Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [56]
At the end of the night, we were watching TV, and I looked at Chloe and said, “I want to kiss you.’
“No. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” Perhaps I could debate her into it.
“I don’t want to get involved in your love triangle. Or love square. Or love pentagon, or whatever it is.”
Then she paused. “Love pentagon. That’s almost an oxymoron.”
“What?”
“The Pentagon is all about war, not love.”
I was finally confessing my long-term crush, and she was doing wordplay. And not even good wordplay. I think it was the third whiskey sour talking.
What was clear was that this was not an emotionally wrenching moment for her. Awkward, yes. But not wrenching. It was probably the only sexual encounter we never talked about again. On that night, I finally snapped out of denial. I realized she would never like me. Never see me the way I saw her. It was at once painful and so staggeringly obvious. I should have known. But the dirty girls keep you hanging on. Every dirty story. Every dirty detail. You think, “That could be me.”
Eventually, as could be scripted by Captain Obvious, Chloe ended up with a guitarist from an alternative band, and I married a woman who worked in magazines. We lost touch, partly because my wife and Chloe didn’t mesh. (See the preceding 1764 words for the reason why.) But I still think about Chloe often. I am reminded of her when I see a certain famous sportscaster or catch an old episode of Saturday Night Live, or even hear about the Pentagon. But not, thank God, when I call my mother to discuss our Thanksgiving plans.
Lesson#39
Being Awkward Can Be a Prophylactic Against Dry Humping
by Matt Goodman
That middle school is rough is a truism, but consider the pressures of the environment in this particular experiment: being a non-Jew in a school in full bloom bar mitzvah season, gold-foil-encrusted invitations and candle lightings at the Waldorf, me with my L.L.Bean tie and a bowl haircut, wishing for my nascent Jewish faith to awaken inside me; reading through Guitar World, learning the vernacular of licks and pick scrapes (“sizzling leads,” “shrieking wail,” “Malmsteen”), and then picking up my three-quarter-size acoustic guitar with the plinky nylon strings I find so embarrassing, piddling out a bare approximation of the intro to that Sublime song where he goes and shoots that esse; joining the soccer team and being the slowest, panting-est one there with the least spring in his kick, the one who is told “I’m going to fucking breeze by you, fatty” by members of the opposing team and then is fucking breezed by, wishing I could head the ball in from my penalty box, sending the orb across the entire pitch.
The list of things so familiar to me but not actually tangible in my life stretches on, from that ball that should have been kicked in the net, to the solo I should have played, to the whopping check from Aunt Esther in Bayside that should have been deposited in my bank account on my thirteenth birthday. Topping the list, however, is love, or dry humping, or both; the magical friction of preadolescent groins grinding against each other through tighty-whiteys and dress pants and skirts hiked up awkwardly but erotically, an elated carpet burn feeling after. Not that I’d know, me with my pants so high up (the socks thickly bunched around my ankles) and my otherworldly knowledge of R. A. Salvadore dark elf fantasy and the sand wyrms of Dune.
But I could know, with the right sort of girl! The kind who wears her acne like a badge, who listens to Moxy Fruvous and wears Doors T-shirts with the logo in Hebrew, who naturally gives off a rank smell I’d recognize years later as patchouli. She is apeshit crazy. She demands to know if breasts would be as attractive to me if they were located on girls’