These were the questions running through my mind as I trudged, with growing despair, to her doorstep. But it was Denise who answered the door.
“Gre-e-e-eg,” she purred, in her cat-voice. “It is so good to see you-u-u-u-u.”
“Right back at you, Denise,” I said.
“Greg, you’re a riot.”
“I’m illegal in twelve states.”
“HA.” This was a huge cackle. Then there was another one. “HA.”
“I have a Surgeon General’s warning tattooed on my butt.”
“STOP IT. STOP. IT. HA-A-A-A.” Why do I never have this effect on the girls I want to impress? Why is it only moms and homely girls? When it’s just them, I can really turn it on. I don’t know what it is.
“Rachel’s upstairs. Can I get you a Diet Coke?”
“No thanks.” I wanted to end with a bang, so I added, “Caffeine just makes me more obnoxious.”
“Hang on.”
This was in a completely different tone of voice. We were back to the old snappish, aggressive Mrs. Kushner. “Greg, who says you’re obnoxious?”
“Oh. Uh, people, you know—”
“Listen. You tell them: They can just shove it.”
“No, yeah. I was just saying that as a—”
“Hey. Nuh-uh. You listening to me? You tell them: They can shove it.”
“They can shove it, yeah.”
“The world needs more guys like you. Not less.”
Now I was getting alarmed. Was there a campaign to get rid of guys like me? Because that campaign would probably start with me.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Rachel’s upstairs.”
I went upstairs.
Rachel’s room had no IV stands or heart-rate monitors like I was expecting. Actually, I had been picturing her room as a hospital room, with like a full-time nurse hanging out in there. Instead, I can sum up Rachel’s bedroom in two words: pillows; posters. Her bed had at least fifteen pillows on it, and the walls were 100 percent posters and magazine cutouts. There was a lot of Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, especially without their shirts. If you were to show me this room and make me guess who lived in it, my answer would be: a fifteen-headed alien who stalks male human celebrities.
But instead of an alien, it was Rachel, standing sort of uncomfortably near the door.
“Rachel-l-l-l,” I said.
“Hello,” she said.
We stood there, motionless. How the hell were we supposed to greet each other? I took a step forward with my arms out, for hugging purposes, but that just made me feel like a zombie. She took a step backward, frightened. At that point I had to go with it.
“I am the Zombie Hug Monster,” I said, lurching forward.
“Greg, I’m afraid of zombies.”
“You should not fear the Zombie Hug Monster. The Zombie Hug Monster does not want to eat your brains.”
“Greg, stop it.”
“OK.”
“What are you doing.”
“Uh, I was going for a fist pound.”
I was going for a fist pound.
“No thanks.”
Just to summarize: I lurched into Rachel’s room like a zombie, freaking her out, then went for a fist pound. It is impossible to be less smooth than Greg S. Gaines.
“I like your room.”
“Thanks.”
“How many pillows is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish I had that many pillows.”
“Why don’t you ask your parents for some?”
“They wouldn’t like that.”
I have no idea why I said that.
“Why not?”
“Uh.”
“They’re pillows.”
“Yeah, they’d be suspicious or something.”
“That you’d sleep all the time?”
“No, uh . . . They’d probably think I was just going to masturbate all over them.”
I would like to point out that I conducted the above conversation 100 percent on autopilot.
Rachel was silent; her mouth was hanging open and her eyes were kind of bugging out.
Eventually, she said: “That is disgusting.” But she was also making snorting noises. I remembered the snort from Hebrew school; it indicated that there were some huge laughs on the way.
“That’s my parents,” I said. “They’re gross.”
“They won’t get you pillows [snort] because they think you’re going to [snort snort], they think you’re going to masturb[SNORTsnortsnortsnort].”
“Yeah, they have really gross ideas about me.”
Now Rachel couldn’t even talk. She had completely lost control. She was laughing and snorting so hard that I was a little worried about her rupturing her spleen or something. Nonetheless, a fun thing to do when Rachel is in the throes of a mega-laugh is to see how long you can keep it going.
• “I mean, it’s also their fault for getting sexy pillows.”
• “We had this one pillow in the house, they had to burn it, because that thing just got me so aroused.”
• “That was the sexiest pillow, I just, I just wanted to make love to it all night, until the break of dawn.”
• “I used to call that pillow the dirtiest names. I used to say, ‘You slutty pillow, you’re such a dirty slut, stop toying with my emotions.’”
• “The pillow’s name was Francesca.”
• “Then one day I came home from school and caught that pillow having oral sex with this table from across the street, and—OK, OK. I’ll stop.”
Rachel was begging me to stop. I shut up and let her calm down. I had forgotten how hard she could laugh. It took her a while to catch her breath.
“Oh—ohhh—ow—oohh.”
The Greg S. Gaines Three-Step Method of Seduction
1. Lurch into girl’s bedroom pretending to be a zombie.
2. Go for a fist pound.
3. Suggest that you habitually masturbate all over pillows.
“Do I have to keep you away from my pillows?” she asked, still having involuntary laugh-snort-spasms.
“No. Are you serious? Those pillows are all dudes.”
Two words: mucus explosion. However, the problem with mega-laughs is that they’re hard to follow up. Sooner or later you’re all laughed out, and there’s this big silence. Then what do you do?
“So I guess you really like films.”
“They’re OK.”
“I mean, you have all these actors all over your room.”
“Huh?”
“Hugh Jackman, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig, Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Craig, Brad Pitt.”
“It’s not really about the movies.”
“Oh.”
She was sitting at her desk and I was sitting on her bed. It was way too soft of a bed. I had sunk into it to an uncomfortable degree.
“I like movies,” said Rachel, sort of apologetically. “But a movie doesn’t have to be good if it has Hugh Jackman.”
Fortunately and unfortunately, at that moment I got a text from Earl.
yo pa gaines drove me to whole foods so if you need some funky vlasic pickle relish for that pussy just hollerrr
This was fortunate because it changed the subject from movies, and it was going to be difficult to discuss movies with Rachel without mentioning my filmmaking career, which for obvious reasons I did not want to mention. But it was unfortunate in that it made me do a sort of snarfing laugh and then Rachel wanted to know what had happened.
“Who was that from?”
“Uh, that was from Earl.”
“Oh.”
“You know Earl? Earl Jackson, from high school?”
“I don’t think so.”
How the hell was I even supposed to introduce Earl.
“Uh, Earl and I send each other disgusting texts sometimes.”
“Oh.”
“That’s basically our entire friendship.”
“What does that one say?”
I considered sharing it with her. Then I decided that that would bring about the apocalypse.
“I can’t show it to you. It is way too disgusting.”
This was a tactical error, because a more annoying girl might have said, “Greg, now you have to show it to me,” and let’s face it: Most girls are annoying. I mean, most humans are annoying, so it’s not specific to girls. Also, I don’t really mean “annoying.” I guess I mean that most humans like to try to fuck up your plans.