I Suck at Girls (16 page)

Her name was Amanda. I’d met her once before when she had come to visit Theresa from San Francisco for a couple days, but had spoken to her only briefly. She had wavy brown hair that fell just past her shoulders and a cherubic face that was lit up by two sparkly light-blue-green eyes. Unlike the rest of the girls in the party, she had actual curves that filled out the navy-blue dress she was wearing. She flashed a nervous smile at me and gave one of those quick waves you give someone when you’re not sure if he remembers you. I smiled and waved back, and she walked over to where I was standing, near the exit.

“I don’t know anyone here, and everyone is cooler than me,” she said.

“So you picked the least cool guy in the place to come talk to,” I replied.

“We can be uncool together,” she said.

I stayed at the show for another hour talking to Amanda. She was quick and funny and a little self-deprecating, but not in a way that seemed like a defense mechanism for a truckload of self-loathing. I tried my best not to weird her out and largely succeeded, except perhaps for one point when I described myself as looking like “Jason Biggs with a terminal illness.” It was the first time in as long as I could remember that I’d enjoyed a relaxed conversation with a woman.

“We should hang out sometime,” I said as I was leaving.

“I’m flying back to San Francisco tomorrow,” she replied.

“Maybe someone will call in a bomb threat and you’ll have to stay another night. Wow. That was a really terrible joke. I don’t know why I said that.”

“No, bomb jokes are always funny to people who are about to board a plane,” she said, laughing. “I wouldn’t worry, anyway. You’ve told way worse jokes within this last hour.” She gave me a hug good-bye.

I thought about Amanda quite a bit over the next few days. The situation seemed kind of hopeless, since she lived five hundred miles away, but my brain didn’t want to acknowledge the distance. I tried to put her out of my mind, to buckle down and finish a second screenplay I was working on. Then, a couple days later, as I was working in my living room, I heard a loud clang on my barbecue. I walked out to my backyard to find a rat splattered on the top of my grill.

“Hey! Stop throwing rats in my yard!” I yelled over the fence.

There was no answer so I grabbed an old newspaper from the recycling bin, used it to pick up the rat corpse, and tossed it back over the fence.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I heard my neighbor yell from behind the fence.

“Dude! Stop it! I’ve had enough of this crap!” I shouted.

“Okay. Shit. Chill out, man. I’m sorry. You don’t need to Nolan Ryan that shit at me, man.”

I went inside, washed my hands, and felt a huge sense of accomplishment. Sure, maybe getting a man to stop throwing dead rats into my yard wasn’t exactly on par with building schools for underprivileged Iraqi children, but at the time it felt significant and invigorating. I sat back down at my computer, opened up my Gmail, and sent Amanda an e-mail with the subject line, “I just threw a dead rat at my neighbor.”

Don’t Make Me Take Up Residence in Your Fantasy Land

When I was thirteen, my dad barged into my room after dinner one night while I was doing homework. Before I could set my pencil down, he said: “You’ve been jerking off a lot.”

“What? What are you talking about?” I shrieked.

“Relax. I could give a shit. Good for you that you can find the time. I can’t get a second to myself. But there’s two things I need you to know: one, I’m going to be doing the laundry for the next few months because your mom’s studying for the bar exam; and two, I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna reach down into the laundry basket and pick up a towel that’s crunchy like a fucking Dorito ’cause you did your business in it, okay?”

He stared down at me. I was frozen in shock and humiliation.

“Say okay. I need to hear verbal confirmation,” he said.

“Okay,” my voice cracked.

“Thank you. Now that we got that unfortunate business out of the way, I figured now’d be a halfway decent time to bring up something else,” he continued.

“Really, I don’t do that, though,” I interjected.

“Are we going to talk like men or do I have to take up residence in your fantasy land?”

“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.