Hipster Love Stories: Kevin and Jessie

He was enjoying his third cup of coffee when she walked in through the front door, the one with the brass knob and the sign offering the instructions, “Turn this way.”  It wasn’t condescending; the knob’s direction was counterintuitive and after enough consecutive months of people shaking the door in frustrated attempts to open it, the coffee shop decided to put a sign up.

Her cheeks were pink with the cold and he tried to find nothing beautiful about them.  Kevin was still in the developing phases of loathing post lust.  It was hard to think of someone that he once wanted to spend every minute of every day with as unattractive just because they weren’t seeing each other anymore.  That was her choice, not his, though when both of them discussed the break-up they would profess it was mutual.  That way, Jessie didn’t look like a heartless bitch and Kevin didn’t come across as a pathetic loser.  It worked out better for both of them.

Kevin saw her before she saw him but pretended that he didn’t, continuing to talk to his friend about holiday traveling and New Year’s plans he said would commit to but knew he would flake on at the last minute. He’d frankly rather shove the whole evening down a garbage chute and just wake up sometime in 2011, at a fair distance from the worst winter of his life.

“Hey!” he heard.  It was her voice, filled with a jilted awkwardness that was never reserved for him in the past.  They hadn’t seen each other since September 23^rd, not that he knew the date by heart but it was his birthday.  She dumped him on his fucking birthday in the garbage bag laden hallway of his apartment building.

Jessie, I hate you.

Jessie, I hate you.

Jessie, I hate you.

Kevin took a sip of his coffee, pretending that he didn’t feel his cheeks flush and that his arms hadn’t gone completely limp.  He held onto his cup, praying that it didn’t fall straight out of his hands.  “Oh, hey,” he said, feeling his friend back away from the conversation like a cartoon animal that had just stumbled upon a sleeping bear.  Half of their friends were of the mutual kind; everyone knew.

“How are you?” Jessie asked.  Kevin hated these questions because no one ever told the truth except maybe British people; British people were okay with the daily miseries of their own existence.  There was no reason to lie; we all felt the same most of the time anyway, right?

“Great, yeah.  Like fucking amazing.”

He regretted the words as soon they came out of his mouth, hearing his seventh grade literature teacher with the cropped blonde hair and the glasses from Lenscrafters saying, “The lady doth protest too much,” while standing in front of a white board.

“Yeah?”

There was an incredulousness in her voice that allowed him to hate her momentarily.  Her look said something all its own – something like doubt, something like I’m-the-best-thing-you’ll-ever-have-and-I-didn’t-want-you.  He held onto the moment in hopes that it would carry him through the rest of this interaction, forcing the urge to kiss her to dissipate.

“Well, that’s good then.  Good for you.  Anyway, I thought my friend would be here but…but I don’t think he is,” she said, pretending to scan the back of the room for a friend that very well may have still been right there.  It was hard to tell if she felt uncomfortable or guilty; it was one of the two, maybe both.  “I’m going to run,” she said, and then she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, filled with an apology that he didn’t ask for.  She held on for an extended period of time that made Kevin cringe.

“Say hi to your mom for me if you’re going home,” she said, heading for the front door, turning the knob the right direction because this was her favorite coffee shop. This used to be their favorite coffee shop.  His New Year’s resolution was to find another one, preferably in the Upper West Side.  No one he knew went there.  Like, literally no one.

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Hipster Love Stories: Fritz and Ana

She was too intense to be cool.  Cool girls had a laissez faire, bored approach to engaging in social interactions.  Looking bored these days was the equivalent of possessing some sort of highly classified intel.  “Oh, you think this is cool?” the cool girls said but did not say at all, their arms crossed over black leather jackets and their mouths opening and closing while they chewed seductively on gum, their eyes wandering the room to see if people were looking at their super rad outfit.  Cool girls had long hair and looked like they wanted to be French.  Their parents did hip things like design jewelry or run art galleries.  Cool girls dj’d parties off of their iPods filled with fuck-me-I’m-so-cool music procured from ex-boyfriends.

Fritz had never heard of this girl before.  He had never seen her in the nightlife blogs he checked every morning to see if his face appeared.  He didn’t consider himself a narcissist because everyone did this.  She didn’t even have a blog herself.  How was anyone supposed to promote themselves without a blog, he thought as she professed that fact in addition to not using Facebook or Twitter.  How were people supposed to know how cool you were if you didn’t report to the world your opinions and likes and dislikes and where you had been or what you ate last night at Marlow & Sons or what job you were doing that week (everyone he knew was freelance).  Outside of the virtual world, did we even exist anymore?  Fritz decided that this girl couldn’t possibly be cool enough to date him.  He needed someone more overexposed.

What was weird was that she dressed like one of Them.  “Them” meaning him, meaning the In Crowd, of course.  Her hair was messy like she never brushed it, her shoes were of the rad granny variety that Fritz hated to love, she wore floral dresses in the summer and oversized knits in the winter.  She looked the part, he thought, but as he sat across from her at Five Leaves, Fritz couldn’t help but think she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Or vice versa.  Wolves were way more awesome than sheep.

Fritz met her on the street that evening and he was a little bit drunk already so he asked if she wanted to grab a drink.  He had invited himself on what was essentially his own impromptu blind date.  Stupid.  She kept talking about weird countries in Eastern Europe and concerts she had been to in the last month, bands he had never heard before.  What bands had he never heard of before?  Fritz knew everything there was to be known.  If it was cool, he was into it.  And if it was cool, it went on his blog.

Ana – that was her name – kept talking and Fritz didn’t really listen while he waited for her to make a comment about his tattoos.  He was used to the attention they garnered, especially the new one on his forearm.  His shirts were attentively rolled so that half of it showed, that way – as what often happened – whatever girl he was talking to at the moment would see its bluish-black curls and push his shirt back while grabbing hold of his wrist, revealing the words “Great Fortune,” the name of his favorite pirate ship.  Tattoos were like being the lead singer of a band, without all the talent and touring and shit.

Out of boredom, Fritz began to scan Ana’s body for evidence of her own tattoos.  Then, he thought, he could talk about hers, which would make her talk about his.  He nodded his head while she continued, now talking about her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen (WTF?!) and how amazing the apples were at the farmer’s market this morning (Ummm…).  Her hands fluttered through the air, emphasizing points Fritz didn’t give a shit about.  There were no tattoos there.  No hearts or words or stars.  This was almost better than discovering that she had gotten one of those stupid mustache tattoos.  God forbid.  At least she had that much going for her.

When she moved the hair on her neck, having now stopped talking a minute or so ago, Fritz scanned behind her ears and at the briefly exposed nape of her neck.  Nothing.  Boring.  Fritz said nothing because he had assumed that she would just continue – girls liked to talk.  Ana looked back at him.

“Hey,” she said, interrupting his fit of excruciating boredom.

“Hmmm?” he responded, her eyes still on her neck.

She looked irritated for a reason Fritz couldn’t understand; she should be happy he even invited her here.  Didn’t she know how fucking rad he was?  Didn’t she know how many girls he blew off on a daily basis?  Fritz took another swig of Modelo.

“Have a good night man,” she said, and then turned to walk out the door five feet behind them.

He wondered what he had missed between the comment about the farmer’s market and her getting pissed off.  Oh, well.  He was supposed to go out with this chick that was Terry Richardson’s new muse.  She was twenty-two and had big tits and a family house in Gstaad.

 

Hipster Love Stories: Penny

Penny sat in the coffee shop, drinking coffee and scribbling dinosaurs into her Moleskin with a red pen.  At least she thought they looked like dinosaurs.  One looked more like a small dog, but oh well… Her mind drifted off into thankful nowhere, listening to the hissing of the milk steamers behind her and the grinding of beans beyond that.  She caught her reflection in the large window onto Berry Street, already dark at 5 p.m.  She looked pale.

In the middle of her peaceful, mindless reverie, Fleet Foxes came on.  “White Winter Hymnal.”  Fuuucccckkkkkk.  Penny watched her face in the window twist into something pained and uncomfortable.  The song reminded her of someone in Los Angeles.  It was his favorite song on the album and he played it over and over again.  Penny didn’t mind because she loved it just as much; it brought to mind Appalachian panhandlers falling in love on a river somewhere, though the reference probably only made sense to her, kind of like the dinosaurs staring up at her from her notebook.  That part of her was already two years old and long dead, but it could have been yesterday.  He played this song and it filled his apartment, wall-to-wall, the noise hanging above them like stars, living in an atmosphere all their own.

Penny silently groaned through the whole two minutes and twenty-seven seconds of it.  It would end soon, she told herself, pulling on the sides of her hat, attempting to drown out some of the noise tapping into the part of her brain that controlled pain and memory.  The track stopped, momentarily filling the room with a blissful second of relative silence.  Penny breathed a deep sigh of relief, picking her pen back up to finish a T-Rex.

Then she heard the first two chords of the following song.  No, no, no, no, she thought.  They were going to play the whole goddamn album.  People kept walking in the door, not aware that Penny was reliving the entire summer of 2008 while sitting on her wooden stool, wrapped in a black jacket and wearing a white hat that had begun to pill horribly in the last week.  She was just another girl drinking coffee and pretending to be doing something productive at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Instead of running away, which Penny was a huge advocate of, she sat through the entire hour, stiff and paralyzed, wishing that she didn’t have ears and that she didn’t appreciate quality music.  After five songs, Penny made a promise to herself: she was going to stop making out and having sex to hipster music, starting effective the next time anyone was interested in doing either with her.

She knew the last track was the last track and Penny felt that she had exorcised some sort of demon, or at least had the wherewithal to endure her own agony, which was a first.  She had always thought she would be more of a grownup at twenty-eight, but then again she had thought she would be a lot of things already.

As she placed the mouth of her intensely strong cup of coffee to her lips, Bon Iver began to play.  It was an album that she listened to for the first time earlier that same year while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, compelled to spend the evening dancing alone on the beautiful rug of a stranger’s living room.  She fell asleep in the king-size bed belonging to that same stranger, filled not with him, but she and her two friends.  She kissed the one to her left, riding the rollercoaster high together and holding hands.  The friend to the right was asleep, she thought, because he had stopped talking about how his stomach hurt, giggling, and talking about his stomach some more.  When she and her friend who was temporarily more than a friend kissed she saw rainbows under her eyelids – the kind Lisa Frank would shit over, minus the unicorns and creepy bears.  At least this memory was just weird, not overtly depressing.

Penny reminisced on the days when she wasn’t so cool, when she didn’t read Pitchfork on a daily basis and wasn’t so well versed in the Minutia of Hip.  She was thankful for those simpler times, times when she made out with aspiring actors living in shitty apartments off of Sunset Boulevard to Coheed and Cambria or whatever bullshit they had on their iPod.

What might have been lost…

What might have been lost…

What might have been lost…

Justin Vernon’s voice softly crooned all of her failings back at her.  See?  Why did she know the name of the lead singer?  Was that useful?  Did that help her in any way except allowing her to connect to some other pretentious nerd one day? Penny grumbled audibly into her cup of coffee on accident and then looked around to make sure no one had seen her.

If she had a remote she would flip rapidly flip through these songs in a desperate search for Katy Perry or Beyonce or anything that brought to mind weaves and pink wigs, hot pants and other images created for us by art directors and not past experiences.  The indie music market had been wholly confiscated by her past relationships with men.  The different mouths, different hair, different hands.  All of them similarly gone, leaving her with a catalogue of music she simultaneously loved and loathed, sort of like the boys themselves.

Next time, she was going to Starbucks.