The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (18 page)

I knew about it only because Bino chose to tell me about it. He carried the letter with him into the to-go station and told me what it said. He told me that
because
of what it said, he was taking me off karaoke detail. He told me he was scrapping the night as a whole.

“But why?” I asked. “I thought it was all going good.”

“It wasn’t,” Bino answered. “I hoped it would, but what I realize now is that karaoke makes people eat less instead of more. Besides which, now here I am with a letter of complaint.”

“But I don’t even get it.
What
was her complaint?”

“That you were ‘acting black.’ She wrote”—and Bino grimaced—“that you were being … 
racist
.”

If you live in a mostly white suburb—and I lived in a mostly white suburb—you learn the lesson fast that there is no worse thing than being racist. One mentions that word, one cuts close to the bone. You learn to be defensive on the subject, and it is this defensiveness that clouds your judgment. It makes it hard to consider the validity of any racist accusation. For example: Maybe a sixteen-year-old who does a certain style of performance is in fact latently racist. Then again, if a grown adult thinks there’s such a thing as “acting black,” well then, maybe
she’s
the one who’s racist.

Regardless of whether my unknown accuser had a valid point, her accusation followed by the loss of the karaoke gig had the cumulative effect of making me
really
depressed. When Bino left the to-go station, I made a mad dash for the employee bathroom for an impromptu clutch-’n’-sob. (In which I clutched myself. And sobbed.) “Possession” was playing on VH1 when I got back, but I couldn’t enjoy it. I just sulked through the rest of my shift, left work, and went home.

My bad mood carried through into the next day. I arrived
at Bino’s BBQ in the early afternoon only to discover that I was atypically
uninterested
in Olaf. He’d brought me my potato as usual, and all I’d said was, “Okay. Whatever, Olaf. Thanks.”

Olaf looked confused.

“Sweat-EEE Sara BEEEE,” he said. “Today you be some bitch? Why come you be some bitch?”

Speaking of some bitch, Olaf asked me why I was being some bitch at exactly the same moment Bino’s wife, Sharon, wandered in. Sharon was in an equally bad mood. Sharon was never in a good mood really, but today’s was especially bad. Earlier in my shift, I’d heard various grumblings about something to do with the employee bathroom. Something about how someone had gone in and drawn Sharon with a penis in her ass. Something about a caption
beneath
the ass that read,
“Tengo muchas ganas de morir.”

This translates roughly from Spanish to English to mean, “I really want to die.”

Sharon had discovered this drawing of herself, and now here she was mere minutes later with Olaf and me. She’d walked in on Olaf giving me a potato, and me leaning against the cash register. VH1 blared from the TV set behind us. It was one Ms. Tracy Chapman. She was “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution.”

Over the several months I’d worked at Bino’s BBQ, Sharon had been successful in instilling within me a certain amount of fear. Normally when she entered the to-go station I would jump to attention to feign a modicum of respect.

This time, though, I didn’t care and didn’t want to.
This
time I had been accused of being racist, I had been stripped of karaoke stardom, I had been told by Olaf not to be some bitch.

This
time, when Sharon barreled in, I stayed exactly as I was.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” she yelled. “YOU ALWAYS WATCH TV!”

And that’s when I said it:

“Fuck you.”

I was not usually so mouthy. But I had been pushed to my limits, and Tracy Chapman was there for support. Tracy Chapman was talkin’ ’bout a revolution. And so was Sara Barron. Sara Barron—
finally
—had the will to take a stand.

And, therefore, a reason to be fired.

There was no fanfare and no time for good-byes. I said, “Fuck you,” and then Sharon shouted, “WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?” and then I shouted, “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” and ran straight for the door.

I was high on fear and excitement for twenty-four hours. Then, though, I had to call work to see whether or not I was supposed to come in. I was terrified to make the call, and to disguise myself I affected a British accent. Which meant I then had to say who I was.
In
a British accent.

“Oh. Bino. Cheerio. It’s Sara Barron. I … um … 
Well
. I do beg your pardon, but I’m … supposed to work today. At four p.m. So, well, should I? Come in?”

Bino was silent for a moment.

Finally, he said, “You told my wife to fuck herself.”

Then I was silent for a moment.

Finally, I said, “No I didn’t. I just said, ‘FUCK YOU!’ ”

With that, I slammed down the phone.

WHERE WAS IT
all coming from? Such boldness!
Such
aggression! I guess my recent exposure to so much articulately expressed female anger had had its positive effect.
And now here I was: standing on the shoulders of giants. On the shoulders of
my
giants. Of Tracy, and of Tori. Of Lisa, and of Sarah, too.

I MISSED MY
job after losing it. I missed Olaf, my potatoes, and the overall sense of camaraderie. I felt the sting of these losses but I also recovered quickly from them. I was mostly just happy not to have to work. I had lost my job one week before I was due back at high school, and was grateful for the extra time in which to relax, as well as for the wealth of new music I’d discovered. I put my personal knack for lyric memorization to good use, singing aloud whenever location permitted: in my bed, in the shower. On long, private walks to the beach. I sang so I would not forget. When finally my last Bino’s BBQ paycheck arrived, I used it to purchase the albums on which all my favorite songs appeared. When Hanukkah rolled around, I requested a cable subscription, promising my parents that if they bought it for me, it would preclude them from further present requests for a minimum of six months.

“Make it a year,” said my mom.

“Agreed,” I said, and as a woman of my word, did not complain when, the following May, I turned seventeen and received a jar of Clausen pickles.

Impressed by the trustworthy teen I’d become, the universe gifted unto me a woman by the name of Alanis Morissette.

She wrote a song called “You Oughta Know.”

The amount I enjoyed “You Oughta Know”—the sheer number of hours I spent seductively pressing my hands against the full-length mirror in my bedroom while singing its lyrics
at
myself with a zeal to suggest I’d suffered a very real mental breakdown—cannot be overstated.

——

I KNOW I’M
not alone in behaving as I did. So many others knew and loved these women and their music. The difference, though, is that these others—the ones I know, anyway—have matured and moved on. I had a friend in high school who
died
for Lisa Loeb. Now, though, she’s a painter-cum-sculptor. Now, though, she dies for Grizzly Bear. Which is a guy, I guess. Or a band? I honestly don’t know. The point is that
now
she likes him/them. For she’s matured, you see. So many do. They’re happy to revisit aural haunts on occasion, for theirs is a journey driven by nostalgia.

Mine, though, is not. My love remains dangerously true. When I listen to Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” it is not, uh, ironic. It is not for some jaunt down memory lane. It is because I’ve opened up iTunes and seen it sitting there beside some other thing called Morrissey, and I have very truly thought, But I
love
the song “Ironic.” Why force my way through the unknown?

My tastes, exposed, may have made me a pariah. But they have fostered self-acceptance. They have made me finally free.

My name is Sara Barron. My favorite album ever made is
Little Earthquakes
.

My name is Sara Barron. My workout mix is Jewel and Meredith Brooks.

I don’t know Bob Dylan.

I don’t know The Smiths.

It may have taken time to get here. But in the end, I got here: In my bones, I am uncool.

Before I moved to New York, a roommate, like a bouquet, struck me as a lovely addition to one’s living space. I’d put in eighteen years at home with my parents and my brother. It hadn’t been bad, but it hadn’t been great, either. Certainly, it had not been great
enough
to slay me with the bittersweetness as we all four reached the end, as I inched toward my college departure. I did not mourn the day-to-day loss of my family. I was too excited for a roommate. A proper gal pal. She would laugh with me in good times, cook for me in bad. I’d be new to New York, exhausted by the intellectual rigor of studying acting, and she’d be there for me, my rock: a full pant size bigger than I was, and dying to hear about my day. I’d come back from class and she’d already be there, already waiting.

“Hi!” I’d say.

“Hi!” she’d say.

“You’ve
got
to hear about my day!” I’d say.

“I
want
to hear about your day!” she’d say.

We would speak only in exclamations and we would be almost always happy.

I held on to this fantasy for six months before I left for college.

I let this fantasy go six days after arriving
at
college. This was thanks to a freshman roommate who tweezed her pubic hair while seated at her desk. It was not an ideal practice, but at least it was quiet. The more significant problem was the whining that followed the tweezing.

“My neck is sore!” she’d moan. “I need a massage!”

There’s a limit to how many times a person can hear this before offering advice. Mine was ninety-five. Finally, I said, “It occurs to me it might be helpful if you stopped staring at your twat like it’s a fucking mirror.”

And she answered back, “Yeah, well, it occurs to
me
it might be helpful if you went and fucked yourself.”

From an objective distance, I now can see we both had solid points. I can see we both suffered through the other’s idiocy, and I don’t begrudge doing so, frankly, since the process taught me an important lesson early on:

A roommate is not there to be a bestie, she’s just there to split the rent.

Thus was my metaphor forcibly switched.

And so did I endure: one new roommate for each new year of college. In the end, the pubic-hair tweezer
did
turn out to be the worst. But the others weren’t great either.
None of them would talk about how wonderful I was and/or ask about my day.

AS I INCHED
toward college graduation, I became increasingly obsessed with the prospect of living alone. I’d look in the window of every real estate office that I walked past. I’d learn all that I could about the apartments that I saw. Dimensions, street names, price. If you told me the size of the place and the street it was on, I could make a pretty good guess at its cost.

I was usually right. But the breadth of my knowledge was narrow. Each one of my college dorms had been in Greenwich Village, and so I’d walked mostly past Greenwich Village real estate offices with Greenwich Village listings. These meanders were the extent of my research. It was 2000–01 by this stage, and while I was aware of the Internet, I did not yet
live
on the Internet. I did not yet have the wherewithal to research any options farther out, and was therefore under the impression that a studio apartment—that
any
studio apartment—cost around fifteen hundred dollars a month.

You might as well have told me it cost around fifteen
million
dollars a month.

There were cheaper options out there in the farther reaches of the outer boroughs. But that would take some time to figure out. All I knew for now and for sure was that I’d need a place to live.

And that in that place, I’d need a roommate.

COLLEGE GRADUATION CAME
and went, my parents informed me that they would no longer be paying my rent. As a gift, they gave me a check for $1,000. My mother was
the one to hand it over. When she did, she said, “This is very,
very
generous. Do not insult us by asking for more.”

I promised I would not, and then promptly used a significant portion of the money to book a one-way flight to London. I was in the midst of a fledgling romance with a British student. He’d decided to move home to London, and I’d decided it might be nice to join him. I thought I might go for the summer and share his apartment and see how it went. I knew it was impulsive, but I was very much in love. And this, my blinding and impulsive love, fought through the fact that he, my beau, looked
just
like Marty Feldman.

Picture those crazy, bulbous eyes. Picture that
tiniest
of tiny hunchbacks.

Imperfection be damned, though, he “shagged” and also “snogged” as though every day might be his last. And we shared a worldview. We agreed on the stuff that’s important:

Things went along okay for a while, but then one afternoon he and I were enjoying a luxurious afternoon nap when he turned to me to say, “Listen: I
do
love you. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and come to the conclusion that I could love someone else … more.”

“Who?”

“Well, I don’t know
who
, exactly, I’m just speaking in general terms.”