Читать книгу Unqualified - Anna Faris, Anna Faris - Страница 10

Ich Liebe Dich

Chad Burke was my first boyfriend. He was a junior, I was a senior and, as far as I was concerned, he was the hottest guy in our high school. So I couldn’t believe it the night we kissed at a Stone Temple Pilots concert. Chad was incredibly angry—this is the guy who snuck out at night to write Rage Against the Machine lyrics on telephone poles—which turned out to be a theme in my life. I spent a long time feeling drawn to angry men.

Chad worshipped Steven Seagal. He looked like a high school version of the action star, with the low ponytail and everything. It was 1993, back when that was sexy. (Was it, though? Or was that just me?)

Chad was popular because he was good-looking, but not in the way well-liked people are popular. He would never have been elected the captain of a team or voted Most Likely to Succeed or anything like that. He was a cynical, bitter teenager, but looks can get you far in high school.

He was smart, too—although, can we talk for a minute about how fucked-up our societal intelligence scale is? Why do we gauge smarts the way we do? I say this out of pride, because I took an intelligence test in high school that scored students on a level of 1 to 5 and I got a 2. The teacher told me my score and suggested that I should become a secretary and I was so pissed off. Not because secretaries are dumb—I’m sure most secretaries are plenty smarter than a 2 out of 5—but because being told what I “should” or “could” do, as if I was too stupid for anything else, was infuriating.

Similarly, I scored a 1060 out of 1600 on the SATs and I remember this guy in my grade asking me what I got, and after I told him he said, “Oh my God, I thought you were so much smarter than that.”

“I know,” I said. “I thought I was, too!”

Thank God I had parents who believed in me, because I really took that secretary thing to heart, and if I didn’t have a family who constantly encouraged me I certainly wouldn’t have the confidence to write this book that I’m totally unqualified to be writing.

But anyway, by conventional standards, Chad was smart.

One September evening in 1993 a group of seven or eight of us went to a Stone Temple Pilots concert. It was exhilarating to be out with the cool kids. I was not in the popular crowd in high school, and while I mostly tried to stay under the radar, I found myself on the receiving end of mean girls or general mocking a decent amount. Being a theater kid wasn’t looked highly upon in Edmonds. So for the concert, I told my mom I was staying the night at my friend Stephanie’s, and instead I went to the concert with classmates I didn’t usually hang out with. So there I was with this hot dude making advances on me, and it was a whirlwind of not just physical but mental intoxication. All I could think was, This is the best night … Of. My. Life. Chad and I made out, and despite the fact that we were completely stoned and smashed in a sea of sweaty fans and standing in front of our classmates—or maybe because of that—I thought it was completely magical. A couple of days later, when Chad asked me to be his girlfriend, I was overjoyed. He snuck over to my house in the middle of the night and put a big banner in my window that read ICH LIEBE DICH. That’s “I love you” in German. He was a big German studies fan.

Chad and I got very passionate very quickly. We would look into each other’s eyes and say that we would die without each other. One day my mom looked at me and said, “Anna, I’ve never seen you this happy before.” I hadn’t told my parents about Chad because I was too embarrassed. It was incredibly important to my mom that I wasn’t boy obsessed, which was a hard standard to live up to as a teenager. And, of course, I was boy crazy, but instead of just embracing that as a normal phase of my teen years, I was ashamed. I thought I shouldn’t feel the way I did, so I never told her anything about boys—not Jason Sprott’s ice milk or Jason Berry’s sodas or anything.

But once my mom noticed that something was different, I admitted that I was dating someone, and that I really liked him. I showed her Chad’s picture, and I remember her saying, “Oh, he’s so handsome.” It was gratifying to hear her say that, but I also thought, Mom, you could not have said anything worse because now I am diving in headfirst. If you are going to approve of this, I am so in.

I was crazy for Chad. He was just so hot and angry, which were my only two requirements in a man back then, and I was in such disbelief that anyone so good-looking would like me that I would have done anything for him. If he had said, “I really, really, really want to have a threesome,” I probably would have been like, “Great! With who? Where? The parking lot? Awesome!” He was the guy I lost my virginity to (more on that later) and my first love. It was that heady rush of young love that has no basis in logic at all. I really thought we were going to get married—he gave me a promise ring!—so when he decided to graduate a year early and enroll at the University of Washington, I followed him there.

Two weeks before college, Chad asked if I would mind if he joined a frat. I told him I didn’t mind at all, even though I had no plans to be a part of the Greek system. The week that college started, I didn’t hear anything from him for three days, even after repeated pages. (Yes, pages. Again, 1994.) So eventually I stalked him. (Yes, stalked.) I knew where all his classes were—and this was a huge school, like forty-five thousand undergrads—so I conveniently found myself outside one of the buildings at just the right time and “bumped” into Chad. He saw me and said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you I want to see other people.”

It was a blow. I must have known on some level—he hadn’t communicated with me in a few days, which was a pretty strong indicator that something was off—but I was still devastated. So I did what any self-respecting reluctant ex-girlfriend would do, and continued to stalk him. Maybe it was more like borderline stalking. I showed up at his fraternity, and his frat brothers would say, “Chad’s not here,” and I’d gasp out between drunken sobs, “Why … isn’t … he … here? Where … is … he?” Then they’d escort me back to my dorm and it was all very pathetic and dramatic in that way that only happens during college.

Four months later, in January, Chad moved into a probably illegal apartment next to a Korean restaurant, which smelled like kimchi had permeated the wallpaper. Soon after that, he called me in my dorm and told me he wanted me back. I did not pass go and ran directly into his waiting arms.

Within the week, I realized I’d lost all sense of myself for this douchebag of a person. But instead of being courageous that very day, I went home and wrote in my calendar that on March 14, I would break up with him. For whatever reason, that was the day I chose—two months away.

I stuck it out for those two months, even though everything about Chad drove me crazy by then. I would stare at his long, delicate, artistic fingers and feel a tug of annoyance. His pride at wearing Tevas, as though he were a river-rafting guide, made me cringe. So did his ponytail, and his cackling laugh, which was usually directed at someone less fortunate than he. One time he told me, after pointing out a Darwin fish sticker on the back of a car, that he “could have invented that.” The worst grievance of all was his surprise at my decent acting skills in the idiotic Steven Seagal fan videos he made with his friends. But mostly, I was horrified by those fingers. Sometimes I worry that if I get dementia like my grandma (who, by the end of her life, talked exclusively about how her brother burned down the family farm when she was nine) I’ll spend my life ranting about Chad’s fingers. In that case, I like to think my family could make a solid case to the state for assisted suicide.

It turned out I needed those two months to realize that I hated more than what I liked about Chad, and to muster the confidence to put my first real relationship behind me. I needed to digest all of it before I really broke it off.

On March 14, I woke up and thought, This is the day I have to have some pride. I marched over to Chad’s place and said, “I’m leaving you,” and he didn’t say anything. He just walked to his fridge, pounded a beer, threw it at a wall, and said, “You’re going to be back here in a week.” At that point, I knew that even if I did want to be back there in a week, which I kind of did, I couldn’t ever return.

So that was the end of Chad Burke. Almost.

Ten years later, right before I married my ex-husband, I tracked Chad down—which was probably a sign that I shouldn’t have been getting married in the first place. I called his mom, and when she picked up I was just like, “Hey, Mrs. Burke! You might not remember me but this is Anna … ,” and she immediately said, “Oh, hi! I’ve been following your career. It’s so great.” The way she spoke to me, and her lack of surprise at hearing my voice, it was as if we’d chatted two days earlier. It was so strange. I told her I’d love to catch up with Chad and gave her my number. At the time I was in New Orleans shooting the movie Waiting … , and the next night, Chad called. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d reached out to his mother—enough time for me to come to my senses. My phone rang and all I could think was, Oh fuck, what am I doing? Why am I reaching out to my ex when I’m about to get married? I didn’t pick up.

He called three more times. I had started this, I realized, so the polite thing to do was at least talk to him. We ended up on the phone for six hours. He lived in San Francisco, and he told me the most grotesque story about going to China and marrying a woman who was in love with someone else and how her family hired him a prostitute. I laughed so hard, and remember thinking, Okay, I made the right choice.

In the end, that wasn’t entirely the case, and that marriage ended in divorce. But the Chad Burke call was another in-stance of me reading a lot into the idea of closure. Chad was my first love, and we all romanticize our first loves. Especially as a teenager, when the emotions flood into your brain in a way that doesn’t happen in your thirties. I do wonder, though, why we are always so tempted to revisit that first relationship. In the very best- case scenario we have someone begging for us back. “Oh my God, you’re the one that got away,” they might say. “I can’t believe I fucked it up. Is there anything I can do to get you back?” But the reality is that that’s not going to happen. And do you really want someone to say that anyway?

To be fair, hearing that the guy who treated you like crap might want you back, and realizing that you’re over it—that you don’t need them, and certainly don’t want them, and are actually too good for them—would definitely feel empowering.

So, yeah. That would be kind of great.