Episode 3: The Bong and the Restless

I’m sitting alone at my neighborhood dive bar when I meet my next boyfriend. He plants his Pabst on the bar in front of me, looking away.

            “Is that for me?” I ask.

            He looks down and smiles. “No, but I can get you one.”

I glance at my girlfriend chatting up some fool at the bar, then I look back at Mr. Pabst. While we wait in line at the bar, I ask him his name. He yelps, “Alex!” I smile. He has the same name as my last Portland boyfriend. I’ve been back for four months, and this is my first night of going out since I've returned that I don’t live with my parents. I feel alive; ready for the crab to come out of the shell. I don’t know what the crab or the shell is, but I hope I don’t get crabs. Just some dick. This one will be Alex 2: the sequel.

Alex has a sweet face, which justifies his stained, ‘70’s porn star jacket. After he buys me my own Pabst, we sit outside while he smokes.

            “So what do you do for work?” I ask.

            “Um, well, I used to work at a coffee shop, but then I got laid off, see, and now I’m actually on unemployment. But I’m looking for work and stuff.”

            I nod. Every guy that has hit on me in the past month either didn’t finish college or is on unemployment. Welcome home, Rose.

            “...But I’m in a band,” he adds.

            Okay, I can work with that. “Cool, what do you play?”

            “I play bass. It’s sort of dancey, electronic pop stuff.”

            Fuck. As if I don’t hear enough of that on 94.7 and at lesbian dance parties at Rotture. “That’s cool. How long have you guys been playing?”

            “A while. We haven’t been playing that many shows as much recently. Our lead singer is kind of...well, addicted to drugs.”

            For having had more Pabsts than fingers, he’s surprisingly coherent and conscientious.  This makes me okay with asking him to walk me home when I realize it’s 2 am and I have to be up for work in four hours.

            In front of my house, he asks if it’s okay for him to call me sometime. Though he seems a little, well, Portland (no job, in a band), my criteria for dating someone ‘settled’ (financially independent, emotionally stable) appears to only be leading me to excess masturbation. I give him my number and a kiss. 

            Seven months later, I’ve lent him $100 three times, and more often than not, made or spotted him meals. At times I wonder if we’re still together because I need to escape my roommates and he needs sustenance. Our relationship is feeling like “Survivor,” except I already know who’s getting kicked off the island.

I eat breakfast with my cousin one morning, whose girlfriend has recently left him for grad school. I ask if he misses her. “I don’t know, I’d like her around, but it’s weird; I don’t necessarily miss her, or the company, or even the sex- I miss having someone remind me to do something with myself. Lately I won’t get up before 11, unless I’m working.”

            I nod, thinking about how I snapped at Alex yesterday for not actively seeking employment, or signing up for PCC classes like he said he would way back during date number five. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only slap of reality to my boyfriend’s face.

            A month later, my roommate and his girlfriend strike a similar iceberg. My coworker complains she's outgrowing her 5-year boyfriend. My friend goes for coffee with me and says she's supporting her boyfriend, and doesn't know how much longer she can put up with it. Is this a domino effect? Why have hopes and dreams massacred every romantic relationship in my line of vision? And why does the more restless/ambitious party tend to be the woman?

Women have more options now than we’ve ever had. This new sense of freedom isn’t limited to just careers or tampons. We don’t have to put up with misogynistic douchewads anymore, but simultaneously, guys have less incentive to be career-driven, especially when living in a young stoner mecca such as Portland. Women dominate college campuses, and have for the past 25 years. Though women still earn only 75% of what their male counterparts earn, and we no longer have the societal pressure to marry young and live off of our partners.

After nine months with now-semi-employed dude, I start to feel Alex wear on me. He still hasn’t signed up for any PCC classes, and his band has disintegrated. “Are you going to find other people to play with?” I ask him one day.

“Yeah, well I was supposed to start playing with Sean soon, but I can’t get a hold of him.”

“Why’s that?”

He fiddles with his phone. “Probably ‘cause he’s on mushrooms all the time.”

I stare at him.  

At dinner one evening, 9 months after our Pabsts, I analyze his scraggly beard, all the way down to his only pair of jeans and decaying loafers. He is nice sex, sweet words, and has been my anxiety hot-line for most of 2011. But I can’t explain one more time how to make an omelet or set up online banking. “I don’t think we should be together anymore.”

            A month later, I find myself back at the same bar, sitting with a 31-year-old barista. He raves about “Do-It-Yourself culture” in Portland and the spiritual benefits of Brazilian dance. He asks if I want to come back to his place and listen to old hip-hop records.

            “You’ll really like my place,” he says. “I live with some friends and their kid. Did I mention I play in a band?”

At least this guy’s name isn’t Alex.