Who You Know (32 page)

1

“I
t couldn't possibly have been that bad.”

“Oh, but it was. I saw his you-know-what within an hour of knowing him, totally against my will.”

“He flashed you?”

“Not exactly. We stopped by my apartment after dinner before we went to the club because we'd gone for Italian, and I had garlic breath, and I wanted to brush my teeth before we went dancing, even though I knew within four seconds of meeting him that it could never go anywhere. I don't know
what
Sylvia was thinking setting us up. But to be polite I had to go through the charade of the date anyway, even though I wasn't remotely attracted to him. So I started brushing my teeth, but I wanted to check on him and make sure he was okay, so I came out from the bathroom into the living room, and he was just sitting there on the couch, naked.”

“No!”

“Yes. Naked and, ah . . . You know, aroused.” I'm stuck in traffic, story of my life, talking on my cell phone, which is paid for by the company I work for, making it one of the very, very few perks of being employed by Pinnacle Media. “I mean I know it's been a while since I've dated anyone, but isn't the whole point of dating and sex to kind of, I don't know, enjoy this stuff
together
? Like getting turned on by the other person's touch, and not by the sound of someone brushing her teeth in the bathroom?”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I looked at him like the maniac he was, and he realized that I was appalled and said that he'd assumed that when I said I was going to the bathroom to brush my teeth, what I really meant was that I was going to put my diaphragm in.”

“I don't . . . Is English his native language? I don't see how anyone could possibly come to that conclusion.”

“Right, Tate, that's my point. The guy was a loon. So I reply, quite logically under the circumstances I think, my mouth foaming with toothpaste, ‘No, I willy was bruffing my teef.' And this whole situation strikes me as so wildly funny. I mean in the past six months I've dated a bitter divorcé, been hit on by a string of lesbians, and now this. How did my dating life go so tragically wrong? Anyway, I just lost it. I crumpled to the ground in a fit of hysteria. I mean I started laughing so hard I literally couldn't stand, and he looked all put out and confused and out of the corner of my eye, as I was convulsing around like a fish out of water, I see him get dressed, and then
he stepped over
my writhing body and said, ‘
I don't know where things went wrong between us . . .
' ”

“No!” Tate howls with laughter.

“Yes. He said some other stuff, but I was laughing too hard to hear him. I mean, hello, I can tell you
exactly
where you went wrong, buddy.”

Tate and I laugh, then she says, “Did you tell Sylvia about how the guy she set you up with is a kook?”

“Hell, yes. I called her up and I was like, ‘um, thanks for setting me up with a sexual predator.' And you know what she said? She said, ‘I knew it had been a long time for both of you, and I thought you might just enjoy each other's company, even if it never got serious.' I don't think you need to be an English lit major to read the hidden meaning in that sentence. I mean, obviously Sylvia thinks I'm such a sad schlub who is so desperate for sex I'll have a one-night stand with a scrawny, socially inept engineer.”

“Jadie, look at it this way: you can put all these experiences into your writing. Maybe you'll write a book one day about all the hilarious dates you've been on.”

I groan. “Oh god, please don't tell me I'm going to go on enough bad dates to fill an entire book.”

“There's a guy out there for you, I know there is.”

“Maybe. I'm just pretty sure he's not in Boulder, Colorado.”

“He's out there. I know he is. Somewhere. Look, I gotta go. I'm going to be late for my shift.”

“Have fun slinging tofu.”

“Oh, you know I always do.”

I click the phone off, and now that I have nothing to occupy myself with I can focus completely on how annoyed I am at sacrificing yet another hour of my life to traffic. Why aren't we going anywhere, why?

I can't wait until the day I can work full time as a writer and won't have to commute in highway traffic twice a day any more.

I'm a travel writer, though most people call me a “creative project manager for a Web design company.” Personally I think this shows an appalling lack of imagination. I
have
published travel articles, after all. Several of them, in fact. Granted, all told, in my five years of freelancing I've only made a few hundred bucks on my writing and my travel expenses have come to about ten times more than what I made from my articles, but it's a start. (By the way, in case you're wondering, “creative project manager” is a fancy title for “underpaid doormat who works too hard.” Essentially, my job is to manage people who do actual work. I make sure the copywriters, graphic designers, and programmers are getting their pieces of the puzzle done on time. Every now and then I get to brainstorm ideas for how to design a Web site, and those are the few moments when I actually like my job, when I get to be creative and use my brain, letting the ideas come tumbling out. But mostly my job feels ethereal and unsubstantial. The world of the Internet moves so quickly that by the time a Web site gets launched, the company we created the site for is already working on a redesign, and within months, any work I did on a site disappears. That's why I like writing for magazines. I do the work, it gets printed with my byline, and I have the satisfaction of having something tangible to show for my efforts.)

Finally I see what has been holding traffic up—a car that's pulled over to the side of the road with a flat tire. Great. Forty extra minutes on my commute so people can slow down to see the very exciting sight of a car with a flat tire.

Eventually I make it home, grab the mail, unlock my door, and dump the mail on my kitchen table, my keys clattering down beside the stack of bills and catalogs advertising clothes I wouldn't wear under threat of torture. I sift through the pile; in it is the latest issue of the alumni magazine from the journalism school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, my alma mater. I flip idly through it until I see a classmate of mine, Brenda Amundson, who smiles up at me from the magazine's glossy pages in her fashionable haircut and trendy clothes. As I read the article, my mood sinks.

I know I'm not the first person who has struggled to make it as a writer, but sometimes, like, oh, say, when I get my alumni magazine and read that Brenda Amundson, who is my age—twenty-seven—and has the same degree I have, is making a trillion zillion dollars a year writing for a popular sitcom in L.A. while I'm struggling to get a few bucks writing for magazines no one has ever heard of, my self-esteem wilts.

I change into a T-shirt and shorts to go for a run—I need to blow off steam. To warm up, I walk to a park, then I start an easy jog along the path by Boulder Creek. It's 7:30 at night, but the sun is still out and the air is warm.

Boulder has its faults, but it's so gorgeous you forgive them. No matter how many years I've lived here, the scenery never stops being breathtaking. As I run, I take in the quiet beauty of the trees, the creek, the stunning architecture. The University of Colorado at Boulder is an intensely gorgeous campus. Every building is made out of red and pink sandstone rocks and topped with barrel-tiled roofs. Behind them are the Flatirons, the jagged cliffs in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that draw rock climbers from around the world and help routinely put Boulder on “best places to live” lists in magazines.

I jog for about half an hour, then walk and stretch until I've caught my breath. I sit down on the grass and watch three college students playing Frisbee in one corner of the field. Across the way, two young people with dreadlocks and brightly colored rags for clothes are playing catch with a puppy.

The puppy makes me smile, but I realize as I watch it that I still feel tense. My jaw muscles are sore from clenching them, a bad habit I have when I am stressed, which is most of the time these days it seems.

I need to get away, to relax. I long to hit the road.

I've always loved traveling. Since I was a little kid I always wanted to escape, to find a place I could comfortably call home and just be myself. In the small town where I grew up, life was a daily exercise in not fitting in.

The fact that I was considered weird was mostly my parents' fault. They ran a health food store/new age shop where they tried to sell crystals to align chakras, tarot cards, incense, meditation music, that sort of thing. I'm fairly certain that no one ever bought a single sack of brown rice or bag of seaweed from their grocery store. They got by because of the side businesses they ran in the shop—Mom cut hair and Dad built and repaired furniture. Yes, I know, a health food/new age/hair salon/ furniture shop is unusual, but when I was growing up, it was all I knew.

My mom was the kind to bake oatmeal cookies sweetened with apple juice and honey and would rather have me gnaw off my own arm than eat a Ding Dong or another processed-food evil. You can imagine how popular the treats I brought to school for bake sales and holiday parties were. About as popular as me. Which is to say not at all.

I sat through years of school lunches all on my own, eating carob bran muffins and organic apples while every other kid had Ho-Hos and Pop-Tarts and peanut butter fluff sandwiches washed down with Coke or chocolate milk. And as I would eat in solitude, I would dream of getting away. I longed to see the world. I ached to find some place where I could be whoever I wanted to be and wouldn't be the weird kid in town.

I found that place in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder is a place where pot-smoking, dreadlocked eighteen-year-olds claim poverty yet wear Raybans. Boulderites believe themselves to be one with nature, but own some of the most expensive homes in the country and drive CO
₂
-spewing SUVs without irony. It's a place that manages to be somehow new age and old school. A place where yuppies and hippies collide and where, inexplicably, people think running in marathons is actually fun.

My life is equally mixed up. It feels like a pinball machine—I'm the ball, getting flung around in directions I couldn't foresee and never considered. Like how I ended up working for Pinnacle Media. I thought that after graduation I would become this world-renowned journalist covering coup attempts, international corruption and intrigue, the works. But after I got my degree, I couldn't get a job writing so much as obituaries for some small-town newspaper. Frustratingly, papers like the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
seemed to be doing okay even without my help, and nobody from their respective papers was banging down my door begging me to write for them. They didn't even glance at my résumé, just like every other newspaper in America, no matter how small or inconsequential. So I took a job doing Web content at an Internet company during the height of Internet insanity, when every twenty-year-old kid with a computer was declaring himself a CEO and launching an online business determined to get rich quick. The company was living large for a while, but then the economy started to turn. I could tell we were going down, and I felt lucky when I landed the job at Pinnacle.

That feeling lasted, oh, twenty-eight seconds.

I've been looking for a new job since about the day after I started with Pinnacle, but with the economy the way it is, there have been almost no jobs advertised that I'm qualified to fill. My mantra is
someday the economy will get better and I'll be able to find another job. Someday the economy will get better and I'll be able to find another job.
But until then, my situation feels a lot like being trapped.

I travel to get away whenever possible, taking a handful of short trips each year to cities in the United States, Mexico, or Canada. I've been saving up money and vacation time to go on a real trip, something longer than a four-day weekend, but I keep waiting for some flash of insight that will tell me where the best place to go is, some location that will prove a treasure trove of sales to magazines.

Although maybe it doesn't really matter where I go, whether Barbados is the happening spot this year or if Madagascar is the place to be, whether the Faroe Islands are going to be the next big thing or if Malta will be all the rave. After all, the articles I have sold haven't come from the short trips I've taken but from living in the Denver/Boulder area—stuff about little-known hotspots in Colorado and how to travel cheap in Denver. Mostly I write for small local newspapers and magazines. I've gotten a few pieces published in national magazines, but the biggies, the large circulation publications that pay livable wages like United Airlines'
Hemispheres
or Condé Nast
Traveler
, remain elusively, tantalizingly out of reach.

In the past year, depressed about my career, I decided I would try to get another area of my life in shape—my love life. It hasn't exactly gone according to plan.

First, there was the bitter divorcé. I didn't know he was bitter until we went out on our first date. I knew he was divorced; he'd told me. I just didn't know how frightening the depths of his contempt for his ex went.

I met Jeff at the Greenhouse, the restaurant where I used to work when I was in college. My friend Tate still works there, and I was waiting for her to get finished with her shift when Jeff and I got to talking. I was sitting at the table next to him, and as another waitress, Sylvia, brought him his shot of wheat grass, he said something that made me laugh, and he kept on cracking me up with little quips and witty remarks. I don't even remember what we talked about, just that he seemed like a nice guy, and when he asked if he could have my number, I told him he could. I started to write it down, and he said abruptly, “Before you give me your number, there is something you should know.”