If at Birth You Don't Succeed (28 page)

Even though I brush-burned everything from my chin to my testicles getting into the Jacuzzi, it still felt like a sexy place to talk. I was only able to say about three words to Allie before the jets knocked me off balance and I gulped down roughly a gallon of water. When my lungs recovered, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be competing with another sculpted expert surfer or anything like that. But I had to be coy about it. I didn't want Allie thinking I only thought she was cool because she was a girl I could potentially hook up with. (If I'm being completely honest, there was about a sixty-forty split between my being a horny teenager and my just wanting to make friends.) So I phrased my question in the most delicate, roundabout way I could think of.

“So, uh, my roommate actually came here with his girlfriend, and he really regrets it now 'cause there's so many girls here he'd like to, ya know, explore things with.”

“I know,” she said, “it's crazy.”

Feeling I'd adequately masked my true intentions, I meekly inquired, “Do you have a boyfriend back home?”

She sort of smiled and stayed quiet for a minute. Choosing her words carefully, she began, “We don't know each other very well, but I like you, so I don't have any problem telling you this, but…”

Go on…,
I thought. I felt like I was an Oscar nominee waiting for his name to be called. There were so many things that could have followed that “but.”

But … I'm really attracted to you
.

But … I've never had a boyfriend and I want you to be the first.

But … I can only climax if my partner is dressed as Chewbacca.

So many ways that that one sentence could open A Whole New World™ of possibility.

But what she actually said was, “I don't have any problem telling you this, but I like women.”

It took a second for me to realize that I had just become the Leonardo DiCaprio of the Hot Tub Academy Awards. I wasn't Allie's type of guy because Allie's type of guy didn't exist. I didn't know much about courtship, but what I did know is that you can't bring a Nintendo Wii remote to an Xbox tournament. So Allie and I just stayed friends. And she was almost a hip enough girl to make me regret having a penis.

What I lacked in game I gained in basic life skills. I spent entire days sorting through the intricacies of doing laundry and putting clothes on hangers so they wouldn't wrinkle. I didn't have a fitness regimen at the time, but I worked up a sweat when I spent five hours struggling to put a fitted sheet on my bed. Sure, I could have asked a roommate to help, but I wanted to prove to myself that I could live independently so long as my only responsibilities were to wear clean clothes, make a bed, and shower afterward.

I had gone through my life feeling like the most inept and underprepared human being in the world, but as it turned out, I wasn't even the most inept human being at Disney World. I was encouraged when I saw a twenty-year-old girl with no physical disabilities (and all of her limbs, because I checked for that now) stuffing two months' worth of laundry into one washing machine and dumping half a container of detergent on top of the explosive mess. The washer bucked like a bronco and frothed like a middle school baking soda volcano. Perhaps there were worse things than taking forty-five minutes to fold a shirt. Even if I wasn't maturing sexually, domestically I was making progress.

Vista Way never lived up to its nickname for me, despite several more attempts. I hadn't gotten laid, but at least I hadn't gotten fired. During my short time in Orlando, I was able to fulfill the dream of a twelve-year-old and come into my own as a twenty-year-old with a job, a home, and the ability to ride Rock 'n' Roller Coaster ten times in a row on a single day. I made friends, money, and personal strides that bolstered my confidence about the next chapter I'd be starting at the University of Texas at Austin.

I knew as I was leaving Disney World that I had a long way left to go on the road to adulthood. But unlike in Disney films, you can't just wave a wand or try on a slipper and have your dreams come true. In real life, magic takes time. Sometimes it takes so long, you start to doubt it even exists. Romance, just like a pixie fairy, will die if you don't believe in it.

The decade between the Disney College Program and my next milestone with the Magic Kingdom gave me little reason to hope that Tinker Bell could be resuscitated. And by Tinker Bell, I mean, of course, my love life. Over those ten years, my quest for intimacy led me all the way from the comfort of the Olive Garden to the extreme discomfort of a bathroom floor and a ball shaver. But in the end, my first romantic connection still happened among roller coasters, spinning teacups, and Winnie the Pooh.

*   *   *

Gillian Grassie came into my life the way most meaningful relationships do these days—via Twitter. It was June 15, 2013, and I was gearing up to move to Los Angeles to begin working on
Have a Little Faith.
I sent out a tweet to announce the move and jump-start my social life on the West Coast. Among the replies of “Good Luck!” and “If you ever come back to Austin, we need to hang!” there was one tweet that stood out because it included an invitation to Europe.

Gillian Grassie:
@Zachanner LA's a lucky city—come to Berlin! Love your show, love your humor.

I had a fan base now that was filled with girls who explicitly stated that they would like to date and/or marry me. Having given up on actual dating, these 140 character propositions made me feel wanted without requiring me to take any emotional risk or even close down my game of Words with Friends. As I did anytime a girl tweeted at me, I clicked on her avatar to see if she was cute and saw a picture of a girl with curly blond hair, a pop of red lipstick, and a pair of piercing brown eyes that were somehow sexy without being cold. She looked kind of like a young Drew Barrymore, the same one who'd graced the cover of the first
Playboy
I ever saw. Jackpot! Her profile only got better from there. Not only was she attractive, but she described herself as an “indie harpist-singer-songwriter, polyglot wannabe, reluctant nomad.” I was intrigued both by the harp and by the word “polyglot,” which I didn't recognize, so I followed the link to her Web site.

What I saw there—or more accurately, what I heard—made me giddier than a techie geeking out over Apple's new iSandwich on release day. Her music wasn't the Celtic ballads about fair maidens from long ago that I'd expected from a harpist, but instead soulful songs that told stories and made me want to know the person behind them. When she sang about traveling the globe, she made me want to hit the road again; when she sang about death, I was compelled to examine my own mortality; and when she sang about lovers, she made me wish that I was one of them. And then there was her voice itself—sweet and just a touch smoky in a way that was undeniably seductive. I could have listened to this woman sing prefab furniture instructions for hours.

After streaming three songs, I was inspired to do something that only twelve people have done in the past decade—buy music. I downloaded both of her albums and her EP on iTunes and spent the day listening to my new favorite artist on my bedroom floor. By the time I replied to her tweet, I was in complete fan-girl mode.

Zach Anner:
@gilliangrassie Thnx but I'd only go to Berlin if there was an amazing singer/songwriter who played harp & had 3 albums I just got on iTunes.

Zach Anner:
@gilliangrassie And we BOTH know the chances of that happening are pretty sli … yeah, I'll start lookin' at flights.

We exchanged ten encouraging tweets over the course of twenty-four hours, which is a record for me. I desperately wanted to get to know this girl better without having to type in short, very public bursts. I needed a way to transition off of social media and just become social. If I was going to build a friendship with her, it had to happen organically. So I stalked the shit out of Gillian online, methodically mining for a casual way to continue our correspondence. Fate rewarded my creepiness when, buried in some of her recorded onstage banter, she revealed that she was a Quaker and was possibly single. I was in the middle of preproduction for
Have a Little Faith
and as luck would have it, Quakerism was one of the religions we planned to profile. So I posted this carefully crafted status update on my Facebook fan page:
I'm gonna be a Quaker! I'll explain later …

Then I waited, and waited, and finally she took the bait.

Gillian Grassie:
Wait, really? I'm Quaker, you know, if you need fact-checking for your sketch or what have you.

With that, we had an excuse to graduate from Twitter and Facebook to Skype. In our first face-to-face video chat, I asked her a few token questions about Quakerism that were designed to make sure she wasn't an Amish person who was saving herself for a carpenter named Eli, because I really didn't know anything about Quakers. The fact that our entire budding friendship was a result of technology should have tipped me off that she wasn't Amish, but I had to double-check. Thankfully, Quakers, as I've come to know them, are more similar to hippies than the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Whenever I Skyped with Gillian over the next few months, the conversations were so natural that it felt like we'd known each other for years. We both loved to travel and meet new people, and shared a sense of wonder and excitement about the world. Other than those things though, we were completely different. She had European sensibilities and the sheer amount of soda I drank made it imperative that I live in a country with free refills. I speak in mostly '90s movie quotes whereas Gillian grew up without a television on a farm in Pennsylvania and misses nearly every pop culture reference I make. Her childhood was filled with books and animals, and my youth was spent playing video games, watching cartoons, and being terrified of all living things. She played in tree houses and I played in couch forts. We came from two different worlds but did our best to meet in the middle. I introduced her to films like
Up
and
It's a Wonderful Life
while she in turn suggested I read Jorge Luis Borges and David Foster Wallace. When I told her that my lazy eye prohibited me from enjoying books, within a few days I had an MP3 of Gillian reading aloud from
The Library of Babel
and
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
. All the differences between us made our exchanges more exciting, and we both agreed that we'd love to meet each other in person someday.

Someday came in October, when Gillian returned to the United States for a tour. Conveniently, a date was set for a house concert in the Hollywood Hills, like,
right
below the Hollywood sign. Watching her at that show had me smitten all over again. Unfortunately, she had seventy-five other adoring fans to attend to, so we didn't get to talk much, but she reassured me, “I really wanna hang out with you, but I'm kind of in work mode right now. Are you free at all tomorrow?” We made plans for the next night.

We went out to dinner and I was so comfortable with her that I actually ate two slices of pizza. I still had that rule to never eat when I'm out with anyone other than family and very close friends, but Gillian was special. She felt like a different kind of friend than I'd ever had before. I couldn't exactly put my finger on it. What was this?

I later found out that when I took her to dinner and we ended the evening in a Jacuzzi making plans to someday go to Disneyland together, Gillian had defined this as a very nice first date. However, my ridiculous inner narrative at the time was something more along the lines of
It looks like a date, it feels like a date … best not to make a move and find out it isn't a date. I'll just send her along with my USB car charger so her phone doesn't die on the way to San Francisco. That's what gentlemen do!

Once again, it didn't register that a girl I wanted to be romantically involved with had been flirting with me all night and was waiting for a kiss. All I needed was a subtle hint that she felt the same way I did. But when Gillian stayed in Los Angeles an extra night just so we could spend more time together and suggested we watch a movie on the couch, I thought that was still a little ambiguous. So I took her out for ice cream instead. I didn't put two and two together until Gillian was back in Berlin. I was asking her for dating advice over Skype and she said, “Well, that's kind of tricky because I could probably give you some really good friendly advice—but
I'd
actually really like to date you.”

That was all I needed. An explicit declaration that the girl I had a crush on would like to go out with me. I would have preferred it signed and notarized, but I guessed I'd have to take her word for it. Having completely blown my first opportunity, Gillian graciously arranged another trip to LA in February so that we could try again. I spent most of my days leading up to this redo texting or video chatting with her, frantically trying to lower her expectations of my dateability. We talked through every potential disaster scenario and finally, after countless hours of correspondence, I worked up the courage to suggest that Gillian stay with me. I was a little worried about cohabitating with a girl because I spent 90 percent of the time in my apartment in my underwear or less. We didn't really know if we'd have any chemistry, but for once in my life, I thought that it was worth the risk to find out. We both took a leap of faith.

To cut down on the potential awkwardness, we took precautionary measures to ensure that if things fizzled romantically, we'd still have a graceful exit strategy with an opportunity to salvage the friendship: we made sure that we had some work to do in town independent of each other and planned some activities together where it would be almost impossible not to have fun. At the top of both of our lists was going to Disneyland. I'd never been there before, but Gillian had never been to
any
Disney park, and she was twenty-eight. To me, this was almost as unbelievable as my being a twenty-nine-year-old virgin was to her. How could someone who'd traveled around the world with a harp on her back still have never heard of Space Mountain? I reasoned that, much like sex, Disney theme parks are a life experience that everyone should have before thirty.