Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Lena Dunham
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“I hope you know you’re cleaning that up,” he said.
I didn’t do it, but I sort of liked being told to. Joaquin was absolutely impertinent and, despite my “why I oughta!” faux consternation, I was melting. He was Snidely Whiplash, and I was the innocent girl tied to the tracks, but I didn’t want Dudley Do-Right to come.
We started emailing. Mine were long and overwrought, trying to show him how dark my sense of humor was (I can make an incest joke!) and how much I knew about Roman Polanski. His were brief, and I could read both nothing and everything into them. He never even signed his name. On the night I quit, we met after work and smoked some pot I had hunted down specifically for the occasion. I didn’t have rolling papers (because I didn’t smoke pot!) so we wrapped it in a page of Final Cut Pro for Dummies. When I tried to kiss him, he told me he shouldn’t—not because he had a girlfriend, but because he was already sleeping with a different hostess. We went out to a twenty-four-hour Pakistani restaurant and, having been rejected, I was hungry for the first time in days. We ate our naan in silence.
We maintained our version of a friendship until finally, the following June, we kissed in the street outside the restaurant. I was disappointed by how hard his lips were and how silent he was once he had an erection.
What followed was two years of on-and-off ambiguous sex hangouts, increasingly perverse in their execution and often involving prescription drugs I’d hoarded from my parents’ various oral surgeries. He’d ignore me for months on end, during which time I’d ride the subway in a beret imagining I saw him getting on at every stop. When he did invite me over, his house was a suckhole. If I fell asleep there, it was often noon the next day before I got out the door. In the street I’d blink at the flat Brooklyn sunlight, cold to my bones.
This relationship culminated in the worst trip to Los Angeles ever seen outside of a David Lynch film. We spent four days in the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi’s ghost makes the tub run funny and they’re mean to you if you ask for a spoon. Highlights included him never touching me once, me falling asleep wearing only a thigh-high boot that belonged to my mother, and his confession that he didn’t think he knew how to care about another person.
As I gained some traction in my creative pursuits, I thought his respect for me would grow, but all it did was provide me with more money to slip out of dinner with friends and take a cab to his house. I hoped nobody asked me where I was going so I wouldn’t be forced to lie. We had sex one or two times after our LA excursion, but my heart wasn’t in it. If my heart was even in it before.
If I was writing this then, I would have glamorized the whole story for you—told you how misunderstood Joaquin was and how he was just as sad, scared, and lonely as the rest of us. I would have laughed as I described all the weird sexual liberties I let him take and his general immaturity (unassembled bed frame blocking the front door, cigar box full of cash, condoms in random pockets). Before entering Joaquin’s house I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they? I thought of myself as some kind of spy, undercover as a girl with low self-esteem, bringing back detailed intelligence reports on the dark side for girls with boyfriends who looked like lesbians and watched Friday Night Lights with them while eating takeout. They could have their supportive relationships and typical little love stories. I’d be Sid and Nancy–ing it up, refusing to settle for the status quo. I’d be cool.
I had a lucky little girlhood. It wasn’t always easy to live inside my brain, but I had a family that loved me, and we didn’t have to worry about much except what gallery to go to on Sunday and whether or not my child psychologist was helping with my sleep issues. Only when I got to college did it dawn on me that maybe my upbringing hadn’t been very “real.” One night outside my freshman dorm, a bunch of kids were smoking and shrieking with laughter, so I rushed outside in my pajamas, eager to join the fray.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Gary Pralick, who always wore a sweater knit by his great-grandmother (I later learned she was only seventy-nine). “Don’t you worry about it, Little Lena from Soho.”
What a snarky jerk. (Obviously, I later slept with him.) I tried my best to dismiss the comment, but it nagged at me, crept in during that nightly moment between eating three slices of pizza and being asleep. What was it that I couldn’t understand and how could I understand it, short of moving to a war-torn nation? I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had experiences to gain, things to learn. That feeling was the crux of my whole relationship with Joaquin.
Well, friends, learning about the “world” is not pretending you’re a hooker while a guy from the part of New Jersey that’s near Pennsylvania decides which Steely Dan record to put on at 4:00 A.M. The secrets of life aren’t being revealed when someone laughs at you for having studied creative writing. There is no enlightenment to be gained from letting your semiboyfriend’s bald friend touch your thigh too close to the place where it meets your crotch, but you let it happen because you think you might be in love. How else can you explain why you’ve spent so much money getting to his house?
The first few times Joaquin and I had sex, it was quick and a little sad. The overhead lights buzzed. He didn’t look at me, and afterward he didn’t linger. I wondered if it was somehow my fault. Maybe I was a dead fish, uncreative in the sack, paralyzed by my desperation to please. Maybe I was destined to lie there like a slab until I was too old for intercourse.
Then, the night before Thanksgiving, I met him at a bar in Queens. Wearing fishnets and a little gray skirt-suit from J. C. Penney, I was dressed like a hooker dressed as an insurance broker. But something about the outfit inspired him, and he looked at me with a new kind of hunger that drove us back toward his house, where he kissed me on the couch, determined, maybe a little pissed. He guided me to the bed, where he turned me on my stomach. Alcohol, fear, and fascination cloud my memory, but I know my tights were balled up and placed in my mouth. I didn’t know where he was in the room at certain points, until I did. And he spoke to me, unleashing streams of the filthiest shit I had ever heard leave another human’s mouth. Impressive in its narrative intricacy, and horrifying in its predilections. This, I decided to believe, is the best game I’ve ever played.
I walked out into the street the next day bare legged and reeling, not sure whether I’d been ruined or awoken.
But I got no closer to enlightenment hiding in a bodega down the block from Joaquin’s house, pretending to be at a cool party “kinda near your place.” He was busy. With his other girlfriend, who, he told me, was “very well raised and even her dirty underwear smells clean.” Why did I keep calling? Because I was waiting for his mind to change, for him to talk to me the way my father does or the way Geoff did, even in our darkest hour. Intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn’t want to be spoken to like that. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left. After a long post-California cooling-off period, Joaquin and I fell in love for a week. At least that’s what it felt like. It was October, still warm, with a near-constant drizzle. I had a new leather blazer, bought with my first paycheck. With its silver grommets and wide lapel, it made every outfit feel like a uniform from the future. We met for drinks, and he hugged me tightly. We talked about Los Angeles, how sad it had gotten, and the fact that we were better off as friends. We lingered, drink after drink, then at his house we agreed friends could have intercourse if they didn’t kiss at all, Pretty Woman style. The next morning he rolled toward me and