The New Rules for Blondes (4 page)

Heidi and I carefully planned my outfit—hot stuff, but not trying too hard and certainly
not
a Constantine Maroulis fan like everybody else at the show. We assembled an outfit that clearly communicated, “I’m just a hot blonde with a head of award-winning hair
15
who you’d probably want to pick up in a bar, but instead I’m here at your concert. But I’m not here because I’m a ‘fan,’ let’s get that straight. Quite the contrary. I’m here because I’m hot and so are you, so you should fall for me so that I can then give you the Heisman.”
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This message was communicated via tight jean capris, wedge-heel espadrilles with long laces that tied up my calves, a blue tank top, and big gold earrings.

Heidi and I made our way across the George Washington Bridge and over to a land that I’d previously only seen in the opening credits of
The Sopranos
: New Jersey. We found MexiCali Live (the infamous Mexican restaurant/performance space) through the sweltering summertime heat and parked the rented midsize sedan across the street.

“Wait—this is it? That nondescript building we almost drove right by! That’s it?” Heidi remarked incredulously. It didn’t look like much from the outside, and I suppose that I didn’t expect much.

“Yup, this is it. I mean, this is effectively a cover band concert on a Wednesday night in the suburbs. I guess this is what you get.” I laughed.

We walked from the glaring late-day sunshine into the darkened venue, paid the twenty-dollar cover (I paid for both of us since I was, again, dragging Heidi along to be my wing woman), and received bracelets whose color indicated that we hadn’t purchased tickets to sit down and eat Mexican food while we watched the show. Yes, that was an option. “A Night at the Rock Show” is like a glorified dinner theater, apparently. Going from the bright sunshine outdoors into the near pitch-black, over-air-conditioned venue felt like that scene from
Varsity Blues
when they stumble out of a strip club and walk into glaring daylight. Only in reverse. There was a small stage toward the front of the venue (with an adjoining “green room” that would have been the size of a telephone booth, if those things still existed), a bar in the back, tables in between the bar and stage, and a small area for people to stand and dance. Or rather, as it was used for this concert, a small area for women to stand and sway while grinning creepily.

The place was packed with women who were either creepy-old to be there or creepy-young to be there. The “creepy-old to be there” contingent looked like the Twitter ladies who followed Constantine, and thus, they enthralled me. They had big hair, outdated fashion sense, and gargantuan, dumpy purses.

“I bet they’re going to tweet about how hard this show ‘rawked,’ ” I joked to Heidi. The assembled ladies scoped one another out, as if on a tacky reality TV dating show. Much like the fat, gay nudist in season one of
Survivor
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and every girl who has ever been ostracized on
The Bachelor
,
I REALLY didn’t come here to make friends
, I thought.

The lights of MexiCali Live dimmed, and the band members took their places on the tiny stage. The excitement was palpable as the band played the first few chords of “Rock On” (the David Essex song, not the Gary Glitter creepfest) and Constantine emerged from backstage. The multicolored theater lights caught the perfect, natural highlights of his long, brown mane as I thought,
Whoa—nice hair.
He was surprisingly thin and tall, dressed in a white V-neck, a vest, and a necklace. For the next ninety minutes, Constantine and his band played covers of every second-rate rock song you’ve ever heard, which makes me think that he probably couldn’t license any songs from
Rock of Ages
.

“A Night at the Rock Show” was fun, albeit corny. At one point, Constantine took the microphone chord and wrapped it around his back, then shimmied almost like in those old “Zestfully” clean commercials. Heidi and I looked at each other and began laughing as the surrounding crowd shushed us so they could capture his every movement on their iPhones.
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Constantine sings well, no doubt, and I appreciate that he’s found a profitable niche as the master of all rock music covers, but I still had a case of the dumb chills.
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That is, until he pointed at me and we made eye contact.

Toward the end of the concert, Heidi and I had scooted our way to the front of the “crowd” of a few dozen ladies as Connie was crooning a power ballad. I flipped my hair, sipped my Corona, and stared up at the hairy Greek Romeo. Just then, we locked eyes, and he pointed at me and made an upward motion with his chin, Dylan McKay style, and made me feel like the only girl in the room.

“Holy shit, he just totally pointed at you!” Heidi squealed while trying to keep her voice quiet.

“I know—holy shits!” I squeaked out through clenched, smiling teeth. I stared at his perfect mane of fluffy curls as all the irony and joke crush stuff fell away, leaving only a real crush. No joke. In that moment of eye contact, this crush had pulled a Velveteen Rabbit and become real. I was going to meet and hump Constantine Maroulis, but the mission to ruin him was aborted. This wasn’t a joke anymore. This was real. I wasn’t doing this for cocktail banter anymore. With a nod of his chin and a moment of eye contact, I was doing this for real. For life. Forever. We could build a life together based on our mutual love of both performing and our own hair. We could make magic.

“A Night at the Rock Show” closed with “We Are the Champions,” the song that made a splash when Constantine performed it on
American Idol
all those years ago. Immediately after the show, a gaggle of women assembled outside the green room door, and Heidi and I agreed that such behavior was pathetic and would probably impede a D-list hump, so we sat down to eat some Mexican food. I needed to chow so that I could sober up before I drove the rental car back to Brooklyn, and we needed to review on the night’s events.

“Well, he totally pointed at you and checked you out, so what’s the plan now?” Heidi asked as we shoveled guacamole in our faces.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll play it coy and just tweet something about the show? I mean, I’m not going to stand by the green room door like a tool. He’s probably gone by now anyway,” I responded. Heidi and I talked strategy for about an hour, then headed out to the parking lot. As we exited MexiCali Live, I pulled out a cigarette so I could smoke before we got in the car. My formerly valuable “smoking while driving” skills had gone down the crapper since college.

At this point, it had been maybe an hour since the show and I was mid–Marlboro Light when who walked out of the venue but my hairy Greek sex god, friggin’ Constantine Maroulis! The main event! The reason we were in goddamn Teaneck, New Jersey, on a school night. The master of puppets of “A Night at the Rock Show!”

I took a deep breath, and as Constantine walked by us on the nearly empty sidewalk, I caught his eye and said, “Great concert in there.” He acted surprised and appreciative, and Heidi, Constantine, and I had a nice chat about performance and power ballads. He came off as surprisingly humble and sweet, only further convincing me that perhaps I had “finally found the love of a lifetime,” just like FireHouse said.

“How did you guys hear about this concert?” Constantine inquired.

“I’m kinda of embarrassed to admit this,” I said as I scolded myself from inside my own head,
Selena! If you apologize and act like it’s crazy behavior, it becomes crazy behavior! AshWants- ToRock never apologizes, and neither should you!
I continued, “But I saw it on your Twitter feed.”

“Oh yeah, I’m trying to do more promotion stuff with Twitter lately,” he said.
You sure are, Connie M.
, I thought.
Your Twitter feed reads like a self-promotion deluge and somehow I love it.
“Where do you guys live?” he asked.

“In Brooklyn. We drove out here . . . for this concert . . . it’s not too far,” I lied.

“Whoa—you guys came all the way out here to see me!? A D-list celebrity!” he said.

Stop the record—did he just call himself a D-list celebrity? His self-awareness was both refreshing and worrisome. I looked at him, tilted my head, and tried to peer into his subconscious. I had been jokingly referring to Constantine on my Facebook page and Twitter feed as exactly that—“a D-list celebrity.” Did he somehow know? Could he tell that I’d been reading his every tweet for the past few months? Did he know that I’d spent many a drunken night typing his name into Google images and scrolling through photo after photo of his smiling face and sick weave? Or maybe this is just how he charms the ladies—with self-awareness and good hair.

Perhaps all the gossip I’ve ever heard about him is wrong,
I thought,
and he’s not a complete douchewad cheesedick after all. Maybe he’s just completely misunderstood and I’m the only one who gets him.
This belief was only further compounded when Constantine not only gave me his email address but also his phone number. Yes, my friends,
digits
. This exchange didn’t just come out of nowhere—we had some laughs, talked about comedy and performing, established that I’m from Boston and he’s been there. We made some serious connexies, people!

“Send me an email about your comedy show sometime,” he said as I typed his email address into my old-school flip phone. “Whoa—nice phone! Haha!”

“I know—I have a whole standup bit about how I’m a Luddite and I hate technology and I still carry a Discman because I’m like a Pilgrim.”

“That’s funny stuff—here, why don’t I give you my number?” he added, and ten digits rolled off his Greek tongue into my millennium-style phone, and my hands shook with excitement and surprise.

By then, his “roadies” (the other guys in the band/his friends) were finished loading the equipment into a lame-looking van, so he had to get a move on. Heidi and I hugged and cheek-kissed him good-bye, then crossed the street and walked into the parking lot.

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!” Heidi whispered as I took deep breaths.

“No freaking out until we’re safely in the car,” I spit out as I nearly hyperventilated. Once we were safely inside the sealed pod of the rental car, I commenced shrieking, “HOLY FUCK, I JUST GOT CONSTANTINE MAROULIS’S NUMBER! HOW YA LIKE THEM APPLES!? I GOT HIS NUMBA! HAHA! OMG OMG OMG!” Heidi and I hugged and stared at each other, attempting to digest the gravity of the night’s events.

“Selena—you amaze me!” Heidi blurted out. “You’ve proven that anyone can achieve his or her dreams, no matter what they are. Obama didn’t prove that—
you
did! You did it! Yes, we can!” she shrieked. I went to bed that night floating on air. It was as easy as that. You
can
achieve your dreams. Heidi was right. I proved that. I did.

Or at least it seemed like I did until I texted him the next day.

I had a standup gig in the homosexual haven of Fire Island, New York, the next night, so I spent the day after “A Night at the Rock Show” in transit, just like so many rock-and-roll bands on the nights after
their
rock shows.
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It’s a sign, right? Getting to Fire Island is like
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
, but I was floating on a cloud of euphoria the whole way, so it didn’t bother me. Constantine Maroulis was to be mine, and I loved sharing the story with my two fellow standup comedian travelers, Leah and Danny. I was the token hetero on this road trip.

“I’m going to text him now so that we keep the momentum going from last night and he doesn’t forget me,” I explained to Leah and Danny on our way to Fire Island. On the train, they had dutifully listened to the entire story from start to finish. I was unrepentant in my willingness to dominate conversation with the saga that should have been nicknamed “Hair,” but with less body odor and more cheap cologne. And so once we reached our hotel on Fire Island and had time to kill before our show that night, I fired off my first text. Light, witty, and awesome, just like me.

“Hey, this is Selena. I put a gerbil in a wheel to generate enough electricity in my old-school phone to send you this text. Great to meet you last night!”

I was a hilarity machine . . . but was Constantine ready for this jelly? What guy wouldn’t fall for this witticism? Apparently a random schmo who wasn’t expecting a text.

“617—is this Boston?” was the response.

Huh. That was weird for a guy with whom I talked about Boston
last night
. No matter. We were going to fall in love, and this was simply a bump in the long and winding road. Someday when we were sitting on rocking chairs on our wraparound porch while our grandkids climbed trees, we’d laugh at this exchange.

“Yes—I’m a Masshole through and through, so I keep it real with the Boston digits.”

“Nice, mami.”

Hmm . . . I’d only heard the word “mami” used by the Mexican guys who hung around outside of New York City bodegas. That didn’t sound very Greek to me, but then again, Spanish is like Greek to me.

“Not as nice as a Greek Idol, am I right?” I tried my hardest to will whoever was on the other side of the phone to be my Greek lover.

“You sound hot hahaha” was the response. Huh!? What was going on here?

“Selena, you need to put the phone down,” my homo amigos instructed me. Lesbian Leah and gay Danny had been listening to the Constantine saga unfold all day, and they were understandably sick of it.

“To be honest,” Leah said, “it seems like either you took down his number wrong, or he is a jerk and he gave you a fake number.”

A fake number? But would my Constantine do such a thing? He pointed at me in the concert. We spoke after the show and joked around. He offered
me
the digits! I didn’t ask for anything!

“Do you have another way to reach him? I mean, can you email him so that you don’t keep texting with this random Latino kid in Los Angeles?” Danny suggested.

“
Yes!
I have his email address! I can email him, make a joke of all this, and then finally we’ll be in communication and our love can begin.”