The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (4 page)

I typed in my bank account’s password. I had paid all my bills for the month and put money in my savings, but I only had $1,200 to get me through until I got paid at the end of the month. Still, Nicole needed the money.

“I’m transferring it into our joint account now,” I said.

A couple of years ago, when I had visited Nicole in Astoria, Queens, I had gone ahead and opened up a joint bank account in both our names. I figured it would make it easier and cheaper to get Nicole money when she needed it.

Maybe I had seen the writing on the wall, because Nicole had needed a lot of money since then. My sister had a problem with keeping day jobs. She would start off in an office or a waitressing job easily enough, but then it would turn out that her boss was a micromanager or working in an office made her feel claustrophobic or the receptionist hated her. And the next thing I knew, Nicole would be wailing to me over the phone that she went out for lunch and never came back because she couldn’t stay in that place a minute longer.

Funny that Nicole had never quit a play, though. A director had slapped her once and told her she couldn’t come back to rehearsal until she had “screwed someone’s brains out,” because obviously she didn’t understand how to portray a sexually evolved woman on stage. Nicole had not only not quit, but had also screwed the director’s brains out that night, then praised him to me as the man that helped her break through to a higher level of acting.

Mind you, this was for a staged reading.

“Thanks so much, my darling sister. I really appreciate it,” Nicole said, all traces of tears gone from her voice. “How are you these days?”

I pushed the authorize button on the transfer. “Good. Tired. Girl, I’ve got a million things to do for Foxman & Carroll this week. I’ve been volunteering for a lot of extra work lately because I’ve decided to have that partner conversation next year. I know, I know. I’ve only been working there eight years, and normally it takes ten to twelve before you can move from senior manager to partner, but I was praying on it the other day, and it was like God sent the message direct to my heart. I really think I’m ready to take the next step in my career.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Nicole said. She never seemed very interested in hearing about my job. And this morning didn’t prove any different. “Are you seeing anybody?” she asked without any transition.

“No, not really,” I answered. “How about you?”

Nicole launched into a story about a bohemian actor she’d met on the subway. He’d gone to NYU, and had just booked a part on
The Good Wife
, playing some sort of gang member. “He must be a really good actor, because you could just feel this positive light coming off of him.”

Nicole was very attracted to “positive” people, which I translated as “people who also flitted from job to job and didn’t have any sort of practical plan for their lives”—or “people like Nicole.” It was like she insisted on dating her own dang self over and over again. But I kept my mouth shut, since my own dating life wasn’t going much better. I’d met a few guys during my eight years in Los Angeles, and every relationship had gone the same route. Serious for a few months, then it would fizzle out. L.A. guys were funny like that.

“You need to start dating out,” Thursday had told me. “Black guys in L.A. are the worst. All they do is string you along and play games and make you feel bad about yourself because you don’t look like Halle Berry.”

Thursday herself only dated white guys, which often came as a surprise to people, since she had dreadlocks down her back and was the daughter of Rick T, one of the most political black rappers in the history of hip-hop. She also got way more dates than I did.

But I couldn’t bring myself to take her advice. I had grown up in the black community, had seen black love with my own eyes. Supposedly my parents had it before my father’s alcoholism forced them apart. Plus, my friend Tammy had a brother named James Farrell. He was not only fine, intelligent, and black, but he had also married a black woman. So I still had faith it would happen for me. I could see myself standing at the altar in a white dress with a strong brother who loved me. I wanted that. Wanted it so bad, I prayed on it every night. Thursday was wrong. My future black husband was out there.

It was just a matter of finding him.

Trying to find love gets a bad rap these days. A lot of my clients come in apologizing for daring to be about finding a man. But you have to understand, love ain’t politics. It’s completely natural, and there’s nothing wrong with seeking it out for yourself. So put in some effort already.

—The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell

THURSDAY

A
Rick T song came on the radio right as I was about to turn into the parking lot for MTS Systems, the armored car company where I work. The song was “Smells Like Bacon,” a surprisingly catchy number from 1987 about cops beating project kids in Brooklyn for committing the crime of “walkin’ black, talkin’ black.”

I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, an upper-middle-class, mostly white city with suburbs as far as the eye can see—the same city that my father grew up in. He left the suburbs as Ricky Turner and returned as Rick T, a rapper that the
New York Times
dubbed “the voice of the modern black power movement.” Neither the music critics nor his many fans seemed to mind that his street preaching didn’t come from the actual streets. And sometimes I wondered if I was the only one in the entire world who saw Rick T for what he really was—a complete hypocrite.

I turned off the radio as soon as I recognized the song, but it was already too late. Hearing even a little bit of one of my father’s songs meant my day was off to a bad start. A cloud of gloom followed me out of my pale-blue 1999 Toyota Echo and into the two-floor concrete building where I toiled not very hard as a contracts administrator.

A couple of minutes later, I entered my beige cubicle, plopped down at my desk, and checked my work e-mail. Nothing important. It took me less than two minutes to clean out my inbox. I then checked my personal e-mail. One of my best friends from grad school, who also had a day job but on the opposite coast, asked me if I wanted to come out to see the world premiere of her play in New York. “Tickets are so cheap between L.A. and New York right now. And you could stay on my couch.”

I loved this friend dearly and loved trips to New York even more, but I’d already given up the dream of writing scripts, and the thought of sitting
in a theater watching the work of someone else who hadn’t given up that dream yet made me feel itchy, like I had come into contact with an infectious disease.

I told my friend that even if tickets were cheap, I still wouldn’t be able to afford it, which was true. I lived paycheck to paycheck, with barely enough left over to make student loan payments, car payments, and for the occasional brunch after I paid my half of the rent.

When I went to get myself some coffee, I found a group of my Latina co-workers at one of the small lunchroom’s two round faux-wood tables, laughing and talking over savory-smelling chorizo and eggs. I had to squeeze past them to get to the coffeepot. If I were being a really good former-writer-turned-comedian, I would have paid attention to them, taken mental notes on their mannerisms and the way they carried themselves so that I could use them in one of my stand-up routines or at least have them on hand, just in case an executive ever asked me if I had any ideas for a workplace comedy in a pitch meeting. But I wasn’t that kind of wide-eyed comedian anymore. I didn’t take real-life dialogue notes as my teachers had taught me or even file situations away to use later in my writing.

Over four years ago, I’d stepped off a cross-country flight with a fresh and shiny MFA in dramatic writing from NYU and dreams of eventually out-earning my famous father as a sitcom writer. Fast-forward to now: I was making more money than I ever had in my entire life—thirteen dollars an hour for eight hours a weekday spent doing the mind-numbing work of contract administrating, which was corporate speak for logging and sending out work agreements—a job that was pretty much the exact opposite of getting paid a lot to entertain people.

Out of frustration, I had abandoned the physical act of writing two years ago and had switched to stand-up comedy, which was, according to a few other writers-turned-comedians I’d met, the best way to land a sitcom writing job if, like me, you didn’t know a lot of people and weren’t, you know, particularly charming outside of the bedroom. But many improv
and stand-up classes later, I hadn’t even gotten my proverbial pitch meeting with the hypothetical exec who wanted to hear my ideas for a workplace comedy. And I still owed more than seventy thousand dollars in grad school loans for a now really dusty MFA.

I was only twenty-nine but, career-wise, I felt like an eighty-year-old. Lately, I had become tired. Tired of my dead-end day job, tired of constantly struggling to make it in a city where seemingly everybody under thirty was struggling to make it. So no, I didn’t pay attention to the dialogue of the common people as I’d been taught to do at NYU. Instead, I poured myself a cup of coffee, grabbed a yogurt out of the refrigerator, and made my way back to my desk.

Truth be told, I was insanely jealous of my Latina co-workers. They had office friendships, spoke in excited Spanglish over the breakfast they shared every morning like one big happy family. They truly seemed content with working eight a.m. to five p.m. in a concrete building. It must be nice, I thought as I trudged back to my cubicle, to be content with living your little slice of life for as long as you had on this earth.

By the time I finished my yogurt it was eight-thirty, which meant that I had successfully wasted an entire half hour, so I figured I should get to work. I started with logging the five work agreements I still had on my desk from the day before. I made notes in all five of the clients’ file folders. Then I printed out a list of twenty-five clients that needed to have their new work agreements logged. Grabbing the already-logged client folders, I followed the blue carpet to the rows of taupe metal filing cabinets, and I put away the finished contracts before beginning the task of pulling the twenty-five folders that I would try to complete that day.

At five-foot-three, I wasn’t a tall woman, so I had to get up on a short stool to get to one client’s folder, Ole Sporting Goods. And when my fingers made contact with the warm-but-dead folders, a not-so-new thought tapped me on the shoulder: I could go up on the roof and throw myself off. My skin prickled as I envisioned my body falling through the air, dressed in
the paisley print maxi dress and green cardigan that I was wearing now. For a moment I stared into space, mesmerized by the lovely image of it ending, ending, ending.

But then again, my office building was only two floors tall. I could end up breaking every important bone in my body, but not dying. Then, in addition to my education debts, I’d accumulate a ton of medical bills and I’d have to go live with my sister, Janine, in Joliet, Illinois.

No, I thought, better to overdose on something or hang myself or go down to the Metro station near my apartment and jump in front of one of the aluminum trains.

It occurred to me then that settling down might not have been the best idea I’d ever had, even if Sharita kept assuring me it was. Without the distraction of sex or the thrill of a new boy hunt, the other parts of my life, which hadn’t been going well for years, had started to cast a rather morbid shadow over my day-to-day existence. I missed the thrill of seeing a guy across the room and hooking him like a fish. I missed sex on the first date, sometimes on the first meet. I also missed always having a pre-coitus outing to look forward to on the weekends. Figuring out whether I liked a boy before I slept with him was so freaking boring.

Of the three dates I’d gone on since dumping my last one-month stand, no guy had sparked anything in me above the waist. I’d yet to meet anyone I could see myself chasing after in a farmers market and agreeing to marry.

On mornings like this, when I heard Rick T songs on my commute and continued to use my ill-advised MFA to do glorified paperwork and got to contemplating suicide while pulling files—it was hard for me to breathe, much less shove myself through my zombie workday.

But maybe, I thought, perking up, this was a good thing. Tonight Abigail would be introducing me to her friend from her Prague shoot, so maybe my miserable morning was setting me up for a big win later in the evening. Tammy, being one of those really rich, overly optimistic people, had a theory
that when things weren’t going well and when a person got to feeling sad, that usually meant something really good was about to happen.

“I broke my arm skiing the week before Farrell Cosmetics offered me my spokesmodel contract,” she told me once. “Now I look for bad signs whenever I’m hoping for something good to happen.” Only Tammy could find silver linings in broken arms.

I closed the file cabinet. “Listen,” I whispered to the Universe, which may or may not have been trying to tell me something with the recurring dreams it had been sending me all summer. “If you’re planning something big for me, please let it happen now. I really need a win.”