I Know What I'm Doing (16 page)

Right now our switch is set to off and we just text each other about our failed romances. There’s nothing better than a male pal telling you that he hates all men on your behalf. Although Gypsy isn’t someone I would put on my Christmas cards—“Happy Holidays from Jen and The Fuck Buddy”—he’s been one of the most special men in my life. Gypsy and I are both in Los Angeles now but our origin stories take place in Boston and New York City.

GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES (OR HOW I CAME TO HAVE A FUCK BUDDY, IN TWO PARTS)

PART 1: BECOMING BUDDIES FIRST

I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there. But just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware.

—Cat Stevens

When I was twenty-one, the love of my life (so far) Blake dumped me. I of course took it really well and waited a whole three hours before I knocked on the front door of his apartment with a plan to explain to him that although I respect his freedom of speech and really found his opinion on “not loving me anymore” fascinating—he was wrong. Luckily for Blake, he wasn’t home. His roommate, my friend, who you know as Gypsy, opened the door. I was mortified. I didn’t care if
Blake
thought I was desperate and psycho. I couldn’t have our
friends
think I was too. What I didn’t know was that this was the beginning of a twenty-year close friendship and occasional benefit-ship with Gypsy—someone I never thought about
in that way.

Gypsy said, “Come in. Come in. You need a cigarette and some tea.”

“You don’t think I seem crazy?”

“No, Kirkman. I think you seem sad.”

Gypsy poured water into a frying pan, which is the closest thing to a teakettle that an apartment occupied by two twenty-year-old guys has. He carefully poured it into a mug. He looked around. “Shit. We’re actually out of tea. How about some whiskey?”

I sipped my whiskey and hot water in the living room. Gypsy stretched out in a beat-up La-Z-Boy and I sat on a neighboring papasan chair.

“What if Blake comes back? He’ll hate that I’m here.”

“You’re my friend too and you’re my guest now.”

Gypsy grew up in Beverly Hills. He had a 1970s style that didn’t seem costumey. He would simply not look right in a T-shirt and jeans. He was made for bell-bottoms and floppy hats. Gypsy lit up a Camel Light and told me that he just had a breakup as well. His girlfriend, the hippie painter, had dumped him. I found this so hard to believe. In my mind they were the perfect couple. I sometimes heard them having sex and it always sounded so intimate and whispery. I thought they had figured out the meaning of life and were just keeping it secret.

I asked Gypsy what happened. He said he couldn’t explain it to me but Joni Mitchell could. He took out the record
Blue
and put the needle on “A Case of You.” Joni sang,
“I am a lonely painter. I live in a box of paints. I’m frightened by the devil. And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.”

“Oh,” I said while nodding and pretending to get it.

“Your breakup is more of a Cat Stevens song,” Gypsy said thoughtfully. After “A Case of You” was over, he pulled
Tea for the Tillerman
out of its sleeve and let Cat Stevens sing “Wild World” for me. “
You say you wanna start something new. And it’s breakin’ my heart you’re leavin’. Baby, I’m
grievin’.”

I couldn’t believe it, but just a few stanzas into that song and I was feeling better. It was so thoughtful of my friend to find me the perfect breakup tune. Gypsy and I sat in silence as “Wild World” ended and “Sad Lisa” began.

ROMANTIC COMEDY MOVIE VERSION OF HOW THAT DAY ENDED:

Gypsy comes over to me and takes my hand, leading me to stand up. We slow dance. I catch a whiff of his musk and realize that it’s always been Gypsy whom I love. Blake comes home. “Gypsy, what the hell are you doing?” Gypsy says, “I’m doing what you could never do for her. I’m appreciating her.” Blake comes closer. “You throw yourself at my roommate in
my
apartment, Jen?” Gypsy says, “This is
our
apartment. Not yours. In fact, your name isn’t on the lease. Technically this is my
dad’s
apartment.” Blake angrily tries to throw a punch but trips over the warped corner of the Oriental rug. He’s humiliated. Gypsy says, “Just go. Unless you want to stay and continue making a fool of yourself.” After Blake leaves, Gypsy takes the needle off the vinyl and changes the record out. “Don’t look,” he tells me. “I have a surprise song for you. Listen to the lyrics.” I wait in suspense until I hear Stevie Wonder’s “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever).” Gypsy takes my face in his hands and says, “I believe.” We kiss. Roll credits.

REAL-LIFE VERSION OF HOW THAT DAY ENDED:

After a few more songs, my fear of Blake coming home outweighed my confidence that I belonged. I drove my dad’s Oldsmobile Cutlass back to my parents’ house, crying hysterically when “Angie” by the Rolling Stones came on the classic rock radio station. I didn’t see Gypsy again for two years.

PART 2: NEGOTIATING THE BENEFITS (OR HOW WE CAREFULLY ADDED SEX TO A FRIENDSHIP)

She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go.

—Dorothy Parker

In 1999 the Internet was on the verge of becoming more important to us than Sony Discmans or dual cassette player stereos. Us twentysomethings referred to it as AOL because mostly that’s all those giant typewriters with screens were to us—ways to send e-mail through America Online. Even then e-mail was used sparingly—something you drunkenly composed and sent when you knew it was too late to call a friend but wanted to let her know about this amazing night you’d had. There wasn’t Wi-Fi back then, so if you were on the Internet you had to be at home connected to a modem that made loud screeching noises like your computer was in heat as it took a good five minutes to connect to the web. That’s where the notion that everyone online is just some creep in his or her mother’s basement comes from. You actually had to be in a basement because it was the best place to keep that unsightly equipment and muffle the sound. With the invention of laptops, now you can be a creep in broad daylight at a coffee shop.

I was suspicious about the Internet before I started using it myself. I looked skeptically at Brian—the guy in college who always wore the extra-long striped Doctor Who scarf even in warm weather. He was constantly at the library (so was I but I worked there) using the one computer and typing away sending e-mails. I used to stare at him and whisper to my friend Liz who shared checkout desk duty with me, “Look at him. He’s
writing
to his friends? What a weirdo. Why doesn’t he just pick up the phone and talk to someone? What kind of sociopath doesn’t want to talk on the phone?” Today, I only want people to call me if somebody died—even then I imagine it’s way easier to just text me the time/place of the funeral and I’ll write back “K.” Followed by a sad face emoticon, of course.

I was also a bit suspicious about this sudden new technology. “I bet the government reads our e-mails.” Now that we’ve found out that the NSA
does
read our e-mails, people posit, “Well, they’re only scanning them for terrorist buzzwords. It’s not like hired hands are sitting in offices reading our private exchanges.” I disagree. Of COURSE they are reading our private exchanges. Do you really think some low-paid hired hand sitting in the basement of the Pentagon is using his access to your Gmail to hunt for words like “terror plot” instead of words like “I don’t usually send pictures of my pussy but . . .”

So it was definitely out of character that in 1999 I landed a job working for an Internet start-up company in New York City. The company was called Funkytalk.com and the goal was to be one of the first “reality TV shows” on the Internet. I was being paid to travel America, blog about my experiences, and perform wacky pranks on camera. No website had successfully integrated video before and lots of bandwidth or whatever it is that makes it all work didn’t really exist in giant quantities yet. Nobody watched videos on their computers. When the funding fell through to keep videos alive on Funkytalk.com, the once-ambitious multimedia website just turned into a webzine.

I was assigned to write a romantic relationship he said/she said advice column with my male office mate Austin. We were forced to make up the questions ourselves because we apparently had zero readership. Our higher-ups were obsessed with the notion of a grassroots campaign to get young people interested in coming to our website. A few write-ups about Funkytalk.com in
Time
magazine and the
Wall Street Journal
weren’t turning into web “hits.” I was assigned to spend my days on Internet message boards trying to make natural online conversation with people about Funkytalk.com. Nowadays people can smell that kind of thing a mile away. “Hey, guys! I’m new here so I’m just wondering what you all think about energy-saving lightbulbs? There’s a great new company that’s on the verge of saving the world with their bulbs made from cow dung. Anyway, LOL! What are you kids up to? I’m young too!”

I trolled one particular message board where people used to go to hook up and I not so casually dropped that there was this great sex advice column they should check out! I got a reply from a guy who nicknamed himself “Sid Kindness,” a take on the Sex Pistols’ famed heroin addict bassist, Sid Vicious, who killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. “Sid” wrote on the message boards that he would check out my column and signed off, “Cheers, love.”

My advice column had my work e-mail address at the end of it so that people could write in. Within an hour I had an e-mail from Sid himself waiting in my in-box. He had written me a long correspondence saying that he has difficulty with meeting girls. He asked me all about myself; quality questions such as, “Where did you grow up?” and “How long have you been a writer?” and not creepy inquiries like, “How big are your boobs? May I nickname them?”

I had just broken up with my boyfriend Patrick and was happy to be getting male attention. Patrick and I had dated for a year but the communication in our relationship started to get rocky when I told him that I was leaving to go on a four-month adventure across America with Funkytalk, and wasn’t able to temper my excitement with the slightest, “But I’ll miss
you
.” I jumped to conclusions and took Patrick’s sadness at my leaving as him trying to “hold me back.” I hastily broke things off by asking him to go for a walk in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park where I just said, “We have to break up,” and then ran off. Like, literally ran away as though it were a game of tag.

Nowadays, Patrick and I are great friends. I’m grateful that he forgave me for my terrible lack of breakup etiquette and I forgave him for rebounding with a woman who at the time was my sworn enemy. We share in common a divorce (not the same one, obviously), and we’re both fiercely independent comedy writers who would rather work late than change diapers.

Sid wrote that he thought I was pretty (my picture accompanied the column) and that he didn’t have a picture of himself that he liked enough to send but promised me that he looked just like the lead singer of Blur. I wasn’t that familiar with Blur, and the Internet being what it was in 1999, I had a hard time finding a picture of the lead singer. I had to have a friend describe him to me. It turns out that there are
two
singers in Blur, Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn, and I wasn’t sure which one Sid looked like. I was hoping for Damon and instead of asking Sid
which
lead singer of Blur he resembled I just fantasized that of course it was the cuter one.

I wrote back and told Sid all about myself. I hit Send and since I had no idea how to check my work e-mail from home I found myself going to bed earlier so that the next morning would come faster so that I could get to work and see if Sid had written back. He wrote back! He gave me his phone number and asked for mine. Later that night I got a call on my landline. I picked it up and heard “Alloisjentheyyah?”

“What? Who is this? I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Alloisjentheyyah?”

Having never traveled abroad at that point in my life I had only heard the prim-and-proper, crisp British accents in movies. I’d never heard a regional UK accent before. It didn’t even sound like the English language. I was confused. It took me a minute to realize that this was most likely Sid calling. He sounded like he had a swollen tongue and was just mastering language in general.

I hung up the phone. I was actually scared of an accent.

He called back. I let the machine pick up and record whatever the hell it was he was saying.
Beeeeep
. “Alloisjentheyyah?” The next day at work I wrote back to him that I thought my phone had a bad connection. He e-mailed that he wanted to come to New York City to visit me and it would be better to talk face-to-face anyway. I told him about how I lived in a two-and-a-half-room apartment in Brooklyn with a roommate and her friend. Sid wrote back, “Your flat sounds a little cramped!” I’ve always found it maddeningly adorable when people who use different slang from us Americans respond back with their word (“flat”) for what I just said (“apartment”). Sid offered, “I’m going to get a room at the Chelsea Hotel. I’ve always loved the history of that place. You can come and visit me there?”

My office mate and advice column partner, Austin, caught wind of what I was using my work computer for most of the day. He was concerned. “You’re having a romance with someone you’ve never met? That’s creepy.”

“I’m sorry if I’m on the forefront of technology. I used to think that e-mail was creepy. And now look at me. I’m able to fall in love with someone from England without having to fly there.”

“Jen. It’s creepy. And you’re not in love.”

Sid signed off of that day’s e-mail exchange with, “I’m going to look into flights. I think I want to stay at the Chelsea Hotel! You should meet me there for a ‘drink.’ ”