Sugaree
May 27th, 2008, 04:32 PM
May 27, 2008 | The summer after I graduated from high school, I went on tour with my then boyfriend's rock band. He was the drummer for an outfit that would eventually become disconcertingly well known, and since I was leaving for college in the fall, probably never to return, I was loath to leave him to the freedom of the road and the ministrations of wan indie rock groupies.
It was very hot, one of the worst summers on record. The van was filthy -- crammed with equipment, sleeping bags and unwashed bodies. My boyfriend was sweet and wonderful, but his bandmates (not unfairly) resented my presence, and when tensions between the frontman and me flared into full-scale conflict, causing him to permanently revoke my in-transit bathroom privileges, my parents arranged a plane ticket home. All in all, not the most enjoyable experience, but chock-full of valuable lessons: how to assemble and disassemble a drum kit in record time, that it was possible to survive on a diet of gummy worms and beer, and that sad boys who write sad songs about love are often total jackasses.
Still, it was a real-life rock 'n' roll tour. I was living the rock lifestyle, and I felt certain that it presaged the adventures to come -- new and glamorous escapades in my new and glamorous life.
Ten years later, I am slumped at my computer, reading an Internet recap of a 2-year-old episode of "Top Chef" that I have seen six times. I have not put on hard pants -- that is, pants with a zipper or pockets -- for four days. The man I married is on the couch in the living room, his eyes glassy as he diddles the control on the Xbox, blowing to smithereens shadowy figures lurching across the screen. We haven't spoken in several hours.
"Ben?" I say. No answer. "Ben? Ben?" I repeat his name over and over again, with increasing desperation, finally culminating in a single, furious shriek. "BEEEEEENNN!"
We live in a two-room apartment. Next door, the neighbor bangs on the shared kitchen wall, the pounding muffled by drywall. "Quiet!"
Finally, Ben looks up. "Sorry, baby. It's the noise-canceling headphones."
Ah yes, the noise-canceling headphones. You could lock Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly and Mullah Omar in a room together with a stack of Hustlers and 10 ounces of meth, and they couldn't come up with anything more misogynist. I storm back to my desk and type the phrases "my husband" "addicted" "video games" "HELP" into the search engine. Hundreds of links appear.
I click on the first one, a Christian counseling Web site, where a desperate woman named Tiffany, whose husband plays video games nine to 11 hours a day, is reminded by the nonaccredited Christian counselor that man is master of her dominion and tells her to pray to Jesus to restore her husband's love.
This isn't going to work for me. Besides, I have already prayed to the Jewish God for guidance, and the Jewish God, as he has done for millions of Jewish wives since time immemorial, advised me to rip my husband's headphones off his head and scream at him for never putting his leftovers back in the fridge. This tactic proved less effective than I hoped.
I click on another page, where a forum of concerned women instruct me to regain Ben's attention by walking around the house dressed in skimpy outfits and waggling my hips provocatively. One enterprising poster, aptly named Cyberhottie69, even suggests draping one's naked breasts somewhere impossible to miss -- like the coffee table, or on his head, like a doughy, undulating hat.
The angle Ben is sitting at makes this impossible, but I sit beside him on the couch, unzip my hoodie to reveal the lacy top of my bra, and press my breasts firmly against his bicep.
"Baby!" he swats me away. "I'm killing Nazis here! I'm saving our people!" His eyes are alight with righteous anger.
"No, you're not!" I want to scream. "You're not killing anything! You are pointing a piece of plastic at another piece of plastic and pretending something happens! You are not a fearless teenage hero of the Warsaw ghetto uprising! You are a copywriter on the Upper East Side and you are over 30 years old!"
The most depressing thing about getting older isn't really the reminders of inevitable physical decay -- the gray hairs that pop up in unexpected places, the faint lines beginning to etch themselves permanently in the corner of each eye, the mornings when you wake up with a hangover, even though you haven't been drinking -- but the gradual winnowing of options, as your personal limitations become more and more obvious and eventually start beating you about the head and neck with brutal force. The chasm between who you planned to be and who you are grows wider and impossible to traverse.
We try to make ourselves more interesting. We might take up salsa dancing, or become obsessed with cheeses, or begin to wear a fez in public. When this fails, we begin to take out our hostility on the person we feel trapped us in our inescapable little shell of mediocrity. Whether this hostility is expressed by retreat into a fantasy world in which one is a gun-slinging super-fighter saving the world from totalitarian evil (him) or a plunge into unforeseen depths of pathetic, whining neediness (me), the result is the same. You start to fake-hate each other, and if you're not careful, the fake-hate festers into real hate, and suddenly, ladies at synagogue are clucking their tongues at your mother. "It's such a shame! They seemed like such a nice young couple."
"If you don't stop playing that game right now, I'm filing for divorce!" I holler. He can't hear me. You know, the headphones.
But this was all BRB, Before Rock Band.
It was very hot, one of the worst summers on record. The van was filthy -- crammed with equipment, sleeping bags and unwashed bodies. My boyfriend was sweet and wonderful, but his bandmates (not unfairly) resented my presence, and when tensions between the frontman and me flared into full-scale conflict, causing him to permanently revoke my in-transit bathroom privileges, my parents arranged a plane ticket home. All in all, not the most enjoyable experience, but chock-full of valuable lessons: how to assemble and disassemble a drum kit in record time, that it was possible to survive on a diet of gummy worms and beer, and that sad boys who write sad songs about love are often total jackasses.
Still, it was a real-life rock 'n' roll tour. I was living the rock lifestyle, and I felt certain that it presaged the adventures to come -- new and glamorous escapades in my new and glamorous life.
Ten years later, I am slumped at my computer, reading an Internet recap of a 2-year-old episode of "Top Chef" that I have seen six times. I have not put on hard pants -- that is, pants with a zipper or pockets -- for four days. The man I married is on the couch in the living room, his eyes glassy as he diddles the control on the Xbox, blowing to smithereens shadowy figures lurching across the screen. We haven't spoken in several hours.
"Ben?" I say. No answer. "Ben? Ben?" I repeat his name over and over again, with increasing desperation, finally culminating in a single, furious shriek. "BEEEEEENNN!"
We live in a two-room apartment. Next door, the neighbor bangs on the shared kitchen wall, the pounding muffled by drywall. "Quiet!"
Finally, Ben looks up. "Sorry, baby. It's the noise-canceling headphones."
Ah yes, the noise-canceling headphones. You could lock Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly and Mullah Omar in a room together with a stack of Hustlers and 10 ounces of meth, and they couldn't come up with anything more misogynist. I storm back to my desk and type the phrases "my husband" "addicted" "video games" "HELP" into the search engine. Hundreds of links appear.
I click on the first one, a Christian counseling Web site, where a desperate woman named Tiffany, whose husband plays video games nine to 11 hours a day, is reminded by the nonaccredited Christian counselor that man is master of her dominion and tells her to pray to Jesus to restore her husband's love.
This isn't going to work for me. Besides, I have already prayed to the Jewish God for guidance, and the Jewish God, as he has done for millions of Jewish wives since time immemorial, advised me to rip my husband's headphones off his head and scream at him for never putting his leftovers back in the fridge. This tactic proved less effective than I hoped.
I click on another page, where a forum of concerned women instruct me to regain Ben's attention by walking around the house dressed in skimpy outfits and waggling my hips provocatively. One enterprising poster, aptly named Cyberhottie69, even suggests draping one's naked breasts somewhere impossible to miss -- like the coffee table, or on his head, like a doughy, undulating hat.
The angle Ben is sitting at makes this impossible, but I sit beside him on the couch, unzip my hoodie to reveal the lacy top of my bra, and press my breasts firmly against his bicep.
"Baby!" he swats me away. "I'm killing Nazis here! I'm saving our people!" His eyes are alight with righteous anger.
"No, you're not!" I want to scream. "You're not killing anything! You are pointing a piece of plastic at another piece of plastic and pretending something happens! You are not a fearless teenage hero of the Warsaw ghetto uprising! You are a copywriter on the Upper East Side and you are over 30 years old!"
The most depressing thing about getting older isn't really the reminders of inevitable physical decay -- the gray hairs that pop up in unexpected places, the faint lines beginning to etch themselves permanently in the corner of each eye, the mornings when you wake up with a hangover, even though you haven't been drinking -- but the gradual winnowing of options, as your personal limitations become more and more obvious and eventually start beating you about the head and neck with brutal force. The chasm between who you planned to be and who you are grows wider and impossible to traverse.
We try to make ourselves more interesting. We might take up salsa dancing, or become obsessed with cheeses, or begin to wear a fez in public. When this fails, we begin to take out our hostility on the person we feel trapped us in our inescapable little shell of mediocrity. Whether this hostility is expressed by retreat into a fantasy world in which one is a gun-slinging super-fighter saving the world from totalitarian evil (him) or a plunge into unforeseen depths of pathetic, whining neediness (me), the result is the same. You start to fake-hate each other, and if you're not careful, the fake-hate festers into real hate, and suddenly, ladies at synagogue are clucking their tongues at your mother. "It's such a shame! They seemed like such a nice young couple."
"If you don't stop playing that game right now, I'm filing for divorce!" I holler. He can't hear me. You know, the headphones.
But this was all BRB, Before Rock Band.