The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 25

  But I sure was rotten to Andrea. And sometimes, I’m convinced she’s not letting me forget it. When the spots end, or segue into the next ad, or into Bette Midler singing “The Rose,” or Pure Prairie League singing “Amy,” or Faith Hill singing some shit I don’t know the title of, I imagine I hear Andrea chuckle. I picture her, sitting on a tall wooden stool under an expensive silver boom microphone. Glass of ice water in her long, manly fingers. Blond hair pulled back in one of those slightly hippie elastic bands. Flip-flops, sweatpants, and a T-shirt. Casual wear being one of the perks of voice-over acting. I see her sad, sharp eyes scanning the text from behind tortoiseshell granny glasses. She nails her part in a single take, takes a sip of ice water, asks the producer, “Is this a regional or a national, Ben? Will this air in New York City?” And when he tells her, “Yes, it will. Repeatedly.” She grins. Satisfied. Avenged.

  MOTHER: And now you can bring a smile to that face for less with any of our special value packs.

  CHILD: Mommy, what’s “vow-you”?

  (Mother laughs warmly again.)

  Andrea does the precocious child’s voice as well. I know her repertoire of female characters. That was the wholesome mother. There’s also the smokey-voiced Demi Moore/Brenda Vaccaro type who sells beer and more decadent desserts like mousse. She can do dippy cheerleader. Sassy waitress or stewardess. Old spinster or nanny. I’ve heard them all, and I can identify them, even now, in the space of an imaginary sniper shot. I used to sit in the waiting rooms, reading four-month-old fashion magazines while she rehearsed sample copy next to me, trying out each of her ladies in search of a good fit. Then they’d call her name. She’d disappear for ten minutes and return, either with a job or a callback or an evil frown. Mostly the frown. I used to pray she’d get whatever gig she was after because whenever she was working, she’d forget, for a little while anyway, that she was supporting me. But she almost never got work. Not while we were together anyway. So whenever her cash got relatively scarce and her credit was maxed (rich girls who shop are broke all the time), and the residual checks didn’t come in the mail, I’d really hear about it.

  I should explain something here: when Andrea and I began dating, I had just moved back to New York from Los Angeles where I was floundering as a screenwriter. I had an agent and met with executives at every lot in town, but either my pallor or the stink of Mexican tar coming out of my enlarged pores scared off all takers. I’d already given up on any real success months before I got my act together long enough to book a flight home. I’d stumble in, slump into the chair, wipe off the tequila drool, and pitch my “fuck you” script. The one about “This poor family . . . who finds a dog that shits money.” I wanted to get clean but I didn’t know how anymore. All my friends in LA were junkies with agents, just like I was. I needed someone to basically nurse me back to some kind of purity or at least encourage me to bathe. Maybe eat some meals. Remove my cigarette from my hand and stub it out before I fell asleep. I needed a mothering type. I’d met Andrea at a party out there. We had a long conversation on the patio of a suite at the Chateau Marmont, during a mutual friend’s birthday party. I remember thinking that she was good-looking, but everyone in LA is good-looking. What really struck me, as we stared out past the Eucalyptus boughs and the giant Absolut bottle billboard, down onto Sunset Boulevard traffic, was her patience with my idiotic behavior. I was high and she was all concerned so I really played it up.

  “What do you see yourself like as an old person?” she mused. “I see myself in a big house in the country. With a garden. And dogs.”

  “I don’t see myself getting old.” I belched. “I’m never gonna make it to thirty.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m cursed. There’s a hellhound on my trail.”

  “Hellhounds?”

  “Yeah.” Belch. “Dogs.”

  She giggled. The ice cream child’s giggle. I’d repeatedly spill my drink and she’d scold me. But she’d always go fetch me a fresh one. It felt good to be minded. Indulged. I wasn’t charming. I felt charming. I was convinced that she was digging the wit underneath my doomed, misguided, blunt, rebel bullshit. She was a good girl. Maybe a little bored with it. And I was . . . like I said . . . very, very bad. But (this is the crucial bit) with potential. Some girls found that shit irresistible. But what happens when your pet project junkie-with-agent is really just a street junkie in somewhat better clothes, looking, just like any junkie, to sell your possessions for smack and tacos? Ideally, when you’re talking diamond-in-the-rough scenarios, the diamond isn’t supposed to exploit the rough. And the rough . . . it’s supposed to be genuinely rough, isn’t it? Organic. If there were any hellhounds on my trail, I was certainly feeding them. We exchanged numbers and addresses but I never called or wrote. I never even called or wrote my real mother. But a couple weeks later, after shooting up some particularly strong balloon bag shit in a friend’s apartment in the Villa Carlotta on Franklin, I determined that I’d run clean out of hellhound chow and needed a good woman’s help keeping the dogs down . . . maybe even rubbing some goodness off on me. Not too much. Just enough to enable me to stay bad a little longer. I stole enough for a one-way flight, bummed a ride to LAX, landed at JFK, got on the train, took it all the way to Hell’s Kitchen, had two quick shots in Rudy’s bar on Ninth (for courage), then walked a ways and smashed my head against her buzzer. She let me in. I was supposed to stay the night. I never left.

  WAITRESS: That biscuit looks awful dry, Hon.

  CUSTOMER: Shoot, Roz, my doctor said if I eat any more lard, I’m gonna have another heart episode.

  WAITRESS: Hmm. Why don’t you try some of this?

  CUSTOMER: “I Don’t Get It . . . It’s Not Lard?”

  WAITRESS: Tastes just like lard.

  CUSTOMER: Come on!

  I remember the girl who shoved the ice cubes up my ass, Graham Parsons style, and brought me back to life. She was a model then and I guess she still is ’cause she was dancing inside a roller-coaster car in this shitty music video I saw the other day. She looked good. Maybe she got clean, too. It didn’t bring back any bad memories at all. Really, it’s only Andrea who makes me reach for the pill. The skinny model chick took care of me just that once. And sure it was pretty serious. But Andrea really kept me off the street every night. And she took me shopping at Barneys. Found me a barber and sat while he cut off what must have been four years of greasy growth. Said “We have to do something about that skin.” And then did something about it. All she wanted in return was that I stay clean and show her love and understanding and gratitude in any way I could. This amounted to an awful lot of kissing and cuddling. I had absolutely no sex drive. I told her that it was all due to the junk and that my libido would soon be restored, which was bullshit since I was still sneaking off to chip out the ten-dollar powder bags they sold on Seventh Street. It was also bullshit because I was fucking two different girls downtown. She was patient with me, talked herself out of her suspicions, I guess. But then I began to push it.

  “Where were you?” She’d be standing in the kitchen with the chain on the door. Padding back and forth in her bare feet and chain-smoking.

  “Please open up. I think I’m being followed.”

  “You’re high.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m being followed by a cop.”

  “I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I have weird eyes, that’s all.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Why should I care?”

  “Andrea!”

  “Don’t shout. The neighbors.”

  “You don’t care where I go? You want me to walk around all night? It’s freezing.”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “I lost my cell phone.”

  “You couldn’t use a pay phone?”

  “There are diseases all over those fucking things. You want me bringing diseases home?”

  Eventually she’d let me in. I’d follow her in
to the living room and her nervous wreck ritual would begin. She’d sit on the rug and pull out an old pale-blue quilted jewelry box. Dump a pair of Xanax on the oval-shaped glass-top coffee table and swallow them down with a glug of white wine. She’d never offer me one. Drugs . . . were bad.

  “I’ve already had one of these,” she’d confess. “I was worried.”

  “I know. I’m really sorry.”

  I’d wrap my arms around her head and rock her. We’d lay back together in the dark. Sometimes she’d cry. Sometimes I’d crack a joke and she’d laugh. Always, we’d drift off. Essentially, strangers. I never asked about her brothers and sisters or whether or not she had a pony as a child. But she made me feel like I wasn’t a lost cause. I made her feel useful, and I guess, functional. With most actors, their sense of worth is only really great when they have a job. When she had me around, Andrea felt powerful whereas she might have felt impotent (I on the other hand, always felt impotent, unless . . . ). She had someone she could control, but only to a point, with her money and her attention and the chain on the door. Whenever I broke away, whenever she couldn’t control her nerves or her emotions or her demons, she had the little white Xanax. And now I have them, too.

  WAITRESS: Eat it!

  CUSTOMER: Hmmm.

  WAITRESS: It’s got just a portion of the cholesterol.

  CUSTOMER: Wow! “I Don’t Get It . . . It’s Not Lard?” is delicious.

  WAITRESS: And it won’t kill you. With the heart thing.

  CUSTOMER: From now on, it’s “I Don’t Get It . . . It’s Not Lard?” for me. Thanks for the big tip, Roz. (laughs)

  (Roz laughs)

  Sassy waitress. Rural. She can do urban, too. But I know it’s a white lady talking. I’m not sure whether or not Andrea has ever seen anything I’ve written, but I expect part of her would feel proud and maybe slightly less regretful that she put in the effort with me. That’s what I like to think anyway. It’s easier for people to feel pride. It’s not as toxic as guilt. Now that I’m doing okay, part of me wants to send her some flowers or a book or a check for about fifteen grand to cover all the meals and cabs and shoes and cigarettes and back rent and loans. But if I did that, I’d be, in a way, acknowledging that I once was that person. And I can’t do that. Making direct amends is very Twelve Step. Not my style. My style is deny.

  Then deny some more. And move on up. Sometimes I even credit the Lord for turning me around, getting me clean for real and putting me on a new track toward semiresponsibility. Sometimes (only sometimes now) I’m an ass. It was Andrea who bought me a computer through the NY Press classifieds and said “Write.” It was Andrea who made me so miserable with the meltdowns every time the bank balance dipped below fifty thousand dollars or so that I started sniffing around for writing work. Pitching more ideas here and there. Serious ones. No money-crapping hound dogs. And it was Andrea who bought me a new shirt and tie when I went in for my own audition at a renowned music magazine. I remember the tie. It was from Agnès B. Navy blue silk with little white polka dots. I don’t wear it anymore. Not because it reminds me of her. Not because wide ties are no longer in fashion, either. I don’t wear it because she tried to rip it off my neck, then strangle me with it, the night I told her I was leaving her.

  Earlier that day (it was after Thanksgiving, and just before Christmas, the time of year when people are on emotionally on edge about their shit anyway) I’d gotten word that the magazine wanted to hire me. I spent the rest of the afternoon planning my escape. I stashed everything I wanted to take with me in a yellow and red shopping bag from the Salvation Army and placed a call to my old college friend African Ralph, who had a loft in Park Slope and was making noise about a roommate, you know . . . “with a job.”

  African Ralph (who was not African) had agreed to front me a month’s rent if I was hired. I suppose if I could say anything at all in my defense about leaving Andrea like that, after I finally became something akin to the genuine diamond she first saw glinting on the Chateau Marmont patio, it’s that I could have just split. Left the key, or a note, or a down payment against that fifteen large. I could have been Paul Simon, hopping on the bus like Gus who didn’t feel a need to discuss much. Instead I was Mariel Hemingway as Dorothy Stratton, trying to leave Eric Roberts on a positive note and getting strapped into a fuck-me chair, raped, and shot in the face with a 12-gauge.

  First she tried to reason with me.

  Then she cried and begged me to stay.

  Then came the ruination of the really nice Agnes B tie.

  Then she said if I didn’t give back all the clothes she bought me, she was going to call the cops and tell them I was burglarizing her apartment.

  Then she called the cops and told them I was burglarizing her apartment.

  Then I stripped down to my jeans and T-shirt.

  Then she asked for the shoes and socks.

  Then I said, “No fucking way. It’s thirty degrees out.”

  Then I gave her the shoes. I wasn’t gonna walk to Brooklyn barefoot. I chanced it.

  She didn’t call the cops.

  Then she cried again.

  “Don’t you love me?” she asked.

  “I never fucking loved you.” I said. I think I might have said “Man.” Too. “I never fucking loved you . . . man.”

  She convulsed a bit, winded like I’d just hit her in the chest. She walked over to the jewelry box and reached for the pills. Or at least I think she did. I was already en route to African Ralph’s in my stocking feet like a Scrooge with no lantern.

  “I never loved you.” Those words still stand as the most honest and the most cruel thing I’ve ever said to anyone.

  I won’t let myself remember any other details. I started forcing myself to forget as soon as the door slammed behind me. And the thing is . . . I did forget. I never looked back. And I got sort of successful, too. Just like she predicted, or hoped, or needed me to be, or prayed I wouldn’t so she could stay on top. Who knows? I was working. I was clean. I was happy. I was not pestered by hellhounds any longer.

  She started getting work, too.

  Now, I never know when I’m going to find myself in the midst of the telltale margarine ad and there’s nothing I can do about it ’cause I have it coming. Now I have my own little ritual. My coffee table is white Bakelite and square shaped, but whenever I’m here, and “The Ocean” by Zeppelin segues into Andrea telling me how I can save 20 percent on my long-distance calls by switching to 1-800–You Used Me Up and Threw Me Away and Now I’m Haunting You Because You Don’t Deserve to Be Free, You Evil Jew, I go to my my black, wooden thrifted snuffbox, the one with the carving of the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkeys on it. I slide off the lid and take out the rust-colored bottle. Remove the kiddie cap and swallow down two X-offenders with a glass of Spanish red. Then I rock back and forth, holding my shoulder blades with my palms, and I wait until the hellhounds are called off the scent.

  YOUTH

  Justin Haythe

  (yōōth) n 1: a: the condition or quality of being young b: an early period of development or existence: a relationship in its youth 2: the time of life between childhood and maturity 3: a young person, especially a young male in late adolescence

  After graduating from an international high school in Zurich, Stefan and his girlfriend, Tara, climbed the hill in the park at the center of the city with their best friends, Russell and Leslie. They sat in the tall summer grass and drank sweet cider and smoked hash joints as they watched the sun set behind the buildings. When it was almost dark, they permitted themselves displays of emotion. They professed love for one another. The two couples kissed passionately and then Stefan kissed Russell, openmouthed, rougher and coarser than either had imagined. Their fearlessness was rewarded; the girls kissed and then Stefan kissed Leslie and Russell kissed Tara. It was a fantasy come true for both young men. As they walked out of the park, they trailed behind the girls tripping each other up and laughing giddily. A few paces ahead, Leslie began to cr
y. She and Russell had decided on different colleges: she would be in Philadelphia, he in Vermont. Tara put her arm around her friend and rubbed her shoulder; she and Stefan had resolved that they would be together forever. They were going to the same college in Miami where they would begin an adult life as soon as possible.

  Less than a year later, Leslie broke up with Russell over the phone. She had been sleeping with someone else for over a month, although she did not admit it even when asked.

  Russell drove all night to Miami, twenty-four hours straight. He lay on the couch in Tara and Stefan’s living room. Seeing his friends only made him miss Leslie more. “All the color has gone out of the world,” he explained. Stefan was standing at the stove in a pair of shorts cooking pasta. “It’ll come back,” said Stefan. They coaxed him out onto the beach only once. Russell appeared in shoes and socks stumbling through the sand. When he was gone, Stefan and Tara agreed that their friend had become melodramatic.

  Halfway through their senior year, Tara discovered that Stefan had slept with a woman named Monica, a mutual friend. Stefan begged Tara to take him back. When she refused, he dedicated the remaining few months of college to sleeping with as many women as possible and after graduation, he continued to seduce women with the urgency of a man who had only months to live.