Love Sick (27 page)

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Stephen Sondheim, “Company,”
Company
, 1970.

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Stephen Sondheim, “Being Alive,”
Company
, 1970.

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Stephen Sondheim, “No Place Like London,”
Sweeney Todd
, 1979.

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I had to laugh when I registered at nolongerlonely.com, a comprehensive “social community for adults with mental illness,” and wondered how a dissociative would answer the questions of activity preference. In fact, the site caters to people with depression, eating disorders, autism/Asperger’s, personality disorder, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, schizoaffective, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive and dissociative disorders. This puts a whole new spin on picking a favorite cuisine or movie genre . . .

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And, yes, there are “1000s of Sexy Midgets” waiting to find love online.

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Millionaire Matchmaker
, Season 5: Ep. 3.

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O’Brien, P. David,
Over 50 Dating Secrets,
Amazon Digital Services, 2012. Kindle edition.

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It is time for spell check to accept “friend” as a verb.

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Currently residing with my niece in Oregon, along with some other china and furniture. The rest of my junk is in Montana. And you wonder why I feel so scattered all the time?

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Caramelized onion bacon blackberry jam; blueberry mint ginger jelly; papaya peach bacon jam; apple bacon butter; lavender Johnny-jump-up jelly; strawberry ginger pineapple jam; pumpkin toasted pecan butter; blackberry rosemary jam; pumpkin pear toasted almond butter.

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My apartment, aka the Bat Cave, is a not-very-long rectangular studio apartment with windows looking into my neighbor’s garden. I have a slice of sunlight for about forty-five minutes each morning that does not cut into the perpetual dusk. I have not infrequently left the house thinking I am wearing black tights only to discover they are navy blue halfway to my destination. It’s easy to take naps there.

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Pretty stale for a lit-boy like Dar.

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No, I wouldn’t. Trust me on this.

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No. You owe me public self-flagellation. I do not mean this metaphorically.

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I know that one guy really liked me. Was it the gift of his riding crop that stanched further contact?

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Until my inability to execute a decent Palmer Method capital “N” made Sr. M. Francesca so furious that she threw my bottle of ink at the wall, where it splattered like the blood of King Harod’s martyred innocents, then made me clean it up. My mother then switched me over to a cartridge pen, sighing at one more minor incident in the parade of persecutions against her nine-year-old passing through Francesca’s clutches.

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I remember a diet in sixth grade, at the start of which I weighed in the 170s. It lasted about ten days. The next time I remember looking at a scale, I was fifteen and weighed 240 pounds. I found the scale useful only when I went on diets.

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That ended the summer between eighth grade and high school, when I read
The Godfather
.

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And consider how enticing it was to me that Rochester overlooked Jane Eyre’s plainness or that Darcy fell in love despite himself.

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We had a large house that should have been designated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation because it was such an exquisite example of the early sixties ranch style. If anything could be “built in”—a blender, a rotisserie, a television—it was. Plus it had a shrine to the Virgin Mary and was almost entirely paneled in teak.

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An irrigation ditch system, lined by old willows, bordered our yard, which was surrounded on two sides by massive fields. The ditch bifected in one of those fields and had wooden floors and trusses. It was a magnificent ditch.

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“You could balance champagne glasses on his butt.”

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Which I got kicked off of. His fame for writing also put a serious crimp in what had been my territory of specialness.

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Now, of course, I know that’s a lie. He had a crush on Mark Fallon. Where there’s a crush there’s . . . Still, what else could he say to me at the time? It was dangerous knowledge.

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Which truly began when Grace Willoughby, Kevin’s little sister, who I had a vague recollection of being in the Joni Mitchell set in high school, walked up to me outside a philosophy class and said, “You’re Frances Kuffel, aren’t you? You look interesting. Do you want to have coffee?”

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“Did you read the part about being bored?” I responded.

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Followed, I assumed, by fellatio.

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“I’m interested” is
not
the correct answer to “I’m bored.” I mean, if my boredom is interesting it must not be boredom, right?

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But a picture of which you?

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A note on phone sex: For someone who is inexperienced and/or insecure, phone sex is a good tool for breaking through all those words, acts, costumes and casts of characters that our mothers and churches would be appalled to know we harbor.

Well, most churches. I’m a malpracticing Catholic. My church may be a pioneer in these matters.

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“No need to despair if your hourglass figure has gained half an hour,” Shirley Friedenthal and Howard Eisenberg chirp in
It’s Never Too Late to Date
. “It’s never too late to lose weight.”

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New York City Black and/or Spanish patois: “I been axin’ a’ the bookstore but day don’ ’ave it.”

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Google is good at translating my wild misspellings. A
musernik
is a student of Jewish morals and ethics.

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Leviticus 15:19–23.

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Now if someone could explain to me exactly why the Christian Right gets to use Leviticus to condemn homosexuality while lunching on crab-stuffed pork and steamed cormorant, I might give up the Big Bang and be saved.

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Ezra 9:10–10:3.

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Frum
, which means “pious” in Yiddish, refers to Orthodox Jews. Really Orthodox Jews are known as
frummers
.

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As I learned later, Leviticus is the Boy Scout manual for what to wear, what to eat, who to fuck and how to pray. Orthodox Jews shave their beards off when they are in mourning but otherwise observe the commandment, “. . . neither shalt thou mar the corner of thy beard” (Leviticus 19:27).

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Baal Teshuva: a Jew who has become observant rather than being born into orthodoxy.

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The “Tommy” was new. He’d used “Danny” with me.

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Real addresses and real name. Or the ones he sent me. Sue me, Oladiti.

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Some grammar, punctuation and spelling have been fixed for your sanity.

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No author. “Signs of a Nigerian Dating Scammer.” chanceforlove.com. 22 December 2006. Web. 20 May 2011.