Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (15 page)

Lesson#39

Being Awkward Can Be a Prophylactic Against Dry Humping

by Matt Goodman

That middle school is rough is a truism, but consider the pressures of the environment in this particular experiment: being a non-Jew in a school in full bloom bar mitzvah season, gold-foil-encrusted invitations and candle lightings at the Waldorf, me with my L.L.Bean tie and a bowl haircut, wishing for my nascent Jewish faith to awaken inside me; reading through
Guitar World
, learning the vernacular of licks and pick scrapes (“sizzling leads,” “shrieking wail,” “Malmsteen”), and then picking up my three-quarter-size acoustic guitar with the plinky nylon strings I find so embarrassing, piddling out a bare approximation of the intro to that Sublime song where he goes and shoots that
esse
; joining the soccer team and being the slowest, panting-est one there with the least spring in his kick, the one who is told “I’m going to fucking breeze by you, fatty” by members of the opposing team and then is fucking breezed by, wishing I could head the ball in from my penalty box, sending the orb across the entire pitch.

The list of things so familiar to me but not actually tangible in my life stretches on, from that ball that should have been kicked in the net, to the solo I should have played, to the whopping check from Aunt Esther in Bayside that should have been deposited in my bank account on my thirteenth birthday. Topping the list, however, is love, or dry humping, or both; the magical friction of preadolescent groins grinding against each other through tighty-whiteys and dress pants and skirts hiked up awkwardly but erotically, an elated carpet burn feeling after. Not that I’d know, me with my pants so high up (the socks thickly bunched around my ankles) and my otherworldly knowledge of R. A. Salvadore dark elf fantasy and the sand wyrms of
Dune
.

But I
could
know, with the right sort of girl! The kind who wears her acne like a badge, who listens to Moxy Fruvous and wears Doors T-shirts with the logo in Hebrew, who naturally gives off a rank smell I’d recognize years later as patchouli. She is apeshit crazy. She demands to know if breasts would be as attractive to me if they were located on girls’ stomachs instead of their chests. She watches
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
while talking about purchasing vibrators. She honks and snorts when she laughs, which she does at inopportune moments—moments of death or respect, though never moments of piety. She is deeply connected to her Jewish faith. She might just have a crush on me. I’m not entirely sure what it means when someone pins me to a couch and force-feeds me Twizzlers faster than I can chew them, red bits of licorice tumbling out of my furiously chomping jaws. She might like me, but that’s not enough. I must win her love to make up for all the bar mitzvah after-party dry humping I’ve missed; for the goals, guitar leads, all of it. For vindication.

I, of course, can’t do this by flowers or serenading, by movie tickets or even alcoholic social lubricant, because I know I’d fail at any of these endeavors. I’d go to a flower shop, spend ten minutes deliberating what to buy, and then give up and go home and cry into my pillow. I know the “opposites attract” adage, but being normal is impossible. So I pray that some wise man on a mountain plateau somewhere has another aphorism, “identicals attract.” This will yield a love, preferably carpet burn-y. I will win her not by following the well-trod traditions of civil courtship. I can’t quite do things normally, but I certainly can be weird. Her crazy and my derangement will spark and titrate and she’ll be mine in all of her oddball glory.

At least this is what I hope as I assemble by the buses at the end of school. I’m half-invited to my crush’s house and accept wholeheartedly (half-inviting myself, completing the invitation). To complicate things, two others are accompanying us to my crush’s house. Or, truthfully, I am accompanying them, since they were invited wholly, no halves. One of them asks me, “So why are you always looking down?” I respond slowly, almost quizzically, “So I don’t have to see you?”

I get into her babysitter’s car. The drive to Westchester is all undulating hills and bushy trees. When I get there, I get out of the car, but spend twenty minutes in her driveway on scooters and skateboards. Eventually my crush gets bored, and decides to head into the basement, full of colonoscopy bags from her mother’s practice. I sit on one of two brown velvet love seats. One of the other two tries to sit down with me. I shoo him away. They can sit on the other love seat.

My crush sits on me. She does not sit beside me in the open seat, not even on the arm of the love seat, but on top of me. She motions for Twizzlers, which I am then force-fed. This is the woman for me, I think. This experiment will succeed. Love will precipitate. But we are interrupted by the babysitter, who tells everyone to get into the car again. She forgot to pick up my crush’s little sister.

I am now idling in the SUV, across from the elementary school. I watch children wait for their parents. My heartstrings twang as my crush moves from the backseat, past the middle row, and into the front seat, where she can operate the stereo. Her breasts may have brushed my shoulder. This is love, I think. Maybe I should just take that elated tidbit and be content with it, but I am emboldened, ready to be apeshit crazy. Any moment now I’ll jump into action, do something. Anything. Only problem is, I don’t know what.

I fidget nervously as the other two, classic rock buffs, debate with my crush the merits of Ozzy Osbourne. I can feel every written word I’ve ever read about rock, about even just guitars, fade from my mind as I grasp for one liners about Led Zeppelin. As I haw about I watch one of the two make a move on my crush, putting an arm around her shoulder. I feel desperate. Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” rises from the speakers. Suddenly I’m stricken by the fear that my time to be apeshit crazy may be passing. I look around for opportunities and see a dog, what looks like a terrier-size German shepherd, squatting smack dab in the middle of the road—like, haunches at forty-five-degree angles to the yellow stripe, tail hovering parallel above it. The owner stands by, oblivious to whatever traffic might come along, fine with his dog brazenly defecating in the middle of the street. I fail to note a pooper-scooper in his hand. My crush and the flirtatious other are discussing whether Tony Iommi or Randy Rhoads was the better Ozzy sideman. I see vindication on the horizon. I think of one of my least favorite sayings, one goading me to action, any sort of action, before I lose my chance. Now or never.

I jump out of the SUV and begin running towards the dog. Everyone in the car watches, which encourages me. I will try and win over my crush by yelling at a dog in the middle of the street to stop defecating. I shriek “Stop crapping!” twice. I then bellow at the dog wordlessly, letting it know my sheer outrage that a dog would crap in the middle of the road. I am hoping this appeals to my crush’s own inscrutable sensibilities. It was the best I could come up with.

My request succeeds as the dog, astonished, stops defecating and looks at me. Then the dog decides, as my crush is deciding, that I am a crazy kid, not in the fun way, but in the way that crosses the line, the awkward line that is painful to watch. The graceful avert their eyes and sigh. The chill of humiliation causes me to turn around, away from the dog and the man who is now demanding to know what I am up to. I heave a flimsy curse in his general direction and then walk briskly back to the SUV. I want to run, but need to walk in an attempt to salvage some, any, dignity.

It didn’t work.

Before I despair, though, now that it’s over, how bad was it really? How deep in my skin did it embed? It shouldn’t have burrowed much, being a relatively minor event in that (a) while my love may have been spurned, she was perhaps too crazy to begin with or not crazy at all, and (b) it was embarrassing, but in front of a relative few. Three people aren’t a big deal. Of course, my mind is infested with fears of “what if they tell someone,” but for once I relish my anonymity within my school, my neighborhood. This invisibility gives me a grace period, to metamorph or incubate or simply jump from one point to another, to the socially viable person who can’t remember how it happened and doesn’t quite believe their own transformation. Besides, even if I insist that being horribly awkward and always rejected is my fate, I know that whole subcultures have sprouted for such people; depression is fetishized, commodified, gentrified even, and though being attached to a bunch of macabre-worshipers isn’t a great idea, it might be nice to have some community. It might help.

We pick up the sister and drive back the house. Trying to redeem myself, I wait for someone to talk to me in the car, or in the driveway, or in the kitchen. No one does. I call my parents, who do, and on top of that will also come pick me up. Thank God for parents. I leave the house without anyone noticing, departing their world leaving as little mark as I did coming in, besides, of course, for a slight depression on the love seat in the basement.

Lesson#41

Dating a Stripper Is a Recipe for Perspective

by Patton Oswalt

Sometimes love goes wrong because your partner changes. Sometimes it fails because you change. But, more often than not, love fails because you stop appreciating what you’ve got. You grow complacent and bored. Quirks become annoyances. Thrills become chores. Novelty becomes drudgery. Who wants “safe” forever? Someone who will cherish you, understand you, grow with you, understand the areas where you don’t mesh and react to that gulf with maturity and understanding—these are
exactly
the kind of people you become disenchanted with, and then leave, and
then
feel like a to-the-bedrock bastard for abandoning.

Sure, your journey of togetherness starts off all sprinkles and buttons. But even the sweetest apple plucked from the tree of love can become a rotted, flyblown failure full of disease, maggots, and yelling.

Yes, when love goes bad, it can fill an apple with yelling.

So how would you feel if I told you I can
guarantee
you a stable, healthy relationship? The kind of deep union wherein, upon waking each morning, you murmur a humble thanksgiving for the gift of eternal companionship, support, and love that’s appeared in your life. And you never get bored. And you always appreciate it. Always. Always. Always.

The answer is quite simple, really. Date a stripper.

Strippers are our country’s most precious resource for keeping people together, and humble, and happy. Forget about counseling. Forget about that weekend retreat to Sedona. And forget about self-help books featuring any of the following words: Secret, Code, Steps, Life, Love, Power, Triumph, or Borderline Personality Disorder.

Doubt me? Take these paired examples as all the proof you need:

Arguments

My wife at her worst:

Sometimes yells. Sometimes conflates one mistake I’ve made into a global condemnation of my character. When I point this out, she relents, laughs at herself, and apologizes.

My stripper ex-girlfriend at her best:

CHIVAS [
her stripper name, not her real name
]: You didn’t introduce me to your friend.

ME: Whuh? [
It’s 4:17 a.m., and she’s woken me up.
]

CHIVAS: Two days ago. When we were on Larchmont and those people you knew came up. There were three of them and you only introduced me to two.

ME: Mike and Millie? Those were the only two I knew. I didn’t know the third person, so I didn’t know his name—it was a friend of theirs.

CHIVAS: WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING WITH THAT MOTHERFUCKING MIX TAPE, YOU FAGGOT?

ME: What?!

CHIVAS: (
Louder, over the sound of her two pit bulls, both of which are now furiously barking
) I HATE ROXY MUSIC!

ME: What . . . what . . . wait . . .

CHIVAS: You think I like listening to that shit? Make a different fuck mix.

ME: Uh . . .

CHIVAS: Is that why you didn’t introduce me to your gay friend on the street?

ME: What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you waking me up now?

CHIVAS: My dad molested me and my dogs hate you.