What the Hell is This?

I always hate when February rolls around…at least until the 15th of the month. And it’s not because of the weather. In my part of the country, we typically have more than a few 60-70 degree days, and the poor crocuses get fooled into pushing their purple and yellow heads up out of the ground for nothing. No, I hold my breath until the hypercommercialized holiday I dread more than any other (including Christmas) is past, and the crimson streamers and pink candy boxes and foil balloons come down.

I look forward to Valentine’s Day about as eagerly as turkeys look forward to Thanksgiving.

No, that’s not quite right. The way I feel about this holiday is more like the way Charlie Bucket felt standing in the shop window watching all the regular middle-class kids with allowances buying up gluttonous amounts of candy. I loved Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because the kid not only finds a golden ticket, but inherits the whole freaking factory in the end. I actually bought a replica of a 1971 Wonka bar, complete with golden ticket, from someone on eBay last week.

Call me nuts, but sometimes a girl just needs to feel lucky.

**

Another Sunday afternoon using the wireless at the coffeehouse. Brendan is at the register today. Brendan has worked here since the place opened, back in 2000 or 2001. Years ago, I had a huge crush on this pretty slackerboy that was as frustrating as it was futile. Latte-brewing Lothario that he is, he was more than happy to toy with me the way a cat bandies about a dazed little bird, until one day, when I must have decided (fear or no fear) that I’d had enough of his equivocal flirtations, and I followed him into the kitchen, seized him by the shoulders, and kissed him full on the mouth.

My life coach friend might call this “breaking the bonding pattern.” I simply called it liberating and exhilirating. Brendan, however, did not seem to appreciate it at all. He copped a sort of sullen resentment over the incident, like I had no business doing what I did, and we didn’t speak for a long time afterwards. But about a year ago he started sporadically attending the yoga studio where I worked, and now when I’m in here he acts like we’re the oldest and best of friends. He’ll sell me a tea for a dollar, and once in a while throw in a free cookie. I feel as if I have his (however grudging) respect, for what it’s worth.

You can’t tell me that men are simple creatures.

**

It seems like I really did arrive on the planet with a sweet tooth, so to speak. I’ve been trying to get my fingers in the metaphorical candy jar almost from day one. As I’ve mentioned before, one of my earliest memories is of chasing my cousin Nate around and around the coffee table (as well as the rest of the apartment my family lived in), trying to kiss him. (Some things don’t change, eh?) The adults laughed uproariously; Nate just squirmed.

He was the youngest son of my Southern preacher uncle, a few years older than my big brother, and I only met him maybe three times in my life — but in one of life’s uncanny little coincidences, he wound up attending the same university as Sonny, who grew up less than ten miles from my uncle’s big magnolia-flanked house. (They’re both fanatical about the university’s nationally respected football team, and Nate and my brother still have a long-distance NCAA pool going.) I guess I’m a sucker for a man with a languorous drawl.

When I went to my first preschool, in the high school where my father taught, I became passionately enamored of Roger, a quiet boy with shiny dark hair whom I distinctly remember in a bright red sweater. He was almost entirely impassive, but finally, at the picnic on the last day of school, he let me hold his hand, and we went running around together in the grass. That was a happy day. The next year, at a different preschool housed in a church, I longingly watched another adorable brunette named Bernard play, totally absorbed, with the church nursery’s collection of cars and trucks. I was too shy to say so much as boo to him, and would never have dreamed of trying to play with the cars and trucks to be close to him. He was scarcely aware of my existence, anyway…but his cherub-faced friend Jacob at least smiled at me, and came to my fourth birthday party. He let me kiss him on the cheek, the only part of my birthday I remember.

It went on from there, an inconsequential history of mostly fruitless yearning. The D’Angelo twins, beautiful olive-skinned Italian boys with big fawn eyes, regarded me with wary curiosity, but let me sit at their desk. I had a crush on most of the boys in my first grade class — including Daniel DuMont, to whom I presented a Snoopy I had lovingly and painstakingly fashioned out of Legos. He simply blinked at me with his long, dark eyelashes, looking mildly amused, as if I had just made some kind of lame joke. Then there was Peter Winters, one grade ahead of me, who stood by uncertainly when his squinty, straw-haired little punk of a friend Colin bullied me to tears on my walk home. And Dennis Noble, to whom I handed my autograph book with a thumping heart, who proceeded to write a cruel rhyme about my weight. (Not very noble.) That Luke Skywalker lookalike I once mentioned, in my youth group, to whom I could barely say hello. Most of my big brother’s buddies, to whom I may as well have been a gnat.

And that’s only a fraction of all that there were — in elementary school.

I had to have been born this way.

**

In a vivid dream I had, I have just been wed to an impossibly beautiful groom in an impossibly beautiful tuxedo (whom I will pretend doesn’t remotely resemble anyone I’ve ever met, because nothing scares a man like the mention of a wedding, even if it’s a symbol in a woman’s subconscious). I’m basking in the unbelievably thrilling and unfamiliar feeling of having captured the heart of such an unbelievably radiant and desirable creature, when I realize that he has suddenly disappeared. Without a word or a trace. I have been left standing in the austere, mostly empty sanctuary of the evangelical church I grew up in, with my mother and Jerry Baines. They’re making small talk about nothing, and I’m starting to panic. Where is he?

Jerry Baines was the low-key, serious boy in my youth group with whom my parents (and his) would have liked to see me. I did go to his senior prom as a sophomore (and to the movies once or twice after that), simply because he asked me. He was the only boy asking me to do anything in those days. I wasn’t the least bit attracted to him, and we didn’t have much in common besides Jesus, so our stilted conversations required a lot of effort. But his parents and mine seemed very excited about the whole idea of us. (I, of course, had other ideas — not to mention other crushes.)

Just remembering this dream makes me furious, with the irrational ire of a superstitious agnostic who has failed thus far to build a successful life of her own. Because I know that the internalized message my mother, and evangelical fundamentalists in general, would like me to retain is this: Everything else in this world will pass away, but we will still be here, waiting for our lost lamb to come home.

In other words, I can try to lead what I believe is my own life, independent of their smothering dogmas and treacly godliness — pursuing my doomed, “selfish” desires as long as I can, even almost getting there — but in the end I’ll be left, like the Prodigal, with nothing but the church, my blood family, and whatever Jerry Baines they want for me.

What I pursue wholeheartedly, like my cousin and so many others after him, will invariably flee me; what I flee wholeheartedly will inevitably catch up with me.

Not the happiest snapshot from my subconscious.

**

Our unapologetically potty-mouthed friend Russ the Librarian has told me that “p*ssy rules,” but I remain unconvinced that mine rules much of anything. Certainly not all mankind. No, I doubt it rules so much as a minor fiefdom. It’s actually probably more the power-equivalent of an aide to a junior member of City Council. In other words, it’s more likely to get sent off on a lackey’s errand to the post office than it is to ever make it to chambers. (Of course, I think I told you, in an earlier post, that when they were handing them out I got issued a defective model I had to try to hammer out myself.)

But seriously, folks…while I’m on this Rodney Dangerfield riff, I could tell you about the only Valentine’s Day in my 41 years that I actually spent with a significant other.

My much older suitor and I had gone to see a local production of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (for V-day, naturally) that evening after dinner. It was well acted and powerful, and, as anyone who has ever seen it knows, quite graphic in its imagery and language. He was visibly affected, saying that it was a play everyone needed to see.

Later on, however, back at his house, he informed me that he wasn’t in the mood to get amorous — my best lingerie be damned — and that we would be going to bed to sleep. “After spending two hours at the slaughterhouse,” he said, “the last thing a man wants is a big, juicy steak.”

You gotta hand it to him, Seamus was a funny guy.

So that was my one shot at a “romantic” Valentine’s Day.

I wasn’t hugely turned on by my boomer beau, to be honest, and I definitely wasn’t in love with him, but he smelled good, and it was nice (not to mention novel) to have access to some male anatomy on a regular basis. Seamus came along after I had been spurned repeatedly by a self-proclaimed hermit of my own generation who bore a passing resemblance to Al Pacino and wrote music columns for the local alternative weekly. (I credit him with turning me onto obscure, wacky bands like Critters Buggin as well as indie veterans like The Flaming Lips.) After Tony’s tetchy rejections, I was tired of feeling like a social and sexual leper. So at the time it didn’t matter as much that Seamus and I didn’t have any kind of deeper connection, or that I felt like averting my eyes when he undressed. For once in my life, I was like everybody else. For once in my life, I was normal.

We would go out to dinner or the movies on a Saturday night, and he would hold my hand, and I was a legitimate heterosexual female for a change. I felt like a little girl playing dress-up, playing at a grownup relationship that had little or no substance. (No one else had to know that, of course.)

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how many people we see, out and about, are playing that way.

**

Yes, I know it’s not that hard for a relatively decent-looking female to have somebody. I’ve tolerated sexual contact on a number of occasions that left me feeling — to borrow an image from novelist Nathaniel West — like a bottle being filled with tepid, dirty water. That’s the perfect description for the sheer ickiness of allowing oneself to be pawed and poked and slobbered upon against the desires and preferences of one’s own keenly attuned body and senses. The experience reminded me of nothing so much as choking down the cold, greasy brussels sprouts my mother insisted I eat before I could leave the dinner table. (I should add that one of my girlfriends adores brussels sprouts. With people, as with food, it’s all a matter of taste.)

Overriding visceral physical aversion with the will is tantamount to a kind of self-rape. I imagine prostitutes do it every day. I wouldn’t do it again.

The difference between feeling this and feeling real desire and pleasure is the difference between a brussels sprouts experience and having the smooth cocoa-butter sweetness of a creamy truffle melt silkily over the tongue and slide, thick and rich, down the throat. I recall a recent controversy involving a leader in the British National Party comparing rape to force-feeding a woman chocolate cake. I thought at the time, wow, that guy really, really doesn’t get it.

Nor did Woody Allen, for that matter, when he famously quipped “Sex is like pizza. When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.” No, Woody, for some of us it’s like sushi: when it’s good, it’s really good, but when it’s bad, it may make us want to vomit. The most “skilled” lover I ever encountered in my less than legendary career, a one-night stand from a bar, was extremely sensuous, a virtuoso of a kisser, and did everything “right” — and I couldn’t wait to get away from him. I stood under a scalding hot shower for thirty minutes, trying to scrub the smell of him off my skin and spit the taste of him out of my mouth, shuddering.

I’m too much of an animal, perhaps — too sensitive to pheromones — but it works the other way as well. Once, I was with someone I could have eaten alive, with a spoon. He didn’t push any secret magic buttons, and he didn’t kiss me as much as I might have liked, but he was all smooth cocoa-butter sweetness and silky richness and I could have had that for dessert every damn day of my life for the rest of forever. When he held me against him, I melted into his body, as if I were made of chocolate too.

**

I wonder who’s kissing her now, the old song goes. Much of my holiday suffering has usually been due to that kind of wondering, on a day when the collective consensus is that we must all make googly-eyes and buy that special someone candy or roses and have mind-blowing sexual experiences, the complicated logistics of which we picked up from Glamour or Maxim in the checkout line. Most of this, I know, is nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy. Nevertheless, I always wondered where Brendan was, where Tony was, where whoever the object of my desire was, on that particular day…whether they were alone, or with some slender little slip of a thing who was wearing some slender little slip of a thing. (An active mind can be an exquisite instrument of self-torture.)

This year is no different. I know a man like Sonny won’t be alone; Facebook updates tease at goings-on I can only guess at. I don’t want to guess. It could be one woman, or ten. I can’t complain; I had my opportunity. The window cracked open, then closed. So I drag out my mental file box of coping recipes and stand picking through my closet of strategies, trying to find something that will remedy the restlessness and discomfort, the shiftless dread and the dull ache of one more disappointing year, in what seems — taken with all the disappointments that came before — to be becoming just a long, tedious slog toward an anticlimactic mound of dirt. Had we but world enough, and time…

Here’s a recipe for Gratitude, instructing that I begin by being glad that I still have a roof over my head, then add the fresh fruit in the crisper that was on sale this week, and blend with old friends who still call. It tastes good, but it’s not entirely filling. I pull Nonattachment out from the mothballs; it looked so attractively minimalist when I bought it, but it never did fit in the crotch, and now it feels tight across the chest. Creative Visualization, which I wore for a week straight last month, now looks like a tacky and ridiculous impracticality that will only lead to further humiliation (and possibly beatings) if I step outside my door. Maybe if I could just whip up some Presence…but you can’t whip up Presence. You have to use Surrender, and just sit with it.

This seems to involve the least amount of struggle, so I take the Presence card out of the recipe file and put it on the table. Set aside your expectations, it says. Separate what-is-now from what-was, and what you have no way of knowing. Sift through your perceptions until projection is at a minimum, and save only simple seeing. Add liberal amounts of Surrender…and let stand.

**

I walk slowly home in the purple twilight, practicing walking meditation, feeling my feet against the insoles of my shoes and my shoes against the pavement. The air is cold, and smells of dry leaves. Almost miraculously, the practice starts to work…

Gazing at the neon of a corner eatery glowing in the fading light, I feel my anxious, compulsive identity falling away, being shed like some 400-pound overcoat that perennially drags me down. All those stories — about cousin Nate and the D’Angelo twins and Jerry Baines and Seamus and Willy Wonka and brussels sprouts — they dissipate like phantoms in the immediate thus-ness of the winter dusk, and I remember how good it feels to forget who it is you think you are. This constructed and habitual entity we call the “self” can be such an endlessly worrisome, burdensome, and troublesome thing. I need a vacation from mine.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do, this Valentine’s Day — give myself a vacation from my self. Experience each moment as something wholly unique, the way newborns do, without prejudice. As for my once very close friend…if he, or anyone, is happy, is in love, that’s good — right? Maybe I’ll soak in the tub and have some Wonka bar. I’m not going to plan, or ruminate on the past, or even obsess about the present.

If nothing else, I’ll just sit still. And savor the sweet taste of freedom, of being no one.