Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (21 page)

“I like that scar. It’s cool. You’ve been through something.”

Good. That was the response I’d hoped for. I was ready to resume the seduction.

“Now, I have something special to show you,” he said flirtatiously and swung open the unfinished wooden door to his bedroom.

In that one moment before light revealed the inner contents of his boudoir, I envisioned many things. Another man? A harness? A bunk bed?

To say I was stunned by the actual contents would be putting it lightly. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, especially from a grown man, or at least one in the same room with me. Rob’s room was full of—and I mean
covered
with—Garfields. Stuffed ones, ceramic ones, bronze ones, Garfields in a variety of poses on a special Garfield-only shelf. There was Golfing Garfield, Pool Hall Garfield, Garfield
avec un beret
, and Angry Garfield. Plus a huge one, twice the size of me, adorned with Mardi Gras beads, propped up on his bed. There were so many of them, frozen in orange-and-black-striped action, it was chilling. I didn’t quite get it. If I performed well, would I win one?

The sight of this altar to Jim Davis’s dynasty killed any sexy, warm, or even
safe
feeling. He was way more scarred than I could ever be. Then I had what I refer to now as a
Kaiser Soze
moment, where I reflected on our night, the things he said, and started to connect the dots. The dog-fart joke, the stuffed bear in his car, the fact that he dated much younger girls, that weird comment about my having a tail. . . Since I didn’t have a coffee cup, my jaw dropped.

“Um
. . . well . . . how did . . . what’s up with all the Garfields?” I asked. I knew I should at least show him the same acceptance he did for me, but he was thirty-seven years old for god’s sake! Clearly he hadn’t gone through anything.

“Oh, I’ve had them since college,” he explained, tossing it off as if amassing a huge stuffed animal collection was a perfectly normal collegiate activity. I was hoping for more of a
They were left to me by my sweet crazy aunt when she died, and I have to display them to keep my inheritance
, or even,
They’re a childhood collection that is now worth millions!

My mind flashed again to our conversation at the bar. He mentioned he was from Boston, that he’d gone to Boston U, then moved to Providence for a while, and then moved back to Boston, then to Manhattan, then to Brooklyn, and now Queens. All I could picture was him wrapping each precious Garfield in newspaper and gently placing them in a cardboard liquor box time after time. I felt cheated and a little ill. He wasn’t a sexy man; he was a fucked-up man-child. To top it off, I was in Queens.

I tried to work with the situation. “Can you take a few of them out of your room? They’re creeping me out a little.” He did, without question, almost as if he had done it before for other trapped desperate girls who were trying anything to make the love den less infantile. He removed the big cat from the bed and carefully selected two other ones from the top of his dresser, setting them neatly on the sofa in the next room. When he returned, he flung me onto the bed and pounced. At least the Garfields were working their magic on one of us.

Turns out the only thing bigger than his Garfield obsession was his penis. It made perfect sense. Only a thirty-seven-year-old guy with a dick that big could get away with a bedroom full of stuffies. I had never seen one
that
big before and wasn’t sure how to approach it. It looked fake, or like it could strangle me. I’m sure
he nicknamed it Odie. Without warning, he threw on a Magnum condom and just . . . stuck it in.

The next thing I knew we were having the world’s worst, most unskilled sex I had ever experienced. Basically, he lowered his head beside my right ear and pumped furiously like a jackhammer. Like Odie in heat. It took a few moments for me to even catch up to what was happening. It felt like he was punching me inside. Like he was fucking a stuffed Garfield, and not even the favorite in his collection. I imagined that under his bed, I would find a bounty of old, mutilated, sticky orange-and-black cats.

More important, had he ever been with a woman before? What past girlfriend would put up with this? Even with all my problems and baggage, I knew that my scar and I were way above this. The sex was so empty and mechanical that I actually started making life resolutions in my head.
Tomorrow, I’m going to go to the gym, cut down on the drinking, stick to a disciplined writing schedule, get out of debt, get a better apartment . . . Tomorrow is a brand new day. I still have my whole life ahead of me. It’s not too late
.

I turned to look at him—at least I could do my job—but his eyes were shut. He had a tight smile on his face as he continued to thrust at a sprinter’s pace. He was lost in some fantasy world. A world of no Mondays and endless lasagna.

And then it was over. He rolled off and wiped perspiration from his forehead. I felt like I had been duped by a distracted carny running a crappy and dangerous ride at the county fair.

“Do you want me to go down on you or something?”

Yeah,
or something
, I thought.

“No . . . I’m good.” I smiled with fake reassurance. Bad missionary-style sex is one thing. Bad oral sex would be unbearable. I didn’t feel motivated to give him useful tips and guidance. Let the next girl deal with it.

He actually wanted to cuddle, and I let him. He wasn’t bad at it. Clearly this was more in his wheelhouse. Emotion swelled in my body as he spooned me tight, and I was surprised that I had to choke back tears. Tomorrow was a brand new day.

M
y dear old friend and drinking buddy, Lisa, was visiting from Toronto, and we met up at a French brasserie where I was a regular, yet the staff never seemed to recognize me. Either it was part of the joint’s charm, or they were really trying to be authentically French. I always ordered the same drink, what the menu called “Country White Wine,” which was a fancy way of saying “the cheapest one.” On this particular Wednesday night, I changed things up and asked for a Grey Goose vodka on the rocks with a lemon. Why? Because I was on a downward spiral, and tossing back a half glass of fruity white wine wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted that feeling of thick alcohol sliding down my throat, coating the ball of confusion and pain in my gut. The lemon on the side was to camouflage its utilitarian purpose: to make it look like I was festively cocktailing. A word
to the wise: If you ever meet me, and I order a vodka on the rocks, just know that it means I’m on the rocks too.

Lisa hugged me warmly, ordered herself a cosmo (because she was in New York!), and asked me to tell her about everything that was going on. I tried my best to make it all sound hilarious and upbeat, but as the words came out of my mouth, they sounded brutally sad.

“The dating scene is pretty intense here. I went out with a ridiculously good-looking guy, but he turned out to be a cocaine addict. Hilariously, he’s the one still calling me. There’s been a comic here, and a married guy there . . . Oh, and get this: A guy actually told me how he likes his girls waxed. I was like, ‘Is that an acrylic sweater you’re wearing? Yeah, you don’t get a choice!’”

Lisa looked more concerned than entertained, so I continued.

“But the best one of all just happened. After this gig a couple Fridays ago, I went home with the headliner, who proudly showed me his bedroom full of . . . stuffed Garfields! Ta-da! Seriously, Lisa, everyone in this town is insane. At least with that guy, if it worked out, we could donate the Garfields to a children’s charity.”

I could tell that Lisa was judging me. Unbelievable. She was the woman who slept with married men; she was the girl who polished off a pitcher of beer and then went home to work on her thesis. She was a fellow independent woman whose life goals didn’t include settling down. She was my idol. And now she was judging me.

Lisa calmly put down her cosmo before she spoke, mostly because it’s impossible to make a serious point with a pink cocktail in your hand. “Sounds a little out of control to me. Are you . . .
okay?”

Her spidey senses were onto something. The bad disconnected sex with The Stuffed Feline Wonder had thrown me off my axis. I understood it was a one-night stand, and I was initially the one who didn’t even want to show him the scar, but the total absence of intimacy coupled with being fucked like I was a prop had really affected me. I mean, I barely needed to be there. I was losing my patience for being of such low value.

“No no no. It’s New York. It’s hard to explain what’s considered normal here. Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

If you ever hear yourself adamantly declare that you’re fine, you’ll immediately hear how
not fine
you really are.

“Maybe you should take a break from chasing such a big life,” she suggested.

“Heeeyyy,” I said, slurring already. “I’m doing the best I can with what’s out there. Plus, I already wrote a joke about the Garfield guy. Did I mention he had a massive penis? I think he said its name was Odie.”

Lisa didn’t laugh along. The fact that our catch-up had suddenly turned into a mini-intervention worried me. Wasn’t I operating like anyone else? Did I really seem out of control?

I ordered another Grey Goose. Rocks. Lemon.

“Is there anyone that you like? A guy from work or . . . someone else in the comedy world? Have you thought about Internet dating?”

Internet dating was still new, and although I didn’t subscribe to the stigma others had placed on it, I’d been around the block enough times to title my profile “As Is.” I was definitely done dating within the
comedy scene. My track record was abysmal, and the thought of falling asleep beside someone who turns off the light and asks, “So why do you think my Wal-Mart joke doesn’t work anymore?” totally repelled me.

But there was one guy, not in the comedy scene, whom I was interested in.

“There is this Jonathan guy.”

“Well, can you get in touch with that Jonathan guy?” asked Lisa innocently.

“Yeah, probably,” I said into my drink. “But he’s probably a douche.”

“Ah, c’mon. You wouldn’t be attracted to him if he was like that.”

I felt like a washed-up Broadway ingenue, and I wanted to yell, “What do you know, Lisa? You have health care and rational men. It’s different here in the Big Apple, sweetheart!”

This Jonathan guy was a new employee at the company where Allison, one of my closest comedy friends, worked. He came to our show, and I say
came to our show
lightly. More accurately, we bullied him and his two guy friends into buying tickets to our show.

Allison and I ran a weekly stand-up show in the basement of a West Village bar, and when we didn’t have enough of an audience, we’d head out to the street and try to persuade passersby to come in, a process known as “barking in a crowd.” In hindsight, I can’t believe it worked at all. It was pretty demoralizing to stand on the street as grown women with college degrees and beg random people to come see our little dog-and-pony show. Maybe the strangers found us cute or felt sorry for us, or maybe they thought we were
the worst prostitutes ever. Whatever it was, we would miraculously scare up a full room every time.

Jonathan and his pals were three of those suckers whom I lured in with the promise of “a few laughs from a handful of New York’s top comics, cheap booze, and an overall good time.” I didn’t know any of their names at the time; I didn’t even know he worked with Allison. The thing that stuck with me was that one of them had these big brilliant-blue eyes. Like a wolf’s eyes. I remembered that pair of eyes beaming up at me from the audience—which was unusual. I had a knack for scanning a room full of faces and ignoring the happy smiling ones to locate the person having the worst time. Every other last audience member could be laughing, cheering, having the time of their life, but I’d hone in on the man or woman who looked miserable, and then I’d spend the rest of my act delivering my material straight to them in some sort of twisted Mexican joke standoff. They were the only ones who mattered. More often than not, those same people would approach me after the show to say thank you and that they had a good time.

I wasn’t used to the idea of a guy flirting with me from the audience, either. A lot of men get into comedy not only because they are funny but also because it’s a sure ticket to getting laid. It doesn’t quite happen the same way for female comics. Why? When have you ever heard a guy say, “I’m looking for a girl with a great sense of humor—and if she is funnier than me, well, that would be such a turn-on!”

After my Canadian intervention, I asked Allison if she could find out if Jonathan wanted to go for a drink with me.

“Jonathan . . . okay.” Allison hesitated. “I was going to set him up with someone else.”

“Well, see if after that someone else, he wants to go for a drink with me. But make sure it’s him.”

I’d already gone on a date with Jonathan, or so I’d thought, but it turned out to be one of the other guys in the group. As I mentioned, I didn’t know any of their names, but I received an e-mail from Daryl. He said that he loved my set and asked if I’d like to “rendezvous for a couple of pints.” Sure, he was mixing French and British words, but at least it showed an attempt at originality. I suggested we meet at my favorite restaurant at the time, a high-volume, chaotic Chinese place called Congee Village. Looking back, that place was almost like an obstacle course for a first date, but I loved the food, there was no “scene” to have to fit into, and their drinks were strong and cheap.

I waited on an orange Lucite stool in the bar area of Congee Village, not entirely sure who I was looking for. All I remembered were the eyes—eyes that I saw from the stage, not even close up. I was pretty sure that all three of the guys had brownish hair, and beyond that I hoped that I would just intuitively know when he walked in. The place was 99 percent Asian, so it was bound to be easy. Unless he was Asian. With blue eyes.

But then I saw him. Unmistakable. It wasn’t because of those big sparkling eyes; it was more that he stuck out, like a clumsy lost child, sporting a huge backpack like he’d come straight from Cub Scout camp. As soon as bright eyes turned around, I realized there had been a mistake. Yes, he had eyes, two of them, but they were brown, and tucked behind a pair of dirty glasses with tape on the frame. He wasn’t bright eyes.