51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (19 page)
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Authors: Kristen McGuiness
BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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“That’s a great idea.”
“Of course it is.”
“I will lie,” I tell him.
I have trouble finding Alan at first, which is the worst. Because there’s nothing like poking around a coffee shop, trying to figure out which man sitting alone is the one you’re supposed to join. I have seen too many headshots by now to remember what Alan’s looks like. Thankfully, Alan approaches me. Alan is a nice, short Jewish man, who I probably wouldn’t have recognized even if I did remember his picture. At this point I can’t even remember why I said yes to the date in the first place, but I also know that I am trying to be open to possibility here, even if I am not quite sure what will come of it.
“I am going to lie to you for the entire portion of our date,” I tell him off the bat.
“Okay.” Though a little confused, he accepts my proposition. Basketball plays on the TV. I start to watch, but only because I’m not in the mood to talk with the man sitting eagerly on the other side of the table. I can tell he wants to talk, and I understand now how Micah must have felt with me poised with all my interview questions, chomping at the bit.
Alan notices the game and asks, “You like basketball?”
And my own game begins. “Love it. Lakers rule, baby.” I couldn’t even tell you who plays for them outside of Kobe. “I’m pretty much an avid sports enthusiast.”
“Really?” he asks.
“Yeah. I’ve got about fifty-six sports channels through Direct TV and spend the better part of my time watching football. All kinds of football, even high school, and rugby.”
I pause. I am breathing a little heavy while I talk. Kind of like Tony Soprano. I wonder if my false sports persona is increasing testosterone levels as I speak.
“I dig extreme sports too. Motocross, BMX racing. Even rockrappelling. Aquatic dancing, spelunking, you name it.”
Alan knows that I am making shit up, and so he plays along. But I try not to let him. I just keep listing random sports.
“Lacrosse, tennis, shot put, track and field, of course, archery, gymnastics, hockey.” I finally run out of Olympic events.
Alan asks, “What about cross-country shooting?”
There is a photo of me on
The Onion
at the gun range where I am holding the electrician’s shotgun.
The Onion
at the gun range where I am holding the electrician’s shotgun.
“I am actually training to become the world’s greatest cross-country shooter.” I lean across the table and whisper, “I am also a hired assassin, but not for pay.”
Alan should be more concerned by that admission, but he isn’t because, as I quickly guess, he is a writer. Another, fucking, writer. Just a dude like me with the big dream and the day job and the little apartment that holds it all until we make it big and grab that house in the hills.
I go back to lying, but I try to intersperse some truth because those are the most believable ones. I tell him I worked in film development and for the crazy book publisher. “But my real job. The rest was just a front. My real job was as a high-end call girl in Paris, but then I got tired of walking the streets.”
“Aha,” Alan calls out. “There’s a hole in your story. High-end call girls don’t walk the streets.”
I don’t even blink. “They were fancy streets.”
I try to make it as funny as possible so I don’t come off as mean. I am supposed to leave the date by 5:30 p.m. to go try on a bridesmaid’s dress for Nat’s wedding in October. And I am less excited about that than I am about this date.
Nat and I met after I relapsed and got sober in L.A. Like Siren, she was one of the first women to reach out to me. Though she was six years younger, she had more sober time, and we quickly became friends. Soon after we met, however, Nat met Reggie, and she pretty much disappeared from my life. Sure, we would run into each other at meetings. Every once in a while we would plan to meet for coffee, but Nat was the type of woman, who once she had a man, didn’t seem to have much room for friends. For all intents and purposes, Nat is a schmoo. Though she is funny and smart and absolutely self-conscious, she is incredible at blending that into the perfect male-focused confidence that the opposite sex finds so intriguing. I have watched as men fall at her feet in easy succession. She is attractive, but I know that’s not necessarily what it’s about. It is about her ability to make them feel safe, feel loved, feel a devotion that I, for whatever reason, can only muster in a creepy, begging way. And I resent her for this. Wholly.
However, when she came to me a few months ago and told me that she was looking for a new job, the words, “We have something at my organization” flew out of my mouth before I could even think about it. And so, not long after, Nat joined my nonprofit as another assistant, and our subtle competition found a whole new stage. Not long after Nat and Reggie got engaged, she asked me to be her bridesmaid. I wasn’t surprised because for all our jealousies and resentments and competition, Nat and I kind of love each other. We are like sisters, bound to one another whether we like it or not. Still, being her bridesmaid hasn’t been easy.
As I explain to Alan: “I guess I can just see me standing at the altar, single, as my much younger friend marries her soul mate, and they run off to their newly purchased home in Echo Park together. And I kinda want that too.”
Alan looks a little excited. And I realize that after lying the better part of the date, this is probably the one subject on which I shouldn’t be telling the truth. Because I do have recurrent dreams about living in my own house in Echo Park. I know the floor plan in every detail; I know what the kitchen table looks like and where I keep the spices, and though there is never a man in the dream, there is always a sense that there is a man present, somewhere.
I told my uncle Vic recently that I had horses to ride and lives to live, and I wanted a man that had as much zest for the journey as I do. He sighed, “You sound just like Coco Van Dyne.”
Ah, Coco Van Dyne. My uncle’s high school girlfriend. Back when he still dated girls. I remember growing up hearing stories about her, and she seemed like exactly the kind of gal I wanted to be. All wild and unfettered and feisty. She was gorgeous and owned horses and seemed like she would jump off a fence and start a fight for no reason at all. She is now fifty-two, single, and walking dogs for a living. She keeps trying to get sober, but it won’t stick, and she keeps telling my uncle that they should get back together because they are both single and depressed. Somehow she is willing to ignore the fact that my uncle has been gay for the last thirty years, but that’s Coco Van Dyne for you. She never gives up the fight.
And when I hear that, I wonder whether I will be able to either. And then I know why I am upset about being the bridesmaid and not the bride: I do want to feel settled down. It’s just that I want to feel a little shaken up too.
Alan is not going to be my settler. That much I am sure. Sometimes when I go on a date, and I am really not excited, I hope that it means I will be meeting the perfect guy, and then years later we can tell our kids how we were not looking forward to our first date, and isn’t that ironic. But there’s no irony here. So I bullshit instead. Alan seems to think that I am interested because I am being so insane and laconic. Maybe he’s the crazy one. But not in the right way.
I thank Alan for the coffee and the lies, and I go to try on the dress. And it’s really, really pretty. For the first time, I get excited about this wedding. As I spin around in the swaths of satin, I forget that I am resentful of Nat’s easy engagement and marriage. I forget how tiresome these dates are beginning to feel. I forget about Coco Van Dyne and what it means to settle down. I remember that anything is possible.
25
Date Twenty-Five: Otorongo
“So you don’t smoke pot anymore?”
I sigh. My father asks me this far more frequently than I care to admit. I try again to explain. “No, Dad, I’m sober.” I stretch the word as though that will make him understand better. “I don’t drink alcohol. I’m even thinking about quitting cigarettes. And no, I don’t smoke pot.”
“Huh...” My dad thinks for a second. “Well, that’s a shame, K. My real hope for you is that one day you’ll be able to enjoy a blessing again.”
I am driving on the 10 Freeway and use the excuse of having to change lanes for my lack of response to both the comment itself and the fact that he just referred to pot as “a blessing.” I have been speaking to my father again recently, which is not an easy task. I know that my request for space has been hard on him. I know that he remembers a time when I loved his wild stories, when I agreed that pot was a blessing, when I thought he was the sun and the moon and all the stars in between. But then I got sober.
And his tall tales didn’t seem as interesting. Whereas we used to talk about legalization and outlaws and the evil American government, whereas we used to talk about cheating the system and living on the lam and breaking the rules, whereas we used to talk about bullshit and pipe dreams and plans that never materialized, I don’t really believe in any of that anymore. And I don’t really believe in him.
He is still at the farm but has recently made an agreement with the FBI to work as a consultant. He wants to have an easy and light chat with me: the type that fathers and daughters do every day because he feels like a normal guy who should be able to call his daughter in California at the end of his work day on the farm.
The tough part is there is nothing about our relationship that is normal. And try as I might to be friendly and easygoing, I find myself being awkwardly silent and responding to everything he says with, “Uh huh” or “Great!” because I can muster no more words than that.
He finally says, “Well, I can hear you are rushing off to somewhere. It sounds like you need to get off the phone.”
“Dad, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.” I sigh. Again. “I don’t know why it’s awkward to speak to you. I know that we had no problems talking for years, but I do now. It’s just how it is.”
“I know why, K. It’s because you’re not too sure.” I assume he means about him, and if that is the case, then he’s right. He decides to take a different tack. “Hey, have I ever told you about the day you were born?” My dad thinks that by going down memory lane we might find some common ground, and he’s right again.
“No, you haven’t,” I say. At first I warm to the story because he is telling me about my mom and Lamaze class, and I can just see that tiny little lady with that huge beach-ball stomach, and it warms me to tears.
And then my dad tells me where he was when my mom was going into labor. “God, what a day, Kris. I had wrecked a Mercedes the night before. Did you know that? It must have been around four in the morning. It was crazy. We went straight off the Merritt Parkway and flipped the car right over into the goddamn pines. It was the pines that broke our fall. We all walked away without a scratch. Shit, do you know that was the second Mercedes I rolled that week?”
He laughs. I fall silent. What the fuck kind of story is that to tell about a person’s birth?
The apex of my father’s career came during his marriage to my mother. For those brief five years, he found himself as the main smuggler of marijuana out of Jamaica, and according to him, Panama and Columbia. We had houses, and cars, and helicopters. And then he was arrested, and all my mom had left was me, a Buick Regal, a handful of Louis Vuittons, and one Rolex watch that my family still won’t let me wear.
My mom has insinuated that my father was not sober the day I was born. When I hear that he was out partying until four in the morning the night before—partying to the point where he flipped a 1970s-metal Mercedes off of a highway—then came directly to the hospital, I know he must have been coked up out of his mind to stay awake until my arrival at 2:45 in the afternoon. I almost want to say something to this effect. But I can’t. My voice gets trapped again.
That’s where Lidia and I begin today. So much has happened since I last saw her. I am starting my new position at work. I just moved into my new office and put in the order for business cards and went to my first conference to meet and greet and start asking those rich people for money. I love my work so much—the children, the people, my boss.
The last time I was with Lidia, she had me create an altar at home. On that altar I am supposed to keep photos of me as a child, a candle, any sacred rocks, flowers, or memorabilia that mean something to me. I did what I was told and have been spending time each day at my altar, trying to communicate with that scared little girl inside who clams up when she most needs to speak and who knows the great truths of this existence, but only shares them when no one is around.
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