I Don't Care About Your Band (2 page)

But here’s the thing: You sanction that kind of behavior when you keep quiet. When you don’t tell your friends it happened because you’re ashamed of what you did and how you reacted to it, and you rationalize that it was something you did that made him shy away. That it was because you slept with him too soon. Because you didn’t play hard to get. You didn’t follow the rules and you failed to act like a hooker who just shrugs and moves on to the next conquest, like those are the only two things a girl can do.

You blame your own fundamental attractiveness, figuring that somewhere in between him pursuing you and his losing interest, you did something that made him stop liking you. You called him too soon or too much. You made a dumb joke. You texted him too late after he texted you, and then he didn’t respond. Maybe he hated your taste in the books he saw on your shelf. Maybe he cringed when you used that emoticon in your last e-mail. Or maybe somehow, he caught wind of your secret—that you were actually unlovable. Needy, ugly, fat, desperate, whatever it is you’re afraid of guys finding out you are or you think you are—even if it’s a person who just has the balls to remain ardently committed to the act of falling in love.

So you tell yourself that you’re practicing the art of connecting and disconnecting, in hopes that the latter will get easier the more it happens. That you’ll get more casual with practice. But you don’t.

And you feel worse each time. And you figure it’s because you’re a big, dumb idiot for wanting to keep taking chances.

Well, guess what? You’re pretty smart for an idiot. And I wrote this book for you and everybody else after my own sloppy, panting heart who, despite our disappointments, trudge on, looking for what we know is real.

It’s just got to be.

“Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.”

—
Pauline Kael,
For Keeps

“You
are
special!
Never
stop believing that!”

—
Daddy Warbucks, in
Annie

 

 

 

T
here are two kinds of girls who drift toward the more unsavory characters in the dating pool. There are, first of all, the kind of girls who’ve been ignored, abandoned, or otherwise treated ambivalently by their dads, and look to creeps as a means of replicating the treatment to which they’ve grown accustomed. These are the kind of girls who endure neglect, hostility, rigorous mind-fuckings, repetitive late-night texts that start “Hey, I’m in your neighborhood . . .” or long stretches of total disappearance from men who reinforce their earliest-learned notion of how a boy should treat a girl. Some of them strip. Some of them strip ironically. Plenty are a great deal of fun at dinner parties.

The other kind of girls who wallow in the Valley of the Dipsticks are the ones who know they deserve better. These are the girls with the great dads; the ones who had their decks stacked from the outset, who knew it couldn’t get any better in the guy department than the one who taught her how to ride her bike. This is the princess who knows only to la- lala-la-la-la-live for today, confident she will always have her daddy to lavish her with the spoils of high-octane attention once the bastard of the week flies the turkey coop. She already has a mensch on the back burner, so in the suitor department, she is not looking for much of a multitasker—just like the married man who doesn’t care whether his mistress can get along with his friends. This category of girls, in which I include myself, has a tendency to exceed her allotted bullshit quota for boys she likes, if only because her stubborn mind will not reconcile the notion of wonderful things ever coming to an end.

My dad was the first man I ever loved so much it hurt. He was always around, from our current-events chat over bowls of Total in the morning, to the most catastrophic of devastations, like when I was ten, and something I thought was horrible happened to me. I hadn’t made it past the second callback for a community theater production of
Annie
.

I mourned my soiled future as my father and I sped home along the Sprain Parkway in the family Toyota Cressida. We were twenty minutes past the exit for Briarcliff Manor when I finally stopped sobbing. My dad, trying to seem sympathetic, told me to listen to the radio; that it would help distract me. I stared out the window, watching my dreams die.

My ten-year-old mind had figured that starring as Annie in a production of the show of the same name would have finally provided me with sweet, elusive, abstract victory. I knew I could play that role better than any of my peers from camp and school. But this production—the one I didn’t get—was going to be cast with
actual adults
in the roles of the grown-up characters in the show; adults like Oliver Warbucks, the billionaire, and Lily St. Regis, the squeaky-voiced trollop. And that made the rejection even worse.

Like a lot of nerdy kids, I was a bit too congenial with grown-ups. I competed for the attention of teachers and my parents’ friends like they were the ones who could rescue me from the company of kids my age, and usher me, via minivan, into the promised land of Eileen Fisher tunics and Merlot. I wanted so badly, in general, to be in the company of elders. And this play—not just any play, but
Annie
, the quintessential ’80s musical about narcissism and striving—seemed like a perfect chance to work in tandem with adults. The kind of people who have checking accounts and pubic hair! I ached with singular ambition to hold hands with an actual grown-up man with a shorn head or in a bald cap, and croon in counterpoint,
“I’m poor as a mouse!” “I’m richer than Midas!”
musically articulating the main way in which Annie and Oliver Warbucks were different.

Sundry dumb fantasies about being onstage suchly pranced about my noggin with cartoonish frequency around that time, fueling my case for a long car ride up to Yorktown, which I laid out point by point in efforts to convince my parents to haul me upstate to the audition. They did, and while I speed-belted the first two bars of “Tomorrow” in a lineup of five other third-graders, my mother made small talk with the other kids’ stage mothers. My mom was always encouraging, but she was no Mama Rose: The idea of time wasted at commercial auditions or tuition thrown at acting schools that gave out homework assignments like “go to the zoo and observe an animal” was dismissible by her as something done for kids who aren’t terribly bright.

I, thrillingly, made the cut at round one of the tryouts, so in between that first night and three days later, when my dad drove me to my callback, I’d already counted, battered, and deep-fried all possible chickens. I’d written my bio for the program, which made generous employ of the phrases “auburn songstress” and “unwavering gratitude,” told off my enemies in my hypothetical Tony Award acceptance speech (“Who’s a fat retard
now
?”), and practiced signing autographs in a stage name I’d chosen—“Kitty Clay”—that was better suited to a 1950s character actress who only played prostitutes. I had set myself up for a mighty descent.

My father, atonally humming along to “Up On the Roof” on 101.1 CBS-FM, was privately happy I hadn’t made the cut. Not because he didn’t encourage my performative instincts: in fact, “supportive” was a tepid modifier for the kind of pride my father took in watching me onstage. He loved watching me captivate and made sure I knew I was star-stuff, and was always front row center at all of my school performances, ready with flowers and praise, even after the doozies. Like when the accompanist at the Y disclosed, at the last minute, that she did not have the sheet music to
Gypsy
, and I opted over “a cappella” and “not at all” to give a fully-committed performance of “Rose’s Turn” along to a cassette of the score from the production starring Tyne Daly, complete with Claudia Teitelbaum providing the off-stage “Yeah!” in between “You like it?” and “Well, I got it,” which, from an eight-year-old girl, is technically performance art.

No, my dad was just relieved that I didn’t get the part because now he was off the hook in the chauffeur department. It was an hour-and-a-half commute back and forth from Scarsdale to Yorktown Heights, where rehearsals were held, and if I’d been cast as Annie, or even one of her ragtag orphan chums—a demotive possibility that hadn’t even darkened the doorway of my ego-addled young mind—he would have had to drive me back and forth five days a week or risk breaking my heart by telling me no. And the sound of that word was always jarring coming from his lips, whether it referenced a third cookie or the actualization of a grandiose fantasy. My mother told me weeks later, once I’d calmed down, that they wouldn’t have driven me to rehearsals if I’d made it, but took the “We’ll cross that bridge!” attitude when she first took me to the audition. My mom, ever-presumptive of her conversation partner’s familiarity with the idiomatic canon, never finished the second part of clichés. From her, it was always “A stitch in time” or “The apple doesn’t fall,” which was deeply confusing advice to a little girl merely trying to make sense of why Andrea Blum—a popular classmate whose mother was a backstabbing monster with an eye-lift that made her look Korean—stole my Doritos.

Being in that play, I reasoned, would have emancipated me from the social oppression I heroically endured daily at the French-manicured hands of the Alpha Jewesses of Solomon Schecter Hebrew School. I was so tired of being at the business end of the sneer of Andrea Blum, not to mention Lizzies Shapiro, Steinberg, and Strauss—the tannest girls with the longest lashes and the scratchiest Benetton sweaters in the grade, whose precocious sarcasm was rivaled only by alpha girls with blossoming breast buds in junior high. I wanted so badly to get this role and bid “Later, losers!” to them all. They’d see me from the cheap seats, I thought. And I’d be onstage with a grown man and a live dog. The sobbing recommenced.

My dad, now feebly whistling along to “Under the Board-walk,” told me to relax. It was good advice with a beginning, middle, and an end that I couldn’t heed, hysterical in the wake of my rejection. What kind of terrible mistake had been made? I thought I had the lead in the bag when I arrived at the open call and saw I was the only redhead auditioning. Everybody knows Annie has red hair, and who wants to put a wig on a kid without leukemia? I was prepared, too, having practiced along to both the movie and the album from the Broadway show, tapping on carpet in my bedroom and letting, respectively, Albert Finney and Reid Shelton promise Annie/me that he didn’t need sunshine to turn his skies to blue,
“I don’t need anything but you!”

In reality, a little girl needs more than her dad, even if he is Oliver Warbucks, the moneyed plutocrat with the heart defrost-able only by the Depression-era optimism of a carrot-topped hobo. But my father, who instilled in me a love of musical theater so potent that I am unable to listen to the cast recording of
Sunday in the Park with George
without bursting into tears, gave me the impression when I was growing up that he was the only man I’d ever need.

My father is a stocky accountant of modest height with a Bronx accent and a bald spot who smiles with his eyes. He is amused by stories as simple as “I saw a golden retriever with a toy in his mouth walking down the street today.” He is an impossibly warm man: When he shakes your hand, he’s probably touching your shoulder as well, and he always looks at me after he cracks a joke at the dinner table, to make sure I know he was goofing for my benefit. He always kept an eye on me, making sure I called home if I was spending the night at a friend’s house or going into the city, and whenever I protested at his protective overtures, he’d just say, “You’re my only daughter,” which I took to mean that I was the only person in the world.

My dad is used to acting the part of patriarch since his father—the one I’m named after—died from a heart attack at a young age. The middle child of three boys, and, from what I glean, a bit of a rumpus-starter in his adolescence, one of the chief defining characteristics of my father is, perhaps idiosyncratically, his deep appreciation of musicals. He still talks about the first Broadway show he ever saw:
Li’l Abner,
a show that is, like
Annie
, based on an ancient, ridiculous comic strip. He recalls sitting starry-eyed as a youngster in an orchestra seat as actors bleated the show-stopping “Jubilation T. Cornpone” number, agape at the spectacle of it all. But although he always loved musical theater, my father was never a performer. Even if he had the ability to carry a tune in a steel-lined bucket, it’s not his nature to take the spotlight. He’s the guy who shines it.

It’s an untrue stereotype to say all gay guys love musicals, but it’s a pretty good ballpark generalization to say there aren’t a ton of straight men under fifty who thrill when told the planned activity for the evening starts with a cab ride up to Times Square and ends when Tommy Tune takes a bow. Heterosexual men typically abhor the pageantry of musical theater; its broad humor, the artifice of a character breaking out into a full-throat ballad during a tender moment, the camp of it all, at once terribly out of date and in questionable taste. What I personally delight in—the humor inherent to stuff so bad it’s good, or at least funny—is a language unintelligible to many a girl-liking boy, with the exception of certain types of straights like tea-sipping PBS-aficionados and actors, who are gay by definition, because all actors are in love with themselves.