I Like You Just the Way I Am (19 page)

Suddenly, the car phone started ringing. It was my dad.

Looking at my watch, I noticed it was now two in the morning. We’d been with Joe for over four hours.

“Who still has a car phone?” Joe asked.

“The guy who still listens to the
Rocky III
soundtrack on disc,” Larry explained.

“We have to go! We are gonna be in so much trouble, and we can’t take Joe with us! Joe get away from the car!” I sounded like a paranoid nineteen-year-old waiting for the results to an HPV test.

“Everyone shut up,” Jason said, helping Joe up and nibbling an Oreo crumb off his chest. “Joe, look, dude, we’ve given you four hours of our lives for an ounce of weed. We gotta get home.”

“That’s only an ounce?” I asked.

“An ounce is a lot,” everyone said in unison.

“
Fine! I was a dork in high school.
This is the first time I’ve had fun, okay?”

“She and my dad were married, she didn’t get out much. I lived with my mom. I totally know what an ounce looks like.” Amanda fixed Joe’s ears and kissed him on the cheek.

We bade Joe farewell and drove home.

“It’s two
A.M
. He’s getting married in less than eight hours. Why is he still awake?” I rambled as we pulled through the security gate of my dad’s house.

“Maybe it was a pocket dial,” Larry offered reassuringly.

The house lights were out and everything seemed quiet. With a renewed sense of victory, we pressed the garage door opener to go inside. There, standing exactly five feet eight in slippers (with lifts) was my dad. He was wide awake.

“Hey! Where have you guys been?” he said. He was completely sober now.

Reeking of marijuana, none of us had an answer. I started to make up some ridiculous story about taking Jason to see my old high school but got distracted by a framed photo of my dad holding another framed photo of my dad. Amanda walked straight past us and went to the fridge to make a sandwich.

All my dad seemed to want to talk about was the Ferrari, so it fell on Jason and Larry to indulge him. I just stood there nodding until eventually, Larry’s true understanding of something my dad actually knew very little about put him to sleep.

The four of us snuck upstairs to my high school bedroom and passed around the first joint ever to arrive on the premises. Kristen’s son slept soundly in the room next door, and on more than one occasion we were tempted to wake him and ask if he wanted a toke. We decided against it because we figured he was too young. Also because in time, he would have to learn that finding weed isn’t always easy. Kids need to work for things in order to appreciate them. Jason was the first one to say out loud what I think all of us were thinking.

“I am so glad you guys are stuck dealing with this shit too. This would really suck if I were here alone.”

We all smiled. None of us could respond. We were also way too stoned to know how to use words.

*   *   *

The next day, my
father married Kristen in an over-the-top ceremony on a golf course. The four of us were late because Amanda wasn’t happy with her updo. But we managed to sneak in just in time to see my dad ride up to the chuppah on horseback. Kristen was carried down the aisle on the backs of five topless dudes I recognized from the summer I worked at Bobby McGee’s, and her ten-year-old trailed behind her, doing the Running Man. The sense of impending doom I’d felt the night before seemed to dissolve in the daylight. Everyone was optimistic and blown away by the mini burgers. Kristen looked gorgeous and in love and not at all concerned with the fact that she’d just married a sixty-eight-year-old man who drinks his coffee through a straw and wears G-string underwear.

For me, the day signified the end of an era. I was no longer my father’s spouse. I was my own woman, with my own husband and my own ounce of weed.

After the cake was served, the mic made its way yet again toward our table. This time, however, I took it. And with a sense of relief, I said:

“Raise your hand if you wanna get high!”

10.

One Shade of Grey

Marriage is amazing. It’s
like living with your best friend—someone you sleep with, laugh with, cry with, and eventually turn into the Crypt Keeper right in front of like it’s no big deal. But you know what’s hotter than having sex with your best friend for all of eternity?

Everything.

The truth is, people are perfect only when you don’t know them. I once dated a guy who in retrospect may have been a mannequin, and I still managed to base my happiness solely upon his approval for a solid three months. When you’re sleeping with a stranger, you aren’t really vulnerable, even though you think you are when you’re filling your iPod with songs you’ve secretly dedicated to them and writing in your journal about how you wish they really knew you. But alas, if they knew you, the fantasy would be over and you would be sleeping with a real person, which is, as I stated earlier, infinitely more complicated than fucking a mannequin.

Most of us can only hope to find that perfect person who accepts us for all that we are and all that we aren’t. Richard Bach wrote, “A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys and keys to fit our locks.” For Jason and me, it was more like he didn’t even try the lock. He just wrapped a big rock in some annoying Urban Outfitters T-shirt I never would have approved of and chucked it haphazardly through my bathroom window while I was picking a chin zit. But once he was in,
he was in
!

I wouldn’t classify our first meeting as love at first sight—unless I was speaking for him, which I have no problem doing. So yes, let’s go with, it was love at first sight (for him). As for me, I was a little taken aback by the fact that five minutes into our introduction, he excused himself to the restroom by saying, “I’m gonna go do some coke in the bathroom. Oh, and also, I hate black people.” When he returned, it was clear he was joking about the coke. We spent the rest of the night bonding over our Zoloft prescriptions and insane parents. Finding out someone is the same kind of crazy that you are is a special kind of turn-on. We didn’t sleep together until a week or two later, and when we did I think I made him bleed from how intensely I was clawing my way into his flesh. You know, the way you do when you really want someone to understand you. Our chemistry was electric, and even holding hands made my heart feel like it was going to beat straight out of my chest. But, like all relationships, ours matured into something more stable. And eventually, squeezing the pus out of his closed-up earring holes replaced sex as my favorite thing to do before bed.

Don’t get me wrong, my desire for my husband hasn’t weakened, just my own motivation to do anything about it. It’s kind of like the treadmill: awesome and rewarding once it’s over, but after a bowl of pasta, two Skinny Cow ice cream bars, and a Gilt Groupe flash sale, just sort of hard to jump into.

For many women (the ones who aren’t liars), it’s work to stay sexually stimulated by a partner who’s returning our phone calls and not mindfucking us into believing that we’re ever so slightly inadequate. In a healthy marriage there is stability, security, and individual packs of Pirate’s Booty. Sex is always an option—but so is getting stoned and watching
Mad Men.
Like anything that is available freely and constantly, there’s just no real urgency about it. Especially when
Mad Men
is on.

That was, until me and 65 million other women met Christian Grey.

*   *   *

Fifty Shades of Grey
by E. L. James crept into my life kind of the same way my husband did: while I was preoccupied with a chin zit.

I don’t typically read books that appeal to women who saw
The Notebook,
wear things from the Victoria’s Secret PINK collection, or happen to be my mother-in-law. I like depressed German authors who write stories about people whose lives start out bad and then get worse. The most pop I’ve ever delved into was that whole
Dragon Tattoo
book, and even then, I had to chew off the cover for fear that people in book clubs would start trying to recruit me.

I was browsing through a bookstore in Santa Monica, unconsciously peeling a layer of skin off an underground whitehead, when a salesgirl asked if I’d read the
Fifty Shades of Grey
trilogy.

“Really?” I said, more than a little disturbed. Was it the fresh blood gushing out of my face? My new bangs? The fact that the bottom half of my body was covered in peanut brittle? “Do I look like someone who’s read any trilogy ever?”

“Trust me, this isn’t your typical trilogy.” She handed me the first book with a look of confidence I’d seen only on the lady who does my filler. “It will change your sex life in a week.”

To be honest, I wasn’t necessarily convinced my sex life needed changing. I was over flying to Vegas and looking for hired help. I was perfectly okay with our dogs watching Jason try to get an erection, and equally fine with them sitting on my face while he was going down on me. (Just to clarify: We don’t fuck dogs. I just get distracted during sex and sometimes I talk to my dogs and braid their hair when Jason’s going down on me.)

It’s not that I’m not by nature a sexual person. It’s just that I’m never good at anything when I know I have to be serious. Sex with your best friend can feel like when you’re in detention and if one of you even looks at the other the wrong way, you’re gonna crack up.

Also, I may not be by nature a very sexual person. I hate being vulnerable, and intimate, or as promiscuous as my parents, who I assume have fucked more people than will buy this book. My husband doesn’t exactly help the cause when he says things like, “Smell my hands, do they smell at all like poop to you?” One day, he called me into the bathroom, beaming with pride to show me that he had shit my initials in the toilet. He has pulled tampons out of my vagina and farted into my mouth while I’m half asleep for his own amusement.

Not that
all
of that isn’t
super hot
. It’s just not exactly the kind of behavior that sets you up for an orgasm. So for sixteen bucks, I decided what the hell and bought the book.

Maybe it was the graphic sex. Or the graphic sex, or the graphic sex. I really can’t be sure. But within two days, I was finished with the first book and more sexually charged than I’d been since ever. My husband’s cock was a walking bull’s-eye. Of course, there are a million places online to find erotica far more sophisticated than E. L. James’s classic, “He touched me down there.” But the reason this book works is because it makes you wait for the payoff. And though nothing makes me more frustrated than waiting, the waiting is the best part. I think we often fail to recognize that by physically acting out our carnal desires, we are in that moment taking a chip out of the mountain of lust that got us there in the first place. Like every TV show from
X-Files
to
Sex and the City,
the minute the two main characters get together, we stop giving a fuck. Not to be a buzzkill, but kind of the hottest thing about sex is not having it. It’s sort of like cocaine. The first bump is mind-blowing but from there, it’s sadly downhill. And it’s only at the end of the night, when you find yourself sweating from your head in some weirdo’s studio apartment in Palms pretending to give a fuck about his exercise blog, that you realize your initial high is
never coming back
.

I think anyone who is in a relationship lasting longer than three months has in some way chosen comfort over butterflies. That being said, I think each of us yearns to feel those crazy, psychotic, “Oh my God the sky is falling” pangs that come from a series of first encounters. And that’s what this book was able to give me. A vicarious feeling of newness and longing for a man who I’d seen eat his own earwax.

*   *   *

“What has gotten into
you?” Jason asked one Sunday morning as I trapped him in our car outside a child’s bris, begging him to finger me with a Pellegrino bottle I’d found under my seat.

“I’ve turned over a new leaf. A sex leaf,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.

“Awesome! Let’s do this when we aren’t in someone’s front yard, yeah? God, this book really did a number on you,” he said, extricating his penis from my ravenous grasp.

Before you run out and get a copy for yourself, know this: The book is not good by any sort of literary standard. There is practically zero story. The heroine, Ana, is a fucking loser whom I’d never be friends with. And the love interest, Christian, is the type of guy who’d no doubt ask to fist me at a dinner party. My response, of course, being: “Dude, you’re twenty-seven years old. Get the fuck away from me.… Wait, you have your own helicopter? Okay, come back.”

The “story,” such as it is, revolves around the dynamics of a BDSM (Bondage & Discipline/Sadism & Masochism) relationship, something I’d be hard-pressed to seek out in real life. Discipline tops my list of most hated things, followed closely by portobello mushrooms and actors.

My father is a control freak and my mom is Cher from the movie
Mermaids.
Regardless of whose roof I was under, nothing was up to me. I was either being groomed for my future eating disorder by being told that I hate watermelon because it has too much sugar in it, or being left at a movie theater because my mom temporarily forgot she had kids. If a guy tried to tie me up, I’d probably freak out and preemptively bludgeon my seducer to death with his own butt plug.

Luckily, the BDSM merely provided entrée into a larger world of role-play and fantasy. The whips and chains weren’t the real turn-on; it was the power play leading up to them. The book initially hooked me with a scene in which Christian shows up at a bar miles away from where he’s purported to be, to swoop in and save Ana from a drunken encounter with an aggressive friend. It sounds absurd even writing about it now, but deep down I think every woman (including myself) is looking for her white knight. And when that white knight does something really white knight-ish but then refuses to fuck you, you kind of want to gnaw your own arm off after masturbating yourself out of an anger tantrum.