Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story (2 page)

    • My grandfather is getting remarried.

    • My stepgrandmother died.

I tugged on Marvin’s leash, trying to pull him inside. He held his ground, staring up at me with his bulging eyes, as if to say, “Oh hells no, I still gotta take a shiiiiit.” For whatever reason, I picture Marvin’s human voice to be that of a middle-aged African-American woman from the South. I probably should’ve mentioned that earlier. And it’s not racist, because he’s a dog.

I stood there and actually debated whether or not it would be worth Marvin’s crapping in my apartment to just go inside already. Saner minds prevailed, but by probably too narrow a margin.

“Poo-poos outside. Come on, poo-poos outside!” Sadly, that’s not one of the commands that dog trainer taught him. If I’m going to pay someone a large sum of money to train my dog, at the very least, I expect him to know how to crap on command. Lucky for me he really needed to go. Or maybe Marvin
was
able to poop on command. Either way, I was in the clear.

As I pulled Marvin along, leaving his feces for the flies to argue over, a frantic voice screamed out from the heavens, “You can’t do that! I know for a fact! I know! I know! I know!” This was Sally, apartment 3A, an elderly agoraphobic woman, who ought to leave her eyes to science since she lives on the third floor and was able to see Marvin’s minute poo. Supposedly she hasn’t left her apartment in
more than fifteen years. Mr. Molever, as much as I can’t stand him, is kind enough to drop off food, supplies, dry cleaning, or anything else she might need. I’m not quite sure why she would even need to get her clothes dry-cleaned, considering she doesn’t interact with the outside world, but I can only assume that even hermits like to look nice. Just, by themselves, sometimes. Actually, Sally is kind of my hero. I can only hope to one day grow up to be a man who never leaves his own personal space and has some guy drop stuff off for him outside his door. She’s a genius if you ask me.

“Apologies, Sally,” I yelled up to her. “It won’t happen again.” I waited for a few moments but didn’t get a response. I assumed that she was too delighted by the fact that I had paid attention to her to care anymore about the excrement dotting the lawn. Besides, let’s be honest, what was she going to do, chase after me?

I had already filled my good-deed quota for the day by acknowledging Sally, which I can admit would probably not be categorized as an act of kindness for the average human being. But, for me, if I do anything I don’t want to do, then I’m committing a friendly gesture to the world. I miss those gold star stickers Mrs. Felcher used to give me for doing something good when I was in the third grade. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way when you get older. Society really sets a standard for you early on in life (gold stars) that only gets worse and worse as you grow up (no stars). Not fair. Perhaps if grown men were issued gold star stickers for proper behavior, there would be less crime.

Finally, I made it back into my apartment after another typical series of nightmare encounters with my neighbors. I was already exhausted and needed to take a nap. But it was only nine in the morning, and I had the rest of the day ahead of me.

CHAPTER TWO

I was sitting in my apartment, wondering if today would be the day I’d finally hang artwork on my walls. I had enough framed art to fill every square inch of my place, but for whatever reason I could not get myself to do it. So each piece lay propped up against the wall on the floor, nail and hammer ready, as if I had literally just moved in. I had actually been living in this apartment for just over two years now. To be fair, I had spent most of my time at my ex-girlfriend’s place, so it was there that I made my home. I even spent an entire day hanging up all of her artwork on her walls. But all that domestic bliss ended when she shattered my heart into fifty million-billion-cagillion-tregazillion pieces.…

 … We were enjoying a wonderful lunch, where the both of us ordered our usual chopped salad, hold the onions. It was a bright summery day and it was
hot
. I was sweating like a pig. Although I’ve never seen a pig sweat. I was sweating like a hypothetical sweaty pig. When I look back on it now, I was very uncomfortable with the high temperature, but I was so in love with this girl that nothing else
mattered. At that time, not even the little things in life bothered me. Now everything bothers me.

I distinctly remember her telling me how proud she was of all the “potential work stuff I had going on” (FIRST RED FLAG) and that I should “never stop believing in myself” (FLAG ON FIRE). For most people, compliments are a positive thing that make them feel good, but to me they mean somebody either wants something from me or is laying the groundwork to break up with me. I started downing cups of lemonade out of sheer nervousness, knowing deep down that this would quite possibly be our final onion-free salad together.

After the last supper (lunch), outside “our” restaurant, we got into her car and the talk began. By the time we arrived at my apartment building, four minutes later, we weren’t together anymore. I can recall a few of her cited reasons for destroying my life, like “I want to be with other guys, especially when I go to Miami in a couple of weeks,” and “You care about me too much, it’s exhausting,” and “I feel like I’m moving forward and you’re moving sideways.” But to be perfectly honest, my main focus in the two hundred and forty seconds while I was being dumped was how badly I had to pee. She also had a tendency to drive over every single bump in the road, which felt like the perfect metaphor for our relationship, and my bladder felt as if it were playing a game of
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!
. Regardless of my extremely uncomfortable urination situation, I didn’t want to get out of the car. I feverishly tried to think of something I could do that would both force her to forget the huge mistake she was making and get me to take my mind off my bladder. What if I faked one of those seizures where my eyes rolled to the back of my head and I started foaming at the mouth? You’d have to be a real monster to break up with someone while they’re seizing. In retrospect, that probably wouldn’t have been the most attractive way to
get her to want me again. Also, I haven’t carried spare foam with me in years. Regardless, absolutely nothing in the entire world could make me open that car door. Because if I did, I knew she would be gone forev—

She kicked me to the curb and drove off (bumping over the pothole at the end of my block, of course). I stood there for a moment, or maybe it was forty-six minutes, not knowing what to do or where to go. I finally stumbled into my building, trying so very hard not to cry and pee in my pants. A messy combination.

As I traveled down the long dark hallway to my apartment, I kept my head down and focused on the mangy green carpeting, trying to put my attention on anything other than what had just happened. Yup, the carpet was still mangy and green. Just then, my two next-door neighbors (2B), Jimmy and Elisa, an annoyingly happy couple, stepped out of their apartment.

“Hey, man,” Jimmy said, beaming.

I kept my eyes on the carpet. My hope was that he was talking to an imaginary friend behind me. I knew that if I stopped and chatted with these people, there was a possibility I would collapse into an uncomfortably loud sob.

“Charlie? Are you okay?” Elisa asked. She was onto me.

I bit my lip, choking down my emotions. I raised my head just a little bit, giving them some acknowledgment, and then performed a kind of half bow, somewhere between a nod and a kneel. Both of them stared at me, mouths agape, with the same look of concern. I couldn’t handle any more of their insufferable empathy, so I turned away from them and faced the wall. They must have thought I was on an afternoon peyote adventure.

“Did we tell you we just got married?” Jimmy called out brightly.

I wanted to respond, “Yes! You tell me literally every single time I am forced to communicate with you. And it’s time to drop the ‘just’ from that sentence. You’ve been married for eight long and I’m sure boring months now since you have to tell me about it every single time.” But instead I sprinted away, giving them a congratulatory thumbs-up, and ducked into my apartment.

I bolted for the toilet, which was where I simultaneously started peeing and scream-crying. Definition:

scream-cry
(verb)
To hold in one’s sadness until it hits the boiling point and one can only wail pathetically. Much more effective if one has to pee simultaneously, because the sound will then be drowned out by the force of one’s urine stream.

Soon after I was able to collect myself enough to curl up into the fetal position on my couch. And I’ve been stuck there ever since,
metaphorically
speaking. (My legs have a tendency to fall asleep when curled.)

Sadly, for the month after we broke up, I wasted much of my precious time wandering down the dark pitiful path of “I’m going to win her back.” Rarely does this idea result in victory, but for some reason, in heartache, I resort to that type of thinking. I repeatedly forget that when someone breaks up with you, that means that they
don’t
want to wake up beside you anymore, not the opposite. Even if I go around telling people, “I know she’s still in love with me, I just have to remind her by way of a plane banner,” or “I’m going to get her back by re-creating the
Say Anything
boom box scene, but with an iPad,” it doesn’t mean that I should actually follow through with
these ideas. In trying circumstances, I am someone who calls for desperate measures. Here are some of my most pathetic post-breakup moments:

I dropped off a cherry Slurpee from 7-Eleven on her doorstep with a handwritten note that read, “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought you would want one of these. It’s cherry flavor … just like you.”

I pretended to “pocket-dial” her while I was in my car singing along to REM’s “Everybody Hurts,” thinking that would make her realize the huge mistake she had made.

I asked her what I should do with her custom-ordered birthday present, especially because it was “too big to fit in my living room.”

I texted her best friend, Lauren, “She was the one,” knowing very well that she would pass the message along to my ex, while they would probably go on to discuss how romantic I was and what a huge mistake she had made.… But Lauren texted me back, “No she wasn’t.”

I texted Lauren once more, this time with a different approach: “Can you keep a secret? I’ve always had a thing for you.…” Again, Lauren would be sure to tell my ex, who would probably freak out in a jealous fit and need to get back together with me just so I wouldn’t sleep with her best friend. Funnily enough, I never heard back from Lauren and when I tried to reach her a third time, I realized she must have coincidentally changed her number.

Once I realized that the chances of winning my ex back were slim, I decided to join an elite group of individuals by becoming “a beard guy.” This took months of focus, determination, and maturity. There comes a period in every beard’s life where it decides to be incredibly itchy. My guess is the beard is going through its teenage years, where it has no respect for authority (my face), it goes places it shouldn’t (up into my nose), and it occasionally retreats into infancy (ingrown hairs). But then, one day, out of nowhere, my beard decided to grow up. I’m sure my constant love and delicate care had something to do with it. I mean, I did give it a biweekly shampoo and condition treatment, as well as downward strokes with a fine-toothed comb. But honestly, I think it’d just had enough rebelling for one growth cycle. You can only fight the good fight for so long. Now my beard was living the good life and nothing could get in its way, except for maybe … my mother. She couldn’t stand my beard. There had even been a few moments where I was certain she was trying to sneak up behind me and destroy my beard by way of electronic shaving device. But luckily for me, facial hair made me more alert. Superhero-like, if you will.

“What are you hiding from?” my mother continually asked me.

“People,” I grunted from behind my shield of hair.

“You’re drawing more attention to yourself with that roadkill-looking thing on your face.” She was probably right, but I would never let her know it.

It’s terrible how an abrupt and devastating end to a relationship can turn an ordinarily cheery person into Virginia Woolf. She was
that depressed poet lady with the big nose played by Nicole Kidman who committed suicide by way of drowning. I don’t think she killed herself because of her nose, though. My point is, I wasn’t always harboring such a negative outlook on life. In fact, back when I was happily in a relationship, I used to actually enjoy my daily interactions with people and considered myself rather good at “small talk.” Even from an early age I was quite adept at listening to people while simultaneously making them feel like they were the most interesting person in the room.

This trait most definitely comes from my father. He is the master of this. And he doesn’t have to remember your name to do it. In fact, he only knows the names of about ten people in his life, and they’re all immediate family members. Everyone else he simply refers to as “darling!” This, of course, only works when you have a cool British accent to rely on, and unfortunately for me, I do not. I learned this the hard way when I was fourteen years old and forgot to do my biology homework for Mr. Sommers. “Oh, darling, I’ll hand it in to you tomorrow. All right with you, darling?” I said with such confidence. He responded by immediately sending me to Principal Nolan’s office for inappropriate behavior toward a teacher. Since then I have settled for “buddy” or “bud.” Although it’s not as good as a British “darling,” it works well with my American accent. But I digress.…