Trashley: Part One

The Physicist

I knew life had taken a turn for the worse when I woke up on New Year’s Day on a half-deflated air mattress in Bakersfield, California. Yes, that Bakersfield. The one that’s an hour and a half north of LA, right past the Grapevine, and directly above a sinkhole to Hell. To understand how I, a funny, smart, stupid TV writer and producer, wound up on an air mattress in a city known as The Devil’s Anus, we’d have to rewind the tape by a year.

Twenty-twenty-one was GOING TO BE MY YEAR!

At the beginning of 2021, the Pandemic was still living her best life, and I was stuck on my couch recovering from a vicious dog attack that left me immobile. I became a pro at staying inside in 2020, so I made the most of it: I read the Artists Way, which led to me keeping a daily three-page journal. I also created a Hinge account because I was bored and lonely. I hadn’t dated in years due to an incident that resulted in a MeToo lawsuit — which I won in the fall of 2019–-but hadn’t recovered from yet.

I put together my Hinge profile and set it to Los Angeles, women only, because I’m a lesbian. I’d always thought I’d meet the woman of my dreams organically on a free-range farm overlooking the Pacific, but meeting her on the Internet was faster and easier. Until then, I had mostly dated men and had no interest in ever making that mistake again. I didn’t do a whole coming out speech or throw a sexual identity party. I just quietly quit men and never looked back.

I'm getting on Hinge.

Once my profile went live, I matched with a lot of women. It turns out I wasn’t the only single, bored, lonely lesbian in Los Angeles. There was the reality TV Producer Bristol; she was funny and beautiful and got bonus points for being tall, but she had the same job as me, which was a deal breaker. Then there was Daphne, but she lived next door to the owners of the production company I worked for, and I’d rather attend a Trump Rally than run into my bosses during a walk of shame. Pass. I have a very specific type, and I wasn’t going to stop until I found her.

Brown eyes. Brown hair. Extra nerdy.

Then, I matched with Ashley. She was a physicist, data scientist, and adjunct professor at MIT, where she had also attended school. I’d never dated a smart person before; as I’d typically dated idiots who made me laugh, but suddenly I wondered what life would be like if I dated someone who made me think.

I’m a sucker for nerds and table pancakes.

Ashley’s profile showed she had a dog, point. She held an owl in another photo, point. And she mentioned a Table Pancake, point point. I had to know more. After some light banter and making sure she wasn’t in Q-Anon, we decided to take things to the next level with a Facetime call. I hated the idea of talking to a stranger on Facetime, but this was the world we lived in, so I embraced it.

Physicist humor, you wouldn’t understand.

We agreed to limit the Facetime to five minutes to see if there was any chemistry. We ended up talking for three hours. I had a lot of science-related questions, like, why are you a Physicist? What is a Physicist? Is time a flat circle? Do you know where the missing airplane is? She explained the theory of relativity and the difference between hadron colliders and regular colliders. She taught a remote course on probability at MIT and complained about her least favorite student, Geoff, with a G, who man-splained science to her. I told her not to trust anyone who spells Jeff with a G.

By the end of our chat, the probability of me asking her out on a real date was one million percent. That’s when she told me there was just one problem: she was in Chicago finishing up her Post-Doctoral work at a place called Fermi-lab, and she wouldn’t be back in LA for at least a few more weeks. I told her not to worry; the world was shut down. I wasn’t going anywhere.

A Post-Facetime Message.

We hung up, and I immediately Facetimed my gayest friend, Cynthia, who was at home making tortilla soup. I gushed about Ashley: how smart she was, even though she lived downtown, which was insane because nobody willingly lives downtown. She was raised in Pasadena in a Hasidic family but wasn’t Hasidic anymore. She was half Israeli and, like me, was Jewish. She bought an apartment in San Fransisco at the start of the Pandemic, but quickly sold it. And she had a Border Collie named Will, who was not named after Will Smith, which was a bummer. Her area code was from Salt Lake City, even though she never mentioned a stint in Utah.

I had so much more to learn about her. I pictured Will and my dog Perci becoming best friends and possibly lovers. I wanted to stalk her, but she told me she didn’t have social media. Kinky. I googled Ashley + Physicist, Ashley + MIT, Dr. Ashley + MIT + Fermilab + Rate My Professor. Nothing. She was truly off the grid.

I asked my friends Anikka and Rachael to look her up on LinkedIn because I thought Ashley might be catfishing me, but I didn’t want her to know I had looked at her page. LinkedIn tattles on you, and fuck you for that, LinkedIn. Also, I’d never been one to follow my intuition because it’s usually right, and that’s boring.

Almost following my intuition.

I thought I was onto something.

The day after our first Facetime, I went to Joshua Tree because a full moon was on the horizon. My friend and neighbor in LA, Kirsten, had a vacation home in Joshua Tree, which meant I had a vacation home in Joshua Tree, so we headed out for a long weekend. Ashley and I texted while I was gone, and I started developing my first crush in a long, long time. I felt like myself for the first time in four years. 

I shut down during my #MeToo lawsuit against my former boss, an awful Greek billionaire who assaulted me, harassed me, threatened me, and tried to intimidate me into dropping my lawsuit. During this time, I barely tweeted, rarely posted on Instagram, and I made my accounts private. I didn’t want to date while I was not myself. Suddenly, I was back. I was ready. 

I told my therapist it felt like a curse had been broken. Little did I know, the curse had just begun.

The moon is my guide.