“Where The Boys Are” by Molly Laich

Photography by Mick Davidson

This was in the winter of my twenty-first year, when I was six feet tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, delivered pizza, attended community college, wore the same cargo pants and hooded sweatshirt every day, had dreadlocks, and was not happy about any of it. Life was mostly torture, but it wasn’t all bad. I was about to get my first real boyfriend, for example.

I already had a lot of friends who were boys. We worked together at Hungry Howie’s Pizzeria, and then at night we would go to one of our parent’s houses and play video games, watch TV, roll around in all the single dollar bills we were making. I should clarify; they played and I watched, sometimes with a book in my lap or writing, and drinking; always drinking. I slept with a lot of my guy friends but didn’t date them. I pretended it was my idea. I could do anything, since I knew how it would turn out. Mopping the floor of Hungry Howies? No problem. I was going to be a writer. Washing dishes I thought, ‘How weird will this seem later?’ Hitting a gigantic bong, doing acid in the backyard (the stars shining down like an accusation) I told the cosmos, ‘you’ll see. This is not the whole story.’

My older brother was long gone, but sister, not so long and her bedroom cried out for orphans. Travis said he just needed to stay for a couple of days because things were bad at home. Travis’s father was an alcoholic plumber named Parky. He was a dangerous, childish man. Parky called in the middle of the night, and when no one answered, when he couldn’t find his son (like a dog chasing a car, what would he do when he caught him?) he dropped his hateful thoughts into the answering machine. I remember one thing he said because it concerned me: “Molly, you’re such an ugly dyke. I don’t know what Travis sees in you.” I always knew there was this other side to life, where people said what they really thought of you, but it hardly ever pokes through. When it does it’s fascinating, like a rip in the universe. It stung, but I knew I wasn’t gay and I’d be prettier later, and I thought, ‘Oooh, does Parky think Travis and I are dating?’

I don’t remember why John moved in and got to start sleeping on the couch, but that happened, and this was the scene. Two rambunctious twenty year olds had taken the place of my siblings. We started with the first three rooms, and then spilled over into the rest of the house, until my mother was pushed back into the deepest recesses, alone in her bedroom with the tiniest television, like a princess in a tower but more ordinary.

John and I delivered pizzas together. Travis spent that time “looking for a job,” in his dreams, probably, because he slept around thirteen hours a day. Some mornings I would already be awake, sitting on the other part of the couch (we called it the vortex) and I would look at John’s silly, happy face.  He smiled in his sleep, and like a car wreck I found it terrible but couldn’t stop gawking. When his alarm went off he sat up dreamily, and he would sing this same song: “wake up, wake up, it’s time to go to work, get some pants and some shoes and put on a shirt!”

My mother tried to keep the house looking nice, but she was outnumbered, and the place slowly took on a bachelor pad aesthetic, defined by ashtrays filled with cigarettes, pizza boxes, homemade bongs and mountain dew bottles. Travis put up a poster of all the Pink Floyd Albums painted on women’s asses. John brought over a second television, so like one of those 80’s art installations we had two TV’s stacked in the living room. A person could play video games and watch cartoons at the same time, if they were so inclined, and they were.

Mom was shy and drank too much. She felt guilty for things that had come before and she had a soft spot for other people’s children. Before my friends, a generation of my brother’s posse came in and out of the house like a kind of juvenile detention center, but with no rules. From as early as I could remember, there had been some dude sleeping on my mother’s couch, and always dudes. I remember when one of the guys brought a date over who laughed like a hyena.  She left a kind of girlish film on the furniture and the next morning my mother crinkled up her nose and said, “Who brought that girl over here last night?”

And then Kyle started working at Hungry Howies, and so began the era of “that two months that Kyle lived at the house.” In the span of things it was a brief episode. Some people don’t even remember this time; my sister doesn’t. I said to her, “You know, Kyle. My first boyfriend?”

Blank stare.

“The short guy who tucked in his shirt and always had keys dangling from his waist? He sold you weed like three times?”

To this day, my sister can’t evoke a memory of my first boyfriend who lived in our house for two months and with whom she had multiple business transactions. I don’t know if that says more about Kyle or my sister.

I didn’t notice Kyle at first because he was short, but after awhile I couldn’t ignore the way he hung on my every word and laughed just a little too loudly at my jokes, and I thought it was nice to be appreciated.

“What do you guys think?” I asked John and Travis.

“Craftsmen Toolbox,” John said.

“Douche,” Travis concurred.

It was true but I wanted it to be some other way. I knew even then that life wasn’t fair for smart, un-pretty girls. Kyle invited me to a party in his friend Mark’s basement. They had just found out about club drugs and were having a party with horrible, outdated rave music. This was what, 2003 or something? It would have been on CD probably, or on someone’s clunky WINAMP song playlist, how quaint.  I had already been going to parties in Detroit until I got arrested and stopped, so I found their newfound enthusiasm for ecstasy touching, but pedestrian. I had planned to break up with Kyle at the end of the night but he kept putting tiny pills in my mouth that made everything seem like a good idea, so we decided to go steady instead.

This was my first boyfriend, and I didn’t understand that they shouldn’t move into your mother’s house in the first week. That’s what happened. Kyle was a gruff, intensely serious boy with big ambitious dreams of starting his own business, working hard, being self-reliant. He delivered pizzas, sold marijuana, and went to Lawrence Tech School of Business. He said that he wanted to take care of me and protect me forever, and I just smiled and nodded, knowing that that was absurd, that we would be breaking up soon. (To this day, I don’t know if I’ve ever not thought that, when men start talking about the future: “don’t bother, we’ll be breaking up soon.” So far I’ve never been wrong.)

The other thing about Kyle is that he loved sex; and not the gee-whiz nineteen-year-old kind, but the weird kind, with chains and leather and gender bending fashion. He wanted me to tie him to things, put makeup on his face, and then, and this he proposed after a couple of weeks of living together: “I want to order this chastity belt online and give you the key to it.” They make these devices that hold a man’s dick in a state of non arousal – you can pee somehow but you can’t get hard or masturbate or stick it in unauthorized orifices when you’re wearing one. He was a submissive and wanted me to be dominant, but he might as well have been asking me to run for president, which is to say, I was not up for the responsibility, and seriously, what was in it for me? He said, “You know that if you held my key I would do anything for you. I would be your slave.” I didn’t want a slave, though. I wanted a tall, popular boyfriend who my friends liked. What I got instead was a man begging to be a slave. He said, “I know some of the stuff I’m into is weird. I’m just trying to explore my sexuality. I really appreciate you being understanding and not telling everybody about it.”

“What the fuck should I do about this weirdo boyfriend,” I asked John and Travis.

“He wants to wear a chastity belt that only I have the key to and he wears fishnet tights when we’re fucking and he has me stick this gigantic butt plug up his” etc.

After days of horrified crowd reaction, of utter debasement and mocking of Kyle and everything he stood for, they managed to tell me, “We hate Kyle.  We liked things the way they were before. Break up with him.”

I knew they were right, but Christmas was coming and he had kept saying to me, “don’t feel obligated to reciprocate, but your present: it’s nice.” And there was a second drug party planned at Mark’s place mid January that I really wanted to go to.

“I know, I know,” I said. “But I want my Christmas present first.”

Our bedroom set up was so awkward. We had two single mattresses lying on the floor next to each other, which never works: they always separate; someone slides into the crack. I felt certain the mattresses were a metaphor. (Recall: I was going to be a writer.) Here’s something you might not know about the dynamics of a dominant- submissive relationship. Dom’s have a terrible reputation for being bossy but really it’s the other way around. The submissive is all, “Do this, do that. Tie me to this. Yell at me. Stick this up here. You’re doing it wrong,” and so on.  Kyle asked me to tie him to the mattress by both wrists, blindfold him, and insert precisely five anal beads. I said I wanted to go to my friend’s house and watch TV. “How long will you be gone?” he wondered. I said just an hour or so; I had philosophy homework to do. He asked me to leave him there and untie him when I got back. It would be so deliciously humiliating for him, he assured me.

“Kyle’s tied to the bed in eager anticipation of more weird shit, I can’t stay long.”

This was at my friend Michelle’s condo. She shared it with three other dudes. She was like me in this way: not very pretty, but funny, a man’s woman. She was my one female friend. She was wickedly smart, evil and meddling, and if I had been paying attention I would have seen the malevolent gears turning in her head.

They all loved anime and I hated it.  They were watching Inuyasha. “Please, God, can we watch something else?”

“Compromise,” they said. “We’ll play the Inuyasha drinking game.” It isn’t rocket science but I’ll explain anyway: you pick a character and take a shot every time they say the name.

“I can’t get drunk,” I told them. “My boyfriend is tied to the mattress and I have to drive home soon.” Also, last time they gave me “Inuyasha,” and my stomach still churned every time anyone mentioned him.

“We’ll give you a minor character this time. Kagome.  Come on.”

I had never heard of Kagome and I stupidly went along. These nerds had seen every episode, and of course it was a Kagome heavy show and after thirty minutes I was possibly drunker than I’d ever been and making out with one of Michelle’s roommates while she looked on, sober as a judge and for all I knew, twisting an evil mustache through her fingers.

I should have been arrested that night, and not just for drunk driving, but crimes against humanity. I’m not a boy scout and my knots were not sophisticated. Kyle had escaped, but he was not pleased. I didn’t care. I knew for sure that night that he loved me and I didn’t love him, and the fact hung heavy in the air between us.

For Christmas, John, Travis, and Kyle pitched in and bought my mother a new Microwave. It was touching; she cried. I attempted a practical joke that would have worked if I had executed it right, but I hadn’t. I bought John and Travis a Game Cube to share. For Travis, I took a big, dirty rock out of the backyard and wrapped it in a box. John opened the Game Cube and was thrilled. Travis thought, ‘Oh man, my present will be just as good,’ and instead found the rock. “Just kidding, your present is also the Game Cube.” He looked really sad and I wanted to cry. I can see now that the joke would have been way funnier and less mean if Travis had opened the rock first.

At the time I was an avid collector of religious imagery, and Kyle’s present to me was a big, heavy bust of Christ. It was a terrible gift. He had missed the point entirely and failed to understand me. I didn’t want expensive, ugly things. I bought my Jesus stuff at thrift stores and garage sales. He didn’t understand anything. The drug party wasn’t for another two weeks but I couldn’t take it anymore: it was time to break up.

Meanwhile, our bachelor pad utopia was ticking to an end. A cloud of smoke and dust hung illuminated in the air like a John Carpenter villain. Dirty tube socks draped on all the furniture and the plants were dying. I knew my mother: a classic passive aggressive. I noticed an increase in heavy sighing and doors slamming. She started keeping her Vodka in her bedroom so my friends and me couldn’t drink it. We ignored the signs. Our friend Eric had gotten an epic Christmas present: Lord of the Rings Risk. LOTR Risk is like normal Risk in that it’s boring and hard and takes a year to finish a single game.  One tries to take over the world with imaginary armies. In the LOTR version, the map is of Middle Earth and you align yourself with either good or evil. On each turn, players advance a gold ring one step closer to Mordor. The game would get started around midnight and wouldn’t end until late the next morning. This went on night after night. My mother, a ticking time bomb in her bedroom. Me, a spectator but mostly bored by the whole thing. Kyle came home every night around two thirty after closing.

“Hey guys, can I play?” he said.

“Sorry,” they said. “We’re in the middle of a game.”

“Next game?”

“Maybe,” they said. “It’s going to be a few hours.”

Kyle wasn’t cool enough for them. He didn’t tell the right jokes; his style of play wasn’t in sync. Really, I’m not sure what it was, but the gang had rejected him and that was that. They weren’t going to put up with him for much longer.

There was one thing I was going to miss, and that was Kyle’s penchant for oral sex. He was a magician and I was lazy. He’d go down on me forever, and then I would half-heartedly suck on his. I figured out that if I put the butt plug in he would come in about thirty seconds and it was way less work for me. “You don’t have to do that every time,” he begged me, gently. “I know,” I said, and did it anyway.

At work we had cartons of some disgusting beverage, Diet Moon Mist Faygo or something. Anyway, it wasn’t selling and they brought it home for the game. The stuff was supernatural – it allowed them to play for hours. A game would end and someone would maniacally scream, “Again!” and so it went. “This stuff is revolting,” they said, drank all, left no friendly drops for Kyle. This was the night I was going to break up with him. “I’m breaking up with Kyle tonight,” I said.

“Woo!” the boys cried. They high-fived me.

“Is he closing?” Travis wanted to know. “Can you ask him to bring home pizza?”

He arrived a few hours later with several pizzas and a single flower for me, a gas station carnation. The saddest fucking flower I’d ever seen, and when I took it from him I thought, ‘someday I’m going to write about this.’

I took his hand and led him into the bedroom. I thought about initiating oral sex first, one last time, but that would have been over the top. I hugged him.

“I want to break up.”

“Why,” he said. And he said it so quickly, like he was ready for it. There was no questioning inflection. He said it loud and fast and it scared the shit out of me.

I was honest. I said that I liked him but I knew that I would never love him. I told him I didn’t judge him for the weird sex stuff, but it just wasn’t for me. We were still hugging. He dug his fingers into my back. I pulled away.

“I’ve accepted the fact that girls aren’t going to be into the same things that I am. It’s okay.”

“No, no,” I said. “There are people out there who like that stuff. You deserve to find a nice girl who’s more into it.”

His voice got panicked and desperate. “About that time I yelled at you for not putting my beer in the fridge, you know, I’m sorry. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

I thought I would feel satisfied or powerful after breaking up with someone, but it wasn’t that way at all. I felt sick. I considered taking it back just to make the awful feeling go away, but I’d just have to do it over again later.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I was sort of expecting it.”

“I’m pretty messed up,” I said.

“Some people just can’t allow nice things to happen to them.”

I thought he was wrong but didn’t know how to voice it. “You’re right,” I said.

When you get broken up with, you should leave, but he lived there and it was the middle of the night; where was he supposed to go? He lingered around the dining room table for a while, eating pizza, watching the boys battle over Ruhan or The Shire or whatever. Everyone knew what we’d been talking about in my bedroom. It was an awkward scene.

It wasn’t long after that that everything fell apart. Mother had gotten rid of one of the boys, but in a way it was the wrong one. Kyle worked hard, cleaned up after himself, didn’t smoke, and even contributed money for groceries occasionally. One morning, with the empty Faygo cans stacked around the dining room like a castle, Mother burst onto the scene, her eyes wild and angry. I thought of a popular television show: When Animals Attack. She told everyone to pack up their fucking board game and get the fuck out of her house. They did. They said they were sorry. It was sad, but it had to happen.

The boys still came over but not as often. Travis started sleeping on Eric’s parent’s couch instead. When John got kicked out, he realized he should do something with his life and joined the Navy. Kyle had done something to me and I changed. I never loved him, but he made me realize that I was worthy of being loved. I cut off my dreadlocks and started dieting. I did Yoga every night in the living room, sometimes even when my friends were over playing Game Cube on the second TV that for whatever reason, remained. “That downward dog doesn’t look anything like Rodney Yee’s downward dog,” I remember one of them saying. Like Parky’s phone message, the sentence echoes in my brain. But I had always known things were going to change, and they did. By April I had already lost sixty pounds. My hair was growing back. I started thinking about applying to the university in Detroit. I got a better, taller boyfriend. I boxed up all my Jesus shit and put it in the attic.

Kyle came by one day that spring, after I’d started dating this new perfect man from an overlapping social circle, a fun, awesome dude that my friends liked. He had already moved in. I felt happy and alive and powerful. My writing was getting better and I was drinking less, to save calories. I sat on the floor in front of the coffee table, breaking up the weed Kyle brought me so we could hang out and smoke a joint, this being a courtesy one extends to a drug dealer that delivers. He started crying – really, openly weeping, one of those rare male events that is significant and means something. He told me how pretty I looked, that it pained him to see me at work every day, that he missed me so much, that he had always been in love with me. He said, “I just feel like such a loser all the time. I feel like everybody hates me. I miss you so much.”

If I could rewrite one thing about this story, I would have gotten off the floor and gone to him and hugged him. I didn’t do that and I still don’t know why. Today it hurts more than being called ugly, or John leaving for the Navy, or my mom yelling at my friends, or giving that rock present.

I didn’t say anything. We smoked the joint. He wiped the tears off his face and left.

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Molly Laich is from Detroit and now lives in Montana. She writes personally and professionally about things like drugs and sadness, but funny! Her real home is the internet. You can find her at mollylaich.com and twitter.com/#!/MollyL. She’d like to soberly and sincerely offer you this raw food sandwich.