Jingle All the Way Read online

  “No!”

  “Yes. Naked and, ah . . . you know, aroused.” I’m stuck in traffic, story of my life, talking on my cell phone, which is paid for by the company I work for, making it one of the very, very few perks of being employed by Pinnacle Media. “I mean, I know it’s been a while since I’ve dated anyone, but isn’t the whole point of dating and sex to kind of, I don’t know, enjoy this stuff together? Like getting turned on by the other person’s touch, and not by the sound of someone brushing her teeth in the bathroom?”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I looked at him like the maniac he was, and he realized that I was appalled and said that he’d assumed that when I said I was going to brush my teeth, that meant I was going to put my diaphragm in.”

  “I don’t . . . is English his native language? I don’t see how anyone could possibly come to that conclusion.”

  “Right, Tate, that’s my point. The guy was a loon. So I reply, quite logically under the circumstances I think, my mouth foaming with toothpaste, ‘No, I willy was bruffing my teef.’ And this whole situation strikes me as so wildly funny. I mean, in the past six months, I’ve dated a bitter divorcé, been hit on by a string of lesbians, and now this. How did my dating life go so tragically wrong? Anyway, I just lost it. I crumpled to the ground in a fit of hysteria. I mean, I started laughing so hard I literally couldn’t stand, and he looked all put out and confused. And out of the corner of my eye, as I was convulsing around like a fish out of water, I see him get dressed, and then he stepped over my writhing body and said, ‘I don’t know where things went wrong between us . . .’ ”

  “No!” Tate howls with laughter.

  “Yes. He said some other stuff, but I was laughing too hard to hear him. I mean, hello, I can tell you exactly where you went wrong, buddy.”

  Tate and I laugh. Then Tate says, “Did you tell Sylvia about how the guy she set you up with is a kook?”

  “Hell, yes. I called her up, and I was like, ‘Um, thanks for setting me up with a sexual predator.’ And you know what she said? She said, ‘I knew it had been a long time for both of you, and I thought you might just enjoy each other’s company, even if it never got serious.’ I don’t think you need to be an English lit major to read the hidden meaning in that sentence. I mean, obviously Sylvia thinks I’m such a sad schlub who is so desperate for sex I’ll have a one-night stand with a scrawny, socially inept engineer.”

  “Jadie, look at it this way: you can put all these experiences into your writing. Maybe you’ll write a book one day about all the hilarious dates you’ve been on.”

  I groan. “Oh, God, please don’t tell me I’m going to go on enough bad dates to fill an entire book.”

  “There’s a guy out there for you, I know there is.”

  “Maybe. I’m just pretty sure he’s not in Boulder, Colorado.”

  “He’s out there. I know he is. Somewhere. Look, I gotta go. I’m going to be late for my shift.”

  “Have fun slinging tofu.”

  “Oh, you know I always do.”

  I click the phone off, and now that I have nothing to occupy myself with I can focus completely on how annoyed I am at sacrificing yet another hour of my life to traffic. Why aren’t we going anywhere, why?

  I can’t wait until the day I can work full-time as a writer and won’t have to commute in highway traffic twice a day anymore.

  I’m a travel writer, though most people call me a “creative project manager for a web design company.” Personally I think this shows an appalling lack of imagination. I have published travel articles, after all. Several of them, in fact. Granted, all told, in my five years of freelancing I’ve only made a few hundred bucks on my writing, and my travel expenses have come to about ten times more than what I made from my articles, but it’s a start. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, “creative project manager” is a fancy title for “underpaid doormat who works too hard.” Basically, Pinnacle Media’s philosophy is to give their staff fancy titles instead of livable salaries, as if this were a fair exchange.) Essentially, my job is to manage people who do actual work. I make sure the copywriters, graphic designers, and programmers are getting their pieces of the puzzle done on time. Every now and then I get to brainstorm ideas for how to design a Web site, and those are the few moments when I actually like my job, when I get to be creative and use my brain, letting the ideas come tumbling out. But mostly my job feels ethereal and unsubstantial. The world of the Internet moves so quickly that by the time a Web site gets launched, the company we created the site for is already working on a redesign, and within months, any work I did on a site disappears. That’s why I like writing for magazines. I do the work, it gets printed with my byline, and I have the satisfaction of having something tangible to show for my efforts.

  Finally I see what has been holding traffic up—a car that’s pulled over to the side of the road with a flat tire. Great. Forty extra minutes on my commute so people can slow down to see the very exciting sight of a car with a flat tire. I growl through gritted teeth at the sinister gods of traffic who are clearly intent on giving me an aneurism.

  Eventually I make it home, grab the mail, unlock my door, and dump the mail on my kitchen table, my keys clattering down beside the stack of bills and catalogs advertising clothes I wouldn’t wear under threat of torture. I sift through the pile; in it is the latest issue of the alumni magazine from the journalism school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, my alma matter. I flip idly through it until I see a classmate of mine, Brenda Amundson, who smiles up at me from the magazine’s glossy pages in her fashionable haircut and trendy clothes. As I read the article, my mood sinks.

  I know I’m not the first person who has struggled to make it as a writer, but sometimes, like, oh, say, when I get my alumni magazine and read that Brenda Amundson, who is my age—twenty-seven—and has the same degree I have, is making a trillion zillion dollars a year writing for a popular sitcom in L.A., while I’m struggling to get a few bucks writing for magazines no one has ever heard of, my self-esteem wilts.

  I change into a T-shirt and shorts to go for a run—I need to blow off steam. To warm up, I walk to a park, then start an easy jog along the path along Boulder Creek. It’s 7:30 at night, but the sun is still out and the air is warm.

  Boulder has its faults, but it’s so gorgeous you forgive them. No matter how many years I’ve lived here, the scenery never stops being breathtaking. As I run, I take in the quiet elegance of the trees, the creek, the stunning architecture. The University of Colorado at Boulder is an intensely beautiful campus. Every building is made out of the red and pink colors of sandstone rocks and topped with barrel-tiled roofs. Behind them are the Flatirons, the jagged cliffs in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that draw rock climbers from around the world and help routinely put Boulder on “best places to live” lists in magazines.

  I jog for about half an hour, then walk and stretch until I’ve caught my breath. I sit down on the grass and watch three college students playing Frisbee in one corner of the field. Across the way, two young people with dreadlocks and brightly colored rags for clothes are playing catch with a puppy.

  The puppy makes me smile, but I realize as I watch it that I still feel tense. My jaw muscles are sore from clenching them, a bad habit I have when I am stressed, which is most of the time these days it seems.

  I need to get away, to relax. I long to hit the road.

  I’ve always loved traveling. Since I was a little kid I always wanted to escape, to find a place I could comfortably call home and just be myself. In the small town where I grew up, life had been a daily exercise in not fitting in.

  The fact that I was considered weird was mostly my parents’ fault. They ran a health food store/new age shop where they tried to sell crystals to align chakras, tarot cards, incense, meditation music, that sort of thing. I’m fairly certain that no one ever bought a single sack of brown rice or bag of seaweed from their grocery store. They got by because of t
he side businesses they ran in the shop—Mom cut hair and Dad built and repaired furniture. Yes, I know, a health food/new age/hair salon/furniture shop is unusual, but when I was growing up, it was all I knew.

  My mom was the kind to bake oatmeal cookies sweetened with apple juice and honey. You can imagine how popular the treats I brought to school for bake sales and holiday parties were. About as popular as me. Which is to say not at all.

  I sat through years of school lunches all on my own, eating carob bran muffins and apples while every other kid had Ding-Dongs and Pop-Tarts. And I dreamed and dreamed of getting away and seeing the world. Going to places where I could be whoever I wanted to be and wouldn’t be the weird kid in town.

  I found that place in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder is a place where pot-smoking, dreadlocked eighteen-year-olds claim poverty yet wear Raybans. Boulderites believe themselves to be one with nature, but ironically own some of the most expensive homes in the country and drive CO2-spewing SUVs. It’s a place that manages to be somehow new age and old school. A place where yuppies and hippies collide and where, inexplicably, people think running in marathons is actually fun.

  My life is equally mixed up. It feels like a pinball machine—I’m the ball, getting flung around in directions I couldn’t foresee and never considered. Like how I ended up working for Pinnacle Media. I thought that after graduation I would become this world-renowned journalist covering coup attempts, international corruption and intrigue, the works. But after I got my degree, I couldn’t get a job writing so much as obituaries for some small-town newspaper. Frustratingly, papers like the New York Times and Washington Post seemed to be doing okay even without my help, and nobody from these respective papers was banging down my door begging me to write for them. They didn’t even glance at my resume, just like every other newspaper in America, no matter how small or inconsequential. So I took a job doing Web content at an Internet company during the height of Internet insanity, when every twenty-year-old kid with a computer was declaring himself a CEO and launching an on-line business determined to get rich quick. The company was living large for a while, but then the economy started to turn. I could tell we were going down, and I felt lucky when I landed the job at Pinnacle.

  That feeling lasted, oh, twenty-eight seconds.

  But whenever I complain about work, people tell me to get another job, like getting another job is easy, especially with the economy the way it is. My mantra is Someday the economy will get better and I’ll be able to find another job. Someday the economy will get better and I’ll be able to find another job.

  Until that magical day, I travel to get away whenever possible, taking a handful of short trips each year to cities in the United States, Mexico, or Canada. I’ve been saving up money and vacation time to go on a real trip, something longer than a four-day weekend, but I keep waiting for some flash of insight that will tell me where the best place is to go, some location that will prove a treasure trove of sales to magazines.

  Although maybe it doesn’t really matter where I go, whether Barbados is the happening spot this year or if Madagascar is the place to be, whether the Faroe Islands are going to be the next big thing or if Malta will be all the rave. After all, the articles I have sold haven’t come from the short trips I’ve taken but from living in the Denver/Boulder area—stuff about little known hot spots in Colorado and how to travel cheap in Denver. Mostly I write for small local newspapers and magazines. I’ve gotten a few pieces published in national magazines, but the biggies, the large circulation publications that pay livable wages like United Airlines’ Hemispheres or Condé Nast Traveler, remain elusively, tantalizingly out of reach.

  In the past year, depressed about my career, I decided I would try to get another area of my life in shape—my love life. It hasn’t exactly gone according to plan.

  First, there was the bitter divorcé. I didn’t know he was bitter until we went out on our first date. I knew he was divorced; he’d told me. I just didn’t know how frightening the depths of his contempt for his ex went.

  I met Jeff at the Tofu Palace, the restaurant where I used to work when I was in college. My friend Tate still works there, and I was waiting for her to get finished with her shift when Jeff and I got to talking. I was sitting at the table next to him, and as another waitress, Sylvia, brought him his shot of wheat grass, he said something that made me laugh, and he kept on cracking me up with little quips and witty remarks. I don’t even remember what we talked about, just that he seemed like a nice guy, and when he asked if he could have my number, I told him he could. I started to write it down, and he said abruptly, “Before you give me your number, there is something you should know.”

  I immediately thought he was going to say that he was out on bail for murder charges or something.

  “I’m divorced and have two kids.”

  I waited a beat. “And?”

  “And what? That’s it.”

  “That’s your big secret? You’re divorced and have kids?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “I think I can handle it.”

  (Of course, that really wasn’t his big secret. His real secret was that he was a complete psychopath whose rage toward his ex festered in a frightening and unseemly way.)

  The fact that he had kids appealed to me. He told me he saw them—a three-year-old girl and two-year-old boy—every other weekend. I imagined Jeff and I getting married, and I would be able to help raise these kids and watch them grow, but on a convenient part-time basis without any of that painful pregnancy and birthing business.

  But then I went out on my one and only date with Jeff, and that fantasy was blown to bits.

  Things started well enough. Then in the middle of a nice meal after a couple of glasses of wine, I asked him something about his ex. Something like if they’d managed to stay friends or why they broke up, I can’t remember exactly. Jeff got this maniacal look in his eyes and said, “That lying, money-grubbing bitch. I hate her. Women—all they want is your money. Lying . . . cheating . . . manipulative bitches. But sometimes you get sick of porn and want the real thing.” He laughed about that last thing, as if it were a joke, but it very clearly wasn’t. And when I looked at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed, he seemed to come out of his trance, and our gazes met. I was blinking in shock, and I think he realized that like an evil villain going around disguised as a good guy, he’d accidentally let the mask slip off and some serious damage control was in order. He smiled. “Just kidding. It was rough going there for a while, but we’re friends again.” He saw my incredulity. “No, really. I love women.” Yeah, to have sex with. “Sometimes you get sick of porn and want the real thing” . . . unbefuckinglievable.

  So that was the end of Jeff.

  So now you’ll want to know about the lesbians. Their names are Laura and Mai, and they live in my apartment building.

  We’d always been polite when we’d met in the hallway or at the mailboxes over the years. Then a few months ago, as I held the front door to the building open for them, they asked me what I had going on that night. It was a Friday, yet I had a whopping nothing to do and no place to be. They said they were going dancing at a lesbian bar that night, did I want to go with them? I said sure, it sounded like fun.

  Laura and Mai are both big girls and very pretty. Laura looks like Mandy Moore would if Mandy were a size fourteen. And Mai has a build like Oprah—busty and curvy and strong. And they have the cutest style. Their outfits wouldn’t be featured in InStyle or anything, but I think they have a certain bohemian charm, and can we talk accessories? Clunky, colorful jewelry to die for.

  We hit the club a few hours later, dancing our little hearts out. For some reason I didn’t think it was strange that they kept buying drinks for me and plying me with alcohol. After all, they knew I was straight, I knew they’d been dating each other forever, what was there to worry about?

  It was late when we got back.

  “Do you want to come to our place for a nightcap?” Mai asked
.

  “No. Can’t drink no more. Alcohol . . . too much.”

  “Why don’t you come inside and we’ll give you some water so you won’t have a hangover,” Laura said.

  I was too drunk to protest—or really even know what was happening. As I staggered into their apartment, I noticed that the hide-a-bed had been pulled out. I remember thinking, I didn’t know their couch had a hide-a-bed.

  We sat on the edge of the hide-a-bed, the two of them flanking me. In an instant, Laura was blowing in my ear and Mai was kissing my neck and stroking my breast. It took me a moment to process what was happening. My brain was working in slow motion. It was like I’d gotten stuck in a sand trap, and no matter how much I tried to accelerate, the wheels of my brain just went around and around and never got anywhere. But eventually I realized that my breast was being stroked by a woman. I found this information to be very confusing.

  Once I finally noticed what was going on, I seemed to sober up instantly. I sprang up off the couch. “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m straight!” I yelped.

  “There’s no reason to be locked into these artificial constructions. . . these meaningless boundaries . . .” Mai began.

  “Like boundaries! Boundaries good!” My English skills, despite my degree in journalism, had been reduced to the level of a two-year-old. That’s when I began backing up toward the door. In moments I was sprinting backward at Mach-10 speed, a blur of a human at break-the-sound-barrier velocity.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that there was a coffee table between me and the door to freedom.

  Another person would have stubbed her leg on it, or perchance been knocked sideways. Me? I was going so fast I became airborne and did a back flip—my head hit the corner of the table on my way down. I knocked myself semiuncon-scious.

  They say there are two responses to fear: fight or flight. No one ever said that knocking yourself unconscious was an appropriate reaction to an uncomfortable situation. But there you have it. I’d turned myself into the perfect victim. I had no way to defend myself. I was at their mercy.