No Sex and the City

Everybody has dating tales of woe. I knew this when I was a youngster living in Arizona, but I also knew that the odds were even more against me. I was a fish out of water there, and the men I managed to dig up were few and far between. I had only one long-term relationship before I moved to New York City, and that was during college, and it was a complete disaster. He was a great guy, but our overwhelming personal issues were constantly battling for attention in what my mom termed "a buffet of neurosis." After a few more years of hunting and pecking, I finally came to terms with the fact that, regardless of the dating scene, Arizona in general just wasn't for me. So I took off for the great beyond to seek my destiny.

My very first date in New York City was with a Jewish lawyer. You can imagine my grandmother's delight. Fresh off the boat, and here I was already fishing from the most coveted pool. My uncle who, not coincidentally, is also a Jewish lawyer, set me up with with him, earning him major brownie points with the family.

Since I was still learning my way around the city, the Jewish Lawyer kindly met me near my office and took the reigns of our date. After a brief stop at the ATM I found myself staring up at the intimidating entrance to The Four Seasons.

The scenario: I am 24. I am wearing a suit that is, literally, held together with safety pins and purchased at the JC Penney outlet. I am new to New York City. I am on a blind date, which is enormously stressful in any situation, and I am sitting in the lounge area, in a big overstuffed armchair, of the Four Seasons. I am too nervous to order anything but a Diet Coke, and am confused when I am unable to sip through what appears to be a glass straw. Hey, I'm thinking to myself, A glass straw! Must be a classy-New-York kind of thing.

But after my face nearly caved in trying to slurp through the fancy glass straw, I drew back and realized it was actually a stirrer. Meant to stir the lemon wedge that still lay untouched and unnoticed on a dainty little plate to one side of the table. Apparently when you spend $6 on a Diet Coke, the lemon comes with.

Heh heh. Oops.

Luckily my date did not notice my faux-paus, as he was busy detailing the entire script, almost verbatim, of the most recent Seinfeld episode. He went on to regale me with further tales of Seinfeld which, while making for extraordinarily dull conversation, proved to be less dull than when he actually talked about himself.

That first date was also the last.

Over the years I went on many, many, many dates. I tried all sorts of dating techniques. Don't get me wrong. I did have a few long-term relationships in there. I dated one guy for a year and half, and another for almost two. I was in New York a total of six years, which means I spent less than half of them single. As I write that, it doesn't seem so bad. But that's a lot of Saturday nights spent alone in my apartment listening to drunk couples on the street having a raucously good time while I channel-surfed and ate Chinese take-out straight from the carton. On the bright side, I learned how to use chopsticks like a native.

The search for the decent single man in New York was, in my opinion, fairly accurately documented in the Sex and the City series. What wasn't so accurate, at least in my particular case, was the amount of sex the ladies managed to have despite all the weirdos they dated. Perhaps I was just a little more picky about who I went to bed with. Yes, I am pretty sure that's it.

I heard about a Temple on the Upper East Side that was sort of known for being a singles hot-spot. Rumor had it you could appeal directly to the Rabbi and she would personally set you up with someone. De-singling Jews is practically part of the religion. So I attended a service but all that talk about God made my skin crawl and I felt horribly out of place. There were hundreds of young people in attendance, all of them, I was certain, far more knowledgeable than me about this religion I was born into but never practiced. If I did manage to meet anybody this way I would be immediately denounced as a fraud. Faking religion to get a date is worse than stuffing your bra with Kleenex. I ducked out early and never said a word to anyone.

I went to a dating seminar, where you are given a number, and then they go around the room and allow each person to sell themselves for about five minutes. After that traumatic experience you're allowed out of your chair to mingle while drinking watery punch and eating cookies that taste like cardboard. Then you filled in the numbers of the people you would go out with on a bubble sheet reminiscent of the SAT. If your number was also selected by the ones you selected then you exchanged phone numbers and went on a date. I have to say, that experience was quite an ego boost. There were hardly any attractive people in attendance so I was, by default, pretty popular. The odds were in my favor. I felt for a brief moment like the belle of the ball, surrounded by horrifically shy, balding, short men who surreptitiously snuck up and thrust a business card in my hand before skulking off again. I got a couple dates out of that, but nothing earth-shattering.

In between relationships I tried online dating. There was a site all the girls in the office were talking about that was specifically for Jewish singles. I was still convinced that, although I was not a religious person, the cultural aspects of being Jewish provided enough common ground that it made sense to pursue the yarmulke-set. So I signed up and went on a series of the worst dates in history. The first guy never took his eyes off the Simpsons, which was playing on the TV above the bar where we met. I mean, he was like emotionally ill-prepared to do anything but watch television. When I tried to interact with him he appeared so irritated by the interruption that I felt like I'd plopped down uninvited in his living room.

The next date called me at 8:30pm one weekday night and asked me if I wanted to meet him in a few minutes at a coffee shop around the corner. What the hell? I thought. Why not? So I gussied up a bit and headed over. "You're spontaneous!" he said after we'd introduced ourselves and pulled chairs up to a table. "I love that!" He then proceeded to agitatedly beat out a rhythm on the table that made sense only to him while bobbing his head back and forth and darting his eyes around the room like he expected the police to burst in at any minute and drag him off. It was probably a pretty realistic fear since he was clearly sky-high on something. Later he confirmed this by leaning over to me and confessing in a whisper, "Before I came to meet you, I did a LOT of drugs." This was after I'd learned he was a doctor. A podiatrist, but still. I wouldn't want that guy touching any part of me, not even my feet.

The third guy I met from the site seemed really great on paper. He worked as a writer for Comedy Central and his emails were hilarious. I agreed to meet him for drinks after work one evening and I was really hopeful about this one. But as soon as I saw him my stomach dropped. I hate to be the type of person who makes snap judgements based solely on appearance, particularly when up until I saw the guy I had nothing but positive vibes. But really, you can't help who you are attracted to, right? That's an old excuse for bad behavior but it also happens to be true.

The guy was very tall and very thin. I think he must have been self-conscious about his height because he sat hunched over to the point that his back actually bowed behind his head. Despite being in his mid-twenties he had the complexion of a boy tortured by acne. He was so sweet. He brought along a Cosmo quiz to break the ice, and he was very funny in a self-deprecating kind of way. Unfortunately most of what he said was accompanied with spittle, so that as the evening progressed I first leaned back in my chair and then started to ever so casually scoot further and further back from the table.

At the end of the date he handed me a piece of paper with several phone numbers on it. "I would really like it if you called me," he said hopelessly. "But I rarely get second dates."

I felt terrible about it, but he wasn't going to get a second date this time, either. When I told my mom about the evening she said, "What's the matter? You have something against spitting hunchbacks? This is how I raised you?"

She was kidding. I think.

After that I gave up on J-Date. I had met nothing but crazy people on that site which led me to wonder if perhaps that was a common trait among Jewish people, among men, among people who looked for dates online, or all of the above. In any case, that's when I met someone with whom I had a serious relationship for the next two years. Unfortunately, as much as I liked him, it wasn't meant to be and eventually we split up.

Shortly after that I heard from a friend of mine that my long-ago college boyfriend, the one with whom I grazed at the buffet of neurosis, was back in Arizona. So when I headed home for the holidays that year I got in touch with him and we agreed to meet for dinner. When we saw each other again after nearly seven years, the electricity was immediate and obvious.

In spite of that, this wasn't something I intended to pursue. First of all, been there, done that. Second, he lived across the country from me and I wasn't about to give up New York. Third, he was recently divorced and struggling through the inescapable emotional and financial residue that goes along with any marital break-up, no matter how amicable. Not someone any single woman should touch with a ten-foot pole. But compared with my dating history in New York City, he was Prince-fucking-Charming.

We continued to talk long-distance and before I knew it, I was hooked. He wasn't Prince Charming - I'd long ago given up the notion that any man was or should be - but he was my best friend and closest confidant and I was madly in love. Eventually it came down to either solving the long-distance problem or discontinuing the relationship. I spent many hours over drinks at various New York bars lamenting this decision. Despite how much I loved him, there was the fact that, well, I had a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. Plus he had been married before and had some baggage from his past that didn't sit well with me. His first wife was a tall, thin, very attractive woman with whom I had nothing in common which led me to believe he was either crazy for being with her, or crazy for wanting to be with me. But either way, he came out crazy.

While I debated what to do I started dating the Matt Damon Lawyer. I call him this because a) he looked exactly like a shorter version of Matt Damon and b) he was a lawyer. The Matt Damon Lawyer and I went on six first dates. What I mean by that is every date we went on never got past that awkward small-talk stage. We never grew more comfortable with each other or progressed to a kiss good night. There was clearly nothing inspirational to tap there, but he kept asking me out and I kept saying yes and I have a feeling we were both doing so for the same reason - we were both hung up on other people we thought less appropriate. Eventually I just gave up. Obviously I was in love with someone else if a lawyer who looked like Matt Damon couldn't do it for me.

But I wasn't ready to give up New York, Tom still hadn't finalized his divorce, and he was, at that time, fairly directionless in general. And yet the time apart was growing more and more intolerable. Over margaritas I detailed this to my friend Mark who was able, in his very Mark-like way, to boil it down to a sentence: "Listen, if you can talk and you can fuck, the rest are just details."

So I did it. I left New York for the boy, despite every feminist instinct screaming at my foolishness. I had to know. And New York would always be there, with all its crazies looking for dates.

As it turns out, I ended up marrying the guy.

The moral of the story? This is great...

Like Dorothy, I had to go to Oz to discover that what I wanted had been in my own back yard all along. I just hadn't been ready to recognize it till I'd journeyed through a land filled with drug addicts, emotional midgets and spitting hunchbacks (oh my) through whom I eventually discovered the ways of my heart.

I Can't Hear You, My Knee Hurts

Last night I was supposed to go to a concert. An Australian knock-off of Pink Floyd that I was actually looking forward to. But at two o'clock in the afternoon I found myself on the phone begging out. I was too tired. I should have known better than to schedule anything on a "school" night. Instead I went home, did the dishes and went to bed early, which I now consider the perfect weekday evening.

When I was a teenager I stayed out all night. In fact my best memories do not involve the sun at all, for weeks at a time. I would sleep till noon, work till 9pm, and then go out all night with my friends. We had the greatest time. At three in the morning, the city of Phoenix was ours. We drove on the wrong side of the road, hiked up mountains in the dark, and partied at after-hours clubs till dawn. I didn't have a curfew; my mother was fairly lenient but I was also a pretty good kid who had learned to rule herself by buying into other people's scare tactics. I was out all night but I wasn't doing drugs, because Nancy Reagan had succeeded in scaring the crap out of me with her ad campaign. And I wasn't having sex, because the pregnancy and STD commercials also scared me into submission.

In retrospect, television had a pretty severe hold on my psyche. But also I was just one of those kids who enforced rules on herself that were so strict that my parents rarely had to step in. I got my homework done hours before it would occur to them to ask if I had any. I put myself to bed at 9pm on weekdays. I got myself up and ready for school and religiously practiced the piano every morning even though I hated it. And I still found time and energy to have fun.

Once I stumbled in around six a.m. after spending the entire night with my boyfriend. That sounds bad, but I was such a goodie-goodie that all it amounted to was six straight hours of pushing his hands off my boobs. You have to admire a teenage boy's persistence. Anyway, I slipped in the front door as the sun was coming up and happened to cross paths in the kitchen with my mother, who had gotten up for a drink of water. She blinked sleepily at me as I sucked in my breath in fear, waiting for perhaps the first severe punishment of my pubescence, but instead she just said, "It's kind of late, isn't it?" and shuffled back to her bedroom.

A similar situation occurred with my brother, when he came home one day to find our mother sitting in the living room calmly paging through one of his Playboys which he discreetly hid, along with porno tapes and bongs of every shape and size, scattered all over the floor of his bedroom. I think he relied on the family's overall disgust of his mess to keep us from discovering his debaucherous tendancies, but apparently my mother had some random reason for going into his room that day. Her reaction? "This is a VERY interesting article."**

But I digress. My point is that I've always been a Good Girl, and I still am, except now I am old, which means after being a Good Girl I have little time for anything else before I get sleepy.

And that is why I bailed out of Pink Floyd last night, and have vowed never again to make plans on a weekday. I am no longer capable of staying up past ten unless I have insomnia brought on by anxiety which isn't a rare occurrence, but a far more objectionable reason to lying awake than attending a concert or dancing all night or watching horror movies till dawn. Instead of claiming the night for my enjoyment, I lie there thinking, "FUCK tomorrow is going to suck. If I fall asleep RIGHT NOW I can still get six hours..."

Old age is suddenly creeping over me with a vengeance. I can no longer eat a pint of ice cream in one sitting. In fact, I can't eat any dairy at all without my entire digestive system aggressively rebelling. And even if I could get past the dairy issue I still couldn't eat a pint of ice cream - not without putting in an extra two hours at the gym. But not on the treadmill, because my knees can't take it anymore. Just walking up these Seattle hills causes them to emit alarming crunching and crackling noises while I grimace in pain.

My hair is falling out. My husband insists I'm imagining it, but I suspect he just has no sympathy since nearly ALL of his has fallen out. I have about half what I used to, and it's brittle and wiry and daily turning more gray, but thank God I still have more than he does. Meanwhile he's also losing his hearing, something else he insists I am making up, but as I am the one who is required to repeat everything twice I am more than aware of the truth. Give us another five years and we will be one of those couples in restaurants where the wife reads the entire menu to her husband loud enough for the whole room to benefit, and punctuates each item with helpful direction ("YOU DON'T WANT THE FISH. THE GARLIC WILL GIVE YOU GAS."), while the husband nods in agreement and smiles blandly at the wall.

But hey, at least we'll be out.

**Results not typical. Parent must be a psychologist with a very open approach to sexuality such that, when her daughter complains that her 14-year-old son has been in the shower for over an hour, she responds with, "Now, Karen, he's just enjoying his new body."

Digging in Desperation through the archives

I am at a serious loss for anything interesting to say. I'm pretty happy at the moment and that never bodes well for creativity. So to keep my fans (both of you - hi, mom) interested, I dug up this old story I wrote, oh, probably eight or so years ago. But it's kind of fun. And long.

Welcome to New York. Now Find a Home

The idea when I moved to New York from Arizona was to go to hip parties, meet celebrities, become an Executive (didn’t matter what field), meet a Nice Jewish Boy, get married and move to a suburb.

But first, I just wanted to get my dog back. My mom was keeping her in Arizona until I found my own place, since dogs were not allowed in the pristine Fifth Avenue building my uncle lived in, and off of whom I was mooching. So I wanted to find my own place as fast as possible. Plus, I was rooming with my four-year-old cousin who was going through a breast fetish and I never felt completely safe.

Finding an apartment in New York is a challenge few are made for and if I had known how difficult it would be, I would probably still be roaming the desert. This was several years before the internet, so searching was done the old-fashioned way – by getting up at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings, hitting the real estate section of the paper, and making a round of calls to agents who inevitably told me, even though it was still dark out, that the apartment had already been rented. I don’t know how that kept happening. There are a lot of psychics in New York and I suspect they are probably in the nicest, rent-controlled apartments, because they could beat out all of us who had to wait for the paper.

I went to countless open houses. Dozens of people would gather outside the building where it was rumored an apartment was for rent. A real estate agent would show up as late as he liked, and we would sign a book that made us declare salary, date of birth, pets yes/no, etc. We would file up the stairs, usually 3 or 4 flights, and cram into the narrow doorway of an apartment of approximately 200 square feet. Sometimes there would be no windows. Sometimes there would be no stove. Sometimes there would be no bathtub in the bathroom. Sometimes there would be no bathroom.

I saw an apartment with windows overlooking the venting system of the building next door, which puffed black smoke directly into the apartment. I saw a place where, by strategically placing myself in the center of the room, I could touch all four walls without moving. One apartment had a bathtub in what I guessed was supposed to be the kitchen.

I learned after about a week that anything in my price range was uninhabitable and decided to try the roommate route. Roommate Finders was the most widely-known and respected roommate service in the City. They were located at Columbia Circle on the 28^th floor in an office about the size of my walk-in closet back home. In this room they had three desks and piles of paperwork like I’d never seen before. I wondered how they could organize my life, and thousands of other lives, when they couldn’t organize this tiny space.

After filling out vital statistics I was given a stack of cards of available apartments and was encouraged to call the people who seemed compatible.

My first visit was to a woman in the East 70’s. Her apartment was listed as #12A. The buzzer had a #12, #13 and #14. I buzzed all the buzzers hoping somebody would just open the door for me, but there was no answer. I wandered around the block and came back and buzzed them all again. This time there was an answering buzz from the door and I pushed my way through into a dirty linoleum-lined entryway.

At the top of five flights of stairs was a very dazzling, very tan young woman in a bikini top, with a flowing scarf tied around her waist. Her hair was up, and she was posing in the doorway. “Hi! I was on the roof but I heard the buzzer. Come on in.”

There were plenty of rooms, but all the doors in the apartment were of glass, which meant no privacy. Also, in the bathroom you had to squeeze between the sink and bathtub, which practically touched, in order to reach the toilet. Although I didn’t try it out, it appeared that you would have to bring your knees to your chin in order to sit on it. Since there was no floor space between the toilet and the tub, I assumed men would have to stand in the bathtub and aim very carefully.

I was then provided with a hand-written questionnaire to complete that, as near as I can remember, read:

1. What is your astrological sign?

2. What is your sun sign?

3. Have you ever had your chart done?

4. Are you very religious?

5. On a scale of 1 to 5, how religious are you?

6. Which of the following religions best applies to you? A) Christian B) Jewish C) Catholic D) Buddhist E) All living beings on this planet are equal and we must live with each other in harmony

7. How would you best describe your eating habits? A) I eat meat and vegetables B) I am a vegetarian C) I eat only natural foods directly from Mother Earth and would never eat a fellow living creature

8. What type of music do you enjoy? A) Pop rock B) Classical C) Rap D) New Age E) I only listen to the soothing natural sounds of Mother Earth, for example the sea or the chirping of locusts

It was pretty obvious what the “right” answers were but since I had no intention of eating granola for every meal until I died or moved out, I quickly filled out the form and ran away.

The next place Roommate Finders led me to was a beautiful, brand-new building in the east 50’s. I checked in with the doorman, glided across the marble floor and soared up in the elevator (an elevator!) to the 8^th floor. I was so in love with this place already. It was clean, spacious, and convenient. I was determined to get it.

I was greeted by two women who on first glance appeared to be twins, or at least sisters, but on closer inspection were just very, very alike. I was to come across this type in my second job working in the Public Relations field, after ditching recruiting, but that’s later.

“HI!” they chimed together. They both wore very short, very tight black skirts and sweater sets, with the cardigan draped over their shoulders. One pink, one blue. And very shiny, very high heels. They both had straight long hair with blond highlights and, although I do not claim to be an expert in this area, what must have been fake boobs. They were both ridiculously skinny.

I was led to the two couches; they sat on one and I sat on the other, facing them. To my right were huge picture windows and a dining table. The place was airy and gorgeous, with beautiful parquet floors and long, uninterrupted white walls.

“Where do you work?” asked one, and they both leaned forward intimately, very interested in my response.

“Are you dating anyone?” asked the other.

“Can you get in to any of the new clubs?” asked the first.

“Know any good parties this weekend?” asked the other.

This line of questioning, and the way the questions were posed, reminded me vividly of my first day at elementary school, surrounded by sweet-looking girls in pristine dresses with their hair pulled back in be-ribboned pony-tails while I faced them in the purple knit shirt and polyester bell-bottoms that my mom had dressed me in.

“I’m a recruiter,” I told the Twinsets. “And I have a dog.” Usually this turned people off immediately and was a good escape mechanism.

“I love dogs!” screeched the Blue Twinset, clapping her hands together. “Does he pee in the house?”

“No,” I said. “But she ate my coffee table.” Which was true, although she was a puppy at the time.

But this didn’t phase them. Next question:
“Did you go to that fabulous opening for Taboo in Soho last weekend?”

“Of what?” I asked.

The first Twinset, who seemed a little more optimistic, tried, “Whose suit is that? It’s adorable. Very retro.”

“Um, I got it at the JC Penney outlet,” I said, with that feeling you get when you know you just filled in the wrong bubble on the SAT at the same time the teacher calls time’s up.

“We’ll call you,” they said, and showed me to the door.

I met with a woman who had an apartment at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth—you can’t get a better location. She was four flights up, but at this point that was no longer note-worthy. The apartment was like a miniature version of a real apartment. The bedroom that would be mine was only big enough for a double mattress. The living room had everything a living room should have, but everything was very close together. You had to sit cross-legged on the couch, for example, because there was no room for your legs between the couch and the coffee table. The television was so close I was surprised she wasn’t cross-eyed. I asked her to consider me for the place anyway, but the dog ruled me out.

My aunt suggested exploring Brooklyn. Despite my snobbery regarding Manhattan, desperation forced me to reconsider. I was told Park Slope is a particularly up-and-coming hip area, so I made an appointment with a real estate agent and bore the 45-minute subway ride across the

East River.

“Right now we don’t have anything in Park Slope that will allow a dog, but if you’ll consider Crown Heights we have several places.”

“Where is Crown Heights?” I asked suspiciously.

“Right next to Park Slope, less than a mile from here,” the agent assured me in a friendly manner, leading me by the elbow to his car.

Back then I was too naïve to know what the difference of one block, let alone half a mile, could make in the safety and aesthetics of an area. Crown Heights, I learned later, had more murders the previous year than

Harlem.

The building the agent showed me was huge, and extremely dirty. Despite the size of it, there was no doorman (probably got shot the night before and it was too soon to find a replacement) so the agent used his keys. The floor of the lobby was cement, and several runny-nosed children who didn’t speak English were playing in the dirt on it. We took an elevator reeking of urine and straining under the difficulty of doing its job to the third floor. The narrow hallways also smelled of urine and I swear I saw actual puddles.

The apartment itself was fantastic, naturally, but I was too busy groping blindly for the mace in my purse in preparation for my walk back to the subway to really notice or care.

I was just getting frantic enough to try New Jersey when I got lucky. Which, I have since learned, is truly the only way to get an affordable apartment in New York—luck.

From the Sunday want-ads I called about an apartment which was, of course, no longer available, but the agent informed me she had just gotten another apartment on the Upper East Side and if I hurried it might still be available by the time I took the train up there.

I took the number 4 to 86^th Street, immediately started walking briskly in the wrong direction, hit 85^th and turned around. (Eventually I learned how to tell where I was when emerging from the subway by looking at the sun—I felt stupid, but it saved my walking a block in the wrong direction.)

As I approached the building I grew more and more excited. There was a cute awning over the stoop and the entryway was clean and well-kept. I took a seat on the front steps to wait for the real estate agent when I noticed some clothing hanging from the tree right by the front door. After I’d been sitting there a minute or so a thin homeless man shuffled up, tried on a pink ruffled blouse from the tree, then politely asked me, “Dese yours?” I shook my head and he shopped the tree a little longer, found a jacket he liked, and shuffled off again.

Despite the floor being ripped up and the kitchen only half-completed, I liked the place. There was a wall running across the middle of the apartment, separating the back half which officially made it a bona fide, rent-controlled one-bedroom. There were windows all along the South side, facing the street, and they even had screens. I couldn’t afford it, but I couldn’t afford it less than I couldn’t afford any other livable place I’d seen, and by that time that was good enough for me. I’d learn to like Raman noodles is all.

Once I was established in my new apartment, I summoned my dog, via my mother, who put her on a plane.

Theo arrived one night shaking from limb to limb and covered in shit. Apparently the tranquilizer had not worked. She was hysterically afraid of the traffic and noise and would not go down the linoleum stairs (although up was okay). Any time anyone in the building made any noise at all, she would let loose with a piercing volley of barks, which would eventually, after an hour or so, taper down to growls. She determined for some reason that streets running East to West were acceptable but refused to walk on the North/South Avenues which made getting to pretty much anywhere with her impossible. But I was so happy to have the company.

And that is how I found a home in New York City! The End.