15
Choose Wisely
It all started with some oversharing. When I set out to write this book, I posted on Facebook: “Hive-mind: Have any of you guys done writing residencies? Do you have a creative place that you loved when you made your doc/book/project? I would love your feedback…xo.” Helpful suggestions trickled in, and then I saw that my ex-boyfriend Paul had posted a comment on my status. I clicked on the notification and saw the words “locked in my bedroom crying.” I instinctively smiled, flushed with a mixture of excitement and dread. He knew what I was going to write about and asked to meet with me.
I agreed to meet Paul for coffee in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Originally he suggested dinner, but that sounded too intimate and time-consuming for this confrontation.
I was already seated when he walked in. I had to admit, he looked good. We started with some small talk, but he was determined to cut to the chase, questioning me about my book. As I told him about my writing, he interjected with “But are you going to talk about that one night?”
I said yes, then tried to lessen his fears by saying I would like to interview him and get his side of the story. I knew I was by no means an angel in my version.
“I just…I don’t know why you need to go into that whole thing. Everyone will know it’s me.”
“Who, our four mutual friends?” I replied.
He looked down. “Everyone, everyone who knows you is going to read it and know it’s me. I have never acted like that since then and I would prefer if that is not what I am known for.”
I nod.
“Do I have any rights here?” he said.
I could not help but feel sad for him. “Well, I can’t print libel or lies. It has to be what happened.”
He looked down again. “That’s what I am worried about.”
A few minutes later we got up to leave. I almost tripped on the way out. When I got dressed that morning I had chosen heels for this very moment, imagining a graceful exit as I walked away from the table with Aretha Franklin pounding in my head. But instead, we shuffled out the door together. It wasn’t triumphant or empowering. It was more depressing and uncomfortable.
As we stood on the sidewalk I asked in a hopeful tone, “Do you feel better now that we’ve talked?”
“No, I actually feel worse.”
I walked him to the subway off of the Seventh Avenue stop. The stop that we used when we lived together.
“Do you remember the last time you spoke to my dad?”
“Actually I do. He literally threatened my life and then told me he loved me.” He laughed. “It was the strangest, craziest phone call I had ever gotten, but it ended with ‘I love you.’ ” He shook his head.
“He loved you because I loved you.”
Until I didn’t.
According to my family, when it came to romance, I have always picked “eight balls,” those who are just this side of crazy—possessing some sort of mental or alcohol disorder, but most likely easy on the eyes. In twelve-step programs, they refer to this as your “picker” being broken. You pick the wrong partner because your brain automatically gravitates toward dysfunction. My last eight ball was the man I had just left at the subway. Years earlier, my colleague Emily had been prepping a narrative short film titled Picnic Table, and had asked me and Paul to serve on her crew. We spent a long day together in a dingy casting facility in midtown Manhattan where Craigslist hopefuls struggled to charm their way into an unpaid acting gig. It was as grim as it sounds. We subwayed back to Paul’s Park Slope apartment afterward and started drinking whiskey. I am not a whiskey gal. I despised the taste, but my brain recognized it as alcohol and thus a liquid to be consumed. My weapon of choice was always white wine—pinot grigio or champagne. Not quite as cool as whiskey, I know. But that night I decided to follow along with the crew and watch John Ford’s The Searchers while drinking a tumbler full of Maker’s Mark.
At some point, the whiskey started to turn my skin warm and made Paul look like he was my type. I decided quickly, then and there, that it was a good idea to sleep with him. On day one of the project. The next morning, I felt far less confident in the quality of said decision. As we were doing the sheepish let’s-put-our-scattered-clothes-back-on dance, we agreed that we would go to breakfast. We got to the bagel store and I mumbled a passing joke that he should pay for my bagel as he had been given my ultimate lady gift the night before. Fortunately, the awkwardness gave way and we were able to talk and find some commonality.
Paul was my age, twenty-four, and a video editor by trade. Lately he had gotten knocked off course and forced into a gig where he had to spend eight hours a day taping demo reels for third-tier actresses. He used to date a beautiful woman, but had been single for a couple of years. He decided to get back in the game and was looking for his next girlfriend.
Anyone who has been single for more than a week knows what a slog dating is. I was done with the merry-go-round and thought it might be a good move to try this whole monogamy deal. We started dating in January and formed a relationship based on a mutual love of simple pleasures, like pop culture and football. He was smart, funny, and could make a mean batch of spaghetti carbonara. I thought I had found my dude. My dad and stepmom were thrilled by the match—I typically dated out-of-work musicians, and Paul seemed like a guy who had his head on straight.
That summer I was staying in a windowless box of an apartment near Paul’s place. In the summer heat, the $700 a month I was paying felt like at least $400 too much. After Paul and I had been dating for six months, he asked me to move in. I was tempted by the idea of saving a shit-ton of money by combining our rents.
I called my dad for his input. While he was not an old-fashioned kind of guy, I wasn’t certain how he would react to the idea of me living with a boyfriend. After I ran the idea by him, he simply and emphatically said, “Do not do this. You are not ready.” He told me that if I valued the relationship, that I should wait another year or so before making such a significant move. I listened, and then ignored him.
I moved into the apartment that Paul shared with three other roommates. It was a homey and warm house, filled with people who liked one another. I would soon find out that the only person in the house that Paul had a problem with was himself.
As soon as the locks clicked behind me on that first night, a different Paul emerged. I learned about his hatred of his job, his life, the people that walked in front of his car as he drove us both to work. In truth, I, too, had parts of myself I would’ve preferred to keep hidden. I was living with someone, and my freedom was gone. No more casual flirting with people outside the relationship, something I had done often in the past.
I started avoiding Paul, staying late at work while he would sit at home. I would often come home drunk, not having much to say to him. I felt stifled and he felt ignored, a toxic combination.
After being together for ten months, I decided to bring Paul to Dad and Jill’s for Christmas. It was shocking for them to see how quickly his mood could shift. He would go from polite and talkative to someone who berated me for sport. I returned the favor with firepower, in front of them. When we had both had enough, Paul went outside into the backyard to smoke some weed. I apologized for his behavior, saying he had just quit smoking cigarettes and was “really tense.” My dad narrowed his eyes, and said, “Be careful.”
A couple of months later I started working on a longer documentary project that required some travel to L.A. I was prepping for an interview when I got an email. It was a forwarded message of a months-old email exchange I’d had with my friend Marc. He had sent me a bare-chested picture that showcased a new tattoo. I responded positively to the tattoo and to his body. Paul had found the flirty email on a tablet I had thoughtlessly left behind. I called Paul immediately and started with a falsely chipper voice, “Hi, babe, how are you?” He immediately told me to check my email, and I heard a
click. My phone beeped and I had a new text message: a simple “fuck you” glowing on the screen.
The jig was up. I had been found out. It wasn’t exactly cheating, but it was behavior that Paul would not tolerate. I wondered if he was going to kick me out. Did I even care? We had another pressing issue: He was supposed to visit me in L.A. in twenty-four hours. Soon he canceled his flight and forwarded me the confirmation. Message received.
More bad news came. The next day my dad called to tell me that his father, our papa, was in critical condition and likely to pass soon. I needed to get on a plane to Minnesota immediately. I was shaken by the news, as death was not something I had any experience with. I was about to learn.
The funeral was Irish Catholic, full of both tears and raucous laughter. A smattering of our strongest male cousins were asked to carry the coffin, and much to my dad’s chagrin, I was asked as well. I was apparently the most masculine of the female cousins. As I helped carry the coffin, the weight of it and the situation allowed me to step outside myself and put the drama with Paul into perspective. After the burial I asked my dad, who was always a crier, how he was holding up. “He had a good ol’ life and it was time for him to go.” My dad was sad but he knew that death was always the ending that life had in store for us. He also knew a good death was never guaranteed. When my dad was forty-eight, his sister had died from an aneurysm. He’d wept for months, long enough to remember that things could always be worse.
I flew back to New York after the funeral and was surprised to find Paul waiting at the airport to drive me home. I had sent him my flight information on the off chance that he would come pick me up, as was tradition, but I wasn’t sure if he would show up.
We drove back to our shared apartment in silence. The death in the family had given me a life preserver for the relationship, and I had to decide if I would take it. I felt conflicted, so I kept treading water. I wanted the comfort of a relationship, but none of the work or sacrifice. I soon realized that we had both picked poorly. Paul was a jealous person, and I was quite adept at making him jealous.
The explosion—or implosion, depending on how you look at it—happened one night when Paul asked me to get drinks after work with some co-workers. We spent the evening laughing and having fun, doing that smug dance that people in relationships do around single people, but something about that fourth glass of wine made me want to act out. We got in a cab. I started texting a guy friend and flirting. I had changed his name on my phone to Liz H, a female friend of mine. I felt a little guilty but was able to quickly reframe it in my mind by insisting that Paul’s jealousy made me behave this way. But it was all fairly obvious and Paul guessed the true identity of the contact, which quickly led to a shouting match. We were standing outside our apartment when he pushed me down to the ground. I looked up at him, shocked. “You pushed me!”
“You fell,” he muttered in disgust.
We moved inside the apartment, where we continued to scream and rail and slam doors. He said the things that men say when they want women to feel small and useless. He threw my phone out the window. I told him I was leaving.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last night of the relationship. But it should have been. We were still living together when I started seeing someone else, to be as deliberately hurtful as possible. I wouldn’t come home some nights, leaving Paul to wonder where I was, who I was with. When I told my dad what had happened the night Paul shoved me, he said, “You need to move, and now.” I told him that it was an accident and I had driven Paul to this point. My father was resolute, but he would not help me move. This was my burden to bear. I found a friend who was also looking for a place to live and began the slow, painful process of moving out.
In the meantime, my dad told me that he was going to call Paul to “set him straight.” I begged him not to, explaining my embarrassingly bad behavior within the relationship. I felt like the whole situation had been blown so far out of proportion. Or had it just escalated so quickly that it was difficult to believe what was happening? Either way, I knew something irreversible had happened when the fight turned physical. Neither my dad nor I acknowledged that he himself knew what it was like to push a woman, that he recognized Paul’s situation more than my own.
Much to Paul’s credit, he picked up the phone when my dad called. He apologized, knowing full well that the damage was already done. He helped me move out and dropped me off in my new apartment. Even though the relationship was a flawed one, I felt scared and alone when he said his final goodbye.
I left it to my former roommates to take care of Paul while I worked on building a new life for myself. A friend of mine had moved into the house during that turbulent time, and I found out that she and Paul had begun spending more time together. I liked her a lot; she was wry, smart, stylish, and my physical opposite. I grew anxious and jealous of the idea that they might sleep together. I wrote to her in a panic asking if my fears were true or if they were an invention of my mind. She took some time and wrote back to me. I opened her email at work and started shaking. She admitted that they did have feelings for each other and they’d already acted on them.
I had not expected this. A raw anger took over. I knew I was finally getting a taste of my own medicine, but I was unable to accept it. Seething, I wrote back.
And just so you know, at the end of the relationship Paul became deeply scary and hurtful, calling me every name he could think of and then pulling a 180 and begging me to stay with him, that he was terrified to be alone, even became physically threatening one evening. I sincerely hope he never repeats that behavior but it is something he is capable of (I know he really regrets this). It’s sad that it has gone this way and it’s too bad that I lost a friend over it. There will come a time when the Paul thing falls apart (because trust me, no one who hates himself the way he does is meant to be in a relationship at this juncture in time) and you will want to talk to me. Don’t. I am very into setting emotional boundaries for myself and I have deleted you from my phone. Please do not contact me.
Years later, I now realize how fucking hypocritical I was being. But at the time, I was wounded. The new guy I had started seeing broke it off with me, saying, “You are great but you have some issues you need to work through.” He told me to call when I was ready. Instead, I called my dad over and over, seeking guidance, admitting that I had handled everything wrong, wondering how to feel about another failed relationship and the fact that Paul had moved on so successfully.
His responses were always solid and sound and made me feel better.
Dolly, he was a significant person in your life, but sadly not a significant person. His quiet rage at the accomplishment of others, his inability to take action in his own life, professionally and emotionally. She will know him as you now know him. Do not give either one of them the satisfaction. Seriously honey, he was the best 180 pounds you ever lost. Life is long.
I printed out the email, stared at it, and for the first time in a long time, felt that I could breathe.
16
The Criers Get Nothing
Click, Print, Gun, my piece about Cody Wilson, the 3D-printing assault weapons guy, was a success. In the first week of its release on YouTube, five million people viewed the twenty-seven-minute film. Those were insane numbers for a movie that long. VICE was pretty happy. It was another way for their brand to be seen as close to the zeitgeist. I was thrilled beyond measure and stayed up the night the film hit the Web to count the views hour by hour. Virality was intoxicating, and it felt like my work getting noticed in a big way.
When Stephen, a rival producer from a competing tech website, direct-messaged me on Twitter and asked to meet for a drink, I immediately responded in the affirmative. I didn’t want to leave my job at VICE, but I knew my money situation needed improvement. I said as much to Stephen at the bar and he encouraged me to send an email of inquiry to the head of the site. I did, and the editor responded,
inviting me to come in and meet with him.
I left my desk at VICE in the middle of the day, citing female problems, and took the train into Manhattan. I used the travel time to run through the conversation my dad and I’d had about money one more time.
“How much do you make now?” he’d asked me quickly. I had gotten a raise in the last year and was up to $40,000, but I was still running at a deficit. “Forty thousand. It isn’t enough, considering student loans and rent.” He knew this much; I had been complaining about what VICE paid me for years.
“What do you want to make?”
I had never been asked that question. I paused and said in a questioning tone, “Sixty-K?”
“C’mon, we can do better than that. What about seventy-five?”
“Yeah, that would be incredible.”
“Ask for that and see what they say.”
Within two weeks I had a job offer in hand with a salary of $80,000; they had added the $5,000 to seal the deal. I was elated. I was flying back from a video shoot at a Bitcoin conference when I emailed my best friend, Yunna, with the good news. She matched my excitement but then said, “I think a change is absolutely the right move. VICE has never been that healthy for you.”
“What do you mean?”
I could feel her thinking as she slowly typed out the next text message. “I mean, I think working there makes your drinking issues worse. Am I completely out of line in saying this?” I was irritated at her for bringing up such an embarrassing subject on the heels of my happy news. I swiped left on the conversation to delete it permanently, and we didn’t talk about it again for quite some time.
I left VICE the only way I knew how: loudly. I told them it was because of the money. It was about the money, but also because I would always be viewed as “David Carr’s daughter” there, a title I both treasured and resented. There was also the matter of inadvertent sexism. After Click, Print, Gun premiered we had a company-wide meeting. I had a feeling that Shane, one of the heads of the company, might give the film a shout-out. When he did, I was thrilled. He then put his arm around me and in front of my entire company said, “Who knew this little girl could do it?” It was a bewildering thing to hear and I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled through gritted teeth. I wasn’t an accomplished video producer with many millions of views under my belt; I was a little girl and they were surprised by my talent.
All That You Leave Behind Page 9
