History Calling

“Listen, when you’re little and you don’t know better, you go up to a hot stove and you touch it and you get burned. Because you don’t know that a hot stove will burn you. But then you learn. And you don’t touch the hot stove anymore.” Jules said. “So don’t touch the hot stove again.”
The Stove in question was a bad idea from the start. He was a going-nowhere addict that hadn’t graduated from any of the three institutions he had gone two in the past six years.
Of course, I fell in love with him.
From the time I was 19 to the time I was 23, the only person I was really interested in was the stove. I dated other people. I slept with other people. But it always came back to him. Even after not talking to him for over a year once, seeing him ignited all the old feelings again. But when he didn’t return my calls the last time, I decided enough was enough and put actual energy into getting over him and it actually worked. I did a damned fine job, in fact. Sure, I thought about him now and then, when something jogged a specific memory, but those times were few and far between and the feelings had changed. I thought about him with nostalgia now, not lust.
Nearly two years after the last time I saw him, which was also the last time I spoke to him, I was having a couple of late-Saturday-afternoon drinks with a few friends when my cell phone rang an unfamiliar number with a 718 area code. I picked it up, wondering which one of my Staten Island family members got a hold of my cell number.
“Hello?”
“L?”
“Yes?”
“It’s the Stove.”
“Oh my god.”
“I live in Brooklyn now.”
“Oh my god.” Part of the whole getting over him process was that he lived on another coast. An essential part. A key part. Basically, what my whole process was based on. I walked out of the bar.
We chatted for a few minutes then I got off the phone (didn’t want to be ruder than I already had been). Our bar party broke up shortly thereafter and I immediately got J on the phone.
“The Stove called. He lives in Brooklyn now.”
J snickered.
More history: J was the reason I met the Stove in the first place. They were in film school together. We met at a film student party. J loves me. She loves the Stove.
She hates the two of us together.
“I love you. I love the Stove. I just don’t love you and the Stove together,” J was saying. “Besides, he’s probably bald by now.”
A just called me right out. “So, are you going to see him?”
“Probably.”
“So … Definitely,” A said, laughing.
“Ummm … yeah.”
There are people in your life that you know are a bad idea from the start, but you can’t help being attracted to them. No matter how toxic the relationship, how stupid you feel when he pulls the same shit he’s been pulling from the beginning, there’s something that pulls you in. What is that? What is that masochistic tendency that lives inside so many of us that they wrote a best-selling book about it?
When you find out what it is, drop me a line so I know just exactly what it is that’s wondering why he hasn’t called me back yet.

In Which I Date A Mythical Creature

Once upon a time, in an act of stupidity, I went on a date with a man who called himself Ogre.
Wish I was kidding.
Ogre was a friend of my friend Jules’ boyfriend. Jules’ boyfriend is great. I thought to myself, “Wasn’t there something about birds and feathers and flocking? He should be a great guy, too.”
That, it seems, is another fairy tale.
Ogre was a before picture and it was going to take a Bob Villa-like effort to make him into an after. I didn’t realize this at the time. I was still going on that whole birds, feathers, flocking mentality. It didn’t take me long to realize he acted, most of the time, like a beast rather than a man. He had been a bachelor for so long that he did all the nasty bachelor things that PG movies have been immortalizing for years. Ate borderline rancid food straight from the container, standing in front of the fridge. Burped, farted, picked whenever he felt the urge. Plus, life to him was the part you had to put up with between buzzes. He drank. Excessively. And he wasn’t always a fun drunk.
The last straw was when I met the other friends. The ones that he kept hidden for a while until he felt a little more secure in the relationship. He saved Pete for last.
Pete was an older guy, a mentor, if you will. That is, a mentor in the sense that if you wanted your life to turn out really, really badly. Like highlight of your life was the time you made a “guest” appearance shirtless on “Cops” badly. Pete thought he was the life of the party, though, and the more he drank, the more he wanted to reminisce about the good old days.
“Lemme tell you a funny story,” Pete says to me and my friend E, taking a big gulp of what smells like diesel fuel. “Lemme tell you a funny story about the last time I saw this guy here,” clapping Ogre’s friend Bear (so named because he’s big and hairy) on the back. Bear is actually the only friend of Ogre’s that I actually like. Although the fact that I met him at all is something of an oddity because, ever since he got married, his wife doesn’t let him play with his old friends any more.
Bear’s wife is a very smart woman.
Pete launches into his story. “So this one time, I walk into the strip club and there’s this guy there. This big black guy that I used to do time with.”
“Did time in the strip club with?” I ask hopefully. I cross my fingers under the table. Please let it be the strip club. Please let it be the strip club.
“Nah. We did time upstate together. Jail time.” Oh Jesus.
Pete continues, “So, anyway, I went up to him and called him a Nigger. And he was all angry about it and shit.” Can’t imagine why. “I didn’t mean it bad or anything. Like, my friend. They call each other that all the time I didn’t see what the big deal was or anything. So anyway, he wants to fight me. He gets his other big friend with him and they’re starting to come at me, so I grab Bear, so it’s even. But these guys are big. Usually, I have a gun on me, but for some reason, I left it in the glove compartment in my car that night. And the car was in the parking lot. Luckily, the hooker with the drugs showed up just then, so we just grabbed the drugs, jumped in the car and took off.”
I am gripping the table, white-knuckled at this point. I cannot believe that I’m sitting across the table from this guy. I am mortified that I brought my friend E into this situation and I can’t help but think, “I am a professional who went to school and busted her ass to get a great job. What the hell am I doing sitting across the table from a racist ex-con who’s drinking himself into an early grave?”
E interrupts my thoughts. “Which part of that story was funny?” she whispers “‘Cause I think we really should laugh. I don’t want to get shot.”
“I have no idea.” I turn to Bear. “What part of that story was funny?”
“It wasn’t funny at all. It was the scariest moment of my life. I thought I was going to die.”
Pete has now finished his drink and has returned to us from memory lane once more. “You know,” he says, looking at me. “You, you’re really uptight.” He turns his attention to E. “But you, you’re kinda cute. You know, I’d rape you if I wasn’t facing 10-20.”
E stands up. “I gotta go,” she says.
That was the last weekend Ogre and I ever spent with each other.

The Best Friend I Never Met

V is a friend of mine that I had never actually met. We worked together in different branches of the same company and we developed a friendship outside of work somehow. So, eventually and inevitably, one day, he comes up to visit.
“Wow! This is so weird,” he says shortly after I pick him up from the bus station. “You’ve always been the best friend I’ve never met. And now, I’m meeting you!”
We have a great day, touring the city, wandering miles through Central Park alone. We go to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants and then go back to my apartment to wait for a friend of mine to come into the city so we can hit up the New York City night life.
We crash. All that walking and “fresh” air just tuckered us out. “How tired are you?” I ask him, lifting my head off my hand but barely opening my eyes.
“I feel how you look right now,” he says. Doesn’t even bother opening his eyes. I call my friend and explain ourselves into a night on the couch in front of the tv.
And then, the inevitable happens.
“For hours, M, HOURS,” I whisper into the phone while he’s in the shower.
“Yeah. ‘Cause nobody saw that coming at all,” M says sleepily. “But seriously, man, congratulations.”
We spend the rest of the day being that cute New York couple. We go to brunch. We walk through SoHo, window shopping. We meet M for coffee and cream puffs. We stop in a store for a second and, while he’s off looking at something, M and I gossip.
“So?”
“He’s cute. And really funny. I like him. Good job.”
“He is cute,” I say as he starts walking back towards me.
We leave M and start walking home. “So, have a good weekend?” I ask.
“Had a great weekend!” He smiles and takes my hand.
“So, think you’ll come back?”
“Definitely. Think you’re coming to see me soon?”
“Sure.” He squeezes my hand tighter. I am deliriously happy.

“You ever see that ‘Sex And The City’ episode from the first season, when Miranda sees Scooter with a new girlfriend and she calls him up and says she wants to see him and he breaks up with the new girl immediately and the new girl says, ‘You’re breaking up with me while you’re still inside me?’”
“Yeah,” M says.
“At least he had the decency to pull out first.”
“NO!”
“Oh yes.”
We’re lying in bed together when all of a sudden, my dear, sweet friend V (who has made guest appearances on this blog before) turns into that most dreaded of creatures: a “guy.”
We went from planning trips back and forth to well, we’ll see, this might not fit into our regular lives, blah, blah, blah.
Do you hear the record scratch in your head? Because I did. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom on the pretext of taking my contacts out. “You are an idiot for buying into this,” I told my reflection.
I left the bathroom and went to my kitchen sink, where I lit up. Normally, I have strict rules about smoking in the house, but I figured tonight was the night to break the rules. I was furious.
By this time, V is sitting on the couch, getting the idea that he’s no longer welcome in my bed. I figure I have nothing to lose, so I ask, “Why did you come up here this weekend?” I get this long-winded diatribe with percentages and figures and references to a friend of his from his home town, but I feel no closer to an actual answer.
Then he starts in on how he hasn’t been in a relationship since he broke up with his girlfriend five (five!) years ago and he can’t maintain an infatuation with anybody so he doesn’t want to casually date. And so on and so forth.
“Dude! Let yourself off the hook!” I finally interject. I’m getting sick of listening to this, honestly, because I’m starting to wonder how genuine this whole rant is and, no matter how honest it is, it still doesn’t take away my feeling that he just came up here to try to get laid.
“What?”
“Let yourself off the hook. Look at the shades of grey. So you can’t maintain an infatuation with somebody. That’s creepy, anyway, somebody who is just infatuated with people, rather than developing a relationship with them based on more than that. Stay with her because she makes you laugh or because she cares about you. Don’t get in your own way.”
We talked about that for a while longer. I try to understand where he’s coming from, but I just can’t wrap my head around the whole been burned once never try again mentality. Who hasn’t been burned? If you’re in your 20s and you’ve never been burned, I feel like you’ve done something wrong. It means you’ve never put yourself out there emotionally and I honestly can’t imagine anything more sad then being that emotionally closed off from the world.
After a while, he takes my hand. “You are a very smart person,” he says.
“I’m a very sleepy person,” I said. “Listen, you can watch tv or read out here. The light and noise really won’t bother me. I just have to get some sleep before I have to pull an overnight.”
“Actually, I’d like to go to bed with you.” Knock me over with a feather. Weren’t we just talking about how he was going to be shy-away-from-intimacy guy? I don’t know why, but I felt oddly compelled to let him. I think a lot of that was I wanted to pretend that what had just happened wasn’t as bad as it really was and it would be easier to pretend if he was sharing a bed with me.
We talked and laughed like we always had and I couldn’t help but feel sad and angry all over again. This is what a good relationship was supposed to be, somebody you wanted to share a bed and a laugh with. Very rarely do the two come together. “Why did you have to go and turn into a guy?” I said, hitting him in the stomach.
“What do you mean?”
“You went and turned into a guy when we were really good friends and now we’re not going to be friends any more. It’s going to be awkward because you’ll never stop being a guy now.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh, it’s true. You’ll call once or twice, there’ll be a few awkward emails, and then, that’ll be it. Next thing you know, it’ll be two years down the road and something will jog my memory and I’ll call you. Of course, without me, your life will take a huge downward spiral and you’ll be a raging alcoholic or something like that, and it’ll just be sad.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I can’t help that you will eventually fall to pieces without me,” I said. “But don’t worry. My fiancé and I will totally get you into a great rehab.”
“Nice.” He swats me playfully. “Thank you for that.”
“No problem.” I roll over on my side and prepare to go to sleep
“Any other prophecies?” V asks as he rolls up behind me and wraps me in his arms. I wish to myself that this didn’t feel so nice.
“Nope. The oracle is going to sleep,” I answer. “Just one last thing: it would be a real shame to miss out on something great just because you’re afraid.”