SoMa Literary Review - Personals Hell

Personals Hell

or How I Learned to Like Being Alone

By Angela Havel

Let me tell you about some perverts I met through the personals.

Actually, there was only one guy who undoubtedly qualified for pervert status. The rest of them seemed okay, as far as I could tell. But how can I say for sure? I never got to know them that well.

Maybe I was the biggest pervert of all for going out with guys as an experiment - the dates and the men to be eventually picked apart and examined.

You be the judge.

It all started when I placed a newspaper ad in the “Women Seeking Men” section of the San Jose Metro that read Suicidal female, 26, wants depressed poet/artist/musician for sick relationship.

I was depressed, but the ad was a joke, really, a jab in the gut to all those yuppies who wrote fragments of delusion like Me: Prince Charming w/BMW. You: Aerobicized blonde princess. Our future: Long romantic walks on the beach, hot sex, a lifetime of bliss. You know the kind. Something about these ads bugged me - if these people were so great, why the hell did they have to advertise? This was in 1989, at the start of the personal ad craze; I was working in the heart of the rat race of Silicon Valley as a courier/intern for the Metro. I could place free ads whenever I wanted. The receptionist Suzanne and I were friends and we’d read the personals even before they got printed, since she opened the mail. A rare few were achingly sincere, some were bizarre, but most just sounded phony and empty-headed.

A week earlier, the Metro had run a feature story about a woman’s experience placing a personal ad. Her story was kind of tame, though, like she wasn’t telling the whole truth. I told myself I could write a more interesting story—the “dark side of the personals.” This was in the back of my mind when I decided to place my ad.

Also, Suzanne egged me on--she was a lot more outgoing than me, that type of petite energetic woman with a quick smile who has a few ex-boyfriends who call periodically, another guy she sees “seriously,” and lot of guy friends. Maybe I was jealous of her. For whatever reasons, I had never felt very comfortable around men. At 26, I had been on only one date in my life, with a bulbous-nosed and slightly balding guy named Izzy who I had worked with in the acquisitions department at the San Jose Public Library. He was a nice enough guy, but there were no sparks.

I wasn’t so hot either. I carried my weight okay, but knew I could lose 25 pounds. And I had a tendency to look like I was always a little pissed at the world whether I meant to or not. So I kind of accepted my dud status in the dating world. But then I remembered this line in a Morrissey song: there’s people uglier than you and me who take what they want from life and I started getting mad at my self-imposed isolation from the social world. I really wasn’t that bad, just a little out of shape and not very smiley like men seem to want women to be. I figured maybe I needed a little social interaction to improve my outlook.

I was clear-headed about the whole thing. I knew the likelihood of finding a soul mate or whatever in the personals was nil, especially since my ad was too ironic to be taken seriously. Anyway, I told myself I wasn’t looking for a relationship or sex. Instead, I looked at my ad as an experiment in human behavior - I wondered how many weirdoes would call, and what forms their weirdness would take. Being something of a weirdo myself, I thought this was an experiment I would relish.

Boy, did they call. I expected maybe one or two responses on my voice mail line. Imagine my surprise when I got home from the Metro office the same Friday the ad ran, entered my voice mail code and heard an automated woman’s voice purr: “You have 18 messages.” I had never been so popular.

As I sat listening to 30-second messages, one after another, of guys trying to impress me, I was astounded at the leaps of faith they took by responding to my ad. For all they knew I was a cross-eyed blob with warts. Guess what? Turns out a lot of the men took my depressing little joke of an ad dead serious—they actually sounded depressed, some morbidly so. It was a revelation: I felt renewed, full of hope even, learning others were as miserable—better yet, more miserable than me. I had lived in San Jose two years without ever scratching anyone’s surface to find the sick black ooze inside. Here was my chance.

Step One: sorting out the mildly weird from the hardcore weird from 30 seconds of taped info. I purposely said nothing about looks in my ad because I told myself I didn’t care what the respondents looked like. But now I tried to put faces on these voices, and it was impossible. I would have to find out the hard way.

My list looked like this:

Lon—sounds sincere

Larry—sounds dull

John—read a poem

Steve—club DJ, a “joker,” kind of cocky sounding

Shannon—nice name

It was a longer list, but you get the idea. Some of them tried to tie in the “poet/artist” angle, but mostly they were weak attempts, like Steve, who said “I spin records in clubs, does that count as a ‘musician’”? Only one of the twelve truly responded to the call for a poet by reading a poem he’d written about death. I decided to save calling him for later.

For some reason I called Lon first. Surprisingly, I wasn’t that nervous, although I’d only called one or two guys before in my life. The sincere sound I’d identified in his 30-second message was still there when I talked to him; he was the kind of guy who could talk about his feelings. That was a good sign, I thought. I found out quickly he was seriously lonely—at the age of 30 he still lived with his parents and told me he didn’t go on many dates. But I didn’t mind that. He worked with his dad at an exotic rug store in Palo Alto, and he said they made a good living.

About a half-hour into the conversation he told me he had tried to commit suicide twice in the past five years, with aspirin. In a strange way, this gave him some cachet. I had flirted with the idea of suicide, and had a gloomy yearning to hear others’ stories of woe. Although Lon was a sensitive soul who could admit he was depressed, he didn’t sound too cerebral. But I wasn’t judging. I guess my heart kind of went out to him.

Another half hour into the conversation, he told me he was drinking vodka and orange juice. I figured a small drink couldn’t hurt, so I retrieved a small flask of whiskey I kept under my bed and started sipping it straight.

And then the conversation got around to sex. It started out innocently enough; he asked how many guys I’d done it with. I told him the truth: two. Lon said he was “pretty experienced” but when I asked for numbers, he got evasive. I noticed his voice had a kind of sleazy drawl when he told me about his “staying power.” By this time the whiskey started kicking in and I told one or two tidbits from my own truncated sexual history. We were having an honest conversation, so it seemed okay.

A few minutes later he asked if I was getting horny. Maybe it was the whiskey, or the fact that I’d never talked so frankly to a guy before, but I was feeling something. I said “yes.”

That’s when he put the phone down and masturbated. Actually, I think he did it with the phone receiver—I heard a muffled rhythmic banging and sighing.

I could’ve just hung up, but didn’t. This was kind of fascinating, as far as learning about human nature went. After about a minute he got back on the line.

“Did you come?” I asked, a little disgusted. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Close enough,” he answered, breathless.

I was attracted as much as I was repelled. He sounded pretty desperate, but I must have been too, or I would have hung up on him. I’ve got to meet him, I told myself—I couldn’t blanch at the first sign of, uh, “humanness” during my foray into the mysteries of human nature. So what if he was a little perverted? Aren’t we all?

We met about a week later, on his turf, downtown Palo Alto, a ritzy Bay Area enclave. I saw him first—I knew it was him because he said he’d wear a black leather jacket. He stood on a dimly-lighted street corner in the haze of a cool autumn evening near a Waldenbooks store. He was looking down at his hands. He’d told me on the phone he was blond and “cute.” I remember a red flag going up in my mind when he said that. I’d never heard a guy describe himself as “cute” before. I stood on the opposite corner, trying to make out his features, but he was too far away. I could tell he wasn’t the level of “cute” I had envisioned. He did have blond hair, and was average height, kind of slightly built. I know I said I didn’t care about looks, and really I didn’t.

If a guy was a true poet or artist, I wouldn’t care if he looked like Quasimodo. And Lon wasn’t gross looking.

Still, I considered bolting, turning and walking away quickly before he had a chance to notice me. I was scared about what his reaction to me might be. I had told Lon I was self-conscious about weighing more than I wanted to; he said “as long as you’re not Miss Piggy that’s okay.” Now that I could sort of see him, I didn’t feel quite so intimidated; driving alone on the way to the date I felt heavy and unattractive, imagining a scenario of approaching an outrageously cute Lon, looking him in the eyes, and seeing that kind of fake friendly look people get when they’re trying to hide disappointment. And this was California, the Beautiful People state. I never felt I measured up. I had to catch myself and remember that my aim was to meet guys randomly, to see what I could learn about them and human nature in general. And to see if I’d been missing anything.

But already, before I’d even said “hi” to Lon face to face, I’d fallen into the trap of the deluded who place personal ads. I had naively fantasized after our first phone conversation that he would be my dream guy, we would really hit it off, he’d give up phone sex and cleave only unto me and all that crap.

Damn, why did I have to make everything into a self-dramatizing crisis? All I had to do was meet him and participate in a genial-type date.

So I didn’t bail. I forced myself to walk across the street and say “Hi, are you Lon?” He looked me in the eye and kind of half-smiled. It seemed like a sincere half-smile, though. I already knew we weren’t soul mates, so his reaction to me wasn’t as important. In the brief moment of first looking at him I saw sadness in his eyes, that lost look some people get from being alone too much. I liked this about him.

While standing in line for the movie Henry V he made a move. It embarrassed me; I hadn’t ever experienced this before, with people standing around and everything. I guess he figured any woman lonely enough to meet a guy who masturbates on the phone would be desperate for some kind of action. I wasn’t, really, but I tried not to shrink back when he kissed my cheek softly. There didn’t seem to be any harm in him, so I tried to ease up a little from my usual cynical attitude about love, go with the flow a little more. I shrewdly realized I could exploit his loneliness, or rather we could exploit each other’s loneliness, have one of those half-assed “I’m - not - very - happy - with - you - but - it’s - better - than - sitting - around - alone - on - Saturday - night” kind of relationships. But I dismissed that idea quickly. Eventually he’d want to do it. And after he told me later that evening he liked to watch pornos featuring she-males, and about one of his weirder sexual experiences—doing it with a woman while her husband huddled under the covers shining a flashlight on the action (turns out Lon was no stranger to answering personal ads)—I decided he was a little too alternative for me.

The Lon experience left me a little wary of meeting more depressed, sincere-sounding guys. But then I figured once I took the plunge, meeting the rest of the guys would be easier. So I plunged.

Frank, a divorced lawyer who described over the phone a scene in a movie where a couple slit their wrists in the bathtub kind of sparked my interest. We met at a Marie Callendar’s pie shop. No spark.

Justice, a black guy who wrote for The San Jose Mercury News, had an air of bemused distraction as we talked on the phone. Somewhere in the conversation he told me he was black, which I had already determined. I told him I had been hoping to meet a black guy. I think maybe he took this wrong. Maybe he thought I meant I was hoping to do it with a black guy. We met one night in front of the Metro office while I was waiting to take the galleys to Alameda to be printed. He had the same air of distraction in person, like he had somewhere he’d rather be, and I could tell pretty quickly it wasn’t a match. Strike Three.

I went out more than once with Mark, the guy who’d read his own poem on the voice mail message. He was a short and skinny genius type who had been born a midget but took growth hormones to allow him to grow to about five foot five. This was back when doctors had first developed the treatment, he told me, and he was one of the guinea pigs. The treatment had worked, sort of. He looked fairly normal except he had an almost nonexistent neck. Of course he couldn’t help this, and I didn’t hold it against him. He had been sick a lot of his childhood years and filled the time by reading. He knew a lot about everything, it seemed—he told me he was taking a class in epistemology, which I hadn’t even heard of before. And he could always think of something cultural to do. He showed me around San Francisco, the North Beach area and City Lights bookstore where Ferlinghetti and the other beat poets used to hang out. We went to a Buddhist temple in Berkeley and meditated together. He wasn’t very exciting personality-wise, but he was probably the best all-around person of all the guys I had met so far. I didn’t have any physical attraction for him, though. I know I said I wouldn’t care what a guy looked like if he was a true poet or artist. I guess I lied. But then again, I hadn’t placed my ad to solicit sex. We did give each other a few backrubs, though.

There were more: an albino named Dave who played blues guitar, and who didn’t really look as weird as you’d think an albino would look, except he had Andy-Warhol-white hair and his eyes were a kind of bluish-pink. A computer programmer named Dirk drank coffee compulsively, bragged he would stay “seven years old mentally” for the rest of his life, and told me he had done it with over three hundred women. Richard was fairly normal, but once again there was no spark, and as we ate our crab at The Rusty Skupper he talked about his failed marriage like he was looking for an analyst more than a date. Actually, I like psychology and didn’t mind this, but there was nothing to make me want to call him again or to make him want to call me again, so neither of us did.

After I had met about ten men and talked to them on dates, I found a mediocre “blah” feeling to be the usual mutual reaction. It was kind of like life itself. If you take the average human life--all the days we exist--during 99 percent of them, not much exciting happens. Same with dates, I was finding out.

But then a jet-to-Paris-for-a-five-star-dinner date wasn’t to be in my future. I accepted my down-market status. In fact, I was perfectly okay with it. Then again, I never expected to go to the opposite extreme.

Which leads me to Roland, a comedian type whose artistic claim to fame was guest hosting on the Dennis Erectus radio show, a Howard Stern-style paean to lonely guys in the greater Bay Area. Roland was a disaster, but that was good in one way—I was determined to see these dates through and then some, keeping in the back of my mind I was learning important clues about human behavior that may answer some of life’s deepest mysteries.

I sat through some forgettable movie with him, enduring dirty looks and Shhhh’s from everyone around us when he started spouting a running critique of the film in a painfully loud voice. To be fair though, it was a bad movie, and his comments were kind of funny, so halfway through I decided to let loose, joining in his schizo spirit and yelling at the screen too. It was strangely liberating.

Despite his thinning hair, large stomach, sweat-stained armpits, and slightly musty odor, when the movie was over I agreed to accompany him to his place, an apartment in one of those big old Victorian houses that you can tell once looked majestic, but are now just kind of sad in their disrepair. His apartment smelled like stale farts and was unkempt in the guys-who-don’t-notice-dirt way: egg- and spaghetti-crusted plates piled to overflowing in the kitchen sink, jeans and T-shirts trampled on and matted to the carpet where they had been thrown weeks before, a pair of underwear with skid marks dangling off the edge of a chair, a desiccated spider plant on the windowsill, splotches of a sickly brown along the ceiling like someone had thrown a cup of coffee at a bug on the wall, which probably wasn’t far off, as I noticed a few small brown roaches crawling among his dirty dishes. I had always heard about this kind of apartment, but had yet to experience one before. Roland dismissed the mess by saying “I wasn’t expecting company.”

He showed me his African parrot, who could wolf whistle. Then he cleared a spot on his couch for us, shoving to one end some Tickhead comic books, a ratty light blue bathrobe, and a ketchup-smeared plate, and he told me he’d been watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator earlier that day, did I want to see it? I said sure, but maybe not all of it since it was getting late, and so he fast-forwarded to the scene where Chaplin in full Hitler regalia sticks his butt up in the air to buffet a balloon that looks like the planet Earth. He turned to me while he laughed at this scene like he had directed it himself. Then he got two Budweisers, cracking open one can for me, a small gesture that maybe he was hoping would win me over, then he cracked open his own. As I was mentally preparing how I was going to take my leave as soon as I finished the beer, he started with small talk and then somehow started telling me about his domineering mother. I’m a sucker for honesty, so I countered with a few anecdotes about my domineering father. Somewhere during this time, I made the mistake of making some offhand remark about my lack of sexual experience. I swear I didn’t mean it to spur him to action.

But Roland hopped up on his feet as if suddenly pumped with an adrenaline-filled hypodermic needle. He seized the moment, jumping onto his bed, which was only about ten feet from the couch, and commenced peeling his Masters of the Universe T-shirt off his large hairy gut. I was struck dumb for a moment by the overhang of that stomach. He seemed to have no qualms about revealing himself so intimately on a first date, though, as he grunted out a throaty “Let me give you something you’ve never had before. I can tell you’re starved for it.” I realized right then with a shudder that Roland wasn’t used to women being nice to him, sitting on his broken-spring couch amidst the cockroaches and farty smells, participating in sober and honest conversation, and he couldn’t handle it. I was going to have to draw the line. I wormed my way out by telling him I’d been thinking lately that I could be a lesbian. He didn’t want to accept this politeness. He persisted. I then decided honesty was the best policy, and told him I indeed was probably starved for it, but not that starved. Then he got quiet. I felt bad about saying it, but figured since we barely knew each other, he’d get over it quickly enough, and I made a hasty exit.

Even though I told myself this was all research, I was sinking yet deeper into disillusionment. I slowly realized, as over the weeks I kept compulsively meeting guys who unfailingly presented insurmountable character flaws, that I was just spinning my wheels.

But underneath, I was still thinking maybe, just maybe, there was a chance....

Then I met Steve, the club deejay I had thought sounded “cocky.” Despite this fault, we had three interesting conversations on the phone. He had a deep intriguing voice; it gave me a tickly-queasy feeling in my gut. And he had a genuine sense of humor. He did impressions of Elvis and Ronald Reagan, which sounds cheesy, but for some reason I liked him for it. He made me laugh. I liked him better each time we talked. He asked me questions about my work, my friends, why I’d moved from Kansas to California. When he asked what I looked like I panicked, wondering if I should lie. I couldn’t, though, if I was going to meet him, and I wanted to meet him. I told him I was 5’9”, not skinny, usually on a diet. He said he didn’t like skinny women. I didn’t believe that, but it made me feel better. In his slightly drawling voice I detected phone sex tendencies, but he never got overt about it like Lon, so it didn’t bother me.

One sunny afternoon in February I took off early from the Metro office to meet Steve at a downtown hangout, Pizza-a-Go-Go. I got there first, ordered a Heineken, finished it quickly, ordered another, watched the entrance, and felt an uncontrollable molten-like quivering deep in a spot between my chest and gut, which made me think maybe this was how an astronaut felt on takeoff to the moon. It was an uncomfortably shaky “no turning back” feeling. I didn’t like the utter chaos of it. I gulped down the last half of my Heineken, which started a buzz that sort of overrode the shaky feeling.

Steve was about twenty minutes late. The minute I saw him, my heart sank. Not because he wasn’t what I thought he’d be, but because he was better than I thought—tall, blond, good features, with a kind of spiked haircut and an earring in one ear. Like Lon, he wore a black jacket, but that was the only resemblance. Steve didn’t smile, or even half-smile when he saw me, but said in that low sexy voice, “You’re better looking than I imagined.”

What a liar, I thought to myself. And immediately I felt in my gut a thick wave of that same queasy concupiscence I’d experienced while talking to him on the phone. It was like I’d swallowed some kind of liquid lust, and could feel its slow slide down my esophagus and into my stomach, rendering me weak and brainless. I was attracted to him, no question.

I had never had a great experience sexually. I figured that’s what made me depressed. I hadn’t even done it until the year before, when I went through a summer-long wild phase, when I got drunk enough at two beer parties to make a move on a few drunk guys, resulting in two separate sexual encounters. But these encounters were quick, furtive, unsatisfying. The guys were younger than me and probably at their sexual peak, but they were completely in the dark about how women respond sexually. Sex with them more a revelation of the mechanics than a transcendent experience like you think it’s going to be. I suppose I was as much as fault as they; I had no confidence in my sexuality. During my dateless and sexless high school and college years I told myself sex was beneath me. Maybe it was sour grapes. I figured no guys could really like me, so I didn’t extend myself in any way to them. Let’s say I had a huge approach-avoidance thing around sex. This resulted in total inertia about any kind of social life, and endless weekends of staring at the walls in desperation.

Here was an opportunity to take my meeting-guys experiment to a higher level. Steve was an experienced guy sexually (he hadn’t actually told me this, but his low sexy voice was enough to convince me) and he was sitting in front of me. He would probably agree to have a fling if I was the type to initiate it. Even if I wasn’t up to Steve’s caliber, he seemed willing enough to pretend.

So what did I do? The only logical thing: I ran from him in horror, knowing myself woefully inadequate. Our hour-long meeting was humiliating. I couldn’t look him in the eye; my gaze ended up resting somewhere at his Adam’s apple.

The gist of our conversation:

Me: (ignoring Steve’s “You’re better looking than I imagined” comment) Man, what a day! (thinking as soon as I said it “Why the hell did I say THAT?”)

Steve: What do you mean?

Me: It’s just been a busy day...lots of work.

Steve: What did you do?

Me: Huh?

Steve: I mean, what made it busy?

Me: Uh, just lots of...I don’t know, just BUSY!” (said in a disgruntled voice, meant to tell him subliminally that I realized I wasn’t his dream girl and I guess we may as well give this charade up right now.)

Steve: Hey, let’s go back to the end booth where we can talk.

Me: Okay, but I have a class to get to at De Anza, I’ll have to leave in about an hour.

Steve: Well, let me buy you a beer anyway.

Me: I’ve already had two. I don’t really need any more.

And so on. The high point of our hour-long meeting was when he told me he’d met the band U2, and me acting appropriately impressed. And he ended up buying me another beer after all. But other than that, there wasn’t much in the way of scintillating talk. It was like we’d never had those great conversations on the phone. I only felt supreme self-consciousness and the overwhelming desire to kill this feeling.

All during our conversation I thought to myself “You ASS! He can smell your fear! Just relax and don’t give a damn what he thinks!” But every fiber of my being was in turmoil, thinking how he was probably wishing he’d never agreed to meet. I ended the agony by saying I had to leave for class. He asked me for a ride home, and all during that drive I was mentally berating myself for getting into this mess, knowing I would think about him with lust long after this day—lust mixed with utter shame and disgust at my inadequacy as a datable person.

I started realizing something about meeting the opposite sex: in every encounter there’s an immediate “pecking order” established, usually based on looks, augmented by personality. Steve had won, hands down. I couldn’t stand that. With the Steve experience I proved myself as big a loser as all the personal ad guys I’d rejected for whatever reasons.

Of course Steve and I never saw each other again. He’d told me to “call sometime” as he got out of my car, but I saw it for the polite let-down it was. I stared at the back of his well-shaped blond head as he walked to the nondescript two-story house where he rented an upstairs apartment. Of course his apartment would be clean and smell good, unlike Roland’s, but I’d never know, would I? I sat there and stared at his house even after he’d entered the front door and closed it, wishing I was the kind of woman he could love. I wished I was the kind of woman he’d think about even when I wasn’t around. I wished I was the kind of woman he’d perform inane acts of devotion for. I wished I could have followed him upstairs.

I wished I was done with all the pain, the inchoate longing for someone. I knew the odds now, and they weren’t in my favor. When I told Suzanne about how I blew it with Steve, she looked at me with dismay and said, “Too bad. From what you told me, he would have been really good for you.” She could have said “It probably wasn’t meant to be” or something like that, just to be a friend. But she looked at relationships as amusing games, and if you weren’t up for playing, it was your loss. Of course I saw how she suffered for this attitude, so I didn’t feel so bad about being the total opposite of her.

Just as expected, though, I tormented myself by thinking about Steve for weeks afterward with the same weak feeling in my stomach. It made me wonder how I could have fooled myself for so long that I didn’t want a boyfriend. Just the memory of him had some kind of weird power over me. I would look for blond heads in the crowds whenever I went downtown, found excuses to drive by his apartment, placed him as the hero of whatever book I happened to be reading. All this after an hour-long, distinctly uncomfortable meeting in a pizza joint.

I told myself the Steve episode was the end of my fiasco. Although I had got a total of thirty-two calls from my ad (and it only ran in two issues), had met and participated in date-type activities with eighteen men over a period of about two months, and observed plenty of human behavior, I ended up alone and damn glad of it. Or if I wasn’t exactly glad, all I had to do was remember the abject terror of witnessing Roland stripping his Masters of the Universe T-shirt off his sweaty gut, or the abject terror of trying to meet Steve’s cool blue-eyed gaze and realizing I would never measure up.

Somewhere in the morass of my singles ad experience is the germ of why men and women have a hard time relating to each other. Maybe you can figure it out. It’s beyond me. Part of me wanted to bitterly conclude that all I learned about human nature was that men think women who place personal ads are hot for sex. Those were the vibes I got from 75 percent of the men I met, anyway.

I know I sound like a total misanthrope. But underneath, I saw all these guys as struggling with their own particular dreams, hopes, and insecurities. Sometimes before falling asleep at night, I would wonder about them, how their lives would turn out. Even Lon the pervert. I was pissed at life, though, for making it so freaking hard to find one guy I was both comfortable with and felt some chemistry with.

As for submitting an article to the Metro about my experience as I’d originally planned, well, I put that idea out of my mind. The whole experience just kind of sat like a quivering lump in my brain, too soggily painful to try to recount.

But after some time went by, after I quit obsessing about Steve, I started looking at the personals again. Out of curiosity. I had no intention of answering any ads.

Then one evening I saw something I could hardly believe: on page 88, in the “Men Seeking Women” section, next to Ernie Pook’s Comeek, an ad shone out—a beacon of light: Morose recluse wants to meet down-on-her-luck woman. Pregnant okay.

I wasn’t pregnant, but I knew this was the guy for me.

Finally, I found myself in the midst of a date that was almost everything a date should be. It didn’t feel like an experiment in human nature anymore. We lounged with our feet up in the back row of Camera Three movie theatre, drinking fifths of Night Train and watching Drugstore Cowboy, just me and Eric, who wrote a fanzine called Dead End and called himself president of the World Suicide Club. He told me “world suicide” didn’t mean he wanted everyone to off themselves, he just wanted people to wake up to the destructive forces in the world and try to create a tolerable existence for themselves. He told me about his rotten past, getting beat up in school for being a nerd, but he didn’t let it get to him, he created humor from it. Eric was smart and funny; even better, he was kind of pudgy, so I didn’t have to feel self-conscious. None of the other guys I’d met were so inspiring.

I kind of wanted to hold his hand during the movie, but was too shy to make a move, so I just let the sleeve of my jean jacket rest against his jacket sleeve. Anyway, ours was primarily a mental attraction—we had the same dark sense of humor. We never had sex. I guess I wasn’t really physically attracted to him, and I don’t think he was to me, either, but that was fine. After all the worrying about whether or not I was attractive to men, it was a relief to take sex out of the equation and just be friends. When I left San Jose about six months after meeting Eric, we exchanged only a few letters and e-mails before drifting off into silence, but it didn’t matter. He was in the world, and I felt a kinship. I still remember getting buzzed with him. It was during the scene where Matt Dillon gets high and sees snowflakes falling and tiny animals floating. I was buzzing so good from the Night Train and being next to someone I liked, I swear I heard these magical-sounding ocean waves in my head and for about five minutes it was like finally everything made sense. It was pretty cool.

Once a resident of San Jose, Angela now lives in Kansas and teaches English online.