Getting Over Jack Wagner (3 page)

“Almost as good as the one where he made Mike's den into a bachelor pad,” Andrew said, earning my instant respect. “That episode is what made me lobby to turn my parents' garage into an apartment.”

I snuck a glance at him. He was wearing the Wissahickon uniform: khakis, Tevas, fleece pullover, and a dirty baseball cap swiveled backward. He was cute, in a generic sort of way. “So did you?”

“I tried. It was freezing and full of power tools and giant spiders. The groovy chicks didn't exactly come running.”

When the show was over, we lapsed into a few rounds of “Bob-BY! CIN-dy!” mountain-call impressions, then discussed the other kids in our dorm and discovered our opinions were the same about virtually all of them. And finally, because we were drunk, and because it was late, and because there was nothing left to talk about, we kissed. Everyone kissed everyone in college. Sitting alone in a dorm lounge at 3:00
A.M.
on a Saturday, there really seemed no other plausible way to get up and say good night.

But even in that first kiss, it was obvious something was missing between us. Our kisses were too kind, too considerate. We paused for Andrew to adjust a contact lens. I sneezed; he drew back and said “gesundheit.” We were too unself-conscious around each other too fast. Yet, for the next six weeks, we made a valiant attempt to be a couple. We slept together (but never “slept together,” a gut instinct for which I am eternally grateful). We stored things in each other's rooms: his saline solution on my dresser, my tampons in his desk drawer. We went to breakfast in our pajamas. We tried to fight, but they were stupid fights (which is the best episode of
Three's Company?
which is better, Cocoa Krispies or Puffs?) and there were always smiles twitching on our faces, as if we were two actors trying to stay composed during a love scene but ready to dissolve into hysterics, link arms, wander off the set and grab a chili dog.

By December, we admitted—to the chagrin of my mother, who had fallen madly in love with Andrew over Parents Weekend—that we were just good friends, friends who were both lonely and liked bad cereal and sitcoms. Still, many people insist that Andrew and I will one day end up together. Between us, it's become a running gag.

“You're way too blond,” I tell him. “You're one of those healthy, happy-go-lucky blond guys who bug the hell out of me.”

“You're one of those brooding dark-haired chicks,” he replies. “You people make me tense.”

“You just don't like me because I'm not a lawyer.”

“And you don't like me because I don't play rock 'n roll.” Sometimes Andrew accents this line with a few moments of awkward air guitaring. It's one of his habits, like wearing socks with sandals, that I've told him he really should try to break.

“If only you were gay,” I sigh. “Then we'd have the perfect '90s friendship.”

Now, even though Andrew and I dated for just forty-one days eight years ago, the experience has entitled us to a certain familiarity when it comes to each other's love lives. It gives us the right to chuckle lightly and say things like “oh,
that”
and “I forgot you did that” and (see above) “you're just exaggerating, as usual.” Having dated for forty-one days eight years ago also rules out our ever completely approving of anyone the other person dates. This is because you understand, on some subconscious level, they chose that person over you.

For example, Andrew's current girlfriend. Her name is Kimberley.
Kim-ber-ley.
It sounds like an adverb or adjective. I could use it to describe a vacation spa (“where expert masseuses will
kimberley
relieve your sore muscles”) or a Mexican villa (“where the
kimberley,
gauze-draped beds will float you to sleep under the stars”).

Like all of Andrew's law-school girlfriends, he and Kimberley do a lot of debating. Whether movies are good or bad. How big a tip a waiter deserves. Where to get the best pizza in Center City and the cheapest place to park and/or fastest way to get there. It's a different kind of arguing than the halfhearted pop-culture disagreements Andrew and I had in college. With Kimberley, it's more like legal foreplay: heated, stubborn, packed with legalese, yet groping each other the entire time.

In the end, of course, I want Andrew to be happy. I will support his decisions. I will endure his habits. I will delicately avert my eyes when he debates with his girlfriends. I will be kind to these women and accompany them to ladies' rest rooms in restaurants and talk to them about candid, girlish things as we pee—how our makeup is smearing in the heat, how PMSed we are—topics that are exclusively female and therefore qualify us as having bonded.

And I will take Andrew's advice seriously. Like Hannah, he is often more sensible about my life than I am. Whenever he argues me on the meet-the-mother point, however, I can conveniently remind him of the night I met his mother for the first time: Thanksgiving Day, freshman year, at his parents' house in rural Vermont where his mother, over the peach pie and coffee, made him perform “Over the River and Through the Woods” on his old trombone.

 

It is silent as Karl parks outside his apartment. We didn't speak much on the ride home, though the tunes were so loud it didn't feel obvious. Now, it feels obvious. The silence is thick, waxy, difficult. The car smells like the lasagna his mother handed him as we were leaving, which now slumbers on the floor of the backseat, heavy with congealing cheese. It has just started to rain again, drops assaulting the windows like thousands of drumming fingernails. I wonder if it feels as symbolic to Karl as it does to me.

“Coming down?” Karl asks.

I stare at my lap, considering the offer. If I go inside Karl's basement apartment, I can predict every detail of what will happen next: the way he'll toss the lasagna on the counter and crank up the Limp Bizkit, followed by the round of sex on his scratchy tiger-print blanket. I have a flash of Karl's Celtic-white arms and legs, scruff picked clean by his mother, breath smelling like buttery crackers. And after, the way he'll pluck at his guitar, shirtless, shoeless, forking cold lasagna straight from the pan. I can already imagine the noise of it, the sweat of it. The noise and sweat of it.

“I don't know,” I say, affecting a yawn. “I'm really tired. I think I need to go home and unwind.”

Karl frowns. He takes his hand off my knee. “What's going on?”

“What do you mean?” I poke at a hole in the seat cushion, burying my finger to the knuckle.

Karl shrugs, waiting. He is very good at waiting. Maybe it's all the time spent in his head. “Usually, when people say they have to unwind,” he says, “there's something that wound them up to begin with. That's what I mean.”

It is always, always, in moments like these that rock stars will surprise you. Just when their image has begun to splinter and crack, just when their true self is starting to peek through, they will say something surprising, something insightful, something to catch me off guard.

“It's not that kind of unwind,” I try to explain, forcing myself not to look at his biceps or chest-ceps or suddenly attractively earnest blue eyes. “Honestly. It's just…I have some stuff to do. Laundry. Bills. Errands. I haven't fed Leroy since, like, Wednesday.”

This is not true and Karl knows it. To his credit, he doesn't accuse me of lying. He just watches me, direct and unblinking, while my guilty glance skitters from his denim lap to his AC/DC key ring to the floor mat, littered with empty coffee cups and scratched, sticky guitar picks. “I know,” he says, and I can feel his eyes roaming around inside my conscience. “You want to go home so you can work on that book.”

 

The concept for the book is this: it will be a guide to dating rock stars. It will be part fiction, part nonfiction. It will be part humor, part personal health. It will qualify as sociology, how-to, reference, and the performing arts. Each chapter will focus on a different kind of musician—an ambassador from the instrumental genre, if you will—and what to expect (and not expect) if you date them. I consider it a public service, a way of using my collective experience to better the world. Maybe, as a bonus, I'll figure out where my own rock star is hiding.

As of yet, I haven't actually started writing the book. I've taken notes, made lists, scribbled ideas. My latest brainstorm is to begin each chapter with songs from a would-be mix tape readers can play as they read along. It would function like any good mix should: triggering a memory, evoking a mood, recalling an especially regrettable year of the 1980s. Capturing the tone and lyric of your life in a particular moment.

The Book With Mix Tape idea grew out of my original scheme, which was Movies That Smell. I still think this idea has merit. The concept is this: you sit in the movie theater and can actually smell the scenes as you watch them.

Examples:

a)
Mystic Pizza
= Italian sausage and pepperoni.

b)
Beaches
= sunscreen and ocean breeze.

c)
Forrest Gump
=

“But what do you do if it's a war movie?” Andrew had asked, after I called him to relay my plan. “Or are all the scenes going to be ones that would smell good?” I could practically hear his brain working over the phone, a series of popping cash register drawers. “That means you're basically ruling out all movies set in major cities. The Rockys. The Godfathers.
Taxi Driver.
Anything Woody Allen. You're going to have to pick ones set only in places that smell good…like the south of Spain. Like Sevilla.” He paused. “Did I ever tell you how it smells like oranges in Sevilla?”

I did mention that Andrew was practical-minded. He also has a tendency to get carried away with his own good sense sometimes, questioning and rationalizing until there's nothing left of a great idea but a few conjunctions. Whenever possible, he also likes to flaunt the fact that he studied abroad our junior year—“Sevilla,” he calls it, accent and all—and I, because of lead vocalist Win Brewer (see Chapter Eight), did not.

Hannah had a more personal take on Movies That Smell. “That's so you, Eliza,” she smiled. “You want to enhance reality. Magnify it, stretch it. You become unsettled when things are too real.”

It was then that I decided the world wasn't ready for Movies That Smell (plus, Andrew had started scaring me with legal talk about people with allergies). So I've redirected my focus: a Book With Mix Tape is the way to go. I haven't told either best friend about it. Karl knows there
is
a book, but not what the book's about. Maybe I won't tell anyone until it's finished.

Because, for now, I'm thinking this book is a pretty good idea. A valuable social resource, a clever book + music marketing concept. Or, it's what my elementary school art teacher was trying to warn my mother about after I made Michael Jackson's head out of papier-mâché. “Eliza has so much creative potential,” she said, sighing. “I just worry about how she's choosing to harness it.”

M
y first bout of rock-star love struck when I was ten years old. When you're ten, unlike when you're twenty-six, having a crush on a rock star doesn't make you weird. Everybody's doing it. You're supposed to be doing it. It's the grade-five, peer-pressure equivalent of smoking pot or having sex in high school.

My crush was on Jack Wagner. His rugged blond face coated every inch of my bedroom ceiling, door, and walls. Jack lived a double life: musician by night, soap star by day. At three every afternoon, I watched him as Frisco Jones on
General Hospital.
Later, when my parents started their nightly round of arguing—Mom's needly jabs, Dad's weary dismissals—I locked my bedroom door and plugged my ears with headphones, trying to ignore the word “divorce” that buzzed around me like a gnat.

“Divorce” was the word in garish red letters on pamphlets in the guidance office. “Divorce” was the point of ABC After School Specials and Judy Blume's
It's Not the End of the World.
“Divorce” was what happened to kids whose parents fought too much, like Jenny Sousa's, whose dad moved to Acapulco to sell baseball caps on a beach. Balled in my bed, I closed my eyes and drowned my worries in the sounds of the greatest mix tape ever made: two sides of back-to-back Jack Wagner's “All I Need.”

The beauty of '80s music was this: rock stars weren't afraid to speak their feelings. Back then, it wasn't corny. It wasn't suspicious. It wasn't desperate. Men could spill their guts in a flood of synthesizers, cymbals, A-B-A-B rhyme schemes and long notes high as women's. They were genuinely impassioned as they “brought ships into shore,” “threw away oars,” and “made love out of nothing at all.” Even heartbreak was delivered with a bravado that seems almost comical to me now. As a grown-up, I find that kind of openness terrifying. But in 1984, it was acceptable, even desirable, and it was the way I loved Jack Wagner: with confidence, fearlessness, and a T-shirt bearing a steam-ironed decal of his sultry face.

“What's that?” my mother pounced, the first time she saw it.

She was sitting at the kitchen table painting her nails a frosty blue from one of the numerous bottles she kept in the refrigerator door, wedged discreetly among the sweet relish and Italian dressing.
Very Violet. Magic of Magenta.
Her hair was, as usual, sprayed and coiffed into a perfect ball. She was wearing a short-sleeve white sweater with pants and jewelry all in matching teal. My mother is a woman greatly concerned with appearances.

“It's Jack,” I said, cool as a cucumber, heading for the back door.

“Hold it!” She stood up and stuck one leg out, aiming her blue pump at the door. I think the woman was prepared to physically bar me from being seen in public. “Who?”

“Jack Wagner,” I said, and sighed upward so my bangs fanned out, my newest and coolest move. “He's a rock star.”

Mom's lipsticked mouth pinched shut like an olive, aimed and fired. “You had a rock star's face sewn onto a T-shirt? One of
your
T-shirts? One of the T-shirts I bought you new for summer?”

“It wasn't
sewn,”
I pointed out, the only glitch I could find. At age ten, I still possessed some amount of guilty fear around my mother. I didn't lie to her. I rarely disobeyed her. If I was going to blaze a man's face into one of the T-shirts she bought me new for summer, I was at least going to be honest about my methods. “I got it ironed on. At the mall.”

She planted one hand on each hip, like a TV mother, her wet nails splayed like sharp wings. Mom was master of the TV-mother moves. TV-mother angry = hands on hips. TV-mother annoyed = arms folded across chest. TV-mother disappointed = arms folded/head shake combo. Her neck and face were flushed deep pink.

I was about to explain the innocent circumstances surrounding the decal—a misguided trip to Everything Ts, the hissing steam, the seductively loud Van Halen on the radio, and the intense peer pressure I was getting from my friend Katie (whom Mom already disapproved of because Katie's mother let her eat pixie sticks)—when she looked in the shadowy direction that was my father.

“Lou,” she said. “Are you listening to this?”

My father—then he was Dad, later I would remember him as Lou—was seated in the darkest corner of the living room, ensconced in his old green recliner. If the man wasn't at work (a job I knew nothing about except that it required him to wear dark suits, come home late, and be perpetually sullen) chances were he was in it. The chair was like his own mini-universe, where he lived alone in his drab corduroys and wrinkled, untucked Oxford shirts, with a dark foamy beer and a messy newspaper, playing slow jazz albums that dipped and sighed and seeped like a moat around his feet.

The chair was an ugly, threadbare monstrosity. A memento, my father said, from back when he was a “bachelor” (a distinction he liked to make, and often, as if he once belonged to a completely different species). He and the chair were starting to age together, even resemble each other, like the elderly and their pets. As the chair sagged, so did my dad, drooping at the shoulders and softening at the gut. Cushion foam was falling out in tufts, like middle-aged hair.

Needless to say, Mom hated the chair. She hated the ugliness of it, the greenness of it, the music and memory that separated us from it. But most of all, she hated the cat scratches. At some point during Dad's crazy bachelor days, the chair had been ravaged by a cat that belonged to one of his ex-girlfriends. It was weird, as a kid, to imagine Dad with any woman other than my mother. But the reality of that woman and her cat sat in our living room every day.
What kind of woman lets an animal rip up her furniture?
Mom would mutter, as she jabbed around the chair with the nose of the vacuum cleaner, though I'm sure the answer terrified her: the kind of woman who was carefree and spontaneous, the kind of woman who took in strays and fed them fish sticks, the kind of woman who, after sex, left scratches on men's backs.

Once, after school, I caught my mother trying to stitch up the cat scratches. Dad was at work, my sister Camilla was at one of her alpha-child extracurricular activities, and Mom was hunkered like a burglar on the living room floor: intense, sweaty, and brandishing a mini-sewing kit in her hand.

From the kitchen doorway, I watched her. It was the most disheveled she had ever looked. Her hair was pinned up sloppily in a couple of my ribboned barrettes and her shoes were kicked off, revealing the dirty soles of her nylons. Straight pins were lined up between her lips and she was mumbling through them as she poked and prodded at the stuffing leaking from the chair. My instinct was to crack a joke, to startle her, but I didn't. I couldn't. I felt too embarrassed for us both. Instead, I crept up to my room and drowned in “All I Need,” over and over, until Dad got home.

As it turned out, my subtlety didn't matter. Mom's covert operation failed, the damaged chair proving to be a) too old, b) too soft, and c) too sentimental to be done away with. In the end, the scratches stayed, the chair stayed, and so did daily proof of the fact that my father would never be as committed to my mother as she wanted him to be.

“What,” Dad replied to her. His tone was flat as an ink stamp. Living with Mom had drained the man of his energy, until his speech began losing punctuation. Question marks had been missing for at least a year. He hadn't managed an exclamation point since 1979.

“Look at her,” Mom snapped. I cringed, as I did every time she got angry with my father, wishing she would be nicer so he wouldn't take off for Acapulco to team up with Mr. Sousa. “Her shirt. It's a decal. From a mall. One of those shack-type places.” This was delivered as if the Everything Ts and Sunglass Shed were of a lower caste than the Gap and Crabtree & Evelyn.

Dad sipped his beer, not even glancing at me. This was not unusual. He didn't interact much with any of us, unless it involved passing food at the dinner table or changing channels on the TV. As a seven-and eight-year-old, this didn't strike me as strange. For all I knew, this was how all fathers behaved. It wasn't until I met Hannah's family, and saw
The Cosby Show
for the first time, that I realized not all dads were as distant and disinterested as mine.

“For God's sake, Linda,” he sighed, running a hand through his thinning, rumpled hair. A hiss of a sigh, like a tire sagging. Every day, a little more sagging. His chair, his shoulders, his tone of voice. “Leave the kid alone.”

I was triumphant. At that moment, it didn't matter that Dad never tucked me in at night. That he never taught me to ride a two-wheeler. That he never took me on secret Dairy Queen runs like Hannah's dad. Sitting in his embattled armchair, he was my ally against my mother. When he disappeared less than a year later, it was for California, not Acapulco, and it seemed only appropriate that the chair was the first thing to hit the curb.

*  *  *

The June after fifth grade, exactly two months before Dad/Lou would leave us, my love for Jack Wagner grew more organized. My friends and I created a fan club for our rock stars named, brilliantly, Official Rock Star Fan Club. We convened on Saturday afternoons. We carried handmade club membership cards. We tossed around the phrases “old business,” “new business” and, for reasons unknown, “order in the court.”

The ORSFC consisted of me, Hannah, Katie Brennan, and Cecilia Kim. Cecilia was the shyest among us. Her father sold home security systems and, maybe as a result, her life was airtight. She wore her hair caught back in long braids, pinched at the ends with rubber bands (not hair elastics, but actual rubber bands, the brown ones that came wrapped around broccoli and newspapers) and was not allowed to stay out past five or drink anything carbonated. Cecilia's house was rigged with an elaborate security system, epitomized by the pulsing red dot in a corner of the living room ceiling that we tried to outsmart by squirming around the floor on our bellies. If the system got accidentally set off, we all knew the password—BABA, after Cecilia's teddy bear—which Mr. Kim had chosen and which seemed, to me, the ultimate act of paternal love.

Katie Brennan, on the other hand, was the renegade. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, she was a girl just killing time until she got old enough to date. She straightened her teeth with braces, curled her hair with Party Perms, experimented with adhesive earrings—all of it preparation and practice. As if through sheer will, she was the only girl in the fifth grade who'd managed to grow any semblance of a chest yet. She already wore a bra, and had perfected a high-pitched giggle that Hannah and I agreed was annoying but that boys inexplicably seemed to like.

Katie had two sisters, both in high school, so naturally she was our CI (Club Informer). She explained the mechanics of blow jobs. She gave us a detailed report on the night Mr. Brennan found a naked boy in her sister's bed and chased him out of the house with a five-iron. She smuggled a tampon into our OCM (Official Club Meeting), where we watched it expand in a bowl of water, eyes popping, until it was the size of a small raft.

Hannah and I had resigned ourselves to the fact that Katie would grow up faster than we would. Between the two of us, it was still a dead heat: neither wore a bra, had her period, or had kissed a boy yet. But unfortunately for me, that was where the happy similarities ended. In fifth grade, I had begun to sprawl until my legs comprised roughly eighty percent of my body, while Hannah remained cute and small—one of only about a million things I envied about her. Like her canopy bed. Her guinea pig. Her station wagon. Her red hair. Her mom, because she said “shit” and knew how to French braid. Her dad, because he wasn't mine. Her older brothers, which I'd always wanted so I could meet their friends and borrow their clothes. Her Minnesota accent, which I filed in the same exotic category as braces, glasses, and broken bones (for the signable casts). But the thing I envied most of all was her sunporch, where the ORSFC convened.

The sunporch at the Devines's was—is—my favorite place in the world. It's casually messy, scattered with sunlight and shadow, torn phone messages and Monopoly money, stray sneakers and drained lemonade glasses. This was the kind of overspill I knew existed in the houses of happy families, and the kind that was missing from my own house, scoured bright and tense as a griddle. From the ceiling hung Mrs. Devine's curly plants, each one carefully christened—Otis, Clarissa, Marguerite—and cradled in a sac of beaded macrame. In one corner, Mr. Devine's Victrola stood like a holy relic, battered albums splayed in reverence at its feet.

I, of course, felt a special sense of entitlement to the porch at the Devines's because a) I was Hannah's best friend, and had the clot of rainbowed friendship pins on my Tretorns to prove it, b) I was the one she was going to overnight camp with in July, and c) I was the only one invited to stay after the Club for dinner.

Dinner at the Devines's was like no meal I had ever known. Because it was summer, they ate on the porch around a wooden table crowded with citronella candles and messy, juicy seafood. My mother, had I been naive enough to tell her, would never have allowed me to eat food involving guts or bibs. But the Devines didn't care. Before digging in, they all held hands and volunteered what they were thankful for—a litany of things from Bob Marley to thunderstorms to super-crunchy peanut butter. Afterward, in the quiet that clung to us like a held breath, Mr. Devine would make his nightly pilgrimage to the Victrola.