Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (6 page)

“Get the fuck off of me!” I yelled as loud as I could and wiggled out of his grip. “Are you fucking crazy? Never touch me like that again.
Ever!”

“I won’t as long as you never talk to Raj again,” he threatened.

“Don’t be insane. You can’t tell someone to do that. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He slumped into a chair like a six-year-old boy forced to share his favorite toy. His outburst should have raised some major red flags, but
hey—he’d never done anything like that before, and I figured I could handle him. I took my “survivor” image a little too seriously.

THE SCHOOL YEAR
was wrapping up, and Tommy and I were invited to a country club for the Honors Society banquet, a grade-based night of awards and overcooked chicken breasts. After receiving our engraved plaques, Tommy and I started to needle each other. He thought I was ignoring him by talking to the other dorks, and I was annoyed that he kept nagging me about leaving early to catch some crappy hardcore band downtown. The result was a huge fight, where I ran out of the dining room in tears. Tommy followed and our argument continued in the car until I noticed he was driving the wrong direction, toward the outskirts of town.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

All I got was a maniacal smile.

I tensed up. I didn’t like this weird control game and demanded that he pull over immediately. Which he did, very calmly. I hadn’t really planned on what to do next, but it seemed like the only thing to do was to get out, which I did. He leaned over, presumably to talk me into getting back in the car, but he pulled the passenger’s door shut instead, did a U-turn, and accelerated back into town. I stood on the side of the highway in awe, clutching my golden plaque. Not exactly the poster child for the Honors Society.

I walked along the highway for about half an hour, wondering how long it would take me to get home, when Tommy returned. I got
back in the car, defeated, and tried to pretend like the whole thing had never happened. But I couldn’t. The next morning, I woke up with a clear head and a solid conclusion that traveling with Tommy to the other side of the planet was a terrible idea. I kept hearing this TV announcer’s voice in my head say, “If you liked being abandoned on a highway outside of Calgary, you’ll love being left at Ayers Rock!”

Tommy and I had plans to hang out at his house because his parents were out of town. His “house” was a mobile home on a farm ten miles outside of city limits, and a few miles past the last remaining drive-in movie theater. He picked me up and we grabbed some Taco Bell for dinner.

We were sitting at the dining room table, finishing our tacos, when he brought out some of our travel brochures to review. My stomach sunk. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to avoid this moment but knew it was inevitable. I took a deep breath. “Tommy, I . . . this isn’t working. I can’t do it anymore.” I paused, then closed with the headline. “I want to break up.”

As I sat there holding my breath, knowing he would
not
react well to this, I could see the rage building inside of him. Within seconds, he exploded into angry tears. He started circling the room and raving like a madman.

“No! No! No! We’re going to
stay
together, whether you like it or not!”

That didn’t sound . . . reasonable.

“What’s so wrong with me?!” he shouted. “Tell me exactly what is so wrong?” And then he tossed me a sheet of paper. “Write them down! All of them. Write them down!”

He looked different to me. All of a sudden I had no idea what he was capable of. My brain started to go to fearful places.
Don’t most murders happen on farms?
It just didn’t feel real; it was like I was in a movie—the prequel to
Trailer Park of Terror
. Tommy left the room to blow his nose, and my instincts told me to flee, pronto. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a car or a plan, so I simply ran. I tore out of the trailer, leaving the screen door flapping behind me, and darted down the half-mile dirt road that led to the highway.

Panting on the dark highway again, I remembered that there was a lonely pay phone near the drive-in movie theater about fifteen minutes away, so I jogged toward it in my jelly shoes. Fishing around in the bottom of my purse, I found a bunch of pennies and one quarter. I thanked the spare-change gods and cursed Midnight Oil,
Dogs in Space
, and Sweden. The decision of who to call was simple: my friend Seth. Seth was the kind of guy who was always up for anything.

“Hey, Seth, it’s Ophira!” I said, as if he had won a prize.

“Oh, hi!” He sounded genuinely happy to hear my voice.

“Something weird happened between Tommy and me and . . . could you come pick me up?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Sure. Are you at home or something?”

“I’m in the parking lot of the Mac’s Convenience Store off of Highway 45 right before the drive-in movie theater.” I shoved all the information together to make it sound like a composed request rather than a cry for help.

“Um
. Okay. Where is that again?”

I gave him expert directions, since I’d driven that route four
hundred thousand times and knew exactly how long it would take. I hung up the phone, wiped the highway dirt from my face, and headed toward Mac’s. It was about a twenty-minute walk. If I made it with a few minutes to spare, I could buy a Slurpee.

It was quiet on the street, almost deserted except for one other person up ahead walking a dog. They were a blur in the dark, so I slowed down to avoid encountering them. As I came a little closer, the dog walker turned around and transformed into a familiar figure: Tommy.

“O-phir-rahhhhh!” He howled my name like a Shakespearean villain and ran toward me. I’d never felt such a menacing moment, even later in life, when I was ping-ponging around strange men’s apartments in New York City. Call me lucky. I spun around and ran in the other direction, into the trailer park. Tommy, chasing me, yelled, “I just want to know what is so wrong!” I wanted to shout back, “Well for one, you’re chasing me!” but figured I should save my breath.

Adrenaline coursed through my body and gave me superhuman powers. I ran faster than I had at any track meet, terrified to be caught. I flashed forward to sprinting away from him in the outback as a kangaroo hopped by.

There is no way I’m going on a trip across the world with a crazy person!
I thought, as I vaulted over a broken fence. I wasn’t stupid.

I could hear Tommy’s footsteps pounding behind me, his body triggering motion lights outside of the trailers. I jetéd over a small ravine and wondered,
Why couldn’t I have dated Sven?
He might have chloroformed me, but at least he wouldn’t have hunted me.

As I careened around the corner near the dumpsters behind Mac’s, I saw a familiar-looking car pull into the parking lot, with a hippie redhead behind the wheel. It was Seth. He had perfect timing—
movie
timing. He spotted me and got out of the car.

“Hey, Ophira!” He waved at me with a relaxed smile.

“Get in the car! Start the car!” I screamed, barreling toward him. Seth’s face turned from pale to panic as he slid back in and started the car. I rammed into the passenger’s door but managed to swing it open, and threw myself into the green-gold mock-leather seats of Seth’s hand-me-down Oldsmobile. He needed no additional command to “gun it” when he saw Tommy racing toward us.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

“Uh
, Tommy and I broke up,” I muttered.

Wasn’t that obvious?

As Tommy became a tiny figure in the rearview mirror, sweat and relief washed over me. I pleaded with Seth to let me stay at his place. I was too afraid to go home. At least I could take some solace in the fact that if Tommy dared wake up my mother, she’d kill him.

“Of course, no problem,” he said, sounding a little stoned.

A half hour later, I was safe in the warmth of Seth’s room and his arms. As it turned out, he had a thing for me. I must have had a hunch when I called him at midnight to rescue me. He was my hero. I slipped into his bed wearing a pair of his boxers and a T-shirt, figuring the best way to thank Seth, in lieu of gas money, was to have sex with him. I had a knack for moving on . . . rather quickly. Why not delay dealing with the aftermath of the evening by engaging in a little
pleasant distraction? Maybe this was no coincidence; maybe the forces of nature brought me to Seth on purpose. But when I went to kiss him, he pushed me away, claiming my timing was “all wrong.”

“Why?” I asked. “We’re here now,” I said, alluding to this magical coincidence I conjured up in my head, one we’d be fools not to take advantage of.

Seth sat up in his futon. “Ophira, I’m going to Europe for a year. Tomorrow.”

Dumbfounded, I suddenly noticed a huge packed knapsack, with a hand-sewn Canadian flag on the front, propped against the wall. I nodded and hugged Seth. And we slept.

I woke up to sun streaming through the A-frame windows and Seth scurrying around his room in final preparations for his big trip. He drove me home, and when I wished him well, it felt like we were parting colleagues who had worked together on a project that never got funding. My mother saw me from the window and ran out the front door waving and yelling at me.

“What the hell happened to you?” she demanded. “That good-for-nothing boyfriend of yours knocked on the door at three in the morning looking for you, and then sat out in front of the house half of the night waiting for you!”

I was disappointed she didn’t kill him.

“We broke up, Mom.”

It was all I needed to say. She shook her head, fed up by my ongoing teenage drama, but I detected a small smile on her face. She was pleased to finally be rid of that good-for-nothing Tommy.

I plopped onto the couch and buried my head in a pillow. What was I going to do? I was certain that my life was going to be better now that he was out of the picture, but the trip was ruined. He was probably canceling it as I lay there. Wait. Why couldn’t I still go? People travel by themselves all the time. I had saved up all my own money, and at seventeen I was a smart, independent woman who could run really, really fast. I was ready to shed my small-town skin, upgrade from trailer trash in the boyfriend department, and discover who I was in relation to the rest of the world. And I’d do it alone.

T
hat summer, I took a job at a do-it-yourself jewelry shop called Beadworks to raise money for my big walkabout through Australia. I maneuvered around that store in ill-fitting vintage dresses and hand-woven tribal fabrics, spouting my philosophy du jour—primarily, that I didn’t believe in God or love because they were constructs built to keep women down. That was until Michael, the guitar guy, walked into the bead store and ruined everything.

I knew
of
Michael before I actually met him. He offered jazz guitar lessons at my high school, and every time he showed up in the band room, my friends Cheryl and Diane, who played saxophone, would swoon. They’d gush about his boyish good looks and recount his witty asides and observations, but my curiosity was not in the least bit piqued. Going gaga over any guitar player—especially an “older” one (he was the ripe old age of twenty at the time)—seemed so cliché.
For my graduation photo, I had braided tiny skull beads into my hair. Clearly I was marching to the beat of my own cow bell. If I were going to crush out on an older guy, it would be a forensic archaeologist, or at the very least an oboe player. So when Michael came into the jewelry shop a year later, I played it cool in my purple Guatemalan pants.

He complimented the beads in my hair. I told him they were baby-hamster skulls. He laughed and said I was funny. In that moment, I noticed his big sapphire-blue eyes framed by four-inch lashes. I felt like a fawn caught in the headlights of his speeding car. If I didn’t look away, I’d be creamed.

Too late.

As we talked, I started to fall under his spell. Michael was different. He wore a blazer. He didn’t seem full of angst, tormented by the problems in Tibet, or on an eternal search for the best ’shrooms. He wasn’t rebelling against anything—just trying to make a living playing jazz. By comparison, all my past boyfriends seemed like hacky-sack-obsessed adolescents who were excited to find a bong that matched their bed sheets. The more I talked to Michael, the more his sweet demeanor seemed to wash away my layers of black eyeliner and tough, too-cool-for-school exterior to reveal a more innocent Ophira who still wanted to be a ballerina. I couldn’t believe it. Was I really falling for his smooth jazz shit?

Despite all the edginess I thought I possessed, I caught myself giggling at his cheesy jokes while I attempted to make him a bracelet out of leather and some masculine-looking beads, which I’ve since learned is an oxymoron. He let me put my creation on his
wrist, and I joked that we were now married in Burkina Faso or something. He laughed again.

“So how much does a Burkina Faso marriage bracelet cost?” he asked.

“Oh no, it’s on me,” I said.

“Are you cereal?”

“Totally!”

“Really? What kind?”

And then he elbowed me, cracking up that I fell so willingly into that classic little word gag. I laughed along with him, although it was the first time I’d ever heard it.

“Okay, at least let me buy you a drink. Oh! Do you want to come see me play tomorrow night? I’m in this superfunkyfragilistic show band, Penguins on Broadway. We’ve got a gig at Rosie’s tomorrow night. What says you?” There was something about the way he talked and joked that reminded me a little of Bill Murray.

“I’d love to,” I said hesitantly, “but,
uh
, I’m underage.” I was so embarrassed by my youth.

He winked and twirled his bracelet. “Don’t worry. I gotcha.”

The jazz club was the most adult place I’d been to, with the exception of the Philharmonic and Chippendales. The clientele looked grown-up, the kind of people who recently took down their British flag in favor of curtains for their windows. It was a welcome switch from all-ages punk gigs and the plaid-clad pseudo-skinheads I’d been subjected to for the past year. I sat at my cloth-covered table and clumsily ordered a glass of red wine of some sort from the
intimidating wine list. There wasn’t one other person even close to my own age in the club. I loved it.