PATRICK WALSH: THANKSGIVING - CHRISTMAS 2003

When we left off, I had just nailed my roommate. If you need to be brought up to date, just check out the "Story of My Life" link on the left side of the page.

http://patrickwalsh.blog-city.com/read/storyofmylife.htm  

Two of my best friends came to visit me in New York for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was great. We painted the town. Some highlights.

1) Attending the Macy's Day Parade. Our spot was right underneath a giant billboard of a male underwear model. We would snap pictures of each balloon character as it approached the man's package. Funniest was Pikachu who was in an "on his stomach, mouth open" pose. Seeing a Pokemon character blow a male model is really what Thanksgiving is all about, isn't it?

2) Seeing Bad Santa at the theater, drunk out of our minds. I believe it was a 2PM show.

3) Enjoying a fairly delicious Thanksgiving dinner in a trashy upper west side diner. 

4) Drinking a downright shocking amount of alcohol in the back of Rudy's, my favorite NYC bar.

It was glorious. At some point, I mentioned screwing my roommate to my friends, and I believe the reaction was wary but encouraging. For about a month now, we'd been having an extremely exciting sexual relationship, trying not to get found out by our other roommate. A lot of tiptoeing between rooms and whatnot, like something out of a Jane Austen novel, if Jane Austen wrote about deviant sex.

Katie spent the Thanksgiving holiday with her parents, but she was going to meet us out in the city the night she got back. I was supposed to pick her up at the subway station and walk her to the bar we were at. Well, it slipped my mind. I should mention that I didn't have a cell phone at this time, and thought everyone who did was a douchebag. (Now I feel that way about Blackberries). So on this freezing cold night, she was waiting outside for me. I finally remembered and met up with her, about 15 minutes late. She was pissed, and she told me she was going home. She was bitching about this and that, and how could I not have a cellphone in this day and age, and don't I give a shit about her and so forth.

All things that would have been easy to tune out, if it wasn't for one nagging thought: She sounds a lot like a girlfriend.

In my immature mind, I was hoping to keep plugging away at my roommate every night, never going past the 'friends with benefits' stage. But now here she was, yelling at me on a wintry New York sidewalk about how irresponsible I was. This was bad. I talked her down (a specialty of mine, especially with my current girlfriend. I think I should have been a hostage negotiator), and we went back to the bar. That night, there was more sex, and it would continue on and off (no pun intended) over the next few weeks.

In truth, we had developed a fairly sweet little arrangement. In many ways, the emptiness of it made the loneliness even worse, but hey, we had regular sex. Trouble was, as it kept going, I knew in my heart I didn't want to "Live with live with" someone at my age. I didn't want a live-in girlfriend. And yet we'd be moving in together in less than a month. Separate rooms, but still. It was easy for me to remain emotionally detached, as I wasn't experiencing "human emotions" at this time. However, we spent snowy Saturdays eating pizza in bed, watching movies, fucking hourly. I can certainly see how she got the wrong idea, and I didn't really do anything to fix that. Nor did I really care.

I don't know statistics, but I would wager that was the coldest winter in quite a while in New York. And my heater was broken. I would usually get fully dressed as if I was going out in the snow before getting into bed. I would sleep each night in hat, coat, pants, socks, the whole nine yards. I refused to put any food in the urine-drenched, cockroach-infested kitchen, so I kept a box of Honeycomb cereal in my room, and i would eat a small amount each night before bed, really the only time I ate. I almost didn't notice, which is the scary part, but I was becoming something of a monster. I lost about 30 pounds my first few months in New York, I lost all sense of morals and decency and goodness, and pretty much the only thing I had to look forward to each week, apart from fantastic but meaningless sex, was a new episode of Paradise Hotel, the greatest reality show of all time. 

RIP Paradise Hotel.

I knew i was going back to Missouri for Christmas and I was truly excited about that. But I knew that when I returned I would be living with, like LIVING WITH, this girl. And I felt terrible because I was shockingly depressed and in no position to be in a relationship. To make matters worse, I wouldn't be there on moving day, so HER AND HER MOM were going to move all of my stuff and furniture into the new place while I was on vacation! She also volunteered to drive me to the airport. 

We got to the airport, and I knew that this was the moment that would decide what kind of arrangement I'd be walking into when I came back and started life in my new place January 4th. She leaned in to kiss me goodbye, a very bold move on her part, a very boyfriend/girlfriend thing to do. I should have set it straight, I should have told her, "Look, I don't want a romantic thing right now, I'm like nearly suicidal, it would be bad for both of us, please let's just switch into roommate mode when I get back to town, OK?"

Instead, I kissed her very tenderly on the lips. Gave her a big hug. Told her I'd miss her. Waved goodbye. And got on the airplane. 

tags: story of my life  

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