Hi kittens! I am so excited to share something very special with you that no other person on the planet has yet to see. Below is an exclusive sneak peek of the first chapter (!!) of my forthcoming book, Don’t Do Anything I Would Do.
DDAIWD is a personal essay collection/memoir about love. The one topic I swore I’d never write about for so many reasons — but mainly because I have always felt like a complete failure in all of my relationships. From feeling like a totally unloveable, awkward outcast as a teenager, to finding myself in a tumultuosly toxic relationship that defined my 20’s, to a decade-long marriage that ended in divorce, to the dating dumpster fires that followed, I spent the better part of my life wondering why I kept getting it wrong when it came to love.
I have rearranged these essays a hundred times. This one nearly didn’t make it, but now I feel like it’s the most perfect way to open this book and to invite you on this ride with me. My hope is that you’ll see a little bit of yourself in some of my stories, or at the very least, get a good laugh.
Don’t Do Anything I Would Do will be out this Spring. I’m still editing the final draft, so I would love your feedback on this piece as I shape what I think is maybe the most important book I’ve written so far. I hope you enjoy it.
With so much love,
Cara
***
May 1994
Boy Crazy
I’ve had the ability from a very young age to make up completely fake scenarios in my head and feel as though they were actually happening. Whether it was envisioning myself as a novelist who lived on a farm in Virginia with a husband, five horses, and three children (this was precisely how I described myself on my About the Author page I included inside the first “book” I wrote at nine years old), or believing wholeheartedly as a teenager that I could cold-call record labels as the “CEO” of my music fanzine and land interviews with bands (I could and I did), I always understood the power of my mind.
My imagination ran so wild that in the fourth grade, we had to write a book report and I not only wrote that book report, but I made up the book that I wrote about. I gave it a fake title, and a fake author’s name, and did my project based on an entirely fabricated book. I got an A+. When my mother found out (I caved one night and admitted the truth after she asked to see the physical copy of the book), aside from probably thinking she had birthed a sociopath, she warned me that the teacher could go to the library at any point and figure out that the book did not exist. The thought never entered my mind, and truly, I couldn’t have cared less. “Let her,” I said, smugly.
So it’s natural that I would carry this questionable talent over into my romantic life. Kind of like in the episode of My So-Called Life when Angela Chase thought that Jordan Catalano wrote the song “Red” about her but it was actually about his car. Angela Chase was one of the most relatable television characters to ever impact my life. From her cherry red box-dyed hair (my signature look in the late 90’s), to her oversized flannel shirts, to her black velvet chokers and Doc Marten boots, to her teen angst and her painstakingly awkward energy around guys and that I still very much feel to this day – I was one with Angela.
I was so delusional in the 7th grade that I convinced myself that Frank Giancolo was secretly in love with me. Frank went to the Catholic school across the street from the public school I attended. He was nerdy, but cute, with short, curly brown hair and black square-framed glasses. I’d see him around the pizzeria on Fort Hamilton Parkway after school where everyone met up after class. There was something endearing about him. He had kind eyes and though he was friends with the “bad boys” he never got into trouble with them. I always saw him standing around the park with the popular crowd who smoked cigarettes and fingered girls, but I knew Frank was different. Frank reminded me of me.
My best friend Kerry was wild. She dropped acid for the first time when we were twelve years old. I was terrified of taking even a sip of alcohol at the time. Kerry was the ringleader in our friendship, always convincing me to go to raves with her (which were terrifying warehouse parties in the worst neighborhoods in New York in the 90s – not like the glamorous DJ sets held in bougie Brooklyn music venues today). I always went along with her even though all I wanted to do was be in my bedroom, tucked tightly under my lavender ruffled comforter, pounding Wise potato chips daydreaming about boys.
Although we shared the same circle of friends, Frank never publicly acknowledged my existence. But I just had a feeling he was obsessed with me. We’d exchange glances from time to time, which I, of course, ran with. I’d spend hours in my bedroom listening to love songs on my bubble gum pink boombox, dreaming about the ways in which he’d ask me out, watching our romance play out like a movie in my mind.
I became so convinced that I had a chance with Frank that I made Kerry get his phone number from Jess, a girl in his class who had fucked at least four of his friends and possibly him. Yes, girls were actually FUCKING in Junior High School. Can you imagine? I most certainly was not. I was eating Entenmann’s chocolate-frosted covered donuts and drinking Lipton tea with milk and sugar in my grandmother’s kitchen watching The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Jess was the gatekeeper of all the cute boys in our grade. She had massive tits and a perm with Sun In streaks and gave blow jobs out like candy, so when she freely offered up Frank’s phone number per Kerry’s request, I felt pretty certain they hadn’t hooked up. Or at least she didn’t care one way or another.
That Friday after school, Kerry and I stopped off at the pizzeria for some to-go snacks, then went back to her house to make the call. This was long before the days of cell phones, so we’d have to call his house. There was a lot more legwork – and frankly bravery – involved in pre-text message life. We arrived at her place, made a beeline for the kitchen, and lined up our second lunch: two slices of pizza each, an order of garlic knots to share, and Diet Cokes. We discussed what would be said and Kerry practiced her lines.
Once we were clear on the script, Kerry went up to her bedroom to call Frank and I stayed in the kitchen to listen in on the other phone line. I clutched the receiver with one hand and hit the neon green light-up mute button with the other so Frank wouldn’t suspect anyone else was on the line. I heard the dial tone switch over the sound of numbers being punched in. Showtime.
“Hi, is Frank there?” Kerry asked when a woman answered the phone.
“Sure, who’s calling?” Frank’s mother replied.
“It’s Kerry. From McKinley.”
“One second….FRANK!”
“Hello…?” Frank’s voice appeared on the line.
“Hey Frank! It’s Kerry,” she said.
“Ummm okay?”
“So listen. I wanted to ask you about my friend Cara. Do you know who she is?”
“Hmm I don’t think so.”
“She has reddish-brown hair, wears a teal and purple Columbia ski jacket? We go to McKinley together. She's in my class.”
“Oh yeah, the girl with the freckles. What about her?”
Freckles. Great.
“Well, she kind of likes you. What do you think of her?”
I held my breath as I waited for him to respond.
“Uhhh, I guess she’s nice, but she’s not really my type.”
“Why not?” Kerry prodded.
“Well, she has a pretty face, but she’s a little chubby.”
Chubby. It was as if a knife had been stabbed through my chocolate frosted donut-shaped heart and suddenly my whole world felt like it was closing in on me. I knew I was chubby, but I didn’t think Frank knew.
This wasn’t the first time a boy had called me fat. Once upon a time in the fifth grade, on a late Spring day, our class was gathered in the school yard. Kerry was talking her usual shit to an annoying group of boys. I, her trusty sidekick, stood next to her in solidarity. I didn’t have the balls to chime in, but she was my best friend so I was clearly her accomplice. I can’t recall what she said, but shots were fired. She must have pissed off Brian Tam, because at that moment, he looked directly at me and yelled, “Blimp!”
Everyone heard it. I was mortified. I felt my face turn beet red, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, that is the first time I realized that other people knew I was a little bit fat.
I knew I was a little bit fat. I knew because of the shame I felt every time summer came around and we went to my cousin’s pool on Staten Island and I wore an oversized t-shirt over my bathing suit thinking it would hide my body and trick people into thinking I was thinner than I was.
I knew I was a little bit fat because of the way I got a little too excited to rip into a box of Entenmann’s donuts after school and park myself in front of the television to watch afternoon talk shows. I’d think about those donuts almost all day. The feeling I got from stuffing them in my mouth, the hard shell cracking as I took a bite into the moist dough as my fingers became covered in melted chocolate. Zoning out to adults talking about Very Adult Things with Ricki Lake or Jenny Jones was my very first buzz.
My mother tells me I gained weight and got a little bit fat when my parents got divorced. I was eight years old and it was an extremely confusing time. My grandfather had just died of lung cancer and my father was on drugs and in and out of our lives. The two men who had been staples in my life, the two men I loved more than anything, were gone. Things were chaotic and depressing. So I coped with food.
I came home that afternoon after the blimp incident and begged my mother to let me join Weight Watchers. It was 1991; the height of diet culture in the United States. Phrases like “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips!” were all over magazine covers and pretty much the best thing you could do as a woman was find a way to get THIN and stay like that. So signing up an eleven-year-old to Weight Watchers wasn’t really that strange.
The first time I walked into that meeting room on 86th street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn was traumatizing as fuck. The room was filled with overweight adults, gathered there every Wednesday evening at 7 PM to talk about how they overcame challenges like skipping a second piece of cake at the wedding they had just attended, or how great it felt to finally fit those jeans again! The room would erupt in applause when someone was brave enough to “toot” about the half a pound they lost that week (“losing is better than gaining!” we were told), and our leader would offer suggestions like filling up on water before going out to dinner to avoid eating too much.
Every day, I would log and categorize my food into a paper journal, ticking boxes and tracking every single thing I put into my mouth. We were told to drink eight glasses of water a day, and, thanks to the magical logic of the 90s, diet soda counted as four of those glasses! That’s right, you could down 32 ounces of Diet Coke every day and call it water.
My life became a flurry of Smart Ones microwavable dinners and fat-free Snackwell cookies and Denise Austin workout tapes and by the end of the summer, I had lost 23 pounds. I started junior high school as a new person. Everyone commented on my weight loss. I was high on all the positive attention, and that commenced my destructive and disordered pattern of gaining and losing weight for the rest of my adult life. The high that came along with losing ten or fifteen pounds became my drug of choice. Restricting myself from food, or sometimes, chewing it and spitting it out as to not absorb the calories, was a game I played with myself for many years.
By the time I was knee-deep in my fantasy relationship with Frank, all the weight had come back. I was chubby again, and not only did he notice it, he cited this as the reason I wasn’t his “type.” I couldn’t listen to the rest of the conversation, so I hung up the phone, grabbed the greasy bag with the rest of the garlic knots and raced to the bottom of Kerry’s living room steps. “I’m leaving!” I screamed upstairs.
I walked out onto the sidewalk, dug around inside my army green Manhattan Portage messenger bag decorated with checkered pins from Canal Jeans, and whipped out my Sony discman – my refuge from the outside world. I felt my eyes well up with tears as I took a bite of my cold, soggy garlic knot.
I fast-forwarded my mixtape until I got to my favorite song of the moment: Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover by Sophie B. Hawkins. Crushed, I stared off into the distance on Fort Hamilton Parkway, grieving my heartbreak with the song on repeat while I waited for the B16 bus to come.
There I was, a pudgy freckle-faced lovesick fourteen year old virgin, relating so deeply to a song about a horny woman hard-up for some man she couldn’t be with. Her throaty vocals did something to me and I felt every word of that song. Even though I had only ever kissed exactly one boy. “I wanna open up / I wanna come inside / I wanna fill you up / I wanna make you cry.”
I loved music because it made me feel things. And I loved to feel things. I made mixtapes constantly. They were filled with love songs that told the story of the relationships I dreamed of having. Even though I had never been in real love, it was all I wanted. According to my favorite songs, relationships were riddled with pain and longing. I wanted so badly to feel that desperation everyone wrote about in their music. Even if it meant creating that desperation in my mind.
It took me a few weeks to get over Frank before I moved onto my next imaginary boyfriend. That was the thing about delusional love. I could free myself from it as quickly as I could create it.
And in the meantime, there were mixtapes – and chocolate frosted donuts.
Words directly to my heart!!! I felt like you where talking about me, cannot wait for the book!!!!
Now that song is stuck in my head. You've done it again, Cara! You are all of us. Now I need to go grab an Entenmann's donut <3