Last weekend my ex-boyfriend came to town, touring with his latest band. Micah turned 37 this month, but his devotion to punk rock has not faded, despite his graying hair and the deaths of most of his peers. Seeing Micah is always strange. As I've mentioned on this site before, he married a stripper while we were dating (and didn't tell me). Having been raised in a reasonably middle-class household, I was unaccustomed to interacting with strippers and was unaware of the potential for matrimony with them. I was seventeen, and shamefully unaware of the ways of the world.
Micah and I stayed together after I left California to go to college in New York. We talked to each other on the phone every night, and I cried and carried on as if my heart would never heal from the separation. Micah had promised to move to New York to be with me, he was just taking a little bit of time to save some money before he came. Like the dutiful teenage girlfriend that I was, I had a large framed picture of him on my desk, and looked at it mournfully many times a day. Finally though, the lesbian influence at Sarah Lawrence affected me, and I allowed myself to be convinced that Micah would never, indeed, save the money he needed to move to New York, and therefore the relationship was doomed. I broke up with him, in a tearful long-distance call. It was only later that I discovered he had married a stripper three weeks earlier and neglected to mention it to me. A year later they had the marriage annulled, on the grounds that they had been under the influence of nitrous (in the form of whipped cream canister refills) at the time of the marriage.
Our relationship officially ended when I was still 17, but I've remained friends with him for the last decade of my life. The only thing more absurd than Micah is his awareness of his own absurdity--a rare trait. When you hear him tell the story of the time he was arrested for loitering with the intent to prostitute, you can't help but think he's got a great imagination. When I was a private investigator, though, I looked up his criminal record in San Francisco and there it was in black and white. The ridiculousness of him is overwhelming. Sometimes though, it's hard for me not to wonder what my life would be like if I had never gone to so many Fang shows and just kept shopping at J. Crew as I was meant to do. You can never really quantify how a relationship affects you, but I do know that my relationship with Micah shaped who I am, both in my teen years and to the present day, more than any I've had since.
And although I love him to this day, I can't help but think that perhaps he would be better served--not to mention the girls that he dates--if he dated women closer to his own age. When I walked in and saw him last weekend, he was with his band. A couple of eighteen year olds sitting around drinking cheap beer with spiked hair and sullen expressions. One of them was named Spaz. Seriously. Micah's new girlfriend was also there, and claimed to be 18. After a few beers though, it came out that she was not quite 18 yet, and I couldn't contain my horror. "I dated him when I was 17, and that was 10 years ago!" I squawked. He gets older and they stay the same age, as the joke goes. "Age is meaningless," the girl replied, snottily. "Yeah, call me in ten years and tell me how it works out," I said, sneering. Even while wearing pearl earrings, I can still make teenagers flinch with a well-aimed look.
Later, we all went to the show together. Mary and I stood and attempted to make conversation with the girl, who was clearly incapable of it. When she saw my new Converse, she said "Lucky!" unable to contain the wistfulness in her voice. I hadn't pined over a pair of $30 sneakers like that since I was, well, 17. Micah had only formed his band eight weeks ago, and had gotten a tattoo to commemorate each month of their survival. Onstage, they were better than I had anticipated, but still slightly horrifying. Besides Micah, I might have been the oldest person in the club, which was covered in graffiti and littered in Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. Underage drinking abounded. When Micah sang, he looked as if ha was going into convulsions and turned scarlet. I whooped when he started singing a Fang song and then caught myself. "Who am I?" I wondered. And then, watching the tattooed middle-aged man on stage screaming the word "fuck" over and over, I thought, "I can't believe I lost my virginity to this guy." I looked around at the crowd of 15-year-olds that had gathered to see the show, and snickered disdainfully. "I was going to punk shows when you were still in Pampers," I thought. And sadly, if any of them had some sort of delayed development--which, judging by the audience, seemed a distinct possibility--that might actually be true.
Mary told me that Micah said to her, "Sometimes Lina looks at me like I ruined her life." I can't help it though, I look at everyone that way.
