Moodswing - I know it when i see it

Raised on notions of love formed by epic romance she-porn

You’d think that, by my popularity alone, Keiger would offer my unemployed ass a job bartending at the Local. But I guess there’s two huge flaws in my argument: One, they don’t need another bartender at the Local; and two, the reason I’m so popular is because the single time I did bartend there, I gave away all the alcohol.

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“It’s on the house,” I yelled.

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“We love you,” they yelled back.

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“They love me,” I tell Keiger today.

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“I’d love you, too, if you gave me my booze for free,” Keiger says. But if you ask me, there are two huge flaws in his argument: One, he doesn’t drink booze; and two, he already loves me. Maybe it’s not the treat-her-like-a-queen kinda love, or even the tolerate-her-like-a-hemorrhoid kinda love, it’s more the ignore-her-and-maybe-she’ll-go-away kinda love, but still. Love is love. I know it when I see it.

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And that’s saying something considering that, at 14, I read a truckload of my mother’s epic romance novels. I would seriously recommend against that. Epic romances are really just she-porn, in which the heroine gets gang-raped, thrown in jail and dragged behind a horse, all by the guy she loves, who couldn’t help himself on account of how he had been driven wild with an accidental glimpse of the small of her back.

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Somehow, though, epic romance writers make it all seem so desirable to a 14-year-old whose hormone-addled romance lobe is still forming. The first one I read involved an incandescently beautiful peasant girl who is the object of desire for two rival monarchs whose crotches explode every time they gaze upon her visage. These men show their passion by torturing and degrading her for 400 pages, but in the end all her suffering pays off when she gets to ride off in the sunset with the man who treated her the crappiest.

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In short, those books fucked me up. I seriously spent decades, it seemed like, just leaning pensively against balustrades in hopes someone would want to sculpt me. That was a major waste of time. The absolute most I ended up with was a boyfriend who broke up with me by pushing me out of his car. Granted, it was a VW, and granted, it was parked at the time, and granted, I was clinging to him like a love-sick squid and there really was no other way to get my bawling, begging ass out the door, but still. He moved to Australia, like, the next day, so frantic he was to escape the tendrils of my epic-romance tainted expectations.

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I have since become a jaded, misanthropic, smirk-prone sea urchin, which I swear to God (probably) is a more realistic stance to take when tackling life. I don’t really have any expectations. Take the last time Keiger took me on a date. Fifteen minutes after the movie started, he got up to get more popcorn and, uh, never came back. At first I thought he’d gone to the bathroom and had a heart attack and died on the toilet with his pants around his ankles like Elvis. But if that were so, there would have been some sign of commotion in the lobby as I exited after the movie ended, like some used medical tubing strewn about, or scuff marks from the ambulance gurney, or at the very least an ashen-faced manager fanning himself with an empty box of Goobers. But no.

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He’d just left. It didn’t help, I guess, that I have a habit of yelling at the movie screen. This is especially true when it’s playing a romantic comedy. “Ha! Like that’s ever gonna happen!” or “Oh, I am so sure!” and such. You can’t always get away with that at a movie theater, and the ushers are not polite when they ask you to leave, either.

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Anyway, at least Keiger doesn’t drag me behind a horse. That’s pretty much my criteria for friends these days. I know it might not sound like a lot, but I have to tell you that any day I’m not dragged behind a horse is a huge relief. For example, yesterday, from the dubious warmth of my car, I watched a woman in the cold, huddled in a doorway, clawing at the meth-addict scabs on her face. She looked like she’d been trampled on by a stampede of horses. Her face was weighted with the burden it must have been just to wake up breathing that day. I wonder what it takes to get to that point, how many friends you have to torture and degrade until every last one of them turns their back on you and leaves you to freeze in a doorway.

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Seeing stuff like that always sucks the anger out of me. I’ll be driving along, all properly pissed about the world in general and my friends in particular, for whatever tortures and degradations they put me through, ruminating on my standards as though I have any, and then I’ll see a cold meth addict in a doorway and instantly those standards are shattered. Who am I kidding? Life ain’t no basket of dandelions, I tell you, and my friends are far from perfect, but I’m further. If it were Grant or Daniel or even Keiger in that doorway — I don’t care what torture they might have put me through, I don’t care what degradation they might have made me suffer — I would climb over jagged glass to get to them.

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Hollis Gillespie is the author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories and Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”