I Don't Care About Your Band (18 page)

But I tried to ride out my first wave of “should- feel.” You know when you first hear bad news and your first reaction, for some reason is, “OK,” right before you flip your shit? Like you’re told you’re fired, or your parents are dead, or the test results are positive. And you know that in a moment or two, it’s going to be a shit show, because honest reactions come from the gut once the brain has chewed and swallowed. But during the seconds it takes for you to hear the words—you practically see them, like they’re in a cartoon coming out of a silhouette’s mouth and landing in your ear—you think to yourself for a split second: “Maybe I can deal with this.” And “Wow, that’s a surprise, but maybe it will be all right.” And then, finally, the unhealthy one: “Ooh!
Drama!
”

 

ONCE I
left Ben’s apartment, I tried to digest the news he’d broken while I watched Nate’s Tenor with Benefits warble
“come let us adore him.”
I tried not to think too fondly on the sexual acrobatics of the night before, as you do when you’re convinced you’re tits-deep with a Trouble Guy and you don’t want to let yourself enjoy liking him so much before it’s too late.

I didn’t hear from him until six days later. While saying I don’t want to be too judgemental at this point in the book is akin to somebody who wrote an auto mechanics manual saying halfway through they don’t want to prattle on too much about cars, I still have to say that it made me feel bad to go almost a week without hearing from Ben. I know I was the one who let him fuck me, panties on or not, on our first “date” after inviting myself over, but I still think that once you sleep with somebody after a night of
heavy talking,
or pretty much in any scenario where you have a feeling the other person might like you above and beyond what could have just been a blowjob in a bar bathroom after doing lines, you should really be in touch with them the next day, if only to dispel the likely impression that you made on the person you spent the night with. If you don’t get in touch at all, it’s a shitty way of communicating your disinterest in any sort of relationship, by way of not communicating. And if you wait to call six days after the fact to bemoan at length how you should have called sooner, like Ben did, you’re just not being a mensch. By then, I was in the position to decide if I wanted Ben’s mensch-less, non-exclusive company, and its ensuing crazy sex, over no company at all.

And, guess what? It turned out that I did.

 

 

BEN SAID
he was going away on business that week, but that he’d like to get together that Saturday. And I didn’t hear from him again until Friday, when he called me over and over again from the airport in Dallas, where he was working, desperate to see me that night. I had dinner plans, but he kept saying how badly he wanted to see me, like he wasn’t going to relent. He called again when his flight was delayed. And when it finally arrived at JFK. And then he whined to me about how badly he wanted me to come out to his apartment after my dinner. He would not let go of his argument. I told him no, let’s do it tomorrow when we could have a proper date, like we’d originally planned. And he said no, he had to see me that night. I told him if he wanted to come into Manhattan, he could. And he said no, he was tired from traveling and I had to come to him because it was urgent and he wanted me. And against the advice of a restaurant table full of friends, and how he made me feel the morning after our first night together, and everything I know that makes sense, I went out to Queens to see him again.

I am not defending my decision. I look back and am floored by the stupidity of it all, and the only way I can explain it is this: Think of crazy sex as some kind of bug that somebody plants in your brain. The bug then eats you from the inside out until you’re stupid and making the decisions of a raving lunatic made almost entirely out of genitalia.

 

 

I TOOK
a cab out to Astoria, where Ben attacked me in his stairwell. We had sex again, and it was so great that I remember thinking it was probably a dream that he told me he was seeing somebody else when we got together two weeks earlier. Another woman didn’t seem possible in the wake of all that simpatico intensity.

I teased him the next morning, asking him when he was going to take me on a proper date. He said he would come into Manhattan later that night to take me out, and I think that made it easier for me to leave. That, and I was starving and there was still no food in his apartment, and seeing Ben in his flannel bathrobe was giving me an unsavory bit of déjà vu. Was this how he functioned all the time? How did he manage to get himself to the airport and catch a flight to Dallas? And he seemed to adore me, at least from his phone call from before, with all its heaving desperation. Why didn’t he call me the day after we slept together? What the hell else was he doing at the time? The only good thing about dating a self-declared loser is that you figure the guy at least isn’t too busy for you.

Later that evening, it wasn’t until I was dressed and ready to head out when Ben called to cancel what would have technically been our first date. He said he underestimated the amount of work he had to do, and that he couldn’t come out to Manhattan. And now I was pissed, because I went out of my way to cab over to his place for sex the night before, and he couldn’t even come out to Manhattan and eat a burger with me in public? I spoke to my shrink about it, and she told me, based on knowing me for the cartoonishly extensive, Alvy Singer-like duration of our therapy, that I should cut Ben loose. That she knew me too well to advise me in good faith to date a guy who was already seeing somebody else.

I happen to be a very jealous person, and I am not interested in learning to chill out in any way about that particular part of my personality. It bothers me so much when I hear about a man cheating on his wife, or stories about girls who give guys they’re dating his super-unique fantasy of having sex with two women at once, or when girls fight over or compete for one guy, that I am actually getting angry just typing this right now. This might be sci-fi of my own design, but I think men should compete for the attentions of women, and that’s sort of that. I may speak from a place of curmudgeonliness, but the opposite feels unnatural and gross to me, like the mint gum they make that also tastes like fruit. The idea that Ben had me and this other girl on his social burners at the same time drove me insane. It was a deal-breaker, ladies! I couldn’t casually start dating him knowing that, and what we were in the thick of already was no longer casual. Hot sex is not casual. It begets legitimate feelings of warmth and attachment, even when the person giving you the sex can’t give you anything else.

So I planned to stop seeing Ben. But before I did, I told him to come over to my apartment that Sunday night. Do you know why? Because my vagina is an idiot. But in addition to that, here is what, instead of logic, was running through my brain.

1. I wanted to break up with him to his face.

2. I wanted to make him get off his ass and travel into Manhattan, just like I cabbed into Queens a couple of nights earlier, like a
hooker
, against the advice of my friends.

3. I wanted him to come into my apartment and decide he liked me—the way I decided I liked him when I walked into his.

It was the cultural talisman thing again. Part of me thought he would fall for me as soon as he saw my books and my DVDs and all the cool shit on my walls, and how neat and clean everything was and how good it all smelled and how comfortable my bed looked and how awesome the music I picked out was. And I guess I hoped that he would see all that and decide to not be a huge mess of a man.

So, I was not thinking clearly. I wasn’t able to see that the crazy Ben made me wasn’t even close to the kind of crazy he had in him. And it was around this time when I realized that “crazy,” in Ben’s case, was not the thing Patsy Cline sings about, or an adjective that describes the hotness of chili. But Ben was a sick guy so devoid of empathy that he was unable to understand why telling me about a girl he was dating after sleeping with me would hurt my feelings. All of the clues were there. Colombo—the
yogurt
—would be able to solve the riddle. It would have just been sad if he wasn’t so talented at making me so angry.

And that’s just it—Ben had the skills of a savvy baby who knows just how to throw a toy down from his high chair until all you want to do is punch him in the mouth. But the baby will keep throwing toys because he knows you won’t punch him, because only a monster would punch a baby. My interactions with Ben gradually turned me into a baby-punching monster. And I know where my culpability lies, so let’s start with this: First of all, I shouldn’t have ever had him come over to my apartment, if only because you don’t break up in person with somebody you like sleeping with. It’s dangerous. And if you do, you do it in public so there’s no “one last time” sex, because that’s like saying you’re going to start a diet after you eat an entire pizza.

Because neither of us knew that, and neither of us operated on any kind of reasonable frequency at the time, Ben came over to my apartment that night in a stink about being “forced” to come into Manhattan. Like a filibuster champion, Ben argued with me for what became five hours about whether we were going to stop seeing each other. He blamed me for him getting in trouble at his work because he was late the morning after our last night together, and faulted me for making a big deal out of a thing that he said he needed to be casual. I told him how I felt, and it fell on deaf ears. It became more and more apparent that the other girl he was seeing was just the tip of an insurmountable, damaged iceberg. All bets for any kind of a relationship with him were clearly off: Ben was a dead end. But he was in my apartment and it was late. And then, I ate the whole pizza.

I’M SORRY
to say it didn’t end after we had sex that night. Ben and I kept sleeping together, and occasionally even going out on actual dates, for three more weeks. We spent marathon weekends watching DVDs and fucking each other, and when it wasn’t horrible, it was fantastic. Because I’d caught his crazy, I relished how unhealthy it all was, and loved the crack high of getting laid. And the sex really was awesome. I mean, you haven’t lived until you’ve let a bona fide nutjob drill your insides with his cock. Like, a real sicko.

Ben loved nothing more than putting himself down in somebody’s presence. That was a perfect “conversation” for him. And in no way would he ever self-identify as a narcissist. Because in his mind, a narcissist is in love with himself. And even though Ben was obsessed with himself, he played the loser card like it was circumstantial. Poor Ziggy gets a sweat-shirt labeled “One Size Fits All,” but it’s too big on Ziggy! I guess the world just fucking hates Ziggy. Ben was Ziggy, except a douche. He was Douche Ziggy. And Douche Ziggy mopes about, all the while bringing the worst possible fates onto himself while spending his time outlining their very design. You know that book
The Secret
? Ben was a walking (or napping) example of the anti-
Secret
. He’d call himself a fuck-up, and then he’d fuck everything up.

But he was also provocative: he loved a fight. I don’t. It’s why I can’t watch
Fox News
, and I keep the comments turned off on my blog. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue, goons! I also hate confrontations, and getting heated up until you’re yelling at somebody who just will not hear you. And that’s what our relationship was when we weren’t fucking each other until our genitals resembled hamburger meat or agreeing that the movie we were watching was cool. And in the time we spent together, talking dirty on the phone, spanning hours without food, gazing into each other’s eyes, grunting and pulling each other’s hair, I managed to forget about that other girl. I figured she went away, just like I never really believed she existed in the first place.

In a way, even though we’d only gone out for a little over a month, I felt like I knew him and that we were close. We spent intimate time together, falling asleep in each other’s arms, sharing personal details about our lives and our families. I couldn’t imagine how he could be seeing another person on top of that. When would he have time? It didn’t make sense.

 

ONE WEEKEND,
after Ben spent the night at my place, we lay in bed together. It was late morning and I asked him what his plans were for later that night. He whined a noncommittal response under his breath, and I asked him again what he was doing. He said he was busy. And I pressed on, because now I was on a scent.

“What are you doing, later, baby?” I asked.

“I have plans,” he said, which seemed insane.

He was always home when I called him there, and we’d spent the last three weekends together. I asked what kind of plans. And he whined like a child being forced to tell his mom why he didn’t want to practice piano when he told me the following, in my own bed, while we were both naked.