I met Randall Chase on the subway, late one Thursday night. I was on the way home from a movie and a few drinks with girlfriends at a nearby bar, and when we both boarded at Union Square, he sat down across from me. I noticed his shoes above the pages of my magazine: Adidas, new, tastefully gray (none of the fluorescent orange stuff the kids are so crazy about these days). The shoes led upwards to a pair of baggy khakis, a shock of floppy blond hair, two cheekbones flushed red with coldor alcohol, I wasn't sureand a pair of brown eyes that glistened even in the flat light of the N train. I took off my headphones as an excuse to flip my hair, and when I went to put them back on, my copy of Rolling Stone went flitting off my lap and across the sticky subway floor to land at his feet. He picked it up by the corner, careful not to touch any more of the paper than necessary, and in one compact move, reached across and planted it back on my bag. I slapped a hand down across its pages and said, "Thank you," ducking my eyes under my bangs and flitting them in my most attractive fashion.
"Not a problem," he replied. "Though you might want to think about your choice of reading material."
"Oh, this," I laughed, trying to hide the address label on the front cover and not be marked as a subscriber. "It's disposable. If I get sick of carrying it, I can just throw it away."
"Planning a long night, then?" he said, elbows to knees, elongated torso stretching gracefully over the linoleum.
Noticing that the entire subway car was silent except for our inane conversation and the tinny music from my headphones, I whispered, "I'm sorrydo I know you?"
"Randall Chase, the man you've been watching since Union Square," he nodded, finally completing his journey into obtrusive by getting up and standing so that his crotch was uncomfortably close to my face.
Ok, ok, I thought. So I brought this on myself. "Right," I scrambled, leaning as far back in the seat as humanly possible. "Ive been watching you. Through the pages of my magazine. Using my x-ray vision."
"No, you've been watching me through your cute little bangs.
I must have looked surprised, because he nodded. Oh yeah, he smiled, I'm on to girls like you."
So, come onI had to talk to him. I couldn't believe he called me on the old bangs-as-a-duck-blind trick. I squeezed over into the shopping bags of the sleeping Dominican woman on my left, freeing up just enough bench space for Randall to join me, and turned off my walkman. Surprisingly, I found him articulate, mysterious, and completely charming (in a boy-band sort of way). He stared a little too much, making me play with my hair more than I might under normal circumstances, but by the end of the ride, it was clear that Randall Chase was definitely going to be a fun new hobby.
When we got off the subway and into the deli, I bought a pack of cigarettes and some Altoids and he bought three bags of beef jerky and a grapefruit. When we got to the bar around the corner from my house, no amount of demurring could convince him that I really did indeed wish to go home. Hours later, when I declared that Id had enough and he simply must release me back into the wild, Randall stood and gave my stool a swift kick. It was like in those old movies my dad made me watch, where the waiter yanks the tablecloth out from under the full set of dinner dishes without a single fork falling out of place: the stool popped out from under my drunk rear end and planted me, miraculously, square on my drunk feet. I have no idea how he'd kept me from landing face down on the sawdust barroom floor, but there was no time to askI grabbed my cigarettes and coat and sloshed out the door, which was just closing behind him.
Standing outside the bar in the thin clear morning light, I scuffed my boots around on the concrete, trying to avoid the fact that Randall was still staring at me with great intensity. Amazing, I thought; how could there still be anything to examine on my face? And just as I was reaching up for the umpteenth time to fuss with my hair, or scratch my nose, or rub my eyes, or something, anything, to keep me from having to stare back, Randall's hand darted out and the next thing I knew, he was holding my Rolling Stone. He rolled it into a tube and used the very tip to brush my bangs back and hold them, planted there under the magazine, on top of my head. My hand, caught mid-fidget, hung trapped in midair.
"Stop squirming," Randall said. "We have work to do."
With that, he lifted me over his shoulder and carried me off to his apartment. I didn't fight. I was just happy someone else was doing all the work for a change. Though I kind of got the scary idea that I might have the situation all wrong, and I was about to become a hobby for Randall Chase.
The next morning, when I woke up on his sofa, I was still wearing my shoes and my coat, and my bag, which was draped under one arm and wedged uncomfortably behind my head as a pillow. The creased Rolling Stone was poking bashfully out of the top. My leg was asleep. Randall was not.
"Up! Up! Up!" he barked, hoisting me to my feet. "We're burnin' daylight!"
"Where am I?" I yawned, trying to get a grip on my surroundings.
"See, that's your problem," Randall hollered, "always worried with the Now! It's not Where We Are, but Where We Are GOING! Up! Up! Up!"
+++
Over the next three days, we did the following things:
1. Visited his grandmother in a convalescent home on Long Island, stopping at every LIRR station to do cartwheels in the parking lot. He cartwheeled, I smoked. That is, until he grabbed the Winston Light out of my mouth, cast it into the convertible parked next to us, and said, "You are missing the point, my dear." Slowly, apprehensively, I did one sloppy cartwheel. Gravel dug into the palms of my hands and Randall whooped like a poor man at the races.
2. Bought ice cream cones for policemen and crossing guards and got melodramatic when they wouldn't take them.
3. Rode the Staten Island ferry four times, each time shimmying up the guardrails to sit on top of the wheelhouse, where, Randall insisted, the view was best. On that sunny Saturday afternoon, there were hundreds of boats out on the water, and Randall identified the make and model of each. This habit reminded me of my cousin, Brad, who used to do the same thing with the cars whizzing by as we sat in the backseat of my mother's white station wagon. Brad had a massive collection of Hot Wheels that he would spread out around him on the floor, categorized and color-coordinated; I pictured Randall in a bathtub with his fleet, gently shepherding each boat into its appointed slot, and then freaked myself out with the thought of Randall naked.
4. Attended a Knicks game, despite my protestations that I really wouldnt get anything out of it. I dont know the slightest thing about basketball, Randall, I warned. Im going to have some questions.
No questions, Randall declared. If youd watch more and ask less, you might learn a thing or two someday. He then bought me hot dog after hot dog, insisting that I needed to put meat on my bones and the nice vending man needed to put meat on his table. So in between illegally-smoked cigarettes, I choked down ambiguous meat products and watched a bunch of very small men run around a very small court, while Randall tried in vain to get the upper tier crowd to start The Wave.
5. In Manhattan, we walked everywhere. The subway, Randall said, was only for desperate times.
On Monday morning, when I awoke to fried eggs and half a grapefruit served to me on the sofa, Randall convinced me to call in sick to work and join him on the corner of the Rockefeller Center skating rink to dress up in a giant owl costume and try and get on the "Today" show. The plan was this: he had a sign advertising a small college in Florida where he said his uncle worked, and I, as the owl, was to get the attention of Al Roker and draw it towards the sign. The sign said, "Whooooo the Hell Has Ever Heard of South Central Florida State?" If we could get Al Roker to read the sign aloud on national television, I was to do a cartwheel. Until he did so, I was to walk around threatening tourists with a large plastic knife and swearing I'd slit my wrists unless the fat weatherman gave me the time of day. All of which I had to convey through mime, of course, because, as Randall made quite clear, owls don't talk.
At ten a.m., when the Today show went off the air, I was lying in a pool of fake blood and Randall was comforting an overweight couple from rural Iowa whose six year old son had been overcome by my little Kabuki drama. When he finally pointed them back towards the Marriott Marquis and we were alone upon the emptying plaza, he lifted me to my feet, removed my owl head, and brushed my bangs off my forehead. Holding them firmly back with one hand, he grabbed me by my padded, owlish waist with the other and kissed me.
A thousand cattle stampeded down my throat and into my liver, where they refused to graze politely but instead insisted upon trampling about on my smaller, more defenseless organs. When I opened my eyes, Randall Chase was gone, and I had a $50 bill in my furry winged palm.
+++
I told my girlfriends about the weekend on the following Thursday night, after whatever movie we saw (I was too caught up in my own drama to notice). They were, for the most part, useless.
He has your phone number but you dont have his?
You let him carry you to his house? Is he a caveman?
Whats with the $50? (shut up, I wanted to say, its paying for your cosmo.)
Im sorry. You said you dont have his phone number?
The facts were ugly, I had to admit. No one quite knew what to make of the pseudo-prostitutional weekend I'd had, and no one had anything in their experience to draw on for conversation. We fell into awkward silence and I found myself suddenly fascinated by the Knicks game on TV. When I got home, I wandered into the bathroom and stared in the mirror, watching the wrinkles around my mouth carve deeper as I smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Then I grabbed a pair of scissors out of a drawer and cut another thick section of my hair into bangs. Satisfied by the way I had further obscured my forehead, I crawled into bed and waited for the phone call.
When Randall called the next morning at nine, I was already up. I hadn't slept, actually, my brain rustling about with thoughts like, why me? and, I wonder when Canby's going to come off the D.L.?
"Up! Up! U"
I cut him off. "Where are we going?"
"Ah, you and the details again, my sweet. Open the window. I'm miles ahead of you, as usual." And as he spoke, I could hear his voice in stereo, rising up from the street where he stood, waving like a lunatic, traffic veering onto the sidewalk to avoid running him over.
The events of the second weekend were similar to the first: back out to Long Island to see Grandmawho, this time, treated me to $50 herself in return for a series of the cartwheels we'd been practicing so diligentlyand then six games of pool in a hall above a bodega on Avenue D that I don't think I could find my way back to if I was given a map. We continued our walking, making random calls at payphones on Randall's dime, to places like Rudy's Habib Kitchen and the 92nd Street Y. We spent Saturday night on the steps of Lincoln Center, shouting the license plate numbers of cars at the top of our lungs. For the first time, I found myself a little annoyed that Randall wouldnt tell me why we were doing this, wouldnt even let me ask. After all, riding the Staten Island Ferry was one thing, but sitting on cold granite steps and hollering for no apparent reason was something else entirely. And then, after two hours of the curious game, the sound of his unwavering voice started to fill me up with energy, and I soon matched it with my own, harmonizing through the water of the fountain and the click of the heels of the crowd filing out of the opera. He kissed me there, elsewhere, everywhere, each time with a glint that was not quite gentlemanly in his eyes, each time with his rough palm upon my forehead, grasping my hair.
Sunday night, when he left me on his sofa and headed into the bedroom, I followed him. As I passed through the doorframe, he turned on me and grabbed my face.
"If you're going to be in here," he said, "you're going to have to come out from under those bangs yourself. I need my hands free."
I grabbed a baseball cap off his dresser, slid it on backwards, and he smiled.
+++
After six weeks with Randall, it appears that Iwell, look: I wasn't myself anymore. I mean, I don't know who I was, but she wasn't me. Me spends her days in a generic office, Me passes the time with memos and filing, subway rides and deli coffee. She, on the other hand, She explores the city on foot, drinking Pakistani sodas in greaseball restaurants and playing hacky-sack with strangers on the USS Intrepid pier. How do you remove yourself from a situation that is scaring the shit out of you at the same time as it's bringing you back to life?
I couldn't tell my friends that it was still happening, because I'd long ago tired of the sort of dead and bloated looks on their faces every time I started a sentence with, "But he-" or "I don't know, maybe he-". No matter what defense I cooked up, Randall Chase had infiltrated my life to the point that the people closest to me viewed any mention of our relationship like some sort of unsightly rash or lesionimpossible to ignore, able to be dealt with only by aversion of the eyes or utilization of their caller ID to keep from having to hear me talk about Grandma or cartwheels or furry owl sex ever, ever again.
I had to admit to myself that I was trapped. That I'd wandered into one of those weird wrinkles in life that nothing can prepare you for, that even though you think you've got your head on your shoulders can still decapitate you and send you rolling down the hills of helplessness until you are a human yard sale on the front lawn of desperation. I had to get out. In the days and weeks that passed, I became what I thought was a total pill of a companion, but Randall seemed unfazed, even using my silence as an excuse to parade me from hospital to hospital, demanding that someone help his poor, mute cousin from the Netherlands.
The easy answer here was, of course, not to go out with him anymore, but the thing with easy answers is that they only work on paper and NBC sitcoms. On one level, Id have to be crazy to give up this gig, right? I mean, I was taking home cold, hard cash three nights a week for doing little more than being a willing stagehand in a one-man show: Randall Chase, Exclamation Point! But every time, every single time he brushed my bangs back, I felt like he was looking for something behind them that I wasn't ready to give, no matter how much money he was willing to spend to find it. In a way, I guess we both needed more from each other: he needed me to turn over my whole self to his whims, and I just needed him to give me one, simple answerwhy?
In time there came the morning that I rolled over to find an empty pillow beside me. I opened my eyes and saw that, somehow, I was wearing Randall's Jets t-shirtwhich was strange, because I could have sworn he'd used it to birth a litter of puppies in the Tompkins Square Park dog run the day before.
"I washed it," he said, before I could even look up.
"When?" I mumbled in disbelief.
"Will you never learn about these questions?"
My eyes had finally cleared: Randall was sitting in a chair next to the bed, knitting, and, of course, staring at me. And, by god, I didn't ask why, or what, or how the hell did you get this t-shirt on me without my noticing, and Jesus God, when did you wash it??? It was all getting too weird, for Me, for She, for everyone involved, except Randall. I pulled on my jeans, shoved the rest of my clothes in a plastic deli bag, and walked home without a coat. Shivering, I crawled into bed, still wearing the green shirt, and missed yet another day of work. I wouldn't hear the furious message from my soon-to-be-ex-boss for another two days; until I finally woke up for real.
+++
The last time Randall called, one week ago Friday, I didnt answer the phone. He didn't leave a message, just coughed twice and hung up. And now I am sitting exactly where I was when the phone rang and the answering machine coughed: on the floor of my shower, no water running, fully clothed.
It was my decision to end things, and I foolishly assumed that end, in this situation, would retain its meaning, i.e. conclude, finish, dispose of. It didn't seem like something I'd get hung up on, franklyjust another incident in this inexplicable city that I could write up in my journal, that I would laugh at six months down the road. It appears that I was wrong. I am jobless, friendless, and bored to tears, but at least all those things are on my terms. I think that if I can get the water turned on, I'll be fine.
And, in good news, it turned out that Grandma's $50 was still in the pocket of these jeans. I spent some of it this afternoon at Rite-Aid, buying a pack of barrettes to hold my bangs back from my face.
Whitney Pastorek is a writer, director, and international star of stage and screen. She is the editor of Pindeldyboz, and has written for the NY Post, Surface Magazine, Time Out, Village Voice, SF Chronicle, Westchester Journal News, and McSweeney's. She once interviewed the White Stripes for NPR's Morning Edition, has appeared on a VH-1 game show about Vanilla Ice, and is alleged to have vomited on Fred Durst. A complete list of everything is constantly in flux over at www.whittlz.com.
"Not a problem," he replied. "Though you might want to think about your choice of reading material."
"Oh, this," I laughed, trying to hide the address label on the front cover and not be marked as a subscriber. "It's disposable. If I get sick of carrying it, I can just throw it away."
"Planning a long night, then?" he said, elbows to knees, elongated torso stretching gracefully over the linoleum.
Noticing that the entire subway car was silent except for our inane conversation and the tinny music from my headphones, I whispered, "I'm sorrydo I know you?"
"Randall Chase, the man you've been watching since Union Square," he nodded, finally completing his journey into obtrusive by getting up and standing so that his crotch was uncomfortably close to my face.
Ok, ok, I thought. So I brought this on myself. "Right," I scrambled, leaning as far back in the seat as humanly possible. "Ive been watching you. Through the pages of my magazine. Using my x-ray vision."
"No, you've been watching me through your cute little bangs.
I must have looked surprised, because he nodded. Oh yeah, he smiled, I'm on to girls like you."
So, come onI had to talk to him. I couldn't believe he called me on the old bangs-as-a-duck-blind trick. I squeezed over into the shopping bags of the sleeping Dominican woman on my left, freeing up just enough bench space for Randall to join me, and turned off my walkman. Surprisingly, I found him articulate, mysterious, and completely charming (in a boy-band sort of way). He stared a little too much, making me play with my hair more than I might under normal circumstances, but by the end of the ride, it was clear that Randall Chase was definitely going to be a fun new hobby.
When we got off the subway and into the deli, I bought a pack of cigarettes and some Altoids and he bought three bags of beef jerky and a grapefruit. When we got to the bar around the corner from my house, no amount of demurring could convince him that I really did indeed wish to go home. Hours later, when I declared that Id had enough and he simply must release me back into the wild, Randall stood and gave my stool a swift kick. It was like in those old movies my dad made me watch, where the waiter yanks the tablecloth out from under the full set of dinner dishes without a single fork falling out of place: the stool popped out from under my drunk rear end and planted me, miraculously, square on my drunk feet. I have no idea how he'd kept me from landing face down on the sawdust barroom floor, but there was no time to askI grabbed my cigarettes and coat and sloshed out the door, which was just closing behind him.
Standing outside the bar in the thin clear morning light, I scuffed my boots around on the concrete, trying to avoid the fact that Randall was still staring at me with great intensity. Amazing, I thought; how could there still be anything to examine on my face? And just as I was reaching up for the umpteenth time to fuss with my hair, or scratch my nose, or rub my eyes, or something, anything, to keep me from having to stare back, Randall's hand darted out and the next thing I knew, he was holding my Rolling Stone. He rolled it into a tube and used the very tip to brush my bangs back and hold them, planted there under the magazine, on top of my head. My hand, caught mid-fidget, hung trapped in midair.
"Stop squirming," Randall said. "We have work to do."
With that, he lifted me over his shoulder and carried me off to his apartment. I didn't fight. I was just happy someone else was doing all the work for a change. Though I kind of got the scary idea that I might have the situation all wrong, and I was about to become a hobby for Randall Chase.
The next morning, when I woke up on his sofa, I was still wearing my shoes and my coat, and my bag, which was draped under one arm and wedged uncomfortably behind my head as a pillow. The creased Rolling Stone was poking bashfully out of the top. My leg was asleep. Randall was not.
"Up! Up! Up!" he barked, hoisting me to my feet. "We're burnin' daylight!"
"Where am I?" I yawned, trying to get a grip on my surroundings.
"See, that's your problem," Randall hollered, "always worried with the Now! It's not Where We Are, but Where We Are GOING! Up! Up! Up!"
+++
Over the next three days, we did the following things:
1. Visited his grandmother in a convalescent home on Long Island, stopping at every LIRR station to do cartwheels in the parking lot. He cartwheeled, I smoked. That is, until he grabbed the Winston Light out of my mouth, cast it into the convertible parked next to us, and said, "You are missing the point, my dear." Slowly, apprehensively, I did one sloppy cartwheel. Gravel dug into the palms of my hands and Randall whooped like a poor man at the races.
2. Bought ice cream cones for policemen and crossing guards and got melodramatic when they wouldn't take them.
3. Rode the Staten Island ferry four times, each time shimmying up the guardrails to sit on top of the wheelhouse, where, Randall insisted, the view was best. On that sunny Saturday afternoon, there were hundreds of boats out on the water, and Randall identified the make and model of each. This habit reminded me of my cousin, Brad, who used to do the same thing with the cars whizzing by as we sat in the backseat of my mother's white station wagon. Brad had a massive collection of Hot Wheels that he would spread out around him on the floor, categorized and color-coordinated; I pictured Randall in a bathtub with his fleet, gently shepherding each boat into its appointed slot, and then freaked myself out with the thought of Randall naked.
4. Attended a Knicks game, despite my protestations that I really wouldnt get anything out of it. I dont know the slightest thing about basketball, Randall, I warned. Im going to have some questions.
No questions, Randall declared. If youd watch more and ask less, you might learn a thing or two someday. He then bought me hot dog after hot dog, insisting that I needed to put meat on my bones and the nice vending man needed to put meat on his table. So in between illegally-smoked cigarettes, I choked down ambiguous meat products and watched a bunch of very small men run around a very small court, while Randall tried in vain to get the upper tier crowd to start The Wave.
5. In Manhattan, we walked everywhere. The subway, Randall said, was only for desperate times.
On Monday morning, when I awoke to fried eggs and half a grapefruit served to me on the sofa, Randall convinced me to call in sick to work and join him on the corner of the Rockefeller Center skating rink to dress up in a giant owl costume and try and get on the "Today" show. The plan was this: he had a sign advertising a small college in Florida where he said his uncle worked, and I, as the owl, was to get the attention of Al Roker and draw it towards the sign. The sign said, "Whooooo the Hell Has Ever Heard of South Central Florida State?" If we could get Al Roker to read the sign aloud on national television, I was to do a cartwheel. Until he did so, I was to walk around threatening tourists with a large plastic knife and swearing I'd slit my wrists unless the fat weatherman gave me the time of day. All of which I had to convey through mime, of course, because, as Randall made quite clear, owls don't talk.
At ten a.m., when the Today show went off the air, I was lying in a pool of fake blood and Randall was comforting an overweight couple from rural Iowa whose six year old son had been overcome by my little Kabuki drama. When he finally pointed them back towards the Marriott Marquis and we were alone upon the emptying plaza, he lifted me to my feet, removed my owl head, and brushed my bangs off my forehead. Holding them firmly back with one hand, he grabbed me by my padded, owlish waist with the other and kissed me.
A thousand cattle stampeded down my throat and into my liver, where they refused to graze politely but instead insisted upon trampling about on my smaller, more defenseless organs. When I opened my eyes, Randall Chase was gone, and I had a $50 bill in my furry winged palm.
+++
I told my girlfriends about the weekend on the following Thursday night, after whatever movie we saw (I was too caught up in my own drama to notice). They were, for the most part, useless.
He has your phone number but you dont have his?
You let him carry you to his house? Is he a caveman?
Whats with the $50? (shut up, I wanted to say, its paying for your cosmo.)
Im sorry. You said you dont have his phone number?
The facts were ugly, I had to admit. No one quite knew what to make of the pseudo-prostitutional weekend I'd had, and no one had anything in their experience to draw on for conversation. We fell into awkward silence and I found myself suddenly fascinated by the Knicks game on TV. When I got home, I wandered into the bathroom and stared in the mirror, watching the wrinkles around my mouth carve deeper as I smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Then I grabbed a pair of scissors out of a drawer and cut another thick section of my hair into bangs. Satisfied by the way I had further obscured my forehead, I crawled into bed and waited for the phone call.
When Randall called the next morning at nine, I was already up. I hadn't slept, actually, my brain rustling about with thoughts like, why me? and, I wonder when Canby's going to come off the D.L.?
"Up! Up! U"
I cut him off. "Where are we going?"
"Ah, you and the details again, my sweet. Open the window. I'm miles ahead of you, as usual." And as he spoke, I could hear his voice in stereo, rising up from the street where he stood, waving like a lunatic, traffic veering onto the sidewalk to avoid running him over.
The events of the second weekend were similar to the first: back out to Long Island to see Grandmawho, this time, treated me to $50 herself in return for a series of the cartwheels we'd been practicing so diligentlyand then six games of pool in a hall above a bodega on Avenue D that I don't think I could find my way back to if I was given a map. We continued our walking, making random calls at payphones on Randall's dime, to places like Rudy's Habib Kitchen and the 92nd Street Y. We spent Saturday night on the steps of Lincoln Center, shouting the license plate numbers of cars at the top of our lungs. For the first time, I found myself a little annoyed that Randall wouldnt tell me why we were doing this, wouldnt even let me ask. After all, riding the Staten Island Ferry was one thing, but sitting on cold granite steps and hollering for no apparent reason was something else entirely. And then, after two hours of the curious game, the sound of his unwavering voice started to fill me up with energy, and I soon matched it with my own, harmonizing through the water of the fountain and the click of the heels of the crowd filing out of the opera. He kissed me there, elsewhere, everywhere, each time with a glint that was not quite gentlemanly in his eyes, each time with his rough palm upon my forehead, grasping my hair.
Sunday night, when he left me on his sofa and headed into the bedroom, I followed him. As I passed through the doorframe, he turned on me and grabbed my face.
"If you're going to be in here," he said, "you're going to have to come out from under those bangs yourself. I need my hands free."
I grabbed a baseball cap off his dresser, slid it on backwards, and he smiled.
+++
After six weeks with Randall, it appears that Iwell, look: I wasn't myself anymore. I mean, I don't know who I was, but she wasn't me. Me spends her days in a generic office, Me passes the time with memos and filing, subway rides and deli coffee. She, on the other hand, She explores the city on foot, drinking Pakistani sodas in greaseball restaurants and playing hacky-sack with strangers on the USS Intrepid pier. How do you remove yourself from a situation that is scaring the shit out of you at the same time as it's bringing you back to life?
I couldn't tell my friends that it was still happening, because I'd long ago tired of the sort of dead and bloated looks on their faces every time I started a sentence with, "But he-" or "I don't know, maybe he-". No matter what defense I cooked up, Randall Chase had infiltrated my life to the point that the people closest to me viewed any mention of our relationship like some sort of unsightly rash or lesionimpossible to ignore, able to be dealt with only by aversion of the eyes or utilization of their caller ID to keep from having to hear me talk about Grandma or cartwheels or furry owl sex ever, ever again.
I had to admit to myself that I was trapped. That I'd wandered into one of those weird wrinkles in life that nothing can prepare you for, that even though you think you've got your head on your shoulders can still decapitate you and send you rolling down the hills of helplessness until you are a human yard sale on the front lawn of desperation. I had to get out. In the days and weeks that passed, I became what I thought was a total pill of a companion, but Randall seemed unfazed, even using my silence as an excuse to parade me from hospital to hospital, demanding that someone help his poor, mute cousin from the Netherlands.
The easy answer here was, of course, not to go out with him anymore, but the thing with easy answers is that they only work on paper and NBC sitcoms. On one level, Id have to be crazy to give up this gig, right? I mean, I was taking home cold, hard cash three nights a week for doing little more than being a willing stagehand in a one-man show: Randall Chase, Exclamation Point! But every time, every single time he brushed my bangs back, I felt like he was looking for something behind them that I wasn't ready to give, no matter how much money he was willing to spend to find it. In a way, I guess we both needed more from each other: he needed me to turn over my whole self to his whims, and I just needed him to give me one, simple answerwhy?
In time there came the morning that I rolled over to find an empty pillow beside me. I opened my eyes and saw that, somehow, I was wearing Randall's Jets t-shirtwhich was strange, because I could have sworn he'd used it to birth a litter of puppies in the Tompkins Square Park dog run the day before.
"I washed it," he said, before I could even look up.
"When?" I mumbled in disbelief.
"Will you never learn about these questions?"
My eyes had finally cleared: Randall was sitting in a chair next to the bed, knitting, and, of course, staring at me. And, by god, I didn't ask why, or what, or how the hell did you get this t-shirt on me without my noticing, and Jesus God, when did you wash it??? It was all getting too weird, for Me, for She, for everyone involved, except Randall. I pulled on my jeans, shoved the rest of my clothes in a plastic deli bag, and walked home without a coat. Shivering, I crawled into bed, still wearing the green shirt, and missed yet another day of work. I wouldn't hear the furious message from my soon-to-be-ex-boss for another two days; until I finally woke up for real.
+++
The last time Randall called, one week ago Friday, I didnt answer the phone. He didn't leave a message, just coughed twice and hung up. And now I am sitting exactly where I was when the phone rang and the answering machine coughed: on the floor of my shower, no water running, fully clothed.
It was my decision to end things, and I foolishly assumed that end, in this situation, would retain its meaning, i.e. conclude, finish, dispose of. It didn't seem like something I'd get hung up on, franklyjust another incident in this inexplicable city that I could write up in my journal, that I would laugh at six months down the road. It appears that I was wrong. I am jobless, friendless, and bored to tears, but at least all those things are on my terms. I think that if I can get the water turned on, I'll be fine.
And, in good news, it turned out that Grandma's $50 was still in the pocket of these jeans. I spent some of it this afternoon at Rite-Aid, buying a pack of barrettes to hold my bangs back from my face.
Whitney Pastorek is a writer, director, and international star of stage and screen. She is the editor of Pindeldyboz, and has written for the NY Post, Surface Magazine, Time Out, Village Voice, SF Chronicle, Westchester Journal News, and McSweeney's. She once interviewed the White Stripes for NPR's Morning Edition, has appeared on a VH-1 game show about Vanilla Ice, and is alleged to have vomited on Fred Durst. A complete list of everything is constantly in flux over at www.whittlz.com.
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or until i'm done with this comment