I didn’t do it, but I sort of liked being told to. Joaquin was absolutely impertinent and, despite my “why I oughta!” faux consternation, I was melting. He was Snidely Whiplash, and I was the innocent girl tied to the tracks, but I didn’t want Dudley Do-Right to come.
We started emailing. Mine were long and overwrought, trying to show him how dark my sense of humor was (I can make an incest joke!) and how much I knew about Roman Polanski. His were brief, and I could read both nothing and everything into them. He never even signed his name. On the night I quit, we met after work and smoked some pot I had hunted down specifically for the occasion. I didn’t have rolling papers (because I didn’t smoke pot!) so we wrapped it in a page of Final Cut Pro for Dummies. When I tried to kiss him, he told me he shouldn’t—not because he had a girlfriend, but because he was already sleeping with a different hostess. We went out to a twenty-four-hour Pakistani restaurant and, having been rejected, I was hungry for the first time in days. We ate our naan in silence.
We maintained our version of a friendship until finally, the following June, we kissed in the street outside the restaurant. I was disappointed by how hard his lips were and how silent he was once he had an erection.
What followed was two years of on-and-off ambiguous sex hangouts, increasingly perverse in their execution and often involving prescription drugs I’d hoarded from my parents’ various oral surgeries. He’d ignore me for months on end, during which time I’d ride the subway in a beret imagining I saw him getting on at every stop. When he did invite me over, his house was a suckhole. If I fell asleep there, it was often noon the next day before I got out the door. In the street I’d blink at the flat Brooklyn sunlight, cold to my bones.
This relationship culminated in the worst trip to Los Angeles ever seen outside of a David Lynch film. We spent four days in the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi’s ghost makes the tub run funny and they’re mean to you if you ask for a spoon. Highlights included him never touching me once, me falling asleep wearing only a thigh-high boot that belonged to my mother, and his confession that he didn’t think he knew how to care about another person.
As I gained some traction in my creative pursuits, I thought his respect for me would grow, but all it did was provide me with more money to slip out of dinner with friends and take a cab to his house. I hoped nobody asked me where I was going so I wouldn’t be forced to lie. We had sex one or two times after our LA excursion, but my heart wasn’t in it. If my heart was even in it before.
If I was writing this then, I would have glamorized the whole story for you—told you how misunderstood Joaquin was and how he was just as sad, scared, and lonely as the rest of us. I would have laughed as I described all the weird sexual liberties I let him take and his general immaturity (unassembled bed frame blocking the front door, cigar box full of cash, condoms in random pockets). Before entering Joaquin’s house I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they? I thought of myself as some kind of spy, undercover as a girl with low self-esteem, bringing back detailed intelligence reports on the dark side for girls with boyfriends who looked like lesbians and watched Friday Night Lights with them while eating takeout. They could have their supportive relationships and typical little love stories. I’d be Sid and Nancy–ing it up, refusing to settle for the status quo. I’d be cool.
I had a lucky little girlhood. It wasn’t always easy to live inside my brain, but I had a family that loved me, and we didn’t have to worry about much except what gallery to go to on Sunday and whether or not my child psychologist was helping with my sleep issues. Only when I got to college did it dawn on me that maybe my upbringing hadn’t been very “real.” One night outside my freshman dorm, a bunch of kids were smoking and shrieking with laughter, so I rushed outside in my pajamas, eager to join the fray.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Gary Pralick, who always wore a sweater knit by his great-grandmother (I later learned she was only seventy-nine). “Don’t you worry about it, Little Lena from Soho.”