51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  Joel sees me and lights up. He doesn’t seem to care that I am not drinking; I think he just likes that I am willing to have fun at this relatively boring, grown-up affair. He asks me to pose for his pictures, and we end up doing our own photo shoot. Not sexual ones. Goofy photos. One where I am curled up on the floor like a cat. Another, we’re both throwing gang signs. One where we are head banging. Regular all-American fun. One o’clock hits, and I am about to leave. I plan to leave. And then everybody else starts leaving, and I realize that Joel is spending the night there. I sit down on the couch, and he comes and sits down next to me. We are getting tired, and he lies down against me. And then I feel it. The stir that had gone missing these last few months. The pulse I had once known with both frequency and intimacy—my raging fourteen-year old hormones. My libido’s back, and I’m gonna get in trouble. Mimi and her boyfriend, Carty, sit on the opposite couch, and it’s as though Mimi knows this when she suggests, “Kristen, why don’t you stay the night?”

  Yes, why don’t I? Surely, I shouldn’t be driving home the four short blocks between our houses. I am sober, and it is before 2:00 a.m. “Okay,” I agree as Joel begins to quietly rub my leg. Mimi and Carty go to bed. Joel and I make room for the both of us on their couch. I am having trouble sorting out all the pillows, and I don’t like being in control in these situations and am playing the dumb blonde to get out of it.

  Joel laughs. “And you’re the sober one.”

  “But I’m still the girl,” I whine. Even pouting my lips for good measure.

  And that’s all I need to say. Because instantly Joel goes into action. He sobers up. He sorts out the pillows, takes off his shirt, positions me on the inside of the couch, curls in behind me, pulls me in close, and it is on.

  It has been years since I had sex like that. Hair-pulling, hickeyleaving, love-making sex. The type you see in the movies when it looks like the actors are about to devour each other and names get uttered over and over. And then it feels like the back of your brain just got blasted out, and your bodies go slack, and your mind goes dull, and it isn’t love. And it doesn’t matter. Because I never do this. And I get to enjoy it with the same amount of satisfaction as if it were the real thing.

  Joel knows this is just play acting. We’re both pros. We know how to pretend we’re in love for one night. And it’s fun to do it with such intensity: We don’t ask too many questions; we don’t pretend this is the beginning of anything; we just kiss and snuggle and find something quite nice for a night. Something that both of us have been missing in our very different lives. Me with my rigorous sobriety and my clean and healthy choices. And Joel? Joel is still living the life I used to live. And it shows. It shows in the dark circles around his eyes. In the clench of his jaw. In the graying hair around his temples.

  I fall asleep praying for him. I pray that his higher power saves him as mine did me. I pray that he gets the chance to live a responsible and healthy life. I pray that he grows up.

  28

  Date Twenty-Eight: California Country

  I’ve been listening to a lot of country lately. And not even good country—cheap, modern, pop country. Shit like Taylor Swift and Shania Twain and Billy Ray Cyrus. When I was a kid growing up in Dallas, country made me nauseous. It was everywhere, like football, and created an immediate, visceral reaction. The first twang of Travis Tritt or the roar of the stadium crowd created an anxious churn in me, which I can only guess is what one feels during a heart attack.

  To this day the mere sight of a football green will make me light-headed, but my opinion on country has changed. Now it seems to be the only type of music that truly relaxes me. Which as I am singing “Red Neck Girls” on my way home tonight, makes me wonder whether I am becoming more Texan. Because I never felt at home in Dallas. I still don’t. I read too much, thought too much, and definitely talked too much to ever be accepted there. And though I have friends and family in that town who love me, and whom I love, I know that I do not belong there, anymore than I belong on a football field. But Texas… well, Texas is all about horses and guns and independent women. And those things I am.

  Which is why when Frank invites me to go shooting for our first date, I can’t help but be excited. Frank is a lighting consultant on blockbuster films. He is from a suburb outside of Chicago. He reads authors like Thomas Pynchon and Jonathan Kozol. He is extremely funny on the phone, and from what I can tell by his pictures, really cute. And I am actually pretty excited about this date. I even shave my legs because I want to feel pretty. And I worry about what I am going to wear and end up putting on a sexy top, paired with my trusty decade-old cowboy boots.

  On Thursday, I went for my first trail ride in Griffith Park. As much as I have loved learning how to walk, trot, and canter in the dust-streaked arenas of the equestrian center, the hills that surround it had begun to beckon me. My friend Jen introduced me to a British horsewoman named Jane, who teaches neophytes like me how to race a horse up a mountain without falling off. With the same thick, woolly hair that all of us horsewomen seem to have and the perfect London accent, Jane quickly became my hero. I borrowed one of her horses, and we went through a tunnel that runs under the 134 Freeway, and she took me up and deep into the Griffith Park hills.

  Growing up, all of my report cards were littered with the same comments, “Refuses to listen,” “Won’t follow directions,” “Doesn’t pay attention.” I hated them like I hated country music, but they weren’t altogether wrong. Later, I would take that inability to listen and bring it into workplaces, relationships, and my conscience. But as I rode with Jane, I paid close attention to her British accent and her wise words about how to stay on a horse while riding on the side of a cliff.

  She explained to me how to give and take with the reins so that my horse didn’t rear on the narrow paths. She taught me how to lean forward while the horse cantered up the mountain so I didn’t bounce off. And as we hit the top of the old landfill that stands above Mount Hollywood she showed me a view like I have never seen. To my right were the Griffith Park Observatory and the smoggy haze of Hollywood. To my left were the high and folding peaks of the mountains of San Gabriel Valley. And in between was us, caught between these incredible worlds of city, country, and ever-winding freeway. It was sunset on a Thursday night. Most people get off work and then go home and watch TV. And normally that’s what I would do too. But that night, I sat on a horse, and I caught my breath because that is the kind of country I pay attention to.

  The following Saturday night, I walk into the Japanese restaurant where Frank, my Pynchon-reading, lighting-consultant date, and I are rendezvousing.

  “Frank?” I hesitantly ask the lone man waiting by the hostess stand. Frank greets me in turn, and I fear he can see the look of disappointment cross my face. Frank looks nothing like his pictures. I am not sure whether it’s because I don’t have the fancy, $25-a-month version of The Onion personals, and so all the pics are thumbnails, or if it’s because Frank has posted photos of himself that are as old as my boots. Because Frank is old.

  He’s got longish, graying blond hair. His eyes are too light and his body not right, and as we sit down to dinner I look at his soft, pale, ill-defined hands, and I know this isn’t going to work.

  “Yeah, this whole online dating thing kind of throws me,” Frank tells me as we sit down at the Sushi bar.

  Whenever you go out on an online date with someone, they always have to mention how weird online dating is. I don’t get it. We live online, we shop online, we chat online, we look at porn online. Why would meeting someone on the Internet be such a source of anxiety?

  I shrug. “I guess.”

  “Or maybe it’s just dating in general.”

  That I get. “Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, but I didn’t go on my first date until I was like twenty-five or twenty-six. It’s still pretty new to me,” I tell him.

  “Me too. Although mine is because I’ve been with someone for a long time.”

  “H
ow long?” I ask.

  “Thirteen years.”

  “Wow.” I can’t help but say it, “That sucks.”

  I feel for him. At least I have been on the dating scene for some time, even if most of my dates, hell, roughly all of them, have taken place in the last six months. After we eat, we go to the gun range as Frank had promised. I blast away at an easy target with my 9 mm, but when I attempt a real one, with a bull’s-eye and not just photos of fake terrorists, I realize that I am a terrible shot. Frank comes over and shows me how. He explains it in depth and gives me my first real lesson in target practice.

  “You should get a .22 next time. You can’t focus your aim with something like a 9 mm. Even my dad, who competed, practiced with a smaller gun.”

  Frank and I finish shooting, and though it doesn’t feel as though the date should end on such an adrenaline-rushed high, I have to get to Hollywood for a birthday party. Nat’s fiancé Reggie is celebrating his two-year sober anniversary at midnight, and I need to be there. I want to be there. So we take our paper targets, and Frank drives me to my car. We hug, and though I am not sure, I think Frank might realize I am more into shooting than I am into him.

  I drive to Canter’s, where my friends and I are meeting. I walk in and go toward the back of the room where I see a large table with warm faces. I give Reggie my target with the terrorists on it, with a Happy Birthday note, and I hug my lovely friends. I sit down and laugh and listen to the lives of those I love. Because I do listen now. I listen all the time.

  29

  Date Twenty-Nine: Cinderella Does Not Smoke Marlboros

  “I just quit smoking.” These words do not surprise my date Tim as much as they do me. I decided two weeks ago to not have one, and I haven’t since. And it’s spooky. I have been smoking Marlboro Mediums since I was eighteen and have a love for them that surpasses most of my human relationships. So why and how I am on the verge of making it to twenty-one days without my oldest friends is beyond me. And the sad thing is I really don’t miss them.

  “That’s good,” Tim replies.

  We are sitting at a bar on Franklin. Franklin Avenue is the quainter option if one is driving from Hollywood to Silver Lake. I used to take it all the time because it is also the street on which Oliver lives. We used to drink at this bar. But now I sit watching my date drink, and I wonder whether he is legal to have one. Whereas Frank from the shooting range looked a good ten years older than his posted age, Tim looks ten years younger than his listed “28.”

  “I’ve been smoking since I was twelve,” I tell him.

  Now, Tim is surprised. “How do you start smoking at twelve?”

  “I was stressed out,” I shrug. When I was eight years old, my mom, Nana, and I moved into the condominium complex that became the setting for my childhood. Situated between a nice neighborhood and a railroad track, it was the perfect analogy for the awkward class position in which we found ourselves. And also the awkward age I found myself at when I turned twelve. Gone were the days when I was the cute little blonde in the class picture. As my boobs failed to develop, and my permanent teeth twisted into an awkward snarl, and the confidence I once had turned into a fear of boys and girls and Nana, the one place I felt safe was that condominium complex situated between a nice neighborhood and a railroad track.

  Nana couldn’t keep me inside after school, and I learned that I lived in a fairy-tale place of adventure. Whereas I spent much of my childhood playing teacher by myself in our one-car garage, I was now given unlimited license to roam. I would do a serviceable amount of homework before slumping down on the couch next to Nana. This was the beginning of CNN in our household, and my grandmother was glued to Wolf Blitzer and the First Gulf War.

  “Nana?”

  “Huh,” she would grunt, watching the SCUD missiles fly high above Israel.

  “Can I go for a walk?”

  She would look at me suspiciously as she had begun to always look at me at that age. As though she too was confused as to what had happened to the adorable little Barbie I had been just two years before. She sniffed the air. “Your breath smells. Go brush your teeth.”

  “Okay, but then can I go for a walk?”

  “Fine. Just be home in an hour. I’m putting the chicken on.”

  An hour would barely give me enough time to smoke my rationed-out two cigarettes and make sure I didn’t smell, but I would take it and rush out the door.

  “You didn’t brush your teeth,” she would call out after me. But I would, just after I got home. After I walked up to the Food Lion and stole my pack of Turkish Camel Unfiltereds. After I put on my Walkman and turned on the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. After I pretended I was someone else.

  Some days I would walk along the tracks, and I would be tough and cool and dangerous. I would listen to The Velvet Underground and pretend I was a junkie dropout like the real tough and cool and dangerous girls in my middle school. Other days, I would play in the gazebo that sat at the entrance of our condominium complex, and I would marry a prince, or accept an Oscar, or act out any number of strange scenes that I am sure made the commuting crowd driving by look twice. Once it started to get dark, I would amble back intentionally late to our condo and prepare myself for Nana’s, “Where have you been?”

  “Walking,” I would mumble, lying down on the couch.

  “You’re late. Finish your homework,” she would yell at me as she breaded the chicken tenders.

  “I don’t have any homework.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No I don’t. And what do you know anyway?”

  She would come in from the kitchen, towel in hand. “I know you have homework to do and that you are thirty minutes late, now move it.”

  She would swat at my feet hanging off the couch, and I would scream as though she had just taken a belt to me, “You hit me!”

  “No, I didn’t. Besides, I’m the boss here,” she would say as she walked into the kitchen.

  “No, you’re not. Mom is. And you’re not my mom!” This had become my rallying cry during these years, before it got so bad that Nana had to move out.

  But my mom would be safe at work. And she would come home hours later, after we had eaten our chicken tenders in silence, and I had gone to bed. And I would lie there waiting for her car to pull into the garage, and I would imagine what my life would be like if I had just jumped on one of the trains that regularly ran past our condo. Because I figured if I couldn’t get rich and become a princess, I should probably just hop a boxcar and become a hobo. Either way, I knew I needed a cigarette. And I was eternally grateful during those years that the Food Lion made it so easy to steal the small delightful packs of Turkish Camels.

  Tim is looking at me like I am telling him about how I had to walk forty miles in the snow to get to school, and I know I have probably just told him too much. But I also know that I can say anything here because I am not interested in Tim. Whether eighteen or twenty-eight, I am not into younger men. First of all, I like my guys a little more road-weary than that. I like some chest hair, and wrinkles around the eyes, and the certain roughness of skin that age creates. Tim is incredibly smooth, so much so I wonder whether he can even grow a beard. People are always shocked when I tell them I’m thirty. Apparently, I look fourteen, but next to Tim I just look old. And I feel even older, referencing Wolf Blitzer and the Pixies and Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume.

  I learn that both of Tim’s parents are deaf, and I ask him if he signs.

  “No, I never learned,” he says, shrugging.

  “Really? They never tried to teach you?”

  “Oh no,” he tells me. “They tried for years, but I wasn’t really interested.”

  I am floored. As much as Tim might think it’s strange that I once stole cigarettes from the local grocery store, or that I would perform small plays by myself in a gazebo overlooking rush-hour traffic in Plano, Texas, or that I feel the need to divulge stories of my adolescence on a first date, I find it all the more weird th
at he can’t sign with his parents.

  Because as much as my grandmother and I screamed a lot during 1990, we still spoke each other’s language. And though I might have started smoking at a precociously young age, I cannot imagine refusing the adventures it brought me on, real or imagined.

  Earlier in the day I had been at one of my organization’s preschools. I was coordinating a donation of toys when one of the little girls came up and asked me in her quiet, three-year-old voice, “Are you a Princess?” I said that I’m not, but that I would like to be. Before I knew it, I had a small gathering of three-year-olds around me. They explained that they were Jasmine, Snow White, and Belle, respectively. The little one who first came up to me took hold of my hand and told me, “You can be Cinderella.”