Exes and Ohs

by Shallon Lester

  Needless to say, my mother wasn’t thrilled when I moved to New York—a city full of open manholes and pokey objects—and resumed playing hockey.

  I pointed out that in all my years on the ice, I’d never been seriously injured.

  “Oh really?” she retorted. “Are you forgetting the three concussions you had in high school?”

  Actually yes, I had forgotten them; that’s how head injuries work. But I didn’t even mind concussions. They were kind of fun. I turned into a babbling idiot and said all sorts of nonsense, much to the delight of my friends. For a few hours, I was the life of the party … until I started throwing up and foaming at the mouth.

  I promised her I’d be careful and for three years, I was. Until that fateful St. Patrick’s Day in 2007 when I broke my elbow. I slipped on an icy patch of sidewalk—sober!—and threw my arms out behind me to break my fall. At first I thought maybe I’d just thrown my back out of alignment—nothing that a few more beers couldn’t anesthetize. But as my friends and I ambled into the next bar, I realized I couldn’t straighten out my left arm.

  “You guys, I think this is bad,” I said as they lined up whiskey shots. “I can’t move my arm.”

  They scoffed. “Eh, I’m sure it’s okay. It’s a good thing you’re a righty!”

  “I’m left-handed.”

  “Whatever,” Marcia said, handing me a shot. “Tomayto, tomahto! Here, pound this.”

  I took the drink with my right hand and flung half of it down my shirt. Covered in Jameson, I decided to call it a night. I hoped that some aspirin and ice would fix whatever was wrong; the idea of going to the ER the day after St. Patty’s was unappealing, to say the least. But after I woke up with my left arm seized up against my chest like a chicken wing, it was time to let a medical professional take a look.

  I draped a coat awkwardly around my shoulders as best I could with one hand and hopped a cab to St. Vincent’s.

  The ER was surprisingly quiet and empty, save for a few drunken homeless men and the large black women working the intake desk, who were delighted to admit someone sane.

  “Oh, honeychild, wussa matter, now? You hurt yo’self?” one of them asked.

  “Yeah,” I squeaked, knee-deep in self-pity. “I think I broke my arm.”

  “Well you just sit on down here and we gon’ have us a look,” she said reassuringly, rubbing my back with her massive hand as she led me to an empty bed.

  “The docta gon’ be right on in, now. Don’t you worry your little head about a thang. Just fill out these forms best ya can wit yo’ good arm.”

  I fumbled with the clipboard full of papers and suddenly missed my mama very much. Since she was the nurse in the family, I relied on her to do things like this while I was busy feeling sorry for myself and complaining about the magazine selection. During every one of my medical maladies, she had pulled the physician aside and explained in a low tone that she was an RN and that he could speak plainly to her and ignore me altogether. She’d then translate the prognosis to me in one of three ways:

  1. “Garbo could handle it.” Translation: no big deal. Garbo was our beloved cocker spaniel and was constantly finding herself in some sort of calamity, whether it was vomiting up rat poison or being stung by wasps or getting horrible ear infections. But no matter how sick she was, she’d take a nap on the cool tile of the foyer and wake up feeling fine.

  2. “We should probably stop at Blockbuster.” This meant there would be some downtime, but my biggest enemy would be boredom, so multiple videos would be needed. If I was going to be uncomfortable, she’d let me rent my favorite Liza Minelli movie, Steppin’ Out, but I knew I didn’t really need to panic until she said …

  3. “I think I’ll make some butterscotch pudding!” She made pudding only when I was having surgery. Once upon a time I probably liked butterscotch pudding, but over the years I developed a Pavlovian response to the dessert—pudding equaled misery.

  I had just eased myself onto the tissue-paper-covered table when an X-ray tech arrived, and ten minutes later I was flopped on the crunchy exam table like a pound of pastrami.

  My arm was throbbing and every bone in my back felt out of place, like a Lego castle put together wrong. Finally, the doctor arrived. She was young and pretty-ish, and, best of all, blond. I feel more comfortable around flaxen people. Brunettes are full of nasty surprises—unibrows, upper-lip hair, unintelligible accents—but blondes are lovely and always smell like Sun-Ripened Raspberry body spray. It’s in our DNA.

  “Well,” the pretty doctor said with a sigh, “looks like your elbow is broken.”

  “Okay … what does this mean?” I said slowly.

  “It means you fractured a bone in your elbow.”

  “So like … videos? Or pudding, do you think?”

  She squinted, obviously disappointed that a patient whom she assumed would be lucid was in fact not.

  “Sling, actually,” she said, pulling one out of the cupboard. “We don’t put broken elbows in casts. Wear this for about six weeks and then do physical therapy.”

  I groaned; I hated physical therapy. It went on forever and was equal parts boring and painful.

  On the way out, she handed me a massive pill.

  “Here’s a Percocet; it should help with the pain. And I’m giving you a prescription for a thirty day supply.”

  “A painkiller?” I said, puzzled. As the daughter of a medical professional, you might think I enjoyed a smorgasbord of lovely drugs, but oh no. Whether I’d had surgery or a stubbed toe, I’d never ingested anything stronger than ibuprofen; my family believed in working through the pain—any pain—au naturel. One time at a family brunch with all my aunts and cousins, the older women started telling childbirth stories. I mentioned something about the miracle of epidurals and the entire table laughed.

  “Yeah, right,” my mom said between guffaws, “you’re not getting an epidural, honey.”

  My ninety-eight-year-old aunt Sally nodded in agreement. “That’s not our way.”

  Margaret, my great-grandmother and de facto nanny, had a home remedy for almost every ailment. She whipped up mystery salves and balms for everything from chest colds to splinters and during the Great Depression used to employ maggots to cleanse wounds and “draw out the poison.” To her, things like anesthesia and morphine were hilariously newfangled. Still, somehow, her curious concoctions always seemed to work.

  But that was then and this was now, and my arm felt like it was on fire, so I swallowed the pill gratefully and left the hospital with my arm in a sling. Fifteen minutes later, I started hallucinating. Decaf coffee is too strong for me, so I don’t know why I thought that a giant Percocet was going to sit well. My stomach lurched and my field of vision split in two as the cab swooped around the corner to my block. I tumbled out of the car and somehow managed to crawl up three flights of stairs to my apartment, clinging to the banister for dear life. Sweating and shaking, I burst through the door and collapsed on the ground.

  My roommates helped me into bed, and even through my doped-up haze, I was furious. All I had wanted was a respite from pain, not a magical mystery tour.

  I slept for eighteen hours until the meds wore off and the dull throb in my elbow woke me up. Clearheaded, I decided not to let this injury get me down. We shall overcome! That buoyant feeling lasted exactly ten more minutes until it dawned on me that with only one working hand—my non-dominant hand—I was basically helpless. Everything from making food to putting on my coat became nearly impossible. Doing my hair was out of the question, so for the next six weeks I was at the mercy of the humidity index. Although it didn’t much matter that I looked like an extra in a Whitesnake video; I couldn’t really go out and risk getting jostled in a crowd anyway. Plus, I couldn’t figure out how to fasten my bra.

  That’s fine, I told myself, I’ll just throw myself into work! But since I couldn’t type, I just sat around the FHM offices reading old issues and bothering everyone. Eventually my bosses told me to stay home until I
was well enough to write again.

  So I sat on the couch and did the only thing I still could: (slowly and laboriously) text my newest flame. For the past few months, I’d been in a hot-and-heavy text-based relationship with a professional tennis player whom I called Penn, like the tennis ball. We had met through my editor at FHM, who had casually mentioned during an interview that there was a female editor (me) who had a crush on him.

  “Really?” Penn had said incredulously, “On me? Here, give her my number.”

  People think that celebrities are hard to date, but they’re not. You just have to meet them in the right context.

  Once we started talking—sorry, texting—it was on. We spent four hours a day with our fingers glued to our phones. I felt like I’d known him my whole life, which, I know, is exactly what people say about the psycho they meet on a World of Warcraft message board who eventually kills them. But my love for him was good and pure. And it wasn’t the fame that did it, either. I had dated celebrities before and they were fun to bat around, like shiny balls of foil. But I actually respected Penn.

  Growing up, my life was devoid of men. No father, grandpa, uncle, brother—even my pets were female. Men were always foreign and strange to me, and most whom I had known in adulthood had proved themselves to be weak creatures ruled by their fragile egos who would cut and run when the going got tough. Penn was different.

  When he was thirteen, he sank his teeth into the dream of being a professional athlete, and he never looked back. Prom nights, study abroad, spring break, twenty-first-birthday benders—he sacrificed all of them as he chased his tennis dream. But like I said, successful men were nothing new to me. Only unlike the various douche bankers and solipsistic musicians I generally ended up dating, Penn neither complained nor crowed. And there was just something innocent about him; he had a wide-eyed sense of wonder about the most ordinary things—Jet Skis, skyscrapers, dirty martinis. Outwardly, he seemed to be taking life by the horns, but in reality he’d experienced very little of it off the tennis court.

  “I think you’re getting a little carried away with this,” my friends said. “You guys haven’t even met!”

  They made a valid point. He lived and trained in Pennsylvania (another reason I called him Penn) and I was starting to wonder if we would ever lay eyes on each other. But it didn’t matter. While most people in my position would have gotten hooked on the generous supply of Percocet I’d been given, Penn was my drug of choice. We texted so much that I finally got a cramp in my right hand and couldn’t move it for over an hour, prompting a screaming, crying fit; I needed to write him back! He would be worried!

  Hysterical, I called my roommate Pfeiffer—with my toe—and demanded that she return from the gym and text Penn for me.

  “Okay, this has gone far enough,” she huffed on the other end of the phone. “I’m coming home, all right, and getting your crazy ass in the shower. We’re going out for Holly’s birthday tonight.”

  The second I walked into the restaurant, I realized instantly that cloistering myself away for all that time had been a huge mistake. Every man in the place was staring at me. At first I assumed they were gawking at my erratic eyeliner or off-center hair clip. But then I recognized the look in their eyes. I’d seen it before, on Animal Planet, when a lion spotted a weak, limping wildebeest dawdling behind the rest of the pack. I was the dating equivalent of that wildebeest: easy prey.

  “Here, let me get that for you,” said a handsome man in a suit, appearing out of nowhere and peeling off my coat.

  “Allow me, miss,” said another guy as he pulled out my chair.

  My friends stared, openmouthed, in disbelief and envy. The manager stopped by our table to wish Holly a happy birthday, but as soon as he spotted my sling, he scuttled over and knelt down by my chair.

  His name was Declan, an impishly cute Irish fellow with a mischievous Robert Pattinson smile. He was witty and charismatic, but then again I’d spent a fortnight in the company of Law & Order reruns—a traffic cone would’ve piqued my attention. He ended up comping half our meal—an “injury rebate,” he called it—and asking me out for the following weekend.

  My roommates were overjoyed. Not only would they get a night in the apartment without me ambling around like Boo Radley, but maybe I’d fall for Declan and shut the hell up about Penn for a little while.

  I had to admit that I was excited to spend my evening with something other than the new-message chime, and Declan had made reservations at the Little Owl, a charming place in the West Village.

  I considered forgoing the sling, but the girls reminded me that it was the reason he’d fallen for me in the first place (certainly not my personality), so I strapped it back on.

  Declan looked dashing in a crisp suit and pink tie, and for the first half hour of our date, things went swimmingly. He was just as clever and rakish as he was the night we met … and then I said six little words that would alter the course of our date completely.

  “Tell me a secret about yourself.”

  This is my go-to first-date question. It fosters a sense of bonding and intimacy, and how much a person is willing to share reveals a lot about them. In Declan’s case, it revealed way too much. This is the story he told me:

  “So all through high school I was really into theater [author’s note: RED FLAG] and my best friend was a total jock—captain of the football team, all that. One summer we were out at my parents’ lake house and he was like, ‘Dude … I think I’m gay.’ And I was like, ‘Really? Well, how are you going to find out for sure?’ And … well, Shallon … that was the first time I had a cock in my mouth.”

  It isn’t very often that I’m rendered speechless. But I stared at Dec in mute, wide-eyed horror like he’d bitten the head off a rabbit. I didn’t even blink. The first time he’d had a wiener in his mouth.

  Keep in mind, this was only our second conversation ever. If he considered this a level-one, “my middle name is Francis” type of secret, I could only imagine what monstrosities awaited me down the road in our relationship. And I didn’t want to know.

  I trudged home after a hasty meal and broke the news to my roommates that Declan was not exactly straight as an arrow. Still, despite his rainbow-colored past, the girls were optimistic that we could make things work, especially if it meant letting go of my Penn obsession.

  “So let me get this right,” I said testily, “you’d rather have me date a gay guy—”

  “Gay-ish, Shallon,” Marcia said, correcting me. “Not totally gay, just gay-ish!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine, a gay-ish guy in person rather than have a text-message relationship with a hetero professional athlete?”

  “Yes,” they said in unison. “Yes we would.”

  Of course they would. The prospective tales I’d bring home after dates with Declan—trysts with barnyard animals, amateur porn, amputee-fetish conventions—would be far more interesting than yet another rundown of banal SMSs about ground strokes and forehand volleys.

  I decided to compromise and give Declan one last shot. We met up for lunch and as soon as I saw him, the Ick settled over me like a lead blanket. He was wearing jeans—rolled up. One look at his scrawny, pale ankles and all I could picture was him leaping around the set of Mamma Mia! playing grab-ass with his boyfriend Sergio.

  I cut off the relationship then and there, saying that my elbow was too much of a distraction. The argument made no sense, clearly, but neither did Declan’s admission of wiener play. Sometimes you have to fight stupid with stupid.

  Much to Pfeiffer and Marcia’s ire, I burrowed back into my phone, ensconced in the warm safety of Penn. Aside from the fact that we’d never met each other, our relationship was, in a way, perfect. All I really need from a boyfriend is constant attention—it doesn’t have to be in person. Penn’s relentless texting was the perfect amount of distraction and titillation. Our imaginations filled in the gaps in the relationship—gaps like actual physical contact. Rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t shake my ad
diction to him—the incessant stream of communication, the proud thrill of seeing him on TV, hearing an arena full of people chant his name. They were all things that I wanted for myself, and I was living, in a way, through him. He was a contact high, and I was perfectly willing to chase him around forever, hoping for one more whiff of his intoxicating scent.

  “I wouldn’t put your eggs in this basket,” Holly said one afternoon. “He’s probably texting a ton of other girls too.”

  Possible, but unlikely—he simply didn’t have the time. I knew where he was every minute of the day. I knew when his plane took off after a match and when it landed back in Pittsburgh. Once, he even texted me during an ESPN interview on TV: “This guy is such a retard.”

  I responded with something pithy and delightedly watched Penn giggle at his phone and wink at the camera.

  One night, Pfeiffer and Marcia came marching into my room and issued a proclamation: I had one month to meet Penn in person (no Skyping allowed) or they were signing me up for eHarmony.

  Reluctantly, I agreed. They were right; something had to give. So I passed along the ultimatum and held my breath as I waited for him to respond. Twenty agonizing minutes ticked by and still no reply. Was he laughing? Deleting my number? Furious that I’d make such an outlandish demand like meeting face-to-face?

  I started to shake and sweat, panic and regret spreading through my chest. This is it, I thought, I’m never going to hear from him again. I’ve blown it.

  Just then, my phone chimed.

  “I have a tourney in Jersey three weeks from now. You have 3 tickets at will call under your name. I’ll kiss that broken elbow and make it better! :)”

  My heart leapt! I held the text up for my friends to oooh and ahh at, like it was a newborn Simba in The Lion King.

  I spent the next few weeks obsessing over what I was going to wear, even changing my mind one last time on the car ride over. I was so anxious that I nearly threw up.

  After I sat nervously through the match (he won), we waited in the stands for Penn to shower and change as the crowd filed out. I’ll never forget the sight of him walking out of the arena tunnel and into my life. The intense angles of his muscular frame were softened by a perfectly tailored black suit, while his dark, wavy hair glistened in the cooling twilight.