The course of true love never did run smooth.
I read that in a horoscope once, although I'm pretty sure they stole it from Shakespeare. Or maybe the other way around. It's impossible to know for certain. Regardless, it is solid advice. To wit, a marriage to Samantha that had always seemed unbreakable, until it was broken, followed by an estrangement that seemed beyond saving, until it was saved. All thanks to an adorable Asian-American woman named Qi and a portly kid named Felix.
I shall explain.
I met Qi at Traffic School. More specifically, Comedy Traffic School which is a thing you can take in Los Angeles if you need to work off the points on your license after getting popped for a rolling stop (which is a bullshit ticket, by the way, but I guess the cops need to hit their quota somehow, right, Officer Hernandez?). It's a nice idea in theory, using humor to alleviate the technical tedium of road rules, but you don't exactly get your A-list comedians teaching the course. And if there's one thing I've learned as a comedy professional it's that bad jokes are a whole lot worse than no jokes.
Anyway, Qi was sitting next to me while I was being a smart-ass to our instructor — I can't help it; there's just something about an educational setting that brings out the snarky teenager in me — muttering flippant comments under my breath, which Qi found hilarious. She would put both hands over her mouth to keep from laughing, which I found incredibly endearing.
Incidentally, Qi is a Chinese name that is supposed to be pronounced Chuh. To my ear, it sounded like the noise a person makes when they get sucker-punched in the stomach. But I was willing to overlook that because she reminded me very much of Melody, my first girlfriend in high school. And no, it wasn't because all Asians look alike, you racists, but because she was smart, super-cute and shy. I do admit to some nostalgia, though. My youthful relationship with Melody was the only one I ever had that didn't at some point blow up in my face.
When we went out for drinks afterwards I discovered that I had completely misread her. (What else is new?) Smart and super-cute, yes. But quiet and shy? Um, no. She was, I discovered, a fitness freak and an adrenaline junkie. She didn't drink alcohol or even coffee, referring to them as "pollutants" whereas I referred to them as "the things that make life worth living." Qi was an avid X Gamer who enjoyed activities such as mountain boarding, base jumping and hang gliding.
So... not my soulmate.
"I see," I said after Qi told me a harrowing story about almost losing her grip while free climbing at El Capitan. "So your goal is to be in peak physical condition when you fall to your death." She laughed at that but then assured me that — despite my stated fears of all those things — she would sooner or later get me to do them, too.
Good fucking luck, lady, I thought.
But here is something important I came to learn about myself. My fear of heights might be paralyzing, but it still no match for the promise of athletic sex with a beautiful, hard-bodied divorcee. So to my surprise, but not Qi's — "I knew I'd wear you down, sooner or later!" — I found myself agreeing to go hang gliding. And I am tremendously glad I did, because I wound up learning something even more important about myself.
I suffer from something called Resting Bitch Face.
RBF, for those of you who have not heard of it, is a real scientific thing discovered by real scientific scientists. Scientists who, I suspect, are complete jerkwads, because otherwise they would have taken the time to give this condition a dignified name. (I mean, name another condition with a curse word in it. The results of your tests are in and I'm sorry to inform you that you have an acute case of Fucknuts.)
Anyway, RBF describes a person whose neutral face looks to others like annoyance, anger or condescension. Think Kristen Stewart or Kanye West or me, which I discovered because, as first-time hang glider, I went tandem with an instructor who not only took care of the all-important not-crashing-into-cliffs duties, but also took pictures of me during the flight (which is impressive multitasking; I can't even change the song on my car radio without veering into oncoming traffic (I guess another visit to Comedy Traffic School is all but inevitable) —which I purchased for an ungodly sum of money because, to my surprise, I found hang gliding not only fun but transcendent. For as long as I live, I will never forget that moment when heart-pounding terror turned to sublime bliss as I soared gracefully and silently above the earth. It was, for lack of a better word, spiritual.
In the pictures though, I looked bored as shit. And not just bored, but also irritated, like I had sand in my bathing suit. If there had been a thought bubble over my picture's head it would have been, Flight is stupid.
That's when it all clicked into place, why so many people thought I hated them when I didn't. Or did, but was trying to hide that from them. So many life puzzles were suddenly solved, not the least of which was why Samantha initially hated me all those years ago, even though I had been enraptured by her. Because while my in my brain I was saying: My God, I have found you, my one true love! my face was apparently saying, You disgust me, you talentless hag.
It was also, I realized, why in my partnership with Tammy I was always Bad Cop. Just by looking at my face they automatically perceived me as the heavy, so I became the heavy. Lord almighty, why didn't anyone tell me?
(Actually, that's an easy one. As far as they knew, there was nothing to tell. Like I have done to others on so many occasions, they assumed they knew what was going on in my head.)
Of course, I am not saying that was the entirety of my problems. Especially because I kind of liked being Bad Cop a lot of the time. But it could only help me if I was able to sync up my expressions with my feelings, which was a lot harder to pull off than I thought it would be. I don't think that most people have to remind themselves to smile back at someone who is smiling at them or to do something encouraging with their eyebrows while they're listening to someone speak, but I did.
It worked, though. Samantha started remarking on how much nicer I had become, which reminded me of something that Tammy said when she came out. "People think I've changed, but I really haven't. It's just that the outside now matches the inside."
I was always a nice guy. I just forgot to inform my face.
And then there was Felix.
Felix was a very nice, very bright, wildly uncoordinated kid on the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum. When he was twelve his parents signed him up for lessons at Sherman Oaks Martial arts, in the hopes of improving his motor skills and keeping his weight down. Three years later, he had achieved partial success. His weight was out of control — he was fifteen years old and well over two hundred pounds — but his motor skills had vastly improved compared to where he started. Not good, but better. But he was still rather shaky and off balance which, combined with his considerable heft made him dangerous to work with.
Because of this Sensei Gilbert had established the rule that only black belts were cleared to partner with Felix, and I had recently become one. It was something I was extremely proud of. When I first saw a black belt test I thought, I could never survive that. But I had underestimated myself and when the time came, I did survive it. Barely. The test ran two-and-a-half hours and it involved randori, which is the closest we came to sparring. I had to deal with punches, kicks, grabs, chokes, knives, sticks and multiple attackers. Towards the end of the test, I could barely lift my arms and I could hardly see, my vision a rippling tunnel. But I made it through. Patience and perseverance.
When I finished, Sensei Gilbert took a few moments to gather his thoughts and then he simply said, "Wow." It was the only unqualified compliment I would ever get from him, but I'll take it. I had surprised the man who had seen it all. What could be better?
And that is why, on the following Thursday, I worked with Felix for the very first time. He was learning a hip throw called seoi nage and he was having a hard time getting it. I was supposed to help guide him
"Don't try to throw Aaron," Darian admonished Felix with a wag of his finger.
"Hai, Senpai," Felix agreed.
"You hear me, Felix? You're not ready to throw."
"Hai, Senpai."
" Setup only."
"Hai, Senpai."
"Repeat back to me what I just told you."
"Set up only. I'm not allowed to try to throw him."
Satisfied, Darian nodded and did the two-finger I'm watching you! gesture and walked away. At which point, Felix tried to throw me. He took a lurching step and lost his balance, falling forward into me and knocking me over. I landed on my back and then he fell on me, knees first, slamming into my ribs with all his weight.
"For the love of God!" I gasped. "We just went over this!"
"Sorry, Aaron," he said, and he really was. "I forgot."
Teenagers, man. Jesus Christ.
Darian drove me to the hospital in his ridiculous black Smart Car with the license plate NINJCAR — which was supposed to mean Ninja Car, but I doubted many people got that — where, if nothing else, I entertained the Emergency Room staff.
"What happened?" the admitting nurse asked.
"A fat kid fell on me," I explained hoarsely. It hurt to breathe.
He didn't even bother to stifle his laugh. Nor did anybody else at St. Joseph's. I didn't hold it against them. When you work in a high-stress environment, you need to enjoy whatever levity you can find and I was glad to be of assistance.
When Samantha arrived at the E.R. she was distraught. Darian had called Sensei and Sensei had called Samantha to tell her what had happened, and I'm not quite sure how he described my injury, but Samantha was clearly under the impression that I had a punctured lung, which was life-threatening. But it wasn't a puncture. Just a few cracked ribs."
"Sounds like you got lucky," she said with palpable relief. "You could have been injured so much worse."
"If I was lucky," I quipped, "I wouldn't have been injured at all." That's the thing about luck. It's all about when you start counting.
When your ribs are cracked, or even broken, there is generally nothing to do but wait for them to heal on their own and manage the pain. To that end, the E.R. doctor wrote me a script for Vicodin, which I stared at like Golem gazing at The Precious. Samantha snatched it out of my hand, tore it to shreds and tossed it in the garbage.
"I was just about to do that," I said.
She looked at me skeptically. "Uh-huh."
Samantha took me home and because of my injury suggested I move back into the main house for a while, which I gratefully did. The next few months were both supremely frustrating and absolutely wonderful. Frustrating because so many movements hurt me. When I went from sitting to standing it hurt. When I went from lying down sitting up it hurt. When I rolled over in bed it hurt. When I sneezed it hurt. When I laughed it hurt. And it wasn't a dull pain, but a sharp stab that made me wince. Which also hurt.
But it was wonderful, too, because I spent a lot more time around Samantha than I had in years. And it gave us an opportunity remember what we had brought us together to begin with. And as weird as it is to say, it helped that I didn't want to have sex during that period — if a sneeze caused extreme pain, ejaculation would have surely killed me — because we just got to enjoy each other as people.
And when finally I was healed — or, at least, healed enough to go about my day unaided — she asked me to stay, which I happily did. But honestly, I think she had made the decision long before that. It was, I think, that moment when she overestimated the severity of my injury that reminded her — reminded both of us, actually — of what a marriage ultimately meant. And she decided that if I was going to be killed by a falling fat kid, she wanted her face to be the last one I'd see.
I was profoundly happy to have found my way back to Samantha, yet there was still the looming problem of our stalled career. But uncharacteristically, I was not concerned. I believed that the worst was now behind us and things would once again swing our way.
And you know what? I was right.