Top Class Posters

Not shaving is ok for dating

As my boyfriend Michael drove us to his place in his gray Honda, I recounted my weekend, “At the party, I shaved all of the right half of John Next Door while he was naked . . . but that was’t the worst part!”

Michael answered cautiously, eyes on the road, “No?”

“No, the worst part was Esther took off my hood with hers, and now everyone who sees the video around town will know it was us! I’ll never agree to do performance art again – its not subversive, it’s embarrassing!”

“Agh!!” Michael opened the door on my side of the car, and tried to push me out. I knew he was kidding, since I was still belted in, but I think that wasn’t the reaction I wanted.

I’ll never top that story, or get such a strong reaction from a listener again. I am too calm and settled. It sucks from a stand up comedy perspective.

The problem is this: I’m disconcertingly, happily married. Believe me when I tell you I didn’t intend that this happen. I come home each night to two cats and a house with un-pruned rosebushes. I fry a veggie burger with tofu cheese and sit on the couch. Later my husband comes home and joins me. We debate how well blow our four hour weekly TV allotment, read, and argue who’s turn it is to find the bills in the coffee table pile (it’s always Jims turn). I’m asleep before 11:00pm, and out of the door by 7:30am. What these sentences can’t show is how wonderful it feels? hard to show how happy I am made by sitting at my desk and looking through the window to my husband, making a TV stand from old birch pieces.

I do miss the old wild days of waking up different places, figuring out what subway stop was closest, and wending my way home, usually with a headache the size of Idaho. There was lots to spin yarns about, my friends and I would constantly astonish one another with what we’d done the night before.

I spray painted lines from “Buckaroo Banzai” on the walls of my old apartment. “I feel so break up, I want to go home,” still sounds exactly right. My friends and I were asked to leave a lesbian bar for dancing too intimately with the Brazilian boy band. I often passed out in my hammock on the roof, and woke to the sound of an empty bottle of Rasberry Riunite rolling on the shingles. I decided men around the age of 20 had many short term advantages and few long term problems. And there is a very practical reason why you shouldn’t walk over subway grates on hot evenings.

Now, the woman on the path who once stopped to smell the dancing boys stops to sniff the garbage disposal, a new tulip, her husband’s nape. It’s as quiet and easy as that, a turning from outward noise to a more inward hum. I’m just as immoderate in my marriage as I was in my single-hood, but the stories are less interesting.

I’m the Listener in most conversations with new friends, smiling and laughing. “Wow, that’s outrageous!” all the while seething to tell my stories, show my street cred. But these are new friends, and there is no good place for my old stories. I am not taking X every weekend, I’m making my arms sore shaking Slug and Snail Death around the front bed. There is no shocked laughter found in undone laundry, unwashed windows, and too many books. I keep mining my every day for drama and coming up short.

My husband is funny, sweet and the best kisser but I never shaved him naked for a performance piece. I never needed a Tarot reading because of a fight we were having. He never tried to push me out of a car. Our love is not wild cocktail party conversation.

Case in point: Valentines Day. I came home and found he’d left me postcards all over the house, different memories written on each one, covering our dating, romance and marriage ’til now. On the last one he’d written, “the future is flighty, but our love is certain. I love you.” This isn’t what I’d planned for. There was no doomed passion, no screaming while chasing a bus, no running through the heather toward Laurence Olivier.

So why am I weeping and smiling? But look, these postcards are photos of San Francisco, they look as if they were sepias, with light watercolor brush marks. He tricked me into showing him which ones I liked best in the book. “Let?s take turns making marks on the backs of which ones we like, just to see.” Then he ripped out all the ones I liked and wrote on them. One was on the front door; another taped to a drawing our friend Esther did of us dancing; another next to where we buried our kitty. He made me remember nine years of flirting, kissing, tears, losses. How strongly I am tied to him.

Would I go back to performance art and performance partying? I swear by my postcards I wouldn’t. But come, tell me your wild stories, and I’ll tell you some quieter ones.

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About the Author

Eric Dexter freelance writer residing in IL with her husband & daughter.

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