51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (22 page)

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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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She explained to me how to give and take with the reins so that my horse didn’t rear on the narrow paths. She taught me how to lean forward while the horse cantered up the mountain so I didn’t bounce off. And as we hit the top of the old landfill that stands above Mount Hollywood she showed me a view like I have never seen. To my right were the Griffith Park Observatory and the smoggy haze of Hollywood. To my left were the high and folding peaks of the mountains of San Gabriel Valley. And in between was us, caught between these incredible worlds of city, country, and ever-winding freeway. It was sunset on a Thursday night. Most people get off work and then go home and watch TV. And normally that’s what I would do too. But that night, I sat on a horse, and I caught my breath because that is the kind of country I pay attention to.
 
The following Saturday night, I walk into the Japanese restaurant where Frank, my Pynchon-reading, lighting-consultant date, and I are rendezvousing.
 
“Frank?” I hesitantly ask the lone man waiting by the hostess stand. Frank greets me in turn, and I fear he can see the look of disappointment cross my face. Frank looks nothing like his pictures. I am not sure whether it’s because I don’t have the fancy, $25-a-month version of
The Onion
personals, and so all the pics are thumbnails, or if it’s because Frank has posted photos of himself that are as old as my boots. Because Frank is old.
 
He’s got longish, graying blond hair. His eyes are too light and his body not right, and as we sit down to dinner I look at his soft, pale, ill-defined hands, and I know this isn’t going to work.
 
“Yeah, this whole online dating thing kind of throws me,” Frank tells me as we sit down at the Sushi bar.
 
Whenever you go out on an online date with someone, they always have to mention how weird online dating is. I don’t get it. We live online, we shop online, we chat online, we look at porn online. Why would meeting someone on the Internet be such a source of anxiety?
 
I shrug. “I guess.”
 
“Or maybe it’s just dating in general.”
 
That I get. “Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, but I didn’t go on my first date until I was like twenty-five or twenty-six. It’s still pretty new to me,” I tell him.
 
“Me too. Although mine is because I’ve been with someone for a long time.”
 
“How long?” I ask.
 
“Thirteen years.”
 
“Wow.” I can’t help but say it, “That sucks.”
 
I feel for him. At least I have been on the dating scene for some time, even if most of my dates, hell, roughly all of them, have taken place in the last six months. After we eat, we go to the gun range as Frank had promised. I blast away at an easy target with my 9 mm, but when I attempt a real one, with a bull’s-eye and not just photos of fake terrorists, I realize that I am a terrible shot. Frank comes over and shows me how. He explains it in depth and gives me my first real lesson in target practice.
 
“You should get a .22 next time. You can’t focus your aim with something like a 9 mm. Even my dad, who competed, practiced with a smaller gun.”
 
Frank and I finish shooting, and though it doesn’t feel as though the date should end on such an adrenaline-rushed high, I have to get to Hollywood for a birthday party. Nat’s fiancé Reggie is celebrating his two-year sober anniversary at midnight, and I need to be there. I want to be there. So we take our paper targets, and Frank drives me to my car. We hug, and though I am not sure, I think Frank might realize I am more into shooting than I am into him.
 
I drive to Canter’s, where my friends and I are meeting. I walk in and go toward the back of the room where I see a large table with warm faces. I give Reggie my target with the terrorists on it, with a Happy Birthday note, and I hug my lovely friends. I sit down and laugh and listen to the lives of those I love. Because I do listen now. I listen all the time.
 
29
 
Date Twenty-Nine: Cinderella Does Not Smoke Marlboros
 
“I just quit smoking.” These words do not surprise my date Tim as much as they do me. I decided two weeks ago to not have one, and I haven’t since. And it’s spooky. I have been smoking Marlboro Mediums since I was eighteen and have a love for them that surpasses most of my human relationships. So why and how I am on the verge of making it to twenty-one days without my oldest friends is beyond me. And the sad thing is I really don’t miss them.
 
“That’s good,” Tim replies.
 
We are sitting at a bar on Franklin. Franklin Avenue is the quainter option if one is driving from Hollywood to Silver Lake. I used to take it all the time because it is also the street on which Oliver lives. We used to drink at this bar. But now I sit watching my date drink, and I wonder whether he is legal to have one. Whereas Frank from the shooting range looked a good ten years older than his posted age, Tim looks ten years younger than his listed “28.”
 
“I’ve been smoking since I was twelve,” I tell him.
 
Now, Tim is surprised. “How do you start smoking at twelve?”
 
“I was stressed out,” I shrug. When I was eight years old, my mom, Nana, and I moved into the condominium complex that became the setting for my childhood. Situated between a nice neighborhood and a railroad track, it was the perfect analogy for the awkward class position in which we found ourselves. And also the awkward age I found myself at when I turned twelve. Gone were the days when I was the cute little blonde in the class picture. As my boobs failed to develop, and my permanent teeth twisted into an awkward snarl, and the confidence I once had turned into a fear of boys and girls and Nana, the one place I felt safe was that condominium complex situated between a nice neighborhood and a railroad track.
 
Nana couldn’t keep me inside after school, and I learned that I lived in a fairy-tale place of adventure. Whereas I spent much of my childhood playing teacher by myself in our one-car garage, I was now given unlimited license to roam. I would do a serviceable amount of homework before slumping down on the couch next to Nana. This was the beginning of CNN in our household, and my grandmother was glued to Wolf Blitzer and the First Gulf War.
 
“Nana?”
 
“Huh,” she would grunt, watching the SCUD missiles fly high above Israel.
 
“Can I go for a walk?”
 
She would look at me suspiciously as she had begun to always look at me at that age. As though she too was confused as to what had happened to the adorable little Barbie I had been just two years before. She sniffed the air. “Your breath smells. Go brush your teeth.”
 
“Okay, but then can I go for a walk?”
 
“Fine. Just be home in an hour. I’m putting the chicken on.”
 
An hour would barely give me enough time to smoke my rationed-out two cigarettes and make sure I didn’t smell, but I would take it and rush out the door.
 
“You didn’t brush your teeth,” she would call out after me. But I would, just after I got home. After I walked up to the Food Lion and stole my pack of Turkish Camel Unfiltereds. After I put on my Walkman and turned on the
Pump Up the Volume
soundtrack. After I pretended I was someone else.
 
Some days I would walk along the tracks, and I would be tough and cool and dangerous. I would listen to The Velvet Underground and pretend I was a junkie dropout like the real tough and cool and dangerous girls in my middle school. Other days, I would play in the gazebo that sat at the entrance of our condominium complex, and I would marry a prince, or accept an Oscar, or act out any number of strange scenes that I am sure made the commuting crowd driving by look twice. Once it started to get dark, I would amble back intentionally late to our condo and prepare myself for Nana’s, “Where have you been?”
 
“Walking,” I would mumble, lying down on the couch.
 
“You’re late. Finish your homework,” she would yell at me as she breaded the chicken tenders.
 
“I don’t have any homework.”
 
“Yes you do.”
 
“No I don’t. And what do you know anyway?”
 
She would come in from the kitchen, towel in hand. “I know you have homework to do and that you are thirty minutes late, now move it.”
 
She would swat at my feet hanging off the couch, and I would scream as though she had just taken a belt to me, “You hit me!”
 
“No, I didn’t. Besides, I’m the boss here,” she would say as she walked into the kitchen.
 
“No, you’re not. Mom is. And you’re not my mom!” This had become my rallying cry during these years, before it got so bad that Nana had to move out.
 
But my mom would be safe at work. And she would come home hours later, after we had eaten our chicken tenders in silence, and I had gone to bed. And I would lie there waiting for her car to pull into the garage, and I would imagine what my life would be like if I had just jumped on one of the trains that regularly ran past our condo. Because I figured if I couldn’t get rich and become a princess, I should probably just hop a boxcar and become a hobo. Either way, I knew I needed a cigarette. And I was eternally grateful during those years that the Food Lion made it so easy to steal the small delightful packs of Turkish Camels.
 
Tim is looking at me like I am telling him about how I had to walk forty miles in the snow to get to school, and I know I have probably just told him too much. But I also know that I can say anything here because I am not interested in Tim. Whether eighteen or twenty-eight, I am not into younger men. First of all, I like my guys a little more road-weary than that. I like some chest hair, and wrinkles around the eyes, and the certain roughness of skin that age creates. Tim is incredibly smooth, so much so I wonder whether he can even grow a beard. People are always shocked when I tell them I’m thirty. Apparently, I look fourteen, but next to Tim I just look old. And I feel even older, referencing Wolf Blitzer and the Pixies and Christian Slater in
Pump Up the Volume
.
 
I learn that both of Tim’s parents are deaf, and I ask him if he signs.
 
“No, I never learned,” he says, shrugging.
 
“Really? They never tried to teach you?”
 
“Oh no,” he tells me. “They tried for years, but I wasn’t really interested.”
 
I am floored. As much as Tim might think it’s strange that I once stole cigarettes from the local grocery store, or that I would perform small plays by myself in a gazebo overlooking rush-hour traffic in Plano, Texas, or that I feel the need to divulge stories of my adolescence on a first date, I find it all the more weird that he can’t sign with his parents.
 
Because as much as my grandmother and I screamed a lot during 1990, we still spoke each other’s language. And though I might have started smoking at a precociously young age, I cannot imagine refusing the adventures it brought me on, real or imagined.
 
Earlier in the day I had been at one of my organization’s preschools. I was coordinating a donation of toys when one of the little girls came up and asked me in her quiet, three-year-old voice, “Are you a Princess?” I said that I’m not, but that I would like to be. Before I knew it, I had a small gathering of three-year-olds around me. They explained that they were Jasmine, Snow White, and Belle, respectively. The little one who first came up to me took hold of my hand and told me, “You can be Cinderella.”
 
Years after walking along the tracks, I actually got on the train. I smoked my Marlboro Mediums, I did my cocaine, and I flipped the ultimate bird at my mom and grandmother for trying to raise me to be a princess. But then I found out where the boxcar takes you, and it wasn’t as exciting as it had seemed. It was a lonely, dead-end place. As I stand in the circle of chanting three-year-olds I know I don’t have to be the sulking, smoking girl anymore with bad breath and a thieving habit to still live the adventure.
 
Tim has two drinks. He sips them very, very slowly. I think in the time it takes him to drink two beers, I have had somewhere around seventeen seltzers. I always used to say that I wasn’t an alcoholic so much as I just drank fast. I wonder whether I wish those club sodas were Beam and Cokes, but I would have had almost as many and probably would have slept with Tim. I look at Tim as he talks and think about what it would be like to have sex with him. My stomach turns.
 
I leave the bar and walk to my car, and though I want a cigarette, as is tradition at the end of all of my dates, I don’t. Because I’m Cinderella, and no matter how poorly she’s treated at home, no matter that she misses her real mother, no matter that she is caught between the better neighborhood and the railroad tracks, Cinderella doesn’t smoke Marlboro Mediums. And for today, neither do I.

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