The Moose in the Closet: Junior Summer: Stutter Stepping

Elk’s Run #4 is in stores and Josh has a nice sell for issue 6 (contains cartoon nudity).

This is going to be a quick Holiday Wishes – I’m tired. I stumbled across Perry Bible Fellowship earlier this year; someone was posting cartoons on a message board. I spent a couple of hours catching up on the strips and have read it religiously since. It’s the only webcomic I read right now, the humor is reminiscent of Far Side but sometimes a bit smarter, sometimes more on-the-nose. Either way it makes me laugh every Sunday and for that I’m sending Holiday Cheer over towards Nicholas Gurewitch – in a time when the funny pages are crammed with the standards and suffocating on their own lack of creativity it’s nice to know there are people like you creating strips that matter.

______________

Robin and I – we had problems.

First time she met my friends was a bit awkward. I don’t know what it was – you know when you get together with a bunch of people and they sense the outsider –the jokes aren’t as funny and the chemistry is thrown off. That’s sort of what it was like – Robin just felt like an outsider and the night didn’t go that well – it was just slow and uncomfortable and filled with recaps of events that were apparently only funny to us. It was no-ones fault; really, there just wasn’t a lot of jive.

It was because of our majors.

Me – biomedical. Robin – communications. In BU, that’s the equivalent of Tom Cruise dating a giraffe – it just doesn’t fit. And my friends called me on it when I first told them about Robin – they didn’t understand why I was dating a Com major and not a Physical Therapy major like we were supposed to date. I think she was at a disadvantage from the start and no-one gave her the benefit of the doubt.

But we persevered. My RA friends liked her and I liked them better so, whatever – friends come and go in college.

Then there was the fact that she’s racist.

Not against black people, no. Nor Asians. No, no. Robin hates Puerto Ricans, apparently. When I first realized this I thought she was joking – she kept telling me she wasn’t, she honestly does not like Puerto Ricans. They always try to hit on her, apparently, and molest her in clubs. Five minutes into this I cut her off and tell her, “You know I’m Puerto Rican, right?”

“But…but you’re white.”

“Rodriguez.”

“Yeah…but…”

“Puerto Rican.”

You know she was honestly upset. She thought I was from Spain. She said the Puerto Ricans won. That we tricked her into dating one of them. And I joke about it, even to my family – she does to – but the fact is to this day Robin just doesn’t like Puerto Ricans. It’s kind of cute, really – in a close-minded way.

Great story. One day over that summer we were going out to meet some people for drinks. I needed to take a shower but we were running late so Robin tells me, “Just take a Puerto Rican shower.” I asked her what the hell is that and she told me to put some deodorant on and spray cologne on myself.

“Oh – you mean a Dominican shower?” I asked her.

We laughed and wondered what Dominicans called it. We both agreed upon “Haitian Shower”. So, the loathing for Dominicans my family raised me to have makes it impossible for me to get mad about Robin’s Puerto Rican thing – and she can’t be too serious, anyway,

But, we persevered.

We didn’t connect too well intimately at first, either. My fault, really – I never connect well at the beginning. What goes on in my head as opposed to what actually goes on is usually two completely different things and it throws me off my game a bit. I’ve definitely discovered I’m more of a one-night man in that arena, no expectations and lower inhibitions makes me one hell of a lover.

But, we persevered.

I wish I could say we persevered because of some deep connection we had. Like maybe both of our parents were killed in the same plane crash and the two surviving children managed to find each other years later. But, no, fact of the matter is she had an air conditioner in her apartment that summer and I didn’t – you’d put up with almost anything for that.

I stayed at her house every night, her roommate didn’t seem to care so neither did I. One morning, though, I wake up to find Robin’s not in bed. I go out to the living room and she’s eating cereal in flannel pajamas, playing Genesis.

I think that’s when I fell in love.

Labels: mitc

Junior Summer: Stutter Stepping

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

0 Comments

Previous Posts