GEORGIA: I think I know myself well enough at this point in my life that I’m just not cut out for school, so it would have to be something I’m already qualified for like bartending or crime scene cleanup. I’ve always thought raising and training cadaver dogs would be fun.
Or! Maybe I’d open a sandwich and pastry shop that also sells vintage kitchenware and has an outdoor bar where people can bring their dogs and babies and there’s also Skee-Ball and Scrabble. Man, that sounds like a perfect place. I bet your cult would hang out there.
art by Abigail Ervin
7
BUY YOUR OWN SHIT
GEORGIA: This goes along with the theme: There are no shortcuts in life. That the easy way is, in fact, never that. When you don’t act with the understanding that no one can take care of you better than you, you can find yourself in a lot of trouble, living a life that you don’t control, or trusting people with nefarious intentions. Just like the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” meaning if it seems too good to be true, GTFO of there.
Georgia Demonstrates the Zen in the Art of Being a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
The acute pain you feel when you get your heart broken … have you ever felt it? Oh my god, it fucking hurts. There is no escape from it, no amount of pills to help you fall asleep and sleep well, no amount of busyness you can fill your day with that’ll block out the raw, constant pain, and it’s physical pain, I swear.
I, of course, learned this firsthand many times, so by the time I was eighteen, I thought I was an old hand at heartbreak. By that point, I had been through multiple relationships, having started dating at the tender age of thirteen. By the time it was my turn to dump someone—my first real boyfriend when I was seventeen—I was very gentle about it, knowing from repeated experience how it feels. The guy I dumped right was Chris, who I mentioned back in “Send ’Em Back.” We’d met in rehab and had basked for a year and a half (an eternity for a teen!) in all the boyfriend/girlfriend goodness that I had always fantasized about, like referring to each other as “babe,” having sleepovers when my mom was out of town (complete with my first orgasms!), and spending Christmas at his house with his big, totally normal family, who treated me like family, complete with my very own stocking hung over the fireplace. It was the first time in my life that I understood why people actually wanted to get married and have kids. I could see having that with him, but when it came down to it, I wanted something totally different in life.
So I decided to create my own breakup model, in which I’d act in the way that I wished the guys who broke my heart had. The whole idea can be summed up by the camping mantra, “Leave it in the condition that you found it.” To sum it up even more bluntly, “Don’t be a dick when you break up with someone.” Essentially, straightforward, honest, and clean is the only way to break up with someone and have you both leave with your dignity intact. No ghosting, no months of breakup sex, no hemming and hawing and toying with them. This takes a TON of vulnerability because this process is awkward as fuck and feels shitty to both parties involved, but I swear if you buck the fuck up and break up like a civilized person, in the long run, unless they’re a psychopath or total dick, you’ll keep your soul somewhat unscathed and their ego and heart not broken beyond repair.
But then at nineteen years old, I met Aiden, who I fell for hard and fast as only someone who thinks they’re immune to heartbreak does. Blindsided is how I would best describe it. It was the late ’90s, and I’d finally (finally) moved to Los Angeles from my hometown of Orange County. I thought my life was beginning and that adventure and freedom would be around every corner. And then I turned a corner one day and I found Aiden. Hot, well-dressed, tattooed Aiden.
* * *
Less than a week after getting handed my high school diploma by Principal Who’d-Have-Thunk-It, I passed through the Orange Curtain and moved to my gloriously gritty, smoggy, unpredictable Los Angeles. You remember this part. This is the part where after eighteen long years of the stifling blandness and uniformity that is suburbia, I’d finally come home.
Being in a city where I knew no one was terrifying and exhilarating. I would drive around aimlessly in my first car, a bare-bones, hand-me-down Toyota Corolla whose after-market budget speaker system was somehow connected to the stick shift so when you shifted up, the radio got louder, and when you downshifted, it got quieter. So just picture eighteen-year-old Georgia in hip-hugger jeans with dyed black hair and a lip piercing screaming along to gut-wrenching emo songs about longing and heartbreak, daydreaming of all the life-changing events that my future had in store.
Every new neighborhood I’d find in my wanderings made me feel like an explorer uncovering uncharted territory that I’d mentally mark on my map, always expanding upon the geography of my adopted hometown.
Beverly turns into Silver Lake. Rowena turns into Hyperion. Hollywood turns into Sunset.
This was when online directions and maps were in their infancy and definitely not available on my archaic pager—yes, I had a pager; no, I wasn’t a drug dealer—so my back seat was littered with discarded printouts from MapQuest, which were usually incorrect and definitely a driving hazard as you’d have to read the tiny printed directions and navigate LA’s traffic at the same time.
Driving in LA is and always has been a feat of bravery, something best left to sadists and those of us with a Xanax prescription. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is the norm, at any time of day, and one out of every three drivers is a raging lunatic asshole who doesn’t think the rules apply to him because he has lots of coke and a car that could pay off your student loans. The stress and idiocy and left-hand turns with no arrows is enough to make a Buddhist monk lose his chill. No joke, sometimes when I’m alone in the car, I roll up all the windows and scream at the top of my lungs just to release some pressure. I’ve spent entire therapy sessions talking about how to control my anger while driving. It’s A LOT.
Road rage aside, the first step to my fabulous new life was getting a job on Melrose Avenue, at the time my favorite place in the world. Back in the ’90s, the famous Melrose Avenue was a gritty, graffitied, eclectic street that, for about eight long blocks, was home to cheap-as-fuck thrift stores, gay sex shops, record stores, and cafés serving terrible coffee.
Adding to its weirdness was a retirement home smack-dab in the middle of the action, whose occupants would post up in their chairs on the sidewalk every morning for a front-row seat to watch the mix of shoppers and homeless people and delinquents with mohawks as they paraded up and down the avenue.
Just a few blocks west was the high school where my parents met as teens, but this was my Melrose that housed the tattoo shop where I got my underage, Ray Bradbury–tribute nipple piercing and my pink ’70s prom dress for twenty-five dollars (a splurge for me then). Throughout high school, I maintained an expertly balanced rebel esthetic of ’60s grandma dresses paired with spiked dog collars and used Chuck Taylors by making twice-yearly pilgrimages to Melrose with my sister in her beat-up 1988 Toyota, on which she’d painted a giant psychedelic butterfly across the side. I officially bestow my heartfelt thanks to the gods of fashion who must have been watching over us, due to the fact that we never stalled on the 405 during that hour-long journey. I mean, that car was a fire hazard. At best.
But Melrose … (takes a deep breath, extends arms, and spins in a circle) … this was our weirdo home base. I collected every Dead Kennedys album from the various record shops dotting the block. It was a hub for those of us who didn’t fit in and had no desire to do so.
So when I moved to LA and started looking for a job, the store didn’t matter as long as I worked on Melrose. That should explain how I ended up with the official-sounding title of assistant manager at the first shop where I had turned in a job application. I was paid in cash under the table every week (in a mini manila envelope, to boot) but they let me blast Modest Mouse over the speaker system, so I looked the other way.
During my lunch breaks, I’d visit the shops along
the block despite the fact that I was paid a pittance, so I couldn’t afford to buy lunch, let alone a vintage purse that I coveted from a shop down the block that was adorned with a giant peacock made from colorful rhinestones.
So one afternoon during that first summer in Los Angeles, 1998, I ducked out on my lunch break, and it was a perfect, perfectly LA day—sunny and warm, but not scorching yet. One of those lovely days that convince you that everything is right in the world. I’d brought my lunch that day, so I had a couple of bucks in my pocket, which I promptly used to buy a used Buddy Holly cassette for my car and its defective stereo before making my way down to window-shop at one of my favorite vintage spots, Jet Rag.
Every month, Jet Rag hired someone to style their four or five window displays, and whoever it was that they used was wildly creative and talented. Using only items in the store, they would create these tongue-in-cheek scenes that were more like dioramas that belonged in a macabre museum than measly store-window displays. But on this particular day, the thing that caught my eye wasn’t the fancy window art, it was the scooter parked out front.
It was a beautiful old Vespa, and even though I didn’t really know what Vespas were exactly, I knew I loved them. I had of course seen Audrey Hepburn looking adorable jetting around on one in Roman Holiday, and I knew I loved the way this one looked parked on the sidewalk, ready for adventure. I coveted it. I had never been a person to have any interest in riding a motorcycle (anxiety doesn’t love it when you take risks), but this cute, kitschy scooter was begging me to don a vintage dress and take a Sunday ride along the beach. It spoke to freedom from the claustrophobia of my car.
As soon as I walked into Jet Rag and saw Aiden, I knew he had to be the owner of said Vespa I coveted. And I coveted him, too. They were a perfect set—the beat-up vintage scooter of my dreams and the cute, quiet older guy with the Rude Boy aesthetic complete with worn-in Doc Martens and suspenders holding up his fitted jeans. His head was shaved, tattoos covered his slender, sinewy arms, and his coke-bottle eyeglasses made me want to protect him from schoolyard bullies. He had adorably crooked teeth and a slight limp from what I later found out was an old scooter accident (see, my anxiety was right!) and I was smitten-as-fuck at first sight.
I grabbed a random dress off a rack and walked over to the dressing room counter he was manning.
“Hi, can I try this on?” I asked in my most charming voice. As he walked me back to an empty dressing room, I casually asked, “So is that your Vespa out front?” He said it was, and I told him how much I adored it, which seemed to stroke his ego, and we shared a flirtatious smile as I closed myself in the dressing room.
Once I was securely behind the curtain, I wrote my pager number down on the back of the receipt for the Buddy Holly cassette I’d just purchased, and when I brought the dress back out to him, I handed him my number as well. “Call me,” I said, and then I sashayed my capri-pant-wearing ass out of the store.
Jesus, I was confident back then.
I only had to daydream and fantasize about being on the back of Aiden’s Vespa for one day before he contacted me, although my aching want to have that Vespa, OK fine, and also him, between my legs made it feel like an eternity. So basically, I did the crush thing I eventually became mature enough to know not to do: I let my fantasy of him become more important to me than who he turned out to be for real, which was not that great and also kinda boring.
The first time Aiden and I hung out, I met him outside of Jet Rag when his shift ended, and he handed me his extra helmet. It was a vintage WWII-style black helmet that I later learned is nicknamed a “brain bucket” by those in the know due to its ability to do absolutely nothing of use in a crash aside from keep one’s brains contained instead of spilling across the asphalt. As an adult, I’m having a panic attack just writing that.
“How does this work?” I laughed as I struggled to figure out the clasp beneath my chin.
“I got it,” Aiden said with suave confidence as he tucked his (much safer) helmet between his legs and moved heart-racingly close to me to help secure the helmet.
I held my breath and took his moment of distraction on the clasp to study his face. Lovely dark lashes surrounded his sky-blue eyes, and his lips were the pillowiest I’ve ever seen. Just as I felt gravity pulling me toward them, the clasp was locked in place and the moment had passed.
“There!” he said in triumph, and he put his own helmet on, straddled his scooter, and motioned for me to hop on back.
“Remember this moment, remember this moment,” I mantra-ed to myself, knowing this, my first-ever motorcycle ride, would be something I’d want to remember in the future. And I’ll be honest, I wasn’t totally sure it wouldn’t be one of my last memories, as the anxious girl in me wasn’t completely convinced we weren’t going to crash and die that night. I hoped we’d at least get a chance to make out before that happened.
We took off from the curb with a jolt and were flying down Melrose Avenue, passing all the familiar shops and personal landmarks, but this time, instead of being safe in my bubble of a car or slowly walking along the sidewalk, I was free and open and it felt like I could reach out and touch something. The road, a store, the sky, whatever. I felt like I had been wearing a heavy coat my whole life, and suddenly, I was wonderfully, refreshingly naked. Add to that the exhilarating feeling of having my arms wrapped around the waist of this very attractive dude, who I’d been fantasizing about and flirting with over the phone for days. It was overwhelming. I was dizzy.
I pressed my nose to the back of Aiden’s leather jacket as we zipped in between cars idling in the late-evening rush-hour traffic, and I inhaled the intoxicating aroma of vintage leather, made all the more exciting by the fact that my last boyfriend, an Orange County bro with the least Rude Boy aesthetic on the planet (what’s up, dreadlocks and nipple piercings), had been (deep, cleansing breath … wait for it…) a vegan.
I had never experienced that shocking freedom that comes with being exposed to the world on a motorbike or the envious looks from the normal people, in their normal cars, living their normal lives. All these things conspired to make my heart race that much more when we later kissed on an empty beach in Malibu, his Vespa abandoned by the road, waiting for us like a spaceship in the moonlight. We rode for hours, late into the freezing-cold night with the single headlight illuminating the road in front of us. Down Sunset Boulevard past the designer stores and huge billboards, through the winding roads that are lined with some of the most expensive houses in the country, and all the way until it deposited us on the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time he dropped me off in front of my grandma’s house, I was so cold I could feel it in my marrow. I felt like I’d never be warm again, so I ran a steaming hot bath and soaked until the shivering finally stopped and my fingertips were shriveled. I went to bed that night, on the same mattress my mom used to sleep on as a child, with a smile on my face, still feeling the vibrations from the scooter throughout my body.
This is how my fairy-tale Los Angeles life began. This is what I had waited eighteen years for under the stairs in my childhood home, reading while wrapped in an afghan, with Whiskers asleep on my feet. It was happening.
* * *
Aiden is from a time in my past I can never get back and never want to. It was the time in my life before I learned that when a guy is quiet, when he seems intellectual and all-seeing with a rich inner life but shy and reserved, it’s actually because he’s boring. Or worse, he’s hiding something. I now know that both of those things were true in Aiden’s case, but at the time, his silence intrigued me and gave me the opportunity to project whatever I wanted and needed him to be onto what I thought was this brooding, deep person.
* * *
Quick advice break, friends and fiends: don’t project your own fantasy and personality on shy people. Let them speak for themselves, or in shy people’s cases, not speak for themselves. If you’re like me and can’t handle one-sided conversations and pulling teeth to get someone to open
up to you, go find someone who will.
I imagined Aiden’s inner world to be deep and complex, and I wanted to be the girl he opened up to and shared his thoughts with. In reality, it turns out he was just concentrating on how to keep his long-term girlfriend a secret from me the whole time. Womp womp.
Don’t mistake someone’s quietness, lack of participation in a conversation, or—worse—air of disinterest as intriguing. If someone holds their cards close to their chest, it doesn’t necessarily mean their cards are worth fighting to see. The people who are open with their cards, who wear their cards on their sleeves and offer them to you in a take-it-or-leave-it manner, those are the people worth playing cards with. I don’t know why this metaphor has become a card game—maybe it’s been too long since I’ve been to Vegas—but you get the gist.
And hey, if you’re shy and hold your cards close to your chest, I get it. It’s hard to open up to people, especially when you’ve been hurt before and you were raised in a house where your caretakers were emotionally unreliable or used your emotions against you because of their own untreated psychological issues (Wait, what? Mom??), or because someone in your past didn’t adhere to the “leave them like you found them” breakup model.
On my second date with my husband, Vince, I was so irritated that he was being quiet that I told him I couldn’t keep hanging out with him unless he started talking. The night we had met, we had talked animatedly all night, so I knew we had a good connection, but as soon as we started dating, he clammed up.
After a date that I cut short ’cause I was just so sick of hearing myself talk and ask him questions to try to get him to talk, he asked me if everything was OK via text.
Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered Page 16
