I Like You Just the Way I Am Read online

  Baz dropped me off at my car and I went home. When I arrived, Jason was cooking and a few of my real girlfriends were sitting in the living room, watching him. In that moment, I realized how selfish I’d been behaving. For the six months I spent investing in Baz, my real life kept moving forward without me. I allowed my obsession to alienate me from the people I actually loved. My marriage should have been my top priority, but instead I focused only on feeding my insatiable ego. Jason deserved better than what I was giving him. And it was time to focus on our relationship, not mine and his ex-girlfriend’s.

  Like all addictions, banishing Baz from my thoughts took time. But eventually I did get to a place where she no longer consumed me. I called her when I heard her cat died. Jason and I once bumped into her at the mall. And I think I might have invited her to “Like” my Facebook fan page. But for the most part, she went back to where she belonged: the past.

  5.

  Show Me Your Teets

  I’ve always assumed that people who don’t own pets are serial killers. And post-college, I was in a pretty dark place. Not to the point where I’d ever be able to kill someone, but definitely in a place where I was listening to too much Morrissey. I’d spent the majority of my time at UCLA studying German literature, feminist theory, and mime. I was twenty-one years old and had just finished work on an adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa was depicted as giant labia. Needless to say, I wasn’t in the greatest place emotionally. Then by pure chance, I stumbled upon a man who changed everything: Mr. Teets.

  My sister, Amanda, was in college at Long Beach State at the time. One weekend I drove down to visit her. On my way, I got a flat tire. And although I wrote my thesis on the antiquated notion of a damsel in distress, I acted on my first instinct, which was to pull into the nearest gas station and start crying. A mechanic came out and told me replacing the tire would take about thirty minutes and that he hoped I could wait because I didn’t really have a choice. I smiled the way you do at people who think they’re funny but actually aren’t and sat down to wait.

  Directly adjacent to the gas station was a shitty pet store with a sign outside that read POODLE PUPPIES 100 DOLLARS. Bored, I walked in and there he was, weighing three pounds soaking wet, the first love of my life. He was a ball of brown fuzz with blue eyes and tan markings around his face and chest. He was born January 30th, making him approximately three months old. I asked to hold him, and curiously, he wasn’t nervous. The rest of the dogs seemed to be bouncing off the walls, trying to escape, but Teets was better than that, or he was on sedatives. Either way, he seemed confident and self-possessed. There was an instant, unspoken synergy between the two of us that I didn’t feel again until I met my husband. We belonged together. After staring into his eyes for less than ten minutes, I bought him. (For the record, this was years before I knew better than to buy animals from a store, like some moronic Betty Draper type who smokes in the car with the windows rolled up while pregnant, then hands over a wad of cash to the proprietors of a backwoods puppy mill where dogs spend their lives locked in 3x5 cages. I would never make this mistake now. And so as not to endorse any future animal slavery, Teets has requested I lie and tell you he’s a rescue.) I wasn’t even looking for a dog. But just like with boyfriends, it’s when you aren’t looking that they always appear.

  The most important thing to know about Teets is that, unlike most dogs, he’s an actual person. I’m not one of those animal freaks who will tell you that all dogs are created equal. Some dogs are just dogs. Teets, however, is a person in a small dog-sized fur suit, and has to be treated as such.

  When I placed him on the seat next to me in the car, he informed me with his eyes that he was both a gentleman and a scholar. He implied that he’d be willing to provide me with a lifetime of complete emotional support in exchange for a per diem of fancy meats and cheeses. Teets demanded respect—and a monogrammed suede doggie bed from L.L. Bean. It was a fair trade and a match for life.

  I wanted to give my new significant other a name that matched his level of sophistication. He couldn’t be something common, like Tiger or Barney. He needed a name with gravitas. Aside from looking like a young Richard Dreyfuss, there was someone else he resembled: John W. Teets.

  The original John W. Teets was an Arizona business tycoon who was the retired CEO of the Dial Corporation. He was a mentor to my father and the one family friend who even as an adult I wasn’t allowed to address by first name. I decided this regal toy poodle should command the same respect.

  As a puppy-man, Teets was the model of elegance and class. I spoke to him only in German, but I think he picked up English from friends at the dog park. He insisted on drinking his water from a glass, and slept with his head propped on a Tempur-Pedic pillow. He never used a leash. He found them antiquated and offensive. He hated swimming but did enjoy wading up to his ankles in koi ponds, pretending to fly-fish like Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It. Teets never believed in pants but occasionally donned a festive ascot or sweater vest when the mood was right. He was modest when using the restroom and pooped strictly in flower beds that could conceal his final product. He rarely misbehaved, and when he did, it was typically just a mutual misunderstanding.

  For the most part, things were copacetic. And the two of us lived together in perfect harmony—until eventually, I ran out of money. At the time, Teets wasn’t working and I was barely pulling in enough cash to cover his Fiji Water and organic bison chews. I knew downsizing meant our having to share a place with someone more financially stable but undoubtedly less snuggly.

  * * *

  The last time I’d had a roommate was my freshman year in college. Because I failed to turn in my housing application on time, I was condemned to a 150-square-foot, three-bunk dorm located on the only all-girls floor on campus. The dormitory opened up to new occupants on a Sunday. Knowing I needed to secure first dibs on the lesser of the three evil bunks, I wrote myself a doctor’s note claiming that if I didn’t move in the night before, I’d die of leukemia. My dad/co-conspirator signed the letter and changed the reason to something more believable. I think juvenile diabetes.

  I woke up at 4:59 A.M. Monday morning to the sounds of my new roommate Hazel Buchheimer jimmying the dead bolt and barging in. The overachieving softball star from Greenwich, Connecticut, was horrified when she found me completely moved in and sleeping soundly on the top bed. I removed my sleeping mask and pretended to have diabetes until her parents were out of sight. About two hours later, Lupe Estevez, whom I referred to as Emilio Estevez for the rest of the year, marched in. She’d taken the bus up to L.A. from San Diego and was already pissed that both Hazel and I were white and owned cars. The friction among the three of us was palpable, and with time devolved into all-out war. Hazel started hiding food from us in her padlocked closet. Estevez reported me to campus police for streaking naked through the book fair. And I picked the lock to Hazel’s food closet and framed it on Estevez. By the end of the year, none of us were on speaking terms. Except for when I think Hazel and Estevez would talk about me behind my back, and totally be on speaking terms. Traumatized, I vowed to spend the rest of my life living solo.

  So years later, when my friend Indra’s brother, Herschel, moved to L.A. and brought up the idea of moving in with Teets and me, I laughed. Hershel was an Orthodox Jew with zero hot friends and way too many Phish CDs. He was only two years my senior but already felt middle-aged because of his crazy beard. He worked in the world of finance while I worked in the world of taking cute pictures of Teets.

  My limited income in those days came from tutoring. After college, I hooked up with a friend who ran a tutoring business and I agreed to help him out part-time by teaching English as a second language. Every week, he’d send me handfuls of eager clients hoping to improve their grammar and pronunciation, and I’d work with each of them for about an hour. The reality was, I had no idea how to teach English. But I did know how to speak it. So how hard could it be? A typical session at
the Jenny School of Immersion would start with me making a pot of tea, requesting twenty bucks, then spending an hour overenunciating whatever thoughts and feelings popped into my head. If I had auditions, I’d make my pupil practice lines with me, then drill them on whether or not they thought I was believable. Sometimes it was hard not to feel guilty taking money from innocent people, but at the end of the day, Teets needed bison chews and I needed to memorize my lines.

  After some serious thought, I warmed up to the idea of moving in with Hersh. I was an overeducated, unemployed actress, and the only man in my life was neutered. Herschel had a stable job, no sex life to get all over my linens, zero interest in stealing my clothes, and more than a little cash to spend on a killer pad. To top things off, his Jew ’fro sort of looked like a poodle, which made me feel safe. Us joining forces would mean less tutoring, a bigger apartment, and a hairdo that in the right light could pass for a brother figure for Teets.

  Over time, Hershel got used to giving Teets commands in German and I got used to hiding my Canadian bacon in my car. We were like The Odd Couple. He was the pious, left-brained, mathematical genius who taught me how to tip at restaurants and never used a brush, and I was the right-brained artist who only went to temple on high holidays and exposed him to his first painting of a girl being unintentionally fucked in the ass.

  Teets came to know him as “der Uber Juden,” and I simply thought of him as “the Chia pet in the master bedroom.” Then, in early spring, an incident occurred that changed everything.

  * * *

  Amanda was in town for a day, so we decided to take Teets to The Grove, an outdoor mall on the east side of town, for some lunch and passive-aggressive bonding. Teets trotted along beside us as we tore through Forever 21 with the desperation of women over twenty-five.

  Now weighing in at a whopping nine pounds and eleven ounces, Teets was too big to hang around my wrist in a rainbow-colored Louis Vuitton. Also I wasn’t Asian, so I didn’t own a rainbow-colored Louis Vuitton. Instead I put Teets on a leash to ensure we wouldn’t get separated and went to work trying to out-shop my sister.

  The only problem with having a dog is that they often attract kids. I was in the middle of explaining to Amanda that a size 2 at Banana Republic actually means you are a size 6 in the real world when a little British girl jumped out of nowhere and started strangling Teets.

  “Mommy, look at the puppy!”

  Teets looked up at me for help while I answered the typical series of non-dog-person questions. The red-haired four-year-old hung on to her mom’s thigh and stared at me like a demented Chucky doll.

  “He’s two. Yup, a poodle. I know, he has human eyes, right? I kind of consider him a little man in a fur suit! Hahahahaha.” Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Amanda forcing a saleswoman to undress one of the mannequins in the window. Amanda was going to get the last BLONDES HAVE MORE FUN baby-T in the store if I didn’t act fast! Yanking Teets away, I started to walk.

  “What’s coming out of his bum?” The little girl pointed, nonplussed.

  I turned to Teets and saw what looked like a shit-strangled condom drop between his hind legs. He had been trying to pull himself out the door to a nearby pot of ivy but couldn’t because he was tethered to my side.

  “Ewwww!” Amanda screamed across the store like a prepubescent boy in a sex ed class.

  Before the mother could usher her daughter away, a second condom peeked out of Teets’s winking asshole. This one, however, wasn’t going anywhere. Teets was overdue for some manscaping, and his excess hair seemed to somehow tangle itself on the rubber, preventing it from falling. Amanda started to hyperventilate. I picked Teets up and shook him vigorously, but the prophylactic poop was going nowhere. Within seconds, a small crowd of shoppers formed around us like we were those living-statue street performers.

  Seconds later a manager walked over. “Ma’am, we are going to need you to leave Forever 21 forever.”

  “She’s not beating him. This isn’t abuse! There’s something stuck on his fur,” Amanda assured both the manager and the crowd.

  “Whatever it is, we’d like it outside. We’re a Christian company.”

  I ran outside and held Teets over the closest trash can I could find. Amanda followed.

  “Just so you know, everyone at this mall thinks you’re the biggest slut right now.”

  “I don’t even have boyfriend!” I said.

  “Sluts usually don’t.”

  “Just— Will you hand me a receipt or something so I can pull the rest of this out of him?”

  Amanda rummaged through her purse but found nothing. Thinking fast, she ran over to the ivy and uprooted a fistful.

  “How about a leaf?”

  Having no choice, I folded the flaccid vines in half, turning them into makeshift tongs. Still holding him over the garbage can, I then took a deep breath and gingerly extracted the digested latex from my dog’s sphincter.

  Teets looked at me, mortified.

  “Walk along, folks, nothing to see. She’s not throwing him in the trash. Just doing some grooming.” Amanda continued chattering out of nervousness, even though there was no longer a crowd.

  It was the first time in Teets’s life that he’d gotten himself into such a bind that rolling over on his back and flashing his penis couldn’t get him out of. He knew that I knew that he knew better than to eat semen, especially when that semen didn’t belong to anyone I was fucking. But he was his own man. I wasn’t privy to his every move.

  I had no idea where he could have stumbled upon a stomach’s worth of Trojans. Was Teets a drug mule? Did he have AIDS? Why didn’t I have a boyfriend?

  We drove to the vet, where Teets was X-rayed and a final condom was discovered in his intestines. The doctor prescribed some laxatives and told me to call if I didn’t see number three in Teets’s number two later that evening. He assured me that the problem wasn’t behavioral and that Teets wasn’t involved in any sort of underground drug ring.

  “Semen is a salty and delicious snack in most dogs’ eyes,” he said. “He’d do the same thing if he came across a T-bone steak. Just instinct.”

  I was picturing my vet cumming into Teets’s mouth when Amanda nudged me to hurry up. She needed to get home and we had driven in the same car.

  Amanda dropped Teets and me off at our apartment and thanked us for a memorable day. When I walked inside, Hershel was standing in the hallway, holding one of my bathing suits. I was too weak to mention how the perks of living with a man were supposed to include my clothes going untouched. Instead, I said nothing and proceeded toward my room.

  “I was just returning this because Olivia needed something to wear in the hot tub,” he said guiltily.

  In all the years I’d known Hersh, I’d never heard him mention females. I’d started to believe his faith prevented him from engaging with them, like shellfish. Hersh’s awkward demeanor had only two possible explanations: He was either ashamed of being in the hot tub with a woman, or he was that woman. The latter seemed easier to believe.

  “No worries,” I said, making a mental note to tell Hersh he ought to reconsider Olivia as a drag name. He needed something more fitting, more personal. Perhaps Penny Pinscher.

  “She’s still here. Wanna meet her?”

  “Like she’s with us right now?” I looked around the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hersh’s drag spirit guide.

  “Umm. Yeah.” He looked at me perplexed as he walked back into his room.

  I took his leaving the door ajar as a sign for me to follow. As I peered around the corner to the en suite bath that was costing Hersh an additional 150 bucks a month, I saw a woman on all fours. She looked like Hershel but not enough to be his drag alter ego.

  “Someone got into your trash,” she called out, continuing to Windex the floor.

  I knew what had happened and I didn’t like it. Hershel was having sex, and my dog was reaping the rewards. It was like Teets was Augustus from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Hersh
el’s trash can was a chocolate river, only it was actually filled with jizz.

  Hershel tried to introduce me to Olivia, but before he could, I turned to him and unloaded the frustration of a day’s worth of cleaning awkward dumps.

  “Teets has been eating all your used condoms. Is it kosher to swallow? Because I think that would really help all of us if she would.” I extended my hand to Olivia and smiled. “Nice to meet you, by the way. Oh, also you two aren’t cutting a penis hole in any of my good sheets are you?”

  Later that night, Teets hatched Hershel’s final sperm baby and I went through my phone, looking for someone I might be able to reconsider as a boyfriend. Unfortunately, nobody compared to Teets. Regardless of the semen slurping, he was still a total catch with perhaps even stronger nails and better skin than before.

  * * *

  As time went on, Teets did eventually have to share me with other men and the occasional woman. But nobody lasted long until I met my husband.

  When Teets first met Jason, he was cordial. Each time Jason came over, Teets greeted him with a perfunctory tail wag, and whenever Jason got near the bed, a look that said, “Don’t fucking think about it.” Teets never saw himself as stepson material. As good as Jason was at giving butt scratches, Teets still considered him an outsider.

  Nine months later, Jason and I were married and Teets gained not only a dad but also a brother. Jason entered the relationship with a bit of baggage. Which is a nice way of saying, he had an asshole miniature pinscher. Harry was a three-year-old uncivilized dick who controlled Jason almost as much as his mother had. Unlike Teets, Harry demolished shoes, barked at inanimate objects, and took giant shits wherever he thought you might walk barefoot. Because of our vastly different experiences, Jason and I didn’t always see eye to eye on how the boys should be cared for. I believed that Teets should have his own seat at the dinner table and that Harry should be taken out into the backyard and shot.