Fourth Comings (25 page)

sixty-two

D
exy looooooooooves the Cupcake.

“It’s adorable!” she gushed as she plugged her pink iPod into my speakers. “It must be, like, a nonstop slumber party!”

“Not lately,” I said hesitantly. “Hope and I are sort of, I don’t know, but I think we might be in a bit of a fight. Or something.”

“Color me shocked!
Shocked.”
Dexy gasped dramatically. “What happened? Is that why she’s disappeared? Where do you think she is?”

“Probably at the studio preparing for her show tomorrow night.”

“What might you be, I don’t know, sort of in a bit of a fight over?” she asked, mimicking my indecisive language.

And then I told her, in as few words as possible, and with little embroidery or embellishment, all about the shared confidences between you and Hope. And to be honest, as I was telling her, the story already seemed like the organic yogurt, well past its expiration date. It all seemed so long ago.

Dexy listened with rapt attention. And when I finished, she was quiet for a second as she scanned through the catalog of songs stuck in her brain. Then she opened her mouth and started
rapping,
which you might think would be less devastating to the auditory canal because of the absence of actual notes, but this performance was somehow even worse than her singing. Then again, not even the originators could pull off those lyrics:

“Cats brawling with them claws out/Bitch YUB Trippin’?/I’m balling with my balls out/Bitch YUB Trippin’?”

Even with the inclusion of the title, I still (barely) recognized this as “Bitch (YUB Trippin’?),” dismal bad-boy-band Hum-V’s biggest hit, the video in which model/actress/video babyho’ Bridge Milhouse (aka Bridget Milhokovich) played one of the aforementioned “bitches,” a role that required her to do little more than make out with the baddest boy bander under a fire-hose downpour in a pervert’s dream of a soaking-wet transparent white T-shirt. That video was in medium-to-slow rotation on TRL for about a month back in 2001, and Bridge (as she prefers to refer to herself when talking about her modeling/acting/ video babyho’ing days, which is next to never because she’s so completely embarrassed by them) even attended a televised teenybopper awards show on the arm of the same Hum-V hottie who, about a year ago, was busted for dealing coke to the types of striving, starving starlets Bridget chose not to be.

I almost shared this all with Dexy because she truly believes, and has told me on several occasions, that she has been tapped by the Gods of Starfucking to be worshipped and adored by the untapped masses.

“Worshipped and adored for what?”

“For being Dexy!”

Well, no duh.

Dexy relishes any real or bullshitted connection to Fame, Fortune, and Fabulosity because it brings her that much closer to her Fate. In fact, if I had told her this story about Bridget and Hum-V, I don’t doubt that she would have appropriated it for her blog, turning
herself
into the lifelong best friend of the former model/actress/video babyho’ who so recklessly and foolishly abandoned the road to stardom for—can you imagine?—college. College! How common.

But I didn’t mention any of this. Instead I said, “That’s not funny.”

“Sorry,” she said dejectedly. Then she cued up her playlist, designed to get me in a party state of mind. She clicked through her selections until she found what she was looking for. I wasn’t sure my speakers could handle the disco that burst forth in a frenzy of horns, frantic Latin percussion, and a foursome of female vocalists panting with lust.

“Push push in the bush,”
Dexy gasped along with the song.
“You know you want me toniiiiiiight!”
Dexy shimmied with pornographic abandon, the twins’ three-by-five daisy garden rug becoming a dance floor for one.

I cut the disco. “Dexy, I have to ask you something.”

“I have to ask
you
something first,” she said. “Is Paulie What’s-his-name going to be there tonight?”

“Parlipiano.” When we were at Columbia, I had told Dexy all about my hopeless high school crush-to-end-all-crushes on Paul Parlipiano, but she had only met him in person at my early-graduation brunch last December. “Uh, I don’t think so. He started grad school this week….”

“Oh, thank God,” she said, raising her palms to the heavens. “We need to find you a fun new fag!” She turned the volume way up and started galloping and swinging an imaginary lasso in time with the beat.

“Dexy!” I covered my ears.

“He can’t dress, doesn’t gossip, and hates musical theater!” She did a sign of the cross in 4/4 time to counteract this last blaspheme. “What homo hates Broadway? He’s the worst gay sidekick ever!”

I switched down the volume yet again and looked deep into her eyes, trying to determine if her pupils were dilated or what. “Can I ask you a question now?”

“Ask me, ask me, ask me,”
she sang, mangling Morissey.
“Ask me, ask me, ask me.”

“Are you on drugs?”

“Of course I am!” She turned the volume way, way up.
“Are you ready? Are you ready for this?/Do you like it? Do you like it like this?”

“Dexy!” I turned it down again. “I’m serious.”

She pinched her lips together, the imitation of a shrewish school-marm, albeit one wearing gold lamé. “Of course I’m on drugs. I’ve been taking the best prescription-only psychotropics since I was twelve.”

“I thought you started taking them when you were fifteen….”

“Whatever,” she said, waving away such a minor detail. “Can we put the music back on now?”

“Are you on anything that has not been specifically prescribed by your psychiatrist, and in the appropriate doses?”

“Why are you asking me this?” she asked. “Let’s have fun!” She turned back to the Mp3 Player and clicked on a new song.

“We were born to be…A-LI-YI-YI-YIIIVE!”
Dexy was doing a variation on Travolta’s shoot-from-the-hips shuffle.
“Born! Born to be alive!”
Her eyes were closed in ecstasy.

“I can’t have fun because you’re scaring me,” I muttered to myself, though she didn’t hear me over the music. I just braced myself against the small windowsill, practically hiding behind the wholesome pink-and-white-checked curtains as I watched and listened to Dexy’s atonal disco ball bacchanal. I was worried that she was working herself up to a monumental breakdown. I’d seen Dexy break down before, the summer before our junior year of college, and it was preceded by an atomic-bomb flash of brief and immeasurable energy.

Dexy finally opened her eyes and saw me cowering behind the gingham curtains. Her expression turned serious in a way I was unaccustomed to seeing. She turned off the music.

“Okay,” she said in a defeated tone. “You win. I’ll tell you the truth.”

This promise of total disclosure caught me utterly by surprise. She took my hand and led me to the bottom bunk. We sat down together, so close that our knees bumped. She opened her mouth, and just when I thought she’d confess that yes, she’d been blowing rails all afternoon, she went a whole other way.

“I’m not boning a sexygenarian.”

“You’re not?”

“No,” she said glumly, resting her elbows on her knees. “Never was.” She placed her chin in the cradle of her hands, like a kid soured by a time-out for bad behavior.

“So you don’t live in his apartment with views of Gramercy Park?”

She looked up at me forlornly through her fake eyelashes. “The Gramercy Park part is true, but the daddy paying my rent is my biological dad, not some sick Freudian substitute. And it’s not a chic pied-à-terre, but a single room in the Parkside Magdalene Home for Young Businesswomen.”

“The wha—?”

“The Parkside Magdalene Home for Young Businesswomen,” she repeated. “It’s a hotel for women run by the Salvation Army.”

It took a second for this to sink in. And when it did, I crashed back onto the bed in hysterics.

“Dexy!” I blurted, in between bursts of laughter. “Only you would be more ashamed of living at a hotel for women than prostituting yourself to a geezer!”

“It’s worse than Bible college! No men allowed past the lobby! I haven’t been laid in three months! That’s my longest dry spell since I was fifteen!”

“Is anything on your blog true?”

“My name
is
Dexy,” she said. She tapped her wig in thought. “And I
do
work in retail, just not at a sex shop. I work…” She took a deep, deep breath. “You must promise not to laugh.”

I had barely recovered from my last fit, but I pressed my lips together and held up two fingers in Scouts Honor.

“I mean it, J,” she said sharply. “You. Can. Not. Laugh. Not so much as a giggle or a twitter or a snort.”

I nodded solemnly, seriously, but a smile already twitched in the corners of my mouth.

“I work at the Gap.”

There was one second of silence—my attempt to be the kind of friend who pledges not to laugh and actually makes good on it—followed by five straight minutes of hysteria because I am not the kind of friend who can not laugh at something so ludicrous as the idea of Dexy—dramatic, costumed, whole-wide-world-is-her-stage Dexy—peddling the khakis and cords and T-shirts that are the staples of my unimaginative wardrobe.

“You promised!” she exclaimed, before giving in to the laughter herself. The bunk bed nearly collapsed from the thunderous gut-busting reverberations. “I know! It’s the least creative job in the world. And Janeane Garofolo hated her job at the Gap in
Reality Bites,
like, a decade ago, so it’s not even creative as a form of humiliation!”

“So you make up all this stuff because—”

She interrupted me. “Because I’m so fucking
boring
!” she cried. “I’m not living this awesome, scandalous life. I’m living a boring, totally chaste life, and I’m required to wear hideously boring khakis and T-shirts while doing it!” We both glanced at the hideously boring khakis and T-shirts overflowing from the hamper. “No offense, Jess.”

“None taken.”

“Can you blame me for wanting drama? Inventing a life?”

At first I was mystified. How could she have possibly pulled this off? But then I realized just how little Dexy and I see of each other. I took all her phone calls, e-mails, and text messages as truth—even the most outlandish bits—because how could anyone actually concoct such a vivid imaginary world? I rarely saw her in person, and when I did, it was usually for a few hours at a time, during which it would be possible for a woman with Dexy’s flair for dramaturgy to convincingly play an alternate version of herself. Hell, I’m not even all that good of an actress, and I was able to pull off my Jenn-with-Two-N’s ruse with Dude.

But it wasn’t just Dexy. She was just the most glaring example of a deeper problem: I was totally disconnected from all of the most important people in my life. And it’s not just about callousness or a lack of empathy that you’ve been warning me about. It’s simpler, and sadder: I just don’t pay enough attention. Even when I’m
with
my friends and family, I don’t listen hard enough for the words that aren’t being said. I’m elsewhere.

I realized that I could make a big deal out of this, or not.

I chose not to.

I just turned up the next song, one about not wanting to talk about love, not even sweet, true love, but especially not about broken romances, or plans and promises made that will never be realized. All she wants to do is go where the action is. All she wants to do is live.

“I love the nightlife,”
Dexy warbled.
“I got to boogie on the disco round, oh yea!”

Since Dexy has to spend every day dressed like me, she’s decided that I need to dress like her, at least for tonight. Thus, the polyester bamboo-print kimono dress and suede to-the-knee boots.

Dexy says she is just about done styling my hair—sectioning off my locks, wrapping them around huge, old-fashioned pink foam rollers, and then doubling the size of the hole in the ozone by shellacking the whole bumpy helmet with highly chlorofluorocarbonated hair spray, transforming it from a sad bun into a preposterously complicated seventies half-up, half-down bouffant-flip show ponytail that took about an hour from start to completion, which is how I’ve had time to write all this down.

But now she’s done. I’m all dressed up to go out and have the type of New York City night that I can only enjoy if you’re not there with me.

sixty-three

I
should have left the Care. Okay? party with Dexy, but she had to make curfew (“Curfew, J! I have a two
A.M.
curfew! I haven’t had a two
A.M.
curfew since I was fifteen!”) and left me behind, and I stayed and did shots with a drag queen named after the colors of the rainbow. When I’m with Dexy, I don’t get drunk because someone has to be incontrol. But what is control, anyway? None of us has any control overanything, it’s all the illusion of control. An annoying celebutard(redundant) sang “Control” by Janet Jackson tonight and sucked hard. She wasn’t good enough to be good and wasn’t bad enough to be good, either. The worst kind of karaoke singer. Dexy is so bad that she’s awesome—which is why I brought her with me even though her behavior scares me. Her stage-humping version of “Like a Virgin” (like being the operative word there) brought down the house, as I knew it would. Then she went back to Bosom Buddieshotel, and I got drunk. Dexy is socrazy that she makes me feel so together even when I am drooling drunk, which I am. Just in case you thought I was trying to hide it from you. I AM DRUNK. I actually drooled on this page, which is why the ink is smeary, though drool isn’t really accurate, it’s more like the spits, the nasty spits before you—

I just threw up.

I’m not going to lie to you. You want all the truth, right? I just threw up because I drank too many shots of tequila after Dexy left because I didn’t have to be the responsible one anymore, plus you weren’t there, either, so I didn’t have to feel guilty about getting drunk in front of you. I want the freedom to drink too much and throw up. I want the freedom to be a hypocrite. I want the freedom to live in a city you hate and get a stupid job you think is beneath me. I want the freedom to make mistakes and not have you make me feel bad about them.