Anyway, from what I gathered, the Gadget Book mostly concerned itself with the cultural and legal snags of internet anonymity, "open" culture, Wiki-dom, etcetera. Snooze. I had been hoping for a more alarmist anti-Singularity Movement argument, one along the lines of "through excessive exposure to technology, we have 'transcended' our animal weaknesses like empathy / intuition and have restructured our fundamental selves to behave like machines, zipping efficiently and unfeelingly from data point to data point and progressively encoding more and more of our personae into social-media platforms that will long outlast our ephemeral corporeal manifestations. And it's FREAKY." But even though the book gave me less flaming rhetoric than I had hoped for, I still found the title to be somewhat provocative. Of course I'm not a gadget, I thought; I am squishy and asymmetrical and erratic; why would anyone need to remind me of this fact? But then I started to brainstorm the ways in which I am indeed a bit metaphorically gadgety (and so are you!) Think of our figures of speech-- "I'm just wired that way" (said by me when I'm trying to rationalize a personality flaw), "I ought to give my system a rest" (said by me when I'm refusing a tequila shot), "I just need to re-charge for awhile" (said by me when I'm checking out of all adult responsibilities for a spell), etcetera etcetera...
Let's linger on the "charging" idea. We all have our M.O.s for system-maintenance, don't we?-- desperate copious sleep, skittery attention-deficit listicle-prone internet binges, the mainlining of coffee, a big plate of kale (and if kale fails, add bacon... bacon-wrapped kale? What a cosmic clash of yuppie values! the Kalies and the Baconites forced into culinary coexistence-- and the Lion shall lie down with the Lamb, OH DAMN, I think the universe just collapsed). And it also seems that we must occasionally recharge ourselves via intergadgetal interfacing/ intercoursing, and this is a fact that I am loath to admit, because wouldn't it be convenient if we could all just hum along smoothly and autonomously as perfect machines, operating on our reserves of sleep, caffeine, and keep all of the gnarly "inter-" stuff out of the equation? Yet I do seem to require the occasional exchange of electric energy, the sudden flash of mutual delight that can pass between two discrete entities-- if this process doesn't occur often enough, the Master Network of Me starts to shut down. It's very inconvenient. And occasionally I even need to lie proximal to another warm body, preferably a canine one, but a human form will do in a pinch-- the point is, somebody needs to be the charger to my MacBook, the case to my iPhone (the case cups the gadget ever so gently, big-spooning it), or else the MacBook will die, the iPhone will shatter, the gadget will be rendered ineffectual for the truly important things in life, like playing Angry Birds or watching Kerri Strug stick her vault against all odds after Little Dominique almost ruined it for everyone.
THUS I have sought "inter"-relationships from time to time when a boost, a jolt, a "charge" has been especially required, but here's the problem: I have tended to make a hash of things. It all comes down to my somewhat restrictive life circumstances and my inherently fallible selection process. Left to my own devices (ha! "devices"), I have inevitably ended up inter-blanking with three categories of individuals: a) friends, b) "professional" colleagues, or c) the nexus of "a" and "b." At best, such indiscretions ultimately resulted in a small measure of awkwardness and discomfort for at least one of the involved, and at worst they
Clearly I was doing something wrong. It hit me one glum and drizzly afternoon last November as I sat at a computer in the PUNY library staring at the screen, pretending to care about an article that claimed that the half-step interval was a signifier for "queerness" in music of the late Middle Ages. Actually, I wasn't even pretending to care. I cared so little that I opened up a new tab on the computer screen and navigated to a popular online dating site, HokaySchmoopid, and started to fill out a personal profile. Here was my sudden epiphany: I was well en route to becoming a gadget, but to really make the leap, to really leave my human failings behind, I needed to reach beyond my given social circle and my faulty, impetuous decision-making... what I needed was an algorithm! Genius! I would just feed some carefully curated personal information into the Machine and it would do the rest, as if I were a medical student being matched to a residency.
And so I inducted myself into the world of internet dating-- in Schmanhattan, no less, the nucleus of hyperconnectivity but also of existential alienation-- and, with this blog post, I am choosing to sacrifice whatever remains of my dignity and disclose some of the choicest encounters of the grand HokaySchmoopid experiment. Now: keep in mind that I am giving you a skewed sample here, and that I managed to have a number of perfectly respectable albeit depressingly sterile interactions with various men-folk from the Tri-State Area; also keep in mind that I am leaving out the "contenders" who never transcended the digital phase because they spammed my inbox-- although some of the messaging actually deserves a mention. See: the guy whose overture to me was "u should smile with your teeth in ur profile pic, it would look better" (textbook example of "negging" right there). Also see: the putatively 61-year-old man who thought it would be a good idea to write, "I want you to play the piano for me naked. Or at least topless." (The second sentence sent me into hysterics because it had such a teenagerish sensibility of "I'll take whatever I can get"-- like the cafeteria boys in Mean Girls who are overheard proclaiming that "it only counts if you saw nipple!"-- kind of like that, but coming from someone who was almost a senior citizen, and by that age one should have the confidence to request complete at-the-keyboard nudity without making any compromises).
ANYWAY, I had gotten into the habit of relaying the more absurd and/ or lascivious happenings of the HokaySchmoopid lifestyle to my friends, and one day a few of them dared me to start an anonymous blog chronicling my tales from the trenches. To which I said, "Um. No, no way. That's not gonna work... I RAISE YOU! HaHAA! I will write and publish these stories on my totally-not-anonymous blog as a service to humanity. Haven't you read You Are Not A Gadget, guys? Clearly our culture of internet anonymity is eroding a sense of personal accountability. It's also degrading general literacy in the population, and it's causing the creative individual to devalue his or her work, to not take credit for it in a sea . Or so said some anonymous reviewer on Amazon, because I didn't actually read the book either. But the POINT is, these are my stories, my intellectual property, or rather anti-intellectual property, and I gotta own that! And 'that which is most personal is most universal,' as some German poet said one time when he was trying to shill his self-absorption as art-- ERGO, my experiences must be shared in full because they happened to me and to me alone... well, and to some other people who were also involved by default, people whom I will pseudomymize because I'm classy, irrefutably undeniably classy, as you'll see when my stories hit the web..."
I. Niall
I'll begin, however, with a disappointing lack-of-scandal... well, in some ways that's misleading, as this guy turned out to have a slightly scandalous occupation the legality of which I'm still fuzzy on, but I'll get to that in a second-- by un-scandalous I mean that our date was rated G, G as in "Going Nowhere Except Maybe A Side Hug." So, anyway, Niall was one of the first people to message me on HokaySchmoopid. He looked maybe Indian or Pakistani; he had gone to music school in Schlockston and now worked as a freelance composer/ arranger around the city. "My last job," he wrote to me, "was to compose and orchestrate the songs for a new musical called 'Little House on the Ferry.' It premiered on Fire Island last March. It was about gay subcultures-- 'ferry,' 'fairy,' get it? But guess what-- my current job is even more out-there than the musical. It's actually so weird that I can only tell you about it in person."
Well-played. My interest was sufficiently aroused, so we arranged to meet for drinks. The bar of choice boasted a disco ball and a dance floor around which was a ring of posh leather loveseats into which the clientele had burrowed itself awkwardly, smartphones at the ready, because nobody was actually dancing, come on! An ultra-clubby remix of a Katy Perry song pulsed on the speakers (I had not fathomed that Katy Perry's music could be even more auto-tuned than it already was, but the music industry seems to have an asymptote-al relationship with gadgetization, perpetually approaching a complete dehumanization of art and coming ever perilously closer to purging all traces of organic life from a medium that had once been a vibrant celebration thereof-- oh BURN!) Anyway, Niall and I located one another and joined the self-conscious circle of onlookers (who were looking-on nothing, as the dance floor was deserted); we sat a chaste distance apart on the loveseat, cradling our cocktail glasses in front of our vital organs like comfort objects, clinking and dewy.
Conversation started, sputtered, halted, and then again; it became clear pretty quickly that here was a mismatch of energies, that while Niall had come across as sharply articulate in the premeditated medium of HokaySchmoopid communications, in person he was shy and soft-spoken and completely overwhelmed by my gabby intensity, and I started to feel the need to fill up the silences and then I started to feel garish and overwrought as I often do when faced with subtle personalities and there was just this snowball-effect of nervous energy emanating from both sides and no, Niall and I did not have a shining future stretching before us-- we would never graduate to dinner or concertgoing or apple-picking or experimentation with safe-words or whatever. But I still wanted to know about his mysterious gig, the shady means by which he could have ostensibly paid for my vodka tonic had I not headed him off at the pass like the Independent Young Woman that I am. And so I steered the conversation accordingly.
"Okay, are you ready for this," he said with a dearth of rhetorical flourish. "So there's this man, I found him on Craigslist actually, he distributes MP3 files of top-40 songs to Eastern European countries. Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, that kind of stuff. But they're not the legit iTunes versions. They're distributed in this interim of time when the songs are on the radio but they're not available for purchase yet." "Oh? So, these are, like, bootleg copies?" I said, still confused as to where Niall fit into the operation. "Actually no," he countered. "Technically they're 'covers' because I make them. All of them, every aspect of them." "Wait, you make, like, a karaoke version?" "No, more like I recreate the whole song from scratch, like, note for note, timbre for timbre. My boss, the guy from Craigslist? He set me up with the software to do it." "Wow, that's kind of incredible, actually-- you must have a good ear and some good transcription skills to be able to reproduce a song so exactly. I mean, I used to teach ear training in music school and occasionally the students would have to transcribe something pop, but, like, just a rough approximation. Not for the purposes of masterful, undetectable, black-marketable forgery, you know? So wait, Niall, once you've re-done the instrumental tracking, do you get singers to come in and record over it or something? Musical theatre kids trying to get a break in the big city?" "No, I do the singing too. Sometimes multiple tracks for boy bands like One Direction." "But for Katy Perry, Lady Gaga-type stuff, you must bring in--" "Nope! All me."
I looked at him with new respect, this outwardly mousy specimen of a man-boy who, if he was telling the truth, was something of a musical savant and a chameleon. At that moment, a One Direction single came on over the speakers. "Oh, THIS song," I groaned, "the you-don't-know-you're-beautiful piece of sh-- sorry, sorry, Niall, I have PTSD: see, I teach piano to these two Park Avenue private school princesses, because we all have to do a few questionable things to make a buck in this town, you know? And these girls, they're so vapid, they refuse to learn how to read music, so I've compromised and every lesson I teach them how to play a pop song by ear. Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber. Like, one measure at a time. Painstakingly. And they never practice, so I have to re-teach them the same stuff every week, and the girls just look at me like I'm the world's biggest bitch because their mom is making them take lessons to look good on college applications-- oh they don't want to be there with me, learning to play the piano, hell no-- and the family has a penthouse apartment with these big windows, which is just kind of bad because I catch myself contemplating suicide via Park-Avenue-swan-dive pretty much every week when I'm there-- ANYWAY, this shitty One Direction song was the subject of last week's lesson. The anointed, the instrument of torture. Do you KNOW how well I know this song now? We must have played it 700 times on my iPhone, phrase by phrase. Do you know what it's like to go through it one measure at a time? It permeates your soul, I think I dreamed about One Direction this week, and not in a questionable statutory-rapey way, mind you, and--"
"Um, actually," said Niall, cutting me off, "I might know the song as well as you do. I, um, 'produced' it recently for distribution. I have the recording on my phone. Wanna hear?" "Shut UP!" I said delightedly, smacking him on the arm. "Niall! You've been holding out on me! Let me listen to your masterful one-man rendition." He fished out his phone and I put an ear-bud in one ear as he flipped through his files, and he alighted on the proper one, and then suddenly I was immersed in this bizarre sonic universe that was comprised entirely of One Direction-- but it was coming at me from all directions, stereo-style, out-of-sync, a phase-music permutation of British boy-band-dom, except one of the "phasers" was a barely-distinguishable counterfeit, "Un"-Direction. I put in the other ear-bud to assess his rendition independently; then I removed the buds to cross-compare with the original version, the "Ur"-Direction that blared in the club and I repeated the exercise a few times before offering up my opinion. "Niall," I said, "This. Is. Brilliant. You sound practically identical to them. However-- one thing-- it's almost a little too good, like, maybe your rigorous musical training has inadvertenly outclassed these barely-pubesced n00bs. Your vibrato is suspiciously warm and your intonation is too precise in a natural way... so, basically, I might just suggest that you auto-tune the shit out of it next time to be extra convincing. In other news, could you please, please send me the file so that I can work off of it it when I teach the Park Avenue brats and they won't be able to tell that it's a fake and I'll be internally cackling at the deception instead of indulging in suicidal ideation?!"
Niall obliged and pressed "send." We moved onto other topics of conversation, but One Direction had been the obvious set-piece of our evening together, and with that vein exhausted, we were reaching the end of things to talk about. The prophesied awkward-side-hug was imminent. We walked to the subway and took our leave and never spoke again and it was fine. And yet I think of him sometimes when I hear a Top-40 radio-bauble in a department store or a diner or on someone's cheap headphones adjacent to me on the subway-- I imagine that same catchy plasticky jam pulsing away at a Eurotrashy club in the Former Soviet Union and it's actually Niall, it's 100% the work of a shy guy on a laptop in Crooklyn plus some shady Craigslister... and then I fantasize about the two of them expanding their operation to the States, somehow, and scamming the music industry bit by bit from within using Niall's Katy Perry rendition that out-Katy-Perrys Katy Perry...
II. Chip
So Chip was a cellist who lived in the Cronx. (Doesn't that sound like the beginning of a nursery rhyme or a Dr. Seuss book? Well, prepare yourselves for a Totes NSFW Version of Such, tee-hee!) He messaged me last December to see if I wanted to go to a piano trio concert that his friend was a part of, but I wasn't free on that particular night, so our plans took a turn away from the performing arts and toward the food-and-drink. He suggested that I come to an establishment in his neighborhood, and initially I was skeptical (strange neighborhood, strange dude from internet, my momma didn't raise no fool) but I was in a slightly reckless state of mind at that point in time, and besides, I had never been to the Cronx except for this one time when I accidentally got on the D train instead of the A train and didn't realize my mistake until I was at Cranky Stadium, at which point I had to do a funky backtracking maneuver, but I had this kind of mystique about the Cronx, this vast anything-goes tundra like The North Of The Wall where the Wildlings live in Game of Thrones, and here the universe was dropping a Cronxian expedition into my lap (if nothing else) so I acquiesced and made arrangements to meet Chip at a Surf 'n Turf diner.
"Hi Chip, where's Dale?" was my opening gambit, and then I winced and said, "sorry, sorry, bet you've never heard that one before... hi, I'm Alana. Long 'A'." Chip was attractive and fit, in his mid-thirties, with a close-cut crop of curls that were making their way from dark brown to gray. "I've done a bunch of squats today," he said by way of greeting. "Burned off a lot of calories. I could go for some lean protein and some hydration." "Squats, eh?" I said, stifling a snort and reminding myself that said squats were probably instrumental to Chip's fine physique. "Yeah, I do about an hour a day," he said without irony. A waiter came to take our orders (grilled chicken breast for him, veggie burger add cheese for me) and then it was time to get down to business and converse. I felt oddly exposed with only a glass of ice water at hand-- I needed a swig of something edge-effacing, a puff of something judgment-softening, I was not dealing too well with the fluorescent-lit formica-top diner reality and the obvious artifice of our interaction-- but, as he was explaining to me now, Chip didn't do substances, he had been a child prodigy and had also been quite precocious in terms of illicit activities, and had had his fill of both the World Stage and of rampant depravity by the age of eighteen. Now he taught a few students and meditated compulsively. Also squatted.
Our food arrived; my veggie burger had the texture and flavor of smashed peas in patty form under a half-melted thicket of grated cheese. I took a few valiant bites, not wanting to seem too high-maintenance, but then gave up and decided to just chatter aimlessly as Chip equilibrated his electrolytes or whatever via consumption of white meat. We asked for the bill. "Split it?" I offered, but he calculated that the addition of cheese to my veggie burger would have me owing a little more than him so if I could throw it down that would be great, and my inner feminist didn't know what to do because of course as a 21st-century woman I should be able to pay my way and I shouldn't demand special treatment as a helpless pretty princess but COME ON, the hairsplitting of a few bucks' difference makes me think that you're a stingy-ass tool, or else in dire financial straits, in which case you shouldn't attempt dating until you've gotten your shit marginally together or have given up on independent solvency and moved back in with your parents, in which case you also shouldn't attempt dating. So I paid my share of the bill down to the penny, brainstorming exit strategies all the while; we stepped out onto the street with my sad boxed-up veggie-patty carnage.
"Wanna see something cool?" said Chip. I almost started in on my escape-route speech, but then suddenly I couldn't bear the thought of my empty apartment-- how atypically un-misanthropic of me-- and I was in the Cronx, I had come this far, and maybe there was something yet to be salvaged from the evening. "Maybe," I replied to Chip. "What is it, this cool thing that you speak of?" "Just follow me." My momma didn't raise no fool, don't follow a strange man to a strange place-- this refrained through my critical-thinking apparatus, but somehow Chip the squat-happy teetotalling former child prodigy didn't strike me as criminal-minded, and the winter night was bitterly cold, and I just wanted to be moving, preferably towards a heat source. So I followed. We crossed a busy street, walking straight into the wind, and came to an apartment building and entered and took the elevator up to the rooftop. The temperature seemed to have plummeted proportionally with each story that we ascended, but the unimpeded view of Upper Schmanhattan-- the "cool thing" to be seen-- was frostily magnificent (I tried to spot my neighborhood, since we were actually looking at the island from the proper angle). At least, the view was magnificent for a few moments until early-stage hypothermia set in, at which point Chip suggested that we go down to his apartment and have tea. Aha, here's the chivalry that was wanting earlier... maybe? Actually I was never for an instant deluded into thinking that this invitation was motivated by chivalry, but a steaming cup of tea sounded heavenly and potentially life-saving at that point and I was willing to loosen my morals for it, so I accepted and we descended the stairs to his apartment and he put the key in the door and turned it and...
"... Oh, by the way, I should tell you: I live with a Russian family, and they'll probably be in the living room watching TV, but we can hang out in my room and have the tea there." Oh okay, I see how it is. At that point I could have extricated myself from the situation... but I was all the way in the Cronx! And it was fricking cold! And, getting more to the heart of matters-- I had wandered in the desert for a very long time when I lived in Schmindiana, being a generally focused and ambitious type with high standards, but recently I had mostly given up on being focused or ambitious, and I had also given up on my stringency of mate selection, instead adopting a personal credo of "lower your standards, double your pleasure" (copyright Me, 2012-13)... so now Chip stowed my leftovers in the refrigerator and steered me past the Russians to a small room that contained a cello, a cello stool, a computer desk, and a futon. I assumed he might be territorial about the stool, so I took the only other available seating option, which happened to be, you know, the bed. Chip opened iTunes and pulled up Glenn Gould's recording of The Art of Fugue (mood music? actually yes, if you're me) and then he sat down next to me, and I started to take off my boots and he decided to help me out and...
... a logical progression of events ensued. A good taut linear goal-directed narrative was underway IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. Then, suddenly, the expository tension slackened, as it sometimes does. Chip rolled away and swore under his breath and I jumped into reassuring mode-- "don't sweat it! ... just met each other... happens to everyone, no worries... we could actually have tea and talk a little..." but he had stood up in his socks with a look of determination in his eyes. "This just happens sometimes," he said, "and I think I just need to play my cello for a little while. It always works." "...oh! Okay, yeah, do whatever feels comfortable..." and I watched as he strode over to the stool, still in just his socks, and he picked up the bow and he sat down and opened his knees to accommodate the instrument, and I tried not to giggle because I was suddenly imagining this situation as a scene from a PG-13 movie, and how cinematically convenient that the cello hid the "naughty bits" from view, and ... "What's your favorite Bach cello suite?" he asked. "I'll play it." Bach in the Buff!! I was ecstatic. Who knew, maybe something about the tightly stretched bow-hairs the soundboard vibrations across the thighs would restore potency. I requested the G Major cello suite, and Chip obliged me with some really exquisite playing, and then he informed me that the G Major was not enough of a technical challenge for his purposes and he was going to move onto the more virtuosic D Major, and I thought to myself that there was some bizarre psychosexual stuff going on here and that he could possibly benefit from an analyst, but at the same time I was pleasantly surprised that I was listening to a spontaneous cello recital from a former child prodigy, and all of this whilst wrapped in his sheet, on his futon, in his little cell of a room that he rented from a Russian family in the Cronx...
To make a long story short, Chip knew himself well, and the one good performance served as the catalyst for the other. In the aftermath, he made good on his promise of hot tea; we sat trying not to dribble it onto the futon while we compared our conservatory educations and tried to figure out who we knew in common in the musical world. He lit some incense sticks. I was starting to warm up to him. And then: "Well, I need to meditate for an hour, so it's probably time for you to head out." "What!" I spat, incensed (ha). "No. No. Look, come on, man, it's the middle of the night, and I'm a female, and we're in the Cronx and I don't know the neighborhood, and it's forty degrees below zero, and this?" I motioned to the two of us, "this doesn't really mean anything, doesn't have to mean anything at all, so don't worry, but come ON, just let me pass out for a few hours here. I promise not to disturb your 'routine.'" "Oh," he said, as though everything "oh, okay, that could work. Sure, I guess you can try to go to sleep. I'll go meditate in the bathroom. But I might wake you up when I do my squats in the morning." "That is A-Okay," I said, cackling, and wished him luck on his lavatory meditation session, and rolled over to catch some sleep.
I slipped out early the next day to circumvent the whole morning squattage business, and took a 1-Train Ride of Shame back into Schmanhattan, and that was almost the end of it, Chip and I. But then, a few days later, my phone buzzed with a text from him: "Your veggie burger is still here." I told him that I was going out of town for a bit, and that really should have been all. But the next week, when I was at my parents' house in California for the holidays, the cell buzzed again with a missive from Chip. I was curled up in the bed of my childhood, thoroughly regressed, pillow over my head at 11:15 AM, and I reached out lackadaisically for the phone on the nightstand to read: "So, um, I regret to inform you that I may have eaten your veggie burger. It was a pretty good source of protein. Still want to stop by for some... tea?" I snorted, half-conscious, and almost texted him back to demand that he reimburse me in exact change for the portion of the veggie burger that he had consumed (tip included) but instead I deleted his number-- the ultimate obliteration via gadget, with this thumb I thee nix-- and I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and rolled out of bed and padded down the hallway and into the kitchen to wrangle with my father's espresso machine, luxury of luxuries...
III. Tebow
Tebow was French, chain-smoking, and gorgeous; I should point out that his real name sounded exactly like "Tebow"-- a homonym!-- although that was the only trait that he shared with Tim Tebow the kneeling Jesussy all-American virginal quarterback. The Tebow of my narrative, by contrast, was Euro and Jewish and was definitely not saving himself for Jesus. Anyway-- we connected after I had taken a leave of absence from the internet dating life to participate in actual life. But I was reeled back in by an email notification that I had a message in my HokaySchmoopid inbox, so I clicked through to the site to find that some rando (not Tebow) had written "happy anniversary, babe!!!!!" with no signature or additional qualifiers. Ok, right, that's why I don't spend so much time on here anymore. Just to prove to myself that I wasn't missing anything, I starting clicking through profiles using the "quickmatch" feature-- an algorithm where you can refresh, refresh, refresh and be presented with an unending smorgasbord of possibilities. Nope, no thanks, pass, no way, eh, HELL no, on and on I clicked, ruthless in my snap judgments and probably giving myself the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome, wow, there's nobody out there, just a slew of fedora-sporting guitar-dilletanting Crooklynites who all look the same and -- hold up. Oh DAMN, he's fine.
My first impression of Tebow, or of his digital analog, was that he looked like an exceedingly attractive male version of me-- the same dark wavy hair, greenish eyes, aquiline nose, except he was, like, a 9.7 whereas I'm a mere-mortal 7.9 (this numerical score is 100% accurate and objective: it was assigned to me in undergrad by my dear friend Squab [we played the Rating Game when we were taking practice breaks]-- actually, he had deemed me to be an 8, but I adjusted for inflation because he was being nice and was really thinking 7 or 7.5, but since then I've dropped some weight and expanded my sartorial repertoire and gutsily chopped off my hair, so my score has probably crept up a bit to a solid C+). Anyway, Tebow and I had a slight family resemblance, and THEY SAY that we're attracted to what we know. A cursory scan of his profile revealed that he was French, a cartoonist, literate, acerbic... and also really, really ridiculously good looking. How shallow of me, but I was having a moment of insecurity and I suddenly wanted to bag a hot guy, an incontestably hot, Armani-model type guy, because if I did it would obviously undo the various emotional wounds inflicted on me in the past by less-perfect specimens of masculinity (hey you and your pancake ass, you and your hairy potbelly, what gave you the gumption to kick me to the curb, to slow-fade, to stop texting, to choose someone else over me?! Well, sucks to be you, because I'm about to LEVEL UP.)
So I wrote to Tebow. We engaged in a brief banter about French Canadian dialects and how funky they sounded to our refined ears (he was Parisian originally, and I had learned standard French). Then he surprised me by saying, "long shot, but are you free tonight?" Cutting to the chase! I was available (of course) so we made plans to meet at a speakeasy downtown-- God I loved the internet at that moment, magic kingdom where you could just order up a speakeasy date with a fantasy Euro hottie as you would Seamless a vegetable vindaloo with a side of naan.
As it turned out, we were denied access to the speakeasy-- apparently you needed to book your reservations way in advance, like, during the actual Prohibition era, so we were out of luck-- and so we wandered in circles around the Least Village for a while. Tebow immediately set to razzing me about being a PhD student, saying with mock deference that he felt terribly inadequate in the presence of somebody so over-educated. "Also, it's my firm belief that we shouldn't pronounce 'PhD' as an acronym, as three separate letters," he said. "Let's pronounce it as written, like the sound of a sneeze: phdddd! pphhhhddDDDdddd!" I laughed and we proceeded to perform a call-and-response of phlegmy sneeze-sounds based on the abbreviation for 'Doctor of Philosophy.' "You know," I said when we had exhausted the sound-effects schtick, "my roommate is a doctoral student too, so our wireless network at home is actually called PhDizzles." "That's funny," said Tebow, not missing a beat, "my wireless at home is called Drop-a-Dizzle." I snorted. "Drop-a-Dizzle? Really? Like a ghetto riff on 'drop a deuce?' I love it. That's crazy that we would both have the 'dizzle' morpheme in our network names!" "No, NO," he replied, "I said 'Dropout-Dizzle.' Dropout, not 'drop a.' It was supposed to be a joke, like, I'm a dropout and you're the grad student. What are you going on about deuces for? Get your mind out of the gutter, woman!"
We sniggered for awhile at the colossal miscommunication that had just occurred, and then wandered into some generic passable bar. Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," ubiquitous summer soundtrack, played in the background (or WAS it really Robin Thicke? Had stealthy Niall at last begun to infiltrate the music biz on our side of the Atlantic?) The genericism hardly mattered, though, because Tebow and I were hitting it off and never stopped talking for long enough to really take stock of our surroundings. He taught me how to speak with a grotesquely exaggerated Quebecois accent. We theorized about the end of Breaking Bad. Our dialog was all very snappy and rom-com worthy. I was having fun! This was easy, effortless: for once, you couldn't hear the grinding gears of incompatibility in our exchange. Look at me now, oh if I could but go back in time and tell my nunnish desert-wandering Schmindiana self that times of plenty were on the way!
Eventually we decided that a change of venue was in order. Tebow suggested a Belgian bar a few blocks away where "they actually shush you! The bartender is like a librarian, shuts it down if things get too rowdy. And it's called 'Palais Belch.'" "Oh!" I said, "is that like a pun on Palais Belge? Belgian castle? Except 'belch' because the beers will make you do exactly that?" "I can only assume," said Tebow, and we headed off to this belchy Belgian establishment that promised only good things. We ordered raspberry lambic beers, which threw me into a fit of nostalgia because Framboise was the beer that finally sold me on beer, five years ago in Bruges when I was traveling alone and I had been pick-pocketed at Gare du Nord in Paris ("fucking Gare du Nord, of COURSE" said Tebow) but didn't realize it until I turned up in Bruges penniless, and a kind stranger pulled me a pint of Framboise on the house and I didn't really like beer at the time, but I accepted the generosity and wait, this shiz was delicious! like ripe red raspberry soda with just a hint of maltiness underneath. And thereafter I conditioned myself to crave that malty note sans fruit...
In the middle of telling this story to Tebow, I released a colossal burp-- it had been brewing for awhile, and really, what was a more appropriate place to let one rip than the Palais Belch? Three things happened on account of my seismic disturbance: 1) the bartender shushed me violently, looking murderous, 2) Tebow spat out his beer and shouted, "That was disgusting! And impressive! And... truly... disgusting," and 3) a man sitting near us walked over, shook my hand, told Tebow that I was a keeper, and declared that the next two rounds were on him. And that's the story of how it came to be two 'o clock in the morning and how I came to be a lot drunker than was the original plan.
At this point, Tebow and I had moved on to talking about our educations, and it emerged that we had both studied Ancient Greek in high school. I flipped out over this discovery-- I had never found anyone in my age group who would admit to having spent time on something so arcane, so utterly useless but so cool-- and I launched into a maudlin reminiscence of my Greeking days, how we were a little group of students that met at lunchtime under the tutelage of Mr. Sturch (his real name!), a tweedy white-haired Oxfordian who had been raised to the level of archetype in our hero-worshiping teenaged eyes, and Mr. Sturch would sometimes bring us green olives or stuffed grape leaves as we quaked in fear that our feeble translations would be met with derision, and there was this one time that I snapped my pencil in half by accident and I started giggling uncontrollably, and Mr. Sturch stood up and strode over to the chalkboard and wrote out a phrase in Greek and made me translate it on the spot, and it was torturous but I finally produced an English version of the phrase-- "small things amuse small minds"-- and OUCH, one hundred points to Mr. Sturch, such a roast! and...
As I talked, Tebow had been writing something on a cocktail napkin. He slid it over to me: the writing was in the Greek alphabet, but the words were English (transliterated). I sounded out his phrase: "This is.. how.... I passed... secret notes... to my fr-- my friends in... class. Ha! No way, we used to do that too. Greek letters for English words." "We were so much more creative before texting," he sighed. I agreed. We passed the napkin back and forth and practiced writing each other's names in the Greek alphabet, then moved onto nearby objects ("glass," "beer," "napkin") and then he asked me, "hmmmm, how would you make a 'w'? There's no Greek equivalent." "True," I said. "What about a diphthong? Two vowels? Ooh-ah? Wah? Upsilon-alpha?" "I'll dip your thong," he said rakishly, and wrote something out on the napkin and handed it back to me to read." I... wah-- I want to---"
"-- You don't want to read this one out loud!!" he cut in, and just in time, because the remainder of the sentence detailed exactly what he wanted to do to me, and the bartender would not have been pleased to hear it. I won't repeat it here, either. Suffice it to say that now it was my turn to spit out my beer in shock. I had just been propositioned, very lewdly propositioned, but in the Greek alphabet, which was kind of amazing, so how could I refuse? It was the perfect Alana-trap... Tebow took advantage of my moral-dilemma pause-face and leaned in to kiss me, a kiss that meant business, but also a kiss that missed the mark-- "this charger is incompatible with this device"-- and it sent a pang through me as I suddenly flashed on the pancake-assed, the hairy-potbellied men of yore, missing them, rush of regrets-- WHY? why now? Jesus, Alana Murphy, keep your head in the game, this guy is almost comically good looking, don't just throw it all away...
... Tebow took my hand and we left the bar; I was a little unsteady on my feet. "So, I have an idea," he said, kissing me and then lighting up a cigarette. "It's 2:30 in the morning. You live way far uptown, I live way out in Spleens, trains are gonna take for-fucking-ever at this time of night. BUT there's this famous seedy hotel exactly... one block away from here, and, well, I've always wanted an excuse to go, just to say that I did, so...?" "You're insane!" I said, "that's so impulsive and insane! I've never-- I don't even--" "Babe, I am impulsive and insane. I have Bipolar Disorder! It runs in my family. My parents are notorious swingers. I'm in a pretty manic phase right now. I won't be as much fun in a few weeks." Ohhhh. Suddenly the whole night made more sense, Tebow's mercurial quickness and volubility, his guileless and flamboyant seduction act. It even partially explained to me why the kiss felt "off" somehow, empty-- he was on an artificial, unsustainable high borne of imbalanced brain chemistry, and thus our personal chemistry was likewise artificial and unsustainable; I must have sensed this somehow.
"Oh no, now you think I'm really crazy," he said, still puffing his cigarette. "Nevermind. You should go home. I'm sorry. This was a great time." Okay, I had an out. But... but... the Greek letters spelling out a dirty desire-- genius-- and it was just so, so late, and my apartment was forever-away, and my younger dry-spell work-sequestered Schmindiana self looked on and said, "seriously, you're not going to act on this after the stunning lack of opportunity that you suffered for years and years?" and my even younger high-school lunch-sacrificing Ancient-Greek-nerdout self said, "seriously, you're not going to have a sordid Schmanhattan affair with a Frenchman in a flophouse in the Village?" The Ghosts of Alanas Past made a convincing case. "You know what, Tebow?" I said. "Okay. Okay! We can do this. Yolo, as the kids say these days. But you have to pay for our lodgings since I did not factor them into tonight's budget." "Sweet!" he exclaimed, fist-pumping the air. "Sure thing I'll pay. I'm drunk and happy. Let's do this." He picked me up and spun me around, and we skipped together across an intersection-- I was catching more of his mania with every step, forcibly sublimating whatever old sense of loss, whatever lingering bullshit, fleet-footed leaps over the abyss-- and we found the hotel of ill repute, a delectably janky and unhygienic-looking historic standby of the Least Village, and Tebow went to the desk to pay; I waited in the lobby-ish area and he came back a moment later and said, "It's cash-only, do you have fifteen dollars?" and I extracted the cash and handed it to him, actually feeling better about contributing, and he pecked me on the cheek and went to pay up and we got a room-- we "got a room!" as we used to say in middle school. My pre-teen self was cheering.
IV. Yeezus
So I wouldn't have met Yeezus if I hadn't started watching Game of Thrones last spring, and I wouldn't have started watching Game of Thrones last spring if I had not wanted to connect with my PhD cohort while simultaneously blowing off the exigencies of my PhD program by mainlining several seasons of an HBO show. See, everyone in the student lounge was just GoT this, GoT that, all the damn time, and I had nothing to contribute since I hadn't a working knowledge of the political climate of Westeros-- it's hard enough to stay abreast of the real-life political climate in my native country, you know? but then I realized that said real-life political climate was depressing and infuriating, and that I would much rather escape into a high-budget medieval fantasy epic with lots of hot hairy men who were wont to deliver impassioned diatribes in pan-UK dialects while hot unknown aspiring actresses cavorted around topless in the background. So I caught myself up on two seasons of intrigue and rape and incest and usurp and public execution and eyebrow-raising Orientalism and stock supernatural entities and so forth, and once I was au courant, I began to watch the freshly syndicated episodes with my friends in Crooklyn every Sunday.
Clearly I had to alter my HokaySchmoopid profile-- long-untouched-- to account for this new facet of my existence. So under the "favorite books/ music/ TV shows" module, I added in a throwaway sentence about my recent Game of Thronesian bandwagon-jumping-onto, stating that I sometimes had trouble following the plot of the show because all of the dirty bearded Anglo men looked exactly the same and I had trouble telling one character from another due to a possible facial recognition disorder on my part, but I still enjoyed the programme very much because it reminded me of The Lord of the Rings mashed up with Showgirls, that fabulously awful '90s cult classic about Vegas strippers in which the dialogue clunks, the fur flies, and the boobs are out more often than they are in.
A day after I had made this profile revision, Yeezus wrote to me: "I offer myself as a humble servant to help you in the art of distinguishing between the many dirty bearded white males of Westeros, being something of an expert in this demographic myself since I hail from the kingdom of Crooklyn." Clever! Clever and sharp. Color me impressed. I racketed the ball back into his court with some similarly snappy response. Then a few days passed where I didn't hear from him, and I was just about to get all faux-indignant that he had "offered himself" without having any intention of following through, that he was just another bullshitting liar-man... kidding, kidding, I actually forgot about Yeezus entirely until he made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. "Hi again, Alana," he wrote. "By a twist of fate, I am in possession of an extra ticket to Showgirls: The Musical for tomorrow night, and it's yours if you so desire. Let me know."
OH I SO DESIRED. I wasn't even aware that Showgirls had been musical-ized, but what a brilliant idea! Was the stage adaptation a intended as a "serious" homage to the original film, or was it a deliberate parody? I didn't care: the production was destined to be hilarious regardless of intentionality. I looked up the website for the show, and the header had a tagline: Music. Dancing. Tits. Well, that sealed the deal. What more could you ask for in a piece of entertainment?
Yeezus and I met at the nightclub where the performance was happening. There was a two-drink minimum for seated patrons-- good, I thought, even if the date is a bust overall, I will be having a grand tipsy time for the duration of the musical-- so we commanded beverages for the table. I studied Yeezus with his long biblical hair and beard, his larger frame, his languid pleasant energy, and we bandied about a few preliminary topics: he had been a theology major (looking the part) but now had dreams of opening a high-concept fusion-Philly Cheesesteak food-truck in Crooklyn. I told him that Cheesesteaks were probably integral to some religion somewhere in the world so he wasn't completely abandoning his undergraduate interests, and before I could talk myself into too much of a hole, the lights went down and it was time for Showgirls. Showtime for Showgirls, fo sho!
It did not disappoint: the production was booby, campy, at once an homage and a satire, and, of course, exhibiting an insane level of acting/ vocal/ dancing/ comedic talent in its cast because this was Schmanhattan with its bajillion performing-arts aspirants who would claw one another to death for a break, even if the break was a topless chorus-girl stint in the Showgirls musical. (I wonder if any of the self-same aspirants will appear in a Game of Thrones brothel scene next season?) Anyway, I had a thoroughly good time, especially when the performance took on a Rocky Horror feel with the audience joining in on some choice moments (these people must have been real Showgirls devotees: they seemed to have internalized the screenplay from a young age and could now recite stretches of it in en masse whenever the actors called for a breaking-of-the-fourth wall).
Yeezus and I left the nightclub punchily, marveling to each other at how the creators of the musical had painstakingly incorporated every movie scene into their rendition-- "very true to the source material," we both agreed. "I love it!" I gushed, jumping in place and making jazz hands as the two of us waited to cross an intersection. "I love this kind of thing, the camp and the garishness and the gratuitous boobage that becomes so gratuitous that it ceases to be erotic in any way, it almost has this performativity that's like drag, so exaggerated... see, Yeezus, I'm not attracted to boobs but I do love an over-the-top tasteless profligacy of them. Basically I'm a queeny gay man trapped in a woman's body."
At this my companion did the very last thing that I expected: he took my shoulders and caught me in a passionate kiss, tonguey, protracted, slightly aggressive... "Oh, uh, wow!" I said when we came apart, the two of us still standing on the street corner. "So soon! ... what prompted that?" He looked at me with intense throbbing eyes."You said that you're a gay man inside. Gay men are always deeply attracted to me. It's something that I project." Huh. Had he somehow interpreted my flippant gender-bendy quip as a come-on, as a take-me-now? Was he acting out a homosexual fantasy that he had heretofore repressed due to religious reasons, but that I could now partially fulfill as a sanctioned anatomical female possessed of a certain inner "fruitiness"? Would he need to close his eyes and imagine me as a man to function properly? Was this his equivalent of playing the cello for an hour?
Yeezus read my furrowed expression and said, "Oh, I've freaked you out. Sorry if I came on a little strong. I'm kind of, uh, getting out of a relationship and finding my footing. My ex, she was this manic-pixie type, you know? and our first date was skinny-dipping in the fountains of Lincoln Center" (me: "you WHAT?! how??") "and then, long story short, I ended up going to a friend's wedding in Vermont one weekend and my girlfriend was there, unrelatedly, as a wedding guest, and she was, um, with her fiance that she had neglected to tell me about." I smacked my forehead. "Jesus, Yeezus! That's terrible. I'm sorry, people can be real shits, and they don't even deserve to be in any relationship at all let alone multiple ones at the same time, at yet they often are, they're out there hogging all of the good people because of their very shit-ness. Well, listen. I had a fun time tonight. The Showgirls musical one-ups a Lincoln Center nude bath for a first date, anyway. Hey, you know, it was lucky that you just happened to have the extra ticket this week, and that you happened to find the online dating profile of the only girl in Schmanhattan who likes Showgirls and who was available tonight."
"Well, um, full disclosure," said Yeezus. "So I had the ticket, and it turned out that none of my friends from theological seminary wanted to go"-- I feigned shock-- "and that's when I logged on to HokaySchmoopid and entered 'showgirls' as a search term. And your profile came up in the search results, and you seemed pretty cool, so..." "Wait, why would my profile come-- OH! because I made the edit about Game of Thrones and how I'm a recent convert and I'm into the series because it's totally like Showgirls, medieval fantasy epic version. And then that sentence would have turned up in a keyword search-- haHA-- and you must have typed in the search term like immediately after I had made the profile alteration... WHAT ARE THE ODDS." My mind was reeling, and gleefully: the search engine feature of an online dating website had garnered me a free ticket to an X-Rated musical with an ex-theologian Philly Cheesesteak entrepreneur who probably needed to sort out his sexual preferences, and all because I wrote a smartass tangential description of Game of Thrones on the spur of the moment...
We had come to a subway station, a natural juncture where imminent decisions needed to be made about the next phase of the evening. However, I think that Yeezus and I were both feeling strangely de-eroticized from all of the campy excess, the paradoxical unsexiness of a show about strippers; also the swoopy street-corner kiss incident still sat between us and not in a comfortable way. So we had one of those merciful moments of mutual well, actually, early morning tomorrow, shouldn't stay out too late, but this was GREAT, get home safe! and then I was on the train uptown, visions of aureoles dancing in my head as I still puzzled over the vagaries of cyber-communication, its fluky channels and mysterious thoroughfares such that a person can cast the smallest inquiry into the Void-- e.g. the word "showgirls"-- and the filament of inquiry brings in returns! its sticky end attaches to a mesh of data points that are a rough representation of a living being, and from there the gadgetry back-and-forth can undergo an alchemical transformation into flesh-and-blood experience-- e.g. Yeezus inspecting my tonsils on a street corner. And while Yeezus and I may have reached the end of our road that night, I thrummed with a strange optimism, a keen awareness of infinite connectivity-- little dendrites everywhere, tireless relayers of signifiers, causing and effecting... and if I could be summoned by a search-term-- just hit "enter" to conjure me, your tapping fingers have a date with destiny-- what then was the charmed combinatoriality of letters, the Google incantation, the magic word that would lead me to you? I would keep trying, a monkey at a typewriter.
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