Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(10)

You know what’s a liberating thing to figure out? Everyone’s butt looks basically how you think it looks.





Step Nine: Taco the Back Wheel of Your Tiny Friend’s Tiny Bicycle in Amsterdam


I TOLD HER IT WOULDN’T WORK.





Step Ten: Neglect to Tell the Heavy Metal Doofus You Lose Your Virginity to that It’s Your First Time and Then Bleed All Over His Bed


“Okay, but, having your bed anointed with virgin’s blood is like the most metal thing ever, right?”

“You should go.”





Step Eleven: Ignore Several Weeks of Voicemails from Your Landlord


This was back when you had to actually physically call a phone number and type in a code to retrieve your own voicemails, which means I literally never did it. Too bad I missed the heads-up that my landlord would be touring my apartment with two appraisers from the insurance company just as I stepped out of the shower fully nude and singing “Just Around the Riverbend” from the soundtrack of Disney’s Pocahontas! YOU’RE WELCOME FOR THE BONERS, INSURANCE APPRAISERS.





Step Twelve: Have Sex that Is Not Silent and Still


On November 17, 2010, I received this e-mail from my handsome, gay apartment manager:


Hi Lindy,



Sorry to have to be the bearer of this type of complaint, but it is what it is, and we’re both adults.

I have had complaints from tenants regarding “sex noise” coming from your apartment, really late at night. The complaints are about creaking and vocalizations late at night (3am).

Thanks,

[REDACTED]





Well, I am a dead body now, so problem solved.





Step Thirteen: Tip Over a Picnic Table While Eating a Domino’s Personal Pan Pizza in the Press Area of a Music Festival


A music festival is a kind of collective hangover in which people who are cooler than you compete to win a special kind of lanyard so they can get into a special tent with unlimited free Gardetto’s. The only food available to the non-lanyarded hoi polloi is expensive garbage dispensed resentfully from a shack, which is how I found myself, in 2010, sitting alone at a picnic table in the press area of the Sasquatch! Music Festival, sweatily consuming a $45 Domino’s pepperoni personal pan pizza and a Diet Pepsi and hoping nobody noticed me.

Someone was interviewing the band YACHT at the next table, and I was sort of dispassionately staring at my phone, pretending like my friends were texting me even though they weren’t because I think they were all back in the free Gardetto’s area playing VIP four-square with Santigold or something probably. I watched the woman from YACHT do her interview for a few minutes before I remembered that we’d gone to college together, where, even before experimental pop fame, she’d been an untouchably cool and talented human lanyard who was also beautiful and nice. I chewed my oily pork puck.

A little gust of wind picked up and blew my Domino’s napkin off the picnic table and onto the ground. No big deal. I leaned over, nonchalantly, to pick it up. Gotta have a napkin! Can’t be a fat lady eating pizza with red pig-grease all over my face! Unfortunately, due to my intense preoccupation with not drawing attention to myself while eating a Domino’s personal pepperoni pan pizza in public at a music festival while fat, I misjudged the flimsy plastic picnic table’s center of gravity.

When I leaned over to grab the napkin, the table leaned over too.

I fell in the dirt. The pizza fell on top of me. The Diet Pepsi tipped over and glugged out all over my dress. The table fell on top of the Pepsi on top of the pizza on top of me. The napkin fluttered away. EVERYONE LOOKED AT ME. The music journalists looked at me. The band YACHT looked at me. In an attempt at damage control, I yelled, “I’m really drunk, so it’s okay!” which wasn’t even true, but apparently it’s better to be drunk at ten in the morning than it is to be a human being who weighs something? All that anxiety about trying not to be a gross, gluttonous fat lady eating a “bad” food in public, and I wound up being the fat lady who was so excited about pizza that she threw herself to the ground and rolled around in it like a dog with a raccoon carcass. Nailed it.





Step Fourteen: Get Hired to Write a Press Release for the Band Spoon, Then Write Something So Weird and Unusable that the Band Spoon Quietly Sends You a Check and Never Speaks to You Again and Hires Someone Normal to Write a Real Press Release


Here is the actual full text that I actually e-mailed to Britt Daniel of the band Spoon:


Some years ago in the past (no one knows how many for sure), a baby was born: his mother’s pride, hearty and fat, with eyes like pearls and fists like very small fingered hams. That baby was named David Coverdale of Whitesnake. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world and many, many years later, an even better and newer baby came out. They called that one Britt Daniel of Spoon. The two would never meet.

The son of an itinerant barber-surgeon (his motto: “Oops!”) and his raven-haired bride who may or may not have been Cher (she definitely wasn’t, say “historians”), Daniel spent his formative years traversing America’s heartland, on leech duty in the back of the amputation/perm wagon. Despite mounting pressure to join the family business—“the Daniel child’s bonesaw work truly is a poem!” swooned Itinerant Barber-Surgeon’s Evening Standard Digest—Daniel heard the siren song of song-singing and fled the narrow confines of his itchy-necked, blood-spattered world.