44 Chapters About 4 Men (24 page)

As it turned out, that was Ken’s first time having sex in a car.
Ever
.

How does a person live thirty-four years in suburbia and never resort to fucking in a car out of convenience or necessity?

Looking back, I’m beginning to realize that our entire relationship might have been based on one big, fat false assumption.

1
For those of you who aren’t up on your hip-hop trivia, 50 Cent is a rapper who survived being shot nine times and went on to become a gazillionaire superstar. He got to fuck Chelsea Handler, got interviewed by Oprah, acted in a movie with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, launched his own line of condoms, and was given a personal meditation mantra by none other than Deepak Chopra himself. He’s pretty much my right nipple’s hero.

When I first began dating Ken, I had just moved back in with my parents after my brief stint of living with Hans had dissolved into a violent (on my part, not his) contentious nightmare within three months. I’d been super pissed off about the whole thing because I was soooo ready to be a grown-up, and my parents were super pissed off about the whole thing because it meant they could no longer walk around naked and smoke pot out in the common areas of the house at all hours of the day. In the few short months I’d been gone, my childhood home had turned into a virtual opium den of hippie hedonism.

When I showed up there after my impressively dramatic breakup with Hans, at ten o’clock at night, screaming and crying and trying to shove my eight-foot-long dresser back up the stairs to my old room, my parents didn’t…even…get off…the couch. I had imagined them mourning my absence and holding nightly candle-lit vigils in my old bedroom while I was gone, not blasting CCR and flopping around naked in a psychedelic stupor on a plastic tarp covered with finger-paint on the living room floor.

I, on the other hand, hadn’t done drugs in, like, a whole year. I had a 4.0 college GPA and good credit, and I was applying to graduate schools. I might have looked like a fuck-up with my half-shaved head and python-print pleather pants, but somehow, the responsibility torch had been passed while I was away, and I was now more of an adult than my parents. Clearly, it was time to go. And I’d just gotten there.

Right before my knock-down-drag-out fight with Hans, I’d met and begun chatting with Ken almost bimonthly at my wealthy, gregarious friend Jason’s weekend house parties. For some reason, Hans never came with me. Oh, yeah, because he was too busy doing blow off of strippers with his bandmates every weekend. Whatever. I didn’t mind going alone. There was always booze, which is kind of a big deal when you’re still ten long months away from being twenty-one, and pool—both billiards and swimming—and plenty of opportunities for some harmless ego-boosting flirtation. That place was a total sausagefest. There were the regulars, which included me and a few guys I’d already boned, and then there was a revolving door of extras, whom all looked vaguely familiar. Ken was one of the extras. We’d gone to the same giant suburban high school, but because he was a senior when I was a freshman our paths had never crossed before.

When I’d first made Ken’s acquaintance, he was in his pajamas and I was living with Hans, so it was hardly a love connection. That motherfucker was always in his pajamas.

(Whenever I tell this story in Ken’s presence, he never fails to rudely interrupt me and insist, “Those were not pajamas. They were running pants.”

To which, I say, “Tomato, tomato.”

That saying doesn’t really work in print, does it?
)

Whenever I saw him at Jason’s house, Ken would just be sitting there on the couch, all cozy in his fucking PJs, watching sports or whatever with the guys, which just so happened to be exactly where my attention-whore, cock-teasing ass always wound up—wherever the guys were.

Without fail, Ken and I would somehow strike up a conversation. He never hit on me. He was never drunk. He would simply make eye contact, smile at appropriate times, and speak to me like one intellectual to another. We would go back and forth about museums we’d been to, music we loved, and movies we’d seen. In fact, Ken was the manager of a movie theater at the time and had seen every film released since 1995 (except for
Meet the Feebles
1
.)

Ken wanted to go to Egypt one day. I was taking an Egyptian art history class. I wanted desperately to go to Europe. Motherfucker had been twice. He had not, however, been to a Cirque du Soleil show, which I had recently become obsessed with.

I wish I could say it had been love at first sight. But, honestly, I never gave Ken a second thought.

Journal, you know my track record. The friendly-guy-in-the-PJs-without-a-criminal-record-or-a-single-visible-tattoo isn’t exactly my type—at least it wasn’t until Jason’s Super Bowl party.

Hans had just dumped me, and I was
soul-crushingly depressed about it. All I wanted to do that night was sit on a couch near other people and get really, really drunk. Jason’s Big Game party was the perfect distraction
2
.

After being there just long enough to grab a beer and a seat on the sectional, I noticed someone entering the room out of the corner of my eye. Time stopped, a wind machine inexplicably roared to life, and the first few bars of Sugar Ray’s “Fly” began to play in my head. This mysterious figure was tall and lean, had short light-brown hair that flipped up in the front, and was wearing black from head to toe—black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black slacks, and a skinny black tie. My heart stopped. It was as if Mark McGrath himself had just walked in.

(He was still a big deal in 2003, I swear!)

Mystery Man greeted Jason with a sexy perfectly straight white-toothed smile/head-nod thing and disappeared from my sight.

Who the fuck was that??

Not that it mattered. I was going to fuck him. I was going to break him. I was going to have him safe-wording on me by the end of the night. I was going to—

Just as I began to march off in search of Mr. McGrath’s doppelganger and hopefully something nice and firm to flog him with, he came back into my line of sight…and had changed into a pair of running pants and a white T-shirt.

No. Fucking. Way.

I suddenly understood how so many people had been successfully duped by Clark Kent.

I used to think,
Really, Superman? A pair of glasses and a tie? Frankly, you are insulting the whole human race with that disguise. How stupid do you think we are?

But there he was. Ken, the quiet, articulate, pajama-wearing introvert whom I’d been having long intellectually stimulating, undeniably platonic conversations with on a bimonthly basis had been able to ignite my libido with as little as a change of clothes and a dollop of hair gel.

I was so confused. Ken was as far from my type as a person could get without having a vagina—nary a tattoo, piercing, warrant, GED, or vice to be found. He didn’t even drink! He’d just sit on the couch, sipping Gatorade in his running pants and Nikes every weekend. But damn, he cleaned up good. And with that tall, fit, lean body, he must actually put those athletic clothes to use.

Maybe he’s a runner? Would that be so bad? A hot, responsible grown-up who takes care of himself and has a decent job and can engage me in discussions about art and travel?

Considering that I was still in the process of unpacking my shit after being dumped by a wannabe rock star who couldn’t scrounge up three hundred and fifty dollars a month to pay his half of the rent because he’d blown it all on nose candy and ladies who probably had C-section scars and facial tattoos down at The Frisky Pony, a guy like Ken actually sounded fanfuckingtastic.

I didn’t talk to Ken at all that night. He sat and watched the game while I sat and watched him, absentmindedly warding off unwelcome advances from the Alexander brothers.

Ethan and Devon Alexander were a couple of good-looking cocky, charismatic man-whores who competed with each other over everything. Ethan had just turned eighteen and was giving his big brother a run for his money in the categories of Funniest Story Told at the Party, Guy Who Fucked the Hottest Girl at the Party, and Tallest Brother, but never in the category of Who Sleep-Pissed in the Weirdest Location After Passing Out. That title will always be held by Devon, the shorter, angrier older Alexander who had once urinated on his own parents while they lay snoozing in their bed.

Rumor had it, when they’d woken up and begun screaming at him to stop, Devon had reportedly held up his hand midstream and screamed back, “Shut the fuck up! I know what I’m doing!”

I love that story.

In defense of the Alexanders, I kiiind of had a reputation for getting drunk and taking boys into the bathroom to show them my piercings at parties, so I’m sure, in my depressed state, I probably looked like low-hanging fruit.

My only other clear memory from that night, besides Ken’s slow-motion entrance and mindfuck of a wardrobe change, is of Jason randomly asking Ken what his last name was. I thought it was an odd question to ask someone out of the blue, and I remember listening intently for the answer, idly wondering why I was so interested in hearing Ken’s response.

I now know that it was because whatever came out of Ken’s mouth next, no matter how unfortunate or unpronounceable or lacking in vowels it might be, would one day be my last name, too.

The days came and went, and for some reason, I just couldn’t shake my two-second glimpse of Mark McKen. I wanted to see him again. I wanted to see if I could synthesize that panty-soaking black-clad hunk with his platonic conversationalist alter ego. They were still two different people in my head.

Then, about two weeks later, the universe delivered my in.

On my way to school, I happened to hear a commercial on the radio announcing that Cirque du Soleil was coming to Atlanta and tickets would be going on sale that week. Instantly flashing on a conversation Ken and I’d had months prior, I seized the opportunity and called Jason.

Before he could get the words “What’s up?” out, I squealed into the phone, “Please, please call your friend Ken and tell him that he’s taking me to Cirque du Soleil! Plea-plea-please!”

The very next day, on my way into my Egyptian art history class, my cell phone rang. It was an unknown number.

Oh my God. It could be Ken!

It had to be. It was far too light outside to be Skeletor calling. I could usually count on Knight to keep his drunk dials predictably stationed somewhere between midnight and four a.m. This person, however, was calling me at two in the afternoon, which gave me just enough hope to answer the phone. I took a deep breath, subconsciously bracing myself for an explosion of expletives out of habit, and pressed the little green button on my glittery plastic Nokia. I exhaled giddily as soon as I heard Ken’s smart-ass opening line.

“So, I hear I’m taking you to the circus.”

Ken has since admitted to me that he wanted to call me the instant Jason gave him my number but waited fourteen whole hours in an attempt to look less eager. Funny, I didn’t know Ken
could
look less eager.