Three of My Ex-Girlfriends
My Fellow Shennyer:
This issue features no photos, so here’s one with a story behind it:
This is a photo of part of Virginia Beach I took in October 2020. I’d just flown across the country to be with my family for the COVID-mediated 50th anniversary of my parents. After my sisters went back home, I booked myself for 3 days at a beachfront hotel, just 45 minutes from my folks’, with the aim of finishing a draft of my memoir.
I’ve been thinking about those days lately because I’m now a couple weeks away from finishing a proposal of what’s become the third full draft. I’d started the 2nd draft in September 2019, on sabbatical, at the Vermont Studio Center. The goal that year was to finish the book before my sabbatical was up, but then the pandemic hit. The VA Beach trip, then, was a hail-mary attempt: finally get to the end and see what I’d made, and what I might do with it.
It was a mistake. VA Beach has fighter jets screaming overhead every twenty minutes, every day, uselessly, wasting who knows how much money. There was a guy just below my balcony who played the sax alongside prerecorded music all morning. I wrote as much as I could, but spent more time walking the beach, where I’d pass this weird jungle gym I rarely saw anyone use.
I was lonely and ate poorly, but in the end, I did finish the draft: 109,000 words. Its final sentence? I haven’t become somebody else, even if I often feel like I have, or would one day like to.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Mister Skeleton’s Trivia Zone
If you’ve been asking yourself, ‘Can the pub trivia nights I enjoy get converted somehow to a Substack?’ then I’ve got the answer for you: kinda. Mister Skeleton is the quizmaster for a thrice weekly newsletter of trivia. Here’s how it works: every newsletter shows up in your inbox with just 2 questions. You’ve got a day to enter your answers on a web form, along with your handle (mine’s DaveM) so he can keep track of your score over the month, at the end of which there’s a prize. The trivia is very good, just hard enough, with just enough tiny hints to make it like an expert Jeopardy! answer. Here’s a recent one:
Katica Illényi, Lydia Kavina, and Pamelia Stickney are all contemporary performers on what instrument? A coupla descendants of this instrument’s eponymous inventor are also listed by Wikipedia as notable performers – but of course I can’t really give ya their names, on account of the aforementioned eponymousness ‘n’ all.
Incidentally, there’s an ‘Electro-’ variant of this instrument being played by a fella named Paul Tanner on the Beach Boys tune ‘Good Vibrations’, which ya might’ve heard. The ‘Electro-’ version of this instrument certainly sounds similar to its predecessor, but it lacks what I’d kinda consider the original’s defining feature.
Easy? Maybe. But Mister Skeleton did teach me that the theremin on ‘Good Vibrations’ wasn’t even a real theremin! This is just one of the many ways my understanding of this big world has shifted, a little, from the Trivia Zone. If you’re thinking, ‘What stops people from just Googling the answers?’ the answer is Nothing does! The best thing about the Trivia Zone is knowing how to go find the answer, but just letting yourself guess and risk getting it wrong. For know-it-alls like me? That’s growth.
2. White Noise & Co’s Colored Noise Generator
If you like quiet when you work, or when you sleep, may I suggest you’re wrong? You might actually want noise—white noise, that is (or better yet brown noise, which sounds as disgusting as it is soothing). The worst thing about quiet is how soon it dies once a dog barks or any nearby person opens their yap speaks their truth, whereas noise is a mess that never alters, and soon you stop hearing it altogether. My campus office opens onto the MFA suite of offices, and as much as I like that we’re all together, lots of talking by needs happens right outside where I ‘need’ quiet. So when I’m reading student MSs, I like the Colored Noise Generator (though I don’t love that name) for its ‘Speech Blocker’ preset, which 100% does the job. You can also calibrate your own personal noise curve, given your headphones and hearing skills. People with tinnitus and ADHD swear by it.
Three of My Ex-Girlfriends
I. Deborah
Deborah Agurkis had the name Deborah Agurkis and a little elfin face to match: dark eyes, olive skin, sandy hair. I picture her with ribboned barrettes. She lived in a development you had to walk though the woods behind my friend Timmy’s house to get to. We met in Kindergarten, when she called me the Tom Selleck of Hutchison Elementary.
Everybody liked her, boys, girls, and teachers, but she liked me special, and from the beginning, she made it clear that our friendship had a romance element, like the school crafts we made in February. I played along because I, too, liked Deborah, and I knew from every movie and TV show I watched that a girlfriend was a kind of social currency.
By third grade, I was never sure whether Deborah Agurkis was my girlfriend anymore, until the news came to me from the important girls in school. They stood like sibyls at the center of our social lives, and it seemed at any random lunch a girl, or six, would come up to my table and report that Deborah and I were back together, or that we’d broken up. The girls announced everything. Keri and Mary and Terri and Rhoda and Stacey and Jackie and Kristina and Danielle. They made up all the rules and they knew what was no longer acceptable to wear, the right juice to choose at lunch, the new slang to say, and I took all this in stride because having older sisters, I’d learned from birth that girls were wiser and made all the rules.
It seems too pat a point to say that girls understand romantic love better than boys do. Likely romance is confusing for every kid lured into it. I’m feeling impelled to write about ex-girlfriends because of this thread of confusion running through that part of my past, like a chicken I’m never going to catch. From the beginning, I wasn’t sure what girlfriends were for, but I wanted one like I wanted a 5-CD changer. Meanwhile, it was the boys in class who starred in the sex dreams I’d started having, the boys I wanted to spend time with, see more of.
Why do so many homosexuals find it easy to separate sex and love? Because the straight world already did it for us. Deborah moved across the country in the summer of 1987, to Pleasanton, Calif. I was just there last weekend to pick up a soundbar from some man I immediately fell in love with, I think.
II. Katie
Katie Knapp wondered after two weeks of going together in 8th grade why I hadn’t frenched her yet. That was how our mutual friend Joann reported this news: ‘She thinks it’s weird you haven’t frenched her yet.’
Nobody had shared with me the timeline.
Katie wore Umbros with blousy T-shirts tucked into their waistbands. Her hair every day was an inert poof hairsprayed over her forehead, the rest shellacked into a tight ponytail. Was I charmed by her freckles, or did I just understand these were a pretty feature? I couldn’t tell you the color of her eyes.
I liked that she was funny, spunky, tough and unencumbered like any only child, but I remember going out with Katie mostly because friends had imparted to me that she was available. That’s what we called it: ‘going out’, even though the only place I remember going with her was to her house down Herndon Parkway, where all we did was stand around and talk.
Joann’s news galled me into action, and one morning before classes I told Katie I would french her after school. We met by my locker after the final bell, and I popped a lemon Jolly Rancher candy I’d stashed there, nervous about how bad I’d taste. We held hands and walked downstairs and down the hall to her locker, where she got the books she needed for homework.
Nobody else was in the hall. I said, ‘Okay,’ and then closed my eyes and leaned in. I shoved the candy into my cheek like a chipmunk. I felt her lips on my lips, and then her tongue on my tongue. It was over in seconds, and I felt a keen release, like when the teacher said ‘Pencils down.’
The kiss was never repeated. Days later, we broke up through the kind of passed notes that got us sent to the guidance counselor, hateful words traded which Mr. Droopydog made us feel bad about. Did I call her a bitch? She’d said my tongue felt like a slug in her mouth.
III. Beth
Beth Brown had a brother in his 20s who lived in their family’s furnished basement. I saw him all of once in the three months we dated. She showed me his room once—it was right off the part of the basement where her computer was—and it was dark in there, with bookshelves full of VHS tapes lining the walls, a chair in the middle in front of a large television, a Home Alone poster framed above it.
‘That’s his favorite movie,’ Beth told me. ‘He loves it so much he put the whole movie on audio tape. He listens to it in the car.’
We laughed together at this. I wondered what it was like to grow up wanting to do such a thing.
Beth and I met at a Mormon dance I went to with my new Mormon friends. I was a freshman and she was a junior, Jenny’s age. She drove us all in her large family van, dropping our friends off first so that she and I could park alone together in front of my house. I sat shotgun, and she’d climb over and sit in my lap. She liked french kissing, and I didn’t, but I knew I couldn’t say this to her.
Beth lived in a different county, all the way over in Sterling, Patton Oswalt’s hometown. Her high school started Christmas break one day before ours, and with my teachers’ permissions she came to school with me that day, sat quietly in the back, hung out with my friends at lunch. At the end of the day, we walked out to her van in the visitor lot, down a hallway I’m not familiar with, and just before the doors, we passed a group of boys I knew would give me trouble.
Sure enough, steps away from the door, one of them spoke up: ‘Is that your boyfriend or your girlfriend?’
I felt my face get hot and I looked down at the ground. Was he talking to me, or to Beth?
Who was I kidding, of course he was talking to her. Beth was pretty in a goth way, with a blond bob that had one longer strand near her face she’d dye purple or green. She was even wearing a skirt that day. I’d gone and found a girlfriend again, like every other boy in school, and yet here I was, still the girl.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. When we were outside, all I could manage was this: ‘My school has a lot of fucking assholes.’ Beth, bless her Mormon heart for eternity, said, ‘Yeah, my school, too.’
There’s a fourth ex-girlfriend I haven’t written about, because I’m still trying to figure out how to. We remain in touch, and she means a good deal to me, and so let’s end here, on another lesson about how hard it is to write nonfiction when you care about people, and don’t feel great about turning them into some literary character to serve your own purposes.
This week’s natatorium is the architecturally stunning Alster-Schwimmhalle in Hamburg, a swimhall so beautiful I need 3 pics to capture it:
(While I’m pleased to hear swimmers make better lovers, I’m interested in the argument to support that claim.)