Bitch Is the New Black_A Memoir - Helena Andrews
One
DIRTY ASTRONAUT DIAPERS
Dex10 (12:01:10 p.m.): hey
Dex10 (12:01:40 p.m.): stop it!
Dex10 (12:03:10 p.m.): you win
Dex10 (12:05:00 p.m.): AHHHHHHHH
Copy, paste, and send. “Dude, what the eff does he even mean by this? Win what? What, in the name of bearded carpenter Jesus, have I won?”
I’m consulting the oracle Gina, as is my ritual. But instead of divining my future from a mound of discarded hot wings, Gi offers me this:
“Dude, you ain’t won shit.”
He’s the Nigerian E-mail Scam of ex-sorta-boyfriends, trying to seduce me over cyberspace with promises of riches in the real world. Problem is, I’m black and I have a vagina, so my Waiting to Exhale intuition tells me this shit ain’t for real. In the history of the world, black women have won approximately three things—freedom, a hot comb, and Robin Thicke. With a track record like that, it’s obvious that the catchphrase “you win” is exactly that—a verbal fly trap meant to trick me into letting him back in, into loving him again. All Dex10 needs next is my routing number and date of birth.
Too bad my DOB wasn’t yesterday. I refuse to write his ass back. I can’t. And even though I’ve been planning our pretend wedding for the past six months, pressing my would-be ring finger on the keyboard would be even more pathetic. So I’m staring blankly at the blank space in our dialogue box. Maybe we should be dialoguing. Maybe he’ll tell me all the things he couldn’t say when I was so obviously his and so ready to hear them and so not in my PJs with my hair in a topknot. My stomach’s tied up in one too. Maybe he’s come around. Maybe he’s chaaanged.
Maybe I’m an idiot.
If I’m not—an idiot, that is—then undergoing evasive maneuvers makes perfect sense. I’m not ready for Dex10 to boldly go where no man has gone before, flicking the switch in rooms usually kept dark. Usually I’ll try it at least once with the lights on, but not this time. See, he’s done all this before. He’s already made me fall in love, then out, then in, then upside down, and then over it. So now, after having succeeded beyond all odds in ignoring his ass for an entire week, he claims I’ve won something. Get the f*ck outta here with that bullshit.
Only Jesus knows how badly I want to f*ck him right now.
The cursor is practicing voodoo on me, hypnotizing me with each black flash. It’s like a neon sign pointing to the space where my thoughts are supposed to go. I could write a book about us there. I should’ve blocked his screen name instead of just deleting it. But then he wouldn’t know I was ignoring him, and none of this would count. He has to see nyCALIgrl4 in bold letters at the top of his buddy list and realize that she hasn’t IM’d him in days and that she probably never will again!
The cursor keeps blinking.
“It’s like that McDonald’s game, dude. Monopoly. Nobody ever wins that shit,” says Gi, snapping me back to bitch and snatching my pointer, middle, and ring fingers away from the J, K, and L keys.
“Yeah, man,” I concede in an exhale. But who loses? Have I lost if I leave this skinny blinking bitch alone and never find out what I’ve already won? Or do I win if I do what I (what all of us) always do: keep it the f*ck moving? I take a minute to stare at the cursor, to stare at my idle fingertips, to stare at my magical keys, to stare at virtual Dex. And then I ex out of “IM with nycaligrl4 from Dex10” and hope he knows how hard that was.
It’s three weeks until I turn twenty-eight, so three weeks and two years before I hit thirty and my face melts off. It’s been one week since I started my online campaign against Dex10, five months since we broke up in real life, and four days since I met this new guy with a cleft chin, so it’s who-knows-how-long before my next nonrelationship. Call me Kiefer: my life has been operating on a ticking-time-bomb scenario for the past year.
“Dude, what is your life about?!” quizzes Gina every morning over IM like the opening bell of a boxing match, startling me into the ring of another Monday. The alarm to starting the day off single.
“Ummmm, who the hell knows?” I say, too exhausted to think of anything better.
I don’t feel almost twenty-eight. Not an actual adult, I’m more adult-ish. See, I’m just a girl. An awesome one, of course, but just one. And like so many other little brown girls my age, I believe the problem of loving, lusting, or even “liking liking” someone can be solved with a simple equation: x + y = gtfohwtbs (if “x” 28 years old and “y” = socially retarded men). So when Dex10 IM’s me again, I react as if on autopilot because doing otherwise would be to go against nature. I’m just following orders:
Dex10 (3:14:46 p.m.): hey
nyCALIgrl4 (3:15:06 p.m.): what?
Dex10 (3:15:26 p.m.): oh
nyCALIgrl4 (3:16:14 p.m.): is there something specific you wanted? or…
Dex10 (3:16:50 p.m.): why are you asking so many questions? i was saying hello
nyCALIgrl4 (3:18:56 p.m.): k
Dex10 (3:19:42 p.m.): am i on death silence?
nyCALIgrl4 (3:20:02 p.m.): ummm
nyCALIgrl4 (3:20:16 p.m.): i dont really have anything to say to you
nyCALIgrl4 (3:20:21 p.m.): have a nice life?
Dex10 (3:20:42 p.m.): oh…
I’m such a badass. I am literally the baddest bitch on the planet. If there was a bitch contest between me and every other heartbroken, hissing, red-eyed, puffy-faced woman in the world, I would defeat every last one of them—handily. People should start worshipping me. To that end, I’ve prepared a few imaginary lectures on the subject of bitching yourself out of a relationship: Step 1, treat him as you would a tardy Comcast guy after waiting from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.: with zero emotion save thinly sliced loathing…
Yeah, I don’t believe me either. I’m a bitch, but I swear I don’t want to be. Really, I think I have to be.
What I really want is to grab this man and hold on for dear life, despite the fact that he kissed another girl in a club—more on that later—and told me I was too perfect for him and that he liked me as “more than a friend but less than a girlfriend.” Cognitive dissonance, he called it. I want that blinking cursor to crap out all the words I’m thinking but not writing and turn that white space black like my heart. I want to see him naked again—just once. I want to make him eggs again.
I want never to be in love again.
To make sure I don’t backslide, I copy, paste, and send my badass response to Gina. The two of us do some preprogrammed LOLing, WTFing, GTFOHing, and I feel encouraged—for now.
But what about later? If I lose this round, will there ever be another? I’ve wasted countless work hours Googling “marriage babies black” because, really, what’s the point in finishing an article on the popularity of Sen. Clinton’s pantsuits when I’ve been sentenced to a closet full of ’em. According to data from the U.S. Census bureau, in 2001 nearly 42 percent of black women over 15 years old (which I guess is marrying age now) had never been married, compared to 21 percent of white women the same age. Since 1970, the overall marriage rate in the U.S. has declined by 17 percent. For blacks, it’s dropped 34 percent.
I hate math—and acronyms.
Never heard of the AAHMI? Me neither. The African American Healthy Marriage Initiative is sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services. It has a Web site (although it’s at a “.net,” which is considerably less convincing than an “.org”) and one hundred followers on Twitter. All those people get to hear its good news, like the fact that black families are less likely to be headed by a married couple than any other ethnic group: 46 percent of black families “versus” 81 percent of all the others. Black families are also more likely to be headed by a single woman—45 percent of black families versus 14 percent for whites—and these manless women are popping out babies like it’s going out of style. Sixty-eight percent of live births in our community are to unmarried women.
So, it’s our stats versus the rest of the country’s, and there’s no time to go to the cards for a decision. It’s over. Technical knockout. While our women were snatching up college degrees and busting up glass ceilings, our men were getting snatched up and busted. We were dreaming of them and waking up alone.
Well, not alone alone—remember, I’ve got an alarm clock.
“Dude?”
“Dude.”
This is how Gina and I say our hellos: Dude. Dude? Dude, what the f*ck. I don’t know, dude. Duuuuude. Dude, yes! We’ve known each other since back when I was lying about getting my period. I’ve been in love with her—no homo—since the eighth grade. This is my longest and most serious relationship. In fifteen years, she’s never said, “Hey, it’s Gina.” I’d probably hang up if she did.
God, fifteen years makes us sound old as shit, doesn’t it? I know, I know. At twenty-seven and counting, we’re not really old old, but damn it, tell that to our uteruses (uterun, uteri?). Tell it to our mothers, who want grandchildren so badly they can catch a whiff of crappy diapers in the night air. Tell it to our fathers, whose abandonment is finally creeping up our throats with last night’s Corona and grenadine. Tell it to our hearts that are so tired of being broken that they’d rather stay that way than be fixed for a better smashing later. I’m telling you, it’s been rough—sorta.
I mean, we’re not spinsters, quite yet. But still. Our age is measured in accomplishments now, not years. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes? More like five degrees, twenty-five boyfriends, six hundred Manolos. Marriage and babies? Waiter? At first I wanted both after my thirties, which according to Sex and the City were going to totally rock. But then I saw the movie, and those chicks looked wrinkly as hell.
Gina says she wants marriage before her eggs dry up—quote, end quote. The likelihood of her freezing them comes closer with each relationship gone bad. If whoever is acting right, the eggs are safe. Acting up? Then she Googles “cryogenics” plus “embryos” while giving me a lecture on advanced uterine aging. I want to tell her that our eggs and our hearts will be just fine. But I’ve never lied to her (except for that one time in 1994 when I pretended to have cramps).
“I’m on sabbatical from these dudes, man.” She sounds halfway serious this time. “I need a break.”
“Ummm, dude, you already know I feel you on that.” I want to say something cheesy like the white girls do: Some guy is going to realize how awesome and beautiful and wonderful you are and then everything will be great and you’ll have a wedding and a baby and a house and a life and…
“They’re messing my whole life up,” she says again a few weeks later while we’re in a cab on our way back to my new “luxury” apartment. I’ve got doormen—they work across the street, though, in North Face uniform jackets, and take super long breaks whenever the cops come around. When we slide out the cab heels first, they study us from their posts. We ignore the “compliments” they chip in on the dresses meant to entice better men. “Sex-zay,” they sing in canon. One swipe of my security key and we’re safe.
Right now it’s September in Washington, which means the annual legislative conference of the Congressional Black Caucus is in town. The CBC is to single-black-chick Washington as Fleet Week is to single-white-gal New York. Seamen? How ’bout degreed men! “Dude, I will be out there for the menses,” Gina e-mails in advance of flying four hours to spend half as many days scouring the capital city for the new American dream (political husband, professional wife, perfect children). We hurdled one party after another, double-daring ourselves to find someone worth the Spanx.
Really, the whole weekend was an exercise in corporal punishment. The highlights: One guy told me I had “award-winning calves,” then handed me his business card. Sweet but fat. Another asked me what I did for a living, and then before I could answer, he slipped me his card, which read “sartorial artist” in the fancy letters that should be reserved for wedding invites. Dude, he’s a seamstress. Next! Then a friend, who starred in more than a few of my mental pornos, showed up with his jeans tucked into combat boots. He’s gay, right? No! I gave serious googly eyes to a few other prospects who gave me the side eye in return. Gina gave her number to some dude I said was a dork. And? I stared at the back of his egg-shaped head for a few seconds, mentally compelling him to call her on Monday. He didn’t.
The rest of our nights were spent pointing out who was gay (everybody), and then the weekend was over. Now we’re headed home alone with each other.
It’s practically scientific how hyped one gets before a night out—all hopped up on New Kids and Corona—and then how quickly hope deflates. We say it’s because we’re getting too old for the club, but I swear it’s because we’re just bored of it. Plus, my feet hurt. Why’s there never any place to sit the hell down?
Gina is staring out the window of her discontent as we drive up Rhode Island Avenue, lost in thought. I’m twenty-eight, she says, breaking the silence of a night that produced more bunions than love connections. This shit isn’t a f*cking game anymore, she says. I’m f*cking tired, she says. It’s two thousand and f*cking eight, she says. I say Umm-hmm and look out my own window, wondering when and having no answers. We go the rest of the way in silence, drag ourselves up four flights, and fall asleep. Tomorrow, maybe, will be different.
Lisa Nowak taught us different the year before.
“Please tell me you saw this shit about this crazy-ass white lady? The astronaut lady?” she IM’d me one morning as I clicked between the New York Times and TheYBF.com, pretending to bone up on Sen. Whoeverthehell’s latest bill about scratching balls while scrolling through snark-infested blogs about black celebs and/or crazy white ladies.
So of course I’d seen it. Mug shots? Murderous monkey-junk love? A productive workday’s worst nightmare. This was what the two of us lived for—something so ridiculous it warranted research.
“Fock! That shit was so damn awesome,” I typed back. “I can’t even breathe right now it’s touching my heart so much.”
“YES!!”
“Dude? Yes!”
And with that, a diapered astronaut became our muse—the awesome crazy we measured our own bizarre love lives against. If we didn’t go that nuts (950 miles with Depends at the ready) over some dude with helmet hair, then maybe we’d be okay. Just maybe. This was the same year that we’d decided to stop “dating” and start “looking.” Two thousand and seven was the year we officially entered our late twenties—the starting line of the death march to menopause. This was the year I fell in love with Dex10, Gina got proposed to, and we both came up smelling like teen spirit—overbored, in denial, and mostly unintelligible. Hello? It was the year my mother, a pot-smoking lesbian who in a moment of overbonding told me she’d been celibate for twelve years because she hadn’t found “an acceptable mate,” began to sneak “grandbabies” into every conversation. She even asked me to come visit her in Atlanta one bitter February.
“How do you know I don’t have plans, like for Valentine’s Day or something?”
“Well,” she purred, “do you?”
I hate her sometimes.
This was also the year Gina erratically swore off black guys for white guys, then Jewish guys, then any guy, even gay guys. It was a flag on the play year for all of us girls. One of my best friends from home, Monique, was dating a married man with four kids who made $490 every two weeks.
“He’s getting divorced.”
“Yeah, but he is married now, right?”
She also had an on/off thing with this Sunday-jazz-brunch guitarist guy. We called him Mr. Damon because he was in his mid-forties, and we respect our elders. Two of my sorority sisters were getting divorces. They had three years of marriage and as many kids between them. My college roommate, Stella, was living with a potentially gay man and constantly checking his e-mail. She’d come across a few juicy tidbits—drinks with an ex when he was supposed to be with the guys—but I don’t think she ever found what she was looking for.
This year, we had a certain refrain committed to memory:
“Dude, where are the men at?” Gina would start.
“Sheeeeeeiiiiiit,” I’d say. They might as well have been on the moon.
Our astronaut, Lisa Nowak, was like us. She was well educated: U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1985. She was successful: umm, NASA. And she would do practically anything to hold on to what she thought was a good man—checking his e-mail, Google-mapping her competition’s whereabouts, then showing up unannounced. We worshipped her. The police found her in an airport parking lot in possession of a steel mallet, a four-inch buck knife, a BB gun, and a map to the home of her rival, Colleen Shipman. All Lisa wanted to do was “talk.”
“Dude, if by ‘talk’ you mean do intense bodily harm!”
We laughed and cried over dirty astronaut diapers for months, dissecting every new morsel of the three-way between Nowak, Bill Oefelein, and Colleen, the other woman. This part was especially hilarious: while planning a vacation to his parents’ home, Bill e-mailed Colleen to say that they needed a hotel room “due to noise requirements.” He wrote, “We need some ‘privacy’!!!!”
“Dude, why are there so many exclamation points in this correspondence?” I wrote.
“You KNOW he holding something,” wrote back Gina.
“Grodie!”
We were diaper-dope sick, every day wondering if there was no end to what a hard-up housewife would do for a little romance—trash your current marriage, murder your coworker, crap your pants. But this was more than just another Midwest meltdown or celebrity slipup. Something besides the random ridiculousness of Nowak’s situation made us hungry for her canonization. See, I don’t watch Flavor of Love, I Love New York, For the Love of Ray J, or Real Chance of Love because I like to keep my white people crazy limited to the Fox News Channel. So what kept us glued to Ms. Nowak wasn’t just the fact of her lunacy—tune in to any of the aforementioned shows, and your eyes will bleed reality-TV red—but the cause of it. It was the same thing that was causing ours. When being interrogated by the police, Lisa described her fling with Bill as “more than a working relationship, but less than a romantic relationship.” We immediately started a blog in her honor. Our mission statement:
We here at Dirty Astronaut Diapers worship secretly at the altar Nowak. We send her the burnt offerings of all the failed relationships, blind dates, missed connections, and random hookups we’ve endured over our decade of dating—the epic saga we hope will one day lead, Odysseus-style, to marriage. Anyone who’ll drive countless hours with a carload of latex gloves, black wig, trench coat, drilling hammer, rubber tubing, and about $600 to “talk” to the bitch who stole her man is a goddess among lesser women. So this is for you, Ms. Nowak—nay, this is for all you women out there who’ve been in “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.”
I was obsessed with the blog for about a month—paying $29.99 for the domain name dirtyastronautdiapers.com, getting some college geek I found on Craigslist to design our Web site, and coming up with a pseudonym for my snarky but sentimental posts. Then we posted like three things on there and got bored of it. Hello, real life was calling. Plus, writing about how much our reality was biting seemed less like some type of postfeminist protest journal and more like a defeatist’s dying declaration. Remember that one scene in SATC when Carrie wants to go live in Paris with Petrovsky’s old light-installing ass and Miranda’s all, “What about your column?!” and Carrie’s all, “I’m old as shit and I need to live my life instead of just writing about it for some bootleg tabloid nobody’s heard of!” Sorta like that.
Still, sweet heavenly Jesus if we didn’t know what it was like to be in the more than / less than emotional equation—who doesn’t know what that’s like? Stuck in that in-between place where nobody’s happy, nobody’s leaving, and everyone thinks you’re settling. But as black women, we felt an even bigger gravitational pull toward the jerks who were at once unworthy and seemingly worthwhile (and I speak for all black women because I can). How many times had we convinced ourselves of someone else’s potential while ignoring our own, giving each other great advice that we never follow (girl, he just might not be right for you)?
Crazy astronaut ladies and fabulous twenty-something black chicks are in the same spaceship: they’re aliens among men blasting off to who knows where.
Right before we met Lisa, I’d just finished licking the wounds of a wasted year being way more than a friend but much less than a girlfriend to a Wellbutrin-popping Muslim podiatrist named Abdul. I slipped up once and said something about “this relationship” in casual conversation. “What relationship?” he asked. Abdul was preceded by West Point Willy, who drunk-dialed a proposal that he, of course, couldn’t recall the next morning. I pretended not to care. Then came possibly gay Winston, two-timing Darin, crazy Darin, short Eddie, possibly gay Jean Claude, etc., etc., etc.
Also, I had been surviving the workday by Facebook-stalking James, a summer associate in my job’s legal department, whom I fell in love with during a seminar on libel. He was staring at me so hard, my white work wife passed me a note: “That guy is totally checking you out!” No shit, Sherlock. He sneezed a few times during said meeting, so afterward I slipped him a packet of raspberry lemonade Emergen-C. He asked me out to Starbucks the next day.
“Soooo, basically this cat is an intern,” said Gina, doing her best to sound supportive.
James and I played relationship limbo for a while, meeting for coffee and philosophy twice a week and hooking up once in his bedroom, which was missing a door because it was two-timing him with the better half of a living room. A week later, he told me we couldn’t get “romantically involved” because it might affect him professionally. Dude, you’re a f*cking intern! You’ve got Ikea curtains for walls! Six months later, I was still convinced we could make it work. I mean, he grew up in Namibia and France and Arkansas. Barack and Michelle 2.0!
At my twenty-seventh birthday party, about a year after the Emergen-C move, I slunk over to where James was standing and wrapped my fingers around his bicep. “Soooo, what are weeeee doing later?”
“You mean after this?” He used his martini glass to draw a circle around the crowd.
“Yes, retard.”
“Wait, you wanna have sex!”
“Omigod. I can’t.” We left shortly after and did.
That was also the first time I met Dex10 (also known as Dexter). I don’t remember it (James, champagne, hormones), but supposedly I was extremely friendly.
“Dude, get your f*cking life together,” was the message that came down from the Oracle. But then again, she was the one who’d spent the past three years “dating” a guy we called the Fireman because he was a fireman. He wanted to marry her and move her to St. Louis, where he fought fires and stuff. “I’m too bourgie for that shit,” was her answer. So now she’s playing red light / green light with Bilal, who thinks marriage is for suckers and children are unethical.
The point is, we’re becoming those women. The ones guys refer to as “wifey material,” since apparently spouses come in specific fabric grades. After about a week of flirting online, Dex10 described me this way: “Hi, my name’s Helena and I’m awesome. The end.” Gee, thanks. I’ll make sure to keep that in mind when we break up for the fifty thousandth time. Suddenly, Lisa Nowak didn’t look so crazy. Actually, she might have been on to something.
What does “wifey material” even mean when someone at the Washington Post thinks the headline “Marriage Is for White People?” is okay? The article, of course, became another one of Gina’s and my obsessions. The Washington f*cking Post was against us now.
“Dude, is there anyone out there who wants us to find a man?” I asked, more begging than wondering. SOSing, really.
“Nope.”
The reporter who wrote the story worked part-time with kids, who I’m going to assume were from the “inner city,” because those are the kids people write about in newspapers. Once, in one of her classes, during a discussion on how to be a good father, one frustrated little boy said, “Marriage is for white people,” and clearly a movement was born (remember the AAHMI? Me neither). This kid wasn’t into the whole “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage” thing. Perhaps Nursery Rhymes that Subliminally Teach Minority Children about Healthy Social Institutions 101 should be a kindergarten requirement.
If so, Dexter would still be eating Play Doh, instead of just playing dumb. Fast-forward to a scene between my sheets on one of the many horrendously long Saturday nights that led to my ignoring him on IM.
So, we’re naked and he goes, “I don’t know. It’s like…I don’t know…Maybe it’s that I don’t think I can live up to the low expectations you have of me.” He’s looking past my forehead.
“What?” I’m trying to sound as nonmurderous as possible. No such luck. “Are you f*cking serious right now? Like are you actually saying this to me right now?”
“Helena, you’re the most amazing person.” Now he’s looking me in the eyes. “Like, I’ll never meet anyone better than you. I just know I’ll mess this up.” He was slipping through my fingers, and I couldn’t clench my fists fast enough. It was one of those terrifying, long-winded, up-late, naked conversations that never begin or end. The first of many we’d have.
This particular cram session all started with a bad fashion choice.
I’d “caught” Dexter—at this point my maybe-boyfriend for at least a month—kissing some girl in a club. Yep, he was tonguing down some light-skinned, curly-haired, Forever XXI fashion-top-wearing girl. The shirt she had on was asymmetrical. Repeat. He kinda betrayed me with a girl wearing a shirt that was long-sleeved on one side and tube top on the other. After a marathon curse-out, he managed to make the situation not about his “cheating”—we weren’t exclusive yet—but about my inherent awesomeness physically compelling him to treat me like “some stupid chick off the f*cking street,” in my humble opinion.
Was I too perfect? What kind of crazy monkey-junk logic was that? Was he just not that into me? Did I actually just ask myself that? What kind of maniac subscribes to a self-loathing brand of reasoning created by a comic with frosted tips? So what was it then? And we’re back to the beginning. What would Lisa do? Where does one purchase a mallet?
We’d started out promisingly enough. Dex was terrifyingly good-looking and had a quirky I-write-poetry-about-the-women-I-date-to-make-each-one-feel-special thing going. He was in law school. He’d be my Cliff. And I’d be a less pathetic Pygmalion. James who?
Then, on that never-ending Saturday night, I stupidly decided to do a drive-by. Sure, I was going to check up on him at the club, but I was going to be super-covert about it—two-stepping in the background and pretending not to care about what he was doing over there with that woman dressed for Homecoming 1996. So the girls and I posted ourselves on the fringes of the dance floor, and he was so good for the first two hours.
Then I came back from the bathroom.
“Stop staring at him!” I screamed over the music. They were busy drilling neat holes in the back of Dex’s head, arms crossed over their chests like pissed-off principals.
“That girl just kissed him,” said Adrienne, my best friend since freshman year, too matter-of-factly to be joking.
“Ummm, what?”
“She kissed him on the lips,” she repeated in the same “just the facts, ma’am” voice they use with victims on SVU. “We both saw it. There wasn’t tongue or anything. But definitely on the lips. Whaddyawannado?”
What do I want to do? What do I want to do? I want to f*cking scream is what I want to do! I want to punch that bitch in the damn throat and slap that shirt back to the bargain-basement bin to which it belongs. I want to slap you for seeing them tongue each other down and then telling me about it. I want to hop in my time machine and take back the blow job I gave him last night. Fock! This dude was supposed to be it. I took him to an office party, for Jesus’ sakes. An office party! I couldn’t stop saying, “Oh f*ck.” He was gorgeous and smart and funny and muscle-ly and beautifully weird and ugly when he came. I’d farted in front of him and didn’t bother to pretend it wasn’t me. And now I was going to have to start over. But f*ck it, right? Keep it moving.
Yeah, maybe tomorrow morning.
I clicked over to where Dexter was sitting with Forever XXI girl and pounded my fingers into his left shoulder. “We need to f*cking talk.”
He was surprised to see me but followed my back through the club without asking questions. I pushed past people like an astronaut with space dementia. When I finally whirled around to face him, I could tell he was drunk. “Are you here with that f*cking girl?” I screamed with my feet shoulder width apart and my nails digging into my hips. Power stance. “And don’t even try to f*cking lie, ass face, because Adrienne saw you licking her goddamn titties.” Dex’s eyes got big, but he didn’t deny it, not even the parts I’d made up. Not a sound came out of this man’s mouth, even though it was so wide open I could’ve put my fist through it. I thought seriously about doing that.
“Omigod, your breath! It’s doing karate moves. Close your f*cking mouth, retard!”
He closed it, and I left.
I ran past Adrienne, who’d witnessed my meltdown along with a bouncer and a few other people, to the ATM across the street to try and get $20 for a cab. Why do I never have cash?! Adrienne ran too. “Get in my car, Helena. I know you’re embarrassed, but it’s me, dude.” Fock.
As soon as I got into my apartment, my always empty but now totally emptier apartment, I flipped open my laptop and deleted Dexter from Facebook, MySpace, AIM, and my Outlook address book. I needed to do something real. But really, he was just another ephemeral disappeared-into-the-Internet ether. Nothing. It was 4:00 a.m., and I wore down my living room floor pacing back and forth, making guttural sounds—grunting like a damn maniac because I couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry—not after only five weeks. So instead I lay on my bed, hissed at the ceiling through clenched teeth like a woman in labor, and waited for sleep to come.
Then he caaaaalled, and we taaaalked, and he beeeegged, and I liiiiiistened.
Yes, I am totally familiar with how ridiculously pathetic I am. How f*cked I am in this entire situation. How like Lisa I am right now. She’d been in outer space. Outer freaking space! I assume she knew she was better than dirty Depends (I mean, there are rest stops). And yet this woman, this woman who was like us in so many ways, was willing to abandon life on the moon for a man with whom she shared “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.” Does success drive you totally insane? Or do men?
Six months and one Lisa later, I still didn’t know for sure. This is why I can’t answer Dex’s whining IMs. This is why I have to get over him. This is why I’ve been super-strong and full of resolve for the past two weeks. This is why when I saw him walking up the stairs of yet another club just last night, my stomach flipped, my eyes went all watery, and I almost choked on a shard of ice. This is why when he came over to our pack with a shit-eating grin on his face and embraced one of my friends and then tried to give me the one-armed homie hug, I gave him the thumbs-up. This is why, when I saw him later the same night, this time standing by himself at the bar looking all lonely and irresistible like DVF at Filene’s, I had to say hello. This is why we ended up talking all night. This is also why I woke up to him the next morning and have to start all over again with the whole ignoring thing.
This is why I never win.