Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

17 - A UFO Abduction Experience

October, 1993

Romantic gestures were never my thing.

(I'll give you a moment to get over your shock.)

My belief was that spending time together should in and of itself be enough to sustain a relationship and that showering a woman with gifts was not only emotional bribery, but a regressive sexist patriarchal courtship ritual incompatible with second- and especially third-wave feminism. (I took a Women's Studies course in college and I definitely got my money's worth.) No, I would not be doing that.

But when I met Samantha, that all changed.

Temporarily.

It started on our first monthiversary, and the fact that I would deign to use such a cloying, gooey term like monthiversary is a good indication of how thoroughly smitten I was.

It was a very strange experience. I was driving down the 134 Freeway on the way home from work and suddenly I found myself emerging from a flower shop with no memory of how I had gotten there. It was like a UFO abduction experience, except instead of giving me an anal probe, the aliens handed me a tasteful arrangement of starburst lilies and baby's breath and sent me on my way.

When I showed up unannounced at Samantha's apartment with a bouquet in hand, her reaction was an astonished, open-mouthed silence. "But... but..." she finally stammered, "I thought you didn't do flowers."

"I don't," I agreed as I handed them to her with a flourish. She looked at them in wonder, but also with disbelief, as if she couldn't quite believe that they were real.

"And how," she asked, sounding even more bewildered, "did you know that starburst lilies were my favorite?"

"Lucky guess." I thought it best not to say anything about the aliens. "Happy one month, sweetheart." I kissed her on the lips and then went off into the night, leaving her deliciously disoriented.

For the rest of our first year together, I brought Samantha a gift every month. They ran the gamut from the thoughtful (a Stephen Sondheim coffee table book — he was her favorite playwright) to the indulgent (a spa day) to the weird (a deluxe ouija board, so she could communicate with a higher caliber of dead people). She loved them all; if not always for what they were (the can of Possum Fixins was a bit of a misfire) than for what they said about how I felt about her.

But me being me I made absolutely sure she understood that the monthly gifts would only continue for one year, after which we would resume our regularly scheduled programming.

There were other things I wanted her to understand, too. I believed myself to be a good guy, but I also knew that there had been plenty of times in previous relationships when I was a tremendous jerk. And I thought it only fair that Samantha knew about them, too. I could be condescending, thoughtless, dismissive, inattentive, combative, self-pitying, irrationally angry. It was a long list of personal flaws and I reeled them off like the warning label on a pill bottle.

"Are you sure you want to put up with me?" I asked Samantha, when I had finally finished.

She went through a series of comically thoughtful facial expressions, pretending to deliberate. "Well... OK. Just as long you as you're not planning to get fat." It was a joke and I laughed, but that brought me to my last confession of the evening: I was planning to get fat.

While I was dating Samantha, I was in the best shape of my life. I had gotten a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do, plus I was still going to the gym on a regular basis. I was fast, flexible, strong and lean. But it was a lie. Sleek, sinewy Aaron was an imposter; the real Aaron was a lazy sack of shit who just wanted to sit around all day eating Oreos until he grew into the couch. And some day, by God, I would.