Life As I Blow It (22 page)

“Perfect, that explains why you sat with her all night and acted like I was in quarantine,” I slurred. I have zero ability to hide my feelings when I've been drinking. Actually I can't even do that sober.

“I haven't seen her in a long time. I was just being polite. I felt like if I introduced you to her she'd say something stupid. She really is crazy.”

“Who were you being polite to? You weren't being polite to me. You're exactly what Cassie said you are.”

Cassie, the eighty-year-old waitress who worked at Formosa with me, had warned me that Nico was a “ladies' man.” He and I had laughed about it in the past, but that night I stopped thinking it was funny. Even though it seemed like he was telling the truth, the feeling that I got in my stomach when I saw her walk up to him scared the shit out of me.

“I guess I am,” he resigned.

Nico wasn't one to confront an issue, and neither was I. We basically just let it all fizzle after that. Unfortunately that didn't stop him from coming into the bar. It was annoying
for two reasons: 1) He would talk to girls that he was obviously trying to pick up right in front of my face; 2) I used to think he came in all of the time to see me, but now it was clear he just liked to drink.

Regardless of who that other slut was, he eventually started coming in with girls that he was definitely dating. Each time I felt like my heart was being ripped out, but I never let him know. One time after a particularly long night of watching him hold court with a stupid-looking blonde, I snapped and texted him a list of five other bars in the area that served Red Bull in a can and carried Stoli, just the way he liked. That text led to a bit of conversation and that led to a few more dogwalks between us. Our reconciliation didn't last long and eventually I was ducked in the passenger seat of Jackie's Honda Civic while we did a drive-by to see if anyone else was parked in his driveway.

“Is that that bitch's car who was in with him last night?” Jackie asked as she turned off her engine.

“Maybe. But maybe it's his car.”

“I can get closer. What kind of car does he drive?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well that's helpful.”

If you don't even know what kind of car the guy you are checking up on drives, the whole drive-by is pointless.

Jackie decided that I needed to cleanse Nico from my system. She believed that he was holding me back from moving on with my life. She insisted that I get rid of anything in my apartment that reminded me of him, take it over to the park I lived next to, and burn it in the garbage. He wasn't really my boyfriend so I didn't have that many things that belonged to him, which depressed me even more. If
we'd had a real relationship, I would have had plenty of stuff to burn. We would have had photos together or I would have gone home one morning in one of his T-shirts.

I scrounged up a shirt and jeans that I remembered I had worn on that one date we went on to that one bar. I also grabbed a DVD that Jackie and I had rented and not returned of a bad Jesus movie he was in. We set the jeans and the movie on fire, but I couldn't bring myself to burn the shirt. It was really cute. We stood and watched the flames for what felt like hours.

“How long does it take for a pair of jeans to burn?” I asked Jackie.

“I dunno. I guess a while.”

We stood there a while longer.

“Maybe it's bad luck that we're destroying a movie about Jesus,” I suggested.

“You're just trying to go back inside. Shut up and be patient.”

“My legs are starting to hurt,” I complained. “How burned does this stuff have to get?”

“It has to burn beyond recognition, so that you no longer recognize the relationship.”

“You made that up. Can we just go in?”

“Shut up. It's almost done. I want you to see this through. You need to let go of this asshole.”

“Fine.”

We stood there for another hour until the last flame went out, then went back into my apartment to drink the rest of the gallon of wine that was responsible for fueling the whole “burn your stuff” idea in the first place.

I guess I didn't get cleansed by the garbage fire, because I still felt sad. About four drunk nights later, I decided that
I would call him. I picked up my home phone, punched in *67 to block my number from showing up on his caller ID, then dialed his number. He answered. I hung up.

Seconds later my phone rang. I got excited that someone was calling me. I was getting kind of bored at home.
Oh, maybe it's Jackie and she'll want to hang out!

“Hello?” I answered.

“Sarah?” the deep voice asked.

“Yeah?”
Shit
. “Nico?” My legs went numb. Or I was just so drunk I couldn't feel them. The realization that he was calling me because I just called him and hung up on him crept in. I guess *69 trumps *67. I fucking hate AT&T.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“What do you mean? You called me.”

“Didn't you just call me and hang up?”

“Nope,” I answered with confidence.

“I think you did.”

“I didn't.”

“You did. It's fine. Just tell me what you wanted.”

“Tell me what you want. You called me.”

“Sarah. I just got a call and they hung up. I hit star sixty-nine and you answered. So, you must have called me.”

“I did not,” I slurred.

“You mean to tell me that someone else just called and hung up on me but when I hit star sixty-nine somehow it dialed your number?”

“Yes. You should definitely call the phone company to get that worked out. Now forgive me for being rude, but I gotta hit the sack.” With that I hung up the phone.

I didn't see him around much after that. I think he stopped drinking and got his shit together because the next time I saw him was on a pretty successful TV show. I was sitting on my
couch alone—drinking wine with no pants on in the shirt that I had refused to burn—when suddenly I heard his voice. I looked up and saw his face, then jumped up to call Jackie and tell her that I hated myself, but I fumbled and fell face-first off the couch. Even through a television he managed to turn me into a klutz.

L
ike most women who are single, have no money, and haven't achieved many goals outside of having gotten really good at Beer Pong, the closer I got to thirty, the more I started to freak out. It was similar to when I turned twenty-five but much, much more similar to a nervous breakdown.

My career was still moving forward, but it was a slow progression. I didn't want to give up on my dream, but I couldn't figure out what the trick was to making it happen. I worked hard at getting auditions, at performing, at trying to figure it all out. I was getting some work, but at night I still clocked in at the bar. I was going on twelve years in the restaurant business and my head was about to explode.

There should be a support group for people in the restaurant service industry. Food and cocktail ordering brings
out the worst in people, and I'm not talking about the ones doing the serving.

Although I never talked much about marriage, I thought I wanted to do it one day.

I didn't think I wanted kids, but I did close my eyes sometimes and think about my wedding day, just like every other asshole does. As happens to most women at that age, my friends started getting married.

Jen Stewart was a girl I'd known for years. She became roommates with Tilley after she and I had moved out of our two-bedroom. She was a ton of fun. I spent many nights drinking with her and Tilley at a hole in the wall across the street from their place called the Starlight Room. Jen and I were terrible influences on each other. We both liked to try new drinks, so we'd always have at least three different types of liquor a night. I'd forgotten my own rule of not mixing. When I finally figured out that that was why we kept waking up with headaches, we opted to stick to our new favorite drink: the White Russian. That phase also ended when one day Jen and I were complaining about our weight gain and Tilley piped up.

“Maybe it's because you're drinking heavy cream every night, assholes.”

We both switched to vodka and soda and never looked back.

Jen also worked at Formosa. She was probably how I got the job, which I didn't figure out until later, when she told me that she was secretly dating the owner, Vince.

Jen had kept her relationship with Vince quiet so that nobody would know why she had the better shifts. Up until she finally told us, everyone at work had just assumed that
she had the better shifts because she and Vince were secretly dating.

Jen and Vince got married the fall that I was turning thirty. The wedding was in Santa Barbara, and since I didn't have a “plus one,” I opted to share a hotel room with another good friend from work, Joanna. She had just turned thirty, and was also handling it terribly. She was the perfect person to go to a wedding dateless with.

Vince had a really hot friend named Scotty. He was ridiculous-looking, one of those guys that you look at and just think,
Well done, God. Well done
. I think he wanted to be an actor, but it wasn't working out. He was getting some modeling work, but he'd gotten sick of trying and had moved to Florida to become a firefighter.
I know. Now
that's
what a firefighter is supposed to look like
, I thought when I heard he had become one. I imagine that women all over Orlando were committing arson just to get an in-home visit from him.

I joked to Joanna that I was going to have dirty, dirty sex with Scotty at the wedding. I guess I'd joked about it so much that I manifested it, because the night of the wedding I had dirty, dirty sex with Scotty.

I had borrowed a dress from Joanna. I'm not going to lie, I looked fucking good. Scotty told me the second he saw me that he couldn't believe how beautiful I looked.

Perfect. He wants to hook up with me. He's already throwing bad lines at me
.

I didn't own any thongs yet—I found them highly uncomfortable—but the dress called for one so Joanna was kind enough to lend me a pair of her underwear. Halfway through the night I drunkenly stumbled to the bathroom. I
managed to get my dress up high enough to use the restroom, then halfway through peeing I realized that I still had the underwear on. Those thongs are tricky, you forget they're there. I didn't feel like walking around in wet underwear, and I was too old to tell anybody that I'd peed on myself. So I wiggled out of the thong and threw it away.

I stumbled back out to the reception and found Joanna.

“Have you seen Scotty?” I asked her.

“Yeah, he's over there dancing with his sunglasses on.”

“Great. I'm going to go tell him I'm not wearing panties and see if that can speed up him putting it in me.”

“What do you mean you aren't wearing panties?”

“Oh, so funny. I peed on them, so I had to throw them away. Don't tell anybody!”

“Sarah, those were my underwear.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Don't worry,” she laughed. “I wasn't going to accept them back from you anyway. I saw you doing the electric slide earlier. I decided then that I'd never, ever want to wear them again.”

I wandered over to Scotty to try to tell him that I wasn't wearing underwear. He was involved in a pretty unwatchable version of the chicken dance, so I walked back to find Joanna. I figured the panty conversation could wait.

Eventually Joanna and I took off to a bar with Scotty and another friend of Vince's. We were pretty intoxicated already, got more intoxicated at the bar, and decided to go back to our hotel to get in the hot tub. Joanna and the other guy excused themselves from said hot tub when it became pretty apparent that Scotty and I were going to have sex in it.

I'm pretty sure I've never felt so proud of having sex
with someone I didn't know that well. When I woke up in the morning and he was in my hotel bed, I thought to myself:
Well done, Sarah. Well done
.

Scotty was supposed to go back to Florida the day after the wedding, but some sort of hurricane emergency kept him in L.A. He asked me if he could stay at my place for a couple of days, until he could get home. I casually said, “Sure,” then called and made an appointment for a bikini wax.

I was very much enjoying having Scotty as a sleepover guest. We had lots of sex, and in the morning I'd wake up to find him doing crunches on my living room floor.
Makes sense
, I thought to myself.

The only time we had a tiff in our four-day romance was when he was on the phone with Vince and told him that he was at my place.

“What were you thinking!” I yelled after he hung up. “I don't want him to know we're doing it! Gross!”

“Uh, he's my best friend. He knew we did it the night of his wedding.”

“Oh my God, he's my BOSS! Did you tell him about the hot tub?”

“Yes, and the elevator.”

“Oh my GOD. This is so humiliating. How can I ever look at him again?”

“He thinks it's awesome. He loves you,” Scotty said nonchalantly.

“Oh, that's really …” I stopped talking, grabbed his hand, and took him right back to my bedroom.

The night before he was going to get to go back to Florida was his birthday. He had plans with some guys, but before he left for the night I surprised him with a cake that I
had made. Yes, I am a horrible cook, but I was feeling very sweet that week, probably because I'd been getting laid every hour on the hour. He cut himself a piece and ate it like it was the greatest thing in the world. Right after he left I tried a piece. It was repulsive.

Scotty went back to his normal life and I went back to mine. I was sad I didn't have any pictures of him to show people who would never get a chance to see him, like Michele. One day I was in a Verizon store and noticed that he was on the brochure. A little something left over from his modeling days. I took about twenty and mailed them out to girlfriends with a little note that said, “Yep. I hit that.” I also kept one for myself.