Top Five Break-Ups

I spend so much time culling, paying homage to, imitating, alluding to, referencing, etc., High Fidelity, I figured it was time I outright stole from it.


High Fidelity is one of those very rare times when the movie is better than the book. And this is no knock on the Nick Hornby novel.  Which is damn good. The movie, however, is fucking great, a study in the power of restraint, proving that it's the notes you don't play that makes the real difference.  When you read the book and compare it with the film, you see the choices director Stephen Frears made regarding what to leave out, how to take 300 pages and make it into (roughly) the best 90 minutes possible, and you can't help but be impressed by his (as the kids say) mad editing skills.  He left a lot of good jokes on the cutting room floor, I'm sure.  But what he left though, as a whole, in my humble estimation, is virtually flawless, a perfectly crafted expose on the subjects of growing up, girls, and rock 'n' roll, three of my favorite things (most of the time).


When I was going through my second divorce, I must've watched that movie 50 times.  It became like a mantra, a new Breakfast Club, a movie my brother Josh and I saw so many times when we were kids, we could quote every line of it, from start to finish.


The divorce probably played a perverse part in how much satisfaction I garnered from watching High Fidelity, like listening to the sad songs after she's gone; it made me feel somehow less...lonely.  But everyone should see it, even if they're not getting divorced.  Because it's such a brilliant film.  It's so funny, and violent, and the soundtrack kicks ass...


Sorry.  This is about my personal humiliation.  Not my ability to steal, word for word, from movies and pass it off as my own.


So without waiting any longer, my Desert Island, All-Time, Top Five, Most Memorable Break-ups (in Chronological Order) are as follows...


1. Tracy B.
2. Amy K.
3. Julie
4. Hadley
5. Marla


(Do you see your name on this list, [insert ex-wife's name here]?  You could maybe sneak into the Top Ten.  But, I'm sorry, there's just no room for you in the Top Five.  It's reserved for the type of heartbreak you're just not capable of... Sorry, I should stop doing that.  It's mean.  I found out a little while ago that my ex-wife reads this damn thing, which is about the funniest shit I ever heard. I really don't harbor any will toward her.  She's just funny to use as, y'know, a punchline.  Not much else you're getting from a marriage that lasts six months. [But, really, (insert ex-wife's name here), you should stop reading this.  Ain't nothing I say is going to make you feel good...]).


I've decided to change names, or at the very least stop using last names.  Even though it's pointless since everyone knows damn well who most of these girls are (and even if they didn't, I will no doubt post a link to an old blog post in which I give her full name, which I won't go back to change, not out of any artistic principle, but because I am too fucking lazy).


1. Tracy B.  


It's hard to classify this as a "break-up" since we never actually dated.  And don't I mean as in "technically."  Didn't come close to dating.  No walks by the pond holding hands.  No love love letters.  No first slow dances in the Berlin High gymnasium (Melissa Cote, where have you gone [sigh]...).  We threw some snowballs at cars when we were 10, and once we went to the Berlin Fair together (http://tinyurl.com/3o2r86t) when I was 12.  My "relationship" with Tracy didn't even last six hours (not for two hours, neither before or after The Rockford Files, for 3 days in a row).  And there was no Kevin Bannister (there was this guy named, I think, Darnell, later on in high school, and I guaranfuckingtee you he's bald by now, but he didn't steal her, because by then I was firmly entrenched in the art room with the ugly kids, and Tracy had risen to the ranks of the ridiculously popular).  It would be nice to think times have changed, skin's thicker...but like Allison Ashmore, there has been an element of the heartbreak I felt over Tracy my whole goddamn life. She was the first girl to truly break my heart. I don't think she ever knew it (well, she does now, dipshit). I remember seeing her in school and wanting to say the right thing, but even then I was so riddled with insecurity, knew something wasn't right inside me, the black dog and darkness taking over; I felt like there was a spotlight on my every move, and the world was just waiting for me to say or do the wrong thing so it could pounce on me... Of course, the world wasn't thinking about me any more than Tracy was thinking about me.  But I'd still sweat and smell like Good Seasons salad dressing (http://tinyurl.com/3lr686s), acting self conscious as hell.  She was just a girl  I could've probably asked out when I was 12, but instead I kept all that love inside, the poetry I wrote for her a secret, so that any time I did see her, I mostly stared at her shoes, smelled like salad dressing, and mumbled incoherently.  Like a kid who kept a box of pet worms and ate Play Doh. Fucking weirdo.  No wonder I didn't have a date to prom.


2.) Amy K.


If you want to know Amy's last name, you only need look at my song catalogue, which contains, last I checked, 412 songs written about her (including, but certainly not limited to, "The Last Song about Amy Krois, Pt. I").  But like Tracy, I didn't really date Amy either.  I had had actual girlfriends by the time I met Amy in college but no one I loved like her.  Jesus, I was crazy about her.  And at this point, you can probably note a certain obsessive theme emerging, and nothing--and I mean fucking nothing--scares off a girl like desperation.  And, oh, my brother, was I desperate. You could smell it on me the second I walked in a room (if you could distinguish it from the Good Seasons fragrance), frantically searching whatever I thought I could save me from myself at that particular moment.  I let nothing come to me, skin too tight, unable to relax.  I chased it hard.  So even when a girl did like me, like Amy did, very much at one point, I suffocated the life out of whatever chance we may've had.  But it all worked out in the end.  I got songs to write about.  I hear she married a bald dude and lives in China.  Win-win.


3.)  Julie


Julie and I actually did date (http://tinyurl.com/3d7uqrp).  We moved to San Francisco together.  And it was like a Tom Waits song.  We drank.  We fucked. We fought.  She'd cheat on me, and I'd get fucked up and throw all her clothes out into the street. Then we'd make up and fuck and one of us would move back in. Then I'd say I was moving to New Mexico, pack up everything I owned into my little red hatchback, and hit the open road and buy like, 18, cartons of cigarettes at an Indian Reservation in Arizona (American Spirits, of course), and chain smoke and meet weird dudes in motels and spend all night on speed in the dessert, conversing with cacti, and then when I'd come down, I'd go back to San Francisco, swearing I'd never see her again, only to end up at her place that night.  And for many many years after we broke up for good, through all the nasty exchanges and polite dinners, the lanes and the miles that separated us, I never really acknowledged just how much she'd meant to me, because it hurt too damn much.  I'd been young and wild and full of it, and I'm not any of those things anymore.  And it's only been recently that I've come to terms with the hole she left in my heart.  Because I loved her very much.


4.)  Hadley


Don't really need a last name for Hadley.  Everyone who knows me, knows about Hadley  And if you don't, you can read my memoir.  Though not published in book format (yet), you can find various selections scattered across the Internet (just look at the right hand side of my blog).  They say a man gets married a second time because he loved his first wife, and a woman gets married a second time because she hated her first husband.  I loved my first wife very much.  But we were young, and I had that drug problem, and she was...afflicted...and we were pretty much doomed from the start.  There's nothing I can write here any better than I wrote about her in my memoir.  I'm happy to send you a copy (or you can hunt down Big John on the streets of San Francisco.  I hear he's still passing them out...)


5.) Marla


This was a weird one.  She was the first girl I dated after the second divorce. And for most of that time, I took her for granted, didn't see much of a future for us.  She was pretty, I liked her enough, but we didn't seem to have a whole lot in common, and now freed from the shackles of a terrible mistake, I wasn't looking to jump back into another one.  Plus, I lived in Miami.  She lived in Berkeley. I met her through my buddy, Rich, while I was visiting SF.  She was a friend of his ex-wife.  We carried on this long-distance thing for a few months, and for most of it I was still getting over my (second) ex-wife.  Which is what makes this so damn odd, a wound that lingered long past unexpected.  Because that second ex-wife, once the initial hurt passed, faded from my memory.  It was like a bandaid over a scab.  One quick pull, a little skin ripped off, some blood, a scream.  Then it heals.  Marla?  She was a slow, dull ache, a motorcycle accident cutting the story mid-sentenc...


That's it.  Not terribly funny stuff, I know.  And now let me do a little damage control.  Because my current wife, the lovely Justine, reads all these posts.  And though I tell her (over and over again) that I love her most of all, Justine still gets a little emotional reading about my past loves, and understandably so. Can't say I'd be anxious to read about all of her heartbreaks and questions of what might've been.  But what my lovely wife needs to understand is this: I'M A MUTHERFUCKING WRITER.  This is what I do.  Mine the depths of personal humiliation and put it on public display.  Because my heart is a black, gaping hole of need.  And one love can never be enough.  I need you all to love me. More, more, more, more.  Plus, I want the hits.  I write, "And then I lived happily ever after in my big house, with my adorable son and loving wife, and it's all puppy dogs, sunshine, and (double rainbows)," I'd get less hits than Aunt Betty's Blog of Homemade Jams.


Now let's close with some delightful outtakes from a terrific, terrific film.


Who needs a drink?

Yeah, that about does it.

10 Erroneous Points about Sex or Redbook Is Full of Shit

A few years ago, one of my jackass friends thought it would be funny to sign me up for Cosmopolitan.  I'd of course seen the magazine before, or one of its countless incarnations, Glamour, Redbook, et al, and I might've even flipped through it while waiting at my doctor's or something.  But the joke was on him. Because when Cosmo started arriving once a month and I started reading the damn thing (most likely on the crapper), I soon discovered I loved the thing. For one, it made me more empathetic with the plight of women.  I mean, seriously, you can see why so many of them are sorta nuts.  The mixed messages in Cosmo are hilarious.  You've got all these "love your body" articles, "15 Reasons Why Every Body Is Beautiful" or "Gyno No Nos: Saying No To Plastic Surgery," this real embrace-who-you-are edict, and then on the very next page there's a picture of some emaciated waif with the body of a teenage boy and perfectly formed tits, all pouty, being ogled by men as she hocks some perfume called Desire or Reckless Abandon or whatever, and I'm thinking, fuck, if I was a girl, struggling with how I look, the last thing I should be reading is Cosmo. Which reminds me of this song

and the line, "do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly." Point is, since this jackass friend (and, no, I never found out who, though I have my suspicions) signed me up for Cosmo, I can't get enough of the damn things.  They are so many degrees of wrong, so fucked up, the advice they espouse to women so off base and misguided, they've become fascinating relationship train wrecks. 


But the best part of these magazines is when they take a break from having women filling women's heads with lofty, unachievable romantic/lifestyle goals and have some dude supposedly write from the guy's perspective.  It's always some douche who's going to keep it real for the ladies by telling them what the men out there really think about stuff like sex and dating, and it is rarely what guys really think about anything, least of all sex, and never have I found a more laughable, piece-of-shit article than this one I just read in Redbook called


What He Secretly Doesn't Want in Bed


The author is some guy named Aaron, and he's probably a nice enough guy in real life.  I mean, I'll never meet him, but if I did we might be able to go bowling or talk at a BBQ.  He's bald, short, but he's got a family and kids, and he's probably only doing his job, which is spoon fed (or at the very least strongly suggested by an editorial board), so I don't want to attack the guy personally. But it's hard not to.  Because there is no fucking way he could actually believe what he is writing, or we're not of the same species.  I mean, the one job a writer has is to be honest, write from the heart and all that crap, right?  I can listen to some fanatical lunatic fringe-type spouting politics I don't agree with if it's at least sincere, however misguided, but if you're completely full of shit, what am I supposed to do with that?


Aaron has a regular column in Redbook called "Whys Guy," where he tackles hard-hitting issues in the battle of the sexes with a humorous bent.  This month, he attempts to set the record straight about what guys really like in bed.  


No shit, this is his list.  Remember: these are things men supposedly don't like.


1.) Aggressive Sexy Lingerie
2.) Role Playing
3.) Watching Porn
4.) Making Homemade Porn
5.) The A-word
6.) Threesomes
7.) Bondage


Before the article actually starts there's a subheading, something, like, "If you're guy is like Aaron, he doesn't want anything of these [dirty] things; he just wants a big sweet helping of you."


Yeah.  


This article is so fucking off base and morally offensive, let's take it one by one. Remember, again, these are things that, according to Aaron, men don't like.


1.) Aggressive Sexy Lingerie.  I don't where Aaron's wife shops or what she looks like or what kind of problems he has with zippers, but what fucking guy is ever disappointed with lingerie, especially "aggressively sexy" lingerie? Everything tight and pushed up, silky and shiny, breasteses all up in your face? You'd rather have, what?  Flannel pajamas?  A muumuu?  A barrel and suspenders?  How can lingerie ever ruin anything?  It's like salt, free money, or little monkeys dressed like butlers: it only makes stuff better.


And, trust me, this point is as good as he gets.


2.)  Role-playing.  I don't care if it's Mistress Ramona or Mexican Apple Thief, having your woman hot enough that she wants to play make-believe before you get it on is fucking hot.  

Whether it's the first date or you're ten years into a stagnant relationship, if you walk in and find your girl dressed in latex and stilettos holding a pair of handcuffs, are seriously going to tell me "it's hard to get in the mood"?, as Aaron contends.  He writes that it makes him "feel ridiculous" if he's pretending to be a European football star or an evil clown, and I hear him about the clown, because clowns are fucked up, but half of the fun of this stuff is about getting the other person turned on enough that she wants to play dress up, so if she's getting hot and bothered with the thought of banging an evil clown, then you get hot and bothered knowing she's getting off.


3.) Watching Porn During Sex.  Really?  Given the choice, you'd prefer not to watch porn?  Your girl says, Let's watch hot people having sex while we do it, and you're going to say, "No, no thanks, I'd rather not.  Oh, look, Golden Girls."  Yeah, porn's a terrible turn off.  Hot chicks writhing and sweaty, their long legs intertwined, locked, hips thrusting, the moaning and talking dirty--like a cold shower and thinking of nuns and dead kittens, a total killjoy.


4.)  Making Homemade Porn.  I almost want to agree with Aaron here.  I mean, you make a homemade porn video, you are sort of a jackass, because it's been statistically proven that there is a 97% chance that, at some point, somebody you don't want seeing your nasty bits is going to see them; and considering most relationships fall apart and half of all marriages end in divorce and people are overall pretty shitty (not to mention petty and vindictive when they feel wronged), the best you can hope for in this scenario is that you are A.) not famous and don't have TMZ bidding for the rights, and B.) it's only her girlfriends who laugh at your lack of rhythm and/or muscle tone (but that wouldn't happen to me; I am ripped).  Still...  If a girl wants to make a porno with you?  Pretty goddamn hot.  Maybe you set the camera up but take out the battery, I don't know.  But you certainly aren't disgusted by the idea.  


5.) The A Word.  Because apparently Redbook doesn't let you say "anal." Aaron's argument here is that since he finds it "unpleasant," he can only imagine "how it feels to you."  How sweet.  Seriously, I don't give a fuck who does what to whom.  It's your bedroom.  You can figure that out.  I'm not saying this is every guy's thing, or that it's my thing, just that it's at least some guy's thing.  So don't pretend when the light's go off it's not in the big sexual playbook.  It's a punchline on Family Guy for crissakes (and here would be a great place for a FG link but I can't find it).


6.) Threesomes.   Now this is every guy's thing.  I've been trying to make this happen most of my life, often to disastrous results (once I was asked to leave while they continued alone; and then there was the...seizure incident of '93).  If your girl comes home with another girl and asks you to please fuck them both--it is the Greatest.  Day.  Of.  Your.  Life.   To his credit, Aaron at least admits this, making a joke about how he can't multitask, and it's a mildly funny joke. But it's also a boldface lie.  There are maybe four guys who don't want a threesome.  Three of them are dead, and the other guy, Rodney, works at the caveman/dinosaur exhibit at the Creation Museum in Kansas.


7.)  Bondage.  Maybe some guys don't like this.  Maybe some girls don't.  I don't know.  I don't care.  But I've always operated under one belief when it comes to sex: if you don't feel dirty, you ain't doing it right.  


Now, I consider myself a fairly liberated guy, sexually speaking.  I mean, I'm as fucked up and damaged by my parents as the next guy, but I like to believe that when I enter the bedroom and the girl's clothes come off, that I am up for trying anything.  At least once.  My favorite quote on the subject of sex comes from Sommerset Maugham, who writes, 

“There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.” 

I know there are probably people out there (like Rodney) who call it "fornication" and who believe sexual intercourse is for making babies and that when performed out of wedlock they deserve a Cotton Mather smack down, but they probably live in the Midwest, which I scarcely even acknowledge as a legitimate populace, and they certainly aren't reading my blog, and maybe this is whom Aaron is writing for, and somewhere there are legions of dumpy, balding guys in Topeka who read Redbook, come across this article and think, Thank God, finally, someone speaks for me!  But I doubt it.  Because guys don't read this shit, unless they have jackass friends who sign them up for it, or they spend lots of time at the dentist. Which means, this article was written for women.  Which is what is really fucked up.  It's subterfuge.  And somewhere there is a little hottie, with a fabulous ass and babydoll negligee, who's feeling naughty tonight...until she comes across this asshole's article, and puts down and the garters and whip, slaps on the sweats, reheats the tuna casserole, and checks to see what romantic comedies are playing.  And that's a tragedy that could've been prevented.