Hipster Love Stories: Leigh

Liking someone was a time-consuming business, Leigh thought, and she wondered if she had better things to do with her time than debate the invisible merits of another person who, in the end, would probably break her heart anyway.  She should be reading books, seeing plays, taking trips up north to the Niagara Falls or going back to school to get her graduate degree.  All of this was possible in the time it took for her to “research” love conquests she wasn’t allowed to be the conqueror of.  That was the problem: girls had to wait.  Girls had to sit on the sidelines batting their eyelashes and making witty jokes if they were even capable of witty jokes until someone, anyone, responded to them.  Things hadn’t changed much since middle school, when she sat in a thick plastic chair pushed up against the wall, waiting for a boy to come up and ask her to dance.  She just wanted to be on the dance floor.  She wanted to be spinning in circles and throwing her hands in the air and kissing who she wanted to kiss without asking.  She didn’t want to wait.

Leigh had decided that the only way to get something close to what she wanted was to be available to multiple men at the same time and not really care about any of them.  She liked to think that she had divided her heart up into little indestructible pieces and those pieces were analogous to some stupid proverbial eggs in that stupid proverbial basket.  Only then was it was possible to give little bits of her heart to multiple people and come out of this whole love thing alive.  You couldn’t give your heart to just one person; that was completely insane, like flying a kamikaze plane into enemy territory.

As a teenager she had seen movies filled with hardened characters giving callous speeches about the correlation between how much you love to how much you hurt.  Give less; hurt less.  Give none; hurt none.  These were lessons delivered during intent drags off of cigarettes, some actor looking off into the distance with a pained gaze that indicated they weren’t completely convinced in their own theories of self-preservation.  Managing feelings was like trying to catch angry bumblebees with your bare hands, she had learned that as she got older.  Theories about such things were useless; feelings had a life all their own.

She used to think these cinematic musings were stupid and insular, the dogma of bitter adults who just needed to toughen up and love some more, but she was thirteen and the closest she had come to getting her heart broken was when Jake told her he wanted to see Melanie instead; they weren’t even really dating, or maybe they were, Leigh couldn’t remember.  She had liked Jake for the better part of sixth grade – she had started listening to The Misfits for him, had learned how to skateboard and even attempted to learn guitar.  Leigh was devastated.  For three weeks, she avoided her friends at lunchtime and ignored all invitations to go see a movie at the local mall.  On the weekends, she sat in her room, listening to Third Eye Blind allude to songs about suicide and staring at last year’s yearbook.  And then, like a bear out of hibernation, she was magically over it.  That’s when she fell in love with Aaron.

As a young girl, Leigh gave her whole heart to everyone, all of the time.  It seemed she should recover from the tragedies of youth much more quickly then, like how skin heals itself more quickly in our younger years than in our aging ones.  Her heart was like that.  The bad habit of being over-exposed and too generous with her feelings followed her into her early twenties until she had lost most of her heart and had to take a few years off to regenerate her spirit and rebuild the desire to love anyone, including herself.  During that period she felt like the ravaged wood in “The Giving Tree,” a book she had loved as a child, but as an adult she found it to be a rather dark tale about irredeemable selfishness.

Leigh had dated enough to know that girls were best served behaving like boys when it came to dating.  Boys had a more grab-bag approach to falling in love.  They always seemed to have a rotation of girls that they liked enough for different reasons (nice apartment, smelled good, a pretty face, long legs) and eventually, one stuck, for reasons Leigh wasn’t even sure a boy was capable of articulating.  Lucky was the chosen girl, surely, but for every person victorious, there were a bevy of losers in the War of Love.

Leigh knew that if she wanted to make it through her twenties without hating men, she had to adopt these tactics, which was excruciatingly difficult for a girl to do.  She had to force herself to not care.  This went hand-in-hand with the theory that women could not have sex without placing some emotional significance on the act.  Men could just fuck.  Women could fuck, too, but there was always something more to it.  Even her friends who were the biggest sluts, the ones who screwed up to five guys in the same week, even though they had all of these options and backup plans for saving their hearts from ruination, even THEN, the sex always meant something.  And when the boys and the sex disappeared, that meant something, too.

She understood why boys did the things they did.  Women were beautiful.  Men could be handsome and interesting, but women were like collectable things.  If Leigh were a man she would conquer as many women as she could.  It was almost like having billions of dollars and buying property in Shanghai and Paris and Rio, not because you love those places so much as it is just because you can and because those places are the places that they are.  So while sitting at a dinner party with all of your rich friends you can say, “Oh, why yes, I do have a house in Shanghai…and in Paris…and Rio…among other places.”  And then you would take a tasteful sip of your champagne and congratulate yourself on your life and your ability to own pieces of the world.  This was how men thought, Leigh believed, and she understood that.

Hipster Love Stories: Anna

Anna was beautiful, that much was obvious – not necessarily to Anna, but surely to everyone else.  To Anna, the idea of beauty was something other people pointed out to you and you eventually became aware or accepting of, and so the only reason Anna thought she might be attractive at all was because people had been telling her so since she was a small child.  “What a beautiful little girl!” they would say.  Strangers, distant relatives, family friends.  The phrase was often accompanied by the uninvited patting of her head – which, of course, was covered in beautiful black curls – or the touching of her cheeks – which, needless to say, were always the most beautiful shade of pink.  She remembered those times and how she stood there, begrudgingly accepting attention, wishing her parents would stage an intervention.  They never did; they were proud of what they had created.

Over the course of her life as a Beautiful Person, Anna had become accustomed to tuning out the world.  It was awkward to be on display all the time, which was how she felt when she actually paid attention to her surroundings as they passed – eyes filled with lusty curiosity and desire.  She was the type of girl that men sidestepped for on the subway platform, as though her beauty commanded more space than mere mortals.  Men held doors open for her even if it were inconvenient.  Sometimes she wished chivalry were dead, that way she could feel invisible for a day.

From an aerial vantage point, watching Anna move through bodies on a crowded sidewalk was like watching the proverbial parting of the seas, a stage perfectly set for Bette Midler wearing a sequin jumpsuit and belting out queeny show tunes.

But none of this mattered.  While it was easy for boys and men to watch her as she moved down the street, her raven hair bouncing behind her like a frame from some absurd TV commercial for expensive shampoo, they often balked at coming any closer.  At a bar, no one ever offered to buy her a drink.  If she caught the steely glance of a boy on a subway, he looked away and never looked back.  And dating – if she ever actually got a boy to date her – that was another story entirely.

The girls she knew that were married or living with their boyfriends or generally appeared happy in a relationship, were all women who seemed like they needed taking care of.  Broken women, crazy women, softer women than she.  But Anna didn’t want to be taken care of.  She loathed the idea of being some boy’s prize or salvation project.  She had her own life and her own dreams and she just wanted someone to…well, she wasn’t sure why she wanted a boy.  It was perhaps the notion of company that sounded nice, or that she wanted someone to touch her hair and not just watch it fly behind her on a breeze.  It was the human connection she craved, not a car or a ring or expensive dinners.  She just wanted someone who would treat her like a woman, not a doll.

This was perhaps what threw off the few boys she dated.  It was possible she was too beautiful to be opinionated or funny or anything else resembling normal human personality traits, though this thought irritated her and made her feel shallow and arrogant and filled with self-importance.  But many of her male friends preferred dim girls who just laughed at their jokes and gave them decent blowjobs.  In a way, she understood: she once dated a man who was extremely intelligent – literally a rocket scientist – and it was generally tiring to keep up.  Stupid people were easier because stupid people were content to just be.  This thought also bothered her because it made her feel judgmental, which she probably was.  She was beautiful, not flawless.

Every relationship Anna had ever managed to squeeze out of a man had lasted no more than a few months at the most, and usually ended without explanation.  Phone calls dwindled, strange excuses filled the places where invitations used to be accepted, she watched her insecurities come to a fever pitch.  And one day, she would realize she had been sleeping alone in her own bed for nearly two weeks.  That was when she knew whatever she had had with that person was over.  These were what Anna’s relationships were like.

In her estimation, she was becoming well versed in the Laws of Revulsion.  She thought about writing a book on the subject.  Its subtitle would be “Tips to Make a Boy Run for the Hills.”  It would be filled with advice on how to contact someone too frequently, how to not be the bitchy girl that boys were supposedly attracted to, how to wear your heart on your sleeve.  She would come out with a sequel some years later and comically document her life as an aging spinster – that way she could at least profit from her misery.

And so as she walked down the street today and saw a young boy looking at her, she wanted to grab him by the shoulders and tell him, “Let me love you.  Let me love you so you won’t love me.”

Hipster Love Stories: Alex, Leigh, and Claire

It was one of those beautiful days that Alex sensed he would recall in a nostalgic way some years from now. He would remember how the air felt, crisp and clean.  The sky would be a visceral, over-exposed memory of an unrealistic kind – too blue and too cloudless.  He sat on the corner of Wythe and South 4^th, his thoughts momentarily paused to better hear the day.  He had been in his head enough lately, thoughts spewing forth like torrents of water out of broken dams, flooding towns and sweeping away innocent children.  It had been a dark month.

For Alex, life was currently better spent away from his present state of mind.  He sat, chilling himself in the shade of a building, looking out at an apartment across the street that was sinking in the middle, dipping into a structurally unsound V shape.  The windows with their white windowsills sloped inward to match the roofline and he wondered what the place looked like on the inside.

Leigh had told him plainly that she wanted to see other people.  This stung like it had stung in the past.  He had heard it before and he imagined he would hear it again.  “Seeing other people” to Alex only meant he was not enough and would never be enough, possibly for anyone.  In two months, these depressed thoughts would be fleeting memories and his morale would have lifted enough to allow him to engage with the world again, but here, here in the shadow of a building, Alex imagined he might never amount up to much – in his career, his bank account…not even in love.

When Alex began to feel the cold sink too deep he crossed the street to where the sun was shining and walked into a store he always admired but never could justify purchasing anything from.  Everything was just too expensive and he usually didn’t have the money.  That was another thing Leigh hated – him not having money.  She was one of those fancy girls that he never imagined being able to score, for various reasons, mostly that he knew she could have whatever she wanted in life on account of her looks.  Leigh owned expensive dresses and wore Wolford tights that cost $40 a piece and when they got tears in them, as they often would, she would simply throw them away.

He met her at a gallery opening for an artist friend who had begun to sell paintings for a good amount of money to rich people with empty walls.  Leigh was with her rich friends, drinking champagne and avoiding the appetizers.  He would later think it was funny that she often complained that he never took her out to dinner because she never actually ate anything, not real food anyway.  Leigh liked the idea of being taken out to dinner but not the food itself.  The food was secondary to her knowing that she had a man who could provide for her.

Alex never intended on falling in love with a girl like this and he didn’t plan on doing it again.

As Alex walked through the store, he thought about Claire, a lovely girl he dated some years back.  She had soft blonde hair and wore one gray cashmere sweater all winter, no matter what.  It had been an expensive gift from a friend who brought it back with them from Italy.  It was the nicest thing she owned and she refused to save it for special occasions.  Claire was the type of girl who wore her boots until the stitching came out where it met the sole and would wear them for another few months before getting them repaired.  She was scatterbrained and erratic in a charming way that reminded Alex of a puppy in the window of a store, diving into mounds of shaved paper and licking at the glass as strangers walked by.

Claire had been easy to please.  She laughed at his jokes and played with his fingers when they held hands in movie theaters.  She slept in on the weekends, but not so much that they wasted the day.  She enjoyed cider and pumpkin soup and scones with Irish butter.  They often walked into stores on Sundays, not to buy anything, but just to look around.  “For inspiration,” she would say, as she pulled his reluctant arm into stores neither of them really belonged in.

Alex wandered one such store today, filled with silver-plated logs to use as tables or ottomans or something a bit flash.  The sofas were nice to look at but too firm to enjoy and the cost of four months rent.  He looked around, trying to find inspiration himself, something he could perhaps duplicate at home with some spare rope and a fistful of pencils.

And there they were – stacks of beautifully patterned placemats in interesting shapes and neutral colors.  He fondled the fabric, feeling its weight and wondering if they were dry clean only.  Claire would love these, he thought, remembering the walnut table she had found on the street one day, a beautiful grained wood that had been underappreciated and discarded.  She took it home and sanded it, oiled it, found chairs that matched it enough but not too much.  Claire would have loved these place mats, surely.

He thought about buying them for a moment, a set of four perhaps.  Christmas was approaching, after all.  But then he remembered that he hadn’t spoken to Claire since their talk on a bench down by the water.  That was the day he made her cry – he had never seen her cry until that day and he would be forever sorry that he had instigated those tears.  He folded the placemat gently and put it back where it belonged, regretting a great many things in his life, but none more than Claire.

Hipster Love Stories: Jane and the UBS Boy Part II

Jane saw him in her peripheral vision as she boarded the Manhattan bound train.  Tidy brown hair and shaved skin.  Tall.  Narrow jeans.  A blazer and a tie.  She couldn’t see his face but she was getting less picky as fall made its sudden descent into winter.  She took a seat across from his place at the door, his large hands grasping onto a pole surely covered in germs.  As the train moved, the bodies in front of her parted enough so that through them she saw it: the UBS bag.

Her heart leapt.  She had managed to find him again.  Not that they had shared any real connection or even a true, singular intimate moment; Jane had merely stared at him for the better part of four minutes a few weeks previous in an unrequited and unreciprocated moment of infatuation.  This happened a lot on trains, she found.  And in bars and coffee shops and streets and…That was the problem here: there were too many beautiful people everywhere.  Boys and girls.  So many options that it seemed no one was ever happy with what they had because they could always want so much more, all of the time.  Love and Lust in New York City was like a diner open 24/7 with a menu the size of the Bible.

The L Train lurched and the bodies in front of her parted again, his face coming into view.  His hair was a work of art, combed so precisely and meticulously that all Jane wanted in the world was to sit in his bathroom, the tile chilling her from her seat on the floor, and watch him create these stiff waves in his hair.  That was all she really wanted out of boys – these small moments that nobody else got to see.  Jane didn’t want flowers or jewelry or dinners; she wanted to see how a man got dressed in the morning, she wanted to know what his favorite shirt was, she wanted them to give that to her – accidentally and unknowingly – nonreturnable and nonrefundable keepsakes.

Jane noticed that he was reading a new book, though she couldn’t tell what book it was.  Obviously a particular person, UBS Boy covered his books with a rubbery black sheath that she had only ever seen used to protect iPads.  In real life – and not the made up, idealistic one in Jane’s head – he was probably anal retentive to an extreme, sterile in an annoying way that Jane would grow to find unattractive.  But here on the train, she found the care for his book endearing.  She watched him read, his brow trapped in perpetual concern.

Union Square came too soon and he had not looked up to catch Jane staring at him, something that was both good and bad – saving her from equal parts awkwardness and possibility.  The doors opened and he took to the stairs, his midnight blue, patent leather sneakers flying forward against the terminal floor.  Jane quickened her pace, moving aggressively through confused foreigners and glacial old people.  She couldn’t keep a fast enough pace, catching him just as he rounded corners, his perfect head of hair disappearing from view.

As Jane ran/walked, she contemplated making a giant poster to place on one of the walls leading out of the L train platform reading: Attention Beautiful Boy with the patent blue sneakers and the UBS bag.  I love you for nothing.”  She could either leave her number or not, making something that was already weird even weirder.

By the time she reached the top of the stairs, he had vanished entirely.  Jane craned her neck in a silly attempt to spot him out of a crowd of surging bodies.  Coming and going, bumping and pushing, while an African drum beat played out on empty paint cans provided a soundtrack to her increasingly pathetic romantic life.

Man with Van: Part I

The movers are late.  After half an hour I call, giving faux casual concern when I ask if they have someone gotten lost in the Manhattan maze.  “This is Raul’s brother,” a man says, “We’ll be there soon.  No problem, lady.”  His casual demeanor is even more casual than my own – the interactive equivalent of a puff off of a joint.  Words luxuriating in the air like dank smoke.  I hang up the phone, processing the lack of apology and the feeling that I will be working for these two today, and not the other way around.

My search for a mover began just two days previous.  Living in New York City, you get this perverse notion that everything you need can and will be provided for you immediately, whenever you want it.  Sandwiches, coffee, you name it.  For whatever reason, mostly lazy complacency, I placed movers into that same category.

A Craiglist query led me to a long list of “Man with Van” search results.  The phrase was alien to me until I moved here; my first experience being a late night, overpriced trip from Park Slope to Chinatown, where I chatted obnoxiously to a man who barely spoke English to mask the terror knowing I was driving across the Williamsburg Bridge at 10 p.m. with a complete – albeit hired – stranger.  Neither the sofa I was carting nor I, myself, were chopped into convenient pieces.  Crisis averted.

The minutes dragged on slowly.  Every second longer I had to stay at that apartment meant another half of Tums I would have to ingest on account of the not-so-latent anxiety that I would have to encounter my roommate one more time.  Over the last two months, I had become incredibly adept at sensing when she had left the building, mostly indicated by the rapid decrease of my own blood pressure.

Cars pass outside my window, honking and angry the way they always are.  The fire truck in the station adjacent to my building comes in and out multiple times.  I scan the clusterfuck street from hell for the clean maroon cargo van displayed in the advertisement.

Flat rate.  Reliable.  Man with Van.  347-555-5555.

The photograph below the advert was obviously a stock photograph, but one that I assumed was chosen based on the car that they actually owned.  Using an image of a van just to further point out that you provided one in said service seemed so unnecessary that I didn’t even consider it as an option.  That was until about 11 a.m., at which point I established that I am a naïve little idiot.

A white, rust-eaten van pulls outside of my building.  The anterior walls are marred with claw-like scratches and cigarette smoke pours out of the open windows.  It might have been new in 1995, but I could easily be off by a decade.  Please don’t be them.  Please don’t be them.  Please don’t be them. I chant to myself in vain, knowing deep in my gut that this is most certainly Raul and I have most certainly been duped.  The man in the passenger seat scans the building for a number and, upon finding the one above my door, hops out.  Mother fuck.  My doorbell rings.  Mother fuck fuck fuck.

I open my door to the hallway, watching a short man in a gray wife-beater tank and shorts near his ankles walk towards me.  I brace myself for the ever-real possibility that each Craiglist experience can lead to death, which I’m sure it says on their website in a disclaimer written in Size 7 Helvetica.

The man is Raul’s brother – the casual puff of smoke I mentioned from the phone half an hour earlier.  He tells me his name but I immediately forget it, mostly because my Fight or Flight instincts obliterate useless senses like hearing and comprehension.  I hold my keys in my hand in preparation for turning my fist into a Wolverine-like weapon where I gouge this dude’s eyes out or break my hand in the process.

He surveys the living room with my stacked boxes and few bulky items, their size and number seeming larger than in actuality, its contents threatening to eat the room whole.  I blame this on my soon-to-be-ex-roommate’s hulking seven-foot tall entertainment unit and her recently acquired piece de resistance – a brown, cracked leather sofa wrapped in brown tape – picked up late last night for $40 bucks or for free on some rotting corner of downtown Manhattan.

On his face is a look of malpracticed concern.  “How much did my brother quote you?” he asks.  I know I’m headed down a slippery, scamming slope – a slope I will slide down with venomous words about false advertising and piece of shit cargo vans, a tirade finished off with a dollop of “Don’t even fucking go there.”

I tell him what his brother told me: $150 for one trip and another $50 if we had to come back for more.  He places his hand on the corner of a stacked box, looking upwards like a plumber surveying a broken water main, and tells me that he thinks it’s going to be more.  Curtly, I inform him that he’s more than welcome to leave if that’s the case; I’ll just figure out what to do on my own.  I do not tell him that if he and his brother had shown up in a shiny maroon van that I probably would have allowed myself to be the shmuck who falls for that type of garbage.

After a phone call in Spanglish to his brother – the only part of it that I understand is a “I’ll do it.  I don’t care” – he drops the price gauging altogether.  That’s the last I hear of that.

As a child I moved houses only a few times.  Each involved me hand packing my life and wrapping it in newspaper.  From there, everything went into a U-Haul with dirty floorboards or got shuttled via inefficient mini-trips in one of my parent’s cars.  We never hired movers; movers were for rich people.  Once my mom researched a company called Bekins, an upscale moving service with a green logo and typeface that reminded me of an organic grocery store.  After the Northridge earthquake in ’94, these trucks were everywhere, moving people out of state, out of shattered houses and into temporary homes.

Now in New York and away from my family or any friend close enough that I could justify abusing without shame or remorse, I had no other option but to put my move into the hands of another.  I contemplated renting my own truck and doing it myself, but the thought evaporated quickly.  “Treat yourself,” my mom said, “Just sit back and let them do it.”

By the time Raul parks their hulking piece of rust, I have already started to put my boxes out on the street.  I can’t help but help.  That and after watching Raul’s brother manhandle my boxes clearly marked “Fragile” I realize that the only way I am going to be able to decorate my new apartment with the delicate nic nacs of my former life, I’m going to have to do some of this myself.

It’s the first of September and the day is hot, ridiculously hot in an unholy way that makes you think about killing people.  Sweat drips down from my armpits and into my tank top like it did back when I played organized sports in high school, uncontrollably and unattractive torrents of I-can’t-help-myself sweat.  I’m in good company, though; Raul’s brother’s gray shirt is sopping wet in the center, a dark gray bib imbedded in his gray tank.

“Hey, Jen.  Is there a grocery store around here or something?  I need to get a drink,” Raul’s brother asks.  Me being me, I offer like a PTA Mom to go get them a soda or something if they’re thirsty.  And me still being me, I don’t understand when Raul’s brother says he can go get it himself.  “I’m going to play a joke on Raul,” he explains.  I’m not sure what type of joke involves soda, but I do find out that apparently there is a type of joke that involves a can of Coors Light.  Raul’s brother comes back with beer in a paper bag and two cups.  Apparently the joke’s on me.  Then again, I already knew that.

While the boys drink beer next to the van, I continue to unload my life onto Broome Street, careful to avoid the piss and spit that so lovingly cover its sidewalks.  Raul’s brother attempts to teach me a valuable lesson of life – one of many he will dole out that day – when he tells me that it’s important to have fun, especially on hot fucking days like today.  “Otherwise, man.  Pssshhhh,” he says into his cup.

The apartment is nearly empty, save for my platform bed (which we momentarily think might fit on top of the van) and the sofa.  Raul runs some sort of packer’s mathematical equation in his head and begins to push all of my stuff that’s already in the van closer together.  “It can all fit,” he says as he crams my leather chairs into one another, collapsing the walls of cardboard boxes.  His math was a bit off and his logic premature; when he goes back inside to “measure” the sofa, he just gives a shrug followed by, “I think we’ll have to come back.”