I Don't Care About Your Band

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praise for Julie Klausner and
I Don’t Care About Your Band

“Julie Klausner has the perfect comedic voice for a new generation of ladies—brave, self-deprecating, high-larious beyond, and brand spanking new. It’s one of those books that you take to bed with you, that keeps you up all night, and that makes you laugh so hard in public the next morning that strangers ask you what you’re reading. And make me so glad I’m not dating.”

—Jill Soloway, author of
Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants
and executive producer of
United States of Tara

 

“If you think dating can’t get any worse, then you haven’t read this book. Julie Klausner’s hilarious memoir will remind you that the worse the date, the better the story it’ll eventually make. If nothing else, you’ll be comforted by the fact that YOUR blind date was never arrested for kidnapping.”—Em & Lo,
EMandLO.com

 

“Julie Klausner is Helen
Girly
Brown: hard-working, yet lusty! Romantic
and
intelligent! But best of all: unapologetic about wanting to be in love.
I Don’t Care About Your Band
has more wit and all of the
tsuris
of Carrie Bradshaw’s
Sex and the City
, without the pithy bromides.”—Sarah Thyre, author of
Dark at the Roots
and actress on
Strangers with Candy

 

“All those misplaced orgasms and disappointing hookups with deviants were well worth it. Julie Klausner’s memoir is screamingly funny and wiser than a hooker with health insurance. Take it home for a ride!”—Michael Musto

 

“Klausner fashions a breathy, vernacular-veering-into-vulgar, spastically woe-fi lled account of her youthful heartaches falling for guys who were just not that into her.”—
Publishers Weekly

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, January

Copyright © 2009 by Julie Klausner All rights reserved

Lyrics to “Fuck and Run” reprinted with permission from Liz Phair.

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Klausner, Julie.

I don’t care about your band : what I learned from indie rockers, trust funders, pornographers, faux-sensitive hipsters, felons, and other guys I’ve dated / by Julie Klausner. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18517-9

1. Dating (Social customs)—Humor. 2. Man-woman relationships—Humor. I. Title. PN6231.D3K.7302’07—dc22 2009036016

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

 

 

FOR MY PARENTS

 

I love you so much it is actually ridiculous. Thank you for your unwavering support in every single one of my creative and personal endeavors and beyond. Next time, I promise I’ll write a book you can read.

 

 

 

T
wo things about me before we get started.

First of all, I will always be a subscriber to the sketch comedy philosophy of how a scene should unfold, which is “What? That sounds crazy! OK, I’ll do it.”

The other thing is, I love men like it is my job.

 

 

I LOVE
men so much that I’ve never once considered what it would be like to “take a break” from dating them, or to focus my mind on other things besides falling in love with one, or to look for work in a field that’s more female-dominated, or anything else lesbians suggest you do after a guy breaks your heart. And despite repetitive instances of heartbreak, humiliations, failures, and mistakes I’ve accumulated, I’ve never stopped casting myself as the straight man in the sketch who agrees to do something bonkers; who submits to the recklessness and absurdity of optimism, time and time again.

Here is why: I could never give up on the possibility of falling for someone who’d make all of the pies I took in the face worthwhile. And this is a book about how frustrating it is to keep returning to something disappointing you will not give up on.

I am, by nature, an expert grudge hoarder. But I don’t save up my grudges for breakups—for me, it’s the disappointments that haunt me like Fail Ghosts. I dwell and retread and mourn relationships that could have been with characters you’ll meet soon. There are some doozies! And I haven’t even included the story about the guy I met at a Korean barbecue restaurant who said, after I remarked on the grill built into our table, that the place was perfect for a blind date, because, “if you don’t like your date’s face, you can just mash it into the grill.” That guy deserves a book of his own, but I think Bret Easton Ellis already wrote it.

What follows in this book are selective stories of guys who came on strong, then sputtered out; high hopes shattered by mucky realities; and romantic miscarriages I had to clean up myself, which is as gross as it sounds.

 

 

I DID
not embark on the task of writing this book for the sake of basking in my own woe,
Cathy
cartoonlike. And by no means is this a cathartic assemblage of “He Done Me Wrong” stories served hot. I’m not PJ Harvey, and this isn’t 1998. I wrote these stories strewn with romantic collateral damage because I think they’re funny now that I’ve stopped crying, and because I learned things from them I hope will resonate with women who’ve snacked on similarly empty fare when it comes to guys.

And there are so many
guys.
I remember the first time a friend referred to a guy I liked as a “man,” and I made a face like I was asking Willis what he was talkin’ ’bout. A man is hard to find, good or otherwise, but guys are everywhere now. That’s why women go nuts for Don Draper on
Mad Men.
If that show was called
Mad Guys,
it might star Joe Pesci, and nobody wants to see that.

Meanwhile, I know way more women than girls. There’s a whole generation of us who rode on the wings of feminism’s entitlement like it was a Pegasus with cornrows, knowing how smart we were and how we could be anything. The problem is that we ended up at the mercy of a generation of guys who don’t quite seem to know what’s expected of them, whether it’s earning a double income or texting someone after she blows you. There are no more traditions or standards, and manners are like cleft chins or curly hair—they only run in some families.

It seems like everybody is just confused.

I know grown women who flip out like teenyboppers once they sense a sea change in a guy who seemed to be in it for the long haul but got scared after some innocuous exchange, and now they feel responsible. (“I shouldn’t have sent that text with that dumb joke!”) There are ladies who hook up instead of date because those are the crumbs to feast on when they are starving. Women who feel awful because they knew a guy was bad news, but got involved anyway, then got attached, and now they feel terrible not just because biology kicked in—“I had an orgasm and I like him now!”—but because they
feel bad for feeling bad.
Like it wasn’t enough just to feel bad because he didn’t call you after his dick was inside you. Now, you have to feel bad because you’re not
allowed
to feel bad.

Because we can hook up just to hook up now. Because you knew what you were getting into. And you did anyway. But then everything changed.

And instead of being the way some guys are at that age, let’s say in their late thirties, and they’ve never been married, and there’s a ticking clock but they don’t hear it because they’re like, “My career!” or “Look at all these twenty-five-year-old girls who let me make out with them even though they didn’t when I was in high school!”—you
don’t
shut yourself off. You don’t stop trying to connect. You don’t close up like a clam, even when it gets hard to tell the difference between who you are and how you are treated.

You keep trying, in the nature of optimism; in the nature of
believing in humanity
, like Carole King told our moms to do. And when you cry about things not working out, you’re crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn’t seem to care you’re alive for some reason that’s beyond everything you’ve been told by teachers, parents, friends and everybody else who knows how awesome you are—who helped make you that way—but also, because you’re ashamed of yourself for crying.

 

IT’S PART
of the female disposition to take the blame for failed things. We’re not as entitled as men, even fictional ones, like Will Hunting, who only needed Robin Williams to scream “It’s not your fault!” to board the self-esteem bus after breaking down. Meanwhile, when we get hurt, we’re ashamed right away.

You stop confiding in people when they ask why you’re upset, because you don’t want to enter a debate on a side you can’t defend. You feel like you were wrong taking a chance on a guy you should’ve known couldn’t give you what you wanted, and in a way, you feel you deserved what you got.