44 Chapters About 4 Men (22 page)

I felt like I was in one of those movies where the main character sat faithfully beside her comatose partner, night after sleepless night, in defiance of everyone who’d said it was hopeless. Except the only one telling me it was hopeless around here was Ken —every time he’d roll away from me when I tried to cuddle with him in bed, every time he’d fold up one of my frilly little calligraphied love poems and shove it in his pocket with a, “Thanks, man,” every time he’d tap me on the ass five seconds after coming.

Ken had been in an emotional coma for ten years, and something I’d said last night woke him up. He might slip away from me again, but now, I have hope.

And every year on December 20, I will make sure that, though his emorection might be gone, it will never be forgotten.

Hans used to get emorections all the time. All I had to do was tell him I loved him and he’d be hard as a diamond. He was my first roommate, and at first, I loved playing house. I decorated the walls with my paintings and stocked the kitchen drawers with miscellaneous gadgets and cutlery that I’d stolen from either my parents’ house or the housewares department at Macy’s where I worked part-time.

I just didn’t love how Hans couldn’t get his shit together enough to help me pay for the place, clean it, or after a few months, even come home to it at all.

Turns out Hans had been spending his weekends doing coke and blowing all his money at the strip club down the street. After discovering that he had also failed all of the college classes I’d signed him up for
and
lost his job without telling me, I finally flipped the fuck out about his partying, and
he
had the audacity to break up with
me
!

Well, the next day at work, I was so distraught that I tearfully clocked out mid shift, snatched an armful of boxes from the Macy’s warehouse on my way out, and decided to race home and dramatically move all my shit out while Hans was…wherever the fuck he went during the day. Only, when I went to pull into my usual spot in front of our building, Hans’s ancient black BMW was already there with one tire lurched up onto the sidewalk, windows halfway down, and keys still in the ignition.

Goddamn it! Of course he’s home! It’s noon on a Tuesday! Where else would he be? Obviously not at work or school!

Up to that point in my life, I’d only experienced two kinds of breakups—the kind where your boyfriend turns into a violent, terroristic stalker and the kind where you just quit answering the phone and they go away. I was wading into uncharted waters. And while I was a thousand percent sure that Hans wouldn’t ever physically hurt another human being, I was about to discover that I couldn’t say the same thing about myself.

As soon as I opened the door, two things immediately grabbed my attention by the balls. They were both black. They were both stilettos. And they were both tossed in a heap on the stairs. The stairs that led to
our
motherfucking bedroom. I short-circuited. Physically. Mentally. Digestively. My first instinct was to barf up my fucking spleen into those cheap pleather knee-high boots, but I never got the chance because my body beat my stomach and my brain up the stairs.

By the time my consciousness caught up with what was unfolding up there, I’d already kicked open the door to
our
bedroom, ripped the sheets off the bed, and started screaming, “Get the fuck out of my bed!” while slapping Goth Girl repeatedly on her bare thigh.

Once my out-of-shape consciousness finally made it into the bedroom, huffing and puffing and pausing to light another cigarette, it watched the assault taking place like an innocent bystander, absentmindedly thinking,
Really, B? The thigh?
That’s kind of a weird choice, don’t you think?

I guess it was the first part of her body I could get my hands on. I dunno. At least I didn’t bite her.

Unfortunately, before I could select a cooler place to strike Goth Girl, Hans leaped out of bed, dragged me into the hallway, locking Goth Girl inside
our
bedroom on his way out, and escorted me into the living room. After chucking three remote controls, a four-pound crystal ashtray—also stolen from my parents—and all of our ceramic coasters at his head like Chinese stars, I finally ran out of ammo and simply melted into a screaming, rocking, hyperventilating puddle on the couch.

Eventually, through the rushing sounds of blood and bile, as well as my own shrieking, I slowly began to make out Hans’s calm, repetitive mantra.

“Nothing happened. Nothing happened, Bumblebee. I swear. Nothing happened.”

When I finally calmed down enough to process visual stimuli again, I noticed that Hans was wearing boxers and a T-shirt. (He usually slept naked.) And when I mentally replayed my assault on Goth Girl, she had been wearing one of Hans’s T-shirts and a pair of boxers, too.

Goddamn it.

Hans explained while I trembled and sniffled and chain-smoked on the couch that he had gone to a bar after our big fight the night before, gotten plowed, and called Goth Girl for a shoulder to cry on. (He always was a little bitch.)

Evidently Goth Girl had just broken up with Goth Boy, so she decided to head on up to the bar and drown her sorrows as well. She wound up crashing at our place because she was too drunk to drive home. (Based on Hans’s parking job, he was, too.)

I actually wanted them to have had sex so that I could be justified in my rage, but I knew that Hans was telling the truth. It didn’t make it hurt any less that he’d run to another girl’s arms just hours after our breakup, but it made me feel like an even bigger psycho for all the thigh slapping.

Eventually, Goth Girl tiptoed out from the safety of her little cage, and we cried and smoked together on the couch while Hans paced around, looking lost. Once I was all cried out I asked both of them to leave so that I could get on with packing up my shit in peace…

Then I gutted that fucking hole-in-the-wall so bad that you would have thought I was trying to stop Christmas from coming.

I took the shower curtain, the rod, and the little rubber drain stopper. I took the toilet paper. I took the blinds, and I didn’t even have a screw driver. I just ripped that shit right out of the wall. I took the pillows, comforter, and twenty-five thread count Walmart-brand sheets. (The mattress stayed only because it wouldn’t fit in the ’stang. The TVs wouldn’t fit in the ’stang either, but that didn’t stop me from taking the remote controls.) I took every pot, pan, dish, scrap of food, and drawer knob from the kitchen. Hell, I even took the last can of Who Hash.

And you know what, Journal? It made me feel a little bit better.

You know what made me feel
a lot
better? Finding out that Hans got evicted the next month and lost his deposit due to all the missing appliances and chunks of drywall.

You know what made me forget Hans had ever existed? Meeting my soul mate.

Mayday, Journal! Mayday!

You’ve been compromised! There’s no other possible explanation! Ken went from giving me head about as often as he changes the AC filter (which he is too cheap to replace until the particulates in the air are so big that I have to duck to keep from bumping my head on them) to going down on me
every time
we have sex. Every. Time. Um, yeah. You don’t go from never doing a thing to
always
doing a thing unless there’s a serious fucking intervention, especially Ken. His behavior is so calcified that I don’t think he could sit on the other side of the couch if you held a gun to his head. There’s only one thing that could make this motherfucker suddenly feel the need to eat pussy all the time, and it’s my November 1 journal entry.

What did he read? How much did he read??

This is so bad. It’s so good, but it’s so, so bad. I totally underestimated him, Journal. Of all the husbots in all the world, why did I have to wind up with the evil genius TL 9000 version?

I’ve been writing a lot lately, so I’ll bet he went to sneak a peek at Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever to see what I’ve been up to, then got suspicious when there was nothing new in there and went on a little fishing expedition.

Did he figure out how to search for recent files? Is that how he found you? I thought that asshole was computer illiterate! Has he just been malingering as a technological simpleton this whole time when in reality he’s some kind of diabolical data miner?? Is he Kevin Spacey from
The Usual Suspects
?? (Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen
The Usual Suspects
.)

Wait a minute! Oh my God, I know what happened! Ken hasn’t read you at all, Little Guy! He read my email! My EMAIL! That entry about him never going down on me was actually just cut and pasted from an email conversation with Sara, right? And Ken totally has access to my email because we’re too cheap to get our own iPads, so anytime he wants to check his email while he’s on there, he literally has to get all up in my inbox to log me out. Usually, I don’t worry about it because everything in my inbox looks like it will immediately inject you with a lethal dose of estrogen upon opening—daily affirmations from Oprah, OB/GYN and hair appointment reminders, half a dozen receipts for romance novels I purchased on Amazon—but I’m sure the subject line
Meditation --> Cunnilingus
piqued his interest.

It’s so simple! This explains why Ken has been giving me head every other day instead of repeatedly kneeing me in the ovaries like he would if he’d actually been reading this shit! We’re safe, Journal! We’re safe!

I’ve been sleeping with one eye open for an entire fortnight for nothing! It’s a Groundhog Day miracle!

Free oral sex? On the regular? And I’m not going to be smothered in my sleep??

It’s too good to be true! Thank you, Deepak Chopra! Namaste! Namaste!

Dear Journal,

I had sex in a car last night. In a random neighborhood. At eleven p.m. It was not a first for me, but it was a new low for my Mother of the Year contention, especially considering that I sprayed breast milk all over Ken’s Oxford shirt mid coitus and used an emergency stash of baby wipes to clean myself up afterward. Goddamn it. I really wanted that trophy, too.

The evening started classily enough. Ken and I had concert tickets, so we got a babysitter and went to dinner at a cozy little Italian restaurant on the way.

(Side note: I’m never going to stop writing
Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read, EVER
. The steady flow of date nights and oral sex is definitely still in full swing. Unsolicited compliments and a tattoo of my name can’t be far behind!)

It was a general admission show, so when we got to the concert venue, I dropped Ken off at the end of the line, so he could grab us good seats while I scrounged up a secluded place to park so that I could pump my breast milk,
like a lady
.

(See, Journal? This is why I was a contender for Mother of the Year in the first place! Who else is conscientious enough to still be breast-feeding nine months postpartum, keeps a hospital-grade breast pump fully equipped with a car charger on hand at all times, AND has the foresight to empty her breasts
before
ordering a double Jameson on the rocks? At this point in the story, I’m basically June Cleaver.)