Getting Over Jack Wagner (21 page)

Basically, the rules go like this:

a) do not ask for too much personal information

b) do not volunteer too much personal information

c) do not attempt to make future plans

d) always, always stay aloof.

But Travis was a rebel. He inspected my dorm room with genuine interest. He looked at my CDs and pronounced them “bitchin.'” He asked questions about my pictures and posters, and frowned at my hot pot as if it were an alien life form. After kissing for about an hour, he actually didn't try to stay over. When he left, he
kissed my hand.
The next night, he called like he said he would, asked about my day, made sympathetic “awww”-like noises when I relived my killer test in Women's Studies, and showed up the following morning on his Schwinn ten-speed brandishing a single, plastic-wrapped pink rose, which I'm pretty sure he bought by the register at the local Gas & Go but still struck me as incredibly sweet and sincere, and which I stuck, triumphantly, in a Wissahickon Dining Service mug on my windowsill.

Within my dorm, dating Travis Young rocketed me to minor cult-figure status. “She said they buy flowers,” went the murmur circulating in the first-floor bathroom. “They call the next day.” “They even kiss well.”

“How did you get him?” asked a girl named Patrice, as we bleached our upper lips in front of the sinks.

“I don't know.” I wasn't about to admit to the weeks of plotting and stressing and near-choking it took me to score Travis. “It just, kind of, happened, I guess.”

I'll admit that telling people (my mother) I was dating a local and telling people (Ashley) I was having frequent, twenty-five-year-old, off-campus sex gave me a feeling of smug satisfaction. Following my lead, other girls in the dorm started eyeballing the locals down at Jack's. They chose their favorites, claimed their territories, and discussed them over butter-soaked popcorn. One night, Ashley dragged home Sparky Elwell (bass), after which she scribbled madly in her journal under “Things I've Tried.” We were something like the Official Rock Star Fan Club, except with beer and actual men.

Only Andrew was unenthusiastic. “A townie?”

“Townsperson,” I corrected him. We were in the dining hall poking at hamburger doused with beige gravy, a.k.a. “country steak.”

“What's this guy's name?” he asked.

At this stage, Andrew and I were able to talk comfortably about dating other people. His girlfriend-of-the-hour, for instance, was in the women's chorus and sang her answering machine message to the tune of Rupert Holmes's “Pina Colada Song.”

“Travis.”

Andrew snorted into his potato buds. “Travis?”

“What's wrong with Travis?”

“You mean like the cowboy-guy-on-
WKRP
Travis?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“Where did you meet Travis?”

“Would you stop saying Travis?”

“I can't help it. Where did you…kids meet?”

“At Jack's.”

“How?”

“It was after his set…”

“Set?”

“…we started talking.”

“Set?”

“He's in a band. Shut up.”

Andrew forked up some beige burger. “Set?”

Even though Travis was fun to brag about and made an excellent grunge mix tape, the reality of our dating life was less exciting than I pretended. Most nights, he was either babysitting his sister's kids or rehearsing with the Fighters. The dates he took me on were uncomfortably fancy. (“I thought college chicks liked fancy,” he said, while empowered Women's Studies lectures ran screaming through my brain.) On my turf, we stood in the corners of frat parties while Travis eyeballed Sigma Nus and Sigma Nus eyeballed Travis and I wondered, nervously, how his band had earned the name Fistfight in the first place.

Naturally, things ended when I met his family.

“Can you help me out?” Travis asked. It was a Saturday morning and he had showed up in my doorway, not with his mother but with two small children dangling from his hands. “I told my sister I'd babysit, but I have practice.”

“Huh?” Like I said, it was Saturday morning.

“Practice,” Travis repeated, like I was five.

“Oh.”

“This is Mikey and Jodie.” He disentangled the kids from his fingers. “Be back in two hours.” Then he was gone.

Mikey and Jodie stared at me for about four seconds before correctly assessing that I was a wuss and commandeering my dorm room. One started jamming to my Walkman. The other was wearing my bunny slippers and snapping pictures on my camera. I caught Mikey sipping the last of a bottle of Boones Strawberry Hill.

“Andrew,” I whimpered. “Help.”

By the time I found myself stoned in a weed-choked backyard falling deeply in love with Win Brewer (lead vocalist), I had earned it. After nearly three years at Wissahickon, I was finally discovering one of the few perks of attending a college in the middle of nowhere: the cheap, off-campus houses tailor-made for copless parties and student bands.

The band that night was Rocks for Jocks (a snub at Geology 50, the slackerest slacker course at Wissahickon). They were playing outdoors via fat orange extension cords snaking from the kitchen to the yard. Two living room lamps flanked the drums, casting eerie shadows on the drummer's shaved head. In front of the mic was a patch of fans holding beers and cigarettes and shuffling their feet to the beat. Dancing, I've found, is much more earnest when you're outdoors and off-campus, undiluted by spazzy strobe lights and the strains of “Never Gonna Get It.” I tried to move my body as inconspicuously as possible as I fixated on Win.

After a few years' rock-star dating experience, there are several criteria I'd learned to look for: instruments, musical styles, kissing styles, clothing styles, jewelry, sunglasses, piercings (number), piercings (location). And, inevitably, the hair. It's not as much of a factor in high school, when facial growth is hormonally limited. Adult rock stars, however, will run the gamut from baldness to Fu Manchus and every hairy permutation in between. To this day, the dreadlock/goatee combo on lead vocalist Win Brewer is the all-time winner in the hair category. It was his thick blond locks that I bumped into (literally) during intermission.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The dreadlocks pivoted to look at me. Up close, Win's green eyes were even greener than they'd looked behind the mic. His shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. Around his neck, a tooth dangled from a piece of leather.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn't mean to bump you.”

Win glanced down at my plastic cup. Its rim was gnawed to a pulp. “Hang on.” He took the cup and dropped it into a bin marked “Remember to Recycle!” Then he loped barefoot into the house and reappeared minutes later with a MEAN PEOPLE SUCK mug filled with beer the color of mead.

“Here.”

“Thanks.”

We clinked. Drank. Refilled. Drank some more.

Then: “Feel like walking a dog?”

There appeared to be about thirty dogs at this party, all of them roaming around collarless and probably rabid. “Sure,” I replied, praying “the dog” in question was the nonbiting variety. Win whistled to a flat-faced rottweiler who came lumbering over, face sucking the ground.

“This,” Win said, thumping the dog's back, “is Tony. And this is…?”

“Eliza.”

“Eliza, Tony. Tony, Eliza.”

“Hello,” I said as I shook Win's hand, impressed by our cleverness. “And this is…?” I asked, though of course I'd already eavesdropped to find out.

“Win,” he said. “Like win, lose, or draw.”

“Or win, win, and win,” I plunged, feeling my face burn hot, and wondering who the hell had spiked the mead.

I could feel Win watching me closely as the three of us wandered into the yard behind the house. We passed a giant barbecue pit and a huge, gnarled climbing tree. “This place is amazing,” I said. “Do you live here?”

“Sure.”

“With who?”

“Friends. Friends of friends.”

It was good enough for me.

“When I was a sophomore…” Win's voice was mellow, unrushed, drifting like a sigh, and I could feel the whole world decelerating as I listened, tension leaking from my joints. “All I wanted was to get away from campus. That scene, man.” He stopped walking and I stopped, too, shaking off the momentary disorientation of being called “man.” “It's not me.”

“Me, either,” I agreed, meaning it.

Win sat down in a bald spot in the grass. Tony and I did the same. I followed Win's finger as he pointed to our right, to a scattering of popsicle-stick stakes labeled “Let” and “Broc” and “Rad.”

“Veggies,” he explained, and I nodded. Above us, a maze of clotheslines was draped with tapestries and Indian-print blankets and prairie skirts with jingle bells at their hems.

“Laundry,” he said.

I nodded again. I knew, without a doubt, Win was the rock star I'd been searching for. For a moment, I let myself pretend Win and I lived alone in the country, eating homegrown salads, co-parenting Tony, being not really married but the equivalent-of-married (because who needs a piece of paper to formalize our feelings?) via a service in the woods with a lute and a flowered veil and an exchange of homemade vows.

Win produced a joint from his pocket, which seemed only appropriate. We passed it back and forth until “Rad” and “Let” and “Broc” seemed heavy with meaning. I felt like I was floating, millions of miles from the classes and hot pots and shower caddies of my other life. For hours—or what felt like hours—Win and I sat in that one spot, touching on religion…childhood…Santa Claus…

At some point, someone started beating a drum in the distance. Tony started to moan.

“Beautiful,” Win said. First I thought he meant the drums, then I thought he meant the dog, then I briefly allowed myself to think he meant me. Eventually, I realized he was looking at the stars. “Beautiful…but sad.”

You can always count on the astral reference, no matter how drugged and cryptic. “Why sad?”

“Anything beautiful is fragile,” Win said, pausing an approximate minute between each word. “Beauty is doomed. Don't you think?”

Did I think? Didn't I think? I suspected he was going after a metaphor or something, but I'd only been an English major for two semesters and at the moment was so stoned I could barely figure out my last name. All I cared about was when Win Brewer, lead vocalist, would finish up his second set and take me up to his room.

Rock stars' bedrooms are a very tricky area. In my experience, they are capable of destroying a relationship before it gets a foot off the ground. Most rooms try hard to look noncommittal. They want to seem sparse, distracted, ideally just a guitar case and a frayed bandanna and a black-and-white photo of a distraught ex-girlfriend from Soho or L.A. But upon closer inspection, most rock stars' bedrooms are just the opposite. Once I spied a Snoopy sno-cone maker. A berry-scented air freshener. A stuffed Papa Smurf. (He claimed it was a returned gift, but that didn't make it okay.)

Win's room was not too bad, thank God. There were a few squatting plants, a few pimply homemade candles, a few books of poetry—Ginsberg, Ginsberg, and Ginsberg—and an army-green sleeping bag spread across the floor. I felt my heart thump as Win knelt down and, in one slow, sexy move, unzipped it.

“After you,” he said.

I carefully slipped my sandals off. Win tossed his T-shirt on the floor. As I crawled inside the bag, he dropped his earth-toned corduroys. By the time I looked up, sleeping bag yanked to my chin, the man was nude.

“Skin needs to breathe,” he explained. Miraculously, this did not sound like a line. From the casual way Win strolled the room, turning off lights and tying his hair back (was that a scrunchie?), not wearing clothes actually seemed to be Win Brewer's natural state.

From inside the bag, I watched Win set the mood. He lit a few lopsided patchouli candles. He filled up the ten-disc CD changer. He was skinny, skinnier than I'd realized under his baggy rock-star duds. His arms were skinny. His dreads were skinny. His penis was the width of a carrot. It was a little disconcerting, being with a guy with more hair on his head and less fat on his body than I had. But Win exuded so much natural confidence I found myself lusting for him anyway.

We were soon zipped into a space the approximate size of a bath mat: definite make-out proximity. But the minute we started kissing, it became clear that nothing altered Win Brewer's pace. Like everything else in his life, he took his sweet time. For what seemed at least an hour, in fact, we did nothing
but
kiss. A full Lemonheads CD later, he ventured below the neck. He fumbled with my bra strap during several tracks of Superchunk and Hüsker Dü. At various points, it occurred to me that maybe he'd never encountered a girl wearing a bra before.