Free I Don't Care About Your Band by Julie Klausner

Lewinsky scandal broke, and Sex and the City debuted. I think 1997 is the only respite of the zeitgeist chatter concerning the ins and outs of romance, and I blame that on Princess Diana’s death. Clearly, a nation’s vaginas were sitting shiva on the behalf of the People’s Princess.
    At this time, I, too, was eager, to paraphrase Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, playing (for a change) a wise old black man, to “get busy datin’ or get busy dyin’.” I bought into the Clintonian promise of a mouth for every dick, and I wanted in on the deal. The rest of the world seemed to buzz on the same frequency, and women everywhere in New York City seemed to crawl with dating desperation. Terminology that previously only lived between the covers of Cosmo now seemed to be inescapable: Get and keep a man! Commitment time! Pleasure zones! On the prowl!
    I dressed the part, in animal prints and red lipstick. But I wasn’t going for “cougar”—I wanted to do the B-movie, cat-eye-glasses, Bettie Page, fishnets, and Russ Meyer thing. You know, the look that people in the Pacific Northwest still think is really cutting-edge? But it didn’t look cute on me. Instead, I looked like a woman with designs on men, and more Delta Burke than Annie Potts.
    Predictably, my efforts were tempered by the fact that real life, thank God, is nothing like Cosmo magazine. Which is why nobody should wear makeup to the gym to meet men or learn how to perfect one’s “Faux-O.” I was like Carrie Bradshaw only in that I hung out downtown and wanted a boyfriend. My shoes were limited to a couple of comfortable options, I didn’t drink, and you couldn’t see my collarbone without an MRI. Also, the people I hung out with around that time were pretty un-fabulous.
    There was Jodi, my roommate from New Jersey who was missing a set of knuckles, so her fingers could only go perpendicular. Candace, the only person I ever met to have actually grown up in the Orchard Beach section of the Bronx, who used to strip to Motley Crüe in Yonkers and blamed her small breasts on an eating disorder she developed during puberty. And Eve, a dumpster-diving punk-rocker wannabe whose identification of water as “wudder” screamed “Pennsylvania Mainline,” but who wanted more than anything to live in a squat somewhere in 1982. Eve’s whole life was scored by URGH! A Music War , but her bank account was padded with the wages of comfortable suburban parents. I was also friendly with a lot of gay girls who would never get sick of telling me how great Judith Butler’s books are, and why it was important to see Boys Don’t Cry more than once, “to catch the subtleties.”
    “I don’t get it,” said Lauryn, one of the aforementioned lesbians, after I made the mistake of asking her for advice about my sorry dating life. “How many times are you going to get screwed over by all those shitty guys before you move on?”
    I just giggled in response, like she was flirting with me—all gay people who share your gender want to have sex with you, you know—and thought, “Lauryn’s so funny!” I knew sex with a girl was like the Master Cleanse: Maybe it changed other people’s lives for the better, but it wasn’t for me, and it sort of made my stomach hurt a little to think about diving into that particular collegiate cliché.
    But Lauryn was right about the shitty guys. I dated them in college like it was my major.
     
    I MET all grades of awful men getting picked up in bars I got into with a fake Georgia driver’s license. Under the guise of hailing from Savannah, I got to meet winners like Reginald Blankenship, a carrot-topped lanky Kentuckian who met me at Max Fish two hours before requesting oral sex with a mintfl avored condom, which is sort of like ordering a cheeseburger and drinking it through a straw. Reginald taught me two things: that I can’t be intimate with a man with the same skin and hair coloring as me, because the minute a redheaded man