I told myself she reminded me of Liz Phair, but without the marijuana-steeped tomboy, devil-may-care, laid-back attitude of Liz Phair. This is the type of thing you tell yourself when you’re young, or at least when I was young. The point is, I was twenty-two and dating a thirty-two-year-old divorced hypochondriac who had a condo out by the freeway, made her living as an aerobics instructor, and who was convinced she and her love of self-help books could make a well-organized, ambitious, proactive, so-called normal man of me. The problem was that I felt perfectly happy being a college dropout who still had a shift at the college radio station and no big ideas. I figured this thing she called a “life’s mission statement” would come to me when it came to me. If it came to me. After all, there didn’t seem to be much sense in my chasing it, considering I was perfectly happy having my days free to hang out with my best friend Dave, drinking canned beer and having bottle-rocket wars in the yard of the small mother-in-law cottage he and I were renting. And in retrospect I was right to be waiting instead of chasing a so-called Life Plan or making something she called my “List of Intentions.” I wound up working in New York advertising agencies and then writing books, two careers you actually shouldn’t rush into; as a matter of fact, two things you will be better at the longer you wait to get started doing them. And anyway, sometimes Dave and I would blow up crab apples from the tree out front with firecrackers—huck them like grenades and say what we thought the soldiers or the Sandinistas in Clash songs said when they threw grenades. Or sometimes we would try to surprise whichever one of us came home late by jumping from the roof onto the latecomer as he fumbled with keys at the front door in the dark. I loved Dave. I don’t know, maybe that was the problem: I liked my girlfriend and I loved my best friend. Or maybe it was the age thing. At least the sex was good.
While my girlfriend was completely cool to be around when she had been drinking, the rest of the time was a challenge, to put it mildly. But I was young enough to think that there was nothing wrong with having a two-year relationship with someone ten years older than me and spending eighteen months of it in something called couple’s counseling. And as we get a little older and wiser, we ask ourselves why. But it’s like asking somebody why they bought Storm Front by Billy Joel or why they shaved their head on acid or wound up living with a cult in the mountains outside Portland; sometimes shit just kind of happens. I agreed to go to couple’s counseling with my decade-older divorced girlfriend the way you might reluctantly say, “Sure . . . I can be there on Thursday,” if a good friend was asking you to help them paint their living room. In the sessions she told her therapist—a forty-something man who smelled like a bottle of vitamins with a hint of hair tonic or aftershave—all about me and why I was frustrating. There were myriad reasons.
“How do I know he’s not sleeping with other women? They all think he’s funny; they all want to hug him when they see him. How can I be sure there isn’t more to it? He needs to convince me I can trust him.”
“Ah-ah-ah,” he started to politely correct her.
Thank God.
“You feel like he needs to convince you that you can trust him.”
“Yeah, I mean, I think that’s just a feeling, honey. I mean, why would I be cheating on you? Sure, you feel like I need to convince you that . . .”
“Well, you do need to convince her.”
“What?”
He continued, “Well, she’s got a point. How do I know you’re not cheating on me? How do I know these girls I’ve seen saying hello to you so exuberantly aren’t lovers of yours?”
“How . . . do . . . you? Know?”
“I’m speaking as her. From her point of view.”
“Uh, because I love . . . you? But I mean, obviously, her.”
He took her side in everything. Jesus, seriously, it was creepy. It was like being framed in a bad television movie of the week, every single week. And it fueled her crazy possessive streak, which, I think, in retrospect, my ego must’ve loved. I mean, as I aged and—how do I put this gently—took another decade and change to end my prolonged adolescent slacker lifestyle, the women I found myself dating were not exactly concerned about the possibility of my cheating on them. I think they figured it was pretty safe to assume that other thirty-two-year-old women weren’t exactly beating down the door for a chance to sleep with the beer-bloated unshaven guy who still thought bottle-rocket wars were awesome even though he was living alone now that his buddy Dave had long since moved out, started a successful career, and gotten married to a beautiful woman doing her premed schooling. At that point women were more like, “Look, Wayne, we can kind of be friends, and even more than friends sometimes . . . but you’ve got to face the fact that even Garth has moved on and grown up.” So, I guess, at the time, having someone be possessive of me felt almost like having made something of myself, and something in me knew to enjoy it while it lasted because it was as close as I was going to get to making something of myself for a while—the next thirteen years, as it would turn out. My older possessive, divorced, hypochondriac girlfriend had a point though; girls hugged me sometimes—pretty often, really. But, I mean, we’re talking about friends of mine, and we’re talking about good old-fashioned everyday people like myself—in other words, it’s not like I had hot young fashion model genetic freaks hanging on me like I was a pop star or drug dealer. We’re talking about my heavyset small-town lesbian friend named Kim from the community theater. Or my friend Alison from the comic book store who sounded ironically like Butt-Head from television’s Beavis and Butt-Head. I’m not saying these people weren’t beautiful, because they were and they are. I’m just saying you couldn’t have picked worse culprits in trying to build a case for girls making sexual advances toward me in public; for that matter, you couldn’t have picked a less likely guy to start with, but like I said, I wasn’t about to end this before it ran its course—what was the point? It would be like the bassist of Counting Crows deciding to quit the band because people were treating him strangely now that they had a big hit single. So what? It’ll be over soon enough, and it’s probably never going to be like this again, so enjoy it while it lasts. I knew where I stood in the food chain of modern love: it ain’t like I was the worst thing you’ve ever seen, but at the same time I was smart enough to know that this was probably my one big hit single; there’d likely be plenty of time in this life to not feel someone be possessive and jealous.
But then there was the painful evening when Kim was in Westside Espresso when my girlfriend and I walked in. Of course, she ran up to me and hugged me—partially because she’s friendly, partially because she had just received some good news about a show of hers that she was hoping would get accepted at a theater downtown. And also partially because she was a big-boned twenty-something lesbian. I mean, find me a full-figured community theater lesbian in her twenties who doesn’t hug her friends when she sees them in a café. But my girl wasn’t having it. Homey didn’t play that game.
I remember it mostly in a slow-motion blur. We walk into Westside Espresso. I hear Kim say, “Daaaaaaaaan!” She comes running toward me. I feel that weird mix of dead calm before disaster and total internal panic; I feel like I’m wearing a wire, like a man who knows there are rifle scopes trained on the people around him and that any one of them making a wrong move will be taken out in a silencer-hushed precision firestorm. Kim keeps advancing. I hear something in my earpiece from one of the SWAT team protecting me: “What? Oh my God, you have to be kidding me. Who is she? Damn it, this is exactly what I was talking about in therapy.” Kim, of course, can’t hear this. Kim, of course, knows nothing about the world I’m living in. Kim, of course, hugs me and asks how I am. Suddenly, I am shoved a bit to the side and there is someone wedged between us.
my girlfriend: What you’re doing is really inappropriate.
kim: What?
me, thinking: Jesus, which part of it is she talking about? Community theater? Being a lesbian?
my girlfriend: Adults have certain boundaries. Certain behavior is acceptable and certain behavior is not. If you and I are lovers, then hugging is appropriate. (Kim and I both seem confused about this last line. Kim seems a bit unclear as to whether or not she’s just met someone new, and I feel a weird excitement then shame wash over me, and then, finally, the dread of being only twenty-two years old and knowing this will all be rehashed in my couples therapy session.)
kim: Um, okay. Dan is an old friend of mine. I’m saying hello to him. I didn’t hug you. I won’t hug you. I mean, I’m not trying to say . . . I mean, I’ll obviously . . . Do you (pause) want a hug?
me: (I start cracking up)
my girlfriend: You actually think this is funny?
me: No. I don’t. It’s just that none of us . . . Well, yes! It’s funny.
kim: (Pointing at me and laughing.)
The whole damn thing was so awash in the power of innocence and honest-to-God confusion. If every tense moment could be swept up in such an utter lack of agenda, wars would cease to exist. It was beautiful and small, this moment where Kim and I were so scared, then so confused, then laughing like kids in the same family. We were so honestly powerless that it became impossible to consume and defeat us, like we were something as simple as rain and someone was trying with all their might to get us to stop falling from the sky—the easiest thing in the world for dumb little raindrops like us to do.
“Oh my God, I’m having a panic attack.”
“Oh, gosh, here sit down,” says Kim suddenly serious. “Do you want some water?”
“Honey, just focus on your breathing,” I say, all the levity drained from the room.
“Does she get these often?” Kim asks.
A handful of big dumb innocent punch lines that Kim would love race through my mind.
The modern reverse: “Only around completely inappropriate lesbians who have no boundaries.”
The Marx Brothers twist: “How should I know, doctor, I’ve never seen this woman before in my life!”
The Woody Allen lift: “Her analyst gave us his emergency number to call if she isn’t having them.
But of course I used none of them. And there wasn’t any laughing. There were glasses of water. There was controlled breathing. My girlfriend was silent. And I was calm, and maybe a little sad, only because I had been through a handful of these attacks, and somehow they felt like reminders that my girlfriend and I never laughed together. These panic attacks always seemed to happen in moments where levity was reminding us both that none of this was to be taken too seriously, and that none of it was even in our control, and that when it came to matters of the heart, everyone on earth was simply doing their best. These panic attacks even lead to regular emergency room visits, during which doctors would say that there was nothing abnormal about her blood pressure, that there was nothing abnormal about her breathing, and that there was nothing abnormal about her pulse. And, even, that everything seemed fine with her heart. Oddly enough, though, each time, when we were walking out of the emergency room and back into the night, mine felt a little heavier, like it was worried I would never learn that its purpose was not to fix the hearts of others.
Very shortly after this incident, life stepped in, as if we’d needed reminding that it was bigger than the both of us; things faded between the two of us, and she started dating a man her age who was a self-help author and who, like her, had also spent a lot of time as a fitness instructor. Somewhere in there I had to hope she was happier, and I got to thinking that maybe we just weren’t that great together. Toward the end I was a jerk, she was a jerk, we were jerks to each other—nothing too terrible, but we were always punctuating a point by slamming a door. We were always raising our voices and feeling like we weren’t heard. Maybe because we had to make it clear to ourselves why this couldn’t work. And then, one random Tuesday or something, you both get tired of the smoke, and somebody finally yells fire, and its over. But it’s funny how quickly you get to feeling better when you’re twenty-two. Sure, it was still a breakup, but it was back when a breakup was marked by a lack of adult responsibility, by sleeping in and dealing with it by listening to songs on college radio that comfort the listener with big fat warm guitars and words about hearts, and by still feeling like a misfit. I’m not trying to say it was easy, I’m sure I was heartbroken, but from eighteen years down the road and looking back, it seems like it was that young version of heartbreak that comes with the excitement of wondering what might be next—you stay awake nights smoking cigarettes that can’t kill you yet, wondering who will be the next person to actually let you see them naked. You’re made confident by nothing more than knowing that with so many years still in front of you, it is simply bound to happen again.
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Artwork by Chris Hathway
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From Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts(Plume), edited by Michael Taeckens.
