Sacred Misfits

My Better Half

29 My Better Half k People who see me must think I’m eccentric, emotionally disturbed, or lonely. People who speak with me have told me that I’m an obnoxious , good for nothing bastard, a nasty prick, but I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. I don’t even care who reads this damned notebook. My name, Andrew Tremper, is right there on the cover for all to see. It all started about nine years ago. I was shacking up with this girl who was what they call a “modern dancer.” We lasted a little under a year together. Her name was Miriam and she went to some artsy fartsy college up in New England to study THE DANCE. When she returned to New York she joined a dance company called Dervishing Divas. I met her at a performance on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I was confused. I’m an educated man and I know what a dervish is—it’s spinning around, out of control. But the Divas didn’t spin. Hell, they barely moved. For over an hour all they did was lift a leg or move an arm or twitch their head every few minutes while electronic music slammed into our ears and pulsing lights irritated our eyes. The Dervishing Divas sucked, but Miriam looked awfully good in her low-cut leotard and I could see that she had the rounded buttocks of a thoroughbred horse. I don’t even remember how I got to a Dervishing Diva performance or where I heard about them, except that back then I used to make the rounds of a lot of inexpensive arts events because there were always lots of women and I was posturing as an arts enthusiast, a good-looking, well-built, arts enthusiast. Hell, I remember the night I nailed Miriam. I had to put up with hours of her artspeak about how the Divas don’t dance, they manipulate movement and shit like that. Well, let me tell you, she moved like a worm with a match under it later that night and a lot of nights that followed. Mark Blickley 30 When she finally skipped out on me, the bitch left me a going away present—a life-sized cardboard cutout of myself. On a note pinned to its crotch she said she had it made because talking to the cutout was the only time she could have an adult conversation with me, expose her feelings, without being ridiculed, cut-off, or ignored. The note said a helluva lot more than that, it was a freakin’ manifesto, but you get the idea. It was a real artsy exit, don’t you think, and probably the highlight of her creative career. I mean, just imagine all the thinking, planning, and execution involved in trying to make me feel like a complete shit. I was going to throw the damn thing out, but I grew sort of attached to it. She did pick a pretty decent photo of me to enlarge in cardboard, although I’ve always thought of myself as somewhat taller than I am. Standing back-to-back with the cutout proves we’re both the exact same height, five feet ten and three quarters of an inch. That sonofabitch dancer nailed me down to three quarters of an inch. In her manifesto, she predicted I’d keep the life size cutout because I was so in love with myself. Miriam was wrong. I kept it to show the other broads I bang the monument of obsessive love given to me by a former member of the Dervishing Divas. The girls I take up to my apartment all seem to be impressed, so I guess Miriam’s cruelty backfired on her. How’s that saying go about a last laugh? I kept the cardboard cutout of myself inside my apartment for about three or four years. It made its world debut at a stupid party thrown by a woman I was involved with who lived in Hoboken. The point of the party was that no one could speak. Everybody had to write these responses, keep them in their pockets, and then show them to other guests when communication was desired. We were kind of like idiotic mimes without makeup. I feel like an ass even admitting that I’ve attended parties like that, but hey, in a times of AIDS, artsy babes are the most liberal and liberated, so I...