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.

 

It Was a Hipster Love Story

It started with vomit.  Projectile vomiting, actually.  And not the kind that happens in the Lower East Side at 4 a.m. but the kind that happens unexpectedly and without provocation in the form of eight whisky sours.  No, this vomit rocket took the shape of a young girl, wearing a backpack and sitting next to her mother.

“Oh, no.  Oh, no.”

Jill turned when she heard the splatter hit the floor of the L Train.

James saw the whole thing happen, having unfortunately chosen to stand right in front of the kid.  He looked down at his shoes, making sure that the strategically distressed and aged leather was untainted; scuffs and tears were okay, but throw up was another beast entirely.

Jill watched as James moved towards her.  She thought she might have seen him before, but maybe it was just that haircut that was so familiar.  She’d been seeing that one a lot lately.  Their eyes met briefly and shared an accidental wink and a nod about what they had just seen.  And then they continued to not look at each other, as people in the subway so often do, holding the rails and feeling the shuddering sway of the train on the tracks.

Together, they watched as a second bout of illness quickly came, the young girl now standing on her feet and completely at the whim of her fickle stomach.  “Oh, no.  Oh, no.”  Politeness being a dangerous road to tread at this point, most everyone parted ways to create a large circle of space around the kid, like an unwelcome dance floor.

Again, the two caught eyes.  Again, the accidental acknowledgement.

First Avenue arrived and the two made their way for another train.  With everyone from the last car in this new one, the boy and girl were forced to stand more closely to one another.  Jill flashed her iPod James’ direction, angled casually to minimize the glare, hopping that he might see her Belle and Sebastian remixed cover on display.  She peeked up just in time to see his eyes moving away from her screen and down to her black boots.

“Madewell?” he asked, though the question was more the assumption of someone who shopped often and knew the minutia of marked designer characteristics – stitching, leather quality, and other trappings of the post-heterosexual days.

“Lanvin,” she countered, immediately following with a self-deprecating apology for having purchased such a grossly expensive item, separating herself from the real artists.  She couldn’t help that her parents came from money, could she?

James nodded his head in a nonjudgmental manner and placed his headphones back on.  She did the same, though she didn’t press play yet.  Instead, she listened to the thumping baseline of her new favorite song play loudly into his ears – the one by that guy who lives in a loft somewhere in Bushwick, you know, the one that sounds like all those other ones with, like, the reverb and stuff.  Her song was on his iPod.

She turned her face away.  He looked over, swearing he caught a wave of blush cross her cheeks.  But then again, it was getting cold outside.

Third Avenue arrived and he departed, off to work a retail gig for a brand that had perfected the art of skinny jeans for boys.  You know, that one.  Jill watched through the dirty glass windows and he disappeared, noting that she hadn’t realized until just now that they were wearing the very same plaid shirt.