I Don't Care About Your Band (7 page)

The notion of finding another human being who liked not just one, but both of the two demographically similar institutions that I was dorkily obsessed with at the time was an epiphany. What were the odds of these two perfect human qualities converging in a Venn Diagram of romantic compatibility?! Wait a minute—he’s black,
and
he can dance?

Tom was the invisible boyfriend I wanted in high school. Even though I’d hook up from time to time, and I thought I wanted to be in a relationship more than anything, I don’t think I was ready for a real person to sop up my time. There were too many laps for me to drive around Central Avenue and tag sales for me to troll for vintage cookbooks that I could cut up for collages; all solo activities. Tom was perfect because he was a fantasy at half a country’s distance. I was beginning to learn that long-distance relationships are an exciting, fun way for your brain to masturbate.

During the school day, I’d jot down things to chat about with Tom on the phone later that evening. I went into our conversations with bullet points, knowing our time was metered; this was during the pre-Skype, Candace Bergen-for-Sprint’s dime-a-minute calling plan days. So, my dad would bug me about the phone bill and Tom and I would keep it brief. And after hanging up, I’d take to my pad, my pen, and the post office, and the two of us forged a lovely bit of old-timey correspondence back and forth, like Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but if the two of them mainly talked about
Mystery Science Theater 3000
.

Tom was dry; friendly but reserved, and rather affectless. He wasn’t in the business of lavishing attention on a tall poppy; his was the character of the gardener hired to prune it, out of courtesy to the rest of the flowers. I’ve since met other Midwesterners, and I know the drill: They can be witty, bright, and kind, but they’re not self-centered, grandiose, or emotional. They are even-tempered, even during shitstorms of winter weather that render their climate unfit for life. They use relative negatives when they’re asked how they’re doing, and say they “could be worse.” They’re polite enough to keep their feelings from bleeding over into messy ethnic territories. They hate margarine.

Most of what I knew about Minnesotans was gleaned from the movie
Fargo
, which came out after Tom and I forged our long-distance friendship. There’s a scene in that film in which Frances McDormand’s character, Marge Gunderson, is reunited with an Asian guy named Mike Yanagita she used to go to high school with. Mike saw Marge “on the tee vee,” and wanted to meet at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis to have lunch, while Marge was in town on business. After forced small talk, Mike oversteps his boundaries and comes around to sit next to Marge on her side of the table. Marge, unsure if Mike is hitting on her, politely asks him to go back to his own booth, and that’s when he breaks down. Mike sobs to Marge that he lost his wife to cancer but how he always thought Marge was such a “super lady.” They decide to meet “maybe another time, then,” and Marge determinedly sips Diet Coke through her mixer straw as a defense to the crippling awkwardness of inappropriate behavior from a lovesick stranger.

After months of chatting in high school, I was smitten with what I knew and didn’t know about Tom. I loved his wry sense of humor, his bordering-on-Canadian accent, his coy withholding of any indicative affection toward me beyond our phone conversations about TV shows and music we did or didn’t like. It was a perfect fifteen- year-old not-romance. Until he ended it one day, after I told him I loved him. He was Marge, I was Mike Yanagita.

“Er . . . well, I suppose I’m sorry, but I don’t feel the same way about you,” said a neutral voice from a sturdy teenager of Nordic descent, coming from the earpiece of my bedroom phone.

I was devastated. And of course, asshandedly back-headed to use the L-word in the first place. And not the L-word that references that show about ladies who love pomade. I used the one that describes what
everybody
wants.

So Tom dissolved, and that was that for a while. I meandered toward other imaginary boyfriends I could profess my love to, but they were mostly photos in magazines of Michael Keaton in
Batman Returns
and white-turtleneck-and-aviator glasses-clad-early-70s-era Mike Nesmith. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, a full twice my time on the planet since I’d first stumbled upon Tom’s Usenet ID, that I decided to look him up. This was last summer.

 

SINCE TOM
was an Internet early adopter, he was easily Google-able. I found his blog, which, like our phone conversations at the time, mostly documented music he liked and the shows he watched. But I also gawked at the photos he posted of his family, because it turned out, he had one. Tom was married and had two little girls. Everybody looked robust and happy, and his kids had his eyes. He wrote about his and his wife’s efforts to lose weight, commemorated his girls’ birthdays, and posted wedding photos. I felt like a creepy tourist sifting through his personal information, however public he made it by putting it up on his blog. My blog mostly has plugs for my shows and sometimes I’ll post a YouTube video I find of a cat answering an office phone (
julieklausner.com
!).

I lapsed into callous New Yorker mode looking at Tom’s photos and summoned my sneering superiority, which is a reflex. In some respects, even though it had been forever since he and I had last spoken, I was still basking in that catty schadenfreude you get when you see somebody who once rejected you, looking less than Daniel Craig-like in the physical-attractiveness department. But a blog post Tom wrote on his wedding anniversary cut my smirking short. Its title was “8th Anniversary,” and its text read, simply: “If you get a chance, marry your best friend. Totally worth it.”

I cried actual tears when I read that. Not because somebody else had nabbed the one who got away—the one who was never mine nor here—but because this guy was in love and I was
not
! Jealousy always trumps schadenfreude! It’s a rule from the heartbreak version of “rock, paper, scissors.”

So, for my thirtieth birthday last year, I decided to fly to Minneapolis. I wanted to meet Tom. Fine, I also wanted to go to the Mall of America. But mostly, I wanted to meet this stranger with a family; the one I spoke to all the time in my bedroom grotto half my life ago. I decided we should meet for drinks in the bar at the Radisson Hotel, like Mike and Marge.

“It seems to be the place for awkward reunions,” Tom agreed in an e-mail.

Nate, who agreed to accompany me on the trip after I promised him we’d get our old-timey photos taken at the Mall, watched TV in our hotel room while I made my way down to the Radisson bar, wearing a nipple-concealing scarf over a tight white tank top and a fetching pencil skirt with a peacock print. I was certain I looked brake-screechingly cosmopolitan. I expected Tom’s brain to crumble like an Entenmann’s treat in the wake of my fashion forwardness.

He didn’t care. Soon after I arrived at the bar, I got a handshake and a hug from a tall, wide, living, breathing version of the photo of a young man with a Dwight Eisenhower haircut I’d been mailed years ago.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Tom said.

He was curt and rehearsed and clearly weirded-out. I was too, but I’d fueled my anxiety into hyper- friendliness, if only as an exercise in contrast. I’d say Tom was slow to warm, but I’m not sure he ever did. At least he made eye contact with me after finishing his second beer, curbing my “Wow, so there’s the Mary Tyler Moore statue” pleasantries with a blunt “Let’s start from the beginning.” He told me where he went to college, and how he met his wife his second day at school, married her, and then had kids. He told me about his tech job, about his in-laws, and that he doesn’t get to go see live bands as much as he used to, now that he’s a dad. So far, I could have been anybody. This was just his bio. I was aching for the kind of self-referential conversation that fuels any one-on-one exchange I’d ever been half of, whether it was on a date or at a job interview. This is what I’m about; how about you? But Tom didn’t ask me any questions, so I just decided to start talking about myself. My angle was: “I’m awesome!”

I gave him an overview of my career, and filled him in on my life in New York; my friends, my accomplishments. I asked if he’d seen any of my work online. He hadn’t. As guilty as I felt spying on his blog, I was sort of surprised—even insulted—that he didn’t have the reciprocal curiosity to cyber-stalk me (
julieklausner.com
!). But I plowed forward, looking not so much for approval, but for some semblance of common ground. I asked him if he’d ever been to New York, and he hadn’t. He said he went to Vegas one time when he was getting good at online poker, and mentioned something about a strip club in passing, which made me feel gross. All of a sudden, Tom felt like a long-lost brother to me, and nobody wants to think of their brother with a stripper’s tits in his face.

I made a point of outlining the difference between our relationship situations. I told Tom in a matter-of-fact way, that people my age in Manhattan don’t tend to get married in our early twenties. That we get our careers figured out first and shop around for the right person. I was telling that to myself as much as him. He seemed perplexed.

“But what if you meet the right person at a young age?” he asked. It was like fielding questions from a caveman about outer space.

Then he asked what music I’d been listening to lately. I had to break the news to Tom that I didn’t follow new music as voraciously as I did when he knew me. That I sort of stopped caring about new bands shortly after alternative music became indie rock and an internship I did at Matador Records made me realize that I didn’t want to spend any more of my time hanging out with the kind of people who seem to love those records than I absolutely had to. And then, soon after that, how a band called The Sea and Cake came around, and how the tweeness of that indie-jazz fuckery indelibly alienated me from anything I ever wanted to do with new music again. How what was once crunchy and weird and fun to discover with partners in crime had become alienating and pretentious and competitive and exclusionary. And that around that time, I started getting bored of going to rock shows and found more pleasure listening to the cast recording of
Jesus Christ Superstar
in my apartment than standing around at a club holding my winter coat and a beer in a plastic cup. By the time I met Tom in person, I was no longer the teenage girl who pored through the pages of the new
Magnet
or
Paste
magazine, starving for a fix from the new verse-chorus-verse ensemble. I was over it, and I had new things on my plate I wanted to talk about.

My answer made Tom’s face fall.

“That makes me sad,” he said. “You really introduced me to some of my favorite music that I still listen to today.”

I didn’t take this the way Tom intended it. All I heard him say was, “You’ve changed.You used to be cool.” And that really pissed me off. This guy never knew me; he was just connecting, as men tend to do, with the emotional veracity of the songs he learned to associate with me at the time.

I wonder if music is more important to guys, or if they just process it differently. Why they have an impulse to catalog it and chart their tastes; to talk bands the way little boys trade baseball cards. I look back at my hunger for that kind of talk as a teenager, and I wonder if it echoed my hopes of getting inside the male mind, the way I ate up those porno magazines. I love music, but I don’t get a singular thrill hearing a needle graze vinyl, and I hate more than anything conversation about bands people go to see, and how hard they rocked.

So when Tom said that, I tried not to seem insulted and quickly returned to my talking points. “I’m so happy about my career. I perform a lot. I write for TV sometimes!” But when you talk to a person with a family about how great your professional life is, all you’re doing is accenting the divide. You’re not making them even a tiny bit jealous about what they’re missing at home in the arms of their spouse, surrounded by their progeny. You’re just driving it home: “You and I have major differences that will become insurmountable upon repetition.” Tom didn’t care about my career any more than I cared about what songs he had on his iPod, and dropping names to him of celebrities I’d worked with was like telling a dog that you lost five pounds. The dog doesn’t care. He’s listening for the word “walk” and waiting for you to make your way over to the food bowl. The rest is white noise.

Tom and I drank and caught up for two hours, at which point he volunteered to drive me around for a tour of the Twin Cities. I told him I had to meet Nate for dinner, which was true. But I also backed out because my street smarts kicked in. I was reluctant to get into a car alone with a person I didn’t know. And that’s when I really saw Tom for who he was: a stranger. A friendly stranger with whom I shared at least one experience IRL, and one who was probably unlikely to abduct and torture me with duct tape and electrical wire—but also, in distilled truth, a man I didn’t know, who lives in a strange place.

So, I politely declined Tom’s offer and we said our good-byes. I told him to let me know if he ever made his way to New York, and he said he’d keep in touch this time.

 

 

I WENT
upstairs, and Nate asked me how it went; who he was and if we’d hit it off. I told him I wasn’t sure; that I didn’t know whether I liked Tom or not. It’s like how you don’t even think about whether or not you like the guy who works a floor below you. Still, I wonder what he thought of me. I’m obsessed with being liked, even by children and people I don’t know: sadly, it’s one of the symptomatic motivations of anyone in a creative profession. And I didn’t get any signs from Tom one way or the other until, I got back to New York.

A few days after our Radisson rendezvous, Tom sent me an e-mail that said “Thanks” in the subject header. I read his note and remembered how charming he could be in his written correspondences. He thanked me for “being bold” and getting together, and told me how glad he was to reconnect. Then he launched into a laundry list of Netflix movies he’d just seen and TV shows he’d caught up on since I gave him recommendations over drinks. He told me about some podcasts he thought I should check out and gave me a list of movies his kids liked. And then he sent me a link to an online compilation of songs he’d put together for my benefit, to catch me up on what he’d been listening to in the last few years. It was an overdue mix tape, and I liked almost all the songs he chose. It meant a lot that he’d selected that music with me in mind, and it gave me a belated relief knowing how it felt, at least for him, to finally meet me.