Smooch
For Sarah (“Cloris”), on her 26th birthday
On the twenty-ninth anniversary of the man’s death, I texted my father’s senior year high school photo to my friend Melissa, the mole on the right side of the class president’s mandible airbrushed from the frame to spotlight his unblemished, handsome face absorbing the soft studio light.
“Your dad was hot, yo,” she wrote back.
She wasn’t my only female friend who had expressed how fuckable my dead father once was, but she was the only one who had ever said she also regretted not dating me. (I’ll save the father and son imagined threesome paragraph for the dark web version of this essay.)
Melissa and I were two of twenty-one University of Connecticut undergraduate students who spent our fall 2004 semester in London, a city where she became my closest confidante, the one person who encouraged me to be real. Not real in the loud, drunken, class clown way our peers knew me, but in the fragile way I never allowed myself to be with anyone, not even my closest friends. To confess all the shame about my mother’s deleterious mental health, about how lonely I’d been living off campus, and about a woman who shared her name and manipulated me into exploring extreme self-loathing. I cried in front of her when I wasn’t jealously calling her German boyfriend a Nazi. I didn’t know how to be vulnerable with someone or process my feelings in a meaningful way until she overlooked my petty impulses and listened, inviting all the conflicted and competing voices inside my head to hang out in her bedroom with us after they’d finally been ungagged. She called me Gary because I seemed like an old man, “like a Gary,” she said; I called her Mooch because she bummed cigarettes from me whenever she drank hard cider. If G+M was streaked in red lipstick with a heart around it on the back of the limousine driving us to the airport for our honeymoon, she would’ve entered my reverie to vigorously wipe it off while yelling about how I’d disclosed that the idea of getting married repulsed me. She didn’t shy away from intensity or bluntness, and she cared enough to challenge me as often as necessary, something those who thought they knew me best wisely circumvented. I wouldn’t figure it out for years, but she was the catalyst I needed to live free in my heart, to be the guy who, in the alternate timeline to ensue, would’ve been more inclined to wink while instead nicknaming her Smooch.
The semester following London left us both depressed—my yearlong suspension for violating the study abroad code of conduct led to working in a corporate call center and drinking booze every weekend, one particularly destructive episode terrorizing me to this day when changing my bedsheets as the Rorschach vomit stain resisted all cleaning products applied to the boxspring—although I did visit a sullen Mooch’s off campus apartment a couple times, including when I met her father, a man whose company I enjoyed despite my unspoken belief that he was, at least as it concerned my proclivities, unfuckable. This was the time when, had all conditions been right, she and I would’ve begun the love affair I’d coveted in London, one that would’ve prevented her from marrying a man whose surname was as inexplicably phallic-sounding as the one bequeathed to her at birth. Unfortunately, my emotional intelligence had yet to reach her heightened aptitude, unable to discern depression’s varying degrees due to being engulfed by my mother’s suicidal struggles since childhood, sadness existing as a part of our home’s décor much like the wallpaper and shag carpeting, which, it occurs to me in retrospect, were not uplifting either. Mooch and I would fall out of touch aside from a very occasional email or text message, and in the intervening years she would survive cancer and get divorced while Sue, the woman who filled the role I once believed belonged to her, would die from cancer. To invoke a favored London phrase of mine that Mooch has long imitated in a deliberately grouchy comic accent: “Fuck that sheeit!”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It’s no shock that the death of my girlfriend, an uncompromising optimist, rekindled connections with several people who’d co-starred in some of my life’s greatest hits, my roommate from London the guy who suggested organizing a twentieth anniversary reunion. Not long after a get-the-band-back-together email arrived, Mooch contacted me on Instagram before we each unfurled our post-college life’s montages as she stated how happy she was that I’d found an “AMAZING woman to complement my Gary-ness” along with how she harbored remorse about living in her head and taking things too seriously in London. She sent a photo of a book of Sharon Olds’s poetry I’d gifted her, its twin themes of death and endurance universal, of course, and the convenient reasons why we’d become reacquainted. I avoided acknowledging how I’d neglected to finish reading The Grapes of Wrath, the paperback copy she gifted me in London the first book a girl I loved had given me as a present, but I had re-read bits she’d underlined in pencil on my behalf, especially enamored with the humanism in “…‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”
I proposed an equidistant meeting point so we could eat dinner together, Mooch disinterested in using her hands to scoop up Ethiopian offerings from the colorful mounds on the circular platter between us. She blamed her Ozempic prescription for inhibiting her appetite undeterred by my awareness that she simply disliked the peculiar spread I’d chosen (its international appeal one she’d agreed to, but still). “I thought you said they played Ethiopian music at this place,” she added as routine rock songs disappointed her while I kept licking my fingers clean, Mooch saying that her boyfriend, an Iranian immigrant, was away for the weekend but had no qualms with our get-together, another man from a foreign land that I associated more with combat than anything else. We walked to a nearby restaurant after our, or in reality, my meal for dessert crepes and to mutter judgments about the age-inappropriate, barely clothed companion of the leather clad motorcyclist sitting beside us, the same catty rapport that would continue accompanying references to London lore in text messages and on a few phone calls, a friendship I’m certain could’ve sustained its unnecessary hiatus. Picturing Sue’s giddiness had she interrogated Mooch about me would’ve been simultaneously thrilling and paralyzing, Sue mirthfully doling out endless examples of my Gary-ness—like how I wouldn’t wear jeans post-London, one of her longtime sticking points—and once again contemplating why I’d spent my salad days being so inept at falling in love.
When my mother backed out of attending a book reading, I inquired if Mooch would go with me. “Would love to but we might have a jihad on our hands,” she wrote back in jest, conceding that Mehdi, her boyfriend, likely wouldn’t object but that she’d forbid it if the tables were turned. Now interested in meeting the man, she bought me an aisle seat a few rows behind the dead center piggyback seating I’d purchased, meaning one seat directly in front of the other one, and we made plans to visit a couple stores in the New Hampshire college town hosting the event prior to eating Thai food as a trio. As someone who has grown to love encountering strangers more and more as many of those around me find humans less engaging as they age, I recalled how Mooch once asked me what I rated on the Myers Briggs personality test, revealing that I was an ENTP—the acronym for extroverted, intuitive, thinking, and perceiving—which failed to surprise her. She pulled into my driveway resembling Jamie Lee Curtis in her new blonde pixie haircut and I sat in the seat behind her, instantly lightening the mood.
Following one joke mocking her sonorous yet soothing voice, one I delighted in comparing to James Earl Jones’s baritone, I asked if she’d failed to tell a now mute Mehdi what I was like. “No, he knows,” she said and summoned a London chestnut about me endlessly mocking the jeans she wore, the denim waistline containing a built-in belt with a sizable buckle that scanned as the sartorial equivalent of potty training for adults who couldn’t comprehend how to prevent their lower torso from becoming exposed. She skipped discussing how envious she’d been in London each time I uttered a word alien to her lexicon, alleging that there had been few people she knew who had a stronger vocabulary than her own, even if I would’ve traded my knowledge of circumlocutious and antinomian in exchange for a night of jolly good rogering on her mattress. I’d asked if Mehdi had screened any Iranian films for her—hoping to (predictably, sure) review Abbas Kiarostami’s oeuvre with him—but she said he collectively hated his homeland, his family and the food the sole things he missed about Iran.
As we progressed northbound, I learned that Mehdi, an autodidact, worked for a company developing Artificial Intelligence-driven apps, a subject whose dicey ethics he was unafraid to confront with me while Mooch silently listened. He said how he’d memorized the fundaments of the role by acquiring numerous books of expertise, tossing them aside one by one after twenty or so pages until the syntax grabbed him, his simple logic that there is a right book for everyone, which I said was the same approach to adapting novels used by Stanley Kubrick. Since Mehdi didn’t tend to read for pleasure—video games occupied his post-work hours—he struck me as the type of person the more close-minded-than-I-admitted-at-the-time version of myself in London would’ve immediately condescended to, arguing that willful intellectual ignorance was the hallmark of a philistine, a bold assertion to make about a humane man who spoke multiple languages and whose ideas would impact redirecting humanity’s future. But now, I recognized a guy who I quickly admired, impressed by anyone who could seek out a new land, thrusting isolation and radically altered cultural norms upon himself in the name of inventing a better life, the kind of parable easy to devalue until in the company of a practitioner, one who tugged on my heart’s entire string section when listing the ingredients in his mother’s eggplant-heavy stews she served for family meals, the truest and purest nostalgia there is: good home cooking. Mehdi would’ve appreciated an Ethiopian spread far more than Mooch, that’s for sure.
There’s no denying that Mehdi’s most striking attributes glistened above his neck, his gorgeous, silky hair and impeccable jawline centerfold ready. Mooch said how one savvy, studious man had approached Mehdi in a store about doing some modeling and indicated to her that she could be featured as well. “You were just going to be a fluffer,” I said about the failed gig, and she exacted her revenge soon thereafter, my mention of eating egg salad topped with diced kalamata olives triggering her fetishization of my “accent,” the nasally diction she heard in my monosyllabic intonation ripe for playful mockery of its unknown origin. Mehdi, however, would indulge me on the ride home, my obsession with fine hair so sincere and idiosyncratic that he let me run my fingers through his mane as I politely ignored the moths laying eggs on his scalp busy conceiving a new layer of obsidian-hued hirsute perfection, ceasing my petting after five seconds—“More like ten,” Mehdi might interrupt—to ask him to praise something about me. “Your voice, the way you enunciate, is so clear,” he told me, an observation yet to leave the mouths of any Americans too inured to truncation and slang to bother noticing what had yet to register as an anomaly. As for analyzing the implications of how Mooch and her man had become preoccupied with my mouth, I couldn’t mask how much I respected them as a couple, a firm believer that antipodes are the ideal form of attraction, and in opposition to how my worst impulses would’ve kicked in twenty years beforehand, wisely kept my mouth shut when pondering the fuckability of Mehdi’s unseen father.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Despite multiple overtures when in London, Mooch abstained from going sightseeing with me. She found it curiously endearing that I dug the Pet Shop Boys to the degree that I did, somewhat amazed that a straight man was comfortable professing his love for the duo while insisting we venture to Trafalgar Square to see the silent film Battleship Potemkin, the screening scored by the group’s live performance, one of the semester’s other biggest missed opportunities. Her unease would be vanquished in minor moments, often at nighttime, like when a ladybug appeared in my bedroom as she drunkenly complimented my smile, avowing how it was genuine yet almost imperceptibly downturned at its corners, a hint that the Real Adam, not Gary, knew more than he let on, saying I was “above it all” while declining to elaborate if it implied I was arrogant or omniscient or both. She had a knack for identifying my principal trait—employing sarcasm and absurdity not to be a thoughtless frat boy, but as imperative camouflage when digging for the truth to evade my own—and then doing the supplementary scrutinization in an attempt to determine what had caused me to make the choices I did, an opaque yet nuanced approach from a woman who regarded my sexiest organ as the unseen one inside my skull.
She made it easier for me to solve her, like when she cooked ramen for me the day I met Ernie, her dad, and assisted him in moving furniture out of her apartment, Mooch answering a phone call at one point as I listened to her vague, discomfited responses to a masculine-sounding voice indirectly antagonizing me through the receiver. “I have to go see my mom soon,” she told me afterward as I wasted no time disparaging her lie and admonishing her for crunching up the noodles she boiled, social and culinary faux pas from a woman I believed was too disciplined to make such embarrassing mistakes. Hindsight allows for judging myself as something of an emotional cuckold, fixating on a woman who clung to an imperfect excuse each time I sensed the inevitable romantic breakthrough might transpire, but now I know that she punished herself by making the incorrect choices, an admission she was too uncomfortable and despondent to grant me in real time, but one I heard as a freshly widowed man two decades later, greeting the sentiment with a smile sans those downturned commissures she’d fretted about. In her defense, I, too, would’ve been anxious about my reaction back then, and in opting for prevarication it’s possible she gave our friendship a belated reunion that the truth might have otherwise squelched.
Mehdi briefly became the third wheel when we stopped at a bookstore, Mooch and I prattling on about London trivialities as I searched for a copy of The Sheltering Sky, a novel about, at least in part, extramarital affairs. We also browsed in a multimedia store where Mooch bought more bright and shiny toy objects she’d begun collecting, a newfound passion she credited partly to learning about Sue’s love of celebrating our inner child’s freedom, a concept that a majority of adults disabuse themselves into judging as inimical—rather than efflorescent—to growth. When we ate snacks in a grocery store parking lot, I insinuated that the teenage girl glancing at the guy in the driver’s seat inside the sedan to our left was about to perform fellatio, almost hoping there would be some form of coitus present in Mooch’s company, and supplemented it with a joke about Mehdi’s “horse cock,” conjecture for which I was not rebuffed.
“Did having your dad die turn you into a huge prick when you were younger?” Mooch texted me months after I shared his high school photo. “A kid I knew’s dad died in a small plane crash when we were eight and he turned into a giant asshole.”
“A lotta things made me angry when I was young,” I replied.
“Having a dead dad became his entire identity.”
“I’ve always been obsessive about loving things, though. My dad dying never defined me. I never used that or my mother’s depression for pity. I don’t believe in that kind of behavior.”
“I mean, I can’t imagine. It’d fuck anyone up and probably mess up a kid’s development, especially a parent of the same gender. You should be way more fucked up than you are. Kudos to you. You broke the cycle.”
These were the types of chats we had engaged in when in London, the introspective reflections that would commence getting sprinkled into my interactions with the people I adored throughout the subsequent years, and the type of kindness and perspective from someone I trusted that helped me rein in the self-flagellation by taking some belated satisfaction in my resilience. Mooch had also consistently inhabited my headspace because of her favorite song—Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’”—a welcome earworm about the heartbroken that managed to uncannily play from invisible grocery store speakers once a month. Now, sitting opposite her and Mehdi at the dinner table, they both offered insights about my friend’s looming prison release while Mehdi devoured bites of spicy eggplant and used his fork to ostracize fried tofu chunks to the plate’s edges, admitting that he had no clue what the cardboard-esque cubes were as I plucked a few lukewarm ones. I am now fighting like mad to refrain from a ribald self-own about consuming Mooch’s beau’s leftovers, or sloppy seconds as the carnal laureates say.
While waiting in the book signing line outside the venue, one employee holding a stack of neon-hued wristbands asked if we’d be drinking alcohol during the reading. “We’re already blacked out,” I said then declared that we had really huffed ether earlier, prompting the lady in front of us to turn around, confirm I was truly kidding, and engross us in a lengthy literary conversation. Eventually, Mooch took a group selfie showcasing Mehdi’s hilariously awkward inability to smile when posing for a smartphone. Maybe it’s a Middle Eastern mandate, but the gift of a horse cock begets the curse of a horse mouth, an inadvertent win-win scenario for his better half, and a surefire explanation for why Mooch misses those pants with built-in belts.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Mooch informed me a couple months after our day trip that her breast cancer had resurfaced as I valued her fortitude and positivity while selfishly wondering why the two women I loved most seemed doomed. She claimed it was stage zero, nothing alarming and easily curable, adding that her father, like he was the first time she’d endured chemotherapy, would be by her side for each round. I found it odd when processing such casual yet catastrophic news, the idea that poisoning one’s body every other Wednesday for months was normal, at least from the distance a screen permits, yet then incriminated myself with flashes of stepping outside at least once per hour for a dozen years to inhale cigarette smoke like it was my responsibility to do harm without the risk of any consequences, Mooch teasing me how it was those Marlboro Lights she’d bummed in London that had done the dirty work on her. The fear that had forced her to shrink at fraught junctures in the past had transformed into a mettle she was confident would yield another victory over malignance. She had courted sympathy from people the first time she got sick—documenting the ups and downs in her excellent, candid newspaper columns—and now refused a reprise. Instead, we largely chatted about the prosaic: our picks for the best soup flavors, Mooch reiterating how the actor Colin Hanks reminded her of me, and my apprising her about how an inebriated, homeless black woman had called me the N-word in a parking lot in downtown Hartford.
“What’s the difference between jam and jelly?” I texted her one day.
“I feel like jam has chunks in it and jelly doesn’t. And one of them is preserved and one isn’t.”
“No, no, no,” I replied. “I can’t jelly a cock down my throat.”
Mooch may have criticized me in our twenties for using ridicule to resist real issues, but it made me happy that she’d now joined the party on some level. Mehdi had graciously left us alone to conclude waiting in the book signing line prior to the reading, neither of us aware then that her body may have already been under attack, and my reminiscences about it later mirrored the same kind of retroactive thinking I applied when viewing photos of Sue holding a holiday-themed Mr. Potato Head stuffed animal while gleaming beside her Christmas tree in addition to modeling the translucent orange boots I’d bought her for what would unknowingly be our final anniversary meal, each image capable of becoming saturnine due to the unpredictable cruelty life administers. And so, I return to my mindset in the book signing line, honored to be with Mooch as she met the writer Sue and I mutually revered, the act of sharing him with The One Who Got Away proving to be the type of silver lining I’d prefer to spray paint gold to reflect how beatific the moment itself should forever remain.
There’s no way to calculate how many times I’ve flipped through the journal I kept in London, but one of my prized Mooch memories has become one I cannot actually recall, the only line describing it written as such: “Melissa busting on me for eating a popsicle.” Might I have been deep throating every inch of its now anonymous flavour [sic]? Did I thart thalking like thith becauth my mouth wath frothen? In what way was it important enough to be etched without any context in between two screamingly funny anecdotes about drinking absinthe? I could ask her, but it’s such a pointless aside that to think she would remember it is presumptuous at best. Ironically, Sue was fond of singing the song lyric “Standing in the sun with a popsicle, anything is possible.” Human existence is marked primarily by its highest highs and lowest lows, but the sheer mundanity of that forgotten popsicle is essentially atavistic, a realization that mere interaction with our favorite people is its own utopia of the mind.
Mooch and I located Mehdi scrolling on his phone and proceeded to our seats, the brown-skinned man one of a select few non-white audience members in the building, a piece of sociology that fascinates me whenever attending live events. In my typical venue aficionado way, I put my eyes through the ringer dissecting intricacies of the ceiling, walls, and stage curtains while alternately crossing my legs to give each foot a rest as I also kept on the lookout for the most attractive woman in the room with whom I hadn’t already concocted a fantasy love life. Mooch perched herself over Mehdi’s shoulder to whisper in his right ear and stroke his hair several times, an act that made me jealous for failing to bring a mannequin head with a wig to distract me from a fresh assault of my fingernails.
Minutes before the show started, I was still busy daydreaming in my seat until I caught Mooch slowly turn her head, grin, and wave the fingers on her right hand at me like she was playing air piano, her melodic notes the platonic keys to my heart. A stranger in the crowd spied on us while looking perplexed, but how could she have known that it was just the love language I’d created with the greatest girlfriend I’ll never have?