness. It goes like this:
Drew, a mutual friend, invited me to a party that my now-wife was throwing. She (Drew, a lady, which I should have mentioned before) couldn’t believe that Maris and I didn’t already know each other. I was on my way from a stand-up show in Brooklyn back to my apartment in Harlem, and the party was almost on my route, which made it a perfect “embrace new experiences” quasi-adventure. Because I arrived on the later end of the evening, I was able to have a long conversation with the hostess, and we got along immediately.
I mentioned how earlier that day I’d booked a gig in Sweden, which I was excited about because I’d never been to Europe before.
“I want to go to Sweden!” said Maris, to whom I am now married.
“Okay, so come with me,” I said, with a casual confidence that I’d never previously displayed for a moment in my sweaty, anxious life. I added, “But then, why don’t you give me your phone number? That way we can hang out once before that in America and make sure we don’t hate each other.”
That was, without a doubt, the coolest thing I’d ever said, and maybe the only time I’ve been cool at all. Maris did not join me in Sweden, which is just as well; my entire immediate family came along, which would have made for an awkward first date. But I did text her the day after the party. We got brunch two days after that, and we’ve been together ever since.
What a nice story, right? It’s got everything you want from a first meeting with a soul mate: a setup by a mutual friend, instant chemistry, charming banter. What more could you want?
Well, for starters, I guess there’s . . . the rest of the story.
The Computer-Literate Version
When younger, more internet-savvy friends and acquaintances ask how Maris and I met, we usually start
with a more complete version of the truth, which is that we knew each other from Twitter. That’s a sentence that’s hard to type, and nearly impossible to say out loud. It’s slightly embarrassing, and also hard to explain. It’s like telling people you met at a cockfight or by bumping into each other reaching for the same pair of orthopedic shoes.
Twitter, if you don’t know, is a social media platform on which users post and share short bursts of text (280 characters, but back in my day it was only 140) along with embedded photos and video. It’s where I’ve learned about some of my favorite writers (Doreen St. Félix! Shea Serrano!) and met some of the people who went on to be my real-life friends (Jazmine Hughes! Ian Karmel!). On the other hand, it’s also an abyss from the depths of which the world’s worst people howl racist and sexist (and all other manner of) obscenities at total strangers.
In addition to giving a microphone to a faction of the populace with the intellectual clout and moral compass of Donald Trump’s nutsack (a reason why, if Twitter’s headquarters sank into a hole in the ground and its servers exploded like Fourth of July fireworks while its employees escaped safely from the rubble, I would not be upset), Twitter also functions as a pretty decent dating app. It’s effective, mostly, because it’s not trying to be a dating app. You interact with strangers, but you don’t see the Tinder version1 of them.
On an intentional dating app, people put what they consider their best, most fuckable foot forward (this is not literally about foot fucking; I assume there’s a different app for that). That can mean anything from posing next to a fancy car, to listing your height, to exclusively having pictures with more attractive friends, as if to say, “Good-looking people want to be close to me. Are you in, or are you ugly?” On Twitter, people feel more empowered to be their horrible selves. Or, at least, they do it all the time by accident. You get to see their worst opinions on politics, art, airline delays, and themselves. People tweet their random bizarre thoughts when they’re bored. They post their pettiest complaints when they’re inconvenienced. You get a much more thorough view of people than just learning that they “love to travel.”
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