51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (28 page)

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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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“Yeah, but you don’t need to be dating.”
 
“Dad, I’m thirty years old. I better be dating.”
 
I think my father forgets or fails to understand how old I am. Because he hasn’t been an active father since I was four, I am some median age between now and then to him.
 
“I want to have kids someday,” I tell him. “I should probably start by going out to dinner with a few potential mates.”
 
“I guess.” Then he thinks about it. “I would like grandkids.”
 
I take the conversation further, explaining that I am the last of a very interesting genetic line, and that I don’t want it to die with me. And I am. Besides a missing half-brother in Mexico, I am the last of my father’s DNA and the last of my mother’s.
 
“It’s a pretty wacky bloodline, Dad. I’d hate to see it go to waste.”
 
“Wacky? It’s not wacky.”
 
I sometimes forget that my father is sixty-two and that he has been in prison since he was thirty-five, and that we do not share a vocabulary. When I was in college, I remember once telling him that I was shanking on some work. To me shanking meant procrastinating; to my father, it meant getting knifed during lunchtime in the mess hall. Needless to say, wacky to me means fun, wild, crazy, loving. To my dad, wacky means weird, bad, dorky. I explain what I mean, and I tell him that’s why I believe in finding the right mate.
 
I think he should understand this. Last month my father moved to South Texas to live on a citrus farm. From what I can tell, he spends his days smoking pot, fishing for clams, and helping a local breeder raise Blue Tick hounds. He crosses the border to Mexico for cheap beer and women, and I think that if anyone would get why I am looking for a more interesting partner than one who hates road trips, it would be him.
 
I come from a family who regularly dances to Madonna after Christmas dinner. We go clubbing together. And when I drank, we were basically a frat party without the Greek letters. But even now that I’m sober, there is nothing formal about the way we treat other. And all of us, including my mom simply by choosing my dad, have been incredibly wild in our time. I think that’s why Jeff’s response to my road trip bothered me because whomever I bring into that fold needs to be able to keep up. I will not let our concentrated eccentricities be dulled by a man who couldn’t fit in as one of our own. But perhaps even more importantly, I don’t want our children tempered by some safe and boring bloodline. My father is a little thrown that I have put so much thought into this. And I realize that this is the great fear of all men. That they are somehow always being interviewed for their semen.
 
This makes for an even more awkward conversation with Jeff. Jeff and I decide to go to a movie on Saturday, which is pretty couply for a third date, but I also welcome it. I haven’t been to a movie with a man I was dating in years. Jeff picks me up, and we get burgers on Sunset. We have time to kill, and so we decide to go to Amoeba Records. We get out of the car in the ArcLight parking lot, and Jeff corners me. Not in a threatening way, just in the way that Jeff wants some kind of reassurance of my interest, and I have been a little vague in terms of hand-holding and hug-returning. So he comes up and tries to kiss me, and I back off.
 
Before I went on the date, I did some energy work, asking my ancestors for the strength to be honest. And it works because I stand there in the harsh glare of the movie theater parking lot, and I ask Jeff not to engage in the physical until I have a better idea about whether there is something between us.
 
I don’t say it like that of course because I am new to this honesty, so it comes out like a language that is foreign to my tongue. “I can’t. Please. I need... I’m not good at this. I want to see what’s here. What I want. What... oh, shit. Can we stay, the physical, stay away, the physical. I’m not good at this. Do you understand?”
 
Though disappointed, he understands. We continue to walk to the record store.
 
“I’m writing a book,” I tell him point-blank because we have gone too far now for me not to. “I’m going on 51 dates this year, but that’s not why I didn’t kiss you.”
 
He laughs. “Oh, I hear you. I’ve been on so many dates recently, I should write a book.”
 
We walk into the record store and are going through the racks of Used Rock. I pretend I care about the music as I say, “I guess in the end, it just all comes down to chemistry.”
 
“Well, if you think that, and you’re not sure about us, that doesn’t sound good.”
 
“Jeff.” I look down. I cannot hold his gaze. I cannot hide the truth.
 
We keep moving through the store, up the stairs to Hip Hop because I want the Kanye West CD. I keep thinking that if I buy a CD, it will make Jeff feel better. He has explained to me how the record industry is on its last leg, and how he represents many clients from it. I figure if I can’t like him romantically, the least I can do is support him professionally.
 
We hit Hip Hop as I explain to him, “I’m just trying to decide, okay? All I am asking for is the physical space for me to do that. Oh, God. I guess what I am trying to say is that it’s not necessarily a no yet.”
 
Jeff stops with his hand on a Rihanna CD.
 
“Yet?” he asks.
 
“Uh...” maybe that was the wrong answer.
 
“That’s like in
High Fidelity
when the girlfriend tells John Cusack that she hasn’t slept with the new guy. Yet. We all know what yet means.”
 
I cringe. Jeff is quoting Nick Hornby at me in the middle of a record store, in the middle of the crowded hip hop aisle nonetheless, and it’s a little embarrassing for us both. He realizes this and asks, “Can we get out this section? Let’s go to foreign film or something.”
 
We end up in the used VHS area as I try to weave some sort of web of compassion and honesty. I decide not to buy Kanye because I can tell by the look in Jeff’s eyes that it won’t make any difference to him whether I purchase a studio album or not. We go to the movie instead.
 
Jeff drives me home, and we agree to speak in a few days, which is when I tell him, “I promise you, Jeff, you will find a lovely, beautiful, amazing girl someday, and it won’t be long because I can feel it. She’s coming soon. But I just see us as friends.”
 
He tells me he doesn’t see that happening, and I understand. I know I am breaking his heart a little bit, and since I have had the same done to me recently, I am pretty cognizant of how it feels. And I know it sucks. But I also know that Jeff will find a lovely, beautiful, amazing girl someday. It’s just not me.
 
38
 
Date Thirty-Eight: Sober and the City
 
My mother moved to New York City my freshman year of college. But that was not my first experience with the town I once loved so much. When I was fourteen years old, I went up to Connecticut to visit family friends. We took one afternoon to go into the City, and that was when it happened. When I fell dramatically in love with the place. I remember going to Saks, and the Plaza, and seeing Tony Bennett eating next to us at Planet Hollywood, and getting to do all the things that people do when they are tourists in New York and don’t know better. I also remember getting on the train back to Connecticut and crying for the better part of the trip because I didn’t want to leave.
 
On Thursday, I fly into New York City on the red-eye, and the next morning I get on the subway from JFK and begin to make my way to my mom’s apartment. I love riding into Manhattan on the subway. There is no better way to feel immediately a part of the city, not as the tourist I was when I was fourteen, but as the resident I still like to consider myself as being. As I ride in, I remember the day that was the catalyst for why I left six years ago.
 
September has always been my favorite month: it’s the one in which I was born; it has the most beautiful weather; and Neil Diamond sang a song about it. It has a lot of great qualities. And that morning when I woke up, got ready for a my job in book publishing, and headed out the door at twenty-two, thinking I had it all together, despite the terrible hangover I was rocking, I had no clue that it was about to end. For all of us.
 
I was getting ready to go into the first big meeting of my career when the news came in. Planes, falling buildings, we know the drill. I waited for my best friend Liz to arrive; our friend Courtney joined us. We picked up a couple cases of beer, some wine and whiskey, went over to my friend Ally’s and began to drink. Sure, we watched the news, sure, the bars were filled all over, but when four o’clock hit, and we were out of weed and couldn’t get any blow, Ally and I decided we would go downtown for some nitrous.
 
I lived in the East Village, so we were able to get past the blockade to make it to the bodega on St. Mark’s that sold cartridges. We picked up a few boxes and were so desperate to get home and get high, we decided to take the bus. And that’s when it hit me. I was an atrocious human being. I remember swaying on the bus, giggling with Ally about our nitrous score, while people stood around us, some covered in dust, all in a state of shock and terror. We were obviously drunk, people were giving us dirty looks, and I remember thinking, “This is not how I should be.” Nine months later I moved to Los Angeles, and I was never able to love that city the same way again. And I think, in many ways, it couldn’t love me.
 
But as I get on the 6 train and make my final leg up to Mom’s apartment on the Upper East Side, I feel that New York state of mind that I haven’t felt in a long time. The advertisements for dermatologists, the poetry sponsored by Barnes & Noble, the warnings about walking between the cars, this is my New York City. This will always be my New York City. Because there is something about the place—the honking horns, the shining steel, the lurch of my subway car—that makes me feel like anything is possible. I get to Mom’s house except for it’s not my mom’s house anymore because, as of the month prior, my mom is now living in Raymond’s apartment, even though it is in the same building. But despite the fact that I might miss the comfortable couches I have known from her place, and the floral calendar in her kitchen, and the picture of sailboats I would wake up to every morning in her bedroom, I am happy for her. And for them.
 
Because my mom has just moved, she still has a bunch of photo albums that I haven’t seen in years. Siren is coming from Philadelphia to meet me in New York, and my mom needs to go to work, so I lie down on her couch and fall asleep looking at these photos of my childhood—of me with my mom and dad—memories that have been lost, like my love for New York City for so, so long.
 
Siren gets into town, and I go and meet her at the Chelsea Hotel, where I have reserved a room for her birthday. I had always wanted to stay at the Chelsea, and just like in Big Sur, my time had finally come. We luck out when we get there because Stanley, the famed manager of the Chelsea, is the one who checks us in. I decide to go bold.
 
“So when I called before, I requested a special room,” I tell him.
 
Stanley looks at my reservation, “Well, then, why aren’t you paying a special price?” I am in an economy room, the least expensive possible.
 
“Because I’m cheap,” I offer.
 
Stanley likes that, and so he gives us Janis’s old apartment. As in Joplin. The room where she famously gave Leonard Cohen head. Siren and I go up and channel all the crazy energy in the room because we can feel it. That shit is heavy, man.
 
That night I take Siren to my mom and Raymond’s apartment, and I show her the pictures I found earlier in the day.
 
“You have got to be kidding me,” Siren says, laughing at a picture of me she is holding in her hand. I am wearing my grandmother’s panty hose and nothing else. It is the time in my life when my dad is still a kingpin, and we have cars and houses and cash. And it shows. Because that little girl is not wondering if she is the prettiest in the room—she knows she is. That little girl is not afraid to ask because she demands. Because that little girl has yet to lose her daddy, she channels him and that shit is heavy, man. I am posing and posturing and pimping in front of the camera. And already at the age of three, you can tell, this kid’s gonna be an asshole.
 
Later, Siren tells me how her own father has been trying to get back in touch with her. She tells me how he has been living with his mother in Bucks County, drinking all day while his mother slowly dies in the back room.
 
“Have you talked to him?” I ask.
 
She shakes her head. “He just leaves messages. Sometimes I can tell he’s really drunk. Sometimes he cries.”
 
My dad doesn’t leave those kinds of messages because he too is posing and posturing and pimping in front of the camera, trying to project who he thinks he is supposed to be. But I know he feels just like Siren’s dad. He is old and tired and drunk, and he just wants love from that little girl he left behind so many years before. And I understand why Siren can’t call her dad back, but in that moment, I see in her father what I often refuse to see in mine. That they are now broken men, and though we might hate them for who they have been, it wouldn’t hurt us to try to love them now. Because they need us.

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