Trashley: Twenty-Four
Places people, places!
After acting like a twat in front of my friend Jess, Ashley and I returned to the hotel. I missed the days when I didn’t have to deal with anyone else’s bullshit and fantasized about being single again. Ashley was acting like a pompous jackass with an over-inflated ego, and we still had five days left in New York, and if it was anything like the first two days, I’m good.
Sensing my disinterest in being around her, Ashley offered to buy Hamilton tickets for our last night in the city. Musicals about the founding fathers are the secret to my heart. Like a dummy, I said that would be excellent.
“I’ll get the tickets right now,” she said, pulling out her laptop. “There are two seats in the box directly across from where we sat the first time.”
“Get ‘em,” I called out while brushing my teeth in the bathroom.
Ashley worked on tickets while I got ready for bed. I watched her from the bathroom door and wondered what had happened to the girl I met. I wanted to unzip her body to see if the original Ashley was still inside her. It made me sad, confused, and angry all at the same time. I thought I had found this nerdy, fun, interesting person with a life even weirder than mine: she was a child genius who grew up Hasidic in Pasadena and became deaf in one ear after her Dad beat her with a book. Her Grandparents (not the ones who “died”) were totally deaf. She was in charge of her other dead grandparents’ estate, which had cash buried all over the property and inside the walls because that grandpa didn’t believe in banks. She told me a tornado picked her grandfather’s house up and carried it away, and it was found fully intact five miles down the road. Okay, maybe that was an obvious lie, but I didn’t question it. Her things were spread out all over the country. She had a dog in bla bla, a car in bla bla, a wife and kids in bla bla bla. And a new TV at my apartment, which I had to say was “our” apartment, or she would fine me sixty dollars. She was a Physicist who was being offered jobs at both Oxford and NASA. She taught a zoom course on Wednesday nights teaching theoretical physics at MIT, which I never witnessed because she said the semester was over by the time she moved in. She had a student named Geoff who spelled his name with a G and mansplained physics. I didn’t even know if she would remember Geoff at this point, but I’d never questioned her because I knew what it was like to tell people about myself and not be believed.
I grew up on a haunted gold mine in the middle of Alaska and had one of the largest wooly mammoth graveyards ever discovered in my backyard. I was a news reporter and anchor starting at the age of eighteen when I was hired by the local Alaska NBC affiliate, who thought I was fresh out of college when I was fresh out of Lathrop High School. I covered crimes and murders and went on undercover police stings and inside meth labs and up Denali.
I covered the mauling of Grizzly Man, the one Werner Hertzog made a documentary about, and famously said he was the only person in the world with the audio tape of him being eaten to death when I was the other only person in the world to have that tape. I have interviewed President George HW Bush, countless celebrities– Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopie Goldberg, Adriana Lima, and murderers, like Matthew Owens and Alec Baldwin.
I moved to New York City when I was twenty and played bit roles on Letterman within a year and Fallon and SNL soon after.
I became friends with an African Prince who flew me all over the world. I applied to Mars One as a joke and made multiple cuts to live on Mars out of two hundred thousand applicants.
I sound like a pathological liar when I talk, but everything is true. When I met Ashley, I thought I’d found my match.
I finished brushing my teeth and put on a face mask. Ashley was on the bed with her wallet, and she didn’t seem to realize I was watching her. I saw her trying to buy the tickets, but her cards kept declining. She glanced at me, and I looked away. She hadn’t caught me looking.
“Do you want to buy the Hamilton tickets with your card so you can write it off as a business expense, and then I’ll just Venmo you?” she asked, even though Venmo is for poor people.
“I highly doubt Jeffrey (my accountant) would ever let me do that since he doesn’t even let me write off the makeup I buy at Sephora. But I can buy them with my Saphhire card because I’ll get points.”
She set her computer down on the bed and walked to the bathroom while I dug my credit card out of my wallet. I looked at her computer screen, which said, “Congratulations, Cecelia. You’ve been approved for a nine-hundred-dollar Affirm loan.” The fuck?
The screen went black.
Had Ashley pretended to be Cecelia just to take out a loan to pay for Hamilton tickets? Because the loan was for nine hundred dollars. The price of the tickets. Were these things connected?
No fucking way, she has money, that would be insane.
They may still share finances since they have to pay for the children. Interesting, I thought.
I bought the tickets, which totaled nine hundred thirty-eight dollars, and Ashley Venmo’ed me for them. Not for the full amount, bitch was thirty-eight dollars short, but whatever. I didn’t care about the cost so much as I noticed it; looking back, it was important.
The next day, I had a hair appointment at MainEntrance with my friend Berry, who had been coloring my hair since I moved to Manhattan when I was twenty. I gushed to Berry about Ashley — how she was probably lying about being a Physicist and MIT professor, and hadn’t told me she had a wife and kids when we started dating, and how her ex-wife and another woman, or possibly woman who was also her ex-wife, or maybe even her brother, had tracked me down. And how she told me her Grandparents had died with all of their money buried in the ground and walls, but that might all be a lie too.
I missed the days when I would brag about how smart she was. Now I gossiped because everything that happened in our relationship was so fucking wild, and I never knew what was lying around the corner. The entire salon was entranced by my Ashley stories. Customers would shout out questions and commentary underneath their heat lamps, “Who do you think the LinkedIn woman was, her ex-wife? And you didn’t have to do anything for the thirty grand? Why the blackout curtains? Did she replace your vacuum? Do her parents think she went to MIT?”
A salon apprentice sweeping hair off the floor asked if the sex was good, and unfortunately, it was. Ashley became somewhat of a celebrity in my three hours there.
A woman who had just finished getting a haircut walked over to my seat while I was waiting for the toner to blonde me. “What time is Ashley coming? I’m supposed to meet a friend for drinks on the Lower East Side at six, but I’ll push drinks to later if she’s coming here soon. I can’t leave without a visual.”
“She should be here at five,” I said.
“Okay, cool. I’ll wait. I’m going to pretend to read a magazine when she gets here.” She asked, “Do you think she’ll wear an MIT shirt?”
“Most definitely.”
I tracked Ashley’s location on my phone, “She’s a block away,” I announced. “Places, people. Places!” I directed as if we were planning a surprise party when she walked in the door.
The woman who stuck around after her haircut ran across the salon floor, grabbed a copy of Interview magazine from the table and started reading it upside down. All of the stylists swiveled their clients to face the door while they mimicked trimming the backs of their heads. The entire salon scrambled.
“Ten seconds, people!”
The buzz of excitement in the salon returned to normal as soon as the front door opened. I looked around. It felt like a scene from a movie or the start of a flash mob. The woman reading Interview held the magazine up in front of her face. Her eyes rose above the cover like a submarine periscope. Ashley was wearing her MIT sweatshirt. The apprentice walked over to greet her, “Hello, Ash… I mean, can I help you with something?”
“I’m just waiting for my girlfriend,” Ashley said, gesturing in my direction.
“Oh, Lauren. Of course. Can I get you a tea or coffee? Water?”
“Do you have Diet Pepsi?” she asked.
“Um, no, but we have grapefruit Perrier?”
“No thanks.”
When the apprentice turned around to walk away, he shot me a coy smile and a slight raise of the eyebrow as if he had just greeted an undercover Beyonce.
I gestured to Ashley to come over so I could introduce her to Berry. She gave me a nasty look, shrugged her shoulders, and shook her head before sitting. She wasn’t coming over to meet Berry, a woman who had been in my life for nearly two decades. Cool.
“Wow,” Berry mouthed to me in the mirror.
“I love this for me,” I said back.
It became clear to me at the salon that dating Ashley would make an incredible story one day. When we started dating, I told Ashley that I read a book on finding your purpose in life, and I realized my purpose was to be a storyteller and to make people laugh. I even competed in story-telling competitions and won Story-Smash at the Improv so many times that they had to stop inviting me for a few years. I loved collecting stories. I even told my therapist that between our bi-weekly sessions, I was out collecting content.
She corrected me with, “You mean you’re living your life?”
Sure.
I said goodbye to everyone at the salon. The woman up front hugged me and whispered, “Good luck.”
Our next stop was a theater on Forty-second Street where an ex-boyfriend from my early days in New York had put us on the guestlist for the off-Broadway show Drunk Shakespeare. Earlier, I had told Gil I would be in NYC and since he’s a restauranteur and events person, he hooked us up with a fun night. I thought it would be cool for Gil and Ashley to meet since they were both Israeli, but he was out of town, and with how she was acting lately around people, no thanks.
On the way to the show, Ashley asked how I knew this Gil person.
“We dated when I first moved here. He owned a rooftop bar I worked at.”
“So you’re talking to your exes? You just have exes everywhere?”
“Are you serious? We dated for nine months in 2004, and we stayed friends.”
“Wow, I don’t feel special.”
“I’m not doing this right now, Ashley. Get over it.”
“God, I was just joking. Calm down.”
She wasn’t just joking. She was just being an insecure jackass.
“Lauren, shalom! Ma nishma,” a man in a fitted grey suit said as he walked towards us from the restaurant. “Beseda, ani tov,” I said back. Ashley’s face contorted like this man had just walked out of a spaceship speaking the official language of the planet Zebulon. For someone who claimed to be half-Israeli, she knew nothing. I still knew basic Hebrew greetings and curse words from when I dated Gil. He must’ve told the manager to greet me that way to see if I still got it.
I do.
“I’m Guy. Gil told me you two go way back, so Gil made you both very special guests tonight. You’ll be playing the King and Queen during the show.”
“Ha! I knew he would set up something like that,” I said. Color drained from Ashley’s face.
“Great,” he said while walking us to the rooftop dining terrace. “So the show starts in an hour, and everything is on the house, of course.”
I thanked Guy, and we sat down. It was a beautiful, chilly October night. I loved New York in the fall, probably because I’m a Virgo and a witch.
“How many exes do you have here?” Ashley said.
“I lived here for eleven years, so I’ve probably dated most of Manhattan.” This was my moment to talk about exes. “Anyway, being friends with your exes is healthy. Just because you break up doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. And I’m sure one day you and Cecelia will be friends. And that would be good for the kids to see.”
“I hate her, so I highly doubt that. I just want her to die.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s fucking harsh,” I said. I’m all for wanting people to die, but only the ones who deserve it. I also think murder should be legal sometimes, but that’s a separate conversation.
“Fine, then I want something bad to happen to her to get her out of my life, like, I want her to be in a coma.”
“She can’t be that bad if she’s texting you all the time.”
“Do you know what she’s saying to me in those texts? She’s begging to get back together. She’s obsessed with me.”
“Wait, really? I thought you said she was abusive and telling you to, like, kill yourself.”
“Do you want to see the bullshit she’s sending me? It’s pathetic.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’d love to see.”
Ashley opened her phone and scrolled back through their texts. She stopped at a certain point and showed me an excerpt.
Ashley, I can’t do this on my own. I need you here, and the kids need you here. We can work through everything and be a family again. Please, I’m begging you. I’m sure Lauren is fun and cool, and you love these trips and being carefree, but we are your family.
That’s all she let me read.
I felt sad for Cecelia. Was I taking Ashley away from her children? She never talked about them, so I assumed she wasn’t too bothered by moving in with me thousands of miles away from them. And, up until this point, she had said Cecelia was abusive and mean. These texts were the opposite of what she had described.
“That’s so sad,” I said.
“Pathetic, right?”
“No, sad. As in, it’s sad you are missing out on your kids growing up.”
“Whatever, I’m going to get full custody. I’m going to sic my lawyers on her and make sure she never see’s a dime of my money again.”
The picture of Cecelia that Ashley had painted didn’t match the Cecelia who wrote those words. After reading her texts, I realized she wasn’t a scorned ex-wife at all. She was a person who was deeply hurt.
I pretended to check my email, but I really looked up Cecelia’s Twitter to see if she posted any more clues, but it was too late. She blocked me.
OMG. She is taking out loans in her ex-wife's name. This is too good. I absolutely love the hair salon scene (I said "scene" because this is 100% a future movie.)
I swear each release is like opening a new box on the Queerest Advent calendar ever. Also, glad I was not required to be camera facing on this team meeting I’m supposed to be paying attention to because “If I got sucked into a Black Hole I’d be so pissed” made me ugly face cackle! Tony Awards to everyone in that salon…