This Book Does Not Exist (2 page)

Why did I believe what she told me? Why was I so confident she was actually reconciling with her old boyfriend? How could I really be sure she was dating other people? After all, this was someone who played a version of herself on TV, watched how she was portrayed when the episodes aired, and then, given what the research on reality show personalities indicated, incorporated what she saw on TV into her own self-perception, and therefore, her actions. Did I wonder what the other people involved in the situation were like? The supposed ex-boyfriend, the other guys she may or may not have been dating, the girl’s friends – almost all fellow reality show cast members – most of whom I’d formed some sort of opinion on while flipping through channels before we ever met.

The ease that we had with one another during the back and forth that ensued helped to erase time. The clock approached 5 AM. We were at a restaurant called Blue Sky, surrounded by food we weren’t eating and people we’d forgotten were even there. We’d only met three hours ago, but it seemed as if we had done this all before.

When the waitress grew tired of us not ordering, she suggested we pay the check upfront, “whenever you’re finally ready.” Naomi convinced me to stay another ten minutes out of spite, something I never would have done on my own. Eventually, we left. I walked out of the restaurant and held the door open for her. I headed to my car. She went to hers. We hugged goodbye.

Later,
as I drove past Naomi’s parents’ house on the way back to my mom and dad’s, I watched her turn into the driveway. I slowed down while she pulled all the way into the garage. I hoped that something else, something wrought by an unseen magician, would happen. But then the garage door started going down, and she was gone before she even got out of the car.

The following night I flew back to LA.

A couple of weeks passed. I found Naomi on MySpace and sent her a link to a new blog post I’d written.

She replied by telling me she wished we had gone home together that night.

The night I met Naomi ended like it did because I was misshapen by events in my past.

I had been lonely for a very long time.

As a child and as a teenager, I was always short. I
was also obese. I spent many hours alone in my room, wanting my life to be different. By the time I was fifteen, I weighed 199 pounds and stood 5 feet 4 inches tall. Other kids called me fat to my face, as if I didn’t already know. I became discouragingly attracted to girls. I remember being twelve, in sixth grade English class, sitting behind a girl named Adrienne, wondering what it would be like to kiss her, believing I would never have a chance to find out. Other boys told me they’d kissed girls. I wanted to be like them. I wanted Adrienne to be the first girl I kissed. But all I could think about was the flab on my stomach and how I looked without a shirt. No girl could possibly want to touch me or be close to me.

Trying to fall asleep at night was the hardest. It was the only time I didn’t have homework, video games, comic books, or sports to distract me from my loneliness. Most nights I cried. I talked to my mom about Heaven and what it would be like to live forever. To never die, to eternally feel the way I did… That scared me the most.

This went on for years. I badly wanted to lose weight. I failed to do so just as badly. I played baseball. I played football. I got cut from the basketball team. I did make a few friends, but the girlfriend I wished for never materialized.

Eventually, because of a tremendous effort, some things began to change.

When I was fifteen and a half, I stopped eating in between meals and started working out on a Nordic Track five times a week for thirty minutes a session. I took up skateboarding after school and on the weekends. I never missed a work out. I never stepped outside of the diet. After unsuccessfully trying to lose weight for so long, it was this regimen that finally led me to lose nearly 60 pounds in five months.

I was a good student before I got in shape, but I became a better one afterwards. Having climbed out of the muck and tasted achievement, I began to aspire. I decided to leave Ohio for college so I could experience another part of the country and expand my perspective. I concluded that I wanted to do something creative with my life. I saw
Pulp Fiction
and chose making movies on a whim. My middleclass parents unequivocally supported me despite not having a background in the arts. I finished sixth in my senior class. I fell in love with New York City while visiting NYU and made it my first choice without taking a formal tour of the college. Contradicting the outcome predicted by my high school guidance counselor, I got in.

In truth, I was proud of myself. But I wasn’t at peace with what tends to matter most to teenagers, namely experimenting with the opposite sex. I weighed myself everyday, monitoring the 140-pound mark obsessively. Any transgression ruined my mood. I’d eat less. I’d work out more. Some days I’d just feel fat and believe I was even though I probably wasn’t. A new struggle ensued – trying to maintain.

More notably,
my social life hadn’t adjusted, and it hurt deeply. What I didn’t anticipate when I set out to lose weight was that simply changing my appearance wasn’t enough. Mentally, I still had to catch up. All of the scars associated with being an overweight child and teenager – name-calling, rejection, feeling abnormal and out of place – weren’t suddenly
lasered
away. I could take my shirt off at the public pool now, sure, but I wasn’t emotionally secure enough to feel any differently when I did.

There
were three me’s – the physical me, the intellectual me, and the emotional me. The emotional me was out of sync with the others. I couldn’t correct that overnight. I had spent too much time with those emotions. They wouldn’t leave. I fought to upgrade them, to bring them into the future. To this day, it’s something I still wrestle with.
When
I was a teenager, however, I couldn’t comprehend what was wrong. I thought finding a girl was the ultimate answer. I thought that would make me better. But it seemed impossible. This was before IM and social networking and every kid having a cell phone, so I had nothing to rely on besides how I looked and acted in person. I wasn’t bad looking. I had good moments. I styled my clothing after that of other skateboarders, who at that time wore baggy jeans and the logo T-shirts of their sponsors. I could be funny when I made an effort, thanks to my dad, who imparted upon me his sense of humor. I learned how to play the guitar, but I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid they’d want me to perform. I buzzed my hair. It made me feel less cluttered. I was intelligent enough. Socially, I didn’t know how to put any of this to use. Maybe if I could have experimented in a
Facebook
profile, learned what people liked and what they didn’t, and then gradually crafted a focus-grouped persona, it would have helped. Obscuring or redefining my uncertainties and deficiencies online, where life is liquid, would have been comforting. If today’s version of the Internet had been around when I was in high school, a lot of things might have been different.

The longer this social vacancy existed, the more it wore on me. At night, not knowing what else to do, I prayed to God. I prayed to discover what it would be like to be held, to be kissed, to feel the warmth of a girl’s body next to mine, to fall asleep knowing I was loved. I prayed to find out what it would be like to wake up knowing at some point that day I would be the reason she smiled. I’d hold her hand and make her laugh and hopefully, when I went back to sleep, she’d still be with me in my dreams.

Praying didn’t resolve the problem.

I went away to college. Even then, there was no one. You could say I gave up. I concentrated on what I did best, attempting to fill the void with work. I excelled at school. On the weekends, I wandered the streets of Manhattan, looking for CD’s in the record shops on St. Mark’s, walking for hours at a time through crowds of people. I listened to sparse,
haunting rap music from
Mobb
Deep and Wu-Tang and this kid from Detroit named Eminem who I heard had just been signed by Dr.
Dre
.
A frigidity
claimed my heart. Instead of building friendships or dating, I bonded with the city itself. It introduced me to another life where my work could be my salvation. People, I thought, shut me down and made me hurt. Academics and New York City did not.

Still, as self-sufficient as I’d become, there were days when I could feel an amoeba of despair lingering underneath my skin. I felt it on the nights I’d eat alone and read
The
New York Times
in a dining hall filled with circles of friends and young couples whose lives were unfamiliar to me. Whenever I called my parents on a Friday night while my roommate was out on a date, I felt it. I felt it when I read other people’s away messages on IM, notes left behind to lovers I’d never know, a pair of sentences like “
i
keep dreaming of you.
i
need a nap.”

This is who I was before I met Naomi. That night, an etched-in belief that she couldn’t possibly fall for
me, that
I was meant to be alone, was what restricted me. I knew then, I know now, that my thinking was flawed. But oftentimes, when emotions are powerful enough, logic can’t make a difference.

After Naomi responded to my message on MySpace, we moved on to communicating through IM. She was in New Jersey, staying with a friend of her parents, while she searched for a job in the city, preferably doing research for a cognitive psychologist. I was back to blog-writing out of my studio apartment in Hollywood, across the street from the “Rock ‘N Roll” Ralph’s, a grocery store that sold guitar strings during the 80’s Sunset Strip glam rock era.

Naomi and I
IM’d
everyday for over two months. Because of the time difference, she’d sometimes stay up until 5 AM to chat.
The idea of me flying out to see her came up frequently.
She mentioned a weekend she’d have the house to herself.

When I moved into my apartment, I couldn’t afford a bed and a couch, so I bought a couch and slept on that. By the time Naomi asked me to visit, I was getting enough traffic on my blog posts to think about buying a bed.

I booked a flight to see her instead.

When I got off the New Jersey Transit in Camden, Naomi was waiting at the bottom of the elevated station in
a red
wool, knee-length coat. Her hair seemed darker than I remembered. It was definitely longer, whisked down beneath her shoulders. She was smiling in a way that convinced me she would never stop.

As I bounded down the stairs, my exuberance for this moment, one I had imagined in so many permutations across countless conversations, distracted me from my carry-on. The wheels caught a chip in the concrete – I fumbled my grip – and the suitcase flipped. End over end it bounced, right at Naomi, who twisted a little bit and stopped it with her boot.

“Don’t kill me already,” she said.

It was only the second time I had seen her in person.

What we did that weekend was irrelevant. Togetherness was our happiness. Even in the middle of the night, as we walked on the darkest stretch of Avenue C to Naomi’s favorite river, the East River, and vagrants caught us sharing our first kiss, every moment was indelible and pristine.

My last night in New York we split the cost of a boutique hotel room in Midtown and had sex for the first time, tepidly, sorting through our emotions and how our bodies fit together as we went. Uncertainty, not about what we wanted but about what we could have, unbalanced our movements. When it was over, I struggled to find a comfortable sleeping position and didn’t close my eyes for hours.

I couldn’t have said so at the time, but we were already falling in love.

The next year and a half was turbulent. It was also beautiful.

I’d like to believe it was more beautiful than it was turbulent.

Without much hesitation, in the middle of Naomi’s first trip to California, we decided to officially become a couple. But since we lived 2789 miles apart
we constructed a different kind of relationship, one that was defined largely by phone calls and texts and IM’s and emails and wall posts and pictures sent back and forth digitally, with an occasional handwritten letter channeled in for romantic effect. On her first day working at an inpatient mental hospital in Washington Heights, I sent flowers. For her birthday, a stuffed dog that beeped out a robotic “Happy Birthday” melody showed up on her doorstep. There was a card in my mailbox for Valentine’s Day… And then there were the red-eye flights from LAX to JFK, my blue Mazda Protégé 5 left in parking lot C for forty hours at a time, hundreds of dollars leaving my checking account every month, changing time zones twice over the course of a weekend, sleeping whenever and wherever I could, concocting blog posts to stay afloat financially, connecting flights in Atlanta and Cincinnati at 6 AM, blood rushing to my spirit every time I saw her face, weekends where we were able to playact like a normal couple, dates and dinner, drinks and live music, meeting each other’s friends, days where all we did was make love in her cramped studio apartment on the Upper East Side.