Band Guy

My track record before this was muddier—brown hair, brown eyes. But there is a kind of blonde that is a universal yes. Something inconvenient written into the genetic code like lactose intolerance. 

We’re at a backyard show in LA attended by boys in long coats who smell of patchouli and girls in billowing dresses who want to be loved by boys like this, with indistinguishable vocal registers at the soothing low hum of a sound bath. There are three tiers to the yard, which is mainly a wooden deck worn by time and sporadic rain, but not enough of either. I first see you from above. A mythical, moppy-haloed figure floating in your own long black coat, you approach a large piano. I can’t figure out how people got it down there without a crane or a miracle, but the thought is forcefully nudged out of my brain by the vision of you, which I examine with a tender admiration previously reserved for women or delicate objects I’m afraid to hold for fear of smashing them to bits. 

I realize that you are one of the performers and the reason I am here. The fact that you are a musician comes as no surprise. You take the mic in your hands like it’s someone you love and when you start to sing with the hot, hoarse grace of Jeff Buckley, I am reminded that we were once all low to the ground, grunting with simple desire. 

You’re there with your girlfriend and my own partner does something else at home because our lives are not shared, and later, too late, I will realize what this means. On the second tier of the deck, there’s a table littered with snacks without labels—anonymous chips and candies and soggy piñata-colored salads which’ve been sitting out too long. You eat three brownies only to find out they are not the ordinary kind of brownie, but the special kind, and I watch you leave your body while I engage your girlfriend in the deft, prehistoric ritual of trying to identify all of the ways that I’m better than her while also dishonestly communicating that I’m not a threat. But she’s a blonde lawyer with shiny hair and swimming-pool-blue eyes, so I find this harder to do than usual. 

For the rest of the night, you’re stuck, weightless and flailing on Planet Brownie, which doesn’t support the life of a conversation, and I’m stuck with the guy at home. So, I file this all away for later. 

And later comes, as later always does, this time in years. It’s the Fourth of July and I’m at a friend’s pool party, like everyone else in the city, when I clock you across a sea of H&M thong bikinis. We smile in a rite of recognition as you walk over to my station near the hot tub, decorated by drunks and glitter and orphaned hamburger buns. I know how I look in my swimsuit with an Olympic-level plunging neckline which some balding guy at the party says makes me look like I’m revealing too much, and, in the five seconds before you get to where I’m standing, I decide that I will get what I want. My freckled friend stands beside me and the three of us begin to talk about books and writing and all the flimsy, pretentious straws we grasp at when we have something to prove. I feel like I’m covered in slime, but you look so good I get over it. I can tell by her performative vocal fry that my friend wants you, too, and I picture knocking her unconscious with a big coconut, wailing victoriously in the dirt. 

We exchange emails so we can “share our writing.” Of course, you don’t just want to share our writing. At the time, I think we both understand this, but your party line is that your intentions are literary and pure. I wonder what might’ve happened if you knew yourself better. 

The boyfriend who does different things is still around. Only a few days after the party, I ask him to be in an open relationship and he agrees eagerly, with the wry satisfaction of a child who thinks he’s just tricked his parents into giving him a cookie he doesn’t know will make him puke later. The desire for non-monogamy started before you—an irresponsible and completely unoriginal surrogate for the breakup I knew was coming but wasn’t ready to face—but you were my evidence. The irrefutable proof that a fantasy is just a termite infestation that will eat a whole life up, so slowly we don’t notice until we fall through the front porch. I can feel the wood buckling beneath my desperate, horny knees. 

We begin to email, sharing our work in what I think is a mutually agreed upon phony foreplay. I am generous with my compliments. I use two-kids-stacked-on-top-of-each-other-in-a trenchcoat-parading-as-a-college-professor phrases like “eloquent articulations,” which I’m ashamed of, but not enough to stop. The truth is, your writing isn’t bad, which makes me furious, but focused. I’m jealous of your ability to come up with characters that exist beyond yourself—a guy from Jersey who’s fixated on eating ass or a twenty-something girl who works at Edible Arrangements and has mysterious urges that I can only guess are about fucking the fruit. One time, you send me something about a Black man navigating the American experience, and I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be writing about this, but I’m too embarrassed to have an opinion on it either way, so I say nothing. 

The emails become texts which become an invitation to a party at your house which becomes my first opportunity to have you. But you don’t make it easy because my plan is not special. I quickly discover there are many, many girls like me, drooling to be chosen by a guy in his mid-thirties whose bedroom wall is actually a thrifted sunflower-patterned sheet thumbtacked into the ceiling—pick me! pick me!—and we’re all at this party wearing crop tops. Your friends are shooting a music video for their band at the party and they ask if I’ll watch you do yoga wearing a kimono in your glorified tent while they film it. So, I sit on the edge of your wilting foam bed as the thing I want bends and contorts, nearly naked, inches from my face, and I know somewhere god is laughing with a boner and a hulking fist full of popcorn, deciding which episode he wants to make his sick little puppets finally fuck in. It’s always later in the season than you want. 

The texts go on. We talk about porn and poetry and, largely by my own design, the vague premise of another hang. Your tone, impressively, promises everything but commits to absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of flirtation one could put on the store checkout counter alongside the other items but just out of the clerk’s view so it could look like their fault if it ends up stolen. 

We message about dreams. I joke that in yours, I probably compliment all of your ideas. You reply, And you’re wearing the red kimono I wore for hawt yoga. Don’t wake me! Finally, evidence that I am wanted. And in writing. 

So, I invite you to go to a concert with me one night, guiding you to my bed like a dumb dog with something ticketed and, therefore, harder to figuratively moonwalk backwards from without some accountability. The fact that this plan happens at all—that you agree to a place and time and eat a Fruit Roll-Up and get in your car and walk the thirteen steps from my driveway to my front door and say hey Rosè (disgusting)—feels like a miracle, some absurd alignment of the cosmos that will be studied for decades. For us to not hook up tonight would be a waste of wonder. 

But you arrive in a mood that starts to wobble the Jenga tower of my fantasy. Looking around at the tchotchkes on my wooden shelf with your hands in your pockets, you tell me you’ve just woken up from a nap. You don’t look like the guy who will fuck me after the concert. You look like an old shoe. I offer you a weed mint in hopes of stabilizing the foundation, because at the time, marijuana is something I pretend to like, even though the line between fun, fuzzy mental edges and an acute fear of myself is imperceptible. 

I didn’t know you and your boyfriend are open, you say in the back of the Uber to the concert after I clumsily work it into a conversation. And now I know you know. 

We end up back at mine, giggling on my bed from the mints because we’d each taken another. I show you my vintage porn comic book and we read from The Portable Curmudgeon, trading off reciting the quips in comedic negativity. I’m proud of the personality I’ve curated for the occasion with my little books—someone smart with niche interests, but not so niche they take themselves too seriously and, most important to my mission, an effortless sexuality. I think, surely, this sets me apart from the other girls in the crop tops. 

You announce that you’re too stoned to drive home and ask if you can sleep over. I say of course, even though I know I’ll get no sleep if you stay. After a while, we put on Blonde and listen together in silence and for a second, I feel genuinely connected to you, falling for the dangerous conflation of loving someone and someone being in proximity to something loved. But, either way, it’s nice. We’re facing each other on two opposite pillows and with the music and the comfortable wooliness I won in the weed lottery, it feels like the moment is mine. 

So, when exactly are you going to make a move, I ask, smiling coyly, as if your answer would be of no consequence. But your expression doesn’t match mine. You immediately retreat into yourself and seem surprised in a way that deeply unsettles me. Is it possible that I could’ve read the situation so poorly? As the proverbial egg starts running down my cheek, I start running the tape back of our interactions, our texts, your compliments, my breath, my first steps as a child—how far back could this thing go? 

Sorry, I’m just processing. It’s just… I guess I never really thought about it, you try. I find immediate relief in this. It’s so clearly untrue that it assures me that I am not the problem. I exhale in a laugh. You continue on, hitting the classics like I worry about ruining our friendship and I just love sharing our art and don’t want to lose that. But in your unimaginative, garbled rant, what stands out most is the space you seemingly leave for me to debate these points. Like there’s an ellipsis at the end of each thought. 

We could… cuddle? You reach out your scrawny, sun damaged arms toward me and, suddenly, instantly, I reach my limit, like a wind-up toy turned too far. The song and dance stops here. 

I really don’t need a consolation cuddle, I say, truly unable to think of anything I would enjoy less than being enveloped in someone’s sweaty pity. We go to sleep, or you do. I stare at the rarely used corner of my room that I sometimes worry is haunted and sit with the stupidity of my circumstances until I can see sunlight trying to cram its way through my one tiny window that I wish I were a magnifying glass so I could fry you awake like an ant to get you out of my house. 

You wake up slowly, making a big, dumb show of it as your arms sprawl toward the ceiling with the soundtrack of a vaudevillian yawn. As you go to put on your pants, you try to joke, I’m sorry I didn’t give you any nookie last night. Nookie? I resolve this is the end for us. 

Four days later, on October 22nd, I’m sitting at my wobbly, wooden kitchen table that my roommate, who is bad at building things, built for us. It’s nearly 1 A.M. when I hear the fateful chirp of my text tone. How’s your Saturday night going? It’s you. I tell you I’d just gotten home and that I’m hungry. I’M so hungry, you say. I tell you to go to McDonald’s or something, then change the subject. But instead of stepping onto the track to run in your familiar conversational circles, you reply, do you have food at your house? 

We’re in my kitchen at the rickety table eating the omelets I made for us because I only had old eggs and some fake meat called Dave’s Korean Tempha from the farmers’ market, which you said was fine. The omelets are weird, but not bad, and we finish them quickly. You’re in a long coat like the one I met you in, maybe the same one, but as you carry your plate to the sink, there’s a decisiveness and velocity to your body language that I haven’t seen before. 

We go to my room and almost immediately, you ask, So, should we make out? I feel like I’m filled with bees, but mostly, I feel proud. We kiss, and at first, I laugh, which I can tell makes you uncomfortable, but after the poisoned brownie and all the years and the kimono and you saying nookie, I just can’t really believe this is happening at all. I make a decision to accept it, surrendering to the spoils of getting something I’ve worked so hard for. And, for once, it works. I don’t imagine that you’re a hot girl or that I’m the subject in some rare medical study wherein they have to measure my orgasms while pointy, mustached men with clipboards watch behind one-way glass. I don’t need the fantasies. There’s an ooziness in the room that wriggles its way around any anxiety, any awareness, any boundary that might remove me from my body—from this scarce moment of singularity with myself. As you move on, in, around me, it feels essential and completely prepositional, like I’m experiencing reality only through space and my relationship to it rather than through time.

Your penis is so huge and perfect that I immediately understand how much I will let you get away with and forgive myself for how much I’ve already let slide. I know if anyone else saw it, they’d forgive me too—that god himself would absolve me—and this comforts me greatly. I wish I could slow everything down, or bottle it up to snort later in small doses. When we’re finished, we each sit in sweaty surprise, our chests rising and falling like tiny empires. A historic victory. 

A couple weeks after we spend the night together, I run into you at a bar with my boyfriend and from twenty feet away he can tell we’ve had sex, even though I don’t touch you. He looks just like her dad! he shouts to my best friend over vibrating disco music. 

Later, I pull up a photo side-by-side. The resemblance is undeniable and devastating. The delicate frame, sinewy, speckled forearms, and sunkissed surfer’s hair. Even the vaguely Mr. Potatohead-if-Mr. Potatohead-fucked nose. I wish my father wanted me as I was. I wish both of you wanted me as I was. Or, at least, that I didn’t have to try so hard to be loved by you when I don’t even like you very much. 

It never happens again, at least not in the same way. Our fucking follows new car rules, depreciating the second you drive it off the lot. You can never get the smell back. When my boyfriend and I break up a few months later, because of course we do, I try to make you the solution, or at least the consolation prize, which isn’t fair. You end up disappointing me in the exact way you feared you would, which impresses me because it’s the first time I think you might understand yourself at all. Your next girlfriend is another shiny blonde with whirlpool eyes. She’s twenty-two.