I Suck at Girls (17 page)

For the next couple of hours, I stood silently next to Amanda as she made her rounds, seeing all of her friends. I felt like it was my first day on the job and I was shadowing my trainer. The place was jammed; ’90s rap music was blasting out of the small living room, where a tightly packed dance party had broken out. Despite the noise and crowd, Amanda was doing her best to introduce me to her friends and make sure I had a good time. And, like a total self-consumed jerk, I was no help whatsoever.

“People are liking your costume,” Amanda said as she poured vodka into two plastic red Solo cups.

“Really? Who told you that?” I replied.

“You know, just people at the party.”

“Nobody told you they liked my costume, did they?”

“No. But it was a vibe I got.”

Meeting your date’s friends for the first time is like playing poker; you have to read each one of them, and then put forth just the right amount of conversation. If you go all in on someone who just wanted to say hi, you’ll risk seeming pushy and desperate. If you fold and stand there silent when you’re introduced to her chatty best friend, you might come off as weird and antisocial. And if you put on a face that says “Don’t come near me,” everyone else will fold—which is what was happening to me. I was tired and nervous, it was loud, and I was talking myself out of every fantasy that had consumed me through those past couple weeks. I was failing miserably, and Amanda could see it.

After a while, she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the dance floor. But just as she did, I felt the Burger King Chicken Griller I’d eaten during the one middle-of-nowhere stop on the bus ride suddenly snap awake in my stomach. It wanted out, and it wanted out now. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be headed out the way it came in. At least if I puked, I could blame it on alcohol or bad food. It happens: people puke all the time at parties. No one gets explosive diarrhea.

Amanda tried to pull me toward her, but I didn’t move.

“Let’s dance,” she yelled over the music.

“I, uh—I think I need to use your bathroom,” I said.

“You know where it is, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll be right back.”

I quickly walked down the hall. With every step, my need to avail myself of her toilet grew exponentially, the way earthquakes get ten times more devastating with every tenth of a point on the Richter scale. I opened the bathroom door, only to find a man dressed as Gandalf from
Lord of the Rings
with his back to me, peeing. I quickly closed the door and hurried back to Amanda, who was on the dance floor with a few friends, moving to the thumping bass of Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance.” I pulled her aside.

“Does your bathroom have a lock on the door?” I yelled.

“No. But just close it. No one’s gonna come in, I promise.”

“So there’s no way to lock it?” I said, starting to panic.

“Well, no. Why, what’s wrong?”

“I just … I’m not feeling well and I sort of need to spend a little while in there, and I really can’t have somebody coming in. Is there like a chair or something I can borrow to keep it closed?”

“A chair? You want to barricade the door closed?”

“I just don’t want anyone to come in.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to come in, but I guess if you’re worried I could stand next to the door and guard it,” she said.

“Is that weird?” I asked.

“Yes. That’s really weird.”

“I’m really sorry, but can you do that?”

She nodded and I immediately turned, swam through a group of a half dozen girls dressed as a six-pack of Budweiser—planting my palms on their backs and shoving off them like I was climbing up a rocky hillside—and hustled toward the bathroom with Amanda close behind. I reached the door and turned to find her right behind me.

“Good luck. We’re all pulling for you,” she said, holding back a laugh.

I feigned a smile, but I had no time to waste. I burst into the bathroom and onto the toilet. And that is where I sat for the next ten minutes as my body expressed its distaste for rest-stop Burger King. In no uncertain terms.

As I sat there relieving myself, I started mulling over everything that had led me to this point. I was broke. I hated traveling. I barely knew Amanda. And yet for some reason I’d allowed myself to blow our relationship out of proportion in my mind and convinced myself that I could make things work with her. Even by coming to see her, I was leading her on. To be fair to her, I had to end this.

Just as I finished and was pulling up my pants, I heard the door handle jiggle.

“No, no! There’s somebody in there,” I heard Amanda’s muffled voice insist.

“So you’re next in line?” another voice asked her.

“Uh—yeah.”

She didn’t need to go to the bathroom. She probably decided it would be much more humiliating to say, “No, I’m guarding the door for this guy I’m dating while he poops.” But now she would have to come in after me—which would be much, much worse than a stranger walking in during my session.

I quickly washed my hands, grabbed a pack of matches, and lit three of them in quick, desperate succession. I pried open the only window as far open as it would go with the force of someone trying to rip it from its hinges. Then I opened the bathroom door, where Amanda—and three others—were waiting.

As she walked in, I gave her a look that said, “I am so, so sorry.” Then I waited outside the bathroom. A minute later came a flush; then Amanda reappeared, with the stunned look of a rookie cop leaving the scene of her first homicide.

To make matters worse, as the next guy in line stepped into the bathroom, he let out a resounding “Whoa!” The two other people waiting looked accusingly at Amanda.

We walked down the hall and back into the party.

“Do you want to go outside for a second?” I shouted over the music.

We went out onto a small balcony, overlooking a courtyard thirty feet below that was littered with cigarette butts.

“You owe me. Like, a lot. There are now people walking around thinking I took, no offense, a really, really nasty poo in the middle of a party I was throwing. That is some above-and-beyond stuff I did right there,” she said.

“I am really sorry. I can go tell them it was me.”

“Yeah, that sounds like that would make things less weird,” she said, laughing.

“Again, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. What can I do to make it up to you?”

“How about you just loosen up a little bit and we have a good time?”

That didn’t really seem possible, and although this didn’t seem like the best time to bring up my fear that a relationship between us could never work, it seemed worse to pretend everything was fine. I had never been very good at doing that anyway.

“I kinda wanted to talk to you about that,” I said.

“About what?” she asked.

“I know I’ve been a little weird since I got up here, and I mean, I’ve been thinking about how you live in San Francisco and I live in LA, and we’re both broke, and clearly I don’t travel well, as you just witnessed, and I don’t know…”

I trailed off in a cowardly fashion, hoping she would finish the thought for me.

“So then it won’t work,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Well, that’s what I’m saying I’m worried about.”

“Right, but either it won’t work, or it will. I don’t know you super well, but what I know I really like, and that’s why I wanted you to come up here. Do you feel the same way about me, or no?”

Not once in the past few hours had I asked myself that question. In fact, I had basically asked myself every other question I could think of. I had focused on all the reasons why our relationship would be tough. But I’d avoided the one thing that had brought me here in the first place. Hearing her ask me point-blank how I felt about her shoved all my anxieties out of the way. The answer to her question popped into my head as if it had sprung from a cage.

“Yeah, I do. I really like you, too. That’s why I wanted to come up here.”

“All right. Well, why don’t we keep coming to see each other until we don’t like doing it, and if that other stuff is just too hard to get past, then I guess we’ll deal with it then. We’re not making any big decisions.”

“I’m down with that. Sorry, I kinda freaked out. I’m pretty neurotic,” I said.

“Yeah, I picked up on that when you asked me to guard the door while you pooped,” she said.

I leaned in to kiss her and she backed away.

“No, no. I taste like booze and Thai food. Super gross. We’ll make out later,” she said, and we walked back inside and onto the dance floor.

For the first time that night I felt unencumbered. I was simply happy to be around Amanda and even happier that she wanted to be around me. The beginning of House of Pain’s “Jump Around” began to play and Amanda grabbed me.

“It’s like a law that white people have to dance to this. FYI, I told people we’re dating,” she said, as she pulled me close to her.

Four years later, I sat down across from my father at a restaurant on the San Diego Harbor and told him I was going to put on my big-boy pants and propose to the first and only woman I’d gone stupid for.

Do You Know What Makes a Shitty Scientist?

In the four years since Amanda and I first got together at her Halloween party in San Francisco, we’d been through bus rides; plane flights; one breakup; one makeup; a Christmas at my parents’ house where my dad told her a twenty-minute story about the “most diseased penis” he’d seen in forty-eight years of medicine; a Thanksgiving at her parents’ house where I told the story of my dad telling
her
that story, which proved to be just as inappropriate; two thousand-plus hours watching HGTV; a couple of funerals; way too many weddings; and at least three more dire occasions when she had to guard a bathroom entrance for me.

Now we were living together in a small apartment in a sleepy neighborhood of San Diego called North Park. She was in a PhD program in San Diego, and I was between jobs writing for bad television shows. When you move in with someone, you can’t hide all the weird and annoying things you do, and while sometimes that unveiling ruins the relationship, often it seals the deal. It’s like being a meat eater and having your vegetarian friend e-mail you one of those videos that shows you what goes on behind the scenes at a slaughterhouse; if you can make it past that, you’ll probably be a meat eater for life.

Amanda and I found that we were a great team. When I would get too neurotic, her blunt, confident, unflinching loyalty would smack me back to sanity, like when she’d tell me, “Just do what you think is right, and I’ll always have your back. Unless what you think is right is some other girl. ’Cause then I’ll stab both of you and go to jail.” When she would get stressed out because she put so much pressure on herself to succeed, I’d be there to make her laugh and tell her, “I’ll still love you if you’re a failure. Just not as much.”

After a few months living together we started to talk about marriage, and as soon as we did, I realized that marrying Amanda was something I wanted to do, not just the next logical move. I confidently conceived of a plan for how I would propose, and I bought a ring. When I finally held the ring in my hand, though, I was struck by the magnitude of what I was about to do, and my anxiety wormed its way back into the equation. When I invited my dad to lunch at Pizza Nova, I hadn’t yet told anyone else about my plans; I was looking for affirmation from the only person I could count on to give me a straight answer. And after our lunch I took my dad’s advice and spent the afternoon in Balboa Park looking back over all my experiences with love, sex, and yearning, in hopes of gaining confidence in my decision.

What jumped out at me, as I looked back, was that I’d spent most of my time in relationships trying not to screw them up. I was like a backup quarterback, just happy to be sitting there holding the clipboard and wearing a headset, but much too scared to get in the game and play. And as I sat there in that park I realized just how much that had sucked. For years, I’d been so busy worrying about whether I might do or say something stupid—like drawing a picture of a dog crapping on a girl’s head—that I never had any fun.

With Amanda, I was finally having fun. And it wasn’t as if I’d consciously decided to stop worrying. She put me at ease, and my desire to enjoy my time with her superseded all the fears that usually rattled around in my head. She was the only person I’d ever met who made me feel calm and confident, like one of the guys in the
Ocean’s Eleven
movies (and not just the little curly-haired guy who’s there because he’s good with numbers). And as I headed out of the park six hours later, as the sun was setting, I knew I wanted to marry Amanda. I also knew I’d better go before the security guard in the park decided this guy roaming the park aimlessly was some kind of schizophrenic or pedophile.

Amanda was visiting San Francisco that weekend, and I’d arranged to surprise her on Sunday at a brunch spot in the Mission district called Foreign Cinema, where I would pop the question. In order to make my 10:30
A.M
. reservation in San Francisco, I had booked a seven o’clock flight from San Diego, which meant I had to wake up at five. That night, I plugged in my cell phone to charge it, then set two alarms on it, one for 5:00 and one for 5:10, just in case I slept through the first one. Then I hit the sack.

When I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I discovered that the power had gone out. I scrambled around in the dark and grabbed my cell. It was shortly after 1
A.M
. and my phone only had one bar of battery left. I had to go someplace where I could charge my phone and be sure my alarm would wake me up. I got out of bed, grabbed the ring box off my dresser, threw on the dress pants and pale blue button-down shirt I’d laid out the night before, and headed out the door.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into my parents’ driveway. I walked up the narrow path to their front door as quietly as I could, slid my key into the lock, and gingerly opened the door. It was pitch-black inside. I made an immediate right into the living room with my hands in front of me to avoid bumping into anything.