I Like You Just the Way I Am (2 page)

This obviously wasn’t the first time I’d gotten wrapped up in one of her harebrained schemes. As children, my sister and I watched her almost get arrested in the middle of the night for public nudity after the three of us were caught doing something she fondly referred to as “butt waving” on Coronado Beach. Butt waving is where you go to the beach late at night, strip off your clothes, and basically moon the waves. The result feels like a cross between a bidet and a freezing cold colonic, but as a kid, or a heavily intoxicated parent, it was thrilling. Then there was the time she broke her leg, drunkenly trying to climb the cupboards in our kitchen. She claimed she was fine, sober, and totally didn’t need a doctor, suggesting instead that we pour dish soap and water all over the linoleum floor and turn the room into an indoor bubble lake. After seven minutes, she was in so much pain that my sister and I had to raft into the living room and call an ambulance. I was used to my mom being nuts, but like all kids, my willing suspension of disbelief made every time feel like the first. (Except when she misjudged and waxed off my right eyebrow before my freshman formal; that time it felt like she needed to die.)

Fishing mango hairs out of my teeth, I heard struggling on the other side of the fence, then vague whispers, followed by my mom’s hands popping out and pinching my ass.

“Mom? What are you doing?” I asked her hands.

I could hear Cody’s voice in reply. “We are digging you in!” she said, overly excited, confirming my suspicions that she was a total coke whore.

“Jesus!” I whispered through the fence. “You guys are a disaster. Please, just leave me out here. I’ll meet up with you later.”

These three weren’t exactly the Viet Cong when it came to digging tunnels, but they seemed determined to make their plan work. I stood up with my back to the fence, looking around once more for my future Mexican mother, when two sets of hands gripped onto my ankles and pulled my legs out from under me. Once I was on my stomach, it was too late to fight it. Half my body was inside the club.

“Okay, Jen! Now push the rest through!” coached my mom, a regular Bela fucking Karolyi. I couldn’t push. I was buried in sand, and there was nothing to grip on to. I tried to rock back and forth, but it was useless.

“I’m stuck!” I shouted loud enough that the guy selling mangos came rushing over to see if I was okay.

“¿Está todo bien?”

I looked at him hard, sending the universal look that translates to “my mom is unstable,” and reached up to him for help. While at the same time, my mom and her weird friends started tugging on me from the
other
side.

“You guys, let go! I’m not coming in!” I shouted through the fence. My legs kicked and squirmed until they had at last emerged and rejoined the rest of my body on the beach.

About half an hour later, my mom and her posse came out to meet me.

“We were gonna leave immediately, but they wouldn’t let us take our drinks,” explained Mandy.

“Should we try a different bar?” my mom suggested.

“No! I’m done! This is stupid!” I said. I began walking away.

“Just remember, you chose me, Jen! You could have just as easily reincarnated yourself into a family with a normal mom, but how boring would that be?” she rationalized in true narcissistic form.

Before I could gain any real distance, an American couple stopped me.

“Excuse us, do you guys know where Papas and Beer is?” asked the man.

“It’s—,” I started, before my mom cut me off.

“You wouldn’t by chance have an ID we could buy off you for my daughter, would you?” I took a second look at the woman and realized she did kind of resemble me.

Karen Bryce Masters was five feet six inches and 120 pounds, with sandy blond hair and green eyes. Everything about her matched me more or less perfectly, aside from the fact that she was fifteen years my senior. I don’t remember much more about her except that she was a Leo, lived at 2454 Mango Way, Del Mar, California, 92014, and didn’t plan on donating her organs.

“Umm. Well, I don’t need your money, but I did just get a new license and I still have my old, almost-expired one if you want it.”

“We totally aren’t weirdos,” Cody inserted in a creepy weirdo voice. She was dripping in post-coke-binge sweat and, after only an hour in the heat, starting to look like the Trash Heap from
Fraggle Rock
.

“I just want my daughter to be able to hang with us, you know?” said my mom, flashing her perfect, capped-tooth smile.

Karen and her boyfriend lightened up once they realized my mom was, in fact, my mom.

“Wow, you are so cool! My parents would never take me out to bars,” said Karen, handing me the ID and shooting me a look that implied she too hated her mother, but for the opposite reasons.

“Kinda the coolest.” My mom smirked. I could see her landing a perfect backflip in her mind.

“Thank you so much,” Cody added. “We promise she won’t get caught with it, or get you in any kind of trouble, or say that we ever met, or that her mom offered you money, or that you were kind of totally fine with a kid having it, knowing she was underage and probably using it to—,” she nervously babbled before Karen’s boyfriend mercifully cut her off.

“Just—be safe.”

*   *   *

That day we went
everywhere. And after several hours of sun and margaritas, I probably did look twenty-seven. Granted, most of the time it was hard to see my face because some guy with a whistle had me bent over a barstool, funneling tequila down my throat. Before I had Karen, I was more or less apathetic about going to bars. Growing up with alcohol being not only suggested but encouraged, I never had a deep desire for it. My only real objective was to appease my mom. But once Karen was secured under the plastic window in my wallet, she felt kind of empowering. She allowed me to sort of step away from myself. When I walked into a room as Karen, the weight of being my mother’s keeper was lifted. I could detach and almost have a modicum of fun. It wasn’t my problem if my mom and Cody were on top of the bar, swinging their bras around like lassos. Karen knew those strange women only peripherally, and she was far too mature to judge others.

I went home to Arizona the following week like a conquering hero. Whispers of Karen were all over school, and before lunch, I’d earned the approval of five different cliques, who all asked if I’d buy them beer. I was too scared to actually use Karen on American soil, but I did practice signing her signature at least ten times a day, just in case. The truth of the matter was that I had no real need for her. My gay boyfriend didn’t want the carbs, and all my other friends were prudes. Eventually, I passed Karen off to my friend Sky, who just transferred to another school and needed an ID to hang out with her Mexican drug lord boyfriend. Even after Karen expired, Sky claimed to have used her successfully all through college.

I’m thirty-three now, and I can calmly walk into a bar through the front door. Though I have been known to tunnel out on occasion. Especially when my mom’s bra is in sight.

2.

Whine Kampf

Bruno was down on
one knee, holding out a ring that looked like it came from an arcade claw machine. His eyes smirked with the confidence of a soap opera bimbo who fucks only in front of a full-length mirror.

“Jen, will you be engaged to me?” he said, hitting the
g
’s in the word “engaged” with a little extra phlegm, his guttural German accent showing.

“I … I hate you,” I said, stunned, before grabbing my purse and searching for mints. I’d just made myself throw up five pounds of garlic knots in the bathroom minutes earlier, and my mouth was still a war zone. I was trapped on the San Diego harbor cruise my mom ostensibly booked as a bon voyage dinner for Bruno. As the ship made its way back into port, I slunk down in my curiously flimsy folding chair and asked the universe three questions: Why the fuck did I just get proposed to? Where the fuck is my mother? And, how the fuck many garlic knots are still floating around in my stomach?

*   *   *

I met Bruno when
I was in high school, where he was the creepy foreign exchange student and I was popular (among the nerds). I convinced myself he was a vampire because of his long nails, long hair, obscure accent, pencil-thin mustache, translucent skin, and uncanny ability to appear out of nowhere when I least expected. I didn’t think much of him then—aside from occasionally giving him a lift off campus during lunch so long as he sat in the backseat and didn’t smoke his cigarillos on me. He was obnoxious and disgusting, and he always smelled like ham. The day his exchange program ended, I assumed, would be the last time I laid eyes on him. I was wrong.

Three years later, I’d just turned twenty and was studying for the summer in Paris. Everything about France was romantic and made me long for a boyfriend who owned a Vespa and couldn’t pronounce my name. I took myself very seriously and would sit in cafés for hours writing hacky Gertrude Stein–esque ramblings about how I hated my parents and held capitalism partially responsible for my anorexia.

One afternoon, sitting in a park in the sixth arrondissement, pretending to be Anaïs Nin because she seemed hotter than Gertrude Stein, I noticed a series of numbers on the back of a card in my journal. Having never been to Europe, I didn’t know until getting there that these numbers were, in fact, a phone number. The card was from Bruno. He was a classical guitarist (hence the long nails), and this was a flyer for a performance he thought I’d give a shit about that happened two years before I met him.

Having nothing to lose, feeling lonely and more than a little curious, I went to a pay phone in my hotel lobby and placed the call.
It’s been three years,
I thought.
People change. Who knows, maybe he has short nails now.

The phone beeped for two long beats before a woman answered on the other end. She spoke German, and I couldn’t understand a word.

“Calling for Bruno. Ob-sessed-with-me.” I tried to explain, but it was no use.

We struggled back and forth for several more minutes before she said something and hung up. I placed the phone back on the receiver when instantly it started ringing. Apprehensive, I picked up.

“Hello,” I said, suspicious.

“Jen. It’s Bruno,” a voice declared from the other side.

His accent was thick, more German than I remembered. But there was something else different about him, a confidence I hadn’t noticed before. The more he spoke, the more I felt the old Bruno fade away, giving way to an erudite, worldly young man who most definitely didn’t smell of ham. He asked if I had plans for the weekend and suggested we meet up in Munich. Overwhelmed by his aggressiveness, I agreed.

The nine-hour train ride to Munich was intimidating and more than a little sexy. I listened to Bjork and pictured myself in the “Jóga” music video—whenever I wasn’t mentally counting my daily caloric intake. It was pitch black when the train pulled into Munich Central Station.
“Ach Ich Ich Ick Ack Euch…,”
was all I heard blaring out of loudspeakers through the terminal. I translated this to mean, “Greetings, Jew-spawn with a shiksa nose.”

As my anxiety mounted, I walked faster. Suddenly, a hand reached out and touched the back of my shoulder. I turned around to see a mini Joseph Fiennes circa
Shakespeare in Love
smiling at me with a bouquet of daisies in his hand. Bruno was a man now—a little man, with daintier hands than me, but still a man. His hair was cut short and his face was clean shaven save for two thin strips of muttonchops framing his cherubic jaw.

“Jallo, Jen,” he said in a tone that made me forget he used to pin his bun up with chopsticks.

I smiled and followed him to his car, debating in my head whether or not I’d make out with him later that night.

By day, Munich was vast, green, and hotter than a packed boxcar. It was July, and the streets were filling with tourists. The city itself was stunning, and for me and my anorexia, the beer gardens proved infinitely scarier than any concentration camp. Bruno showed me castles and concert halls as he caught me up to speed on the last three years of his life. He told me how he was getting a master’s in economics in Germany while simultaneously getting a master’s in classical guitar in Yugoslavia, his parents’ native country. He told me how he was trapped in Belgrade earlier that year when Clinton “drop bombs” on Milosevic to encourage his withdrawal from Kosovo.

“Nobody in Belgrade even knew what was going on in Kosovo. And yet, innocent people, women and children, lost their homes … their lives.…” He trailed off into a posttraumatic trance.

When he came to, he went on to describe how the German embassy vanished overnight and how he was forced to escape Serbia by boat to Hungary with a fake passport and a loaf of bread. Bruno considered Americans ignorant of the world outside, as he put it, “their little island.”

Hypnotized by his filmworthy story, I never wanted to set foot on American soil again. I wanted to run away with Bruno and right every wrong ever inflicted upon anyone ever! This was intense shit, and there was nothing left to do but embrace it fully. Perched under a tree in a giant beer garden full of simple sugars, I leaned in and kissed Bruno on the mouth.

Later that night, I was completely smitten and past the point of making logical sense about anything. Bruno stood on the platform watching me board my train back to Paris with damp eyes and a heavy heart.

“I’m ashamed of my country and I want to be with you! Maybe forever!” I screamed out my window as he jogged alongside me. Seconds later, he jumped on the train, grabbed me again, and made out with me until we reached Stuttgart.

“When will I see you?” he screamed, waving his fanny pack.

“Soon!” I promised.

*   *   *

Back in Paris, I
looked at all the American college boys and scoffed. I thought about how prosaic their lives were. What war did they ever find themselves stuck in? Bruno and I transcended summer-love bullshit. Together, we were going to save the world and start a revolution. My cause was still unclear, but in time I had no doubt the universe would reveal it to me. So in the meantime, I just accepted that I was a great humanitarian and lay low while I awaited further instructions.