I’ll never forget the day I became a REAL writer. It was a bright, cool, crisp, sunny day in late November, 1992. I was 26 and had just moved to Three Rivers. I was walking out of the local grocery store and saw the most beautifully handsome, hunky, breath-taking man I had ever seen. Think Patrick Swayze, Rob Low, Tom Cruise, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt all rolled into one.
What was even more amazing was the way he was staring at me.
“Who me?” I wanted to say, as he smiled broadly, his white teeth gleaming in the sunlight, as if he were auditioning for a toothpaste commercial.
As the new girl in town, I had a lot of male admirers. I didn’t always behave too admirably, I have to admit. One night, I'm sad to say, I walked into the local bar with one perfectly nice, decent, guy, and walked out instead with the smiling, handsome toothpaste-commercial guy.
We dated for six weeks. He was so handsome, I was too tongue-tied to speak. That was ok. We didn’t talk much anyway. Mostly, we spent hours rolling around my living room floor, kissing and making out like 7th graders. I do remember him telling me a story of torturing frogs as a child (which I quickly put out of my mind). At some point, he tired of my reluctance to move matters to the next level. So, he moved on to the next woman.
I was devastated. I knew I couldn’t compete with his new girlfriend, who was beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent, artistic-- and quite honestly--a much nicer person than I was. So, I started writing for the local newspaper. I thought to myself, I'll charm him with my wit and my words.
I took to heart Robin Williams’ words from Dead Poet’s Society: “Language was invented for one reason, boys—to woo women (or in my case to woo men).”
So, I began my campaign of words. Whenever I bumped into the toothpaste commercial guy, he’d whisper in my ear, “I love your stories," sending shivers down my spine.
Eventually, I gave up on him, though I still continued my word campaign. But my efforts backfired. No one wanted to date me for fear of ending up in one of my stories.
A friend once told me someone she knew who had a crush on me. “But he’s got a temper. Just last week he threw a chainsaw at someone he was pissed off at.”
“Was the chainsaw on or off?” I asked.
My friend laughed. “Does it matter?” she asked.
"I don't know anymore," I said.
I ended up with a decent boyfriend—for a while-- who wasn’t much of a reader or a writer, and was for the most part, a pretty good guy. “I don’t give a shit what you write,” he said.
“That’s the spirit!” I said.
I would have preferred him say: “Write about me! Write about us! Write about the good, the bad, the ugly! Do it, Lisa! Do it! Do it!”
He never said that, but I stuck with him because he was a feminist at heart, who encouraged me when I infiltrated the local all-male softball league.
Weirdly enough, someone from my old team recently emailed me out of the blue and confessed, “I’ve always had a thing for you.”
“Really? Why?” I asked, ever suspicious of anyone who professed to like me.
“You tried really hard out on the field,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Can I ask you out?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. In fact, I always had a thing for him, too.
Two weeks later, he face-timed me and with an ashen look on his face said, “God, I hope I don’t end up in one of your posts!”
I laughed. “Don’t worry. If I write about you, no one will recognize you. I never expose anyone unless they're a dangerous sociopath, my ex-husband, a white-collar criminal—or all three.”
I guess that didn't reassure him much because the next time I checked Facebook he had a new girlfriend. I suppose my posts about overthrowing the male patriarchy didn’t help much, either.
The one person I’ve never written about publicly was my old college boyfriend, Rolf. He was tall, handsome with fire engine red hair, soft brown eyes, a deep talk show host kind of voice, and broad shoulders. He played football in high school and was a man's man with a sensitive soul who was also a feminist and studied literature and poetry at Berkeley, just like me. He was perfect.
Six months into the relationship, he began hinting at marriage. I, in my fully unformed, 21-year-old, emotionally stunted immature brain said, “Oh, I’m never going to get married.
He turned red and never brought up marriage again.
God knows what I was thinking. If I were in my right mind, I would have married him on the spot and had five kids with him. But what’s the literary appeal of a book called "One Perfect Husband/One Ordinary Life" versus a book called "All My Bad Boyfriends"?
Twenty-three long years after Rolf, I met the second love of my life, M. He seemed even more perfectly perfect than Rolf. He was a NYC Jew like me, a Woody Allen fan, creative, smart, funny, and enamored with me. He loved my quirks, my messy car, and my lack of domestic skills. One time when I was cooking, my dishrag caught on fire, and he jumped out of his chair and said, “Wow! You're perfect!! I should ask you to marry me right now!”
A few years later after we were married, he announced, “This bad boyfriend book you're writing is an abomination--an absolute embarrassment. If you try to publish it, I’m going to divorce you. If you work on it secretly, I’m going to divorce you. If you talk to anyone about it, I’m going to divorce you.”
“WHAT?!!!!!!!!” I shrieked.
M. was supposed to be the final chapter of my book—the crowning achievement of my life and my book. How could the hero of my story try to prevent me from telling the story? He was turning into the anti-hero.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
I tried to explain his ultimatum was incongruous with the aims of my book.
“It’s me or the book,” M. insisted. "Let’s delete all the files right now and burn the pages together.”
It was like he was asking me to burn my soul. I spent the next year-and-a-half pacing the streets, filled with a King Lear, Shakesperean kind of madness, wanting to pluck my own eyes out. What should I pick—my husband or the book?
I gave up writing for a bit, and focused on painting crazed, desperately unhappy, women trying to crawl out of their own skins. I messily tracked paint on the bottoms of my feet all over the house, but M didn't seem to mind or notice. Nor did he notice anything telling or symbolic about my paintings.
“They’re fantastic!” he proclaimed. "You could sell these!"
One desperate day, I drove to my old boyfriend’s house—the feminist who didn’t read or write much--and told him the whole story. He said, "You know what you gotta do! Be tough! Be a marine!"
And so, I went home and ran inside the house and with marine-like precision, scooped up my cash, my marijuana, and most importantly, my book, and ran away from home. My husband called me over and over--for many months--, begging me to come back. But I told him,
“I choose the book. Not you."
In the end, I lost "the guy"--in fact every single guy. But I still have the book, which was always, of course, the most important thing.