Stupid and Contagious (2 page)

Whenever I’m washing my hands in a public bathroom, nine times out of ten, the woman next to me sucks her cheeks in when she looks in the mirror.

What are these women doing? Trying to look thin?

Like a fish? Like
Zoolander
? If they’re not going to keep that face on when they leave the bathroom, what exactly does the exercise gain them? If it’s just for fun, then, hey, I’m al for it.

When I say marriage sucks, I don’t mean it
sucks,
so much as I don’t real y know if it sucks or doesn’t.

I’ve heard good and bad. My feelings about marriage are mixed, or should I say mixed-up. My parents were split before I even knew what a split was. So, while I’m speaking with authority, I have no experience with marriage or married parents, to say nothing of marital bliss.

My first memory of the male/female dynamic would be enough exposure to hold me through several years of high school.

When I was about eight years old, Pete, my neighbor from down the street, used to lurk outside my house for hours on end. Sometimes I’d come out and play. Sometimes not. He was relentless in his pursuits, and with me . . . persistence often pays off.

One day, when I was picking flowers from my neighbor’s garden to make a bouquet for my mom, Pete fol owed me for half an hour without saying a single word. And I ignored him.

When I started to go back to my house, he final y spoke up and asked what I was doing later. I told him I was going out to dinner with my dad. He asked if he could come. I said okay.

On our way to Santo Pietro’s we were in the backseat of my dad’s Camaro. My dad’s girlfriend, Sandra, was in the front seat with her long blond hair and overgrown, feathered bangs, and al I could think about was the twisty garlic knots that we’d have at the restaurant. I didn’t see my dad very often. I think it’d be safe to say the garlic knots were more familiar to me than my dad.

So there we were . . . me, dreaming of bread, Pete trying to get my attention. And the whole car ride I was trying to touch my tongue to my nose.

“I’l show you mine if you show me yours,” he said. I shrugged and stuck my tongue out at him.

“You don’t want to?” he asked.

“I just showed you!” I said, sticking it out again, this time bulging my eyes out at the same time.

“Not that,” he said. And then he looked down and yanked at his zipper.

“I don’t think so,” I replied, wondering how much longer to Santo Pietro’s.

“I’l show you mine anyway?” he offered.

“Okay,” I said, looking out the window, watching my dad navigate the twists and turns of the canyon.

Without a second thought, Pete unzipped his fly and pul ed out his johnson, not even bothering to unbutton the top button. He just pul ed it through. It was thin. It looked like a misplaced pinkie.

But more important, my tongue was now only a teensy weensy bit away from my nose. I gave it one last try, curling it upward, stretching it, reaching . . .

Then BOOM. From up front, a thunderclap shook the car in the form of my dad yel ing. I don’t remember what he said as he caught Pete in the rearview mirror, his penis on casual display as though it were a Peking duck hanging in the window of a Chinese restaurant, but I know the sheer force of it practical y blasted me out of my seat. To this day, the mere sight of a penis makes my ears hurt a little.

My dad turned the car around immediately and took Pete home, and then he took me home. No garlic knots. I was devastated.

Brady

And then he comes. The jerk-off that is about to claim the seat next to mine. My aisle seat. No chance of there being
two
beautiful women on this plane. Not with my luck. Luck being a relative term, because lately I haven’t had any. I’m the Siegfried and Roy of luck. Not in the smash-hit-show-on-the-Strip-for-fifteen-years-running sense, but rather in the this-thing-that-supposedly-loved-me-is-dragging-me-around-by-my-jugular-like-a-rag-dol -and-fighting-off-efforts-by-stagehands-to-rescue-me sense.

I look in the mirror and I know I’m not in the top 1

percent. But definitely top 10 percent. Or maybe 20.

Certainly no worse than 30. Anyway, I clean up nice.

I’m a good enough height that I don’t automatical y get ruled out for dates on that alone. In some cases, it may have even been the
only
attraction, which is not to say I’m super tal —luckily, I’m just tal enough. It’s like that sign in front of the dangerous rides at the amusement park: You must be
this
tal to get on this girl.

Some girl once told me that I have a cute smile. But there was a time immediately after the Rol ing Stones’

Tattoo You
came out when I thought it could have been made better with the addition of a diamond in my front tooth, à la Mick Jagger.

I have what has clinical y been described as “dating disorder,” characterized by a series of medium- to long-term relationships, suffering from sore tempers, abraded vocal cords, and the occasional fractured heart.

First there’s Sarah, a particularly severe case. But we’l get to her later. She was only the most
recent
in a series of troubling episodes.

My mom says it’s temporary, but looking at her and my dad, I sometimes think my romantic problems are congenital. Their idea of a good time is finding the thousand ways they can spend entire evenings in separate rooms without saying a single word to each other—though the house I grew up in had exactly five rooms spread across 1,400 square feet. My dad says it’s because I haven’t met the right girl yet, but sometimes I think maybe I’ve met her five times already but ended up staring at her friend al night and asking
her
out, the one who would eventual y steal eighty dol ars out of my wal et to pay for a bikini wax, which I never got to see.

It’s not al my fault, though. I’ve had a substantial selection of the crazy and the cruel. There was Jil Perczyk, who broke up with me on New Year’s Day and then cal ed me three weeks later to ask how much the DVD player I bought her for Christmas was, because she couldn’t determine a fair price to ask on Craigslist.

There was Courtney Goodkin, who scolded me good-naturedly about paying more attention to my dog than I paid to her,
then
revealed her true nature by leaving a twenty-four-ounce bar of dark baking chocolate in her purse by my dog’s bed one night—a gift he eagerly consumed. A sleepless thirty hours and five hundred dol ars in vet bil s later, Courtney was but a bittersweet memory.

And then there was Wendy Richtor, whose name couldn’t have been more fitting. If a devastating earthquake measures an eight on the Richter scale, the Wendy earthquake of ’92 registered a twelve. She was beautiful. She had long, wavy strawberry-blond hair and milky-white skin. Her long, wil owy arms were like stretched-out vanil a taffy, and to be lost in them was better than any sugar high I’d ever experienced.

I met her at a Pearl Jam concert, which made me feel like it was destiny. I loved Pearl Jam and she loved Pearl Jam, and I loved her and she loved me. It was perfect. Like Eddie Vedder brought us together.

Eddie sang the words I wished I could tel the girl I thought I’d never meet. And there she was . . . singing along to every word. And it’s not that Pearl Jam was any more amazing than anyone else. I think we just liked who
we
were when they were who
they
were. If I could stop time at my last moment of purity and innocence, it would be right then.

Wendy warmed my heart, earned my trust, touched my soul, and then touched me in a lot of other places.

And right after we’d slept together for the very first time she looked up at me with her chocolate-brown, trustworthy doe eyes and said, “I’ve got herpes. I thought you should know.”

“I guess this is me,” the interloper says, and I nod as he sits himself down and gets situated. “I’m Marc.”

“Brady.” We shake hands. His hands look like oversize pancakes. Did I mention I also hate germs?

Now I want to wash my hands. I’m not obsessive-compulsive, and I don’t mean to come off sounding like a wuss, but there’s like zero air pressure in here, and the air is al recycled. It’s basical y a germ factory, and I can’t afford to be sick when I get home. Not because I have anything important going on. In fact, that’s just it. Nothing’s going on, and I’ve got to
get
some things going on. God, I want to wash my hands.

We haven’t even backed away from the gate, and already the bathroom thing is coming into play. I’l just suck it up and wait.

Heaven

I’m not a list-maker. I’m not overly organized. I’m not what some people would cal “anal retentive.” And I’m definitely not the kind of person who makes air quotes when she says “anal retentive.” That said, I’ve made two lists in my life that give a little insight into who I am. Not much, but a little.

One list is the “People I Hate” list. The other is the

“People Who Are Not Invited to My Funeral” list. I used to update and revise the “People I Hate” list regularly, but truth be told, it hasn’t been updated in years. It’s been so long I don’t even know where it is or who was on it. Except for G. E. Smith. I know he was definitely on it. So I can safely say it hasn’t been updated since G. E. Smith was part of the
Saturday Night Live
band. I don’t know him personal y, in case you were wondering. I just always hated the way he mugged at the camera like a skeleton in heat.

The whole funeral thing isn’t as morbid as it sounds.

I don’t have a disease or a death wish. In fact, I plan on living a very long life. It’s just that in the event some freak accident happens, I want to be prepared. And I want to make sure certain people don’t show up and pretend they were my friends and act al sad and so forth. I have to assume I’l have a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, and watching people I dislike feigning sadness at their loss would just bug the hel out of me.

I want to be able to enjoy my own funeral. I think I deserve at least that.

Life doesn’t always work out the way you think it wil

—sometimes you walk into the restaurant thinking salad, and end up with nachos and a greasy Reuben.

I went to Emerson Col ege. I double-majored in economics and political science. After graduating with a BS degree, I got a job with one of the top PR

firms in New York, which specializes in entertainment.

What public relations and economics/poli-sci have to do with one another is absolutely nothing, but during my last semester I got rejected for an internship at the governor’s office, and ended up interning at the PR firm. They loved me there and offered me a job at graduation. A job I gladly took.

Within three years I was dealing with al their major clients. Within four years I was making six figures and living in a kick-ass apartment with rooftop access.

And as I prepped myself for a major book signing with one of our clients—Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe—I had every reason to believe I was one more “attagirl”

away from being made a partner.

So there I was. Twenty-five years old. Soon-to-be-married almost PR mogul.

Brady

As it turns out, Marc and I both flew out for the South by Southwest Music Conference. This is the one place where everybody who’s nobody in the business goes to realize just how smal we real y are next to the true luminaries and visionaries, who seem to be stacked like cordwood about the place. And this is an indie conference. It’s not like the Rol ing Stones are there performing. Stil , it’s the people who rule
my
world and I always come away feeling like a peasant, wishing I had more than my slop bucket to peddle.

“Leaving a day early, huh?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“First time at South by Southwest?”

“I’ve been every year since they started,” I admit.

“Cool, man. See anything good?” This is the exact conversation that I do not want to be having with a total stranger. Especial y a stranger that looks almost identical to me. Thirty-something, hair slightly thinning although neither of us has admitted it yet, and dressed like a teenager. Band T-shirt, ugly-yet-cool button-up shirt over it, Diesel jeans, and sneakers.

“Couple good shows,” I say. “Mostly letdowns.”

“I hear ya.” I desperately want to get out of this conversation by putting on my headset and becoming one with my trusty iPod. “MyPod,” as I cal it. I don’t want to talk to Marc about bad-joke bands with one great song, who al suck live but get good press from assholes who don’t know shit about music but think they’re supposed to like it. No, that is not what I want to talk about. I don’t want to talk at al , in fact.

So here we do the classic dance of not wanting to be murdered in your sleep by an irate seatmate but not wanting to be
too
friendly so you can’t zone out and ignore them for most of the trip. “Wasn’t Cat Power amazing?” he asks. Here it goes. “I saw Liz Phair at the Cat Power show. She was standing in front of me in the tightest jeans you’ve ever seen. Al of a sudden she feels herself up. I swear to God, dude. It was unreal. Like I’d wil ed her hand to grab her own ass. It was truly a beautiful thing.”

I just don’t feel much like dancing. I pul out my iPod, pop the headphones on my ears, take a quick glance back at the hot chick, and settle in for the ride. And then . . . Marc pul s out his iPod.