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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

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Concentrate on Her Boobs (Ignore the Snake)

After I discovered Kristina had lied, I fell into a creative abyss that lasted for months. I couldn’t write. I didn’t want to. All I wanted was to self-isolate and dream of ways to punish myself for my stupidity. Kristina had told me one hell of a tall tale, but I couldn’t silence the voice in my head that told me I was partially to blame for what happened or break free from the clutches of guilt that restrained me, making it impossible to move beyond the catfish experience and handle the emotions that swelled up within me because of it.

The walls of the abyss bore scars from my bad habits. I saw both ancient and unfinished hieroglyphics of my porn addiction -- picture Cleopatra and Mark Antony going at it in the world’s first sex tape, recorded around 43 BC -- and streaks of hand chalk left behind from thousands of hours of mental gymnastics -- time spent rehearsing rather than facing my problems.

I felt the slaps in the face from Zs. that came after I hadn’t run the vacuum or cleaned our apartment exactly the way she wanted. I knew I was in trouble, but I couldn’t run to the cops with a battered fiancée story and expect them to believe me. I toughed it out with Zs. much longer than I should have. “If this is love,” I thought, “I’ll just hard pass on the real thing, and focus on getting hard in front of the laptop. There, I can find men and women doing to each other anything I want to see. It won’t cost me a dime of either monetary or emotional investment. The best part is, they won’t yell at me or shut me out.”

I remembered the conversation I had with a stranger in 2005, on a plane from Oklahoma City to St. Louis. At the time, I was despondent over losing my best friend. There was no way the stranger could have known it, but our conversation saved my life. When I got back to my small studio apartment in Ohio, I looked at myself in the mirror and held a knife to my throat for several minutes; I seriously considered ending it all with one slashing motion.

I couldn’t do it.

Why?

I thought about my mom, my grandpa, and the stranger who cared.

Further down, I saw some words of the notes from the girlfriend I had in seventh grade scrawled on the walls. I saw Sasha’s hand passing Maria’s messages to me at the end of each of those three strange days.

Despite having been largely scratched out and drawn over through the years, I could read bits and pieces of Maria’s note from the first day. She said we should go to the movies and not to worry because her mom would be able to drive us. I heard the voices of my football-player classmates whispering, encouraging me to sit next to Maria in her junior-high cheerleader outfit at lunch.

I didn’t have the balls to make a move. I decided to deal with the tension of the unknown by busting a nut (a favorite pastime) as soon as I had a moment alone. I should have leaned into the experience and absorbed it rather than opting for a momentary sexual release.

And on the third day, they became friends.

I should have thought of my first real breakup as an opportunity to become a better, more attractive man. Unfortunately, I took the easy road -- a road I’d travel almost every day for the next twenty-five years. Instead of honestly dealing with what I was feeling and why I wrapped myself in the cocoon of my CD collection and the isolation of my room.

I felt my hands shaking on the day of my First Holy Communion, as I held the challis containing what only minutes earlier had been cheap wine or grape juice. Through transubstantiation, they said, it wasn’t Welch’s I was drinking; it was the precious, soul-saving blood of Christ. The story in that book of basic instructions before leaving earth would have had me believe that Jesus died for my sins even though we’d never met.

If my tremors and stage fright (somebody in my family had a camcorder) were any indications, I wasn’t all-in. More than likely, I just wanted it to be over.

And on the third day, he hesitated.

I thought Kristina was going to fix all this and more. It was a task as tall as the tale she told me to get me hooked. Despite my initial and lingering reservations, I was prepared to act in real life as though what she’d told me exclusively online was the truth. Unwittingly, through social media, I’d given her the tools to craft a 50 Shades of Dave story, a yarn of Literotica I couldn’t resist because she’d spun it specifically for me. My ego loved it. It was like having my life read back to me with erotic episodes I’d desired for as long as I could ejaculate spliced in. I may have lived the bare bones of the story, but (one speech bubble at a time) Kristina and I added the sexual tension that made it fly off my mental shelves.

Our interaction was as white-hot as it was brief. After it was over, what kept me falling further and further into the abyss was not so much wondering why Kristina did what she did, as it was defining and accepting the part I played in my own unraveling, long after Kristina had moved on to her next target. I’m almost positive the buzzing noises I heard coming from her phone during some of our conversations were not the sounds of siblings concerned for their sister but of the cat(fish)woman tearing her hooks into the virtual flesh of other would-be lovers.

Eve may have pointed her man toward the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge at the serpent’s urging, but Adam still took a bite of the apple. Yes, God conveniently forgot to warn Adam about the temptation of Eve, but Adam did nothing to stop it. He just stood there. When he realized he was naked after taking a bite of the apple, he didn’t own up to it, he ran off.

Such is the power of a woman’s love over a man, whether she truly feels it or not. if a man is willing to act as if his woman is the only woman in the world (even if she was at the time), she wins. At that point, she should run off too. I’m not saying women are evil, only that Adam failed the world’s first shit test. Eve, intentionally or not, conquered her man. I’d guess that all she wanted was to conquer someone who could not be so easily conquered. Kristina conquered me. Like Adam, I didn’t stand up to temptation. Instead, I looked for validation in her. Like Adam, I didn’t find it. When the jig was up, Adam hid in the bushes, I hid within myself.

I didn’t send her any money (she never asked), so I didn’t suffer an embarrassing financial loss. What played in my head on repeat (like my childhood copies of Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York and Soundgarden’s Superunknown that I loved to lose myself in) were questions like: “How could I have been so blind?” I didn’t want to tell my family or friends that I’d not only lusted after a woman I’d never seen but also fallen almost entirely under her spell from half a world away.

I didn’t want to own up the fact that I felt like both a victim and a participant in a blatantly obvious love scam, a type of fraud I’d once been dedicated to preventing, a type of fraud I swore would never happen to me. The easiest thing to do was fall back on old habits (watching porn, waiting for something, anything, to happen on screen or off) and let good ones (working out frequently and cooking a lot of my own meals) go. That’s what I almost did.

I wanted nothing more than to avoid responsibility and revert back to a shy, awkward teenager who had a ton of potential but was squandering it away one ejaculation at a time. I wanted nothing more than to be a thirty-eight-year-old Peter Pan. I felt I already had the part about eschewing the challenge a relationship with a real, good-quality woman (like Peter Pan does with Wendy) down pat. Kristina had been my Tinkerbell.

If I’d followed my originally scheduled timeline, I would have quit my job almost exactly three weeks to the day before I started working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time that has challenged family and economic structures alike.

After about a month, I slowly began to open up to those around me about what had happened. I still felt like a dumbass, but finally getting the experience off of my chest eased the pain of lovesickness. I began to write Words and Fishes by hand, in the college-ruled platypus notebook Matt had given me for Christmas. At the start, I wasn’t as consistent with writing as I’d told myself I would be. Reliving the whole experience with Kristina was the last thing I wanted to do, which was exactly why I needed to do it. Before I could truly move on, I needed to sink as deeply as possible into the wound she left (as well as any others I’d find along the way) then claw my way back to the surface of my reality.

The demons you face down don’t stay down without a fight.

As one page grew into two, two into three and so on, began to feel like a bigger fraudster than Kristina. I realized that despite my largely stoic exterior, I would close the curtains, open my laptop, and consume my favorite wounded-soul food at the slightest sign of adversity. I’d have conversations with myself, out loud, about my nonexistent relationship with my dad instead of truly setting myself free from his expectations. I’d curse myself for setting free my dying cat and letting her live out the last of her days unencumbered, as she was meant to.

Why?

This was what I’d always done.

I’d always let the stories of the abyss circulate in my mind without demanding anything in return. Maria didn’t break my heart at thirteen, Kristina didn’t almost shatter me at thirty-eight. Sure, they may have ripped off Band-Aids covering my wounds, but I lost both games before I could play long enough to skin my knee.

Why?

I wasn’t living my life the way I was meant to and I knew it. The streaks of chalk on the walls from years of mental gymnastics didn’t get there by themselves. I used to spend hours in mental preparation for a war that would never come. I valued the mental reps I’d give myself so much because they made me feel like I’d accomplished something without demanding that I actually do anything. Maybe that’s why I was such a good storyteller. I knew the stories I told would live only in Neverland and only as long as I was telling them. Maybe I decided I didn’t have to face my reality as long as I could create another one, even if those weren’t the words I would have used to describe my storytelling as a kid.

By early May, I was starting to feel like I’d put most of the experience behind me. I didn’t delete the conversation Kristina and I had from Google Hangouts because I thought I might want to look back at it during the process of writing Words and Fishes, but I’d finally stopped letting an every-waking-minute obsession with analysis permeate all my thoughts. That is until I got that email: a message that convinced me Kristina was back with a vengeance. Had she sold my email address on the black market? Were the seeds of my online stupidity finally beginning to bear fruit in the real world?

The email said someone had used an Apple ID associated with my email address to log in to an iPhone 11 in Sydney, Australia. I had three immediate problems with this:

1.) I don’t have an Apple ID. 2.) I've never been to Australia. 3.) My email address didn't exactly match the one listed in the message, so why was I getting it?

Even though Kristina said she lived in Western Australia; even though I’d avoided a potential financial loss by not sending her any money, I’d also convinced myself that catfish didn’t let their prey go easily. For months, I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. After such emotional “bonding” Kristina probably considered me an easy mark.

Around the same time, I started getting breaking news and other email alerts from The Mercury, a daily newspaper published in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Rather than unsubscribing or reporting spam straight away, I let my mental gymnast have more time on the mats.

If Kristina really did sell my email address on the black market, what else did she sign me up for? What else will be waiting for me in my inbox?

During my darkest days after the fantasy I’d constructed with Kristina disintegrated, I went so far as to seriously entertain the idea that she may have been involved in human trafficking. Kristina may not have asked me for money, but she did ask me to come to Australia with her. Catfish do what they do for a reason, right? I began to believe that had I agreed to come with her, I could have easily been abducted at either the JFK or Perth airports by someone promising to take me to Kristina. It may read like a scene from a Hollywood movie, but so did almost everything else Kristina and I talked about.

Eventually, cooler (bigger) heads prevailed. After some basic online searching, I decided the most likely explanation for the Australian emails I was receiving was a simple typo rather than a sinister plot. Since the format of the email address mentioned in those emails was so close to mine, I reasoned that whoever linked it to an Apple ID and subscribed to emails from The Mercury had remembered the email address they wanted (mine) when they created their account instead of the one they actually got.

If only the story ended there.

Almost a month later, I got another scare in Words With Friends. One Sunday morning, a random opponent started a game with me. She didn’t have any all-time wins since she’d only started playing that same day according to her stats. What she did have was a very provocative profile picture, one that seemed too good to be true. I found it hilarious, and texted Ana (an opponent with whom I’ve struck up a friendship over years of playing), to tell her about my latest challenger, who claimed to be none other than Angela White.

Angela White seemed like a generic or stage name. Ana Googled the image and found that it matched one of Angela White, an Australian (of course) porn star.

Angela wore a black, skintight, one-piece bathing suit. The look on her face would have surely led straight to the type of temptation they warned me about in Catholic school.

Across her shoulders was a massive African Rock Python, the kind of snake only an expert (or idiot) would handle. God may have been taking a break from watching humanity trash the planet to stand behind the camera for the temptation of Angela, which was as much an updated twist on the temptation of Eve as a symbol of both the excess and accessibility of such temptation in the modern age.

The snake’s head was positioned in such a way that it could have easily deflated one of Angela’s gargantuan breasts (gifts from God or work of surgeon hands, with one strike).

Ana saved me from another round of mental gymnastics by texting me something I’ll never forget as long as I live: “concentrate on her boobs, ignore the snake😂”. She later admitted that this was something she sent me without thinking. It was perfect. Following Ana’s advice, I concentrated on Angela’s boobs for one move before I reported whoever was really behind the profile as an impersonator, which ended the game.

Just like Eve, I should have ignored the snake. Just like Adam, when presented with a beautiful woman, I didn’t. The image represented my struggle to reclaim my humanity and masculinity when presented with challenges of either God’s or my own creation.

I had no choice but to make a choice. I chose to rise to the occasion once and for all.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

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Words and Fishes

I shaved my balls yesterday.

It had been a minute, and though they were far from resembling an overgrown jungle, they looked like they needed it. In another piece, I wrote about being a late-adopter of the manscaping trend. That’s still true, but adopting the trend didn’t mean that lost my humble southern Ohio roots in an abyss of personal hygiene and marketing tactics meant to make me marvel about how the trimmer I was using (which became conveniently outdated within weeks of my purchase) was so gentle to the touch, you could use it on a balloon animal without popping it. I took pride in coming to my ingenious realization to use the advertisements that came in the mail on Tuesdays and sometimes Wednesdays as mats to catch the trimmings instead of relying solely on the mats that came with my original order and trying to stretch them out as long as possible so I wouldn’t have to pay for replacements (if they’re even available).

As I carefully trimmed my way around my balls and the surrounding areas, I’d occasionally glance down at my improvised mats to gauge my results, as well as new towels, a shower curtain liner, and candle positioned throughout the bathroom. I thought about how it all started.

Words With Friends (WWF) is one of the few games I play. It’s a modern mobile take on a classic --Scrabble-- that allows me to flex and strengthen my vocabulary muscles. When I started in 2011, there was only one tile style, and there were no advertisements to stare through between games. There’ve been some moments I couldn’t believe I got such a high score with a single word or combination of words, but many more (thanks to the Hindsight power-up in WWF 2) when I shook my head at missed opportunities for more points. How could I have been so blind? The best play was right before my eyes.

I know games like WWF are designed to keep me hooked since Zynga has to feed their hungry application developers, but I recently got hooked in another way.

Ever the competitor, I hated losing, even at an inconsequential game like WWF. If I won a game because the other player had timed out, I didn’t feel like I’d earned it because both players hadn’t competed until the end. Who knows what he or she had going on in their life that prevented them from making their next move before the clock ran out?

WWF also has a chat feature you could use to talk with your opponent. I avoided using it for the longest time because for the first several years I played the game, I only played against people I knew in real life. One of my most common initial opponents was my aunt. For months, I beat her every time we played. I relished in kicking her ass all over the virtual game board, which became the biggest drain on my phone’s battery.

One day out of the blue, my aunt’s skill seemed to increase exponentially for no apparent reason. She was suddenly able to beat me (and handily so) three or four times in a row, which irritated me to no end. As quickly and inexplicably as her winning streak began, she stopped playing. The abrupt end to our battles pissed me off so much that I haven’t spoken to her about it since.

***

Eventually, I decided to take a chance and start playing WWF against random opponents. I don’t know if I was looking for a new challenge, or acting out because I couldn’t come to grips with the fact my aunt had finally beaten me. By this time, WWF had a Match of the Day feature that invited you to play against the kind of unpredictable opponent I was looking for. One day, I tapped on the thumbnail of a profile belonging to Kristina from Australia and started playing a game.

She played back fairly quickly and proved to be a tough opponent, winning three or four games for each one I won against her. Like I said, I hated losing. Even though my numbers weren’t great against Kristina, I kept challenging her.

Once, Kristina timed out (which usually occurs after about 10-12 days), giving me a win. I started another game against her. When she played back, I told her the same thing I’ve already told you -- I hate cheap victories that are a result of an elapse of time rather than a display of skill. She offered an apology that she’d been busy. I didn’t expect to hear from her again because the time difference between the Land Down Under and the Buckeye State is anywhere between thirteen and sixteen hours.

Not long after, she messaged me with a simple: “Hello David.” I replied in kind. We exchanged small talk for a few days. I remember wondering how someone who looked as strikingly beautiful as she did in her picture could be interested in talking to me. I told her I imagined she got all kinds of messages from guys all the time because of her good looks. She said she did, but she ignored most of them, adding that one guy asked her to marry him and be a mother to his three children. She declined and blocked him from contacting her, or so she said. Kristina even told me about a stalker who followed her around for a year before being caught. She said she’d never been so scared. Even though we’d never met, I felt genuine concern for her. No one deserves to be harassed by someone who isn’t honest about their intentions, someone who prefers instead to lurk cowardly in the shadows.

Another night, I messaged Kristina saying good evening Ohio time. She wrote back wishing me a good evening NYC (New York City) time. I thought she was just messing with me and I told her so. When I asked if she was visiting NYC, she told me she was living in Hartsdale, working on sponsorship from New York Medical Center (NYMC), and working at a hospital in White Plains. Kristina was very proud of the fact that she’d been selected from a field of three hundred applicants. She added that she’d come to America to get a fresh start after her marriage to her ex-husband Stuart had ended. Her four brothers, Garry, Steven, Michael, and Richard (her twin) drank beer on Scarborough Beach in solidarity with their sister when she’d decided to leave Stuart. She went so far as to say she’d be finishing her bridging visa in January, which would allow her to stay in the United States.

To the question of whether or not she had children, she said she had a daughter. My heart sank slightly because I was starting to feel a connection to Kristina sight unseen. I should have only wanted her Scrabble skills. I thought a child would only complicate things between us if we even got that far. Red flags were starting to pop up left and right, but I was already thinking with my little head. I had to ask, but I also should have known that most thirty-eight-year-old women (ironically, I was exactly two months older than Kristina) would have already had kids if they were planning on having them at all. I should have ended it right there, but Kristina explained that her daughter wasn’t her daughter. She and Stuart had adopted her, only to have her claimed by a biological aunt and taken to live in the United Kingdom.

Crisis averted, it almost seemed too good to be true.

***

I began to open up more to Kristina as the days turned to nights and back again. I told her about how much I loved my grandfather, she told me about her grandmother who lived to be 104 and gave up playing tennis only after falling and breaking her hip shortly before her death. I figured Kristina must have gotten her love of tennis (a sport I’d played as a child), swimming, and golf honestly. I shared with her that my grandfather had been more of a father to my brother and me than he ever should have had to have been, and he too had lived a very active lifestyle until congestive heart failure began to slow him down so much that even he could not fully recover.

She told me many times that she didn’t want gravity to take over as she aged. In reply, I’d point out that I had more to worry about than she did since I was exactly two months older than her. But, one thing I didn’t mention was that not wanting gravity to take over was the same rationale I’d been using for years when deciding to work out. I was afraid of turning into my dad, by which I mean having to watch my gut grow further and further past my belt until my waistline became nothing more than a proverbial line in the sand. A line I once said I’d never cross -- a line I’d move so far away from that despite a steadfast original promise to hold it, I could no longer see. Unlike my dad, I didn’t want to have to take a bag full of medications just to stay alive, even though I’d truly given up on life a long time ago.

Not long after our grandparent conversation in the WWF chat, I began to trust Kristina enough to share some of my writings with her. I can’t remember if we were talking about how emotion and intent aren’t always conveyed well in text messages, or how I’d never quite mastered the use of emojis. Either way, something inspired me to share Ite, emoji est with her. If you haven’t read it, it’s the story of my eggplant emoji fiasco. She laughed hysterically and told me about the eggplants in her vegetable crisper. Kristina said that thanks to me, she’d never look at eggplant the same way again. For an instant, I thought it was odd that she had eggplants readily available. Most people probably don’t keep eggplants on hand. Still, I didn’t think twice about it until much later.

If my ill-advised emoji choice ruined eggplants for the both of us, Kristina didn’t let that stop her from sharing stories of her mishaps. Once, she told me she’d spilled hot chocolate all over the white nightgown she was wearing as she sat in front of the fireplace. Another time, she told me she dropped a fish filet on her foot, but it still ended up in her tummy. I found it odd that she would still eat something after having dropped it, but I dismissed this a personality quirk of hers. I was becoming convinced that she was a klutz, just like me.

Over the next few weeks, I’d discover that clumsiness was one of many traits and/or experiences Kristina and I had in common. I know now that I should have seen all of these commonalities (she’d grown up Catholic like me, her father had been a cop like mine) as significant red flags instead of opportunities to bond with her. At the time, I was too thrilled to meet someone with whom I shared so much to put an abrupt end to our interaction. If I’d known what was to come, I’d wish I had.

One morning, I asked Kristina if there was anything she’d always wanted to try. Her response was skydiving. I said I wanted to dance the tango. We shared visions of tandem jumps and tango lessons. She said she had a red, thigh-high slit dress exactly like one the tiny emoji woman who was always ready to dance in my phone wore. Kristina said Richard had once dropped her while they were doing the tango, so I had to promise to be careful with her. I imagined our two bodies melting into one; our hearts pounding and sweat dripping in unison. I couldn’t wait to feel the shape of her body beneath her dress as we glided together across the dance floor. She purred at the thought of me in a tux.

The more intense our conversations became, the more I entertained the idea of communicating with Kristina outside of the game. I offered her my phone number because it’s a man’s job to move things forward. She didn’t call or text me. Yet another red flag. I wondered if I’d blown it or gone too far since she didn’t reciprocate. In retrospect, this was another chance to walk away from her that I didn’t take, however obvious it was that I should have. I either couldn’t or chose not to see what was going on because I was too grateful for the attention of a beautiful woman read: thumbnail that I would have otherwise considered out of my league and never approached in real life.

Around Christmas, she told me her co-workers were beginning to notice a change in her and surmised that she must be in love. The women wanted to know all about her mystery man; the guys wanted to know what I had that they didn’t. “Personality” was her answer. The rum balls she made for the office Christmas party were a hit. She was the only person I’d ever met apart from my mother who made them, and she admitted to being a piggy when it came to eating them. It seemed our connection was deepening over most trivial things, which made it so much more powerful. I never told her that one holiday season while I was living in Serbia, my mom made rum balls and mailed them to me. I was so happy that I posted a picture of them on Facebook.

One morning, Kristina messaged me saying she had feelings for me and didn’t know what to do with them. Somehow, she said, I’d managed to knock down the walls she’d been building around her heart since she left Stuart, and she’d never felt the same way about another man that she felt about me. She couldn’t figure out how she’d fallen for me. Despite her curiosity, she promised she wouldn’t scroll back through our WWF chat to find out. She closed our exchange of messages that morning by saying that she wanted me to make love to her.

***

I thought this was a great idea. Still, I couldn’t rest on whatever virtual laurels I thought I’d won by having her suggest lovemaking. Instead, I used whatever literary skill I thought I had to paint verbal pictures of the two of us together. I had neither the stamina, nor the potential STDs of a porn star (Kristina was oddly forthcoming about both her lack of STDs and disdain for condoms. Red flag... Red flag...), but I was genuine in my expression of my desire to truly explore her, ravish her, and ejaculate as a choice rather than a punchline. Episodes of our chat became increasingly sexually explicit, both of us contributing content. Sexual tension even spilled over into our WWF games, both players passing up points to play erotic words or make references emotionally charged content of speech bubbles hours or minutes past.

It was wonderful to finally connect with someone on not just a thumbnail but an emotional level. I never told her about my mild Cerebral Palsy, but when she told me she dreamed of specializing in orthopedics, I was convinced I’d found a keeper. I would never immediately volunteer my disability status to a potential partner. Yet I’m sure that somewhere in the darkest corners of the Internet, there are Pickup Artist forums that discuss tactics guys with disabilities can use to get girls. I can see thread now, with posts by guys with usernames like CPaul or DysplasiaDarryl:

Tell a girl about your autobiography, Limp: The Story of My Life. Joke about how you were referring to your leg, not your dick. Ask if she wants to see. If she asks which one or gets the Iceberg Slim reference, assure her your third leg works just fine. If she refuses to investigate on her own, she wasn’t for you anyway. She’s probably a slut who imagines herself having high standards. The girls you really want will get dripping wet at just the thought of being with an artist.

I didn’t think any tactic would have worked on Kristina anyway. Why would I have used something as hollow as a few canned lines or routines with her anyway? She’d have seen right through it all. Besides, I didn’t need to. I’d won her over naturally. My disability was the result of something that happened to me a long time ago. There was no need for me to be angry about it, or keep it locked away like some kind of dark secret. How I chose to handle it would say more about my character than any reaction of hers ever could have. At the end of the day, I didn’t think she would care, so why should I?

Mom and I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at my brother and sister-in-law’s house. She wanted to be there to watch my niece and nephew open presents before Christmas became less magical and more an opportunity for awkward family photos. I can’t say I blame her. After all the gifts had been opened, my niece repeatedly tried to break a board she’d gotten as a training tool for martial arts; my nephew rotated between riding his new bike around the house and nearly flying his new drone into the oven any time it was open. Mom milled about the kitchen, offering to help my brother and sister-in-law prepare a meal.

As for me, instead of spending time with real people, I’d steal away into an adjacent room to check my phone every time it buzzed. I was less concerned with making moves in WWF than I was with seeing if Kristina had messaged me. I felt bad that she couldn’t spend Christmas with her family. Her mother died when Kristina was three, her father had passed away more recently; her brothers were on another continent. Each time checking my phone revealed a message from Kristina, I felt not only validation but strength. She wasn’t the only one who’d built walls around her heart that were beginning to crumble.

***

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I’d finally connected with someone smart, sexy, athletic, and perhaps most importantly a deep thinker. Kristina was reflecting so much on our future together that it’s almost as if she knew how to put my mind at ease before I could even get nervous. Sure, I was a bit taken aback by her insistence on how clean and STD-free she was, but that was only one instance in which she was all too willing to share. For example, I’d always heard that people who have more money than they know what to do with are usually very quiet about it, especially if it’s family wealth that’s grown with them for generations. So, when Kristina volunteered that she was financially secure, I was surprised, slightly skeptical, but most of all curious.

To hear her tell it, her father (who’d given up his career as a cop for one as a farmer) had accumulated a fortune buying and selling horses. He’d subsequently done very well for himself with stocks and investments, leaving Kristina and her brothers shares upon his death. In terms of which stocks or investments, she only mentioned Bitcoin, which she was able to sell before its value crashed, and an Australian Super Fund, which she claimed had once earned her $81,000.00 in three weeks. At the end of the day, she said, she could afford never to work another day in her life if she so chose. I had a hard time wrapping my Southern Ohio barely-middle-class head around the numbers.

A woman with no kids or STDs who’s both secure and interested in me? It seemed too good to be true.

Despite babies spitting and old men hitting on her, Kristina told me how grateful she was to the staff of NYMC for their hospitality and all she’d learned. Sure, she occasionally had drug seekers tell her to go back to Australia after she’d refused their requests, but her boss had been accommodating enough to actually allow her to go back to Australia when one of her brothers had gotten into an accident two years ago. They’d told her to take all the time she needed.

As much as she loved NYMC, Kristina admitted that she didn’t like New York City very much. She said she was willing to come to Columbus to build a future with me beyond tango and skydiving lessons. As our plans to meet cam closer and closer to fruition, I realized certain aspects of my lifestyle could use upgrade. This is when ordered manscaping tools, cologne, a candle, and a new shower curtain liner. I didn’t stop there. I added new pillows, pillowcases bath towels, and bathmats. I’d be lying if I said these purchases weren’t made at least partially with Kristina in mind (I wouldn’t want to explore a forest, so she shouldn’t have had to either), but they were also very much needed upgrades, no matter how much she’d become my weakness and I’d become her strength.

The Hugo Boss cologne I chose had hints of orange peel and bamboo for Christ’s sake. The “Sexy Man” candle supposedly also had the aroma of a man’s cologne. Kristina said she was curious to find out what the candle smelled like. Unfortunately, we’d never get to make that discovery. I received neither the cologne nor the candle in the mail. On the day they supposedly arrived, I got an email from UPS with a picture of both items in front of my door. But, when I got home from work that night, they were nowhere to be found. The UPS driver who’d delivered them came out to my place the next day asking where I’d looked for my packages. He advised me to file a claim with UPS. UPS in turn advised me to file a claim with Amazon and try to get my money back.

As luck would have it, I got through to an Amazon customer service representative about seven minutes too early the following Monday. Initially, I was told I had two options. The first was to have replacement items sent to me, the second was a refund. Of course I wanted replacements I said. I had to have masculine fragrances to balance out the intoxicating scent of the $29.99 Ambrosia perfume Kristina said she’d be wearing. She’d let me guess which part of her body she’d place the fourth drop of perfume on. She’d promised to leave a bottle at my place to remind me of her. She’d bought lingerie for my eyes only that the store employee told her she was born to wear. She’d told me she slept naked even though I didn’t ask (though she wondered how much sleep we’d be getting). I had a lot riding on this. Could replacements be sent to me?

No.

Since I’d called before 4 P.M. Pacific time (it was 6:57 P.M. ET by this point), my only choice was to a refund. I ended up ordering cologne and bath towels through one of Amazon’s competitors.

***

Even having Kristina in mind while I was trying to make these upgrades was a mistake, but I was acting according to The Awful Truth of where a man’s heart is truly located and giving her credit for things she didn’t earn. For instance, I told her that I had no concerns about her because we’d taken “precautions” even though we’d never met, or video chatted. In reality, we hadn’t done shit but type messages back and forth.

I mentioned that in my experience, fraudsters we usually very demanding, aggressive, and single-minded. They want what they want and they don’t stop until they get it. As proof, I offered my experience with a WWF player who’d messaged me a few days ago, before I even had a chance to accept her invitation to play. That player wanted to know if I was single right off the bat. She demanded that I give her my phone number so we could text, be friends, and maybe more. I blocked her almost immediately. In response, Kristina asked if she was too friendly. “No. You’re just right,” I replied. Goldilocks would have thrown up in her mouth. I was too deeply under the influence of Kristina’s digeridoo siren song to care, and she knew it.

After the first of the year, we transitioned to chatting on Google Hangouts. I sent her a recent photo and asked for one of her in return. She sent me what she said was her most recent one, in which she had long brown hair, dark brown eyes, and wore a white suit. Even though the photo didn’t look anything like her thumbnail form WWF, it did make fa perfect headshot for a medical professional in New York City. As for my photo, she said I had a kind face.

I may have had a kind face, but I never saw Kristina’s real face. She would call me through Hangouts, as she once did even while locked in the morgue, hiding from an active shooter (all the more reason to get out of New York City, she said), but our calls were voice-only. As for photos, she sent me only two more throughout our entire conversation. One was of her dog Buddy, who despite his Australian origins, had once been quarantined for eight hours at the Perth airport when they’d arrived home from the United Kingdom. The other was of her when she was about twelve. She was hanging upside down in a tree, a huge smile on her face.

Kristina gave me the impression that having four brothers made her bit of a tomboy, meaning whatever her brothers did, she did too. It didn’t matter whether they were hanging upside down from trees, or servicing cars. She could do it all. I was falling for her more and more each day. Whenever my phone buzzed, my heart leaped. I didn’t mind the startling lack of visual evidence that she was the woman in the white suit. Sure, she told me videos wouldn’t play on her phone, but I could hear it occasionally buzzing, and birds occasionally beatboxing in the background, when we spoke. We were going to be together. That was all that mattered.

So deep was her commitment to me, our commitment to each other, that she not only vowed to find a job in Columbus (she sent me a screenshot of a job posting at Wexner Medical Center she intended to apply for), she also turned down an offer of a salary increase to stay at NYMC that was more than what I make in a year. She’d even found a house of us to live in and made plans to take her citizenship oath in Cleveland during the weekend of February 19th. I made sure to schedule that weekend off (who knew how much sleep we’d be getting) and introduce her to my mother.

Before any of that could happen, we had to meet for the first time. We made plans to finally connect in person over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend. She’d even found us a house in Victorian Village (a four-bedroom palace by my standards) that had been built in 1900. She’d pay cash for it of course, and we’d figure out a way to pay off my lease so we could live together. She’d be a doctor and I could quit my job at the bank for a career in freelance copywriting. In the evenings, we’d alternate between dancing the tango and chasing each other throughout the house in various states of undress.

After years of false starts and failures with the opposite sex, my ship was finally coming in.

***

Somehow, Kristina managed to schedule her job interview at Wexner Medical Center and a showing of the house on the same day. I couldn’t be with her since I couldn’t get time away from work on such short notice, but she messaged me once she was back in New York saying that the interview had gone well. They’d agreed to let her have a month off (she suggested we vacation in Hawaii during that time). Her first day would be February 24th, which would line up nicely with what I’d planned to be my last day at the bank, March 1st.

She also said she had a new set of keys in her hand. The wire transfer to purchase the house (list price: $539,000.00) had gone through without a hitch. I’d made sure to have Kristina confirm the wiring instructions verbally with the recipient before sending the money. I didn’t want the woman I loved to be scammed. The house was hers free and clear. She could have both something she wanted (a pool, for only $20,000.00) and something she didn’t (a mortgage).

I was as over the moon as a reserved yet intensely passionate person can be.

In a not so simple twist of fate, Kristina called me the morning from New York. There had been an accident.

Garry had called to say that Richard had been driving in Red Hill (a suburb of Perth) when another driver, who’d gone fishing for their fallen cell phone, rear-ended him. The guy who caused the accident wasn’t seriously injured. Richard, on the other hand, had a broken leg and a collapsed lung. She’d be leaving New York for Perth that night, with a layover in Dubai (another potential vacation destination we’d discussed).

“Do you want to come to Australia with me?” She asked.

Kristina was willing to call Emirates and book tickets for both of us. She wanted to check with me first. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was fast approaching, but Australia wasn’t a continent I could visit over a three-day weekend. Kristina was disappointed yet understanding. The boxes she’d packed in preparation for her move to Columbus would have to spend several New York minutes in solitude while she traveled to be with her brothers, Richard’s wife Michelle, her niece Bianca (who was the same age as my niece), and the rest of her family. My heart didn’t quite break for her, but cracks appeared. Both of her parents were deceased, now her twin was clinging to life. How much more unlucky could she be?

***

I was sad that I couldn’t see her, but our plans were becoming more specific with each passing day, almost scarily so. There was no question that they were worth waiting for. I’d waited 38 years for Kristina, what was another 10 days?

We’d talked about getting married in our new house, in front of a small group of friends and family. Privately, I hoped my friend Matt, when he finally met Kristina, wouldn’t embarrass me too much with ill-timed disability jokes, but I was bracing myself for the inevitable on more than one front. I’d told Kristina there was no need to spend $6,000.00 on a wedding dress like she did when she’d married Stuart. Even though I had the impression that money was no object to her, I figured the biggest thing she’d be spending money on was travel expenses. Bianca had asked her auntie Kris if she could come to the wedding. Auntie Kris did not object.

We even planned on starting a family. Kristina said she’d been met with surprise from a fellow doctor when she approached them about having a Mirena (inserted into her uterus to guard against pregnancy. I supported her decision and remembered how she’d told me she didn’t like condoms as she reminded herself to breathe during our sexually-charged WWF chat sessions. As far as I was concerned, her body was exactly that. It wasn’t my place to tell her what to do with it. She took it a step further, however, as only she could.

If she had the Mirena removed after a year, would I be opposed to having a child? Of course not, I said. Her voice nearly cracked with joy. I could almost feel the tears running down her face. She’d later tell me of a dream she had in which she was breastfeeding our son, Alexander David when he wrapped his hand around my index finger as I passed by.

Her reaction to our agreement to have a child was as extreme as her dreamy description of breastfeeding, but I didn’t chide her for it. Not my place. After all, it wasn’t the first time she displayed a penchant for the outliers of affection. She loved to send me YouTube videos others had made of love letters to their one and only. You know, the ones where the letters of each word come across the screen one-by-one, with some incredibly cheesy song playing in the background. She sent me a clip of a couple dancing the tango (of course), and the official music video for How Do I Live by LeAnn Rimes, yet another way of reminding herself to breathe.

Though I loved her no less, I sent her only two videos. One was the Raymond K. Hessel scene from the movie Fight Club, in which Tyler Durden challenges Raymond to begin living his life according to his dreams instead of quitting whenever things got too hard. I told Kristina that I tried to live (though I didn’t always succeed) with the same sense of urgency Raymond displayed as he left his apathy behind and ran down the street toward the best-tasting breakfast of his life. Kristina said the scene was scary, and I was nothing like Raymond. She always seemed to know the right thing to say.

The second video was a performance of Nature Boy by Nat King Cole. I’d come to admire the song because I’d heard it many times through the years on my favorite Serbian radio program, Peščanik. Nature Boy had always reminded me of the hundreds if not thousands of hours I’d spent listening to Peščanik to improve my language skills and knowledge of current affairs in the former Yugoslavia. Now, the lyrics had another layer of meaning:

There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far, very far Over land and sea A little shy and sad of eye But very wise was he

And then one day A magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return

The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return

Like I said, what was another ten days?

***

The situation on the ground was worse than anticipated by the time Kristina arrived in Perth. Richard’s lung hadn’t just collapsed, it had been punctured. There was a serious question of whether he’d be able to breathe on his own. Kristina said the driver who caused the accident had been arrested and charged with manslaughter. If that wasn’t enough, she’d had a tense encounter with his sister when she came to the hospital to check on Richard.

As the only medical professional among the five siblings, Kristina had been given the unenviable task of deciding whether to keep Richard on life support or give him a chance to breathe on his own. Even though we were on opposite sides of the globe and dealing with a thirteen-hour time difference, it was hard for me to focus at work. I was constantly checking my phone while at my desk at work, whether I’d heard the buzz of an incoming message or not. My heart raced every time I opened my phone case to illuminate the screen. Getting caught looking at my phone on the production floor could have meant a serious rebuke from management if the wrong person caught me on the wrong day.

I didn’t give a shit.

Someone I loved was hurting. I knew where my priorities were. I knew I would only be with the bank a short while longer (even if no one else did) before Kristina and I started our life together. The last eight years wouldn’t be easy to brush aside. Still, the chance to live in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman, and pursue a copywriting career seemed too good to pass up. I was willing to trade the certainty of the present for my dreams of an uncertain future. Tyler Durden gave Raymond K. Hessel six weeks to get on his way to becoming a veterinarian. If he didn’t, Tyler said, Raymond would be dead. In the real world, March 1st was almost exactly six weeks away.

I’d need no such warning; I’d gotten this far by not heeding warnings.

The next morning (Ohio time), Kristina called me and said Richard had squeezed her hand while she sat beside him in his hospital room, but there was still a long road to recovery ahead. I was no medical professional like Kristina, but I was hopeful this was a positive sign. I didn’t know the man, but I’d looked forward to meeting him ever since Kristina said Richard would be stopping to visit us in our new house after taking care of business in California. She spoke so lovingly of him. I’d always heard twins had a special bond. They were no exception.

She spoke lovingly of me to her brothers too. Kristina said they had come to believe that I must be a hell of a guy if I could make their sister feel the way I did by knocking down the defenses so firmly-entrenched around her heart. She said that in her brothers’ eyes, I’d come a long way from being just a random person she’d met playing a game (a game!) on her phone; someone who could have been a rapist. Kristina made me feel like I was becoming part of their family.

The next morning, I woke to a heart-wrenching message from Kristina. Richard hadn’t been able to breathe on his own and had died as a result of his injuries. Kristina agonized over having made what she said was the wrong decision. I did the best I could to console her from half a world away. I’m not sure how much help I was, but my heart was with her even though I couldn’t be. The time and distance between us meant we couldn’t be together to mourn Richard’s death and celebrate his life. As much as it hurt for us not to be together. Kristina did have one request of me, a request I was happy to oblige: She asked me to pick. the flowers for Richard’s funeral the following Thursday.

I chose pink roses because I felt they were unique. I’d never heard of a funeral with pink roses before. After I’d communicated my decision, Kristina sent me an image of a pink rose, saying she’d bought 300 of them. She promised to make sure everyone knew they were my contribution to the occasion. Since she’d be giving Richard’s eulogy, she’d have ample opportunity to do so.

About two days before the funeral she called me saying that that they’d had a least a hundred people at what had been her childhood home to celebrate Richard. Her father had sold some of the properties the family owned before he died, but her brother Michael still lived in what had been Kristina’s childhood home. Michael suggested Kristina take one of their father’s cigar boxes as a memento, but she was content to leave it where it was.

She took the same approach to her childhood bedroom, which she’d left largely untouched since moving out years ago. Amazingly, she still had a doll of Gizmo from Gremlins, which her father had taken her to see in what probably felt like another lifetime. I admired how she managed to look back at her past and forward to our future. Her family wanted her to stay longer than she’d planned after the funeral, but they understood how much she just wanted to be with me. It seemed “I just want to be with you” was a phrase she repeated every chance she got. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the same way.

***

Kristina called the morning of Richard’s funeral (Australia time) understandably a mess. She and Michelle were about to head over to the church. She said she didn’t know how she was going to make it through without me. I offered the best encouragement I could, told her I loved her (I did), and asked her to be strong. I spent the entirety of my shift at work that day physically in the Buckeye State, but mentally in the Land Down Under. Kristina said she’d try to get in touch with the guys who were supposed to drive her stuff from New York and see if they could meet her in Columbus. We knew she’d be exhausted if she had to drive to Ohio almost immediately after spending 30 hours (she’d gotten a hotel room for the six hours she’d be spending in Dubai) in transit from Western Australia, but it was a price we were willing to pay.

What was waiting for another four days to be together compared to the rest of our lives?

Kristina called me the next morning to say that she almost didn’t make it through Richard’s eulogy. She had to be emotionally and physically supported by her brothers as she bid farewell to her twin. She said she thought about me as she spoke, and she’d gotten a lot of compliments about the pink roses.

She also gave me the impression that it’s customary for people to speak out at funerals in Australia. Her boisterous cousin Anthony, who asked Kristina to “Show us your tits!” a few days earlier (in reference to when she was 16 and her bikini top came off at a swimming pool), wanted to know all about her plans with her “Yankee man” in the middle of the service. I couldn’t help wondering if Kristina had told everyone about our agreement: her bikini top would be entirely unnecessary whenever we were in the water together. I knew those inquiring Aussie minds were so far away from me that our toilet water didn’t even flow in the same direction when flushed, but my face turned as red as the bikini bottom I’d imagined Kristina wearing as we kissed, buoyant beneath the moonlight of the hot Australian summer, her top long ago discarded, floating unattended and aimless on the other side of the pool.

By Friday, Kristina was in the air, and I was making final preparations for her arrival. After the false start of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, I was convinced nothing was going to stop us this time. She’d already worked her final shift at NYMC, and said her toughest goodbyes. Among these was Simon, an eight-year-old with Leukemia who was not long for this world. I’d told Kristina I had a Buckeye necklace she could give to him as a way to both remember her and think of her new life in Ohio. Still, she’d placed serious doubt in my mind as to whether or not he’d live long enough to wear it. At that moment, I’d thought of a quote I’d attributed to Athletic Shorts, a collection of short stories by Chris Crutcher, who I’d met at the American Corner in Novi Sad years ago:

If you want to make life important, shorten it.

I’d always liked that one, even if I hadn’t always lived by it. Kristina and I were about to leave our pasts behind and live fully in the now, however exciting, intoxicating and scary it may have been. The pillow on the left side of my bed, the one she’d chosen, wouldn’t be empty much longer. I had Monday, January 27th off, and hoped to need it after a weekend of little sleep.

***

On Saturday, I made a trip to TJ Maxx. I was looking for a new pair of jeans to wear when I saw Kristina for the first time. As excited as I was, I hadn’t shared in her wealth yet, so I still didn’t want to break the bank. I chose a dark wash that I could wear with anything. I was feeling good about myself when I remembered something I’d learned in Serbia that had nothing to do with athletic shorts: You should never show up at someone’s house for the first time empty-handed.

I already had a cutting board shaped like the state of Ohio that I’d bought at the same place I got the bathmats. I thought it was such a unique idea because it served two purposes. One was in the kitchen, the other was in geography. It was supposed to a a cool way to introduce Kristina to the what, where and when of my home state.

Fresh jeans around my left forearm, I almost got in the checkout line. I was inches from crossing the point-of-no-return barrier that separated the checkout line from the rest of the store when a horrible thought occurred to me. I needed to bring Kristina something to eat. I turned around a ventured into a section of TJ Maxx unspoiled by humans. There was no one around me for ten feet in any direction. Intentionally or not, I was practicing social distancing in a pre-Coronavirus lockdown world.

I saw it when I found a few shelves of snacks, oddly placed there in its box between some graham crackers and a jar of Nutella. It might as well have been a resident of the Island of Misfit Toys, or a sickly puppy from a shelter that nobody wanted because you couldn’t say for certain whether or not it’d be dead in three weeks. In other words, it was exactly what I wanted, what I needed: baklava.

Who the fuck buys baklava at TJ Maxx?

***

I didn’t notice the small details of my new jeans until I got them home. The phrase LUCKY YOU was sown on the placket (a word worth 18 points in WWF) were sown on the placket. There was also a small piece of paper the looked like a fortune from a fortune cookie in one of the pockets. It read: Today is the first day of one wild ride. Lucky # 10, 23, 30, 35, 59, 11. “Kristina is going to love this,” I thought.

Late Saturday night, Kristina messaged me saying she was back at her duplex in New York. Her crystal was all boxed up and her co-workers were running out of time to interrupt our conversations by knocking on her door and begging her to stay. Two guys would be there to start the trip to Columbus with her at 10 A.M. Sunday morning. She’d had to pay extra for them to work on Sunday, but who cared? I didn’t. She certainly didn’t. Money can do lots of things when it’s no object.

The only catch was that one of the guys didn’t have a Driver's License, so Kristina would have to drive her black Ford Focus while the two guys manned the truck. The guys were slow at loading Kristina’s things onto the truck, so they were behind schedule by the time all three hit the road, but Kristina was on her way to me nonetheless.

I’d message her about every two hours to see how far along they were. I paced nervously around my apartment all day because I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. All I wanted to do was step out from behind my phone’s keypad and ravish Kristina in real life. She was so close I could almost taste her.

I’d thrown caution to the wind a long time ago, but I still had some lingering doubts. Like I said, we’d never video chatted, so I’d never seen her face when she wasn’t posing for a picture. I couldn’t find her anywhere on social media. Reason, aka the voice in my (big) head that screamed “Abort! Abort!” had passed out drunk for the last time after too many nights of partying with his false friends Raw, Dick, and Imagination.

***

If anything, the huge plot holes in our love story made my attraction to Kristina even stronger. In my mind’s eye, I saw this woman I had never met as the anthesis of the look-at-me/outrage/cancel culture that screams the loudest in America today. Kristina was the opposite of my oops-my-pussy-is-showing roommate Dragana from Enter the Dragana. We talked about books and fitness instead of counting followers and likes. Kristina had even signed up to volunteer with me at a tennis clinic for kids with Down’s Syndrome. I knew then that her heart was as big as her wallet.

She didn’t need the attention that Dragana craved. At the very beginning of our connection, Kristina had asked me if I had any other women in my life. I asked her the same question about other men. We both answered no. She said my lack of other women was a good thing; the only things she didn’t like sharing were her men and her chocolate.

Somehow, I managed to get a bit of sleep Sunday night, but it came only after I read that Kristina had arrived safely in Columbus. The movers had even helped her unload her car.

Monday morning, I messaged Kristina asking how she was feeling after spending the night in our new house. She replied that she’d woken up in the middle of the night and didn’t know where she was.

After everything she’d been through in the past two weeks, who could blame her?

As I had the day before when she was traveling, I messaged her about once every two hours to see how she was doing. I didn’t want to come across as needy, but I couldn’t help myself. I thought I’d found love, something I’d convinced myself didn’t exist. I wanted to dance the tango with Kristina and promptly rip the red thigh-high slit dress, gorilla costume, or whatever she was wearing off of her. I was convinced she wanted the same and nothing was going to stop us.

***

As hours passed without a message from Kristina, the fears I’d hidden away, buried, or just flat-out ignored from the moment she said said, “Hello David” came creeping back. Around 3:30 that afternoon, I knew I had to do something. I had to know the truth. I requested a Lyft and entered as my destination the address where my new life was supposed to begin. I put on my new jeans, placed the baklava in a reusable shopping bag with the Ohio-shaped cutting board, and waited.

Five-star Jeff came pretty quickly. We talked about what we both did outside the car as we made our way down to the house. Twenty minutes felt like all the games Kristina and I had played, plus the two months we’d spent talking, all rolled into one.

I lied to Jeff for no reason other than it was easy; I told him the contents of my shopping bag were housewarming gifts for friends of mine who were new in town. “Yeah. She’ll be starting a job at Wexner Medical Center next month. They gave her a month off to acclimate herself to her new surroundings. Can you believe that shit?”

I noticed something odd when we pulled up to the house, but I lied again and had Jeff pull over to wait for me in case they weren’t home, even though I instantly knew they wouldn’t be.

A burgundy-colored For Sale sign was still in the front yard.

I silently cursed myself for not having listened to the less-hornier angels of my nature. I felt like I was going to vomit burgundy-colored blood all over five-star Jeff’s floorboards. I liked Jeff, but I couldn’t let him know how badly I’d been played, or all that had led up to what he’d just witnessed. I needed to get home before I could even think of letting my feelings show. At that moment, Jeff was the only other human being on the planet who knew where I was, even if I’d lied about why he’d taken me there.

I walked up the steps and sheepishly knocked on the door. Ringing the doorbell would have been much easier, but my stomach was doing somersaults. I fully expected a classic fat-chick catfish reveal like so many I’d seen on television, but there was no moment of truth, no dramatic confrontation. After five minutes of tense anticipation that quickly morphed into oh-shit-what-if-someone-really-lives-here paranoia, I went back to Jeff’s SUV and explained that they must not be home, so I’d like to go back to mine.

After Jeff dropped me off at my place, I messaged Kristina that I needed to talk to her and it was important. I made sure to include two of the kissy-face emojis that had become ubiquitous in our exchanges. As many times as I tried to send the message, the reply was always the same: Sending failed... tap to retry. I knew I’d been had, but the enormity of both what she’d done to me, and what I’d allowed her to do, didn’t really hit me until I emailed her in a last-ditch effort to tell her something she already knew: I couldn’t reach her through our chat. After I hit send, I finally let my heart sink among the crashing waves of anger, sadness, regret, and self-loathing that had been battering it all day.

David played “why” for ten points.

The pillow on the left side of my bed is still empty when I wake up in the morning. Instead of a four-bedroom house, I still live in my one-bedroom apartment. The walls are so thin that I once heard one of the two homosexuals who live adjacent to me tell someone on the other end of the phone that they could tolerate lemon pepper seasoning in their food if they didn’t know it was there, but foreknowledge of its presence was a deal-breaker.

The things you do for love.

It may not be a reality dreams are made of, but at least its real, and it’s mine.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

Text

Me and OBG(YN)

My left ear has been popping a lot for the past few days. I don’t know if I somehow got water in my ear canal, have an infection, or it’s just the Ghost of Q-Tips Past taunting me. Googling “water in ear” led me to a suggestion for removing it called the suction cup method. I was supposed to tilt my head to one side, rub my hand up and down over my ear, then pull it away quickly. Ideally, the resulting vacuum would give the water a chance to escape. It didn’t.

I tried another way: tilting my ear to one side and pulling down on my earlobe, hoping that straightening my ear canal would give whatever I felt in there a chance to evacuate. It didn’t. I swore I could feel something working its way to the fringe of my inner ear, yet retreating only millimeters from freedom.

After three or four attempts apiece at creating suction cups and reenacting the classic labyrinth marble tilt game (substituting my ears for the maze and whatever was in my ear for the marble), I decided to wait before cooking up a hairbrained home remedy and doing real damage to myself, if I hadn’t already.

The popping and/or sloshing sound isn’t as pronounced today as it’s been over the past 48 hours. I hope it silences itself; I believe it will as long as I don’t try to touch my brain by passing my index finger through my ear. Whatever happens, the experience has allowed me to reflect on the last time I got something stuck in a bodily canal.

For years, I didn’t think twice about using Q-Tips to clean my ears. It was something I’d always done. I’d heard the tips could break off, but I thought this always happened to somebody else, until that is, the day it happened to me.

I met Dr. Petar Drača while I was leading the English conversation club at the American corner in Novi Sad. He was a gynecologist, his wife an anesthesiologist. I’d imagine they were in their late sixties or early seventies at the time. During dinner at their apartment one evening, they shared stories about their daughter, and their time Houston, Texas. Dr. Drača even got me a pair of ridiculously tight-fitting jeans with all sorts of designs on them when he saw I was struggling to find a decent pair of pants. Those jeans weren’t something I would have normally worn, but I was glad someone cared enough to do something like that for me when I was thousands of miles from home. Dr. Drača and his wife reminded me of my grandparents, who I missed terribly.

Dr. Drača’s office was across the street from the American Corner, and up the street from the apartment I shared with Dragana. I continued leading the conversation club after I moved out of that apartment and into the one I’d later share with Zs., so I still got to see Dr. Drača’s office sign every Wednesday.

I always thought I’d make it through life without requiring the services of a gynecologist like Dr. Drača. I hadn’t had any close calls since fifth grade, when Mrs. Layne had to remind me that I didn’t have ovaries after I freaked out about the possibility of ovarian cancer when it came up in health class or sex ed. Backed by Mrs. Layne’s anatomical assurance, I believed visiting a gynecologist was one less thing I’d have to worry about. I had no way of knowing how wrong I’d be, just as I’d been about my orange blood. If old habits die hard, old convictions die slowly.

As my relationship with Zs. deteriorated, so did my hygiene habits. Still, something I could not stand was a buildup of earwax. Removing it with a Q-Tip was one personal care routine I didn’t overlook. it required minimal effort, so it was perfect for someone in a weakened state of mind at the time, like me.

On probably a Tuesday, Zs.’s longest day at the university, I repeated the ritual of cleaning out my ears with a Q-Tip, as I had done thousands of times before without incident. Everything was fine until I heard the snap.

The tip of the Q-Tip I was using had broken off inside my ear; just like I’d been warned about hundreds of times.

Yet my first thought was not of my well-being:

Shit! If Zs. sees me like this, she’ll NEVER let me hear the end of it. She already hates me; the last thing I need to give her ammunition that comes from me having done something legitimately stupid.

I knew I wouldn’t see Zs. for several hours, so I had time to think, but the paralysis of fear didn’t take long to kick in. had no idea how to go about getting the tip of the Q-Tip out of my ear. I didn’t have the tenderest of hands, so trying to remove it myself was out of the question. I had to think about not only how to explain my problem in Serbian, but also how to find someone who would help me no questions asked. I didn’t have health insurance at the time; there’d been no reason to. Being insured by an American carrier while overseas was cost-prohibitive, and health insurance wasn’t a requirement for foreigners in Serbia back then. I’d never been sick or damaged enough to need it.

Until that moment.

The only doctor I knew I could trust was the same doctor who, due to his specialization, I could also assume would have tender hands. I decided I had to go see Dr. Drača the gynecologist and hope his wife, the anesthesiologist, could knock me out for three days after the removal, to spare me the wrath of Zs.

I found Dr. Drača‘s business card and called his number. Using a mixture of Serbian and English, I managed to explain what happened. He said I could stop by his office. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sit in stirrups; unfortunately, Dr. Drača didn’t have an appropriate instrument to remove the tip of the Q-Tip from my ear. He told me I’d need to see an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor (ENT). There was one in the office right next door, but as luck would have it, the doctor wasn’t in. I’d have to face the wrath of Zs. after all, and make an awkward trip to the Clinical Center of Vojvodina in the morning.

Zs. spent the night turned away from me as we slept, ridiculing me under her breath.

Dr. Drača had said the ENT could see me at 10:30 AM the next morning. A taxi could only take me so far due to restrictions on the types of vehicles allowed on the grounds. Dr. Drača had also told me exactly where I needed to go, but I’ve never been very good with directions. This left Q-Tip and me walking around in a state of confusion after I got out of the cab.

For the next hour, I meandered through two or three buildings, saw my fair share of ambulances and gurneys, and started to wonder if I’d ever get the damn thing out of my ear. I didn’t ask for directions because I assumed most of the doctors and nurses I saw would be too wrapped up in their own worlds to help me. By the time I finally found the right place, I was so late that I was afraid the ENT wouldn’t be able to see me.

I remembered something Zs.’s mother had once said when she came to visit after taking a notoriously behind schedule train from Subotica:

If you’re afraid of the end of the world, come to Serbia. It’ll get here a hundred years late.

One part of me said that I didn’t have anything to worry about because Zs.’s mother was right. If the end of the world was going to take its time descending upon Serbia, why should I rush to see a doctor I’d never met, only for him to do something that will take all of a minute? I’d probably never see him again. What happened to me will become nothing more than a punchline at his next cocktail party, if that.

As much as I had adapted to the more deliberate pace of life on the Balkans, the part of me that stil prized punctuality was panicking: “What happens if I can’t see the doctor? How long am I going to have to walk around with this thing in my ear? Zs. is going to love this.” Like I said, if old habits die hard, old convictions die slowly.

Most of the patients I saw that day looked like the really needed to be there due to illness, not a hygienic mishap like I had. When I found someone who looked like a receptionist, I explained why I was there and who I’d come to see. I was certain she’d respond with, “You did what?” I wouldn’t have blamed her If she’d banished me to he section of the waiting room where old hardline Communists were playing cards with a disguised Ratko Mladić as they waited for Tito’s ghost to join them.

The ENT turned out to be a nice guy. He didn’t make fun of me though that would have been easy. When I explained that I had been referred to him after my unsuccessful gynecological visit, all he said was:

“Who told you it was a good idea to clean out your ears with a Q-Tip?”

I wanted to shoot back:

“In Serbian, don’t you call those štapići za uši? Ear is part of the name. What was I supposed to do? It was an accident.”

At that moment, I recalled how the consumerist culture I was born into called them Q-Tips, a brand name synonymous with the product itself, like Kleenex or Band-Aid. Would you know what to do if someone asked you for a cotton swab, facial tissue, or adhesive strip? I’d need a minute, just like I did when deciding how to respond. I thought I needed someone who’d help me no questions asked, yet the one question this man did ask me seemed perfectly reasonable.

“I don’t know. That’s how I’ve always done it,” I said.

He removed the tip of the Q-Tip and told me that using a washcloth or anything less pointy would be a better choice to clean out my ears in the future. Alanis was right about the good advice that you just can’t take.

If necessity is the mother or invention, comfort is the mother of convention. My irony was that after trying an unconventional solution to a problem I created by doing something in a conventional manner, I ended up seeing a specialist for a dose of common sense.

Maybe doing things the way I’ve always done them isn’t always the best idea.

I’m no gynecologist, but I’ll take a look.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

Text

This is My Blood

Blood is a fluid of life. And, as with life, we’ve had a bit of an odd relationship. At one time or another, I’ve colorized it, been taught how to drink and stop it, given it, then told I couldn’t.

I was in and out of the hospital a lot as a young child. Sometime between ages three and six, I had blood drawn and wholeheartedly believed it was was orange. Of course there were no witnesses to what I considered a medical miracle. The enthusiasm with which I reported my discovery to my mother and brother was understandably met with great skepticism. Instead of making the rounds on popular TV talk shows of the day like Sally Jesse Raphael, Donahue, or Geraldo, my unwavering conviction became a joke around the dinner table.

I would put on a veneer of calm, but remain seething underneath at the disbelief of those closest to me. I wanted to lash out, “You’ll see! One day, Phil Donahue is going to pick up my story; he just has to finish introducing hip-hop culture to a wider (whiter) audience first. I don’t care if the fainting spells some of his audience members experienced were staged. I’m going to be huge.”

Phil’s call never came. As colorblind as I was to the truth about my blood, I wanted to believe its orange hue was real. Part of me still does. Part of me always will.

Growing up Catholic meant my faith tried to impress upon me that sacrifice was the highlight of the mass, and I'd damn well better pay attention because my soul was riding on the line. If I blinked, I might miss a process called transubstantiation, whereby bread and wine became the actual flesh and blood of Christ, not cheap knock-offs from a Chinese factory, not symbols, not representations (insert savory pun here).

I can’t tell you how many times I stood nearby an altar as a server and heard a priest say:

“Through the mingling of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Then a big one:

“Take this, all of you, and drink from it: This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.”

*bell rings*

If translators argued about how Latin should be translated into other languages, or if a translation isn’t valid, the consecration of the bread and wine may not be either, I argued that orange should be added to the words spoken by a priest during the consecration. This way, orange blood could be shed for me and for all, and account for any misremembrance (of me) when I finally got to see what really happened after I’d died.

Why were we so concerned with the Last Supper anyway? If Christ humbled himself to share in our humanity, surely he had a sense of humor too? There's no way he got everything right on the first try. What if all the other suppers were dress rehearsals? Why don’t we hear about the outtakes and blooper reels that may be buried somewhere beneath the Vatican? A collection of Last Supper fuck-ups could have made my Catholic upbringing so much more relatable.

Imagine:

“Take this, all of you and uh…. uh… LINE!”

“Cut! Peter! Quit playing with you your food! That’s it! You are no longer the rock upon which I will build my church. You’re going to deny me anyway…”

“Oops. Can we edit that last prediction out and take it from the top? ROFL!”

“Lord, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but this chicken is woefully undercooked. A skilled veterinarian could still save it.”

“Guys… I have a confession to make… I’m not God’s only son… In about 2,000 years, Steve McPherson from Eau Claire, Wisconsin is going to appear on something called television and tell a man named Phil Donahue that he has a shocking revelation to share with the world about his paternity. No one will believe him, but what he’ll have to say is true. It’s all part of the plan.”

I’ve never been much of an athlete. Still, as a native Ohioan and graduate of The Ohio State University, I’ve acquired a strong distaste for the Michigan Wolverines during my lifetime. My lack of athletic ability meant I didn’t have an opportunity to sacrifice my body (or blood) to defeat them on the gridiron. But during my freshman year, which coincided with the 2000 football season, I decided to try to beat *ichigan the best way I knew how: giving blood in the annual battle to see which university could donate more pints to the American Red Cross during the week of the game.

I sat in a chair designed to accommodate a blood donor and began squeezing the little ball I’d been given to regulate the flow of blood from my vein to the collection bag. Someone told me that giving blood wasn’t a race, but I forgot all about that as I watched the bag fill. It took me between six and seven minutes to donate my pint. I thought I wouldn’t need to eat a piece of Adriatico’s pizza (a thick, square-cut campus staple) that the same person said would be available if I felt lightheaded after donating. I stood up, and began to feel dizzy almost immediately. Having a piece of pizza sounded like a good idea after all.

By 2005, I had been to Serbia and back once in search of my next adventure. As much as I tried during and after college to distance myself from my humble beginnings, this was when I discovered the Tridentine Latin mass at Holy Family Church, and began to rededicate myself to the idea of religious piety.

The Tridentine mass attracted a more conservative, hardcore Catholic. I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the attendees, but I enjoyed the solemnity of the celebration, the music, and the connection to a religious past that I’d only heard and read about; I was born almost twenty years after the guys at Vatican II decided having mass in local languages, instead of Latin, would make the faith more appealing to the masses (ha).

One of the more ardent attendees was Sister Margarita. Originally from Hungary, she’d been a medical doctor before becoming a bride of Christ. She emphatically stated that only males should serve mass, as only the blood of the new and everlasting covenant should be on the altar. I didn’t comprehend what she meant by this until a late-night shower thought I had several weeks later. When I finally connected the dots, I decided it was best to continue my studies and get back to the former Yugoslavia in pursuit of my dreams. I had to worry about my own body and blood after all.

I tried to donate blood again in 2013, while working for one of the largest financial institutions in the world. I’d been to Serbia and back twice more by then. I had a stable income for the first time in years, and lived in a place nicer than anywhere I’d ever been. Still, I never lost the desire to give back to the community that I learned from being a Boy Scout. Among the many things scouting taught me was first aid, including mnemonic devices such as, “If the head is pale, raise the tail” to help with blood flow, and tactics to handle bleeding events.

The bank frequently had philanthropic efforts, including blood drives,that didn’t make the news, which suited me just fine. I jumped at the chance to give blood again. I knew there was always a need, and I remembered how accomplished I felt during *ichigan week years before, despite feeling like I was going to pass out afterward.

I had to fill out a questionnaire before I could donate, so I was directed to sit a table behind the privacy of a curtain. I breezed through most of the questions until I came to one I really had to think about. It asked if I had spent more than four years in any of a list of counties between 1977 and the present. On the list was the former Yugoslavia. It was close, but I didn’t believe I'd spent more than four years there. I seriously thought about complaining that the question was unfair. I hadn’t been born until four years after the date range began, and I couldn’t account for all of my parents' whereabouts as they were carrying the egg and sperm cells that would later unite to create me.

Despite my reservations, I filled in the “yes” circle because I was nervous. A scout is trustworthy, but I couldn’t remember the exact dates of every flight I’d taken to and from the land of southern Slavs. Had I lied, no one would have known about it until well after the fact. I decided not to risk it then, but I still wonder if there’s a support group somewhere for people who’ve been blacklisted by the American Cross after inadvertently fibbing about their donation. If it was up to me, I’d call it: This is My Blood.

I can see the group meeting in a basement of a local Methodist church on Wednesdays to trade anemia anecdotes, AIDS adventures sickle-cell stories, and transfusion tales. There’d be lots of hugs, and somebody would always break down crying during story time. Me? I’d be content to sit quietly with my complementary coffee and doughnut, and have people wonder what terrible things I must have done to end up there because I never shared.

A guy in scrubs came to collect my questionnaire and left me waiting like a game show contestant who’d given their answers confidently, but instantly regretted not being 100 percent certain once they realized their life could change for the better, or they could fail miserably. Adding to the tension, each contestant would be well aware that their potential elation (or agony) would only be amplified by the reactions of a studio audience filled strangers, and those yelling at their televisions while watching from home.

Take this, all of you, and drink from it: This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant…

I knew I didn’t have AIDS or another sexually transmitted disease, so I expected scrubs to return pretty quickly. Early Christians probably felt the same way about Jesus after his ultimate sacrifice. More that 2,000 years later, as my seconds of waiting turned into minutes, stories I’d heard of ancient blood oaths taken on the Balkans started swirling through my head. I’d never taken a blood oath that I could remember, but I do remember watching the scene from My Girl when Thomas J. and Vada became blood brothers. It was disgusting.

…it will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven…

I suddenly longed for forgiveness, not from God, but from the pencil I’d used to mark that regrettable, uncertain response. I couldn’t go back and tell them that while most recently in Serbia, I’d eaten a largely vegetarian diet, consistent with that of my self-described fat lawyer turned yoga teacher. It was too late.

No bells rang when scrubs finally pulled back the curtain after five minutes that felt like five hours. He admitted he’d never had anyone else answer yes to the question that included Yugoslavia, which was why he’d been gone so long. Then came the bombshell: He said answering yes to that question meant I might have Mad Cow Disease lying dormant in my brain, and I shouldn’t donate blood again until a vaccine was developed against Mad Cow Disease in humans. The fail sound from The Price is Right, my favorite game show, played in my ears.

I don’t know what the symptoms of Mad Cow Disease in humans are, but for what it’s worth, I'm proud to say that I rarely moo with rage or regret. Until I can donate blood again, I encourage those who can to do so whenever possible.

Do this in memory of me.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

Text

Higher Ground

I love coffee.

Probably not the same way a mother loves her newborn, or with the intensity that certain sects or Christianity proclaim to love Jesus, but it’s close.

When I close my eyes sometimes, I can still taste the first cup I ever had, at age sixteen. I don’t remember if I had it with hazelnut creamer or black, but I do remember looking left and right that morning at the kitchen table, half expecting my dad to come home for lunch from his midnight shift as a cop and ask what the hell I was doing drinking coffee.

“Mom said I could!” was ready on the tip of my tongue.

Before I started drinking coffee, I’d heard everything from, “It will stunt your growth” to “It’ll put hair on your chest.” These and other descriptions of what coffee could do made me balk at it during the innocence of childhood, and want it even more as a sometimes defiant, hormonally-charged teenager. My first sip of coffee whet my appetite for culinary danger. I felt like a beverage badass, having finally tasted what had been an adults-only indulgence for all of my sixteen years. It was awesome. Dad never came through the door that day, but on that one occasion at least, I wish he had.

At 38, I’ve stopped holding out hope for that adolescent growth spurt; my grandma stopped telling me, “You’re getting so tall” when I was 13. What’s more, the trend in men’s personal grooming seems to be to shave the hair from your chest and other areas. I was a late adopter of manscaping, but this doesn’t mean I’m going to compensate by carefully shaving a unicorn into my pubic hair, or meticulously dyeing it all the colors of the rainbow.

Damn you, coffee... Damn you...

*Five minutes later*

Aw... who am I kidding? I could never stay mad at you. Let’s have a make-up cup.

When I was an undergrad, I got a job as an assistant at the front desk of the dorm where I lived. I worked from 11 PM to 3 AM most Friday nights. Before almost every shift, I’d turn on a little Mr. Coffee coffeemaker I had, brew two cups by the pot’s measure, add whatever flavored creamer I could find to my mug, and take it with me as I rode the elevator down to start my shift. Holding the mug in my hand and drinking its contents made dealing with oh-shit-I-lost-my-room-key drunks a bit easier.

My first trip to Serbia in 2003 meant my first cup of Turkish coffee, a style in which beans are pulverized to the point that they look like powdered sugar. In Serbian class, I’d learned that Turkish coffee was made using a long-handled pot called a džezva. You bring hot water to the edge of boiling, add the coffee, stir, and wait for the coffee to rise. If the water boils or the džezva overflows, you’ve screwed up. I’d been looking forward to trying Turkish coffee from the moment my plane touched down in Belgrade, so when the Matejić family offered me some, I didn’t dare refuse. I was tired and didn’t quite know where or when I was, but coffee was calling to me.

There was just one problem. For all the praise heaped upon it in the classroom, in tales of tassology, and in the Matejić family living room as St. George watched dutifully overhead from his portrait on the wall, nobody warned me about the sediment that rests at the bottom of every properly made cup of Turkish coffee. I’ll go to my grave believing that the Matejić family knew the whole time that I didn’t know about the sediment lurking at the bottom of my tiny cup, and they placed bets before I even arrived about how long it would take me to notice. If tassology is the practice of fortunetelling by reading coffee grounds, tea leaves, or wine sediment, my fortune that day was clear. The Matejić family chose not to intervene.

I spit the sediment back into my cup almost as soon as it touched my lips. Zoran, Ljilja, Aca, and Miloš bent over with laughter. Knowing what I know now, I can’t blame them.

Years later in Novi Sad, Massimo almost killed me with his powerful Italian espresso. My heart nearly lept from my chest as I raced home from our English lesson trying to figure out what was happening to me. I couldn’t help thinking of what seems to be a natural human attraction to things that challenge or could kill us, such as skydiving or doing the tango with a beautiful woman. I hadn’t gotten a tassology reading from the 2003 Turkish coffee sediment, but as my heart continued to thump, I wondered if I’d tempted fate one too many times, and would as least die having done something I loved as one of my final acts on Earth.

As the years passed my comfort in coffee increased. Though I once gave a friend a džezva as a birthday gift, I rarely drank Turkish coffee and steered clear of Italian espresso.

I experimented with pods and French-presses before finally settling on some kind of a Black + Decker brew station that has three of four more features than I really need. Its filter is reusable, but I’ll often curse myself if I forget to clean it out, thereby leaving it for a zombielike version of myself the next morning. More than once, I’ve asked myself who would do such a stupid thing, but then I remember that I have only myself to blame. If a practitioner of tassology could read my fortune in those used, wet, and clumpy grounds, it would probably say something like: You will be unnecessarily angry today. Your lucky numbers are 7, 19, and 23.

If my palate for coffee weakened over time, so too did my care of the coffee and its containers. To save space of the kitchen counter, I moved a canister of coffee from this most logical place to the shelving above my washer and dryer. One morning, shortly after 6 AM, I scooped out some coffee, put it in the filter, and went to return half-full canister to its illogical place on the shelf above my washer and dryer.

There was just one problem. I forgot to secure the lid on the canister. As I reached up to place it on the shelf, I lost control. It went flying out of my hand, somersaulting like Simone Biles, sending precious coffee grounds all over, beside and behind the washer and dryer. I wanted to yell obscenities, but I quickly realized this wouldn’t do any good by myself in my apartment at 6:30 AM on a Thursday.

I vacuumed up the grounds I could see as best I could, but the lid to the canister was no where to be found. Not knowing where the lid was bothered me more than having spilled the coffee. Out of respect for its fallen bean brethren, I wanted to preserve the remaining coffee in its original canister. I couldn’t effectively do this of course, without the lid designed to fit said canister. To add insult to injury, the coffee serving scoop had fallen into the no-man’s land between the dryer and the wall. I knew I didn’t need that scoop to get a satisfying serving size of coffee, but it was part of a set that belonged to my grandparents; as odd as it sounds, that little scoop had sentimental value to me.

When I got home that afternoon, I resolved to find the lid any way I could. I knew what happened was an accident, but I felt dumb for allowing it to happen by deciding to store that canister above the washer and dryer in the first place. I downloaded a flashlight app on my phone, located the coffee serving scoop, and fished it out of apartment purgatory with a tool that allows me to extend my reach to high shelves and tight spaces I wouldn’t naturally be able to.

Damn you, coffee... Damn you...

In search of the prodigal lid, I climbed on top of the dryer and shined the flashlight all around. Nothing. My knees hadn’t hurt that bad since the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar when I served the Tridentine Latin Mass at Holy Family Church half a lifetime ago. Back then, I wore skateboarders’ kneepads underneath my pants to cope with the pain. There, atop the dryer, my lapsed Catholic ass thought of something I hadn’t for years:

“If Jesus hung dying on the cross for three hours, you can get through this.”

Introíbo ad altáre Dei.

I can’t explain why that thought occurred to me just then. Perhaps, in moments of discomfort, we revert back to what we know. These days, I don’t elevate Christ (or my coffee) to such lofty places. I try my best to remain grounded in facts, evidence, and reason while recognizing that not everyone will share my beliefs, or love of coffee.

No matter how you grind the beans, we all should remain grounded in something. But, it does bring me peace of mind if you come to service my washer and dryer and you have a vacuum with a really long hose among your tools of the trade. I’d recruit you to find most of the remaining grounds about a month after the incident, and for years to come, until they’ve all been collected. Like a shepherd tending to the lost sheep of his flock, still I can’t let go. You belong to me. I belong to you.

The lid ended up in the laundry basket among a breakaway sect of coffee grounds, a group of granular renegades that had separated themselves from the whole in a great schism. Tired of the House of Maxwell, they had broken free like Protestants in search of a new method, or a perfect latte. Instead of putting these ground rebels back with the masses, I momentarily admired their conviction before dumping them out, and leaving them to their own brew. Turkish, French Press, percolator, pour-over, drip, etc... that’s how it should be.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

Text

Enter the Dragana

The title is a homage to the 1973 film Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee. I don’t know if what follows will have anything to do with the movie, but Enter the Dragana sounded cool.

Meeting roommates can be exciting, nerve-wracking, or a host of other adjectives that describe the tension between humans. My first encounter with Dragana was very brief. We hadn’t said much more than “hi” to one another before she left on vacation to Greece for a week. My little head thought she was an attractive woman, but all I knew for sure was that one of the four small rooms in the Crazy House now had a new tenant to help Raymond and Vesna pay for their son’s private school tuition and the washing machine none of the tenants could use.

In the summer of 2008, I took a bus from Novi Sad to visit my sister-in-law, who was attending the Trieste Joyce School in Trieste, Italy. I’d paid Raymond’s mother a portion of my month’s rent before I left and promised to pay the rest upon my return to Novi Sad. She seemed cool with it. Raymond, however, was not. All hell broke loose when I returned from Italy. Raymond felt I was late on my rent. I don’t know if this meant he and Vesna couldn’t pay their son’s tuition on time, but I knew I had to change my living arrangements before somebody got hurt because there was no banister for the stairs that led up to our rooms, or someone found out that we four roommates were living in the Crazy House without any formal rental agreement.

“You and I should get our own place,” Dragana told me one day. I’d heard from more that one novosađanin that people from Vrbas were crazy, but I wouldn’t know the full extent of Dragana’s pantyless, partying ways until I agreed to share an apartment with her to escape the Crazy House.

The apartment was modern for Novi Sad standards. It had a decent-size living room and kitchen, along with an upstairs you could get to using a staircase where each step as designed for alternating feet. The lone bathroom was at the top of stairs, to the left was a large bedroom and closet.

Dragana was already in party mode the first night we spent together at our new place. Dragana had already taken the bedroom upstairs, so I laid claim to the pullout sofa bed in the living room. I soon noticed an odd reddish glow coming from the kitchen. I discovered that Dragana had used red nail polish to paint the kitchen light fixtures red. I worried that her artistic endeavor could be a fire hazard. All she cared about was whether or not the music was loud enough. I couldn’t fall asleep later that night because Dragana and her guy friends didn’t seem to be able to stop talking for more than ten seconds. As I lay on my back plotting my revenge on the sofa bed, one of them came downstairs. He must have detected that I was pissed off by the lateness of the hour and the unending noise.

“I sorry brother,” was all he said. I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t just stick brate on the end of a sentence and expect that we’d be instant homies,

Dragana had a seemingly endless stream of male friends. I think Bojan’s father owned a construction company, which would explain why Bojan would always leave some money for Dragana either before or after a night out. Srđa would pull up porn sites on Dragana’s laptop and die laughing as she’d squirm uncomfortably. Boško had beaten up his girlfriend and spent three years in prison for involuntary manslaughter after shooting the wrong guy while working as a nightclub bouncer. Dragana said he regretted not bringing me a gift. She never said what the gift could have been, but I didn’t think Boško was the type of guy I should accept gifts from.

For all of Dragana’s male friends, the guys she loved were the soccer players.

Mladen played soccer for one of Belgrade’s two major sports clubs, Partizan (Partisan). I don’t know how he met Dragana, but I do remember that damn ham sandwich. Once, as I was tossing and turning on the sofa bed trying to fall asleep at around 4 AM, the room flooded with light from the hallway, Dragana and (this time) Mladen were home. I decided sleeping was pointless and I’d just get out of bed. As happy drunk Mladen stumbled toward me with the sandwich, he yelled something at me I’ll never forget:

“NOOOO SLEEEEP MYYY FRIEEEEND!!!”

“Shit,” I thought. This is going to be a long night. I was hungry, so I accepted the sandwich without knowing where it had been. As I ate, Mladen and Dragana swayed and sauntered up the stairs as best they could. Soon after, I could hear music playing in the bedroom, but more prominent were the unmistakable sounds of human copulation. Wide awake, I lay flat on my back with my eyes open. I could only take it all in. I don’t remember how long their session lasted. The next thing do I remember is Mladen leaving our apartment at about 8 AM. I never saw him again. Dragana’s belief that she was special in his eyes was misguided after all.

When she came downstairs later, I confronted her about the previous night’s soundtrack:

“I heard you and Mladen fucking last night. I don’t care if you do that, but if Mladen is going to be in town, could you let me know so I can crash somewhere else?”

“But… I had the music on!”

“I know… I heard that too.”

I slept upstairs after that.

II.

At that time, there was what I considered a trashy British TV show running on Serbian TV called Footballers’ Wives; the day Dragana showed up at our door with a Maltese puppy, I thought we might get our own spinoff, Footballers’ Dogs.

Leno the Maltese belonged to another soccer player, Diarra, from Senegal. I think he was under contract with Belgrade’s other major club, Crvena zvezda (Red Star) His relationship with Dragana wasn’t sexual that I know of, but somehow they made an arrangement for Dragana to look after Leno while Diarra was playing in Turkey.

We were only supposed to have Leno for a week, but he stayed with us for nearly a month. Dragana would complain that she’d take him out for hours but he wouldn’t relieve himself. Once, as soon as they hit our apartment door, Leno ran expertly up the stairs (much more deftly than Dragana’s own thoroughly confused Shar-Pei) and shit in the corner of the shower cabin in the bathroom. I don’t know if the little guy was waiting for the privacy of being behind a curtain, but he looked up at me afterward with a sense of accomplishment, as if to say, “Look what I did!”

I already knew Dragana could be gone for hours, days, and sometimes weeks at a time. As long as she paid her share of the rent, I didn’t mind. I thought sleeping upstairs would mean I’d see her even less. Sadly, any hopes I had that a change in sleeping arrangements would bring me a measure of peace were quickly dashed.

Many people Dragana’s age were students at the University of Novi Sad. Dragana, on the other hand, had openly bragged to me not long after we moved into the apartment that although she was technically a student, her parents paid off her professors to give her credit for attending class. I never once saw her with a textbook of any kind. She thought of herself as a model and tried to get me to vote for her in the Ms. Serbia on Facebook contest in or around July 2008. She came in second place. Her performance must have been a boon to her confidence because her modeling aspirations led to two of the most bizarre incidents of our time together.

On one occasion, she called me the night before she knew The Man in the Cowboy Hat and I would be passing by Štark Arena (formerly Belgrade Arena) to ask if I could bring her the hair extensions she sometimes wore. I don’t know if she had a photoshoot scheduled, or what. Picture me with an old-school Nokia in one hand rummaging through a woman’s closet with the other:

“Which one? Blonde or brunette?”

“The brown one!”

“Can’t I just bring whatever looks like hair and let you sort it out?”

Click.

Another time, she’d been to a club opening and hadn’t come home that night. The only phone in the apartment was downstairs. It rang five times, stopped for a few seconds, and then rang several times again. I ignored the ringing at first because I thought it was just Dragana’s grandma being persistent. But, by the time the pattern had repeated itself for what felt like twenty minutes, I was in panic mode.

My brother was serving in the U.S. Army and had been deployed to Iraq. As the ringing kept on, I began thinking the only person who would call so many times was someone from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade who’d somehow gotten my number and was calling to tell me my brother had been killed.

When I finally answered the phone, I was boiling mad and sick to my stomach:

“Is Dragana there?”

I’ve never been so angry at another human being. I yelled something like this at him in English:

Listen, you stupid motherfucker. Do you have any idea what it’s like to think your only brother is dead and you’re about to get the worst news of your life? If you EVER call here again, I will find you, and I will fucking kill you. Understand?

He was calling because Dragana was late for a photoshoot.

After that, the phone didn’t ring for the rest of the day.

III.

The last incident I’ll never forget occurred when Dragana and a group of friends came to our apartment to remember a friend of theirs who’d been killed in an accident. Dragana was inconsolable that night and repeatedly mentioned taking drinks for her friend’s soul. I never got the person’s name, nor do I know exactly what happened to him or her. I was upset about all the noise she and her friends were making, but at the same time, I’ d never seen Dragana so emotional, so human. She never mentioned her friend or what happened that night around me again. I suppose some things shouldn’t have to be rehashed.

Dragana was practically living in Belgrade by the time I moved out of the apartment. It was a miracle she paid her portion of the rent for as long as she did. My life was never quite the same after Dragana entered it, which is not a bad thing. I appreciate the experience. Wherever she is today, I hope she has consistently found whatever hair extensions she’s needed. She reminded me that no matter how different we think we are from another person, we all share in a common humanity, with a seemingly infinite capacity to frustrate and fascinate one another.

Choose your roommates, partners, and puppies carefully.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

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Candy Kane

I’ve never been a big fan of family pictures, or holiday celebrations. When I was about seven, my brother Derek and I had our picture taken with our cousin Kyle, who couldn’t have been much more than a year old. Kyle was smiling, but also pointing at something off in the distance (probably a prop the photographer was using to make him laugh). Derek and I had on clip-on ties that were recycled from a previous Easter. I wore thick, almost square-framed glasses. if I left the house with them on today, they would almost certainly impede my ability to successfully procreate. I had little choice at the time since I needed corrective lenses, and wouldn’t start wearing contacts for at least another six years.

By the time I’d made the switch, the photo of Kyle, Derek, and me belonged to a museum exhibit—frozen in time like the Iceman—of pictures my grandparents loved, but their grandchildren wished no longer existed. By 1999, they’d moved into a house much smaller than the one in which they’d raised their six children, and the photo had been relegated to a literal wall of shame in their basement. Along the wall were senior pictures of my mother and her siblings, and various photos of the nine grandchildren, including that of a triumvirate of boys c. 1988. I can’t think of a time anyone whose picture was on the wall expressed fondness when looking at it. Each of us probably thought about what we’d tell our younger selves if we passed them on the street, or secretly wished to remain arrested in that state of childhood development, our entire lives uncertain, unfolding, before us one day at a time.

The biggest reason I’ve never been a huge fan of holidays, family pictures, and especially family holiday pictures is because the only capture one moment in time, moments that, for better or worse, are frozen on film or stored in cloud of data and never really gone. Whenever the holidays come around, I have a tendency to cram an entire year’s worth of socializing into 48 hours, or however long I get to spend with my family and friends.

In my family, those occasions are typically when we celebrate some Puritans surviving a hard winter despite wearing ridiculous hats, and the birth of a boy who somehow managed to erase his teenage debauchery from the record. You know he had to screw up those miracles dozens of times in private before nailing them (oops) in public by his early thirties. This must be why we never hear about the zombies of Arimathea he couldn’t quite bring all the way back from the dead, or the numerous weddings he crashed around Nazareth during puberty, flexing to prostitutes about how he could turn water into wine in exchange for performing a number of sins his Dad didn’t have to know about (but would later be considered deadly because Mary Magdalene couldn’t keep her mouth shut) only to deliver vinegar.

I guarantee you Jesus promised Joseph of Arimathea eternal salvation as thanks for the years of resurrection practice, and in return for the use of his tomb one Friday night. Mary Magdalene showed up at the tomb three days after the crucifixion because she finally realized how serious Jesus had been about her fucking up his chances to keep holy the Sabbath day with a bridesmaid, before he hit it big and all the lepers wanted a piece (oops again) of him.

Anyway… If family pictures remind me of who I used to be, holidays remind me of things I used to wholeheartedly believe in.

My first picture with Santa was probably taken in 1982, before I had the surgery to straighten out my leg that left me with a cool scar. My enthusiasm for the holidays faded as I grew older and began to challenge my beliefs that one man could deliver presents to all the world’s children in a single night, and the three wise men could find Jesus just by following a star.

After passing at least numerically through teenage angst, I started to realize how incredibly fortunate I’ve been instead of complaining about what other people had that I didn’t. But what really got me comfortable in my own skin was volunteering, a series of activities in which I put myself in some very uncomfortable positions by surrounding myself with people and places I didn’t know. Still, my desire for the uncomfortable hasn’t weakened my ability to attract the absurd.

I recently had a chance to volunteer at Santa’s Workshop. I put on my elf hat (which I later found out had been on backwards all night) and got to work in the arts and crafts area, but that didn’t last long. Macaroni pictures weren’t doing it for me. I needed a different challenge.

Soon enough, I found my way to where Santa was. My backwards elf hat and I had to keep the line moving so every kid would have a chance to see Santa before closing time at 6 PM. Thee were all kinds of characters around me. Rudolph was there, and so was this character that had Pinocchio’s face, but looked how I imagined the Frisch’s Big Boy would if he’d been on a liquid diet for six months. “Who’s THAT?” I asked the event coordinator. “That’s the Elf on the Shelf,” she replied. “Oh… shit… I was way off,” I said. Whenever I caught the characters waving to children and their families as they passed by, they looked like those people from 80s and 90s workout videos who got stuck doing the low-impact versions of the exercises everybody else was doing at full speed. I wondered if they were secretly asking themselves why they agreed to do this, quietly cursing themselves for not auditioning to sell shit on QVC instead.

I’m not sure if the first child whose Santa aftermath I’ll remember for a long time was just really upset, had a cognitive deficiency, or both. Either way, he or she was not happy. My first post near the man of the hour was standing outside a fence they’d set up around Santa’s chair. My job was to wave the kids and their families forward once the previous family had enjoyed their moment in the makeshift winter wonderland. As the child left Santa’s lap screaming bloody murder and passed through the fence with his/her parent or guardian, they let out a sound I can only describe as a Home Improvement-era Tim Allen grunt mixed with visceral cry for help: UHHHAAHHHOOOOO!

Before I knew what was happening, the child headbutted themselves against the exterior glass of the Lazarus building, like Kane and the Undertaker from another spoiled childhood fantasy of so many— professional wresting. All the person accompanying the child said was, “Now honey… Don’t hit your head.” All I could think was, “Damn.” But as a man wearing a backwards elf hat, I couldn’t say shit to them.

Not long after witnessing a pediatric concussion, I found myself in the path of low-impact Rudolph herself. I slightly embarrassed myself by giving her a fist bump and talking to the person in the suit as though they were the red-nosed reindeer in the flesh. I came back to my adulthood while low-impact Rudolph was in the middle of muffled sentence about candy canes. I noticed had a bucket in her hands, which I assumed had been filled with the striped holiday icons. There were no candy canes in her bucket, but I did notice a set of Toyota car keys. In my confusion, I almost blurted out, “Shouldn’t you be guiding a sleigh instead of a fucking Camry?” Some things are best left unsaid.

For the first two hours we were there, the line to see Santa seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, which made the next encounter I remember even more excruciating. A lady walked up and stood right next to me, thus blocking my view of the line and preventing me from doing the one volunteer task I was explicitly asked to do. To make matters worse, she started offering a running commentary on all the children she saw in Santa’s lap, like a color commentator at a sporting event who didn’t know when to just shut up and let whatever moment they were witnessing wash over them.

It didn’t matter whether they were boys dressed in identical suits for the obligatory in-lap picture with the big man (Oh, how cute!) or babies whose faces became contorted with red hot agony upon being separated from their mothers and embraced by a strange man (Oh, he is NOT having it!) The line seemed to grow infinitely longer during her soliloquy and I found myself thinking it was a shame the crucifixion of the guy whose birthday everyone would be celebrating in few weeks didn’t draw a crowd like this. In Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk observed that on some crucifixes, Jesus looks jacked enough to be modeling Ray-Ban sunglasses and Guess jeans without a shirt on. I can’t help thinking Chuck would concur that since not everyone will reach that level of supposed piety or physical fitness in a lifetime, it’s a bigger draw to remember God’s only son immediately after he humbled himself to share in our humanity the same way we all started—as a baby.

Anyway… as her commentary droned on, found myself wishing I could be the elf in the holiday classic A Christmas Story who tells Ralphie to get a move on before Santa kicks him down the slide, “Let’s Go!!!” But it bears repeating that in my backwards hat, my powers of persuasion were limited.

Not long after the soliloquy ended, I was approached by what I assume was a mother and daughter pair who were wondering if they’d ever get to see Santa. “I don’t know if we’re going to make it,” the older one said. “Let’s just take my picture with the elf.” “Actually, my name’s Dav…” I wanted to protest, but with my powers weakened, all I could do was acquiesce to their demands. The younger woman held a smartphone at what seemed like six different angles during our impromptu photo session. By the time they were done, I felt certain I was destined for Instagram infamy.

Eventually, the powers that be decided that I should move inside the fence and stand on the glitter-covered red carpet in an effort the speed up the queue after sunset. Before I went to the other side of the fence, someone asked me if I knew whether or not they’d be cutting people off at 6 PM. I didn’t, but I wished they would. I was growing tired of head injuries, seething, teething infants, and watching people taking selfies or recruiting the other elves to take pictures of them standing under one of the arches leading up to Santa’s chair.

I must have been distracted. The next time someone tried to get my attention, I was accused of holding up the line. The man had on a white, short-sleeved polo shirt. The woman wasn’t wearing a coat, but had on something I never thought I’d see on Santa’s red carpet: a leopard-print dress and dull pink high heels. “I used to be a Santa’s helper in this building,” she exclaimed. She said something else, about 1978, but I was too busy trying to avoid another “Damn” moment to really pay attention. “Actually, we just want our bathroom done. He’s working on our house.” “Fine.” I muttered. She proceeded to throw herself at Santa like he was Hugh Heffner, and she was Playboy Bunny. The whole scene looked ridiculous, but so did I.

After the final patrons had paid Santa a visit, the other volunteer elves and I sat for our own picture with the man himself. It was likely the first time I’d had my picture taken with him since the year the picture of Derek, Kyle, and I was taken. I wasn’t filled with regret over my evaporated childhood and its beliefs, or terribly concerned that no one said a word about my backwards elf hat the whole night. I was glad I’d put myself in another uncomfortable position and come out clean on the other side minus the glitter that will be stuck to the bottoms of the shoes I wore that night for months. I was reminded of the importance of not trying to cram everything into one season, or in Santa’s case, one night. Let the kids have their beliefs and grow up to challenge them. I didn’t have to sit in Santa’s lap to tell him that wish come true was all I wanted for Christmas. I have a funny feeling that whoever he is, was, and has been, he knew what I wanted long before I ever asked.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

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Hurricane

For years, I was a night owl. When I started my second stint with the company I work for today, I worked a 1:30 PM to 10 PM shift as one of many people answering the phone if you called the number on the back of your debit card. I didn’t much care for the constant what-happened-this-time beep in my ear that meant another call had come through, but some days were better than others.

I enjoyed helping customers as long as what they asked me to do was within my power, but there were times I didn’t feel like listening to strangers’ life stories or treating their self-inflicted financial wounds. My schedule wasn’t ideal because I had to work one weekend day. Having a day off during the week wasn’t without its advantages, but it also meant trouble might find me at an unexpected time or place.

The first time I saw Kathy, I thought she looked like life had taken a lot out of her from behind the counter of the Circle K, but she was easy to talk to. She was blonde, thin but not sickly, and wore shoes that suggested she was accustomed to being on her feet most of the time. I guessed she was in her mid-forties. She was a nice departure from a lot of the women I saw at work every day. Of course, I couldn’t know exactly what was going on in a given woman’s life just by looking at her any more than she could know what was going on in mine. Still, it was hard to appreciate an individual woman’s beauty when most of them I saw towered over me in their high heels, flaunted legs that kept going until next Tuesday, and looked like they had trained with a Bloodsport-era, badass Jean-Claude van Damme, not the one content with starring in Tostitos commercials breaking chips instead of bones, and taking your place in your circle of friends. Kathy was different.

Maybe we got along because we were both night owls. Maybe it was because we both found ourselves doing things we never imagined doing when our parents asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Kathy told me she’d previously been a waitress at the Olive Garden. I told her how I was rebuilding my life and had had a literal pregnant pause between jobs once I’d come back from overseas.

Some nights, we’d talk long after she’d rang up my Combos and/or beef jerky. I’d offer general descriptions of the craziest recent customer interactions I’d experienced:

While working overtime one Saturday (a day I wasn’t even supposed to be there), I heard the beep of an incoming call in my ear, introduced myself, and offered to help, as was standard procedure. The guy on the other end of the line immediately started pulling his cheek back and forth. I could tell he’d moistened the inside of his cheek with spit (probably while listening to the preceding hold music) as an act of premeditation. His vagina song was broadcast directly into my ears and left no doubt he’d been watching too much porn and studying how to replicate the anatomical musical score with himself. Why he decided to share his concert with me, I’ll never know. Some things are best left unsaid.

When I asked Kathy what the strangest thing she’d ever sold someone was, she replied without hesitation: “I once had a guy come in here at three o’clock in the morning who bought condoms and bleach.”

I was left wondering why I’d even asked.

As much as I enjoyed conversations with Kathy, much briefer exchanges were the norm. The place was usually dead when I’d get there around 10:30 PM, but my arrival always seemed to trigger an avalanche of customers who urgently needed gas, cigarettes, or lottery tickets. I usually took the onslaught of humanity as my cue to exit stage right.

That’s how it went for us. That was our routine.

The first time I saw Ashley, she was telling Kathy about how much she missed. Kayla. Kathy introduced us and told me she used to work at the Olive Garden with Ashley. I was instantly glad I hadn’t earlier ridiculed the wardrobe of white shirts and solid, brightly-colored ties that waitstaff of the Olive Garden in required to wear, though I’d wanted to badly. Ashley talked about how she’d recently had an argument with her mother, whom she hated, and how her son’s father, then serving in the U.S. Navy aboard a ship somewhere off the coast of Greece, was an asshole.

I’m not sure if Ashley interpreted the fact that I asked her questions as a sign of genuine interest, or if I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. As luck would have it, this was not one those nights when we were interrupted by strangers seeking swizzle sticks. She went on and on about how she missed Kayla. I just kept nodding, unsure of what else to do. I could have left at any time, but I was overcome with curiosity, as if I’d passed a really bad car accident, one that when you see it, you instantly ask yourself if somebody died. You feel bad for staring, but you can’t look away.

This carnage involved conversation instead of cars.

After an eternity of my unanswered prayers to be interrupted by a customer, Ashley suggested I join her for a drink. It was a Friday night and I didn’t have to work the next day, so against my better judgement, I agreed to go with her. She must have had to use the bathroom before we left; once Ashley was out of earshot, Kathy leaned over the counter and told me to be careful because Ashley may have already been drunk, high, or both. When we finally got into her car and pulled away from Circle K, I caught a glimpse of Kathy through the window, motioning to me with her hands as if putting on a seatbelt, reminding to me to do the same. She was trying to keep me safe with (or from) a woman I’d known for all of three hours.

Our first stop was a sports bar called The Crown, merely feet away from Circle K. Ashley ordered a Blue Mojito. I don’t remember drinking anything, but I do remember her taking my tie off without really asking if she could, and putting it around her neck as she continued to drone on about Kayla, her bitch of a mother, and her son.

Next, we went to a bar called the Keystone Pub and Patio. It had to have been around 2 AM; chairs were already turned upside down on top of tables when we walked in. Ashley must have known the bartender, who poured us shots of something that looked like Fireball. I don’t remember either one of us paying for them.

We were supposed to go to Waffle House after this, but that’s when shit got really weird. Ashley drove us there, but we sat in the parking lot for what felt like forever. We never made it inside. At one point, she just lost it:

Her: ”I miss KAYYYYYYLLLLLLAAAAAAAAA!!!!”

Me: “Um…. I’m sorry for your loss. I can tell she meant a lot to you.

Her: “I wish I could just crawl down into her grave any lie beside HEEEEEERRRR!!!! Oh Gawd!!!”

Me: “Okay.”

Her: “Put your hand on my chest and feel me sing.”

Me: “Ashley, I don’t know if that’s such a good…”

Before I could finish my sentence, she grabbed one of my hands, placed it just above her breasts and held it there. The next song was I Believe You Liar by Australian singer/songwriter Washington. It started with a hauntingly beautiful piano intro, the kind that made me stop (despite the awkward position of my hand) and listen. The first verse is:

All the things you've said And things you've done I remember, in memoriam You said that you did But you did not Oh, you ache for something God knows what

I’d never heard the song before. Even now, I still can’t listen to it without thinking of that moment in Ashley’s car. The piano part still gives me goosebumps, the kind you get when a song truly captures your attention, the kind that form long before you’ve heard a song 500 times thanks to Top-40 radio, TV dramas, and being a resident of planet Earth. I haven’t heard I Believe You Liar anywhere near 500 times. I don’t want to. For some reason, I don’t want to spoil it despite the ridiculousness surrounding when I first heard it.

Once it became clear that we wouldn’t be going inside Waffle House, I was slightly pissed off. I was hungry, dammit. We'd been drinking, so the conditions were perfect; I’d heard most people only go there when they’re drunk anyway. But I wonder now if listening to Washington’s song wasn’t a better fit than intoxicated waffle consumption for what Ashley was going through. It’s easy for me to describe the absurdity of our encounter, but there may have been more to it. However demonstratively, Ashley was grieving, aching. for her friend who died unexpectedly. I just happened to meet her that night.

Ashley had been in my life for about eight hours when we pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex. The sky was starting to change color, signaling the beginning of a new day. I thought of a video game I used to play as a kid, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. One of the most annoying aspects of which is that you never knew when night was going to transition to day or vice versa.

If you were in a town when a transition to night happened, all the townspeople vanished, and you were faced with zombies that moved like rejects from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, plus bats you couldn’t even see coming because they blended in almost perfectly with the nighttime screen. When the lights went down in the city, you, Simon Belmont, the next in a long line of heroic vampire slayers, were reduced to jumping around whipping at shit in your 8-bit leotard while a soundtrack played that didn’t exactly inspire fear in, or of the undead.

Whether you were in town or out and about in the blocky wilderness, your only salvation from the darkness was another seemingly randomly timed pop-up box like this, which meant it was about to be daytime again:

I hated not knowing when day or night would come next. Even as a ten-year-old, the unpredictability made me nervous. You might say it was my first encounter with a pop-up ad, long before the modern incarnation those annoying little fuckers (or the option to skip ads) existed. This might be why I hate most ads to this day. Still, that night with Ashley, I actually prayed for the first time in my life that a Castlevania II pop-up would appear in the sky overhead, vanquish the horrible night, and send her back to wherever she’d come from.

Only that’s not what happened

II.

“Do you mind if I stay here tonight,” she asked.

“Not at all (this night couldn’t possibly get any weirder),” I said.

We went upstairs and went straight to bed. I couldn’t sleep, and my occasional attempts to kiss Ashley didn’t escalate into anything more. I just tossed and turned, unable to sleep thanks to the alcohol and the stranger in my bed. Ashley didn't have any such problems.

After hours of restlessness, I gave up trying to sleep and decided to go about my normal Saturday routine, beginning with doing laundry. I tiptoed around to avoid waking Ashley, but this didn’t stop me from checking on her every few minutes to make sure she was still breathing. After she'd spoken so agonizingly about missing Kayla, I seriously believed Ashley could kill herself right there in my bed without a second thought.

She finally woke up in the middle of the afternoon. We sat on the couch and talked about books and what we wanted to do with our lives. I agreed to let her borrow my copy of Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and she said she let me borrow her copy of The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Notes from the Underground was one of those books I was supposed to read in college but never did. I was looking forward to reading it on my own time, when a requirement wasn’t hanging over my head. I’d read one of Mitch Albom’s other books, Tuesdays with Morrie, which heart-wrenching though it was, had been a fast read. I thought I could get through The Five People You Meet in Heaven quickly, and reasonably expect Ashley to finish Notes from the Underground in about the same amount of time. I figured we’d meet up after reading, give each other their book back, and that would be the end of it.

That’s not what happened either.

First, we drove to her mom’s house so she could pick up The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Ashley decided she was hungry, so we stopped at Wendy’s on the way back to my place. Eating fast food was a rare experience for me (but the whole night before had also been). Until 2017, I had no idea Wendy’s had a vanilla Frosty on their menu, an item that had already been around for more than a decade by the time I caught on. I’d had other things on my mind.

We went back to my place to exchange books and phone numbers. Ashley finally left at around 6:30 PM, capping a whirlwind twenty hours. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, or why, but it did happen.

I finished The Five People You Meet in Heaven in about a week, and texted Ashley to let her know I was looking forward to giving her back her book. I got a brief response like, “Hey” and something about her work schedule being crazy. At first I didn’t mind having her book (and not having mine), but as time passed, it started to bother me. Not a lot gets on my nerves, but two things that do are owing people money and having something that doesn’t belong to me. Every time I’d see Ashley’s book on my shelf, I’d think: “Man... I really should get that back to her.” Then a more basic thought would creep into my brain: “I hope she hasn’t made good on her desire to crawl down into the grave with Kayla. Fuck... I hope she’s still alive.”

Over time, my texts and her replies became more and more infrequent. I’d joke with Kathy that I was reaching out to Ashley once every season, just to prove to myself that I was still trying to do the right thing by returning her book. As the months passed, I started to just want my damn book back, and to give her hers so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.

That’s how it went for me. That was my routine. Until the day she just showed up in my parking lot.

By September 2013, I’d found a job in fraud prevention. I jumped at the chance to learn something new without subjecting my ears to incoming vagina songs. I was still a night owl, but struggling to work at a pace that met the expectations of my new department. To help me acclimate, management had me do a few days of side-by-side training with a more experienced specialist. This meant I also got to temporarily change my schedule to a more traditional 9 AM to 6 PM.

For some reason, after working my temporary shift one day, I decided to walk through the rear parking lot of the complex instead of the front one. Then I saw her. She was in a car I didn’t recognize, but she was with two guys I did, from Circle K. The driver’s side door was open so she'd gotten a bit of a head start towards me before I realized what was happening. She ran into my arms and hugged me like I was someone she truly missed:

“Hiiiiiiiiiii!!!! I am SO sorry!!!!” She was practically squealing.

You’d have thought it had been only a week instead of nearly a year since I’d wished for the morning sun to vanquish that horrible night. All I could think was, “Finally! Here’s my chance to return her book and be done with this shit once and for all.” I’d aged almost 365 days since the last time I saw her, but Ashley must have thought I was elderly and feeble. She took me by the arm and helped me up the stairs and into my apartment. Once inside, she helped me take off my shoes and put on house slippers though I never asked her to.

“Ashley, what about your friends? Aren’t they still down there with the car running?”

“Oh, they’ll be fine. They’re just down there smoking weed...”

’WHAAAAAAAAAA!?!?!?’

I have absolutely no problem with recreational marijuana use, but I also knew that if the cops showed up (seeing law enforcement officers driving up and down my street was not uncommon) and started asking Cheech and Chong questions about why they were there and who they were with, I wasn’t going down with them. Even in their intentionally altered state of consciousness, I was convinced they could still identify me.

I case you’re wondering, Ashley left before I had a chance to bring up the books. I think I’d pissed her off by talking shit about her to one of my neighbors that night without realizing she was close enough to hear me. I should have whispered like Kathy had the year before when she was sure Ashley was out of earshot.

Still got it.

I never heard from Ashley again. I haven’t reread The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and the piano in I Believe You Liar still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m okay with that. Why? Mitch’s book and Washington’s song make up the eye of Hurricane Ashley, a storm I won’t soon forget.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

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90 Days

What can you accomplish in three months? Could you lose weight? Could you find love? Would you really know if a job you thought you wanted was the right fit? If you were still a fetus within those first three months, you’d have grown from a single cell to about the size of a domino piece that, according to WebMD, could open and close its fists.

Most tourist visas (for fetuses and otherwise) last 90 days. I’ve often wondered whose decision this was, and why. When I was staying in Serbia on a tourist visa, I never seemed to be able to get a straight answer, which was par for the course.

I’ll never forget the first time I had to leave Serbia because my tourist visa was expiring. It was October 2007, and the weather was finally beginning to turn colder. I’d had my mom pay too much money to mail me my own sweaters from home, but even her monetary efforts couldn’t delay the passage of time.

Adam and I woke up early that morning because we wanted to go to Tempo (think a smaller version of Wal-Mart) to buy a wall heater for the upstairs bathroom of the house. The closest Tempo was in Baja, Hungary. Baja wasn’t that far from Sombor, so going to Tempo seemed like the perfect opportunity to get my obligatory border crossing out of the way, and make it back to Serbia without too many sideways glances at my U.S. passport. Privately, I hoped that the same policemen who were on the Serbian side the Hungarian border when we crossed would still be there when we came back, so I wouldn’t have to explain the whole story of what I was doing in that part of the world to someone new, even if I didn’t know what my whole story was.

We crossed into Hungary without incident, and I got a stamp in my passport of a little car as proof of when and how I’d left Serbia that day. It sat nicely next to the one of a plane that said Surčin from when I landed at the airport in Belgrade almost three months before. It was a new day, but the sun wasn’t up yet. I’d been spoiled by the long days of summer. While the days had grown gradually shorter since the end of June, I remember looking at my watch thinking the sun should have been up by then. Whatever my circadian rhythms were telling me, our first priority was to exchange our dinars for the local currency, forints.

As we drove around Baja looking for a place to exchange money, the city looked to still be asleep. Adam finally found a hotel with an open exchange office, and we were on our way.

Tempo was just as dead. I was amazed at how few people were in the store. Most of them were older, and moved quite deliberately, either as a sign of their age, or other conditions not so easily estimated by the naked eye. It reminded me of visiting Wal-Mart with my dad to gather supplies for days of painting Spartan Municipal Stadium for my Eagle Scout service project.

Adam’s phone rang just as we walked out of the store with the wall heater. It was his father, and my yoga teacher, Fabijan:

“You guys got up really early this morning,” he said.

It was only then I realized that we’d both forgotten about the time falling back an hour overnight. We finally understood why we had such trouble finding an open exchange office, and why Tempo had been largely devoid of human life.

We crossed back into Serbia, but since the police had taken the white card that was my Declaration of Temporary Residence when we left, I’d have to go back to the police station and get another one -- the first of many such trips in the years to come. When I went to the police station in Sombor that Monday to get another white card, the lady behind the desk looked really confused. Her lips didn’t form any words, but her facial expression seemed to say, “You left Serbia and came back?” It’s also possible that she’d seen a U.S. passport as often as she’d seen a guy with two fs in his last name like me. Serbian is written exactly as it’s spoken and vice versa, so the second f at the end of Ratcliff would be unnecessary.

I left Sombor for Novi Sad not long that return trip to the police station, but my 90-day clock never stopped ticking. My first two weeks in Novi Sad were the hardest. Not only was I sleeping on Ivica’s (someone I barely knew) couch, but I also couldn’t register at his address because he only rented the apartment. I needed to legally report my presence to the Novi Sad police in exchange for yet another white card, but I first had to hope that Fabijan and Slavica - especially Slavica - hadn’t already reported to the police in Sombor that I was no longer living with them. Fabijan had at least been gracious near the end of my time in Sombor, telling me one day that he didn’t ask me to come, so he wouldn’t ask me to leave. Slavica, on the other hand, struck me as the type of vindictive cunt who would snitch on me to the cops out of pure spite, since it turned out that I wasn’t the rich, look-at-me symbol of American excess she needed to trot out in public to stroke her ego and become the envy of the neighborhood.

If Slavica decided to rat me out to the police in Sombor, I would have had to go to the police in Novi Sad with either the owner of Ivica’s apartment or at least her lična karta (national ID) as proof she knew I was living there. Given how my welcome in Sombor had worn out, and the fact that the lady who owned the place had no idea I’d crashed on the couch, this wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing. During those two weeks, all I did hope and pray the lady didn’t show up unannounced, as I had. I worried about being kicked out of the country since I could have had police from both cities after me. I thought even Serbia’s bureaucratic system, which was notorious for making things extraordinarily difficult on its own citizens, would be able to produce all the evidence it needed to deport me as something of a persona non grata within a matter of minutes.

Tick... tick... tick...

There were times when Sanja’s business partner and fellow English teacher, Maja, would take me to their school in Šid to get my trimestral obligation out of the way. Strangely, from Novi Sad, it was easier to get to Šid by briefly crossing into Croatia rather than staying in Serbia the whole time. Maja told me she’d seen cops prop their feet up on the swinging gate on the Serbian side of the border to combat boredom, and she even heard one admit to watching westerns to pass the time.

More than once after I started working with Daniel and the man in the cowboy hat, we’d hop in the man in the cowboy hat’s yellow Chevy Spark, cross the border with Croatia to get the exit stamp, and just turn right back around. I could feel that the women who worked in the division of the Novi Sad police department responsible for keeping track of foreigners were growing more and more suspicious of me. One lady, in particular, had long black hair, and eyes that seemed to burn a hole through my forehead every time she looked my way. To this day, I don’t know if she was angry because she saw me so many times, or because my appearances frequently interrupted her morning coffee service, and make her do work that didn’t involve her playing hostess.

Whatever her motivation, or lack thereof, I wished she’d focused her energy on stopping crimes committed by Serbian citizens, and let my single American life slide. Besides, her country’s institutions of law enforcement had such a history of helping criminals get out of the country with fake passports in the nineties, that I didn’t think any policemen would pay attention to the fact I was trying to stay in my real American one almost two decades after their most recent round of wars ended (at least on paper). That is until I heard a knock at the door one day.

I’d been living with Zs. under somewhat more comfortable conditions. With Sanja’s help, I’d managed to get the mandatory health insurance I needed because Serbia’s visa regime was undergoing changes meant to harmonize its regulations with those of the European Union. We’d also managed to get my fiancée visa in just under the wire. Due to another change, if I hadn’t transitioned to a fiancée visa before my last tourist visa had expired, I would have had to leave the country for three months before being allowed back in. Some kind of 90 days in, 90 days out rule had been put on the books by the time the knock came.

Zs. was still in her underwear. I’d just finished my latest hack job attempt at shaving. I’d nicked myself in too many places to count, and applied dozens of tiny toilet paper squares to my face to curtail the bleeding. The sound of the knock startled us both. A quick glance through the peephole in the door showed two uniformed police officers waiting outside. Zs. ran to put on pants, I ran to dispose of any flyers advertising schools of foreign languages, worried that if the wrong eyes fell upon them, I’d find myself having to explain away almost indisputable evidence that I’d been teaching English under the table because I had no legal right to do so. This time, I didn’t have to worry about Slavica. I had to worry that the mere sight of an officer’s holstered gun would compel me to tell the truth, just as it had when I was a kid, and my dad would stroll in to the kitchen every Sunday night dressed in uniform to work bingo, and share in the roast my mom had made more often than not.

Yes dad, I know I currently have a C in Algebra. Yes, dad, I know I can do anything if I apply myself, I’ll bring the textbook home and read ahead every night until my grade gets better. Yes, dad, I know Timmy Smith’s father is a piece of shit, and Dr. Jones didn’t get to be a doctor by running around with the idiots he went to high school with.

Tick... tick... tick...

Surprisingly, these officers didn’t want much from me. One just stood around staring off into the distance at God knows what, the other sat on the couch asking Zs. and me questions. I can’t remember how many bloodied squares of toilet paper fell from my face like snowflakes from the sky during the interview, but I do remember the officer asking me if I was born in New Orleans (where my passport was issued), and asking Zs. what her occupation was. Our encounter with Novi Sad’s finest wasn’t anything like the hours-long interrogations I’d come to expect from watching too many true crime shows on television. I didn’t know if these guys had honed their interview skills by watching reruns of Columbo, or if, from behind their desks, they were just too worn out and disinterested to care. I imagined them like my dad, content at their keyboards or relive their glory days of kicking in doors and slapping handcuffs on supposed bad guys.

Satisfied with our answers that I lived of remittance from relatives abroad, and Zs. was a university student, the officers turned to leave. I couldn’t shake the notion that even though the leftover bloody toilet paper snowflakes seemed to fall from my face all at once -- out of relief that, like me, they no longer had to cover up what they’d been hiding -- one of the officers would catch sight a neglected school flyer, turn to me like Lieutenant Columbo, and say: “Just one more thing.”

I flashed back to an experience I had with my dad when I was about fifteen. He’d insisted on taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go. As I begrudgingly opened the passenger door to his black, beat up 1987 Cutlass Sierra S, fully expecting us to ride together in silence, he looked at me and said, out of nowhere: “Your mother tells me you’ve been saying fuck a lot.” I knew I was busted, so I had no choice but to come clean about my affinity for a certain four-letter word.

More than a dozen years after the confrontation about my love of fuckery, as the officers came closer to our apartment door, I could still see myself cracking under the slightest pressure of being asked just one more thing. In an instant, I thought my whole charade would come crashing down, and I’d have to tell the whole, unadulterated truth to yet another a cop:

Yes, officer, I’m teaching English in your country illegally. Yes, officer, the monthly transfers into my bank account aren’t enough to live on, even here. Yes officer, I fully intend to marry this psycho bit... I mean, uh... fine woman.

I was so close to freedom from the inquisition, yet I had to remind myself that even as the doorknob turned, I would not be truly liberated until our apartment door had closed and the officers’ footsteps had faded down the hallway. Despite the years of practice I’d had with my dad, after our visit from Novi Sad’s boys in blue, I started feeling unsure of how long I could maintain my smokescreen of half-truths and one-word answers to authority figures. I began to entertain the idea of leaving Serbia before my next 90-day period came to an end. I knew full well that thanks to Zs. I had a fiancée visa which lasted a year, but after years of “tourist” trips across borders and back, 90 days had become my default measurement of time.

When such questions came from behind the glass that shielded one of my fellow countrymen at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, I started thinking that even they didn’t want me to stay. Zs. had to visit the embassy multiple times as part of the application process for the scholarship she would eventually win to study in the United States. I don’t remember why they called me over during one of her visits, but I do remember the man behind the glass looking at Zs., looking back and me, then asking, “Did you marry her yet?”

I felt like I was on an episode of a popular “life unscripted” TV show where the contestants (if you can call them that) have 90 days to get married before one has to leave whichever country they’re in. 90 days isn’t enough time to know if a job’s a good fit, or if a commitment you made to drop extra pounds has become a lifestyle change, let alone if a person’s a good match to spend the rest of your life with. Sure, the contestants’ day-to-day activities, fights, and occasional intimate moments might make interesting fodder for the masses who’d rather watch navigate their lives instead of living their own, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that contestants’ lives didn’t really start until the cameras stopped.

The producers of those so-called unscripted shows know this, but they’re still laughing all the way to the bank. They’re betting their audiences would prefer sitting back, cracking open a White Claw (or munching on a bowl of movie theater butter popcorn), and watching someone else’s relationship Hindenburg to working on themselves. it’s easier to indulge in the hard seltzer craze, pretend to care about koala colonies threatened Australian bushfires, or flex to your friends about how much you love your new sheets made from ethically-obtained cotton than it is to unplug the Wi-Fi and really try to fix your life. Zs.’s favorite “life unscripted” show was about brides-to-be trying to find the right wedding dress. I wonder why that was?

I know these shows exist because I’m just as guilty of watching them as anyone else. Some moments make me cringe, others make me cry, and a third grouping makes me want to yell at the television about what I hadn’t seen as much as what I had, thanks to some magical, manipulative editing.

Perhaps the best approach is to take life one day at a time, whether you’re battling an addiction, trying to put on a pretty face for the camera, or take one off after the lights have gone down. Either way, the show must go on.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

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Jellyfish by Ana

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

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The Awful Truth

During my first three years as an undergrad at Ohio State, I stayed in the dorm closest to Ohio Stadium, the same one Jeffrey Dahmer lived in when he was a student there. Dorm-room technology had probably changed in as many ways as it stayed the same between Jeffrey’s era and mine. In the micro-fridge that had probably been in the room since Jeff roamed the halls of this building named after one of Mr. Lincoln’s acts that freed land instead of people, I don’t remember finding a singular earlobe encased in ice, or a perfectly preserved pubis devoid of flesh that may have once been a good luck charm to suggest that I’d be having friends for dinner in the same room where Mr. Dahmer may have studied the intricacies of human anatomy in preparation for his career of choice.

The first of the two rooms of my suite had corkboard filled with holes that were probably as much natural as manmade above two desks that sat catty-cornered from one another. As I began to unpack my computer and set it on the desk closest to the disappointingly barren micro-fridge, my brother told me that the Internet connection I was about to plug into was the equivalent of a firehose at a time the standard was a dialup garden hose with kinks in it every six inches.

The bedroom had two beds, catty-cornered from one another like the desks in the front room, and shelving between them that was probably installed around the same time somebody thought a micro-fridge was a good idea. I wasn’t much interested in the shelves, or rock-paper-scissoring it for who got which one. I didn’t want to piss in the corner like a dog marking its territory either, despite the fact that listening to my dad tapping the steering wheel while butchering Incense and Peppermints by Strawberry Alarm Clock on the drive up made doing stop drop and roll in traffic, or deliberately wetting myself just for the attention seem like great ideas.

All I was focused on when it came to the bedroom was putting my Rita Hayworth poster on the wall above the head of my bed using some bluish silly putty the manufacturer said wouldn’t damage the walls. Once I stuck the poster to the wall, I only pretended to ignore it, secretly hoping that someone would oblige my reference to The Shawshank Redemption by calling me Andy, telling me to guard my pickax carefully because folks around the dorm loved surprise inspections, or wondering aloud how long it would take me to tunnel through the wall with it.

The eight of us sharing the 1150s suite that year had been scattered throughout Ohio before uniting on Ohio State’s Columbus campus that fall. The only exceptions were one guy from Illinois, and one from Pennsylvania. As college freshmen, we were terrified, yet hungry for new experiences at the same time. Who felt what, when, and why probably varied from man to man. I was more terrified than hungry, yet still eager to prove to myself that I could transverse the sprawling campus without the assistance of the same transportation from the Office of Disability Services that had spectacularly backfired during orientation by either showing up late or not at all to shuttle me back and forth between placement tests.

When I wasn’t out trying to make it from point A to point B, my roommates and I were spending too much of our free time playing video games. At one point, the eight of us were playing old-school Punch-Out on our computers at the same time using emulators like NESticle to reach into the past and bring bits (bytes) our childhoods to the present. That said, most of our screen time was spent playing Madden. I don’t know how he did it, but Illinois would play as the Falcons every time, and constantly call audibles that made Chris Chandler, Jamal Anderson, and Terance Mathis look like first-ballot Hall of Famers. We were powerless to stop him, but that didn’t stop us from trying.

When it became clear that the eight of us wouldn’t try to kill each other except in Madden, we began decorating the walls of our suite’s common area with posters. Rita stayed in my bedroom not only because she gave off more of the prison cell vibe I was going for, but also because my Rita Hayworth story was both too obvious and too personal for anyone who happened by to see. I was content with the ah-ha moments and laughter that came when a near stranger comprehended the thinly-veiled reference to one of my favorite movies, but I also that hoped the same near-strangers wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at me that I balled my eyes out every time I watched the ending.

One day, someone hung a poster displaying an awful truth in our common area. It was black and white with The Awful Truth written in all caps across the top. Below that, there were symbols you'd see on the respective signs for men’s and women’s restrooms. The female’s heart was drawn where it anatomically should have been, the male’s heart was in his dick. I got a good laugh each time I saw it, but it was also a stark reminder of how inexperienced I was with the opposite sex at age 19.

Back then, I controlled my libido the only way I knew how: constant unfettered release. My consumption of adult content wasn’t as bad as it would become as Internet connection speeds got even faster, but I won’t lie and say that I didn’t take advantage of the high-speed connection of the time for some high-speed gratification. When 19-year-old me met a real woman, I had no clue what to do, what to say, or how to act. I didn’t know who I was at that time, probably because I was setting millions of little pieces of myself free far too often. It was easier to lose myself in the pornscape than hold on to what naturally made me a man. There, I didn’t have to think of women as real people who could challenge me. There, I never had to be afraid that a woman would call me a creep if I expressed sexual interest. Women across the pornscape never said no, not even to a 19-year-old like me, and they always seemed to enjoy whatever their fellow performers did to them.

Years later, when I met the woman who would become my fiancée, she was also 19. I’d been leading the English conversation club at the American Corner in Novi Sad, where Zs. was a student at the university. I assume that’s how she found me, but I can’t be sure. I got a friend request on Facebook stating she’d added me. She had no profile picture, and of course, I didn’t recognize her name. Despite these obvious red flags, I acted per the awful truth of males thinking with the little head instead of the big one and accepted her request sight unseen. And to think, when I was 19, I thought my dad was an asshole for doing essentially the same thing at a time before social media exploded.

At first, I thought she was just picking my brain for its knowledge of English. As a student of the language, I assumed she was happy to learn whatever I had to offer as a native speaker in a place where native English speakers were as rare as walls untouched by nationalistic or phallic graffiti. The red flags became even brighter when she’d just so happen to be at the end of my street before I could cross into the city center where one of the schools at which I taught was located. Glad for the attention, neither of my heads was thinking straight. The big one began to fill with love dreams brought to music by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt - Zs. was, after all, from a predominantly Hungarian-speaking part of Serbia - the little one and its attachment began to fill with blood. Honestly, I didn’t feel as intensely attracted to her as I had to other women. I won’t say she made it too easy, only that the ego wants to want more than it wants to have.

The interior of her apartment was as cold as her hand the first time I held it. Still, I loved waking up beside her in the morning and watching a VH1 station that played music videos as we lay beneath the covers. Daniel repeatedly tried to convince me that Zs. was working for the Security Information Agency of Serbia (BIA), which meant she was using her sex to pump me for information. He offered to put her under surveillance as often as he congratulated me on being with a nineteen-year-old. Paranoia would slowly seep into my big head as I replayed his words of utter conviction that I was sleeping with a real-life spy whenever Zs. and I were together. Predictably, my little head could not resist the temptation that I’d so often prayed God would not lead me into while growing up Catholic.

When I saw how ridiculously high her heating bill was, I began to entertain the idea of asking her to move in with me. Our relationship was as new and exciting as it was unknown; I thought I loved her. Plus, I needed someone with whom I could split the bills after escaping the Crazy House and renting an apartment that a fellow teacher had occupied before returning to Seattle. I thought it was a win-win situation for both of my heads.

But, red flags kept waving even before we decided to live under the same roof. Sex with Zs. had been nowhere near as fulfilling for me as it had been with S. Zs. and I never bonded in the same way, however briefly, that S. and I had. This wasn’t entirely Zs.’s fault. Since being kicked out of the house in Sombor and letting my thoughts run wild about my uncertain future, I hadn’t practiced yoga. To this day, I’m convinced that the practice allowed me to enjoy sex with S. so much because not only had the technical difficulties of Sombor kept me from any contact with porn, but, I’d learned to discipline my body in ways I never had before. This combination allowed me to consistently last as long as I wanted, and feel the unchartered contentment of holding S. in my arms after making love without the emptiness of a genital sneeze at the end. The contentment of the feel of her long black hair across my bare stomach as she’d rise slightly to settle herself on top of me, and kiss me upon coming back down. The ecstasy of sinking more deeply into one another’s being, the heat of the summer sun trying to burn its way through the curtains that kept us from prying eyes all the while. The rapture of neither wanting the moment to end.

Zs. did not enjoy cunnilingus nearly as much as S., another red flag. To make matters worse, as the mental and physical discipline instilled in me by yoga faded away, I lost control over my body and mind that I once had. if I could tell Zs. wasn’t into it, or I just wanted sex to be over, I’d ejaculate too early, or almost immediately after penetration out of spite. Eventually, I couldn’t withhold my seed for more than ten minutes if I tried. Since I’d gone back to regularly consuming porn, I found myself envious of how the male performers seemed to be able to both last forever, and ejaculate on cue. Since Zs. didn’t fancy cunnilingus, but could easily lose herself in British literature (she would repeatedly tell me that I just wouldn’t understand Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes), I privately wondered if I could spice up our relationship by having us pretend to be in a 1960s-themed black-and-white British porn mystery called Alfred Hitch’s Cock Presents, which would later be reimagined as a series of erotic nursery rhymes adapted for after-dark television, featuring the largest of black male talent: Hickory Dickory Cock.

The degree and forethought of my fantasies were at least partially the results of the feast-or-famine lifestyle of substitute teacher taking its toll on me. Some days I’d have three classes at multiple schools. Others, my phone wouldn’t ring at all. I’d be stuck in our apartment watching the slow, flickering death or my laptop screen, and wanting to save it more than save myself. On rare occasions when my laptop was closed, I’d be locked in a staring contest with the vacuum cleaner Zs. insisted we buy. One part of me wanted to run it, another didn’t see the point. If I didn’t do it, she’d yell at me for not helping out around the house. If I did, no matter how hard I tried, she’d be unsatisfied with the results. She’d tell me I couldn’t do anything right, and slap me across the face so hard that imprints of her fingers would be left across whichever of my cheeks got in the way of her palm. Finally, and frequently after long days at the university, she’d do it herself, and make sure I could see the contortions or her angry, embittered, I’m-going-to-kill-you face all the while.

I could have been a better lover and partner to Zs., there’s no doubt, but as both our familiarity and dissatisfaction with one another grew, her attacks became more frequent, and the polarity drained from the relationship.

The awful truth.

I couldn’t go the cops even though the police station was right around the corner. No one would have believed that my fiancée beat me up, not in a Serbian society still paying the price for repeatedly looking backward while others around it had been opening up to the world, drinking beer from tallboys, and eating lunch at noon for years. Besides, I wasn’t sure what, if any, rights I had on their turf. I like to think that that I was somewhere between the Hungarians and the fifteen layers of downward-rolling shit that separated them from the Roma in Serbian societal hierarchy, but maybe even that’s being generous.

Even as it became clear the relationship wouldn’t work, I couldn’t just hop on a plane and go home. I didn’t want to think of myself as a coward. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t entertain the thought of just turning my back on it all, and watching it burn like one of the precious books Zs. said I’d never understand. Tuesdays would have been my best chance. She had French class at 7:30 A.M. and was at the university all day. I was too scared (scarred) to run the vacuum, so instead of porn fantasies starring Zs. and me, I’d dream of packing everything in the same suitcases I’d drug behind me when I was practically homeless after getting kicked out of the house in Sombor, and never looking back.

One particular Tuesday, amidst my thoughts of flying home and seeing her jaw hit the floor upon walking into an empty apartment, Zs. came home unexpectedly. She had terrible menstrual cramps, and was practically convulsing in pain the moment she walked in the door; I’d never seen anything like it. Through clenched teeth, she managed to tell me how to ask for maxi pads in Serbian, and I went to the corner store to buy some.

The things you do for dissolution.

Even after she stopped slapping me around (her friends told her she was mean to me), I couldn’t bring myself to love her again. My sometimes-intentional-sometimes-not premature ejaculation paled in comparison to her capacity for cruelty. I questioned myself as a man for allowing such domestic violence to occur on my watch. I felt as if it was my fault for allowing her verbal and physical abuse to go on for so long. Maybe I did this because I was taught that girls don’t hit boys, and boys don’t hit girls, however untrue that turned out to be.

Zs. may have been a minority, but she was still a Serbian citizen. If I fought back, and she went to the police with even the tiniest bruise claiming to be a victim, I reasoned that they’d be all too happy to throw me in prison. If the media got wind of it, I could have easily become the new symbol of American aggression against peaceful Serbia. Even a country whose conservative political currents had had no problem looking back over 600 years to their ancestors’ glorious defeat battle of Kosovo wouldn’t have to go back that far - the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia - to find an example of bloodshed in which Americans like me could easily be blamed. I could see the title card of the Netflix miniseries chronicling my relationship with Zs. in my mind’s eye:

Američki nasiljnik for Serbian-speaking audiences, Bruise is the New Bomb for English-speaking ones.

So I waited. There were many nights when Zs. and I wouldn’t even look at each other after pulling out the sofa bed to go to sleep. I’d stare into the darkness of the ceiling above, dream of coming home in a coffin, and wonder what the hell I’d gotten myself into by agreeing to share a studio apartment of 28 square meters with a woman eight years younger who made me watch Ally McBeal reruns and romcoms until I wanted to throw up. In 2011, when she got a scholarship to study at Montclair State University in New Jersey, I knew I’d have to leave Serbia too, as she had become my basis for staying in the country.

I came home that summer. When Zs. tried to convince me to come to New Jersey and spend Thanksgiving with her that fall, I told her I wouldn’t. Not long after, we broke up over Skype, the same means I’d used talk to my family while missing out on the previous four Thanksgivings.

I laugh when people ask me if I still talk to her. I don’t think I spoke to her even once after the Skype breakup. I stopped returning her calls because I wanted her to suffer, like I did when I was alone in my room in Sombor, or solitary in the darkness of my first night in the Crazy House.

I intentionally keep my emotional distance from most people these days. Yet there are times when I’m as sick of the sound of my voice as I am the company of others. Hoping Zs. would suffer was as ill-advised as trying to recapture the contentment of intercourse with S. as we shielded ourselves from the piercing summer sun. My attachment to feelings of that kind is the root of my suffering, not the feelings themselves. My cup may never runneth over, but I’ll find ways of filling it, ways to embrace experiences instead of attaching myself to outcomes. I might even read Flaubert’s Parrot, not out of spite, but curiosity.

That’s a truth I can live with. Not because it’s awful, but because it’s mine.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

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Ants

“Dave Matthews Band (DMB) was barred from playing in Chicago after the incident,” she said.

My thoughts immediately went back to my college dorm room, the last time I’d listened to DMB with any consistency. Ants Marching from Under the Table and Dreaming was one of my favorite songs the first 1000 times I heard it. I couldn’t understand 80% of the words Dave sang (OK, more like 95%), but through the years, Ants Marching became instantly recognizable to me. Wherever I heard that horn and drum beat, I was neither happy nor blood-boiling angry. I didn’t want to smoke or immediately run for another beer either.

I couldn’t help wondering if the guys in the band felt the same way about the song after playing it so many times. Had become their American Pie (Don McLean), a song that, if not played live, could mean blood in the streets? Or did they always give the people what they thought they wanted, just to keep themselves and their audience at least anatomically awake between self-induced altered states of consciousness?

I’m long-removed from a college dorm room, but I sometimes feel like a marching ant even today. I probably look like one in the windshields of the cars that have to wait to turn as I cross the street on my way to work every morning. If I’m lucky, there will be a long line of cars that can’t immediately make the right turn they so desperately want to because I’m doing my thing. If I’m really lucky, the cars at the back of the line start honking their horns at each other out of frustration because they can’t see who the holdup is: me. I love it when, after I’ve safely crossed, cars at the front of the queue speed up, their drivers either pissed for having lost thirty to forty-five seconds of their in-a-hurry-to-get-nowhere commute to my deliberate stride, or incredulous that people like me still use their legs to move rather than their own overpriced and oversized machines of choice.

Driving in on this highway All these cars end up on the sidewalk

Fortunately, not all of the animal kingdom moves about in SUVs Can you imagine two pseudo alpha male giraffes in Gold’s Gym t-shirts getting in a car accident because, instead of keeping their eyes on the road, they were too busy gawking at their phones because one of the penguins texted some nude photos of the newest female giraffe the whole zoo had been talking about? Some long-necked SOB forgot to activate the lane departure warning feature in their Escalade.

Anyway.

Like most of their animal kingdom counterparts in zoo confinement, humans can wander around absently, until something jolts them from an all-too-natural, blissfully unaware condition. Case in point would be the humans on an architectural boat tour that time in 2004 when a bus driver in a DMB convoy inexplicably decided to empty about 800 gallons of shit and god knows what else from the bus’s septic tank at the precise moment their boat passed by.

Poopgate was born.

Recently, I was also caught blissfully ignorant until I found a tiny ant making his way across my bedsheets one morning as I was making my bed. I thought it was odd to see just one ant, but I really didn’t put much thought into it. I just figured he’d partied too hard the night before, gotten roaring drunk on high-fructose corn syrup, and separated from his friends. Little did I know how close his friends were.

I’ve lived in my current apartment for almost a little over years. In all that time, it never occurred to me to clean underneath my oven. When you cook as much as I do, bits of chopped onion, severed celery, or minced-but-meant-to-dice mushrooms can fall through the crack that is the space between the countertop and the oven. There’s always been a small margin for error.

The tiny ants looked like bits of food or sauce that had splattered out of a pan and onto a virgin surface when I’d had the heat of the stove on too high for too long. Their purpose seemed singular: get over that (what probably appeared to them to be a) wall. If one had gotten lost in my bedroom, dozens if not hundreds had gorged themselves on the leftover buffet on the floor beneath my oven, and now, their corpulent asses were trying to showcase remarkable agility by scaling the wall between two separate counter spaces in my kitchen, like Marines battling the logs of an obstacle course. Only I couldn’t tell the Senior Drill Instructor ant from the confused ant-equivalent-of-testosterone-filled recruit ants.

Does his teeth, bite to eat and he’s rolling

It’s amazing how the perceived crisis of the ant invasion made me spring into action. Crises or any kind of stress had a funny way of snapping even my porn-addicted brain out of a Saturday morning post-ejaculation fog.

They all do it the same They all do it the same way

“How dare these ants force their way into my home. I’m going to kill them all,” I told myself. I could feel again, but I truly wanted nothing more than for those ants to be dead and gone so i could go back to cycling between my addictions to porn and living for the weekend. I knew the ants weren’t on my lease, so I wanted them out, as much to avoid being charged for unreported occupancy of my apartment as having hundreds of pairs of tiny eyes watching what I really did when the blinds were closed.

Hell, who was I kidding? At my addiction’s lowest point, I was engulfed in such a love affair with the performers on the screen that it might as well have been just the three, four, or five of us there: me, the computer screen, and however many people happened to be starring in whatever eight to twelve minute clip I’d either stumbled upon, or known I’d wanted from the moment I woke up in that morning. I knew the ants were there, but I still had to get my fix, no matter who else was watching.

She thinks, we look at each other Wondering what the other is thinking But we never say a thing And these crimes between us grow deeper

I evicted the ants fairly quickly thanks to help from a neighbor who had some over-the-counter insecticide, the maintenance staff who moved and finally cleaned under my oven, and the pest control company that treated my place amid the carnage of dead insect bodies frozen in miniature yet permanent Jesus Christ poses after betraying me one too many times.

I may have overcome the ants, but it’s taken much longer to overcome Saturday mornings’ post-ejaculation fog. I try to fill my time with creative endeavors instead of flying off the handle whenever a real or imagined tragedy happens, such as spilling coffee grounds gymnastics-style behind my washer and dryer, or having the washer decide to go out walking because I got greedy and filled it with things that would force it to go off balance instead of delaying my gratification until another, smaller, less intense load.

I shouldn’t need tragedies of invasion or violation to stir me into action. I too can remember being small, playing under the table and dreaming. I wish I could go back in time and stop myself from ever seeing that first porn video. I wish I could tell my younger self how many hours his future self would spend consuming porn, feeling like shit inside, then feeling just good enough to do it over, and over and over again.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

The first thing I did when I started my weeklong vacation from work yesterday was to start the stopwatch on my phone. Not because I wanted to have some immediate temporal value attached to any Porn Masturbation Orgasm achievement, but because I wanted something I could use to hold myself accountable. Something to remind myself of the time I could be and have been spending doing other things. I’ve always had the antlike scale-the-countertop intensity, but I lost it slight of it in a fantasy world of 34 DDs, reverse cowgirls and superhuman stimulus cocks that might as well have come (pardon the pun) out of comic books.

Now I’ve set out to get it back.

Take these chances Place them in a box until a quieter time Lights down, you up and die

Right on Dave. I imagine people in Chicago are still salty about poopgate, but at least I’ve grown beyond associating marching ants exclusively with my college years. Some might say that’s progress, yet I know I’ve got a long way to go.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

Text

Minutes

I’ve seen the musical Rent at least three times. One of the songs, probably Seasons of Love, has a line that asks how years are measured. The answer they came up with is 525,600 minutes. The time constraint got me thinking this Pride month about how many of those I spend on my phone. I remember having so many minutes as part of my cell phone plan, but the unlimited ones didn’t start after 9 P.M. Imagine that. Measuring how you use your phone based on how many minutes you spent talking to someone else rather than how many gigabytes of data you used all by yourself.

As I write, I’m attempting a digital detox by giving myself only so many minutes to look at my phone each day. I didn’t even take it with me to work yesterday, but I couldn’t shake an anxious feeling I did bring along. It was as if a part of me was missing. You’d have thought I was in mourning. I feel something similar if I’m unlucky enough to forget my watch. I’ll stare down expectantly at the obvious tan lines on my wrist seeking validation that time is indeed passing, but not counting how many of the 525,600 minutes I had left in 2019 and beyond. If I’ve worn my watch but forgotten my phone, the left front pocket of my jeans feels as empty as my wrist without its timepiece. Maybe my soul already was empty. The two questions that consistently emerge are how did I get to this point, and how can I reclaim my minutes instead of just watching them pass?

There are unexpected moments that pique my attention. The first times I heard the phrase: the modern Stone Age family, and the piano outro on In The Meantime by 90s alternative rock outfit Spacehog come to mind. Neither of them made much sense.

In an ode to another of my vices, I recently watched a video in which the author stated that by living for the weekend, your average 22-year-old in the United States has a life expectancy of approximately eleven years if you consider hours spent working a 9-5 job, sleeping, and medical conditions brought on by age that cause one’s quality of life to deteriorate. I’m sure there were even more factors, but if I tell you everything, I’d pretty much rip away the joy of self-discovery.

I wish that my journey toward self-discovery could fill me with the childlike enthusiasm of the athletes of the Special Olympics I saw in action this morning. Not that I wish I had Down’s Syndrome like many of them, but I couldn’t help noticing how those athletes who live with it always seemed to be in IDGAF (I Don’t Give a Fuck) mode. I was envious.

Learning to live with envy isn’t easy without another emotion or activity to balance it out. I won’t go as far as saying I want an extra chromosome or advocating for a specifically-targeted line of 24 and Me DNA tests. Still, I could learn something from the athletes of the Special Olympics. They have every reason to be pissed about the shitty hand life and dealt them on the surface, and the minutes stolen from them due to circumstances beyond their control. If nothing else, watching the athletes compete made me think twice about giving away my minutes so easily to activities designed to take my minutes away.

A few days ago, I watched part of a video presentation in which the speaker said something simple, yet potentially very powerful depending on how I chose to react to it. He admitted to having heard the phrase somewhere else, but I’ll give him credit for it because I don’t know the source. The simple phrase was: “Create more than you consume.” I started ruminating on those words the moment I heard them, and have yet to continue watching the presentation. Why? It speaks to the struggle I’ve had when it comes to seeking validation. It flies in the face of the notion that the things you own end up owning you. It was the rarest of phrases that I could fundamentally relate to rather than just powering through to the next page, segment, or some other demarcation only to feel an ever-fleeting sense of accomplishment. After I heard this, something clicked. I understood that if I wanted to achieve anything worthwhile, I should stop giving myself away so easily when various opportunities present themselves.

I don’t want to break the rest of my life down into fifteen-minute increments, but I would like to relearn how to stay focused beyond the commercial breaks between major events.

When it comes to creative endeavors in which I engage to repurpose my time, I often think of two things I’ve attributed to Charles Bukowski. I’ll give him credit for saying that he tried to write two hundred shitty words a day and that he’d get letters from strangers who told him that Notes from a Dirty Old Man turned them on. Would I like an occasional letter from a stranger confessing that my writing made a bit more blood flow to their private parts? Sure, why not?

My lost minutes are like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan’s Neverland. Lost Boys had fallen out of their prams, and if they weren’t claimed within seven days, they’d be sent to Neverland, where their captain was the boy who wouldn’t grow up. My lost minutes can’t figure out who their captain is. The top contenders are anger, regret, pornography, irrelevant video clips, swirling thoughts, and superficial conversations. Oh, and the newly discovered (by me at least) assertion by Peter Pan that there were no lost girls. Girls were far too clever to fall out of their prams. Who knows why the author was already putting women on a pedestal before they were strong enough to stand on it. Maybe their baby legs couldn’t support the weight of the expectations they were already feeling.

If I believed that there were no lost girls, I might as well go all the way and start shouting from the hills that a certain shampoo really can bring a woman to orgasm, or that an electric toothbrush does remove 47% more plaque than manuals. Below the gum line even. Won’t somebody think of the goddamn gum line? All I had to do was watch thirty-second ads for each product at least one hundred times (thereby throwing more of my nonrenewable minutes in the trash) before I truly believed the messages they were pushing. After all, what're thirty seconds? Whatever stupid show I was watching or game I was playing would be right back, so why should I care?

If I shouldn’t care, why would I be angry? Because the doctor messed up either during or immediately after my birth? Should I be pissed that he was allowed to go on practicing medicine unimpeded, yet his mistake condemned me to a life of not exactly wanting to identify as a person with a disability, but also not wanting to milk my disability for unreasonable accommodation or financial gain? I have to laugh when I see those ads from lawyers trying to drum up clients on TV:

Was your child born with Cerebral Palsy?

Did you or a loved one serve in the Navy or work in a shipyard thereby risking exposure to asbestos?

Are you sick of no one letting you and your wheelbarrow ride the elevator in privacy due to your severe Orchitis?

What’s the point of surrendering my minutes to an emotion rooted deeply in my past when I have to live in the present? My clock has never stopped running from the moment I was born?

Long summer days remind me of the brief period that I felt close to my dad. I was fourteen going on fifteen in the summer of 1996. That’s when I began working on the service project requirement to attain the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America (fuck yeah). My project was to repaint the bleaches at Spartan Municipal Stadium, which almost every Scioto County schoolkid knows was the site of the first night game in the history of the National Football League.

Dad would wake my ass up at 6:30 A.M., and we’d go to the New Boston Wal-Mart to buy paint, trays, and rollers. In small glory-days-are-gone areas like Scioto County, Ohio, Wal-Mart(’s) had become the place to see and be seen. You could find almost everything American consumerist culture said you needed, and catch up with friends from school, church, or around the corner all under one roof.

If you were having a bad day, pushing your cart past the checkout aisles only pretending to look for the shortest line could make you feel better about yourself almost immediately. You were bound to see people of all shapes and sizes in various states of undress. It was an honest-to-God spectator sport, worthy of competing against the very Spartans whose stadium we were painting. The only real difference (other than the circumference of their waists) between those Spartans and the modern incarnation being that those modern warriors were people who’d largely given up on life, but still needed to sustain themselves before thinking of a way, creative or otherwise, to check out permanently. The fact that even this microcosm of modern life in my hometown was deserted when dad and I came in search of supplies should say something. The prevailing sentiment was that trips to cookie-cutter chain stores like Wally World were all small towns like mine had to look forward to.

As if attaining the rank of Eagle Scout would be my ticket out of that hilly hell hole. When’s the last time you heard someplace described by three straight words beginning with h? Supposedly, only two percent of the boys who join the scouts ever make it to the rank of Eagle. As if I too would grow up to be a United States senator, like John Glenn, or have a generation of kids grow up believing that the answers to life’s biggest questions could be found in my movies, like Steven Spielberg.

I may have believed some of the stories I heard about what other Eagle Scouts had done with their lives since reaching the top of the scouting mountain, but I wanted to get in and out of Wal-Mart on those summer mornings before people who were easy subjects for my dry, often callous sense of humor showed up. The biggest reason I loved pointing out the differences between us was that deep down, I knew there weren’t any.

If dad and I were lucky, we’d make it to the stadium before the heat of the season sucked up the breeze so typical of its early mornings, and left behind temperatures that only seemed to move in one direction. We hardly even talked. We just painted. A father and son who had both suffered loss at an early age, yet not dwelling on anything for once in their lives, just focusing on the task at hand. Not even a traveling band from Cleveland could interrupt us. We’d been instructed not to let anyone who wasn’t helping with the project inside the stadium gates. I’ll remember that summer painting with my dad for the rest of my life. Why should I still be angry at him for not being like the dads I saw on TV? Why should I regret that not a word has passed between us in almost five years? That summer was better than nothing. It gave me more time than a lot of boys got to spend with their dads, however unavailable they may have been. How many minutes have passed between now and then? How many have those have I already lost to useless anger and regret?

Porn’s been a hell of a time thief too. But is it guilty of stealing my time if I was a willing participant? In Q, I wrote at greater length about my addiction and struggling to overcome it than I will here. For now, I’m mainly concerned about the theft of time. I began my meteoric descent into the pornscape at about the same time as my rise through the ranks of scouting. If John and Steven could have only seen what was just the beginning of my life out of uniform. What started as a curiosity ballooned into a serious problem because, for years for the average 22-year-old living for the weekend, I didn’t ownership of the why behind it. I thought watching short spurts (which reflected more on me than them) of acrobatics executed by male and female performers with both surgical enhancements and natural gifts could permanently take the place of genuine intimacy forged with a real partner.

What started as a weekend thing with the sound off and the blinds closed became more and more of a wide-open, sound-no-higher-than-twelve (I had to show some restraint for Christ’s sake), IDGAF, who-would-notice-me-anyway thing. I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted on porn rather than creating or consuming something of real value to the person I could become. Porn was a nasty reminder of what they always say about potential: It just means you haven’t done it yet. I knew that those who acted in and sent it out into the world didn’t give a damn about me, but the real tragedy was that I didn’t give a damn about myself. I often wonder who I’d be, and what I would have accomplished by now if I’d stopped my recidivistic porn use a long time ago, but that’s in the past, and time waits for no man as it marches on. I have a much better idea now of who I was and who I want to be.

At least that’s what I tell myself until a clip of a video I watched one Monday morning, or Wednesday night (what’s the difference) flashes through my dreams. I don’t care as much about the actresses’ measurements or what she was doing in the clip as much as I do being able to see her face, but having no idea what her name is. You’re nobody if nobody’s watching.

The intellectual part of me takes over. I become obsessed with finding her name, or at least what she calls herself in front of the camera. Intellectual curiosity, or so I say, leads me back down a rabbit hole I’d fought for so long to climb out of. Urges win the minutes. My streak ends quickly and has to start all over again, way back at zero.

At least I found out her name’s Britney. With one t and an e.

If I ever woke up feeling less hardcore, or less like dwelling on some perceived slight from my past, no matter how recent or distant, I’d tap the thumbnail of a popular site for posting video clips that came pre-installed on my phone. If it was already there before I even bought the damn thing, that means it was supposed to be, and I was supposed to use it. Besides, its a library of largely short clips that only take five, seven or ten minutes to watch. I need this information if I’m going to be able to seamlessly work references from an episode of an animated show that originally aired twenty-five years ago into current conversation. I need to be able to quickly recall the hardest college football hits of all time if I’m going to have a shot at being accepted during Monday morning water cooler talk with no one in particular during the season. I need to know why women reject men or the benefits of making a schedule and sticking to it. It’s okay. Britney doesn’t even have to know.

They’re just minutes. I’m still young. My hair hasn’t even started to go gray. There’s still time. There will always be. Time’s my friend. Blah Blah Blah.

At the end of the day, all of my excuses were lies. Whether they stemmed from negative emotions like anger or regret, or destructive behaviors like watching porn or too many other, non-explicit videos. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. I spent too long avoiding resistance. I’d talk about putting in the work, but at the core of my being, I wasn’t into it. I’d have much rather had someone tell me what to do with my minutes instead of holding myself accountable for how I chose to use them. I was the greatest thief of my own creative space, not a video clip, or a performer with fake tits or a nine-inch cock.

Me.

I can’t get the lost minutes back, but I can turn my back on Neverland, and ask myself “What if I could,” instead of saying, “This is why I can’t.”

525,600 minutes? How about the rest of a lifetime? Not given away, but carefully measured. One second at a time. I’ll take that any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years ago

Text

Insertive

“Hey beautiful, can I buy you dinner,” he said to the girl walking in the opposite direction and on the other side of Dunavska Street. I wasn’t part of the interaction, but I was so embarrassed at his words that could I feel blood either rushing to or draining from my face. Whether it bubbled beneath my cheeks or pooled at my feet, I couldn’t believe he’d been so bold as to yell out his invitation to a complete stranger from such a distance. This was something I’d never had the guts to do because I was too busy living in my own head.

“How can you just come out and say something like that,” I’d ask Daniel each time I’d witness him approach a stranger and suggest a date.

“You just need to be more insertive,” he’d say. “Insertive? You mean assertive,” I’d correct him.

The first time I heard him use this word of his own creation, the English teacher in me died a little, but I quickly gave up on pointing out his mistakes. Daniel most likely understood the point I was making, but he couldn’t have cared less. He’d just look through me with a blank expression on his face, his attention focused a thousand yards behind me, on something only a former soldier could see.

Regardless of which direction my blood flowed when he spoke, part of me was envious of his direct approach to women. I thought Daniel and I couldn’t have been more different. As a soldier, he told me, he’d once been built like a brick shithouse; a shithouse whose dream of serving in the Special Forces had been shattered because his arm got fucked up after spending hours in a prone position with a rifle in the field of Kosovo. Shithouse? Me? I couldn’t even medically qualify for military service. Daniel openly stated his desire for revenge on the doctor he blamed for derailing his military career. I’d silently curse the doctor who delivered me for taking me off oxygen too soon, or my dad for not being like the ones I saw on television while we lived under the same roof.

Daniel wasn’t concerned about what my dad said to me when I was I was six years old. He didn’t mind if a woman he’d randomly asked to dinner from across the street just kept walking. His biggest complaint was that he didn’t know what to do with downtime, something we had more than our fair share of.

At my boss’s recommendation, I’d taken Daniel in sight unseen. He needed a roof over his head, so I agreed to let him stay at my place. I had space since my roommate at the time was pursuing a modeling career, riding the cock carousel, or both in Belgrade. I hadn’t seen her for at least a month, and though I knew she could walk in at any moment, I didn’t give a shit. All I really knew about Daniel before meeting him for the first time was that he’d worked with my boss at an American consulate in Germany when both were in the Army, and he’d ben living there on some sort of pension that was the result of his arm injury. He’d hit a rough patch with his wife, and even though he’d miss his daughter like crazy, he and his unapologetic sexual appetite were driving in a station wagon full of hard cases to Serbia to either try something different, or relive his glory days.

Daniel’s insatiable aversion to downtime led him to realize that my boss was screwing us over long before I did. The only phrase he seemed to utter more often than “Hey beautiful...” or “It is what it is” was “I knew I should have gone to the Philippines. I have people there.” I didn’t ask if his people were ex-Army, ex-cons, or just expats avoiding this expensive American life on islands most Americans couldn’t find on a map. If I didn’t ask, I couldn’t know, and I figured ignorance would keep me safe for a while. If Daniel craved action, I was just happy to be at the party. Having tunnel vision to light your way will do strange things to a man, whether he sees the light at the end as a beacon of personal freedom, or a signal of an oncoming train.

As much as I tried to pretend Daniel and I were different, we had more in common than I cared to admit. Both of us were searching for something. Both of us bought in to promises from our boss that were filled with more hot air than substance. We both had reasons to be angry with doctors over medical mistakes.

For years, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted nothing more than to separate myself from my experiences with him or embrace them through writing. All I could say for sure was that I wanted, as much as I needed, to make sense of them. Occasionally, I think of Daniel as my Tyler Durden, an alter ego like the one from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club that I used to experience things my conscious mind would not allow me to. Of course, Daniel and I weren’t one and the same person, but I allowed his influence over me to create a different persona -- a more insertive me -- that could switch on at any time.

In one particularly telling episode, I needed money because my teaching salary hadn’t come out from under table yet, and the savings I had back in the States was either running low or totally gone. Such was the life of a substitute English teacher. My phone could make any number of sounds beckoning me to any school at any moment, but I never knew when or if I’d be paid. Daniel was in the kitchen; I was about to go to the small bathroom at the top of the stairs. By chance, I looked down into a greenish vase that had somehow ended up under the staircase. The vase had become the final resting place of black bra my roommate had discarded after a night of partying. “Bitch,” I said to myself as I picked it up, half expecting a matching pair of panties to land at my feet -- she had a reputation for not wearing them, as Daniel and I had discovered one night while scrolling through photos on my digital camera -- but that didn’t happen. Instead, I saw something glisten: a ring. In a wave of emotion cresting somewhere between lust, jealousy, and a thirst for vengeance, I decided to take the diamond to a jeweler to see how much I could get for it.

I was unaccustomed to being so sure that I wanted to be so bad. But at that moment, I wanted my carefree party-girl roommate to suffer, to lose, to lack something -- anything -- at a time when she wanted for nothing. She was technically a student at the University of Novi Sad, but she’d openly bragged to me about her family paying off her professors to give her credit for attending classes she had no interest in. She lived off monetary support from her father, who worked at a food processing plant, and countless other male sponsors who wanted nothing more than a shot at the pussy she’d so accidentally-on-purpose displayed for my camera. I, on the other hand, wasn’t sure when my phone would ring again, which could mean someone needed me to teach a class, or was just curious if I still existed.

“Let’s sell this shit,” I told Daniel.

Like I said, I knew she could’ve come through the door at any moment, but this was also one of those rare moments when I truly didn’t give a fuck.

It was awesome.

Daniel did some of his customary “Hey beautiful! Can I buy you dinner” approaches as we got closer to a jewelry store. As usual, they made me so uncomfortable that I hoped I’d throw up in my mouth a little so I’d have an excuse to look away. But then, between thrusts of sexual intent, he said something I’d never heard anyone say before:

“Do you want me to switch on?”

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

Almost instantly, and maybe through the work of his own Tyler Durden, he started treating the diamond I was carrying like his personal protectee. He began walking much closer me, and constantly scanning the horizon for any threats. Maybe he was expecting a piano to fall from the sky, or a pigeon to waddle too close. It was like I had my own bodyguard, but this one couldn’t be abated by a few notes from Whitney Houston. If consumers gave in and bought the soundtrack to The Bodyguard within a few bars of I Will Always Love You, Daniel’s resolve to be a real bodyguard only intensified with every step.

When we stepped into a jewelry store, I awkwardly tried to explain to the man behind the counter why we were there. Daniel didn’t speak Serbian, so he just kept scanning our surroundings for ballsy pigeons, falling pianos, gypsies, or dangers of his own creation foolish enough to try to enter the space around me or the diamond. The man behind the counter took out one of those magnifiers you only see in jewelry stores and looked closely at the specimen I’d presented him. My stomach turned with anticipation, almost in sync with his hands as they turned the ring from side to side inspecting it. I hoped he’d give me some good news, the kind I’d almost forgotten existed. I hoped being able to sell the diamond would mean I wouldn’t have to worry about paying rent, bills (at least for a little while), or money from teaching that may or may not come out from under the table on time. However, life in the Balkans had also taught me to prepare for anything, especially disappointment.

When his eyes finally came up to meet mine, I was so nauseous that I surprised myself by not throwing up right in his face.

“This is cubic zirconia,” he said.

My heart (and stomach) sank. You’d have thought I’d just seen Daniel make one of his trademark approaches, or get slapped by a woman whose meathead boyfriend in a military haircut, dark sunglasses, and year-round track pants had seen the whole thing crash and burn from a distance. This was worse. This was reality slapping me. Even Daniel’s switched on personal protection skills couldn’t save me from the hard truth that our little adventure had been for naught. Part of me wanted to rub his face in it, like an owner to a dog that shits where it shouldn’t. I’d wanted to do the same to my dad for years but I’d never had the guts. I was afraid of what would happen if I stood up for myself. Desperation makes friends of enemies and enemies of friends.

I probably made more than one remark to Daniel about how his hyper assertiveness and aggressiveness reminded me of my dad. He’d just dismiss the comparison and start talking about how it wasn’t fair to a man to compare him to another man. Whether I wanted to hear it or not, I think he was right. It was his style that I wasn’t was used to. He’d notice something I did or didn’t say or do, make a direct remark about it, and tell me I should fix it. I remember thinking: Is this how men communicate with each other? Why does it strike me as so strange? Is this feeling what you feel when you belong to a generation of men raised by women, a generation conditioned to please them at home, in school, and throughout adulthood? Then you wonder why those same behaviors women taught you repel them in the realm of courtship?

At the end of the day, I attributed his assertiveness to military training and told myself that neither training nor assertiveness was something I’d ever have. But, if I’m being completely honest, Daniel didn’t begin my insertive journey, he just amplified it when a swift kick in the ass was exactly what I needed. I’d tried to go my own way as far back as 2001 when I started studying the story of Yugoslavia. It was just supposed to be a nice little fuck you from me to my dad. Since he didn’t know anything about it, I threw myself into it as a way of trying to escape from his shadow. I did so without really nailing down my why behind it, without looking into my own darkness instead of running from it.

I’d begun developing my own version of Tyler Durden from the moment I set foot in what was then Serbo-Croatian class, where my teacher didn’t speak a word of English for forty-five minutes on the very first day. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I decided I’d stick with it. His personality and positivity rubbed off and me, so I started trying to emulate him, another louder, more forceful, and seemingly happier me began to emerge. The split between the English-speaking part of me and the Serbo-Croatian one was only intensified by the fact I could speak Serbo-Croatian with only a very small group of people. I felt an almost instant bond with people I barely knew as soon as I’d discover that the language was something we shared either by choice or accident. I could hide my infant Tyler from my family and friends who’d known me before 2001, but I couldn’t hide the stunted-growth Tyler from Daniel in 2008.

When I’d visited Serbia in 2003 and 2006, I’d always known when I was coming home, and where my home was; I’d felt like I was on vacation. By the summer of 2007 I knew neither, and the vacation mystique was long gone. I was actually living among the same people who’d experienced war, the rise and fall of a civil religion, more wars, and a bombing intended to slap them out of the madness. I was living with no direction home -- as Mr. Dylan would say -- among people who had every reason to be bitter about the hand that fate had dealt their country. I had my own reasons to be pissed off too. (Maybe that’s why I identified with them so well.) Yet they still called me komšija whenever I walked into a mom-and-pop grocery store like the one my great-grandfather ran, and shared whatever they had with me no matter how much or little there was to go around.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that my Yugoslav journey started out because I thought of myself as a victim of circumstances, or at the very least someone who needed an escape from them. I’ve said many times, and probably more often than necessary, that I chose to study the Yugoslav idea because I wanted to do something different than what I thought my dad wanted for me. If I created my Tyler because I needed a way to cope with my anger over the expectations and actions of my father, I finally confronted my Tyler for the first time when Daniel showed up at my door. I may never subject myself to military training, or be insertive enough to ask random strangers to dinner from across the street. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t draw lines in the sand that I will not cross, or that I can’t hold myself accountable for my actions as much as my inactions like Daniel and Tyler would.

When Daniel came to live with me, it was like living with my dad all over again, whether he wanted it to be or not. This time, I couldn’t get lost in my music like I had as a teenager whenever dad would make me angry by just shutting down instead of dealing with why he’d shut down in the first place. Since my American life had gone away to another place most Americans couldn’t find on a map, I had no choice but to confront both men and what they represented to me. You might say Daniel bombed my ego to slap me out of my comfort zone, pity party, or whatever was going on in head at the time. One part of me hates him for it, another will always be grateful.

He taught me how to embrace my dark side, something I wish I’d learned a long time ago. He showed me, in a direct and forceful way, the benefits of owning your past experiences while making new ones. Thousands of miles from almost everything and everyone I’d ever known, that’s exactly what I needed.

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