The Garab Chronicles

While You Were Out Living Your Life...

This happened:

 

Mommy, What's a Garab? (My Almost Boyfriend, Part 4)

After courting my love for the appropriate two-point-six week period, it was time to get laid. I believe in monogamy, and monogamy is a tease on some days and an evil torturous bitch atop a fire-breathing moral high horse that thinks that doggie style is icky on most others. Meeting Magnificock changed my life in so many wonderful, magical ways, but only if thinking about celibacy makes you nostalgic for unicorns and Rainbow Bright, and induces you to call your mommy. Low level lack of action only gives me a slight buzz, which is nice when you’re trying to be productive and welcome the break from thrusting your pelvis at things because you come from a sexually repressed society that equates erections for anything other than your legally-wedded wife to an arrow pointed towards eternal damnation and psychological anguish and self-doubt that makes you yearn for death.

A few days without the loving of a good, or bad, or marginally attractive man, and bed posts become alluring in ways that Jesus couldn’t have imagined when he took up carpentry. Judge not, lest ye find yourself, on a cold, lonely mid-afternoon, asking the back left pole of perfect, erect mahogany on a fetching California King what it likes to do for fun when it isn’t supporting a heavy mattress, then asking it through dejected sobs why it refuses to kiss you back.

My shrink looked at me as if he’d never thought about asking a piece of furniture out on a date. I could just see the judgment radiating from his eyes.

“What?! At least it was a stable and available bed post. How many men can you attribute those qualities to? Can we move on now, please?” I pleaded, wondering why he’d backed his chair so far away, close to the door and a desk that may or may not have contained a can of pepper spray.

“Please continue”, said my shrink, after reminding me of our safe word. 

Two weeks adrift in a lustless desert, and I start taking long drives through the heart of the city, any city, searching for the tallest building from which I might fling myself, but only after packing a tiny parachute that, when deployed, might afford me the few necessary seconds to scream “I did it ‘cause he wouldn’t fuck me!” before I splattered on the pavement below; a sad slice of road pizza and pathos.

I hadn’t logged on to Connexion since my first date with Magniff, and if I caught some cute guy checking me out while I sat, innocently sipping a three thousand calorie latte at some coffee shop while contemplating my future husband’s birthday and Christmas gifts, I made sure to give the lewd so and so a look so dirty that he’d never mistake me or any other man for available ever again. I was chastely spoken for, thank you very much, and Magnificock and I were so in love that we didn’t need some bourgois “talk” to establish that we were going steady. Did Sleeping Beauty need a prenup before she got on the back of Prince Charming’s big-assed white horse? I think not! Would the man who kissed Snow White out of a coma ever have brought up seeing other people? No, the dashing fucker would have kissed all his former fuck buddy princesses goodbye, locked up their dripping chastity belts despite their loud protests and claws, thrown away the keys, and never looked back.

To keep faithful, I touched myself a lot, because, like consuming enough fiber, there are things a man must do, frequently, once he turns thirty if he expects to keep everything regular. Naturally, I banished all fantasies involving Magniff when I reached between my legs in the morning, after lunch, and twice before bed. I couldn’t dream of scandalizing him with filthy imaginings of the things I planned on doing to him at the end of our third date.

My fiancée knew I’d been working hard, thinking about him every waking moment and overtime in sleep, so he spared me the pretense and the expense of taking him out to dinner. For date numero tres – which couldn’t have arrived a fucking minute too soon - we would stay in and consummate our relationship. Ordering in was for peasants who needed nourishment and conversation and boundaries. Time, like age, was nothing but a number to either of us, so even there we would defy convention and get together, not at eight-thirty, not at nine, but around eleven o’clock on a Saturday night after I got off work and watch a movie at his house.

You see, Magnificock’s important job kept him occupied during the week, but as soon as I gave my life the makeover my insecurity required, I too would have a night-to-eight job in an office somewhere in East Corporate Jesus* so I could have two hours free in the evening to commute home, skip dinner, and spend quality time with the man I loved.  For now, I was bound to serve the hungry masses and prepare myself for the most important night of my entire life while dreaming of a day when I would be free to devote all of my time and energy to building our little domestic slice of Donna Reed Americana. Just thinking about the quaint lovers’ quarrels we’d have over the color scheme for the dining room at the El-Emam-Magnificock household made me dizzy with excitement, but not so dizzy as to allow myself to fantasize about the make-up sex we’d have in the CB2 bed in our guest room while the cute pug puppy we rescued from the shelter mere seconds before extermination looked on with wide-eyed love and a secret envy.

Some friction would be required, of course, for the health and longevity of our union. Our fights would have to be intense enough to warrant the love making to follow, but they couldn’t be so vicious as to undermine the bond of mutual admiration of understanding between us. I’d have to keep arguments mundane at first, maybe a little flash of frustration just shy of anger in the Home Depot gardening section to let him know that I was no pushover, before I surprised him with fellatio in the parking lot so that we’d have something to knowingly giggle about at that evening’s dinner party. After meeting his best friend at a 4^th of July beach party, I would make sure to state the obvious fact that his childhood companion, though straight, with a wife and a mistress, had a thing for him. Things would escalate to a heated argument on the car ride home, and he would say something about my mother being overbearing, causing me to dissolve into a tearful soliloquy where I’d question my ability to go on like this and Magniff would have to dramatically swerve across three lanes of traffic to pull off the main road. There, under the glow of countless passing headlights, he would look deeply into my eyes, shed a single tear that would drip all the way down his cheek and hang off his chin, before he’d throw himself at me and, gasping for breath and talking dirty, and we’d make hot, steamy, filmable, missionary style—“

“Sneaky subconscious, trying to trick me into imagining what my man’s junk looks like before he, in an intimate moment of naked vulnerability that would deepen our trust for eternity, showed me the goods that would be my reward for loving him.  Patience, my love, for date night was nigh.”

I arrived at Magnificock’s palatial one bedroom shortly after the appointed time. Table thirty-two was a campy, undertipping hipster/foodie nightmare from the innermost ringlet of Hell’s gaping ass, and Mercury was either in retrograde, about to go into retrograde, or was just coming out of retrograde, because no matter how abundantly clear I made it that I had a hot date that I’d rather go to than serve their Yelp-happy-take-a-fucking-picture-of-every-morsel-of-food-you-shove-down-your-yuppie-scum-throat-before-you-Tweet-about-it-asses, they would not eat fast enough. “Chew, fuckers. Chew!” I silently mouthed every time one of them shut up long enough to take a bite. “Chew for the love of god and country. Chew like your lives depend on it, because before long, they very well may.”

I left a trail of dust and used napkins behind me as I raced from the restaurant, up the street to a bakery where I intended to procure the most delicious chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons on earth according to some hipster on Yelp, because my mother taught me never to go to somebody’s house empty handed, and because Magnificock had casually mentioned at our kissy face dinner date that he had a weakness for macaroons, and I wanted to show him that I was a good listener.

I made sure to have the delicious coconut goodness placed in a brown paper bag, so as to take my love by surprise, and then to just take him. He would answer the door in a classy Calvin Klein robe, because that’s just the kind of thing he wore around the house after 9pm. Trembling, I would slowly unsheathe my gift, first the chocolate tip, then the whole glorious confection. I would quickly realize that he hadn’t taken the time to fasten the robe about him, and that underneath, he wore only a jockstrap and a smile.

I found parking right outside his building. All of his poor sap neighbors were out looking for love, and here I was coming home to it. “Come up and get a parking pass”, read the text from my man in waiting. He was saving himself, robe, jockstrap, and smile for me upstairs. Our intimacy was too precious to share with some neighbor who might be out walking the dog.

I raced up the stairs, and knocked, or rather patted the closed screen door to his apartment. But even then I knew that something was amiss. There was no smooth jazz emanating from the chamber within. “It’s alright,” I thought “maybe he prefers Zero 7 and has really thick walls.” As soon as he opens that door, Annie Lennox, or Hotel Costes, or K.D. Lang, or Thievery Corporation will come rolling out, enveloping us both in the perfect soundtrack for screwing.

The door swung open, and there he was, in Gap shorts and a plaid button-up with rolled up sleeves. “That’s the most intricate jockstrap I’ve ever seen”, I almost said aloud. But then I remembered that I hadn’t yet perfected my powers of expectation projection and I held my tongue. “Where’s the fucking music, lame ass?” I started to say, before the realization set in that Parking Enforcement in West Hollywood on a Saturday night loved handing out tickets like an over-indulgent crack dealer on a benevolent streak. Magnificock, fully clothed, handed me a parking pass and dispatched me to secure my vehicle.

I returned to the quiet, tasteful, really conservatively decorated apartment, still ready to hand over my macaroon and my body. But then I realized something: Not only was Magnificock’s place quiet, tasteful, really conservatively decorated, and too small to raise our family in, it was also hotter than balls. Sure, our clothes were coming off any minute anyway, but I had a more pressing concern at the moment. If we didn’t migrate to a cooler climate, and soon, the chocolate would melt!

“Not that I’m trying to seduce you, but the air conditioner is in my bedroom, so it’ll probably be more comfortable to watch a movie in there.”

“Whew! Seduce away, maestro.” Magnificock led the way down the path to his inner sanctum, all two and a half beige carpeted feet of it. He opened the door, and I could already feel the cool recycled air blasting inside. Whoever observed that the average man’s balls shrink when they get cold clearly hadn’t met me. My macaroon was intact, my ambitions were high, and my manhood clanged in the face of the approaching conquest. “Take it easy at first”, I quietly coached myself. “Remember that he doesn’t do this often, and that he has to really be in love to go all the way. Give it forty-five seconds of small talk, five minutes of making out, reveal the macaroon for incapacitating infatuation, and then strike once his pupils dilate.”

But then I fucked the whole thing up and produced the macaroon prematurely. “I got you something”, I said, my hands trembling as planned.

I pointed the paper bag at him, and then slowly, elegantly, slipped it’s silken, brown paper skin from the tantalizing pastry within…

There it was, naked in my hands save the thin layer of fine imported chocolate that covered it in feigned dignity. He took a step back to catch his breath. He looked at the offering before him for what seemed like an eternity. And then, he spoke.

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Is that a…?”

“Mmmhm. It’s a chocolate dipped coconut macaroon. I remember you said they were your favorite.”

“Oh…I meant French macaroons…but this is nice. Thank you.”

“Fuck you, France, you’ve ruined my life.” I wanted to go back in time and erase the five years I spent in high school learning the language of love and learn Russian instead. As I watched Magnificock put the coconut macaroon back into the now chocolate-streaked paper bag to save for later, I cursed Louis X, Louis XI, and XII through infinity. I pictured two guillotines, one for Marie-Antoinette, and one custom made for the cold-hearted prick that invented the pastel Oreo cookie monstrosities that were enjoying a resurgence among Yelp-happy-hipsters who’d survived the recent cupcake craze that swept a nation of foodie lemmings and were now Hell-bent on developing Type-2 Diabetes gorging on French fucking macaroons that tasted like nothing and were produced exclusively in colors not found in the natural world.**

Magnificock must have sensed that I was distraught, so he sat me down on his bed, told me that he wanted to take me to San Francisco and the Independent Nation of Wine, which is apparently located in the Napa Valley region in the State of California. And then, he kissed me. Magnificock was right; it was more comfortable in his bedroom, especially since his bed was as soft and perfect as his lips. Yes, it was becoming more evident by the minute that I was falling in love with, and was about to have hot dirty man-sex with a hipster, but so what? So fucking what?

Sure, he read GQ and Esquire, and Details and probably dressed the way they told him to. Who wasn’t susceptible to a little fad or twelve here and there? I was being a judgmental little bitch, just like when I insisted, at the top of my lungs to a pair of very nice security guards, that “Transformers” was the most bloated piece of molten human waste I’d been subjected to since birth and demanded that the U.N. pass a resolution barring anyone associated with its creation from touching so much as a video camera ever again. I can be harsh, and I know that. If my destiny was a pretty hipster, then so be it. At least I’d always be fashionable and my accessories would be up to date.

We kissed for what must have been hours, and then I looked at the clock and realized that it had been. We held hands. We napped. He turned on a bad romantic comedy that I couldn’t recall if you paid me to, but would probably throw me into a seizure if I ever saw it again. I lay in Magnificock’s bed, so happy and comfortable in his arms that I didn’t even care that from that angle I couldn’t see his eyes to tell if his pupils were dilated or not. I only knew that he felt what I felt, and that I wanted it to last forever. It no longer mattered whether or not I got to do the things I imagined myself doing with Magniff. I stopped thinking about the puppy, and the kids, and the house, and the blow job in the parking lot outside the home improvement superstore. I was here, in this moment, with a great guy, and the only piece of clothing I’d taken off was my shoes. Come what may, I would enjoy every minute I got to be there with him. We held each other a little tighter, I kissed him again, and we drifted off to sleep.

Ten minutes later, I awoke to find Magnificock gazing at me through beautiful brown eyes. The pupils may have been dilated, but I couldn’t be sure. We were both groggy from our short nap. I looked back at him, my mind racing. “Was this it? Was he giving me the signal? Maybe he is an axe murderer after all, and that’s the look they give you before they chop you up into little pieces. Yes. No. Yes, this is it, and no he isn’t an axe murderer. Wake up, fluff your manhood, this is the moment you’ve been dreaming of ever since you saw that episode of “Dallas” where the guy in the funny hat said something to that lady and they fell down and wrestled and Mom screamed because she didn’t know it was coming and didn’t cover your eyes in time.”

I opened my mouth, either to speak or to blow him, whichever came first. But Magnificock beat me to the punch. “Are you okay to drive?”

“You want to go to San Francisco at two o‘clock in the morning? How adventurous!”, I thought. I’d packed an overnight bag, of course, but it was still sitting in my car lest I appeared presumptuous. A trip to San Francisco required a valise and my personal butler, and at the moment I had neither. While I searched for the answer to my love’s query, he took notice of the puzzled look on my face and explained.

“It’s just getting kinda late. I should be getting to bed.”

“Oh. You mean exactly where we’ve been for the last four hours, douche face?” Fuck lovers’ quarrels in public, we were about to have our first, full-fledged domestic violence incident!***

I got up, and stretched with every ounce of dignity I could muster. I yawned, only so I wouldn’t scream. “Yeah, it’s pretty late. I’m gonna sleep like a baby tonight. Oh shit, let me go get your pass.”

“No, keep it…”

Kicking me out of bed at two in the morning + Keep my parking pass x not putting out = me confused.

“Let’s go on a hike tomorrow”, he continued.

I imagined three guillotines, all of them custom made for guys who put out mixed signals…

*Sorry Lord, I’ve invoked your name twice in vain, but then I remembered that I’m sort of Agnostic so please don’t strike me down or make things any more unpleasant than you already have. Love, me.

**J’adore la France. C’est le meilleure destination sur le Terre, et J’espere de la visite very soon. Et les macaroons: Mon Dieu, quelles magnifiques!

***There is no excuse for domestic violence, but you are allowed to imagine it when dealing with the people I’ve dated.

Mommy, What's a Garab? (My Almost Boyfriend, Part 3)

For our second public outing, I took Magnificock to my favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, all the way in the Valley. He worked for one of the studios nearby, so while I sat in traffic, sweating through my sexiest I-know-I-look-good-in-this-but-it-doesn’t-look-like-I’m-trying-too-hard-button-up, he finished up at his I-have-real-adult-responsibilities-and-get-paid-really-well-for-it-even-though-we’re-the-same-fucking-age-but-don’t-let-that-make-you-feel-insecure-job and then popped over in the same old thing he’d worn that morning. And he still looked hotter than I felt, all without burning a single calorie thinking about it.

I’d chosen the place because it was casual enough for us to blend into the wallpaper, the food was good, and, if I liked him enough, I could afford to pick up the tab. But that was only if he didn’t get wasted on cheap red wine.

He didn’t. As a matter of fact, he was a total sweatheart, even when we started talking about sex and he found out I was what I’d call easy, but not quite slutty unless he was into that. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Before we started discussing the carnal, we focused on the intellectual.

“You didn’t finish college?!” gaped Magniffi.

“Nope. Tried twice and hated it the second time more than I did the first. Besides, I was on a full scholarship and exempt my first year anyway, so it’s not like I dug myself into some massive student loan debt or anything.”

But he did. Magnificock had a very, very expensive education. His education was so expensive I was sure it came with an insurance policy and a blow job. We’re talking almost six figures expensive, and that was before he decided he was studying the wrong thing and stopped to go get another degree, for about another six figures, and his last name still wasn’t M.D.

“Damn, dude, your student loan payments must be through the roof. My friend Sa—“

“My parents paid for it.”

“Oh. Cool.”

“You have to go back and finish”, he said again, sounding enough like my father to…”

It was at this moment that I could have sworn I heard my shrink mutter the word “Porsche”, which he tried to play off as a wet cough, and I had to stop and remind him, in no uncertain terms, that I did not have daddy issues, only mommy ones, and those were already buying him a fucking Audi.

Back at the restaurant, the damage had been done. Magnificock had a fancy degree from a fancy school and he had the fancy job to go with it. I was a college dropout loser who couldn’t commit to anything except long term therapy and even bigger losers who never liked me back, I was stuck in a job where I’d serve him and his buddies lunch for the rest of my natural life, and my daddy – with whom I had no issues – was right all along. I was 32, going on 50, going on sad, lonely death. The only sane thing to do was abandon the half eaten dolmas in front of me and move back home, take out a loan as big as my head, and start college the very next day!

But then we started talking about sex and I felt much better. Magnificock, it turns out, was a bit of a prude. Granted, the hooker working the corner market under your apartment is a bit of a prude compared to me, but still. This was exciting. This meant that, college degree or not, I had something valuable to teach Magniff.

Sure, Magnificock had been with plenty of guys, it’s just that none of them were random hookups. He had dated all of them.

“How many deep, meaningful relationships could you have possibly had with so many guys?” I thought. “Did the ability to dissolve into a time warp come with your expensive education?”

I decided to dismiss this foray into the world of logic for the moment and listen to my new pupil so that I could best craft his course of study, most of it now legal in the Continental United States, all of Western Europe, and even a handful of the former Soviet bloc.

Baffled, I finally threw caution to the wind and asked him. All my adult life, I’d struggled with the notion that I shouldn’t casually date people because it might distract me from finding my destined, true, reciprocated Disney brainwash love. Casual screwing was okay, all I had to commit to there was twenty minutes and a trip to the laundromat. But here in front of me was someone who’d actually figured it out. You could genuinely get to know the people you got naked with and still be able to look up and recognize the love of your life when he materialized before your very eyes. Just look at us!

“How did you—?“

“I had sex with them, but not, you know, full-on sex. I have to be totally in love with someone to do that.”

The Anti-Christ sat before me. This was the bastard that considered foreplay sex and thought that unfulfilled look on your face when your eyes bled with rage was cute. This was the kind of fucktard that milked you for twelve dates of “let’s play hard to get with mixed signals” and said he was emotionally available even though he had the numbers for his last three ex-boyfriends on speed-dial and used them nightly after blocking his number just to hear the sound of their exasperated breathing. If the falafel betwixt my thumb and forefingers wasn’t so delicious and covered with a dollop of hummus so perfect it would have made Picasso him-fucking-self weep at the sight of its simple elegance, I’d have hurled the whole thing, dripping with olive oil and hate, at the coy son-of-a-hyena and told him to lose my Connexion profile. I felt insecure about my station in life because of THIS guy?! Fuck him and my father – with whom I have no issues.

But then he smiled, and it suddenly made sense that you had to be head-over-heels in love to fuck somebody, and not just heels-over-head. Of course Magnificock withheld penis, it was the kind, thoughtful, I’m-saving-myself-for-true-love kinda thing to do. And besides, now that we’d found each other, he’d never have to withhold anything ever again. I couldn’t wait to talk about our feelings after fucking like rabbits in inappropriate places!

Later that night, we kissed under a full moon that I wish I was making up. We bathed in its pure light while sipping warm tea in a cool breeze after we split the bill at the restaurant where he was nice to the server and tipped twenty percent. We talked about destiny and fate and how you meet people in life not by accident or as a consequence of coincidence, but because it’s meant to be. We gazed into each other's eyes and I remembered that the world was a wonderful place full of exciting and magical possibilities, that everything I’d experienced so far was leading up to this fateful moment, and that everything would, in the end, not only be alright, it would be beautiful.

This man, this promise of a new day, had so far blown past all of my defenses. Far from being a fall down drunk, he rarely touched spirits, and this because he chose to experience life through the prism of present authenticity. He’d only been to prison while watching crime dramas on TV, and everything he knew about drug abuse was filtered through that same, true-to-life medium that is so thoroughly researched and thoughtfully presented that it could never stoop to exaggeration or stereotype for the sake of drama. He worked in marketing for a television studio, after all, so he knew this. But forget noble profession. Everyone has to make a living. So what if he smoked like a chimney, drank like a barracuda, or shot heroin between his toes while taking a break from cooking crystal meth to wipe away the residue of last night’s coke binge from his upper lip? Who was I to judge another man, as full of flaws and quirks as I know I am? There was only one test this man had to pass to win my heart, until I came back to my senses, and that was the kissing test.

And Magnificock was the Goldilocks of kissers. Kissing him was like dancing that didn’t make you point and laugh. Kissing him turned my innards into a thriving butterfly colony that may have been gas. Kissing him made me think about reading “Twilight”.

I had stuff in my back seat, so we kept our hands to each other’s necks, ears, and cheeks, the way I imagine repressed Mormon virgins do before they plunge into moral oblivion and have to marry vampires. We bid one another adieu and, later that night, he added me on Facebook.

The next day, I opened my eyes to a bright and expectant world. I was ready to climb mountains, bench an extra five pounds, and, recession be damned, find a job with benefits. I would set about doing all of this after checking my email, tweezing my eyebrows, touching myself to online porn, maybe twice, and brushing my teeth – no, scratch that. I needed no online porn on this day, the beginning of the rest of my life. I had love, goddamn it, and love had no time for chiseled abs and eight-inch insignificance. I skipped three whole steps in my regular morning routine and logged on to Facebook instead.

I was in no mood for games, opting to focus my energy on a task so important it didn’t even make my to-do list. I clicked on Magnificock’s profile page, and the butterfly colony exploded within me. There it was, for all the world to see: a coded status update dedicated to me. His face “hurt from smiling so much”. Oh, Virginia Woolf, you committed suicide too soon! Had you but lived to see the affection showered upon me by Magniffi, my Magniffi, the snuffed out flame of hope within your bosom would have been kindled anew.

I waited, until the cascade of comments sure to follow my beloved’s declaration reached a worthy crescendo before I revealed myself. “Silly friend”, I thought. “My love smiles not, as you so naively commented, in celebration of a recently ingested macaroon. He smiles instead for the discovery of me.”

I waited still, for surely, someone close to him would guess that it was his heart, and not his stomach, that brought him late summer joy. If someone didn’t get it soon, I’d have to chime in with a hint.

I grew restless. I had things to do, and his friends were either too stupid or had jobs and lives that prevented them from playing status update trivia. Clearly, they didn’t know who I was by name yet. But then I finally understood: Magniff was protecting my identity. He wanted to introduce me to his mother first (or Mom, as she’d insist I call her), and then to his friends. Christmas was only a few short months away, so I still had time to break the news to my own family that this year I would be spending the holidays with my new in-laws. I finally tossed one of my trademark smiley faces ( a ;-) for reference) into the comment thread and logged off to go poop…