Onuncu maç Sandman çizgi romanının bu sefer ilk sayısıyla, her bölümü ayrı bir yazar tarafından kaleme alınmış Things I've Learned from women who've dumped me (Beni bir köşeye atıp giden kadınlardan öğrendiklerim) arasında.

Bir önceki Sandman maçında olduğu gibi, bunda da (süresini biraz uzatarak) çizgi romanı tamamen bitirince diğer kitap üst tura yükselmiş oldu. Onu da okudum. Eğlenceli bir kitap ama anlattığı hikayelerden erkekler terkedilince bir şey öğrenmiyor, onu anlıyorsunuz.

The Sandman - Volume 1 - No: 1 - January 1989

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me

▪ My daughter hates me. I don’t care if she’s only a couple of weeks old. She hates me. And I am not OVERREACTING! Tell me if this is overreacting: I go in her room to try to get her back to sleep, cry cry cry cry cry scream cry scream cry cry cry. Angie goes in, picks her up and whimper whimper sob coo. COO! FUCKING COO! What’s happening to me? This is insane. I try to tell myself, she’s just a baby, it doesn’t mean anything, but it seems like she’s doing it on purpose. I feel like I’ve been dumped. I’m in love with my daughter for nine months, she comes out and dumps me. Beautiful. I need a Vegas trip. August 3, 1998 12:49 a.m. Maybe it’s because I’m black. Seriously, I’ve run out of reasons. I’ve changed my deodorant four times. I’m using a different soap, different shampoo, nothing matters. Scream, scream, scream. I hate to play the race card but what else could it be?

▪ August 3, 1998 2:15 a.m. I forgot, Angie’s black too so it can’t be that. I don’t even like Häagen-Daz and I’m on my second tub. Everybody says she’ll grow out of it pretty soon. Grow out of it? My daughter has to grow out of hating my fucking guts? Am I the crazy one here? I don’t think so. I am seriously out of control. I gotta get it together. Give it a couple of weeks.

▪ This was Angie’s first day back in the choir. My job was to sit in church with my daughter. That’s all I had to do. But no, we had to get a sixteen-year-old stranger to sit there with me so my daughter doesn’t scream and everybody thinks I’m beating her. And to top it off, the little jackal dumps the load of loads in her diaper and who’s got to change her? I’m in the church bathroom cleaning what I can only describe as debris you’d scrape off the bottom of a lake in hell; she’s screaming, I’m gagging, my wife’s singing, and the babysitter had an attitude.

▪ But, then again, who the fuck was this secret admirer? I was twenty-eight years old and just out of an extremely long-term relationship that had devoured my twenties. As much as I feared the worst, I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t like the idea of having a secret admirer. I liked it a lot. Sure, there was the part of me that was convinced that any girl who admired me, secretly or otherwise, couldn’t be all that attractive. But the optimist in me was running wild. Hell, I had a secret admirer! Rebecca Schwartz was right.

▪ There was no hallway, just a small landing with doors leading to two apartments. In front of one stood a smiling zaftig woman in her fifties with frosted blond hair. “May I help you?” she asked. “Uh, I’m Eric Slovin.” “Oh, hi, Eric,” she said, the smile glued to her face, “I’m Rebecca Schwartz.”

▪ For two weeks I imagined a lot of things, but I never imagined what I had just walked into. The youngest man there was no less than fifty-five. The oldest could easily have been eighty, maybe more. The women ranged in age from about forty-five to sixty. Each one looked like she could be my aunt. What if one actually was my aunt? That would be awkward.

▪ And then there was me, in my windbreaker and sneakers, looking for my secret admirer.

▪ My secret admirer was neither the princess of my fantasies nor the troll of my fears. In fact, my secret admirer wasn’t anything. She didn’t exist. There was nothing left to say. I took the elevator down. A couple of days later, Helen Goldfarb called. She wanted to apologize. She’d gone back to her books and couldn’t figure out why I’d been invited. “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” she insisted. I told her not to worry about it

▪ Some nights later she told me she loved me “as a person.” Unless you want someone to hate you forever, don’t ever tell him you love him “as a person.” It’s like a consolation prize you don’t want that leaves you with an unwieldy tax burden. If you absolutely have to love me as something, love me as a walking dildo.

▪ In 1987, when I was thirteen years old, I dated Jessica. She was the first girl I ever dated. It lasted two weeks. Then she became the first girl to ever dump me. For years afterward I was secretly in love with her. In fact, it never really went away, even during the occasional times I saw her as an adult. In March 2007, using this book as an excuse, I called Jessica up in San Francisco to talk about it. With her permission, I taped the conversation.

▪ JESSICA: But I am not sure . . . if it’s . . . I would think we may have gone out . . . before I went . . . before I went out with Jon Nelson.

▪ JESSICA: And you know, I think . . . we started talking and maybe I agreed to go out with you . . . and maybe—this is like I am reaching back—that you may have asked me to go out and I said yes but I don’t know if we did or not. But I think that was how it was. But I am not sure if I agreed to go out or not. Um, I think I recall like it being like it was for two hours or three hours or one of those things like its going out but it only lasted a couple hours. RODNEY: I remember [it] being like a couple of weeks. JESSICA: Oh my God.

▪ JESSICA: And you know, I think . . . we started talking and maybe I agreed to go out with you . . . and maybe—this is like I am reaching back—that you may have asked me to go out and I said yes but I don’t know if we did or not. But I think that was how it was. But I am not sure if I agreed to go out or not. Um, I think I recall like it being like it was for two hours or three hours or one of those things like its going out but it only lasted a couple hours.

▪ RODNEY: So you don’t even . . . JESSICA: No crush. RODNEY: So . . . so this may be hard if you don’t remember us dating for more than a few hours. JESSICA: Right. RODNEY: But why . . . but why if I asked you out, why would you have said yes? JESSICA: I think . . . because I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. And I would just feel bad to say no. Maybe it was the first time being asked, or having a romantic relationship. And not knowing what to do. RODNEY: Yeah not knowing what to do. I think that was . . . probably the first time I ever asked anyone out. In fact, I am sure it was. It was through other people. It was like, “You know Jessica? If you ask Jessica out she will say yes.” And I was, “Okay, then tell her that I’ll ask her out.” Then it was like, “Jessica says she will go out with you,” and then I do . . . have a memory . . . of seeing you in the hallway . . . in junior high school after that . . . and really not knowing how . . . JESSICA: Uh-huh.

▪ RODNEY: Well, do you remember . . . do you even remember kissing me? JESSICA: [Pauses] Nooooooooo. RODNEY: You don’t remember? JESSICA: Nope. Did we kiss? RODNEY: Yeah. Yeah. JESSICA: Stop. RODNEY: Yeah. JESSICA: Where? RODNEY: For real. I will tell you exactly where because I have thought of this probably fifty thousand times. I was going to say fifty times so that I would not seem weird, but in reality probably somewhere between fifty and fifty thousand. No, but I remember this well. It was while we were going out . . . my definition of going out, not yours. JESSICA: Yeah . . . RODNEY: It was in my house and it was in my closet of my bedroom . . . and I was there, my sister was there, and probably Peter Tompkin was there . . . JESSICA: Oh my God. RODNEY: And the thing that was