23. The Fucking Drummer

Let's get this over with.

by Luke John Matthew Arnold

NOW UPDATED with a playlist (available on Apple Music here) themed around this post: the unrequited, the used, the fed up, lend me your eards:

My therapist smiled at me. We’ve gotten to the point where she’ll smirk in response to my jokes, my stupid asides, my Tommy Davidson’s Premium Blend of John Mulaney’s impression of a Def Jam comic and Judy Garland’s “I Don’t Care.”

(I am leaving this here and you do need to watch it.)

But my therapist does not start our sessions with a smile. I get a nod and a “So, what’s on your mind?” I do not get “that must have been hard for you” or “you did the right thing.” I get “I would ask why you need me to tell you that your instinct was correct” and “you know I’m not going to answer that.” And I am stubborn. I love The Music Man and I call myself “Iowa Stubborn” all the time, even though every himbo I say this to says “…I…thought…you were from…Jersey?” I am hardheaded and not just because of the hairspray. And I ask, and I ask, and get the same answer. But occasionally, I get closer to what I want to hear, with a lot of what I need to hear along the way.

So when I have earned a smile, I know what it means. It does not always meant the exact permutation of words, but its curve scrawls a tiny cursive, “you’re onto something here, you’re getting it, you’re getting yourself.”

She had asked if I was considering the type of men I was attracting. I never really have understood. You’d think “boob guys,” but thanks to the lobbying by Big Booty, I have found mostly ass men who are ambivalent-to-neutral about the motherfucking thangs on me. Dads, of - naturally - sons, but (and let the eldritch terror wash over you) daughters, too. Men who sat in a classroom and watched the Challenger explode. Divorced but sharing the house, divorced but the ink is still in the pen, but actually divorced!!!¹ One Olympic swimming contender from Turkey.

She of course meant emotionally unavailable. Emotionally withholding. Emotionally on probation, emotionally found unresponsive on the floor of their apartment on the 6400 block of La Cienega.

The smile, this time, was because I threw my arms up and said “I fell in love with another narcissist, didn’t I?”

My therapist would never, ever, diagnose someone without them being a patient, barely even if. The DSM-V seems to be a paperweight, for her, nothing more. It’s not important if he was a narcissist. Or what type of crazy I am. What’s important is that I tie any symptoms I’m convinced are the sign of a massive disorder within myself to how I was raised. How mothers and other strangers have made kintsugi of me, shattered porcelain, smelted soul, a cooling to the world and within myself, but inspiring to behold from afar by those who feel they are kind. A case of “why not just buy another?” by those who feel they are one paycheck away from being millionaires.

It (the end) had started on a fourth of July a lifetime ago.² Hehad texted me about Koko the gorilla (in a crux of dramatic irony, neither of us realized that she had, in fact, been born on the fourth of July).³ This was common - not texting about a superstar gorilla, but texting about something ridiculous. Texting on a holiday when we should both be present at the table with our families, our significant others. Texting for 35, 125, 205 straight minutes about absolutely nothing. Talking around absolutely everything.

I asked if he was going to see our girl in concert, his favorite, one of our favorites, someone who he’d played for his girlfriend to “crickets.” Of course he was going, both nights. One solo, one with his mini-me of a daughter.⁴

“Oh shit, I didn’t realize it was a night show. Maybe she won’t be able to come.”

“Oh no! Well I mean, I was going to ask (member of the band) to guest me the second night, but I don’t want you out a ticket and I likely wouldn’t even be seeing him at the show. So, if you need to reallocate…and if it wouldn’t be the end of the world for us to go together.”

Now, the reason I said this:

We have only been within three feet of each other twice. The first time was…well, you know. The second, five minutes at a concert sixteen months later, so excited to meet one of his closest friends that I dropped a piece of trivia I had remembered about them, a thing we were both into, dropped it like a piece of chocolate on the floor of the home you share with a minuscule, immunocompromised, curious chihuahua. They did not recognize my face, or my name.

I learned two months later that he and I weren’t allowed to be in the same room together on purpose because he had a girlfriend⁵ now, you see…

…and she didn’t know I existed. And they had been fighting, over exes, exes of each, who’s still friends, who called, not texted but called on whose birthday and what that meant. He wouldn’t say, refused to say upon my asking, whether I meant so little that I wasn’t worth the jealousy, or that I meant so much that the jealousy was justified. I asked. I did ask.

He wouldn’t say anything beyond us, “this” just being “weird.” “Weird.” A word I have come to loathe the way your most boring coworker makes a big deal of the word “moist.” When he ended our courtship, it was because it had gotten “weird.” The word “weird” is verbal laxative for me now. I assumed his syntax had meant that I had been weird, that I had been clingy or desperate for answering his eight hours of texts a day, for admitting he had ruined the idea of seeing anyone else at the moment when he couldn’t understand nonmonogamy, was relentlessly a one-woman guy, to make him feel safe.⁶ When I sent him a photo of me and he was wearing the exact same shirt, not simply a black shirt, but the exact same band tee we’d ordered on release day, “weird.” When he got to open for his musical heroes, it was very fun but also very “weird,” and he left halfway through their set to go have Burger King alone. I’m “weird” for watching a DVD like an “old Luddite.” Our relationship being based, by his hand, not being “built on attraction to physical or aesthetics…mostly this. Which is fucking weird.”

We weren’t allowed to be in the same room. Not when The Metrograph showed our favorite movie alongside a Q+A from the director. Not for ice cream on Chelsea pier. Not the night I was out for my dad’s birthday in the same New Jersey hamlet he was just leaving, gigging there that month. Not when he had a gift for me - a free gift, a regift - and I offered to come pick it up. Would he acknowledge the passive aggression into which I was cornered?

“How do you know the (member of the band)?”

No.

“You want the honest answer? I saw him talking to his family offstage, we wound up making search engine eyes (Google-y eyes, I’m doing this to keep you sharp) at each other, so I hopped into his DM’s and we’ve been chatting.”

A reply if I will wonder my life through was an easy, breezy, beautiful Cover-up for a scraped ego came through, a suspicion of exclamation points like an unkindness of ravens, a word lost in dictation because Siri was typing his response to me as he was peeing. And you wonder why I thought there was something here. It was possible to find me in the land of washed hands and flushed toilets. I wasn’t going anywhere. And yet.

“Nice sidestep.”

“Sidestepping what?”

I lingered over the text, invitation to join him: “This. I’d sure hope you’re not sidestepping in the bathroom.”

“We know where this leads.”

“Us in the same room together, or verbally acknowledging reality?”

And then the fighting. Not really fighting, no “whoever threw that paper, your mom’s a ho.” Him telling me he doesn’t want to veer into anything but light conversation with me at this point. Me asking him to define the “tension” he kept alluding to. Was it sexual? Romantic? A tension headache I had caused? Him refusing. “Apologies.” And finally, the question I had asked seven times (seven times he’d “fall asleep” before answering, say the conversation had “real stakes” and was therefore too arduous for him in his stress to have to say nothing of my stress at having to have it, being unable to discuss “THIS” without getting frustrated, being unable to say the truth because it would “drag everyone else down” with him, apologizing for the “quadruple-edged sword” he was by existing and how he was going to “slink back into the shadows now,” goodnight) since the November before:

“Tell me you don’t like/want/lust after/lose sleep over me, and the half of my brain that thought you talking about our ‘mutual angst’ and how you ‘can’t’ want me, not yes or no as I posed three months prior, but that you ‘can’t’ want me; your ‘I can’t give you a straight answer’ when I said things would be easier if you just told me I was just your chubby little sister now, sexless, sardonic, nothing more, the half of my brain that read these words with heart and hope will decree itself deprived of oxygen and common sense, accept your lack of feeling, and never bring it up again.”⁷

I wanted to be real friends. I wanted to have it out. I wanted to define boundaries from that admission that kept it sustainable, that made it easy for us to go to a concert, for us to run into each other without me worrying - because I did - if I was even supposed to pretend I knew him or say hello. I wanted his girlfriend to know who I was. I loved him. I was in love with him. I was so in love with him. But to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda (I’m so sorry): “at least I keep his eyes in my life.”⁸

I asked for months and risked his dismissals, his 9:00pm abandonments, to try to give him what I had told myself he wanted, me to be his friend and supporter and confidant with our sexual and romantic history neatly packed away like a widow’s wedding dress.

And this time, on an Independence Day, cheap life poetry, I got my answer:

“I don’t. I’m in a completely different place. You’re great, funny, but there’s nothing beyond that to hash out for me. If we can be just friends, great, if not, I want no part of it.”

I gave it a day. I never do. I only give it as long as I need to think of the right SAT word to toss in there. I saw an Instagram post recently that said waiting an hour before sending that text can save your relationship. I gave it seven, eight hours: it saved me. And so, you, the supportive, the nosy, here it is (because I can barely tell time on an analog clock but I can remember every vicious little diamond of a word I’ve written and find a text from even twenty years ago like nothin’):

My friends and my psychic (shut up, reformed Catholics can have a little glamour and mystery⁹ as a treat) to this day would swear on a stack of beloved grandmothers that he was lying.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if he was lying. (His type is Linda Ronstadt. We fucked once. In between kisses, he had sworn that he had been wanting this for “hours, days.” You’ve seen my ass. I once chased down his favorite comedian, one of maybe three people the boy stans, and handed him 100 dollars to film a video greeting for him. I tracked down the belt buckle he wore every day for fifteen years until it broke and mailed it to him for Christmas. This man doesn’t follow anyone on Instagram, zero people, but looked at my Instagram stories every day for a year. He was lying, right?)

He could have been lying because he liked me, loved me, had to hide his love away and be my noble one that got away, and me his, but anyone worth my loving back (liking back) wouldn’t lie about something so simple as loving me. And so it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.

He could be a narcissist. It doesn’t matter. But if so, I got off easy. No pregnancy scares. No return to my father’s last name held in the palm of slow bureaucracy, hostage to what freedoms can be granted within the county court’s business hours. No falling in love with his dog or his tiny sweet son who has to wear those little rubber glasses with the loops over the ears. No one to be ripped away from, apologize to in a language they can’t read, and hope they’ll understand in time. No hands where they shouldn’t be. No words that cut worse than the ones I’ve breathed in already. No trips to Paris, no cities ruined. No worse than he left me now.

My therapist, I think, will smile while reading this.¹⁰ It didn’t matter to my therapist if the fucking drummer was a narcissist. She and I will never know. It does. Not. Matter. What mattered was that I felt the poison ivy of past pain¹¹ curling around my heels and stepped to safety.

Only took two years this time.

Feels like a commuted sentence.

I leave you with this:

from @gendersauce.

Let’s find out.

Love you bitches,

TG

1. Sometimes they actually are!!

2. 👀

3. Also, I can not find anything, ANYTHING, confirming that Koko and Steve Irwin ever met and subsequently maximized their joint slay.

Chilling.

4

I am literally now, with Matt and the chickens, the younger second wife/cool stepmom. I could have done it!!

5. I may talk about this in another newsletter because it is a fascinating and so plausibly deniable little (sub?)conscious tactic: the girlfriend didn’t have a name. For a calendar year, an entire calendar year, it was “the woman I’m seeing,” “my GF,” “my current GF” (chilling, anytime someone says “my current spouse/wife/boyfriend” I think of Rob Lowe in the Drew Peterson Lifetime movie), “the lady.” …Yeah, I’m gonna write about this, actually.

6. He absolutely went on a date with someone else in that window, though! And never went on a second with me, who he had been texting for you know, eight hours a day, instead. This is where the “tension” began. He kept it to text, many texts, thousands of texts, texts until he fell asleep, entire essays he had written for music publications in my texts, and I spent all that time wondering if we were kept to texting because he thought he couldn’t trust himself in the same room as me. Trust himself to not kiss me. And instead of this, I let myself be degraded to the point where I once told this 45-year-old man who should have been kinder verbatim, VERBATIM!!! that I swore on my grandmother that I wasn’t going to tie him to a chair Reservoir Dogs style, pull up Stealers Wheel on Spotify, and dance around him before giving him a big, bloody smooch.

And yes, that hyperlink is to Fleabag fanfiction.

7. Listen, sometimes you just have to Austen it up. Sorry.

8. I was really nice to him. I was.

9

10. She asked to read it and to her: thank you for your work. Thank you for making me work harder.

11. The NUMBER OF TIMES I said “you know, he’s kinda acting like (the ex who is the reason I still sleep with a baseball bat next to my bed) here. But wouldn’t I be smart enough to realize he was a narcissist by now?” My friends are fucking patient, man.