The best jokes are the ones you explain
In 2004, M and I were dating long distance from Austin to Boston. There was no direct flight, and neither of us had a ton of loose income, so dating that year was typically about one mad-dash of a long weekend per month, with lots of phone time in between. One trip, M’s first flight was delayed, leaving her only 20 minutes to make her connection. When she called to tell me she missed it, I said, “Oh, that sucks. Running through the airport and the gate’s already closed.”
“I didn’t run,” she said. “That’s not my style.” I felt this bizarre mix of admiration and frustration that I took to mean I had fallen in love for the first time.
This was my third major relationship, following a college thing that ran through law school (hers) and a too-quick marriage to a brilliant and brilliantly funny woman who would have made a perfect lifelong friend. Up till 2004 I’d had moments of infatuation and lust, but never anything that seemed complex enough for love.
When we started dating, I had just become a practicing alcoholic. After my divorce, I fell into a deep well of drinking, more than any other point in my life, before or since. I mostly drank Stoli blue label because it was 100 proof for the same price as 80. Everything I did in 2003 and 2004 starts with “I got drunk and…” I got drunk and flirted online at work through Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger. I got drunk and told the Chinese bartender at the Italian restaurant I loved her before I threw up outside and lamented that I wouldn’t see her again.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why I crashed so hard when my marriage ended. I wanted to be just like Michael Steadman on “thirtysomething”, which I watched obsessively as a teen, then re-watched daily on reruns on Lifetime in college. I had no ambitions of my own, so that seemed to be achievable: a wife, kids and a desk job with enough intrigue to carry the occasional two-part episode. After the show ended, I watched everything Ken Olin directed (“EZ Streets”!) and Timothy Busfield starred in (“The Byrds of Paradise”! It had Seth Green in it.).
I believed that the best path to being lauded by my parents was to get married, and when that identity was gone, I didn’t have a backup self.
******
While working at Copy Cop in Boston, I developed a mad crush on a coworker, a redheaded painter who lived a quirky life in a converted dentist’s office. Was I seeking Melanie Mayron as “Melissa”, the arty photographer who lived in a messy downtown loft in Philadelphia? Temple University accepted my creative writing application — I could’ve gone to Philadelphia, where the show was set, instead of Boston. I could have driven around Bryn Mawr, where the exteriors were shot. I’ve been married twice to redheads, including M, who was also a painter?
M was born in Roxbury and as Boston as they come. Her father owned a gas station, her mother was a nurse, brother’s a cop, sister’s a dean at a local college. Once, at the end of another compressed weekend, I lamented that we hadn’t done something-or-other that I’d planned for us to do, and M started to laugh.
“I didn’t do enough!” she mocked. “I could’ve done more!”
I must have looked thoroughly confused.
“Schindler’s List,” she said. “I could’ve done more.”
That’s was the next time I fell in love.
******
Long-distance relationships were, for me, a perfect balance of commitment and freedom. I loved the emotional roller coaster that comes from longing, reconciling and parting, over and over again. I’ve been through three of them, and in each case I was ambivalent about actually moving to the new town. They allowed me to put my best self forward, because I was afraid that any other version of me, the daily life version, would prove dull or sour. Plus, when I got time alone, I could get back to listening to the saddest albums I could find and drinking till I could feel again.
I don’t remember anyone on thirtysomething having a severe drinking problem, but maybe I could get a three-episode arc where I work in creative, wear a too-big suit and keep missing important meetings, covering up by claiming that I’m a genius, and that’s just my style. Then Elliot will have to intervene while confronting, let’s say, his mother’s alcoholism.
Oh my god these people look so young.
P.S. A regular reader of this blog, about the same age, shared that he, too, had a similar thirtysomething obsession, structuring parts of his life around it. I’m more shocked to be not-alone on this front than any story I’ve shared in AA.