Once he was asleep, I snuck as far away from our room as I could go without having to end up on Nancy Grace’s show and would crap my head off in the Guatemalan jungle. The third day I got a system down of going into the jungle and releasing the horror show in my belly. One night, we came back to the room from eating yet another diarrhea-inducing dinner to find a giant bobcat asleep on our front steps. After much cajoling and praying in two different languages, we managed to scare it away, and I wondered if this was the night I’d have to forgo my secret jungle routine. But no, my fear of exposing myself as human to a guy I was dating was way stronger than my fear of being mauled by a bloody-toothed feral animal. So did I go out into the jungle that night knowing a wild bobcat was afoot? You bet I did. But the episodes were over much quicker because it turns out that worrying about a wild bobcat mauling you literally scares the crap out of you.
On our way back to Florida, we waited for our flight in the Cancún airport after driving back over the Guatemalan border. He had been acting paranoid and was sweating profusely, which is usually more my thing. Even for Guatemala in August, there was a comical amount of sweat on his forehead. Now, if any guys are reading this, first of all, God bless you, and second, I know how much you hate when we go through your stuff, but please know that we do it because our reptilian brains tell us it’s a great way to keep us from getting hurt: Our amygdala (the fear center of our brain) tells our hippocampus (our memory center) that we’re in danger, and when the hippocampus corroborates with our frontal lobe (our decision-maker), our frontal lobe is, like, “Hey girl, I sense some weird shit going on. He’s shady as hell and the only logical solution I have right now is for you to go through his personal items so we can get more intel. Godspeed!”
French guy went to the bathroom and my primordial survival instincts took over. My hands went into his bag and opened his wallet before my conscious mind could even process what was happening. I don’t even know why I chose his wallet to go through, given he was a bartender two nights a week and his credit cards were all fake; I’m not even sure why he needed a wallet in the first place. That said, my primordial brain was on to something, because inside the wallet I found three little Ziploc bags full of white powder.
Was I furious? Yes. Could I have been arrested at the Guatemalan border for possession of drugs and never have seen my Myspace top eight friends again? Yes. Could I have been killed by a teenage machete-happy Guatemalan who had an excellent excuse to kill me? You bet. Did I say anything to him about it? Of course not. I put the wallet back into his bag and pretended nothing happened, because, well, God forbid I do something that could lead to a breakup with a drug-addicted, sweaty bartender who I couldn’t even have a lucid conversation with.
Annoyingly, I can’t chalk this behavior up to being a stupid teenager because I was still martyring myself for dudes in my late twenties. I’m not proud of this, but I once pretended I knew how to snowboard for a guy. He was great at it and I wanted so badly to be the cool girl who knew how to snowboard, but you’ve seen my body—I’m a gangly mess of tendons and have no business being anywhere near ice. Or even marble floors for that matter.
The first week I was in Los Angeles, someone invited me to a party at Val Kilmer’s house. I know, weird brag. Anyway, to get ready for my big Hollywood party debut, I went and bought myself a hot pair of pumps from Nine West. Unfortunately for me, Val Kilmer’s floor at the time was made of some kind of impossibly shiny marble that could only have been made from porcelain doll eyes. In an attempt to make a sexy, dramatic entrance that was sure to catch the attention of a powerful Hollywood agent (back then I thought this was how Hollywood worked, not that I have any idea how it works now), I stormed into this party like an ostrich auditioning for America’s Next Top Model. I’d say I made it about seven feet or so before I found myself on the floor, in a sideways Warrior 1 pose, trying to get up like a newborn deer on ice. I split my probably Wet Seal pants in half, revealing a red thong that made me look like I had a horrible accident in my nether regions. The point is, I can barely walk on fancy floors, much less do snow sports that require skill and balance.
I didn’t grow up skiing or any of that, and when you don’t have health insurance, going eighty miles per hour down wet ice while standing up certainly doesn’t crack the top thousand on your to-do list. As kids, if we wanted to slide around on something slippery, we would put Palmolive dish soap on a laminated picnic tablecloth or my sister and I would roll ourselves up in a comforter and slide down a flight of stairs. That may sound insane, but I promise it’s worth the rug burn and risk of death. Basically anything that was free and super dangerous is how we kept ourselves entertained. So, without snow sports, we still managed to have a total blast as kids, even though I occasionally ended up with splinters in my teeth.
Anyway, I may not know a lot about winter sports, but one thing I do know for sure is that you can’t just pretend you know how to do them the way you can pretend you know what a movie’s about based on the title. After telling my boyfriend I needed to “brush up” on my snowboarding skills with a refresh lesson (it was my first and only lesson ever), I begged the instructor to make me a pro in two hours. I remember him looking very panicked by my ambition and my complete denial of how learning a skill works. He just kept repeating the phrase “In snowboarding, you go where you look.” I froze. Not just because I was genuinely freezing (I didn’t have on enough warm clothes, having prioritized cuteness over warmth) but also because I felt it was the most profound advice I’ve gotten about life in general. You go where you look.
The at once wonderful and horrible thing about snowboarding is that you have to be completely in the moment or else you’ll eat (hopefully white) snow. This made me particularly terrible at it, since I’m someone who multitasks and am usually torn between regretting what I did ten minutes ago and fearing what’s gonna happen in ten years, so being in the moment is not my forte.
After practicing for about two hours, I lied to my boyfriend and told him I was ready to “board.” The look on his face told me board is not a verb used by anyone who actually knows how to snowboard. He then responded with the news that we were going up to a black diamond, and unfortunately that had nothing to do with the ring Big got Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Because of my codependence, it didn’t occur to me that I could protest or request a smaller, less murder-y hill. I had been so many things for so many guys, it didn’t occur to me that “expert snowboarder” wasn’t one of them. The idea of his thinking we weren’t compatible was much scarier to me than cracking my face open on a giant mountain made of sociopathic stalagmites.