I Know What I'm Doing (21 page)

COCKROACHES. IN THE SINK THAT WAS ALSO HIS BED.

This is why I didn’t want to just jump into calling someone my boyfriend only to find out
later
that his ice cube tray doubles as his kitchen counter. I don’t need a man to live in a luxury rooftop apartment and have unnecessary decorations like balls of twine in a bowl on an end table but I question how developed a man is who makes things look nice for a living but can’t quite do it for himself. I knew Ab-Master as a talented carpenter who often had to create a piece for a cozy living room. Was I remiss in assuming that he had already made a home for himself? He was a woodworker who knew how to make furniture but rather than make himself a bed, he made a pile of wood shavings on his bed.

I told the Ab-Master that if it was okay with him, I would probably never ever under any circumstance come over. I’d already lived through a cockroach phase when I lived in a studio apartment in Hollywood. I woke up with a cockroach on my face and when I screamed, shook it off, and went to the refrigerator to get some water there were over a hundred cockroaches inside of my fridge. It turned out my neighbor was an elderly hoarder who lived in squalor and one night the roaches just rebelled and magically oozed through the walls into my immaculately clean, charming little place. I’d already taken the last copter out of Saigon and I really wasn’t looking to get back in one for another tour.

The Ab-Master was hurt. “But, babe, I want to be able to share my home with you, and take care of you when you sleep over.” There was no need to “take care” of me during a sleepover, unless we’re talking you-know-what. Otherwise, I’m not on dialysis and don’t need monitoring throughout the night. A good way to take care of me would be to let me just sleep in my own home—a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo with a washer/dryer, deck, and central air-conditioning. He and I both had jobs that were within walking distance of my place. And as a woman who is fast approaching “older” status, I have creams—creams for the cellulite on my butt, a morning under-eye cream, an evening under-eye cream, and an oil to apply to my face to get it ready for the cream that’s coming. Then there are lotions—lotions for my legs, salves for my elbows (one of the first places to show signs of age), and a leave-in conditioner to put at the ends of my hair. I can’t lug a carry-on bag full of creams just to spend the night at a gentleman’s . . .
room.
He felt that I was judging him for living in a studio apartment. I said, “I’m not judging that at all. You’ll move someday when you can. I’m judging that you want a grown woman to sleep over at the risk of cockroaches getting tangled in her hair extensions.”

We were only five years apart but it was our life experience differences that didn’t sit well with me. We were just fundamentally different people and I wasn’t looking to fix or change him but I felt he was trying to fix and change me. He told me that he had a big talk with his sister about how I didn’t want children and that he wasn’t sure if he did or not but that the good news was that if he did want kids he could help me change my mind. I told him that I was not going to change my mind. Hello, I wrote a book about it. He said, “Babe, it’s not written in stone.” It’s written on paper, which is good enough for me, and besides, my reproductive system after all these years
is
turning to stone.

Around month three, as summer ended, he seemed to be growing increasingly frustrated. He wanted to know why I hadn’t told my family about him. He resented that he had met my friends (over dinner and drinks) but I wasn’t willing to meet his by going to an industrial music Goth rave dance club dance in a bad part of town at midnight. He kept insisting, “Jen, you’re not letting me show you who I am.” I asked him to explain what he needed me to know about him that it was somehow my fault for not knowing.

He said, “Well, you don’t even know the most important thing about me.”

“Okay. Tell me the most important thing about you.”

“Halloween is my favorite holiday!”

“That’s the most important thing about you?”

“Yes. Just like you always say, sometimes the smallest thing about someone can shine a light on who they are.”

“I meant more psychologically speaking, but . . .”

There’s nothing wrong with a guy who loves a good haunted house, but one who says it’s the most important part of him? I cringed at a vision of him carving a pumpkin in his room, seeds and guts spilling onto the bed.

I just wanted someone to have some salmon and sex with. Not at the same time. But on a Saturday night I loved the idea of taking a nice hot shower, putting on some makeup, a decent outfit, and having dinner with a man. I just wanted a little bit of companionship. On our last date, the Ab-Master picked me up in his sixteen-year-old car. I hate cars. I don’t understand why people want to spend a lot of money on a car, why anyone cares what make or model a car is or how much horsepower it possesses. I see it as a necessary evil that takes me from point A to point B. I don’t care if a car is old but I don’t care to sit on piles of trash and I don’t feel safe sitting in a passenger seat with a dented door. The Ab-Master still hadn’t registered his car in California in his three years of residency, claiming, “There are more important things in life to get to every day.”

We finally broke up over the phone when I was on the road in Austin, Texas. I didn’t mean to break up with him on the call, but when he asked me why I couldn’t make a plan with him to meet his mother eight months from then, I sort of snapped. I told him that I would have known by now and it didn’t look like I’d be falling in love. He retaliated with, “For someone who has been in therapy for fifteen years, you sure don’t know yourself. It hasn’t worked at all.”
Excuse me?
Anyone who talks about therapy that way or uses it against me, that’s where I get all Oprah-in-a-movie-playing-an-angry-mom-yelling-at-her-son’s-girlfriend on their ass. “Don’t you come around here anymore and tell us our lifestyle is wrong, you trifling bitch!” His final plea of, “What’s wrong with my wanting to change you? It means I love you! I want you to change me too!”

The red flags had turned to white. Time to surrender. This. Was. Over. I felt validated that I had been kind of right since the beginning. I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me again that I was unwilling to love and just needed the right man. I’m unwilling to love the wrong man just because he’s a man. I have nothing to prove. I want to relax with someone—not rebuild him. I’m done with put-it-together-yourself furniture and men. Besides, his favorite holiday is Halloween? That’s so immature. Everybody knows that Christmas is the best holiday. It’s like, duh, grow
up.

After my book tour of 2013 finished up, I got an e-mail from my ex-boyfriend Blake, whose cheating escapade was chronicled in
I Can Barely Take Care of Myself
. We had seen each other only one other time since college, ten years earlier. We met up for drinks. Once I sat down, Blake told me that he’d read my book and wanted to clear the air. He said that he had never cheated on me. In his version, he was unhappy in our relationship and was unhappy about being unhappy and once we broke up, then and only then, he took solace in the alleged other woman’s arms. I laughed at his explanation—it sounded plausible but it really didn’t matter anymore. I only wrote about it in the book to illustrate my past. I wasn’t really still holding a grudge. I thought of how my relationship with Blake and all of my relationships from my twenties had seemed so easy, compared to the ones I seemed to be getting into in my late thirties. The Ab-Master wasn’t a bad guy. He really would be a great catch for a woman who is maybe in the same place emotionally that he is. Maybe relationships were easy when I was younger because most twenty-year-olds are in the same place and it’s not such a glaring red flag when someone has a hot plate as a headboard.

As we finished up Blake gave me the speech—it’s a speech I’ve heard from other exes. I call it the “You Made Me a Better Man” speech, because he started it by saying, “Jen, you made me a better man.” Blake told me that I’d challenged him to dare to dream and to achieve his goals. I showed him the meaning of unconditional love by not judging his Friday-night drum circle jams. He said that he understood women better because of me and is proud to call himself a feminist. He said that he could never be the man he now is for his wife and kids if it wasn’t for me unknowingly helping in his remodeling. We ended up just laughing and sharing some sentimental tears about how long it’s been since we were young. I’m so happy that Blake found that wife and kids he always wanted, and in no way do I want him for myself, but I never meant to fix him up for another woman. I certainly never meant to reupholster him like an old chair so that somebody else could put him in her living room. Although I do sort of hope right now there is a girl out there unknowingly refurbishing some guy and I’ll find him in a few years in a thrift store just waiting to be taken home and sat on.

17

AUNT-ARCHY IN THE UK

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.

—ISABELLE EBERHARDT, EXPLORER

Traveling is the spice of life.

—AUNT JENNY (
THE BRADY BUNCH
)

I
n September of 2013 I had a six-night “run” at a cabaret space in London—the Soho Theatre on Dean Street in, duh, Soho. I wish I could say I was doing a one-woman version of
Waiting for Godot
or
Liza with a “Z”
but I was just doing my stand-up comedy. Whenever I have opportunities like this that I never imagined I would, I think to myself,
Hey, I’m just this dumb little kid from Needham, Massachusetts, and I was asked to go overseas and tell jokes about my life and my vagina. And this is my
job
.
That is an honor. For me. Probably not for the audience. But I was looking forward to a completely paid-for, business-class flight and hotel. There’s really no better way to experience London—unless you get to stay in Buckingham Palace or with Morrissey.

I’d been to London before back in February of 2008—dolefully remembered by me as “The One Year I Didn’t Get A Flu Shot.” I boarded an eleven-hour flight with a head cold and exited the plane with some mishmash of pneumonia, swine flu, and death. Thank God (and may He save the Queen) for free clinics. I had a humiliating conversation with the doctor when he tried to prescribe antibiotics about my inability to swallow without panic large, chalky pills, and specifically my phobia of swallowing large, chalky pills in foreign countries. What if the pill gets lodged in my windpipe and I choke? Who is in charge of shipping my body back to America? My parents can’t get on a plane and locate a hotel in Sloane Square and carry my body back to my final resting place. My mom has a bunion and my dad has no sense of direction. They wouldn’t even make it to the international section of Boston’s Logan Airport without getting in a big fight, and my dad missing the flight because he wanted to enjoy a Tiparillo cigar in the one designated smoking area left these days, inconveniently located about two miles away from the airport.

I spent that 2008 trip to London sleeping, waking up every six hours to suffer through swallowing thick liquid antibiotics. When I actually tasted an antibiotic I began questioning everything I’d ever learned about their supposed ability to help fight illness. It seemed like poison. I felt slightly improved on my last day in London. I was able to take about five breaths without coughing, which made me feel like an Olympian. I gorged on fish and chips at a nonauthentic British pub and took one short ride on a double-decker bus.
Oh,
there’s Big Ben
, I thought to myself as I made grunting noises in an effort to reverse my postnasal drip.

When I got the chance to make a triumphant return to England five years later as a fully flu-shotted woman with a newfound habit of taking probiotics—I was giddy. The Ab-Master and I broke up about seven days before I was to head overseas and I was dismayed at how many friends and acquaintances and just people walking past me on the street said things to me along the lines of, “Are you okay? I always pictured [Name Redacted] going to London with you.”
Am I okay?
He was never coming with me. We’d only been dating for a few months and there was no reason for him to come along. After that was cleared up, people’s comments veered toward, “Well, maybe you’ll meet someone in London! Maybe you’re being sent to London ‘for a reason’!” Yeah. The reason was called work. Maybe I would meet someone. Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would also exercise caution and not have sex with a stranger who I just met in England. Also, I’ve heard from some of my more international friends that British men aren’t circumcised. I’ve never seen an uncircumcised penis. But I have a feeling that I would not like the way one looks. So, I guess we can add fear of swallowing an uncircumcised penis in London to my list of oddball phobias.

I am not a member of Led Zeppelin. I know this comes as a shock. But I am not a rock star with a team of security guards who can stand outside or inside of my bedroom suite and make sure that no groupies get out of hand or try to kill me just to have a good story. And unlike Led Zeppelin, any groupies that I might sleep with are men. Men are human beings who are usually more large and strapping than me and my first thought is that it would be unnerving to take one I didn’t know back to my hotel room—and although I still have an overdeveloped right arm from scooping ice cream as a teenager at my after-school job at Baskin-Robbins, I can’t physically make a man who might be a psychopath leave my room when I start to suspect he’s a psychopath. And I really don’t want to go to some “bloke’s flat”—having no idea where I am and no one outside can hear me scream because at night in London the streets become filled with people fighting one another. My cries for help would blend right in to the darkness.