by Ben Philippe
I wanted to be one of the obnoxious chosen ones. After all, I already knew my heart can be cold. I knew that two countries ago. I wanted to confirm the opposite now. The logic was that if I could will myself to be skinny, how hard can that be?
As you might have already picked up on, I’m occasionally very dim.
Seventeen
Ivory Skin, Eyes of Something Green
Two months into junior year, I’M TWENTY-TWO STILL, already sliding back up toward 160 pounds, and watching Gossip Girl in my dorm room on a Saturday night. Take a moment to absorb the full sadness of that image. It is a mirror image of my being eighteen and watching Gossip Girl, and later, twenty-nine and watching Gossip Girl, only then it will be in preparation for my college syllabus on Gossip Girl as an aspirational cornerstone of teenage media content for a class I am teaching on American TV Drama. Life is a boomerang that keeps regaining velocity by bouncing off the face.
The night’s episode is appropriately set at Columbia and involves secret elite societies and a showdown at Fashion Week. I had a lot of expectations of Columbia University and, beyond the books, postcard-worthy campus, and the prestige of an Ivy League, a lot of them came from Gossip Girl. You can’t blame me here. I was raised in the era of The Gilmore Girls’ Life & Death Brigade, a time where every other teen movie had a casual mention of Yale University’s Skull & Bones secret society, where the Illuminati’s hot teen offsprings have orgies on their way to Ibiza every weekend.
College had delivered on many fronts, but not that one. Columbia may have prestige and reek of privilege, but one thing it is not—as the pungent clouds of body odor in Butler Library during finals week will attest—is glamorous. For one thing, the only notable secret society—St. A’s—was a boring collection of European students and WASP kids who referred to their parents by their first names, blew mummy and daddy’s money on coke, and went into finance. Moreover, the only famous person on campus at the time was actor James Franco trying to prove something by simultaneously attending NYU, Columbia, and, I believe, Yale. At any rate, I never even bumped into him. Who knows? If I had, I might have prevented The Disaster Artist.
The semester was well underway, and there were no real updates to my love life. Unfortunately, this new slim body did not change the operating system. I still didn’t have the verve of guys who take photos of their dicks with their pants around their ankles and holding their long tank top up between their teeth in front of a stained bathroom mirror.
I mostly like people; I just tend to be bad at them in any romantically combustible context. My flirting game was still, by modern human conventions, limited. In social situations, it often amounted to paying casual compliments like, “Oh, I like your shoes” and then fifteen seconds later adding, “I’m not gay. I mean not as a full orientation. It’s all fluid but, like, sexually, I like women,” all delivered with unwavering eye contact.
And then two days later, in the middle of another conversation about coursework, I would slip in a “And, by the way, the shoe thing the other day was not sexual. Like, the actual shoe would not make me climax without your foot in it or anything. Cool! Goodbye forever!”
College students, as it turns out, only throw two kinds of parties. The intimate kind, that never include more than a handful of close friends, and the open-door kind, where everyone is invited and the point is to crowd the space to the point of discomfort. Kesha blares so loudly you feel it in the foundations, you can’t move ten feet without navigating past twelve sets of elbows, and every line has to be spoken twice over the sound, and even then all you can do is nod a reply to whatever it was that was asked because you’ll never hear it.
I turn off Gossip Girl and decide that’s the sort of party I need tonight. College, dammit! New York City! I’m wasting svelteness while people all over the world are spending their Saturday nights on treadmills or eating small portions of oatmeal and whey powder trying to achieve this.
A few minutes on Facebook and I find out there’s one happening on the northern outskirts of the campus, teetering into Harlem. I wasn’t invited but “everyone’s invited!!!!” I know “everyone.” I have a class with “everyone.” I could be everyone’s plus one.
I wear a leather jacket and push my way into the wiggling mass of people, throw a few ’sup nods at people I don’t recognize, and a girl with a red Solo cup yells, “Woooo!” when she sees me. I yell, “Wooo!” back. There’s always a fun, loud girl yelling “Woo” at the door. They’re a precious resource to the world; a burst of cheer that lets introverts and maladjusted people think they can actually do whatever it is they are trying to do in spaces like these.
I’m an asocial social drinker who spent many formative Saturday nights indoors during my teenage years. I watched SNL live with a stack of mangas at my side when I should have been tipping cows over. This means I’ve been improperly trained in the art of drinking, which in turn makes me the lightest of lightweights; slurring after a peach Bellini is my weight class. Woo!
I look around for an entry point and catch snippets of conversations. “I hear he pokes holes in condoms, dude,” a guy whispers to another, and I will spend the rest of my life, up to this very manuscript, wondering what was the tale of this sharp-penised gentleman.
“It’s all over Facebook,” a voice whines on my right.
“You’re being dramatic,” her left-side counterpart says. “It’s not all over Facebook. It’s one post on one person’s wall. It’s not like the masses are talking about it.”
“People are saying she has chlamydia on Facebook,” the left voice, soft like summer rain, says with a smile, leaning into me without boundaries like I’m a conspiring cousin at a wedding. This voice belongs to, well, I can’t use their real name, so let’s say, Jolene. Ivory skin and eyes of emerald green. Jolene enjoys attention, makes poor spur-of-the-moment decisions, and falls in love too easily, as Jolenes tend to do. I won’t say that her beauty is beyond compare, but she is very, very pretty.
“Jolene!” her friend exclaims, pretending at slapping Jolene. “You bitch. I don’t have chlamydia!” Jolene laughs and hugs her friend—Olivia—defusing the anger. She has sweaty brown hair and enough freckles to look French.
“Ben.” I surprise myself with my casual, first-name-only introduction.
It’s “Ben” because I don’t use “Rubeintz” anymore these days. I’ve never had much attachment to ID cards. It’s supposed to be a shuffle of the letters of both of my parents’ names. “Robert” + “Belzie.” A strangely creative choice, but one I’m grateful for considering the first choice was apparently “Junior.” “Ben” works. Short for one of my middle names, Bennett. I like being a simple one-syllable. You could recast me as Todd tomorrow and I wouldn’t mind. Names are just one-word bits of fiction, after all.
“Jolene,” she says, simply stating her name, and it feels like a line from a movie, which is fine because I’m working with the entire CW catalog in perfect recall myself.
“I’m Olivia,” the possibly chlamydia’ed redhead at her side says, taking it upon herself to complete the circle of introductions because she still thinks this is a triangle, though I banished the thought the moment an STI was mentioned.
Conversation with Jolene, with occasional attempts to join in by Olivia, is easy. We’re head turners tonight; an inciting incident at the corner of a party. This is exactly what I had launched myself out of my dorm room in search of an hour ago. I suspect Jolene likes being seen talking with a Black guy. I like being seen chatting up a pretty brunette, whose voice carries over the music, swaying her hips occasionally but not quite dancing.
“Dude, what are you going to do with a degree in creative writing and sociology?” Jolene asks. She uses dude a lot, as though she has cracked the code of speaking guy.
“Write creatively about society, duh.”
Or, herd stray writers into functioning social groupings. I haven’t decided yet.
“Ha! You better you marry rich, dude.”
I wink and it’s more of a brazen closing of one and a half eyelids but she laughs out loud nonetheless.
“Oh, man. Can you imagine!” she asks Olivia without necessarily waiting for an answer. “My mom would make you sign a brutal prenup, sorry.”
I learn that, at twenty-two, Jolene proudly describes herself as a secular humanist, which makes me both performatively groan and is also an inexplicably huge turn-on. She and I continue like this, laughing out loud at random interludes of a conversation that requires less and less of Olivia. We let her jokes fall flat and refocus on each other, stifling a giggle at her story and then bursting out into laughter at the silence we created around it. Poor Olivia. Don’t feel too bad for her: she was the type of twenty-something who called her singing “her vocals.”
Jolene tasks the two of us with guarding the door to a nearby open dorm room’s open bathroom. It’s a two-person bedroom left ajar for convenience while its occupants join the party, which is entirely their fault.
“You’re going to need diapers when you’re older,” Olivia mocks. “You just peed an hour ago!”
“Shut up. Also, you two aren’t allowed to fuck without me,” Jolene warns, before closing the door, already pulling up her skirt.
Olivia takes this as a challenge and tries to kiss me and narrowly misses only to end up licking my ear. Her tongue feels grainy and harsh against my skin as though it might lead to zits.
“Um, I’m, thank you, first of all, but I’m not looking for anything right now, sorry,” I say, and I wonder if all my lines are lifted directly from television.
“Whatever,” Olivia scoffs.
She is embarrassed, and when Jolene exits the bathroom with fresh makeup on and a toilet flush echoing behind her, Olivia announces that she has received a text that 1020, a bar at the corner of Amsterdam and 110th, is where she has to be tonight.
“This place is dead,” she says, no longer watching me. “I’m bouncing. Later.”
The invitation is not extended to the two of us. She dismissively hugs both Jolene and me at once, squeezing one of each of our shoulders without bringing our three bodies closer. We watch her walk off in what could be construed as a huff.
“We were like twins last year. Inseparable,” Jolene says, shaking her head, as we watch her go. “I don’t know what happened.”
I shrug, not wanting to appear too thrilled that her friend is gone. No, I don’t want to make out with you, Olivia. You seasonal-arc villain. You’re a temptress, a foil. This is not an episode of Gossip Girl, seedy and tantalizing; no, this is a rom-com.
“This is going to sound mean but,” Jolene starts as we naturally navigate out of the party after waiting a few minutes, wanting to avoid an awkward run-in on the ground floor, “do you ever wish we could just meet a whole new set of people every year? Not just college but, like, our entire lives?”
“New stories.” I nod. New first impressions each time until you get it right. Until you find your tribe. Who wouldn’t want that?
“Dude, yes, exactly!” Jolene exclaims. “I just keep meeting the same people in different outfits.”
Belzie would like her, I think. We fell in love drunk one night in college is a pretty good story. I’m fascinated by the life she’s led, where she might have been at the exact moment I was reading a book or defeating some final boss on my bed in high school, or on my knees in Haiti.
“Hitchhike? You hitchhiked around Los Angeles all summer?”
“It was Santa Monica Boulevard and in broad daylight!” she defends. “People were super nice.
Jolene is that secular humanist majoring in economics who occasionally dabbles in commercial acting.
“One couple even went into the lot and dropped me off right at my audition. People are nicer than you think, Mr. Sociology.”
She and I roam around the well-lit and well-guarded enclave of the Columbia University campus. The campus is never quite empty; the patterns just change.
Once we tire of walking, we sit on the steps of the Low Memorial Library, overseeing and tracking the foot traffic of people returning from parties toward their dorm buildings. We get to know each other that specific way people who interact from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. get to know each other.
Our conversation dissolves into tired nonsense, so much empty bubblegum pop that Willy Wonka might seek legal action.
“I think I’m in love with you,” I say without thinking. How many other things in my life had I not willed into existence by speaking them out into the universe?
Jolene lets out a cackle. “Go home, Ben,” she eventually says, which I somehow still find endlessly charming and clever. In a few months, I will think of it again and make it my Twitter handle.
“No,” I insist. “Marry me.” I suddenly stand up only to get down again and on one knee. “This is now a proposal.”
Jolene pinches my cheek and pulls me up by the forearm.
“You’re a puppy.”
“And you’re reckless,” I say, still drunk enough, as she leads me across campus toward the East Campus.
“I’m reckless,” she agrees with some satisfaction.
“Well! What’s more reckless than marrying a guy you met three hours ago at a party?”
It’s dramatically elegant, sober or drunk. I was a Canadian in need of a visa, after all. Jolene watches me for a moment, enjoying weighing a sudden proposal. It will never be clear to any of the parties involved how serious I was about this marital outcome at twenty-two.
We make out waiting for, riding, and subsequently exiting the elevator up to her dorm room on one of the top floors. Her roommates are either gone or asleep and every window in the suite is outlined with dimly lit Christmas lights. Jolene’s breathing is ragged and her cheeks shine pink when we tumble into her room. We tumble in only because we’ve both seen people passionately tumble into bedrooms before and it seems hotter than simply walking into said room. Both of us are performing for an audience that isn’t there. Her desk is cluttered with nail polish bottles, and the circular mirror above it has words like CITIZEN and LOVER written all over it, some in lipstick and others in black Sharpie. It’s perhaps one of the various art projects she had mentioned earlier.
“Do you have condoms?” she asks.
“Yes.”
Leather jackets come preinstalled with condoms. If you own one, go check the pockets right now. There are a few LifeStyles peppered throughout.
“This is just friendly, right?” she verifies, throwing her wallet and purse, and kicking boots off.
“Yeah, of course,” I lie.
Wrong! I’m still waiting for an answer to my proposal. I’ll tell her about Robert with my head on her lap someday. We’ll whisper while the baby sleeps in a tiny but well-situated apartment in the West Village we can both afford.
It is hot and more angular than not. Everything is pressed together, generating the uncomfortable heat of unfamiliar bodies pretending otherwise. I’m sweaty, but sweaty at 154 pounds is a lot different than sweaty at 192 pounds; a light mist as opposed to a swamp with a shopping cart in the middle.
“Pin me down,” Jolene demands.
I have no proof of this, but I have the distinct feeling that she watches more porn than I do, which is a daunting statement considering my porn consumption is at a twenty-two-year-old-male-college-student-without-roommates level.
“Squeeze my tits,” she moans.
We are billionaire Chuck Bass and millionaire fashionista Blair Waldorf, in the back of a limousine. I’m Dan Humphrey and she’s Serena van der Woodsen. I’m Nate Archibald and she’s Juliet Sharp. I’m Nate Archibald and she’s Bree Buckley. I’m Nate Archibald and she’s cougaresque duchess Catherine Beaton. Jesus, that show never did figure what to do with Nate Archibald, did it?
“Squeeze my fucking tits,” she breathes again, sounding annoyed.
Isn’t that what I was already doing? Stop thinking about Gossip Girl, you repressed catamite! I curse myself. Focus on the moment. That is what this is:
a moment.
“Yes, baby, slam that Black dick into me.”
I oblige as best as I can. Jolene is still in character, moaning loudly. I think she’s trying to wake up her roommates.
“Like that?” I try.
“Yeah, just like that. Drive it deep in there.”
I’m a bad actor. I don’t have the hips or the gusto for her verbs. I want to right-click and downgrade “slam” to “bring” or “throw.” I wish I had access to all the synonyms needed for this. Fat or skinny, I really should never be naked. It’s awkward for everybody involved, and I somehow still maintain the energy of someone wearing ill-fitted clothes made of itchy fabric.
“Yeah, baby. Rape me. Fucking rape me with that Black dick.”
“Why are you stopping?” she asks, breathless, which I can’t help but note with some pride before all the uglier feelings catch up to my brain.
“I’m not . . . doing that, though,” I say. “The r-word.”
This is less chivalry than the accumulated pamphlets and tutorials and campus discussions on the nature of consent. Only yes means yes.
“I know that,” she says, and when I remain motionless, she sighs heavily and pulls her arm out from under me.
She runs her fingers together over my head like she’s sprinkling magic dust. “I hereby grant you full consent to ram that Black dick in me.”
Forty seconds ago, it could have been cute. In the moment, I had almost forgotten I was the owner of a Black dick.
“Okay,” I say and we resume.
She uses the word again and I shut it out of my brain and focus on the feeling instead.
I notice how quiet the room actually is beyond the sound of our two bodies. My nails are clogged with dirt, but I can’t recall from where. They were clean when I left my room. I wonder if my ice cream is melted. That mini-fridge can’t be trusted.
