Once I Was Cool

by Megan Stielstra

  I've since tried to imagine what he saw that night—the girl he thought he knew so well, squatting on the tiled kitchen floor with her blue nightgown hiked up around her thighs, surrounded by foodstuffs and spices and flatware and Tupperware. My eyes must have been glassy as I looked up at him, my hair wild.

  He was very still as he sized me up. Then he asked, "What’s going on in here?" as though I might have a logical explanation.

  "Your nose whistles," I said.

  He just stood there, not making any sudden movements.

  "Every night," I went on. "Every night it whistles, every night I listen, and I figured I should get up this time and do something different so that every night wouldn't be the same night as last night—"

  That's when the alarm starts buzzing in our bedroom, and it's time to go to work. Napkin, spoon, fork, knife. Creamers in the bowls. Coffee decaf regular. And at nine-thirty, we open and the place fills up. It doesn't matter where my mind is—my body knows what to do. It's muscle memory that makes your latte, classical conditioning that reaches for the juice; like, how someone can ask What's up? and you say Fine, 'cause you assume they've said, How are you?

  I know what to do and I do it—it's routine—except today is different. Today, Molly says, "Hey, look," and points out the front windows of the restaurant. It’s one of those warm, perfect Chicago September mornings. Every customer waiting for a table is standing around outside: moms and dads, girlfriends and boyfriends, tables of six or seven friends meeting for brunch, all of them on the sidewalk looking at the sky with their arms in the air and their hands held palms up to catch the snow. Snow—it's snowing, white fluffy flakes falling mid-September. But when I get closer to the windows and out the front door, I can see what it really is: feathers. Hundreds of feathers floating in the air, and I stand on the sidewalk and tilt my head back. There, leaning out his window above us with an army knife and a pillow, is Eddie in all his fringe. He splits the pillow open with the knife, holds two opposite corners, and shakes it 'til the feathers fly. Then he reaches behind him and grabs another pillow, pillow after pillow. "How's your mattress, Megan?" he yells down from the window, and I close my eyes and let the feathers brush my face.

  It feels really wonderful.

  Even if it is kind of crazy.

  THOSE WHO WERE THERE

  WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN, I accidentally went to bed with a guy who had a glass testicle. I say accidentally because I’d been trying to go to bed with someone else, someone with what I can only assume were normal testicles. But in the end that didn’t pan out, and the guy with the glass testicle was, you know—there.

  I remember feeling anxious about the testicle because earlier that year I’d sliced my hand open, which I’d like to say happened because I was out living life in some young and fabulous way, but the truth is that I wanted to see what the snow looked like inside of a snow globe—laundry detergent, in case you’re wondering; the kind with the flakes—a discovery which was decidedly not worth seven stitches across the center of my palm, tiny and meticulous and bloody beneath the florescent lights of the ER. And that, my friends, is what I was imagining as the guy with the glass testicle slid around on top of me: one false move and back to the ER, except this time, it wouldn’t be my hand; it would be my insides.

  The fact that I thought his testicle would be inside of me is a perfect illustration of my eighteen-year-old understanding of sex. In my defense, I’d only been with one other guy, my sort-of, sometimes high school boyfriend, Jimmy, and our furtive fumblings in the prop room after play practice were more is it in there/is it not than they were actual sex, which was beside the point because, so far as I was concerned, we were in love. Like, epically. If Sid and Nancy, Patti and Robert, F. Scott and Zelda had been lame, sheltered, adolescent Midwesterners, we’d be them. So you can imagine my heartbreak when we broke up senior year due to future plans. Mine of which included college in Boston, and his of which included fucking Shelby Lapinski. She would be, you know, there.

  “You have to get over that guy,” my new friend Jill would tell me. “You should have sex with Ira Birnham.” Ira Birnham lived in our dorm. His parents owned a place on an island called Martha’s Vineyard where Bill Clinton had a summer home, and sometimes, when I passed Ira in the hall on the way to the cafeteria, I thought I smelled the ocean. Maybe I should have sex with him, I thought, but then I went back to Michigan for Christmas break, and Jimmy was in my driveway in a used RV. “Here’s my plan,” he said, after a very fast I’m sorry, Shelby’s a bitch, can’t live without you, is it in there/is it not. “This summer, I‘ll pick you up in Boston, and we’ll travel around the country. The RV doesn’t, like, drive right now, but I’ll get it fixed and then—the story of our life will begin.”

  The fact that I thought this could actually happen is a perfect illustration of my eighteen-year-old understanding of reality.

  The day Jimmy was supposed to pick me up was the same day we moved out of the dorm. I had just finished packing my stuff, Jill had just sat down to roll a joint, and Ira Birnham had just stopped in to say that we should look him up if we ever came to the vineyard. “I told you to have sex with him,” Jill had just said, and that’s when the phone rang.

  “I don’t know what happened!” Jimmy said into my ear. “One second I’m driving, the next second I smell smoke, the next second my back end’s up in flames. And I’m lucky I got out when I did ‘cause like a minute later they caught the gas tank.”

  “What caught the gas tank?” I said.

  “The flames,” he said.

  “So the RV—“ I started, and he finished—“Exploded.”

  Think about how hard it is to get over your first love. Part of me wonders, if it had been any other reason—he didn’t want to travel, he was out of money, he was back with Shelby—anything else, maybe I’d have forgiven him. Maybe I’d still be obsessed with him, still waiting for the story of our lives to begin. But that day, that glorious day, Jesus Christ our Lord gave me a sign from the Heavens. It said: megan. walk away. and to be sure there is no confusion on this issue, i’m going to set fire to his rv, which i hope you understand is a metaphor.

  I understand, Jesus, I whispered. A metaphor.

  “… so I’m stuck outside of Battle Creek,” Jimmy was saying, unaware of my religious experience. “I called a tow truck, but I need you to—“

  I hung up.

  Almost immediately, the phone started ringing again.

  I looked at it. Then I looked at Jill and said, “I don’t know what to do.” I had nowhere to live until school started in the fall; no job, no internship, eighteen and stupid, certainly. But also, for the first time in my life—free.

  “I have a plan,” she said, handing me the joint. The phone kept ringing while we smoked, and it kept ringing as we loaded my stuff into Jill’s car. Sometimes, if I listen really hard, I can still hear it.

  Jill’s plan went like this:

  1) Get off the ferry on Martha’s Vineyard.

  2) Find Ira Birnham. Exactly how we’d accomplish this wasn’t clear. She kept saying, “He told us to look him up,” but this was 1993, pre-cell phone, pre-everyone on the internet all the goddamn time, and do you know how many Birnham’s are in the phone book? Anyhow, she was sure we’d find him, at which point—

  3) I would have sex with him, and—

  4) We’d stay for the summer at his parents’ fancy beach house, which to her, seemed completely plausible.

  This is what actually happened:

  1) Jill met some people on the ferry who said we could stay at their place so long as she shared her mushrooms.

  2) I was like, “Mushrooms, the food?”

  3) She was like, “No.”

  4) You guys, mushrooms are awesome! Colors are like, bright; you can’t tell where the sky ends and the ocean begins; and everyone you meet is a part of your family. On the way to wherever my new family was taking me, we stopped by the beach to pick up t
heir friend Steve, which is such an amazing word to feel inside your mouth! Let’s all say it together—

  steve.

  —and when I first saw him, he was upside down in some totally cosmic yoga headstand with the sun setting orange and purple behind him. I was like gaaaaaah, and Jill was like, “You should have sex with him.”

  “Aren’t I supposed to have sex with Ira Birnham?” I asked.

  She was like, “I don’t care who you have sex with, just have sex with someone, anyone, everyone as soon as possible,” which at the time was so fucking profound, so I ran towards the sunset, put my head in the sand next to upside-down Steve, and said, “We can have sex if you want.”

  If you’re ever in need of a pick-up line, that one totally works.

  My new family and new boyfriend, Steve, lived in the woods—about ten-or-so twenty-something kids squatting in tents around a makeshift fire-pit. They washed their clothes in the ocean and hung them on tree branches. They grew their own weed and slept under the stars. To me, mid-mushrooms and stupid with 19th Century romance novels, this was the most perfect living situation in the history of ever, and I decided to stay there for the rest of my life, eating green peppers roasted like Marshmallows and having sex with Steve in his tiny, two-person tent, bending our bodies into totally awkward positions to get out of our clothes in that tiny, cramped space. I remember he tasted like salt water from showering in the ocean. I remember thinking now the story of my life will begin. I remember him looking deep into my eyes, almost climbing down inside my brain, and saying, “Before this goes any further, I have to tell you something.”

  In the twenty years that have passed since then, there has been some version of this moment every time I’ve had sex. “I have something to tell you,” they say, and then: I have a girlfriend and/or boyfriend; I’m leaving tomorrow for LA and/or Morocco; I have crabs and/or herpes and/or Gonorrhea; and my personal favorite: I have a phobia of naked feet, so can you please put your socks back on. In all of those situations, I have known what to say or at the very least, faked it well, but riddle me this: what do you say when he looks deep in your eyes and says, “I have a glass testicle”?

  Later, in the thick of it, I’d worry that the glass might cut me.

  Later still, long after I’d left the vineyard, I’d wonder how he lost the testicle in the first place. Birth defect? Disease? See-saw accident?

  Still later, while looking at testicular prosthesis on the internet,1 I’d learn that glass hasn’t been used since the 1940s. Why, for the love of God, would he lie? About that?

  And later—still, still later—while working on this essay, I’d realize: of all the people I’ve slept with because they were, you know, there, he is the only one I really remember.

  But of course, in the moment, in that tent, drugged and naked and stupid and free, I didn’t say any of that.

  I said what I think any of us would have:

  “Dude. Can I touch it?”

  It felt sort of like a snow globe.

  Footnote:

  1. I should not have to explain the American phenomenon of Looking At Stupid Shit on the Internet, but here’s what happened: In 2005, my then-boyfriend/now-husband and I adopted a super-mutt puppy named Mojo, and of course we got him fixed because there are already enough adorable puppies out there needing homes (in fact, why don’t you adopt one or two or five right now!). So one night, we’re sitting on the couch with Mojo asleep between us, lying on his back with his little paws in the air, and Christopher looks down at him and says, “Do you think he knows we took away his testicles?” I don’t answer this question, hoping that if I ignore a conversation about testicles it will go away, but Christopher has had a drink or two or five, so he grabs the nearest laptop (re: mine) and plugs testicles for pets into Google, which brings him to a site called Neuticles. And of course, we have to do shots and read aloud from the testimonials.

  “I've put off neutering Crooked Joe for months, and when I found out about Neuticles and spoke to them, it made me feel better about neutering. Joe not only looks the same now—but doesn't know he's missing anything.”

  “Frodo never knew he lost anything and is just a happier little dog since he's been neutered with Neuticles.”

  “Neuticles were the absolute least I could do.”

  At one point, Christopher got up to make popcorn, and I went to check my email or something. Since I’d just been looking at testicular prosthesis, every ad on the entire Internet now thought I was in the market. Still to this day, they think I’m in the market, and since they want me to be as informed as possible, they send me all sorts of products and info sites including history sites—hence how I found out about the glass. The end.

  HOW TO SAY THE RIGHT THING WHEN THERE'S NO RIGHT THING TO SAY

  for T.

  YOUR FRIEND IS going through something hard, and you don’t know what to say. There are words and there are words and there are words.

  Stop saying them. Stop trying.

  Instead, pick her up in your Jeep. Don’t worry if you don’t have one. This is your imagination; you get to have cool stuff. You get to drive a Jeep and wear Marc Jacobs and super cool aviator sunglasses, even though you don’t usually wear sunglasses because you sunburn easily (one time in college, you got a bitch of a sunburn around your sunglasses, which left weird raccoon circles on your face for months, so now you just squint). Your friend, Sheila—we’ll call her Sheila—has on a black vinyl catsuit—think Trinity—and one of those Marilyn Monroe scarves around her head so that her shiny, perfect hair doesn’t get mussed in the wind—because, of course, the top is down, and you’re driving super-fast, like Action Movie Chase Scene fast, so fast you left your infant son at home because, even in your imagination, it’s irresponsible to drive that fast with a kid in the car, which is why in real life you have one of those baby on board signs suction-cupped to the back window of your Honda, because drivers in Chicago have a lot of road rage—yes they do—and you don’t want anybody fucking around when your kid’s in the car. So you hung that sign because that’ll make them drive nice, right?

  You and Sheila hang your hands out the zipped-down windows, your palms pushing against the wind, and in your other hand you have an extra-large, extra-caffeinated Frappuccino with bourbon because yum. But this means you don’t have any hands on the wheel, so, okay then, it’s a magic Jeep, and you can drive it with your mind. Or maybe the Jeep can talk! Like Kitt, from Knight Rider! Maybe the Jeep is Kitt from Knight Rider, except a Jeep instead of a Trans Am, and you can talk to it or think at it, thus keeping your hands free for the wind against your fingers and caffeinated alcoholic beverages, which in real life you’re not currently drinking because you’re breastfeeding, but zomfg you would so totally kill for a Maker’s Mark right now.

  So anyhow, you’re driving these precarious winding trails through the mountains, passing ginormous valleys and snow-capped peaks. After a while, the road starts running parallel to a train because, in your mind, all trains are on windy tracks through the mountains, like duh. You briefly consider hijacking it—getting the Jeep right alongside and then jumping onboard with some of that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon shit, saving whoever’s being held against their will or stealing back the medicine that someone very corrupt stole from dying villagers because wouldn’t that be awesome?—but then, you look at Sheila, your beautiful friend who is right now trying to slay a dragon so huge and deadly it could engulf a whole city with a single exhale.

  Sheila doesn’t need to hijack a train right now.

  What she needs is a friend.

  “Go faster,” you say to Kitt the Jeep.

  “Faster.”

  “Go faster than this train.”

  The tires are screeching now, burning into the asphalt. Sheila’s scarf comes loose and whips away, but it’s okay because you own Neiman Marcus and you’ll get her another tomorrow. Right now you’re chasing the train, passing the train, ahead of the train, wa
y ahead of the train, far enough ahead to pull over, grab Sheila by the hand, run to the side of the tracks, and—

  Wait.

  You’ll feel it coming first, the ground trembling beneath your shoes.

  Next, you’ll hear it: the whistle, the wheels churning on the tracks.

  Then, it’s there: the enormous front engine, car after car behind it for miles, curling behind the winding track. It’s coming closer, faster, getting louder, louder, louder. you can’t hear anything over the immensity of sound. You’re so close to the tracks, your toes a few feet from the hammered metal, and when it passes you, you scream.

  At first, Sheila looks at you like you’re crazy which, frankly, isn’t anything new. She’s been looking at you that way since you were both kids in OshKosh B’Gosh in the mud in Southeast Michigan. Then in college, shaking her head in disgust as you poured Everclear into the Kool-Aid. And now, screaming your head off over the relentless roar of a passing train. And okay, fine, whatever, maybe you are crazy, but sometimes crazy is the only way to get through.

  Sheila shuts her eyes, then opens her mouth, and now she’s screaming, too—both of you screaming holy hell as the train pounds past, car after car. And you scream and you scream ‘cause there’s so much inside that needs to get out—anger and longing and no sleep and time moving too fast and sorrow and fear. You scream so long, so loud, it’s like your throats are bleeding, rubbed raw on the inside. And by the time the last car passes, it’s all been drained, like you’re sponges squeezed dry. You sit on the ground, exhausted by the energy it takes to let go, and lay backwards in the grass. The sun shines on your faces. The backs of your eyelids glow red. There’s a breeze, and the grass is soft, and you move your arms and legs to make snow angels even though there’s no snow. It feels nice to be so deliciously empty, so open for new things, like spring and laughter and the future and new memories and newly remembered experiences and all the things you’ve been lucky enough to do, and the knowledge that you still have, at the very least, this single, perfect day to live.