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He was always home when I called him there, and we d
spent the last three weekends together. I asked what kind of
plans.And he whined like a child being forced to tell his mom
why he didn t want to practice piano when he told me the fol-
lowing, in my own bed, while we were both naked.
 I can t spend tonight with you, sweetie, because I have a
date.
And that. Was. It. I was suddenly sober. Something in my
ailing brain snapped back into place with the accompanying
blam of a cap gun being fired, and all of a sudden, I felt my crazy
collapse into itself, like a demolished house, until all that was
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left inside of me was a single, raw nerve. And it wanted to kill
the fat, nude jerk in my bed. It wanted to fucking kill him.
I got steely silent the kind of internal quiet that makes
men nervous when they see women go there, because it means
they re stewing and plotting.And as I processed the audacity of
the morning s events, I thought about that old fortune cookie
game the one you play with your friends at the end of a
Chinese meal, when you add the phrase  in bed to whatever s
in your cookie? This guy this fucking narcissist with the hy-
giene of the Unabomber told me that he had a date with the
bisexual vegan he d been dating this whole time In. My. Bed.
I GOT up and started putting my clothes on, and Ben frantically
followed me into the next room. It was like he had to take a
cue from my behavior to see that he d done something wrong:
He didn t know before I d reacted that he said something he
wasn t supposed to say. He begged me not to be mad, and I
icily deferred, and then he got hysterical, hoping I d respond,
but I didn t. He wasn t going to defuse my anger, and he wasn t
going to confuse me any more into thinking that I was as crazy
as him.And then he made himself cry.
Have you ever seen a grown man in the act of working
himself up into a lather so that he can cry real tears in front of
you? It s an excellent cure for being attracted to someone.
Ben stood in my living room, squeezing out tears like
he was wringing a damp rag, whimpering out everything he
could bring himself to say except that he was sorry. He said
he was  flipping out, that he  couldn t handle it, that  What
did I want him to do lie? It was all self-saving. It was what
he had to tell himself out loud so he didn t have to face the
possibility that he d actually done something wrong. I watched
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I DON T CARE about YOUR BAND
him self-destruct with indifference. I wanted him to get out
of my apartment. It was like I d woken up from a nightmare,
but I still felt complicit. Like I d watched a scary movie before
going to bed.
Later that day, I got rid of Ben for real, but he kept call-
ing to argue with me about why I had no right to be mad,
until I had to hang up on him. I made the mistake of trying
to convince him that he was wrong and I was right, and you
just can t do that. People like Ben just can t understand anyone
else s point of view.
There s a test that was developed by a child psychiatrist
named Piaget, where you show a toddler a three-dimensional
model structure, like a castle, and you sit with him across the
table and ask him to draw it twice: one from his point of view,
and one from the point of view of the person across the table,
who sees the castle from the back. But the kid will draw the
same thing twice. He will draw, two times, what the castle
looks like from where he sits. Because he hasn t reached the
point in his development where he can imagine another per-
son s perspective.
Ben didn t even try to see the castle from my position on
the table.What he did do aggressively was try to be friends
with me after the wreckage. He would send me long e-mails
and leave me rambling voice mails saying he wanted to make
sure I knew how awesome he thought I was. As though me
being kick-ass was ever at stake in our not seeing eye-to-eye.
And he begged me not to hate him. It made it harder for him
to sleep at night knowing that there was somebody out there
who knew his  sensitivity only referenced his ability to bruise
easily with standard handling. Because Ben s was not a two-
way thin skin. He didn t have any problem hurting the girl
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smart enough to know that  Please don t hate me is not the
same thing as  I m sorry. He just couldn t stomach the conse-
quences: He could not be hated.
And I don t hate him. But I don t like him. And I don t
have to. Of the many lessons one can learn from dating crazy,
I ve learned that asking Ben to be decent and empathetic was
like asking somebody with two broken legs to run a mara-
thon. He just can t, and it was cruel of me to expect that
he could. But I also know now that there are some people
who, even though they are low-status and should, by defini-
tion, evoke compassion, will instead bring out a side of you
that is so sadistic, so eager to be mean and combative and
other things that are not you, that you must avoid them al-
together.These are the provokers the ones who can t evoke
pity because they re inherently infuriating. It s the woman at
the gym who screams at you when you change the channel,
or the old man who wanders around the park and gets mad
because you re sitting on his bench, or that asshole baby who
throws his toys.
There are plenty of troubled, cluttered souls who make
you want to hurt them as much as they hurt you, even though
you know they re already suffering plenty.The part of me that
is kind sympathizes, because I know that as difficult as it is to
be around someone like Ben, it s way more difficult for him to
be himself.The part of me that still hurts knows the same thing,
and takes comfort in the karma of it all.
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giants and monsters
:
was going to meet Greg at the bar again. He was home,
visiting New York, and I hadn t seen him for years, since we
Iused to sleep together, in my early twenties. Greg holds the
distinction of being, to this day, the ugliest person I ve ever had
sex with.
THERE ARE a couple of advantages of sleeping with an ugly
guy. First is the obvious: that if he s self-aware of his visual
deficiencies, he might be nicer to you than a good-looking
person, and possibly even try harder to please you sexually.This
theory is in line with the water-tight one passed around frat
houses that fat girls will  do more in bed because they hate
their own bodies and don t want you to leave them.
But the other attractive thing about ugly guys lives in the
uniquely female part of the brain that makes sex with them
I DON T CARE about YOUR BAND
exciting. Because just as men can be really turned on by the act
of degrading a beautiful woman in bed coming on her pretty
face and generally violating her perfect body some girls get
off on the idea of letting a hideous monster have his way with
them. It s a turn-on for some of us to be defiled in some way. If
you try hard enough, you actually feel like a prostitute!
I hooked up with Greg on and off for a long stretch of
time we did not date. Greg was ugly and angry a winning
combination, only the opposite and in no way did he want
me for anything beyond the occasional last-minute night to-
gether, when he d take me home with him and plunge his dry,
plump fingers inside of me. After we d sleep together, neither
one of us would talk about it to each other or mention it to
anyone else.
I WANT to clarify what I mean by  ugly, because it s a harsh
word. Greg was heavy and tall, and he had sausage lips, tiny eyes,
and a broad nose with nostrils you could see just by looking [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]