I Don't Care About Your Band (17 page)

4. Shooting presidents

5. Providing otherwise reasonably functional people with crazy sex, which is not
just
sex with a crazy person, though it certainly is that, but also sex that is, by its nature, insane.

Even nonsexual human interaction with crazy people can cause people to become temporarily crazy (think about your family); but crazy sex with crazy people can make regular people
totally fucking lose their minds.
And all you can do once the sex stops and you’ve come to your senses is look back and retrace your steps to figure out how it is you got yourself into that mess in the first place.

 

I HAD
an eighth-grade history teacher who wouldn’t make us memorize any dates. She figured it was useless for us to know that the Magna Carta was chartered in 1215 or that the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. Instead, when it was quiz time, she’d give us a list of events and test us on our ability to rearrange them in the order they happened. The time line, she reasoned, would be of more use to us than anything else, because the only way to make sense of history is by studying its cause-and-effect cycle.

I got into a situation with a crazy person named Ben because I had the loss of a damaged person named Alex hanging over me like a dirt cloud over Pig Pen for what had ballooned into a six-month funk. Alex’s frigidity, after the sex-free final year of my doomed relationship with Patrick, plus all the time invested and the chocolate-chip scones downed in their respective aftermath, honed me into the perfect vessel for Ben’s brand of crazy. Alex was Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, I was the lantern he kicked over, and Ben was the Chicago Fire.

TEN POUNDS
heavier from sadness scones than I was when I was wasting my time talking to Alex, I was only being productive in the moping department of my life, and the only writing I did took the form of boring journal entries about what a terrible person I was for not eating more salads. The days were getting shorter and colder, and the writer’s assistant job I’d been working on for the past eight months had ended, and I suddenly found myself fat and alone and not over Alex one bit. But I decided I would try to quit being so narrow minded, and try to be “open” to men in my life I already knew but had never previously considered as potential romantic partners. That’s right! I would do that! It would be a method known more commonly as “rooting through the garbage,” but at the time I was certain it would solve my problems.

I’d known Ben in passing for years and never regarded him in any way beyond thinking he was friendly. He was a little heavy, but kind of cute. He was someone I’d say hello to in passing—a friend of friends. That’s it. I saw him one night after a party I forced myself to go to, and when I went outside the bar to hail a cab, he talked to me while he smoked a cigarette. We talked about
Nashville
, and Karen Black, because Karen Black should always be talked about, and then Ben told me that he remembered meeting me six years earlier, and recounted all the details of our first encounter. He knew where we were, who we were with, how I made a joke about the Holocaust being fake. It jolted me; I didn’t remember any of that, but his story seemed to check out, especially because the Holocaust is
totally
fake, and most of the time people think I’m joking about it. I was really flattered Ben remembered all those details about meeting me, and that he was, I gleaned, “open” enough to tell me about how he did. I thought he was really sensitive.

A week later, I wrote Ben and asked him if he wanted to watch a Robert Altman movie that we discussed when we were outside.

 

HERE’S THE
thing about Robert Altman. His name is a cultural talisman; it’s a topical buzzword for attracting the attention of a male adult of a certain age and cultural disposition. Some women learn about sports so they can seem interested in the Giants at a dive bar in Midtown, and others take the cultural approach. Altman is like Stanley Kubrick or Tom Waits or other men who make art that men like. I like Robert Altman fine.
Nashville
and
Short Cuts
are great movies, if a little long, and nobody is going to argue with Elliot Gould in
The Long Goodbye
. But I didn’t really care about the movie Ben was telling me about that night. I was open to watching it, but my e-mail to him was more about me saying I was open to getting to know him.

I know. If you hear the word “open” again, you’re going to
open
your mouth so vomit can spill out of it into the terlet. Well, ditto, dollface. I’ll hold your hair if you’ll hold mine.

Ben replied to my e-mail, saying he was happy to hear from me, and invited me over to his apartment in Astoria, Queens. And then, I decided to like him. He was funny over e-mail, and he mentioned details that “cool people” usually skip over, like how he didn’t really have any food in his house except for wasabi peas and Beaujolais Nouveau, which he knew was sort of gay, and then he gave me really extensive directions to his neighborhood and told me to call when I was downstairs. And I was really charmed by how he typed out his train of thought: It was an affectless way of flirting. Again, I thought, he seemed really sensitive.

I SHOWED
up to Ben’s place wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, which, for me, is an unheard- of outfit to wear unless I am taking a trip to the county dump or giving a cat a bath. But I didn’t want to break out a dress and tights because I didn’t want him to think I’d made up my mind that I was attracted to him, even though I already sort of had, and I also didn’t want to look like I thought we were on a date. Because we
weren’t
on a date. We were just hanging out.

When I came into Ben’s apartment, I took in all the books on his shelves and the movies in his collection, scoping out the semiotics of the place, and decided it was all very acceptable and impressive. Again, it was the cultural-literacy thing. I didn’t care about college degrees and good breeding in terms of parents and towns. I was looking for the pedigree of taste, and with Ben, I thought I’d found a quality contender.

Ben was loquacious and polite. He spoke constantly and enthusiastically about the movies he showed me and the art he’d hung on his walls, and we got to know what we each thought was
cool
over what soon became hours.

Finally, around four thirty a.m., he stood behind me as I sat watching a YouTube video on his computer, and put his hand on my shoulder. It was the first time he’d touched me all night—that’s how cautiously he set the stage for maybe later making his move, with permission. I didn’t flinch, so two hours later, he finally lowered his voice and said how he was thinking about wanting to maybe kiss me if that was OK, and I smiled and nodded, like “Fucking finally, jackass,” and the next thing you know, he’d gotten me onto the floor, flipped me over to all fours, pushed my panties to the side, and started aggressively lapping at my ass with his tongue like he’d been thinking about doing it for the last six years.

This was surprising.

At first I was embarrassed, because I hadn’t shaved or showered right before, and didn’t expect to be in the throes of such graphic intimacy when I headed out to his apartment. I was wearing jeans, remember? But when you’re digging into the carpet and somebody’s been eating your ass for ten minutes, your inhibitions and expectations shift considerably. Soon, moving into his bedroom seemed like a reasonable thing to do, especially since it was getting light out already.

I got under a filthy black comforter in his tiny, dark bedroom, the corners of which were graced with stacks of dusty old issues of
Penthouse
, and told Ben with no uncertainty that I was not going to take off my panties. He said fine, and we made out more, and then he was behind me, feeling my tits under my bra and rubbing his dick against my ass, and then I felt him push my thong panties to the side and slide inside of me. He started fucking me, muttering the whole time.

“It’s OK, Julie. I left your panties on. Your panties are still on. It’s OK.”

I was deliriously turned on. I’d gone from no sex to crazy sex, and it was not healthy. It was setting me up for a crash, like eating a huge pile of candy after fasting for a week.

 

 

I WOKE
up a few hours later to find Ben on his couch in a flannel bathrobe. I guess I’d banished him there during the night because his snoring set off my sleep-talking tendencies. He was smoking and drinking freshly microwaved tea—there was no food in the apartment, and the idea of him running out to get us some bagels seemed like something I’d be crazy to ask for. He seemed pretty settled in, like he wouldn’t be leaving the house anytime soon. He puttered around, stalled and tethered in his own space, like a dog in its crate. There were no snacks in Ben’s cupboards and the fridge was empty. For a fat guy, it seemed a little weird—I wondered when it was he actually ate food.

There was more sex after no-breakfast, and then I began getting ready to head out in my jeans from the night before. We shared our niceties about how it was a lovely evening, and what a great surprise and all that. He gave me a hug and I combed my hair.

And that’s when he told me he was seeing someone.

 

 

“SO,” HE
said, like an afterthought, while I was getting my stuff together to leave, “I’ve been dating somebody for a while. But it’s pretty casual. She doesn’t mind if I see other women.”

He cleared his throat and took a sip of tea, then continued, as calm as a pond, like he was about to ask me if I knew the weather. “How about you? Are you seeing anybody?”

My stomach lurched. I needed to go out and get food.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not seeing anybody.”

And I was shocked. Not because I figured Ben had been waiting around his whole life for me, or at least since we met and I made that (hilarious) Holocaust joke, but that in the wake of what was an oddly direct disclosure that he was dating somebody, more than anything, I just couldn’t believe that this guy wasn’t completely available. As in, totally alone. It was kind of his
shtick
. When we were hanging out on the couch the night before, his gratitude for my company was almost overbearing. Who’d have gotten any whiff of unavailability from this guy? It was so masked by desperation musk the night before.

“I CAN’T
believe you know about
this
movie!” he’d exclaimed hours earlier, exalting something off the radar in, like, 1991. He’d made me feel so high-status—I was the awesome babysitter with boobs and Van Halen tickets, and he was my adoring charge. And now, after a night of ass-pounding floor sex, he popped a “B.T. Dubbs” and told me, “P.S. I have an open relationship with a person you haven’t heard of until now.”

I had to go. Nate was dating this guy in a gay choir (don’t ask), and I had plans to accompany him to Grace Church to watch his guy sing Christmas Carols next to a gaggle of other mustachioed songbirds, because I am the World’s Greatest Hag. But Ben kept telling me more about the girl he was dating as I put my coat on, and that’s when I found out that not only was Ben crazy enough to be telling me all this stuff with no shame at all, but that the girl he’d been seeing was a bisexual vegan who volunteered for PETA, and she’d been dating him for a
year.
I couldn’t even react anymore at this point. I was just stunned, and didn’t know what I needed most at that moment—an omelet, a nap, or a gun.

But Ben was surprised that
I
was surprised to learn all of this. He said he thought I knew about her. I asked him how, and he said it was because when I was working at my TV job before, I was in charge of maintaining the guest list for our wrap party. And because he was invited, and he told me at the time he needed a “plus one,” I should’ve known from his RSVP that his “plus one” was his date. Meaning, that he and his “plus one” were dating. He told me that he’d introduced me to her, which I did not remember. That he said, “Julie, this is Leah, Leah this is Julie.” And that I therefore had no reason to feel shocked and upset and hungry and bewildered and oddly betrayed by the events that had transpired over the course of the last twelve hours of my life in an apartment that looked increasingly disgusting in the light of day.