I Don't Care About Your Band (28 page)

“[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.”

—
Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Remember, we dancing girls are honor bound to keep on dancing.”

—
Cynthia Heimel,
Sex Tips for Girls

 

 

 

I
’ve never been one of those people afraid of getting older. Maybe it’s because I seem to get happier the further away I get from elementary school, and maybe it’s because I’ve always had good adults around me, like my parents, who were examples of what older people can be like when they’re not awful. Beyond the ability to teach you hilarious new words for sex, I don’t see the romantic allure of youth. The baby- fat faces of those chimps on
NYC Prep,
the ersatz hip-hop posturing of white teenagers from the suburbs, the hairless bodies, the orthodontia, the awful clothing, the vampire shows: All of it is off-putting to me. But most of all, I’m not overly fond of young people because, with the exception of fictional characters Little Man Tate and Doogie Howser, they just aren’t as smart as older people. They haven’t lived long enough to know about stuff with cultural roots deeper than “Remember
Full House
?” and most of them aren’t too curious about learning what came before
them
.

I started feeling my own transition from young to smart, appropriately enough, on New Year’s Eve—that of “Baby New Year” and “Old Man Old Year” iconography. It was the last day of the twenty-ninth year of my life, and I had a few different plans with girlfriends I was weighing for the night ahead. My friend Donna was going to a party in Williamsburg, which I was only beginning to hate, so I tagged along. She schlepped me to a loft party hosted by a model friend of hers. Model parties are the worst, because they have terrible snacks and beautiful people, and when you look at the beautiful people, they only make you want delicious snacks. Donna got bored there, so she ditched me to race to Times Square, yes seriously, so she could kiss her boyfriend by midnight in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment she swore had an “awesome view of the ball drop,” just like every TV in the country. I wandered the streets debating my next move, and then it was eleven thirty, so I hailed a cab to get to another party my friend Becky told me was at her friend’s place, right near the Lorimer stop on the train.

I had a street address, but no cross street. The cab driver asked where to, so I had him drive straight on the block I had written down as I stared out the window at revelers in cocktail dresses, watching the street numbers slowly descend. We passed the BP gas station, and Broadway, and the other landmarks I recognized, until we were in a residential neighborhood far away from anything I’d ever seen before. The condos turned into projects, and the projects turned into tenement buildings, surrounded by leafless trees and carless streets. Orthodox Jews dwindled from groups to pairs, then there was the odd lone rabbinical student, and soon there were no more people on the sidewalk at all. My cabbie kept driving.

“How much further?” the driver asked.

I checked my phone: it was 11:50 p.m.

“I’m not sure. It’s number seventy-six.”

The numbers on the apartment buildings outside my window read 354 and 352. I tried calling Becky, but she didn’t pick up or text back. Finally, we pulled up in front of number 76, a grubby walk-up. A girl in her early thirties with dyed green hair, a presumed reveler, stumbled past the front door. She looked methy and had no companion. As Green Meth got buzzed in, I realized from the safety of the backseat that this party spelled bad news. There was no way it couldn’t
not
be fun. And I’d never be able to get home once I made what I’d hoped was going to be a quick appearance, which also seemed like a fat chance. I was miles from any train station, Becky had no car, there weren’t any cabs that drove near this neighborhood unless dumb Jewish girls forced them to, and nobody in the city can get a car service to pick up the phone on New Year’s Eve. If he dropped me off at 76 Whatever Street, on the corner of What The Fuck, I would be at that party indefinitely.

The cab driver pulled up to the curb and looked at me in the rear view mirror.

“Do you want to get out?” he asked me.

“No,” I replied. “No, I don’t.”

I was relieved he gave me the opportunity to hear my thoughts spoken out loud.

Without wasting another minute in the middle of nowhere, the driver hit “reverse” and slammed on the gas, desperate to get back to a zone where drunks paid cabs for rides. The speedometer hit 60; he knew that he wouldn’t hit any other cars if he drove backwards as fast as he could, into the abyss.

It was 11:55 p.m. when I realized that my decision to say no to that party had landed me face-first into the plot of a Sandra Bullock movie.
“Who will kiss me at the stroke of midnight?”
I panickedly wondered to myself as though it were important, behind a plastic console and a Moroccan immigrant driving backwards on the icy streets of the most deserted non-desert terrain of the country I’d ever greeted with bare eyes. I called my friend Michelle, who was at a roof party in the neighborhood, and she told me to stop by.

So I did, and I got to hug Michelle in time for the fireworks and the rest of the ballyhoo, and honestly, it was all perfectly fine. A relief, truly: the kind not worth its build-up. And I thought to myself, never again will I do something that dumb; will I buy into somebody else’s notions of what has to happen on New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day or all the other stupid designs in place to time your feeling bad with the rest of the world’s calendar. Since when have I been so lame that I cared about stuff like that? Only sad sacks and conformists need things like no kiss on New Year’s Eve to remind them to feel lonely. They’re as bad as the people who need St. Patty’s Day as an excuse to get drunk or Halloween to wear slutty outfits. You can feel sorry for yourself and dress like a hooker all year round: Hallmark never needs to know.

I stretched my arms out on the roof at that party with Michelle and all her tattooed, skinny friends, sucking in the night air. I remember walking to the lip of the building to better see the skyline of sweet, wide Manhattan and thinking about how good it felt to exist in a negative space. To know what I was
not
. How the kids around me, the ones who looked good scowling in photos, and got laid constantly and had access to phenomenal cocaine and implausibly flattering vintage clothing, could probably never write a story like I could, or be as good of a friend. How I knew there were people more easygoing than me; who would have said “What the heck!” getting out of that cab earlier, and would go sniff out the offerings of that party without a single worry about how they would get home later or how late they planned on staying.

But who knows whether the easygoing people in your life who can sleep with somebody and then move on, or take you to a party only to ditch you for Times Square, were going to be around in the long term. Would they be there if somebody you thought you could fall in love with disappeared without a trace and you wanted to talk at two a.m. about how much you missed him, or how secretly you think you’re exactly like the person in your life you hate the most, or about how you’re afraid of failing at being a writer?

I thought about how lucky I was to be different from how I was before. How I used to mistake “yes” for “yay!” and the pursuit of knowledge for the possession of it. I thought about how trivial people used to be better company to me than solitude, and how I’d finally earned the ability to shut out clutter—at least occasionally—and to leave self-sabotage to the kids who can’t enjoy being alone now and then. The ones who do not believe deep down, even through the gauze of thick doubt, that they have what it takes to rise to the top, like cream. And I took relief that night in knowing that someone, somewhere else knew that too, and that he’d
get
me, once he finally got the chance to make my acquaintance.

“NO” IS
a word that has different meanings, depending on your age. When you’re a kid there’s the apathetic “no,” the cynical “no,” the “no” you use because you don’t want to try a gross-looking food or learn how to multiply fractions. Then, in your twenties, you try saying “yes,” because you’re racking up experiences. But eventually, you figure out that unless something seems outstanding and un-missable, it usually feels better to turn it down. And the name for that stage of life is “your thirties.”

Michelangelo said that he makes a sculpture out of a marble block by removing everything it’s not. Pretty smart stuff from a guy who made pizza pies in Boston! I’m thinking of the right Michelangelo, right? He has a chain restaurant? Wears a toga? Anyway, it’s nice to know that once your twenties are over, you don’t have a bunch of extra marble weighing down your silhouette.

You don’t feel compelled to go out with guys who smell like bad news, and you don’t have to do things you know will not be fun, like hauling your ass to a gig for some band you’ve never heard of so you can spend three hours on your feet, switching your purse from shoulder to shoulder.

Your twenties are the worst part of your life that you don’t actually know at the time is terrible. Being a teenager sucks too, but you’re aware of every last second of it. I decided to write this book right before I turned thirty, as a way to say good-bye to saying yes to things that don’t make sense.

 

THERE’S A
fantasy I’ve always entertained about connecting with somebody who hated as much about the world as me. Somebody cranky and contrarian, who loved dishing about successful people we both knew who sucked, but meanwhile liked my friends without any reservations. In my quest, I gave too much leeway to guys who seemed negative enough for the job, and they ended up hurting me. Alex, the critic, whose job it was to have a snide thing to say about every band you’d never heard of. Ben, who had nothing but self-deprecating insights into how lousy he was, without taking any responsibility toward what it was about him that made him insufferable. Jonathan, the man-child with the kid who wouldn’t return a text unless it was at his own leisure. The more I heard “no” from them, the more I felt “yes”—that they were it. But the older I got, the more I liked about the world, and the better I got at figuring out what was game for tearing apart, and what was best to leave alone. It’s the difference between cynicism and criticism; you need to be more of a grown-up to tell the difference.

The Critical No is the one you grow into. When you use it, it’s to save yourself from future turmoil you reckon is beneath, or at least behind you. The biggest prides I’ve taken since graduating my twenties lay in the risks I took in turning things down. I said no to a dumb reality show after I read the contract, even though I had no other possibilities on the horizon at the time and was starving for cash. I quit smoking pot once I realized I did not need help being hungry. I got rid of the people I outgrew, and I fended off pests who tried to get back into my life.

Like, last week—I got a “friend request” on Facebook from this awful woman I went to college with. She was one of those friends I had that I didn’t like, but kept around for company. She found me online and wrote me a little note saying “Long time no see! I’m up to the typical three B’s: Book, Baby, and Brooklyn!” And I clicked “Block” so quickly that the rush felt like crack cocaine. I only wish I’d had the balls to click “Report This User” so the FBI could’ve kept her on the potential sex offender list in time for her to start shopping for expensive preschools.

But I digress. Around this time of graduation or evolution or whatever you call becoming thirty, I started fending off the guys I didn’t like
before
I slept with them. It was the first change I noticed in my behavior that really marked my twenties being over.

And. Thank. God.

 

 

OF THE
multitude of characters I’m relieved to
not
be, I’m most grateful that I’m not one of those women who fights against time like somebody buried alive, scratching at the lid liner of her coffin. I cheerfully ushered in my thirties the year that began with a cab tour of What I am Not Land with the knowledge that I can confidently pass up opportunities that don’t make sense because there’ll be better ones on the horizon, even if I have to wait.

But I only know that kind of peace since I’ve given myself a break. All of a sudden, at some point, it became no longer necessary to punish myself for every transgression I made, like eating candy before noon or not writing a feature screenplay every week. Once I was rid of the chemicals in my brain that blocked out patience with anger, I could start making more informed choices about what makes me feel good and whom I allow to make me feel bad. In other words, I could start liking myself. And I began letting myself like people who have that in common with me.