A Virtuosic Piece of
Poo
Untangled: Her Side
By: Tommy
Don't ask me where this short thing came from. I'm not sure I have an answer for you. I started it with no one in mind, unsure of the voice, and then Britney's voice came out of my stereo on my pop mix CD...and it made sense. This should be a Britney thing.
Truly ambiguous like my writing professor always hoped I would be one day. Whatever.
Britney. Trying to figure things out. Love sucks, but that's love, ain't it?
My first kiss was with a wall I named Jake.
It wasn't my best kiss, but sadly it wasn't my worst. Jake's makeshift lips were rough and I ended up with pink paint chips on my tongue, but Jake definitely provided me with plenty of practice in the technique department, one-sided participation does that to a person.
Of course, I don't tell the world that. For their ears, I memorized a press release, "My first kiss was with Justin."
It wasn't a complete lie either. If you considered the expectation of a peck on the cheek, turning your head to receive it, having your cheek slobbered on with someone's tongue, and then watching him run off with the other guys from your show a kiss, then by all means, Justin filled that requirement. Justin robbed me of my moment. Justin stole the label, "Brit's first kiss" and I learned nothing and there were no flashes of forever and the earth below me didn't move, unless I count his feet scampering as far away from me as possible.
It was the first time I was called easy in my life. Britney, you whore, you kissing Lolita.
First times were great.
Jake didn't kiss and tell. I had full control and I imagined that Brad Pitt had come to sweep me off my feet. Forget Gwen, I whispered to Jake who remained silent and wooden. Forget Gwen, she's nothing, and I'm Britney Spears. It didn't mean anything at the time, but surely it would one day, one day when I was bigger than Gwen and had my own perfect boyfriend that the world envied and People--well Teen People--called sexy.
I was thirteen, a late bloomer according to my friends with no hope of someone to kiss, and I had walked in on my brother and his girlfriend in the middle of a full-throttled high school passion play complete with her hands in the back pockets of his overly-baggy jeans and his one finger pirouetting the bangle-sized hoops dangling from her earlobes over and over. I had stood there and watched the way their lips met, their noses barely grazing each other, their bodies so close...
"Get outta here, Brit! Are you some sorta pervert?" my brother had yelled at me when his girlfriend came untangled from him.
Untangled.
I didn't have to untangle myself from Jake. That was the great thing about a wall. It was like a guy. You found yourself doing all the work, but baby, you expected it from a wall.
My friend, Mikey, said kissing a girl was like sucking on a lifesaver. There was only so long you could allow the taste to linger on your tongue before you tried to take a juicy bite out of her. My friend, Mikey, didn't have many girlfriends, but made a big deal out of the fact that he was the first of us to be kissed, like he tackled some mountain that the rest of us had yet to, like he achieved adulthood while the rest of us were wallowing in the odor of cheap adolescence.
I've sometimes wondered what happened to Mikey.
I haven't talked to him since I became masturbation material for half the world. I haven't thought about him since I became me--the dichotomy of cute girl chasing butterflies and sinful sex kitten. I haven't dialed his number from memory since the day my knees buckled under the weight of full-fledged lust and I surpassed his geek stature and extensive porno collection.
I don't even remember how it happened.
There was a bottle of Jack Daniels to induce the desire and Madonna's remake of "Fever" blasting from a stereo to create the ambiance. I was somewhere; I was in one of those states in the middle. Holiday Inn, Best Western, or maybe a HoJo's. Still haven't figured it out. They all had the same tatty aroma, curtains, and matching comforter sets that scratched your skin.
First day Cleveland, next day St. Louis, followed by blah, blah, blah. It was somewhere like Nebraska or Kansas where kids had sex at fourteen because they were bored and didn't have cable. The boys didn't really like the girls and most of the girls downright loathed the boys, but it was Kansas and they found themselves lying down in the back of a red truck with Dukes of Hazard paint on either side of them while the moon shone down on the cornfields that went for miles and miles.
There was no tornado to take them to Emerald City.
There was boy on top of girl, girl with a bored glint in her eye, thinking, "Is this all there is?" Ten minutes of unending grunting from a boy who coulda, woulda, shoulda been her soulmate, but wasn't. Just some boy, some cute boy that people picked out for her between laughs, that she chose absentmindedly along with her Coke or Pepsi.
Justin always thought he was the first.
I learned a long time ago that honesty wasn't always the best policy with Justin. He needed to believe that he was my first, that he was my Lancelot riding in to rescue me from my burdensome virginity. It didn't matter that I was his twenty-third or fifty-first, one of those numbers that he bragged about over beers with his buddies when he thought I wasn't listening. And he never acknowledged the almost mechanical moves he brought to our relationship, maneuvers he used to lure other girls, girls not me, into his bedroom.
Our hands intertwined and his breathing fell in tempo with mine, a harmonization of excellence like I was Snow White and he was Prince Charming saving me from the wicked world and showing me his amazing lands with sweet kisses and strokes of flesh.
Justin smiled over at me and I couldn't help thinking that if only I smoked things would be much less awkward. Light up and allow the smoke to engulf the high emotions and lack of proper words in the dictionary to describe it.
"Britney, I didn't hurt you, did I?" he asked as he let go of my hand and lifted the sheets to cover him.
I smiled. I couldn't say that it didn't hurt because he wasn't the first and I doubted he would be the last. I couldn't describe the hopes that with him it would be different than the other boys, that being in his house with rose petals, candles, and Luther Vandros emanating from his sound system was like a fairytale and what I always dreamed of, except that it wasn't. It was still sticky not sweet. Not the ultimate. He was no different than the other boys, and I nothing but a carbon copy of those fifty-some girls in his bed before me.
"You were great sweetheart," he said, as if I could be anything else, as if it were possible.
Again, I smiled and rolled over on my side, snuggling in closer to him and drawing patterns on his stomach with my fingers. My fingers glided, randomly playing with drops of sweat before undertaking a more daunting movement--our initials and a heart, like I was twelve and crushing on him like so many other girls, a time before I discovered that sometimes a wall was all a girl needed.
And he smiled back and took my hand. He gently rubbed it between his fingers and lifted it to his lips. He smiled, the perfect smile, the toothy, ear-to-ear grin that lit up the room and sometimes, usually a rainy Sunday morning, my heart. "I'm glad I was your first."
"Yeah," I said because I couldn't take that away from him. Because while he often acted recklessly with my heart and left it broken time after time, I didn't want to do that to him. I wanted to love him, like he was made for my arms and heart, like he was mine.
He loved me. I was the lucky one because he loved me.
Sometimes being the lucky one was like being dealt a bad hand in poker. There was only so long that you could bluff the house outta a few bucks, before they caught on, before they called you on it, before you were branded a loser, the unlucky bastard with the bad hand.
Justin told me I thought about things too much. "You put too much damn emphasis on the meaning behind everything, B. Sometimes it is what it is."
And sometimes it wasn't what it appeared.
I wore the clothes. I walked the walk. I drank the drinks that some forty-year-old lawyer bought for me while he hid his wedding ring in his pocket and the picture of his kids in his wallet. I danced with the boys who approached me on the dance floor, one hand on the small of my back and the other pressing into my ass like I was their personal plaything. I moved my lips to the music, even when I wasn't feeling the words, and allowed myself to be ogled by a few and hated by many. I smiled for the cameras and clutched Justin's hand like I was expected to. Because telling people about Jake seemed crazy, because I convinced myself that Justin was my first, and because I was the lucky one.
"If this is what it takes to prove I'm serious about you, then fucking do it!" he said enraged as I had never seen him before. This quiet, sullen boy had inhabited my enigmatic boyfriend's body and was spitting nails at me at warped speeds.
I hesitated, "I don't know."
"Sweetheart, I love you. If you think telling the world will make it more believable then just say so. I'll do it. I'll do whatever you want me to do."
"It's not that simple, babe."
"It is. This is you and me, B. That's all that matters to me. What do you want?"
And that was the question drilling at my skull and churning bile in my throat. What did I want...I wanted the perfect boy, the boy that made everything fall away, and I longed for that boy to be Justin--to have private jokes and secret looks of lust and want, rather than the typical dog brushing up against my leg because he needed a quick fuck before he went out with the boys. I wanted to hear an operatic masterpiece and suddenly remember perfect poems about passion and desire. I wanted not to be an artist because I doubted that a banker or mortician thought about love as a possibility for perfection-living art--but rather a practicality. I wanted peace of mind.
I wanted peace of mind, so I lied.
"I want you. I want you more than anything, babe," I replied because everything else seemed too small, too intangible, and lying to him and lying to myself was simpler somehow.
He kissed me, better than I ever imagined, more wistful and loving than I thought Justin had in him, and I knew he meant it and that I had long ago surpassed those notches on his belt. He wanted me. I was his perfect girl, the soulmate, the uber crush and I would learn to want him that way. He wouldn't be the spurious body in my bed at night. He would have my heart and soul.
We drank wine, screaming to the world that we were adults and knew what we were doing, even though twenty wasn't an adult and no one knew what they were doing. And I quoted Sylvia Plath, "I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed...and sung me moonstruck, kissed me quite insane"
Untangled no more.
We were the antithesis of untangled. We were interweaved in one another. Our bodies, our careers, our dreams, sometimes our hearts...but never our minds.
"There are days when I don't get you at all, B, like you're a stranger, some freak that walked up to me on the streets and took my life hostage," he said in agitation, bouncing his basketball against the wall of our bedroom door at the MGM Grand. He couldn't go out. I couldn't go out. We couldn't go out together without disguises.
I liked the idea of the disguises, a momentary lapse into someone else's life. I could be anyone and the world was my oyster and there were no patronizing smiles from girls who wanted my boyfriend and salacious stares from boys who could be much better than he was. The thought of getting lost for a few hours in a crowd of thousands elated me.
I could dress up like Kate Jackson when she was on Charlie's Angels. She was no-nonsense and brains and the type of girl that didn't get screwed in a Best Western or one of those ranch-shaped places off I-70 somewhere in the middle with the-not-quite-right boy. She was pretty and brunette, like I used to be when I was still drowning in the cologne of adolescence and Justin was running away from me, telling the world what a kissing slut I was and enjoying adult euphoria with various German blondes on the road.
I bought the brunette wig, the big seventies sunglasses that covered most of my face, and the bellbottoms that never seemed to end. And I bought Justin a brown wig, an outfit paying homage to Vinnie Barbarino, and small blue spectacles. We were a melting pot of seventies shows come to life and it could be fun. It could be an adventure, but it never made Justin happy.
He would frown. He would hammer his basketball into the walls and sigh in frustration and glance at the clock every five minutes like my presence was annoying, like if I wasn't around he wouldn't be Justin Timberlake and I wouldn't be Britney Spears and we wouldn't be the "it" couple of the new millennium. Things would be different. Things would be perfect like they never were before.
"I wish I could be invisible," I said throwing the remote control on the bed after the fourth time through the channels left me even more bored than I was ten minutes before.
Justin stopped his annoying dribbling and stared at me. He leaned back in his chair, his stomach protruding through his clothes, and arms, still holding the basketball behind his head, flexing his muscles. Justin had an amazing body. Sometimes I'd lay my head on his chest just to revel in the fact that a part of perfection belonged to me, but it quickly passed when his hands got tangled in my hair and I felt like a fraud.
I wanted to be untangled.
Untangled.
Justin's eyes cut through me and he asked, "What?"
"You heard me."
"Yeah."
"So why ask?"
"Why not?"
"Justin, sometimes I think you don't hear me."
"I always hear you, but I don't get you, sweetheart."
And I knew he didn't. I knew that no matter how many times I told the world and told myself that he was the one, the elusive Pimpernel of soulmates, it wouldn't help him get me any better. It wouldn't make our minds work the same way or our bodies fit right together.
"Whatever."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?" I replied with a sweetness and innocence I hadn't possessed since Baby One More Time made me Britney Spears.
Justin began to tap his foot rhythmically; ready to show me through song all the ways I was a complete fuck-up for a girlfriend. He rubbed his eyes, "Tell me what you're thinking."
"You wouldn't understand."
"Because I'm not you and I don't read Sylvia Plath or hypothesize about everything? Christ. This depressed rockstar shit has been done before, Brit. You're not even fucking original."
And he was right and I wasn't unique, but it wasn't my job that left me numb, it was Justin, sometimes so much that I hated him and thought about walking out and never turning back. Sometimes I'd get as far as the door, hand grasping at the knob, leaving imprints on the stainless steel, and I'd glance back at him. His eyes lingering on me in a possessive, but ravishing manner that elated me because no one looked at me like that, with such pure emotion. Raw desire or the challenge of fucking a princess, I saw, but Justin could make me weep, as his face became a canvas and my face the portrait of amorous affectations displayed for everyone to see.
He loved me and I was the fucking lucky one. And I would turn around, leaning my head against the door--any door, it never mattered--and say, "Why can't you just get me, Justin? It would be perfect."
"We're as close to perfect as it gets, sweetheart. It's you and me," he would reply with a smug grin as he stood up and enveloped me in his arms, smelling of my Herbal Essences shampoo and reeking of the sex yet to be had. He'd kiss my cheek and my neck and whisper, "It's you and me."
And this time could be it. This time could be perfection. He would sing to me and make me forget those other girls and we would suddenly become perfect boy and girl, toppers on a beautifully tiered wedding cake.
It never lasted and I always ended up back in some damn room, choking on the awkward quiet when we ran out of things to talk about--how's your mom? How's the family? See any good movies?--and mentally calculating the number of steps to the door, for real this time, for good.
Steps I didn't think I had the guts to take.
Because that meant coming untangled.
I walked over to the windows, looking down on a lively city filled with thousands of people having fun and getting lost in tacky souvenir shops and drinking overpriced daiquiris. I felt like a princess locked away in castle and I knew Justin was ready to slay the dragons and rescue me if I just let him. But he couldn't and I wouldn't.
"I don't want to sit here all day, Justin. The only time I get to go anywhere while I'm visiting you on tour is to see your fucking show. It's a great show, but after the twentieth time, it loses something and I need human interaction."
"Since when? You're the one who hates going to clubs and to parties. You're the one turning into one of those agoraphobics I read about in Time Magazine."
"I told you not to read that news shit, but you never listen to me."
"That's right, and you avoid everything under the pretense of it being too damn depressing, sweetheart. Perfect blend, if I say so myself."
I rolled my eyes because otherwise it was another few steps closer to that damn door, tempting me with the unknown, and further proof that Justin and I would never have a merger of the minds or dabbles with destiny. My hands groped at my head and I replied indifferently, numbly, dead inside in ways I wished I wasn't because I was the lucky one, with a bad hand, involved with the closest thing to perfection there was and still dreaming of a wall named Jake, and I replied, "Las Vegas is meant to be seen, Justin, not observed from some castle in the sky."
"You heard Johnny. It's too dangerous for us to go out together, baby," he replied starting with the incessant basketball drumming yet again and allowing the word "together" to linger in the air and stifle out the last of the oxygen there was between us, as if to say, "It's your fault we can't go out. Why can't I have a normal girlfriend?"
I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit him and yell, "Fuck you, Justin! Fuck you!"
It never was easy being the first.
There was no uncomplicated way to untangle myself from the first, even if parts of it were a lie, and it wasn't possible to go back and make it so.
Justin said I broke his heart, that I took everything he had counted on and ripped it from him when he wasn't ready, when he wasn't looking--somewhere between his newfound spirituality and fucking love affair with his guitar--and when he had his guard down. When he wasn't ready.
He hollered, "Fuck sweetheart. You really got me. I wasn't ready for this."
I said, "No one's ever ready, babe" and walked out the door like I didn't care, like I was emotionless, cool as Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and as unstoppable as Superman in one of his movies.
And the press clamored to get the real deal and the world's collective mouth gaped open and girls raged against my heartless destruction of their cherished boy and men everywhere lined up to fill the void in my heart.
All the while, I smothered tearless cries in my pillow and sang for people and created new songs, different songs that all said the same thing as they did the first and second times around. I boasted about not being a girl, but couldn't fight the feeling that I was twelve years old all over again and Justin had run away from me, feet pounding into the flooring of the MMC sets, and laughing about getting quiet Britney to let him stick his tongue down her throat when it never really happened and I had spent the next twenty minutes wiping his slobber off my cheek.
Clamoring to say that he was the first to get in Britney's pink hot pants, even though he wasn't, and even though he had grown up and it wasn't like that for him, but I wasn't sure what it was like for me. It wasn't true love and it wasn't an attraction made out of hatred. It wasn't simple, but I couldn't find enough complication in it, so I made it up as I went along. Dreams and spiritual connections and Zen-fucking-like epiphanies that I never really had and wasn't sure I could recognize if I did have.
But I was finally untangled.
And I thought about my brother and that girl that he dated for a few weeks before he met Missy Jacobsen and forgot all about her. I thought about the way Justin lifted my hand to his lips and spoke quietly, gently, soothingly, telling me that I was the only girl that mattered, telling me that he never wanted to hurt me. I thought about that first time with Tim or Tom or Tad, one of those names that began with "T", who slurred his words and ten minutes afterwards vomited on my generic hotel bed, emitting the stench of bourbon and bodily fluids into the air.
Justin was supposed to be perfect, and to many he was, but not to me, never to me, not after eight years and not after ruining me for everyone else. He couldn't play the role of saint but he couldn't be the snake in the Garden of Eden either. He couldn't help but be him of the glistening smile and clammy hands engulfing my own tinier ones.
He was used. I was used. That was the game--to get untangled before realizing that perfection was fleeting-and I was the champion.
Justin needed to learn the game and I needed to find a way to stop playing the game. Until then, neither of us would be right for each other. And all those entanglements would feel like weights in a wade pool, drowning us, sucking the life from our bodies, and leaving us cold...blue, dried out lips...dead inside.
And it was the reason I got lost in songs and movies and books and memories of a wall bleeding pink paint on my lips. I could walk away. No guilt, no doubts, no worries that I was the only one there. Because a wall was inanimate, a non-thinker, and I felt less alone with that wall and my imagination than I did any day afterwards.
Baby, you expect it from a wall.
You expect to come untangled.