Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  I paused before letting it spill.

  “I’m a love pusher. I make men tell me they love me before they’re ready and then when they don’t end up actually loving me, I am all the more hurt because we were supposed to be in love. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “Have you ever watched a pelican eat?” Joe asked.

  “Way to change the subject, but, OK, I’ll bite. No, I don’t think I have ever watched a pelican do anything. So eat, pelican, no.”

  “Well, pelicans eat fish and they fly over the ocean watching the water until they see the perfect fish that they want for their dinner. If you watch them when they make their decision, it looks like they’re falling out of the sky. They literally drop into the ocean like dead weight and plummet headfirst into the water. But they always get their fish.”

  “Always?”

  “Ninety-eight percent of the time.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s a little like falling in love. They see what they want. They throw caution to the wind and they go for it. They literally fall head over heels from the sky.”

  “But they always know they’re going to get their fish.”

  “That’s why I wouldn’t want to be a pelican,” Joe said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “They know things will work out every single time they let themselves go. It’s got to get boring after a while. There’s no challenge in it after the first ten times. I would rather fall and miss that fish a dozen times and then finally catch the right one. The fattest, juiciest, fishiest of the fish. Because then I would feel like I really deserved that fish. Like I worked for it.”

  “Why do you know so much about pelicans? Were you a middle-school science teacher in a past life?”

  Joe laughed. “I was a nerd. A serious nerd all through high school. I had acne and glasses and was shy as hell, so I watched a lot of the History and Discovery Channels.”

  “Better than Dungeons and Dragons.”

  “I did that, too. I also built my own computers.”

  “So back to the pelicans. I don’t get it.”

  “You dove after every fish, Sophie. You wanted all the fish to be a great catch and since not every fish can be a great catch, you tried to turn the bad catches into good catches by convincing yourself that the two of you were in love. The pelicans may catch every fish every time, but some of those fish are rotten or bony or just swallowed a syringe and now they have fish AIDS. If you just wait, then one of these days that fat, juicy fish will be right under you waiting for you to fall for it.”

  “And then I’ll eat it?”

  “It isn’t a perfect metaphor.”

  For the first time since the AA meeting I was nervous around Joe. He seemed like such a good fish.

  But then I realized, as per usual, I was likely getting ahead of myself.

  Admit to yourself and someone else all the crazy shit you have done

  “I’m Cameron, and I’m a love addict. This week I booty texted three ex-boyfriends.”

  Cameron had gone off the deep end after running into Vegan Biter with his new fiancée. I pointed out that the silver lining of that particular run-in is that there is indeed someone for everyone.

  To save time, Cameron texted all three at once.

  I miss you. Come over.

  Well, all three came over. In fact, they all met in the elevator and drunkenly chatted about the proximity of a very delicious underground hot dog shop around the corner that fried their hot dogs before wrapping them in bacon and frying them again before covering them in both chili and cheese. A sad truth is that at three in the morning many a man will choose greasy food over sex that he likely can’t see through to completion. So they all set off together, and Cameron was left alone in her apartment. She was given the information from Maxem, her faithful doorman, whom she had also once tried to make out with after seeing her college boyfriend pushing a baby stroller down the street.

  “Why did I let Vegan Biter upset me so much?” Cameron wailed. “Why did I care? I didn’t like him when he bit me, but when I thought I couldn’t have him anymore because he belonged to someone else, all of a sudden I can’t get him out of my damn head.”

  We all admitted to having a hamster wheel in our head.

  “I think I do it because I watched my parents and their really unhappy marriage,” Cameron volunteered. “In the back of my mind, that seems normal, because I don’t really have positive role models for how love should be. I think drama equals love so I just chase the drama instead of trying to find someone who can make me really happy. ”

  “Low self-esteem,” Katrina chimed in, adding the caveat, “I’ve been asked this before.”

  “Bloody romantic comedies,” Jordana blurted out. “I mean, all they do is tell us that true love is simply one hilarious misunderstanding away and once that hilarious misunderstanding is overcome, then you will live happily ever after. It is bullshit. I didn’t find a hilarious misunderstanding in my boyfriend’s e-mail. I found a fucking pervert! There is no misunderstanding that. But if this were a romantic comedy, those e-mails would all be part of an elaborate hoax he was staging for a buddy for his stag night. Did that thought run through my mind? OF COURSE IT DID. That is why these romantic comedies are ruining our lives.”

  Stella applauded and snapped her fingers.

  We all agreed. Romantic comedies had in some way contributed to all of us obsessing over the idea of romantic love. But how could we break that cycle right now? We really had no choice but to do what we did next. In order to debunk their lies, we had to expose ourselves to them—all of them.

  And so the next twenty-four hours straight were spent watching every romantic comedy we could order up on Netflix. We laughed and groaned and discussed (ad nauseum) why these movies were absolutely nothing like real life.

  This was aversion therapy. Anytime one of us got too into one scene or cried a little too much, someone would pinch her—hard enough to leave a mark.

  Along the way we made a list debunking all the lies that romantic comedies have told us—a kind of treatise or “mission statement” (fuck you, Jerry Maguire, for trying to have us at hello) of what we should believe to replace what decades of chick flicks from When Harry Met Sally to Letters to Juliet had programmed into our brains.

  The nerdy guy should not always get the girl.

  Nerd is the new douche. The chubby, less attractive alternative to the macho dick is also likely a dick. Nerds have an ax to grind and once they finally land a chick they don’t always treat her like a princess. Instead they take out years of their pent-up rejection anxiety on the relationship. And today’s nerd isn’t an underdog. They’re likely a tech millionaire. You know what Duckie Dale is doing right now? Coding for Facebook and shitting gold bricks.

  Your best friend is not your soul mate.

  Damn My Best Friend’s Wedding and When Harry Met Sally. This fantasy is the most dangerous of all the lies romantic comedies tell you because it seems so plausible. Yes, your male best friend, the one who has nursed you through countless breakups with margaritas and karaoke, who already sleeps in your bed when he spends the night (but nothing ever happens, natch), who has seen you puke, fart, and burp, and has touched your legs when they weren’t shaved, is definitely the man you should spend the rest of your life with. The problem with this scenario is that your best friend … is gay.

  The biggest cad in the world does not want marriage and children, even if you manage to catch him at the right time.

  There is not a magical right time. What he wants is to continue being a cad. Forever. And not even overcoming that hilarious misunderstanding is going to fix that.

  The cool, really attractive, popular guy isn’t actually very sensitive and he does not secretly love you.

  How do you know he is actually a douche? He isn’t even nice to his popular, really attractive girlfriend. In fact, he would sell her to a nerd for something he could find on Google.

  There is
no such thing as a soul mate.

  There isn’t a “one.” There are probably lots of ones and mates and people who will touch our souls, but looking for the one is crazy.

  And finally, love is not one hilarious misunderstanding away.

  True love will not happen after you butt heads for almost a year before he tells you that all his glowering stares were directed at your womanizing boss and not you before he reads your diary and goes to buy you a new one because he gets that you were just being quirky when you wrote a bunch of nasty things about him. It won’t happen after he decides to get revenge on you when you have amnesia by pretending you are his wife even though you are a really rich heiress with a yacht and a slutty husband, and it certainly won’t happen after he picks you up on Hollywood Boulevard and then tells his chubby lawyer you are a hooker, forcing you to leave him even though it is true that you are indeed a hooker. We don’t live in an episode of Three’s Company.

  We printed up these dictums and we decided to read them at the opening of our meetings. It was our version of the serenity prayer to ensure there would be no more hilarious misunderstandings. And then we added a new rule.

  Rule 5: Thou shalt not believe the myths of

  the romantic comedy. Thou may only indulge

  for the snappy dialogue.

  The Sunday after our emotional hara-kiri via John Hughes and Nora Ephron, we were again cross-legged on the floor like a kindergarten class alert after nap time. We had a guest speaker. Suze Heart stood in front of us, her platinum-blond hair so bright it practically reflected the light back at us or at least bounced it down to her shiny powder-blue tracksuit.

  Within a minute of silence she had managed to elevator eye every one of us from our sneakers to the crowns of our heads.

  Another division of my publishing house was publishing a self-help book by the self-made love coach Suze. Called Tough Love: Take It or Be Sad and Lonely Forever, it was poised to enter the bestseller list at number three just like Suze’s past books, You’re a Whiner and Get the Hell Out of My Bed.

  During her last book tour, Suze had come off too strong and actually made two men in the audience of an author talk and book signing cry by telling them their mothers had ruined them for all other women. Since then she had been working to soften her image, so Megan thought it would be helpful to give her some practice by sending her out to New Jersey for the day to speak to our motley crew.

  “How many of you are obsessive dialers?” Suze asked us without introducing herself or asking us anything about ourselves.

  Five hands rose before Suze clarified, defining obsessive dialing as calling more than twice in an hour after getting an answering machine. Four more hands went up.

  “What’s the point?” Suze yelled. “Do you think it’s 1987 and you’re dialing a rotary phone that doesn’t have caller ID and maybe just maybe they missed a call and have no way of knowing that you called or who called them? They know. It’s on their phone and when you’re through it ends up being on their phone twenty times. And you know what they’re doing as they hit the ignore button on their phones? They’re showing their friends the nineteenth call from this crazy-ass girl who will still sleep with them if they just answer their phone on call twenty and then say something slightly nice to her.”

  The truth was totally harsh.

  Suze’s eyes rested on Prithi for just a moment as she switched gears. “Pull the goalie?”

  Prithi ducked her head and moved her arms protectively around her nearly nine-month belly. Suze walked over and chucked her under the chin the way my grandfather used to do.

  “Don’t you be ashamed, little lady, pulled the goalie twice myself. Have two beautiful kids. Wouldn’t change a thing. It’s all about what we learn from what we do and how we make ourselves a better person each time.” Suze strode back to the front of the room. “I didn’t learn my lesson that first time and I did it again and then I learned my lesson. Nothing wrong with that since the lesson got learned. Here’s what we need to do, ladies. We need to live our lives in a spiral, a spiral all moving toward AWESOME YOU.”

  Suze drew a swirly shape on the blackboard behind her and a stick figure in the middle with a big round circle at its midsection that we just assumed was a pregnant stick Prithi.

  “Right now you’re probably in a cycle, and that’s no good because a cycle goes around and around doing the same thing over and over again.”

  She repeated her earlier question.

  “How many of you are obsessive dialers?”

  All hands in the room shot in the air.

  “It’s a funny thing, obsessively dialing these men who treat us like shit, who don’t call us. Who tell us they don’t want to be with us. It’s funny because who the hell uses the phone anymore? None of you, right? I’ll bet you Facebook your mom to say hi and how are you doing, but call, no one calls anyone. You even text your friends when you get a promotion at work. Except you call that one douchebag who doesn’t want you to call him. That’s why it’s funny.”

  Suze picked up a piece of chalk and wrote in giant pink letters on the chalkboard—FAF. “You are going to FAF. Fone A Friend. That’s right. We never call our friends when we want to chat about the good shit, do we? Well, we will now. You pick a designated friend, one who can put up with your loads of BS once in a while, and you name that friend the nasty son of a bitch in your phone. When you want to make seventeen phone calls in the span of an hour to say you miiiiiissss him, you call your goddamned friend. Cycle one. BROKEN.”

  When Suze said “Broken,” she spiked the chalk on the floor like it was a football and it shattered into a hundred shards. Now I understood why she requested we supply her with six boxes of chalk.

  It went on like that for about an hour and a half and we went though two more boxes of chalk before Suze said she was hungry just as the doorbell rang. A pimply-faced teen balanced four pepperoni pizzas on his arms.

  “How many pepperoni on each of those pizzas, Mikey?” Suze called from the living room without even looking out the door to see who it was.

  “Twenty-two, Suze,” Mikey replied like his life depended on it. I tried to slip him some cash, but he just shook his head and muttered, “Already paid for,” before scurrying back to his Chevy Impala with a Crazy Eddie’s Pepperoni Palace sign balanced on the top. When the hell did Suze order pizza? How did she know where to call, and what was up with the twenty-two pieces of pepperoni? I didn’t even want to know the answers to these questions. I was a little in love with this woman who seemed to have complete control over every aspect of her life.

  Suze was full of stories and metaphors, half of them involving sports, the other half involving wild animals. Joe, with his penchant for the Discovery Channel, would have loved her, except Joe had to do some work at the hospital today and wasn’t able to be there.

  One story she told stuck with me.

  She began each of her stories with “Did you hear about …” So “Did you hear about the golfer who couldn’t drive to save his life but was an ace on the putting green?” “Did you hear about the baboons who let the males impregnate them and then raise their baby baboons in female-centric tribes, forcing the men to wander the savannah alone looking for their next fertile female?”

  Then, “Did you hear about the loneliest whale in the world?” This is the one that got me. Scientists tracked the loneliest whale for years. She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have a family, tribe, pack, or gang. She never had a lover. Why? Her voice was unlike any other baleen whale. The rest of the whales sing at a level between 12 and 25 hertz. She sang at 52 hertz. None of the other whales could hear her. All her desperate calls to communicate went unanswered.

  I imagined that massive whale floating alone and singing her song to her fellow whales and none of them hearing her. She didn’t know she was different. She just knew she was always alone.

  Of course, the moral of the story (all Suze’s stories had morals) was that if we weren’t communicating with me
n on the same level, then they couldn’t hear us and we were bound to be alone. If in our heads we were picturing our wedding day on our first date—or in Cameron’s case picturing family beach vacations in Avalon—and proceeding with that path in our mind but never communicating what we wanted, it was no wonder these guys turned tail and ran. Our songs were being sung at a frequency out of their range so that when they finally caught a smidgen of what we were singing, they ran for the hills.

  “I’m a lonely whale,” I muttered, picking at a piece of chipped nail polish on my big toe.

  “Speak up, girl. There’s no whispering in baseball,” Suze barked.

  “I’m a lonely whale. No one can hear what I am really saying. Sometimes I can’t even hear what I’m really saying.”

  “That’s a start. There you go. Now you know it, and now you can start singing at a frequency someone can hear.” Suze walked over and gave me a very aggressive hug. “I’m proud of you, champ.”

  Cameron flung her hand in the air.

  “What do we do if we catch our boyfriend cyber cheating?” she asked.

  “On the Internet? Like e-mailing?”

  Cameron nodded. “But more tweeting and Facebooking.”

  “Ahhh, common problem these days,” Suze said with a knowing nod. “All those congressmen sending out pics of their wangs and whatnot.”

  “But that one said he never cheated. He said it was all online. He never physically did anything.”

  “And would you women be cool with that?” Suze asked us, looking around the room.

  Collectively we were about to shake our heads, but then we all just shrugged. We had come to accept a lot of bad behavior from dudes. If he didn’t physically cheat, did it matter what he did on the Internet?

  Suze groaned low and long. “Ladies, ladies, ladies. None of you have any self-respect anymore. No dignity. But I will tell you that you aren’t entirely wrong. I’ve been doing some research for my next book: Men: If They Didn’t Have a Penis We’d Give Them Back to Their Mothers. And oddly enough I think that we need to feel sorry for them.”