Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be

by Nichole Perkins

  The rest of the letter was him making excuses for what he did:

  I could have lied to you that night and said the condom broke. I didn’t. I could have said nothing at all and waited it out. If you did get pregnant i could have denied it. I could have just went ghost but i didn’t. I admitted what i did because i care about you. I would not have done any of these things to you.

  I just wish that you can step back and see the good in me and all the nice things i have done for you and let them outweigh it…

  I don’t know your history or what may have happened to you in other relationships but i am one of the nicest guys you will know. Please don’t give up on me. I know i should not put this in this letter but if i can just talk to that pretty kitty and tell her how sorry i am she would believe me. I miss you nichole. Please let me back in your life…

  This man who had repeatedly pressured me into sex, who had ignored my pleasure to get his, who had violated two of my most sacred casual sex rules, told me he was a Nice Guy. If the stench of emotional abuse coming from his letter wasn’t enough to send me running for the hills, the fact that his handwriting looked almost exactly like my father’s would have done the job.

  I was officially afraid. How many nights had he been driving to park outside my door?

  I took pictures of the letter and asked my friend Lola, whose boo thang was an investigative reporter, to go with me to file a police report.

  Lola and her friend went with me to the police station. The officer, a white guy with dark, close-cut hair a little too long on top and such a thick New York accent I thought it was fake, made me almost as uncomfortable as Hal. He filled out the paperwork as I answered his questions.

  “Race,” he said instead of asking, as if bored already.

  “Of me or the guy?” I asked for clarity.

  “The guy.” He looked at me over his glasses. He could’ve been cute if he weren’t a dick or a cop.

  “He’s white,” I replied.

  The cop raised his eyebrow at me in assessment and gave me a sweeping glance.

  “Do you know his address?”

  “Not specifically. I never went there, but it was in near Newark,” I told him.

  The officer looked impressed and said something along the lines of “Boy, he must really like you to come all that way,” and it felt so nasty and scuzzy. I guess he thought he was complimenting me, like “You’ve got a white boy driving from Jersey to be with you; you must really be worth it.” If I hadn’t been there filing a report because said white boy had escalated to stalking me, maybe I would have taken it as praise, but now was not the time, copper!

  I was scared after filing the police report. Would Hal somehow get a copy and escalate even further? Would this man kill me for rejecting him? Was it all my fault because I’d kept blurring my own boundaries, trying to be nice?

  I worried I’d fall out of love with roses. I loved them and enjoyed buying colorful bouquets to brighten up my place. Some people think they’re boring and played out, but I’d always appreciated the simple beauty of them, the velvet petals under my thumbs.

  And he was ruining them.

  The grocery store bouquets would pile up on my dresser. I refused to put them in water, refused to smell them or touch them. They were not an expression of love. Not from him.

  He was another man following some script he’d imagined would appeal to me, and he couldn’t accept that I was not performing my lines. When he’d asked me if I wanted a boyfriend and my answer was ambiguous, he took it as a sign to woo me, to show me he could be what I said I didn’t want. In page 5 of his letter, he wrote, “I know you don’t want a relationship and i am okay with that. I just want to be around for one day that you do.”

  The idea that if you keep showering a woman with gifts and telling her you know her mind better than she does, she’ll eventually succumb to your romantic intentions has lasted far too long and gets perpetuated constantly in pop culture. He was following the examples in everything from movies like Say Anything to There’s Something About Mary to the way Urkel on Family Matters harassed Laura before finally wearing her down.

  From that Thanksgiving weekend until I moved out of the apartment the following April, I worried every day that he would show up. Whenever I left the building or returned, I’d look for his truck. I started dating again around February, and I worried he’d see someone arriving and lose it. Luckily, that never happened. I don’t know if he ever received a copy of the police report or when he stopped trying to contact me. I did eventually block his number. The stress of waiting for another text from him had become too much.

  When I moved, I bought myself some roses for my birthday—a beautiful red bouquet of two dozen stems. I felt safe and free. I felt back in control of my sex. No one else was going to make me afraid to say no again.

  I Love Niles Crane

  In the 1990 Cheers episode “Severe Crane Damage,” Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane (Bebe Neuwirth) goes on a talk show to promote her new book, which is all about women’s attraction to “bad boys.” Her husband, Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), and Sam Malone (Ted Danson) are in the audience. Lilith uses Sam, playboy bartender and former major league pitcher, as her example of a bad boy. Frasier becomes the example of a “good boy.” The host invites them up to the stage. Of course, Sam wins over the audience of women with his flirtatious nature, and Frasier resents his own seeming lack of appeal. Later, to prove he can be dangerous, he picks up a pair of scissors and runs around the bar, yelling, “Would a good boy do this? I am running with scissors!” Frasier’s hair, styled a bit like George Washington’s but longer in the back, perhaps to compensate for a receding hairline, flies behind him as he opens and closes the scissors, creating a tinny snicking sound to punctuate the foolishness of his male ego.

  For the past thirty years, my sister and I have said the line “I am running with scissors!” any time we pick up a pair. It’s not often that a show can bring in a new character and have him become a lasting crowd favorite. Frasier Crane, a psychiatrist, appeared in the third season of Cheers as a love interest for Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) and to throw a monkey wrench into the Sam and Diane love story. Diane eventually left, but Frasier stayed, lasting past the Cheers series finale to become the star of his own spin-off show, simply called Frasier. If you ask me to name my favorite sitcom, that is the show I will give before you’ve even finished the question, and yet, it’s not Frasier Crane that makes the show my favorite. It’s his younger brother, Niles, as played by David Hyde Pierce.

  On Cheers, Frasier doesn’t have any family. He even says his father is dead, but on the spin-off, he has a curmudgeonly lovable father, Martin (John Mahoney), and his brother, who is also a psychiatrist. Niles and Frasier are so competitive they took sibling rivalry to elevated, snobbish dimensions, like cattily badmouthing each other for an exclusive membership in a gentlemen’s club (not a strip joint but a place filled with baby-bottom-soft leather furniture and rich old white men reading newspapers in silence). Most of Frasier’s story lines on the show are about him looking for a relationship after his divorce from Lilith sends him across the country from Boston to his hometown of Seattle. When we first meet Niles, he’s married to the never-seen Maris, a Seattle socialite too delicate to do anything except shop and pamper herself with expensive beauty treatments. On the surface, Niles seems stuffy and starched, a perfect companion for an invisible woman who wants affection through displays of wealth, but it’s through his attraction to Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves), Martin’s healthcare provider, that we see Niles is a passionate, thoughtful man—and he has ruined me.

  I want my Niles Crane.

  * * *

  Frasier ran for eleven seasons, from 1993 to 2004. Until I left for college, my sister and I watched the show and fell apart at the seams practically every time Niles spoke. We had watched Cheers together, and I pretty much always watched whatever my sister did in order to spend time with her. Mama says we were like two old ladies on the c
ouch, cackling. The television show Bones helped pull me from an especially aggressive depressive moment in my life, but Frasier is what I use as a regular antidepressant. For a while, I watched my DVDs all the way through once a season, but I realized gorging myself so often was dimming my taste for the show, so now I limit myself to watching all eleven seasons once a year. However, I pop into random seasons all the time and let the episodes run to balance me out at the end of a long day.

  It’s become a barometer for my life. When I’ve gone too long without watching Frasier, I start to get irritated. I measure the potential in dates by whether they already like the show or how they respond when I put it on when they come over. If they don’t pay attention or laugh, I know there’s not much they can bring to my life.

  * * *

  Niles always wears a suit and tie, oversized just enough to mark mid-’90s fashion but somber enough to indicate wealthy professional. He is so smart and witty; he can cut someone in half with that sharp tongue. I truly think Niles received all the best lines on the show, and Hyde Pierce added a graceful bit of physical comedy to the character that leaves me swooning. In “Three Valentines,” Niles (long separated from Maris) gets ready for a date in Frasier’s apartment. At the top of the scene, he explains to Frasier on the phone that his date is a fastidious woman, so everything has to be perfect. He’s cooking dinner when he realizes the crease in one of his pantlegs isn’t as neat as it could be. Niles is very particular about these things, and now he has the added pressure of a date. He begins ironing, somehow cuts his finger, passes out onto the couch from the sight of blood, recovers, tries to get the blood out of the sofa with a special cleaning fluid but passes out again; then his pants catch on fire. He tosses the burning trousers onto the couch where he’d spilled the highly flammable cleaning fluid, which sparks a huge fire, so he takes the big pot of noodles he was cooking and tosses them on the flames, effectively and completely ruining his date before it’s even begun. Because Niles is the only breathing soul in the apartment, other than Martin’s dog, Eddie, there is no more dialogue after his phone call to Frasier. The humor comes entirely from Hyde Pierce’s increasingly panicked facial expressions and body language. It’s a modern vaudeville act, and Hyde Pierce owns it thoroughly. It’s one of my top three Niles Crane moments.

  Niles is a fussbudget with every allergy known to man and, according to Frasier, can barely lift anything heavier than a nail file, so you wouldn’t consider him the most stereotypically masculine of men, but he is also hot-blooded and possessive and incredibly ethical, and he loves Daphne so much, even when he isn’t supposed to. I love a good yearning, and Niles Crane is television’s best yearner.

  * * *

  As a freelance writer and media person, my pitches aren’t always good enough. I see people making announcements about promotions or lucrative deals, and sometimes I feel envious. I wonder where my portion is. Sometimes my Instagram coughs up too many “Happy Anniversary, baby!” posts, and the past ten years of singlehood swallow me whole. I’m not proud of those envious feelings, and I try my best to work through them with facts and tips I’ve learned from therapy, but the thing that works best for me is cueing up a heavy Niles and Daphne episode, and watching patience, perseverance, and passion win.

  Niles was in a strange, affectionless marriage when he fell for Daphne, someone he never thought he could have, someone who was completely clueless to his feelings. His frustrations frequently got the better of him and he tried to sabotage anyone who expressed interest in her, like the time he told Daphne a contractor who wanted to ask her out had slept with all his wealthy clients, or the time he showed up to a dinner where Frasier had hoped to set Daphne up with his boss. Niles was even jealous of his nephew Frederick’s childhood crush on Daphne, because Frederick was allowed to snuggle himself to sleep on her lap. After Niles filed for divorce, which took years to finalize, he had to watch Daphne fall for other men, occasionally comforting her broken heart. He tried clumsily to see if she could see him in a different light, but he knew neither of them were ready for that, so he offered her counsel as a friend. It wasn’t the time for the two of them, and as much as it hurt him to realize that, he knew there was no one to blame. Sometimes things have to happen in their own way, in their own time.

  When I watch Niles lean in to smell Daphne’s hair or how he stops by Frasier’s to spend just five minutes with her, despite not knowing if he’d ever have anything more, I see a piece of myself, learning how to bend my dreams. Obstacles, rejections, and envy pop up far too often for my liking.

  My hands-down favorite Niles and Daphne episode is “Daphne Hates Sherry.” Sherry is Martin’s girlfriend at the time, and in the middle of an unusual heat wave, she and Daphne clash. Sherry tells Daphne she wouldn’t be so uptight if she got laid. The temperature is high; tempers are short, and Daphne runs to Niles’s place for respite. After Niles recovers from fainting (twice) at the sight of his longtime crush on his doorstep, Daphne wonders if what Sherry said was right, if maybe she does need a good tumble. The air between Niles and Daphne is crackling with possibilities when an alarm on her watch goes off. She has medicine to take, but oh damn—she left it back at home. The two hurry over to the apartment, and Daphne and Sherry make up with a little help from Frasier. Niles blames his brother for ruining his moment, but Frasier reminds him that he could’ve written Daphne a backup prescription and he has a twenty-four-hour pharmacy across the street from his place. Niles kicks himself, but Frasier tries to make him see that Niles must not have truly wanted to start a relationship with Daphne that way, that subconsciously he knew it wouldn’t have been right.

  When I am knocking my head against the wall of my professional frustrations, and envy threatens to swallow me whole, I remind myself a better path will reveal itself and take me someplace even more satisfying than I could imagine.

  * * *

  I don’t know which is cheesier—that regular doses of Frasier keep me sane or that I want someone to long for me like Niles did Daphne.

  In the third-season episode “Moon Dance,” Daphne agrees to teach Niles how to dance for an upcoming ball he wants to attend after his recent separation from his wife. His date cancels, and Daphne accompanies him, wearing an amazing red dress that strikes him briefly speechless. Everyone at the ball is watching Niles and pitying him, but when he and Daphne dance a tango, the room is mesmerized by their chemistry and grace. Niles, overwhelmed by the moment, declares to Daphne, “You’re a goddess!”

  It was not the first time he referred to her as a goddess, and it certainly was not the last. Almost every time he called her that, it was played for laughs, until the eighth season, after they were finally together, when Frasier helped Niles realize that assigning such divinity to Daphne was too much pressure and created unrealistic expectations for her to live up to. An important lesson, but even if it was healthier, I must admit I was sad to see his love become more grounded.

  Too many of my relationships have been pinned to earth to keep me from having high expectations. Someone was always making sure I knew it could be over at any moment. I learned not to hope for much: not a card on Valentine’s Day, not a phone call or text to end the night, not even public affection sometimes. I may not want my man to be as pretentious as Niles, but I want him to think my presence is a blessing from on high. I want him to create moonlit picnics on rooftops for us. I want tropical vacations where we make love on the beach. I want him to believe I’m psychic even though he is a man of science.

  I’ve had a few subs call me Goddess. I allowed it, but it secretly made me laugh, thinking of Niles, until one sent some particularly naughty texts:

  and ask your permission to cum

  Yes. Don’t come until I tell you to. Do you think you can hold on until I tell you to come?

  that goddess cunt is tight

  Well, yes. There is divinity here. Thank you for honoring that, pet.

  My Kameelah-Ass List

  In 1992, reality television change
d from watching prank-filled wholesomeness, for the entire family, to watching groups of beautiful young people serve up stereotypes and sex, for the music-video generation. MTV’s The Real World transformed reality TV—for the better or the worse is your decision to make.

  It started in New York, of course: “Seven strangers, picked to live together in a house…and have their lives taped, to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” There was always the same variation of characters: a very Christian country bumpkin, a blond cheerleader type, a party animal, a player, an angry Black woman, an angry Black man, a queer person. Everyone was always fit and cute, if not outright hot. When the group had house meetings to discuss the inappropriate or questionable behavior of one of the residents, it was often because of something the token Black or brown person had done.

  I was newly fifteen years old when The Real World first aired, ending my freshman year of high school, anxious for summer and my sophomore year. I was switching schools, tired of the science concentration of my current school. It was a magnet school, where I’d been since seventh grade, and we had to do science projects every year. I could not imagine more of an academic hell than being a poet/book nerd and having to flex the scientific method on a regular basis. So for my sophomore year, I was moving to another magnet school, this one dedicated to the arts. Everyone there was a musician, an artist, an actor, or a writer of some kind. We were a bunch of artsy nerds, so keeping up with The Real World was the perfect way for us to stay trendy while both envying and sneering at the cool kids on TV.