Scrappy Little Nobody(27)
I met Landon through the internet. Not ON the internet like some kind of freak. No, I met him the normal way: Heather (my hot blond friend) met Brent (Landon’s hot blond friend) on Myspace and those two introduced us right around the time they were getting tired of having hot blond dry-humping sessions. Because hot blonds need breakup wingmen, I guess?
Landon was attractive and he knew Anchorman by heart, which at the time passed for really funny. He was kind of a jock, which made me want to turn my nose up at him—as I did with all jocks—so I could let the world know that not being with a handsome, athletic type was MY CHOICE. But he was persistent and a genuine romantic, and when I weighed my options logically it seemed silly not to date him. I wanted to escape the wasteland of being the nineteen-year-old loner and, to the naked eye, this guy was perfect. He was polite and punctual and my friends liked him a lot . . . and he was very handsome.
One day during our courtship, he dropped off a novelty trucker hat on my doorstep. I know we’ve all figured out that novelty trucker hats are hideous, but it was cool at the time. Today, that would be like a guy giving you a spiked ear cuff, or a turtleneck crop top (or for future editions: a novelty trucker hat, because fashion is cyclical). It was sweet and original and I could resist no more. Let’s be real: he had a pulse and he wanted to be my boyfriend.
On our first official date, he took me to a trendy restaurant. I rolled my eyes over how “LA” it all was. I’d never been somewhere so stylish, which should have made me nervous, but being openly disdainful of anything cool is in my comfort zone, so I still had a couple moves at my disposal. I really shine in a Taco Bell parking lot with a water bottle full of vodka, but I could work with this.
After dinner, we went back to my apartment and talked with my roommates for an appropriate length of time before retiring to my room and crawling into the luxury of my twin bed. We fooled around for a while, I employed a few suggestions from the early chapters of the Guide to Getting It On!, no one recoiled in horror at any point—a successful first-date-level encounter.
I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, the first thing that went through my mind was Why is he still here? I was thrilled! I was proud of myself. I was still in control! Just because we’d hooked up didn’t mean he had the upper hand. I was still powerful, and hard-hearted, and I could walk away from this whenever I felt like it.
The next morning, we drove to breakfast and I told him as much, just so he knew the score. “Okay, creepy,” he said, and turned up the radio.
I assessed the situation. We’d had a nice dinner, some playful banter, and fooling around that was in no way objectionable. All right, world, let’s do this, let’s have me a damn boyfriend.
I looked at dating him as a kind of personal experiment. Something about him being a jock or liking nice restaurants or having the stench of family money despite his studio apartment made me feel like this would be a safe bet for me. In theory, I should have been intimidated. Instead, I felt superior. He’d also never met a girl as bossy as me, and knowing that emboldened me even more. I am a boss bitch, and this dude is too basic to hurt me. Neither of those slang terms were around yet, but that’s the vibe I had.
I am a jerk for feeling superior to anyone ever, and that was equally true of Landon (despite being the kind of guy who saved up to buy the exact suit Ashton Kutcher wore on the cover of GQ). I made fun of him a lot—luckily that’s the kind of thing that comes across as playful at nineteen—but Landon turned out to be fun, caring, and seriously right-brain smart.
After a satisfactory couple of months, I felt more committed to this “dating experiment” and started subconsciously, and sometimes consciously, making a bizarre coming-of-age checklist. (Had I learned nothing from my beads-and-lipstick pen pal episode?) It was mostly stuff I’d seen in movies, and I knew it was stupid, but every milestone gave me a sense that I was approaching normalcy. Nothing in my life was going especially well at that point, but if the guy I was seeing burned a CD for me (Check!) it felt like I was becoming a standard American adult.
He asked me to take a road trip to meet his parents.
“Okay. If I meet your parents, would that make us boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“I thought we already were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“No, we’re not. But would you agree that me ‘meeting your parents’ would make us officially boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Yeah, creepy, I guess it would.”
“Okay, great. I’m looking forward to it.”
The road trip hit a lot of items on my imaginary relationship checklist. We shared painful childhood memories during the long stretches of the drive—Check! We took pictures kissing in front of national landmarks—Check! He showed me his childhood bedroom—Check! It was like a real relationship! All of it was genuinely meaningful to me, but the checklist was always there, giving me little bonus rushes of validation.
After I met his parents and we got back to LA, I addressed a big unchecked box. “Okay, we’re boyfriend and girlfriend now. So we should have sex, right?”
Landon had had sex before and always assured me that he was fine with what we were doing. Gently, he said, “I’d love to, but only if you want to, and if you think you’re ready.” He put his hand on my arm.
“Blechhhh. Don’t make this weird, let’s just go have sex.”