The Giant

I wasn’t very nice to John. I look back on how I treated him, the bluntness with which I dealt with his emotions, the devil-may-care attitude I took towards the future, and I’m stunned at my own callousness. At the time I said to myself, “Look, I’m just being honest with him” and I was – I can honestly say that I was more honest with John than I probably was with anybody else in my life at that time. He was a stranger to me, someone completely new, and I was in the process of re-inventing myself and he was the first to benefit from the new me. Or be bludgeoned by the new me. Depends on how you look at it. I see it now as bludgeoning. Later, once I became used to this new person, the person who had shuffled off the shackles of my Holly Hobbie dress-wearing past, I didn’t need to bludgeon people over the head with my persona. But John got there first. I trembled on the abyss, I remember the feeling. I could have gone backwards … it would be so easy to go backwards … that old self was right there, I could still feel her in me, I could still revert to her in moments of insecurity or when I feel threatened … but oh, this new self has arisen, and she is powerful, and she is free, and she doesn’t have to be the way she used to be, she doesn’t have to accept that old destiny … But I was awkward just being myself. I had no idea who I was, but I knew the old me was dead. Any infringement on my new self, any limits put on her – I fought like a tiger. I was not graceful yet. I was still learning. I was like a giant trying to play with a human-size chessboard. There was much bumbling. There was much inadvertent bludgeoning. And so I bludgeoned John with honesty. And he took it. Maybe I didn’t respect him for that, but I don’t believe it’s that simple.

For a while there, for 2 or 3 months during that manic spring, we had an awesome understanding. I had just moved to Chicago, fleeing a relationship gone bad, and a crack-up in Woodland Hills that left me chastened and frightened about my ability to actually get along in this world. My old boyfriend, my first love, had moved on already. He was dating someone else. The fact of this seared through me, singe-ing me to the bone. And yet he also would call me, randomly, from pay phones, choked with tears, as he suddenly realized what we had actually done.

I was in a new city, a city I had only spent 24 hours in prior to moving there, and everything was shimmering, dangerous, the air full of knives. But instead of sensing the threat, I only felt excitement. The pores opening up, the fearlessness rising. I loved walking through the streets, dodging the knives hurtling at me. I still had terrible moments, lonely moments, in my first apartment – the only apartment I had ever had by myself. A quiet dark room, with a ratty grey carpet, the hallways reeking of the sweet poison of roach motels. The elevator was rickety and would stall between floors. It had a creaking metal gate that you had to yank open to disembark. I put on my Salvation Army bought corporate outfit, and took the L downtown to my temp assignments, staring out the window, my eyes dilated, my breath high in my chest. I had been living with fear for a couple of years. Dodging the truth about myself. Tamping down the reality of Sheila, in order to fit into my relationship. Carol Shields talks about “inner weather”. I had been in open battle to calm down my inner weather for years, thinking that there was something wrong with me, something was terribly terribly wrong.

Turns out there was something wrong. But it wasn’t with the ups and downs of my inner weather. It was the suppression that was wrong. It took me years to come to terms with it, and on some level – it is an issue with which I still struggle. I rode the L, wearing my little flats, my hose, my hair pinned down to one side, staring out at the roofs of the brownstones, the lights of Wrigley Field, the brand-new silhouette of the Chicago skyline against the dusk, and think: This is me. This. Is. Me. I had never had my life look the way I wanted it to look. Not since I was, oh, 5 or 6, maybe. But now, I got to choose. It’s not that everything suddenly was hunky-dory and all my dreams had come true. It was that now, it all was up to me, and to me alone. I was by myself, I had my own apartment, I was single as an adult for the first time ever, and I was meeting every challenge that came my way. I could do this. I could sign up with a temp agency. I could kick ass on the typing test. I could look for an apartment, find an apartment, put down money for it, get a cat, get my cat his shots, and set up a litter box. These are small things, but at this point in my life they were tremendous triumphs. There was a secondhand store where I bought a mattress. I put it on the floor. I had no other furniture for months. It didn’t feel right to have possessions. All of my books were shipped to me from LA and I threw them all out. Can you believe that? That gives you some idea. I threw out my entire book collection. Eventually I got a little two-seater couch, a hand-me-down from a friend – but for the year that I lived there, that was it, in terms of furniture. I didn’t even put blinds up. My windows remained bare, and open to the alley and building beyond. I just didn’t care. The details of life, the surface stuff, which had consumed me when I was with my boyfriend – no longer seemed relevant or interesting. It had been a highly domestic relationship, where we cared about futon covers and teflon and shower curtains and getting our pitcutres framed, All that had disappeared. Vanished. Never, really, to return, actually. I enjoy having nice bookshelves. And I love the curtains my mom made for me. And I am happy that I can now afford a nice bed, with a great mattress and a box spring, and I have a really nice dresser with a swivel mirror that I adore. But that obsession with domesticity, that feeling that pots and pans are important … is not in my DNA. I felt shame about that for years. I felt like I, as a woman, was supposed to somehow … give a crap. It’s harder for some people. It was hard for me. I had been at war with my own nature.

I have a Polaroid of myself from a fund raiser I went to very early on in Chicago, maybe 2 months after I had arrived. I had been cast in a show and the theatre company held a fund raiser. I was making new friends. I hadn’t made a new friend in years, my relationship had been very insular, we had been each other’s everything. Most of the new friends I made were men. They hovered around me. Kenny, Paul, Michael At the time the photo was taken, I was very skinny, skinnier than I had ever been. This was not because, oh, I was dieting and taking care of myself. The skinniness was a direct result of the horrible breakup, of being so poor that I lived on Lipton’s cup-a-soup, and the adrenaline rush of having to survive. On my own. I stand in the middle of an open space in the photo that I have, I am wearing all black, my hair is curly and red, I am pale, and I am smiling, my mouth open, holding a plastic cup of wine. A mere two months before I had been sitting in my room in Woodland Hills, California, wearing an old jumper I had made, a lavendar Holly Hobbie jumper, billowing, shapeless, tennis sneakers, and a T-shirt, sitting and watching M*A*S*H re-runs, and drinking Rolling Rock. Sick at heart. The transformation was that radical, that fast.

In retrospect, I suppose if I could – I would say to that girl in the photo: “Sheila, you have no business getting involved with anyone right now. You need to be by yourself. You’re a mess.” And while this was true, my messiness had nothing to do with needing to be in a relationship again. It was completely the opposite.

I have girlfriends who have never been single, and who cannot be alone. They need a boyfriend. “Having a boyfriend” is, and always has been, a part of their adult lexicon. This was not me, although I was not believed at first when I would share this with the new men (we’ll get back to John in a minute). Men would roll their eyes at my declaration of independence, and say, “Yeah, right. You girls are all alike. You all just want a boyfriend. I’ve heard this one before.” I don’t blame the guys for having this response, by the way. They were responding to the stereotype – the stereotype that exists because, for the most part, it is real. Only in this specific case, it was not real. I actually meant what I said. It wasn’t until I met M. (only a couple of months in the future) that I found a man who not only did not roll his eyes at my declarations, but grinned and said, “Cool. Me too.”

My first month in Chicago was chaotic. I crashed on my friend Jackie’s couch. The sky was white and wintry. The dome from the church a block away stark and black against the billowing blizzardy sky. I had a suitcase of clothes. I missed my boyfriend so much that I would lie at night, on her couch, clutching myself, holding on, pressing my hand down over the spot on my chest where my heart was, trying to soothe, trying to press it back, tamp it down. Jackie and I also got bronchitis, with the swiftness of a stampede. We lay on her couch together, watching Life Goes On, feverish, our throats burning (“there is a tiki torch in my throat” Jackie said 10 times a day), and occasionally – I would start to weep. I remember one disastrous bronchitis-ridden afternoon when we were flipping through the channels, saw that The Way We Were was on, and thought, foolishly, “Oh, we love this movie! Let’s watch!” By the end, we were both wrecks, but then my wreckage took over the afternoon. It was one of those moments. Jackie was crying about the movie, I was crying about the movie, and then I started crying about my whole life, and then, whaddya know, I could not stop. Jackie, even with her tiki torch brigade, took care of me. I was lying face down on her couch, holding onto a blanket with fists, crying so hard no sound came out. By this point, the skinny Sheila had already started to emerge, my old pajamas suddenly hung off me, I swam in them. And that afternoon, I happened to have a blue bandana wrapped around my head. So I lay on her couch, and howled, and Jackie got Kleenex, and the white sky shot away from us out her window, and Jackie had a couple of moments when she looked at me, skinny and pale with the bandana around my head, and thought, “Wow. Sheila totally looks like a chemo victim right now.” We laughed about it later. “Member that day I was a chemo victim on your couch?”

But once I got my own apartment, and got my cat Sammy, I started settling in. Settling in to a new and oftentimes jagged reality. I was unhinged, unattached. I was in a strange freefall. Every day I woke up thinking; Anything can happen today. Earlier on, as the bronchitis was starting to settle in, Jackie and I were invited to be part of a new actor’s collective, called The Actor’s Gym. We had to go meet the two organizers of it up in an apartment in Rogers Park. The tiki torches had begun their approach, so we were ill, but we kept our appointment. We hacked our way through the interview, talking about what we were looking for as actors, telling our interviewers what type of work we had done. “I worked at The Walnut Street … hack cough hack … which was great for me … cough … I just moved here … cough cough … so I’m looking to immerse myself … hack hack hack tiki tiki …” The beautiful thing, in memory, about that surreal hacking afternoon in Rogers Park, in an apartment that was being painted so every piece of furniture was covered with a drop cloth, adding to the unreal atmosphere, is that one of the men interviewing me was Ted – a man who would become a dear friend, and who remains a dear friend to this day. This was my first moment meeting him. He remembers that first encounter. “You guys were so sick. We just fell in love with both of you.” They invited us to join the Actor’s Gym. Doing battle with the tiki torches made it difficult to be 100% psyched about anything, but I did have the presence of mind to be happy, proud, and gratified. I had been in Chicago 2 weeks when I joined the Actor’s Gym.

Every Saturday a group of actors would meet in a drafty warehouse space, above the China Club, a red-velvet-rope nightclub on the outskirts of downtown Chicago. The windows were as tall as the walls of my apartment, and the wintry wind shrieked through the cracks into our class. Through the windows, you could see the Sears Tower. I would be lying on the buckled hard-wood floor, doing my breathing exercises, doing the group sensory exercises that were part of the Gym, and occasionally I would open my eyes, stare out the window to see the blinking red lights of the Sears Tower antennae against the black night sky, and feel something akin to contentment. It had been years, so I wasn’t sure if that would be an accurate word for that emotion. Did “contentment” feel so exciting? So full of possibility? That’s how I felt in that warehouse space. With the bare lightbulbs, the scratched table, the random furniture lying on the outskirts – a bedframe, an old fridge with the door off, battered chairs, desks – the leftovers of some defunct bureaucracy. This is where we had our acting class.

And that was where I met John.

He wasn’t the first guy to show interest in me. He was just the first guy to make a move. In my bludgeoning honesty, I said that to him later, in a defensive tone, “You just made the move first.” This was the truth. John said, “Well … what if Donald had made the move first?” ” I totally would have gone out with Donald.” I saw no point in lying to John. I wasn;t having a relationship wtih him, where it seemed to be required that you lie, gently, in order to save the other person’s precious feelings. John would laugh. “So … what … you like Donald?” “I have no idea.” “But you just said you would have gone out with him.” “If he asked me, sure. Why wouldn’t I?” “How about Paul?” “What’s wrong with Paul?” “Nothing.” “I totally would have gone out with Paul if he had asked.” “So … are you saying … that you are only going out with me because I asked first?”

I was so selfish at that point, so consumed with my own reality, that I saw no problem, none, with telling the truth. “Of course, John. You asked first.” It was a brutal place I was in, a place of pared-down behavior. You said what you felt. You acted according to your conscience. You did NOT LIE. You did NOT PLAY GAMES. I took all of this quite literally. Donald was hot, and Donald was interested in me. Donald said to me point-blank, “Sheila, call me when you’re done with John. You and me? We’ve got unfinished business.” “Okay. I will.” I saw no problem with any of this.

But, as always, I am getting ahead of myself.

John showed interest in me almost immediately. Chicago is a smaller town than New York, and all of the actors know each other, or know of each other. I was new. A new girl had come to town, and so she is automatically interesting, by default. I noticed, during our Actor’s Gym Saturdays, that he would always be by my side, making conversation, lingering so we could walk out together.

A couple of words about who John was. He was a very good actor, who had been in kind of a large hit the season before, so he had that confidence about him. There were other guys in the Gym who might have been more good-looking or sexy … I hang out with actors, who are weird people, in that there are usually a ton of freakily good-looking sexy people in my field. These are my peeps. John had beautiful piercing blue eyes, he was pale, and he had an interesting intense face, with an ear to ear grin. He dressed down, he was not a dandy. He was kind of a schlump, to tell you the truth. He wasn’t 30 yet, but he had a receding hairline. And yet charm? If the boy could bottle what he had, men round the world would score on a more regular basis. He wrote the book on charm. He had a kick-ass personality, a snarky sinister sense of humor, and a beautiful way with women. I would dare any woman to try to resist him. He knew how to draw women out, he knew how to ask leading questions, he appeared to listen, he would make funny comments, he forgot nothing, and he also seemed to truly enjoy the company of women. Women respond to that. John was as much of a dog as the rest of the guys. He was no wilting sensitive flower. He, like the rest of them, wanted to get as much tail as he possibly could … but if you, as a man, come off as a person only interested in tail, then you will only get a certain kind of woman. Because real quality women hate being treated like tail, and resent it. We also are interested in being seduced and having as much sex as we possibly can. Of course we are. But if you treat us as though we are interesting? As though you actually enjoy spending time with us? You will never be lonely, kid.

But let me try to describe where I was at, psychologically, at this point. I was not “looking”. I was not “on the market”. I wasn’t even like, “Maybe I’ll be ready to be on the market by the fall.” The marketplace was 10 oases away, as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t planning on living like a nun, oh no. I was planning on having lots of sex. I was hyped up, I was alive to myself, I felt pretty for the first time in years, and I loved the buzzing male attention. I had been “off the market” for 4 years. My ex-boyfriend had been my first (and only) boyfriend, so I had zero experience outside of him and was ready to branch out. I was 24 years old. Time to have some fun. But not boyfriend fun. No. Keep it light, keep it unattached, don’t get involved, because you know what “being involved” means. “Being involved” means futon covers and Holly Hobbie. The choices were that stark to me. To me, boyfriend meant “domesticity” and that word has taken on unfavorable connotations to me ever since. Spare me from domesticity. Do not fence me in. Do not tie me down (unless we’re in bed together!). BE with me if you want. If I want. But do not fence me in. I was in a growth spurt when I met John. Growth spurts are not comfortable. You do not gradually go from child to adolescent. From adolescent to adult. There are pains. People get hurt along the way. I don’t mean to excuse my behavior, because much of what I did to John was appalling. But I was suddenly, for the first time in my life, in the realm of Truth. My truth. You think truth isn’t relative? Then you can’t understand my life. I was living in a perpetual state of blinding white truth. At every moment of the day. Say whatever is on your mind. Speak it out. Damn the consequences.

Our sessions at the Actors Gym were so long that we would take a dinner break. I remember being outside, and it was still daylight out. Perhaps I was going to a nearby deli to gorge myself on Lipton’s cup-a-soup. I remember John following me, and catching up to me, and saying, squinting at me with those blue eyes, “I’d love to take you out. Would you like to go out sometime?” I felt a quickening, a small flutter up and down my nervous system. Here it is. The moment. I had felt that it was coming. It was in the air. But I had also felt it with Donald. With Kenny. With Paul. With Michael. But John had the balls to make the move. I liked John. He made me laugh. I remember him saying, during class once, he was up in front of the class, doing an acting exercise, in front of all of us, being guided through it by Bobby, the leader – and it was a raw and open and almost excruciating thing to watch – and I remember John muttering to himself at one point, in the middle of it all, “I feel like I’m having a stroke”, and it was so dry, so witty, such a comment on what all of us felt when we were in his position, that waves of laughter erupted throughout the warehouse room. He was self-deprecating, he was honest about feeling scared, like a doofus, he made sure the joke was always on him. I liked him. So when he asked me out, I said to him, openly, “I’d love that!”

I hadn’t been on a date since I was in college. And I was no longer the same person I had been then. I was now a woman. I had had sex. I don’t remember our first date, and as a matter of fact, all of our dates kind of blend together – although there are some spectacularly original and cinematic moments which have stayed in my brain, the nuggets at the bottom of the sieve. Insane sexual escapades.

In retrospect, John was my entryway into the Chicago actor life. He knew everyone. He was well liked. He had a busy social life. He loved to go out. He loved meeting up with friends at the Melrose Diner at midnight, after their shows got out. I would go with him. I met crowds of awesome people. John knew weird things to do, odd events: miniature golf tournaments, weird matinees of performance artists who lathered paint over their body and screamed about their mothers, midnight double-features of Andy Warhol movies. We did all of that stuff. I never would have been up for all of that on my own. I am much more of a solitary type. I probably would have holed myself up in my apartment, with the mattress on the floor, my meowing cat, my soup, and read. I was very into Jeanette Winterson at that point. The Passion became a guiding post, a lantern lighting the way for me. Villanelle – the red-headed cross-dressing web-footed gambler – the heroine of The Passion – took up space in my imagination. Her freedom with her love, her intensity, her knowledge of herself – that the domestic way would never be for her … I read that book over and over.

John included me in his crazy whirl, and – very unlike myself – I went along for the ride. John would call me after our nights out and say, laughing, “Well, once again, you were a huge hit last night.” “I was?” “Yeah. 2 of the guys and 1 of the girls asked me for your phone number.” “Really? Which ones? Tyler?” “Yeah. Tyler.” “I loved her.” “Yeah, well. She loved you.”

I did not take John seriously. Not as a potential mate anyway. I did not feel that we were “moving towards” anything. I did not let him think that this could ever “be” anything. I didn’t know much at that point – I was just getting through each day – but I did know that I would not be a girlfriend any time soon. No. No girlfriend. I am not a girlfriend. No. No. No.

Early on, maybe our second or third date, John and I sat in the back room of a bar which actually was just a house. There was no sign outside. I have no idea where we were in Chicago. I never knew where I was with John. The city was so new. But there was a bar – and it was in a house. You walked in and it was a regular old house, with a living room, a kitchen – and yet there was one room with a bar. You ordered drinks. Then you went and hung out in the house, wherever you could find a spot. We sat in a back room, by ourselves. It was dark, and there was a couch. There were windows, with lights shining on them, and the windows were stained glass – deep blues and reds and blinding whites. I feel like I can’t be remembering this correctly, that essential expositionary details are lost, and perhaps this is true, but the fact remains: we were in a bar, that was just a regular house, and there were lit-up stained glass windows. Nobody joined us. We had stained-glass window room to ourselves. John, in his charming way, grilled me on my life. I was the opposite of cagey. I was the bludgeoning giant, remember. Unconcerned with how I was coming across, unconcerned with the fact that maybe this person – this man sitting with me – actually was … a PERSON … who might be developing feelings for me – I answered his questions forthrightly. I could not lie anymore. No more tamping down. And John was one of those people – so typical of actors – who are hungry for information. They love people. Their religion is other people. Who IS that person? What is HER story? Why are his eyes like that? What is going on with him? John turned that spotlight onto me. “Where’d you grow up?” “What was high school like?” “What was your first kiss?” “You moved here from where?” Tireless. I do not remember the connecting of the dots, but I do remember this. In that dark stained glass room I said to him, “Listen. We can hang out. I am having a BLAST right now.” (I was.) “But you must not think I will be your girlfriend. I will never be your girlfriend. I’m just not into that right now. I am not into any of that. You just need to know what you’re getting into.” This was not a script. A “let’s not be exclusive” script. An “I’m just not that into you” script. It was a bluntly spoken expression of what was going on with me. I liked John, and I loved how he was dragging me around the city, doing cool things, and I was even cool with it being romantic, and us having dates. “But don’t ever introduce me as your girlfriend. Because if you do – you’ll never see me again.” John burst into laughter. We both were kind of drunk. I started laughing too. The blues and reds of the stained glass piercing through the black. I said, “I’m serious. No girlfriend talk. I just won’t have it.” John said, “Let’s just keep hanging out. I’m fine with that.” I had a bad premonition. So of course I spoke it out. “I feel like you’re gonna develop feelings for me. And you really can’t. I am not available. Seriously. If you think you can’t handle it, get out now.” “I’m not looking for anything serious right now either.” Doubt prickled at my spine. IIt’s like I was the stereotypical guy, and he was the stereotypical girl. I felt like I wasn’t being believed. I said, “You’re not?” “No. Let’s just keep hanging out.” “John, just remember what I said. No girlfriend talk. If I hear the word ‘girlfriend’ out of your mouth, you’ll never see me again.” Then John attacked me. In the stained glass room. Okay, I can deal with THAT. I had been monogamous with my boyfriend, of course. I had been unhappy for a long time. So I made out with John in that black and red and blue lit back room, in the bar that was a house, in some unknowable Chicago neighborhood, and it was awesome. He probably didn’t know what hit him. I had a lot of sexual steam to let off.

And that, at the bottom of it, was what it was all about for me. Letting steam off. And I learned that it doesn’t matter how clear you are at the outset. Clarity does not save you from misunderstanding. Things change. People’s feelings change. I had said exactly what I meant to John. In a way that left no room for doubt. I even said it in what could be characterized as a mean way. I let him know that of COURSE I would date Donald if he asked me. Why wouldn’t I? None of this was a pose. It was completely genuine. I would ask him, guileless, “Why wouldn’t I date Donald if he asked me?”

Honesty was new for me. My own voice was new to me. I had never said the real truth to my boyfriend. Not until the very end when it was way too late. It was never about lack of love between us. We always loved each other. That was what made it so horrible to break up. But I felt my own power with John, for the first time ever. And I used it. I used it brutally.

He would get mushy mushy on the phone. “I haven’t seen you in a couple of days. I miss your sweet face.”

“Wow,” I would drawl. “That sounds an awful lot like relationship talk.”

And yet – when he would ask me to go out and do something – I would always say yes. The adventures were fast and furious with John. Some of the adventures took us to other states. We found ourselves joining up with insane wedding parties that we were not a part of. We found ourselves gyrating to house music at some rave on the south side of Chicago, a rave where you had to have a CODE WORD to get in. We found ourselves having a quiche brunch with the gay couple we had met up at a random wedding, having never met them before in our lives, but feeling that kindred spirit “ohmygod, we must be best friends” connection. We went to a gallery opening in a VERY sketchy neighborhood one night – the gallery opening began at one in the morning. It was a night where purple lightning forked through the sky. We sat in this dumpy gallery, on the 4th floor of a huge abandoned warehouse, surrounded by smoking drinking people, drinking cheap wine, with the windows occasionally flashing purple, and John tried to be my boyfriend, and I would not let him. I would brush him off. I would make snarky comments when he would get sentimental. He would get touchy-feely, and I would say, “Member what I said months ago? I’m not girlfriend material right now. You said you were okay with that.” Throwing it back in his face. I would talk with another guy in a stairwell for 20 minutes. I would flirt with the bartender. Dangerously. Like … something could happen. I was feeling it. I was feeling it all the time: This. Is. Me. So you. You. John. I’m talkin’ to you. Get. Out. Of my way. But then we left the art gallery and had sex in his car, right on the street. He sent me flowers. I rolled my eyes to myself. I found myself getting angry. Hadn’t I been clear? What … he hadn’t believed me? What the fuck was his problem? Why is he treating me like a girlfriend? Even though we are making out at various venues up and down the Lake shore? I TOLD him. He’s just being stubborn. The giantess was coming out. The bumbling giant fingers. I did not treat him with delicacy or respect. I should have cut it off with him about 2 weeks in, because it was obvious almost immediately which way the wind was blowing. But John knew about such cool things to do … John had such a group of cool friends … John listened to me, was fun to talk to, we had a good time … Fine. I will continue on with him, even though I realize he’s softening towards me – because I can rest easy in my conscience that I WAS CLEAR. Too bad for him if he didn’t get the message.

Cold as ice.

There was a night when there was a double-feature at the Music Box: Play it again, Sam and Harold and Maude. Ted (the guy who had interviewed me for the Gym) lived across the hall from John (randomly) and somehow – maybe when I was over John’s one day – the 3 of us decided to go see the double-feature. I didn’t know Ted that well, and as a matter of fact, I was kind of intimidated by him. He was my teacher. He was brilliant. I looked UP to him. When Ted found out that I had never seen Harold and Maude, he flipped out. It was his favorite movie of all time. I HAD to see it and he HAD to be there when I saw it so he could experience it through my eyes. That night of the double-feature was the true beginning of my long friendship with Ted. It was cemented that night. He remembers it that way too. I watched Harold and Maude, sitting between these two men, and there was one point – when the general with one arm finds himself stuck in the salute position with his fake arm – and you can see his silhouette, with the fake arm saluting his forehead, reflected in the puddle – and I started laughing so hard and so loudly that eventually I had to get up and leave the theatre. I stood in the lobby of The Music Box, luscious and baroque, with the red carpet and the old-fashioned popcorn machine, leaning against the wall, literally having a rabit fit of laughter. I thought I would never be normal again. What a release! I finally came back into the theatre, but the second I saw the action continuing on up on the screen, I was gone again. I sat between them, and wept with laughter. Wept and wept and wept. Ted was beside himself with delight. I remember him catching it. Catching my laughter. He had seen the movie so many times. So to see me flip out to such an intense degree gave him such pleasure. Every time I would bark out a laugh, after trying to suppress it, Ted would start guffawing. I couldn’t stop. People were getting annoyed. They were all old old Harold and Maude fans from way back. They had all seen it a gazillion times. But I experienced that movie as an assault unlike any other. I was aware, dimly, that as my laughter intensified – and as audience members were growing annoyed by the girl obviously having an apoplectic fit 3 rows back – that John was getting mildly irritated. He just wasn’t having the same experience I was. At one point, he said, smiling a bit, putting his hand on my arm, “Sh.”

And I was done with John from that moment on. He “sh”ed me and I was immediately done. Nope. This is what I remember from relationships. This is how I remember my boyfriend behaving. Always trying to control me, tamp me down, afraid of my intensity, trying to get me to express it in a more acceptable way. All of this may sound like an elaborate justification for my meanness to him, my coldness – the fact that I could so easily turn OFF – and to some degree it is. We all come from somewhere. That was where I was coming from at that point. He “Sh”ed me, and I had HAD it with being “sh”ed, on a literal and metaphorical level. No one will ever “Sh” me again. Especially not when I’m LAUGHING. If I’m having an inappropriate temper tantrum in a restaurant, then yeah shush me. But don’t you ever “sh” me when I’m laughing.

Two nights later I did what I should have done months before. I had John over to my apartment to break up with him. I resented even having to ‘break up’ because all along I had told him “this is not a relationship”. But it had become apparent that I needed to stop seeing him. I found an echo of a conscience. I would miss the midnight gallery openings, and the secret raves. I would miss the crazy sex. He was such a blast. But this was crazy. I had to get rid of this guy. Before he “sh”ed me again. I think maybe I felt I should get rid of him before he fell for me even further – but really, it was just about the fact that he had become a drag. And I was not into having a drag. Relationships were a drag. I TOLD you I didn’t want one. But here you are. Acting like a boyfriend. And it’s a drag.

John came over and I remember he had flowers. I struggled to not whip him about the face and neck with them. My cat tiptoed around our feet, looking up at us anxiously, green eyes glowing. I had my mattress on the floor. No blinds. The windows from across the alley looked down on us. I said, leaping off the cliff, “John, I can’t see you anymore.”

There was a stunned silence. I was so wrapped up in myself, so much of an giant Id at that moment, that it had never once even occurred to me that he would be surprised by the news. Or hurt. I totally assumed he would be like, “Yeah, I’ve seen this coming.” But that was not how it went. John just looked at me. I waited. I don’t remember what he said in response. I do remember having a long conversation about it – where he told me he was falling in love with me. At one point, he suddenly – it came out of nowhere – put his hands over his face and started to cry. I was horrified. Horrified and also embarrassed. For him. He said something along the lines of “I guess I thought you’d come around” … and for once I didn’t say something along the lines of, “Well, that is ridiculous. I told you point-blank who I was 2 months ago. Why did you not believe me?” I just let him talk. I listened to him talk. He was emotional.

And to be honest, what was going through my head during all of this was: It’s almost over. He’s almost outta here. This conversation is nearing its completion, and soon the door will close behind him, and I will be alone again and it will be DONE.

Just smile and nod, Sheila. Smile and nod at John. Make a sympathetic face. Nod. Look like you’re listening. It’s almost over.

It was the weirdest feeling. To watch a guy get all broken up over me not being into them – and to feel literally nothing. I always feel something. Even if it’s annoyance. I always have some emotion throbbing through the ol’ veins. So it was chilling, and kind of creepy, to stand there, as he sat on my mattress on the floor, with his head in his hands, and feel absolutely nothing. Nothing for him personally, that is. I did have one feeling, and that was: “Soon he’ll be gone, and I’ll hear him yank open the elevator gate, and I’ll hear the elevator jumpstart itself, and hear the cranks moving him down the shaft, away from me … and I’m not sorry. I wish it was 5 minutes from now, so he would be GONE, and I could play some music, and have some Lipton’s.”

I had always been hurt, desperately hurt, by what I saw as men’s ability to turn on and off the switch. Turn ON the romance switch. And then turn it OFF. My boyfriend had just done that. He turned OFF the romance switch with me, and within a matter of weeks, turned it ON with someone else. The thing about John was – I never turned on any switch. Not emotionally anyway. I was always OFF. Later, much later, when we ran into each other again, he said, “You were so detached. I could never get to you.”

I have not since treated anyone with the coldness with which I treated John. Thankfully. A couple months later, my sense of proportion had come back, the adrenaline rush started ebbing out, I had eased into my new circumstances, and I was starting to fit into my new skin. I became a normal-sized woman again, and not a giantess.

But not before John became a casualty.

It wasn’t that I walked all over him, or abused him, or openly had contempt for him – and he just took it. No, no, it wasn’t that. It was that I had told him exactly who I was, with a diamond clarity that would be lost in a matter of months, once the crisis period passed – and he had said, “Okay, that’s fine by me”. And he meant it. For a while he meant it.

Until he realized that I had actually meant what I said too. That I really was just as treacherous as I had described.