Emily's Greatest Hits

Prior to the age of twelve, all that interested me were dinosaurs and killer robots. Then I turned twelve, and the whole system went straight to Hell. All that interested me afterward were girls (and killer robots). I quickly discovered that puberty is a time-consuming, expensive disorder.

My actions thereafter should have resulted in someone baker acting me. Three-in-the-morning, and I’m awake, manipulating fistfuls of aluminum foil, trying to unscramble Cinemax. How I must’ve horrified my dear, sweet mother by taping posters of supermodels to the ceiling right above my bed, as if my reasons weren’t grotesquely obvious.

Because that “series of tubes” otherwise known as the Internet hadn’t yet been invented, my only understanding of sex at that time came from those dirty jokes I didn’t understand but laughed at, nonetheless. It never crossed my mind to ask my parents for information about sex because, as far as I could tell, they never experienced it. In fact, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the two of them have never kissed, touched, spoken to or thought about each other, occupied the same room, gone bungee jumping with a fully grown gorilla, or were ever once aware of the other’s existence.

When my fifth-grade teacher announced that my class would take a sex education class, relief slammed me like a truck. Of course, I had had the presence of mind to fake boredom, because, of course, I already knew everything, and therefore there wasn’t anything school could have taught me.

Finally! Education I planned on using in my adult life. The class began with a slide-show of barnacle-like lumps of soggy, cornflake-ish material covering what perhaps were once some poor bastard’s genitals. My teacher—a hideous woman who couldn’t have gotten a date without the aid of chloroform—explained to my traumatized classmates and I that if we so much as thought about sex, our entire bodies would become infested with these grotesqueries. She said this the way a priest speaks of the plagues God visited upon Egypt. The second part of this class made the slide-show seem sensible.

My teacher read aloud jaw-dropping, doomsday statistics. My teacher told us with an astonishingly straight face that one-in-five people had AIDS and didn’t even know it.

Yeah. That survey could’ve happened:

“Excuse me, sir. Could I trouble you for a moment? I’m conducting a survey with which to scare the living crap out of small children.”

—“Why certainly. What would you like to know?”

“Do you have AIDS?”

—“Why, yes. Yes, I do.”

“Are you aware of it?”

—“Nope. Haven’t a clue.”

As the other children in my class counted each other and performed their fearful math, I actually heard my teacher’s lingering credibility scream as it was forever vaporized.

My teacher, and many like her, only wasted her breath. Male spiders and praying mantises mated knowing that the female would afterwards murder and eat them, and they still went through with it . . . and spiders and mantises aren’t exactly cute.

In high school, girls noticed me the way a dog notices the color green. The other boys (who towered over me because they were all mutant-troll-mastodon-hybrids created by a God who had enjoyed a few too many rum-and-cokes) noticed me the way a bull notices the color red. Frankly, I don’t know why I wasn’t more popular with either. I was a sixty-pound bookworm who thought Huey Lewis and the News rocked (and they so do!).

            Once I turned sixteen, I decided to acquire a job, so that I could buy all the crap that television swore would get girls to notice me. I trusted every commercial that promised me that, regardless of my looks, owning a pair of two-hundred dollar sneakers would make me attractive through the scientific process known as “magic.” I tried to drown my social awkwardness with Old Spice. I came to believe that women were attracted to people who had loud, important-sounding conversations on expensive cell phones. My parents disallowed me a cell phone because they wanted me to remain a virgin all my life, because deep down, they hated me (to be fair, cell phones were still unreasonably expensive and only owned by pimps and men who carried briefcases with them everywhere they went). I ended up having loud, important-sounding conversations on a bar of Irish Spring Soap while hoping no one would smell the difference.
            Shortly after graduating high school, I learned to lie. I told the girls I met at clubs and bars (to which I always brought a book) all manners of bullshit. I became a bullshit artist. I invented someone I that I had wished I was and pretended to be him. The girls were accommodating enough to pretend to believe me, but in return, I had to pretend to believe that each of them was the person she pretended to be. This suited me fine for a few years, until I had the unpleasant realization that none of these women were sleeping with me, but rather with the fictional character I masqueraded as. They never met the person I pretended not to be, and I knew nothing about any of these girls I never truly met. This resulted in me telling myself lies about my lies.

This is only a temporary fix.

I’m just getting myself through a rough week.

I can quit anytime I want.

Then, one eventful Easter, I experienced the worst lonesomeness of my entire life while getting laid. This comprehension sucker punched me so hard that everything I thought I knew about space and time went swirling down the thunder bucket.

            So I pledged to find a real relationship. Because I didn’t know any better. Only while faced with such a goal could I have noticed how many girls just want to “have a good time.” It was as if I were trying to learn how to cook, and someone kept handing me coupons for free food at McDonalds. McDonalds will fill you up, sure, but . . . well, when you’re younger, you love getting a Happy Meal (sometimes it even comes with a surprise toy). After you grow up a little, however, you just hate yourself after a BigMac.

I met and fell in love with a magnificent girl named Cheyenne, but . . .

Me: “So what have you been up to?”

Cheyenne: “Loving Jesus.”

Me: “Right. Right. But physically, I mean. What have you been doing as of late?”

Cheyenne: “Just praising Jesus’s name.”

Me: “ . . . Okay. Well, you want to catch a movie?”

Cheyenne: “Only if there’s nothing in the film that might offend out Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Me (wondering why she felt the need to specify which Jesus she referred to): “Yeah, they pretty much all will. So if a movie’s out of the question, what would you care to do?”

Cheyenne: “We could go to church and pray together.”

Me: “We could. Sure. But that would suck. How about if we just grab something to eat?”

Cheyenne: “It can’t be anyplace that serves alcohol.”

Me: “I agree. That sounds perilously enjoyable.”

Cheyenne: “I’m going to put on some music.”

Me (because I know what’s coming): “Please don’t.”

Music: “Jesus is great. Jesus is perfect. Jesus’s armpits smell like a Cinnabon stand. Blah. Blah. Blah.”

Cheyenne: “This is my favorite song of the entire fifty-disc box set.”

Me: “How can you tell them apart?”

Music: “JesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJe . . .”

            Next, I dated Maggie, a cute, affectionate girl who on several awkward occasions tried to count the number of hairs in my eyebrows. She used an egg-timer to ensure that she brushed each tooth for the same number of seconds. On the day she told me about my cat’s former life as a Geisha, I smiled, nodded, and knew for certain that if sex didn’t feel so damn good, nobody would put himself through this kind of crap.
            Towards the end of our doomed relationship, I might have only stuck around out of morbid curiosity for what she might do or say next. Here are some sample tracks from Maggie’s Greatest Hits:
            Track 3: “Do you ever wonder how clouds work? They seem complicated.”
            Track 7: “If it weren’t for my neighbor’s parrot, I might still be trapped in that van.”
            Track 11: “I thought Korea was that teddy bear place from Return of the Jedi.”                                           
          This she decided to share with me during sex. It was sort of a show-stopper, to tell you the truth.
          About a year after Maggie disappeared to join the circus, I meet a girl named Emily. Like a moron, I plunged irreversibly in love with her. I imagined our future together, and I treated these delusions as forgone conclusions. I asked her to move in with me. I planned to eventually marry her and buy us a home in Portland, Oregon. I came home early one night from my third-shift job and overheard her and her ex-boyfriend in my bedroom.

Something inside me wilted as I realized that the only thing worse than hearing someone fuck the woman I love is hearing someone fuck her better than I could. I couldn’t have coaxed that much noise from a piano.

I left without making a sound—not that there was much chance of being overheard. I went to the twenty-four hour gym. I exercised on the back machine, lifting all the weights at once, as I conspired to kill her, her ex-boyfriend, myself, and then the ex-boyfriend once more for good measure. I schemed to become a filthy-rich rock star just so she would painfully regret her disloyalty. I would have gone through with this plan had I possessed a shred of musical talent or stage presence.

In the morning, Emily and I shared a volcanic altercation. She packed her things, and most of mine, before moving in with her ex, an unmotivated, unemployed douche nozzle named Ryan, who never showered or awoke before one in the afternoon. Ryan’s only claim to fame was his high score in Halo. Emily considered Ryan a god.

That evening, my back ached from its torture session at the gym, but since I hadn’t anyone to rub Icy Hot into my throbbing muscles, I had to get creative with a pair of spatulas and the only mirror I hadn’t yet broken.

            About this time, I realized that I could no longer name half the dinosaurs I had known so intimately when I was ten years old.
            So it went. From one ridiculous setting to the next, I met the wrong woman over and over again and missed the joke every time. I grew pessimistic, miserable, and exasperated. I became envious of organisms lucky enough to reproduce asexually, for surely splitting in half couldn’t be as painful or messy as the alternative.
            The catch is that if I had met the right woman right away—if so much were not required of me in this pursuit—I might have become an unmotivated, unemployed douche nozzle who never showers or awakes before one in the afternoon, whose only claim to fame will always be his high score in Halo, and who’s currently living in Portland with a much fatter, angrier version of a girl I thought I wanted to marry.