I Suck at Girls

by Justin Halpern

  “What were you going to say, Dad?”

  “Clearly your hormones are bouncing around like a puppy with two dicks. But I’m not here to give you some bullshit talk about women. There are three billion of them, and to generalize that many people with some blanket statement is the definition of being an asshole. Women are all different, so I don’t have any advice on them. But I feel fairly qualified to give you some advice about yourself.”

  “Okay,” I sighed.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, am I keeping you from a fucking appointment with the head of marketing or something?”

  I sat back in my chair and put my feet up on the bed to signify my surrender.

  “Someday you’re going to meet a fine woman. And hopefully, if I haven’t completely fucked you up, you’re going to recognize that. But I have never seen a human being drive himself more batshit than you when it’s time to make a decision. Every time you order lunch it’s like you’re presiding over the fucking Cuban missile crisis.”

  “I’m a picky eater,” I said.

  “You’re a picky everything. Probably my fault. Did my best. Not gonna dwell on it, though. Which brings me to my point. Someday you’re gonna go stupid for a woman. And when you do, do me this one favor: don’t get all caught up in the bullshit that’s going on in your head. If it’s right, then you put on your fuckin’ big-boy pants and you go for it.”

  Twelve years later, I felt, for the first time in my life, like my dad’s prediction had come true: I was going stupid for a woman. Before meeting Amanda, I’d done plenty of stupid things for women, like the time I lent my car to my first girlfriend’s little brother, who used it to mule a thousand dollars of Viagra he bought in Tijuana back across the border. But even when I was infatuated with a girl in the past, she never became the only thing I could think about. With Amanda, everything changed.

  In the month since I’d run into her at the gallery show, she and I had exchanged e-mails every day. We e-mailed about everything from past relationships to major league baseball to what scenario would make it okay to eat your family dog. (I said the apocalypse; she argued that I’d never survive the apocalypse because of my allergies, so why eat my only companion just so I could live a few more dark days?) I became so enamored of our discourse that I would sit down at my wobbly forty-dollar Ikea desk in the corner of my bedroom and spend two hours drafting, rewriting, and polishing a five-thousand-word e-mail—only to wake up the next day and find one just as long from her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I thought about what she might be doing, what she was thinking, where she was right then. I thought about what it would be like to date her, or even be married to her. I had gone stupid. And we were just getting to know each other.

  I lay in bed one night, a month into our e-relationship, driving myself crazy wondering if she’d ever consider moving to Los Angeles and how it would work if she didn’t. I realized I needed to stop. My obsession was unhealthy; and I was setting myself up for potential heartbreak. I needed to think critically. I took a deep breath, tried to clear my head of all my hopes and fears, and focused on the most logical question I could ask myself: How could I possibly like her as much as I felt I did? The answer I came up with was that there was no way I could. In twenty seconds I went from head over heels to completely cold feet.

  I didn’t e-mail her the next day. It was the first day I had missed in a month. If I backed off and put a little distance between us, I figured, maybe I could control myself, get a better handle on the situation. Plus, I wasn’t even sure how Amanda felt about me, and I was already hoping our kids would get her nose instead of mine. But I never got the chance to take a breather. The very next day, Amanda sent me this note: “I would love it if you would come see me in San Francisco this weekend. I’m having a Halloween party. I’m going to be dressed as Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas after she peed her pants on stage. Just in case you were thinking of going as that.”

  Flights from LA to San Francisco started at a hundred bucks. I currently had one hundred and thirty-three dollars in my bank account. I knew that because I checked it online every day leading up to the end of the month. I lived in constant fear of my bank balance. I always got a paycheck around the first of the month, which usually gave me just enough money to pay my rent if I didn’t miss any shifts, but going to visit Amanda would definitely make me miss at least one. Still, I couldn’t shake how much I wanted to see her.

  I decided to look online to see if I could find a sale on flights. I couldn’t. The cheapest was a hundred and fifty bucks, which would put me seventeen dollars in the red. But way down on the Google search results page was an ad for a company called Megabus, which was offering one-dollar round-trip rides from L.A. to San Francisco for the first ten people who bought tickets. There was one left for the upcoming weekend. I bought it and e-mailed Amanda to let her know I was coming.

  That Saturday morning I stuffed a weekend’s worth of clothes in a backpack and headed over to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, where I came upon a large blue bus emblazoned with a giant pig wearing a bus driver’s costume. I showed my ticket to the driver, who grunted and motioned for me to take a seat. The bus was dark and cold, yet somehow humid, like the dank pit where Buffalo Bill keeps his victims in The Silence of the Lambs. The forty or so seats were mostly empty, save for about ten occupied by fellow travelers, all of whom looked like they were fleeing LA rather than visiting San Francisco.

  As I walked down the center aisle to find a seat, a man with a sleeveless T-shirt and one eye swollen shut looked at me, then put his feet up on the seat next to him. I headed all the way to the back, three rows away from the nearest passenger, sat down, and cracked open a book. Then, just before we were about to head out, a man in a wool cap carrying only a single fishing pole got on the bus, walked all the way to the back, and sat down right next to me. I thought about getting up to move, but then worried I’d insult him, and he didn’t look like the type of guy who took insults well.

  For the next eight hours we sat in silence next to each other, save for a ten-minute break when we stopped off at a roadside Burger King. He stared straight ahead, motionless the entire time, with his hands in his pockets. I had planned to sleep, but I kept hearing the noise of something he was fidgeting with in his pants and started worrying that I wouldn’t be able to protect myself if it turned out to be some kind of weapon and he was in a stabbing mood, which didn’t look implausible.

  Finally, at around five P.M., San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid and surrounding skyline appeared on the horizon. The fisherman shifted his weight and turned to me for the first time.

  “Why are you here?” he said in a guttural voice.

  “Like, why am I going to San Francisco? Or why am I on this bus?” I asked, sliding away from him and preparing for a defensive maneuver.

  “San Francisco.”

  “I’m visiting someone.”

  “Do you enjoy this bus?” he asked.

  “Do I enjoy it? I mean, not really. Do you?”

  “I paid one dollar. For one dollar I would let them rape me on this bus,” he said, then broke into an uncomfortably boisterous laugh, as if he were in the audience of an episode of Cheers.

  Amanda had given me directions from the bus station to her house via subway, and after getting on the wrong train twice in a row, I groggily walked up to an old Victorian apartment building near the Castro district. Door-to-door, it had taken me eleven hours to get to her. I was in a horrible mood, and I looked and smelled like a nineteenth-century miner who’d just traveled to San Francisco by boat to mine for gold. My head was throbbing as I walked up the stairs to her second floor apartment and knocked on the door.

  The door flung open. Amanda grabbed me with both arms and squeezed.

  “You’re here!” she said, holding on to me in the doorway. “How was the trip?”

  “It was long,” I replied.

  She grabbed my bags from me and led me into her apartment.

  “Ugh. That
sucks. Well, I’m really excited you’re here. I’m gonna put your stuff in my room. We have to grab some booze for the party, and I figured we could stop at a thrift store, too, so you could buy some stuff for a costume. Did you think of any ideas on the way up?”

  “No. I sat next to a rapist.”

  “What?”

  “He might not have been a rapist. I shouldn’t say that. He just seemed like it. Anyway, I didn’t think about a costume.”

  “Oh. Well, okay.”

  Amanda set my bags down in a small, plaster-walled room, which looked like a converted dining area, now occupied by a neatly made bed that smelled like the opposite of me. I walked back down the hall to the lone bathroom. As I washed my hands and ran water over my face, I started thinking about having to make that bus trip several times a month. And then about how broke I was. And then it hit me that, last time I’d checked my bank account, I’d forgotten to account for my phone bill, which I had on auto-pay. I asked Amanda if I could jump on her computer, and when I did my online balance confirmed my anxiety. I now had fifty-four dollars in my account to last me for the rest of the month, and I still needed a Halloween costume.

  I also realized I hadn’t really been putting on a good showing for Amanda. I had to buck up—especially because her costume was perfect, right down to the shape of the urine stain on the crotch, which perfectly mirrored the one in the photo of the soiled rock star she’d clipped out of a celebrity magazine. I should have been excited to be there with Amanda, after all those weeks of thinking of little else, but I was so consumed with worrying about money that all I could think about was that I’d never be able to afford the travel and the missed work it would take to date her, even if I was willing to take the dollar bus filled with suspected criminals. Determined to create the cheapest costume possible, when we got to the thrift store I ended up buying a three-dollar pair of brown slacks, a two-dollar shirt, and a thirty-cent hand broom. Then I scooped some black grease from the inside of a tire on the sidewalk in front of her house, rubbed it on my face, and called myself a chimney sweep. An hour later her tiny apartment filled with thirty or forty costumed partygoers.

  For the next couple of hours, I stood silently next to Amanda as she made her rounds, seeing all of her friends. I felt like it was my first day on the job and I was shadowing my trainer. The place was jammed; ’90s rap music was blasting out of the small living room, where a tightly packed dance party had broken out. Despite the noise and crowd, Amanda was doing her best to introduce me to her friends and make sure I had a good time. And, like a total self-consumed jerk, I was no help whatsoever.

  “People are liking your costume,” Amanda said as she poured vodka into two plastic red Solo cups.

  “Really? Who told you that?” I replied.

  “You know, just people at the party.”

  “Nobody told you they liked my costume, did they?”

  “No. But it was a vibe I got.”

  Meeting your date’s friends for the first time is like playing poker; you have to read each one of them, and then put forth just the right amount of conversation. If you go all in on someone who just wanted to say hi, you’ll risk seeming pushy and desperate. If you fold and stand there silent when you’re introduced to her chatty best friend, you might come off as weird and antisocial. And if you put on a face that says “Don’t come near me,” everyone else will fold—which is what was happening to me. I was tired and nervous, it was loud, and I was talking myself out of every fantasy that had consumed me through those past couple weeks. I was failing miserably, and Amanda could see it.

  After a while, she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the dance floor. But just as she did, I felt the Burger King Chicken Griller I’d eaten during the one middle-of-nowhere stop on the bus ride suddenly snap awake in my stomach. It wanted out, and it wanted out now. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be headed out the way it came in. At least if I puked, I could blame it on alcohol or bad food. It happens: people puke all the time at parties. No one gets explosive diarrhea.

  Amanda tried to pull me toward her, but I didn’t move.

  “Let’s dance,” she yelled over the music.

  “I, uh—I think I need to use your bathroom,” I said.

  “You know where it is, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be right back.”

  I quickly walked down the hall. With every step, my need to avail myself of her toilet grew exponentially, the way earthquakes get ten times more devastating with every tenth of a point on the Richter scale. I opened the bathroom door, only to find a man dressed as Gandalf from Lord of the Rings with his back to me, peeing. I quickly closed the door and hurried back to Amanda, who was on the dance floor with a few friends, moving to the thumping bass of Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance.” I pulled her aside.

  “Does your bathroom have a lock on the door?” I yelled.

  “No. But just close it. No one’s gonna come in, I promise.”

  “So there’s no way to lock it?” I said, starting to panic.

  “Well, no. Why, what’s wrong?”

  “I just … I’m not feeling well and I sort of need to spend a little while in there, and I really can’t have somebody coming in. Is there like a chair or something I can borrow to keep it closed?”

  “A chair? You want to barricade the door closed?”

  “I just don’t want anyone to come in.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to come in, but I guess if you’re worried I could stand next to the door and guard it,” she said.

  “Is that weird?” I asked.

  “Yes. That’s really weird.”

  “I’m really sorry, but can you do that?”

  She nodded and I immediately turned, swam through a group of a half dozen girls dressed as a six-pack of Budweiser—planting my palms on their backs and shoving off them like I was climbing up a rocky hillside—and hustled toward the bathroom with Amanda close behind. I reached the door and turned to find her right behind me.

  “Good luck. We’re all pulling for you,” she said, holding back a laugh.

  I feigned a smile, but I had no time to waste. I burst into the bathroom and onto the toilet. And that is where I sat for the next ten minutes as my body expressed its distaste for rest-stop Burger King. In no uncertain terms.

  As I sat there relieving myself, I started mulling over everything that had led me to this point. I was broke. I hated traveling. I barely knew Amanda. And yet for some reason I’d allowed myself to blow our relationship out of proportion in my mind and convinced myself that I could make things work with her. Even by coming to see her, I was leading her on. To be fair to her, I had to end this.

  Just as I finished and was pulling up my pants, I heard the door handle jiggle.

  “No, no! There’s somebody in there,” I heard Amanda’s muffled voice insist.

  “So you’re next in line?” another voice asked her.

  “Uh—yeah.”

  She didn’t need to go to the bathroom. She probably decided it would be much more humiliating to say, “No, I’m guarding the door for this guy I’m dating while he poops.” But now she would have to come in after me—which would be much, much worse than a stranger walking in during my session.

  I quickly washed my hands, grabbed a pack of matches, and lit three of them in quick, desperate succession. I pried open the only window as far open as it would go with the force of someone trying to rip it from its hinges. Then I opened the bathroom door, where Amanda—and three others—were waiting.

  As she walked in, I gave her a look that said, “I am so, so sorry.” Then I waited outside the bathroom. A minute later came a flush; then Amanda reappeared, with the stunned look of a rookie cop leaving the scene of her first homicide.

  To make matters worse, as the next guy in line stepped into the bathroom, he let out a resounding “Whoa!” The two other people waiting looked accusingly at Amanda.

  We walked down the hall and back into the party.

 
; “Do you want to go outside for a second?” I shouted over the music.

  We went out onto a small balcony, overlooking a courtyard thirty feet below that was littered with cigarette butts.

  “You owe me. Like, a lot. There are now people walking around thinking I took, no offense, a really, really nasty poo in the middle of a party I was throwing. That is some above-and-beyond stuff I did right there,” she said.

  “I am really sorry. I can go tell them it was me.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like that would make things less weird,” she said, laughing.

  “Again, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. What can I do to make it up to you?”

  “How about you just loosen up a little bit and we have a good time?”

  That didn’t really seem possible, and although this didn’t seem like the best time to bring up my fear that a relationship between us could never work, it seemed worse to pretend everything was fine. I had never been very good at doing that anyway.

  “I kinda wanted to talk to you about that,” I said.

  “About what?” she asked.

  “I know I’ve been a little weird since I got up here, and I mean, I’ve been thinking about how you live in San Francisco and I live in LA, and we’re both broke, and clearly I don’t travel well, as you just witnessed, and I don’t know…”

  I trailed off in a cowardly fashion, hoping she would finish the thought for me.

  “So then it won’t work,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Well, that’s what I’m saying I’m worried about.”

  “Right, but either it won’t work, or it will. I don’t know you super well, but what I know I really like, and that’s why I wanted you to come up here. Do you feel the same way about me, or no?”

  Not once in the past few hours had I asked myself that question. In fact, I had basically asked myself every other question I could think of. I had focused on all the reasons why our relationship would be tough. But I’d avoided the one thing that had brought me here in the first place. Hearing her ask me point-blank how I felt about her shoved all my anxieties out of the way. The answer to her question popped into my head as if it had sprung from a cage.