Kiss Off or Kill
by Sylvia Math
One of the mysteries of life is that you could live with a really smart guy for a year and learn nothing, but date a dimwit for a month or so and have several Revelations. This story is about a sexy dimwit.
In his defense, he thought I was a crazy bitch. But because he was a dimwit, I figured out he was a dimwit long before he got it that I was a crazy bitch. And to be fair to both of us, these things are relative. One woman’s sexy dimwit is another woman’s smart guy, and one man’s crazy bitch is another man’s not-so-crazy-un-bitch. But this is what we were for each other. I’m not going to explain why he was a dimwit, it’s boring and you’ll have to take my word for it. But I will elucidate a bit why he thought I was a crazy bitch.
We were in our early 20s. He was good-looking and worked in a recording studio South of Market (a neighborhood in San Francisco). I went out with him because I was bored. In spite of the fact that he was an amusing distraction, and very good-looking, I was pretty much never interested in having sex with him. The fact that I thought he was dumb left me carnally cold.
The first revelation was how good anything sounds if it is played on the equipment in a recording studio. He liked lots and lots of music; I was much pickier. So when he thought I had unfairly dismissed something, he would drive me to the recording studio and play albums on the sound system. We went there frequently, late at night when no one else was there. I didn’t change any of my opinions about any music. But I did completely understand after that how musicians could think their album was great even though it sucked: the equipment and acoustics in recording studios do that to you. I pretty much hate Pink Floyd for example, but I could happily listen to their entire oeuvre in a recording studio. I could probably listen to Britney Spears in a recording studio and be wowed. Really good audio equipment is phenomenally tricky. Big death star machine banks of pure aural trickiness. I didn’t change my mind about anything but I didn’t object to listening to whatever in the studio, marveling at the alchemy, how good machinery magically transformed sonic garbage to sonic gold.
The second revelation was how sexy my man looked scoring drugs. He bought weed in Dolores Park. I tried to dissuade him. Even though I hate weed, I always know where to get it. One simply does not score one’s weed in Dolores park, I tried to tell him. It is not done. He refused to listen to me or make use of any of my very excellent drug connections. I told him my dad had been a weed dealer, and still smoked. I told him that I lived in cool house in college, that cool house was labeled a “drug den” in the sf chronicle. I told him there was graffiti on campus “where do you score drugs in this town” and all the responders wrote “cool house cool house cool house.” I told him the whole Mission was now populated with cool house alumni friends, and we could score weed in about ten minutes, really good weed too. I told him if there was one thing in life I really knew for sure, it was where & how to get good weed.
He had intensely stupid masculine resistance to letting me be the one with superior drug connections. He set his jaw. He was going to Dolores park to his guy and he didn’t want to argue. I stayed in the car, and watched intently at Dolores park, watched him stride towards the mid park bathrooms. I was thinking of how my dad would make fun of me if dimwit got busted buying weed from a narc-in-the-park, and I had to call him for help getting dimwit out of jail and then a plea to a diversion program. “You let him score weed. In Dolores park. Ahahahaha…” Adrenaline sharpened my senses; I braced myself for a bad scene, having to deal with cops.
Sexy dimwit was dressed all in black, with sunglasses. About 6 feet. Leather jacket, heavy boots. He had his own style; neither grunge nor punk, but some of both, and a little pulp fiction. A soupçon of Tarantino pretension that worked if overlaid by enough punk et grunge, in those days. He had a good stride; the boy could stride. And then he utterly astonished me. He was no rube, and maybe not as dumb as he looked. About this one thing anyway. He executed the most perfect drug money handoff I’ve ever seen in film or reality. It was a thing of beauty and grace. The drug deal equivalent of an Olympic skater triple axel. He was super sly and elegant. He did the deal in one smooth gesture like he invented drug dealing maneuvers and everyone else was an amateur copycat. This aroused me. When he returned, I was all over him in the front seat, grabbed the keys out of his hand and hid them in my bra right away. Men in their early 20s pretty much want to do it anywhere, anytime. And I never wanted to do it. With him anyway. So he acted like it was his birthday and I was naked & jumping out of a cake with a six pack of really good beer. “You wanna do it in the car?” Now? He was more than happy to oblige. He enjoyed my heated sudden interest. The first time.
The second time, he started to suspect that I was his idea of a crazy bitch. In fact, he accused me of as much. He thought it was perverted that the only times I wanted to have sex with him were in the car, right after he scored drugs. (He was most amorous late at night at the recording studio, trying to convince me to like an album I was never ever going to like. In spite of the intriguing setting, I barely made out with him in there no matter how seductive or insistent he ever was. I could see that he probably thought about sex a lot when he was at work. Men think about sex every 20 seconds or something? And he was there all the time. Of course he wanted to realize his daydreams in the locale where they were set. I saw that I was frustrating to him, and did not care. Not enough to have unwanted sex. I was unapologetic about both being attracted to him when he was buying drugs and completely uninterested in the studio. Nothing is sexier than when someone does something they are really good at, and he was really good at buying drugs. Whereas he was really bad at convincing me to like albums I didn’t like.
The third and final revelation was about spiders, but not really. There was a spider in my apartment. I screamed. Kill it! He got a mason jar from my dish rack and very carefully scooped up the spider and took it outside. This pissed me off. I said kill it, not put it outside where it can come right back in. This was no fluttery adorable daddy long legs. It was a big honking fully mature brown recluse, fat with venom. I followed him outside. When he gently released the spider onto the porch, which took some time & coaxing, I stepped on it. Hard. There was a long pause, where I could tell he wanted to strangle me. His vision of me still, with purplish blue lips was so vivid I could see it too. I thought of how funny it would be if he did. Man So Committed to Nonviolence Will not Kill Spider Murders Girlfriend for Killing Spider He Tried to Save. I laughed at my own unspoken thought. I really wanted to fuck him right then too. He was as good at embodying suppressed murderous fury as he was at scoring drugs. he went inside, got his leather jacket and his cars keys and left. For good. Without saying goodbye. It wasn’t a relationship that was going to last more than a month anyway and I wasn’t attached to him. But getting over the violent tumult of his departure —in a vicious aura of one-millimeter-from-murder—took the rest of the day. I made a note that murderous rage and “ethically committed nonviolence” are not at all incompatible. They are no doubt not just connected, but twins sometimes. Anyone very invested in not killing might have struggled mightily to arrive at that position. Because they have struggled mightily not to kill, are more than capable of it. Watch out.
Sylvia Math lives in NYC and has work in X-Ray, Hobart, Burial Mag, dontsubmit, coming soon in Scaffold. She’s editing her memoir Looks Bad on Paper, & writing a novel called Future Murder Victim.