to be fucking kidding me.
I simply shrugged and handed him one nearly dried out square of cloth.
In my defense, just in case any of you actually serve on the Mother of the Year judging committee, I want to make it known that I did, in fact, hold on to both our soiled baby wipes until we got home so that I could be sure that they made it safely into our trash can. I could have easily tossed them out the window like a common hoodlum, but no, not me. I care about the environment—and world peace.
As it turned out, that was Ken’s first time having sex in a car. Ever.
How does a person live thirty-four years in suburbia and never resort to fucking in a car out of convenience or necessity?
Looking back, I’m beginning to realize that our entire relationship might have been based on one big, fat false assumption.
* * *
1 For those of you who aren’t up on your hip-hop trivia, 50 Cent is a rapper who survived being shot nine times and went on to become a gazillionaire superstar. He got to fuck Chelsea Handler, got interviewed by Oprah, acted in a movie with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, launched his own line of condoms, and was given a personal meditation mantra by none other than Deepak Chopra himself. He’s pretty much my right nipple’s hero.
Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #5
When I first began dating Ken, I had just moved back in with my parents after my brief stint of living with Hans had dissolved into a violent (on my part, not his) contentious nightmare within three months. I’d been super pissed off about the whole thing because I was soooo ready to be a grown-up, and my parents were super pissed off about the whole thing because it meant they could no longer walk around naked and smoke pot out in the common areas of the house at all hours of the day. In the few short months I’d been gone, my childhood home had turned into a virtual opium den of hippie hedonism.
When I showed up there after my impressively dramatic breakup with Hans, at ten o’clock at night, screaming and crying and trying to shove my eight-foot-long dresser back up the stairs to my old room, my parents didn’t…even…get off…the couch. I had imagined them mourning my absence and holding nightly candle-lit vigils in my old bedroom while I was gone, not blasting CCR and flopping around naked in a psychedelic stupor on a plastic tarp covered with finger-paint on the living room floor.
I, on the other hand, hadn’t done drugs in, like, a whole year. I had a 4.0 college GPA and good credit, and I was applying to graduate schools. I might have looked like a fuck-up with my half-shaved head and python-print pleather pants, but somehow, the responsibility torch had been passed while I was away, and I was now more of an adult than my parents. Clearly, it was time to go. And I’d just gotten there.
Right before my knock-down-drag-out fight with Hans, I’d met and begun chatting with Ken almost bimonthly at my wealthy, gregarious friend Jason’s weekend house parties. For some reason, Hans never came with me. Oh, yeah, because he was too busy doing blow off of strippers with his bandmates every weekend. Whatever. I didn’t mind going alone. There was always booze, which is kind of a big deal when you’re still ten long months away from being twenty-one, and pool—both billiards and swimming—and plenty of opportunities for some harmless ego-boosting flirtation. That place was a total sausagefest. There were the regulars, which included me and a few guys I’d already boned, and then there was a revolving door of extras, whom all looked vaguely familiar. Ken was one of the extras. We’d gone to the same giant suburban high school, but because he was a senior when I was a freshman our paths had never crossed before.
When I’d first made Ken’s acquaintance, he was in his pajamas and I was living with Hans, so it was hardly a love connection. That motherfucker was always in his pajamas.
(Whenever I tell this story in Ken’s presence, he never fails to rudely interrupt me and insist, “Those were not pajamas. They were running pants.”
To which, I say, “Tomato, tomato.”
That saying doesn’t really work in print, does it?)
Whenever I saw him at Jason’s house, Ken would just be sitting there