Boyfriend, Boyfriend, Yes I Had Your Boyfriend

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Yesterday, I drove to Buenos Aires. I really did that! It’s totally true!

I had been having a week (again), and if I didn’t get away, far, far away, someone was gonna get cried at. By me!

So there I was, in Buenos Aires, covered in cat hair and wearing stretchy three-day pants, watching Law & Order in the middle of the day. I was attempting a World’s Sadness Record, and if you leave out all the times when actual bad things have happened to actual people, I could have been a contender.

I was about to rush outside and ask the couple walking by for a third-day-without-smokes cigarette, but then the shouting started. I had to hush Lilo’s barking so I could hang on every word. It was a black couple, they had pulled their car over smack in front of my house, and the he of the couple was trying to escape her sad frustration.

I took notes.

He had fucked somebody last night. She was not happy. How could he fuck her? He kept walking away. “I’m not fighting!” she shouted. “I’m talking!”

“I don’t need this crazy shit,” he said softly, and I had to strain to eavesdrop. About the girl, whom he had fucked. Last night. And the girl was all up on him. The girl was always all up on him, and the girlfriend knew it every time. You say that’s your boyfriend, you say I’m out of line, funny, he said I could call him up anytime ... If that’s your boyfriend, if that’s your boyfriend, if that’s your boyfriend, he wasn’t last night.

No respect, right in her face, trying and succeeding in stealing her man. And his girlfriend did not know why. And then I got a better look at her, and she wasn’t chubby, like I’d thought she was, with a cute li’l beer belly just like mine, she was pregnant, five or six months maybe, and how could he?

She wasn’t fighting, she was talking, and then all of a sudden she couldn’t stand it, and she rushed him, she slapped him, a flurry of hands. He kept walking. She kept shouting. And then she got back in the car, and she drove away.

He did need that crazy shit. How could he?

Oh, I used to have the most terrible neighborhood, in Long Beach, where ghettoes abut upper-middle-class streets, socioeconomies and crime rates shifting block to block. Mine was bad, a daytime hooker on the corner, a murder down the block, the early-20s (late teens?) fat white mom across the street who would scream at her children for hours until I truly thought she was killing them, and then I’d go and shout up to her apartment until she came out to the balcony, and I would offer very casually and nonjudgmentally to take her kids for a couple hours to play—everybody needs a break, no judgment! no judging!—and she’d calm down and say she couldn’t let the kids come play, she had somewhere to be, and then she’d get them in the minivan and peel out down the road. There were meth moms with crazy children who broke any toy my then-five-year-old buttercup left in the yard. I knew they were crazy, because otherwise they would have stolen the toys instead of smashing them. Smash smash shatter.

I didn’t leave that neighborhood, even though it was giving me cancer, until the day a man crouched behind a car across the street, waving a gun. All the neighbors heard the shouting, so we all came out to our porches for the free entertainment, and then we all saw the weapon and lit up the LBPD switch board like a Pachinko machine. It was 5 pm, and my son was out playing I didn’t know where, and I finally had an excuse to move, to Santa Ana, where it was safe.

I’ve lived here, in my peaceful Mid-City L.A. neighborhood for just a year now, a year this week. I’ve seen exactly one creepy neo-Nazi meth guy on a bicycle; one very drunk Mexican dude jabbering in Esperanto; and that’s it. This lower-to-middle middle-class neighborhood may be the safest, calmest place I’ve ever lived as an adult. There are nightly helicopter fly-bys, but so far none of them has announced through the helimegaphone, “FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, PLEASE STAY IN YOUR HOMES AND LOCK ALL DOORS AND WINDOWS,” as happened one night in the LBC. Oh, I didn’t sleep for days! Here, a thoroughly blended populace walks its dogs and says hi. Dogs are walking by right now, bichon frises from the looks of them, with their lady. The jacarandas are almost nude. And somewhere that pregnant lady is either crying by herself or shouting her troubles to her girlfriends and her mama, and they are listening to her and making sounds of outrage and threatening to chop off somebody’s balls. I am angry for that lady, during commercials. The rest of the time, I’m busy. This Law & Order episode isn’t going to watch itself!

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