by Sara Barron
“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.
Part III
Roommate
11
Mole Woman
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.
From: Bouquet.
To: The process of a most unpleasant puke.
From: A lovely contribution to a living space.
To: Something awful you endure because you have to.
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.
400 square feet. Morton Street: $1,800 a month.
300 square feet. Christopher Street: $900 a month.
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:
1. The sunny side of the street causes headaches.
2. Pets are disgusting.
3. Chronic lateness is indicative of self-absorption.
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.”
A decade later, I calmly reflect on this exchange—on the romance as a whole—as one of youthful misadventure. I rejoice in the gentleman’s current status as a waiter/unpaid blogger on the indie-music scene.
At the time, though, my brash American temper got the best of me. I reached for the bedside pot of tea and tried scalding bits of his anatomy. Then I hopped the next flight to New York. Which isn’t a cheap fuck-you, by the way. I used up most of the rest of my graduation gift to do so. I had no money left over, and since my parents had the ridiculous idea that college graduates ought to pay their rent themselves, I went ahead and chose the least-expensive option: I moved into the walk-in closet of this guy I knew named Wayne.
Wayne and I had met three years prior in a college elective called Valuing Self: Solo Performance Through the Ages. Within days of my New York return, he and I ran into each other in Tompkins Square Park. I’d gone there to consider whether the homeless lifestyle might be negotiable by any stretch, and Wayne had come to power-walk.
“Sara? Barron?” he’d asked.
He’d seen me crying while lying prostrate on a bench.
“Why are you crying on a bench?”
Wayne’s question was the perfect inroad to a conversation on the injustices of postcollegiate life. I told him, “I just got dumped by that English guy you said looked like Marty Feldman! I have no money! I slept at a youth hostel last night, and when I showered there this morning I stepped in a pile of someone else’s hair! I swear to you, it looked alive!”
“I hear you,” said Wayne. “My dad cut me off after graduation. It’s totally unfair.”
Wayne’s dad was a wealthy businessman who’d built his fortune on savvy participation in the Indian hair trade.
“He still pays for this class I’m in called Script Yourself, and for my rent and for a gym membership so I can work on my pear shape. And he pays for groceries and a weekly cleaning service. Nothing else though, and I’m like, ‘Well, I can’t create art, if I can’t afford to see art.’ ”
I nodded sympathetically. I said, “Struggling is the destiny of the artist, though. Just like they taught us in Valuing Self.”
Wayne and I tossed around solutions to our respective problems, like that I could sell my eggs or that Wayne could get a job. But these were not realistic options. I lacked the necessary generosity of spirit, and Wayne lacked a willingness to interrupt his PACT.
PACT was an acronym from Valuing Self.
It stood for Personal Art Creation Time.
Eventually, though, and after enough rigorous debate, we arrived at a potentially brilliant and mutually beneficial solution: I could move into Wayne’s apartment, but then in lieu of paying rent, I’d do the cleaning. I’d shirk homelessness this way, and Wayne would free up a portion of his budget.
“But what if your dad finds out?” I asked.
“He won’t,” Wayne answered. “I get a lump sum every month. And all he says is, ‘Just please go to the gym. Just please work on your pear shape.’ ”
The plan felt perfect to the both of us. The only downside was that Wayne was homosexual, and that this, in turn, meant no hope of trading sex for further amenities. It was a shame, really. I would’ve loved the occasional romp if it meant un-begrudged access to Wayne’s high-end foodstuffs. But as Wayne himself would say, “Why shove a lemon up your asshole if you’re drinking lemonade?”
Why, indeed? I would opt to keep my asshole lemonfree.
Wayne lived in the East Village, which, as a neighborhood, can shift on a dime. Or rather: in a block. From idyllic to disgusting. From brownstones and boutiques to bongs and belly-button rings. The apartments do the same. Some are tiny as a shoebox. They are weirdly arranged with showers in kitchens and toilets in communal hallways. Others, however, are dream-worthy brownstones. They look like how New York looks in the movies. By which I mean like a rom-com kind of movie. Not a gritty drama.
By which I mean When Harry Met Sally. Not Kids.
Wayne, as I said, was still supported by his parents. Not a little by his parents. Completely by his parents. The situation surprised and confused me: How had Wayne coerced them? How and why had they agreed? I could only imagine that they had done so begrudgingly, and that if Wayne lived in the East Village, he did so on a grimy street, in one of the shoebox apartments.
Please, then, try to imagine the surprise I felt the first time I saw Wayne’s actual apartment. His actually perfect East Village apartment. For it was not a grimy shoebox. No. It was a gorgeous, light-filled unit in the newest building on the street.
“Jesus Christ,” was all I could say when I saw it.
Wayne shrugged. He pointed to a nearby gym. I could see it through a floor-to-ceiling window.
“My dad liked the look of that gym,” he said, “since he likes when I work on my pear shape.”
Wayne then pointed to the balcony. Because there was a balcony.
“I, however, like the balcony,” he said. “I like to use it when I’m PACT-ing.”
I nodded. I said, “I can see why you would.”
The apartment was beyond my wildest dreams. Nevertheless, it was still a one-bedroom. It offered everything in the way of, well, everything, but not much in the way of space. Wayne thought the best way to solve the problem would be to put me in the closet.
You would think I would not want to be put in the closet. But I did want to be put in the closet. Because Wayne’s closet was not just any closet.
Wayne’s closet was … a walk-in closet.
We’re talking in Manhattan. We’re talking very big.
“We’ll make it your own little room,” Wayne said.
“Sounds perfect,” I said. Because it genuinely did. The closet was big enough for me to stand upright or lie lengthwise on my air mattress. I plugged a “desk”-lamp into the outlet and nicknamed the space “A Room of My Own.” That is, until Wayne told me my nickname was ill chosen.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” Wayne answered, “Woolf’s point was that a woman should have a space that she has paid for, for herself. And you don’t pay for this yourself.”
“Who’s Woolf?” I asked. “I’m quoting the Indigo Girls.”
This, here, was a nice thing about Wayne: He might not have exchanged intercourse for foodstuffs, but at the same time, he knew enough about ’90s chick rock to help me unravel the threads of my own ignorance.
Wayne explained, “The Indigo Girls were quoting Virginia Woolf. Which is why they called the song ‘Virginia Woolf.’ She believed that for a woman to be an artist, she had to have a space that she, herself, has paid for. A space she’d use for work.”
“Oh. I’m using it to work,” I said, and this was essentially true. Lacking a TV for my walk-in closet, I set to work on a solo show that detailed this first year of my postcollegiate life.
Its working title was Mole Woman, and the process of writing it did the job of a TV insofar as it could alternately entertain me and lull me into sleep.
In my experience, art that puts you to sleep does so because it’s either especially stupid or especially complex. Mole Woman was especially complex. If you doubt me, here’s a sample:
Her future stretched before her like a wide, open meadow.
She knew she’d live a big and vibrant life.
WAYNE AND I lived happily together for a full six months. During those six months, I scored a job as a greeter and shirt-folder at the Banana Republic store in SoHo. Since I wasn’t paying rent, I managed to squirrel away a portion of my income while simultaneously treating myself to my own high-end foodstuffs. I’d do the occasional after-work jaunt through the Dean and Deluca at Broadway and Prince. I’d buy artisanal chocolate bars or loaves of Asiago cheese bread. I would share these treats with Wayne, who in turn would share his treats with me: a mint-scented Kiehl’s exfoliant. A body butter from Laura Mercier.
I was grateful to Wayne for this exciting first go at nonstudent housing. My gratitude was manifest in the zeal I brought to my cleaning. Wayne, in turn, was grateful for my zeal. We had such a good balance. Such a perfect give-and-take. Our relationship was like my initial roommate fantasy from several years before, and it convinced me, for a moment, that living with a roommate could be better than living alone. It could be better, but only if Wayne was that roommate. Only Wayne. Perfect Wayne. Always and forever: Wayne.
And by “always” and “forever,” I meant until we both had boyfriends.
And by “until we both had boyfriends,” I meant until I had a boyfriend.
SO YOU CAN see, then, why I perceived it as a problem when Wayne got a boyfriend first.
Wayne’s boyfriend was a young man named Tomas. (Pronounced, not “TAH-miss,” but rather the immeasurably more annoying “Toe-MOSS.”) Tomas was, in personality, the Antichrist. He was a hellish man for a wide variety of reasons, but perhaps the most telling one of all was that he called himself an actor/dancer.
