I Don't Care About Your Band (26 page)

It was a whirlwind romance, contained in a few months and told to me in the time it took for our enchiladas to arrive. I was almost impressed by how cracked this guy had to be, not only to live this reality, but to relay it with such ease to a first date—with no sense of shame or decorum at all. What a disaster was Alistair. It was like he was the living personification of
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Then he told me about the time he was arrested.

He was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time, so I figured he wasn’t incarcerated for any kind of offense that wasn’t adorable. I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest, but my impression of that part of the country is that it’s all café au laits and ironic lunch boxes. I figured he was arrested for shoplifting one of those Ugly Dolls, or a box of those Band-Aids shaped like bacon strips from one of their hipster gift shops. But then he gave me more data to add to the “Crazy or Stupid?” bar graph poll in my mind—the one that was quickly becoming a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. Alistair told me that he used to “party” a lot, which explained the impulse control he failed to exercise with the Cypriot, not to mention the cranberry juice and soda he ordered with his meal, and soon I was treated to the story that narrated his push into the twelve-stepiverse.

He was wasted one night, which is a great way to start an “I got arrested” story, because you know already that the point isn’t how he
got
that way but what he did once he was. It was around four a.m., and wasted Alistair saw a car idling, its doors open and nobody in the front seat, in a Chevron Food Mart parking lot, where he ended up alone, though he did not remember how or why. At the time, because he was drunk, Alistair thought it would be really
funny
to drive around in that idling car. The one that wasn’t his. That’s what he thought would be funny. I thought about the sketch he’d brought to class before, and wondered if indeed there
were
jokes in it—only they were “Alistair Jokes.”

So, he’s drunk and high on something too, and he’s taking this late-night joy ride in a stranger’s sedan at a high speed around Portland, when he suddenly realizes he’s being followed by a heap of squad cars. And then, once he sees their flashing lights in his rearview mirror, he also catches sight of what’s in the backseat of the car. He turns around to confirm what he saw, still speeding on the evergreen, drizzly streets of Oregon, and there it is: a toddler, asleep in a baby seat. In the car he ostensibly stole.

Long, dreadful, horrifying, damning, humiliating short? He was charged with DUI, Grand Theft, and Kidnapping. Funny, right?

I was still processing the news of the Cyprus girl’s abortion.

BY NOW
our dinner was over, and Alistair wanted to go to a bar to have a coffee, which is what alcoholics in recovery drink when they go to bars. So we did, and then he wanted me to come home with him. And you’d think I’d be in the “no way” zone, but, frankly, I was still in the “whatever” zone with this guy, who was clearly a hot mess in so many new and hilarious ways, but also inarguably cute. And besides, I’d already come out to Brooklyn to make out, and frankly, no disrespect to Deana Carter, but “Did I Come to Brooklyn for This?” is the new “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

A cab took us to an unidentifiable, nightmarish section of what I was told was Prospect Heights, but looked like the set of
The Warriors.
There was a Chevron Food Mart across the street from him, and I didn’t even know there were any Chevron Stations in New York City. I guess he managed to find one out of the nostalgia he felt for the hilarious night he stole that car.

He had a second-fl oor walk-up apartment—a railroad, in the confines of which I felt distinctively unsafe. There was no style to the place—he had hunter-green “teenage boy” tinted walls and a black leather loveseat behind a Target coffee table. I have to say, though—the novelty of going into other people’s apartments never gets old for me. Having sex with people is a great way to see what kind of furniture guys have and how their apartments are decorated. It’s replaced babysitting for me as the best way to snoop around people’s homes.

We made out, and I’d say it was OK, but I honestly don’t remember, which probably means it was fine. And we kept going, not because I was turned on, but because it was so dull that I felt the need to step it up, just for the sake of getting the bang for the buck. Like when the food is bland and not so tasty, you just keep stuffing yourself, in hopes that the fullness will substitute for what you’re missing. Satiety for flavor swap. Quantity over quality. Lousy food in big portions. You get the idea.

And that’s how I found myself on top of Alistair’s navy blue cotton comforter, with his dick
and
balls in my mouth. I needed to teabag him out of necessity, because Alistair was the kind of small in which you feel the need to treat his balls like they’re part of his penis, just to give the whole situation some extra length. Like when you let somebody keep their shoes on when you’re measuring their height. I pretended his balls were the lumpy, wide base of his underwhelming shaft, and he moaned in appreciation over the fat-skinny guy gut he blamed on his breakup with the girl from Cyprus.

We finished, and I had him call me a car service, because there was no way I was going to sleep in that bed, nor was I going to go out and hail a cab in that neighborhood alone any time of day or night. He wrote me the next day and told me he’d had fun, but I saw no point in writing back until my birthday, a few months later, when he reached out to wish me a good one and called me hot stuff, and I let him take me out to dinner again.

That was a bad idea.

I knew it was, as soon as I got a call from him telling me he got lost, even though I gave him excellent directions to a restaurant in Manhattan on the corner of two numbered cross-streets. I’d made the mistake of delegating another evening of my life to this Burning Man festival-attending, pointy dick-having,
Crystal Skull
-liking, self-admitted kidnapper. Still—I’m glad I went. Because after bearing witness to what I’d later call his “Vagina Monologue” at dinner—about how he just isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life, whether it’s paint or write, and how he thinks he’s lazy, maybe, and also has a hard time setting goals for himself because he isn’t sure what he wants, and how he doesn’t know whether to look for another job or work toward a promotion—I had my answer to the riddle that plagued me since I first met Alistair in my class.

“Is he crazy or stupid or both?” didn’t seem to be the most pertinent question anymore with this guy. I had my answer. Alistair was just a loser. Of course he was! Why hadn’t I pegged him sooner? I’d made out with enough by then to know one at first glance.

 

 

HE WALKED
me home after splitting the check, which was lame because the idea was that it was my birthday dinner, and when we got to my building, he asked to come upstairs. I was about to politely refuse, when he begged to use my bathroom. My bathroom! Do people still do that to get laid? “Please, let me come upstairs for sex.” No? All right, how about this: “Please let me come upstairs to
move my bowels
.” Yeah! That’s more like it! Let the boning commence!

So he came upstairs and peed, and then he came out of the bathroom and looked around my apartment. He noticed that I didn’t live in a tenement apartment in the “apocalypse” part of Prospect Heights, My Ass, and that my furniture didn’t look like it had come from the “Back to College” aisle of a superstore, and, using classic Alistair judgment, he decided he had to comment.

“Wow, what is your rent?” he said. “Like, a million dollars?” Asking New Yorkers how much rent they pay is like asking someone what she weighs. It is very rude. So at that point, I made the conscious decision to ignore Alistair, who had officially become a contaminant in my stylish and reasonably priced Manhattan one-bedroom, and instead of glaring at him or giggling or responding in any way at all, I silently turned on the TV
.

I flipped through the channels icily as he made his way next to me on the couch. He put his arm around me and I didn’t move. And soon enough, the small talk about the yogurt commercials faded into awkward silence, and then he said he was tired and should go, and I walked him to the door and decided he stunk.

I got an e-mail from Alistair later that night—a rambling monologue about how he was sorry for not knowing what he wanted or something about being more “on it” next time, and instead of telling him that there was not going to be a next time or writing back, “That’s OK, good to see you!” or anything else, I deleted the e-mail and forgot about him all over again. Until the summer, when I saw some photos he posted on Facebook that he took at Burning Man. He was in a dress, alongside fellow freaks, behind the wheel of a float that resembled a giant rubber ducky with a disco ball for a head.

I took in the scene: the sun, the pink smoke, the sand around the duck truck that went on for what seemed like miles, the girls in bikinis and tattoos in giant birdcages on deck. And for Alistair’s sake, I peeked in the back of the float to make sure he wasn’t accidentally transporting a toddler.

 

 

 

T
here’s a type of man who stands out when he walks into a room, like the little girl in the red coat from
Schindler’s List
.He comes in, and suddenly everyone else around you is black-and-white, offsetting this dynamo, this apple-cheeked, charisma-drenched peacock. That’s when you’ve got to be careful.

I met one of the flashy ones at a reading.The first thing I noticed at the event was him. The second was his wedding band.

I don’t, as a general rule, mess around with married men. There are girls who kill themselves over their attention, their duality, their unavailability and empty promises. I slept with one once, when I was traveling in my early twenties, but the experience didn’t devastate me because I didn’t like the guy very much. He wasn’t great in bed, either: He made monkey faces when he moaned and hokey Dad Jokes in between switching positions, and at a certain point he just wanted to talk to me about the TV shows he liked to watch. The only hazard the affair posed to my mental health was my being bored to death. But it still wasn’t good for me, and I didn’t repeat it.

 

IF ANYBODY
studying psychology wants a concrete example of what a narcissist looks like, I advise them to consider any man who cheats on his wife. These guys are the textbook mefirsters, the ones who think the rules don’t apply to them, the ones who tell themselves as long as she doesn’t know, there’s no harm done. No woman needs to sleep with these guys. There are so many
single
self-absorbed narcissists who will fuck you poorly.

I was downright high on the fumes of my own self-righteous philosophy until Leo walked into that party like he was walking into a Carly Simon song. And Leo taught me in an instant that your convictions about what men should and shouldn’t do once they have wives who aren’t you is all well and good until someone is flashing this boyish grin at you and undressing you with his eyes and laughing at your jokes and touching your forearm and otherwise being the most charming man you’ve never met, and you want so badly to be on your back with your panties at your ankles, grinding his face into a soft pulp with your crotch.

All I did was flirt with Leo that night, and he drank it in like a mule at an oasis. Some married men flirt the way starving people pull up to a buffet.They partake of every morsel—each breadstick, every cocktail shrimp; pasta
and
rice—as though it were their last gasp before reboarding the express train of their marriage. Plates are filled; garnish is inhaled. They don’t even know what they’re doing sometimes; they just know they are so hungry.

The night we met, Leo asked me out to lunch at his work, and I said yes, and then, he said, “Boy, if I were single . . .” which gave me the chance to mentally finish his trailed-off sentence: “. . . I’d date you
and
fuck you.” Leo followed me around the bar that night until Nate came by and sulked, because he was cranky and hungry and didn’t want to hang out with writers who dressed terribly at a lousy party, bless him. So Nate and I left to go eat Chinese food, and I came home to an e-mail from Leo, and the correspondences began.

It was a pleasure meeting me, he said, then added, “Who, precisely, was that silent redwood hovering nearby? The guy, I mean. Did I detect a glower?”

He was baiting me, like I’d be dumb enough to play jealousy doubles with a guy who had a spouse to compete with. Maybe he thought he’d luck out negotiating a wife swap. And honestly, for any girl looking to sleep with a Married, the only viable option I can possibly advocate, reporting as a correspondent from Crazy Town, is doing it when you’re married too. Sometimes that shit works out! Two people in unhappy relationships commiserating as peers? People still get hurt, but at least the low and high status stuff evens out, so it’s slightly less unfair than the alternative.