In the indie film version of this story, it would probably be time for a “love montage.” This one would begin with a tracking shot of a small art-house revival theater, where we would find my character standing behind Brad in a movie line, waiting to pay for her own ticket. Then it would follow her as she followed him up to the snack bar, where we would watch her digging around in her big leather purse, hoping to find enough loose change to buy herself a popcorn. Cut to the inside of the theater itself, where, on the smallish screen, W. C. Fields would be shaving a man in a barber chair before the camera panned over to the audience. There, with the movie light flickering gently on their faces, my character and her date would be sitting side by side, not even acknowledging each other. Next would come a series of quick shots of the two of them driving away in his truck, still not touching or saying a word. Then, from a camera angle at the bottom of a stairwell, we would bear silent witness as they quietly marched up to his flat at the back of the house, hearing only the sound of their shoes scuffling on the rotted wood as they climbed.
The montage would end with one of those uncomfortably clear overhead shots of my character lying flat on her back, open-eyed, as she lost her virginity.
This would be a tricky scene to direct because it would somehow need to visually convey how mechanically Brad made what I don’t think you could really call love: how he moved like an alien who had never experienced what the earthlings called “emotions.” How he touched like an animatronic statue, perhaps Abe Lincoln on Main Street in Disneyland or one of the mechanized Santa’s helpers from the Macy’s Christmas window display.
Throughout the several minutes of the actual event, things were far too quiet. I knew I should be making gasping noises of some kind, but I didn’t dare try because I wasn’t sure how a real-life version of these noises needed to sound. So at the very juncture where Natalie Dylan was probably fantasizing about how much of her windfall she would spend on an amazing new back-to-school wardrobe, I was lying there embarrassed and disoriented, not even sure if the whole thing had officially ended.
Had it gone badly?
Had it gone well?
On what basis was this experience supposed to be evaluated?
When Brad rolled off me this time, I figured I’d better follow his lead. After all, it was his house. So when he got dressed, I got dressed too. That I couldn’t think of anything to say only matched the fact that neither could he. Clearly I had done something wrong. Why else would he be acting so cold and aloof?
It was then that I noticed that there was blood on the sheets. I had either started my period or it had been Mission Accomplished. In either case, I felt bad about causing him an extra trip to the Laundromat. So I apologized as he wordlessly stripped the sheets off the bed. Then we stood around for a few minutes while he made some coffee. After that he walked me to the bus stop and left me there to wait.
Sitting alone on a cracked green Naugahyde bus seat, headed back to my dorm, I stared out the window and watched the streets of Berkeley go by. Where, I wondered, was the emotional center in this for me? I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t have a sense of accomplishment. But mostly, I was unable to decipher what all the fuss was about. What was it about sex that people liked so much? A million musicians, a million writers, a million paintings and poems and stories and songs, all rendered completely incomprehensible. I’d always thought that when I arrived at this moment, the magic they were all describing would be revealed. Had it been, but I missed it? Or was sex one of those things that everyone else agreed was great but I would never understand, like, say, orange Slurpees or Red Skelton? What part of what had just happened was supposed to have been the good part?
Here’s what else was weird: in all my meandering thoughts during what might have been my moments of basking in the afterglow, as the bus made its way down College Avenue toward my dorm, I never once wondered if I should have waited for the right guy to come along. Like Natalie Dylan, I had turned my back on acting like one of those naïve teenagers who bought into that romantic crap. Those myths were for people who weren’t part of the solution because they were part of the problem.
Yet unlike Natalie Dylan, who’d said she was seeking “a combination of a great time with a good connection and a financial agreement that I can be happy with,” I had asked for nothing from anyone and had succeeded one hundred percent.
So puzzled was I by what had or had not just happened sexually that a couple of weeks later I went back for seconds to clear a few things up. Maybe some circuit would light this time, now that I knew what to expect? At the very least, a second visit would allow me to amortize the cost of my new birth control pills down to just pennies a serving.
Unfortunately, nothing that happened the second time—or the truly unnecessary third time—taught me anything more about sex or human relations, except that I could accurately predict each of Brad’s moves in his never-changing sequence, based on the one that had preceded it.
By winter quarter, I was seeing Brad only intermittently. The awkward silences were wearing me down. And after he decided it was a good idea to introduce me to several other girls with whom he was also sleeping, I finally threw in the towel. And by “the towel,” I am referring to my search for an actual reason to continue our loose association. Especially after that night of watching him take PCP and throw his television set out the window. I guess I had hoped that if we saw each other for a while, something meaningful would have no choice but to develop. Wasn’t that the way the world worked? Any seed that was planted, when offered the right amount of water and sun, had to grow into something or other, right?
Looking back, I marvel at the way the teenage me made choices. I wonder, too, which part of our schizophrenic culture might be held responsible for making young female humans require less from their courtship rituals than do sea turtles or millipedes. In all of the animal kingdom, only delusional teenage human girls steeped in their own melancholia seem to require no special acrobatic nest-building competitions or intricate mating dances involving red inflatable bladders to be convinced of the worth of a suitor. Why bother with dangerous hormone-driven treks across the Arctic wasteland, like the ones Mother Nature requires for male penguins and moose, when a scowling, anorexic, paintbrush-holding guy with an outsized sense of his own importance gets the same results simply by being rude?
Which brings me back to Natalie Dylan and her fellow virginity entrepreneurs, with their sleazy online auctions and fat bank accounts. Tawdry though their deeds may have been, at least they could logically explain their own motives. At least they held themselves in such high regard that they looked at the chance for someone else to spend time with them as a high-ticket item. The best I could do was imagine myself as the provider of raw data for a sociology experiment no one was conducting.
The truth is, if a Web auction had been available to me back in my Berkeley years, even the greasiest, most debauched bidder would have been demonstrating more appreciation for me than the rude little art scenester I picked. And even if I’d been hanging out with friends like Natalie Dylan, I’d probably still have thrown my virginity in as a bonus to the highest bidder in a separate auction of my used textbooks. I simply didn’t have the ego to be a self-employed capitalist, let alone an underpaid volunteer escort.
That’s why the modern-day horror stories about teenage girls and their sexting and hooking-up activities don’t surprise me so much as they make me feel sad. The only thing girls are doing now that is demonstrably worse than what I did at their age is starting younger, thereby entitling themselves to even more years of hysterical late-night phone calls to like-minded girlfriends in which they will endlessly rehash and analyze the incomprehensible results of their bad love decisions. Decisions, I must add, that are made without the benefit of a fully wired frontal lobe. Because recent neurological research now explains what I could never have known: that it’s no accident that teenagers are devoted to being boneheads. The frontal lobes of the brain, the area that allows
us to comprehend the idea of actions having consequences, aren’t finished being wired for functioning until your late twenties. If ever a religious philosopher or moralist needed a place to anchor cautionary advice about waiting until you’re twenty-eight to pick partners or marry, that frontal lobe data would be a good place to start.
But the worst part is that if I’d known this handy fact back when I was in college, it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of my behavior very much. After all, the teenage version of me would have thought the very idea of worrying about consequences before you act was excessively “middle-class.” I would have argued that no great artist ever worried about consequences. And I would have been processing all of this with only a partially wired frontal lobe.
How to Spot an Asshole
I WAS IN THE SHOWER WHEN I HEARD THE PHONE RING AND THE answering machine pick up. Over the whoosh of the running water, I could just make out a deep, flat voice leaving a lengthy message. Concerned that some kind of an emergency was unfolding, I wrapped myself in a towel and stood dripping wet in the hallway to hear the details. It scared me that I didn’t recognize the voice. Was it a wrong number? A dangerous interloper? When he hung up, I played the whole thing back.
Slowly it dawned on me that the voice belonged to a guy I had met a few nights before at a dinner party. Apparently he had gotten my number from mutual friends and decided to call. The content of the message, when I boiled it all down, was basically that he thought it would be a good idea for us to spend some time together. Nothing scary there.
The bloodcurdling part, however, was in the way he chose to express that thought to me. Here is the actual transcript: “Hello, Merrill? I’d like to see you sometime, the earlier the better. Right now would be perfect. If you’re in the mood to do something tonight, that would be good. Because my moods shift so dramatically these days that it’s easier for me to go on impulse than to make a date with someone and then realize when the time comes that I am not really in the mood to do anything. So that’s kind of the way I want to operate.”
He might as well have said: “Hey, Merrill … if you have a ton of free time and would like to babysit a self-absorbed, needy, demanding middle-aged adult who is only interested in using you as a sounding board for his neurotic problems, you can look long and hard but I doubt you’ll find anyone better than me.”
His words were immediately filed for posterity in my very special pantheon of unintentionally revealing statements, right next to those of the seemingly nice woman I met at a job who told me that she spoke with her shrink every day on the phone and then went on to ask, “Can I have your phone number? I love to talk on the phone, but I wore a lot of my old friends out.”
One of the prime achievements of my adult life, right up there with owning my own washer and dryer, has been learning to read the warning signs broadcast by an asshole. With all the social networking going on, the importance of watching and listening for pernicious symptoms when you first meet someone is more important than ever, because these days the lines have become so blurred that it’s easy to find out you are “friends” with all kinds of people you simply have no reason to trust, beyond a stated appreciation of Radiohead.
Somewhere between our Neanderthal beginnings and the twenty-first century, the instructional software that was supposed to be installed in each of us to teach us how to connect with appropriate members of our species for the purposes of mating seems to have been infected with some kind of virus. Every other species on planet Earth received their behavioral software, plus tutorials. Take the buff-breasted sandpiper male, for example, who arrives straight from the manufacturer knowing how to flash the undersides of his wings and make those special clucking sounds that magnetize the female and fill her with lust. Or the male porcupine, who somehow understands, despite unfavorable odds, how to successfully pass on the family lineage through the porcupine female, a creature covered with needlelike sharpened quills who is receptive for a few hours a year.
Only we human beings, working with a nearly nonexistent connection to our own instincts, seem to grow increasingly more clueless about basic behavior as we evolve. By the time every religion and governmental body going back to the beginning of civilized life on planet Earth got finished adding its own personally designed improvements to the instruction manual, the rules regarding human mating had become as self-contradicting and confusing as a Japanese game show.
For a look at how things used to work in the simpler but not particularly good old days, witness the past and present women of Kyrgyzstan. Here is a community of lucky gals who, according to The New York Times, continue to meet their mates when they are abducted off the street by roving bands of vowel-deprived bachelors. These husbands-to-be rape the women they’d like to spend their lives with in order to make them socially undesirable, knowing this will put them in just the right mood to get married. Once they have been turned into social pariahs, the ladies are left with a choice: be shunned by everyone for the rest of their lives or agree to wedded bliss with their kidnapper-rapist. Out of this romantic Sophie’s choice was born a wise old oft-repeated Kyrgyz love homily: “Every good marriage begins in tears.”
When I first learned about Kyrgyz courtship, I was horrified and shocked. Then I began to remember something that was told me by my aunt, a sophisticated upper-middle-class housewife from a country known as Long Island. My aunt was a seventysomething, retired, fashionably dressed former docent who never missed a museum opening. One day, while I was suffering from the kind of whiplash that only the sudden collapse of a long-term relationship can inflict, we met for lunch in a trendy Manhattan café. In awe of the contrast between her life history and my own, I asked her to explain the secret of what she constantly referred to as her “happy forty-year marriage.” I was expecting to hear a predictable string of platitudes along the lines of “Never go to bed angry” or “Don’t take each other for granted.”
Instead I got this: “Well, dear, not a day goes by that he doesn’t make me cry.”
After a rather long silence, I asked, “If he makes you cry every day, why do you call it a happy marriage?”
“Honey,” she said, “you learn to take the good with the bad.”
That shoulder-shrugging grain-of-salt approach to companionship pretty much summed up the old-school prerequisites for a functional romantic union between two humans. The male half of a lucky couple only needed to earn a living. The female was supposed to have babies, do the housework and the shopping, and get her hair done now and then. And having accomplished that, they were both expected to call whatever else happened as the years went rolling by “a happy marriage.”
Not anymore.
Today’s peppy modern spouses don’t have the patience for a “happy” marriage to someone who makes them cry every day (unless one of them has their own reality show with a thirteen-week guarantee). These days, unhappily married men and women carry within their souls an alternative vision of themselves as a spouse-seeking Ulysses, riding the bounding main on a forty- or fifty-year voyage in search of the perfect soul mate. For those who embark on such a quest, the journey starts out smooth, with the wind in their sails, as they brave the mighty oceans in record time. But by their forties, even the most energetic and gregarious among them are so seasick from the vagaries of dating that they can’t face the awful truth: that those first three chemically charged sunlit months of any new relationship are a honeymoon period and a totally false read. During this rosy-hued but unreliable time, plenty of clearly observable bad behavioral patterns go overlooked. It’s only in the aftermath of the inevitable wreck that the survivor discovers that buried within the splinters of yet another crashed relationship lies a black box full of recordings picked up by an early tracking system they were choosing to ignore.
Until our culture heeds my pleas for the establishment of a national network of diagnostic stations where one can drop off new love interests and have them evaluated, as one does when purchasing a used car, we will co
ntinue to be forced to rely on our instincts. And since no one seems to have the faintest idea what those are, here is a list of specific behavioral clues I have been collecting for the express purpose of helping confused and clueless friends of mine avoid repeating the mistakes I am pretending that I will never make again.
1. AN OBVIOUS LACK OF INTEREST IN YOU
There are so many socially acceptable ways for someone to exhibit a pathological lack of empathy nowadays that this is a very easy symptom to misread. I am here to tell you that if someone is texting, Twittering, and/or checking Facebook while you are talking to them—or using any other app or Internet-related site or device that has been invented since this piece was written—they are telling you as clearly as they can that they are an asshole.
You have the right to command the full attention of the people who are sharing your immediate physical space on any social occasion. And you have the right to expect the attention they give you to be free from lengthy contact with acquaintances at other locations. This kind of behavior is analogous to channel surfing in the middle of a heart-to-heart talk or screaming out someone else’s name in bed. Common human decency also dictates that the time you spend together should be free from jiggling legs, drumming fingertips, jangling keys, exasperated sighing, ill-tempered eye rolling, a peevish tone of voice, or any other indications of impatience or boredom. The right to reach over and throttle the perpetrator is one of the few important things our founding fathers forgot to include in the Bill of Rights (along with the right to make a citizen’s arrest of a person who replies to something you have said with a famous line from a blockbuster movie).
Cool, Calm & Contentious Page 13
