Emad is giggly on the phone as he says good-bye. He’s nervous about our date, I thought. Or very high.
We met at Rum Runners. Nothing says romance in Amsterdam like Jimmy Buffett blasting in a Caribbean tourist bar. Also nothing says romance like bringing your manager from work with you. On the barstool next to Emad was Mikhas.
Emad continued to refer to the night as “our date” while the three of us sat and did round after round of Laser Beam shots—a neon-green concoction that gives you that “laser beam melting your organs” feeling that the kids love.
Before the Laser Beams liquefied my insides, Emad told me he used to be an agricultural engineer back in Egypt. He lived in Libya for a while, married and divorced a white African woman, and moved to Holland.
I like him.
Mikhas and Emad kept excusing themselves to use the bathroom every few minutes. Any time one was gone the other would scoot his barstool over and whisper, “I like you, Lauren. I really like you. Oh! Here he comes!” It was hard enough for me to think of dealing with one guy falling in love with me, but two! Best friends and on the same night! I’d read about this sort of thing in Seventeen magazine, but I never thought it would happen to me!
“Tutti frutti, man!” Mikhas yelled as he ran out of the bar bathroom with a handful of flavored condoms. Mikhas and Emad high-fived each other.
Oh, wait a minute. Do these guys think . . . ?
By the time we got to my flat I was feeling woozy. All I’d eaten that day was a stack of sugar cookies called Jodenkoek, which in Dutch means “Jew cookies.” I hate to blame the Jews for everything, but those cookies didn’t quite have the absorption power that six Malibu rum shots needed.
I didn’t care about who liked me more. To overcompensate for my head spins I invited them both up—assuming they’d decline.
“Please join me for a nightcap. I’ll be right back. Just want to powder my nose!”I ran inside. After I’d thrown up so hard my eyeballs got shoved out of their sockets, I opened the bathroom door and was shocked to find Emad standing there. Waiting. I’d been in there for three hours. Or maybe it was ten minutes.
“Hello, Lauren!” Emad was waiting right outside the bathroom door, and he looked so sober and wide-eyed. He told me that if I wanted them to go home right now they would, no problem. Or—big wide-open-face smile—“We could stay and make you very happy.”
He assured me, “We’ve done it before, and it’s a guaranteed success. Mikhas is good guy. I trust him more than my brother.”
I’d hate to meet his brother.
Before answering Emad, I needed to ask myself the two questions that have launched every hero’s journey: “Didn’t they hear me throwing up?” and “Will my mother ever be able to find out about this?”
The answer to both of those questions was “No.” I hoped.
That’s what you do in your twenties, I told myself. You explore.
If I did this, did it mean I was going to have horrible boundary issues and do whatever men asked me to do? No. It didn’t.
I don’t remember saying yes, but I do remember saying “Okay.”
Let the wild rumpus begin.
What happened then was that we all made sweet, beautiful love. Smiling at one another and checking in to see if everyone was feeling connected. There were a lot of “Are you okay?”s and “Does that feel good?”s.
Oh no, wait, I already spoiled the ending, so you know that it was the most unsexy thing that was supposed to be sexy that I’ve ever done. It was an exhausting forty minutes that felt like seven hours of “Okay, so who needs a leg? Could you get by with just a foot? Emad, let him have my arm and then you take this leg . . .”
Every few minutes there was an “Okay, now, everybody flip!” It was like a drunken game of naked Twister. Fumbling and losing balance. The worst part of it for me was that I felt out of control of what parts of my body were being exposed. Normally, during intimate encounters I like to make little mountains out of my comforter to hide certain areas of my body. Or demurely cover my entire body with pillows, leaving just an ankle sticking out, which could make actual sex impossible, but at least I was in control. Sex with two people is like doing theater in the round; no matter which way you turn, someone is looking at your ass and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The night ended when Mikhas checked his watch and announced that he had to get home because his wife got nervous being alone with her newborn baby at night.
He had a newborn?! What kind of person left his wife at home with a newborn while he . . . ech. Ech-ech. Awful people making disgusting choices, and there I was in the thick of it. They shouldn’t call them three-ways. They should call them “piles of idiots.”
What the hell was wrong with me? Everyone out! Out so I could wash the smell off of me, so I could journal and re-hang my flying pigs sculptures that they took down in case someone hit their head. How dare they take down my flying pigs! They were the symbols of my “magic is possible” life in Amsterdam.
I was convinced that this was the darkest night of my life . . . until they were gone.
The minute the door shut behind them I got up and sauntered over to the mirror. “Look at you—you’re insane! What’s next, Anaïs Nin? What is next?!”
My breezy “anything goes, I’m in my twenties in Amsterdam” façade worked until I was at breakfast the next morning telling my English painter friend, Rachel, about my night and she burst into tears. “Why did you let them do that to you?” she sobbed.
I told the story to another friend that day, an African American experimental dancer, and even though I presented it with all the “dark night of the soul” affectations I could muster, she thought it was the best thing she’d ever heard. She high-fived me throughout the story. “Next time something like that comes up, call me!” she said.
What did happen? I have two minds about it. Everything’s in twos. Two minds. Two penises. Hopefully the tutti frutti didn’t break, because if it did I’d be having twins.
• • •
No good relationship starts with a three-way, but Emad “likes me, really likes me” and I “like him, kind of like him,” so we started dating. It wasn’t what I would have called a romantic, lovely relationship. It was mostly just fun. And exotic. Emad had been a wedding singer back in Alexandria, Egypt. After sex, we’d lie on his bed under the mosquito net while he sang songs about brides feeling like the queen of the Nile who finally found their kings. “It’s our story,” I’d say to him, and he’d laugh and jump up to wash his hands, face, neck, and feet for the ninth time that night. The man was so clean he sweated soap bubbles, and I popped them with my kisses.
At work, Mikhas tried to return coffee mugs that he knew didn’t belong in the café a few times to let me know that he was always up for bringing back the magic, but after I asked him if that meant his baby was sleeping through the night now, he left me alone.
After a month of dating, Emad and I both had trips planned to go home to visit our families. The first chance we got once we were both back in Amsterdam, we went out to dinner. I’d worked in my mother’s year-round Christmas store helping her glue together cotton balls to make fake snow for her window displays and drank large tumblers of Diet Coke that made me feel sick. It was hell.
I asked Emad how his trip was.
“I got married!”
“What?”
“I got married!”
He burst out laughing, and because I was so disoriented, I joined in.
“That’s crazy!”
He laughed harder. “Yes! Crazy! And, Lauren, I can’t wait for you to see her. You won’t believe it. You’re going to love her. You think I’m Muslim? She’s got the veils and everything!”
Emad’s parents had surprised him with a wife as soon as he got off the plane. He’d never met her before, so it was “very exciting!” His wife had never lef
t her country before and she was a little nervous about joining him next week.
“But it doesn’t matter. We can still see each other.”
What would have made him think that I’d be the kind of girl who would continue to see someone who was married? Oh, wait.
I sighed. “No, Emad. I’m not going to see you anymore. This is where I draw the line.”
He gave me an “Oh, this is where you draw it?” smirk. Fair enough.
It had felt good to turn him down. It wasn’t a hard call, but it still felt good, like proof that I’d finally taken control of my life. I didn’t have to date the man I had a threesome with who now had an arranged bride. I was really growing up.
Maybe that’s what the three-way had been, too! A way of saying, “Guess what, Mom? I don’t have to Windex all the bathroom windows just because it’s on my chore list.”
The moment I ripped up my return ticket to America and decided to stay in Amsterdam, I took control. Of my life.
Back in the car with David I finish the story by telling how what I’d really wanted back then was some hand-holding, a nice dinner, and back-tickling with one boring unmarried person. I’m not Anaïs Nin.
“I’m with Rachel,” he says. “Why would you let someone do that to you?”
Honestly, I feel the same way. A little sad and embarrassed for the girl who couldn’t say no but also jealous of the freedom to catch whatever crazy ship sailed past me. That pretty much sums up my twenties.
David gets his revenge and manages to tell three stories from his twenties that highlight his taste for danger and his attraction to exotic women before we’ve even reached our exit on the highway.
By the time we pull into our driveway, we agree that any story that starts with “Once, when I was in my twenties . . .” is a story, as meaningful and life-changing as it may be, we were going to have to pay a professional to listen to.
BFF
According to the little red clock above the stove, I’ve been lying on the floor of Magda’s kitchen for thirty-five minutes. I fell off her kitchen counter trying to sponge-clean her ceiling. I’d tried to move, but the ache of my spine and the intense swelling of the brain-like pain in my head wouldn’t let me. Magda’s note had a list of specific areas of her flat she wanted cleaned. People normally leave their instructions for me in English, but Magda wrote her note entirely in Dutch, and I didn’t bring my dictionary. It’s never been a problem before since I’ve been able to figure out the words for “dried pee” using context clues. Five minutes after I fell I remembered the Dutch word for “front steps” and screamed to nobody, “Steps! ‘Stoop’ means front steps! Clean the front steps!”
It would be a lot easier to be dying slowly from a concussion if Nina Simone wasn’t on the radio singing “Porgy and Bess.” In the best of circumstances my heart can’t handle listening to her sing. Her voice is so pained and haunted. It makes me feel so alone.
“Porgy . . . if you can keep me, I wanna stay here forever . . .”
If I’d known I was going to fall and suffer what could be a broken back or a mild concussion, I would have put on Billy Joel’s spiritual and uplifting “River of Dreams” or U2 or Paul Simon. Really, any song with a white man singing with a gospel choir would work.
Life had been so good a few hours ago, dancing my heart out to Prince in my little apartment, laughing hysterically at how many grapes I could fit in my mouth (twelve). I’d smoked half a joint by myself, so it was drug-induced, but joy is joy no matter how much you pay for it, and I’d found the joint on the ground next to my bike this morning, so my joy was the best kind of joy—the free kind. Now I was paying for it.
Pot is usually my perfect Buddhist boyfriend, taking me gently by the hand and showing me how to turn a dirty menial job into a spiritual practice by cleaning the too-often-ignored objects in a home, like pen caps. Today, he turned on me. I don’t want to blame pot. I blame that photo of Magda and her boyfriend, Dick, standing in front of a waterfall with their arms around each other. They’re completely naked. Of course. You cannot keep clothes on Dutch people. The glass covering the picture is thick with grease because Magda hung it right above her stove and filthy because I’d never noticed it before. One of those dust-ball dingle berries hanging off the bottom of the frame is going to plop right down in Magda’s pea soup if I don’t clean it soon. As soon as I regain the use of my hands, I’ll get right to it.
How does dour, humorless Magda with her brown-tinted teeth and the profile of a bulldog have a boyfriend, while I, at almost twenty-four years old, which is almost thirty, which is almost dead, have been single forever?
She does have nice eyelashes. Very long.
If I don’t meet someone soon I’m going to end up being so alone and desperate I’ll say yes to the first psycho who likes my ankles and end up with someone like my high school boyfriend Sam.
The first time I tried to break up with him, ten minutes into our first date, he burst into tears and threatened to kill himself, which was weird since he was twenty-two and could drink legally, so he had it made. It was so flattering and horrific I ended up staying with him for four months. He tried to push me out of a moving car so many times for things like singing along with “that fag” David Bowie, I started jumping out at stoplights even if Dire Straits was on the radio, just to be safe. If I tried to go out with my age-appropriate, happy high school friends, he’d threaten to kill himself. Thankfully, like most failed stand-ups who live in their mothers’ basements, his follow-through was horrible.
I’m guessing I was the only junior in my high school getting pushed out of a car by her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend. It was all so Tammy Lisa.
Last month, I found out that for the first eight days of my life, my name was Tammy Lisa. The adoption agency let my birth mother and birth father each give me a name for my original birth certificate. My birth father chose Tammy and my birth mother chose Lisa, so put it together and you’ve got Tammy “Get off me, Daddy, you’re crushing my smokes” Lisa. My adoptive parents recrowned me “Lauren Huntington,” but no matter how many country club sports they trained me in, they couldn’t quite scrub all the coal dust off my neck.
Tammy Lisa lurks. I have to be very careful.
My back has stopped throbbing, and I could probably get up if I wanted to, but my head hurts. My headache could have less to do with a concussion and more to do with the gas leak in my apartment. Ever since I read Sylvia Plath’s journals I’ve been paranoid that the gas heater in the corner of my bedroom is leaking, and I’m dying a slow, drawn-out version of her death.
You know what bothers me about the idea of death? It’s so hard to look forward to, and I love planning. I guess I can add “go blind, go deaf, lose teeth, and start to shit myself” to my list of things to do.
One by one, you lose your senses as you age. The only thing that connects us to life is our senses. That’s pretty deep. You see, my Buddhist boyfriend pot still treats me right. I’m going to get up really quickly and write that down in my journal. Then I’ll lie right back down in case I have a concussion and shouldn’t be moved.
You know what else this headache could be from? The giant zit on my forehead. It’s morphed the entire shape of my head. I could barely get my hat on this morning. Or it could be my new vitamins. Besides the daily pot smoking I’m really trying to take care of myself.
It’s getting dark out. Magda will be home in twenty minutes. If I get up now she may not believe me when I tell her that I fell. She might think it’s just a big ruse to get out of dealing with the mound of cat hair she calls her living room.
You know when I peaked? Fifth grade. Words like “ugly” and “pretty” didn’t matter to me. The ability to make my arms into the shape of a Y and an M and a C and an A as I sang along with the Village People gave me all the happiness I needed. As many days of the week as I could, I wore my purple satin disco pants and matching purp
le satin jacket that said STAR on the back, and under the word STAR, in case anyone found the yellow cursive stitching hard to read, was a giant yellow satin star. I strutted down the hallways of Grandview Elementary like they were the streets of Brooklyn and I was John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
Then puberty hit. I bought a DISCO SUCKS T-shirt and never wore purple satin again.
Well, Tammy Lisa, traumatic brain injury or not, get up off the floor. Tonight could be the night Magda plays squash; if I wait for her to get home, it could be hours. I’ll leave her a note explaining about my accident. My head still feels a little sore, but I haven’t felt this rested in a long time.
Magda calls me after I get back to my flat and yells at me for leaving early and not finishing my job. “I felt nauseous from the fall, Magda!” I sob to her. She is not moved. “Whatever. I wanted to fire you anyway.” Her name alone should have given me a heads-up that she was going to be a cruel and awful master.
Before I smoke pot and watch Oprah (busy, busy), I should check the want ads section of the Volkskrant for any housekeeping jobs. Hey . . . what’s this?
The award-winning American-Amsterdam Theater Company, from Houston, Texas, is bringing their unique style of Raw Emotional Theater to Europe. Seeking special individuals who are risk-taking artists who demand artistic excellence to become full-time paid company members.
A full-time professional theater company is looking to hire company members? And they’ll pay them? I’ve never seen anything like this in the want ads. In Amsterdam or back in Indiana, and believe me, I’ve looked. This is huge. Being a full-time paid member of a theater company is something that happens if you’re a Barrymore or you graduate at the top in your class from Yale School of Drama, not by responding to a want ad in the back of a newspaper. But this is Holland. Everything is different. Being an actor here isn’t something “special”—it’s a common trade, like being a carpenter or a prostitute who specializes in eating bananas with her vagina.
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