Dear Girls Above Me: Inspired by a True Story (19 page)

LIFE’S IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

Dear Girls Above Me,

“What do you think happened first, tea bagging or like actual tea bags?” Is this your version of the chicken and the egg?

Dear Girls Above Me,

“This might be a stupid question—” Girls, there’s no such thing as a— “Do fish, like, drink water?” Never mind, stupid question.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“You know what I really wanna know?” How Stonehenge was formed? “Do ladybugs get jet lag?” Oh right, that mystery.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“What if the world actually did end and we’re painting our nails in heaven right now?” Then I’m the devil sitting on a toilet.

Dear Girls Above Me,

“Do guys actually circle jerk? Can you imagine if girls were like, come on over and we’ll all touch ourselves.” Yes, I can imagine.

THE GIRLS ON THE CASEY ANTHONY TRIAL

Dear Girls Above Me,

“The verdict is not guilty!? (pause) So, is she going to jail or no?” What’s confusing you, the word “verdict” or “not”?

THEY ARE GOOD SISTERS

Dear Girls Above Me,

“My little brother just called to find out the exact location of a girl’s G-Spot. He’s so cute!” Replace cute with
very creepy
.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“You really fucked me good, Claire.”

Is it Thursday night already? I jokingly wondered.

“I can’t believe you were dumb enough to tag me at 3rd Stop. I told Chad I had reading to catch up on and now he’s gonna see on Facebook I was out happy-houring it with you!”

In Claire’s defense, I’m not sure how strong of a landing the “catching up on some reading” excuse would have made. I knew that Cathy had finished the entire
Fifty Shades
series in less than a month, and if those late-night visits from Chad were any indication, he knew too. So unless she started reading Tolstoy, I think happy hour drinks at 3rd Stop was a pretty safe bet.

It used to be that a distrusting spouse, suspicious of infidelity, would reticently tail his potential cheating partner in the dreaded hope of confirming his fears. And if things really got desperate, one might consider hiring a third party to monitor and then take pictures in order to catch the cheater right in the act. Times are now
different. We’re all somehow connected, so there’s no need for any type of surveillance. People catch themselves by …

1. Literally tagging themselves with the person they’re cheating with (FYI, Becca, tagging yourself with Turtle is going to raise some eyebrows).

Example—My friend Jennifer’s status update … Friday night at 9
P.M.
:

ROUND UP SPORTS BAR

$30 and you DRINK ANYTHING you want ALL NIGHT LONG!!

No one does it better than us!!!—with Jon Bergman and 3 others.

My friend Jennifer’s status update … That same Friday night at 1:30
A.M.
:

DOUBLETREE HOTEL

ROOM 220 No one does it better than us … STILL!!!—with Jon Bergman

2. Using Foursquare to become the mayor of the motel that they frequent when cheating on their spouses. (I believe my friend Jennifer was the first female mayor of a DoubleTree hotel; she really broke through that glass ceiling.)

3. Accidentally Instagramming a naked pic they meant to send
to the dude they’re secretly fucking (“accidentally” adding the Amaro filter might make one question whether or not the whole thing was intentional).

4. Or checking into a bed-and-breakfast (only to then @check-in to a bed-and-breakfast). Sometimes I think Jennifer was just crying for help.

People, this is how empires crumble, destroying themselves from within. We talk about the Internet killing the newspaper industry or Facebook rendering high school reunions irrelevant, but you know whom I really feel bad for? You know which group of individuals, by far, has taken the biggest hit since the social media boom?

Private eyes.

No group has been more negatively impacted by social media than those poor PIs. We cry for newspapers and magazines, but nobody has taken up the private investigator cause. Well, I’m here to speak on behalf of all the PIs out there who don’t have the means to speak for themselves. (Incidentally, most are older men who don’t know how to work a computer, let alone have social media accounts, so they literally don’t have the means to speak for themselves.) You want to talk about job creation; these poor bastards are losing business because idiot twentysomethings (and a few politicians) are outing themselves as cheaters on social media platforms. Cathy, Claire, Anthony Weiner, and others of your ilk, stop putting PIs out of work by doing their job for them 140 characters at a time.

And now, mothers, a breed of the human species that
already
has carte blanche when it comes to invading privacy, have joined the ranks. Albeit, they don’t understand what tagging actually is. Sometimes my mom tags me when she goes out to lunch with my sister because she wants me “there in spirit.” Then, in an attempt to avoid
confusion, I detag myself so people I evaded hanging out with in the first place can’t be all like, “Charlie, you’re not trampolining today, you’re out with your mom and sister eating veggie burgers.” Then my mom gets offended because I detagged myself from her post.

We were better off with beepers. You had a code number that you used to identify yourself (mine was 220) and different combinations of numbers translated to different things (45 56 meant good night, sweet dreams). This was a convenient, easy-to-decipher form of teenage correspondence. Moms couldn’t pick up a beeper and decode the messages. It was paradise. Then we had to go and get all advanced and ruin everything. Oh, whatever.

220—45 56, private eyes.

“Would you keep
dating a guy you really liked if he admitted to wanting to have sex with your mom?” Cathy fervently asked Claire during one of their impromptu one
A.M.
think-tank sessions.

“Hmm, that’s a toughie” was Claire’s inspired response, the two of them really spitballing now. “I guess I’d wanna know if he’s masturbated to her or not. That’s the million-dollar question.”

“Chad told me he looked my mom up on Facebook and started going through her pictures. He thinks she’s hot. Ugh, I wish my mom understood the meaning of privacy settings.”

“I know. Facebook settings are
such
an invasion of privacy,” Claire said sympathetically. Claire and Cathy continued complaining about Facebook’s invading their privacy. This coming from two girls who never missed an opportunity to pose in front of a mirror and take a picture of their reflection while exposing their “toned tummies” right after yoga. You can’t complain about Facebook privacy settings if your profile picture is a self-portrait of you with your shirt off and pouty lips.

Other than that one glaring hypocrisy, I totally empathized with Cathy’s complaint about Chad wanting to bang her mother. No son or daughter should ever have to worry about that imagery. Trust me, the effects of something like that will ripple through the rest of your life.

We all casually throw the term
MILF
around like it’s a football on Sunday morning. To hear Cathy complain about her MILF mom’s exposed Facebook photo album was pure comedy compared to the hell I had to live through growing up.

Most people who suffer the burden of having an attractive mother don’t also share the additional burden of that mother’s being an Academy Award–winning actress. I come from a strong bloodline of actors. Both of my parents have individually made names for themselves working the last four decades in theater, film, and television. I was lucky enough to grow up in a household of people with immense talent and determination to live out almost every single goal they had ever set for themselves.

The first question I inevitably get asked when meeting someone for the first time is “What’s it like growing up with a famous parent?” That I can handle. Their wanting to have sex with that parent, I can’t.

And it’s not just strangers I have to deal with. Just the other day, during a routine checkup, my family doctor said, “So your mom came in for some flu shots last week. She’s a MILF that just keeps looking younger, isn’t she? Okay, now cough again for me, please. Sorry, my hands are a little cold.”

Did Dr. Romoff just tell me that he would like to have sex with my mother, while in the very same breath cupping my testicles? There’s an illusory familiarity people believe they have with my mom because they saw her on a movie screen, and they think this artificial
familiarity gives them the go-ahead to say whatever filth comes to their mind.

The traumatizing experience that irrevocably changed the course of my early teenage life forever occurred one Friday afternoon, during a sleepover at a friend’s house. Specifically, my best friend’s house. His name was Alex Israel, and his dad kept a hidden stash of
Playboy
magazines in a box that would have survived a nuclear holocaust. Or so we thought. You see, Alex’s dad got crafty. He knew the game we were playing, and he didn’t want us to be any part of that world. So he relocated his pornographic treasure trove to an undisclosed location.

For hours, we scoured the entire house looking for the magazines. The search went on into the late evening, to no avail. Rome was built in the amount of time we dedicated to finding a box of porn. After a disappointing night of frustration with no arousal, we decided to hit the hay. I made myself comfortable in my Ninja Turtle sleeping bag, which I’d outgrown but couldn’t find the strength to part with.

I closed my eyes. And just as I was about to welcome REM into my night, I was attacked by a sudden burst of noise and flash of light. I opened my eyes. The TV was on.

“Israel, what are you doing?” I said with an annoyed tone.

“I’m looking for some porn on the TV. Go to sleep,” he replied. Back in those days, once you scrolled all the way up to the scrambled channels, sometimes, if you got lucky, the astrological gods would smile down on you. If the right sequence of satellite signals bounced back and forth at precise congruent angles, they’d form a perfect synchronized alignment that beamed directly to your TV. And when that happened, you were able to see part of a scrambled boob with fuzzy lines going through it. In other words, heaven for
a thirteen-year-old boy. But tonight, Alex was determined to scroll through the channels and find the real thing. It was in his eyes. I saw it.

“Are you going to jerk off while I’m sleeping in the same room?” That was an important question, not to be overlooked.

“Just go to sleep!” Israel said after one too many beats of silence.

“Go to sleep? Are you crazy? How do you expect me to go to sleep knowing what you’re about to do?”

He continued to browse through the TV guide, looking for any title with even a slightly pornographic name. I watched as he paused on
Dirty Harry
for a moment, read the description, oddly contemplated keeping it on, but then thankfully changed the channel.

“You’re tired. That’s all that should matter,” he said to me.

“My friend masturbating a few feet from me while I sleep is something that matters to me very much.” Did he really expect me to fall asleep at this point?

I rolled over, facing the wall, and wrapped my pillow around my ears, which ended up being uncomfortably pointless. I could still hear an indistinct hullabaloo coming from the television. Every few seconds a whole new set of voices could be heard as Israel feverishly changed to the next channel. My only hope was that with each failed channel, his horniness would lose steam.

After a few more minutes had passed in this great hunt for pornography, Israel finally settled on a station. “All right, here we go. I finally found some good shit.”

The sexually aroused teenage boy in me wanted to turn around to catch a glimpse of a woman’s naked body, but I was equally exhausted and didn’t want to give Israel the satisfaction of being interested in what he had found. So I continued to stare at the wall
as projections of light danced and mocked my stubborn decision. What if he had come across something really great? It would be a disservice to me, and mankind, to not even look and see the type of porn Israel had discovered. Maybe just a peek?

As I turned my body over and locked eyes with the television, I realized I was looking directly at my absolute worst nightmare.…

My own mother, naked on-screen.

It was the movie
Melvin and Howard
, which she won an Oscar for, but it would now become infamously renowned as the movie that caused the death of her only son. A medley of so many horribly disturbing emotions took over my dumbfounded body. I was like a deer in the headlights; the only difference was that I was begging for the TV to drive off the wall and put me out of my misery. Not to mention the most appalling part of all of this was that my best friend was on the floor aroused, with no idea that the figure arousing him was my mother at the innocent age of twenty-seven.

“Israel!?”

“I knew you’d be thanking me,” he said coyly, which only made me want to direct the vomit that was seconds away from projecting out of my mouth on his stupid face.