because he loooooved Jazz. Jazz Matt’s real name was just regular Matt, but Nate and I came up with the bright idea to call him “Jazz Matt” because it rhymes with “Jazz Cat.” And few things were funnier to us than the idea of Matt “jazzing-out” to cool-be-boo-bebop-scat-a-tat-tastic, heroin-ific jazz, when in fact he was just this geeky white jerk who, given a chance, would like nothing more than to sit quietly in a room, sipping tea.
Jazz Matt fizzled out during our pitiful Gil-Scott-Heron- fueled make-out session, so he couldn’t throw his jazz hat into the ring for the boyfriend position I was interviewing intensively for. But something was coming together for me around this time that was new. I didn’t sweat J-Matt, and I didn’t stalk or fume once my crush had petered out its torque. Maybe my hormones had finally learned to shut the hell up for a minute, or maybe I’d shed some of the ego- fueled “how dare he not love me ” vitriol that was conjoined like an evil twin to the star-crossed circumstances of every guy that didn’t come through. Either way, around that time, I began to get a little better at letting go. And there were plenty of guys around whom I walked away from before they even had time to express interest—the defecating neighbor comes to mind.
Then, right before I turned twenty-one, I met my first real boyfriend.
DAVID WAS just a year older than me, and his intelligence was visible from across the room. He was a particular kind of quiet, and there are different kinds—there’s shy/socially phobic quiet, angry and plotting quiet, blissful Zen quiet, illiterate farmhand quiet. David’s quiet was patient and smart—the kind you need to get through a ton of books. I wondered if I seemed too frivolous for him; I had pink leopard prints pasted all over my dorm room walls, and Spice Girls posters hanging alongside framed photos of John Waters.
But David liked me, and soon enough we got together. I loved falling in love. I loved the whole incubation period: all the lazing about in bed staring into each other’s faces, the midsummer hangouts on his fire escape, the activity of the night being listening to a record or taking a walk. I was having the time of my life being loved as what I gleaned was an adult. I would say to people, “I have a boyfriend . This is my boyfriend .” And after my mint-condom-sucking, Jazz Matt-chasing college days, I was ripe and delighted in the sensation of being courted in a proper way, by a boy who didn’t just think I was sexy. David thought I was adorable.
We went to Montauk together. We drank Mike’s Hard Lemonade in a motel room and read Penthouse to each other in the rental car back to the city. I let him take my picture without any makeup, on the beach. Around David, I felt cherubic and endearing.
It didn’t work out.
There were differences—the kind that have nothing to do with him liking that band the Mountain Goats when you feel like hearing that guy’s singing voice is like being stabbed in the eye with a shrimp fork over and over again. He loved me, but I also think he was infatuated with somebody in me I wasn’t so crazy about. If Nate was the one who saw Kate Pierson underneath my grubby disaffect when we met, David tried to strip away all of Kate’s lovely lashes and wigs and iridescent outfits to reveal what he was confident was the mousy, wide-eyed ragamuffin little girl that he wanted to love me as, and who he wanted me to be. It would come out in little things, like how he told me how pretty I looked in a T-shirt when I let my hair go into its natural wave, or in acts of faith in my talent, like when we’d try to collaborate and he’d write me a part that was more in his voice than mine.
After we split, David went on to reach his goal of becoming a successful television comedy writer, which was never a surprise given his talent and work ethic, and one day, I came into his office to interview for an on-air/writing
Jazz Matt fizzled out during our pitiful Gil-Scott-Heron- fueled make-out session, so he couldn’t throw his jazz hat into the ring for the boyfriend position I was interviewing intensively for. But something was coming together for me around this time that was new. I didn’t sweat J-Matt, and I didn’t stalk or fume once my crush had petered out its torque. Maybe my hormones had finally learned to shut the hell up for a minute, or maybe I’d shed some of the ego- fueled “how dare he not love me ” vitriol that was conjoined like an evil twin to the star-crossed circumstances of every guy that didn’t come through. Either way, around that time, I began to get a little better at letting go. And there were plenty of guys around whom I walked away from before they even had time to express interest—the defecating neighbor comes to mind.
Then, right before I turned twenty-one, I met my first real boyfriend.
DAVID WAS just a year older than me, and his intelligence was visible from across the room. He was a particular kind of quiet, and there are different kinds—there’s shy/socially phobic quiet, angry and plotting quiet, blissful Zen quiet, illiterate farmhand quiet. David’s quiet was patient and smart—the kind you need to get through a ton of books. I wondered if I seemed too frivolous for him; I had pink leopard prints pasted all over my dorm room walls, and Spice Girls posters hanging alongside framed photos of John Waters.
But David liked me, and soon enough we got together. I loved falling in love. I loved the whole incubation period: all the lazing about in bed staring into each other’s faces, the midsummer hangouts on his fire escape, the activity of the night being listening to a record or taking a walk. I was having the time of my life being loved as what I gleaned was an adult. I would say to people, “I have a boyfriend . This is my boyfriend .” And after my mint-condom-sucking, Jazz Matt-chasing college days, I was ripe and delighted in the sensation of being courted in a proper way, by a boy who didn’t just think I was sexy. David thought I was adorable.
We went to Montauk together. We drank Mike’s Hard Lemonade in a motel room and read Penthouse to each other in the rental car back to the city. I let him take my picture without any makeup, on the beach. Around David, I felt cherubic and endearing.
It didn’t work out.
There were differences—the kind that have nothing to do with him liking that band the Mountain Goats when you feel like hearing that guy’s singing voice is like being stabbed in the eye with a shrimp fork over and over again. He loved me, but I also think he was infatuated with somebody in me I wasn’t so crazy about. If Nate was the one who saw Kate Pierson underneath my grubby disaffect when we met, David tried to strip away all of Kate’s lovely lashes and wigs and iridescent outfits to reveal what he was confident was the mousy, wide-eyed ragamuffin little girl that he wanted to love me as, and who he wanted me to be. It would come out in little things, like how he told me how pretty I looked in a T-shirt when I let my hair go into its natural wave, or in acts of faith in my talent, like when we’d try to collaborate and he’d write me a part that was more in his voice than mine.
After we split, David went on to reach his goal of becoming a successful television comedy writer, which was never a surprise given his talent and work ethic, and one day, I came into his office to interview for an on-air/writing
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