Julie Klausner Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  SECTION ONE - here comes my childhood!

  broadway, daddy, and other barriers to loving me

  kermit the frog is a terrible boyfriend

  never tell them what you’re actually wearing

  be your own gay best friend

  twin cities

  SECTION TWO - missing knuckles, snowballing vegans, self-help books, and other atrocities

  the rules

  power of three

  white noise

  turn down the glamour

  star wars is a kids’ movie

  SECTION THREE - “crazy” is an std

  sweet sweeney agonistes

  the critic

  douche ziggy

  giants and monsters

  SECTION FOUR - exile in guyville

  paper clips versus larry flynt

  i don’t care about your band

  so you want to date a musician

  the kid

  did i come to brooklyn for this?

  red coats and mary wilkies

  SECTION FIVE - the house of no

  old acquaintances

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for Julie Klausner and I Don’t Care About Your Band

  “Julie Klausner has the perfect comedic voice for a new generation of ladies—brave, self-deprecating, high-larious beyond, and brand spanking new. It’s one of those books that you take to bed with you, that keeps you up all night, and that makes you laugh so hard in public the next morning that strangers ask you what you’re reading. And make me so glad I’m not dating.”

  —Jill Soloway, author of Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants and executive producer of United States of Tara

  “If you think dating can’t get any worse, then you haven’t read this book. Julie Klausner’s hilarious memoir will remind you that the worse the date, the better the story it’ll eventually make. If nothing else, you’ll be comforted by the fact that YOUR blind date was never arrested for kidnapping.”—Em & Lo, EMandLO.com

  “Julie Klausner is Helen Girly Brown: hard-working, yet lusty! Romantic and intelligent! But best of all: unapologetic about wanting to be in love. I Don’t Care About Your Band has more wit and all of the tsuris of Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex and the City, without the pithy bromides.”—Sarah Thyre, author of Dark at the Roots and actress on Strangers with Candy

  “All those misplaced orgasms and disappointing hookups with deviants were well worth it. Julie Klausner’s memoir is screamingly funny and wiser than a hooker with health insurance. Take it home for a ride!”—Michael Musto

  “Klausner fashions a breathy, vernacular-veering-into-vulgar, spastically woe-fi lled account of her youthful heartaches falling for guys who were just not that into her.”—Publishers Weekly

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  GOTHAM BOOKS

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, January

  Copyright © 2009 by Julie Klausner All rights reserved

  Lyrics to “Fuck and Run” reprinted with permission from Liz Phair.

  Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Klausner, Julie.

  I don’t care about your band : what I learned from indie rockers, trust funders, pornographers, faux-sensitive hipsters, felons, and other guys I’ve dated / by Julie Klausner. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18517-9

  1. Dating (Social customs)—Humor. 2. Man-woman relationships—Humor. I. Title. PN6231.D3K.7302’07—dc22 2009036016

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  FOR MY PARENTS

  I love you so much it is actually ridiculous. Thank you for your unwavering support in every single one of my creative and personal endeavors and beyond. Next time, I promise I’ll write a book you can read.

  introduction

  Two things about me before we get started.

  First of all, I will always be a subscriber to the sketch comedy philosophy of how a scene should unfold, which is “What? That sounds crazy! OK, I’ll do it.”

  The other thing is, I love men like it is my job.

  I LOVE men so much that I’ve never once considered what it would be like to “take a break” from dating them, or to focus my mind on other things besides falling in love with one, or to look for work in a field that’s more female-dominated, or anything else lesbians suggest you do after a guy breaks your heart. And despite repetitive instances of heartbreak, humiliations, failures, and mistakes I’ve accumulated, I’ve never stopped casting myself as the straight man in the sketch who agrees to do something bonkers; who submits to the recklessness and absurdity of optimism, time and time again.

  Here is why: I could never give up on the possibility of falling for someone who’d make all of the pies I took in the face worthwhile. And this is a book about how frustrating it is to keep returning to something disappointing you will not give up on.

  I am, by nature, an expert grudge hoarder. But I don’t save up my grudges for breakups—for me, it’s the disappointments that haunt me like Fail Ghosts. I dwell and retread and mourn relatio
nships that could have been with characters you’ll meet soon. There are some doozies! And I haven’t even included the story about the guy I met at a Korean barbecue restaurant who said, after I remarked on the grill built into our table, that the place was perfect for a blind date, because, “if you don’t like your date’s face, you can just mash it into the grill.” That guy deserves a book of his own, but I think Bret Easton Ellis already wrote it.

  What follows in this book are selective stories of guys who came on strong, then sputtered out; high hopes shattered by mucky realities; and romantic miscarriages I had to clean up myself, which is as gross as it sounds.

  I DID not embark on the task of writing this book for the sake of basking in my own woe, Cathy cartoonlike. And by no means is this a cathartic assemblage of “He Done Me Wrong” stories served hot. I’m not PJ Harvey, and this isn’t 1998. I wrote these stories strewn with romantic collateral damage because I think they’re funny now that I’ve stopped crying, and because I learned things from them I hope will resonate with women who’ve snacked on similarly empty fare when it comes to guys.

  And there are so many guys. I remember the first time a friend referred to a guy I liked as a “man,” and I made a face like I was asking Willis what he was talkin’ ’bout. A man is hard to find, good or otherwise, but guys are everywhere now. That’s why women go nuts for Don Draper on Mad Men. If that show was called Mad Guys, it might star Joe Pesci, and nobody wants to see that.

  Meanwhile, I know way more women than girls. There’s a whole generation of us who rode on the wings of feminism’s entitlement like it was a Pegasus with cornrows, knowing how smart we were and how we could be anything. The problem is that we ended up at the mercy of a generation of guys who don’t quite seem to know what’s expected of them, whether it’s earning a double income or texting someone after she blows you. There are no more traditions or standards, and manners are like cleft chins or curly hair—they only run in some families.

  It seems like everybody is just confused.

  I know grown women who flip out like teenyboppers once they sense a sea change in a guy who seemed to be in it for the long haul but got scared after some innocuous exchange, and now they feel responsible. (“I shouldn’t have sent that text with that dumb joke!”) There are ladies who hook up instead of date because those are the crumbs to feast on when they are starving. Women who feel awful because they knew a guy was bad news, but got involved anyway, then got attached, and now they feel terrible not just because biology kicked in—“I had an orgasm and I like him now!”—but because they feel bad for feeling bad. Like it wasn’t enough just to feel bad because he didn’t call you after his dick was inside you. Now, you have to feel bad because you’re not allowed to feel bad.

  Because we can hook up just to hook up now. Because you knew what you were getting into. And you did anyway. But then everything changed.

  And instead of being the way some guys are at that age, let’s say in their late thirties, and they’ve never been married, and there’s a ticking clock but they don’t hear it because they’re like, “My career!” or “Look at all these twenty-five-year-old girls who let me make out with them even though they didn’t when I was in high school!”—you don’t shut yourself off. You don’t stop trying to connect. You don’t close up like a clam, even when it gets hard to tell the difference between who you are and how you are treated.

  You keep trying, in the nature of optimism; in the nature of believing in humanity, like Carole King told our moms to do. And when you cry about things not working out, you’re crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn’t seem to care you’re alive for some reason that’s beyond everything you’ve been told by teachers, parents, friends and everybody else who knows how awesome you are—who helped make you that way—but also, because you’re ashamed of yourself for crying.

  IT’S PART of the female disposition to take the blame for failed things. We’re not as entitled as men, even fictional ones, like Will Hunting, who only needed Robin Williams to scream “It’s not your fault!” to board the self-esteem bus after breaking down. Meanwhile, when we get hurt, we’re ashamed right away.

  You stop confiding in people when they ask why you’re upset, because you don’t want to enter a debate on a side you can’t defend. You feel like you were wrong taking a chance on a guy you should’ve known couldn’t give you what you wanted, and in a way, you feel you deserved what you got.

  But here’s the thing: You sanction that kind of behavior when you keep quiet. When you don’t tell your friends it happened because you’re ashamed of what you did and how you reacted to it, and you rationalize that it was something you did that made him shy away. That it was because you slept with him too soon. Because you didn’t play hard to get. You didn’t follow the rules and you failed to act like a hooker who just shrugs and moves on to the next conquest, like those are the only two things a girl can do.

  You blame your own fundamental attractiveness, figuring that somewhere in between him pursuing you and his losing interest, you did something that made him stop liking you. You called him too soon or too much. You made a dumb joke. You texted him too late after he texted you, and then he didn’t respond. Maybe he hated your taste in the books he saw on your shelf. Maybe he cringed when you used that emoticon in your last e-mail. Or maybe somehow, he caught wind of your secret—that you were actually unlovable. Needy, ugly, fat, desperate, whatever it is you’re afraid of guys finding out you are or you think you are—even if it’s a person who just has the balls to remain ardently committed to the act of falling in love.

  So you tell yourself that you’re practicing the art of connecting and disconnecting, in hopes that the latter will get easier the more it happens. That you’ll get more casual with practice. But you don’t.

  And you feel worse each time. And you figure it’s because you’re a big, dumb idiot for wanting to keep taking chances.

  Well, guess what? You’re pretty smart for an idiot. And I wrote this book for you and everybody else after my own sloppy, panting heart who, despite our disappointments, trudge on, looking for what we know is real.

  It’s just got to be.

  SECTION ONE

  here comes my childhood!

  “Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.”

  —Pauline Kael, For Keeps

  “You are special! Never stop believing that!”

  —Daddy Warbucks, in Annie

  broadway, daddy, and other barriers to loving me

  There are two kinds of girls who drift toward the more unsavory characters in the dating pool. There are, first of all, the kind of girls who’ve been ignored, abandoned, or otherwise treated ambivalently by their dads, and look to creeps as a means of replicating the treatment to which they’ve grown accustomed. These are the kind of girls who endure neglect, hostility, rigorous mind-fuckings, repetitive late-night texts that start “Hey, I’m in your neighborhood . . .” or long stretches of total disappearance from men who reinforce their earliest-learned notion of how a boy should treat a girl. Some of them strip. Some of them strip ironically. Plenty are a great deal of fun at dinner parties.

  The other kind of girls who wallow in the Valley of the Dipsticks are the ones who know they deserve better. These are the girls with the great dads; the ones who had their decks stacked from the outset, who knew it couldn’t get any better in the guy department than the one who taught her how to ride her bike. This is the princess who knows only to la- lala-la-la-la-live for today, confident she will always have her daddy to lavish her with the spoils of high-octane attention once the bastard of the week flies the turkey coop. She already has a mensch on the back burner, so in the suitor department, she is not looking for much of a multitasker—just like the married man who doesn’t care whether his mistress can get along with his friends. This category of girls, in which I include myself, has a tendency to exceed her allotted bullshit quota for boys she likes, if only because her stubborn mind will not
reconcile the notion of wonderful things ever coming to an end.

  My dad was the first man I ever loved so much it hurt. He was always around, from our current-events chat over bowls of Total in the morning, to the most catastrophic of devastations, like when I was ten, and something I thought was horrible happened to me. I hadn’t made it past the second callback for a community theater production of Annie.

  I mourned my soiled future as my father and I sped home along the Sprain Parkway in the family Toyota Cressida. We were twenty minutes past the exit for Briarcliff Manor when I finally stopped sobbing. My dad, trying to seem sympathetic, told me to listen to the radio; that it would help distract me. I stared out the window, watching my dreams die.

  My ten-year-old mind had figured that starring as Annie in a production of the show of the same name would have finally provided me with sweet, elusive, abstract victory. I knew I could play that role better than any of my peers from camp and school. But this production—the one I didn’t get—was going to be cast with actual adults in the roles of the grown-up characters in the show; adults like Oliver Warbucks, the billionaire, and Lily St. Regis, the squeaky-voiced trollop. And that made the rejection even worse.

  Like a lot of nerdy kids, I was a bit too congenial with grown-ups. I competed for the attention of teachers and my parents’ friends like they were the ones who could rescue me from the company of kids my age, and usher me, via minivan, into the promised land of Eileen Fisher tunics and Merlot. I wanted so badly, in general, to be in the company of elders. And this play—not just any play, but Annie, the quintessential ’80s musical about narcissism and striving—seemed like a perfect chance to work in tandem with adults. The kind of people who have checking accounts and pubic hair! I ached with singular ambition to hold hands with an actual grown-up man with a shorn head or in a bald cap, and croon in counterpoint, “I’m poor as a mouse!” “I’m richer than Midas!” musically articulating the main way in which Annie and Oliver Warbucks were different.