Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [6]
The next night we went to a party, where I embarrassed Molly by conversing with one of her more bearable friends about our shared obsession with the band Devo. “These people go to Havrard! They don’t want to talk about stupid shit like Devo!” Molly screamed. I, in turn, exploded at her flat-out wrong assessment of her friend’s degree of interest in Akron’s proudest sons, and suddenly we were in the fight that ended our relationship once and for all. We agreed to avoid each other over the six remaining days of my trip. (Why I didn’t just fly home on an earlier flight is lost to the mists of time, but knowing me, I probably didn’t want to inconvenience the airline.) I spent my nights freezing on Molly’s couch, and my days reading Vonnegut outside an Au Bon Pain. I think I may have had a nervous breakdown at some point, as I distinctly remember curling up next to Molly’s dorm-room fireplace, sobbing uncontrollably about nothing and everything. (And what kind of bullshit dorm room has a fireplace in it, anyway? Fuck Havrard.)
In the end, after all we went through, the most enduring lesson I learned from Molly is that regardless of whether or not my parts work on a given try, sex is always the most stressful thing in the history of the universe. After (and because of) our failed attempt at Sin, it took me three more years to officially lose my virginity. And to this day, despite being blissfully married and having fathered a kick-ass son, I consider myself a victim of Post-Traumatic Sex Disorder. (If I’ve inadvertently stolen this term from a struggling stand-up comedian, I humbly apologize.) Every single sexual encounter of my life has been preceded by feelings of overwhelming dread, because no matter how many hundreds of times I’ve hardened up and rocked it in there, part of me is still that confused twenty-year-old, staring at my flaccid shame, getting berated for being defective. Worse still, the mere whiff of white-cheddar popcorn still brings back all the hopeless feelings I went through in the rain that night almost twenty years ago. And I used to love that shit!
I did, however, learn to masturbate at age twenty-four, making me the only man on earth to lose his virginity to a girl before losing it to himself. And if that fact doesn’t bring a tear of hope to your eye, then I’m sorry, but you simply aren’t human.
Lesson#2
Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys with Fat Asses
by Andy Richter
My parents divorced when I was four, and afterwards my brother, mother, and I moved into my grandparents’ house, where a particularly bone-crushing form of matriarchal rule was practiced. At first my grandmother protested against having to care for me while my mother worked, and insisted that I be enrolled in the Jack and Jill Nursery School so that I wouldn’t cramp her Margaret Dumont of Mayberry lifestyle. Her protests were soon proven to be just a way to fuck with my mother, waste our money, and make a difficult time in my mom’s life even more difficult, as most days my grandma kept me out of Jack and Jill and made me her sidekick on an endless round of shopping trips, bridge game lunches, and ladies’ auxiliary something-or-others.
On one such excursion, my grandmother and I were in the tearoom of Marshall Field’s department store, where we had stopped for a snack. The snack, for me, consisted of a hot fudge sundae, which my grandma asked me if I had enjoyed. After I responded in the affirmative, she asked a question which still chills me.
“Does it taste like more?”
There were moments in my childhood where a preternatural maturity rose up in me, where the Future