I sat back down where that beam or 4x4 had been. I felt so annoyed that I was just always thinking about myself. I remembered how my mom would say, “You have to think about other people. That’s the point of life—doing things for other people.”

OK, no time like the present. I walked up to a crew member and said, “Hey…can I help in any way?” Oh my god—I’m such a loser! Yeah, I’m so sure this kid needs me to help build a set. He smiled and said that no, he was good.

“You want a beer?” he asked.

“No, thanks.” I really felt like crying. I need to call Dr. Temple tomorrow and like triple my Celexa dose! So I went inside Bruce’s place and sat down on the couch. It was dark and cold. Bruce came in to check on me.

Jenna convinces Chuck to get w me so he can have Jeff

“Is everything OK,” he asked.

“Totally! I was just getting really hot! God. These Maryland summers. I swear I’m moving to Alaska someday!” Bruce laughed, got a beer, and went back outside. I laid eyes on a little bookshelf of Bruce’s. Books—my saviors always. I went over and looked at some of Bruce’s books—biking, hiking, environmental activism. I pulled out a book on the best bike trails in Baltimore County. I loved that heavy paper stock it was printed on. And, of course I had to smell it. I loved the smell of books, old, new, and everything in between. Just then—of course, just then—two young hotties came in.

“Sorry, but books smell so good.” Stop apologizing for everything, I thought to myself. And as it happened sometimes in the cavernous freak show that was my mind, another voice countered: “You’re not actually apologizing, it’s just a figure of speech.”

The hottie smiled and one went to the bathroom while the other ran into the kitchen sink for some reason. He came back into the family room where I was turning this book around trying to follow the paths.

[P. 50 of All Memoir Stuff Combined 112023]

“So, do you bike a lot?”

“Me? Oh, well—I do love riding a bike. But I don’t do it a lot. And these trails are crazy!”

“They’re pretty tough.”

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t resist: “Maybe we should go sometime! Biking! Oh, wait—these are too advanced for me. Duh!” I rolled my eyes and smiled.

“You could do it. My name’s Andy, by the way.”

“Hi, I’m Akbar.” I smiled and shook his sweaty hand and suddenly felt like I was at a job interview. But I was the interviewer. I asked Andy how long he’d worked for Bruce. A couple months, it turned out.

“It was nice meeting you, Akbar,” said Andy.

You can come work with me anytime you want, handsome, I thought, “You too! And we’re going on one of these trails one day, you don’t have a choice,” I smiled.

“You got it,” he said and smiled.

His friend came out of the bathroom and looked like he thought this conversation was so not what he expected to find. Andy remembered they’d better go back to set-building. As they walked out Andy leaned into his friend and they laughed about something. This always happened. Were they laughing at me or just because I was unusual—which I didn’t mind when it was from a place of fascination and interest—or were they pleased because I was flirty—and petty? I went outside. The heat felt good, even though it was a muggy, Maryland summer. And we were at Bruce’s on the water in Dundalk. Extra muggy! As I was turning to go, Andy came back in with a mean, red swelling on his hand. Some double socket wrench driver doodad thing fell on it.

“Oh, my god! Sit down!” I ordered, and the grounding feeling of having something concrete to focus on, a problem to fix, a person to help (you were right, Mommy!) pleased me so much I almost smiled.

Andy sat down and I could tell he was in a lot of pain but trying not to show it.

I got a bag of frozen [peas] and two Advil out with bizarre alacrity, considering I didn’t know from Bruce’s kitchen. I put them down in front of Andy who was on the couch. I went back and got a glass of water. He took the two Advil. And I got back up to got a towel to wrap the bag of peas in.

“I’m not used to taking pills,” he said.

“Ha! Sorry it’s just that I take so many—prescribed! Andy, I’m from a family of doctors. And they all know that laughter is the best medicine. So…” I looked up to think. “One time on 90210 this girl was addicted to diet pills and Kelly goes, ‘Why can’t you just be whoever you’re gonna be without all these pills?’ We both laughed. “And once on ‘Roseanne’, Roseanne was on the phone and goes, “Hi, I’m Roseanne calling from the Magazine Discount House, and—yeah, well I’m not interested either but it’s my job.” Again, we both laughed. “AND once on ‘Golden Girls’ Rose was wondering why Blanche hadn’t been married in a white wedding dress, opting for red instead. Blanche goes, “Rose, it’s one thing to hear snickering when you walk down the aisle. But me in white—please! Even I couldn’t keep a straight face.’ “

“Do you feel any better, Andrew?”

“A little,” Andy said, and smiled.

“You’re a liar,” I smiled back.

“Maybe you should be a doctor too.”

“Or maybe I should do something else that I find uninteresting and gross! Just kidding. I want to be a writer.”

“What do you want to write?”

“You know, mostly non-fiction, I think, because that’s what I’m best at. So, like journalism, essays…and you know what I really would love to write? The dictionary!”

“Isn’t it already written?” Ok, you are the cutest, Andy.

“Well, yeah, but languages are dynamic and ever-changing. Lexicographers find out new stuff about words every day. OK, I’ve bored you enough.”

He didn’t say that I hadn’t bored him and that he loved talking to me, which was also pretty cute. He lifted the bag of peas to reveal a less-swollen hand. I imagined the Advil was kicking in too. I wished I could stay there and talk to him more. But I thought I should get home and get some homework done.

“Bruce, I’m gonna go. Bye, Rich! I have so much homework.” And I did. And I loved college and what I was studying: classical rhetoric. I loved doing my assignments and papers and worksheets. What are the three modes of persuasion? Ethos, logos, and pathos. What are the five disciplines of rhetoric? Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, Delivery. What are the six parts of the oration? Introduction, Statement of Fact, Narration, Proof/Confirmation, [Sometimes a Digression], Refutation, and Conclusion. Fuck sex. Fuck boys. Being a rhetoric nerd made me so happy.

At home my mom asked me how Bruce was.

“Good! I had fun!” I went upstairs and put sweats on, fired up the old MacIntosh –I don’t even know what model it was because it was so old. But, yay—I could work on an assignment, which was to analyze a piece of text of our choosing and write about how the author used tropes and figures of language to convey a point. That was my mentor’s, Professor Jeanne Fahnestock, specialty within the broad field of rhetoric. I picked a passage from an essay by Camille Paglia: “Kind of a Bitch: Why I Like Hillary Clinton.” Then? Old episodes of “Will & Grace” and “The Golden Girls”. Well, an episode of the latter had to be paired with my angel, Emily. I called her, and we had one of our marathon phone conversations. Three hours.

The next day I went to Border’s and bought a small, paperback “Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary”. Inside I wrote, “Smell here.”

I drove to Bruce’s house uninvited, though you never needed an invitation to Bruce’s. He just loved having people around.

I saw Andy outside standing by the set and couldn’t believe how fast the work was going.

“Andy! I got you something,” I said, holding the dictionary behind my back. I showed him the dictionary, and he looked truly dumbfounded. He did that super-sexy thing that guys in baseball caps in hot weather do a lot: take it off and like rub the top of their heads. Oh my god! Can you stop—FOR ONE SECOND—thinking about what hot guys do?

“Oh—cool!”

“Look at the inscription,” I said. He seemed like he wasn’t sure what that was, so I opened it for him. He laughed and actually did smell it.

“See?!” I asked.

“It does smell good.”

“Well…

“Ok…

“I still have homework I haven’t finished, and do you know how long it takes me to get home from here? 40 minutes! So, I better go.”

“Thanks for this,” he said, smacking the book against his bruised hand. “Ow! Jesus.”

“Andy, I never thought I’d say this: but be careful with that dictionary!”

I turned to go. As I walked in the crunchy gravel in front of Bruce’s house I felt a lightness I hadn’t felt in months. Yes, Andy was handsome and really had a cute, endearing personality, but I wasn’t in love with him. So our interaction felt totally angst-free. A friendship. I thought about how Rich was my good friend too, but all the other intense, incessant feelings I had for him made it difficult. Even just that brief thought of him made me a little breathless and scared, scared of the intensity, the impossibility, and the paradox that I could never “have” Rich, despite thatI still felt so strongly him. He, like everything, felt like it was always slipping away from me. If only I’d known then that the harder you grasp something—someone—the more likely you were too lose it.

Emily said to me during that marathon phone conversation above, “Honey, when you feel that strongly for someone, there has to be something there.” I was crying about Rich over the phone. And there was something there, yes! But I only knew to call it something. What was it, I still wasn’t sure and maybe never would be. But I thought, “It’s ours.” I imagined what would have been so painful for me just a moment before that: Rich with someone else. But if he were, I realized, that had nothing to do with our…something. It was sovereign and everlasting, I truly believed.

It was like lethologica, when a word is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t think of it. And I just wanted to…who the fuck knows what I wanted. This is why drugs and alcohol had always appealed to me: because they silenced the non-stop, self-indulgent, cyclical stream of consciousness barreling through my head at all times. “Rich,” I thought as I merged onto 695 back to my house, “It feels difficult, but that’s OK. Because I love you. You’re worth it to me. You’re my canary in the coalmine, my cat’s pajamas, my dog that won’t hunt, none of which made sense, of course. But it made me laugh. And in that moment, something shifted. I decided I’d stop punishing myself—and Rich!—and just be normal with him. I couldn’t make the love go away—and maybe I shouldn’t anyway—but I could stop hurting over it, especially if there were a chance my hurt would make Rich suffer in any way.

Many years later when I began to explore self-help and spirituality and even religion, I learned that when I felt something, I didn’t have to identify with it. It wasn’t me. And maybe being in love wasn’t about possessing someone but about appreciating them. And giving to them, even if that just meant allowing myself to breathe—because then he could breathe.

I did feel a quick pang of sadness because it felt like distance from Rich, and for almost a year now, all I’d wanted was to pull him closer. I realized the need to pull him closer was…holy shit: another addiction—THE addition. It’s ok. He’s still there. He’s still there. He’s still here. I thought to myself, placing a hand on my heart as if saluting the flag. I silently thanked Andy for reminding me of laughter, and discovery, and the joy of taking an interest in someone else and his happiness.