I Can Barely Take Care of Myself, Jen Kirkman [the false prince txt] 📗

I was still under the impression that she was going to pick up that red phone as soon as she was done getting high with a bunch of twenty-one-year-olds, to let Hollywood know that I was no longer hiding. I held out hope that something would save me from my credit card debt. I’d just added another couple of hundred bucks to my MasterCard to have that queen at the chichi salon shave my head.

I’D PASSED MY college years spending money on important things like tapestries for my bedroom walls and cigarettes for my lungs and now it was time to tighten my belt buckle—or at least to get a belt. The good thing about moving back home with my parents was that they weren’t the type to try to teach me a lesson by charging me rent. They probably had more fun just silently judging me.

My original life plan had been to graduate and then move in with my boyfriend, Jamie. The only problem with that was that Jamie had dumped me a few months before graduation. (That also could have been a catalyst for the haircut, now that I think about it.) Jamie lived with his friends Adam and John, in the closet of Adam’s bedroom. We’d lay in his single bed, watching his shirts hang above our heads, listening to Adam snore through the closet door and making plans for the day when Adam would move out and Jamie and I could take his room. When we weren’t fumbling to get each other’s pants off on a thin mattress on the floor of his closet, we were in the same college sketch comedy troupe called This Is Pathetic, which actually would have been a great label for our relationship.

Jamie and I were opposites. The only thing we had in common was our comedy troupe. Jamie was a beer-drinking, sports-loving fraternity guy. When I wanted to go see the Ramones play at a rock club in Boston on Valentine’s Day, that was the beginning of our end. He didn’t like the same music I did, yet he didn’t want me running around to concerts by myself on such a Hallmark holiday. He said it “embarrassed him” that his woman attended a show alone. I never got the chance to ask him before he died, but I don’t think Joey Ramone gave a shit that I went unaccompanied to see his band play.

Jamie always told me that I reminded him of his best friend from high school, Paula, for whom he’d always had unresolved feelings. He and I would take long, romantic walks through the Boston Common and he’d just stop and smile at me. He had a fantastic smile. He was like a shorter, greasier-faced Robert Downey Jr. I’d say, “Yes, Jamie?” waiting to hear him profess his love for me. And he’d say, “Sorry, you’re just so . . . Paula right now,” and then hug me tightly. I was too young to realize that if your boyfriend has feelings for his unrequited high school love and high school was only four years prior, you’re not just a pleasant reminder of his youth; you’re a Second-Place Paula.

Jamie dumped me after running into Paula when he went home for a weekend to visit his mother. He said they fell in love that weekend and it just “happened.” As I type this I realize that he probably didn’t “run into her” but had been talking to her all along, and his visit with his mother was really just his planned rendezvous with Paula. Oh my God, I was so stupid back then. But at least today I don’t have lopsided boobs after two kids, like Paula does. Oh, and she didn’t end up with Jamie. He was just a detour on her way to marrying a different guy from high school.

I’d just assumed that Jamie and I would be together all summer and our love would be my backup plan in case the getting-famous thing didn’t happen right after graduation. I definitely didn’t want to have kids with him—we were both professionally undiagnosed but in my opinion clinically depressed. Any offspring of ours would probably fight to stay in my womb because it would be too despondent and tormented to want to be born. I didn’t necessarily want to get married to Jamie either; I just wanted to continue to be distracted by him. When he broke my heart, it felt like he stole my future or, alternatively, was making me face it. I was devastated and unable to get out of bed, like a mom, somewhat ironically, with an unfortunate case of postpartum depression.

I swore I would never love again until a few weeks later, when I went to a party and met a junior at Emerson named Blake. I know his name makes him sound like a rich kid from Pretty in Pink but he was actually the son of a single mom from a working-class town in Massachusetts, which is way more hot—it’s like getting the dude from a John Cougar Mellencamp song who’s going to make out with you in the back of his truck.

Blake was an actor (still is) and a damn good one. He was skinny and small with a slight underbite and watery blue eyes, and he dressed like he was wearing someone’s hand-me-downs from the Partridge Family. One of my friends once told me that she thought that he looked like a mouse, but when Blake was onstage—he was a man. He touched off something in my DNA that craves and lusts after very skinny guys in bell-bottoms with 1970s-inspired shaggy haircuts. It probably has something to do with all of those full-color booklets inside the Led Zeppelin albums that my sister had in our bedroom. I love outgoing and gregarious men who want as much attention as I do. I’ve always had a thing for guys who make a living doing something in public (with the exception of someone who hands out sandwich