Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [38]
Because The Real World isn’t about finding the person you most relate to—these are funhouse mirror characters, after all, people made to appear so pathetic and embarrassing and drunk and silly that pleasure radiates from your very soul that you are not, in fact, them. There are, of course, exceptions—Pedro Zamora, who died in 1994 from complications from AIDS, is the most notable—but usually it’s all about deciding who horrifies you more. Do you side with the bully who believes she can claim a random guy as her own, despite already having a boyfriend, or the alienated one who can’t stop pushing people’s buttons? Well, God damn it, Sophie had it comparatively easy. (For the record, I went with Parisa, even though her decision to send Trisha home was the ultimate act of pettiness; her ineffectual social skills kind of broke my heart and besides, Trisha managed to make even Puck seem oddly appealing.)
The fact that I feel perfectly comfortable castigating these people I’ve never met is particularly ironic given the fact that I so desperately wanted to be one of them myself. In the malaise that was my early twenties—back in my hometown of San Francisco after an abysmal postgraduation stint in New York, realizing that Parenting magazine was serious about paying me $18,000 a year, depressed beyond belief that college had ended and I was now meant to fend for myself for meals, rent, and entertainment, and horrified to discover that drinking Amstel Light after Amstel Light and smoking a pack of Camel Lights a day was no longer considered cute and cool but both bizarre and slightly sad—I spent most of my time wondering how life had suddenly become so inexplicably real. I was still packing the freshman fifteen I’d acquired (having added a few more to that initial acquisition each passing year of college with nightly pizza-and-beer binges), and was completely without direction, somehow convinced that the world should reward me.
Into this sea of monotony and dread, like Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy to Elizabeth’s dreary, proposal-less, marriage-obsessed existence, came Aaron: blond, handsome, and sweet as could be. He was, as my friend noted while we lay out in a San Francisco park, famous. “From The Real World,” she whispered with reverence. At the time, I was mostly ignorant—I’d been vaguely aware of the first season, when everyone looked more like the types of people you see in an airport or a Las Vegas casino than the sort who’d swarm the treadmills at the West Hollywood Equinox. But I’d missed the second one, in which Aaron had appeared. Still, I understood enough about fame to know that it meant possibilities, options. Fame had nothing to do with taking the bus to work and answering someone else’s phone in the hopes of being able to edit articles about Barney the dinosaur and someday, if you were really lucky, make $19,000 a year.
I became friends with Aaron. Not that day in the park—I don’t actually remember how we met but I feel certain that it was through a combination of my self-will and some coincidence, and that he was reasonably entertained by me. While he didn’t trash the show that had by that point become my complete obsession (thank God for MTV’s devotion to reruns), he was wholly uninterested in talking about it. We became friends—going out to bars, playing tennis, watching TV, lying out in parks, always with lots of other people—and while he was simply interested in having a new pal, I was feverishly, obsessively fetishizing his fame, and more particularly what my proximity to it meant about me.