I've Got This Round

by Mamrie Hart

  “You’re gonna be fine,” I heard, just then noticing the other cop was still there. I had forgotten about him completely but was relieved to see his friendly eyes and Erik Estrada smile. I smiled back. “Sorry, I feel like a mess. I’m just— I’m going through a breakup, and my boyfriend usually took care of these things, and I moved out so my stuff is everywhere, and this isn’t normally how I look and—”

  “Hold on a second,” he said, cutting me off. “Look in your rearview.” I looked in the reflection, expecting to see Bad Cop coming back with handcuffs or a German shepherd. The only thing that could be more embarrassing than getting drug searched in the middle of Sunset Boulevard was them making me open my trunk to reveal . . .

  Girl Talk board game

  Dream Phone board game

  Mall Madness board game

  Novelty-size martini and margarita glass

  Blender

  Box of copies of my first book

  Piñata that looked like a giant eyeball

  Family-size bottle of Advil spilled everywhere

  Fake E.T. hand

  Replica of Michael Jackson’s jacket from “Beat It”

  (You think I might be exaggerating, but this was exactly what I had back there. Popping my trunk would’ve been a Pandora’s box of questions and, no doubt, jealousy, because hot damn, those are some enviable board games.)

  “What? What am I looking for?” I asked him.

  “No, look at you in the mirror. You’re telling me that gorgeous woman is single?”

  I leaned back in my seat. Was this cop actually hitting on me? “You aren’t going to be single for long. You’re friggin’ gorgeous,” he continued. OMG. CHiPs had a thing for the teased hair and Abby Lee makeup! He was digging this look. “Let me see what I can do with my partner here. He’s a real tight-ass.” Apparently he wasn’t the only tight-ass, I thought, as I watched him walk back to the car.

  I tossed my hair in the mirror. Was I into this? This was the kind of scenario you only see in movies, specifically of the porn variety. After what felt like forever, CHiPs was back. “Okay, beautiful, here’s the deal. You’ve got to get your registration up to date. Normally your car would be impounded for this.* Also, I told my partner that you found your license, or else that would be a five-hundred-dollar ticket. So, just write down some numbers and you’ll just have a fifteen-dollar ticket.” He handed me a form.

  “Wait.” I was confused. “I just write down a fake license number?” He nodded. “If it’s not my real number, will this ticket even count?” He smiled. Damn, he really did look like Erik Estrada.

  I wrote down some numbers frantically and handed it back to him. He handed me another paper. “What’s this?” I asked. It was just a blank paper. “Oh, that’s for you to write down your phone number.” My jaw dropped. Guys. In retrospect, I am aware how much of an abuse of power this was. Like, what, I refuse to write down my number and then he gives me a real ticket or impounds my car? I couldn’t say no. But I also didn’t want to. He was real cute, and I was real sad and lonely.

  “I’m Marco, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand. I resisted the urge to tell Marco that I liked his polo and kept it cool. “Mamrie,” I said, shaking his hand and handing him my number. Our beginning of a porn moment was interrupted when Bad Cop appeared at my driver’s side. “Miss Hart, here’s your warning,” he said, handing me the fifteen-dollar ticket. “Please go get your registration sorted out. Then take care of this ticket.”

  “I will, Officer. I swear I’m not normally like this.” Bad Cop walked off as Marco leaned in. “I’ll call you,” he said, then walked away.

  I was stunned. Was it wrong of me to have gone along with Marco’s obvious power move just to get out of a ticket? Was I a bad feminist? Was it wrong of me to have allowed my giant teased hair and heavy nineties makeup to subvert the law? Furthermore, if this look garnered such attention, why wasn’t I dressing like this all the time?!

  I decided to table my head full of questions for a moment, mainly because there were several cars laying on their horns, and instead just tried to sit with the emotion of gratitude.

  If I had been done up like my normal self, I think I would’ve lost my car that day. But instead I drove off with a fake ticket and a new cop boyfriend. So, in conclusion, I have to give credit to Abby Lee. While I knock her style on the regular, it really goes over well for a certain audience.

  This was literally seconds after the whole ordeal. I don’t even think they had pulled away yet, but I was feeling invincible!

  Unfortunately, that audience is full of SHIT. Turns out, Marco never called and the ticket did count. However, I didn’t know that because I hadn’t had my mail forwarded yet. I found out only when I was on vacation in Hawaii while writing this book and I got a voice mail from a collections agency saying my license had been revoked for failing to pay the ticket for six months and not showing up in court.

  Luckily, even though I had to pay a fucking ridiculous fine, I wasn’t taken to jail. Abby, on the other hand, is currently serving 366 days behind bars for that bankruptcy fraud charge, which is the only reason I had the balls to tell that story from Grace’s show.

  Give ’em hell in there, Abby! Also, please don’t come for me when you get out. I have a gun and a butt full of heroin, and I’m not afraid to use them.

  Pros and Cons

  IT WAS A few months into singledom, and wouldn’t you know it? I got invited to do another convention. YES. Another one. Even I knew it was excessive. At any point I expected my friends to perform a Convention Intervention, reading me their letters about how much they love me and need me to stop talking about myself on panels. But I didn’t care! I was still very much into keeping myself distracted and my house was still 90 percent empty, so when San Jose asked me to come to their first-ever Comic Con, I quickly accepted.

  They had decided to have a panel about YouTube, which felt like a weird one in the world of cosplays and nerd culture. Would I walk in and feel like a dweeb entering a football locker room? Or a quarterback walking into a game of Dungeons & Dragons? I had no clue! All I knew was that they were flying me there and putting me up for two nights, and I never say no to an opportunity to drink from a minibar in a hotel bed.

  When I got to my hotel in San Jose, I was told I couldn’t check in to my room yet. Shocker. Part of me thinks that telling a customer that their room is being cleaned but should be ready in an hour is all a plot to drum up more business for the lobby bar. And guess what? I fall for it every damn time. The concierge hadn’t even set down his walkie-talkie that he was using to “page housekeeping for an ETA” before I had saddled up to the bar. It was your classic hotel bar, one that hadn’t figured out its identity yet. The type of bar where the top half of the menu is edamame and cucumber martinis but the table tent is advertising $3 Jager shots and a buffalo wing special.

  It was there, Sake-to-me-tini in hand, that I discovered my new favorite activity: sitting by the window of a bar near the convention center during Comic Con. Honestly, it’s like sitting front-row center to a parade. Some might argue it wouldn’t be entertaining if you, like me, know only about 1 percent of the characters that people are dressed up as, but that’s what made it so much fun! It was basically like being planted in front of a brand-new universe, or what I imagine Tokyo is like. Just a never-ending carousel of one insane look after the next.

  For about three hours, I sat there, drinking up this alien spectacle. Turns out there are only a certain number of niche characters from Sailor Moon and Silent Hill you can watch walk past before you get desensitized. So, with my belly feeling like a boozy boba tea (a couple of martinis and a handful of edamame thrown in), I decided to venture out into day one of this convention.

  People were buzzing everywhere, all moving together toward the convention center in intricate costumes. It was so packed that you had to ti
me yourself to join the foot traffic, like someone waiting to find the right moment to hop into the swinging ropes of double Dutch.

  I kept my head down so as to not be recognized before realizing that no one gave a shit. Nary a single double take. Oh right, I thought. This isn’t an Internet convention where everyone knows everyone on YouTube. Literally no one here knows who you are. It was the first time I had been able to walk around a Con without being stopped by anyone. It was like I was wearing Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak! (Which is about as nerdy a reference as you’ll get from me.) Normally at a convention, I’d have to go through back doors and service elevators, hopping into town cars and being dropped off at service entrances to avoid the madness. But that wasn’t the case here. I could bob and weave among the attendees totally unnoticed because who the fuck cares about a medium-tier YouTuber when there is a reunion of the cast of Back to the Future happening?!

  After swimming upstream with the masses for a while, avoiding sharp and potentially dangerous costumes became tiresome for Two-Martini Mamrie, and I dipped out, taking solace on a creature-free sidewalk a few blocks away. I stopped dead in my tracks as a group of young girls with slicked-back buns, sequined outfits, and faces loaded with makeup ran past me to cross the street. Those aren’t comic book characters, I thought to myself, a smile spreading across my face. Those are . . . and then I looked up to see a theater across the street from me, shining like a beacon in the sun. A banner was draped across the front, proclaiming, “Starpower Dance Competition March 18–20!” Was this a mirage?

  I had no choice. I had to go in. I don’t think I even moved my legs; I just levitated and floated into the performance hall the way you see abductees being lifted into a UFO.

  I didn’t get two steps into the lobby before I was hit with that familiar scent of stale venue + hair spray + new leather ballet slippers. It was pure nostril nostalgia. Or Nostralgia (trademark pending). In a sea of sci-fi, I had sniffed out my people!

  The lobby was packed with girls bustling about practicing routines, merch tables selling pink tutus and purple boas, and parents scrambling to buy their kids whatever tiny duffel bag they wanted so as to not upset their angels on the day of the show. I pushed through the lobby and continued to the carpeted hallway. Nervous groups of girls practiced their routines in sped-up 8-counts, marking the steps. I saw one girl bossing around her teammates, clearly from nerves, to go over it one more time. Aww, the memories! I was that girl, the Nervous Nelly who would want to go over the routine nine hundred times before going out.

  I peeled myself away from staring at strangers’ children and pushed through the double doors to the theater. It was dead silent until a loud voice boomed through the speakers. “Contestant 257, we have Abigail with ‘Baby Love.’” A light clapping trickled through the audience, and then the lights came up with a girl in head-to-toe sequins in a perfect starting pose ready to impress those judges. I looked around, knowing exactly what I’d see: a few dozen parents scattered throughout the crowd, not paying attention until their kid hit the stage. Yes, I thought to myself. I had found my mecca on the illustrious solo day.

  I (very easily) found a seat away from any of the parents so they would not be tipped off that a rando woman had stumbled in from Comic Con. I looked around at the crowd, locking eyes for a second with a mom with a severe bob and an even more severe stare. Anxiety coursed through me until I realized I had nothing to worry about. For all they knew, I was just a nonsocial mom whose daughter was performing that day and who just happened to smell faintly of vodka. How dare they judge me? They don’t know how hard it is to raise my little Maggie all by myself, I thought. Lord knows her deadbeat father doesn’t do anything but watch CSI: Miami and drink Bud heavy! Yes, this inner monologue might’ve been the paranoid ramblings of a buzzed woman, but at least I had my alibi prepared if confronted by a parent.

  For the next hour, I sat in that dark theater in complete bliss. I didn’t want to forget one detail, but I also couldn’t videotape it, seeing as that would be creepy,* but I did, however, take some notes on my phone to remember the spectacle, Siri acting as my stenographer as I quietly dictated to her without having to take my eyes off the action. Hell, if the parents in the audience didn’t at least buy that I was a mom, maybe they thought I was some weird talent scout, looking for the next Maddie Ziegler.

  Notes

  We are clearly on solo day today. There’s a tiny, chubby girl with massive blond curls doing a dance to that fifties song “Stupid Cupid.” Very confusing song. She says she’s carrying his books at school but describes his lips as wine. Is this about underage drinking?

  Holy shit. This next solo has a prop, and it’s a giant high heel. I repeat. A giant high heel has been wheeled out to the stage. She’s doing a dance called “Call Me Princess.”

  Get the fuck out of here. I just looked down at my phone for one second and there’s a DIFFERENT high heel onstage. This number is called “It’s All About Me.” This one is leopard print. Both pigtails are clip-ins.

  The next soloist is named Chloe, and, just in case the judges forget her name, a giant mirror with “Chloe” painted down the side has been rolled onto the stage. Sassy. Is this the prop category? Why are there so many props? The trophies should be handed to the dads for making these things/wheeling them onstage.

  Three Chinese cuties doing a dance called “The Lotus Fairies” to some plucked Chinese harp. While all these other girls are sassy and vain, this is just a straight-up traditional dance. It’s so pure!

  BAHAHAHA. When the lotuses bowed, another song accidentally started. It’s Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” and those poor sweet girls are still slowly walking offstage, smiling at the judges, while the lyrics “Boy toy named Troy used to live in Detroit / Big dope dealer money” played them off.

  I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was the only one laughing, and I was straight-up wheezing. I busted back through those double doors and got the hell out of there, Severe Bob shooting me a look as I ran out. I took my invisible self back through the crowd before finally tucking into bed with my tiny Tito’s and sodas.

  The next day I headed to the chaotic convention center and met my fellow panelists, one of them being Alx James (pronounced “Alex”). I shook his hand, and before I could ask him if his mother was allergic to vowels, I got the question that no one wants to hear: “You don’t remember me, do you?” he said with deadened eyes. I was mortified. “We’ve met before . . . at Scott and Mitch’s house.” Still nothing. “I was about forty pounds heavier, had a beard, and since then I’ve gotten a nose job?” Motherfucker, what? You can’t blame someone for not recognizing you when you’ve had a makeover like you were on the short-lived reality show The Swan! While his calling me out was ridiculous, I appreciated his lack of fucks given and decided I liked this Alx guy, so as soon as the panel was over, I asked him if he wanted to grab lunch. He agreed despite having recently taken up smoking to help curb his appetite.

  We sat there, drinking eating our lunch and getting to know each other. We talked about YouTube over apps and our mutual love of dogs over entrées, before realizing our biggest commonality over another round dessert: we both were utterly obsessed with Dance Moms.

  “Wait, you love Dance Moms, too?!” He nodded. “I watch it religiously. It is my religion. I want a crucifix necklace with Abby on the cross.”

  “I know,” he said, pushing his food around his plate. “And can you believe that Maddie is leaving after this season? Sia better keep that wig on to protect her identity because Abby is gonna get out of jail and come for her.”*

  “This is going to sound weird,” I said, as his eyes lit up like he’d just been gifted a fresh carton of Marlboro Lights.

  “I like weird. I love weird. What is it?” he asked.

  “Would you have any interest in going back to the hotel, making to-go cocktails, then attending day two of the San Jose Starpower Dance Co
mpetition?” If you looked hard enough, you could almost see the wrinkles in his forehead spelling out DUH in cursive.* “Check, please!” he said, motioning to the waiter. We ran back to the hotel and through the throngs of costumed crowds, once again rocking that invisibility cloak of anonymity because no one gave a shit about these YouTube dorks.

  Within a half hour, we made it into that dark auditorium, coffee cups full of vodka soda. We were in heaven. We clapped hard for the girls who gave a standout effort. Quietly critiqued them when they could’ve done better. Tried not to audibly gasp when one girl clearly fell out of a triple pirouette and just did a double. After about an hour, the lights came on. “There will be a ten-minute break for our judges, and when we return, we will start our jazz trios.”

  “Trios!” we said in unison with the joy of a child hearing the ice-cream truck. “You know one of them is going to fuck it up and bring down the points.”

  “Oh, I know. Just keep a duet. No one needs a Kendall thrown on top to mess up the rhythms of the fouettés!”

  “Speaking of, you know some of the Dance Mom girls follow me on social media.”

  “Really?!” I asked, trying to squeeze one last sip out of that to-go cup.

  “Yeah, they love YouTube. I bet they follow you, too.” I looked around the room to notice a few girls staring, some whispering into each other’s ears.

  All of a sudden, it felt like that moment in Toy Story when Buzz Lightyear gets stuck in the claw machine at Pizza Planet and all the aliens turn their eyes to him. Or in the 1991 movie Sleeping with the Enemy, when Julia Roberts realizes her husband is indeed the enemy. Everything came into focus.

  “We’ve been spotted,” I said. It was like our invisibility cloaks had just been ripped off and we were standing there fully exposed. I grabbed his hand. “Don’t make any sudden movements,” I said. We slowly stood up and backed out of that auditorium as if we were face-to-face with a pack of mountain lions. Once we made it past the sign-in desk, we busted into a full-on sprint back to the hotel.