Ask the Box

25 sep 06

"What do you think of ELAINE er...umm (guessing) from seinfeld?"

see, i don't mind this sort of nonsense when it's from rahul, because i know that he's already sunken down to the depths of the most blasphemous depravity known to any earl of hell, and that one can only shrug one's shoulders and accept him for who or what he is.

just like HELEN of troy, elaine was a "girlfriend" (second in line), even though i was 19 and she was 25 when we were an item. i basically hung around her apartment all day and played with the musical equipment i bought with my wholly surplus library of congress salary, while accumulating fat. she was into me, though, whereas i was sort of spaced-out and pretty much only along for the ride, no double-entendre intended.

some time during my 19th year, i was working a $6/h job at the library of congress, to and from which i commuted for an hour-and-a-half. i did the same thing later in the bay area, when i lived in concord and yet again commuted 90 minutes to and from work, this time at "the art store" in berkeley. in both cases, i blew something like $6 a day in metro fares.

at the library of congress, my job was to take a book off of a cart, examine it, and supposedly, based on some of its properties, type up "binding instructions" on a paper slip. in reality, i never learned to recognize any of these properties, so i just typed "do not trim" on every slip. the job was centered around these slips, and we ("binding analysts", i suppose) had per-day slip-quotas we had to meet. so, after i had typed "do not trim" on twenty-five paper slips, i was done for the day, and could go nap in one of the employee lounges.

elaine worked there, too -- that's where i met her. she had gotten the job through her old professor at CUA, where she received her masters degree in "library science". elaine was, in an official capacity, a simple peon like me: made to type "do not trim" on little slips of paper. but in reality, she was working on some ellaborate secret project for her ex-prof which was concealed from the rest of the peasantry, lest we take up arms in a class struggle.

elaine picked me up with some line about helping her celebrate, or mourn, or whatever -- some excuse to get drunk. so, i went to her apartment, and got drunk with her. i guess i knew all along what was going to happen, but i sort of pretended i didn't. elaine and i had our night, and after it i gradually moved in with her in her upper georgetown/glover park flat.

which reminds me: she was rich. i'm not sure how rich, but i think she was officially a "trust fund baby". at any rate, her father had set her up in an apartment in georgetown, so he must have had something in the bank. elaine and i visited her parents house (her parents were very nice, except they knew where this was going), as well as their "vacation house", and while the houses were rather big and opulent, they weren't "bill gates" sorts of mansions. but, the family was definitely in the top 1%. i think at one point elaine told me she had a five million dollar trust fund.

her father was executive VP of research and development at R.J. Reynolds, the ciggie manufacturers. he was also a medical doctor. shortly after elaine and i started our love nest, she showed me a video cassette (this was before DVDs were in widespread use) of her father sitting at a table with the other RJR big-wigs during congress's period of grilling tobacco industry representatives. remember all of those lawsuits?

a couple of years ago, i tracked down elaine on the web via her father's resume. she was happy to hear from me and told me what she was doing, i told her what i was doing, and that was the end of it. but i noticed, during my sleuthing, that elaine's father's resume said nothing of his service in the name of "joe camel". elaine used to tell me that he was uncomfortable working there (now he's on the board of directors for some medical corporation), and that both he and she missed the days when he worked for "johnson and johnson", which was a "good" company (baby shampoo and such).

just now, i'm pretty sure i worked out his company email address. i'm, like, a professional stalker, even though he's right there on the yahoo finance and forbes websites. my goddamned phone number is on the very first page you get when searching on my name, and yet i've never been stalked (that i know of).

elaine was notably fat, and she fattened me up good, too. there was a time after my job at the library of congress had ended (supposedly because it was a temporary position, but really because i was extraordinarily lazy and worthless) during which i slept in that apartment, drove elaine to work in her car, recorded rock-and-roll songs on my four-track tape deck all day, picked elaine up from work, went out to dinner, and went back to sleep. i don't know how long this went on, but it was certainly a matter of months. i remember it all feeling mildly creepy and uncomfortable, now that i write about and remember it.

at some point she moved out of DC to an apartment in northern virginia, and i think bt then i had started sleeping at my mom's house more often. i was just a kid, and elaine was an adult. years later, when i dated ana while she was 18 and 19, and i was 28 and 29, i thought of elaine, and got some insight on the nature of the child-adult romantic relationship.

basically, they're mired in fantasy, because the kid has no idea what's going on, and the grown-up is projecting all kinds of properties, thoughts, and feelings onto the kid. so, everything is fine and fun, light and airy, until the kid finally grows his or her own adult personality and is no longer a suitably blank screen for the projector -- the problem with dating children is that they're bound to turn into different people in a few years.

i used elaine to break up with my first girlfriend, and then used another girl to break up with elaine ("i cheated on you -- we have to break up"). the girl who replaced elaine was the famous lauren, the iciest fish ever to swim along both coasts. but she was really pretty and really smart, along with being really inaccessable, which of course made her incredibly attractive. part of elaine's being so unattractive to me was her simpering neediness and doe-eyed suppliance.

but lauren basically hated me, which was exciting.

however, she loved the letters i sent her. i was a good writer then, as well as a practiced cartoonist. so, i'd type up letters, and then illustrate them with all kinds of pictures of her, of her parakeet "snowy", of me, of "us", etc. i also used to send this brand of awesome letter, which contained hours of work and love, to serena. those two really dug them, too -- serena told me that she saved all of them. i wonder if she still has them, or if lauren still has hers. i wouldn't be surprised either way, in either case.

i remember one letter from lauren in which she told me that her favorite musical key was "g minor". years later, i thought of this again and wondered to myself if she might have developed these feelings in a "first language acquisition" sort of way, while she played violin as a little girl, accompanying the rest of her elementary school band. beginning bands tend to play in the key of "b flat" to accomodate fledgling horn players, and of course the relative minor key of "b flat major" is...

mystery solved! i don't really buy into the whole "favorite key" thing, and think it has more to do with what you're used to and what your instrument can play easily than anything else; most people don't have perfect pitch.

ok, one more lauren story. i have to mention this, have to get it out there, because it was the one and only time i ever had one up on lauren. peter (old friend) and i were getting drunk at my mom's house, when lauren called me, in tears. "snowy's dead!" (snowy = parakeet, who was at the vet), she said between sobs. at that moment, a sleepy-eyed, drunken peter wandered into the kitchen, looked at me through half-closed eyes, looked down at a roasted chicken on the counter, and then bent at the waist to take a huge carnivorous bite out of the chicken as it lay there. when i saw him do this, i burst out laughing, which was poorly timed with lauren's just telling me her parakeet had died. "excuse me?!?", she said angrily. but that was it -- that was all i got. the rest of the relationship involved, proverbially, me crouched outside her window in the rain, clutching a bouquet of dead flowers, right up until the "let's just be friends" phone call.

peter tended to like elaine the best, out of all of my girls. but i suspect that in part he was putting effort into being un-shallow, since elaine was the least physically attractive; a lot of people have a sort of paradoxical reaction to pretty girls, including myself. but elaine had a beautiful face, and her fat was arranged in a voluptuous, woman-shaped way -- i don't want you to think i was dating jabba the hut or anything.

so that's how i feel about elaine: only an experience to add to my neurochemical mnemonic construct. she told me she took our break-up badly, by staying home for three days, drinking liquor. soon after she called me and asked if i would pick up my stuff, using a really affected "i'm totally over you" voice. i think her devastation wasn't so much at losing me as it was an expression of her own loneliness and perceived inability to keep around even some psychotic, 19 year old, scatterbrained, barely-employable loser, whereas now i'm a 31 year old.

people have shaken their heads at me and said "you missed your big chance to marry into money!" at first i thought they were kidding, but then i realized that at least in large part they weren't. but then i remembered that a lot of people do marry for money, which isn't any more reprehensible than marrying a girl because she's beautiful. even though marrying for these reasons isn't bad or wrong, per se, those most often don't grow into pleasant, lasting marriages. a beautiful wife of donald trump cleverly answered, when asked if she loved donald only for his money, that he wouldn't be with her if not for her looks. what a piece of work is man.

the character of "elaine" on the tv show "seinfeld" is entertaining -- julia louis dreyfuss is a good comic actress. i think she started out on "saturday night live", come to think of it.