Love Stinks
Stein, Benjamin J.
.................................................................................................................. Benjamin J. Stein LOVE STINKS Today love -means never having to say you're...
...I've noticed that girls with blue eyes tend to be a lot nuttier than girls who don't have blue eyes...
...Oh God, talk to me about the Crash...
...Dante had it totally wrong," she explained to me over the telephone...
...Mom asked...
...The "love affair" becomes a nagging emotional flu, sapping strength, curving the spine, depriving life of its just rewards and pleasures...
...She asks everybody if he can get her a job...
...The one with the little sassy haircut...
...And then there is my friend who has two boys who are complete punkers, shaved heads, safety pins through their ears, leather jackets and engineer boots and tattoos...
...Today, as I write this, there is Jerry, who loves a girl who openly tells him that she wants to have another man's baby...
...Or one of the parties starts to feel that the relationship is suffocating and does not work for some reason...
...It makes the rats crazy...
...I'd seriously consider loves me, and that if I ever left L.A...
...We go out to La Scala and she gets totally blitzed on something called a `Seabreeze' and she starts to tell me about all the other guys in her life that she's been in love with, and all the guys who `send her into orbit,' and she doesn't even mention me...
...It stinks...
...Staci broke up with him because he was too nice...
...Why...
...I know I should shoot her...
...El Michael is forty years old and generally looks like a mixture of poured concrete and steel-eyed determination...
...So very damn lucky...
...I mean really...
...They get totally addicted...
...His latest book, Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights, will be published by Bantam Books in July...
...But still the relationships do not end...
...You're soaking in it," I was thinking when I heard the dogs yelping at the front door...
...Maybe he knew that...
...It's Dorothy again," Michael said...
...I mean truly on fire...
...Now I have no doubt whatsoever that this situation has been a part of human relationships for as long as there have been hearts and flowers...
...It's starting...
...Some day soon I'm going to wake up and I won't even remember Dorothy Destiny...
...For whatever reason, the nature of the relationship changes...
...You're so incredibly lucky...
...When the movie was over, I asked the kids, "How many of you have ever been in love and been sad about it...
...I want her to have a safe car...
...Or maybe one of the two wants a trip to Florence...
...That was really rude "Michael, I'm sorry...
...After a certain amount of foreplay of every kind, there is either an abandonment of the relationship or an intensification of the affair...
...Nice legs, even though she is a little pigeon toed...
...I'm also talking about love that notoriously does not last...
...Here is what I thought: that every single man or woman I know who experiences love experiences it as incredibly painful...
...Definitely...
...Or one of the two may meet someone else...
...She also often gets so drunk that she passes out at restaurants, just after calling Jerry by the name of the other guy...
...I don't know...
...Soon, laceration replaces love, and quips replace kisses, and hostility replaces hugs...
...But there's something about her that's incredibly appealing...
...Maybe love affairs that hurt have to do with endemic low self-esteem that needs to be fed with blows to the heart...
...I'm talking about everybody I know...
...One of the smartest boys asked, "In love and feeling sad...
...He's so important, he could get me a really important job in Hollywood.' How do you think that made me feel...
...But don't talk to me about love...
...shooting her," I suggested...
...Then she started to go out with a man named Larry, who owned a chain of pizza parlors in Orange County...
...I mean, this has happened before, with a little real estate saleswoman, and a stewardess, and a college girl who was a Filipino-American, and a big tall girl from the Madeira School in Washington, D.C...
...Or maybe he had lost a friend...
...At that point, one of the parties falls slightly (or greatly) more under the spell of the other...
...Every one of the forty students in the class raised a hand...
...He was steaming...
...1 "Mallon is genuinely funny...
...His sense of parody is delicious and vicious and is actually reminiscent in its goofy play on a self-contained world of Catch-22...
...That's a good question...
...Maybe that's what Beatrice is all about...
...It's called `intermittent reinforcement.' It's like when they take rats and feed them a really rich diet, but only intermittently...
...It's like an epidemic...
...The boy and girl no longer see each other's idealized vision in the other's eyes...
...Mike is the kind of guy who works out for two hours a day and pushes people around and jams their gears at Warner Brothers for the rest of the day...
...I wish a flying saucer would take Dorothy Destiny away to another planet so I could get on with dealing with people who have more sense...
...a little big...
...she'd be heartbroken...
...F or whatever reason, men and women are suffering, and Michael is still sitting next to me as evening turns into night by the pool, and he says that he doesn't know how much longer he can take it...
...That's it...
...What's the difference...
...Michael went on in this way, talking about the things he noticed and remembered, and I thought about love in 1988...
...I really don't know...
...Then there's Staci...
...Or at the least, with a dancing nimbus that mocks the idea that love is somehow good for you...
...Lemme tell you something, pal," he said...
...Yet you can't help but root for him...
...That they'd rather stick needles in their arms and rather fight with hammers than fall in love...
...Maybe girl meets boy...
...It's a lie...
...I notice these things...
...You are lucky you're married...
...Benjy, I have five girls who follow me around and tell me they worship the ground I walk on and that I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread...
...These are the symptoms: Boy meets girl...
...That way you don't ever have to fall in love in the eighties...
...There's something about girls with blue eyes that makes me insane...
...They seem to appear when acorns or twigs or something fall onto the light blue pool bottom...
...Listen, the whole thing is a good question...
...At least in my life and the lives I see, the kind of love that burns and sears burns with a flame not of passion or euphoria, but of sadness laced with panic...
...I wish I were living in 'Ozzie and Harriet' where this kind of thing never happens...
...I'm the one who's strange for putting up with it...
...The relationships continue, disturbed, deranged, off the track, like wounded, crippled B-29s lurching back to England after getting shot up over Schweinfurt...
...You hurt my feelings by not introducing yourself to Jimmy and telling him how much you like his movies...
...The short, sassy girl's cut...
...The lowest circle in hell is the circle of being in love...
...I feel like a stupid teenager going berserk about someone who's so nutty...
...Love stinks...
...Day by day, or so it seems, I take an inventory of which of my friends is in intensive care because of love...
...Benjamin J. Stein LOVE STINKS Today love -means never having to say you're happy...
...But I can tell you this...
...Cause sometimes when we're together she tells me she's madly in love with me, or anyway that she THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 21 "You know something," he said, "every last one of them had blue eyes...
...Today, he looked like he had been run over by a multi-front end combination thresher and mower...
...She asked me if I could help her get a job...
...Another friend, a brilliant social scientist in Washington, D.C., told me that she had recently been in love with a revolutionary/lobbyist who had broken her heart...
...If you ask me, the whole punk movement is about love and trying to escape from the way it wounds people...
...It's not that she's strange," he said...
...I'm talking about that feeling that's supposed to be great, that's supposed to make life worth living...
...I think it's because they're insane...
...A usual evening sitting by the pool, wondering where those little brown spots come from...
...I teach a class at Pepperdine, a magnificent university campus on a bluff overlooking the beach right above the Malibu Beach Colony...
...Then when the pool man comes, the spots go away again...
...It hurts...
...That tall dark girl you met with me at Matteo's...
...Guess what: In 1988 anyway, it's a myth...
...She sounds a little strange," I said...
...Why do you want her to have a safe car...
...Great teeth, even if they are Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer living in Los Angeles...
...Or maybe the thrill of being hurt in a relationship supplies thrills and chills in an age in which we have all become addicted to speed and action and catastrophe...
...They're great, and I love 'em, but Dorothy is the one I think about all the time...
...How do you think that made me feel...
...Last week, I showed the students The Graduate...
...She cries herself to sleep every night...
...You know what they tell me...
...Well, I'm actually just giving her the down payment, but that's still a few thousand bucks...
...He told Staci he loved her more than he had ever loved any other woman...
...Maybe this mania for love that hurts is a reflection of the national obsession with self...
...Far from it...
...Addicted to Dorothy Destiny...
...Staci is still in shock...
...He also looked tired...
...She reads books about losing a love, but it doesn't help...
...I'm talking "high end" love here, the kind of love that people remember, that goes into their history books, that makes them slightly crazy...
...And then she puts her head on my shoulder and sighs, and I feel like I'm going to live forever...
...As if fed by an underground fuel storage tank, they smolder and hiss indefinitely...
...She's out on a date with me at Matteo's and she's asking me to fix her up with Denny Simpkins...
...That's the problem," he said...
...So the very next day, I'm on the phone all over town to get her car insurance, and to pay off her parking tickets, and wondering what she's going to do tonight to hurt me when I take her to the Bel-Air Hotel for dinner...
...Dorothy's the one I'm trying to get a car for...
...Love that hurts is now the norm...
...Today, he looked like he had been run over by a multi-front end combination thresher and mower...
...But what I see now is that love-as-pain is not just an aberration or a fluke...
...GEORGIA JONES-DAVIS, Los Angeles Times Book Review ARTS AND SCIENCES a seventies sedtaction by THOMAS MALLON ~FIEL0.S Jacket design & illustration: James Steinberg 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988...
...Larry was rich...
...Dorothy's the one that I think about when I wake up at three in the morning...
...He drove a Lamborghini...
...Oh, God, I thought...
...He is forty years old and generally looks like he is a mixture of poured concrete and steel-eyed determination...
...Maybe it really is an addiction...
...ROGER DAVIS FRIEDMAN, Chicago Tribune Books "Imagine a cross between Woody Allen and John Keats...
...The pint-size hero of this novel could be written off as a self-indulgent wimp...
...But-and this is a big but-this does not mean that the relationships end...
...Love hurts more...
...She used to go out with a man who worshipped the ground she walked on, who would have walked over ground-up Porsche gears barefoot to get her an Evian...
...Some cruel nurture of disappointment and frustration keeps the relationships going long after any useful feelings of happiness sprout from it...
...I took her out to Matteo's and we were sitting across from Denny Simpkins, the hottest producer at Warner Brothers, and he comes over to say hello, and all she can say afterwards is, `Why don't you get me a date with him...
...When my student said that being in love and being sad were the same, he said a mouthful...
...Love again...
...Even so, feelings of "love" drag on and on more or less indefinitely...
...Those blue eyes that look like they're made from sapphires...
...It's a story about sadness and desperation around love...
...Sleepless dawns and Tuinal replace nights of love and champagne...
...After six weeks he told her he had to go out with other women, that he was suffocating...
...But I am definitely talking about love here...
...She deserves shooting...
...I remember her well," I said...
...Talk to me about EpsteinBarr virus...
...Mallon has captured his 'grindy little wonk' of an academic at just the right moment...
...I cut him off...
...I'm not just talking about Michael and his pals in Hollywood...
...A corresponding feeling of loss and anger wells up in the erstwhile "mate...
...It was my pal Michael...
...You're buying that little demon a car...
...I think I studied that in college psychology," I said...
...My wife was at that little park in Beverly Hills near Coldwater and Beverly and the housekeeper won't answer the door anymore, so I went upstairs to check it out...
...He sort of looked like he had been crying even...
...She runs out of this restaurant we're sitting in, and she sees this guy she used to date, and she runs up to him and hugs him like she's going to put her hips through his stomach, and I'm standing there like the village idiot, and when I get into the car with her and tell her she hurt my feelings, she says, `No...
...The narcissistic need to feel validated by the other person goes unmet...
...In many cases, the shift from happy feelings to midnight terror can be almost instantaneous...
...You know Dorothy Destiny...
...I notice also that if they have really pale skin, they tend to be even more whacked out than if they have darker skin...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
