The Best Time I Became a Slutty Couchsurfer

by Rocio Anica

Let’s pretend for a moment that your boyfriend has had enough of your drinking and your cheating, and you have to move into your car. And let’s pretend like this isn’t at all new or surprising to you, because the kind of person who does these things while being fully in love with a boyfriend is any number of the following:

– The dust around a toilet bowl. (It’s not dust!)

– A shitty orgasm that you could have given yourself except YOU DIDN’T.

– An episode of Sesame Street where they teach you that S is for Shamelessness.

– That time you puked after your first hit of marriage-iguana.

– A narcissistic sociopath with very nice hair.

So living in a car is like, “Oh, yeah. OK, yeah. Yep.”

So you’re in the car now. You’re in a borrowed car actually. It’s yours temporarily, because, of course, you crashed your first two cars long ago (incidentally, NOT from drinking and driving; you’re an animal, not an IDIOT). You’re just driving around LA, wondering what to do. The world feels full of lightness and sprinkles, because now every guy you’ve been eyeing is a package (yes) to open and charm. Every moment is a flirtation, actually, and no one is going to talk behind your back about how you give such weird sensual vibes all the time, especially when you drink. It’s so sad, I mean, because of her BF. Touchy-feely.

But then you have to pee. You’re still driving, going up La Brea, and then down Fairfax, and then up La Cienega, and then down Crescent Heights Blvd., like you’re tracing the straightest streets in Los Angeles with your tires, but, so, now you’re confused. You can’t figure out where to stop and pee. In a normal situation, you’d just pull over and pee at a Jack in the Box, but now you’re a homeless person trying to pee at a Jack in the Box. And what if you want to change out of these pants? Things start to get unsexy real quick.

It becomes very important for you to make the right choice. Any choice you make will define the kind of homeless person you are. If you call up your best friend and say, “Can I pee at your place,” she’ll start to ask questions. “What the hell is going on? Why didn’t you call me? What’s wrong with you?!” And you realize that not treating your girlfriends like your girlfriends is probably, maybe, why you’re in such a bind. Girlfriends are free therapy, you freak, a freak who needs therapy.

If you call the BF, he’ll sigh in agreement and hang up. Then he’ll spend the next 24 hours worried that you’ll actually show up.

If you call your parents, they’ll be super saintly with their sympathy, all in their ridiculously happy marriage. You’ll have a full-frontal nervous breakdown in front of everyone — everyone will be there — about the catastrophic loss you have allowed to happen, and so you’ll have to move in with these people. And their liquor cabinet? One bottle of Shiraz someone re-gifted them ten years ago. Oh, they’ll know you took it.

There’s only one way to handle this. Somewhere in your bag is a short, black skirt. You reapply your makeup in the rear view mirror, and go down your iPhone address book.

You make contact with a familiar, and then you’re on your way to someone’s house. You’re the kind of person who loves visiting people in their homes, because seeing how others live is like taking a vacation from yourself, but tonight you don’t know what to do. When you’re invited to sit on the couch, you suddenly realize the rest of the night is not up to you. In fact, it might be very important that you entertain. Before, it would have been a given that you’d enjoy sleeping with this person in front of you, but there was always the alternative. You could change your mind. I mean, you wouldn’t, but tonight, now, where are you going to go after having spilled wine on yourself?

And it’s there, in the dim living room, when your host retreats temporarily into the bathroom, that it occurs to you that the reason you got into this mess is your inability to keep your pants on. You just love to love men so MUCH. The thing about flings is that people are better in the mind’s eye before they take shape, before they exist around you enough to fill out and become the flawed cynical urbanites you tend to fall for. Indeed, the reason you can’t keep your pants on is the ridiculously fun chase after ideal lovership — before you get bored. But right now you realize you don’t want to be flung. You want to be in a bed. There is nothing sexy about this lack of agency. Even Camille Paglia would agree.

Before your host returns, you decide to get up and get the fuck out.

When you grow up, you will not live in your car.

Rocio Anica is a freelance writer/part-time copywriter who listens to too much music. She is probably listening to some music right now.

Photo via Flickr