Bizarre Love Triangle

For a few years in the early 90s, everyone was a vegetarian. I don’t know why. It seemed like the right thing to do—not necessarily because we cared about the animals (leather consumption was on the rise), and certainly not because we were concerned with living a healthier lifestyle (everyone also smoked and French fries were considered a perfectly legitimate vegetarian option). We stopped eating meat because everyone else stopped eating meat. Cheeseburgers were unfashionable and pork was downright tacky. I heard a lot of half-assed excuses for why eating meat was bad, but ultimately no one really believed them. In about six months in 1997, 95 percent of all vegetarians I knew fell off the wagon, made a beeline for the local steakhouse, and, coincidentally, became better than average cooks. The remaining five percent became vegans, started referring to their colonic hydro-therapists as “Miracle Workers,” and (for reasons I cannot begin to understand) stopped eating wheat, usually after relocating to the West Coast. We felt sorry for them, but ultimately celebrated their decision to survive on tasteless crap 3000+ miles away, while we were free to prepare crab cakes and lamb tenderloins and oxtail and chicken green devil curry at our dinner parties.

Much like vegetarianism, our collective flirtation with bisexuality arose out of similar circumstances. Less indicative of any real sexual confusion than boredom and curiosity, my friends pranced around for about five years declaring themselves openly bisexual, regardless of whether or not they’d actually hooked up with a member of the same sex.[1] It was a pretty sweet deal, in that it allowed women to shave their heads and stomp around campus handing out riot grrrl pamphlets in combat boots and National Coming Out Day t-shirts during the week, while spending the weekend hooking up with Tim, who took women’s studies classes and claimed to be bisexual because it made chicks think he was more sensitive and artistic. The actual homosexual community was divided on the issue—half choosing to benignly ignore the new army of bisexuals, and possibly get a little sideline action from an otherwise unlikely candidate, and half getting pretty cross at the exploits of the undergraduate interlopers. As openly heterosexual ombudsman for complaints against bisexuality, I heard a lot of kvetching about the political ramifications of the new culture of fence-sitters, which, if extrapolated, was certainly worthy of concern. But from my standpoint, the bigger issue boiled down to semantics— “”bisexual” sounds a lot better than “unable to commit.”

When I met Adrienne, early during my freshman year at Hollins, the bisexuality fad was at full-tilt. So much so that my reluctance to jump on the bandwagon was met with a fair amount of condescension from my friends and classmates: “You’re still heterosexual. Really? How very quaint.” I did a lot of eye-rolling in those days, and chose to ignore the implications of the word “still.”[2]

I’d auditioned for the head of the Theater Department at the beginning of the semester, while still under the misguided impression that I might want to be an actor. I wasn’t cast, and it wasn’t a tragedy as I found myself, among other things, free (of parental, administrative[3], and/or directorial prerogative) to do whatever I wanted to my hair. As a result, my roommate’s suggestion that I audition for a grad student production wasn’t terribly appetizing. The script, an unappetizing slush of feminist theory and performance art entitled “Penthesilea,” wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but I was bored, and by that time, my few friends on campus had tired of my interminable ranting. So I auditioned, got cast as Aristotle, and started attending rehearsals in the basement of the science building three times a week.

The first time I saw Adrienne, I thought she was a boy. A thin, hip, smirking boy, who looked for all the world like a troublemaker at an English boarding school. Adrienne was, in fact, one of the hottest boys I’d seen in a long time, which caused no lack of confusion on my part when I found out she was a girl. She was funny, and smart, and a little bit of an asshole, and tended to squint while inhaling cigarette smoke in the same fashion as the boys I admired.

She’d been cast as Achilles, for the reasons noted above, and, like me, believed the quality of the play straddled the fine line between sham and utter debacle. I think she got into it because her then-girlfriend had been cast as the titular character, and because, well, she had nothing better to do.

Adrienne and I spent a good amount of time outside the stage door smoking cigarettes in the rain. While our cast mates, a fairly dull lot, spent their time between scenes completing math homework, studying Gaelic, and recounting childhood tales of victimization, Adrienne and I discussed whether or not ability to make spit yo-yos at fourteen was enough to convince the eighth grade that you were a card carrying punk rocker. We talked about bad movies and good music in the kind of coded language I’d learned from all the boys I knew.[4] Both of us had been the focus of whimsical delusions on the part of our classmates. They believed me a scary nihilist with serious street cred[5]; they believed she was an androgynous changeling endowed with supernatural shape-shifting abilities. Both of us derived pleasure from their confusion (I had a score of perky blonde would-be antagonists terrified to knock on my door; she had extraordinary skill at scoring pretty, probably heterosexual girlfriends), but at the end of the day, neither one of us was very happy. On campus, we collected curiosity seekers instead of friends. In my case, girls that thought I might have some privileged information about how to be tough, cool, and able to get dates with boys in bands; in her case, girls who just wanted an easy way to experiment. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to uncover the real source of my bad attitude[6], nor would it have taken a genius to figure out that Adrienne wanted more than playing rebound to a fraternity brother. Not that we had those conversations. It would have ruined the dynamic. Fact is, I liked Adrienne because she was funny and didn’t talk to me like I was a stereotype. We were casual friends—the kind that would stop and smoke cigarettes on the dining hall steps, or take occasional late night drives to the diner up the road for a cup of coffee at 1am—not soulmates. Our paths crossed, we made each other laugh, and that was pretty much it.

Seven months later, I would arrive home late, following another Friday night spent with townies, and find my roommate, Mason, sniffling at her desk, and shooting daggers my direction whenever I so much as breathed across the room. She and I hadn’t been on the best of terms since the beginning of spring semester. I assumed her current state had something to do with the fact I drank all of her vodka or interrupted her nap that afternoon with a lively telephone call to my friend at Brown.

I ignored her and set about preparing for bed. She sighed. Three or four times. Cleared her throat. I plumped my pillows and opened a book.

“It’s just not fair,” she said.

I turned a page.

“It’s just not fucking fair.”

I looked up. “What’s not fair?”

“You ruin everything.”

I nodded and tried to remember if I’d spilt wine on her sweater or dropped one of her earrings down the drain. I had deliberately scratched the back of her Hole CD, because another reprise of “Doll Parts,” would have driven me to commit Hari Kari with the samurai sword she had hanging over her bed. But I’d copped to that months ago, fearing retribution at the point of the selfsame samurai sword, and she’d moved on Mazzy Star. Water under the bridge.

“What did I ruin?” I asked.

“Don’t act like you don’t know.” She gazed at her computer screen. “Several months ago, I realized I loved someone. Someone unlike anyone I’ve ever known. Someone who made me realize something very important about myself. Someone who made me realize I was—“

A vegetarian.

“Bisexual. And tonight, at the library, I finally tried to tell her how I felt, and all she could do was talk about you.”

I put my book aside. My stomach growled. The realization of whose name she was about to say came so suddenly that I felt sort of dizzy.

“Adrienne,” she said. “I think I’m in love with Adrienne and you’ve fucked it all up.”

Having missed rationality’s hasty departure (by my watch about an hour before my entrance), I knew better than to try and defend myself by reviewing the catalog of Things I Didn’t Know. That Mason liked Adrienne, for example. Or that Adrienne liked me. Bewildering. I mean, it had honestly never crossed my mind. Not in months of hanging out. Not for a second. And it was flattering to think that Hollins most popular (lesbian? Strikes me now that Adrienne also told me she was a bisexual, although I never saw her date a man) would pine over me. But still, weird.

For a split second, sitting there on the bed, I entertained a fantasy of running over to Adrienne’s room, through the misty spring night, to arrive breathless on her doorstep, to ask her to verify if what I’d heard was true, to embrace bisexuality, to see if the illusion of her boyishness would be enough to make me forget that she wasn’t a boy, but a girl with short hair and small breasts and a bit of a swagger.

It was that last point that stopped me. I was pretty hard up for action, and still open-minded enough to think that okay, yeah, maybe, but if I could only conceive of hooking up with Adrienne because she reminded me of a boy, if I was just doing it to “see what it’s like,” then I would be a fraud, and I would be using her, especially if she really did like me. And maybe she was cool with that. Maybe it suited her fine, but I knew how it felt to be used, to be an experiment of sorts for someone you legitimately care about and have the whole incident chalked up to a learning an experience, or an accident. Some interlude sworn to secrecy, because the other party felt it was just too embarrassing to contemplate by light of day. I knew how it felt to be tossed out. And consequently, I knew, at that moment, that I was unfortunately, definitively heterosexual.

“I’m not interested in Adrienne,” I told Mason. “It’s my tragedy to report that I’m seemingly only interested in those who are not interested in me. I’m surprised and flattered, but I’m no threat to you. She’s a friend of mine. That’s all.”

Mason made some play at sniffling and left the room before I fell asleep, perhaps to report what I said, perhaps to find a dark corner of the common room to write a love letter to Adrienne. I don’t know.

I also don’t know, to this day, whether what she said was true. Adrienne and I would see each other off and on for the next three years. Her circle of friends intersected with my remaining friends at Hollins. She dated a series of girls who would then go on to long-term relationships with men. She introduced me to Modest Mouse, and never failed to keep me entertained. We never talked about what Mason said. I never mentioned it; she never acknowledged it.

Adrienne sort of disappeared off the face of the planet about five years ago. Those who’d kept up with her cited unhappiness, frustration, maybe a touch of something more. I don’t pretend to really know anything about her life. Childhood, psychology, hopes, dreams, aspirations—those weren’t the things we talked about. Last time I saw her, I was in the middle of my own nervous breakdown, but I’d been drinking airport bottles of Scotch all afternoon, and by the time she showed up, my own personal tragedies had been appropriately reduced to dirty jokes about my psychiatrist.

Like vegetarianism, fashionable bisexuality lasted only as long as it was convenient and not boring.[7] Then people moved onto swing dancing and the Dogme manifesto and polyamorous child rearing zines and sooner or later, Radiohead. Such is the way of things. Most of the avowed bisexuals I knew in college have either gotten married (to a heterosexual) or have come out of the closet. I’m “still” heterosexual, still single, and still suffering bad dreams that find me back at Hollins. But that’s a whole other story, and I find myself suddenly craving a cheeseburger.

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[1] If they had, it amounted to little more than drunkenly groping their roommate on a dare.

[2] Delivered in much the same manner as, “Oh my god, you still haven’t moved to Williamsburg. You poor thing!”

[3] Quoth the Asheville School Handbook: “Any radical hairstyle is prohibited (e.g. a bald or partially shaven head, punk style, or inappropriately bleached or colored hair). Hair must remain within a slight variation of the person’s natural color.”

[4] Being an outsider at an all-girl’s school can have an oddly masculinizing effect.

[5] Earned on the suburban mean streets of a North Carolina resort town, no less.

[6] I thought I was too smart to be at Hollins.

[7] We were, after all, the slacker generation.

Voice Lessons

I come from a long line of big talkers. Loudmouthed soapboxers, amateur advice givers, obnoxious critics, part-time preachers, stand-up comedians, and enthusiastic fabulists. My limited understanding of genetics and the limited resources available to me have not, as of yet, been able to account for the exact moment when the clearly dominant bigmouth gene defeated its demure, discretionary recessive sibling, but judging from how much everyone seems to know about my family (on all sides of my family) in spite of lacking physical evidence, I’'m inclined to think it predated the wheel.

Whatever the case, I like to imagine some apocryphal incident when some thickly bearded fellow in animal skins, or perhaps his cackling wimpled wench, effectively steamrolled over the tribal chieftain'’s opening remarks in favor of a hyperbolic, detail-rich anecdote about his father'’s sordid sexual secrets or the misadventures accompanying the five minute walk from mud hut to village green. For reasons unknown to me said talker was neither offered up as a ritual sacrifice to the God of Polite Conversation nor stoned to death and allowed to advance the logorrhea gene into the next generation.

As such, events in my family tend to feel like the International Competitive Filibuster Tournament, where words flow like Niagara and breathing can be a real disadvantage. There'’s no way to politely break up a trademark monologue (in fact, raising your hand will merely spurn the talker into either a reflection on his or her education or summon a sharp-edged screed on the merits of not being an asshole). You have to jump in with both feet, speak loudly, and make a compelling narrative. For if you are not able to win the listeners over to your story, you’ll only be met with shame and ignominy. If you have to ask a question, make sure you have cleared your schedule, relieved your bowels, and have received adequate rest. If you’'re lucky, the answer will be explained, analyzed, illustrated by personal and or historical example, disseminated, and ultimately deconstructed in the space of about an hour. Sometimes one question can go on for days. Beware the “"I was thinking a little more about what you said last night, and I realized I hadn’'t given you a full enough response."” If it comes to that, you are categorically fucked.

The upshot to all this is that lots of talking prohibits any hard filter. Given enough time, you can pretty much find out everything there is to know about my family. Traversing the murky path through poetic license, rumor, self-delusion, and plain old exaggeration can be perilous, but if you’re armed with a halfway decent bullshit detector, the road to capital T truth is reachable. I find it helpful to invite as many members of my family as possible to weigh in on an issue before contemplating relative veracity. When that fails, there are always friends, neighbors, co-workers, ex-lovers, sworn enemies, and Google.

Then there are the high risk stories—--those introduced with the “"Never tell a soul I'’ve said this to you”" or “"This is truly horrible, shocking, meaty stuff and it would kill your ___________ (father, mother, grandmother, aunt, best friend, dog, mayor, congressman, etc) if s/he ever knew that you knew" These stories ”will be held over your head like a brass ring. Any tale requiring such a grave disclaimer must truly be something special. The teller knows it, and therefore can string you along for days with a “"One day I will tell you this story. It will explain everything, but it will also appall your fragile sensibilities. You can’t handle it yet, but maybe one day the flower of your innocence will wither and you'’ll be armed with the kind of steely constitution necessary to hear what I need to tell you about your__________ (father, mother, grandparent, cousin, goldfish, fifth grade teacher, great uncle)”[1] " Usually, said storyteller will hold out on you for about three days, at which point their compulsion to narrate will sate your ravenous curiosity. There have only been a few times in my life when I’'ve been made to wait for the payoff, which usually comes quite out of nowhere and is preceded by “"You’re now old enough for me to tell you this.” " My heart flutters, the room silences but for my breathless anticipation and the clinking of ice in a tumbler of Scotch.

And the payoff? Not really the promised panacea, but usually a good, solid yarn, full of sex, violence, and occasionally death, populated by a roving cast of grotesques[2] (more Faulknerian than Dickensian, due to my geography), and (nine times out of tine) featuring a strong (if not completely heroic) female protagonist[3] Sometimes I am haunted by what I hear (one story in particular gives me the willies just thinking about it[4]), but I’'m not sorry to have heard it.

In my family, there is no such thing as too much information

Of course, the downside to all this is the lack of simple language. Storytelling is fundamentally self-indulgent. Instead of real advice, I get an illustrative anecdote or some psychoanalytic criticism. Oftentimes, the stories don'’t coalesce. How my mother got dumped by her college boyfriend and unofficial fiancé, though told eloquently, doesn'’t really relate to me feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't make any friends when I was fifteen. All the extra-linear grappling and philosophical reaching won'’t allow for a story about my father failing out of college because of his membership in a debauched fraternity to shed any light on why I suffered a bout of depression at age twenty-two. At best, the stories are a distraction; at worst, they’'re a needling reminder of how much less interesting and, by extension, less important, your reality is by comparison. My tales draw sighs and accusations of spotlight hogging and scenery chewing. My side of a conversation is treated to workshop style critiques and editorial scrutiny. My father accuses me of lacking sensitivity, vulnerability, and emotional candor, while my mother pans my heartfelt confession as the work of a drama queen.

I talk too fast, as a rule, sometimes with a shade of a stutter, trying to cram in all the details necessary before the inevitable sigh and bored stare. The are you still talking face. As a writer, I am a compulsive revisionist. As a talker, I am frantic, illogical first draft. Too loud. Too bold. Too much information. I just want to be heard over the clamor of other voices telling other stories. I want mine to be the one worth hearing.

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[1] This is, of course, hyperbole, but it adequately conveys the way I was prepped for tales of familial transgression when I was a child.

[2] Bootleggers, whores, madams, lovers off the carnival circuit, tramps, drunkards, bible beating murderers, slave drivers, cowboys, pirates, adventurers, gamblers, adulterers, traitors, lunatics, thieves, dirty politicians, addicts, witches, bitches, rogues, rakes, coal miners, and decadent aristocrats.

[3] Irregardless of the teller’s gender.

[4] You'’ll pardon my reticence at telling. It’s damn good material and it got dropped on my lap like proverbial Manna from heaven when I was about sixteen, and I'’m inclined to wait until I can do it justice.

Society Column

I try to believe that the true blue bitches of seventh grade plateaued somewhere around age fifteen, and are now living colorless lives in some ugly suburban condo with four kids and a cheating, sleazy husband. My friends have stories like this about their seventh grade antagonists, how they went home recently and found Stacy or Michelle missing teeth and working at Wal-Mart, hair crisped by too much dye, morbidly obese, and still bragging about winning the dance contest at someone’s illicitly coed slumber party.

We laugh—“Totally acceptable schaudenfreude. Karmic”—and I skirt around the issue of my seventh grade nemeses, because they’re sure as hell not working at Wal-Mart or morbidly obese. I know this because my mother calls every Sunday to read me their wedding announcements in my hometown paper, and the vast majority of my those girls have write-ups that sound something like this:

“Maggie Fairchild, daughter of Dr and Mrs Henry Marlowe Fairchild of Asheville, married Robert Archer Winthrop IV (of Charleston, SC), this past Saturday at Trinity Episcopal Church.

Ms. Fairchild is a graduate of Brown University where she double majored in Art Semiotics and Political Science. She received a Master’s Degree in Comparative Lit from Stanford University, before attending Harvard Law. An Olympic snowboarder, she currently practices constitutional law at Winthrop, Winthrop, Steinberg, and LaMancha in New York City. Her self-titled debut album, “Maggie,” was released earlier this fall to critical acclaim

Dr Winthrop is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and works as a Cardiologist at Name Hospital. A noted philanthropist, Dr Winthrop spends two months out of the year using art therapy and experimental procedures to heal impoverished children in leper colonies worldwide. His first novel, “Eat, Eat the Blossom,” published by Simon and Schuster, won the Pen/Faulkner award in 2003.

The bride and groom will honeymoon in Tahiti.”

You get the picture.

I squirm.

My Bio pales in comparison.

Let’s just put it this way: if you believe in karma, then I must have been a bad ass motherfucker in my past life