Puppy Love

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story from a collection called A Sketchbook. It’s basically about urban life in my 20s. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Joshua Doležal

has a very deep, thoughtful essay on St John de Crèvecoeur.

Best,

Sam

PUPPY LOVE

My friend Josh was a bit of a Bingo Little type — that’s actually exactly how he described himself. We were watching Jeeves and Wooster in college and he’d paused on the scene where Bingo had fallen in love with somebody different, right at the moment when the charge of his old love was drowning in a lake, rewound, watched the scene all over again, his fingers kneading his scalp, pulling on the ends of his hair like a mad scientist. This struck him as a strong, viable identity — he was somebody who was always in love, with everybody, with no real hope of its ever leading to anything.

He was a comic, he’d been on improv troupes in college and when he moved to New York, he — with great prodding, with basically kidnapping operations organized by his friends to drop him off at comedy clubs and leave him there without an escape — started to make it as a standup comedian. His skits were all about this, his nebbishy qualities, the complete impossibility of ever getting a girl. He took this identity very seriously. We’d be on the subway and he’d point to a Fiverr ad of a guy in glasses with sloping shoulders saying, “Your company needs a voice, it just shouldn’t sound like mine,” and he’d ball up his fists and press them against the side of his forehead, a gesture I’d become so familiar with and say, “Ah, another role model.” And in his act, he’d go through all the benefits of living alone and then get in to a few of the issues — that he never had someone to give him an alibi if he was accused of murder; and then he’d try to work out if asking a girl to come to his place so that she could give him an alibi was a good line or not. It doesn’t sound as funny writing it out as when he was doing it, his little body, his sloping shoulders, his quivering voice, he had never quite overcome stage fright by the time he started his set, and he made that part of his performance, the way he would warm to the crowd and the crowd to him, how he would beam completely sincerely the first time they truly laughed at one of his jokes, his very slow delivery like he was incredibly high and was having trouble remembering the beginning of the sentence, his very real fear when he’d say something like, “But I’m alone then, with no one to vouch for me — and that’s the murdering time — and that’s the reason, the best reason I can think of, to take to wife.”

Standup was a side passion for him. His money came from comedy writing — he’d been a copywriter for a while until a veteran comic took him aside after a show and said, in so many words, look kid, you have something and advertising will steal your soul — is guaranteed to steal it, has stolen it every single time — and you need to do something that exists in some marginally pure way, that isn’t directly there to sell a product. So the comic made a call and he ended up working for a kind of television variety show. He was a musician too — he really had a lot of talents — and he wrote songs and Gina, who played a kind of ditzy, idealistic city councilwoman, would sing them, strumming along with a few chords on a ukulele.

When it aired, a group would usually go to Josh’s to watch. He always complained about not having friends, that was an important piece of his comedy, but he had a loyal group he’d picked up over time — apparently, people loved to kind of feel sorry for Josh, try to talk him through everything wrong in his love life — and they’d go to his apartment whenever the show aired while Josh hid behind the couch or escaped all the way to the bathroom and pulled the door shut behind him and a group of us would have to get a foot in the door or pry his fingers off it and then carry him, someone securing each limb, back to the common room where the TV was waiting, paused, for Gina’s skit.

She would be there sometimes. She was a trim beauty with dark hair circling her face in some complicated stylish wave. She was very short actually, as you kind of learned to expect from somebody on television. She got really upset when Josh would lose his nerve and take off just before her skit. “Are you fucking kidding me??” she would shout. “All this time, this sketch we did all this time on, and you can’t watch me do it?” And she would be the most energetic to pry his fingers off the doorjamb, maybe with her nails, maybe with her teeth, and beat Josh with whatever was closest at hand while he was frog-marched or carried back to the TV, and Gina would sometimes stand behind him and hold his eyelids open like they were in A Clockwork Orange so he couldn’t blink all through the show.

She was cool, spunky and cool, and nothing like the idealistic city councilwoman on television. Josh was hopelessly in love with her. This was supposed to be a secret, but he seemed to have shared the secret with everybody in our friend’s circle — and swore them all to secrecy — and then I was at drinks once with the comedy writers from his office and they all knew about it too. They had a competition in which they passed around a napkin and each wrote down the filthiest pickup line they could think up for Josh to try to bring Gina out of the friend zone. When they were done they presented it to the very cute bartender to be the judge while Josh either covered his eyes with his hands or tried to duck for cover behind his chair.

The worst part was that Gina, of course, knew all about it as well. Sometimes, when they were sitting around at a desk trying to come up with a sketch — but only when there were enough people in earshot — she would haphazardly say, “Josh, what do you think a good name for our children would be?”

And Josh, who only pretended to choke under pressure, would reply, exactly as if he had been thinking about it for a long time, “Well, I was figuring that they could all have four-letter names, so there would be Josh and Gina and Brad and Chad and Cora and Tina — ”

“Jesus, how many of them are there going to be?” she would say.

“And Stan and Dave – ”

“And won’t Brad and Chad sound too much alike?” she would ask, but Josh was already off to the races.

“And Pete and Réné and Pélé and Jane — ”

And she would think about it and say, “You know, I’ve always hated the name Jane. I don’t think you’re ever getting in.”

And whoever was listening would boo and heckle her, the way that, with a single snide comment, she’d unmade this entire gorgeous multi-ethnic family.

When they wrapped for the season, they rented out a bar and threw an enormous party. Everybody by this point was tired of hearing each other talk and joke — they were all out of material — so pretty quickly they got fixated on arm wrestling. Josh won his heat, which had mostly women in it, but then he started to cruise through the finals. Either he was secretly very strong — he actually did have some kind of a belt in muay thai — or else the comedy people were all really feeble, but he won over and over and his opponents had to down these increasingly mammoth drinks. It was agreed that the grand prize would be a night with Gina and she stood there like a ring girl with her hand on her hip, clapping along for the different contestants, giving Josh a surprised, pleased tilt of her head every time he sent another writer diving into a stein of beer. But in the last round he lost to the very butch script supervisor who led Gina out on the dance floor and settled for a dirty, grindy dance with her, while all of Josh’s vanquished, humiliated rivals held him down and pinned his arms back to be sure he drank everything that was coming to him. “Since none of us ever got into a frat,” one said, “we have to do this now.”

I ran into Josh a bit later while we were both puking on the sidewalk. He kept up a running banter while we paused between heaves. “You know, it’s not like we had really had anything anyway,” he said. He had been in comedy for so long by now that it was hard to tell with him when he was doing a bit, staying true to a persona, or when he actually meant what he was saying. “She’s very cold and everything she says is meant to bring you down and she can think about one thing and one thing only, which is her incredible, glittering, shimmering career. I pity — ” Here he had to pause to puke, which turned out to just be a long string of spittle. “I pity the man — or the bull dyke — I pity whoever it is that wins her.”

Gina left after that season, she’d gotten a recurring role on a network sitcom. Josh went on Tinder and within a couple of months he was dating Emy and telling everybody that she was the love of his life and he was going to marry her. And his social circle tried to see it in Emy, really did. She was his size, had a similar sloping frame, they seemed to fit well into one another when he was squeezing her tight. She was quiet, withdrawn, but sometimes, especially around the comedy people, she would laugh so hard she would have trouble breathing and Josh would dutifully try to fan down the air around her. They reminded me of a couple of kids on a sleepover, the way they would hit each other, tickle each other, they seemed to have a whole private, whispered world, which, unfortunately, wasn’t accessible to anyone around them.

Gina, as anticipated, had disappeared as any sort of a presence in Josh’s life. It was a bit surprising that he had settled so completely on Emy. It wasn’t actually like he was completely starved of attention — I’d seen girls line up after his comedy set to talk to him, a certain kind of girl, looking for someone thoughtful, light-hearted, someone who was gentle to the core. Emy struck me as the kind of person you have your first kiss with, a summer camp romance, but there she was — and Josh was swearing up and down that she was the woman for him, they were soulmates. I saw less of him too, he did fewer shows, there were fewer watch parties at his sty of an apartment, he kept getting promoted at work, now mentored younger writers, did more supervision.

When Emy was out of town — she traveled fairly often for work — he would suddenly get incredibly lonely and needy and invite a bunch of people over on various pretexts. So I was there to help him deal with some problem that he swiftly forgot about and he turned on the TV and flipped around the channels. Probably he knew that Gina’s show was on — the surmise was that that was the whole point of my being over, that he didn’t want to watch it himself — and he pretended to stumble across it and we watched together. It was completely idiotic, she was pretty much the same role she had been in his sketch, ditzy and idealistic, but as a sort of fifth wheel to a group of friends. She would constantly appear skittering across a lobby or the doorstep of an apartment as they were heading out somewhere, the move pretty much directly modeled on Cosmo Kramer’s entrances, and pretend that she was passing by, see if she could be included.

“Awful?” Josh asked.

“Awful,” I confirmed, which seemed to satisfy him. It had been somehow taken for granted that we would be drinking hard this evening, which was now no longer usually the case with us. It was meant to be comedy but I don’t think either of us laughed once, just stared in the dark at the screen. When the group had finally, conclusively ditched Gina’s character and somebody had thrown a glass of something at her and then she’d stepped towards a sidewalk curb and been splashed by a passing semi-trailer from the other side, which was clearly meant to be her finale for the episode, Josh jabbed at the remote to turn the volume down.

“It’s like I told you — nothing there,” he said. And his voice sounded like a normal voice, not the lost-in-thought stoner he was on stage, not the creaking nebbish he became at the office. “No use even pretending there was anything there. She’s difficult — a brat — she toys with people. A year, year-and-a-half, we worked together, I knew that if anything was ever going to happen it would have happened like right away or not at all. Knew that. It’s just — when you know somebody that well — are around somebody that much — for nothing to happen at all, for it to just go away — it’s just stupid, so so stupid, all this time thinking about it and for what.”

He gestured to the muted screen, the credits were rolling and starting to roll very fast to merge into the next show, Gina’s name and character sliding up and off the screen.