013 - No Tomatoes

I was taken aback by just how humid the jetway was. Michigan gets sticky in the summer, but nothing like this. Walking down that retractable hallway to the airport felt like a low-power car wash for humans, by the end my shirt sticking to me and the clammy perspiration covering my torso. I had been to Florida before, but that was a decade earlier, in December, in Central Florida. Southern Florida, as it turns out, is a different bushel of oranges entirely.

I got a hold of V and let her know I just had to wait for my bag. She informed me that she was running late and would be there soon. I retrieved my bag from the rotating Pez dispenser of personal belongings and made my way out of the air conditioning and onto the concrete sidewalk. It was already dark but still hot. Jesus Christ, now I know why all the crazy shit seems to happen in Florida. This is winter here?

Bathed in orange incandescent light, framed in by palm fronds I waited there, with the smell of idling exhaust in the air, and the sound of droning insects reverberating in the stillness. Cicadas? Mosquitoes? I didn’t know, and I was fine keeping it that way. Whatever Cretaceous Period critters this state had could stay unknown to me. I’ll leave the dinosaurs (and alligators) to Jeff Goldblum.

V and her dad arrived and it was...strange? It wasn’t my first time crossing the streams of virtual and vivant, but there was something uncanny. I think because unlike my podcast friends, I had seen photos of her, and now the IMAX 3D version seemed...too real. I was transfixed on her mouth as she spoke, in a surreal stupor, a demi-disbelief. It’s not like I didn’t think she was real, or that I assumed I was being catfished, but I think some details of my inner portrait of V didn’t match up, and there was something bizarre and alternate-reality about it all.

Like when you realize you’ve been mispronouncing a word or name you’ve only ever read, and now are hearing aloud for the first time.

“It’s Hermione?I’ve been reading it as Her-me-own for years!”

It takes time for the adjustment. Hermeown doesn’t disappear in a puff of floo powder just because J.K. Rowling came and set the record straight. It’s why Pluto still feels like a planet to us. How dare those scientists downgrade it to dwarf status — it’s still real to me, dammit!

It’s always awkward when parents are involved, but hers didn’t really make it that way. They were quite glad I was there and incredibly welcoming. It took a fair deal of recalibration — their house was far from home-field advantage for me. Very catholic, and very conservative, nearly every wall had some kind of dead Jesus on it, and the sixty-five-inch living-room TV continuously flashed with FOX News updates, luckily with the sound off most of the time. I’m surprised I didn’t catch fire the moment I crossed the threshold, smote in my place by the Lord Almighty.

I could handle it. I’m a chameleon when it comes to these things: talk a little college football, drop a few references to the man upstairs, act like I had my shit together, yes sir, no ma’am — can I help you with that? What a lovely home, I’m so thankful I get to visit. Just keep your mouth shut when the magic box talks about how Obama is a secret homosexual Al Qaeda operative, and things will go just fine.

Her parents were pretty naive, in a sweet and innocent way. I walked with V upstairs, and she showed me her room.

“So, should I put my stuff in your brother’s room?” Her brother’s room was adjacent, and he was away at FSU, so I assumed, well, yeah.

“No, no, you’re staying in here,” she replied.

“In your bed?”

“Yeah, my parents are fine with my friends doing that.”

Well color me baffled. I would not have expected a laissez-faire bedsharing policy from parents of such...interests. I guess they just trusted her — and by extension, everyone else — to keep their hands to themselves and not draw anger from on high. In fairness, they didn’t really have to worry. There was no way I was making any first moves. Whatever we were, or were going to be would be on her terms.

That’s always been my policy, mostly out of a fear of rejection — a few or sharing my feelings for someone and being rebuked, a fear of saying something I can’t take back. Something that risks the current relationship dynamic for the possibility of a greater one. If it ain’t broke, don’t be the one to fuck it up, I always say.

The first night was, well, awkward? I guess I don’t know how to describe the feeling of meeting someone in the flesh after months of daily correspondence, and then hours late, finding yourself in the same bed. I also apparently wasn’t the first internet friend to come visit, so... was I... or... just what was going on here? Being me, the self-loather, I concluded I was probably only a friend in her eyes. I hadn’t exactly received much positive feedback from the opposite sex in the world of romance up until that point, so I doubted someone so seemingly out of my league would be the first to affirm anything. We slept in the bed together that night, with enough room for Jesus between us.

V didn’t have a license. Despite living in the suburbs her whole life, with no access to public transportation, it just never happened. She started modeling at sixteen, and was travelling to Europe pretty often, so much so that she had to withdraw from High School and get a GED, since she was gone too often to meet the state attendance requirements for a diploma. She was plenty smart, just not around. Seemingly, the driver’s license also fell by the wayside in her teenage career pursuits. I was visiting during the workweek, and her parents graciously sacrificed a vehicle and carpooled so V and I had some wheels for whatever we wanted to do while they were at work.

Our first stop was Big Bear brewing Company, the jewel of Coral Springs. Most every corner of this white-suburban-golf-course-hell was dotted with chain restaurants you’d find in mall parking lots across America, cheesy slogans and walls covered in ornamental kitsch, but Big Bear was really doing the damn thing. Their menu changed pretty consistently, the owner and head chef knew what they were doing, and I can honestly say that everything on that menu was fantastic. All the way down to their in-house root beer.

That was our first stop, for lunch on my first full day in Florida. We didn’t get there until almost 3:30 though, because goddamn, V slept forever. She could go eleven or twelve hours without so much as opening her eyes once. I wasn’t much of an early riser myself, but still spent a couple hours each day busying myself alone in the house while visions of sugarplums still danced through V’s head upstairs. Make coffee, let the dog out, pace around aimlessly, look at the newspaper to see just what South Florida was up to, scroll deep down into Reddit, lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling... there were even mornings where I wound up taking a nap and awoke to find her still asleep.

V also took forever to get ready. For anything. She’d change her mind and try five different outfits, only to return to her first choice, each time asking me what I thought. “I don’t know, you look great in all of them”, to which her response was always a myriad of grievances invisible to me.  “This skirt makes my thighs look huge — ugh, my shoulders are so broad, I look like man”, critiques that no outside opinion could quell. She’d eventually abandon and accept whatever outfit she ended on, never fully content with how it made her look, despite turning heads and garnering compliments everywhere we went.

Then came the makeup. Even all these years later, a small part of me dies inside thinking about how many hours I lost waiting on V-onardo da Vinci to finish the Mona V-sa’s face in the bathroom. Foundation, eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara, the whole lot. Just like her outfit, she’d find one thing she didn’t like and start all over. Early on it didn’t bother me — watching it all for the first time, I didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe everyone did this? Is this what all that “unattainable beauty standards” talk is about? If this is part of the patriarchy, call me Susan B. Anthony, because I’m fucking starving and will do anything to get out of this house already.

I hate being late. I hate people making me late. I hate wasting people’s time. I hate people who make me waste someone’s time. If you’re the kind of person who waits until the Uber arrives to say your goodbyes and put on your coat — I despise you a little. I’m there, on the sidewalk, ready. It’s not the driver’s job to wait for you. They make fuck-all of a salary chauffeuring mostly drunk people around all night. Have some fucking respect, the app shows you when the car will arrive. Don’t be that person. I’ve met several people who talk about how you “can tell who a person really is by how they treat waitstaff” — saying they always tip twenty percent or more — but then will somehow have ten minutes’ worth of shit to do while I’m in the backseat of a Hyundai Sonata telling the driver “Oh, they’ll be right out”, knowing he is watching more and more money disappear from his bank account like pennies in an hourglass.

To the people I’ve made mention of this in my personal life who have replied with “it’s their job”, or “they’re used to it”, or “everyone does it”, I will now speak on behalf of all the drivers too respectful to say something:     Fuck You. A taxi driver is not your butler.

Anyway, my greatest pet peeve aside, V and I finally did make it to lunch. She told me to order for her --  margherita pizza, no tomatoes. Okay, I guess in the South maybe some traditional gender roles endured. I would later learn it wasn’t about any man-woman dynamic, but instead V’s paralyzing social anxiety. So afraid she would flub a word or mishear the waitress and be forever remembered by someone as the girl who embarrassed herself. Boisterous and opinionated otherwise, in public, to strangers, she became a mouse. She couldn’t even call her doctor’s office to make appointments, someone else had to.

That was an entirely foreign idea to me. I was never worried about being embarrassed — I had spent so much of my life as a fat kid who hated himself and the way he looked; tripping over my words to a server seemed like small potatoes. We all have our things though, so I respected that concern of hers.

“Hi, we’re doing great, how are you? Yes, I’ll have the ahi tuna salad, and she’ll have a

margherita pizza — no tomatoes.”