She’s had yet another AMAZING MAGICAL DAY. There’ve been a lot of those lately. Every day when I come home from work, she’s got another mind-blowing, life-changing, magical story to share. Crazy things happened to her and all she had to do was stand still. She didn’t know why—they just did!
Old Dutch women would come running up to her on the street, flagging her down just to hand her a flower and thank her. “It’s the power of loving thought, my friend. I’m telling ya!”
And dag nabbit if her birthday hadn’t been yet another blessed day of miracles.
“I saw the most beautiful sunrise over the canal when I was doing my five A.M. workout this morning—”
“Five A.M.? What’s your workout called? Lying on your back breathing like you’re sleeping, because I never hear—”
“I swear to god, I’ve been doing it every morning. I have to. Keeps me sane. Hey, could you hand me that cake behind you?”
She’s bought herself a cake for her birthday. I hand it to her and notice a tiny red gash on the inside of her palm where she’s digging her thumbnail into her skin. I’d seen her do this before, a nervous habit but never to the point that she drew blood. Which is what she’s done today.
“Oh my god, I almost forgot to tell you this. Unbelievable what happened today. Mind-blowing. You know how I’ve wanted to learn to speak Dutch? Well, last night before I went to bed I said a little prayer—‘Help me learn Dutch.’ Just decided to say it out loud to the universe. Didn’t say, ‘I know this is dumb but—’ Just said it. Then today, I swear to god, this little Dutch girl comes right up to me, like she knows me, and starts just yammering away in Dutch to me, and, Lauren, I swear to god, I understood every single word she said. Now, she was five, so it wasn’t real deep, but . . . Hey, could you hand me that fork right there?”
I hand her a fork. She takes it and says to me, in her same happy singsongy voice, “Okay, what you’re about to see is something I’ve never let anyone see before. We’re about to get real close real quick.” And stabs her fork into the cake.
I watch her eat the entire cake, the whole time thinking, I don’t think she’s going to save me a piece. And she doesn’t.
She keeps on chirping away, telling me the other crazy little funny things she saw all day—butterflies landing on her nose, newborn infants saying her name . . .
“Hey, girlfriend, could you hand me that bag on the floor?”
Against my better judgment I hand it to her and she pulls out five avocados. I hate avocados. Avocado is the one food that I’m allergic to, and people are always like, “Oops there’s some avocado in the salad. Is that okay?” No, it’s not okay! And whenever I say I hate avocados, people are like, “What! Well, what about guacamole? Do you like guacamole!” and I’m yacking. I’m sweating watching her.
She eats five of them. Should I bring up the Mexican dinner? Is she going to throw up? Turns out I didn’t have to worry about bringing it up because she sees the time and yells, “Hey, time for Mexican food!”
At dinner, the party doesn’t stop. She’s ordering enchiladas! Loving her birthday! Singing “Happy Birthday” in Dutch. I’m scared. What’s next? Is she just going to reach into her purse and pull out a gun? “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!” BAM!
Back at the apartment she turns off all the lights. There’s no possible way she’s not feeling a little ill. God knows I am.
“I’m tired of lying to people,” she tells me. “Tired of saying things I don’t mean. I’ve let so many people down in my life. My parents must be so exhausted. Been married three times. I’ve brought so many different lovers home with me over the years. White men, black men, old guys, young black women. I’ve made so many promises, started so many different lives, that I don’t know who I am anymore. If I flew home tomorrow and showed up on their porch with my arm around a can of beans I was planning to marry and announced I was becoming an astronaut, they wouldn’t bat an eye. Lord have mercy on my sad little soul stuck in this big old body, how I wish I was kidding.”
Nico never talked about her past. All we usually talked about was how special I was going to be or how special she was going to be.
It’s incredible and she’s not done. She tells me secrets. Upsetting stories about her past that if I had heard from anyone else but her I would have judged as bat-shit crazy, but the truth from the source is a completely different truth.
Weird to think, but in my twenty-three years, I’ve never heard an adult, someone I look up to, admit to making a mistake. It’s so comforting to know that all the intensely overwhelming emotions I feel all the time aren’t reserved for me.
In the middle of me telling her about dating Sam, I stop myself. It’s bad enough one person went through it—I suggest we eat some rice cakes and call it a night. Nico tells me to keep going and don’t leave anything out. “Why not? I got at least two hours before this enchilada lets me get to sleep.”
Friends my age didn’t admit to the awful things from our past. Never. Who wanted to think about all that? I spent most of my time trying not to be found out. Being able to get out what I’d been carrying around for so long was, to put it mildly, so nice.
From that night on we refer to ourselves as BFFs.
Nico’s parents fly her back to live with them in Houston. It’s tough to be away from the one person on the earth who knows me. We’re making little mini-cassette recordings for each other, just like Felicity. We call them “the BFF tapes.” The best friends forever tapes. The recorder is plastered to my lips all the time. The tape that came in the mail today had an hour of an Oprah episode about “unsung heroes.” Nico forgot she was recording and accidentally recorded the entire show. I’m glad she still sent it. It was like we were watching TV together.
The other side of the tape is the sounds of her driving around Houston in her VW bug, drinking Diet Coke and looking for an office job. “BFF, if you moved back to America you could be a movie star. I’m telling you.”
Dreaming of being a movie star is so fifth grade. I was going to be Annie in the movie version of the Broadway hit musical Annie. “Will have braces removed if cast” was written at the top of my résumé. The part was my mine to lose. I was adopted. I’d perfected the screaming song technique that all good Annie wannabes had. The auditions required you to submit a headshot before you showed up in Chicago for the audition. My father took pictures of me in our backyard exuding more confidence and chutzpah than Judy Garland in her prime. “Sure it’s a hard knock life, but look at me now!” with hand on the hip, jaunty head tilt, and big smile, screamed at the camera. I even went so far as to get out my special Annie purse I’d bought at the merchandise table when the Broadway touring company of Annie came to town, and stuck our white Persian cat, Phantom (or maybe it was Diablo or Demon or Goblin; there were so many family cats with demonic creepy names, it’s tough to be sure), in it for a few photos (and this was before carrying small animals in your purse was high fashion). I flung the purse and the tense-looking cat over my shoulder with a wink to the camera that said, “See ya on the set, girls!”
The auditions were held at the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Chicago. There were hundreds of girls, wealthy suburban girls dressed in exact replicas of Annie’s signature red dress, putting my Annie cat-pee purse to shame. Other Annies did what they could with red T-shirts and burgundy shorts, Ronald McDonald curly red wigs slipping off their heads. The director, an old white man with poufy gray hair wearing a pink cardigan sweater, circled us up to sing “Tomorrow.” He pointed at a girl and she sang. If he liked a girl he let her sing a few verses and then cut her off and pointed to the next girl in the circle to pick up the song wherever it was left off. To the right of me in the circle was Marissa, a tiny Jewish girl with naturally curly auburn hair and large boobs for an eleven-year-old. She sang an entire verse before she was cut off at the word “tomorrow.” She didn’t even get to finish the word. All she got to was “To�
�” and the director cut her off and pointed at me. This was it. This was my moment. I opened up my mouth—“MORROW!”—and was immediately cut off. That was it. My parents drove three hours to Chicago so I could scream “morrow” in a gay man’s face, get in the car, and come right back home.
My dad suggested I focus on school and learn to type. All the girls in that room thought they were special. But they weren’t. None of them. Including me. Especially me. Well, there was a delicate little boy who came dressed as Annie who had the best voice in my circle. He was certainly special, but he still wasn’t any movie star.
Or was he? That was a long time ago. How do I know that little boy wasn’t Neil Patrick Harris? Anything is possible.
Anything is possible. I’m okay now.
I’m going back to America. It’s time. I decide to move to Seattle, a city where I know no one, because it seems like Amsterdam. Lots of rain, bikes, and “I like these shoes; they’re comfortable” kind of people. And it’s the only city where I was accepted for a theater internship.
Moving back is a lot of work. I can’t hold a tape recorder to my mouth as I’m packing boxes. It doesn’t leave enough room for the joint to be in there. I’d think about calling Nico up, but I was so busy surviving I’d have enough time for only a quick “Man, the portion sizes are big in America” before I needed to get to the bank to try to figure out how to get a checking account.
“Hey, BFF! I’m here! I’m in Seattle! I sold my car and bought a bike but Seattle is so full of hills, I end up walking around pushing my bike everywhere. This internship thing is good, but it’s hard. People all seem more suspicious of the fact that I lived in Amsterdam than impressed. I’m so poor I’ve been going to a food bank. None of the other interns at the theater understand what my deal is. They all have girlfriends and husbands and houses and lives. They’re clearly the Okays.”
The next morning I want to tell Nico about how I smoked pot out of a bong the size of an eleven-year-old with a picture on the side of it of a skeleton dressed as Uncle Sam saying, “I want YOU,” and how Bride of Frankenstein was on TV as I had sex with the lawn care guy who works on my block—but I can’t find the tape recorder.
The lawn care guy’s name is Greg. It’s nice to have someone to smoke pot and watch old horror movies with. I’m not going to feel bad about spending night after night with someone who may have brain damage from excessive pot smoking, but I do hope I don’t get in trouble for missing the last three internship meetings.
Tonight, I’m not staying at lawn care guy’s house. Attempting to maintain the Euro lifestyle I’d grown accustomed to, I moved into a quaint little month-to-month studio that seemed artsy because it had a shared bathroom, “like an artist commune,” but the place turned out to be an SRO that houses mostly male ex-convicts. It’s not ideal, but I need some time alone.
There’s always some surprise awaiting me when I open the door to my room. Cockroaches, a drunk man the landlord accidentally let into the wrong room slumped over on a chair, you name it. Tonight I open the door, and there she is, sitting in the dark. Nico. She’d used her Texas charm to get my landlord to let her into my room.
I cannot believe she’s here. It’s incredible to see my BFF here. Or it should be incredible, but I’m feeling slightly ambushed. I’d missed the tape she sent me that said she was going to take a road trip to Seattle to come see me. We laugh about the pile of dried throw up in the hallway. She tells me about a “god moment” she had right as she crossed the border of Arizona.
She thinks my voice sounds odd. I think her voice sounds odd.
I am a little worried she’s mad at me for not sending any more tapes. I’d like to turn the lights on to make sure she’s not sitting there with a horse’s head on her lap or a loaded gun, but she won’t let me.
In the dark, she starts making plans for day trips for us to take. Got to go see that mountain! Got to check out those fish throwers! Got to see this waterfall I heard about! We laugh about how I’d missed that she was coming to see me, but I’m fake laughing. Thanks to my wound work, it sounds real.
Most days, I stay at the theater filing plays for the artistic director, or watching him play video games on his computer. I have no idea what she’s doing with her time and I don’t want to know. It’s going to be something huge and dramatic and I won’t believe her and I don’t know what she plans on doing here in Seattle. I’m working with a new theater company. And honestly, I don’t really need a roommate. The only reason I’m staying at the lawn care guy’s place every night is to give her room. My place is tiny.
Praying she’s not home, I’m making a quick stop to pick up some clean clothes. She’s not there. At all. Her stuff is gone. She’s written me a note on the cover of a People magazine (I mean The Atlantic Monthly): “Gone to stay in a motel.”
Sure, I’d avoided her completely and been deliberately unwelcoming, but I hadn’t meant for her to just leave. I feel awful. And completely relieved.
Nico has also left me a message on my answering machine. Her voice is flat. “Why don’t you meet me the Irish Lion at eight P.M.? We need to talk.”
At 8:15 I’m standing outside the door of the Irish Lion wishing they served beer on the sidewalk. I’m a nervous wreck. Making eye contact with Nico is impossible. She seems very . . . okay. The nachos arrive. “I read your journal.”
What? She read my journal? I’m trying to think of what I wrote about her. I’m sure I wrote something, but hey. Wait a minute. You can’t read my journal. It doesn’t matter what I wrote.
“Listen, girlfriend, something was going on with you and you weren’t being honest with me.”
“So you took it upon yourself to go into my private things and take what wasn’t yours to have? Wow.” Reading a person’s journal is too far. You don’t read a person’s journal. The only thing I think I even wrote about Nico was something about how she annoyed me sometimes. Big deal. I may have mentioned how I think she could be a big old lesbian and was full of shit, but outside of that I think I mostly wrote about what I ate for lunch.
“You aren’t yourself, Lauren. You’re pulling yourself down and I’m not going to watch.”
“That’s a real deep insight, journal reader,” I say to her and order another beer. I don’t have to listen to a word she says.
Victims don’t have to listen to perps.
“What happened to that little twenty-three-year-old who was working so hard to be okay?”
“Well, what happened to the American-Amsterdam Texas whatever it was called Theater Company? Blah-blah-blah. Big words coming out of a journal reader’s face, Nico.”
I’m about to tell her how sick I am of hearing about all her “good moments” and how amazing life is for her and how special she is, when she stands up and throws a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore,” she says, and walks out of the pub.
• • •
It’s been almost five years since my ex–best friend and guru paid twenty dollars for four-dollar nachos and broke up with me. I’ve just started as a cast member for a local half-hour sketch comedy show in Seattle called Almost Live!
During the first year Nico was out of my life I tried to call her, but her phone was disconnected. I tried her parents’ number and their number was disconnected too. Did she make her whole family move because she hated me so much? For a long time, it was tough knowing that the one person who knew me better than anyone else on the earth was out there cursing my name.
I’m sitting at my desk reading a book about doing yoga instead of writing jokes when my phone rings. I jump up and close my door. If a comedy writer overhears a serious conversation it can make them do crazy things like scream “cocksucker” as loud as they can or organize a group of writers to stand in front of you in their underwear to distract you.
“Hey, girlfriend, guess who this is!”
; Nico. How on earth she got my work number is beyond me, but I don’t waste time finding out because I have too much I have to tell her. It was a year of hell after she walked out in Seattle, but since then it’s been kind of incredible. All the skills she gave me, all that she taught me, helped me start writing plays, and it’s been going so well. I got married. He’s a bartender but not the gross kind. The sweet, loving kind. He’s one of the Okays, Nico. And he says he loves me, and I believe him.
Soon after a producer from this TV show saw me in a play I wrote and now I’m a cast member of this show that’s local but it’s a big deal here and it should lead to other things. I get in trouble a lot for never writing for anyone but myself, which is embarrassing.
Nico started her own computer repair company, got married, bought a house, has a little boy, and could not be happier. “I’m no rock star. It suits me fine.”
In Amsterdam, Nico had given me answers to help save me from myself, but all of that disappeared once I moved. The loneliness I felt in Amsterdam quadrupled in Seattle. I was so scared when I first moved here, and I didn’t want her to see how badly I was coping. I didn’t want her to see how awful the lawn care stoner guy was for me. I think she just had too much power in my life and I had to push her away so I could find out who I was on my own. The passing of time and being surrounded by comedians has helped me come to the understanding that we are all fundamentally alone. No matter how many times I think, oh, this is it, I’m okay, I’m home, I’m fooling myself, and within a month or a week or a year, I’m homeless again.
The main thing I have to tell her is how sorry I am for what happened when she showed up in Seattle but how ultimately it was a good thing that I was allowed to save myself.
Nico asks me what the hell I’m talking about.
“Listen, I did crazy stuff back then, so I wouldn’t put it past me!” she says, and bursts out laughing.
Miss Fortune Page 8
