Turn Around Bright Eyes (20 page)

Since it was 2003, everybody in the loft sang the latest hits by the Libertines and the White Stripes and Hot Hot Heat. There was no stage, just two mike stands on the floor, gigantic room, high ceilings, and an even higher audience. I sang AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” with a Lower East Side playwright and an Australian bassist. It’s always a fun, effective pick, with all those Bon Scott screams. (Even if you have to wonder, just how many dirty deeds did Bon have in his repertoire? I count only two, homicide and fornication. That’s enough to go pro?)

Ally got on the mike to do Blondie’s “Rapture” all by her lonesome. Maybe it was all the dilated eyeballs, but I saw lots of downtown scenesters, people who’d been too cool to remember my name the other forty-six times we’d met, staring in awe at this girl as she rapped the Debbie Harry poetry about the man from Mars who eats bars and cars and guitars. I thought, “Hey, it’s not just me. Everybody else is crazy about this girl, too.” Considering that she barely knew a soul in the room besides me, it was impressive courage. She made some fans that night—for years I ran into people who asked me about Rapture Girl. Afterward I joined her for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and it was an honor to be on her team.

She loved the Mary Janes so much, I couldn’t remember why I had been so afraid of overdoing. Was I afraid to get the size or style wrong? Or was I afraid of getting caught paying too much attention? Was it the fear I wouldn’t be able to keep up that level of attention? All of these things, no doubt, plus lots of others. The fear I was making a big deal out of nothing. The fear I was pretending to be much more tasteful and fashion-conscious than I was, setting her up for disappointment. The fear I was setting a boyfriend standard I couldn’t live up to. There were plenty of valid reasons to be afraid. That’s probably why she was so impressed. My friend Melissa had been right—it wasn’t the shoes, it was the way I’d noticed her liking the shoes.

Shoes are still one of those female languages I have struggled to comprehend. I wish I could advise my adolescent self to learn how to talk about shoes; it would have been useful to learn that whole vocabulary at a young age. But I still work at it. Last December, I was in line outside a designer shoe boutique in Soho that was having a word-of-mouth sale. When I was young, I didn’t know sales like this existed, much less places like this, but a friend tipped me off, so here I was, hoping to pick up a surprise for my girl. The shop only held twelve customers at a time, so when one person left, another was allowed inside. The line was forty women deep, looking like one of those 1980s Alphabet City heroin dealer lines you read about, determined to tough out the arctic-tundra weather. Everyone had brought a book or a pair of headphones; everybody came prepared for a Stalingrad-level wait. I was the only male in line. Inside the boutique it was like the mosh pit at a Black Flag show, everyone throwing elbows and kicking ankles. There were no rules except the law of the shark pool: Eat the wounded. Women were stepping on my hands while climbing on me to get a clearer shot at the merch. I felt lucky to get out of there with some seven-and-a-half pumps and my teeth. Once again, I get scared of overdoing, then end up finding out overdoing is the only thing to do.

1:32 a.m.:

So my friend Jacob calls me up. He wants to meet.

His new girlfriend is dangerous, just his type. I like this one. After I met her, he called me while I was still in the cab. “She will kill you,” I said. “Then she’ll bury you in a shallow grave with the knife still sticking out of your heart. Then she’ll dig you up so she can kill you again.”

How could this go wrong? Somehow it’s going wrong. Jacob wants to talk tonight, so we meet at a bar in the East Village. They’ve been broken up for three days.

“Remember that night you came over for dinner? She was mad.”

“I could tell. She didn’t say a word all night.”

“She was mad before you got there.”

“She had her arms folded. Mad girlfriend arms-folded. What was she stewing about?”

“She was mad all night. I kept asking what was wrong and she wouldn’t say. It wasn’t until four hours after you left that she came out and said why she was mad. She said, ‘I found a condom. In the kitchen trash. A used condom.’ I said, ‘Show me.’”

“Was it there?”

“It was a tea bag. That’s what she was mad about.”

“That doesn’t prove you’re innocent.”

“She was mad all night. She had to stay mad longer because it was a tea bag. Eight
hours
. So we broke up. We’re meeting for a drink tonight.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“You need to come with me. Make sure I leave by midnight.”

“This is stupid.”

“I know. Don’t leave me there.”

It’s already twelve thirty when she shows up. The three of us sit in a booth for twenty minutes or so. There’s a bar trivia night we’re trying to ignore. Occasionally Jacob’s girlfriend leans back to whisper a clue to the booth behind us, just because she knows she looks hot at that angle. One-third into the second drink, they’re kind of not broken up anymore, and I grab my raincoat.

There are no cabs on Avenue A tonight, so I walk up to the L train. The sidewalk is full of ostentatiously disappointed girlfriends, mad about something, three or four paces ahead of the boys trailing along, with those determined angry-haughty stomps, arms folded in that showy way. It’s February, drizzly, windy, so their arms would have been folded anyway, but if you’ve been a boyfriend, you can see the difference.

You know the German term
schadenfreude
, which means secretly finding relief or even pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. There is a similar phenomenon that I like to think of as
schtraight-boyden-freude
, which is when you see other men’s girlfriends and you feel a certain guilt-riddled joy in not being that woman’s boyfriend.

This is not an admirable trait, but you can’t avoid it, especially when you’re walking in New York. Every block seems to have one of these girlfriends. You see the stomp-and-follow and you feel a certain relief you’re not in this scene, not this time, anyway. You try to act like you don’t notice. Some nights, especially weekends after eleven, every street serves up a schtraight-boyden-freude smorgasbord.

I am grateful for my girl. I could tell her this story but I will probably tell her something else about today instead. I will probably describe walking up Avenue A, the rain, the headphones, the puddles seeping into my socks, the songs I listened to, the wind. When I get home, she’s asleep. The next day, she will ask, “So how’s Jacob?” I will say, “He’s great,” and it will be the truth.

JACOB AND I FIND EACH
other exotic. He’s a woman magnet, so we’re at total opposite ends of the romantic spectrum. So we’re fascinated with each other’s love lives. We are driven by anthropological curiosity to observe each other’s mating games. He finds my choices just as bewildering as I find his. We were talking on the phone in the summer of 1991, at the absurdly tender age of twenty-five, not that it seemed that way at the time, a few weeks before my wedding. (He couldn’t make it, as he was at his French girlfriend’s country house.) While we talked, I had the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds
playing, from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” all the way to “Caroline, No.” I quoted the line about how Brian Wilson is trying hard to find the people he won’t leave behind, because that’s the adventure I was on. Jacob made sad clucking noises. “I never should have let you listen to that album.”

Maybe a husband needs a pet womanizer, just as a womanizer needs a pet husband. It helps protect you from the delusion that other people are having more fun than you are, a delusion that seems to create at least 40 percent of the misery in an American’s life. Like Humphrey Bogart says in
Casablanca
, Jacob is like other men, only more so. When he’s on the prowl for another danger girl, I make a wish list for him: I think I should have a say in who he chooses, since I have to listen to him complain when it blows up. That French girl’s name still makes him jump like a World War II veteran when a car backfires.

But he never listens, because deep down he believes I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to women, and he’s probably right. He’s never aspired to be a husband, just as I’ve never aspired to be a womanizer, and neither of us has it in him to function anywhere in between. We admire each other’s commitment to one particularly insane kind of devotion, but we each think we’re the one having the fun.

Being part of a couple is the most mysterious of human experiences, and yet nobody really seems to get how it works. Nobody knows how good love goes bad, or the more baffling question of how good love goes good. You often hear the words “they finish each other’s sentences,” yet I’ve never been able to understand why this is supposed to be a good thing. In my experience, trying to finish a woman’s sentence means taking your life in your hands, and if someone finishes one of mine, it’s usually “I’ve heard this one” or “Sorry, dude, you lost me when you compared Bell Biv DeVoe to Alfred, Lord Tennyson” or “Your head is so far up your ass right now you could play your prostate like a kazoo.”

Another thing people say in praise of couplehood is “She calls me on my bullshit.” Again, I’m not sure why that’s a positive thing. I, for one, have zero trouble finding people to call me on my bullshit, especially since my bullshit is not really the hard-to-notice kind. I can barely walk around the block without getting called on my bullshit. (Today, for example, I went down the street to Uro Café for a coffee and two of my fellow pedestrians snickered at what I was wearing. But since that was a hot-pink T-shirt for a band called Nuclear Power Pants, I can’t blame them.) So that old phrase is still not really a sufficient description of how people live together successfully.

There is a lot about love I will never know, just because I have been lucky in love. Everyone I’ve fallen for has been a solid gold, true-blue good person, someone who was kind and admirable, whether we got along at the time or not. So I have no idea what it’s like to be cheated, mistreated, played, betrayed, used, abused, lied to, painted blue, led astray, walked this way, shot through the heart, sliced apart, run over with a Dodge Dart, deceived by the deception of which she was practiced at the art, etc.

Sometimes this makes me miserable about how much I’ve missed out on, as a music fan. There are lonesome songs I can sing along with, and happy songs and desperate songs and angry songs and dumped songs that have been near to my heart at one time or another. There are “ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with?” songs and “tangled up in blue” songs and “good lovin’ gone bad” songs and “prayin’ for the end of time so I can end my time with you” songs. All those songs I’ve lived out for a night or three. But songs about falling in love with someone mean who does you wrong and treats you like dirt—those are science fiction to me. I sing along with them the way I sing along with songs about robbing banks or shooting up with Andy Warhol or knowing how to dance.

But if I’m being honest, the things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going
right
is what’s bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I’m concerned, “some people are very kind” is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breakup songs are kid stuff. Some people
are
very kind and there’s nothing in the universe to explain why.

It’s a mystery how people lose each other—but to me, it’s an even stranger mystery we manage to stay together, or to collide together at all. And that’s the part I’m always more curious about.

I WAS TELLING A BUNCH
of my
Rolling Stone
editors about my personal stash of
Welcome Back, Kotter
episodes. I know, right? Take a moment to swallow your jealousy. Yes, my hoard of
Kotter
reruns from the seventies, lovingly preserved on VHS, taken along every time I move. (They just don’t look right on DVD.) I worship the sweathogs and that sassy Vice Principal Woodman. I particularly prize my copy of the Nick at Nite
Kotter
marathon from 1999, when they were doing “Marathons to the Millennium,” and showed six solid hours of
Kotter
reruns, including the classic where Vinnie Barbarino runs for student council president, with the badass Juan Epstein on the ticket as Secretary of Fear. Juan’s campaign slogan: “Vote for Vinnie . . . And Nobody Gets Hurt.”

I assumed my editors were laughing out of jealousy at my outlandish good fortune in still having these cultural treasures in my possession. Instead, my editor Will Dana said, “I can’t believe you have
Welcome Back, Kotter
tapes in your apartment—
and
you still got someone to marry you!”

Okay. I deserve that. I’ll wear that crown of fools proudly. But don’t we all have
Kotter
tapes in our closet? Or their spiritual equivalents?

My wife does not share my sweathog fetish, so I don’t watch them when she’s in the apartment, just as I don’t play Cat Power or vacuum while we’re both home. But the important thing isn’t that we’re freakazoidal about the same things—it’s that she’s as freakazoidal about her stuff as I am about mine, and that enthusiasm can’t help but unite us, even if the object thereof doesn’t. If two people are twisted enough to connect on a deep level, it’s only natural there will be lots of angles where they don’t connect at all. Yet in some abstract way, all that enthusiasm just feeds into the connection between us.

When you come into a relationship as a full-fledged adult, you bring your lifelong enthusiasms. Ally is a woman of many enthusiasms, some on the earth and some in the cosmos. (One of the first things she said when we got engaged was “I’m going to have the same initials as the American Astronomical Society!”) Her enthusiasms are part of our bond, whether I share them or not.