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: Sarah and Andrew

Sarah woke up first.  She could feel it already, how the day would move painfully slow, time dripping through a sieve blocked with blackstrap molasses.  It would be one of those eighteen-hour epic hangovers from a night of too much yelling and too little sleep, fueled by a nasty combination of uppers and downers.

Andrew shifted in his sleep, his face contorted in a pinched grimace, as though he felt the same way Sarah did but didn’t know it yet.  She looked around a bedroom she hadn’t found herself in for nearly a month.  He still kept his pile of shoes in a corner: a large stack of battered Converse with shredded shoelaces and holes where his feet were too wide.  His closet doors were wide open, organized by color – something she had always found funny because he was a slob in all other capacities.  She rolled quietly to the right to look at the wall and not Andrew’s face, her left arm resting uncomfortably on top of the comforter she never liked: a sallow buttercup yellow blanket that looked like something her grandmother kept hidden in her basement back during the ugly part of the 70s.

Sarah hated knowing so much about this room and wished that she were naïve to this boy all over again.  Not in an I-wish-I-never-met-him type of way, but something else.  She wanted to feel and think the way she did when they first met – how everything Andrew did was cool and interesting, how she didn’t judge his messiness but found it charming, how she was nervous he wouldn’t call and surprised when he always did.  She carried this false history with her and it killed her a little bit.  She couldn’t wait for it to be gone.

To Sarah, knowing someone in such close proximity – with such extreme detail – made the chasm of being away from them seem endlessly large.  Her life had been so wrapped up in Andrew that it consumed her now even though they were apart.  She couldn’t even go shopping without finding something that he would like: a pair of slippers, a striped cardigan, air plants.  Sarah looked around a room that was familiar but no longer felt like home.  She felt strange and unwelcome and wondered if she should leave before he woke up.

They had run into each other last night in front of the Kitty Day Care on Bedford, an empty looking room with a few sad looking playpens for cats.  Sarah didn’t much care for cats and the whole enterprise irritated her.

Sarah sat on the cold concrete, inhaling the fruits of her American Spirit, when he walked by.  She hated how this place had turned into a college campus: everyone knew each other and everyone had slept with each other, broken up with each other and gone off to sleep with one another’s close friends, and afterwards they were then routinely forced to see each other.  Brooklyn was a cruel and unusual punishment for the dating community.  Sarah wondered if getting dumped was easier in Los Angeles, where people could just break hearts and get heart broken and then drive away in their cars, isolated and alone whenever they wanted to be.

From far away, she knew it was him.  Andrew had a noticeable gait, his thin legs bowed at the knees.  And the coat he wore, she recognized that, too: she had given it to him last winter.  It was expensive and right then she wished she had that money back.  Sarah kept her head down hoping that she could avoid what ended up happing anyway – the awkward hello, the excessive drinking, the ending up back at his place when there were eight million other places in the world she should have been instead.

Andrew shifted in the bed behind her and Sarah closed her eyes tightly in case he was awake.  She waited for some sort of touch or movement but it never came, and even if he had been awake he probably wouldn’t have reached for her.  She couldn’t bear the thought of him not drawing her in close to him, feeling his warm belly against her back like he used to do every morning.  Her stomach turned, not because she was hungry or sick but because she was overwhelmed with the nausea that usually accompanied her self-loathing.  She was angry with herself for ending up back here.  She was embarrassed and angry.

Quickly, Sarah crawled out of bed and began the search for her clothes from last night, digging around for whatever she could find immediately.  Her pants were near his shirt; her bra was buried under his sweater.  A sock had gone missing but she put her boot on anyway.

She crept to the door, coat in hand, walking on the balls of her feet to avoid excessive contact with the floor.  And she left him, lying asleep in an empty bed, the remaining warmth from her side rapidly disappearing.  As she took one last look at his bedroom filled with no evidence they ever existed, her stomach turned again with the knowledge this was the last time she would wake up next to him.

Hipster Love Stories: Devon

Devon swiped his card.  Insufficient Fare.  He had multiples, ones he kept in his wallet because he never trusted those words: Insufficient Fare.  The expiration date on his MetroCard always seemed to come too quickly and at inopportune moments that left him watching his train depart its station like a bullet on a string, without him onboard.   And so he kept the supposed discards in his wallet, trying them on a couple different occasions and at a few different turnstiles.  In the end, the meters were always right.

He put the first denied card in his back pocket and promised to throw it away on the other side of the gate.  Devon then procured a second.  He swiped.  Insufficient Fare.  Assholes.  He was mad at that proposed fare increases and wondered how people making minimum wage could afford anything, especially in New York.  He made good enough money bartending and he still struggled.

There was a third somewhere in his wallet, he knew that.  He dug around between crumpled five-dollar bills and one crisp twenty.  There, smashed next to the face of Abraham Lincoln, was the card that would work.  He swiped.  BEEP.  Insufficient Fare.

Devon walked away from the turnstile, concerned that he was perhaps holding up the line, but who was he kidding, it was 3 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in the depths of Bushwick; no one was behind him.

He was about to succumb to purchasing a new card when he found the fourth.  This one must be it, he thought to himself as he steadied his hand above the machine that was able to read the magnetic stripe on the back of this yellow card by some trick of science he never studied.

There was a definitely a card with money left on it.  His friend had given him her MetroCard before she left town.  “I think there’s a couple bucks left on this one,” she said before hauling her heavy suitcase down four flights of stairs.  He had offered to help but she declined, so when the door closed, he sat back down on his couch to watch Dexter, listening to the sound of her bag clunking against the hallway walls until her noise disappeared underneath the sounds of bad dialogue and a screaming victim.

Later, Devon thought that he probably should have insisted on helping, even if she insisted otherwise.  Girls did that shit all the time – the whole “No Means Yes” thing, but not in that rapey way they warned you about in high school.  This was becoming a proven truth in Devon ’s relationships with girls and women, and judging by how many times his mother warned him about this pattern of female behavior and how often it had happened in real life, he would be best served in adapting to their nonsensical Laws of the Universe.  “That’s what you’ll need to know, Devon, if you ever want to keep a woman,” his mother always told him.  But Devon didn’t want a woman, and he was on the fence about girls, too.

BEEP.  The words flashed again and Devon groaned.  Another Monthly Unlimited, here I come, he thought.  Devon ’s mother had taught him a lot about thrift and maximizing one’s dollar, but her relationship advice had always irritated him, probably because it was often unprovoked and uncalled upon.  What did his mother know about relationships anyway?  During his childhood, she had been divorced four times, routinely dated hideous douche bags in between, and then seemed to magically forget about all of it, willingly putting herself back out there into a worthless dating pool of a small town on the outskirts of Bakersfield.  He didn’t need to hear advice from her, Thank You Very Much.

The MetroCard machine ate his money and spat out its blue and yellow card of proverbial gold.  Another eighty-nine fucking dollars, he thought.  Devon walked to the turnstile, which now graciously offered him the word “Go.”  He just wanted to be home already; he was tired from the MetroCard ordeal and the four glasses of red wine he had just had, and went to rest against a grimy tile wall while waiting for the train.

Kelly.  That’s who he had just met for drinks…drinks and other things.  They had ended up back at her house – a terrifyingly unpalatable mish mash of magazines ordered alphabetically and shabby chic décor.  The girlish nature of her abode made Devon nervous.  These were the types of girls who wanted to get married before they turned twenty-six and have kids two years after.  They wanted big wedding rings and white ponies.  Girly girls.  His mother had warned him of those, too.

Devon had been dating a lot lately.  Ever since he got a bike he had been above ground for most of the summer, exposing himself to a world of beautiful girls in short shorts and see-through dresses, colored sandals and Ray Ban sunglasses.  He looked at them as trophies to be collected.  Dirty blondes, shorthaired brunettes, chicks with freckles on their backs and nicely painted toenails.  There was something addicting about women – not one particular woman, but women in general.

His bike had opened up an entirely new, entrepreneurial world to Devon.  He thought of all those years he had wasted on the subway, staring at homeless people with long fingernails and vomiting children.  The choice to ride through downtown had turned out to be quite a fortuitous one; he met a new girl who seemed keen on him at least three times a week.  Winter made him nervous, though secretly relieved.

It had been fun in the beginning, sleeping with as many girls as he possibly could because he could.  He didn’t even really have to try, which probably meant that he was good looking, though he never thought of himself in that way before.  And when he was over each of the many girls that happened between the months of May and September, he didn’t really have to try to end it either.  It ended simply because it didn’t continue, and he thought that would be enough for the girls, though they were most often left anxious and confused.  But that was their problem, not his.  Onto the next one, the next one, the next one.  There was some comfort in that, he supposed.

Devon couldn’t say he was looking for anything in particular, or anything at all.  He found it interesting that as the months went on and the number of dates increased in equal measure, the way he kissed – any signature style or tricks or, fuck, he didn’t know – was gone.  His kisses had become an indecipherable mess derived from the collective mouths of different girls.

By the end of summer, Devon was well versed in the art of casual, flirtatious interactions.  He knew what stories to tell from his youth – sweet stories about trips with his family to the Grand Canyon, how he got lost at Disneyland for six hours when he was five, about the time he got This scar, this scar right here.  The girls would watch him as he told them these stories, these anecdotes that were sure to illicit the same Fuck Me reaction.  And to be sure, they worked every time.  Devon knew when a girl had been hooked by how they would lean over a table or a drink, giggling and batting their eyes.  He knew by the way they would engage, which was, to him, an obvious combination of coy and vulnerable.

Devon said “They” because it was literally every girl; not one was able to resist him.  Suckers.  Girls routinely ignored patterns of the male species.  No matter how many times a girl was routinely destroyed by a man, she would dust herself off and start over again, telling herself, “This guy will be different.”  There was something about this that made Devon a bit squeamish, knowing that these girls were pretty much just younger versions of his own mother – hopeful, open, loving women who he would break down because he could and because he had to and because he was, well, easily and routinely bored.  Something inside of him wanted to sit down and tell these girls the truth, that each guy was exactly the same, but it didn’t seem like the best strategy for getting laid.

Through the depths of the dark tunnel, Devon could hear his train approaching, sucking the cold air of December past him like a vacuum, sending an unexpected shiver down his spine and awakening his dulled senses, however slight.