When I was twelve, a drunk, older guy at a Jewel concert bumped into me and loudly exclaimed that I looked like Elizabeth Shue. I turned bright red and tried as hard as I could not to smile wide enough to reveal a mouth full of braces—I knew they’d undermine the intellectual, physical, and emotional maturity that he MUST have identified in me. (’Cuz nothing says maturity like scrawling “Eat Shit & Die” on your converse, stuffing your bra, and forcing your mother to sit ten rows behind you at The Wiltern and act like she doesn’t know you…but I digress.)
This man’s attention lit me up like a goddamn FEMA switchboard in a natural disaster, but he also made me feel so uncomfortable and so unsafe. This man didn’t see me. He couldn’t see me. And I knew it.
What I didn’t know and couldn’t have known at twelve was that this brand of cognitive dissonance—a paralyzing, simultaneous ignition of worthiness and worthlessness—would eventually become my emotional calling card. Welcome to womanhood, baby girl. Good luck making sense of anything that’s happening to you.
He asked for my [parents’ home] phone number; I gave it to him.
* * *
Today, as I pumped gas at the Monrovia Shell station, an embarrassingly bad, up-tempo Jewel tune of modest, early-2000s fame—God bless that woman’s second act—blared out of the speakers. And if Big Oil doesn’t believe we should occupy public spaces in silence, then neither do I, so I started singing along at full volume. Just as we hit the bridge (“…sell your sinnn; just cash innnn…”), I looked over my shoulder and caught the gaze of an older, mentally-disheveled lookin’ dude filling up his Mini Cooper.
He looked me up and down, hungrily licked his bottom lip, smiled approvingly, and said, “You remind me of Elizabeth Shue.” I immediately remembered that night in ’96 at the concert. Jewel! Elizabeth Shue! Creepy man! Same shit—how about that? I must have looked confused rather than surprised, because Mini Cooper man cackled—loudly enough to move him from the “mentally disheveled” to “mentally unhinged” category—and added, “Elizabeth Shue is from the 90s. Who knows what you were doing in the 90s.”
“This,” I said. “I was doing exactly this.”
Welcome to womanhood, baby girl. It only took twenty years to make sense of anything that’s happening to you.
He, too, asked for my phone number; I didn’t give it to him.
I Still Read Your Horoscope 