I Don't Care About Your Band by Julie Klausner

Author:Julie Klausner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

WE E-MAILED back and forth for a while, and that lead to IMs, then texts and calls. He found my website and he liked my work, going as far as to pay me what was the ultimate compliment coming from him: “I keep getting indicators that you might be the female version of me.” And on the surface, we did seem to have a lot in common, but only in the way I scanned his profile for proper nouns, like bands and movies. Alex was a music critic and a pop culture savant, which I loved about him, but I was also at a stage where I didn’t realize the relative importance of things like musical taste and opinions about TV shows in the grand scheme of two-person compatibility.

After our first phone conversation, I wound up at a party at the apartment of one of Alex’s New York friends—another fan of that same band, which seemed to attract a lot of people of a similar ilk. Bands are social; they’re not like comedians. Band members hang out with one another after shows, and there are parties and hookups and fun and other things that make me nervous and sort of jealous of people less neurotic than me. I guess it’s why I glommed on to those guys, groupie-style, after my breakup. It all symbolized some kind of social opportunity. And nobody will go to as many parties or be more open-minded to hanging out with random jerks as the recently single. People who’ve just gotten out of relationships are constantly trying to prove to themselves how much they were missing out on before.

I was psyched to be at that party, even though I was flanked by a bunch of hipsters with whom I’d never be able to sustain a conversation longer than “Cute shorts,” “Thanks.” But at least I wasn’t home alone, online. I called Alex the next day to tell him how funny, what a coincidence, and pretended that I hadn’t gotten a wretched impression of that whole scene. I felt like now I was in, even though those people—his friends, I assumed—were alien and awful.

Soon, Alex and I were talking on the phone every day. I got to know his routine; he would take me with him when he went to buy his menthol cigarettes at the Circle K, and I would talk to him on my walks home from shows.We would text each other constantly while we watched the same thing on TV. We got to know one another, sort of, and I became comfortable chatting on the phone beyond figuring out a time and place to meet up, which is what I usually use the phone for, when I’m not texting. With Alex, I’d created the perfect boyfriend whose only flaw I could think of was that he couldn’t touch me, and I would voraciously debate people who wondered if I chose him because intimacy freaked me out.

You can’t say something that direct and honest and totally true to people in a long-distance situation.

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