But this isn’t a story about music. This is a story about how I was so lonely that I spoke every-other-nightly on the phone with an eccentric string bean who got so excited about whatever he happened to be talking about—politics, music, art—that he would end up lecturing me on subjects for hours. I couldn’t tell if Colin was brilliant or even smart; he made sense, so he wasn’t totally bananas. But enthusiasm and loquacious-ness can be a decent guise for what is otherwise a mediocre intellect. I couldn’t tell. I was just so glad to be on the phone with a guy I thought was kind of interesting, who made music that I’d listened to in high school. It’s a popular fantasy to get with a guy you used to think was attractive from afar, and at the very least, talking to Colin distracted me from the millionth repetition of “Selfless, Cold and Composed” that blasted from Jodi’s room, ten feet away.
My “conversations” with Colin would have been more two-sided if I were taking notes: our relationship was an accidental correspondence course in Colin 101. He’d get himself worked up about some abstract concept rooted in the discipline of new media or transcendental meditation or why it’s wrong to advertise junk food to children, and the next thing I’d know, I’d be peeing into the plastic Bed, Bath & Beyond wastebasket I kept in my bedroom instead of interrupting him to ask whether I could call him back after I used the bathroom.
I understand if you need to go back and reread that last part. But indeed, peeing in the garbage can is what I did—on more than one occasion—because I would feel self-conscious stopping Colin in the middle of his impressive flow of enthusiastic discourse in order to start a flow of my own. It’s out of character for me not to use a toilet like a civilized person with no desire to mark one’s territory or to save one’s body fluids in the name of eccentricity, agoraphobia, or sloth. But I didn’t want the flush to gross out Colin (though apparently I have no qualms disgusting
you
), and I couldn’t just leave my urine in the tank for Jodi to find later. No, clearly the best and most socially considerate thing to do in deference to my long-distance professor/imaginary boyfriend and my disfiguredly digited roommate was to piss in a garbage can, wipe myself with Kleenex, then pour the fluid waste down the communal bathtub—a relatively silent endeavor.
I told you this was a dark period of my life.
So, even though I didn’t feel technically necessary when I was on the phone with Colin, he still figured that it would be a good idea to buy himself a plane ticket to come out and visit me for a weekend. I don’t know why he felt compelled to meet me, honestly. Short of a dial tone, I was the most passive phone audience I can imagine. But maybe that’s what appealed to him about me. Plus, my fandom, my age. My vagina. No, I’m not bragging—I had one, even then.
So, Colin came out to visit. And I remember being attracted to him right away. He was tall and thin, with salt-and-pepper hair, and tattoos all over his arms. He dressed like a kid, in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers, as all musicians do, whether they’re forty-one or sixteen. And in person, he was similarly gregarious, geeky, and oddly indifferent to my presence. Until we fucked each other.
It was tough to get through to Colin, even once he got to New York, that my principle interest in him was romantic. I think guys like him are preternaturally oblivious to connections beyond the pale of the casual. It’s a musician thing, I think. Those guys are just happy to make friends, and they seem to have a bevy of different kinds of relationships across the country. All those amicable connections prove resourceful for touring because they’ll always have a place to stay, whether it’s with fans, peers, idols, groupies, or fellow freaks. Part of being a musician is the ability to form and release weak social bonds, if only because of the travel involved in making one’s living. Then, there’s the task of navigating boundaries with the fellow guys in your band: the fittest survivors in that racket tend to be the easiest-going. It’s a big reason why I, Captain Intensity, am fundamentally incompatible with those of the Wah Wah Brotherhood.
But whether he’d known or not, I’d already decided, in my typically impudent, freshly adolescent fashion, that I wanted Colin to fuck me, under the covers of my twin-size dorm bed, even though one of the only things I knew about him personally—as opposed to what I knew about his music—was that he was not only a vegetarian, but he was a vegan. And Colin was one of the first vegans I’d ever met.
NOW, I
am probably about to alienate the remaining six or seven young women who like Sleater-Kinney and confused this book with
The Veganomicon
just because it landed in the Alternative Women’s Studies section of your locally owned independent bookstore, but I have to go on record about the following. I haven’t met a lot of vegans who aren’t a little crazy, a little dumb, a bit of both, or a lot of either. And I’ve met plenty since Colin.
I love animals, and I watch what I eat. I’m the furthest thing from Ted Nugent you can be while still loving Dolly Parton. But I think of veganism as a counterculturally sanctioned eating disorder. There are different kinds of people who go vegan for different reasons, and here’s a rough working field guide.
Firstly, there are Animal Rights Vegans. These include misanthropes who prefer the company of their pets to conversations with humans, and people who
love
starting emotionally heated fights that nobody can win. Some “adopt” feral cats off the street—even the ones that will claw your face into skin ribbon—because they feel so bad for the homeless cats, they forget that they are wild animals, like crocodiles or kangaroos, which have no place inside of an apartment. Animal Rights Vegans have no problem with PETA—its objectification of women in its ad campaigns, its KKK campaign for which protestors wore white sheets outside the Westminster Dog Show to protest the “eugenics” of purebreds, or that poster they ran comparing chicken farms to concentration camps. That’s how much the Animal Rights Vegan can actively dislike people.
There’s also the Anti-Preservative/Hormone/Antibiotic/ Chemical Vegan. This group includes paranoid, antiestablishment kids or kidults eager to blame their problems on large corporate infrastructures, as though businesses that earn more than thirty grand a year had been designed to personally destroy them. This type makes up the majority of male vegans, from my experience, especially those who interpret their preference of beer to pork as some kind of deciding vote against The Man. That’s right, “The Man.” Politically, The APHAC Vegan is still at the philosophical evolution of a circa-1964 Lenny Bruce, one of the most overrated stand-up comedians of all time. (Most underrated? Mo’Nique. The END.) This category of vegans includes performance artists who run for mayor as a goof, bike messengers who sprout dreadlocks from Caucasian hair by not washing it frequently, and people who sneer in the face of science, consistently opting out of Western medicinal revelations like antibiotics, preferring instead to treat infections with herbal tea. There are also a lot of overweight people in this category who claim they went vegan for the sake of being healthier, and there is no population on earth—including people who traverse malls with the aid of a Jazzy Scooter—who consume more cookies, fries, cake, and breads, rationalizing that it’s OK, because their carbs are baked with soy butter, agave nectar, and carob chips.
Finally, there’s the Anorexic Vegan, delighted to be able to blend into her surroundings by adopting a style of eating that’s considered acceptable for reasons besides “I want to starve myself until I disappear and never have to deal with the time I was molested.” These include women who would put restrictions on what they consider acceptable eating no matter what, and have the book
Skinny Bitch
to thank for endorsing a diet with a socially conscious veneer when, in actuality, all these girls want to do is sip hot water for dinner until they look like a corpse. There are subtler variations of these girls; the Heidi Pratt types in stilettos and minis and people in fashion who don’t have a sense of humor. I met one emaciated Los Feliz resident who told me, over the eerie silence of her still-running hybrid, that she thought it was “heroic” to avoid dairy, milk, and eggs. “Uh-huh,” I said, then asked, “Do you know what
words mean
?”
SO, THOSE
are some vegans I’ve met. And then there are the kinds of people who call themselves vegans, but eat cheese or fish on occasion, and those people are A-OK by me, one thousand percent, because those people are not vegans—they are vegetarians. And vegetarians are great, as long as they don’t try to convert me while I’m tucking into a shepherd’s pie, because that’s very Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and if I wanted to talk to men who wear short sleeved shirts with neckties and who read the Bible all day, I’d go to AA.
But Colin was the first vegan I ever met, and he fit into the second category—The Anti-Preservative/Hormone/Antibiotic /Chemical Vegan—because his eating choices very much reflected his political views, which had a lot to do with opting out of corporate culture, and other concepts that are really exciting to people going through puberty. The other thing that was distinctively immature about Colin was that he had no sense of what to say around women who wanted to sleep with him in order to keep himself, for lack of a better term, attractive to them.
“Boy, the flight out here was really long,” he told me over (vegan!) fries at the Cloister Café across from my dorm. “They didn’t have any meals without eggs or cheese or meat, so I brought a head of raw broccoli on the plane with me and munched on it the whole way over. I think the woman next to me was kind of grossed out by my broccoli farts after the first four hours.”
And so on.
But I, in my lonely days, reacted to most of Colin’s personality by plugging up my ears with my fingers and singing my favorite song: “I Can’t Hear You,” which I’m sure, by now, is in the public domain.
So we fooled around, and I got to watch Colin thaw into a slightly more attentive version of himself. As soon as we got physical, his monologues became conversations. The miracle of sex! It
does
help boys notice you! And my wastebasket was mercifully free of urine that whole weekend. Colin was also, incidentally, endowed with the most enormous penis I’d ever seen in my life, an appendage on behalf of which I actually had to run errands. I remember buying Magnum brand condoms at Duane Reade with a twinkle in my eye like Gene Kelly’s while he splashed in the puddles outside Debbie Reynolds’s house.
Soon, Colin and I were telling each other what we wanted in bed, and although he was uncomfortable at first with the kind of conversation that didn’t involve enlightening me about how the Australians are superior to Americans because they ban billboards in certain areas of their countryside, he slowly began to talk to me, more and more, about what he wanted to do with the baseball bat he kept in his pants.
“You know what else I imagine?” he said one night, confusing “imagine” with “request.”
“I would really like it if you took my cum in your mouth when you were done going down on me, and then you let me kiss you with my tongue so I could taste my own cum.”
Anybody unfortunate enough to have sat through Kevin Smith’s
Clerks
(the best of what is a largely reprehensible oeuvre) will know that the sexual act Colin described is known as “snowballing.” And while requesting that favor was a bit surprising, it was not something outright uncalled-for, like asking me to shit on his father’s face, a variation I believe was addressed in
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
. And because I was having pussy-stretching sex with a guy I was really attracted to, I did it.
It’s really a tribute to the female bonding hormones that are released when you’re getting good-laid that you’re pretty much up for anything exclusive of fisting your sister. I wondered what was
in
Colin’s semen, considering his diet. Was our affair just a nefarious scheme to get me to eat tempeh?
Anyway, that happened, and he was really turned on, and then, the next time, he told me he was going to come on me and lick it off, and then he did, and soon enough, he was just eating his own semen and I was there as a witness.
I felt like I did on the phone—unnecessary. I mean, what’s the point of having a girl in the room if all you want to do is dine on your own jizz? Why not cut out the middleman?
Colin was probably just starving for animal protein, poor guy. No wonder he was obsessed. It’s like how all dieters do is think about cupcakes, or how all Catholics do all day is imagine how much fun it would be to get an abortion.
COLIN SOON
returned to whence he came—to his recording studio and his band and his ideas and his touring schedule. He called me a couple of times after that weekend, but our conversations went back to the way they were before. I was superfluous—an appendage, and not as formidable as the one between his gawky legs. He told me how much he wanted to drop acid with me in the desert, and how much he hated New York City; two things that pretty much make me as dry as a
“
Shouts & Murmurs” column. Soon enough, we went our separate ways. Me with the knowledge that our differences were insurmountable, and him knowing, wherever he is—probably Portland—that somebody once witnessed him feasting on the kind of intimate delicacy that is not technically permissible on a vegan diet.
turn down the glamour
D
uring my last year at college, I decided to open my horizons, which is a fancy word for “legs.” I figured that if I was less picky about the guys I hooked up with—as though that was ever my problem—I’d increase my odds of finding somebody good. It is not an absurd philosophy by any means, as long as you’re not too emotional about it.
I tried dating boys from school for once: a pockmarked, handsome weirdo with Clark Kent glasses from my photography seminar; a schlubby, Jewish tall guy who lived in the dorm room next to mine who blathered on about De La Soul before asking me if he could use my bathroom, then taking an extraordinary crap in the toilet that was, ostensibly, right next door to his own. And then there was Jazz Matt, Nate’s nickname for the skinny Daniel Stern lookalike from my screenwriting class who interned at Small’s Jazz Club because he
loooooved
Jazz. Jazz Matt’s real name was just regular Matt, but Nate and I came up with the bright idea to call him “Jazz Matt” because it rhymes with “Jazz Cat.” And few things were funnier to us than the idea of Matt “jazzing-out” to cool-be-boo-bebop-scat-a-tat-tastic, heroin-ific jazz, when in fact he was just this geeky white jerk who, given a chance, would like nothing more than to sit quietly in a room, sipping tea.